The work, Perzmeters, Pavilions, Decoys, 1978, by Mary Miss, is of course a sculpture or, more precisely, an earthwork.
Over the last ten years rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture: narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.
The critical operations that have accompanied postwar American art have largely worked in the service of this manipulation. In the hands of this criticism categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything.
No sooner had minimal sculpture appeared on the horizon of the aesthetic experience of the 1960s, than criticism began to construct a paternity for this work, a set of constructivist fathers who could legitimize and thereby authenticate the strangeness of these objects. Plastic? inert geometries?

Factory production?-none of this was really strange, as the ghosts of Gabo and Tatlin and Lissitzky could becalled in to testify. It did not matter that constructivist forms were intended as visual proof of the immutable logic and coherence of universal geometries, while their seeming counterparts in minimalism were demonstrably contingent-denoting a universe held together not by Mind but by guy wires, or glue, or the accidents of gravity.
As the 1960s began to lengthen into the 1970s and "sculpture" began to be piles of thread waste on the floor, or sawed redwood timbers rolled into the gallery, or tons of earth excavated from the desert, or stockades of logs surrounded by firepits, the word sculpture became harder to pronounce-but not really that much harder.
Postmodernism occurs at a specific moment in the recent history of art. It is a historical event with a determinant structure. The conditions of possibility-that brought about the shift into postmodernism, as they also address the cultural determinants of the opposition through which a given field is structured.