appendix a: playgrounds in history and today

7/22/2019 Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

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Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Playgrounds

New Spaces of Liberty (The Question of Form)

Kunsthof, Zurich, 2013

A project curated by Dimitrina Sevova in cooperation with Prof. Elke Bippus, Franziska

Koch and the department Vertiefung Bildende Kunst of the Zurich University of the Arts

Contents

The Function of the Playground in Public Life brief outline and historical background 3

Public Space and Social Organization 3

From Outdoor Play in the Medieval Town to the Playground Movements of Modernity 4

The Invention of Childhood 5

The Democratization of Play 6

Crisis and Playground 8

The Rise and Fall of Adventure Playgrounds 10

The Creative City where the city itself becomes a new total playscape, introducing a new

work time timeless play of precarious perfection, the bold recreation the total playscape

is part of a major urban renewal, replacing the machinery of the factory system 11

Public Art and Urban Renewal 14

Between Art for Social Change and Subjection to the Technological Apparatus 17

Appendix A: Playgrounds in History and Today

Text and research: Dimitrina Sevova


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This preliminary research provides a gen-

eral introduction to the historical condi-

tions and social function of public play-

grounds in Western societies, in the con-

text of the project Opportunities for OutdoorPlay? Playgrounds New Spaces of Liberty

(The Question of Form)at Kunsthof, Zurich,

2013. The aim is to initiate a transdisci-

plinary collaborative research group which

is to focus on analytical micro-research on

the city of Zurich, taking into special con-

sideration the district 5 in which Kunsthof

is located. During the last one hundred

years the playground has transformed

from its 19th-century factory-regime guise

to a public place for raising the kids of

mass production and automation, and lat-

er to the exible playscapes of the creative

city with its economic bio-games.

Book cover of Ingeborg de Roode (ed.), Aldo Van

Eyck: Designing For Children, Playgrounds,

NAi Publishers/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,

2002.1

1 Referenced in Paige Johnson, The Play-

grounds of Aldo van Eyck, Amsterdam, 1950s-

1970s,playscapes a blog about playground

design, 18 March 2008 (accessed

2013-02-23).

Meteor boulder being unloaded from a truck

and installed in Cantelowes park storyscape in

Camden.2

2 Muarrikh Choiron, Cornish Megaliths for

Camden Playgrounds, worlds children: The

Kids and Family On The world(blog), 12 No-

vember 2009 (accessed 2013-02-23).


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An Iraqi boy squeezes through a gap in a stretch

of security barrier erected in Baghdads Azami-

yah neighborhood.3

Boys play soccer near a blast wall in Baghdads

Karrada neighborhood. U.S. forces plan to erect

walls and Jersey barriers around at least 10

districts.4

3 Bryan Finoki, Border to Border, Wall to

Wall, Fence to Fence, Subtopia: A Field Guide toMilitary Urbanism(blog), 24 April 2007 (accessed

2013-02-23). Photo: AP/Asaad Muhsin (accessed 2013-02-23).

4 Karin Brulliard, Gated Communities

For the War-Ravaged, Washington Post, 23

April 2007 (accessed 2013-02-

23). Quoted in Bryan Finoki, op. cit.Photo:

Getty Images / Wathiq Khuzaie.

The Function of the Playground

in Public Life brief outline and

historical background

Public Space and Social Organization

Between childhood and personhood, be-

tween labor and education, work and free

time the production of subjectivity in public

space is placed under contemporary condi-

tions of urbanization. Playgrounds can be

seen as urban prototypes of technological

and architectural apparatuses involved in

the production of the liberal subject, aimed

at generating articial structures and sur-

faces of safety and regulating outdoor activ-

ity in public spaces, leaving their mark onsocial, economic, and biopolitical identity-

making.

They serve as a means of combining play

and pedagogical methods with the interest

of psychologists in order to stimulate

cognitive, affective, physical and social skills

in children, thus installing a habitus. From

the outset, in this concept of recreating

kids play environments the main task is

to provide public instructions and control,

mediated through the technologization of

childrens play. Their playground activities

have to be observable from a distance.

Every movement has to be exhibited anddisplayed in order to avoid violence between

them and to regulate and design behavior,

which at the same time is prone to increase

their physical activity and the socializing

mechanisms between them without

the intervention of pedagogues or adult

supervisors to structure and regulate their

play.

This is why from the very beginning

preference was given to transparent

architectural structures, borrowing from

adapted archaic rituals, and appropriating

its materials and forms from the factory.The history of playgrounds reects the his-

tory of capitalism at each stage of its eco-

nomic transformations, and the ways in

which the social system and its dispositifad-

dresses and controls behaviors at a distance

through the installing of common sense. A

new form of planning emerges along with

the social sciences, a form of surveillance, a

form of insurance. The architectural setting

and the functionality of the design directly

form the body, i.e., the materiality of power

operates a reality of abstraction, inscribing it

directly in the body, disciplining it.


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From Outdoor Play in the Medieval

Town to the Playground Movementsof Modernity

In the medieval inner city, protected by

the city walls, there is no space for play.

Such activity is relegated to the outside of

the city in the common green lands, un-

regulated and accidental. The playground

makes its appearance on the public scene

in the industrial city of the mid-19thcen-

tury, an articial creature of modern

time and its forces, a social technological

device combining the model of the panop-

ticum with the techniques of the factory.

