Reflective Log: Sculpture Unlimited Book

Grubinger, Eva and Jörg Heiser, Sculpture unlimited II: Materiality in Times of Immateriality (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015) pp. 1- 200

Key Points & Reflections:

• The introduction explains something of sculptures expansion - in terms of its definition, and more so in recent years, "The idea of sculpture "unlimited comes into its own: after "external" expansions into other materials, processes, and fields, and the "internal" re examination of sculptures own history, we now look to the horizon ahead" p7. 
• "under the conditions of advanced capitalism - immateriality comes at a price. Globally, one persons profit, achieved thanks to complicated financial market algorithms, may mean that a lot of other people lose their jobs; "liberation" toward immaterial labour implies another person's enslavement with even more debased forms of material labour (the fancy smartphone that makes us "flexible" is being produced under terribly "inflexible" sweatshop factory conditions." p8. 
• "How can we make productive use of new technologies while not getting entrapped in their aesthetic limitations and often dire eco-economical consequences?"p8 
• "One explanation may be that a lot of people do feel they are being treated more and more like objects, while objects have become more and more sentient".p9. ... maybe like art in art market... artists are objects to galleries? 
• "[Timotheus] Vermeulen's essay looks at the social and political conditions under which sculpture is made in the first place, assuming that these conditions are not an empty container where artistic practice happens to be situated, but that obviously these conditions sculpt the space in which sculpture is made. This leads him to French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who was one of the first thinkers to inquire into space as a social construct, and to a historical reconstruction of how out of postmodernism and the neo-liberal paradigm our current "meta-modern" condition has arisen. Are we living in a global allegorical shopping mall, inaugurated by the likes of Tony Blair or Gerhard Schroder, that, as run down as it may be now, defines our environment?". p10. 
• "Sculpture to me [Mark Leckey] is about the experience, the encounter with an object in space. And how this encounter affects you in a physical and psychic way." p15 
• "If sculpture is becoming unbound, unlimited, then one thing I believe happens is that it returns to an older form of how we respond to thing, to objects that take the form of fetishism or totemism. One of the reasons I am interested in sculpture is that objects to me are essentially fetishistic - on a pathological level. Through objects I am trying to understand why I am attracted to them, what makes them so alluring."p.15 
• "I [Timotheus Vermeulen] accepted the kind invitation to contribute , are the changing conditions of and for sculpture. To an extent I am thinking here of conditions in the narrower sense, the stuff of the studio. This includes matter be it actual or virtual; craft, be it physical, intellectual, spiritual or otherwise; time, be it the time one invests, and can invest in the practice of sculpture; and above all, space, the creation in and especially of space: the concretization of air, the transformation of fluid atoms into solid ones, the actualization, permanent or fleeting, of the virtual" p25. 
• From page 27 there is a good essay about space."The space that is sculpted - that is, the space that is materalized through sculpture... is always already occupied by any number of realities: rules of gravity, moisture or dust, but also discourses about art, social relations, money problems..."p25. 
• But on page 30, there is an essay on 'metamodernism' which includes information on current society, Marx references, postmodernism, politics and society: 
• It talks about how in the 90s there was a belief that 'the development of mankind had come to an end' p30, as reiterated by Jamesons quote "the last few years have been marked by an inverted millenniarism, in which premonitions of the future... have been replaced by the end of this or that..." however "What awaited us there was not, ... as Marx had hoped, a dictatorship of the proletariat." instead were "tanned white men in brouges and jeans who called themselves liberal democrats. Leading us into the shopping mall, buying us coffee and chocolates imported from far away counties and prepared on the spot by their former inhabitants... Strollng through the mall, we had to hand it to them: it did seem peaceful, and it certainly was luxurious". p.31