La escultura posible: resistencia y perspectiva del cuerpo en la contemporaneidad 
Tesis doctoral presentada por Luis Montes Rojas
Resumen en Castellano


Our thesis The possible sculpture: resistance and perspective of the body in contemporaneity is structured in four chapters, which are connected in such a way as to drive the reader into an organized structure seeking the demonstration of the proposed hypothesis.

The starting question guiding this thesis is which is the effective link between body and sculpture, and how this link can provide sustainability to the interest in making sculpture in contemporaneity, understanding that the ideas defining the concepts of body and sculpture are not immutable; thereby it would be possible to find a distinctive relation between these concepts in the middle of the particular conditions that define contemporaneity as historic time.

By virtue of that construction we are allowed to establish the manner in which today body and sculpture are related, first it is necessary to establish that these two concepts lack of immutability. It is essential to corroborate that this ideas have evolved as a result of beliefs displayed in every historic time, and even established that variability, the link that makes of the body a privileged referent of the sculpture has not been broken.

In a second section we will try to find the indicators of a general crisis that may involve body and sculpture to the same extent. The enormous transformations lived in the contemporary world should necessarily modify the conception of the own body and the relation with others, and in that conflict sculpture must be necessarily involved, since it is the unequivocal representation of the vicissitudes of the corporeity. Discussions proposed in contemporaneity should be manifested in the sculpture, from the body resistance to the invitations to absolute abandonment.

In order to make more rigorous diagnosis in respect of the condition of both concepts in our historic time, we look for a structure of analysis that allows us to explore such condition. To this end, we assemble Virilio and García Cortés discourses by identifying three levels of analysis concerning the body. Both authors refer these three categories; the first is the biological level, the second is denominated social, and a third one that makes reference to the totality and the territory. We must submit both concepts to these levels to determine with moderate clearness its condition in the contemporaneity. The third chapter of the thesis is focused on this analysis.

The last chapter attempts to establish an answer to the condition of the body, considering as antecedent that the body is a paradigm of the sculptoric creation and, therefore, by clearly knowing that its abandonment also compels to the decadence of the sculpture itself. It turns interesting to observe how contemporary artists come back to affirm the value of matter and sensibility by valorizing the corporeal and validating sculpture as a category entirely operative in contemporaneity.