How to Understand Rosalind

Krauss, the Art Critic Who

Made Theory Cool (and
Inescapable)

The reputation of the art critic Rosalind E. Krauss is the kind of

paradox one only finds in the art world. Though the theory-heavy
art journal she’s famous for founding—October—only has a
circulation of about 2,000 people, and her myriad books and
articles remain little-read outside of academic circles, she is
considered one of the most influential critics of Modern and
contemporary art of the past half-century. Most specifically, she’s
credited with helping introduce the American art scene to French
post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jaques
Derrida in the 1970s and ‘80s, whose ideas have since become
almost de rigueur for talking about and teaching art history in the
21st century (for better or worse).

The ideas in her work, however, and her influence on today's art
community are intensely important to understand even if you're
not about to wade into the Columbia University professor's
scholarly oeuvre. For the time-impaired, here’s a quick primer on
Krauss to get you started.

Beginnings

In her own recounting, Krauss has been both interrogating and

defending Modern art from her earliest aesthetic experiences.
After noticing that his daughter, who enjoyed painting as a child,
had a predilection for art, Krauss’s father encouraged her creative
side with regular trips to the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. (conveniently located near his offices at the
Department of Justice, where he worked as an attorney). There, as
Krauss recounts, the budding critic began honing both her eye
and her tongue. “In the modern galleries,” Krauss writes, “my
father would make objections to the works and I would defend
them. I adopted a certain militancy, for I had to try to convince my
father that these modern works of art were not phony, that they
were really important. This sharpened my desire to explain.”
Works by Paul Klee, Georges Braque, and Mark Rothko proved
especially influential on the young aesthete, and helped form her
thinking.

By the time she arrived at Wellesley College as an art history

undergrad, this early appreciation for Modernist masters had
blossomed into a full-blown love affair. It was in the context of her
senior thesis on Willem de Kooning that Krauss found herself
seriously engaging with the work of Clement Greenberg, the
ultra-influential New York art critic best known for his strict
formalist analysis, insistence on medium specificity, and
championing of the Abstract Expressionists during their early
days. This intellectual relationship shifted into a personal one
following Krauss’s enrollment in Harvard’s department of fine arts
as a PhD student, where she met and befriended Greenberg as
she prepared her dissertation on the recently deceased AbEx
sculptor David Smith, whose estate the elder critic helped to
manage.

Breakages

The friendly dealings between these intergenerational critics

proved short-lived. Krauss, who had been writing for such
respected publications as Artforum since 1966 (only four years
after graduating from Wellesley and three years before she
received her Harvard degree), found herself increasingly
interested in the work of Minimalists like Richard Serra and
Donald Judd—artists Greenberg dismissed as not adhering to the
strictures he laid out for Modern art.

For Greenberg, truly avant-garde art strove for an ever-increasing

purity and adherence to the history its medium, a view Krauss
eventually came to regard as overly simplistic. As she says,
“[Greenberg’s] whole relationship to art was incredibly
teleological. His idea was that art had to end up in a certain place,
and if it didn’t contribute to that trajectory then he dismissed it.”

In the context of this opposition, Krauss began exploring novel

avenues for evaluating works of art that seemed more true to her
experience as a viewer. She eventually landed on the writings of
French post-structuralists like Michel Foucault and Roland
Barthes, incorporating their ideas on meaning and value as a
subjective, historically contingent, and mutable phenomenon into
her own writings on contemporary art. Freudian thinkers like
Jaques Lacan also proved useful insofar as they theorized the
repressed, often violent and sexual impulses that Krauss was
coming to believe were vital to the Modern art she loved.

Far more than academic navel-gazing, Krauss and her

contemporaries saw these ideas as intensely political and even
revolutionary; as she wrote in 1972, “We can no longer fail to
notice that if we make up schemas of meaning based on history,
we are playing into systems of control and censure. We are no
longer innocent.” Increasingly, the artwork’s medium became less
relevant than the socio-political history surrounding and
informing the work itself, a history that could be reframed by a
sensitive and informed critic.

