UPDATE: I couldn’t get any of the image links to work… :(. Go here to look at all the cool lego sets. http://www.lugnet.com/pause/

So Julie found met his fantastic article on Salon. Go read it. It’s fascinating. I’ll wait.

Ok, so wasn’t that good? I think both the teachers and the conservative columnist make very good points. The conservative columnist doesn’t delve quite as much as he should, but I’ll let that slide because his last sentence is such a doozy…

All structures will be standard sizes. At Hilltop Children’s Center, all imaginations will be a standard size as well: small.

Ouch! And yet very true. I lived the Lego Town experience growing up. In New Jersey we had a separate room in the basement that was dedicated to Lego. It was probably a 20’x10’ room with a nice hard rug that kept the Lego off the damp concrete, but didn’t cause it to fall over. We were allowed to build whatever we wanted as long as we didn’t “block the traffic pattern” as my Dad used to say. That meant we had to keep a 3 foot runner from door to door free of stray pieces. I have 2 older sisters and a younger sister. When my older sisters started collecting there was nothing but Lego town sets. Eventually a lego castle was added. Christine got this for Christmas one year. It was amazing. It had several knights. It had six baseplates that were hinged to open up the castle walls for play inside. It was quickly broken down for pieces. It is still a significant source of pieces in our lego collection. A collection that now spans over 3 full xerox paper boxes. The 6 green baseplates, and countless 1 and 2 stud lego pieces were quickly repurposed into the town. The entire town that had formerly had a red tinge (don’t know why. Lego just liked that color in sets up into that point), now took on a yellow tinge. The town grew with town homes, chalets, villas with outdoor fireplaces, a riding stable, hospital, fire station, airport, police stations, cargo ships, and trains . Man, looking back I’m realizing that we probably got 75% of the lego sets released in a given year.

I got my first lego space sets in 1984. They were 3 small sets. With sensors and probes that looked far too much like guns, they were immediately arrested by the town police if they ventured into town. They were relegated to exploring space. And by space we mean “the area outside of town”. Many fights broke out, and eventually order was restored, and the space “guns” were converted into telescopes on second floor balconies of palatial mansions.

My oldest sister stopped being as heavily invested in the lego town after we moved to Texas (probably a result of being in High School), my second oldest sister was not far behind. Around that time Lego introduced a second round of castle sets. I immediately moved to transform lego town into a medieval fiefdom. Weapons were clearly in play at this point, and the already strained relationship between my little sister and me reached the breaking point trying to decide who would get to play the infinitely cooler “Robin Hood” type characters, and who would be playing the King and his Knights. As my little sister lost interest the town became infested with pirates and their colonial overlords. What was interesting here, was that even as the play space became dominated by me, there was still ostracism. The learned behavior was still there, and the knights and thieves were banished from the pirate towns.

Growing up we always had a snobbery against people who mixed lego towns with their other toys. There were rules to be followed. And other kids were rarely invited to play in our lego town since it would have taken to long to get them up to speed on the laws of the land.

I completely agree with Drew in the article:

“Sometimes I like power and sometimes I don’t. I like to be in power because I feel free. Most people like to do it, you can tell people what to do and it feels good.”

I’ll be honest. I like power. For me sharing became a power situation. Sharing is essentially being the one in power and being “nice” enough to give your friends a turn playing with the toy. By sharing, your generosity inflates your feelings of self-worth. So I definitely learned the rules and structure of our capitalist society through Lego. And I find I still am that way. I’ve ascended quickly in the business world by “helping” people in my workplace. But the constant helper is motivated by the same things as the political cutthroat (money, power, less crap work). The methods are just different.

I didn’t give up on the system, I played within their rules. Kept the spaceships and castles outside of town, and eventually came to own the system. But my little sister gave up. And the same thing happened with our computer. I was often blamed for monopolizing the computer growing up. I’m almost certainly guilty of that. But even more of a problem was the fact that my sisters gave up. They found the process of asking me to get off the computer so they could use it, and then asking me for help on how things worked, to be too much. So they opted out of the system. I controlled that system, and it wasn’t worth it for them to try to find a place within it. The barrier was too high, and the pay out too low. They were used to being in control, and when confronted with a lack of control they just gave up.

