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Actually Existing Sculpture

Julian Stallabrass

In a well-known article published in 1979, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’,


Rosalind Krauss wrote that some very strange items had lately attracted the term
‘sculpture’, so that the concept seemed to be in the process of becoming ‘infinitely
malleable’, and indeed to be in danger of collapse. She saw the core role and concept
of sculpture as having been eroded by a questioning of its monumental and memorial
functions, and that in its dissipation, sculpture had become part of a group of related
practices (which encompassed performance, land art, appropriation, installation, and
so on). What could be firmly identified as ‘sculpture’ was defined only negatively, as
that which did not fit into the categories of ‘landscape’ or ‘architecture’. The field
which she mapped has persisted, and while museums and galleries display lots of
things that look sculptural, few of them are unequivocally sculptures, and there are
few artists who would describe themselves as sculptors.

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Much of this development was driven by forces internal to the art world, in dialogue
with its histories, and in the continual centrifugal forces that push artists to distinguish
themselves from one another through the colonisation of new materials, methods,
theories and concerns. The art world, though, drawn as it is to converse with itself, is
also affected by the wider culture: it is repulsed by practices that speak too directly of
those artistic pasts that are found embarrassing in the present, and by most forms of
standardised mass culture. Jeff Koons’ reproduction of kitsch popular figurines safely
distance artist and viewer from the sentiments expressed in the source material
through an amused and detached pastiche. Like the documentary lens, Koons focuses
attention on an aspect of a pre-existing scene, though he does it in three dimensions.
The results may look like sculpture but the act of appropriation grants them the cachet
of fine art.

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Yet, as soon as we chose to look, Koons’ source material—popular and mass-
produced ‘sculpture’—is all around us. Given the ease and cheapness of its
manufacture, new materials (fibreglass resins which can be made to look like marble,
bronze or porcelain, and various commercial stone substitutes) and new uses for old
ones (such as concrete), along with the intensity of commercial culture and the
growing magnitude of our own consumption, the environment is more densely
populated with sculpture than ever. It is found in shops and garden centres,
workplaces and homes, as municipal adornment, and is frequently used to attempt to
bring a unique sense of place into those areas that threaten to become non-places.

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It encompasses delicate figurines, kept behind glass, and monumental pieces (I will
never forget glimpsing, from a Belfast bus, a seven-foot gorilla peering over a garden
wall); the cheapest plastic souvenir, including objects that have the status of ironic
jokes, or a unique hand-crafted carving, embodying the noblest of sentiments. The
sculptures that people buy for themselves often convey an array of emotions long
banished from contemporary art: they strive to be pious, heroic or cute, to mark the
exuberance of youth or the companionship of maturity, to be funny or affable, to be
objects of veneration or bathos. For many viewers schooled in the sophistication of
high art, these sculptures may fail in their apparent task but for the millions who buy
and house them, they speak of ideals and feelings that exceed their commercial and
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off-the-peg origins. The Madonna of the air-conditioning unit, or the appearance of
Lenin at sunset amid a kitchen’s spice jars, point to an attempt to leaven mundane life
with the ideals endangered by it. Even the careful and artful arrangement of figurines,
mannequins and props by shop-window dressers may show the way in which the
business of selling must, to be successful, gesture towards ideals (of love and
romance, say) that lie beyond consumption.

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When sculpture is placed in the public realm, or in the quasi-public, privatised space
of the shopping centre or corporate lobby, its failures become readily visible as it is
treated with indifference or hostility. Pedestals may be used as tables and sculptures
as climbing frames. With older works, both traditional and modernist, the heroic
images and ideals of the past seem to mock our banal and degraded present, and the
response is often to scrawl on them, mutilate them or even throw them to the ground.

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For others, sculpture is simply the site of work, another object to be lifted, packed and
unpacked, moved from one place to another or displayed for potential buyers. You
gain a different relation to an object when you have to lift or sell it.

The photographs in this project (of which a small sample is shown here) are not meant
to stand aloof from their subjects. They are straightforward notes about our typical
commercial environment, and the behaviours, idealist and negatory, that it regularly
fosters. They are a way of exploring the utopian urges inherent in ‘actually existing
sculpture’, and how they punctuate an environment that has structurally opposed areas
of cleansed and stark heritage and corporate sheen set against the unplanned but
predictable consequences of an agglomeration of functions and neglects: the heavily
trafficked and rubbish-strewn street, for example. This sculpture tells its viewers
things that the quasi-sculptural objects of the art world conceal: it clearly declares its
status as a commodity, it bears the marks of its public reception, and it inhabits and is
exposed to the impoverished environment to which it is such an inadequate but
insistent response.

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