Sculpture In The Expanded Field

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

ROSALIND KRAUSS

Toward the center of the field there is a slight mound, a swelling in the earth, which is the only warning given for the presence of the work. Closer to it, the large square face of the pit can be seen, as can the ends of the ladder that is needed to descend into the excavation. The work itself is thusentirely below grade: half atrium, half tunnel, the boundary between outside and in, a delicate structure of wooden posts and beams. The work, Perzmeters, Pavilions, Decoys, 1978, by Mary Miss, is of course a sculpture or, more precisely, an earthwork. Over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographsdocumenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert. Nothing, it would seem, could possibly give to such a motley of effort the right to lay claim to whatever one might mean by the category of sculpture. Unless, that is, the category can be made to become almost infinitely malleable. The critical operations that haveaccompanied postwar American art have largely worked in the service of this manipulation. In the hands of this criticism categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of rlasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything. And though this pulling and stretching of a term such as sculptureis overtly performed in the name of vanguard aesthetics-the ideology of the new-its covert message is that of historicism. The new is made comfortable by being made familiar, since it is seen as having gradually evolved from the forms of the past. Historicism works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate difference. It makes a place for change in our experience by evoking themodel of evolution, so that the man who now is can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by simultaneously being seen-through the unseeable action of the telos-as the same. And we are comforted by this perception of sameness, this strategy for reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are.

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OCTOBER

No sooner had minimalsculpture appeared on the horizon of the aesthetic experience of the 1960s, than criticism began to construct a paternity for this work, a set of constructivist fathers who could legitimize and thereby authenticate the strangeness of these objects. Plastic? inert geometries?factory production?-none of this was really strange, as the ghosts of Gabo and Tatlin and Lissitzky could be called in to...