Dissertation submitted in partial compliance with the requirements for the Master's Degree in Technology: Fine Art, Durban Institute of Technology, Durban, 2004. / This dissertation investigates the use of clay as a medium in contemporary sculpture made between 1980 and 2003. This research focuses specifically on discussing the artists' (both sculptors and ceramists) different approaches and attitudes to working with clay, from construction, manipulation, firing and glazing techniques through to their personal aesthetics and ideas. This dissertation examines how and why the contemporary sculptor trained in Fine Art is increasingly using clay as a medium in which to work. In addition, the candidate discusses the work of ceramic artists that have moved away from the constraints of earlier, more traditional, functional ceramics and have sought to push the boundaries of clay usage in terms of size, scale, mass and concept. Chapter One presents a broad historical overview of the use of clay in sculpture. This overview illustrates the depth and breadth of the use of clay in the making of sculpture, spanning the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, in order to highlight the significant shift in the use of clay in contemporary sculpture. Chapter Two introduces and discusses a number of contemporary sculptors who work in clay in different ways. Section One examines artists using clay and other materials in the creation of installations. These include Antony Gormley and Andy Goldsworthy. Section Two discusses those artists working with clay in large-scale, including Jun Kaneko and Wilma Cruise. The architectural and environmental use of clay materials is discussed in Section Three; this includes artists John Roloff, who works with the kiln as sculpture and Joyce Kohl, who works with adobe assemblages and steel. / M

Alternative to meeting a calculus of quality roundness and curves are everywhere. Peaches, pinks, browns, ochres, greens. Klein Blue. --------- An experiment like a party; the hows and whys of picking bedfellows yields a list of possibilities— iterations of better, advantages in flesh volume. Inventory whittled down to give us stories, aspirations, allegiances. --------- Just to see it and touch it. Build in different ways, depending. Grow, cover, carve, cast—let for flexibility. Limbs in one direction sawed off, turned round, glued back on. If it looks like two more ways of how I want it there’s more work to be done.

The present thesis examines the notion of “sculptural frame” through a meticulous analysis of the spatial practices observable in British Sculpture from the 20th and 21st centuries. The sculptural medium having been left out of the theoretical debate surrounding the frame’s artistic definition and application, this study’s aim is to make up for this lacuna by focusing on the interdependent relationship between three essential sculptural elements: the body (of the artist and of the beholder), the object and, of course, space. Beginning with Henry Moore and closing with a side-by-side analysis of Rachel Whiteread and Antony Gormley, this research puts forth two fundamental paradigms developed in the first half of the past century – Landscape and Architecture – which articulate much of sculpture’s spatial evolution on the British Isles. Moore’s generation interpreted Landscape as an ideological frame which served both as the origin and the destination of sculpture. Richard Long’s conceptual generation gave this frame a sense of spatial self-sufficiency by dematerializing art, rendering the frame boundless. Anthony Caro, by adopting an architectonic vernacular, progressively welcomed the beholder’s body into inhabitable frame-like sculptures -- a spatial dialogue continued yet re-envisaged by Gormley and Whiteread, who respectively stimulate and negate the sentient spectator. These paradigmatic evolutions reveal a shift in prism in the ’70s, which goes hand in hand with an increasingly internalized spatial trajectory as sculptors transition from a material focus to a corporal one. Based on these spatial assessments, the present thesis challenges the current understanding of the “dividing frame”, proving it to be inadequate, and proposes – using the studied corpuses as argumentative examples – a novel definition of the sculptural frame as an encompassing one. / Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This study reappraises the role and value of statues (i.e. the figure as sculpture) in order to determine what happens when we encounter these objects. The consideration and construction of statues in my studio practice has generated specific insights into statues as person-shaped objects and into our encounter with these objects. From the perspective of a practice making statues this study addresses how, through the encounter, statues both stimulate and obscure our perceptions of them as objects. My practitioner's understanding of statues is articulated and enlarged by developing methods which allowed me to gain an expanded perspective of my practice, through data collected from conversations about statues, and via a subsequent diffractive dialogue with concepts gleaned from other disciplines. This research process has revealed specific characteristics of the encounter, and of statues themselves, that have been excluded or obscured by familiar assumptions and theories, such as a tacit consideration of statues that allows us to be unsettled by their nudity, or the role touch plays in considering statues, and ultimately the history of the object itself. These findings are considered through a sustained engagement with Object Oriented Ontology (after Harman). Through this process, my initial findings are subsequently expanded and further enhance a re-conception of the encounter and of statues as objects. Finally, I argue for the importance of considering this reappraisal of the role the encounter with statues could play in revealing and reframing our relations with objects more generally.

