Sculpture Flashcards
Mario Merz, Giap Igloo—If the Enemy Masses
His Forces, He Loses Ground; If He Scatters, He
Loses Strength, 1968
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Arte Povera
Mario Merz was born in Milan. He grew up in Turin and attended medical school for two years at the Università degli Studi di Torino. During World War II he joined the anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Libertà and was arrested in 1945 and confined to jail, where he drew incessantly on whatever material he could find. In 1950 he began to paint with oil on canvas. His first solo exhibition, held at Galleria La Bussola, Turin, in 1954, included paintings whose organic imagery Merz considered representative of ecological systems. By 1966 he began to pierce canvases and objects, such as bottles, umbrellas, and raincoats with neon tubes, altering the materials by symbolically infusing them with energy.
In 1967 he embarked on an association with several artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio, which became a loosely defined art movement labeled Arte Povera by critic and curator Germano Celant. This movement was marked by an antielitist aesthetic, incorporating materials drawn from everyday life and the organic world in protest of the dehumanizing nature of industrialization and consumer capitalism.
In 1968 Merz adopted one of his signature motifs, the igloo. It was constructed with a metal skeleton and covered with fragments of clay, wax, mud, glass, burlap, bundles of branches, and often political or literary phrases in neon tubing. He participated in significant international exhibitions of Conceptual, Process, and Minimalist Art, such as Arte povera + azioni povera at the Arsenali dell’Antica Repubblica, Amalfi, and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968; the latter exhibition traveled to Krefeld, Germany, and to London.
Sevres Manufactory,
A pair of potpourri vases with lids, 1761
Detroit Institute of Arts
French Rococo
The manufacture nationale de Sèvres is a porcelain factory in Sèvres, France. Formerly a royal, then an imperial factory, the facility is now run by the Ministry of Culture.
Louis XV had been an early investor in the fledgling ceramic enterprise and became itssole owner in 1759. However, due to the upheavals of the French Revolution, its financial position at the beginning of the nineteenth century was extremely precarious. No longer a royal enterprise, the factory also had lost much of its clientele, and its funding reflected the ruinous state of the French economy.
Lygia Clark, Animal, 1960
Neoconcretism (co-founded)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cq2OVD7dvA
Throughout her career trajectory, Clark discovered ways for museum goers (who would later be referred to as “participants”) to interact with her art works. She sought to redefine the relationship between art and society. Clark’s works dealt with inner life and feelings.
The Neo-Concretists believed that the object and person should become a single entity. They utilized 3-dimensional moveable figures so that the spectator, in essence, becomes the artist. Neo-Concretists looked to push the limits of what art represented. The art is the actual process of doing. It is during this interaction that the spectator truly experiences what the art work means.
During the 1970s, Clark explored the role of sensory perception and psychic interaction that the participants would have with her artwork. She referred to this as “ritual without myth”. For Clark, art work would have no representative meaning outside of its manipulation by the participants. Participants would take the art objects and fashion them in any way that they pleased. At this point, the line between the participant and art work would become blurred. The participants would become one with the art piece. In a sense, the participant and art work would become fused. In the final years of her career, Clark focused solely on psychotherapy and the use of art in healing patients. Clark’s objective through her art was to surpass each phase since ideas that were originally considered groundbreaking were outdated with regard to her latter works.
Marcel Breuer, Armchair, model B3, Dessau,
Germany
Designed late 1927 or early 1928
Joseph Beuys, Auschwitz‐Demonstration
(Seitenansicht), 1956‐64
Conceptual Art: Social Sculpture
In West Germany, as elsewhere in the western art world, art practices expanded beyond traditional categories in the 1960s and 70s to include performance art, video, ephemeral and multiple works of art. [66]
Much of this was politically motivated against the new consumer society and as a critique of the older generation, whose authority was now being questioned in light of new revelations of Germany’s Nazi past. The most important and influential artist of his generation was Joseph Beuys. A political activist, Beuys believed in art’s potential to transform society. Through the inclusion of performances, environments, documents, multiples, and drawings, Beuys aimed at the fusion of art and life. He tailored his art and personality on the model of the shaman, the artist healer of primitive hunting societies who served as mediator between society and its ills and the forces beyond.
