Rosalind Krauss

La obra impresa "Crucificatur", integración de gráfica y poesía, del artista italo-costarricense Alvaro Bracci (n. 1948), inspirada en su conocida serie de quince pinturas de gran formato sobre el vía crucis, de 1987, ha visto la luz coincidentemente con una pandemia global que ha llevado a la humanidad a reconocer su vulnerabilidad y dependencia.
El crítico de arte, Juan Carlos Flores Zúñiga, ofrece una lectura estética alternativa a esta innovadora publicación, en la nueva edición de Ars Kriterion E-Zine, sobre lo que significa la encarnación de Dios hecho hombre mediante Jesús en un contexto plástico y poético como el que ofrece Bracci y el cambio de paradigma crítico hacia una teología de la producción artística.

Among all the arts-those children of pleasure and necessity in which man has participated to help him bear the trials of life and pass on his memory to future generations-one cannot deny that architecture must hold a most eminent place. Even considered only from the point of usefulness, it surpasses all the other arts. It ensures to the salubrity of cities, guards the health of men, protects their properties, and works only for the safety, repose and orderliness of civic life.

Insofar as semiology examines language synchronically, there is question about its application within a specifically art-historical discourse. A productive test case for analysing the potential conjunctions and disjunctions between art historiography and semiology is the re-examination of Cubism by October critics Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. At the 1989 Picasso and Braque symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art, both Bois and Krauss presented important papers that utilized semiology as an interpretative method for elucidating the collages and papier collés of Synthetic Cubism. In both of their presentations, historiographic questions and the inaugural character of collage are repeatedly highlighted. Bois' essay exhibits an effort to think through the process that led to the epistemological break of the paper collés, and for Krauss the issue of art-historical method is raised, particular the antimony between formalist versus socio-historical paradigms. This paper explores the semiological approaches taken by Bois and Krauss and considers their fecundity for the art-historical study of Synthetic Cubism. However, in doing so, it seeks to resist the notion that Cubism is viewed through the lens of semiology as if such a theoretical approach merely constitutes an interpretative model that can used or not. On the contrary, this paper aims to suggest that Cubist collage functions as a model: firstly, as a model for understanding semiology rather than vice versa, and secondly as a model for our art-historical accounts of Cubism. By examining how Cubist collage establishes the condition of possibility for its interpretation, I hope additionally to shed light on October's overall turn from art criticism engaged with theorizing contemporary art to a more genealogical writing that will define the journal's output from the late 1990s onwards. That is to say, collage becomes a potential model for art history tout court.

This paper describes how two works by the Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera articulate the conditions of participation within both the political and aesthetic fields. That articulation unfolds in Bruguera’s specifying her performances’ structures of address in order to demonstrate the ways in which individuals are variously folded into or blocked out of community-forming activities. In its insistence on such a specificity, which this paper traces to a modernist notion of medium specificity, Bruguera’s performances are shown to question the manner in which the field of “participatory art” is frequently generated out of an optimism for effective political and artistic practice within the conditions of post-Fordist sociality.

This paper offers a multifaceted, close reading of the
‘post-medium’ discourse proposed by art critic Rosalid E.
Krauss since the late 1990s. I argue that Krauss’s ‘post-medium’
discourse is meaningful in its two ways of reconfiguring the
ideas of medium, more than declaring the demise of modernist
medium specificity thesis. The first lies in Krauss’s conception
of the medium as internally heterogeneous, self-differing, and
opening itself to new relations to its neighboring arts and their
corresponding material, technical, and aesthetic components. The
second lies in Krauss’s elaboration on Walter Benjamin’s idea
on the redemptive possibilities of the outmoded, which leads to
her critical evaluation of the artistic practicies that recuperate
the aesthetic potential and cultural memory from now obsolete
technical supports. While discussing the implications and
influences of these two conceptual layers in Krauss’s
‘post-medium’ discourse, this paper also argues for its limitation,
that is, her strict dichotomy between her idea of the medium
open to renivention and the media as the means of
communication that threatens to annihilate the idea of medium
specificity. My comparative reading of the ‘post-medium’ and
the ‘post-media’ discourses offers a useful insight into this
limitation caused by Krauss’s binary oppostion.

