History of Sculpture

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...