| 7 |
At the time of Sottsass’s death, he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at a gallery in Trieste. His work was laid out on seven tables. You sailed around the gallery and visited the table islands, and while you were examining it all, you listened on a headset to him talking about the objects and buildings and his process.
So many architects—architects in particular!—at the ends of their lives become invested in staging monolithic shows about the importance of their buildings/themselves, but here, Sottsass had put together an exhibition with the grace and humility of a yard sale and had made his own little mix tape for it.
It was not a show about having all the answers. The title of it was I Want to Know Why.
8
American Wind
| 1 |
In being married to Frank, who is a flea-market and thrift-store devotee, I have had the opportunity to observe someone, over time, whose habits regarding objects are very different from my own. We actually have opposing perspectives on objects, which makes for an interesting household.
If we were to play a game called “how we deal with objects,” and if this game were played by the rules of my childhood game of war, the two sides could be broken down as follows: Frank’s side believes that all objects are a type of pet, and for owners like Frank, this is part of their charm. Objects are part of their owner’s family. They never leave their adopted home voluntarily; when they do leave, it is always due to a sad or unfortunate circumstance that forced their departure. The acquiring of an object is a joyful event.
My side also believes that objects are a type of pet, but for owners like me, instead of being a comfort or a charm, this quality is a burden. The fewer objects owned, the better.
Frank and I are not quite at war over this. We play at getting and then getting rid of things. And I appreciate a fantastic object as much as the next guy. Maybe even more, because I believe that making an object is a greater task, really, than making a human.
Getting pregnant is not always easy, but making a human, once you are pregnant, is easy. You are not the architect; you are the clay. The architect works through you. You have no choice; you yourself are the object. You are sculpted.
In being human and making an object, you are also sculpted, but the process is much more subtle. You yourself are sculpted by your actions. It is a much slower and more delicate process than gestating, which is pretty dramatic in comparison.
In making an object and being finely sculpted by that process, you have the whole world to choose from in terms of your medium, and every one of your choices, good or bad, is reflected in you, on and in your body.
Objects are greater miracles than people, then, because we humans have no fantastic-genius architect working through us when we want to build a toilet: We have to figure everything out. We have to make it all up, and we don’t know everything.
Maybe this is the great development of the technological age: People make objects now like it’s nothing. It’s not magic anymore. It’s not even important. Objects—amazing objects—are everywhere. We are drowning in them.
We make all this stuff, and yet, I am convinced, we don’t know what any of it is. We don’t see how objects live; we don’t recognize the glacial pace of their aging process. We don’t see that we look like blurs to them; we don’t recognize how we are like rainbow lights zooming by until we stop and touch them. At those moments, we come into focus for them like ghostly forms on infrared cameras. There she is, the sugar bowl thinks: Mommy.
They sometimes threw objects in black plastic bags and sent them away on boats to be buried, our children’s children will say, shaking their heads.
| 2 |
Women who have been through childbirth have a leg up on dying, I think. They have been at least partway to that place, that life/death place, and they know some of what it means to be in pain and vulnerable there.
I recently heard a talk about assisting the dying, and there was a lot of talk about dying “with dignity,” and I have to say, I wasn’t sure what that meant at first. A lot of the same emotions and events that often present themselves in childbirth—pain, loss of bowel control, anger, withdrawal—are associated with dying. Some women say they are nervous about pooping on the delivery table, but in my experience, a doctor or nurse waves a hand and says it’s perfectly normal and not to worry, no one cares. No one talks about dignity, although that is exactly what the mom-to-be is concerned about. It is scary to think about being so incredibly undignified, sweating and grunting and pooping, in pain, in front of other people. It is undignified, though, it just is, and it can’t be made dignified because you have to stay present. You can’t just be knocked out, because you have to think about the baby.
In death, there is no baby; you are birthing yourself. Dying with dignity, I think, means that you are not alone in that birth experience, and you are not screaming in pain. You are clean and calm and appropriately medicated and, ideally, with a loved one.
I don’t know what the hardest thing about death is; I don’t know how hard it is to die. Maybe for a person who is dying with dignity, death itself is not so bad. Maybe it can be a good birth.
| 3 |
For myself, I believe that no matter the circumstances of death, after death, there is a place you go to, or maybe go back to.
There is a reality twin.
| 4 |
Often, my boys want to play war games. They want to pretend they are in battle; they want to throw sticks and rocks; they want to read books about modern fighting helicopters; they want to amass Pokémon armies; they want to play hair-raising computer games where they are transformed into tanks that drive around and shoot at other tanks.
They have always loved Legos, but this winter they began a new building project that was more ambitious than any Frank and I had previously seen.
It started with a spinning top someone gave Mick for his birthday. It was a really nice top, metal; a modern take on the world’s oldest toy. A Beyblade, it was called. I hadn’t seen a spinning top like that since Japan; the kids I saw there played with wooden ones they call beigoma.
Mick has acquired a million Lego sets and in the process has amassed some really odd-looking pieces, including several dome-shaped ones, each about the size of a dime. Mick discovered that when he affixed a dome-shaped piece to the bottom of any structure, he could spin it. He got the idea to make a spinning top out of Legos.
King got involved. The boys began spending hours in their bedroom making, perfecting, and then naming spinning tops, until at last the tops emerged from the bedroom into the world of the larger apartment for their life purpose: to do battle.
The boys cleared off the now beat-up train table to make an arena. Each boy chose a top he had made, then the two boys did a countdown backward from three and began spinning the tops toward each other on “one.”
We all watched the collisions; whichever top survived the clash more intact was the winner.
The tops were breathtaking, with fantastic names: Whirlwind Ravener, Knife Hurricane, Civil War.
I began photographing them, but I am not a patient photographer. Frank got involved. He set the tops on nice paper, positioned them in good light, and photographed them with our most powerful and obedient camera. Whenever a new top materialized, Frank and I would sit there and admire it, proud grandparents.
Rockslide Megafortress
Eye of the Sun
Police Brutality
American Wind
Planet
Knife HurricaneFRANK L. SNIDER
“Look at that beast,” Frank would say with pleasure about a delicately wobbling plastic rectangle.
I watched my sons work with the structure, care, and feeding of these snarling, whirling demons. I was awestruck. Here we all were, in an apartment in the shadow of Times Square, cut off from any grass, in a box with all the windows closed, in winter, with forced heat, and yet, in these plastic pieces, the spiraling power that is life came
in and was fighting for recognition, for reverence—here, on our old train table.
It was not real life, of course, in that Red-and-Black Catastrophe whirling was not a real catastrophe; it was art. But that’s what is fantastic about art. It is tricky, alive and not, a balancing act.
| 5 |
We are trying to move closer to the boys’ schools so we don’t have to do this back-and-forth on the train all the time anymore, so we can all walk to school together.
Moving is a huge job; I am depressed. I have been looking at spaces for months. Everything is so small and costs so much. Walls are painted gold to show you that they are valuable. Homes are like walk-in safes. I want to see a home that has not been decorated with the underlying idea of placing expensive objects like stars in a constellation that is ever fixed and means something supposedly really important. I want to see a home that is not, itself, dead. I want to see a home that acknowledges life and death.
This week I went to another apartment appointment. I have long ago stopped looking at apartments with my broker because I can’t be bothered to call him up all the time. The apartment is being sold as is, the seller’s broker, whom I meet there, says. I am not sure what that means until we get upstairs and I see the place is an empty wreck.
“Why is it like this?” I ask.
He explains that it is a rent-stabilized apartment, which in New York City means that the people who live there usually do not move out until they die. The old tenant who had been there for years finally moved out, he says.
Suddenly, he says, “I remember you. You’ve been to this building before. You saw the apartment across the hall, the mirror apartment.”
We go over the details; he is right. I was here nine months ago and I forgot about it.
I’m ready to move this time, I tell him.
9
The Structures Tremble
| 1 |
We have a piece designed by Sottsass. It’s from 1979, and it’s called The Structures Tremble. It’s a table that’s forty-five inches high with a twenty-inch-square glass top. It’s not really good for anything except holding a single object, an object you want to display and adore.
The table itself consists of a square, white laminate base upon which four machinery-like silver cylinders sit. From each silver cylinder, an enameled metal leg, each in a different Easter-egg color—pale blue, yellow, pink, and green—oscillates up and outward, “trembling.”
