Introduction:

The Medium
before
Modernism
Roland Betancourt
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
University of California, Irvine

Medium and its specificity have oriented the discourse on the arts throughout
various historic and historiographic periods. Clement Greenberg, for example,
was one of the most vocal and notorious representatives in recent history to
advocate for the specificity of the medium as the legitimating drive of artistic
production.1 For him it was a self-reflexive study of paintings two-dimensional
picture plane that was the only true driving force for an avant-garde in the late
twentieth century: namely, around issues of flatness and opticality. The critical
discourse that emerged around Greenberg and his followers focused on the
various articulations and possibilities of the medium as an orienting tactic for
artistic production in the face of trends, such as minimalism and conceptualism,
which challenged the predominance of medium-specificity, particularly the role
of painting in modern art history. This was certainly manifested in the works
of Greenbergs acolytes, such as in Michael Frieds take on minimalism and the
enduring problem of theatricality.2

The advent of performance, installation, new media art, and so on have chal-
lenged these particular narratives and called for the necessity for new modes
of investigation. This likewise has been met within the academy by efforts to
more actively involve archaeological and anthropological theory in the disci-
pline, alongside the promulgation of visual studies, material culture studies,
and design history as programs and departments of research within or beside
art history departments. Approaches such as the latter take a holistic view of
the history of culture that by necessity is both highly interdisciplinary and
all-encompassing of material ranging from industrial products, crafts, and
popular culture to art. Nevertheless, the discipline of art history as a whole still
bears traces of earlier intellectual traditions. This can be seen not only in the
divisions along areas of specialization, study, and display, but also in the way
in which we continue to conceive of an aesthetic medium as nothing more
than an unworked physical support, to quote Rosalind Krauss.3 It is no sur-
prise that medium would endure in this fashion, given that the origins of this
conversation emerged alongside the birth of the modern discipline, specifically
in Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Laocon from 1766.4 Lessings work was written
as a response to his contemporary Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the founder
of the modern discipline of art history. Throughout Laocon, Lessing criticizes

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Winckelmann for his misunderstanding and ignorance of the manner in which
medium contoured the meaning of art. 5

Over the past twenty years, art historians have gone through a slow and
methodic sensual turn, moving from visuality through the various senses and on
to a broader interest in materiality. In the past decade, the revitalized interest
in phenomenology, materiality, and agency, and the ongoing debates regarding
object-oriented ontology, have drawn attention back to the material under-
pinnings of the arts. While enabled by critical theory and its afterlife in areas
such as queer theory, archaeology, and philosophy, such methods have often
enacted a bureaucratization of the senses: at first, studying each of the senses
uniquely, moving through individually one by one, and then seeking to rearticu-
late, redefine, and rehabilitate forms of medium-specificity, whereby medium is
once again reduced and pinned down to the unworked substrate of its matter.
These trends in the humanities at large demonstrate a burgeoning return to
the notion of the medium with its various ontological and phenomenological
permutations.

Notably, however, these methods have become predominant in art histori-

cal discourse primarily in subfields outside of modernity, such as the ancient
world, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period. These are presumably
areas of study less tired, bored, and scarred by the modernist debates around
medium-specificity.6 While debates regarding object-oriented ontology and
speculative realism have found their place either within medieval literature
studies (far away from art historical discourse) or in the contemporary art world,
they have had little import for the art and visual culture of the ancient and
medieval worlds. In other words, while issues of matter and materiality taken
directly from archaeology, anthropology, and material culture studies have
recently thrived in medieval art history, the more conceptual and philosophi-
cally oriented conversation regarding the ontology of objects has had far less of
an impact. In contemporary art, discourses such as actor-network theory and
object-oriented ontology have been favored. This conversation on new material-
isms is defined by an interest in how the being of things exists within distributed
networks of action, agency, and objects, rather than by the reification of the
thing itself down to its mere material makeup, as has been the case in premod-
ern and early modern scholarship.

