Circling Modernism: Charles Ray, Tom Friedman, Analia Saban, and Sculpture after 1970
Circling Modernism: Charles Ray, Tom Friedman, Analia Saban, and Sculpture after 1970 In the mid-twentieth century, sculpture underwent a seismic shift. The development of the literal, or minimalist, rubric of art as “what you see is what you see”—which entailed simple, often serial, structures made of industrial materials such as plywood, steel, or bricks installed on the floor without pedestals—created a crisis of autonomy. Turning the lens from the artwork itself to the viewer’s phenomenal experience of it and the surrounding environment, the definition of sculpture was radically cracked open. This dissertation presents a study of three sculptors working in the wake of the medium’s sea change. Born roughly fifteen years apart, Charles Ray (b. 1953), Tom Friedman (b. 1965), and Analia Saban (b. 1980) were trained in progressively different decades: Ray in the seventies, Friedman in the nineties, and Saban in the aughts. As a result, their work develops out of three specific sculptural responses: postminimal, postmodern, and postmedium, respectively. Nevertheless, my project shows that while Ray, Friedman, and Saban are distinctly of their time, they also share a common sensibility that harks back to earlier tenets of sculpture established during the rise of modernism from 1890 to 1960. Through the modernist writings of Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and Clement Greenberg—as well as comparisons to modernist works by artists such as David Smith, Auguste Rodin, and Morris Louis—my project connects Ray, Friedman, and Saban to reveal an overarching self-reflexivity in their work. Each chapter pairs an artist with a specific modernist concept: Ray engages space as a medium rather than as an environment; Friedman produces labor-intensive objects that benefit from extended looking and forefronts the act of looking itself; and Saban possesses an unyielding curiosity for materials and a desire to push them to the furthest limit. This attention to space, looking, and material sets Ray, Friedman, and Saban apart from other contemporary sculptors, proving the continual potential of modernism in the current sculptural moment.
sculpture, art history, Charles Ray, Tom Friedman, Analia Saban, contemporary art, contemporary sculpture
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