![Robert Smithson“One thing films have is the power to take perception elsewhere” (Smithson [1971] 1979, p.105)Spiral Jetty (1970)Actual work made in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/week3pomo-110428063558-phpapp02/85/From-Object-to-concept-environment-performance-and-installation-art-26-320.jpg)
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From Object to concept: environment, performance, and installation art
This document provides an overview of postmodern art movements that emerged in response to modernism, including minimalism, conceptual art, performance art, body art, earthworks, and installation art. It discusses how these genres emphasized ideas over visual forms, incorporated elements of theatre and audience participation, and challenged definitions of art. Key artists mentioned include Robert Morris, Joseph Kosuth, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Richard Serra, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Bruce Nauman. It also summarizes Michael Fried's criticism of minimalism and Rosalind Krauss' theory of sculpture's "expanded field."
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From Object to concept: environment, performance, and installation art
- 1. Postmodernism in Art:an introductionFrom object to concept: environment, performance and installation artUniversity of EdinburghDeborah Jacksondjackso1@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
- 2. Define the attributesthat you consider makes something: a sculpture
- 3.
- 4.
- 5. landscapeRecap Weexplored how the emergence of Minimalism added extra strain to the meticulous formal rules laid out by Greenberg, threatening the ‘purity’ and coherence of modern art
- 6. We considered howaspects of Minimalism that caused a break with the Modern paradigm, by for example suggesting that the the spectator had a part to play, and also by hinting at the ambiguity of objects subject to interpretation
- 7. We examinedthe roots of Conceptual Art and in particular artworks that emphasized ideas over visual forms and we considered how these works fitted into or challenged definitions of art
- 8. We also exploreddifferent methods of using language in art
- 9. And howConceptual Art challenged the traditional status of the art object as unique, collectable or saleableAims of this lecture: To introduce the notion of a dialogical practice. In other words, the artwork is part of the construction of a conversation between the audience and the artwork.
- 10. To introducethe de-automatised art work. By de-automatise I mean that the artists involved in these responses to Greenberg's notion of Modernism wanted to get rid of his notion of art's separation from life and its radical purity and essential elitism.
- 11. Discuss worksthat incorporate the notion of theatre, and the phenomenological experience of the artwork. This means how the artwork operates in the dimensions of time and space shared with our bodies. Post-Minimalism/Process Art Body ArtPerformance Art Installation Minimalism Conceptual Art Environmental Art (Earthworks, Land Art)
- 12. Joseph Kosuth“One andFive (Clock)”Four gelatin silver prints, clock1965
- 13. In Body Art,the artist's own flesh (or the flesh of others) is the canvas. Body Art can range from covering volunteers with blue paint and then having them writhe on a canvas, to self-mutilation in front of an audience.Yves Klein Untitled Anthropometry (1960)
- 14. In the 1970s,as boundaries between artistic disciplines blurred and artists sought alternative modes of expression and presentation, performance emerged as one of the dominant art forms.Bruce NaumanDance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1968)
- 15. Working in thecontext of first wave feminist protest and body politics, attempted the metaphoric transformation of the female body from passive object to speaking subject in this performance ‘Interior Scroll’ in which she extracted a text from her vagina which she read aloud.CaroleeSchneeman. Interior Scroll (1975)
- 16. Chris Burden's performanceswere the ultimate test of bodily pain and endurance. In his most notorious piece, Shoot (1971), Burden asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22 caliber rifle in a gallery space (he was hit in the arm). In Seedbed (1972), Vito Acconci hid under a ramp for the duration of the exhibition and masturbated, "spreading his seeds" as he listened to viewers' footsteps. Speakers installed in the gallery transmitted his fantasies.
- 17. IlyaKabakovThe Man WhoFlew Into Space From His Apartment, 1968-1996.Installation art is exemplary of 'post-medium specific art', in other words, art whose medium is so expanded that it no longer has much to do with traditional art historical genres such as sculpture and painting.
