Banal Series #10 Abandoned Playground Equipment

Old playground equipment stands as decaying monuments to youth: reclaimed by tufts of grass and volunteers of weeds and yearning vines, as the flecking paint on tubular steel puckers to ragged brown lesions. A former slide mangled and warped to a twisted sheet. A see saw marred to a rotten plank, frozen and motionless.

Discarded or unused playground equipment strikes deep chords in the observer. A mature observer sees these rusted shells and hulls of swing set or slide as symbolic of a lost childhood: halcyon times of potential and promise: days filled with unbridled wonder; those pieces of equipment a broad canvas. Analogous to what Thomas Aquinas referred to as “Physical Evil,” these abandoned structures remain as bold referents to a former actual: an effigy to what once was.

A child observer, perhaps more astutely, may only see the starkly pragmatic. Rusted chains and bars are dangerous and forbidden, and ultimately useless. Sadness felt comes from an immediate lack of use value. Any vicarious sadness is contextualized opaquely; the recounted lost youth of a parent or a grandparent – murky tales of times gone by – romanticized by just such an oxidized ruin.