tailieunhanh - Herder’s Aesthetics of Sculpture Rachel Zuckert, Northwestern University April 2008

Long-term survival of outdoor sculpture will be affected by use of the site, adjacent buildings, trees, roads, playgrounds, ponds and similar features. Determine who—pedestrians and pets, cyclists, skateboarders—and how many will use the area and how they will use it. Susan Carr, director of public art, Arts Commission of Greater Toledo, has learned to include users in the mix of design considerations. “Our Major Ritual by Beverly Pepper suffered serious damage from skateboarders. It’s taken a lot of time, dollars and public relations to correct the damage. Even resited on grass with a wide stone border, the sloping sculpture sometimes proves too seductive for skateboarders, in-line skaters or bicyclists. Now the artists and. | Draft Only No Citation without Author Permission Herder s Aesthetics of Sculpture Rachel Zuckert Northwestern University April 2008 1 Zuckert Herder s Aesthetics of Sculpture April 2008 Among the art forms identified in the eighteenth century as central - painting music sculpture architecture literature -- sculpture has perhaps received the least focused attention from aestheticians as having its own standards of excellence or as affording a distinctive kind of aesthetic experience. Unlike music or architecture traditional sculpture does not pose obvious questions about common claims concerning the nature of art or of aesthetic experience such as imitation or disinterestedness . It has often been treated then and now as one of the visual arts together with painting and thus implicitly as requiring no distinct treatment of its own for painting generally has dominated discussion of the visual arts. In this paper I propose to discuss a little known treatment of sculpture in the history of aesthetics which attempts precisely to argue that sculpture has its own norms and provides its own type of aesthetic experience by contrast to painting that of Johann Gottfried Herder in his work Sculpture Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion s Creative Dream. 1 Herder argues that sculpture is a distinctive artform because it is directed towards and appreciated by the sense of touch rather than vision. I shall suggest that Herder s attempt to define sculpture as an artform by reference to the sense of touch is not successful but that his arguments are useful for making salient distinctive aspects of some experience of sculpture making connections between 1 All citations to Sculpture will be to the Jason Geiger translation University of Chicago Press Chicago 2002 . I will also draw from Herder s earlier briefer but consonant treatment of sculpture in his Fourth Critical Forest citations to this work are from Herder Selected Writings on Aesthetics ed. and trans. Gregory .