Rosalind Krauss Sculpture in the Expanded Field.

Sculpture in the Expanded Field chronologically explores how the expanded field
evolved out of the need to understand the complexities of sculpture as a medium
and category in art. The categorization and terminology involved led to the
development of the expanded field which encouraged the emergence of three
other categories; site construction, marked sites and axiomatic structures.

Krauss traces back to Modernism’s strong focus on categorizing artworks into

rigidly defined mediums and the need to justify works by Historicizing them
and placing them in a understandable linear evolution. Krauss argues this was
done to the point the term ‘sculpture’ became more obscure.

Sculptures own and unique internal logic is understood as the monumental.

This, although, begins to demise in the late C19th and Krauss uses Rodin’s works
Gatels of Hell and Balzac as examples of how sculpture lost it’s monumental
status and move into its negative condition. Modernist sculpture thus becomes
characterized by its self-referential and abstract state in which celebrating the
base, revealing its process of construction, and becoming functionally placeless
come to be primary concerns. This autonomous state severely contrasts to
sculpture’s initial focus on the monument, that it is in particular space and
speaks a symbolic language about the meaning/use of that place. Krauss uses
Brancusi’s Cock, Caryatids and Endless Columns as examples.

The exploration of sculptures negative condition meant exploring an idealist

space disconnected from the temporal and spatial representation that once
limited it. Krauss identifies this as ‘pure negativity’ only able to be defined by
what it isn’t; what is in, on or around a building, but isn’t the building (non-
architecture); what is in the landscape but isn’t the landscape (non-landscape).
Barnett Newman’s quote “Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to
see a painting” (p36) is used as textual evidence while Robert Morris’s works in
the 1960, the Green Gallery Installation and mirror box installation are visual
evidence of this point. This ‘pure negativity’ encouraged an exploration of the
outer limits of the excluding terms.

Krauss then uses the term involved in the logical expansion of sculpture to create
a quaternary field that includes the negative and positive terms, non-landscape,
landscape and non-architecture, architecture, introducing the once excluded
term into the conversation of art. She argues our culture has been unable to
“think the complex” unlike other cultures, using Japanese gardens and labyrinths
as examples. This problematizing of the modernist definition of sculpture
created the expanded field and opens up three other categories, Krauss
identifies, we now have permission, and are pressured, to see using Robert
morris, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Bruce
Nauman as examples.

site-construction
Marked landscape complexarchitecture Axiomatic
sites non-landscapeneuternon-architecture structures
sculpture
 As our art critical historicism requires, Krauss identifies this historic rupture as
Postmodernism. Artists like Robert Smithson (Partially Buried Woodshed 1970)
began occupying complex axis, or site construction. Others explore the marked
site category by making impermanent marks or through the use of photography
Axiomatic =
self-evident or (Smithson’s Spiral Jetty 1970). The axiomatic axis was investigated usually by an
unquestionable intervention into the real space of architecture or thought partial reconstruction
(sometime drawing) or by using mirrors like Morris’s mirror box installation.

Krauss discusses what the expanded field means in relation to modernist art
criticism and its dependence on purity and reliance on medium specificity. While
the expanded field in postmodernism embraces crossing over and movement
between the four categories, working with cultural terms to develop work,
modernism would only label it ‘eclectic’. It organized work in a way not “dictated
by the conditions of a particular medium”, but through universal terms felt in
opposition within a cultural situation.

Krauss concludes by claiming this condition is not unique to sculpture but also to
other mediums, like painting, that has its own corresponding set of opposing
terms and tensions. She claims the strongest works must then reflect the
condition of the logical space and the inherent ongoing tensions between the
categories, like John Sahpiro’s Untitled 1975 that while positioned in the neuter
terms, also converses with the other categories.