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 carved 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).
