Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.



Why is Rosalind Krauss’s seminal work in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” relevant in contemporary art practice today?

Rosalind Krauss, an influential art critic and theorist and founding member of October, provides discussion of ‘the expanded field’ for the post-modernist artist. Krauss discusses a ‘logic of space’ to include a larger cultural field beyond the pure medium thereby opening up the definition of sculpture. In the ‘expanded field’ the hybrid state opens up infinite possibilities within a field of practice beyond High Modernism to the disintegration of the formal to the 'formless'. It does this through oppositions. It is the oppositions that in my opinion make it relevant today. The logic of the ‘expanded field’ begins with oppositions, such as ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’.1 Introducing the inverse of these oppositions, ‘not cultural’ and ‘not natural’ doubles the expansion. These two parts mirror the original opposition and open it up to its negative space. It becomes a map of possibilities through the universe of terms that are in opposition with the cultural situation.2 This provides a language of oppositional thinking, questions or tensions. Oppositions enable conversations outside of art world into other disciplines such as science, technology and philosophy. It frees the art of its pure medium. This interdisciplinary approach enable artists to deal with concerns from other media, simultaneously exploring and occupying different positions in the expanded field. The expanded field is relevant beyond sculpture and into my area of interest, photography. George Baker, Photography in the Expanded Field (1979) discussed how artists such as Jeff Wall reconcile photography with other media like painting, cinema and advertising by inventively drawing on cultural concerns outside of photography.3 The expanded field of photography oppositions of stasis and narrativity and their pure negatives broaden the discourse beyond the pure medium to include cinematic and moving image across a myriad of disciplines. This expanded field opens up new questions that constitute contemporary practice across all disciplines broadening the scope for artists in the postmodern. Artists like Wall questioned what had gone before in painting by the use of photography to question autheniticity and aura of painting. He did this by using large formats and presentations that expanded the field of photography into other media of cinema and advertising to subvert content and provoke discussion around contemporary art practice that has conceptual determinations. Wall used what Krauss called a logic of space that extended out of the pure medium of photography into an expanded field.


1.Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 37.
2. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 43.
3.Baker, George. “Photography’s Expanded Field.” October, Vol.114, (Fall, 2005) Issue 114, pp 123.