Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu
'Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right when they tell us nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. It might have pleased fortune to let the Lilliputians find some nation where the people were as diminutive with respect to them as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious race of mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant part of the world, where of yet we have no discovery.' Lemuel Gulliver, Gulliver's Travels.
Slinkachu's photographs capture the evanescent existence of the diminutive in the great and troubling city and have all the power of Guillevers Travels to impose upon us a realisation of the asinine pride we take in the mere fact of comparison. Or rather: the asinine pride that derives from our environment and ourselves being to scale with each other. The built environment is an outgrowth of social form and thus an endlessly repeated sample of the same old tune: human domination and submission, leading to individual alienation.
In Levi-Strauss's formulation, 'the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of the intelligible dimensions.' In other words: we cannot know what it feels like to be a tiny manikin - a Borrower, Stuart Little, a Gulliver - adrift in the Brobdingnagian city, but we understand their predicament intuitively, because it mirrors our own responses to both a built environment - and a concomitant social form - that impose upon the individual impotence at every turn.
(Above are parts of the foreword that I found interesting and extracted, by Will Self)
Slinkachu's Website: http://www.andipa.com/artist/slinkachu
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