On <i>The Painted Word</i>

October · 2025-01-01

Abstract This article is a reprint of Rosalind Krauss's 1975 review of Tom Wolfe's “The Painted Word,” published in Partisan Review. The review critically examines Wolfe's polemical attack on modern art, its creators, critics, and patrons. Krauss argues that Wolfe's fundamental thesis—that modern art is empty of intrinsic content and functions merely as a social exchange medium validated by obscure critical theory—stems from his professed inability to experience genuine aesthetic response to the works themselves. The review defends art criticism as a legitimate endeavor that aids viewers' authentic engagement with art rather than creating meaning where none exists. Krauss contrasts Wolfe's dismissive approach with the serious critical projects of figures like Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg, who, despite their different approaches, share a commitment to describing and clarifying genuine aesthetic experiences. She argues that Wolfe's theatrical style substitutes his own personality for substantive engagement with art, and concludes that, contrary to Wolfe's claims, the real problem in contemporary art criticism is not excessive theorizing but insufficient critical engagement with modern artistic developments.

Sculpture Is a Verb: Remembering Richard

October · 2024-01-01 · 11 citations

Abstract Rosalind Krauss analyzes aspects of Richard Serra's oeuvre, and Clement Greenberg's opposition to it, by way of a discussion of several of his sculptures, particularly One Ton Prop (House of Cards), as well as Verb List, locating the essence of Serra's work in that of the medium of sculpture itself: contrapposto. The article begins: “My flight from the house of Greenberg (Judd called us “Greenbergers”) began with Richard Serra: In conversation, Clem would dismiss him outright. “I think this derived from his indignant reading of One Ton Prop: House of Cards, with its four lead plates abutted corner-to-corner, indeed like a “house of cards.” My guess is that Clem made a snap judgment from this almost-cube that Serra was a Minimalist—an aesthetic neighbor of Flavin and Judd. But from the first, starting with my encounter with One Ton Prop at the Whitney's Anti-Illusion exhibition in 1969, I have seen Serra's work as being adamantly opposed to Minimalism and exploring, instead, sculpture's “aesthetic support.” All mediums derive their logic from such a core postulate. We could say that poetry's is metaphor; ceramics' is symmetry (as the two hands shape the wet clay on the pottery wheel); and sculpture's is most emphatically that of contrapposto: the bilateral articulation of the human form in terms of weight and support.” “Contrapposto: art-history speak for counterpoise—the necessary balance for the upright human posture. Freud tells a simple evolutionary story in Civilization and Its Discontents, the dénouement of which is the moment mankind stood up—left the ground behind and rose above it on his two legs. This moment engineered a momentous realignment of man's perceptual organs, he reasoned. Nose and teeth and jaws receded before the supremacy of eyes and ears, the animality of pawing and sniffing being replaced by the visual, giving way, instead, to beauty and detachment. Thus the mental space in the armor of humanity expanded. Detachment in turn opened onto newly established cognitive zones: reflection, logic, memory. “Perceptual distance opened a space within which memory developed and with it the grasp of history—of the moment of realization that one has left the ground. The brevity of that moment contracts it into a timeless purity, and the purity of this snap of the fingers makes it abstract.”

Штука по 1900 роцi

Rocznik Ruskiej Bursy · 2023-12-15

The Madness of the Gaze: for Hubert Damisch, in every light

October · 2023-01-01

Abstract In his seminar “The Eye and the Gaze,” Jacques Lacan is forced to regard the problem of the unconscious through the grid of the Cartesian cogito. In the certainty of “I think, therefore I am,” which expresses the complete transparency of the self to its own apprehension, leaves no space for the ineffability of the unconscious. Lacan sees this proto-enlightenment certainty running through all perceptual mechanisms, as in Paul Valèry's poem “La Jeune Parque,” which declares, “I saw myself seeing myself.” Lacan turns to anamorphosis as a perceptual exception, in which there are two viewing points turned on the same object, neither coinciding with the other, such that classical perspective's fundamental unity of the perceiving subject is alienated from itself—a Spaltung, or split, that enables the unconscious presence of the uncanny and its castrative impression of death.

Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (1976)

2022-01-01 · 71 citations

Beyond Painting

October · 2022-01-01

Abstract Rosalind Krauss argues that the 2020 Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art shows that the painterly side of this famously “anti-painter” artist was more pronounced than he would have ever admitted.

Paradigm Shift: The Speculation of Downcast Eyes

Berghahn Books · 2022-10-01

Tracing Nadar

Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

• Art
• Art history
• History

The portraitist Nadar was well-placed by longevity and a chequered, somewhat picaresque career to survey his century’s shifts and advances towards modernity. Though it was written toward the end of his life, Nadar’s memoir, My Life as a Photographer, was undertaken at a point when its author’s activity in the medium had far from ceased. The memoir on photography was hardly Nadar’s only publication. In the three chapters, then, Nadar circles around what seems for him to be the central fact of photography: that its operation is that of the imprint, the register, the trace. Photography was born in the 1830s by, in Nadar’s words, ‘exploding suddenly into existence, surpassing all possible expectations.’ And into the initial responses to this event are folded the themes of the Spiritualism. For Nadar the question of the intelligible trace remained viable as an esthetic basis for the photography.

The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism

Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 38 citations

• Art
• Visual arts

In this chapter the author uses structuralist tools to analyse the importance of photography within the Surrealist project of registering ‘the marvellous’. In 1925 Andre Breton began to examine the subject surrealism and painting, and from the outset he characterized his material in terms of the very twin poles - automatism and dream - and the subject matter of William Rubin’s later definition. Breton introduces ‘Surrealism and Painting’ with a declaration of the absolute value of vision among the sensory modes. The privileged place of vision in surrealism is immediately challenged by a medium given a greater privilege: namely, writing. Psychic automatism is itself a written form, a ‘scribbling on paper,’ a textual production. And when it is transferred to the domain of visual practice, as in the work of Andre Masson, automatism is no less understood as a kind of writing. The surrealist photographers rarely used photomontage.

A lógica cultural do museu tardo-capitalista

ARS (São Paulo) · 2021 · 2 citations

• Humanities
• Art
• Humanities

À luz das modificações sociopolíticas ocorridas na década de 1980, mormente a escalada dos processos de financeirização, este texto discute a participação dos museus e complexos culturais – sua íntima relação com o então recente estatuto da arquitetura pós-moderna, sua abertura aos mercados mundiais e a crescente especialização de suas funções – em uma renovada dinâmica dos processos de comercialização e recepção dos trabalhos de arte e, sobretudo, na reconfiguração do alcance da experiência estética. Detendo-se em exemplos europeus e norte-americanos, a autora analisa o nexo iminente, àquela altura, entre a apropriação institucional das operações do minimalismo e as revisões do campo disciplinar da história da arte para fundamentar a nova "lógica" verificada em consagrados espaços dedicados à arte.