Post on 29-Mar-2023
URBAN PLAY
Art as Regenerative Force
By
Ekaterina Belyaeva
Master of Letters
College of Arts
University of Glasgow
Christie’s Education
London
Modern and Contemporary Art
September 2013
© Ekaterina Belyaeva
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Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without the encouragement, advice and support of
those who were always willing to assist. For all those I am referring to I owe my gratitude.
In particular, however, I wish to thank my tutor Dr Catherine James for her endless support
and generosity in sharing her knowledge and time.
I furthermore wish to extend my gratitude to the entire staff of Christie’s Education, London
for creating the atmosphere of freedom and creativity so unique to Christie’s, and especially
so the course director Ms Lizzie Perrotte for her professional leadership, support and
guidance, Mr Mike Ricketts for his indispensable assistance and bibliographical suggestions,
and Mr John Slyce for his keen commitment to instil in us the all-important critical approach
to learning, analysis and research.
Finally, I owe a special gratitude to my mother Dr Liudmila Osmolovskaya for a lifetime’s
encouragement and support.
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Abstract
Globally, cities have sprung up and grown into ever-expanding melting pots of peoples,
cultures, practices, ideas, knowledge, technology and social challenges. The city is by its very
nature a constantly evolving environment where different cultures interact in expressing
themselves, where the inhabitants’ values and ways of life define their expectations, needs,
and demands. Ideas about art and urban space, and the interaction between the two has been
the subject of considerable research. Art lives in dialogue with and contributes to changing
urban environments. It also lives in dialogue with public spaces and society at large. Play as
an activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation is an inherited part of contemporary
urban society. For both adult-play and child-play, the urban environment creates both
limitations and opportunities for ‘irrational’ behaviour and unplanned random interactions.
Play can happen anywhere, the place and time is unpredictable. It is also a characteristic
which is present in many different kinds of human behavior.
URBAN PLAY: Art as Regenerative Force will attempt to illustrate the role of ‘play’ in the city
environment and the possible value of ‘urban play’ in art as a regenerating force. In doing
so, it will place reliance on a number of notable artists whose work, as different from that of
each other as it may be, focused on urban wastelands and transitional spaces. These were
artists who, each in their own way, reacted to the many struggles inside those urban spaces
and observed everyday urban life, used cities as a creative forum, and sensed or even inspired
changes in society or architectural thinking. With very different artistic practices and using
different media, they captured and recorded everyday life in the urban environment, the
social challenges often associated with urbanized populations, changes in how societies
organize themselves, and the failures and opportunities that so often go unnoticed during
times of transition. In following these artists, URBAN PLAY will take the viewer to those
cities where their creativity found expression, from the disadvantaged 1930’s Bolton, to the
1950’s post-war London, and ultimately to the 1970’s New York City.
Word count: 17 291
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... 2
Abstract ............................................................................................................................................... 3
List of Exhibited Works ................................................................................................................... 5
List of Comparative Illustrations..................................................................................................... 6
URBAN PLAY: Art as Regenerative Force .................................................................................. 8
Comparative Illustrations ............................................................................................................... 44
Catalogue........................................................................................................................................... 58
Glossary ............................................................................................................................................ 97
Appendix 1. Venue .......................................................................................................................... 98
Appendix 2. The Right of Children to Play ................................................................................. 99
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................... 102
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List of Exhibited Works
1. Humphrey Spender, Children in the Rubble, Tyneside, 1938 ...................................................... 59
2. Humphrey Spender, Children’s Slide in Queen Park, 1937-8 .................................................... 62
3. Humphrey Spender, Street life - children playing, 1937 ............................................................... 64
4. Nigel Henderson, Peter Samuels, 1951 ....................................................................................... 67
5. Nigel Henderson, Bag-wash, 1949-53 ........................................................................................ 70
6. Nigel Henderson, Untitled No. 8 (Shattered Glass), 1959 .......................................................... 72
7. Nigel Henderson, Head of a Man, 1956 ..................................................................................... 74
8. Alison and Peter Smithson, Grille pour le C.I.A.M. d’Aix-en-Provence, 1952-53 .................... 77
9. Roger Mayne, Goalie, Brindley Road, off Harrow Road, 1956 ..................................................... 81
10. Gordon Matta-Clark, Realty Properties: Fake Estates – “Jamaica Curb,” Block 10142, Lot 15,
c1974.................................................................................................................................................. 83
11. Gordon Matta-Clark, Realty Properties: Fake Estates – “Maspeth Onions,” Block 2406, Lot
148, c1973 ......................................................................................................................................... 86
12. Trisha Brown, filmed by Babette Mangolte, Roof Piece, 1973 .............................................. 88
13. Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974-75 ................................ 92
14. Steve McQueen, Drumroll, 1998 .............................................................................................. 95
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List of Comparative Illustrations
Plate 1. Walker Evans, Subway Portrait, 1938-41 .......................................................................... 48
Plate 2. Humphrey Spender, Woman Cleaning Pavement, 1937 .................................................... 48
Plate 3. Humphrey Spender, Catapult Kids, 1937 ......................................................................... 48
Plate 4. Humphrey Spender, Washing on the Lines, 1937 ............................................................. 48
Plate 5. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Juvisy, France, 1938 ..................................................................... 49
Plate 6. Henri Cartier-Bresson, During the Visit of George VI of England to Versailles, 1938..... 49
Plate 7. Nigel Henderson, Stressed Photograph, c.1950 .................................................................. 49
Plate 8. Nigel Henderson, Collage, 1949 ........................................................................................ 49
Plate 9. Nigel Henderson, Untitled (No.50), c. 1956 .................................................................... 50
Plate 10. Nigel Henderson, Shop front, 1949-53 ........................................................................... 50
Plate 11. Nigel Henderson, Distressed door, 1949-53 .................................................................... 50
Plate 12. Nigel Henderson, Peter Samuels, 1951 ........................................................................... 50
Plate 13. Nigel Henderson, Gillian Alixander Skipping, Chisenhale Road, 1951.......................... 51
Plate 14. Nigel Henderson, Chisenhale Road, 1951 ....................................................................... 51
Plate 15. Nigel Henderson, Chisenhale Road, 1951 ....................................................................... 51
Plate 16. Nigel Henderson, Chisenhale Road, 1951 ....................................................................... 51
Plate 17. Bidonville Mahieddine Grid, 1953, CIAM-Alger .............................................................. 52
Plate 18. Parallel of Life and Art, 1953 ............................................................................................ 52
Plate 19. From This is tomorrow exhibition catalogue, 1956 ........................................................ 52
Plate 20. Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So
Appealing?, 1956 ................................................................................................................................ 53
Plate 21. Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson, Patio and
Pavilion, 1956 ..................................................................................................................................... 53
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Plate 22. Roger Mayne, Street Cricket, Clarendon Crescent, 1957 ................................................... 53
Plate 23. Roger Mayne, Southam Street, London, 1957 .................................................................. 53
Plate 24. Boy on a Bombsite, Waverley Walk, Harrow Road area, 1957 ........................................... 54
Plate 25. Documerica project. Danny Lyon, Support the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, New York,
1974 ................................................................................................................................................... 54
Plate 26. Documerica project. Dan McCoy, Traffic congestion in Midtown Manhattan, 1973 ......... 54
Plate 27. Roger Myers, The Wall, 1973 .......................................................................................... 54
Plate 28. George Maciunas and Takako Saito, Flux-Treadmill, 1973 ........................................ 55
Plate 29. Richard Hayman, Bellroll, 1975 ...................................................................................... 55
Plate 30. Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969 ................................................................................ 55
Plate 31. Daniel Buren, Seven Ballets in Manhattan, 1975 ............................................................. 55
Plate 32. Hans Haaske, Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1,
1971 ................................................................................................................................................... 56
Plate 33. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974 .............................................................................. 56
Plate 34. Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975 .................................................................. 56
Plate 35. Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970 .................................... 56
Plate 36. Trisha Brown, Women Walking Down a Ladder, 1973 .................................................. 57
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URBAN PLAY: Art as Regenerative Force
Ideas about art and urban space, and the interaction between the two has been the subject
of considerable research. The historic ability of some cities to develop modern art and design,
coupled with the blend of art, architecture and society in some well-organized and
economically competitive urban areas has always been a subject of interest. There are various
driving forces behind the growth or change in the artistic landscape that may influence urban
spaces. Artistic and architectural movements and schools of thought, influential thinkers,
politicians and their policies, social trends, evolving popular culture, and social projects come
to mind. Whatever those forces may be, artists of various subject-fields of the arts have long
been not only contributors to urban development and regeneration; they often drive it,
knowingly or unknowingly, directly or indirectly. Amongst these different groups, there are
photographers, painters, designers, sculptors, architects and city planners to name but a few.
There have certainly been artists who inadvertently contributed a body of work that created
awareness amongst the public of certain challenges or opportunities, artists whose work
started a new trend or school of thought, or those who expended their energy with urban
development or regeneration as their focus or interest.
Globally, cities have sprung up and grown into melting pots of ideas, practices and peoples.
Their very nature and purpose drew people of diverse backgrounds, cultures, professions
and interests, together into very confined living spaces. Cities are an environment where
different cultures interact in expressing themselves, where the inhabitants’ values and ways
of life define their needs, cultural demands, and expectations in terms of public services. It
is an environment characterized by constant first-time exposure for its inhabitants to new
cultures, ideas, practices and challenges.
There are many theories and definitions of the ‘city’ in literature, some of which also resonate
with the author. Nick Barley in his Breathing Cities has described contemporary cities as living
creatures where flows of people, streams of consumer goods and waste, urban fauna, planet
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life and weather complete the architectural environment.1 Victor Burgin refers to the ‘city’ as
an individual with human character. He has been quoted as having said: “Our relations with
cities are like our relations with people. We love them, hate them, or are indifferent toward
them. On our first day in a city that is new to us, we go looking for the city. We go down the
street, around that corner. We are aware of the faces of passers-by. But the city eludes us,
and we become uncertain whether we are looking for a city, or for a person.”2
The available space in any city is made up of public and private space. Interaction and
exposure to new people and ideas is something one can expect to be more likely in public
spaces rather than in private spaces not open to the general public. Public spaces therefore
play an important role in everyday society; they are an important setting for informal social
interaction.
Social, economic, and political change profoundly shape people, impact on their lives, and
alter their social needs. This then is also why cities evolve. They change demographically,
culturally, in influence, in prosperity, and in the way they are organized. Modern cities in the
era of industrialisation were designed as functional spaces with city planning and urban
aesthetics being subject to the ideas of reason, order, and rational organisation of space.
Industrial innovation and technological advances allowed for the development of urban
transportation links, provided business and employment opportunities, and drove
urbanization and migration. Modern planning principles stressed zoning and segregation of
1 In the introduction Barley divides the components of a city into several categories: the architecture of the city;
the flow of people (commuters, shoppers, tourists, homeless people) moving around the city; everything that
those people consume (food, drink, clothes, flows of goods) together with waste of the consumption (human
and animal excrement, litter, household rubbish, industrial effluents); the fauna and geology of the land (rats,
pigeons, cats, insects that inhabit the metropolis); plant life together with rivers, earthquakes, smog, and every
kind of weather condition. Nick Barley, ed., Breathing Cities: The Architecture of Movement (Basel: Birkha user;
London: August, c2000), p. 5
2 Victor Burgin, Some Cites (London: Reaktion, 1996), p. 7. In this autobiographical book, Burgin recalls cities
where he lived or visited. In this work is also to be found many of his photographs with accompanying
comments and stories, capturing street life in cities like Sheffield, London, Coventry, Paris, New York, Los
Angeles, Berlin, Lyon, Grenoble, Warsaw, Gdansk, Lodz, Malmo, Perth, Tokyo, Singapore, Blois, Marseille,
San Francisco, Las Vegas, Grenoble, Tobago, Orleans, etc.
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like functions and activities into different districts and areas, functional buildings with equally
functional but less aesthetics exteriors.
Criticism of the modern city relates to many cities having been laid out, built, organized and
administered with no space for ‘irrational’ behaviour and unplanned random interactions that
add so much to city life. The urban reality of modernity has not been one that catered for
the inhabitants, but for capitalist speculators, business requirements, production and
efficiency. Modern cities frame opportunities for play, but do not actively encourage it. Like
the frame of a painting limiting the canvas, cities set limits, both architectural and physical.
Play can be seen as an activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious
or practical purpose. As early as in 1938, the human instinct to play and play-acting in modern
western society was a topic that Johan Huizinga, a reputed Dutch cultural historian, discussed
in his work titled Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.3 For Huizinga play was
something embodied in culture. It is something he characterized as a voluntary activity
directly opposite to seriousness, as activity that is not ‘ordinary’, but well removed from ‘real’
life. He argued it to be an activity not aimed at material interest, but as an activity aimed for
fun.4 Huizinga’s play is something freely engaged in and something that is an expression of
one’s freedom from the everyday.
The idea of play in an urban setting may go back to Baudelaire’s flâneur – an urban walker, a
person who walks the city in order to experience it, to observe the city, to walk for walking’s
sake and lose himself in the labyrinth of streets.5 The street becomes a dwelling for this urban
walker who totally immerses himself in the environment, and at the same time attempts to
3 Huizinga sees play as something that is instinctive, a quality that exists and is expressed independently from
culture stating that: “Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes
human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.” Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens:
A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Poutledge & Kegal Paul, 1980), written in 1938, originally
published in 1944, p. 1
4 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pp. 8-10
5 Walter Benjamin in his discussion of Baudelaire’s work develops an idea that flâneur’s purposeless walks directly
contradicted capitalism’s cult of industriousness. Walter Benjamin, “The flâneur”, Charles Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in
the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 54
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interpret the city as a set of signs to be decoded. Play can happen anywhere, the place and
time is unpredictable. For Quentin Stevens, play is “a characteristic which is present to
varying degrees in many different kinds of human behavior.”6 Play can be seen as irrational,
purposeless behavior opposite to serious, expected, pragmatic and predictable behaviour.
Play is more than just fun. It is a spontaneous and creative activity that gives an illusion of
escape from the ‘everyday’. Play is an informal social interaction, it is not serious, but it has
to be taken seriously by the “players”.
Children enjoy playing. This is a need, and it is quite possibly the default mode for most
young children. The understanding of children’s play has historically been viewed as
something very different or contrary to that of playful adult behavior. It will be safe to assume
that children experience urban environments differently than would most adults. For
children, roaming around, discovering new things and places, and learning as they go along,
instils confidence and independence. Roaming around a city and playing in the streets is no
different from that of the child living in the countryside venturing over the next set of hills
or crossing another stream. It is places where they learn and grow. Playing may be at the
centre of their experience of the world, but it plays an important role in the development of
their cognitive and social skills, prerequisites for learning and mastering more complex skills
as they grow up. Walter Benjamin saw children as having a special, distinctive relationship
with the spaces and objects they encounter in their urban environment. For him, their
perceptions and playful activities are marked by a distinctive, intimate connection to, and
immersion in the world that surrounds them.7 Children at play today are the generation
shaping the play of tomorrow. Children’s experiences of ‘play’ have a formative effect or the
way their personalities, views, priorities, and interests develop later into maturity. For this
reason then, the way children play may have an impact on the way they will play as adults,
6 Quentin Stevens, The Ludic City: Exploring the potential of public space (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 26
7 See more details in Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1996), p. 83
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the same adults that will be driving the projects, urban regeneration programs or shaping of
the environment of tomorrow.8
Whereas children continue to play in whatever urban environment in which they find
themselves, it is the adults who ‘play’ with the urban environment. Those who conceptualize,
plan, initiate, authorize, finance and execute urban regeneration will always be adults. It is
the adults who initiate urban projects based on their views of the perceived needs of specific
communities or groups. Childhood play in urban environments and in city-streets in the era
of considerable urban development inspires architects, but overall the development of cities
still and always will follow the needs of adults first.
There has been a limited focus in literature on the non-functional role of cities, the playful
use of urban space, and urbis as a substance that encourages play. There has however long
been an awareness of the potential for cities to be more than just functional units. For many
scholars the post-modern city is a city of greater flexibility than the modern city, the latter
very much being viewed as representative of ‘bubble planning’ with separate spaces specially
set aside and designed for play. Post-industrial society is calling for cities to be places
embodying a built-in play factor. Henri Lefebvre, recognized as one of the most prominent
French thinkers of the twentieth century who gave considerable thought to current urban
theory, in his work titled The Production of Space argued the idea of space being a social product
affecting spatial practices and perceptions rather than being a mere architectural product.
Lefebvre has been quoted as once saying: “The city must be a place of waste, for one wastes
space and time; everything must not be foreseen and functional […] the most beautiful cities
were those where festivals were not planned in advance, but where there was a space where
they could unfold”.9
8 Play as human behaviour is however not only something of interest to students of the arts, architecture,
education, sociology and psychology. It is human behaviour that has entered the economic and political
domains. See Appendix 2 for more details.
