The Materiality of the Artwork

Since antiquity the discrepancy between sculpture as a representation of a living human being and its literal materiality as a thing made of stone, bronze or plaster is considered a problem of this art form. Pygmalion, who after Ovid is seen as one of the prototypes for the figure of the artist, begs Venus to bring the female object of desire that he made of stone to life. Although painting has had to constantly battle with the allegation of the falseness of the illusion it generates, it does not share the frustration about the lifelessness and material properties of an artwork that evokes the living presence of a figure as an effect, but precisely because of this effect always renders the imprisonment of the figure in the material apparent. On the one hand, the immobilization, thisfreezingof human traits in sculpture allows for a greater understanding of the meaning of humanness than one is aware of in real life; on the other hand, it is this very immobility and lifelessness that brings the sculpture close to being nothing more than mere thing that limits its capacity for emotional and psychological expression. (19) The fact of being an object and the wish to transcend its own objectness belong to the essence of sculpture as an art form. In his famous essay on Laocoon, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing poses the question of whether there is an inherent difference between an event and a static object, and what this difference might mean. For Lessing, the essence of sculpture lies in its static character. Unlike a poem, for example, in a visual work of art all of the individual parts are accessible to the viewer at the same moment. He recognizes, however, that sculpture also inherently depends on its distribution as an object in space implying a certain temporality:

“All bodies, however, exist not only in space, but also in time. They continue, and, at any moment of their continuance, may assume a different appearance and stand in different relations. Every one of these momentary appearances and groupings was the result of a preceding, may become the cause of a following, and is therefore the centre of a present action.” (20)

For Lessing this potential of bodies to change within the course of an action crystallizes in the “most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect of the moment.” (21) This moment is characterized by having the potential to generate a narrative, i.e., a before and after is inscribed into it.

The 18th century custom of viewing sculpture as tableaux vivants by torchlight (thereby giving them a ghostly presence), expressed the human desire to overwhelm the limits of the dead medium via illusion. Such a paradoxical quest to appear both alive and quasi-human as well as abstract and ideal is equally inscribed into a normative notion of sculpture just as it is embodied by the ideal, classic sculpture. In his General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771-74) Johann George Sulzer leaves no doubt about the fact that sculpture has nothing to offer but dead material which is brought to life quasi-metamorphically by the imagination of the viewer. (22) In a classicist conception of sculpture, the inevitable narrowness of the art form must be compensated for by the imagination of the viewer and yet, at the same time, must satisfy the standard of wholeness and completeness necessary to represent a human figure in order to evoke a corresponding effect in the viewer at the moment of apprehension. 

As long as sculpture was embedded in an architectural and ritual context, its meaningfulness was secure but as an object in a museum it lacked this context, making its status problematic. It was in danger of becoming a mere object, a thing. Baudelaire compared sculpture to a primitive fetish that has been deprived of its magic and can now only evoke the false allure of the commodity. (23) Which order does an artwork belong to that is no longer anchored in religious belief and ritual but merely an object of contemplation? It becomes part of the economic order. For Baudelaire the tension between the ideal of a true work of art whose imaginative force seizes us in the moment of its apprehension and the trivial existence as mere thing or commodity, inherent to the artwork in modernity, is most strongly embodied by sculpture. Based on the assumption that a convincing sculptural depiction of the human form now relies on the acceptance of its objecthood and no longer on the illusion of transcendence, sculpture of the early 20th century emphasizes its own objecthood. The attempt to be something that it was not, compromised the fundamental qualities of sculpture, or so it was thought. This imperative was so powerful that in his famous essay from 1907 Rainer Maria Rilke, in his ambition to portray Rodin’s oeuvre as a radically modern one, introduced the artist’s sculpture not as figures but as things. (24)

Situated between Rodin’s oeuvre and the 1960s the sculpture of modernity brings forth new forms of objecthood that are fundamentally distinct from the monumentalizing tendencies of classical sculpture. This development towards the literalness of the object found its endpoint in American Minimalism. In their self-referential conception, the Minimal Art objects are simply there, sharing a common space with the viewer.They no longer present an internal structure that can be read as formal equivalent to the human figure or as an embodiment of human subjectivity. Thus, the site of meaning shifts from an inner, formal structure to the common presence of work and beholder generating a kind of “intersubjective drama,” which, as we have already seen, is described as “theatrical” by Michael Fried. Minimal Art, which Fried calls “literalist art,” “[…] aspires not to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such.” (25) In its literal objecthood it seemed to question the assumption that every artwork embodies a formal-aesthetic logic that is different from the material properties of a mere thing, thus producing, as Fried writes, “the risk, even the possibility, of seeing works of art as nothing more than objects […]”. (26) This potential was already implied in the objects of the Dadaists and other avant-gardists, but now that it had arrived at the heart of modernism it apparently was more threatening. Fried therefore declared the project of modernist painting “to defeat or suspend its own objecthood” as the Leitmotif of Art and Objecthood, arguing that sculpture should attempt to transcend its objecthood instead of just falling into the literal and exhibiting the inevitable void of meaning. This premise remained central to Fried until he quit art criticism in 1970, which testifies to a consciousness of the fact that the illusion that an artwork is more than the literalness of its material consistence is fragile and — especially in the case of sculpture —constantly endangered.