A Category Under Strain
By the 1960s, the word "sculpture" covered radically diverse practices. Rosalind Krauss addressed this in her essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (1979).
She noted that modernist sculpture was a negative category: not architecture, and not landscape. Krauss mapped these oppositions into an expanded field of relations:
| Position | Defined as |
|---|---|
| Sculpture | Not-landscape and not-architecture |
| Site construction | Landscape and architecture |
| Marked sites | Landscape and not-landscape |
| Axiomatic structures | Architecture and not-architecture |
The scheme maps the Expanded Field of Sculpture through these structural positions.
What Produced the Strain
Three core shifts drove this transformation:
- The base went. The work shared actual space with the viewer.
- The object went. Process, performance, and instructions replaced durable artefacts.
- The gallery stopped being the destination. Works moved directly into sites and landscapes.
The Consequence
Because of this shift, medium stops being a useful classifier. Sculpture now marks a history and a set of concerns rather than a fixed material format.
Common pitfall: Krauss's model is not an "anything goes" licence. It is a structure with defined positions, offering precise categories for post-modern practice.