Alex Potts; The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. . - book review

ALEX POTTS

The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 432 pp.; 50 color ills., 115 b/w. $55.00

Nearly twenty years after controversy erupted over Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, sculpture would appear to be back--and with a vengeance. From Robert Gober's official coronation at the American pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 2000 to the gargantuan presence of Louise Bourgeois's monstrous arachnids at the Tate Modern, the public embrace of sculpture seems to have come full circle. On the face of it, this seems an odd turn of events, its implications for contemporary art as potentially disturbing as the conditions that facilitated the removal and attendant destruction of Tilted Arc. Sculpture, after all, has hardly enjoyed the vaunted status accorded painting. And yet the distinct change in sculpture's institutional fortunes might be indirectly tied to the state of contemporary art itself. For one thing, its reappearance suggests that the sculptural object might be regarded as a more discretely salable and display-ready commodity than so much recent and unwieldy installation art. Second, it implies that t he sheer materiality of sculpture--its phenomenal density or even lumbering presence--is in direct opposition to the more transient seductions of so much digital art.

What historical lessons might derive from the seeming about-face in sculpture's public reception? A number of recent books on modern sculpture prove especially illuminating, perhaps none more so than Alex Potts's The Sculptural Imagination. Alongside James Meyer's Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (2001) and Miwon Kwon's One Place after Another (2002), accounts that address very particular episodes in the history of recent sculptural practice, Potts's work gives a more historically expansive view of sculpture's place within modernity and the theoretical issues of beholding it raises. The subject of his book is "a distinctly modern sculptural imaginary" that arises, in part, with the emergence of the public sphere in the 18th century. New modes of display and public institutions, he claims, presaged the rise of the autonomous sculptural object, no longer tethered to the architectural contexts that determine sculpture's place within presecular (that is, premodern) culture. In a series of finely argue d case studies, beginning with the figurative work of Antonio Canova and Auguste Rodin and going to the modernist imperatives of Constantin Brancusi, David Smith, and Barbara Hepworth to end with the minimalist anti postminimalist concerns of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse, Potts seeks to uncover the peculiar dynamics that obtain between sculpture and its audience. The book makes no pretension to the encyclopedic in its consideration of such diverse figures (one might quibble, for instance, with the relatively short shrift Potts devotes to Russian Constructivism, particularly given its centrality to the minimalist work he discusses at such great length). Even so, it remains no less ambitious nor, for that matter, important. The Sculptural Imagination, close to four hundred pages in length, is striking in the range of its author's scholarly engagements.

What precisely, for Potts, is the "sculptural imagination"? The book's title might seem to promise a broad meditation on the aesthetics of modern sculpture, but no one overriding philosophy of the imagination guides the author's particular discussions. Indeed, while a theory of the imagination may be said to constitute a principal concern of aesthetics, Potts's text is relatively free of specific treatments of its major thinkers within philosophy or poetics (a tradition that would include figures ranging from Hume to Kant to Sartre to Wollheim). This is hardly to suggest that Potts is inattentive to aesthetics or that his work is uninflected by such concerns. (To be sure, his earlier book Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History [1994] is a deeply sustained engagement with philosophical aesthetics. In turn, The Sculptural Imagination takes up classical aesthetics most prominently in the first chapter, in which the discussion of Johann Gottfried Herder is paramount.) For Potts, rather, the sculptural imagination is lodged within the acute encounter between the viewer and the work of art. The obdurate materiality of sculpture, what Potts describes as its "awkwardness," therefore produces a decidedly antiaesthetic experience for the spectator in opposition to the relatively limited demands that painting places on the viewer's body. Potts's book, then, is ultimately an argument about embodiment, of the almost physical power sculptural objects wield over their beholders. As he notes in the introduction:

I am making a case for a critical rethinking of sculptural norms that engages seriously with the more vividly embodied physical and perceptual response integral to any apprehension of the art object, however anti-aestheticizing it might be, bringing into play issues that cannot be dealt with adequately at a purely conceptual or ideological level. (p. 5)

For Potts, there are as many sculptural imaginations as there are specific encounters with a given work of art. Myriad contingencies of the viewing experience, be they spatial or temporal, are acknowledged in the confrontation with sculptural work. In contrast to a totalizing aesthetics of the imagination, Potts is interested in "the more phenomenological dimensions of a viewer's interactions with a work of sculpture particularly." To this end he has produced a series of extremely subtle and careful discussions of both texts and works of art; his treatment of the contemporary reception of sculpture, not to mention his own interpretation of objects, are models of close reading and visual analysis. The result is an extraordinarily measured and methodically argued book, one that offers surprising revisions of the inherited views on much modern sculpture.