It spreads rapidly and is appropriated asan organizational apparatus of modernist

discourse and socio-cognitive instrument,

and nds its supporters and promoters to

master spatial arrangements and habits

of the population of big industrial cities

in the developed West. These are social

techniques directly implicated, along with

industrialization, in the production of new

liberal subjects ready to participate in the

new economic and social order, its rules

and limits. This is a process of individu-

alization, secularization, rationalization

and disciplining of bodies. With its socialfunction and form of orchestrating group

activities, personhood and childhood in

public places, the playground stands as a

historically distinct relation to the private

sphere, just as important to the bourgeois

urban population of the time.

The Playground, a Vacant Lot, Hale House,

Boston, Mass., c1903. 5

It takes time for public playgrounds to be-

come common-place directly at the heart

of the city, be it within a park or occupying

their very own playing area. Campaigns

are launched, shaped by activist argu-

ments not unlike those in favor of public

baths, green areas and grounds for out-

door sports in the city, and public parks

5 Social Museum Collection, Fogg Museum,

Harvard Art Museum. Quoted in Nancy Cott

(ed.),Women Working, 1800-1930, Harvard

University Library Open Collections Program

(accessed 2013-02-21).

Francis Goodwin Peabody established the So-

cial Museum at Harvard University in 1903 to

promote investigations of modern social condi-

tions and to direct the amelioration of industrial

and social life. Peabody was a leader in social

reform, teaching popular courses on social eth-

ics as early as the 1880s and forming the De-

partment of Social Ethics in 1906.

Sports feld in the city moat. Childrens Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

(detail), circa 1560.


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in the history of Commonwealth countries.

A large gamut of genres emerges, among

them adventure playgrounds combing fun

and pedagogy, or eld experiments for the

outdoor cultivation of plants in the newlyconstituted public schools for mass educa-

tion.

It is as part of a reorganization of the

social eld that the market economy of the

19thcentury introduces a modern concept

of childhood as a distinct happy life stage

of personhood, rst for the kids from the

upper classes, but with the rise of the

concept of the mass society, gradually

extending to be the norm for all social

strata.

A diversity of playground movements

makes its appearance around that time,

led by a range of interests. Social activists

engage to promote and standardize mass

leisure time and organize free time after

long working days in the new crowded

cities, hand-in-hand with education,

public life, entertainment, and urban and

social planning. First publicly accessible

playgrounds are built, while the state

starts supporting, planning and governing

comprehensive recreational programs,

outdoor play and green spaces and areas

for physical and cultural activity in

order to structure the interplay between

environmental, social, cultural andeconomic factors on a given site.

After the 16th-century enclosures

where an end was put to the access to

land as a common good and the living

wage was introduced for the proletarized

rural populations, this is a big step in

reinventing the social space as a public

space, which takes place not without great

social and political struggles. Playground

reformers believed that supervised play

could improve the mental, moral, and

physical well-being of children, and in the

early twentieth century they expanded

their calls into a broader recreationmovement aimed at providing spaces for

adult activities as well. 6

The childrens behavior is to be

supervised in order to develop better

citizens for the near future, to serve the

industry and the economic exchange. At

the same time this is a means of cleansing

6 Julia Sniderman Bachrach, Playground

Movement, Encyclopedia of Chicago (accessed 2013-02-20).

and integrating marginalized elements

such as migrant kids, of disciplining

children infested with lice, or the children

of the working class who are roaming the

streets after school without supervision ifthey are not forced to work, that is.

Armour Square, Children in wading pool. South

Park System, 33rd to 34th streets, from S. Wells

Street to S. Shields Avenue, Chicago, IL, 1909. 7

The Invention of Childhood

This is why the history of the early-20th-cen-

tury playground incorporates the construc-

tion of childhood as a myth, but is also a

part of policy-making, the foundation of legal

liberalism assigning to them certain rights

and even some privileges as sovereign sub-

jects with special treatment under public law,

allowing them to a certain extent an indepen-

dent status in contrast to their previous sta-

tus as property of their parents, imposing

on parents obligations in the public domain

a rather new phenomenon at the time.

In the form known to us, childhood

dates back about 100 years, to the early

20thcentury, which coincides with the

construction in a commercial mode of the

toy system of the fast-growing industry, and

with the rise of scientic disciplines with an

interest in the social and the subject. Theseprocesses reshape the perception of what can

be called a happy childhood while placing it

in the light of consumerism and the economic

benets and developing in children the habits

required by the new relations.

7 Georgia Silvera Seamans, Contested waters

at Americas swimming pools, local ecologist

(blog), 25 February 2009 (accessed 2013-02-

21).


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Before that, children were playing on the

street itself, along the river, or had to work

in the farm, do housework and raise their

younger siblings. Child labor was widespread

in factories, mines and on constructionsites. In the USA it is only after the Great

Depression, i.e., in the 1930s, that child labor

comes under regulation and is forbidden in

some cases, something that comes about not

without struggles and efforts, just like the

newly appeared free time, with the regulation

of the working day, and the vacations

of workers and of the lower strata of the

population.

In Switzerland, the widespread

phenomenon of contract children, or

indentured child laborers, continued into

the 1960s. These were children who were

taken away from their parents and given to

other families, where they were often forced

to work. These social processes replicate

the new economics techniques and recreate

the enormously growing industrial city, as a

result of which playgrounds provide different

spatial realities, under the regulation of the

state, derived from complex urban change.

