Is sculpture dead? Or is sculpture just really, really tired? (2000)
An essay by Glenn Harper, the editor of Sculpture !
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 12 February 2011
This essay was presented at the Nexus Contemporary Art Center (now the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center) in August 2000.
As the editor, now, of a magazine called Sculpture, capital S, the artist whose name I see referred to most often by our writers is probably Marcel Duchamp— he is usually standing in for the idea that anything can be art. But the movement that is referred to most often by far by writers and artists in our pages is without any doubt Minimalist. On the one hand, Minimalism is the most sculptural of styles: Donald Judd’s boxes or Carl Andre’s bricks are above all objects, sitting there in living 3D. But on the other hand, Minimalist objects have no meaning, refer to nothing, exhibit industrial material and processes, with no reference to the hand of the artist. They are simply objects, sitting there in the space we share with them.
Oddly, the Minimalist object, with its plain and simple quality of being there, is the source of everything from Rachel Whiteread’s inside-out-bathtubs to Damien Hirst’s animal carcasses to the cows, pigs, and buffalos littering the streets of New York, Cincinnati, and Buffalo this summer. Robert Storr is quoted in a recent New York Times article as saying that the use of animals and other non-sculptural materials has followed a general "shift to literalism." "By the 1960’s a painting was just paint and canvas. Sculpture went the same way. A steel box was a steel box. A stone was a stone."
And if sculpture ultimately is just whatever put out in that name by the artist, the gallery, the museum, and the magazine, has the expanded field of sculpture grown so large that it encompasses everything and therefore signifies nothing?
Or is it that the linear notion of art that periodically pronounces the death of painting even the death of art what is actually dead? Mike Bidlo says that in the ’70s, he saw that "the system [was] closed…[that] Everything exciting [had] been done." (Re-enactment/ Rapprochement flyer) But, Bidlo, of course went on to make art for the next 30 years and counting.
Maybe what is more pertinent to artists today is not the death of art or the death of sculpture but the open-endedness, the lack of and end or a goal or a common sense of what we are working with or what we are talking about when we use the word art or the word sculpture.
Is sculpture dead? - Glenn Harper: 1 | 2 | 3
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