WORK
Sculpture in the Expanded Field
Krauss's 1979 essay mapping the dissolution of sculpture as a coherent category—using the Klein group to reveal new positions (site construction, marked site, axiomatic structure) that logic made possible and material conditions made actual.
Published in October in spring 1979, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" is the single most influential essay in postmodern art theory and the founding document of structural analysis applied to artistic categories. Krauss began with the observation that by the late 1970s, almost anything could be called sculpture—a pile of thread waste, a mirror in the desert, a photograph of an absent site—and that the category had been stretched so far it no longer described anything in particular. Her solution was to apply the Klein group from mathematics, generating a field of four logical positions from the binary oppositions landscape/not-landscape and architecture/not-architecture. Traditional sculpture occupied the nexus of both negations; the new work occupied positions the old category could not name. The essay's method—rigorous, diagrammatic, indifferent to artists' intentions—established the template for structural analysis of categorical dissolution that applies with uncomfortable precision to the AI moment's collapse of "authorship."
