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    Krauss Rosalind Textos varios

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    227 views33 pages

    Krauss Rosalind

    Uploaded by

    Hector Mario Acosta Mazzolini
    Krauss Rosalind Textos varios

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 33
    THIS IS THE THIRTY-FIRST OF THE WALTER NEURATH MEMORIAL LECTURES WHICH ARE GIVEN ANNUALLY BACH SPRING ON SUBJECTS REFLECTING THE INTERESTS OF ‘THE FOUNDER OF THAMES & HUDSON THE DIRECTORS OF THAMES & HUDSON WISH TO EXPRESS THEIR GRATITODE 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 w Gut gooo Any copy hit book sue by she pulser asa paperback sso subject coche ‘ont at aba ety way of unde reborn, rend, hired tor “ahr crculsed withthe publi’ ror ons iaany rao binding at ‘iveratherthan tat io which tis public sd wives sila coin ‘nlading hese wonds being posed on subsequent purchase ‘The Wille: Newath Memos Leemres upto 1993, were given a Bikbeck allege, Universiy of London, whose Governors and Mister mos peserousy sponsored hem Ec ery far yu, © 1ye0 Rosalind Krauss ‘Bi published paperback inthe United Seaes of Ameria in 00 by ‘Thames & Hudson Ine. s00Ftth Avent, New York, New York 1110 Library Congress Catalog Card Number g9-08196 TSBNospo-n8207-2 All Rigs Reserved No purof his piston may he veprodvcedotransmined inany formor by any means, econ e mechanical, neluding phoxnenpy, recording oranyeeher information eorage snd eel system, wth poe petmision ia wring fom se puis Pt twee FEB 2 2 2001 Fn PREFACE _Atjinst T thought L could simply draw line ander the sword medi, bury it Tike 0 much critical te waste, and walle away rom isnt a world of lesa iedom. “Medium seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too dogmatically oo discur- sively loaded. Luonderedif Tcould make nseof Stonley Cavell’sautomatism, the erm he Io appropricted tn attack the double problem of addressing il asa (relatively) new medion and of Bringing into focus what seemed to him unexplained abont ‘modernist printings The word “automatism” captured for him the sense i which part of film — the part that depends on the mechanics of a camera — is autamstic; it alo plugged nto the Surrealist use of “outomation” as on unconscious reflex dangerous allusion, but «wef one as we wl ee); and it contined he possible connotatve reference to “autonanry,” i the sense of the resultant work's freedont from its maker. Like the notion of mediue or onte within more traditional contexts for at 2 entonratom would iausve the relationship betwen atedlnical (or material) support andthe conventions with whih « particular geure operates or articulates or works on that support, What “automatism thrusts into the foreground of this traitonldefriton of “medinn,” however is the concept of improvisation of the need fo take chances nthe face of medium now cut fice from the gvaranees ‘ af artistic rain, I's this sense ofthe improvsatory tha welcomes the word's «associations with “psychic automatism’ but the automatic rfleschereis not sa much can unconscious one as itis something like the expressive freedom that improvisation always contained, as the relation between the technical ground of a gente and its _lven conventions opened np aspace for release th way the fugue makesit possible _for example timuprovise complex marriggss between its voces ‘The conventions in question need not be as strict as those of « fugu or a sonnet; they might be exceedingly Ioose or schematic. But without them there would be no possiility of judging the successor failure of such improvisation. Expressiveness would have 1 goal, soto speak:* The attraction of Cavell’ example for me was its insistence on the internal plurality of any given udivn, of the impossibility of thinking of an acthetcmedin senathing mare then an nore physielcupport That eck «a cftion of the medi as mere physical objec, nalts relucticenes and dive toward efcation, hd become cormon currency in the ort world, and thatthe name Clement Greenberg had been attached to this definition so that, from the “60s on, ‘nutter the word “medium” meant invoking“ Greenberg,” was the problem Laced Indeed, 50 peroasive wns this drive to "Creenbergize” the word that historically previous approaches tots definition were naw stripped of their own complexity Mowrice Denis’s famous 18y0 dictum about the pictorial media — “It is well fo rementber that pcaure — before being a battle horse, a made woman, oF some aiccdote — is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain onder” ~ 0s now being read, for example, as merely presaing an essentialist reduction of painting “fotuess.” That isis nox Dens pent, tht eis nstead scribing the layered, complex relationship that we could call a recursive structure — a structure, that is, some of the elements of which will produce 6 the rales that generate the structare itself — was (and is) just... ignored. Further, that this recursive structures sontething made, rather than something give, is what islatent inthe taditonal connection of “din to matter of tehnign, as when teats were divided up within the Academy int atl representing the diferent ‘mediums — painting, sculpture, arciteceure—in order tobe taught ‘Ths if Thave decided in the end to retin the word “div, "itis because for all the misunderstandings and abuses attached i, this is he term that opens onto the dcursivefld that Font to addres. This is tre at the historic level in that theft of tis concept sees to belong chronolagiall othe rsof acti post modernism (institutional critique, site specificity) tha i its turn has produced its ‘own problematic aftermath (the international phenomenon of installation art). Te seemed, that in thet only “niedivm™ would face onto this twen of events, And at a lesical level, iti the word “medion” ad not something Ue “autamatis,” that brings the isue of “specifiy” in ts wake — os in the designation “medion: specificity.” Although this is another, unfortunately loaded concept — abusively recast form of ebectcation or ication, since a medinm is purportedly made spec by bring redeced to nothing but is manifest physical properties — itis (iv its noneabasiely defined Jom). noncteless intrinsic 0. any. dicossion af how the convents ler jnto a medic might function, For the nature of arccrsive secu thas it mus be able at est in par to spy tel Stuck, therefore, with the word “smedisn,” T must trast i equally on my reader in the reflections that follow. I hope, however, that ths note inthe form of 4 preface will have gained me some distance between the word itelf with its long istry outside the recent battles over “Jormalism,” and the assumptions about the ler’s corruption and collapse that those batles generate. With the exnny clairvoyance of the materialist, Broodthaers antieipared, sseitly asthe mid-1960s,thecompleretansfarmation of artistic production into a braneh of the culture indoscy, a phenomenor winich we anly now recognize Benjamin Buchlobs 1 A cover, devised by Marcel Broodthaers fora 1974 issue of Studio Iter- national, will serve as the ineroduetion to what I have co say here. cis a rebus that spells out riNE Axcts, with the picture of the eaglesupplying the last Ieter of “fine” and that of the ass functioning as the first one of “ant.” If we adopc the commonly held view that the eagle symbolizes nobility, height, imperious reach, and so forth, then its relationship. ta the fineness of