This series, published in Studio International between December 1974 and May/June 1975, was based around a direct confrontation with sculpture as it is and as it is made. The eight parts were originally a series of seminars given to advanced sculpture students and other sculptors at St Martin’s School of Art. In ‘What Sculpture is’ a divergence from the method of sculpture discourse promulgated in The Language of Sculpture is clear from the start. Tucker states near the beginning of part one:

‘Until now I have thought, and have encouraged students to think of sculpture, especially recent sculpture, in the matrix of history:…’ (my emphasis)

Now, instead, Tucker proposes an immediate and direct confrontation with the objects of sculpture, as if free from history, free from the considerations of time and place, and ideally from a position of sheer ignorance, or at least having made an attempt at a radical forgetting. Tucker continues:

‘I want to strip away all context from the work, so far as that is possible, the physical context, the cultural context, the biographical and historical context.’

Tucker states:

‘I want to talk about this sculpture present to us now.’

A statement which begs the question: ‘who is this us’? When these essays were lectures to sculpture students at St Martin’s the answer would have been straightforward. ‘We’ – Tucker included – the ‘us’ of the statement, are sculptors. When the context in which the words are presented changes – from an art school seminar to an essay published in an art magazine – the ‘us’ is not refocused. ‘I’m assuming for the moment,’ states Tucker, ‘that you [presumably now including all readers] are all sculptors’. What is presented here is a professional confrontation with sculpture: a meeting of sculptors with sculpture and by extension of assumed sculptors with imagined sculpture. This seems to mark a radical departure in Tucker’s theory and its presentation. Theoretically, the radical rejection of history seems an overt volte-face on his previous approach. In terms of presenting his writing, this series of seminars appears rendered as pure transcript. There is no apparent change between the words of the seminars and the words on the published page. Of course without comparing the words on the page to the actual spoken words we have no way of knowing for sure that this is precisely what happened. However, what is important is that this is how the words appear. This apparently spontaneous, direct form of address is in marked contrast to the carefully reworked words that made their way from lecture to magazine article and finally to The Language of Sculpture. The contrast between The Language of Sculpture and ‘What Sculpture is’ suggests that Tucker’s approach is dependent upon his audience, and that an investigation of the proposed audience for his words might be revealing of their form, but more profoundly, the contrast shows how Tucker makes use of seemingly contradictory approaches in his attempt to reconcile more fundamental problems at the heart of his practice: problems of perception.

Tucker’s approach in these essays might be defined as ‘phenomenological’. ‘What Sculpture is’ is informed by the kind of philosophical approach that examines the way in which human beings perceive the world. There are various arguments concerning the extent to which the way we see and understand things is culturally conditioned and whether it is possible to apprehend the world in a direct way prior to or without regard to these cultural cues. Tucker is examining such ideas here and challenges the viewer to directly encounter the work without reference or regard to such cultural ideas as history or biography. Whether or not one thinks this kind of encounter possible or even useful, it is clear that this is a very different approach to sculpture to one in which we would examine the historical background to the work, the motivations for its making, the ideas behind it or interpretations of its meaning. However there are echoes of the approach presented in ‘What Sculpture is’ in other of Tucker’s writings. For example in the introduction to The Condition of Sculpture Tucker insists that we consider sculpture rather than sculptors, prompting formal investigation of the objects of sculpture rather than questions about their makers’ biographies or intentions. Suggestions of a phenomenological approach to sculpture in Tucker’s writings are found every time he declines to discuss the historical background or the meaning of the work and instead focuses on the formal appearance of the work: what it looks like, how it is formed, or how it appears to the viewer. Evidence of Tucker’s phenomenology is found in his reluctance to discuss certain topics as much as in the things he chooses to discuss.