How Digital Fabrication Changed Sculpture

“WHY, SOMETIMES I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” That’s the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland talking her usual nonsense, back in 1871. Now, it is 2024, and six feels like a low estimate. Each day brings a new round of claims and counterclaims, a confusing collision of the actual, the improbable, and the outright ridiculous. Impossibility, indeed, is becoming paradoxically pervasive, with cinema, video games, and advertising all converging into one big special-effects extravaganza. This distortion field is now being amplified by artificial intelligence, placing unprecedented demands on our collective visual literacy. Believing in things is coming to seem a provisional affair.

Until recently, contemporary art has been seriously outgunned in this battle of appearances. It was just a few years ago that only the most highly capitalized artists—the Hirsts, Murakamis, and Koonses of the world—had the means to create truly convincing digitally fabricated objects, and they generally acted as cheerleaders for the unfolding spectacle. Their sculptures actually required extensive and expensive handwork to perfect, but they seemed to have popped right off a screen. To behold them was to confront a new technological sublime, to be forcibly suspended in a state of disbelief. This art was genuinely amazing, but honestly, it didn’t really give a damn if you thought it was any good. It asserted itself through superior production values, as indifferent to critique as Marvel or Louis Vuitton.

But something happened on the way to the simulacrum. Digital production got gradually cheaper and more accessible, putting it in the hands of more and more artists. At the same time, and with impressive speed, audiences became jaded about the latest computer-generated wonders. Last year, when the Swedish company Sandvik Machining unveiled what it claimed was the first sculpture ever authored by an AI—an “impossible statue” in stainless steel, based on the aggregated works of Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, Augusta Savage, and other artists—it was generally met not with awestruck astonishment, but with a resigned shrug. As Sarah Rose Sharp wrote in Hyperallergic: “Would anyone be impressed with this sculpture if it weren’t made by AI? No. Is it a better stainless-steel statue than I could make? Pretty much.”

Such skepticism is certainly warranted, and it has led to some welcome pushback, including a widespread embrace of crafts like ceramics and weaving, ancient engines of creativity that are being repurposed for the 21st century. At the same time, however, some of today’s most exciting sculptors are bringing their (human) intelligence to the realm of digital fabrication, just as they have to so many earlier technologies. American sculptor Aria Dean, for one, has been making what she calls “impossible objects” since 2021. She works in collaboration with a digital animation specialist to create a fictitious scenario, unconstrained by the laws of physics—for example, a horse figurine scanned, copied into multiples, then merged into a seething, turbulent mass. In this case, she took a single freeze frame from that animation and used it as the basis of a sculpture that she had Johnson Atelier, the leading art fabricator in New Jersey, construct in painted foam. The process can then be repeated, with successive moments from the animation used to generate a family of forms, achieving what Dean called in an interview a “torqued seriality.” The resulting works are captivatingly strange, with a material expression “somewhere between metal, fabric, wood, and Jell-O.” Digital animation software, after all, is totally unaware of such categories as abstraction and representation: it doesn’t know what it’s making. The artist and the machine grapple in the darkness, together in the black box.

Dean’s project, in fact, was inspired by a particular box, made in 1961 by Robert Morris. Titled Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, it conceals a tape player that continuously loops a three-and-a-half-hour recording of its own manufacture. (When Morris showed it to John Cage, the composer listened to the whole thing, accepting it as the musical interpretation of a score.) While Dean’s works are not durational in this way, she thinks of them as similarly self-referential and time-stamped documentation of their own origins. Despite their alien unrecognizability, they have a just-the-facts sensibility descended from Morris’s generation of artists, with Minimalism’s pixel-like rectilinear blocks replaced by lossless, amorphous … somethings.

IN RETROSPECT, THE MOVE from “postminimalism into maximalism” (the title of a book by critic Robert Pincus-Witten, published in 1987) looks like the dominant trajectory in sculpture over the past half-century. It characterizes not only individual careers—including that of Morris himself—but also a change in the discipline’s overall priorities, from intensive, rigorous investigation to extroverted, polymorphous exploration. There are all sorts of reasons for this shift, foremost among them a welcome increase of diversity in the art world, which has brought a pluralism of aesthetic sensibilities.

Means of production, as is often the case, are an underestimated part of this art history. Sculpture remains an expensive enterprise. With the arrival of specialized fabricators, though, beginning in the late 1960s, production got a heck of a lot easier. And the services on offer have constantly expanded in the decades since. What began with steel has ramified into a huge palette of other materials: plastics, foams, metals, fiberglass, and more. Digital manufacture—scanning, 3D printing, laser cutting, robotically controlled carving, and so on—is only the latest addition to this tool kit, but it is a decisive one.

Frank Stella is a perfect example. Having begun his career as a defining Minimalist, with the uninflected brushstroke as his generative unit, he went on to pursue an ever-increasing complexity, while still deriving his compositions logically from the available means of production. He adopted computers early, already using CAD to design his sculptures in 1990, and enthusiastically exploited advances like 3D printing as they became available. His “Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick” (2006–24) sculptures—named for the 18th-century composer Domenico Scarlatti and an interpreter of his music, Ralph Kirkpatrick—was a major milestone in this journey of exploration. Begun in 2006, the series positively thrills to the possibilities unleashed by the digital. Each sculpture began as a handmade model, which was then scanned, manipulated on-screen, fabricated in resin, painted, and finally supplemented with bent tubing. The wall-mounted sculptures, which look like bent scraps of hot rods mounted on wire armatures, are far more complex than one could hold in one’s head, and thus, arguably, could consciously intend. All those complex curvatures nested neatly inside one another are made possible by the software’s calculations. The effect is indeed similar to that in baroque music, in which a
simple melody is elaborated though a series of procedures—repetition, inversion, fragmentation, layering—the original motif extrapolated into a dizzying construction.

