Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf -

A key term in Krauss’s argument is apparatus (borrowed from Jean-Louis Baudry and other film theorists). An apparatus includes:

Krauss insists that a reinvented medium cannot be reduced to any single element of the apparatus. Instead, it emerges from their interplay – and each new artist working in that medium must re-negotiate the entire apparatus.

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.

Krauss borrows a term from psychology and surrealism: Automatism. In art, she uses it to describe the "default settings" of a medium. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

Think of painting. The default support is the canvas. The default tool is the brush. An artist who doesn't question these things is operating on "automatic pilot." They are just making another painting because that’s what painters do.

For Krauss, the crisis of modern art occurred when artists could no longer blindly rely on these conventions. The old supports (the canvas, the pedestal) became hollow. If art was to survive, it couldn't just abandon the idea of a medium—it had to reinvent it.

If you have typed "rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf" into Google, you have likely encountered a wall of academic paywalls (JSTOR, ProQuest) or broken links on university servers. Here is the legitimate landscape: A key term in Krauss’s argument is apparatus

“Reinventing the Medium” has been enormously influential, but also contested:

Krauss herself addressed some of these in later essays, particularly on the “post-medium condition” and the work of artists like Stan Douglas and Pierre Huyghe.

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: Krauss insists that a reinvented medium cannot be

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

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

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.

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.