Distinguishing different media can help us classify the arts according to their different codes, languages and characteristics. This is probably the most common way of understanding the arts although it can be seen as superficial. Opposed to grouping according to the purpose or effect, the technique and materials the artists employ define them and their works. Traditionally an artist specialises in one of these – their preferred medium. Usually, this specific medium is used for the great part, if not all of their career.
Art as expression
The view that “art is imitation (representation)” has not only been challenged, it has been moribund in at least some of the arts since the 19th century. It was subsequently replaced by the theory that art is expression. Instead of reflecting states of the external world, art is held to reflect the inner state of the artist. This, at least, seems to be implicit in the core meaning of expression: the outer manifestation of an inner state. Art as a representation of outer existence (admittedly “seen through a temperament”) has been replaced by art as an expression of humans’ inner life.
But the terms express and expression are ambiguous and do not always denote the same thing. Like so many other terms, express is subject to the process-product ambiguity: the same word is used for a process and for the product that results from that process. “The music expresses feeling” may mean that the composer expressed human feeling in writing the music or that the music when heard is expressive (in some way yet to be defined) of human feeling. Based on the first sense are theories about the creation of art. Founded on the second are theories about the content of art and the completion of its creation.
Expression in the creation of art
The creation of a work of art is the bringing about of a new combination of elements in the medium (tones in music, words in literature, paints on canvas, and so on). The elements existed beforehand but not in the same combination; creation is the re-formation of these pre-existing materials. Pre-existence of materials holds true of creation quite apart from art: in the creation of a scientific theory or the creation of a disturbance. It applies even to creation in most theologies, except some versions of Christian theology, in which creation is ex nihilo—that is, without pre-existing matter.
That creation occurs in various art mediums is an obvious truth. But once this is granted, nothing has yet been said about expression, and the expressionist would say that the foregoing statement about creation is too mild to cover what needs to be said about the process of artistic creation. The creative process, the expressionist wants to say, is (or is also) an expressive process, and for expression something more is necessary than that the artist be creating something. Great care must be taken at this stage: some say that the creation of art is (or involves) self-expression; others say that it is the expression of feeling, though not necessarily of one’s own feeling (or perhaps that and something more, such as the feeling of one’s culture or of one’s nation or of all humanity); others say that it is not necessarily limited to feelings but that ideas or thoughts can be expressed, as they clearly are in essays. But the distinctively expressionist view of artistic creation is the product of the Romantic movement, according to which the expression of feelings constitutes the creation of art, just as philosophy and other disciplines are the expression of ideas. It is, at any rate, the theory of art as the expression of feelings (which here shall be taken to include emotions and attitudes) that has been historically significant and developed: art as specially connected with the life of feeling.
When people are said to be expressing feelings, what specifically are they doing? In a perfectly ordinary sense, expressing is “letting go” or “letting off steam”: individuals may express their anger by throwing things or by cursing or by striking the persons who have angered them. But, as many writers have pointed out, this kind of “expressing” has little to do with art; as the American philosopher John Dewey said, it is more of a “spilling over” or a “spewing forth” than expression. In art at least, expression requires a medium, a medium that is recalcitrant and that artists must bend to their will. In throwing things to express anger, there is no medium—or, if one’s body is called the medium, then it is something one does not have to study to use for that purpose. It is still necessary to distinguish a “natural release” from an expression. If poetry were literally “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as William Wordsworth said, it would consist largely of things like tears and incoherent babblings. If artistic creation can plausibly be said to be a process of expression, something different from and more specific than natural release or discharge must be meant.
