Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf Access

: Utilizes stop-frame animation and the physical process of charcoal drawing/erasure (the palimpsest effect) as his unique technical support.

Her key move is to replace the old definition of a medium (a physical material like paint or stone) with a new one: Borrowing from the film theory of Stanley Cavell and the phenomenological tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Krauss defines a medium not by its substance but by the automated, repeatable, technical apparatus that produces a specific type of aesthetic experience.

To counter this, she proposes that artists must "reinvent" the medium, not by returning to traditional materials, but by establishing a technical support University of Warwick Key Arguments and Themes Photography as a Theoretical Object:

To make her case, Krauss analyzes three then-contemporary artists who, in her view, successfully reinvented their mediums:

Krauss, writing in the late 20th century, recognized that this paradigm had collapsed. The rise of Conceptual Art, Installation Art, and Performance Art in the 1960s and 70s signaled a rejection of material purity. Artists were using text, video, performance, and ephemera. To the orthodox Greenbergian, this looked like the "death of art."

She writes that in the post-medium age, artists do not simply accept the given properties of a form. Instead, they "reinvent" the medium by acknowledging its obsolescence or its compromised state and working through that compromise.