Small Elegies for America

When we were children, we were also accidental geometers. The genesis of our spatial training came from the first places we lived. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that our childhood homes are “physically inscribed” in us.¹ In geometry, to speak of inscribed shapes means that they fit snugly in other shapes. Bachelard goes on to show how the process doesn’t stop when we move out of these homes, but instead we take these impressions with us as long as we live. As we dwelled in those homes, they dwell in us.

When we move through the world, we exscribe the habits we honed in our first homes on each other and on the world. This all goes quite smoothly if our childhoods were secure, if cultures remained stable, and if social worlds tumbled out gently from one generation to the next, but for most of us living in the twenty-first century, the mutual dwellings—the homes inside us and the homes we live inside (if we are so lucky)—have become architecturally, emotionally, and socially incompatible. We question their very foundations. How can we confront the enormity of this?

One way to begin to grasp the current state of destabilization of American life, especially in terms of housing, is through thinking with miniatures. As Jack Davy and Charlotte Dixon write in “What Makes A Miniature?”, a miniature that “resembles a particular thing can simultaneously be a representation of something else, something less tangible.”² In this essay, I think with miniatures to get to the complex feelings of stress, distress, and disappointment held by a large swath of contemporary Americans unable to find consistent housing and supportive communities. Inside this swirl of mixed emotions there are elegiac feelings—sorrows of perceived lost chances, sadness at social connections that slipped away, and the sense that something beautiful that was just out of reach is now gone.

Susan Sontag writes that “being a spectator of calamities … is a quintessentially modern experience.”³ And while this is certainly true, making sense of these calamities is not so easy, as Sontag shows in Regarding the Pain of Others, her book exploring representations of atrocity. When a catastrophe is seen firsthand, the scale of the event can be hard to take in; when it happens slowly over time, such as the erosion of the chance at a good life that includes housing stability, it can be harder still to contemplate. When disasters are brought to our attention through texts, photographs, or films, it can be difficult to feel the immensity of the losses, even if they register on a factual level. More than an exercise in morose mini-mimesis, miniatures that draw attention to the housing crisis and loneliness of this particular moment can help us to think through how we got here through triggering emotions, memories, and affects that we can then begin to decipher and critically assess.

As I have written elsewhere, “when the gigantic … threatens to overwhelm us completely, we turn to miniature.”⁴ Miniatures enhance our ability to take in information, making things that might be too overpowering when experienced through other media, such as documentary photography or video, more intelligible. Small-scale models force us to look closely, and at the same time, they can allow us to do so without the guilty feelings of voyeurism that can sometimes come with photography or film. As Susan Stewart writes: “the miniature becomes a stage on which we project, by means of association or intertextuality, a deliberately framed series of actions.”⁵ Through their affective infrastructures, miniatures of catastrophe and lonely endings serve as reminders of the ways in which we can be harmed by individuals or institutions and how we can fall out of intimacy and sociality, but they can also help us to remember the ways in which we are implicated in the hurt and care of and for others.

Miniatures hold our attention through a replication of cultural architectures and gestures made small, which are processed through the imagination, memory, contemporary technologies, and social relations. Miniature worlds draw us close. And by bringing us “in,” they bring us into immediate contact with parts of our interiority that are lit up by the encounter, where “values become condensed and enriched.”⁶ As John Mack writes in The Art of Small Things, “The processes of creating small things are not simply technologies for reducing scale but also imply a corresponding exaggeration of content.”⁷ Miniatures, created through minifying processes, have magnifying capabilities.

In this essay I think with miniature artworks from three contemporary artists: Michael Paul Smith, Thomas Doyle, and James Casebere. All three work with similar motifs, including: houses, neighbourhoods, nuclear families, small towns, suburbs, and swimming pools, with atmospheres that exude loneliness, nostalgia, and resignation. Although each artist does this in his own way, all three depict small, elegiac architectures infused with the expired dreams of progress held by past generations, which become layered on the present-day nightmares of ecological, economic, and domestic insecurity. What we see in the work of artists such as Smith, Doyle, and Casebere are the exposed beams of greed and grief at the heart of the contemporary American housing crisis and the ongoing failure of the United States to provide stable grounding—both material and emotional—for the majority of its citizens. At the heart of this crisis, is a failure to understand that times have changed.

