Childish Things @ Fruitmarket Gallery

Pin-pricking the nostalgic bubble that surrounds our memories of childhood, the Fruitmarket Gallery’s latest show presents our formative years as an unsettling period of social conditioning, vulnerability and sexual taboos.

Like a nightmarish toyshop, Dada’s Boys curator David Hopkins deliberately takes the kitsch and iconic and subverts it to perverse and dark ends. Jeff Koons’ colouring book-like policeman is distracted from his duties by a giant teddy-bear; Paul McCarthy’s over-sized, mop-haired, anatomical education doll is violently zipped open, leaving his fabric entrails to fall out onto the gallery floor; Susan Hiller’s Punch and Judy video accentuates the puppet show's violence, overlaying it with a threatening soundtrack.

Manipulation is emblematic of the whole show. It's what Hopkins terms the exhibition's "dark poetics". Turned upside down and played back to front, McCarthy's inversion of the children's classic, The Sound of Music, subverts Julie Andrew’s familiar melodies into something resembling a sci-fi movie soundtrack. 

However, this exhibition is not merely an advocate of sensationalism, or descriptive of the identity politics popular during the 80s and 90s that unites the seven artists on show. Carefully arranged, it articulates a rigorous enquiry into a period of art history. The Fruitmarket’s first floor space presents this analysis best. A selection of exhibits sit awkwardly together, creating a friction that is a consequence of the post-modernist and post-conceptual dialogues the works simultaneously engage in: Louise Bourgeois’s soft, Freudian patchwork dolls overlook Robert Gober’s cold, conceptual frame, for example. This emphasises the incongruity of the already distorted subject matter.

Rousseau said that childhood is the sleep of reason. This show certainly testifies otherwise.