This paper considers the material exchange initiated in the early sculptural practice of Barbara Chase-Riboud when she began to incorporate fiber into her bronze sculptures by looking closely at her ...1972 work, The Albino. I suggest that Chase-Riboud staked a claim for sculpture as a symbolic site at which material knowledge might be transferred across time and space. The work’s negotiations open western sculptural practice to a hybridized form located within transhistorical associations that rework the alleged specificities of both craft and bronze into sites for the exchange of ideas and practices.
In the 1950s and 60s, Martin Heidegger turned to sculpture to rethink the relationship between bodies and space and the role of art in our lives. In his texts on the subject—a catalog contribution ...for an Ernst Barlach exhibition, a speech at a gallery opening for Bernhard Heiliger, a lecture on bas-relief depictions of Athena, and a collaboration with Eduardo Chillida—he formulates his later aesthetic theory, a thinking of relationality. Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein. Filled with illustrations of works that Heidegger encountered or considered, Heidegger Among the Sculptors makes a singular contribution to the philosophy of sculpture.
Creating a successful sculpture requires an imaginative concept and a sound design that utilize the potential and avoid the limitations of the material and the process used in making it. Prior to a ...few decades ago, most sculptors were restricted to carving stone and wood or casting plaster, ceramics and bronze for their creations. Contemporary sculptors, however, are no longer bound by the limitations of these traditional materials and processes, and can now create works in sizes, forms and textures that could not have been achieved previously. Many modern sculptures are now made from materials ranging from steel and aluminum to plastics and composites using processes ranging from welding and adhesive bonding to molding and 3D printing. To fully utilize the full potential of such new materials, the sculptor needs to understand their points of strength, their limitations, and the most effective way of shaping them to achieve a given design. Although this book is written by a materials engineer, the subject matter is presented from the point of view of the sculptor with emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of different materials, their resistance to weather conditions, natural color and possible surface textures, possible methods of shaping and joining, tools and equipment needed, and safety measures to take. Whenever possible, case studies are used to illustrate the sequence of processes and the cost elements involved in shaping a given material to create an actual work of sculpture.
The sculptural history of the long 1980s has been dominated by New British Sculpture and Young British Artists. Arguing for a more expansive history of British sculpture and its supporting ...infrastructures, these twenty-three vivid and enthralling interviews with artists, curators, dealers and facilitators working then demonstrate the interconnected networks, diversity of ideas and practices, energy, imagination and determination that transformed British art from being marginal to internationally celebrated. With a substantial introduction, this timely volume provides valuable new insights into the education, work, careers, studios, infrastructures and exhibitions of the artists and facilitators, substantially enlarging our understanding of the era.
Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from ...modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the 1970s and 1980s by U.S. Black women artists Beverly Buchanan, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar reveal how Black feminists have engaged with modernist protocols in order to redress cultural erasures of Black women. These practices exemplify Black feminist modernisms, or creative practices that unsettle the racist and sexist logics of dominant cultural institutions. Each of these artists utilizes haptic surfaces as a method for defying institutional modernism’s obfuscation of the past. The analysis focuses on Buchanan’s defiance of memorial erasures, Nengudi’s reenactment of labor, including in its historical forms, and Saar’s adaptation of generational memory-making processes. Ultimately, these artists’ rejection of a “timeless” modernism demands that viewers understand the present moment in relationship to a still-evolving past. In this way, Buchanan, Nengudi, and Saar position the present as an accumulation, rather than transcendence, of historical occurrences.
Written from the perspective of practice-led research, this reflective case study rationalises and charts the production of ‘Clean-Up Workers (Deluxe Series)’—mixed media sculptures that embody ...notions of waste aesthetic, value and abjection. Integrating discourses surrounding waste theory and using the sink and plug as a metaphor to discuss Lacan’s theory of the objet petit a, the paper is presented as an autobiographical waste narrative. Production of a series of anatomical vacuum cleaners made from re-appropriated artwork found waste materials in the form of ‘pre-owned objects or materials’ and ‘by-products’ of a creative practice’, sit alongside crafted luxurious glass objects and speak of corporeal ageing, dysfunction and the domestic realm. Discarded objects take the form of car parts found in the non-places of the gutter. Through assemblage, these unique items’ ‘use-time’ is recontextualised and elevated as art objects viewed within a gallery arena.
Sculpture and the decorative meet in all manner of objects, art practices, and contexts. Yet they are largely kept apart in academia, art criticism, exhibitions and museums. By foregrounding the ...overlaps between sculpture and the decorative, this volume of essays by artists, curators and art historians offers a model for a more integrated form of art history writing. Through distinct case studies, from a seventeenth-century Danish altarpiece to contemporary British ceramics, the book charts the ways in which concepts associated with sculpture and the decorative have been employed and negotiated by practitioners, critics, audiences and historians. Exploring why and how these categories are constructed and contested reveals the various agendas that the shifting relationships between sculpture and the decorative expose and serve to support. Bringing to centre stage makers, objects and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries within art and design discourse, these essays challenge the classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the Decorative is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of sculpture and the decorative arts and the methodologies of art history.
Manitoba artist Don Proch is recognized as one of the most influential visual artists to come out of western Canada, and his work can be found in Canada's major art galleries. Richly illustrated with ...more than 80 plates, this book discusses the themes and influences behind his work and their context within the history of Canadian art.
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