Reinventing The Medium Pdf 'link' — Rosalind Krauss
It retains a relationship to past forms of expression, acting as a counterweight to the disposable nature of commercial culture. Case Studies: Benjamin and Broodthaers
The ultimate "automation of the image" where the machine dictates style.
Why it matters today: Krauss’s thinking anticipates the fluidity of contemporary art, where digital practices, time-based media, and participatory projects resist neat classification. Her framework encourages critics and artists to attend to context—the exhibition format, technological affordances, and institutional economies—that shape how works are experienced and valued. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
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.
Krauss argues that Coleman successfully "reinvents the medium" by exploiting the unique structural gaps of the slide-tape format, such as: The split-second of darkness between slides. It retains a relationship to past forms of
When an artist uses an algorithm to generate an image, what is the medium? Is it photography? Is it coding?
The most famous (and most complex) argument in the essay involves Krauss’s adoption of the a concept borrowed from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Her framework encourages critics and artists to attend
By the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of Conceptual art, installation art, performance, and institutional critique shattered these boundaries. Art became "post-medium." Artists mixed materials indiscriminately, and the traditional definitions of painting and sculpture seemed obsolete.
In her 1999 essay originally published in Critical Inquiry , renowned art theorist Rosalind Krauss addresses a crisis in contemporary art: the "post-medium condition". For decades, the art world followed the formalist doctrine of Clement Greenberg, who argued that each art form must stay within its "pure" material boundaries—painting should be about flatness, and sculpture about three-dimensionality.