One view of emotional expression in art is that it is preceded by a perturbation or excitement from a vague cause about which the artist is uncertain and therefore anxious. The artist then proceeds to express feelings and ideas in words or paint or stone or the like, clarifying them and achieving a release of tension. The point of this theory seems to be that artists, having been perturbed at the inarticulateness of their “ideas,” now feel relieved because they have “expressed what they wanted to express.” This phenomenon, indeed a familiar one (for everyone has felt relieved when a job is done), must still be examined for its relevance. Is it the emotion being expressed that counts or the relief at having expressed it? If the concern here is with art as therapy or doing art to provide revelations for a psychiatrist, then the latter is what counts, but the critic or consumer of the art is surely not concerned with such details of the artist’s biography. This is an objection to all accounts of expression as process: how is any light at all cast upon the work of art by saying that the artist went through any expressive process or through any process whatever in the genesis of it? If the artist was relieved at the end of it, so much the better, but this fact is as aesthetically irrelevant as it would be if the artist had committed suicide at the end of it or taken to drink or composed another work immediately thereafter.
Another problem should be noted: assuming that artists do relieve their oppressed states of mind through creating, what connection has this with the exact words or score or brushstrokes that they put on paper or canvas? Feelings are one thing, words and visual shapes and tones are quite another; it is these latter that constitute the art medium, and in them that works of art are created. There is doubtless a causal connection between the feelings of the artist and the words the artist writes in a poem, but the expression theory of creation talks only about the artist’s feelings, while creation occurs within the art mediums themselves, and to speak only of the former is not to tell anything about the work of art—anything, that is, that would be of interest other than to the artist’s psychiatrist or biographer. Through what paroxysms of emotion the artist passed does not matter anymore, insofar as one’s insight into the work is concerned, than knowing that a given engineer had had a quarrel with a friend the night before beginning construction on a certain bridge. To speak of anything revelatory of works of art, it is necessary to stop talking about the artist’s emotions and talk about the genesis of words, tones, and so on—items in the specific art mediums.
The expressionists have indeed brought out and emphasized one important distinction: between the processes involved in art and in craft. The activity of building a bridge from an architect’s blueprint or constructing a brick wall or putting together a table just like a thousand others the artisan has already made is a craft and not an art. The craftsperson knows at the beginning of the processes exactly what sort of end product is wanted: for example, a chair of specific dimensions made of particular materials. A good (efficient) craftsperson knows at the beginning how much material it will take to do the job, which tools, and so forth. But the creative artist cannot work in this manner: “Artists don’t know what they are going to express until they have expressed it” is a watchword of the expressionist. They cannot state in advance what a completed work of art will be like: the poet cannot say what words will constitute the completed poem or how many times the word the will occur in it or what the order of the words will be—that can be known only after the poem has been created, and until then the poet cannot say. Nor could the poet set about working with such a plan: “I shall compose a poem that contains the word the 563 times, the word rose 47 times,” and so on. What distinguishes art from craft is that the artist, unlike the craftsperson, “does not know the end in the beginning.”
The distinction seems valid enough, but whether it supports the expressionist’s view is more dubious, for it can be held regardless of the attitude assumed toward the theory of expression. The open-ended process described as art rather than craft characterizes all kinds of creation: of mathematical hypotheses and of scientific theory, as well as art. What distinguishes creation from all other things is that it results in a new combination of elements, and it is not known in advance what this combination will be. Thus, one may speak of creating a work of sculpture or creating a new theory, but rarely of creating a bridge (unless the builder was also the architect who designed it, and then it is to the genesis of the idea for the bridge, not to its execution, that the word creation applies). This, then, is a feature of creation; it is not clear that it is a feature of expression (whatever is being done in expressing that is not already being done in creating). Is it necessary to talk about expression, as opposed to creation, to bring out the distinction between art and craft?
