Secession, Vienna is exhibiting Ericka Beckman's, "Game Mechanics."
The film and video work of the American artist Ericka Beckman focus on games and sporting competitions as well as their rules and structures, the underlying playing fields being conceived as allegories for the development and maintenance of sociocultural norms. In her exhibition Game Mechanics, Beckman shows the film installation You the Better (1983/2015), her latest film Tension Building (2016) as well as drawings. 'You the Better' is one of Beckman's early films, which are largely structured as games and evolve their narration from topics such as accumulation, competition, and the organization of thoughts and memories through rules, symbols, and symbolic thinking. In the film, a team of uniformed players performs the mechanics of a gamble that produces points like a machine and is neither controllable nor predictable in its course.
The acting figures are not actors, but act as the play ends. For the installation of the film in the last room of the gallery, Beckman expands the projection through eight light boxes in the form of a house that, as reproduced props, structure the space in depth and change its light color synchronously with the rhythm of the film. The motif of the house appears repeatedly in the film. It first appears as a home in a new resettlement, then as part of the mechanics of the game and the goal to be achieved, and finally as a display board, which notes the accumulation of houses on a property and thus does not advance the capitalistic motivation behind the house.
