Social constructions of the concept of child art

Abstract

This text is a theoretical paper based on the method of critical discourse analysis of child art. The paper is aimed at presenting the genesis of this concept in order to reexamine the hitherto approaches and to support the thesis that children’s art is a cultural construct by using the arguments based on a socio-cultural research platform. The defining of this concept will be critically reviewed and the conditions and procedures for proclaiming children’s drawing as art will be pointed out. Once childhood started to be observed as an important separate period of human life in pedagogy and psychology, there consequentially appeared the notions of the uniqueness of children’s drawings, children’s artistic development and child art as a separate category, which is at the same rung of the evolutionary ladder as the art of the “primitive” peoples. The discourse on the child as an artist was formed in the fields of psychology, theory of art and artistic practice and started to spread in the 20th century. With the development of psychoanalysis it obtained its ideological connotations. Teachers, pedagogues, psychologists and artists construct a set of narratives and theories about child art that reflect humanistic values of free self-expression. The above-mentioned theories still serve as the basis for the development of school practice of art education in the contemporary education systems. Therefore, it is important to offer to art pedagogues the new theoretical approaches that re-examine the hitherto modernist ideas on children’s drawings in order to change their attitude towards practice.

Keywords

• child art
• education
• visual culture
• society
• modernism