Mediation, Marshall McLuhan & the conundrum of Visual Art.

The scene is set, Woody Allen &

Diane Keaton are standing in a movie

line in Annie Hall, when Allen overhears someone pontifi-

cating loudly and incorrectly about Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. Allen pulls

McLuhan into the line, (a perfect cameo) to prove his point, and with typi-

cal smart-aleck-panache he delivers the punch line of “Boy if life were only

like this..”1 In his 1964 book Understanding Media McLuhan pointed out

that the media itself should be studied as opposed to the content that it

carries, therefore: ‘The Medium is

the Message.” Serious philosophers

scoffed at McLuhan’s immersion in

mass culture, and dismissed him as a

pop-philosopher whose ideas held no

academic rigor, he lived his work, so

much so that he articulated his perceived image in the media he was analyz-

ing. I think that now, more than ever, McLuhan’s ideas hold a resonance.

Even though we take our immersion in media for granted, I wonder if we

consider what this immersion does to our experience. This led me to ques-

tion the possibility that visual artists could use the idea of mediation to their

advantage, and that understanding mediation helps to return control to art-

ists and their work . Then could the artist consider the mediation of the

work becoming the work?

Within this text I am primarily interested in discussing visual forms

of communication. I was using mediation unwittingly in my own practice

until a conversation with Sarah Sze. She asked me why would I create

sculptures and drawings only to photograph and place them in the context

of a book. She articulated that most artists would sit and contemplate the

actual works, where I was more concerned with creating something to fill

the page. At that point I began to consider that mediation is a way of in-

terpreting the world through a halfway point, and it

is how we are able to communicate with each other.

The media is a carrier and a filter that allows us to

experience communication in a broader sense, thus

extending our reach as humans and allowing bound-

aries of space and time to break apart. We all know that visual art is consid-

ered a media, but it is continuously being mediated by other forms such as

printed magazines, photographic documentation, television, and the inter-

net. Art is then unique in itself because of the infinite interpretation of what

it can be and also its form, thus there are equally infinite ways of mediating

and disseminating artwork.

Ten years ago the artist Seth Price discussed the idea of dispersion

in his widely published essay of the same name. Price points out “Immers-

ing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of art—and with it, the status

of the artist—disperse entirely.” 2 He looked at modes of distribution calling

out “social information in a common market” and argued that “It’s space

into which the work of art must project itself lest it be outdistanced entirely

by these corporate interests. New strategies are needed to keep up with

commercial distribution, decentralization, and dispersion.”2 The shifts in

the art world since the publication of this essay in 2002 are increasingly

fragmentary and housed in the digital realm. Price then goes on to talk

about how throughout history artists have utilized the form of the media in

order to publicize their work, and by releasing disper-

sion as a free downloadable essay on the internet he

plays into his own notion.

Ben Schumacher is an artist who works

with sculptural installations and mediated imagery. He considers that the

documentation of his work is speaking directly to the viewing of the work.

He mediates this work when he posts it online with a modification or wa-

termark. Schumacher regards the collapse between this artwork and his

mediated image an intrinsic part of the viewers experience. Schumacher

has sent friends and curators physical objects, presents (such as a car

doors from ebay) in the mail. The intention being that he “would like to give

people objects that he has only seen in a photograph.”3 He engages with

the dispersion and circulation of his works as a supplement to his gallery

based practice. In an interview with Bob Nickas in the September 2011 is-

sue Mousse Magazine Schumacher says “I am also interested in a lot of

the same ideas about the mobility and instability of images. I grew up in

a rural area of Ontario, only seeing sculpture in magazines or on the In-

ternet. My first sculpture was actually made to be photographed, and then

destroyed.” This harks back to Duchamp and how the fountain was placed

in art history through the photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. Schumacher has

begun to customize the image documentation in order to fictionalize the

actual object. In a press release for his 2012 show Register of Documents

1974- at James Fuentes, Schumacher sums up “One cannot maintain that a

work, inclusive of its properties, exists out there on the internet irrespective

of our consciousness of it.”4 Does our consciousness of a work embed the

physical manifestation of it in a particular space or time? Through media-

tion of this work can we discover slippages in how the work functions.

