Childish Things: Fantasy and Ferocity in Recent Art Now, he’s at it again, taking a sideways look at art from an angle nobody else seems to have thought of: toys. From this Friday, the Fruitmarket will play home to Childish Things, a choice selection of recent art, themed loosely around the plaything. Hopkins, professor of art history at Glasgow University, set himself a challenge from the outset. “It’s not really been done before,” he tells me. “It’s amazing really… I think sometimes people think it might end up being whimsical or fey, so I’m trying to do something else with it… doing it in quite a challenging, tough sort of way.” Childish Things was inspired not just by art history, but by Hopkins’s experience as a father. “When you have a child of your own,” he explains, “there are times when they’re quite gentle with toys, but very often, quite the reverse: quite destructive, interested in pulling them apart to see how they work. I think it’s a very powerful experience for an adult to watch this, and I want to bring some of that to the show.” Hopkins has quite literally brought that to the show with a piece by Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy, called Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure. The glaikit-looking doll, originally owned by the artist’s children, is presented as a readymade object. “It’s basically a sort of Andy Pandy-like figure,” says Hopkins, “with a zipper down its front so you can unzip it, and its innards spill out. It’s actually very disturbing in a way, but his children apparently used to gleefully rummage around inside it, so there’s this very dark element there.” McCarthy’s work, dating from around 1990, is one of the earliest in the show – which might surprise those who know Hopkins as an expert on Dada and Surrealism. Childish Things covers the narrow period of 1983 to 2008, but the influence of those earlier movements remains palpable. Louise Bourgeois, who died as the show was being planned, was rooted in Surrealism, and the concept of the readymade – originating in Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal of 1917 – is never far from the surface. Masquerading as a readymade, New York artist Robert Gober’s wooden playpen is a meticulously handcrafted reproduction. Fellow American Jeff Koons, famous for his bling recreations of common, playful objects, is represented by two kitschy trinkets blown up to human scale. The influence of Surrealism is also easy to spot, particularly where it seems that Freudian psychoanalysis is at play. Louise Bourgeois’s Oedipus is a powerful piece of visual storytelling which makes clear reference to her own difficult childhood. Helen Chadwick’s Ego Geometria Sum, though a much gentler piece, also revisits important moments from her childhood. It’s clear that for Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism will always play their part, which makes it all the more interesting that he has chosen to restrict Childish Things to late 20th century art from Britain and America. “It occurred to me to question why toys should have become such dominant images in the late 20th century,” he explains. “You could say that there is toy and childhood imagery in Dada and Surrealism itself, in Miró and some of the Surrealist objects perhaps; there is a very playful quality to those, but they’re usually quite small things, and not central to that period.” Hopkins believes that toys only really became central to art in the late 20th century. “You might say there’s an escapist aspect,” he says, “a nostalgia from the adult’s point of view, but at the same time what I’m trying to suggest, in the selection of the show, is that there might be a darker thing going on here. It might be about social anxieties about children, about our attitude to children. The curator points to Susan Hiller’s arresting installation of 1990, An Entertainment. Four video projections attack you in a claustrophobic black room, with footage from seaside Punch and Judy shows. The undisguised domestic aggression of this longstanding summertime tradition makes for an uncomfortable experience, particularly when considered in the context of children’s entertainment. Hopkins, who has written poetry on this subject as well as academic treatises, has alit upon the word “adulteration” to sum up his point. Not only does it describe the process by which artists alter existing, apparently innocent, material to bring out its darker side; the word also encapsulates our concerns about the premature loss of innocence in today’s children. “We no longer possess the attitude to children that the Victorians had,” Hopkins explains, “where they were emblems of innocence. We’re in a post-Freudian world; we can’t imagine them in that way any more, and yet I think we’re also very disturbed about that.” A good example of this is Jeff Koons’s Winter Bears, a massive reproduction of a seemingly harmless trinket. Two cutesy bears wave, fixed grins on their rosy-cheeked faces. “It appears to be quite innocent,” he says, “and yet it’s also rather a disturbing work I think; quite manic.” Its companion piece is a seven foot bear playing with the whistle of a childish policeman. Koons himself has said that the policeman in this ostensibly saccharin sculpture is being “sexually toyed with”. I am speaking to Hopkins before the installation begins, and he is excited about the way this exhibition will look. With Dada’s Boys he packed an ambitious amount of material into the gallery, but here he is keen to “allow the work to breathe”. “It’s very important to me that there aren’t many works,” he says, “but I feel that each one makes its point really well, so there’s a simplicity about the curation of this which I like a lot.” There won’t be anything on the walls upstairs; instead the floor will be scattered with objects, some outsized, “like a great big playpen”. Within this space, it’s the relationships between the objects that really excite Hopkins. “This is what’s going to be so strong about this show,” he says, imagining the potential power, for example, of Robert Gober’s playpen sitting next to Mike Kelley’s Innards, a blanket scattered with dismembered knitted dolls. In this context, Hopkins thinks that Helen Chadwick’s work, Ego Geometria Sum, will resemble a child’s wooden blocks scattered on the floor. Made in 1983, the work consists of several plywood objects of different shapes, representing key moments in the artist’s early life. They are printed with photographs of her nude body, curled and twisted to squeeze into the geometrical shapes. “It’s really nice to bring Helen Chadwick into this exhibition,” says Hopkins. “For me it’s one of the things I’m happiest about, because most of the others are really big names, and Helen Chadwick, who died in 1996 when she was only 42, hasn’t made it to the same degree.” “There is a very poetic quality to these things,” he explains. “They’re certainly uncanny in a way, because the images she imposes on these objects are the adult Helen Chadwick. It’s as though she’s trying to reinhabit, or get back into, the object in some strange way, so it’s about this relationship of an adult sensibility to her own childhood, and that’s very poignant”. Perhaps the strongest contrast between this exhibition and Dada’s Boys is the part that women artists will play. Three of the seven artists are female, and their contributions are, in my view, considerably more substantial than those of their male counterparts. Could it be, I ask Hopkins, that childhood is a feminine subject matter? “The strange thing here,” he answers, “is that Susan Hiller’s work is a very aggressive work; you could almost say it was a ‘male’ piece. Robert Gober’s work, the playpen for instance – you might say it had a slightly feminised quality to it. So if anything, I think the gender demarcations get a little bit blurred in the show.” Childish Things, then, is not set to be sugar and spice and all things nice. From the sound of it, frogs, snails and puppy dogs’ tails are more the order of the day.
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