Words!

I’ve put off my work on the Athena sculpture for now. I still want to talk about the power of allusions in sculpture, though. Please read if you have the time/patience.

The ability to convey a concept is one of the most important aspects of art. Art, like literature, is a medium of culture. The mindset of a culture is created by what is passed down through generations, and having a say in this passage is a powerful thing. People can be sometimes be convinced of things through logic, but they take for granted hundreds of seemingly strange or unhappy or illogical things because of their culture.

Although I wouldn't dare to get into a definition of Art itself, I think that a general definition of art deals with its ability to evoke some type of response. Meaning is created in the interaction between the viewer and the work- they call it reader response theory in literature. Sometimes people doubt whether the response that is evoked by a piece of art is one that art is supposed to evoke, like Damien Hirst's cow halves. Often, I think, what a piece intends to evoke is simply beauty, or motion, or something simple like this (abstract art often is in this category).

Some art intends to convey not a concept, but a message. A painting can employ a scene, and therefore an interplay of objects and people, to convey its meaning. Sculpture usually does not have this luxury. Therefore, the use of allusion is all the more important.

Because I see things in terms of literature (if you hadn’t noticed) I will now explicitly state my extended metaphor- literature is like sculpture. A writer could write a paragraph describing a particular situation, or they could write a single sentence alluding to a myth and convey the same meaning. The allusion is even more effective because it engages the reader, and encourages them to both recall the myth and fit it into the present situation. It also makes the story more relatable because it draws off of shared knowledge.

Of course, if you want to say something new you have to do more than just mention a myth; you have modify it. This was the main concern of the Greek playwrights- they told and retold old myths in new ways, focusing on different characters and making up new details in order to convey their message. The concept of cyclical time is important here, where events are only important in how they refer to a mythical past. But that it outside the scope of this post.

Back to sculpture-- sometimes all you have is a single sentence. I believe that the deepest depth of meaning that you can achieve is through allusion to, and modification of, some piece of shared knowledge.

Of course, it would be absurd of me to say that all sculpture has to follow what I have outlined here. This is something that makes sense to me.