Rosalind E. Krauss

Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born November 30, 1941)is an American art critic, art theorist and a professorat Columbia University in New York City.[1] Kraussis known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting,sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist shehas published steadily since 1965 in Artforum, Art Inter-national and Art in America. She was associate editorof Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor ofOctober, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and the-ory that she co-founded in 1976.

1 Early life

Krauss was born to Matthew M. Epstein and Bertha Lu-ber [2] in Washington D.C. and grew up in the area, visit-ing art museums with her father.[3] After graduating fromWellesley in 1962, she attended Harvard,[4] whose De-partment of Fine Arts (nowDepartment of History of Artand Architecture) had a strong tradition of the intensiveanalysis of actual art objects under the aegis of the FoggMuseum.Krauss wrote her dissertation on the work of DavidSmith.[5] Krauss received her Ph.D. in 1969. The disser-tation was published as Terminal Iron Works in 1971.[4]

In the late-1960s and early-1970s Krauss began to con-tribute articles to art journals such as Art Internationaland Artforum — which, under the editorship of PhilipLeider, was relocated from California to New York.[5]She began by writing the “Boston Letter” for Art Interna-tional, but soon published well-received articles on JasperJohns (Lugano Review, 1965) and Donald Judd (Allusionand Illusion in Donald Judd, Artforum, May 1966). Hercommitment to the emerging minimal art in particular sether apart from Michael Fried, who was oriented towardthe continuation of modernist abstraction in Jules Olit-ski, Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro. Krauss’s articleA View of Modernism (Artforum, September 1972), wasone signal of this break.

2 Founding October

Krauss became dissatisfied with Artforum when in itsNovember 1974 issue it published a full-page advertise-ment by featuring the artist Lynda Benglis aggressivelyposed with a large latex dildo and wearing only a pair ofsunglasses promoting an upcoming exhibition of hers at

the Paula Cooper Gallery.[6][7] Although Benglis’ imageis now popularly cited as important example of genderperformativity in contemporary art, it provoked mixedresponses when it first appeared.[8] Krauss and other Art-forum personnel attacked Benglis’ work in the followingmonth’s issue of Artforum, describing the advertisementas exploitative and brutalizing, and soon left the magazineto co-found October in 1976.[9]

October was formed as a politically-charged journalthat introduced American readers to the ideas ofFrench post-structuralism, made popular by MichelFoucault and Roland Barthes.[2] Krauss used Octo-ber as a way to publish essays on post-structuralistart theory, Deconstructionist theory, psychoanalysis,postmodernism and feminism.[2]

The founders included Krauss, Annette Michelson andthe artist Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Krauss was appointed asits founding editor. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe withdrew af-ter only a few issues, and by the spring of 1977, DouglasCrimp joined the editorial team. In 1990, after Crimpleft the journal, Krauss and Michelson were joined byYve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,Denis Hollier, and John Rajchman.[10]

3 Academic career

3.1 Hunter College

Krauss taught at Wellesley, MIT and Princeton beforejoining the faculty at Hunter College in 1974. She waspromoted to professor in 1977 at Hunter and was alsoappointed professor at the Graduate Center of CUNY.She held the title of Distinguished Professor at Hunteruntil she left to join the Columbia University faculty in1992. In 1985, a monograph of essays by Krauss, titledThe Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other ModernistMyths was published by The MIT Press.

3.2 Columbia University

Previously Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art andTheory at Columbia, in 2005 Rosalind Krauss was pro-moted to the highest faculty rank of University Profes-sor. She has received fellowships from the John SimonGuggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National En-dowment for the Arts and has been a fellow of the Centerfor Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and of the Insti-

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2 4 CRITICAL APPROACH

tute for Advanced Study. She received the Frank JewettMather Award for criticism from the College Art Associ-ation in 1973.[11] She has been a fellow of the New YorkInstitute for the Humanities since 1992 and was electeda member of the American Academy of Arts and Sci-ences in 1994. She recently received an honorary doctor-ate from the University of London.

