The Games They Played

A recent visit to Montreal found us at the MAC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal

Fortified with coffee and breakfast treats at Olive et Gourmando on Rue St. Paul, we walked up Rue Saint-Pierre and onto Rue de Bleury to Rue Sainte-Catherine.

We managed to miss the entrance – even though it was right in front of us – but nonetheless managed to get to the museum before it opened. And that allowed us to scope out the Montreal underworld entrances to the Metro. (There were snow flurries up top and while it was not bitterly cold the sidewalks were icy.)

Lots of interesting stuff of course but what caught my attention most was the big dark space inside which large two sided screens played videos of children playing games.

It was so staged that you could see several at any time and the gently muted sound tracks interplayed with each other creating a full immersion in the scenes of children intent in their own worlds and on their own games.

The exhibit is Francis Alÿs: Children’s Games  – a collection of videos of children at play around the world. It’s an inventory of childhood games and industry that reveals how children turn simple, ordinary things—elastic, coins, sand, sticks, stones, plastic bottles, broken mirror glass, tires—into objects of attention, competition and absorbing activity. 

The films are short, of varying lengths, and looped so each film plays with the others. I found the effect quite mesmerizing as I moved from one part of the room to another. Each distinct game, each group of children and the sounds of their play overlapped and moved in and out of attention. 

There are eighteen films in all and from a  wide-range of places: , Afghanistan, Belgium, France, Jordan, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Venezuela.  The settings are public spaces, a beach, open lots, disused and abandoned buildings, housing projects, a refugee camp, dusty streets and the edges of town. Together they make for an immersive experience that creates a rather benign illusion about childhood – the sense that play is universal and children are resourceful, independent and serious. If play is the work of the child then these children are intensely serious about their about their task. 

Alÿs is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist now living in Mexico City. You can see all the videos on his website. Imagine them all being played in the same darkened space so that seem to flow dream-like together to tell a story of a timeless and idealized childhood. Here are three of them.

These are games that  – with some variations  – are played all over the world and some for as long as we can tell. Sophocles wrote about knucklebones and there are depictions of the game on terracotta vases dating to 350 BCE. Growing up we called it five stones or jacks.

These are children who must fall on their own resources to provide the means for play. They don’t have expensive commercial toys and electronic games and gadgets. They play the way children have throughout time – by making use of what is available and making stuff up. .

Peter Bruegel the elder painted many of the same games in 1560.

Alÿs’s videos show the same games. Let’s take a look at some of the details of the games in the painting.

Game #3 is Coins Mexico City 2008. The players each take a coin and take turns tossing them towards the wall: the coin the closest to the wall wins. Often called Pitch and Toss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game #6 Sandcastles Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium 2009. Bruegel shows playing with sand and building. 

Game #7 Hoop and Stick Bamiyan, Afghanistan 2010. 

 

Game #8 Marbles, Amman, Jordan 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game #9 Saltamontes  Salto Acha, Venezuela 2011. Grasshoppers. Making a game of catching and torturing small creatures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game #10 Papalote Balkh, Afghanistan 2011. Kite flying. Here’s Flying a ribbon on a Stick from Bruegel

 

Game 13 / Piñata Oaxaca, Mexico 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game #14 Piedra, papel y tijeras Mexico City 2013. Rock, paper, scissors hand game played in shadow. And here’s Bruegel with Morra – A hand game that dates back thousands of years to ancient Roman and Greek times

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game # 18 / Knucklebones Kathmandu, Nepal

 

 

 

 

 

 

With his painting, Bruegel was possibly making a social commentary on the folly and childishness of human behavior. He shows one ever popular human activity that will probably not make it into Alÿs’s video repertoire. Here it is: