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Tate Modern's Turbine Hall: Is it becoming more about taking your kids out for a fun day than art?

The Danish trio Superflux on swings at Tate's Turbine Hall which has been turned into a kids' playground called 'One Two Three Swing!'
The Danish trio Superflux on swings at Tate's Turbine Hall which has been turned into a kids' playground called 'One Two Three Swing!'

Tate Modern's Turbine Hall has always been a good place for staging various kinds of children's games. What else would you use it for? It's too big, too cavernous, too draughty to be climate-controlled, so the idea that paintings could be displayed in it would be out of the question - even if they were twice the size of a good, overbearingly gloomy Anselm Kiefer, or one or another of those bad Julian Schnabels that you can see over at Frieze Masters this week.

Its floor slopes down, which means that sculptures would look very odd in it, slightly wonky and side-on, like a ship at the mercy of the waves. You can't take it all in at glance because there is a giant bridge flung across it half way down. It's also a fairly unattractive, rackety sort of space too, a place that looks as if it might just be on the way to somewhere else with much greater appeal – the galleries full of art in the Boiler Room, for example - so it cries out for a bit of shouting and screaming and leaping about. Perhaps then the best idea is is to mess about in it, work out wheezes that seem akin to childish play.

And that's exactly what's happening there at the moment. A trio of subversive Danish idealists collectively known as Superflex have installed an entire playpark in there, complete with 22-sets of swings with three seats, titled One Two Three Swing! No solo swings. No swings for loners or introverts. That's all part of the philosophy of the makers. No one should be alone on a swing. Swinging is all about joyously releasing our energies collectively. At least, that's what it says on the wall.

The huge stripy carpet down the long slope of the Turbine Hall complete with a silver ball that swings from side to side by Superflex
The huge stripy carpet down the long slope of the Turbine Hall complete with a silver ball that swings from side to side by Superflex

They've unfurled a huge, stripy carpet down the long slope - right up to the point where it levels out. Mums and dads love this – toddlers too. The two-year-old can fall down onto his backside all of a sudden without pain. Dad can lie on his back and contemplate the silver ball that swings from side to side above his head like a giant pendulum, whilst at the same time keeping one hand on the back wheel of the pushchair so that it doesn't run amock. There are only one or two swings just beyond where the the carpet ends. Most of them have been installed in the level space beyond the bridge that bisects the room.

A linked network of poles and supports of Superflux's playpark which has turned the Turbine Hall into a noisy mayhem for children of all ages
A linked network of poles and supports of Superflux's playpark which has turned the Turbine Hall into a noisy mayhem for children of all ages

It's noisy mayhem in there, for children of all ages. All the swings hang down from a linked network of poles and supports. The network continues beyond the building, we are told. It sweeps out into the city. The slow joyous creep of more and yet more swings. Soon officer workers will be swinging to the sound of Bow Bells. Where did this idea of linkage come from? Just to the side of the swings there's a small room called The Bank of Opportunity. In there you can see photographs of what helped to inspire all this linked-swing mania: an installation by Marcel Duchamp of 1962 called 16 Miles of String, proboscis monkeys forming a line as they jump from tree to tree, the Great Wall of China and how it ribbons along for hundreds of miles...

Carsten Holler famously turned the Turbine Hall into a giant amusement park for The Unilever Series 2006 (Tate Photography)
Carsten Holler famously turned the Turbine Hall into a giant amusement park for The Unilever Series 2006 (Tate Photography)

Back out in the Turbine Hall again, bellowing school kids, having flung down their bags and blazers, are kicking out with their legs, then drawing them back, urging themselves higher and higher. A couple of metres away, there's a tranquil nursery scene. A mum is sitting pretty, gently rocking between two tiny daughters. Everyone is smiling. An entire family skips past me. This is infantilism writ large.

Louise Bourgeois' 'Maman' (1999), a giant spider, was also installed at the Turbine Hall (Tate Photography)
Louise Bourgeois' 'Maman' (1999), a giant spider, was also installed at the Turbine Hall (Tate Photography)

But infantilism has been revelling in the Turbine Hall before because artists are children at heart, and when they are invited to do something in a space such as this one, which is almost the size of a football pitch and looks so skateboard-friendly, they let rip with their most ambitious childish dreams and nightmares. Remember Marsyas by Anish Kapoor, that crazy, double-headed, red trumpet, the biggest trumpet you've never heard parp in your life? How we roared with laughter at its ridiculous scale when it was installed here in 2002! It had barely the elbow room to breathe. The very first show in this space was every child's worst nightmare – a giant black spider by Louise Bourgeois, sited on the bridge overlooking us all. How many bad dreams did that induce? Louise Bourgeois said it was just a portrait of her mother after all, but it seemed more like a spider to me. Then we had the slide experience, courtesy of Carsten Holler, in 2007, when the Turbine Hall became an amusement park, and we all hurtled down those twisty silver chutes, heads spinning, disembodied, displaced. Crazy kids up to thrillingly crazy kid antics. Such infantile fun, and all in the name of art.

Anish Kapoor's 'Marsyas' was a giant trumpet installed in the Turbine Hall, as art of the Unilever Series 2002 (Tate Photography)
Anish Kapoor's 'Marsyas' was a giant trumpet installed in the Turbine Hall, as art of the Unilever Series 2002 (Tate Photography)

Isn't that what artists have generally been up to anyway though, harnessing the best impulses of the child, ever since the dawn of Romanticism, when Wordsworth declared in a great ode called 'Intimations of Immortality' that the child was father to the man, that it was the child who could unlock our best kept secrets of past and future? Once upon a time, children had been adults in miniature – look at any portrait from the seventeenth century. Then they came into their own. And artists especially have always loved that idea, that art is a form of play, that it is driven by childish impulses, childish daring, irrepressible childish energies. Picasso never stopped drawing upon the energies of the child within, proving again and again that his art-making was a species of uninhibited play. Dubuffet was the same – go over and look at his show at Pace Gallery in Burlington Gardens, all that frenzied, child-like cartooning in irrepressibly joyous primary colours. Even Grayson Perry hasn't been able to stop himself getting in on the act. When Claire first strutted the back porch back in the 1980s, she was a middle-aged Essex housewife. Now she wears bobby-soxes and loves her teddy. The younger we become, the better things get.

Superflex's 'One Two Three Swing! runs until 2 April at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall (www.tate.org.uk)