Modern Sculpture, a Photobook
This paper considers the first survey of modern sculpture, Carola Giedion-Welcker’s Moderne Plastik. Elemente der Wirklichkeit. Masse und Auflockerung (Modern Plastic Art: Elements of Reality. Volume and Disintegration), published in Zürich in German and English in 1937. It examines how Giedion-Welcker worked with the graphic designer Herbert Bayer to narrate the recent history of sculpture through a sequence of photographic reproductions. Through a careful selection, layout, and ordering of photographs, the book makes a visual argument for the origins of new sculptural form and its perception. By drawing comparisons to other publications by Giedion-Welcker and a wide range of contemporary photobooks dedicated to the art of sculpture, this paper locates Moderne Plastik at the heart of key debates about the development of sculptural form and its proper reproduction. It argues that Giedion-Welcker’s book demands that the reader apply a specifically sculptural mode of perception to the photographic sequence, and shows how this encounter enlivens theoretical claims about the temporality of modern sculpture and its particular relationship to space.
Megan R. Luke is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which received the 2015 Robert Motherwell Book Award. With Sarah Hamill (Oberlin College), she is co-editor of Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction (forthcoming, Getty Publications, 2017) and the recipient of a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She is currently preparing a new book, The Sculptural Surrogate: Reproduction and the Ritual Object, which considers the role of reproductive technologies and materials in the development of modern theories of sculptural perception and history.