THIS 18 THE THIRTY-FIRST OF THE WALTER NEURATH MEMORIAL LECTURES WHICH ARE GIVEN ANNUALLY EACH SPRING ON SUBJECTS REFLECTING THE INTERESTS OF THE FOUNDER oF THAMES & HUDSON THE DIRECTORS OF THAMES & HUDSON WISH TO EXPRESS THEIR GRATITUDE TO THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON, FOR GRACIOUSLY HOSTING THESE LECTURES “A VOYAGE ON THE NORTH SEA” ART IN THE AGE OF THE POST-MEDIUM CONDITION ROSALIND KRAUSS THAMES & HUDSON{Any copyof this bock isued bythe pabisher asa poperbackis sold subjctt the ‘condidor that hall ne by way of trade raheras be lee, retold, hired autor there csculated without the publisher pir content io at foem of Binding ‘ver cer dha that in whichis publsbed and widout a similar eondison including hese word: being imposed ons aebuaquer purchase Te Waler Neurath Memorial Lecues, upto 1992, were given at Bikbeck Calle, University of Lonéor, whese Govemers and Master mos gererusly sponsored them forewenyyfus years, © 1000 Rosin Kraus Fit publithed in pepebick inthe Unied Kingdom in 2000 by Thames & Hudson Lid, 1814 High Helbocn, London wey 72% AIL Right: Reserved, Nott of tht publication may berepredueed or tansmited ‘nay former by any meam, dectonicor mechaacal, including phowocopy, ecoxding or any oer information sorageand reseval system, without prior petmision in writing fromthe pabisber Beith Li Amabg dienes! 57 Catloguingin-Publintion Dasa this ok ie svlbl onthe Bets Library ISBN o'50078207-2 Printed and boundin aly PREFACE Abfiest 1 thought I could simply draw a line under the word medivamn, bury it ike 0 much etal toxic waste, and walk away fiom itintoa world of lexical fredon. “Median” seemed too contanineted, 00 ideologically, too dogmatically, too discure sively loaded. Iwondered if Tcould make use of Stanley Cavell’s automatism, the term be fad appropriated 10 attack the double problem of avesing film as a (relatively) new medium and of Bringing into focus what seemed ¢o him unexplained about modernist painting’ The word “augomatism’” captured for him the sense in which ‘part of film — the part that depends ont the mechanics of « camera — is autamatic; it els» plugged inio the Surrealist use of “automatism as an unconscious reflex (a dangerous allusion, but avuseful one, as we will see); and it contained the possible connotatve reference to “autonomy.” inthe sense of the resultant work's freedom _from its maker, Like the notion of medium or gare within more traitional contexts for art, «an automatism would involve the relationship benveen a technical (or material ) support and the conventiens with which a particular gente operates or articulates or works on that support. What “eutomatism” thrusts into the foreground ofthis ‘rational definition of “median,” however, isthe concept of improvisation of the need to take chances in the face of medium now cut jee from the guarantees 5of antistc tradition. It is ths sease of the improvisatory that welcmes the words associations with “psychic automatism” but the autometc reflex heres not so much «an unconscious one as itis something like the expressive freedom that improvisation always contzved, asthe relation between the technical ground of a genre and its _given conventions opened up aspace fr release —the may the fugue makes it possible, {for example, ta improvise complex marriages benven its woes. The contentions in question need not be as strict ar those of a fugue ov a sonnet; they might be exceedingly loose or schematic. But without them there would be no possiblity af judging the ruccess or failure of such improvisation. Expressivenes: would have 10 goa, soto speck The attraction of Cavell’s example fer me wis its insistence on te internal plurality of any given median, of the impossibility of thinking of anaesthetic meliamas nothing more than an unworked physical support. That such 4 definition of the mediunt as mere physical object in all its reductiveness and drive ‘toward refeston had become common curceney in the ert world and tat the wane Clement Greenberg had been atached to this dfuiton so that, fr the os on, foutterthe word “median” meant inking “Greenberg,” was the problem Laced Tnleed, so pervasive was this drive to “Greenbergize” che word chat historically previous approaches to its definition were now stripped of their own complexity. Maurice Deni’ famous 18go dictum about the pictoriel medium — “Ics well to remenber that a pieure — before being a battle horse, a nud woman, or some anecdote ~ is essentially a plane surfce covered with eolrs assembled in a certain order" — wos now beng real, for exanple, as merely presogng an essentialist reduction of painting to “flainess.” That this is not Denis's point, thatheisinstend describing the layered, complex relationship that we could call o recursive structure ~ a siructore, that 15, some of the elements of whick will produce 6 the rules that goerae the structure itself — was (andis) just... ignored. Furthe, that this recursive structure is something made, rather then something given, is what rhe the arts were divided up within the Academy ints ateliens representing the different is Iatentin the traditional connection of “medium” to matters of techuique, as rnedisas— pointing, sealpture architecture —in order tobe taught: ‘Thus if Uhave decided nth nd resin the word “medi,” itis because for cll the misunderstanding and abuses attached it thsi te erm that opens onto the discursive field hat I want to address. This struc at the historical level in chat the fate of this concept seems to belong chronologically tthe vise of critical posi- rnodernism (institutional critique site specificity) shat in its tem has produced iis cwn problematic aftermath (the international phenomenon of insiallaion at). I seemed, hari; thatenly “medium” would face arto shit ourn of events. And ot a lexical level, iis the word “medion” and nat something ike “autometion,” hat brings the issue of “Spefty” in its wake — as ithe designation “‘mediame spedficy.” Although this another, unfortmately loaded concept ~ ebusvely recastas.a form of objectification or refcaton, since a med fs purportedly made specific by being reduced to nothing but its manifest physical properties — i 8 (in its non-abusively defined form) sonetheless intrinsic to any discussion of how the conventions layered into a medium might function, For the vatse of a recursive structure is that it ust be abl atleast in part specify ise Stuck, therefor, with the word “medium,” 1 must thrust i equally on my reader in the vefectios that follow. I hope, however, that this ote inthe form of preface will hove guned me some distance between the word itself with slong history outside the recent battles over “formalism,” and the assumptions chout the term's corruption and allapse tha hove battles generated.12 MatcelBroodedses, fone (ove and back (lf) covers of Suu eration, Qcrabet 1974 With the canny aseatly ac the mi imo a branch of che culture industry, 2 phenomenon which we only now recognize, Jairvoyance of the materialist, Broodthaers anticipated, 060s, the comple ransformation of artiste production Benjamin Bochlohs A cover, devised by Marcel Brooxlhaets fora 1974 issue of Studio Inter- rational, will serve as the inteoduetion to what T have to say here. It is a rebusthat spells out FINE ATS, with the picture of che caglesupplying. the last letter of “ne” and that of the ass fonetioning asthe first one of “ants.” If we adopt the commonly held view that the eagle symbolizes nobility, height, imperious reach, and so forth, then its relationship to the fineness of the fine ats seems perfectly obvious. And if the assis presumed, chrough the same kind of intellectual reflex, to present the lowliness of a beast of burden, then its connection to the arts is not that of the eagle’s unifying movement — the separate arts raised up o subsumed under the synthetic, larger idea of Art —butrather, the stupe- fying particularity of individual techniques, of everything that embeds practice in the tedium of its making: “Dumb like a painter,” they sa. But we can ako read the rebus as an eclipse of the appropriate letter of the given word, and so arrive, somewhat suggestively, at FIN ARTS, ot the end of arty? and this in tum would open onto a specif way that Broodthaers ofien used the eagle, and thus onto a particular narrative about the end of art, ot —teading his robus