Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the session on ‘Play and Measurement’ as I was on sick leave. I was feeling dizzy, exhausted and unable to think clearly. This has enabled me to have greater empathy for my students who are struggling to complete work due to physical or mental health issues. Another valuable experience!
Vilhauer’s text Understanding Art: The Play of Work and Spectator[1] discussing Gadamer’s notion of ‘play’ suggests a move from the idea of an artwork containing its meaning to the notion of the artwork encouraging a transformative process (through engagement with the artwork) in the viewer. This engagement in ‘play’ gives rise to its meaning for the spectator – it becomes the ‘event in which meaning is communicated’. As Gadamer writes: ‘the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it’. bell hooks[2] in Teaching to Transgress espouses a similar form of engaged pedagogy, which leads to a transformational experience.
When I watched the recording of the lecture, it was interesting to observe the way the lecturer used this idea of play during the session – ‘a dance of mutual responsiveness’ – to help us understand both Gadamer’s notion of ‘play’ as well as engage with the rather dry TEF text. We became implicit in the process through the questionnaire we were required to complete. What became quite apparent for me, however, was the difference between actually attending a live online session as opposed to listening to the recording afterwards. My level of engagement (being-a-participant) was much less than if I was participating in a live online session. This made me realise how we really need to stress that live participation in lectures, even if online, is better for students than listening to recorded sessions. My level of involvement in the ‘dynamic, interactive and variable’ activity of ‘play’ was reduced. I was outside the game and did not lose myself in it.
Gadamer stresses that our engagement with an artwork serves as ‘an encounter with art’. From additional reading on Gadamer, I understand that his philosophy stems from a phenomenological viewpoint. While I am familiar with phenomenology, in particular Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (from Heidegger’s) notion of our embodied being in the world as the basis of the self, I have never read Gadamer, so found his phenomenological interpretation of the role of artworks extremely interesting. My Master’s thesis posits the photograph as the embodiment of an encounter between photographer, photographed and viewer, offering the possibility of an affective transaction. This is affirmed by Gadamer’s thoughts on the artwork and its transformative power: becoming lost in the artwork, which in turn brings forth something in the spectator and possibly enables us to grasp some truth. As Vilhauer writes: ‘in every artistic presentation there exists an articulation of our reality, of world, or of some subject matter’. Through playful engagement something is revealed. I definitely need to bring more ‘play’ into my lectures.
REFERENCES:
hooks, b. 1994 . Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Taylor and Francis. Routledge.
Vilhauer, M. 2010. Understanding Art: The Play of Work and Spectator. In Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other. Lexington, pp. 31-48.
[1] 2010:31-48
[2] 1994:13