Rosalind Krauss dwells upon the evolution of sculpture as well as its three-dimensional form. She claims that this medium has become more flexible as compared to its traditional forms because nowadays a lot of things can be named sculpture. The major works that mark the transition from the classical to the modern period that she cites are Gates of Hell and the statue of Balzac by Rodin. Both sculptures abandoned the pedestal, on which traditional sculptures commonly resided making the sculpture lose its ‘site’. Gradually, monuments were becoming more and more abstract and ‘nomadic’, which put an end to the traditional period.
In the 1950s, sculpture became a ‘combination of exclusions’, which implied that it turned from statement to negation. Varying between ‘not landscape and ‘not architecture’, sculpture used both to define its own meaning (e.g. Robert Morris’s Green Gallery Installation).
In its current state, sculpture, according to Krauss, can be anything at all including a whole variety of media such as books, mirrors, photos, etc. This makes it rather challenging to give a definition of this modern form of art. However, the major benefit the present-day sculpture provides to artists is freedom of choice as it rejects all the previously accepted boundaries and canons.