Intermedia / edited by Ursula Frohne ; with an introduction by Rachael Z. DeLue, and essays by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Maggie M. Cao, Sebastian Egenhofer, Eva Ehninger, Natilee Harren, Michelle Smiley.
Publisher:
Terra Foundation for American Art,
Copyright Date:
2022
Description:
272 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 cm.
Machine generated contents note: 1) Michelle Smiley, "The Circulating Medium: Joseph Saxton, Minting, and the American Daguerreotype" -- 2) Anna Arabindan-Kesson, "From Poetry into Paint: Robert S. Duncanson and The Song of Hiawatha" -- 3) Maggie M. Cao, "The Readymade and the Counterfeit: The Material Conditions of Art and Money" -- 4) Sebastian Egenhofer, "Optics and Humor: Light, Pictures, and Subjectivity in the Work of Dan Graham" -- 5) Eva Ehninger, "Visualizing the City: Interrelations between Painting and Photography" -- 6) Natilee Harren, "Proposals for Intermedia Art Education: Robert Watts' Experimental Workshop at the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1968-1969".
Summary:
"In 1965, the American artist and Fluxus cofounder Dick Higgins stated that much of the best art being made at the time fell between media. He linked the dismantling of divisions among media to decompartmentalization in society more generally and to the impending dawn of a "classless" society. After High Art, represented by the elite medium of painting, he wrote, came the deluge, brought on by Duchamp's ready-mades, Robert Rauschenberg's combines, and Alan Kaprow's happenings. Intermedia, the term Higgins selected to describe this trend, referred to works of art that conceptually fused different and, often, non-traditional media, rather than simply juxtaposing them, as with "mixed media" or "multimedia" art. In intermedia, boundaries between mediums dissolve and new mediums emerge. Visual poetry is a classic example of intermedia, as are Nam June Paik's video sculptures. Never a prescriptive term, intermedia remains fluid, both as an artistic practice and an art-historical category. It resists periodization, as well. Higgins associated intermedia with post-war art yet understood intermedia as a mode of making taken up by many cultures across time. Essays in the volume consider a range of subjects from the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture, exploring in detail and depth particular instances of intermedia within specific cultural, social, and historical contexts and in relation to both current and contemporaneous theorizations of media, image making, and materiality. Together, the essays present a rich and newly illuminating account of American artistic practice as an open and proliferating system of medial interrelation and exchange, highlighting the persistent and experimental cross-pollinations and transgenic mutations among painting, drawing, print, sculpture, photography, film, installation, performance, site specific work, and social practice in the art of the United States"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.