Lars Bang Larsen Eng
Lars Bang Larsen Eng
Lars Bang Larsen Eng
Palle,
It has been difficult to reach you, but I hope that
I have sent the letter to the right place this time. I have
worked on the children’s outreach programme at the
Moderna Museet for seven years. As you can see from
the enclosed letter, the programme is to be documented in
a catalogue for a big exhibition in Brussels in the autumn
of 1981.
I hope that you will contribute an article to the
catalogue, since The Model, which you initiated in 1968,
is one of the most important events in the history of the
museum – it was, so to speak, the starting signal for a
whole new form of organisation, not only at the Moderna
Museet but also in most other museums in Sweden.1
29
Modellen. En modell för ett kvalitativt samhälle (The Model –
A Model for a Qualitative Society) was an adventure play-
ground for children that Nielsen organised inside the Mod-
erna Museet over three weeks in October 1968. The Model
made available to children space and means with which
they could play, including tools, materials and paint, cos-
tumes and masks of world leaders, and LPs that could be
played on a large sound system.
People queued to get in, and newspapers carried pho-
tos of children running around the museum. Nielsen’s ad-
venture playground used the child’s experience to human
ise the art institution, and the photos he took to document
the event radiate delight and exuberance. But if The Model
embodied all this positivity and immediacy, today it can
no longer be understood in those terms. And even though
it was subsequently referred to as a forerunner for the out-
reach programmes that art museums established during
the 1970s, it was not this kind of institutionally provided
service. 2 And so Nielsen never replied to the misunderstood
praise of Moderna Museet’s curator.
30
This was not the first time that children had been pro-
posed as producers and consumers of art in exhibitions. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, the Whitechapel
Gallery appealed to the children of London’s East End with
pageants and a toy exhibition; while in the 1940s MoMA in
New York held the annual holiday exhibitions and art work-
shops Children’s Holiday Circus of Modern Art. The Model,
however, was more closely aligned with the avant-gardes’
energetic destruction of meaning and value, and their ush-
ering in of the art work as a new psychic arena: in the spirit,
for example, of André Breton’s declaration that ‘the mind
which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excite-
ment the best part of childhood’. 3 In a similar way, The
Model was concerned with the meaning of the social and
subjective change that the playing child generates within
the machinery of society. As such, the event was nothing
short of a mass utopia of art activism, aimed at applying an
anti-elitist concept of art for the creation of a collectivist
31
human being. The result, as one reviewer put it, was ‘almost
frightening for adults’.4
Based on archive material – photographs, press clip-
pings, various textural sources – and on conversations with
Palle Nielsen, what follows is a retracing of The Model. In
an attempt to recreate the event’s particular time and lan-
guage, I will read it through the way it was torn between
polarities such as art and anti-art, idealism and pragma-
tism, inside and outside, the child-led and the adult-led.
Jacques Derrida writes that the starting point for decon-
struction is exorbitant, since one thereby sets out to find a
way to exceed the sphere (orb) of metaphysics, and the ways
in which it still shapes thinking. This way, one proceeds
‘like a wandering thought on the possibility of itinerary and
of method. It is affected by non-knowledge as by its future
and it ventures out deliberately.’5 If my reading is a decon-
struction, The Model itself can also be seen as a paradigm
of a critical attitude of venturing out: it was an exorbitant
event because of the raw energy that it unleashed inside the
museum, but also because of the unmapped potential that
was laid bare in the tug-of-war between its anti-authoritar-
ian agenda and its rather administrative title, The Model –
A Model for a Qualitative Society.
In the early twentieth century, two Russian art critics
wrote that the distinguishing feature of children’s art is the
32
‘sudden event’: the accident, the coincidence, the miracle.6
A similar discontinuity characterised the unlikely appearance
of The Model at the Moderna Museet in October 1968 – as
well as its disappearance. Both in Sweden and in Nielsen’s
native Denmark, the event slipped out of the art historical
field of attention.7 Several factors have contributed to this,
one of them simply being that Nielsen stopped making art.
Having always worked in and between the fields of art, teach-
ing and architecture, he had dropped out of the Copenhagen
art scene by the end of the 1970s, disenchanted with the
incipient entrepreneurial spirit amongst artists there.
The Model is also historiographically off the beaten track.
It can’t be understood as a neo-avantgardist project (at least,
33
not in the strict sense of that term). Its relationship to the
art institution was different to that of the Conceptual art
work, for example, that, in a more fundamental way, relied
on the art institution to subvert the art object. At the same
time, The Model’s vaulting, social ambitiousness took it well
beyond the now domesticated ideas of the ‘open’ art work
and audience participation, and therefore it can hardly be
understood in terms of later artistic developments. On top
of this, it subverted authorship to a degree that – even today,
with the death of the author a theoretical given – it still
appears as a radical critique of the way institutions and
markets fetishise the artistic persona and signature.
The Model ’s reappearance in this book may be a sign
that it had, or has, its roots in the future; a more important
consideration to lamenting its exclusion from art history. As
such it might throw new light on certain artistic developments
of the 1970s, such as art activism and institutional critique.
The term ‘art activism’ was coined in the 1970s, among other
things inspired by artistic and theatrical forms of protest
from the 1960s. The spirit of the The Model can be found, for
example, in the workshops for neighbourhood children that
the New York collaborative Group Material ran in their exhi-
bition space. But while unruliness and anarchy defined The
Model, there were rules for the Group Material workshops:
‘everyone helps clean up after class; everyone takes proper
care of art materials; no rough playing or fighting in the
gallery,’ one invitation stated. 8 Nielsen’s insistence on using
institutional space for advancing artistic critique was also
34
precocious. By choosing an institutional site for his model for
a qualitative society, he subverted Herbert Marcuse’s claim
that the utopian is what social power prevents from coming
into existence. While Nielsen thus realised a tactical and less
deterministic concept of the institution than the dialectical
posturing of many artists and activists at the time, the range
of possible meanings The Model released through its accept-
ance of process-oriented and collective work are far removed
from institutional critique’s documentary procedures and
textual aesthetics.
I will argue that Nielsen failed to take into account the
aesthetic metaphysics he evoked by staging his critique in a
museum, something that destabilised the social concretism
of his playground activism. Once inside the art institution,
a playground is no longer just a playground; and a material-
ism that is related to play will invariably be a volatile one.
In this way contradictory subtexts were raised that evoked
disciplinary tropes in the middle of The Model ’s emanci-
patory programme, but at the same time it was propelled
towards new forms of speculation with which it replies to, or
even upsets, the theoretical tools which seem to be the most
obvious ones to approach it with. Thus The Model cannot be
reduced to, for example, activism’s sociological concept of
art or to a heterotopic politics of space.
