Krauss, Post-medium.pdf

Two Moments from the

Post-Medium Condition

ROSALIND KRAUSS

Lip Synch: Marclay Not Nauman

Bruce Nauman’s video Lip Synch (1969) shows the artist’s head upside down

and close up, his inverted mouth at the bottom of the screen repeating the words

“lip synch,” as the sound gradually moves out of synch with the image, this drift

transforming the engorged neck and pulsating mouth into a part object, erotically

charged. The video clearly pays homage to the technical breakthrough in ﬁlm his-

tory when, in 1929, synch sound did away with silent ﬁlm and brought a new

dimension to cinema. Video, a later generation of motion-picture technology, had

synchronous sound available to it right from the start. It is to this dimension that

Nauman points in Lip Synch .

Christian Marclay’s magisterial work Video Quartet (2002) spreads four separate

screens of DVD projection across forty feet of wall, each screen showing the unreel-

ing of a compilation of ﬁlm clips from well-known works of sound cinema. The four

different tracks compete for attention for the most part, but occasionally they display

the same image, creating synchronicity along the horizontal expanse of the work.

The effect, not unlike Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (1970), is a visual grid: the ver-

tical axis becomes the unreeling narrative of the constitutive shots—including Janet

Leigh’s scream in the shower from Psycho (1960), or the meditative humming of

Ingrid Bergman’s “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca (1942)—the horizontal one,

the repetition of the visual ﬁelds, or the competition among them for dominance.

Repetition is, for the most part, a matter of analogy, as when the full-screen image of

a spinning roulette wheel rhymes visually with a record on a turntable, as well as with

the circles of drumheads seen from above. These turning disks, needless to say, create

the kind of self-reference—here to the reels of ﬁlm itself—familiar to us from mod-

ernist art.

But Marclay’s prey goes deeper into the nature of his own medium by medi-

tating on synch sound itself as the “technical support” of cinema. I am using the term

“technical support” here as a way of warding off the unwanted positivism of the term

“medium” which, in most readers’ minds, refers to the speciﬁc material support for a

OCTOBER

Right and facing page:

Christian Marclay.

Video Quartet. 2002.

Courtesy Paula Cooper

Gallery, New York.

traditional aesthetic genre, reducing the idea of medium to what Michael Fried

complains of as the basis of the “literalism” of the art he rejects. “Part of my argument

with Clement Greenberg’s reductionist, essentialist reading of the development of

modernist art,” Fried writes, “was precisely this case history in Minimalism of what

happened if one thought in those terms.” It is an objection that Stanley Cavell sec-

onds by dismissing “medium speciﬁcity” as producing “the fate of modernist art

generally—that its awareness and responsibility for the physical basis of its art compel

it at once to assert and deny the control of its art by that basis.” Both critics reject the

version of modernist “medium speciﬁcity” articulated by Greenberg.

“Technical support” has the virtue of acknowledging the recent obsolescence

of most traditional aesthetic mediums (such as oil on canvas, fresco, and many

sculptural materials, including cast bronze or welded metal), while it also wel-

comes the layered mechanisms of new technologies that make a simple, unitary

identiﬁcation of the work’s physical support impossible (is the “support” of ﬁlm

the celluloid strip, the screen, the splices of the edited footage, the projector’s

beam of light, the circular reels?). Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera

(1929), perhaps the most medium-speciﬁc ﬁlm in the history of cinema, drama-

tizes the act of modernist self-reference that reveals the nature of the medium, as

his own camera tracks the movie’s cameraman through the city, while, from vari-

ous conveyances such as cars or horse-drawn carriages, the latter ﬁlms the urban

landscape, an activity of surveillance that provokes the viewer to reﬂect on the

unseen cameraman who is even then ﬁlming the ﬁlmer. By dramatizing this nor-

mally invisible actor, Vertov forces into experience that part of the cinematic

Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition

medium—the celluloid support of the ﬁlmic image—that is not usually exposed

to view. Vertov’s prey in manifesting the medium of his art is wider than the physi-

cal support of the representation. As well, he dramatizes the fact of editing—the

normally invisible joining together of sequences of action to produce a narra-

tive—by reversing the forward motion of such narrative, to produce the feeling

that the spools of ﬁlm are being wound back through the projector’s gate onto the

reels from which they originally issued—an effect Annette Michelson identiﬁes

with the poetic trope “hysteron proteron.” 1

If the traditional medium is supported by a physical substance (and prac-

ticed by a specialized guild), the term “technical support,” in distinction, refers to

contemporary commercial vehicles, such as cars or television, which contempo-

rary artists exploit, 2 in recognition of the contemporary obsolescence of the

traditional mediums, as well as acknowledging their obligation to wrest from that

support a new set of aesthetic conventions to which their works can then reﬂex-

ively gesture, should they want to join those works to the canon of modernism.