the fine arts seems perfecly obvious. And if the assis presumed, through the same kind of intellectual reflex, to present the owliness 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 or subsumed under the synthetic, larger idea of Art —butrather, the stupe- fying particularity of individual techniques, of everything that embeds practice in the redium of its making: “Dumb like a paincer,” they say. But we can also read the rebus as an eclipse of the appropriate leret | of the given word, and so arrive, somewhat suggestively, at FIN ARTS, Broodthaets often used the eagle, and chus onto a particular narrative about the end of art, or ~ reading his rebus more carefully —the end of thearts. | or the end of arty” and this in turn would open onto a specific way that i) and bc (fe Sado eral, cre 974 ‘There was, indeed, a narrative about this end to which Broodthaers was especially sensitive in the late 19608 and early "70s. This was the story of a militantly reductive modernism chat, by narrowing painting | to what was announced as the medium’s essence ~ namely Hatness — feacted by the prism of theory \had so contracted it chat, suddenly, ° | ithad emerged from the other side of the Tens not simply upside down but transformed into its opposite. I the story goes, Frank Stella's black canvases showed what painting would look like once materialized as unrelievedly fat ~their supposed essence understood as nothing more than an inertly physical feature —they announced to Donald Judd that painting had now become an object just like any other three-dimen sional thing. Further, he reasoned, with nothing any longer differen- tiating painting from sculpture, the distinceness of either as separate mediums was over. The name that Judd gave tothe hybrids that would form out of this collapse was “Specific Objects.” Ie-was Joseph Kosuth who quickly saw thatthe corrsce term for this paradoxical outcome of the modernist reduction was not specfc but general.’ For if modernism was probing painting for its essence ~ for what made it speciicas a medium — that logic raken to its extreme had ‘turned painting inside out and had emptied it into the generic category of Art: arvavlarge, or arvingencral. And now, Kosuth maintained, the ontological labor of the modernist atise was to define the essence of Art 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 painting is specific.” Te-was Kosuth’s farther contention that the definitions of art, which works would now make, might merely take the form of statements and thus rarefy the physical object into the conceptual condition of language. Bast these statements, though he saw them resonating with the logical fivality of an analytical proposition, would nonetheless be art and not, say, philosophy. Their linguistic form would merely signal the transcen dence of the particular, sensuous content of a given art, like painting or photography, and the subsumption of each by that higher aesthetic unity Attitsef —of which any one is only a partial embodiment ‘Gonceptual art's farther claim was that by purifjing art of its mace Hal dross, and by producing it as a mode of theory-aboutary, its own 5, Joep Kost eas Meso He 4 Joseph Kemah, Seth eesti (Artes rt He, 10 practicehad escaped the commodity ormin which paintings and sculp- \tores inevitably pattcipated as they were forced to compete ina market or artthac increasingly looked just like any other. In this declaration was folded yet another paradox of recent modernist history. The specific mediums ~ painting, sculprore, drawing — had vested their claims to purity in being autonomous, which is to say that in their declaration of being about nothing bur their own essence, they were necessarily disengaged from everything outside cher frames. The paradox was that this autonomy had proved chimerical, and that abstract art’ very modes of production — its paintings being executed in serial uns, for example seemed co carry the imprint of the industially produced commodity object, internalizing within the feld of the work its own status as inter’ changeable and thus as pure exchange value. By abandoning this pretense to artistic autonomy, and by willingly assuming various forms and sites—the masc-dstributed printed book, for example, or the publie billboard ~ Concepeual art saw itself securing a higher purity for Axe, so that in flowing ehrough the channels of commodity distribution it would not only adopt any form it needed but would, by a kind of homeopathic defense, escape che effets of the market itself sant te See Si vw OEPARTENEAT, ‘065 AIGLES 5 (op) MacelBeooutaes, Aen f den At, Ealee Dara (Deiter Wert>~Covet) 1968. 6,7 (alone) Marcel Brower, Masons Mon At xls Dp 8h-Comary Seo, 1988-9 Although by 1972 Broodthaers had ended his four-year enterprise called the “Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Departinent” —a sequence of works by which, in producing the activites of the Museum's ewelve sections, he operated what he once referred to asa fictitious museum itisclear hat oncof the targer of thar project catries aver onto the Studia International cover. Having, cxplained, a few years before, that for him there was what he called an “identity of the eagle as idea and of art as {dea,” Broodthacrs's cagle functioned more often than not as an emblem. for Conceptual art And in this cover chen, dhe wiumph of the eagle announees nor the end of Art butthe termination of the individual arts as medium-specifc; and it does so by enacting the form that this loss of specificity will now rake. On the one hand, the eagle itself wll be folded into the hybrid oF intermedia condition of the tebus, in which not only language and image but high and low and any other oppositional pairing one can think of wall fiely mix. But on the other hand, this particular combina- tion is not entcely random. It is specific tothe site on which it oceurs, which ere is the eover of that organ of the market, an art magazine, where theimageof the eagle does noc eseapethe operations of the market a 1 Marea Boosters tia Matra, ales grt, cey S69. AVIS 9. Masel Brothas et ever Iarfnkoney,Fll 07a. served by the press. Accordingly it becomes a form of advertising or promotion, now promoting Conceptual art, Broodthaers made this ‘lear in the announcement he drew up as his cover design for the maga zine Tnterfnksone, at abou the same time: “ View,” it reads, “according to which an artistic theory will function 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 co which, etc. ... [signed] Broodthaers.”