In sum, Reinventing the Medium captures a pivotal moment when photography shed its documentary skin and emerged as a versatile, self‑reflexive medium—an evolution that continues to shape contemporary visual culture.
Rosalind Krauss’s “Reinventing the Medium” argues that the medium is not a given but an achievement. An artist reinvents the medium by:
In doing so, the artist creates medium-specificity without modernism—a way for art to be formally intelligent and historically aware after the death of the traditional fine arts.
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.
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. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
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.
As mentioned, Coleman’s work uses a single slide projected over time with layered audio. Krauss argues that this medium creates a “suspended” temporality. Unlike cinema (24 frames per second), the slide projector allows for duration without narrative flow. The viewer is trapped in a perpetual present, which Coleman uses to explore political trauma (e.g., The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg).
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. In sum, Reinventing the Medium captures a pivotal
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.
Since I cannot provide the PDF, here are legitimate ways to read “Reinventing the Medium”:
Interlibrary loan – request a scan from your local public or university library. In doing so, the artist creates medium-specificity without
Purchase the book – Perpetual Inventory is available in paperback (MIT Press, 2010). Many academic libraries also have it.
Authorized repositories – Some scholars post pre-print versions on institutional websites (e.g., Academia.edu or ResearchGate), but always check copyright.
“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.
Once you locate the PDF, do not read it linearly. Krauss writes in a dense, crystalline style—every sentence carries weight. Follow this method: