the child

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
there is this german radio show i sometimes listen to and they always treat a specific subject and discuss this with children. they go on air and are interviewed. the other day the question was "what is the difference between animals and humans" and the little kid said "humans wear sunglasses and animals don't". it's just a little example of how brilliant children can be. i want to know, what role does the child play in art? is it true that we lose a certain talent and ability to see and perceive the world at one point? is this culturally? is this biologic? what examples of art can you come up with when thinking of the child? some quotes to start with:

version said:

I like the way stuff like graffiti re purposes these places, reminds me of skating. It completely changes how you view the environment, I still see stairs, ledges, banks and so on in terms how you'd skate it. You often get people skating sewage pipes, reservoirs and stuff too.

rimbaud said:

Man of ordinary constitution, wasn't the flesh a fruit hung in the orchard, O childhood days! the body a treasure to squander; O to love, the peril or the power of Psyche? The earth had slopes fertile in princes and artists, and lineage and race pushed us to crimes and mournings: the world your fortune and your peril.

edward j. ahearn said:

Such ambitious and ambiguous poetry, extraordinary in itself, is on the evidence of Rimbaud and the others a culmination of the poetic fidelity to childhood. The tradition, from Wordsworth to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and beyond, sees poetry as outgrowth, persistence, preservation of the child’s vivid perceptions, which are at once sensuously more acute and more liberated from the limits of sense than adult vision. Thus the great poet of nature, Wordsworth, ultimately conceives of the mind as sublimely superior to the world of sense, with the deepest experiences of childhood opening onto a celestial radiance and a mysterious abyss beyond the solidity of the normal world. Hugo’s poem on Palestrina depicts the child as seeing through sense to the spiritual, and Blake’s apocalyptic imagination glimpses a world of transcendent energy. Even Baudelaire, oppressed by the weight of time and the sordid burden of human existence, appalled in “Le Voyage” by the submission of the child to the immortal ennui of life, nonetheless stresses in the child (and artist) the tendency to the spiritual, immaterial, abstract, imaginative — in sum, the revolt against nature and the real.

picasso said:

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

raoul vaneigem said:

Economic necessity and play don't mix. Financial transactions are deadly serious: you don't fool around with money. The elements of play contained within feudal economy were gradually squeezed out by the rationality of money exchanges. Playing with exchange means to barter products without worrying too much about strictly standardised equivalents. But from the moment that capitalism forced its commercial relationships on the world, fantasy was forbidden; and the dictatorship of commodities today shows clearly that it intends to enforce these relationships everywhere, at every level of life.

The pastoral relationships of country life in the high Middle Ages tempered the purely economic necessities of feudalism with a sort of freedom; play often took the upper hand even in menial tasks, in the dispensing of justice, in the settling of debts. By throwing the whole of everyday life onto the battlefield of production and consumption, capitalism crushes the urge to play while at the same time trying to harness it as a source of profit. So, over the last few decades, we have seen the attraction of the unknown turned into mass-tourism, adventure turned into scientific expeditions and the great game of war turned into strategic operations. Taste for change now rests content with a change of taste...

Contemporary society has banned all real play. It. has been turned into something only children do. And today children themselves are getting more and more pacifying gadget-type toys rammed down their throats. The adult is only allowed falsified and recuperated games: competitions, T.V. sport, elections, gambling... Yet at the same time it's obvious that this kind of rubbish can never satisfy anything as strong as people's desire to play - especially today when game-playing could flourish as never before in history.

The sacred knows how to cope with the profane and deconsecrated game: witness the irreverent and obscene carvings in cathedrals. Without concealing them, the Church embraced cynical laughter, biting fantasy and nihilistic scorn. Under its mantle the demonic game was safe. Bourgeois power, on the contrary, puts play in quarantine, isolates it in a special ward, as if it wanted to stop it infecting other human activities. Art is this privileged and despised area set apart from commerce. And it will stay that way until economic imperialism refits it in its turn as a spiritual supermarket. Then, hunted down everywhere, play will burst out everywhere.

It was in fact from art that play broke free. The eruption was called Dada. "The dadaist events awoke the primitive-irrational play instinct which had been held down an the audience", said Hugo Ball. On the fatal slope of plague and mockery Art dragged down in its fall the whole edifice which the Spirit of Seriousness had built to the greater glory of the bourgeoisie. So that today the expression on the face of someone playing is the expression on the face of a rebel. Henceforward, the total game and the revolution of everyday life are one.