° The redou- bling of artas theory, then, delivers art (and most particularly the art for sich cis thetheory) to exactly those sites whose function is promotion, and does so without what might be called a critical remainder. And it does so without a formal remainder, as well. In the intet- india loss of specificity to which che eagle submits the individual art, the bird's privileges itself scattered into a multiplicity of sites — each of them now ermed “specific” — in whch the installations that are con- structed will comment, often critically, on the operating conditions of the site itself: To this end, they will have secourse to every material support one can imagine, from pictures to words to video to readymade objects to films. But every material support, including the site self — whether art magazine, dealers fair booth, or museum gallery —will now beleveled, reduced roa system of pure equivalency by dhe homogenizing principle of commodification, the operation of pure exchange value from which nothing can escape and for which everything is transparent tothe underlying market value for which itis sign. This reduction was given manic form by Broodthaersas he affixed “gure” labels to random sets of objects, effecting tir equivalence through the tags thar assign them as cither “Fig, 1,” “Fig. 2," “Fig. 0,” or “Fig. 12.” In the Film Stetion of his museum, noc only did he stick these labels onto mundane objecsssuch as mirrors, pipes, and clacks, but the movie seeen itself was riddled with fguee numbers as wel, so that everything in the lm pro- jeted onto it —from Chaplin’ image to the Palais Royale in Brussels — now entered this compendium of Broodthaers’s “Fig,"s. 15 Inthe Section des Figures ( The Eagle fram the Oligocene to the Present), mounted by his fictional museum, Broodthaers famously submitted ‘more than three hundred different eagles o this principle of leveling. In this way, che eagle itself, no longer afgure of nobility, becomes a sign of the figure, the mark ~ that is ~ of pure exchange, Yet in this there isa farther paradox that Broodthaers himself did not live to see. For the cagle principle, which simultaneously implodes the idea of an aesthetic ‘medium and tars everything equally into a readymade that collapses the difference between the aesthetic and the commodified, has allowed the eagle to soar above the rubble and to achieve hegemony once again.!! ‘Twenty-five years late, all overthe world, in every biennial and at every at fait, the eagle principle functions as the new Academy. Whether it calls itself installation azt or institutional critique, the international spread of the mixed-media installation has become ubiquitous. Tiie umphantly declaring that we now inhabit a poscmedium age, the post medium condition of this form traces its lineage, of course, not so much to Joseph Kosuth as to Mareel Broodthaers. 17 Us Nace Beoodkaers Mart of Moles Art Eels Dwr, Swi er Fes (Th Ele he Die the Present inion atthe Seance otha, Died 18 (ahs) Mare Brose er Mao Eng Dagar (Vie lei he Olive roie Pasa), 172, ri Ar, ss Fques os The Elf te lig 2 At about the same time when Broodthaers was producing this medita- tion on the eagle principle, another development, with undoubtedly wider reach, had entered the world of art ¢o shatter the notion of medium-specificity in its own way. This was the portapak —a light- weight, cheap video camera and monitor —and thus the advent of video into art practice, something that demands yet another navrative, Iti astory har could be told fiom: the point of view of Anthology Film Archives, a screening room in New York’s Soho, where in the late 60s and early "70s a collection of artists, film-makers, and composers sathered night after night to view the repertory of modernist flm put together by Jonas Mekas and projected in an unvarying eycle, a corpus that consisted of Soviet and French avantgarde cinema, the British silent documentary, eatly versions of American Independent film, as, well as Chaplin and Keaton movies.*? The artists who satin the dark ness of that theater, the wingchaivlike seats of which were designed to cut off any peripheral vision so that every drop of attention would be focused on the screen ieself, artists such as Richard Serra, Robert ‘Smithson, or Carl Andre, could be said to be united around their deep hostility co Clement Greenberg's rigid version of modernism with its doctrine of Ratess. Yer if they were gathered in Anthology Film A.tchives in che frst place it mean that they were commited modernists nonetheless, For Anthology both fed into and. promoted the current work of structuralist film-makers such as Michael Snow or Hollis Erampton or Paul Sharits, its screenings providing the discursive ground within which this group of young actsts could imagine their ‘way into a kind of film that, focused on the nature of the cinematic ‘medium itself, would be modernist to its core. Now, therich satisfactions of thinking about films specificiey at chat juncture detived fiom the medium’s aggregate condition, one that led a slightly later generation of theorists co define its support with the com 24 . @ ay Michal Soon Welt, 1967 sound idea of the “apparatus” —the meditim or support for film being ‘eitherthe celluloid strip of the images, nor the camera that filmed them, nor the projector that brings them o life in motion, nor he beam of light thae relays them to the screen, nor that screen itself, bur all of these taken together, including the audience’ position caught between the source of thelight behind ie and the image projected before is eyes.* Strneturalist film set itself the project of producing the unity of this diversified support in a single, sustained experience in which the ucterinterdepen dence ofall hese things would itself be revealed as a model of how the viewer is intentionally connected to his or het world. The pars of the apparatus would be like things that cannot touch on each other without themselves being toucheds and this interdependence would igure 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, a 45-minute, single, almost uninterrupted zoom, captures the intensity of this research into how to forge che union of such a trajectory into something both immediate and obvious. In its striving to articulate what Mesleau-Ponty had termed the preobjective, and thus abstract, nature of this connection, such a link could be called “phenomenological vector.” For Richard Serra, one of Anthology’s denizens, a work like Wave loygth would have performed 2 double function. On the one hand, 25 Snow’ film enacts itself as pure horizontal cheose, sul hat its inex rable forward movementis able to ereate the abstract spatial metaphor forfilm’s relation totime, now essentiaized as the dramatic mode of sus pense.*s Serta’s own drive to make sculpture a condition of something like a phenomenological veetor, itself the experience of horizontality, ‘would thus have found aesthetic confirmation in PVaveleneth."® But mote shan this, in structuralis film itself Serra would have found suppose fora newly conceived idea of an aesthetic medium, one that, like film's, could not be understood as reductive bur again, like film’s, was thor- oughly modernist. Serta’s reformolated idea of what an aesthetic medivm might be participaced in his generation’s newly won understanding of Jackson Pollock and a notion that if Pollock had progressed beyond the easel picture, as Clement Greenberg had claimed, ir was not to make bigget and flatter paintings.