- 18. Christo, The RunningFence, Marin County, California, 1976Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, 1970, black basalt, limestone and earth, 1,500' (aerial photograph)
- 19. Michael Fried (1939-)MichaelFried’s influential and controversial essay, Art and Objecthooddiscusses minimalist art and its relation to modernist painting and sculpture
- 20. Fried's essay claimsthat Minimal Art defines its position as neither modernist painting nor modernist sculptureFried suggested that Minimalism had betrayed Modernism's exploration of the medium by becoming emphatic about its own materiality as to deny the viewer a proper aesthetic experience. Minimalism (or "literalism" as Fried called it) offered an experience of "theatricality" rather than "presentness"; it left the viewer in their ordinary, non-transcendent world.
- 21. Above Left: Installationat The Green Gallery, 1964, NYCAbove Right: Portland Mirrors, c.1970, Portland, OregonBelow Left: detail of Corner Piece, 1964Below Right: Cloud, and, Slab, c.1964Robert Morris
- 22.
- 23. Richard Long (1967)A Line Made by Walking England.
- 24. Dennis OppenheimDirected Harvestcirca 1966-8
- 25. Walter De MariaLightning Field (1971) Western New Mexico
- 26. Robert Smithson“One thingfilms have is the power to take perception elsewhere” (Smithson [1971] 1979, p.105)Spiral Jetty (1970)Actual work made in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
- 27. Robert Smithson,A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey), 1968, painted wooden bins, limestone, gelatin silver prints and typescript on paper with graphite and transfer letters, mounted on mat board, bins installed: 16.5 x 82.25 x 103 inches, board: 40 x 30 inches,
- 28. The artist nolonger supplies the‘raw material’ for someone else(e.g. curator, historian, critic, etc.) to organise into systems of meaning, but takes on this organising role for him/herself.
- 29. Institutional Critique The actof critiquing an institution as artistic practice, the institution usually being a museum or an art gallery. Institutional criticism began in the late 1960s when artists began to create art in response to the institutions that bought and exhibited their work. In the 1960s the art institution was often perceived as a place of cultural confinement and thus something to attack aesthetically, politically and theoretically.
- 30. “Art degenerates asit approaches the condition of theatre”Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood Location of meaning out of the artwork
- 31.
- 32. Location ofmeaning in the surrounding environment
- 33. Existing foran audienceDonald Judd: Untitled, 1982-1986, 100 works in mill aluminumChinati Foundation, Marfa, TexasAny meaning this kind of work had was dependent upon the experience of the person viewing it, an aspect of the flux of everyday life.
- 34. “The most notabledevelopment in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of sculpture itself…In a bid to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself.”NORTH, MICHAEL. The Public as Sculpture: from Heavenly City to Mass Ornament, in MICHELL, W.J.T. Art and the Public Sphere
- 35. The cultural studiestheory known as Structuralism uses a term of art called "binary opposition" to explain human knowledge and to explain how many naturally occurring phenomena are constructed. Systems are "binary" when they are composed of only two parts.Many systems of meaning are based on binary structures (masculine/ feminine; black/white; natural/artificial), two contrary conceptual categories that also entail or presuppose each other. One aspect of semiotic interpretation involves exposing the culturally arbitrary nature of this binary opposition and describing the deeper consequences of this structure throughout a culture.
