From art to get involved in the game to get into art

"The art of GET IN THE GAME BY GAME GET IN ART": of very serious fun images
by Paolo Pistellato, historian and art critic

There is no more serious business of the game, in which small (thoughtless?) We learned the difficult art of unsuspecting get involved, starting to define our future adult roles. That effort: yet now regret that time as an unrepeatable golden age. Since we find other great games, but it is no longer the same. Luckily the art gives us - at least from the nineteenth century - return routes the playful childhood. Discarded individual sports or team (the you would too wide survey), it will affect browse through the game images from ancient art to the '700: from acrobatic somersaults on the rumps of Minoan bulls kottabos classics symposia; the late Gothic snowballs nobles Trentino the curious backgammon (to toss up the robe saint) in crucifixions Cretans of '500; the moralizing childish games of Brueghel and the lucky theme of cards cheater six-eighteenth century (from Caravaggio to Longhi, but the cards will still have a long life), to the many carnival entertainment. And yet dolls and swings, checkers and chess, being silent on the other. But only with the 800 - Advance from soap bubbles Chardin - the issue becomes poignant individual memory, that metaphysics and surrealism traghetteranno nell'onirico: interrupted games (Cecioni), piled up in attics metaphysics of mind (De Chirico, Carra) , the object of alienating contemplation (Casorati) loaded onto floating islands to the delight of our inner Peter Pan (Savinio), scattered sidereal desert spaces (Tanguy) the dumb bells Magritte fail to revive, or substitutes of impossible travel ( Cornell). In the '900 even mechanical devices (serial objects par excellence) will make individuals who refuse to produce and start to play, often the erotic seduction (the "celibate machines" to funny rattling Tinguely). And the mobile Calder? Make history in sculpture for other reasons, but here it is tempting to evoke little hands reached for the colored pendants calls on the cradle. Since last - but not least - claim their space puns, short circuits between titles and subjects of the works (Duchamp teaches and countless imitators vary on the subject, through the pastime of the surrealist exquisite corpse): remain unsurpassed pages Freud on wit to reveal the regressive pleasure of a pre-logical use of language, with the help of the unconscious or pre-conscious. Passed the sixties and entered the real contemporary, everything is complicated or rather branches off along multiple paths of expression and unpredictable access to the leisure sphere, impossible to summarize in a few lines: better to let the audience the surprise of discovery or even more - seen the theme - keep the last card to play after the game.
Paul Pistellato