17.12.20

PLAY, IN SPITE OF, PLAY 

by Charles Merewether 

In the face of a pandemic, of global warming and destruction of our environment through waste, it is timely to think of cases that have sought creative alternatives for the restoration of hope, optimism and enhancing our ways of being and living together.  

After the traumatic experience of World War Two, Constant Nieuwenhuys (Amsterdam 1920–2005,) an architect, writer and theorist, met with the Danish painter Asger Jorn in Paris to create CoBrA (named after the three capital cities Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam). The future of the city had become Constant’s subject, working on the 'Nieuw Babylon' ('New Babylon') project, imagining an urban utopia in which every individual designed his own home and broader environment. His designs focused on the creation of a ‘new man’ who, by means of technological advance, would be free of the constraints of labour to lead a life of sheer playfulness and creativity. Constant wrote of the need to construct new situations for the integration of art and life that would in turn rebuild our environment. (1) 

More broadly, the subject of the individual’s relation to their environment had become the centre of philosophical reflection during this time. Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty was translated into English in 1963 in which he argues for viewing the physical and sensory experiences of the human body as the primary means of relating to and knowing the world. We are open to the world, and we are embedded in it. This is the ground in which the potential of imaginative play can be found.  Perception is not thought but rather, we construct meaning through bodily experiences in direct engagement with the world, of inhabiting the world. Merleau-Ponty’s views could not have been more apt than in the sixties.

Amsterdam, Constant’s home town and a place of CoBrA’s activities, had already experienced tremendous change in the sixties.  The city had been the centre of street happenings, demonstrations and clashes with the police in the preceding years of the tentative early stages of a youthful revolt against established patterns of authority. The royal wedding in 1966 between Crown Princess Beatrix and the German prince Claus von Armsberg which had taken place in Amsterdam, provided a flash-point for the expression of discontent. One of their most infamous acts was their disruption of the wedding in 1966 by setting off smoke bombs, an event which was broadcast around the world. (2) 

While the Provo had formally disbanded by 1967, their methods were emulated by other social activists. By the late 1960s, many protests centred on the country’s prominent, conservative – and heavily subsidised – arts institutions. Inspired by Constant’s work, Provo set the tone and provided a language for many of the public happenings, challenging the established order. ‘Ludiek’ was the word Provo used for their style of public action, a word derived from Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens (1938) and translated as playful or carnivalesque. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary condition of the generation of culture. Play, he argued, was older than culture and can be seen as enabling freedom beyond an ordinary life, an activity connected to neither material interest nor profit. 

Through the playful provocation (hence their name Provo) of the established order, they staged public performances which they called happenings. The Provo movement was geared towards reshaping Amsterdam into an environment for a new, playful, human being, and took its name from its ‘provocations’ of police and state powers through games and ritualist performances. Provo co-founder Roel van Duijn explicitly rejected collectivist ideals of earlier Dutch anarchists in favour of a more individualist and antagonist form of anarchism. Instead of an emphasis on shared responsibility and social cohesion, Van Duijn advocated unlimited individual freedom. This meant that the social order was subservient to individuality and that the ideal society was better described in terms of constantly transforming forms of disharmony and inequality than of balance and equilibrium. 

Equally important were both composers and improvisers who sought to negotiate the place of their music in a wider social context, merging avant-garde music with the ideals of collective creativity of Provo and situationism. The Sigma Centre, founded by the Situationist and beat poet Alexander Trocchi and psychonaut Simon Vinkenoog with support from Provo, was intended as a centre where people could engage in “active recreation” and “experiment in the use of free time.” (3)

As a precursor to the new society envisioned by Provo, nobody would be required to work. It attracted avant-garde improvisers (including Breuker, Tchicai, and AMM) as well as composers to organise workshops and musical events, but disagreements soon arose. For one thing, for professional musicians, this “active recreation” was their job and they expected compensation for their efforts, which obviously went against the egalitarian spirit of Sigma. Furthermore, the free participation of audiences, particularly the rowdy Provo, were experienced by musicians as a disruption of their music rather than a collaboration. Soon enough, both improvisers and composers started to instruct their audiences to keep quiet, thereby returning them to the role of passive spectators. 

The Provo and other Sigma board members felt, justifiably so, that the musicians were more concerned with their personal artistic development than with ideals of collective creativity. When the improvisers did involve the audience, their actions were closely circumscribed, so as not to interfere with the intentions of the musical performers. Such performances, organised as part of various ‘love-ins’, did not actively seek to expound an artistic vision, but offered instruments for audiences to play along with the music – if they felt like it. The more accessible music also helped to engage the audience – however, most composers and improvisers dismissed any form of popular music as ideologically suspect. 

