Between Haptics and Kinaesthetics: Body Experience in Some Contemporary Theories of Sculpture

• Main Author: Katarzyna Trzeciak
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University 2015-03-01
• Series: The Polish Journal of Aesthetics
• Subjects: sculpture; body; kinaesthetics
• Online Access: https://pjaesthetics.uj.edu.pl/documents/138618288/138854209/eik_36_10.pdf/677e5869-b7c5-4fa6-8828-39676a376b82

The text deals with the question about the perception of sculpture which is this kind of plastic art in which all human body is engaged in the process of perception. In Katarzyna Kobro’s and Władysław Strzemiński’s Composition of Space (1931) we can read that sculpture is a way of space organisation. The experience of sculpture is not (as in painting) based on looking or understanding, but on the feeling of spatiotemporal motion. Oscar Hansen also emphasised the role of psychophysical activity in contact with sculpture and went a step further than Kobro i Strzemiński experiencing the impact on the human body different sculpting materials. In William Morris’s Notes on Sculpture (1966–1969) sculpture exists only in subjective, corporal way of experience, away from consciousness and discursive association. All those theories and their artistic concretizations redefines the role of the viewer of artifact and extend the Classic concept of sculpture as an art close to the body. In a number of contemporary sculpture this is not the model’s body that is the most important. Rather they deals with viewer’s body which is increasingly drawn into artistic representation.