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American Society for Aesthetics and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. http://www.jstor.org Sculpture and the Sculptural Author(s): Erik Koed Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 147-154 Published by: on behalf of Wiley American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3700468 Accessed: 28-11-2015 06:31 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 83.137.211.198 on Sat, 28 Nov 2015 06:31:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Sculpture and the Sculptural

American Society for Aesthetics and Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

Sculpture and the Sculptural Author(s): Erik Koed Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 147-154Published by: on behalf of Wiley American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3700468Accessed: 28-11-2015 06:31 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 83.137.211.198 on Sat, 28 Nov 2015 06:31:12 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Sculpture and the Sculptural

ERIK KOED

Sculpture and the Sculptural

Pictures and the pictorial are the subjects of a burgeoning philosophical literature. Sculpture and the sculptural, by contrast, have received little attention. What recent philosophical thought there has been has focused almost exclusively on the nature of sculpture, rather than the sculptural, and has sought to under- stand the art form primarily in terms of the physical characteristics of art materials and the role of our perceptual and cognitive faculties in appreciation. I will argue that these theories fail to provide an adequate conception of sculpture, or its differences from painting and pictures. Instead, I develop a theory of the sculptural in terms of a distinctive way of using materials as an artistic medium. Such an account enables us to understand the sculptural features of artworks whether or not they are sculptures, painting, or other kinds of work. I build on this account of the sculptural to suggest that the category of sculpture can best be understood in terms of the relationship of works to a tradition of art prac- tice in which the sculptural use of materials is standard. This conception of sculpture and the sculptural, I suggest, has explanatory utility and is evaluatively relevant without being overly prescriptive.

I. THEORIES OF THE NATURE OF SCULPTURE

Physical three-dimensionality

In its most basic form, this idea holds simply that sculptures are those art objects that are three-dimensional. The contrast here may be with a conception of the pictorial arts as being two-dimensional. Whereas painters and pho- tographers and the like produce flat objects,

sculptors produce objects in the round. This typical commonsense thought is widely assumed in the philosophical literature. Herbert Read, for example, asserts that "the peculiarity of sculpture as an art is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space," whereas painting "may strive to give, on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space."' Similarly, F. David Martin maintains the traditional view that sculpture is basically three-dimensional and painting two-dimensional.2 Naum Gabo ("sculpture is three-dimensional eo ipso") and L. R. Rogers ("what basically dis- tinguishes sculpture from painting is...the mundane and marvelous fact that it extends three-dimensionally rather than two-dimension- ally") are among those sculptors who have made similar theoretical claims.3

The problem with this idea considered in its most basic form is that all instantiated or embodied artworks, including pictorial works, are three-dimensional in their material construc- tion. It follows that the distinctive nature of the sculptural cannot lie in its physical three- dimensionality. Of course, sculptures may typically be less "flat" than paintings, but this neither grounds a distinctive sculptural nature, nor offers us the resources for explaining why sculptural works may generally be "rounder" than paintings.

Robert Vance gives this idea a more sophisti- cated form. Vance claims that "sculptures are objects designed in three dimensions" and that "what counts for sculpture is real occupancy of space."4 But while the notion of design gives access to a way of distinguishing sculpted from natural objects, it cannot distinguish them from other kinds of artworks that are also designed and fashioned out of three-dimensional materials and for which the "real occupancy of space"

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63:2 Spring 2005

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matter. A similar approach would be to suggest that although pictorial works may be constructed from three-dimensional materials, only their two-dimensional surface properties are artisti- cally relevant, whereas three-dimensional properties are artistically relevant to our appreciation of sculptural works. But we have to be careful here, for there are a number of ways three-dimensional properties might be artistically relevant, and at least some of these ways seem standard to pictorial arts such as painting. As will be discussed further in Section II, paintings take their appearance and embody their two-dimensional properties in virtue of their three-dimensional construction, and this relationship often plays a role in our appreciation of them. An appeal to differences in the artistic relevance of the two- and three- dimensional in the pictorial and the sculptural cannot be explained simply by an appeal to the dimensional qualities of material.

