Sculpture in the Age of Doubt

Chapter 1: Summary

When I first dove into reading Sculpture in the Age of Doubt by Thomas McEvilley I was confused on what this book was going to be about. There were so many philosophers and historians talking about whether over the years doubting was a positive action and what will happen if we do not doubt.

English philosophers Francis Bacon and John Locke believe that doubting will "clean away the under brush of superstition on the way toward truth." That if you doubt fully, you will awaken fully. Hakuin explains that doubting is like renewing and purifying yourself. "To bring before yourself the great doubt is to experience the great death and feel the great joy." In

Christian or islamic wars about dogma, it is true that nothing at all is more important than the correctness of the opinions one holds. That everyones opinion matters. The Pyrrhonists believe suspended judgment on all questions refusing to declare whether something might be true or untrue. 

Ages of certainty and ages of doubt have altered with a slow rhythm. Like modernism, universals were being realized in history. Science became "more or less entirely theory- centered." Rationalism came to worship the irrational, which is reconciled as a hyper-rational. Enlightment ideals started tiring into sublime. Ideals began turning into ecstatic suicide.  

"Absolute freedom" was driving the western world and its idea of progress. Though the alteration between ages of certainty and ages of doubt seems inherent in the makeup of western civilization, it seems also to be linked to contact with outside cultures. Boucher and Fragonard trace the path of sublime in paintings, reflecting on what is happening at the time. Portraiture and landscape paintings form into abstract. Mondrian portray the sublime, abstract paintings that are not the figure but focus on the ground. Abstract was said to be the art of the end of the world. 

Post-modernism is a new culture and social formation that needs new cultural and social forms. It is a novel stage of history and novel socio-cultural formation which requires new concepts and theories. Post Modernism seems new but it is an end of an age of irrational dogma and communal folly. 

Chapter 2: Summary

There were more witnessed radical changes in both practice and theory than in any other historically visible period for tens of thousands of years. It was a specialized existence of the end of the age of certainty in a new age of uncertainty or doubt. A re-direciton was taken place not only in art but in the social world. 

Heinrich Wofflin claimed there were two roots in art. It was either visual and internal or  social and external roots. A series of reversals had taken place. New aesthetic is in place- post modernist. more social and external root is used. The everyday world took over art world and the last abstract expressionism was in the age of certainty. This was a diminished period for painting.

Sculpture and painting conveyed the same ideological spiritual values. The Renaissance thought of the painter as a aristocrat and a sculptor to be a proletarian but are both mutual supporting modes of representation. Sculpture became mathematical and particular. Portraying the soul not the figure with ratios. Abstraction was a radical shift showing spirituality and the passing scene, not the figure. Painting showed non- illusionistic objects. The hierarchy was telling painters to sculptorize there work because sculpture was becoming more popular. 

After the war there was a turn toward sculptural performance. Where painting and sculpture became opposites. Anti sculpture and anti painting were introduced. Which meant they were reactions against the traditional paintings or sculptures. At the end of this time, Duchamp displayed his everyday items as a soulist approach to art. There was a break through in what was considered "art." Sculpture became the primary medium of at least the first generation of the age of doubt.