Rosalind Krauss Reinventing The Medium Pdf Direct

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.

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.

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 feedback. 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.

The essay posits that every genuine artistic medium is a form of recursive rule-structure. The artist does not invent a new medium from scratch. Rather, they find a dormant technical support (like a postcard, a phonograph, or a video monitor) and "reinvent" it by uncovering its internal, forgotten logic.

A key term in Krauss’s argument is apparatus (borrowed from Jean-Louis Baudry and other film theorists). An apparatus includes: rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf

Krauss insists that a reinvented medium cannot be reduced to any single element of the apparatus. Instead, it emerges from their interplay – and each new artist working in that medium must re-negotiate the entire apparatus.

You might read “Reinventing the Medium” and wonder if it is merely an artifact of 1990s theory. On the contrary, its relevance has exploded.

In the age of generative AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, Sora) and NFTs, the question of medium specificity has returned with a vengeance. When an AI generates an image from a text prompt, what is the medium? Is it the algorithm? The dataset? The GPU? Krauss’s framework is eerily prescient.

To “reinvent” the medium today means to hack the technical support of our age: the social media feed, the search engine algorithm, the blockchain. The most famous (and most complex) argument in

Krauss explicitly distinguishes her concept from digital “new media” theorists (e.g., Lev Manovich). For Manovich, new media are defined by computational properties (modularity, automation, variability). For Krauss, these are not artistic media because they lack internal, convention-based constraints.

A true artistic medium must have specificity—not technological specificity, but formal and operational specificity derived from an artist’s sustained exploration of a support.

Ruscha’s small, deadpan artist’s books (e.g., Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip) reject both fine-art photography and commercial publishing. Their medium’s rules:

For Krauss, Ruscha’s medium is photography as indexical record, stripped of both artiness and documentary function – a pure technical support for serial enumeration. Krauss insists that a reinvented medium cannot be

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

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.

“Reinventing the Medium” 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” has been enormously influential, but also contested:

Krauss herself addressed some of these in later essays, particularly on the “post-medium condition” and the work of artists like Stan Douglas and Pierre Huyghe.