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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. One of the benefits of the break with an essentialist approach to media should be a sustained investigation of media's historical lives and of the historicity of the concept of the medium. In its current form, it is quite a recent creation, as it emerged only with the modern mass media. While we now talk of the medium as well as of the art of painting, it was once only the latter. The words medium and media only came to have something' like the meaning with which we are now concerned in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. This current meaning is still more a matter of tacit assumptions than of commonly accepted definitions--attempts at these usually revolve around the storage and transmission of data or (in Bruce sterling's words) 'human sensory stimulus'. [5] The term medium has of course a wider meaning, and it can refer to almost any means or intermediary phenomenon; this wider meaning was reintroduced by McLuhan in nascent 'media theory': a hammer or a wheel is a medium, an extension of man. The best-known traditional use of the term 'medium' in the arts was highly specific: it only referred to the liquid substance (such as oil or water) with which pigments are mixed and applied. Painting as such was no medium. [6] If, in the end, the term medium in this specific meaning became prominent, it was to a large degree because a class of phenomena existed that were not a priori 'fine arts', and for which a handy generic term was needed: 'the media', newspapers, film and the like.

Now that the terms medium and media have triumphed, the concept of the medium and the actual media are according to some already deceased. The digitized media adopt or mimic each other's characteristics; following in the footsteps of McLuhan, who stated that a new medium has an older medium as its content, Bolter and Grusin have called this process remediation. [7] Even painting, which at first sight would seem to be resistant to digitization, has become absorbed in the process, as artists mimic the look of photography and as photographers create elaborate tableaux. In this way the digitized media can be seen not so much as dead but as 'undead' media, phantoms of their former self. Sometimes media die, but they are not all equally dead. Some become undead media; vampires or phantoms that continue to haunt us. Some time ago, Bruce Sterling initiated a Dead Media Project on the internet, which contains the panorama and the peepshow, among others. It is called an archive of 'the deceased, the slowly-rotting, the undead, and the never-lived media', and another contributor has proposed a 'taxonomy of dead media' according to which not all dead media are equally dead, nor equally alive [8] Perhaps it is time to conceive of media theory as Aby Warburg conceived of his art history, as a 'ghost story for the wholly adult.' [9]

LAOCOONISM AND GESAMTKUNSTWERK

In his 1940 essay 'Towards a Newer Laocoon', Clement Greenberg explained how 'the arts' had in the modern age been 'hunted back to their mediums'--how painting, for instance had striven to become 'pure painting' instead of 'literary', anecdotal painting. Here we see the convergence of the old art theory and an emerging medium theory. In this use of language, the medium (canvas with paint on it) is the material support for the art of painting, [10] Greenberg did not pay any real attention to mass media; without an art to redeem them, they were cast in the role of villains, as purveyors of kitsch. It was against the debasement of art by the mass media that the modernist striving for medium-specific purity of the arts was aimed. [11] Greenberg is an exponent of an important tendency in modern art theory which could be called 'Laoocoonism'. The founding text is, of course, Lessing's Laokoon, which is mainly preoccupied with the distinction between poetry and visual art. [12] However, Laocoonism also tried to distinguish the intrinsic properties of the different visual media, such as painting and sculpture. While an important impetus behind early Laocoonism was largely the breakdown of traditional iconography and conventions in the eighteenth century, later Laocoonism increasingly pitted the artistic, 'pure' use of media against mass-media kitsch. [13]

Laocoonism was complemented by a tendency in modern art theory which wanted to go beyond Laocoonist separation and reunite the arts in a Gesamtkunstwerk--a total work of art. This tendency aimed not only at uniting the arts, but also at integrating art and society once again. The great example here were the romanticised Middle Ages, when the gothic cathedral had been both a place where architecture, sculpture, painting and music had come together and a place where individual people became an organic whole of believers. [14] In spite of Rudolf Arnheim's Laocoonist attempt to establish film as a unique art form among others, early film theoreticians often described cinema as the true realization of the ideal of the total work of art. [15] it is not surprising that both the Nazi and the Soviet state found cinema a congenial means to reform society and wield it into a new whole, at least on the screen; whereas social reality was always to some degree resistant to the vision of what the perfect society should be like, cinema could show a world inhabited only by strong, disciplined bodies. But this Gesamtkunstwerk of cinema and the Volk is of course an illusion created by the Party, even if it could influence people's behavior and their perception of the world.

