Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

THE AESTHETICS OF SIZE

From the ridiculous to the magnificent to the sublime.

From King Kong to Apollo 11 to Michelangelo.

By what route, under what circumstance?

I have often told friends to go see King Kong, the terrific, the wondrous.

Nonsense! they cry, having seen him. Not so!

Indeed not, I respond. Because you saw Kong only on a home television screen. My 50-foot ape was chopped down to your 12-inch-high dwarf.

Similarly, space travel from Canaveral to the Moon and Mars is starved and withered, the great candle melted, giving up three hundred long feet to matinee star in Hop O’ My Thumb.

Kong belongs on cinema walls, in his proper dimension.

Apollo II should climb the stars in Imax or Omnimax theaters.

And how does this Aesthetic of Size apply to Michelangelo, Titian or Raphael?

Viewed in the galleries where they hang, full-size in multifold glories, one thing.

Up close, in library books, another.

Wrong size.

The trouble is you hold art in your hands. But, consider, shouldn’t it be that the art within those books should hold you in its hands?

May I solve the problem?

Let us build the first color-slide projection art gallery in history.

A good-size gallery, lit only from behind a series of twelve or fourteen projection screens. And on these screens, as we wander a room some 40- or 50-feet-long by 30-feet-wide, let us project the finest landscapes by Monet, the napes of lovely women’s necks by Manet, or the summer-ripe peach ladies of Renoir.

And all in their original size.

Which is what our slide-projection gallery is all about.

And not just a dozen Renoirs or Monets, but everything they painted or drew!

Which is the other thing our gallery would be about.

Because of the size, shape, weight and number of paintings by the world’s greatest artists, packing, shipping and hanging them by the tens of thousands is, if not impossible, incredibly expensive and time-consuming.

But, with a few small cartons of color slides, you can air-mail Picasso anywhere, set him up and have him hung within an hour.

Multiplicity is one thing. Size, to repeat myself, is another.

Your average art lover cannot possibly guess, reading the measurements of a Botticelli or Veronese coffee-table book, just how large the stunning originals are!

But now, for the first time, the non-travelers of the world will be knocked back on their heels when they enter our, you might say, camera obscura environment to find Botticelli’s Seasons towering, and Veronese’s Disciples looming, over them.

“My God!” the common cry will be, “are the great paintings of the world all that immense!?”

Not all, no. Some. Quite a few.

And heretofore unseen, or if seen, melted down to hand-mirror size and trapped in books, beautiful and small, instead of ten times more beautiful and perhaps a hundred times larger than the lives that pass through these galleries to be changed, enroute, forever.

Why bother?

Well, even in this jet-travel time, millions will not fly about the world, millions will still be stay-at-homes in 2001. It will be for them, as it was in the time of Victoria and Albert and their incredible Curators, that we will build our twilight museum. The Queen and her Prince truly cared for the general population, and so shipped home treasures to please the shopkeeper and thrill the barmaid.

Then, too, there will always be the jet-traveler, who will hunger for a large size memory refreshment. Anyone in need of a proper Monet fix, or a Seurat eye-dazzlement can ramble to our just-before-sunrise, just-after-dark-shadow gallery, and watch as a dozen and then a hundred and then a thousand bright images come up in waves, like tides on an amazingly endless shore.

Stroll in our twilight gallery and see twelve portraits for half an hour. Or touch a button, stay for three hours, and see every mind-numbing grotesque painting that Dali ever imagined while driving horizonless highways without his car.

Technical problems?

Plenty.

But we have moved into a high-tech world, where the quality of photography, color slides, projectors and screens should insure us of high-resolution delivery.

Not just another head-on slide show. But a gallery-seeming experience, where you are surrounded on all sides, by the imagination of the artist, a gymnasium where his whole life’s work can perform endlessly for art critic, passionate art lover, or your merest student from first grade to senior high.

Well, there you have it. A garden of ever-changing delights. Or a fountain that runs in colors and changes shapes through noons, mid-afternoons and nights. A gift to all who will never travel. A loving reminder, to those who have, of what they left behind in Florence, in Rome, in Paris, and all across the world.

Can we collect these photographic bouquets and rearrange them and hand them back as celebrations on no particular day for no particular reason, save beauty itself?

Might as well ask if Monet can make the sun climb the cathedral facades at dawn, dazzle the battlements in the late day, and bronze them with a golden flesh as the sun vanishes.

Monet, borrowing from the history before Time cried: “Light!” And there was Light.

Why can’t we do the same?