The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the sculpture itself. Ever since Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York destroyed itself at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to find new ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial, or remote. Where the sculpture did have some material presence, it often took unexpected forms. As Rosalind Krauss says, “Rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: (...) narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.”However various these experiments may seem, they began with a single motive: to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself. To prevent this new work from becoming just another commodity in the market, artists either produced works so intangible or remote they could not be bought and sold, or disseminated their ideas in so many reproducible forms they could not be monopolized. The political nature of these motives also meant that much of this “sculpture” could be considered “public.” Changing the nature of the art meant changing the role of the audience as well, questioning the purely contemplative role the observer plays in the conventional setting of the museum or gallery. According to Henry Sayre, “As the avant-garde work of art denies its own autonomy, it implicates the audience in its workings.”3 As the aesthetic focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the relationship of the two goes beyond mere implication: the public becomes the sculpture. Artists, like Richard Serra, whose goal is to illuminate the material nature of space and the often tenuous materiality of the observer’s own body, have made “the viewer, in effect, the subject of the work,” to quote Douglas Crimp. Michael North is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets and is currently completing a study of the politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. (shrink)

La Ruta de la Amistad surgió con motivo de la XIX Olimpiada en México. Siendo el corredor escultórico más largo del mundo, donde a lo largo de diescisiete kilómetros se ubicaron 19 esculturas monumentales de arte abstracto, marcó el punto de partida de un nuevo arte público, alejado de nacionalismos. Para que esta ruta se hiciera realidad implicó un arduo trabajo, desde su gestión hasta su construcción, que generalmente no es mencionado cuando se habla de ella. A más de cincuenta (...) años de su creación, sigue siendo muestra de lo mejor del arte mundial de la década de los sesenta. (shrink)

This paper presents the sanctuary of Zeus Ammon at Kallithea, Chalcidice, where three related deities were worshipped. The cult of Dionysos and probably that of the Nymphs began in the late 8th century BC or earlier in a cave in the southern part of the sanctuary. The cult of Zeus Ammon was introduced in the first half of the 4th century BC, and in the second half of the century a Doric peristyle temple and an open-air corridor running parallel (...) to the temple and flanked by two rows of monumental bases that supported sculpture were built. The cult of Asclepios was introduced in the same period. In the 2nd century AD the sanctuary reached its apogee: the area was reorganized, the old buildings were altered and new edifices were built. Cet article présente le sanctuaire de Zeus Ammon à Kallithea en Chalcidique, où trois divinités liées entre elles étaient honorées. Le culte de Dionysos et, probablement, celui des Nymphes a commencé à la fin du viiie siècle av. J.-C., ou plus tôt, dans une grotte située dans la partie sud du sanctuaire. Le culte de Zeus Ammon a été introduit dans le premier quart du ive siècle av. J.-C. et, dans la deuxième moitié du siècle, on a construit le temple dorique péristyle et un portique ouvert parallèle au temple et flanqué de deux rangées de bases monumentales qui soutenaient des sculptures. Le culte d’Asclépios a été introduit à la même période. Au iie siècle de notre ère, le sanctuaire atteint son apogée : l’espace est réorganisé, les anciens bâtiments sont transformés et de nouveaux édifices sont construits. (shrink)

What, if anything, is aesthetically distinctive about sculpture? Some think that sculpture differs from painting in being a specially tactile art. Different things might be meant by this, but it is anyway unhelpful to focus on our means of access to sculpture’s aesthetic properties, rather than those properties themselves. A more promising idea is that, while painting provides its own space, sculpture exists in the space of the gallery. To pursue this thought, I expound and develop the views of Susanne (...) Langer. Sculpture organizes the surrounding space when we see that space as defined by the potential for action of the sculpted object. (shrink)

This reference essay addresses how sculpture may be defined, the nature of sculptural representation and content, the distinctive forms of tactile and bodily experience to which sculpture can give rise, and the ontology of sculpture. It addresses both sculptures whose form is largely fixed and contemporary sculptural practices incorporating found objects and variable presentation.

