Session 1 – The Place of the Medium

This panel explores the artist’s relationship to the status of the medium in an increasingly interdisciplinary world. Within the last decade, the proliferation of digital intermediation and a continuing movement toward the dissolution of the art object have raised the question of whether the category of “medium specificity” continues to hold significance. In the age of what Rosalind Krauss has termed the “post-medium condition,” does the medium still matter? And how can we talk about medium specificity without resorting to essentialist qualities of its material support: Celluloid, projected light, bits, bytes, pixels?



Abstract:

Nicky Hamlyn: In this essay I will look at the question of medium specificity by examining works that could not have existed other than in the medium in which they were made. The essay develops out of two chapters in my book Film Art Phenomena, which worked with an idea that different media offered different possibilities and facilitated particular ways of working and kinds of outcome: a kind of medium specificity-lite argument, in the sense that it held back from a stronger position on film, video and digital media as being absolutely distinct or antithetical. Actually, I don’t think it’s possible, or even necessary, to show that they are absolutely distinct in order to argue for medium specificity; they are, obviously, all media designed for recording moving images, and for many people, in a majority of production contexts, such as TV, the distinctions are simply irrelevant. A second motive for writing the essay was prompted by a feeling of resistance to the long running fashion for a rejection of medium-based forms in favour of so called post-medium practices. Practitioners, however multiple, mixed or post-media their work may be, can never escape the question of medium. In relation to photographic media, such attempts would seem to commit them to an ideology of transparency, while, more broadly, artists who mix media cannot ignore the specificities of those media’s histories and effects, just because they’re using them in conjunction with sculpture, drawing, installation or combinations thereof.

Michael Snow: "How can an artist work objectively for a generalization?"
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