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  • Childhood Undone: Four Contemporary Art Projects with Children
  • Krys Verrall (bio)

The girl who fixes the camera with an even gaze is about nine years old (see fig. 1). On the ribbed edge of her white hat, two appliqué tongues, the size and colour of pink erasers, sit askew above her brow. Colour saturates the screen. A deep red-orange flattens the picture plane behind her and frames her with two ample swaths. The contrast between her fuzzy hat and her pensive expression and almost reverent cradling of the object between her hands gives force to the way she looks out from the screen toward us. Midway between her throat and her raised hands, the word “Simone” appears in block letters. The word fades. A man’s voice off-screen says, “Action.”

The scene is from Bird Songs for Toronto and Afghanistan, which documents Canadian artist Bill Burns’s work with fourteen children over three months between 2007 and 2008 and is the video component of his two installation works, Bird Radio and the Eames Chair Lounge and Bird Radio for Afghanistan. Central to both installations are string- and hand-manipulated noisemakers, which the artist describes as “jerry-rigged bird calls” (Burns, Bird Songs). It is one of these bird calls that Simone holds. I begin with this scene from Bird Songs for two reasons. On the one hand, it introduces the kind of work on which my current research in child and youth contemporary cultures focuses: art projects realized through collaborations between young people and professional artists. On the other hand, it underscores the strengths and limitations of collaborative work with young people. One of the strengths of collaboratively produced intergenerational projects such as Bird Songs is that they provide an alternative to the conventional top-down model of child/youth and adult interaction. [End Page 87] That said, the limitations are real. Artists and their projects are shaped, enabled, and constrained by the same ideological, institutional, and embedded power relations that govern all cross-generational interactions. Allen Feldman’s point that “ideological structures . . . make children visible in institutional settings in a particular way” (287) is as applicable to the production, circulation, and reception of art as it is to his areas of study: education, medicine, and law. These strengths and limitations underscore the complex intergenerational dynamics at play between young people and adults in collaborative art projects and the value of research that helps to make these dynamics transparent.

The following article takes four art projects from visual arts, performance, and design as case studies in order to identify a number of key features for analyzing artistic texts produced by child/youth and adult artists. While the kinds of projects examined here have strategies particular to them, in my discussion I identify some of the strategies and characteristics they share. My findings have wider application both to child and youth studies and to community art, art education, and avant-garde studies. My discussion should not be taken as an attempt to represent an entire genre of art. I make no overarching claims for collaborative practices between professional artists and young people. Instead, my intention is to sketch some of the key elements activated in these projects. I argue that what is useful about these collaborative art projects is that their differently aged participants must negotiate across the culturally imposed boundary separating the spheres of childhood/youth from adulthood. In doing so, they reveal how age distinctions are constituted discursively, institutionally, and commercially in relation to an adult norm. At the same time, however, collaborative work shows another set of conditions and possibilities by fostering intercultural and intergenerational exchange. I conclude by reflecting on what the projects contribute to undoing hegemonic understandings about young people and their relationship to a common intergenerational culture, a culture shared between young people and adults.

Before beginning, let me make a brief note about terminology. In this essay, “young people” and “child/youth” often appear interchangeably and are rhetorical devices that allow me to talk in broad conceptual language about all young people who occupy non-adult spaces. When discussing particular art projects and specific young people, I use “child,” “teen,” or “youth...

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