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    ALEX POTTS - The Sculptural Imagination p.1-23

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    Sara Yahvé
    This document discusses the history and evolution of sculpture as an art form. It describes how sculpture transitioned from being viewed as subordinate to painting to becoming a more autonomous art form displayed in its own right in galleries and museums in the 18th century. It then discusses how sculpture took on a more problematic status in the 19th century due to developments in aesthetic theory. In the 20th century, sculpture began expanding beyond self-contained objects to include installation and spatial works, though it played a secondary role to painting until recent decades. The document examines how our understanding of sculpture has continued broadening, moving away from object-focused conceptions.

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    ALEX POTTS - The Sculptural Imagination p.1-23

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    This document discusses the history and evolution of sculpture as an art form. It describes how sculpture transitioned from being viewed as subordinate to painting to becoming a more autonomous art form displayed in its own right in galleries and museums in the 18th century. It then discusses how sculpture took on a more problematic status in the 19th century due to developments in aesthetic theory. In the 20th century, sculpture began expanding beyond self-contained objects to include installation and spatial works, though it played a secondary role to painting until recent decades. The document examines how our understanding of sculpture has continued broadening, moving away from object-focused conceptions.

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    This document discusses the history and evolution of sculpture as an art form. It describes how sculpture transitioned from being viewed as subordinate to painting to becoming a more autonomous art form displayed in its own right in galleries and museums in the 18th century. It then discusses how sculpture took on a more problematic status in the 19th century due to developments in aesthetic theory. In the 20th century, sculpture began expanding beyond self-contained objects to include installation and spatial works, though it played a secondary role to painting until recent decades. The document examines how our understanding of sculpture has continued broadening, moving away from object-focused conceptions.

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    1K views25 pages

    ALEX POTTS - The Sculptural Imagination p.1-23

    Uploaded by

    Sara Yahvé
    This document discusses the history and evolution of sculpture as an art form. It describes how sculpture transitioned from being viewed as subordinate to painting to becoming a more autonomous art form displayed in its own right in galleries and museums in the 18th century. It then discusses how sculpture took on a more problematic status in the 19th century due to developments in aesthetic theory. In the 20th century, sculpture began expanding beyond self-contained objects to include installation and spatial works, though it played a secondary role to painting until recent decades. The document examines how our understanding of sculpture has continued broadening, moving away from object-focused conceptions.

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    at a l AUS oe ar rp Wolo Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist Alex Potts1 Joseph Beuys, Plight, 1958-85, felt, piano, chermometer, as installed at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Landon, 1985, now in the Cenere Georges Pompidou, ParisIntroduction The Sculptural Imagination and the Viewing of Sculpture Some time in the late 1950s of early 1960s, in che heyday of high modernist formalism, the painter Ad Reinharde came up with a statement that enjoyed a remarkable resonance because it was so in tune with long-standing acticudes to sculpture: ‘A definition of sculp- ture: something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” In more tra- ditional gallery installations, the sculptures often do feel a little out of place, either ‘unframed and somewhat awkward intrusions on the viewer's space or decorative adjuncts, to the display of paintings (fig. 2). As objects, they may seem not to invite the same level of imaginatively engaged viewing that paincings elicit through their clearly defined status as depictions or representations. ‘Ad Reinharde’s diccum points to something very real about public atticudes to viewing. sculpture, exposing a pervasive modern unease about the staging of sculpeures as objects of display in galleries and museums. This framing of the sculptural, though, needs to be set against a very different but equally significant and in its own way equally modern perspective on sculpeure. It comes into play when a viewer encountering a work of sculp- ture does become absorbed in looking at it. At the moment when Reinhardt made his ‘uncompromisingly negative statement, the American sculptor David Smith offered an equally telling commentary on what happens as we are drawa into a sculpture’s ambit and become actively involved in the ‘adventure’ of viewing it (fig. 78): ‘My position for vision in my works aims to be in it... It is an adventure viewed." Engaging with a sculpture for what it is, a physical thing intervening in our space, is, in the end what has to cheat the tendency to see it as inertly object-like.’ When a sculp- ture displayed in a gallery does somehow seem compelling, our attention is sustained by an intensified visual and kinaesthetic engagement with it which is continually changing and shifting register. This is what makes its fixed shape and substance seem to come alive. Caught up in what Smith called ‘an adventure viewed’, the work momentarily becomes a liecle strange and elusive as well as being insistently present, unlike the objects we encounter more casually in the course of our everyday lives. eee What I am envisaging here as a distinctively modern sculptural imaginary began to define itself as a result of developments in the eighteenth-century art world, among the most importance of which were the emergence of public exhibitions and, towards the end of the century, the establishment of public art galleries. These formed a context where works of art were presented to be viewed as relatively autonomous entities within a public space.2 Gallery in che Hanover Landesmuseum in che early 1920s 2 The Sculptural Imagination The custom-designed sculpture gallery, where sculptures featured as self-sufficient objects, and not just as adjuncts co an architectural setting, was largely a creation of the period — one key example being the remodelling of the display of antique sculpture in and around the Vatican Belvedere in the 1770s to create the Museo Pio-Clementino.* In such a context, a sculpture was defined as a generically different kind of art work ftom a painting, while being granted a status as an autonomous entity like an easel painting, even though it would in practice often be installed more decoratively, and might be partly integrated into the museum's interior architecture. Here I am concerned primarily with sculpture designed to be viewed in an interior space. Outdoor sculpture, that functions as landmark or monument, or part of an archi tectural ensemble, raises a rather different set of problems, as does work such as Robert Smithson’s with its interplay between interior and exterior sites.” At the same time, indoor sculpture still has to be seen as existing in a dialectical relationship with the more public and monumentalising values that come into play with large-scale outdoor work. Also important in creating a context for a distinctively modern sculptural imaginary was an aesthetic theory being developed in the eighteenth century that engaged in a sys- tematic enquiry into the differences and affinities between various forms of art. Lessing set the ball rolling with che famous distinction he made between visual art and licera- ture in his celebrated essay Lascoon published in 1766.° The idea that che formal organ- isation of a work of art had a basis in the distinctive mode of apprehension it elicited was later developed to define a systematic distinction within visual art between sculpture and painting — first by Herder in an essay entitled Scuipture published in 1778 and lacet, most influentially, in Hegel's Aesthetics.” In this differentiation from painting, sculpture acquired a strangely ambiguous and problematic status. Sculpcure, designated as the art centrally concerned with form, was in theory primary, but in practice it acquired a status below painting, not only becauseIntroduction 3 painting had more formal means at its disposal — light, colour and atmosphere, for example — but also because painting seemed better able to capture transitory appearances, while sculpture was seen to be limited co the rendering of fixed shapes. Painting’s ostensiveness seemed more modern, more subjective in a way, more akin to inner per- ceptual and imaginative experience. The problematic status of sculpture in the nineteenth century was nicely summed up in Walter Pater’s influential seudy The Renaissance, published in 1873. On the one hand, he wrote, sculpture, as epitomised by ancient Greek seatuary, ‘records the first naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself’ On the other, it can only work for a modern viewer if it somehow overcomes its tendency’ ‘to a hard realism . . . Against this tendency to hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles.” ‘The paradoxical imperative for sculpture to dematerialise the literalising of shape that distinguished it from painting became if anything more insistent later on, in the period of early modernism —a moment when painting took over as the principal arena for evant- garde innovation, and sculprure, at least as mainstream practice, rather than as informal object-making, played a secondary role.'” Ie has only been in the past few decades, start- ing with tendencies such as Minimalism, Arce Povera and Neo-Dada in the 1960s, that three-dimensional