The Journal of Aesthetic Education

Two eleven-year-old boys face a bulletin board, arranging silver thumbtacks into shapes of fighter planes. They have arrived early for an after-school puppet workshop. Both boys are under five feet tall: the thin one sports a green terrycloth wristband and a big fro. “The girls like the poof,” he says. The other boy has a fuller body, a haircut similar to the Fab Four in the late sixties, and wears wide-leg jeans and a red t-shirt that brushes his kneecaps. The boys talk while puncturing the corkboard with tacks.

I like this game. It’s Star Miner. There’s this thing. It’s a ship that looks like this. The other ships are too detailed.

You try and blow up a jet thingy, it spirals and can catch on fire.

The evil dude’s head has like big tire marks on it. The only difference between him and other villains is he has a sash thingy that are like badges. He used to be good but in his world if a good person kills an evil person that sash will clamp to his arm and infect him with an evil virus that will go through his veins. First it goes to his hand and makes his fingernails long and sharp. His arm is not completely infected. This part’s really scary: his eye is infected with it. His base on his planet is shaped like that symbol on the sash. There’s an X through the center where it intersects with a laser. This thing shoots it up into this laser and generates a big force field around it. It’s electrified. Even if you get a foot from it, it will shoot a lightning bolt and zap you.

The boys’ play revolves around the action video game, its language, strategies, heroes, villains, obstacles, and continual updates. They know which video games their friends have and who among their classmates are not into techno games. Says the boy sporting the poof, “Randy doesn’t [End Page 25] like video games. He’s into mythology and the Loch Ness monster.” The boys’ favorite television program is Mythbusters, which proves or disproves rumors such as “tooth fillings can pick up radio signals,” and “tanning booths can cook your internal organs.” Mutual beliefs arising from video games and television act as bonding agent among boys of this age and shape their identities.

As an after-school art teacher and student-teacher supervisor, the contact I have with young artists exposes me to the screenager culture. I observe youth freely telling stories and acting out violent scenarios that appropriate the composition, language, and narrative aspects of video games. Their art making is in sharp contrast to traditional school art, where the teacher’s cautious aesthetic, the template for art production, is fabricated, uniform, and removed. The adult agenda often silences the youths whose art making must mimic the teacher’s model, or in reaction to this teacher-mandated scribing, the art making of youth resembles avoidance behavior or causes disruption. As the teacher in an after-school drawing club, with the opportunity for spontaneous, non-adult-directed drawing, I observe drawing that is violent physicality in narrative—a fantastical, repulsive, aggressive imagery heavily influenced by images promoted through electronic media that permeates the language, drawings, and narratives of the youth.

Observing the boys’ extreme preoccupation with violence motivated me to pursue a qualitative study where as teacher and researcher I would reflect on the authentic art making of postmodern youth through my historical position as a boomer-generation art teacher. While I feel isolated from the lure of the video game, I do share with the youth some cultural memory and the crush of consumerism.