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Current sculpture and its spaces; a focus on Great-Britain. From conception to reception, a study of the sculptural frame

par Sinan, Tarquin
Président du jury Lenain, Thierry
Promoteur Clerbois, Sébastien
Publication Non publié, 2019-01-18

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

The present thesis examines the notion of “sculptural frame” through a meticulous analysis of the spatial practices observable in British Sculpture from the 20th and 21st centuries. The sculptural medium having been left out of the theoretical debate surrounding the frame’s artistic definition and application, this study’s aim is to make up for this lacuna by focusing on the interdependent relationship between three essential sculptural elements: the body (of the artist and of the beholder), the object and, of course, space. Beginning with Henry Moore and closing with a side-by-side analysis of Rachel Whiteread and Antony Gormley, this research puts forth two fundamental paradigms developed in the first half of the past century – Landscape and Architecture – which articulate much of sculpture’s spatial evolution on the British Isles. Moore’s generation interpreted Landscape as an ideological frame which served both as the origin and the destination of sculpture. Richard Long’s conceptual generation gave this frame a sense of spatial self-sufficiency by dematerializing art, rendering the frame boundless. Anthony Caro, by adopting an architectonic vernacular, progressively welcomed the beholder’s body into inhabitable frame-like sculptures -- a spatial dialogue continued yet re-envisaged by Gormley and Whiteread, who respectively stimulate and negate the sentient spectator. These paradigmatic evolutions reveal a shift in prism in the ’70s, which goes hand in hand with an increasingly internalized spatial trajectory as sculptors transition from a material focus to a corporal one. Based on these spatial assessments, the present thesis challenges the current understanding of the “dividing frame”, proving it to be inadequate, and proposes – using the studied corpuses as argumentative examples – a novel definition of the sculptural frame as an encompassing one.