Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf

In her 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium," influential art critic Rosalind Krauss addresses what she calls the "post-medium condition"

Sophie Calle: Adopted the journalist’s report as a medium, using its neutral, distanced structure to explore deeply personal and emotional subjects. Why It Matters Today

The Key Concept: The Postal Principle

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. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

Krauss argues that this old definition of medium-specificity has collapsed, but she doesn't believe we should abandon the idea of a "medium" altogether. Instead, she suggests that artists can—and must—reinvent it. The Role of Obsolescence

Medium specificity is no longer about material purity but about the internal rules and "recursive structures" an artist builds within their chosen support. Essential Case Studies In her 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium," influential

Key Points

Under Clement Greenberg’s modernism, the “medium” was defined by its physical limits. Painting was flatness and pigment; sculpture was volume and gravity. The goal of modernist art was to purify the medium, stripping away anything that belonged to another art form (literature, theater, architecture). By the 1970s, however, this logic had exhausted itself. Minimalism and Conceptualism attacked the very idea of artistic purity, leading many critics to declare the death of the medium. Painting was flatness and pigment; sculpture was volume

2. William Kentridge (b. 1955) – Animated Drawing

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:

The Core Argument: The “Technical Support”

The single most important concept in “Reinventing the Medium” is the “technical support.”