Between Art and Play, We Can Figure It Out

“And to me, there’s something kind of insect-like about this process. The body of the caterpillar dissolves inside of a chrysalis in order to transform. I think art has to be pulled from someplace like this, quite intimate, and then shared.”

Lillian Davies

While studying at Paris College of Art, Lillian Davies was my professor in a class called Marketplace for Art and Design. She developed the entire class curriculum not just for us, but with us, creating a non-hierarchical, lateral environment. Throughout the class, we explored contemporary art venues in Paris, meeting curators, artists, and directors, and I watched how Lillian genuinely connected, listened, and cared for all of the people she came into contact with. 

Her approach as an educator and community member was inspiring and collaborative in nature, and I have been eager to catch back up with her to learn more about her unique perspective on contemporary art and her thoughtful outlook on life as an writer, professor, and researcher.

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Gwen Hoeffgen: I’ll explain the project to you briefly– we have this ongoing publication led by the students in our program. We interview artists, community members, and educators, and we publish the interviews quarterly. It sounded familiar, because we were able to do the same thing in our class last year. I appreciated the “give and take” from you. We had an assignment, but also you then spent so much of your own time editing the thing. That really resonated with me, being a collaborative project between all of us. 

Lillian Davies: We met when you were doing your MA in Drawing at Paris College of Art.

Gwen: Yes. It was interesting for me because my experience studying Contemporary Art in Paris was very individualized and I felt a little isolated from the community within my practice– I started wanting to do more work relating to my background in social work. But, I really got a lot out of the MA and I still have an active studio practice because of it. 

Lillian: And now you’re doing an MFA in Art and Social Practice at Portland State University? A two-year MFA? 

Gwen: It’s a three-year program, which hopefully will allow for a variety of short-term and long-term projects.

Lillian: Learning about your program makes me think of Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud. That was the first time a critic identified social practice. It makes sense that now 20 years later, schools are offering programs concerned with this way of working. When we look at what’s happening in the world now, collective action is urgent. And with the exponential and under-examined development of AI, it is imperative that human brains come together. 

Gwen: Exactly!

Lillian: And in Portland, maybe there’s still hope? In Houston, Texas, more than two dozen public school libraries have been closed this year and converted into disciplinary centers. It’s George Orwell happening. 

Gwen: Oh wow, I didn’t realize the extent of that. It sounds too strangely dystopian, but at the same time it’s sad that I’m not very surprised. I’ve just recently moved to Portland. There seem to be more social programs and accessible art organizations here than what I’ve seen in other cities. Hopefully it will be nourishing to build community with. 

Lillian: Well, I’m excited about your program. 

Gwen: Me too. The first question I have for you is really broad. What do you define as an artist? 

Lillian: Oh, that’s such a good question. I love that. It’s a hard question to answer and I’m not sure I have an answer. I love Raymond Williams’s Keywords. His project defined terms chronologically, as definitions always change over time. I think if I’ve learned anything from Raymond Williams’s project it’s that what we define as art, what we define as artists, what we even define as writing or literature, is constantly evolving. These definitions change depending on who’s speaking and from where and with what life experience, body experience, and what experience they have with art making and art makers. 

What is an artist? Who is an artist? You asked, what is an artist, or who is an artist?

Gwen: What. What is an artist? 

Lillian: Right. That’s great. Because a definition can extend to an object, a plant, a stone, or a body of water. I’m teaching Art History this fall and Gardner’s Art Through The Ages, basically, the Bible of Art History, nearly 1000 pages long, begins in a Paleolithic site in South Africa (Makapansgat), where people picked up a pebble from the bottom of a riverbed that had been worn by the water because it looked like a little face. It wasn’t carved by people, but seen, and recognized by people. Someone looked into that body of water and not only saw their reflection on the surface, but saw themselves reflected, or maybe their friend or their child, reflected in this little pebble, whose surface was worn to look like a face. So, I’ll propose that idea and I’ll think about the “what” because that brings in the possibility of a non-human artist. And then I think I’ll also lean on someone else to answer the question. Recently I took my class, Writing Art and Design, to The Joyful Revolution, an exhibition of the fabulous Sister Corita Kent at Collège des Bernardins. She was an artist and she was an art teacher and she was a nun. But then she left the church because the church thought that she was being sacrilegious. Comparing the Virgin Mary to the ripest of tomatoes. Anyway, at Collège des Bernardins, the artistic director, Pierre Korzilius, giving us a tour, explained “There are three things that we do here. First, the seminary, the theological course, and then there’s a scientific research wing and third” and this is what he said, “everything that cannot be addressed in theological studies or scientific research– That’s art”. So, how’s that for a definition?

Gwen: It’s fascinating to hear about who or what an artist can be, and I’m also interested in what or who defines it. Pierre Korzilius’s response makes me think of the magic art evokes– it’s a beautiful definition. 

