Description

This course examines the matter of scale, one of the issues most central to the making and reception of art. Often mistaken as size, scale opens up questions of agency (who could have made it?) and compels reconsideration of what it means to be involved in the creation, circulation, and reception of visual art. How does one think about size as internal to form, or, for that matter, how it frames the artwork as a function of responses between meaning and materiality? Even more than other foundational constructs such as colour, line, or shape, scale forces us to rethink the artwork in the most visceral terms possible.

This course deliberately ignores traditional chronological distinctions and bring together a vast range of artworks, from miniature Japanese Netsuke to the inflated sculptures by Jeff Koons, to investigate the many dimensions and functions of scale.

Objectives

At the end of the module, the students will have:

• improved their understanding of key problems and methodologies in art history and criticism
• a new perspective on the world’s art history
• a familiarity with a small number of case studies

Preliminary Reading

(*indicates essential reading)

Doane, Mary Ann. “Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:3 (2003): 89-111.

Dabakis, Melissa. Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880-1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011).

Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 143-189, 281-294

*Grimaldo Grigsby, D. Colossal: Engineering Modernity (Periscope, 2012)

Mack, J. The Art of Small Things (Harvard, 2008)

Meyer, James. “No More Scale: The Experience of Size in Contemporary Sculpture,” Artforum 42:10 (Summer 2004): 220-229

Morris, Robert. “Size Matters,” Critical Inquiry 26:3 (Spring 2000):474-487.

Payne, Alina Alexandra. 'Materiality, Crafting, and Scale in Renaissance Architecture.’ The Oxford Art Journal 32:3 (2009), 365-86.

Silver, Larry, ed. Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press 2008).

Stafford, Barbara Maria. “Mummies, Herms and Colossi: Easter Island and the origin of sculpture.”  The Art Quarterly 36 (1973), 31-55

* Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 37-69

* Wu Hung. Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)