*? Rather, it was to rocate his work out of the dimension of the pictorial abject ahogether and, by placing his canvases on the foot, to transform the whole project of art from making objects, in their increasingly reifed form, to articulating the vectors that connect objects co subjects. Tn understanding this vector as dhe horizontal Seld of an event, Serr’s problem was try to find in the inner logic of events themselves the expressive possibilities or conventions that would articu- late this field as a medium. For, in order to sustain artistic practice, a medium must bea supporting structure, generative ofa secof conver tions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as dheit subject, will be wholly “specific” to it, hus producing an experience of their own necessity. For the purposes of the argument here it is nor necessary to know exactly how Serra went about this. Suffice i to say thas Serra drew these conventions from the logic of the event of the work's making, wher char event is understood as a form of series, not in the sense of stamping out identical cass as in industrial production, but in that of the differential condition of periodic or wavelike fax in which separate 26 1 Ridued Sera, Cs, 1960-91. sets of sexi repetitions converge on agiven point. The importanc thing fs that Serra experienced and articulated the medium ia which he saw himself to be working as aggregative and thus distinc from the material properties of a merely physical objectlike support; and, nonetheless, be viewed himself as modernist. The example of indezendent, struc turalst flm — itself a matter of a composite support, yet nonetheless modernist — confirmed him in this, -Atthis juncture itis importang, however, to makes litle detous into the history of official, reductivist modesnism iself, and to correct the ‘ecord as it had been written by Judd’ logic of specific objects. For like Serra’s, Greenberg's view of Pollock had also led him eventually to jet- tison che materialist, purely reductive notion of the medium, Once hie saw the modernist logic leading to the point where, as he put it, 27 Ane observance of merely the two [constitutive conventions or nonin of painting fatness andthe delimitation of flatness —|senough to create Gnbject which can be experienced as a piceure,” he dissolved that abject inthe Buid of what he frst called “optcality” and dhen named color field."! Which is to say that no sooner had Greenberg seemed to isolate che essence of painting in Ramness than he swung the axis of the feld ninety degteesto cho actual picture surface to place all the impoxt of painting on the vector that connects viewer and object. In this he seemed to shift from the first norm — flatness —to the second — the delimitation of flanness ~ and to give this lamer a reading that was not that of the hounding edge of the physical objecc but rather the projective resonance of the optical field itself ~ whar in “Modernist Painting” he had called the"‘optical third dimension” created by “the very st mask on a canvas [which] destoys its literal and urer laness.”** This was the resonance be dmpnred to the effelgence 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.”"* “Opticality” 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 seends the real parameters of measurable, physical space to express the purely projective pawers of a preobjective level of sight: “vision ieseté"=+ The most serious issue for painting now was to understand not irs objective features, such as the Ratness of the material surface, bur its specific mode of addvess, and to make this the source of a set of new conventions — ot 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 ctitics like Leo itis tad Rita ttalka deca taendot Secinberg to speak of their sense of speed: what he called che visual inthe An Emmasch Gallery efficiency of the man in a hurry. Another derived from the setiality — both internal tothe works and to their production —to which the color hot field painters uniformly resorted. 25 (i) Kenneth Nolan Thus it could be argued that in the "60s, “opticality” was also serving as more than just a feature of art; it had become a medium of art Assuch it was also aggregatve, an affront to what was officially under stood as the reductivist logic of modernism — a logic and doctrine attibuted to this day to Greenberg himself: Neither Greenberg not Fried theorized colorfeld painting as a new medium, however; they spoke of it only as a new possibility for abstract painting.** Nor was ‘process art — the term under which Serra’ 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 scen as internally differentiated — on the order of the filmic model — 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 setve as an ontological metaphor, a figure ~ like the 4s-mi Zoom ~ for the essence of the whole. In r972,structuralist film's self description, as Thave said, was modernist. Inco this situation there entered the partapak, and it televisual effect was to shatter the modernist dream. In the beginning, as artists began tomake video works, they used video asa technologically updated con Sinuation 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.* To my knowledge only Seera himself immediately acr Knowledged that video was in face television, which means a broadcast ‘medium, one that splinters spatial continuity into remote sites of trans mission and reception, His Television Delivers People (1973) ~ a message displayed in a continuous crawl ~ and Prisoner's Dilemma (1974) were versions ofthis, Ieis this spatial separation, coupled with the temporal simuleancity of instantaneous broadcast, that has led cestain theorists to try to locate the essence of television in its use as closed-circuit surveillance. But 30 You are the product Cs) AZ bE Cm Gy CU a a ey UCC 27 Richard Seng Tele Delis Pole 973 che fact of the matter is that television and video seem Hydsa-headed, existing in endlessly diverse forms, spaces, and temporalices for which no single instance seems to provide a formal unity for the whole."® This is what Sam Weber has called television’s “constitutive heterogeneity,” adding that “what is perhaps most difficultto keep in mind are the ways in which shat we call television also and above ll differs from itself”: If modernist cheory found itself defeared by such heterogencty — which prevented it from conceptualizing video asa medium—modernis secucturalis film was routed by video's instant suecess asa practice. For, even if video had.a distiner technical support —its own apparatus, so to speak —itoccupied a kind of discursive chaos, a heterogenciy of activie ties that could not be theorized as coherent or conceived of as having something like an essence or unifying core. Like the eagle principle, Fa it proclaimed the end of medium-specifcity. In theage of television, soi broadcast, weinhabita post medinm condition. “The third narrative, which 1 will set out with considerably mote disr patch, concerns the resonance between the post-medium position and poststuetusalism. For during this same late-“oosfcatly-'70s moment, deconstruction began famously attacking what it devisively referred toas 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 buile demonstration after demonstration to show that the idea of an intetior set apatt from, or uncontaminated by, an exterior was a chimera, a metaphysical fection. Whether it be the interior of the work of art as opposed to its context, or the interiority of a lived moment of experience as opposed to its repetition in memory or via writen signs, wha deconstruction was engaged in dismantling was the idea of the proper, both in the sense of the selfridentical — as in “vision is what's proper to the visual arts" ~ and in the sense of the clean or pure as in “abstraction pusifes painting of all those things, like narrative ot sculptural space, that are not proper to it.” ‘That nothing could be constituted as pure interiorty or selfidenkity, tha this purity was always already invaded by an outside, indeed, could itself only be constituted «rough che very introjection of that outside, was the argument mounted oscuttle the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic experience, or the pos- sible purity of an artistic