In the text ‘Ask the Dust’; ‘Unmonumental: the object in the 21st century’, Gioni provides a psychoanalytical response to the ‘fictional universes’ that began to appear within sculptural practice, describing them as a ‘schizophrenic division between the desire to dissolve into the world and the need to fortify their own borders’. Reflecting on this dichotomy, Gioni defines these artistic acts as an ‘indecision’, which he declares as having a resemblance to ‘the state of paranoia that we live in as we stand divided between carrying out a new war to conquer new territory or, instead, retreating and carefully protecting our own ground’.[1]
Mark Manders, ‘self-portrait as a building’ series, 2010
Louise Bourgeois, ‘Cell’ series, 2008
To reflect on Gioni’s use of the phrase; ‘schizophrenic division’, I make a comparison between Bourgeois ‘Cell series’ and Manders ‘self-portrait as a building’ series. Though Bourgeois denies the physical exploration of the gaps between her assembled scenes, by containing her fictional world within a caged boundary, in particular a circular cage, akin to a zoetrope; which turns to create the illusion of a motion picture within its circular drum, as the viewer circles the 360 degrees of the circumferential surface, the sense of the boundaries edge is dissolved, drawing the viewer within Bourgeois universe.
Unlike viewing Bourgeois cells, the viewer is free to roam the physical spaces between Manders series of objects and installed environments. Manders describes his individual assembled scenes as being part of a collective self-portrait ever-expanding universe and what I find comparable between these artists fictional worlds, is the sense that you can never fully grasp the totality of their collective universe, as their worlds continually push at the boundary creating an ever-expanding universe.
Referring to Stewart’s ‘contrasting modes of analogy’ explored between the boundaries of scale, in ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’, she delineates how the miniature and the gigantic are both exaggerations. Defining the miniature as having ‘proportion, control and balance…a model universe’ and a contained ‘world within a world’, in opposition, she refers to the gigantic as an ‘analogical mode of thought’, that reflects a ‘world without world’ in a ‘powerful’ and ‘self-destructive’ sense, who’s ‘infinite’ nature evokes a sense of ‘disorder and disproportion’, while creating a sense of containment as it ‘envelopes’ and ‘encloses’ the spectator who walks within its ‘shadow’.
Articulating the miniature as ‘reductive’ and ‘toy-like’, that enables interior thoughts to be ‘over-seen’, Stewart refers to the ‘expansive’ state of the gigantic as being akin to ‘magnificent’, ‘sublime’ landscapes, which elevate thought ‘physically and psychically’, impressing the mind with a sense of awe. Though Stewart particularizes the gigantic as offering ‘unlimited consumption’, she explicates how there are ‘consequences of movement’ when viewing ‘vastness’, which limits perspective, by disintegrating any sense of a framed whole, that can only ‘partially’ and ‘fragmentarily’ consumed. Bestowing ‘unconsumable’ landscapes with a ‘theatrical’ significance, Stewart describes such scenes as generating a ‘consuming’ and ‘cannibalistic’ force, leaving their viewer feeling ‘swallowed’ and ‘devoured’. Here, Stewart defends the reactions of ‘the soul and emotions’, portending how overwhelming encounters can leave one feeling the need to ‘domesticate’ and ‘reform’ nature.[2]
[1] Massimiliano Gioni. ‘Ask the Dust. In: Richard Flood Unmonumental: the object in the 21st century’. New York: Phaidon, 2007, p65
[2] Susan Stewart. ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’. Duke University Press, 1992, p73-86