But back to Arists being inherently capitalists. It was only after I had driven my sisters away from playing lego, that I began truly experimenting. At one point I built a 1/3 height self-portrait of myself. That was only possible because I was able to use all the pieces without negotiation. It would never have been feasible under the old systems (and who knows where it would have fit in the town). So I was able to create art because I was “rich”. It’s possible I would have been able to create art under the old town system, but that would have involved negotiation the patronage of one of my powerful older sisters. They probably would have asked me to tone it down to fit into the scale of the town. And they probably would have had ideas on color and placement as well.

We take a lot of pride in the fact that Loaded Gun Theory is self-sustaining. But it’s only self-sustaining because of large (relatively. at the time we were poor and just out of college) sums of cash the founding members put into the pot. So our art is a byproduct of the fruits of capitalism, and good accounting practices. Hardly a socialist utopia. And we still can’t get motivated to go look for patrons. Because it’s too hard. If you take city money you have to prove you’re providing benefit for the community. So you have to give classes, and get kids involved, and do plays with redeeming social messages. And who has time for that. We’re artists. Pursuing our own goals…

Yeah, I guess I’m pretty selfish. I find my actions are definitely those of a capitalist, and I’m not sure how my motivations could be otherwise. I think unfortunately, there are always people who are going to pursue power from those in power. Whether it be a socialist or capitalist system. In the case of the article, they’re painting it as a Utopia at the end, but I’m wondering if the new rules just caused different sections of the population to give up on the system. It seems as though in any system there are those in power, those who are trying to challenge those in power, and those who have just given up on the whole thing. Obviously we can give the disenfranchised the power, but then we’ll have another whole subset of the populating giving up. It’s harding building a Lego utopia.

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Comments

Julie

2007-04-04T21:24:21.000Z

That was quite a post. You can’t remember to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer, but you remember all the rules and inhabitants of your childhood lego town? Wow.

Tim (http://www.loadedguntheory.com/blog/director/listblog/tim.html)

2007-04-04T21:29:50.000Z

You don’t want to get me started. I was looking for pictures for this, and I realized I could remember almost every single one of the sets we owned. Plus I could remember individual houses and vehicles. Features of them, etc. We had a fascination with trapdoors and revolving walls for a while. I could even identify whether I had some of the sets based purely on remembering unique pieces that were in the sets and whether we owned them. So yes. I have far too much brain space caught up in this.

Travis (http://the-holmes.blogspot.com)

2007-04-05T03:24:00.000Z

I think Williams’s comment misses a major point. The exercises that these children went through between the time of Legotown’s destruction and the return of the Legos undoubtedly did more for their young imaginations than any amount of Legos could have done, not to mention their critical thinking skills, empathy, and emotional intelligence. I might have agreed with him if the teachers had simply yanked the Legos, redistributed them equally, and screeched “you kids play nice or no snack!” But that’s clearly not what happened. They engaged these kids in a pretty serious discussion that gives them a lot more credit as thinking learning individuals than somebody crying foul on liberal elitism and claiming it’s all just kids being kids. It’s interesting that they spent so much time discussing the nature of power. For myself, I don’t believe that power is strictly about control. True, that’s what we often think of when the word “power” is used, the ability to make others bend to our will. If we’re in control, then somebody else who’s not in control only gets something when we say so. In certain situations and in the hands of a wise person, this can be a good thing, but in many other cases, it obviously leads to exploitation and marginalization, and creates a paternalistic system that only further entrenches “the way things are.” Hence its often negative connotations. But there’s another more positive side to power as well, which I think this story illustrates quite nicely, that of being able to influence others in an empowering way. Teachers obviously have a measure of power in their classrooms, not as brutal overlords or anything, but simply as the ones whose role puts them in charge. The teachers in this case could have exercised their power by just shutting down Legoland once and for all, or by forcing the kids to share. But they didn’t. They took it a step further and used their influence to draw the kids into a critical examination of the system that had cropped up. They empowered the whole class to be a part of it, including those who had previously been marginalized. They empowered those who had been in charge of Legoland to examine their behavior, and those who had been left out to join back in. You’re almost certainly right about the fact that there will always be those in power and those under power. But let’s not forget that it’s always the second group who forces society to evolve and move forward and question the way things are. And I think there’s another group as well, which are those who are not interested in having any more power than is required to maintain their own autonomy. I’m guessing this is the group where most artists fall, that is, until the first group encroaches upon them.