Work is a way of playing
In pursuit of the core idea for this film, I went back to Corita’s book Learning by Heart (2008) a core text which, if you’ve read almost any other blog post, will not surprise you that it is central to the whole research project. I went back and re-read about plork, and about her belief that play and work aren’t opposites; about how in some cultures, they don’t exist as separate ideas at all. And as usual, as I was reading, I found something new in her work. “Play is a way of working,” she writes in a caption to an image. “Work is a way of playing. Our best times are when working and playing are the same thing” (p157).
It is the subtle difference between these two statements that really caught me this time. I think that until recently, much of my research, or my feelings towards my research, has been focussed on the first statement - that to play is a way of making things, creating things, bringing things into being. That being playful can be part of a methodology for creating outputs; that you can use play. But what felt like for the first time I really started thinking about what it means that “work is a way of playing”.
What does it mean to say that work is a way of seeking pleasure, of having fun, of being creative? It sheds new light on the perspective of creative practice. We know we be making outputs through engagement with our playful selves. But perhaps we can also become more engaged with our playful selves through the focus that making something provides. Work - creative work, artistic work, at least - is an opportunity to seek pleasure, and fun, and become curious and creative and optimistic and all the characteristics I associate with playfulness. And so engaging playfully with your creative practice is not about approaching the project playfully and allowing the outputs to come; or at least, not justthat. It is also about making outputs and allowing that process to feel, to be, playful. Really, it’s about doing away between the distinction between the two at all. I much prefer De Koven’s idea that we play, and each play experience “opens its own world that exists for us only as long as we keep…working and making. As soon as we stop playing, as we must eventually do, the play becomes finite, fixed, a ‘work’” (De Koven and Gramazio 2020, p3). It strikes me that De Koven purposefully blurs the line between the two - are we playing, or are we working? - until ultimately we stop and declare ourselves finished, at which point the ‘work’ is just that, a work.
And so while I’ve been trying “think playfully” in order to develop the idea for this new film, perhaps I have been missing a trick. Perhaps I just need to start working - and let work be a way of playing. And to do that, a sensible place to start feels like the place I found myself at the beginning of my research - trying to unpick what play is. Except now, I’m not trying to explain it using theory. Now, I’m looking back on a work I’ve made and using examples from that. Now, I know a little better what play is. Play is a way of working. And work…well, you get the idea.
References
DE KOVEN, B. & GRAMAZIO, H. 2020. The infinite playground : a player's guide to imagination, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
KENT, C. & STEWARD, J. 2008. Learning by heart, New York, Bantam Books.