- Department: History of Art
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: M
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
- See module specification for other years: 2023-24
This module examines the connection between modern sculptural practice and aesthetic thought, with a focus on art and writing in Britain.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
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A | Semester 2 2024-25 |
This course examines the relation between two linked phenomena: the rise of modern sculpture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Britain, and the parallel development of new modes of sculptural encounter, staged in experimental critical writings. What does sculpture do to us, and what do we want it to do? How can we best account for its experiential parameters? In what ways have those parameters changed under conditions of modernity?
Close analysis of both texts and objects will bring into view the special demands that sculpture makes on its viewers as an art of matter, space, and touch as much as one of sight. We will consider the ways writers have registered the phenomenological complexity of the medium—its emphatic three-dimensionality, experienced by embodied viewers in real space and time—along with various attempts that have been made to flatten such complexity out, reducing sculpture to two dimensions on a page. Sculpture’s uneasy adjacency to other mediums, including photography and film, will be examined.
Most of all, attention to the procedures, challenges, and rewards of critical description will enable us to come to works of sculpture themselves with fresh eyes. Visits to local collections, alongside intensive study of reproductions and critical texts, will allow us to develop a precise and flexible vocabulary of our own with which to describe encounters with sculpture’s forms.
Artists considered may include Antonio Canova, Jules Dalou, Auguste Rodin, Hamo Thornycroft, Alfred Gilbert, James Havard Thomas, Medardo Rosso, Camille Claudel, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, R. D. Fergusson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore.
Writers may include Johann Gottfried Herder, William Hazlitt, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edmund Gosse, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, H. D., Carola Giedion-Welcker, R. H. Wilenski, Adrian Stokes, Robert Lowell, Rosalind Krauss.
By the end of the module, students should have acquired:
Task | % of module mark |
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Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
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