There does not seem to be any true generalization about the creative processes of all artists nor even of great artists. Some follow their “intuitions,” letting their artistic work grow “as the spirit moves” and being comparatively passive in the process (that is, the conscious mind is passive, and the unconscious takes over). Others are consciously active, knowing very much what they want in advance and figuring out exactly how to do it (for example, the 19th-century American writer Edgar Allan Poe in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition”). Some artists go through extended agonies of creation (the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms, weeping and groaning to give birth to one of his symphonies), whereas for others it seems to be comparatively easy ( Mozart, who could write an entire overture in one evening for the next day’s performance). Some artists create only while having physical contact with the medium (for example, composers who must compose at the piano, painters who must “play about” in the medium in order to get painterly ideas), and others prefer to create in their minds only (Mozart, it is said, visualized every note in his mind before he wrote the score). There appears to be no true generalization that can be made about the process of artistic creation—certainly not that it is always a process of expression. For the appreciation of the work of art, no such uniformity, of course, is necessary, greatly though it may be desired by theorists of artistic creation.
The main difficulties in the way of accepting conclusions about the creative process in art are (1) that artists differ so much from one another in their creative processes that no generalizations can be arrived at that are both true and interesting or of any significance and (2) that in psychology and neurology not enough is known about the creative process—it is surely the most staggeringly complex of all the mental processes in human beings, and even simpler human mental processes are shrouded in mystery. In every arena hypotheses are rife, none of them substantiated sufficiently to compel assent over other and conflicting hypotheses. Some have said—for example, Graham Wallas in his book The Art of Thought (1926)—that in the creation of every work of art there are four successive stages: preparation, incubation, inspiration, and elaboration; others have said that these stages are not successive at all but are going on throughout the entire creative process, while still others have produced a different list of stages. Some say that the artist begins with a state of mental confusion, with a few fragments of words or melody gradually becoming clear and the rest starting from there, working gradually toward clarity and articulation, whereas others hold that the artist begins with a problem, which is gradually worked out during the process of creation, but the artist’s vision of the whole guides the creative process from its inception. The first view would be a surprise to the dramatist who set out to write a drama in five acts about the life and assassination of Julius Caesar, and the second would be a surprise to artists like the 20th-century English artist Henry Moore, who said he sometimes began a drawing with no conscious aim but only the wish to use pencil on paper and make tones, lines, and shapes. Again, as to psychological theories about the unconscious motivations of artists during creation, an early Freudian view is that in creating the artist works out unconscious wish fulfillments; a later Freudian view is that the artist is engaged in working out defenses against the dictates of the superego. Views based on the ideas of the 20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung reject both these alternatives, substituting an account of the unconscious symbol-making process.
The mediums of art
In the context of every work of art there are three items to consider:
1. The genesis of the work of art.
2. The artifact, or work of art, which is a publicly available object or thing made by the artist and viewed by the audience.
3. The effects of the work of art upon the audience.
The first item comprises all the artist’s mental states, both conscious and unconscious, in the creation of the work, including the artist’s intention with regard to the work, as well as all the factors that led to these states of mind—for example, the spirit of the age, the socioeconomic conditions of the times, exchanges of ideas with other artists, and so forth. Whatever factors helped to form the work of art in the artist’s mind fall under this heading. The experiences undergone by the artist in the creation of the work constitute the artistic experience.
The third item includes all the effects of the work of art upon those who experience it, including both aesthetic and nonaesthetic reactions, the influence of the work of art upon the culture, on the state of knowledge, on current morality, and the like. The experience that involves the observer’s attention to the work of art for its own sake and not for the sake of some ulterior end is called aesthetic, but of course art has many effects that are not aesthetic. The aesthetic experience belongs to the consumer of art, as opposed to the artistic experience, which belongs to the creator of art.
The second item is what is usually called the work of art itself. According to some writers, such as the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, the work of art exists only in the mind of the artist, and the physical artifact then counts as an effect of the work of art. But in ordinary usage, as well as the usage of most philosophers of art, the work of art is identified with the physical artifact, as it exists in the physical medium. What goes on in the creator’s mind is already contained in the first item.
