Saturday, October 7, 2017
Sculptures: Fact vs. Abstract
After reading the pages from Flemming's Arts and Ideas, I noticed something about ancient sculpture. Ancient sculptures are usually depictions of things that were fact, meaning that the pieces were not meant to be abstract or up for interpretation, but rather seen as a representation of an actual event or being. Ancient sculptors tried to capture the most amount of detail as possible in order to make their pieces as real as possible. I see that contemporary art is more abstract rather than fact. Greek sculptures were mainly of people who were believed to have existed; however today's sculptures don't necessarily depict a specific subject. Contemporary sculptors focus on a more generic subject but placed in some unordinary scenario. Contemporary sculptors create sculptures for numerous reason; sculptures could be used as political pieces, metaphors, or just pure beauty. Ancient sculptures were representations of scenes or people that actually took place, but today's sculptors are not restricted to only depict historic events or people; contemporary artist depict generic subjects with some in testing trait.
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I think in looking at sculpture and how it has changed since the ancient times we are studying, it's interesting to see how the very idea of sculpture itself has changed. As you say, in modern art sculptures are often very abstract. I think it's worth noting how radical this shift actually is from depicting people to depicting things or abstract ideas with sculpture. Like if you make a sculpture of something besides a person/other living thing, there is necessary jump in the level of abstraction that is automatically made. For example, Picasso made some influential sculptures out of random materials he found like his Guitar. Making a statue of a guitar is a kind of weird concept because the ideal physical sculpture of a guitar that most accurately depicted a guitar would just be an actual guitar. I think this difference between abstract sculptures of objects and sculptures used almost exclusively to represent people is important and interesting to think about. As another example of abstract sculpture, I thought of the 20th century Romanian Constantin Brancusi's Birds in Space sculptures that try to represent the essence of a bird with just a single oblong feather thing.
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