Materiality, as ancient and medieval art history has only recently come to know
it, has been immensely indebted to the work of theoretical archaeologists such
as Chris Tilley, Tim Ingold, Daniel Miller, Lynn Meskell, and Ian Hodder. These
writers, among countless others in visual culture, media studies, and design
history, have been championing studies in materiality since the mid-1990s,
with a flourishing of this work in the early to mid-2000s.7 The wanderings and
permutations of discourses around materiality in the premodern world remind
us of the role that medium has in the conception and definition of the work of
art. Thus, the need to critically reexamine medium in the ancient and medieval
world is that in doing so we are inherently challenging the notion of an era
before art, as Hans Belting suggested. As Belting resolutely put it in Likeness
and Presence, published in 1990 and translated into English in 1995, with the rise

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 of the modern image, [f]orm and content renounce their unmediated meaning
in favor of the mediated meaning of aesthetic experience and concealed argu-
mentation. 8 The cult image is thus structured as such by virtue of being bereft
of a medium and thus is made fully present through a system that circumvents
representation and signification altogether. The loss of unmediated presence
and the rise of a formalist admiration for the skill of images are precisely what
Michael Camilles The Gothic Idol from 1989 ascribed to the rise
of the artwork proper in the early modern period.9

Thus, it is worth considering that in the mid-1990s, the very period when the
medium was coming to be seen as an obsolete concern in modernist art, its
place within the premodern image was also being excised.10 Articulating in
its stead was what seemed to be, at least on the surface, a consideration of the
cultural ontology of art and the fraught status of the medium, but this was
medium defined in terms of its structures and methods of mediation rather
than oriented around matter, materiality, phenomenology, or ontology. At stake
in this is the fact that if we privilege the self-reflexive understanding and use
of a works medium as synonymous with the modernity of art, and by extension
the definition of art proper, then divisions between art and visual culture, and
premodern and modern art, are wholly blurred. In other words, recent stud-
ies on materiality in premodern visual culture make it impossible to claim the
ancient or medieval worlds as part of an era before art, an argument that has
been developing for the past two decades in art history, and which scholars in
visual/material culture studies and design history have long understood. Clem-
ent Greenberg himself was acutely aware of this fact in his eloquent writing on
Byzantine and medieval art, in which he praised the self-referential take on
medium pervasive in the sculptural practices of late antiquity and in the rise of
the icon in the Byzantine world.11

The challenge, then, for the premodern or early modern art historian is to
rethink the definition of medium beyond the reductive and reifying think-
ing of it as merely the underlying matter, material, or technical skill of the
artwork. Today, medium and its specificity are a necessary and poignant
lineage of thought for premodernists because of the current attractiveness of
and interest in methods that seek to focus upon the meaning and material of
ontology and interobject relations, bearing an almost repetitive parallel to the
discourses of previous decades. Certainly these new materialisms are no longer
oriented around issues of flatness or opticality, but they carry with them their
own trends toward sensory and material specificities, as when Caroline Walker
Bynum suggests that the materials of the object ask to be touched more than
seen.12 Furthermore, these materialisms are also not oriented around matter or
material alone. Therefore, it becomes ever more necessary to think of medium
beyond matter. For scholars of material culture and design history, the works of
Ian Bogost, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad have helped to push the bounds of
materiality into a consideration of the ontological relations between objects and
the philosophical shifts our understanding of matter and being has enabled.13
Such studies, in particular, suggest next steps for premodern materialities that
go beyond any reductions of medium to the material technical support, and
that begin to stage medium instead as that generative state or condition of

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possibility that makes representation possible and undergirds the prospect of
being coming into being. The crucial shift here is understanding medium as the
condition for signification, the binary that establishes the paradigm, the very
episteme itself, which enables a discursive space of artistic practice to emerge.