4 Critical approach

4.1 Greenbergian tradition

Krauss’s attempts to understand the phenomenon of mod-ernist art, in its historical, theoretical, and formal dimen-sions, have led her in various directions. She has, for ex-ample, been interested in the development of photogra-phy, whose history-running parallel to that of modernistpainting and sculpture-makes visible certain previouslyoverlooked phenomena in the “high arts”, such as the roleof the indexical mark, or the function of the archive. Shehas also investigated certain concepts, such as “formless-ness”, “the optical unconscious”, or “pastiche”, which or-ganize modernist practice in relation to different explana-tory grids from those of progressive modernism, or theavant-garde.Like many, Krauss had been drawn to the criticism ofClement Greenberg, as a counterweight to the highly sub-jective, 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 McShineto Peter Schjeldahl, but for Krauss and others, its basisin subjective expression was fatally unable to account forhow a particular artwork’s objective structure gives riseto its associated subjective effects.Greenberg’s way of assessing how an art object works,or how it is put together, became for Krauss a fruit-ful resource;[12] even if she and fellow “Greenberger”,Michael Fried, would break first with the older critic,and then with each other, at particular moments of judg-ment, the commitment to formal analysis as the neces-sary if not sufficient ground of serious criticism wouldstill remain for both of them. Decades after her firstengagement with Greenberg, Krauss still used his ideasabout an artwork’s 'medium' as a jumping-off point forher strongest effort to come to terms with post-1980 art inthe person of William Kentridge. Krauss would formu-late this formalist commitment in strong terms, againstattempts to account for powerful artworks in terms ofresidual ideas about an artist’s individual genius, for in-stance in the essays “The Originality of the Avant-Garde:A Postmodernist Repetition” and “Photography’s Discur-sive Spaces.” For Krauss, and for the school of critics whodeveloped under her influence, the Greenbergian legacyoffers at its best a way of accounting for works of art us-ing public and hence verifiable criteria.

4.2 Translating ephemeralities into prose

Whether about (Cubist collage, Surrealist photography,early Giacometti sculpture, Rodin, Brâncuși, Pollock) orabout art contemporaneous to her own writing (RobertMorris, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman),Krauss translates the ephemeralities of visual and bodilyexperience into precise, vivid English, which has solidi-fied her prestige as a critic. Her usual practice is to makethis experience intelligible by using categories translatedfrom the work of a thinker outside the study of art, such asMaurice Merleau-Ponty, Ferdinand de Saussure, JacquesLacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, GeorgesBataille, or Roland Barthes.[13] Indeed, she participatedin the translation of Lacan’s key text "Television" whichwas published in October and later reissued in book formby Norton. Her work has helped establish the positionof these writers within the study of art, even at the costof provoking anxiety about threats to the discipline’s au-tonomy. She is currently preparing a second volume ofcollected essays as a sequel to The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (1986).In many cases, Krauss is credited as a leader in bringingthese concepts to bear on the study of modern art. Forinstance, her Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) makesimportant use ofMerleau-Ponty's phenomenology (as shehad come to understand it in thinking about minimal art)for viewing modern sculpture in general. In her study ofSurrealist photography, she rejected William Rubin's ef-forts at formal categorization as insufficient, instead ad-vocating the psychoanalytic categories of “dream” and“automatism”, as well as Jacques Derrida's “grammato-logical” idea of “spacing.” See “The Photographic Con-ditions of Surrealism” (October, winter 1981).

4.3 Picasso’s collages

Concerning Cubist art, she took Picasso's collage break-through to be explicable in terms of Saussure's ideasabout the differential relations and non-referentiality oflanguage, rejecting efforts by other scholars to tie thepasted newspaper clippings to social history. Similarly,she held Picasso’s stylistic developments in Cubist por-traiture to be products of theoretical problems inter-nal to art, rather than outcomes of the artist’s love life.Later, she explained Picasso’s participation in the rap-pel à l'ordre or return to order of the 1920s in similarstructuralist terms. See “In the Name of Picasso” (Oc-tober, spring 1981), “The Motivation of the Sign” (inLynn Zelevansky, ed., Picasso and Braque: A Sympo-sium, 1992), and The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus andGiroux, 1998).

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4.4 Freudian theory

From the 1980s, she became increasingly concerned withusing a psychoanalytic understanding of drives and theunconscious, owing less to the Freudianism of an AndréBreton or a Salvador Dalí, and much more to the struc-turalist Lacan and the “dissident surrealist” Bataille.[5]See “No More Play”, her 1984 essay on Giacometti, aswell as “Corpus Delicti”, written for the 1985 exhibi-tion L'Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, CindySherman: 1975–1993 and The Optical Unconscious (both1993) and Formless: A User’s Guidewith Yve-Alain Bois,catalog to the exhibition L'Informe: Mode d'emploi (Paris:Centre Pompidou, 1996).

