STATMOB:
In making sculpture, movements of the artist’s eye and hand connect to feeling.
The artist’s eye travels lines of sight, perceptually slicing space so as to discover the relationships of parts: the axial tilts and swivels, the contrapositioning of the ribcage to the pelvis…
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The statue must coax its viewer to move around it; it relies on a roving eye and a moving body to explain its occupation of space.
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The statue– neither mannequin nor marionette– is a codified gesture of emotion.
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The statue– through its alignment of limbs and balance of parts– must suggest that motion is merely suspended, paused… poised, rather than frozen, its gesture existing at the margin of a Before and an After.
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Of course, we must distinguish between accomplishing motion and merely alluding to its possibility. (Sometimes a statue must bear the ceiling on her head).
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There are those statues who speak as fragments, their limbs lost to the blows of history, vulnerable- after all- to movement and being moved. The gesture is curtailed though its core survives, deepened perhaps by the ellipsis, in as much as we love the mystery.
What might Venus de Milo have said with the span of her arms which have been missing all these years?
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