A medium comprises both the materials that an artist uses to make a work, and a set of conventions to which an artist refers. In either instance, a medium is neither immutable nor inherent. Though the concept dates significantly further back (to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the eighteenth century), in the period of modernism, especially in the United States, medium assumed great importance through the writings of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss. By the mid-1960s and 1970s, those associated with minimal and conceptual art began to produce works that either blurred the boundaries between media or pushed aside the object altogether in favor of the promulgation of ideas. It was this latter gesture that gained traction internationally, disregarding to a certain degree the urgency medium specificity had in the United States.
But in an art world that has, discursively at least, become reluctant to advocate for medium specificity’s relevance, there is still a powerful, contextually based reconsideration of medium in conceptual and new media art, as Sabeth Buchmann reveals in her “The (Re)Animation of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Art.” Indeed, as technologies have changed—and with them, “media”—other genealogies of medium specificity have become significant. One such lineage proceeds from Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist concerned with the effects of technology on culture and the individual within it in the 1960s, to discussions of internet art and other developments in recent years.
Even before, and coinciding with the globalization of the contemporary art scene in the late 1980s and 1990s, artists from around the world continued to explore multimedia practices often driven more by subject matter than considerations of medium. Building on Krauss’s attempt to rethink medium in the wake of a proliferation of photography and installation art that bears a reciprocal relation to globalization, Irene V. Small argues in “Medium Aspecificity/Autopoietic Form” that there has been a push away from medium as such to questions of the recursivity of form.
Nonetheless, medium specificity still bears on institutional organization in art schools and museums alike (where departments are commonly organized around medium). It has also become a useful way to talk about the material conditions for practice, as well as the social structures that are maintained by them. Moreover, in a world increasingly dominated by its visual culture the question of medium is one way in which to particularize art, and to see how it functions differently from other elements of visuality. Indeed, as Richard Shiff discusses in “Specificity,” it is through medium that one is able to sense the world, to feel something that is always specific to the individual yet irremediably alien.
Given the wide spectrum of so-called new media characteristic of postclassical, non- or anti-formalist art, it is astonishing how little significance is accorded to them in contemporary aesthetic discourses. Ironically, however, the critical discourse on art continues to articulate the formalist credo of media specificity, which originally referred to painting and sculpture, where artistic aspirations are founded on qualities that are (allegedly) immanent to a medium; examples include abstract film as well as certain sectors of video and computer art. In conceptual forms of artworks, by contrast, the definition of the medium tends to be a matter of its employment. Media specificity, that is to say, depends on the medium’s particular function: documentation, information, communication, participation, interaction, etc. Although the emergence of historical conceptual art took place in parallel with the expansion of new media, critics as well as the artists themselves have paid fairly little attention to technological and material aspects. According to Gregor Stemmrich, conceptual art emerged out of the awareness “that all media are at bottom equal in value and capable of being put to artistic use. It is not the historic pathos and prestige of a medium that count but rather the concept of engaging with information.”1
Such objectivation of the medium may motivate Rosalind Krauss’s critique of conceptual art. She argues that the latter bears partial responsibility for what she sees as a loss of medium specificity in contemporary art, especially in multimedia installations. Against this loss, in which she recognizes a reflection of art’s subjection to the logic of consumer culture, Krauss, drawing on Walter Benjamin, posits the potential for aesthetic resistance implicit in the “obsolete medium”: Only the medium that has recently become obsolete, she claims, runs counter to the capitalist ideology of progress by virtue of its unfulfilled promises and potentials.2
With regard to the tendency of discussions of “aesthetic experience” in the sense of “differential specificity”3 to either underestimate or overrate the import of media, the debate Krauss initiated no doubt represents an overdue revision. Still, I believe that the tradition of conceptual art contains approaches toward a re-establishment of medium specificity—one that is now radically contextual in nature. The oeuvres of Hélio Oiticica, Martha Rosler, or Robert Smithson, for instance, offer examples of a temporally and spatially specific dynamic-topological, network-based, and flexible concept of their media4 the art of the 1980s and 1990s could build on. Smithson’s works were realized in the form of contributions to journals, filmic documentaries, and sculptural assemblages of objects. Similar strategies are apparent in the photographic-documentary practice of Rosler5 as well as Oiticica’s quasi-cinematographic environments, which rejected the formalist credo of the “pure” medium as cleaving to a myth that excluded an “impure” social experience, and excluded the “other” and “heterogeneous.”6
Craig Owens’s exemplary 1980 essay “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” describes the allegorical—which is to say, both fragmentary-transitory and temporary-site-specific—montage-like character of (post-)minimalist or (post-)conceptual artworks.7 Owens refers to Smithson’s late 1960s critique of a “natural history of Modernism,” against which Smithson had mobilized the artificial, the discontinuous, and the differential, which he recognized in the ultramoderne of the 1930s as much as 1960s pop art.8 The integration of semantics that articulate a critique of hegemony, such as class, skin color, and gender/sexuality into post-conceptual forms of artworks became manifest not least importantly in the artistic appropriation of media such as film, television, architecture, design, literature, and (pop) music that to my mind offered far more extensive interfaces to social contexts and experiences.
The praxis of allegorical montage benefited such a localization of art within an expanding modern media culture by enabling the observer to regard art and its history as a complex nexus of contingent phenomena that reached beyond the radius of canonical media. This conception helps us to understand the widespread use, in descriptions of site-specific work from the 1990s, of the concept of “layers,” whose topological nature allowed critics to think time in the sense of “placed time”9 and nonlinear processes. If such views articulated a conception of art as a noncausal constellation of fragmentary strata of meaning, they inevitably also required a revision of distinct concepts of media. The topological-temporary conception of media would seem hard to square with linear conceptions of the distinction between “old,” i.e., “obsolete,” and “new,” i.e., “advanced,” media. Yet we become aware of its significance for the (post-)conceptual works produced in the era’s art scenes in New York and Western Europe—we might mention Group Material, General Idea, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Juli Ault/Martin Beck, Gregg Bordowitz, Clegg & Guttmann, Christopher Williams, Stephen Prina, Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, Fareed Armaly, Renée Green, Sharon Lockhart, Stan Douglas, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Stephan Dillemuth, Nils Norman, Tom Burr, Josephine Pryde, Dorit Margreiter, Florian Pumhösl, Mathias Poledna, Zoe Leonard, Harun Farocki, Henrik Olesen, and others who always also examine the contextuality of artistic media by virtue of the way they employ them. So if we seek to address the question of medium specificity in post-conceptual multimedia installations,10 we must do so with a view to their situationally dependent conditions of presentation and reception. For to the extent that we can say that the distinguishing feature of art resides no longer in the category of the medium but rather in that of the site conceived in temporal-spatial terms, we must acknowledge the immanently referential nature of multimedia montages.
The political upheavals of 1989 not only redrew the political map of Europe; they also lent new force to a process comprised under the umbrella term “globalization”: the shift, described by Jean Baudrillard and others, from Fordist industrial capitalism to an economic system defined by freely roaming financial capital. This process left its mark on the era’s artistic discourses about media, as exemplified by the project The Message as Medium, conceived by the art historian and curator Helmut Draxler for Vienna’s Museum in Progress in 1990–91. Sponsored by Austrian Airlines, the project was published over the course of several months in the Austrian daily paper Der Standard and the business magazine Cash Flow. The title quoted—though in ironic inversion—Marshall McLuhan’s credo that “The Medium is the Message,” and with it the invocation of a global media revolution, an idea the postwar avant-gardes had profoundly taken to heart:
“The Message as Medium” is an exhibition which is not taking place in a gallery or a museum but exclusively in print media. […] The word exhibition can be used because on the one hand no reproductions of “real” works will be seen and, on the other, because the printed pages are to be understood as a totally specific “space.” And this does not mean the “white box” of enclosed and protected culture but rather a specifically world-orientated space, related to the public, to the distribution of information and to the economy. It applies to all artists that the way of handling the respective medium and the particular public before whom they are appearing is to be treated as the actual theme. […] [The artist’s] work can no longer be thought of in categories such as painting or sculpture. He acts as scientist, journalist, philosopher, politician, preacher or designer. […] It is much more a question of specific differences between, on the one hand, being bound by and, on the other, released from functional and institutional straightjackets (here, the two media). In this interaction lies the chance to be more than an agreeable investment and to create new forms of knowledge and consciousness.11
The terms Draxler uses to designate the general framework that constitutes these media (as a space of the public) are striking: the economic sphere, information, and science.
