Leo Steinberg’s classic Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (1972), discusses the sudden and unexpected shift in the way art was perceived and created during the 1950s. Influenced by the flatbed printing press, Steinberg correlates the pictorial surface of art with the “human posture”; he comments on the way cultural, social and political situations mould art. The changing mentalities forced a change in the way art is conceived; Steinberg explores the conception of the “picture as representing a world, some sort of worldspace”. Steinberg focuses on the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet who have distanced from the previous “vertical fields” and transitioned into “opaque flatbed horizontals” thus altering the subject matter of art to emphasize culture over nature. This new orientation resulted in the modification of both the physicality and definition of art. Like Steinberg, Richard Serra (from the Yale lecture 1939) also comments on the changing orientation by referring to the way traditional means of creating sculptures have been replaced by new technology and industry. As a result, the concept of site-specificity has altered; “a new behavioural and perceptual orientation to a site demands a new critical adjustment to one’s experience of the place. Site-specific works primarily engender dialogue with the surroundings.” (pg. 23-33)

Charles Harrison, C, and Wood, P. (1999) Art in Theory, 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell