Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf Guide

Krauss warns against the trendy, late-90s embrace of "mixed media" or installation art that simply uses whatever technology is available without critical thought. She argues that when art becomes entirely unmoored from a specific medium, it loses its capacity for self-critique. It risks becoming mere entertainment, mimicking the shallow commercialism of television and advertising. 2. The Automation of the Image

Since this is a seminal academic text, it is widely available through various educational platforms. You can typically find it via:

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.

Have you read Krauss’s essay? Do you agree that the concept of a "medium" is still relevant in the age of digital art? Let me know in the comments.

It is a complex, self-imposed structure or set of rules that an artist chooses to operate within. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

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.

: Photography occupies a central role in Krauss's argument. It is a hybrid form that never fit neatly into the modernist paradigm. By 1999, photography was also being declared "obsolete" with the rise of digital technologies. Krauss saw this moment of obsolescence not as an end, but as a paradoxically liberating starting point for artistic reinvention. Her essay is a "looking back" at the convergence of art and photography, but from a contemporary perspective that allows for a radical reassessment.

According to Krauss, a reinvented medium is defined by three core characteristics:

Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Krauss notes that mechanical reproduction destroyed traditional notions of artistic unity and authorship. II. From "Medium" to "Technical Support" Krauss warns against the trendy, late-90s embrace of

. 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.

They aren't just making "hybrids." They are using the conventions of one medium to critique or expose the conventions of another. They are conscious of the "ghosts" of painting, film, and theater, and they summon those ghosts to create something new.

Analyze how this essay connects to Krauss's earlier work on Provide a detailed summary of her critique of digital media

Serra’s early work involved “to roll, to crease, to fold.” Krauss uses Serra to show that a medium can be a list of actions applied to a material. In “Reinventing the Medium,” she reframes Serra’s lead-throwing as a recursive system: The act of throwing defines the sculpture, not the lead itself. Artists like or Jeff Wall (photographers who treat

If you are reading this for a class or a project, consider these questions:

It is neither pure photography, cinema, nor theater. By using a commercial, semi-obsolete technology, Coleman creates a unique "technical support" that dictates how time, memory, and narrative function in his art. Robert Whitman’s Mixed-Media Performances

For years, critics and artists alike declared the death of the "medium." The postmodern era of the 1970s and 80s witnessed the rise of conceptual art, installation, and video, which seemed to abandon the specialized, singular materials of painting and sculpture. This was seen as a liberation from the restrictive, Greenbergian view that art must solely explore its own material limitations (e.g., painting is only flat canvas).

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