Pedestals lift and protect sculptures, guarding them from the clumsy and the clumsy from them. But pedestals, besides signaling “beware” or “look,” tend to enforce a false unity. Why must sculpture, unlike life, be so self-contained? Beginning in the early ’60s, sculpture came down off its pedestal. Some give credit to Anthony Caro for this move; a rougher, more dramatic, and perhaps more influential leap was accomplished almost simultaneously by a yet-underacknowledged American, George Sugarman. Doing away with the pedestal and its traditional distancing may have been a notion whose time had