CASTRATED at an early age, and estranged from his surroundings by his scale, the 12 year-old miniature horse Floyd was kept as as a house pet in England before being moved to his current stables in Ostprignitz, in Germany’s Brandenburg region.
Not to be confused with ponies, miniature horses differ from their relatives in both size and characteristics. The line between ponies and horses is strictly guarded by communities of miniature horse owners. The American Miniature Horse Association sets an upper height limit of 34 inches (86cm) as one of its registration criteria and states that a miniature horse, seen devoid of a scale reference, should be identical in characteristics, conformation and proportion to a full-sized horse. The association declares its objective as producing ‘the smallest possible perfect horse’.
A R T W O R K D E T A I L S
Stabled: Floyd (2001)
38cm x 110cm x 78cm
living horse
Dark bay coloured Miniature British Horse gelding. Full name ‘Asils Pretty Boy Floyd’, progeny of stallion ‘Asils Calisto’ and mare ‘Gaterley Mistlethrush’
“I’ve been more fearful than fond of horses most of my life. They were never sweet playthings. More like scary masculine brutes. Horses used to strike the tarmac outside my childhood home at 7am every day. Up to the gallops. Like clockwork. Giant ‘Grand National’ bound machines with pneumatic legs, schizoid eyes and twitching metal flanks. Mechanical beasts cocked and coked up for the racetrack, or for attacking with flying iron feet that would suddenly flail out in all directions; feet which once kicked the postman off his bicycle. These nervous androids carried hiccupping midgets and would attract scurryings of burly bossyboots, who smelt of manure, leather and control. Then one day the stables shut down, leaving the barstools, where the jockeys once perched high and mighty, empty and suddenly brought down to size.”
“The first thing I got, of course, was the ‘Grooming Parlour.’ This included a comb, various harnesses and other equestrian accoutrements, plus two hats and a plastic cat. I remember I was quite excited by the male shire horses with long hair on their feet. For ages I wanted to get the Dream Castle. But for some reason that was simply too much, and probably too expensive. So I had to wait until my sister didn’t want to play with hers anymore, and then I inherited hers. That was a day to remember. I don’t recall exactly how I played with the ponies, but I definitely groomed their hair, and I would also sew clothes for them using an antique crank-operated sewing machine my father gave me. My parents never challenged the fact that I was playing with pink plastic ponies. But when I got a little older, I started to hide the ponies under the mattress in my bed.”
“The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.
For the miniature, in its exaggeration of interiority, and its relation to the space and time of the individual, perceiving subject, threatens the infinity of description without hierarchization, a world whose anteriority is always absolute, and whose profound interiority is therefore always unrecoverable.”
SUSAN STEWART
A R T W O R K D E T A I L S
Stabled: Vitrine
(2013)
2m x 1m x 1m
teak, brass, water, hay, horse excreta
Modified teak vitrine, after original by Kaare Klint
This piece borrows its detailing and materiality from vitrines that Kaare Klint designed for The Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen, when it was first established in the former Frederick’s hospital building in 1926. Klint designed a museum display system that echoed the modular structure and contamination-limiting function of the hospital wards.
Kaare Klint is often referred to as a ‘father’ of Danish modernism. His principle of stripping down and mutating inherited classical forms, rather than radically rejecting history, distinguished Danish modernism from other more revolutionary currents within modernism, like the Bauhaus.
This is one of a series of mutations of Klint’s museum furniture,in which the standardised proportions and details are specifically adapted to its contents, and the glass has been removed so that the work breaks out of its frame, while fingers, hay, dust and excrement enter in.
