Thought provoking trip to the Dowse

So with my head full of ideas from research I had been skimming about at risk adolescents and literacy I took my ten year old and his twelve year old friend down to check out the Dowse this morning.

I want to digress here and comment on the value of quality early childhood education... Jon's centre was five minutes walk from the Dowse and it was quite common for a couple of the teachers to take the older children for an afternoon walk to check out what was on. While we re-enforced his interest by always letting him show us what he had liked when we went there for coffee, I do think the credit for his expectation that going to galleries and museums will be interesting (meaning he is a charming companion, appreciated by all his older relatives) goes to the learner centred approach of his ECE teachers - the old Jesuit saying ...give me a child before he is five rings true in this case. However I was particularly impressed by his enthusiasm today as it was the alternative to not being able to get a booking at Laserstrike!

Given it was his trip I stood back and just let them go for it. After enjoying watching them problem solve a number of exhibits in Believe it or not we headed into the graffiti exhibition. A couple of things about this exhibition struck me - I realised that as my older children value this as an expression of art I looked it at with slightly different eyes. I also wondered about what the impact of being valued by middle class socially and economically successful (in the traditional sense) young people meant to a culture of art that used to be decidedly fringe.

Then with the ideas of the 21st century learning being literate in visually rich environments ticking over in my head, some of the messages of the exhibition pieces stood out in stark relief - particularly messages about why would we want walls to be grey, why would we want things to look the same, and that by constantly blanking out graffiti art we were practicing inter-generational repression. There were some other political statements that had me standing there thinking "is that really how we (the parent generation) appear?" And in the meantime these two kids I was with just totally related to it as art they understood.

If you had asked me before I went in I would have probably said this kind of art was "other" the work of kids on the edge and at the limits of social acceptability. I've spent quite a bit of time with the marginalised in our education system and society and in this case my identification of other is recognising the cultural discomfort of another lens. I had to put some effort into my viewing. One example was when Jon asked me if I had seen the board with blood on it - no - well actually yes, I just hadn't recognised the clever depiction of concrete grazes on skin! And as another example of cultural dissonance - Jon asking "Can we buy one, Mum?" The skateboard decks weren't for sale but he negotiated hard to try and get a poster size graffiti screen print. In this case it wasn't what he wanted to buy what was actually pretty cool but the fact that it was for sale in the context of a major gallery.