Looking at the Relevence of the Body in Contemporary Sculpture
Saturday, 23 August 2008 17:41

The question of whether the human figure can play a central role in contemporary sculpture continues to be debated. Even those critics seeming to advocate a meaningful role for the human figure, question its real relevance. Kathleen Whitney, in her 1997 article in Sculpture Magazine (now available in Sculpture Magazine Online), The Body is Exhausted, allows for the human body to play a role. However, this role is a supporting one. The body should not appear as subject: it can appear only to lend contextual significance to the work.

She begins the article by tracing the path of the human form as subject matter in sculpture. She explains, “The body, at one time a genuinely transgressive visual trope, has been seriously overworked, beaten out of shape by a plethora of visual, ideological, and formal demands, all of which picture it from one particular vantage point.” She maintained that sculptors, instead of simply focusing on the body as the subject, focus on what the body can mean in a specific context. This concept grows out of post-structuralist narrative.

In this vision, the body is mired in contingency and ambiguity. It is an expression of its culture. The general, who lost his horse in the 19th century, subsequently lost his pedestal and his boots in the early part of the 20th century. He then disappeared altogether. Subsequently, he began making a reappearance, but in a very diminished role. We saw the context of his life and through that the context of our own. In the work of Rod Baer and Steve Barry, we saw the sofa and chairs that he had so recently sat in. This may indeed be “an extremely clever way to expose the personal as a microcosm of the social,” as Kathleen Whitney states, or it may be that the “the body is both metaphor and machine, mirror and mystery.”

Or it may be that the body is more than a metaphor and a mirror. It is our reality and is demanding to be let back in the room. This can be seen by the tremendous growth in the number of sculptors working in a figurative idiom over the last 10 years. For them, the figure is not a metaphor; it is central to our reality. In the words of sculptor Amy Evans McClure, "The figure is me. The figure is you. The figure is an ancient goddess relic from the Paleolithic and as contemporary as Cindy Sherman."