Nothing spared in images that shock

Steven Meisel's photographs show contempt for the American dream.

The exhibition Mixed-up Childhood at Auckland Art Gallery's New Gallery is the most disturbing seen here for years. It is in the line of Sensation and Apocalypse at the Royal Academy in London, shows that are specifically, even cynically, designed to shock. Childhood includes work by Jake and Dinos Chapman who were prominent in Apocalypse and were finalists in the Turner Prize in the year it was won by Grayson Perry, whose work is also here.

The Chapman brothers' work customarily deals with the disasters of war, concentration camps, horror, execution and torture. In this exhibition they have a single work, one of their multi-headed adolescent female dolls. This one has two heads. The faces are blue-eyed, innocent and beautiful. The figure is naked, grubby and scarred. There is no hint of genitals at the groin, but where the heads meet the ears make a red, folded form that resembles a vagina. The work hints at the figure's future difficulties with sex. It is a work that is genuinely shocking.

Perry's art is inscribed on conventionally shaped porcelain bases, then glazed. There are three vases in the show. At a distance they are graceful and vivid, but close up are nothing less than horrific. Perry is preoccupied by the feminine and the terrible things that are done to young women. The grace of his vases and elegance of colour is the vehicle for the depiction of atrocities.

Interior Conflict owes a lot to another artist in the show, the ultimate "outsider" Henry Darger, a Chicago recluse who wrote and drew epics about the struggle of little girls, like fairies, who fought against adults.

For Interior Conflict, Perry has borrowed a decoration of lovely flowers, churches, fields and clouds. But hovering in the clouds are a bald father and an aproned mother pointing to a world where boys in girls' clothing have their knickers dragged down and their penises and testicles hacked off by soldiers.

Elsewhere there is a girl in a cot that has become a cage, attended by a soldier while his colleagues march young girls to a gallows where one already swings while being preached at by a bishop. On the other side of the vase another victim, in a bonnet and dress, is soiling him/herself while wearing anti-masturbation gloves.

The vase called Patterns of Cigarette Burns and Bruises is covered by a superb combination of charming detail in gold, and energetic forms in a potent red. The red forms show a girl chasing a man with a club and a man lashing a girl in pigtails for the sin of penis envy. The burns and bruises are inventively indicated by abrasions to the delicate glazes on the vase.

The work of these artists has many levels of meaning and represents in striking and unsettling form not only disquieting things about human nature but the ambiguities of our attitudes toward childhood.

Since Freud there have been two attitudes toward childhood. There is the old Romantic attitude where childhood is a wonderful time of innocence. Then there is the other attitude where the child is driven by instinctive egotistical drives that lead towards evil unless shaped and governed by adults' mature values.

This exhibition is full of the ambiguity and irony of such attitudes and on the whole inclines to the second view.

In this show, innocence is present only as irony, notably in the photographs of Loretta Lux and Yvonne Todd, and beauty is sacrificed for impact.

The way adults shape childhood is crudely conveyed in a video by American Paul McCarthy, where a father-figure hammers and moulds and shapes paste and a doll, while an adult playing a child cringes under a table.

Everywhere in the show stereotypes are attacked. The commentary on the wall beside the photographs of Steven Meisel say they "drip with contempt" for the American dream of bright father, charming Mom, athletic son and pretty daughter. His photographs show such a family unremittingly cheerful and bright even as they "Simonise the car" in a telling reminiscence of one of the tragic exhortations in Death of a Salesman. There's no tragedy in these satiric photographs though, just a full-scale attack on the values of sales and publicity.

Amid all this tension and irony, what are the richest and most positive works? Well, there is Christian Boltanski's huge compilation of photographs from an English secondary school where - despite the uniform - the variety of faces, races and expressions and the headscarves dotted through the ranks, give an unparalleled sense of the richness of human existence.

Most powerful is a sculpture of found objects by Louise Bourgeois. Much has been made of her background of sinister abuse and her father's mistress who lived in the house, but this work is about education.

Basically it is a framework cage, confining like a prison but, in other places, transparent and with openings. On a table there are marble hands - the cold hands of instruction, the statuesque, fixed past. Attentively around the table are glass vessels, receptacles waiting to be filled. Education is seen as a tatty and formal process. The hint of menace in this resonant work is a slim chain - confinement in waiting. The multiplicity of meanings make many other pieces in the show look merely clever.

The exhibition tells us some awkward truths about childhood. What it tells us more comprehensively is where international art is today. In his novel The Tin Drum Gunter Grass made the toy a symbol of strident neurosis. It is characteristic of this show that one of the most memorable images is a beautiful, digitally altered child banging a tin drum.