5 Card Garfield

I love books

I love book art

I love opening presents

lids and covers

and cracking the spines

to discover the magic contained inside. 

But historically books were a teensy bit elitist.  No, actually they could only be enjoyed only by the haves…not the have nots. Not everyone was able or allowed or had time to read or could afford to buy books.  Once upon a time books were so expensive to create that one volume could be worth the equivalent of a house.  Books were held under lock and key.  They were stored in vaults. They were chained to bookshelves. They were reserved for a small population. Some were created for a soul user and not to be shared. Holding secrets between you and god.  Over time printing presses, xerox machines, home printers and the internet changed all that of course, and we have access to books even if we can’t afford them. We can read without touching paper, enjoy stories without knowing how to read.

This past year I’ve been consoled by reading books, playing games and sending letters.  I’ve been thinking about Ray Johnson and Mail Art as well.  I love the idea that anything can become mail art once the postman has delivered it for you.  This still does not solve the problem of creating art for the masses, but somehow it feels much more democratic.  

I’ve been creating small editions of artifacts to mail out and letting serendipity play a part in who receives them. 

I mailed them out on Tuesday, and by Wednesday I got responses.  The post office is very efficient!

5 Card Garfield is a riff on 5 Card Nancy, a game invented by cartoonist Scott McCloud.  Apparently, the comic strip Nancy (drawn by Ernie Bushmiller from 1946 and after) is the ideal comic strip for this game but since we only have stacks of Garfield books in our home I’ve substituted this Dadaist card game with everyone’s lasagna-loving cat.  The game is essentially an exercise in collaborative storytelling, played with a deck of cards. Each card in the deck features a single, panel taken from Jim Davis’s syndicated comic strip beginning in 1978, and according to the Guinness Book of World records, is the world’s most widely distributed comic strip.

I’ve recently created an assignment for my students to make “Stories in Boxes”, akin to Duchamp’s  Boîte-en-valise, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the shape of fables, fairytales and folktales.  I show them Kurt Vonnegut’s entertaining lecture “The Shape of Stories” where he graphs the different rise and fall of a narrative.  On a chalk board he makes a line from “The Beginning” to “Entropy” filling the scenes in between. 

Three stages of a narrative

Beginning                    Middle                    End

Introduction                 Crisis                    Conclusion

Exposition                Development          Recapitulation

The Set up                Climax                        Satisfaction

Invitation                   Response                        Party 

      Birth                        Life                           Death

This is why I decided there should be three frames to build a narrative in the game of 5 Card Garfield.  In the spirit of “choose your own adventure”, you can use Garfield as your doppelganger to tell simple-or theoretical stories.  

Life is simple, so tell simple tales.

Life sucks, so make them all eat lasagna

Life is beautiful so have fun while you can telling stories with games. 

In graduate school, I took an architecture course taught by Frank Fantauzzi, who’s work I admired. He used buildings as installations, similar to cuttings done by Gordon Matta Clark (who btw was the godson of Marcel Duchamp’s second wife Teeny).  I spent the majority of my time in his course reading postmodern literature and creating small editions of objects (mostly in boxes) that I shared.  These editions all documented time in one way or another.

Two examples: 

A box that contained 200 minutes: which consisted of a small cigar box with 20 cigarette butts enclosed identified with time/date/person’s name.  They were each indexed with a 10-minute conversation that I had with various people while smoking each one. 

A laminated map of I-71 from Columbus to Cleveland which catalogued roadkill with longitude/latitude and time of discovery.

These were the two projects I remember the most.  Documenting time in different ways.  This is where my head is at the moment.  Creating objects to create a moment in time, used to create stories.

Instructions:  

Number of players: 2+

Age: 2+

Game Set Up:

Shuffle the cards and deal 5 to each player.

Place the remaining cards face down in the draw pile.

Game Play:

To choose the first player, begin with the youngest person and go around the circle to name types of pasta.  The person who can name the most pasta types goes first.

First player will select a single card from their hand, and place it face up in the left black box- Beginning. 

This card will serve as the first panel in the collaborative comic strip that will emerge. 

 The next player places a card to the right of the first card- Middle.

The next player places a card from their hand to end the narrative- End.

The round is concluded at 3 panels (or cards).  

Then the next round may begin.

The next person (after the person who placed the concluding card from the last round) places the Beginning card and continue making stories with 3 cards.  

Judging:

A judge or judges (usually the other players) then vote on the appropriateness of each particular panel (card) to unfold a narrative with a thumbs up or down. If majority opinion favors the proposed panel, it becomes a part of the strip, otherwise it gets put at the bottom of the draw pile and player must pick up another card from the top. If the card is accepted by the judges, the player does not have to pick up any cards.

Move clockwise (unless its Wednesday) around the table, each player adding their card to the storyline. If the player feels they do not have a good card to add to the story, they can discard to the bottom of the draw pile and get a new card from the top. 

Winning: Continue play until one player has run out of cards and wins.

Ties:  If there are ties in the voting process, in the spirit of Dada, make up a silly challenge to break the tie.

Some examples can be: 

Person who can stand on one lag longest

Person who can sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the highest key.

Person wearing the most articles of clothing.

*If you foresee ties in your future, write down a few tie breakers on scrap pieces of paper and put into a hat to draw from later.