In 1908 near Willendorf, Austria, one of the earliest artworks created by human hand was discovered: a twenty-five-thousand-year-old sculpture variously interpreted but clearly representing a woman. From the beginning, sculpture was used to make icons of sacred and potent beings such... [more]

In 1908 near Willendorf, Austria, one of the earliest artworks created by human hand was discovered: a twenty-five-thousand-year-old sculpture variously interpreted but clearly representing a woman. From the beginning, sculpture was used to make icons of sacred and potent beings such as goddesses of fertility, animal totems, and warrior kings. The effect of an object on the space around it -- the aura that it casts -- was recognized early on for the power it held. Sculptures often stood at the center of cults and religions; cultic buildings, in fact, came to incorporate sculpture in their structure and decoration. If more traditional sculptors like Michelangelo and Rodin could see what the twentieth century has done to the scope of the medium known of sculpture they might thrash in their graves. Modern sculptors have patched together rusted automobile parts and called it art, made constructions of packing foam and bottles and dubbed it profound, and tackled every conceivable theme from the scatological to the sexual, let alone the sacred and religious. Much of the sculpture since the 1960s has looked to process, both conceptual and physical, as the most important part of object-making (or, in the case of Eva Hesse, object-making and object-disintegration). Process art's concern for the artist is indicative of Postmodernism's shift toward themes of perception. As technological advances alter our perceptions of time, Postmodernist sculptors have turned to Kinetic and Video sculpture to explore themes of duration and subjectivity. These enormous changes in technique and theme do not vitiate the underlying potency of sculpture, however, to reach out into the space around it and define both the space and the onlooker. [show less]