If art is play, can play be art?

 In my post last night, I proposed that art is play, but actually the reversal is interesting: is play art? I think this is perhaps the more interesting, and the more practical question. 

Public art can be playful - David Shrigley's Really Good being a lovely example, but participatory art can go a lot further, as Pope.L's Pull! demonstrates - here the public gets to observe the play, but they also get the chance to join in. 

On a much more modest scale, my own piece, Wish You Were Hear (I really need to standardise the spelling of that, I write it differently every time, but actually hey, nobody knew what it was called, and admitting or broadcasting that it had a name would probably have harmed it) can definitely be re-framed as a social game with a set of rules viz:

• It's anonymous
• Share what you have written by pinning it up
• Use the prompts on the cards frame the things to share
• Don't steal the pen
• Don't damage, remove, or deface other people's cards

And interestingly, none of these rules were enforced, but they were almost entirely followed - the only one that was ever 'broken' was a few people ignored the prompts on the cards, either playfully (a card reversed to show the white side with "this is the anticard!" written on it) or to share their own messages (names, a few insults, and a single picture of an ejaculating penis). I guess a feature of any game is people 'cheating'!

Could a direction for my work (I'm not pompous enough to say "for art"!) be to create these 'sacred' games? To stop thinking about art as 'things' and more as 'shared experiences'? My current work focuses a lot on my grief/trauma experience, and is (inadvertently) characterised by the use of my own face and themes of pain/damage/emptiness, but also hope/rebirth/natural cycles. Maybe as I work through this, a direction would be towards more participatory experiences? To create 'sacred' (I need a better work) acts of play, capture them in compelling ways, and make that play into art? Such art could have a number of positive outcomes:

• Exploring the fact that most people do follow 'the rules' most of the time - we are social creatures conditioned to be social not selfish or destructive
• Exploring how games can bring people together in shared activities, and then showing more people how people can be brought together in shared activities
• Allowing and benefiting from having everyone contribute, even though those outcomes are mediated through me - in other words, incorporating other people's inputs to make a better overall output

Putting it in a slightly more emotive way: can I make art using (willing) people as the medium?

Things to consider:

• The art is the event not the activity - this is NOT about bringing people together to make artefacts, but bringing people together as an act of art. It is NOT art therapy for the masses, and the outputs can be beautiful and come from me as an artist, not the participants directly
• Although the work would be participatory, and some of the meaning and goals would be social, it would not be social art. It's goals would be artistic, not social - i.e. Pope.L's pull was participatory, and the themes were social (the value of works and labour) but it was NOT a social art project
• Documentation needs to be compelling - while the act is the art, the artefacts will be the only things that remain - these need to be interesting and compelling in their own right - I am effectively making two pieces of art for the 'price' of one - an act that is transient, and an artefact that is not (but which needs the act for it to exist)