The Democratization of Play

Matador No. 1, Korbuly, 1932. 8

Take todays highly standardized play-

grounds for instance. These post-and-

platform structures attempt to design

every risk and fall out of play. Danish

landscape architect Helle Nebelong writesand lectures about how the regularity of

most playground equipment lulls children

into thinking that every rung or step will

be a uniform distance or height.

Nebelong believes that mid-twentieth-

century Danish examples of play environ-

ments, which permitted children to work

8 National Building Museum, Architectural

Toy Collection. Photo by Museum staff. (accessed 2013-02-22).

with surplus materials and objects (loose

parts) and to use real tools, helped forge

her own passion for playgrounds in which

there are no set ways to do anything.

These older outdoor spaces were calledAdventure Playgrounds. Children would

decide what they wanted to build and

how to build it, using hammers and nails

to construct their own structures and

spaces. These playgrounds, which had

excellent safety records, gave children the

opportunity to direct themselves and take

control of their surroundings.9

Roy Toy Log Camp Building Set, Roy K. Dennison

& Sons, 1946. 10

Prior to the advent of Adventure Play-

grounds, early 20th-century construc-

tion toy systems gave children an outletfor imaginative play. 11

If in the beginning play is the privilege of chil-

dren from the afuent strata while other chil-

dren are often forced to work, in our days the

fault line is between rich and developed coun-

tries in which child labor is outlawed and child-

hood is under the protection of the law system,

and those in which child labor to a varying ex-

tent remains widespread. If in Germany or Chi-

na child soldiers were last used during World

War II, they have in recent times been, or are

still sent to the front in such countries as Sierra

Leone, Yugoslavia, the Philippines or Bolivia.

9 Susan G. Solomon, Play and Parenting,

imaginationplayground (blog), 13 January 2013

(accessed 2013-02-22).

10 National Building Museum, Architectural

Toy Collection. Photo by Museum staff. (accessed 2013-02-22).

11 Susan G. Solomon, Play and Parenting,

imaginationplayground (blog), 13 January 2013

(accessed 2013-02-22).


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Since the ancient Greeks (or even earli-

er) there has been a strong link between

physical health and general wellbeing.

For nearly 100 years, the Parks Depart-

ment has been at the forefront in sup-

porting a healthy city and putting the

recreation in Parks & Recreation.

From the early bathhouses to the anti-

obesity programs of today, the Parks

Departments focus on active recreation

has supported the goal of a healthy

citizenry and positive social and moral

conduct.12

Charles S. Hamlet (left), supervisor of outside

maintenance for the Akron Board of Education,

and Herbert A. Endres, assistant manager of

Goodyear research, inspect the wear patterns

beneath the swings on a rubberized playground

at Margaret Park School in 1951. 13

12 City of New York Parks and Recreation,

Recreation in Parks: NYC Parks (ac-

cessed 2013-02-20).

13 Akron Beacon Journalle photo. Source:

Mark J. Price, Akron gives big bounce to play-

ground safety in 1940s, Akron Beacon Journal

Online, 18 March 2012 (ac-

cessed 2013-02-20).

Workers from the Portage Bituminous Co. sweep

away excess rubber from the top of Akrons

bounciest playgroundat Margaret Park School

in 1950. Akron experimented with rubber play-

grounds with materials furnished by Goodyear

and Firestone. 14

14 Akron Beacon Journalle photo. Source:

Mark J. Price, op. cit.


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Modernist design principles came to the play-

ground through the work of Dutch architect Aldo

Van Eyck. When he began his work in 1947

there were few public playgrounds in Amster-

dam. When he fnished thirty years later, he had

constructed over 700 serene, minimalist play

environments. Sometimes, as in these photos, he

simply carved out a section of the street, giving

children as much legitimacy in the city fabric as

vehicles.15

The noble and generous era of the play-

ground as part of the utopian, modernist

project of the city, with their equipmentand things, part of an agenda with its

machinery for organizing the betterment

of life, the typical playground with xed

equipment that some can still remember

is on the wane in the contemporary urban

environment. In a time in which play spac-

es start out from the factory regime they

consist of the typical metal play equip-

ment, concrete and pipe design, asphalt

surfaces perfectly replicating the needs

and spirit of mass society with its housing

system, the factory, and production lines.

These places with all their

contradictions in effect embody utopianideas, promote dramatic play, and

imagination towards practices linked

to social constructivism and some sort

of pedagogical impulse placing and

treating equally its citizens in the social

15 Paige Johnson, Mid-Century Modern on

the Playground, dwell at home in the modern

world, 1 August 2011 (accessed 2013-02-22). Images from

Aldo van Eyck, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,

NAi Publishers, 2002.

fabric. Speculatively speaking, public

playgrounds with their impact on the city

population contribute to the establishmentof new kinds of businesses following the

principles of the playground system of

commanding behavior from a distance,

and the introduction of self-service models

such as supermarkets, which start to

develop as businesses between 1950 and

1960.

Crisis and Playground

Every endeavor to uninstall and reinstall

a new playground system is accompanied

by much heavier and stratospheric shock

waves and the ow of composition-decom-position-recomposition of capital and of

social production and technologies. As a

result, the playground apparatus under-

goes continuous rethinking, replanning,

endless unshaping and reshaping of its

internal structure and surface, along with

the idea of its materials, design and archi-

tecture and their integration, as a part of

a bigger project of optimization reecting

planning interests and the economic con-

ditions.

