Seeing Through a Crack: Miniature Versus Totality

“When theory fails, art gains.” Isn’t this the message that the culture industry sends to all of us? In 2010 Barbara Kruger exhibited the video installation The Globe Shrinks at Mary Boone (Chelsea), featuring ­episodes from an inventory of daily life, experienced and co-created by total strangers. Presented as randomly linked clichés of minor significance, these mundane episodes suggest extrapolation. Whereas in the past the opposition between fragmentation and totality was clear, today it is more ambiguous. 

These fragments are being extrapolated into what can be dubbed as “totality in miniature” — the infantile model of the whole. A symptom readable as the deferral of adulthood.¹ 1 - In The Globe Shrinks the preference of small-scale deconstruction over systemic ­critique is self-evident. In the words of Ilya Kabakov: “A person who feels like a child is able to escape the canons and boundaries of being, in which he or she is, as it were, assigned a place. You develop an entirely different attitude toward reality. It is perceived as a theft, even though it is, in fact, not limited by anyone and therefore belongs to you in unlimited quantities. This is space without dimensions: it can be shortened but can also be expanded. What starts from such attitudes (or criteria) is the prospect of complete happiness and eternal childhood.”² 2 - An excerpt from my conversation with Kabakov in “Parallels Leben oder Leben im Kanon,” Neue Bildende Kunst (December 1998): 60-64.