Rosalind Krauss

The topic of this paper is the concept of originality as it relates to the concept of genesis developed by Deleuze in his early essay 'The Idea of Genesis in Kant's Esthetics.' Using the recent exhibition of Tim Bennett's as a starting point, it brings together two accounts of originality, the first postmodern one represented by Rosalind Krauss's 'The Originality of the Avant-garde' and the second genetic kind found in Deleuze's aforementioned essay, to show how originality and genesis might correspond, paying close attention to the transcendental innovations of Kant's aesthetic tradition to which both concepts belong.

RESUMEN: Este artículo tiene como objeto realizar un análisis del motivo visual del ojo en Un chien andalou. El ojo, que en esta película es rasurado con una cuchilla, tiene una función simbólica que recorre toda la filmografía de su director. Numerosos ojos aparecen en toda su obra, desde los de los ciegos de nacimiento, una figura esencial en su cine, hasta las alusiones al ojo del espectador. En este artículo realizo una lista de las veces que aparece el motivo del ojo en la obra del cineasta aragonés y mediante los presupuestos de la teoría de la recepción interpreto el significado de dicho símbolo visual en la filmografía de su autor. Se concluye que el ojo en la obra de Luis Buñuel alude a la procedencia interior de las imágenes que componen el film, es decir, a una reflexión del mismo autor sobre su proceso creativo.

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.

With the introduction of moving image artworks like film and video into the traditional art museum setting, a new way of instantiating relations between different art and media forms appeared. While some critics, such as Rosaling Krauss, think that Viola's recent Works 'derealize the medium' altogether, this article argues by contrast that he re-imiagines different art and media forms affectively.

Available for purchase: https://www.routledge.com/Consuming-Surrealism-in-American-Culture-Dissident-Modernism/Zalman/p/book/9781138548251

Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism argues that Surrealism worked as a powerful agitator to disrupt dominant ideas of modern art in the United States. Unlike standard accounts that focus on Surrealism in the U.S. during the 1940s as a point of departure for the ascendance of the New York School, this study contends that Surrealism has been integral to the development of American visual culture over the course of the twentieth century. Through analysis of Surrealism in both the museum and the marketplace, Sandra Zalman tackles Surrealism’s multi-faceted circulation as both elite and popular. Zalman shows how the American encounter with Surrealism was shaped by Alfred Barr, William Rubin and Rosalind Krauss as these influential curators mobilized Surrealism to compose, to concretize, or to unseat narratives of modern art in the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s - alongside Surrealism’s intersection with advertising, Magic Realism, Pop, and the rise of contemporary photography. As a popular avant-garde, Surrealism openly resisted art historical classification, forcing the supposedly distinct spheres of modernism and mass culture into conversation and challenging theories of modern art in which it did not fit, in large part because of its continued relevance to contemporary American culture.

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.

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.

«Le mot hébreu pour «visage» est une forme plurielle: Panim. C’est dire comme le visage est à la fois ce qui regarde et ce qui est regardé ; c’est dire à quel point on (re)connaît l’Autre dans le visage que l’on voit, dans celui qui nous regarde, dans cet entre-regards qui fait la relation humaine. C’est pourquoi le visage ne se laisse jamais regarder comme une image, et c’est peut-être le sens de la formule énigmatique de Levinas, «l’éthique est une optique», qui revient à plusieurs reprises dans ses écrits. Dans un monde saturé d’images et de visages désincarnés (publicité, écrans, foule), que reste-t-il de notre responsabilité quand il s’agit de voir? Notre regard porte-t-il encore en puissance la dimension éthique que lui accordait Levinas? «Il n’y a pas si longtemps, il est arrivé quelque chose à notre regard. L’expérience de la vision a changé. Le champ visuel a subi une transformation radicale. Les images sont pourtant plus nettes que jamais. Le niveau des pixels ne cesse d’augmenter. Mais cette acuité dissimule le fait que le sens de la vue n’a plus de sens, que l’œil est cliniquement mort. » C’est à partir de ce constat qu’Hagi Kenaan propose une autre éthique du regard après Levinas.

