In her book On
Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection, Susan Stewart talks about how miniaturization effects
interiority, a private enclosure, the production of the bourgeois subject.
However, your play with the Sonny Angel figure, the photographs you took, and
their placement within the flows of social media makes Stewart’s theorization
seem reductive. As J. Allan Mitchell argues in
his recent book, objects are not “used up” in the process of representing
certain class formations, or, through play, disciplining certain social
behaviors (G.I. Joes teaching boys how to be masculine, aggressive, etc.) In
fact, your play with this odd, precocious, anthropomorphic baby-angel may show
how messy the world of objects, consumerism, and the experience of change can
be.
To Stewart, the world of the daydream, the “infinite time of
reverie,” that toys induce, limit change: that the world of the miniature produces
a reified world of things. In the modern west, the anxiety produced between the
gap between signifier and signified is reduced by the process of miniaturization:
to scale things up or down requires the certainty that objects are what they
are and that they originate in relation to the scale of the human body. While I
agree that miniaturization can do these things, it seems as though Stewart is
giving too much agency to humans and not enough to the toys, their material
efficacy, and what they do in the
human-object relationship—their social consequences in general.
As I look at your pictures, I sense a longing, not for narrative
closure, but for an expanded engagement with the ecological meshwork of your
surroundings, that is, central New Mexico, the ecology of the social meshwork
of social media via Tumblr, Instagram, etc, or both at the same time. In this
sense, I see you utilizing the Sonny Angel figure as a sort of way to enter
into a different kind of relationship with your surroundings, or at least, to explore
new ways of being in the world through (following Alphonso Lingis and
Merleau-Ponty) a sort of new “postural schema,” or embodied way of encountering an
ecology of objects.
If the experience of place, according to Timothy Morton is
always uncanny: familiar yet escaping description or complete knowledge, and if
this experience may be productive of both fear or enchantment, is your disenchantment or lack of enchantment
with “New Mexico” (reified, ironically,
as a “land of enchantment”—its own sort of miniaturization: an entire state on
a coffee mug, snow globe, etc.!) addressed by reducing your scale to muddy
river banks, reeds, icy puddles, and driftwood—a scale in which you can be
re-enchanted with your surroundings, or opened up into an ecological meshwork?
What happens when you take a picture of this play of scale?
Were you playing just to take pictures? And who were you taking pictures for? Especially if you intended all
along to post them on social media, why were certain compositions, especially
of an “unnatural” figure in “nature” so important to how you wanted to depict
your tastes in the very specific realm of, in this case, Tumblr?
If the consumption of miniatures, according to Stewart, has
to do both with taste as a performance of appropriate class comportment, and of
composing borders between interiority/exteriority, the domestic/foreign, inside/outside,
nature/culture, historicity/timelessness what is going on when you enter into the
supposedly “classless” world of social media, a “virtual” place that has little
use for such binaries?
And what does cuteness have to do with all of this? Especially
how you are responding to the object itself? How has Sonny Angel directed you?
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