9 Quoted by Stevens in The Ludic City, unnumbered preface
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Art lives in dialogue with the changing urban environment and contributes to a changing
environment. It also lives in dialogue with public spaces and social issues. Rosalyn Deutsche,
an art historian and critic who has written extensively and lectured internationally on
interdisciplinary topics such as art and urbanism and art and the public sphere, has in the
past recognized this interplay. She noted that there was significant growth in urban
development in New York in the 1980s which as she saw it coincided with the intensification
of official rhetoric about new public spaces, an increasing interest in the aesthetic of urban
planning and public art.10 Artists of all walks of life are a major contributor and driver of the
post-modern landscape. They are in a position to use their skills at informing, convincing
and organizing to shape the post-modern city’s landscape and functionality. Architecture is
commonly appreciated to be only one of the shaping factors in the urban environment. It is
however one of, if not the most significant one. It shapes the urban landscape, determines
its functionality, and its contribution will usually be lasting and visible. Walter Benjamin was
once quoted as having said that: “Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient
than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt
to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art”.11 For Benjamin, architecture is
“appropriated” not only visually, but through all our senses. For him, the city is not only
experienced when we see comfortable places, but also when we see and recognize
uncomfortable places. Architecture stands central to the development of the socially
functioning city catering to a functional and social balance. It is architects, more so than any
other group of artists who can shape post-modern cities into more hybrid socially
functioning cities accommodating public spaces for urban play.
Pat Kane, a reputed consultant promoting the power and potential of play, argues that the
role of artists in societies “where play values, rather than work values, become dominant” is
to keep the society in play.12 Play reveals the struggles inside urban spaces, it revitalises urban
10 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, c1996), p. xiii
11 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, transl. by J. A. Underwood (London:
Penguin, 2008), first published in 1936, p. 240
12 Pat Kane, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living (London: Macmillan, 2004), pp. 223, 225
14
gaps and reveals the potential for regeneration. Play heightens awareness of the city using its
wastelands and buildings to reflect on the evolution of the urbis itself and the elements that
comprise it. In our postmodern society, playfulness and irony became hallmark of the artists’
style. Some serious subjects are treated whimsically from a position of distance and
disconnect. Elements of previous styles are combined, pasted, and playfully appropriated.13
In the post-industrial economy where the service sector generates more wealth than the
manufacturing sector, knowledge becomes a creative instrument with creativity and
innovation becoming cult. Where there is a playful spirit between competitors, business itself
can take on a more playful character. Play-centered postmodern society emphasizes pastiche,
parody and irony. Walter Benjamin’s playfulness and dreaming is “part enchantment, part
disenchantment, of the adult world.”14
URBAN PLAY: Art as Regenerative Force takes the viewer to a number of the world’s ‘art
capitals’ and other important cities, with emphasis on London and New York. It presents a
number of notable artists whose work, as very different from that of each other as it may be,
focused on urban wastelands and transitional spaces. These were artists who, each in their
own way, reacted to the many struggles inside those urban spaces and observed everyday
urban life, used cities as a creative forum, and sensed or even inspired changes in society or
architectural thinking.
Most of the participating works have previously been exhibited in different contexts as part
of shows presented at premier venues like Tate, Barbican and Whitechapel Galleries. Century
City, one of the most prominent exhibitions offered by Tate in 2001, explored the
relationship between cultural creativity and the metropolis. It focused on nine cities from
around the world where at some point over the previous century those cities came to the
fore as centres for artistic innovation.15 The more recent Barbican show of Laurie Anderson,
13 The root origin of the word ‘pasted’ can be traced to pastiche
14 Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 92
15 The exhibition explored Paris in 1905 – 1915, Vienna in 1908 – 1918, Moscow in 1916 – 1930, Lagos in 1955
– 1970, Rio de Janeiro in 1955 – 1969, Tokyo in 1969 – 1973, New York in 1969 – 1974, Bombay in 1992 –
15
Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s presented the
work of these artists, all recognized and highly regarded for their pioneering work in the
1970’s New York art scene, with a focus on the intersections between their practices.16 The
Whitechapel show of 2010 reconstructed the 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow featuring Nigel
Henderson and Alison and Peter Smithson who contributed to the 1956 exhibition with their
Patio and Pavilion section. Patio and Pavilion addressed what was at the time argued to be a
problem of a lack of connection between architecture and the inhabitants. This is Tomorrow
has been argued to become an exhibition that was later accepted as the beginning of a new
spirit of British art and the whole installation concept.17 The Photographers’ Gallery in 2013
opened an exhibition titled Mass Observation: This is Your Photo. The exhibition explored the
role of photography in the Mass Observation as a document of everyday life, and, in fact, also
encouraged public participation in the observation.18
URBAN PLAY: Art as Regenerative Force will attempt to illustrate the role of ‘play’ in the city
environment and the possible value of ‘urban play’ in art as a regenerating force. In this work
reliance will be placed on a number of notable artists who, using different ways and media,
captured and recorded everyday life in the urban environment, the social challenges often
associated with urbanized populations, changes in how societies organize themselves, and
the failures and opportunities that so often go unnoticed during times of transition.
The work of photographers like Humphrey Spender, Nigel Henderson and Roger Mayne
added more than just a body of images, but contributed to an understanding of the workings,
shortcomings, challenges and unrealized opportunities prevalent in the cities and
2001, London in 1990 – 2001. New York in the beginning of the 1970s was presented as a subject matter with
the works of Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘alternative’ architectural language. It was presented together with ‘specially
female’ art by Hannah Wilke, Lynda Benglis’s ideas of femininity, Vito Acconci’s Following Piece. See exhibition
catalogue Iwona Blazwick, Century City: art and culture in the modern metropolis (London: Tate Publishing, c2001)
16 See exhibition catalogue: Lydia Yee, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Poineers of the Downtown
Scene New York 1970s (Munich: Prestel in association with the Barbican Art Gallery, 2011)
17 See exhibition catalogue: Nayia Yiakoumaki, curator, Iwona Blazwick and Nayia Yiakoumaki, preface, This is
tomorrow (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), originally published in 1956
18 Mass Observation: This is Your Photo, Photographers’ Gallery, 2 August - 29 September 2013, Exhibition page,
accessed 24 Aug 2013: <http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/mass-observation-2>
16
communities in which they immersed themselves. Humphrey Spender’s documentary
photography recorded the everyday life of the working-class population of Bolton. His body
of work is today recognised as an important part of the Mass Observation, a project in operation
at a time of widespread social and political discord in pre-war Britain. Nigel Henderson’s
work stands out in that it inspired and complimented that of other artists, the latter notable
for their own contributions. During the transitional period of recovery following WW II, a
time of increasing debate around Britain’s urban environment and architecture, it was
Henderson’s photographs of children playing in the streets of Bethnal Green that inspired
architects Alison and Peter Smithson and contributed to their views on urban planning with
a focus on the street as an extension of the house. Roger Mayne’s shots of disadvantaged
children in post-war London portrayed the street as the arena for people’s lives. Mayne’s
name has since grown synonymous with street photography.
New York City in the 1970s represented different things for different observers. For some
it was a city in decline, but for many artists it provided an arena for their art. It was a place
that offered opportunity for artistic expression, a place that was fertile ground for
experimentation with their urban and playful performative practices. SoHo in particular
witnessed considerable artistic growth, became an open stage for experiments, and offered a
peculiar blend which made it a popular focal point for artists like Martha Rosler with her
recordings of the street-life of the homeless, and Gordon Matta-Clark and Trisha Brown
who played with the city and used it in their performances.
Observations of everyday life as captured and recorded in photography have grown beyond
just being a hobby of a select and knowledgeable few. It has for all practical purposes become
engrained in modern life with cameras now available and being used by millions of people
capturing their lives and that of others with photographs being published on a wide range of
platforms and social networking websites such as Facebook and Instagram.
17
There is a renewed interest in the Mass Observation project and the work it engaged in. On
2 August 2013, the Photographers’ Gallery opened an exhibition titled Mass Observation: This
is Your Photo. It is an exhibition the curator described as an exploration of the role of
photography in the project as a document of everyday life. As part of the preparation for the
exhibition, the Gallery commissioned a project titled Photography and You, an initiative
intended to get the public “to respond to and participate in a series of gallery directives.”19
Public responses to the Mass Observation are also exhibited in the Gallery.20 Another
contemporary project built on the Mass Observation saw the involvement of those people
associated with Bolton who contributed editorially or as commentators in complimenting
the visual record of Bolton as captured and recorded by Humphrey Spender. This amongst
others made possible the compilation of an interactive map showing the locations where
individual photographs were taken with links to the photographs of Spender.21
Mass Observation can trace its roots back to 1930’s Bolton, a then working class industrial
town in the north east of England.22 The project was embedded in a time characterized by
19 Mass Observation: This is Your Photo, Exhibition webpage
20 Refer <www.flickr.com/groups/thisisyourphoto>, accessed 28 August 2013
21 Bolton Worktown, Photography and Archives from the Mass Observation, accessed 25 Aug 2013:
<boltonworktown.co.uk>
22 Mass Observation started out as an ambitious project founded in 1937 by the anthropologist and ornithologist
Tom Harrisson, the poet and journalist Charles Madge, and the surrealist painter and film-maker Humphrey
Jennings. They were a small group of like-minded friends who shared an interest in the interrelationships
between art, sociology, and anthropology in addition to an interest in the study of anthropology in Britain. In
1937 Harrison published a poem of his in the New Statesman. Coincidently, the poem appeared on the same
page as a letter posted by Madge and Jennings wherein they summarised their project to encourage volunteers
in London to reply to regular questionnaires on a variety of matters. Harrison, who was himself interested in
the anthropological study of the British and was already immersed in his study in Bolton, contacted Madge and
Jennings. Within a month, the two projects joined together under the title of Mass Observation with the aim
to create an “anthropology of ourselves” – a study of the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. Their
shared sentiments, that may arguably also be their underlying motivation for the project’s founding, can possibly
be gleaned from a 1937 pamphlet which outlined the Mass-Observation’s project and wherein Harrison and
Madge were quoted as having stated that: “How little we know of our next door neighbour and his habits; how
little we know of ourselves. Of conditions of life and thought in another class or another district, our ignorance
is complete. The anthropology of ourselves is still only a dream”. Quoted by Rod Varley in Mass Observation
1937-1987 (Brentford: Watermans, 1987), published on the occasion of an exhibition at Bolton Museum and
Art Gallery, p. 9, and by Deborah Frizzell in Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes, Photo-Documents, 1932-1942
(New Haven: Herlin Press Inc., 1997), p. 24. See also the Mass Observation archive for more details, last accessed
25 Aug 2013: <http://www.massobs.org.uk/original_massobservation_project.htm>.
18
widespread social and political discord. Pre-war Britain had seen considerable social unrest,
poverty was rife due to the affects of the great depression, the underclass felt they were being
ignored, and there was the Royal abdication crisis to name but a few of the then current
events. Starting out as an ambitious project for its time, Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge,
Humphrey Jennings and the observers set out to document and record British culture and
society. The intended objective of the initiative was to create an information platform as a
measure to counteract many of the stereotypes of the time that still held sway in the British
media.23 They initially focused their study on Bolton – a town in the greater Manchester area
in the Northwest of England. The study was titled The Worktown Project. It was followed by
launching another study in Blackpool titled The Leisuretown Project. Harrisson and a team of
observers reportedly continued their study of life and people in Bolton (the Worktown Project),
with Madge having remained in London to organise the writing of the volunteer panel.
Observers were selected from both the scientific and non-scientific community. A team of
British scientific experts and writers grouped into what was called the The National Panel of
Diarists were to keep diaries and interpreted information as received from the Mass Observation
project’s central team. Another group of experts and artists were to identify the population’s
basic artistic needs coupled with the development of programmes that could satisfy those
needs. In addition, the project’s compliment of observers was augmented by a team of those
who were not scientifically trained but were to observe, photograph, and make notes on the
lives of people.24 The debates around the contradiction of objectivity (the ability of a camera
to capture objects and the presumed ability of anyone to read and reach the same conclusion
23 Tom Harrisson, one of the co-founders of the Mass Observation project, described Bolton, Lancashire, as a
typical working-class and industrial work-place like many others encountered throughout Britain. Tom
Harrison, Britain Revisited (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), p. 25. David Mellor, University of Sussex art
historian, quotes statistical data from a Bolton’s officer’s report forwarded to the Central Office of Information.
Bolton in 1937 had a population of 170 000 people that was decreasing at the rate of on average 1 000 per year.
The unemployment rate was 11 %, compared to 6 % in London, and the death rate was on average 25 % higher
than the national average, tuberculosis associated with the cotton industry being a suspected contributing factor.
See David Mellor, Humphrey Spender’s Worktown Photographs of Bolton and Blackpool Taken for Mass-Observation, 1937-
1938 (Gardner Art Centre, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, 1977), p. 16
24 Deborah Frizzell makes reference to an estimated 400 observers during 1937, a number which rapidly grew
to up to 3 000 volunteer observers in the 1940s). Frizzell, p. 29
19
upon any photograph) and subjectivity of photography were not fully developed yet, with
misconceptions of photographs being ‘evidence’ for ‘objective truth’ being common.
Influenced by Surrealism, members of Mass Observation attempted to access and account
for the unconscious as it was expressed in the everyday lives of the inhabitants.25 They were
required to record the lifestyles of ordinary people in as much detail as possible, a task which
entailed a great degree of submergence into the full spectrum of social and public situations
i.e. meetings, religious occasions, sporting events, leisure activities, and mixing on the street
and at work. Children at play were also of interest.
Humphrey Spender is recognized by many scholars as one of the early pioneers of what is
today generally referred to as documentary photography.26 Spender joined the Mass
Observation project in Bolton in 1937; most of his photographs were taken during his multiple
trips to Bolton over the period 1937-1938. As a member of the project, he took photographs
capturing the lives of the 1930’s working-classes, photographs the artistic significance of
which and its prominent place in the history of the social documentary was in fact only
appreciated in the 1970’s. It must, however, be said that Spender’s photographs were never
intended as art, but were in fact taken with the view of them being used as records and
25 The exhibition Subversive Spaces: Surrealism + Contemporary Art in Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 2009
attempted to analyse the connection between Surrealism and disordered spaces in the cities. See exhibition
catalogue for more information: Maria Balshaw, Samantha Lackey, David Lomas, Anna Dezeuze, Subversive
Spaces: Surrealism + Contemporary Art (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 2009), Exhibition catalogue
26 Spender studied art history and German at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau (1927-28) and architecture
at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London (1929-1933). Although Spender qualified as
an architect, he decided on a career in photography. He first started experimenting with photography whilst
studying at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Spender frequently spent time in
Germany. It is doubtful that the New Vision photography with its focus on the formal qualities of the image
over its context and the use of the advanced technology to expand the borders of human vision that he would
have encountered there, is something Spender would have overlooked. Deborah Frizzell in her analysis of the
aesthetic, critical and art-historical importance of Spender’s work within the genesis of British photojournalism
notes the influence of the aesthetic of New Objectivity – a new painting philosophy which emphasized the
rendering of concrete reality as opposed to a romantic, impressionist or symbolist approach – on the reportorial
approach to documentary photography of British artists at the time when Spender started his photographic
career (see Frizzell, p. 11). The impact these influences might have had on Spender’s own technique is debatable
but not to be waived as improbable. Initially setting up a studio in London, Spender in 1935 took up a position
as a photographer for the Daily Mail. It is at or around this time that his work was noticed by the Mass Observation
team.
20
sources of information in support of the intended objectives of the Mass Observation project
as they were at that time. His photographs are nevertheless today recognised as an important
part of the Mass Observation archive.
The Mass Observation observers placed heavy reliance on the objective observation of people,
avoiding interaction. Not surprisingly, there were some who viewed the observers with
suspicion, with participants often deemed as spies and snoopers. Spender was concerned
that the presence of a camera would influence the way people behaved, sometimes
concealing his camera in his coat or taking snapshots with his camera resting on a table.
Similarly, Walker Evans between the years 1938-1941 photographed commuters on the New
York subway with a camera hidden in his jacket.27 An unobserved observer with a small 35mm
Leica camera as opposed to the cumbersome large format cameras previously used, Spender
perceived himself as an invisible spy, once commenting that: “We were called spies, pryers,
mass-eavesdroppers, nosey parkers, peeping-toms, lopers, snoopers, envelope-steamers,
keyhole artists, sex maniacs, sissies and society playboys.”28 The underlying suspicions and
fears, and the reactions of the populations of the time is quite explicable considering the
limited understanding one might expect from the people of the time when they were for the
most part not fully familiar with the nature, potential use, and consequences of use of
photographs taken by individuals whose identity or motives they were not familiar with.
Spender did not limit his work to particular scenes, but also photographed people,
playgrounds, river-scenes, graffiti on walls, the ground, pavements, street scenes, and
children playing.29 In some respects, Spender’s photography is comparable to the work of
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the latter often cited as the inventor of photojournalism.30 This is also
noticeable in his use of psychological and visual space, unspoken feelings, gestures, body
27 See Plate 1 for an example of Walker Evans’s photographs on the New York subway
28 In an interview with Jeremy Mulford in Jeremy Mulford, ed., Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England,
1937-1938 (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1982), p. 16
29 Plates 2-4 present some of Humphrey Spender’s most recognised works
30 See, for example, Plates 5 and 6 for some of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s works
21
language, geometries, and the sense of something being in the air at that moment in time.31
At the same time, Spender’s photographs show a more utilitarian and many may argue, a less
poetic quality.
He recorded the identity of Bolton, and in his urban landscapes of a city then very much in
decline, the overwhelming sense is one of Bolton being a deprived and depressing city. He
captured the communication between the city’s urban landscapes and its inhabitants –
capturing and documenting the pavements, corners, empty spaces, and children playing
street games. His photography is not one of only a depressing landscape or disadvantaged
people, but one of people living their lives and children playing their games in the
environment within which they found themselves. Spender’s work is just as much a record
of the street life of the common people of Bolton. Although from an upper-middle-class
upbringing, his work shows a powerful familiarity and interaction with the struggles and
realities of daily life for the working-class and the disadvantaged communities of the time.