A few principal periods stand out after

World War II of these social apparatuses,


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comprising socio-economics post-

war crises and the desire to overcome

them with the Fordist model of mass

consumption. The 1960s bring the decisive

change with respect to the recreation ofthe landscape and working places, and

the understanding of leisure time. Most

of the playground structures are removed

after 1980 and never again reinstalled or

reconstructed in the same guise, following

the tendency to deindustrialization of

the big global cities and their turning

into attractive places for the headquarter

economy.

The deindustrialized city is subjected

to a privatizing mechanism of its public

space, to increase its exibility under

the new dispositifof the social coming

from the context of social science, maths,

information technologies and biology, as

techniques of a soft technological society

which prefers indoor recreations like body

building, cosmetics or computer games

and gambling.

Various semiprofessional sport activities

and the emergence of tness centers

replace to a large degree the traditional

places for free play in public space in

the 1980s. Labor and work in precarious

perfection are subjected to multiple

abstract choices in a limited gamers eld.

The scal and social crisis of the1970 of the plan economy pushed local

politicians and planners to adopt growth-

oriented or entrepreneurial policies. To

support the market, governments have to

invent and install new capitalist rules of

the game to secure the participation of all

players, limiting them and increasing their

competition. Architecture and designer

initiatives respond to this radical change,

consisting in the forming of a reexive

project of the self, rst by creating lots of

closed, commercial spaces for play, and

in recent timesby producing pseudo-eco

environments as part of gentrication andtotal urbanization even of the landscape

between cities.

The spatial arrangement and the

production of space in todays urban

environment entail an entirely new

concept in which the spatial gives way

to the temporal, increasing neurologic

stimulation, where affective and

immaterial labor are dominated by

psychological and behavioral changes

intended to integrate their creativity

into the new production system. At the

same time, the new places for play create

decision-making environments under

scientic and biopolitical discipline and

self-reexive control, exposing players to a

calculated risk and increased competition,providing the perfect semiotized context

for the nancialization of the market and

the new demands put by the new spatio-

temporal regime on the relation between

work and play.

Following the economic downturn of the

1970s and residual effects that lasted

for the city into the 1980s, Parks was

able to redirect its energies towards

building recreation centers. Asser Levy

Recreation Center was updated and

equipped with a computer resourcecenter. Sorrentino Recreation Center in

Queens was acquired by the City from

the Knights of Columbus in 1974 and

rented to the Police Athletic League

until 1985 when it became a full Parks

facility.16

16 City of New York Parks and Recreation, op.

cit.


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The Rise and Fall of Adventure

Playgrounds

Cubbies adventure playground on Con-

dell St has evidently existed for a long

time, as this photo from 1975 shows a

place that was denitely not recently

created. They make it look like it has

experienced a war or natural disaster;

decline and abandonment are obvious.

Until a few years ago the site looked like

an occupational health and safety night-

mare. Since then it has been cleaned up

and made safe for a new generation of

children from the Atherton gardens. 17

With the disappearance of unregulated

vacant lots in-between the neighbor-

hoods of big cities, the general tendency of

privatizing all areas, and tightened regula-

tions and procedures for permission, the

self-made peculiar playground structures

and inventive public places for free and

alternative play have disappeared.

Unable to reappropriate the city,

children and youths spend more and

more time isolated. This varies from one

neighborhood to the other, segmenting

the city even more clearly in low-incomeperipheral zones and high-income

neighborhoods usually located around

the city center and downtown, depending

on the concentration of capital and on

economic interests.

17 Brian Ward, Fitzroy history Cubbies ad-

venture playground on Condell St, Fitzroyalty:

Hyperlocal news about Melbournes frst suburb:

Fitzroy 3065(blog), 12 January 2009 (accessed 2013-02-23).

Most adventure playgrounds emerged

in the 60s, 70s and 80s through grass-

roots community action in desperately

deprived areas. In London, about 80

have survived the battles of the Thatch-

er years and attacks from health and

safety over-regulation. It is hard to con-

vey their special qualities to those who

have never visited them. Their dizzy,messy, low-tech architecture is at its

best a glorious dreamscape inspired

by the collective memories of past free-

range childhoods. 18

18 Tim Gill, Families need adventure play-

grounds, and cities need families, the guard-

ian, 16 May 2011 (accessed

2013-02-21).

Cubbies adventure playground on Condell St,

Fitzroy 3065, Melbourne.

Tennis court at King George V Recreation Centre, The

Rocks (City of Sydney), New South Wales, Australia.


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K o lle 3 7 19

K o lle 3 7 2 0

The Creative City where

the city itself becomes a new

total playscape, introducing

a new work time timeless

play of precarious perfection,the bold recreation the total

playscape is part of a major

urban renewal, replacing the

machinery of the factory system

With the restructuring of the urban space

and the introduction of private companies

to maintain their different parts, the ten-

dency is towards supervised play services

that have to create a sustainable busi-

ness model for something from which one

would not expect any revenues. As a result

of this process thematic play areas are es-

19 Paige Johnson, Spielwagen Portable

Playground, Berlin, 1980s to present,play-

scapes a blog about playground design, 5 May

2010 (accessed 2013-02-21).