Under the rubric of Sigma Projects initiated by Tjebbe van Tijen, Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver, Pieter Boersma, Willem Breuker, John Latham, Nico Nijland and Graham Stevens collaborated in a series of street art projects, including Emergence of Continuous Forms at Better Books in London in 1966. Another Sigma project was Corpocinema with Shaw, Botschuijver, Wellesley-Miller and van Tijen in Rotterdam and then Amsterdam, 1967. Corpocinema, was an inflatable dome made of transparent plastic, five meters high and seven meters wide, onto which a film was projected. Smoke, coloured powders and foam were used and water sprayed over the interior space of the dome. Images were projected onto the exterior and a variety of films screened in this immersive expanded cinema performance. 

Shaw had studied and exhibited with Tjebbe van Tijen in Milan, and in the late sixties he also began to work together with the Dutch industrial designer Theo Botschuijver and the American architect Sean Wellesley-Miller. Shaw was then a young man in his twenties, ready to embrace new challenges and make new engaged art. Also, it is hard to convey the tremendous changes that the Netherlands had undergone throughout the decade of the sixties in all sectors, politically, socially and culturally. This was case in many countries, as can be seen in the international development of the artistic movement of Fluxus, in which play was a key component of its practice and its local manifestations in Europe, Japan and the US. 

Shaw, Botschuijver and Wellesley-Miller then made MovieMovie. Also initiated by van Tijen and SIGMA Projects, this expanded cinema performance was created for the Knokke Experimental Film Festival. In the foyer of its casino venue, three persons dressed in white overalls carried in the inflatable plastic, semi-transparent structure and unrolled it on the floor. As the structure gradually inflated, film, slides and liquid-light show effects were projected onto its surface. Its fully inflated shape was a cone seven meters in diameter and ten meters high, with an outer transparent membrane and inner white surface and speakers on the inside and outside featuring live sounds by the ‘Musica Elettronica Viva’. The projected imagery first appeared faintly on the outer envelope and then fully on the semi-inflated inner surface. In the intermediate space between these two membranes, performers and audience rolled about on the soft projection membrane and played with white balloons and inflatable tubes. In this way, flat cinema projection became animated as a kinetic, immersive space. As Shaw has written: 

“The multiple projection surfaces allowed the images to materialise in many layers, and on the bodies of the performers, and then of the audience… In this way the immersive space of cinematic fiction included the literal and interactive immersion of the viewers. They modulated the changing shapes of the pneumatic architecture, which in turn transmuted the shifting deformations of the projected imagery.” (4)

In 1969 in Amsterdam, Shaw co-founded the Eventstructure Research Group with Theo Botschuijver and Sean Wellesley-Miller. As before their work was dedicated to surprise in everyday situations and thus breaking through the social conditioning in the conventional patterns of experience and behaviour. In 1969, the Eventstructure Research Group performed six unannounced events in the urban environment of Amsterdam, using inflatable objects that people could enter and/or play with. Pneutube was one of these events. Performed on Frederiksplein on September 17, 1969, Pneutube was a three meter in diameter and sixty meters long transparent tube filled with air, and which contained a ‘jump-on’ yellow tube also inflated with air. A few days later at Sloterplas, an artificial lake, another work Waterwalk was installed. It was a tetrahedron made of plastic, floating on the water that people could climb into. Closed by a waterproof zipper, people could then walk across the surface of the lake. 

(1) In 1957 Constant became a co-founder of the 'Internationale situationiste' movement. See Mark Rigley, Constant’s New Babylon The Hyper Architecture of Desire. Rotterdam: Witte de With center for contemporary art, 1998. (2) I am thankful to Jeffrey Shaw for discussions and his editorial amendments. (3) See Niek Pas, ‘In Pursuit of the Invisible Revolution: Sigma in the Netherlands’ in Between the Avantgarde and Everyday Subversive Politics in Europe: Sigma in the Netherlands. Edited by Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. (4) Jeffrey Shaw, Scanlines: ‘Media Art in Australia since the 1960’s,’ Moviemovie, 1987. See also imaginarymuseum. org. 1967.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Dr Charles Merewether is an art historian, author and curator who lives in Tbilisi, (Georgia) and has worked in Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. He is the author of many publications, including State of Play (Tbilisi: National Museum of Georgia, 2017), After Memory: The Art of Milenko Prvacki (Singapore: Relay Books, 2013) and Under Construction: Ai Weiwei (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008). He was co-editor with John Potts of After the Event (Manchester University Press, 2010), co-editor with Reiko Tomeii and Rika Hiro of Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970, (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, The Getty Center, 2007, and editor of The Archive (London: Whitechapel Gallery/Mass: MIT Press, 2006).