This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice of looking closely at things. It started when one of The Gallery Companion readers
sent me some wonderful writing and drawings that her boys Henry (age 10) and Rufus (age 9) had done in response to an exhibition in London that I reviewed a few weeks ago. The show is called When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture, and it explores the history of contemporary static-but-dynamic sculpture.With a brief to write what they thought about the artworks, my young friends spent over an hour deeply engrossed in looking closely at them. Henry drew the sculptures that interested him as well as describing the works in formal and sensory terms, comparing them to things he recognised in the world.
Rufus was philosophical in his response to the artworks, and thought hard about what it could all mean. He said that writing his ideas down helped him decide what he thought. Here’s some of what he wrote:
When forms come alive… what could it mean? What is a form? How is it alive? The first thing I see on my way in is the statue of only the bottom half of a human. Maybe a form is human, as humans are alive?
I’ve just entered and the chandeliers are jumping like jellyfish in the sea! The next piece of art is made of foam. Or at least I think it is. Jellyfish-like lights and foam are both watery, so a ‘form’ could mean watery? Then there’s what I call ‘liquid bricks’ melting over chairs. To prove my point on form meaning watery, the sea is alive, so ‘when forms come alive’ could mean ‘when oceans come alive’.
The critical thinking and stretching of imagination evident in both boys’ observations made me think once again about how valuable art is for children’s learning. This is a subject I’ve written about before. The benefits spill over in every direction, not only in the process of making art but also in thinking about it. Kids learn to identify patterns and structures, think about scale and perspective, describe and question, imagine and analyse.
Then there’s the social and emotional learning that goes on. Contemplating the meanings in art helps children to develop their self-awareness and relational understanding, as well as stimulating them to think critically about the world around them. This recent video from the education team at MoMA demonstrates how they use methods of teaching and learning to effectively engage children in their programmes:
The practice of looking closely, of slow contemplation, is the opposite of what is going on for the majority of children nowadays, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Discussions of his new book The Anxious Generation have been dominating my podcast feeds this week, and it sounds like fascinating reading. In the age of social media and smartphones, Haidt argues that the mass migration of childhood from the real to the virtual world has created a generation of kids who are more lonely, risk-averse and anxious than ever.