art has come to occupy a central position in the visual imaginary of the modern art world. Earlier in che cwentiech century, the spatially more inventive sculptural experiments functioned less as phenomena in their own right than as ideas for architecture. The artists involved in such work, however, most notably the Russian Constructivists, did pioneer some novel installation-otiencated forms of display. Taclin’s exhibition of his Model of she Monument to the Third International (fg. 4) in 1920,"" for example, has come to be seen in retrospect as a major sculpeural work in its own right, even if this goes somewhat against the grain of its original conception. ‘The once problematic status of sculpture as an art thae has systematically to be dis- inguished from painting is no longer a major issue in contemporary art circles. This change has gone hand in hand with the dissolution of modernist notions of sculpture as an embodiment of plastic form, and with a new emphasis on installation and display and viewer response. In 1978, Rosalind Krauss came up with a classic formulation of this change as ‘sculpture in the expanded field"? — a sculpture no longer circumscribed by a monumentalising or classicising ideal, or by a modernist cule of the self-contained art object. Sculpture was now seen to deal in spaces and environments and assemblages of objects. Ithad in a way become painting that had moved out into chree dimensions, with the frame extended to encompass the viewer (fig. 1). In che 1970s, when this reconfiguring of the sculptural was still relatively recene, it made sense to celebrate it as a radical clearing away of the dead weight of worn-out aes- thetic categories, and an opening up of new possibilities. There was something quite exciting about the shife from the object-focused conception of sculpture that had domi- nated until then, and about the new expanded notion of viewing that resulted — no longer just a disembodied gazing, but a process involving the viewer spatially and kinaes- thetically and intellectually, as well as visually. From a present-day perspective, however, the situation looks rather different.'* Installation has become naturalised, as has a self- conscious contextualising of arc work, while post-modern fashion has largely rendered4 The Sculptural Imagination redundant the categorical distinctions beeween different forms of are chat previously made sculpture seem problematic. In the present context, then, a continuing celebration of the move beyond the confines of the traditional sculptural object is hardly more than a con- ventionalised promotion of current practice. The freeing up of the boundaries between different media, and the supposedly critically aware liberation from traditional norms this produces, has effectively become just one further wonder of the eriumph of late capitalism." My misgivings on this score are not only the obvious political ones, nor are they entirely explained by my antipathy to modern versions of a blandly progressivist liberal view of history and a mindless welcoming of ever expanding possibilities. Some- thing more precise is also at issue. ‘The self-conscious departure from normative conceptions of sculpeure initiated by the Minimalists in the 1960s derived much of its energy from the continuing fascination exerted by the insistent materiality of their work (igs 118, 148). There still existed a tension between the idea of a new, more open intervention in three-dimensional space and the awareness of a work's resistant object-likeness. A compelling feature of three- dimensional art at the time was that it did not disclose itself co the viewer wich quite the same ease as painting or image-based work — its inert thingness, its impinging on the viewer's space, still getting in the way of normative patterns of visual consumption. Nowadays, sculpture no longer seems weighed down by che austere heaviness of monu- mental form or by the literal inertness of solidly embodied shape, but assimilates itself often quite self-consciously to popular forms of visual spectacle, whether displays of com- modities in shops, fashionable minimalist interiors or pop video scenarios. The trouble- some facticity of the sculptural object has largely disappeared from view, and in the process lost much of ies potential for portentous inertness, as well as its intermiccent resistance to image-based consumerism From the Neo-Classical figure sculptures of the late Enlightenment and early nineteenth century through to the installation-conscious work of recent decades, there have unde niably been some radical changes in what counts as sculpture. Ac issue are not just dif- ferences in the formal structuring of sculptural objects. Equally, if not more important, are the differant ways in which work has been staged, and the different modes of viewing it has invited. To clarify this, I shall posit a crudely schematic history of changing for- mations of modern sculpture, moving from the classical figure to the auonomous mod- ernise object and then on to Minimalist and post-Minimalist things and spatial arenas and markings of