Parenting #8: Raising an Art Monster
On taking your kid to your weekly artist's date.
On Saturday I took Olive to have a romp in the woods. An art exhibit by JG Everest at the Montalvo Arts Center promised to guide us through a sound installation combining a babbling creek with an instrumental work piped through tiny speakers spread throughout the trail. We drove an hour down south and Olive delighted in the sparkly fabric covering each speaker hidden in a small bucket down in the earth, and put her ear up to another hanging from a piece of thin wire standing high from the ground.
“This one’s the best,” she said of two speakers hanging on either side of a path, each playing different music, and she bopped between them, noticing the difference.
After about an hour we headed out to another area of the property and had a snack, found the bathroom, which was down a bit from where we had parked, and then walked back up to the parking lot to find our car to drive home. Two hours in total, out in nature and experiencing something new and creative. Not bad, I thought, patting myself on the back.
At one point, she had even danced with mystic intention by the tiny waterfall near a set of stone steps that led down to the creek. Honestly, this is my dream, I had thought, feeling like someone had plucked another scene from my subconscious and allowed it to live on the surface of life.
In the car on the ride home Olive announced, “I hated that. That was the worst adventure ever. I can’t wait to go home and watch a movie. How much longer do we have?”
After that comment I just flung myself into a deep silence until we got back and Olive announced to Aron that she hated it and it was the worst adventure and she couldn’t wait to watch a movie.
I made several phone calls after that, from my front step, with the door closed behind me.
“It's good that you listen to her,” said a friend, “but also you don’t have to listen to her.”
“But are they thick as thieves?” asked another friend with a daughter two years older than O. She was alluding to Aron and Olive and how maybe some of this had to do with Electra.
I had mumbled to Aron, “I think it’s an issue when you don’t come along,” before I walked out the door to sit on the steps and just wallow in my failures as a parent on the phone for an hour before I went back upstairs.
At some point after the movie, I just had to ask.
“Did you really hate the adventure?”
“Yes, I hated it. It was hot and it was buggy and I didn’t like it at all.”
“But you seemed so delighted,” I said. “Are you sure it wasn’t that you were of two minds and one is coming out more than the other? I mean, you danced in the woods!”
“That was my adventurous side and my graceful side and the dancing doesn’t count because I would dance anywhere.”
“Ok,” I said. “But what about the fairies?”
At one point she had stopped at a tree and remarked it was where the tree fairy lived, but that it wasn’t in that tree at the moment because she often moved houses. There was also a moon fairy she found in one of the speakers shaped as a birdhouse and a forest angel who stood in the spot where the sun hit the ground, although the angle did not appear to humans during the day.
“What about all those creatures,” I repeated, “who you found in the woods?”
“They did not come from my imagination,” she said.
Secretly, I was quite vindicated by this. I was always skeptical of her early Waldorf education and their prompting that elfin stories were as natural to children as the hairs on their head; I had in fact always felt that they were a bit of an intrusion.
Later, I pondered. I think perhaps kids are authenticity meters and can clock something fake from a mile away. Come to think of it, I had felt some anxiety in the woods; there was a gap between delightful and the truth. Why did the map lead in three places but also nowhere? Was it really a symphony of music and water coming together to make new sounds, or did one actually have to work hard to listen to the digital sounds and the natural sounds and find a way to fit them together. In short, just whose fantasy WAS this scene from exactly? And what did it mean for me to step into it?
The whole experience reminded me of seeing Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation: The Visitors, and feeling on one hand mesmerized by the multiple life size screens, the rooms lit like paintings, the musicians playing in each room, all coming together to playback a pre-recorded version of a soft folk song in a historic mansion. On the other hand, as I saw the artist himself, naked in a tub, strumming a small guitar, on one of the screens I also thought ICK. Just as I felt a little put off when I read the signs in the woods encouraging visitors to be quiet while listening to the little speakers in their tins, I felt a little put off to be asked to agree with Kjartansson’s fantasy, especially after the pandemic. Is “alone together” something we fantasize about now? Who is it exactly that wants to conjure familiar spirits in rooms that are vacant and woods that are still, only to leave both those spaces empty at the end of the day? And what connection did these two artists have to the original space? That crumbling house? That bubbling brook? Perhaps not everything has to be capitalized upon? Or maybe, Olive and I are just true Art Monsters, refusing to fold another’s umbrella.