Given the academic demand for this essay, it is understandable that many search for a "Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the Medium PDF." However, there are important legal and scholarly protocols to observe.
The essay is also compiled in Krauss’s influential book, Perpetual Inventory (MIT Press), which expands on these themes across various contemporary artists.
We currently live in a hyper-accelerated version of the post-medium condition. Software programs can instantly mimic the texture of oil paint, the grain of 35mm film, or the dimensions of architectural spaces. In this seamless digital soup, the traditional material definitions of art are entirely neutralized.
was strictly about three-dimensional space and weight.
In the late 1990s, art historian tackled this identity crisis head-on in her seminal essay, "Reinventing the Medium." If you’ve ever downloaded the PDF hoping for a quick definition, you likely found a dense, theoretical thick forest. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
is her answer to this crisis. She argues that the medium is not dead; rather, we have been looking at it the wrong way. The medium is not a physical support (canvas, marble, clay). Instead, it is a technical support —a set of conventions, recursive rules, and material constraints that generate artistic meaning.
One of the most crucial distinctions Krauss makes is between the "physical support" of an artwork—the canvas, the paper, the stone—and what she calls the . For Krauss, the former is dead matter; the latter is the living, operative structure that gives an artwork its logic. The technical support is the set of conventions, tools, and automatic processes that an artist adopts and manipulates. It is a "technical apparatus" or a "recursive structure" that allows a work to be coherent.
Krauss directly challenges the influence of critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg believed modernism meant each medium purifying itself (painting becoming flatness). Krauss argues that after minimalism and conceptual art, the medium didn’t disappear. Instead, it was reinvented as a technical support—a prosthesis for the artist.
For Krauss, a medium is not a material (e.g., “video”) but a set of conventions derived from a technical apparatus. She famously analyzes James Coleman’s slide projections and William Kentridge’s animated drawings . These artists don’t just use film or drawing—they build a new medium by establishing recursive rules (e.g., Kentridge’s erasure-and-redrawing process). Given the academic demand for this essay, it
Krauss argues that Coleman does not simply use this technology as a neutral vehicle for content. Instead, he treats it as a "technical support." By exposing the internal mechanics, constraints, and structural gaps of the slide-tape apparatus, Coleman elevates it to the status of a medium. He accomplishes this by developing what Krauss calls "automatisms"—a term borrowed from Stanley Cavell, referring to a set of rules or formal possibilities inherent to a specific technology that an artist can explore to generate meaning. Photography and the Archive
The third and most crucial path deals with the . Building again on Benjamin, Krauss argues that a condition of obsolescence—when a technology is no longer "state of the art"—is precisely what allows artists to reinvent it.
To “reinvent” the medium today means to hack the technical support of our age: the social media feed, the search engine algorithm, the blockchain.
Krauss highlights how Coleman uses the "low-tech" slide projector to create complex narratives, forcing a "recursive" examination of the photographic medium. Software programs can instantly mimic the texture of
However, by the 1960s and 70s, artists began to reject this purism. They embraced the "expanded field," blending performance, video, and text. The orthodox medium seemed to collapse. Many critics proclaimed that the medium was an obsolete concept—a relic of a bourgeois obsession with categorization.
However, in , Krauss observes that this abandonment led to what she terms a "deadening generality"—a homogenization of art where everything becomes a variation of the same, empty, "post-medium" conceptual gesture. The Core Argument: Reinvention vs. Specification
Utilizing the newspaper and the photographic document, Calle reinvents the medium of narrative and documentation.
Krauss, a foundational figure of October magazine and a former student of Clement Greenberg, uses this text to mount a defense of the "medium" itself—not as a rigid, material constraint, but as a crucial, self-regulating structure necessary for artistic meaning.
