Theories of Sculpture in Technological Change

The 1960s witnessed the end of the classical sculpture idiom on both a practical and a theoretical level. A breaking-down of material and media genre boundaries through new media, techniques and conceptual frameworks dismantled the narrative of sculpture as a self-contained entity. Awareness of its historical determinacy replaced the notion of sculpture as a universal category. However, as early as the late 19th century new reproduction technologies such as photography had produced epistemological formations that destabilized conventional notions of sculpture. In the photographic image, sculpture’s materiality, scale, temporality, and site-specificity become portable and fluid. As a prefiguration of a postmodern logic, this challenged the internal coherence and traditional definition of the genre of sculpture.

Fig.: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Marmor an der Lahn (Metamorphit), 1963, plate 55, in: “Gestein,” 1966, © Albert Renger-Patzsch / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

Speakers Ursula Ströbele | From Body to Machine: Sculpture in Times of Technological Change Megan R. Luke | Sculpture in the Age of Mass Reproduction