Thoughts on: A child's everyday.

I am becoming aware that within a lot of things I am reading, the idea of childhood, or things from a child's perspective is a regular consideration about the change in how we see/observe our (everyday?) lives. It keeps cropping up, but I am finding myself quite interested in all these different things, which is unusual, because, I don't really like children...

Unsure if these are yet to relate to anything...

- TACITA DEAN- ON COLOUR (PREVIOUS POST) 'Learning that colour is a fiction of light is one of the primary shocks of growing up...that nothing can keep its colour... are monstrous things for even my ADULT MIND

-RACHEL WHITEREAD- ON COLOUR ' When I was seven I was allowed to choose the colours for my bedroom, free will, 'lilac and orange' was my chosen colour scheme. When I was fourteen I changed the colour scheme to dark blue and white. Ever since then I have lived and worked in white rooms.'

-WALTER BENJAMIN- A CHILDS VIEW OF COLOUR. 'The child's view of colour represents the highest artistic development of the sense of sight; it is sight at its purest, because it is isolated...Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect, they only see.'

-ROLAND BARTHES- PARIS NOT FLOODED- 'Paradoxically, the flood has created a more accessible world, manipulable with the kind of pleasure the child takes in wielding his toys, exploring and enjoying them. The houses are no more than cubes, the rails isolated lines, the herds shifted masses, and it is the little boat, the superlative toy if the childhood universe, which has become the possessive mode of the arranged outspread and no longer routed space.'

-LEVI STRAUSS- 'BRICOLAGE' Combining and re-combining a closed set of materials to come up with new ideas. Children play with whats at hand, looking at what's available, moving it around, thinking about it...

-SHERRY TURKLE- TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS- 'Concerned with the first possession and with the intermediate area between the subjectivity and that which is objectively percieved.' There is a trauma of realising there are things that are not us, and as we grow mature we realise a connection to external reality. Children use things (play) as a pivot for thoughts.


Quite a few points from WE ARE JUST PLAYING, Stuart Lesser, Shopping Hour Magazine...

-'Adult utopian desires see children as holders of the promise of a better future...

-The strangeness of children requires action to turn them into becoming the same...

-Acts of playing as moments of non-sense, are ways of bringing the mundane everyday events to a different form of scruting and expression in which the everyday becomes anything but everyday...

-Another way of seeing things differently representing the world through the inversion of the apparently natural state of things, conjuring up a picture of marvellous possibilities  by a simple irrational connection. The 'montage' offers and unusual combination of events that surprise, make one look again and disturb habitual ways of seeing things. '

Again, this is just plastic food for thought.