Private and public - Barbara Bloom's latest installation of art

Art in America, Sept, 1995 by Susan Tallman

Barbara Bloom's newest installation, which opened in June at Leo Castelli and will travel, leaves behind her accustomed, genteel, museological elegance in what may seem an uncharacteristic fit of grandiosity and operatic overstatement. A vast floor of brilliant red (the hue popularly associated with Oriental lacquer) carries wave upon wave of small plaster heads - an ocean of identical couples, male and female faces repeating the same Asian features, stern expressions and sidelong glances. Arching above them, a great wooden bridge, 50 feet long, presents the only direct way across. At its apex stands a chinoiserie display case, glass-topped and inset with magnifying lenses, each of which reveals a single grain of rice, and on the grain of rice, a microscopic reproduction of a shunga woodcut - one of the infamous Japanese "images of spring" in which that fecund season is represented not by cherry blossoms and diagonal downpours but by acrobatic human rutting. Each grain of rice carries a scene gracefully composed from swirls of patterned fabrics, tangles of lithesome limbs, and impossibly large and elaborately detailed pudenda.

The immense and bombastic set is an extravagant lure to this tiny point, a grandiloquent lead-up to an infinitesimal punch line. As we lean down to look closer (betraying, as we do so, a curiosity that may quickly come to feel like prurience), we are watched by 600 cast-plaster eyes. Perched above the crowd, we are brought face-to-face with the private, engendering act. The arching bridge is a link between the enormous and the minuscule, and also between the anonymous and the particular, the social space of the multitude and the private space of the body.

Space and scale are the explicit subjects of Pictures from the floating World. The scattershot Asian references are intentionally eclectic, meant not as representations of real cultures but as triggers for cliches of both immensity and intimacy. As in her palindromic installation Never Odd or Even, presented at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1992, a fundamental visual tool for manipulating fundamental human responses is turned against itself.[1] The Never Odd or Even installation included, among Janus heads, Siamese twins and other strangely symmetrical elements, paired collections of dead butterflies and of photographs of Nazi architecture, splayed and pinned in display cases - a strange and evocative comparison between the beauty and the brutal authority implicit in symmetry, and one that depended greatly on the shrinking of the buildings' Ozymandian pretensions to the size of a Monarch.

In Pictures from the Floating World, Bloom plays at both extremes of scale, touching simultaneously upon Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian fantasies. There is a tendency to think of scale in contemporary art only in terms of largeness. Pollock, we are told repeatedly, dealt with scale," meaning vastness; and in general, largeness is perceived as an avatar of artistic importance and expresive power. Miniaturism, on the other hand, has come to be disdained as neurotic, or in any case dismissably twee (at least the Western variety-Islamic and Indian miniatures still carry considerable cachet in contemporary art circles). But the art of the miniature has flourished off and on throughout history and across many cultures-Asian, Indian, Islamic, European-and it has done so usually not as an alternative to more monumental art forms, but as a complement to them: the Taj Mahal emerged from the same culture and class that gave us masterpieces of miniature painting. Tsarist Russia gave us both the Winter Palace and Faberge's minuscule gold clockwork Trans-Siberian railway; China has given us both the Great Wall and the engraved rice grain.

Though the image on Bloom's grain of rice was made by photo-contacted microfiche, the Chinese have been engraving images on grains of rice, slivers of ivory and even strands of human hair for thousands of years, and the tradition persists to this day. In 1989 the Xinhua News Service reported on an artist who had engraved 18 Arhats (the "perfected ones" of Buddhism) frolicking among temples, pavilions, pine trees, tigers and flying dragons, all on a single grain of rice. It is easy to regard such feats as impressive only in a Ripley's-Believe-It-Or-Not sort of way. (In fact, Chinese micro-engraving has been featured in both Ripley museums and Ripley television programs.) But the function of miniaturization, especially the absurd-to-the-point-of-sublimity miniaturization of micro-engraving, is not to diminish the subject-or to make it cute-but to give it an unparalleled concentration, an intensity distilled beyond visibility. Micro-engraving is an art too minute to be done by eye-the engraver literally cannot see what he's doing, and must work by touch. In execution at least, it is a blind form of visual art, a poetic oxymoron that dovetails neatly with Bloom's ongoing fascination with the fringes of visibility. (It is worth noting that in the world of fairy tales-that great province of size-shifting-largeness and smallness are endowed with distinctly different forms of power: that of largeness is overt, belligerent and stupid; while that of smallness is covert and clever. Cleverness is more powerful than brute strength, in part because it is invisible.)