Week 2: Reaction to Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”
Pretty interesting piece, which by trying to address a definition for sculpture, comes up with a useful model for thinking of site in general. The model incorporates landscape, architecture, not-landscape and not-architecture as key pillars, and then defines various interactions. For example, site construction lies between architecture and landscape (eg. Works of Robert Morris and Smithson). Sculpture is located between non-architecture and non-landscape.
I am struck by how it may be possible for a single work to move among these categories. For example, many ancient sculptures and temples, relocated to modern museums, move from one extreme to the other. For example, the great altar of Zeus at Pergamun (today in Berlin) was intended to shape the landscape in which it was located, an example of site-construction. Visiting the site in Turkey today, one is struck by the dominating absence of the altar! Moving the entire structure into a museum in a distant country suddenly reformats it as a work of sculpture, between not-landscape and not-architecture.