Beuys was also the first German artist to try to deal with the commemoration of the Holocaust. His sculpture “Auschwitz Demonstration” belongs to what he called his “social sculptures”. In a vitrine, resembling a medical cabinet, he positioned two blocs of fat on top of a cooker, which is not plugged in and is therefore unable to provide the necessary heat to warm the fat and depriving it of its malleability.
For Beuys fat, as well as bees’ wax were in their malleability symbolic of the transformative qualities he aimed for in his art. [68] In his procedure, his use of happenings, Beuys was heavily influenced by Fluxus. Fluxus, an international movement that had originated in the U.S., was based on the concept of Dada inspired anti-art, which aimed at recreating the experience of being part of the real world. [69] Beuys’ famous claim that everyone is an artist has to be understood under that angle. His most famous Fluxus event in 1963 started with a happening, in which Beuys filled a discarded piano with candy, dried leaves, and laundry detergent. What he wanted was to create was (I quote) a “healthy chaos” as protest against the official hypocrisy in the face of continued violence and torture in the world. [70] What resulted from the “healthy chaos” was Beuys bloodied nose and its famous press photo, which came to be viewed as iconic for the power of art as player in the cycle of violence and redemption.
Henri Matisse,
Back I‐IV, 1909‐1930
Tate Gallery, London
David Hammons, Bliz‐aard Ball Sale, 1983
Kiki Smith, Blood Pool, 1992
Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Mona Hatoum, Corps Étranger, 1994
Post-Conceptual (?)
This complex piece is composed of a cylindrical space with padded walls where the viewer is invited to enter and see a video of Hatoum’s internal body. As such, she makes use of indispensable medical imaging technology (that without, the work would not exist). Hatoum uses the strategy of abjection in displaying the internal cavities in a way that has the effect of swallowing up the viewer. The abject destabilizes boundaries.
The work also features aspects of biotourism (the transformation of bodies into landscapes and rendering the rendering of the invisible visible – her inner anatomy would otherwise remain foreign to her and to viewers but it becomes visible by generating images of the body’s inner architecture through visual mapping of her internal organs as well as her external shell – her skin)
There is a physical space one enters but immediately, the viewer feels like a force is pulling him/her in to be engulfed as we are given a perspective from above. She reveals the body’s unknown interior. Another layer of meaning has to do with the interaction of our bodies and her body: as we enter the cylindrical space, we become the foreign bodies entering her body. Another layer of meaning: relates the exploration of the foreign to her identity as a foreigner. Hatoum is a Palestinian artist (born in Lebanon but she is of Palestinian origin).
David Smith, Cubi XVIII, 1964, Cubi XVII, 1963,
Cubi XIX, 1964
Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969‐70, Nevada
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Constantin Brancusi, Endless Column, 1937‐38
Abstract Sculpture
Brancusi made several versions of his Endless Column. It consists of a single symmetrical element, a pair of truncated pyramids stuck together at their base, then repeated to produce a continuous rhythmic line. In replicating the same abstract shape, Brancusi emphasized its potential for vertical expansion—it was, he later said, a “column for infinity.” In Brancusi’s work generally the pedestal that traditionally supported sculpture, usually a secondary element, took on a new prominence, often equal to that of the artwork itself: he first used the geometric motif seen here in bases for his sculptures, but gradually realized its value as an independent form. He later repeated the Endless Column on larger scales and in different materials, making it serve as an architectural element and a monument. Its simplicity, directness, and modularity helped to define the foundational principles of modern abstract sculpture.
Carl Andre, Equivalent (VIII), 1966
The circumstances in which Andre’s brick sculptures were first created have been summarised by David Bourdon, loc. cit.: ‘For some time it had been apparent to Andre that his sculpture should be low. In summer, 1965, while canoeing on a New Hampshire lake, he realised his sculpture had to be as level as water. For his second show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in March 1966, Andre created an astringent environment by setting eight rectilinear mounds of 120 bricks each on the gallery’s parquet floor’. 120 was chosen because it was a number particularly rich in factors. The bricks had to be stacked in two layers to prevent them drifting apart and to give the pieces sufficient mass. Thus the top layer of each mound had only 60 bricks. The bricks were assembled in only four out of six possible combinations: 3 x 20, 4 x 15, 5 x 12 and 6 x 10. (In bricklaying, bricks laid end to end are called a stretcher course and bricks laid side by side are called a header course; thus the pieces may be described as 120 bricks in two courses each, i.e. 3 header x 20 stretcher and 3 stretcher x 20 header etc.). The same 6 x 10 combination, for example, could be either an elongated rectangle or a near square, depending on the orientation of the bricks. Although each of the eight shapes was different, they all occupied the same amount of space in cubic centimetres, which accounted for their visual equivalence. He therefore entitled this exhibition Equivalents (which was also the title of Alfred Stieglitz’s series of cloud photographs).
