I was talking with an artist friend yesterday, and he made a reference to “Krauss’s ‘Sculpture and the Expanded Field’,” and I was all, “huh?” And he was all, “WHAT?” And so I was like, “Don’t know it,” and he was all, “Dude, it’s canon. First handout they give you when you get into art school.” And I was like, “And who reads October unless they’re being graded on it?”
Still, once he explained her postmodernist proposition for sculpture, I was like, “Expanded Field? We’re soaking in it!”
So I read it, and yeah, I knew that; it’s basically the idea that in the late 1960’s, artists challenged and expanded the definition of sculpture, or to flip it around, the logical structure of artists’ practice expanded beyond the finite, inherited modernist definition of sculpture. There’s even a fancy diagram to explain why what Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and others of the era were doing is not modernism, but is sculpture.
Anyway, here’s a PDF version of Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture and the Expanded Field”. Get an education so you don’t embarrass yourself like I did. [sic and/or heh]
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the making of, by greg allen