In The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, Alex Potts explains the transition from self-contained figurative sculpture to sculpture-in-the-expanded-field as the culmination of two centuries of beliefs that sculpture incites a “distinctive mode of apprehension” (2) from painting. This significant divide rests not strictly on the formal means of the two mediums, but also on the reactions these means prompt in viewers: For Potts the “vividly embodied physical and perceptual responses” (5) that accompany the spatiotemporal process of looking at three-dimensional art are necessarily unmatched in any flat, two-dimensional experience. Potts’s study does not recount the historical debates on painting versus sculpture; instead, it emphasizes the phenomenology that provokes a “sculptural imaginary” (23) his coinage for the medium-specific “psychic dynamic” (8) of the “physical, sensual and affective dimensions” (4) that in modern art “lay bare the tension” (23) in the disintegration between “the individual and the public arena” (23).

If Potts’s focus on an art “activated” by the viewer has a hint of existentialism, the flashback to the 1960s and 1970s is deliberate and, he argues, unavoidable. Minimalism and Postminimalism take the “contingent dimensions of viewing” (12)—first experienced with the oeuvre of Antonio Canova—to a new extreme, one still pervasive today, he claims. Furthermore, his scholarly ambition is to both complicate and push backward by a century the “historical progression” in Rosalind Krauss’s 1977 book Passages in Modern Sculpture, “from [her] figure [Rodin] to object [Brancusi] to arena of encounter [Minimalism and Postminimalism]” (12).

To accomplish this task, he presents an ever-increasing tension between materializing and dematerializing tendencies in sculpture theory and contemporaneous production. The study begins with the aesthetics of Johann Gottfried Herder (1778) and its bearing on Antonio Canova’s sculpture and, to mention only the most extended discussions of this ambitious project, moves to Charles Baudelaire’s review of the 1846 Salon; Walter Pater’s Hegelian views (1873); Adolph von Hildebrand’s essay “The Problems of Form in Figurative Art” (1893); texts by Georg Simmel (1902) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1903 and 1907) on Auguste Rodin; Carl Einstein’s largely forgotten critique of formalism (1915) and its connection to Aristide Maillol’s art; Ezra Pound’s modernist celebrations of Constantin Brancusi’s forms (1921); British-favorite Adrian Stokes’s thoughts (especially those from 1933 and 1951) on Barbara Hepworth and David Smith; the influence of the theories of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) and Theodor Adorno (1970) on the writings (indicated by date) and/or artwork of Donald Judd (1965), Robert Morris (1966), Michael Fried (1967), Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Louise Bourgeois. This latter group, around which Potts’s main ideas on the 1960s and 1970s circulate, forms the heart of his account, since, despite its impressive breadth, six of the eleven chapters are largely devoted to these figures.

A fair bit of The Sculptural Imagination‘s material was published as essays during the past ten years, as Potts—whose earlier book was Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)—has added the twentieth century to his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century credentials. Consequently, he finds the roots of a modern sculptural imaginary in the Neoclassical, using Canova’s Three Graces (1815–17) to show that, unlike in Krauss’s static conception, modern sculpture has only an “elusive and provisional sense of wholeness” (13). His argument runs as follows: If seen from a distance or in a photograph the marble sculpture appears invariable, a closer encounter reveals a “spectacle of vividly felt shapes and surfaces quite disconnected from the clearly configured form” (12–13). This effect—one that “hovers forever on the margins of one’s immediate awareness” (13)—is due to the oscillating temporality built into the looking experience, the result of the women’s varied gestures and poses and the visual contrast of textured drapery with smooth flesh. While Potts is not the first to attend to such aspects of sculpture—indeed, he wrote the book to show otherwise—his is the clearest genealogy of today’s conflation of medium’s material and phenomenal poles.

For Potts, this phenomenological modulation of Canova is a less intense “decentering” than that in Minimalist works such as Morris’s felt pieces of the late 1960s, which are “literally a play of surface almost entirely disconnected from any supporting structure” (13). Decentering, importantly, is not limited to artistic effect; it has distinctly political implications. It provides a “perpetual unfixing of images representing any ideal or collectively shared subjectivity within modern culture” (19), staging a breakdown in the “rosy vision of the triumphal progress of bourgeois individualism and freedom-promoting capitalism” (101).

Canova and Morris are not the only ones who “stage” the artistic encounter, for this theatrical concept is the most salient aspect of the art and ideas Potts traces. For instance, as Rilke explained, Rodin’s sculptures exert vastly different effects as a function of how viewers encounter them. Seeing the art in his studio facilitates an unfixed and intimate “modalities of viewing” (98) that could, as Potts summarized, “plunge his audience into an imaginary space…a scene of childhood fantasy…where objects are felt to carry a charge…still envisaged as extensions of the inner self” (78–79). In the public arena, with its lack of intimacy, the viewer is distanced from these same objects and unable to activate their surfaces. There, according to Rilke, they instead present, as Potts explained, a “resolutely thing-like quality,” an autonomy that entraps them in an inertia of material fact (88).

It is just this very ambiguity of presence that Potts sees as the compelling feature of Minimal and Postminimal art. For instance, Andre’s sculptures have “an acutely felt physical sense of presence coinciding with absence, something manifesting itself powerfully yet reticently through the evacuating of full-bodied shape and the flattening out of solid substance” (312). In his discussions of art on the 1960s and 1970s, Potts is careful to highlight the contemporaneous criticism of figures such as Mel Bochner and David Bourdon, while also paying close attention to what the artists themselves have to say. It is also in these chapters that his own views become most strongly apparent. Exploring attention to artists’ attitudes toward photographing their three-dimensional works of art, Potts contributes a new understanding of the era. Pointing out the general dilemma as discussed in Morris’s 1978 essay, “The Present Tense of Space,” Potts explains that while photographs are “totally inadequate for conveying anything of the felt sense of space and internal lived experience of time” (267), they nonetheless permit some dimension of the art to reach a wider audience. More to his main point, he demonstrates the care with which these artists staged their works for photographic dissemination: Serra hired a well-known photographer; Andre’s early black-and-white images deliberately intensify the tonal contrast between the floor and the work, as they would otherwise begin to merge pictorially—despite the fact that the lived experience of this potential merger is a key part of the sculptures’ impact on the imagination.

No one stages this potential for merger—this play between “arenas and objects”—more effectively than the enduring Louise Bourgeois, who has also been instrumental in a “regendering of the persona of the sculptor” from its “insistently masculine inflection…well into the 1960s and early 1970s” (357). For Potts, her works are “dramas of confrontation” (361) where the self “can only anchor and define itself by way of the resistance it encounters in impinging on and being impinged upon by an object looming before it” (364). Despite her affinities to Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking, the main thrust of this confrontation, for Potts, is to bring about the tension between public and private modes of Being, the legacy of forces set in motion two centuries ago, and a defining characteristic of much significant three-dimensional art since.

Throughout this review, I have generally chosen to let Potts’s language speak for itself, since I want to let his obviously deep-felt Marxist and psychoanalytic convictions come through. However, since the goal he expressed in his preface is to “engage with the verbal paradigms and cultural praxes which we surmise would have framed the viewing of the work for its original audience” while also presenting the “rather different paradigms and praxes within which our own viewing of the sculpture is embedded” (xiii), his convictions create something of a methodological conundrum at the study’s core. At what point does criticism dull the edges of history?