Undead media Essay

Udead media

 

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....