What Ever Happened to Medium Specificity? Problems with 'New Media' and What to Do with Contemporary Art Categorization

Jeff Koons, Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985, Basketballs, sodium chloride reagent in distilled water. MCA.

Ashley Bickerton, Wetlandscape #2, 1990. Anodized aluminum, steel, glass, wood, leather, sand, rocks, and decomposed seaweed. MCA.

Adrian Piper, Out of the Corner, 1990 (installation view, Full House, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006). Sixty-four gelatin silver prints, table, sixteen chairs, pedestals, specified lighting, seventeen monitors, seventeen DVD players, and seventeen DVDs, color, sound; 26 minutes each (originally shown on 3/4-inch videotape).

Dan Flavin, Untitled (for Robert, with fond regards), 1977. Pink, yellow, and red fluorescent lights. Whitney Museum.

Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, 1965. 17-inch black-and-white television set with magnet. Whitney Museum.

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991. Wax, cloth, wood, leather, and human hair. Whitney Museum.

Within the discourse of contemporary art history, there is a tendency to refer to “new media” art. This vague term is a symptom of a problem that stems from the need to classify works of art. Until the mid-twentieth century, whenever an artist produced a work, it necessarily came into dialogue with a specific tradition of the medium in which it was produced. What this selection of images aims to highlight is how art in the last 50 years has progressed in a new direction, namely, one that often refuses clear and direct classification. That is not to say that classification is not possible. Most of these works could be or are considered "installations," which is another vague term that attempts to put works of extreme variation into one category based on their method of exhibition. There has been a drastic turn away from specific media traditions that has occurred in post-modern art with the centralization of the concept as the vehicle for artistic creation. This sometimes can lead to a kind of confusion that causes all contemporary art to be considered "new media" unless it is directly in dialogue with a traditional media. It is easier to call a Sol LeWitt wall drawing a drawing than it is to call Matta-Clark's Splitting a sculpture or installation. That's were "new media" terms like "site-specific" come into play. But while these terms can help us make more contemporary and relevant categories for works that purposefully exceed boundaries, they don't necessary solve the problem. And then there is McLuhan on the subject, who says that all media are "new" at some point. Is it really the media that are new, in the case of new media? I personally do not believe so. Instead, it is a different tradition of art making that we are witnessing develop. Again, I say different, not necessarily new.