Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic, edited the seminal 1997 volume Reinventing the Medium: The Photographic Image in Contemporary Art. The book, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, gathers essays that explore how contemporary artists re‑contextualize photography, treating it less as a documentary tool and more as a conceptual medium.
Given the academic demand for this essay, it is understandable that many search for a "Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the Medium PDF." However, there are important legal and scholarly protocols to observe.
The Source: 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).
How to Obtain the PDF Legally:
Warning on "Free" PDFs: While you may find a scanned PDF on academic sharing sites like Academia.edu or Scribd, be aware of copyright. Critical Inquiry is published by the University of Chicago Press. Downloading unauthorized copies, while common, denies the publisher and the journal the revenue needed to support future scholarship. Furthermore, many free PDFs are OCR-scanned with errors (missing diagrams or corrupted footnotes), making them unreliable for professional citation.
Searching for "rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf" is an act of intellectual resistance. In a culture of scrolling and swiping, you are seeking a difficult, rewarding, 25-page argument that refuses to simplify art into lifestyle content.
Krauss offers no manifesto for cool digital tools. She offers something harder: a method. How do you look at a strange video installation and decide if it is lazy or revolutionary? You ask: What is its reinvented medium? What technical support does it activate? rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
The PDF is not just an article. It is a permission slip to think structurally about art. Find it, print it, and read it with a pencil. Your relationship with contemporary art will never be the same.
Further Reading (PDFs to find next):
Search tip: When looking for the PDF, use the exact citation: Krauss, Rosalind. “Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 289–312. Adding the volume and issue number often retrieves library-indexed PDFs via Google Scholar.
Rosalind Krauss’s "Reinventing the Medium" argues against the exhaustion of traditional art forms, proposing a "post-medium condition" where artists define new, internal rules for their work rather than adhering to traditional materials. Key to this theory is the concept of "technical support" and the reinvention of mediums, illustrated through artists like Marcel Broodthaers and James Coleman.
Krauss examines three artists who, each in their own way, reinvented a medium:
To understand Krauss’s 1999 essay, one must look back to her 1986 essay, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde.” There, she dismantled the myth of the Romantic genius. By the late 1990s, the art world was obsessed with “interactivity” and “dematerialization.” Critics argued that digital art had no medium—only code and screens. Rosalind Krauss, a leading art historian and critic,
Krauss saw this as a lazy fallacy. She believed that simply declaring the death of the medium was an act of theoretical bankruptcy. Instead, she proposed that the medium was not a physical substance (canvas, stone, bronze) but a recursive structure—a set of conventions, memories, and technical supports that an artist activates.
Her target was Clement Greenberg’s formalism. Greenberg argued that each medium should purify itself (painting should be only flatness and pigment). Krauss argued the opposite: The post-medium condition allows an artist to reinvent a medium from scratch for each project.
“Reinventing the Medium” became foundational for:
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.
In the landscape of 20th-century art theory, few concepts have caused as much productive friction as Rosalind Krauss’s notion of "reinventing the medium." Written at a time when the prevailing winds of Postmodernism—spearheaded by Krauss’s contemporaries like Douglas Crimp—were declaring the "death of the medium" and the triumph of hybridity, Krauss offered a counter-narrative. She argued that the medium was not dead, but rather undergoing a complex, paradoxical resurrection.
Ironically, searching for the "Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the Medium PDF" is a perfect example of her thesis. The PDF is a technical support. It is a specific format (Portable Document Format) with its own recursive rules: hyperlinks, searchability, fixed pagination, and the scroll wheel. Warning on "Free" PDFs: While you may find
When you open that PDF, you are not simply "reading an article." You are engaging in a circuit. The author sent a signal (the essay) through a channel (the academic journal, then the digital scanner, then your screen). You, the receiver, will decode it, highlight it, and possibly send it back out into the world via citation or conversation.
Krauss’s great gift was to show that art is not about freedom from constraints, but about the rigorous exploration of constraints. To reinvent the medium is to find the rule—and then break it beautifully. Whether on a video monitor, a charcoal drawing, or a computer screen, that recursive loop is where meaning lives.
For academic citation: Krauss, Rosalind. “Reinventing the Medium.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 2, 1999, pp. 289–312. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344239.
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
I can’t provide a direct PDF of Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Reinventing the Medium” (or any other copyrighted material), but I can offer a detailed, in-depth summary and critical analysis of its key arguments, structure, and significance within her broader work.