The format of the way we access visual art depends specifically

upon the medium of its reception. There are consequences in terms of how

we encounter images in visual culture, essentially the meaning and experi-

ence of the work is altered. When we watch a video of a performance on

a phone or see paintings hanging in the background of a TV show each

mediation of the work alters our perception. In the 1972 documentary from

the BBC entitled Ways of Seeing John Berger expands: “When the cam-

era reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a

result its meaning changes. Or more exactly, its meaning multiplies and

fragments into many meanings. This

is vividly illustrated by what happens

when a painting is shown on a televi-

sion screen. The painting enters each

viewers house. There it is surrounded

by his wallpaper, his furniture, his me-

mentoes. It enters the atmosphere of his

family. It becomes their talking point. It

lends meaning to their meaning.“5 What Berger is pointing to is how the

work travels through the context of the media and fractures to become part

of a larger milieu of life. This means the artwork is no longer situated in the

specialized elite of uptown galleries or the museum, it exists in a broader

context, reaching a larger audience.

There is a power shift in taking claim to the way that a work is

mediated. Let’s look at this story about the artist Yves Klein. In 1962

Klein attended the Cannes Film Festival, for the screening of the exploita-

tion documentary Mondo Cane. The filmmakers had captured one of his

performances. The appalling segment of his work depicted Anthropom-

etries of the Blue Epoch completely out of context. The secondary media-

tion by filmmakers shifted the meaning of his intention with the artwork

entirely. The music had been switched from The Monotone Symphony,

his minimalist one note composition to a cheerful jazz song. The live

nude models begin to paint each other from buckets of IKB Blue paint,

and depicted salaciously they move to a large canvas and press their na-

ked bodies to it. The Narrator chimes in with a dismissive description:

“As some of you may have guessed, Klein’s favorite color is blue. Blue is

also his favorite form as a matter of fact blue is his only form and his only

color. Blue are his paintings for which there are a great demand. Blue is the

work towards which

our cameras are moving. Considered by most authoritative critics the great-

est Klein masterpiece and which the expert is ready to deduct that blue is the

dominant color... The masterpiece, each stage of whose creation we have

had the pleasure of recording on film, is on sale for only four million francs.”6

Klein was humiliated at this misrepresentation of his work. Mondo Cane

represented him as sexually deviant instead of the distinguished and ab-

stinent ritual he had intended. He believed in his work so strongly that he

ended up becoming physically

distressed at the portrayal of

his work in the film. Although

this situation was unfortunate

Klein was keenly aware of how

to use mediation. Just two years

before in 1960 he created his

newspaper Dimanche and the

work served many functions,

part declaration of a holiday,

part performance, part appro-

priation. Klein was able hint at

the many future movements taking shape in that era. Klein claimed with

the photomontage Leap into the Void that he was a painter of space, so in

order to paint space he had to figure himself in space itself. Klein was able

to seamlessly merge art and life and consider mediation in the form of a

newspaper a part of his work. I have experienced this work in person and

on the internet, and there is a real sense of the historical document seeing

the work printed on newsprint, crumbling at the edges. There was a lost

fragility when you download a PDF from an archive. I believe that Klein

was meticulous in his persona and knew that good public relations and the

contextualization of the work was what gave it presence and established

him into the history books.

The speed of production and disper-

sal has increased to a fever pace and content is

documented and published in the digital realm in

a continuous self-satisfied cycle. The media has

swelled to accommodate the ‘global-village’, and

with the expanse of internet it means literally ev-

eryone can be on it. McLuhan believed that the

media is an extension of the self, and at its core the media we think of today

is a narcissistic concept. This shift in scale has become the false-guise of

connection, and the speed of information is such that we expect everything

to be instantly accessible, downloadable, and categorized for us. In his

essay Use Me Up the Art Critic Jan Verwoert poses that: “..the economic

rationale of just-in-time-production lies precisely in the realization that the

storage of goods in warehouses is too costly and has to be replaced by mod-

els of distribution where the consumer or client can access the desired ser-

vice or product right away (ideally through downloading).” 7 He goes on to

say that this should be actualized as fast as possible. This idea works for

capitalism through online shopping, but what happens to cultural capital8

when applied to these new modes of distribution?

We all know that there are things that the internet cannot tell us.