Every work of art occurs in a medium; that is, there is some physical object or series of events by which the work is communicated to the recipient (listener, observer, reader) by means of the senses. In painting, the medium is paint; in sculpture, such materials as stone or wood or plastic. It might at first be thought that the medium of music consists of the musical score on which the composer writes the notes, but the written notes are not music; they are a set of visual cues for the production of the tones to be emitted by the various instruments. If every player had a perfect memory, there would be no need for the written score; indeed, music existed long before there were any written scores and was played or sung from memory from one year or generation to the next. It could be said more plausibly that the medium of music consists of the physical sound waves by means of which the sound sensations enter the consciousness of the listener. The medium of literature can truly be said to be words, yet not words as abstract entities conceived in the mind but words as spoken (in oral presentation) or written. The physical medium of literature, then, is either auditory or visual, although what is conveyed through the medium is not.
Classifying arts by their mediums
There are many ways of classifying the arts—by their purpose, by their intentions, by their effects. But the most usual and the most fundamental method of classifying the arts is by their mediums:
This includes two-dimensional visual arts such as drawing and painting and also three-dimensional visual arts such as sculpture and architecture. Some of these should doubtless be called visuo-tactual art: buildings are ordinarily touched as well as seen, sculptures could be more fully appreciated if touched as well as seen, and even paintings may sometimes have enough three-dimensionality to repay touch experience. At any rate, all these arts appeal first and foremost, though not exclusively, to the sense of sight, and the artifact is an object in the visual medium.
Auditory art
This includes music in all its forms but not song, opera, and those arts that combine music with literature (see below Mixed arts). Just as the medium of visual art is sight, so the medium of auditory art is sound.
In auditory art there is—unlike visual art—no physical object (other than the score, which as has been seen is not the music). There is only the temporally successive series of sounds: sound waves emanating from the various instruments. While no such tones are being emitted, no sounds exist; only the musical score exists (and the memories of listeners, some of whom might enable the score to be reproduced if it were lost), from which music can be reproduced. Unlike the existence of paintings and sculptures, the existence of musical sounds is intermittent. In what sense, then, does the music exist between performances? It exists only in the sense that it is reproducible from the written score.
The ‘Medium’ as Raw Material
Going back to the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the ‘Medium’ in Art can also be understood as ‘raw material’. This introduces a slightly different meaning. As explained in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “creation is the re-formation of these pre-existing materials”. The ‘medium’ is the material with which the artwork is made – the essential tool necessary for artistic creation.
In the Visual Arts – paint, ink, crayons, charcoal, watercolours… In Sculpture – chalk, wood, bronze, marble… In performance arts – the body of the performer; in writing – the pen or writing software; in internet art – the programming tools. There are endless possibilities. Virtually anything can be used by artists in infinite combinations.
Liz Ligon, Alison Knowles’s performance ‘Make a Salad’ (1962) at the High Line in 2012, 2012, Courtesy of Friends of the High Line.
If we consider this understanding of ‘medium’ as the substance with which an artwork is created, there is another more technical meaning we must cover. In painting, the ‘medium’ is a specific component of the paint. It is the liquid part which is combined with pigments.
The ‘medium’ is chosen according to its use and effects. Tempera, Oil, Fresco… Painters would choose the medium according to how they prefer to work and the results they want to achieve. It determines drying times, durability, and even the glossy or opaque aspect of the end result. The artist can use a certain ‘medium’ to achieve a certain effect or highlight a certain aspect.
Artists must be skilful and know about the characteristics of the materials they use. A Tempera medium is emulsion traditionally egg yolk, and water. The most common alternative is an oil medium such as walnut or linseed oil. The main difference is that an oil medium takes much longer to dry than tempera, but even the transparency and the way it is applied to the canvas changes. Other options include gum, wax or alkyd resins like liquin. All of these have different opacities, properties and drying times. Impasto is commonly used to make the paint thicker, but these can also be diluted thanks to turpentine or other spirits.