20 Paige Johnson, Kolle 37, Berlin, self-

constructed and constantly changing, 1990 to

present,playscapes a blog about playground

design, 2 May 2010 (accessed 2013-02-23).

tablished, which integrate new forms of an

economics of fancy playscapes with their

equipment combined with recreational

areas like cafs, restaurants, sports and

gambling facilities, which are supposed

to t into the city landscape. The effect

is similar to that of multiplex cinemas

or shopping malls, at the expense of the

small public playgrounds and vacant lots

in the city which were used for alternative

and non-commercial outdoor activities and

play, as common property in the public

space. The self-organized and grassroots

community initiatives have vanished, and

growing parts of the urban territory are

organized on the principle of the landown-

ers economic benets. This ends up being

a way of privatizing and commercializing

parts of the public space that have re-

mained as a sort of commons under the

regulation of the city even during indus-trial urbanization. Extending nancial

logic to the public sphere, with its rules,

its privatizing discipline and concentration

of power according to Christian Marazzi

leads to common poverty and moments

of deconstruction-without-reconstruc-

tion. 21

21 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial

Capitalism (New Edition), trans. Kristina Lebede-

va and Jason Francis Mc Gimsey, Semiotext(e),

2011.

Interestingly, Kolle 37 grew out of an earlier move-

ment, Spielwagen Berlin, in which grown-ups con-

cerned about the lack of play opportunities in urban

Berlin started a mobile playground that traveled to

parks and public squares.. 19

Kolle 37 is another amazing adventure

playground located in the Prenzlauer Berg

district of Berlin for children 6 to 16. Uniquely,

it is an integral part of a larger park complex,

nearby to a central square and open air mar-

ket. Its perimeter fence even has openings

that see through to the street and its sidewalk

cafes.20


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From playgrounds that derive inspi-

ration from nature to pop-up urban

installations, spaces for play are transi-

tioning away from traditional manufac-

tured solutionsie. the ubiquitous plas-tic and/or metal jungle gyms one spies

at most playgroundsand getting the

attention they deserve as exciting design

opportunities. I use the term playscapes

to highlight sites that move beyond the

playground fence to become total land-

scapes for play.

By using only safety surfacing and

equipment in a naturalized garden

space, Stoss Landscape Urbanism de-

signed a springy playscape that also

comments on our obsession with play-

ground safety (gotta watch those trees).Image courtesy of Stoss Landscape Ur-

banism.22

New genres of playgrounds appear out of

this process, such as these thematic mast-

odons returning to nature in the form of a

simulacrum, simulation models of stimu-

lating virtual reality integrated in nature.

Their surfaces are treated such that they

are not only safe, but inspire creative and

intense sensual and emotional feelings

while developing cognitive skills. It might

bring up the idea of the zoo, only withoutanimals or of outdoor props of cinema

studios with their fake reality. Since in

most cases they are found outside the

city, they are reachable mainly by car as a

family entertainment precinct in which to

engage in a creative environment with an

ecological touch providing a higher de-

22 Paige Johnson, An Introduction to Mod-

ern Playscapes, dwell at home in the modern

world, 11 July 2011 (accessed 2013-02-26).

gree of interaction with the equipment sur-

face and structure, for extreme sports and

the development of bodily strength and

orientation skills. This is a kind of militari-

zation of the concept of the playground, atraining camp for the whole family, a new

type of virtual combat-play, extending into

real space.

Those playgrounds that remain on the

territory of the city are equally subject to

a new public policy and urban planning

under the motto of the City Beautiful

or the Creative City, where they often

merge with what is known as Public Art,

which tends to turn it immediately into

a highly active space within the public

domain.23This unleashes opportunities

for authority to put them under its

constant protection and supervision as

signicant details, lending urbanization

an identity of economic and social growth.

This coalescence undoubtedly contributes

to the broad social perception of the

economic and cultural value of the place

and its valorization on the map of the

city. This version of the playground as

Public Art embodies the long-standing

history of conict and irts or complicity

of interests between architects, artists,

designers and the public administration

of the city, manipulated as they are by

various economic and political lobbying.In-between recreation facilities,

playscapes and the totality of architecture

projects and the functionality of design,

the impact of public art from the beginning

of this process of installing a free market

economy has been one of the new

techniques for implicating the notion of

creativity and exible time in the heart of

the city where in shiny ofces biopower of

labor appears as privileged form of labor

the production of men through men.

(Marazzi)

Public art in most cases ts in

with what Bourdieu calls the logic ofdisinterested art, i.e., art that is part of

the symbolic goods and works within the

logic of commerce, taking in postmodern

urbanism the role of the ornament, so

despised and rejected by modernism.

This type of art has in various guises

been an active participant in the larger

socio-economic changes from the modern

23 Grant Pooke, Contemporary British Art: An

Introduction, Routledge, 2012, p. 37, talking

about Trafalgar Squares fourth plinth.


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time to the global creative city. Indeed the

concept of public art has from the outset

been targeted at showcasing the relation

between an author and authority

governing the concentration of ideas andproduction of the artist. However, as it

seems, the old notion of the playground

as a safe place of kids gathering is not

really vanishing in this transformation

process of constant re-forming of the social

place, where the focus of interests shifts

to seeing the playground not primarily as

a place in which children play, but as a

construction praised for realizing aesthetic

needs and the desires of art lovers under

the motto of art for arts sake. The new

aestheticization accompanying exhibitions

of art in public is part of a restructuring of

the urban space and draws on arguments

regarding the possibility of control at

a distance, chiey through imposing

disciplining mechanisms of self-control.

