Child’s play
Ruth Guilding
Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing Compton Verney, until 5 June
Compton Verney House has reopened for its second season, continuing its founder Sir Peter Moore’s aim of bringing art which is under-represented elsewhere in Britain to a new audience. Alongside landscape paintings by the 17th-century Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa is a larger, thematic exhibition, Only Make-Believe, curated by Marina Warner, who brings to the task a weight of experience.
Spread out through several rooms in the house, the show is more about her thoughtful intimacy with the subject than just the simple sum of its themes and exhibits. Its gurus are the child psychologists and educationalists Friedrich Froebel, Melanie Klein and Maria Montessori with their benign interrogation of the psychological and cultural aspects of child’s play. Friedrich Froebel was the 19th-century inventor of the Kindergarten, the creator of simple yet highly satisfying coloured balls, shapes and paper cut-outs, tools for an understanding of the natural laws and materials of the universe. Passing into the designs of the Bauhaus group as a utopian, pared-down formalism, this legacy was to re-emerge, like a playfully wielded cosh, in the insouciant brutalism of socially generated architecture such as Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower and his grid-framed behemoth at the Elephant and Castle.
Elsewhere, among paper dolls, origami and bricolage, are the Brontë children’s deftly miniaturised storybooks, born of the novel Enlightenment child-rearing theories of Locke and Rousseau. Roger Hilton’s late, left-handed works are represented by a splashy gouache, ‘Lobster’ (1973), the product of a second childhood induced by the alcoholic poisoning which killed him. Paula Rego’s etchings from 1989, ‘The Nursery Rhymes’, are steeped in the residue of her own childhood memories, nursery characters animated by the murderous, incestuous, covetous and lustful adult world. One of her sources of inspiration was the little-known ‘outsider art’ of Henry Darger (died 1973), the Chicago hospital porter who chronicled the epic and bloody adventures of the seven Vivian girls and their adult tormentors, the Glandelinians, shown here in three frieze-like watercolours, a surreal Angela Brazil story with military uniforms, battlescapes and severed limbs.
Other artists have responded in ways that are more, and less, subtle. From Mat Collishaw there is ‘Snowstorm’ (1994), a video projection of a homeless rough sleeper trapped inside the glass bubble of a Victorian snow dome. The components for the Polish artist Zbigniew Libera’s carefully shocking ‘Correcting Device, Lego Concentration Camp’ (1996), a seven-box kit including a gas chamber and mounds of brightly coloured discarded mini-suitcases, were supplied by his sponsor Lego, in ignorance of the artist’s intentions; the original version is now shown in the Jewish Museum in New York.
Warner cites Roland Barthes’s rant against the commercial embourgeoisement of playthings, such as baby dolls which wet their nappies to condition little girls for motherhood, framed in the 1950s long before Barbie, Action Man or Bratz dolls; but keeps clear herself of any taint of idealism about the childlike state as envisaged by Blake or Coleridge, or even about Barthes’s longing for the ‘poetry’ of honest, hand-made wooden toys. Instead, for the uncomplicated gratification of her smallest visitors, she provides Glenn Kaino’s bathetic ‘Simple System for Dimensional Transformation’, 2003, installed in Compton Verney’s stately marble entrance hall, a waterwheel paddled by giant plaster dentures, powering a revolving turntable and a stuffed rabbit.
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