Einstein’s Brain by Sal Restivo

Author:Sal Restivo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030329181
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Auguste Rodin

What do you see when you see Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker (Le Penseur)? Do you see a great piece of art created by Rodin? Perhaps that’s not the end of the story. Consider the film, Camille Claudel . Claudel was Rodin’s student and lover but above all a great artist herself. In one section of the film, Claudel is shown entering the studio where The Thinker, as one of the elements in the sculpture garden, The Gates of Hell, is being sculpted. The question is: Where is Rodin and what is he doing? As Claudel walks into and through the studio, we see many people climbing up and down ladders, standing on scaffolds and on the ground chipping away at chunks of marble and other materials. We see materials being brought into the studio and taken out. There is, in brief, a great deal of collective activity taking place and we see this all along Claudel’s walk through the studio. Again, where is Rodin and what is he doing? We finally come across him in the midst of all this hubbub of activity wearing a suit and tie and a hat talking to representatives of the Ministry of Finance. What does the clip show?

First let’s understand that the film is an artistic account and not a documentary. At this point at least it is virtually an ethnography of Rodin’s studio. What we see is that if we look at The Thinker and only see the work of one man, Rodin, we will fail to understand what we are looking at. We have to see The Thinker as embodying all of the activity in that studio directed toward construction of the sculpture along with all the other sculptural ingredients of The Gates of Hell. Rodin deserves credit not for being the sole creator of The Thinker but for being the key node in a social network of workers all of whom have stamped their activities into and on the sculpture(s). And remember that even when Rodin was working on the sculpture “alone,” he was working as a “self as social structure” and not as an instantiation of the grammatical “I.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.