Culture Vulture: Child's Play

And he really does mean kids, wee bairns, the little darlings. See, the sight of children at play is a remarkable one. Outside the window of the office where the Vulture dictates this piece to his assistant, five children stand atop a beat-up Nissan and, in a sublime piece of performance art, take turns to jump on it in a Mexican wave of derision towards the capitalist model of consumption and obsoletion. When quizzed about their inspiration for this protest piece (much better than Wallinger’s State Britain), these proto-Zapatistas simply stopped, climbed down, and, prior to dispersing, advised the Vulture: "Fuck off, gayer". What wisdom!

The one problem with observing these great artists’ works is that the presence of an adult shits on the whole reason for it existing and makes it stop. Adult-accompanied, a child is a lazy little fuck seeking only to freeload your evermore-depleted reserves of fun and money whilst taking every opportunity to be obstinate. Alone, it’s different: what seems like a caustic verbal assault on the Vulture’s sexuality was in fact a plea to protect their precious creative process. The transgression of rules and common sense which defines child’s play exists only without adults, so rarely do we glimpse it.

In a fit of pretension which might well see him ejected from real life, the Vulture associates the drunk’s tin cans with a Warhol-turned-binman pop art, and indicates parallels with the post-war Italian art povera movement, where natural objects become buildings and furniture. The images serve as a how-to for artists everywhere. "I’m proud of those pictures because they’re intimate - how many pictures have been taken inside a children’s playhouse?" The photos are, in a way, the kids’ own - as if they used this adult as a tool for their art. I wouldn’t put it past them; children are evil as well as genius, as we all know.