Concrete thinking for sculpture
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Huddersfield
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 14
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.1080/13534645.2015.1058884
- Title of journal
- Parallax
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 241
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 1353-4645
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article considers‘ concrete’ as both a material and a thinking process. The paper takes its lead from the cultural theorist Meike Bal to consider how, by presenting concrete as a ‘travelling concept’, a triangulated reading practice in, of and for sculpture is made possible. Four case studies provide the focus for this reading practice. The first considers the use of concrete as a material in some of the ‘technical’ experiments of Henry Moore from the 1920s and 1930s.The second addresses Barbara Hepworth’s public concrete kinetic sculpture Turning Forms, commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The psychic registrations of form-in-concrete are explored through the aesthetic reception and understanding of these works. The third examines the interplays between ‘abstraction’ and ‘concretion’ in a work of structural engineering: the Arqiva Transmission Tower on Emley Moor, West Yorkshire. This structure is a working utilitarian model of the telecommunications industry which took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. The fourth considers the display of Lygia Clark's Bichosat the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2014–2015,to reveal a particular translation between concrete thinking and concrete experience. These case studies show how the semantics of concrete as a thought process make up three interconnected points within a triangulated reading process: the concrete specificity in the material works selected, the broader field of concrete forms within which the sculptural may sit and the philosophical/aesthetic language of concrete for sculpture.The article featured as part of a guest-edited issue on the theme of concrete, which included contributions from art historians, philosophers, artists and architects across a range of disciplines. The focus of the guest issue was to engage with some of the ideas presented in Adrian Forty’s Concrete and Culture (2012), which includes the physical and metaphysical contradictions that surround concrete.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -