In my previous blog post I continued a review of Paul Crowther’s recent book Theory of the Art Object. In explicit disagreement with most fashionable views in academic writing and art criticism, Crowther argues that there are distinctive characteristics of the different major art media (painting, sculpture, drawing, etc), and that such characteristics provide resources of meaningfulness that are themselves distinctive of each medium. Following a long-standing manner of conception, Crowther distinguishes painting from sculpture as a two-dimensional art form against sculpture’s three-dimensionality. In order to account for relatively recent kinds of three-dimensional arts, Crowther further distinguishes sculpture from assemblage: whereas in a sculpture each part contributes to the formation of an aesthetic unity, in an assemblage parts maintain a sense of their distinctive existence prior to their incorporation into a work of art. Crowther then further distinguishes assemblage proper from installation art, in that part of the meaning of a work of installation is given in the relationship between the work narrowly conceived and its space of display; by contrast assemblage is as it were self-contained and indifferent to its contingent spatial location.
In my previous post I suggested that Crowther’s conception is in two senses ahistorical: he neither considers and incorporates any material relating to the historical changes in the concept of sculpture, nor does he consider the historicity of art historical genres generally or of sculpture in particular (see the previous post for explication of these points). Perhaps Crowther’s full account suggests that recent history does enter in one way, in that the development of assemblage and installation art might be thought to have forced the expansion of the concept of sculpture. But the widespread pre-modern practice of ‘spolia’, the incorporation of recognizably prior artworks into a new work, such as the installation of 2nd-century reliefs into the early 4th-century Arch of Constantine, points to a perennial kind of assemblage; and the site-specificity of countless Paleolithic paintings and Neolithic monuments suggests an archaic and durable artistic practice of relating artifacts to site. (Crowther notes the latter point, but misses the former (p. 74))
So one might think that something like the conceptual differentiations marked in Crowther’s schema is necessary for making sense of the world’s art generally. But does this schema illuminate our more specific concern with the novel aspects of contemporary sculpture? Crowther approaches the issue through the basic claim that each of the genres of three-dimensional art has a distinctive ‘ontology’ and manner of engaging the viewer. What makes a conception ‘ontological’ is that offers a way of comprehending “who and what we are”, and “our relation to being.” As artistic genres, the kinds of three-dimensional art “draw attention not only to how we occupy space, but also to how we share it with modes of configured material.” And as ontological, the artistic genres and their related instances “illuminate the finite limitations of organic beings, yet also offer an aesthetic compensation for it, through the order of being that they allow us to identify with in imagination.” (ibid) So for Crowther an artistic genre and its instances have the following features: (a) distinctive characteristics that can be described generally and without specifying a range of contents; (b) a consequent distinctive manner of soliciting engagement; and (c) an ontological schema that bears particular implications for a poetics of finitude, both in what it expresses of conceptions of self and relation to nature, and in its compensations, effected through the exercise of imagination, for the contingencies and limitations of finite beings. Crowther of course includes the qualification that this schema is a piece of conceptual typology, and that in practice particular works may be marginal with respect to a genre, or contain characteristics of more than one genre.
Now for sculpture (as ontologically distinct from assemblage and installation), Crowther specifies the schema as follows: (a’) (i) a sculpture consists of material shaped into a form (p. 61); (ii) a sculpture is a marker of place, and so has ‘some relative constancy’ that permits its identification across time (p. 59). Then (b’): Sculpture, like painting, has a virtual content in addition to its material substrate; but in contrast to painting, in sculpture the material and virtual contents seem to inhabit the same space simultaneously. This co-habitation of the material and the virtual gives sculpture “the hint or evocation of magical transformation”, and so “there is always something of the miraculous in sculpture.” (p. 61) And (c’): On this point Crowther distinguishes relief sculpture from free-standing sculpture. He writes that relief sculpture “brings the virtual content towards the viewer physically even whilst creating an illusion of recession” and so “solicits touch”, (p. 63) but fails to indicate any implication this has for the poetics of finitude. Perhaps he means to include the effects of relief sculpture with those of free-standing sculpture. The latter “has a fully thing-like structure” that also “has great kinship to the body insofar as it has a dominant aspect, and has lower extremities that stay upon the ground.” Since sculpture necessarily embodies virtual content, and the content evokes the events and gestures of an embodied being, a sculpture as something relatively enduring is also ‘monumental’, in the sense that it involves “a preservation and elevation of meaning.” Since we are relatively transient and mobile beings in contrast to a relatively enduring and fixed sculpture, the contemplation of a sculpture “allows us the fantasy of finitude suspended, and does so at the level of being that is fundamental to existence, namely space-occupancy.” (ibid) Crowther’s most developed example of a traditional work of sculpture is Michelangelo’s Rome Pieta. Crowther stresses the way in which Michelangelo’s use of aspects of the physical medium, such as the marble’s color and sheen, fuses with the rendering and disposition of the bodies (Mary’s youthful melancholy; the upward facing Christ entwined with the folds of Mary’s drapery) to create not just the general sculptural effect of monumentality, but moreover shows the mutual adaptation of medium and meaning, and so enhances the sense that the meaning achieved in the work is something that is only available in sculpture, and not in life or in other art forms. (pp. 63-5) (For a much more detailed account of the work that in the end agrees with Crowther’s point that a distinctive feature that contributes to the sense of this Pieta as among the supremely powerful works of art, see Leo Steinberg’s account (2020?) More recent works—Duchamp’s Étant donnés, a late capitalist gewgaw of Jeff Koons, a low stack of bricks by Carl Andre—are treated as instances of works at the limits of sculpture, works that, despite their oddness in exhibiting lack of facture and excessive or insufficient differentiation of parts, show the unity of aesthetic appearance and co-existence of materiality and virtuality characteristic of sculpture.