4.5 Interpreting Pollock

Years after her time at Artforum in the 1960s, Kraussalso returned to the drip painting of Jackson Pollock asboth a culmination of modernist work within the formatof the “easel picture”, and a breakthrough that openedthe 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. uri-nation) paintings. For reference, see the Pollock chapterin The Optical Unconscious, several entries in the Form-less catalog, and “Beyond the Easel Picture”, her con-tribution to the MoMA symposium accompanying the1998 Pollock retrospective (Jackson Pollock: New Ap-proaches). This direction provided intellectual valida-tion for the explosive Pollock markets; but it exacerbatedalready tense relations between herself and more rad-ical currents in visual/cultural studies, the latter grow-ing steadily impatient with the traditional western art-historical canon.In addition to writing focused studies about individualartists, Krauss also produced broader, synthetic studiesthat helped gather together and define the limits of par-ticular fields of practice. Examples of this include “Senseand Sensibility: Reflections on Post '60s Sculpture” (Art-forum, Nov. 1973), “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcis-sism” (October, spring 1976), “Notes on the Index: Sev-enties Art in America”, in two parts, October spring andfall 1977), “Grids, You Say”, In Grids: Format and Im-age in 20th Century Art (exh. cat.: Pace Gallery, 1978),and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (October, spring1979). Some of these essays are collected in her bookThe Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other ModernistMyths.

5 Curator

Krauss has been curator of many art exhibitions at lead-ing museums, among them exhibitions on Joan Miró atthe Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1970–73), on

surrealism and photography at the Corcoran Museum ofArt (1982–85), on Richard Serra at the Museum ofMod-ern Art (1985–86), and on Robert Morris at the Guggen-heim (1992–94). She prepared an exhibition for theCentre Georges Pompidou in Paris called “Formlessness:Modernism Against the Grain” in 1996.

6 Bibliography

6.1 Selected books by Krauss

• Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith.Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971.

• The Sculpture of David Smith: A CatalogueRaisonné. Garland Reference Library of the Hu-manities, 73. New York: Garland, 1977.

• Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge Mass:The MIT Press, 1977.

• The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Mod-ernist Myths. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MITPress, 1985.

• L'Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism. London:Arts Council, 1986. Exhibition at the HaywardGallery, London, July to September 1986.

• Le Photographique : Pour une théorie des écarts.Translated by Marc Bloch and Jean Kempf. Paris:Macula, 1990.

• The Optical Unconscious (1993)

• Formless: A User’s Guide (with Yve-Alain Bois)(1997)

• The Picasso Papers (1999)

• A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of thePost-Medium Condition (1999)

• Bachelors (2000)

• Perpetual Inventory (2010)

• Under Blue Cup. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MITPress, 2011.

6.2 Selected essays and articles by Krauss

• MIT Press: selected articles by Rosalind Krauss

• “Contemporary Criticism.” Markham, Ont.: AudioArchives of Canada, 1979. 1 sound cassette: 1 7/8ips.

4 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Critical Perspectives in American Art, pp. 25–27.Introduction by Hugh M. Davies. Amherst: FineArts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts,Amherst, 1976. Rosalind Krauss’ text is followedby illustrations of works by Donald Judd, RobertArtschwager and Joel Shapiro. An Exhibition se-lected by Rosalind Krauss, Sam Hunter and Mar-cia Tucker. Fine Arts Center Gallery, University ofMassachusetts/Amherst, April 10, 1976 – May 9,1976, American Pavilion, Venice Biennale, summer1976.

• “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materializationof the Sign in theWork of Peter Eisenman.” In PeterEisenman’s Houses of Cards, pp. 166–184. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1987.

6.3 Book reviews by Krauss

• “Man in a Mold.” Review of James Lord, Gia-cometti: A Biography. In The New Republic, Dec.16, 1985, pp. 24–29.

• “Post-History on Parade.” Review of three books byArthur Danto. In The New Republic,May 25, 1987,pp. 27–30.

• “Only Project.” Review of RichardWollheim, Paint-ing as an Art. In The New Republic, September 12& 19, 1988, pp. 33–38.

6.4 About Krauss

• David Carrier. Rosalind Krauss and Americanphilosophical art criticism. Greenwood PublishingGroup, 2002. ISBN 0-275-97520-7, ISBN 978-0-275-97520-3

• “Rosalind Krauss.” In Judy K. Collischan VanWag-ner, Women Shaping Art: Profiles of Power, pp.149–164. New York: Praeger, 1984

• JanetMalcolm, “AGirl of the Zeitgeist”, Part II,TheNew Yorker, October 27, 1986.

• Scott Rothkopf, “Krauss and the Art of CulturalControversy,” TheHarvard Crimson, May 16, 1997.

• Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” ArtBulletinMarch 2000.

• David Raskin, “The Shiny Illusionism of Krauss andJudd”, Art Journal Spring 2006.

• Eddie Yeghiayan: Articles About Rosalind Krauss

• Yve-Alain Bois. “Rosalind Krauss with Yve-AlainBois”.The Brooklyn Rail, 2012

6.5 Reviews of Krauss’s work

6.5.1 The Originality of the Avant-Garde and OtherModernist Myths

• Bois, Yve-Alain. Art Journal (Winter 1985), pp.369ff.

