Artist Deconstructs His Work

On Saturday, Ivan found some stickers on the floor of his room. "Ticker, ticker," he said.

They came off the Easter Bunny plate they made in daycare a few weeks back. It was a white paper plate with yellow Easter Bunny cutout shape stapled to it. The Bunny had two different color ears stapled on and was decorated with stickers and some crumpled wads of glued-on tissue paper in different colors. The plate was hanging in his room. It was really cut. Shall I say, his first artistic collage piece?

I took the plate down so he could put the stickers back on it.

We looked and played with the plate a bit. Then I went to pee. I left him alone in the room with the plate. I heard to shushing and tearing noise. By the time I returned, he had pulled off the tissue paper, pulled off the tears and was basically tearing the whole plate appared.

He created a mess on the floor.

"Mesh, mesh," he promtly told me. "Tash, tash," he said as we started picking up the pieces. He wanted to run off and throw the trash into the trash can but I stopped him so I could collect the pieces and take a photo of his destroyed artwork.

As this was all going on, I couldn't help but wonder whether I could extrapolate some deeper meaning from his actions. He was the creator and destroyer of his piece of work.

He created it and then deconstructed, it calling it trash.

Not that he ever thought it was a valuable piece of anything, unlike us, adults close to him, in awe of every achievement.