“A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition

Exploring the nature of the aesthetic medium has been at the heart of much of modern art. For exponents of high modernism, the essence of each medium lay inherently in its own particular material properties. Accordingly, the import of painting was its “flatness,” as exemplified by the monochrome canvas. But some artists rejected this description as inadequate. Citing the examples of film, television, and video, they understood and articulated the medium as a complex structure of technical supports and layered conventions distinct from physical properties. Here, Rosalind Krauss positions the work of Marcel Broodthaers within this alternative narrative. Referring to the Belgian artist’s films, books, graphic design, and museum “fictions,” she presents Broodthaers as standing at, and thus standing for, the “complex” of the self-differing medium.