Rosalind Krauss Books

Focusing on pivotal events in art from 1900 to the present, this landmark study features 130 articles detailing significant moments such as the creation of influential works and major exhibitions. It explores the evolution of modernism and postmodernism, alongside antimodernist reactions. The revised edition includes insights into globalization's impact and covers topics like Synthetic Cubism, avant-garde film, and queer art. Recognized as the definitive work in art history, it is essential for understanding contemporary art's complexities.

The book offers an in-depth look at architect Alan Buchsbaum's influential career from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties, showcasing over fifty projects that highlight his unique design philosophy. It features a blend of residential and commercial designs for notable clients, alongside Buchsbaum's writings and insights from prominent critics and architects. His work spans three distinctive periods, reflecting a mix of irreverence and elegance, and his innovative styles, including Pop Art and High-Tech, significantly shaped American design before his untimely death from AIDS.

Explores the relation of aesthetic mediums to memory and discusses the work of such artists as Ed Ruscha, William Kentridge, Sophie Calle, and James Coleman

In essays that span three decades, one of contemporary art's most esteemed critics celebrates artists who have persevered in the service of a medium. The job of an art critic is to take perpetual inventory, constantly revising her ideas about the direction of contemporary art and the significance of the work she writes about. In these essays, which span three decades of assessment and reassessment, Rosalind Krauss considers what she has come to call the “post-medium condition”—the abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. Jean-François Lyotard argued that the postmodern condition is characterized by the end of a “master narrative,” and Krauss sees in the post-medium condition of contemporary art a similar farewell to coherence. The master narrative of contemporary art ended when conceptual art and other contemporary practices jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work. For Krauss, this spells the end of serious art, and she devotes much of Perpetual Inventory to “wrest[ling] new media to the mat of specificity.” Krauss also writes about artists who are reinventing the medium, artists who persevere in the service of a nontraditional medium (“strange new apparatuses” often adopted from commercial culture), among them Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay, William Kentridge, and James Coleman.

This image-rich essay offers a radical rethinking of the ab-ex painter Willem de Kooning by one of the greatest American art critics. Many have written about de Kooning s startling canvases of monstrous women, but none have approached them this way. In prose as energetic as her subject, Rosalind Krauss demonstrates how de Kooning could never stop reworking the same subject. Deploying one telling image after another, she shows that, from the early days of his career, de Kooning nearly always (1) worked with a tripartite vertical structure, (2) projected his own figure and point of view as the (male) artist into the painting, and (3) was compelled to produce the female figure, legs splayed obscenely or knees projected into the viewer s space in practically everything he made. Hidden in plain sight even in paintings of highways, boats, and landscapes, Woman is always there. How could we have missed this?"

Since the 1970s, the South African artist William Kentridge has charted the turbulent terrain of his homeland in both personal and political terms. With erudition, absurdist humor, and an underlying hope in humankind, Kentridge's artwork has examined apartheid, humanitarian atrocities, aging, and the ambiguities of growing up white and Jewish in South Africa. This October Files volume brings together critical essays and interviews that explore Kentridge's work and shed light on the unique working processes behind his drawings, prints, stop-animation films, and theater works. Krauss's understanding of Kentridge's work as embodying a fundamental tension between formal and sociological poles has been crucial to subsequent analyses of the artist's work, including the new essay by the anthropologist Rosalind Morris, who has collaborated with Kentridge on several projects.

Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss convincingly introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production

Auf der Suche nach künstlerischen Zeugnissen einer 'Verweigerung der optischen Logik des Mainstream-Modernismus' entwirft Krauss in The Optical Unconscious ein schillernd-facettenreiches Bild der modernen Kunst. Künstler wie Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol und Eva Hesse stehen im Mittelpunkt ihrer Analysen. In dieser Programmschrift attackiert sie die Ideologie des Modernismus in ihren künstlerischen und theoretischen Ausprägungen und lädt ein in die Bloomsbury-Salons, das Wohnzimmer Clement Greenbergs und die Seminare von Michael Fried, zu Freud, Lacan, Bataille, Deleuze und vielen anderen. Erfrischend ist nicht nur Krauss’ 'alternative Geschichte', sondern auch ihr freier Schreibstil, der zwischen Kunstgeschichte, ästhetischer Theorie, tagebuchartigen Beobachtungen und einer fast literarisch schwungvollen Erzählung changiert. Mit Hans H. Harborts Übersetzung liegt Rosalind E. Krauss’ Hauptwerk endlich auch auf Deutsch vor.

Four key historians present a comprehensive history of art from the past century, documenting through 100 essays presented in a year-by-year format key events that contributed to the changing of artistic traditions and the invention of new practices and forms, in a volume complemented by more than 600 reproductions of some of the century's most important works.

Studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.