Partisan of the fake on every occasion, anti-naturalist in the first degree, Picabia made nomination—albeit in an occult fashion—into a conventional act, applying to it the protocol of the readymade.
Picabia’s encoded, hypertrophied, or redoubled name, as well as his recourse to the pseudonym (to which one might add Duchamp’s invented alter ego and change of name) are all examples of the name as ornament.The mechanomorph, the proper name Picabia, and the inscription had in effect replaced the face: they were the chain of substitutes employed to compensate for the deficit of figural representation, and they had in common their graphic nature.

na podstawie tekstów T.Załuskiego oraz R.Krauss) Przedmiotem tekstu "Rosalind Krauss : Oryginalność awangardy i modernizmu" autorstwa Tomasza Załuskiego jest analiza dyskursu estetycznego The Oryginality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths amerykańskiej krytyk i historyk sztuki Rosalind Krauss traktującego o problematyce zjawiska powtórzenia w kontekście sztuki modernistycznej. Załuski w swoim artykule dąży do ukazania pewnej definicji modernizmu poprzez pryzmat powtórzenia oraz elementów które powinny być od niego wolne , jak i do ukazania złożonej relacji zagadnienia . Przytacza nam pewnego rodzaju syntezę tekstu Krauss dodając do niego swoje zastrzeżenia czy wątpliwości względem jej twierdzeń.

Postmedia Books giugno 2020
isbn 9788874902705
Nuova edizione della traduzione italiana, con un'introduzione di Elio Grazioli.
L'illustre storica e critica d'arte Rosalind Krauss analizza con eccezionale chiarezza e intuito le principali opere che hanno portato la scultura del XX secolo dalla scultura tradizionale e figurativa alla rivoluzionaria arte concettuale degli anni Settanta, un'arte che ha sviluppato una nuova "sintassi" che scarta la "narrazione" per un impatto istantaneo e apre decisamente nuovi orizzonti verso quella poetica del "campo allargato" che svilupperà due anni più tardi nel famoso saggio del 1979.

"Rosalind Krauss e il corpo nella fotografia surrealista: dall'informe all'identità di genere, verso un'arte femminista", di Andrea D'Ammando. Tra la fine degli anni Settanta e la metà degli anni Novanta, nell'ambito degli studi critici sul Surrealismo, si assiste a un recupero della centralità di Georges Bataille e del gruppo di surrealisti dissidenti riunitosi intorno alla rivista Documents. Alla riscoperta dell'assoluta importanza e originalità dell'impresa batailleana, divenuta ormai quasi un luogo comune tra chi si occupa del movimento surrealista (nonché della cultura francese degli anni Venti e Trenta del secolo scorso), ha contribuito in modo determinante il lavoro di Rosalind Krauss, che già nella prima metà degli anni Ottanta dedica alla fotografia surrealista-e, come si vedrà, al suo rapporto con il corpo-mostre e saggi destinati a esercitare una notevole influenza sulla critica successiva.

Статья посвящена книге известных историков современного искусства Ива-Алена Буа и Розалинд Краусе «Бесформенное. Руководство для пользователю> 1 ( 1997), в которой понятие « бесформенное » исс л едуется в том его значении , которое было впервые сформулировано ф ранuузским философом Жоржем Батаем в конце 20-х годов в статье для журнала «Документы».

A monograph reproducing a series by Bonnie Bronson of 10 small mixed-media drawings from the middle 1980s. With an introduction by Kassandra Kelly and an essay by Randal Davis. This is a much-expanded version of the materials which accompanied the initial exhibition, in 2010, of this series of work.  The series of drawings is reproduced full-size.