- 36. Rosalind Krauss’Expanded Fieldof SculptureFirst published in 1978The term ‘expanded field’ was born from the critical debates surrounding sculpture and painting in the 1960’s
- 37. Schematic Definition ofModernist Sculpture:Krauss proposed a dialogic interplay among categories not-landscapenot-architectureSCULPTURE
- 38. Schematic Definition ofModernist Sculpture:Sculpture can be in architecture or on it, but it is not architecture itself.Sculpture can be in the landscape or on it, but it is not a landscape itself.not-landscapenot-architectureSCULPTURE
- 39. Expanding the Definitionof Sculptural Works:landscapearchitecturecomplexnot-landscapenot-architecturenueterSCULPTURE
- 40. Expanding the Definitionof Sculptural Works:Krauss argued that for example Land Art might best be defined in terms of a double negative; it was neither architecture nor landscape.Krauss also suggested that other works could better be placed in one of three other related categories: landscape and architecture, architecture and not architecture, and landscape and not landscape.landscapearchitecturecomplexnot-landscapenot-architecturenueterSCULPTURE
- 41. Expanding the Fieldof 3D worksAt first site these do seem contradictory but when held up against the work dubbed Land Art, Environmental Art and Installation it does start to make sense.landscapearchitecturecomplexnot-landscapenot-architecturenueterSCULPTURE
Editor's Notes
- #3 Individually I want each of you to define the attributes that you consider makes something: a sculpture a painting architecture landscapeNow in pairs/3’s discuss and then feedback with a definative list.
- #4 Recap We explored how the emergence of Minimalism added extra strain to the formal rules laid out by Greenberg, and how this threatened the so-called ‘purity’ and coherence of modern art We considered how aspects of Minimalism caused a break with the Modern paradigm, by for example suggesting that the the spectator had a part to play We examined the roots of Conceptual Art and in particular artworks that emphasized ideas over visual forms and we considered how these works fitted into or challenged definitions of art We also explored different methods of using language in art And how Conceptual Art challenged the traditional status of the art object as unique, collectable or saleable
- #5 Objectives of this lecture: To introduce the notion of a dialogical practice. In other words, the artwork is part of the construction of a conversation between the audience and the artwork. To introduce the de-automatised art work. By de-automatise I mean that the artists involved in these responses to Greenberg's notion of Modernism wanted to get rid of his notion of art's separation from life and its radical purity and essential elitism. Discuss works that incorporate the notion of theatre, and the phenomenological experience of the artwork. This means how the artwork operates in the dimensions of time and space shared with our bodies.
- #6 For most of the twentieth century, sculpture had seemed to be the poor relation of modernist art compared to painting. After the crisis of modernism, or rather the challenge to Greenbergian modernism in the late 1960s this changed, as painting lost its position at the centre of contemporary art to be replaced by a multiplicity of three-dimensional practices, including Body Art, Performance At, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism also called Process Art, Installation Art, Conceptual Art, and Environmental Art or Earthworks or Land Art.In the US critic Lucy Lippard’s book ‘Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972’ she spoke about the difficulty of grasping just what art was becoming during this period.She raised questions such as: do artworks have substantial form or isit a set of ideas in how to perceive the world? Was it a single object or was it more diffuse, occupying a much larger space? Was art to be found inside or outside the gallery? One thing was clear though and that was that art’s changing identity was neither the unstoppable, nor the inevitable forward march that the modernist notion of the avant garde had proclaimed. Furthermore, there was no preferred way of working that would cover all circumstances and requirements and the idea that an artist should have a signature style also ceased to make much sense.
- #7 So as we saw last week, Conceptual Artwas founded on the principle that art is a concept/idea rather than a material object, and importantly this weekwe will see the influence of the notion that the work,if its exists at all is regarded as a form of documentation rather than an artifact.As a direct influence of Conceptual Art the emphasis in art practice had begun to shift from the end product to the process of its making. And with this, an acknowledgement of the bodily presence of the artist as a crucial factor in that process became all but unavoidable. In particular Body Art and Performance Art exemplify that acknowledgement. Even when it takes place in a gallery, performance can only exist as a photograph or report for everyone except the very few present as its audience. The importance of documentation in this kind of work is again important and has its antecedents or roots in Conceptualism and is extended through to the Land Art of Long and Smithson.
- #8 Body Art "Body Art" began in the 1960s. In Body Art, the artist's own flesh (or the flesh of others) is the canvas. Body Art can range from covering volunteers with blue paint and then having them writhe on a canvas, to self-mutilation in front of an audience.In the 1960s and 1970s, the body became an influential site for artistic inquiry and exploration. By replacing paint and canvas with the immediacy and physicality of the human form, body artists aimed to unite physical, psychological, and emotional experience. The body--most often the artist's own--was manipulated, probed, and investigated as its physical capabilities and limitations were put to the test. Crucial to Body Art is its performance aspect. Whether artists "performed" in front of an audience or in the privacy of the studio, documentation through photography, film, video, and/or text allows the work to be experienced by others.
- #9 In the 1970s, as boundaries between artistic disciplines blurred and artists sought alternative modes of expression and presentation, performance emerged as one of the dominant art forms.By 1970, Performance Art was a global term, it describes a range of activities that emerged as visual artists added action to their static works. Deriving from 1960s conceptual art (in which the idea or concept for a work was more important than the execution of a material object), these works were ephemeral, time-based, and process-oriented, and brought artists into more direct contact with the spectator. Performance art encompassed many forms, including Body Art, Fluxus, feminist art, mail art, and video art. "Performance Art" meant that it was live, and it was art, not theatre. Although the exact difference between innovative theatre and Performance "art" is perhaps hard to fathom. Performance Art also meant that it was art that could not be bought, sold or traded as a commodity. Performance artists saw (and generally continue to see) the movement as a means of taking their art directly to a public forum, thus completely eliminating the need for galleries and any other aspect of capitalism. However, its insistence on being labeled "art" – which is clearly, traditionally a bourgeois event - sits awkwardly alongside its anti-establishment ethic. Then again, you could consider whether it is a sort of social commentary on the purity of art?
- #10 CaroleeSchneemandid Happenings and installations incorporating live, nude performances that represented the nascent stages of feminist art.In this work,Schneeman was working in the context of first wave feminist protest and body politics, and attempted the metaphoric transformation of the female body from passive object, as it had traditionally been regarded in art, to the speaking subject in this performance ‘Interior Scroll’ in which she extracted a text from her vagina which she read aloud. In the later 1960s, some of the artists included in this exhibition--Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, and William Wegman--began subjecting themselves to actions, tasks, and manipulations that tested the limits and malleability of the human body in varying degrees.
- #11 Chris Burden's performances were the ultimate test of bodily pain and endurance. In his most notorious piece, Shoot (1971), Burden asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22 caliber rifle in a gallery space (he was hit in the arm). In Seedbed (1972), Vito Acconci hid under a ramp for the duration of the exhibition and masturbated, "spreading his seeds" as he listened to viewers' footsteps. Speakers installed in the gallery transmitted his fantasies.
- #12 Installation (1960s onwards) A new art form which came to attention in the USA during the 1960s, although the idea dates back to the Surrealist exhibitions created by Marcel Duchamp and others, when individual works of art were arranged to form a complex and compelling environment. Installation art is exemplary of 'post-medium specific art', in other words, art whose medium is so expanded that it no longer has much to do with traditional art historical genres such as sculpture and painting.The ascendency of 'post-medium art' in the 1960s is accompanied by a new emphasis on the first-hand experience of the viewer
- #13 Environmental Art (Earthworks, Land Art) (mid-1960s) uses or interacts with the landscape to create artistic shapes or "events." Referred to by a variety of names, Environmental or Land Art typically re-fashions natural forms or enhances them with man-made materials. Pioneers of this artform include Robert Smithson, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy.
- #14 In Michael Fried’s influential and controversial essay, Art and Objecthood his target was Minimalism. In the essay he discusses minimalist art and its relation to modernist painting and sculpture.He claims that Minimal Art defines its position as neither modernist painting nor modernist sculptureFried suggested that Minimalism had betrayed Modernism's exploration of the medium by becoming emphatic about its own materiality as to deny the viewer a proper aesthetic experience. Minimalism (or "literalism" as Fried called it) offered an experience of "theatricality" rather than "presentness"; it left the viewer in his or her ordinary, non-transcendent world. By the time Fried wrote this essay in 1967 Art now existed in a complex and expanded field. This led to the loosening of categories and the dismantling of interdisciplinary boundaries.Michael Friedhad been a pupil of Clement Greenberg and to an extent he continued his critical tradition. His main issue with Minimalism was that there no longer could you look at the object/painting in front of you and discern meaning from what the work offers up, instead it provides asset of cues by which the viewer can orient the experience of being in the gallery with it.
