매체를 넘어선 매체: 로잘린드 크라우스의 ‘포스트-매체’ 담론

초록

This paper offers a multifaceted, close reading of the ‘post-medium’ discourse proposed by art critic Rosalid E. Krauss since the late 1990s. I argue that Krauss’s ‘post-medium’ discourse is meaningful in its two ways of reconfiguring the ideas of medium, more than declaring the demise of modernist medium specificity thesis. The first lies in Krauss’s conception of the medium as internally heterogeneous, self-differing, and opening itself to new relations to its neighboring arts and their corresponding material, technical, and aesthetic components. The second lies in Krauss’s elaboration on Walter Benjamin’s idea on the redemptive possibilities of the outmoded, which leads to her critical evaluation of the artistic practicies that recuperate the aesthetic potential and cultural memory from now obsolete technical supports. While discussing the implications and influences of these two conceptual layers in Krauss’s ‘post-medium’ discourse, this paper also argues for its limitation, that is, her strict dichotomy between her idea of the medium open to renivention and the media as the means of communication that threatens to annihilate the idea of medium specificity. My comparative reading of the ‘post-medium’ and the ‘post-media’ discourses offers a useful insight into this limitation caused by Krauss’s binary oppostion.

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