Este artículo plantea una exposición y revisión crítica del método psicoiconográfico de Mary Matthews Gedo a través de su confrontación con autores como Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Jean Sutherland y Georges Didi-Huberman en torno a los usos de la teoría psicoanalítica en la historia y crítica de arte. Esta aproximación crítica permitirá diferenciar los usos del psicoanálisis que derivan en la psicoiconografía frente a aquellos vinculados a la recepción del psicoanálisis lacaniano en el contexto de
la crítica de arte norteamericana por parte de autores vinculados a la revista October, como Krauss o Foster. A pesar de señalar algunos aciertos metodológicos, como la interpretación de las imágenes a partir del proceso de elaboración onírica, la aproximación crítica se centrará en dos aspectos concretos del método de M. Gedo: la excesiva importancia concedida a las experiencias traumáticas infantiles en la producción artística de Picasso en obras como Guernica, y el desmedido “furor interpretativo” de la vida privada del artista que lleva a cabo en la crítica de obras como La vida o El viejo guitarrista.

On a Web page for Momentum International Art Conference, art theorist Annette W. Balkema (2000) foresees the day when "familiar philosophical concepts will no longer be able to understand and clarify what visual art in the 21st century is about". The reason Balkema gives for this rather radical change in circumstances should come as no surprise: the impact of media technology on all forms of practice, including art. "There is an enormous shift in today's artistic attitude, which may be traced back to the world of the Internet", says Balkema. Art, too, is advancing into the present century, pulling theoreticians along with it: "we will have to imitate artists and shift our (theoretical) attitudes". Art theory usually arrives late, but it shouldn't have to imitate artists unless there is something about to happen that will completely redefine its relation to practice. How then can we account for such a shift in attitude when the conceptual tools at our disposal are known in advance to be inadequate, and how do we go about inventing adequate ones? Since not every shift in attitude demands new concepts, perhaps our preparing ourselves for the unfamiliar is a question of methodology.

Neste artigo, analisamos como, em termos visuais, os significados articulados pelo informe, verbete publicado por Georges Bataille na revista Documents, são determinados por uma operação que dilacera a forma, ao mesmo tempo que a mantém no limite da integridade. Nesse sentido, investigaremos como a nuvem e a mancha, nas obras de Hans Bellmer e Nobuyoshi Araki, contrapõem-se à noção de pureza do corte fotográfico defendida por Philippe Dubois, no instante em que percebemos, a partir do conceito de heterologia, de Georges Bataille, como elas tornam-se um espaço de contaminação, onde o baixo e o elevado alternam-se a ponto de eliminarem as fronteiras entre o sujeito e o mundo, o ser humano e a natureza.

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.

In this paper I argue that a reimagining of the notion of silence as more than a sonic phenomenon is needed to address the dominant structural apparati of Western discourse. Silence as an existential medium is where the Foucauldian apparatuses that power the status-quo of the world operate. They forge connections between things like ideology and social organization where one falls into the wake of the other and is shaped in a way that is nearly invisible to the passing glance. It is the indeterminacy within silence as explored by John Cage that that allows this to happen, but it also offers the potential to have an active role in the shaping of these apparatuses toward a more beneficial and culturally aware form of society. This new approach is crucial in helping one learn to embrace the indeterminacy of life and the hazy relational structures that drive our existence.

The first publication in a series of three articles devoted to the memory of Anthony Caro (1924—2013), one of the last great sculptors of the XX century. Gaining fame in the 1960s, he entered the history of art as an inspirer of the “new generation” — a group of British sculptors who were mostly his students. The publication traces the evolution of Caro’s work in the 1950s — 1960s, from early expressionistic sculptures to his famous abstract compositions. It also explores the origins of his perception of abstract sculpture in theoretical and practical context, analyzes the ideas of Clement Greenberg and art methods of American sculptor David Smith. Special attention is paid to the artistic program of the “new generation” and its relationship with the American minimalism.

Первая публикация в серии из трех статей, посвященных памяти Энтони Каро (1924—2013), одного из последних скульпторов XX века. Получив известность в 1960-е гг., он вошел в историю искусства как идейный вдохновитель «нового поколения» — группы английских скульпторов, бывших в основном его учениками. В публикации прослеживается эволюция творчества Каро в 1950-е — 1960-е гг., начиная от ранних экспрессионистических скульптур и заканчивая абстрактными композициями. Исследуются истоки его понимания абстрактной скульптуры в теоретическом и практическом контексте. Анализируются идеи Клемента Гринберга и художественный метод американского скульптора Дэвида Смита. Уделяется внимание художественной программе «нового поколения» и ее взаимосвязи с американским минимализмом. Итоговые выводы статьи связаны с размышлениями о глубоко индивидуальном характере творчества Каро, его личном пути в современной скульптуре.

