Willy Rotzler

On the Experience and Comprehension of Sculptural Art

The flood of reproduced images in newspapers and magazines, in films and on TV has blunted our sense of three-dimensional perception. Many of our contemporaries find it difficult to cope with the very real presence of sculptural art, and are reluctant to accept that it is impossible to comprehend three-dimensional objects from a single standpoint. Rather, each sculpture surprises us with a multiplicity of views that merge into one another as we walk around it. A second insight – and one that is often denied us in practice – is that unlike painting, each sculpture is a physical, tangible object whose figural evolution, surface texture and material qualities can only be comprehended by our tactile sense, the actual touch of our hands. Starting from these elementary facts, the audio-visual introduction intends to give our visitors a few hints on what contemporary sculpture is and can be about.

Beginning with early modern sculpture at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, stylistic and formal changes are highlighted at a moment when the figurative canon with its focus on the human form was abandoned in favour of various types of abstraction. The next section shows how, over the course of several decades, physical and geometrical "concrete" art renounced anything that might smack of the representational, while artists gave sculptural expression to their own visual concepts. Most of all, we wish to show that these new styles did not impoverish but rather enriched the sculptural idiom. For it was only when the representation of visible, real world motifs was abandoned that sculptors began to study and visualise problems of form without blinkers or filters. At the same time, interest increased in the specific properties of the sculptural materials – wood, stone, concrete, bronze, iron, synthetics, etc. – and adequate ways of working with them. In yet more recent times, sculptures have increasingly been used to convey messages of a physiological, psychological socio-political, ecological etc. nature. In other words, sculptures can provide food for thought.

This year's Swiss Sculpture Exhibition shows even more clearly than its predecessors the vast spectrum of sculptural possibilities and statements, and the extent to which the notion of "sculpture" has become flexible, especially in recent years. Our humble "visual training course" does not claim to demonstrate to our visitors the full range of current tendencies – the "pluralism" of what sculpture can or should be is far too great. We do, however, wish to provide some essential information regarding the immediate background of the works presented here; the likely wider context in which they stand; and what kinds of insights we might expect to gain from them. Like any other works of art, these sculptures are ultimately intended to help us define more precisely our own standpoint in this world.
Willy Rotzler

© Translation from German, August 2008: Margret Powell-Joss