Page 19 - Studio International - March 1968

cryptic, or simply because their authors, The games which come into the same sort
mostly artists of considerable achievement, of category present a slightly different
do not feel the necessity to say anything problem. I have in mind three games by
more than a hello and leave it at that. There George Brecht, which far from being
is also the possibility that the audience—the empty or minimal, present the player with a
reader, the owner or the borrower—are puzzle which may be no easier to solve
being given quite deliberately a carte than to read Herman de Vries' Weiss. One
blanche to fill in with their own imaginings. is a deck of cards, each card different with
black and white drawings ranging from
small geometric patterns juxtaposed with
acrobats and dancers to drawings of
lemons, bulbs, taps or fish. The deck of
cards is one of a number of Fluxus games
for which the players invent their own rules.
On spreading out the 52 cards any prospec-
tive player would spend many hours trying
to figure out what possible methods could
be employed in order to have a game with 52
totally disconnected images. The cards are
objects which invariably are looked at and
then put down.
In the series of games and puzzles by
George Brecht, one comes across a number
of well-made transparent plastic boxes
with varying contents. In the case of the
Black Ball Puzzle, for instance, the box is
divided into seven separate compartments
and contains one large red ball, two
smaller black balls of different sizes, and a
tiny pale blue ball. Inside an instruction
card says: 'Change smaller black ball into
larger and larger black ball into smaller.
Make both black balls the same size.'
There appears to be no specific aim or
message motivating the non-books and non-
games. They are not an insult directed at
the world, they are not a joke, and they are
not a decoration. They are not an art state-
ment, but a statement of attitude, and all
the objects demonstrate this in different
ways. What they share is their recent
arrival on the scene, i.e. since the begin-
ning of the 1960s, as well as a lack of any
justification or manifesto that would com-
ment on their purpose. To me they repre-
sent a grasping at privacy. It may seem to be
a nihilistic attitude, but one which is not
entirely surprising. The increase in com-
munication media can result in the dilution
of content; and to some the prospect of
doing research with the aid of computers
seems analogous to acquiring a knowledge
of literature through a digest. It is not so,
but it can look frighteningly like that at
times. The empty books on the one hand, and
the phenomenon of easily accessible in-
formation on the other, represent, to me,
the two emotional polarities of a single
development. At the moment they seem
irrevocably interdependent.
q