little

Miniatures

From imagination in miniature to the miniature as new media object.

Little Disasters in Art

Not long after I started my online exploration on miniatures in art, I stumbled on the website of the young Britisch artist Rachael Allen. On here site she gives a comprihensive explanation of why the miniature is her most significant object of art. For Rachael miniature model making provides “a stage for the exploration of mortal existence, where the fine line separating youth and age, birth and death highlights our vulnerable condition as human beings. The art functions on a level of seduction that invites the viewer to enter a diminutive world that speaks about the universal mortal condition.”(4)

The miniatures from her Wheelchairs serie, confront the viewer with a sinister situation. All the wheelchairs seem to be crushed or broken. It is hard to look at it as a toy because wheelchairs don’t really fit the idea one has of a toy. When you let your imagination skew down to the scale of the wheelchair, one enters the moment after an uncanny event. What happenend?

Rachael Allen,

At first sight the works of the young New York based artist Thomas Doyle look like tradional manufactured, train model like, miniatures. In the artist statement on his website he writes the following:

“Conversely, the private intensity of moments rendered in such a small scale draws the viewer in, allowing for the intimacy one might feel peering into a museum display case or dollhouse. Though surrounded by chaos, hazard, and longing, the figures’ faces betray little emotion, inviting viewers to lose themselves in these crucibles—and in the jumble of feelings and memories they elicit.”(5)

Most of his works are contained under glass and radically disconnect the world within it. The viewer is able to gaze over these miniatures, but when zooming in the compressed worlds, allowing oneself to inverse the perspective, the viewer is confronted with details of what are mostly chaotic, destructive, thrilling events, modeled around typical civil environments. Imprisoned in glass in an eternal silence, increasing the siginifance of the signs, enhancing the imagination.

Thomas Doyle,

Another New York based artist Lori Nix manufactures dioramas not to exhibit them, but as miniature stage of a world which she then photographs. The resulting artwork is the photo. Nix uses the miniature to recreate the atmospheric, narrative environment she has in mind. She is totally in control of her subject matter. In this snippet taken from her website she writes:

Lori Nix,

I am interested in depicting danger and disaster, but I temper this with a touch of humor. My childhood was spent in a rural part of the United States that is known more for it's natural disasters than anything else. I was born in a small town in western Kansas, and each passing season brought it's own drama, from winter snow storms, spring floods and tornados to summer insect infestations and drought.(6)

Nix is heavily influenced by landscape painting, especially the Hudson River School of Painting which included the artists Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, Frederich Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and the Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich.. Her colorful photographs have the sensation of romantic paintings and landscapes filled with the force of nature. A destructive force, present in all the layers of her work. The powerful atmosphere caused by the lightning and colors in relation with carefully manufactured objects and environments, the abandoned, hazardous cities and landscapes, cause an intriguing esthetic experience.

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Besides these relatively young artists there is an artist duo of which their work needs to be mentioned in relation with miniatures. Assuming that most the readers are familiar Jake and Dinos Chapman, I will skip a detailed description of there life’s and works, and immediately jump to, what is generally seen as their most ambitious, work ‘Hell’ (1999), an enormous tabletop miniature filled with over 30,000 remodelled, 2-inch-high figures, an immense amount of mutilated figures and corpses, and many figures in Nazi uniform and performing egregious acts of cruelty and destruction. The work combined historical, religious and mythic narratives to present an apocalyptic snapshot of the twentieth-century. Unfortunately this work was destroyed during a fire at MOMART in 2004. In 2008 the Chapman brothers finished another more ambitious and detailed version named ‘Fucking Hell’ .

Jake and Dinos Chapman

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The effect most of the artists try to achieve is the one of provocation and uncanny feelings. The artist uses the narrative and nostalgic properties of the miniature to seduce the viewer to loose herself in the small distanced world. Once inside the world through imagination, the artist makes you complicit in the depicted narratives about mortality, catastrophe, cruelty, and death. An inversion of perspective with a thrilling twist. As if the characteristics of a miniature are used against you.

notes:
(4) Rachael Allen, http://www.rachaelallen.com/section466217.html
(5) Thomas Doyle, http://www.thomasdoyle.net/info.htm
(6) Lori Nix, http://www.lorinix.net/about.html

Photo's:
Rachael Allen, http://www.rachaelallen.com/gallery_251997.html
Thomas Doyle, http://www.thomasdoyle.net/
Lori Nix, http://www.lorinix.net/the_city/index.html
Chapman Brothers, http://www.lexpress.fr/diaporama/diapo-photo/culture/art/musee/visite-du-nouveau-musee-pinault-a-venise_764848.html?p=9

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Untitled (black wheelchair), Rachael Allen, 2007

Untitled (pushchair), Rachael Allen, 2007

A corrective, Thomas Doyle, 2010

Escalation, Thomas Doyle, 2008

Floater, Lori Nix, 2001

Mall, part of series The City, Lori Nix, 2010

Fucking Hell, Jake and Dinos Chapman, 2008

Before I started my research this performance was my one and only inspiration. I often showed this work to others as an example of creating a visual performance without the use of computer graphics, and video manipulations. When preparing the performance for the Speech, I often analyzed the photo’s and video’s on their website.
Great War, is a live animation performance, created with a miniature filmset. With this performance Hotel Modern attempts to make tangible the experiences of the First World War. The narrative is based on original letters of soldiers from the Western front. With the use of atmospheric miniatures, rusty objects, soil, fire, and smoke, Hotel Modern recreates the horrors of war. In 2005 another the performance ‘Kamp’ premiered. An enormous scaled model of Auschwitz with thousands of miniature puppets functioned as the stage for a narrative about the greatest mass murder in history.

Hotel Modern, Great War, 2001

The way I want to apply the miniature is as an scaled remediation of the body of the spectator. It follows the conventions of a miniature with the difference that the miniature in Reconstruction of Catastrophe is expanding. I am interested in the change of significance of the orginal body when it is transformed into different media, ending as scaled imperfect representation of the body in a totally different context. How does the spectator relates to its scaled materialized representation and what embodied experience does this transformation invoke? Especially within the new scene of mortality and destruction. On my research on miniatures in art I found many examples of miniatures that deal with themes as mortality, catastrophe, cruelty, and destruction. Although I found other examples of miniatures in art which adresses completely different themes, I had a strong feeling that this amount was smaller than the amount of examples dealing with catastrophe.

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Geat War, Hotel Mordern, 2001

Videostill, Great War, Hotel Modern, 2001