Rosalind Krauss' Under Blue Cup
Though Rosalind Krauss broke her alliance to the formalism of Clement Greenberg in awareness of its limitations for addressing the postmodern art of the 70s and 80s, she has maintained some Greenbergian rigidity in her critique of contemporary art. As early as 15 years ago in Voyage on the North Sea, Krauss expressed discontent with much of the art coming out of what she calls the “post-medium condition” (e.g. video installation, intermedia), establishing it as “an indulgence in capital enterprise.” Krauss’ 2011 Under Blue Cup demonstrates the critic’s continued support for medium specificity (though she differentiates her evolved version of specificity from Greenberg’s) and her continued assessment of much of the installation art of the past decade as meretricious.
Krauss feels that four things: 1) the dematerialization of the art object that arose out of postminimalism, 2) conceptual art and its focus on the idea and the textual versus the visual, 3) the importance of Duchamp’s readymade (but more so artists continual rehearsal of his initial gesture) and 4) deconstruction’s attack on the “self” or specificity have all contributed to the post-medium condition resulting in installation art that is fraudulent, takes shortcuts, has forgotten the history of art and therefore ignores the scaffolding on which it could be supported. In her evolved version of medium specificity, she does not argue that that painters be painters, sculptors be sculptors and so forth, but she finds merit in the artists who, though inventing their own set of rules, do so while remembering the history of the medium and applying that to their practice. She clearly delineates her opinion of quality work which continues to point out “who it is” in a recursive, self-referential manner from the aesthetic meaninglessness and wasted efforts of many contemporary installation artists.
In what initially seems to be a somewhat separate crusade, Krauss puts forth resistance to the “collapse of the white cube”, which she feels continues to be necessary by offering support to a work the way in which the edge of a pool is the surface against which we kick off of in order to propel ourselves back through the water. Through Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, Krauss points to the errors made in a reader’s inclination to hurry to get to the point of a narrative (i.e. cultural conformism or political moralism), as well as the tendency to disallow oneself the pleasure of the “erotics of art” in a misguided attempt to achieve quick understanding as contributors to the the problem, coupled with the pervasive narrative about the obsolescence of the white cube. As she furthers her plea for the preservation of medium specificity through the remembrance of the history of the medium, she links it to the beneficial structure that can be provided by the preservation of the white cube.
What Krauss intends when referring to the remembering the history of the medium, is substituting a new or invented “technical support” for the traditional idea of a physical medium. So instead of oil on canvas or tempera on wooden panel, she means an idea or a logic that can be borrowed from what we could consider traditional mediums or from available mass-cultural forms like animated films, automobiles, investigative journalism or movies (such as in the artist examples she provides).
For example, in William Kentridge’s animated film Ubu Tells the Truth, Krauss finds an allegory of postmodernism’s attack on the specific medium and a way of resisting it. She discusses the “elegance of this enactment of modernist self-reference” and because of his reflexive presentation of the cinematic medium, considers Kentridge a “knight of the medium” or one of the artists she champions, along with Christian Marclay, James Coleman, Sophie Calle, Marcel Broodthaers. In a greater leap for articulating the kind of new or "invented" medium she supports, she uses the presence of the automobile as a theme/device (read: medium) woven through Ed Ruscha's works, though never actually visible.
Ubu profanes the medium though Kentridge resists its desecration in a synchronous audio/visual tango between protaganist and antagonist.
The succession of window frames references the celluloid strip through projector.
Krauss spoke of Tacita Dean's "FILM", deeming it a success because "you can't say 'she could have just done that on video.'"
Krauss says Ruscha invented the car as medium to make a recursive structure that signifies, the way older mediums had done.