Spender’s work is often characterized by images of unattractive places and miserable
structures. Life he depicted is one absent any shine or reflection. Spender could find beauty
in the ordinary, often using chance to capture the moment. His photographs are deeply
personal, recording what was the way of life of the subject. Many of them were used in
exploring depression, hidden tensions and broken promises. There is however also a warmth
in Spender’s photographs. Some depict people that were, despite their difficult lives,
seemingly happy. In others, children are to be seen spreading their wings and playing their
games independently and out of sight of adult supervision. Spender himself is quoted as
commenting: “the kind of photograph that interests me most is a revelation of human
behavior […] those who, in disclosing humanity and human behavior, also disclose part of
their own attitude towards humanity and human behavior.”32
31 In an interview with Jeremy Mulford, Humphrey Spender admitted he had been enthusiastic about the work
of Cartier-Bresson from a very early time. See Mulford, p. 12
32 Humphrey Spender in an interview with Jeremy Mulford, see Mulford, p. 21.
22
Some of the initial results of the Mass Observation’s project were already published as early as
1938. During World War II, much of Mass Observation’s work was directed in support of the
war effort. Much of the work carried out at the behest of a number of Governmental
Departments involved the analyses of the population’s responses on a wide range of matters
such as political personalities, the fear of espionage, happiness, attitudes towards art, sexual
habits, and shopping. Mass Observation continued to operate into the early 1950’s, but
gradually the emphasis shifted away from social issues towards consumer behaviour.33
There is no denying that World War II had a dramatic impact on Britain, the British people,
and on their cities, and it left a lasting legacy on British art. In many ways, the war was a
turning point for British society and culture. Britain and its people exited the war as a victor.
It was a time marked by hope for the future and faith in a better society. That being said, for
post-war Britain life was also one of austerity and shortages, rationing (which continued as
late as 1954), less-than adequate social services, and a housing shortage. Its capital London
showed the scars of a long war’s bombing with bombsites still being visible into the 1950’s.34
It was to be a time of recovery and rehabilitation, and the rebuilding of the cities was viewed
a priority. It was also a time of transition and opportunity. The 1950’s proved to be
transitional both for London and for British art, and many artists and architects responded
to the changing world around them. New projects provided opportunities, raised
expectations, and initiated a renewed interest and debate around the ‘new’ urban
environment and its architecture.
As time would prove, there was no shortage in talented people who were more than eager
to contribute and influence. There was the ‘Independent Group’ of avant-garde thinkers,
33 Mass Observation continued to have an impact in the decades that followed, albeit not under the banner and
style of Mass Observation but this time more indirectly. In the 1960’s a number of the original ‘observers’ returned
to Bolton and Blackpool as part of the ‘Britain Revisited’ project team. This project was again re-launched in
1981 following the move of the archive to the University of Sussex. The project-methodology however evolved
to one of focusing on individual voices and personal experiences as reported by volunteer Mass Observers in
open-ended-question surveys. The project’s Archive is currently being held at the University of Sussex,
consisting of extensive written accounts of daily life, ephemera and photographs, while other works have been
taken into the national museum collections. See Mass Observation Archive
34 For a mapping of the WWII ‘bomb census’ refer <http://www.bombsight.org>
23
artists, art historians and architects, included in its ranks people like Richard Hamilton, Nigel
Henderson, William Turnbull, Eduardo Paolozzi, critics Reyner Banham and Toni del
Renzio, and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. They were already a prominent group of
campaigners based at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London.
One of the founding members of the Independent Group, Nigel Henderson’s involvement
with the Independent Group dates back to the Group’s early beginnings in 1952. He was
certainly also viewed as an influential member of the Group. This was certainly the view held
by writer Martin Harrison who once referred to Henderson as the “the catalyst” of the group
for Henderson’s collages (as described by Harrison) being “source of visual imagery that
uncovered innumerable areas of inquiry”.35 Best known as a documentary and experimental
photographer and artist, Henderson initially started out as a biology student, but from as
early as 1936 he started to immerse himself in the arts. His interest in the arts may well be
attributable to his close relationship with his mother who from 1938 managed Guggenheim
Jeune for Peggy Guggenheim, at the time a prominent collector of modern art in London.
This may well also be the connection that paved the way for Henderson’s early introduction
to leading figures of the avant-garde, notably individuals like Max Ernst and Marcel
Duchamp. Curators of his exhibition in the Anthony d’Offay Gallery did on occasion refer
to Peggy Guggenheim as Henderson’s “fairy godmother” who supported him financially,
something which may, coupled with his exposure and possible opportunities through his
mother, explain Henderson’s opportunity to exhibit two of his own collages at the Guggenheim
Jeune in 1938.36 Joining the war effort in 1939, Henderson served as a pilot in Coastal
Command until his discharge in 1945, leaving the forces with a serviceman’s grant to study.
Moving to London’s East-End with his wife Judith Stephen, they settled in Bethnal Green,
an area of extreme poverty, overcrowded housing, and poor sanitation. It is also an area that
35 Martin Harrison, Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties (London: Merrell in association with Barbican
Art, 2002), published on the occasion of the exhibition, p. 99
36 They also note the influence of Laurence Vail (Peggy Guggenheim’s first husband, French writer, sculptor
and painter of Dadaism) on his collages. Anthony d’Offay (Firm), Nigel Henderson: Paintings, Collages &
Photographs, exhibition catalogue (London: unknown binding, 1977), unnumbered p. 5
24
suffered severe bombing damage. Henderson joined the Shade School of Art where he met
Eduardo Paolozzi, an event which proved to be the start of a life-long friendship.37
Henderson’s wife Judith Stephen was an anthropologist who between 1948-1952 assisted the
sociologist J. L. Petersen with a sociology course titled “Discover your Neighbors”. The
course was mainly targeted at professional people in the Bethnal Green area, mainly intended
as a course to create an awareness of the culture in which they were working and living. There
is no evidence of Henderson in any way being involved in his wife’s project, but it was during
this time that Henderson started taking his drily observed, documentary photographs of life
on the street.38 Henderson at this time continued to experiment with collage, like Surrealists
and Dada artists, and with the physicality of photography.39 Frank Whitford, the curator of
Nigel Henderson’s exhibition in Kettle’s Yard in 1977, noted that Henderson in his practice
came close to what American artists and photographers were producing at that time, and
compared Henderson’s works with that to be expected within Abstract Expressionism.40
There is reason to believe that Henderson was aware of the Mass Observation project’s work
in Bolton, a project that would have also resonated with him. Martin Harrison noted that
Tom Harrisson, a co-founder of the Mass Observation, assisted his wife with her sociology
course. Henderson knew Humphrey Jennings who’s film Spare Time (1939) was partially shot
37 Martin Harrison mentions that Henderson “failed to complete a single painting there” – Martin Harrison,
Young Meteors: British Photojournalism 1957-1965 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. 23
38 Roy Kozlovsky comments that Henderson used a section of Stephen’s notes (written on a daily basis,
observations of everyday life of the community) in his catalogue of the photographs. Roy Kozlovsky, “Urban
Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity”, Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, Marina Lathouri, ed., Intimate
Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 204
39 Henderson’s photograms, distorted or ‘stressed’ images he produced in the early 1950s, were aimed to stress
a point or evoke an atmosphere of an ordinary subject to make it surreal, unrecognisable (see, for example,
Plate 7 for his Stressed Photograph, c.1950). In his collages, photographs were transformed into something
that could at the same time come over as at the macro-level something resembling a map of the landscape and
on the micro-level something representing a scratched urban surface (see Plates 8-9 for some of Nigel
Henderson’s collages). Arguably, he may well have been inspired by aerial photography and the aerial views of
the world which he grew accustomed to during his wartime service as an aviator.
40 Frank Whitford, Nigel Henderson: Photographs, Collages, Paintings (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 1977), exhibition
catalogue, unnumbered p. 10
25
on location in Bolton where the Mass Observation project was conducted.41 Martin Harrison
also goes on to mention Henderson’s friendship with two individuals who were directly
involved in Mass-Observation’s Worktown Project in the 1930s.42 This was at or around
1949 when Henderson started to take photographs of people living in London’s East End.
There is nothing to indicate that Henderson ever entertained the idea of embarking on a
photography career. He was at first just wandering around his neighborhood, observing life,
and at some point started to carry a camera. All indications are that of his photography career
having started from photography as a hobby. He portrayed the grittiness of everyday live in
Bethnal Green, the people, urban surfaces, shop fronts, and graffiti.43 He had an eye for a
moment – there often seemed to be something surreal in the chance of his reportage
photographs. Henderson captured the individual’s experience of living the city.44
Children from working-class families proved to be a popular subject of his observations with
Peter Samuels being his favourite model.45 The realities of austerity and hardship put toys
out of reach for many working-class children. Understandably, many children in that position
will make the street their playground. He depicted the naivety of childhood and the ease with
which children manage to interact with their environment. Whereas many may interpret these
photographs of children who often were in need to be also a symbol of need, there were also
many who viewed children playing in the slums as a regenerative social force. Roy Kozlovsky
for example, an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, goes as far as
to see the play of children as a metaphor for reconstruction and regeneration, and refers to
newspapers of the time wherein they were in fact referred to as “post-war builders”.46 Streets
41 For a more detailed discussion refer see Harrison, Young Meteors, pp. 22-23
42 Martin Harrison makes specific reference to Julian Trevelyan and Graham Bell. See Harrison, Transition,
p. 100
43 See Plates 10, 11 for vivid examples of Henderson’s photographs at that time.
44 Nigel Henderson’s photographic approach, however, can be opposed to that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a
photographer whose works Henderson knew via an ICA exhibition in 1952. Henderson’s focus seems to have
been very much limited to capturing life as it was where he lived, Bethnal Green
45 See Plate 12 for one of many Henderson’s photographs of Peter Samuels
46 Kozlovsky, p. 195
26
became playgrounds to rehabilitate bombed sites, starting regeneration from within.47 Play
became associated with the making of citizens through the concept of fair play, a
strengthening force within communities, and as a vehicle for the promotion of a liberal model
of democratic citizenship.
Alison and Peter Smithson, both active members of the Independent Group, recognized in
his pictures the self-sufficiency of street life. The Smithsons prior to 1950 worked in the
London Country Council (LCC) Architects’ department, but then moved into private
practice.48 This was at a time marked by post-war lack of resources with most projects at that
time financed by government. It was a time when admirers of Le Corbusier and likeminded
individuals could expect opposition from older generations intent on maintaining the status
quo. The Smithsons were introduced to the Independent Group by Henderson and Paolozzi,
both of whom they met at the Central School of Art in 1952. Henderson was at that time
still teaching an evening class in creative photography.49 With the Smithsons came a fresh
and rigorous understanding of modern architecture.
The Smithsons incorporated some of Henderson’s photographs of children’s street-play into
an Urban Re-identification grid that presented their view on urban planning and altered the
experience of Henderson’s photos.50 This Grid was ultimately presented to the CIAM – the
Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (Eng. International Congresses of Modern
47 See John Lewis, ed., Urban Structuring: Studies of Alison & Peter Smithson (London: Studio Vista Ltd, 1967),
p. 15, where John Lewis expresses the opinion: “The street is an arena for social expression”.
48 For more detailed background information see Helena Webster, ed., Modernism Without Rhetoric: Essays on the
works of Alison and Peter Smithson (London: Academy Editions, 1997), p. 17
49 Ken Garland, one of Henderson’s students, was once quoted as saying: “[…] not only did Nigel open you
up to all kinds of experimentation with the photographic process, he was also completely at home with the
European modernism that had by-passed Britain. We had a lot of catching up to do, and it was Nigel and not
our main tutors that introduced us to key texts like Kepes’ Language of Vision and Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in
Motion”. Quoted by Martin Harrison in Harrison, Transition, p. 103
50 Alison and Peter Smithson, Grille pour le C.I.A.M. d’Aix-en-Provence (Urban Re-identification Grid), 1952-53,
collage, photographs (by Nigel Henderson), ink on paper and papiers colles, 83.5 x 275.5 cm. Centre Pompidou,
MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Georges
27
Architecture) in 1953.51 Founded in Switzerland in 1928, the CIAM was an architectural
organisation credited for arranging a number of congresses held across Europe. The main
objective of the CIAM was the planning of international gatherings and to be a vehicle for
debate on urban living and design.
The CIAM VIII conference of 1952 raised questions as to the formulation of the notion of
habitat, a living environment. Though the members, on this question, failed to reach
agreement on this notion, the discussion is believed to have somehow resulted in a change
of thinking within CIAM that culminated in a shift from Le Corbusier’s “industry of living”
– a zoned city containing standardised dwellings and different areas for work, home, and
leisure, to a new discussion of town planning with emphasis on the immediate surroundings
of the dwelling, an idea that was further developed over the following conferences.
CIAM IX, the first conference where “young” members were allowed to participate, gave
the Smithsons the opportunity to present their urban analysis and address a number of
questions facing urbanism. Grids had always been a popular presentation aid at CIAM
conferences, and the Smithsons presented their information in a grid, but in this instance
they presented it with a somewhat altered structure.52 In their presentation, eleven of
Henderson’s photographs of the Bethnal Green area were framed in a social and architectural
context. His works, including his famous Gillian Alixander Skipping and Chisenhale Road, were
collaged with the Smithsons’ housing project presented for the Golden Line competition in
1952.53 They focused on the street as an extension of the house, used the unique needs of
children to play to illustrate the social needs of the whole society, and suggested a new urban
51 Between 19-26 July 1953, Aix-en-Provence, France. According to Dirk van den Heuvel, a former associate
professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft and a recognized expert in the history and theory of post-war
modern architecture, the conference was the largest and most diverse yet, attended as it was by over 3 000
delegates and observers. Dirk van den Heuvel, Team 10: 1953-81, in search of a utopia of the present (Rotterdam:
NAi, 2005), pp. 20-21
52 The grid was developed in 1947 by Le Corbusier while preparing for the C.I.A.M VII under Le Corbusier’s
leadership. Referred to by Catherine Blame in Van den Heuvel, Team 10, p. 18, and Ben Highmore, “Rough
Poetry: Patio and Pavilion Revisited”, Oxford Art Journal, Issue 29/ 2006, p. 283
53 See Plates 13-16 for some of Nigel Henderson’s works incorporated into the Grid
28
planning philosophy with a focus on a local environment instead of linear street planning.54
They focused on what was missing in the town, a message they incorporated into the Grid:
“In the suburbs and slums the vital relationship between the house and the street survives,
children run about, people stop and talk, vehicles are parked and tinkered with… you know
the milkman, you are outside your house in your street.”55 Instead of a careful analysis, they
prepared a grid of patterns of association supported with a statement to the effect that a
community “should be built up of a hierarchy of associational elements (the House, the
Street, the District, the City)”, those aspects of real life that had fallen “through the mesh of
the four functions (housing, work, recreation and traffic)”.56 Henderson’s photos became
instrumental to the Smithsons’ rethinking of urban life.
Their statements were not among the most discussed at CIAM.57 It was at or around this
time following the 1953 presentation of the grid in Aix-en-Provence, that the Smithsons,
Candilis, J. B. Bakema (of Holland) and a number of other individuals formed Team 10 where
their discussion of urban planning continued. It was an influential group that certainly
managed to shift architectural thinking and address the issues of urban infrastructure.
Henderson collaborated with the Smithsons on two important events. In 1953 together with
the Smithsons and Paolozzi he organised the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art in the ICA.58
It was an exhibition which critic Reyner Banham in as early as 1955 described as key
movement in the emergence of New Brutalism in art and architecture in England, New
54 Smithsons’ concept of half-open and half-closed space system as it was developed through their career is
discussed by Max Risselada, curator and professor of architecture, in Max Risselada, “The Space Between”,
Max Risselada, ed., Alison & Peter Smithson: a Critical Anthology (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2011), pp. 346-353
55 Transcribed by Roy Kozlovsky in Kozlovsky, p. 199
56 Quoted at Webster, p. 46
57 Dirk van den Heuvel later recollected that it was in fact the Bidonville Mahieddine Grid, CIAM-Alger of
1953 that was the most memorable (see Plate 17). Van den Heuvel, pp. 22-23
58 Parallel of Life and Art Exhibition, I.C.A., Dover Street, London, 11 Sep – 18 Oct 1953. According to Sze
Tsung Leong and Chuihua Judy Chung, the exhibition was originally called ‘Sources’. Sze Tsung Leong,
Chuihua Judy Chung, ed., The Charged Void: Architecture. Alison and Peter Smithson (New York: The Monacelli
Press, 2001), p. 118
29
Brutalism being a reference to art brut (Debuffet, Pollock and the Paris art scene).59 The artists
created a total environment with a host of black and white images taken from a range of art
and non-art sources.60 Arguably not ‘beautiful art’, but processed images with a considerable
quantity of non-art imagery, it included photographs from newspapers, commercially
produced blow-ups of micro-photographs, x-rays, geological aerial views, and archaeological
objects. In other cases, documents were arranged together with documentary photography,
some images were unrecognisable. The exhibition went as far as including a photograph
taken by Hans Namuth of Jackson Pollock working in his studio, a photo of a burned forest
in California, and another one taken at the funeral of King George VI. Many will view the
seemingly odd and random arrangement of works as radical: there were no labels, some
works were installed hanging under the ceiling, and the printed guide was unreliable. It was
more of a collage of different objects inside the gallery space with different layers of
information, but with little connection with one another. Everything seemed to be arranged
so as to suggest to the viewer to find clues, to become active participants of the show, to
play with the mixture of objects and photographs discovered, and to find in it possible
correlations with their own everyday lives.
