Some other studio books

1) Expanded Practices

Text: Something that fits between the categories ‘landscape’ and ‘architecture’, is a ‘site construction’. Sculptors increasingly made these ‘as the 1960s began to lengthen into the 1970s’. Traditional sculptural practices were ‘not architecture’ and ‘not landscape’. Imagine an artist like me using Krauss’s diagram to calculate new locations for my practice. One looked for unclaimed adjacencies, not historical legacies. This was when fine art experimentation gained a generic name – and a potential location on a field-like diagram.

Notes: I quote throughout from Rosalind Krauss (1978) ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, in Krauss, R. E. (1986) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp 277-290.

Image: juxtaposition in my iCloud photo library.

Text: Yes, ‘surprising things were now being called sculpture’, and I felt free to call the space I regularly crossed to get from an art school to a museum, a site of creative calculation, rather than pedagogic development. The art school, and its adjacency to the museum, was surely an expanded field. This single idea radicalised my practices as a young art school tutor.

Image: Martha Argerich performing Chopin and the V&A’s Veit Stoss carving.

Text: And Rawson’s Tantra catalogue was in my studio at the time. He had demonstrated that entirely new acts of exhibition could emerge from over-familiar modes of museum display. The spatial and temporal distribution of historic artefacts was the opportunity. New art could be made in conjunction with the past. The generation of arts practitioners to which I belong thought Tantra was a transformative experience. After that, we no longer assumed that the future was white cube exhibiting.

Krauss quote: ‘The expansion to which I am referring is called a Klein group when employed mathematically and has various other designations, among them the Piaget group, when used by structuralists involved in mapping operations within the human sciences’

Krauss footnote: For a discussion of the Klein group, see Marc Barbut, ‘On the Meaning of the Word “Structure” in Mathematics’, in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism, New York, Basic Books, 1970.

Krauss footnote: For an application of the Piaget group, see A.-J. Greimas and F. Rastier, ‘The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,’ Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968),86-105.

2) Expanded Field inverted

Text: In the expanded field, opportunities are not linear. Krauss was providing an explanatory guide for avant-garde practices, and for practitioners this was confirmatory. But those teaching in art schools also realised that the expansion of sculptural practices increased our sense of the otherness of conventional sculptures. Perceptions were intensified.

Text: I carve limewood. It’s a northern European tradition famously explored by Michael Baxandall. He makes it easier to acknowledge that the aesthetics associated with this medium are no longer available to us. It’s not the way we see things any more.

Notes: Michael Baxandall (1980) The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Image: marked page in Baxandall’s book.

Text: And yet, siting my sculptures in the Pitt Rivers Museum gave my version of this carving tradition unexpected contemporaneity. The ‘historically bounded category’ of sculpture was as much a location for experimentation as a ‘site construction’. This is the kind of paradox that keeps me going. Difficult sensibilities are spatial, not temporal. This is what Jacques Rancière calls dissensus.

Notes: Jacques Rancière (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, London: Continuum.