In keeping with these broader trends within the wider humanities, this special
issue endeavors to think of medium beyond its traditional confines, acknowl-
edging its rich lineage in visual culture, art and design history, and theory. The
aim is to carve out spaces in the premodern world that allow us to break past
mediums already worn-out strictures and avoid earlier pitfalls, given premod-
ern art historys newfound interests in forms of materiality and materialism
that have been popular in fields such as postprocessual archaeology and design
history for several decades. The issue begins with an article by Finbarr Barry
Flood, whose argument regarding marble as medium takes us from the medi-
eval Islamic world and Byzantium to the works of modern architects Mies van
der Rohe and Adolf Loos. In this magisterial survey of the uses of architectural
marble, one can witness the intersection of form and medium as, for example,
the book-matching of marble gives way to painting meant to simulate marbles
aesthetic appearance and anthropomorphic and zoomorphic visual effects.
Patrick Crowley continues the conversation in the volume by eloquently put-
ting recent conversations on medium in an expanded field into dialogue with
ancient conceptions of rock crystal and its aesthetic properties in the facture
and reception of art. However, rather than lingering on the materiality of
crystal alone, Crowley demonstrates how transparency is developed, articulated,
and deployed as medium. In the final article, the present author takes on this
paradox between the potentiality and actuality of form within the context of
the Byzantine icon, namely in its use of gold ground. Taking its cues from
Heideggerian phenomenology, this work revisits the issue of phenomenology
in Byzantine art and perception, informed by recent conversations regarding
object-oriented ontology and the equipmentality, or tool-being, of objects in
the world. Together these three interventions contribute to an understanding
of medium as the event of manifestation, harnessing those moments where
transparency, abstraction, or formlessness gives way to the revelation of form in
momentary flashes of representation. This acute understanding of the fragil-
ity of medium speaks to the continued eloquence and potential of thinking
through medium and mediation outside the strict bounds of matter. In other
words, this volume reminds us to ascribe a medium not to the underlying mate-
rials of an artwork, but rather to the dynamic actions and operations that the
artwork undertakes in its perception and perceptibility as such.

Roland Betancourt

1 Clement Greenberg, Towards a Newer Laocoon, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1:
Perceptions and Judgments, 19391944, ed. John OBrien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
2337, at 3234.
2 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1967), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 14872; Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in
the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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 3 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1999), 6.
4 G. E. Lessing, Laocon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
5 See Victor Anthony Rudowski, Lessing contra Winckelmann, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
44:3 (1986): 23543.
6 See David Joselit, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Hal Foster, eds., A Questionnaire on Materialisms,
October 115 (2016): 3110.
7 Medieval art history at large was introduced to two convergent lineages of materially oriented
investigation with two important publications: first, Carolyn Walker Bynums Christian Materiality from
2011, which is immensely indebted to the discourses on materiality in archaeology and anthropology;
and second, Aden Kumler and Christopher Lakeys special issue of Gesta from 2012, titled Res et
Significatio, which took a similar approach to materiality but from within the archives of medieval
and art historical discourse via the work of Friedrich Ohly. For the ancient world, a similar path
could be sketched out through the work of Lynn Meskell, Verity Platt, and Milette Gaifman, to
name but a few. And, Rebecca Zorachs Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold from 2005 is an important precedent
for these investigations in early modern art history. See Chris Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape:
Places, Paths, and Monuments (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1997); Tim Ingold, Materials against
Materiality, Archaeological Dialogues 14:1 (2007): 116; Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005); Lynn Meskell, ed., Archaeologies of Materiality (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2005); Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion
in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2011); Aden Kumler and Christopher Lakey,
Res et Significatio: The Material Sense of Things in the Middle Ages, Gesta 51:1 (2012): 117; Lynn
Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present (Oxford: Berg Publishers,
2004); Verity Platt, Making an Impression: Replication and the Ontology of the Graeco-Roman Seal
Stone, Art History 29:2 (2006): 23357; Platt, Burning Butterflies: Seals, Symbols and the Soul in
Antiquity, in Pagans and ChristiansFrom Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Lauren Gilmour (Oxford:
British Archaeological Reports, 2007), 8999; Milette Gaifman, Fluidity, Timelessness and Apollos
Libation, RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/64 (2013): 3952; Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk,
Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
8 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 16.
9 Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 33851, esp. 341.
10 See Roland Betancourt, Medieval Art after Duchamp: Hans Beltings Likeness and Presence at 25,
Gesta 55:1 (2016): 517.
11 Clement Greenberg, Byzantine Parallels, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1961), 167170. See Roland Betancourt, Introduction: The Slash as Method, in Byzantium/
Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, ed. Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina (Leiden:
Brill, 2015), 17992.
12 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 38.
13 Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006);
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010);
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

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