Rosalind E. Krauss
Encyclopedia
Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born 1941) is an American art critic
and theorist; she is a professor at Columbia University
in New York City
. In 1985 a monograph of essays by Krauss, titled The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths was published by The MIT Press.
, whose Department of Fine Arts (now Department of History of Art and Architecture) had a strong tradition of the intensive analysis of actual art objects under the aegis of the Fogg Museum
. Krauss wrote her dissertation on the work of David Smith
, whose recent death had rendered him an acceptable dissertation subject in Harvard's view. Krauss received her Ph.D. in 1969. The dissertation was published as Terminal Iron Works in 1971.
In the late-1960s and early-1970s Krauss began to contribute articles to art journals such as Art International and Artforum
— which, under the editorship of Philip Leider, was relocated from California to New York, and became one of the leading titles in art criticism during that era. She began by writing the "Boston Letter" for Art International, but soon published well-received articles on Jasper Johns
(Lugano Review, 1965) and Donald Judd
(Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd
, Artforum
, May 1966). Her commitment to the emerging "minimal art" in particular set her apart from Fried, who was oriented toward the continuation of modernist abstraction in Jules Olitski
, as well as from Kenneth Noland
and Anthony Caro
. Krauss's article A View of Modernism
(Artforum
, September 1972), was one signal of this break.
, Krauss and Michelson became less satisfied and eventually left the magazine to found October
in 1976. This was one important symbol of the eclipse of serious non-academic critics like the New York intellectuals, and the rise of an academic intelligentsia in step with the post-GI Bill expansion of higher education. Just as much, the title indicated another trend: the uneasy yoking of the academic study of art with a French intellectual frame of reference and radical politics.
and Princeton
before joining the faculty at Hunter College
in 1974. She was promoted to professor in 1977 at Hunter and was also appointed professor at the Graduate Center of CUNY
. She held the title of Distinguished Professor at Hunter until she left to join the Columbia University
faculty in 1992.
Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia, in 2005 Rosalind Krauss was promoted to the highest faculty rank of University Professor
. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Arts
and has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and of the Institute for Advanced Study
. She received the Frank Jewett Mather
Award for criticism from the College Art Association
in 1973. She has been a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities since 1992 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1994. She recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of London
.
, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
, and MIT from 1974 and at Columbia since 1992, Krauss and October became a powerful inspiration for students and colleagues who aspired to the rigorous, philosophical study of contemporary art. One measure of her influence is that her example inspired both Yve-Alain Bois
and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
to migrate across the Atlantic and settle in the United States. Both would become, in succession, chairs of modern art at Harvard (and Bois at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton). Along with Hal Foster
at Princeton, they together established the dominant graduate programs for modern art, eventually consolidating their methods in the undergraduate textbook Art Since 1900. Although Bois and Buchloh eventually placed more of their own protegés in influential academic positions than Krauss did, her influence remained strong, and she supervised the undergraduate studies of Maurice Berger
and the graduate work of scholars including Rosalyn Deutsche, Brian Wallis, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Maud Lavin, Mignon Nixon, David Deitcher, Kathy O'Dell, Ann Morris Reynolds, Alastair Wright, and George Baker, as well as the dissertations of Foster, Buchloh and Douglas Crimp
, who were already established critics when they received their doctorates.
, as a counterweight to the highly subjective, poetic approach of Harold Rosenberg
. The poet-critic model proved long-lasting in the New York scene, with products from Frank O'Hara to Kynaston McShine to Peter Schjeldahl
, but for Krauss and others, its basis in subjective expression was fatally unable to account for how a particular artwork's objective structure gives rise to its associated subjective effects.
