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
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