Size Matters

   Who says that sculpture has to be three dimensional? Take a piece of cardboard, say ten inches long by 4 inches high, gently curve it, but not symmetrically, and with a bit of scotch tape, attach the one ten-inch edge to your desk or table, so that it stands up, so to speak. Now you have a work of sculpture of sorts—at least if you are generous about your use of that term. If it’s sculpture, it’s art and to call something a work of art is surely honorific.

   But I see that you are not impressed. So, let’s have someone expand the dimensions of that cardboard—say using sheet metal—keeping the shape and proportions, making a piece 40 inches high and 100 inches long, curved like the cardboard. Are you more impressed? Do you like it better as a work of sculpture?

   Honestly, “Yeah, but  . . . blah . . . . “ might well be the answer. Happily no one, to my knowledge, ever produced works of the kind just described. However, sculptures of such and similar shapes were created by the American artist, Richard Serra. But his works, while perhaps originating in simple drawings of shapes and curves as just described, dramatically exploded to heights of twenty feet and more, emphatically asserting themselves in textured corten steel. Size matters.

   Go to YouTube and see a demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGR24BcR18. There you will see, accompanied by an explanatory voice, two gloved hands variously twisting and twirling a sausage-shaped blue balloon, until, lo and behold, it turns into a cheerful balloon dog. By my guess that shiny beast is about ten inches high and perhaps a foot long. Balloon twisting is not an ancient art, but it seems to have entertained children at birthday parties since the early forties of the last century.

   That is Jeff Koons’s starting point. The sculpture with which he winds up is also shiny, to the point that you can use it as a mirror, and, like the original, apparently seamless. But Koons’s dogs are made of metal, come in several vibrant colors and are big. I mean BIG: over ten feet high and about twelve feet long. We’re talking feet, not inches. We’re also talking millions: dollars, that is.

   To get there, Koons had to devise manufacturing techniques and supervise a large squadron of assistants with a variety of technical skills. His mega-baubles cost a lot to produce, but they cost much more to the mega-collectors who have bought them. Size matters.

   Size matters: that is how Serra and Koons wind up on the same page. But there are profound differences. Serra has invented a profusion of shapes—variously curved planes that are born at the size at which they are created and displayed. Koons, on the other hand, appropriates previously existing models and lavishes on them his considerable technical know-how to create his multi-million dollar Collector’s Items. “Koons is a man who gives a whole new meaning to the term lightweight,” says Felix Salmon in a Guardian review of the recent Koons exhibit at the Whitney, its last in the Breuer building.

   Size matters. Has it ever before in the history of art?  For sure it has, starting with the Parthenon. But I cannot think of many other instances where size was IT. Here are two different examples.