Playgrounds

Playgrounds. Reinventing the square. From 30 April to 22 September 2014

Play is older than culture. This is how the study Homo Ludens, published by the historian Johan Huizinga in 1938, starts out. Huizinga sustains (in the book’s central thesis) that culture appears in the form of play – or to put it another way, that culture in its early manifestations evolves in the forms of and with the spirit of play.

Play appears in association with an act of freedom, although it is limited to a space and time in which play is created and consumed according to established rules.  

The ideas of Homo Ludens were taken up by the Situationist International, a movement that was interested in bringing about situations conducive to direct living and thus found the practice of play attractive. Play in which competition disappears in favour of the collective. Play that would cross the barriers of fictitious worlds and of ordinary life and that would do so – according to Huizinga – with utter seriousness, with the ultimate focal point being, for the Situationists, a critique of the capitalist production system.

Play was also proposed by the practitioners of happenings, as a means to bring people closer to reality through apparently theatrical actions the final aim of which was to get other players or participants involved.

One such action will guide us, from this point forward, in our attempt to illustrate the idea that non-competitive but involved play has, from the 1950s to the present, contributed to building an idea of public space.

- Audio: "This is a lecture on how to make a happening. There are 11 rules of the game" 

- Audio: "Forget all the standard art forms. Don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music, don’t make movies, and above all, don’t think you’ll get a happening out of putting all these together" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening.1969)

In 1966, Allan Kaprow, a main figure in the happenings of North America, launched an LP entitled “How to Make a Happening.” It was a lecture cum instruction manual that describes, in 11 points, how to succeed in such an endeavour.

Ten years before writing this, in 1956, Kaprow attended in New York City the composition and experimental music courses taught by John Cage at the New School for Social Research. Those courses, where the ideas about happenings germinated, were also attended by artists and musicians such as George Bretch, Jim Dine and Dick Higgins.

That same year, 1956, John Cage was on the TV program “I’ve got a secret” in which a panel had to guess the secret hidden by the contestant in question – usually something considered strange, funny or even embarrassing in those days.

In this case, the game show host decided to skip the game to present in all its glory Water Walk, a concert by John Cage, the instrumentation of which included, among other items, a bathtub, ice cubes, radios, a blender, a rubber duck, a vase of flowers, a wine bottle, a goose call, a siphon and a piano.

The playful character of the program and the laughter heard during Cage’s performance fit perfectly with the point of departure of happenings – actions inserted into daily life and intended to provoke reactions in the spectators. Contrasting with the laughter, viewers will be struck by the seriousness with which Cage undertakes the action, a degree of seriousness and concentration that are typical of a player immersed in play, showing his or her skills in dodging and advancing in the contest (question) with ingenuity and intelligence.

It comes as no surprise that in the attempt to blend artistic action with situations of the context, actions like that of Cage would try to link up with the media settings of radio and television. What definitely becomes apparent is that the growing interest in making sure that these artistic actions had a profound significance in people’s experience prompted their organisers to move towards public space. In this way the encounter with citizens took on a new social and cultural dimension.

- Audio: "You can steer clear of art by mixing up your happening, by mixing it with life situations. Make it unsure even to yourself if the happening is life or art. Art has always been different from the world's affairs, now you've got to work hard to keep it all blurry" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969) 

In 1976, the group of architects known as Art Farm performed CarMen, an opera for 35 cars staged in front of the Sydney Opera House, the most emblematic building of Australia’s capital city. Using the car as one of the cultural symbols of the times, the action must have almost appeared to be a provocation and a social satire of traditional music and the popularity of automobiles. Reusing the title of Bizet’s opera Carmen, making the most of the evident and simple wordplay contained in its name: CarMen was performed in three acts, with the sound of the motors, horns and windshield wipers of these noisy contraptions flooding the city streets.

- Audio: "The situations for a happening should come from what you see in the real world, from real places and people rather than from the head" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)  

Little by little, with the aim of engaging broader audiences, the idea of the spectator was left behind, giving way to the idea of an audience, or even beyond that, of a citizen that would access the work without any imposed spatial or discursive conditions. In the public sphere, away from places reserved for art, the actions were impregnated by the public space itself, and they questioned and criticized the way such space is conceived and organised.

This modus operandi − creating a direct impact on passers-by, demanding their attention and eliciting a response − was one of the strategies used by feminist practices such as those of Susanne Lacy with her project Three Weeks of May, in 1977, a series of events that denounced the high number of rapes and aggressions against women that took place over a three-week period in May, in the city of Los Angeles.

Among the project’s multiple actions, as a means to attract the attention of the people on the streets, Lacy set up a map of the city in front of City Hall. Then, over the course of the three-week action, she stamped it with the word “RAPE” in red letters in all the areas in which violations took place during the period documented by the project. To do so she used information from police reports. The result, a map that was visually interrupted by countless rapes, pushes aside the city in the urban planning sense, and instead makes it a story in which a series of events occur, thus building a different idea of public space.

- Audio: "Break up your spaces. A single enactment space is what the theatre traditionally uses. You can experiment by gradually widening the distances between yours events" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969) 

Lacy’s cartography, visualized on the map and verbalised in the criminal reports drawn up by the police, offers an image of the city that departs from the aseptic vision of the map and observes not just spaces but also experiences and situations associated with such spaces.

This same idea, which the Situationists had explored in psychogeography and had reflected in their influential cartographies (no encuentro este termino en inglés, ¿será algo totalmente diferente?), shows the city as if it were a game board on which events, situations and experiences take place. A city, as a theatre of operations, that they undressed so that it could be seen as a mechanism with multiple gear actions that weave and unweave amidst the multiple subjectivities and stories.