place. ‘This schema, I hasten to add, is not designed to offer a complete mapping of tenden- cies in modern sculpture. Many of these will emerge later in my detailed discussion of those moments in modern sculpeutal theory and practice that I have singled out for atcen- tion, Ie is a schema with a distinctive agenda, and is designed co highlight aspects of modern engagements with the sculptural that have to do wich the physical, sensual and aifective dimensions of the encounter between viewer and work. A different schema would be appropriate were I wishing, for example, to focus on the anti-form and conceptualIntroduction 5 imperatives that have been associated with Duchamp's distaste for sensory immediacy. Ie is not that I wish to deny the strategic significance of various late avant-garde attempts to suppress visual and affective resonances in an effort to combat a conservative privi- eging of the visual and tactile wholeness of che art object, though I would argue strongly against the idea chat such suppression is still a necessary precondition for art with an ‘oppositional political edge. Rather, I am making a case for a critical rethinking of sculp- tural norms thac engages seriously with the more vividly embodied physical and per- ceptual responses activated by viewing three-dimensional work. Not only are such levels of response integral to any apprehension of an art object, however anti-sestheticising it might be bringing inco play issues that cannot be dealt with adequately at a purely con- ceptual or ideological level; the more phenomenological dimensions of a viewer's inter- action with a work of sculpture particularly need to be addressed in the present context because they have not been accorded anything like the same critical attention as the viewing of painting.'* Conceptually based redefinitions of the art object have tended to dominate in most of the more critically and intellectually engaged studies of three- dimensional work over the past couple of decades. The point of departure for the tripartite schema I propose is the classicising represen- tation of a self-contained, beautiful human body. In the late eighteenth and through most of the nineteenth cencury, free-standing indoor sculpture usually took the form of an ideal nude or lightly clad figure modelled on antique Graeco-Roman prototypes. The Venus Ttalica completed by Canova just after 1800 (fg. 22) serves as a good example because it hhas now become something of an unacknowledged popular icon. Wherever you find crude, small-scale replicas of classicising sculpture for sale, in gift shops ot garden centres, ‘more often than not the Venus is not an antique Greek or Roman one but Canova's Venus Ualica ‘The sculpeure presents itself as autonomous at several levels — firstly, formally, as a finely configured shape, and secondly, representationally, as an image of a body and self in perfect harmony with one another. What animates the sculpture, however, is the way in which it slightly disrupts the ideal of a self-sufficient and fally realised wholeness chat theoretically was the aim of this kind of work. Its mode of address is a little ambiguous, the pose both confidently ac ease and cautiously guarded. The figure is not quite self sufficient and set apart in its own world, but aware of being constituted in someone else's gaze. In histories of modern art, it has long been standard practice to single out Rodin’s sculpture as making a definitive break with the classical ideal and opening the way to a radically different, modern conception of sculpture."” A traditional sculpcural wholeness is supposedly disrupted by the fragmenting of the body in his late partial figures, and by the prominent residues these display of the process of fabrication — making them almost more like objects than representations of a figure. Such claims, however, require considerable qualification. For one thing, the fragmentary status of the figures is bound up with a conception of sculpture latent in an earlier sculptural imaginary. Ie had been customary for some time to display recently excavated Greek sculpture, however incom- plete, in unrestored fragmentary form. What makes the status of Rodin’s late sculprure particularly paradoxical in any mapping between classical figure and modernist object, however, is the way the object-likeness actually functions to make some of the figurative4 Constantin Brancusi, Tor of a Young Man, c. 1916, maple, 48.3 X 315 X 18.5cm, on limestone block, height 21-5em, Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Waleer Arensberg Collection 3 (lof) Auguste Rodin, Siriding Man (bronze, from 1907 plaster model, 214 70.5 X 154m) temporarily displayed in the coureyard of the Hétel de Biron, Rodin’s residence in Paris, photographed by DruetIntroduction 7 elements more vividly alive."