Rosalind E. Krauss · 1985 (title essay October 18, 1981) · PDF · Calibre ID 729
Resurfaced in Certificates Without Originals (2026-09-26).
Role in the triad
The theory both fictions test: the discourse of originality rests on a repressed discourse of the copy.
Why this book
Names the certifying machinery Zweig’s councillor points to (‘the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original’), argues spontaneity is manufactured (Winckler’s jaw, reversed), and starts from Benjamin on the print, the medium of Zweig’s portfolios.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “we could say that all the casts of The Gates of Hell are examples of multiple copies that exist in the absence of an original” (p. 152)
- “a legitimate work: a real original we might say” (p. 151)
- “Sitting in the little theater, watching the newest Gates being cast, watching this violation, we want to call out, ‘Fraud.’” (p. 157)
- “to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original” (p. 162)
- “the modernist grid is, like the Rodin casts, logically multiple: a system of reproductions without an original” (p. 162)
- “spontaneity was the most fakable of signifieds” (p. 167)
- “we look back on the modernist origin and watch it splintering into endless replication” (p. 170)
Themes
Benjamin · copy · grid · Monet · originality · picturesque · postmodernism · repetition · Rodin · Sherrie Levine