When contemporary artists want their work to have an air of tribalism or antique cults, they generally end up producing sculpture. The wish to give modern art a mythic dimension sometimes gets in the way of the forms we see in front of us. And at times artists believe the mere presence in a gallery of hunks of wood or metal, clay or stone will work more magic than it really does. But there’s a sense in which the artists have been right to take up sculpture, for sculpture keeps eluding the modern tradition of art created for exhibition. Sculpture can force the viewer into the position of an idol worshipper; you share real space with real objects, which is why the great modern sculptors’ studios—those of Brancusi, Picasso, and Giacometti, for example—have the feel of cult sanctuaries.

More often than painting, modern sculpture suggests fundamental dissatisfaction with the conventional way of doing things. Mobiles, scrap metal constructions, ready-mades, earthworks: these are forms that, whether through whimsy, a spirit of zany speculation, or sheer grandiosity, call most of the Western tradition into question. It’s under the general rubric of sculpture that a lot of the self-styled buccaneers of the 1960s and 1970s worked and continue to work. They’ve dug ditches, moved bodies of water, covered tracks of land out West, and generally come up with creations so overblown they elude the very idea of art. But if sculpture, through its dogged unconventionality, can sometimes spell aesthetic insanity, sculptors