Sculpture Unbound
Juror’s Statement


When the exhibition title “Sculpture Unbound” was first proposed, two ideas of the show occurred to me: the first a simple joke (I’m the editor of a printed, bound magazine on sculpture, and the exhibition would be the “unbound” presentation of sculpture in the gallery rather than the magazine’s pages); the second a reference to the Greek plays about Prometheus, first bound (for his Mephisophelian crime of bringing knowledge to mankind) and then liberated, unbound. But what bondage is sculpture released from? Historically, sculpture descended from the pedestal, moved from its link to architecture and the figure, and began to flow in new directions, into the “expanded field” of polyvalent, contemporary art-making.

E.H. Gombrich described the history of art, in his book Art and Illusion, as a process of “making and matching,” in the service of an increasing realism in artists’ depiction of nature—just as a scientist employs a schema and subsequent modifications in the process of experimentation. Gombrich ends his history with the separation of making and matching, as the Modernists shifted toward making in itself, not in the pursuit of the matching or representation of nature but the revelation of psychological realities. But throughout the past 100 years, making and matching have continued to shift, “matching” having turned into the representation (or even direct presentation) of the things of consumer culture and everyday life rather than the depiction of nature; and “making” leaving behind even the realization of inner realities to become a way of thinking or working directly in materials. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift proposes a universal language of things: people should carry around a big bag of objects and when they need to refer to something, pull the thing itself out of the bag. Contemporary artists have taken Swift’s philosophical joke seriously, attempting to think and speak in things, to directly employ the stuff of our world, whether natural or cultural.

This art of “making” does not portray, it embodies, and is thus the natural milieu of the sculptor rather than the painter. The art in this exhibition isn’t “like” something in the real world, it is the same stuff, after passing through the hands of the maker, the artist, using a rhetoric of synecdoche or metonymy, not metaphor: operating through proximity or participation, rather than by similarity. The material is from nature, from the streets, from the factory, even from the art store (paint or pigment becomes substantial stuff rather than a medium for representing something else). These sculptures do not depict something, they are a direct, messy incarnation of the process of making art.

- Glenn Harper, December 2005

Sculpture Unbound
EDISON PLACE GALLERY
January 13 - March 31 2006
Juried by Glenn Harper, editor Sculpture Magazine
702 - 8th Street NW
Washington D.C. 20001