Perceptual modes

A second approach to the question is to argue that the nature of the sculpture can be understood in terms of the essential role in appreciation of one or more modes of sensory perception, such as touch. Read, for example, holds that sculpture is "an art of palpation" that gives preference to tactile sensations.5 But touch does not have a necessary role in our appreciation of sculptural works, for there are many instances of sculptures that cannot or are not intended to be touched, and also for which touch has no role in appreciation. Think, for example, of most monumental statuary, Dan Flavin's Neon sculptures, Naum Gabo's flimsy and convoluted forms, or even Damien Hirst's animals preserved behind glass in formaldehyde, all of which are clearly inten- ded to operate and be appreciated primarily in terms of their visual effects. Further, a strong case has been made by Dominic Lopes for the possibility of "tactile pictures," on the basis of the ability of the blind to both create and interpret complex raised-line perspectival drawings (more on this in Section II).6

Perceptual phenomena

A third general approach appeals to the dis- tinctive phenomenal content of our perceptual

experience. Read, for example, claims that our experience of sculpture has "nothing in com- mon with visual perception, i.e., with the visual impression of a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional plane," since sculptures (unlike pictures) utilize actual rather than illusory space.7 F. David Martin claims that the nature of the sculpture lies in the distinctive way it manifests itself in our perceptions, in particular a phenomenon he calls "enlivened space" or "impacting between" that makes the space around sculpture a perceptible part of the work in virtue of a sculpture's location in a space continuous with our own.8 Similarly, Susanne K. Langer argues that sculpture is characterized by a dis- tinctive variety of virtual space, understood in terms of the way our experience of space is structured or organized in our experience of the work. According to Langer, as distinct from painting, "a piece of sculpture is a center of three-dimensional space. It is a virtual kinetic volume, which dominates the surrounding space, and this environment derives all proportions and relations from it, as the actual environment does from oneself."9

The space of sculptural works is often conti- nuous with our own space, but this is neither always nor exclusively the case, for it seems that the space of the work may be related to our space in a variety of ways in both painting and sculpture. The apparent space of either kind of work can seem continuous or discontinuous with our own; and the space represented in a work can be represented as located in or dislo- cated from our own space. Familiar arguments undermine the notion that picturing is a matter of illusion, although some kinds of pictures do give the illusion of space (for example, trompe-l'oeil paintings).10 Read's distinction between sculpture and painting in terms of actual and illusory space is undermined by the fact that spatial illusion may also be an import- ant feature of sculptural works. In George Rickey's Two Lines sculptures, for example, it is hard to judge from any perspective the length and angle of projection of the twin offset blades. Nor need spatial illusions be confined to vision-things may, for example, sound further away than they really are. With respect to Mar- tin's and Lange's theses, it should be noted that large abstract color-field paintings and trompe- l'oeil painting are examples of types of pictorial

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works that create an apparent space that imposes itself on us in perception in this man- ner, or that forms a kinetic center around which our experience of the space of the work and its location is structured. Conversely, some very frontal sculptural works, such as statuary high on buildings, do not seem to fill or energize space, or form an experiential kinetic spatial center. Even if there are some general differ- ences in the typical content of our experiences of sculptures and pictorial works, these general- izations themselves require an explanation and do not in themselves seem sufficient to ground an account of these as works of essentially different kinds.

Sensibility

A fourth, more promising, approach seeks to ground an account in the involvement of a dis- tinctive sensibility in production and apprecia- tion. Read, for example, suggests that sculpture requires the involvement of a specifically plas- tic sensibility ("more complex than the specifi- cally visual sensibility")."l Central to this sensibility is a sensation of volume as denoted by plane surfaces (perceiving from depth to surface), a notion that Read illustrates by quot- ing Rodin: "Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces more or less flat, I represented them as projectors of interior volumes. I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the limbs the efflo- rescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep beneath the skin. And so the truth of my figures, instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself."l2 Also held central to this sensi- bility is a synthetic realization of the mass and ponderability of the object (visualization of a complete form as if held within the hand). Here Read appeals to Henry Moore's view that the sculptor "gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head-he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complete form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, it mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air."l3

But while perception "from depth to surface or from surface to depth" may well be charac- teristic of our experience of Rodinesque works, it does not seem necessary to our appreciation of all sculpture. Think again of Dan Flavin's neon sculptures, or Alexander Calder's "mobiles," such as his Red Polygons, which simply consist of articulated surfaces that seem to lack interior volumes almost entirely. Fur- thermore, it seems true of some paintings that the thickness or depth of the paint, and not sim- ply our experience of surface qualities, enters into our appreciation to the extent that our feel- ing for it is integral to our experience of the work-this seems true at least of some works of van Gogh, Auerbach, or even Rembrandt. Further, palpability on the metaphor of the enclosed hollow of a hand, even if true of the production and apperication of Moore's sculpture, seems antithetical to works such as Anthony Caro's Early One Morning, which are principally concerned with the arrangement of abstract line and form. Works such as Michael Heizer's Double Negative, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Lothar Baumgarten's Terra Incog- nita, or Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube seem even further removed from this concep- tion. But as the quote from Moore illustrates, the process of realizing the mass and ponder- sability of the object will sometimes be an imaginative process of visualization, which sits uneasily with Read's claim that the plastic sen- sibility has nothing in common with the visual. Indeed, we may sometimes imagine the mass and ponderability of a painting's material con- struction (and certainly of its represented object) in ways that seem consistent with Moore's notion of visualization.