more carefully ~ the end of hearts, ‘There was, indeed, a narrative about this end to which Broodehaers was especially sensitive in the late 19608 and early "70s. This was the story of a militancly reductive modemism that, by narrowing painting to what was announced as che mediums essence ~ namely flatness — had so contracted it that, suddenly, refracted by the prism of theory, 9it had emerged fiom the other side of the lens not simply upside down but transformed into its opposite If the story goes, Frank Srella’s black canvases showed what painting would look like once materialized as tunrelievedly fat ~ their supposed essence understood as nothing more than an inertly physical feanure ~ they announced to Donsld Judd that painting had now become an object just like any other three-dimen- sional thing, Farther, he reasoned, with nothing any longer differen- tiating painting fom sculpture, the distinctness of either as separate ‘meditums was over: The name that Judd gave to the hybrids that would form out ofthis collapse was “Specific Objects.” Te was Joseph Kosuth who quickly saw that che correct term for this paradoxical outcome of the modernist reduction was not sprefc but general’ For if modernism was probing painting for its essence ~ for ‘what made it specificas a medium. that logic taken to its extreme had turned painting inside out and had emptied it into the generic category of Art: arvatclargg, or artingeneral, And now, Kosuth maintained, the ontological labor of the modernist artist was to define the essence of Act 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 art. That's because the word artis general and the word paining is specif.” Je was Kosuth’s further contention that the definitions of art, which works would now make, might merely cake the focm of scatemenis and thus tarefy the physical object inta the conceptual condition of language. But these satements, chough he saw them resonating with the logical finality of an analytical proposition, would nonetheless be att and not, say philosophy. Their linguistic form would merely signal the transcen dence of the particular, sensuous content of a given att, like painting ot photography, and the subsumption of each by that higher aesthetic unity ~ Arcivelf ~ of which any one is only a partial embodiment. Conceptual act's farther claim was that by pusifjing art of its mate- rial dross, and by producing it as 2 mode of theory-abouvatt, its own » Joseph Kost, Ata Kena es, 1567 «4 Joseph Kosuth, Seethinstsatin (Aras eas la) 1060 practice had escaped the commodity form in which paintings and sculp- tutes inevitably participated as they were forced to compete in a market forart that increasingly looked just like any other. In this declaration was folded yee another paradox of recent modernist history. The specific mediums ~ painting, sculpture, drawing — bad 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 abstractart’s very modes of production — its paintings being executed in serial runs, for example seamed to carry the imprint of the industrially produced commodity objec, internalizing within the field of the work its own status as inter- changeable and thus a> pure exchange value, By abandoning this pretense to artistic autonomy, and by willingly assuming various forms and sites ~ the mass-distributed printed book, for example, orthe public billboard — Conceptual art saw itself securing a higher purity for Art, so that in flowing through the channels of commodity distribution it would not only adopt any form it needed but would, by a kind of homeopathic defense, escape the effects of the market itself ufat A, DEPARTENENT, DES AIGLES Balt hie Yh wee 5 (tp) Mate Broplnaes, Musnaf Madom Art, Eagle periment (Deit-Ingrr- Wi 67 («lovcanlrih) Marcel Broosers, Muu of Mok A, Eagles Dermat, gt rh) 1988 uy Section, 1958-9 Although by 1972 Broodkhaers had ended his fouryear enterprise called the “Museum of Modern Act, Fagles Departmen:” a sequence of works by which, in producing the activities of the Muscum’s twelve sections, he operated what he once referred to as « fctitious museum itis clearthat one of the targets of that project carries over onto the Studio International cover. 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,” Broodacts’s eagle functioned mote offen than not as an emblem for Conceptual art? And in this cover then, the tiumph of the eagle announees not the end of Art but the termination of the individual arts as mediumspecific; and it does so by enacting the form thet this loss of specificity will now take. - ‘On the one hand, the eagle itself will be folded into the hybrid or intermedia condition of the rebus, in which not only language and image but high and low and any other oppositional pairing one can think of will rely mix. Buton the ather hand, this particular combina- tion is not entirely random. It is specific to the site on which it occurs, which here isthe cover of that organ of the market, an ait magazine, ‘where the image of theeagle does not escape the operations of the market Aw 1 Mare! Brocdtbers, Mase of Mor Ar, Eales Dpremen Dacimetry Sein 70AVIS me drei fon foc oe ab ANSICHT SaSNera ne 1» Marcel Broodthuers, ot cove Italien Fall 974 ee ee hay tb fe served by the press. Accordingly, it becomes a form of advertising or promotion, now promoting Conceptual art. Broodthacrs made this clear in the announcement he drew up 2s his cover design forthe maga zine Interjunkeionen, at about the same time: “View,” it reads, “according (© which an artistic theory will fanction for the artistic product in the same way as the artistic product itself functions as advertising for the order under which itis produced. There will be no other space than this view according to which, etc. ... [signed] Broodthaers.”*° The redou bling of arcas theory, chen, delivers art (and most parcicularly che ac for which itis the theory) to exactly thote sites whesefunetion is promotion, and does so without what might be called a critical remainder. < And it doe: so without a formal remainder, as well. In the inter: media loss of specificity to which the eagle submits the individual arts, the bite’ privilege is itself scattered into a mulkiplicity of sites —cach of them now termed “specife” — in which the insiallacions that are cons strucied will comment, ofien critically, on the operating conditions of the site itself. To this end, they will have recourse to every material support one can imagine, ftom pictures to words to video to readymade ‘objects to fms. But every material support, including the sit itself — whether art magazine, dealer's fair booth, or museum gallery — will now be leveled, reduced to asystem of pureequivaleacy by the homogenizing principle of commodification, the operation of pure exchange value from which nothing can escape and for which everything is wansparent to the underlying market value for which iris sign. This redvetion was given manic form by Broodthaersashe affixed “figure” labels to random sets of objects, effecting their equivalence through the tags that assign them as either “Fig. 1,” “Fig. 2,” “Fig. 0.” or “Fig. 12.” In the Film Section of his museum, not only did he stick these labels onto mundane objects such as mirrers, pipes,and clocks, but the movie screen itself was riddled with figure numbers as well, so that everything in the film pro- jected onto it — from Chaplin’s image ta the Palais Royale in Brussels — now entered this compendium of Broodthaers's “Fig,”s. 15b LINVENTION Lop ii) Marcel Brcodthaers, untied, f Iroodhaers holding Sado’Inn the Section des Figures (The Eagle from the Oligocene tothe Present), mounted by his fictional museum, Broodthaers famously submited more than three hundred different eagles to this principle of leveling. In this way, the cagle itself, no longer a figure of nobility, becomes a sign of the figure, the mark — that is — of pure exchange. Yet in this there is a farther paradox that Broodthaers himself did not live to see. For the cagle principle, which simulancously implodes the idea of an aesthetic medium and turns everything equally into a readymade that collapses the difference between the aesthetic and the commodified, has allowed the eagle t roarabove the rubble and to achieve hegemony once again." Twenty-five years later, all over the world, in every biennial and atevery 