The film director who has reflected most on cinema's position as heir to the 19th-century dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk is probably Luchino Visconti. He has investigated the ideal of the total work of art as a symbolic answer to the threat of decadence--the specter that haunts all nationalisms. His Ludwig (1973) focuses on two dedicated Romantic anti-Laocoonists, who are obsessed with the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk: the eponymous Bavarian king and Richard Wagner. Visconti makes sure to dwell on Wagner's plans for the Bayreuth opera house with its phantasmagoric stage effects and its sunken orchestra, which media-theorists have habitually called proto-cinematic. Whereas Wagner tries to create a total work of art in this way, the king of Bavaria builds fairytale castles with all kinds of unreal touches, such as starlit skies for a bedroom. In a memorable scene Visconti used the Venusgrotte: an artificial cave with mysterious lighting and an electrically propelled swan boat. Ludwig's Gesamtkunstwerke were 'total works of art' only in the sense of uniting different media; they were by no means aiming at 'the people', at a community. However, his castles are now top tourist attractions, and the Venusgrotte seems like a study for a Disneyland ride. With his juxtaposition of Wagner and Ludwig, Visconti uses the Gesamtkunstwerk to examine the total work of art's history, including its dark and grotesque sides. In this self-critical turn the claim to totality is effectively abandoned, as the Gesamtkunstwerk's auto-critique destroys its foundations.

THE COMMERCIAL GESAMTKUNWERK

Visconti's historical reflections notwithstanding, Hollywood has long recognized that the Gesamtkunstwerk to which film is a heir is not so much the artistic Gesamtkuntwerk dreamt by the romantics, but what has been called the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk of 19th century arcades, world fairs and department stores. [16] The Crystal Palace, rather than Bayreuth, is the model--although it has been argued that Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk in Bayreuth with its phantasmagoric stage effects was thoroughly implicated in the commodity fetishism of the bourgeois era. The commercial Gesamtkunstwerk is after all spectacle: capital turned image. The staging of commodities in the late 19th century departments stores was thus not totally unrelated to the artistic version of the Gesamtkunstwerk--and today, it is clearer than ever that the commercial version was the stronger sibling, and the basis of much of our culture. This culture seeks neither medium-specific purity nor an organic totality but rather a myriad of combinations of different stimuli, cinema and other media are by now mere fragmentary intimations of the true contemporary commercial Gesamtkunstwerk, constituted by multimedia conglomerates such as AOL Time Warner, Disney and News Corporation. We live in an era of the pragmatic and effective bricolage of objects and all sorts of media. The dream of organic unity has given way to a montage of bits and pieces that is no longer nostalgic Mr the medieval cathedral, but rather modeled on the displays of the department store. It exchanges the Romantic ideal of organic wholeness for the spectacle of commodities, which tries to give the illusion of being a real and complete world in itself, more real than human society. This commercial Gesamtkunstwerk has now culminated in our digitized 'postmedia' culture. However, statements like Lev Manovich's claim that the categories of post-media aesthetics 'should not be tied to any particular storage or communication media' overlook the degree to which the use of media remains shaped by cultural expectations, and to that degree specific rather than generic. [17]

Manovich admits that his approach has its blind spots; 'while it can be productive to begin approaching history of culture as the history of information interfaces, information behaviors, and software, such a perspective can make us less attentive to other aspects of culture'. [18] One such aspect, I would argue, is the role played by memory in guiding the use of media. Media are not just tools or machines, but layerings of conventions, and memories of media haunt us, perhaps more than even in the 'post-media'age. They have all the persistence and tricks of phantoms. Many of the remediations in our culture, both in mass culture and art, involve rather facile historical reminiscences; such overt remediations often serve to anchor the mythic power of signs, but some artists attempt to demystify this phenomenon by constantly foregrounding its mechanisms. In a mainstream film such as Gladiator, 'painterly' elements (in this case from 19th century academic paintings of imperial Rome) are used in such a way that they do not disturb the film's pace and action; by contrast, jean-Luc Godard effects a critique the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk by showing the seams and transitions making the intermedia quotations a bit too blunt for easy consumption. Already in Pierrot le fou (1965) but also in later films from Passion (1982) to Eloge de l'amour (2001) and of course the Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard has focused on painting as a Vorbild for cinema. Quite different from Visconti, Godard progresses with a bluntness that destroys the experience of a film as something organic: the extravagant tableaux vivants in Passion are prime examples of this. Godard also has the habit of making characters read aloud from books, with the same effect. Godard examines the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk exploited by others; in this sense he has the same relationship to the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk as Visconti to the artistic one.

The term 'commercial Gesamtkunstwerk' was used by Archer in the context of a discussion of installation art, which he describes as a convergence of the artistic and the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk. Installation art certainly shares a practice of impure 'remediation' with today's media culture, which we have described as the apotheosis of the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk; various objects and media can be combined at will in installation art, and the result often resembles a showroom. The term arose when, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Artforum and other art magazines increasingly published 'installation shots' and discussed the installation of artworks. [19] At first the term installation was still a conventional name for a picture of the 'installation' or arrangement of artworks in an exhibition space, but a lot of 1960s works, especially minimalist ones (a piece with TL lights by Dan Flavin for example), could not be severed from their surroundings and so had to be discussed and depicted as installations. Hence the term became more and more frequent, and acquired came to signify a new art practice. [20] Art increasingly became theatrical and spectacular; although early installation art was often critical of art's commodity status. What is specific about installation art in the context of today's remediating commercial Gesamtkunstwerk is the container, that is, the medium of the gallery space. With art magazines, catalogs and artist's book, the white cube is one of the main publicity media of the art world. In the 1960s, the traditional distinction between the artistic medium (a painting or sculpture) and the publicity medium in which it is presented (the white cube) eroded, as artists began to use the white cube as an artistic medium, in which almost any medium and type of object could be used. In this, the gallery space seems to be a double of the multimedia commercial Gesamtkunstwerk. They are both postmedia bricolages. But while it is true that the art world has been increasingly integrated into the entertainment industry, with museums programming blockbusters and creating 'experiences', the publicity media of art still function in a different way from the mass media. The art world is related to the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk as a second-degree system or a meta-medium. It not only incorporates other media, like the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk, but it incorporates this commercial Gesamtkunstwerk itself.

SECOND-DEGREE EAGLES

Marcel Broodthaers' legendary installation Der Adler vom Oligozan bis heute (the Section des figures of his Musee d'art moderne, 1972) focused on the eagle as a mythical sign. The form in which this investigation took place was that of the installation, which in this case up to a point mimicked a conventional themed show of artefacts from different eras. Even the title clearly signals that the eagle is examined as a myth by claiming to present eagles from a prehistorical epoch to the present--a claim which was not in itself incorrect, but which like all claims of that kind functions to naturalize present society by placing it at the apex of the history of civilisation. Broodthaers wanted to 'tear some feathers from the mythical eagle', which comes with the suggestion of 'Divine spirit. Spirit of conquest. Imperialism,' even though the actual animal is according to Konrad Lorenz rather dumb and cowardly. [21] Broodthaers states that this mythic power of the eagle, which one might have presumed to have waned in the modern age, comes to fore again in the media, in advertising: 'The language of publicity aims at the subconscious of the viewer-consumer, and thus the magical eagle regains its full power.' [22] By combining eagles from different eras and in different media (sculptures, paintings, printed matter, product wrappings), he intended to 'sabotage the use value of the eagle as a symbol, and reduce it to its zero degree in order to introduce a critical dimension into the history and use of this symbol.' [23] Der Adler combined works in various media, including reproductions; the catalog also reproduced many works from the show, including material that was already mass-reproduced, and in the Section publicite that was shown at the 1972 Documenta, a lot of the material was again present in photographs and slide projections. By showing paintings (including one by Gerhard Richter), as well as imperial-looking sculpture and jewelry, Broodthaers also takes into account the ways in which the conventions of media inflect images and increase or decrease their powers.

