Hannah Higgins reviews Transmedium

Garrett Stewart. Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 320 pp.

Review by Hannah Higgins

14 March 2019

Garrett Stewart’s recent book, Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (Chicago, 2017), proposes an open and dynamic framework for coming to terms with the emerging habit among contemporary artists to work across media and to capture the effect of one medium in another, especially using or referencing emerging technologies of representation. Stewart’s argument in this book can be summed up in the opening lines of “Endscapes,” the last chapter: “whereas mixed media works (even most multimedia works) are concerned with the material poetics of admixture, transmedium works are drawn from the conceptual logistics of mediation,” (p. 237).

Over the course of the book, Stewart moves from photorealism in painting to critical realism to dynamic light and sound work and contemporary film over an intentionally “decomposed” bridge (a middle chapter) titled “Entré Action,” a conflated term of his invention that resembles nothing so much as an architectural cartouche. Ornate language and persistent punning are a shame throughout since the sequence of works and the generalized pattern among contemporary artists makes sense; however, the terms he devises to make his case are too clever to really be useful. At its core, the interface between the two acts of the book––each consisting of three scenes––is symptomatic of the problem with the rest of it. This complicating interface interrupts astute observations regarding these transmedium artworks that are often, though not exclusively, reliant on new technology and/or its impact on contemporary life.

Each of the six scenes that make up the core of the book consist of several subchapters that are titled using a double colon, also called a bi-fold colon. This suggests linked ideas that are related but not simply so. Cory Arcangel’s installation Colors is one of several subjects of “Endscapes.” Colors seems to be randomly selected for translating the filmic image into an installation where the 1988 gang/police thriller, Colors (dir. Dennis Hopper, 1988),was reinterpreted in terms of its “constituent pixel streams,” basically color bands. These bands exemplify transmedial interplay by a double negation of commercial cinema and the cinematic apparatus. Displaying the “return of the repressed infrastructure from an often enigmatic congestion of image” (p. 248), the work interrelates manifestation, materiality, representation, and transmediation in an overwrought reimagining of the Greimasian semiotic square.

While Stewart has rightly identified a tendency among artists today to directly address the media forms of museum and gallery display in ways that reject both orthodox modernism’s media specificity and academic postmodernism’s pluralist reaction formations, virtually no attention is given to subject matter, the artists backgrounds, or their writing or interviews. As a result, his is a formalist argument. Returning to Cory Arcangel’s installation as instructive of the problem, Colors is a film about two white cops (Sean Penn and Robert Duvall) attempting to stop gang violence in South Central Los Angeles. Deconstructing that film very specifically has to do with race and the way colors are not merely colors but significations both of race and organizing systems operating among culturally repressed ethnic groups subcategorized through the affiliate colors of gang members. Arcangel is Caucasian. White light is a combination of all wavelengths so has political implications with regard to who holds the color cards/power. Maybe I’ve missed something, but (as in almost every example in the book) how subject matter, artist positionality (90 percent white and male), and audience explicitly form the context for each artist’s entry into transmedium forms means the book fundamentally lacks a social grounding, and the works are reduced to their forms. Perhaps this explains the near absence of diversity of artists and viewpoints in the book. The reader learns almost nothing about the remarkable parade of artists that Stewart has assembled and the deeper historical contexts that made the work necessary. Nowhere, for example, does Stewart mention Arcangel's background in music, or the important influence of the composer Pauline Oliveros for this transmedial artist.

Despite these misgivings, I find that the transmediating antisystem Stewart invents has its uses. The book is important as an account of what these many stylistically divergent trends in the arts have in common aesthetically. They are “more transactive than composite” (p. 266). Stewart gives a fantastic account, for example, of Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror (1999), a work where a 67” x 80” grid of roughly 4” wooden cubes reflected the generalized form and movements of a viewer translated through a computer program into enormous pixels organized as a grid. “No denaturing 2.0 work, in its own throwback artisanal “carving,” could cross paradigms––whole technical epochs––more openly” (p. 78). The resulting interactive digital mosaic brought together elements of cubism, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance art in a marvelously distilled moment and object. His account of it is delightful, truly. At the moment of description, Stewart has a real gift.

Other benchmark moments in the book involve a gripping account of Anthony McCall’s slicing spatial light bands, and more recent the light cones, as well as Ed Ruscha and Raymond Pettibon’s “The End” (2003), a lithograph that appears to capture the title words split across two frames. Significantly, the last chapter of the book takes a deep, descriptive dive into Michael Haneke’s remarkable film Amour (2012). The film ends with a gesture of euthanasia and a sequence of still images of small paintings from an elderly couple’s apartment which Stewart describes with a depth and interest that was fully engaging, critically rich, and flowed easily and unpretentiously. The film’s near absence of a musical soundtrack is a missed transmedial opportunity however, as Haneke was clearly producing sound-based images and memories off scene for the viewer alongside the film’s tight focus on the couple.

Reading the book as an art historian of the interdisciplinary poetics of concrete poetry, graphic musical notation, performance scores, expanded cinema, and experimental intermedia of the 1950–70s, the persistent use of already famous artists used to tether the book to these important precedents struck a discordant chord for me. I could spend the duration of this review lamenting the many lost opportunities at the author’s disposal to make a stronger historical argument based on regrettable omissions of lesser-known figures associated with those movements. A few key examples: he makes a big deal of blank celluloid that shows wear in the process of viewing (Rosa Barba’s wonderful piece Stating the Real Sublime, [2009]) as if it’s a new idea while not making any mention of Nam June Paik’s paradigmatic Zen for Film (1965), which consisted of blank film run over the course of many hours and slowly ground down by the mechanism and dust. Relatedly, the enveloping soundscapes of Max Neuhaus and the instructional events of George Brecht (both of the 1960s and virtually absent from recent histories of art) make scant appearance, though they belong in this account as important forbearers, particularly with regard to the category of the category of “event drawings.” There is no mention of Dick Higgins’s 1965 coining of the term intermedia, although the University of Iowa Intermedia Program based on it makes an appearance. I try to avoid mentioning it because Dick was my father, but his term explicitly deals with the question of artists using mediation between established media and strikes me as (at least the way it functioned in the 1960s) essentially synonymous with Stewart’s term.

Relatedly, the definition of conceptual art in play here captures only those few academically well established artists who took up Henry Flynt’s 1961 definition as very specifically language-based works. Flynt described the work in 1963, writing “since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.”1 That essay does not appear in the book, even in a footnote. Nor does a single mention of Lucy Lippard’s benchmark Six Years: Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–19722, which functionally lays out an argument about conceptual art concerning itself very directly with the mediating relationship between language and a range of unconventional materials and new technologies. Transmedium, in other words, is something of a misnomer, as Conceptualism 1.0 was a great deal more materially complex and transmedial than the orthodox account upon which this is based allows. More effective by far would be the terminological framework that Stewart devises toward the end of the book, "conceptualism²," meaning “raised to the power of itself, squared into a whole new order of reflex recognition” (p. 245). What a wonderful, if underdeveloped idea.

In summary, the term transmedium has enormous promise as a mechanism for understanding contemporary museum and gallery art. For this reader, the book’s language games and its lack of both current context and historical detail left that promise of the book as just that: a promise.

1Henry Flynt, "Essay: Concept Art," Henry Flint "Philosophy," 1963, http://www.henryflynt.org/aesthetics/conart.html

2 See Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (New York, 1973).