There is already an extensive comprehension of literature theorizing the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Through this research an underlying theme within his oeuvre is revealed. That of expanding or rupturing the perceived boundaries of architecture. This paper examines the issues raised by Rosalind Krauss in her highly influential essay, ‘Sculpture and the expanded field’ (1979). Its usefulness for architecture was that of amplifying the perception of its limits, as it addresses the prohibited terms of Architecture and landscape. This paper will examine how far Matta-Clark’s work expresses the ideas Krauss’s essay raised and how his work fits into this context leading towards an expanded field in which art and architecture are not separate fields, but rather two ends of a connected spectrum of disciplines which can intermingle, connect and critique each other.
This essay will also explore Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural education at Cornell (1962-1968), in order to grasp his initial responses towards the field of architecture, and the influences that led to him becoming the rebellious artist he is seen as today. During his tenure at Cornell he was made aware of Both Colin Rowe and Peter Eisenman. This essay will question the importance of their viewpoints in relation to Matta-Clark’s attitude towards the architectural climate in the 1970’s.
From this information this dissertation will go on to critically analyze Matta-Clark’s interventions in space, in conjunction with Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 work, ‘Production of space’. Matta-Clark’s oeuvre can then be discussed based on the theories set forth by Lefebvre. Highlighting how Gordon Matta-Clark explored the possibilities that emerge when boundaries are considered to be porous and why this is important . Concluding that the relationships that exist across the various disciplines should be explored further in order to continue to discover ideas surrounding the possibility of spatial experience.

Utopian visions and diagrams have engaged in a multitude of relationships. For example, a utopian narrative can be conceived as a diagram, or with the aid of diagrams, and understood through diagrammatic (re) annotation. This notion is explored through an interpretation of Thomas More’s Utopia and Andrea Branzi’s Agronica. Both schemes address various structural conditions through diagrammatic operations. In More’s scheme the channel that separates Utopia from the mainland, dug by its putative founder King Abraxas, inscribes a circular boundary, reiterated in the city walls and moat; it is resonant with contemporaneous rota and volvelle schemata. Conversely, Andrea Branzi’s “mirror simulator” multiplies Agronica’s centrifugal grid to infinity, negating the “outside,” and is evocative of pervasive virtual networks.

Taking Rosalind Krauss’s visual methodology, ‘Horizontality’ as part of the Formless Guide on the informe, this thesis thesis aims to extend ‘Horizontality’ into Along horizontality as an integrated theoretical and practical methodology for critical spatial practice.

The floor becomes a production site to deliberately resist, and be ‘at a variance’ to vertical hierarchies with an interdisciplinary practice method of drawing, to take it into the type of cultural ground characterised in Krauss’s essay as ‘the low cultural ground’ – Edgelands, zones of neglect, blurred variations of local landscape, and the rural/urban wilds named by Marion Shoard. In revolt, ‘horizontality’ is anti-form in specific relation to the ground, to the body and to architectural order, and expresses a negative condition to spatial organization.

As spatial mapping, ‘horizontality’ extends into a diagrammatic, mapping operation. The study investigates how the indexical lines and gestural lines of throwing down, falling, in essence the effect of gravity on movement and matter can be used as an interdisciplinary drawing method. Through the examination of line, movement and the perceptions of being inside the project it incorporates drawing, apparatus and performance to make a quasi-diagrammatic approach to Edgeland sites.
These culminate in works called blubilds, a playful and choreographic take on the blueprint into activities that are task-based and operational, to get mapping ‘down and dirty’ into the gutter of Edgelands. As temporal acts blubilds reflect the desire of the body to speculate on the lived feminine body and its experience of Edgelands as a highly experimental mode of dwelling. In a twist out of the representational forms of Edgelands, this uses a feminine line of enquiry with Deleuze’s energetic mapping planes and Walter Benjamin’s  spatial critique for the woman to shape lines of desire as a process of ‘alteration’ to activate Edgelands.

What should we do about defunct or ‘aging new media’ artworks by a now deceased artist when there is no specific manual or artist’s statement to consult? Taking Nam June Paik’s dysfunctional multi-media artwork <The More, the Better>(1988) as an ‘exemplary symptom,’ this paper seeks to offer an answer.

Focusing on the relationship between ‘Time’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Technology’ in Paik’s oeuvre in terms of ‘entropy,’ we will see how they serve to illuminate contemporary discussions of preservation and conservation of so-called ‘time-based media’ as ‘performance.’ To that end, we will critically engage with the humanist take on Paik’s artworks as well as confusion about seemingly interchangeable concepts such as ‘entropy,’ ‘indeterminacy,’ and ‘chance.’

By re-reading Paik’s crucial statements, writings, artworks including performances such as “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan,” <Confused Rain>, and his 1997 performance in a wheelchair at the Walker Art Center, we will see how <The More, the Better> as an ‘obsolete new media’ showcases what I call ‘parallax contemporaneity.’