* Few traditional whole figures convey the dynamic of walking with the immediacy of Rodin’s headless and armless Striding Man (fg. 3). ‘The work of a slightly later modernist artist such as Brancusi certainly makes even Rodin's more incomplete renderings of the human body look unequivocally figurative. His Torso of a Young Man (fig. 4) is clearly much mote of an object than any Rodin sculp- ture. It is, in a way, a found object, fashioned in its earliest wooden version by adapting the given form of a branched trunk. Its scale, very much smaller than life size, semblance of figurative presence. It is also presented as an object and set on a custom- reduces any designed pedestal. These pedestals, however, play an incriguingly ambiguous tole. While they underline the autonomy of the object displayed by isolating it from its surround- ings, they also partially undo this autonomy by virtue of the sculptural interest they excite in their own right (fig. 68)."” ‘What is mose significant about the shift in the later conception of sculpture that came to a head in the 1960s and early 1970s is not so much the radically abstract recon- stieution of the object, but the undoing of the expectation that the object should command attention through the internal integrity of its form (fig. 5). When Donald Judd called the new three-dimensional ‘works specific objects, what he had in mind was their specificity as physical entities rather than as formal constructs, things having a specific scale, made of specific mate- rials, and having a specific placement in their immediate environment. An open array of galvanised metal boxes set along a line marked out by a separate blue bar too thin substantially co structure the arrangement, which was devised by Judd in 1966, became ‘one work when resting on the floor and quite another raised up and cantilevered off the wall (fig. 121). When other Minimalist artists of Judd’s generation came to describe the kind of arc work they were producing, they would often avoid the word ‘object’ altogether because of the associations it had with the idea of a closed, self-contained construct. The new 5 Carl Ande, Lever, as installed at ehe ‘Primary Seeuctuses’ exh bicion in the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966, 137 firebricks ‘each 6.4 X 11.4 X 20.3¢m, overall 11.4 % 20.3 X 885 em, National Gallery of Canada, Oxcawa8 The Sculptural Imagination sculptures were variously represented as things or places or sites. This compulsion to get away from the structuring imperatives of the word ‘object’ is nicely articulated in an interview Carl Andre gave in 1970 where he proposed the designation ‘place’ to describe his work.”” Andre's metal floor pieces (figs 132, 154) almost force the viewer to envisage them as subverting che visual logic of a traditional sculpted motif. Looking straight ahead, there is nothing much to see. Yet the work impacts dramatically on the space where it is placed. ‘This undoing of sculpture as plastic shape cook a number of forms at the time, as in the dangling rope and string pieces Eva Hesse produced towards the end of her career in 1969-70 (figs 149, 150). Situation in both cases is crucial. Andre's work hugs the floor, ic is visibly grounded, by contrast with most sculpeure where little is made of how it rests on the ground. Wich Hesse, the situation is reversed. The specificity of the work: comes from its being suspended, and chus negating the standard notion of a sculpeure as a self-supporting construct. In both cases, there is a teasing ambiguity between a sense of insideness and outsideness that the closed solid shape of most traditional sculptural objects largely precludes. A shift occurs, then, whereby the scructuring of a work is partly defined chrough the viewer's physical encounter with it, and can no longer be located entirely in ies form. A psychic dynamic is activated by its physically intruding on or reshaping the viewer's sense of ambient space, and from the vague feelings of contact the viewer has with the shaping, and texturing of the stuff from which it is made — hard, dense and sharply defined with ‘Ande, or more indeterminate and flexible, yet stringily fibrous and knotty, with Hesse. The impact made by these works also depends importancly on optical effects of a kind that traditional theories of the sculptural dismissed as secondary. The reflective sheen that catches the eye as one looks closely at Andre's metal floor pieces, for example, momen- tatily almost de-solidifies them, transforming them into shimmering planes of light float~ ing just above the matt, inert floor on which they rest (figs 133, 136). Light gives the work lift-off, just as the fibrous opacity of the latex-covered free-floating rope core in the Hesse gives it a certain weight and density. ‘Traditionally, sculpture has been envisaged as che visual art that gives substance to forms that can only be depicted in painting. This effect would if anything seem co be enhanced in Minimalist and post-Minimalist work, as such sculpture gives literal three dimensional substance not only to plastic shapes but also to spaces and environments (fig. 99). But does this materialising of form and space mean that one’s viewing of sculpeure is somehow more stably anchored than one's viewing of images or paintings? I would claim not. If, with painting, instability is created by the ostensiveness of the spatial fields and shapes its flac surfaces