No critic diagnosed this shift more acutely than Rosalind Krauss. Through her seminal essays, most notably "Reinventing the Medium" (1999) and her book A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition , Krauss formulated a brilliant theoretical framework to understand how art could retain its critical power after the death of traditional mediums.
At a time when digital technology threatened to erase the traditional boundaries of painting, sculpture, and photography, Krauss argued that the medium was not dead. Instead, it was being radically reinvented from within. The Historical Context: The Crisis of High Modernism
This is the crux of "reinventing": the artist does not abandon the medium; they restructure it. They acknowledge its conventions in order to open them up to self-critique.
—a "stone-age" cinematic process—to layer history and memory through physical erasure. Ed Ruscha: automobile rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Krauss acknowledges that the traditional, material-based definitions of mediums are gone. However, she rejects the idea that art can exist without any structural framework. She introduces the concept of the —a baseline structure or mechanism that an artist adopts and subjects to a specific set of rules or rules of transformation. 2. Photography and the Automation of Art
: Many art history departments host the PDF for syllabus use.
's focus on physical materials (like the flatness of canvas) toward "technical supports" that are discursive and historical. The Power of Obsolescence: Inspired by Walter Benjamin No critic diagnosed this shift more acutely than
The tension between the stillness of the photograph and the continuous movement of the audio narrative.
To explain this, Krauss breaks down the concept of the medium into a dynamic structure: The physical, material basis.
Following Clement Greenberg, Modernism (e.g., Abstract Expressionism) insisted on the purity of the medium—painting should only be painting (flatness), sculpture only sculpture. Instead, it was being radically reinvented from within
To illustrate reinvention, Krauss analyzes Irish artist James Coleman’s Projected Images (slide projections with voiceover). Coleman does not use “film” (traditional medium) or “photography” (also traditional). Instead, he creates a by combining:
To “reinvent” the medium today means to hack the technical support of our age: the social media feed, the search engine algorithm, the blockchain.
| 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) |
The text of is considered a landmark for several reasons: