Crucially, Krauss does not advocate for a conservative return to oil painting or marble sculpture. Instead, she argues that artists must the idea of a medium.
Krauss recognized that the traditional concept of the medium (oil on canvas, carved marble) was obsolete. However, she rejected the idea that the "medium" itself was dead. Instead, she argued that the medium must be from the ruins of postmodernism. Reinventing the Medium: The Core Arguments
To “reinvent” the medium today means to hack the technical support of our age: the social media feed, the search engine algorithm, the blockchain.
When an artist paints a canvas pure white, are they destroying painting? Krauss argues they are revealing the medium. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Rather than hiding the clunking mechanism of the projector, Coleman makes the structural limitations of the machine central to the viewer's experience.
For Krauss, a medium is not a material (e.g., “video”) but a set of conventions derived from a technical apparatus. She famously analyzes James Coleman’s slide projections and William Kentridge’s animated drawings . These artists don’t just use film or drawing—they build a new medium by establishing recursive rules (e.g., Kentridge’s erasure-and-redrawing process).
The enduring digital search for "Rosalind Krauss reinventing the medium pdf" reflects the text’s ongoing relevance in the digital age. Writing at the dawn of the internet explosion, Krauss accurately anticipated the anxieties of our current cultural moment. Crucially, Krauss does not advocate for a conservative
| Aspect | Greenberg’s Medium | Postmodern “Medium as Mix” | Krauss’s Reinvented Medium | |--------|--------------------|-----------------------------|-------------------------------| | Source | Physical properties (flatness, etc.) | No source; pure convention | Technical support + apparatus | | Goal | Purity, self-criticism | Play, irony, subversion | Recursive rule-following | | Temporality | Historical progress (teleology) | Eternal present (sampling) | Iterative, time-bound | | Example | Modernist painting | Video/installation mashup | Coleman’s slides, Kentridge’s drawings | | Failure mode | Kitsch, theater | Indifference, banality | Loss of recursion (becoming illustration) |
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Krauss borrows the term “post-medium condition” from philosopher Stanley Cavell. However, she clarifies that this condition does mean the end of media. Rather, it signals the breakdown of traditional, a priori media (e.g., painting, sculpture) and opens the possibility for artists to invent new, specific media on a case-by-case basis. However, she rejected the idea that the "medium"
If you are looking to read the full text, searching for "Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the Medium PDF" on academic search engines like JSTOR or Academia.edu will yield the original publication from Critical Inquiry . Many universities also hold this in their digital repositories.
The flattening of art into a singular, commercialized multi-media stream.
Drawing heavily on the theories of , Krauss suggests that a medium’s true aesthetic potential is often only realized when it becomes obsolete . When a technology (like analog photography or slide projectors) is no longer a primary tool for mass-market commodity production, it is "freed" from its utilitarian purpose. This freedom allows artists to look back and use these outmoded tools as a "technical support" for new creative rules and conventions. Examples of "Reinventions"