The modern object sculpture understood as a work of art

Until modernity, the word ‘sculpture’ was used to denote mimetic representations of the human form. From modernity on this term was extended to include new and unusual works that often do not share obvious features with traditional sculpture or even with what we know as art. This thesis is placed in the chronological frame of modern art and examines the meaning and truth of modern sculpture and the ways it is to be understood as a work of art. The thesis is separated into three parts. The first and introductory part explores the way modern sculpture has developed and redefined its status and meaning in the history of art from Rodin until Duchamp and the movements of found art and conceptual art. The aim of the first part is to specify the issue of perception and the function of phenomenology in the understanding of modern sculpture. The second and third parts aim to specify the validity of modern sculpture as art, considering particularly Heidegger’s thinking on the nature of art and the truth of art in the postreligious age of modernity. Specifically, the second part examines Heidegger’s position on the meaning of art after the ‘death of art’ and moreover the place of sculpture in modernity focusing on the theme of homelessness in Rodin’s and Giacometti’s sculpture. The third part examines more closely the way abstract art and specifically the work of Barnett Newman could be seen as a truth revealing, following Heidegger’s criticism of the metaphysics of symbolic and representational art. The thesis argues that the validity of modern sculpture and generally modern art lies in its acknowledgement or, in Heidegger terms, thinking of the homelessness of the human being in modernity and the destitution of modernity, and hence in its revealing of the aspect of the truth and being that has been forgotten.