The Work of Sculpture: Object Encounters within Art History and Everyday Life
This panel seeks critical approaches to sculpture (broadly conceived to include objects, installations, environments, and architectural-based work) through different modalities of encounter, that is, how observers engage with art in ways conventional art historical narratives of autonomy, interpretation, and beholding cannot fully address. How we use artworks is a key element of these encounters. For example, we use art objects to think, imagine, exchange, and enact emotional and affective experiences, particularly those affording difference, ambivalence, wonder. Transdisciplinary encounters with research, practice, making, and theorizing artworks highlight the “complexity of language, subjectivity, symbolic practices, affects, and aesthetics” that produce meaning within our encounters (Pollock 2018). From Julia Bryan-Wilson’s “counter-monographic” study of Louise Nevelson that explores a queer feminist reading of sculptural embodiment; to Delcy Morelos’ immersive environments of textile, fibers, clay, and soil evocative of human and ecosystemic relationships; to Julia Phillips’ ceramic and metal sculptures conjoining tools, prosthetics, and body parts suggestive of interpersonal object relationships, encounters with three-dimensional work afford viewers divergent ways to engage with hybrid experiences in everyday life and world. The work of sculpture is meant to suggest the materiality and labor of making, the cultural, archival, emotional, and psychological work of attending to objects with care and imagination, but also the critical ways that artworks can be said to “work on” viewers. Open to global perspectives on the theme of encounter, the panel welcomes intersectional studies on sculpture including (but not limited to) anthropological, ecological, political, phenomenological, feminist, race, queer, gender, and disability frameworks.
Session Convenor:
Lynn M. Somers
Speakers:
Victoria MacBeath, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
The Object before the Object: Embodied Encounters with Craft
Indigenous artist and art historian Mikinaak Migwans (2022) asserts that the museum is what turns objects into objects – that through its bureaucracy and archival practices it reduces agential materials into still and studied things. How then, might art historians breathe life and agency back into these objects? This paper takes up Migwans’ suggestion that a relational form of engagement with archival objects might act as an animating form of research. To do so, I turn methodologically to material culture studies: considering the full life cycle of crafted objects to unpick what a careful and relational archival encounter with craft might reveal about the life of the object before it becomes an object. In taking this approach, I argue, we enable ourselves as art historians to attend to the fullness of the crafted object’s being and agency. A consideration of the life cycle of the object – what has been, what is now, and what will come – offers greater insight than less contextually-grounded approaches can provide.
To ground this work in materials, I engage with a hooked rug located in the archives of the Acadian Museum in New Brunswick, Canada, to consider what evidence of creation and use might teach us about the life of this rug before it was archived. What might evidence of use, and attention to materials and the method of making reveal about the way that we are encountering this object now? The answer to this, I assert, is revealed to us through a material culture approach.
Laura Lake Smith, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Making Change: Enacting Mutability and Agency in Richard Tuttle’s Untitled (Paper Cubes)
Richard Tuttle’s Untitled (Paper Cubes) (1964) is a series of porous ten three-inch cubes, each of which is laboriously and differently hand-formed from a single sheet of standard cardstock by scored lines and intricate foldings. Rather than rely on firm plans, Tuttle’s process is dictated by making change—that is, in exploring the iterative differences and possibilities that emerge in and over time in the modes of thinking, acting and making. Small in scale and light in weight, the fragile cubes were intended to be touched and held. Amid close looking, pencil markings that served as guidelines in composing the cubes remain evident and have been subsequently smudged on the cubes’ creamy surfaces. In part, such smearing is due to Tuttle’s handling amid the complicated processes of making, but it is also the effect of viewer engagement in the acts of touching, holding and even rearranging the cubes, which importantly evoke building blocks and encourage viewers to participate in a seemingly simple act of agency that has significant metaphorical resonance. As this paper will explore, in Tuttle’s paper cubes, there is a double but entangled articulation of the term “work”—the creative labors of the artist and the creative actions of the viewer—both of which test our capacity as subjects to embrace mutability and agency, in art as in life. For, to find oneself in the processes of Tuttle’s work is also to find oneself with the processes of the world and with the capacity for making change.