- #15 Thinking mainly of Robert Morris’s work Fried asserted that Minimalism committed the cardinal sin, from a modernist point of view of borrowing from other disciplines effects. In the case of Minimalism, theatre supplied the ‘effects’. Minimalist objects were said to rely on their anthropomorphic sense of presence precisely on being like presences waiting to be met and completed as artworks by the spectators entering the gallery space. Theatrical staging and duration, according to Fried, were integral to their functioning. Fried famously declared that Modernist art and theatricality were at war.
- #16 By 1968 and the publication of his landmark essay “Anti-Form” Robert Morriswas arguing for absence of determinate shape, absence of durability, absence of outline or silhouette.In Anti Form Morris argued that rather than being preconceived sculpture should follow the dictates of process.Anti-Form Morris promotes an art that takes process and ‘hold it up as part of the end work’. Artist were also concerned with arts presentation, where it could be placed and what consequences might follow from the choice of different sites.In 1978, Robert Morris pointed out that white gallery spaces could be taken in at a single glance, that they were in this sense the equivalent of Minimal Art, anti spatial or un-spatial in terms of behavioural experience. His point was that the younger generation of artists no longer wanted an anonymous space and absorption into the institution of Art as represented by the white cube.
- #17 The same shift from object to process was evident in a host of other artistic projectsRichard Long made art by going for walks on routes that could easily be conceptualised, a line, circle or square would be followed on the ground. The walk itself could not easily be directly experienced by an audience who instead saw some form of documentation of it, a map with the route or a photograph for example. In the face of this kind of work the question of ‘where is the art?’ is posed. Long’s walks could be seen in plain sculptural terms as the description of form in space. Richard Long’s work is neither monumental nor heroic, but transitory and transient. He made work by going for walks.Intervened on the landscape by walking a line back and forth, tramping a line in the grass and documenting it in photographs. It constituted for him, amongst other things, a rejection of traditional fine art drawing on paper as well as a signaled resumption of the English Romantic tradition of journeying to rural places to take pleasure in the countryside.Even more fundamentally, perhaps, this and similar excursions into the land such as those by the Americans Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim, were forcing a dramatic separation between some outdoor event often taking place miles away from any gallery, and the subsequent display of its documentation to an art audience indoors.
- #18 Dennis Oppenheim’s work was usually presented as collages, consisting of coloured or black and white photographs, cartographic materials, aerial shots and a short typed description of the work itself.
- #19 DematerialisationWalter De Maria’s work typifies a conviction, pervasive by the mid 1970s, that thought was as much an artistic material as any other. Critics perceived the ‘conceptual’ to be the dominant zeitgeist.There was a transformation of art from an autonomous object to a contextual materiality.In her important chronicle of the period 1966-72, the leading radical critic Lucy Lippard saw it as unifying practices such as Land Art and anti-form in a wave of ‘dematerialisation’, predicated on resistance to galleries and the market.John Chandler and Lucy Lippard coined the notion of dematerialization in their seminal text “The Dematerialization of Art” from 1968. In the text they identified dematerialization with so-called ultra-conceptual art that “emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively” and “may result in the object becoming wholly obsolete”.To Lippard and Chandler there was a connection between the dematerialisation of the art object and the rise of the counter culture.Lucy Lippard mournfully admitted “Hopes that the conceptual art would be able to avoid the general commercialisation, the destructively ‘progressive’ approach to modernism were for the most part unfounded…Whatever minor revolutions in communication have been achieved by the process of dematerializing the art object, art and the artist in a capitalist society remain luxuries.”The desire to see landscape as the site of trancendental ‘presence’ is particularly clear in Walter De Maria’s Lightening Field, finished in 1977 in New Mexico. It consists of 400 steel poles, like a bed of nails protruding from the earth, one mile long and wide.This work dramatises nature and uses the desert as metaphysical space, a extreme landscape to experience the sublime.Lightning Field is permanent but isolated. “isolation” de Maria said, is “is the essence of Land Art.”De Maria’s expectation was that in the future he would be able to do without art galleries altogether.