"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."-Johann Gottfried Herder Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with (...) a wide range of sources-from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible-to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture. Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, Sculpture is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory. Jason Gaiger's translation of Sculpture includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text. (shrink)

I present and analyze J.G. Herder’s aesthetics of sculpture, as an art form directed toward and appreciated by the sense of touch. I argue that Herder is unsuccessful in his attempt so to define sculpture, but his account is nonetheless fruitful, both in making salient and explaining signal aspects of sculptural appreciation and criticism and, more broadly and quite innovatively, in proposing an aesthetics of touch, even an embodied aesthetics.

What is distinctive about sculpture as an artform? I argue that it is related to the space around it as painting and the other pictorial arts are not. I expound and develop Langer's suggestive comments on this issue, before asking what the major strengths and weaknesses of that position might be.

This essay explores “sculptural plasticity” through neuronal matterings of the brainbody in philosophy, literature, and art. It focuses on Socrates’s cataleptic condition as evidenced in Plato’s Symposium, the plasticities at work in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and morphogenetic acts of cell formation in the sculptural installation of Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead.

A common approach to drawing boundary between fiction and non-fiction is by appeal to the kinds of speech acts performed by authors of works of the respective categories. Searle, for example, takes fiction to be the product of illocutionary pretense of various kinds on the part of authors and non-fiction to be the product of genuine illocutionary action.1 Currie, in contrast, takes fiction to be the product of sui generis fictional illocutionary action on the part of authors and non-fiction to (...) be the product of assertion and other familiar kinds of illocutionary action.2 The central thesis of this paper is that the speech act approach to fictionality is simply a non-starter. Now it is, of course, commonplace to note that approaches of this kind run into difficulty accommodating nonliterary fictions3 and uncomposed or authorless fictions. What will be argued here, however, is that speech acts analyses are inadequate even understood narrowly as accounts of composed literary fiction. And the reason is that they fail to adequately attend to the distinction between composition and storytelling. (shrink)

Introduction Commencé à la demande de l’éphorie de Delphes aux lendemains des festivités du centenaire des débuts de la Grande Fouille par A. Peignard et Ph. Jockey, le récolement des sculptures de pierre conservées à Delphes, conduit par J.‑L. Martinez à partir de 1996 et H. Aurigny à partir de 2006, s’achève et s’est accompagné de l’aménagement d’une réserve dédiée, imaginée et mise en œuvre par D. Braunstein de 2006 à 2009. La base de données créée et alimentée depuis vingt (...) ans, comme ce c... (shrink)

En prenant comme point de départ la proposition d’André Breton d’une « physique de la poésie », nous analyserons ici les conditions de surgissement de diverses variations qui pris forme dans la pratique surréaliste de l’objet surréaliste, depuis la Boule suspendue (1930) de Giacometti aux sculptures crées par Miró dans les années cinquante, en prenant compte de la construction des objets à fonctionnements symboliques de Dalí, à l’« Équation de l’objet trouvé», écrit fondamental de Breton, et à la célébration, en (...) 1936, de l’exposition fondationale à la Galerie Charles Ratton. (shrink)

This article is first within the Russian and Western art history to examine the concept of visual poetics as a separate subject of research. Based on the analysis of iconographic and theoretical searches of the masters of symbolism, which found reflection within the boundaries of expressive means of visual art, the author comes concludes on the poetic principles of symbolist artists as the fundamental sources of the formation of the style of Art Nouveau – a new sculptural language of (...) the XIX – early XX centuries. Detail characteristic of the philosophical-aesthetic content that underlies optical forms of the visual symbolist image, in its scientific origins leans on the capabilities of the art comparative-formal analysis, as well as iconological method adapted to the period under review. The innovative conceptual approach towards studying the art of symbolism lies in the fact that poetry as the concept is depicted beyond the literary sphere, as a specific type of artistic worldview that influenced the development of the visual language of art in the era of Art Nouveau. At the same time, visual poetics is compared to the complex system of internal images, which shape in with the works of the master throughout the entire path of his self-expression, and are directly related to profoundness of the poetic principle of the soul, lyrical and metaphorical intuition of the artist. This approach allows us broadening the representation on the aesthetic benchmarks of the symbolist artists, as well as designating the new methodological coordinates in the field of studying the art of symbolism in both national and international contexts. (shrink)

