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December 21, 2007
For kids
At the Andy Warhol exhibition in Edinburgh this summer thousands of visitors paid £8 each to contemplate images that deliberately - and very successfully, to judge by the visitors' faces - induced a profound boredom. (I was at least getting paid to be bored, as a warder.) However, one room that drew people like a magnet, partly because of the odd, violent-sounding noises emanating from it, had an atmosphere all of its own. It was occupied by one piece, an installation called 'Silver Clouds', which consisted of large, pillow-shaped, silver-foil balloons filled with a certain proportion of helium so that they floated at various heights, some clustered up at the ceiling like a kind of abstract heavenly host, others gracefully descending to the floor, unless intercepted by the visitors, who were invited by a notice at the entrance to the room to "interact gently with the exhibit". So the piece provided an interesting occasion for people-watching, specifically kid-watching, since the room seemed to transform all visitors into kids, whatever their actual age. The real kids had a great time playing volleypillow or pillowfights or, in the case of one four-year-old psychopath, systematically punching or kicking the living daylights out of every pillow within reach, while his dad stood by with some friends trying to conceal his embarrassment beneath a grin of arty sophistication. The pretend kids joined in a bit too and admired the general scene, no doubt murmuring to each other approvingly about the "paradoxical innocence of the slightly tacky transcendance evoked by the artist while surreptitiously conveying today's commercialisation of all values, of which Warhol of course was so hyper-aware", or words to that effect. At any rate the adults finally left the room, dragging their reluctant offspring after them, with the facial expression of apathy temporarily replaced by a knowing smile. Fun and boredom, after all, are two sides of the same coin.
But another vignette from that room that has stayed with me was simply of a one-year-old boy, sitting by himself in the middle of the floor, gazing utterly transfixed at the shininess wafting and bouncing around him, and his facial expression was one of the most unadulterated joy - he was beholding the glory, all right. Well, if an artist can create something that provides a one-year-old with an experience like that, they must be doing something right... However, I was the warder, I was on duty, so it wasn't appropriate for me to join in the fun - I stood at the entrance and watched.
'Christmas is for kids', they say - and consumerism doth make children of us all. Christmas, as a kind of heightened snapshot of society and its values, has been reminding me of that room of silver-foil clouds. It's a room we seem to have to visit once a year, in which a sort of collective dream is being played out. And of course the thing to do is to abandon the critical faculty and join in the game. Come on in! To be is to be involved! If you give the impression that you're not that keen on joining in because you're more interested in something else, you'll risk being called stuck-up or sad or mean, or just about any other social insult you could name, since perhaps the ultimate crime against society is 'not feeling like joining in.'
If Christmas is for kids, maybe I'd enjoy it more if only I could become like a little child and sit down in the middle of it and go 'Wow!' But what happens if what you really feel like doing is "putting away childish things" and thinking about what growing up might mean? Is that still allowed?
Posted by Andrew at December 21, 2007 03:50 PM