Medium specificity

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Medium specificity is a consideration in aesthetics and art criticism. It is most closely associated with modernism, but it predates it. [1]

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Overview

According to Clement Greenberg, who helped popularize the term, medium specificity holds that "the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique to the nature" of a particular medium. [2] For example, in painting, literal flatness and abstraction are emphasised rather than illusionism and figuration. [3]

Medium specific can be seen to mean that "the artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material." This would probably include the techniques used to manipulate the materials. "Medium-specificity is based on the distinct materiality of artistic media." As early as 1776 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing "contends that an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium." [4]

Today, the term is used both to describe artistic practices and as a way to analyze artwork. Critic N. Katherine Hayles, for example, speaks of "media specific analysis." [5] As discussed by critic Marshall Soules, medium specificity and media specific analysis are playing an important role in the emergence of new media art forms, such as Internet art. [6] Medium specificity suggests that a work of art can be said to be successful if it fulfills the promise contained in the medium used to bring the artwork into existence. Much debate can remain as to what a given medium best lends itself to.

Art dialogue in the post-modern period has tended to steer away from medium specificity as a particularly relevant principle. [7] Tom Palin maintains the importance of a notion of medium to the practice of painting, with recourse to Heideggerian phenomenology.

See also

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Visual focus depth art (VFDA) is a form of mixed media collage that places an emphasis on the use of three-dimensional application to individual creations of single one-of-a-kind art pieces to emphasize individual meaning in the work. It is a derivative of assemblage, collage and decollage. The concept is similar to the basic mixed-media collage idea of building up various levels of the piece for emphasis. Known in this medium as projections, the artist tries in a variety of ways to create a visual image that causes the viewer to focus on certain areas of the art framework that would ordinarily be overlooked or relegated to the background rather than to randomly layer structure creating a whole image of the work.

Medium essentialism

Medium essentialism is a philosophical theory stating that each artform has its own distinctive medium, and that the essence of such an artform is dependent on its particular medium. In practice, the theory argues that every artwork should manifest its essential properties, those which no other artform can employ. The theory relies on the presumption that every artform has a unique medium, and is divided into two main interpretations. The ‘limitation’ interpretation of Medium Essentialism argues that, due to their medium, some artforms should be constrained in their aspirations. The ‘productive’ interpretation reasons that a work's medium determines what content or style will function best, and that practitioners should pursue ventures aligning with the nature of this chosen medium. Clement Greenberg is a prolific medium-essentialist in relation to modernist art, proposing that artists such as Jackson Pollock are successful because they properly exploit elements of their chosen medium, such as a painting's physical flatness. However, Medium Essentialism was most propagated by film practitioners throughout the twentieth century, as it legitimised cinema as an artform for the first time. Previously, film had been regarded as merely a recorded representation of a written play. It is therefore most discussed today by film theorists, stemming from the work of critics such as André Bazin. Regardless of the interpretation favoured, what constitutes a film's medium, and therefore essential meaning, has been heavily debated, and has prompted the creation of several sub-theories. The theory has been widely discussed among contemporary film theorists and has featured in the Anthology of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures.

References

  1. "Medium_specificity".
  2. Clement Greenberg. "Modernist Painting". Archived from the original on 2006-01-05.
  3. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Jeannene M. Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, Routledge, 2004, p8. ISBN   0-415-30866-6
  4. "Medium_specificity".
  5. N. Katherine Hayles. "What Cybertext Theory Can't Do". Archived from the original on 2006-03-13.
  6. Marshall Soules. "Animating the Language Machine: Computers and Performance". Archived from the original on 2006-02-24.
  7. http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/specificity.htm Medium Specificity