Hailed in his time as the greatest living artist, Antonio Canova (1757-1822) expressed his genius not only through the masterful conception and carving of his sculptures, but also in the meticulous orchestration of their display. Enshrining his marble figures alongside plaster casts of ancient works, bathing them in candlelight, staining and waxing their surfaces, and even setting them in motion on rotating bases, Canova challenged his audiences to rethink the very nature of sculpture. My dissertation argues, for the first time, that the meanings and impact of Canova's sculpture depended in significant part on the ways in which he and his patrons exhibited them. Canova himself began staging his work in Rome in the 1780s. His patrons, following the artist's lead, subsequently mounted their own dramatic exhibitions of Canova's work. Organized as a series of case studies, the dissertation examines four key exhibitions of Canova's work in four major European centers--Rome, Naples, Venice and Paris--from 1780-1843. These exhibitions had multiple functions. On the one hand, they enabled Canova to showcase his artistic talent and allowed his patrons to advertise their wealth and good taste. More importantly, however, these exhibitions required viewers to transform their interaction with Canova's sculptures into performative moments in which they displayed their own historical, cultural and artistic knowledge. Viewers of Canova's work performed their own position as beholders, and, indeed, my dissertation is as preoccupied with the reception of Canova's sculptures as it is with his and his patrons' display strategies. Not only do viewers' accounts often reveal the particularities of the exhibitions themselves, but the intensity of beholders' responses to Canova's work also signals the way that his sculptures took on a wide-variety of meanings that he and his patrons could not always control. Equally striking is the way diverse visitors continued to find meaning, validity, and subjects for debate in Canova's work despite sixty years of political, historical, and social change. Throughout many transformations, Canova's sculptures remained a focal point for discussions of politics, cultural heritage, archaeology, connoisseurship, artistic production and the development of art history itself. I have focused largely on three Italian centers because Italy was the center of origin for many of aspects of Canova's stagings. In Rome, for instance, Canova was introduced to serious study of the antique and it was there that he began to compare his works of art with ancient masterpieces. The display of Triumphant Perseus next to a cast of the Apollo Belvedere, for instance, generated conversations regarding the nature of imitation and the importance setting and political circumstances had on the understanding of his work. In Naples, on the other hand, the exhibition of Venus and Adonis in a tempietto in the garden of Francesco Maria Berio, Marchese di Salza, launched a city-wide debate regarding modes of artistic production and the best means of communicating those artistic possibilities to an audience. In Venice, in 1817, Leopoldo Cicognara juxtaposed Canova's Polinnia with recently restored Venetian Old Master paintings, including Titian's Assumption of the Virgin, in the Accademia di Belle Arti's new public painting gallery. This exhibition reaffirmed the Veneto's artistic authority at a moment when Venice's political fortunes were at their nadir. Given the primacy French art has held in the study of the nineteenth century, I hope serious reevaluation of this period will contribute to a renewed understanding of the importance Italy had for the history of art at the turn of the century. Yet, I conclude the project by focusing on Paris. It was there, in the French capital, where the exhibition of Canova's Penitent Magdalene in the townhouse of Giambattista Sommariva launched a discussion about expression and the emotional resonance of art. Penitent Magdalene's despair encouraged beholders' self-reflection, and in so doing reinforced notions of individuality and the self, established the sculpture as a particularly "French" and modern work, and perhaps more importantly, forged a direct link between emotional resonance and aesthetic value. Throughout Europe, the staging of sculptures organized by Canova and his patrons generated discussion about the appropriate ways to look at, talk about, and write about sculpture. Reactions to Canova's works inspired wide-spread debates about the nature of artistic production, the writing of art history, the context and significance of exhibitions and personal emotional reactions to works of art. My dissertation reimagines Canova's keystone position in the larger art world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by bringing the contexts of exhibition and response into our understanding of the artist and his work.

