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What Makes a Miniature?

Jack Davy

Introductory presentation at the first Worlds in Miniature workshop, 20 June

2014, The British Museum.

My name is Jack Davy and I am one of the co-organisers of this workshop. I am

a British Museum collaborative doctoral award student working on a PhD

project in association with UCL Anthropology. Prior to this I was the Museum

Assistant for North America here at the Museum for five years.

I’m really excited to see such a large turnout for a workshop on what on the

face of it seems like such a niche topic – when I first started thinking about

miniatures a few years back I was startled to realise how ubiquitous they are in

material culture collections all over the world and yet how little studied they

seem to be.

When Charlotte and I designed this event, we deliberately left the theme as

open ended as possible to attract papers from across a range of subjects and

disciplines, an ambition achieved through the excellent line up we have for you

today. Although we did suggest that the papers should explore the “social,

cultural and technological processes of miniaturisation", we consciously left

the interpretation of these processes undefined and our speakers have

consequently written their own papers in their own way.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the views expressed here are my own

and not necessarily those of my colleagues who will follow.

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My research looks at miniatures from Native American contexts, such as this

fine miniature canoe here, but I’m going to kick off our talks for today by

talking about an entirely different miniature on display here at the museum.

Through this example I want to convey my thoughts on miniaturisation as a

cognitive technique and try and lay out what I see as the principle

characteristics and purpose of miniatures. I don’t expect all or even many of

you to agree with me on the points I make, and I look forward to some

gentlemanly debates on these questions during today and beyond.

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The miniature in question is on display near the Museum’s north entrance –

some of you might have seen it if you came in that way as you walked down

from Euston or King’s Cross. For many visitors arriving by coach, it is the first

thing they see as they enter. It is this scale model of the British Museum as it is

currently situated. It measures 154cm by 158cm and stands 66cm off the

ground next to a series of panels explaining the ongoing building work at the

new World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre in the Northwest corner of the

museum site.

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When I started to really examine miniatures I was struck by three principle

qualities which I believe all miniatures hold. The first, and in my opinion the

most important is that they must always resemble something else. Often this is

an object or animal, something people use or see in their daily lives.

However this is not essential – Claude Lévi-Strauss once famously pointed out

that the Sistine Chapel is a miniature of the end of the world (1966 [1962]:23),

and the centrepiece of the Warner Brothers studio experience in Watford is a

1:24 scale model of the fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

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© Warner Bros Entertainment

Thus intangible things that have never physically existed can form the iconic

prototypes of miniatures. The salient point however is that although

miniatures incorporate imagination in their construction, they are always

intrinsically iconically linked to something else – in the case of our model of

course, it is to the British Museum itself.

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The second quality is reduction.

Am,B43.25 Am1898,1020.1

Miniatures are always smaller than the things they resemble. Sometimes this

reduction is based on mathematical principles to generate a model used in a

scientific way, and sometimes proportion and detail are ignored in favour of

emphasis or exaggeration of certain features. To be a miniature however the

size must reduce, as has self-evidently occurred here.

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Thirdly, a miniature is always less complex than the thing it resembles.

From Perseus Digital Library 1894,1101.7

This may seem like a contentious point, and I must make clear here that I am

referring to the miniatures themselves as simplifications, and not the

processes which created them, which can sometimes be far more complex

than those involved in creating larger objects. The reduction in size is itself a

simplification, as are a host of other features, such as the removal of context

and animation or alteration of materials. As intricate and technical as our

particular miniature is, it clearly is of less complex construction than the whole

Museum. It does however reflect this point – the materials are simpler and

smaller; it sits in a Perspex case protected from the elements and thus not

prone to environmental fluctuations; above all, it doesn’t work – inside these

buildings there are no cases, no objects, no lifts, lights, toilets or pipes or any

of the things that enable the Museum to operate; and there are no people –

no staff, no visitors, no little workshops going on in seminar rooms. In all these

ways this intricate and fascinating model is a simplification of the building that

surrounds it. But is it functional?

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Although we clearly understand that this miniature has a purpose, there has

sometimes been a tendency to misinterpret the relationship between

miniatures and functionality and to assume that because miniatures are

smaller and simpler than larger objects they are somehow lacking in

functionality beyond the aesthetic, but nothing could be further from the

truth. The anthropologist Ruth Phillips strikes at the heart of this issue when

she notes that miniatures, through the processes already described, exchange

a practical functionality for a representational one (1998:91). The purpose of a

miniature is not to have a practical effect on everyday chores, but to use the

representational qualities embedded in the object by the process of

miniaturisation to communicate with someone interacting with the miniature,

skeumorphically bending reality to create an optical illusion that alters a

viewer’s understanding of the world.

I think we can all see that by commissioning this miniature and placing it in the

North foyer, the British Museum is attempting to contextualise the

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considerable disruption occurring in the building as a result of the

development of the WCEC.

The miniature enables the visitor, whatever their language, to view the whole

site from above, unimpeded by rain, cranes or aircraft. They can grasp not only

how the museum is changing, but also how the new building has been

incorporated into the existing one. This is part of the network of influences

that have contributed to the construction and use of the model, but it only

presents part of the picture. Deeper study can reveal much more about the

creators of the miniature and the world they inhabited.

For modern scholars trying to grasp the original function of historic miniatures

in museum collections it becomes imperative that we relocate the miniature in

the social, cultural, environmental and temporal circumstances from which it

originated.

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To do this, one has to recreate (and such a recreation can only ever be partial)

the myriad influences and inferences that surround the miniature and give it

its representative power. Once we have done so, it becomes possible to

discern less tangible or obvious elements of the miniatures conception: here

we have a major cultural institution embarking on an expensive, complex and

risky operation taking place over a decade that is designed to fundamentally

alter the way the Museum operates – thousands of things can go wrong in that

time, but here is a perfect model that encapsulates that hope, that vision and

that ambition in an idealised and sanitised form.

When we think of miniatures in this way, it becomes clear that their

representational quality is largely symbolic. By invoking a resemblance to

something and stripping away detail and scale, a miniature can become a

vessel for entirely intangible human concepts. Thus the scale model of the

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Museum is not just a handy guide to visitors, but a strident statement about

the Museum’s own vision of it’s future, tinged with optimism and a certain

disingenuity.

When we impose this methodology on historic miniatures from very different

contexts, they can take on a whole new reality:

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1901,0608.23

A barge found in an Egyptian tomb is not a watercraft, but may be a symbolic

representation of the journeys during the afterlife and consequently the

fascination with death that permeated their society.

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© Sir John Soane’s Museum

The collection of cork architectural models in Sir John Soane’s Museum

becomes a recreation of his desire to encapsulate and understand the world

during the height of the European Enlightenment.

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A souvenir miniature canoe from the Northwest Coast like the one with which I

began this presentation emerges as the embodiment of the nostalgia and

dislocation created by a small pox epidemic.

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© Mattel

And a Barbie doll is revealed as a miniature docent on how a girl should look

and dress when she grows up.

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You may agree or disagree with my points here, but either way, when you’ve

listened to each of the other speakers today take a moment to consider what it

is that the miniatures they are discussing might truly represent and how much

they can be understood as the voices of peoples far away or long dead coming

through to us here in London.

Thank you for listening

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Quoted bibliography

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966 [1962]. The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press

Phillips, Ruth B. 1998. Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the

Northeast, 1700-1900. Seattle: University of Washington.

Thanks to Dr. J.D. Hill and The British Museum for hosting this workshop.

Unless otherwise noted, all images © Trustees of the British Museum. Further information on any of

these objects can be obtained via the Museum’s website at

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx

Research supported by: