Krauss, R E. 2000. A Voyage On The North Sea - Summary, Alice Trow

Alice Trow
“A Voyage on the North Sea”

Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition
Rosalind Krauss
In the preface, Krauss sets out to introduce the purpose of the essay and suggests that it
essentially stems from her dislike of the word ‘medium’ and what it stood for: it had become
too contaminated, too ideologically/dogmatically/discursively loaded. Krauss had a problem
with the fact that from the 60s onwards, the word ‘medium’ had become synonymous with
Greenberg and, as a result, any understandings of ‘medium’ prior to Greenberg had been
stripped of their complexity. Instead of agreeing with Greenberg’s definition of medium as
mere physical object, Krauss agrees with Cavelle, who believed in the internal plurality of
any given medium. Leading on from this, Krauss suggests that ‘medium specificity’ is
intrinsic to any discussion of how the conventions layered into a medium might function.
Throughout the essay, Krauss chronologically explores the events which have led to what she
describes as the ‘post-medium’ condition. Despite acknowledging several factors – such as
the invention of the Portapak camera which simultaneously proclaimed the end of medium
specificity and introduced the notion of medium as aggregative and complex – she suggests
that essentially we can attribute the creation of this condition to the work of Marcel
Broodthaers. She argues that it was he who first alluded to the post-medium condition in
1974, with his design of the cover of the Studio International magazine which seemed to
imply the end of the arts: “Fin Art”.
She calls upon the ideas Donald Judd and his belief that the reductive modernism of the late
60s and early 70s had reduced painting and sculpture to “specific objects”, and hence that any
distinction between the two mediums was now over. Having acknowledged this, however,
she aligns herself to Joseph Kosuth, who described the outcome of modernist reduction as not
specific, as Judd had suggested, but general. In searching for the essence of painting, they had
put painting into the generic category of art. Now, the objective of the modernist was to
define the essence of art itself and to question the nature of art. This, she argues, was the
beginning of conceptual art.
Conceptual art, Krauss writes, saw itself as purifying art of its “material dross” and, as a
result, securing a higher clarity for art so it could adopt any form and escape the effects of a
market which saw abstract art as an “industrially produced commodity.” She uses
Broodthaers’ Museum of Modern Art; Eagles Department to demonstrate this as it
represented a hybrid or intermedia condition in which not only language and image, but high
and low, and any other oppositional pairing one can think of, will freely mix. Broodthaers’
installation proposed that “every material support will now be levelled, reduced to a system
of pure equivalency”, which, Krauss argues, is responsible for the post-medium age which we
now inhabit.
Krauss then moves on to Broodthaers’ Voyage on the North Sea – to which the essay owes its
name – to further illustrate what seem to be the central arguments of the piece. She suggests
that the passage between surfaces in the work acts as a layering that draws analogy between
stacked pages of a book and the additive condition of paint on a canvas. In this layering,
Broodthaers tells us of the impossibility of Greenberg’s theory of ‘medium as mere physical
Alice Trow
object’ and proposes the idea of the self-differential condition of mediums themselves. This
exemplifies Krauss’s argument that the specificity of mediums must be understood as
differential, self-differing, and thus as a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into
the physicality of their support. She also suggests that in Broodthaers’ combination of
technology with commonplace objects, it is the onset of higher orders of technology (e.g. the
computer) which allow us, by rendering older techniques outmoded, to grasp the inner
complexity of the mediums those techniques support.
Essentially, Krauss argues that Marcel Broodthaers embodies the idea of the post-medium
condition in the sense that his work dismantles the idea of the ‘proper’ – the self-identical and
specificity of medium – in favour of the idea of medium being self-differing and aggregative.

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Alice Trow

“A Voyage on the North Sea”

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