For all the emphasis placed on the conditional and, therefore, heterogeneous approaches to objects that constitute Potts's sculptural imagination, his book is not without organizing principles. A series of controlling binaries recur insistently throughout the text, suggesting that the problems of sculpture and spectatorship within the modern era Potts articulates may, in fact, be foundational to an understanding of the modern itself. Foremost among them is the relationship between painting and sculpture, in which sculpture has either been cast as marginal to the achievements of the easel painting--its shadow figure, so to speak--or parasitic to its aesthetic norms. The question of medium specificity is thus absolutely central to Potts's larger consideration of sculpture's reception. It makes regular appearances in his readings of Antonio Canova and Carl Ludwig Fernow (chapter 1, "Classical Figures"), Adolf Hildebrand and the modems (chapter 3, "Modernist Objects and Plastic Forms"), and Michael Fried, among others. Although pivotal to The Sculptural Imagination, this is an issue that I will address, perhaps counterintuitively, at the conclusion of this review. The implications of Potts's sculpture-versus-painting thesis build most effectively on the more particularized analyses of the tensions at work in the encounter between sculpture and audience.

More often than not, these tensions are roughly thematized around binaries of interiority and exterionty, or of marked and unmarked terms, that are inextricably bound to one another throughout the course of his argument: they include close viewing and distant viewing, public and private, mind and body, material and immaterial, presence and absence, object(ivity) and subject(ivity), abstraction and representation, the neutered and the gendered. Many of these binaries implicitly internalize, to borrow Paul de Man's well-known formulation, the hermeneutic tug-of-war between literal and figurative language described as "blindness and insight" (for example, language is both "blind" because grammatical and literal and "insightful" because metaphorical). De Man's example crytallizes the productive frisson at the heart of the reception of modern sculpture. To invoke the play between the literal and the figurative is to underscore a critical issue for Potts's larger project. It suggests how the alleged autonomy of mo dern sculpture as a material thing is always confronted or "destabilized" by the imaginative projections of the beholder, in the process presenting a set of interpretative questions far different from those of painting.

Take, for instance, "Modern Figures," a chapter that represents the range of tensions that form the foundation of Potts's book. It traces the problem of interiority and exteriority in the spectatorial experience of Rodin's work as necessarily convergent with the question of its autonomy. Certainly, no sculptor seized the critical imagination as Rodin did, counting among his interlocutors voices as ideologically removed from one another as Georg Simmel and Rainer Maria Rilke. As in all the chapters of The Sculptural Imagination, Potts is very attentive to the artist's contemporary reception, teasing out the often conflicted and conflicting discussions on the modern that an encounter with Rodin's sculptures might stage. Simmel's first essay on Rodin and the contemporary spirit, for example, argues that Rodin "managed to give convincing form to a distinctly modernized sense of self and of the world by revolutionising an art whose literal materiality seemed to be particularly resistant to the subjectivising cast of the modern spirit" (p. 72). Here, then, the reader is immediately confronted with the thematics of subject and object, matter and immateriality, physical reality and inner experience. As Potts describes it:

In Simmel's diagnosis of the modern condition, there is an irreducible split between subjective individualism and submission to some external, objective law. Art has the function of fulfilling the longing for a fusion of the two, offering an instance where a law-like necessity does not oppose but is at one with the free projection of individual impulse. In art this apparent fusion is achieved by a synthesis between two aspects of physical appearances that are starkly at odds with one another in the modern world, the image as material thing, as purely sensual, objective phenomenon, and the image as symbol and expression of the soul. The modern work of art achieves this synthesis by intensifying the disparity, by making the split in modern existence unavoidably evident. (p. 72)

Rodin's sculptures, in other words, are successful for Simmel precisely because they mediate between these poles of modern experience; their modernity lies in their capacity to elicit "promptings of the inner self" but remain formally self-sufficient as objects of visual pleasure and material culture. And the fragmentary quality of Rodin's work, specifically, its aesthetics of unfinish, serves further to underscore the essentially divided nature of spectatorship within modernity. Rodin's unfinish not only negates the aesthetics of wholeness seen as integral to classical sculpture, it also activates the audience's imaginative capacity to "complete" the work of art as a gesture of viewing.

