Toys

Excerpt from Artist and Artisan, KG. Subramaniam, Geeta Kapur

The toy has to have a materiality in optimum relation to its many fictions.(1) Which is to say, it should be manipulable actually, in the sense of bobbing, wheeling, levered parts or otherwise sufficiently absurd or incomplete to invite the amused extension of its parts by the child. For that very reason, the simpler the toy the better. Its life is anyway in good hands. The child after all needs after all only a paper windmill to set all the coloured flags of the universe awhirl.

The toy, a perfect play object, is also a seductive sign.; the possibilities of the signifier always exceed the limits of the signified, and you test your improvisatory capacities with it. For of course the toy has no function or meaning beyond what the imagination brings to it. After the wane of magic the only object that can be called magical is a toy; an object that is the sum of its parts demonstratively put together, and which is allso more infinitely more because the parts , the signifying elements, are always in permutation. At least for the child and also for the adult who will let each configuration escape a simple computation.

Modern artists have looked to the artefacts of the primitives to invent what one might call a nonsense totem, a cross between a toy, a secret object of desire; a compact little semiological unit for the purpose of encoding catastrophic messages.

1- Cf. Roland Barthes, 'Toys', Mythologies