As this example suggests, Stella was totally tuned in to the expansive possibilities of the digital. For one of his last projects, in 2022, the octogenarian artist released a collection of NFTs, which buyers were invited to print for themselves. “They own it, they could develop it,” he remarked. “It would be interesting if they could make it better.” In the digital era, authorship often seems to be undermined and extended all at once. For this reason, it has led to a new take on found objects too. One approach, adopted by Lynda Benglis, Urs Fischer, and Christopher Wool, involves digitally capturing a chance form—a squeeze of clay, a snarl of wire—then enlarging that scan to monumental proportions, both dramatizing and satirizing the superpowers that artists now have at their disposal. As Jerry Saltz has remarked in reference to Wool’s work, “every artist has looked down on the street and a squished twisty thing of metal and wanted to make it.” Thanks to 3D scanning, now they can.

Another approach, aesthetically antithetical but practically kindred, uses digital means for figurative hyper-similitude. With the help of 3D scanners and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) milling machines, artists like Barry X Ball, Frank Benson, and Tavares Strachan are rebooting classical statuary while speaking to the transmuted sense of self that prevails in the age of the avatar. Pierre Huyghe has taken things still one step further in his “Mind’s Eye”series (2022–), using a “brain-computer interface” to create a character based on purely mental images, then having that imaginary entity sculpted in a mysterious “synthetic / biological aggregate.” The resulting object is uncanny in the extreme, a manifestation of how humanity might appear from a cyborg’s perspective.

The danger with such experiments is that digital fabrication becomes too powerful, overshadowing the artist’s own contribution to the form. Such technological determinism tends to date badly: Antony Gormley’s Quantum Clouds series (1999–2007), so technically pioneering when he made them, now feel as rudimentary as the wire frames on which they were based. More recently,Maurizio Cattelan, who can always be relied on to subject art’s current preoccupations to gleeful mockery, provided as the centerpiece of his latest show at Gagosian a marble sculpture entitled November. It depicts a man, presumably unhoused, sleeping on a bench, letting out a stream of piss. As usual with his provocations, it’s certainly possible to provide critical justification for the work, as yet another of his references to Duchamp’s Fountain, or a comment on the crisis of homelessness. Most viewers, however, are likely to get a different message: thanks in part to digital tools, a powerful artist can bring extravagant production values to just about anything, including a crass one-liner.

AS IF SPECIFICALLY to address this surfeit of possibility, Charles Ray, in a three-work exhibition this spring at Matthew Marks, traversed a spectrum from the artisanal to the automated. One sculpture, a crashed car in miniature, was painstakingly made by hand in cut and folded paper. A second, a life-size figure in cast paper pulp, had the blurriness of a low-resolution GIF. The final one, mordantly titled Two Dead Guys, showed a pair of cadavers lying on a slab, all executed in marble. The pair of figures came into and out of focus; in some passages the surface had hyper-similitude, in others a rougher, grooved surface, betraying the involvement of a CNC cutter. At a time when it’s often difficult to distinguish the work of human assistants and digital assistance, Ray was making a virtue of that epistemic uncertainty to draw us closer: we may not always know what we’re looking at; all the more reason to look more carefully.

Resistance is forming too in the work of the French-born, London-based artist Marguerite Humeau. As she told me in an interview, “anything that looks digitally fabricated is not interesting to me.” She achieves escape velocity from predictable outcomes through a thoughtful conflation of computational and organic processes. Thus, while she does use software to generate her sculptures, she bases their forms on beehives, fungi, and other natural structures that materialize collective (“eusocial”) agency, an intriguing parallel to AI itself. She might mill a model using a CNC and then cast it in beeswax, for example, or ask an artisan to interpret a digital rendering by knitting it.

Humeau also has a penchant for swirling, dynamic forms, as in her series “The Dancers;” if Stella looked back to baroque music, her works allude to the sculpture of the same era, by figures like Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Alessandro Algardi. When these artists carved drapery, they were not so much depicting real cloth as using it as a pretext to give marble a life of its own. In retrospect, we can see that they were already operating in a zone that was neither fully representational nor entirely abstract, floating free of real-world materiality. Of course, they could achieve this only through extraordinary feats of skill; with digital techniques, that freedom has become child’s play, and Humeau takes full advantage, allowing her sculptures to surge into space as if impelled by invisible forces. A similar dynamism can be seen in the work of many other artists using digital technology today. It’s present in Arlene Shechet’s sensational “Girl Group” (2024)for Storm King Art Center, which features gestural, contingent shapes that “give form to instability itself,” as she puts it; and also in Yinka Shonibare’s knowingly titled “FABRICATION”series (2002–13), which look like screengrabs of wind-whipped kente cloth.

As befits an artist of her generation, Humeau (b. 1986) clearly has an instinctive affinity for the digital tools at her disposal. Her agitated forms do for computers what 19th-century spirit photography did for the camera, at once exploiting a new technology and highlighting its artifice, conjuring the ghost in the machine. But she is using this apparatus to reconnect with natural forces, not abandon them.She points out that like certain animals, machines may be blind to some things we find easy to see, but they also sense things we do not. A CNC machine, for instance, is exquisitely alert to variations in hardness, precise surface contours, even to the dust in the room. AI understands the world not as an array of discrete solids, but as a vaporous, variably concentrated point cloud (as it happens, a more accurate description of physical reality than what human beings perceive). By exploring this radical otherness, digitally empowered art might just help us enlarge our concept of human agency, rather than diminish it. This is the vibrant prospect that lies before sculpture now: like Alice when she reached Wonderland, to be curiouser and curiouser.