The Ends of Art (Sculpture)

Abstract

This installation consists of a series of video works documenting the stages of the industrial processing of marble into tiles. The videos are shot in a straight conceptualist manner and have not been aestheticized neither during the shoot- ing nor the editing stages. Likewise, the sound elements of the work have been left unaltered in order to evoke the original atmosphere of the factory. The clinical portrayal of the commer- cialization of an otherwise historically traditional material for sculpture (marble) through an in- dustrial repetitive process underlines the recent methodological transitions in sculpture after the readymade: the substitution of the unique hand- made artifact by a massively reproduced object. In other words, it is a ‘behind the scenes’ docu- mentation of the process that produces a would- be-readymade while at the same time the mate- rial (marble) by which this object is produced is considered to be an important constituent of sculpture’s history and tradition. Likewise, due to the fact that this work problematizes the promise of a ‘new sculpture’ offered by the historic transi- tion towards interdisciplinarity it demands an approach that is foreign to the conventional aes- thetic means and phenomenological con nes of traditional sculpture; hence, the choice of video. Despite the radicality of Duchamp’s Fountain it persists as a sculptural form; regardless of how much it expanded the methodological eld of sculpture and by extension the de nition of art it remains an object.