Play-acting

1. Does "play-acting" mean "pretending"?

2. Does "acting dirty" mean "playing the role of dirt"?

Context :

As opposed to the Vienna Actionists’ use of perverse actions to challenge the law of the father, Mike Kelley’s Manipulating Mass-Produced Idealized Objects, 1990, a performance in which naked performers, including Kelley, play with fluffy toys and dirty bottoms, is a tongue-in-cheek parody of perverse actions which suit the contemporary landscape of liberalism, where play-acting to create shock and an infantile seeking of punishment is par for the course.

A number of artists’ work at this time, from Andres Serrano to Rona Pondick, engaged in a discourse of bodily fluids, which caused questions to be asked about the historical effectivity of such work. The contrast between these two artists evokes somewhat the contrast art historian Hal Foster makes between the Surrealism of André Breton, artist and writer, and philosopher Georges Bataille, Surrealism being an historical precedent of abject art where the desublimatory trajectory of the body was probed to challenge orthodox categories. According to Foster, Breton thought that ‘Bataille was an “excrement-philosopher” who refused to rise above big toes, mere matter, sheer s.h.i.t, to raise the low to the high. For Bataille, Breton was a “juvenile victim” involved in an Oedipal game, an “Icarian pose” assumed less to undo the law than to provoke its punishment.’ Foster elaborates Surrealism as pivoting on these dichotomies of pure filth and acting dirty.?