Reading 2: “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”

Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.

In the advent of the allusively permissive, un-categorizable phenomenon known as postmodernism, sculpture unwittingly emancipated itself from any preconceived definition. Starting with the basic precepts of modernism, where form was employed in the service of function, sculpture was most closely aligned with the place of monument. In her article Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Rosalind Krauss traces the re-contextualization of sculpture from the quantifiable precepts of modernism to the radical, manifestations of postmodernism.

Krauss aligns the degeneration of post-war American sculpture with the manipulation of art categories via art criticism. Any new art experimentations were imbued with a familiarity that could be traced to a former, knowable time in history. Krauss recounts the lineage of Minimalism as inherited from the paternity of its constructivist fathers. Issues of explicit ideological incompatibility were overlooked in favour of aesthetic and historic familiarity. The eradication of the pedestal by Brancusi meant that sculpture became officially devoid of any extraneous function and maintained its own autonomous ontology.

In its most pure postmodernist form, Krauss argues sculpture became that which was not-landscape and not-architecture. An excellent example of sculpture occupying this ‘non-place’ would be Claes Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument, 1967. Oldenburg himself occupied an un-categorizable place in art history. His works effectively trail blazed postmodernist ideologies particularly Minimalist and Conceptual art practice. He was an art prophet. Placid Civic Monument effectively inverted the notion of sculpture. At approximately 10:00 a.m., Sunday 1st October, a grave was dug behind the Metropolitan Museum in New York.1 The covert hole dug secretly behind the museum was filled in again after lunch. This ‘hole’ was arguably the quintessential manifestation of the not-landscape, not-architecture place. Oldenburg took the classic notion of monument and subverted its commemorative function, culminating in a fugitive, temporary deconstruction and reconstruction of place.

Krauss asserts that under the guise of postmodernism, sculpture now defies all categorization. She states ‘the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or for that matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.’2 In other words, within a postmodern context sculpture is no longer confined to materials or function, rather it can be anything in dialogue with either the degeneration or regeneration of its former categorization. Postmodernism has given sculpture the permission to be whatever it claims itself to be, occupying a place that is at once not-landscape, and not-architecture but everything, or anything, in between. Sculpture is a secret hole dug behind a museum then filled in after lunch, it is the un-categorizable thing which defies place.

1 - Boettger, S. A Found Weekend, 1967: Public Sculpture and Anti-Monuments. Art in America. http://findarticles.com/p/articles 26/08/2008
2 - Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44. P 43.