Paisid Aramphongphan, “The Skin Is Faster Than the Word”: Some Notes on the Body’s “Thingness”
This talk opens with Paul Thek’s self-cast sculptural works from the 1960s, which simulated mutilated flesh and bodily fragments. Prompted by an encounter with dried-up human corpses in a catacomb, Thek (1933-1988) spoke of the body’s “thingness,” to a certain extent equalizing the liveness of his body with that of his creation. In the same time period, choreographers such as Simone Forti (1935-) were making performance pieces that displayed the kinesthetic intelligence of the responsive body, opening a door toward viewing bodies as continually self-organizing things—sculpture, even. Two versions of human thingness, one drawing on a religious relic tradition, the other on somatic inquiry, they both connect us to other beings in the more-than-human world.
Elise Archias, Firm Boundaries: Melvin Edwards in the 1960s
Melvin Edwards’ reliance on interiority as a formal element in his 1960s sculptures sets him apart from his contemporaries who rejected modern ideas about the human in favor of newer emphases on surface and system. Though women, black Americans, and the formerly colonized were beginning to make good on their entitlement to modern selfhood and its political rights during these years, the work of many of Edwards’ white peers has been celebrated by postmodernists for undermining the ontological status of the subject. Today, Edwards’ model of relationship seems to hold more promise.
Caitlin Meehye Beach, Edmonia Lewis’ Relief Work
In his groundbreaking text Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (1916), Freeman Henry Morris Murray wrote of sculpture’s singular ability to “say something” about the history of slavery and its abolition. His statement was at once provocative and enigmatic: what could (and did) sculpture do at the ends of slavery? This paper considers one possibility by way of the work of Edmonia Lewis, who during the American Civil War modeled a series of plaster sculptures depicting abolitionists and war heroes. Focusing on their display at relief fairs for Black soldiers, their families, and formerly enslaved people, it explores the ways sculpture might work as a praxis through which individual bodies and civic collectives might be forged anew.
Patricia Ekpo, Site, Specificity, and Antiblackness: Maren Hassinger’s Freeway Sculpture
In 1977 and 1978, black female sculptor Maren Hassinger created several freeway sculptures in central and south Los Angeles with federal and state funding and support. The siting of these artworks at the intersections of major L.A. highways and roadways emerged from myriad racial and political factors that informed the artists’ desires and state imperatives. This talk uses these works to engage art historical and ideological tenets of site specificity, whose seemingly politically radical aims seek to trouble the autonomy of the art object by bringing the specific context of place to bear on its ontology. Utilizing an understanding of the fixedly unsettled spatial dynamics of anti/blackness—what Frantz Fanon termed “vertigo”—I argue that the use of site to ideologically contextualize, inform, and even critique the art object and its ground still upholds ideas of the universality and transcendence of the aesthetic and its attendant white modern Western conception of the human.
David J. Getsy (Keynote), Scott Burton’s Embrace
Scott Burton was one of the most well-known proponents of the new public art in the United States in the 1980s, and his work involved making site-specific sculptures of furniture that anonymously served the passerby. These seemingly innocuous functional artworks, however, were based in Burton’s long-running investigation into the queer experiences of public behavior, cruising, BDSM, and tactical dissemblance. Burton’s sculptures hide in plain sight, and this talk will examine their undetectability in the context of the first decade of the ongoing AIDS crisis. Burton’s sculpture was both materially and conceptually tied up with the cultural battles over representation and contagion, and his works allow for an alternate account of the visibility politics that tend to dominate histories of AIDS and queer art in the 1980s. Burton’s contribution, I will argue, was his reimagining of sculpture’s long-standing associations with embodiment and the figure through his sculptures’ self-abnegation, practice of support, and facilitation of contact—both physical and social.
Aaron Glass, What is a Mask? Indigenous Ontologies of Carving and Kinship
Figural sculpture is often approached as a medium and mechanism for visual depiction. Among Indigenous peoples along the North Pacific Coast, wooden carvings are also means of instantiating ephemeral rights and embodying ancestral kin connections. In the context of a collaborative project to produce a critical edition of Franz Boas and George Hunt’s groundbreaking 1897 monograph, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, this paper troubles the taxonomic legacy of art historical and anthropological attention to both iconography and authenticity by foregrounding Kwakwaka’wakw ontologies of ceremonial regalia and other hereditary belongings.
Aglaya Glebova, Sculpture’s Growing Pains: Vera Mukhina, 1936–37
This presentation examines the making of Vera Mukhina’s monumental steel sculpture The Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937), an icon of socialist realism and textbook “bad object” of interwar modernism. The monument’s scale and material posed unique challenges of reproduction and augmentation, problems that despite the seemingly industrial ethos of the work called up the fragility and organic plasticity of the human body. Informed by the institutional frameworks of socialist realism and the World Fair, the collective and often speculative labor of its making, and scalar and material constraints, this surprisingly delicate sculpture belied its subject and strained the limits of its medium, embodying the tenuous integrity of the “human” during the interwar.
