User:Lbattich/On Rosalind Krauss
Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999)
It was Joseph Kosuth who quickly saw that the correct term for this paradoxical outcome of th modernist reduction was not specific [to painting, or painting in relation to sculpure] but general For if modernist reduction probing painting for its essence – for what made it specific as a medium – that logic taken to its extreme had turned painting inside out and had emptied it into the generic category of Art: art-at-large, or art-in-general. And now, Kosuth maintained, the ontological labor of the modernist atist was to define the essence of Art itself. “Being an artist now means to question the nature of art,” he stated. “If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of ar. That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific.’
I was Kosuth further contention that the definitions of art, which works would now make, might merely take the form of statements and thus rarefy the physical object into the conceptual condition of language. 10
[Consider conceptual art’s claim to do away with the art object as commodity, something in which painting and sculture participated as they were forced to compete in a market for art that increasingly looked like any other. And: the subsequent realisation that the ‘dematerialized’ artworks of conceptual art (which could not do away with some sort of ‘support’ for the work) were just as much marketable and liable to take a commodity form (in form of documentation, or the fetish of the original support in which the dematerialized artistic statement was first written/printed)]
The specific medium – painting, sculpture, drawing – had vested their claims to purity in being autonomous, which is to say that in their declaration of being about nothing but their own essence, they were necessarily disengaged from everything outside their frames. The paradox was that this autonomy had proved chimerical, and that abstract art’s very modes of production – its paintings being executed in serial runs, for example – seemed to carry the imprint of the industrially produced commodity object, internalizing within the field of the work its own status as interchangeable and thus as pure exchange value. (11)
Having explained, a few years before, that for him there was what he called an “identity of the eagle as idea and of art as idea,” Broodthaers’s eagle functioned more often than not as an emblem for conceptual art. And in this cover then, the triumph of the eagle announces not the end of Art but the termination of the individual arts as medium-specific; and it does so by enacting the form that this loss of specificity will now take. (12)
[On the Studio International cover, and the figure of the eagle:]…here is the cover of that organ of the market, an art magazine, where the image of the eagle does not escape the operations of the market served by the press. Accordingly, it becomes a form of advertising or promotion, noe promoting Conceptual art. (15)
In the intermedia loss of specificity to which the eagle submits the individual arts, the bird’s privilege is itself scattered into a multiplicity of sites – each of them now termed “specific” – in which the installations that are constructed will comment, often critically, on the operating conditions of the site itself. To this end they will have recourse to every material support one can imagine, from picture to words to video to readymade objects to films. 15
[The eagle, besides this ‘eagle principle’ with which Krauss refers to the image of the eagle as a critique of Conceptual art, addresses a fuller range of issues, which include the political dimension of the symbol and more specifically, within Broodthaers’s European context, its permeation and exploitation by fascism – see n11 p58]
[By the principle of leveling exerted by affixing “figure” labels to a wide collection of eagles], the eagle itself, no longer a figure of nobility, becomes a sign of the figure, the mark – that is – of pure exchange. … [T]he eagle principle, which simultaneously implodes the idea of an aesthetic medium and turn everything equally into a readymade that collapses the difference between the aesthetic and the commodified, has allowed the eagle to soar above the rubble and the achieve hegemony once again. Twenty-five years later, all over the world, in every biennial and at every art fair, the eagle principle functions as the new Academy. Whether it calls itself installation art or institutional critique, the international spread of the mixed-media installation has become ubiquitous. Triumphantly declaring that we now inhabit a post-medium age, the post-medium condition of this form traces its lineage, of course, not so much to Joseph Kosuth as to Marcel Broodthaers. (20)
Note: According to Krauss, then, it seems that the eagle acts as an emblem for conceptual art and at the same time as a device for a critique of this art.
This critique takes form in the leveling action – by way of attaching “figure” labels. But most importantly by explicitly relating the eagle to the art market: “the eagle does not escape the operations of the market [in this instance] served by the press” (12,13) Rather than making a ‘new’ relation, it should be seen as doing away with the illusion that Conceptual art is exempt from art market conditions and commoditization.
