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.

Krauss explicitly distinguishes her concept from digital “new media” theorists (e.g., Lev Manovich). For Manovich, new media are defined by computational properties (modularity, automation, variability). For Krauss, these are not artistic media because they lack internal, convention-based constraints.

A true artistic medium must have specificity—not technological specificity, but formal and operational specificity derived from an artist’s sustained exploration of a support.

Krauss borrows the term “post-medium condition” from philosopher Stanley Cavell. However, she clarifies that this condition does not mean the end of media. Rather, it signals the breakdown of traditional, a priori media (e.g., painting, sculpture) and opens the possibility for artists to invent new, specific media on a case-by-case basis.

“The post-medium condition does not imply the negation of the medium. On the contrary, it opens the way for the medium’s reinvention.”

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Rosalind Krauss's 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium" argues that artists in a "post-medium" era must redefine artistic boundaries by grounding practice in specific "technical supports" rather than traditional material mediums. Krauss contends that when media become obsolete, they can be reinvented, citing artists like James Coleman and William Kentridge who create new frameworks for critical engagement. Access the article through UChicago Journals The University of Chicago Press: Journals

Krauss, Reinventing The Medium (Critical Inquiry 1999) - Scribd

Reinventing the Medium" (1999) Rosalind Krauss explores how photography shifted from an aesthetic object to a theoretical one, eventually leading to a "post-medium condition" where artists must invent their own specific "technical supports"

Below is a structured paper summary based on Krauss’s arguments. You can view the original text or related academic discussions on platforms like Semantic Scholar ResearchGate Paper: Rosalind Krauss and the Reinvention of the Medium I. The Obsolescence of Photography

Krauss begins by looking back at the 1960s, a period when photography converged with traditional art forms. Paradoxically, she argues that photography’s triumph as an art form occurred just as it was becoming commercially and technically obsolete due to the rise of digital technology. Theoretical Object: A key term in Krauss’s argument is apparatus

Rather than being judged for its beauty, photography became a site for exploring concepts like the simulacrum (Baudrillard) and (Barthes). The End of Aura:

Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Krauss notes that mechanical reproduction destroyed traditional notions of artistic unity and authorship. II. From "Medium" to "Technical Support"

To move beyond the "outmoded" and "positivist" definition of a medium (which usually refers only to physical materials like canvas or oil paint), Krauss proposes the term "technical support" Definition:

A technical support is a specific set of rules or conventions an artist adopts to create meaning.

In cinema, the "technical support" might be the synchronized sound or the physical celluloid, which artists like Vertov or Marclay manipulate to reveal the nature of the art itself. III. The Post-Medium Condition

Krauss, Reinventing The Medium (Critical Inquiry 1999) - Scribd Krauss insists that a reinvented medium cannot be

| Greenberg (Old Medium) | Krauss (Reinvented Medium) | |------------------------|-----------------------------| | Medium = physical material (paint, canvas) | Medium = technical support (rules, apparatus, convention) | | Purity (eliminate everything extraneous to material) | Hybridity (combine supports in new, consistent ways) | | Medium is fixed, universal, a priori | Medium is invented, specific, a posteriori | | Progress through self-criticism | Progress through re-invention and recoding |

Krauss argues that Greenberg’s medium leads to a dead end: painting reduced to opticality and flatness. Reinvention, by contrast, allows artists to create new media for each new set of artistic problems.

| Theme | How It Appears in the Book | |-------|----------------------------| | Medium Specificity | Krauss revisits Clement Greenberg’s idea, arguing that photography now interrogates its own materiality—its surface, light, and mechanical processes—rather than merely representing reality. | | The “Post‑Photographic” | Essays discuss works that blur the line between image and object (e.g., installations, digital manipulations), showing how artists treat the photograph as a site for theory and experience. | | Historical Dialogue | Contributors trace links from early modernist photographers (e.g., László Moholy‑Nagyi) to late‑20th‑century practices, emphasizing continuity and rupture. | | Institutional Critique | The book examines how museums and galleries frame photographic works, questioning the authority of exhibition spaces in defining what counts as “art.” | | Technology & Materiality | Discussions of digital printing, Xerox, and video highlight how new technologies expand the photographic vocabulary. |

| 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) |

Krauss replaces the Greenbergian “material base” with the concept of the technical support. A technical support is not a physical substance (canvas, bronze) but a set of operational rules and conventions that produce artistic meaning. Examples include:

An artist reinvents a medium by rediscovering or inventing a technical support and then exploring its unique formal and conceptual possibilities.