Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf _best_ -

The Knight’s Move: Rosalind Krauss and the Strategy of Reinventing the Medium

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.

2. William Kentridge (b. 1955) – Animated Drawing

Kentridge’s charcoal drawings, filmed, erased, redrawn, and re-filmed, produce a distinctive “stop-motion” animation. Krauss shows this is not traditional cel animation nor simple film. Its rules:

• Erasure as a positive act – the smudges and ghost images of previous drawings remain visible, creating a palimpsest.
• The studio as technical support – the camera, the light table, the artist’s hand, all become part of the work’s “apparatus.”
• A non-linear temporality – not forward-driven narrative but cyclical, obsessive return.

Kentridge’s medium, Krauss argues, is drawing that remembers its own process – a recursive loop of making and unmaking.

Contrast with Greenberg and Postmodernism

| 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) |

Why This Essay Matters Today

Why is this essay—written decades ago—still relevant? Because we are in the middle of another medium crisis: Digital Art and AI.

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

Applying Krauss’s logic, we shouldn't look for the "purity" of the digital medium. We should look for the automatism. AI works on automation (predicting the next pixel based on data). An artist "reinventing the medium" of AI would be one who disrupts that automation—exposing the dataset, glitching the output, or forcing the viewer to confront the "support" of the algorithm itself.

Conclusion: Why You Still Need This PDF

Searching for "rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf" is an act of intellectual resistance. In a culture of scrolling and swiping, you are seeking a difficult, rewarding, 25-page argument that refuses to simplify art into lifestyle content.

Krauss offers no manifesto for cool digital tools. She offers something harder: a method. How do you look at a strange video installation and decide if it is lazy or revolutionary? You ask: What is its reinvented medium? What technical support does it activate? rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

The PDF is not just an article. It is a permission slip to think structurally about art. Find it, print it, and read it with a pencil. Your relationship with contemporary art will never be the same.

Further Reading (PDFs to find next):

• Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (1993)
• Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (2010)
• Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (1971)

Search tip: When looking for the PDF, use the exact citation: Krauss, Rosalind. “Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 289–312. Adding the volume and issue number often retrieves library-indexed PDFs via Google Scholar.

Rosalind Krauss’s 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium" theorizes the transition from modernist medium-specificity to a "post-medium condition," where artistic practices are defined by "technical supports" rather than material limitations. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Krauss argues that technologically obsolete mediums can be redeemed and reinvented as new aesthetic possibilities, referencing artists like James Coleman and William Kentridge. Read the full text at The University of Chicago Press: Journals.

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

This document provides an overview and analysis of Rosalind Krauss's essay "Reinventing the Medium." The summary is as follows: 1) Rosalind Krauss: between modernism and post- medium

Rosalind Krauss’s 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium" defines the "post-medium condition" by arguing that artists must replace traditional material-based mediums with technical supports derived from obsolete technologies. The text highlights artists like James Coleman and William Kentridge who use these constraints to create a "differential specificity" in their work. The full text is available for download at Critical Inquiry.

Reinventing the Medium" (1999) Rosalind Krauss explores how photography shifted from an aesthetic object to a theoretical one, eventually leading to a "post-medium condition" where artists must invent their own specific "technical supports" The Knight’s Move: Rosalind Krauss and the Strategy

Below is a structured paper summary based on Krauss’s arguments. You can view the original text or related academic discussions on platforms like Semantic Scholar ResearchGate Paper: Rosalind Krauss and the Reinvention of the Medium I. The Obsolescence of Photography

Krauss begins by looking back at the 1960s, a period when photography converged with traditional art forms. Paradoxically, she argues that photography’s triumph as an art form occurred just as it was becoming commercially and technically obsolete due to the rise of digital technology. Theoretical Object:

Rather than being judged for its beauty, photography became a site for exploring concepts like the simulacrum (Baudrillard) and (Barthes). The End of Aura:

Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Krauss notes that mechanical reproduction destroyed traditional notions of artistic unity and authorship. II. From "Medium" to "Technical Support"

To move beyond the "outmoded" and "positivist" definition of a medium (which usually refers only to physical materials like canvas or oil paint), Krauss proposes the term "technical support" Definition:

A technical support is a specific set of rules or conventions an artist adopts to create meaning.

In cinema, the "technical support" might be the synchronized sound or the physical celluloid, which artists like Vertov or Marclay manipulate to reveal the nature of the art itself. III. The Post-Medium Condition

Krauss, Reinventing The Medium (Critical Inquiry 1999) - Scribd Erasure as a positive act – the smudges

Legal & Authorized Access Points

1. JSTOR (Subscription Required) : The essay appears in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter 1999), pp. 289-312. Most university library credentials grant access.
2. The University of Chicago Press: The publisher holds the copyright. You can purchase the article directly or access it via institutional login.
3. Academia.edu & ResearchGate: Krauss’s essay is frequently uploaded in preprint or scanned PDF form. While the legality is gray, many scholars share it under “fair use” for educational purposes. Search these platforms with the full title.

Summary: The Takeaway

Rosalind Krauss’s "Reinventing the Medium" is a call to move beyond nostalgia. It is a challenge to artists:

1. Don't just accept the defaults. If you use a camera, understand its history.
2. Acknowledge the ghosts. Art is always in conversation with what came before.
3. Use the support. The physical or technical substrate of your art (the screen, the code, the wall) is not just a container—it is the subject.

If you haven't read the full PDF yet, dive in. It is a difficult text, but it provides the vocabulary to understand why modern art looks the way it does—and how artists navigate a world where all the rules have already been broken.

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.

Key Case Studies in “Reinventing the Medium”

Krauss examines three artists who, each in their own way, reinvented a medium:

The Case Study: The "White Paintings"

In her essay, Krauss uses various examples, but one of the most powerful ways to understand her theory is through the lens of "monochrome" painting (artists like Malevich, Rauschenberg, or Ryman).

When an artist paints a canvas pure white, are they destroying painting? Krauss argues they are revealing the medium.

By removing the image (the picture of a landscape or a person), the artist forces the viewer to look at the support—the physical fabric, the texture of the paint, the wall behind it. They take the "automatic" part of painting (the canvas) and turn it into the subject itself.

This is the crux of "Reinventing the Medium." It is not about working within the rules of a medium; it is about dismantling the medium to find its hidden, structural truths.