Salute to the small and the beautiful
Documentary on little creations and their makers revels in odd beauty and timeless appeal
The documentary Miniature, co-directed by Tony Coleman and Margaret Meagher, is a lovely miniature itself, barely more than an hour long but highlighting numerous artists whose work is small and beautiful. Here are five things we learned about miniatures from the movie.
1 THEY’RE OLD
Some of the oldest art in the world — sculptures created 30,000 to 40,000 years ago — are miniatures, including the famed “lion-man,” which is about 30 centimetres tall. Its purpose isn’t known, but ancient Egyptian tombs also contain miniatures that are clearly religious artifacts. 2 THEY’RE UBIQUITOUS
The filmmakers note that children spend most of their (non-digital) playtime with miniatures of one sort or another; it’s how they learn how the larger world works. And if you have any sort of mantelpiece tchotchkes in your home, they’re probably scale models of people or things.
3 THEY’RE LIKE RUSSIAN DOLLS
Many of the miniature dioramas seen in the movie feature mini-miniatures, like architectural models or a halfbuilt model ship inside tiny studios.
And the model village in Britain’s Bourton on the Water, created in 1937, contains its own miniature town, which contains yet another and, almost impossible to make out, another.
4 THEY CAN BE ART, ACTIVISM OR BOTH
While most model villages are idealized — Britain’s feature trains that run on time, and no rail strikes — artist Jimmy Cauty’s in London looks like an alternate-universe police state. We also visit Hypotopia, a model town built in a public square by Viennese students who wanted to show what could have been done with the 19 billion euros spent on a bank bailout. Less socially conscious but just as cool is Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, which includes more than 13 kilometres of train tracks, thousands of moving vehicles and a model airport with tiny planes that take off and land. A control room that looks like it could handle actual air-traffic keeps an eye on things.
5 IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE
The appeal of miniatures is difficult to put into words. “I’ve always wanted to have a little row of something,” says one artist. An academic notes that a miniature chair has all the “chair-ness” of the real thing but is totally unusable as a chair. But from Gulliver’s Travels to dollhouse conventions, the appeal of miniatures can’t be denied, even if it can’t quite be explained either.