Historically, sculpture has been an influence more than it has been influenced, though that changed with Modernism, when sculptors began to turn to other media, primarily painting, for inspiration. From Picasso, with the collage and Cubism, and Marcel Duchamp, with the readymade, to a host of color field and Abstract Expressionists, 20th century abstract sculpture has absorbed, and reinterpreted, a host of outside ideas. Whether one talks of an “expanded field,” as Rosalind Krauss would have it, or of “the world as sculpture,” after James T. Hall, the materials, techniques, and approaches now accepted as sculpture can be dizzying. And that’s all for the good, because the infusion of ideas from craft, industrial design, painting, theater design, and architecture has only made sculpture more interesting, if harder to pin down. …see the entire article in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
