Cardinal Pole Catholic School, east London
The artist has handed over the canvas to give schoolkids from around the world an outlet for their adolescent rage. The problem is, they’re not all rebels like him
Adults are not schoolchildren and – as all good teachers know – you’re deluding yourself if you pretend to be one of the kids. Oscar Murillo, best known as one of the four artists who chose to share the 2019 Turner prize, has ignored that wisdom. He has returned to his former school and to his adolescence. After his family came from Colombia to Britain when he was 10, he was educated at Cardinal Pole Catholic School in Hackney, east London. It is an impressive place. Indeed the evident seriousness of the school – and the articulacy of its senior pupils, who are spending the summer as helpers for the project’s producers Artangel – oddly shows up the bad-boy fantasy of Murillo’s project.
Apparently Murillo was unhappy, frustrated and rebellious at school. He sees the same alienation in the pen marks and cuts pupils everywhere leave on their desks. So, since 2014, he has been providing school classes across the world with pieces of canvas to graffiti as they wish, assembling a global archive of dissident art made by 10 to 16-year-old kids at 350 high schools in 30 countries. In his installation of this entire hoard in Cardinal Pole’s hall, the boredom of a planet of adolescents seeps from thousands of inky doodles. A rotating selection is displayed on glass-covered tables while the rest are stacked on shelves in a well-organised archive to be consulted with the help of volunteers, as if you were in a library researching a PhD on the teenage mind.
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