Greenberg's gifted way of assessing how an art object works, or how it is put together, became for Krauss a fruitful resource; even if she and fellow "Greenberger" Fried would break first with the older critic, and then with each other, at particular moments of judgment, the commitment to formal analysis as the necessary if not sufficient ground of serious criticism would still remain for both of them. Decades after her first engagement with Greenberg, Krauss still used his ideas about an artwork's 'medium' as a jumping-off point for her strongest effort to come to terms with post-1980 art in the person of William Kentridge
. Krauss would formulate this formalist commitment in strong terms, against attempts to account for powerful artworks in terms of residual ideas about an artist's individual genius, for instance in the essays "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition" and "Photography's Discursive Spaces." For Krauss and for the school of critics who developed under her influence, the Greenbergian legacy offers at its best a way of accounting for works of art using public and hence verifiable criteria (unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein could also be found in Krauss's arsenal); at its worst, in a repetition of the late Greenberg, an apodictic monologue in pseudoscientific jargon cloaks essentially unverifiable judgments of taste in a mantle of spurious authority.
, Surrealist photography, early Giacometti sculpture, Rodin
, Brancusi, Pollock
) or about art contemporaneous to her own writing (Robert Morris
, Sol LeWitt
, Richard Serra
, Cindy Sherman
), Krauss has a gift for translating the ephemeralities of visual and bodily experience into precise, vivid English, which has solidified her prestige as a critic. Her usual practice is to make this experience intelligible by using categories translated from the work of a thinker outside the study of art, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty
, Ferdinand de Saussure
, Jacques Lacan
, Jean-François Lyotard
, Jacques Derrida
, Georges Bataille
, or Roland Barthes
. Her work has helped establish the position of these writers within the study of art, even at the cost of provoking anxiety about threats to the discipline's autonomy.
In many cases, Krauss is credited as a leader in bringing these concepts to bear on the study of modern art. For instance, her Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) makes important use of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (as she had come to understand it in thinking about minimal art) for viewing modern sculpture in general. In her study of Surrealist photography, she rejected William Rubin's efforts at formal categorization as insufficient, instead advocating the psychoanalytic categories of "dream" and "automatism", as well as Jacques Derrida's "grammatological" idea of "spacing." See "The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism" (October, winter 1981).
's ideas about the differential relations and non-referentiality of language, rejecting efforts by other scholars to tie the pasted newspaper clippings to social history. Similarly, she held Picasso's stylistic developments in Cubist portraiture to be products of theoretical problems internal to art, rather than outcomes of the artist's love life. Later, she explained Picasso's participation in the rappel à l'ordre or return to order
of the 1920s in similar structuralist
terms. See "In the Name of Picasso" (October, spring 1981), "The Motivation of the Sign" (in Lynn Zelevansky, ed., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 1992), and The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
or a Salvador Dalí
, and much more to the structuralist Lacan
and the "dissident surrealist" Bataille. See "No More Play", her 1984 essay on Giacometti, as well as "Corpus Delicti", written for the 1985 exhibition L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, Cindy Sherman: 1975–1993 and The Optical Unconscious (both 1993) and Formless: A User's Guide with Yve-Alain Bois, catalog to the exhibition L'Informe: Mode d'emploi (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996).
in the 1960s, Krauss also returned to the drip painting of Jackson Pollock
as both a culmination of modernist work within the format of the "easel picture", and a breakthrough that opened the way for several important developments in later art, from Allan Kaprow
's happenings to Richard Serra
's lead-flinging process art to Andy Warhol
's oxidation (i.e. urination) paintings. For reference, see the Pollock chapter in The Optical Unconscious, several entries in the Formless catalog, and "Beyond the Easel Picture", her contribution to the MoMA
symposium accompanying the 1998 Pollock retrospective (Jackson Pollock: New Approaches). This direction provided intellectual validation for the explosive Pollock markets; but it exacerbated already tense relations between herself and more radical currents in visual/cultural studies, the latter growing steadily impatient with the traditional western art-historical canon.
