Post-medium Condition Research Articles

Debt Aesthetics: Medium Specificity and Social Practice in the Work of Cassie Thornton

This article considers the “debt visualizations” of social practice artist Cassie Thornton. Thorton’s works use a combination of photography, performance art, sculpture, non-fiction narrative, text, and hypertext to explore the cost and consequence of the accumulation of student loans. The essay examines Thornton’s use of both traditional and non-traditional artistic materials and practices in order to articulate how the ‘immaterials’ of debt become an artistic medium; her radical departure from traditional media leads squarely back to the problem of the medium itself in Thornton’s assertion that “debt is [her] medium.” While it is tempting to read such a claim as an embrace of a “post-medium condition,” this essay argues that in our highly leveraged present, the very form of unsecured student debt that Thornton works in and on invites a return to and a reconsideration of the seemingly conservative impulses of aesthetic Modernism and its critique.

Systems and Automatisms: Jack Burnham, Stanley Cavell and the Evolution of a Neoliberal Aesthetic

This paper compares Jack Burnham's “systems esthetics” and Stanley Cavell's “automatisms,” linking them by way of organizational and systems theories of the mid-20th century and the rise of the post-medium condition in art. Although rarely paired, curator and critic Burnham and philosopher Cavell offer similar ontologies of art in the post--World War II period. Their ideas freed artists from old constraints of formalism and medium specificity while foreshadowing the rise of an artistic atomization driven by technology and economics. If Burnham's concept of systems aesthetics is concerned with a sense of cybernetic connectivity based on a feedback loop between the artist, artwork, art community and monetizing power of the market, then Cavell's automatisms describe a condition of laissez-faire independence in which each artist must work entrepreneurially, wholly for and unto herself.

Post-Medium Condition and Intericonic Art Theory: On the Self-Invention of Online Video Art

Today, videos orignially displayed online have entered substantial areas of the art scene.1 In 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosted an exhibition entitled YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creat...

Under Perpetual Inventory

The publication of these two books offers the opportunity for an appraisal of Rosalind Krauss's arguments over the past decade concerning what she has termed the ‘post-medium condition’, which she says afflicts contemporary art, and the importance, she has urged, in this context of a reinvention of the idea of an artistic medium. The two volumes offer complementary approaches: the first, Perpetual Inventory, is a collection of essays, most of which have been previously published. It is chronologically various, with essays spanning from 1966 to 2007, but nonetheless is presented as unified by a central theme, namely what Krauss describes as the charting of her ‘conviction as a critic that the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art’.1 This is a subject that became an explicit focus of Krauss's writing only in the years from 1997 to the present; and yet just one of her major essays on the medium from these years is included here (‘The Rock: William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection’, first published in 2000). By thus introducing a selection of chronologically and thematically diverse essays under one particular rubric, Krauss performs an act of retrospective authorship: not exactly rewriting, but inviting us to re-read at least a selection of her life's work for a new meaning. The potential interest of such an enterprise for readers must be not so much that we might find Krauss's earlier work simply confirming her recent arguments but rather that the earlier essays might suggest a new understanding of her present commitment to the theme of the medium.

THINKING THE PHENOMENON OF IMAGE THROUGH THE POETICS OF CONTEMPORARY EXPANDED PAINTING / ATVAIZDO FENOMENO REFLEKSIJA ŠIUOLAIKINĖS IŠPLĖSTINĖS TAPYBOS POETIKOJE

