The Object of Our Engagement with Sculpture In what follows I discuss a limit that is commonly attributed to certain forms of figurative sculpture. It is one that, for example, Kant char- acterizes in his Critique of Judgement. There, he wisely observes that in pictures or descriptions, one can offer a beautiful representation of things—the Furies, diseases, devastations of war—that themselves are assuredly not beautiful. But perhaps not so wisely, Kant denies that sculptural depictions enjoy such an aesthetic independence from the things in the world they portray. In a sculpture, he writes, “art is almost confused with nature,” and thus, it must confine its direct representation to only beautiful things. 1 It is a limit that Baudelaire complains of in his review of the 1846 Salon, under a section with the snarky title, “Why Sculpture is Boring.” There the poet suggests that, whereas painting and literature can elicit thoughts of abstract ideas, absent objects, and fantastical states of af- fairs, sculpture cannot provide an experience whose content excludes an awareness of the work as an ordinary object in our environment, “as brutal and positive as nature herself.” 2 Later, Walter Pater takes up the charge, asserting that sculpture suffers from a “tendency to a hard re- alism…[a]gainst this tendency to hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles.” 3 Rephrased in the deprecatory ontology proposed by the painter Ad Reinhardt, “sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” 4 These invidious comparisons among the arts echo the standard charge against sculpture made in Renaissance notions of the paragone: that its powers of representation are much weaker than those of painting be- cause it cannot depart from the actual shape of what it depicts. Hence, in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Pliny’s story of the adolescent boy’s libidinous reaction to Praxilites’ statue of Aphrodite while locked in her shrine overnight, explanations of how viewers of a sculpture could respond to it—a mere object—with real emotions or desires, proposed that they confuse the artwork with the actual thing in the world it only represents. 5 8 Material, Medium, and Sculptural Imagining Jonathan Gilmore