The Evolution Of Sculpture As An Artform

By Author: Fiona Langman
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Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into 3-D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can range from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. An unrestricted variety of materials are often used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials are carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed label that applies to a permanently restricted category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that grows and changes and is continually extending the range of activities and evolving new types of objects. The scope of the term grew much wider in the latter part of the 20th century than it had been only two or three decades prior, and in the everchanging state of art at the start of the 21st century, no one can predict what its future dimensions are likely to be.

There are a few features which in previous centuries ...
... were thought to be essential to the sculpturing art but are now not present in a majority of modern sculpture and so no longer form part of the definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as a representational art; imitating forms in life, mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. From the beginning of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that figures of such functional 3-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-D works of art began to be produced.

Before the 20th century, sculpture was seen as primarily an art of solid form, or mass. Though the negative elements of sculpture, the voids and hollows within and between its solid parts, have always been to some extent an inextricable part of any design, but the role was secondary. In a good deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus has shifted, and the spatial aspects have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a wholly recognisable branch of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components had to be of a constant shape and size and, excepting items such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Diana (a monumental weather vane), did not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can any longer be regarded as essential to defining the art of sculpture.

Last, sculpture in the 20th century was not limited to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As contemporary sculptors will use any materials and methods of manufacture that they wish to, the art can no longer be identified with any special materials or techniques.

Throughout all this evolution, there is probably only one thing that has remained constant in sculpture, and it emerges as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a field of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of art in three dimensions.

Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached object in its own right, with an independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not have this kind of independence. It is part of and projects from or is an integral part of an object that might serve either as a background for it or a matrix from which it emerges.

The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round puts limitations on its scope in certain respects compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not cast the illusion of space from purely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as painting might. But sculpture does possess a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and may appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can create and appreciate some pieces of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as firstly an art of touch and that the originating roots of sculptural work can be based on the pleasure that we experience in doing so.

All three-D forms are seen as possessing an expressive character along with their purely geometric properties. They come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and such. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, the artist is able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce each other. Such images go beyond the pure presentation of fact and imply a wide range of subtle and powerful emotions.

The aesthetic raw material in sculpture is, so to speak, the entire realm of expressive three-D form. A sculpture might draw upon what already exists in the endless worlds of natural and man-made form, or it might be an art of genuine invention. It has been used to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the terribly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of three-D form, learn something of its structural and expressive properties and will develop emotional responses to them. This combination of understanding and sensitive reaction, known as a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to the sense of form that sculpture primarily appeals.
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