Abraham Adams, Lou Cantor (Eds.

), Intersubjectivity
Misunderstanding, Sternberg Press, June 2016, English
ISBN 978-3-95679-199-4

Vol.

Language

and

The playground as program, Vincent Romagny

The playground has made a comeback in the contemporary curatorial field, both as historical
object1 and as metaphor2. Its aesthetic and artistic dimensions almost make it a model for
radically rethinking the political, between Kinderffentlichkeit3 and heterotopia4; hence also
the temptation to consider the model as a means. If playgrounds cannot be thought separately
from children's creativity, are they therefore a political model? The current interest in
playgrounds is based on the idea that children's play, like the artwork according to the
classical tradition, is primary, unconditioned, an absolute model and even of a renewed
society5. Yet playgrounds also remind us that play can only occur if the child is given an
environment affording a diversity of possibilities for action. Such an example of conditioning
seems difficult to reconcile with the idea of an unconditioned origin... Before positing the
playground's political dimension, then, the historical conditions for the work of art /
playground convergence need to be more clearly established.
The historical moment during which the design of playgrounds begins to be entrusted to
artists is subsequent to the heyday of modernism, and just prior to childhood's being
disqualified from any claim to innocence. Which is to say, it comes in the wake of the
modernist notion that childhood is a source for the renewal of meanings and forms, but before
artists begin to use the kinds of forms to which this assumption gave rise as artistic material6,
including in works which denounce the playground's biopolitical aspects7. Thus, from the end
of the Second World War through to the 70s, artists are creating playgrounds and playground
designers or architects are influenced by the artistic ideas of their time: Pierre Szekely creates
"child-scale sculpture areas" in the suburbs of Paris; Isamu Noguchi realises his first
playground design in Yokohama, Japan, in 1966 ... Waldemar Cordeiro in Brazil, and still
others, could also be mentioned in this connection. And from the side of playground design:
Aldo van Eyck covers Amsterdam with 700 playgrounds, placed in the "interstices" of the
city; in France, Group Ludic builds over 200 playgrounds in "holiday villages", and mile
Aillaud designs new towns in the suburbs of Paris like a series of playgrounds La Grande
Borne in Grigny, for example. Most surprisingly, playgrounds appear which seem to have
been influenced by the art of their time, and even their immediate neighbourhood: Richard
1
2

3
4
5
6
7

The Playground Project, Kunsthalle Zrich, 2016 (cur. Gabriela Burkhalter); Reinventing the Square,
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (cur. Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Tamara Daz, Teresa Velzquez), 2014...
Air de jeu, Centre Pompidou, 2015 (cur. Michel Gauthier, Florencia Chernajovsky), Biennale, Playtime,
Biennale de Rennes (cur. Zo Gray) several years previously, I approached the question of the playground
in art in a non-metaphorical manner, with Playground, counter-locations, Art Centre of LOnde, VlizyVillacoublay, and Playground: the police or the pirates, Le Quartier, Quimper, 2010.
Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and
Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Labanyi, Daniel and Oksiloff, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
1993 (1973).
Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique, suivi de Les htrotopies (1967), Fcamp, Nouvelles d. Lignes, 2009.
Lars Bang Larsen, Palle Nielsen, The Model for a Qualitative Society, Barcelona, Macba, 2010.
For example, Mike Kelley's iconic Test room containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and
Manipulatory Responses, Le Magasin, Grenoble, 1999.
We mention Playgrounds by Rosemarie Trockel (1994), Modern Suite by Seth Price (20012009), Evenings
& Weekends by Corin Sworn (2006) and of course Playgrounds by Peter Friedl (1995 2014)...

Dattner's "Adventure Playground", in the south-west of New York's Central Park, opens in the
same year as Primary Structures, the inaugural minimalist exhibition at the Jewish Museum.
And then there are the instances where playground and artistic forms bear striking similarities
such as Mitsuru Senda's 1976 "Funnel Tunnel", and Saburo Murakami's "Iriguchi",
presented at the First Gutai Exhibition in 1955 ... What sense can be made of these parallels?
Are they the sign of an origin shared by both art and the playground, or is this merely a
projection resulting from certain prejudices? Doesn't the comparison suggest, above all, a
need to produce familiarity, when the real problem is how such a "family resemblance"8 can
be grounded?
Thus, one might ask why no modern or modernist artist has ever made a playground (apart
from Isamu Noguchi). Certainly, the Eameses produced sublime children's furniture, and Le
Corbusier put a school on the roof of his Radiant City in Marseille; Bernard Rudofsky's
solarium also comes to mind but none of these examples are playgrounds per se.
Nevertheless, slides, sandboxes, jungle gyms and swings were features typical of the modern
city. Why, then, is there no explicit recognition of a kinship between post-Second World War
playgrounds and the stereotypical playgrounds that had existed since the end of the 19th
Century?
The reason is that to acknowledge a relationship between the "artistic" playgrounds, which
this article began by describing, and the stereotypical "4-S" model (slide, see-saw, swing and
sandbox) would be to fundamentally question the innovativeness of the former. This perhaps
explains the rewriting of playground history, as well. The literature on playgrounds almost
systematically locates the origin of the playground with the adventure playgrounds theorized
by the Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sorensen (1893-1979) in 1931, which were
realised in occupied Copenhagen in 1940, and of which Lady Allen of Hurtwood (1897-1976)
was an active promoter9.
The misallocation can be attributed to the fact that this version of a ludic apparatus stresses
the innate creativity of the child as actually productive of forms of play. However, the
adventure playground was only an inflection of the playground itself; a strong model for
rethinking its function and form, but in no sense at its origin. Then why the almost unanimous
projection? Because in the adventure playground, children's play produces its own frame. Or
more specifically, the post-Second World War notion of the necessarily artistic dimension of
the playground is itself derived from the notion of the child-as-originator. Georges
Canguilhem already recognized this in 1952: "the idea that man has of his poetic power
corresponds to the idea he has about the creation of the world; and to the solution he gives to
the problem of the radical origin of things."10
Childhood is taken as the playground's radical origin but almost exclusively after the
Second World War. Why not during the historical golden age of modernism? Because at that
8
9