The Broodthaers of the Musee d'art moderne is not interested in self-differing mediums but in developing a critical media mythology, focusing on the eagle as a mytheme that shows up in various eras and different media. He does this in a context that specializes in importing various media; the art context of the white cube. Art media are as it were the uncanny doppelganger of mass media. Contemporary art is dependent on publicity for its value and functioning, but this publicity is of a different nature than the mass media's, as can be decued from the puzzlement, suspicion and overt hostility with which the mass media often regard the art world. [24] The art media repeat the mass media, but yet they are distinct presences, unwilling to become assimilated. Installation art is not so much a fusion of the artistic and commercial Gesamtkunstwerk as it is a second-degree version of and reflection on the latter. One of the main artistic procedures in an age when the white cube is the most important artistic medium is import: objects are imported into the white cube, both in actual fact and though photography and video; these and other media are also imported. As in the digitized commercial Gesamtkunstwerk, everything comes together and is combined through montage or bricolage. But the function is different. The aim is not easy communication and redundancy, but an investigation of the uses and meanings of objects and images that goes against the grain of the media industry. In order to achieve this, the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk and its way of combining media and stimuli is imported into the art word's publicity media--the white cube and its relative, the black box, as well as magazines and other publications. This second-degree commercial Gesamtkunstwerk is a new artistic Gesamtkunstwerk, which is able to analyse the first-degree commercial Gesamtkunstwerk. It is hardly a coincidence that Godard's position has been marginalized in cinema, and that he has an avid following in the art world; he operates within cinema as if he were operating in a second-degree medium such as those provided by the art world.

There has of course been a pronounced tendency in recent years to assimilate the art world into the culture industry, to make it part of the primary system. In a sense, it is part of that system, but it is the part where it becomes self-critical, where its products are dissected and altered. I do not dispute that the art world's commodity-based workings often result in conservative tendencies, but this somewhat strange economy of the unique or limited objects which are publicized though exhibitions and art publications has its possibilities. Although parts of the art world are rather hostile to discourse, art theory and criticism are an integral part oft his system, and the important impulses they receive from media theory and visual studies do not diminish the fact that they are needed as specific--perhaps perverse --practices in the age of media. There are obviously those who want to eradicate the specificity of the art world--this difference, this aberration within the system. Various forces want to make it a well-oiled, unproblematic part of the commercial Gesamtkunstwerk, rather than a subsystem which functions as a second-degree system. That this exception still maintains itself to a significant degree has to do with memory--the memory that culture can be something other than DreamWorks. This is a memory that is not, or should not be, a nostalgic one, but a way of looking towards the future.

NOTES:

[1] Lev Manovich, 'Post-Media Aesthetics', www.manovi....

[2] Rosalind E. Krauss, 'Reinventing the Medium', in: Critical Inquiry 25 (winter 1999), p. 305.

[3] Rosalind Krauss, 'A Voyage on the North Sea". Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London, Thames & Hudson, 2000, pp. 55-56. Krauss complicates, and confuses, things by advocating a very free use of the word medium, in which, for instance, fiction can be Broodthaers' medium (p. 46).

[4] Krauss, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 297-298.

[5] Bruce Sterling, 'Dead Media Project, Working Notes arranged by Category', www.deadme...

