Големият формат във визуалните изкуства – между легитимацията на институционалното и авангардното

The problem of large-scale format in art is multi-layered – apart from being comprised of numerous technological, spatial, and financial conventions, it is also a consequence of various legitimation aspirations. Large-format works are not attached to a certain era or style but must be understood phenomenologically because they appear at different moments in the history of art, under different circumstances, and with different purposes. Although it seems like a formal decision, the choice of format has repeatedly caused significant artistic transformations in the history of painting. Such a key example is the work of Gustave Courbet, who was at the heart of one of the first revolutions of modernism in the mid-19th century, expressed in an over-scaling of everyday subjects and ordinary people – a gesture against the thematic hierarchy of neoclassicism. The extent to which modernism has realized the legitimizing qualities of large formats can be judged by the development of American Abstract Expressionism, which probably would not have had the fortune of being a dominant style in mid-20th-century art if it had appeared in a pocket format. What we can certainly say is that photography and graphics could not have been transformed as media for contemporary art without the active use of large formats in the 1980s. These examples clearly show how large formats have influenced the institutional processes in the history of art – beyond the specific image, the artistic impulse is intertwined with certain legitimation aspirations.