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Sculpture from Behind

Monday 18 April 2016, 5.00PM

Speaker(s): Jeremy Melius (Tufts)

Reinhardt Sculpture from BehindTaking as its starting point Heinrich Wölfflin’s insistence on a normative frontal vantage from which sculpture should be photographed, set out in an essay of 1896, this paper attends to several moments in which the meeting of photography and sculpture does something quite else, deviating from the frontal in order to picture, or perhaps to produce, a complex of fears and desires attendant on the figure’s dorsal view.

For Wölfflin, elaborating on the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand’s The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1893), photographing statues head on served to confirm and extend the aesthetic force of figurative sculpture itself, embodying that viewpoint from which the artwork itself, as it were, most wished to be seen. Yet in Hildebrand’s treatise read more closely, in photographic slides the painter Ad Reinhardt made in the 1950s and 60s, and most of all in a sequence of photographs Hildebrand himself took of his daughters in the late 1880s, another aspect comes into view: a vision of sculptural dorsality, in which sculpture turns its back on its dispossessed viewers, opening them to the frightening vulnerability of the body’s exposure to three-dimensional space. In doing so, these documents ask us to reconsider crucial episodes in the elaboration of sculptural theory, as well as to come to grips with the intensity of sculpture’s dorsal life.

Jeremy Melius is Assistant Professor of Art History at Tufts University, where he teaches modern art and art writing.

Location: The Bowland Auditorium (Berrick Saul)