This is actually an amplication of the

function of the playground as a social

apparatus as both pure and functional

aesthetic object.


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Public art as playground at Postdamer Platz in

Berlin.24

Public Art and Urban Renewal

Indeed today the concept of public art as a

playground thrives remarkably and nds

its total application in the global creativecity, on the territory between the blur-

ring boundaries of a range of interests

and practices. Without this function that

lends it an added aura, it might have been

subject to public criticism. The contempo-

rary re-created and expanded concept of

the playground allows it to rehabilitate in

social space concepts that contemporary

democracy has rejected and found unac-

ceptable, giving a fresh touch even to the

symbolic of the monument in its imperial

acceptation, a phenomenon which until

recently seemed overcome and put out of

fashion by contemporary society and re-vives imperial, colonial, fascist and totali-

tarian visions of representation of the sym-

bolic presence of power in public space.

This new style of monuments of playful

consumerism which symbolize nothing

but the production of modern mythologies

in their Barthean sense, often made of

24 Paige Johnson, Berlin playground ele-

ments,playscapes a blog about playground

design, 20 July 2009 (accessed 2013-02-23).

temporary and cheap materials, can in

some cases be called anti-monuments,

or grotesque, second-order monumentsin the desert of the real, products of

the society of what Baudrillard calls

second-order simulacra, multiplying the

Disney-Land scenery. It crawls out of the

playgrounds established by corporations

like McDonalds or Shell and spreads to

ever greater urban territories.


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New York Citys annual Figment festival is

an ideal t for this scheme, as it transforms

one of the citys favorite playgrounds into a

wacky world of art installations. This example

may be rather funny with its folk festival spirit

introducing some vulgar enjoyment in this

concept, as in the installation of the life-size

torn-off head of the Statue of Liberty lying in

the terrain like a ruin or ancient vestige of

American democracy.

Another, Parque Gulliver in Valencia, Spain,

built in 1990, can be seen rather as a prototype

marking the launch of a new genre in the

urban environment, of a properly neoliberal

understanding of creative urbanism. It is a

joint project of a perfectly triumphing triangular

group consisting of architect Rafael Rivera,

artist Manolo Martin and the designer Sento.

Gullivers body morphs into slides, ramps,

stairs and caves, scaled so that visitors are the

size of the Lilliputians.25

This description eloquently refers to themonument in its classic imperial and colonial

form, whose function was to achieve precisely

this to create historical memory through a

certain perspective, to make people feel like

Lilliputians in front of the dominant power

celebrating its rule.

25 Paige Johnson, Parque Gulliver, Valencia

Spain, 1990,playscapes a blog about play-

ground design, 16 November 2009 (accessed

2013-02-23).

F ig me n t2 6

L ib e rty 2 7

Parque Gulliver, Valencia, Spain, 1990. Gullivers

body morphs into slides, ramps, stairs and

caves, scaled so that visitors are the size of the

Lilliputians. A joint project by architect Rafael

Rivera, artist Manolo Martin and the designer

Sento. 28

26 Jessica Dailey, Public Art: Figment Festival

Takes Over Governors Island With Oddball Art,

Curbed, 11 June 2012

(accessed 2013-02-23).

27 B. Hudson, 67th Anniversary of V-E Day,

The Denver Post, 8 May 2012 (accessed 2013-02-23).

28 thekittycats, P L A Y T I N E R A R I E S: Play-

grounds Worth A Trip, Citineraries(blog), 18

New York Citys favorite playground was transformed into

a wacky world of art installations this weekend, as the an-nual Figment festival took place on Governors Island. [] The

lawns were dotted with sculptures including Lady Libertys

lifesized face (which you could climb all over). 26

People crowd Times Square at 42nd

Street in New York City to celebratethe victory in Europe on May 8,

1945.27


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16


At the same time, more elaborate and

well-organized structures than this have

developed in the contemporary urban

landscape and have provided unsuspected

opportunities for new expressions of totalarchitecture, gradually imposing the

model of the playscape and inventing new

super-apparatuses covering the entire city

environment and transforming the city

into a total arena of play as a post-Fordist

strategy.

In the context of Outdoor Play?

Playgrounds New Spaces of Liberty

(The Question of Form)at Kunsthof,

Zurich, 2013, we aim to investigate more

carefully the relation between art and

public space and playgrounds, and how

we can critically reect its agency in this

process. If on the one hand there is art for

social change, linked to art and political

movements, on the other there is the

cultural form of art in public space, which

with Bourdieu can be understood as forms

of aesthetic domination.

What are their codes of the former,

and of the latter, and how do they relate

to social forms and the architectonics of

space? In what way are art movements

for social change linked to the ephemeral,

creating temporary social gures,

temporarily re-appropriating the urban

space in order to intervene in everydaylife? Or to what Rancire calls relational

art in which the construction of an

undecided and ephemeral situation

enjoins a displacement of perception, a

passage from the status of spectator to

that of actor, and a reconguration of

spaces.29

On the other hand there is so-

called Public Art, which installs rather

prefabricated solid forms directly in

social space, thus fencing it in, or rather

marking it, directly mastering the social

tissue. As far back as the 19thcentury the

relations between art, the economy, andindustry were a priority of public policy

July 2011 (accessed 2013-02-

23). Paige Johnson, Parque Gulliver, Valencia

Spain, 1990,playscapes a blog about play-

ground design, 16 November 2009 (accessed

2013-02-23).