[6] The 1933 Oxford English Dictionary states that oil painting, watercolor etc can also be called media, on the basis of their respective liquid media, but this seems to be a comparatively late development. See the Oxford English dictionary, Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1933, vol. VI, L-M, p 229. I believe that a thorough examination of the history of 'medium / media' and its various meanings and usages has yet to be undertaken. The crucial era for such a history would no doubt be the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the wider usage of 'medium / media' referring to any means by which something is achieved or transmitted (a book, but also, for instance, a hammer or a person) was complemented, but not supplanted, by a more specific meaning referring to newspapers, magazines, photography, film, and later radio caused these means of communication to be called 'media'. This was then imported into artistic discourse as well, complementing and eventually all but supplanting 'the arts'. This, anyway, is my provisional theory. Further historical research is needed.

[7] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge MA / London, MIT Press, 1999

[8] Stefan Jones, 'Thoughts toward a Taxonomy of Dead media', www.deadme...

[9] Quoted as motto in: Georges Didi-Huberman, L'Image survivante. Histoire de l'art et temps des fantomes selon Aby Warburg, Paris, Minuit. 2002, p 7.

[10] Clement Greenberg, 'Towards a Newer Laocoon' (1940), in: The Collected Essays and Criticism I: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, Chicago / London, University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 23-38. Krauss follows Greenberg in using 'mediums' as the plural of 'medium' when the term refers to an artistic (use of a) medium, rather than to commercial or mass media. I always use 'media' as the plural of 'medium'.

[11] Clement Greenberg 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' (1939), in: ibid., pp 5-22.

[12] Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon oder uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766) in: Werke. vol. 2, Leipzig, VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1956, pp. 138-254, Lessing, of course, did not yet mention 'media', only 'arts'.

[13] Rudolf Arnheim, 'A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film' (1938, originally in Italian), in Film as Art, Berkeley / Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1957, pp. 199-230.

[14] See exhib. Cat. Der Hang zum Gesamtkuntwerk (exhib cat.). Kunsthaus Zurich / Stadtische Kunsthalle und Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf / Museum Moderner Kunst, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Wien, 1983.

[15] See Paul Coates, The Story of the Lost Reflection, London, Verso, 1985, pp. 15-27.

[16] Michael Archer, 'Towards Installation' in: Nicolas de Oliviera, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petty (eds.), in: Installation Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1994, p. 15.

[17] Manovich, 'Post-Media Aesthetics'.

[18] Ibid.

[19] To trace this development, see for example: the caption 'Dan Flavin, view of installation' in: Jack Burnham, 'System Esthetics' in: Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968), p. 30; the caption mentioning Michael Asher's 'Pomona Installation' in: Robert Morris, 'The Art of Existence. Three Extra-Visual Artists' in: Artforum 9, no. 5 (January 1971), p. 28; and a reviewer discussing 'The installation Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay' by Dan Graham in: Barbara Baracks, 'Dan Graham, Sperone Westwater Fischer Gallery' in: Artforum 14, no. 9 (Play 1976), p. 67.

[20] Julie H. Reiss does not stand on very firm ground with her claim that the emergence of the term 'installation' for a form of art was not so much the result of a switch from 'environment' to 'installation art' as it was one from 'exhibition' to 'installation'. 'Installation' had been in use for a long time to refer to the way works of art were hung and placed in galleries or museums. The word 'installation' did not come to replace 'exhibition' in the sixties and seventies; it was precisely because it was a familiar term that it appeared in captions (and slightly later in articles). Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center. The Spaces of Installation Art, Cambridge (Massachusetts) / London, MIT Press, 1999, p. xi.

[21] Marcel Broodthaers. 'Section des figures' (1972), in : Marcel Broodthaers par lui-meme (Anna Hakkens, ed.), Gand / Amsterdam, Ludion / Flammarion, 1998, pp. 89-91.

[22] Ibid., p. 91.

[23] Marcel Broodthaers, 'Le degre zero (1973), in : ibid., p. 95.

[24] Boris Groys has made this point in various publications.

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