This dissertation explores a constellation of interrelated, and under-investigated, French and Japanese ceramics spanning the period between 1866, the year that marked the production of the first ceramic set that came to be known as japoniste, and 1904, the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, where contemporaneous Japanese and French ceramics shared a common vocabulary. The historical data I collected in France and Japan and its analysis, through qualitative and quantitative sociological tools, led me to conclude that Japonisme represented a tightly knit social network in which ceramics were used as currency to broker unprecedented links within and between the central binaries of the nineteenth-century French art world: academic/ avant-garde, art/ craft, fine art/ decorative art, painting/ other mediums, intrinsic/ instrumental, representational/ self-referential, and tradition/ innovation. Until now, most attention to Japonisme has been concentrated on the ukiyo-e woodblock prints used instrumentally by the Modernist practitioners of what Duranty called the “new painting.” My study turns our attention to a medium in which cultural power relationships were more evenly balanced, and in which, therefore, we can trace how two cultures can interact productively. Japanese ceramics taught French collectors and artists how to begin to discern between Chinese and Japanese traditions and to “read” the cultural references embedded in Japanese decoration. Also, French collectors’ antiquarian interest in Japanese ceramics was readily matched by French potters who reformed their practice and altered hierarchies of medium by drawing on the European arabesque tradition, the Rococo Revival, and the Japanese aesthetic of playfulness. In return, Meiji- and Taisho-period Japanese potters and porcelain manufacturers emulated European japoniste ceramic vocabulary in what constituted a renegotiation of the balance between tradition, on the one hand, and imported technologies and new global markets, on the other. Their ceramics reflected several rounds of exchange between the Japanese and French art worlds. These objects demonstrated just how complexly two social networks from two previously distinct cultures had been influencing each other in a medium they both valued, ceramics. I call this phenomenon “uroboric” Japonisme because it most fully illustrates the circular nature of transcultural exchanges and the central role that such exchanges play in the renewal of aesthetic and sociocultural identities.

The intent of this thesis project was to use sculpture as a means of investigation for exploring the structural uses of Masonite, and to understand how those uses affect the nature of my work. The transformation of this material into form becomes the a process that is adjusted and refined until a formal solution is found. The tension, texture, scale, and form of the work contribute to a dialogue that results in sculptures that reference the human body and the growth of plants.

The process of obtaining the Master of Fine Arts degree led me to probe the aims and methods of my artmaking. What emerged and became uppermost was the issue of form and content or perhaps form versus content. While highly concerned with the formal aspects of art, content (subject matter) would not fade from my intentions or cease to occupy my mind. Through much "soul searching" and inquiries into numerous materials both familiar and new to me, I concluded that my intended content was about my experience of being. I further distilled my conclusion and focused on my ontological experience in terms of the self (subject) as contained by the body (matter). I realized that the successful and specific translation of my intentions into my artistic works had become one of the core issues in my artmaking endeavors. Thus, clarification of subject matter emerged as a core issue from the two year process and focused my attention. The many mediums I worked with helped to increase my sensitivity to the inherent nature, characteristics, and behaviors of materials. The body of work exhibited in the Autzen Gallery m Neuberger Hall from June 5th through the 20th reflects the preliminary residuals of this process.

Texte abrégé et remanié de: Dissertation--Philosophische Fakultät--Universität Bonn, 1992. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät I--Würzburg--Julius-Maximilians-Universität, 1992. / Notes bibliogr.