Contrary to what one might expect, The Model didn’t
distil children’s play to its ludic essence. It wasn’t an attempt
at transforming work into play, which was how thinkers at
the time, such as Marcuse, conceived of the subversive poten-
tial of aesthetics. It was rather about the transformation of
play into work. This is arguably a fine distinction in relation
to the former, but it is a way of breaking down the play/work
antinomy that harks back to the early nineteenth century
35
utopian socialist Charles Fourier’s idea of how children’s
spontaneous participation in the work place will reveal the
big lie of civilisation:
If one can make the children work and make them par-
ticipate for the sake of pleasure, it will be all the easier to
make their parents enthusiastic, who are more inclined
to renounce pleasure for the sake of money. 9
36
1. Confront the specific issues
37
was being talked of in Scandinavia, and all over West
Germany New Left activists set up Kinderladen in aban-
doned shop fronts: anti-authoritarian day care centres
dedicated to children as political and sexual beings. In
Paris, high school students organised committees against
the Vietnam War, and went on strike with workers and uni-
versity students. Journalists Patrick Seale and Maureen
McConville described how thousands of high school stu-
dents took to the street on 10 May:
38
republics’ with playgrounds and their own meeting places –
arose spontaneously following the October revolution, as the
children’s own reply to the political upheavals, and not as
an extension of adult organisations. These were manifesta-
tions of a Kinderöffentlichkeit, a children’s public sphere –
one as sovereign as play itself.
The bourgeois public sphere relegates children to
ghettos and surrogates, such as children’s television. In
order to develop their particular sensibility, however, child
ren need different spaces and time scales to adults:
39
For Kluge and Negt, the children’s public sphere represents
an oppositional dynamic that can’t be isolated, but which,
like all proletarian public spheres, shows a tendency to include
all of society.
Aligned with Kluge and Negt’s Kinderöffentlichkeit,
Palle Nielsen’s research into playgrounds in the late 1960s
responded to children’s need to play. While still training
as a painter at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, he
managed to talk the municipal architect of the Copenhagen
suburb Gladsaxe into employing him as artistic consultant. In
this capacity, Nielsen dedicated himself to producing what
he called spatial formations for children. Experiments he
carried out show that the intensity of play and the frequency
of group playing increased when the spaces set aside for
them were made smaller, such as screened, angular spaces
or elevated vantage points, rather than with large, open
areas. Working with these principles, Nielsen designed a
5,000 square metre play space that opened in the autumn
of 1967 with – as a Copenhagen newspaper described it –
‘playing field, toboggan run, adventure playground with a
place for bonfires, animal house, jungle gym, sand box,
roller-skating rink, open air theatre, suspension bridge,
outdoor doll’s house and playhouses’.14 This was a playscape
that offered a wealth of play opportunities, but which also
lacked man-made play equipment, so that children could
make a mess and experiment on their own. It wasn’t, how-
ever, a Kinderöffentlichkeit in the strict sense that it was a
40
space produced by the children themselves; like Nielsen’s
other projects it was a children’s public sphere produced on
behalf of the children.
Nielsen soon took his research onto the street. During
one Sunday in March 1968, activists and residents erected
an adventure playground, designed by Nielsen, during a
raid on the back yards of some old working class housing in
Copenhagen’s Northern Borough. Residents were woken up
at seven by activists who told them that their backyard had
been selected to be the site of a new adventure playground:
a roll call that convinced residents to spend Sunday morn-
ing building a playground (and not call the police).
To Nielsen and his fellow activists, building illegal
playgrounds was an alternative to protest forms such as
demonstrations or squatting, and aimed at offering a
constructive critique of city planning. Nielsen wanted to
‘confront the specific issues’ of urban space through a tactic
that addressed specific instances of injustice, adopting the
point of view of an individual who is empowered through
the struggle.15 Agency, in other words, consisted in pro-
ducing an extra-parliamentary space open to individual
participation on a collectively identified site. By partici-
pating spontaneously, the Northern Borough community
acknowledged that the erection of a children’s playground
represented a need that had not previously been identified
for the site.16
41
The scene for the playground action was a city space
in which there was still room for informal change. Urban
functions had not yet been fixed by rising real estate values
and a city planning favouring retail; instead Copenhagen
at the time was not short of obsolete housing and derelict
neighbourhoods. The precondition for change was, as always,
in people’s minds and bodies, and the reason why residents
recognised the activists’ intervention was psycho-social or
psycho-spatial as much as anything. Young parents had
gone through the disciplinary school system of the 1930s
or forties, women were typically still stuck at home and the
Scandinavian welfare state’s high (or highly praised) stand-
ards of economic redistribution were in many ways still in
the making. Play spaces for children were non-existent.
For Nielsen and his fellow activists, playground activ-
ism was not guided by any particular political doctrine; nor
42
Offset printing press installed by Palle Nielsen for the
exhibition Festival 200 at Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall
in Copenhagen, 1969
43
in the daily newspapers as well as on national television. By
being extended from a new kind of public space for child
ren into photogenic events they differed as a means from
what the garden architect C. Th. Sørensen in the 1930s had
named ‘ junk playgrounds’ (skrammellegepladser). Sørensen
encouraged giving children the possibility to build their
own ‘cities’ on unused plots of land in urban areas where
they could themselves be creators. The junk playground
was a site beyond pedagogy, in that children here should
be allowed to play with a minimum of adult interference: no
educational relation was necessary in the children’s city. In
1943, the first junk playground in Copenhagen was opened,
and after the Second World War the concept travelled abroad.
Among its proponents was the landscape architect Lady Allen
of Hurtwood, who introduced adventure playgrounds to the
UK in the late 1940s after having visited the Copenhagen
prototype; it is also to her that we owe the term ‘adventure
playground’.17
17. C. Th. Sørensen writes for the first time about junk play-
ground in Parkpolitik i sogn og købstad (Open Spaces for Town
and Country, 1931), and many of his ideas were implemented by
John Bertelsen who was the leader of the first junk playground
and talked about the necessity of producing pro-child physical
space and a pro-play psychic space (see for example John Bertelsen:
Børn bygger [Children Build]. Copenhagen: Aktieselskabet Rock-
wool and Dansk Gasbeton Aktieselskab, 1958). The Danish history
of junk playgrounds is of course more comprehensive than what
is sketched out here, and it also provides more examples from
vanguard art-related activities and forms of organisation. In the
1960s, Provos would – in a more anarchic manner than Nielsen
and his fellow activists – encourage the building of ad hoc play-
grounds by simply dumping building materials from trucks in
schoolyards. Together with unpaid volunteers, activist and poet
Carl Scharnberg initiated in May 1968 Børnenes Jord (Children’s
44
2. A large pedagogical model exhibition at Moderna Museet
Earth), spaces for older children and teens designed for play and
other kinds of activity such as animal husbandry. Børnenes Jord
still exists in several cities in Denmark. (See Carl Scharnberg,
Børnenes Jord, svar på en udfordring. Århus: Aros Forlag, 1969.)
For an outline of the architectural and English history of adven-
ture playgrounds, see Nils Norman’s book An Architecture of Play:
a Survey of London’s Adventure Playgrounds. London: Four Corner
Books, 2003. Other efforts developed around the same time, such
as the more than 700 speelplatsen that the architect Aldo van
Eyck built in Amsterdam from the end of the 1940s and over the
next thirty years. These were also inserted into the gaps left by
urbanisation. Unlike Le Corbusier, for example, who placed en-
vironments for play in idealised architectural surroundings, Van
Eyck used interstitial spaces that had been left empty, thereby
supplementing the (lack of) city planning with his stylish, mini-
mal playgrounds.
18. GL, ‘Aktion Samtal’, Form, no. 8, Stockholm, 1968, p. 504.
45
enlarge their leisure space. When the police arrived, they
were met by a blockade of residents.
