Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf File

For researchers analyzing the PDF or text of "Reinventing the Medium," the essay can be synthesized into several core concepts: Definition Artistic Implication

: The most reliable way is through a university or public library's subscription to JSTOR, ProQuest, or the University of Chicago Press Journals (the publisher of Critical Inquiry ). You can typically search for the article by title or DOI (10.1086/448921).

Krauss anchors her theoretical arguments by referencing specific artists who embody her new model.

This refers to the physical, commercial technology itself—be it a television, a computer, a smartphone, or a camera. The apparatus is mass-produced, commercially driven, and designed for consumption. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

: 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.

"Reinventing the Medium" was not an isolated work but part of a broader intellectual project that has shaped art criticism for decades.

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. For researchers analyzing the PDF or text of

But by the post-war era, artists were ditching these rules. They were making installations, using lights, dirt, and performances. Did this mean the concept of "medium" was dead?

Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers is a cornerstone of Krauss’s text. Broodthaers famously created fictional museums and installations utilizing outdated printing techniques, slide projections, and ready-made objects. Krauss argues that Broodthaers used these obsolete tools to mimic and critique the bureaucratic systems of museums and mass media, effectively inventing a new medium out of the debris of the old. Photography and the Mechanical Medium

Coleman utilizes the slide-tape format—a synchronized system of projected photographic slides and recorded audio. Originally used for school presentations, corporate lectures, and medical training, this format was already becoming obsolete by the 1990s. In the mid-20th century

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The online availability of the essay has also facilitated its use in educational settings, allowing students and scholars to engage with Krauss's ideas in a more direct and accessible way. This, in turn, has helped to ensure the continued relevance and influence of Krauss's work in the field of art criticism and theory.

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.

Thus, reinventing the medium means —not collapsing all media into a gray goo of digital data.

Beyond the Flat Surface: Re-reading Rosalind Krauss and the Expanded Field of Contemporary Art