A quick look through the recent publication Modern Sculpture Reader throws up an array of quotes (see below) relating to process and materials in the history of modern Sculpture. We can draw out these themes and see how they apply to or differ from current (or 'contemporary') practices as well as to our own emerging practices.
Don't worry that they appear to all belong to the late modern and early post-modern period we will simply use them as a kind of grounding from which to speculate on Contemporary practices. So as well as discussing Donald Judd's hard-edged steel or the standard 'contemporary' fayre of styrofoam & concrete we are just as likely to talk of Poppy Seeds & Seaweeds, contest the apparent deathliness of bronze, anxiety over Ivory, or consider Coral in an age of global warming.
Please read and discuss the quotes below with your peers prior to the session. I may add some more using the books 'Unmonumental' and 'Art in Theory' as alternative resources.
Feel free to bring your own quotes, ideas and examples to the Speculecture session. I will write and deliver -as usual- my own 'Speculecture' on the theme before inviting questions and generating discussion.
"In casting I always like the parting lines and the seams'
Bruce Nauman, p. 409 Modern Sculpture Reader
" ... it is obvious that I've never ... included myself in the lines of descent traced from Henry Moore. yet I have always used a concept of 'truth to material' which ... was always attached to his work when I was a student [...] if 'truth to material' was taken as the overriding criterion or value in sculpture, he said, 'a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a Rodin or a Bernini."
Susan Hiller, p.493 Modern Sculpture Reader
"A bale of hay is as much a man-impressed work as a brick or an ingot of steel."
Carl Andre p. 309-19 Modern Sculpture Reader
"...people kept saying of the white styrofoam, 'Oh it's so like pentelic marble' They couldn't say that about the Orange styrofoam. ... things have practical, explicit origins. There was not doctrine or dogma but the necessities and conditions I was working under that led me to styrofoam'
Carl Andre, pp 310-11 Modern Sculpture Reader
" Prairie (1967) consists of four long poles of aluminum tubing suspended parallel to one another about eleven inches above a sheet of corrugated metal [...] which runs north-south to the poles' east-west and is itself suspended about twenty-one inches above the ground. If we approach Prairie from either end of that sheet, the physical means by which these suspensions are accomplished are not apparent; but as we move around the sculpture it becomes clear that the sheet is held up by two sharply bent pieces of metal plate, one on each side, which spring out and down from the underside of the sheet until they touch the ground, whereupon they angle upward and outward until they reach the height of the poles, which they support also. Two of the poles are supported at only one point, about twenty inches from the end; a third is supported about twenty inches from both ends, that is, by both of the ben, upward springing metal plates; while a fourth is not supported by these at all but is held by a large upright rectangle of metal which stands somewhat apart from the rest of the sculpture and in fact is not physically connected to it in any way. But grasping exactly how Prairie works as a feat of engineering does not in the least undermine or even compete with one's initial impression that the metal poles and corrugates sheet are suspended, as if in the absence of gravity, at different levels above the ground."
Michael Fried, p.259 Modern Sculpture Reader
"This is the point at which to emphasize the pre-eminence of stone as the material to be carved. I am not thinking of its durability, nor even of the shape it will allow. I am thinking of the equal diffusion of light that, compared to most objects, even the hardest and darkest stones possess; I am thinking of hand-polished marble's glow that can only be compared to the light on flesh-and-blood. the sculptor is led to woo the marble. Into the solidity of stone, a solidity yet capable of suffused light, the fantasies of bodily vigour, of energy in every form, can be projected, set out and made permanent. Most other statuary materials, bronze and terra-cotta, are far higher mediums of manifestly reflected light, as if their light were not their own light. the majority of stones, on the other hand, are faintly or slightly translucent so that their light seems to be more within them [...] The great virtue of stone is that unlike other hard materials it seems to have a luminous life, light or soul."
Adrian Stokes, p.115 Modern Sculpture Reader
"Any art work of significance, regardless of whether it embraces qualities that we see as sculptural or actively negates these, is caught up in a very basic contradiction, momentarily bringing to life alternatives to the pervasive reifications shaping the world of art and the world of everyday experience while also being embedded in these reifications. For artist and viewer, art involves a process in which material substance is given to impulses, ideas and apprehensions of things. As such, it is inevitably caught up in the forces that shape the artificially fabricated environments viewer and artist inhabit, forces permeated by the imperatives of modern capitalism. Like other imaginatively charged materializing processes in which people engage form time to tie, art can momentarily project them beyond and perhaps even able to resist these imperatives, but it cannot do so on a permanent basis. An artistic phenomenon that is seen to have achieved stable significance or value, like any other phenomenon that has become a fixed feature of the world we inhabit, is inevitably absorbed back into the indifferent, ready-made environments from which it once briefly stood out."
Alex Potts, p xxviii Modern Sculpture Reader
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