medium, or the presumed separateness of & given intellectual discipline, The selfidentical was revealed as, and thus dissolved into, the selfdifferent, In the university this, along with other poststeueturalist analyses, such as those of Michel Foucault, proved 2 powerful argument for an end to the separation of academic faculties within distinet branches of » knowledge, and thus a powerful support for incerdisciplinariry, And courtside the academy, in dhe arc world —where autonomy and the notion that there was something proper or specific wo a medium were already under attack ~ this gave a glittering theoretical pedigree to practices of rampant impurity — like Fluxus or Situationist détowrnement (subversive appropriation) ~that had long since been underway. In the late 1960s and early "70s, Marcel Broodthaers appeared to be the knight errant of all this, In being a fantastic feat of institutional idtoursoment, his "Museum of Modern Art” also seemed to constitute the ultimate implosion of medium-specificity. And even as it did so, irappeared to be seting forth the theoretical basis of its own project. As we have seen, forexample, the affixing of figure numbers toa miscellany of objects operated as both a parody of curatorial practice and an empty. ing ont of the very meaning of classification. Accordingly, the figures fonctioned as 9 cer of meta/caprions whose operation was theoretical Broodthaers himself commented: “A theory of the figures would serve only to give an image of a theory. Bur the Fig. as a theory of the image?" Yet if Brooddhers can be seen to be moving within the poststruc- turalist circle of theory, we must also remember his deep ambivalence about theory itself, We must recall the statement from tnterfinktionen in which theories are reduced to, ot pethaps revealed as, nothing more than “advertising for the order under which [they are] produced.” ‘According to this condemnation, any theory, even if it is issued as a critique of thecultare industry, will end up only as a form of promotion | for that very industry. In this way, the ultimate master of déturement turns out to be capitalism itself, which can appropriate and reprogram anything to serve its own ends. Thus, if Broodthaers did not live to see the absolute confirmation of his entirely pessimistic “View,” he had nonetheless predicted both the eventual complicity between theory and the culture industry and the ultimate absorption of “institutional exi- tique” by exactly the institntions of global marketing on which such “critique” depends for its success and its support a ce # ‘Thisleads us, however, toanother story. For if capitalism isthe master of <étonrernent, absorbing every avanv-garde protest in its path and tuening ico its own account, Broodthaers — by some ultimace turn of the serew was ina strange kind of mimetic relationship o this. To puc ic simply, there sa way in which he conducted a form of détournement on 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-Cemtury Gallery: Eagles Department”) were installed, namely the sections of promotion 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 dat wine Luda dhe auss's explanations of bis work ated die unfolding of the work itself Benjamin Buebloh has written, for example: “If any- thing, ic 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." Ac one point Buchloh sees this as a species of Hlagie, a willfl, tonguevinecheek form of double negation in which a peuified language acts to mimic the present-day reification of speech itself at the hands of the consciousness industry. called “My Rhetoric,” in which dhe artist writes: “L,I say I; I, Psay 11, 9 this effect, he quotes a Broodthacrs text the Mussels King. You say you, T taurologize. I ‘ean it.’ T sociologize I manifestly manifest ....” and so on.% Donglas Crimp has also fastened on this farnre of contradiction, which Broodthaers sometimes called his own “bad faith,” as when be explained his decision in the early 1960s to stop being a poet and start beingan artis. The reason, he wrote, was that since he hadn't the money to collect the art objects he loved, he decided to create them instezd: to become creator, then, by defaalt of not being able to bea collector7 4 2 Marcel Browder, Mun of Mor det Dap, Sci 5 “tusbe ent moderne” PUBLICITE In a certain sense, the whole of the museum fictions, in which Broodthaets is installed as dizeetor, enact the collecting function. But Broodthaers also distinguishes this public form of collection fiom a per sonal one in a work called Ma Collection, a work given a special aura of privacy and inwardness by the presence, within its assembly of images, of the picture of Stéphane Mallarmé. Focusing on this distinction between public and privat or instcurional and personal, Crimp sa a addresses Broodthaers’s odd privileging of the personal collector tbtough the lens of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of such a nineteenth century collector as a postive countertype nat nly ta the bourgeois consumer but also othe contemporary privat collector who now oper’ ates on the pattern of commodity consumption. Against the consumer ‘who is driven to amass objects cither to display them as capital or to use them up, the crue collector, Benjamin says, liberates “things from the bondage of utility.” What is decisive in che act of collecting, he goes on, js “thac the objec be dissociated fiom al its original functions in order ea enter into the closest possible relationship with its equi the diametric opposite of uss, and stands under the curious eategory of completeness.” ents. This is a Uneostede Mated Broonaes 4 propor de Me Collen EB Thistox wa writen bythe Me Callin est une pte comport de dase vole dont rttoacrompany Mi Cllein _chaqueFcees explo. Danske premicvaleecomportice (see fortran). es decumens expositions auxqods 's pu pareiperes: inet unpaged atl del fie de Cologne rt repro: es phors des meres dacumens. Leseeond valet de Mi Cai et om an pore pe eropen SupbaneMallarnen que wile onda det comempersin."Uneoup de dis jas nlabolalehaserd” Mi Clletineestuneptcesd lesyrinecauclogique et i ul pours ees expr, (learnt one pls desea qu'une collosion dmb postes), Lecstaloge de — la peso expo eau mane dl pour coatioee tne pte cart inne rnoignaederexpoiose augue 35 (a) Mare Brose, fe Collation 1977 Font vis, 38 aired dois 97 | 1 (olow) Mare Brother, Me Callin, 1970 ack ews Here, the equivalency principle that levels objects to the measure of their exchange value, and which Broodthaers seems to attack in the application of “Eig.” numbers within the Fin Section of his museum, is vvalorized in the situation of the personal collection. This Broodthaers, alo seems to acknowledge, in that the “Fig,” numbers captioning the images in Ma Collection could be seen as working to form the new relar tionships forged by the “true” collector.” These relationships, which ie lierokehl pees sdsiee Benjamin calls a “magie circle,” allow cach object to exfoliate into so tun pus un Pey-Eny pon de Ardsttons many sites of memory. “Collecting,” he says, “is a form of practical ‘memory and, among the profane manifestations of ‘proximity the most convincing one."