12/09/2007 CULTURE VULTURE: CHILD’S PLAY
Martha Cooper’s Street Play
The Vulture sits perched atop the Gherkin, torpid and full, digesting the exquisite morsels he has recently purloined from some cultural cadaver. Ruminating as he does this, he concludes that now is the ideal time to tell you about a worldwide network of remarkable artists, who combine arts brut and povera, Duchamps’ ready-mades and a Surrealist re-signification of objects and acts. They are, of course, the Children.
And he really does mean kids, wee bairns, the little darlings. See, the sight of children at play is a remarkable one. Outside the window of the office where the Vulture dictates this piece to his assistant, five children stand atop a beat-up Nissan and, in a sublime piece of performance art, take turns to jump on it in a Mexican wave of derision towards the capitalist model of consumption and obsoletion. When quizzed about their inspiration for this protest piece (much better than Wallinger’s State Britain), these proto-Zapatistas simply stopped, climbed down, and, prior to dispersing, advised the Vulture: “Fuck off, gayer”. What wisdom!
The one problem with observing these great artists’ works is that the presence of an adult shits on the whole reason for it  existing and makes it stop. Adult-accompanied, a child is a lazy little fuck seeking only to freeload your evermore-depleted reserves of fun and money whilst taking every opportunity to be obstinate. Alone, it’s different: what seems like a caustic verbal assault on the Vulture’s sexuality was in fact a plea to protect their precious creative process. The transgression of rules and common sense which defines child’s play exists only without adults, so rarely do we glimpse it. Martha Cooper’s Eastpak exhibition Street Play is a singular peek into this unfathomable creative world.
In 1977, Cooper used up film stock left over from work for the New York Times by driving around the impoverished, derelict Alphabet City on the Lower East Side, just “looking for creative things kids were doing when their parents weren’t watching”. The Vutlure opines that the resulting collection is an illuminating chronicle of the ephemeral, perpetual novelty defining children’s art. Their act of play leaves no record; it is judged purely on its ability to sustain entertainment (like drunken conversations with tramps). The photos should already be a creative bible – like Subway Art, her legendary chronicle of early 80s graffiti. So why is this vital document only reaching us now?
“B ecause no one wanted to publish it. [The photos] have acquired a vintage patina over the years. When they were first taken I think they were just too ordinary.” The years of illumination we’ve missed out on! “My idea of documenting kids being creative grew into documenting hip hop. I don’t consider myself a hip hop photographer – the term didn’t exist. Graffiti is very much connected, because of that sense of play.” These children and their ilk - bored, poor and probably higher than the Vulture has ever been - would create the zeitgeist of the decadent end to the millenium. Do you see already, now, the brilliance of these creatures and what it can lead to?
While these kids might have been wearing enough gold and surrounded by enough whores to corrupt a Pope in their imagination, we’ll settle for what we can see. The Vulture likes the sweet-natured series involving kids setting up a pretend bar using rusting cans, before staggering around pretending to be drunk. Another series sees boys “cooking” leaves in a club house, followed by the house collapsed into rubbish a day later.
 In a fit of pretension which might well see him ejected from real life, the Vulture associates the drunk’s tin cans with a Warhol-turned-binman pop art, and indicates parallels with the post-war Italian art povera movement, where natural objects become buildings and furniture. The images serve as a how-to for artists everywhere. “I’m proud of those pictures because they’re intimate – how many pictures have been taken inside a children’s playhouse?” The photos are, in a way, the kids’ own – as if they used this adult as a tool for their art. I wouldn’t put it past them; children are evil as well as genius, as we all know.
Cooper describes herself as an ethnographer: “my form of documentary photography is a very literal, specific sort of historic preservation.” With Street Play, she’s documented the child’s world of inspired artistic genius – something, perhaps, for Tracy Emin to learn from before she makes any more flimsy shit, forcing the Vulture to read her precious explanations in ALL NEWSPAPERS FOR A MONTH - without realising that what she’s done is in fact merely a CHARLATAN’S IMPERSONATION OF ART. Cooper worries that “you’re not gonna find kids roaming Manhattan using raw materials the way they used to.” About that, she’s wrong – children are born artists.
To win a copy of Street Play, turn to Lucky Buggers, page 97
www.e-eastpak.com
Read (Imperative)!
See through the eyes of a child.
The Vulture forthwith suggests some themed reading matter. Writers, as adults, look hazily back on youth in the hope they might find how to recapture the pure pleasure of throwing stones at cows.
1. Arthur and Guinevere – James Schuyler – Philandering gay poet’s only novel, a dialogue-only story of the imagined world inhabited by a brother and sister avoiding family troubles. Light and charming like a kid in a bow-tie floating into the sky with a balloon.
2. Cider with Rosie – Laurie Lee – Professional Old Man Lee writes about the bucolic beauty and hardship of Gloucestershire in the age before technology ruined everything. Lots of corn and illness.
3. Les Enfants Terrible – Jean Cocteau – Sublime tale of another brother and sister’s fantasy world which leads to sexual deviance and death. Savour with red wine and prozac.
4. Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier – The consuming adventures of childhood striving for love and fantasy worlds, ultimately disappointed by the realisation that other people are selfish c***s.
5. Bonjour Tristesse – Francoise Sagan – Teenage girl leads romantic fantasy life and accidentally perverts hordes of men old and young; like if Lolita wrote her own story. |
