Games are not a new presence in museums but their arrival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C, home of the country?s very first collection of American art, is an unmistakable achievement for games; an awkward art-world outsider that is finally being recognized, given rooms of its own in America?s museum with ?The [...]
Games are not a new presence in museums but their arrival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C, home of the country?s very first collection of American art, is an unmistakable achievement for games; an awkward art-world outsider that is finally being recognized, given rooms of its own in America?s museum with ?The Art of Video Games? exhibition, which runs from March 16 to September 30.
?We could not have had this exhibition at any other time than now,? says ?chief gaming evangelist? Chris Melissinos, ?because we finally have the vocabulary to understand and appreciate [video games]?I believe it?s society?s responsibility to protect and nurture this new form, and whether or not they can be art, I leave to you.?
The exhibition is spread across three big rooms on the museum?s third floor, the first of which greets visitors with a sizzle reel showing short clips from Sonic Adventure, Mario 64, Geometry Wars, Earthworm Jim, Pac-Man, Rez, Shenmue, Final Fantasy VII, Marble Madness, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, and more. The room also holds a selection of concept art, with early drawings from StarCraft, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Metal Gear Solid, which establish how much detail and intent is put into games, even when technology forces developers to make sacrifices.
The next room is an art-installation arcade where attendees can play one of five games projected on walls the size of mini-billboards. You can try Super Mario Bros., Pac-Man, Myst, The Secret of Monkey Island and Flower
The final room is a kind of history-walk, starting with Atari?s VCS (later the 2600) and ending with the current console trio of PS3, 360, and Wii. There is a mint-condition console and four representative games taken from Action, Tactics, Target, and Adventure categories accompanying each display.
The games are shown as a single still images captured by designer Patrick O?Rourke. At the side of each display is a video monitor where short pieces explaining the historic importance of each game can be played with a button press. The selection of games was determined by an advisory board of writers, academics, game developers, and executives who created a master list of significant games for each platform and the final selection of four per console was determined by a public poll with more than 3.7 million votes cast from 175 different countries.
So we?ve done it, finally. Halo is in a museum now. That?s where it is and it was us who helped put it there. Only trouble is, the curated assembly of games all come from corporations of varying size. The collection is not a celebration of video game art but of commercialized products.
On the way into the exhibit, one has to pass through a collection of work from Nam Jun Paik, including Megatron Matrix, a massive bank of smaller screens used to create the impression of a larger image passing over them, and Zen for TV, an old television screen that subverts one?s want for constant change with a single white line bisecting it. The transition from these works to Geometry Wars and Sonic the Hedgehog is nearly incomprehensible. And yet Paik?s work does not come from a separate world of high-brow art. He is sometimes associated with the Fluxus movement of artists whose work is influenced by the artistic traditions of games and rules.
In many ways the history of art is inextricable from games. Game pieces were among the first pieces of art created in human history, from the carved pieces in the Royal Game of Ur to the hollowed boards of Mancala. Before humans wrote novels and painted bowls of fruit, the impulse to create artifice was first expressed through play.
Through the centuries, play and art intermingled freely. The idea of games as taking place in the magic circle, an area where normal rules of social conduct were set aside for expression and experimentation, helped inform and free other forms of art. Roman reliefs celebrated men proving their worth in sport, in Scandinavia and Germany villagers collaborated on the decoration of Maypoles and danced around it in a social invocation of the midsummer reprieve from winter. French aristocrats indulged the liberation of masquerade balls and courtship rituals by playing self-consciously dramatic roles.
In the early 20th Century the Dadaists used playful forms of social interaction and absurdist performances, and later Guy Debord and the Situationists forwarded a theory of society as an interactive construct wherein people subconsciously adhered to the rules of psychogeography.
In the 1960s and 70s Fluxus artists?including Paik?made art whose meaning required interaction to appreciate, from Yoko Ono?s ?Yes? to Robert Rauschenberg?s tennis variation ?Open Score.? A year after Rauschenberg had reduced tennis to a glowing orb being hit across a dark room by discarnate tennis rackets lined with glowing lights, Ralph Baer created the first prototype of ping pong, sending a glowing orb back and forth across a screen.
In the years since, artists have never stopped using rules and play as the basis for art. Jason Rohrer?s Passage is the most famous recent example of a game designed purely for expression but there are volumes of other video games that call themselves art and take inspiration from the traditions of the past. There is Ian Bogost?s recent collection of video game poems, A Slow Year, and Mary Flanagan?s entire catalog of work, from the Unreal Mod Domestic which plays out torturous memory fragments as a woman escapes a burning house to [xyz], in which players use a game controller to select words to complete a poem. There is also Jaron Lanier and Bernie Dekoven?s early Atari collaborations on Alien Garden and Moondust, whose concepts and structures are closely replicated in Flower. There is Michael Mateas?s and Andrew Stern?s collaboration on Facade, the conversational AI game in which players watch a couple?s relationship disintegrate over the course of a dinner while being able to type in anything they want to try and intervene.
These games shouldn?t automatically be taken as superior to Mario and Halo, but neither should Mario and Halo be taken as the exclusive proof of how and why video games are art.
At The Art of Video Games, it is the catalog of multinational corporations?Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Sega, Atari, Electronic Arts, 2K Games?the canon. This arrangement narrows the scope of video game art to an eBay-style list of boxed products. The only non-corporate selection in the exhibition is Minecraft, and it?s hard to imagine it would have been included had the game not generated revenues similar to those of a game from a major-publisher.
As with any other form, there is overlap between the purely commercial and the purely personal works in video games and any institution that purports to celebrate the art of the form, ought to include works that represent the full spectrum, and not just the part of the spectrum where multinationals were able to make money selling plastic boxes and mass-produced discs to credulous kids.
The Art of Video Games narrows the history of games into a false canon of toy products left on the shore in the wake of yesteryear?s crashing waves of marketing. Super Mario Bros. and Pac-Man and Myst and Pitfall! and Geometry Wars are amazing creations as ar emost of the other games included in The Art of Video Games. But the exhibition fails to capture what is beautiful in those games, and how much they resonate with the spirit of all the other works displayed in the museum.
The Art of Video Games has ignored the games that called themselves art without apology, and didn?t, as Melissinos put it, leave it for the audience to decide.
Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in Slate, ABC World News, The Believer, The Daily Beast, Kill Screen, Gamasutra, The New Inquiry, Edge, and Billboard.
Source: http://feeds.ign.com/~r/ignfeeds/games/~3/2qfdemiM78U/1221949p1.html
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