Frederick Kiesler, plan for Endless House, 1958‐59
Surrealist (architecture/exhibition design)
For his object designs, such as the biomorphic furniture in his Abstract Gallery room of Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of This Century Gallery art salon (1942), for example. For it, he sought to dissolve the visual, real, image, and environment into a free-flowing space. He likewise pursued this approach with his “Endless House,” exhibited in maquette form in 1958–59 at The Museum of Modern Art. The project stemmed from his shop-window displays of the 1920s and his Film Guild Cinema in New York City, mentioned above. Pursuing display and art-gallery work, he was a window designer for Saks Fifth Avenue from 1928 to 1930. Earlier in his career in Europe, Kiesler invented the 1924 L+T (Leger und Trager) radical hanging system for galleries and museums.
His unorthodox architectural drawings and plans that he called “polydimensional” were somewhat akin to Surrealist automatic drawings.
Henry Moore, Four‐Piece Composition:
Reclining Figure, 1934
Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky
Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Bruce Nauman, Green Light Corridor, 1970
Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993
Hugo Ball reciting the poem Karawane
at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916
Robert Morris, installation view of Green
Gallery exhibition, New York, 1964
Minimalism
In 1964, at New York’s Green Gallery, Robert Morris exhibited a suite of large-scale polyhedron forms constructed from 2 x 4s and gray-painted plywood. This kind of simple geometric sculpture came to be called Minimalist because it seemed to be stripped of extraneous distractions such as figural or metaphorical reference, detail or ornament, and even surface inflection. Sculptures like the Untitled (Corner Piece), one component of the 1964 suite, boldly delineate the space in which they are located, thus defining the physical and temporal relationship of the viewer to the sculptural object.
Morris’s sculptures often consist of industrial or building materials such as steel, fiberglass, and plywood, and were commercially fabricated according to the artist’s specifications. The value of the “artist’s hand”—the unique gesture that defines an individual’s skill and style—was inimical to Morris, and the work of art became, in theory, not an “original” object but a representation of the idea from which it was conceived.
Louise Bourgeois, La Fillette, 1968
Feminist / Surrealist-inspired Sculpture
“Everything I loved had the shape of people around me—the shape of my husband, the shape of the children,” Bourgeois has said. “So when I wanted to represent something I love, I obviously represented a little penis.” The title of the work, however, lends it ambiguity. In the 1960s Bourgeois began constructing hanging sculptures and using a variety of materials—here plaster and latex—to create organic, fleshy sculptures that recall the human body.
By layering latex over plaster, Bourgeois achieved a fleshy, tactile texture in this hanging sculpture. While it most obviously represents a phallus, the work can also be seen as a female torso, as the title suggests; in this reading, the two round forms are the tops of two legs, attaching to their hip joints. This eliding of genders creates ambiguity, as do the work’s dual qualities of erect potency and fragile vulnerability. “From a sexual point of view,” Bourgeois said, “I consider the masculine attributes to be very delicate.”
Claes Oldenburg,
Floor Cake (Giant Piece of Cake), 1962
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Francois Rude,
The Departure of Volunteers of 1792 (“La Marseillaise”), 1833‐36
Arc de Triomphe, Paris
Neoclassical into Romanticism
“La Marseillaise” (French pronunciation: [la maʁsɛjɛz]) is the national anthem of France.
Arc de Triomphe: The four sculptural groups at the base of the Arc are The Triumph of 1810 (Cortot), Resistance and Peace (both by Antoine Étex) and the most renowned of them all, Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 commonly called La Marseillaise (François Rude).
