Sculpture

Sculpture genres

Ancient Greeks' depiction of ideal form of the body is expressed through sculptures such as this one. Sculpture is any three-dimensional form created as an artistic expression. Sculpture is primarily concerned with space: occupying it, relating to it, and influencing the perception of it. The term also refers to the artistic discipline, act or art of making sculpture: changing one or more of the physical or contextual attributes of an object, such as its mass, color, texture, context, location, form, scale, implication, association, temperature or smell. Much contemporary sculpture transmits expression through arrangement and juxtaposition or by the simple designation of an object or even an act as sculpture.
The artist who sculpts is called a sculptor or sculptress. A sculpted object or material has been worked to resemble sculpture either by human hands or by nature. A figure or person can be described as sculpturesque if it shares qualities with classical figurative sculpture or statue.

Contemporary materials
In his late writings, Joan Miró even proposed that some day sculptures might be made of gases; see gas sculpture. Other materials used in modern and contemporary sculpture include: sand, stone, granite, marble, glass, metal, aluminum, bronze, mercury, wood, resin, polymers and many other synthetic materials, water, ice, snow, the environment, textiles, terra cotta, found objects, balloons, liquid crystals, frozen blood, dead animals, sound.
Perhaps the least elitist of these media is sand, as it is used by young and old to create sand castles.

Forms
Some of the forms of sculpture are:
• Relief: sculpture still attached to a background, standing out from that ground in "High Relief" or "Low Relief" (bas relief)
• Sculpture "in the round": designed by the sculptor to be viewed from any angle.
• Free-standing sculpture
• Mobile (See also Calder's Stabiles.)
• Statue
• Bust (sculpture)
• Site-Specific
• Equestrian
• Jewellery
Perhaps the majority of public art is sculpture.

Sculptors
Sculptors include the Classical Greek masters, through Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance masters, to modern sculptors such as Henry Moore, Felix de Weldon, and Alexander Ney.

Sculpture genres
Allegorical sculpture
It refers to sculptures that symbolize and personify abstract ideas. The most commonly seen examples are statues of "Justice", traditionally holding scales and wearing a blindfold to represent her impartiality. This approach of using human form and its posture, gesture and clothing to wordlessly convey social values developed under the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, is usually associated with Victorian art, and is most commonly found in works from around 1900. In Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York, for instance, had an extensive scheme of allegorical sculpture programmed by Karl Bitter. The allegorical group on top of Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, carved by the French sculptor Jules Felix Couton in 1912, represents the Roman gods Hercules (strength), Mercury (speed), and Minerva (wisdom), and collectively represents "Transportation."

Holography
Salvador Dalí claims to have been the first to employ holography artistically. He was certainly the first and most notorious Catalan surrealist to do so, but the 1972 New York exhibit of Dalí holograms had been preceded by "the first holographic art exhibition [which] was held at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1968. The second took place at the Finch College gallery in New York in 1970 and attracted national media attention." (source: http://www.holophile.com/history.htm ).
An interesting new development is the holography of Yves Gentet. Using a new emulsion, the quality of the holograms has increased dramatically. Examples of it can be seen at [1]. The artistic possibilities are evident, however the technology is new and still mostly undiscovered by the art world.

Ice sculpture
Sculpting ice presents a number of difficulties due to the variability and volatility of the material. Ice must be carefully selected to be suitable for sculpting. The ideal material should be made from pure, clean water for high transparency, and have the minimum amount of air bubbles. The temperature of the environment affects how quickly the piece must be completed to avoid the effects of melting; if the sculpting does not take place in a cold environment, a large ice house is generally required. For this reason ice sculpture is not common in warm or temperate areas.

