Sculptures are a separate genre of art that deals with three-dimensional objects especially made for decorating a place to make it aesthetically pleasant to the eyes. In the past centuries, sculptures were defined as elaborate, discernible figures of living things depicted in various poses mainly to evoke reactions from its viewers and up until the 19th century, the sculptors continued this tradition of making elaborate figures of humans to appease the artistic cravings of their patrons. Krauss (1979) explained in her article that although this might seem to be the real nature of the sculptures in the past, the sculptures of today have been reduced from aesthetically pleasing ornaments to the low class minimalistic structures that seem to obstruct the meaning of the artist’s message.
Her article argues two points: the first role of a sculpture is to maintain its original use as a symbol or a landmark of a particular place. For instance, the author cited Bernini’s Conversion of Constantine, a sculpture located at the edge of the Vatican staircase. She explained that the Bernini’s work follows the definite rule of a sculpture must be. Another example was the statue of Marcus Aurelius, a famed Roman who once ruled the city of Campidoglio. In the case of Bernini’s work, the statue depicting Constantine’s conversion to the Christianity signified an important part of the Roman Catholicism which is the establishment of the religion itself and making the Roman Catholicism as the official Imperial religion of the whole Roman Empire. On the other hand, the statue of Marcus Aurelius symbolizes the transition of government powers from past to the present. The Campidoglio was the seat of Aurelius Imperial authority as a ruler and this fact remained true in the 21st century since the city still has its own seat authority; a tradition which continued from the Roman times up to the present era and the statue symbolizes this facet of history.
Furthermore, the second argument she established that not following the function of the sculpture as a symbolic landmark of a place contributes to its homelessness or a sense wherein the sculpture itself will remain as a dead work of art; a figure that cannot be appreciated in its entire glory. She cited Rodin’s The Gates of Hell emphasizing its worthlessness as a sculpture mainly because there was no existing original work found in its previous location but there were a vast number of copycat relics can be found on different places.
The sculptures of the Minimalistic period especially those made in the 1950s to 1970s were mostly simple junk-type of styles of sculptures made out of metal sheets and assembled together to form a unique style which is ‘sculpture’. The nature of sculpture as Krauss explained was the ability of the object to interact with its place and to illustrate the significance of the place and its history to the world. Sculptures were more than just simple relics; they bear the torch in which they carry the legacy of the past for the present audience to see and judge. Right now, what the author points out was the fact that sculptures of today may not seem as real sculptures in a sense that the objects are commercialized and have been made without an interaction to its surroundings; hence, the dead spaces encapsulating these objects were no less than interactive to the sculptures they hold. Krauss (1979) reiterated that these spaces although dead, became the start for the artists to explore and create newer designs to match the sculptures’ theme but then again blames the post-modernism as the culprit bastardizing the sculptural form of the 21st century as the reduction of the artistic appeal to simple non-moving and non-functional designs.
REFERENCES
Krauss, R. (1979). Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October, 8, 30-44. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778224
