A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

Your search term is Sculpture, Sculptural. Scroll down for the results!

πŸ” Search Within Selection

Sculpture, Sculptural is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances

Viewing chapter Sculpture, Sculptural (10 quotes)
Nudity is sculptural, not visual.
Counterblast (1969), p 61
Quote #6272
Year: 1969
Chapter: Clothing and Nakedness
Sculpture tends toward the timeless.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 188
Quote #6273
Year: 1964
Corbusier after careful studies discovered that the right place to put any form of sculpture was where you would stand, whether indoors or out of doors, to be heard. Insisting that sculptor is essentially an auditory, resonating, form that fills and makes its own space. The β€œarcher” statue by Henry Moore is not representational, itΒ΄s participational. Many people are offended by this kind of thing because they can't classify it, they can't fit it into any little niche or category. And this is all one of its principal characteristics: it compels the viewer to make his own sculpture as he looks at it. It forces the spectator to become co-maker with the sculptor. You have to get into the act of making, not of classifying.
The Medium Is the Message,” TV interview with Fletcher Markle on CBC β€œTelescope 67,” (1967), p 3
Quote #6274
Year: 1967
Chapter: Acoustic Space
The igloo and the pueblo hut are not enclosed space; they are plastically modelled forms of space, very close to sculpture.
β€œCybernation and Culture” (1966), p 97
Quote #6275
Year: 1966
Chapter: Space
Sculpture tends towards the timeless.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 201
Quote #6276
Year: 1964
The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal.
Counterblast (1969), p 145
Quote #6277
Year: 1969
Chapters: Image | McLuhanisms & Zingers
The 19th-century painterly interest in the nude goes together with the rediscoveries of sculptural values.
Letter to Michael Wolff, July 3, 1964, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 305
Quote #6278
Year: 1964
Chapter: Senses

Drawn to McLuhan #2

Two-panel comic illustration of a boxing match: a humanoid figure made of tumbling alphabet letters wearing "BRECE" shorts faces off against a muscular boxer with a smartphone for a head, under a "LITERACY VS ELECTRONIC" ring sign; in the second panel the smartphone boxer knocks the letter-man apart with a "K.O." punch.
β€œIt may even prove to be the case that the entire tradition of phonetic writing, which is co-extensive with our Western world and the Graeco-Roman tradition, cannot sustain the electronic impact.”
Illustrated period scene of a man in early-1900s suit and cap stepping into a Ford Model T outside the "Biograph Theatre" marquee advertising "The Artful Dodger," with a thought bubble above showing rows of parked cars at an outdoor movie screening.
β€œNew means create new goals.”
Illustrated interior of a rustic coffee shop with several patrons seated separately, each connected by small thought-bubble trails to one large shared blank thought bubble overhead, suggesting wordless, intuitive communication.
β€œThe future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological extension of the action of consciousness.”
Illustration set in a lush jungle showing a feather-adorned Indigenous tribesman facing a translucent glowing green humanoid figure whose body is composed of streaming binary code.
β€œThe new electronic man and pre-literate man see eye to eye.”
Stylized line-art illustration of an elevated highway with a bright yellow central lane sweeping up into a sharp architectural peak, flanked by a modern city skyline of glass skyscrapers.
β€œThe road is our major architectural form.”
Illustration of a cluttered living room where a mother holds a baby on a couch surrounded by several children, most staring blankly at an unseen glowing television screen while a teenager scrolls a phone.
β€œWe are not the true parents of our children.”
Illustrated lineup of warriors and soldiers spanning history left to right β€” an Indigenous fighter, Roman legionaries, a medieval knight, WWI and modern soldiers, a futuristic armored figure, and an astronaut on the moon β€” set against a backdrop of fire, smoke, and space.
β€œWe put on our technology as evolutionary clothing.”
Comic-style illustration of a robed orator gesturing dramatically from a pedestal, his speech rendered as a jumbled speech bubble of scrambled Greek letters, while an assistant arranges the same letters into ordered puzzle pieces spelling Greek words like "ΑΑΕ΀Η" and "Ξ”Ξ™ΞšΞ‘Ξ™ΞŸΞ£Ξ₯ΝΗ" on a scroll.
β€œWriting is the spatialization of thought.”
The YouTube logo: a red rounded rectangle with a white play-button triangle beside the black "YouTube" wordmark on a black background.
[With electronic media, we are building] β€œβ€¦a new tribal encyclopedia of auditory incantation”
[Le Corbusier] sees Manhattan as β€œhot jazz in stone,” offering a focus of attention like that which the Negroes have fixed in a music that is β€œthe equivalent of a beautiful turbine running in the midst of human conversations.”
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 85
Quote #6279
Year: 1951
Chapter: Music
A photograph of "St. Peter's at a Moment of History" was the cover feature of Life magazine for June 14, 1963. It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photo that it isolates single moments in time. The TV camera does not. The continuous scanning action of the TV camera provides, not the isolated moment or aspect, but the contour, the iconic profile and the transparency. Egyptian art, like primitive sculpture today, provided the significant outline that had nothing to do with a moment in time. Sculpture tends toward the timeless.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 88
Quote #6280
Year: 1964
Chapter: Photography
Newton discovered levity, not gravity. He discovered the ex-fluence of the moon. So far as NASA is concerned, the attractions of the moon still over-ride all the traditional thoughts of dignity and gravity.
β€œKahn-frontation”, essay written for Newsweek, June (1969) never published; LAC: MG 31, D 156, Vol. 134, File 5, p 1
Crossed-out text represents crossed-out text in the typescript in the archives.
Quote #6281
Chapters: Chiasmus, Flips, Reversals | Mechanization
© The Estate of Marshall McLuhan