In 1956, Henderson, Paolozzi and the Smithsons contributed to the This is Tomorrow
exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery with their Patio and Pavilion section.61 Together with other
artists, including the prominent Richard Hamilton with his Just what it is that makes today’s
homes so different, so appealing?, they addressed what was argued to be a problem of a lack of
connection between architecture and the inhabitants.62 Lawrence Alloway, an English art
critic and curator of This is Tomorrow, described the exhibition as one where art and
59 Banham claimed New Brutalism to have started as a result of a common mood shared by a number of artists
in London, including their interest in Le Corbusier and non-Marxist politics. Reyner Banham, “The New
Brutalism”, in Max Risselada, ed., Alison & Peter Smithson: a Critical Anthology (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2011),
originally published in 1955, p. 114
60 See Plate 18 for an installation shot of the exhibition
61 For Ben Highmore this exhibition was another example of New Brutalism. Highmore, p. 271
See Plate 19 for dual pages from This is tomorrow exhibition catalogue originally published in 1956 prepared by
the artists
62 See Plate 20 for Richard Hamilton’s work
30
architecture were presented as something resembling a “many-challenged activity” that was
“as factual and far from ideal standards as the street outside”.63 The curators of the
reconstructed 2010 This is Tomorrow exhibition (a show that explored the original 1956 This is
Tomorrow exhibition), have voiced the opinion that the original show was the beginning of
what can be considered a new spirit of British art and the whole installation concept.64
12 groups of artists, musicians, architects and designers worked independently on their part
of the show, but eventually presented the final show as one environment. The lack of any
interpretations was once again intended to challenge the audience.65
For this exhibition, Henderson, Paolozzi and the Smithsons produced a symbolic human
habitat.66 The pavilion, a structure resembling a shed, symbolized the private space, and the
enclosed area symbolized the patio (the public space) which was “furnished with symbols for
all human needs”, i.e. an image of a tree for nature, rocks and natural objects for stability, a
sculpture of a head – for a man, the frog and the dog – for animals, the light box – for family,
a wheel for machines, and a photo of a house for a private space.67 Henderson’s large collage
Head of Man symbolized the inhabitant of the space.68 The main structure was made of wood
with aluminum walls that reflected the interior and symbolized the light, and a semi-
transparent plastic roof that revealed the objects placed on top. The floor of the patio was
covered in sand with some elements impressed into it i.e. bricks, stones, and sculptures.
Symbolic representations of objects and concepts suggested the active involvement of the
viewers. James Stirling, Michael Pine and Richard Matthews were subsequently to say that:
“a total sense of environment will only be brought about by people themselves wanting it.
63 Lawrence Alloway, “Introduction I”, Yiakoumaki, unnumbered p. 14
64 See exhibition catalogue: Nayia Yiakoumaki, curator, Iwona Blazwick and Nayia Yiakoumaki, preface, This is
tomorrow (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), originally published in 1956
65 Iwona Blazwick and Nayia Yiakoumaki, “Preface”, Yiakoumaki, unnumbered pp. 1-2
66 See Plate 21 for an installation shot of Patio and Pavilion, 1956
67 The artists’ comments to their part of the show. Yiakoumaki, unnumbered pp. 61-63
68 Nigel Henderson, Head of a Man, 1956, photographic collage on paper mounted on board, 159.7 x 121.6 cm.
Tate collection.
31
Architects, painters and sculptors can only help by developing together their means of
expression to act as a stimulus to this end, and not by working in a formalist vacuum”.69
In 2006 Ben Highmore in his highly acclaimed article “Rough Poetry: Patio and Pavilion
Revisited” draw correlations of the way of presenting the objects and images and the Patio
and Pavilion’s aesthetics of the everyday with Henderson’s study of shops display in Bethnal
Green and with North American advertising – aesthetic method that already existed in
everyday, “the practice of layering and putting next to”.70 For him, the Patio and Pavilion is
not just an installation of different objects, materials, and panels, but a “conglomeration of
references” – rural dwelling, a shed in Bethnal Green, a post-nuclear ruin, a junk playground,
a symbol of discontinuity between architectural plan and occupation. The reference to both
the pavilion and the patio in the title of the installation, and the installation of different
objects represented an emerging urban discourse of the mid fifties in Britain and referred to
architectural and artistic debates of that time – shift to a more human-centered urban
environment.
This exhibition marked the end of the Independent Group with its ultimate disbandment in
1956. It is to be noted that the artists referred to above were by no means the only artists or
the most prominent artists associated with the Independent Group. The Group was also
home to many other influential British artists and architects whom associated with the
Group.71
Many photographers, past and present, have found inspiration in children’s play. It is
universal and timeless. Children playing on the streets of London has long been a source of
69 Essay by James Stirling, Michael Pine and Richard Matthews. Yiakoumaki, unnumbered p. 78
70 Highmore, p. 283
71 Martin Harrison among others mentions Colin St. John Wilson who worked together with Alan Colquihoun
and Peter Carter, responsible for some Corbusian developments categorized as New Brutalism; Jon Catleugh,
Richard Lannoy and others. Harrison, Transition, p. 130
32
inspiration for Roger Mayne whose name became synonymous with street photography,
particularly his shots of disadvantaged children in the still war-damaged 1950s London.72
With a degree in Chemistry from Oxford, Mayne instead decided on pursuing a career in
photography, a hobby of his at university. He joined camera clubs, became a member of the
ICA, learned from other photographers’ practice, and built friendships with other
photographers. One of the prominent photographers he befriended was Nigel Henderson
with whom he spent some time in Bethnal Green.
Many of Mayne’s photographs were taken in and around Southam Street, North Kensington,
London, between 1956 and 1961. A part of London in 1963 declared as not suitable for
human habitation, it was later demolished and replaced by what can at best be described as
a Brutalist experiment in high rise tower block living. It was, however, an area, as
disadvantaged and shabby, as it was that appealed to Mayne. He was once quoted as having
said: “The reason for photographing poor streets is that I love them and the life on them
[…] empty, the streets have their own kind of beauty, a kind of decaying splendor and always
great atmosphere - whether romantic on a hazy winter day, or listless when the summer is
hot; sometimes it is forbidding; or it may be warm and friendly on a sunny spring weekend
when the street is swarming with children playing, or adults walking through or standing
gossiping.”73
For Mayne, the street is the arena for people’s lives. Although every street-activity was equally
important for him, his focus was very much on children and their play. His observations of
street life transmitted a love and warmth towards children. His works, usually against a
backdrop of poor housing areas, nevertheless portray scenes full of joy and happiness. In the
1950’s London, in areas that were lacking in the playgrounds and facilities today taken for
72 Mayne has been widely exhibited in Britain and worldwide. Among the last exhibitions a recent exhibition in
Bath can be mentioned: Roger Mayne: Aspects of a Great Photographer, Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 26 January –
7 April 2013
73 From Universities and Left Review, Spring 1959, quoted in Ray Gosling (introduction), Roger Mayne:
Photographs (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), p. 18
33
granted, and not limited by contemporary regulations and safety requirements affecting
contemporary playgrounds, children played in the street. On Mayne’s photographs we can
see them playing football and cricket, we can almost hear their laughing, giggling or crying.74
Mayne’s archive is a beautiful historical survey. He captured the spirit of the people. They
might have lived in slums, but they could still play and have fun.
Mayne received recognition quite early on in his career. As early as 1956, his works were
exhibited and acquired by MOMA and other major collections in the world, and it struck a
chord with many architects and their concerns with town planning.75 Mayne’s photographs
are not as dispassionate as one may at first think. He himself acknowledged the power of the
photographer in the pictorial illusions he creates, once quoted as having said: “Photography
involves two main distortions – the simplification into black and white, and the seizing of an
instant in time. It is this particular mixture of reality and unreality, and the photographer’s
power to select, that makes it possible for photography to be art. Whether it is good art
depends on the power and the truth of the artists’ statement.”76
New York City in the 1970’s was a city in decline. For New York City the 1970s was a time
of urban crisis, the relocation of industry to other states, a collapse of the city’s manufacturing
base, and a time of population decline. This left in its wake a city left with abandoned estates
and rising levels of crime. An insightful visual record of this world-city as it was in the 1970’s
is to be gleaned from the records or the Documerica project, organised and maintained by the
Environmental Protection Agency between the periods 1972 to 1977.77 It was a project that
in fact shared quite a few similarities with the Mass-Observation project in Britain in the 1930s.
74 See Plates 22-24 for some of Roger Mayne’s works
75 Theo Grosby, an architect whose name can be linked to many major developments in design spanning several
decades, has in the past described Mayne as one of the few English photographers who disclosed a world of
modern fact: “a portrait of urban sub-life of which, without him, [Grosby] would have been unaware”. Quoted
in Mark Haworth-Booth (preface), The Street Photographs of Roger Mayne (London: Zelda Cheatle Press, 1986),
p. 78
76 From an interview with Peace News in 1960, in Gosling, p. 18
77 See Plates 25, 26 for some of the Documerica project photographs
34
The main objective of the project was to gather evidence of the harmful effects of the lifestyle
of the society of the time on the environment, but along the way photographers also covered
the daily lives of ordinary people across the United States.
At the same time, however, the financial and artistic sectors started to grow. It was a time of
permissiveness, mass protests against the Ford administration’s policies, garbage strikes in
1978, the 1979 5th Avenue anti-nuclear sit-in protests, disco, bell-bottoms, big cars, punk-
rock, 6th Avenue pride parades, environmentalists, Iggy Pop, Willian Friedkin’s The French
Connection in 1971, Woody Allen’s Manhattan in 1979, Studio 54 nightclub. It was also John
Lennon’s last refuge. With the decline of the city and fall of the dollar, life in the city became
cheaper. This all seemed to provide the right setting for Manhattan to attract increasing
numbers of individuals from what can for the lack of any other more apt description be
referred to as other ‘alternative’ social and artistic groupings.
It was during this time of transition when SoHo was born as a centre for artistic activity,
arguably the first example of the revitalisation of the city area in New York, and also marking
the renaissance of New York as an art stage. Galleries started to relocate to SoHo, new
studios started to open, and artist-cooperatives were established. Forrest Mayer’s piece The
Wall (also known as The Gateway to SoHo), a piece of art almost completely covering one of
the wall-surfaces of a building situated in SoHo, was very much the face of a changing area.78
Mayer, who once referred to himself as the “pioneer of SoHo” was once quoted as having
said that: “What made SoHo was all of these cheap lofts”.79 As early as in 1976 the
phenomenon of SoHo was explored by the Berlin-based Akademie der Kunste in their
exhibition titled New York – Downtown Manhattan. Soho.80 The transformation of SoHo was
78 Roger Myers, The Wall, 1973, 42 seafoam green pylons on the north face of 599 Broadway, New York.
Plate 27
79 Interview by Joelle Panisch, “The Pioneers of SoHo: Forest Myers”, SoHo Journal, accessed 5 September
2013: <http://www.sohojournal.com/content/pioneers-soho-forrest-myers>
80 See exhibition catalogue: Rene Block, New York – Downtown Manhattan. Soho (Berlin: Akademie der Kunste
and Berliner Festwochen, 1976). The three part exhibition “New York-Downtown Manhattan: Soho” that run
from September 5 - October 17, 1976 was meant to portray the culture of Soho and show the relationship
35
evidently something that drew international attention with Rene Block, referring to Soho,
commenting that “for European time standards, the speed at which this industrial slum, even
though slated for demolition, has become the focal point of Western Avant-Garde is nothing
short of mind-boggling,” and describing SoHo as “a state of mind, an intellectual attitude”.81
Artists played with the city and used it in their performances. The city provided them with
an open stage for their experiments and became a laboratory for their ideas. The city became
their studio and their medium. A number of notable artists and art movements come to
mind. A prominent one deserving mention is the Fluxus movement, an international
movement of artists with members as far afield as Japan and the West Coast. It was towards
the end of the 1960s when they started to have urban and playful performative practices.
Their festivals in New York really started to blossom once George Maciunas started
coordinating them.82 New York Fluxus is viewed as a crucial factor in the emergence of SoHo
with Peter Frank in 1976 describing it as “the earliest conceptual and performance activity
to occur between Houston and Canal Streets.”83 It was also at around this time when a series
of Street Works events were organised, the pieces mostly performances and physical objects
using some or other New York City street.84 It was in March 1969 when the project started
off with Street Works I consisting of only 7 participants them being Vito Hannibal Acconi,
Gregory Battcock, Meredith Monk, Anne Waldman, Les Levine, Arakawa, and Lucy
R. Lippard, but by April of that same year Street Works II showed a compliment of
40 participants. It continued to grow in interest after that.
Other widely recognised Street Works include that of Vito Acconci with his Following Piece,
where he was playing with the idea of the interaction between the art activity and everyday
between art and city life through theater, music, and film. The catalogue includes essays by Rene Block,
Lawrence Alloway, Peter Frank, Lucy Lippard, Douglas Davis, Stephen B. Reichard, Joan La Barbara.
81 Block, p. 7
82 For example, George Maciunas and Takako Saito, Flux-Treadmill, for “Flux Game Fest”, 19 May 1973 in
80 Wooster Street. Plate 28
83 Peter Frank, “New York Fluxus”, Rene Block, New York – Downtown Manhattan. Soho (Berlin: Akademie der
Ku nste and Berliner Festwochen, 1976), p. 151
84 For example, Richard Hayman, Bellroll, Street Works, April 1975, on Mercer street. Plate 29
36
life and over three weeks followed one randomly chosen stranger through the streets of New
York until they entered a private location.85 In 1975, there was Daniel Buren‘s Seven Ballets in
Manhattan involving dancers carrying placards featuring the striped work of Buren, an event
accepted as artwork by SoHo audiences, but interpreted as protest by Wall Street.86 Then
there was Hans Haacke’s Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1,
1971 where he documented in photography and then mapped the real-estate holdings of one
of New York City’s most renowned slum landlords.87 Lucy Lippard, an internationally
renowned art critic and curator, acknowledges the transformation and role of SoHo as being
“a case history in the legend of urban pioneers, the forerunner of a larger nationwide
movement […] When middle-class people had left the cities for the suburbs in the seventies,
they “repossessed” working class and industrial neighborhoods, ineluctably changing the
city’s geography and economy”.88 This transformation was accompanied with and may
arguably have been driven by what Lippard has referred to as “a collage of unlikely networks:
between artists and other artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, and musicians on the one hand,
and between them and the marketplace and the social superstructure in the other hand.”89
Laurie Anderson, who was herself one of these early ‘Soho pioneers’, describes the artistic
environment of early 1970’s New York as “[…] Paris in the ‘20s. I was part of a group of
artists/pioneers that included Gordon Matta-Clark, Gene Highstein, Susie Harris, Tina
Girouard, Richard Nonas, Dickie Landry, Phil Glass, Keith Sommier and several other
sculptors and musicians. We often worked on each other’s pieces and boundaries between
art forms were loose […] We were very aware that we were creating an entirely new scene
85 Vito Acconci, Following Piece, performed in New York City between October 3 and 25, 1969. Plate 30
86 Daniel Buren, Seven Ballets in Manhattan, work in situ, New York, USA, 27 May-2 June 1975. Plate 31
87 Hans Haaske, Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 142 photos with data
sheets, 2 maps, 6 charts, slide excerpt. Photograph courtesy Fred Scruton; all Hans Haacke images courtesy
Hans Haacke. Plate 32
88 Lucy R. Lippard, “The Lure of the local: Senses of place in a multicentered society, New York, 1997”, quoted
in Blazwick, p. 128
89 Lucy R. Lippard, “The Geography of Street Time: A Survey of Street Works Downtown”, Block, p. 181
37
(later known as ‘Downtown’). Gordon Matta-Clark was the centre of this scene, which ended
with his death.”90
Gordon Matta-Clark was one of the most notable artists who worked directly in the urban
environment and who challenged the urban context in his very unique way, even by today’s
standards. Mostly known for his ‘building cuts’, that is to say removing parts of buildings or
splitting dwelling houses in half allowing to see through the structure, Matta-Clark had a
talent for manipulating the fabric of the city.91 Born in New York, Matta-Clark hailed from
a family of artists, growing up in what can be considered an avant-garde artistic environment,
surrounded by people more aligned to the bohemian side of New York. His mother had
been a member of a Surrealist group based in Paris. His father was a renowned Chilean
Surrealist artist at one time working for Le Corbusier in Paris, and his godfather was Marcel-
Duchamp.
After spending a year in Paris studying French literature at the Sorbonne, Matta-Clark went
on to complete an architectural course at Cornell University, New York. Matta-Clark’s time
at Cornell can arguably be considered as one of the shaping factors in his later life and as
expressed in his later work. Cornell University’s educational approach in the 1960s was very
much based on critique of modernist architecture and architectural contextualism, and the
influence of the environment, an approach that could most likely be traced to the influence
of Colin Rowe and his Cornell-based Urban Design Studio.92 With the limited number of
new developments going on at the time, 1970’s New York offered few opportunities to
young aspiring architects. Not going into practice, Matta-Clark began working with
abandoned buildings in New York marked for demolition. From early on it was evident that
90 Laurie Anderson is quoted in Yee, p. 17
91 See Plates 33, 34 for Gordon Matta-Clark’s most famous ‘building cuts’: Splitting, 1974, and Conical Intersect,
1975
92 Stephen Walker quoting Tom Schumacher, one of Rowe’s students, commented: “It is precisely the ways in
which idealized forms can be adjusted to a context or used as “collage” that contextualism seeks to explain,
and it is the systems of geometric organisation which can be abstracted from any given context that
contextualism seeks to divine as design tools”. Stephen Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the
Attack on Modernism (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), p. 7
38
although he was operating within a modernist city, his approach was one absent modernism.
His time at Cornell coupled with the observable changes in the architectural and artistic
modernism of the 1960s, minimalism, Pop, land-art, and site-specific works, all could have
had a significant influence on him.
His very physical play with the city was highly irrational, with his investment in fifteen tiny
properties perhaps the most irrational project he embarked on.93 In 1973, the city of New
York auctioned off plots of land for anyone wanting to own a New York property. In reality
it was no more but a city-attempt to get rid of all the holes in the urban strata, but at least
offering the city a return in property tax. Matta-Clark became familiar with the auctions
through his friend Alanna Heiss, founder of the Institute for Art and Urban Resources. Heiss
herself was in fact looking for abandoned sites with the potential of use as temporary
exhibition spaces. Accompanying Heiss to these auctions, Matta-Clark found himself to be
inspired by these small unusable and sometimes inaccessible spaces.
Matta-Clark ended up purchasing 15 of these properties, 14 equally unusable bits in Queens,
and another slot on Staten Island, all in the price range of twenty-five to seventy-five dollars
per slot.94 These were often no more but narrow areas between houses, narrow slices of land
along curbs, or corner slots of little more but several square feet. All these slots were of odd
dimensions, some were only one or two feet wide. His stated intention with these odd plots
was that it was intended for use as artwork, once quoted by Times as having said: “The
artworks will consist of three parts: a written documentation of the piece of land, including
exact dimensions and location and perhaps a list of weeds growing there; a full-scale
photograph of the property, and the property itself. The first two parts will be displayed in a
93 Series of works Realty Properties: Fake Estates, 1974-75
94 Technical details provided in Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Frances Richard, ed., Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon
Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates (New York: Cabinet Books, 2005), p. 43
39
gallery, and buyers of the art will purchase the deed to the land as well”.95 Over the following
years, he collected the relevant maps and deeds and photographed these little slots of land.
Matta-Clark thus became a New York property owner with a little portfolio of little
properties that was of no practical use and often not even accessible. Though these little slots
of land were private, the idea of ownership was washed out. Highly irrational estates revealed
the absurdity of them being brought to sale by the city in the first place. Matta-Clark however
started reusing these spaces that were so magnificently lacking any other rational function –
as artwork. They existed as private properties and as physical areas, but by incorporating
them into his artwork, they played a new role. There was something surreal in those spaces
between spaces. In an interview with Lisa Bear he explained: “When I bought those
properties at the New York City Auction, the description of them that always excited me
most was “inaccessible”. What I basically wanted to do was to designate spaces that wouldn’t
be seen and certainly not occupied. Buying them was my own take on the strangeness of
existing property demarcation lines. Property is so all pervasive. Everyone’s notion of
ownership is determined by the use factor”.96
Matta-Clark was questioning the boundaries between the private and public space, focussing
as he did on the use of land and space and the materiality of space. He pointed on a very
strange development of the city and strangeness of property demarcation lines. He didn’t
involve other people in play, but made the city spots themselves play. There are
commentators who have drawn comparisons and argued correlations between Matta-Clark’s
project and the Situationist’s urban interventions.97
Matta-Clark visited his properties several times. Jaime Davidovich, a friend who
accompanied Matta-Clark on a visit of these properties in 1975 and whom also recorded the
95 Matta-Clark in an interview to Times, quoted by Jennifer Johung in Replacing home: from primordial hut to digital
network in contemporary art (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 33-34
96 Quoted in Johung, p. 38
97 Judith Russi, “The Idea of Community in the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark”, Corinne Diserens, ed., Gordon
Matta-Clark (London: Phaidon, c2003 2004), p. 148
40
visit on video, recalled a very negative and sometimes hostile reaction by neighbours when
told that part of their driveway or parking space was owned by Matta-Clark.98 There is some
debate around what he was going to do with these little plots of land. There is some evidence
to believe that he discussed the project and ideas with the Anarchitecture group, an artist’s
group of young artists whose collaborative efforts eventually culminated in the Anarchitecture
exhibition in 1974. He died in 1978 without realising any plan. The properties eventually
reverted back to the city due to delinquent tax bills. Matta-Clark’s collection of original
documentation relating to his project i.e. photographs, deeds and maps, were travelling from
one collection to another until 1992, when Jane Crawford, his widow, assembled it in collages
for Matta-Clark’s retrospective.99 The Cabinet Magazine in 2005 repurchased the little slots in
an attempt to recover the initial artwork.
SoHo in the 1970’s also became a centre for music, art and performance. Not only did plays
and performances play itself out at the micro-level within the confines of SoHo venues, but
the SoHo landscape was incorporated into some of those performances. Stephen Koch was
in 1976 once quoted as having said: “Performance […] is the word used when referring to
any event in SoHo in which people do things in front of the audience. […] For some reason,
one always must climb stairs to reach a performance. The ascent is the same to reach the
most modest, well, dump, with battered floors and grimy windows, or the cool sanctum of
the Castelli gallery (downtown) of the high grandeur of the Whitney. And when you have
gotten to the top of whatever stairs you have climbed, you will find yourself not in a theatre
but in a “space”.”100
A number of notable SoHo artists did not only climb stairs to reach ‘a space’ or to experience
the performing platform as ‘space’, but made ‘space’ their performing platform. Of these
artists, Trisha Brown is arguably the best example. A native of California, Brown relocated
98 See Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Frances Richard, ed., Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
(New York: Cabinet Books, 2005), p. 47
99 Retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark, IVAM Centro Julio Gonzalez in Valencia, Spain, 1992
100 Stephen Koch, “Reflections on SoHo”, Block, pp. 132-133
41
to New York in 1961. With a background in dance, her dance training included ballet, jazz,
acrobatics and tap. She learned composition from Louis Horst and dance technique from
Martha Graham at Mills College, San Francisco. She also took some classes from the
influential dance workshops of Merce Cunningham and Anna Halprin. Brown joined the
New York based Judson Dance Theatre, a dance company that, according to internationally
renowned curator Peter Eleey, laid the foundation for postmodern dance.101 Named after the
Judson Memorial Church where they performed, a venue that previously hosted
performances by artists such as Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine, the Judson of the time showed
strong influence by Merce Cunningham and John Cage with their ideas of spontaneity, the
use of chance, scores and instructions.
Brown participated in some of the Fluxus festivals, performed at one of Yoko Ono’s events,
collaborated with film and video artists, and grew close to Robert Rauschenberg who she
met at Cunningham’s studio. Cunningham, Cage and Rauschenberg not only had a strong
influence on Brown’s artistic development and practice, but evidently had considerable
artistic influence in 1970’s New York. Joan La Barbara in her essay for the exhibition New
York – Downtown Manhattan. Soho (1976), noted that New York cooperative events took roots
in John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s works in environments created by Robert
Rauschenberg.102
In 1970, Brown formed the Trisha Brown Company. She employed rooftops and walls in
her various performances, performances that in fact went far beyond the limits of dance. Her
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, for example, involved the slow and well controlled
rappelling of a man from a SoHo building rooftop ‘walking’ horizontally at a 90-degree angle
101 Peter Eleey, ed., Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing (Minneapolis:
Bolger, 2008), p. 10
102 Joan La Barbara, “SoHo, a community of cooperating artists a compendium of art: music, dance, video,
theatre and assorted combinations, discussing work performed in and/or by members of the community”,
Block, p. 174
42
down the face of the building.103 This is a technique once she again employed in her Women
Walking Down a Ladder which involved what appears to be a woman descending down a
water-tower, but this time ‘walking’ down the steel-ladder horizontally at a 90-degree angle
as opposed to climbing down vertically.104
Her Roof Piece (also going by the alternative title: Roof and Fire Piece) is probably one of her
most famous pieces, partly due to the fact that it was photographed and filmed by Babette
Mangolte.105 First staged in 1971, it was repeated in a different location in 1973. Using several
cityscapes as stage, she used and integrated buildings with the alleyways and gaps between
them in her play. Several performers dressed in red transmitted movements from one to
another and from rooftop to rooftop. The movement of one dancer on one rooftop would
be copied by another in his/her line of sight but on another rooftop with the latter in turn
transmitting it to another. They were passing silent improvised movements, drawing
connections in the air. Wearing red costumes and occupying line-of-sight positions along the
rooftops, the performing dancers could see each other, but for the observer it was impossible
to see the complete circuit in motion considering the significant distances between the
buildings and performers. Roofs of Manhattan became multilevel stage for the piece.
Whereas certain artists from 1970’s New York concentrated their efforts on art that very
much manipulated the real character of the city, presenting it as Brown did as something
surreal or different from what it in fact was, there were other artists whose focus was on
scratching beneath the urban surface, exposing and bringing into the open those naked
realities of the city that often went unseen or ignored. A good example in point will be Martha
Rosler who, with her photography of alcoholism on New York’s streets, presented some of
103 Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, performed at 80 Wooster Street, New York, on
18 April1970. Plate 35
104 Trisha Brown, Women Walking Down a Ladder, performed at 130 Greene Street, New York, 1973, on
25 February 1973. Courtesy Broadway 1602 New York. Plate 36
105 Trisha Brown, filmed by Babette Mangolte, Roof Piece (alternative title: Roof and Fire Piece), 1973, colour film
transferred to video, 31:38 minutes. Courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company and ARTRIX (video)
43
the city’s realities that many would best ignore.106 Her subject was thus very much one of
realty that many New Yorkers might have been ignorant of as in fact being a reality.
Martha Rosler majored in literature at Brooklyn College, New York, followed by a course in
the fine arts at the University of California. Professionally she worked in video, performance,
and photography at a time when these media dominated in SoHo. Through her work Rosler
eventually built a reputation that was cemented not only in the United States but also further
afield. The curators of Rosler’s 1998-99 retrospective at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham,
referred to her as “one of the most influential artists of her generation.”107 Steve Edwards,
author of a detailed analysis of her work and referring to Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate
Descriptive Systems, described it as “one of the most significant works of the 1970’s.”108 The
work consists of an interesting collage of twenty-one images together with twenty-four text
panels with typewritten words and phrases. The photographs portray streets, alleyways and
shop-fronts littered with booze bottles and waste, the habitat destitute alcoholics call home.
The typed text consists of words, phrases and American slang relating to intoxication and
alcoholism. Playing with the photographic and literary language associated with alcoholism,
she arranged words in groups hinting at the ironic, destructive, dependant to violent.
With the more ‘traditional’ photography of poverty, one tends to find the struggles of the
poverty-stricken to be portrayed with images of them as the subject of the photograph in
their poverty-stricken environment. The circumstances under which the image was captured
will usually make redundant the need for any interpretation as to what it portrays. The plight
of the subject is evident from the circumstances and environment as captured on the
photograph. Rosler’s photographs on the other hand could just as well have been that of a
police photographer one will find in a case dossier, they are cold and detached. They present
106 Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974-75, forty-five gelatin silver prints of text and
image mounted on twenty-four backing boards, Edition of 5. Provenance:Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York (Edition No. 2 of 5)
107 Catherine de Zeghered, ed., Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press,
1998), p. 9
108 Steve Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (London: Afterall, 2012), pp. 1, 6
44
the homeless in their habitat as victims of the contemporary urban environment. What is
intriguing about Rosler’s approach is the absence of people in the work. The images capture
the signs of alcoholism, regression and decay, but absent any people. There is nothing more
but the signs of their presence or passing, notably the empty booze bottles. In an interview
with Buchloh she explained that: “I wasn’t much interested in making pictures of people”.109
Allan Sekula expressed his overall impression of the work in the following terms: “The
photographs consistently pull us back to the street, to the terrain from which this pathetic
flight is attempted. Rosler’s found poetry begins with the most transcendental of metaphors,
‘aglow’, ‘illuminated’ and progress ultimately, through numerous categories of symbolic
escape mingled with blunt recognition, to the slang terms for empty bottles: ‘dead soldiers’
and ‘dead marines’. The pool of language Rosler has tapped is largely the socio-linguistic
‘property’ of the working class and the poor. The language attempts to handle irreconcilable
tension between bliss and self-destruction in a society of closed options.”110 On the face of
it the theme of the work all seems to relate to homeless alcoholics as a New York subculture.
Rosler may have focused her lens on this particular self-destructive group, but not just as an
account of the subculture itself, but also for its reflective value on various other “universes
of discourse”. In an interview with Benjamin Buchloh, Rosler explained that: “There is a
poetics of drunkenness here, a poetry-out-of-prison. Adjectives and nouns build into
metaphoric system – food imagery, nautical imagery, the imagery of industrial processes, of
militarism, derisive comparisons with animal life, foreignisms, archaisms and references to
still other universes of discourse – applied to a particular state of being, a subculture of sort,
and to the people in it.”111
An oil barrel is rolling down a street. The viewer is not watching it rolling but is in it, only
observing a range of random and fragmented images of what is clearly city-life. There are
109 Benjamin Buchloh, “In conversation with Martha Rosler”, Zeghered, p. 24
110 Allan Sekula in “Dismanting Modernism, Reinventing Documentary”, quoted at Edwards, p. 9
111 Benjamin Buchloh, “In conversation with Martha Rosler”, Zeghered, p. 42. Also quoted at Edwards, p. 56
45
fleeting images of tarred surfaces, blue sky, traffic, crowds of people, reflections of street life
in shop windows, garbage bins, and yellow cabs. There are the sounds of a city where people
go about their lives, the sound of traffic, the dizzy rhythm of what is clearly New York, and
we can hear a person following the barrel say “Excuse me, please, excuse me” as he is pushing
the barrel. The barrel is rolling through the street, physically exploring the urban surfaces,
almost reminiscent of the way many artists have explored it before, rolling their treadmills,
balls or themselves.112
It is however all an illusion, or is it? It is in fact one of the recent, many would say more
meaningless projects of British artist Steve McQueen, an old hand at working with film and
video as his main medium.113 He is playing the city in the same way as musicians are playing
their musical instruments.
Drumroll combines and appropriates multiple projects and ideas from the past. There are
three cameras mounted at different locations within the drum, one on either side with
another recording through a hole cut into the drum’s wall. The two projections on the left
and on the right spin round in opposite directions, and the central one revolves vertically at
great speed from the sky to the asphalt street and to the artist himself. At the end, McQueen
turns the barrel upright to mark the end of the walk, and the image turns black on one side
and the sky appears on the right.
McQueen’s observation of city-life is detached. It is the barrel that finds and records
everything it encounters on its way. The cameras observe and record everyday life on the
streets, transforming it into vertiginous ironic images. The sound reproduces the noise of the
city. The three-channel projection of the rotating images, filmed from different viewpoints
as it is, confuses the viewer with people and objects constantly slipping out of the viewer’s
grasp.
McQueen’s city as play is a city that is rolling, living its life, running, shouting, crying, playing,
changing in tandem with society. There is no fixed position to observe this play. Like
Baudelaire’s flâneur, McQueen is rolling the barrel through the city in order to experience and
observe it. In random urban art intervention, he discovers laid-out routes and obstacle
112 For example, George Maciunas and Takako Saito, Flux-Treadmill, for “Flux Game Fest”, 19 May 1973 in
80 Wooster Street. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 22.7 cm (Plate 28). Richard Hayman, Bellroll, Street Works, April
1975, on Mercer Street (Plate 29).
113 Steve McQueen, Drumroll, 1998, colour video projection, triptych, 22 min 1 sec. Pamela and Richard
Kramlich and the American Fund, on long-term loan to the Tate Gallery
46
courses through New York, a city of industrial urban planning and architecture, but with a
post-industrial society that is transforming the city to make it more flexible to embody the
play factor.
48
Plate 1
Walker Evans, Subway Portrait, 1938-41,
Gelatin silver print, 16.5 x 20.4 cm.
Collection of MOMA. Photograph
provided by Walker Evans Archive, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Plate 2
Humphrey Spender, Woman Cleaning
Pavement, 1937, Gelatin silver print,
25.1 x 36.8 cm. Collection of Bolton
Library and Museum Services.
Photograph provided by Bolton Council.
Plate 3
Humphrey Spender, Catapult Kids, 1937,
Gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 35.2 cm.
Collection of Bolton Library and
Museum Services. Photograph provided
by Bolton Council.
Plate 4
Humphrey Spender, Washing on the Lines,
1937, Gelatin silver print, 23.5 × 34.3
cm. Collection of Yale Centre for British
Art. Photograph provided by Yale
Centre for British Art.
49
Plate 5
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Juvisy, France,
1938, Gelatin silver print, printed 1947,
23.3 x 34.8 cm). Collection of MOMA.
Photograph courtesy Fondation Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Paris
Plate 6
Henri Cartier-Bresson, During the Visit of
George VI of England to Versailles, 1938,
Gelatin silver print, 35.4 x 24 cm.
Collection of MOMA. Photograph
courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-
Bresson, Paris
Plate 7
Nigel Henderson, Stressed Photograph,
c.1950, Gelatin silver print,
30.5 x 50.7 cm. Collection of Tate
Gallery. Photograph courtesy of Nigel
Henderson Estate.
Plate 8
Nigel Henderson, Collage, 1949, Oil paint
and photographs, black and white, on
paper on board, 32.8 x 36.6 cm. Tate
Collection. Photograph courtesy of the
Estate of Nigel Henderson.
50
Plate 9
Nigel Henderson, Untitled (No.50),
c. 1956, Screenprint with collage and ink
on paper (Photographs, gelatin silver
print on paper and ink on paper),
22.7 x 19.8 cm. The Estate of Nigel
Henderson. Photograph courtesy of
Estate of Nigel Henderson. This collage
is much smaller in scale that other similar
works by Nigel Henderson.
