I watched the Art 21 video on Play in art. The video takes us into the artist’s studio to see the artist at work and play at the same time. All the artist’s featured in the video had a very different idea of Play, as well as a very different style of artistic expression.
The first artist on the video was Jessica Stockholder. She started her video segment out by making paper. She explained that she likes to be in the studio alone when she does her work. She also explained that she thinks choosing to put yourself in a circumstance where you don’t know what you’re going to do is exciting and rich and difficult at the same time.
She created “pieces of furniture” although they don’t serve any particular function most of the time. She loves plastic and she also loves color. The materials she used were cheap and easy to buy. When she talked about her work she said that she doesn’t have a literary story in her mind. Afterwards she can put words to what she’s doing.
Drawings are a way of planning what she’s going to do, putting herself in the space and mapping out the space like “recipes for action”
She’s interested in systems in her work; geometrically organizing things, or how a thinking process can meander in unpredictable ways in contrast to a system that’s been planned and shared amongst people.
Since the segment that she was involved in was titled play, she shared her thoughts on that. She thought that play is a kind of learning or thinking that doesn’t have a predetermined end and she thinks she’s involved in that.
Ellen Gallegher was next on the video segment. She started by talking about how she takes an advertising sign and makes something joyful out of it. She didn’t come from a fine arts background but from a carpentry background.
Her work is built from found materials. She collected archival material from the 20’s through the 70’s – ebony magazines. Then she added things to them, making them fun and enjoyable. The material she collected was mainly advertisements but also stories and characters. The ad’s were about identity in the most uniform way. The people were captured in one moment exactly how they were. She was really inspired by “Moby Dick” and peg leg appeared in her work more than once. She was also inspired by water because her family arrived here by water. Her father’s family arrived on whaling boats.
She also puts her images on film and projects them on a wall. She does this to show that each individual picture is its own drama or it’s own stage. The idea of repetition and revision is central to her work. She talked about how there’s nostalgia in her gathering and looking at the material. She described it as a way of looking backwards and moving forward at the same time; continually seeing the world.
Arturo Herrera was next in the series of artists and he worked mainly with collage.
He started off by explaining that collage is something you can do very inexpensively. He started off with very limited space and money was tight, collage allowed him to move forward without purchasing expensive equipment. All he needed were items like scissors, and exacto knife, glue and paper. The art form he has chosen requires limited amount of space and inexpensive resources.
He was intrigued by the idea of collage because you could change one specific element into something completely different. When one thing was once easily recognizable as a foot or a hat is now just a shape on paper. Everything you cut out can become either simpler or more complex.
He’s interested in how an image that’s so clear and objective is made and forced to be together into an image that will have a different meaning than the separate fragments did not intend. He also likes the ambiguity of the images and how they’re forced to be together, and yet they’re all just abstractions but they affect viewers in different ways.
At the end of his segment he explained that he’s going to continue to see what he can say with the language of collage.
Oliver Herring was the final artist to be featured in the Play video. He started off by explaining that he likes things simple. He likes to boil things down to an essence. English is a foreign language to him and as he learns he has to express himself in crude ways but that forced him to make his point clear.
His work started with something he knitted. The reason he started to knit was in reaction to the suicide of someone who was close to him as an artist. He took all color out of his work and subjected himself to this rigorous and monotonous discipline. It wasn’t a conceptual decision but an emotional one. The knitting was never about knitting it was about the performance; going through a certain motion repetitively for ten years in this case. He explains that people only witness the outcome of the performance, in other words the legacy of that time spent.
He also made artistic videos. The videos were a way for him to be flamboyant he said. In the first few he was in it because he had to try it out but eventually he replaced himself with other people. He doesn’t care about the medium or the object but mostly about the process. He liked that it’s an intimate experience because it’s so unusual.
Sometimes he uses a person in film as the art and sometimes he uses a person as inspiration for a sculpture. Sometimes the focus is on fun and action and sometimes it’s a very quiet focus; like when he’s making a sculpture based on a real life sample. 
He made the point that most people are much more creative and eccentric and weird than they have the time to express. He wanted to express that idea artistically through his videos and pictures.
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