But, maybe, is there a game to art? A playing with materials as well as the viewer? Thomas Bang, for instance, seems to toy with dualities—in or out, empty or filled, fragment or whole. On the wall is a black metal rod which curlicues at both ends into slits cut into the wall and dammed up in black. A literal drawing in space. Two wooden slats parallel each other vertically on the wall. The top of one is broken off at an angle, the resulting wedge between the two clayed in. Displacement denoted in a visual tug-of-war as one pulls the skewed segment back into uprightness, closing the articulated gap. Not exactly a trick, but pieces of a puzzle which one fits into a whole. On the floor a plaster semicircle with a hole containing the beltlike spiral of a thick canvas strap. Adjacent a plaster circle, size of the hole, impressed with a spiral, size of the strap. The whole split into parts, perception putting it back together. I find myself joined in a sport. Is art then the mapping out of the rules of the game? The viewer, the player, adding and piecing, following the clues, formulating an image out of its parts?

—Susan Heinemann