© Association of Art Historians 2011 612 Reviews Redrawing the Medium Matthew Bowman Perpetual Inventory by Rosalind Krauss, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2010, 336 pp., 47 b. & w. illus., £22.95 Coming after The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986) and Bachelors (1999), Perpetual Inventory is the third anthology of Rosalind Krauss’s art-critical essays. Its contents, however, suggest that for the most part they do not so much follow after these earlier anthologies but rather serve as bookends positioned to either side of them. Most of the essays postdate those contained in Bachelors , with a signiicant portion published after 2000. Importantly, many of those essays evince a shift back towards – and hence revive – questions of medium speciicity. The book also contains a number of essays dating between 1966 and 1976; most of these essays were published before the establishment of October while Krauss was still a prominent critic at Artforum (1964–76). The only exception here is ‘Video: The aesthetics of narcissism’ which was Krauss’s essay for the première issue of October . Notably Perpetual Inventory features no essays from the 1980s, this decade being covered in the previous anthologies. Given its broad scope, then, it is inevitable that this collection might be taken as something more than a third anthology. To a degree, Perpetual Inventory stands as a summa of Krauss’s career, as if she has reached a point from which that career now appears legible to her and demands to be surveyed. The book jacket image, a 1969 photograph of a younger Krauss, her head viewed in proile rested upon a typewriter, hints that there is something personal about this collection. The introduction offers a few very brief relections upon her career as a critic, but most readers familiar with her oeuvre and the art-critical procedures associated with October would be struck by her claim that Perpetual Inventory ‘charts my conviction as a critic that the abandonment of the speciic medium spells the death of serious art. To wrestle new mediums to the mat of speciicity has been a preoccupation of mine since the inception of October’ (xiii). This statement sounds obvious and yet a little off-tune. What is one to do with the knowledge, for instance, that in her inluential essay ‘Sculpture in the expanded ield’ (1979) she