Assemblage and its variant sub-form installation are treated more briefly. In terms of Crowther’s schema and in contrast to sculpture, both exhibit (a’’) juxtaposition of independent parts, with again installation further distinguished by incorporating its context of display (p. 67). (b’’) Because the parts are independent and pre-exist their incorporation into the work of assemblage, the kinds of meaning that arise are relatively (in contrast to sculptural meanings) allusive and ambiguous, and so solicit from the viewer more imaginative possibilities. Crowther writes that the audience “is invited to play with conditions of objectivity”. To capture this point he introduces the difficult conception of ‘notional axes of arrangement’ through which the viewer grasps, or attempts to grasp, the unprecedented kinds of artistic unity possessed by assemblages. Although the source of his conception is unmentioned here, Crowther seems to be drawing from L. A. Rogers’s book Sculpture (which he cites approvingly elsewhere), wherein Rogers uses the term ‘axes’ more literally to identify a range of horizontal and especially vertical dynamisms and compositional forces that unify figural sculptures. (Rogers, pp.132-33) Crowther adds the term ‘notional’ to suggest that the kinds of concepts imaginatively mobilized by viewers to grasp the artistic unity of assemblages are those of ‘conditions of objectivity’, specified in an explicitly Kantian manner as unity, plurality, totality, extensive and intensive magnitude, substance and accident, and so forth (pp. 67-9). And (c’’): As with many aesthetic experiences, those induced by assemblage loosen up “our customary cognitive moorings to the objective world,” but distinctively do so “in reference to [the work’s] physical being.” Assemblage provides a “much more labile dimension” to the social, psychological, and autonomously artistic meanings than other art forms. And at a deeper, metaphysical level, the use of independent parts in a relatively contingent configuration suggests that “all finite things come together, and eventually come apart.” (p. 70)
The schema presented in a’’-c’’ is equally applicable to assemblage and installation, but installation bears further characteristics by virtue of its context-specific incorporation of its conditions of display. As the key difference between assemblage proper and installation is the latter’s incorporation of the context of its display into its content, installation typically creates an environment, and so massively expands the possible physical trajectories of the viewer. As Crowther puts it with regard to installation: “Movement through or around the assembled elements constitute the most basic axes of arrangement. In the former case, the installation allows diverse possibilities of movement through its configured elements and envelops the viewer the viewer . . . In the second case, walking around the configuration allows its details to emerge . . . “ Crowther’s examples of such installation are works by Cornelia Parker and Anya Gallacio. The former’s Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-89; 2011) displays flattened silver objects, such as plates, spoons, and trophies, suspended from wires in groups. The latter’s ‘Preserve “Beauty”’ (various instances 1991-2003) displays a small field of living daisies pressed between four panes of glass, so that over days and weeks the flowers pass from blooming to decaying to forming dull brown detritus on the floor. Crowther readily and convincingly analyzes such works as exhibiting characteristics a’’-c’’ and so ultimately as instances of a poetics of finitude. (pp. 71-73)
So Crowther has provided the account of contemporary sculpture as a spatial art that was missing in the canonical formulation Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. Or so it seems. I turn in my next post to the work of an especially challenging, though far from unique, contemporary sculptor, Giuseppe Penone’s. Penone’s first major work was a series of ‘actions’ in 1968, the best known of which is ‘Maritime Alps—My height, the length of my arms, my depth in a river’ (1968). The work consists of a rectangular frame placed in a shallow stream bed. Does Crowther’s account provide the requisite conceptual materials for understanding Penone’s piece?
References:
Paul Crowther, Theory of the Art Object (2020)
Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1977)
Clare Lilley et alia, Giuseppe Penone: A Tree in the Wood (2018)
L. A. Rogers, Sculpture (1969)
Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Sculpture (2018)