 |
| Edmé Bouchardon Child riding a dolphin 1738 tinted plaster Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"Any activity, with perhaps the exception of unfocused play, projects some more-or-less specific end, and in this sense separates the process from the achievement. But images need not be identified with the ends of art. Although priorities do exist in the work under discussion, they are not preconceived imagistic ones. The priorities have to do with acknowledging and even predicting perceptual conditions for the work's existence. Such conditions are neither forms nor ends nor part of the process. Yet they are priorities and can be intentions."
 |
| Anonymous Spanish sculptor Pietà polychromed plaster ca. 1725 Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| John Cheere Capitoline Isis 1767 painted plaster Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Jean-Antoine Houdon Seated Voltaire ca. 1779-95 plaster Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"One aspect of the work worth mentioning is the implied attack on the iconic character of how art has always existed. In a broad sense art has always been an object, static and final, even though structurally it may have been a depiction or existed as a fragment. What is being attacked, however, is something more than art as icon. Under attack is the rationalistic notion that art is a form of work that results in a finished product."
 |
| Antoine-Louis Barye Nereid arranging necklace ca. 1836 plaster and wax Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Annibale Fontana Adoring Angel ca. 1583-84 wax on metal armature Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi Apotheosis of Antonio Manoel da Vilhena, Grand Master of Malta ca. 1725-29 wax relief Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"The detachment of art's energy from the craft of tedious object production has further implications. This reclamation of process refocuses art as an energy driving to change perception. (From such a point of view the concern with 'quality' in art can only be another form of consumer research – a conservative concern involved with comparisons between static, similar objects within closed sets.)"
 |
| Anonymous Japanese sculptor Elephant ca. 1250 wood Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Anonymous Japanese sculptor Guardian animal ca. 1250 wood Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Anonymous Japan sculptor Guardian animal (detail) ca. 1250 wood Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Anonymous Japanese sculptor Guardian animals ca. 1250 wood Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"The attention given to both matter and its inseparableness from the process of change is not an emphasis on the phenomenon of means. What is revealed is that art itself is an activity of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and mutability, of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes. At present the culture is engaged in the hostile and deadly act of immediate acceptance of all new perceptual art moves, absorbing through institutionalized recognition every art act."
 |
| Alonso Berruguete St Mark ca. 1560 polychromed and gilded wood Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Francesco Picano St Michael casting Satan into Hell 1705 polychromed wood Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Augustin Jean Moreau-Vauthier Cupid 1875 ivory and silver Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
Quoted passages are by Robert Morris (born 1931) from Notes on Sculpture, Part 4 – originally published in Artforum in April 1969, reprinted by MIT Press in 1993.
I am grateful to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for making photographs of the sculpture collection available.