In her seminal essay Sculpture in the Expanded field Rosalind Krauss theorises the dissolution of the Post-Renaissance monument in the negative ontology of postmodern sculpture. For Krauss, Sculpture is that which is not the landscape.
Sculpture is also that which is other than architecture.
The artist Robert Smithson offers a simpler theory in his opposition of site and non-site . Modernist sculpture occupies the physically empty, semiotically blank and ideologically neutral non-site of the gallery while postmodern work actually constitutes its site . Contemporary installation works extend beyond art s own objecthood into the space and the context of its presentation, encompassing thematic, architectural, social, political, historical, theoretical, critical and even market system concerns. Anne Rorimer notes that installation artists like Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodhaers and Lawerence Weiner, have played an important part in dispelling the notion of art s assured autonomy by pointing to its reliance on or involvement with its institutional circumstance . If the expansion of sculpture into site specific installations has deconstructed the institutional white cube of modern art, the construction of Bernard Tchumi s red cubes , his folies, at the Parc de la Vilette in Paris, articulate postmodernism s negative ontology on a architectural scale.