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. Tri umphantly declaring that we now inhabit a poremedium age, the post-mediam condition of this form traces its lineage, of course, not so much to Joseph Kosuth asto Marcel Broodehaers 17 (Ie) Mace Broedehaes, Mazen § Moin A, Eagles Deprman, ‘Seconds Furs (Te El fom he (Obscene the Pret), t9 72. View cf theinwallton at te tide Kunsthalle, Disdder, 18 (aloe) Marcel Broodthues, el of Mac of Modern Art cers ager Depron Se (The Bagh fom he Ol Pree) 197222 (ppc and sre) Maced roosters deals Musca of Mon Ar, Depuremet, Secon de igs (Te Bal fon the ln tthe Paes), 19732 Ac about the same time when Broodthaets was producing this medita, sion on che eagle principle, another development, with undoubtedly wider reach, had entered the world of art to shatter the notion of mediumspecificity in its own way. This was the portapak — a light- \weight, cheap video camera and monitor and thusthe adventof video intoart practice, something that demands yet another narrative, Ik isa story thar could be wold fiom the point of view of Anthology Film Archives, a screening room in New York’s Soho, where inthe late “o0s and eatly "70s. a collection of artists, flim-makers, and composers gathered night after night to view the cepertory of modernist film put together by Jonas Mekas and projected in an unvarying cycle, a corpus that consisted of Soviet and French avant-garde cinema, dhe British silent documentary, early versions of American Independent film, as well as Chaplin and Keaton movies. The artists who sat in the dark ness of that theater, the wingchaielike seats of which were designed to cut off any peripheral vision so that every drop of attention would be focused on the screen itself, atiss such as Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, or Catl Andre, could be said to be united around theie deep hostility to Clement Greenberg's sigid version of modernism with its doctrine of amness. Yet if they were gathered in Anthology Film Accchives in thefitse place ic meant that they were commited modernists nonetheless. For Anthology both fed inco and promoted the current work of structuralist film-makers such as Michael Snow ot Hollis Frampton or Paul Sharts, its screenings providing the discursive ground within which this group of young artists could imagine their way into a kind of film that, focused on the nature of the cinematic medium itself, would bemodernistto its core. Now, therich satisfactions of thinking about film’s specificity atthat juncture derived from the medium’s aggregate condition, one that led 4 slightly later generation of theorists to define its support with the com, 4 3 Michad Snow, Wel, 1957. pound idea of the “apparatus” ~ the medium or support for film being neither dhe cellaloid scrip of the images, nor the camera that filmed them, not the projectorthat brings them to life in motion, nor the beam of light that rlays them to the sereen, nor that screen itself, bu all of these taken together, including the audience’ position caught between the source of the light behind it and the image projected before its eyes.» Struccuralist film set itself the project of producing the unity of this diversified support in a single, sustained experience in which the utter interdepen dence of all chese things would itself be revealed as. a model of how the ‘viewer is intentionally connected to his or her world. The parts of the apparatus would be like things thet cannot ouch on each other without themselves being touched; and this interdependence would figure forth the mutual emergence of a viewer and a field of vision as a trajectory through which the sense of sight touches on what touches back. Michael Snow's Wavelength, 2 45-minute, single, almost uninterrupted zoom, captures the intensi of such a trajectory into something both immediate and obvious. In its striving to articulate what Merleau-Ponty had termed the preobjective, and thus abstract, nacure of this connection, such a link could be called “phenomenological vector.” For Richard Serra, one of Anthology’s denizens, a work like Waver Iength would have performed a double function. On the one hand, of this research into how to forge the union 25Snow's film enacs itself as pure horizontal dhrust, such that its inex orable forward movement is able to create the abstract spatial mctaphor for film's relation o time, now essentalized as the dramatic mode of sus- pease.'s Scita’s own drive to make sculpue a condition of something like a phenomenological vector, itself the experience of hozizontality, would thus have found aesthetic confirmation in Wavelength. But moze than this, in sructuralist film itself Serra would have found support fora newly conceived idea of an zesthetic medium, one that, like film's, could not be understood as reductive but again, like film's, was thor- oughly modernist. Scrra’s reformulated idea of what an aesthetic medium might be participated in his generation’: newly won understanding of Jackson Pollock and a nocion that if Pollock had progressed beyond the easel picture, as Clement Greenberg had claimed, it was not to make bigger and flatter paintings.” Rather, it was to rotate his work out of the dimension of the pictorial object altogether and, by placing his canvases ‘on the floor, to transform the whole project of art from making abject, in their incteasingly ceified form, co articulating the vectors that connect abjects to subjects.1# In understanding this vector as the horizontal field af anevent, Serta’ problem was to try to find in theinner logic of events themselves the expressive possibilities or conventions that would acticu- late this field as a mediam. For, in order to sustain artistic practic a medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a sec of conver tions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly “specific” to it, thus producing an experience of theit own necessity? For the purposes of the argument here it is not necessary to know exactly how Serra went about this? Suffice it to say chat Serra drew these conventions from the logic of the event of the work’s making, when that event is understood as a form of series, noe in the sense of stamping ont identical casts as in industrial production, but in that of the differential condition of petiodic or wavelike flux in which separate 26 24 Richard Sera, Cari, 1960-9%, = sets of serial repetitions converge on. given point. The important thing is that Serra experienced and articulated the medium in which he suw: himself to be working as aggregative and thus distinct fiom the material properties of a merely physical objectlike support; and, nonetheless, he viewed himself as modernist. The example of independent, strue- turalise film — itself a matter of a composite support, yet nonetheless modernist confirmed him in this. Acthis juncture itis important, however, to makea little detour into the history of official, reductivist modernism itself, and to correct the record as it had been writen by Judi’ logic of specific objects. Fo like Serra’s, Greenberg's view of Pollock had also led him eventually to jet’ tison the materialist, purely reductive notion of che medium, Once hie saw che moderne logie leading to the point where, as he pat it, 27“the observance of metely thetwo [constitutive conventions or norms of painting —flarness and the delimitation of flatness ~ ]is enough to create an object which can be experienced as + picture,” he dissolved that ‘object in the fluid of what he first called “opticality” and then named “color ficld.”*" Which is to say that no sooner had Greenberg seemed to isolate theesence of painting in flatness than he swung the axis of the field ninety degrees to the actual picture surface to placeall theimport of painting on the vector that connects viewer and object. In this heseemed to shift from the first norm — flatness ~ to the second — the delimitation of Aatness — and to give this latter a reading that was not that of the bounding edge of the physical abject but rather the projective resonance of the optical field itself — what in “Modernist Painting” he had called the “optical third dimension” created by “the very first mark on a canvas [which] deseroys its literal and uucer flatness.” This was the resonance he imputed to the effulgence of pure color as he spoke of it, not only as disembodied and therefore purely optical, but also “asa thing that opens and expands the picture plane.”