John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

negative terms to their positives (‘landscape’ and ‘architecture’) as a set of
binary pairs (Figure 27). As well as these five categories Krauss identified three
new positions: ‘site construction’ (the conjunction of ‘landscape’ and
‘architecture’), ‘marked sites’ (the conjunction of ‘landscape’ and ‘nonlandscape’)
and ‘axiomatic structures’ (the conjunction of ‘architecture’ and
‘non-architecture’).
Figure 27: ‘Klein group’ model from ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (Krauss,
1979)
This method is related to the semiotic square. This was introduced by the
structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas as a means of analysing paired
concepts more fully. The semiotic square is intended to map the logical
conjunctions and disjunctions relating key features in a text. Starting with a
binary opposition the semiotic square is capable of generating possibilities for
relationships between categories beyond the ‘either/or’ of binary logic. Krauss’s
expanded field is a relationship of categories and their negatives to expand the
definition of what sculpture can be. When this essay was first published in 1979
Krauss sought to apply this method to the critical discourse of fine art to the
types of artworks that had been produced in the 1960s and 1970s (for example
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