• Carrier, David. Burlington Magazine (November1985), 127(992): 817.

• Owens, Craig. “Analysis Logical and Ideological.”Art in America (May 1985), pp. 25–31. Reprintedin Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, andCulture, pp. 268–283. Berkeley: University of Cal-ifornia Press, 1992.

• List of reviews ofTheOriginality of the Avant-Garde

6.5.2 The Optical Unconscious

• Roger Kimball, “Feeling Sorry for RosalindKrauss,” New Criterion 1993

• Reviews of The Optical Unconscious

6.5.3 The Picasso Papers

• Marilyn McCully, “The Fallen Angel?" review ofThe Picasso Papers in New York Review of Books,April 8, 1999.

• Harry Cooper and Marilyn McCully, “The PicassoPapers: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books,October 7, 1999.

6.5.4 Art Since 1900

• Claire Bishop, Artforum.com, Apr. 9, 2005

• Matthew Collings, The GuardianMay 14, 2005

• Martin Gayford, arts.telegraph Apr. 24, 2005

• Eric Gibson, OpinionJournal.comMar. 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 inAmerica, Nov. 2005, pp. 61–63.

• Barry Schwabsky, The Nation Dec. 8, 2005

• Frank Whitford, Times Online (UK) Mar. 20, 2005

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6.6 General material about Krauss

• David Cohen, review of Challenging Art in Art Bul-letin, Sept. 2002

• Columbia University: Rosalind Krauss

• MIT Press: Rosalind Krauss

• Robert Storr, letter to the editor, Artforum Nov.2002

7 References[1] Columbia Faculty directory

[2] Rosalind E. Krauss biography

[3] “Rosalind Krauss”. The Art Story. The Art Story Founda-tion. Retrieved October 5, 2012.

[4] The Real Thing: An Interview with Rosalind E. Kraussby David Plante at: http://www.artcritical.com/

[5] Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary ofModern and Contemporary Art , Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2009. p. 384

[6] Cohen, David; Newman, Amy (September 2002). “Chal-lenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974”. The Art Bulletin 84(3): 535–538. doi:10.2307/3177317. JSTOR 3177317.

[7] Doss, Erika (2002). “Feminist Art and Black Art”.Twentieth-Century American Art. Oxford History of Art.Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 184. ISBN 0-19-284239-0.

[8] Richmond, Susan. "" “Sizing Up the Dildo: LyndaBenglis’ Artforum Advertisement as a Feminist Icon”,n.paradoxa 15 (January 2005): 24-34.

[9] Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary ofModern and Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2009. p. 384

[10] “Mathias Danbolt, Front Room – Back Room: An Inter-view with Douglas Crimp”. Trikster – Nordic Queer Jour-nal #2, 2008. Retrieved 2008-09-26.

[11] “Awards”. The College Art Association. Retrieved 11October 2010.

[12] Hughes, Robert (21 October 1993). “The Medium In-quisitor”. The New York Review of Books 40 (17). Re-trieved 4 June 2013.

[13] Chilvers, Ian & Glaves-Smith, John eds., Dictionary ofModern and Contemporary Art , Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2009. p. 385

6 8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

8 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

8.1 Text• Rosalind E. Krauss Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_E._Krauss?oldid=660427945 Contributors: Zoicon5, Topbanana,Pigsonthewing, DragonflySixtyseven, C12H22O11, Liuyao, Recury, Japanese Searobin, Kelly Martin, Chochopk, Mandarax, BD2412,Mordant21, Gdrbot, Roboto de Ajvol, YurikBot, DanMS, Grubber, Nikkimaria, SmackBot, Bluebot, Colonies Chris, Grhabyt, Fuhghet-taboutit, Blima3000, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Michael Bednarek, BillFlis, Phuzion, Ewulp, Cydebot, Emeraldcityserendipity, Modernist,Dsp13, Freshacconci, Postmoderator, Velocicaptor, JaGa, Flowanda, Johnpacklambert, Entre5et7, Acmilan10italia, Ethicoaestheticist,Michaeldsuarez, Sean.hoyland, Lightwiki, Cenarium, Dk 1969, JFMS, Weerloos, Jcraford, Theredproject, Artethical, Addbot, Modarnist,Yobot, AnomieBOT, Valueyou, AaronF2, Diminster, Omnipaedista, D'ohBot, Johnflynch, Peacedance, RjwilmsiBot, Artiquities, Akerans,Midas02, Philafrenzy, Raymond Ellis, Helpful Pixie Bot, Mr. Credible, Arthistorygrrl, Rahz123, VIAFbot, Refusecollection, Macro-scope7, G S Palmer, Monkbot, Lindsaytorte, Cz2127, KasparBot and Anonymous: 45

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