| 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 |
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.
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Krauss describes this maneuver as a "knight’s move." Just as a knight in chess moves in an L-shape, bypassing the linear path of other pieces, the artist bypasses the traditional definitions of the medium. By treating the museum as a medium, Broodthaers exposed the medium’s conventions—its systems of display, its rhetoric of authority—while simultaneously using those very conventions to critique the institution. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
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.
Reinventing the Medium: Rosalind Krauss and the Post-Medium Condition
One of the most crucial distinctions Krauss makes is between the "physical support" of an artwork—the canvas, the paper, the stone—and what she calls the . For Krauss, the former is dead matter; the latter is the living, operative structure that gives an artwork its logic. The technical support is the set of conventions, tools, and automatic processes that an artist adopts and manipulates. It is a "technical apparatus" or a "recursive structure" that allows a work to be coherent. | Greenberg (Old Medium) | Krauss (Reinvented Medium)
Contrast her views with other theorists of the post-medium condition, like or Peter Weibel Share public link
Rather than hiding the clunking mechanism of the projector, Coleman makes the structural limitations of the machine central to the viewer's experience.
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. This link or copies made by others cannot be deleted
The sustained interest in finding a digital copy of this essay stems from its profound predictive power. Written before the smartphone, social media, and generative AI, Krauss’s text accurately anticipated the challenges contemporary creators face. Modern Challenge Krauss's 1999 Perspective
[Commercial Slide-Tape Projector] │ ▼ (Adopted by the Artist) [Exploration of Constraints] ──► (Discontinuity, Narration, Stillness vs. Motion) │ ▼ (Result) [Reinvented Medium / Aesthetic Significance]
For Krauss, to reinvent the medium is to refuse the amnesia of the "post-medium" age. It is an insistence that art requires a set of constraints—a set of rules to push against. Whether it is the grid of Sol LeWitt or the "deadpan" photography of the Dusseldorf School, the reinvented medium proves that boundaries are not just barriers; they are the very ground upon which art builds its meaning.