von Bartha

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Auguste Rodin engaged the young, penniless Rainer Maria Rilke as his secretary; months of mentorship and admiration followed. From them came Rilke's epiphany about sculpture: "There is only one single surface which suffers a thousand changes and transformations". A remark about modelling turns into something closer to cosmology – for a moment, he adds, it was possible to think the whole world under this idea. A century on, surface is still the condition we live in and take at face value, and sculpture one of the few things able to interrupt it. In…