Der Begriff des Kontradispositivs wird in der vorliegenden Studie zur Beschreibung zeichnerischer Verfahren und Diskurse im Zeitraum von 1955 bis 1975 gebraucht. Als Kontradispositive lässt sich eine dekonstruktive Zeichenpraxis beschreiben, die an den Paradigmen ihrer eigenen Geschichte und Technik ansetzt, indem sie die Theorie der Zeichnung zu Ende denkt und sie als eine Kunst der Entgrenzung fortschreibt. Philosophische Exkurse und kunsthistorische Einzelstudien zu Linie und Grund, Geste und Spur, Blindheit, Händigkeit und Aleatorik ›ergrenzen‹ die Möglichkeiten zeichnerischer Medialität und eröffnen gleichzeitig einen kritischen Blick auf Allegorien und Adaptionen ihrer Entgrenzungsgeschichte nach 1975.

Ausgezeichnet mit dem Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis 2018 des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte in München.

Często, aby odświeżyć znaczenie jakiegoś słowa, którym się mamy posługiwać lub którym posługujemy się stale tak, jak każą prawa zwyczajowe, bezwiednie przyjmowane i akceptowane, zastanówmy się, co mówi nam ono samo przez się, co mogło znaczyć, zanim tradycja nawarstwiła na nim sensy bezpośrednio przez to słowo niewyznaczane".

This paper theorizes the representation of Isabel Archer’s subjectivity as complicated by James’s own rhetorical uses of image and text in The Art of the Novel. Using the film theory of Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss’s readings of Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills,” this essay argues that moments where Isabel’s representation seems to evoke the formal tropes of portraiture and the realist novel concurrently mark sites of discursive deconstruction that are key to understanding the complexity of representing selfhood.

While he is appreciated primarily as a sculptor, Richard Serra also made several films and videos in the 1960s and 1970s which have a pivotal role in both the history of avant-garde film and the development of early video art. This article takes into account this ‘collateral’ production, suggesting that Serra’s work is not merely formalist or materialist. Rather, as his video work suggests, his larger sculptural works and conceptual approach require a re-interpretation as commentaries on social and political issues. This essay focuses on the artist’s videos, reading them as an extension of both his films and his sculptural production, but which takes a more explicit stance than either. The essay will also take into account the similarities between Serra’s stance and that of the contemporary Guerrilla Television movement, trying to position them within the articulated history of the relationships between contemporary art and mass media.

A first attempt at a rational linguistic distinction of the real that separates the determination of characteristics from the absence of this determination-this being an attempt to assign the real to another space other than the reality in which it currently exists, which one might suspect is only a construct-is the same as the distinction between the representational and the nonrepresentational. This ex negativo concept of the real would fall into the latter category, as it is the coded denotation, the characteristic-filtering gaze, and the eyes schooled by the conventions of seeing and the desire for categories that give any form of realism the ability to deceive us with its temporal and stylistic artificiality. Either from a Kantian concept of a fundamentally unapproachable reality or from the constructivist view of artificiality that is void any reality whatsoever, if when looking at something the viewer takes into consideration the means of viewing, the methods, or the experimentation, then the real is often seen as precisely the area that is able to elude the symbols created by both the sciences as well as art, even though the real provides the very inspirations for all of the insights, discoveries, and inventions that they create.

Walter Benjamin is a reference we keep stumbling upon in texts about modernity and contemporary art. The North-American authors of the New York school became one of the most influential sources for the dissemination of his work, propagating the use of his concepts throughout academia and art criticism. The founders and disciples of October magazine (MIT Press, created in 1976 by Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson) played a key role in changing art history’s discourse, leading to a thorough rethinking of a number of artistic proposals (almost invariably western ones) starting from the early 20th century. They re-read them in the light of new conceptions of history and of the art historical object in a process profoundly influenced by French structuralism and post-structuralism. But also by Walter Benjamin. In this article I will analyse how the formulation of a «copy paradigm» to understand 20th century art as a reaction to Clement Greenberg’s modernism, promoted the dissemination of Walter Benjamin’s concepts in the art historical discourse. To this end, I will focus on some works by Rosalind Krauss and her contribution to a reformulation of art historiography which has had a major influence on international theoretical approaches, criticism and 20th century art history.