Nagy Ildikó szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 1980-1988 (MNG Budapest, 1989)
The Hungarian National Gallery's Art Workshop for Children and Young People (Árpád Szabados)
THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY'S ART WORKSHOP FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE The Workshop began in 1975 and is attended by some 200 children a year. These range in age from 6 to 14 and are grouped by age. just as in school. Normally, each group's two classes weekly are held under the tutorship of an artist-teacher. Each year's course closes with an exhibition or show or some other art happening. These bare facts may suggest that this is a sort of school. Indeed, the Workshop is a school, too. In Hungary the word school has a discordant overtone when applied to a leisuretime activity. Yet only regular and systematic —school-like — sessions with the children can give the chance to influence the development of their personalities and mentality. Time is a central factor in this process since all the spiritual things have to be introduced to the children through activity —chiefly manual activity. The reader may wonder what the Workshop has to do with the National Gallery. If it is there, hadn't we better confine ourselves to introducing the children to the works in the museum? Indeed, that is our task, too. It is. however, questionable whether the usual guided tours of the exhibitions or the art quizes and competitions can offer the children an insight into the essential questions of art. Experience has shown that these do give the children a glimpse of the system and methods of art history and of the historical and intellectual background of the works, but they fail to enhance childrens' responsiveness to art. No doubt these aspects are also important components of an approach to art works, yet I would venture the assumption that, unless they are applied in research work, they hinder the process of reception. If the recipient is burdened with too many precedents and analogies, the situation may easily arise in which the work of art is no longer what it actually is but a good or bad proof of an anticipated series of representations. (That is particularly true when works of art are studied in terms of the history of style. ) I may have stretched the point a bit too far. since we also make use of the above approaches in our classes, too. Too has great weight laid upon it, either suggesting some compromise or something additional we intend to add to the existing methods. Let us look closer at the essence without too. We try to hide contemporary problems of art in — possibly playful — tasks so that they can be conceptualized by the children (e. g. what do a process, its reversibility or the interchange of sequences mean? Can a work of art be built on transience? What happens when the art object moves and not the viewer?) Naturally, the problems are graded for age groups and offer different levels of conceptualization. Also, the problems of contemporary art often lead us back to the precedents, from comics to the Biblia Pauperum. to Egyptian reliefs... and back again through sketchy scenarios and comics to animation, to video art. the visual poetry of our days. In all the different activities, in which visuality dominates, the development of communicative skills is also underlined (verbal and kinetic games arc part of our project). In our view, the natural way to approach a work of art is through the very idiom it uses. Thus we do not seek verbal explanations to visual phenomena. (E. g. It is useless to explain in words that colours are so relative that a white horse can be painted in green, but the children will grasp what we mean if we formulate this problem as a task.) The example 30. Krisztián Bene in the Workshop
