Elasticity in twentieth-century sculpture

Abstract

How can elasticity be applied as an analytical category for the study of sculpture, here especially of the 1970s? The aim of this article is to circumvent binary, gender-bound approaches to materials. It discusses how elasticity moves from representation (Germaine Richier, Olga Jevrić, Naum Gabo) to materiality and medium, such as nylon and rubber/latex (Rosemary Mayer, Senga Nengudi, Eva Hesse, Claes Oldenburg), leaving behind the paradigm of minimalism in favour of eccentric, bodily and sensuous objects. Rosalind Krauss emphasized how in post-war American art, ‘sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity’. This breaking out of categories can be seen as a sociopolitical figure of thought, for example in Nengudi’s sculptures, where the (female) body is restrained by the material and enmeshed in a social web of heteronormative ideas, but also in the sociopolitical context, such as the Black Liberation Movement and demonstrations against the Vietnam War.