The earliest treatise on sculpture, by the ancient Greek sculptor Polykleitos, is nonextant and dated to 450 BCE. The earliest Indian treatise on sculpture is the Vastu Sutra Upanishad, authored by Pippilada Maharshi; its date is unknown. The Vastu Sutra covers traditional aspects of sculpting, from materials to techniques. Yet this work offers no discussion of sculpture as an independent art form. Perhaps the cultural context of that time was not fertile ground for such questions.
Sculpture’s
close connections are with architecture and painting. In earlier times,
sculpture was closely related to architecture. In cities and temples, statues
were compulsory. Sculpture is a sign of civilisation and culture; for this
reason, the invading country disfigures the statues of the existing power. The
statues are not demolished or removed, but dismembered to keep them as signs of
the new power. Even in revolution, this is common. This is called iconoclasm.
In
post-medieval times, religious painting came into vogue. Then, sculpture
shifted its relationship from architecture to painting; painting was considered
a step above sculpture in status. At the beginning of modernity, painting was
thought to engage the senses and imagination more than sculpture. Sculpture was
preferred when it resembled a painting. To achieve this, the sculpture had to
be organised to offer a frontal view. Even when the viewer walks around the
sculpture, it should, by its capacity or design, present its front as a
reference point to keep the viewer connected to the frontal view, like a
revolving brass relief. In short, a sculpture was being instructed to become a
painting in the form of a sculpture.
A dominant
view in another camp of artists held that painting is trivial compared to
sculpture. Even Michael Angelo joined this camp for his own reasons, given the
effort involved in sculpting. A famous and funny comment in favour of
sculpture, emphasising its physical presence, goes like this: when we step back
to adjust the view of a painting, we will bump into a sculpture.
While
viewing a sculpture, the viewer’s free play of imagination is at work. If the
sculpture is attached to a temple or a story, this free play may be amplified
to an uncontrollable level. In such cases, the sculptor has little control over
the viewer’s licence to imagine. Suppose the sculpture depicts Durga killing an
Asura; the viewer will add and fill in what is not shown. If Durga is about to
strike with a sword and kill the Asura, even if Durga is cherishing a smile in
the sculpture, the viewer will interpret the smile as favouring the
continuation of the action that unfolds in the viewer’s imagination. This kind
of digression is perhaps applicable to all representational artworks. However,
if the sculpture is abstract, there is no chance to identify with something or
complete an action in imagination. The viewer has to resort to projective and
ampliative imagination through free play with abstract sculptures.
To see how
imagination works in this way while viewing a sculpture, take VK Rajan’s The
Rhythm of Silence, installed on the beach in Kozhikode: a huge stone figure,
stones stacked one upon another in a spiral, almost in the shape of a cone. One
would wonder how it stands like that with no support to hold the stones
together. One would wonder whether it would fall if the wind came or if another
stone were placed on top of it. In these responses called on by the sculpture,
two things happen from the viewer’s side. The viewer, through imagination,
identifies with the sculpture and projects their proprioception onto it. This
is like experiencing another body (sculptural) through one’s own body as
body-subject. Another thing the viewer sees is that this sculpture is like
arrested time while in motion. To imagine this, the viewer has to amplify their
imagination in terms of time, envisaging a river of time in which this
sculpture was just an arrested moment, a moment in which all the stones were
arrested and locked in a sculpture. And when viewers subtly look all over the
sculpture, they start to see inner carvings of crevices, like lamps in each
stone, with lamps arranged proportionally along the spiralling stones.
Johns
Mathew’s “Rain Lamp”, another sculpture installed on the same beach, calls for
a different response from viewers. It is too abstract and will not speak to you
unless you wait a while. You will see a shape that questions shape, or a shape
primordial to all shapes. On closer scrutiny, you will see a track of flow. The
flow starts from the head of the sculpture. As if something has happened, the
trace flows down into a crevice below. You will be reminded, in a flash, of a
raindrop falling, travelling slowly from the heroine's eyelash to the navel, as
described in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava. But in this sculpture, nothing reminds
you of everyday life. Strangely enough, it seems to capture the moment of
creation. Something happens out of nowhere, from nothingness, and it passes
down and makes the first mark of creation. Creation is always out of nothing,
ex nihilo. This sculpture seems to be an attempt to understand the ontology of
creation and to express what it is to be creative.
Some
sculptures do not give the viewer enough space to exercise their imagination.
One such work is Andreas Slominski’s Imprints of the Nose Cone of a Glider,
made for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2005. A glider is brought into the
gallery, breaking a window, and rolled onto a pink foam block mounted on the
wall. The glider’s nose leaves an imprint on the block. The glider is then
removed, and the window is replaced. The viewer will have no clue about the
sculpture beyond what can be inferred from the title. The sculpture offers
little scope for imagination. One may call this work a shallow relief, but that
misses the process by which it was made. Most of the work lies in the process,
which is invisible.
Another work
that offers scant scope for the exercise of imagination is a pair of
sculptures. One is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, and the other is Cold
Dark Matter: An Unexploded View. A garden shed is exploded with dynamite. The
fragments of the explosion are gathered and hung in the gallery using wire.
Toys are hung too. The way they are hung looks like a capture at the moment of
explosion. A central light illuminates the scene. It is a stunning sight. The
viewers will be stunned. The other one is before the explosion. The shed is lit
from inside and covered with a sheet that blocks the view inside. Both are
stunning sculptures or installations, leaving no room for imagination.
