Fig.
1 - Visual comment by Gianfranco Baruchello to Le ballate della
signorina Richmond by Nanni Balestrini (Rome 1977).
Fig.
2 - Hans Bellmer, Poupée: Variations sur le montage
d’une
mineure articulée, from “Minotaure” 5,
1934.
The desire
for play, or the “play-drive”, is halfway between
sensitivity and intellect, said Schiller.
It is a primarily aesthetic space that joins matter and form.
Between matter and form there has always been the game-of-art, the game
of architecture.
Children impetuously take apart and reassemble the games that adults
give them. Thus, through play, we take possession of the outside world,
but also its estrangement in the construction of a new world, where the
pieces of yesterday are reconnected in new and unpredictable ways.
This is the transformative action which expresses itself through play.
Benjamin wrote of these things when speaking of toys.
Now there are different types of play. Physical, requiring skill, of
chance, or representational.
Here play is of interest as a combinatorial process, as the capacity
for assembly: taking a doll apart to reassemble it in a different way.
A little like a game of skill, a little like one of representation. Nor
is chance irrelevant. In the sense of the randomness that fuels every
kind of play, which precedes its structure in a set of shared rules.
Therefore, play and assembly share the same transformative tension.
Therefore, play and assembly are opposed to the real.
Taking apart reality to reassemble it in a different way. This is what
cinema has always done.
In addition, play and assembly invite us to succeed with little: with
the pieces left over, with the residue of the world of adults. With the
architecture of yesterday or the day before yesterday. That which the
spirit of time has left behind. Those whom we cannot leave, out of too
much love.
Ultimately, this is a message of hope.
Shklovsky was not mistaken when he claimed that everything in life is
the result of assembly.
If you want to understand what art is, start taking the doll apart.
It will be a story of errors, setbacks, and defeats. Attempts to reach
the end of the maze of possibilities.
Only then will we have another doll.