evoke, with sculpeure we are made more aware of instabilities inherent in our perceptual encounter with che work itself as object or environmental configuration. The sustained viewing of a free-standing sculpeure not only dissipates the fixed image we might have of it because of the different aspects it presents from different angles. ‘There are also other, more radical inscabilities that come into play as we come close to it. Our sense of the work as a whole shape literally gets displaced by the spectacle of continually shifting partial aspects it presents. This destabilising effect is particularly insistent in the case of a sculpture because of the distinctive kinds of visual and spatialIntroduction 9 awareness that now come into operation. Not only does what we see change more rapidly with the slightest shifts of the eye, but stereoscopic vision begins to kick in, so that the shaping of surface in depeh is felt much more strongly. The parts we are looking at now seem to impinge more dramatically on their ambient space. They also almost float free. ‘There is no single clearly defined plane in which they are arrayed, as in a painting, and we no longer see them as anchored in their surrounding environment as we did in the more distant overviews we had of the work. The impact made by a recent work by Tony Cragg, for example, is almost entirely lost if we simply stand back from it and take it in as a whole motif, which at first can seem a lictle banal or arbitrarily abundant, and fail to open our viewing to the striking flows and hiatuses and shifting modulations of surface that come into play as we get close (figs 6, 7). Far from the close viewing of a sculpture giving a solid grounding to our perception of its shape, then, the effect is co activate changing sensations of surface and texture and depth that give us a quite different, more indeterminate sense of what the work is. The disparity between close and far views could be seen as che sculptural equivalent of the disjunction between the different apprehensions to be had in looking closely at a paint- ing as the visual sensations generated by the marks and colours on its surface separate out from the image or visual configuration into which these coalesce when we take in the whole work at a glance. Last, but not least, the kinaesthetic viewing activated by three-dimensional work brings with ita heightened sense of temporality. An important feature of the close looking elicited by any work of art compared with everyday image recognition is the way we linger and become so conscious of viewing as a process unfolding over time. The ritu- alised viewing of a painting or sculpture, exemplified in the ‘look and tell’ routines of allery guides, takes che form of peering intently first at chis and then at that feacure of it. Our sense of the work as a whole is partly defined through the ever changing and variously focused parcial views we have of it, and can never entirely be condensed in a single stable image. With painting, awareness of this is more easily occluded because we can shift attention from detail to detail without having to change position. By contrast, taking in a sculptute is manifestly not just a matter of looking and scanning but also, as Serra emphasised, of taking time to walk round it too (figs 8, 9).”" Michael Fried, in his critique of Minimalism in his 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, evoked this insistently temporal dimension of viewing sculpture when he expressed his unease over being drawn. by his encouncer with Minimalist objects into a sense of ‘endlessness, being able to 20 on and on, and even having to go on and on... . of time passing and to come, simulta~ neously approaching and receding.”” ‘A consciousness of the temporality of viewing, previously registered mostly indirectly by analysing che time-bound processes of making a work of art, was given a particular impetus in the 1950s and 1960s through the expansion of avant-garde practice into per- formance work”® and work that itself visibly changed over time — whether because it was kinetic or because it was made to retain marks of short-term wear and tear. Minimalist sculpture played a key role in this development in that it brought such temporal awareness into a sphere traditionally seen as operating outside or transcending time, namely the viewing of a static object or configuration. A significant interplay thus took place between the heightened awareness of temporality created by performance work and10 The Sculptural Imagination 6 Tony Cragg, Serato, 1998, thermo plastic and fibrealas, five pars, 248 X 335 X a9sem, Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London a new interest in the temporal dimension of viewing art objects. Several prominent artists of the period, such as Morris, Beuys and Oldenburg, developed their practice by moving beeween performance and sculpture. Fried rightly identified temporality as a key issue in the Minimalists’ performative or theatrical staging of sculpeural objects. The highly schematic history of sculpeure that I have just adumbrated might suggest that there