the architectures we built as children

For over twenty-five years, Michael Paul Smith created the fictitious town of Elgin Park, a dreamy place set in the American Midwest in the mid-twentieth century. Elgin Park exists as an immense collection of forced perspective photographs staged by placing diecast model cars and handcrafted architectural miniatures in the real-life spaces of Winchester, Massachusetts. In the images from Smith’s imaginary town, fragments of a prosperous America are layered with some of the darker ambiguities of the age. For example, in one photograph, there’s a handsome two-toned red and cream station wagon at the A&P on double coupon day, an illustration of Americans’ love of a deal, supermarkets, and abundance. In another image, we see a silvery-blue El Camino with white-walled tires parked jauntily in front of the Superette, promising style, along with groceries, speed, and convenience. Another photograph features a toy store at night after closing, its bright banners offering a colourful contrast to the gray and empty street. The shop is full of eye-catching items, including a poster of a tiger on a pink background, a candy-red truck, and even a seaplane suspended from the ceiling, but what causes me to pause is a Pinocchio doll in the corner of the window. Pinocchio, much like Elgin Park itself, gives off the appearance of a toy about to spring to life at any moment. The most foreboding photograph, to me, in the entire series reveals a mysterious research building at the edge of town, where I can imagine all kinds of secret experiments conducted by men with serious glasses and austere haircuts draped in white coats. The images that make up the town highlight particular dreams and material desires intrinsic to many twentieth-century Americans; they are scenes of near-fulfillment for a predominantly white middle and upper-middle class world with the nuclear family at its core, but they leave a space for something still wanting, which makes them mesmerizing.

This wanting is similar to “the desire to animate” that Stewart identifies when writing about toys, where “the desire is not simply to know everything but also to experience everything simultaneously.”⁸ It is a desire for possibility, maybe for a different life, or maybe for just more of the life suggested in the scenes—a Pinocchio who does become a real boy, triple coupons, extra superette, longer fins on your shiny automobile.

Every photo of Elgin Park creates a tender and slightly unsettling microclimate of yesteryear in 1:24 scale. The combination of atmosphere, artifice, and reality create an illusion that feels lived in, somehow real, even though we know these are fabrications. Smith is proud of the fact that he doesn’t use photoshop or other digital manipulation software. Instead, he positions his models in such a way that the atmosphere appears natural, and then he takes photographs with a simple, two-hundred-dollar point-and-shoot camera. Smith was not formally trained as an artist or photographer, but he has a unique and varied employment history, and as a result, a wide variety of skills, which he brings to his art. He has worked as an architectural model-builder, illustrator, postal worker, wallpaper hanger, and museum display designer. Smith is a talented craftsman, but he also has an uncanny ability to create ambiance of bygone days. His photographs have a consistent mood where the not-quite-real past—miniaturized—is weirdly representative of the feeling of a childhood that both was and wasn’t part of American history. This is memory work for memories that don’t quite work. His photographs create the backdrop for an alternate history, where America could be a place good enough to be nostalgic for.

With Elgin Park, Smith invented a whole world—one that seems to expand as soon as we enter it, then to close us within its sphere. He refers to this opening and enveloping quality as “spookiness.”⁹ This spookiness is a particular flavour of the uncanny that is produced through interaction with miniature things. The feeling can be eerie, like in Elgin Park where you become transfixed by the sensation of a temporal stretchiness, as if you are looking at vanished time. With this diminutive town, Smith creates “a past that can be all the more spellbinding,” because as Walter Benjamin writes, “it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the time of a childhood.”¹⁰ It matters that the childhood Smith wishes to fashion is a childhood, and not a complete replica of his own, even if his past undeniably permeates Elgin Park. Smith grew up in the 1950s in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, a steel-mill town just north of Pittsburgh, bordering the Ohio River. Sewickley comes across as the perfect town to miniaturize, measuring just one square mile. Its smallness creates the illusion of knowability and containment.

The landscape of Smith’s youth is at the heart of his work and provides both a historical referent and an emotional tether for Elgin Park.¹¹ The childhood he taps into is a dreamworld of small-town America steeped in victory culture following World War II.¹² It is a place of security, inventiveness, and material wealth for normative white Americans longing for upward social mobility. As Smith defines the era: “The 50s and 60s had a sense of hope about them. Television had come in, new cars came out every year and everyone avidly looked at science fiction hoping to get a glimpse of what the future would be like. The future was tangible, and it just made it worthwhile getting up in the morning to see what was going to come down the pipe next. It was an amazing time.”¹³ This spirit of American optimism colours the magic geography of Elgin Park, but shades of loneliness and apprehension seep through as well. Today, the future no longer feels so optimistic or hopeful for most of us, as it did for Smith in his youth, and of course for many Americans, the United States never elicited this kind of promise. In our times marked by ecological crisis, political division, and the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic, it’s hard to be excited about what is “going to come down the pipe next.” Will it be a new form of acid rain? A never-seen-before dangerous flu? Another crime committed by a president? Another murder of a Black citizen? More misogynist legislation? For me, the separation between present-day America and Smith’s quaint twentieth-century scenes saturates them in an anxious radiance.