To My Child-Friend took its name from Lewis Carroll’s The Game of Logic (1886), a primer that teaches syllogisms through games played on a printed board and counters and is addressed “to my Child-friend.” The exhibition also reflected on the gallery’s location opposite the Fröbel Seminar in Aachen. Friedrich Fröbel, founder of the kindergarten, developed a pedagogical theory centered on learning through play and a series of educational “gifts” (Gaben) that structured activities between adult and child. The exhibition comprised three related groups of work that wove these references together.
The first was a suite of 43 drawings, Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt According to the Game of Logic by Lewis Carroll as Played by Brian O’Connell, which applied the rules of Carroll’s game to Sol LeWitt’s 1969 “Sentences on Conceptual Art.” The second was BOX, a modular OSB sculpture enlarging Fröbel’s fifth gift — eight cubes — to one cubic meter, with a ninth cube nested inside, merging the formal structure of Fröbel’s block game with Carroll’s two-dimensional system of nested binary pairings. The third was a series of drawings produced using the method of Fröbel’s eleventh gift, in which patterns are generated by pricking holes in paper, reproducing at large scale the illustrations from his block instruction manuals.
Fröbel, Carroll, and LeWitt inform the work formally, conceptually, and historically. BOX and a second 2005 “playing” of the game are in the collection of the Abteiberg Museum, Mönchengladbach; the first playing, also shown in Ideal City – Invisible Cities (2006), is in a private collection.