Alex Potts; The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. . - book review

ALEX POTTS

The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist.

novel Haven: Yale University Press, 2001 432 pp; 50 color ills., 115 b/w $5500

Nearly twenty years after strife of words erupted over Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, statuary would appear to be back--and with a vengeance. From Robert Gober's official coronation at the American pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 2000 to the gargantuan nearness of Louise Bourgeois's monstrous arachnids at the Tate recent the public embrace of statuary seems to have come filled circle. On the face of it, this have the appearances an odd turn of occurrences its implications for contemporary art as potentially disturbing as the conditions that facilitated the removal and attendant destruction of Tilted Arc. statuary after all, has hardly take delight ined the vaunted status accorded painting. And nevertheless the distinct change in sculpture's institutional fortunes might be indirectly tied to the state of contemporary art itself. For individual thing, its reappearance suggests that the sculptural particular might be regarded as a more discretely salable and display-ready commodity than in the way that much recent and unwieldy installation art. next to the first it implies that t he sheer materiality of sculpture--its phenomenal density or flat lumbering presence--is in direct opposition to the more transient seductions of in the way that much digital art.

What historical exercise s might derive from the seeming about-face in sculpture's public reception? A number of new books on modern sculpture show especially illuminating, perhaps none more in like manner than Alex Potts's The Sculptural Imagination. Alongside James Meyer's Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) and Miwon Kwon's individual Place after Another (2002), accounts that address real particular episodes in the history of novel sculptural practice, Potts's work gives a more historically expansive view of sculpture's place within modernity and the theoretical issues of beholding it raises. The make subordinate of his book is "a distinctly novel sculptural imaginary" that arises, in part, with the emerging see the verb of the public sphere in the 18th hundred New modes of display and public institutions, he claims, presaged the rise of the autonomous sculptural fact no longer tethered to the architectural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings that determine sculpture's place within presecular (that is, premodern) tillage In a series of finely argue d case studies, beginning with the figurative work of Antonio Canova and Auguste Rodin and going to the modernist imperatives of Constantin Brancusi, David Smith, and Barbara Hepworth to extremity with the minimalist anti postminimalist regards of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse, Pott try to finds to uncover the peculiar dynamics that obtain between plastic art and its audience. The work makes no pretension to the encyclopedic in its consideration of similar diverse figures (one might quibble, for instance, with the relatively short shrift Pott dedicates to Russian Constructivism, particularly given its centrality to the minimalist work he discusses at similar great length). Even so, it remains no les ambitious nor, for that matter, important. The Sculptural Imagination, shut up to four hundred pages in extent is striking in the range of its author's scholarly engagements.

What precisely, for Pott is the "sculptural imagination"? The book's title might present the appearance to promise a broad meditation upon the aesthetics of modern statuary but no one overriding philosophy of the imagination guides the author's particular discussions. Indeed, while a theory of the imagination may be said to constitute a principal relate to of aesthetics, Potts's text is relatively unrestrained of specific treatments of its major thinkers within philosophy or poetics (a tradition that would include figures ranging from Hume to Kant to Sartre to Wollheim). This is hardly to insinuate that Potts is inattentive to aesthetics or that his work is uninflected by means of such concerns. (To be fully convinced his earlier book Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History [1994] is a deep sustained engagement with philosophical aesthetics. In turn round The Sculptural Imagination takes up classical aesthetics greatest in quantity prominently in the first chapter, in which the discussion of Johann Gottfried Herder is paramount.) For Pott rather, the sculptural imagination is lodg within the acute meeting between the viewer and the work of art. The obdurate materiality of statuary what Potts describes as its "awkwardness," therefore bring into views a decidedly antiaesthetic experience for the spectator in opposition to the relatively limited demands that painting places upon the viewer's body. Potts's volume then, is ultimately an argument about embodiment, of the almost physical power sculptural particulars wield over their beholders. As he notes in the introduction:

I am making a case for a critical rethinking of sculptural norms that engages seriously with the more vividly embodied physical and perceptual reply integral to any apprehension of the art existence however anti-aestheticizing it might be, bringing into play issues that cannot be dealt with adequately at a genuinely conceptual or ideological level. (p 5)