The given text Leo Steinberg (b.1920) from Other Criteria explains how art has changed from being flat and revolving around a classic horizontal image, corresponding with the human posture to no longer being painted for a wall, instead it was art for itself. The flatbed picture plane was once horizontal as it was said they are more natural, harmonizing with an erect human posture. The natural element of this was said to ‘evoke sense data’, meaning that as an audience it would be recognisable and familiar, maybe even relatable as we can see our own form within the image. Even Pollock, an abstract expressionist followed this flatbed picture plane rule. The process of making the work on the floor was just a means to an end, because eventually he would sit the work up on the wall and let the paint take its natural course and drip down the canvas. Even the fact that the paintings were hung upright corresponds with this rule again. In this respect, Steinberg claimed that abstract expressionist artists were still just nature painters. Even artists such as Rothko and Willem de Kooning followed this rule. Steinberg claimed that the biggest change in art was Rauschenberg and Dubuffet. Their work no longer followed the flatbed picture plane rule, it still however hung on walls, but it didn’t correspond with the human form like previous work has. The process of how the painting was made became more important than the composition of the image. According to Steinberg, the tilt of the flatbed picture plane is just as expressive than the shift from nature to culture within subject matter.
In text two, Richard Serra (b.1939) from The Yale Lecture focuses mainly on the practice of sculpture. Similar to how Rauschenberg works, mentioned in the text above, Serra is also a very process-based artist to which the material and industrial quality of the work is more important than the aesthetic quality. Serra doesn’t produce work to be sat in someone’s house and admired, or to just be looked at by gallery goers, but work for everyone to view. He produced work so that it became part of the environment to which it was built in. Serra’s site-specific works cannot be shifted and moved to one place or another like many paintings can, they are ‘inseparable’ from the site, due to the scale, mass and even the social and political elements which was considered in the making of the work. Both Serra and Steinberg talk about the importance of moving forward with art and how it is viewed by the public.
http://www.theartstory.org/critic-steinberg-leo.htm
http://arthistoryunstuffed.com/robert-rauschenberg/