Plate 10
Nigel Henderson, Shop front, 1949-53,
Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm. The
Henderson Estate. Photograph provided
by the Henderson Estate.
Plate 11
Nigel Henderson, Distressed door, 1949-
53, Gelatin silver print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm.
The Henderson Estate. Photograph
provided by the Henderson Estate.
Plate 12
Nigel Henderson, Peter Samuels, 1951,
Gelatin silver print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. The
Henderson Estate. Photograph provided
by the Henderson Estate.
51
Plate 13
Nigel Henderson, Gillian Alixander
Skipping, Chisenhale Road, 1951, Gelatin
silver print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. Photograph
provided by The Henderson Estate
This work became part of the CIAM
Grid
Plate 14
Nigel Henderson, Chisenhale Road, 1951,
Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm. The
Henderson Estate. Photograph provided
by the Henderson Estate.
This work became part of the CIAM
Grid
Plate 15
Nigel Henderson, Chisenhale Road, 1951,
Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4cm. The
Henderson Estate. Photograph provided
by The Henderson Estate
This work became part of the CIAM
Grid
Plate 16
Nigel Henderson, Chisenhale Road, 1951,
Gelatin silver print, 21.5 x 16.5 cm. Tate
collection, Reference P79313.
Photograph provided by Tate.
This work became part of the CIAM
Grid
52
Plate 17
Bidonville Mahieddine Grid, 1953, CIAM-Alger, prepared by a group of architects and urbanists and
addressed the problems of squatter settlements of colonized society, was a work This work
received a significant attention at CIAM IX.
Plate 18
Parallel of Life and Art, 1953, Installation
shot of the exhibition. Photograph
provided by Smithsons Family
Collection
Plate 19
From This is tomorrow exhibition
catalogue originally published in 1956.
Reproduced in This is tomorrow, exhibition
catalogue (London: Whitechapel Gallery,
2010)
All the groups provided some essays and
photographs of themselves for the
catalogue. Here, the artists are posing in
a residential street stressing the belief in
the value of street in the urban
environment.
Left to right: Peter Smithson, Eduardo
Paolozzi, Alison Smithson, Nigel
Henderson.
53
Plate 20
Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That
Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So
Appealing?, 1956, Collage, Papier,
26 x 25 cm, Kunsthalle Tübingen
Gallery, Tübingen, Germany. Image
provided by Kunsthalle Tübingen
Gallery.
Plate 21
Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and
Alison and Peter Smithson, Patio and
Pavilion, 1956, installation shot.
Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Photograph provided by Smithsons
Family Collection
Plate 22
Roger Mayne, Street Cricket, Clarendon
Cresent, 1957, Gelatin silver print,
20 x 28.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Image courtesy Roger Mayne
Plate 23
Roger Mayne, Southam Street, London,
1957, Gelatin silver print, 20 x 28.7 cm.
Collection of Victoria & Albert Museum.
Image courtesy Roger Mayne
54
Plate 24
Roger Mayne, Boy on a Bombsite, Waverley
Walk, Harrow Road area, 1957, Gelatin
silver print, 28.7 x 20 cm. Courtesy of
the artist. Image courtesy Roger Mayne
With play also comes scratches, cuts an
tears
Plate 25
Documerica project. Danny Lyon, Support
the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, New York,
June 1974. Image credit: Danny
Lyon/National Archives and Records
Administration
Plate 26
Documerica project. Dan McCoy, Traffic
congestion in Midtown Manhattan, April
1973. Image credit: Dan
McCoy/National Archives and Records
Administration
Plate 27
Roger Myers, The Wall, 1973, 42 seafoam
green pylons on the north face of 599
Broadway, New York. Photograph
courtesy of Roger Myers.
The piece was taken down during
building repairs in 2002
55
Plate 28
George Maciunas and Takako Saito,
Flux-Treadmill, for “Flux Game Fest”,
19 May 1973 in 80 Wooster Street.
Gelatin silver print, 15 x 22.7 cm. Estate
of Peter Moore. Courtesy of Barbara
Moore. Photograph by Peter Moore
Plate 29
Richard Hayman, Bellroll, Street Works,
April 1975, on Mercer street.
Photograph by Pam Jarvis
Plate 30
Vito Acconci, Following Piece, performed
in New York City between October 3
and 25, 1969. Photographs courtesy of
Vito Acconci
Plate 31
Daniel Buren, Seven Ballets in Manhattan,
work in situ, New York, USA, 27 May-2
June 1975. Photograph courtesy DB &
ADAGP
56
Plate 32
Hans Haaske, Manhattan Real Estate
Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of
May 1, 1971, 142 photos with data
sheets, 2 maps, 6 charts, slide excerpt.
Photograph courtesy Fred Scruton; all
Hans Haacke images courtesy Hans
Haacke
Plate 33
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974,
Colour photograph, 68 x 99 cm. Estate
of Gordon Matta-Clark, GMCT1051.
Photograph courtesy ARS, NY and
DACS, London, 2007
Plate 34
Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect,
1975, Photograph courtesy of the Estate
of Gordon Matta-Clark and David
Zwirner, New York
Plate 35
Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side
of a Building, performed at 80 Wooster
Street, New York, on 18 April1970.
Walker Art Center Archives. Photograph
by Carol Goodden.
57
Plate 36
Trisha Brown, Women Walking Down a
Ladder, performed at 130 Greene Street,
New York, 1973, on 25 February 1973.
Courtesy Broadway 1602 New York.
Photographs by Babette Mangolte.
59
1
Humphrey Spender
Children in the Rubble, Tyneside
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 36.5 cm
Executed in 1938
Provenance: Yale Centre for British Art
Exhibited: Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes, Photo-Documents, 1932-1942, Yale
Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 1997
Literature: Deborah Frizzell, Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes, Photo-Documents,
1932-1942 (New Haven: Herlin Press Inc., 1997), reproduced on
unnumbered p. 133
Image credit: Bolton Museum & Archive
This photograph by Humphrey Spender was taken in 1938 as part of his street-life survey
carried out in Bolton, Lancashire. Spender at that time was working as a member of the Mass
60
Observation project. Spender documented daily living situations, environmental decay, street
scenes, and scenes of children at play.
In this photograph, Spender portrayed a quintessentially provincial English world with a
sentimental nostalgia. The photographs give a sense of a place where nothing happens. There
is a something surreal in Spender’s vision of industrial England and in this scene that the
viewer enters. Spender’s Bolton is depressing and disadvantaged, and the tonality of the
image is dark. On his personal experience of life in Bolton, Spender was quoted as saying:
“In general, the experience was alarming – and depressing, because of the evident poverty,
or at least the lack of anything that could be called luxury.”114
There is the temptation to create a narrative from the image. Children playing unsupervised
in this desolate rubble littered space, the mothers possibly busy with their housework, the
fathers at work, and washing hanging on the lines in the background. The children-at-play
transform this lifeless space. Children-at-play Spender often portrayed as part of the local
landscape.
We often do not see the faces of Spender’s subjects in his photographs. His photographs
tend to be a record of what they were doing rather than of them personally. It is clear that
Spender was sympathetic to their daily lives and the hardships they endured. He comes over
as a person with a strong social conscience, concerned for the struggles and plight of the
socially disadvantaged. Spender through his photography contributed to spreading awareness
as to the poverty and social inequalities of the time.
His photographs will often show stark contrasts. In this photograph, the area is evidently
services with electricity evidenced by the electric lighting, but a cart, most probably for coal,
is standing a short distance away. The boy sits and stares at Spender, the girl walks away with
her black coat contrasted against the white washing hanging on the line. In the distance, the
main streets are organized and clean, but the backstreet in the front is straddled by the heaps
114 Mulford, p. 16
61
of rubble where the children play. The chaos of children’s games contrasted with the rows
of houses and the organization in the background as an organic part of their lives. In a place
seemingly dark and dirty, white washing hangs on the line, people still trying to live clean.
Spender used a 35mm Leica camera, shooting wide angle. With Macro lenses not yet in use
at the time, he would have had to get very close to his objects. The subjects portrayed in
Spender’s photographs often do not seem to notice his presence or if they do, they are
seemingly unconcerned about it. This is also surprising considering Spender’s own upper-
middle-class upbringing, something that would not have always gone unnoticed by the then
working-classes in places like Bolton. Spender was however known for sometimes spending
days at a time in the same place allowing people to get used to him, for hiding his camera,
and for taking photos with the camera being held and aiming from the waist.
62
2
Humphrey Spender
Children’s Slide in Queen Park
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 40.6 cm
Executed in 1937-8
Provenance: Bolton Museum & Archive Service
Exhibited: Worktown People: Photographs from Nothern England, 1937-1938, Bristol, 1982
Literature: Jeremy Mulford, ed., Worktown People: Photographs from Nothern England, 1937-
1938 (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1982)
Image credit: Bolton Museum & Archive
Humphrey Spender’s black and white images are immediately visually emotive with its
minimalist natural style and observational content. A member of the Mass Observation project
in Bolton, Spender portrayed urban settings and landscapes shooting streets, alleyways,
fences and walls, local pubs and markets, and anything in between. On this photograph, he
focuses on the empty playing field and shows the surface of the ground rather than the
63
children at play. It is a sunny autumn day, with the leaves and shadows creating a mosaic on
the ground.
On this sequence of photographs, the slide is high by modern standards, but the children are
seemingly confident, leading one to believe they are familiar with it. The adults watching
(presumably the parents) do not seem overly concerned. The boy and girl are playing the
same games together as opposed to playing with each other with the male watching them
striking a confident pose. His arms are crossed and he seems more of a supervisor than a
participant. He observes the children with all in turn being observed by Spender.
Related works:
Humphrey Spender, Children’s Slide in
Queen Park, 1937-8, Gelatin silver print,
30.5 x 40.6 cm. Collection of Bolton
Library and Museum Services.
Photograph provided by Bolton
Museum & Archive.
Humphrey Spender, Children’s Slide in
Queen Park, 1937-8, Gelatin silver print,
30.5 x 40.6 cm. Collection of Bolton
Library and Museum Services.
Photograph provided by Bolton
Museum & Archive.
64
3
Humphrey Spender
Street life - children playing
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 36.5 cm
Executed in 1937
Provenance: Bolton Library and Museum Services
Exhibited: Worktown People: Photographs from Nothern England, 1937-1938, Bristol, 1982
Literature: Jeremy Mulford, ed., Worktown People: Photographs from Nothern England, 1937-
1938 (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1982), reproduced on p. 35
Tom Harrisson, Britain in the 30’s (London: The Lion and Unicorn Press,
1973), reproduced on unnumbered pp. 36-37
Image credit: Bolton Museum & Archive
Humphrey Spender in 1937 took a sequence of photographs of children playing on this
railway bridge in Bolton. These were taken as part of his street-life survey in Bolton,
65
Lancashire, having joined the Mass-Observation project that same year. These are also
amongst the photographs that have since become a central part of the project’s archive.
There is much that can readily be gleaned from this particular image. In it, Spender managed
to capture the grimy Northern England atmosphere, the melancholic weather with the
gloomy colours so commonly associated with English rain, and the raw surfaces of the
working class industrial town. Small children are playing on the railway bridge with a worn-
down wooden barrier scratched and covered with children’s graffiti on the backdrop. The
railway bridge being a place that will attract children’s interest is to be expected. For most
children there will be something enthralling about steam engines and shunting wagons.
Spender captured the moments of their play with his presence seemingly going unnoticed.
All their attention is directed towards the wooden barrier and the hole in it – a spot and
vantage point to that beyond and for which they seem to compete. In the upper left corner,
barely visible, one can identify barrels which could have been used for beer, or quite possibly
for the tar used during the construction of the roads.
Graffiti happened to be of interest to Mass-Observation where many of the members viewed
it as a form of expressive art. As evidenced by the inhabitants of Bolton, there is still a bridge
at the same location, and it is still covered in graffiti.115
Related works:
Humphrey Spender, Street life - children
playing, 1937, Gelatin silver print,
36.5 x 24.8 cm. Collection of Bolton
Library and Museum Services.
Photograph provided by Bolton
Museum & Archive.
115 Bolton Worktown webpage
66
Humphrey Spender, Street life - children
playing, 1937, Gelatin silver print,
24.8 x 36.5 cm. Collection of Bolton
Library and Museum Services.
Photograph provided by Bolton
Museum & Archive.
Humphrey Spender, Street life - children
playing, 1937, Gelatin silver print,
24.8 x 36.5 cm. Collection of Bolton
Library and Museum Services.
Photograph provided by Bolton
Museum & Archive.
67
4
Nigel Henderson
Peter Samuels
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4 cm
Executed in 1951
Provenance: Tate collection. Reference P79304
Exhibited: Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, UK,
2001
Nigel Henderson: Photographs of Bethnal Green 1949-52, Midland Group,
Nottingham; Side Gallery, Newcastle; Camerawork, London, 1978
Literature: Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: The Elephant
Trust, 2001), reproduced on p. 70
68
Lynda Morris and Terry Morden, curators, Nigel Henderson, introduction,
Nigel Henderson: Photographs of Bethnal Green 1949-52 (Nottingham: Newstead
Publishing Ltd, 1978), reproduced on p. 37
Image credit: Nigel Henderson Estate
This work, executed in 1951, is one of many photographs taken by Nigel Henderson during
his time in Bethnal Green. Following his discharge from Coastal Command in 1945,
Henderson and his wife moved to Bethnal Green, an area of extreme poverty that suffered
severe bombing damage during WW II. Bethnal green and its people became an inspiration,
something that is also evident from his photography. Starting photography as a hobby,
Henderson portrayed the people, the urban surfaces, shop fronts, graffiti, and everyday life
in Bethnal Green as it was.
Children playing on the streets did not avoid Henderson’s attention. The boy pictured, Peter
Samuels was one of the many neighbourhood children that used to roam the streets of
Bethnal Green and was also one of Henderson’s most favourite models. The Hendersons
were certainly familiar with the boy and his family, with a number of comments in Judith
Stephen’s diary referring to the Samuels family, their habits and everyday life.116 Henderson
in turn made photo-observations.
The boy is pictured leaning against a scratched wall covered with children’s graffiti. Around
9 or 10 years of age, his shoes and clothing comes over as worn, considering the culture and
circumstances of the time quite possibly passed down from an older sibling and quite
possibly also his only set of clothes. The image carries with it an impression of him possibly
taking a break from his play but his gaze does leave the observer with the impression that he
has not totally distanced him from the street-activity. There is a contrast between the
innocence of the boy and the scarred filthy environment that surrounds him. The
116 Judith Stephen, Henderson’s wife, used to keep a diary where she penned down her observations of the
neighborhood, a habit most likely related to her own professional activity. She assisted with a sociology course
based in Bethnal Green titled ‘Discover your Neighbors’, a course that was aimed at creating an awareness of
the culture in Bethnal Green.
69
photograph does not carry with it a sense of desperation, but rather that of a boy waiting for
something to happen. There is a sense of expectation, a quality that may be interpreted as a
symbol of hope.
Henderson’s photographs of children’s street-play was to become a source of inspiration for
other artists such as Alison and Peter Smithson who eventually used some of his works in
developing their own urban planning and design concepts which placed considerable
emphasis on the local environment and the importance of streets as an extension of the
house. These ideas, first presented at the International Congresses of Modern Architecture in 1956,
were then further developed within Team 10, a then influential architectural group that made
a considerable impact in shifting the architectural thinking.
70
5
Nigel Henderson
Bag-wash
Gelatin silver print
20.3 x 25.4 cm
Executed in 1949-53
Provenance: Tate collection. Reference P79305
Exhibited: Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury,
Suffolk, 2001
Literature: Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: The Elephant
Trust, 2001), published to accompany the exhibition for Gainsborough’s
House, reproduced on p.74
Image credit: Nigel Henderson Estate
This photograph of a shop window is one of a series of Nigel Henderson’s works executed
over the period 1949-1953. Henderson, a member of the Independent Group, with his wife
71
Judith Stephen moved to Bethnal Green, London in 1948. Stephen at that time assisted with
organising a sociology course targeted at local professionals to help them understand the
neighborhood and the people’s needs in services. Inspired by the street life, Henderson
photographed everyday life of his neighborhood and its people.
Henderson at that time also experimented with different techniques, including collages. This
photograph may appear to be a collage of different images, but it is in fact no more but a
photograph of what was the common commercial practice of the time, for shopkeepers to
advertise their merchandise in their shop-windows. The result of this particular shopkeeper’s
efforts however came over as and was captured by Henderson as resembling a collage.
Visible in the windows are some commercials that were obviously at some point painted or
attached to the glass but subsequently partially removed i.e. “Laundry”, “Bag Wash” and
“Household Goods”. The windows show a number of cracks and scratches, very much
reminiscent of the poverty so prevalent in many of the most affected post-war areas. This,
coupled with the grid created by the window frames, increases the sense of fragmentation.
The photograph itself has over time suffered some damage in the form of bends and tears,
qualities that somehow seem to only enhance the effect of post-war Britain’s scratched and
scarred urban surfaces.
72
6
Nigel Henderson
Untitled No. 8 (Shattered Glass)
Photographs, gelatin silver print on paper and ink on paper
121 x 121 cm
Executed in 1959
Provenance: Tate collection, Liverpool. Reference T12443
Exhibited: On display at Tate Liverpool
Literature: Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: The Elephant
Trust, 2001), reproduced on p. 70
Image credit: Nigel Henderson Estate
73
This work is one of the many collages produced by Nigel Henderson at the time when he
still lived and worked in Bethnal Green. This collage is made up of fragments of black and
white photographs combined into an abstract pattern resembling what most will interpret as
an aerial photograph or landscape map. Henderson may arguably have been inspired by aerial
photography and the aerial views of the world which he grew accustomed to during his
wartime service as an aviator. The collage is partially over-painted in black ink. The surface
comes over as scratched, resembling rough urban surfaces, broken glass, or the texture of
walls and doors.