was a progressive shift from the sculpcural figure, representing an idealised human body as a whole, beautiful form, to the sculptural object, offering a single iso- lated shape characterised by its integrity of form, to work defined more as an arena of encounter with the viewer. It would seem that in this last phase the viewing of chree- dimensional work finally came into its own, liberated from norms more appropriate to viewing paintings or two-dimensional images. However, the recent focus on installation, and experiencing work in its three-dimensionalicy has not superseded what might be seen as traditional sculptural figuration or object-making. Essentially abstract Minimalist or post-Minimalist concerns now often come most vividly to the fore in work chat offers the viewer a recognisable figure or naturalistic motif. Charles Ray's manikins, for example, depend for their effect on a response attuned both to their physical scale and presence as objects and to the kind of figure they so graphically represent. What makes Ray's Boy (fg. 10) particularly scriking is the awkward disproportion between its adult size7 Tony Cragg, Sertions, detailBand’g Richard Serta, Weight and Measure, 1992, forged steel, ewo blocks, one 173 X 275 X Lo4em, the other 152 X 275 x 04cm, installed at che Tate Gallery, London, in 1993, (aboe left) view cowards the fat end of the sculpeure galery, and (above righ!) ‘view towards che entrance of the sculpeure gallery and its boyish shape. As one approaches, the enlarged yet blandly accurate body and chil- dren's shoes and pinafore outfit begin co look a little monstrous. A simple historical progression from figure to object co arena of encounter also becomes significantly complicated if we look backwards historically. Now we are attuned to envis- aging a sculpture as something existing in our space that activates a potentially endless flow of shifting apperceptions, it is apparent chat earlier figurative or object sculpture often presented itself to be viewed in such a way. Krauss's Passages in Modern Sculpture, published in 1977, the classic formulation of che new post-Minimalist phenomenological sculpcural aesthetic, revisited Rodin’s and Brancusi’s objects co show how they came alive for a present-day sensibility because chey were not cnvisaged solely as autonomous plastic forms, but brought into play other more contingent dimensions of viewing, This opening up of our understanding of earlier sculpture can however be caken much further than Krauss herself would allow. Canova's sculpture the Three Graces (figs 11, 12) is featured by her as an exemplar of the stable wholeness demanded by traditional conceptions of sculpture. But it only remains so if one looks no further than the photograph showing the front of the group seen head on. Approaching it, and looking closely at the details, it is difficult not to be carried away by a spectacle of vividly feleshapes and surfaces quite disconnected from the clearly configured form che sculpcure presents from a distance. One's attention is seized by the couch of « hand on a cheek, the inclination of ewo heads in gentle contact with one another, the ripple of drapery brushing against an area of smooth flesh, and above all by the unendingly varied modulations of contour and surface. This decentring, chis proliferation of viewing, is accentuated thematically by che cross-cut of exchanged glances between the chree figures. Te may be a long way from Canova's sculp- tute to a Robert Morris felt piece from che late 1960s (fig. 13). My contention, however, is that Morris's sculpture, which is literally a play of surface almost entirely disconnected from any supporting structure, dramacises something that goes on in certain moments ‘of the close viewing of a work such as Canova's Three Graces." And the Mortis fele is not entirely formless either. It involves a particular kind of shaping, with the mal- leable array suspended from chree clusters of nails sec in the wall, tumbling down to accu- mulate on the floor, There is a weight and measure to it, a weight and measure that one simultaneously knows, feels and sees. It is ro Charles Ray, Bey, 1992, painted fibreglass, see, fabri, 181.6 x 68.6 x 86.4em, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, pethaps no less a whole thing than the Purchase wit ind fm Jelitey Deitch, Bemrdo Nudl-Ginc, Canova, where the apparent tightness of and Penny and Mike Winton linear composition and the figurative motif disguise a certain cavalier disregard for inte- grated plastic form. The elusive and provisional sense of wholeness one has in che pres- fence of the Canova can never be pinned down — it too hovers forever on the margins of one's immediate awareness. eee If a consideration of sculptural viewing can begin to blur neatly defined distinctions between Neo-Classical figurative sculpture and late twentieth-century, three-dimensional work, significane historical differences nevertheless still assert themselves. These differ- ences have largely co do wich changing notions of the kind of sculptural object chat could seriously sustain a viewer's attention