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Period Bands A/B/C

Art and Scale

Tutor: Emanuele Lugli

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.

Charles Ray, Boy with a Frog

   Out of place and out of scale