Wearable Sculpture:a Study On Body, Space And Object

From the earliest times human beings have made objects by which they decorated their own body and the environment in which they lived. During the Renaissance a clear distinction between artistic objects has been made. Some objects were considered to be art, others mere craft. This distinction never completely disappeared in the Western art. In this PhD dissertation, I focus on two media in particular:sculpture and jewellery. Both have in common that they are3dimensional objects. Sculpture is placed in the art or the public space, while jewellery is worn on the body. Sculpture is generally considered to be art, jewellery belongs to craft.Discussing several several developments in modern and contemporary Western art that find their origins in the Art and Craft Movement of the19th century, I will show from an art historical and art theoretical perspective how artists solved the distinction between art and craft. I will explain how in the artworks of major representatives of the Wearable Art Movement, Surrealism, Bauhaus, and Art Jewellery, sculpture and jewellery came together through the concept of the wearable sculpture. The wearable sculpture is an object that can be worn on the body but has all characteristics of a genuine work of art as well. It is not produced for functional qualities, but only to express the artistic ideas of the artist. Yet, it differs from sculpture because it can be worn on the body. By placing the wearable sculpture on the body, a special relation between the body and space is established. In addition to Western art historical and theoretical ideas about the wearable sculpture, I also include a Chinese philosophical perspective. In particular by looking at Chinese traditional medical and Daoist religious ideas, I introduce the concept of "the human body as a landscape".In the first chapter of my Phd, I explain these Chinese philosophical backgrounds. In the following chapters, I discuss the unique position of wearable sculpture as an object that overcomes the traditional distinction between art and craft. Moreover, I further analyse how strong, but various, relationships with the body are made in contemporary art jewellery. This is further elaborated on in three case studies in which I analyse the contextual backgrounds and artworks of three artists, Calder, Schick and Martinazzi, which represent major trends in wearable sculpture. Although the artistic output of these three artists is very different, they all reflected on art and craft, and also on body, space and object. Their ideas inspired my own PhD artistic project, which I discuss in the final chapter. I will show through a theoretical analysis, incorporating both western contemporary ideas on the wearable sculpture and traditional Chinese ideas on the landscape as body, how my own artistic research evolved as a process by which the distinction between object, body and space is overcome.