Star Wars ModernThe natural environment of man has yet to be built.

The reason Clement Greenberg was inconsistent on the subject of sculpture is because in constructing his formalist theories he had conceptually painted himself into a corner. He insisted that the ideas in Modernist Painting were never intended to be prescriptive, but he had successfully mapped a generation worth of artistic production, starting with Frank Stella’s black painting (which he evidently didn’t much like), right up through to the minimalist (who he down right disliked), and dribbling out among the earth artists (those guys were totally formalists – see PMD 2/3). That is no small achievement, even accounting for the mixed results (in Greenberg’s opinion). His rejection of minimalism wasn’t arbitrary - he clearly hoped to extend his influence for another decade or two.
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Just as artists had “entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist,” some time in the late sixties and early seventies, so too had Rosalind Krauss. her Klein group diagram elegantly signaled two things: that she was orienting her thought by means of the “undecidable” mix of intellectual disciplines that was just beginning to coalesce at the time; but more importantly, the diagram was a visual rebuttal to the modernist theoretical framework that had dominated the New York art world for decades. Like the cartoonist Thomas Nast lampooning Boss Tweed, Krauss constructed a visual tool that her constituents could easily understand, but Krauss’s target was the modernist critic Clement Greenberg. Like Tweed, Greenberg might have yelped, “Let’s stop them damned pictures, I don’t care so much what the papers write about—my constituents can’t read—but damn it, they can see pictures.” In all probability however, Greenberg may have never understood that his most important constituents were artists, or how effective Krauss’s diagram would turn out to be in undoing his legacy.
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