We Go to the Gallery

hen profanity collides with childhood innocence, it’s funny―when pretension does, it’s even funnier.

We go to the gallery has plenty of both. The slim volume is artist Miriam Elia’s parody of a British early reader series designed to help children learn new words (Peter and Jane). Elia stays true to the source material, picking out three words on each page for the reader to learn (toilet, feminist, and balloon, for example) as she narrates two children’s distressing first encounter with contemporary art. The book is a self-described teaching tool for children under five. Acknowledging that art is difficult to explain to children in “plain, simple English,” We go to the gallery promises to help children “smoothly internalize all of the debilitating middle class self-hatred contained in each artwork.”

Cheerily titled “The End of Meaning,” the exhibition at the gallery is sure to catch little John and Susan off guard. Confronted with a bag of trash, an empty room, a room filled with oil, and a transvestite, the children are understandably bewildered. Thankfully, Mummy is always happy to explain:

          “Why is there a penis in the painting?”

          “Because God is dead and everything is sex,” says Mummy.

There’s a wide gap between the “pretty” art that Sharon was hoping for and a smelly bag of trash (“the stench of our decaying Western civilizations,” Mummy proclaims). In a way, the book is educational. It’s funny because it’s true: contemporary art is often shocking and bizarre. As John and Susan struggle grasp both the adult themes and conceptual nature of the exhibition, it reminds us that contemporary art is an acquired taste―maybe not for everyone.

We Go to the Gallery forces the reader to see through children’s eyes, to challenge established conceptions of contemporary art. In this way, publisher Dung Beetle fulfills its lofty goal: to “drag families in to the darkest recesses of the collective unconscious, for their broader cultural benefit.”