Rosilind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture

INTRODUCTION

- references Gotthold Lessing's aesthetic treatise on Laocoon
- references Carola Giedion-Welcker's Modern Plastic Art

Lessing:
static arts (traditional painting and sculpture) can be referred to as simultaneous, they are to be perceived all at once.

"Lessing asserts that sculpture is as art concerned with the deployment of bodies in space."

Lessing also adds:
"All bodies, however, exist not only in space, but also in time. They continue and at any moment of their continuance, may assume a different appearance and stand in different relations. Every one of these momentary appearances and groupings was the result of a preceding, may become the cause of a following, and is therefore the center of a present action."

Krauss asserts that spatial arts cannot be separated from space and time.

Krauss paraphrasing Carola Giedion-Welcker says that Gabo's work is about using "light to open up matter to an analysis of its structure".



FUTURISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

Tatlin's constructivism used the properties of the material as the basis of form. Gabo's ideals were to imagine a conceptual form and then build it with the appropriate materials.



MECHANICAL BALLETS

[15, p204]
"It is beyond question that a large number of postwar European and American sculptors became interested both in theatre and in the extended experience of time which seemed part of the conventions of the stage."

- sculpture was used in theatre as both surrogate performers and for environmental context

- is it kinetic sculpture or mechanical theatre

Moholy Nagy's Light Prop (or) Light-Space Modulator
- originally intended as an on-stage projector

[15, p208]
"Like a human figure, the Light Prop has an internal structure that affects its outward appearance, and, more crucially, an internal source of energy that allows it to move. And, like a human agent, the work is meant to affect its space through the gestures which it makes over a period of time. The fact that these gestures -- the patterns of projected light and the shifting patterns that relate throughout its internal structure -- change in time, and have a complex program, gives the object an even more human, because seemingly volitional, quality. Thus, no matter how abstract its forms and its function, the Light Prop is a kind of robot; the place it was meant to take on stage is that of a mechanical actor."
the light prop is therefore, the descendant of automatons.

[15, p209]
Behind it stands a far-reaching mimetic impulse, a passion to imitate not simly the look of the living creature but to reproduce as well its animations, its discourse with the passage of time."

[15, p209, 210]
Krauss on Jack Burnam's 'Beyond Modern Sculpture'
"the most fundamental ambition of sculpture, since its beginnings, is the replication of life."
"The extremely intricate clockwork automata created in the eighteenth century by Vaucanson arose from and satisfied the need to perfect the apearance of lifelikeness in the mechanical creature."
Burnam describes automata as 'subsculpture' and says, "The history of automata has always run close to that of technology."
Krauss points to examples where sculpture does not represent life, calls Burnam's book technocratic (it defines technology as morally neutral) and criticizes him. 

"constructivist analytic mode of sculpture"

"In terms of the sophistication of its technology, Light Prop stands midway on a spectrum of the artist's use of movement to endow the sculptural object with the animate qualities of the human actor. At the more primitive end of this spectrum one would locate the work of Alexander Calder, an American Contemporary of Moholy-Nagy's, with its mechanical simplicity reflecting the naive and humorous direction of its content. On the other, more complex, end, one would place the work of Nicolas Schoffer, whose use of computers makes the sculptural ensemble visibly responsive to its environment -- to the point where a piece such as CYSP I (cybernetic-spatiodynamic construction) utilizes control devices to allow the sculptural array to respond to changes in ambient sound and light. 'Different colors make its blades turn rapidly or lie stationary, move the sculpture about the floor, turn sharp right angles or stay still. Darkness and silence animate the sculpture, while brightness and noise make it still. Ambiguous stimuli ... produce the unpredictability of the organism."

Schoffer, Tinguely, Takis and the new tendency sculptors "implant the sculpture with sophisticated devices to give one the sense that its animation has been motivated by some aspect of the sculpture's environment" Calder also, but with less technology.

Calder's mobiles have a 'delicate equilibrium'

[15, p216]
from Calder "When I use two circles of wire intersecting at right angles, this to me is a sphere ... what I produce is not precisely what I have in mind -- but a sort of sketch, a man-made approximation.

virtual volume

[15, p216]
"The path of Calder's mobiles leads from Gabo's abstract geometries to the anthropomorphic content of the body's intermittent action."

Calders sculptures have INTERMITTENT motion rather than MECHANICALLY CONTINUOUS motion, which gives them more of a relation to the body (or organisms) than to machines.

[15, p220]
mobile, meaning something that moves, also means 'motive' in French
the course of mobiles did not provide for artistic variation. Calder and George Rickey were able to have a strong voice. Rickey's mobiles utilize a 'knife-edge fulcrum' technique and use plane geometry in opposition to the curvilinear vocabulary of Calder. mobile production was intense in the 1960s, led into...

objects with internal movement
"Automatically programmed and specifically staged as performances, this sculpture is meant to "enact" itself.

Len Lye, The Loop (there is a good quote in Burnam)

"unfolding temporal and dramatic events"

kinesthetic

[15, p 220]
little info on Tinguely and Bury