Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into three-D works. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that range from tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator. An unrestricted variety of material are used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials can be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed branding that can be applied to a permanently standing category of objects or range of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that grows and is changing and continually extends the range of activities and evolving new kinds of objects. The scope of the term was much wider in the second half of the 20th century than as it had been only two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of visual art at the turn of the 21st century, no one can predict what its future dimensions are likely to be.
There are a few features which in previous centuries were regarded as essential to the art of sculpture but are no longer present in a big part of modern sculpture and so no longer form part of a definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. Since the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that the forms of such functional 3-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional artworks began to be created.
Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as primarily an art of solid form, or mass. It is true that the negative elements of sculpture - the voids and hollows underneath and between its solid forms - have generally been to some extent an intricate part of the design, but this role was unacknowledged. In a good deal of modern sculpture, however, the attention has widened, and the spatial elements have started to become dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a fully recognisable field of the art of sculpture.
It was also taken for granted in past sculpture that its components consisted of a constant shape and size and, except for objects such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), did not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can remain to be considered to be fundamental to sculpture.
Finally, sculpture during the 20th century was not restricted to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As contemporary sculptors may use any materials and methods of manufacture that work for their purpose, the art form can no longer be identified for the use of any particular kind of materials or techniques.
During all these changes, there is probably still one element that stays constant in the art form, and it exists as the central abiding concern of sculptors: the art form is a field of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of art in three dimensions.
Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round will be a separate, detached piece in its own right, with a similar independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A relief does not have this independance. It is attached to and projects from or is an innate part of some object that may serve either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from which it projects.
The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round puts limitations on its scope in some respects compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture cannot cast the illusion of space with simple optical means, or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as we can see in a painting. Sculpture does possess a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that is simply denied in the pictorial arts. Sculptures can be tangible as well as visible, and they may appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual sensibilities. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate different forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, debated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be seen as elementarily an art of touch and that the origins of sculptural forms can be based on the pleasure one feels in touch.
All 3-D forms are seen as exhibiting an expressive character as well as solely geometric properties. They may be viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and such. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, the artist is able to create images in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce each other. Images go beyond the simple presentation of fact and imply a huge range of subtle and powerful feelings.
The aesthetic raw material used in the art of sculpture is, so to speak, the entire realm of expressive 3D form. A sculpture might draw upon what we know exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of genuine invention. It has been utilised to express a huge range of human emotions and feelings from the gently tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of 3D form, learn something of its structural and expressive properties and possess emotional responses to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and reaction, often called a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that sculpture primarily appeals.
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