What is Sculpture?
Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into three-D art objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. An unrestricted variety of materials can be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or simply shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed name that applies to a permanently restricted category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of activities and evolving new kinds of objects. The breadth of the term became much wider in the latter half of the 20th century than as it had been merely two or three decades before, and in the evolving state of visual art at the start of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future possibilities are likely to be.
Certain features which in previous centuries were considered essential to sculpture but are not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of a definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. From the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without having to be representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D artworks began to be an art form in and of themselves.
Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as primarily an art of solid form, or mass. It is true that the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows inside and between its solid areas — have always been to some extent an inextricable part of the design, but this role was purely secondary. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus has broadened, and the spatial roles have started to become dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a fully recognisable area of the art form.
It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, excepting works such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), would not move. With modern developments of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its elements can any longer be regarded as fundamental to defining sculpture.
Additionally, sculpture since the 20th century has not been confined to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that contemporary sculptors will use any materials and methods of manufacture that serve their purpose, the art of sculpture can no longer be identified with any special materials or techniques.
During all this change, there is probably still one element that stayed constant in the art of sculpture, and it emerges as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art form is a part of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of form in 3D.
Sculpture may be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round will be a separate, detached piece in its own right, leading an independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A relief does not have this independance. It projects from and is attached to or is an innate part of some other object that may serve either as a background to it or a matrix from which it projects.
The actual 3-D nature of sculpture in the round restricts its scope in some respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not cast the illusion of space with simple optical means, or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as we might see in painting. However, sculpture does possess a reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied to the pictorial arts. Different forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can create and appreciate certain forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as elementarily an art of touch and that the origins of sculptural work can be based on the pleasure one experiences in doing this.
All 3-D forms are viewed as exhibiting an expressive character along with pure geometric properties. They are viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and more. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, sculptors are able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce each other. Such images go beyond the simplistic presentation of fact and impress a huge range of subtle and powerful reactions.
The aesthetic raw material used in sculpture is, so to speak, the entire realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what we see exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of pure invention. It has been utilised to express a huge range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of three-D form, realise something of its structural and expressive elements and will develop emotional reactions to them. This combination of understanding and sensitivity, also known as a sense of form, is able to be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that the art of sculpture primarily appeals.
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