Rosalind Krauss
20th-century Art and Theory
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1969
Biography
Professor Krauss' attempts to understand the phenomenon of modernist art, in its historical, theoretical, and formal dimensions, have led her in various directions. She has, for example, been interested in the development of photography, whose history-running parallel to that of modernist painting and sculpture-makes visible certain previously overlooked phenomena in the "high arts," such as the role of the indexical mark, or the function of the archive. She has also investigated certain concepts, such as "formlessness," "the optical unconscious," or "pastiche," which organize modernist practice in relation to different explanatory grids from those of progressive modernism, or the avant-garde.
Recent Dissertations Directed
Susan Laxton "Paris as Gameboard: Ludic Strategies in Surrealism" (May 2004)
Jaleh Mansoor, "Marshall Plan Modernisms: The Monochrome as the matrix of Abstraction" (May 2007)
Abigail Susik: "The Vertigo of the Modern: Surrealism and the Outmoded" (May 2009)
Recent Courses
Graduate Lecture course: Modernism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism
Graduate Lecture course: Dada and Surrealism (team-taught with Noam Elcott)
Methods Seminar: The Rhetoric of History
Methods Seminar: Picasso and the Masters
Methods Seminar: The History and Future of the Medium
Selected Publications
Under Blue Cup, MIT Press, 2011.
Bachelors, MIT Press, 2000.
Formless: A User's Guide, Zone Books, 2000.
The Picasso Papers, MIT Press, 1999.
October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996, MIT Press, 1998.
The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press, 1994.
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, 1986.
