Mediation,

Marshall
McLuhan &
the
conundrum
of Visual Art.
The scene is set, Woody Allen &
Diane Keaton are standing in a movie
line in Annie Hall, when Allen overhears someone ponti-
cating loudly and incorrectly about Marshall McLuhans ideas. Allen pulls
McLuhan into the line, (a perfect cameo) to prove his point, and with typi-
cal smart-aleck-panache he delivers the punch line of Boy if life were only
like this..
1
In his 1964 book Understanding Media McLuhan pointed out
that the media itself should be studied as opposed to the content that it
carries, therefore: The Medium is
the Message. Serious philosophers
scoffed at McLuhans immersion in
mass culture, and dismissed him as a
pop-philosopher whose ideas held no
academic rigor, he lived his work, so
much so that he articulated his perceived image in the media he was analyz-
ing. I think that now, more than ever, McLuhans ideas hold a resonance.
Even though we take our immersion in media for granted, I wonder if we
consider what this immersion does to our experience. This led me to ques-
tion the possibility that visual artists could use the idea of mediation to their
advantage, and that understanding mediation helps to return control to art-
ists and their work . Then could the artist consider the mediation of the
work becoming the work?

Within this text I am primarily interested in discussing visual forms
of communication. I was using mediation unwittingly in my own practice
until a conversation with Sarah Sze. She asked me why would I create
sculptures and drawings only to photograph and place them in the context
of a book. She articulated that most artists would sit and contemplate the
actual works, where I was more concerned with creating something to ll
the page. At that point I began to consider that mediation is a way of in-
terpreting the world through a halfway point, and it
is how we are able to communicate with each other.
The media is a carrier and a lter that allows us to
experience communication in a broader sense, thus
extending our reach as humans and allowing bound-
aries of space and time to break apart. We all know that visual art is consid-
ered a media, but it is continuously being mediated by other forms such as
printed magazines, photographic documentation, television, and the inter-
net. Art is then unique in itself because of the innite interpretation of what
it can be and also its form, thus there are equally innite ways of mediating
and disseminating artwork.
Ten years ago the artist Seth Price discussed the idea of dispersion
in his widely published essay of the same name. Price points out Immers-
ing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of artand with it, the status
of the artistdisperse entirely.
2
He looked at modes of distribution calling
out social information in a common market and argued that Its space
into which the work of art must project itself lest it be outdistanced entirely
by these corporate interests. New strategies are needed to keep up with
commercial distribution, decentralization, and dispersion.
2
The shifts in
the art world since the publication of this essay in 2002 are increasingly
fragmentary and housed in the digital realm. Price then goes on to talk
about how throughout history artists have utilized the form of the media in
order to publicize their work, and by releasing disper-
sion as a free downloadable essay on the internet he
plays into his own notion.
Ben Schumacher is an artist who works
with sculptural installations and mediated imagery. He considers that the
documentation of his work is speaking directly to the viewing of the work.
He mediates this work when he posts it online with a modication or wa-
termark. Schumacher regards the collapse between this artwork and his
mediated image an intrinsic part of the viewers experience. Schumacher
has sent friends and curators physical objects, presents (such as a car
doors from ebay) in the mail. The intention being that he would like to give
people objects that he has only seen in a photograph.
3
He engages with
the dispersion and circulation of his works as a supplement to his gallery
based practice. In an interview with Bob Nickas in the September 2011 is-
sue Mousse Magazine Schumacher says I am also interested in a lot of
the same ideas about the mobility and instability of images. I grew up in
a rural area of Ontario, only seeing sculpture in magazines or on the In-
ternet. My rst sculpture was actually made to be photographed, and then
destroyed. This harks back to Duchamp and how the fountain was placed
in art history through the photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. Schumacher has
begun to customize the image documentation in order to ctionalize the
actual object. In a press release for his 2012 show Register of Documents
1974- at James Fuentes, Schumacher sums up One cannot maintain that a
work, inclusive of its properties, exists out there on the internet irrespective
of our consciousness of it.
4
Does our consciousness of a work embed the
physical manifestation of it in a particular space or time? Through media-
tion of this work can we discover slippages in how the work functions.
