reviews play safe
Is it safe? The question so beloved of the White Angel has become a key appears to cross Twister with something scary from Pina Bausch.
Western interrogation. Mobile phone masts? Investments? Transfats? The French game theorist Roger Caillois would instantly recognise
Foreigners? Abroad, in general? Is it safe? Our favourite unanswerable the pleasure evident in Bartana’s work as the act of simulation. Callois’s
floats over every exchange as we wait, quivering, for the data that will allow partial taxonomy of gaming – a touchstone among video game designers
us to take control again, to act, if only to choose the elective annihilation of – is further exemplified in Axel Stockburger’s Boys in the Hood (2005).
the safe room. Created almost as though shot in a quiet corner of an internet café, it
Worse still, the regularity and intensity with which the question gets compiles interviews with young male video gamers who bring back tales
asked increases when children are concerned. Curator Jonathan Carroll’s from the other side, from the heart of the game: elaborate sagas of lightning
mostly screen-based group show unites artists busily peering at children in storms and BASE jumping from mountainous peaks, or the camaraderie of
peril – real and simulated – in the belief, perhaps, that among these shouts drive-by shootings, or, perhaps most vertiginous of all, visits to the casinos
and cries, rules and transgressions, is something with import beyond the based in virtual worlds – to play on their slot machines.
playground. Ralph Borland displays his Suited for Subversion (2002) a jelly bean-
The audience for Joost Conijn’s installation Siddieqa, Firdaus, shaped bright red costume that is, in theory, to be worn by activists on
Abdallah, Soelayman, Moestafa, Hawwa and Dzoel-Kifl (2004) must watch demos, though the design hardly provides the protection that some of the
his documentary seated on a rickety set of bleachers, introducing a sense official military-industrial gear would offer. It represents rather – as do most
of unease that is entirely warranted. His film patrols the border between of the activist art interventions in the field of ‘provocative technology’ that
childhood freedom and ferity: a group of Dutch children apparently are part of Borland’s lineage – an attempt to introduce an element of the
abandoned on a large squat, scavenging for food, deprived of care of carnivalesque into a pinch-point of the march of global capital.
any sort, bar the lens of Conijn’s camera, but otherwise enjoying a kind of Borland’s intervention, in the spirit of the agonist ideas that trickle
vertiginous existential rush of smashing, grabbing and puddle surfing. through at various points in Play Safe, eschews confrontation with the aim
Playground games as socio-political critique may be as old as of victory in favour of an engagement that functions symbiotically, that
Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosy, but that hardly softens the surprise of Yael Bartana’s tolerates and even celebrates an unending struggle in the expectation,
contribution, Wild Seeds (2005), in which a group of Israeli children re- perhaps, that reaping the whirlwind might offer some compelling gameplay.
enact the removal of settlers by the Israeli Defence Force as a game that Luke Clancy
Play safe: Battlefield
in the Playground
project arts centre, Dublin
26 july – 1 septem ber
joost conijn, Siddieqa, Firdaus,
Abdallah, Soelayman, Moestafa, Hawwa
and Dzoel-Kifl, 2004, still from video
installation. courtesy the artist
artreview 168
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 22 4/9/07 12:46:54
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