Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches

Description

Sculpture has been a central aspect of almost every art culture, contemporary or historical. This volume comprises ten essays at the cutting edge of thinking about sculpture in philosophical terms, representing approaches to sculpture from the perspectives of both Anglo-American and European philosophy. Some of the essays are historically situated, while others are more straightforwardly conceptual. All of the essays, however, pay strict attention to actual sculptural examples in their discussions. This reflects the overall aim of the volume to not merely "apply" philosophy to sculpture, but rather to test the philosophical approaches taken in tandem with deep analyses of sculptural examples. There is an array of philosophical problems unique to sculpture, namely certain aspects of its three-dimensionality, physicality, temporality, and morality. The authors in this volume respond to a number of challenging philosophical questions related to these characteristics. Furthermore, while the focus of most of the essays is on Western sculptural traditions, there are contributions that features discussion of sculptural examples from non-Western sources. Philosophy of Sculpture is the first full-length book treatment of the philosophical significance of sculpture in English. It is a valuable resource for advanced students and scholars across aesthetics, art history, history, performance studies, and visual studies. Contents Introduction 1 Projective and Ampliative Imagining • Jason Gaiger 2 Sculpture, Embodiment, and History: Reassessing Hegel and Winckelmann • Kristin Gjesdal 3 The Temporality of the Figure in Sculpture • Alex Potts 4 Cubic Form: Carl Einstein’s Philosophically Realist Theory of Sculpture • Andrei Pop 5 African Sculpture: Interrelating the Verbal and Visual in Yorùbá Aesthetics • Barry Hallen 6 The Persistence of the Body in Sculpture after Abstraction • Ingvild Torsen 7 Sculpture on the Verge of Architecture: Reflections on Gordon Matta-Clark • Fred Rush 8 Material, Medium, and Sculptural Imagining • Jonathan Gilmore 9 Materials and Meaning in Contemporary Sculpture • Sherri Irvin 10 The Sculpted Image? • Robert Hopkins Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index