The format of the way we access visual art depends specically
upon the medium of its reception. There are consequences in terms of how
we encounter images in visual culture, essentially the meaning and experi-
ence of the work is altered. When we watch a video of a performance on
a phone or see paintings hanging in the background of a TV show each
mediation of the work alters our perception. In the 1972 documentary from
the BBC entitled Ways of Seeing John Berger expands: When the cam-
era reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a
result its meaning changes. Or more exactly, its meaning multiplies and
fragments into many meanings. This
is vividly illustrated by what happens
when a painting is shown on a televi-
sion screen. The painting enters each
viewers house. There it is surrounded
by his wallpaper, his furniture, his me-
mentoes. It enters the atmosphere of his
family. It becomes their talking point. It
lends meaning to their meaning.
5
What Berger is pointing to is how the
work travels through the context of the media and fractures to become part
of a larger milieu of life. This means the artwork is no longer situated in the
specialized elite of uptown galleries or the museum, it exists in a broader
context, reaching a larger audience.
There is a power shift in taking claim to the way that a work is
mediated. Lets look at this story about the artist Yves Klein. In 1962
Klein attended the Cannes Film Festival, for the screening of the exploita-
tion documentary Mondo Cane. The lmmakers had captured one of his
performances. The appalling segment of his work depicted Anthropom-
etries of the Blue Epoch completely out of context. The secondary media-
tion by lmmakers shifted the meaning of his intention with the artwork
entirely. The music had been switched from The Monotone Symphony,
his minimalist one note composition to a cheerful jazz song. The live
nude models begin to paint each other from buckets of IKB Blue paint,
and depicted salaciously they move to a large canvas and press their na-
ked bodies to it. The Narrator chimes in with a dismissive description:
As some of you may have guessed, Kleins favorite color is blue. Blue is
also his favorite form as a matter of fact blue is his only form and his only
color. Blue are his paintings for which there are a great demand. Blue is the
work towards which
our cameras are moving. Considered by most authoritative critics the great-
est Klein masterpiece and which the expert is ready to deduct that blue is the
dominant color... The masterpiece, each stage of whose creation we have
had the pleasure of recording on lm, is on sale for only four million francs.
6

Klein was humiliated at this misrepresentation of his work. Mondo Cane
represented him as sexually deviant instead of the distinguished and ab-
stinent ritual he had intended. He believed in his work so strongly that he
ended up becoming physically
distressed at the portrayal of
his work in the lm. Although
this situation was unfortunate
Klein was keenly aware of how
to use mediation. Just two years
before in 1960 he created his
newspaper Dimanche and the
work served many functions,
part declaration of a holiday,
part performance, part appro-
priation. Klein was able hint at
the many future movements taking shape in that era. Klein claimed with
the photomontage Leap into the Void that he was a painter of space, so in
order to paint space he had to gure himself in space itself. Klein was able
to seamlessly merge art and life and consider mediation in the form of a
newspaper a part of his work. I have experienced this work in person and
on the internet, and there is a real sense of the historical document seeing
the work printed on newsprint, crumbling at the edges. There was a lost
fragility when you download a PDF from an archive. I believe that Klein
was meticulous in his persona and knew that good public relations and the
contextualization of the work was what gave it presence and established
him into the history books.
The speed of production and disper-
sal has increased to a fever pace and content is
documented and published in the digital realm in
a continuous self-satised cycle. The media has
swelled to accommodate the global-village, and
with the expanse of internet it means literally ev-
eryone can be on it. McLuhan believed that the
media is an extension of the self, and at its core the media we think of today
is a narcissistic concept. This shift in scale has become the false-guise of
connection, and the speed of information is such that we expect everything
to be instantly accessible, downloadable, and categorized for us. In his
essay Use Me Up the Art Critic Jan Verwoert poses that: ..the economic
rationale of just-in-time-production lies precisely in the realization that the
storage of goods in warehouses is too costly and has to be replaced by mod-
els of distribution where the consumer or client can access the desired ser-
vice or product right away (ideally through downloading).
7
He goes on to
say that this should be actualized as fast as possible. This idea works for
capitalism through online shopping, but what happens to cultural capital
8

when applied to these new modes of distribution?
We all know that there are things that the internet cannot tell us.