This monument, part of the Arc that was never completed by Napoleon, commemorates the volunteer army that halted Prussian invasion in 1792. Despite the classical details, the impact of the sculpture is Romantic - in the excited group and frantic winged Liberty calling them to action.
Figures dressed in classical armor and the Roman war goddess (literally La Marseillaise in France) shouts the battle cry. Classical accessories do not disguise Baroque drama with densely packed masses and violence of motion.
• The new king Louise-Philippe and his minister Adolphe Thieres used arch’s completion
as propaganda
- Demonstrated that July Monarchy was government of national reconciliation
- However, Rude was politically a Bonapartist
Man Ray, Gift, replica of lost original of 1921
French Dada
The transformation of an item of ordinary domestic life into a strange, unnameable object with sadistic connotations exemplified the power of the object within dada and surrealism to escape the rule of logic and the conventional identification of words and objects. Man Ray once said, ‘There are objects that need names.
In his autobiography Man Ray recounted the story of the making of the original Cadeau. On the day of the opening of his first solo exhibition in Paris he had a drink with the composer Erik Satie and on leaving the café saw a hardware store. There with Satie’s help – Man Ray spoke only poor French at this point – he bought the iron, some glue and some nails, and went to the gallery where he made the object on the spot. He intended his friends to draw lots for the work, called ‘Cadeau’, but the piece was stolen during the course of the afternoon.
Contradiction, paradox, irony are the bequest of Dada. Use of an ordinary manufactured object and not only remove its function by inserting spikes, but showcasing malicious humor with the title.
• Worked closely with Duchamp
* Incorporated found objects into pieces
* Trained as architectural draftsman and engineer
* Worked as graphic designer and portrait photographer
* Interested in mass-produced objects and technology
* Explored psychological realm of human perception of exterior world
* Uses chance dislocation of ordinary object from its everyday setting to surprise viewers
into new awareness
* Image is laundry iron with row of wicked-looking spikes
* Subverts proper function of smothering and pressing
* Malicious humor
Laszlo Moholy‐Nagy,
Light‐Space Modulator, 1922‐30
Bauhaus
Also called Light Prop for an Electric Stage, this kinetic sculpture that László Moholy-Nagy designed and photographed was intended to create light displays for theater, dance, or other performance spaces. With its gleaming glass and metal surfaces of mobile perforated disks, a rotating glass spiral, and a sliding ball, the Light-Space Modulator created the effect of photograms in motion. As photographed here, the geometric complexity of the design and the shapes created by shadows and light convey the dynamic possibilities of both machine and camera.
Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.
Perhaps his most enduring achievement is the construction of the “Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Buehne” [Light Prop for an Electric Stage] (completed 1930), a device with moving parts meant to have light projected through it in order to create mobile light reflections and shadows on nearby surfaces.[4][5] Made with the help of the Hungarian architect Istvan Seboek for the German Werkbund exhibition held in Paris during the summer of 1930, it is often interpreted as a kinetic sculpture. After his death, it was dubbed the “Light-Space Modulator” and was seen as a pioneer achievement of kinetic sculpture. It might more accurately be seen as one of the earliest examples of Light Art.
Alexander Calder, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail,
1939
Kinetic Sculpture (American)
Calder trained as an engineer and made biomorphic forms move. His sculpture was admired by the surrealists. He used light and industrial materials, explored negative space and took sculpture off a pedestal.
His kinetic works unfix the traditional stability and timelessness of art and invests it with vital qualities of mutability and unpredictability, at first it might seem completely abstract, but the title clarifies the visual experience. Biomorphic form shows inspiration from Miro.
- Although realism dominated American art between wars, Calder remained committed to abstraction
- Kinetic works defy traditional stability and timelessness of art
- Inspired by both surrealism and Mondrian’s abstract De Stijl
- Rectangles of colored paper on Mondrian’s walls inspired Calder to consider flat shapes
in three dimension
- Thus began creating mobiles
- Both geometric (Mondrian) – shapes from circles and ovals – and organic (Miró) –
shapes are biological forms
- Lobster Trap and Fish Tail is delicately balanced
- Unpredictable and ever-changing
- Title helps viewer’s imagination find the trap and crustaceans
- Whimsical spirit and Biomorphic form reflect Miró’s influence and surrealism
- Term mobile coined by Duchamp is French for “moving body” and “motive” or “driving
force”
- Double meaning (i.e. object pushed and the force that pushes it)
- Kinetic sculpture first conceived by Constructivists
Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing, 1947
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Expressionism/Existential Sculpture
Defied easy categorization - associated with Surrealists but excommunicated from that group.
Figurative sculptor who captured the bewilderment, loss, and alienation of modern society. Renders the effect of great space as it presses around a figure, modern man aware of the vastness of the space that separates him from his neighbor. Forms so attenuated that they sometimes disappear, figures striding abstractly and never meant to collide with each other.
* Existentialism: the absurdity of human existence and impossibility of achieving certitude
* Kierkegaard was the first existentialist
* Post war period – Sartre – captured existentialist spirit
* According to Sartre, people must consider seriously the implications of atheism. If God does not exist, then individuals must constantly struggle in isolation with the anguish of
making decisions in a world without absolutes or traditional values
* Spirit of pessimism and despair emerged in European art during postwar period
* Giacometti best expressed the spirit of existentialism
* Sartre was Giacometti’s friend and saw this figures as the epitome of existentialist humanity – alienated, solitary, and lost in the world’s immensity
* Around 1940 Giacometti abandoned direct observation and began to sculpt from memory
* Thin, virtually featureless figures with rough, agitated surfaces
* This is not solidity and mass of conventional bronze figurative sculpture
* Severely attenuated figures are swallowed up by space surrounding them
* Sense of isolation and fragility
Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the sitter’s gaze. He preferred models he was close to, his sister and the artist Isabel Rawsthorne (then known as Isabel Delmer). This was followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues of Isabel became stretched out; her limbs elongated.[1] Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisaged through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, “he would make your head look like the blade of a knife.” After his marriage to Annette Arm his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti said that the final result represented the sensation he felt when he looked at a woman.
Marcel Janco, Mask, 1919
Medardo Rosso, The Concierge (La Portinata), 1883
Wax over plaster
He worked as a painter until 1880; in 1883, he lived in Paris for two years, worked in Dalou’s atelier and met Rodin. After 1889 Rosso spent most of his active career in Paris, until his death in 1928.
Rosso (unlike Rodin) deliberately dissolved the sculptural forms until only an impression remained. His favorite medium, wax, allowed the most imperceptible transitions so that it becomes difficult to tell at exactly what point a face or figure emerges from an amorphous shape and light-filled, vari-textured surface.
The subjects themselves– detailed genre scenes and conversation pieces reminiscent of paintings by Vuillard– stretch the limits of traditional sculpture.
Anticipated the search for immediacy that characterizes so much of the experimental sculpture of today.
James Turrell, Milk Run III, 2002
Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992 (detail)
Vladimir Tatlin,
Model for the Monument to the Third
International in the former Academy of Arts,
Petrograd, 1920
Russian Constructivist
This was meant to be a grand monumental building that was planned for Petrograd after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 but never built, as the headquarters of the Comintern (3rd Int). It was meant to be a symbol of modernity - built in iron, glass and steel.
- Choice of material favored the industrial over the natural, like in this example, expressions of the post-world war I shift away from aestheticism and toward utilitarianism in Russia. Object was housed the organization devoted to the worldwide spread of Communism, new hybrid form of avant-garde sculpture and utilitarianism echoed the revolutionary politics. Was never built, although it did echo what Lenin called the “permanent revolution.”
* This is the image of technological utopia under Communism
* Communists believed in power of art to reshape society and the structure would house
the Communist Part offices
* Model for a 1,300 foot building to house the organization devoted to the worldwide
spread of Communism
* It was part of 1919 plan to implement Vladimir Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda
* Combined appearance of avant-garde sculpture and fully utilitarian building
* New hybrid for as revolutionary as the politics it represented
* Steel structural support – a pair of leaning spirals connected by grillwork – is on outside
rather than inside
* Combined skeletal structure of Eiffel tower and vocabulary of Cubo-Futurists
* Epitomizes Lenin’s “Permanent Revolution” of Communism
* Although Russia lacked resources to build Tatlin’s monument, models displayed publicly
