intermedia

George Brecht (1962) Solo for Violin, Cello or Contrabass

Philip Corner (1962) Piano Activities

Dick Higgins (1964) Fluxus Street Performance [photo by George Maciunas]

IntermediaJames Clegg

(Ingold and Hallum 2007)

A ‘Forward Reading’ of Creativity

TemporalRelationalGenerative‘It is the way we work…’

Le Corbusier (1928) Villa Savoye

The Everyday

“It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been located in activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, for example, in the morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of my elbow moving up and down...”

(Kaprow 1986)

art

On Intermedia: “When art is only one of several possible functions a situation may have, it loses its privileged status and becomes, so to speak, a lowercase attribute.” (Kaprow 1971, p.105)

Materiality

“The intermedial response can be applied to anything – say, an old glass. The glass can serve the geometrist [sic] to explain ellipses; for the historian it can be an index of the technology of a past age; for a painter it can become part of a still life, and the gourmet can use it to drink his Chateau Latour 1953”

“We are not used to thinking like this, all at once, or nonhierarchically, but the intermedialist does it naturally. Context rather than category. Flow rather than work of art.”

(Ibid p.105)

objects

Institutional Art intermedia

Institutional Art

Cornelia Parker (1991) Cold Dark Matter

Frozen Objects and Fixed Things

“Where there is no visible action there can be no play.”(Huizinga 1955, p.166)

“The goal or aspiration of much of the tradition of Western thought has been directed towards the establishment of meaning and presence as an outgrowth of fixed abstract essences or higher conceptual ideals. Fluxus, however, rejects this tradition and posits instead a view of the world and its operations which celebrates an absence of a higher meaning or a unified conceptual framework while simultaneously stressing the act of this very celebration.” (Smith 1992, p.116)

Hannah Higgins (2002)

“Fluxus materials are useful in … an emancipatory sense – not because they construct political ideologies but rather because they provide contexts… for primary experiences.” (Higgins 2002, p.58)

Presence

Absence

“… to insist that primary experience is paramount in Fluxus counters any move to assign specific and permanent meanings to the work.”

(Ibid p.59)

Intermedia

Inter…

“I cannot … name work which has consciously been placed in the intermedium between painting and shoes.” (Higgins 1965)

Different conditions for intermedia now…

“The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social thought – categorizing and dividing society…”

(Higgins 1965)

Does every artist now make intermedia?

What “position” could intermedia have today?

(Taken from Latour 1993, p.11)

De Certeau 1988

Yuriko Saito (2007) everyday aesthetics

How should boundaries be drawn around the contemporary sources I analyze?

What methodologies might I use to ‘analyze’ intermedial works?

What academic field will this work best be suited for?

Can intermedia be considered a ‘discipline’ and can it really be considered to have a future?

References