Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf ✔
Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic, edited the seminal 1997 volume . The book, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, gathers essays that explore how contemporary artists re‑contextualize photography, treating it less as a documentary tool and more as a conceptual medium.
Krauss argues that this old definition of medium-specificity has collapsed, but she doesn't believe we should abandon the idea of a "medium" altogether. Instead, she suggests that artists can—and must—reinvent it. The Role of Obsolescence
Analyze how this essay connects to Krauss's earlier work on Provide a detailed summary of her critique of digital media rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
She argues that in the postmodern era, the "medium" often survives as a ghost. Artists like or Jeff Wall (photographers who treat photos like cinema, or cinema like painting) are reinventing the medium by acknowledging that the old boundaries don't exist, yet still grounding their work in a specific technical apparatus.
Krauss's post-medium condition is, in many ways, a direct response to the crisis that Greenberg's own logic created. By pushing the idea of medium specificity to its extreme—to the monochrome canvas and the readymade—Greenberg's followers had painted themselves into a corner. Krauss's essay is a way out: a "looking back," as she puts it, at the road that led to this impasse, in order to find a new path forward. Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic,
When traditional mediums became obsolete or co-opted by mass media, avant-garde artists did not abandon the concept of a medium. Instead, they adopted unexpected, often obsolete technologies and treated them as a new ground for artistic rules.
In cinema, the "technical support" might be the synchronized sound or the physical celluloid, which artists like Vertov or Marclay manipulate to reveal the nature of the art itself. III. The Post-Medium Condition Krauss's post-medium condition is, in many ways, a
Krauss notes that early photography and film were once celebrated for their indexical relationship to reality—the fact that light physically bounced off an object and left a chemical trace on a negative.
By shifting the terminology to "technical support," Krauss moves away from the spiritual connotations of "medium" (implying a pure essence) and toward a more grounded, structural understanding. The medium is no longer about purity; it is about a set of technical conditions and rules that the artist adopts as a platform for invention.