At a rally in preparation for Action Dialogue, Nielsen
shared his experiences and emphasised method. Just
as important as direct action, he claimed, was reaching
people and decision makers through the news media. He
proposed taking over a cultural institution – the Moderna
Museet, for example – by organising a children’s adventure
playground there, an event that would raise the profile of
Action Dialogue and enable the activists to disseminate
their views on a large scale.
Nielsen’s idea for an institutional extravaganza for
Action Dialogue was criticised. Counter-cultural ortho-
doxy considered institutional space to be by definition
conformist, and Nielsen’s idea was therefore seen as elit-
ist, as an artwork, something that would alienate ordinary
people. An activist was first and foremost part of the move-
ment: being an artist was a mere ego trip. In its own way,
the counter-culture fulfilled Roland Barthes’s demand
for an active reader who might replace the author’s indi-
vidual prestige, which was ‘the epitome and culmination
of capitalist ideology’.19 Barthes called this active reader
‘a someone’: for the activists, it was a collective ‘someone’,
who existed outside the ideology of the aesthetic.
Despite the scepticism of his activist peers, Nielsen
insisted that a strategic alliance with the cultural estab-
lishment would benefit them all. In July 1968 he met Carlo
Derkert and Pontus Hultén, the curator and director of
46
Palle Nielsen (right) with activists from The Model
in the Moderna Museet Café, Stockholm, 1968
20. Nielsen’s event was to take place in the large gallery hall.
In two smaller galleries are shown exhibitions with Jean Pierre
Raynaud and Eva Aepplis.
21. Quoted from Nielsen’s fundraising paper, Stockholm, 1968.
47
Constructivism at Moderna Museet. But he had also turned
the museum into an internationally renowned institution,
and was therefore somebody who didn’t need to give any
reasons for opening it up to the zeitgeist; in this case the
‘pressing task for the new museums’ to provide space for
precisely these kinds of ‘experimental models’, motivated by
dissatisfaction with a reactionary education system that dis-
regarded a child’s artistic creative potential, as Hultén put
it in the exhibition catalogue.22 On the other hand, Hultén’s
embrace of activism could be seen an instance of repressive
tolerance, to use Marcuse’s term; that is, when the authori-
ties, rather than openly excluding certain people, follow the
more cunning tactic of implicating them in the processes
of their own alienation. But this is of course a counterin-
tuitive (if not paranoid) point of view, and probably does
no justice to Hultén’s personal motives, which can also be
read through the notion of play. In an open letter, the artist
Öyvind Fahlström complained that the Moderna’s direc-
tor was ‘“an old anarchist” prone to “the polymorphously
perverse” total openness, joie de vivre and immanent beauty
of childhood – in exhibitions of the artistic playpen type’.
These were references to Hultén’s Movement in Art exhi
bition, among others, but could potentially also be an
indictment of The Model, if one considered this an example
of anarchist mysticism. 23 In fact, during Nielsen’s stay in
48
Stockholm, Fahlström – who had a hard time accepting the
adventure playground at Moderna as art – invited the Danish
art activist home to suss him out. Agreement between the
two grew when Nielsen argued that he wasn’t interested in
promoting himself as an artist, but in questioning the gallery
space and in opening it up to new audiences.24
In July 1968, Nielsen received a doctoral grant from
the Royal School of Architecture in Copenhagen, which he
used to give The Model the status of a research project – the
only way to raise the money needed to realise it. With the help
of two journalists from Stockholm’s left-wing media, who
made use of their local networks, The Model became an inter-
disciplinary endeavour with sponsors and research partners
such as the Ministry of Education, the Swedish Building
Research Institute, the Stockholm Council for Children’s
Welfare, and a media partnership with the newspaper Dagens
Nyheter.25 A mixed group of volunteers holding less intran-
sigent political positions than Action Dialogue helped build
the playground; amongst them were polytechnical students
as well as designers, artists, theatre professionals and writ-
ers who had become enthusiastic about Nielsen’s idea.
49
In a working paper, carefully worded for the purpose
of raising money, Nielsen presents The Model as an event
based on participant interaction and the observation of a
children’s environment. It is a completion of art’s radical
promises:
50
children can freely choose their play ‘will it be possible to
show an example of children’s creativity and great need for
group interaction’, as Nielsen put it. 27 Such a model will be
the frame for ‘the maximising of play [in a] new and extreme
situation’ – what is effectively a simulated environment:
27. Ibid., p. 3.
51
dressing up and paint will become an essential part of
the sensory group experiences. In the same way, wood
and tools will be provided with which to further process
the frame. Physical play will be provided for by the large
play frame of beer crates and car tyres, both with and
without wheels. A big and varied shielding in the middle
of the space contains a mass of foam rubber, also to be
placed over most of the gallery. It will also be possible for
the children to take slide photographs and see their works
enlarged on the walls by projectors...
From this jumble of possibilities, certain patterns
will appear in the course of the exhibition, representing
the children’s own choices. The subject of our observa-
tion will be the alternatives chosen compared with the
degrees of interest for the different patterns of play. In
order to record the varying patterns of experience, the
idea is to thoroughly film and photograph the individual
phases in the exhibition. The exhibition will only finish
when it has been built…
The proposed pedagogical model as exhibition at
Moderna Museet has the ambitious aim of sparking debate
about the artist’s role in society. It is to focus public atten-
tion on the individual’s isolation and lack of opportuni-
ties for interaction – and especially the child’s need to
create its own framework and to express itself in relation
to this. What is more, it is to become an indispensable
part of an investigation about the concrete working out
of children’s environment. 28
52
The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society opened on
30 September 1968, and was, by and large, carried out as
described. In the event, the idea of making slide projectors
available to the children was not used; instead, five closed-
circuit video cameras transmitted footage from the play-
ground to television monitors lining the entrance, and the
children could operate a remote control to zoom and turn
the cameras above the playground. The entire gallery space,
and the children’s patterns of movement in it, were transmit-
ted to one of the monitors in a live feed from a camera placed
high above the ‘diving pool’ filled with foam rubber. Nielsen
even managed to change the museum’s normal admissions
policy by making entry to The Model free for children up to the
age of eighteen, while adults had to pay five kronor to enter.
In the midst of this buzzing practical reason, Nielsen sur-
prisingly outlined a metaphysical dimension in The Model.
29. Ibid., p. 2.
53
metaphysical exclamation is symptomatic of the way he
intends to realise a surplus of meaning through The Model:
… when they ask us about our specific political model, we
can only answer that we want to do more than take over the
means of production. This ‘more’ is what we call qualitative
values, and the system a qualitative system.30
3. Aesthetic conflicts
54
Cover of The Model exhibition
catalogue, 1968
55
about alienation in the new satellite towns. Significantly,
the discussion of art that was prominent in Nielsen’s fund
raising paper has altogether disappeared from the cata-
logue, in favour of a social critique that broadly revolves
around a demand for legitimate power over judgment in
everyday life. To this the title added its mass utopian super-
structure: The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society. 32
56
Another aesthetic conflict took place under the aegis of
The Model when two different conceptions of counter-cultural
art clashed. The artist Sture Johannesson was invited by Hultén
to make the exhibition poster, but was vetoed by Nielsen,
since Johannesson’s underground graphics revolve around
the use of hallucinogenic drugs – something that for Nielsen
had no place in a project involving children. Johannesson,
in turn, promised to make a ‘clean’ work. His poster for The
Model was a montage in saturated orange, blue, pink, yellow
and gold that became a phantasm-event in its own right. Its
main component was the Swedish flag, tilted by the photo of
a little boy to destabilise patriotic expectations of the qualita-
tive society. Semi-abstract shapes of high rises reverberated
in the flag’s four blue fields, while the yellow cross carries a
rash of elements from Alice in Wonderland illustrations, pop
song lyrics and photos of children playing. However, Johan-
nesson managed to slip in psychedelic contraband: in the
flag’s horizontal bar, caricatures of straight society (the army,
the police, the church, the medical profession and the petty
bourgeoisie) chase a joint-smoking hippie out of the flag. But
Johannesson also adhered to the activist code of authorship.