Broodthaers seems then to both endorse the post-medium condition and the demise of specificity, while at the same time issuing a warning –in the figure of the eagle and the treatments he imposes to this figure– that this ‘generality’ can and does bring about a collapse of the “difference between the aesthetic and the commodified.”
It is in this sense that Broodthaers can be seen as holding a critical complicity with his own practice in a way that the conceptual artists…
Broodthaers “foresaw that the radical institutional critique of his late ‘60s peers would end in a mere expansion of the field of exclusively spatial, plastic, and aesthetic concerns.” (Buchloh ‘Introductory Note’ 5) - > - > Think of this an apt description of Daniel Buren shows in 2011 and 2012. Buren’s critique has run its course, in the sense that the structure of the institutions that he opposed in the 1960s and ‘70s, have changed to the extent that different critical approaches are needed. In other words, the 1960s institutions, in the aspects in which Buren criticized them, are a thing of the past. In the 2011 and 2012 shows it is difficult to see more that “spatial, plastic and aesthetic concerns.”
Back to Broodthaers (Krauss):
[On television & video] For even if video had its own technical support – its own apparatus, so to speak – it occupied a kind of discursive chaos, a heterogeneity os activities that could not be theorized as coherent or conceived of as having something like an essence or unifying core. Like the eagle principle, (31) it proclaimed the end of medium-specificity. In the age of television, so it broadcast, we inhabit a post-medium condition.
Note on Dada:
If we consider the most radical of the historical avant-gardes, Dada, as a semi-anarchic revolt against any kind of organized principle, against any kind of stratification (against the cherished modern ideas of Truth, Value, Progress and Art with a capital ‘A’); then it is patent how Dada is a precursor of the demise of modernist medium specificity that took place during the 1960s. (In the preface of Picabia’s book, the editor writes on Dada being the precursor of conceptual art, performance and postmodernism)
Krauss:
[O]utside the academy, in the artworld – where autonomy and the notion that there was something proper or specific to a medium were already under attack – this [poststructuralist analysis] gave a glittering theoretical pedigree to practices of rampant impurity – like Fluxus or Situationist détournement (subversive appropriation) – that had long since been underway. 33 In being a fantastic feat of institutional détournement, his “museum of Modern Art” also seemed to constitute the ultimate implosion of medium-specificity. And even as it did so it appeared to be setting forth the theoretical basis of its own project. 33
[Here –and throughout her essay– Krauss seems to suggest that Broodthaers is not only engaging in a collapse of medium-specificity, but also and at the same time, is concerned in creating or reinventing his own medium, in the manner of Judd (‘specific objects’) and Serra (‘process art’), for instance. She later identifies this medium as ‘fiction itself.’ The question remains whether Broodthaers’ own project for a conceptual support or medium for his practice would side, from Krauss perspective, with a modernist project of the medium, and to what extent, that is, whether it acts in a Greenbergian ‘reductive’ logic, or rather in an aggregative logic (Serra) Or, perhaps, (as I see it) Broodthaers is not concerned to ‘reinvent’ or conceive a new aesthetic medium at all.] As we have seen, for example, the affixing of figurer numbers to a miscellany of objects operated as both a parody of curatorial practice and an emptying out of the very meaning of classification. 33
Yet if Broodthaers can be seems to be moving within the poststructuralist circle of theory, we must always remember his deep ambivalence about theory itself. We must recall the statement from Interfunkionen in which theories are reduced to, or perhaps revealed as, nothing more than “advertising for the order under which [they are] produced.” According to this condemnation, any theory, even if it is issued as a critique of the culture industry, will end up only as a form of promotion for that very industry. In this way, the ultimate master of détournement turns out to be capitalism itself, which can appropriate and reprogram anything to serve its own ends. Thus, if Broodthaers did not live to see the absolute confirmation of his entirely pessimistic “View,” he had nonetheless predicted both the eventual complicity between theory and the culture industry and the ultimate absorption of “institutional critique” by exactly the institutions of global marketing on which such “critique” depends for its success and its support. 33
If I am pursuing the example of Marcel Broodthaers in the context of the post-medium condition, it is because he stands at, and thus stands for, what I would like to see as the “complex” of this condition. For Broodthaers, the presumed spokesman for intermedia and the end of the arts, nonetheless wove for his work an internal lining that has to be called redemptive.45
[Is the “complex” of the post-medium condition a play between doing away with modernist idea of medium specificity, while trying to find a redemptive (albeit “human”, non-commodified? in the language Krauss uses?) element in a medium early technological stages? Is this like a nostalgic attempt to save the idea of ‘medium’ at all? This redemptive element, serves to reinstitute the medium, to it? I think Krauss sees the ‘redemptive’ quality that Broodthaers sought in early film, as the possibility of escaping the ‘law of commodification’, escaping the subject’s objectification at the hands of the machine (camera) or/and of the capitalist market. But can this Benjaminean/Adornean view still be useful?]
