Pdf | Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium

| 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) |

In the landscape of 20th-century art theory, few concepts have caused as much productive friction as Rosalind Krauss’s notion of "reinventing the medium." Written at a time when the prevailing winds of Postmodernism—spearheaded by Krauss’s contemporaries like Douglas Crimp—were declaring the "death of the medium" and the triumph of hybridity, Krauss offered a counter-narrative. She argued that the medium was not dead, but rather undergoing a complex, paradoxical resurrection.

By anchoring his work in the specific rules of this chosen apparatus, Coleman achieved the same depth of self-reflexive critique that modern painters once achieved through flatness. 4. Photography, Film, and the Digital Threat

While many celebrated this pluralism as a liberation from rigid Modernist rules, Krauss saw a hidden danger. She argued that when art abandons the concept of a medium entirely, it risks losing its critical edge, dissolving into the generic aesthetics of mass media, consumer culture, and pure spectacle. What Does "Reinventing the Medium" Mean?

This document provides an overview and analysis of Rosalind Krauss's essay "Reinventing the Medium." The summary is as follows: 1) Scribd rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

During the mid-20th century, American art criticism was dominated by Clement Greenberg. Greenberg’s theory of Modernism dictated that each artistic discipline must purge itself of effects borrowed from other mediums. For example:

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Krauss heavily references cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, particularly his ideas regarding the "optical unconscious" and the impact of mechanical reproduction. She notes that a medium's true artistic potential is often only realized when it is on the verge of obsolescence—just as it is being replaced by a newer, faster technology. Why the "Reinventing the Medium" PDF is Highly Searched

To understand why Krauss felt the medium needed reinvention, one must first understand what she was reacting against. | Aspect | Greenberg’s Medium | Postmodern “Medium

Krauss doesn't suggest returning to oil on canvas. Instead, she argues that artists must find a new "technical support"

had to abandon three-dimensional illusionism (which belonged to sculpture) and narrative (which belonged to literature). It had to focus purely on its own inherent traits: flatness, the shape of the support, and the properties of pigment.

. Krauss argues that for art to be meaningful, it must work within a set of constraints—it must have "rules" that the artist can follow or break.

: However, starting in the 1960s, artists began to deliberately challenge and dismantle this idea. Conceptual art and other contemporary practices "jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work". This experimentation led Krauss to define a "post-medium condition"—the abandonment of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the primary source of artistic significance. For Krauss, this "spells the end of serious art" if not critically confronted. What Does "Reinventing the Medium" Mean

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.

Krauss, Reinventing The Medium (Critical Inquiry 1999) - Scribd

When an artist uses an algorithm to generate an image, what is the medium? Is it photography? Is it coding?