I found Herbert George's approach to the elements of sculpture to be profoundly illuminating. Maybe, in most people's minds, sculpture is still synonymous with "statues" despite the inroads pioneered by the likes of Brancusi. In this book "The Elements of Sculpture", George attempts to unravel the essential elements that bind sculpture together as a genre despite some being clearly; large, heavy and colourful and others being ephemeral such as Richard Long's "Iris blades pinned together with thorns". Of all the possible elements he has chosen to focus, at the highest level on six:
1. The object, including the materials used and it's place in the environment.
2. Characteristics..such as surface, edge, texture, colour and scale.
3. Physicality such as mass and centre of gravity.
4. What George calls Expanding the core but is really about the volume and space occupied by sculpture.
5. Challenging Solidity by the use of such elements as movement and light
6. Past experiences or memories.
This is a good start to try to put some parameters about sculpture which has evolved so far from traditional figurative sculpture as to be unrecognisable. But it is probably not sufficient. Virtually all the examples (Richard Long and maybe Christo aside) are of tangible, physical sculptures ....likely to enjoy some degree of permanence. In the closing chapter he acknowledges that he has not dealt with installations, sound art, video sculpture, body art and other practices. To me, this is a severe deficiency because by ignoring these forms of sculpture he is clearly missing a number of elements. He also seems to be struggling with his 4th element in clearly differentiating between volume and space.
George suggests we can use his "elements" in seeking an understanding of a work of sculpture..... "Untitled (2005-2006)" by Robert Gober....... where nothing is as it seems at first: What appears to be a common paint can is actually made from cast glass...and so on. And it does seem to work reasonably well at this level. So he has given us a set of tools to use. And it's a reasonable and well thought through tool kit. But, the fact that sound art doesn't fit the schema and, maybe, installations also don't fit......says to me that the tool kit is incomplete. And maybe, with the continual evolution of what is considered sculpture...that is just the way it should be.
All of that aside, there is a great collection of photos of wildly different sculptures to illustrate the elements that George has defined. And, maybe for the first time, somebody has actually given us a language and a set of tools for talking about sculpture as it has evolved and as it is recognised today. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding sculpture or interested in art. ( )