Originality of the Avant-Garde & Other

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum ofthe 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the majorformulation of the theory of postmodernism.In this challenging collection of fifteenessays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in whichthe break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our variousunderstandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea ofthe avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, andpoststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the wayother prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In twosections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from theproblem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the worksof Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about majortrends in contemporary literary criticism.Rosalind E. Krauss is Professor of ArtHistory at Hunter College.