ABSTRACT
Sculpture as an art form has had a complex and potentially vexed relationship to understandings of temporality. Traditionally, it has been the art whose durable materials made it the medium of choice for monuments and memorials. In the modern period, which prioritizes vitality and immediacy, however, the insistent stasis of the sculptural object or statue has made it a source of considerable disquiet, particularly for work that purportedly represents a living personage. This article explores the persistent if often uneasy mediation between the static and the animate informing responses to sculptural representation of the human figure. It does so by focusing on the moment in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century when issues of temporality played a key role, not just in the reconceptualizing of sculptural representation but also in new philosophical thinking about internal time-consciousness. It shows how phenomenological understandings of the apprehension of time that were developed by figures, such as Henri Bergson, and above all, Edmund Husserl can cast light on the enhanced temporal dynamic that modern sculptors of the period, such as August Rodin and Medardo Ross, brought to their work. At the same time, the article argues that the phenomenological explorations of the complexities of internal time-consciousness that took shape in the late nineteenth century have an important bearing on understanding the temporal awareness activated in the apprehension of any sculpture that seems to overcome the inertness of its literal condition as object. There is a distinctly phenomenological cast to a conception of sculpture as appearing to one rather than merely being a fixed object standing in place as well as an affinity between the sustained looking integral to apprehending the enlivening effects such work conveys and the sustained thinking which a philosopher, such as Husserl, saw as central to understanding our inner consciousness of the passing moment.
