A Childs Machiavelli: The Little Guys

I wrote and illustrated A Child’s Machiavelli (1994-1995) when I lived in Berlin in the late nineties. It was inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s treatise from the Italian Renaissance, considered the first book of political philosophy. My version started as a series of paintings and drawings that in a small catalog self produced for a painting exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Am Acker, produced by the Realismus Studio, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in 1995. The catalog was eventually released as an expanded hardcover by Penguin USA in 1998, along with German and French editions. 

When I wrote and illustrated my Machiavelli, I wanted to keep to the meaning of the original, but reflect the voice of the youth culture of my time. So I transformed the original text, intended to advise a young king on the ways of power, into a primer teaching bad manners and street smarts to small children. It has proven prescient, prefiguring the infantile brutality of our current US politics. 

Then, a few years back, I discovered among my files a series of Flash animations created by Flicker Labs, a production company that never quite finished a 2010 e-book made from my original gouache paintings. Using these, I produced my final re-conception of A Child’s Machiavelli, a series of mini-movies condemning power structures and institutions. I created them in 2023 using a new Adobe product called Animate, that allowed me to finally reopen my old Flicker Labs Flash files. With this final transformation, what has emerged are a series of cruel but true insights that stand as reminders of the fact that while new technologies may come and go, human frailties will always remain the same.