Sizing it up: when it comes to art, bigger isn’t always better

By Yourwellness Last updated May 12, 2014 9

One perhaps positive effect of the recession was that we didn’t get the massive Antony Gormley sculpture promised for Dublin’s Docklands. At the time, Gormley said the 48m-high (157ft) sculpture would “allude to the human body as a dynamic interconnected matrix evoking the collective body”. Whatever it was supposed to allude to, it was going to be big.

Big art has sprung up around the world and Gormley is partly to blame. His 20m high/54m wide sculpture Angel of the North, which appeared in the north of England in 1998, became an icon of the regeneration of that area, spawning a rash of imitations. Wanting a share of the feel-good press coverage and icons to market their cities, planners and local authorities rushed to commission art on a large scale.

Of course Gormley didn’t invent the trend. Politics and religion had got there long before; he was simply co-opting it for contemporary public art. There are the American presidents, carved into Mount Rushmore, beginning in 1927; Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer, started in 1922 and completed in 1931; and those enormous communist icons that appeared across the USSR, now either broken up or banished to graveyard sculpture parks. More modern versions can be seen in Fabrice Fouillet’s series, Colosses (online at fabricefouillet.com), which documents what the French photographer describes as “the wave of ‘statuomania’ [that] spread over the world in the 1990s”.

One of the best things about big art is that it photographs well from a distance. That doesn’t always mean it works close up. You can see this with Andy Scott’s The Kelpies, recently unveiled in Falkirk, Scotland. The two horse-head sculptures are 30m high and can be illuminated after dark. The stainless-steel structures are clumsy, the shapes not quite right. But from far away, and in the right light, photographs make them look magnificent.

The galleries follow suit

The Angel was also the precursor of a trend in art in galleries where the wow factor seems to lie solely in the size: you know it’s art because it’s glossy and enormous.

Looking at Richard Mosse’s huge photographs of the Congo, in his much lauded Venice Biennale show The Enclave, I tried to imagine how they might work if postcard size. If the main attraction is scale, does that mean bigger is better and there’s little more to it than that?

Jeff Koons employs the “size matters” tactic in sculpture, with his pieces Hanging Heart and Balloon Dog. These are huge stainless-steel shapes that vacuous super-rich art collectors lap up. Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at auction last year for $58.4 million (€42 million). You can also see big empty gesture art in the atriums of boom-time office blocks across Ireland: guaranteed inoffensive, marking status rather than artistic depth.