ABSTRACT
In this paper, I look at some of the philosophical questions raised by and about sculpture in modernism, starting with Greenberg characterization of modernist and then Minimalist sculpture. I suggest that we can gain insight into the topic, and our philosophical ways of dealing with it, by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body-subject, which is, I contend, one of the best philosophical accounts of how the body comes to expression, in other words, of embodied meaning. I suggest taking the body rather than perception as the paradigm for articulating the sense of sculpture, and I give three arguments for the body’s centrality. Thus, my paper puts forth a different phenomenological interpretation of sculpture of the last half century, which also allows for a reassessment of which sculptors we understand as paradigmatic for sculptural modernism and its aftermath.
