BANK HOLIDAY SPECIAL: Adult playground launched at Tate Modern

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12 April 2012

It is a child's playground, constructed for adults. This weekend Tate Modern is recreating its 1971 installation Bodyspacemotionthings, which was shut after four days because, newspapers reported, visitors "went bloody mad" and began "jumping and screaming" around the exhibit.

The re-creation opens to the public today but the Standard was granted a sneak preview to find out what caused all the delirium last time. The answer is simple. Perhaps one should be installed in every park to reintroduce stressed adults to the elemental pleasures of balancing, sliding, climbing, swinging, and going up and down planks of wood.

Today's gallery staff underwent training to prevent a repeat of the scenes that shocked Seventies Britain. The installation is by American artist Robert Morris. It has been remade using plywood, rubber and steel to meet modern safety standards, rather than the original's unfinished materials. Initially hesitant visitors soon find their cares slipping away with the chance to climb a rope, push around a glass fibre ball or clamber through a sloping wooden tunnel.

More pictures: Tate Modern's giant playground

Above all, the installation demonstrates that while great art can provoke, stimulate and deal with the big questions of life, it can also bring out your inner child and put a smile on your face.

Curators are predicting a more sophisticated, if no less enthusiastic, response from audiences now accustomed to Carsten Höller's slides in the Turbine Hall. Curator Catherine Wood said: "It was an absolute shock when it was shown in 1971. In the Tate the public were used to seeing marble and bronze sculptures shown in a very traditional way. There was no frame of reference as to how you might interact. The kids were the best at doing it because they were used to playing in public playgrounds. It was the adults who went crazy."

Morris, now 78, has been advising on the re-creation which Ms Wood said seemed contemporary — and not at all easy. "It's quite demanding. You've got to take risks. I was quite good on the four-way seesaw but not very good on the climbing chimneys."

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