Post Medium and me

In his essay "Medium Specificity in Post-Media Practice," Alessandro Chierico engages with Rosalind Krauss's theories from The Optical Unconscious (1993), where Krauss examines Clement Greenberg's assessment of Jackson Pollock through his notion of "medium specificity."1 While Greenberg interprets Pollock’s work as a display of painting’s inherent qualities, Krauss argues that Pollock’s drippings represent a new artistic practice rather than a mere celebration of the medium. Pollock’s horizontal painting technique and distinct methods for creating his drippings establish a set of conventions unique to his work.2

Krauss elaborates:

To sustain artistic practice, a medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly 'specific' to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity 3.

Krauss suggests that, in our post-medium condition, emphasis shifts from the medium itself to "specific objects". Krauss, however, argues that artists must reinvent their mediums, merging the specificities of the media with their creative intentions through conventions that bring the artwork into being. This reinvention of medium for artistic purposes, she asserts, is crucial to contemporary art practice.4

This perspective relates to my approach in my next series of sewn and collaged paintings, where stitching, gluing, and configuring spaces or pauses between the works allow the medium itself to generate meaning and structure (fig. 1).

Figure 1, Sally Barron, Single memory, Oil and collage on canvas, 16500mm x 1800mm 2024

I have been considering repeating pattern and negative space, (in some cases literally blank canvas pieces), as an impactful way to create abstraction from other painted sources.

Figure 1. Sally Barron, second landscapes, 2024. House paint, acrylic, ink, and oil on canvas, 2050 x 900 mm.

The work of Jo Bradley and Sterling Ruby have been influential as both use an industrial sewing background to create their work (fig. 2).

Figure 2, Joe Bradley, East Coker, 2013, oil on canvas, 100 × 102 inches (254 × 259.1 cm). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Working on the floor allowed me to use long-handled brushes from a standing position, and walking over the canvas left imprints, showing the process of making the work on the floor rather than on the wall. Other methods, such as pouring, dragging tools, and imprinting with objects, also influenced the texture and marks (fig. 3).

Figure 3, Sally Barron, Weather Notes, Wip, Housepaint, pencil and collage on unstretched canvas 1500mm x 1500mm 2024

footnotes

1 Chierico, A. 2016. "Medium Specificity in Post-Media Practice." V!RUS, 12. [online] Available at: http://www.nomads.usp.br/virus/virus12/?sec=4&item=6&lang=en, [Accessed: September 28, 2024].

2 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 26.

3 Ibid

4 Ibid