The history of the painted image has involved various metamorphoses from cave, to architecture, to easel and most recently the radical hybridisation of expanded multimedia forms. Through each age the shedding of one aspect of the image; ritual, spirituality, portability, has resulted in a shift from sacred static images towards profane ephemeral events. This transformation has intensified over the last century where the repeated announcement of the death of painting has seen painting reborn as a mode of radical self-questioning. This paper takes an overview of painting's morphology by way of Martin Heidegger's discussion of picturing and representation in his essay “The Age of the World Picture” (1938). By focusing on the history of picturing, an understanding of “original aesthetics” and its apprehensions can be developed, for comparison with contemporary art in its “post-medium condition”. The new ontological paradigm of contemporary art therefore demands another discourse, a “post-aesthetics” that overcomes the subjective bias of modern philosophical aesthetics in favour of a primary relationship to things and their mode of presence in the world. As a result, contemporary expanded painting is shown to be a radical revision of art, a moment of ontological “presencing” favouring spatial environments and temporal events that reveal “what is” and “what matters” in a contemporary techno-scientific age. As a result ontological aesthetics could indicate what is good at the boundary between people, communities, technology and the earth, in short, a politics of being. In the politics of being, which is most appropriate to the expanded work of art, politics is linked to the polis, the place where culture emerges into a world, and where things unfold according to the sense of possibility that a world grants. Art is intimately involved in an alternative politics of being when it poses another way of dealing with beings, people, objects, and things, that result in new economies and temporalities indicating the possibility of something beyond our habitual understanding of the world. Expanded painting as the exemplar of contemporary art is an ontological cut in our understanding of art and the world. It slices through the contemporary understanding of presence and delivers a monstrous thickness, no longer supported by a surface as substrate, but instead compelled by the phenomenal experiences of the world, and is thereby multiplied exponentially and existentially. Santrauka Tapyto atvaizdo istorija apima įvairias metamorfozes, pradedant urvais ir baigiant architektūra, molbertais, o pastaruoju metu – radikalia išplėstinių multimedijų formų hibridizacija. Bet kuriame amžiuje nunykdavo tam tikras atvaizdo aspektas; ritualai, dvasingumas, portatyvumas sakralius statiškus atvaizdus pakeitė profaniškais trumpalaikiais įvykiais. Ši transformacija suintensyvėjo pastarajame amžiuje, kai buvo pakartotinai paskelbta, esą tapyba mirė, atgimstant tapybai kaip radikaliai saviklausai. Šiame straipsnyje pateikiama tapybos morfologijos apžvalga, remiantis Martino Heideggerio apmąstymais. Susitelkiant į atvaizdų istoriją, gali būti išplėtota „originaliosios estetikos“ ir jos suvokimo samprata, lyginant su šiuolaikiniu menu ir jo „postmedijine būkle“. Todėl nauja šiuolaikinio meno ontologinė paradigma reikalauja kito – „postestetikos“ – diskurso, įveikiančio subjektyvų moderniosios filosofinės estetikos šališkumą pirminio santykio su daiktais ir su jų buvimo pasaulyje būdo atžvilgiu. Iš to išplaukia, kad šiuolaikinė išplėstinė tapyba pristatoma kaip radikalus meno peržiūrėjimas, ontologinio „esamumo“ akimirka, palaikanti erdvines aplinkas ir laikinius įvykius, atveriančius „tai, kas yra“ ir „tai, kas vyksta“ šiuolaikiniame technikos ir mokslo amžiuje. Tad ontologinė estetika gali nurodyti, kas yra gera ties žmonių, bendruomenių, technologijų ir Žemės ribomis, trumpai tariant, atskleisti būties politiką. Šioji yra pati tinkamiausia išplėstiniams meno kūriniams; politika yra susieta su polis – ta vieta, kurioje kultūra iškyla į pasaulį ir kurioje pagal pasaulio teikiamą galimumą skleidžiasi daiktai. Menas yra glaudžiai įtraukiamas į alternatyviąją būties politiką, iškeldamas naują būtybių, žmonių, objektų ir daiktų santykiavimo būdą. Tai lemia naujose ekonomikose ir laikiškumuose nurodomą galimybę kažko, kas yra anapus mūsų pasaulio įprastinio supratimo. Išplėstinė tapyba kaip šiuolaikinio meno pavyzdys yra ontologinis įtrūkis mums suprantant meną ir pasaulį. Ji aptinkama suprantant šiuolaikinį buvimą, yra labai reikšminga ir nebėra palaikoma paviršiaus kaip substrato; veikiau įtikinamų fenomenalių pasaulio patirčių, taip dauginamų išoriškai ir egzistenciškai.

