A definition of sculpture for our time.Excerpt from the magazine Sculpture November1998 Vol.17 No. 9

by Donald Kuspit  

Sculpture, like art in general, has become an amorphous concept, ill-defined and perhaps undefinable—yet another case of art-as-epistemological-problem. Anything that occupies space, and doesn’t hang on a wall, is “sculpture” or “sculptural.” The days when, with the English critic Adrian Stokes, one could make a nice neat distinction between three-dimensional objects made by carving and those made by modeling are over. Now, any object that sprawls in space, has physical presence, and manages to hold its own against architecture is sculpture. And yet the root of sculpture since antiquity has been the body’s existence in space. To be emotionally credible, what we call sculpture must evoke or in some way engage the archaic presence of the body in space. It must suggest the primitive experience of being a body in space, and convey the vicissitudes of the body in time. It must suggest what it feels like to live one’s body and how one’s body lives its own space and the space in which
it moves.

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