‘This sense of freedom’: sculpture and architecture together

Abstract

This special issue explores the changing status of architectural sculpture, sculptural architecture, and artistic and political identity in a global context, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In recent years, sculpture studies within art and architectural history have grown exponentially, increasingly taking diverse themes into account, including materiality, gender, postcolonialism and affect. In the rapid transformations of state power and imperial activity in the eighteenth century, through into the post-revolutionary political atmosphere of the nineteenth century, nations appeared to sponsor the celebration of the public citizen and actively projected imperial stability in the midst of change and resistance. Despite its association with permanence, sculpture was charged with representing change: materializing new identities and formulating representational traditions. Architectural sculpture in particular marked sites of urban modernity, such as railway stations, cultural institutions, civic landmarks and sacred structures; these large and prestigious commissions often sparked public debate around identity and artistic production. As the onset and outcomes of the First World War shaped the power and politics of cultural memory, sculpture took centre stage, with new responsibilities amid global tensions. Interwar architectural sculpture negotiated and articulated increasing anxieties regarding ornament, historicism, modernism and minimalism. With the arrival of modernism worldwide, some believed architectural sculpture was anathema. Others looked to it as the vehicle to facilitate and embody vitality in bold new architectural experimentation. Architectural sculpture was a crucible for artistic and wider cultural dialogue concerning modern life and modern subjects.In our own century, the relationships between sculpture and architecture have come to public prominence in many different ways. Conflict, regime change and terrorism in the Middle East have seen the destruction of monuments to rulers both ancient and modern. In New York, architectural remnants of the World Trade Center towers have been transformed into monumental forms, reminiscent of the obelisks and cenotaphs of earlier centuries. At the same time, sculptors have been working on increasingly large, architectural scales. Anish Kapoor's Orbit, in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, created in collaboration with the engineer Cecil Balmond, is now known as Britain's largest sculpture. Made entirely of prefabricated parts, it was manufactured by a team of over 100 people. In this regard, its production values and complexity recall the sculptural anima of Victorian industrial forms produced on a mass scale using numerous complex techniques.1 As of summer 2016, Carsten Holler's Slide runs around Kapoor's tower, transforming the sculpture into an interactive visitor attraction by merging two artists' perspectives on monumental forms. Holler, whose sculptural signature is the architecturally integrated metal tube slide, populated Tate Modern's turbine hall with his metal spiral artforms in 2006-07, shifting the way that visitors could relate to the cascades of vertical space in this massive industrial hall. In a sense, Holler's sculptural intervention in the turbine hall was in dialogue with recent commissions by two other artists in particular. One was Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, in which the artist cut jagged cracks into the floor, mapping out the consequences of some long-forgotten earthquake and fragmenting the smooth concrete surface into projections that allowed visitors to question the relationship between surface and depth. The most entertaining images of this installation were those taken directly from above of visitors clinging on to the cracks, which were then rotated to suggest that the turbine hall's floor had become a precarious series of ledges. The sublime lurked around the saw-edged corners of this installation, the traces of which can still be seen in Tate Modern's concrete floor, like so many old scars. …