Reflections on medium specificity occasioned by the symposium 'Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation', Melbourne, 2011

Drawing on discussions at a symposium held in Melbourne in 2011, this article describes the reactions of artists, curators and software engineers to the varied transitions between analogue and digital media. The authors argue that both the 'post-medium condition' mooted by Krauss and the 'Death of Cinema' theses of film scholars like Rodowick and Mulvey miss critical issues in these transitions and over-emphasize others. We make the case that there are more continuities than often recognized between analogue and digital; that transitional forms like video have not been analysed sufficiently; that software studies needs to be backed up with hardware studies; and that there is a new role for mediumspecific criticism. We argue that, in the current state of digital resources for production, distribution and display, each work needs to be analysed in its specificity, rather than ascribing universal qualities to imaginary abstractions such as 'digital media'.

The post-medium condition and the explosion of cinema

In a series of articles since the mid 1990s, the renowned art critic Rosalind Krauss has striven to maintain the legitimacy of medium specificity and of the notion of medium as such in order to individuate forms of artistic practice in the contemporary new media environment.1 Her critical reexamination of medium specificity was initially launched in the realm of a contemporary art criticism that has been confronted with the pervasive power of electronic and digital media to challenge the concepts of a medium and its specificity in the name of convergence. Her response is to redefine a medium as ‘a set of conventions derived from (but not identical to) the material conditions of a given technical support’,2 suggesting that the medium is not reducible to its physical properties. Krauss eschews a Greenbergian notion of medium specificity, according to which a medium's distinct identity is circumscribed by its unique and proper artistic territory. She does so by resuscitating the idea of a medium as a ‘supporting structure’ marshaled by ‘expressive possibilities or conventions’.3 On the one hand, Krauss reaffirms the salience of the material support on which the modernist idea of medium specificity rests. On the other, she avoids any direct association between the medium and its physical characteristics, and instead highlights the significance of certain artistic expressions which call into question the effect of a medium's constraints and thereby reconfigure it as an open field for the interplay of ‘conventions’ and ‘possibilities’. Hence her notion of a medium as a ‘supporting structure’ reconciles the requirement for the material and technical specificity of a distinct medium with the formal and conceptual diversity of artistic creation.

Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition

Bruce Nauman 's video Lip Synch (1969) shows the artist's head upside down and close up, his inverted mouth at the bottom of the screen repeating the words lip synch, as the sound gradually moves out of synch with the image, this drift transforming the engorged neck and pulsating mouth into a part object, erotically charged. The video clearly pays homage to the technical breakthrough in film history when, in 1929, synch sound did away with silent film and brought a new dimension to cinema. Video, a later generation of motion-picture technology, had synchronous sound available to it right from the start. It is to this dimension that Nauman points in Lip Synch. Christian Marclay 's magisterial work Video Quartet (2002) spreads four separate screens of DVD projection across forty feet of wall, each screen showing the unreeling of a compilation of film clips from well-known works of sound cinema. The four different tracks compete for attention for the most part, but occasionally they display the same image, creating synchronicity along the horizontal expanse of the work. The effect, not unlike Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma (1970), is a visual grid: the vertical axis becomes the unreeling narrative of the constitutive shots including Janet Leigh's scream in the shower from Psycho (1960), or the meditative humming of Ingrid Bergman's As Time Goes By from Casablanca (1942) the horizontal one, the repetition of the visual fields, or the competition among them for dominance. Repetition is, for the most part, a matter of analogy, as when the full-screen image of a spinning roulette wheel rhymes visually with a record on a turntable, as well as with the circles of drumheads seen from above. These turning disks, needless to say, create the kind of self-reference here to the reels of film itself familiar to us from modernist art.

Claudia Mesch. Review of "New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality" by Anne Rorimer, "Rewriting Conceptual Art" by Michael Newman and Jon Bird, and "A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition" by Rosalind Krauss.

Claudia Mesch. Review of "New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality" by Anne Rorimer, "Rewriting Conceptual Art" by Michael Newman and Jon Bird, and "A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition" by Rosalind Krauss.

Tadeusz Kantor's Happenings: Reality, Mediality, and History

In “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss writes about Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, and William Kentridge because, as she notes, these artists have decided not to follow the international fashion of installation and intermedia work in which “art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.”Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 56. Neither have they retreated into the etiolated forms of traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture. Rather, their recent works have embraced the idea of differential specificity, in which a medium itself is reinvented and rearticulated.