=! “Opticeliry” was thus an entirely abstract, schematized version of the link that traditional perspective had formerly established between viewer and object, but one that now tran- scends the real parameters of measurable, physical space to express the purely projective powers of a preobjective level of sight: “vision itself” ‘The most serious issue for painting now was to understand not its objective features, such as the lamness of the material surface, bur its specific mode of address, and to make this the source of set of new conventions — or what Michael Fried called “a new art.”*% One such convention emerged as the sense of the oblique generated by fields that seemed always to be rotating away fom the plane of the wall and into depth, a perspectival rush of surfaces that caused critics like Leo Steinberg to speak of their sense of speed: what he called the visual efficiency of the man in a hurry.** Another derived from the setiality — both internal tothe works and to their production —to which the color- ib, 1967. field painters uniformly resorted. 25 (ls) Keane Noland istlaion of Covne Shadow and Sia in he Ande Emvmerih Caller. 26 (ti) Kenneth Noland, 29Thus it could be argued that in the “60s, “apticality” was also serving as more than just a feauure of arg; it had become a medium of art. Assuch itwas also aggregative, an affzont to what was officially under- stood as the reductivist logic of modernism ~ a logic and doctrine attributed to this day to Greenberg himsdlf. Neither Greenberg nor Fried theorized colorfeld painting as a new medium, however, they spoke of it only 2s a new possibility for abstract painting.»” Not was process art ~the term under which Serea's early work was addressed — adequately theorized. And certainly the fact that in both cases the specificity of a medium was being maintained even though it would now have to be seen as internally differentiated — on the order of the flmic mode! — was not theorized cither. For in the case of that later model, the impulse was to try to sublate the internal differences within the filmic apparatus into a single, indivisible, experiential unit that ‘would serve 25 an ontological metaphor, a figure — like the 45-minute zoom ~ for the essence of the whole. In 1972, structuralist film’s self description, as [have said, was modernist. Into this situation there entered the portapak, and it televisual effect was to shatter the modernist dream. In the beginning, as artists began to make video works, they used video asa technologically updated con, tinuation of the mode of address organized by the new attention to the phenomenological, although it was a perverse version of this since the form it took was decidedly narcissistic: artists endlessly talking to themselves.a# To my knowledge only Serra himself immediately ac- knowledged that video was in fact television, which means a broadcast mediam, one chat splinters spatial continuity into remote sites of trans- mission and reception. His Television Delivers Peaple (1973) ~ a message displayed in a continuous crawl — and Prisener’s Dilemma (1974) were versions of this, cis this spatial separation, coupled with the temporal simultancity nstantancous broadcast, that has led certain theorists w try co locate the essence of television in its use as closed-circuit surveillance. But 30 AT CUCM cee Tong of tv. You are delivered to PUM gs muy Pur CU Cl 27 Richard Serta, Teton elie Pep, 197 the fact of the matter is that television and video seem Hydra-headed, existing in endlessly diverse forms, spaces, and temporalites for which no single instance seems to provide a formal unity for the whole.:2 This is what Sam Weber has called television's “constitutive heterogeneity,” adding that “what is pechaps most difficuleto keep in mind are the ways in which what we call television alsoand aboveall differs from itself.” If modernist theory found itself defeated by such heterogencity which prevented it from conceptualizing video as amedium—modernist, structuralist film was routed by video's instant success as a practice. For, xen if video had a distinct cechnieal support — its awn apparatus, so to speak — it occupied a kind of discursive chaos, a heterogeneity of activi, ties that could not be theorized as coherent or conceived of as having something like an essence or unifying core.) Like the eagle principle, 3it proclaimed the end of medium-specifcry. Inthe age of television, s0 it broadcast, weinhabita pos-medium condition. 3 ‘The third narrative, which I will set out with considerably more dis- patch, concerns the resonance between the post medium position and powsructutalism. For during this same late “cosfearly’7os momen, deconstruction began famously attacking what it derisively referred to 28 the “law of genre,” or the aesthetic autonomy supposedly ensured by the pictorial frame.¥* From the theory of grammatology to that of the parergon, Jacques Derrida built demonstration after demonstration to show that the idea of an interior vet apart from, or uncontaminated by, an exterior was a chimera, a metaphysical fletion. Whether it be the interior of the work of art as opposed 0 its comtext, or the interiorty of a lived momentof experience as opposed tots repetition in memory or via written signs, what deconstruction was engaged in dismantling was the idea of the proper, both in the sense of the self identical — as in “vision is what's proper to the visual arts” ~and in the sense of the clean or pure— as in “abstaction purifies painting of all those things, like narrative ‘or sculptural space, that are not proper to it.” That nothing could be constituted as pure interiority or self-identity, that this purity was always already invaded by an outside, indeed, could itself only be constituted through the very introjection of that outside, wasthe argument mounted to scutle the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic experience, orthe pos sible purity of an artistic medium, or the presumed separateness of a given intellectual discipline, The selfidentical was revealed as, and thus dissolved ino, theself-diferent. In the university this, along with other postsructuralist analyses, such as those of Michel Foucault, proved a powerful argument for an end to the separation of academic faculties within distinct branches of 32 knowledge, and thus a powerful support for interdisciplinarity. And ‘outside the academy, in the art world — where autonomy and the notion that there was something proper or specific to a medium were already under attack — this gave a glittering theoretical pedigree to practices of rampant impurity — like Fluxus or Situationist détournement (subversive appropriation) ~ that had long since been underway. In the late 1960s and carly '705, Marcel Broodthaers appeared to be the knight errant of all this. In being 2 fantastic feat of institutional détournement, his “Muscum of Modern Art” also seemed to constitute the ultimate implosion of medium specificity. And even as it did so, itappeared to besetting forth the theoretical basis of its own project. As ‘we haveseen, for example, the affixing of figurenumbers to a miscellany of objects operatedas both a parody of curatorial practice and an empty’ ing out of the very meaning of classification, Accordingly, the figures finctioned as a set of meta-captions whose operation was theoretical Brovdthaers himself commented: “A theory of the figures would serve only to give an image of a theory: Butthe Fig. asa theory of the image?" ‘Yet if Broodthaers can be seen to be moving within the poststruc’ turalisecitcle of theory, we must also remember his dep ambivalence about theory itself, We must recall the statement from Inlerfiiktionen in which theoties are reduced to, ox perhaps revealed as, nothing, more than “advertising for the order under which [they are] produced.” ‘According to this condemnation, any theory, even if ic is issued as « critique of the culture industry, will end up only asa form of promotion for that very industry, In this way, the ultimate master of dcournement turns out o be capitalism itself, whieh can appropriate and reprogram anything to serve is own ends. Thus, if Broodthaers did not live to see the absolute confirmation of his enticely pessimistic “View,” he had nonetheless predicted both the eventual complicity between theory and the culture industry and the ultimate absorption of “instcational cri tique” by exactly the institutions of global marketing on which such “critique” depends for its success and its support. 