On Sculpture

Abstract

In this chapter we consider sculpture, which was originally made to fit into an architectural environment but later became freestanding and monumental. It occupies space through its external form and sets up tensions in the surrounding space. The work proceeds by modelling (perhaps followed by casting), carving, and constructing, depending upon the medium. One has to move away from the expectations produced by Greek and Roman styles in order to appreciate the entirely different mode of treatment in other sculptural traditions. The chapter concludes with a more extended treatment of Rodin.

Appendix

THE ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

By Rainer Marie Rilke

Verse

Verse We cannot know his astonishing and silent head, its eyes ripened like fruit.

Verse

Verse But its torso glows like a street lamp which, its gaze turned down, maintains itself and glows.

Verse

Verse Otherwise the curve of his breast could not dazzle you and the soft twisting of the loins could not go smiling to that center which bears procreation.

Verse

Verse Otherwise the stone would be stunted, cut short under the pellucid plunge of the shoulders and not shimmer like a wild beast’s coat nor break out of its boundaries like a star. For there is no place which does not see you. You must change your life.

⁶¹

The last line contains enigmatic words indeed. Peter Sloterdijk named his 2009 book You Must Change Your Life, after that last line and devotes the first chapter to its discussion. He says (Fig. 5.5):

Fig. 5.5

Torso of Apollo. Credit Prisma Archivo/Alamy Stock Photo

One does not have to be an enthusiast to understand why those closing lines have developed a life of their own. In their dignified brevity and mystical simplicity , they radiate an art-evangelical energy that can scarcely be found in any other passage from recent language art .

Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit and more potent authority than God, the ruling idol of religions .

Only their verticality is beyond doubt.⁶²

The last sentence of the poem seems to come from nowhere and follows on from a startling claim that the torso itself not only sees the observer, but sees from every spot. It repeats Hegel’s description of the work of art as “a thousand-eyed Argus.”⁶³ Sloterdijk continues: “In the position where the object usually appears, I now ‘recognize’ a subject with its ability to look and return gazes.” The sense that non-conscious things seem to look out at the artist is reported by several artists. The piece radiates brilliance from the inside, and from that inside it is said to look out from every spot. The image of the turned-down street lamp near the beginning qualifies the gaze that glows within the torso, forecasting the lines where it bursts forth like a star and looks out at you. This at least parallels Martin Buber’s notion that in a great work of art we are being addressed by the Eternal Thou , called to transform our lives.

Sloterdijk , claiming that “Rilke had read his Nietzsche,” reads the phrase “glistening as a wild beast’s fur” as a Dionysian moment in the Apollonian whole. He links the emergence of athleticism at the turn of the century with the cultivated body of the athlete that was the exemplar of the god that the ancient sculptor chose. Even now, the body in perfect shape is a call to those of us who are out of shape to change our lives. But according to Sloterdijk, attributing the source of the experience to the divine has thankfully been superseded by “anthropotechnics,” the formation of one’s life as a whole, and not simply one’s body, by practice. Changing one’s life through cultivation is a life imperative, whatever further interpretation the poem may allow.