The contributors to Draxler’s project—Fareed Armaly, Georg Büttner, Michael Clegg & Martin Guttmann, Andrea Fraser, Thomas Locher, Mark Dion, Stephen Prina, Michael Krebber, Christian Philipp Müller, and Heimo Zobernig—were among those artists who, in the 1990s, took up what Alexander Alberro describes with reference to the early conceptual art produced in the orbit of Seth Siegelaub’s gallery as the “politics of publicity”: a strategy that, by circulating exhibitions in the form of media of distribution, broke with the notion that art is primarily at home in galleries and museums. Although these latter sites have not really lost their institutional privilege, conceptual forms of artworks imply the intertwinement of “real” and “symbolic” places, which is to say, of material and media categories. Draxler’s updated version of Siegelaub’s model sketched a multiplication of the profiles that constitute the artist’s role, which seem to anticipate the capacity for multitasking today’s art world has come to expect of media-savvy artists. Given the fact that the postmodern discourse of media rose in the 1980s to the status of a social theory, and in light of the Bulletin Board System technology of the time, which anticipated the internet revolution of the 1990s, it is hardly astonishing that post-conceptual artists showed particular interest in those aspects of modern media culture that attest to the interwovenness of (retro-)avant-gardist utopias with technological optimism.
One significant example of what Draxler invokes as a turn away from the author-centric production of objects and toward an integration of scientific, journalistic, and discursive tasks into the artist’s media practice is Christian Philipp Müller’s exhibition Vergessene Zukunft [Forgotten Future], which was on display at Kunstverein München in 1992.12
As the title suggests, the exhibition examined utopias that had been repressed from contemporary consciousness: a pavilion Le Corbusier had designed, at the behest of the electronics manufacturer Philips, in collaboration with Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair; Nicolas Schöffer’s book La ville cybernétique (1969); and Veit Harlan’s movie Bewildered Youth [Anders als du und ich] (1957). Drawing on historic materials, the show documented these three projects, which would at first glance seem unrelated, in montages of texts and imagery on walls painted in various colors that recalled the exhibition displays of Group Material. It was not by accident that the deliberately aestheticized form of presentation brought the interpenetration of art, architecture, and design in the historic avant-gardes to mind, a practice late modernism, here represented by Le Corbusier, had revived in the form of the high-tech spectacle. Yet far removed from the auratic aesthetic of the White Cube usually associated with high and late modernism, Müller’s wall design pointed to a historic event in whose light the clean break that ostensibly separates the era of high-modernist formalism from that of the neo-avant-gardist media revolution appears less absolute. Not only does the pavilion commissioned by Philips, whose products were sold worldwide, suggest the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk that gestures back to the historic avant-gardes; it also adumbrates the shift from single-medium works toward the post-avant-gardist multimedia installation. It is precisely such multilayered genealogies that Müller’s spatial montage of historic documents, minimalist object-rhetoric, and post-conceptual information display reflects—a technique that enabled the artist to both historicize and recontextualize modern media.
Forgotten Future manifested this sort of context-referential and topological concept of its media not least importantly in its aesthetic emphasis on materials and objects. A large model of the Philips pavilion presented on a pedestal was at once functional and autonomous in character, as the viewer could read it either as an architectural element or as an art object. The color of aluminum and set against a blue surface, it was placed on a radiant yellow platform that conformed to Le Corbusier’s doctrine of colors. The indistinguishability of functional-illustrative and autonomous-presentationist exhibition elements returned in the reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s Paris “minuscule bureau” or “tiny office.” Set in the “White Cube” architecture at Kunstverein München, the windowless room, constructed on the basis of the Modulor system and measuring no more than 226 by 259 by 226 cm (7.4 by 8.5 by 7.4 feet), which provided space for a maximum of four people, looked like an oversized minimalist object. Müller’s reinterpretation of the “minuscule bureau” into a walk-in sculpture added a new dimension to Le Corbusier’s calculation that spatial constraint would render the communication with collaborators and visitors as efficient as possible. Though functioning, within the framework of a contemporary art exhibition, as a spatial expansion of aesthetic perception, the reconstruction also revealed itself to be an instrument of social control; for the exact duplication of Le Corbusier’s office—instead of the original’s colorful interior design, one copy was outfitted as a White Cube, the other as a Black Box—engendered a fusion of architectural and media-based semantics of space. If this structure evoked an interrelation between the modernist paradigm of rationality and the (post-)modern one of reproduction, the restrictions on the visitors’ freedom of movement lent it another meaning: In order to open the door that led to the office reconstruction designed as a “White Cube,” they had to pass through a photoelectric barrier,13 and only after closing this first door could they operate the glass door leading to the “Black Box,” which would reopen after pressing an alarm button. Triggered by a motion sensor, Varèse’s eight-minute composition Poème électronique would be played for visitors once they had entered the Black Box.
In other words, the visitors gained a physical experience of invisible technologies that allowed them to interact with a contemporary (re-)construction of a late modernist version of multimedia aesthetics. In this way, Forgotten Future set empirical knowledge of social control, mediated by a spatial-temporal ensemble, against the phantasm of democratic participation frequently invoked by modern architecture as well as avant-gardist exhibition designs and interactive installations.
Forgotten Future was intended as a complement to Beatriz Colomina’s instructive study Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media14 by offering insight into the role modern art plays in the production of architecture as a (mass) medium. This role became visible in the form in which documentation of the Philips pavilion was presented. Where the “minuscule bureau” embodied the dialectic that links the artificial scarcity of space and time to efficiency enhancements, the pavilion’s architecture, based on hyperbolic paraboloids,15 housed an audiovisually overwhelming multimedia spectacle: Le Corbusier’s eight-minute projection of “representative” images from world history, ranging from monkeys to a newborn baby to the detonation of a nuclear bomb to the architect’s own works,16 in combination with Varèse’s abstract composition and Xenakis’s design based on mathematical formulae proved to be a synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk of architecture, music, film, and light. Varèse’s timbres amalgamated machine noise, piano chords, singers’ voices, etc., which unfolded into a dynamic-spatial acoustic environment thanks to a special audiotape technology developed by Philips. Yet the way Le Corbusier’s picture show stylized an advanced electronic composition into a synthesis of organic life and technological developments evinced the same humanist pathos that had been the target of Smithson’s critical assessment of the “natural history of Modernism.”