The essay aims to outline an epistemology of photography through the critical issues that arise from the encounter between photography and sculpture. In particular, it investigates the aesthetic and semiotic constraints that define the specificity of the photographic look with respect to a sculptural three-dimensional vision. The relationship between documentary and art photographs is the main area of research; specifically, the essay tries to highlight the interpretative value that can also be attributed to documentary photography, underlining the boundaries of (...) a complex distinction. A specific section is devoted to Medardo Rosso’s photographs of his own sculptures. Rosso’s work solicits a reflection on the status of photography and on some theoretical problems such as reproducibility, the relationship between original and copy, and the creative gap produced by variation in a series. The artist suggests a peculiar “grammar” of photography by virtue of his relationship with another art – sculpture. (shrink)

Abstract The artwork of Joseph Beuys was provocative in his time. Although he was very successful on the international art scene and on the art market, the larger The public is still bewildered by his Fat Chair or his installations and his performances. The article shows the evolution of his artwork from classical materials (stone, steel) to soft materials (animals, products of animals) and further to his concept of “social sculpture” and to programmatic diagrams (with words and graphics). A special (...) point of interest is the transition towards language (phonic and conceptual), the philosophy of art exposed in his drawings, and diagrams and the relation between art and science in his artwork. (shrink)

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor vision and mission are to improve the people's living standards of Pakistan and China through bilateral investments, trade, cultural exchanges, and economic activities. To achieve this envisioned dream, Pakistan established the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Authority to further its completion, but Covid-19 slowed it down. This situation compelled the digitalization of CPEC. This article reviews the best practices and success stories of various digitalization and e-governance programs and, in this light, advises the implementation of the (...) Ajman Digital Governance model as a theoretical framework for CPEC digitalization. This article concludes that the Pakistani government needs to transform CPEC digitalization by setting up the CPEC Digitalization and Transformation Center at the CPECA office to attract more investors and businesses. (shrink)

An extensive literature about pictorial representation discusses what is involved when a two-dimensional image represents some specific object or type of object. A smaller literature addresses parallel issues in sculptural representation. But little has been said about the role played by the sculptural material itself in determining the meanings of the sculptural work. Appealing to Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin’s discussions of literal and metaphorical exemplification, I argue that the material of which a sculpture is constituted plays (...) key roles in what is represented and how it is represented, in part because we have bodily and emotional responses to the real possibilities the sculptural material creates for us. I discuss examples of contemporary artworks by Melvin Edwards, Kara Walker, Willie Cole, Marc Quinn, Ai Weiwei, Janine Antoni, El Anatsui, Zoe Leonard, and others. (shrink)

I raise two questions that bear on the aesthetics of painting and sculpture. First, painting involves perspective, in the sense that everything represented in a painting is represented from a point, or points, within represented space; is sculpture also perspectival? Second, painting is specially linked to vision; is sculpture linked in this way either to vision or to touch? To clarify the link between painting and vision, I describe the perspectival structure of vision. Since this is the same structure we (...) find in painting, the link is that painting manifests the perspective of vision. Touch is also perspectival, but the perspective involved is different from that in vision. Thus we can answer my second question, concerning the relations of the art forms to the senses, by addressing the first, concerning the role of perspective in sculpture. I argue that sculpture exhibits neither the perspectival structure of vision, nor that of touch. It is not perspectival, and it is not linked to either sense as painting is to vision. I close by considering the aesthetic significance of these conclusions. (shrink)

