Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf Today

Krauss positions her argument as a direct but nuanced response to Clement Greenberg. She is considered a lifelong critic of his, yet still haunted by his notion of the medium. Her key revision is to redefine what gives a medium its "specificity."

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In her landmark 1999 essay “Reinventing the Medium,” Rosalind Krauss responds to a crisis in contemporary art: the idea that we live in a “post-medium condition,” where artists can use any material or technology freely. While this sounds liberating, Krauss argues it leads to a loss of critical rigor. She offers a powerful defense of the medium —not as a traditional category (like oil painting or bronze sculpture), but as a set of technical conventions and recursive rules that generate meaning.

Krauss highlights several artists who successfully "invent" their own mediums: James Coleman: slide-tape projector rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

In the landscape of contemporary art theory, few figures have been as influential—or as provocative—as Rosalind Krauss. A co-founder of the prestigious journal October , Krauss spent decades defining the parameters of postmodernism, structuralism, and post-minimalism. However, at the turn of the 21st century, she enacted a surprising pivot, moving away from the "deadening generality" of postmodernism to advocate for a renewed understanding of the artistic medium.

A true medium, in Krauss’s sense, generates meaning through internal difference and repetition. It’s not about expressing an idea through any means available, but about constraining yourself to a set of operations that become the content itself. This is what separates “art” from mere illustration or spectacle.

The slide projector inherently relies on a gap—the dark moment of silence and blackness between one slide dropping and the next appearing. Coleman emphasizes this rupture, contrasting the stillness of the photograph with the continuous flow of the audio narrative. Krauss positions her argument as a direct but

The Historical Trajectory: From Greenbergian Purity to the Post-Medium Condition

To appreciate “Reinventing the Medium,” one must first understand the state of art theory it was reacting against.

While many critics celebrated this liberation, Rosalind Krauss viewed it with a degree of skepticism. She argued that the total abandonment of the medium did not result in absolute freedom. Instead, it left art vulnerable to the pervasive, neutralizing forces of global capitalism and commercial mass media. Without a "medium," art risked losing its capacity to critique the world or mean anything at all. Core Arguments of "Reinventing the Medium" The keyword includes "pdf", so the article should

: She highlights artists like James Coleman and Marcel Broodthaers as pioneers who used technical supports (like slide projections) to establish a new kind of artistic "specificity." 📖 Summary of the Argument

This article will serve as a comprehensive guide to Krauss's essay, providing a detailed summary of its key arguments, exploring its theoretical underpinnings, and, crucially, offering guidance on how to access and engage with the PDF of this seminal text.

Under Clement Greenberg’s modernism, the “medium” was defined by its physical limits. Painting was flatness and pigment; sculpture was volume and gravity. The goal of modernist art was to purify the medium, stripping away anything that belonged to another art form (literature, theater, architecture). By the 1970s, however, this logic had exhausted itself. Minimalism and Conceptualism attacked the very idea of artistic purity, leading many critics to declare the death of the medium.

Krauss does not advocate a return to Greenbergian purity. Instead, she proposes a "post-medium" condition—a new era where artists deal with the memory of a medium, using obsolete techniques to create new possibilities. 3. The Role of the Obsolete