Lillian: Right. And also the art of trying to figure things out. People try to figure things out through religion. People try to figure things out through science. If it can’t be figured out in those two areas, Korzilius is saying, the third option is let’s try to figure it out in art. 

Gwen: I recently read art being described as something aesthetic. That was a piece of it, but also something that is communicated or transferred. So, what would you define art as then? 

Lillian: I think part of the definition includes communication- an interface. Is it art before it’s shared? And then does it have to be visible or aesthetic? You mentioned the word magic. I’m thinking of a beautiful text by Sheila Heti, in the book, Motherhood, where she debates with herself whether or not she should have a child. Ultimately she decides not to. In the book, she describes the process of creating as an artist, and as a writer. And she talks about going deep, deep inside of herself, to the mush. I’m paraphrasing terribly, but basically, the idea is she has to go into the mush in order to come out of it and make something from it. And to me, there’s something kind of insect-like about this process. The body of the caterpillar dissolves inside of a chrysalis in order to transform. I think art has to be pulled from someplace like this, quite intimate, and then shared. 

Gwen: What you said relates to what I’ve been thinking about recently in my work. Social Practice is strange because it’s technically non-object-based, right? So it’s understanding art as just that: The Mush being shared. If we take the object out of art, but we’re still sharing, and building community, is that as powerful? Is it doing something? Is it art? I don’t know. Do you consider yourself an artist, Lillian? 

Lillian: Do I consider myself an artist? It depends on what I’m doing. I think I appreciate communicating with artists. I’ll say that. And don’t we all aim to be artists– isn’t that the goal? For me, it’s an intention, a goal, to live artfully and understand an artful approach to life. 

Gwen: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your book and workshop, Playgrounds (Drawing is Free Press, 2023). Could you tell me a little bit about how you and Chloe Briggs developed the idea for Playgrounds?

Lillian: So, I have been spending a lot of time in playgrounds during the last decade and a half with my children. It was a difficult thing sometimes because I was also writing for ArtForum, working as an art writer and as a teacher at an art school, and doing doctoral research at the Ecole du Louvre and EHESS. So when I was in the park with the kids, I felt like I was a bit out of the professional loop. And then I’d go to openings, and I remember some curator saying, “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you. Do you even live in Paris anymore?” I recently started to answer these sorts of questions with, “I’ve been at the playground.” I finally realized it was a place where the Venn diagram of motherhood and Art History overlaps. It was a long process for me because I had separated my work as a writer and my work as a mother, and, especially before the MeToo Movement, women didn’t communicate about their family life in the professional sphere. But, then things changed, and I changed. And what got me was when I started seeing all these male colleagues making a big deal about being dads. So I felt a little bit more comfortable speaking about maternity in my work, and the knowledge and experience this brings.

Anyway, I started researching the history of playgrounds and artists working with playgrounds. Many different artists have designed playgrounds, or painted or photographed playgrounds, and I cite Isamu Noguchi as one of the first. So when I was starting this research, I saw on Instagram that Chloe Briggs was making drawings of playgrounds. At the park with her son, she’s making drawings of the playground. So I said, we have to talk! And then we started looking at this place together. How do we make sense of this place? In addition to the art historical story of the playground and motherhood story of the playground, it’s also a place to consider play as a method for working and making art. A brilliant artist and scholar Mary Flanagan published a book Critical Play that talks a lot about play theory and play in the digital space, in video games. And I just read the beautiful new novel by Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and in her story about video game designers, there are some very very smart passages about what play is and how intimate play can be. 

And then we also looked at playgrounds as an alternative space for working and making art. Because where do you make your work if you can’t afford the Virginia Woolf “Room of Your Own”? Another important part of this project was when I saw a canvas by Elene Shatberashvili, a young painter from Georgia, the former Soviet Bloc. At the moment when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she’s painting a playground in Tbilisi. She’s not a mother. She’s looking at the structure of the playground, these fixed metal structures, the slide, the monkey bars, the whole thing, as an existing political infrastructure. And then the question is: How can young people, flexible bodies, and creative minds, move around this place in a new way? 

Chloe and I are continuing with Playgrounds in different ways now and proposing the playground as an important third space, where you can meet other people and interact, maybe, playfully. A French curator Vincent Romagny, in partnership with Gabriela Burkhalter, published an encyclopedia of artists’ playgrounds, which is great. My project with Chloe is not that. It is about the lived experience of female and maternal users of the playground. And I’m hoping that what we published last year is the first chapter of a longer project.

Gwen: It sounds like you’ve already developed so much into this project, but I’m excited to see how the idea of the playground, and play as a method of working and creating, will evolve within this workshop and publication. I am intrigued by the users of the playground, specifically seeing the playground as a third space where caregivers dwell, socialize, and create work. I wonder about the many types of shared relationships that exist due to playgrounds. And it’s also fascinating to think of a playground as a political space, and of how the infrastructure is created. I’ve never thought about playgrounds in that way. 

