Sculpture after Darwin

What does Darwinian sculpture look like? Sculpture has received comparatively little attention in the literature on evolutionism and the visual arts. Highlighting parallels between evolutionary theory and the concerns of modern sculpture, this paper takes seriously the possibility that the distinct conventions, methods, materials, and display conditions of sculpture allow it to register the implications of evolutionary theory in ways that other art forms do not. Evolutionary theory challenged the sculptural ideal of a universal, fixed, chaste, eternal human form and paved the way for a more inclusive sculptural field that could embrace variation, diversity, mutation, fragmentation, and decoration.

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