by Mariane Klettenhofer

Toys are a significant part of the work of many artists. Such is the case of Joaquín Torres-García, who founded the Alladin Toys toy factory while living in New York in 1924, which was destroyed by a fire the following year. ‘Transformable toys’, as the artist called them, were figures that were divided into several parts and which could be recombined to form new figures, according to the desire and imagination of those who played with them. 

Pablo Picasso once dismantled a coffee table and turned it into a horse to give to his grandson Bernard. Paul Klee, for his part, created countless puppets for his son Felix to play with. Alexander Calder created perhaps one of the best-known playful works, Circus (1926–1931), which is now part of the Whitney Museum collection in the United States. The artist spent years performing in Paris with miniature acrobats, trapeze artists, clowns, dancers, lion tamers, knife swallowers, and many other circus characters, sculpted in great detail in wire and fabric. 

The artist couple Ray and Charles Eames were also engaged in the creation of toys, such as House of Cards (1952) and The Toy (1951). Some Bauhaus pieces include furniture made especially for children – such as Peter Keler’s geometric cradle, which became a design icon – Joseph Hartwig’’s chessboard; Margaretha Reichardt’s wooden toys (Steckpuppen and Hampelmann); the small shipbuilding game (Kleines Schiffbauspiel) and Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s action dolls (Wurfpuppen) made of string. 

In all these works, there is a certain idea of freedom present in the way children think and act, in the way they mix notions of reality and fantasy, interpret and experience the world through play, announcing that playing should be taken seriously, as something structural, fundamental, and foundational.

Never detached from the formal unity characteristic of each creator’s output, these toys may be seen by some critics as less pretentious works. However, as well as supporting the language of those who produce them, they call into question the very limits of the work and challenge the idea of art. In other words, they fulfill much of what certain artists sought. Miró and Kandinsky, for example, intended to reproduce the action of a child before a canvas, as if seeing it for the first time. Through an intuitive aesthetic operation and a poetic dimension that is only possible during the early stages of life, still free from experiences full of meaning, they wished to resurrect the childlike spirit that captures the world in its essence. 

Picasso used to say that in his childhood he was able to paint like the Renaissance artist Raphael, but it took him an entire lifetime to learn to draw like a child. According to him, every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist as we grow up. In this sense, Fayga Ostrower also reminds us that “it is enough to see the contagious joy of children, entirely absorbed in their work, to get an idea of the great adventure that creating is. Adventure, surrender and conquest; towards new experiences and new worlds. It’s as if children have always known how to harvest the essence of being”.¹

If, in the act of creation, art may bear similarities with child’s play, this approximation also happens in its reception. Specific characteristics, such as playfulness and humor, demand a different kind of relationship between the viewer and the work. It’s a more active relationship. Another point of approximation between play and reception can also be understood in the attempt to broaden real access to these works, an expression of a real intention to integrate the arts into people’s daily lives, just as toys are integrated into children’s daily lives.

The possibility of uniting art and life was evident in movements such as the Bauhaus, which saw industrialization as a way of disseminating a series of objects capable of uniting beauty and functionality. The members of the school saw technological progress as a chance to synthesize and disseminate architecture, art, and industry. It was an opportunity to explore new skills and act socially, politically, and aesthetically, driving transformations that would lead to greater democratization and access. This would all contribute to building what they believed would be a better world. Although the Bauhaus’ attempt to bring art and life closer together was decimated by the Nazis, who ordered the school to close in 1933, its ideals were already widespread. The utopian dimension of art and the search for the aestheticization of life continued to reverberate. 

At the end of the 1990s, Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational art’ to describe the work of certain artists who sought to create new ways of ‘shuffling art and life’ and thus produce alterities, constitute other modes of existence in reality, and engender models of possible universes. According to the author, from then on, art was not to be taken into account solely for its meaning but for its use, which is why he emphasized social interactions and collective experience as central elements of this concept. 

Rather than focusing solely on the artistic object as an isolated product to be appreciated, relational art proposes that the act of experimentation, dialog, and human relationships form the essence of the work. This could take many forms: performances, installations, community events, or any project that involves the active participation of the public. The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, at the opening of his exhibition at the Paula Allen gallery in New York in 1990, surprised visitors who, instead of finding artworks on display in the space, were able to enjoy a delicious pad thai, freshly prepared by him.

An important aspect of relational art is its capacity to provoke reflection on society, promoting a more inclusive approach within the artistic field, even if the ways of achieving this are somewhat challenging, as artists continue to work in institutionalized spaces where unpredictability and conflict are not always welcome. Even those artists who have been working in public spaces for years know that there is a large gap between seeing the city as a museum and actually intervening in space and human relations. In a way, these practices are disconnected from the ‘real world’, unable to suspend the hierarchy and power that shape ordinary life. They are thus prevented from inaugurating a new meaning for the relationship between art and life.

