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Consultant Project Management, Glitterbird and Associate Professor: Ivar Selmer-Olsen
THE END SPEECH - Lecture at the Glitterbird conference in Oslo 25th June, 2004
Glitterbird
And by this conference the bird, the Glitterbird, in seriousness has unfolded her colourful wings and taken off. We are now in the flow, and we shall be in the flow for almost three years. Perhaps it may be of inspiration for you to know that the Glitterbird in fact exists. We had not given name to a figment of imagination, but the bird turned out to be real. The Golden-shouldered Glitterbird, Kalimantornis solstitialis is a tiny gem of a bird restricted to a small area of mountainous rainforest in south eastern Sulawesi.
Glitterbird, Kalimantornis solstitialis (Sulawesi)
In Norwegian fairy-tales the code is that you must listen to the birds. Birds tell the truth, and you may trust their messages. The birds have important messages to give: It is important to free small children from old prejudices, from the artistic isolation they are in, from underestimation and their imprisonment in instrumental learning. We have to adapt our conceptions about children and childhood. Childhood is neither hell nor a garden of happiness. We have to understand that small children are fully capable of enjoying art, but also that they have to experience art in their own ways.
Projections and ?the best for children?
Adult artists using all their artistic professionalism in creating and giving themselves and their art to small children, adults that try to break through their prejudices, adults that with respect wish to touch and to be touched in this artistic meeting, may be the most beautiful concretizing of a modern view on small children. But we have to see the problems too.
People create each other. I create you in my image, out of my fire and out of my ashes I create you, as you create me out of your heaven and your earth. But you have your own fire, and I have to endure the burden of my own ashes. That is how it is between adults. And so it is between children and grown-ups too. But added to this, the relationship between children and grown-ups always has a focus on power also. It is as it should be. But under such unilateral power conditions, it is extremely important to be aware of and try to expose some of the projections of those who owns the power, i.e. our, the adults, projections.
Under cover of ?the best for children? adults will always create a childhood which serves their interests, always create the childhood we have the energy to deal with, and the childhood demanded by the culture we live in. You cannot give an answer to the question ?what is the best for the children?? that is independent of the culture and of the cultural conceptions. We are all deeply woven into the culture we belong to, and in many ways we also feel we have the best life when we live in harmony with this it.
Glitterbird is a cultural battle for the child
But children?s position in the culture is not satisfactory. Glitterbird is therefore also a cultural battle to improve small children?s position as participants in our societies, as real human beings with human rights, skills, needs and possibilities. The little child is situated in a place in life which is just as important and living as every other place in life. It is difficult to talk about art-impressions as vital, but on the other side it is impossible to talk about art and play, which are both non-instrumental and to no purpose, as something other than extremely necessary for the human being.
Children?s position in the culture is on the move. This is possible to observe by research and we may describe some of these movements. We want to have control over the direction these movements take. The relationship between children and adults may be characterized by instability, uncertainty and hesitancy. Glitterbird points towards a normative attitude which may be described like this: Children have the right to the best. Children may demand that we are working seriously. We must not allow adults to be tempted by their power and their arrogance to give children superficial and flimsy art. It is always an ethical challenge to maintain respect for those you have under your power.
In children?s literature we sometimes talk about something we rather disrespectfully describe as the hydrocephalus or ?water-head? syndrome. Here it refers to a tendency in picture books: they often portray children with a disproportionate large head. The intention is to make the children more cute by giving them some sort of baby-look even if they logically and according to the text may be 5 or 10 years old. The result may often be grotesque. This caricaturing move and other grasps in various sorts of art, enable us to immediately identify cultural products for children and to separate them from cultural product intended for adults.
We who are working with children?s language are well familiar with the phenomena we call baby talk. Baby talk is characterizing how adults all over the world and in all languages that are studied, talk to small children with a light voice, using shorter and more correct sentences than in normal talk among adults, using especially words that are easy to pronounce and exaggerating our signals, repetitions and pressures in order to have their attention. Baby talk is to day accepted being fundamentally important for children?s learning of language and for communication with small children.
But this tendency to hydrocephalus often reflects unfavourable conceptions of children and childhood. I will not say that children should have the same art as adults, nor that they experience art in the same way as us. But at the same time we can see that art produced for adults often and in a nice way may talk strongly to children. Just as art produced for children may talk to adults. But false and oppressing prejudices are not good for anyone to have on their neck.