- #20 Robert Smithson also demonstrated an interest in manipulating and altering the landscape on a great scale.Spiral Jetty projected a quarter of a mile and was only legible as a spiral from the air. A visit to the Spiral Jetty was like a pilgrimage because it was so distant. It had the appearance of an archaic work, situated outside of modernist time.Its museum defying size was no mere inflation but a necessary element of the work.
- #21 Robert Smithson devised a possibly more elegant solution to the problem of how to bring the works created in inaccessible places to the public. He used photographs, plans, and sketches as intermediaries and transferred items, such as pebbles, from the ‘site’ of his work to the exhibition space (non-site).A number of conceptual artists – including Smithson – were working with ‘dematerialization beyond the object’.Smithson was concerned to develop a theory of the relationship between a particular location in the environment that he called the ‘site’, and the anonymous, essentially interchangeable spaces of the galleries in which he might exhibit, and that he called ‘non-site’. Among other things sites had open limits, scattered information and were some place, non-sites had closed limits, contained information and were no place.
- #22 Robert Smithson had strong political motivations. In 1977 he talked about wanting to explore the ‘apparatus’ he was ‘threaded through’. By this he meant the gallery system with its hunger for artistic commodities, but he saw this as merely an extension of the larger post industrial phase of capitalismThe artist no longer supplies the‘raw material’ for someone else(e.g. curator, historian, critic, etc.) to organise into systems of meaning, but takes on this organising role for him/herself.
- #23 These ideas were more broadly examined under the rubric of:Institutional Critique The act of critiquing an institution as artistic practice, the institution usually being a museum or an art gallery. Institutional criticism began in the late 1960s when artists began to create art in response to the institutions that bought and exhibited their work. In the 1960s the art institution was often perceived as a place of cultural confinement and thus something to attack aesthetically, politically and theoretically.“All of Smithson’s work effected a radical dislocation of art, which was removed from its locus in the museum and gallery to remote, inaccessible locations. This displacement is not only geographic, but economic as well: the ‘value’ of the work of art is no longer determined by its status as a portable commodity; it is now the work itself which bestows value (upon the depreciated site where it is installed).”Institutional Critique as a commentary of the various institutions and assumed normalities of art and/or a radical disarticulation of the institution of art.For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of painting and sculpture are often explored, and are then historically and socially mapped out as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, it seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Institutional critique is often critical of how of the distinctions of taste are not separate from aesthetic judgement, and that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility.As we have seen it is a practice that emerged out of the developments of Minimalism and its concerns with the phenomenology of the viewer, as well as formalist art criticism and art history (i.e., Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), conceptual art and its concerns with language, processes, and administrative society, and appropriation art and its concerns with consumption and identity. Institutional critique is often site-specific, and is linked to the advent of the "earthwork" by minimalist artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. Institutional critique is also often associated with the developments of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy, critical theory and literary theory.
- #24 This shift of the location of meaning out of the object and into the surrounding environment was characterised by Fried in negative terms as falling away from what art really was.‘Art’ he said “degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre”. Modernist art, which is to say the historical procession of images and objects produced within the social, industrial, economic and political conditions defined by the Industrial Revolution, sought authenticity in the rigor with which the medium explored its own techniques and materials. Minimal art, which Fried called ‘literal art’ did not display this self-sufficiency. It existed for an audience, it was something not quite life and not quite art, but rather the one quite self consciously presenting itself as the other; an engineered ‘situation’ that reflected upon the qualities of the moment.
