between body and space
In this term I’ve been exploring scale and its connections with the notion of intimacy. I realized that the body in the space, circulating and perceiving the work, takes part in defining the meanings of this relationship.
Susan Stewart associates the miniature as a metaphor for the interior and intimate space, and the gigantic, analogously, as a metaphor for the exterior and public sphere. Furthermore, the body is pointed as essential in these associations: “The problems uncovered in such narratives — problems of inside and outside, visible and invisible, transcendence and partiality of perspective — point to the primary position the body must take in my argument. The body is our mode of perceiving scale and, as the body of the other, becomes our antithetical mode of stating conventions of symmetry and balance on the one hand, and the grotesque and disproportionate on the other” (STEWART, 1992, p.XII).
Stewart also mentions that “Although this body is culturally delimited, it functions nevertheless as the instrument of lived experience, a place of mediation that emails irreducible beyond the already-structured reductions of the sensory, the direct relation between body and the world it acts upon” (STEWART, 1992, p.XIII). This brings back the phenomenological perspective of the body, playing a vital part in perceiving (and being in) the world.
The temporality is also another point directly connected to the scale, as Stewart explains that “(...) the miniature world is a world of arrested time; its stillness emphasizes the activity that is outside its borders. And this effect is reciprocal, for once we attend to the miniature world, the outside world stops and is lost to us” (STEWART, 1992, p.67). It is as if the small scale encapsulates time in this enclosed space, and time passes in a different way. When in relation to the giant, however, the experience becomes fragmented both in terms of time and space; we can only experience it partially, as we’re “inside” of it, as it is surrounding our body.
With that, the aspect of space/physical distance is enhanced, as the smaller the scale the more distant our body is, as we can only experience it from outside, while the larger scale makes us feel enveloped by it. Therefore, its existence and its way of being in the world are also deeply transformed. This creates yet another threshold between the body of the viewer with the scale of the work: it is a paradox in which the body in relation to the miniature becomes giant, and when in relation to the giant, it becomes a miniature. Here, I decided to focus on the way that these oppositions can evoke intimacy.
I started to reflect on how this manifested inside my own body of work. A small-scale piece, such as Impermanence, can only be seen from the outside. One could see the whole work with just one glance, so the time of looking at it could be also minimized. However, it evokes this intimate feeling as the body needs to move forward and closer to it to be able to perceive its details. “There is only space because there is a body. The spatiality of the body, in turn, is only realized in action.” (PRADO, CALDAS, QUEIROZ, 2012, p.782). It’s as if an intimate relationship with the work is created through this approximation from the viewer — however, it all depends on their own intentions.
“We do not move in the world according to our objective representations of space, but according to our intentionality that situates us in the world (...) Therefore, the spatiality of the body is situational, that is, it concerns how I situate myself in the world in relation to other objects and other people” (PRADO, CALDAS, QUEIROZ, 2012, p.782). This brings to light the idea that the body's point of view can transform the meaning/open new perspectives on the same object, as in the case of walking around an installation, such as Distant confluences, and noticing that the relationship between the images changes. In this case, with a large-scale work, my initial thoughts were that the size would take away from the intimacy I wanted to evoke; however, after studying these dichotomous relationships and receiving feedback on my work, I realized that larger size also evokes intimacy, but in different ways. The intimacy was brought by the environment that the piece itself created, as if the image is coming down and embracing the viewer’s body, approaching an immersive experience.
This relationship between body and scale also brings to mind Gaston Bachelard’s ideas. “Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense (...) It is often this inner immensity that gives their real meaning to certain expressions concerning the visible world” (BACHELARD, 1994, p.184, 185).
I started to realize that even the miniature could evoke this feeling of immensity in the realm of the intimate space. “The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold” (BACHELARD, 1994, p.192), according to Bachelard; but it doesn’t exclude the possibility of being unfolded by a small-scale “spectacle” or piece of work. The philosopher states that “The two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth” (1994, p.201) and that “It would seem, them, that it is through their ‘immensity’ that these two kinds of space — the space of intimacy and the world space — blend” (1994, p.203). It feels that this threshold of interior and exterior (related to scale and body), in the end, becomes a real point of encounter; they coexist in the territory of intimacy.
“This coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our own existence is a very concrete thing (...) In this coexistentialism every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space. For each object, distance is the present, the horizon exists as much as the center” (BACHELARD, 1994, p.203).
References
BACHELARD, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
PRADO, R.A.A., CALDAS, M.T., QUEIROZ, E.F. (2012) The body in an existential-phenomenological perspective: approximations between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão, 32 (4), p.776-791.
STEWART, S. (1992) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Distant confluences at the MA Summer Show at Camberwell College of Arts, July 2024