Krauss’s theory of reinventing the medium saved the concept of the medium from the dustbin of history. She transformed it from a rigid container of purity into a fluid space of strategic resistance.
Example: Charon’s Fee (1984) – a single slide of a Greek temple’s interior, accompanied by a narrative about a tourist’s near-death experience. The medium’s “rule” is that meaning emerges from the between seeing and hearing. rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
Krauss’s essay is essential reading for anyone working with digital media, installation, or post-internet art. It warns us that without a medium (a structure of repetition and difference), art collapses into “the narcissistic, the formless, or the purely informational.” For example, an Instagram slideshow or a VR experience becomes art only when the artist invents or repurposes a technical logic that structures the viewer’s experience over time. Krauss’s theory of reinventing the medium saved the
Krauss describes this maneuver as a "knight’s move." Just as a knight in chess moves in an L-shape, bypassing the linear path of other pieces, the artist bypasses the traditional definitions of the medium. By treating the museum as a medium, Broodthaers exposed the medium’s conventions—its systems of display, its rhetoric of authority—while simultaneously using those very conventions to critique the institution. The medium’s “rule” is that meaning emerges from