By addressing the confrontation between two different practices of montage, one allegorical, the other topological, Forgotten Future at once also brought to light the differences as well as the similarities between the conceptions of media inherent in them. The spatial nexus of the office and the pavilion with the documentary graphic material illustrating Schöffer’s plans for the transformation of Paris into a “Cybernetic City” revealed the proximity between avant-gardist utopian, technocratic, and biologistic visions of a systemically regulated urban structure promoting increases in efficiency and productivity by rationalizing space and time. In formal terms, the spatial segments that served the presentation of materials concerning Harlan and Schöffer were dominated by flesh tones. By evoking such references, the exhibition’s topology allowed the viewer to read the shadows cast all the way into the present by the negative outcomes of attempts to translate utopian ideas into reality. Unlike the allegorists, however, the postmodern theorists of media pursued—and more or less affirmed—the idea that technological change shaped social development—a vision that, in the case of Schöffer’s work, reached into the dimension of biopolitics as described by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Manfred Hermes’s essay in the catalogue accompanying Forgotten Future draws our attention to this dimension as well; Hermes writes that Schöffer’s model was based on “fascist conceptions of national hygiene” whose hetero-sexist implications are evident in the design for a “center for sexual recreational activities”: The center was conceived as “a sort of basement orgy room” to which “only heterosexual couples” would be admitted. Schöffer “feminized” the building that would house the center: “soft shapes, a color scheme based on pink, the whole structure in the shape of a female breast.”17
If Forgotten Future thus opened biopolitical perspectives on a late modernism situated between corporatist interests, fantasies of technological omnipotence, and masculinist creation myths, it sharpened the argument by presenting documentary materials around the movie Bewildered Youth in a movie theater-style display box. Veit Harlan’s vile concoction, firmly rooted in the tradition of anti-Semitic18 and homophobic agitation, first came out in 1957, the year Müller was born. It tells the story of a young man who is seduced by a homosexual dealer of modern art,19 juxtaposing the anti-modern impulse manifest in the connection between deviant sexuality and abstract aesthetics with the tensions, but also the complicity, between modernism and anti-modernity revealed in Le Corbusier’s and Schöffer’s models. As Draxler writes in his contribution to the catalogue, the exhibition thus examined the rising popularity in the late 1950s of “ideas about the harmony between art and an aesthetic social hygiene” that had left the “classical potentials for conflict between technology and the social realm” behind.20
We might add that these very same potentials for conflict came to light in the allegorical-topological montages of documentary imagery and texts, objects, architecture elements, movable walls, film projection, sound, wall displays, and print media—and also with regard to the artistic and aesthetic position Müller staked out for himself. For the post-minimalist and post-conceptual interior and communication design he had created evinced intersections with the multimedia look of the late 1950s, revealing unresolved continuities.
Against such entanglements, the spatial placement and aesthetic design of the documents and models posited a structure of disruptions and dissonances: Le Corbusier’s office, for instance, was originally furnished with a table, a chair, a sculpture, and a wall painting; patently stripped of its original function, it was now a container that served as passageway, sound studio, and projection surface. The work of montage in the space thus appeared as a time-bound process of self-reflective remedialization. This nonlinear layering of meanings, which must perhaps be described as postmodern, was also manifest in the convoluted placement of architecture elements, autonomous objects, and functional partitions that opened forever new lines of sight and fields of vision as the viewer moved through the room. If this imitation of filmic montage lent the exhibition design a cinematographic quality, the consequence was a (de-)naturalization of aesthetic perception that reflected back on the way media exercise a form of control over such perception (for instance, by predetermining the selection of visual detail) while also contrasting it with a displacement of perspective.
Around 1989, a number of exhibition models similarly opened the montage of real and symbolic, of architectural and media sites toward a perspective on modern art and media culture with a view to a historical critique of power; examples include shows by the abovementioned artists, such as Fareed Armaly’s (re)Orient, on display at Galerie Lorenz, Paris, in 1989, which was received as a central contribution to the debate over postcolonialism, as well as Renée Green’s Import-Export Funk Office (1992), created in collaboration with the music theorist Diedrich Diederichsen for Galerie Nagel, Cologne, which helped initiate the discourse on “black music for white listeners” in the German-speaking world.
In art since the late 1980s, we can observe a transformation of allegorical montage that becomes manifest in the shift from functional sites to topological spaces. This shift also reveals a process that renders a return to distinct media more difficult for the simple reason that it commingles material and immaterial media to a point where they become indistinguishable. It seems to me that today, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we would do well to recall efforts such as those undertaken in Forgotten Future to object to the media-based naturalization of aesthetic perception, which obscures the conflict between technology and the social even as that conflict no doubt continues unabated. More particularly, in light of what is by now a fully integrated network culture as well as the current renaissance of the scientific exhibition,21 such efforts would seem to be an indispensable contribution if this conflict is to be openly enacted in and with an art that does not imagine its place to be beyond the modern media culture.
Notes
1 Gregor Stemmrich, “Conceptual Art: Begriff und Wirklichkeit,” Kunsthistorische Arbeitsblätter, no. 11 (2003), pp. 43–54.
2 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 41.
3 Ibid., p. 56.
4 See Eric de Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006), pp. 32–63.
5 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, eds., Art After Conceptual Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 27–51, esp. 44–45.
6 For instance, one of Oiticica’s famous installations, Tropicália (1967–68), bore the inscription “Purity is a myth.”
7 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part I,” October 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 67–86, and “Part II,” October 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 59–80. See also Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998).
8 Robert Smithson, “Ultramoderne,” Arts Magazine 42 (1967), p. 31. Reprinted in Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations (New York: New York University Press, 1979), pp. 48–51, quote p. 48.
9 See Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies in/and New Worlds” [1992], in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 343–373, quote p. 355.
10 See Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).
11 Helmut Draxler, “The Message as Medium” (1991), www.mip.at/attachments/84.
12 This was the second exhibition held under the direction of Helmut Draxler, who had recently been appointed director of Kunstverein München.
13 See the description of Vergessene Zukunft in Christian Philipp Müller, exh.cat. Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), pp. 100–108.
14 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 39–40.
15 See Christian Philipp Müller, op. cit., p. 102.
16 Ibid.
17 See Manfred Hermes, “Elevation. Im Jahr 2000 wird die ganze Welt schwul sein!,” in Christian Philipp Müller: Vergessene Zukunft, exh.cat (Munich: Kunstverein München, 1992), pp. 30–53, quote p. 42.
18 In 1940, Harlan had made the film Jud Süß for the Nazis; he was acquitted after the war, despite his active involvement in the Third Reich.
19 As Christian Philipp Müller notes, the dealer, as a disseminator of modernist ideals, replaces the Jewish conspiracy insinuated by the Nazis.
20 Helmut Draxler, jacket copy, in Christian Philipp Müller: Vergessene Zukunft, op. cit.
21 To mention only one current example: the exhibition WeltWissen: 300 Jahre Wissenschaften in Berlin [World Knowledge: 300 Years of Science in Berlin], which was on display at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau from September 2010 to January 2011 (the exhibition poster was designed by the artist Mark Dion).
Patently, art does not have a monopoly on creation, but it takes its capacity to invent mutant coordinates to extremes: it engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being. The decisive threshold constituting this new aesthetic paradigm lies in the aptitude of these processes of creation to auto-affirm themselves as existential nuclei, autopoietic machines.
(Felix Guattari)
In the opening pages of her 2010 collection of essays, Perpetual Inventory, Rosalind Krauss states that the anthology “charts my conviction as a critic that the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art.”1 Such a declaration is not unexpected: Since the late 1990s in particular, Krauss has elaborated critical artistic practices resistant to the so-called “post-medium condition” triggered by postmodernism.2 Contra hybrid, intermedial genres such as installation art, Krauss argues that the most important contemporary art turns on the invention and reinvention of mediums, each of which carries within it a set of recursive structures that provide a logic for production and a matrix of meaning.
Yet the statement is not without a certain historical paradox. It was Krauss, after all, who in the early 1970s delivered a penetrating critique of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, the two writers most closely linked to the discourse of medium specificity in the 1960s.3 Greenberg’s and Fried’s modernist criticism, she argued, telescoped history into the dissembling objectivity of master narratives, and it was against this looming teleology that Krauss sought out aggregate, impure, and self-deferring mediums such as film and opted for alternate terms such as “technical apparatus” in her criticism of the 1980s and 90s.
But what if one were to reorient the discussion of medium within contemporary art away from the question of specificity and towards an articulation of form? How would the terms shift in character and relation, and what potentialities might be revealed? Consider Maria Eichhorn’s Maria Eichhorn Public Limited Company, a work commissioned for Documenta 11 in 2002 that involved the establishment of a public limited company with a single shareholder, Eichhorn herself. Eichhorn stipulated that the company’s assets—the required initial investment of €50,000—should never appreciate in value. She further transferred all shares to the company itself, thereby eliminating her role as shareholder. Stripped of the possibility of profit, the company forfeits its raison d’être, but also cannot fold. The €50,000 investment, meanwhile, loses its representational and mobile character as capital and becomes mere matter, static and dead.
Maria Eichhorn Public Limited Company is an example of a work of art whose form, rather than medium, is recursive. As a legal entity continually divesting itself of its own financial potentiality, it is a glittering kernel of autonomy within a market system premised on the capital of art. Documentation regarding the company’s establishment can (and has been) purchased, thus participating in an external appreciation of value that its internal rules disallow. Yet the company itself is owned by itself. Impervious to market fluctuation, it simultaneously evacuates and gives form to capital, each operation a figure to the other’s ground.
The mediums for Eichhorn’s work of art are the legalistic discourse of financial institutions, the profit motive of capitalism, the aesthetic valuations of the art world, and the means by which such valuations translate into financial worth. Eichhorn did not reinvent these mediums; indeed, she appropriated them readymade. What Eichhorn invented, to use a phrase drawn from Felix Guattari, are the “mutant coordinates” of a form that is capable of both endless self-production and constant irritation within the very mediums from which it is plied.4 To speak of the “medium specificity” of Maria Eichhorn Public Limited Company is to redundantly describe the work of art’s constituting matter without articulating its animating form. Rather, one might term its medial condition as “aspecific”: a de facto situation and a processual state.
Like an increasing number of contemporary works of art, the form of Maria Eichhorn Public Limited Company is not a shape or object, but a behavior. Such works frequently have multiple, fluctuating, and contingent mediums; their critical capacity, meanwhile, derives from their situatedness within interactive ecologies, some of which involve other works of art, but many of which do not.
How does one recalibrate seminal terms like “medium” and “form” in response to the character of such works? This essay proposes one possible defamiliarization through the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose elaboration of systems theory in the 1980s and 1990s has widely influenced the analysis of communicative structures in sociology, science, and law.5 Luhmann’s systems theory is a totalizing theory of social production, and as such, not without ample pitfalls of its own. Within the context of contemporary art, however, its decidedly nondisciplinary vocabulary provides new purchase on a set of foundational art historical terms and a dynamic description of their relations, and it is these aspects that I seek to foreground here.
For Luhmann, the term “medium” does not refer to individual media, for example, painting or sculpture, and the normative conventions or technical supports that determine them.6 Rather, Luhmann conceives of medium broadly as the means by which communicative acts occur. Just as oil acts as a vehicle for pigment in paint, a medium is a facilitator; it establishes a condition of possibility for the appearance of forms, but is in itself formless and fluid. Drawing from the psychologist Fritz Heider, Luhmann understands medium as coupled with form in terms of relations or proportionalities: Form is a tight configuration of elements, whereas medium is a loose configuration, potentially of those same elements. Medium and form are therefore mutually dependent, and may constitute and reconstitute each other through time.
Luhmann’s articulation of medium opens up to the exigencies of contemporary art in a number of ways. First, Luhmann’s coupling of medium and form is aspecific. The form/medium distinction may be narrowly conceived in terms of an object: matter gathered into definite shape as opposed to loosely distributed, as in the difference between a pyramid of sand fashioned on a table and the loose sand of the beach upon which such a table might sit. But a work of art’s form might also emerge out of multiple, simultaneous mediums, artistically or otherwise defined. One could conceive of the form of Gabriel Orozco’s Sand on Table (1992), a photographic image of precisely the form/medium distinction described above, for example, not simply in terms of the photograph’s composition, but the analogic transit between the table as a physical site where a form/medium distinction is performed and the photograph as a temporal platform by which this event is contained and conveyed. The flexibility of the form/medium distinction thus spans micro and macro art systems, and further, allows mediums to be continually constituted rather than a priori defined.
Luhmann conceives of medium and form as intrinsically, rather than circumstantially, co-dependent. Thus, a medium has no abstract identity or determined set of conventions that particular forms only provisionally embody. Rather, mediums only become visible by way of the forms constituted through them; in turn, forms do not emerge without the facilitation of mediums. The practice of institutional critique produces institutionality as a medium just as the medium of the institution allows for a configuration of elements to form into institutional critique. Similarly, the interventionist forms of many activist-oriented practices (Critical Art Ensemble or The Yes Men, for example) are often intended to force a loose configuration of elements within a political-economic medium such as global capitalism to thicken into a legible structure that can be perceived, analyzed, and potentially dissolved. The shifting relationship between medium and form thus allows for works of art to act swiftly and nimbly, keeping pace with the ever-quickening speed of capitalism itself.
Luhmann’s formulation is temporal and understands forms not in terms of stable objects, but contingent events. A work of art is conceptually constituted within one medium, or condition of possibility, but it may also be dissolved and reconstituted by way of another. Much of the way art practices and discourses animate other art practices and discourses is by virtue of these reconstitutions. The inception of minimalism is one such example: If Frank Stella’s paintings of 1959 emerged out of the American discourse of medium specificity (with its priority on mining the limiting conditions of the painterly support), contemporaneous artists such as Carl Andre and Donald Judd almost immediately reconceived of these paintings as insistently material objects that dialogued with the literalness of their own sculpture. The temporal nature of the form/medium distinction thus acknowledges the way in which reception and interpretation are constitutive, rather than incidental, to the identity of works of art. It also explains why a configuration may be a work in some cases, but not in others.
Luhmann’s articulation of medium depends on the foundational role of the observer in making the distinction between medium and form. In their respective formulations of medium specificity, both Greenberg and Fried advanced the centrality of the observing subject or critic.7 Luhmann departs from these approaches in his emphasis on the subject’s perception over and above his or her judgment. This means that questions of evaluation shift from designations of quality to estimations of success, wherein success is measured (with no specific positive valence) by the ability of a medium/form distinction to generate further distinctions for one or several observers. Likewise, while the observer is constitutive in describing the medium/form distinction, she necessarily occupies the blind spot of her own point of observation. As such, a second observation is required to situate the first, and so on.8 Contradiction, contingency, multiplicity, and delay are thus woven into the very texture of observation, and consequently, the role of observation in determining medium and form.
Finally, Luhmann’s coupling of medium and form shifts attention away from identity and towards boundaries. Following the mathematician George Spencer-Brown, Luhmann argues that each form/medium distinction creates an inside and an outside of that form, and further, that “the question of what lies on the other side of the form is posed anew in each instance.”9 Whereas narratives of twentieth-century modernism frequently depend on the relative stability of art as a category to either continue or supersede, Luhmann’s aspecific conception of medium and emphasis on processes of differentiation and distinction allow for an epistemological, rather than ontological investigation of how communicative acts come to mean. Observing distinctions (whether traditional “canvas/painting” couplings or the increasingly frequent “project/practice” pair) is therefore an experimental, rather than disciplinary gesture, one in which “art” is a permeable and often temporary form posited relationally by way of a broader medium.