(From Sandbeck, Vidar 1978 : Vi hjelper mor og far Litor forlag, Oslo)
The responsible child
I will not be cited in support of all my opinions. The new childhood we are about to create or to describe ideologically, is often characterized by words as human rights, participation, negotiations and autonomy. When I read some of the texts that I myself and colleagues that I identify with have written, I sometimes get worried. When we ask for human rights and children?s participation, it sometimes seems like we are about to reconstruct the responsible child, the traditional Nordic child strained with guilt and responsibility.
It is almost like using bad language in a Lutheran and pietistic Norwegian church, but let me ask: isn?t irresponsibility or freedom from responsibility a value? Isn?t it at feature of childhood which we ought to protect in all this modernism and talking about taking children seriously? Perhaps we sometimes should take children humorously instead, perhaps we should enjoy children more, look more to the beauty of children, - well aware of the danger of romanticising.
Again it is about ethics and aesthetics, and it is typical for Nordic people that we together with Søren Kierkegaard always find our place in the ethics. And ethics is of course very central when dealing with kids. The ethics goes in both directions, but it isn?t the same in both directions, for the relationship between children and adults is asymmetric. Upbringing implies processes in both ways, both the person bringing up and those who are being brought up must be prepared for changes in life and in thinking, and for that matter in the culture as such. Reflection and skill to take in children?s messages is conclusive if we shall succeed in our project.
Maja and the mourning Madonna
In the County Museum of Gotland, Sweden, a great collection of wooden sculptures from the many old churches on the island is saved. Little Maja stops in front of the most famous sculpture, called the mourning Madonna from the 11th century. The sculpture obviously makes a strong impression on her. And after a while she turns to her father and asks:
?Why is the lady so sad??
Her father is well known with modern thinking about how we should present art for children. Therefore he doesn?t give Maja any answer, but he asks:
?Why do you think she look so sad, Maja??
Maja consider a while, and says:
?It?s because she has no child.?
In its original surroundings, in the church of Öja on the southern part of Gotland, the mourning Madonna was part of bigger decoration, a so-called triumph crucifix. It is an antagonistic crucifix of victory, formed like a sun. It tries to combine sorrow, pain and death with victory, hope and new life.
The mourning Madonna is situated as a spectator to this golden sunny crucifix, still spectator is perhaps not the right word. She doesn?t look upon the pain and the victory of the crucifix, she is looking down, perhaps more introspective, perhaps she is just looking on her own hands. We don?t know whether she is presenting her worries for God, or if she?s just standing there twiddling her fingers. It does not seem like she is happy at all of the fact that death just has been defeated to a victory in heaven. That is perhaps not so difficult to understand for a father or a mother, whether they have lost a child or not. Mary is a mother standing back alone. Her child, her son, is taken from her, and if anybody says it was necessary to fulfil a larger project it is completely indifferent for her, he is suffering, he is dying, it is her child this is happening with, her child who came to existence trough her body.
Bringing children into the world, this doubleness of putting children to life, giving birth, on one hand it is the most important thing we in the name of love, hope and victory may do. On the other hand it is also a fact that the child we bring into life with necessity will meet pain and suffer, illness, anxiety, sorrow and death.
This is what Maja?s father is thinking, but he does not tell her that. He does understand that her obvious answer is a correction to depressed 50-years old grown-ups who have lost their belief in the future and their skill to live in the moment.
?Mary is sad because she has no child,? Maja is determining. ?Here I am,? that is what she is really saying, ?here I am just now, and so are you, daddy, you are here with me just now, and most of all I want you to be jubilant and happy to be with me and together with me, I want you to see me and listen to me when I am playing my flute. Come, let us dance and sing and hold each others hand.?
For sure time goes by, and for sure we are getting older, for sure you have had your troubles, and for sure you may expect what is worse, illness and death is coming, but Maja, this little memento mori[1], she has no ulterior motive, she wants her father to show her his most beautiful paintings, she wants him to tell her his strangest stories. And he will have part in her devotion and her optimism about the future. Perhaps she wants him to buy her an ice-cream. Maja will probably not keep back the possibility of an ice-cream.
But this is about his capacity to take in. That is what he has to learn in the meeting with Maja.
?Also in art-meeting with children it is about taking the child in, let the children and the children?s interpretations come into the room, and allow the room to be coloured by all who are inside, not only the adult, not only the child. And then look upon this meeting as an enrichment.
Maja instantly understands that Mary is sad, for Mary has no child.
[1] ?memento mori? (lat.) may be translated into: ?a reminder of the fact that I shall die?
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