Rosalind Krauss’s essay "Reinventing the Medium" reframes how we think about artistic media, challenging the simple idea that each art form has a single, stable "medium" (painting, sculpture, photography). Instead, Krauss argues that media are historically and institutionally produced: what counts as a medium changes through artistic practice, critical discourse, and museum and market systems. This shift moves the conversation from essentialist definitions toward relations, techniques, and conditions that produce meaning.
Theoretical Interventions – Krauss and contributors invoke semiotics, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to argue that the photograph now functions as a site of meaning rather than a transparent window. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
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. Rosalind Krauss — Reinventing the Medium: A Short
She argues that in the postmodern era, the "medium" often survives as a ghost. Artists like James Coleman or Jeff Wall (photographers who treat photos like cinema, or cinema like painting) are reinventing the medium by acknowledging that the old boundaries don't exist, yet still grounding their work in a specific technical apparatus. Artists like James Coleman or Jeff Wall (photographers
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.
James Coleman: Used the slide-tape projector (an outmoded advertising tool) to create complex, layered narratives that exist between the still and the moving image.