To provide some degree of recourse as to the photographs of the other sculptures, I think we can gain some degree of clarity by referring again to this notion of de-ontologisation. A discussion on the ontic features of sculpture would seem to be immediately self-defeating, as surely it would suffice to say that any scientific deconstruction of an artistic medium would reduce its aesthetic categories to mechanically reproducible parts that could be sublated to form totalised “works of sculpture”. As Walter Benjamin would say, such mechanically reproducible features would nullify an art work’s “aura”, rendering it “not art”. In this case the elucidation of these ontic features should serve only to illustrate the amorphous qualities of the medium.
For the most basic approach to this issue we can attempt an understanding of the metaphysical compounds of sculpture using Aristotle’s metaphysical categories of “form” and “matter”. Aristotle surmised that all ontological “stuff” are composites of these two categories; for example the wood, wicker, glue, and fabric of a chair would constitute its “matter”, whereas its shape, one that constitutes its functionality as something to sit on (with a back rest and so on), its “chair-ness”, would account for its “form”. Isn’t it evident that, in relation to sculpture, these very categories have already shifted greatly over time, even within the framework of the popular sculptural canon (from, say, Michelangelo to Henry Moore) sculpture’s matter has included everything from marble and limestone to metal, wood (Constantin Brancussi), cardboard (Picasso), string and wire (Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo), and even the briefest glimpse of the history of sculpture would tell you that its form has virtually no denominational categories whatsoever. It would seem evident then that any attempt to define sculpture or “not sculpture” as a product of its Aristotelian features would prove futile.
On a scientific level then, we could tempt the hypothesis that sculpture does not really exist, at least not as something that we can incorporate into the framework of objective empirical reality. To put it another way, one could not claim that contemporary sculpture is a de-ontologised form of “sculpture proper” because there are really no discernible ontic sculptural features to begin with. “Sculpure-ness” is simply a fetishistic connotation that we apply to objects, or as Lacan would put it, sculpture is simply something that we see in objects that is more than themselves, an abstract excess that exists only within the plain of our symbolic subjectivity. To categorise and alienate any sculpture as being “not sculpture” would be akin to claiming that one fetish was necessarily more legitimate than another one, and such a claim is clearly redundant. The point then should not be, as Claude Levi-Strauss might have said, to identify whether something is sculpture or not but rather to identify this antagonism of interpretation as the “real” thing, the deadlock that needs to be elucidated and addressed. To concentrate on the categorisation of sculpture and not sculpture would seem to be missing the issue. The action that should be taken is for sculptors to address the antagonism of why the differentiation has to be made in the first place. This is clearly not, as we have seen, about the issue of what defines sculpture – as such a debate is evidently futile – but about these categorisations as a symptom of contemporary cultural tensions.
The reasons then that these forms are defiantly sculpture, or at least “sculptural” (the differentiation of the definition of these two terms could spark its own commentary), is because they seek to dismantle the framework and to address these antagonisms; these are clearly sculptures about sculpture (devoid of any of the interpretational mess of post-modernism). It is political sculpture, a sculpture that addresses the politics of aesthetics by provoking debate, and, if a line truly has to be drawn in the sand, as so many have insisted, then it is one that is to be drawn between those who are willing to tackle the antinomies of the politico-cultural aesthetic space and those who choose rather to adopt a sort of fetishistic-disavowal, as if to say, “I know very well that these antagonisms exist but I choose to ignore them”.
