Thus, if I have decided in the end to retain the word “medium,” it is because for all the misunderstandings and abuses attached to it, this is the term that opens onto the discursive field that I want to address. This is true at the historical level in that the fate of this concept seems to belong chronologically to the rise of a critical post-modernism (institutional critique, site specificity) that in its turn has poduced its own problematic aftermath (the international phenomenon of installation art). It seemed, that is, that only “medium” would face onto this turn of events. And at a lexical level, it is the word “medium” and not something like “automatism,” that brings the issue of “specificity” in this wake—as in the designation “medium-specificity.”
Krauss, Rosalind. “A Voyage on the North Sea.” Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000[1999].
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