Art for the Wilderness 3: Playing With What You’ve Got
Meeting our constraints with playfulness
This seven-week series explores what we can learn about navigating the wilderness from artists who engage with difficult experiences through their art.
Hello friend,
This week, we are going to spend time with an artist who plays with constraints on airplanes.
In an airplane bathroom, the artist Nina Katchadourian spontaneously put a paper toilet cover on her head. She took a photo in the mirror with her phone, and the result reminded her of a 15th-century Flemish portrait.
This was part of her ongoing art project, Seat Assignment (2010-present), where she uses airplanes as her art studio. She improvises with photography using only a camera phone and the materials she finds around her. She takes pictures of collages made with in-flight magazines, sculptures made out of snacks, and the reflections of other passengers on her seatbelt buckle.
The images in her series Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style were taken on a 14-hour flight from San Francisco to Auckland. She would sneak into the bathroom when it was free, sometimes hanging a scarf behind her as a background, and improvise outfits out of found materials for her silly and subversive portraits.
Instead of disengaging from the notoriously unpleasant experience of being stuck on an airplane, Katchadourian leans into it. She practices radical presence, through a "complete investment in the present moment, the materials at hand, and faith and attentiveness to both".
Katchadourian uses play to engage deeply with the world, her artistic practice, and herself—transforming one of the most sterile places in the world (a long-haul flight) into fertile ground for creativity.
Play is a difficult concept to define, both what it is and why we do it. It has several broad characteristics: it is freely chosen, separate from the ordinary, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, and imaginative. Play gets us into a state of flow, and it doesn't really accomplish anything.
Play is frivolous, but not trivial.
A 2014 article in the American Journal of Play (!) argues that play has an important role in the process of self-realization. Play helps us explore and expand our capacity to act in the world: "it is necessary for comprehending what we can be and what we can do."
Through play, we practice identifying goals and finding creative solutions. We reconnect with past versions of ourselves and explore who we want to become. We dive deeply into the present moment. We reclaim our power to create and subvert.
Play changes us.
Some seasons in life are particularly shaped by constraints. As our days become delineated by the demands of external factors (pandemics, caretaking, employment, illness), our lives may feel small, out of our control, on hold. Immediate change is not always an option; the baby must be tended, the rent paid, the virus avoided.
Sometimes we’re stuck in a bathroom hurtling through the sky on a trip that feels far too long.
And there’s freedom in accepting the reality of our constraints, trusting that we are on our way somewhere important. We might think to ourselves, "Ok, I’m stuck here for a little bit. Now what?"
When we stop resisting what is, we can start to play with what could be. Play helps us reclaim our agency and reconnect with ourselves.
This next week, I invite you to play (of course!). Let yourself get silly—especially in moments that feel tight, like there is no margin for joy or choice.
Your play doesn’t have to be clever or polished. You don’t have to make elaborate rules, or come up with a project so creative that it gets acquired by a museum. This is not about the outcome, it’s about enjoying the process.
If you find yourself overthinking play (like I often do), start with your body. Get physical and particular.
In my own experimenting with play, I took a walk in the woods and just started touching things. I touched path signs, slush, the fabric of my coat. As I touched the trees that lined the path, it felt like I was walking down a reception line, formally making their acquaintance. I reached out for a branch, finding it smooth and bursting with buds; it felt sacred like rubbing a pregnant woman’s belly.
As I played, I got out of my head and into my sensations, my silliness, my curiosity, my receptiveness. I felt connected with myself as a child and the self I am working to become.
Giving myself over to play felt like strengthening the muscle of being me.
The fourth installment of Art for the Wilderness will be sent out next Sunday.
Remember, even in our constraints, there is spaciousness.
Warmly,
KEEP PLAYING
Read an interview where Nina Katchadourian talks about using airplanes as art studios, read an essay about her methodology, and look at more photographs from her Seat Assignment series
Between Art and Quarantine (Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine) encourages people to recreate works of art using three household objects
A parody conspiracy theory called Birds Aren't Real aims to fight misinformation with absurdism, a form of activism through play (The Daily did a podcast episode about it that made me laugh really hard)