Page 24 - Studio International - January 1969

An essay on

sculpture

by William Tucker

`It is this durability which gives the things of the its subject-matter, material, and physical presence of ambient men and things.
world their relative independence from men who pro- status have tended to remove the work from Object-existence, object-life, constitutes a kind
duced and use them, their 'objectivity' which makes its object-reality, to make it something rare, of web or net overlaying, underlaying, or en-
them withstand, 'stand against', and endure, at special or superhuman: and to mythify the tangled with the lives of modern urban men.
least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of sculptor himself into a semi-divine creator, Objects come into being, multiply and divide:
their living makers and users. From this viewpoint giving 'life' to inert matter. change hands, change uses: metamorphose,
the things of the world have the function of stabil- It is the matter-of-fact `objectness' of sculpture submerge, emerge: are subject to life and use
izing human life, and their objectivity lies in the that has become in recent years its prime processes of man, natural processes of wear and
fact that—in contradiction to the Heraclitean saying feature. Of all the arts sculpture is most erosion, oxidization and decay: gradual and
that the same man can never enter the same stream— liable to human use or disuse. Its continual violent change; accident; human design,
men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can presence in the world, its permanence as three- modification and redesign; families, tribes,
retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by dimensional thing, obstruction, if not as valu- nations, of objects; simultaneous existence of
being related to the same chair and the same table.' able and permanent material, makes the fact generations of objects, ancestors and descen-
Hannah Arendt, 'The Human Condition' of its initial coming into existence and sub- dants; massed, ordered, dispersed; static or in
sequent use or disposal a perennial physical motion; all in a state of continuous existence
`Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, problem. By contrast architecture embraces in time and space, constituting a vast process,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window,— more immediate human function, is capable the complexity of which rivals that of the
possibly: Pillar, Tower? . . of development or conversion with changing natural world. The world of objects has been
R. M. Rilke, `Duino Elegies', Ninth Elegy. human needs: whereas poetry, drama, paint- created by man and could not long survive
ing, music, film, are essentially occasional arts, without him; nonetheless it has the charac-
The emergence of a kind of sculpture in the to be read, seen, performed when demand teristics of a separate, identifiable world-
last few years that is distinguished from pre- arises: otherwise easily shelved, physically out complex, the internal processes of which are
vious sculpture by two main characteristics— of the way, to be remembered or forgotten as surely as relevant to us who inhabit it, as those
that it stands on the ground rather than on a subsequent needs determine. Sculpture is real, of the natural world were to pre-industrial
base, and is made of easily available 'industrial' part of the physical world, in a manner not man. Modern man increasingly objectifies his
rather than expensive conventional materials— shared by other arts, and it suffers the advan- environment, and the object-nature of sculp-
raises certain questions about the nature and tages and disadvantages of its position in ture suggests. a role in imaginatively. articu-
aims of sculpture, and its relation to reality. reality. It is essentially a contingent art, sub- lating this process.
In effect sculpture has become part of the ject to those conditions of reality, especially Since the Renaissance painting has functioned
world of artifacts which we inhabit, marked off light, which affect all objects. In the past the as the major medium for change and renewal
only by the stated intention of the artist and monument has been the result of man's heroic in plastic ideas. Sculpture has limped behind,
the context in which the work is seen. Sculp- effort to defy these conditions, to make a virtually paralyzed by restrictions of imagery
ture has always been literally object, in terms dominant object whose physical presence will, —the human figure—and materials that had
both of its three-dimensionality and size: but imagery apart, suppress the competing remained constant since the Greeks. In the