*° esos ot em acsegan gaa tn seenenbnten Ot Act sripeif jal fe’ Aeeepnrarcay casas ata ae oatg | ‘This structure in which two opposing forms of equivalence can converge in the object—that of exchange an that of “ proximity” —is a Se ae dialectical condition in which everything within capitalism — every uslivh artistique corteine? D'nitne ood object, every technological process, every social type ~ is understood as 2a dete phair oa Geert, te pak invested witha double valence: negative and positive like an objectand soe ee He ent me its shadow, ora petception and its afte-image. This is what links type to Se a countertype or, in the ease ofthe commodity, produces what Benjamin rusts Bee called “the ambivalence between its utopian and its cynical clemens.”** That the cynical clement gains che 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 itis precisely at the moment of the 33 gat ws one Te obsolescence of that technology that it once more releases this dimen- a weosranece sion, like the last gleam of a dying star. For obsolescence, the very law iat of commodity production, both fies the outmoded object fiom the grip 26 wots on wera ates of utility and reveals the hollow promise of that law:* Broodthaers’s deep attraction to the forms of the outmoded has been remarked pen by his vatious critics, His system of references focuses mainly on the nineteenth century, be they to the Ingres and Courbets in the first manifestation of his museum, or to the example of Baudelaire and Mallarmé for his books and exhibitions, or to the panorama and the si Wattasug ca ounzeraat me sated sae anh Hable | 15, Typewtinen teat on Ml Calli by Boodes (pg ar 36 Mure Bodnar, Union ci 2075 winter garden as his models for social spaces. In fact, as Benjamin Buchlob has commented, this “altogether dated aura of nineteenth. century bourgeois culture that many of his works seem to bring co mind might easily seduce the viewer nto dismissing his work as being obviously obsolete and not a all concerned with the presuppositions of contemporary art." But what Crimp is suggesting is that che power that Walter Ben- jamin invested in the outmoded should be acknowledged in Brood. hacts's use of it~as nis assumption of the form of the““true” collector. ‘This was a power that Benjamin hoped his own prospecting in the historical grounds of ninetenth-century forms would be able to release. Whiting of his own Paris Arcades project, he said: “We are here con seucting an alarm clock that awakens the kitsch of the past cencary into ‘e-collecrion.""*4 That Beajamin’s archaeology was retrospective was a function of the face that he believed is view could open up only ftom the site of obsolescence. As he remarked: “Only in extinction is the [trac] collector comprelieuded. "4s 5 The ruc collector, however, was not the only outmoded figure to whom Broodthaers was attracted. Another was that of the flm-malker from the carly moments of cinema when, as with the Lumive Brothers or with D. W. Griffith's and Chaplin's scock-company operations (such as a Biograph or S. and A.), movie production was entirely artisanal. As Broodthaers began to make films in earnest in 1967 and into the early *70s, he cast his own production in precisely this mold. He imitated the gestures of the silent-movie comic actors, particularly Buster Keaton, captuting 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 flickering gait. “That the kind of spontaneous activity represented in this model would be rendered obsolete by the industrialization of cinema at the hands of the big studios in Hollywood and Europe was an issue for just that structwralist film being made in the late 1960s in the context of ‘Anthology Film Archives and shown annually at the Experimental Film Festival at Knokke-le-Zoute, on the Belgian coast, an event that Broodthaers twice attended. The demonstration that it was possible to. defy che system and co make film single-handedly, on practically no a7 Matel Broohaers ala 2960 18 Masel Meoubces, Cine eine ani, 69-73 budget, and from the scraps and discards of old stock, as exemplified at Knokke by the Americans and the Canadians, undoubtedly reinforced Broodthacrs’s carlicr cxpetiments in film. But though many of the Americans saw this deffance of Hollywood asa progressive, avant-garde ‘move, the opportunity for a modernist concentration of the disparate, rss of the Hollywood production into the single, sentceural vector that would reveal the nature of film itself, Broodthaers read i etrogressively A return to the promesse de bonheur enfalded in cinema’s beginnings. In so parting company with structuralise film’s modernism, Broodt haers was not denying film asa medium. He was, rather, understanding is medium in the light of che openness promised by carly film, an jopenness woven into the very mesh of the image, asthe fickering irresor lution of the illusion of movement produced the experience of sight itself as dilated; a phenomenological mixture of presence and absence, immediacy and di ance. If the medium of primitive film resisted struc tural closure in this sense, it allowed Broodthaers to see what the struc’ turalists did noe: that the filmic apparatus presents us with a medium whose specificity is to be found in its condition as self-differing, Te is aggregative,a matter of interlocking supports and layered conventions, ‘The structuralists strove to construct the ultimate syneedoche for film 44 jel — motion both reduced to and sommarized in the ulkimate camera movement (Snow's z00m), ot filmic illusion typified in the flicker film's dissection of the persistence of vision (Paul Sharits’s work) = one which, like any totalizing symbolic form, would be unitary; Broodthaers honored the di relation beewcen simultaneity and sequence, its layering of sound ortext ntial condition of film: its inextricable 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 it inal stages of development, And the televisual por- tapak that killed American Independent Cinema was just this declarae tion of film's obsolescence. 6 If fam pursuing the example of Marcel Broodthaers in the context of the post-mediam condicion, itis because he stands et, and thus stands “for, what I would like to see as the “complex” of this condition. For Broodthaers the presumed spokesman for intermedia and the end of the arts, nonetheless wove for his work an internal lining that has to be called redemptive. [am taking this notion of redemption from Walter Benjamin, whose idea of the countertype — asthe dialectical after image of a social role now refied and corrupted under capitalism ~ seems operate over part of Broodthaers’s activities as collector. And farther, the analysis of photography that Benjamin consizucted ean be seen to slide over Broodthaers's practice of film, Acits this may seem counterintuitive, for like Broodthaets, Bene jamin is famous for a deconsteuetive atinude toward the very idea of a ‘medium. To this end he used photogeaphy not only asa form chat erodes its oun specificity — since it forces the visual image into dependence on a wwtiten caption — but as a tool to attack the idea of specifiy forall the 4s arts. This is because photography’s status as a multiple, 2 function of ‘mechanical reproduction, restructures the condition of the other arts. Asan example, Benjamin explained chat “to an ever greater degece the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for repror ducibility”” And what follows fiom this is that, becoming prey to the lay of commodification, the separate work of art, as well as the separate mediums of a:t, enter the condition of general equivalency, thereby losing the uniqueness of the work — what Benjamin called its “aura” as well