Fort/Da: A reading of Pictures of Innocence by Anne Higonnet

Abstract

According to one recent account, art theory has, until recently, dismissed childhood.1 Understood at once to be too trivial and too dangerous a focus for critical enquiry, a subject for ‘second rate minds’ that can too easily lead to the disclosure of unacceptable desire, childhood has languished on the margins of the discourse of art.2 The account proceeds to claim that the last decade has seen this situation challenged, with a number of texts reading themselves as following innovations within the social sciences and approaching childhood as a ‘construction’, ‘an abstract, shifting and heavily ideological concept’3 rather than a reflection of a prior ‘reality’. Such a move is understood as part of an ongoing critique of patriarchal normalization in art theory, the claim being made that ‘just as class, gender, and race challenges to academic disciplines came first from art history’s neighbouring fields of literary criticism and social history, so it has been with the subject of childhood’4.