viv dixon
Website by jennifer hackett and beth shapeero
scale in a
secular age
karl hobbs
independent curator
We attempt to order and classify groups or
objects in order to understand their relationship
to each other and our relationship with them.
Ordering works of art in a scale allows
comparison between the relative magnitudes
of the works and evokes in the viewer
psychological responses to the encounter.
Artworks described as ‘large scale’ are
invariably large or even enormous in size, and
provide an encounter that is often described
as monumental or awe inspiring. Towering
above the viewer they seek to describe or
portray something that is bigger or more
powerful than us or something for us to
aspire to. By comparison the smallest scale
art works, the ‘Portrait Miniature’, provides
an intimate, private and portable experience
for the viewer. The use of a very small scale
also transforms these works of art into
exclusive and desirable commodities.
Throughout the periods of history where
works of art have been associated with
religious worship or linked to political and
social organisation, scale has been a tool
used to direct people’s thoughts and beliefs
and to indicate power, wealth and control.
The builders of the Egyptian Pyramids used
their immense scale and sophistication to
demonstrate power and wealth. Great Norman
Cathedrals used scale to reinforce man’s
subservience to God and the Soviets’ use of
scale in their Hero City Monuments provided a
focal point for reinforcing a political doctrine.
Contemporary artists working in secular and
often post-
works in a variety of scales. The range and
breadth of contemporary artistic responses to
scale is immense but Richard Serra and Rachel
Allen give us two examples of artists working
at each end of the scale range. Richard Serra’s
site specific works in steel use scale as part
of the site, highlighting and altering the space
they occupy, challenging our perception and
responses to both the work and its site. Serra
uses large scale in these works to emphasise
the potential of steel rather than to decorate,
illustrate or depict the sites they occupy.
Rachel Allen, in comparison, makes very small
scale sculptures and uses the miniature to
place the viewer in a more powerful position
than would be suggested by the ideas
portrayed by the objects. She describes the
use of very small scale as, “Thus, adopting the
miniature scale provides an effective platform
to communicate moral ideas of life/death
within a diminutive, ordered world away from
external chaos.” “Her miniature reconstructions
have a doll-
surreality of scale projected onto the viewer;
it is unsettling via a context of abandonment
and an odd mixture of affection and superiority
through the tiny-
The artists in Scale have drawn on both
historical and contemporary references to
scale to present fragments of individual
experience, merging the private with the
public, integrating with each other, responding
to the gallery space and creating an
overlapping of various scales. Working within
the enormity of the Fishmarket Gallery space
provides the artists with an opportunity to
explore relative scale, where even large works
will take on a domestic scale in relation to the
space. Positional relationships then become
the key to understanding and structuring
the multiple dialogues between the works
and the site. This highlights the complex
relationships between the individual, the
group and the institution of the gallery both
in a political and a spatial sense, challenging
the viewer to explore the immense and the
intimate, its organisation and spatial patterns.
¹Fiona Shaw, From the cradle to the grave (2007)
S C A L E
How do you bring together and exhibit the work of eleven diverse people, different ages, different backgrounds, different aspirations, different experiences, different attitudes, different cities. There is no common thread in our work; no discernable pattern, no shared context or theme.
How do you surmount, (scale) the challenge and put on an exhibition that is cohesive in its difference, that convinces us that this is an event, that goes beyond being a showcase for individuals.
How do you overcome (scale) the challenge of the Fishmarket? It is a gallery, it has been designated one, but also it is not quite a gallery. It is not a white cube with perfect walls with perfect angles, controlled lighting and flat floors. It does not have the hushed ambience for contemplation and fulmination. It is an old Fishmarket with its own history; it was a place of work and commerce, a place of noise and wetness, a place that floods in heavy rain and so cold in winter that it has to close. It carries feint odours of its past like a well worn overcoat no longer used and left in the cupboard under the stairs.
It is a public walkthrough; people do not enter the Fishmarket necessarily to look at art, but to get from one place to another. It has a box of a cinema plonked in the middle of it; it has shops, a cafe, seats, a bit of carpet, a place to wait in and wait for. It has the atmosphere and qualities of a bus station; it seems to have little to link it with the business of art, except its art. But it is also more than a non space that needs a bit of decoration, a nod and a wink to cultural development. It is a space that takes itself seriously as a place for art. It is brilliant
It is also so bloody big, the scale of it is overwhelming, art can drown in it, artists feel like fish out of water when confronted with it; breathless, gills flapping, mouth gaping; just how do we deal with this space? Some of us have dealt with its history, some with its physical size and some with our relationship within it; but we have all dealt with the Fishmarket in one way or another.
It was this that brought us together, the difficulty of the space, a white cube would have been so much easier; but then it would just have been a showcase for individual work; nothing to scale.
S C A L E
Opening Night : 10.09.10 6 – 9pm
Open: 11/09/10 – 8/10/10 Thurs-
Address: The Fishmarket
Bradshaw St
Northampton
NN1 2HL
Contact: info@scale2010.com