29 Jacques Rancire, Aesthetics and Its Dis-

contents, Polity Press, 2009, pp. 23-24.

and interests. Even then the potential of

organizing the production and exhibiting

of art as a display of consumer culture,

something which was a priority also on the

part of the market economy. The creativeindustry produces universal products, as a

result of which there is objective art as a

realization of the dreams of rationalization.

This form of public art can be termed

an oxymoron, after the gure of speech

embodying paradoxes with respect to

an object. An apt characterization of the

destiny of contemporary art according to

Adorno: Art that is simply a thing is an

oxymoron. Public art as an oxymoron

is a gure between the creative industry

and a badly understood ready-made

between Duchamps (R. Mutts) Fountain

and Walter Benjamins statement from

his essay The Work of Art in the Age

of Mechanical Reproducibility that the

new art will be produced industrially and

apprehended chiey as a thing produced

of solid materials with shiny and colorful

surfaces, on the boundary between a

designers object and a luxury commodity,

showing off the social status of its owner,

in this case of a given district of the

city, of the municipality, the museum or

corporation whose property it is.

Yvonne Domenge Olas de Viento (Wind Waves)

(2010)30

In the Vancouver of today, everything

adds up to the realization that artistic

creation is rendered impossible under

the auspices of state sponsorship and

ruling class culture. On the balance

30 Graeme Fisher and Andrew Witt, Fabri-

cating the Creative City: The New Monuments

(2/3), The Mainlander (Vancouvers Place for

Progressive Politics), 10 January 2012 (ac-

cessed 2013-02-23).


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17


sheet of recent artistic production, the

empty pluralism of public art ambigu-

ous text-based works, gardening, light

projections, and billboard images is

found siding with the medium of theculture industry. All established means

in the arsenal of artistic creation, to

paraphrase the words of Alain Badiou

on militant art, are mobilized to sing

the praises of conservative institutions,

while artistic novelty is inscribed within

the continuity of the state. 31

While sculptors focused on designing

better playground parts, landscape

architects began to emphasize the com-

plete play landscape: a playscape. Rob-

ert Roystons California parks included

pedal car freeways and gopher holes.

The freeways are gone, but you can still

visit the gopher holes at Mitchell Park in

Palo Alto. 32

If landscape architects began to empha-

size the complete play landscape, the

playscape, it would seem appropriate to

ask the question what role art on the one

hand, design on the other have played for

urban culture and the social production in

the city. Despite their complicity with ar-

chitecture they have secretly always tried

31 Ibid.

32 Paige Johnson, Mid-Century Modern on

the Playground, dwell at home in the modern

world, 1 August 2011 (accessed

2013-02-22).

to betray it even in their most subservient

guises in order to realize their own ends.

Londons Trafalgar Square is considered

the rst place in which public art was of-

cially exhibited.In reality it is an emanation of a cross-

space in which a public square and public

art have become an example of how an

event or happening can be tamed and

reduced to a showcase, to create space

for cultivation, for actions and events,

as a free-speech platform and location for

protest demonstrations, a government-

subsidized open-air gallery, a site for

commercial publicity stunts, or whatever

the case may be. Then again, there are

projects much more ambiguous than

the aforementioned, and yet it looks like

they contribute to the reterritorialization

of spatio-temporal relations, as playtime

and disappearance of the space, a dead

structure over the entire range of living

production.

Between Art for Social Change and

Subjection to the Technological

Apparatus

This is the case of Longplayer by Jem

Finer at the Lighthouse in Trinity Buoy

Wharf, London, which started playing on 1

January 2000 and will run without repeat-ing itself a 1,000-year-long composition.

Created with London-based arts organiza-

tion Artangel to mark the turn of the mil-

lennium, Longplayeris Finers response to

the difculty of representing and under-

standing time on a grander scale. At its

core, Longplayeris a mathematically self-

generating score not random, but a set of

principles that allow the score to continu-

ally create itself in a way that is aestheti-

cally beautiful and musically unique. 33

Bearing in mind the challenge of

keeping Longplayer playing for a thousand

years overcoming short-lived technologies,

the future prospects of the project oscillate

between thoughts of techno-feasibility

reminiscent of deep-space missions of

the space industry, and the use of social

production relying on setting up a long-

33 Phil Thompson, Jem Finer Launches

Longplayer with Shortplayer, Pittsburgh New

Music Net, 1 October 2010

(accessed 2013-02-24).


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18


term machine orchestrating human

performance.

If Longplayer is to survive at all, then

people will have to want it to. So, ulti-

mately, the best strategy might be forit to be played by humans as long as

they are around. This may mean that an

idea of Longplayer as an intermittent

continuum might, in time, have to be

adopted something like thinking of a

partially submerged landscape that is

only ever visible as a string of islands.

In theory, once a stable platform for

human performance is established a

durable or easily replaceable set of

instrumental tools, an accurate meth-

odology and a means of conveying this

methodology from one generation to the

next future performers would be able

to pick up the performance at any given

point in time based on a set of simple

calculations.34

The point could be argued whether

this would lead to a truly participatory

and emancipatory project or whether

it would rather be the embodiment of

pure industrialization and automation,

linking the symbolic dimension to the

subjection and automation of living labor

in a technocratic machine. The question

that arises is how art contributes to the

domination of dead labor over living labor,

and whether this is a monument of human

creativity and vitality or a machine of

the creative industry, which puts human

labor power under the command of the

machines and the total computerization

of the social system. Is this not the

apparatus that sucks out social

production, as Kronos the Titan ate his

34 Jem Finer, About Longplayers Survival

(accessed 2013-02-24).

children, to perpetuate itself through its

repetition? Is it not this empty repetition

that lls the void left by the absence of

rituals, social memory and traditions in

the social bond that Paolo Virno speaksabout, where the social exchange is

executed through market economic models

colonizing the energy of play?

