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 —a set of conventions, memories, and technical supports that an artist activates.
To understand the "reinvention," one must first understand the demise. In the mid-20th century, the influential critic Clement Greenberg argued that the definition of Modernism was the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself. For Greenberg, "purity" was the goal: painting should strip away sculpture, literature, and theater to focus entirely on the flatness of the canvas and the optical experience. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Kentridge erases and redraws charcoal figures on a single sheet of paper, filming each alteration. Krauss argues that Kentridge reinvents the medium of animation by refusing cel animation’s clean substitutions. Instead, Kentridge’s technical support—the physical erasure and residue of charcoal—produces a “palimpsestic” space where time appears as scarring, not fluid motion. Krauss saw this as a lazy fallacy
Krauss argues that Greenberg’s medium leads to a dead end: painting reduced to opticality and flatness. Reinvention, by contrast, allows artists to create for each new set of artistic problems. To understand the "reinvention," one must first understand
Rosalind Krauss’s “Reinventing the Medium” argues that the medium is not a given but an . An artist reinvents the medium by: