Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf !!hot!!

Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic, edited the seminal 1997 volume . 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 makes a fascinating distinction between a medium and a genre. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

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. Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic,

Rosalind Krauss’s essay "Reinventing the Medium" reframes how we think about artistic media, challenging the simple idea that each art form has a single, stable "medium" (painting, sculpture, photography). Instead, Krauss argues that media are historically and institutionally produced: what counts as a medium changes through artistic practice, critical discourse, and museum and market systems. This shift moves the conversation from essentialist definitions toward relations, techniques, and conditions that produce meaning. In the landscape of 20th-century art theory, few

To illustrate reinvention, Krauss analyzes Irish artist James Coleman’s Projected Images (slide projections with voiceover). Coleman does not use “film” (traditional medium) or “photography” (also traditional). Instead, he creates a by combining:

When an artist paints a canvas pure white, are they destroying painting? Krauss argues they are revealing the medium.