In so doing, we will provide a necessary, if not exhaustive corrective to the extant scholarship on Nam June Paik’s art, and by extension, suggestive stimulants to contemporary reflections on new media, post-medium/media, and media archeology.

Joseph Beuys term “Soziale Plastik" not only classified his own artistic practice as essentially sculptural but, more importantly, it allowed him to thematize its heterogenous relationships to art market, exhibition, museum, and various modes of reception, and to stake its political claim. A close analysis of Beuys’s contribution to the 1977 documenta, “Honey Pump at the Workplace,” reveals that the layered invocation of plasticity characteristic of Beuys’s practice and theorizing ought not be historicized, as is commonly done, as an instantiation of the excessive, transgressive–and quite possibly disingenuous–zeal of a “neoavantgarde.” Beuys’s “Plastik” should not be confused with anti-aesthetic formlessness, base materialism, a post-Duchampian ruination of the objet trouvé, and least of all a Neoromantic or Wagnerian projection or hypostatization of the autonomous work of art. The avantgardes of the 20th century have rendered the relationship of art and aesthetics tenuous at best, their artistic “innovations” straining against the supratemporally or anthropologically defined characteristics of aesthetic valuation, play, or force. Many have sought to address this problem by tethering art to society in a shared “contemporaneity.” What would be the implications of recasting this relation of art and society as one of “plasticity”–with all the conceptual forcefulness presented in Catherine Malabou’s work?

L'arte nell'era postmediale
Marcel Broodthaers, ad esempio
di Rosalind Krauss

Negli anni in cui l'arte si ritrova a fare i conti con la globalizzazione dell'immagine al servizio del capitale, Broodthaers ci insegna come la specificità mediale non serva più a caratterizzare l'opera, ma la sua reinvenzione e riarticolazione permette agli artisti di avere strumenti in grado di produrre delle differenze.
"Trascrizione della Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture del 1999, “L’arte nell’era postmediale” è uno di quei testi che sono entrati presto nella leggenda: tutti ne hanno sentito parlare, ma solo pochi fortunati finora ne hanno avuto una copia tra le mani. Il libro, nonostante la brevità, è un largo ed intricato spettro teorico fatto di osservazioni originali e provocatorie in cui Krauss, co-fondatore e co-direttore della rivista October, veterana di Artforum negli anni 60 e 70, esamina l’intersezione degli interessi artistici con la cultura visiva attuale." Segno, n.203 / 07-2005

Undici saggi analizzano alcuni capolavori dell’arte contemporanea, distanti tra loro ma accomunati dal fatto di conferire movimento all’immagine. Muovendo dalla specificità dei singoli casi, l’autore documenta le motivazioni che hanno spinto i pittori a sperimentare quello svolgimento nel tempo che una volta era loro precluso, e oggi è invece un campo operativo solidamente acquisito, come si constata nella vitalità del film e soprattutto del video d’artista.
L’esame si addentra in profondità, interrogando le opere e le poetiche anche nei loro aspetti più sottili, tenendo conto sia del “da dove si viene”, ossia della storia dell’arte che continua a far scorrere sangue blu nelle pratiche degli artisti; sia del “là fuori”: la produzione mediatica, extra artistica, dove l’immagine in movimento si è via via imposta come il più popolare dei mezzi d’espressione, che ormai tutti maneggiamo in qualità di creativi grazie alla videocamera che teniamo immancabilmente a portata di mano.

Il tema approfondito in questa tesi di laurea triennale è il metodo psicanalitico applicato alla critica d’arte: la commistione di queste scienze misteriose e affascinanti che, fondendosi, indagano sulla Creazione Artistica e sul Genio creativo che traspone il proprio inconscio nella sua opera. L’obiettivo è dare una valutazione della validità di questo interessante approccio critico, alla luce di un percorso che, partendo dagli ultimi esiti, a ritroso torna all’origine della psicanalisi nell’arte e sviscera tutti i contributi più importanti del XX secolo.

