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Unique Artistic Properties (1) The difference and affinities between the sculpture and historic and contemporary aspects of international sculptural practice must be recognised. It is necessary to know how the sculpture differs from Western "religious" art. It is necessary to understand the African quality of the sculpture, and its relationship to African tribal art. In Western countries, sculpture historically has had a closer connection with the world outside art than art itself. Sculpture for centuries was public art and generally reflected the interests of the general public. Sculpture's history has not so much been its own history but the history of church and state, of cities and leaders and heroes, of exploration, human achievement and of death. Churches, buildings, civic squares and the recognition and honouring of leaders have been the reason for sculpture's existence. Sculpture's historic home has been outside the gallery or the museum and in the street, the square or the plaza. For centuries, sculpture's public has not necessarily been an art-loving public but a heterogeneous crowd interested in sculpture, not because of its artistic properties, but because of the people, incidents and deeds it represents. Historically in Western society, sculptors were under the patronage of church and state and the commitments manifested in their work were largely religious, political or civic. The presence of a sculpture underpinned the permanency and efficacy of a system, an ideology or a belief. Today when systems, ideologies and people come and go before they are considered memorable, sculpture has lost its historic associations. Television, film and the biography have taken over sculpture's commemorative role. Abstraction and modernism removed sculpture from its representational associations and established autonomous objecthood as the reason for its existence. After the 1920s, sculpture no longer had to be about something, or of someone or something, to be understood. It became valued for its artistic properties; for its formal values and for considerations on the part of the artists of mass and space; and on a more personal basis, what it made its viewers feel. With its genesis in the work of Picasso and Gonzales - cubism and constructivism - abstract sculpture moved from the base onto the floor, later the table and more recently the wall, thus creating a physical intimacy rather than a distance between the work and the viewer. Sculpture began to take its place in galleries, becoming an art commodity rather than a commissioned item. Sculptors could now say what they wanted to say rather than what they were told to say. Sculpture, like painting, became subject to conditions of connoisseurship; works were bought and sold and provenance established. If sculpture was no longer a monument to human endeavour, it established for itself a new value as art. Post-modernism again posed challenges to accepted notions of sculpture. It established a discourse about the nature of objeethood, its meaning and its ramifications. The object had become considered as more than a thing in itself, with cultural and social significance. In the 1970s, the thinking or concept behind the work of art became as important as the work of art itself. The definition of sculpture was opened out to include conceptually-based new and ephemeral art forms: performance art, video art, installations, and body art - all three-dimensional and often all three taking place together. If these works negated the artists' hand and denied their materials the truth, they were filled with the artists' presence and often ritualised the work process, giving it a sense of theatre. Hence sculpture became an inclusive and overwhelming set of activities of which object- making was one. The 1980s saw the concept of the sculptural object become more inclusive. Found objects from the real world, with already culturally assigned significance and meaning, were culturally redefined through placement in a fine art context. Hence sculpture regained its link with the real world but in a very different way to before. These links were also established through environmental sculpture, when artists worked with the natural environment, used natural materials and explored the sculptural properties of natural form. As performance art, video art, installations and other ephemeral art forms became art forms in their own right, there was among sculptors a return to object-making, sometimes through the releasing of materials from traditional expectations and the mixing of media with culinary skill. On the other hand, some artists re- established the traditional relationship of the artist to his materials and once more engaged in the heroic sweaty tussle with their work characteristic of Michelangelo. This relationship now included what was thought about subject and was largely a conceptual rather than a perceptual understanding of subject. The statement of the new object sculpture included the statement about the artist's relationship to society, his or her own culture and other cultures. Often the natural properties of the material were highlighted in the cause of realising its truth, and had an influence on the subject. Stone sculpture in Zimbabwe has a strong affinity with this direction in object sculpture. It has a traditional treatment, hand carving of an age-old material - stone. The historic sweaty tussle remains, while a more heady exercise takes place at the same time. The mind becomes shaman, the idea becomes the driving force and part of the means. Stone sculpture in Zimbabwe at its best arises from the need of the artist to express himself or herself, from the need to make permanent his conception rather than a perception of things and to do so with total honesty to the material. However, stone sculpture in Zimbabwe has little in common with historic aspects of sculptural practice. It has seldom been intended or considered to be public sculpture. Its development has never accompanied the building of cities. Stone sculpture in Zimbabwe does not depict individuals, nor is it commemorative or emblematic. It is seldom representational. Although the matrix of stone sculpture in Zimbabwe is the spiritual beliefs of the societies represented by the artists, it is not -religions art- in the Western sense, or the generally accepted African sense. Its spiritual dimension is markedly different. Unlike Western religious art, its imagery is not already established or collectively understood as religious imagery. The subject does not come from religious narrative or from the written word such as the Bible. Religious traditions among the societies represented by the artists are largely oral, passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation and made concrete by observance. Unlike Western "religious" art, stone sculpture in Zimbabwe does not depict familiar religious figures. The religions of the artists' societies have no saints or prophets. The stone sculpture does not depict religious incidents or events and it does not have moral overtones.
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