Portfolio Ten: Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Prompt: Do Chinese rocks as defined by Zhan Wang "fit" into Krauss' argument about the modern and the postmodern?

In "Sculpture and the Expanded Field" Rosalind Krauss argues that 'modern' sculpture (that is, sculpture that is produced under the conditions of Western modernity) abstracted the sculptural form from its architectural or scenic environment.  What Krauss calls the 'monumental' aspect of sculpture was a pre-modernity ideal that figured the sculpture as supplementary to its environment, performing an ideological function that would modify or commemorate its site and it's (the site's) function.  Modern sculpture changed this by allowing the sculpture to function and signify on its own terms, by its own terms, and for its own terms.  As radical as this shift was, modernism still demanded a 'purity' of mediums and figured the artist as a specialist in a given medium.  

     Some time in the 1960s, according to Krauss, the 'field' of sculpture expanded drastically.  Sculpture was but one term in a complex of relations between sculpture, architecture, and landscape.  All these things have specific relationship to one another because the way our culture sees and defines sculpture in terms of what it is not.  Thus 'not-landscape' and 'not architecture' can signify 'sculpture' just as 'sculpture' can signify 'not landscape' and 'not architecture.'  Because "sculpture" is only intelligible in terms of these binaries, our historical period how "allows" for sculptures to be produced which situate themselves in complex relationship with categories like 'landscape,' 'architecture' as well as what Krauss calls, 'site construction,' 'marked sites' and 'axiomatic structures.'  Krauss calls this historical period (1968 onward) 'postmodern.'  However, I sense a timidity here in Kruass' writing.  She seems to wish there were another, less controversial term she could use other than 'postmodern.'  Perhaps she feels a pull between history and theory that is largely passed over in her essay.  Or maybe she isn't entirely sure herself whether the postmodernism of sculpture is so easily relatable to other kinds of postmodernism as the shared term implies.  She points to a modernist bias in contemporary art historical praxis that might resist her account of sculpture's history, so it may be that the timidity lies more in a sense of conflict between herself and her peers, rather than a conflict  between ideas internal to the text.  Though I sense that there is something more going on here.

     I do think that there is a 'fit' for Zhan Wang's sculptures and Krauss' notion of the postmodern.  Though I think that Wang's art pushes Krauss' framework to its limits and that ultimately, the stress calls for a new, or expanded framework.  The problem is that Kruass' argument is explicitly bound to western culture and history.  She does note, in passing, that non western cultures have an very different and interesting relationship to sculpture in that 'landscape' and 'architecture' are conceived of very differently.  Thus, the binary which defines sculpture as the point at which 'not-architecture' and 'not-landscape' meet does not work in, say, a Chinese context.     

         The Chinese scholar's rock, according to Zhan, "satisfied people's desire to return to Nature by offering them stone fragments from Nature" (qtd. in Wu Hung, 133).  Thus, Chinese 'rockery' is related to landscape.  However, as John Hay's article shows, chinese rocks have a close relationship with sculpture in that they were considered in one way or another art objects.  The word 'painterly' comes up several times in the historical texts, and they were sometimes c

arved and modified to achieve certain effects.  As the translation of jia  shan shi, "fake mountain rocks," shows, the rocks had a certain monumental quality, in that they were intended to directly reference mountains for the purpose of bringing a piece of actual nature to a landscaped garden.  Chinese rocks can thus be thought of as somewhere between landscape and modern sculpture.

     The above comparisons work out rather awkwardly because of the inherently western terms applied to a Chinese context.  As Krauss says, the 'field' of Chinese sculpture is simply a different field than our own.  Yet, I think Krauss' argument works out better as we think of Zhan's work in a postmodern context.  Beijing's rapid growth of urban infrastructure has brought western aesthetics into a Chinese environment.  Zhan sees the relationship between Chinese and Western aesthetics as an uneasy one for which an effective solution has yet to be found.  His metallic rocks, based on the forms of actual chinese rocks, takes the Chinese scholar's rock, a found object, and turns it into a postmodern sculpture.  The form of the chinese rock represents an authentic, old, Chinese culture.  The metal represents the new, amalgam culture of urban Beijing.  Thus, the chinese rocks shift from sculpture to architecture.  However, they hold on to the modern, monumental aspect of the chinese rock because rather than self referential, they function directly with the urban landscape of Beijing.  They are intended to, in a way, anneal the rift between an authentic Chinese culture and a borrowed Western one, still in the uncertainties of construction.

     Using Kruass' 'complex,' Zhan's rocks might be said to be between the categories of architecture and landscape, because of the landscape function the original Chinese rocks performed.  The rocks create a space as well as modify one.  The garden environment of the Chinese rock (representing authentic Chinese culture) is laid over the present environment of urban Beijing (representing a culture unsure of how to represent itself).  

Portfolio Nine [Under Construction]

O Portfolio Nine, like so much else in this uncertain world, your presentness is an impossibility....

Portfolion 8: The pleasure of the gaze

     Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" critiques representations of gender in the cinema with a pointed use of psychoanalysis. Her main argument is that the cinema offers scopophilic pleasure which is ultimately narcissistic. On the one hand the spectator gains a (sexual) pleasure from the images seen, on the other hand he identifies with certain images. These two modes of looking is divided along gender lines. The (male) protagonist structures film. What the camera shows or does not show us is always in significant relation to that which the protagonist sees or does not see. He has a life of his own, so to speak, and the spectator is invited to identify with him. The gaze of the spectator is therefore gendered male because of this

 identification. The woman is figured as an object of the gaze and does not direct the spectator's perception in the authoritative way in which the male protagonist does. As an object she gives scopophilic pleasure, but as an autonomous person, her very presence in the image causes a castration anxiety in the spectator due to her lack of penis. This is the case because the cinematic experience closely simulates the Lacanian psychosexual stage of the Imaginary win which the subjectivity of the spectator's ego is developed and regulated by the play of scopophilic pleasure and identification with the figures represented on the screen. Thus, in order to counter the castration threat the woman poses, cinema employs a range of techniques to deny the woman a gaze and subvert her autonomy and identity as a character in the story.

     In his book, The Double Screen, Wu Hung describes the "Twelve Beauties" screens owned by Prince Yongzheng in the 18th century with a perspective very much like Mulvey's.  As in the image to the right, the women are situate in their own, private

 spaces, and "the illusory space behind each woman entices the viewer to peep through layers of gates and windows into her private domain" (Wu, 219).  In the painting at the right, the hand seems to gesture upwards, toward the face, inviting the viewer to deny any subjective power the woman's gaze might suggest, and instead consider her an object intended to give scopophilic pleasure.  The calligraphy in the background, written by Yangzheng himself, positions the prince in the role of primary viewer (the paintings were commissioned by the prince, for the prince) as well as a co creator of the image.  The calligraphy acts as a stand in for the prince and his presence in the woman's private quarters conveys a sense of his ownership over the space and the figure as well.   

     Wu does not use the words "castration anxiety" in any of its forms, and does not even say that the women represented had the capacity for threatening the viewer in any significant sense.  Yet, his arguments are all centered towards the ways in which the autonomy of female's image was denied, how the figures were carefully crafted to have a certain seductive power, and yet remain wholly objectified.  Part of the difference in approach between Mulvey and Wu may just be the difference between western cinema and Chinese painting.  The former has a sense of verisimilitude written into its very practice, while in the latter, realist representation was sideline to other concerns.  What these paintings show, for Wu, is the way in which Yangzheng displayed his mastery over the other which, for the Manchu rulers, constituted the entirety of subjects over which they ruled.  Such mastery "fulfilled not only a private fantasy [for Yangzheng] but also a desire to exercise power over a defeated culture and nation" (Wu, 221).