The aim of most kinetic sculptors is to make movement itself an integral part of the design of the sculpture and not merely to suggest movement within a static object. Calder’s mobiles, for example, depend for their aesthetic effect on constantly changing patterns of relationship. When liquids and gases are used as components, the shapes and dimensions of the sculpture may undergo continual transformations. The movement of smoke; the diffusion and flow of coloured water, mercury, oil, and so on; pneumatic inflation and deflation; and the movement of masses of bubbles have all served as media for kinetic sculpture. In the complex, electronically controlled “spatio-dynamic” and “lumino-dynamic” constructions of Nicolas Schöffer, the projection of changing patterns of light into space is a major feature.
The environmental sculptor creates new spatial contexts that differ from anything developed by traditional sculpture. The work no longer confronts the spectator as an object but surrounds him so that he moves within it as he might within a stage set, a garden, or an interior. The most common type of environment is the “room,” which may have specially shaped and surfaced walls, special lighting effects, and many different kinds of contents. Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (destroyed in 1943) was the first of these rooms, which now include the nightmare fantasy of Edward Kienholz’s tableaux, such as Roxy’s (1961) or The Illegal Operation (1962); George Segal’s compositions, in which casts of clothed human figures in frozen, casual attitudes are placed in interiors; and rooms built of mirrors, such as Yayoi Kusama’s Endless Love Room and Lucas Samaras’s Mirrored Room, in both of which the spectator himself, endlessly reflected, becomes part of the total effect.
Environmental sculpture. “Mirrored Room,” mirror on wood by Lucas Samaras, 1966. In the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. 305 × 244 cm.Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, gift of Seymour H. Knox; photograph courtesy of the Pace Gallery, New York
Environmental art, in common with collage and assemblage, has tended toward greater concreteness not by making a more realistic representation, as naturalistic art does, but by including more of reality itself in the work; for example, by using casts taken from the actual human body, real clothes, actual objects and casts of objects, actual lighting effects, and real items of furniture. Plastic elements may be combined with music and sound effects, dance, theatrical spectacles, and film to create so-called happenings, in which real figures are constituents of the “artwork” and operations are performed not on “artistic” materials but are performed on real objects and on the actual environment. Ideas such as these go far beyond anything that has ever before been associated with the term sculpture. Representational sculpture
Sculpture in the round is much more restricted than relief in the range of its subject matter. The representation of, say, a battle scene or a cavalcade in the round would require a space that corresponded in scale in every direction with that occupied by an actual battle or cavalcade. No such problems arise in relief because the treatment of scale and relations in depth is to some extent notional, or theoretical, like that of pictures. Then again, because a relief is attached to a background, problems of weight and physical balance and support do not arise. Figures can be represented as floating in space and can be arranged vertically as well as horizontally. Thus, in general, sculpture in the round is concerned with single figures and limited groups, while reliefs deal with more complex “pictorial” subjects involving crowds, landscape, architectural backgrounds, and so on. The human figure
The principal subject of sculpture has always been the human figure. Next in importance in historical work are animals and fantastic creatures based on human and animal forms. Other subjects—for example, landscape, plants, still life, and architecture—have served primarily as accessories to figure sculpture, not as subjects in their own right, except as decorative elements within architecture or as precious carved witticisms such as those of the British wood-carver Grinling Gibbons. The overwhelming predominance of the human figure is due: first, to its immense emotional importance as an object of desire, love, fear, respect, and, in the case of anthropomorphic gods, worship; and, second, to its inexhaustible subtlety and variety of form and expression. The nude or almost nude figure played a prominent role in Egyptian, Indian, Greek, and African sculpture, while in medieval European and ancient Chinese sculpture the figure is almost invariably clothed. The interplay of the linear and modeled forms of free draperies with the solid volumes of the human body was of great interest to Classical sculptors and later became one of the principal themes of Renaissance and post-Renaissance sculpture. The human figure continues to be of central importance in modern sculpture in spite of the growth of nonfigurative art; but the optimistic, idealized, or naturalistic images of man prevalent in previous ages have been largely replaced by images of despair, horror, deformation, and satire. Devotional images and narrative sculpture
The production of devotional images has been one of the sculptor’s main tasks, and many of the world’s greatest sculptures are of this kind. They include images of Buddha and the Hindu gods; of Christ, the Virgin, and the Christian saints; of Athena, Aphrodite, Zeus, and other Greek gods; and of all the various gods, spirits, and mythical beings of Rome, the ancient Near East, pre-Columbian America, Black Africa, and the Pacific Islands.
ShakyamuniBuddha Shakyamuni, metal, copper alloy with traces of paint, Uttar Pradesh, India, late 6th century; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Photograph by Howard Cheng. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of the Michael J. Connell Foundation, M.70.17
Closely connected with devotional images are all of the commemorative narrative sculptures in which legends, heroic deeds, and religious stories are depicted for the delight and instruction of peoples who lived when books and literacy were rare. The Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian traditions are especially rich in narrative sculpture. Stories of the incarnations of Buddha—Jataka—and of the Hindu gods abounded in the temple sculpture of India and Southeast Asia; for example, at Sanchi, Amaravati, Borobudur, and Angkor. Sculpture illustrating the stories of the Bible is so abundant in medieval churches that the churches have been called “Bibles in stone.” Sculpture recounting the heroic deeds of kings and generals are common, especially in Assyria and Rome. The Romans made use of a form known as continuous narrative, the best known example of which is the spiral, or helical, band of relief sculpture that surrounds Trajan’s Column (c. ad 106–113) and tells the story of the Emperor’s Dacian Wars. The episodes in the narrative are not separated into a series of framed compositions but are linked to form a continuous band of unbroken relief.
Trajan's ColumnDetail of Trajan's Column, Rome, depicting the Roman emperor's victories beyond the Danube River.© Tiziano Casalta/Dreamstime.com
Portraiture
Portraiture was practiced by the Egyptians but was comparatively rare in the ancient world until the Greeks and Romans made portrait sculpture one of their major artistic achievements. The features of many famous people are known to modern man only through the work of Roman sculptors on coins and medals, portrait busts, and full-length portraits. Portraiture has been an important aspect of Western sculpture from the Renaissance to the present day. Some of the best known modern portrait sculptors are Rodin, Charles Despiau, Marino Marini, and Jacob Epstein. Scenes of everyday life