Ivan Knapp, University of York
Relating Objects, 2016/2021
As digital media continue to exacerbate social division and galvanise reactionary political movements, this paper explores the ways in which sculpture offers something unique, a method of production and reception that revolves around the physical nature of materials as well as a vehicle to engage with cultural heritage. Focussing on recent works by the sculptor Rachel Harrison that address the nexus of far-right populism and digital media in US politics, I ask what is at stake in the encounter with a sculpture’s material qualities in a contemporary mode of circulation and dissemination in which compression algorithms reduce physical objects into interchangeable image file formats. Mobilizing theoretical approaches drawn from psychoanalysis, conceptual art, and digital cultures, I suggest that Harrison’s installations can be understood in a broader context of instances of contemporary sculpture that have reinvested the medium as a site of political resistance and a vehicle for critique of the social and technological conditions which characterise our contemporary image culture.
Tess McCoy, Florida State University
Embodying Interconnectedness and Indigenous Worldviews in Hannah Claus’s our minds are one
Many contemporary Indigenous artists reference continuities between the past and present of their communities by utilizing an Indigenous aesthetic that engages customary practices alongside innovative methods. Multidisciplinary artist Hannah Claus (Kanien’kehá:ka/English) foregrounds Indigenous stories, concepts, and symbols while working with new media and techniques to create dynamic sculptural installations. In the suspended dome-shaped installation our minds are one (2014),Claus illustrates cultural knowledge and relationships coming from Kanien’kehá:ka and Haudenosaunee practices using visual metaphors of connection to evoke the ongoing existence of her cultural heritage. The title, shape, and creation process reference the Thanksgiving Address, the Sky Dome, and Wampum Belts, which each have historical and contemporary ties to her community and reference proper ways of being in the world. Claus also physically represents the teaching of interconnectedness by inviting viewers to duck underneath and move around the lightweight acetate circles and threads hanging from the ceiling. As the viewers’ bodies disrupt the stillness of the work, this intimate and personal relationship to the piece embodies the larger understanding of relationships between the human and more-than-human worlds. This paper engages with our minds are one on two fronts, the connection between customary knowledge and its materialization in the work and how the viewers’ intimate engagement with the piece is a manifestation of the principle of interconnectedness, to argue that in this complex installation, the artist centers Indigenous worldviews so that Native and non-Native audiences can physically and mentally acknowledge their role as active participants in the world.
Susan Richmond, Georgia State University
Day after Day: Jackie Winsor’s Material Negotiations
Most accounts of Jackie Winsor’s (1941–2024) career concur: her work’s importance lies in its intensive material processes. Indeed, Winsor doubled down on studio work in the 1970s as many of her peers abandoned conventional object-making. Sculptural form still held the potential for surprise, even though her approach entailed, in Anne Wagner’s apt words, “no white heat of creativity.” Admiring Winsor’s prosaic methods, Wagner and others have written favorably about their contradictory results: eloquent and awkward, restrained and obsessive, obdurate and inviting. The coexistence of these qualities warrants further study.
Instead of the white heat of creativity, Winsor chose the slow burn of repetitive muscular tasks. Actions such as joining, binding, compressing, and molding enabled her to explore the integrity of her materials and their ability to work in tandem to produce a unitary form. The labor of (in her words) “putting things together a lot” imbued her sculptures with a dynamic, embodied history of material negotiations. Attending to this history through close readings of specific works, I have two objectives: first, to demonstrate how Winsor’s methods coaxed reciprocities between seemingly oppositional effects and, second, to read her processes through feminist theories of everyday temporality. Rita Felski observes, “Everyday life is above all a temporal term … it conveys the fact of repetition; it refers not to the singular or unique but to that which happens ‘day after day’” (“Invention,” 81). Through her studio practice, Winsor found ethical value in the material relationships that accrue “day after day.”
Tobias Teutenberg, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte
Tempted to Touch: The History of Tactile Art Galleries for the Blind
The aim of the presentation, which is based on archival research that I was able to conduct in the USA, Australia, South Africa and various European institutions, is to reconstruct the epistemic and institutional milestones in the history of the tactile art gallery analytically, critically, and in a global perspective. Tactile art galleries are heterotopias within the functional unit of the museum. They suspend the founding paradigm of these institutions by breaking away from ocularcentrism and liberating their objects for haptic experience. They first emerged in the United States in the early 1960s against the backdrop of the disability rights movement and soon spread around the world. All tactile art galleries were designed for blind and visually disabled people but were also accessible to nonblind visitors. They mainly contained original sculptures and statuettes as well as handicraft objects from all periods of European art history, as well as a large number of objects from ethnological collections (World Art). The history of the tactile gallery is linked to contemporary art historical phenomena such as the participatory approach of environmental art, but also to the methodology of art history. By examining these historical approaches to museum pedagogy for the blind, the talk will also critically engage with contemporary tactile programs in art institutions.