Undead media

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Sven Lutticken

Theorists have announced the 'post-medium' or 'post-media' age, as digitized media can hardly be said to have 'essential characteristics' that distinguish them from others. Obviously there are still television channels, films, photographs and newspapers, but most of these are now different manifestations of the same code. But if it is the case that 'Various cultural and technological developments have together rendered meaningless one of the key concepts of modern art--that of a medium', as Lev Manovich has put it, then how can we think about art, or culture? [1] In a counter-attack, Rosalind Krauss has stated 'the need for the idea of the medium as such to reclaim the specific from the deadening embrace of the general.' [2] Krauss is right in emphasizing that media are 'layerings of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support', but in her eagerness to distance herself from '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', she still restricts a medium to its own internal 'difference', to its 'self-differing' character. [3] Even her own examples make it clear that this is untenable. Aside from artists such as Broodthaers and Coleman, she discusses Barthes' discussion of film stills, but these may be the result of an internal 'self-differentia]' of film, whose essence turn out to be in the still photograph rather than in the moving image, but they are also photographs, and as such they have infiltrated and influenced photography--Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills being just one obvious example. [4] In the guise of a radical new step, Krauss in fact proposes a rappel a l'ordre--the cherished medium-specificity of her youth in new garb.

Nonetheless, Krauss's formulation of the medium as a 'layering of conventions' is valuable in its emphasis on the temporality and mnemonic function of media. One of the benefits of the break with an essentialist approach to media should be a sustained investigation of media's historical lives and of the historicity of the concept of the medium. In its current form, it is quite a recent creation, as it emerged only with the modern mass media. While we now talk of the medium as well as of the art of painting, it was once only the latter. The words medium and media only came to have something' like the meaning with which we are now concerned in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. This current meaning is still more a matter of tacit assumptions than of commonly accepted definitions--attempts at these usually revolve around the storage and transmission of data or (in Bruce sterling's words) 'human sensory stimulus'. [5] The term medium has of course a wider meaning, and it can refer to almost any means or intermediary phenomenon; this wider meaning was reintroduced by McLuhan in nascent 'media theory': a hammer or a wheel is a medium, an extension of man. The best-known traditional use of the term 'medium' in the arts was highly specific: it only referred to the liquid substance (such as oil or water) with which pigments are mixed and applied. Painting as such was no medium. [6] If, in the end, the term medium in this specific meaning became prominent, it was to a large degree because a class of phenomena existed that were not a priori 'fine arts', and for which a handy generic term was needed: 'the media', newspapers, film and the like.

Now that the terms medium and media have triumphed, the concept of the medium and the actual media are according to some already deceased. The digitized media adopt or mimic each other's characteristics; following in the footsteps of McLuhan, who stated that a new medium has an older medium as its content, Bolter and Grusin have called this process remediation. [7] Even painting, which at first sight would seem to be resistant to digitization, has become absorbed in the process, as artists mimic the look of photography and as photographers create elaborate tableaux. In this way the digitized media can be seen not so much as dead but as 'undead' media, phantoms of their former self. Sometimes media die, but they are not all equally dead. Some become undead media; vampires or phantoms that continue to haunt us. Some time ago, Bruce Sterling initiated a Dead Media Project on the internet, which contains the panorama and the peepshow, among others. It is called an archive of 'the deceased, the slowly-rotting, the undead, and the never-lived media', and another contributor has proposed a 'taxonomy of dead media' according to which not all dead media are equally dead, nor equally alive [8] Perhaps it is time to conceive of media theory as Aby Warburg conceived of his art history, as a 'ghost story for the wholly adult.' [9]

LAOCOONISM AND GESAMTKUNSTWERK

In his 1940 essay 'Towards a Newer Laocoon', Clement Greenberg explained how 'the arts' had in the modern age been 'hunted back to their mediums'--how painting, for instance had striven to become 'pure painting' instead of 'literary', anecdotal painting. Here we see the convergence of the old art theory and an emerging medium theory. In this use of language, the medium (canvas with paint on it) is the material support for the art of painting, [10] Greenberg did not pay any real attention to mass media; without an art to redeem them, they were cast in the role of villains, as purveyors of kitsch. It was against the debasement of art by the mass media that the modernist striving for medium-specific purity of the arts was aimed. [11] Greenberg is an exponent of an important tendency in modern art theory which could be called 'Laoocoonism'. The founding text is, of course, Lessing's Laokoon, which is mainly preoccupied with the distinction between poetry and visual art. [12] However, Laocoonism also tried to distinguish the intrinsic properties of the different visual media, such as painting and sculpture. While an important impetus behind early Laocoonism was largely the breakdown of traditional iconography and conventions in the eighteenth century, later Laocoonism increasingly pitted the artistic, 'pure' use of media against mass-media kitsch. [13]