Not in vain, one of the most famous cartographies created by the Situationists, The Naked City, which shows fragments of a map of Paris joined by arrows or vectors of desire, takes its name from a 1948 film by Jules Dassin in New York, the first 5 minutes of which represent almost an exercise in Situationist drift, in which the narrator’s voice glides through and is imbued with the details and temporalities of urban space, from the upper part of the city.

The film − inspired in turn by the book Naked City published three years earlier by the photographer Weegee − hits the streets to delve into the ups and downs of the everyday world. The holistic vision of cartography thus arrives on the scene, in a way reminiscent of Michel (errata texto original) de Certeau’s reflections in “Walking in the City” which, in contrast with a more aerial and sterilized vision of cities, shows the value of immersing oneself in the urban muddle.

It is ‘down below” – said de Certeau – below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. (…). It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and infinitely other. (de Certeau – Walking in the City)

- Audio: "Break up your time and let it be real time" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)  

Movement, times and the multiplicity of actions and relations start up when you go out on the street. Conceiving of the city and public space as places that are transited and practiced, places that can be temporarily appropriated and used as a speaker or sounding board, depending on the case, becomes a constant from that point forward in contemporary creation.

The piece In living memory of what never happened by James Webb, which has been installed in various cities since 2009, takes up the logic of the commemorative monument to speak ironically about time and trivial aspects of the city, aspects that although they often go unnoticed are still consubstantial to its existence.

Permeating the urban network and replicating the codes of loudspeaker systems: the intonation and cadence of the voice in this work grab people’s attention in the city and ironically twist the medium to send a satirical message in different languages.

In this work amplified sound and the human voice become tools with which to abruptly remove citizens from their own particular time and submerge them once again in the common and specific time of urban space.

This is what Floriano Romano did in Falante (loudspeaker in Portuguese), the performance he did in Río de Janeiro in 2007. Carrying a loudspeaker on his back and a microphone, he wandered the streets telling people to not pay any attention to him.

The obvious contradiction between the situation and the message cause laughter or surprise in this performance. The loudspeaker as an amplified listening device is put to the service of the absurd, in search of interaction or responses. This becomes a two-directional game in which the city, a space characterized by competition for the attention of citizens, is subverted so as to favour spontaneity and interaction.

- Audio: "Arrange all your events in the happening in the same practical way In addition to being a space of altered temporalities, the city is a set of rules and codes that organize the flows of citizens, vehicles and information at different speeds. These patterns transform urban space into a space similar to a playing field, where the sports players have to carry out the actions according to agreed rules" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)  

- Audio: "Since you’re in the world now and not in art, play the game by real rules. Make up your mind when and where a happening is appropiate" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)  

In 2009 the Mexican group Teatro Ojo organized the project México mi amor nunca mires atrás. Estado Fallido 2: multifamiliar Juárez. A dirt football pitch, where a Nike slogan proclaimed “Nunca mires atrás” (Never look back), was the pretext for this art action, which looked at the state of tension between history and memory, by holding a football match.

The land that is now a playing field was once a cemetery, then it was the site of a national stadium and finally of residences − designed as part of a modernizing program undertaken by the Mexican government − which later suffered severe earthquake damage. Through this project the land became a scenario charged with history and contradiction.

While the game was underway, the loudspeakers reproduced the narration of the game between the national selections of England and Mexico in the 1966 World Cup. Since the action on the field had nothing to do with the narration coming from the loudspeaker system, a situation of surprise arose. Interspersing the game, like little time capsules, were breaks during which fragments of recordings of political rallies, speeches and other historical archives could be heard, coming this time from small speakers carried by the players, who had stopped all activity on the field.

The action is seen to be a rupture that falsifies play and recovers, in an unusual manner, times gone by, revealing the gap that arises from the tension exercised by history and memory, not just in this playing field but in the entire Mexican state. Visibilizing in such a way, through play and mass culture, the fissures in the fabric of the urban and political codes on which the present in built, is not an isolated practice in contemporary art.

- Audio: "Work with the power around you, not against it. It makes things much easier, and you're interested in getting things done" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)   

- Audio: " When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening. This will make it unnatural and because it will build in the idea of good performance, that is, 'art'." (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)  

Making use of these very fissures in the institution or in its apparent openness to the context surrounding it, some paradigmatic actions in activism and revindication of public space have entered institutionalised discourses. This occurred in the most recent Documenta in Kassel, Germany, with the Occupy movement, or further back, with the project ‘The Model’ which Palle Nielsen carried out in the Moderna Museet of Stockholm in 1968, as yet another action in the urban activist plan "Action Dialogue".

- Audio:  "Perform the happening only once. Reapeating it makes it stale, reminds you of theatre and does the same as rehearsing" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)   

Having turned the museum’s entrance hall into a play area which only children and teenagers could access, the action becomes a means by which to reclaim urban territory for social transformation, a space for play that adults provide and children use. A model for conceiving space that empowers those who occupy it.

- Audio:  "Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a show. Leave the shows to the theatre people and discotheques. A happening is a game with a high, a ritual that no church would want because there’s no religion for sale. A happening is for those who happen in this world, for those who don’t want to stand back and just look" (Allan Kaprow. How to make a Happening. 1969)   

The crucial separation that we have to overcome is – as the Situationist International would say – the one existing between play and ordinary life, which views play as an isolated and provisional exception.” Get out into the city and see what happens there. Find other languages and codes with which to converse and construct situations. Be an urban practitioner and play a game that resignifies the spaces of daily life. This is a constant in artistic creation from the 1950s forward. Reinventing the square and thus giving public space new and necessary social and cultural forms.