In 1939, Alberto Giacometti proposed an unusual work for the Swiss National Exhibition: a tiny head placed on a wide pedestal, which gave rise to dramatic scalar effects. This essay places this little-known episode at the origin of Giacometti's post-war experiments with scale, and argues that those experiments emerged out of a historical context – Switzerland's tense negotiation of national identity in the 1930s – in which monumental forms of sculpture could no longer fulfil their political functions. By untethering the bigness of a monument from its scale, Giacometti's little head disclosed scale's more profound social operation: to formalize and embody our historical practices of engaging with vast structures, including the political structure of the nation. This alignment of aesthetic and political scale suggests how a new phenomenological account of modern sculpture, indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre rather than Maurice Merleau-Ponty, calls into question modernism's supposed negation of the monument.

中文翻译：

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国家规模：阿尔贝托·贾科梅蒂的微型纪念碑

1939 年，阿尔贝托·贾科梅蒂 (Alberto Giacometti) 为瑞士国家展览提出了一件不同寻常的作品：一个放在宽底座上的小脑袋，产生了戏剧性的标量效应。本文将这一鲜为人知的事件置于贾科梅蒂战后规模实验的起源，并认为这些实验源于历史背景——瑞士在 1930 年代对国家身份的紧张谈判——在这种背景下，具有纪念意义的雕塑形式无法不再履行其政治职能。贾科梅蒂的小脑袋从规模中解脱出来，揭示了规模更深刻的社会运作：形式化和体现我们与包括国家政治结构在内的巨大结构接触的历史实践。