![]() ![]() The Chapman brothers recreated Goya’s horrifying etchings with remodelled toys, and scattered Nazis through other vitrine collections in 1995 the Polish artist Zbigniew Libera used Lego to recreate a concentration camp. So does pure escape, though some of the examples Garfield offers deliberately complicate both instincts. The illusion of mastery is especially significant – the idea that, in Lévi-Strauss’s phrase, the “intelligible dimensions” of a miniature can help us to feel in control in a world that rarely gives us that option. Garfield, whose range of critical reference is equally wide (taking in WG Sebald, Walter Benjamin and Simon Armitage), is fascinating and often funny about why miniatures exert such a hold. We consider how a model of a fully loaded slave ship on the Middle Passage was handed around parliament in the 1780s, instantly doing the job no amount of words had yet been able to achieve. They are “but boxes of play, but they work an unfeasible trick: they cloud us with doubt, and doubt foreshadows inquiry”. We move from the bathetic Miniatur Wunderland, in Hamburg, both “stupefyingly impressive” and “stupefyingly deranged” to the mysterious and moving, such as the Nutshell Studies of forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee – doll’s house-style dioramas of murder scenes, where attention to every detail was the educational point. Wells wrote two books about his enthusiasm, Floor Games and Little Wars, and has a decent claim to being the grandfather of video games. We also meet HG Wells, sitting on a nursery floor with his son, building cities and conducting battles sometimes Jerome K Jerome helped, “knocking down 2-inch Zulus with his spring-breech loader”. We see Zaha Hadid attempting to reduce her vaulting ambition to 1:12 (it wasn’t very successful), and hold our breath as a micro-miniaturist describes replicating the Mona Lisa in less than a square millimetre (he used an eyelash for a paintbrush).Īrthur Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton and Siegfried Sassoon provided original work for the tiny books in Lutyens' dollhouse It was so beautiful that actually playing with it was out of the question. Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Wharton and Siegfried Sassoon were among those who provided original work for the tiny, readable books Gustav Holst wrote a score. He takes the reader from Ancient Egyptian shabtis, miniaturised retainers who accompanied their employers into the realms of death, to the doll’s house Edwin Lutyens made for Queen Mary, in which every aspect, from the books to the telephone to the toilet, was made by the leading practitioner in the field: clocks by Cartier, cricket bat by John Wisden & Co, wine from Berry Bros, the art by Paul Nash and Arthur Rackham. ![]() (He is robustly dismissive of the soulless greatest-hits parade of, for instance, Mini-Europe in Belgium.) The hint of cattiness on the faces of the pub regulars in Bekonscot, the hopeful cricketer on the village green: there is a sense of unease, and of a clear point of view.įrom the first person who climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower and was amazed to see Paris receding and Parisians becoming ants from the moment, in fact, 40,000 years ago, when Venus figurines, a few centimetres tall, were first carved, we have been in thrall, Garfield argues, to the clarifying effects of scale. According to Garfield, what makes Bekonscot attractive is not only its size – a scale of 1:12 and 1:32, across an area of 40,000 sq ft – but its idiosyncrasy. People were so keen that by the end of last year more than 15.4 million people had visited it. He built a village around his railway, and people to live in it impressed friends suggested the public might pay. So the husband, accountant Roland Robert Callingham, took over the garden. “N o one is quite sure how Bekonscot, a model village in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, came to be,” Simon Garfield writes, but “the most satisfying story” begins in 1927 “with a housebound miniature railway that grew so big that a wife reached for the rolling pin: either it went or she did”. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |