ABSTRACT
A growing number of the artists with whom they were working came from a performance rather than a visual arts background, drama students rather than art students, and these performers began increasingly to shape the group’s aesthetic practices. Many artists besides Martin Goodrich, Jim Ives and Barbara Wheeler-Early contributed to the Fair, a number of whom, such as the former academic and French scholar Michael Hecht, would go on to work with Free Form later. A committee, consisting of children, parents and artists, was set up and made decisions as to how the playground was to be run and policed. The Free Form Project Centre was seen as a way of eliciting from the ‘community’ specific problems, to which the artists’ expertise could provide solutions. A passage in Gramsci’s prison notebooks in which he talks about what a new progressive literature would look like resonates with the aspirations of the artists:.