Henderson first started experimenting with collages in the 1930s. He was familiar with the
Surrealist collages he encountered at Guggenheim Jeune where his mother helped Peggy
Guggenheim run the gallery and where two of his own collages were also on exhibition
before the war. He returned to collages after the war, some of which were on exhibition at
the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1954. Frank Whitford, the curator of Nigel Henderson’s
exhibition in Kettle’s Yard in 1977, noted that Henderson in his practice came close to what
American artists and photographers were producing at that time, and compared Henderson’s
works with that to be expected within Abstract Expressionism.117
117 Whitford, unnumbered p. 10
74
7
Nigel Henderson
Head of a Man
Photographic collage on paper mounted on board
159.7 x 121.6 cm
Executed in 1956
Provenance: Tate collection. Reference T01939
Exhibited: This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery, August–September 1956 (part of
exhibit No. 6)
Literature: Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: The Elephant
Trust, 2001), reproduced on p. 122
Image credit: Courtesy The Estate of Nigel Henderson
75
This large collage was one of three works executed by Nigel Henderson in 1956 for the ‘Patio
and Pavilion’ installation. This installation formed part of the This is Tomorrow exhibition
organised by Whitechapel gallery in 1956. The exhibition was aimed at exploring the
collaboration and integration of art and architecture. The exhibition included twelve
‘environments’, each prepared by different group of artists. Head of Man was the central part
of the ambiguous installation ‘Patio and Pavilion’ that was organized by Henderson in
collaboration with Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson. For this installation,
they constructed a symbolic wooden structure (Pavilion), a symbolic habitat representing
private urban space. This structure was surrounded by an area covered with sand (Patio) as
being symbolic of public urban space. Both these spaces were filled with symbolic objects
intended as symbols of what we encounter in everyday life i.e. trees as representing plant life,
a wheel representing machinery, and rocks for stability.
Installed inside a Pavilion, Head of Man was intended to be symbolic of man, the user of the
space. The figure looks contorted and destructed, very typical for post-war representations
of the human body. Henderson may arguably have been influenced by both his own
traumatic war-time experiences, having served as a pilot at Coastal Command from 1939 to
1945, and by other artists with whose work he is thought to have been familiar. There is
some evidence of Henderson at that time having had some exposure to Dubuffet’s work in
Paris.
On closer inspection, it is evident that the work is in fact made up of a variety of materials.
The heavily textured figure is collaged of a mixture of many small photographic fragments
of landscapes, stones, and leaves. The technique used in its construction involved the initial
use of a smaller collage head which was then photographed and enlarged, some areas of it
then painted, and then again photographed and enlarged with additional collage elements
added. The ultimate result is one which Victoria Walsh has quite aptly described as a
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“surrealist game of finding faces in puzzle”, a game that involves the viewer and reconnects
the Head with the surrounding landscape.118
The most accurate description of what the figure was intended to represent is probably to be
found from its creator. In 1975, Henderson explained it in the following terms to his friend
Colin St. John Wilson (who in fact bought the collage from Henderson at some point in the
1960’s): “The image largely filled one wall of a rather diagrammatic hut or shed which stood
in a compound. This was to suggest a working shed or even a ‘summerhouse’ where a Head
worker might cultivate his intelligence and imagination or a Hand worker his ‘garden’. Each
would impose his presence. The visor-like element was to symbolise this Head projection or
Head protection role. The face was heavily textured to underline the association with hide
or bark and the bust/shoulders adumbrated with bits of photo-material like stone or leaf to
further his association with nature.”119
Related images:
Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and
Alison Smithson, Patio and Pavilion, 1956,
installation shot. Whitechapel Art
Gallery, London. Photograph provided
by Smithsons Family Collection
118 Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: The Elephant Trust, 2001), p. 119
119 From Walsh, p. 118
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8
Alison and Peter Smithson
Grille pour le C.I.A.M. d’Aix-en-Provence (Urban Re-identification Grid)
Collage, photographs (by Nigel Henderson), ink on paper and papiers colles
83.5 x 275.5 cm
Executed in 1952-53
Provenance: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Georges
Exhibited: Documenta 10, Kassel, 1997
CIAM IX, Aix-en-Provence, 1953
Literature: Helena Webster, ed., Modernism Without Rhetoric: Essays on the works of Alison
and Peter Smithson (London: Academy Editions, 1997), reproduced on p. 46
Dirk van den Heuvel, Team 10: 1953-81, in search of a utopia of the present
(Rotterdam: NAi, 2005), reproduced on pp. 30-31
Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: The Elephant
Trust, 2001), published to accompany the exhibition for Gainsborough’s
House, reproduced on pp. 38-39
Roy Kozlovsky, “Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity”,
Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, Marina Lathouri, ed., Intimate Metropolis:
Urban Subjects in the Modern City (London and New York: Routledge, 2009),
reproduced on p. 200
Image credit: Centre Pompidou
This Urban Re-identification grid by Alison and Peter Smithson was presented at CIAM IX
– Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (Eng. International Congresses of Modern
Architecture) – in Aix-en-Provence in 1953. Founded in Switzerland in 1928 by some of the
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most prominent architects of the time, the organisation can be credited with arranging a
series of congresses held around Europe. One of the primary objectives was to encourage
debate on many of the questions surrounding urban living, landscape, space and urban
design. The 1953 conference, also the first one where younger members could participate,
was arranged around the theme of Habitat (La charte de l’habitat) as a living environment.
Though CIAM was disbanded in 1959, many of the ideas developed during the Congress’s
work had a lasting impact on the shape of cities all over the world.
The grid as a way of presenting the ideas and materials was typical for CIAM.120 Smithsons
borrowed this form; however, instead of following suggested notions of dwelling, work,
transportation and recreation commonly used in presenting and comparing different modern
town planning projects, the Smithsons explored it as House, Street, District and City. Their
provocative presentation may well not have provided for careful analysis, but it did provide
for what can be viewed as a poetic statement. Their patterns of association supported their CIAM
declaration that a community “should be built up of hierarchy of associational elements […]
(the House, the Street, the District, the City)”, these latter elements being the aspects of real
life that had fallen “through the mesh of the four functions (housing, work, recreation and
traffic)”.121
The Smithsons incorporated some of Nigel Henderson’s most recognizable photographs of
Bethnal Green into a grid. The Grille consists of eight vertical panels, divided into two
functional parts that play with each other. In the left-handed part “House – Street –
Relationship” photographs of children playing in slums are collaged with a bright human-
like figure, with the accompanying text to the photographs presenting the Smithsons’ own
reading of the photographs: “The street is an extension of the house, in it children learn for
the first time of the world outside the family”.122 The right-hand part “House – Street –
120 The grid was developed in 1947 by Le Corbusier while preparing for the C.I.A.M VII under Le Corbusier’s
leadership. Referred to by Catherine Blame in Van den Heuvel, p. 18, and Highmore, p. 283
121 Quoted at Webster, p. 46
122 Text accompanying the top left image of the Grille
79
District – City” shows the Smithsons’ housing project as presented for the Golden Line
competition in 1952, a project that was in fact never realized, together with an image of a
street decorated for the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, an event that reflected a
changing Britain. The project emphasises the use of the space in-between, and suggests a
new urban planning with a focus on a local environment instead of linear street planning.
The Smithsons to a certain extend changed the experience of Henderson’s photographs,
framing his works in a social and architectural context. They saw the self-sufficiency of street
life, in his photographs of the working class neighbourhood of Bethnal Green. They aimed
to explain how people identify themselves with their environment and used the images of
children playing on the streets to present their view on urban planning. They emphasised the
immediate surroundings of the dwelling, the unobserved gaps between some architectural
developments and a play of a street network with the daily life of inhabitants and their social
needs. They not only saw the world of childhood as a part of the world, but also used the
unique needs of children to play to illustrate social needs of the whole society.
The Smithsons opened a new discussion of urban planning. Their understanding of the built
environment through the notion of social practice caused a radical shift in the modern
movement’s conception of dwelling. The Smithsons were subsequently invited by CIAM to
establish a new body, Team 10, to prepare an agenda for the next CIAM meeting. Their
concepts proved to be well received and recognized judged by the accounts of Team 10.
Related images:
Grille pour le C.I.A.M. d’Aix-en-Provence,
installation view. Photograph provided by black
dog publishing.
81
9
Roger Mayne
Goalie, Brindley Road, off Harrow Road
Gelatin silver print
28.7 x 20 cm
Executed in 1956
Provenance: courtesy of Roger Mayne
Exhibited: URBAN PLAY: Art as regenerative force is the first exhibition of the work
Literature: Ray Gosling (introduction), Roger Mayne: Photographs (London: Jonathan Cape,
2001), reproduced on p. 55
Image credit: Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library
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Roger Mayne’s name is usually associated with his extended observation of 1950’s street life
in the then Southam Street, North Kensington, London. One of the poorest working-class
areas of post-war London, Southam Street was a place of disadvantaged Londoners living in
a slum still showing the physical scars of 5 years of bombing.
This image, taken in 1956, was very typical of Mayne’s work. In it, Mayne managed to capture
one of those fleeting moments of urban childhood. A street scene with a boy playing football,
at the instant when the image was captured attempting to make a dramatic save. All his
attention is focussed on the ball. The image however captures more than just a young boy at
play and his dramatic game. It also highlights the grim reality of post war 1950’s Britain. A
visual image, the observable and underlying contrasts give the photograph a sense of
darkness. On the one hand, the image draws the viewer into the boy’s game and what the
viewer anticipates as a painful fall, scratched knees, and possibly torn clothes, but at the same
time there is the inescapable sign of poverty, worn-down surfaces, and architectural decay.
In most of Mayne’s photographs the children seems to have been aware of them being
photographed, in many instances actually posing with him, not trying to escape the camera.
In this picture, the boy comes over as either oblivious of Mayne or just more concerned with
his game than the photographer recorded his game into history. Emotionally involved with
his subjects, Mayne captured the spirit of street life, recording as he did the simple pleasures
of childhood, children playing on ‘their’ street, their run-down houses in the background.
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10
Gordon Matta-Clark
Realty Properties: Fake Estates – “Jamaica Curb,” Block 10142, Lot 15
Twenty-for gelatin silver prints, collaged, deed, and three site maps.
Collage: 11.4 s 365.8 cm. Deed: 36.5 x 21.6 cm. Maps: 27.9 x 35.6 cm each.
Executed c1974 (assembled posthumously, 1992)
Provenance: Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark
Exhibited: The Grand Domestic Revolution – User’s Manual, De Rooie Rat Gallery, Utrecht,
2011-12
Odd Lots, Queens Museum of Art, 2005
Reality Properties: Fake Estates and Other Architectural Musings, Rhana Hoffman
Gallery, Chicago, 1995
Reality Properties: Fake Estates and Other Architectural Musings, Holly Solomon
Gallery, New York, 1994
Retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark, IVAM Centro Julio Gonzalez in Valencia,
Spain, 1992
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Literature: Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Frances Richard, ed.; essays by Jeffrey
Kroessler and Frances Richard, Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake
Estates (New York: Cabinet Books, 2005), reproduced on p. 11
Corinne Diserens, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark (London: Phaidon, c2003 2004),
reproduced on pp. 150-151
Gloria Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings (Barcelona:
Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006), reproduced on pp. 354-355
Elisabeth Susaman, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), reproduced on pp. 100-101
Image credit: Emilio Moreno for De Rooie Rat Gallery, installation view
Realty Properties: Fake Estates – “Jamaica Curb,” Block 10142, Lot 15 is one of fourteen collages
that represent the properties purchased by Gordon Matta-Clark in 1974. This particular slot
is a skinny part of land measuring one foot by ninety foot, bought at one of the New York
City Auctions.
Although Gordon Matta-Clark trained to be an architect, he never practiced as such because
of the economic and urban decay; he eventually used urban decay as his medium and subject
matter. The investment in these ridiculous microscopic properties is highly irrational
revealing city gaps and untenable but own able spaces. From Matta-Clark’s comments and
interviews it can be understood that the property itself was intended to be an inherent part
of the artwork. In an interview with Times he remarked that: “The artworks will consist of
three parts: a written documentation of the piece of land, including exact dimensions and
location and perhaps a list of weeds growing there; a full-scale photograph of the property,
and the property itself. The first two parts will be displayed in a gallery, and buyers of the art
will purchase the deed to the land as well”.123 Matta-Clark photographed the property,
photographs which together with the maps, deeds and other documentation ended up as
part of the property archive.
123 Matta-Clark in an interview to Times. Quoted by Johung, pp. 33-34
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All indications are that Matta-Clark did not have a clearly defined idea as to what to do with
the properties and the documentation. There is some evidence that point to him at some
time entertaining the idea of it being assembled as a collective art project, something he did
in fact discuss with the Anarchitecture group. Matta-Clark, eventually unable to pay the
property taxes on the lots, sold the archive box to his friend Norman Fisher, and the lots
themselves were transferred back to the city. The materials started to pass from one owner
to another. Following Fisher’s death in 1977, the box with the material moved on to the Tina
Girouard, the executrix of his estate, who in 1980 returned them to Jane Crawford, Matta-
Clark’s widow. Crawford in 1992 proceeded to assemble the archive in collages for Matta-
Clark’s retrospective. In 2003, Cabinet magazine researched the location of and in 2005
eventually repurchased those lots. A part of the artwork is site-specific, it cannot be exhibited
in a gallery or be relocated, and the collages only refer the viewer to a part of land in New
York.
There are fourteen collages, and the fifteenth is incomplete, because the slot is impossible to
photograph. The collages are however spread between different collections all over the
world. There may be a number of questions around Matta-Clark’s work. He did not put the
collages together himself, and there is in fact no reason to believe that he ever intended to
assemble them. Even assuming that it might have been his intention, then it is still unclear
as to what they would have looked like. Another point to consider is the fact that over quite
a considerable period, the sites themselves were not in possession of those in possession of
the archive. The artwork in the original state was effectively missing. Despite these questions,
the collages are still recognized and defined as his work. Following the repurchase by the
Cabinet magazine, Matta-Clark’s work together with a number of other collages was included
in a New York exhibition split into two parts. Odd Lots in the Queens Museum of Art
presented the Matta-Clark documentation, with the second part in The White Columns made
up of artworks by artists who responded to Matta-Clark’s project. It included bus tours for
incite inspections of the properties.
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11
Gordon Matta-Clark
Realty Properties: Fake Estates – “Maspeth Onions,” Block 2406, Lot 148
For gelatin silver prints, collaged, deed, map, and overview.
Collage: 25.4 x 45.7 cm. Deed: 36.5 x 20.3 cm. Map: 20.3 x 25.4 cm. Overview: 20.3 x 25.4 cm
Executed c1973 (assembled posthumously, 1992)
Provenance: Collection of David and Monica Zwirner, New York
Exhibited: Odd Lots, Queens Museum of Art, 2005
Reality Properties: Fake Estates and Other Architectural Musings, Rhana Hoffman
Gallery, Chicago, 1995
Reality Properties: Fake Estates and Other Architectural Musings, Holly Solomon
Gallery, New York, 1994
Retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark, IVAM Centro Julio Gonzalez in Valencia,
Spain, 1992
Literature: Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Frances Richard, ed.; essays by Jeffrey
Kroessler and Frances Richard, Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake
Estates (New York: Cabinet Books, 2005), reproduced on p. 14
Gloria Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings (Barcelona:
Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006), reproduced on p. 352
Stephen Walker, Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on
Modernism (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), reproduced on p. 136
Image credit: Courtesy David Zwirner
87
Realty Properties: Fake Estates – “Maspeth Onions,” Block 2406, Lot 148 is one of fourteen collages
assembled by the late Gordon Matta-Clark’s widow Jane Crawford. Crawford in 1992
compiled these from Matta-Clark’s original documentation. The collage includes two
photographs of a tiny slot, in fact just a corner of a piece of land adjacent to another property,
the deed, and an area-map.
Matta-Clark in 1974 invested his own money in several of these unusable and hardly
reachable slots in New York. Those parts of land, unusable and odd, became part of his
artwork, mocking the idea of private property, wasted and ridiculous city spaces, denying the
traditional use of the land and pointing on the strangeness of property demarcation lines.
Discussing this project, Matta-Clark commented in an interview: “Buying [these properties]
was my own take on the strangeness of existing property demarcation line. Property is so all-
pervasive. Everyone’s notion of ownership is determined by the use factor.”124
The collage was widely exhibited together with some of Matta-Clark’s other works.
