“the ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment ‘ordinary life’ may prevail once again. The geographical limitations of play is even more striking that its temporal limitation. Every game takes place within the boundaries of its own special domain”
Guy Debord from On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time
A little while ago I was doing a session as a visiting artist for an outreach youth work programme, it consists of a couple of youth workers and an artist going out each week and doing a half hour session in four different outdoor locations around the local community. Each week children and young people show up in anticipation of the team arriving or drift over slowly from whatever other activities they’re engaged in if their interest is peaked. I’ve worked with the team a few times now and each time I’ve done something a little more abstract and been delighted in the ways the young people respond. This time I wanted to take an area of art theory that interests me and see if I could reinterpret it in a relevant and playful way.
Psychogeography is one, of many, areas of art theory that make people despair, it’s overly wordy with its key practitioners seeming to have spent more time writing about it than doing it and no one quite knows exactly what it’s meant to be, it can be applied to literature, performance art, politics, town planning and psychology… but, here is the definition which most interests me;
psychogeography is; ‘whole toy box full of playful inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians of their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape
Yes, of course, the definition that mentions play. Psychogeography is about the link between our emotional experience and our environment. Not a particular or special kind of environment; but any and every space in your everyday. It’s also a tool to explore or interrogate that environment and your relationship to it. Think of the writers who tell stories about and through their cities, the parkour runners or skateboarders who turn unnoticed and unremarkable aspects of an urban environment into part of their playground and whoever it is that keeps putting traffic cones on top of statues that you maybe never even looked at properly, that is, until they gained a bright orange hat. You were probably a psychogeographer once too… think of the child who studies every crack or feature of the pavement and turns navigating them into a game, the child who sees every bench, wall or curb as part of a never-ending climbing frame and the child whose imagination breathes life into inanimate structures and buildings.
In simplest terms perhaps psychogeography could be described as the art of being in a creative relationship with the space around you. This is a two-way relationship; it’s both taking inspiration from your environment, noticing the effect it has on you and putting inspiration into it through your creativity. It’s quite a wonderful thing to find yourself having a greater level of control over how you experience the space around you especially perhaps when you don’t have much choice over the environments you find yourself in.
On this day the environment was a slightly chilly residential area in Edinburgh and the tools were a pile of empty frames, three pineapples and a bunch of children’s creativity. My first proposition was that we turn the space into an art gallery. To do this they could take a frame and walk around the space looking for art. Some took a literal approach using things found in the environment to create art within a frame, tearing up grass and piling up twigs to create landscapes. Others jumped on the concept and pushed it beyond looking around their space in new ways; literally reframing aspects of their everyday space as art. Frames were held high, placed on the ground, balanced against fences, stacked on other frames. They were also climbed through and held up to frame each other looking through frames, looking through frames… The one thing every group had in common was that at some point someone would hold up a frame in front of their face and declare themselves art. I liked their confidence.
The next proposition was that they give each other a tour of this new art gallery. Here they were to walk around the newly imagined space and tell each other about their work. I gave prompts where needed; “what do you like about this”, “does the piece have a name?”. Children would listen to each other briefly before continuing to experiment, stepping into each other’s frames, directing each other and hanging frames from bodies.
The final proposition came with a request, for this part they weren’t to talk. The proposition itself was non-verbal, and, as I looked around with faux-sternness to check they weren’t chatting, I walked across to our non-descript black bag and slowly, one by one, pulled three pineapples out. Placing them on the ground and I would step away, giving a nod of ‘go on then’ to my mostly quiet spectators. For the couple of groups who really followed the no-talking request the moment when I pulled out the pineapples gained an extra level of absurdity. With eyes widening and jaws dropping they looked to each other in confusion, amusement and excitement. Not being able to communicate in their usual way completely changed the atmosphere and possibilities of the space. Suddenly a pineapple or two against the backdrop of the everyday was a fascinating concept. The pineapples were absorbed into the narrative as they were moved, balanced, rolled, stacked and of course, framed. Two ultimately met an unfortunate fate.
Here I was playing with the idea that by creating absurdity or abstraction you create an opportunity for art and play, and, if this is all it takes it follows that art can be created anywhere and everywhere. In this case, the abstraction was created by firstly changing the the social rules of the space through taking away speech and then behaving unexpectedly. They couldn’t ask questions or comment in their usual way which could have quickly normalised the situation instead they were held in the moment of absurdity and, able to consciously decide whether to go with it or not. They very much did.
Play Radical 