334 This leads us, however, toanother story Forif capitalism isthe master of déournement, absorbing every avant-garde protest in its path and turning it to its own account, Broodthaers ~ by some ultimate turn of the screw was ina strange kind of mimetic relationship to this. To put ie simply, there is a way in which he conducted form of détournementon himself. Acknowledging this in the press release issued during the 1972 Documenta, where the final sections of his Museum (now renamed the “Museum of Old Master Art [Art Ancien], 2oth-Century Gallery: Eagles Department") were installed, namely the sections of prometion and public relations, Broodthaers speaks of the “contradictory inter” views" he had given on the subject of his museum fictions. Indeed, Broodthaers’s best critics have been alert to the peculiar inconsistencies that mine both the artist's explanations of his work and the unfolding, of the work itself Benjamin Buchlob has written, for example: “If any” thing, it would be his persistent sense of contradictions that could be called the most prominent feature in Broodthaers’s thoughts and state” ments and, of course, in his work.” Ar one point Buchloh sees this 2s a species of Blagee, a willful, tongue-in-cheek form of double negation in which a petified language acts to mimic the present-day reification of speech itself at the hands of the consciousness industry. To this eect, he quotes a Broodthaers text called “My Rhetoric,” in which the artist writes: “I, Isay I I, Isay 1, the Mussels King, You say you. I autologize. | ‘can it. T sociologize I manifesely manifest ...,” and so on.3 Douglas Crimp has slso fstened on this feature of contradiction, which Broodthaers sometimes called his own “bad faith,” as when he explained his decision in the early 19608 co stop being a poet and start being anartist. The reason, he wrote, was that since he hadn’tthe money to collect the art objects he loved, he decided to create them instead: to become a creator, then, by default of nox being leto be a collector 34 O Motlancolee Foye Cou tes tgs . 3 5 Wisse d'art moderne PUBLICITE 28 MatcelBooitaess, cum Made Art, Exes Depertmee, Seton eb, roy.In a certain sense, the whole of the museum fetions, in which Broodthaers is installed as director, enact the collecting function, But Broodthaers ako distinguishes this public form of collection from a per” sonal one ina work called Me Collection, a work given a special aura of| privacy and inwardness ky che presence, within its assembly of images, of the picture of Stéphane Mallarmé. Focusing on this distinction beeween public and private, or insticutional and personal, Crimp addresses Broadthaers’s add privileging of the personal collector through the lens of Walter Benjamin's analysis of such a nineteenth, century collector as 4 positive countertype not only to the bourgeois consumer but also to the contemporary private collector who now oper ates on the pater of commodity consumption, Against the consumiet who is driven to amass objects either to display them 2s capital or to use them up, the true collector, Benjamin says, liberates “things ftom the bondage of utility.” What is decisive in the act of collecting, he goes on, is “that the object be dissociated from all its original functions in exderto enter into the closes possible relationship with iss equivalents. This is the diametric opposite of use, and stands under the curious category cof complereness.”»* Untente de Mared Broodfsirs apmmpos de Ma Cullen "Thiseet was writen by the ‘Ma Cleo es ue ite composte de dan vets dent Hntoevompany Mi Cllcfon chaque ic tt explaite, Dara lepreni volt eraperint (ere 6 forint), «es docunent expos anxgudls pu paniiper ex Inseeeune paged cxalygae de fie de Calne 7 ‘eprodisintlesphotes desménes document, Lesecond soe de Ma Calletonestrné dn poroat da pote crop ‘Suéghane Mallar ea ie vile ondatur dear ‘onemparia, “Un cup de ds jaisefabolia eb.” Me Cilleson ex une pce ob eyetmetantcogique ct uals pour stur es lew exposition. (Etleauraitdene plas ceenequione colectiondetimbier pote). Lesage de le présexceaposcon er uilisé comme deal por consiuce use pice at ere emoignne des expencns ataxquces 38 jfaparcpé depuis 197. 35 (ty) Marcel Brooker, Ms Colkeion, 1971, Frome view. (abe) Marcel Brodthaers, Ma Colleton, 1971.Back viewsos 92 out qusetion un centre fe omaetttuct pas un rooigenate selon 2s tenistion, ay +4 16m accope gus 1a xégeesantation 4 oon art yzecta wa cnaeninah 24 nea/nieryn, le ourest core ‘un soulyenide Yue Zoran medio, us seagate barageae G+ renkyrante tutions Syutvatralt dose 3 an objet dart Anstmise Soman vende 8 Jonte at onine uta oan da uaiteh aruietaqee sorter 3180 party ge mtameatepn lai peo 10 front da eoboslar mir a Ochection" Bion mam seman qutawie Lhangnt stone J zournetn eotagwe 2a loice qui sbvit sir Indep 98 emore 20 payer wo sbroustion A'avatr-gurte, Gk omtrat, un bo comiret ee Sematt fn atcttotnen om oontanaast non tntontt ue gon Sahn lo, gh ofaire pesormesr us dap6t (oar croste x c'auteurt) oa trea gi zoprodutmaoat age ou ontatonte sr Las piboations, se Sleantion ot 158 dmagto te 2 tn fore ae stage Th. Va O mxtie ( ( routefote, af qutae asieteur tanatt ovoare & postion okjeb shysigne de Mp Detestionty Le px om sara ene ontet te anf cowsctoveo (Brix 6 asbttre). Ai, 1s. ‘Typewntentexton Me Colleton Brothers (x pao tesa). Here, the equivalency principle that levels objects to the measure of their exchange value, and which Broodthaers seems w attack in the pplication of “Fig,” numbers within the Films Section of his muscum, is valorized in the situation of the personal collection. This Broodthaers also seems to acknowledge, in that the “Fig.” numbers captioning the images in Ma Collection could be seen as working to form the new telar tionships forged by the “tcue” collector.» These relationships, which Benjamin calls a “magic circle,” allow each abject ro exfoliate into so many sites of memory. “Collecting,” he says, “isa form of practical memory and, among the profane manifestations of ‘proximity,’ the most convincing on This steucture in which ewo opposing forms of equivalence can converge in the object ~ that of exchange and that of “proximity” ~isa dialectical condition in which everything within capitalism — every object, every technological process, every socisl type— is understood as invested with a double valence: negative and positive, like an object and its shadow, ora perception and its after-image. This is what links type to countertype, of, in the case of thecommodity, produces what Benjamin called “the ambivalence between its utopian and its eynical element.”** ‘Thar the cynical element gains the upper hand over the course of time goes without saying, But Benjamin believed that at the birth of a given social form or technological process the utopian dimension ‘was present and, furthermore, that it is precisely at the moment of the bsolescence of that technology that it once more releases this dimen sion, like the last gleam of a dying star. For obsolescence, the very law of commodity production, both fiers the eutmoded object from the grip of utility and reveals the hellow promise of that wet! Broodthaers’s deep attraction tothe forms of the ourmoded has been remarked upon by his various critics. His system of references focuses mainly on the nineteenth century, be they to the Ingres and Courbets in the first manifestation of his muscum, ot to the example of Baudelaire and Mallarmé for his books and exhibitions, orto the panorama and the an36 Marcel Broitiuess, Usjaindtive. 197, winter garden as his models for social spaces. In fact, as Benjamin Buchloh has commented, this “altogether dated aura of nineteenth- century bourgeois culture that many of his works seem to bring to mind might easily seduce the viewer into dismissing his work as being, obviously obsolete and not at all concerned with the presuppositions of contemporary art.” But what Crimp is suggesting is that the power that Walter Ben jamin invested in the outmaded should be acknowledged in Brooct- hhaers’s use of it~ as in his assumption of the form of the “true” collector. ‘This was a power that Benjamin hoped his own prospecting in the historical grounds of nineteenth century forms would beableto release. Wiiting of his own Paris Arcedes project, he said: “We are here cone structingan alarm clock thatawakensthe kitsch ofthe past century into ‘re-collecsion.’ "+ That Benjamin's archaeology was retrospective was a function of the fact that he believed is view could open up oxy from the site of obsolescence. As he remarked: “Only in extinction is the [true] collector comprehended.” : 5 The true collector, however, wes not the only outmoded figure to whom Broodthaers was attracted, Another was that of the film-maker from the carly moments of cinema when, as with the Lumitre Brothers or with D. W. Griffith's and Chaplin’s sock-company operations (such as 2 Biograph or S. and A.), movie production was entirely arsisinal. As Broodthaers began to make films in earnest in 1967 and into the early °708 , he cast his own production in precisely this mold. He imitated the gestures of the silent-movie comie actors, particularly Buster Keaton, ‘captusing the amazing sense they radiated of dogged persistence in the face of endless adversity. And he replicated the primitive look of early ‘cinema with its uneven exposures spliced together and its fickering gait. That the kind of spontaneous activity cepresented in this model ‘would be rendered obsolete by the industrialization of cinema at the hands of the big studios in Hollywood and Europe wasan issue for just that structuralist film being made in the late 1960s in the context of Anthology Film Aschives and shewn annually at the Experimental Film Festival at Knokkele-Zoute, on the Belgian coast, an event that Broodthaers twice attended.s* The demonstration that it was possible to defy the system and to make film single handedly, on prsctically no 37 Marcel Booithars, Lalu, 1969.» 38 Mare Broodthaers, Cucine ait psu pp, 1960-78 ade budget, and fiom the scraps and discards of old stock, as exemplified at Knokke by the Americans and the Canadians, undoubtedly reinforced Broodthaers’s earlier experiments in film, But though many of the Americans saw this deiance of Hollywood as progressive, avant-garde move, the opportunity for a modemist concentration of the disparate” ness of the Hollywood production into the single, structural vector that would reveal the nature of film itself, Broodthaces read ic xetrogressively return to thepromesse debonheur enfolded in cinema's beginnings. Inso parting company with structuralistfilm’s modernism, Broodt- haers was not denying film asa medium. He was, rather, understanding this medium in the light of the openness promised by carly film, an ‘openness woven into the very mesh of the image, as the flickering irreso- lation of the illusion of movement produced the experience of sight itself as dilated: a phenomenological mixture of presence and absence, immediacy and distance. If the meditum of primitive film resisted struc” tural closure in this sense, it allowed Broodthaers to see what the struc’ turalists did not: that the filmic appacarus presents us with a medium whose specificity i 10 be found in its condition as selfdiffering. It is aggregative, a matter of interlocking supports and layered conventions. The stracturalists strove to construct the ultimate synecdoche for film 4 “itself” — motion both reduced to and summarized in the ultimate camera movement (Snow’s zoam), or filmic illusion typified in the flicker film’s dissection of the persistence of vision (Paul Shatit’s work) — one which, like any totalizing symbolic form, would be unitary; Broodthaers honored the differential condition of film: its inextricable relation berween simultaneity and sequence, its layering of sound ortext over image, “As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development. And the tdevisual por- tapak that killed American Independent Cinema was ust this declara- tion of film’s obsolescence 6 If Tam pursuing the example of Marcel Brooethacrs in the context of the post-medium condicion, itis because he stands af, and thus stands Jor, what T would like wo see xs the-*eomplex” of this condition. For Broodthzers, the presumed spokesman for intermedia and theend of the arts, nonetheless wove for his work an internal lining that has to be called redenptiv. Iam taking ehis notion of redemption from Walter Benjamin, whose idea of the counterrype—as the dialectical afterimage of a social role now reified and corrupted under capitalism — seems to operate over part of Broodthaers’sactivices 2s collector. And further, the analysis of photography that Benjamin constcucted can be seen (© slide over Broodthaere's practice of film. At first this may seem counter-intuitive, for like Broodthaers, Ben Jamin is famous for a deconstructive attitude toward the very idea of a medium, To this end heused photography not only asa form that erodes its own specificity ~ since it forces the visual image into dependence on a writen caption ~ but as a tool to atack the idea of specificity for all the 45arts, This is because photagraphy’s satus as a multiple, a function of mechanical reproduction, restructures the condition of the other arts. Asan example, Benjamin explained that “to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the werk of art designed for repro- ducibilie.” And what follows fiom this is that, becoming prcy to the lav of commodification, the separate work of art, as well as the separate mediums of art, enter che condition of general equivalency, thereby losing the uniqueness af the work — what Benjamin called its “aura” — as well asthe specificity of its medium. But far from being an undilued celebration of this stave of affits, Benjamin's contemplation of photography was also cast in the mold of his retrospective attitude, which is to say his scnse that, as a fossil of its birth, theoutmoded stage of a given technological form might betray the redemptive obverse of that technology itself In the case of photography this other promise was encoded in the amateus, non-professionalized character of its catiest, pre-commercialized practice, as artists and writers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Victor Hugo, and Octavius Hill took pictures of their friends, Italso had to do with the length of the pose exacted by their work, dusing which there was a possibility of Jnumanizing the gaze, which isto say of the subject's escaping his or her own objectification atthe bands of the machine.” The refuge that Broodthaers took in a practice of primitive cinema betrays this same thought of the redemptive possibilities encoded ac the birth of a given technical support. And it is this thought that I would like one to ser as acting on all of Broodthaers’s production as, like a saking light shining aca suange angle over a surface, ic brings into relief an entirely new topographical structure. If I do not have space to give anything like a full demonstration of this here, 1 would nevertheless suggest that the flmic model is a subse of a larger contemplation about the nature of the medium conducted through the guise of what I think functioned as the master medium for Broodthaers, namely fiction itself, as when Broodthaers referred to his musenm as “a fetion.” For ftion 46 always seems to have contained a revelatory aspect for him; as he said of the difference between official museums and his own: “a fiction allows uasto grasp reality and atthe same time what ithides.”s! ‘Whatis at issue in thecontext of a medium, however, is not justthis possibilty of exploiting the fictional ro unmask reality’s lies, but of pro- ducing an analysis of fiction itself in relation to a specific structure of experience. And it was just this structure of a spatial “behind” or layer ing that was forhim a metaphor forthe condition of absence that is atthe heart of cin, That the novelas the technical support through which fction was conventionalized during the nineteenth century was of particular inter- «st to Broodthaers emerges not just in his statements like the one he pro- nounced in reference to the “Theory of Figures” exhibition — where he sees the objects bearing “Fig,” numbers a5 “taking on an illustrative ind of novel about society.” Ie also takes on. character reférting to a physical shape in relation o his own practice of producing