Sculpture
Erotikons and Idolons
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10285177 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nina Holton (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1975 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 133 |
| Publication date | 1975-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Leonardo (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-094X • E-ISSN: 1530-9282 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1572955 |
| OpenAlex | W2324893407 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
The theme of the sculptures that I shall describe is the theme of encounter, of tenderness, of a unity lost, searched for or found. As the Mexican poetessayist Octavio Paz wrote: 'For an immense moment we catch a glimpse of our lost unity' [1]. These two series of sculptures, Erotikons and Idolons, are my visual conceptions of mythic lovers of the distant past. In trying to put into words my thoughts and preoccupations when sculpting these biomorphic objects, I remember Herbert Read's remark in The Origins of Form in Art: 'The greatest enemy of originality is, perhaps, the Zeitgeist, that pervasive spirit in a country which at a particular period of time unconsciously compels artists of all kinds to adopt a common idiom, to relinquish their personal choice of language' [2], p. 20. A common theme of contemporary art in the U.S.A. and in other countries of the West seems to be derangement and brutalization, which reflects the gloomy pattern of this century with its wars and holocausts. Beyond art, even the science of physics appears to have been open to the theme of disjunction and disintegration, as indicated by the terms that have entered its language, such as radioactive decay, decay of particles, displacement laws, nuclear disintegration, discontinuity, dislocation, indeterminacy, uncertainty, strangeness quantum numbers, negative states, particle annihilation and black holes. It is perhaps because I am looking toward the more utopian or beneficent potentials of human societies that I have tried to find in my sculpture expressions of the joyous and harmonious elements of life, of the basic forces of integration that provide for me the positive rationale of existence. The visual aspects of my sculptures are not intended to be guided by the current Zeitgeist but they are my response to ideograms and signs, old and new. The sketches that I make for my sculptures (Fig. 1) are almost always directly in clay or Plasteline, which I then rework and refine in wax for casting in bronze. Each sketch starts out in the form of a sign [3, 4], which evolves sometimes into 3-dimensional form-a totemic image
Art · Computer graphics (images) · Sculpture · Visual arts · Computer Science · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,04 |
| Citation span | 1981 - 2002 (22) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |