'All Solid Things Vanish Into Thin Air.' The Space in Modern and Late Modern Plastic Art.

The article follows Max Weber's Comprehensive Sociology and uses the hermeneutic and iconological analysis sociological methods applied to plastic works (painting and sculpture), significant and representative of modern and late modern art. Starting from these theoretical and methodological bases, it pursues three specific objectives: to analyze the construction of space in plastic art, to verify how this theme has evolved in artistic practices from the first modernity to the second and to verify the way in which the complementary visual language the conceptual of contemporary sociological theory. In this regard, the analysis and interpretation of the eleven selected works reveals three important consequences of the modern influence on space, gradually emptied of meaning and replaced by non-places: its conversion into merchandise, its loss of solidity and stability and the confusion that occurs in it between reality and its representation. Consequently, the implicit content converges with the essential postulates of the sociologists who have approached the subject of space, although it goes further because the foray into the iconographic hermeneutics of these works puts an image to the conceptual theoretical discourses of the sociologists, in a way that visual language complements and enriches, with more emotional and sensitive nuances. Therefore, our discipline begins to overcome a traditional deficit, in that it moves from the essential rationality that structures its origin and turns towards a greater coupling of the emotional and sensitive social plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]