Why it matters today: Krauss’s thinking anticipates the fluidity of contemporary art, where digital practices, time-based media, and participatory projects resist neat classification. Her framework encourages critics and artists to attend to context—the exhibition format, technological affordances, and institutional economies—that shape how works are experienced and valued.
: Photography, once a tool for documentation, became a "theoretical object"—a way to deconstruct art's traditional focus on manual skill and the "original". 2. What Does "Reinventing" Mean?
Searching for is an act of intellectual resistance. In a culture of scrolling and swiping, you are seeking a difficult, rewarding, 25-page argument that refuses to simplify art into lifestyle content.
A: It is the idea that contemporary art no longer relies on the traditional, pure media of painting or sculpture. Instead, it freely mixes techniques, technologies, and supports, often using "strange new apparatuses" like the car, the camera, or the computer to create new, temporary mediums.
An artist reinvents a medium by rediscovering or inventing a technical support and then exploring its unique formal and conceptual possibilities.
A central figure in her discourse is the Belgian artist . Krauss explores how Broodthaers used the outdated medium of the magic lantern, silent film tropes, and fictional museum displays to challenge the totalizing force of mass media. By adopting a medium that was already obsolete, Broodthaers was able to isolate its structural mechanics and expose how capitalism transforms art into a spectacle.
Following Clement Greenberg, Modernism (e.g., Abstract Expressionism) insisted on the purity of the medium—painting should only be painting (flatness), sculpture only sculpture.
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 ).
A technical support carries its own history, conventions, and automated processes. The artist’s role is to unpack, fracture, and reassemble these layers to expose how the medium constructs meaning. Case Study: James Coleman and the Slide Tape
The Historical Trajectory: From Greenbergian Purity to the Post-Medium Condition