Artists with children
How does the act of bringing a child into the world relate to the act of making art? This was the question posed by Elizabeth Gertsakis in her gathering of fifteen artists for the exhibition Inherited Absolute. Of course, any curatorial thesis is to be judged partly on the kinds of works it brings together: is it useful as a frame for relating the work of different imaginations? However, the nature of Gertsakis' thesis is defiant enough to focus a review on its substance and the curatorial strategy it inspired.
Gertsakis' curatorial essay, "Artists with children", concerns the culture of the child with which any contemporary artist engages. She argues that moderns focused on childhood with a scientific concern to 'validate' a system of knowledge. Childhood for modernists represented the laboratory outside of normal adult life in which the essence of human nature might be examined pure of self-consciousness.
The child, and radiating from it every aspect of the society, carried within it the threat and compulsive attraction of the unknown. This could not be tolerated, and like all objects of social currency entered into the battle for ownership, cultural investment and control.
Gertsakis presents here the judgment that modernism moved within an order of the same by which difference was a stake in competing ideologies determined to exercise their powers on the hitherto uncontrolled elements of their field.
The natural complement of this totalising modernism is the relativistic generosity of postmodernism, with its offers of heterogeneity and multiplicity. The basic dilemma addressed in Inherited Absolute is how to fit the modernist drive to unity within a tolerance of difference. This indeed is a paradox: how to represent