In addition to writing focused studies about individual artists, Krauss also produced broader, synthetic studies that helped gather together and define the limits of particular fields of practice. Examples of this include "Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post '60s Sculpture" (Artforum, Nov. 1973), "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism" (October, spring 1976), "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America", in two parts, October spring and fall 1977), "Grids, You Say", In Grids: Format and Image in 20th Century Art (exh. cat.: Pace Gallery, 1978), and "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (October, spring 1979). Some of these essays are collected in her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
Sharing this orientation with artists ranging along the trajectories from Picasso
through surrealism
to Pollock
, or from abstract painting through minimalism
to "indexical" post-minimalism, Krauss's arguments in this field have been widely persuasive. Both she and these artists would deny that the significance of their work could be equated to either a succession of changing fashions or of epiphenomena of social history or biography.
However, like critics of many other stripes, she and the October editors seem to be less well equipped to deal with a more recent art world in which this assumption has rapidly declined in currency, with the professional definition of 'artist' shaped much less by any convictions about its autonomy, special privileges or obligations, and much more by its interweaving with a multifaceted and all-pervasive media culture, historical amnesia and the commodification of everyday life. If the prestige of Krauss's legacy has been relativized by these rather chaotic developments, her work still offers among the best examples of a philosophically serious attempt to translate, categorize and analyze visual-phenomenal experience in the verbal register.
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
(1970–73), on surrealism
and photography at the Corcoran Museum of Art (1982–85), on Richard Serra
at the Museum of Modern Art
(1985–86), and on Robert Morris
at the Guggenheim (1992–94). She prepared an exhibition for the Centre Georges Pompidou
in Paris called "Formlessness: Modernism Against the Grain" in 1996. She is currently preparing a second volume of collected essays as a sequel to The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986).
Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting
, sculpture
and photography
. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum
, Art International and Art in America
. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October
, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976. Professor Krauss's attempts to understand the phenomenon of modernist art, in its historical, theoretical, and formal dimensions, have led her in various directions. She has, for example, been interested in the development of photography, whose history-running parallel to that of modernist painting and sculpture-makes visible certain previously overlooked phenomena in the "high arts", such as the role of the indexical mark, or the function of the archive. She has also investigated certain concepts, such as "formlessness", "the optical unconscious", or "pastiche", which organize modernist practice in relation to different explanatory grids from those of progressive modernism, or the avant-garde.
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
and theorist; she is a professor at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. In 1985 a monograph of essays by Krauss, titled The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths was published by The MIT Press.
Early life
Rosalind Krauss grew up in the area of Washington D.C., where she recalled, as a formative experience, visiting art museums with her father. After graduating from Wellesley in 1962, she attended HarvardHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, whose Department of Fine Arts (now Department of History of Art and Architecture) had a strong tradition of the intensive analysis of actual art objects under the aegis of the Fogg Museum
Fogg Art Museum
The Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums....
. Krauss wrote her dissertation on the work of David Smith
David Smith (sculptor)
David Roland Smith was an American Abstract Expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.-Biography:...
, whose recent death had rendered him an acceptable dissertation subject in Harvard's view. Krauss received her Ph.D. in 1969. The dissertation was published as Terminal Iron Works in 1971.
In the late-1960s and early-1970s Krauss began to contribute articles to art journals such as Art International and Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
— which, under the editorship of Philip Leider, was relocated from California to New York, and became one of the leading titles in art criticism during that era. She began by writing the "Boston Letter" for Art International, but soon published well-received articles on Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
(Lugano Review, 1965) and Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
(Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
, Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
, May 1966). Her commitment to the emerging "minimal art" in particular set her apart from Fried, who was oriented toward the continuation of modernist abstraction in Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...
, as well as from Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
and Anthony Caro
Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro, OM, CBE is an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects.-Background and early life:...
. Krauss's article A View of Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
(Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
, September 1972), was one signal of this break.
