Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf Free

Rosalind Krauss’s "Reinventing the Medium" argues against the exhaustion of traditional art forms, proposing a "post-medium condition" where artists define new, internal rules for their work rather than adhering to traditional materials. Key to this theory is the concept of "technical support" and the reinvention of mediums, illustrated through artists like Marcel Broodthaers and James Coleman.

—often an obsolete technology or a "low" cultural form—and treating it as a recursive system for creating new aesthetic rules. Key Arguments and Concepts The Post-Medium Condition: rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

Critics have noted that Krauss’s model works best for artists who produce a coherent body of work around a single support (e.g., Nauman, Coleman, William Kentridge). It is less applicable to eclectic or purely discursive practices. Drawing on Walter Benjamin

| 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 | a priori | Medium is invented

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 .

They aren't just making "hybrids." They are using the conventions of one medium to critique or expose the conventions of another. They are conscious of the "ghosts" of painting, film, and theater, and they summon those ghosts to create something new.