Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf May 2026

The essay originally appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Critical Inquiry (Vol. 25, No. 2, Winter 1999, pp. 289-312). It was later reprinted in Krauss’s essential collection, Perpetual Inventory (MIT Press, 2010).

By the 1990s, the art world was in a state of theoretical vertigo. With the rise of installation art, video art, and digital media, it seemed that anything could be art. Krauss found this laissez-faire approach intellectually bankrupt. In her view, the simple declaration that "anything goes" failed to explain why some works of art had lasting power while others felt like lazy pastiche. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

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. The essay originally appeared in the peer-reviewed journal

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). 289-312)

is her answer to this crisis. She argues that the medium is not dead; rather, we have been looking at it the wrong way. The medium is not a physical support (canvas, marble, clay). Instead, it is a technical support —a set of conventions, recursive rules, and material constraints that generate artistic meaning. 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.

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 . 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.

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. To understand why Krauss felt the medium needed reinvention, one must first understand what she was reacting against.