Carlos Basualdo.

Rosalind Krauss's "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames & Hudson), a brilliant new chapter in her continuing investigation of medium specificity, was published late in 1999--too late, in fact, to make that year's "best of" lists. Through a close analysis of the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Krauss redefines the concept of "medium" as a differential one, a complex aggregate made to cohere only by the sheer consistency of the artist's oeuvre. Krauss opens up a large and intricate theoretical territory that should enable the critical reading of many non-canonical works--by artists like Gego, Lygia Clark, and Helio Oiticica--that have proved to be particularly resilient to interpretation based on the (American) high-modernist critical apparatus and to fuzzy postmodernist theorizing as well.

Carlos Basualdo is Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and a cocurator of Documenta II, which opens in 2002.