And the Chocolate Factory

Almost Warm and Fuzzy:
Contemporary Art and Childhood
at PS.1 Contemporary Art Center

Remember that part in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where all the children and their parents burst into a garden (of Eden) and everything is made of candy? It's all a glossy, technicolor dream fest until one child gets a little too out of control and greedy. Then the dangerous, punitive side of this enchanted forest comes out. It's rather like the idea of razor blades in Halloween candy -- you indulge your craven childhood desires too much, and you get cut.

The best pieces in the exhibit, "Almost Warm and Fuzzy", address this experience in childhood. The work here is saturated with the notion that early childhood, far from being all lambs, cotton clouds and warm, dry nappies, is a frenzy of fantasy, fear, anger and ecstasy.

Sandy Skoglund's installation, "A Shimmering Madness", approaches this childhood excess. She coated her life-size figures and foreground entirely with real, multi-colored, jelly beans. Moreover, the background to these two running, smiling figures (who happen to have their faces on backwards) is a wall covered with mechanically twitching butterflies. Skoglund's understanding of childhood seems to be that it is so full of wonder and joy that it becomes over exciting, almost terrifying in its intensity.

Kim Dingle's installation, "Pris", appears to be a refutation of all those soft-focus diaper ads with cooing, grinning babies. Popular culture almost fetishes the "softness" expected of children, and of little girls in particular. In a sly take on this expectation, Dingle placed two upright and wickedly frowning baby mannequins, dressed in perfectly sweet doll-like dresses, in a crib surrounded by broken and torn toys and food. The crib is shredded. The toddlers' hair rises like smoke, and is in fact made of metal wool. One doll has glasses on, which magnify her evil, knowing glare, and seem to imply that she's the one who really "sees" what's going on. Dingle's piece makes plain the anger and destructive desires toddlers must feel in their helplessness, and points out our own blindness in refusing to acknowledge this.

Much of the other work was fantastic (in both senses) as well. Another piece that really caught my eye was the absurd animal alphabet, made up of water colors of mutant animals. The animals often appeared to be made by breeding two opposite creatures; a giraffe and eagle, for example. These paintings tipped their hat to the bizarre and sometimes frightening imaginations of children, which often begin an idea with "What if?" and end with sleepless nights and nightmares.

The obsessive detail children put into their oh-so-serious "play" was also explored by several artists. A tiny, intricately detailed and feathered museum devoted to the Dodo was one such piece. This "museum" also touched on a theme rendered by several other artists -- the idea that in childhood, scale flucuates daily, as if all children are growing and shrinking Alices in Wonderland.
There were toddler booties the size of a small European car, and a chair whose seat could have made a king-sized bed at a table set for a child's tea party. And there was a tiny, tiny flea circus and clowns made out of lost teeth (so that's what the tooth fairy does with them).

This exhibit was so successfully evocative that I started remembering all sorts of bits from my own childhood. Plus, it made want to touch everything like a bad little girl. I managed to satisfy that nasty itch by just taking forbidden pictures of the exhibit(see above).

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