A technical support is an underlying structure, often borrowed from commercial or obsolete technology, that an artist adopts and subjects to a rigorous set of self-imposed rules.
In its obsolete state, the technology enters a "redemptive" phase. Artists can look back at the discarded apparatus and see its unfulfilled utopian potential. By adopting an obsolete technical support, the artist stands outside the relentless current of consumer novelty, using the dead technology to critique the living culture. Why "Reinventing the Medium" Matters Today rosalind krauss reinventing the medium pdf
The recent resurgence of analog photography, vinyl records, and modular synthesizers among contemporary artists can be viewed precisely through Krauss’s lens of redemptive obsolescence. A technical support is an underlying structure, often
A significant portion of the discourse surrounding "Reinventing the Medium" focuses on photography and film. Krauss examines how early practitioners and later avant-garde artists treated the camera not merely as a tool to record reality, but as a structural medium with its own rules—such as the shutter speed, the negative, and the chemical development process. By manipulating these mechanical constraints, artists resisted the reductive, commercial uses of photography in advertising and journalism. Why the Essay Remains Vital Today By adopting an obsolete technical support, the artist
and the commercial photo-book to redefine the conditions of viewing and landscape. Marcel Broodthaers:
However, Krauss viewed this development with deep skepticism. In her view, the dismantling of specific mediums did not liberate art; instead, it left art vulnerable to the forces of the "International Style" of global commerce. The Threat of Kitsch and Commercialization
By the 1990s, Krauss observed that this modernist paradigm had collapsed. The rise of conceptual art and postmodernism had jettisoned the idea of a pure, specific medium, leading artists to freely mix images, text, and found objects. is Krauss's forceful response to this fragmentation. She doesn't mourn the loss of the old mediums but rather argues for a new understanding of what a medium can be—not a fixed, physical support (like canvas or marble), but a “ technical support ,” a set of conventions and possibilities that artists can actively generate and reinvent.