Their significance for the speaker is appreciated from this distance, although one desires to close it and the other seeks to maintain it. In both rock and folk songs, the speaker takes a gigantine gaze over a field of homes, enabling him and her to view them under a microscope. As Nicola Bown herself argues, "Magnification and miniaturisation are the same thing because they show us anew the familiar in a wondrous form." The slippery ratio between simultaneous magnification and miniaturisation leads viewers to question, according to Bown, the scale of the world, which in pre-Industrial societies was God: man, and later became unfixed and uncertain (pp. The very image of little houses, of miniature homes, in both songs is remarkably similar despite their divergent generational views and even their subjects: subdivisions in one and homes of the upper-middle class in the other.Īs Susan Stewart in her study On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantine, the Souvenir, and the Collection has argued "miniature worlds, objects and beings tend to be idealised and perfected versions of their human-sized counterparts" (Bown's characterization, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, p.69). Folksinger Malvina Reynolds had an earlier, more activist generations skepticism of conformity, especially when it meant buying in and moving up.
With his most nostalgic, Midwestern, good-ol-boy charm, John Cougar Mellencamp sings "little pink houses for you and me" (Pink Houses, Uh-Huh, 1984) with some enthusiasm, but it isn't unmixed with bitterness for the down and out who haven't been able to buy into the American Dream - "ain't that American, home of the free." The post WWII GI bill built neighborhoods of affordable, but similar homes in many towns throughout America. Little houses have even been remarked upon in song. The sculpture uses the Huf House timer and glass design. What is this fascination with little houses? UK artist Willard Wigan has just exhibited a microsculpture of a house small enough to fit on the head of a pin.
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