Metropolitan forms of life, stripped of

tradition and poor of experience, actu-

ally show childish, or rather puerile

traits: although childhood is their key of

explanation, they only show a depraved

and sometimes terric image of it. The

society of advanced capitalism uses the

threatening one more time for building

a dreadful kindergarten. Playful repeti-

tion is countered by technical reproduc-

ibility with the compulsion to repeat

commodity and wage labour. Culture

industry decorates the poverty of expe-

rience in order to make it unnoticed; it

fosters the lack of customs and shows

simple reiteration as their substitute; it

establishes furtive and annoying pseudo

traditions; it gives serial repetition

an aura. Its fault is not damaging the

hearts and souls, but, quite on the con-

trary, to lull them at all costs. (Virno)35

THE LIVE DEBUT OF THE LONGEST

PIECE OF MUSIC EVER WRITTEN

Lasting 1000 years, Jem Finers Long-

player has been playing without inter-

ruption, since the rst moments of the

year 2000, at listening posts around the

world. Originally commissioned by Ar-

35 Paolo Virno, Three Remarks Regarding the

Multitudes Subjectivity and Its Aesthetic Com-

ponent, in Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw

(eds.), Under Pressure: Pictures, Subjects, and

the New Spirit of Capitalism, Sternberg Press,

2008, p. 39.

Early calculations for Longplayer Live,

2009.

Original schematic drawing, 2009. Image: Sam Collins.


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19


tangel, for almost 10 years it has been

performed by computer. Now, for the

rst time, a tiny fragment of its millen-

nial expanse receives its live debut.

On September 12th 2009, Finer will

direct Longplayers spectacular rst-

ever live performance 1000 minutes

from its vast continuum, performed by a

26-strong orchestra, on a purpose-built

20-meter wide instrument, effectively

a giant synthesizer built of bronze-age

technology, with highly resonant bells

for tone generators and humans for

power. 36

Another project that can be viewed

through the prism of public art while be-

ing rather ambivalent in that it raisesquestions with regard to public space in

relation to aesthetic and social produc-

tion is Jeremy Dellers The Battle of Org-

reave. It is a homage to the minor strike

of 1984 and the events that followed from

it. The lm is a re-enactment using as its

arena and scenery the place of the original

events, and gathering for its expressive

mass scenes of the face-off between police

and the workers directly former miners

and ex-police ofcers from the local com-

munity to take part in the re-enactment

commissioned by the British agency Ar-tangels and publicly funded.

Jeremy Dellers approach is similar to

Sergei Eisensteins for his lm Strike37

which he lmed on the premises of the

factory, using the place of the actual

36 Alexander Rose, Long Player Live in

London, The Long Now Foundation(blog),

21 August 2009

(accessed 2013-02-24).

37 Soviet silent lm by Sergei Eisenstein,

1925.

events as the scenery of his lm, and hired

as extras a great number of workers who

had also participated in the strike and

protests the lm is about. As a result,

the cinematographic shock effect is muchstronger than in half-documentary,

half-ction lms, which lend a striking

authenticity and materiality to the lm

material.

In the case of The Battle of Orgreave

despite the similarities to Eisensteins

Strike we can nd many of the

contradictions between contemporary

capitalism and living labor and the

position of contemporary art that rather

perpetuates the spectacle. The project

tests on the one hand the performative

dimensions of public space as a theaterarena and on the other, casts in the

role of actors and extras former miners

who lost their jobs when the mines were

closed, many of whom have remained in a

precarized situation since. It is not a real

protest, but the performance of a protest

where they play themselves in a time in

which they were active and really struggled

for their right to work, in a time in which

they were miners. They are thus turned

into a kind of creative workers, which

makes the project potentially ironic if not

cynical. The question is towards whom.

Clearly, not towards the former miners.Something deeply subversive remains

in the project, not only in the beauty of

the performance but also in the hidden

potential enclosed in the cycle of the

media spectacle. This is a project that

truly looks at playtime and work time

and their changed conditions in the

new neoliberal capitalism, and at the

resistance of the miners. What is then

the role of art between social space

and social engagement? What Rancire

intends with his question: Why does

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreaves, 2001. Photos: Martin Jenkinson, courtesy of Artangel.


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this suspension [of the players cognitive

power of understanding that determines

sensible givens in accordance with its

categories, and of the power of sensibility

that requires an object of desire]simultaneously found a new art of living,

a new form of life-in-common? And yet

there remains a sadness that this is only

a repetition, play, stimulated and made

possible by a commission.

Called The Social Playground, the exhibition

at Liverpools Foundation for Art and Creative

Technology (FACT) was based around the Brit-

ish tradition of racing eggs down hills at Easter,

2011.38

38 Kate Chiu, The Social Playground by Aber-

rant Architecture, dezeen magazine, 10 July

2011 (accessed 2013-02-23).

appendix a: playgrounds in history and today

Documents