My friend Emmy, a teacher, invited me into her primary school class in 2018. The first thing I asked the kids was to show me the most boring thing in the class. One kid brought a copy of the Bible. Then they found a bump on the wall, declared it the most boring thing, and everyone gave it a round of applause. We asked, ‘Is it still boring after it’s had a round of applause?’ The session went so well I decided to make it a regular after-school club. Early on, I had to learn how to cope with the way kids think. For example, I once asked a child to dissect the letter A; she refused, but was happy to dissect B instead. I realised weeks later that, because her name was Abby, she didn’t want to dissect the letter that begins her name. She wouldn’t tell me that, I had to figure it out. A strange solution to an odd problem. And every solution creates its own new problem.
When I was 12, I invented the Antibiotic Dance Academy, where I wrote instructions like, ‘Put a warm slice of bacon on a baby's head,’ or ‘Become a police officer for 40 years and then retire.’ Just silly prompts, Fluxus with the flu. It’s the same with Spag—I write prompts myself, with my girlfriend Claudia Sohrab. It’s not hard once you have a reason to write them. I’ll introduce topics I find intriguing, like the frothing water underneath the Tic Tac UFOs, or Google Vs the Delphic Oracle. Over time, I started asking the children what they wanted to discuss. If you include something they care about, like Pusheen or Ninjago, they’ll be eager to answer any other questions because they know they’re a part of the Club’s creation. Lots of what we cover is usually reserved for degree-level discussions. I never pander down, and they love the difficulty. My secret motto for Spaghetti Club would be: Adults have more to learn from kids than kids do from adults. It’s not true, but I like the attitude.
The Instagram account exists only because the children suggested it; otherwise, all of the activity might have stayed unseen. They love the idea that people around the world look at their work and enjoy it. The account is flung together, error strewn and full of youthful, running-without-looking type – bloody-knee energy. Regarding the booklets, I just happen to like making them. I was in charge of stocking zines at ICA bookshop years ago and started creating my own to pad out the shelves. One was about Ed Ruscha’s painting, which shows LACMA on fire. I wrote to the librarian at LACMA and asked, ‘If that fire happened today, what artworks would we lose, and what would be a bit scorched, but ok?’ Our back and forth was made into a booklet. I have Donald Judd’s collected insults too as a Spag booklet, and An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in GTA Online (after Perec), etc. For the Club, I make two booklets every week for the children to eat, destroy, or fill in, and they need to be good. Kids will roast you if they’re bored. Their Caveh Zahedi type of radical honesty keeps me on my toes in terms of staying creative.
Once, I asked a child about an artwork, and they responded, ‘Art can work?’ I'd never thought of that being a jarring mix before. To them, art is painting, making a mess, moving colors around—not worrying about originality, politics, etc.
Yeah, for children, a blank sheet of paper isn’t daunting. No existential, ego-driven dread. They dive in and destroy. I’ve explained the prefix ‘con-’ in Conceptual Art’ and how adults sometimes see art as something that can’t be real, a trick they feel excluded from. Some adults feel like they are the Emperor’s new clothes and they’ve been left hanging in the wardrobe. I tell the children there’s no trick—and they aren’t worried about not understanding anything. Their default mode is enthusiasm, they lack suspicion. I tell them that understanding art can require reading and effort, which they’re eager for. We have an introduction to Conceptual Art course for the seven-year-old children which many do before they’ve even got their pen licence.
Yes, they sometimes take things very literally, language still has its shoes off for the bouncy castle. Many shoes have the wrong socks stuffed in. It’s hard for me to guess how they might respond, they wrong-foot me consistently. I once asked the children to write a haiku, partly explaining it as three gentle lines. One child drew three wavy lines, turning it into the first ever concrete haiku. A very beautiful misunderstanding. I tell them, ‘Take your time to make sure you get it wrong!’ This surprises them because school teaches them to get everything right, which makes sense. Bohm says we have a psychological need to understand the Universe so we can feel ‘at home’ in it… But since computers can retain and instantly recall all information, we should perhaps teach children the importance of asking chewy, offbeat questions and encourage their unique interpretation of things. I’ll give them prompts like, ‘The first dream you ever had in the womb and the last dream you’ll have before you die meet up and dance together. Please draw this dance.’ I encourage them to be as weird as possible. They often ask, ‘How should I do this?’ And I say, ‘You're in charge. Do whatever you want.’ I don’t give them examples because they’d just copy. We're looking for something unknown about something unknown. Blindfolded in the Rumsfeldian maze.
