| This dissertation engages two conflicting concepts of medium that have developed in contemporary art theory and media studies in the postwar period (1960-1990): the aesthetic versus the technological medium. The critical question that underlies this dissertation is why the term "medium" has been privileged in the field of contemporary art theory at the expense of its plural, "media." Applying the interdisciplinary method of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) to the field of art theory, this dissertation argues that a polemical antagonism between modern art theory and the emerging field of media studies developed in the postwar period starting with two of the most influential intellectuals of American Cold War culture in the 1960s: Art critic Clement Greenberg and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. This comparative analysis of their concepts of medium demonstrates, by way of rivalry theories of Harold Bloom and Rene Girard, that Greenberg and McLuhan initiated this diametrically opposed discourse on medium in their major writings, "Modernist Painting" (1960) and Understanding Media (1964). The historical claim of this dissertation is that these two intellectual traditions of medium conceptualization continued in the 1990s, when its bipolar positions passed on to---in Bloom's vocabulary---two of Greenberg's and McLuhan's strongest heirs: the Literaturwissenschaftler and media archaeologist Friedrich Kittler and the art historian, theorist, and critic Rosalind Krauss, in books such as Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) and "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999).;Dissatisfied with the existing concepts of the aesthetic and the technological medium and the seemingly never-ending Laocoonic struggle between the arts and the media, this dissertation advocates the development of an alternative concept of medium that reconciles these antithetical positions on the intersection of aesthetics and technology. For, whether aesthetic or technological in conception, the underlying discourses of medium challenge and make use of each other throughout the postwar period. A three-dimensional version of Girard's mimetic triangle is used as the explanatory model to illuminate the intrinsic intersections among the four theorists' notions of medium---a precondition for resolving the categorical conflicts between them and preparing the ground for a third concept of medium. |
