Archive for September, 2012

Where the Nation Was Built

Thursday, September 27th, 2012

Washington Park playground (Hill District, Pittsburgh), c. 1907

Children playing at the Washington Park playground (Hill District), c. 1907

At the turn of the last century, it wasn’t the aim of playgrounds to provide fun for children. Back then, playgrounds were part of a clear social and educational agenda. The Playground Movement and the American Settlement Movement (an important progressive reform initiative at the end of the 19th century) fought both for the improvement of the mental and physical health in lower-income classes and immigrants.

The Playground Association of America, founded in 1906, spread the idea of structured play in the American cities. As Boston reformer Joseph Lee declared in 1907, “organized recreation is one of the building blocks of the republic. Properly equipped and run by a good leader of  ‘a high personal type’ the playground is ‘a school of all civic virtues.’” Streets were described as a “school of crime.” Playgrounds were therefore perceived as tools to civilize children. Other instruments included gymnasiums, educational storytelling, and free and fresh milk for schoolchildren. In the case of Pittsburgh, the city placed the management of its playgrounds in the hands of the Playground Association of America. The organization’s Third National Congress took place at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland in 1909.

In the 1930s, this approach with its emphasis on physical and moral education moved gradually into what would become the vision of creative playgrounds. Developed by Scandinavian urban planners and landscape designers (and then taken over by many others), the new concepts stressed the conviction that a child is not simply an incomplete adult, but an individual with creative potential.

Gabriela Burkhalter just moved from Basel to Pittsburgh, but still runs Architektur für Kinder (Architecture for Children), a homepage dedicated to the history of playgrounds.

Quotes from Linnea M. Anderson’s “‘The playground of today is the republic of tomorrow’: Social reform and organized recreation in the USA, 1890-1930’s,” 2007, from The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education

Photos from the Historic Pittsburgh Image Collection

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The youth is the capital of Iran

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Film poster of the legendary film "The Cow"

If you’re wondering why I went to Tehran, read this. So, after my initial blues, I met with a couple of young artists. I had contacted them through a friend and they had invited me to give a talk in their apartment, which they use for discussions, lectures, screenings, etc. They wouldn’t give me the address but picked me up at a designated location, so I’d better not give any names at all. It was such a great evening! A group of about 30 people gathered, I explained my ideas on art in public space, where they came from historically, and what I have learned from artists, artworks, and the public. We discussed how little was possible in Tehran since the public space is under heavy surveillance and that only private apartments offer suitable space for these kinds of experiences. When I tried to show them a film about an event on YouTube, it was blocked by the censors (see screenshot below).

The next day I visited the Film Museum of Iran. Being an admirer of Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, and Jafar Panahi’s banned film “This Is Not a Film” (see also Cinema of the World), I wanted to see the museum and find out if these filmmakers were still a part of it or if they had been censored. Thankfully, they were still very much present, and the museum offered good insight into the history of Iranian cinema and culture. In the evening, I had a memorable discussion with a young philosopher I’d met the night before. The next day, I visited galleries, saw a mini-retrospective of Ghassem Hajizadeh, and spent my evening at the apartment where the hosts showed recent short films by young filmmakers. All of this was very rewarding since it became clear that contemporary art and film means a great deal to them, and that the apartments are an active space for freedom, knowledge, debate, and experience. You know, these kinds of spaces have always meant the same for me, but sometimes, looking around, I wonder if I am just living an old-fashioned and romantic dream. Ha!

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Tehran is the capital of Iran

Monday, September 10th, 2012

A work by Alexander Calder in front of portraits of Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Hosseini Khamenei at the Tehran Museum of Art

“Why are you in Tehran?,” people in the capital continuously asked me. “Why are you going to Tehran?,” my friends wondered. Well, come to Pittsburgh in October 2013, visit the Carnegie International, and you will know. Until then, travel to Tehran, don’t believe what you read in the papers, or what they tell you on TV and other media. It’s absolutely stunning, it’s way too isolated, it’s not dangerous, it’s big (the metropolitan Tehran counts more than 15m inhabitants), the youth is great, as is suspicion, knowledge, curiosity, and hospitality.

Okay, there is some really bad stuff going on there, and there are not many tourists around, either. So, the first thing I did was walk to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art built by Iranian architect Kamran Diba and opened in 1977. According to Wikipedia, this great building hosts “the most valuable collection of Western modern art outside of Europe and the United States. It is said that there is approximately £2.5 billion worth of modern art held at the museum.” Entering into the main hall, you could see a mobile by Alexander Calder floating in front of portraits of Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Hosseini Khamenei (see image above). They had their collection of Giacometti, Hamilton, Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Vasarely, and Warhol on display (see images below). While visiting, you were surrounded by a gentle sound (as in many of Tehran’s art galleries) which let me drift away into melancholia. You couldn’t help but wonder what this kind of high-end Western contemporary art was doing in today’s Iran (read here why contemporary art is indeed important in Iran). Out of this bluesy mood I sent a message to Sam Keller, the director of the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, who initially wanted to travel to Tehran with me. He texted me back that that it was Ernst Beyeler who had sold some of these works to Farah Pahlavi, the Shah’s wife, and responded to my melancholy with “Warhol had the blues.” A few hours later, I learned that there was not too much reason for playing the blues.

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Polish Hill, Russian icons

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Entering Polish Hill under the Bloomfield Bridge

Entering Polish Hill under the Bloomfield Bridge

I love my tiny neighborhood of Polish Hill. Nestled between the Strip District, Lawrenceville, Oakland, and the Hill District, it often feels like a little village in the middle of the city. At the top of the hill on Bethoven Street, birds chirp in rambling gardens behind brick houses, and all is quiet (except for the brass band practicing in the old garage). Slightly crumbling  public stairways make their way through leafy hills, popping out between houses. Porches face north, with an incredible panoramic view of valley, rivers, train tracks, and city. There are hidden houses at the bottom of gullies. An outdoor gallery of graffiti under the Bloomfield Bridge gives way to a community garden. I live next door to a three-story building housing Lili Coffee Shop (a café that often hosts good live music),  the excellent record store Mind Cure Records on the second floor, and Copacetic Comics on the third, with its great selection of graphic novels, comics, used and new books, cds, and the wise council of its owner Bill Boichel. And there’s almost no need to mention Gooski’s—definitely the best dive bar in a hundred-mile radius…

The neighborhood is home to a fair number of artists, musicans, chefs, filmmakers, etc. I recently came accross this short film by Julie Sokolow about the neighborhood’s resident Russian Orthodox icon painter. Pretty fascinating stuff.

And a great set of photos of the recent May Day celebrations by Polish Hill man-about-town Mark Knobil.

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