Simmel's discussion of Rodin is paradigmatic in that it points to sculpture's singular status as an index of modern alienation: sculpture embodies the will to synthesis between subject and object that modernity seems to resist. In this regard Simmel's essay parallels many other accounts of the visual arts within modernity. (One thinks in particular of Wilhelm Worringer's formulation of abstraction and empathy--that is, how abstraction, in opposition to figuration, represents a peculiar aesthetic retreat in the face of a nonintegrated culture.) And this is certainly the case for Rilke's two essays on Rodin, which rest on the poet's ambivalent attitude to the work's autonomy, not to mention his rather reactionary understanding of modernity itself. Potts discusses Rilke's description of Rodin's work as "homeless"--as occupying a rather liminal position in the modern world. This theme seems to be heir to Charles Baudelaire's peculiar anxiety about sculpture's separation from architecture and its dangerous proxim ity to what Potts calls "the luxury object." For Rilke, however, the homelessness of Rodin's sculpture speaks more specifically to problems of the object's public display, the "absence of public arenas conducive to the close and imaginatively charged viewing his sculpture demanded" (p. 78). It is a phenomenon accompanied by a sense of loss. Whereas sculpture in premodern times could claim a specific place in its environment (a function, in part, of its literal attachment to architecture), its newfound sitelessness (or autonomy) seemed to confirm "the essentially nomadic conditions of existence in the modern world."

By the same token, Rodin's sculpture "can be projected as imaginatively resonant in two ways: either as a presence that is felt to be so close that we feel it almost as an extension of our inner world, or as something set in a sphere quite apart from the immediate environment we inhabit" (p. 87). Here Potts describes a special mode of spectatorial engagement of critical importance for his book: the tensions between apprehending a work at a distance as opposed to (or in dialogue with) its close viewing. For Rilke, the viewing of a Rodin under these conditions "produces disparities between different modalities of viewing"(p. 98). To take in a Rodin from afar, for example, is to apprehend the object as a relatively stable entity; to view it close-up, however, is to destabilize the perceptual fixity of that object. Following Rilke, this is largely the result of the surface quality of Rodin's sculpture. A work such as The Thinker might appear as an inert, black lump when viewed at some remove, but closer inspecti on of the object reveals a surface rich in modulation of form and the play of light. Following Potts's account of Rilke, the vigorous modeling of surface in Rodin's later work inspires in the viewer a state of absorption--"an almost inhuman calm" (p. 100)--at odds with the perceived drama of its representation. Hence, the movement between distance and proximity produces the experience of an "indeterminate state suspended between life and death" for the viewer, a condition sympathetic to Rilke's own literary thematics.

This tension between distant viewing and close looking is a central concern for The Sculptural Imagination. Potts's treatment of Herder, Fernow, and Canova in chapter 1 is partially organized around this conceit. For Herder, distant viewing correlates specifically to the sense of sight, whereas close viewing is linked to touch, and the implications of this belief are brought to bear on the matter of treating sculpture as distinct from painting. (Riegl, of course, would revisit this question in his subsequent formulation of the haptic and optic.) Potts's larger interest in the chapter, however, is to challenge the received wisdom on Canova's Neoclassicism, and he does so with respect to the viewer's engagement with the work as a matter of distant and close viewing (not to mention the critical trashing Canova received at the hands of Fernow). Here, Potts's attention to the apprehension of a Canova from near and afar underscores the way in which the artist subverted the imperatives of wholeness associated with Neoclassicism. The author's visual analysis of Canova's Cupid and Psyche (1787-93) methodically emphasizes the "stong effect of dispersal" (p. 51) Canova's sculpture produces, a result of both the open stances of the figures and the subtle exchange of glances the psychic drama represents. This is one of many fine, very close readings of works of art by Potts.

But the question of distant viewing and close viewing has implications beyond an individual's reception of sculpture, for it implicates the activity of beholding as necessarily embodied and kinesthetic. Potts begins his chapter on Rodin with an acknowledgment of Adolf Hildebrand's The Problem of Form in Figurative Art (1893), and this text seems to anchor a larger discussion of the ramifications of the autonomous status of sculpture in the following chapter. Potts begins chapter 3, "Modernist Objects and Plastic Form," modestly enough: his aim is "to clarify what it is that makes certain objects stand out from the usually less than remarkable hub of modernist sculptural production" (p. 104). At this point the chapter moves with some quickness from Constructivism to Duchamp to Surrealism, perhaps the only part of the book that reads as slightly perfunctory. With Potts's discussion of Hildebrand's treatise, however, we are confronted with the problem of moving around freestanding sculpture itself: how the spec tator's literal passage around the autonomous object engenders an experience of a work that is potentially dispersed and formally incoherent. We learn that the logic of close viewing and distant viewing for the German theorist was tied not only to the effort to distinguish sculpture from painting (in spite of this, his reading of sculpture was decidedly pictorial or optical) but also to the necessity of autonomous sculpture to reaffirm some connection to architecture. For Hildebrand, the "variable forms presented by sculpture in the round had to be overcome by defining a principal viewpoint from which the sculpture became manifest as clearly defined form" (p. 125). Part of the solution to this problem was to site the freestanding work within an architectural frame, one that would effectively bracket the experience of viewing. The paradox for Hildebrand, of course, is that so-called freestanding sculpture achieves visual unity by virtue of a context independent of it.

The discussion of Hildebrand makes explicit the importance of siting in the reception of modern sculpture, just as it emphasizes the kinesthetic approach to the object from up close and afar. It is fitting, then, that Potts devotes so much space to intensive readings of Michael Fried (chapter 5, "Minimalism and High Modernism") and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (chapter 6, "The Phenomenological Turn"). For any student of postwar art, the place of both the art historian and philosopher in the critical literature on minimalism is a foregone conclusion, particularly their respective attitudes on the place of the body in its encounter with objects. Far less common is the kind of searching analysis of both figures Potts generates in these two chapters. While many may imagine that they know Fried's criticism or Merleau-Ponty's central works all too well within the context of minimalism, Potts demonstrates that both authors' writings can be profitably, and compellingly, revisited.

This holds true especially for Potts's discussion of Fried's "Art and Objecthood," an essay that has long functioned as something of postmodernism's sacrificial lamb. Yet Potts takes Fried's language very seriously indeed, and consequently offers a reading of the text that reveals it to be far from critically exhausted. Dissecting the twin pillars of Fried's condemnation of minimalism--its objecthood on the one hand, its theatricality on the other--Potts argues that "Fried drew attention to the affective, psychic dynamic of the interaction between viewer and work, unlike most writers on modern or modernist art at the time, who treated such interaction, if they treated it at all, in purely formal terms as the articulation of space, placement and scale." Already, then, Potts has restored some of Fried's critical subtlety to an essay that is reductively characterized as one of formalism's last stands, "a rearguard defense of an increasingly outmoded modernist aesthetic" (p. 199). To that end, Potts attributes c ritical importance to a relatively overlooked sentence in Fried's account: that modernist painting's "self-imposed imperative" was 'that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood" (p. 187).

Potts makes much of the word "suspend" in this phrase. Read in conjunction with the word "defeat," it decisively complicates the beholder's experience of sculpture's autonomy. Essentially, he argues for a far more dichotomous understanding of autonomy in Fried than that given by his reductivist critics, one that by necessity admits to the very conditions that would effectively destroy it. "Defeat implies abolishing or transcending," Potts writes, "perhaps a Hegelian sublation, a moving onto a higher level which encompasses both terms of the contradiction between art work as art and mere object: But suspend is a different matter, suggesting a momentary escape from an endemic tension that inevitably will return at some point, and is always at the very least latent (p. 187)." Potts is drawing our attention to an ambiguous dialectic of beholding within Fried's modernism--and the relative ambiguity surrounding the terms of the critic's autonomy. As Potts argues:

Fried himself recognized the limits of standard formalist understandings of a work of art's integrity or autonomy, and offered an alternative conception whereby the grounding structure of the work would not be some ideal configuration ... but rather was some momentary [my italics] overcoming or suspension of a structural tension endemic to the work of art in the modern world. (p. 199)

