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Scale in Contemporary Sculpture: Enlargement, Miniaturisation and the Life-Size

This book is the first to devote serious attention to questions of scale in contemporary sculpture. The study brings together a new group of recent artworks spanning sculpture, installation and photography, and proposes new definitions of ‘scale’ and ‘size’, by relating each term to differences of quantity and quality respectively. This novel framework, supported by a detailed analysis of Bergson and Deleuze’s writings on difference, is used as a motor for the rest of the discussion. The book argues that the recent artistic address of scale should be considered within the interlinked cultural and socio-historical framework of postmodern theory and the growth of global capitalism. Within this context, the book proposes an original interpretation of the identified artistic phenomenon as a reassertion of the importance of qualitative and external difference in the construction of meaning. The book’s argument is born out of extensive research into contemporary sculpture, installation and photography made since the end of the Cold War, and is supported by a detailed analysis of relevant existing literature on scale, postmodernism and global capitalism. Given the paucity of literature on both a theorisation of scale, and the address of scale in recent art practice, the research presented in the book offers new insights into an important development in international artwork of the last twenty years. The breadth of artwork discussed, and the development of a theorisation of scale and size more generally, mean that this book offers a reference point for art historians within the fields of sculpture studies and the history of photography, as well as a useful resource for artists, and for wider readers interested in recent cultural history.

This book presents the compilation and analysis of a considerable body of international sculpture, installation and photography made since the late 1980s addressing the theme of scale. Representing intensive work undertaken over a five year period, the book presents the generation of a complex original thesis regarding both the emergence of this body of artwork and the theorisation of scale. Substantial interdisciplinary research was necessary to locate the artwork within a social, historic and philosophical framework. The book, no section of which has been previously published elsewhere, is comprised of an 80,000 word text and brings together 60 colour illustrations.