Rather than signing the work, as a bourgeois artist would
have done, he instead inserted a collectivist signature in the
bottom left corner: a group photo where he poses together
with workers from his printer’s workshop.
Meanwhile, across the 660 square metres of the main
gallery in the Moderna Museet, towers and bridges had been
erected, along with pools of foam rubber for jumping into,
climbing over and swinging across. Constructive forms of play
were encouraged by making available tools and brushes, and
the gallery space was gradually transformed by the child
ren’s interaction, as they painted, worked on and destroyed
57
Exhibition poster for The Model, designed by Sture Johannesson
in 1968. Silk-screen on paper, 70 x 100 cm. MACBA Collection.
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Consortium, 2009
58
materials and surfaces. The Royal Theatre in Stockholm
donated discarded costumes for the children to dress up in,
and Nielsen provided 200 carnival masks of Fidel Castro,
Chairman Mao, Charles de Gaulle and President Johnson
(an even match of two revolutionaries versus two reactionar-
ies) to emphasise the political nature of role-playing.
Like in Charles Fourier’s socialist utopia, where con-
certs of all kinds would be played in créches in order to
stimulate the musicality of the commune’s infants, children
in The Model were able to play LP records that resounded
quadrophonically from loudspeaker towers placed at each
corner of the gallery space. As promised, rock music was at
hand – Dylan, Zappa, The Incredible String Band – but also
music from other historical eras, such as organ concerts.
The albums in highest rotation were Ravi Shankar, dance
music from the Renaissance and an LP with recordings
of the industrial sounds of steam trains: all in an operatic
collage of noise and masquerade.
There is no doubt that Nielsen managed to commun
icate what he intended on a mass scale. During the three
weeks it ran for, the ‘play exhibition at Moderna’ – as The
Model became known in the media – was visited by some
35,000 people, 20,000 of whom were the children it directly
addressed. To include other children than those from an
already museum-going social class, kindergartens and
schools were encouraged to book visits: after only three
days, admittance had to be limited to between 350 and 380
children per hour, as children had been hurt in the scrum
in the playground.33 To prevent those waiting in line outside
59
from getting bored, an outdoor playground was improvised
at the entrance.
The Model drew more journalistic than art critical inter-
est, largely for being a children’s Trojan horse inside a cul-
tural institution. In general, the event divided the right- and
the left-wing press, with the former taking a sceptical stance
or even running negative campaigns against it, and the latter
refraining from controversy. Clas Brunius of Expressen cred-
ited Nielsen as its author and believed that the event was
‘a magnificent construction’. However, he concludes:
60
Playground at the entrance of the
Moderna Museet during The Model, 1968
61
‘There is nothing new in this’, wrote the journalist Hans
Evert René, who judged the event harshly:
In short, The Model pointed towards Lord of the Flies and not
the qualitative society. What subverts René’s argument, how-
ever, and what complicates The Model, is that adults cannot
be said to play a passive part in children’s play. Rather, adults
have narrowly defined concepts of play and childhood.
Not surprisingly for an anti-authoritarian event whose
main ingredient was children, security became an issue.
One parent fulminated in a headline, ‘I was afraid that my
son would be trampled!’37 The same day, Svenska Dagbladet
informed its readers that only two out of 8,000 children
had been hurt, and that in order to prevent further inju-
ries it had been decided to reduce ‘the intake of children’.
62
Articles for and against this were followed by a debate over
children’s physical safety in the everyday environment. 38
Throughout October 1968, The Model was continuously
in the news. At the end of its second week, Stockholm’s fire
marshal – alerted by a journalist from a conservative news-
paper – ordered that the playground be closed unless it was
rebuilt to avoid the fire hazard posed by the foam rubber
in the diving pool. Nielsen complied, deciding instead on
a large slide. Since foam rubber was routinely stored in
large warehouses (in the form of mattresses and so on), the
volunteers who helped Nielsen rebuild the playground sus-
pected that the fire marshal’s intervention was politically
motivated. Hence when The Model reopened after four days
of reconstruction, the volunteers had hung red banners
from the ceiling and painted graffiti on the walls. Nielsen
was opposed to politicising the protest in this way, but
again he bowed to the collective will, provided that the only
graffiti they wrote were quotations (from Mao, André Gorz
and others) and not slogans. He had to concede, though,
that the numerous red banners produced a softer light in
the large gallery hall.
One journalist noted how The Model paradoxically set
an objectifiable limit to the freedom of the playground:
63
and educationalists are taking notes. It all looks like a
clinical experiment with guinea pigs. 39
39. Macke Nilsson, ‘Ni tror att dom bara lattjar! Men i själva
verket bygger dom upp morgondagens samhälle’, Aftonbladet,
Stockholm, 5 October 1968.
40. Anna Lena Wik-Thorsell, ‘Modellen – bara ett nöjesjippo?’,
Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, 11 February 1970.
41. Ibid.
64
Nielsen’s photographs from The Model, showing children en-
gaged in producing their part of the ‘model for a qualitative
society’, look like dream sequences from the space of a rich
imagination that has developed in the absence of seriousness
and rules.
Nielsen took his pictures from dynamic angles – a
worm’s eye view of a girl taking off her top, boys floating in
a web of suspended rope, receding rows of red banners – as
if aiming to reveal patterns of social energy; or ‘patterns of
play’, as he put it. This tendency towards images in which
the individual is shown as a component of a bigger struc-
ture, a new social body, socialism, is counterbalanced by
those pictures showing children playing alone, enthroned
as faithful monarchs above worlds that belong to them, as
Walter Benjamin once described the child on its carousel.42
For Nielsen, then, social transformation doesn’t only start
on the factory floor or in the street, but in the space that
play demands and produces. Production is the first his-
torical act, Karl Marx said, but play may even be prior to
it. If play is production (or production before production),
then the child is a subject with a natural inclination towards
socialism: this is The Model as ‘the pre-school of the culture
revolution’.43
At the same time, Nielsen photographs seem to docu-
ment what is not there – or at least not yet there. To the
degree they appear to have been taken just before the trans-
formation – just before the Aufhebung into the qualitative
life promised by the title – the photos raise expectations:
65
something other than play appears, something other than
adulthood is to come. However, from this point of view the
photos can also be considered an impossible wish to preserve
spontaneous life. Quite literally so, inasmuch as the events
unfolding before Nielsen’s camera were disorderly and unre-
hearsed, carried out by undirected actors. As Rosalind E.