As a descriptive schema, Luhmann’s formulation of the medium/form relationship does not offer prescriptive guidelines for art’s evaluation. But it does facilitate the charting of new genealogies of distinction responsive to the recursive forms increasingly prevalent in contemporary art. Let us take an example. In 1954, Lygia Clark made a collage framed by the mat of a passe-partout, and observed that when she abutted this passe-partout with a collage element of the same color, a line of space appeared between them. She observed that the line was an undrawn line, that it was contingent and indexical, and that it was found, not made. In a series of paintings that same year, Clark deployed this line to “break the frame” of the painting support. The line of space entered the composition, while the painting moved out to incorporate the frame. Two years later, Clark connected this “undrawn line” to the lines of space that appear between doors and lintels, windows and frames, tiles on the floor. She named it “the organic line,” and began to use it as a structuring element in her work.10
Since Greenberg’s articulation of medium specificity depended on exploring the limiting conditions of a medium in order to better secure its “area of competence,” it was well equipped to make sense of the problem of edge. Fried later observed exactly this concern in the “deductive structure” of Stella’s paintings and Kenneth Noland’s “discovery of the center” in the radiating circles of his target forms. Edge, in Luhmann’s terms, corresponds to the interior limit of a form. It establishes identity by virtue of a positive value: in the case of Stella or Noland, by way of the painting’s support. Clark’s “organic line,” by contrast, concerns the exterior limit of a form: that which is liminal, rather than integral, to a form’s identity. It is a byproduct of making, but it is not making in itself.
By using the organic line as a generator, Clark shifted attention from support to frame, from edge to gap, and from the medium of painting as a historically continuous category to the medium of space through which the distinction of painting and not-painting occurs. It is precisely this interval that Gabriel Orozco harnessed when he placed an empty shoebox on the gallery floor as his contribution to the 1993 Venice Biennale. For Orozco, it was crucial to preserve the infrathin plane of space between the box and the surface upon which it rested. By insisting on the continuity of this space and that around and within the box itself, Orozco effectively displaced the form of the sculpture from the empty container to the volume of space that filled it. If the shoebox demarcates this form’s interior edge, the infrathin plane of space beneath the box gestures to its exterior limit: that limit where form disaggregates into medium, or full space once again becomes empty. It is therefore the shoebox that functions as the organic line of this sculpture, dividing medium from form and work from frame.
From this perspective, Orozco’s innovation lies less in his recuperation of the category of sculpture than in the way he slots traditional mediums such as sculpture and photography into the liminal interval described by Clark’s organic line. Hence his notorious 1994 solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, in which he affixed single clear yogurt caps to each of the gallery’s four walls at eye-level. Rather than solicit interest in themselves, the yogurt caps initiated the viewer’s rotation in space as she pivoted within the gallery’s architectural frame. In so doing, the caps coagulated the medium of space into an experienced form, one that could also be understood as social, historical, and institutional, as when, in Home Run (1993), the artist activated the space between the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a neighboring apartment building by asking residents to display oranges in the windows facing the museum. The physical coordinates of this work—oranges, windows, apartment building, museum—correspond to what may once have been called “sculptural” materials. In Home Run, however, they form an interface that allows the fugitive medium of “public space” to become visible as a contingent, relational, and potential form produced in the moment of observation.
It is precisely this interest in harnessing and manipulating “extra-artistic” mediums—mediums such as public space, ideological conflict, historical archives, communicative networks—that characterizes much contemporary art today. In such practices, the first function of a work is often to identify form/media distinctions already being performed outside the normative parameters of art. Yael Bartana’s Trembling Time (2001), for example, documents the Israeli state’s orchestration of a monumental form of nationhood through the minute of stillness that begins Yom Hazikaron, the memorial day for Israel’s fallen soldiers. Shot from an overpass into the bright lights of oncoming traffic, the video captures the moment when drivers, signaled by a siren’s wail, stop their cars in remembrance of the dead. The video is first a tool of observation, one that records how the state carves an ideological form out of time and space. Extending this minute to a full seven minutes, Bartana calls attention less to the ritual’s startling lack of movement, than to the indeterminate edges of the stillness itself. As one watches the cars’ interminable grinding to a halt, their ghostly doubling, and finally their gradual return into motion, the video unhinges the specific contours of the ideological form and reveals it as a continuous thickness that permeates embodied experience within the nation-state as a whole. In producing this ideological “trembling,” Bartana has, in Luhmann’s terms, turned the state’s own distinction between form and medium into another medium, one generated by the organic line that previously acted as their boundary.
The organic line, conceived broadly as the interval that occupies a position between entities, is a boundary reconstituted by every distinction between medium and form. Yet, since the medium/form distinction can in turn function as a medium, the organic line is also the mechanism by which form becomes recursive. As Bartana’s Trembling Time demonstrates, such recursivity may involve one medium/form distinction generating another. But it may also involve the maintenance of a single form, as in Maria Eichhorn Public Limited Company, where the potentiality of capital generates an organic line that is both constantly frustrated and endlessly renewed.
Luhmann, extending the biological theories of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to the realm of social systems, describes such behaviors as autopoietic, meaning auto- or self-producing.11 An autopoietic unit is one that generates and regenerates itself via internal feedback, despite external events that require adjustments to its internal functioning. Such an entity’s autonomy depends on the continual production of its own boundary. Since the positing of a boundary involves both the internal and external limits of a form, however, an autopoietic unit is not hermetically sealed, but rather “structurally coupled” with its environment in relations of dynamic interaction and response. In Greenberg’s formulation of medium specificity, recursivity inheres in the self-critical capacities of a medium; in Krauss’s articulation of the technical apparatus, it provides a set of self-generating rules through which to justify artistic choices. An autopoietic conception of recursivity, I would argue, understands recursive operations as the means by which an artistic entity not only regulates identity, but creatively responds to its outside.
Francis Alÿs’s The Rumor (1997) offers a succinct demonstration. The piece began when Alÿs initiated a rumor in a small Mexican town concerning an individual who had not returned to a hotel, and ended when municipal police issued a missing person poster based on verbal descriptions, thereby giving the rumor’s immaterial fiction a material claim. Demarcated by these two events, the work of art’s form consisted solely in its ability to recursively generate the work’s identity as a set of related verbal utterances in relation to the larger medium of social communication through which it flowed. As an autopoietic unit, the rumor responded to deformations brought about by the medium: idiosyncrasies in narration, for example, missing details, or the addition or elaboration of information when the rumor was told. Indeed, such deformations actually sustained the rumor, which also demonstrates the interrelationship between medium and form. As such, Alÿs’s rumor models, not simply the recursive operations of a work of art, reconceived as an autopoietic unit, but the way in which such a work can act as a “perturberance” within other self-organized systems that share its medium, such as community infrastructure or the geopolitics of the state.
It follows that one central task of the “historian” of contemporary art is to excavate the organic line that lies between these various configurations, to give texture to how this boundary delineates inside limits from outside space, and to chart the “mutant coordinates” of experience produced in its wake. To approach works of art as autopoietic forms produced in relation to a multiplicity of aspecific mediums is to conceive of art’s autonomy as operative, rather than merely ideological or aesthetic. Such an autonomy does not concern the specificity of art within an art system, so much as the way works of art organize themselves into acting entities that can be observed and described from various locations, each of which contains its own blind-spot, its own aporia of situated space. Contemporaneity is one such blind-spot. But it is also the generative platform from which to construct the conditions of possibility for works of art, and the subjects that observe them, to exist.
Notes
1 Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. xiii.
2 Also see “Reinventing the Medium” Critical Inquiry 25: 2 (Winter 1999), pp. 289–305 and “A Voyage on the North Sea,” in Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999).
3 Rosalind Krauss, “A View of Modernism” [1972], in Perpetual Inventory, op. cit., pp. 115–128.
4 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 106.
