Summary - Medium specificity

VIAM – Synopsis of Reading 1
McNamara, A & Ross, T 2007,’On medium specificity and discipline crossovers in modern art’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art, vol.8, no. 1, pp. 99-106, viewed 7 March 2014.
Ranciere states that his work a-disciplinary or in-disciplinary which aims to disrupt the notion of specific disciplines and the exclusion this concept brings. Those with expertise within various disciplines are viewed as able/competent and those without expertise/knowledge etc are viewed as unable. Also that those with this knowledge of disciplines have a separate intelligence to their ‘subjects’. He suggests that if the museum/ installation art becomes caught up in allocating specificity of disciplines it becomes a self conscious drawing the line between who is able/competent/ has knowledge and who doesn’t instead of exploring and reframing ‘the common landscape of the visible’ and stepping beyond disciplinary frames to do so. In his art practice he presupposes that all people have life knowledge that ‘oversteps the divisions of disciplines’.

Ranciere argues that the idea of modernism as the ‘emancipation of each art, ….truth to its own medium’ is a late one as that historical modernity was about ‘crossing of borders between the different arts and between art and life’ . In relation to hybridity it was seen by modernists as the collapse between art and the commodity/ entertainment yet was celebrated in postmodern discourse due to this break down of boundaries and as evidence of new artistic and life possibilities. The aesthetic revolution played its part in this as the artwork was no longer bounded by a specific plane/destination and was instead given the idea of framing a sensorium of experience which could be seen as the museum (art separated from social/religious destination) and that the artistic practice stepped over boundaries between media & the senses in order to achieve this sensorioum. The hybridity/ multimediality is therefore important in the role it has played in this process.

However just because a work is a multimedia work Ranciere suggests that does not make it automatically ‘subversive or interesting’ as multimedia simpy means the combining of several types of media and despite the intentions of artists this combination may simply achieve the effect of being an enhanced theatrical performace/ multimedia spectacle.

In addition Ranciere suggests that for artists to successfully be critical they need to disconnect from stereotypes of critical discourses on consumerism/ globalization which have become a nihilistic wisdom whereby any protest is seen as a performance which is a spectacle and itself a commodity. So instead of taking a patronizing position of agreeing with this wisdom that people are impotent in the face of this condition and need others to open their eyes to it Ranciere instead wants to set aside this patronizing outlook and instead explore new ways of looking at culture and its conflicts.

Ranciere also argues that there is no connection between medium specificity and aesthetic judgement as medium is such a broad term therefore that multimedia work can revive the critical potential of the aesthetic. The concept of a medium as a specific technical means was associated with the essence of art and the medium thought of an end in itself instead of the means of making the art. When this was overturned the ‘truth to medium became obedience to the other’. Before the medium was seen as the other versus the artist as the artists representation would have a gap but because in modernity representation was no longer necessary therefore the commitment to matter became the new alterity.

Ranciere argues that the hierarchy of genres that was questioned by 19th C artists and writers was a hierarchy of form- matter that represented an underpinning social, political and ideological construct which was called into question by the assertion of equality however this led to a new aesthetic opposition that of non art and art – what is considered art and what isn’t? Ranciere suggests that the borders are unclear in this interesting case.

Ranciere concludes by saying that for him it is not the dangers of overriding the boundaries of different disciplines that is an issue but more that all people are able to access knowledge if they wish, use their own understanding and create new links between separate objects and fields and in this way ‘frame new landscapes of the preciptible and thinkable’.