Krauss has argued, the unique moment of photography is
a glitch in time that upsets the temporal continuity of
meaning, tradition and history.44 It is obvious that Nielsen’s
photos show the art museum as the site of an event involved
in a struggle against tradition and history; but do they not
also rupture The Model’s own production of social presence?
In this sense, the photos also document the oozing of sym-
bolic value that invariably takes place in the art institution’s
rarefied space and, in the case of The Model, makes it dif-
ficult to distinguish between the child as a qualitative human
being and an aesthetic subject, or even an art work.
This is also to say that the concept of play itself made
problematic The Model’s claims to social significance. The
patterns of play that would supposedly form the basis of a
qualitative society could be said to be produced by subjects
who are unaware of they are being productive, and hence
liberated from any ulterior motives other than the continu-
ation of play/production. This is how play, and the playing
subject, manifest themselves in and by The Model. In his
classic essay Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen
(On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, 1793), Friedrich
Schiller argues that play is capable of reconciling aesthetic
66
pleasure with societal governance. Schiller proposes that
the aesthetic faculty is based on an instinct, the impulse to
play. Once it is acknowledged as a form of play, the aesthetic
function would ‘place man, both morally and physically, in
freedom’. Feelings and affections can thus be harmonised
with beautiful forms, depriving the laws of reason of their
moral compulsion and reconciling them ‘with the interest
of the senses’.45 When art is determined by a new relation
between instinct and reason, guided by the play impulse, the
citizen’s ethical and political duties will become internalised
as spontaneous inclinations.
For Schiller, art was all that was left to reconstruct
an enlightened society following the violent excesses of the
French Revolution. In his influential book Eros and Civili-
zation (1955), Herbert Marcuse revitalises Schiller’s play
impulse with a view to reconstructing modernity’s aesthetic
dimension, now understood as the fulfilment of people’s
true needs and as the channelling of the pleasure princi-
ple into the peaceful coexistence of a ‘libidinous morality’
which underpins a society of play. For both thinkers, then,
the vision of a non-repressive culture leads from art to free-
dom by means of play: an aesthetic convention, established
by eighteenth-century Romanticism and taken up again by
emancipatory-utopian thinkers after the Second World
War, which is implicit in the concept of sociality and freedom
that The Model produces from its institutional site – if only
because Nielsen did not argue with, or replace this conven-
tion’s fundamental association with the art concept.
67
But in The Model art is no longer conceived as some-
thing ideal and harmonious, nor is play ultimately the essence
of free subjectivity, as it is in Schiller and Marcuse. In The
Model there is a different accent on play, in so far as it is a
child’s form of production. Thus The Model not only tended
to give in to a romanticist tradition of society and aesthetic
subjectivity. The avant-garde metaphor of originality is liter-
ally brought back to itself, to the child as a life source. As
Rosalind E. Krauss put it:
68
possible. But we cannot choose our audience at random.
Indoctrination is far too advanced for that.47
Not only has the revolution been made for the children, as the
future race, they are an incarnation of the changes to come: a
new human being, a force of pure history. Here, the spontane-
ous and disinterested need to play that is implicit in Schiller’s
play impulse echoes metonymically in the child considered as
incarnate bearer of the revolution.
The Model’s passage beyond art consists in the way art
was repressed in the context of Action Dialogue, but also in
the event’s dismissal of art’s typical forms of appearance and
privileged distance from the world. At the same time, what
tradition has defined in various ways as the essence of art is
still active within The Model: aesthetic conventions that the
ostensibly de-aestheticised event pushes to the margins con-
tinue to resonate and lend meaning to its representations.
69
Yet another rupture occurs on the level of the event’s
economy of representation; one that results in the unantici-
pated empowerment of the playing children.
5. A crossing of names
70
Perhaps it will be the model for the society child
ren want.
Perhaps children can tell us so much about their
own world that this can also be a model for us.
We hope so.
Therefore, we are letting the children present their
model to those who are working with or are responsible
for the environment provided for children outside – in
the adult world.
We believe children are capable of articulating
their own needs.
And that they want something different from what
awaits them.49
49. Palle Nielsen, ‘En modell för ett kvalitativt samhälle’, op.
cit., p. 4. The first line of the text refers to the other texts in the cat-
alogue. Nielsen also contributes to a catalogue essay with the
same title as the event, and which he signs in his own name.
In this text he defines – seemingly at odds with the primacy of
the children’s work on the frame that the ‘manifesto’ talks about –
children’s play in terms of imitation. Accordingly, a reflexive
relation between children and adults is outlined: ‘When we see
the kids playing down in the yard, we dream. We know they are
playing at being us. That they play at what we do every day. Their
contact with reality is the account we give them of it.’ Nielsen
concludes: ‘But now we know that we need to change ourselves,
our own approach to society and to the people we encounter and
know, while giving children the opportunities they need as hu-
man beings. Then they will also play at what we do. And that is a
model for a qualitative society.’ However, the catalogue essay that
Nielsen signs does not mention the action at Moderna Museet,
and hence addresses the idea of a qualitative society in general
terms. See the essay in p. 115 of this book.
71
Nielsen had volunteers to help him, no such group existed.
The signature of the Working Group was a pseudonym used
by Palle Nielsen to avoid his authorial signature, and sign
his text with a collective identity instead: a way for him to
remain loyal to the ideology of Action Dialogue.
The text by the fictitious Working Group can be read
as a manifesto for The Model. But it is very different from
modernism’s inflammatory battle cries, signed by a sovereign
We that states its demands in a revolutionary Now. Jacques
Rancière has written that the manifesto’s time of political
subjectivation can be conceived as ‘a crossing of identities,
relying on a crossing of names: names that link… a being to
a non-being or a not-yet-being’. 50 The collective that ‘crosses
its names’ in the manifesto is structured by its anticipation
of freedom and what it is not or does not yet have (equality,
rights). In The Model, the universal becoming of the child
– the child as an unfinished person, a pre-being or a future
race – is turned into just such a not-yet-being that demands
its rights and freedom. This process of political subjectiva-
tion is emphasised by Nielsen’s self-truncated authorship.
By disappearing as the author of the event and instead
working under a collective pseudonym, he crosses identities
and links names outside of his own signature to produce a
literally un-authorised space where the children can use
play to ‘talk about their ability to express themselves’.
This is a dizzying perspective, but also an unexpectedly
productive one. The fact that the text of The Working Group
is a counter-discourse written by a fictitious author on behalf
72
of a collectivity – the children – which can’t or doesn’t write,
inadvertently creates a strange equality. Because three authors
who are only half-present write each other, a collective
authorship is realised: under its pseudonym, Nielsen writes
the text of the Working Group, which passes on the work of
signification to the children, who in their turn continue to
‘talk about’ their work on the framework for the qualitative
society. This amalgamation of names would also include
Pontus Hultén’s, as the event’s institutional mediator, and
Action Dialogue’s, as Nielsen’s ideological authority.
What Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The
German Ideology, call a communist organisation of society
also has consequences for the role of the artist. When there is
no longer such a thing as a division of labour in society, ‘there
disappears the subordination of the artist to some definite
art, thanks to which he is exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc.’
