'All concrete shapes dissolve in light': Photographing sculpture from Rodin to Brancusi (original) (raw)

2018_Photographing Sculpture: Aesthetic and Semiotic Issues

Aisthesis, vol.11, n°2, Aesthetics of Photography, edited by Fabrizio Desideri and Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, 2018

The essay aims to outline an epistemology of photography through the critical issues that arise from the encounter between photography and sculpture. In particular , it investigates the aesthetic and semiotic constraints that define the specificity of the photographic look with respect to a sculptural three-dimensional vision. The relationship between documentary and art photographs is the main area of research; specifically, the essay tries to highlight the interpretative value that can also be attributed to documentary photography, underlining the boundaries of a complex distinction. A specific section is devoted to Medardo Rosso's photographs of his own sculptures. Rosso's work solicits a reflection on the status of photography and on some theoretical problems such as reproducibility, the relationship between original and copy, and the creative gap produced by variation in a series. The artist suggests a peculiar "grammar" of photography by virtue of his relationship with another art-sculpture.

Sculpture in the expanded field: some considerations on Rosalind Krauss' text

In her text Sculpture in the Expanded Field, originally published in 1979 by October magazine, Rosalind Krauss proposes a new approach to space, one that radically surpasses the limits of the traditional notion of sculpture in three-dimensional art production and that is regarded as part of the transition to post-modernity. Many consider her article to have become a reference in the field. In this text I intend to highlight the author's main arguments and to discuss them, subsequently. There is an attempt to deepen reflections concerning questions about space in the field of art. In the end, I propose an approach to the study of the mechanisms that involve spatial issues in artistic creation, focused on the nature of the relationship between work and interlocutor.

‘A series of surfaces’: The New Sculpture and Cinema

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2016

This article examines the impact of photographic motion studies, a major precursor to the cinema, on the 'vitality' that characterized Britain's New Sculpture movement. I argue that cinema is an essential yet overlooked influence in the transformation from neoclassical to modernist sculpture in late nineteenth-century Britain. From Rodin's collections and commissions of chronophotography, it is clear this proto-cinematic art seriously impacted his studio, bringing into relief sculpture's temporal presence and the democratic contingencies of its reception. After studying under Rodin in Paris, Victorian sculptors like Harry Bates returned to Britain to participate in a movement whose vitalization of form and democratization of reception was discernibly influenced by the photographic arts

Material, Medium, and Sculptural Imagining

Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches, 2020

In what follows I discuss a limit that is commonly attributed to certain forms of gurative sculpture. It is one that, for example, Kant characterizes in his Critique of Judgement. There, he wisely observes that in pictures or descriptions, one can offer a beautiful representation of things-the Furies, diseases, devastations of war-that themselves are assuredly not beautiful. But perhaps not so wisely, Kant denies that sculptural depictions enjoy such an aesthetic independence from the things in the world they portray. In a sculpture, he writes, "art is almost confused with nature," and thus, it must con ne its direct representation to only beautiful things. It is a limit that Baudelaire complains of in his review of the 1846 Salon, under a section with the snarky title, "Why Sculpture is Boring." There the poet suggests that, whereas painting and literature can elicit thoughts of abstract ideas, absent objects, and fantastical states of affairs, sculpture cannot provide an experience whose content excludes an awareness of the work as an ordinary object in our environment, "as brutal and positive as nature herself." 2 Later, Walter Pater takes up the charge, asserting that sculpture suffers from a "tendency to a hard re-alism…[a]gainst this tendency to hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles." 3 Rephrased in the deprecatory ontology proposed by the painter Ad Reinhardt, "sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting." 4 These invidious comparisons among the arts echo the standard charge against sculpture made in Renaissance notions of the paragone: that its powers of representation are much weaker than those of painting because it cannot depart from the actual shape of what it depicts. Hence, in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Pliny's story of the adolescent boy's libidinous reaction to Praxilites' statue of Aphrodite while locked in her shrine overnight, explanations of how viewers of a sculpture could respond to it-a mere object-with real emotions or desires, proposed that they confuse the artwork with the actual thing in the world it only represents. 5