In a similar vein, Robert Vance builds on his view of sculpture to claim that being designed to occupy three-dimensional spaces related to the spaces we ourselves occupy makes them dependant on the appreciator's bodily self- awareness in a way that differs significantly from the pictorial. Our observations of sculpture evoke "nonpropositional" tactile, haptic, and kinaesthetic imaginings involving somatic sen- sations, engendering identification with the sculpture "tantamount to my imagining my being (the part of) the sculpture, identifying with it as if its sculpturally articulated material were my own body in which I feel its apparent

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weight and degree of equilibrium."14 Although I think it doubtful that to imagine feeling the sur- face or weightiness of the sculpture is itself to imagine being the sculpture or to imagine the sculpture as one's own body, we can imagine in the way Vance describes and doing so may be appropriate to the appreciation of some sculptural works. But such imagination does not seem to be involved in our appreciation of all sculptural works. Furthermore, nonproposi- tional imaginings do sometimes play a role in our appreciation of other kinds of art-we might also imagine the thickness and resistance of the paint in its application to the canvas, or the mass and density of its final hardened state, or in viewing a picture imagine its represented features as being experienced by ourselves.

In a related approach, L. R. Rogers proposes that "sculptural thinking" differs qualitatively from the kind of thinking involved in other kinds of artistic production or appreciation.15 Rogers holds that complex spatial thinking in terms of three-dimensional form or spatial con- cepts is found most thoroughly and with less restriction in sculpture than in the other arts. This variety of thinking involves both "analy- zing complex forms, particularly natural forms," and "manipulating, combining, and performing operations upon easily conceived spatial forms in order to develop more complex forms that are not directly derived from objects."16 Spatial forms, on this account, are taken to involve both "structure in space" (mass and the displacement or occupation of space), and "structure of space" (voids or the spatial relations between material elements).17 Sculptors (and, presum- ably, appreciators) need on this view to be schooled in general principles of the construc- tion of three-dimensional form, or the "logic of form," which makes the articulation of forms in sculpture intelligible.

Rogers may be right to hold that thinking with or through three-dimensional spatial con- cepts or forms plays a central role in the produc- tion and appreciation of sculptural works, but it also seems to play a role in other kinds of art.18 It is certainly not unusual in the pictorial arts for artists to think and work with spatial concepts and articulate forms in just this kind of way, not only in conceiving but also in executing their works. For it is not just represented forms that might be thought of and articulated in this way,

but also the material construction of the work such that the three-dimensional formal proper- ties of the paint on the canvas might be of spe- cial practical interest to the painter. Roger's claim, however, was not that this kind of think- ing was the exclusive preserve of the sculptural, but that it is found most clearly expressed and realized in the production of sculpture. But if there is a difference between the pictorial and the sculptural in the relationship between this kind of thinking and the realization or appreci- ation of a work, then it is not obvious just from the notion of complex spatial thinking in three- dimensions what this difference might be. More needs to be said if something is to be made of this conception.

II. THE SCULPTURAL MEDIUM

In appreciating an artwork as an artwork, we attend to the medium of the work. That is to say, we attend to the way materials are used toward the end of content and, at the same time, to the content as realized through that use of materials, rather than solely to the material construction or the content of the work. One reason the examined theories fail to identify characteristics essential to sculpture is that they focus on the psychological mechanisms or physical materials (and their effects) employed in the production and appreciation of works, rather than on the ways these materials are used to function as an artistic medium.19 My sugges- tion is that the sculptural, and how it differs from the pictorial, can be understood in terms of a distinctive way of using the physical and perceptual properties of materials as an art medium. What separates the pictorial and the sculptural is not, for example, whether three- dimensional materials are used or whether three-dimensional space is represented. Rather, it is the way representation is achieved, and the way it is interpreted, through distinctive ways of using materials as a medium for representa- tion. An account of the sculptural in terms of medium enables us to understand general physical and perceptual differences between sculptures and paintings as contingent rather than essential. At the same time, such an account of the sculptural provides the basis for an alternative account of sculpture as an art.

