We human types have been building huge replicas of ourselves for centuries. We've imagined gods as hundred-foot-high human forms and spent tons of labor constructing statues that portray them as such. We love to picture ourselves as mountains. You'll see evidence of this all over the ancient world, from enormous sculptures of Buddha carved into mountainsides to the Great Sphinx to the Colossus of Rhodes. The instinct to amplify ourselves is universal.
Even now in the age of freeform contemporary art, scale plays a vital role in how a work will affect us. Nothing packs quite the same presence as a piece that won't fit in a typical gallery or museum space. Take an everyday, common object and inflate it to the size of a building; suddenly, your viewers are confronted with the problem of how to regard it in relation to its surroundings. Take the human form and the art becomes even more complicated. How do we relate to something that looks like us but is ten times bigger? Or that reminds us of ourselves but also of the huge, impossible infrastructure that makes up our modern world? These artists entertain these questions with mammoth installations around the world.
The famous British shark-preserver dabbles in other media, too. He recreates the anatomical human form in bronze at enormous scales, creating freakish towers of exposed organs. In a biology classroom, this sort of model would be perfectly normal to see at perhaps a ten inch scale. Stretch it out to a story high and suddenly it becomes both uncomfortable and awesome. We're accustomed to seeing the human form scaled up in statues and monuments, but we don't typically get a glimpse of statuesque anatomy. Our own proportions feel feeble by contrast; we may be shaped similarly, but we're certainly not made of metal.
"Angel of the North" by Antony Gormley
Do angels look the same as they always have in a post-industrial world? Gormley proposes a striking hybrid of human and airplane for his vision of a present day angel, which stands in Gateshead, England. Despite the faceless, monolithic quality of this structure, there's something oddly welcoming and spiritual about it. Maybe it's the geometrical resemblance to the Christian cross or the serene Buddhas of the east. It manages to strike a profound presence without any attachment to a particular dogma.
Upon looking at this giant steel spider, you might not be flooded with the most maternal of feelings. But the artist did indeed build Maman as a tribute to her mother. The giant spider figure holds giant spider eggs inside of it, which are visible from the bottom.
"The Awakening" by J. Seward Johnson Jr.
This sculpture of a raging giant is a frozen instant from a kinetic, emotional scene. The silver giant has probably just woken up from a thousand-year sleep only to find himself trapped beneath the skin of the earth. He doesn't look too happy about his fight for freedom. The sculpture, which is now installed on a beach in Maryland, is open to interaction with the public, so it mostly has kids crawling on it. You'd be angry if people let their offspring step in your eyeballs, too.
"Giant Clothespin" by Mehmet Ali Uysal
Sometimes art is simply clever, manipulating its surroundings in a way that makes us smirk. By translating an everyday object to a massive scale, the artist also allows us to think about what separates an object from a monument in meaning.
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