Sculpture

Week 1 Day 7: Sculpture

What is Sculpture?

My sculpture art class had an entire discussion of what we should consider or what qualities as sculpture. We looked at both the noun's and the verb's definitions.

Noun: the art of carving, modeling, welding, or otherwise producing figurative or abstract works of art in three dimensions, as in relief, intaglio, or in the round.

Verb: to carve, model, weld, or otherwise produce (a piece of sculpture).

We looked into the intention of the artist or designer. for instance is a chair sculpture or a craft? Our class agreed that if the creator of the chair intended it to be sculpture then it is a piece of sculpture.

Then my instructor posed the question of virtual space in the computer. Could something virtual be considered sculpture? Here we enter the world of grey. Art is already subjective and there is no wrong or right to art, but reading the above definitions we see that is never says that virtual sculpture is sculpture.

I was one of the few in my classroom who said that a virtual piece of sculpture could be considered as a sculpture. I do not make the clay, but I manipulate it to create a sculpture. A computer artist may have made the program of just manipulated the program to create the desired effect. My clay art takes up space in inches or feet, a virtual art piece takes up space in the mega bytes form.

Now it is true that with a virtual piece of art you can only view a 3-D object through a 2-D screen, however what if I take a picture of my clay sculpture and show it to you?

I admit I am torn with this because I openly admit that if the assignment was to make a close to perfect sphere, I used clay while another student used the computer. I would probably be enraged that the hours I spent trying to work with the clay to give me a perfect sphere while the computer already knows the mathematics to give a close to perfect sphere with a couple of clicks with a mouse. Plus virtual art has its own category in the art realm.

I guess I have to agree with what the class agreed on. If the artist intends it to be a piece of sculpture - it is. End of Story. Be it clay, wood, metal or virtual. As long as it takes up space, and is a 3-D object. How it's viewed (photograph or computer screen or in person) is irrelevant. The artist is the creator and decides what its create should be considered.

Just as a side note: My favorite sculpture would be Gian Lorenzo Bernini. His work Rape of Persephone is shown throughout this blog.