Children's art and the magic eye

T.S. Eliot on the critique of poetry

[There is a false perception of] the author’s having left
something out which the reader is used to finding; so that the
reader, bewildered, gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles
his head for a kind of meaning which is not there, and is not
meant to be there.

Magic eye, first released in Japan in 1991, is a series of books containing images with 2D patterns which, if you look at them in the right way, allow you to see a hidden 3D image. This image with seemingly no meaning has something more to it if you only look at it enough. You'll eventually learn to see the other image.

I feel like that's a popular mentality in the visual arts, this kind of thought that each work is a magic eye piece in of itself. 

I recently came across some children's art while working. I was facilitating a Korean group of teachers as they toured a Canadian elementary school. It had been a long time since I was exposed to such genius. 

The contrasted words FREEDOM and LABOUR echo the nazi concentration camp mantra Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free), all placed within the context of major brands Nike and Adidas. Considering how advanced this concept is, and how it was created with such poor mechanical skills, the artist must be very young and very intelligent.

Maybe this is a piece made by an immigrant student, maybe a former sweatshop labourer from China, who lived in what is essentially a modern day concentration camp, forced to stitch Nike and Adidas shoes for ignorant consumers.

Maybe the black backdrop in this painting symbolizes the artist's ethnic background, and this piece comments on the historical duality of labour and freedom for black north americans, and the modern manifestations of this duality in the context of Nike and Adidas's targeted marketing campaigns to that demographic?

- - - 

Then later that day I came across a hallway filled with something special. The hallway was covered in various painted portraits. The venue was called The Hall of Faces. I snapped my favorites:

This abstract expression of a face in the lower left of the photo.

The accusing eyes and apathetic face of the lower right.

The various skull-like faces all smiling viciously, surrounding an unsuspecting victim.

A ventriloquist doll (just creepy) in the upper left.


A baby with a bindi in the lower right, with badly burnt skin and scabbed lips
























The sour and jaded woman in the upper left, nose broken, neck bearing a bloody stoma likely from a tracheotomy.

The ghost of a murdered child in the lower left, hair wild, sticking his tongue out playfully.























The crazed jaundiced man in the lower left, make-up haphazardly applied to his face. 

The drowned woman, lips blue from lack of oxygen, hair covered in algae, in the upper left.

The flayed man in the upper right, bloodied and yet unmoved, framed by his own fragments of self-excised skin.


                                                                       

The inbred troglodyte in the lower left, experiencing the only emotion he knows.

The bald, lidless, noseless, monster of the lower right. With its leathery face placid, looking at you with its all-knowing red eyes, basking in an evil aura.

Who knew children were capable of such darkness? Carl Orff, the 20th century composer, was said to only take children as disciples because they still had the rawness of the human mind, which tends to get removed through education by adulthood.

Perhaps this is what we're seeing here.

Or maybe works of art aren't magic eye pieces. Maybe the magic eye is something we develop, something we learn to do with art. We look hard, squint, tell ourselves we see something deep within the obvious image, and just see what we want to.