The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society which banished it. At the same time it is setting up a new type of society, one based on real participation. It is impossible to foresee the details of such, a society - a society in which play is completely unrestricted - but one could expect to see the following characteristics:

- rejection of all leaders and all hierarchies;

- rejection of self-sacrifice;

- rejection of roles;

- freedom of genuine self-realisation;

- utter honesty.
 

luka

Well-known member
I can't remember what the world looked like when I was a child. The assumption is it's more immediate. Language doesn't get in the way. Preconceptions and expectations don't form a buffer between you and reality. It's intense, squirming, vibrant.

Of course, children can't make art because they're too stupid.
 

version

Well-known member
I guess the main thing is the further back you go, the fewer connections there are between things and there's a flattening with regard to the value of them. The distinction between a ten and a twenty pound note is lost on a child but an adult obviously knows one's more valuable than the other and an adult is also aware of what it's for whereas a child may try to eat it, wear it or do any number of things with it.

It's the lack of well-worn connections and associations that allows for that sort of creativity. If you don't yet know the rules of the game then you're unlikely to play it like everyone else.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
The interesting thing is when you have a kid and they get a bit independent enough to let you know their wishes, they expose the way in which we've learnt to do things. Our conventions. For my daughter this morning, there's no reason why she couldn't have two breakfasts. Stupid not to. This evening there's no reason why should couldn't put two balloons in her bed to keep her company as she went to sleep. Why not?

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DannyL

Wild Horses
I can't remember what the world looked like when I was a child. The assumption is it's more immediate. Language doesn't get in the way. Preconceptions and expectations don't form a buffer between you and reality. It's intense, squirming, vibrant.

Of course, children can't make art because they're too stupid.

I can kinda remember when I learnt to think in language. Well what I actually remember is contrasting this to an earlier mode which seemed to be more about feeling. was more about big swathes of feeling sweeping you up, like massive splashes of colour.
 

version

Well-known member
I struggle with memories of my childhood. I can remember plenty of stuff, but I have no clue as to when exactly that stuff happened. I remember almost eating a snail in the garden and being told off but I can't remember whether that happened before or after we got a dog.

The other one I struggle with is whether I actually remember something or whether I've just extrapolated from a family photo from back in the day.

I definitely can't remember what the world looked like as a child. That's been lost.
 

Lichen

Well-known member
I can't remember what the world looked like when I was a child. The assumption is it's more immediate. Language doesn't get in the way. Preconceptions and expectations don't form a buffer between you and reality. It's intense, squirming, vibrant.

My recollection of childhood is of a succession of unclassifiable feelings, often linked to places, but also seasons.
 

version

Well-known member
Is the childlike state of having no associations so anything can be connected to anything more or less what D&G are on about re: rhizomes? It seems like the same thing. Likewise tripping where a chair or wallpaper can become as fascinating as a painting or film.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
Is the childlike state of having no associations so anything can be connected to anything more or less what D&G are on about re: rhizomes? It seems like the same thing. Likewise tripping where a chair or wallpaper can become as fascinating as a painting or film.

was having the same association and sounds exactly what luka said:

The assumption is it's more immediate. Language doesn't get in the way. Preconceptions and expectations don't form a buffer between you and reality. It's intense, squirming, vibrant.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
This article describes a study of bones undertaken by 5-year-old children in a bilingual school in Mexico City. The article discusses the process and shows the results achieved by the children during the three phases of the project through photographs and other documentation of the children's work. The article concludes with reflections by the author and parents.
http://ecrp.illinois.edu/v5n1/kogan.html

kogan-06.jpg

absolutely brilliant how this kid wrote the words on the left site in mirror to those of the right site. writing M R A and A R M.

kogan-12.jpg

Some children thought that what is inside our bones changes as we grow: "A girl has rocks inside her bones because she is 2 years old. The boy has plastic inside his bones because he is 5 years old. The boy has sticks inside his bones because he is 11 years old."
 