- #25 In other words, any meaning this kind of work had was dependent upon the experience of the person viewing it, an aspect of the flux of everyday life.
- #26 “The most notable development in public sculpture of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of sculpture itself…In a bid to escape the constraints of the pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself.”NORTH, MICHAEL. The Public as Sculpture: from Heavenly City to Mass Ornament, in MICHELL, W.J.T. Art and the Public Sphere
- #27 Dialogic Interplay Among CategoriesRosalind Krauss All art media is subject to the already-encoded value system from traditional high-art media (oil paint, marble, etc.) through modern materials (acrylic paint, steel/metals, plastics, lighting, film, video, etc.) to outside and newly introduced materials (organic, industrial, found, biological, excrement, food, digital processes). All are constantly being repositioned in a network of systemic relations (mediology). Many systems of meaning are based on binary structures (masculine/ feminine; black/white; natural/artificial), two contrary conceptual categories that also entail or presuppose each other. One aspect of semiotic interpretation involves exposing the culturally arbitrary nature of this binary opposition and describing the deeper consequences of this structure throughout a culture. If a system of mutually dependent signs are culturally constructed, then they can also be de-constructed by exposing the supressed logic of mutual entailment, which is frequently presented ideologically as natural, normal, or what goes without saying. The expansion of binary logic into the "semiotic square" (derived from classical logic) was developed and popularised by A. J. Griemas
- #28 Rosalind Krauss is, without visible rival, the most influential American art writer since Clement Greenberg.Art in the expanded fieldThe term ‘expanded field’ was born from the critical debates surrounding sculpture and painting in the 1960’sAt the beginning of the 1960s it was still possible to think of works of art as belonging to one of two broad categories: painting and sculpture.In the years since the late 1960s there has been a breaking down of the certainties of this system of classification.By its very definition, the term expanded field opened up discussion surrounding the expansion of the artistic field. This field now encompasses not only the art object but its immediate surroundings, the architectural space in which it inhabits and in turn the effect this has on the spectators that activate the space. These fields of discussion have had huge and ongoing implications within the art world, beginning with Minimalism and following through to conceptual art and contemporary practices such as installation.
- #29 Changing the role of the audience, from contemplative, the aesthetic focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the public becomes the art.In 1979 the US critic Rosalind Krauss proposed a rationale for understanding the proliferation of art form which for want of a better word, continued to be grouped under the general heading of sculpture.
- #32 Krauss argued that for example Land Art might best be defined in terms of a double negative; it was neither architecture nor landscape.Krauss also suggested that other works could better be placed in one of three other related categories: landscape and architecture, architecture and not architecture, and landscape and not landscape.
- #33 At first site these do seem contradictory but when held up against the work dubbed Land Art, Environmental Art and Installation it does start to make sense.
- #34 This idea that sculpture becomes public by taking special experience of its audience as a subject has influenced and unites the whole range of contemporary sculpture:“The shift Krauss describes from the inner space of the artist’s psyche to the exterior space of public convention dissolves the old opposition between artist and audience and makes all sculpture potentially public.” NORTH, MICHAEL. The Public as Sculpture: from Heavenly City to Mass Ornament, in MICHELL, W.J.T. Art and the Public Sphere
- #35 It is important to see art works in a system of meaningful relationships, not as independent styles of types of visual content. This means seeing works for what they are not doing--negating past ways of working--as well as what new positive expressions are being made. The naive concept of "influence" is inadequate for understanding the density or complexity of interdependent meaning in a cultural system. What is always in play is a semiotic matrix, positions within a system that presuppose and cross-reference each other.The re-evaluation of the spectator’s role emerged with the modernist/minimalist debate. The ‘logic of the expanded field’ broadened to include the subject of the spectator. This role became progressively complex and unclear. Artists from this time on became increasingly aware of the viewer, duration of time and the location of their work.
- #39 Rosalind Krauss…