Sculpture Since 1960 529

SCULPTURE: Sculpture since 1960 529 ence of the masterpieces of early sculpture. Such sculpture Clement; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Hegel on the ranged from the more conventionally plastic quasi-figura Historicity of Art; Medium; Origins of Aesthetics: Overview; tive work of artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hep Surrealism; and WOlfflin, Heinrich.] worth, and Marino Marini to the more radically modern looking forged metal constructions and dislocated figurative presences of David Smith and the slender abstractions BIBLIOGRAPHY of Giacometti's standing and striding figures. Such large Baudelaire, Charles. "The Salon of 1846, XVI. Why Sculpture Is Tire scale modern work was complemented in the early 1960s by some (Pourquoi Ia sculpture est ennuyeuse)." In Art i11 Paris 1845- the new more openly structured metal creations of artists 1862, u·anslated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, pp. 111-113. such as Anthony Caro, who were seen as realizing a new, London: Phaidon, 1965. visibly ambitious, more purely abstract sculpture paral Baudelaire, Charles. "The Salon of 1859, IX. Sculpture." In Art in Paris 1845-1862, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, pp. 203-214. leling the radical optical abstraction of contemporary color London: Phaidon, 1965. field painting, while still taking the form of a bounded Curtis, Penelope. Sculpture 190o-1945: After Rodin. Oxford: Oxford sculptural entity. The 1960s also saw numerous commis University Press, 1999. sions for large-scale modern sculptures installed in public Giedion-Welcker, Carol a. Modem Plastic Art: Elements of Reality, volume spaces. Previously, ideas for a new public sculpture did not and Disimegmtion. Translated by P. M. Shand. Zurich, Switzerland: H. Girsberger, 1937. English translation of Modeme Plastik, Elenzen.te generally get beyond the project phase, and public sculp der Wirklichkeit, Masse und Aufiockerung ( 193 7). ture for the most part had continued in a conventional Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 2. monumental figurative mode. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. English trans Concomitant with the official canonization of modern sculp lation of Hegel's lectures delivered in the 1820s and first published in ture came an explosion, starting in the later 1950s, of experi 1835. See pp. 701-718,718-720,797-820. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Sculpture: Some Observatio11s on Shape and mental alternatives. On the one hand, the latter's rejection of Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream. Edited and translated by formalized convention could be seen as opening up an ex Jason Gaiger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. panded field of sculptural practice that picked up on the more Krauss, Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking, radical, earlier avant-garde experiments in three-dimensional 1977. work. On the other, it could be taken as evidence of a break Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations be tween Painting and Sculpture in the Modem Age. Translated by Chris down in the conventions defining sculpture as a distinctive art Miller. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008. English transla form. This did not mean the end of sculpture so much as the tion of La Tache Aveugle: essai su1· les relations de la peinture et de Ia end of a certain idea of modern sculpture. The medium sculpture a l' age modeme (Paris: Gallirnard, 2003). specific understandings of sculpture that had sparked off even Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. The New Vision: From Material to Architecture. some of the more far-out earlier notions of modern sculpture Edited and translated by D. M. Hofmann. New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932. English translation of von Material zu became increasingly irrelevant, most markedly so in the late Architektur (Munich: A. Langen, 1929). A more widely available 1960s and early 1970s with the systematically anti-modernist, revised edition was published as The New Vision: Fundamentals anti-formalist tendencies of minimalist, conceptual, and en of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. (New York: Norton, vironmental art-a time when Duchamp's radically anti 1938). aesthetic notion of the ready-made became paradigmatic Potts, Alexander. The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modemist, Minimalist. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2000. for experimental understandings of object-based work. How Read, Herbert. A Concise History of Modern Sculpture. London:Thames ever, the 1970s also saw the publication of two key texts that and Hudson, 1964. became classic points of reference for subsequent studies in Tucker, William. The Language of Sculpture. London: Thames and modern sculpture, William Tucker's The Language of Sculpture Hudson, 1974. ( 197 4) and Rosalind Krauss's Passages in Modern Sculpture Wood, Jon, David Hulks, and Alex Potts, eds. Modern Sculpture Reader. Leeds, U.K.: Henry Moore Institute, 2007. (1977). Tucker's book is a belated, if persuasive, attempt to identify the foundational principles of modern sculpture, ALEXANDER Porrs while Krauss's is more transitional. It seeks to rescue from earlier formulations of modern sculpture an alternative to traditional notions of sculpture as centered entity, while giving Sculpture since 1960 pride of place to recent developments that pointed the way to a radically different kind of art constituted as environment Since the 1960s the medium of sculpture has been an open or interaction between viewer and work that was no longer question rather than a consistent category. Sculpture's three quite sculpture. While further canonizing the idea of modern dimensionality, its temporal and spatial incitements to the sculpture as a distinctive formal enterprise, it was also sig viewer, and its relations to bodies, quotidian objects, and naling its end. built structures have all been expanded upon to the point [See also Autonomy; Baudelaire, Charles; Breton, Andre; where it might at first seem that any artistic practice can be Collage; Conceptual Art; Formalism; Futurism; Greenberg, nominated as "sculpture." Rather than lead to the dissolution d ~ 530 SCULPTURE: Sculpture since 1960 of the medium of sculpture, however, this historical situation malism's defenders, but from one of its most ardent critics, has facilitated the centrality of the sculptural in contempo Michael Fried. His "Art and Objecthood" (1967) remains rary art. Its questions have become generative of entirely dis one of the most important art critical texts of the twentieth tinct and coherent new media or artistic practices (as in the century, and its effects continue to be felt in sculptural dis consolidation of performance and of installation art since the course to the present day. Fried provided the best definition 1960s or with the emergence of social practice in recent de of Minimalism in the course of his defense of the art object's cades). There has also been an equally vital continued inves autonomy and his critique of what he understood to be Min tigation of the potentials and capacities for three-dimensional imalism's cheapening of the aesthetic experience to mere representation as sculpture's distinction from the quotidian "theater." Fried's attack on Minimalism had a counter-effect and the pictorial. and canonized Minimalism and its shift of emphasis to the In what follows I will examine some of the major tenden viewer. Subsequent sculptors and critics valued the situa cies in sculpture in America and Europe since 1960. While tional, spatial, and relational capacities of sculpture, and it there are key texts in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the major has been their exploration that has fueled the expansion of positions in sculptural aesthetics in recent decades have been the sculptural medium to incorporate performance, architec established through artistic practice itself. Consequently, in ture, and installation. dividual artists are cited as exemplary of tendencies and po Importantly, Fried chose to attack the Minimalists' claims sitions, but I have not attempted to provide a comprehensive that they had fully suppressed sculptural representation-in history of sculpture so much as to delineate broadly the vicis particular, anthropomorphism. In one of the most compel situdes of its evaluation. ling parts of his argument, he contended that these objects in The New Base: Minimalism in the 1960s. Without a human scale displaced space and demanded physical rela doubt, the movement that has come to be known as Mini tionality in much the same way as statues. In other words, by malism proved to be one of the most impactful for artistic occupying the category of sculpture (even in spite of their practice since the 1960s (Foster, 1996; Potts, 2000) Mini makers' assertions that they had moved beyond traditional malism reacted to the dominant logic of modernist criticism medium distinctions), Minimal objects were not as literal put forth by Clement Greenberg, who asserted a teleological and nonreferential as their creators posited. By contrast, their view that art was best judged according to how well it ad claims to be nonrepresentational were subverted by their vanced the distillation of the core traits of its medium. Artist activation of bodily relations of scale. Representation and fig critics such as Donald Judd ( 1965) and Robert Morris ( 199 3) uration, in other words, continued to operate in even the rejected Greenberg's emphasis on the pictorial and posited most rigorously reductive objects as the denominator against

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