work in the form of books, One of these, Charles Baudelaire Je hais le mouenent qui déplae les ligues (1973), is a specific engagement with the revelatory power of the novel. For in its peculiar dilation of a Baudelaire poem, the book's nov, clized, sequential form is made not only to expose as sefdelusory the romantic belief in poetry 353 form of toal immediacy ~a collapse of the difference between subject and object ~ but also to open that immediacy ‘oits real temporal destiny, in which the subject can never become iden tical with himself, Based on Baudelaire’ early poem “La Beauté,” whece subjective immediacy is given voice by a seulprure vauncing the way its own self-sufficiency and simultaneous presence is abletosymbol- ize the infinity of a perfecc whole (“Je sus belle, 6 mortels! comme un sévede pierre”), the book sets its sights on empeying ovt this very notion of simultaneity. Printing the pocm in its catircry on the first page, which is marked “Fig. 1," Brondthaers singles ut in red the line of verse hrough which "7UN COUP DE DES JAMALS NABOLIRA LE HASARD 49. (gh) Mars Brsoddbet, Uncop eal jms aia Kelso laae, 1969 Cover Sel 44 (pst) Marcel Brodtbaen, Uap ej abil Inge, 2960 Mallarmé's pom, rendering ielins of ‘verunintligibl, hereby earsforms (GaSe the sculpture defics any temporal dilation of is perfect form, theonethat reads, “Thate the movement that shilts the lines” Throughout the fol- lowing pages of the book, however, Broodthaers proceeds toward just thi shift o¢ displacement, 28 the verse itself becomes layered into the movement of its own vanishing horizon, with each of its words con signed tothe bottom of a single page: Ik could be objected that, with this revision of Baudelaire's poem, Broodihacts is simply following the example of Mallarmé’s Un coup de «és, in which the words of the ttle (“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hhasard”) are similarly extended along the bottom of several pages, the text of the poem itself made radically spasial by the ieregalarity and dis» persal of its lines on every page, sometimes even running actoss the gutter of the book, to transform the verses into something like an image. ‘The argument for this parallelism might be further supported by the sprinkling of “Fig.” numbers oa che upper part of the pages of Broodthaers’s Baudelaire, acknowledging the way Un coup de dés trans forms the sequential condition of wricing ino the simultaneous realm of secing ina move to which Broodthaets frequently referred. “Mallarméis so "Ti i at the source of modern art,” he would explain. “He unwittingly invented modern space.”> But Brood:haers’s own understanding of Mallarmé’s strategy runs counter to what the Baudelaite book performs. First, the very condition of Broodthaers’s “Fig.” notatiorinsists on the incomplete ot fiagmentary status of the ward, its resistance to the pessibility of the image's ever being fally (s)present: as his question “Bur the Fig. asa theory of the image?” suggests, the “Eig.” theorizes the image into the self-deferring and displacing status of fiction.’ In this sense, the “Fig.” questions rather¢han imitates the calligrammatic status of Mallarmé’ pages. And second, the way sequentialization works in the Baudelaire opposes its operations in Mallarmé, For in Un coup de dés, the slow unfurling of the tile along the bottom of the poem's pages serve: more like continous pedal point, or like the harmonic suspensions that serve to transform the diachronic flow of musical sound into the heart-stopping illusion of the synchronic space of a single chord that we hear, for example, in Debussy. That the dilation weare made to expecience in the Baudelaire is something else again is reenforced by being, restaged in the film that stBroodthaers conceived in the same yeas, A Viyage on the North Sta, in which once again the gestalt of the image is narcativized (see pages 54-5). Casting its cinematic voyage in the form of a “book,” the film’: tuiterly static shots (each lasting about ten seconds) alternate intertiles, beginning with "PAGE 1” and running to “PAGE 15,” with motionless images of boats. These begin with a photograph of a distant, solitary yacht, seen four times as one progresses from page one to page four, and then shift to a nineteench-certury painting of a fshing fleet under sail, which over successive “pages” is shown in various details. ‘The first of these, in performing the radical leap from the full marine scene, with its schooners and longbeas, roa giant close-up of the weave of dhecanwvas, cedes by the next “page” to such a near view of the double billow of the main sal that ittakes on the look of an abstract painting, only in turn, after the announcement of the following “page,” to yield to another view of canvas weave that parades 28 a kind of radical mono- chrome. This progression might suggest that the narrative summoned by the “book” is an art-historical one, telescoping onto three successive pages the story of modernism’s exchange of the deep space necessary to visual narrative for an increasingly fattened suxface that now refers only to its own parameters, the “reality” of the world supplanted by the reality of the pictorial givens. Buc by the next “page,” the monochrome detail again retreats to a full-view of the schooner, as in successive moves Broodthaers scrambles the account of a modernist progression. ‘What we ate offered in its place is the experience of a passage between several surfaces, in a layering that draws an analogy between the stacked pages of a book and the additive condition of even the most monochrome of canvases, which, however objectified it might be, must nonetheless apply paintover ts underlying support Indeed, as the book's “pages” unfurl, this voyage appears to be one of a search for the work’s origins, such an “origin” being suspended equally between the material, ity of the work’s canvas flatbed (the modernist “origin”) and the image projected on that opaque surface atthe index of the viewer's originating 32 desire to open up any given moment of experience to something heyond itself (realty as “origin”). In both encompassing and enacting such site, fetion is, then, the acknowledgment of this very incompleteness. Iti the form that an unappeasable lack of selfsullciency takes as it sets of ina search for its own beginnings ot its own destiny as away of imag ining the possibility of achieving wholeness. Ici the impossible attempt co ansform succession into stasis, ora chain of parts into a whole, ‘The modernist story that yielded the suppoted “triumph” of the ‘monochrome believed that it had produced this totalization in an object that was utterly coextensive with its own origins: surface and support in an indivisible unity; the medium of painting so reduced to zero that nothing was lef but an object. Broodthaess’s recourse w fiction els of the impossibility of this story inthe enactment of a kind of layering that can isdf stand for, ot allegorize, the seli-differential condition. of ‘mediums themselves. When Broodthaers refers to the novel in his definition of a““Theory of Figures,” he speaks of the complexity he hopes to have achieved with the commonplace objects like pipes and mirrors that “illustrate” this work. “T would never have obtained this kind of complexity,” he says “with technological objects, whose singleness condemns the mind to monomania: minimal art, robot, computer.”s5 In such a remark is folded wo components of the argument I have been pursuing in this meditation on the medium. Fits, that the specie ficity of mediums, even modernist ones, must be understood as differen tial, selé-dffering, and thus as a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support. “Singleness,” as Broodthaers says, “condemas the mind to monomania.”* Second, that iis precisely the onset of higher orders of technology ~ “robot, com puter” — which allows us, by rendering older techniques outmoded, to grasp the inner complexity of the mediums those techniques support. In Broodthacts's hands, fction iwelf became such a medium, such a form of differential specifiy. 3? Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodernity as the total saturation of cultural space by the image, whether at the hands of advertising, com- munications media, o1 cyberspace. This complete image permeation of social and daily life means, he says, that aesthetic experience is now everywhere, in an expansion of culture that has not only made the notion of an individual work of art wholly problematic, but has also ‘emptied out the very concept of aesthetic autonomy. In this state in which “evecything is now fally translated into the visible and the eulkur- ally familiar, [including all critiques of this situation)... aesthetic attention,” he says, “finds itself wansferred to the life of perception as such.” This is what he calls a “new life of postmodern sensation,” in ‘which “the perceptual system of late capitalism” experiences everything from shopping to all forms of leisure as aesthetic, thereby rendering any- thing that could be called a properly aesthetic sphere .. obsolete. ‘One description of art within this regime of postmodern sensation is that it mimics just this leeching of the aesthetic out into the social feld in general. Within this situation, however, there area few contemporary artists who have decided not to fallow this practice, who have decided, that is, not to engage in 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. These same artists have abso resisted, as impossible, the retreat into etiolated forms of the traditional mediums — such as painting and sculpture. Instead, artists such as James Coleman or William Kentridge have embraced the idea of differential specificity, which isto say the medium as such, which they understand they will now have to reinvent or rearticulate.s° The ‘exemple of Marcel Broodtaers, which I have been presenting here, has been fundamental to thistask. NOTES. + Sanky Cosel, The Wirt Pevel (Cam Uris ss: anand Unienity Dies, 1971), Front 2 In dis seid, se Staley Cal, “Mose Discogs” in Mit We Mow Wht We Se (New Yrs Seu’ 5501p. 10-20 41 This prablin ie Grier complicued by he seryoedss bela ff reste soune vite sac ex-qioe inte way ane do inthis see: 3810 ne ha ei ang of is Coen we of he werd “edn” soled and invelve) 4 seange mixndenenediag, on that T dessblow (spp. 27-0) 44 Throgghou ds tow edn the slr mdi increta conan with red, which Tas eerrng re wckoologi mene nit by tales em 5) Beojania H. D. Bucklo, “Innoduciry No [tthe peal Boars eh” Orie, 42 (F187), p. 5. Bayjmin Bacio ce tell inthe ental eegion of Brodtase’s wor sth uted inde xy itor it the many cintns of is wring dat pcr Atroager ch at ini rience hi ue tering active editors pis in con retin wi ik journal einen, ere ‘i apes co ts steep ep gap} towhat lbw, wane dace myonn ge det exjamia Bue forthe geery of hi willingoess to ead hs ein mance and des wih on inthe openexchange oF apne Iaton and dsgrement hi makes dgee wah him one chalngngand minting 6 Shao nema wh 196 (Osos 194) "Te back cove abo by Brosh. Ie imamate ofthe same kind of cir “bet leson” diss (2 fr zebra, H fe bars, W fo tc, withthe appt pcre an ech di) are diss Fearn lees on: Unde the grid of thee dis, Boothe has pond "deme dh dlvcaes re ponent seit Tart ne fate Arathogaphe cché sau un Gomage” This refs woaspec of hi own wrk, On he ne hand. eles aif eh La Fone Bbleof thefae aed the cow dat had ved Bieodatrs for is auton sn Sl Le Caeser (1097). On he other isle he syp in snacomceen it nition "Covet Cui” (agers ia which he perio te hin Beeacrandeteanadedthleter by ha, theeby een the misuke iw sn aug he woik or makeabl objet of, in Fac tang, "Soma" (0) 7 Myaueain wast dowatothis coves at is arcu oe wore, by Benim Bile inhi mortne sway "Move Browdtaes: Alle soews afte Ast Cad” Arian vl OVE [May 298)» 7 Tore procaton and teonoe of es ‘asfomuton fom pee gene ee Thy de Dore, Ke Afr Dac (Camb, Mass: MIT Pres, ss), pail she cape "The sociremean th Blak Canvas” 4 Broodthien'sexpaation ype the rwearlamecatague af he enhton "Der Ader von Olgocia ba Hews” (Dim Suede Kunal 972), ves 2. 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Coe Suey of Cie cer 81 Wine 998, pp 3-H 1a Se JL Bandy, "The Appar,” Cava Obra. (1970);andTees de Larisa Stephen Hex (6d), The Chemie Apps (Caden: Macriln, 0) 1g Mice NevessPons. Phonic eepti rane, Cokn Sits (Landon Resta sd Kgin Pah 162). The son sill “The Tod adteone the cence of the to “ack” and “ent win pte of roi of thse elton. The, gen pe bj yd pce ofthe bd ths ton zaprinordid mod fr meaning nell The body ike pobjathe goundof allexperine of de ladies of oes the fs “we” expel eee errr $8 1s Aneete Michdaon weiter “As the mea ontinses 9 moe stenly fas, bldg 2 eet eae eae eee of lyme ie, wih seeping onaons desing te cones of seis of ‘ha rate sma by deere ene ‘ali, ring upon esi, ard eel, Wang fran se, we are spend owes resin... Savy in rneodiciogexpecatien the oe an Ge eden ope eng. rely empl nsion" Veiga of ‘eectrel prlr of meas | Se teed a gand metaphor fr nave frm (Tomare Stow: Uae” Aon el (Je ‘97. pe. Snow’ work fr hin in Asnexe Michelson, ‘Rdhad Sera, nd Clare Wejagul, "The ls of Richard Sere Ameri" Qa, 6910 (ator 17 Tere of ng ihe ate s4on Green tegen ea of the snd exe pale ing and te opeisg of pturemaking <0 sonething “bend” t. Soe “The Cristo the Eas Picue” (Apel eq) and “The Rele of Nau ig Moden Painin” (‘4p in Cire Gwen, The Cale Eas a Cries 2. eelsoeee cheneas Heauttrie) ti of Chicago Ps 1986) pp 2 aa a4 Sires rite we Clot Grebe opt vel. 3 9.2 18 Ie anayzing the ines of intaon eat oor a subjet nhs wodd, Sa speaks ma onl o he repre ois of view =the vecorths tones ny adj asm pat of view Peete acon acl cee co tts) epetereent tc oe ee ny Been of appreputing Usage ply ‘xl, “Spor” he wat, isaHeewatsfrma tion of te warily eoienns ino te agp ingelenet ef hatin, Thi maesicreative likes. Thence may be id of sae tose kisaead tops it Keeps pure eit abel pale te wndiereon, fas moni, aed i whites manor the alsolue mudiy ef ubsasce ici he isl which aly wise... What Twi da his ‘nits mighe be a ae of enanatin of myself cist ae eel eat ara which allces so dleply wo te moter eat dhe rue appara elt te ek the im ‘Toss beyond al, pid pl, way pose sesing this eld Lam donguameting eo yay civ Lam changing the manerand easing of ‘hese Jean-Paul Sate, Riya Nhs ‘eal es ater [Neos Sole ag Sq Peay 136) ps 742 9). The ome of i eee | ester) wa hs ea of a ace ef eatin tnd cennctn ugh which asbjet ager wi a ‘wil asmeanigi 1g Thieexploed tisisuein aseiesof ess: “Aad Than Tun Awa? Au Esayon Janes Cale,” Over, 90. (Suman 1092. PE ‘5-33 "envenig the Medio," Chia ig, tay (Winer 199) pp a soy and "Th {Gis of de Bas Piet” fndcoming in dhe secon lume af he Jckon Plock loge, “The Meum of Nodern Art, New Yor eer ei cere eee 20. Such an alysis isunderake in be'dscns* sien of Se arth end of ay "The Casio the Essd Pimp ct 31 Sce"Laieand Nalaed™ (ep) and “Aer “Abwusc Expesionin” (1962), in Clnet Gender op iva 4p oranda. 22 “Modes Fai", 9. 2) “Lesa Noun” bid, p97 14 They de Dues acount of Cresbeg’s rex t Minima’ tanimutaon of made ‘ms ft itr monocamecam taken ae eee eee ing nodenitn and enbucing fomal, che Rite geet porate deeseteotjudgnens of tte in "The Honor ‘ome andthe Blank Cabs” op. ci p332)- This of coune, acco with Grenbergs lh scrpion in his poses. witegs such as *Comphins of an Art Cie” (Artin [Ocober rgs7]. What tis reading sean hveve, te way Gremberg undestod th: ‘exegor of pty 5 1 sipoe fee pace, andshas~thagh Fe neve sy i+ meio ‘Ned iat dh mena arnt Coen ricerca nearer anaes op and company wasted oun stand, ede Duve aknowedges. The guscin ‘piliy 2a phenemiologel eos fer vdoped in ny "The Crs he asd Pie once 25 In setionw oe verano sch notion, eae eee Pe Laie eee seat” (Mica Bed "Shapes For ‘ud Ob [Chieagy and Landon: Chiags Uierity Pres 1998 p88). 25. Leo Stinburg. Cie Cris (New York Oxtrd Univesiy Pres, 1972) 872 27 Cuvel’s sof thetem stim co suse ‘leiden medaamts separ. patie ere tp the basing of each + sertin. Fe empl is th lain teen ave “ium he far indepen wold ‘ake ames seal in trea member theses bangs new itanceo emetic (i Hin ie op ie 10-4). 28, Set ny “Vide and Nac,” Oc, rm. (Spring 07 2 Sey Cael! sacks to ese chit iy ‘levoph eee meni ari ws "secre simaliaors vem cept” ad of pw “ition spit which el" maneorng” (oe Stanley Cav, "The Fat of lesson 0 Vi Calne A Crd Innsgeton, pha arhard(Reshat N¥sVil Sees Work stop, 1986. Other temps arcuate spec fig of eran ao vdeindac: ane Fee, The Conca Li Telerison: Olay 9 begs) a Ree Telre | ie “Appa es E- Aa Kapha (rec Ma Unterary Publiatonsof Aenea, 1983) Mary ‘An Dost, “ermason, Crit and Catate- tin" in Lp Tein: Bin Cub Crt fam, ol, Paice Mallen Bleoing 59