Transmedium ─ Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art

Mediums: in the art world we never stop talking about them, and I don’t mean the kind of mediums in the turbans and staring into crystal balls. The main agenda of modernist art (at least as Clement Greenberg saw it) was for a painting or sculpture to examine the limits of the medium in which it is rendered. But that’s just the beginning: there is mixed media and there are experimental media, and digital media, and post-media, and mediality, and new media. What Garrett Stewart is writing about is a project by contemporary artists that brings two or more mediums together in an effort to stage something entirely new: not a new medium, but a kind of relationship between mediums, where artists create an object or event that overtly crosses/traverses media without resolving them. It’s this transition that is the actual object of the work. Examples: Anthony McCall’s light sculptures: cones of projected light that pierce and illuminate a dark space; Matt Saunder’s process that draws upon painting, photography, and film to stage battles between them. Paul Sietsema’s confrontations between paint, paint brushes, hammers, photographs and printmaking. This book is as current as it gets on contemporary media-driven practice. It will be of interest to artists, critics, art historians, art students, collectors and dealers.

Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters in the English Department of the University of Iowa and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance.