Book Review

Passages in Modern Sculpture

by Rosalind E. Krauss

     The fine arts in Western cultures had, for thousands of years, been conservative in form and content. Most art, especially in western Europe, was limited to themes of Christianity and judgments of quality were based largely on the mastery of technique. Things loosened up during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and occasionally some oddball like Hieronymus Bosch made something so different that no one could comprehend it. Then Modernism came along and everything went haywire. Rosalind E. Krauss, armed with a solid background in philosophy and art criticism, takes a stab at making sense out of the course that modern sculpture took in her early work called Passages in Modern Sculpture. Through the construction of her own theory, she hones the chaos of modernism into semi-coherent steps along a continuum progressing towards an unknown destination.

The foundation of Krauss’s theory is the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. On the principle of the transcendent I, meaning that an individual’s true nature is not only located subjectively inside their own consciousness but rather is a meeting ground between their own self-perception and the perceptions of others, she builds a critical theory around the idea that modern art has no inherent meaning. In other words, the meaning of art is created by the viewer as they perceive and interact with that art. Pre-modern concepts of symbolism or allegory no longer apply with the avant-garde art movement of the Modernism period.

She also approaches art through the mediums of time and space. Pre-modernist sculpture was about the perfection of physical form whether the work be a three-dimensional statue or a two-dimensional work set against a background relief while suggesting a third dimension. Also, pre-modern sculpture mostly appeared in media res, representing a point in time along a narrative structure, implying the existence of moments before and after that point, suggested to the viewer and not directly experienced. Modernist sculpture broke with these constructs of time and space to create sculpture requiring different frames of reference for interpretation.

The fun really begins when Krauss applies her theory to art objects. She begins with Rodin, then moves on to the Futurists who expose the core of their objects by penetrating their surfaces and the Constructivists who reveal the interior of their sculptures by displacing outer parts, making surfaces that only cover fragments of the interior, or even using transparent materials. The ubiquitous readymades of Marcel Duchamp are analyzed to show a disconnect between the artists’ subjectivity and the art object itself which no longer represents their subjective life. Brancusi eradicates the inner core of sculpture by mi minimalizing the constituent parts of the surface. The Surrealists transform everyday objects into nonsense to reveal hidden unconscious contents and so on.

Her analysis is engaging and logical up to this point. When she introduces her concept of theatricality into the critique, it begins to wear a little thin. She brings theater into the discussion to show how sculpture was used by modernists to break down the barrier between performers and audience, what Antonin Artaud called the destruction of the fourth wall. But this idea barely seems to fit with what she is saying considering that it is a stretch to redefine performers on stage as art objects moving among other art objects. What she is trying to do is introduce the concept of movement into the study and analysis of sculpture. While previously sculpture had been static and unmoving, modern artists introduced the element of movable parts on one hand, as in the case of the mobiles of George Segal, or art that alters in appearance as the viewer moves around it as in the work of Anthony Caro. But the connection she makes is weak and confusing. This is partly due to her attempt at describing non-representational shapes that have no signifiers to properly correspond to the form they hold in physical space. Her argument also suffers because she introduces a large number of works that she never analyzes past the initial mention in the text.

The writing picks up again after that as she moves into postmodernist movements like pop art, minimalism, abstract expressionism, and earthworks. What this all builds up to is the concept of decentralization in art, an idea that originated in Freud’s theory of the decentralization of the ego in modern psychology, and reached its full expression in postmodern concepts of the interplay of surfaces or the lack of inner meaning, a state where symbols no longer symbolize anything unless the receiver of the symbol assigns a meaning to it. Does this critique of artistic progression run parallel to the experience of humanity in the twentieth century or does art now inhabit a space of its own that is disconnected from reality and impossible to interpret? That discussion would take a whole other book to explore, but I am sure Krauss would continue to insist that any art can be interpreted if we choose to put the creative effort into making it mean something, no matter how bewildering it may become.

The verity of Passages in Modern Sculpture is open to debate. Whether the order that Rosalind Krauss explicates is there or whether it is a construction of her own devise that she imposes on the chaos is an open question. There is something quite arbitrary in how she forms her argument and chooses art objects to support it. But if we follow the theory correctly, that is the whole point. It is up to us to create meaning. It isn’t handed out or spoonfed to us the way ultimate religious truths are. It is more a matter of asking the right questions in the first place and on that note, this book is worthwhile for consideration.