Marclay’s focus on his technical support manifests itself early on in Video Quartet

when the left-most screen shows a clip of cockroaches running soundlessly across the

keys of a piano, returning us thereby to silent ﬁlm. In doing so, we have the sensation

1. See her fundamental essay, “The Man with the Movie Camera: From Magician to

Epistemologist,” Artforum 10, no. 7 (February 1972), pp. 62–72.

2. I am referring to artists such as James Coleman, whose technical support is the slide tape, more

currently embodied in the technology that underwrites Microsoft PowerPoint; and William Kentridge,

who exploits (and brilliantly develops) the support of animation.

OCTOBER

of looking at the projection on this ﬁeld winding backwards into the history of the

movies to the onset of sound itself. The sensation is one of actually seeing the silence

as well as the gridlike layering of the cinematic medium’s additive condition of the

soundtrack’s audio edge running along the celluloid strip of the images. A composer,

Marclay has made quasi-sculptural works out of sound materials, such as skeins of

audiotape, an unpleated accordion, or telephone headsets cast in series. None of this

has the originality or focus of Video Quartet , as it unpacks the speciﬁcity of synch

sound, making it visible to us and converting ﬁlm’s narrative continuum into a funda-

mentally visual simultaneity.

Leviathan

Is it time to puncture the secret about Conceptual art kept so long by its sup-

porters and advocates, who are bent on declaring it the form the avant-garde has

assumed in our time? This “secret” is the deepest identity of Conceptualism, which

is, at its core, the contemporary avatar of kitsch. Benjamin Buchloh long ago

exposed the formal emptiness of the movement by characterizing its notions of

structure as “tautological.” 3 The calling-card sentiment of this kind of tautology (I

am thinking of Joseph Kosuth’s work Five Words in Blue Neon [1965]) is enough to

attach it to the most spurious forms of cultural exchange for which “kitsch” is the

baldest term.

From “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” we have the deﬁnition of the phenomenon

pronounced by Clement Greenberg: “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sen-

sations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is

the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.” Against the spurious

condition of kitsch, Greenberg pits an authentic avant-garde that calls for the artist

to “imitate” the medium of his own craft, making of that re-authenticated medium

the artist’s subject matter.

A contemporary avant-garde has organized itself to reject Conceptual art,

which it views as the most recent form of kitsch. As it had been in the past, the cul-

tural ambition of such avant-garde artists is vested in making their own medium

into the subject matter of their art.

As I have argued in a series of recent essays on this phenomenon, these artists

do not work with the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture, which they

view as exhausted, but are instead forced to do something as counterintuitive as

inventing a new medium. 4 Accordingly, they reach for modern, technological

mechanisms as the “supports” for their own work. Examples would be the art of Ed

Ruscha, for whom the automobile has served as medium—his parking lots, gaso-

line stations, and highways, articulated as the secondary supports for the car itself.

3. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to

the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 105–43.

See my “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999), pp. 289–305.

Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition

Sophie Calle. Exquisite Pain. 1984–2003.

Courtesy the artist.

James Coleman has fashioned a medium from the commercial vehicle of the slide

tape, a more ubiquitous version of which would be the computer program

PowerPoint. The last three decades have provided us with the development of con-

ceptual photographer Sophie Calle, whose technical support is the investigative

journalist’s documentary research.

The modernist reﬂexivity of Calle’s art is a matter of what Jacques Derrida calls

invagination, by which he means the folding of one story within another through

the invention of a character who exactly repeats the opening of the ﬁrst story,

thereby setting it off on its narrative course once more. 5 Exquisite Pain is Calle’s

account of her acceptance of a three-month fellowship in Japan, despite her lover’s

threat to abandon her should she leave him for so long. Before she leaves, they

make a pact for a reunion in a New Delhi hotel one year hence. But in place of her

lover, she receives a telegram message that an illness will prevent his arrival. The

missed encounter, which Calle names “Unhappiness,” is then symbolized by a red

telephone atop the sheets on the hotel room bed, while the successive photographs

See Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (1980).

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