Sculpture in the Expanded Field

So, Sculpture in the Expanded Field was the first thing on my mind when I woke up this morning- an essay by Rosalind Krauss in 1985 included in her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. I read this for the first time in art school back in 1999, introduced by Kate Hunt, my sculpture professor.

This article is pertinent to my exploration and design of this site for several reasons. Krauss talks about what sculpture had become through the advent of the late ninteeth century and the failing of the logic of monument as the defining logic of sculpture. She sites the failure of two works in particular as "monument"- the Gates of Hell by Rodin, and Balzac, also by Rodin. The subjectivity with which they were made and their unfinished state and abstraction, respectively, cast them into a "negative condition" of sorts- "a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one enters modenism, since it is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction , the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential." 

This mention of the self-referential and placeless as the result of a modernist abstraction is right on target with the anonymity and placelessness of many urban environments, and often even sculpture in urban environments. The work is separate from the place, an homage to itself or to the whim of the artist with no connection to the city around it. And though maybe not a modernist abstraction in the sculptural sense, this separation of meaning from site is clear in the un-designed spaces of a city, disconnecting people from the potential for a meaningful experience in the built environment. As for the civic park in Bryan, even the "designed" space with its axis to nowhere still separates- people from eachother, library from children's museum, with no sense of place to speak of. 

Back to Krauss' argument for a redefinition of terms, or maybe a first definition of terms- in the Klien group diagram- this "expanded field" - having defined sculpture previously, she notes three other designations that hold intrigue for this project. The one that speaks to me most readily is the "marked sites" that results from the involution of the landscape-not landscape schema. The works she sites that fall in this category are works like Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Heizer's works in the desert such as Double Negative, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. While imagining any of these in downtown Bryan may be a stretch, the kind of attention to physicality and place should be as acute if I am to make any difference for the space. Another one that is clearly relevant is the term of site construction, a positive result of landscape and architecture, and not the abscence of both, not neither/nor. It is within these terms and approach that I wish to create. 

Krauss also mentions the critics of contemporary making on these terms and points out that such movement from one medium to another, from the domain of sculpture to landscape to architecture is suspect in the eyes of a modernist society that demands separateness of various mediums, career designations and specializations, etc. However, I am intrigued by this way of making that is defined by "the logical operations on a set of cultural terms for which any medium (and I would add form) might be used."

shoot me an email, and I'll send a pdf of the book chapter.