Gregor Beedie
'Shift'
June 4th - July 3rd 2001

Since time immemorial the human form has been a perennial subject for sculpture. The three dimensional nature of sculpture as a medium, the carving or working of stone, wood and metal enables the expression of particular gestures, the movement of particular figures, emotions and attitudes. But in the latter half of the twentieth century sculpture moved away from the figurative or allusions to the human body in favour of, at its best, formal, structural concerns with the materials of sculpture or, at its worse, the indiscriminate rearrangement of objects as springboards for viewer association.

A central problem with much contemporary abstract sculpture is that the artistic shaping of our experience through our engagement with the object has been abrogated in favour of presenting objects which merely instantiate ideas or are arranged so loosely that any experience we may have in relation to them seems barely related to the object at all. Yet sculpture should shape, prescribe and delimit what we experience in seeing the object before us.

This kind of problem is often associated with the very nature of abstraction - absence of representation. But this cannot be right for abstraction admits of degrees. Even the most realistic, sculptural duplication of the human form manifests a minimal degree of abstraction. The distortion, accentuation or schematisation of scale, proportionality or detail is itself an abstraction. And minimally abstract works can be poor sculpture because they are too life-like - merely detailed visual replicas of what they are not. One way of viewing contemporary sculpture, then, is in terms of a dilemma of how to avoid mere life-like representation whilst avoiding meaningless abstraction in the service of artistic expression.

Matthew Kieran, Philosophy, University of Leeds.