The American Sculpture, 1951

American Sculpture 1951 was a catalog for an exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Held in 1951 it surveyed the state of sculpture at the beginning of that decade. Although it was a time when Abstract Expressionism and abstraction in general, were beginning to overtake the American art scene, it didn't appear so in the catalog. Aside from a handful of purely abstract pieces, figuration dominated the show. The catalog claimed that sculpture seemed less willing to abandon realism than painting, an assertion dimly present in current art history. Most interesting to me, however, was the way the catalog had physically aged. Images bled from one side of the page to the other, and through this seepage, new works had morphed into being. History was being redone visually. Entropy, the persistence of time and physical deterioration, had reconfigured the images into a slowly morphing Exquisite Corpse. The mutual leeching of images from one side of the page to the other r