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 66, 67.

This is Richard Dattner's claim (Design for Play, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1969), which is reiterated by
Susan
G. Solomon, (American playgrounds : Revitalizing Community Space, University Press of New England,
2005)
and which I also took up, without being able to verify its legitimacy (Vincent Romagny (ed.), Anthologie
Aires de jeux dartistes, Golion, Infolio, 2010).
10 Georges Canguilhem, "Rflexions sur la cration artistique selon Alain", in uvres compltes Tome IV:
Rsistance, philosophie biologique et histoire des sciences 1940-1965, Paris, Vrin.

time, the playground formed part of a different representation of childhood, to whose

modification it afterwards contributed. Rather than play motivating the creation of the
apparatus, the playground's original purpose was to channel play's fundamental
inoperativeness. At the playground's historical, rather than metaphorical origin, stands a
precise and particular conception of childhood dominated by the recapitulative paradigm to
which Ernst Haeckel gave canonical formulation, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". At the
end of the 19th Century, child psychology understood the development of the child as a replay
of the development of the human species11.
This schema was intangible, but could still be compressed. Thus the playground elements
(sandbox, jungle gym, etc.) are revealed as a series of environments corresponding to the
stages of human evolution, and each ordeal corresponds to the crossing of an evolutionary
threshold: protozoa (emerging from the water and splashing about in the sand), ape (making
merry in the trees), etc.12 Because the child psychology of the era saw children under 7 years
of age as incapable of play, strictly speaking, their behaviour was understood as a pure
expenditure of formless energy. At age 7, the child could begin to participate in games
defined by rules (which is why basketball is played on a playground ....), under the direction
of play leaders ... 13: neither play nor creativity were implied in the child's indeterminate
activity, a pure becoming determined by its purpose, strictly speaking an origin without
genesis. There was no play in the sense that we understand it, as an activity free of
determinism, gratuitous and potentially creative. When this scientific theory became obsolete,
play began to be considered as mitigating the human's lack of instinct, and accordingly
retained its utilitarian function14.
After the Second World War, the artistic evolution of the playground is a blatant sign that the
child has begun to be viewed as a life-form in dynamic relationship with its environment.
Without being able to further elaborate here on the factors involved in this change, we can
invoke the combined effect of psychoanalysis and alternative pedagogies. But the result of
this change is that childhood comes to be thought of as the occasion of a genesis due to the
child-as-living being's dynamic relationship to its environment, where previously the child
played the role of indifferent site for the unfolding of the evolution of the species. It's
legitimate, then, to be surprised at the idea of the playground as a basis for "living together",
and especially for a political mode: taking children and the playground as a foundation for
politics means considering as an origin that which is the object of a genesis. But we can thus
understand how the playground entered the artist's jurisdiction.
Perhaps authentic child's play has never been at issue in the playground, whose history
remains marked by a concern to give form to the "formless" activity of childhood. Formless
not by nature, but because of our incapacity to grasp its disconcerting and ever-renewed
logics.
Post-war playgrounds are thus as much implicit or explicit attempts to comprehend child's
play, as they are attempts to approximate its meaning and offer it appropriate forms; to be at
the level of the child's "fixed and animally ecstatic eye", as Charles Baudelaire wrote in the
11 The theory of recapitulation gave meaning to epigenesis development of the embryo via differentiation and
complexification in contrast to the theory of preformation. Cf. Dominique Ottavi, De Darwin Piaget.
Pour une histoire de la psychologie de lenfant, Paris, CNRS ditions, 2001.
12 Cf. Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and morals, organized playgrounds and urban reform, 1880-1920,
Philadelphia, University Press of Philadelphia, 1981.
13 Cf. Philip Roth's novel Nemesis.
14 Karl Groos, Les Jeux des animaux (1896), Paris, Alcan, 1902

Painter of Modern Life. It's easy to see the attraction for artists: are not the genesis of
childhoood and the genesis of art in a specular, reflexive relation?
Playgrounds should not be interpreted solely from the perspective of the artists who have
designed them, but rather art should be interpreted from the perspective of playgrounds,
which offer just as many possible models for understanding. Thus the playgrounds of Group
Ludic express a consideration of form15, while mile Aillaud's playground-towns are the
expression of a specific conception of the image16 ... playgrounds, then, as a multiplicity of
ways to give sense to the fact that "the child sees everything anew" (Baudelaire again). We
would be in error to take the playground as a point of departure; we must return to it. We need
playground studies.

15 Interview with Xavier de la Salle, by the author.

16 Interview with Fabio Rieti, by the author.