Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf __hot__ Jun 2026

By working within the rigid constraints of the slide-tape system, Coleman achieves a depth of psychological and historical resonance that free-form installation art cannot match. He creates a new "medium" out of a discarded commercial tool. The Role of Obsolescence

With the dawn of digital imaging, this physical connection was severed into binary code. Krauss feared that the total flexibility of digital media would erase the productive resistance that physical mediums offer. Reinventing the medium, therefore, often involves artists turning to obsolete or outdated technologies (like celluloid film, vinyl records, or slide projectors) precisely because their physical limitations force a deeper structural engagement. 5. Why Scholars Search for the PDF

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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: rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

In doing so, the artist creates —a way for art to be formally intelligent and historically aware after the death of the traditional fine arts.

Artists must invent rules for new technologies rather than just using them as tools.

Searching for 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. By working within the rigid constraints of the

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 .

In her landmark 1999 essay “Reinventing the Medium,” Rosalind Krauss responds to a crisis in contemporary art: the idea that we live in a “post-medium condition,” where artists can use any material or technology freely. While this sounds liberating, Krauss argues it leads to a loss of critical rigor. She offers a powerful defense of the medium —not as a traditional category (like oil painting or bronze sculpture), but as a set of technical conventions and recursive rules that generate meaning.

– Krauss and contributors invoke semiotics, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to argue that the photograph now functions as a site of meaning rather than a transparent window. Krauss feared that the total flexibility of digital

The late 20th century witnessed a profound crisis in the world of art criticism and practice. For decades, the dominant understanding of modern art relied on "medium specificity"—the idea that each art form should isolate and explore its own unique physical properties. However, the explosion of installation art, conceptualism, video art, and digital technologies in the 1960s and 1970s shattered these traditional boundaries.

Krauss borrows from the film theorist Raymond Bellour and the structuralist Marcelin Pleynet. She argues that a medium is not a material but an apparatus that supports aesthetic convention. For example:

– Perpetual Inventory is available in paperback (MIT Press, 2010). Many academic libraries also have it.

Case Studies in Reinvention: James Coleman and Robert Whitman