Children's Drawings in an adult world

A detail from an old school table that had been transported to the Palais de Tokyo

I was in Paris last week and amongst many cultural venues visited the Palais de Tokyo, which was hosting the exhibition, 'Another Banana Day for the Perfect Fish', an exhibition that was exploring various artists' reactions to the theme of Childhood. 

Petrit Halilaj had reconstructed an old schoolroom, sourcing desks that still had children's graffiti etched into their surfaces, he then mixed the schoolroom layout with large scale renderings of children drawings that were made in metal rod. 

Detail of Petrit Halilaj's installation

As you can see from the image above Petrit Halilaj has taken tracings of children's drawings and has had them enlarged and made up into images that cut into the space in a very disjointed and challenging manner. It is as if giant child was scribbling over everything using one of those new 3D pens. 

Petrit Halilaj

Petrit Halilaj: detail from a school desk in the installation

This was a response that I thought was OK, but one that didn't go beyond  a 'nice' idea. So why did I find the work a little thin? Perhaps it's because I had recently seen the work of Terry Hammill, another artist fascinated by the work of children, in this case his own grandchildren and Terry's response was much more profound as a meditation on how an adult imagination can be stimulated by a child's image. 

Solar Bomb: Terry Hammill

Sope and Water: Terry Hammill

I was privileged to see the original drawings that Terry worked from and he has realised his grandson's drawings in a way that is loving and caring, the work being very much about the tight bond that can exist between generations, a much more complex and profound idea than the idea of disjuncture that comes through in Halilaj's work. In Hammill's case what we see is one person with a very sophisticated understanding of drawing and sculptural form, willing to invest time and interest in the drawings of someone fresh to image making and not worried or unaware of drawing's ability to be both art and simply a communication tool. Both sets of work are of course humorous ideas and humour is a vital part of our relationship with children. Perhaps it is in the fresh unexpected way that children return to ideas about the world that we find both new invention and humour, and in seeing this we refresh our own often jaded senses. 

Picasso famously stated, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up". However what we read as 'originality' or 'authenticity' in child's art can simply be a mistaken way of looking at the work of young people who are simply trying to communicate. I can remember my own children's drawings and I enjoyed looking at them, but I was also aware that the drawings were part of a whole spectrum of ways that they as learning young mammals were developing communication skills. 

Children's art has been categorised and explored as to its ability to act as an indicator for things such as a child's levels of cognitive or psychological development and several theorists have attempted to classify children's art in terms of its diagnostic value rather than insights into the world. This is something I'm very wary of and would rather just enjoy the way that a child can dive directly into a visual problem and solve it by drawing. However several artists have learnt much from exploring the way that children can draw and if you want to look at good examples the most well known collection of children's drawings is that of Rhoda Kellogg. 

Rhoda Kellogg is well known for her studies and collection of children's art and her books are an excellent introduction to the way that children's art has now been categorised and its various tropes identified and highlighted as to what they might represent. The archive is itself now used as a platform from which artists may interact or respond to what they find there, for instance the artist Brian Belott recently visited Kellog's archive of children's art, and used what he found to develop an exhibition and had this to say about what he was interested in, “... the fact is that what you’re seeing here is a collaboration between a teacher-philosopher and a two-year-old.” Belott is one of those artists that love collecting things and his interest is I would suggest as much about Kellogg's urge to collect as her particular focus of children. 

Many artists – Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Miró and Dubuffet – had sizeable collections of artwork by children. They responded to children’s pictures as though they offered a way to break through to fresh or authentic ways of seeing the world. One of the strangest but perhaps revealing moments associated with this need to emulate the 'un-control' of children's drawings was when Jean-Michel Basquiat paid an eight-year-old twenty dollars a day to paint motifs such as a rocket-like Empire State Building into Basquiat's own images, which had themselves benefitted from an association with a certain 'outsider' feel. Basquiat's work is now of course read as 'authentic', but at the time I wonder what was really going on in his mind? Did he realise he was being used for his lack of sophistication and that the more he was involved in the art world the more sophisticated he was becoming and an artist that was too knowing, would no longer be flavour of the month. As it was he died young enough for the mythology surrounding his life and work not to have become tarnished. 

                      Jean-Michel Basquiat: Revised undiscovered genius of the Mississippi Delta: 

1983

Jasper Lack, the boy employed by Basquiat came up with the hook and line motif in the painting above. Dubuffet in his 'Portrait of Fautrier' below, on the one hand uses a childlike simplicity but in his drawing of a cigarette and some of the facial details gives away his adult sophistication. 

Dubuffet: Portrait de Fautrier, 1947

I think it is very difficult to use both outsider art and children's art as sources for your own work, not unless you are prepared to take the imagery on a journey back through an adult world. Children's art represents an idea of an art untouched by the too knowing world of adulthood, but as adults we need to take on the responsibility of being adults and therefore always remain aware that we are bringing something of ourselves to the event. There can be a directness and straightforwardness about certain types of art that are very attractive, but beware of mistaking the un-control of youth for a genuine poetic sensibility. 

      

                          

See also:

Disney and art