Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf top -

Rosalind Krauss and Reinventing the Medium (PDF)

Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic, edited the seminal 1997 volume Reinventing the Medium: The Photographic Image in Contemporary Art. 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.

3. Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) – The Photographic Book

Ruscha’s small, deadpan artist’s books (e.g., Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip) reject both fine-art photography and commercial publishing. Their medium’s rules:

Seriality without hierarchy – each image has equal weight.
The grid of the book’s page as a structuring device, not a metaphor.
Boredom as a productive aesthetic – the repetitive, banal subject matter forces attention to the interval between images.

For Krauss, Ruscha’s medium is photography as indexical record, stripped of both artiness and documentary function – a pure technical support for serial enumeration.

Post Title: Unpacking Rosalind Krauss’s “Reinventing the Medium”: Beyond the Post-Medium Condition

Introduction 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.

Key Arguments

Against the “Post-Medium Condition” Krauss directly challenges the influence of critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg believed modernism meant each medium purifying itself (painting becoming flatness). Krauss argues that after minimalism and conceptual art, the medium didn’t disappear. Instead, it was reinvented as a technical support—a prosthesis for the artist.
The Medium as a Technical Support 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).
Recursiveness and Difference 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.

Why This Matters Today Krauss’s essay is essential reading for anyone working with digital media, installation, or post-internet art. It warns us that without a medium (a structure of repetition and difference), art collapses into “the narcissistic, the formless, or the purely informational.” For example, an Instagram slideshow or a VR experience becomes art only when the artist invents or repurposes a technical logic that structures the viewer’s experience over time. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

Discussion Questions

Can we apply Krauss’s idea of a “technical support” to a contemporary digital platform like TikTok or AI-generated art? What would be the recursive rules?
Is Krauss’s position too restrictive for artists who intentionally work across radically different materials?
How does her concept of the medium differ from Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”?

Further Reading (No PDF, but check your library or JSTOR)

Krauss, Rosalind. “Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter 1999), pp. 289–305.
Also collected in: Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (MIT Press, 2010).

Tip for finding the essay legally: If you are a student, check your university library’s online database (JSTOR, Project MUSE, or MIT Press Direct). Many public libraries also offer free access to academic journals through interlibrary loan or digital archives.

The Context: The Death of the Medium

To understand the "reinvention," one must first understand the demise. In the mid-20th century, the influential critic Clement Greenberg argued that the definition of Modernism was the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself. For Greenberg, "purity" was the goal: painting should strip away sculpture, literature, and theater to focus entirely on the flatness of the canvas and the optical experience.

However, by the 1960s and 70s, artists began to reject this purism. They embraced the "expanded field," blending performance, video, and text. The orthodox medium seemed to collapse. Many critics proclaimed that the medium was an obsolete concept—a relic of a bourgeois obsession with categorization.

4. Case Study: James Coleman’s Slide Projection

To illustrate reinvention, Krauss analyzes Irish artist James Coleman’s Projected Images (slide projections with voiceover). Coleman does not use “film” (traditional medium) or “photography” (also traditional). Instead, he creates a new medium by combining:

Still photographic slides
Synchronized voiceover
Temporal delay between image and sound
The architectural space of projection

This hybrid becomes a medium because it establishes its own internal logic—a set of constraints and affordances that the artist explores systematically. It is not multimedia collage; it is a newly invented, self-consistent artistic support.

Conclusion: Why It Matters

Krauss’s theory of reinventing the medium saved the concept of the medium from the dustbin of history. She transformed it from a rigid container of purity into a fluid space of strategic resistance. Rosalind Krauss and Reinventing the Medium (PDF) Rosalind

For Krauss, to reinvent the medium is to refuse the amnesia of the "post-medium" age. It is an insistence that art requires a set of constraints—a set of rules to push against. Whether it is the grid of Sol LeWitt or the "deadpan" photography of the Dusseldorf School, the reinvented medium proves that boundaries are not just barriers; they are the very ground upon which art builds its meaning.

In her 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium," influential art critic Rosalind Krauss addresses what she calls the "post-medium condition"

—a state where traditional distinctions between artistic media like painting and sculpture have collapsed. Instead of viewing this collapse as a total loss, argues that artists can "reinvent" the medium by adopting a "technical support"

—often an obsolete technology or a "low" cultural form—and treating it as a recursive system for creating new aesthetic rules. Key Arguments and Concepts The Post-Medium Condition:

critiques the "deadening generality" of postmodernism, where "art-at-large" or generic installation art has replaced specific craft. Technical Support vs. Material Medium: She moves away from Clement Greenberg

's focus on physical materials (like the flatness of canvas) toward "technical supports" that are discursive and historical. The Power of Obsolescence: Inspired by Walter Benjamin

, she suggests that when a technology becomes obsolete (like 35mm film or slide projectors), it is freed from its commercial utility, allowing artists to rediscover its utopian and aesthetic potential. Differential Specificity:

Medium specificity is no longer about material purity but about the internal rules and "recursive structures" an artist builds within their chosen support. Essential Case Studies Seriality without hierarchy – each image has equal weight

Krauss highlights several artists who successfully "invent" their own mediums: James Coleman: slide-tape projector

(an outmoded advertising tool) to explore the gaps between still and moving images. William Kentridge: animated charcoal drawings

—a "stone-age" cinematic process—to layer history and memory through physical erasure. Ed Ruscha: automobile

and the commercial photo-book to redefine the conditions of viewing and landscape. Marcel Broodthaers:

itself as a technical support, turning institutional structures into a medium for critique. case studies mentioned in the essay, or do you need help locating a PDF version for your research?

Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, by Joanna Slotkin

Core Thesis: Medium as “Recursive Rule-Set”

Krauss draws on two key theoretical sources:

Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the “infrathin” – the smallest possible difference between two seemingly identical things (e.g., the warmth of a seat just vacated). For Krauss, this becomes a model for how media operate at the threshold of perception.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games” – specifically, the idea that meaning arises from rule-governed activities, not from reference to an external reality.

From these, she argues that a reinvented medium is:

“a set of conventions that are derived from a technical support, but that are not reducible to that support, and that can be repeated across different works, generating a tradition.”

Crucially, this medium is recursive: it generates its own internal logic and criteria for success/failure, independent of broader artistic trends or market demands.