Founding October
After Leider left ArtforumArtforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
, Krauss and Michelson became less satisfied and eventually left the magazine to found October
October (journal)
October is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in contemporary art, criticism, and theory, published by the MIT Press.-History:...
in 1976. This was one important symbol of the eclipse of serious non-academic critics like the New York intellectuals, and the rise of an academic intelligentsia in step with the post-GI Bill expansion of higher education. Just as much, the title indicated another trend: the uneasy yoking of the academic study of art with a French intellectual frame of reference and radical politics.
Hunter College
Krauss taught at Wellesley, MITMassachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
and Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
before joining the faculty at Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
in 1974. She was promoted to professor in 1977 at Hunter and was also appointed professor at the Graduate Center of CUNY
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
. She held the title of Distinguished Professor at Hunter until she left to join the Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
faculty in 1992.
Columbia University
Previously Meyer SchapiroMeyer Schapiro
Meyer Schapiro was a Lithuanian-born American art historian known for forging new art historical methodologies that incorporated an interdisciplinary approach to the study of works of art...
Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia, in 2005 Rosalind Krauss was promoted to the highest faculty rank of University Professor
University Professor (Columbia)
University Professor is the highest academic rank at Columbia University.-University Professors:*Richard Axel, molecular biology and neuroscience*Jagdish Bhagwati, economics and law*Ronald Breslow, organic chemistry...
. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...
and the National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
and has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and of the Institute for Advanced Study
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...
. She received the Frank Jewett Mather
Frank Jewett Mather
Frank Jewett Mather was an American art critic and professor.He was born at Deep River, Conn., and graduated from Williams College in 1889 and from Johns Hopkins in 1892: he studied also at Berlin and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris...
Award for criticism from the College Art Association
College Art Association
The College Art Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for practitioners and scholars of art, art history, and art criticism...
in 1973. She has been a fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities since 1992 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 1994. She recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
.
Influence
Teaching at Hunter CollegeHunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
, and MIT from 1974 and at Columbia since 1992, Krauss and October became a powerful inspiration for students and colleagues who aspired to the rigorous, philosophical study of contemporary art. One measure of her influence is that her example inspired both Yve-Alain Bois
Yve-Alain Bois
Yve-Alain Bois is an historian and critic of modern art. Yve-Alain Bois was born on April 16, 1952 in Constantine, Algeria.-Education:...
and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University. His 2000 book, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, is a collection of eighteen essays on major figures of postwar art written since the late 1970s...
to migrate across the Atlantic and settle in the United States. Both would become, in succession, chairs of modern art at Harvard (and Bois at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton). Along with Hal Foster
Hal Foster (art critic)
Harold Foss "Hal" Foster is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997...
at Princeton, they together established the dominant graduate programs for modern art, eventually consolidating their methods in the undergraduate textbook Art Since 1900. Although Bois and Buchloh eventually placed more of their own protegés in influential academic positions than Krauss did, her influence remained strong, and she supervised the undergraduate studies of Maurice Berger
Maurice Berger
Maurice Berger is an Americancultural historian, curator, and art critic.- Biography :Maurice Berger is a cultural historian, art critic, and curator. He is Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A student of...
and the graduate work of scholars including Rosalyn Deutsche, Brian Wallis, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Maud Lavin, Mignon Nixon, David Deitcher, Kathy O'Dell, Ann Morris Reynolds, Alastair Wright, and George Baker, as well as the dissertations of Foster, Buchloh and Douglas Crimp
Douglas Crimp
Douglas Crimp is an American professor in art history based at the University of Rochester.- Biography :Born in Idaho, Crimp went to Tulane University in New Orleans on a scholarship to study art history. His career started after moving to New York in 1967, where he worked as an art critic,...
, who were already established critics when they received their doctorates.
Greenbergian tradition
Like many, Krauss had been drawn to the criticism of Clement GreenbergClement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
, as a counterweight to the highly subjective, poetic approach of Harold Rosenberg
Harold Rosenberg
Harold Rosenberg was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. The term was first employed in Rosenberg's essay "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952 issue of...
