Professor David J Getsy, ‘Actuality and Sculpture’

When sculptors represent the functional object on a one-to-one scale, does the sculpture become that object?

This talk will examine this question through a discussion of Harry Bates’s Pandora 1890 and Scott Burton’s Bronze Chair 1975.

If a central anxiety for modern sculpture has been that it is sometimes indistinguishable from everyday objects or spaces, then how do assertively representational and realist sculptures – like the Pandora or the Bronze Chair – propose to overcome the assumed opposition between literalism and representation, between image and object?

Tracking this question across the history of modern sculpture allows for a different understanding of nineteenth-century sculpture’s art-theoretical complexity to emerge.

About the speaker

David J. Getsy is the author of Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022), Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015/2023), Rodin: Sex an the Making of Modern Sculpture (2010), and Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (2004).

He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.