Page 13 - Cyberculture and New Media

4 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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expressed by means of the flatness of the form; for sculpture, it is the
rotational affordance of one’s gaze in three dimensions that produces and
transcends the rustle of narrative in the object. Through this interpretive
specialisation, the production conditions of each medium could be used to
critique the medium itself; paintings that use, evoke, or transcend the
backdrop of the level plane are in conversation with the conditions of the
flatness of their native medium, and thus, for Greenberg, will definably self-
identify with the aesthetic traditions of modernism. The legendary
proclamation, Greenberg’s most oft-quoted mantra, was unequivocal: “The
essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of
a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in
order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”, and reveals with
the passage of time an assumption of stability and transparency of medium
that is so unimaginable today that one can look to Greenberg’s own examples
as sites of contradiction vis-à-vis the evolving concerns of new media. On
one hand, Greenberg erects high art as specifically medium-derived:

Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi,
even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief
inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement
of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation
with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces,
shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not
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necessarily implicated in these factors.

Immediately we might remember, however, that several expressive
genres, chief among them that of collage, distort the material and aesthetic
integrity of the medium as defined by Greenberg’s prohibitive art panorama.
We might consider collage as not-painting, but it is not sculpture, either; its
coarse, uneven tatters, cementations of more than immediate expression,
announce the commanding plan of bastard form, and thus the cacophony of a
staunch anti-formalism. As neither painting nor sculpture, collage could be
th
inaugurated as the first new art medium of 20 century sensibility. The
difficulties for Greenberg in approaching this medium point to the persistence
of the modernist optic in attempting to frame media that have already entered
new paradigmatic space. His Collage essay, focusing on pasted paper,
formation of shapes, and interlocking silhouettes, in short, issues of material
support and the mounting of elements so physically central to collage, all but
ignores the expressive force of that practice as a hard-edged support whose
exploration in subsequent political uses underscores the necessary
relationship of medium to message that became a cybercultural credo. That
Greenberg’s Collage essay, which remains still too under-explored, was to be