This thesis explores the nature of contemporary sculptural practices in relation to the broader field of installed sculpture (which deploy articulated, interrelated, but autonomous components) and in the context of recent approaches to both curation and display. The artistic work and attendant commentary constitute a response to the issues of sculptural agency and display raised by both the practice-based outcomes and key works of several contemporary artists: Gabriel Kuri, Gedi Sibony, Melanie Counsell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Michael Dean. In a number of exhibitions ‘post-installation’ practices and the function of ‘montage’ sculpture is examined. Through outlining the current landscape of sculptural production and medium specificity a progressive notion of the monument is established. The sculptural artwork is seen to retain a political resistance, as both art-object and thing in the world. An assessment is made of how sculptures produce space within and through their exhibition context, directly related to the production of space as a whole (a social morphology posited by Henri Lefebvre). Applying a conception of time in reference to spatial production opens up the artwork’s potential to draw on complex codes of mnemonic function, which can potentially generate emancipatory agency from ideological issues in late-capitalism. Re-readings of key installed works by Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Mark Dean, through contexts derived from Nietzsche and Mark Fisher, reveal how sculptures can activate specific mnemonic codes, or collective memory. Such art works utilise a ‘forgetful memory’ – a reflexive process of positing, junking and reimagining relationships to cultural information. The body of artistic work produced for this research, intertwined with its critical reflection, makes an original contribution to knowledge by interrogating theoretically and experientially the potentials of ‘the sculptural’, as part of the plural production of art and exhibition-making. By means of practice and its outcomes, the research engages the current dynamics of spatial production and radicality of sculptural objecthood. The work examines the complex relationships between social memory and historicity, with which sculpture in an exhibition environment can engage.

La rencontre entre le cinéma et les arts du volume relève d’un principe de perméabilité. Le travail des cinéastes, qui se sont essayés à l’installation, témoigne de phénomènes d’hybridations connexes. Si le cinéma gagne l’espace d’exposition, c’est pour y retrouver les données séculaires de sa monstration. Le septième art voit dans sa déterritorialisation vers l’objet d’art tridimensionnel, l’expression réaffectée de son histoire. Le déplacement du cinéma dans le champ des œuvres d’art en volume doit donc être interrogé selon un principe de survivance. En feignant d’amortaliser les êtres qu’il capture, le cinéma trouve dans la sculpture un moyen de présentifier la mort. Dans notre travail plastique, cette entreprise passe par un procédé formel reconnaissable : le renversement. De ce geste plastique, dont nous postulons qu’il est métonymique d’une forme d’enfouissement, naît l’idée que le cinéma et la sculpture s’inscrivent tous deux dans un régime funéraire de l’art. / The meeting of cinema and sculpture must be analyzed through a principle of interrelationships. The work of movie directors, who tried to realize sculptures and installations, proves similar phenomena of hybridization. When cinema leaves the theatre for an exhibition, it is also to find again, with the updating of new plastic forms, the secular data of its screening. With its transfer towards the sculpture the cinematographic art acquires the new expression of its personal history. Knowing this, the movement of cinema towards sculpture must also be questioned in the light of a principle of survival. By pretending to a-mortalize the beings that it shoots, the cinema find in sculpture a means to nurture its macabre labour. Besides, this display of death undergoes a very identifiable formal process : the inversion. We may then identify this plastic gesture with the metonymical figure of a burying. Thus, both cinema and sculpture seem to join in a funeral system of art.

Alors que les individus dans la société contemporaine sont unis non par une propriété mais par un devoir et par une dette, par un manque, par une limite prenant la forme d’une charge pour celui qui en est affecté, la postmodernité rend à la mort et à l’absence toute sa densité. À travers la répétition, entre jubilation et désespérance, les artistes figurent la temporalité de l’épreuve par une écriture qui travaille l’instant. Ils racontent ces évènements infimes qui sont les plus fragiles, les plus précaires, ayant pourtant une forte efficacité. Il s’agira ici d’étudier les nouvelles postures devant l’événement historique, quand l’artiste se tient au plus singulier. / While individuals in contemporary society are united not by property but by a duty and a debt, a lack, by a limit taking the shape of a responsibility for the one who is affected, postmodernism returns to death and absence all its density. Through repetition, between jubilation and despair, the artist represents the temporality of the event. His writing works the moment. He tells these tiny events that are the most fragile, the most precarious, having nevertheless a strong efficiency. This thesis will try to study the new postures in front of the historic event, when the artist stands in the most singular.