When traditional mediums became obsolete or co-opted by mass media, avant-garde artists did not abandon the concept of a medium. Instead, they adopted unexpected, often obsolete technologies and treated them as a new ground for artistic rules.
reducible to pure material properties (negating modernism).
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.
Krauss uses the example of early video art. When artists like Richard Serra or Joan Jonas first used video, they did not just broadcast content; they critiqued the television monitor itself. They used tape delays, feedback loops, and vertical roll distortions to turn the commercial technical apparatus of TV into a distinct artistic medium. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Krauss illustrates this theory brilliantly through the work of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, particularly his installation Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles . Broodthaers took the medium of the "museum"—an institution traditionally seen as a container for art—and treated it as an artistic medium itself.
Krauss does not advocate a return to Greenbergian purity. Instead, she proposes a "post-medium" condition—a new era where artists deal with the memory of a medium, using obsolete techniques to create new possibilities. 3. The Role of the Obsolete
An artist reinvents a medium by rediscovering or inventing a technical support and then exploring its unique formal and conceptual possibilities. When traditional mediums became obsolete or co-opted by
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.
Does "reinventing the medium" still apply to , or has the medium disappeared entirely?
Rosalind Krauss's 1999 essay "Reinventing the Medium" argues that artists can counter the "deadening generality" of postmodernism by engaging in "redemptive obsolescence," utilizing technologically outdated mediums as new "technical supports". By embracing "differential specificity," artists like James Coleman and William Kentridge redefine artistic mediums through recursive, rule-based structures rather than traditional material purity. Read the full article at Critical Inquiry . Reinventing the Medium | Critical Inquiry: Vol 25, No 2 By the 1970s, however, this logic had exhausted itself
Krauss also looks back at Ed Ruscha’s artist books from the 1960s, such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations . Ruscha did not treat the camera as a traditional photographic medium. Instead, his medium was the conceptual framework of the American highway, car culture, and deadpan documentary formatting. The car and the road trip became the structural apparatus through which the art was generated. The Threat of "Intermediacy" and Visual Culture
The post-medium is defined by self-examination and redefinition, not by a final, fixed state.