Essay On Kaprow's The Education Of The Un-Artist

Introduction

For nearly two and a half years between 2008 and 2010, San Francisco, California was host to two parallel worlds. Simultaneous to the quotidian urbanity, a burgeoning venue for spatial and ludic interrogation intertwined itself with the city’s urban fabric. The evidence of this second world sprouted gradually: strange flyers on street corners advertising fantastical and unbelievable technologies, cryptic graffiti, and a pirate radio station that was only within range from the city’s Mission Dolores Park. In response, thousands of San Franciscans enlisted and engaged with this parallel realm over the course of its operation. These participants endeavoured on quests across the city in the name of Eva, a vagabond artist who had
disappeared while honing her abilities in a mystic power known as “divine nonchalance.”
Conceptualized and implemented by the Oakland, California-based design firm Nonchalance under the direction of lead designer Jeff Hull, The Games of Nonchalance was a city-wide participatory experience that promised to “provoke discovery through visceral experience and pervasive play” over the course of five acts and several special missions. While the description I provide above illustrates the place and themes of the experience, the sheer enormity of the project renders it perpetually truncated when described in text. Sections of the following dissertation have been allotted to describing Act I and Act V of The Games of Nonchalance, but like with many participatory artworks, writing semantically obscures the deeply experiential, spatial, and ludic foundations of the project; factors that otherwise remain lucid to the participants who engaged with them. Verbal description relates everything and nothing about experience.
Spencer McCall’s 2013 documentary entitled The Institute archives the potency and resonance of the experience with a handful of participants who devotedly followed nonchalance’s trail throughout its two-year run: one participant describes leading a spirited mock-protest through San Francisco’s Chinatown and Financial District; another describes her struggle with re-entry into the “real-world” when the project concluded in 2010; later, yet another bears a Games of Nonchalance-inspired tattoo towards McCall’s camera. From the populated message boards on the Alternate Reality Gaming website Unfiction to the still-active companion group, The Elsewhere Philatelic Society, the emotional and experiential effects of The Games of Nonchalance still linger with many of those who moved through it.
But is to experience also to know, is to apprehend physically also to comprehend cognitively?
Allan Kaprow writes in “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part II” that the reconstitution of “art” into “play” as “something the world can spend… play as currency” is essential to mobility and social change. As indicated by the title of his essay, Kaprow anchors play in education, in the acquisition and generation of knowledge by those who play. This would suggest that while Kaprow calls for play as global currency, the currency of play itself is knowledge: the ability to develop complex and flexible epistemic chains through novel ludic encounters. “Visceral experience” and “pervasive play” are Nonchalance’s canonized currencies as expressed in the firm’s mission statement, but knowledge as an integral component of play goes unidentified in that transaction. That begs another set of question: what kinds of knowledge emerged from the spatial and playful intersections of the Nonchalance experience? Participants trekked around San Francisco gathering clues to untangle Eva’s disappearance and the key to divine nonchalance, but did these clues have any real-world consequences beyond the narrative? What elevates participation like this from ludo-spatial experiences to ludo-spatial
epistemologies?
Over the next two chapters, I explore the epistemic potential of The Games of Nonchalance as a large-scale, long-form participatory artwork through its two main antecedents: space and play. In the strategic activation of space and play, the designers and participants of The Games of Nonchalance wove an experience-specific informational web, complete with characters, narrative, hierarchies, and a code of ethics, all orbiting around a ludo-spatial praxis. As I intend to argue throughout this dissertation, The Games of Nonchalance demonstrated an experimentally variable and unsentimental approach to its epistemological apparatus, which was deconstructed and undermined as much as it was affirmed and utilized. Within this fluctuating apparatus, space and play operated as overlapping, multivalent processes that resulted in an irregular and unsustained transformation of participatory information into participatory knowledge. Though both antecedents were developed complexly through varying states of repetition, absence or rupture, and heterotopia, a robust and integrated epistemology with tangible external consequences was left only partially realized.
Within this dissertation, the term “information” is used to describe organized data sets, such as characters or narrative sequences, while the term “knowledge” is used to describe curated and networked clusters of information whose application extends beyond its original context. While the information present in The Games of Nonchalance only circumstantially constituted knowledge, there was certainly an abundance of it. Over two and a half years, The Games of Nonchalance and its participants produced countless pieces of ephemera, digital archives, blogs, and images to document the equally numerous characters, plot points, fictional histories, and correspondences that embodied the experience. The narrative itself stages a familiar dichotomy: the unregulated corporate evil of the cultish Jejune Institute versus the grassroots idealism and civic good of the Elsewhere Public Works Agency (EPWA). The Jejune Institute, directed by the sinister Octavio Coleman Esquire, sought to commercialize and profit off “divine nonchalance,” a mysterious yet innate force denoting breezy luck and an effortless fluidity with which one moves through life. As evidenced by the Jejune Institute flyers that had been posted throughout the city, the organization perfected and marketed a range of outlandish technologies: personal force fields, an apparatus that made it possible for subjects to talk with dolphins, a dream-recording machine, etc.