Painting Must Die (Part 3/3): The Final Solution

Frank Stella, Detail of notes for Pratt Lecture (1960); Tony Smith, Die (1962)

When Rosalind Krauss wrote that sculpture was "a historically bounded category not a universal one" her aim was to establish territory for the new art work that had developed out of minimalist "practice." She was not however being entirely honest intellectually. If she had been, she would acknowledged the full dept minimalist art and post-minimalist art owed to painting. She would not have defined sculpture in terms of "artistic practices" - an expanded, but still finite field. If Krauss had been totally honest she would have been forced to consider sculpture in terms of a much larger field, artistic reception - an admittedly far more difficult set of relationships to chart within a Klein group.

Painting Must Die (Part 2/3): Framed.

Laocoön and His Sons (160-20 BCE), Frank Stella, Newburgh (1995) 

As counter-intuitive as it is to think of sculpture as painting, that is in fact the steady state; the status quo, not the exception. In her book, Passages in Modern Sculpture, Rosalind Krauss quotes the the 19^th Century theorist Adolf von Hildebrand, who writes:

All separate judgements of depth enter into a unitary, all-inclusive judgement of depth. So that ultimately the entire richness of a figure's form stands before us as a backward continuation of one simple plane, whenever this is not the case the unitary pictorial effect of the figure is lost.

Painting Must Die (Part 1/3): Backing into Murder

Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp (1962), Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970)

Barnet Newman's quip that, "sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting,” has become a cliche no self respecting art historian would quote. So it's a curious pleasure to find it in Rosalind Krauss's essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field. (It's like coming across a knock knock joke in a Walter Benjamin essay.) Like all humor, Newman's joke is funny because it is a little cruel, and it is cruel because there's some truth to it (one of my pieces was damaged that way once - my friends all laughed). As a sculptor it is painful to admit this, but by all accounts, for most of history, painting has driven art. That’s why we discuss the death of painting, and (almost) never the death of sculpture. The harsh truth is, no one much cares if sculpture dies because sculpture is thought of as a kind of painting; a parasitic twin carved in stone.