New Art Book Plays with Scale
Big Art/Small Art by Tristan Manco, out later this month from Thames & Hudson, is an attempt to see what size means to art in the 21st century.
A new book is looking at the scale of contemporary art, from monumental color experiments on dirt and trees by Katharina Grosse to minuscule amusement parks built from hair and dust by Takahiro Iwasaki. Big Art/Small Art by Tristan Manco, out later this month from Thames & Hudson, is an attempt to see what size means to art in the 21st century.
“By daring to think big or small,” Manco writes in an introduction, the 45 artists represented are “opening our eyes to things we might previously have taken for granted and making us look at the world around us in new ways.” It’s a large book itself, with pages that alternate between glossy for photographs and colored paper for the text, which offers brief essays of introduction by Manco and short paragraphs for each artist.
There’s Lilian Bourgeat’s magnifying boots and benches, Lorenzo Manuel Durán cutting scenes with a scalpel from leaves, and Luke Jerram making glass sculptures of microbes (although I’d suggest these, with the enlargement of their subjects, belong in the “Big” section). Fujiko Nakaya’s “fog sculptures” may arguably be the biggest in terms of their dissipated water that could go on forever. It’s not a book that goes into the whole history of scale in art, or really past the last couple of decades. Yet it has an interesting range, although perhaps not extreme enough for those considering the legacy of Victorian diatom microscope art or maybe even the Colossus of Rhodes.
The project is interesting in that it give these artists the space to explain why they work at the scale they do, especially when it defines their practice. For example, Thomas Doyle, who builds miniatures of suburban life beneath glass, explains: “Smaller works, especially those that attempt to create worlds and environments, not only allow us a place to escape to momentarily; they transform the mundane into something extraordinary.” On the other end of the size spectrum, the Madrid-based street art collective Boa Mistura, which paints huge typographic pieces that colorfully, blend into blighted neighborhoods, stated: “The bigger the work, the more we improve the area.” Then there’s Egied Simons who works with living organisms, such as algae and insects: “Small reveals patterns. Small is magic. Small reflects really big.”
Big Art/Small Art by Tristan Manco is available October 14 from Thames & Hudson.
