Rosalind Krauss: between modernism and post-medium

Abstract

Rosalind Krauss: Between Modernism and Post-Medium’ is a response to an essay, ‘Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts’, by Irish aesthetic philosopher Diarmuid Costello criticising the prominent American art critic and historian Rosalind Krauss for her notion of “post-medium” art. Costello objects to the fact that in Krauss’ theorisation a particular post-medium can in principle be practised by only one artist and thus does not allow the comparative judgement and sense of artistic or historical development that the notion of medium implies. This essay by contrast contends both that Krauss’ notion of post-medium does allow comparison and that in the very notion of medium on which Costello relies there is a certain moment of non-comparison, of a particular author or artist making something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Indeed, it suggests that these two qualities of the medium cannot be separated and necessarily imply each other. The author does this with reference to the work of the American “ordinary language” philosopher Stanley Cavell, on whom Krauss draws for her theorisation of the post-medium. Also included is an interview with Krauss herself that raises a number of these matters.