Rosalind Krauss’s 1999 essay, "Reinventing the Medium," is a foundational text for understanding contemporary art. In this piece, Krauss explores how the traditional definition of a "medium" (like painting or sculpture) has collapsed and how artists can find new ways to create specific, meaningful work in a "post-medium" age. 🎨 Key Concepts
The Post-Medium Condition: Krauss argues that traditional artistic mediums have been "outmoded" by technology and mass media.
The Problem of "Apparatus": She discusses how photography and film transitioned from artistic tools to mere "appliances," losing their unique aesthetic power.
Reinvention: Instead of abandoning the idea of a medium, Krauss suggests artists must "reinvent" it by creating their own internal sets of rules and structures.
Case Studies: She highlights artists like James Coleman and Marcel Broodthaers as pioneers who used technical supports (like slide projections) to establish a new kind of artistic "specificity." 📖 Summary of the Argument
Krauss critiques the way globalization and the "culture industry" have flattened art into a generic experience. She believes that for art to remain critical and deep, it needs a "technical support"—a physical or conceptual framework that dictates how the work functions. By looking back at "obsolete" technologies, artists can find the friction necessary to resist the slickness of modern digital media. 🔗 How to Find the PDF
Since this is a seminal academic text, it is widely available through various educational platforms. You can typically find it via:
JSTOR: Often titled under "Reinventing the Medium" or found within the journal Critical Inquiry.
University Repositories: Many art history departments host the PDF for syllabus use.
Google Scholar: Searching "Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the Medium 1999 PDF" will usually yield direct links to academic uploads.
Books: It is also a lead essay in her book, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. 💡 Discussion Starters rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
If you are reading this for a class or a project, consider these questions:
Does "reinventing the medium" still apply to digital art and NFTs, or has the medium disappeared entirely?
How does Krauss’s view of obsolescence change the way we look at "retro" technology (like vinyl or film)?
Can an artist truly create their own "rules" without the backing of a traditional discipline? To help you get the most out of this text,
Explain the difference between a "medium" and a "technical support"?
Help you summarize a specific section for an essay or presentation?
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:
Rather than being judged for its beauty, photography became a site for exploring concepts like the simulacrum (Baudrillard) and (Barthes). The End of Aura: Rosalind Krauss’s 1999 essay, "Reinventing the Medium," is
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
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
In "Reinventing the Medium" (1999), Rosalind Krauss critiques the "post-medium condition," advocating for a return to "technical support" or specific artistic conventions over the generic, mixed-media approach of contemporary art. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, she argues for the "redemptive obsolescence" of mediums, highlighting artists like James Coleman and William Kentridge who redefine their work through specific, self-imposed rules. Read the full text at Semantic Scholar. Rosalind Krauss: between modernism and post- medium
In the pantheon of late 20th-century art criticism, few names loom as large—or provoke as much rigorous debate—as Rosalind Krauss. A co-founder of the seminal journal October, Krauss has spent decades dismantling the formalist orthodoxies of Clement Greenberg while simultaneously carving a distinct path through post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of medium specificity. For students, scholars, and artists grappling with the transition from modernism to postmodernism, one essay stands as a crucial, albeit notoriously dense, milestone: “Reinventing the Medium” (1999).
Searching for the "Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the Medium PDF" is often the first step for a graduate student preparing for a comprehensive exam or a researcher tracing the evolution of digital art theory. However, finding a legal, accessible PDF is only half the battle. The other half is understanding what Krauss means by “reinventing” a concept that many critics had declared dead. This article serves as a guide to the essay’s arguments, its historical necessity, and the ethical considerations of accessing the text. The PDF Search: Where to Find “Reinventing the
Why is this essay—written decades ago—still relevant? Because we are in the middle of another medium crisis: Digital Art and AI.
When an artist uses an algorithm to generate an image, what is the medium? Is it photography? Is it coding?
Applying Krauss’s logic, we shouldn't look for the "purity" of the digital medium. We should look for the automatism. AI works on automation (predicting the next pixel based on data). An artist "reinventing the medium" of AI would be one who disrupts that automation—exposing the dataset, glitching the output, or forcing the viewer to confront the "support" of the algorithm itself.
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.
Lacan argued that a letter always reaches its destination. He used the story of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” to suggest that meaning is not fixed but is generated by the structure of signifiers. Krauss adapts this to art. She claims that a medium works like a postal system: it establishes a circuit, a channel of communication that includes the possibility of noise, delay, return, and interception.
For example, consider the medium of video art. It is not simply "electronics" or "magnetic tape." According to Krauss, the medium of video is defined by feedback. The closed-circuit loop—the ability to project the self onto a screen in real time—creates a specific psychological and aesthetic condition. Artists like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci didn't just use video; they reinvented the medium by exploring the recursive loop between performer and monitor.
The essay posits that every genuine artistic medium is a form of recursive rule-structure. The artist does not invent a new medium from scratch. Rather, they find a dormant technical support (like a postcard, a phonograph, or a video monitor) and "reinvent" it by uncovering its internal, forgotten logic.
In an era of AI-generated images, NFTs, and post-Internet art, “Reinventing the Medium” offers a vital toolkit. It asks us not to abandon the question “What is this art’s medium?” but to answer it differently: not by naming a material (oil on canvas, digital file) but by describing the recursive operations that give the work its internal coherence and difference.
For Krauss, the medium is not a prison but a game – one whose rules are made up as we go along, but without which there is no play at all.
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: