From ready-made to playground: Function displacement as a political strategy

Abstract

The relation between ready-made and political activism goes back to the main artistic movements and political changes that took place at the beginning of the 20th century, such as anarchism, communism, or fascism. Although authors like Boris Groys find precedents of this situation in the French Revolution, it is also true that the historical avant-garde movements where ready-made stems and develops—Dada and Surrealism—are jointly connected to revolutionary left-wing ideologies. Since then, the operations built on ready-made have been used for several political purposes, accompanying some revolutions or progressive-type demonstrations.

As a spatial practice, ready-made is a political instrument that implies a displacement of function. This circumstance may be noticed in some adventure-oriented urban play sites, the adventure playgrounds, which were installed as a political activism operation in some European cities during the 1960s. Other less radical cases can be found in some proposals that take advantage of the practice of such displacements, for instance public-funded permanent installations, of which Aldo Van Eyck’s playgrounds in Amsterdam are a well-known example.