Yes, they sometimes arrive with amazing booklets they’ve made (unprompted) in the style of the Club. But, at the moment, they’re typically much better at coming up with creative answers. They're still learning about the world and need a starting point, which I’m here to provide. Coming up with good questions takes time. At some point, I’ll break down a question as if under a magic magnifying glass that shows its underlying structure so they can see behind the curtain.
I never thought of The Breakfast Club! ‘Spaghetti Club’ was a quick decision—anyone can draw spaghetti, just scribble. The way the Club works is like spaghetti too: an omnidirectional mess, a brainstorming maze with no beginning or end. Spaghetti is almost the outcast of pasta, like fusilli looking down on it as unsophisticated. Despite me saying it’s not about food, some parents thought we offered free meals at first. And children, like cats, are obsessed with food as they can’t buy it, so maybe that feeds in.
It's changed a lot. The quality levels rise and fall depending on the time I have, outside stresses, and whether the group of children magically clicks. Initially, it was more of a discussion group. Then there were lots of writing exercises, which I learned to shuffle up with drawing prompts, like a chocolate reward for eating vegetables. Now, we have far more drawing exercises because we have lots of younger children in the Club. Sometimes I think we’ve made a question clear, but then four children will come up asking, ‘What the hell is this?’ So, there’s plenty of room to improve.
There are some questions which we think are good and we get excited for the answers, but the kids don’t engage, their responses don’t shine or they just skip it altogether. Ultimately the children judge. Good answers have their own unique glow, like it’s been nicely baked, and you can smell the goodness. Really good exercises have multiple, completely different surprising, exciting answers. Sometimes, flicking through older booklets, I find I’ve missed the good answers—they’re so deep I just missed them from my biased, adult framework. It makes me wonder, how often am I missing references in everyday life?
Yeah, they can’t, they’re going through synaptic pruning. The references they have are things like a specific shaggy dog they once saw a year ago, or a cupboard in a cartoon which never opened. So much richer than someone constantly referencing Claire Denis, or Brutalism. Celebrity references mean nothing to the children. I tell them real celebrities are hamburgers, puddles, triangles, or letters of the alphabet. They’ll reference window drawings they did that morning at 7am in condensation as a famous piece, or a child in the school I’ll never meet, who they insist is a far better artist than Matisse could ever be. The references I include in the exercises are often driven by the children’s requests. Part of the fun is figuring out how to explain them in a way which makes sense. The first introduction to something can be very important. I show children "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) (I call it Perfect Love) by Félix González-Torres and forget they may not know how to tell the time yet. It warps that reading in a whole new way.
Science worries me as I don’t know what I’m talking about, while the children take about five seconds to figure that out. We're like mad scientists, the lab is on a cruise ship in a storm, petri dishes and test tubes shattering everywhere. We’ve drawn things running out of the first ever split atom. The obvious exciting stuff includes the double slit experiment, having Schrodinger explain his work to a tiger, having Simon Cowell and Barry White slammed together flying around the Large Hadron Collider to create something new—as well as Richard Feynman and the Eames films on science. I’ve tried to explain to them the ultimate goal of the Universe—how the basic elements are still the same from the Big Bang, yet forming richer, more complex patterns over time. The Universe swirled and organised to create humans, humans organised to create AI, and AI organises to perhaps stop the Big Freeze and the End of the Universe. We mess around with that. I once had this nightmare: 100 + 100 equals 200, fine; but a million + a million isn't 2 million, because the energy needed to run the equation loses a number. So math breaks down at higher levels. The children loved this idea of thinking differently about the obvious and messing with rigid logic. Once, they had to destroy their own work. I told them about Tinguely’s self-destructing machine, and they couldn’t believe this existed. They loved it. They’re rarely told about such ideas. But everyone appreciates a machine that, when you press a button, kills itself—it sounds so human, so self-destructive, and so silly.
Yes, they want to make art! I showed the kids Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing too—a kind of self-destructing machine, a suicidal drawing—and they loved it. Teachers can't show children Conceptual Art, they've got deadlines, curriculum, and lots of pressure. I get a week of evenings to come up with the lessons, I don’t have any government curriculum to worry about, or Ofsted reporting to stress me out. We have total freedom.
