Playing rough
Fun and art
Tumble down a grass bank.
Head first.
Heels up.
Wet grass,
still warm.
Knees green.
Clothes too.
No watch.
Empty pockets.
Climb the hill again,
and go.
I don’t like the climb,
but I’ll do it.
Seems to have gotten bigger this time.
Or maybe I rolled a bit further,
stayed on the ride a little bit longer,
didn’t get off at my normal stop.
Maybe I’m getting good at this.
Still need to go back.
Back up.
No watch on my wrist.
Empty pockets.
I can go wherever I want.
Play
I spent this week installing Playground at Ladbroke Hall as a way to add to the floral noise of Chelsea Flower Show.
A conceptual installation built on Huizinga’s idea that culture comes from play, sited in the gardens of Ladbroke Hall. It takes the form of an immersive floral environment with interactive elements to engage in.
Ace, who led the floral artistry, and I have worked together for a couple of years now. Last year we had five months to prepare. This year we had five days.
The hypothesis I’ve been playing with over the last two years is that if art wants a wider crowd without losing its purity, it has to interact in adjacent spaces. Find the people who already understand some of the things we prize. Fashion and Floristry → Beauty. Retail and social media → Spectacle. The crowds who value having something to say → Thought.
It’s not a pitch to become enmeshed in culture, if anything it’s us riffing on their games to let them know what we have to offer. The core movement isn’t novel. It’s how humans have always operated. We take our toys to the fringes of our friendship group, figure out what they have over there and play a new game together.
Huizinga puts forward this idea that culture is built from a sense of play. White cube galleries don’t have that. A few weeks ago one of my most important supporters was in town and we took a ride to White Cube Bermondsey, it’s an incredible site, but even when it’s in full swing, it is not a place where ‘play’ is natural. Most artist studios are, primarily for them not an audience, but the site of ultimate freedom for their inhabitants, and what is play if not an exercise of freedom.
Finding play inside whatever constraints are against you, the tools, the environment, the audience and their whims, is part of the game we all play. Taking that into industries focused on beauty, commerce or spectacle is where we can lend our toolset and bring over those that like how we play.
Playground
The installation has three key elements. A Jean Prouvé Maison Démontable turned into a sanctuary from the city. A violet floral installation built around the scent of hyacinth. Tatami mats underfoot that pull you into the ground without making you dirty. And a layered soundscape that reminds you that you can have fun in nature by doing nothing. To see how I could affect the hall’s conventional clientele I added egg timers, a visual excuse to spend more time inside than they otherwise might.
When you walk through Ladbroke Hall and see the £200,000 tables and £100,000 chairs, and watch the people being taken around, it’s clear they don’t know the name of the artists they’re being shown. But they probably have really nice homes that need a big table in them.
I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get them to take their shoes off. Lie on the floor. Change how they engage in the world for five minutes of an egg timer. And see if that little change creates the spark I believe art is.
A change of perspective.
There’s something special about falling over as a kid. An unexpected part of our body impacts the floor in a way that lets us realise we are both significantly sturdier and more mortal than we thought.
The floor. Grounding, honest, humble. A place we avoid as adults in the West. Maybe our egos don’t let us lower ourselves to those dark depths. Maybe we’re scared we might fall and not be able to get back up.
Falling over brings us to the present. It focuses us. But as we get older, we try to do it as little as possible. And with it we lose access to our mentor the floor.
At the back of the gardens, sits a deck with two books on it. One for memories of play in childhood. One for adulthood.
The childhood book was full of stories of scuffed knees, chasing one another, playing around in nature with a freedom you only really get as a child amongst other children that see you.
The adulthood book was filled with references to sex, debauchery, and civil disobedience. We lash out a bit when we’re older, maybe because the only way we know how to challenge the rules is by abandoning them entirely and showing those around us we are still free. Showcasing our descent into Bacchanalian decadence. Cranking on the dopamine and serotonin as hard as we can to feel something in a world that really just wants us to do our job.
Throughout the garden, alongside the floral installations, there are poems scattered for people to read to the plants. We often mistakenly frame nature as an object to look into. We distance ourselves from it. Even as I describe it now, I frame it as some other, as if I’m not a part of it. Our polite civility tells us every day that we are unique. That our pretty little clothes and our idyllic sense of self, makes us distinct from the flora and fauna we have named.
But I am an animal, and so are you.
The first time I saw this game played was with Uriel Orlow, he was handing out poems to people in the back gardens of the Venice Biennale. A crowd of people excited to be there, standing in the bushes, reading poems to plants. It’s inspiring every time I see it. Art is an activity, a process, not a product for your walls. When you see it happening, it’s infectious.
Sit down
There’s a small card in the Jean Prouvé. It says this is better when you sit down. It should say lie down. I figured if people saw the phrase lie down they’d resist. But once they’re sat down, they might figure out the lying down part themselves. Letting them feel smarter than me costs nothing.
A family today took the card out of the sanctuary and into the rest of their day. They photographed it on a tree branch. On the grass, with their daughter lying underneath. In the basket of a Lime bike. On the saddle of another. On the rail of a London bus. They sent me the photos as I wrote this.
When I make work I don’t really know who it’s for. Me, for sure, but usually there’s someone else out there on the same wavelength. When someone takes it into their own life it feels complete. Today that was them.
Next week I’ll show you some of the paintings I’ve been working on. And I’ll start going in the opposite direction to where I’ve been going for the last few months, which has mostly been towards and around ideas of freedom.
Welcome to summer, from here we’ll be looking at the other side of the coin.
Control.
Thanks again.
Love you loads.
R x
If you enjoyed this week’s issue of Hot Girls Like Art, share it with a friend. It’s always nice to be the person that found that artist that made it before eveyone else.
Peace and love
R x