Certaines sculptures d’époque archaïque trouvées dans les fouilles de l’École française d’Athènes à Délos sont encore très peu connues : c’est le cas des œuvres étudiées dans cet article, qui datent toutes de la fin de la période considérée. La paire de lions A 4103 et A 4104, trouvée par Homolle en 1878 dans l’Artémision (voir, en appendice, un bilan sur les sculptures archaïques découvertes à cette occasion), appartient à une série de fauves figurés dans une attitude menaçante qui est (...) représentée, en particulier, par deux exemplaires de l’Acropole d’Athènes également étudiés ici ; placés sur de hauts supports, peut‑être vers l’entrée du sanctuaire, ils soulignaient la puissance redoutable de l’Apollon Délien et de sa sœur Artémis. La sirène A 3995, un des rares exemples en ronde bosse de ce type de monstre à l’époque archaïque, se rapportait probablement au culte d’Artémis. Enfin, il est certain que la paire d’oiseaux A 3122 et A 3123 (pigeons ou colombes) provient non pas de l’Héraion, comme on l’a pensé, mais d’une zone située au sud‑est du lac : ils appartenaient peut‑être au sanctuaire GD4 68, comme la lionne A 4105. (shrink)

In this article I review the anthology Experiencing Animal Minds: An Anthology of Animal-Human Encounters, edited by Julie A. Smith and Robert W. Mitchell. Apart from providing an overview of the arguments proposed in the book, I propose Jakob von Uexküll’s (1909/1985) idea that we should get rid of the anthropocentric prejudice that animal lives belong to the same frame as ours. The animal other has to be studied from his or her own perspective, not from ours, as we try (...) to reconsider from the right perspective the ontological break of the single word "animal" proposed by Jacques Derrida (2008). (shrink)

This thesis first introduces the basic principles of model-based image sequence coding technology, then discusses in detail the specific steps in various implementation algorithms, and proposes a basic feature point calibration required in three-dimensional motion and structure estimation. This is a simple and effective solution. Aiming at the monocular video image sequence obtained by only one camera, this paper introduces the 3D model of the sculpture building into the pose tracking framework to provide initial depth information. The whole posture tracking (...) framework can be divided into three parts, namely, the construction of the initial sculpture model, the posture tracking between frames, and the robustness processing during continuous tracking. In order to reduce the complexity of calculation, this paper proposes a new three-dimensional mesh model and a moving image restoration algorithm based on this model. At the same time, the influence of the intensity and direction factors in the scene is added, the simulation results are given, and the next step is discussed. The optimization work that needs to be done. (shrink)

This article proposes a direction—inspired by a reading of Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture— in which thinking enriched by artistic experience can unfold an alternative mode of being-in-the-world. Heidegger points out that, in contrast to a scientific understanding of space as an empty container, the special character of space in sculpture is characterized by a clearing-away (Räumen), which presupposes and points to an open, receptive attitude toward experience that is necessary for dwelling to take place. From Heidegger this article proceeds to (...) reflect on artworks by Eduardo Chillida and Janet Echelman. These offer concrete examples of how a thinking of sculpture can apply to different notions of place. While Chillida’s sculptures present a sense of place as rooted and embedded in the landscape, Echelman’s artworks explore an expanded notion of place through a multisensory sense of immersion. Applying Heidegger’s meditations on Räumen, it turns out that the differences between these artworks are of greatest significance in illustrating the breadth of the experiential space that they share: an openness to dwelling and a receptivity toward being-in-the-world. In this way, Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture are unfolded in a contemporary context and the potential of sculpture for a thinking of experience is established. (shrink)

Is there anything significant in the fact that Aristotle, in explaining his conception of causation, takes the activity a sculptor as one of his key exemplars, his paradigm, if you like? In this paper, I am going to see if, in using Aristotle's account of causation, we can illuminate the nature of sculpture and the approach sculptors take to their art.

In this article I review the anthology Experiencing Animal Minds: An Anthology of Animal-Human Encounters, edited by Julie A. Smith and Robert W. Mitchell. Apart from providing an overview of the arguments proposed in the book, I propose Jakob von Uexküll’s (1909/1985) idea that we should get rid of the anthropocentric prejudice that animal lives belong to the same frame as ours. The animal other has to be studied from his or her own perspective, not from ours, as we try (...) to reconsider from the right perspective the ontological break of the single word "animal" proposed by Jacques Derrida (2008). (shrink)

This volume comprises ten essays at the cutting edge of thinking about sculpture in philosophical terms, representing approaches to sculpture from the perspectives of both Anglo-American and European philosophy. Some of the essays are historically situated, while others are more straightforwardly conceptual.