Modern
sculptures do not aim to create eternal works, to carve proportional anatomy,
nor to present neatly calculated shapes. What is perfect, neat, and eternal
smacks of the classical past. The contemporary viewer engages by placing
oneself in lived time. For a sculpture to attain lived temporality, the
opposite of frozen time, it has to offer a lived-time experience by realising
features that embody the flux of time through varied aspects of the sculpture.
At the same time, a sculpture is not a movie. It is a still, a still in the
temporal flux. A statue loses its meaning if it becomes a pause in a violent
action, as the word statue comes from the Latin Sto stas, which means to remain
firm and to stand stably.
The right
fusion of stillness and action makes the sculpture endure, not for a passing
glance but for contemplative viewing, repeated over time. A good sculpture
captures different aspects of the moment it depicts, and so, in the end, it
encapsulates the past, present, and future of that moment.
There is a
widely accepted, taken-for-granted belief that sculpture is an art of touch and
painting is an art of sight. There is also talk of the eye’s incompatibility
with three-dimensionality and a suggestion to keep the sculpture as a relief.
Perhaps this prompted the sculpture to evoke tactility visually. One of the
reasons nobody paints a sculpture is to avoid interfering with the tactile
sensation with colour.
Sartre offers a picture of how a modern sculptor engages with
his work. “Thoughts of stone possess him (Alberto Giacometti)” (Jean Paul
Sartre, On Modern Art, Seagull Books, London, 2008, pp. 2-3). According to
Sartre, Giacometti’s “task was to carve from that infinite archipelago the
complete form of the only being that can touch other beings” (Ibid, p. 3).
Many wonder why Giacometti makes such a fuss about sculpting.
Sculpting began three thousand years ago, and many techniques have been passed
down through tradition. Then why can't Giacometti do that? Giacometti is
confused because the sculptures in the museum are carved out corpses; it is not
the duty of the contemporary sculptor to add items to the museum. The
contemporary sculptors are going to sculpt, perhaps for the first time, real
sculptures, not dead ones.
What affected Giacometti was the faces and gestures of
people. He felt that people with all these features were cascading towards him.
The issue before him was to carve a human being out of stone without being
petrified. It was an all-or-nothing game. If he could sculpt once as he aimed,
all his sculptures would stand; if he failed, nothing. He was always beginning
anew.
Giacometti will finish a sculpture and then demolish it. He
keeps on beginning. His friends saved the surviving sculptures from the
massacre. He allowed them to be exhibited because he was in utter poverty. That
does not mean that he disowns his sculptures. No, he admits and values them,
but he forgets them and creates new ones because he aims to achieve the
absolute. Nothing short of that makes him satisfied. To his mind, all his
sculptures are halfway to their goal. He feels discomfort with anything halfway
to the goal or with approximations in sculpting.
Giacometti told Sartre that he had just destroyed some
sculptures he had made a few hours earlier, and that they were good. Those
sculptures had only the life of fireflies, yet they were charming. Sartre
writes, “And it is true that his figures, being designed to perish on the very
night of their birth, are the only sculptures I know that retain the
extraordinary charm of perishability” (Ibid, p.6).
A sculpture may destabilise the viewer’s cherished visual
habits. Sartre points out this aspect in Giacometti, “… by putting a distant
head on a nearby body, so that we no longer know where to place ourselves or
literally how to focus.” “We are accustomed to so long, smooth, mute
creatures…” (Ibid, p.14).
When it comes to appreciating a sculpture, there may be gaps
in how the sculptor and the viewer conceptualise it. Regarding the creator
versus the viewer, Sartre, commenting on Giacometti’s works, says: “He knows
what he was trying to do and we do not; but we know what he has done and he
does not” (Ibid, p.16).
Usually, going beyond the ordinary is considered odd. Going
far out is radical; at this point, sculpture reaches the boundary of art.
Beyond that boundary lies mere objecthood. Sculpture is an object plus
something. This ‘something’ constitutes art. Stripped of it, the sculpture
fades into mere objecthood, an object that neither represents nor means
anything beyond itself.
In the modernist paradigm, a sculpture internalises certain
characteristics such as exploration of space, relation, and force. Bereft of
these qualities, a sculpture diminishes to a mere object. Just beyond the
“far-out” is the end of the road; it may be the end of one road but the
beginning of another as well, because it is just one possible way among others
for a sculpture to be. And the new beginning could be unrecognisable within the
modernist paradigm because it is far-out and beyond it. The new contemporary
sculptures are events rather than objects. They are a mess, organic, and
active.
Sculpture, which can be body-like, has a long history with
the body. It is not equivalent to its representation. The question of how
to represent a body depends on how we look at it. Are we going to look at the
body's outer shape? From an external view, the body is an object with certain
outer characteristics. There are other ways to engage with the body besides
representation. Emotion, interiority, density, flow, etc., are bodily qualities
that can have sculptural expression. In this sense, sculptures can be bodies or
body-subjects even when abstract. The body is not a material substrate but a
site of existence constitutive of meaning.
The world as
a continuous surface, lovingly worked – this can be a sculptor’s gaze. When the
sculptor creates, it is an act of resistance. Resist what? Stupidity. Art
resists death, ready-made information, and modernity's control system.
Creativity itself arises from a need to create. That need stems from the
stupidity or morbidity of what exists; therefore, creativity is an act of
keeping one's distance from it or resisting the status quo.
Mukundanunni
(Sculpture and the Aesthetic Experience, INKochi Magazine, Vol 01, Issue 67, June 2026, pp- 18-23)
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