Sculptural Values: Carving, Modelling, Making

This event for is part of a Research Season that centres on the idiosyncratic sculptural imagination of critic Adrian Stokes (1902-1972).
About this Event

How do we address questions of matter, process, facture, climate, fluidity and scale in premodern sculpture today? What languages of art history and criticism might enable us to hold such qualities within description and to do so with verve? What deeper fantasies lie within materials? What inner ferments does the artwork externalise?

This event for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) is part of a Research Season at Henry Moore Institute that centres on the idiosyncratic sculptural imagination of the English critic Adrian Stokes (1902–72). A key voice in mid twentieth-century sculptural and architectural criticism, Stokes uniquely combined a disparate set of compelling concerns: modernist values of direct carving, speculative psychoanalytic thought, a sensitivity to the vitality of natural materials, and a deep understanding of pre-modern sculpture in its continual reanimation. The workshop will engage, both directly and indirectly, with some of Stokes’ key terms, but no prior familiarity with his writings is necessary.

The workshop brings scholars working on premodern sculpture together to re-assess Stokes’ primary distinction between “carving” and “modelling” as part of a larger discussion of sculptural values. How does the division Stokes maintained between aesthetics and process, implicit in his definitions of the two terms, challenge the assumptions of new methodologies such as affordance theory, material engagement theory, eco-criticism etc? How should we approach Stones of Rimini (1934), Stokes’ best-known study, anew after the material and now ecological turns in art history? Can we still speak of “calcareous” versus “siliceous” traditions? Is limestone really the “humanistic” rock? Was Stokes right to locate an origin for the Ionic volute’s scroll in ammonite fossils, and what other natural derivations might we add to his way of looking at architectural forms? What does it mean to bestow a tempo on things? Other of Stokes’ values to be discussed include “immediacy”, “turning out” and “massiveness”.