Im/pulse to See in Rosalind Krauss

Abstract

“After Greenberg, no one has had as much influence on American art critics as Krauss”, wrote David Carrier in his intellectual biography of the American critic and art historian Rosalind Krauss (Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2002, 2). He refers to criticism, which he calls philosophical, based on a solid theoretical ground, though one that underwent diverse transformations throughout Krauss’ career. Krauss’ art criticism, at the beginning published in Artforum and since 1976 in October (the magazine she co-founded with Annette Michelson and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe), and the task she set for herself as an art historian to rewrite the history of modernism, first from the structuralist, and later from poststructuralist and psychoanalytical perspectives, are complementary and inseparable.

The article is an edited, fragmentarily modified, and translated by the author version of an original text which was published in Polish as “Rosalind Krauss: przekraczanie modernizmu?” in Didaskalia 111, 2012, 41–50.