Yet can we exist autonomously from this era of technology? Our accessi-

bility means we are lazy and hesitant to interact in real space. When we

allow our mediated selves in a digital sense to take over the actual, a shift

happens: we begin to lose

touch with reality. Filters,

not unlike curated spaces,

exist within the media be-

cause there is limitless in-

formation on the internet

and these clarify and articu-

late what deserves our attention. Through social mediation we experience

the art work at an opening or crowded free museum night or when we share

a link with a friend via a website. There is a certain expectation within these

so called ‘curated’ social interactions. We anticipate a high level of quality

within the exchange with these people or institutions; therefore we trust

their opinions. Writer Sarah Hromack in the catalogue Never Odd or Even

delves into the idea of Acceptable Approximation. She calls into question

her conduct: “Where things become genuinely disconcerting, is when I […]

fail to control my own behavior in relationship to the internet, allowing it to

serve as an acceptable approximation for the physical experience itself.”9 If

this mediation is what we begin to accept as the real world, a schema needs

to be articulated to deal with these inadequacies and consider the media-

tion part of the artwork itself. If not examined the dissipation of artwork re-

lies on mediation as a crutch instead of using it as a virtue. We need be clear

in what we gain from these mediated states. This situation can quickly dis-

sipate into the realm of self-exploitation and then we begin to utilize media

that is already in dialogue with a filter that has no clear intention. Shouldn’t

the form of the work manifest itself in relationship to the media it is being

presented?

Where do the lines become blurred between art and mediation? Is

there a way to rethink the mediated experience as the primary encounter of

the work? Articulating what is considered art becomes increasingly ardu-

ous. Is the artwork found in the photographic documentation of a work,

the online presence, the book or the catalogue, supporting records and

drawings, or specifically the actual physical object? Artist Dan Graham ob-

served in the 1960s a work of art had to be reproduced in a magazine or had

to be written about, to be considered worthy of the status of ‘art’. This state-

ment comes in an era where there is a weight on the physicality of the work.

Typical to the question

of mediated documenta-

tion is the archive format

of conceptual works of

this time. The documen-

tation begins with the

Land Art movement and

then through to Conceptualism where artists need something physical to

document space or idea. For example many of Baldessari’s works exist only

in documentation, we can’t see his cremated paintings or watch him sing

Lewitt (because he never performed this live) but there are photographs

and videos of this work.

Mediation can also point to re-representation of historical works

within an art context, and with this in mind, we can consider Sherrie Levine’s

work. She has utilized mediation to question authenticity throughout

her career. Levine has successfully rewritten art history by appropriating

various images and objects as her work. Her most famous photographs are

After Walker Evans (1981), which are re-photographs of Walker Evan’s

iconic photographs of Americana from his exhibition catalogue First and

Last. By doing this Levine questions authorship, authenticity, identity,

property, originality and artistic lineage.10 She asks “that is to say, what do

we own? What is the same?”11 This work is seminal to postmodernism,

taking on the role of patriarchal authority and critiquing commodity and

institution simultaneously. In his book on Levine, Howard Singerman

claims that “Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction has left it’s mark in —the invocation, for example of the ‘value

of uniqueness’, and even more clearly in the listing of those ‘notions of

value, of presence or aura, of authenticity’ that are being revived.”11 Levine

desperately wants to posses these works, and by making her own versions

she can, and will. She takes on mediation as a way to circulate her ideas

of appropriation. Levine said in an 1985 interview “Having the feeling of

somehow being outside of the mainstream of the art world had a lot to

do with my feelings about art. Seeing everything through magazines and

books—I got a lot of my sense of what art looked like in terms of surface

and finish.” 12 Through mediation she alters the meaning of the original

work drastically. In After Courbet: 1-18 she uses Gustave Courbet’s The

Orgin of the World and then reinterprets the work as a framed multiple

from a museum postcard borrowing legitimacy from the institution itself.

I have experienced this work at the Whitney Museum and if you removed

the fancy frames and articulate lighting these postcards could exist in the

gift shop postcard rack. Levine elevates the object but her mediation is

about the seductiveness of materials and understanding how these react in

space. Levine challenges the assumptions about mediation by examining

the impact of viewing a work digitally, in a magazine, book or museum.

A critical aspect that comes from this is the articulation of the ‘aura’

of a work. What happens to this undefinable quality that surrounds a work?

What is it the aura of a work when it is mediated? A computer screen or

photograph cannot pick up the different gradations of black in an Ad Re-

inhardt painting, yet he purposefully created the work this way, to reject

mediation which he experienced in his illustration career. 13 The represen-

tation of art work on the internet changes the embodiment of how you view

the work. Primary experience could be described as the reaction you have

when you spend time with a work first hand. The color of the paint, the

edges of the frame, the scale in relationship to your body the details that

the eye can pick up are important signifiers to how the work functions in

space. There is a precedent in the first hand experience of a work. Today,

there is unprecedented access that artists can use to distribute their work

by documenting it and then hyper-contextualizing the work by publishing

it online instantly. This attributes to the ‘myth’ that the artist can create for

themselves. The artist is in a constant production-consumption cycle and

because of the demand from the speed of the media there is an expectation

to constantly participate. Are contemporary artists thinking of ways to con-

ceive this work through technology?

Maybe a complete rejection of mediation is a canny way to achieve

attention for an artwork. Tino Sehgal’s practice certainly claims this rejec-

tion. His works are a counter to the norm of high priced object based fetish-

ism that is a standard in the art market. As a viewer you can only experience

the works in the space and time that they occupy and the memory of the

work is the only documentation. A quick web search shows that on his deal-

er Marian Goodman’s website there is only a blank space where an image

would represent his work. Although there is a ‘no documentation rule’ there

are photographs of his work such as The Kiss available on the New York

Times14

Art Review, (they cite that this image was taken with an iPhone).

Sehgal’s constructed situations use language, voice, interaction and move-

ment and are similar to Bas Jan

Ader’s concept of using gravity

as a medium. Sehgal however,

certianly has a sale price for

these works, but the buyer re-

ceives no written receipt of the work, only a conversation with a notary be-

ing the oral contract. Is the way to separate ones work to reject completely

the system that it occupies? Anything outside this standard becomes talked

about, a strategy for distributing through word of mouth.

As art increases in scope it becomes a container for expanding

ideas and assumes a mediated relationship completely. Marshall McLu-

han’s pop philosophical idea, “The Medium is the Message” can be applied

to the mediation of Visual Art in cultural society. Artists can use mediation

as a tool and thus the mediation can become the work. A loss of control in

mediation is inevitable but if the artist is aware of what mediation can do

and how it could even become the work a power reversal is possible. This

fragmentary positioning of the artwork, in its mediation will help the work

to exist beyond its initial format. This mediation can be harnessed to give

the work back a self-assertion that the filter ultimately disrupts.

By Robin Cameron

2012

This essay is published by Document, an online distribution project of Bodega

Works Cited1 Annie Hall. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton. MGM, 1977. DVD.2 Price, Seth. Dispersion. Facsim. ed. New York: 38th Street Publishers, 2008. Print.3 Nickas, Bob. Mousse Magazine NICE TO MEET YOU - Ben Schum-acher, Things That Look Like Other Things, Sept, 2011. Print4 Schumacher, Ben. Register of Documents 1974- Press Release James Fuentes, 2012. Print 5 Berger, John. Ways of seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corpora-tion, 1972. Print.6 Mondo Cane. Dir. Paolo Cavara. Perf. Rossano Brazzi, Stefano Sibaldi. Italy, 1962. DVD.7 Jan Verwoert Use Me Up. Metropolis M, No 1, 2007. Print 8 Cultural capital articulated as non-economic worth and upward social mobility through educational and intellectual pursuits. See Cultural Repro-duction and Social Reproduction and Pierre Bourdieu9 Hromack, Sarah, Never Odd or Even. Acceptable Approximation cata-logue Goethe-Institut New York, 201110 Singerman, Howard, and Sherrie Levine. Art history, after Sher-rie Levine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Print. 11 Whitney Museum. “Mayhem: Sherrie Levine.” Whitney Museum Cata-logue 1 (2011): 1. Print.12 Siegel, Jeanne. After Sherrie Levine, Arts Magazine, Summer 1985, 13 Bois, Yve-Alain. What is there to see, on a painting by Ad Reinhardt, MoMA, No. 8 (Summer, 1991). Print14 Cotter, Holland, The New York Times Art Review, http://www.ny-times.com/2010/02/01/arts/design/01tino.html?pagewanted=all Jan, 2010