From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art

University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011
Games and play occupied a central, if misunderstood, role in modern art in the twentieth century. Many art-historical narratives have downplayed the ways in which artists returned to play and to games as analogues to art practice, as metaphors for creativity, or as models for art criticism. The essays collected in this volume investigate the fundamental importance of supposedly nonserious activity and attend to the ways in which artists used play and games in order to reconsider their practice and to expand their critical strategies. With subjects ranging from early twentieth-century manifestations of games and play in Surrealism, Duchamp, Picasso, and Bauhaus photography to their repercussions in Fluxus, performance, public practice, and new media, these essays establish the diversity and potential of games and play and point toward an alternate trajectory in the development of modern art.

FROM THE REVIEWS
“Far too often the seriousness of high art has been invoked at the expense of compelling art’s sheer gratuitousness, irrepressible impertinence, and spontaneous playfulness. A welcome and particularly bracing overturning of this staid approach is David J. Getsy’s From Diversion to Subversion, a collection of lucid essays by established and emerging scholars, which focuses insightfully on the oxymoronic turns of serious humor, games played in earnest, and ludic research.” – Robert Hobbs, Virginia Commonwealth University

"The book's project is a worthy one; play as a source for the creative imagination has too long been secondary... Recommended." - Annabel Wharton, Duke University / Choice Review

“Getsy’s anthology is a strong piece of work, with older theories of play marshaled not to justify the fun house that the art world has become in our day, but to remind us of how deeply modernists have engaged with a range of ludic possibilities.” – Jed Perl, The New Republic

Return to list of books by David Getsy