actually existing sculpture

8/8/2019 Actually Existing Sculpture

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Actually Existing Sculpture

Julian Stallabrass

In a well-known article published in 1979, Sculpture in the Expanded Field,

Rosalind Krauss wrote that some very strange items had lately attracted the term

sculpture, so that the concept seemed to be in the process of becoming infinitely

malleable, and indeed to be in danger of collapse. She saw the core role and concept

of sculpture as having been eroded by a questioning of its monumental and memorial

functions, and that in its dissipation, sculpture had become part of a group of related

practices (which encompassed performance, land art, appropriation, installation, and

so on). What could be firmly identified as sculpture was defined only negatively, as

that which did not fit into the categories of landscape or architecture. The field

which she mapped has persisted, and while museums and galleries display lots of

things that look sculptural, few of them are unequivocally sculptures, and there are

few artists who would describe themselves as sculptors.


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Much of this development was driven by forces internal to the art world, in dialogue

with its histories, and in the continual centrifugal forces that push artists to distinguish

themselves from one another through the colonisation of new materials, methods,

theories and concerns. The art world, though, drawn as it is to converse with itself, is

also affected by the wider culture: it is repulsed by practices that speak too directly of

those artistic pasts that are found embarrassing in the present, and by most forms of

standardised mass culture. Jeff Koons reproduction of kitsch popular figurines safely

distance artist and viewer from the sentiments expressed in the source material

through an amused and detached pastiche. Like the documentary lens, Koons focuses

attention on an aspect of a pre-existing scene, though he does it in three dimensions.

The results may look like sculpture but the act of appropriation grants them the cachet

of fine art.


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Yet, as soon as we chose to look, Koons source materialpopular and mass-

produced sculptureis all around us. Given the ease and cheapness of its

manufacture, new materials (fibreglass resins which can be made to look like marble,

bronze or porcelain, and various commercial stone substitutes) and new uses for old

ones (such as concrete), along with the intensity of commercial culture and the

growing magnitude of our own consumption, the environment is more densely

populated with sculpture than ever. It is found in shops and garden centres,workplaces and homes, as municipal adornment, and is frequently used to attempt to

bring a unique sense of place into those areas that threaten to become non-places.


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It encompasses delicate figurines, kept behind glass, and monumental pieces (I will

never forget glimpsing, from a Belfast bus, a seven-foot gorilla peering over a garden

wall); the cheapest plastic souvenir, including objects that have the status of ironic

jokes, or a unique hand-crafted carving, embodying the noblest of sentiments. The

sculptures that people buy for themselves often convey an array of emotions long

banished from contemporary art: they strive to be pious, heroic or cute, to mark the

exuberance of youth or the companionship of maturity, to be funny or affable, to be

objects of veneration or bathos. For many viewers schooled in the sophistication of

high art, these sculptures may fail in their apparent task but for the millions who buy

and house them, they speak of ideals and feelings that exceed their commercial and


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off-the-peg origins. The Madonna of the air-conditioning unit, or the appearance of

Lenin at sunset amid a kitchens spice jars, point to an attempt to leaven mundane life

with the ideals endangered by it. Even the careful and artful arrangement of figurines,

mannequins and props by shop-window dressers may show the way in which the

business of selling must, to be successful, gesture towards ideals (of love and

romance, say) that lie beyond consumption.


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When sculpture is placed in the public realm, or in the quasi-public, privatised space

of the shopping centre or corporate lobby, its failures become readily visible as it is

treated with indifference or hostility. Pedestals may be used as tables and sculptures

as climbing frames. With older works, both traditional and modernist, the heroic

images and ideals of the past seem to mock our banal and degraded present, and the

response is often to scrawl on them, mutilate them or even throw them to the ground.


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For others, sculpture is simply the site of work, another object to be lifted, packed and

unpacked, moved from one place to another or displayed for potential buyers. You

gain a different relation to an object when you have to lift or sell it.

The photographs in this project (of which a small sample is shown here) are not meant

to stand aloof from their subjects. They are straightforward notes about our typical

commercial environment, and the behaviours, idealist and negatory, that it regularly

fosters. They are a way of exploring the utopian urges inherent in actually existing

sculpture, and how they punctuate an environment that has structurally opposed areas

of cleansed and stark heritage and corporate sheen set against the unplanned but

predictable consequences of an agglomeration of functions and neglects: the heavily

trafficked and rubbish-strewn street, for example. This sculpture tells its viewers

things that the quasi-sculptural objects of the art world conceal: it clearly declares its

status as a commodity, it bears the marks of its public reception, and it inhabits and is

exposed to the impoverished environment to which it is such an inadequate but

insistent response.


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