Hélio Oiticica popularized the phrase ‘Museum is the world’, not with the intention of creating an aesthetic world, but to call on participants to see themselves as figures capable of recreating themselves as subjects and also transforming the world in which they live. For Oiticica, “creating was not the artist’s task, but changing the value of things”.² He considered art not just as a form of expression, but as production, a work with the potential for social engagement and transformation. In this way, he ended the notion of leisure (‘lazer’) on the opposite side, which would lead him to conceive of the notion of ‘crelazer’. That is, non-repressive leisure, the opposite of planned leisure, which is gratification resulting from alienation promoted by the usual processes and conditions of hours of labor production. In other words, a leisure that should be understood as disinterested, unconditioned, one that is carried out for pure pleasure.

Éden, a work that took place at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1969, where it brought together a series of Bólides, Ninhos, Parangolés and Penetráveis, would synthesize this proposal. The exhibition was an invitation for all the senses. There were spaces for listening to music, reading books, stepping barefoot on the sand, lying on foam flakes, playing games, getting doused with water. Environments that could be occupied by visitors as they wished, in their own time, out of any order or obligation, in an active attitude towards the work, freely, because only then would they be able to see themselves as inventors and creators of their own existences. According to Oiticica, this would be the way to live in a permanently inventive state, constantly transforming, including leisure and laziness, achieving the ideal of “inhabiting the work itself”. 

The transformation of ‘work life’ into ‘leisure life’, to be carried out in shared spaces, also seemed to be Constant Nieuwenhuys’ intention, as can be seen in the idealization of his New Babylon project (1959–1974). For him, in his “world city for the future”, land would be collectively owned and there would no longer be any need to work, as everything would be automated, allowing people to live a nomadic life of creative play. In New Babylon, free from the alienation of productivity, being fully creative in everyday activity would be possible, and art would then no longer be an exception but on an equal footing with other activities, it would be dissolved into life. 

However, Nieuwenhuys’ city project was never built. The artist, who spent years creating models, drawings, collages, graphics, and texts, expressing theories of urban development and social interaction, split with Guy Debord, his colleague from the Situationist International, precisely because the latter wished to keep the project under a kind of utopian prism.

Although it didn’t come to fruition, New Babylon served and continues to serve as an inspiration for artists, architects, and urban planners. One example was Palle Nielsen’s The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society (1968), an exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet aimed entirely at children. The Danish artist wanted to draw attention to the lack of urban facilities for children where they could experience things for themselves and build their self-esteem. In The Model, children would find a space where they could play freely, without adult intervention, without rules, in an undisciplined, anarchic way. It was a place to jump from bridges, climb, swing on tires, make things with DIY tools, paint and mix music on record players, and communicate their capacity for self-expression.

The result was somewhat frightening for the adults, who questioned whether it was really art. Nielsen effectively claimed that there was no exhibition: “The exhibition is the work of children. It’s only an exhibition because children are playing in an art museum. It’s only an exhibition for the people who aren’t playing. That’s why we call it a model.”³ According to the artist, children should be seen as capable of articulating their own needs and pointing to something different from what is generally already programmed for them.

Palle Nielsen found a way to question gallery spaces and their audiences, and it wasn’t long before he expanded on this idea, taking his experiment to the streets. In 1968, together with a group of activists, he erected a playground in the yard of a former working-class housing project in a neighborhood in north Copenhagen. It is said that the residents were awoken at seven in the morning with a basket of fresh bread, a manifesto letter, and the news that their backyard had been selected to be the site of a new playground. They were convinced to spend Sunday morning building the playground together instead of calling the police.

For Nielsen, social transformation would begin in the environment that the game demands and produces, by individuals who are not conscious of themselves as productive agents. As such, they would be free of any intention other than the continuity of fun as a form of production. Playful children would be considered the bearers of the revolution.

It’s hard to really believe in the transformation of our society through creative practices generated by leisure, recreation, and play. Perhaps it will never be entirely possible to “inhabit the work itself”, “create all the time”, “expand the notion of play until it embraces the totality of life”. Some even say that if this were to happen, art would be decreeing its own annihilation, as it would mean the end of its autonomy. But it is only the desire to break with this impossibility, which is so characteristic of art, that allows us to experiment with other modes of living.

¹ Fayga Ostrower. Acasos e criação artística. Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2013, p. 247.
² Hélio Oiticica. “Experimentar o experimental”. In: Navilouca. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Gernasa 1974.
³ B. G. Larseben, Palle Nielsen. The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society, 1968. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 2009, p. 70.

About the author

Mariane Klettenhofer holds a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from FAUUSP and a Master’s degree in Art, Philosophy and Critical Thinking from the European Graduate School. In 2018, she founded the O Pequeno Colecionador project in partnership with the artist Artur Lescher, through which she works with research, education, and curatorship in order to bring the world of visual arts closer to the experience of playing. Among projects she has carried out are the Laboratório de Experiências Lúdico-Artísticas, which was part of the Arte é bom exhibition at the Museu da Imagem e do Som (2022–2023) and Tudo é arte, tudo é brinquedo, selected by the 10th Call for Mediation Projects in Art and Cultural Citizenship (2023), promoted by the Centro Cultural São Paulo and the Department of Culture of the São Paulo Municipal Government.