History of Sculpture

               The Dia: Beacon trip was in many ways a pleasant surprise, as I had not been before and did not know what exactly to expect. The first thing that struck me was the spaciousness of the museum, of course specifically needed for such large-scale installations, but impressive in scale none the less. Since it was an old industrial building, there were many motifs of repeated, vast spaces that worked in many ways to influence the feelings of those inhabiting them. Rows of skylights and wide, column less spaces, coupled with overall high ceilings and flat concrete or brick walls seemed to extend the space into infinity. I was actually surprised at how sparse the sculptures were, anything but crowded and given plenty of room to be considered independently of surrounding work, an important aspect to any exhibition that is often curtailed to use space more efficiently. I suppose when dealing with such large ...

                The history of sculpture has been largely dominated by male artists largely because of the presumption that sculpture is messy and requires physical strength. This in a way is a leftover sentiment from when most sculpture was either carved stone or cast metal. Both processes, by nature of their perceived requirements of physical strength from the artists, were considered unladylike. This is of course not true, as women like Claudel clearly proved. Prejudiced views that women, due to lack of strength and resilience, could not work in such a demanding medium as sculpture lead to exclusion even after it has been made clear gender is irrelevant in such matters.             Another obstacle was the subject matter of sculpture, which has been focused on depiction of the figure for quite a long time. Such figures were largely female, idealized...

Like Life The Like Life exhibition at the Met Bruere confronted varying depictions of the human body ranging from the idealized white figures of antiquity to hyper-realistic silicone molds that were practically indiscernible from a real person. Themes of the depiction of flesh, articulation, skin and surface, and personal identity were addressed with examples from 1300 to the present. This was a welcome difference from the typical museum collections of classically ideal figures that can only be talked about in terms of form and not through their emulation of life. Many were related to aging and the life/death process, others were celebrations of the materiality of the body. Some of the work dealt with the inherent visceral quality of the human body, sometimes showing only a limb or a heap that had the qualities of flesh. The exhibition was structured not in a chronological, but a thematic order, which really helped enliven the show. For example, works regarding the...

Noguchi Museum Visit                         I had not previously seen the work of Noguchi before visiting this museum, and overall it was an enjoyable exhibition. The variety of materials in his work was well balanced, showing he experimented with many ways of making rather than sticking with one thing he knew well. This amount of experimentation is very healthy for artists as it keeps them from getting stuck repeating the same type of work over an d over. An artist can certainly concentrate in a specific area or medium, but a certain amount of variety keeps the viewer interested across and exhibition. However, Noguchi also knew how to popularize his art. By creating his interpretations of traditional Japanese lanterns, he created art pieces that were not expensive collectors’ items but accessible to the general public. This is important for many artists as it connects...

The Readymade in Sculpture             The readymade or  found object as used in sculpture is a vital, if debatable, part of sculpture. We usually think of art as something that has had tremendous effort put into making it by an individual artist. Artistic creation surely must necessitate that the artist carefully controls the form of their work, and surely commonplace objects are in no way art. The world at large has, and most likely will continue, to hold the opinion that art is something separate from everyday life. This makes the idea that mass produced goods as the parts or whole of an artistic piece is difficult for observers to fully understand, despite over one hundred years of the readymade appearing in art.             One of the most recognized readymade sculptures is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain , in which he famously signed and dated a urinal that otherwise was unchanged from i...

Hand-colored lithograph by Day & Son. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.             While still wrapped up in the continuous desire to depart from the past and define itself as a new age, the 21 st century must grapple with the precedents set and philosophies solidified by past movements just as much, if not more so, than previous centuries. To effectively reconcile ourselves with the past, we must not simply disregard it, or look upon it with the removed, passive eye afforded to us by our position in time. We must empathize with the struggles and uncertainties express by those who lived through historic events, as often the struggles of their day are in fact still our own today.             Thus, past sculpture should not be looked at as something that is invalidated by its place in history, made irrelevant and trivial by our ability to see with historical hindsight. For e...