The Structures Tremble, Ettore Sottsass, 1979© 2014 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/ADAGP, PARIS; PHOTOGRAPH BY K. HATT
The net effect is of a box upon which someone has placed four cheerfully exploding batteries, and on top of the explosion, your object magically floats.
You could put a dirty diaper on that table and it would look fantastic, like it had blown in from the sea and was standing there on a half shell, surrounded by cherubs and combing its luxurious long hair. Everything about an object is more interesting when it is placed on that table; you believe it is something miraculous, something to be worshipped.
Whether the idea behind the design of the table was tongue-in-cheek or not is hard to say. It’s a table that is simultaneously terrified and defiant. It is a table that is doing its table work as it naughtily mimics or honestly quakes in fear of the earthquake that, in one fell swoop, will one day destroy every single glass-topped table that now stands.
| 2 |
All objects are broken, because they need us.
All people are broken, in their need for one another.
We are all trembling, people and objects, for one another, all the time.
| 3 |
I wipe Katie’s bottom. She has had a fever the last couple of days, and has diarrhea.
She is on her back, looking up at me, poop everywhere.
I love you, she says.
| 4 |
What makes us savage or not is not the tools we pick up and hold in our hands.
What makes us savage or not is not the astonishing objects we devise, and clutch, and look into, and stroke, as if we were at long last finding ourselves there, like Narcissus gazing at the lake.
What makes us savage or not is whether we have the ability to love one another, and have compassion for one another, in light of the fact that we are broken.
What makes us savage or not is the recognition that a girl who comes into the world and stays for less than two days is human; that what joyfully fucked to conceive her was human; that what labored to help her arrive was human; that what prepared her body for cremation was human; that what grieved immeasurably was human and cannot be thrown away.
| 5 |
I can’t believe you are moving, Yelena e-mails me when I tell her the news. Your apartment seems so much a part of you.
I haven’t yet seen the new apartment Yelena lives in, the home she moved into after she divorced R. I do know it’s near Hanegi Playpark. They can smell the playpark smoke from her house, she told me.
I asked her how the playground was faring after the earthquake.
The Savage Park rocks, she wrote. We are there almost every weekend.
Resources
| SOURCES |
Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Caldwell, Lesley, ed. The Elusive Child. London: H. Karnac Books Ltd., 2002.
Chudacoff, Howard P. Children at Play: An American History. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Cranz, Galen. The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982.
Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design: Reflections of a Master Game Designer. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.
Dattner, Richard. Design for Play. New York: Van Nostrand–Reinhold, 1969.
Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Hewes, Jeremy Joan. Build Your Own Playground! A Sourcebook of Play Sculptures, Designs, and Concepts from the Work of Jay Beckwith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950.
Ruskin, John. On Art and Life. 1853–1859. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Solomon, Susan. American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2005.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge, 1971.
| SOME PLAY RESOURCES OF NOTE |
International Play Association: http://ipaworld.org; http://ipausa.org
Playpark Setagaya: NPO organization overseeing the adventure playparks in Tokyo; www.playpark.jp/info_pp/setagaya.html (in Japanese)
Berkeley Adventure Playground: www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/adventureplayground/
Imagination Playground: www.imaginationplayground.com
Wayfinder Experience: www.wayfinderexperience.com
American Academy of Pediatrics, release on the need for free play, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/119/1/182.full.pdf
Alliance for Childhood: www.allianceforchildhood.org
Pop-Up Adventure playgrounds: http://popupadventureplaygrounds.wordpress.com
Adventure Playgrounds: http://adventureplaygrounds.hampshire.edu/history.html
Cas Holman: www.casholman.com
Toni Pizza: www.tonithepizza.com
ScienceDaily, on the importance of free play: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090415102211.htm
Ithaca Children’s Garden: http://ithacachildrensgarden.org
Kaboom: Play Matters! http://kaboom.org
Acknowledgments
Thank you:
To Yelena, Chuck, Gen, and Aevi; to Noriko, Haruki, and their new baby girl
, Iraho; to R; to Philippe Petit and Kathy O’Donnell; to Bill Burke; to Hitoshi Shimamura; to Ossan; to Dr. Harry Engel; to Cas Holman; to Marc Hacker; to Koji Takiguchi; to Kevin Hatt; to Sottsass Associati; to Andrew Decker; to Gene Nakazato and Yurie Takeuchi.
Savage Park : A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die (9780544303294) Page 9
