Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Contemporary accounts of the nature of sculpture have sought to identify distinctive features of works of sculpture, or our experience of them, that are nontrivially necessary and plausibly sufficient for their being sculptures. They have focused variously on the physical properties of work materials, the involvement of specific perceptual modes, or perceptual phenomena, or the relationship to sculpture of a distinctive sensibility. An alternative is to understand the art of sculpture in terms of the ways the use of materials features in practices of producing and appreciating. There is a commonsense thought that sculptures are three-dimensional art objects as distinct from, for example, the two-dimensional pictorial arts. The sculptor Naum Gabo asserted that sculpture is three-dimensional eo ipso . The problem with this idea is that all embodied artworks, including pictorial works, are threedimensional in their material construction. Sculptures may typically be less flat than paintings, but the nature of sculpture cannot lie in physical three-dimensionality per se. Alternatively it could be argued that whereas sculptures and paintings are all made of threedimensional materials, three-dimensional properties are artistically relevant to our appreciation of sculptures but not for paintings (where only the two-dimensional surface properties count). Robert Vance, for example, argues ... log in or subscribe to read full text