Working wonders
Of all the displays I’m looking forward to seeing this month, now that museums in England have finally reopened their doors, one of the most enticing is also almost certainly the smallest. For Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, director Simon Martin has commissioned more than 30 artists to create miniature artworks for The 2021 Model Art Gallery, a pint-sized palace of art that will complement examples from 1934 and 2000 that are already housed at the gallery. Among the artists contributing in small ways this time are Rachel Whiteread, John Akomfrah and Edmund de Waal (who has made a 2cm-high porcelain vessel). Their works will be installed in an architect-designed model building.
This project is an inventive response to the privations of a year in which all our lives have been diminished. As such, it is a type of creative monument to that experience. Like any anthology though, it is bound to be a time capsule: a particular condensation of contemporary British art at this moment, the future critical assessment of which it is impossible to divine. But that is a game for generations to come. For me, the initial interest will be in gauging whether artists have sought to distil their largerscale works, shrinking them to size, or to work from the ground up, as it were, embracing the constraints and imaginative implications of the miniature. It is captivating to hear that, for her contribution, Caragh Thuring has painted on a support chosen specifically for this project, its material properties intended to coincide with the diminutive display space.
The 2021 Model Art Gallery has not been conceived for children, although it will no doubt appeal to them (I’ve enjoyed hearing from Martin about his efforts to make the model as accessible as possible – not for Lilliputian art lovers, but for any visitor who wants to look into rather than get into the building). As Ben Street reminds us in this issue, art does not come with age classifications in the way that books or films do: children often impart ingenious and insightful responses to complex works of art, while adults may well drift back – happily – into the curious wonder of childhood in the face of great painting or sculpture (see Diary, pp. 27–28).
All manner of arguments are playing out in and around museums at the moment, from battles over their intellectual freedoms (see Forum, pp. 24–25) to disputes about the future of objects collected or looted during the colonial era (see Books, pp. 98–99). Museums should be spaces that welcome rigorous, fair debate – and must be open to change – but I hope that they never cease to be places of wonder, too. It feels apt for the Victoria and Albert Museum to have reopened with an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-themed extravaganza (‘Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser’; until 31 December) – a reminder of how museums engage our appetite for fantasy even while they call for our critical judgement.
Surprises of scale, whether monumental or miniature, have a way of inducing wonder. So too do the juxtapositions of collage, whereby elements are moved out of place and pressed into beguiling new contexts. As we are pasted back into versions of our old lives in the months ahead, we may well feel like the world has taken on something of the abrupt contrast so often found in collage – which has a comedy about it, if we approach it in the right way. So another welcome exhibition this month is ‘Peter Blake: Time Traveller’ at Waddington Custot in London, exploring the artist’s commitment to the medium over the course of his long career (18 June–13 August).
Profiling him in this issue, Martin Gayford draws attention to the individualism of Blake’s vision, developed over decades of rummaging in and rearranging the faces and traces of popular culture (see Feature, pp. 48–53). Blake, like his namesake William, lets us imagine other worlds that are possible. Imaginative play is not just for children – it ought to sustain us all.