[For Krauss, the idea of a collapse of medium specificity is intimately related (equivalent) to the fact that the art and its different so-called specific mediums are also prey to the laws of commodification: “the separate work of art, as well as the separate mediums of art, enter the condition of general equivalency, thereby losing the uniqueness of the work – what Benjamin called its “aura” – as well as the specificity of its medium.” 46 This same logic, i.e., art being equivalent (or no different) to the industrial and commercial world of capitalist economy, is deduced by Krauss from the aims of Conceptual art, thought she pitches Conceptual art against Broodthaers, by making the former unaware of its own liability to commodification (the proposition: after (/in) the post-medium condition, all art is subject to the law of commodification’ seems to be the guiding thought for Krauss), while Broodthaers is prescient that his own practice of institutional critique is already to an extent commodified. ]
[Krauss is eager in finding a medium that would suit Broodthaers’ practice:]
I would nevertheless suggest that the filmic model [the redemptive possibilities encoded at the birth of the a given technical support (here, early film)] is a subset of a larger contemplation about the nature of the medium conducted through he guise of what I think functioned as the master medium for Broodthaers, namely fiction itself, as when Broodthaers referred to his museum as a “fiction.” 46
B: “a fiction allows us to grasp reality and at the same time what it hides.” (Exh. cat. Paris: Jeu de Paume, 1991, 227)
[After quoting a remarking on Jameson:] One description of art within this regime of postmodern sensation is that it mimics just this leeching of the aesthetic out into the social field in general.
[Krauss is obviously siding with the attempt to keep alive the notion of medium specificity, even if changed and malleable (as with her analysis of Broodtahers). She despises the institutional embrace of post-medium and intermedia: “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.
For Krauss, however it is important that the notion of medium specificity has to go beyond the traditional modernist mediums: the ideal contemporary artist would resist, as impossible, “the retreat into etiolated forms of the traditional mediums – such as painting and sculpture.”
Artist must embrace “the idea of a differential specificity, which is to say medium as such, which they understand they will now have to reinvent or rearticulate.” 56
For this Marcel Broodthaers serve as example, so Krauss has tried to show.
But does this ‘reinvention’ or ‘rearticulation’ take the form as it did with Judd and Serra, of a desire to keep the modern teleos alive? Is Krauss notion of a ‘reinvented’ medium so close to Greenberg, as Judd’s is as well?