Snow sculpture

It is a sculpture form comparable to ice sculpture in that most of it is now practiced outdoors, and often in full view of spectators, thus giving it kinship to performance art in the eyes of some. The materials and the tools differ widely, but often include knives, picks, chisels, and irons. Snow sculptures are usually carved out of a single cube of snow about 15 feet on the side and weighing about 30 tons. The snow is densely packed after having been produced by artificial means.
Since 1973 there has been an international snow sculpture contest during the Quebec City Winter Carnival and more recently the Winterlude celebrations have had snow sculpture events. Perm in Russia and Breckenridge, Colorado have also hosted snow sculpting events. Creating amateur snow sculptures is a popular pass time in some areas. They feature prominently in the annual Winter Carnival at Michigan Technological University. These sculptures are not carved from a single cube, but rather an ever-growing pile of snow. For this reason, they can grow quite large (2 to 3 stories in height and 20 to 30 feet long).

Kinetic sculpture

It creates sculptures that are designed to move. Additionally, sound sculpture is considered kinetic sculpture. The name is derived from the scientific term, kinetic energy, which is the energy possessed by a mass by virtue of its motion including the atomic level as in heat. Alexander Calder (inventor of the mobile) and George Rickey pioneered kinetic sculpture. Other leading exponents include Yaacov Agam, Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo, Ronald Mallory, Jean Tinguely, Zero group and Arthur Ganson.
Some kinetic sculptures are wind-powered, and others are motor driven. A variety of human powered craft involved in cross country races and parades are considered kinetic sculpture. Kinetic sculptures are often implemeted as installation art. A mobile is a type of kinetic sculpture constructed to take advantage of the principle of equilibrium. It consists of a number of rods, from which weighted objects or further rods hang. The objects hanging from the rods balance each other, so that the rods remain more or less horizontal. Each rod hangs from only one string, which gives it freedom to rotate about the string. The sculptor Alexander Calder is well known for his mobiles. Calder is credited with inventing the mobile in 1931, although it was named by Marcel Duchamp. Mobiles are also popular in the nursery, where they hang over cribs to give infants something to entertain them and give them external visual stimulus. Mobiles have inspired many composers, including Morton Feldman and Earle Brown who were inspired by Calder to create mobile-like indeterminate pieces.

Kouroi
A kouros (plural kouroi) is a statue of a male youth, dating from the Archaic Period of Greek sculpture (about 650 BC to about 500 BC). The earliest kouroi were made of wood and have not survived, but by the 7th century the Greeks had learned the art of carving stone with iron tools, and were making kouroi from stone, particularly marble from the islands of Paros and Samos.
The Ancient Greek word kouros meant a male youth, and is used by Homer to refer to young soldiers. From the fifth century the word referred specifically an adolescent, beardless male, but not a child. Modern art historians have used the word to refer to this specific type of male nude statue since the 1890s. Kouroi were also commonly known as Apollos, since it was believed that all kouroi depicted Apollo.
Kouroi were created at a time when Greece was under the cultural influence of Ancient Egypt, as can be seen by their characteristic rigid pose, reminiscent of statues of Egyptian kings. Greeks would have seen these statues when visiting Egypt as merchants or mercenary soldiers hired by Egyptians. Kouroi nearly always stand with their arms at their sides and their fists clenched, although a few show one arm extended forward from the elbow, holding an offering. They always stand with their left leg slightly forward. This was also a common pose in Egyptian statuary.
Kouroi are always naked, wearing at most a belt and occasionally boots. Their faces and heads show a cultural influence from Crete: they wear their hair long and braided or beaded in the Cretan fashion, and their eyes sometimes have a recognisably Egyptian aspect, which was copied in Cretan art. Later kouroi show more naturalistic poses and their hair styles become more typical of mainland Greece. Kouroi always depict young men, ranging from adolescence to early maturity. In cemeteries, they showed the deceased as the Greek ideal of masculinity.
In very early times, it is likely that kouroi were thought to possess magical properties, and to be actual representations of the gods. By the 7th century, the earliest period for which sources exist, kouroi had come to serve two purposes. They were presented to temples as devotional offerings by prominent Greeks, as is shown by the inscriptions which frequently appear on their plinths. They were also placed in cemeteries to mark the graves of prominent citizens.
Kouroi, however, were never intended to be representations of actual persons. One of the best known kouroi is the grave-marker of Kroisos, an Athenian soldier. The inscription on his statue reads: "Stop and show pity beside the marker of Kroisos, dead, whom once in battle's front rank raging Ares destroyed." The word "marker" (sema) tells us that this is a symbolic representation of Kroisos, not a portrait. Another well-known work is the double kouros known as Kleobis and Biton, found at Delphi. These statues date from about 580 BC and are representations of two semi-mythical heroes of Argos in the Peloponnese. Although an inscription identifies them as Kleobis and Biton, they are typical kouroi, representing the Archaic Peloponnesian virtues of filial piety and physical strength rather than actual persons. In the 6th century kouroi grew larger as the Greeks became richer and more confident with marble sculpture. Some were three or even four times lifesize. Some of the largest were made for the great sanctuary of the goddess Hera on Samos, which was lavishly endowed by the tyrant Polycrates. One of these giant kouroi, at five metres tall the largest ever found, was unearthed in 1981 and is now in the Samos Archeological Museum, which had to be rebuilt to accommodate it. An inscription on its left thigh tells us that the statue was dedicated to Hera by an Ionian nobleman called Isches.
Most kouroi were commissioned by aristocrats as offerings to temples, or by the families of aristocrats to place over their graves. Marble sculpture was very expensive and only the wealthiest could afford to pay sculptors to create these works. Kouroi are therefore a representation of the wealth and power of the Greek aristocratic class, and as this class lost its power in the 6th century, so the kouros went out of fashion both politically and artistically. By the end of the 6th century, the kouroi were giving way to naturalistic sculptures of living people. Among the earlier representations of real people are the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, erected in Athens in about 500 BC. These figures (see the illustration at the Harmodius and Aristogeiton article) still show some of the formality of the kouros tradition, but are generally more lifelike. It is significant that these statues were a memorial to the establishment of Athenian democracy. They thus represent the replacement of both the kouros and the system of aristocratic rule which it represented.

