In his classic 1938 study of play in human culture, Homo Ludens, Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga draws a parallel between playing fields and ceremonial sites. “Formally speaking,” he contends, “there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play.” For both types of space, physical “separation from ordinary life” marks a zone with its own specialized rules and logic. Abstracted from the content of their internal activities, “the turf, the tennis-court, the chessboard and pavement hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.” The formal congruence between these two types of space suggests the possibility that play may serve a ritualistic function and that ritual, however serious it seems, may itself contain play elements.
At the Queens Museum, Ronny Quevedo’s site-specific installation, no hay medio tiempo/ there is no halftime, is an ingenious and touching artistic exploration of Huizinga’s formalist thesis. For the work, Quevedo applied colored pieces of vinyl tape to the museum’s atrium floor in the shapes of athletic field boundary lines. Near the floor’s halfway line sits a grey soccer ball made out of concrete and chalk; because visitors are allowed to walk on the tape-covered floor, faint patches of chalk dust have dispersed across its surface. The wall text describes the work as a “floor drawing,” but it could just as easily be described as a sculpture or a covert work of relational aesthetics.