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I suggested in relation to the "physical three- dimensionality" view that there are a number of ways three-dimensional properties might be artistically relevant. Differences in the artistic relevance of physical and perceptual features are determined in large part by differences in the ways such features are used to function as an artistic medium. Independent of such consid- erations of use, there is nothing that can account for a property or kind of property having this or that relevance in appreciation. If we now con- sider the role of materials in their use as a medium, there are at least three obvious ways the three-dimensional properties of material might be artistically relevant. There is the simple idea that any two-dimensional surface of a work only appears to us the way it does because, among other things, of the way the materials used in its production have been shaped. In the pictorial arts, for example, a painted or printed surface appears the way it does because of the way paint or other sub- stances have been applied in three dimensions to some part of a three-dimensional body. The same might be said of the relationship of two- dimensional surface properties in sculpture to their three-dimensional underpinnings. But in such an instance, it is the two-dimensional surface properties of the material (for example, the planar arrangement of line and color), rather than the three-dimensional properties them- selves, which function as the medium of representation or expression. Those three- dimensional properties are artistically relevant only in so far as they are a material condition for the two-dimensional surface properties that function as the artistic medium. The focus of appreciation of the work in such a case rests at the level of the relationship between the two- dimensional surface properties and the work content.

Extending this point, we can think of cases in which work content is realized via the function- ing of two-dimensional surface properties of material as a medium (for which the three- dimensional properties of the material are a base) but for which the relationship of texture with two-dimensional surface properties and represented content is itself a matter of interest in appreciating the work. For example, in some of the portrait works of Auerbach, such as several of his versions of Head of E. O. Wilson,

it seems that had the paint not been applied with those very three-dimensional characteristics, the face could not appear to us as it does. Neverthe- less, the characteristic protruding thickness of the paint does not itself represent the protruding thickness of a jaw or a brow so much as under- pin its representation through the supervening two-dimensional surface properties in such a way that we cannot ignore the connection in appreciating the work.

I take these two ways in which three- dimensional properties can be artistically relevant to be distinct from a third kind of relationship wherein the thickness or weight of the material itself plays the role of artistic medium. In this third case, we do, for example, take the protrusions and ridges of the material art-object themselves to represent the protrusion of brow and cheekbones. Although both depic- tion and sculpting involve the use or construc- tion of materials in three-dimensions, my suggestion is that only for sculptural works are the three-dimensional properties of the material art-object artistically relevant in this third way of functioning as an artistic medium. A work will be sculptural, on this account, just to the extent that the use of the three-dimensional properties of materials functions as a medium in this way. For the pictorial, on the other hand, three-dimensional properties need only be artistically relevant in the minimal first sense and may also be relevant in the second, although I do not propose either as sufficient for the pictorial. Three-dimensional properties may also feature in the first and second ways in sculptural works, but this is incidental to their nature as sculptural.

An advantage of conceiving of works as sculptural in so far as the use of the three- dimensional properties of materials functions as an artistic medium for the work is that it is able to account for the kinds of features to which the earlier four theories appealed but failed to explain. For, on this conception, if sculptural works tend to be bulkier objects than pictorial works, if it generally makes more sense to touch or to walk around sculptural than pictorial works, or if there are differences in the percep- tual effects and phenomena typically associated with sculptural works, then this will be because of differences in the ways the physical and perceptual properties of materials are used as a

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medium. It should not be surprising that the sculptural use of materials has tended contin- gently to result in the production of works more massive than those in which two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional features function as a medium. To the extent that it makes more sense to touch or move around sculptural than pictorial works, this can be explained in terms of general differences in the configuration of materials that are likely to result from the different ways materials and properties essen- tially function artistically when they are used as sculptural or pictorial media, and the resultant contingent variations in the appropriateness to appreciation of touch and shifting perspectives. Likewise, the sculptural role of particular ways of thinking or imagining in terms of three- dimensional form, spatial concepts, visual, tactile, somatic, and haptic sensations can be made sense of in terms of their relationship to sculptural use of materials as a medium in the production and appreciation of works. It is not that we could not or do not think and imagine in these ways in producing and appreciating pictorial works, but that these activities are dif- ferently related to the ways the properties of the material art-object are used as an art medium.