Sound sculpture
Sound sculpture is one term for the multimedia artform where, as the name suggests, sculpture produces sound or, less often, the reverse. Most often sound sculpture artists were primarily either visual artists or composers, not having started out directly making sound sculpture. Other terms is sound art and sound installation. Sound sculptures take the form of indoor sound installations, outdoor installations such as aeolian harps, automatons, or be more or less near conventional musical instruments. Cymatics has influenced sound sculpture. Sound sculpture is often site-specific. Cymatics is the study of wave phenomena. It is typically associated with the physical patterns produced through the interaction of sound waves in a medium.
The term cymatics was coined by the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny (1904 - 1972), it is derived from the Greek "kyma" meaning "wave", and "ta kymatica" meaning "matters pertaining to waves." Cymatics was explored by Jenny in his book by that title in 1967. Inspired by systems theory, the work of Ernst Chladni, and his medical practice, Jenny began an investigation of periodic phenomena but especially the visual display of sound. He used standing waves, piezoelectric amplifiers, and other methods and materials. A simple experiment demonstrating the visualisation of cymatics can be done by sprinkling sand on a metal plate and vibrating the plate, for example by drawing a violin bow along the edge, the sand will then form itself into standing wave patterns such as simple concentric circles. One of Jenny's more complex experiments include a spherical vibrating water droplet containing fine particles, these particles then formed into a 3-Dimensional star (or dual) tetrahedron shape with surrounding circles as shown below. The higher the frequencies, the more complex the shapes produced, with certain shapes having similarities to traditional mandalas and crop circle designs. Jenny's book influenced Alvin Lucier and, along with Chladni, helped lead to Lucier's composition Queen of the South. Jenny's work was also followed up by Center for Advanced Visual Study (CAVS) founder Gyorgy Kepes at MIT. His work in this area included an acoustically vibrated piece of sheet metal in which small holes had been drilled in a grid. Small flames of gas burned through these holes and thermodynamic patterns were made visible by this setup. Jenny's term was later adopted by some Holistic healing practitioners, who believe that sound waves transmitted through the human body can normalize imbalances and synchronize the cells' frequencies back to their natural, healthy state of vibrational resonance. Where Jenny's original work was based on methodologies that were repeatable by others, these holistic claims are not evidence-based medicine and have not been conclusively demonstrated through clinical trials.
 

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