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: She highlights artists like James Coleman and Marcel Broodthaers as pioneers who used technical supports (like slide projections) to establish a new kind of artistic "specificity." 📖 Summary of the Argument
In the landscape of 20th-century art criticism, few essays have shifted the tectonic plates of theory as decisively as Rosalind Krauss’s Published in 1999 in Critical Inquiry (Vol. 25, No. 2), this seminal text arrived at a moment of digital anxiety. Artists were abandoning traditional painting and sculpture for video, installation, and the internet, leading many to declare the “death of the medium.”
For Krauss, Ruscha’s medium is – a pure technical support for serial enumeration.
Under Clement Greenberg’s modernism, the “medium” was defined by its physical limits. Painting was flatness and pigment; sculpture was volume and gravity. The goal of modernist art was to purify the medium, stripping away anything that belonged to another art form (literature, theater, architecture). By the 1970s, however, this logic had exhausted itself. Minimalism and Conceptualism attacked the very idea of artistic purity, leading many critics to declare the death of the medium. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Krauss revitalizes the theories of German philosopher Walter Benjamin. She notes that when a technology becomes obsolete (losing its commercial value), it paradoxically gains a new layer of poetic and artistic potential. The medium is freed from the demands of capitalism, allowing artists to look at its mechanics with fresh, critical eyes. 2. Marcel Broodthaers and the Eagle
To this day, remains a cornerstone of contemporary art theory. It shapes how critics, curators, and scholars analyze work in an era of constant media upheaval. Krauss's central questions—"What is a medium?" and "How do artists create meaning through specific technical supports?"—are more relevant now than ever in a world of AI-generated art, digital photography, and NFTs.
Rosalind Krauss is a renowned art critic, theorist, and professor. Born in 1941, Krauss has spent her career writing about modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on photography and sculpture. She has taught at a number of institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles. Krauss has published numerous influential essays and books, including "The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Essays" and "A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Postmedium Condition." She has received numerous awards and honors for her contributions to art criticism and theory. : She highlights artists like James Coleman and
You might read “Reinventing the Medium” and wonder if it is merely an artifact of 1990s theory. On the contrary, its relevance has exploded.
Krauss rejects both. She argues that the medium is neither dead nor merely material. Instead, it must be as a technical support —a set of conventions, practices, and apparatuses that artists can reactivate.
Krauss uses the artist as her primary example. Coleman’s slide projections do not fit neatly into film, photography, or theater. By using a carousel projector synced to a soundtrack, Coleman “reinvented” a medium that operates in the gap between stillness and motion. Coleman’s technical support —the 35mm slide carousel—produces a unique aesthetic experience impossible in any other format. The goal of modernist art was to purify
Are you analyzing this text for a specific or studio art project ?
Why does one essay from 1999 still generate so much interest? Because the questions Krauss asked have become even more urgent in the 21st century. We live in an era of deepfakes, AI-generated imagery, and social media platforms that blur the lines between image, text, and video. The concept of the "medium" as a stable, physical category seems almost quaint. Yet Krauss's argument—that the medium must be reinvented , not abandoned—provides a powerful tool for analysis.
Rosalind Krauss’s "Reinventing the Medium" remains a vital text because it refuses to look at art history as a simple linear progression from painting to pixels. Instead, it challenges artists and critics to realize that meaning is only generated through resistance. Without boundaries, art becomes indistinguishable from the media-saturated landscape that surrounds it.