From Under Blue Cup (MIT, 2011)
The bias on medium specificity is patent in a passage where Krauss recounts Ed Ruscha’s attempts to move away from painting as medium, a traditional support which eclipsed during in the 1960s. “Ruscha was forced to ‘invent’ a medium in painting’s stead. It was at this impasse … that the car became the continuous frame of his work. As a ‘technical support,’ the car offered a repertory of its own underpinning – from its road (like Kerouac’s) to its gas stations and finally its parking lots.” Krauss talks of this new created medium in terms of “structure” and “grid” for a practice that can take form in different material supports (artist books, paintings, etc). In Ruscha’s case, the car is not to be thought of as a medium in the traditional sense. Krauss clarifies: “it is what Ruscha ‘invents’ in order to make a recursive structure for himself that will signify in the way older mediums had done.” Quoting Ruscha: “I’m painting on the book covers. I guess I’m just looking for another support,” Krauss calls such another a technical support. (Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 2011, 77)
It is important to notice that by her use of ‘medium,’ Krauss wants to move away from associations with can be seen as Greenberg’s reductive dogma. For this reason she emphasises time and again that the notion of medium she endorses (and which artists ‘invent’ and ‘reinvent’) has less to do with “the physicality of the support than with a system of rules.” Rules give a role to invention, and become necessary for the artist in the post-medium condition, “cut free from tradition and wandering haplessly in a field where “anything goes’” (78)
In a sense, this can be seen as a version of the view that the work of art imposes its own set of rules and conventions, under which it should be aesthetically considered. But Krauss goes further in that each ‘invention’ of a technical support also includes the rules and conventions that come with that support. In this way an invention is rather a ‘reinvention.’
Excerpts:
[On art installation] Their identity as kitsch derives from their feckless indifference to the idea of medium, so long ago condemned by Greenberg's admonishment in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Kitsch he defines as the corruption of taste by the substitution of simulated effects for tat recursive testing of the work of art against the logic of its specific conditions, a testing he named "self-criticism." (69)
Under Blue Cup is an act of remembering, an insistent "who you are": a crusade to think back beyond the onset of conceptual art with its Ubuesque fanaticism; a shrug of the shoulders at deconstruction's dismissal of the "self," Its concern is those very few artists who have had the courage to resist the aneurystic purge of the visual, a purge meant to bury the practice of specific mediums under the opprobrium of a mindless moralizing against the ground of art itself: the aesthetic object which it abjures as mere commodity, and the specificity of the medium which it shuns as inadequately philosophical. Under Blue Cup will call these defenders of specificity the "knights" of the medium. (31)
From Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (essay collection. MIT, 2013), Introduction
Lyotard argues that postmodernism spells the end of what he terms the “master narrative,” or the account of a broad sweep of history (such as the industrial revolution) in the light of a consistent worldview (such as utilitarianism) that shapes and interprets meaning. (xii)
The master narrative of modern art turns on the importance of specific aesthetic mediums understood as simultaneously empowering artistic practice and leveraging the works’ possibility of meaning. In charting the development of twentieth-century painting from cubism to abstraction to abstract expressionism, critics and historians follow Greenberg who, in his essay “Modernist Painting,” singled out flatness as the characteristic specific to painting because unshared by any of the other mediums, such as sculpture or drama.
This master narrative hit the wall of Lyotard’s Postmodern condition when certain aspects of artistic practice, such as conceptual art, jettisoned the use of a specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text within the same work. The now-fashionable possibility of installation art followed in the wake of this dispatch of the medium. Installation is relentless in its refusal of specificity, filling galleries with mixtures of video images and taped narratives.
For the most part, Perpetual Inventories charts my conviction as a critic that the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art. To wrestle the new mediums to the mat of specificity has been a preoccupation of mine since the inception of October …
The onset of postmodernist practice in the 1980s saw the collapse of traditional mediums such as painting or sculpture. But the abandonment of the medium as the basis of artistic practice was not total. . I welcomed the perseverance of new artists in leveraging the meaning of their work in relation to what I came to call a “technical support.” (xiii)
[Krauss acknowledges that while the traditional medium is “specified by the material [i.e. physical] support they supply for artistic practice,”(xiii) the medium in the sense of technical support goes beyond this association with a material base.] The artists I observed persevering in the service of a medium had abandoned traditional supports in favour of strange new apparatuses, ones they often adopted from commercial culture... Calling such things “technical supports” would, I thought, allay the confusion of the use “medium.” too ideologically associated as the term is with an outmoded tradition. (xiv)
The greatest challenge to grasp of the art of the 1970s was the need to assemble the diverse threads of newly invented mediums (such as video, performance, doby art, or the “dematerialization” of conceptual art) into coherent enterprises, related to one another by what could be understood as a common goal and a concerted projection of meaning. (1)