What is Sculpture?
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Sculpture is an art in which hard or plastic materials are worked into 3-D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments varying from tableaux to contexts around the spectator. A massive variety of material are used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials can be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or simply shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed name that can be applied to a permanently standing category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, an art that grows and changes and is continually extending the range of forms and evolving new designs of objects. The breadth of the term was much wider in the later part of the 20th century than what it had been merely two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of the visual arts at the beginning of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future extensions are likely to become.
There are a few features which in previous centuries were thought to be essential to sculpture but are not present in a big part of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of a definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. Since the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that forms of such functional 3-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without having to be representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional art began to be created.
Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as fundamentally an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte 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 its design, but that role was a secondary one. In a large part of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has shifted, and the spatial elements have started to come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a generally recognised field of the art form.
It was also taken for granted in past sculpture that its components had to be of a constant shape and size and, except for 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 remain to be viewed as inherent to sculpture.
Additionally, sculpture in the 20th century has not been confined to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that modern sculptors can use any materials and methods of manufacture that will serve a purpose, the definition of the art can no longer be identified with any special materials or techniques.
Withstanding all these changes, there is probably still one element that stays constant in sculpture, and it endures as the central abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a field of the visual arts that is especially concerned with the creation of art in three-D.
Sculpture can be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached item in its own right, leading a similar independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not have this kind of independence. It projects from and is attached to or is an innate part of an object that serves either as a background to it or a matrix from which it emerges.
The actual three-D nature of sculpture in the round limits its scope in some respects compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not have the illusion of space with solely optical means, or invest its structure with atmosphere and light as we might see in painting. But it does proffer a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that is denied to the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate some sorts of sculpture. It was, in fact, debated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as firstly an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural forms can be traced to the pleasure one feels in doing this.
All 3-D forms are seen as possessing an expressive character along with purely geometric properties. They are viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and more. By exploiting the evocative qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness are mutually reinforcing of form. This visual imagery may go beyond the mere presentation of fact and demand a vast range of subtle and powerful feelings.
The aesthetic raw material in the form is, so to speak, the entire realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what we see that exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it might be an art of pure invention. It has been utilised to express a wide range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the most violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of three-dimensional form, realise something of its structural and expressive aspects and possess emotional responses to them. This combination of intellect and sensitive response, also known as a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to the sense of form that this art of sculpture primarily appeals.
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