asthe specificity of its medium. But far ftom being an undiliced celebration of this state of affairs, Benjamin's contemplation of photogsaphy was also cast in the mald of his retrospective arinude, which is to say his sense that, asa fossil ofits birth, the outmoded stage of a given technological form might betray the redemptive obverse of that technology itself. Inthe ease of photography this other promise was encoded in the amateus, non-professionalized character of its earliest, pre-commercialized practice, as artists and writers such as Julia Margarer Cameron, Victor Hugo, and Octavius Hill:ook pictus oftheir fiends. Italso had to do with the length of the pose exacted by their work, during which there was a possibility of hhumanizing the gaze, which is to say of the subject’s escaping his ar her own objectfieation atthe hands of the machines?” The refuge that Broodthaers took in a practice of primitive cinema betrays this same thought of the redemptive possibilities encoded a the birth of a given technical suppore. And itis this thoughe ehae I would like one to see as acting on all of Broodthaers’s production as, like 2 raking light shining aca strange angle over suxface it brings into relief an entirely new topographical structure. If T do not have space to give anything like a fall demonstration of this here, T would nevertheless suggest that the filmic model is a subse of a Larger contemplation about the nature of the medium conducted through the guise of whac I think functioned as the master medium for Broodthaers, namely fiction ise, as when Broodthaers referred to his museum as “a fiction.” For fiction 46 always seems to have contained a revelatory aspect for him as he said of the difference between official muscums and his own: “a fiction allows ‘asto grasp reality and at the same time what ithides.”** ‘What isat issue in the contextof a medium, however, isnot just this possibility of exploiting the fictional to unmask reaity’s lies, but of proe ducing an analysis of fction itself in relation to a specific structure of experience, And it was just chis structure of a spatial “behind” or layer’ ing cha heattof fetion. ‘That the novel as che technical support through which fiction was conventionalized during the nineteenth century was of patticular inter «esto Broodthaers emerges not justin his statements, like the one he pro- nounced in reference to the “Theory of Figures” exhibition ~ where he sces the objects bearing “Fig.” numbers as “taking on an illustrative character referting to a kind of novel about society.” Ie also takes on physical sliape in relation «0 his own practice of producing work in the form of books. ‘One of these, Charles Baudelaire. Je has le mowvement qui déplece les lignes (1973), isa specifi engagement with the revelatory power of the novel. For in its pecolia dilation of a Baudelaire poem, the book’s nov- clized, sequential form is made not only co expose as self-delusory the romantic belie in poetry asa form of total immediacy —a collapse of the difference between subject and object — but alsoto open that immediacy to ts real temporal destiny, in which the subjeet can never become iden tical with himself, Based on Bandelaite’s early poem “La Beauté,” where subjective immediacy is given voice by a sculpture vaunting the sown self-sufficiency and simultaneous presence isableto symbol” forhim a metaphor forthe condition of absence thatis atthe ie the infinity of a perfec whole ("Je sus belle, 8 morcls| comme un réve de pier”), the book sets its sights on empeying out this very notion of simukaneity. Printing the poem in is entirety on che frst page, which is marked “Fig, 1,” Broodthaers singles out in red the line of verse through whic v7 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE | fi bee be rancremant gu tiles Ca Gres ‘i : 30 hove) Manel Broodéhaers, Chars Be eli Je hats emtomrvntnt qi ple Tignes 1973 Covet : + s ages 2and 34a, rr UN COUP DE DES JAMAIS NABOLIRA LE HASARD 45 (gh) Mate Beers, Uncap edie le aad rg 198, 44 (poi) Mares Brooahers, Un ap | fe joa Pag ge, 196, Mallarmé poem, rendsing eines of ‘esseuninelhigil hry maaass the pages ico ec oF images the sculpture defies any temporal dilation of its perfect form, the one that reads, “T hate the movement that shifis the lines.” Throughout the fol” lowing pages of the book, however, Broodthaers proceeds toward just this shift or displacement, as the verse itself becomes layered into the movement of its own vanishing horizon, with each of its words cot signed tothe bottom of a single page. It could be objected that, with this revision of Baudelaire’s poem, Broodthaers is simply following the example of Mallarmé’s Ur coup de 4s, in whieh the words of the title (“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”) are similarly extended along the bottom of several pages, the textof the poem itself made radically spatial by the irregularity and dis- persal ofits lines on every page, sometimes even running across 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 on the upper part of the pages of Broodthaers’s Baudelaire, acknowledging the way Un caup de dés trans forms the sequential condition of writing into the simultancous realm of seeing in.a move to which Broodthaers frequently referred. “Mallarmé is 50 at the source of moder art,” he would explain. “He unwitingly invented modern space.”** But Broodthzers’s own understanding of Mallarme’s strategy runs counter to what the Bardelaize book performs. Fist, the very condition of Broodthaess’s “Fig.” notation insists on the incomplete, or fragmentary siatus of dhe word, is resiscance to the possibility of the image's ever bing fally (se)present: as his question “But the Fig. asa theory of the image” suggests, che “Fig.” theorizes the image into the self-deferring and displacing status of fection.» Ia this sense, the “Fig.” questions rather than imitates thecalligrammatic starus of Mallarmé’s pages. And second, the way sequentialization works in the Baudelaire opposes its ‘operations in Mallarmé. For in Un coup de ds, the slow unfasling of the tidlealong the bottom of the poem's pages serves more like a continuous pedal poin, or like che harmonie suspensions that serve to wansform the diachronic fiow 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 we are made to experience in the Baxdelair is something else again is reeaforced by being restaged in the film that st Oe Broodthaets conceived in che same yeas, A Viyage on the North Sea, in which onceagain the gestalt of the image is narrativized (see pages 54-5). Casting its cinematic voyage in the form of a “book,” the fl’ uxterly statie shots (cach lasting about ten seconds) alternace incertitls, beginning with “PAGE 1” and running to “vac 15,” with motionless images of boats. These begin with 2 photograph of a distant, solitary yeh, seen four times as one progresses from page one to page four, and then shife roa nincteenth-century painting of a fishing let under sail, which oversuecessive “pages” is shown in various decals, ‘The first of these, in performing the radical leap from the fall marine scene, with is schooners and langhoats, o a giant close-up of the weave of thecanvas, cedes by the next “page” to such a neat view of the double billow of the main sail that it takes on the look of an abstract painting, only in turn, afte the announcement of the following “page,” to yield co another view of canvas weave that parades asa kind of radieal mono chrome. This progression might suggest thae the narsative summoned by the “book” isan art-historical one, telescoping onto three suecestive pages the story of modernismy’s exchange of the deep space necessary to visual narrative for an increasingly Aattened surface that now tele only to its own parameters, the “reality” of che world supplanted by the reality ofthe pictorial givens.