5 See in particular Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems [1984] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
6 Niklas Luhmann, “The Medium of Art,” in Essays on Self Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 215–226 and Art as a Social System [1995] (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
7 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” [1960] and “Complaints of an Art Critic” [1967] in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 85–93, 265–272; and Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella” [1965], in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 213–265.
8 Niklas Luhmann, “Speaking and Silence,” New German Critique, no. 61 (Winter 1994), pp. 25–37.
9 Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, op. cit., p. 123.
10 Lygia Clark, “Lygia Clark and the Concrete Expressional Space” [1959], in Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998).
11 Niklas Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems” and “The Work of Art and the Self-Reproduction of Art” in Essays on Self Reference, op. cit., pp. 1–20, 191–214; Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living [1972] (Boston: D. Reidel, 1980).
Some arguments are hard to believe as we think them, easier to believe if we feel them. Here, to the contrary, is an idea easy to think: If we concentrate on the feel of the pencil within our grasp or the keyboard beneath our fingertips, we risk losing what we intended to write; distracted by the physical sensation of writing, we abandon its plan. Ed Ruscha recently spoke of “looking at the word [that he painted] long enough to lose the meaning.”1 His account is logical, for rational discourse opposes sense-as-feel to sense-as-meaning—a typical dualism. Focusing on the one blurs the other. Yet English offers a single word for both types of experience, and an artist might insist that the feel and the thought occur simultaneously: sense-as-sense.
Let me begin again, not in recognition of this convergence but in acknowledgment of a difference. There are at least two types of experiential specificity explored by modern artists who work through a material medium. First, you can manipulate the material—for instance, paint—as a way of assimilating your sense of what you see externally. The resultant representation lends physical substance to immediate vision. Second, the same paint medium may refer to, or even directly express, inner feelings. You realize these feelings, you feel them, in the act of working the material. Like the feelings, the paint medium itself has neither essence nor limitations. A material medium and its associated procedures are specific to the experience conveyed. The reflectivity or translucency of a paint surface may prove more significant than its color. Despite patterns in customary practice, paint need not imply “painting.” This general category of medium is a mere analytical contrivance. Each of the two experiential modes aims to eliminate such intermediary cultural coding. Each seeks specificity even as it forms a representational sign—perhaps an unattainable goal, if only because of how we think signs operate. Like designations for media, signs generalize. But for now, assume that an artist can present the specificity of experience with an appropriately specific materiality and that there are at least these two variants of the process.
Paintings by Paul Cézanne exemplify the first method or attitude. The distinctive qualities of his brushstrokes, tactile as much as optical, record moments of visual concentration. The materiality of Cézanne’s surfaces inspired Pablo Picasso, the owner of a densely structured Cézanne landscape, to show the painting off to guests by rapping his knuckles against an area of blue near the center of the taut canvas. As he did this, he said: “Look at the sea. It’s solid as a rock.”2 He was responding to the physical solidity of the painted image. This was no pictorial conceit, no question of “solid” composition. By knocking against the painting, Picasso referred to the hardened surface of Cézanne’s relatively thick strokes. He recognized an irony beyond comparing water to rock: Critics and historians had for several decades—this was 1971—discussed Cézanne’s effect of solidity when they might have investigated actual solidity.
In 1966, five years previous to Picasso’s irreverent treatment of Cézanne, the East German artist A. R. Penck (Ralf Winkler) painted a single standing figure with outstretched arms, all in tones of red: a case of the second experiential attitude. Whereas Cézanne depicted an environment complete with terrain, trees, sea, and sky in full spectrum, Penck reduced his figure to the point that it resembles a monochromatic pictograph on an amorphous field—an abstract sign. Yet, at five and a half feet in height, the figure approaches human scale, although oddly proportioned and extremely linear—a human-size stick figure.3 Penck states that he thinks in terms of “abstract motions.”4 He thinks through the abstracted forms and potentialities of his body, shared with other human bodies. There may be something universal about pictures that resemble pictographic abstractions, as Penck’s do. But this universality or generalized quality of sign is sufficiently crude and coarse to appear specific to this image. Imagine a familiar sign—the letters S and O were Ruscha’s example—rendered oddly enough to shift attention from the conventional communicative value to an open sensory experience. This condition approaches Penck’s sense of representational reality.
Our response to a stick figure is intuitive, as if we recognized and even felt our own stick-like extensions into surrounding space and matter. If any one of us were to create a human pictograph, we would render the arm of the figure as an extended line, perhaps with an elbow bend, the mimetic equivalent of the vectored movement of extending our drawing arm. Penck’s figure has an oversized hand; it seems to stretch the linear arm taut, as if pulled by the hand’s weighted action, an inertial force. When we take some distance from the situation of our own body—perhaps by using a mirror or by observing others—an arm looks like the same linear abstraction that it feels like. And a hand looks and feels more complex than an arm; it has a greater presence and looms larger in consciousness. If Penck’s picture refers (like a sign), then it refers to this intuitive feeling. Here, visual understanding corresponds to kinesthetic understanding in terms of extension, a natural movement of the arm, or what Penck calls an abstract motion. Extension is the conceptual abstraction that identifies or names the indeterminate movement. We extend (same term) the abstract meaning of the movement to willful, purposeful intention—as if an arm or a line were extending itself because it wanted to go precisely where it goes. To get something accomplished, extend yourself. If Cézanne represents what we might see outside ourselves, actualized in brushstrokes, Penck provides a material version of how our bodies feel from the inside and how the externalized visual sign of a concept of the body translates back into corporal feeling and action.
Penck’s imagery lacks a personality type. His loose, brushy lines indicate merely that there is or was an actual person who drew them. Any work so obviously handmade evokes a human presence, the human touch. But nothing guarantees that a more precise interpretation of these deposits of fluid paint will accurately capture the existential conditions that brought these marks to their present state. Just as Penck’s image induces us to fantasize our own movements, we are free to fantasize what kind of person this artist could be, and what he may have thought he was doing. But when interpreted, Penck’s image mirrors its viewer’s fantasy life, his or her anticipations and suspicions, not the artist’s. Penck assumes no control. He refers to his system as “wide open … The sequence of signs has only to be accessible so that the viewer can work somehow with the information.”5 To experience Penck’s imagery is to invert the usual order of ideology: Nothing compels you to receive from the image what it gives; instead, what you get is whatever you choose to take. The responsibility, the judgment, is yours.
If we were to imitate and reproduce one of Penck’s figures (as he suggests), we would be capturing its indeterminate range within the sensory substance of our marks, within the material medium.6 This mimetic condition would apply even if we were deploying virtual, electronic imagery—the medium would still become a determining factor in establishing the character of the expression. The medium would be speaking back to us, even though we were trying to channel it for a purpose. A nominally disembodied medium becomes embodied through its human use, a condition more evident in depictions thick with substance. But certain presentations of dematerialized filmic and electronic imagery make the point just as well. In 1971, Douglas Davis faced a standard television set to the wall and tuned it to produce nothing but a reflected glow and a hiss (The Backward Television Set). More recently, between 2006 and 2009, Jim Campbell produced a series of moving images projected by widely spaced, vertical strings of LED lights suspended between the viewer’s position and the screen. You see the image through the external raster of this coarse projection device. It interferes with the integration of the view, as if you were seeing a painted image as lumps of pigment that remain independent of the totality even as they constitute it. To some extent, this is the effect of all painting and of every medium. The specific physicality of the medium, its aggregate of material properties, introduces sensory variables that confound any standardized interpretation of the imagery. If you think you know what the image must mean, you may well be confronted by sensations inconsistent with your preconception. Any materialized image has the potential—like Ruscha’s painted lettering—to escape its customary message, resisting interpretive clichés and all ideology. In this respect, little separates Campbell’s projection device from Ruscha’s lettering from Penck’s stick figures from Cézanne’s landscape.
Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” explores an analogous tension between articulate, interpretable reason and inarticulate, fluid, yet utterly precise sensation. If any literary work succeeds in featuring the convergence of sense in its two senses (meaning and feeling), this one does. Kafka describes an act of writing that uses the skin of a criminal prisoner as the writing surface—and not just skin, for needles perform the writing, gradually cutting deep into flesh. The crucial sentences are these: “Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body. … It’s no calligraphy for school children. … There have to be lots and lots of flourishes around the actual script. … How difficult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds.”7 Ideally, the writing with needles becomes the prisoner’s punishment, his execution, but also his rehabilitation or redemption, though the redeeming moment of comprehending the necessity of the law coincides with the moment of death. If visual expression normally dominates tactile expression when the concern is a conceptual abstraction such as a law or regulation, here the usual hierarchy of social knowledge will be inverted. Reading is to be done by feel, not vision.
During the 1980s, Penck was one of a number of German painters—among them, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz—who received the awkward title “Neo-Expressionist.” In one respect, the name was suitable, for these artists often referred back to the German cultural context of Kafka’s generation of writers and the expressionist painters at work before the cataclysm of Nazism and the Second World War. They shared a motivation—a resistance to ideological order and its polarized conceptual divisions. Baselitz stated the position succinctly: “I was born into a destroyed order … And I didn’t want to reestablish an order.”8 In the postwar East there was socialism, with realist art promoting it—absolute truth, transparent message. In the postwar West there was capitalism, with abstract art exemplifying a liberated, creative spirit—transparent vision, absolute form. During the earlier postwar period, the typical West German critic regarded abstraction as the progressive mode for new art. Later, during the 1960s, the progressive position shifted to images of popular, consumer culture—potentially, “realist.”9 The political use of abstraction and then of variations on American pop projected these forms of imagery as antithetical to traditional realism, associated with the political past of both Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s Communism. The cartoonish imagery of pop became the newer fashion. In 1963, Lüpertz (born in the East, schooled in the West) painted The Death of a Donald Duck; it treated the famous Disney character as a noble subject with a life history worth memorializing, all the while rendering the cartoon character barely recognizable through a barrage of flashy, expressionistic strokes. Lüpertz’s amalgam of references to abstraction and pop mocked the very thought of progressive fashion by adopting multiple fashions. Scrambling the terms of his ideological resistance, he avoided the formulaic character that political resistance had assumed for others. He chose cultural incoherence rather than an aesthetic-cultural hierarchy.
Whether directly or indirectly, Kafka’s thinking instructed the postwar Germans who, even when in compliance, doubted the validity of their social order. “It is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know,” Kafka wrote.10 You discover what the law is only when your behavior conflicts with it. The prisoner undergoing judgment in Kafka’s penal colony is ignorant of the ultimate workings of the ideological system presumed to govern his conduct. Submitting to the system of justice and a punishment proper to his unknown crime, the prisoner learns the nature of the violated law as the needles of an execution machine inscribe its verbal message on his skin and into his flesh. He will “learn it on his body,” Kafka wrote, even though the knowledge, the drawing itself, causes him to bleed to death.11 The cursive script that reveals the law—in flourishes, paraphs, and other signs of the aesthetic—is barely legible, if at all.
The condemned man experiences on his body a specific aesthetic feeling, rather than a rule corresponding to it. This application of law is profoundly anti-ideological since the individual cannot internalize it intellectually. It exists only at the moment of execution, as if made for one person alone, within a context so unique it can hardly acquire meaning. Like a work of art, the law assumes its meaning only at the moment of interpretation, proceeding by corporal feeling, not mental reasoning—an ideological superstructure become physical infrastructure. Given how the law surfaces, it applies only to the specific case: traced out on the body, sensed on this body, the feeling of the law is your feeling. This law is intended for you. Under the law, survival depends on allowing thought and feeling to converge, living by the moment’s rule. The rule is: Remain open to your sensations.
Readers of the more academic forms of American art criticism might nevertheless doubt that a sense-oriented rendering, such as a brushy painting, could be politically alive after the 1960s. American criticism of contemporary art written during the 1970s and 1980s and even later often dismissed painting as work in a “dead” medium, reduced to a limited range of canonical practice and ill-suited to address pressing cultural issues. Critics impugned expressionism (German, American, or otherwise) for cashing in on a preexisting mythology of impulsive genius. “To retain its ‘art’ value,” Rosalind Krauss wrote, artists give a painting “the authorial mark of emotion—expressionism, psychological depth, sincerity.”12 As opposed to arts of material gesture, critics elevated whatever seemed discursively structured—art subject to translation into a textual equivalent—precisely what the likes of Penck, Baselitz, and Lüpertz regarded as verging on ideology.
The claim that painting in the 1980s was dead amounted to an anachronistic reprise of what Walter Benjamin had argued under very different social circumstances a half century earlier. While painting continued to demand contemplative interpretation because of its stylistic and representational complexities (perhaps less the case now than in Benjamin’s 1930s), the products of photography and film, with their radically altered relation to lived time, could be absorbed under psychological conditions of distraction. To the typically unreflective viewer, the new media provided the appearance of reality in real time, requiring little or no interpretation. But more important were the implications for class division in a modern society. Because painting suited the viewing environment of an aristocrat’s private gallery or a bourgeois gentleman’s drawing room, it reinforced the patterns of life of these patriarchal social classes, whereas the reproducibility and mechanicity of photography and film suited the consciousness of new urban masses, people with little cultural investment in private aesthetic pleasure. Simply put, the political force of film, not to mention its economics, was revolutionary.13
Here, for the sake of providing a context for the reception of neo-expressionist art in American academic circles during the 1980s, I have eliminated the many subtleties and ironies within Benjamin’s argument.14 Critics working in the United States at the time reduced Benjamin even more, claiming that photography, film, video, installation, and text-based art were the enlightened media that would lend imagistic and semiological support to a radically egalitarian society in a new technological era. In contrast, anything created through the seemingly elite, hand-oriented media of painting and sculpture appealed to sentiment and nostalgia: media of illusion, even delusion. This divisive attitude set an abstract, speculative theory (perhaps already outmoded around 1980) ahead of whatever understanding might be gained from an artist’s experience of the working conditions of a studio, or on the street, or in any given moment of a life. Overly wary of signs of emotion, the critics with their hard-headed ideological theory precluded all contrary sensory and emotional indications.
Critics who focus on modes of reception are often at odds with artists concerned with production. In 1981, German-born critic Benjamin Buchloh implied that, by the very act of painting by hand, an artist would tacitly claim an unmediated integrity and presence, imposing an unjust authority.15 This paranoid response is a critical viewer’s claim, not an artist’s. What justifies it? It may be that connotations of authority overwhelm viewers culturally indoctrinated and sensitized to these same effects. In an authoritarian state, references to authority and even to a counter-authority become all the more pernicious, either reinforcing the prevailing ideology or encouraging panicked appeals to whichever alternative might be invoked (hence, the odd attraction of intellectuals in the West to authoritarian Maoism during the 1970s). Buchloh cited arguments of the time that were being directed against a culture of male sexual dominance and mirrored them with Benjamin’s way of associating a dominant social class with its preferred art forms.16 The argument derives from theory, enforced by conceptual syllogism. But cultural forces are far less coherent and abstractly dialogic than this argument—which has its own seductive aesthetic, its feel—would make it seem. A medium can be guilty by association with those who maliciously appropriate it, but not inherently guilty, even within a particular historical context. Each use of a medium is specific but not to the medium. A medium is not an abstract law.
