This paper addresses automatism and autonomy in artistic mediums as found in the parallel of Stanley Cavell’s and Rosalind E. Krauss’ thought. Their alternative concepts of medium, which they invented to stand against the vacuous generalization of...
This paper addresses automatism and autonomy in artistic mediums as found in the parallel of Stanley Cavell’s and Rosalind E. Krauss’ thought. Their alternative concepts of medium, which they invented to stand against the vacuous generalization of the aesthetic in media dominance, have been significant in film and visual art. Based on the physical irreducibility of the medium implied by Cavell's automatism, Krauss’s "technical supports" delve into how contemporary artists’s practices are reinventing mediums. Through a more comparative investigation of two concepts, this paper aims to reveal their strategies and orientations of each alternative conception of medium regarding agency, automatism, and autonomy. In short, while Cavell implicated artistic mediums in a potential and generative mode of artistic existence in the moment of consciousness of modernism, Krauss, as a post-structuralist, brings it into a psychoanalytic and postmodern frame, presenting ‘the technical' as a possible condition for the autonomy of art over the impossibility of modernist medium specificity.