Yet can we exist autonomously from this era of technology? Our accessi-
bility means we are lazy and hesitant to interact in real space. When we
allow our mediated selves in a digital sense to take over the actual, a shift
happens: we begin to lose
touch with reality. Filters,
not unlike curated spaces,
exist within the media be-
cause there is limitless in-
formation on the internet
and these clarify and articu-
late what deserves our attention. Through social mediation we experience
the art work at an opening or crowded free museum night or when we share
a link with a friend via a website. There is a certain expectation within these
so called curated social interactions. We anticipate a high level of quality
within the exchange with these people or institutions; therefore we trust
their opinions. Writer Sarah Hromack in the catalogue Never Odd or Even
delves into the idea of Acceptable Approximation. She calls into question
her conduct: Where things become genuinely disconcerting, is when I []
fail to control my own behavior in relationship to the internet, allowing it to
serve as an acceptable approximation for the physical experience itself.
9
If
this mediation is what we begin to accept as the real world, a schema needs
to be articulated to deal with these inadequacies and consider the media-
tion part of the artwork itself. If not examined the dissipation of artwork re-
lies on mediation as a crutch instead of using it as a virtue. We need be clear
in what we gain from these mediated states. This situation can quickly dis-
sipate into the realm of self-exploitation and then we begin to utilize media
that is already in dialogue with a lter that has no clear intention. Shouldnt
the form of the work manifest itself in relationship to the media it is being
presented?
Where do the lines become blurred between art and mediation? Is
there a way to rethink the mediated experience as the primary encounter of
the work? Articulating what is considered art becomes increasingly ardu-
ous. Is the artwork found in the photographic documentation of a work,
the online presence, the book or the catalogue, supporting records and
drawings, or specically the actual physical object? Artist Dan Graham ob-
served in the 1960s a work of art had to be reproduced in a magazine or had
to be written about, to be considered worthy of the status of art. This state-
ment comes in an era where there is a weight on the physicality of the work.
Typical to the question
of mediated documenta-
tion is the archive format
of conceptual works of
this time. The documen-
tation begins with the
Land Art movement and
then through to Conceptualism where artists need something physical to
document space or idea. For example many of Baldessaris works exist only
in documentation, we cant see his cremated paintings or watch him sing
Lewitt (because he never performed this live) but there are photographs
and videos of this work.
Mediation can also point to re-representation of historical works
within an art context, and with this in mind, we can consider Sherrie Levines
work. She has utilized mediation to question authenticity throughout
her career. Levine has successfully rewritten art history by appropriating
various images and objects as her work. Her most famous photographs are
After Walker Evans (1981), which are re-photographs of Walker Evans
iconic photographs of Americana from his exhibition catalogue First and
Last. By doing this Levine questions authorship, authenticity, identity,
property, originality and artistic lineage.
10
She asks that is to say, what do
we own? What is the same?
11
This work is seminal to postmodernism,
taking on the role of patriarchal authority and critiquing commodity and
institution simultaneously. In his book on Levine, Howard Singerman
claims that Walter Benjamins Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction has left its mark in the invocation, for example of the value
of uniqueness, and even more clearly in the listing of those notions of
value, of presence or aura, of authenticity that are being revived.
11
Levine
desperately wants to posses these works, and by making her own versions
she can, and will. She takes on mediation as a way to circulate her ideas
of appropriation. Levine said in an 1985 interview Having the feeling of
somehow being outside of the mainstream of the art world had a lot to
do with my feelings about art. Seeing everything through magazines and
booksI got a lot of my sense of what art looked like in terms of surface
and nish.
12
Through mediation she alters the meaning of the original
work drastically. In After Courbet: 1-18 she uses Gustave Courbets The
Orgin of the World and then reinterprets the work as a framed multiple
from a museum postcard borrowing legitimacy from the institution itself.
I have experienced this work at the Whitney Museum and if you removed
the fancy frames and articulate lighting these postcards could exist in the
gift shop postcard rack. Levine elevates the object but her mediation is
about the seductiveness of materials and understanding how these react in
space. Levine challenges the assumptions about mediation by examining
the impact of viewing a work digitally, in a magazine, book or museum.
A critical aspect that comes from this is the articulation of the aura
of a work. What happens to this undenable quality that surrounds a work?
