Rosalind Krauss’s “The Originality of the Avant-Garde”: A Machine for Deconstructing Modernist Myths
This is not a simple art-historical narrative; it is a critical machine for dismantling myths, demonstrating “how we have been taught by a whole set of discourses and institutions to understand ‘originality’.”
In the 1980s, art historian Rosalind E. Krauss collected her key essays from the 1960s and 70s into The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Using rigorous textual analysis and structuralist/semiotic tools, the book systematically examines the theoretical and institutional myths behind keywords like “originality,” “avant-garde,” and “modernism,” repositioning photography, conceptual art, minimalism, and sculpture within 20th-century art.
Core Concepts: Index, Grid, and the Expanded Field
Krauss’s argument unfolds along four primary paths:
1. “Originality” as a Discursive and Institutional Effect
Krauss argues that modernism mythologized artistic genius and the unique artwork. However, 20th-century practice (from the readymade to conceptual art) constantly worked with copies, repetition, series, and structural rules. The supposed “originality of the avant-garde” was largely a narrative of legitimacy produced by critics, museums, and the market. The point: a work’s power often comes from its operation on grammar and rules, not mysterious genius.
2. “Notes on the Index”: The “Trace” Theory of Photography and 70s Art
In her famous essay, Krauss borrows from Peircean semiotics to understand photography (along with imprints, casts, rubbings, and fingerprints) as an “index”—a trace that has a physical, causal connection to its object. She uses this to read conceptual and performance art: after the body’s departure, site markers, photos, and documents become a “presence-in-absence.” This shifts the focus of art from representation and form to a system of trace-evidence-archive.
3. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”: Rewriting Categories with a Structural Map
Using a structural map of oppositions (“sculpture/architecture,” “landscape/not-landscape”), Krauss proposes a four-quadrant field. This map explains how Land Art, installation, and site-specific work since the 70s escaped the traditional boundaries of monolithic sculpture. The methodological point was not to list movements, but to establish a logical, deductive coordinate system.
4. “Grids” and the Self-Mythology of Modernism
Krauss identifies the “grid” as the emblem of modern art: it simultaneously declared formal autonomy, anti-narrative, and anti-representational stances, making the work appear self-sufficient and ahistorical. She cautions that the grid, as a formal language, also functions as a rhetoric of decontextualization and sacralization, and must therefore be read historically, not as a purely neutral visual device.
Value and Impact: A Toolkit and a Lineage
The enduring value of this book can be understood on two levels:
- Value as Method and Tool: Krauss provides three key analytical tools: (a) An “anti-originality” framework that substitutes “repetition/series/rules” for the myth of genius; (b) The “indexical” tool for understanding how photography and performance/land art operate as trace and archive; (c) The “categorical map” (Expanded Field) that re-charts the boundaries of sculpture, providing an operational tool for curators and historians.
- Long-Term Impact: Krauss’s models profoundly influenced photography theory (the long-running debate on indexicality), the “archival turn” in art, and institutional critique. Her work complements Sontag’s cultural criticism, Barthes’s theory of affect, and Berger’s analysis of the gaze. It also laid the theoretical groundwork for scholars like Sekula and Tagg (on the archive and the state). In short, the book gives us the tools to precisely dismantle *how* the “avant-garde” and “originality” are produced between form, institution, and history.
The Originality of the Avant-Garde teaches us that instead of worshipping originality, we should learn to see the rules and traces that produce a work’s power and legitimacy.
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