Description:
Boxed game of Tik-Tak-Toe with playing pieces are made from acorns, branches and oak leaves packeged with a hand-colored lithographed game board in a green cloth-covered box with compartments.
Label Text:
Label text (excert) from graduate curated exhibition: "We Gotta Get Out of This Place - Transportive Art" March 24 - May 1 and September 30 - December 11, 2022; Tirzah Frank (MA 2022) and Cecily Hughes (MA 2022)
The British name for Tic-Tac-Toe, Noughts and Crosses is both an art object and a game. With Xs and Os replaced by delicately veined leaves and rounded acorns, the set is elevated from schoolyard play to an elegant collector’s item. But Barth’s choice of material is thought provoking: Why make a game, something meant to be handled, out of a poisonous material like lead? And why choose ephemera—leaves fall, acorns grow—from trees as the pieces? Barthes makes the player complicit in destruction in order to indulge their desire for entertainment: to get all of the pieces to play, they must snap leaves and acorns from leaden branches. Noughts and Crosses dances around themes of life, death, and the diversions in between.
Tags:
games Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+1993.10 |
