Sculpture Since 1960 [entry for revised edition of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2014] (original) (raw)
Related papers
From ‘The New Sculpture’ to Garden Statuary: the suppression of Abstract Expressionist sculpture
2015
In the 1940s, David Smith, David Hare, Herbert Ferber, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton and Theodore Roszak were part of a new generation of sculptors working in New York who used welding and other direct-metal techniques to make abstract sculpture. In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionist sculpture was praised for its vitality and inventiveness, yet beginning in the 1960s these works gradually fell out of favour. The sole exception is David Smith, who has been upheld as the only sculptor of merit from this period. This study will contend that the suppression of Abstract Expressionist sculpture is largely due to Clement Greenberg and the lasting impact of his writings. Furthermore, his critique of the new sculpture has shaped subsequent assessments by Michael Leja, Kirk Varnedoe, and Edward Lucie-Smith. It has also contributed to the belief, still current today, that Abstract Expressionism is a movement of painters with no comparable counterparts in sculpture.
ARTHI 1013: Modern to Contemporary Sculpture
This survey addresses the history of European and American sculpture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It charts transitions from the innovations of Auguste Rodin to a variety of sculptural modernisms, the emergence of minimalism and earthworks, and the expansion and diversification of practices as we move toward today. Meetings are informed by readings from the textbook, supplemented with scholarly articles that present a range of critical approaches to the production, reception, and interpretation of sculpture past and present. Class sessions combine a lecture component and discussion in the classroom, in the galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere in the city.
Undergraduate seminar, Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Winter 2020 The second half of the twentieth century saw a fundamental reorganization of the medium of sculpture, and this course will chart its major developments. From the 1950s onward, sculptors in the United States became preoccupied with their work's relationship to everyday objects, industrial products, mass consumer goods, and the human body. Sculptural representation was left behind as abstraction, assemblage, objecthood, and dematerialization took hold, and we will examine sculptors' restless attempts at greater degrees of relation to everyday things, institutional contexts, and human bodies. Artists were energized by how sculpture could expansively incorporate architecture, performance, and the lived body; but they also prophesied its disintegration and obsolescence. Pushed to its limits, sculpture came to occupy a central role in American art theory, and it became an analogy for debates about gender, power, history, and commodification.
Five Propositions on Abstract Sculpture
Theories of women artists and the conditions for studio-based sculpture, in conjunction with the exhibition catalog, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016
Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd ed., ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (Routledge, forthcoming)
Sherri Irvin Sculpture has received comparatively little attention from philosophers of art. However, sculpture, in its classical and contemporary forms, raises distinctive questions about the ontology, representational character and appreciation of art, and is thus well worth attending to. DEFINING SCULPTURE Before the turn of the twentieth century, nearly all sculptures in the Western fine art tradition were three--dimensional representations of recognizable objects, most often human figures. Most sculptures were freestanding objects, though bas--relief sculpture on buildings and altarpieces also constituted a notable form. Sculptures were typically static objects made of durable materials such as stone, bronze, clay and wood. But over the past century, the range of sculptural materials, subject matters and practices has exploded. Many sculptures, such as the abstract works of Barbara Hepworth or Louise Nevelson, are not obviously representations of objects, even imaginary ones. Kinetic sculptures, unlike their static predecessors, involve movement and, sometimes, sound elements. Installation artworks frequently involve an immersive environment that we explore by moving through it, rather than an object that we view by circling it; and they may incorporate multimedia elements such as film and video. Earthworks involve interventions, sometimes on a very large scale, in exterior landscapes. I favor a treatment of sculpture that includes all of these developments, since they are outgrowths of earlier sculptural traditions and practices. I also aim to maintain the traditional divisions separating sculpture from painting and architecture, and to distinguish sculpture from performance art, which raises interesting but distinct issues. Sculptures must also be distinguished from three--dimensional non--art objects, no small feat now that artists have begun to incorporate a wide array of artifacts into their work. Sometimes a snow shovel is just a snow shovel; other times it is Marcel Duchamp's (1915) In Advance of the Broken Arm. A simple, neat definition of sculpture is thus precluded by the great diversity of sculptural works and by the complex contours of the boundaries that distinguish sculpture from other domains, which are the product more of historical traditions and practices than of rational calculation. Moreover, there is no defining sculpture without having already made some decisions about what to include, as I have indicated above. And once those decisions have been made, much inquiry about sculpture could proceed-and has proceeded-by looking at a variety of cases without trying to unify them under a definition.
Revival and Invention: Sculpture and its Material Histories, 2011
Materials may seem to be sculpture’s most obvious aspect. Traditionally seen as a means to an end, and frequently studied in terms of technical procedures, their intrinsic meaning often remains unquestioned. Yet materials comprise a field rich in meaning, bringing into play a wide range of issues crucial to our understanding of sculpture. This book places materials at the centre of our approach to sculpture, examining their symbolic and aesthetic language, their abstract and philosophical associations, and the ways in which they reveal the political, economic and social contexts of sculptural practice. Spanning a chronology from antiquity through to the end of the nineteenth century, the essays collected in this book uncover material properties as fundamental to artistic intentionality.