Hence the ‘exclusive concentration of artistic talent in par-
ticular individuals’ is dispersed into the broad mass as there
will be ‘no painters but at most people who engage in paint-
ing among other activities’.51 This reintegrated artistic talent,
shorn of individual authorship, is known as unalienated
labour; but it might just as well be the kind of production
that is called play. And thus, because he subverts individual
authorship by choosing to omit or erase his own signature,
Nielsen manages to include the children as producers and
realise the full political potential of The Model, beyond all
the paradoxes and ambiguities the concept of play carries
with itself.
73
6. Hitches in time and space: festivals and gestures
74
children’s playground. The political imperative could reject a
building’s or a vehicle’s original function and enlist it under
a new guise in the service of mass education: the facade of a
church could be rigged to appear as a giant tank, a weapon
of the Red Army; and, to enlighten the rural population,
agit-trains were sent to the provinces as classrooms and
exhibition spaces.
The exhibition catalogue of Pontus Hultén’s 1969 exhi-
bition Poetry Must Be Made by All! featured an essay on the
Bolshevik mass festivals of the 1920s; parades that would
snake through the city as mobile propaganda sculptures.
One A. Mazaev defined the mass festival as:
75
space and subjectivity it is also an aesthetic form in which
political ritual – as a conceptual space enclosed by illusion –
inheres. From this point of view, play doesn’t get us any closer
to the real or the political than does the art exhibition.
In José Triana’s Night of the Assassins (1965) – a theatre
play that, like The Model, was also presented in Stockholm in
1968 – three siblings play a forbidden game in which they kill
their tyrannical parents and demand the right to remake the
world. For their revolution at home they chant their demand
for a space in which things are given new names and places:
‘the living room is not the living room, the living room is
the kitchen. The kitchen is not the kitchen, the kitchen is the
loo.’55 The museum is not the museum, the exhibition is a
playground… However, in Triana’s play the children’s revolt
turns against itself. Through the repressive norms and habits
they have instilled in their offspring, the parents end up hav-
ing the last say. Something similar occurs when you put an
adventure playground in the museum: which, of course, is
not just any architecture to be appropriated and detourned,
but enshrines a very sophisticated appropriative power that
became entangled with The Model.
As Nielsen said, the exhibition space provided the
perfect research context for surveying chaos. But this also
implies that when The Model enrolled children in an evolu-
tionary process, it was really acting no differently to those
nineteenth-century museums which were mechanisms for
progress and citizenship. In this way, The Model raised the
ghost of the museum as an organ for public instruction.
By having played a decisive role in the formation of disci
76
plinary society, museums and exhibitions are fundamental
instruments of the educative and civilising functions that
constitute the state. ‘The exhibitionary complex’, to use Tony
Bennett’s term, isn’t a power that operates by force or cor-
rection, but enlists people on its side and offers them a role
in its own operation. 56 Exhibition audiences celebrate and
regulate each other by occupying a consensual space defined
by certain values where they look at art, and where they
look at each other looking at art. So The Model may have
emptied the exhibition space of objects and given it over
to uncivilised bodies, but it also turned childhood into
a spectacle of civics – albeit an emancipatory or utopian
one: ‘A model for people who want to look at people,’ as one
newspaper put it. 57
In his book Inside the White Cube (1976), Brian O’Doherty
defines the artistic gesture as an artwork that uses the exhi
bition space itself as artistic material; for example when
Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1968 wrapped the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago in tarpaulin. By employing the
architecture around art, the artist investigates the ideologi-
cal presuppositions behind isolating certain objects in the
gallery space and according them value, or she displaces
the physical parameters of the exhibition space towards
artistic representation. The gesture is often an indexing and
a staging of the entire way the reception of the artwork is
structured, just as the adventure playground in the Moderna
Museet intervened in conventional expectations of art and
77
the art exhibition. Hence the gesture ‘is not art, perhaps, but
art-like and thus has a meta-life around and about art’. 58
Since a playground is neither exclusive nor difficult to
understand, The Model fits easily with O’Doherty’s critique
of the exhibition space as a bearer of social, intellectual
and economic snobbism. The gesture is a sudden shift of
perspective, a surprise raid on the exhibition space or on
the museum’s claim to be a place that contains all histori-
cal times. The gesture makes energy and surprise erupt by
pointing towards a future development:
58. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the
Gallery Space. London: Lapis Press, 1986 (1976), p. 70. O’Doherty’s
characterisation of the gesture as meta-art is prefigured by Henri
Lefebvre, writing about appropriation as a particular kind of pro-
duction of space: ‘An appropriated space resembles a work of art,
which is not to say that it in any sense is an imitation work of
art.’ Lefebvre argues that most modern experiments in collective
lifestyle have lost their power because of what he calls insufficient
spatial morphology; namely, the risk of a passive takeover inher-
ent to the way communes have started to use existing spaces for
their own purposes – the suburban villa, the farm, more or less
ruinous castles and so on. In order to produce new space through
qualitative differentiation, the invention of a ‘space of enjoyment’
has to consciously pass through an ‘elitist phase’, a phase of ab-
straction. The Model was perhaps such an ‘elitist phase’ expressed
through a variation of activist strategy in favour of pressing
the demand that critical art belongs in the institution. (Henri
Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999
[1974], p. 380).
78
are born out of a desire for knowledge, which time may
make available.59
79
Thus, in several respects, Nielsen’s went further in his
reconstruction of the white cube than what O’Doherty had
in mind when he wrote about the gesture. Moreover, the
manoeuvring that Nielsen had to perform to please his fel-
low activists in Action Dialogue shows that he was painfully
aware that the white cube isn’t an uncontested space. On
the other hand, The Model relied – both as a pedagogical
laboratory and as a mass utopia – on the idea of the white
cube as a mute and universal site.60
7. Swimming in paint
80
Palle Nielsen here managed to put together the very same
dream, for everybody to see and to live: a huge, self-mul-
tiplying society for happy, free people, which in this case
were mainly children but could just as well have been
adults; a deeply integrated communal way of life that
nonetheless did not hamper the individual’s free expres-
sion; a qualitative society where the point was precisely
that it built on an intensive quantity: the real and free
choice between a profusion of possibilities. There were,
for example, a large number of costumes and masks from
every period, so the children could freely construct their
own roles. This is what the dream of freedom looks like.
To think with roles is to conceive of revolt. Or that, at least,
is what it ought to be. For it implies the ability to imagine
other roles than those society imposes in an authoritarian
manner.61
81
that is called a game’.62 Even if Hans-Jørgen Nielsen considers
this a rebellious mindset, it also represents a certain political
fatalism – at least from the point of view of Palle Nielsen’s
more robust and oppositional activism. In attitude relativism,
art can only offer another field of play. You may ‘massage’
and colour the roles you inhabit, and inscribe yourself sub-
jectively on them in various ways, but you will always have to
play along.
If Hans-Jørgen Nielsen’s idea of role swapping doesn’t
apply to The Model and its complicated freedom, his com-
mentary does raise the question of exactly what relation Palle
Nielsen’s ambiguous model of social transformation has to
subjectivity. In 1969, Nielsen revised and published the essay
that he had written – and omitted – for the exhibition cata-
logue of The Model. Entitled ‘The social artists’, the text
expresses his scepticism about existing concepts of social
transformation (such as that of an orthodox dialectical mate
rialism), just as he had earlier seen the event’s purpose in an
indefinable surplus, ‘a qualitative “more”’. Nielsen confesses
to having ‘dictated to the kids’ in The Model, by assuming
that they would work with the materials in the same way he
would have, rather than wasting or destroying them.63 But
if the social artist lets the child play freely he must also let
go of ordinary criteria of production. As always, politics
82
get complicated when the unique perspective of the pleasure
principle is employed in a project of social reconstruction.
