No Medium (MIT Press) by Craig Dworkin

by Craig Dworkin

Close readings of ostensibly “blank” works—from unprinted pages to silent music—that point to a new understanding of media. In No Medium , Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau's Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawin g to the artist Nick Thurston's erased copy of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston's marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage's 4'33” , Dworkin links Cage's composition to Rauschenberg's White Paintings , Ken Friedman's Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film ), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music. Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.

Genres: Art

Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in love with Craig Dworkin's body (of critical writing). The "Further Listening" section alone is worth the price of admission here, as is the half-sardonic, half-in love tone of criticism. See, for example, this entry:

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse: Dark Night of the Soul (self-released, 2009). Brian Burton and Mark Linkous collaborated with over a dozen singers for a concept album of trippy, moody self-regard. Fortunately, a dispute with EMI kept the music from being included in this release, which instead offered a booklet bloated to over one-hundred hard-backed pages of David Lynch photographs and a recordable disc with the explanation: "For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will." Sadly, the dispute was quickly resolved and the songs were officially released the following year. Not to be confused with a Jarrod Fowler project.

Oh, and there's plenty of able, cutting-edge criticism that precedes this stuff too. Just great.

[Chris Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has an interesting, if somewhat vapid, premise. Dworkin takes a couple hundred pages to do close readings on blank books. This seems to me to be much ado about nothing. The best part is the last chapter, where he steals from the archives of WPRB (a radio station where I used to work) to discuss silent recordings. In all, however, I would say I'll continue to write books with actual words in them, thanks anyway.

[Mills College Library]

701.8 D9934 2013