sculpture, a touchstone

     Would the discredit on figurative art not have impeded on progress in sculpture, all along the 20th century, while it, instead, fostered progress in painting ? For if, indeed, pictorial arts innovated from within the formidable progress and invasive evolution of images which turned to be most incentive and differentiating to them –images then fully relied on the charms and lures of figurative art- sculpture, on the contrary, did not benefit by those very challenging surroundings. What is still to be understood, though, is why it found in totalitarian propaganda such a powerful expression, and, consequently, the cause for its damnation. .
      Unlike the pictorial arts, sculpture, in its preponderant forms and from time immemorial, needs an inevitable share of body and corporeality to come into play in its compositions for it is an amplifier of physical expression, and thus of figurative conveying. Could it be what precisely made it so appropriate to totalitarian propaganda?.
      Yet, is not sculpture’s quest for bodies a vain one ? It makes them stark and stiff, conveys a delusive vision of them (as would of idols), whereas life is bigger and never lies fallow. Sculpture’s weakness, seduction, strength reside in that. Should you bring figurative art into disrepute, painters would get out of it much better off than sculptors. The painter’s image-effects, out of the figurative field, have greater likelihood and scope to beat the sculptor’s interacting masses : whether figurative, abstract, conceptual … sculptures are always first and foremost perceived in their bodily tuning, in the way they summon figuration.
     Eventually, it cannot be denied that sculpture, put to the test by our modern days, is betraying its own contradictions : it is a time of invading images –images ravening on the seduction of bodies - yet plastic arts are squeamish about that sort of seduction that they will not indulge in (dishonourable, reviled beauty); while men and women’s relationship to body and reality gets poorer in the present world, subjugated as they may be to the reign of image-effect, superficiality, delusion, sculpture lies on its own, spurned by all, without being granted the time and insight it requires. Now, is that cluster of contradictions not reason enough to dread a return of figuration after that of religion ?
(Translated by Michèle Bustros)