Art Schooled: A Year among Prodigies, Rebels, and Visionaries at a World-Class Art College

11. The End of Sculpture (As We Know It)

[ 11 ] the end of sculpture (as we know it) n the first Wednesday morning of the second semester, January 20, the frost is melting away, letting the sun in through the skylights of the campus sculpture studio. Inside, the white walls grow brighter. The room also fills with the faint sound of two students smacking clay on armatures. They are ready to sculpt the head of a model, who is late to arrive. It’s a low turnout this term for Intermediate and Advance Figure Sculpture, but that is what the instructor, Tylden Streett, expected. This term, students have a schedule conflict with another required course. Today, Streett paces the studio, high in the stone, fortress-like walls of the Mount Royal Station building. Normally, he’d have a full class of ten. “And they have to learn everything in fourteen days,” he says, referring to the one-day-a-week schedule. “They say doing sculpture is best for the hand-eye skill.”1 At the last faculty show, Streett put up a bronzecast low relief, showing himself, with stylus, working on a clay sculpture of a female figure. The title was, Figurative Sculpture Is Alive and Well in a Far Corner of [mica]. Some students told him they didn’t know such a course existed. He understands. At art school today, students must learn one of everything, jacks of all trades but masters of none. Also, the market for classical sculptors—those who work in clay, marble, or bronze—has fallen on very hard times. Not that sculpture is unpopular at mica, however. It’s an expanding world now for the modern art student. In 2005, the department was renamed Interdisciplinary Sculpture to indicate how many media the discipline may include. “Sculpture,” the catalogue says, “is contemporary art’s meta-medium.” With sculpture, “artists cross boundaries, invent hybrid processes, and explore innovative content in areas of object-making, installation , performance, site-work, time based art, and digital forms.”2 Streett has taught sculpture at mica for a half century, watching the art form evolve to what it is today—from cemetery statuary to cubist and O The End of Sculpture (as We Know It) [ 171 ] expressionist forms, giant outdoor mobiles, and finally rooms filled with light shows and dancing performers. Sculpture means “anything threedimensional ,” he says. He can still talk the same language with the newest generation of sculptors. “They tolerate me, and I tolerate them,” he says. “And we’re friendly. We’re all in the same racket.” The sculpture racket today has much in common with “new media.” That is because traditional three-dimensional objects are now combined with conceptual art, performance, video, and sound technologies. At mica, and at other art schools, sculpture has gone through the interdisciplinary revolution, a kind of rejection of specialization, but also a broader meaning for each art discipline. Down two flights of stairs from Streett’s studio, the seeds of sculpture’s popularity are being planted in mica’s Foundation Year course, Sculptural Forms. A semester long, it introduces every art student to materials and tools. Depending on the teacher, you can get very conceptual assignments , or ones that have the feel of an engineering or materials problem. Either way, freshman like Liam Dunaway and Holden Brown are finding sculpture to be more satisfying than anything two-dimensional they’ve done, indeed “the only meaningful place to do art,” Liam will argue.3 This being the second semester, Holden will take his first course in filmmaking, his major, but he has been surprised by sculpture as well. If once it seemed to be mere objects on pedestals, now it can seem cinematic , he says. “I discovered that same kind of satisfaction in sculpture that I’ve found in film; seeing a vision fully realized.”4 In his Sculptural Forms class, he was given an assignment to “fill the greatest amount of space with the least amount of material.” For this, he had a vision, perhaps like a film. He would create a human figure, built of chicken wire, put his own plaster-cast face on top, then cover it with flowers and, in a dark classroom, project on it a video image of bees, with a buzzing sound piped in. With this sculpture, he has densely filled a space with mostly air, light, and sound. Like Holden, Amelia Beiderwell also is drawn to the world of creating spatial experiences. When Amelia arrived at mica to be a sculpture major, the...