Rosalind Krauss' journal essay provides an insightful look at sculpture's recent past and significant evolution. Whilst, as I mentioned in reading group, I found it hard to get beyond the mathematical complications of page 37 (and am currently still attempting to..) I still found the article offered some very sensible explanations as to the how, when and why of sculpture's entrance into "modernism".
Krauss refers to the two failed commissions of Rodin as a point where sculpture, or the logic of the monument enter "a kind of sightlessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place". Krauss sites this "negative condition" as the beginning point of modernity for sculpture and it is this that I find interesting.
What intrigues me about sculpture's apparent turning point is its lack of a clear explanation when compared to, say, that of painting. Much of painting's turning point towards modernity eventuated as a result of the invention of photography. The simplest explanation of this being, what validity does painting have as a recorder of pictorial history when photography can do it quicker, more accurately and more efficiently? Following this question painting had to ask itself what paths it could explore with photography having assumed its most obvious role and the rest is history. As far as I am aware nothing ever assumed sculpture's pre-modernism role in the same way photography did to painting, i.e. the controversial Balzac sculpture did not eventuate as a reaction to some incredible new invention that could churn out representationally accurate monuments at the push of a button.
My observation is obviously a naive one. After all it is only right that sculpture should have moved with the times. That sculpture entered this negative condition seems inevitable and necessary for the sake of its own progresion within an art world that had now begun to question the relevance of the monument in increasingly changing times. Yet I still speculate that sculpture's shift to modernity was in some small way prompted by that of painting, that without painting's shift somehow the shift of sculpture would have seemed less necessary. It is interesting to note that the Balzac commission (which Krauss sites as a pivotal point in the monument's fade to illogicality) occured on the same year that VanGogh (arguably a godfather of modernist painting) commited suicide.
Unfortunately for Van Gogh he was simply too far ahead of his time to be appreciated, nonetheless painting was undoubtedly changing as a result of photography's invention. Is it therefore possible that other art forms felt prompted to follow the trend? The question I am asking is; did sculptors such as Rodin take note of the changes that were happening in painting around them and feel obligated to reexamine the values in their own practice as a way of keeping up?
More than likely there is more to the story than this and I am simply being foolish having forgotten my art history lectures. It does provide interesting food for thought though. I remain intrigued at the notion that any change in technology (in this case the invention of photography) can cause a butterfly effect of sorts. In one of our earlier readings Tamara Trodd (2008, p.373) comments that within the fine arts the medium of film seems obligated "to follow an imperative to be anti-narrative" and Sean (who supplied the reading) felt frustrated by the idea of conforming to this expectation. I dare say, though, that sooner or later the somewhat unlimited realms enjoyed by the other mediums of the arts is bound to envelop upon that of film. As with changing trends from painting to sculpture over a century ago the butterfly effect is inevitable.
References:
Trodd, T. (2008). Lack of Fit: Tacita Dean, Modernism and the Sculptural Film. Art History, 31, 368-386.
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