It’s precisely this spirit of revolution that lead Krauss to the next
big break of her career: leaving the respected editorial board of
Artforum in 1976 (she’d been promoted to editor in 1971) to start her
own publication called October. The departure resulted from one
of the great art-world controversies: when the artist Lynda Benglis
took out a two-page advertisement in Artforumfeaturing herself
naked but for sunglasses and a provocatively co-opted dildo—a
response to what Benglis saw as the machismo of the male
Minimalists encapsulated in a notorious photo Krauss herself
took of the artist Robert Morris—Krauss condemned the
magazine for allowing what she deemed pornography to
"brutalize" its staff and readers, and left.

Co-founded with her Harvard classmate and fellow Artforum

apostate Annette Michelson, the new journal took its name from
Sergei Eisenstein’s classic 1927 film October: Ten Days That Shook
the World, an avant-garde recounting of the Russia’s famed
October revolution. Their goals for the new magazine were clear:
provide an outlook for the then-nascent critical writings of the
post-structuralist school in the American context.

As anyone whose taken an art-history class in the past two

decades can attest, these thorny ideas (and the interpretive mode
of looking at and talking about art they call for) have proven
highly influential in the academy, where Krauss has spent most of
her adult life—she’s been on the faculties of M.I.T., Princeton,
Hunter, and finally Columbia, where she’s worked since 1992.

Both October and Krauss have earned reputations as highly

progressive and eminently obscurantist, a reflection of their
shared reliance on dense theory as a means of unlocking the art
object. If you’ve ever scratched your head over a Derrida or Lacan
quote in a press release or catalog entry, chances are good you
have Krauss and her revolutionary little publication to thank. By
the time contemporaries like Hal Foster began contributing to
October, this decidedly postmodern turn had taken a firm hold on
the artistic mainstream, setting the stage for the vibrant
interpretive art culture we have today.

Books

While Krauss first achieved prominence for her articles in

Artforum and October (many of which, such as her legendary
"Sculpture in the Expanded Field," included her infamously
inscrutable diagrams) her books have proven especially
significant in establishing her place in contemporary art criticism.

Her 1985 collection of essays The Originality of the Avant-Garde and

Other Modernist Myths, for instance, takes the mythos of the
historical avant-garde to task. Krauss claims that the
developments of postmodern art theory call for a thorough
reevaluation of Modernist masters like Rodin and Giacometti, as
well as an overall overhaul of the ways in which we evaluate art to
include (perhaps unsurprisingly) the analysis of the philosophers
she admires. In contrast to claims about these artist’s boundary-
breaking originality and continual inventiveness, Krauss finds
repetition and reproducibility to be at the heart of their work, and
positions it as a challenge to their late-20th-century celebrants,
who are now tasked with proving the artistic value of their
achievements through appeals to framing (both physical and
metaphorical) or what she calls “the authorial mark of emotion,”
better known as feeling.

Her 1993 book The Optical Unconscious expands upon the ideas of
this earlier effort, turning to figures like Man Ray, Marcel
Duchamp, and Max Ernst as embodying a counter-narrative to
the Greenbergian formulation of modern art. In short, Krauss
argues that Modernism was in fact less concerned with purity and
autonomy than previously thought, looking to movements like
Surrealism and Dada as concurrent developments that take the
subjective states of the unconscious as their inspiration and
rationale, and drawing heavily upon the psychoanalytic theories
of Freud and especially Lacan. The book is also notable for
Krauss’s unusual, almost diaristic writing style, which
underscores the intensely personal (not simply “pure”)
motivations underlying the work.

Movingly, Krauss’s 2011 book Under Blue Cup also attempts to write
theory through personal narrative, this time through the very
specific lens of her 1999 brain aneurysm that left the intellectual
temporarily bereft of her short-term memory. A central insight
from her subsequent cognitive therapy—“If you can remember
who you are, you can teach yourself to remember anything”—
provides the occasion for a reappraisal of the artist’s medium as a
form of memory. She looks to the work of artists like Ed Ruscha
and Sophie Calle as exemplifying a way out of the so-called “post-
medium condition” by turning to a new medium (cars for Ruscha,
photojournalism for Calle, etc.) to act as structure and support for
their ideas.

For younger artists still casting about for a new way to make their
mark on art history, Krauss’s ideas should provide a welcome
jumping-off point, as they have for an entire generation of art
writers.