Between Media and Art, or Media Art with and Against Art History

Abstract

My talk will take up my earlier confrontation of Art History (in the form of Rosalind Krauss’s meditations on media art) and Media Studies (in the form of Lev Manovich’s historicization of new media in reference to various conventions of Western art) in order to ask whether and how media art marks a historical break, indeed a rupture, with art’s traditional philosophical vocation, namely to give a sensible appearance of the idea (Hegel). My talk will put particular pressure on the singular aesthetic of temporality that informs new media art, and that is informed by a shift from a model of storage or reproduction (in which a painting, for example, fixes or records an experience lived by an artist) to a model of production (in which, as Edmond Couchot puts it, “the spectator participates in the upsurge [jaillissement] of a non-lived, ‘sensual and anarchic’ present”). Taking stock of affinities between new media art and art movements from the 1960s and 1970s, I shall explore the theoretical consequences of this important shift for our conception of art’s history today at this moment of massive media expansion. Ultimately, the question will be whether and how exactly art history can “incorporate” new media