. The poet-critic model proved long-lasting in the New York scene, with products from Frank O'Hara to Kynaston McShine to Peter Schjeldahl
Peter Schjeldahl
Peter Schjeldahl, , is an American art critic, poet, and educator.Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He grew up in small towns throughout Minnesota, and attended Carleton College and The New School...
, but for Krauss and others, its basis in subjective expression was fatally unable to account for how a particular artwork's objective structure gives rise to its associated subjective effects.
Greenberg's gifted way of assessing how an art object works, or how it is put together, became for Krauss a fruitful resource; even if she and fellow "Greenberger" Fried would break first with the older critic, and then with each other, at particular moments of judgment, the commitment to formal analysis as the necessary if not sufficient ground of serious criticism would still remain for both of them. Decades after her first engagement with Greenberg, Krauss still used his ideas about an artwork's 'medium' as a jumping-off point for her strongest effort to come to terms with post-1980 art in the person of William Kentridge
William Kentridge
William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two...
. Krauss would formulate this formalist commitment in strong terms, against attempts to account for powerful artworks in terms of residual ideas about an artist's individual genius, for instance in the essays "The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition" and "Photography's Discursive Spaces." For Krauss and for the school of critics who developed under her influence, the Greenbergian legacy offers at its best a way of accounting for works of art using public and hence verifiable criteria (unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein could also be found in Krauss's arsenal); at its worst, in a repetition of the late Greenberg, an apodictic monologue in pseudoscientific jargon cloaks essentially unverifiable judgments of taste in a mantle of spurious authority.
Translating ephemeralities into prose
Whether about art from earlier moments of modernism (Cubist collageCollage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, Surrealist photography, early Giacometti sculpture, Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
, Brancusi, Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
) or about art contemporaneous to her own writing (Robert Morris
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
, Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism....
, Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
, Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...
), Krauss has a gift for translating the ephemeralities of visual and bodily experience into precise, vivid English, which has solidified her prestige as a critic. Her usual practice is to make this experience intelligible by using categories translated from the work of a thinker outside the study of art, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
, Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
, Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
, Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
, Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
, or Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
. Her work has helped establish the position of these writers within the study of art, even at the cost of provoking anxiety about threats to the discipline's autonomy.
In many cases, Krauss is credited as a leader in bringing these concepts to bear on the study of modern art. For instance, her Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) makes important use of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (as she had come to understand it in thinking about minimal art) for viewing modern sculpture in general. In her study of Surrealist photography, she rejected William Rubin's efforts at formal categorization as insufficient, instead advocating the psychoanalytic categories of "dream" and "automatism", as well as Jacques Derrida's "grammatological" idea of "spacing." See "The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism" (October, winter 1981).
Picasso's collages
Concerning Cubist art, she took Picasso's collage breakthrough to be explicable in terms of SaussureFerdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
's ideas about the differential relations and non-referentiality of language, rejecting efforts by other scholars to tie the pasted newspaper clippings to social history. Similarly, she held Picasso's stylistic developments in Cubist portraiture to be products of theoretical problems internal to art, rather than outcomes of the artist's love life. Later, she explained Picasso's participation in the rappel à l'ordre or return to order
Return to order
The return to order was a European art movement that followed the First World War, rejecting the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918 and taking its inspiration from traditional art instead. The movement was a reaction to the War...
of the 1920s in similar structuralist
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
terms. See "In the Name of Picasso" (October, spring 1981), "The Motivation of the Sign" (in Lynn Zelevansky, ed., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, 1992), and The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
Freudian theory
From the 1980s, she became increasingly concerned with using a psychoanalytic understanding of drives and the unconscious, owing less to the Freudianism of an André BretonAndré Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
or a Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
, and much more to the structuralist Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
and the "dissident surrealist" Bataille. See "No More Play", her 1984 essay on Giacometti, as well as "Corpus Delicti", written for the 1985 exhibition L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, Cindy Sherman: 1975–1993 and The Optical Unconscious (both 1993) and Formless: A User's Guide with Yve-Alain Bois, catalog to the exhibition L'Informe: Mode d'emploi (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996).
