Handling the Technical and Theoretical Paradoxes of Moulding

The ambiguous status of moulding in sculpture’s technical repertoire has been an enduring problem in art history. Traditionally excluded from fine arts discourse and snubbed in the artisan world for its mechanical (i.e., non-manual) nature, this particular savoir-faire is currently gaining prestige in contemporary art practices and theory, thanks to the major contribution of art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. His exhibition L’empreinte (The Imprint), presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1997, proposed an in-depth reassessment of the status of moulding in twentieth-century art. Nearly fifteen years later, the substantial work1 1  - Georges Didi-Huberman, L’empreinte (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). produced for the occasion remains the ultimate theoretical statement on the question. While beneficial and fertile, there is opposition to this historical rereading. Indeed, the consensual authority of Didi-Huberman’s argument is articulated through a theoretical paradigm that tends to limit one’s phenomenological and conceptual apprehension of the works. Without denying the relevance of the imprint paradigm in question here, one may nonetheless examine whether it is capable of accounting for the diversity of contemporary artistic production, given that artists are increasingly turning to the techniques of moulding and casting.

Didi-Huberman considers moulding an exemplary case of “technical survival.” The cover of L’empreinte’s exhibition catalogue in a sense encapsulates its anthropological conception and evokes a certain form of romanticism: the imprint of a hand, that of the great Picasso,² 2 - A reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Main droite de Picasso (1937). a choice evocative of Modernist aesthetic ideals. The hand of the creator incarnates the human body’s original contact with material, constituting a fundamental gesture of technical mediation. The image thus recalls the mythic origin of (non-mimetic) resemblance, through the (almost) direct transfer from one form into another.³ 3 - I am referring to the mythic origin of painting, as told by Pliny the Elder: a young woman traces the shadow cast by her lover on the wall. Moreover, the non-mimetic nature of human likeness recalls the wax funerary effigies of antiquity, which Pliny also dealt with. Moreover, it expresses man’s equally mythical desire to leave behind a permanent trace of his existence.