Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Rosalind Krauss was originally a formalist follower of Clement Greenberg, who was a champion of Modernism and Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock. As Modernism waned, Krauss became interested in newer movements that she felt "required a different theoretical approach which focused less on the aesthetic purity of an art form (prevalent in Greenberg's criticism), and more on aesthetics that captured a theme or historical and/or cultural issues." www.theartstory.org/critic-krauss-rosalind.htm In her article "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", published in the journal OCTOBER in 1979, Krauss gives us a history lesson, describing how rapidly sculpture has changed, that the category of sculpture can be made to be "infinitely malleable", and that post-war art can include just about anything. She describes the historicizing critics as attempting to make the new sculpture seem familiar, as if it had evolved in a linear progression from the past; Minimalist sculpture of the 60s was seen by critics as having evolved from the early 20th century Constructivists. The "rage to historicize" would have seen Donald Judd's work as similar to the Constructivists, although he was much more concerned with materials. As sculpture became even more involved with materials in the 70s, historians looked even further back to find comparisons, to ancient sites like Stonehenge, but Krauss maintains that those sites were most emphatically not sculpture - the people who created them certainly did not see them that way. Historians also referred to "primitivist" sculpture such as Brancusi's work, to "mediate between past and present". Krauss then asks - what IS sculpture? and goes on to say that traditionally it has been a commemorative representation, such as the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Michelangelo's Campidoglio, which was used by the Renaissance popes as a link to Imperial Rome. Sculptures like this were figurative and vertical, their pedestals an important part of the structure. The logic of the traditional monument started to change in the 19th century with Rodin, and that then sculpture became Modern, not linked to specific sites, it becomes self-referential. The pedestal becomes part of the sculpture, and does not connect it to place. By the 1950s, Modernism had become exhausted, and sculpture had become defined by what it was not; Barnett Newman said "Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting." Krauss used Robert Morris' work as an example - in the room but not of the room, visually linked to the landscape but not of the landscape. Her definition of sculpture at this point is that it is "not-landscape and not-sculpture". In the 1960s, artists explored the limits, and sculpture becomes an "expanded field" - it can now be both architecture and landscape, which Krauss call the "complex". Sculpture is now only one "term on the periphery of a field in which there are other differently structured possibilities." The expanded field opens up to 3 other forms - "marked sited", "site-construction", and "axiomatic structures". In the late 60s, artists like Smithson, Heizer, and Morris, no longer Modernist, explored these new forms. The expanded field characterizes Postmodernism, and involves two factors - 1) the individual practice of the artist expanding the boundaries of sculpture - modernist critics call this eclectic. Modernism demands "purity and separateness of various mediums. 2) However, in Postmodernism, ideas about culture are more important, and any medium or combination of mediums can be used to express those ideas. Postmodernist practice may not be organized around medium, but Krauss argues that the strongest work still reflects logical space. Krauss concludes by saying that Postmodernism is an historical event within the art history continuum, that it is important to try to map it, but that the historicist's "constructions of elaborate genealogical trees" may not be the best way, because they insist on similarities to past work. She describes postmodernist sculpture as a rupture from Modernism, a reaction to events of the present, and not necessarily part of a linear progression. New ways of looking are necessary to view the new sculpture.