The See-saw

CHAPTER ONE

The Seesaw
The delicate balance between vulnerability and empowerment

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean, except me. I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's what I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all, I know it's crazy, but that what I'd like to be.”
Catcher in The Rye, JD Salinger, 1945

What I like about this description of the “catcher in the rye” is the way it beautifully illustrates the desire within us all to protect those more vulnerable than ourselves. Holden Caulfield is barely more than a child himself, but in going through his rite of passage into adulthood he finds salvation in his need to protect the innocent from the dangers and the cynicism of the adult world. It is part of our natural instinct to want to protect our children. But, as JD Salinger shows, fear for our children is often fear for us. Holden Caulfield has suffered the terrible trauma of losing his brother, but he is unable to heal his own wounds. Instead he seeks to protect his younger sister from the psychological pain, which he projects onto her, so that she becomes the object of his catharsis.

Artists have always been drawn to represent the vulnerability and fragility of the child. From the romantic images of Victorian childhood by artists such as John Everett Millais, to Mary Kelly's work in the 1970s with her mixed media documentation of her child's early life, Post-partum document , using items such as soiled nappies and bibs in an unsentimental approach to the subject.

For me, however, one of the most powerful images of childhood fragility is Mona Hatoum's 'Incommunicado' (see plate 3) at the Tate Modern. It is an infant's hospital cot, which has been stripped to the bare metal making it cold and harsh, and where the mattress should be there are just thin wires stretched taut. It looks more like an egg slicer than a cot and one immediately associates it with a situation of danger and the threat of abuse.

Although there is no child involved, the absent imagined child is far more powerful as Mona Hatoum herself says: “When I started making these works I was criticised for not showing the 'spectacle of horror', but expecting the viewer to imagine for themselves the impending disaster. I personally felt that this was precisely the strength of the work and a sign of maturity in the way the work conjures up certain images in the viewers mind. That these things are implied through the visual poetry of the work, rather than didactically stated, is much more satisfying for me.”

What makes the work so potent for me is the way she has created a sense of the uncanny by taking the familiar object - the cot, and then by adding something unfamiliar and threatening - the wires, she generates an uncertainty about the object in the viewer's mind. Is it a cot or an instrument of torture? Freud describes the uncanny as that class of frightening which “leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”, he says that not everything unfamiliar is uncanny - something extra has to be added to it, “the essential factor is intellectual uncertainty”. It is exactly this that gives 'Incommunicado' its poignancy.

More complicated, perhaps for artists, is the issue of the empowered child. In literature there are many examples of children who hold power over adults. In Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, the children's behaviour so disturbs their governess; they cause her mental breakdown and eventual suicide. Nabakov writes about a middle-aged man brought down by the sexual power of an underage schoolgirl, Lolita , and in Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, the beauty of a young boy bewitches an elderly gentleman.

In 'The Darker Side of Playland', an exhibition held at The San Francisco museum of Modern Art in 2001, the more sinister aspects of the power of the child are explored. Heather Whitmore Jain (curator of the exhibition) explains: “In the popular imagination, childhood tends to be seen nostalgically as a time of blissful innocence. Yet many contemporary artists present a more nuanced view, often exposing the darker side of youth.” This exhibition brought together works from the Logan Collection that depict toys, cartoon characters, and fantasies seen from a child's perspective. Characteristic of the Logan Collection, this group of works has an eerie undercurrent.

The implied threat of violence present in many of the works in the exhibition reflects the negative feeling that children can express through playing with their toys. Children often take out frustrations, which cannot be vocalised on their toys, doing to their toys what they would actually like to do to their parents for example.

Dutch artist Heidi Zumbrum explores this theme through buying stuffed toys at flea markets and giving them to her dog to chew. She then photographs these mauled toys, blowing up the final images to many times their original size (see plate 4). These huge prints become psychologically charged and yet they are ambiguous.

Children may also identify themselves with the dolls or figurative toys they play with and thus they become surrogates for their own bodies rather than those of someone else. These maimed toys could therefore either represent the child as the abuser, or as the abused. The seesaw effect in the mind of the viewer from one scenario, where the child is the destroyer, to the other where the child is innocent and vulnerable, is a powerful metaphor for the complex duality of our psychological make-up - that we can be, at the same time, both parent and child, guilty and innocent, good and bad.

Anna Freud writes, in her study on childhood aggression that “at some moment or other in the development of the young child the aggressive urges become incompatible with other strivings or with the higher agencies in the child's mind and are rejected as dangerous”. As adults we find the uninhibited violence of children troubling because it reminds us of our own destructive instincts which we have repressed.

The artist Georgina Starr explores our fears about the inherent violence of children in 'The Bunny Lakes are Coming' . This series of films draws on Otto Preminger's 'Bunny Lake is Missing', in which a young girl is abducted by her uncle and kept prisoner in the back of his car . Starr sees Bunny Lake as a motif for childhood trauma, which she turns into an avenging force against the adult world.

In the first film, a child attaches bunny ears to a MacDonald's sign and then hangs herself. In the second film, the 'Bunny Lakes' (who are a group of young girls dressed in white fluffy bunny outfits) storm a fashion show and shoot the catwalk models in a gruesome bloodbath (see plate 5). In the final film, the 'Bunny Lakes' decide to kill a drive-in movie audience using hosepipes attached to the exhaust pipes of their cars.

This vision of anarchic children in a world turned up-side-down, where the innocent little girl in the white bunny outfit, a picture of purity, becomes the purveyor of evil, is reminiscent of William Golding's novel 'The Lord of the flies'. They both illustrate what happens when children take control and their primitive instincts are allowed to come to the fore. Images such as these tap into our deepest fears about the baseness of human kind, as well as doubts about our own personal repressed primal natures