Rosalind Krauss is an American art critic  and a Professor at the Columbia University in the City of New York for the study of Art History. Her work is to understand modernist art in all its dimensions; formal, historical and theoretical. Krauss is interested in the development in photography as well as works in art. She tends to focus on the avant-garde and feminist work. Krauss was also a critic and contributing editor for Artforum and one of the founders of the quarterly art theory journal October. She is a highly influential critic and theorist of the post Abstract Expressionist era.

About Rosalind Krauss: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Krauss.html

Bachelors | Book Research

In this book Krauss explores the art of painters, sculptors and photographers. She examines their work on what they represent and how they show that representation. She looks more into the movement of feminism and nine women artists. Krauss claims that the women she has written about in this book challenge the ideals of unity and identifying with masculine aesthetics. Krauss talks about Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, Louise Bourgeois, Dora Maar and many others in expressing her views of women within the art industry.

“Within surrealist practice, too, woman was in construction, for she is the obsessional object there as well. And since the vehicle through which she is figured is itself manifestly constructed, woman and photograph become figures for each other’s condition: ambivalent, blurred, indistinct, and lacking in, to use Edward Weston’s word, ‘authority’.” – Rosalind Krauss

Krauss states that women lack authority in the photographic world and are still being objectified and seen as things rather than as human beings. This is really interesting to me as I do find most art has really blurred the woman and made it seem as if the woman is an object and is to be controlled by the male painting her etc. However, although there is a lot of objectification of women within photography, female photographers tend to make themselves the subject and almost parody the idea of being seen as an object, especially through the work of Cindy Sherman. I believe that now women are using their bodies because it is the only thing that is our own, we are taking it back in a sense.

Krauss talks about the work of Cindy Sherman and identifies her work as ‘slavishness’ as if she becomes a slave in her own images and another art critic writes about the link between Sherman and Douglas Sirk. This critic compares the work of Sherman to a still from  one of Sirk’s films and how both are focusing their work on a ‘remembered fantasy’. This is interesting to me as it brings in another dimension to Sherman’s work and how she came up with her ideas from watching old B films and Film Noir style films, this does suggest that Sherman has dreamt of envisioned her situation before hand and then worked based off of memory in her images. However, Sherman has stated before that she doesn’t envision any particular scene but she does it all there and then. She stated ‘some people have told me they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all’. I like this quote as it shows that Sherman really does make it all up when she gets to her studio and works with what looks good in front of the camera and doesn’t solely depend on a memory or having to perfectly re-stage an image from a still that she took from an old film.