The paper is a comprehensive discussion of Rosalind Krauss' art-criticism and an attempt to trace connections and shifts in her relation to theoretical and philiosophical currents throughout Krauss' career until her recent book Under Blue Cup. In the first part of the article I introduce the issue of Krauss' attachment to Clement Greenberg and his importance for her writing as a Figure of the Father or Law, who, rejected or overcome in a variety of ways, re-emerges in Krauss' revisionist discourse, as a constant point of reference. Later I trace her postmodern and psychoanalytical inspirations, respectively focusing on her project of "de-mythifying" modernism with such notions of originality and expression and a detailed discussion of the essay The Impulse to See (translated into Polish in the same issue of the journal) and her book The Optical Unconscious. I carefully trace the philosophical background behind her arguments and the emerging idea of vision as a complex subject-object phenomenon governed by the rhytmic pulsation of the unconscious. In the last section I demonstrate how since late 1990s Krauss concentrated on the problem of the medium and gradually distanced herself from poststructuralism and deconstruction.  She claims that the problem of the medium, so important for Greenberg and modernism, remains essential in the consideration of modern and contemporary art. However, it is no longer physical support that makes a medium specific but various sets of principles, ways of proceeding with artistic work. These principles provide a framing for artistic activity, a kind of restricted field for the work of  difference (the paradoxical, but very apt term "differential specificity" of the medium she came up with in her essay Voyage on the Norths Sea is in order here, however  she did not use afterwards, though). In Under Blue Cup, book written after her recovery from serious stroke, she radicalized her position (to some it may seem strongly conservative) adding the existential-ontological dimension to her reflection on the medium with the essential question "Who you are"?, a question about a core structure or a scaffolding which enables both a critic and an artist to work successfully, being guided by a certain constants or principles; she uses a metaphor of a pool off which one has to push oneself to swim freely. Krauss picks a group of artists who, usually described as installation artists - a term she criticizes,  follow these rules and hence avoid the arbitrariness prevalent in contemporary art. Most importantly, for Krauss, the question of medium specificity is related to Barthesian "pleasure of the text" or Sontag's "erotics of art" - a scrutiny of the mechanisms of signification which need to be medium-specific. I interpret her attachment to medium-specificity and search for a constant point of reference as indirect acknowlegement of Greenberg and his idea of modernism as the structural framework, a principle-giver, rebelling against which Krauss  achieved her identity as an art critic. By reconsidering medium, even if wary of Greenberg's spell, she both overcomes and reinstates his position.

This dissertation studies the notion of critique in the context of art, understood through the Kantian paradigm as the enactment of political subjectivity through artistic practice. Firstly, I examine the 20th-century theorisation of critique, closely interlinked with the canon of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde (including conceptual art and 70s institutional critique), in order to highlight the essentially antagonistic and transgressive characteristic of modernist criticality – a critique that, despite its self-imagined ‘outside’ position, is deeply embedded in modernity’s commodifying institutionality. Secondly, I discuss some practices and theories emerging in the 90s in Western Europe and the Americas that began to deal with critique non-antagonistically, instead looking to find relational political subjectivity within institutional and corporate structures. Lastly, I discuss David Joselit’s After Art as a paradigm to think critical expression in the contemporary, in which the critical emphasis changes from art’s production to its circulation and movement as an image in the network. Discussing Hal Foster, I establish ‘post-critique’ as a category that embraces a range of critical cultural practices beyond the critical hierachies of modernity, and conclude that critique must operate omnipresently inside institutional structures to match the increasingly complex institutionality of neoliberal capitalism of today.

The aim of this investigation is to consider the extent to which the processes and material stuff of painting remain central to its identity and meaning. Within writing that supports painting, the role played by the medium of paint is too often sidestepped—sidestepped within writings that take as their starting point the interdisciplinary assumption that the message owes little of consequence to the medium through which it becomes disclosed. The retreat from medium specificity, in the 1970s – a move largely made in opposition to the hegemonic force of Greenbergian formalism and the expanded field ushered in by studio practices, as well as an embrace of the text (promoted through theory) – dislocated image from that from which the image is constituted. To a significant extent, particularly in the most vibrant approaches to the medium, the iconographic possibilities of a painting came to be situated in opposition to the characteristics of the painted object.