Sarah Hamill, Skins, Husks, Coffins, Voids: Mary Miss in the 1970s
Focusing on Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, the temporary sculpture Mary Miss constructed in 1978, this paper looks at how Miss shaped bodily containers, haunting devices to encase the body within, as one part of her sculptural practice. These works stage a feminist politics of precarity and a newly relational humanism. Built in alternative sites, on the edges of the mainstream art world, Miss’s sculptures carved out a space for a publicly accessible and psychically-charged sculpture that eschewed discourses of Land art for a feminist, responsive encounter with site.
Kajri Jain, Concrete Becoming and Unbecoming
Since 2018, India holds the record for the world’s tallest statue: a figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel, built at an existing mega-dam named after him. Its sculptor Ram Sutar’s first monumental statue (1962) anthropomorphically embodied the river goddess Chambal Devi, also at a big dam. Built in concrete, these statues and dams assemble canonical and novel poetics, oscillating between sculpture and infrastructure, figure and ground, condensed and expanded field. But Sutar’s proposal for a sculpture of laborers at another dam site remained unrealized. What becomes of the human at such sites, between icons of divine nature and the state?
Namiko Kunimoto, Performing Memorial Sculpture: Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism, and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism
This presentation revisits the events surrounding the 2019 Aichi Triennale, with a special focus on the feminist artist, scholar, and activist Shimada Yoshiko. I argue that Shimada’s performance work, Being a Statue of a Japanese “Comfort Woman,” is not simply about memorializing the past, but instead seeks to reveal how militarized sexual violence and social violence are ripple effects that share the same origin: a form of bourgeois liberalism that upholds patriarchy, attempts to maintain an image of societal unity, and disavows responsibility for the past.
Megan R. Luke (Keynote), Mother Right: Carola Giedion-Welcker and the Prehistory of Modern Sculpture
This talk revisits the art and literary criticism of German-Swiss art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893–1973) with a focus on her influential history of sculpture as a contemporary art, Moderne Plastik (Modern Plastic Art), first published in 1937. Inspired by her reading of Johann Jakob Bachofen, Leo Frobenius, and James Joyce, Giedion-Welcker juxtaposed work by modern European sculptors with prehistoric art, ethnographica, geological formations, and dance performance to make the case that all belonged outside of history conceived as an exclusively written chronicle of past time. Sculpture signified a primal will-to-form encoded in organic life, and imagined through photography, it registered an atavistic impulse at the heart of modernity.
Christa Noel Robbins, Figure Painting
This paper questions sculpture’s status as a privileged object in the investigation of human embodiment by describing Lee Lozano’s pictorial approach to the embodied subject. Diverging from minimalism’s contemporaneous emphasis on the experience of a generalized, universal viewer, Lozano figures a specific maker in and through pictorial experiment. By centering making over viewing, an alternative approach to understanding art’s potential contribution to a phenomenological inquiry is proposed—one that reasserts the distinction between phenomenal experience and phenomenology—and considers the value of pictorial figuration in the study of embodied experience.
Robert Slifkin, Sculpture as Cenotaph, or, Minimalism and Mortality
One of the central features of the modern work of art is its capacity to outlive both its creator and every subsequent generation of beholders. Understood as durable bodily surrogates whose material permanence and institutional preservation ensure that they will temporally surpass the finitude of the human body, works of art have traditionally served as a crucial means of marking time and cosmic orientation. This paper will consider how the various strategies of aesthetic contingency and material impermanence associated with minimalism challenged these longstanding precepts of artistic longevity, at once aligning the art object with the mortal human body and in turn proposing alterative models of social organization.
Irene V. Small, Walls, Skins, Organic Things: On the Sociality of the Threshold
This presentation explores how the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s concept of the organic line potentializes the wall as a social, economic, and affective threshold. Comparing Clark’s 1955 architectural maquettes with period architectures and Le Corbusier’s formulations of a “machine for living,” I propose that Clark’s maquettes introvert the organic as a defining quality of the architectural seam, offering up a mutant model of how sociality congeals within surface and space. While the organic line invites us to attend to zones of facilitation and expediency, it also indicates how such channels swell and stick, thwarting protocols for ever smoother globalization today.
Sanjukta Sunderason, To ‘absorb the broken world through the human modular’: Meera Mukherjee’s Ashoka at Kalinga (1972) as Epic Form
This paper will use the Indian sculptor’s Meera Mukherjee’s 1972 work Ashoka at Kalinga as an entry point to reflect on the unique positionality of sculpture as a genre of postcolonial humanism in the decades of decolonization in the 1940s-1970s. A meditative work made under the shadow of violence, not only within Mukherjee’s hometown of Calcutta (now Kolkata) but also across national, regional, and global scales in the early-1970s, Ashoka at Kalinga becomes a surrogate for making tangible aesthetic enunciations of violence and liberation, and entangled temporalities of the universal and the particular.