It may be objected that this account of the sculptural fails for reasons identified by Dominic Lopes in his account of tactile pictures. For while my account shares Lopes's rejection of a distinction between the sculptural and the pictorial grounded in the role of the sense modes, would not tactile pictures as Lopes conceives them nevertheless count as sculptural works on my account? I do not think they would, because on Lopes's account the use of three-dimensional properties of material does not function as a medium of representation, but rather functions in the first (and possibly in the second) sense of artistic relevance I identified above. Certainly, if the three-dimensionality of the raised lines in Lopes's tactile pictures itself were to function as a medium for representa- tion, then those works would be sculptural on my account. But on Lopes's account, as I under- stand it, the three-dimensionality of the raised lines serves only to convey to the appreciator the two-dimensional configuration of line and field, and it is that two-dimensional configura- tion that in turn functions as the medium for representation. This is not quite the same as

Robert Hopkins's point that although touch can inform us about perspectival outline shape, it does not present it to us but only enables us to form other mental states that represent it to us.20 Hopkins does not take this claim about the role of touch to prove the impossibility of tactile pictures, but rather that visual and tactile experi- ence play different kinds of roles in picturing, such that tactile pictures fail to exhibit those aesthetic features that are distinctively picto- rial.21 The difference is that on my account it is not the role of touch or vision that is essential to the distinction between the pictorial and the sculptural, but rather the way in which the dimensional properties of material, how- ever perceived, function as a representational medium.

A further objection might hold that my account cannot possibly succeed given we find this same use of materials not just in sculpture but also in architecture, jewelry, or, indeed, painting. But it is worth noting that to give an account of the nature of the sculptural is not quite the same as giving an account of what makes something a sculpture, any more than an account of the pictorial gives us a full account of painting. Indeed, just as painting is but one of several pic- torial arts, such as photography, film, or video, so, too, when we consider jewelry, architecture, and installation works we find that sculpture is not the only sculptural art. An understanding of sculpture or painting, or their differences with other sculptural or pictorial works, can hardly be exhausted by our understanding of the nature of the sculptural or the pictorial.

In this regard it can be helpful to recall Kendall Walton's notion of standard, variable, and contra-standard features of artworks, whereby a feature is "standard" with respect to a category just if it is one of those in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category; "variable" in so far as the feature is irrelevant to a work's belonging to that cate- gory; and "contra-standard" in so far as the presence of that feature tends to disqualify works as belonging to that category.22 On this model we might conceive of the category of "sculpture" as a tradition of art practice in which the sculptural use of materials is stan- dard. This is not to say that the category of sculp- ture is to be equated with a singular tradition of art practice and, of course, traditions can shift

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and change over time and across cultures. Works that do not belong to this category may well nevertheless involve a sculptural use of materials where this use is variable (as in archi- tecture) or contra-standard (as in painting).

The more or less exclusive association of the sculptural with sculpture, and of the pictorial with painting and drawing, that may have existed in the past (at least if we consider the mainstream of the Western art tradition) seems largely an historical accident that certainly came to an end with the modem and postmod- em periods. Indeed, as Rosalind Krauss has observed, recent shifts in the conventions and logic of art practice are such that "the category [of sculpture] has now been forced to cover such a heterogeneity that it is, itself, in danger of collapsing."23 Consider, for example, Michael Heizer' s Double Negative, Eva Hesse' s Aught, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Rachel Whiteread's casts of building interiors, Joseph Beuys's "social sculpture," Richard Long's "walks," the "mixed-media" work of Ben Nichol- son, Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon, or even Anselm Kiefer' s Isis and Osiris.

One might, of course, have supposed that the diversity of works and practices in the modemrn and postmodern periods, and between cultures and across time, makes implausible any account of the nature of sculpture or the sculptural. The diversity characteristic of the contemporary art world might well undermine theories of the nature of sculpture that appeal to particular physical properties of materials, or to the involvement of specific perceptual modes, phenomena, or sensibilities, as criteria. But the conception I propose of sculpture in terms of the sculptural is compatible with this kind of diversity within sculpture, and also with the fact that we can and do speak of the sculptural ele- ments of mixed-media works that we would not, perhaps, classify as "sculptures." All the preceding examples are sculptural works, or have significant sculptural elements, but are they sculptures? The answer, on the proposed account, will depend on the facts of the works' relationship to the traditions of art practice out of which they emerge. Whether works are sculptures may, of course, be relevant to our appreciation of them. But whereas the value of a concern with works belonging to the category of sculpture decreases as the diversity of art

practices increases, an interest in the ways that materials have been used sculpturally remains of interest even if the works have little relation- ship to a given tradition of sculpture.

