Rosalind E. Krauss - Overview

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 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.