It’s a Mall World After All: "Re-Imagineering" the Disneyland Map.
By Joanna Neborsky
Disneyland opened in 1955, and the first map of the park was published three years later. It’s a giddy document of a new fantasia–Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland gleaming around Main Street, the park’s centerpiece and cri de coeur. Brooklyn-based artist Holly Tavel bought the 1958 souvenir on eBay (that newer fantasia) and found it to be a complicated bit of kitsch. The map might have served to orient visitors, but it also subtly controlled their movements.
Sociologists have written about the ways in which malls and museums direct their human traffic for maximum profit (exits hide in moribund corners; exhibits transubstantiate into gift shops). Disneyland famously perfected the psychological methods of commercial architecture by overwhelming the visitor’s sense of time and slyly dispersing its shops and restaurants. (Why might a person be inspired to buy grizzly bear shorts at Rushin’ River Outfitters, if not for the magic of "The Magic of Brother Bear" exerting itself nearby?) Where the blandly utilitarian map of a shopping mall won’t advertise its ingenuities of entrapment, the map of the Magic Kingdom sort of does: the place looks like a trap. It asks people to lose themselves in its pavilions of childhood fantasy and ersatz nostalgia. Lost people buy more.
Tavel grew up in Orlando, and she talks about Disneyland with the ambivalence of one who has lived in the shadow of the "ultimate escapist environment." She used the 1958 map as a prompt to interrogate the park’s weird "hyperreality" in an exhibit at the Psy.Geo.Conflux conference that gathered in New York this past May (she had helped to organize this summit of "psychogeographers" interested, like her, in the quirks and secrets of places). Alongside a mounted cut-out of the map, Tavel supplied Magic Markers, tape, a glue stick, an Exacto-knife, and a note inviting visitors to go to town. Over the course of the event’s four days, participants remade the theme park that is itself a remaking of "the cumulative truths," in the words of critic Ada Louise Huxtable, "of place and past." They vivisected the map with lines extending to the gallery floor; drew their own monsters to join the Disney stable; scratched out features and captions; and scrawled things like "the MAP is not the territory." While Disneyland studiously invokes a sentimental dream of youth, here was a more convincing image of childhood–anarchic creativity, an incuriosity about rules, the urge to draw on walls.
If the graffiti of "Re-Imagineering" saluted Dada more than Donald Duck, all the better to create a "jarring, alternate reality for parkgoers" which Tavel plans to export to Orlando. Though lack of funds have temporarily stalled the project, she hopes eventually to drop-lift reprints of the altered map in locations throughout Disneyworld. A tourist, finding this oddity stuffed among the gift shop memorabilia, might be led to question the pieties of the Disney myth. Or he may just be confused. Either way, Tavel’s charge that the park is artificial is an unworthy basis for critique–artificial things often improve on nature–but Disneyland’s regimen of fun is so lifeless and scripted that pranksterish campaigns such as hers are needed to teach the playground the better meaning of play.