Such diversity may also undermine accounts of sculpture and the sculptural that equate the value of works with their degree of fidelity to an ideal nature. Mine is not such an account. There is a middle ground between an essentialism that is overly prescriptive with respect to evaluative issues, and an essentialism that is of little rele- vance to them. The account I have sketched does not help much in knowing or deciding which sculptures are good, typical, or paradig- matic, but it remains evaluatively relevant with- out being evaluatively prescriptive.24 It identifies the ground of sculptural value at its most basic level without predetermining the appropriate content of any evaluative judgments concerning the value of any given kind or piece of sculp- tural work. Distinctively sculptural values, on this account, will be those values tied to the sculptural use of materials. What those values are, and the ways particular kinds of thinking and imagining are related to the production and appreciation of works through the sculptural use of materials, will be among the concerns of a broader aesthetics of the sculptural. An account of the nature of the sculptural can provide a foun- dation and orientation for the larger and complex project of constructing such an aesthetics.25

ERIK KOED

Wellington, New Zealand

INTERNET: Erik.Koed @ mch.govt.nz

1. Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1956), p. 46.

2. F. David Martin, Sculpture and Enlivened Space (The University Press of Kentucky, 1981).

3. Naum Gabo, as quoted in Donald Brook, "Perception and the Appraisal of Sculpture," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27 (1969): 323; and L. R. Rogers in "Sculpture, Space, and Being Within Things," The British Journal ofAesthetics 23 (1983): 166.

4. Robert Vance, "Sculpture," The British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995): 224, 217.

5. Read, The Art of Sculpture, p. 49. 6. Dominic M. Lopes, "Art Media and the Sense Modal-

ities: Tactile Pictures," Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1997): 425-440.

7. Read, The Art of Sculpture, p. 71. 8. Martin, Sculpture and Enlivened Space, p. 14.

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9. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 91.

10. See, for example, Richard Wollheim's arguments in Painting as an Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), pp. 37-39.

11. Read, The Art of Sculpture, p. 71. 12. Read, The Art of Sculpture, p. 73, quoting Rodin. 13. Herbert Read, "Notes on Sculpture" in Henry

Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, 2nd ed. (London: Percy Lund, 1946), p. xl.

14. Vance, "Sculpture," pp. 224-225. 15. L. R. Rogers, "Sculptural Thinking," The British

Journal of Aesthetics 2 (1962): 291-300; and L. R. Rogers, "Sculptural Thinking-2: A Reply," The British Journal of Aesthetics 3 (1963): 357-362.

16. Rogers, "Sculptural Thinking," p. 293. 17. Rogers, "Sculptural Thinking," p. 297. 18. Here I differ from Donald Brook ("Sculptural

Thinking-I: Rogers on Sculptural Thinking," The British Journal ofAesthetics 3 [1963]: 352-357), who holds that Rog- ers's conception of "sculptural thinking" seems characteristic of some kinds of sculpture only. Although some of Rogers's attempts to clarify his idea do seem in danger of falling into the trap Brook points out, his basic conception does not.

19. By 'psychological mechanisms' I mean the percep- tual and cognitive faculties, capacities, and abilities that make possible the use of materials in productive and appreciative art practices. By 'physical materials' I mean the "stuff" used in making artworks, including substances and their various physical and basic perceptual properties.

20. Robert Hopkins, "Touching Pictures," The British Journal of Aesthetics 40 (2000): 156.

21. Hopkins, "Touching Pictures," p. 167. 22. See Kendall Walton, "Categories of Art" as reprinted

in Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, ed. Joseph Margolis (Temple University Press, 1987), p. 57.

23. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, 1987), p. 278. Krauss discusses sculpture in more detail in her Passages in Modern Sculpture (MIT Press, 1998).

24. I am in agreement, this far, with Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 1.

25. Research for this article was made possible by grants from the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals, St. Leonard's College of St. Andrews University, the EU Socrates/Erasmus Programme, and the Danish Research Academy, and this assistance is gratefully acknowledged. Versions of this paper were presented at St. Andrews University Moral Philosophy Research Seminar; the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2000; the Australasian Association for Philosophy (New Zealand Division) Conference at Victoria University Wellington, 2000; the Bilkent Univer- sity Philosophy Research Seminar; and in absentia in summary at the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference in Minneapolis, 2001. Particular thanks are due to this journal's editor and referees whose thorough review of drafts led to many improvements, and also to Berys Gaut, John Haldane, Paisley Livingston, Alex Neill, Derek Matravers, Peter Lamarque, and Julie van Camp for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper and related material.

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