124 In an interview to Liza Bear, quoted in Walker, p. 141
88
12
Trisha Brown, filmed by Babette Mangolte
Roof Piece (alternative title: Roof and Fire Piece)
Colour film transferred to video
31:38 minutes
Executed in 1973
Provenance: Courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company and ARTRIX (video)
Exhibited: Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing,
Minneapolis, 2008
Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, 2001
Literature: Hendel Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown: dance and art in dialogue, 1961-2001
(Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art; London: MIT Press
[distributor], c2002)
Rene Block, New York – Downtown Manhattan. Soho (Berlin: Akademie der
Kunste and Berliner Festwochen, 1976)
Lydia Yee, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Poineers of the
Downtown Scene New York 1970s (Munich: Prestel in association with the
Barbican Art Gallery, 2011)
Peter Eleey, ed., Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I
Have Stopped Dancing (Minneapolis: Bolger, 2008), published on the occasion
of an exhibition at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, still reproduced on p. 16
Image credit: Courtesy of Trisha Brown Dance Company
89
Details of the performance:
Length: Approx. 30 minutes
Choreography: Trisha Brown
Set design: Trisha Brown
Date: Initially performed on 11 May 1971 on 53 Wooster Street at 381 Lafayette,
New York, NY. No photography or documentation available
Performed again and widely publicized on 24 June 1973, and 1 July 1973 at
420 West Broadway to 35 White Street, New York, NY
Remounted in 2011 on the High Line in New York, NY
Remounted on 6 April 2013 in Getty Center, Los Angeles, California, as part
of The Retrospective Project
Performers: 1971: 12 dance students, names unknown
1973: Carmen Beauchat, Trisha Brown, Douglas Dunn, Tina Girouard,
Caroline Goodden, David Gordon, Nancy Green, Susan HArris, Elsi
Miranda, Emmett Murray, Sylvia Palacios, Eve Poling, Sarah Rudner,
Nanette Seivert, and Valda Setterfield
2011 and 2013: Trisha Brown Dance Company members, names unknown
Costumes: Red long-sleeved shirts and red sweat pants
This film presents a widely recognised dance installation choreographed by Trisha Brown on
a number of rooftops in Downtown Manhattan and filmed by Babette Mangolte in 1973.
Only 30 minutes in duration, the performance involved several dancers positioned along a
number of Manhattan rooftops who in silence transmitted improvised movements from one
to another and from rooftop to rooftop. Initially staged in 1971, only a very limited number
of visitors with access to a number of Manhattan rooftops could actually see the
performance. Repeated in 1973, it received considerable attention and became one of
Brown’s most recognised works.
Trisha Brown is a widely acclaimed choreographer who started her career in New York in
1961. She studied under and later participated in the performances of artists who
experimented with performing in unusual spaces and constantly challenged the limits of
90
choreography. With her 1973 work Roof Piece, Brown participated in the performance
initiating the movements. Babette Mangolte was later commenting on the making of Roof
Piece (July 2007): “The movement was improvised by Trisha Brown facing south and seen by
the dancers closer to her facing North. Trisha was sending the movement down the line to
Carmen Beuchat at the receiving end on White Street. After 15 minutes, Trisha ducked below
the ledge of the roof signalling to all the dancers on their rooftops that it was time for them
to face South to be ready to transmit the movement originated by Carmen Beuchat on White
Street back to Trisha Brown on the receiving end of the line. The total piece was two times
fifteen minutes or thirty minutes plus duck-time.” 125
In shooting the 1973 performance, Mangolte installed three cameras at different rooftop
locations along the performing line. Apart from filming the performance, she also shot some
black and white photographs. Published in the New York Times, one of the photographs
enjoys iconic status with frequent subsequent reproduction in different print media. What
Brown attempted to achieve with the piece is probably best summed up by Mangolte where
she in discussing the Roof Piece said (July 2007): “For Trisha the choreography was testing
how improvised movements appear at a distance and are transformed by transmission by a
succession of dancers mimicking with variation what they see and how what has been
transmitted at one end is different when received at the other end. The dance tested the
erosion of movement by transmission as in telegraphy. It also was about revealing the majesty
and privacy of downtown roofs and the sculptural effect of its water towers.”126
As part of The Retrospective Project, the Roof Piece was once again performed at the High
Line area in New York in 2011. This time however, the piece was performed in a very
different space, and the viewers had to move around the space to see every dancer. The piece
saw another performance at the Getty Center, Los Angeles in 2013. Babette Mangolte’s name
125 Babette Mangolte on her official webpage, accessed 8 September 2013:
<http://www.babettemangolte.com>
126 Babette Mangolte on her official webpage
91
is just as much associated with the piece as that of Brown’s. The 2011 performance in High
Line was in fact, like 40 years earlier, again filmed by Mangolte.127 In 2013, the performance
was appropriated for an art centre for the retrospective of the Trisha Brown Dance
Company.
Related images:
Invitation post for Roof Piece, 1973,
55.9 x 43.2 cm. Collection of Trisha Brown.
Image courtesy Trisha Brown
Babette Mangolte, Roof Piece, 1973, gelatin
silver print, 40.6 x 50. 8 cm. Courtesy
Broadway 1602 New York.
Performance views of Trisha Brown Dance
Company performing Trisha Brown, Roof Piece,
on and around The High Line, New York,
9 June 2011. Photograph provided by 16 Miles
Performance views of Trisha Brown Dance
Company performing Trisha Brown, Roof Piece,
on and around The High Line, New York,
9 June 2011. Photograph provided by 16 Miles
127 Babette Mangolte, Roof Piece on the High Line, 2012, 35 minutes, DVD
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13
Martha Rosler
The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems
Forty-five gelatin silver prints of text and image mounted on twenty-four backing boards.
30 x 60 cm each
Edition of 5
Executed in 1974–75, assembled in 1976
Provenance: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Edition No. 2 of 5)
Exhibited: Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007
The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, Vin&Aprithistoriska Museet,
Stock, 2002
Netherlands Foto Inst, Rotterdam, 2000
Inst.d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, Vienna, 1999
Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1998-99
Literature: Catherine de Zeghered, ed., Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World
(Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 1998), reproduced on pp. 40-41, 56-
61
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Martha Rosler, Martha Rosler / 3 Works: critical essays on photography and
photographs (Halifax, N.S.: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
c1981), reproduced pp. 11-57
Steve Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems
(London: Afterall, 2012), reproduced pp. 21-52
Image Credit: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Edition No. 2 of 5),
installation view
The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems is a complex photo and text piece with the
photographs taken by Marta Rosler over two sessions during December 1974 and January
1975, with the photographs subsequently collaged into a grid in 1976. Twenty-one image of
corners, streets, and alleyways littered with booze bottles and waste and frontal views of a
number of Manhattan stores are collaged together with twenty-four text panels with
typewritten ironic words, phrases, or American idioms commonly used in referring to
alcoholics and drunks, the state of intoxication, or symptoms of alcoholism. These include
words and phrases such as:
loopy – groggy – boozy – tight – steamed up – bent – folded – flooey
muddled – fuddled – flustered – lushy – sottish – maudlin
stewed – boiled – potted – corned – pickled – preserved – canned – fried to the hat
comatose – unconscious – passed out – knocked out – laid out – out of the picture –
out like a light
lush – wino – rubbydub – inebriate – alcoholic – barrelhouse bum
drunk – derelict – bum
THE BOWERY – in – two – inadequate – descriptive – system
For the observer, the overall impression of the work is one of regression, hopelessness, and
decay. Rosler, however, followed an interesting approach in how she approached the
neighbourhood and the underlying theme. The observer can recognise and sense the
engagement of the inhabitants with their urban space on the one hand, and the interaction
between the different inhabitants of that urban space with each other on the other. This is
exceptional considering there being no representation of the inhabitants other that what is
expressed or what they leave behind. She deliberately avoided capturing the inhabitants in
94
person, only representing the poverty but in a different way. Originally intended as a gallery-
piece, the work is presented in a documentary mode. It offers a stark glimpse of the dark
side of the neighbourhood, acting as a mirror of society but the reflection being what the
inhabitants are trying to avoid.
Rosler captured the connection of the homeless and drunk, the deprived, those we usually
pass with just a glance, with the urban environment they also call home. There is an
overwhelming presence of absence, absence of people and total absence of warmth and
empathy. The work was intended as a “structural critique” but “without the high drama of
human actors”. In an interview with Benjamin Buchloh, Rosler explained that: “the Bowery
was in a sense genealogical […] it looked back to a history that was decrepit and said, there
is a reason for its decrepitude, but it’s a mistake to throw this away. It is not simply a set of
dismissive quotations, […] and yet it is a set of rough quotations of style, for want of better
word. It also demanded […] a new look at the urban at the depth of New York’s fiscal crisis.
The work intended a structural critique, yet without high drama of human actors. Only banks,
storefronts and empty bottles.”128
Related images:
The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, detail. Photograph provided by Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York.
128 Benjamin Buchloh, “In conversation with Martha Rosler”, Zeghered, p. 42
95
14
Steve McQueen
Drumroll
Colour video projection, triptych
22 min 1 sec
Executed in 1998
Provenance: Pamela and Richard Kramlich and the American Fund, on long-term loan to
the Tate Gallery
Exhibited: Steve McQueen, Retrospective at Schaulager in Basel, 2013
Steve McQueen, Sala Mendoza in Caracas, Institute of Contemporary Art in
Cape Town, Museu de Arte Moderna in San Paulo, Museo Rufino Tamayo
in Mexico City, 2000-2001
Steve McQueen, ICA, London, and Kunsthale, Zurich, 1999
Literature: Gerrie van Nord, ed., Steve MvQueen (London: ICA, 1999), reproduced on
p. 43
Thomas Mulcaire, Steve McQueen, exhibition catalogue (Caracas: Sala
Mendoza, 2000), reproduced on unnumbered pp. 24-26
Image credit: Courtesy of the artist
A British artist, Steve McQueen for the most part works with film and video with the length
of his works varying from anything between 54 seconds to 70 minutes. McQueen was
awarded Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 1999 for his work Drumroll. This work, a
multiple image colour video, involved the recording of images generated by three cameras
installed at different points within the confines of an oil barrel rolled down a New York
street. Two of the cameras were mounted filming through the ends of the drum with another
positioned so as to record through a hole cut into the side. With the one camera recording
96
reflections in the windows, another captured roads, cars and traffic, with the last camera
recording the artist dressed in pink, the sky, and the road surface as the barrel rolls. With all
three videos recorded and projected simultaneously, the result is a triptych of moving images.
McQueen’s view was that the placing of the cameras was irrelevant arguing their unusual
positioning and the “film language” as having been sufficient to question the narrative and
“look at things in a different way.129
This work itself is very much camera-centred with the human presence reduced to the
reflections of the artist in some of the shop windows and in the fleeting images of the legs
of pedestrians. McQueen also recorded the sound of the drum rolling on the street and the
noise of the city. The viewer can hear traffic, noise, people talking, and at one point even
McQueen’s voice saying “excuse me, please” as he is trying to pass through the crowd. The
images are constantly rotating, and watching them induces a feeling of dizziness, as if the
viewer is also an ‘occupant’ in the drum, rolling down the street exploring the urban surface.
129 An interview by Patricia Bickers in Art Monthly, Dec 96 – Jan 97, quoted in Thomas Mulcaire, Steve McQueen,
exhibition catalogue (Caracas: Sala Mendoza, 2000), pp. 62, 65
97
Glossary
CIAM Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne. Eng. International
Congresses of Modern Architecture
Flâneur Originating from the French flâneur – ‘saunter, lounger, stroller, loafer’.
Flaneur – an urban walker, a man who saunters around observing society. Originally coined
by French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) at a time of considerable urban expansion
and associated with the era of modernity, to walk the city in order to experience it, to observe
the city, to walk for walking’s sake.
Habitat Tracing its origins to the Latin habitare, to ‘possess’, ‘inhabit’, or to ‘dwell’.
Originally used in referring to the natural home or environment of animals or plants. Usually
referring to the environment in which an organism or group normally lives or occurs i.e.
jungles, mountains, deserts, water-environments or in modern times in urban environments.
In the context of cities as environments of human habitation, CIAM has adopted habitat in
referring to cities as environments that could accommodate the ‘total and harmonious
spiritual, intellectual, and physical fulfillment’ of its inhabitants.
Photogram In historical context referring to pictures produced with photographic
materials, but without the use of a camera. However a term to which different meanings have
been ascribed by different artists i.e. Nigel Henderson who used it in referring to his ‘stressed
photographs’ – experimenting with the printing process, he distorted (or ‘stressed’) the image
during the printing process with the effect of the scene coming over as distorted, as if viewed
in a distorted mirror.
Urbis, urbs Originating from old Latin and used in referring to urban areas such as cities
and towns.
98
Appendix 1. Venue
Curve Gallery has been selected and will make for a perfect setting for an eclectic show such
as URBAN PLAY: Art as Regenerative Force. The topic and show-content can accommodate
the integration of multiple artists and two art forms, photography and video. Additionally it
can also address a wide audience. Curve is part of the Barbican center, a large multi-art center
in the heart of the City of London. Built during the 1960s and the 1970s in an area with a
rich cultural background that did not escape the devastation of WW II, it is constructed of
concrete blocks and glass, overall of cold appearance, and a good example of Brutalist
architecture in London. It is however a landmark that reaches a diverse public with a wide
range of different art-forms.
99
Appendix 2. The Right of Children to Play
Play is human behaviour that has entered the economic and political domains. As far as play
by children is concerned, ‘play’ has gained international and national legal status and
recognition as yet unknown and un-catered for in the history of human civilization.
As late back as 1959, Article 7 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child stated that: “The child
shall have full opportunity for play and recreation. […] society and the public authorities
shall endeavour to promote the enjoyment of this right”. The 1959 declaration was followed
by the rights enshrined in Article 31 of the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child
recognizing the right of children to play as an internationally recognized and enforceable
fundamental right:130
The States Parties to the present Convention […] have agreed as follow:
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and
recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural
life and the arts.
2. States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural
and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for
cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.
It is, however, a fundamental right which calls for more than just recognition by signatory
states, but in fact calls for a paradigm shift in the way governments think and cater for
children, budget for resources and facilities, develop spaces and view the concept of play,
and govern in general. General comment to the Convention sets out the factors considered
necessary for an optimum environment creating the context for the realization of the above
rights:131
130 United Nations. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989, entry into force
2 September 1990.
131 Paragraph 32 of the General comment No. 17 (2013) on the right of the child to rest, leisure, play, recreational activities,
cultural life and the arts, CRC/C/GC/17, Adopted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child of United Nations
at its sixty-second session (14 Jan – 1 Feb 2013).
100
Children have a spontaneous urge to play and participate in recreational activities and will
seek out opportunities to do so in the most unfavourable environments. However, certain
conditions need to be assured, in accordance with children’s evolving capacities, if they are
to realize their rights under article 31 to the optimum extent. As such, children should have:
An environment sufficiently free from waste, pollution, traffic and other physical hazards to
allow them to circulate freely and safely within their local neighbourhood;
Accessible space and time for play, free from adult control and management;
Space and opportunities to play outdoors unaccompanied in a diverse and challenging
physical environment, with easy access to supportive adults, when necessary;
Opportunities to experience, interact with and play in natural environments and the animal
world;
Opportunities to invest in their own space and time so as to create and transform their world,
using their imagination and languages;
Opportunities to explore and understand the cultural and artistic heritage of their
community, participate in, create and shape it;
Opportunities to participate with other children in games, sports and other recreational
activities, supported, where necessary, by trained facilitators or coaches.
Once ratified by any State, the signatory state accepts the Convention as part of its own national
laws required to be complied with. Judged by a reading of the Convention and the comments
to Article 31, most signatory states insofar as is concerned the rights contained in Article 31,
have thus far failed to comply or do so or only partly comply.132
The Convention it changes everything not only for children and all those who have an interest
in their childhood, but also for the artistic and architectural community as professional
groupings, as they have a legally enforceable instrument in their hand enabling them as a
collective to demand from signatory governments the resources and measures necessary to
132 A fact recognized by the Committee stating (at p. 2): “[…] the Committee is concerned by the poor
recognition given by States to the rights contained in article 31. Poor recognition of their significance in the
lives of children results in lack of investment in appropriate provisions, weak or non-existent protective
legislation and the invisibility of children in national and local-level planning. In general, where investment is
made, it is in the provision of structured and organized activities, but equally important is the need to create
time and space for children to engage in spontaneous play, recreation and creativity, and to promote societal
attitudes that support and encourage such activity. United Nations, Committee on the Rights of the Child.
General comment No. 17 (2013) on the right of the child to rest, leisure, play, recreational activities, cultural life and the arts
(art. 31), CRC/C/GC/17, Adopted by the Committee at its sixty-second session (14 Jan – 1 Feb 2013).
101
provide for urban areas complying with the spirit and terms of the Convention. It is no longer
open for debate whether or not those areas, facilities and open spaces is necessary, or
whether or not playful activity in public spaces is acceptable or not, international law as
ratified by the signatory States says it is. Whether or not the constituencies of signatory states
will put sufficient pressure on their governments is a different matter, and what level of
compliance and provision will be considered sufficient is another.
It so happens that General comment No. 17 (2013) to the Convention also offers what can arguably
be considered the most authorative and useful definition of ‘play’ in relation to children. It
defines play as:
“Play: Children’s play is any behaviour, activity or process initiated, controlled and structured
by children themselves; it takes place whenever and wherever opportunities arise. Caregivers
may contribute to the creation of environments in which play takes place, but play itself is
non-compulsory, driven by intrinsic motivation and undertaken for its own sake, rather than
as a means to an end. Play involves the exercise of autonomy, physical, mental or emotional
activity, and has the potential to take infinite forms, either in groups or alone. These forms
will change and be adapted throughout the course of childhood. The key characteristics of
play are fun, uncertainty, challenge, flexibility and non-productivity. Together, these factors
contribute to the enjoyment it produces and the consequent incentive to continue to play.
While play is often considered non-essential, the Committee reaffirms that it is a fundamental
and vital dimension of the pleasure of childhood, as well as an essential component of
physical, social, cognitive, emotional and spiritual development.”133
133 General comment No. 17 (2013) on the right of the child to rest, leisure, play, recreational activities, cultural life and the arts,
paragraph 14 p. 4-5
102
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