Lillian: Well, yes. The way playgrounds are set up is completely based on belief systems. In the United States, there’s the current belief that parents should be very present and interactive with children. So playgrounds in the U. S. are bigger than they are in France– they’re big enough for an adult to climb up on the structures too, right? Whereas in France, the play structures are much smaller. Adults can’t really fit in all of them. And in French parks, there are benches everywhere for parents to sit down and watch the children play because there’s a belief following the child psychologist, Francoise Dalto, of letting children go and explore. If you go back and look at some of the first playgrounds that Roosevelt’s Playground Association of America built in the early 1900s, those were created as public health projects. Society was being transformed, and playground equipment was imagined as exercise machinery so that the children (no longer working in factories) could physically build muscle. Then there was a change in playground design post World War II, when Europe and the UK developed adventure playgrounds. It was a sort of a free-for-all pile of junk. The kids were meant to build their play areas because the thinking was that we needed to rebuild and reimagine. But then by the time the 1980s arrived, capitalism was cocaine-fueled, the obsession was safety, and playgrounds were no longer for adventure, but containment. There’s padding, fences, and there’s this idea of the safety threat. So it’s very interesting to see how belief systems have shaped playgrounds. 

Gwen: It’s interesting to think of how structures like the playground change due to how our society is shaped. I wonder if we can see changes in other spaces, like the grocery store, or the “office”, which is now reimagined due to remote capabilities. The playground seems to be metaphoric for our understanding and perception of society.

Lillian: Yes, maybe so. Anyway, that’s where I am right now. Of course, most of us had playground time as kids. But I look at the playground differently now, returning there with my children. What do we believe about play in France in 2024? What was Noguchi’s experience with playgrounds? There’s a story that he had a traumatic experience in a playground in Japan as a kid, and I think he might have wanted to fix that by returning to playgrounds, in design and art, his entire life.

Gwen: I can imagine that someone would want to repair something where there was a traumatic experience. Maybe he wanted to exist within the playground again but in a different context, similar to how you did. 

Lillian: You ask about art and artists, right? I mean, we all can agree that Noguchi is an artist and I don’t think we should consider his playground designs separately if it’s coming from Heti’s mush-place and intended for another to experience life in a beautiful way. However, beauty is complicated too. I’m writing now on Miriam Cahn for ArtForum. And her work, as beautiful and painterly as her canvases can be, is essentially about violence. Do you know the work of Miriam Cahn? 

Gwen: I do, yes, I researched her when I was studying artists who investigate trauma. 

Lillian: It’s tough. Some of her paintings are truly terrifying. 

Gwen: Well, there’s a question of the sublime. It is possible to find something beautiful that also instills a sense of terror. It’s contradictory, but I experience that a lot with art. 

Lillian: You’re right to bring up the sublime. It’s like Noguchi’s process of going back to trauma, using it as material or site, or a proposal for a resolution through play. 

Gwen: Yes, and to fully close the circle- Back to the question of what is art. If you can’t figure it out by science, and you can’t figure it out by religion, you have to figure it out through art. I think those questionable places most times exist within our memories, perception of experiences, and emotions. Sometimes I think our brains are just too small for our hearts. Using art as a language allows different processing, and maybe an ability to find truth.

My parents moved last week from New Orleans, Louisiana up to the top of Maine, where it borders Canada. During my road trip with them, my dad (who isn’t an artist) told me that artists are good at seeing and expressing the closest possible truth. 

Lillian: That’s beautiful. Good for you for driving with them. 

Gwen: Well Lillian I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for making time to chat with me. 

Lillian: Thank you. Big questions. I hope something made sense. 

Gwen: It did, it did! It was a phenomenal conversation. Thank you. 

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Lillian Davies 

Art historian and author of multidisciplinary artist Mounir Fatmi’s first monograph (Suspect Language, Skira, Flammarion), Lillian Davies writes for Artforum, Flash Art, Interview, Numéro, and Objektiv. Guest lecturer at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Ecole W (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas); and Parsons Paris, Lillian is an Advisor for L’AiR Arts and Atelier 11 at Cité Falguière and Adjunct Professor at Paris College of Art and Sciences Po.

Lillian earned a BA in Art History and Comparative Religions from Columbia University, a Masters in Curating Contemporary Art from Royal College of Art, and recently conducted Doctoral research in a Troisième Cycle at the Ecole du Louvre, presenting her work on modern and contemporary art in the Arab and Muslim worlds and their diasporas at conferences hosted by EHESS, Université de Genève and Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne. Lillian is a recipient of AICA France’s Bourse Ekphrasis.

Gwen Hoeffgen

Gwen Hoeffgen is a visual and social practice artist investigating the perception of psychological trauma and dissociation of the mind and the body. Previously, she had experience working as a social worker in the mental health, addiction, and cognitive health fields, and she currently uses mediums of painting, drawing, performance, and conversation to explore how to find stories within pieces, creases, breaks, and bends.