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

Sinopsis

Con el ensayo La escultura en el campo expandido Rosalind Kraussgenera el marco conceptual que pueda explicar las prácticasesculturales de la postguerra.

En un breve recorrido histórico describe cómo la categoríade escultura surge como monumento pero luego sedesterritorializa y se vuelve autónoma. Las esculturas Laspuertas del Infierno y Balzac de Auguste Rodin marcan el punto deinflexión de la escultura como monumento al multiplicarse odesubicarse y el inicio de la modernidad con su condiciónesencialmente nómada. Al absorber el pedestal en sí misma,como en la Columna sin fin de Brancusi, pierde su significadoy función de señalar un lugar a favor de su autonomía. Laescultura modernista explora un espacio separado delproyecto de representación temporal y espacial.

A principios de los sesenta, por esta desterritorializacióny abstracción, la escultura se define en contraposición alos espacios en los que está, como una ausencia ontológica,en que es en o en frente de un edificio lo que no es unedificio, o lo que está en el paisaje que no es paisaje.

La definición de la escultura desde la negación como no-arquitectura y no-paisaje la sitúa en una posición suspendidaentre dos opuestos desde los que Krauss genera un campoexpandido entre lo construido y lo no-construido, locultural y lo natural. Desde la lógica del grupo de Kleinconstruye un campo cuaternario de relaciones queproblematiza la serie de oposiciones entre las que estásuspendida la categoría modernista de escultura. Por mediode la expansión lógica de una serie de binarios refleja laoposición original y, al mismo tiempo, la abre:

Dos parejas de pura contradicción ocupan las cuatroesquinas del cuadrilátero y forman dos ejes: arquitectura – paisaje / no-arquitectura - no-paisaje.

Hay dos relaciones de contradicción expresadas comoinvolución que se denominan esquemas:paisaje - no-paisaje / arquitectura - no-arquitectura.

Y por último hay dos relaciones cruzadas de implicacióndenominadas deixes:arquitectura - no-paisaje / paisaje - no-arquitectura.

En su periferia se generan nuevas categorías conceptualesde intervención espacial que describen las prácticasartísticas que implican la ruptura histórica y latransformación estructural, que Krauss data entre 1968 y1970, y conllevan el paso del modernismo al posmodernismo.

En este ejercicio de explicación se genera una expansión dela teoría de los campos disciplinares tradicionales haciauna teoría interdisciplinar que admite categorías hastaentonces inadmisibles en la cultura occidental, laarquitectura y el paisaje.

Sin embargo se trata de un espacio cultural que otrasculturas han asumido sin contradicciones, como los jardinesjaponeses, los laberintos o los campos de juegos ritualesde antiguas civilizaciones que son al mismo tiempoarquitectura y paisaje y de los la escultura participa comoun elemento más.

Krauss denomina estas nuevas categorías conceptuales

construcción de lugares, suspendida entre paisaje yarquitectura;lugares marcados, suspendidos entre paisaje y no-paisaje; y estructuras axiomáticas, suspendidas entre arquitectura y no-arquitectura.

Los lugares marcados pueden ser señalados por manipulaciónfísica del lugar o de forma impermanente, sin embargodocumentadas en fotografías.

Las estructuras axiomáticas son intervenciones en el espacioarquitectónico real que se manifiestan a través de lareconstrucción parcial, con dibujos o con el uso deespejos. También pueden ser un proceso de cartografiar lascaracterísticas axiomáticas del la experienciaarquitectónica de un espacio existente, tal como los queregistra Bruce Nauman su instalación audiovisual Corridors.

La lógica espacial de la práctica posmodernista ya no seorganiza alrededor de la definición de un medio dado sobrela base del material o de la percepción de éste, sino através del universo de términos que se consideran enoposición dentro de una situación cultural. Esto significaque dentro del campo expandido se pueden utilizar distintosmedios y que un mismo artista puede ocupar sucesivamentedistintas posiciones dentro del campo, siendo el propioespacio el condicionante y condición de la obra.

“But two cases come to mind, both bearing the marks oftheir own transitional status. Rodin's Gates of Hell and hisstatue of Balzac were both conceived as monuments. The firstwere commissioned in 1880 as the doors to a projectedmuseum of decorative arts; the second was commissioned in1891 as a memorial to literary genius to be set up at aspecific site in Paris. The failure of these two works asmonuments is signaled not only by the fact that multipleversions can be found in a variety of museums in variouscountries, while no version exists on the original sites —both commissions having eventually collapsed. Their failureis also encoded onto the very surfaces of these works: thedoors having been gouged away and anti-structurallyencrusted to the point where they bear their inoperativecondition on their face; the Balzac executed with such adegree of subjectivity that not even Rodin believed (asletters by him attest) that the work would ever beaccepted.With these two sculptural projects, I would say, onecrosses the threshold of the logic of the monument,entering the space of what could be called its negativecondition —a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, anabsolute loss of place. Which is to say one entersmodernism, since it is the modernist period of sculpturalproduction that operates in relation to this loss of site,producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as puremarker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential.It is these two characteristics of modernist sculpture thatdeclare its status, and therefore its meaning and function,as essentially nomadic. Through its fetishization of thebase, the sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestalinto itself and away from actual place; and through therepresentation of its own materials or the process of itsconstruction, the sculpture depicts its own autonomy.”

p. 34

“But it would probably be more accurate to say of the workthat one found in the early sixties that sculpture hadentered a categorical no-man's-land: it was what was on orin front of a building that was not the building, or whatwas in the landscape that was not the landscape.

