Sculpture and its index

                   

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970), volcanic basalt rock. (Photo: George Steinmetz).

        

                

Postmodernist sculpture appeals to the medium of photography as its documentary representative. In contrast to the received notions of sculpture as permanent statuary, some postmodern sculpture is grand scale and ephemeral; it is therefore largely reliant on documentation for its meaning and interpretation. In her essay Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America (1977), Rosalind Krauss contends that the index (the photographic medium) informs the work of many postmodern artists; “that whether they are conscious of it or not, many of them assimilate their work (in part if not wholly) to the logic of the index.”1 This is evident in site-specific postmodern sculpture, temporal and contingent works such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Christo’s Running Fence, which is dependent upon its photographic representation.2 These artists accepted the idea that their sculpture would be largely apprehended through the photographic referent.

Lance Pearce

    

1 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (Autumn 1977) 67.

2 Mary Bergstein, ‘Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture’, The Art Bulletin, 74:3, (Sep., 1992) 496.