Page 26 - Studio International - January February 1975

Yet the chosen materials of sculpture
demonstrate their physical and structural
properties more effectively outside art —
in rocks and in trees, or in the steel
frames of buildings and bridges, for
example. Is sculpture to be limited to the
isolation and imitation of these effects ?
I would argue that sculpture has no
need to arm itself against painting or
architecture as though sharing either
their scope or their aspirations. If you
will think for a moment of the sculpture I
asked you earlier to consider, what is the
one characteristic that transcends
distinctions of image, material and size,
yet allows each work to impress itself on
you as 'sculpture' ? Surely the inevitable
answer is : the sculpture is a thing. It is
present to us as a thing before it is
recognised as wood, stone or steel: a
figure of a god or an animal, the size of
your hand or of a mountain. Things have
to be made of material, must be a certain
size, true, but it is not material or
dimension that makes them things. The
ground of our perception of the world is
of material revealed by light and extended
about us: it may even have distinct
boundaries, but it does not necessarily
resolve itself into things. A world is
perfectly conceivable without things.
What makes the thing distinct from
reality in general ? For the moment I will
say it is this, that it can be grasped.
Grasped literally by the hand: grasped by
What Sculpture is the eye as a distinct whole, a gestalt:
grasped by the mind, through language,
naming. These three aspects of grasping,
of laying hold of things, are inseparably
William Tucker Part three
interwoven.
You may well object that a painting, a
What is it that makes sculpture single view. Both claims seem to me building, are things also, as indeed is a
sculpture, and not say three- defensive, as though trying to affirm poem or a symphony. This leads into
dimensional painting or small-scale rights to territory in which painting was difficult aesthetic territory (traversed for
architecture? What room is there for already secure. The sculptors did not example by Richard Wollheim in 'Art
sculpture? need Leonardo to tell them that the and its Objects') which I don't propose to
The question will not readily answer discovery of the deep space behind the enter here. It may be an intriguing
itself. Even to ask it might be taken as the plane had given painting the capacity to problem to identify where, physically,
sign of an excessive self-consciousness, if articulate a whole world of experience — the objective existence of a poem lies — on
not complete loss of nerve. Yet, at a of the depth, light and atmosphere in the printed page or in the original
period when sculpture was entirely a which bodies exist — in other words, the manuscript, or in the mind of the reader,
matter of representing the human figure, world — now apparently denied to for example, but for sculpture, and as a
Michelangelo asserted its supremacy sculpture. They denigrate this access as sculptor, I would say the problem does
over painting on the grounds of the mere illusion, and, pretending that painting not exist. Even where there is more than
physical labour and practical judgement is simply a matter of representation on a one cast of the same model, no two casts
necessary for its realization, while Cellini surface, argue that sculpture's can be identical; knowing this, serious
argued primacy of sculpture because it materiality, on the one hand, or its sculptors have always 'finished' each cast
had many views as against painting's greater visibility, render it superior. distinctly, thus affirming their separate
Materiality and visibility are not identity as thing. The sculpture is
exclusive properties of sculpture : they indisputably its own evidence,
are common to the visual arts. What is continually present to us, available under
central to each art is the kind of the conditions common to things in
materiality and of visibility proper to general. But still, architecture and
each. The visibility of painting is painting notably in this century might
different from that of sculpture, and affirm a special claim to be considered
different again from the visibility of primarily as 'thing', graspable in the same
architecture. In our own time, when sense as I have proposed for sculpture.
representation is no longer a point at Painting especially has drawn attention to
issue, sculpture might be defended as a the boundaries and physical
more compact, more economic and more characteristics of its surface. Yet
flexible form of architecture — indeed I considered only as a bounded surface,
have been tempted into this fallacy painting may be a thing, but it is a thing
myself. Again, the painters and of the lowest possible interest, flexibility
architects who have turned to sculpture and differentiation. It is only by evoking
in this century have almost all inflicted through illusion the space painting has
sculpture with their visual prejudices, so traditionally opened up that the work
that the usual defensive position the continues to come to life; in other words,
`pure' sculptors have adopted has again by overcoming the thing quality claimed
been that of its obvious and palpable as its major virtue.
The Kiss 1901-4 Rodin materiality. Just as literal surface limits the
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