* But by the next “page,” the monochrome deta again reeeats to a fll vi Broodthaers serambles 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, whieh, however objectfid it might be, must nonetheless apply paint overits underlying support. Indeed, asthe book’s “pages” unfurl, this voyage appears to be one of a search fr the work's origins, such an “origin” being suspended equally beeen the material ity of the work's canvas Batbed (the modernist “origin”) and the image projected on that opaque surfice as the index of the viewers originating of theschooner, asin successive moves 2 desite to open up any given moment of experience o something beyond itself (reality as “origin”). In both encompassing and cnacting such desire, fiction is, chen, the acknowledgment of this very incompleteness. Ieis de fore thar an unappeasable lack of self-sufficiency takes as i sets off ina search forts own beginnings or its own destiny asa way of imag ining the possibilty of achieving wholeness. Icis the impossible attempt to transform succession into stasis, ora chain of parts intoa whole, The modernist story that yielded che supposed “triumph” of the monochrome believed that it had produced this totalization in an object that was uterly coextensive with its own origins: surface and support in indivisible unity; che medium of painting 30 reduced to zero that nothing was lefe bot an object. Broodthaers's recourse to fiction tells of the impossibility of this story in the enactment of a kind of layering that can itself stand for, or allegorize, the self-dfferential condition of mediums themselves, ‘When Broodehaers refers to he 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 “illusttate” this work, “I would never have obrained this kind of complexity,” he says, “with technological objects, whose singleness condemns the mind to ‘monomania: minimal ar, robot, computer.” In such a remark is folded two components of the argument [have bbeen pursuing in tis meditation on the medium. First hat the speci- ficity of mediums, even modernist ones, must be understood as differen tial, seldiffering, and thus as a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support. “Singleness,” as— Broodchaers says, “condemns the mind to monomania."s Second, that it is precisely the onset of higher orders of technology ~ “robot, come puter” ~ which allows us, by rendering older techniques outmoded, ro grasp the inner complexity of the mediums those techniques support. In Broodthaess’s hands, flexion itself beeame such a medium, such a form | of differential speciiciy. 8 Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodemnity as the rotal saturation of cultural space by the image, whether atthe hands of advertising, com rmumications media, or cyberspace. This complete image,permeation of social and daily life means, he says, that aesthetic experience is now everywhere, in an expansion of culture chat 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 stare in which “everything is now fally ranslated into the visible and the eultur- ally familiar, [including all critiques of this situation],... aesthetic attention,” he says, “finds itself transferred to the life of perception as such.” This is what he calls a “new life of postmodern sensation,” in which “the percepewal system of lace capitalism” experiences everything from shopping toall forms of leisure as aesthetic. thereby rendering any thing that could becalled a properly aesthetic sphere ... obsolete ‘One description of art within chis regime of postmodern sensation isha it mimics just this leeching of the aesthetic out into the social field in general. Within antsts who have decided not co 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 also 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.** The example of Marcel Broodthaers, which I have been presenting heve, has, been fandamental to this task. is situation, however, there area few contemporary 56 NOTES 1 Suey Covel, The Hts and (Came Sedge, Maes Lard Unvriy Det 1378), piers 2 Inthe rege se Suey Cand “Mose Divine" io Mit 1 Mae 1M Sey (ew Merk: See 105), p19 20 “This olan ft corp! by te ‘erjooe a ace off Camaberpsame whe tee acne io che wap 1 ae ee nth ‘Sse eect hs mango ten of he word "mstion mole Gnd fvhe) = mnge minindewanding, an ta 1) tos ow ep. 27-9) I 4 Thanghac tx lee ie i ust pana i cis ib te wbich Tam renin re shop communi abcd by leer 2 Bevanin HK. D. Bela. “lareducoey ‘Noa (tie sil Boos ius" Oa, ou (Ellin), emai Baca’ em (el ale io he cote ep of Brass od ehorunldaiaehery pes bone nang nia of ba weg cegsrihdiwanstimand plletrinc, bien ie apps wy hice pled 90 ee rerio lows, ante stem ong igen Seyanin Bush rehegencery a hit ‘eller edt in manent seam twit a mth cpen eninge 9 tao me gees at ses dle wit simeenstnd clean and Dui 6 Sa oer, wl 108 (ashe 1974). “he back cover a by Benhass irate of de sane Lid of e's be leo!” dae 2 fr ade, HW Sr hae, W fe ‘ac, eae appropiate pean ea Si) es Berg ers aly. Under ed hee des, eis aspen dt est ve pees er Tut ae Eane otpaphe ice eae tn Beige” Tie in oewo apes hi wok, Om one nnn a8 he Ls Foie le the esd the rt Bd ered Bb, fons sii ad ee Cai ad (7). On dene allades oh pode seen rites "CaCl (Ger iwc he pce a "in dines deat ade he ne band, thereby sing the mise oan sung swmk ve mashable ees x, in ech dag "oa mo 7 Myatenion warn eset ditcner ad ‘paola om wed by Renmin Bahia ‘eos nana y"Mated Brose le favo he Avae-Gade” Ari sl. XVI (aay 100) 9 4 ora prea srl tain of hit ‘ewiematon fom poet se Thier {4 Dove ov Afr Dap (Cambie, Mae QT Dens oy), peed the caper "The Mocca Be Cs” 1 Bowelertsengneionagpers elem ‘Le wonslumeeaoge of the ekibion “Det ‘Ader tom Oligessn fi Heo” (Deseo, Skicke Kalle 197) oh 3.19: Tathe a oa cs appre Adee Jeg Hoses, Breas aed wi ence ia lin "ey and ch bina Linc nv api sath well oi at bit pene tamibebage Thai Egle HetbeEse ‘Wea El sriperen in 37 10 Hanon 014 (Flap cove Bens jamin Basch dinar nd perf this wa {ude jpn, comin Whe ever Font roduc, well atier wen rtebine nsemero ed "Sten ini ette si owing ein of 3 “thar” ee ude, and = Fills Rare im ot rongh pe img. "Stone" as backed yaya image ale ey ae whic ce ion “Rasome vigil" anounecd me Sar Kadiconingbook of earns at clo wh assed Sethe’ cove tm, “hie” ino Engl ealabaaton wih the tos Once agin, tens ase on Sth wa led by Bol, in "Benda ‘Alpe ic ut-Cade ops, pis 1 Byeaiiagthe im “gh pil” Feat prillinstiaestmad iengedatetiyes {Conca and ths ean tn of eis ioe hie of pemwarat Fa a Binet di Rom tbe lange of whit osltacs meat te age w ae, which sth nla he poli dimeson of be aan aid merece lin Broo, Eran cones pam an epcon lysain 2 For a diconion of Amtolagy Fl Acces soe Annete Mba, "Coote and Asya A. Cow Sty of Cine” Gases an (Wier 98 298 a5 Se ]L. Baad "The Appar” Cae Srp Hea (28), The Coca par (Loon: arin, 18. tg Mauer Medusa, Phananely of Poet Sin Sm (Landon Rong tnd Kepan Pal 186), The etn sided "The Body" addesas dhe imcgmecadnes of he hp "ac ad ne” win

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