This project addresses how the reduction of painting to linguistic schemas has rendered the material object of painting redundant. The conception of painting as image – free of material baggage and operable through language alone – serves to disguise the temporal nature of the manner by which a painting is constructed. A painting’s surface is built incrementally and, in its stillness, offers clues to what it has been—perhaps the only clues to what it is. I will redress this in two ways. First, through a body of studio practice I will demonstrate the indispensability of spatiotemporal concerns in respect of the processes and object of painting. My painting is reliant on responsiveness to methods of making, and I will foreground the image’s construction, staging it as an imbrication of language and material in time.

Secondly, I will engage in a written inquiry comprising of five chapters. In Chapter 1, I attest to my concerns as a painter. Chapter 2 embarks on an investigation into the notion of a medium within the post-medium condition. Chapter 3 will consider the positioning of painting: examining philosophical omissions and historiographical oversights, which have, together, contributed to misunderstandings. Chapter 4 seeks, through the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Hölderlin, to negotiate a new ontological model for the medium of painting, and Chapter 5 re-considers my recent practice – and position on medium – through the lens of the aforementioned inquiry.

The context for this work is the realm in which painting’s ontological status is questioned—targeting the nodal point where there is recourse to consider the extent to which the meaning of a painting is dependent on the specificity of its material conditions. To that end, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of truth (and of equipmentality) – developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and the Hölderlin Lectures – offers the possibility of replacing the redundancy of the medium with a notion of regeneration, against the backdrop of the endism that haunts painting.

They would say, face the canvas and let it happen, follow your own gestures, let the painting create itself. But I'd always have to think up something first. If I didn't, it wasn't art to me. Also it looked real dumb. They wanted to collapse the whole art process into one act; I wanted to break it into stages, which is what I do now. Whatever I do now is completely premeditated, however off-the-wall it might be.

Tom Gunning has recognized in the notion of attraction an “anti-narrative” potential able to survive in the underground cinema, inspiring the affirmation of a cinematic counter-history. Similarly, Rosalind Krauss has identified in the cinema of attractions the possibility to produce aesthetic counterstrategies that aim to question the claim of purity of mainstream modernism. This essay has the purpose to analyze how the cinema of attractions has influenced, during the nineteenth century, the formation of a new perceptive consciousness able to redefine our cinematic and aesthetic gaze.

Approaching the wealth of contemporary experimental practices in which geography and art spar and fuse with one another, it would be easy to play them off against a straw-man vision of modern geography, fervently scientistic and defined strictly against imaginative practice. But geography was never such a fossil, prime for artistic deconstruction or demystification. Reflections on

The argument here is that Peirce was much stranger and more complicated than he has been taken to be in art history (by readers from Rosalind Krauss onward). And a parallel argument that in most cases, what art historians want to say does not require the concept of the index.

Dominik Brabant
Rodin-Lektüren
Deutungen und Debatten von der Moderne zur Postmoderne
DOI: https://doi.org/10.16994/bah
English Summary
Interpreting Rodin
Debates and Discussions from Modernity to Postmodernity

With the works of Auguste Rodin, modernity finally reached the art of sculpture. One might think for example of the French sculptor’s innovative depiction of the human body as a living organism (The Age of Bronze) and of the playful proliferation of iconographic and literary
references (The Gates of Hell). But how, one could ask, did this art historical knowledge come into being? How did the work of the French sculptor become an iconic ›incarnation‹ of modernity itself?
While art historical research and exhibitions usually tend to use the notion of »modernity« as a conceptual framework which helps to describe the newness of Rodin’s works, this study in contrast turns to the historical emergence of this modernist discourse in some of its key
moments. Its main focus is on the highly divergent approaches to the sculptor and his work, as they appeared for example in the art criticism of the naturalist and symbolist schools, but also in vitalist philosophy, in sociology, in cultural criticism, in the rather conservative art
historical research of postwar Germany, in the American debate on modernism and in postmodernist interpretations. In the debates about Rodin, every new ›reading‹ of his works and of the artistic persona seems to take up earlier interpretations and reinterprets them. The
reader of this study is therefore invited to take part in the encounter of a dense network of ideas and concepts about modernity in search of itself.
The second chapter, entitled Einfühlung und Diagnose, is devoted to Rodin’s famous sculpture The Age of Bronze (1877) and to the notorious scandal that this work evoked at its first presentations in the Salons of Belgium and France. Rodin’s naturalistic exaggeration of
the traditional modes of representation of the human body has traditionally been interpreted by art historians as a proof of his outstanding craftsmanship. As can be read in many studies,
the artist had, with this work, achieved a new degree of sculptural immediacy in the empirical description of the human body. In contrast to that, the focus of this chapter will be more on the ways how contemporary art critics, in their early comments on this work, and later art historians have exerted the ambivalence of their own receptive attitude towards the work – and how this ambivalence has become an important catalyst for the discussions about Rodin’s modernity. As shall be demonstrated, these early critics verbalized an indecisive oscillation
between an enthusiasm for the aesthetic presence (which seemed to directly emanate from this sculpture) on the one hand and an accusation that this work might have been produced by the use of a mechanical reproduction of a living body on the other hand.

