Thinking Sculptures
Ron Mueck | Wild man 2005 | Polyester resin, fibreglass, silicone, aluminium, wood, horse hair, synthetic hair, ed. 1/1 | Purchased by the Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Foundation and The Balnaves Foundation, 2008 | Collection: McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park, Langwarrin | © Ron Mueck | Courtesy Anthony d’Offay, London | Photograph: Mark Ashkanasy
Thinking Sculptures
Nicholas Chambers
Portrayals of anonymous, solitary, introspective figures, where the activity of thinking could be said to be the subject of the work, are far from commonplace in the history of art. Certainly, there are countless portraits and busts of thinking writers and philosophers but the aim in these works is to portray a particular person rather than to convey the abstract notion of introspection. To take an example from the Victorian era, in Daniel Maclise’s 1839 portrait of Charles Dickens the author is depicted at his desk, hand on a manuscript, looking ponderously upwards. The subject of this picture is undoubtedly thinking. Via the narrative elements of the composition we might even hazard a guess at what he is thinking about, but the purpose of the composition is to convey the persona of Dickens rather than to consider the nature of thought.
The most famous sculpture of introspection, Auguste Rodin’s The thinker 1880, undoubtedly depicts the act of thinking itself but as viewers we are cut off from what is going on inside his head. In Rodin’s words:
What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.1
So, The thinker portrays introspection as a physical act and while this might prompt us to think about thinking, the character or content of the subject’s thoughts is irrelevant.
In a lecture presented at the University of Saskatchewan in 1968, British philosopher Gilbert Ryle posed a curious question: what is The thinker doing?2 For a philosopher of language with behaviourist leanings, the answer was far from given. Following Ryle’s argument, ‘thinking’ would constitute far too general and not terribly useful a response unless we were also able to describe the level of sophistication of his thought (silently counting passing cars, for example, being a less sophisticated level than pondering a chess move or composing a piece of music) and to what specific end the thinking is directed.
Ryle’s lecture was concerned with linguistics rather than art criticism but it illuminates the complexities involved in producing a plastic representation of introspection — what would an introspective figure that gave us some access to the nature of their thoughts look like? [next page]
