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"
Krauss highlights several artists who successfully "invent" their own mediums: James Coleman: slide-tape projector rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
This is the crux of "reinventing": the artist does not abandon the medium; they restructure it. They acknowledge its conventions in order to open them up to self-critique. Reinventing the Medium" (1999) Rosalind Krauss explores how
Beyond the Frame: Decoding Rosalind Krauss’s "Reinventing the Medium" While this sounds liberating, Krauss argues it leads
Krauss rejects two dominant responses to this crisis:
“Reinventing the Medium” has been enormously influential, but also contested:
In her landmark 1999 essay “Reinventing the Medium,” Rosalind Krauss responds to a crisis in contemporary art: the idea that we live in a “post-medium condition,” where artists can use any material or technology freely. While this sounds liberating, Krauss argues it leads to a loss of critical rigor. She offers a powerful defense of the medium —not as a traditional category (like oil painting or bronze sculpture), but as a set of technical conventions and recursive rules that generate meaning.