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Written by DCist contributor Menachem Wecker.
American sculptor Claes Oldenburg is famous for his work in the 1960s and 70s that inflated everyday objects to enormous proportions: safety pins the size of trucks, typewriter erasers ten times life-size (here at the National Gallery of Art), and hamburgers that would have comfortably served Goliath.
BIG/small, one of the current shows at the National Museum of African Art, merges Oldenburg’s vision of the gigantic with a variation on “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” The exhibit, a hodgepodge of large and small African artifacts, is designed to stress size differences. But more than that, it is an effective curatorial enterprise that allows viewers to interact with and, in a way, determine the intrinsic nature of the pieces.
One advantage of sculpture over painting is that it allows the viewer to participate as more than a bystander. A painting creates its own world, and it is up to the viewer to either enter that world or alter course. But a sculpture is interactive; the viewer can walk around it and consider every angle and perspective. This establishes a relationship in which the viewer becomes the point of reference for the sculpture.
In BIG/small, a pair of chairs, for example, casts the viewer in the role of reference point. You could hold Weight in the form of a chair in your hand. Made of copper alloy in 18th or 19th century Ghana by an Asante artist, the weight was used by businessmen to measure gold dust. The chair is sturdy and heavy looking, with a pattern of rounded projections emerging along its edges that lends the chair a look as if struck by measles. In a glass case beside the weight is almost precisely the same form—just bigger—of a chair used by Asante royalty.
Across the room from the chairs is Nesting baskets (mid or late 20th century), a series of fiber and leather baskets made by a Tusyan artist. They range from small to medium size and are often given as gifts to an engaged Tusyan girl. The baskets serve a clear pragmatic purpose—the Tusyan version of Tupperware—but they are also symbols of a coming of age, reflecting in their sizes the progression in life from young to mature.
Both the chairs and the baskets show scale differences, but what BIG/small truly demonstrates is that scale, even in art, is always relative. Ultimately it's the viewer—not the objects—who decides what is big and what is small.
Take the early 20th century brass and iron Anklets (pictured) made by an Igbo artist in Nigeria. At first, the richly decorated objects look like platters, candle holders or cymbals, in which case they're fairly unremarkable in size. But as ankle jewelry, they suddenly appear abnormally bloated. Like the chairs and the baskets, the objects’ true size has little to do with their actual dimensions. They become enormous or miniature based on an interpretive act of the viewer. If good art can be said to change the way we view the world, BIG/small is successful because it privileges viewers over art. Depending upon the viewer’s self-awareness, the objects and the self can appear large, small, or anywhere in between.
The National Museum of African Art is located at 950 Independence Avenue, SW and open daily, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Big/small runs until July 23, 2006.
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Great article on an interesting exhibit! I wanted to add that the show is very kid friendly and would be perfect for first-time/younger museum goers.