Like the earth art it championed, the Expanded Field’s particular brand of post-modernism was still very formalist however. Krauss was not looking forward towards a future beyond modernism, she was firing back over her shoulder, aiming to kill modernism. She was still trying to beat Greenberg on his own terms. Paradoxically her essay does not refute or debunk Greenberg, but instead her defense of minimalist and post-minimalist art extended the half-life of Grenberg's formalism. Starting with her opening ambit: her choice of Auguste Rodin's Balzac and The Gates of Hell as precedents for modernist sculpture. These two works put her at odds with her former mentor (one imagine he would have landed solidly on Constantin Brâncuşi's Endless Column), but the negative and theoretically abstract tone Krauss used to discuss Rodin's masterpieces Greenberg himself had made the recognized the coin of the realm  within the art world's loftiest precincts.

Love that notion of formalist half-life.
- bill 1-06-2015 2:53 pm [add a comment]