Abstract
According to one recent account, art theory has, until recently, dismissed childhood.1 Understood at once to be too trivial and too dangerous a focus for critical enquiry, a subject for ‘second rate minds’ that can too easily lead to the disclosure of unacceptable desire, childhood has languished on the margins of the discourse of art.2 The account proceeds to claim that the last decade has seen this situation challenged, with a number of texts reading themselves as following innovations within the social sciences and approaching childhood as a ‘construction’, ‘an abstract, shifting and heavily ideological concept’3 rather than a reflection of a prior ‘reality’. Such a move is understood as part of an ongoing critique of patriarchal normalization in art theory, the claim being made that ‘just as class, gender, and race challenges to academic disciplines came first from art history’s neighbouring fields of literary criticism and social history, so it has been with the subject of childhood’.4
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Notes
A. Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998).
M. Brown (ed.), Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
P. Holland, Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
The text was also chosen because, unlike Picturing Childhood, Patricia Holland’s study of the image of the child in advertising and popular culture and Picturing Children, a collection of essays concerned with childhood in Fine Art, it has the broadest sweep, reading everything from Caravaggio to Geddes, Bon Jovi CD covers to the photography of Sally Mann. Also, Pictures of Innocence was first published in 1998, with subsequent texts regarding it as the seminal history of construction, see J. Milam, ‘Sex Education and the Child: Gendering Erotic Response in Eighteenth-Century France’, in M. Brown (ed.), Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood Between Rousseau and Freud (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). pp. 45–53, p. 52 and Holland, Picturing Childhood, p. 22. If Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood might be regarded as a better candidate, it is worth stressing that Higonnet is critical of that text, claiming that Aries relies ‘too much on images, which he uses liberally as social evidence’ (Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, p. 25).
Holland is keen to point out she is not arguing for a childhood selfrepresentation that is qualitatively different from adulthood, just one that of necessity comes from a different point of view. Despite Holland’s reading of child self-representation as an alternative rather than as authentic, Picturing Childhood is still concerned with the promotion of ‘childhood’s self representation that is not “mediated by adulthood” and the child’s “right to wildness”’. In this, Holland can be read as offering a version of the ‘Childist’ approach to texts pioneered by Peter Hunt in Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and developed by Sebastien Chapleau in New Voices in Children’s Literature Criticism (Lichfield: Pied Piper Publishing, 2004). For a reading of this, see K. Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Children’s Literature: New Approaches’, in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children’s Literature: New Approaches (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 1–25 and N. Cocks, ‘Response and Responsibility: “The Reader in the Book” by Aidan Chambers’, in N. Cocks, Student Centred: Education Freedom and the Idea of Audience (Ashby-de-la-Zouch: Inkermen/Axis Series, 2009), pp. 45–75.
Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, p. 173. Here, and below in my discussion of the parental gaze, I am following the reading of the child gazing ‘out’ of the image offered by Joe Kelleher in his ‘Face to Face with Terror: Childhood in Film’, in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 29–55.
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© 2011 Neil Cocks
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Cocks, N. (2011). Fort/Da: A Reading of Pictures of Innocence by Anne Higonnet. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (eds) Children in Culture, Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307094_9
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