Life and death, presence and absence, an intuitive way of experiencing art and a diagnostic
gaze, an apologia for artistic originality and a looming reproach for mechanical reproduction: these seemingly opposing terms are intermingled in an indissoluble way since the early
debates about the sculptor – up to the highly polemical dispute between Rosalind Krauss and the Stanford art historian Albert Elsen in the 1980s which will be discussed in the last

chapter.

The third chapter addresses the recent research on Rodin. In addition, some theoretical and methodological reflections are presented. A central challenge of this study lies in the question of how the reception history of Rodin’s works can be described without falling back into antiquated notions of creative genius and artistic »intentionality« on the one side and radically constructivist methods on the other side. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, a theorist of science studies, has created the concept of »Experimentalsysteme« in order to be able to describe the
emergence of new knowledge in the process of knowledge-making. This notion can help us to come to terms with the fundamental contingency of the discourse on Rodin and the project of
modernity.

The fourth chapter with the title Figurenkunst und Künstlerfigur turns to the art-critical writings on the Gates of Hell (1880). In this chapter, famous art critics and writers such as Edmond de Goncourt, Gustave Geffroy, Anatole France and Arthur Symons are at the center
of interest. For the generation of the symbolist art critics, for example, the Gates of Hell  became an icon of their own melancholic art doctrine insofar as the art work seemed to stage a temporality of deferral and hesitation which could be understood as a counter-image to an
all-too-optimistic belief in historical progress. At the same time, Rodin’s apparent inability to bring this work to an end seemed to betray a very similar understanding of time.

Rilke’s and Simmel’s interpretations of Rodin’s work, which are at the core of the following chapter, are described as theoretically ambitious attempts of emulating the art-critical debate at the turn of the century by using innovative narrative strategies of coalescing biographical
patterns and reflections on art (Rilke) or by declaring Rodin’s work to be the ideal object for an analysis of modernity in the context of contemporary sociology (Simmel).

The sixth chapter, entitled Verlust und Wiederbelebung, turns to two interpretations by German-speaking authors in the years around 1950: the philosopher Günther Anders and the art historian Josef Schmoll. gen. Eisenwerth. Anders, who was also a student of Edmund
Husserl, described Rodin’s sculptural images of the human body as artistic expressions of an historical experience of loss and isolation, as objects which could stimulate a deepened reflection about modernity as crises. Josef Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth’s investigations of the
motif of the torso, which emerged in the 1950s, rather tried to describe the fragmented body as the »symbol« of an aesthetic experience of totality and holism. Obviously, the art historian’s strategy of emphatically denying the disturbing aesthetic effects of some of Rodin’s torsos can be – at least from today’s perspective – conceived as a way of dealing with the historical experience of the collapse of civilization.

The last chapter of the study is entitled Auf dem Weg in die Postmoderne. It focuses on the writings of Leo Steinberg and Rosalind Krauss since the 1960s. While Steinberg was mostly interested in the diverse ways of how Rodin constructed and deconstructed the meanings of his sculptures with the help of the art forms of the »montage« and the »assemblage«, thereby ostentatiously demonstrating the sculptural »semiosis«, Krauss emphatically turned to the problem of ›reading‹ Rodin’s images of the human body. For her, Rodin’s sculptures became
emblems of an ›opaque‹ subjectivity and therefore the first artistic realizations of a radically new paradigm of aesthetic reception: Instead of clinging to the traditional notions of psychological and hermeneutical depth in the beholding of sculptures, in her view Rodin’s
sculptures emphasize the material surface as the original site of the production of meaning.