Krauss and Reinventing the Medium

"...digitalized imaging will replace photography altogether as a mass social practice. Photography has, then, suddenly become one of those industrial discards, a newly established curio, like the jukebox or the trolley car. But it is at just this point, and in this very condition as outmoded, that it seems to have entered into a new relation to aesthetic production. This time, however, photography functions against the grain of its earlier destruction of the medium, becoming, under precisely the guide of its own obsolescence, a means of what has to be called an act of reinventing the medium."

Basically, in her essay Reinventing the Medium, Krauss argues that once photography becomes obsolete as a result of being displaced by the digital, the medium will be reinvented, the "plurality of the arts" revived. She uses the artist James Colman's body of work to support the underlying theory that obsolete technologies can be co-opted and their mediums reinvented. For instance, she shows how James Colman "'reinvented' the slide tape as a medium" and implies that photography will experience the same thing in the future.

Perhaps I missed a nuance in Krauss's argument, but I found myself wondering why she believed that James Colman's working with slide tape went beyond the medium (reinvented it) that is slide tape. Did he not just work within a medium? Would Krauss say that abstractionist painters reinvented the medium of painting? Probably not. But if so, how are these two cases different?

The difference for Krauss must lie in the medium's obsolescence. That is to say, the fact that the medium has become obsolete, fallen out of favor, opens up the possibility for its reinvention. But this doesn't seem like a truth to me. For instance, if I began to cave draw, would those drawings reinvent the medium of cave drawing simply because cave drawing is no longer practiced? In my view, I would still be participating in the medium of cave drawing. But in Krauss's view would I be reinventing the medium? If so, her view doesn't seem correct.

After writing this, I wonder if Krauss is working under a different definition of medium from me.