Artistic practice and its criticism often divide. A critic’s objection to the political naiveté, or perhaps the disingenuousness, of interpreting a work of art as an autonomous, specific object has little to do with the liberating feeling of autonomy that an artist in the studio may sometimes experience, with or without cultural references. There are times, certainly not always, when individuals can act not only in character but out of character. They follow the course of unfamiliar feelings rather than willing their emotions into the comfort of thoughts and sensations already known. They learn from the objects and signs they produce.
Rather than expressing a preferred ideological or cultural position or even a personality, many artists whose intellectual and emotional formation occurred during the middle and late decades of the twentieth century have used the specificity of material practices to separate themselves from their history of cultural indoctrination. Richard Tuttle mused recently: “If I can free a humble material from itself, perhaps I can free myself from myself. … I think [my work] knows, is smarter than I am, better than I am.”17 Jasper Johns expressed a similar notion, that he aimed to generate art “a little more worthwhile than oneself.”18 Concerning a set of drawings from the early 1990s, Richard Serra stated: “I wanted … to avoid the histories of existing styles, even my own. I wanted to free myself from my own ready-made handwriting.”19 And Barnett Newman used to say that the last thing he wanted to create was “another Newman”—a work too clearly identified with the person that he, Newman, already was.20 To this end, Bridget Riley assigns the final version of her paintings to assistants, ensuring that no habitual mannerism, no Riley-ism develops on the experiential surface; and Robert Mangold uses a roller to cover his large canvases as quickly and “matter-of-factly” as he can.21 Nominally an expressionist, Penck has risked anonymity as have these others, all of whom—especially in this respect—address the hypertrophied state of twenty-first-century culture. Critics should avoid applying theoretical generalizations to generalized categories of form. Any material condition—Tuttle’s paper, Serra’s paintstick, Penck’s stick-figure—can project sensation outside personality, outside cultural identity, outside theory itself.
We have all experienced culture’s Kafkaesque writing on the body. The ideological code becomes so internalized that the personality you project cannot be “yours,” any more than you can possess the pronouns or even the proper nouns that identify you. Any aesthetic practice can be a remedial form of drawing on the body (not writing): sensations that restore particularity, enhancing the specifics of life rather than hastening an acculturated death. As long as there is feeling, Kafka concluded, “enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted”—in his case, as a redeeming demise.22 But with the convergence of feeling and thought (feeling as the thought, thought as a feeling), Kafka’s story reads as an extension of life. T. W. Adorno speculated that the liberation of self from self could indeed occur through language: “The subject’s forgetting himself, his abandoning himself to language as if devoting himself completely to an object—this and the direct intimacy and spontaneity of his expression are the same.”23 Immaterial language becomes a material medium that hardly mediates.
When criticism is as confining and legislative as what it opposes, it fails. Can we be certain, however, that open experience—the specific stuff of art, both input and output—actually occurs? If I were to accept without question the intellectual commonplaces of recent decades, I might argue that experience is never so devoid of a linguistic or ideological frame.24 Conscious awareness comes with a delay, as if all thought were reflecting its context. We have been taught that every image is merely the sign of some other image, already associated with a multitude of ideas that constitute an established culture. This all-or-nothing position exaggerates the degree to which the conceptual message of a sign prevails over the aesthetic sensation of the sign (thought over feeling). In experience, in every passing moment, conditions waver. To argue that the feeling is the sign, that feelings refer to other feelings of analogous immediacy, may be a step in the right direction, but still misses the point. A feeling is not what is—not what belongs to a single moment of interpretive fixation, as if you could photograph its structural type and compare variations. Feeling is not what is but what is happening, hardly the equivalent of a still image.
Feeling is changing. It shifts and turns in ignorance of ideological polarities. Specific at every instance, we draw the sign of our feeling on the flowing body of our sensation.
Notes
1 Ed Ruscha, in Dana Goodyear, “California Postcard Moving Day,” New Yorker (April 11, 2011), p. 20.
2 Pablo Picasso, quoted in William S. Rubin (interviewed by Milton Esterow), “Visits with Picasso at Mougins,” Artnews 72 (Summer 1973), p. 44.
3 On the stick figure, see A. R. Penck, “A New Ground for the Underground: Organization of an Individualistic Underground (OIUG)” (1989), reprinted in John Yau, A. R. Penck (New York: Abrams, 1993), p. 119.
4 A. R. Penck, statement for the exhibition A. R. Penck, Waddington Galleries, London, 1984, reprinted in Yau, op. cit., p. 118.
5 A. R. Penck, statement (November 30, 1982) in Dorothea Dietrich, ed. and trans., “A Talk with A. R. Penck,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 14 (July–August 1983), pp. 94–95.
6 See A. R. Penck, Was ist Standart (Cologne: Gebrüder König, 1970), Part III, n.p.
7 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” (written 1914), trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 144, 149–150.
8 Georg Baselitz, interview by Donald Kuspit, “Goth to Dance,” Artforum 33 (Summer 1995), p. 76.
9 See Siegfried Gohr, “The Difficulties of German Painting with its Own Tradition,” trans. J. W. Gabriel, in Jack Cowart, ed., Expressions: New Art from Germany: Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, A. R. Penck (Munich: Prestel, 1983), p. 27.
10 Kafka, “The Problem of Our Laws” (written 1917–23), in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, op. cit., p. 437.
11 Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” op. cit., p. 145.
12 Rosalind Krauss, “Sincerely Yours” (1982), The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 194.
13 See Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (1936–39), in Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, eds., Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1972–89), vol. 1, pp. 471–508.
14 See Richard Shiff, “Handling Shocks: On the Representation of Experience in Walter Benjamin’s Analogies,” Oxford Art Journal 15: 2 (1992), pp. 88–103; Richard Shiff, “Digitized Analogies,” in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, eds., Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 63–70.
15 Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting” (1981, with later postscript), in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 123. Buchloh’s 1981 essay refers only to Benjamin’s early treatise Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, but he could fairly assume that his readers were already familiar with Benjamin’s later writings. His notion that a medium or “production mode” can be “obsolete” is vaguely Benjaminian.
16 Buchloh, in Wallis, op. cit. pp. 121–124. On gender issues Buchloh appeals to figures of authority of that moment—Laura Mulvey, Max Kozloff, and Carol Duncan—whose writings were prominently cited by academically oriented critics during the 1970s.
17 Richard Tuttle, quoted in Paul Gardner, “Odd Man In,” Artnews 103 (April 2004), p. 105; Richard Tuttle, “Drawing Matters: A Conversation between Richard Tuttle and Catherine de Zegher, April 2004,” in Richard Tuttle: Manifesto (Drawing Papers 51) (New York: The Drawing Center, 2004), p. 7.
18 Jasper Johns, interview by Richard Field, April 23, 1999, audiotape transcript, unpublished (courtesy Jasper Johns and Richard Field); see also Richard Shiff, ed., “Flicker in the Work: Jasper Johns in Conversation with Richard Shiff,” Master Drawings 44 (2006), pp. 294, 297.
19 Richard Serra, in “Richard Serra: An Interview by Mark Rosenthal,” Richard Serra: Drawings and Etchings from Iceland (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1992), n.p.
20 Barnett Newman, “A Conversation: Barnett Newman and Thomas B. Hess” (1966), in John P. O’Neill, ed., Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 282.
21 On Riley and Mangold, see Richard Shiff, “Bridget Riley in Particular,” in Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, eds., Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art 4 (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2009), pp. 46–47.
22 Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” op. cit., p. 150.
23 Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957), trans. Bruce Mayo, Telos 20 (Summer 1974), p. 62.
24 As a statement of the problem, see Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982), pp. 761–775.