Appel à communication : « Why Sculpture Is Not Boring: New Approaches to Modern Sculpture, 1846-1966 » (Norwich, avril 2015)

In a few brief – and now infamous – passages of his Salon of 1846, published under the heading ‘Why Sculpture is a Bore’, Charles Baudelaire tolled the death-knell for the medium of sculpture. Elaborating upon the centuries-old paragone, Baudelaire not only cited sculpture’s inferiority in the face of painting’s more expansive formal resources, but also concluded that the medium was ill-equipped to capture modernity’s particular forms of beauty. While sculptural production both before and after 1846 was anything but boring, Baudelaire’s eulogy cast a pall over the study of sculpture. The publication of Robert Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture’ in 1966 arguably resuscitated the medium in the realm of practice – yet art-historical enquiry on sculpture remained stuck in the methodological past. Scholars of sculpture have only recently taken fuller advantage of new interpretive and theoretical models – from psychoanalysis to post-colonialism and the anti-hermeneutic turn – that allow for innovative interpretations of sculpture’s distinctive contributions to modernism.