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other_life

bioconfused

picture of adam qadmon, naked.

i get too easily frustrated too often w the kids i've taken on, but when we're all in that play-state things are just golden. flowing. "game for anything".

i really have to learn how to chill out or else i'm just another loud voice, i escalate things.

trick or treating last night was a ball. stupid interesting to have the perspectives switched, me at the back w the grownups, trying to keep the 3 of them and their 'cousin' (of sorts) all together as a group. was entertaining the thought of putting on makeup and going out into the night after everyone went to sleep (but by the last block circling to home i was just as tired as The Lady.)

the timing of this in my life is interesting too, bc i've spent the last 3 years trying to re-learn Play. letting things be ambiguous, letting the changes and connections happen. just yielding to raw LIFE.

this is a 'superpower' in development, exactly the kind of 'switch it on and off' thing. i still haven't got a great grasp on it, but having kiddos is helping immensely.

i love showing them how to play with words like a magician/m'qubal. i described sigils as 'blowdarts made of language' to the middle kid during bedtime book reading, showed him and his brother how to make em.
 

version

Well-known member
“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”

-- Tarkovsky.

“My objective is to create my own world and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are. We have forgotten how to relate emotionally to art: we treat it like editors, searching in it for that which the artist has supposedly hidden. It is actually much simpler than that, otherwise art would have no meaning. You have to be a child—incidentally children understand my pictures very well, and I haven’t met a serious critic who could stand knee-high to those children. We think that art demands special knowledge; we demand some higher meaning from an author, but the work must act directly on our hearts or it has no meaning at all.”

-- Tarkovsky again.
 

other_life

bioconfused
commonalities here between tarkovsky quotes and feldman's quotes Against Art more generally i saw being thrown around.
the raw. the foraged. theophany of the WILD one as imposing, benevolent bio-form. mankind as still in a sort of adolescence.
what does 'forgetting what it was like to be a child' look like? when you were a child, were you aware grownups had forgotten/perplexed by the idea that they could?
is this 'forgetting' something we willfully do bc of not being able to integrate that rawness/being scared by it, not wanting to remember how immense the world was, or is it something those immense forces make us forget?
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
Onfim (Old Novgorodian: Онѳиме, romanized: Onfime; Russian: Онфим; also Anthemius of Novgorod) was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark[1] which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.[2] Onfim, who was most likely six or seven at the time, wrote in the East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect. Besides letters and syllables, he drew "battle scenes and drawings of himself and his teacher".[2]

Onfim.jpg


Onfim left seventeen known birch bark items. Twelve of those have illustrations, five only text. One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, with Onfim's name written next to him, stabbing someone on the ground with a lance, with scholars speculating that Onfim pictured himself as the knight. The writings are clearly learning exercises: Onfim practiced by writing out the alphabet, repeating syllables, and writing psalms—texts that were presumably familiar to him.[8] His writing includes phrases such as "Lord, help your servant Onfim" and fragments from Psalms 6:2 and 27:3.[9] Most of Onfim's writing consists of citations from the Book of Psalms.[10]

1920px-Bb199.gif



Onfim's illustrations include pictures of knights, horses, arrows, and slain enemies. One image, "a portrait of himself, disguised as a fantastic animal",[11] is found on item 199 (pictured above; it was originally the bottom of a basket made of birch bark), which contains a picture of a beast with a long neck, pointy ears, and a curly tail. The beast either has an arrow with feathers in its mouth or is spewing fire; one of the accompanying texts (the one below the box) says "I am a wild beast" (the text in the box says "Greetings from Onfim to Danilo", likely a friend or classmate of Onfim).[12] The number of fingers on the pictured people's hands varies from three to eight; Onfim had yet to learn how to count.[13]

The rows of five letters each on the other side of 199 are an alphabet exercise.[14] On item 205 (not pictured in this article), Onfim wrote the Cyrillic alphabet and added "On[f]", for his name, in the middle; below that alphabet is what some researchers see as a boat with oars.[15] Item 206 contains alphabetic exercises and "'portraits' of little Onfim and his friends".[16]

%D0%9E%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BC_%28200%29.gif

Bb206.gif
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
One word - nappies. Not nappynoonoo time, full on muck spreaders. I’ve raised dogs with more potty sense

You can see childhood enculturation in Mesolithic child burials from Denmark, 6500BC ish. Burials can tell you so much about how a society or societies placed themselves within their larger set of worldviews. You see tenderness with occasional traces of flowers encasing preserved burial stratification. With dogs too, ie gradations of personhood

Not directly recommending anyone read the below text (brain numbing dryness), more of what it reveals around how we prehistorically constructed childhood within that larger set of values which we call identity. A better archaeological case study of the ephemeral nature of childhood are preserved footprints


@yyaldrin



masses of tracks

 
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