Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into 3-D works. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can vary from tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator. An unlimited variety of materials are used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed branding that is applicable to a permanently standing category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, an art that grows and changes and is continually extending the range of activities and evolving new designs of objects. The breadth of the term was much wider in the latter part of the 20th century than it had been only two or three decades prior, and in the evolving state of visual art at the dawn of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future dimensions are going to see.
A few features which in previous centuries were considered to be essential to the sculpturing art but are not present in a large part of modern sculpture and so no longer form part of the definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, most often human figures but also inanimate objects, like game, utensils, and books. Since the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that forms of such functional three-dimensional objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without being in any way representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3D art began to be produced.
Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was considered essentially an art of solid form, or mass. It is true that the negative elements of sculpture – the voids and hollows inside and between its solid areas – have usually been to some kind of degree an integral part of the design, but that role was unacknowledged. In a lot of modern sculpture, however, the focus has broadened, and the spatial elements have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a fully accepted branch of the art form.
It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, except for pieces such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), could not move. With contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can any longer be seen as fundamental to defining the art form.
Additionally, sculpture in the 20th century was not limited to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to the traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that modern sculptors will use any materials and methods of manufacture that will serve a purpose, the art of sculpture can no longer be identified with any special materials or techniques.
Withstanding all this evolution, there is probably still one element that stayed constant in the art of sculpture, and it exists as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a field of the visual arts that is especially concerned with the creation of form in three dimensions.
Sculpture may be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached item in its own right, possessing the same kind of independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not have this independant form. It is attached to and projects from or is an innate part of some object that might serve either as a background to it or a matrix from which it projects.
The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round limits its scope in some respects compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not have the illusion of space by simple optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as painting might. Sculpture does have a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that simply cannot be found in the pictorial arts. Different sculptures are tangible as well as visible, and they may appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual sensibilities. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate different types of sculpture. It was, in fact, argued by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as firstly an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural art can be traced to the pleasure we experience in touch.
All three-D forms are regarded as exhibiting an expressive character along with purely geometric properties. They can strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on and so forth. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, the artist is able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. Images go beyond the pure presentation of fact and imply a vast range of subtle and powerful feelings.
The aesthetic raw material used in sculpture is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive 3D form. A sculpture might draw upon what we see exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of genuine invention. It has been used to express a wide range of human emotions and feelings from the gently tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of three-dimensional form, learn something of its structural and expressive aspects and develop emotional reactions to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and sensitive response, also known as a sense of form, may be cultivated and refined. It is to the sense of form that this art primarily appeals.
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