Shelf artists

Arts & Activities, May, 2004 by George Szekely

When the stacks of art-education magazines finally outgrew our home, my daughter Ana and I set out to haul them to my school office. On the way, we stopped to purchase steel shelves on which to organize the collection.

When we arrived at my office, Ana became quite interested in assisting with the opening ceremony of the carton. It took one incision to free seemingly millions of exciting parts from the dark cavity of the big box. "Can I help you put it together, Dad?" she asked, wearing my leather tool belt and carrying our old red toolbox.

I sat on the floor, unfolding the map-sized instructions and finding the right language to decipher. "You study the instructions and I'll work," she said. Perplexed with the problem of identifying the No. 14 screws, I hardly noticed Ana playing in the metal pile using my biggest screwdriver. Competing with my attempt at concentration, I recall Ana's barely audible ruminations: "This could be a space station, and the top will be the tower...."

After figuring out the master plan, I announced that we would soon be ready to start construction. Imagine my surprise when Ana proudly announced she was already finished. I looked up to find a life-sized erector-set version of a shelf, with flying buttresses, bracket wings, and oddly twisted columns. This shelf obviously never read its own instruction booklet. It could not support a single journal, yet it was dramatic.

"Do you like it Dad?" Ana asked. "Will you take it apart?" The questions came in rapid succession. My admiration for her work became clear when I asked her to help me move the structure from my office to center stage of the art room, waiting for Monday's art class. Over the weekend, I picked up several other boxed shelving units, not to accommodate reading materials, but to offer other young architects of the future an opportunity to test their visions in steel.

Young artists are interested in building. They view all unusual objects in the environment as raw materials waiting to be put together. The opportunity to use a screwdriver and shelves, magazines or erasers, hair curlers or shoulder pads to test artistic vision is the way children formulate the future of sculpture and architecture.

Many items wear the ominous warning label: "assembly required." The anticipation of instructions in multiple languages with illegible diagrams sends most adults fleeing, whereas children flock to the challenge, seeing possibilities far beyond the instructions. They are ready to assemble and take things apart in free and imaginative ways. Anything that needs assembly can be brought to the art class and become the basis for an unforgettable art experience. As art teachers, we need to support the interest in playing with tools and putting things together.

Children love not only assembling shelves, but also collecting them and building their own. They spend a great deal of time designing and displaying objects on shelves. The many forms of shelf art are basic to children's art. Lending children your tools is symbolic of a trust in their building and construction abilities that most art forms require.

Putting a child in charge of putting together a cardboard of metal shelf is ah early architectural license to build and find satisfaction in creating structures with one's own vision and hands.

Challenged by tasks that involve building and taking apart experiences, children's architectural models often appear with objects as ordinary as boxed shelving units.

SHELF COLLECTORS While I walk through the video rental store, Ana is busy checking out the shelves. The best cardboard display shelves are like valuable movie posters: frequently reserved by a child with the foresight to have talked to the store clerk. Children are familiar with the beauty of cardboard and plastic store-display shelves and, if allowed, would fill their entire room with them. Adults at home or in school are a bit slower to recognize sources for the most interesting contemporary furnishings, which don't come from furniture stores. Kids know their shelves, and they value all unusual features such as authentic labels, illustrations and price tags. Shelves are children's store windows or museum cases, where they place their most important collections.

SHELVES AS CANVASES Shelves are the three-dimensional version of children's bulletin boards. Like the doors to children's rooms, shelves are canvases for constantly changing displays and arrangements. A store display shelf in a child's room is his or her handpicked furniture and canvas for a select grouping of three-dimensional collections. Just as two-dimensional design is studied on the door, children learn three-dimensional design by reorganizing objects on a shelf.

When kids say, "I'm cleaning my shelf," it can be interpreted as a design work in progress, a reorganization and rearrangement of forms on the shelf. Children are just as concerned as adults with the appearance of their rooms and often rearrange shelves, doors, bulletin board and window displays to make their environment more beautiful. In a toy box, items are thrown together for a quick cleanup. On a shelf, however, toys and pocket-finds meet on equal footing, carefully arranged and treated like forms on a traditional canvas.