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.
To better understand how this theory applies to specific art historical movements, I can provide further insights. If you are interested, please
Reinventing the Medium: Rosalind Krauss and the Post-Medium Condition rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
It provides a specific physical or conceptual resistance that forces the artist to innovate.
To understand Krauss’s argument, one must first understand what she was reacting against. For decades, twentieth-century art criticism was dominated by Clement Greenberg’s concept of . Greenberg argued that each art form should isolate and celebrate its unique, inherent physical properties—painting should focus on flatness, and sculpture should focus on three-dimensional mass. If you are looking to read the full
By the 1970s and 1980s, the explosion of installation art, conceptual art, performance, and video shattered these boundaries. Art entered what Krauss termed the .
By utilizing a sequence of still photographic slides accompanied by recorded audio, Coleman created a brand-new "medium" out of the gaps between film, photography, and theater. The friction between the still image and the moving timeline of the audio forced viewers to critically analyze how narrative and memory are constructed. The Ghost of Walter Benjamin If you are interested, please Reinventing the Medium:
In her later expansions of the essay (particularly in A Voyage on the North Sea ), Krauss refines the term "medium" into "technical support." She notes that contemporary artists often work with industrial or commercial bases—like cars (for Ed Ruscha), or advertising layouts—that are not traditional artistic mediums.
A significant portion of the essay traces the history of photography, particularly through the lens of early pioneers and later conceptualists. Krauss looks at how photography—originally dismissed as a mere mechanical copy—grew to challenge traditional aesthetics. In the post-media age, the mechanical or automated nature of photography becomes a tool for artists to explore new rules of representation. 3. The Medium as a Self-Imposed Constraint
Krauss doesn't just keep the argument in the abstract. She grounds it in a detailed analysis of the work of Irish artist James Coleman, to whom she devotes the final part of her essay.
