Vitamin 3-D

This latest offering in the Phaidon ‘Vitamin’ compendiums includes all forms of sculpture and installation, except for film and video installations. Even before Rosalind Krauss’s landmark 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, the distinction between sculpture and its environment had begun to dissolve. Today, artists demolish the classical definition of sculpture – ‘not architecture and not landscape’ – in such works as Jorge Pardo’s houses, Mike Nelson’s labyrinthine interiors and Fischli and Weiss’s garden plots. And if in the years leading up to Minimalism, sculpture absorbed its pedestal, it has now spread across the floor, hung from the rafters and even swallowed the whole building. As visually pleasing as the others in the series, Vitamin 3-D comes in a lovely pea-green.