The purest examples that come to mind from the early 1960sare both by Robert Morris. One is the work exhibited in1964 in the Green Gallery —quasiarchitectural integerswhose status as sculpture reduces almost completely to thesimple determination that it is what is in the room that isnot really the room; the other is the outdoor exhibition ofthe mirrored boxes-forms which are distinct from thesetting only because, though visually continuous with grassand trees, they are not in fact part of the landscape.In this sense sculpture had entered the full condition ofits inverse logic and had become pure negativity: thecombination of exclusions. Sculpture, it could be said, hadceased being a positivity, and was now the category thatresulted from the addition of the not-landscape to the not-architecture. Diagrammatically expressed, the limit ofmodernist sculpture, the addition of the neither/nor, lookslike this:

Now, if sculpture itself had become a kind of ontologicalabsence, the combination of exclusions, the sum of theneither/nor, that does not mean that the terms themselvesfrom which it was built-the not-landscape and the notarchitecture —did not have a certain interest. This is becausethese terms express a strict opposition between the builtand the not-built, the cultural and the natural, betweenwhich the production of sculptural art appeared to besuspended. And what began to happen in the career of onesculptor after another, beginning at the end of the 1960s,is that attention began to focus on the outer limits ofthose terms of exclusion. For, if those terms are theexpression of a logical opposition stated as a pair ofnegatives, they can be transformed by a simple inversioninto the same polar opposites but expressed positively.That is, the not-architecture is, according to the logic of acertain kind of expansion, just another way of expressingthe term landscape, and the not-landscape is, simply,architecture. The expansion to which I am referring is calleda Klein group when employed mathematically and has various

other designations, among them the Piaget group, when usedby structuralists involved in mapping operations within thehuman sciences.”

p. 36-37Klein groupThe dimensions of this structure may be analyzed asfollows:

1) there are two relationships of pure contradiction whichare termed axes (and further differentiated into thecomplex axes and the neuter axis) and are designated by thesolid arrows; 2) there are two relationships of contradiction, expressedas involution, which are called schemas and are designatedby the double arrows; and 3) there are two relationships of implication which arecalled deixes and are designated by the broken arrows.

“Another way of saying this is that even though sculpture maybe reduced to what is in the Klein group the neuter term ofthe not-landscape plus the not-architecture, there is no reasonnot to imagine an opposite term —one that would be bothlandscape and architecture— which within this schema is calledthe complex. But to think the complex is to admit into therealm of art two terms that had formerly been prohibitedfrom it: landscape and architecture — terms that could functionto define the sculptural (as they had begun to do inmodernism) only in their negative or neuter condition.Because it was ideologically prohibited, the complex hadremained excluded from what might be called the closure ofpost-Renaissance art. Our culture had not before been ableto think the complex, although other cultures have thoughtthis term with great ease. Labyrinths and mazes are bothlandscape and architecture; Japanese gardens are bothlandscape and architecture; the ritual playing fields andprocessionals of ancient civilizations were all in this

sense the unquestioned occupants of the complex. Which isnot to say that they were an early, or a degenerate, or avariant form of sculpture. They were part of a universe orcultural space in which sculpture was simply another part —not somehow, as our historicist minds would have it, thesame. Their purpose and pleasure is exactly that they areopposite and different.”

p. 38“The expanded field is thus generated by problematizing theset of oppositions between which the modernist categorysculpture is suspended. And once this has happened, onceone is able to think one's way into this expansion, thereare —logically— three other categories that one canenvision, all of them a condition of the field itself, andnone of them assimilable to sculpture. Because as we cansee, sculpture is no longer the privileged middle termbetween two things that it isn't. Sculpture is rather onlyone term on the periphery of a field in which there areother, differently structured possibilities. And one hasthereby gained the “permission” to think these other forms.So our diagram is filled in as follows:

p. 38

“It seems fairly clear that this permission (or pressure)to think the expanded field was felt by a number of artistsat about the same time, roughly between the years 1968 and1970. For, one after another Robert Morris, RobertSmithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria,Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman… had entered asituation the logical conditions of which can no longer bedescribed as modernist. In order to name this historicalrupture and the structural transformation of the culturalfield that characterizes it, one must have recourse to

another term. The one already in use in other areas ofcriticism is postmodernism. There seems no reason not touse it.”