What is it the aura of a work when it is mediated? A computer screen or
photograph cannot pick up the different gradations of black in an Ad Re-
inhardt painting, yet he purposefully created the work this way, to reject
mediation which he experienced in his illustration career.
13
The represen-
tation of art work on the internet changes the embodiment of how you view
the work. Primary experience could be described as the reaction you have
when you spend time with a work rst hand. The color of the paint, the
edges of the frame, the scale in relationship to your body the details that
the eye can pick up are important signiers to how the work functions in
space. There is a precedent in the rst hand experience of a work. Today,
there is unprecedented access that artists can use to distribute their work
by documenting it and then hyper-contextualizing the work by publishing
it online instantly. This attributes to the myth that the artist can create for
themselves. The artist is in a constant production-consumption cycle and
because of the demand from the speed of the media there is an expectation
to constantly participate. Are contemporary artists thinking of ways to con-
ceive this work through technology?
Maybe a complete rejection of mediation is a canny way to achieve
attention for an artwork. Tino Sehgals practice certainly claims this rejec-
tion. His works are a counter to the norm of high priced object based fetish-
ism that is a standard in the art market. As a viewer you can only experience
the works in the space and time that they occupy and the memory of the
work is the only documentation. A quick web search shows that on his deal-
er Marian Goodmans website there is only a blank space where an image
would represent his work. Although there is a no documentation rule there
are photographs of his work such as The Kiss available on the New York
Times
14
Art Review, (they cite that this image was taken with an iPhone).
Sehgals constructed situations use language, voice, interaction and move-
ment and are similar to Bas Jan
Aders concept of using gravity
as a medium. Sehgal however,
certianly has a sale price for
these works, but the buyer re-
ceives no written receipt of the work, only a conversation with a notary be-
ing the oral contract. Is the way to separate ones work to reject completely
the system that it occupies? Anything outside this standard becomes talked
about, a strategy for distributing through word of mouth.
As art increases in scope it becomes a container for expanding
ideas and assumes a mediated relationship completely. Marshall McLu-
hans pop philosophical idea, The Medium is the Message can be applied
to the mediation of Visual Art in cultural society. Artists can use mediation
as a tool and thus the mediation can become the work. A loss of control in
mediation is inevitable but if the artist is aware of what mediation can do
and how it could even become the work a power reversal is possible. This
fragmentary positioning of the artwork, in its mediation will help the work
to exist beyond its initial format. This mediation can be harnessed to give
the work back a self-assertion that the lter ultimately disrupts.
By Robin Cameron
2012
This essay is published by
Document, an online distribution
project of Bodega
Works Cited
1 Annie Hall. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton. MGM,
1977. DVD.
2 Price, Seth. Dispersion. Facsim. ed. New York: 38th Street Publishers,
2008. Print.
3 Nickas, Bob. Mousse Magazine NICE TO MEET YOU - Ben Schum-
acher, Things That Look Like Other Things, Sept, 2011. Print
4 Schumacher, Ben. Register of Documents 1974- Press Release James
Fuentes, 2012. Print
5 Berger, John. Ways of seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corpora-
tion, 1972. Print.
6 Mondo Cane. Dir. Paolo Cavara. Perf. Rossano Brazzi, Stefano Sibaldi.
Italy, 1962. DVD.
7 Jan Verwoert Use Me Up. Metropolis M, No 1, 2007. Print
8 Cultural capital articulated as non-economic worth and upward social
mobility through educational and intellectual pursuits. See Cultural Repro-
duction and Social Reproduction and Pierre Bourdieu
9 Hromack, Sarah, Never Odd or Even. Acceptable Approximation cata-
logue Goethe-Institut New York, 2011
10 Singerman, Howard, and Sherrie Levine. Art history, after Sher-
rie Levine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Print.
11 Whitney Museum. Mayhem: Sherrie Levine. Whitney Museum Cata-
logue 1 (2011): 1. Print.
12 Siegel, Jeanne. After Sherrie Levine, Arts Magazine, Summer 1985,
13 Bois, Yve-Alain. What is there to see, on a painting by Ad Reinhardt,
MoMA, No. 8 (Summer, 1991). Print
14 Cotter, Holland, The New York Times Art Review, http://www.ny-
times.com/2010/02/01/arts/design/01tino.html?pagewanted=all Jan, 2010