The guarantee of the medium : Rosalind Krauss (2009)

이 글은 상당부분 Two-moments from the post-medium condition 하고 text가 동일하다. 

Clement Greenberg tied the practice of the avant-garde to a notion of authenticity.

The guarantee of such authenticity was understood by Greenberg as the irrefutable materiality of the individual medium

The different mediums are exploding: painting turns into sculpture, sculpture into architecture, engineering, theater, environment, “participation.” Not only the boundaries between the different arts, but the boundaries between art and everything that is not art, are being obliterated. At the same time scientific technology is invading the visual arts and transforming them even as they transform one another. And to add to the confusion, high art is on the way to becoming popular art, and vice versa. (1955. Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties. In John O’Brian (ed.) Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. 292-303.)

초기에 아방가르드를 예술의 purity를 해치는 것으로 보고 반대했던 그린버그가 이 글에서 보이듯이 초기의 형식주의적 입장을 수정하기 시작했다는 것을 알 수 있다. 나아가서 그는 급기야 키치에 대항하는 예술형식으로서 아방가르를 극찬했다. 

(140)

As medium specificity fell out of fashion, it seemed retrograde for artists to attempt it or for critics to praise it. Art had, it seemed, entered a “post-medium condition” in which the inauthentic seemed more daring and up-to-date than the exploration of limits and materials.

Technical Support의 개념을 이해하는 것이 중요하다.; 

The “Technical Support” – a New Form of the Medium

이것은 기술적 지지체로 번역되는데, 기존의 회화, 조각, 사진 등의 매체를 가지고 작업을 하려는 현대 작가들은, 그것의 traditional supports를 replace해야하는 필요성에 직면했다. 그래서 그들은 adopt ‘technical support’했다. 이것은 전통적인 매체에서 파생하는 것이 아니라, 이미 전제된 예술형식, 내용, 방식으로부터 기술적인 지지체 (technical support)를 찾는것에 대한 것이다. 예를 들자면, 상업적 장르나 대상으로부터 형식을 차용하는 등이다.

Implicitly acknowledging the fact of postmodernism’s declaration of the death of painting as well as sculpture, the artists who still find the relay of some sort of medium necessary to the very possibility of artistic signification, need to replace the traditional supports of the now outmoded aesthetic mediums, such as oil on canvas, plaster on metal armature, or carved image on stone block. To this end they have tended to adopt what needs to be called “technical supports” for which commercial genres or objects might serve as the backbone (or undergirding) of their practice. (142)

이러한 작업을 하는 작가의 예로, Sophie Calle, Christian Marclay, Wiliam Kentridge 등을 들고 있다.