Exposing the Children to Art

Posted at 3:30 PM, Thursday, April 24, 2008

With luck, we'll have rain today and throughout the weekend, and then it will turn colder and more autumn-like. I asked the kids yesterday how they wanted to spend the last sunny day for the next while and suggested we go to the beach. They said No! Nadav commented, "I'm starting to get sick of beaches." I guess that five-day run down the Great Ocean Road soured him on local sand. Even when they are reluctant to go, by the time we get to the beach the kids are usually elated. But I decided not to force it on them yesterday.

Yonatan declared that he wanted to go to an art gallery and see beautiful pictures. He may well have been influenced by the book we've been reading called "The Art Book for Children," which is a thoroughly charming kids' art appreciation book. At any rate, after a quick stop at the department store to buy grey slacks for the new school term, we walked up to North Terrace to spend ninety minutes at The Art Gallery of South Australia.

The kids whizzed through the galleries displaying earlier works and started showing just a bit of interest when we hit the Impressionists. But what really captured their attention was the contemporary art. Nadav looked at an enormous field of black paint framed with a narrow band of red and asked, "Why did they paint a picture of nothing?" He commented that several paintings must have been created by children, and shrugged off my assurance that all the pictures in the gallery were by adults. Both Yonatan and Nadav are very tactile beings, and they were extremely disappointed that they weren't allowed to touch anything, including the oh-so-touchable metal sculptures just at their eye level.

It was our great fortune to get to enjoy the exhibit The 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Handle with Care. The exhibition had received rave reviews in "The Australian," and although I'm unqualified to evaluate contemporary art, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The textures, variety, materials, and presentations were very compelling, and the kids kept finding things to capture their attention. Both boys were entranced with an installation entitled "Leave your shoes here," which had the sense and feel of a mosque and had been created by the Iranian-Australian artist Hossein Valamanesh. It was a room with niches in the wall, covered in a variety of oriental carpets, and dappled with long vertical cylinders that cast spots of light. My favorite was a piece called "Be-longing" by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan. It was a cozy room with a door and windows, formed entirely out of personal belongings. There were clothes of course, but also several home computers, kitchen appliances, a stereo, board games, stuffed animals, and hundreds of other items. I found the work particularly evocative, because it reminded me so powerfully of our own experience of trying to condense the possessions most significant to us down to 1000 cubic feet as we prepared for our move to Australia.

The boys behaved very nicely, and only once did a security guard need to chase one of them away from coming too close to one of the pieces of art. It was a lovely afternoon.