The Postmedium Condition, or Better: Art-at-Large

Rosalind Krauss’ development of the idea of the postmedium condition (1999a) was inspired by Walter Benjamin and his conception of the redemptive characteristics of the obsolescence of the medium: the medium is redeemed in its aesthetic possibilities once it has become obsolete, once its interest as a commodity of mass consumption has been definitely lost.

Therefore, for Krauss the reinvention of the medium, as an ensemble of conditions derived from the material characteristics of a given technical support, consists in developing a form of expression from these conditions that can be at the same time “projective and mnemonic” (58). In short, it means that once a medium has become obsolete the artist can recontextualise and resignify it to make its real aesthetic possibilities emerge.

According to this line of reasoning, the current time is that of the post-medium condition. In a first moment, Clement Greenberg had identified the medium exclusively with an artwork’s material support, namely flatness and colour (1961); and then with what Krauss named opticality: a vector that connects the vertical pictorial surface with the viewer – thus defining opticality as a phenomenological relationship (1999a: 29). What both movements have caused is the erasure of the medium through the evacuation of all its aesthetic significance. According to Krauss, this is what defines the post-medium condition: the medium has been “exploded” in order to return to the “complex technological instruments of advertising, of communication and of information” (Krauss 1999b: 16). In short, there are no longer any medium-specificities, no “painters” or “sculptors”, but only “artists”. The medium has been exploded, and therefore art is art in general.

Two main factors have determined the beginning of the post-medium condition: conceptual art and video art. Conceptual art implodes the idea of an aesthetic medium and turns everything into a readymade that collapses the difference between the aesthetic and the commoditised. The constitutive heterogeneity of video art, on the other hand, avoids any reduction to an essence or unifying core (Krauss 1999a), which means that the notions of authorship and a unified materiality are not defining characteristics of video art.

However, it would be more accurate to say that if there is anything that can be called a post-medium condition, it owes its existence to Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade and the conception of art as a process of selection (de Duve 1996:162). Thierry de Duve’s writing features a subtle yet significant difference in its conception of post-mediality when compared to Krauss. Duchamp’s invention of the readymade was about painting before it was about art in general. However, it legitimated the fact that “you can now be an artist without being either a painter, or a sculptor, or a composer, or a writer, or an architect – an artist at large”(154).

Moreover, it had the effect of making everyone involved talk about art, to reflect upon art when seeing it, and to make painting about painting. In short, it made art, and its public, become reflexive.

On top of this, the readymade rendered “art as choosing” pervasive. This is one of the ways in which the prevalence and popularity of the contemporary conception of the role of the curator can be explained: What does the curator do if not choose readymades and create a bigger artwork: an exhibition. As Nicolas Bourriaud asks, what is a curator if not a DJ of readymades (2001)? Not everyone has to agree with this job description of the curator, but this is how the role is primarily theorised, described and taught at the moment.

The interest and advantage of foregrounding this conception of art-at-large consists in the fact that it fosters what can be called an intermedial consideration of art, downplaying further divisions based on media-specificity, and of the “intrinsic characteristics” of a certain medium. This is a division that Krauss’ definition of post-mediality still contained as a residue of a modernist legacy.

References:

Bourriaud, N. (2001) Postproduction. New York: Lukas & Sternberg.

de Duve, Thierry (1984) Pictorial Nominalism. On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Greenberg, C. (1961) Art and Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

———-. (1996) Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Krauss, R. (1999a) A Voyage on the North Sea. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson

———-. (1999b) Reinventing the Medium. Critical Inquiry, 25 (2), “Angelus Novus”: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin, Winter, pp. 289-305.