Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf 🏆

Once you locate the PDF, do not read it linearly. Krauss writes in a dense, crystalline style—every sentence carries weight. Follow this method:

The most famous (and most complex) argument in the essay involves Krauss’s adoption of the “postal principle,” a concept borrowed from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Lacan argued that a letter always reaches its destination. He used the story of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” to suggest that meaning is not fixed but is generated by the structure of signifiers. Krauss adapts this to art. She claims that a medium works like a postal system: it establishes a circuit, a channel of communication that includes the possibility of noise, delay, return, and interception.

For example, consider the medium of video art. It is not simply "electronics" or "magnetic tape." According to Krauss, the medium of video is defined by feedback. The closed-circuit loop—the ability to project the self onto a screen in real time—creates a specific psychological and aesthetic condition. Artists like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci didn't just use video; they reinvented the medium by exploring the recursive loop between performer and monitor.

The essay posits that every genuine artistic medium is a form of recursive rule-structure. The artist does not invent a new medium from scratch. Rather, they find a dormant technical support (like a postcard, a phonograph, or a video monitor) and "reinvent" it by uncovering its internal, forgotten logic.

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 new medium by combining:

This hybrid becomes a medium because it establishes its own internal logic—a set of constraints and affordances that the artist explores systematically. It is not multimedia collage; it is a newly invented, self-consistent artistic support. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic, edited the seminal 1997 volume Reinventing the Medium: The Photographic Image in Contemporary Art. The book, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, gathers essays that explore how contemporary artists re‑contextualize photography, treating it less as a documentary tool and more as a conceptual medium.

In her later expansions of the essay (particularly in A Voyage on the North Sea), Krauss refines the term "medium" into "technical support." She notes that contemporary artists often work with industrial or commercial bases—like cars (for Ed Ruscha), or advertising layouts—that are not traditional artistic mediums.

By shifting the terminology to "technical support," Krauss moves away from the spiritual connotations of "medium" (implying a pure essence) and toward a more grounded, structural understanding. The medium is no longer about purity; it is about a set of technical conditions and rules that the artist adopts as a platform for invention.

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. Once you locate the PDF, do not read it linearly

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.

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Rosalind Krauss's 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium" argues that artists can counter the "deadening generality" of postmodernism by engaging in "redemptive obsolescence," utilizing technologically outdated mediums as new "technical supports". By embracing "differential specificity," artists like James Coleman and William Kentridge redefine artistic mediums through recursive, rule-based structures rather than traditional material purity. Read the full article at Critical Inquiry. Reinventing the Medium | Critical Inquiry: Vol 25, No 2

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 hybrid becomes a medium because it establishes

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 essay "Reinventing the Medium" reframes how we think about artistic media, challenging the simple idea that each art form has a single, stable "medium" (painting, sculpture, photography). Instead, Krauss argues that media are historically and institutionally produced: what counts as a medium changes through artistic practice, critical discourse, and museum and market systems. This shift moves the conversation from essentialist definitions toward relations, techniques, and conditions that produce meaning.

Krauss highlights several key moves. First, she insists that medium is not a self-evident given but a contested field—artists and critics repeatedly “reinvent” media by exposing their conventions and limitations. Second, she maps how modernism attempted to purify media (the idea that painting should emphasize flatness, for example), and how postwar practices disrupted those purities through hybrid and anti-medium strategies. Third, she connects medium to institutional frameworks: museums, galleries, and critics help stabilize what a medium is by deciding how works are shown, talked about, and sold.

The essay’s most generative contribution is its emphasis on medium as a problem rather than a category. Rather than asking “Is this painting?” we ask: what networks—material, technological, economic, discursive—make this object legible as a painting? This approach opens analysis to interdisciplinary practices (video, installation, conceptual art) and to media that are procedural or relational rather than object-based.

Why it matters today: Krauss’s thinking anticipates the fluidity of contemporary art, where digital practices, time-based media, and participatory projects resist neat classification. Her framework encourages critics and artists to attend to context—the exhibition format, technological affordances, and institutional economies—that shape how works are experienced and valued.

Takeaways for readers and creators:

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