p. 41

“But whatever term one uses, the evidence is already in. By1970, with the Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent StateUniversity, in Ohio, Robert Smithson had begun to occupythe complex axis, which for ease of reference I am callingsite-construction. In 1971 with the observatory he built inwood and sod in Holland, Robert Morris had joined him.Since that time, many other artists —Robert Irwin, AliceAycock, John Mason, Michael Heizer, Mary Miss, CharlesSimonds —have operated within this new set ofpossibilities.Similarly, the possible combination of landscape and not-landscape began to be explored in the late 1960s. The termmarked sites is used to identify work like Smithson’s SpiralJetty (1970) and Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), as it alsodescribes some of the work in the seventies by Serra,Morris, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim, Nancy Holt, GeorgeTrakis, and many others. But in addition to actual physicalmanipulations of sites, this term also refers to otherforms of marking. These might operate through theapplication of impermanent marks —Heizer’s Depressions,Oppenheim’s Time Lines, or De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing, forexample-or through the use of photography. Smithson's MirrorDisplacements in the Yucatan were probably the first widelyknown instances of this, but since then the work of RichardLong and Hamish Fulton has focused on the photographicexperience of marking. Christo’s Running Fence might be saidto be an impermanent, photographic, and political instanceof marking a site.The first artists to explore the possibilities of architectureplus not-architecture were Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, BruceNauman, Richard Serra, and Christo. In every case of theseaxiomatic structures, there is some kind of intervention intothe real space of architecture, sometimes through partialreconstruction, sometimes through drawing, or as in therecent works of Morris, through the use of mirrors. As wastrue of the category of the marked site, photography can beused for this purpose; I am thinking here of the video

corridors by Nauman. But whatever the medium employed, thepossibility explored in this category is a process ofmapping the axiomatic features of the architecturalexperience —the abstract conditions of openness and closure— onto the reality of a given space.”

p. 41

construction of sites

landscape

site-construction

Robert Smithson Partially Buried Woodshed (1970)

Robert Morris Observatory (1971)Robert IrwinAlice Aycock

architecture

John MasonMichael HeizerMary MissCharles Simonds

physical manipulations of sites

landscape

marked sites

Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty (1970)Michael Heizer Double Negative (1969)Richard SerraRobert Morris

not-landscape

Carl AndreDennis Oppenheim Nancy HoltGeorge Trakis

impermanent marks of sites

landscape

marked sites

photographythe photographic experience of marking

Michael Heizer Depressions

Dennis Oppenheim Time Lines

Walter De Maria

Mile Long Drawing

Robert SmithsonRichard LongHamish Fulton

Mirror Displacements

not-landscape

impermanent,photographic, and political instance of marking a site

Christo Running Fence

intervention into the real space ofarchitecture

architecture axiomatic

structures

through partial reconstruction

Robert IrwinSol LeWitt

through drawing Bruce Nauman not-architecture

Richard Serra through the use of mirrors

Christo

mapping the axiomatic features of thearchitectural experience

architecture axiomatic

structures

mapping the abstract conditions of opennessand closure onto the reality of a given space

Bruce Nauman

Video corridors

not-architecture

“From the structure laid out above, it is obvious that thelogic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longerorganized around the definition of a given medium on thegrounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception ofmaterial. It is organized instead through the universe ofterms that are felt to be in opposition within a culturalsituation. (The postmodernist space of painting wouldobviously involve a similar expansion around a differentset of terms from the pair architecture/ landscape —a set thatwould probably turn on the opposition uniqueness/reproducibility.) It follows, then, that within any one of thepositions generated by the given logical space, manydifferent mediums might be employed. It follows as wellthat any single artist might occupy, successively, any oneof the positions. And it also seems the case that withinthe limited position of sculpture itself the organizationand content of much of the strongest work will reflect thecondition of the logical space. I am thinking here of thesculpture of Joel Shapiro, which, though it positionsitself in the neuter term, is involved in the setting ofimages of architecture within relatively vast fields(landscapes) of space. (These considerations apply,obviously, to other work as well —Charles Simonds, forexample, or Ann and Patrick Poirier.)”

p. 43

Otros diagramas

https://wba3.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/architecture-in-the-expanded-field-the-diagram/

At the end of the late 1970s, art theorist and critic Rosalind Krausswrote a seminal text entitled ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ in anattempt to both locate and analyze vanguard sculptural practices ofthe time. Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Mary Miss, and Donald Juddcrossed the limits of traditional sculpture and entered into therealms of architecture and landscape through the production of worksthat Krauss classified as site constructions, marked sites/earthworks,and axiomatic structures.

Over the last three decades, the blurred boundaries between art andarchitecture have generated a series of works known as installations,whose conceptual, spatial and material trajectories have produced anew and expanding network of relations between the domains ofarchitecture, sculpture, interiors and landscape. These installations,emerging from both architects and artists, operate on the fundamentalconditions of the architectural, without producing buildings.

This advanced studio, led by Douglas Burnham and Ila Berman, exploresthe realm of installation art and architecture through studentresearch initiatives covering a broad terrain of installationpractices (our newly constructed “expanded field”) ranging from theproduction of immersive environments in the works of Olafur Eliasson,

James Turrell and Philippe Raum, for example, to the deconstructionsof Gordon Matta-Clark and the spatial distortions and tectonicmanipulations of contemporary works by Softlab, Numen/For Use andtheverymany.”

Ila Berman / Douglas Burnham