Nielsen acknowledges that he is forced to drastically scale
down his artistic critique:
Only the fact that [the kids] are swimming in paint is a step
towards a changed social structure. It is small. It is slow.
But it initiates a movement of desires and actions.64
64. Ibid.
65. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Ce que les enfants disent’, Critique et
clinique, Paris, 1993, p. 86.
83
linguistic consequences. This in terms of Nielsen’s strug-
gle to find the right vocabulary to articulate the kind of
critique that The Model gestured at, but also with regard
to the theories and vocabularies with which we approach
the event today. Michel Foucault writes of utopias that even
though they have no real locality, they offer society in per-
fected form, or they offer consolation in the form of fan-
tastic, untroubled regions; ‘they open up cities with vast
avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is
easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.’66 Outside
of the lyrical and systemic utopias we find heterotopias.
These are the ‘other spaces’, the pockets in official reason –
in our culture, sites such as prisons, psychiatric wards, or
the cinema. Heterotopias are counter-sites, as Foucault
calls them, in which all other real sites within culture are
‘simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.’ A
heterotopia has no moral destination, and therefore poses
a challenge to knowledge and language:
84
This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run
with the very grain of language and are part of the funda-
mental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias… desiccate
speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very pos-
sibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths
and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.67
85
for The Model as a political fable, with which it opened up a
view to a potential, as saturated as it was uncertain.
In fact the text of the ‘Working Group’ – Nielsen’s
‘manifesto’ for The Model – addresses the search for such
a critical vocabulary. The text claims that the children con-
tinue ‘the work on the frame’. A surprising phrase, first of
all because it describes the fullness and teeming activity
of the adventure playground as a transitory phase towards
an essence that may or may not arrive. Secondly, if the
children only work on the framework they are not produc-
ing any content towards the qualitative society but rather
a discourse about their play, as a way for them to ‘talk about
their ability to express themselves’ and ‘tell us… about their
world’. With this, Nielsen states that more important than
the adventure playground that the children make is the fact
that they represent, frame and give meaning to it, by articu-
lating a ‘language’ that is spoken from the empty place of
power.69
A pedagogical model can petrify as a power structure.
‘The domination of a pedagogical model,’ Foucault writes,
is where we may ‘encounter the tyranny of goodw ill, the
obligation to think “in common” with others.’70 In this way,
the mass utopian aspects of The Model had it filtering 350
children per hour through a giant playground, as if it di-
86
vided human capital into a social analysis of quantitative
and qualitative. But the heterotopic side of the event is al-
ways easy to see, as the points at which it shifts into some-
thing unrecognisable that checks its utopian impulse. In an
almost Dadaist way, The Model was also a derailed sacred
act in which the distinction between utopia and heterotopia
breaks down, opening up towards new vocabularies where
difference and potential don’t risk being ruled and recap-
tured by dialectics.
87
to objects which still belong to the realm of utility (a car,
a gun, cooking utensils and so on). Agamben writes:
88
Nielsen did nothing to evaluate the event as a research
project. He doesn’t, for example, interview any participat-
ing children about their play experience in the supposedly
ideal playground of the museum, or their recollection of it.
As it turned out The Model would, to a large extent, have ful-
filled its purpose as an event that generated certain effects
through the impact of its exposure through the museum
and the mass media. These effects would emerge from the
symbolic meaning of the image of the children’s playground
in the museum and from its media reception, as much as
from the playground’s physical presence and its effect on
visitors to the museum.73 After all, on many days children
could only play for a very limited time in The Model. In this
way, the event could just as rightfully have proclaimed its
reality as a model on its first as on its final day.
But even if it was a playground, The Model was para-
doxically not a toy or a game, nor was it in this sense a
model. The Model was a miniature that dismembered the
89
past (‘adult society’), but it didn’t miniaturise anything that
already existed. Instead it miniaturised the future by aiming
to accelerate time towards the moment of its own applica-
tion and enlargement. The Model’s tendency, then, is not
to conceive of play as being derived from something else,
as having belonged ‘once but no longer’ to the realm of the
sacred or of the practical-economic, as Agamben puts it.
Instead play is an independently becoming ontology of a
future that should not be repressed.
Nielsen could be said to have used the insight about
the toy as a historical essence as not only offering a perspec-
tive on the future, but also in the Marxist sense of use value.
At the same time, what Agamben calls the sacred model for
play is in a sense recuperated by Nielsen’s repeated engage-
ment in playground actions. Political action also has its ritual
objects: for Nielsen, they are playgrounds. In the same vein,
The Model could be seen as a rite of initiation in which child
ren become producers. And so in Nielsen the playground
becomes a site that not only points to the structural corre-
lation between ritual and play, as two opposing tendencies
that for Agamben traverse human societies. Nielsen draws
them closely together in order to use them in a single oppo-
sitional movement against existing society. The playground
becomes a dynamic unit of tightly interwoven synchrony
and diachrony. On the one hand, as a playground action it is
the explosive moment of an intervention into a site (whether
urban space or museum); and on the other hand, as a possi-
bility to play it has a long diachronic perspective onto human
and social time, in which it may become a duration for the
individuals whose future being is constituted by play, if only
in the sense that the playing you do – or don’t get to do – as a
child comes before everything else you do later in life.
90
9. Create two, three… many playgrounds
91
struggles was their multiplication as singularities, rather
than their serialisation based on a model. Che writes:
92
There is no need for playgrounds. There is a need to
change how people behave, to change society and create
a socialist world where people can communicate. What
the hell are playgrounds for? I have seen children func-
tion perfectly well on asphalted yards, when they were
allowed to play with whatever they liked. You can’t design
anything specific, but you can give them opportunities to
work with themselves, and that is when you really achieve
a change of behaviour.77
93
such an unheard demand through the children’s play and
through its own self-contradictions that came unexpectedly
together to express the force of a desire that could not be
reduced to play as such, nor to any specific form or space.
The playground in the museum was an ecstatic space that
remained open and expectant. It allowed for a working
through of the idea of the political as something unfin-
ished and becoming, in a space where others are present.
This was perhaps its single biggest achievement. To this day,
there are few spaces where we may glimpse an outside to the
present, where we may see a future, an uncontrollable more
that we may share between us.79
94
Minister of Education Olof Palme visiting The Model
with his sons, 1968
95
Inside The Balloon, Västerås, 1968–69
96
The Balloon, Västerås, 1968–69
97
dwellings between 1965 and 1974.81 But around 1970 the new
world of the Swedish Social Democrats began to fracture. The
economy, the welfare state, the housing and the planning
programmes simultaneously began to show signs of systemic
failure. Peter Hall explains:
98
How would your Balloon look? If a Balloon were built where
you live. What would it look like? What would you want to
have in it? Write and tell us. Wish for everything you feel
like. Everything you want. Everything you can imagine.83
99
into account. Left-wing criticism characteristically opposed
the authoritarian centralism of planning with soft or small
moves such as proposals for playgrounds and communal
areas, or with putting environmental issues and family poli-
tics on the agenda. Opposition to social experiments like
Sweden’s Million Programme aimed between the houses,
so to speak; the critique was based on a point of view that
sought to make the agendas of cultural production and social
change coincide. More specific architectural criticism was
advanced along these lines, for example Nielsen’s proposal
that housing should consist in dense and low buildings with
many spatial formations on a ‘human scale’.