To emphasize that objecthood is momentarily suspended (if not completely defeated) is to highlight the centrality of time in Fried's reading, a point that Potts usefully explores in his broader reading of minimalism. It is also to disturb a notion of autonomy that is wholly idealist--that is, naive--and therefore implies that Fried's essay is far more embedded in a politicized discourse than generally recognized. To make such a claim, Potts puts forward a surprising, even provocative, comparison between Fried's analysis and that of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory. The exercise is of heuristic value; Potts is the first to acknowledge the seeming peculiarity of the juxtaposition. In the end, though, the structural similarities he manages to draw from their respective writing nuances our understanding of autonomy in "Art and Object-hood" and restores to the formalist project something of its dialectical imperative.

In his longer discussion of minimalism, Potts places the role of the beholder's body even more in the forefront than he had in his earlier chapters. And what the discussion of the body dramatizes, in turn, is the way in which the embodied spectator necessarily confronts the issue of private and public in the reception of the sculptural object. (If distant viewing underscores something of the public dimension of looking--because it suggests something of the openness of approaching a sculptural object-close viewing implies a physical intimacy, a private viewing, in the spectator's experience of a work of art.) Nowhere does this thematic loom larger in Potts's book than in his lengthy discussion of Robert Morris, "The Performance of Viewing," and the analysis of Richard Serra that follows. Potts's strength as a reader can be clearly seen here: he traces the development of Morris's own writing on sculpture as indicative of the artist's peculiar attitude on the split between public and private held as central to the discussion of minimalism. He is especially preoccupied with the first version of Morris's "Notes on Sculpture" (1966), an essay that, while in partial thrall to a Gestalt conception of viewing sculpture, nevertheless foregrounds the environmental conditions of viewing sculpture and therefore opens further onto the debate of public and private. As Morris famously writes about the new sculpture of the mid-1960s (quoted by Potts):

The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer's field of vision. It is in some ways more reflexive because one's awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work is stronger than in the previous work, with its many internal relationships. One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial content. Every intimate relationship, or what have you, reduces the public, external quality of the object and tends to eliminate the viewer to the degree that these details pull him into an intimate reaction with the work and out of the space in which the object exists. (p. 239)

This passage has long been cited to demonstrate Morris's critical engagement with the question of public and private in modern sculpture and his attention to the social dimensions of spectatorship more generally. But in considering a few of Morris's earlier and later texts, Potts argues that the emphasis is misplaced--that, in fact, Morris's "sense of himself as an artist is quite a traditional one." He argues less for a progression in Morris's critical writing than a complete break between its early and later periods. "What really concerns him," Potts maintains, "is the engagement to be had with the work in the relatively private confines of his studio" (p. 243). Morris's later essay "Notes on the Phenomenology of Making" inspires such statements inasmuch as Morris claims he is concerned only with "the artist's role playing" and not at all with art's social function. For Potts, this text in particular represents a romantic, perhaps even reactionary, retreat into the private space of art making, one that dis avows the function of the public in mediating art's social roles. "The phenomenology of making," Potts writes, "is largely a matter of indifference unless it has an impact in some significant way on the phenomenology of viewing--an impact that can be direct or indirect, paradoxical or even perplexing He continues:

Such impacting necessarily involves some recognition, however tacit, that the encounter between viewer and object is mediated to a degree and played out in a public context of some kind, not just a private, psychic space--a reality that at one point Morris seemed to embrace but later found increasingly depressing to countenance. (p. 253)

While Potts suggests that Morris's retreat into the private represents a crisis of faith in the avant-garde and the political situation of the late 1960s, his verdict on the artist ultimately reads as unsympathetic. Those who have come to view Morris as among the most critically engaged of 1960s artists will find this reading somewhat disturbing. One might argue that Potts pays insufficient attention to a number of Morris's essays that may well nuance Potts's understanding of the artist's critical trajectory. Relatively little is said about the shift between the first version of "Notes on Sculpture" and the version that followed it by months, for instance, not to mention the process-oriented concerns of his "Anti-Form." How these two texts in particular inflect the question of public and private in Morris's critical genealogy would be interesting to consider.

Potts's analysis of Morris opens onto a few questions about the book's approach more widely. A truism in academic work holds that one's greatest strengths as a scholar might also represent one's potential liabilities, and this claim might extend to Potts's book on two counts. In this review I have tried to demonstrate the importance of The Sculptural Imagination on the grounds of its exacting interpretations of both objects and texts; the depth of Potts's engagement with the theory of sculpture is nothing less than profound. Paradoxically, though, the very closeness of his readings--his fidelity to text and object--raises the issue of historical distance. Indeed, in linking Morris's description of art making and "psychic space" to the political fallout of the late 1960s, Potts inadvertently brings up the question of history in general in his book. Evidently, his is not a history of modern sculpture as such, nor is it a social history of the work in the limited sense of that expression. The author should not be faulted for failing to meet such criteria, as his project lies very clearly elsewhere. Yet the recurrence of many of his critical tropes over a period of two hundred years leads the reader to question what is historically specific about their appearance. What might the thematic of close viewing in the mid-19th century, for instance, suggest about the period as opposed to its iteration in the early 20th century? Potts begins his project by describing how new modes of sculptural spectatorship developed in relation to a newly emergent public sphere. One would welcome equally some historical speculation (and speculation would suffice in this context) on what the repetition of these modalities of viewing might mean at different moments in history.

A second point to be addressed about Potts's reading has to do with his neglect to employ textual sources beyond those immediately contemporary to the sculpture under discussion. Potts seems relatively uninterested in more recent art historical analyses of sculpture in the body of his text. (Two exceptions hold here. Potts refers to Anna Chave on a couple of occasions, if critically; he also mentions Rosalind Krauss a few times throughout the book, although usually in relation to work published in the late 1970s.) One wishes to hear other contemporary interlocutors weigh in on the sculptural imagination throughout the book. (James Meyers's work on minimalism and Mignon Nixon's reading of Louise Bourgeois would prove important.)

But these last few criticisms are, in the end, overshadowed by the significance of Potts's contribution both as a genealogy of the sculptural imagination and as a prognosis for future developments. This leads me ultimately to address the binary of sculpture and painting, which is foundational to his project. Potts considers at length the effort critics, philosophers, and artists made to distinguish sculpture from painting from the 18th century on-to find what was unique to the medium and therefore elevate its problematic status within the visual arts. Of course, this is a project of medium specificity born of Enlightenment principles of rationality and that period's taxonomizing drives; it may therefore seem irrelevant to the art of the present day. However, returning to the reflections on sculpture that opened this review, I think Potts's engagement with this deeply historical problem might serve as a radically contemporary object lesson. Questions of medium specificity might seem a moot point to those who first assimilated and then rejected the lessons of high modernism, but Potts's book proposes that such issues are all the more pressing precisely because of their apparent out-modedness. This is especially so given the hybrid genre of installation art that has emerged in the last ten years, not to mention the hyperbolic rhetoric of "the new surrounding so much digital art and its "subversion" of traditional media. As Potts writes of installation art in his introduction, "Installation has become naturalized, as has a self-conscious contextualizing of art work, while postmodern fashion has largely rendered redundant the categorical distinction between different forms of art that previously made sculpture seem problematic" (p. 3).

Potts voices grave suspicion about this alleged "freeing up" of different media as "just one further wonder of the triumph of late Capitalism" (p. 3). Certainly, many of these installations (specifically, so-called interactive new media installations) flirt with the more trivializing tendencies of the spectacularized museum or gallery of the early 21st century: much of what we see that stands for contemporary artistic practice is little more than so much art-as-entertainment. In his insistence on highlighting the importance of the sculpture-versus-painting debate that runs throughout modern criticism, Potts sheds important light on these recent developments. In many ways his book is as much a meditation on media as it is on sculpture's relation to painting, or even sculpture exclusively. It provides a critical genealogy, even prehistory, of the debates leading up to the problems of intermedia in the present. And, to the extent that his analysis of medium specificity is organized around a sculptural imaginati on that is active, the thematics of the sculptural medium are, in crucial respects, the thematics of a critically engaged beholder. This is a lesson that any audience for contemporary art--whether for sculpture or painting or new media or some combination thereof-- cannot afford to ignore.

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