and present itself as having an autonomous value when displayed as a free-standing entity in a gallery. During the late eighteenth and16 The Sculptural Imagination 15 Robere Morris, Untitled, 1967, a6 installed in che Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1968, fele, variable dimensions, collec sion che arcise much of the nineteenth centuries, the assumption was that such an object needed to take the form of a beautiful, finely shaped nude or lightly clad figure. The identicy of such an object as a self-sufficient thing was underpinned by its symbolic significance as the rep- at one with itself, This underpinning was precarious resentation of a human subjectivity in that most ideal figures in nineceenth-century sculpture were endowed with an obvious erotic charge (fig. 14), so the figure engaged the viewer not just as the image of an ideal self but also — and perhaps primarily ~ as something one might desire. In a way, thisprecatiousness made the empty fiction of pure autonomy capable of exciting a viewer's interest.” Looking back on this paradigm from a present-day perspective, the question then becomes why it ceased to be viable. How was it that in avant-garde circles of the early ewentiech century the assumption developed that a sense of convincing autonomy could only be recovered by making a sculpture object-like rather than figure-like? Within che terms of an early modernist aesthetic, the answer would be that the autonomy of a sculpture was compromised if it projected the semblance of being what it itself patently ‘A sculpeural object could only devalue its integrity by masquerading as 2 living human subjectivity. This imperative ‘was so powerful char Rilke, when seeking to represent Rodin's work as radically modern in his famous essay of 1907, envisaged his sculptures as things rather than figures Now chat che anti-representational imper- atives of modernist theory no longer have the same purchase, other issues seem to be more crucial. We might argue chat the classicising figure ceased to be a viable model for any even remotely critically aware sculpeural practice because it presented itself so bla- tantly as a reassuringly consumable com- modity. It had become the reification of a fixed subjective ideal, rather than a stimulus to think subjectivity anew. If it was to sustain an imaginative resonance, a sculp- tural object had in some way to resist being projected as a familiar and gratifying image of the self. Except in the case of the odd defianely Introduction 17 14 James Pradier, Nyssia, 1848, marble, height 176cm, Musée Fabs ,, Montpellier non-sculptural and anti-aesthetic experimental work by Dada or Surrealist artists such as Duchamp, however, or the more political antiart interventions of the Russian Con- structivists, the general assumption continued to be that a compelling work of sculpture ‘was possessed of an autonomy, echoing the viewer's own, that was somehow inherent in irs qualities as an object. In this way, the more idealist modernist conceptions of sculp- tural are, which began to establish chemselves as normative from the 1920s onwards, were able to perpetuate the assumprion that the viewing subject generated out of het ot18 The Sculptural Imagination his contemplation of a sculptural object a sense of subjective wholeness thar could be located, if not in some figurative image the object represented, then at least in its inner formal structure. ‘The dissolution of traditional ideas of sculpeural embodiment went a stage further wich the reconceptualising of the chree-dimensional art object that got under way in the 1960s. ‘A Minimalise object in particular no longer presented a dense enough internal seructur- ing to be seen as a formal correlative of a figure, let alone as embodying a human sub- jectivity. Increasingly, there has been a move away from the format where a single autonomous object centred the viewer's contemplation. A work would often be dispersed inco an array of objects (fig. 161) or become an atena or environment (fig. 162), provid- ing a context within which a subjective awareness was activated that could not be asso- ciated with any substantively defined motif or shape. At issue in this development is not so much some intangible decentring of subjec- tivity as such, but rather the tendency co a perpetual unfixing of images representing any ideal or collectively shared subjectivity within modern culture. In the circumstances of contemporary capitalism's unrelenting dissolution and remaking of chose cultural norms that momentarily mediate between the individual's self-awareness and a sense of the larger social and economic realities within which this self-awareness is constituted, the com- pelling art work will no longer be one chat purports co embody some stable essence of individual subjectivity. If a work gives rise to a vivid subjective awareness, this aware- ness cannot seem to be encapsulated in some potentially inert and fixed objective thing, Tc has to emerge from within the contingencies of the viewer's encounter with a work. Where three-

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