This paper is a study of Skulptur-Sortier-Station (1997), a sculpture by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn (1957-), which was first realized for the third "Skulptur. Projekte in Münster," an international exhibition that takes place every ten years in Germany. Attending closely to the work's unique material qualities, the circumstances of its original realization, and the implications of its subsequent reiterations in other European cities, this paper argues that Skulptur-Sortier-Station proposes a new sculptural syntax by destabilizing received notions of the relation between object and site.

The work's site condition is such that it engages (in order to ultimately reject) the modernist model of sculpture as autonomous and nomadic, as well as the postmodernist model of sculpture as site-specific and context-bound. Repeatedly dismantled and reconstructed in a potentially ongoing series of locations, Skulptur-Sortier-Station is a precarious physical structure that inhabits and produces a precarious spatial condition. I argue that this precariousness is in itself a contemporary sculptural value for Hirschhorn and is related to theories of "non-place," a new paradigm of contemporary space as decentered and transient.

Through chapter-length studies of works by Isamu Noguchi (Chase Manhattan Plaza, 1956-64), Robert Smithson (Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport, 1966-67) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles (New York City sanitation system, 1977-80), this dissertation proposes a dialogic relationship between the historical emergence of site-engaged artworks and the “mega-project era” in U.S. urban policy, a surge of federally-funded infrastructure projects that dramatically reimagined and reshaped U.S. cities. Contemporary artworks are typically marginalized within the historical understanding of large-scale urbanist schemas, narrated as either decorative addenda to the cityscape or reactive counterproposals to planning projects. This dissertation argues that both these dominant art historical models have not gone far enough to examine art’s multimodal engagement with the materials, sites and processes of urbanism during the 1950s–1970s, a period in which urban infrastructure emerged as a new arena for advanced art practice and discourse.

The study thus presents a rejoinder to art historian Rosalind Krauss’ influential concept, as outlined in her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” that post-1960 sculpture began to share its logical structure with those of architecture and landscape, broadly-defined. By presenting a selective history of urbanism alongside analysis of exemplary artworks by Noguchi, Smithson and Ukeles, this dissertation grounds art’s “expanded field” in the representational systems and material output of urban planning and civil engineering, fields that were simultaneously undergoing systemic change related to federalist programs of urban reconstruction.

The dissertation asserts that well-known categories such as site-specific art, systems art, and Land art should be seen as various means of comprehending a historically-specific project of urban transformation. At the same time, urbanism sought new terms of engagement with art, as planners and architects contracted “artist consultants” on the means of producing the future of U.S. cities. And, finally, this embedded position within urbanism enabled art’s epistemological inquiry into the era’s infrastructure as a new “syntax of sites.”