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In an essay entitled 'The Philosophy of Toys', the poet and art-critic Charles Baudelaire put forward this intriguing proposition: 'The toy is the child's earliest initiation to art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, nor the same enthusiasms, nor the same conviction.'1 Art thus becomes a partial or incomplete substitute for the relinquished toy object and the infantile pleasures with which it is associated. To think of this in terms of psychoanalysis, one could say that what Baudelaire delineates is the primal scene of art.
It is within such a setting that one might consider the work of David Akenson. For his exhibition Game, Akenson took to remaking modernist sculpture as a type of toy or game and, in the process, uncovering the repressed infantile origins behind its logical geometric structures. Although retaining the fastidious do-it-yourself look that has become something of his signature style, Akenson's decision to use 'candy' colours on this occasion represented a significant formal departure from his previous work. The effect of this chromatic shift was to give the work a decidedly more ludic quality which pointed towards a playful re-interpretation of modernist conventions that would ultimately push the logic of Modernism beyond its own rational intentions.
This playfulness was perhaps most immediately apparent in the two sculptures Rocker and Roller which together formed the centrepiece of the show. Painted in colours of baby blue, pink and orange and skilfully fashioned from craft wood and fitted together with dowel, these objects were suggestive of, among other things, toy rocking horses. More