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

Barbara Bloom's newest installation, which render free of accessed in June at Leo Castelli and will travel, leaves behind her accustomed, well-bred museological elegance in what may have the appearance an uncharacteristic fit of grandiosity and operatic overstatement. A vast floor of brilliant r (the shade popularly associated with Oriental lacquer) carries wave on wave of small plaster heads - an ocean of identical pairs male and female faces repeating the same Asian features, severe expressions and sidelong glances. Arching above them, a great made of wood bridge, 50 feet long, at hands the only direct way across. At its apex stands a chinoiserie display case, glass-topped and inset with magnifying lense each of which reveals a single grain of rice, and upon the grain of rice, a microscopic reproduction of a shunga woodcut - individual of the infamous Japanese "images of spring" in which that fecund season is showed not by cherry blossoms and diagonal downpours on the contrary by acrobatic human rutting. Each grain of rice carries a spectacle gracefully composed from swirls of patterned fabrics, tangles of lithesome limbs, and impossibly large and elaborately detailed pudenda.

The immense and bombastic locate is an extravagant lure to this tiny point, a grandiloquent lead-up to an infinitesimal perforate line. As we lean down to gaze closer (betraying, as we do thus a curiosity that may quickly draw near to feel like prurience), we are watched by the agency of 600 cast-plaster eyes. Perched above the multitude 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 bring under rules of Pictures from the floating World. The scattershot Asian regards are intentionally eclectic, meant not as representations of real agricultures but as triggers for cliches of the couple immensity and intimacy. As in her palindromic installation at no time Odd or Even, presented at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1992 a fundamental visual tool for manipulating fundamental human answers is turned against itself.[1] The not at any time Odd or Even installation included, among Janus heads, Siamese twins and other strangely symmetrical uncompounded bodys 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 harmony and one that depended greatly upon the shrinking of the buildings' Ozymandian pretensions to the size of a Monarch.

In Pictures from the Floating World, flower plays at both extremes of scale, touching simultaneously on Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian fantasies. There is a aptitude to think of scale in contemporary art solitary 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, upon the other hand, has approach 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). on the contrary the art of the miniature has flourished not on and on throughout history and across many cultures-Asian, Indian, Islamic, European-and it has done in like manner usually not as an alternative to more monumental art forms, on the other hand as a complement to them: the Taj Mahal emerg from the same tillage and class that gave us masterpieces of miniature painting. Tsarist Russia gave us the one and the other the Winter Palace and Faberge's minuscule gold clockwork Trans-Siberian railway; China has given us the couple the Great Wall and the engraved rice grain.

Though the image upon Bloom's grain of rice was made through photo-contacted microfiche, the Chinese have been engraving images upon grains of rice, slivers of ivory and plane strands of human hair for thousands of years, and the tradition persists to this day. In 1989 the Xinhua novels Service reported on an artist who had engraved 18 Arhats (the "perfect ones" of Buddhism) frolicking among fanes pavilions, pine trees, tigers and flying dragons, all upon a single grain of rice. It is easy to regard similar feats as impressive only in a Ripley's-Believe-It-Or-Not sort of way. (In fact, Chinese micro-engraving has been featured in the two Ripley museums and Ripley television programs.) on the other hand 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 means of eye-the engraver literally cannot diocese what he's doing, and must work by the agency of 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 notorious belligerent and stupid; while that of smallness is shrubbery and clever. Cleverness is more powerful than ferocious animal strength, in part because it is invisible.)