Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf Online

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.

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

Lacan argued that a letter always reaches its destination. He used the story of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” to suggest that meaning is not fixed but is generated by the structure of signifiers. Krauss adapts this to art. She claims that a medium works like a postal system: it establishes a circuit, a channel of communication that includes the possibility of noise, delay, return, and interception. By the 1970s, however, this logic had exhausted itself