Interpreting Pollock
Years after her time at ArtforumArtforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
in the 1960s, Krauss also returned to the drip painting of Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
as both a culmination of modernist work within the format of the "easel picture", and a breakthrough that opened the way for several important developments in later art, from Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
's happenings to Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
's lead-flinging process art to Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
's oxidation (i.e. urination) paintings. For reference, see the Pollock chapter in The Optical Unconscious, several entries in the Formless catalog, and "Beyond the Easel Picture", her contribution to the MoMA
Moma
Moma may refer to:* Moma , an owlet moth genus* Moma Airport, a Russian public airport* Moma District, Nampula, Mozambique* Moma River, a right tributary of the Indigirka River* Google Moma, the Google corporate intranet...
symposium accompanying the 1998 Pollock retrospective (Jackson Pollock: New Approaches). This direction provided intellectual validation for the explosive Pollock markets; but it exacerbated already tense relations between herself and more radical currents in visual/cultural studies, the latter growing steadily impatient with the traditional western art-historical canon.
In addition to writing focused studies about individual artists, Krauss also produced broader, synthetic studies that helped gather together and define the limits of particular fields of practice. Examples of this include "Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post '60s Sculpture" (Artforum, Nov. 1973), "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism" (October, spring 1976), "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America", in two parts, October spring and fall 1977), "Grids, You Say", In Grids: Format and Image in 20th Century Art (exh. cat.: Pace Gallery, 1978), and "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (October, spring 1979). Some of these essays are collected in her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
Overview
Krauss attends to a rich variety of artists and artworks, explaining them in the terms of a number of different critics. Still, a certain fundamental modernist orientation is arguably always present, so taken for granted as to never need to be openly articulated. That is the assumption that the artist, as someone possessing advanced technical competence in the means of visual production, is, in the service of enlightenment, entrusted with the task of wrenching, tearing or cajoling the beholder's habits of perception out of their ossified, conventionalized, academicized and ultimately falsified norms.Sharing this orientation with artists ranging along the trajectories from Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
through surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
to Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, or from abstract painting through minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
to "indexical" post-minimalism, Krauss's arguments in this field have been widely persuasive. Both she and these artists would deny that the significance of their work could be equated to either a succession of changing fashions or of epiphenomena of social history or biography.
However, like critics of many other stripes, she and the October editors seem to be less well equipped to deal with a more recent art world in which this assumption has rapidly declined in currency, with the professional definition of 'artist' shaped much less by any convictions about its autonomy, special privileges or obligations, and much more by its interweaving with a multifaceted and all-pervasive media culture, historical amnesia and the commodification of everyday life. If the prestige of Krauss's legacy has been relativized by these rather chaotic developments, her work still offers among the best examples of a philosophically serious attempt to translate, categorize and analyze visual-phenomenal experience in the verbal register.
Curator
Krauss has been curator of many art exhibitions at leading museums, among them exhibitions on Joan MiróJoan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
(1970–73), on surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
and photography at the Corcoran Museum of Art (1982–85), on Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(1985–86), and on Robert Morris
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
at the Guggenheim (1992–94). She prepared an exhibition for the Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou
Centre Georges Pompidou is a complex in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil and the Marais...
in Paris called "Formlessness: Modernism Against the Grain" in 1996. She is currently preparing a second volume of collected essays as a sequel to The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986).
Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
and photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
, Art International and Art in America
Art in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...
. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October
October (journal)
October is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in contemporary art, criticism, and theory, published by the MIT Press.-History:...
, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976. Professor Krauss's attempts to understand the phenomenon of modernist art, in its historical, theoretical, and formal dimensions, have led her in various directions. She has, for example, been interested in the development of photography, whose history-running parallel to that of modernist painting and sculpture-makes visible certain previously overlooked phenomena in the "high arts", such as the role of the indexical mark, or the function of the archive. She has also investigated certain concepts, such as "formlessness", "the optical unconscious", or "pastiche", which organize modernist practice in relation to different explanatory grids from those of progressive modernism, or the avant-garde.
Selected Books by Krauss
- Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971.
- The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 73. New York: Garland, 1977.
- Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press, 1977.
- The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985.
- L'Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism. London: Arts Council, 1986. Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, July to September 1986.
- Le Photographique (1990)
- The Optical Unconscious (1993)
- A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999)
- Perpetual Inventory (2010)
Selected essays and articles by Krauss
- MIT Press: selected articles by Rosalind Krauss
- "Contemporary Criticism." Markham, Ont.: Audio Archives of Canada, 1979. 1 sound cassette: 1 7/8 ips.
- Critical Perspectives in American Art, pp. 25–27. Introduction by Hugh M. Davies. Amherst: Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1976. Rosalind Krauss' text is followed by illustrations of works by Donald Judd, Robert Artschwager and Joel Shapiro. An Exhibition selected by Rosalind Krauss, Sam Hunter and Marcia Tucker. Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, April 10, 1976–May 9, 1976, American Pavilion, Venice Biennale, summer 1976.
- "Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman." In Peter Eisenman's Houses of Cards, pp. 166–184. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Book Reviews by Krauss
- "Man in a Mold." Review of James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography. In The New Republic, Dec. 16, 1985, pp. 24–29.
- "Post-History on Parade." Review of three books by Arthur Danto. In The New Republic, May 25, 1987, pp. 27–30.
- "Only Project." Review of Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art. In The New Republic, September 12 & 19, 1988, pp. 33–38.
About Krauss
- David Carrier. Rosalind Krauss and American philisophical art criticism. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. ISBN 0275975207, 9780275975203
- "Rosalind Krauss." In Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner, Women Shaping Art: Profiles of Power, pp. 149–164. New York: Praeger, 1984
- Janet Malcolm, "A Girl of the Zeitgeist", Part II, The New Yorker, October 27, 1986.
- Scott Rothkopf, "Krauss and the Art of Cultural Controversy," The Harvard Crimson, May 16, 1997.
- Anna C. Chave, "Minimalism and Biography," Art Bulletin March 2000.
- David Raskin, "The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss and Judd", Art Journal Spring 2006.
- Eddie Yeghiayan: Articles About Rosalind Krauss
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
- Bois, Yve-Alain. Art Journal (Winter 1985), pp. 369ff.
- Carrier, David. Burlington Magazine (November 1985), 127(992): 817.
- Owens, Craig. "Analysis Logical and Ideological." Art in America (May 1985), pp. 25–31. Reprinted in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, pp. 268–283. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
- List of reviews of The Originality of the Avant-Garde
The Optical Unconscious
- Roger Kimball, "Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss," New Criterion 1993
- Reviews of The Optical Unconscious
The Picasso Papers
- Marilyn McCully, "The Fallen Angel?" review of The Picasso Papers in New York Review of Books, April 8, 1999.
- Harry Cooper and Marilyn McCully, "The Picasso Papers: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, October 7, 1999.
Art Since 1900
- Claire Bishop, Artforum.com, Apr. 9, 2005
- Matthew Collings, The Guardian May 14, 2005
- Martin Gayford, arts.telegraph Apr. 24, 2005
- Eric Gibson, OpinionJournal.com Mar. 11, 2005
- Barry Gewen, New York Times Dec. 11, 2005
- Dan Hopewell, Iconoduel Apr. 9, 2005
- Pepe Karmel, review of Art Since 1900, in Art in America, Nov. 2005, pp. 61–63.
- Barry Schwabsky, The Nation Dec. 8, 2005
- Frank Whitford, Times Online (UK) Mar. 20, 2005