ABSTRACT
One of Lessing’s central concerns in Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766) is to establish a distinction between the materials out of which something is made and the use of those materials as a medium over which the artist exercises control. This has important consequences for the viewer, for it suggests that if our imaginative responses are to be answerable to the work, rather than becoming detached from it, we need to be attentive to the way in which the artist has deployed the materials to sustain recognition.
At the time Lessing was writing, he could safely start from the assumption—put forward in the opening sentences of the Laocoön—that both literature and the visual arts ‘represent absent things as being present, appearance as reality’. However, the turn away from the direct depiction of the human body in twentieth-century sculptural practice and the emergence of various forms of nonrepresentational object-making raises questions concerning the continued viability of this approach.
Drawing on Anthony Savile’s elucidation of our capacity for ‘ampliative’ and ‘projective’ imagining, I argue that it is possible to uphold the distinction between materials and medium, and thus the requirement that the viewer’s responses be guided by a sense of purpose that is recoverable from features of the work, even in the absence of narrative or figurative content. The aim here is to demonstrate that the resulting account of imaginative engagement is not restricted to representational art forms such as figurative painting and sculpture but that—suitably adapted—it can also be extended to include examples of nonfigurative or fully abstract three-dimensional work.
The category of sculpture is now exceptionally broad, encompassing installations, environments, and assemblages, as well as object-based three-dimensional work. I, therefore, focus on some specific examples of recent and contemporary sculptural practice—including work by Richard Serra, Bill Bollinger, Giovanni Anselmo, Gabriel Orozco, and Cornelia Parker—whose selection is guided by its suitability for thinking through the issues involved. I defend only the weaker claim that the ideas presented here have relevance to at least some works of nonrepresentational art. However, if this claim can be substantiated, it will allow me to establish some surprising continuities in the kinds of imaginative responses that can be sustained by both representational and abstract works of art.