To commentators such as Nielsen, the experience of liv-
ing in the new dormitory towns amounted to a veritable cata-
logue of alienation. He found that the solidarity that existed
between people in the old neighbourhoods was deracinated,
and crime, isolation, mindless consumerism and a widening
generation gap followed. The result was social marginalisa-
tion. In ‘Anklage – og forsvar’ (Accusation – and Defence),
an essay from 1971, Nielsen generously estimates the pro-
portion of ‘deviants’ in society to be as high as fifty per cent:
We know them: The children who aren’t old enough, the old
who aren’t productive any more, the women who can’t work
effectively, longhairs who aren’t willing to do anything. The
paranoid, the drug addicts, the abused, the thin, the fat.85
100
don’t live in the housing they design (this claim was based
on fact: he had checked their addresses!). Thus Nielsen’s
story of decline is divided into those who plan and those
who are planned for, into manipulators and manipulated,
the latter sinking ever deeper into anomie. The group identi-
ties Nielsen constructs – deviants and ‘normal’ people – is a
discourse that doesn’t contain The Model’s open-endedness
and acceptance of uncertainty, where the child was given a
chance to produce its space and discourse (or at the very
least, was represented as somebody who should be given that
chance). At this stage it no longer seems relevant to Nielsen
to operate at a micro-level of artistic critique. In indigna-
tion over the moral bankruptcy of the city planning, Nielsen
personifies the class struggle and speaks on behalf of the
subaltern:
101
drift towards self-destruction, Nielsen wants to see people
behind the ‘deviants’ who are capable of coexisting and
even revolting together when an imposed order becomes
unbearable.
A small-scale uprising took place in the context of a
playground that Nielsen designed for the new Copenhagen
suburb Høje Gladsaxe. Planned in the late 1950s to house
7,000 residents, the Le Corbusier-inspired high-rise complex
was the largest of its kind in Denmark. The pre-cast con-
struction had the size of a city but lacked a city’s complexity
and details – nor did it offer any play facilities whatsoever.
In spite of many complaints and the establishment of sev-
eral committees, neither the city nor the housing authority
had come up with any solutions to this. Høje Gladsaxe was
described by one critic as a place built by fathers, for fathers:
life there for house-bound mothers, the elderly and child
ren was limited because they didn’t drive to work in the
morning. In the end it was the mothers who, with nowhere
to take their children to play during the day, eventually
had enough.
A group of about forty of these disenchanted resi-
dents, along with Nielsen and a group of psychologists,
sociologists and architects who had been doing research
in the area, decided to confront the ‘recreational injustice’
of Høje Gladsaxe. Using elements they had constructed in
advance, Nielsen’s design for a 400 square-metre adventure
playground was erected by residents and activists over one
day in April 1969. The location of Høje Gladsaxe was ideal,
placed next to a large moor – which, however, was shielded
off from the high rise complex by a 2.5 metre-high wall,
that extended along the entire length of the tower blocks.
Nielsen had devised the playground to be built adjacent
102
Høje Gladsaxe, 1969
103
104
The Høje Gladsaxe adventure playground, 1969
Copenhagen dailies wrote about ‘the housewife-architect
construction’ carried out by ‘pioneers’ whose ‘million ham-
mer blows’ augured political climate change:
106
While the local authorities suggested that this was a case
of taking the law into one’s own hands – a slippery slope, a
bypassing of tenants’ democracy, etc. – the media’s exalted
response interpreted the intervention as an example of how
residents could influence their living environment and col-
laborate directly with architects.
As part of his Ph.D. research into architecture, Nielsen
recorded the outdoor activities available for children and
adults in the area. Before the playground action, he drew
up a questionnaire together with a group of psychology and
sociology students, and visited one in ten of the residents of
Høje Gladsaxe. Six months later, the same residents were
interviewed and asked whether their views on the quality of
life and outdoor facilities had changed. Among the families
who had taken part in organising the adventure playground
a relatively high percentage of divorces was found, as well
as a wish for further education. Other findings showed that
about 60% of those asked were unaffected by the interven-
tion; but only 30% of these had children. Forty per cent
were affected, negatively and positively, by the action, and
80% of these did have children. About 75% of both groups
reported they would move out if offered somewhere else
to live.
107
Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in
cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of
the suburbs. 90
108
which the commercial spheres of circulation adjust and
control social processes. 91
Foucault writes of the heterotopia that it always has a
function in relation to all the space that remains. What hap-
pens, then, when society outside the children’s playground
starts ‘playing’? As a subject in the process of becoming,
the child is the locus for receiving and passing on mean-
ing to the future. In the experience economy, on the other
hand, the playing subject has been placed outside of any
necessary relation to history, since what matters is the con-
sumption of her own experience. Under such a regime, this
subject’s way back to history must be long, because play has
already been assigned a function that revolves around indi-
vidual experience, its intensities and perceived essences. In
a society where play is capitalised, time stops.
If indeed the future is lost in the prosaic dumps of the
past, as Smithson wistfully phrases it, it may be worth try-
ing to recover history from ‘the celestial playgrounds of the
suburbs’. The very first play space that Nielsen designed in
1967 when he worked for the city of Gladsaxe is still in use
after more than forty years. A play wall made of coloured
concrete elements was recently restored and reopened in
the summer of 2009. At a time when the widespread fears for
children’s safety have today made sixties-style playground
activism almost impossible to practice, and when the mean-
ing of play is changing as a result of its commodification,
it should also be recalled that initiatives such as Nielsen’s,
109
and the way they were initiated at many cultural levels and
sites, have been influential in changing attitudes to children’s
needs both inside and outside institutions. These attitudes
are now, however, under pressure due to increasing govern-
mental focus on education as a political tool.
Nielsen continues to reflect existing society through
his institutionally-sited playgrounds. For a 2009 biennial
exhibition for children in Utrecht, he produced an out
door playground – or model – entitled The Children’s Peace
Corner. Featuring many of the same installations as The
Model, the Peace Corner made a point of integrating the
parents. In The Model, the children typically squeezed those
who didn’t play to the sides of the exhibition space, as play
functions were concentrated in the middle. In the Utrecht
installation, there was space around the play functions for
adults to be around the playing children. 92
Of course, The Children’s Peace Corner is a work signed
by the artist Palle Nielsen, now acting on his own outside of
activist networks or research contexts. When he shared his
authorial signature with a crowd of children at the Moderna
Museet it was a radical, egalitarian gesture with which he
intended to reconstitute the concept of art by stripping it
110
Palle Nielsen’s The Children’s Peace Corner, Utrecht, 2009
111
As an event, The Model may have failed to rebuild the
immediacy of social space and make artistic form transpar-
ent – if that is indeed a failure. But what is more important
is that it had the potential to become a narrative of how we
might turn ourselves over to the other and to the future, to
what time makes possible after the event.
112