The way tools and techniques are used is extremely personal. So much changes according to which materials are used. Artists can prefer specific ones in isolation, or combine them to achieve different effects or textures. Some artists prefer methods they are familiar with due to their training and education. For other artists the choice is symbolic as they pick materials which are connected to memories or traditions. The materials can even represent something or be connected to the meaning of the work. Many artists even go to the extent of developing their own mediums adapting them to their own needs, or because they see it to be an essential part of the artistic process.
Nowadays it is extremely common to use mixed media in the Arts. In fact, artists have been experimenting by combining and blending different techniques and tools to achieve new effects. Especially in the Visual Arts, different processes have blurred the boundaries of the materials used in visual media. With collage, textiles, ceramics or plastics, certain artists use a combination of different media. This is their signature, and the overlapping of different tools is central to their art.
The flexibility of using different mediums and different techniques is not as obvious as it may seem. In art history, up until the end of the 19thcentury artists would use the traditional methods, taught and loved in the Academy. Even though there were experimentations beforehand these focused on achieving a perfect imitation or illusion of reality. The real novelty came with a break with this tradition, as the mixing, overlapping and blurring of the ‘Medium’ began to be a widespread and accepted phenomenon in the Arts.
Over the years, the experimentation and exploration of the ‘Medium’ has transformed its understanding. The overlapping and mixing of varied materials and tools did not only revolutionise artistic practice from a practical point of view, it also changed the understanding of the concept of ‘Medium’ from a theoretical perspective.
n.d., VR technology in a museum, n.d., Courtesy of jasoren.com.
Medium-specificity and Post-medium
Art produced from the end of the 19thto mid-20thcentury significantly changed the relation to the medium. Artists started to produce pieces which highlighted the intrinsic qualities of the technique, tools and materials. A painting, instead of presenting a perfect perspective illusion, sfumato and incredible detail, started to appear flat and imprecise with the brushstrokes clearly visible. The medium was used to underline its materiality and sensorial quality.
American art critic Clement Greenberg associated the purity of the medium with Modernism. It was the specificity which he saw in modern artworks. In other words, the aesthetic quality of pictorial art lay in this flatness. According to Greenberg, this is both its limit and its greatest quality. This flatness is crucial in a modern painting as it defines and distinguishes this medium from others.
The idea that anything can be used to create art emerged with the turn of the 20thcentury, when new objects and materials were used by Avant-garde artists. Art Nouveau artists started to use industrial materials to achieve sinuous decorative works. The Dadaists presented common objects as artworks, so called ‘ready-mades’. So, although previously the idea of the ‘medium’ was a simple ‘pure’ one, gradually the boundaries between different media started to merge and overlap as materials and techniques changed.
This was just the first step, as it became more and more common for artists to use different tools according to their work and aim. In the 60s and 70s, the term ‘Intermedia’ was coined, moving even further away from the strict traditional categorisation. It emerged in association with the international group Fluxus. The term was used for happenings and inter-disciplinary activities which combined different media. New names were invented to describe some of these new categories, such as Visual Poetry or Performance Art.
Crossing the boundaries of one medium, artists like Dick Higgins, John Cage, Yoko Ono and Alison Knowles created new innovative pieces which startled and involved the public. In the age of internet and global connections, the response art has is at the centre. This is the medium, which gives importance to the human dimension: life. These innovative artistic projects use photograms, specific rules, or steps to move outside the limits imposed by conventional media.
Maysles Brothers, Yoko Ono performing ‘Cut Piece’(1964) in 1965, 1965 Courtesy of Yoko Ono ©1965 Yoko Ono.
American art critic Rosalind Krauss, calling Greenberg’s idea of ‘medium-specificity’ old-fashioned, talks about the ‘post-medium condition’. The ‘post-medium’ of Conceptual Art, Installation or Performance art – and even the virtual or digital forms of art – give new meaning to these works. By leaving the purity of the medium behind, artists break free from the conventional media to introduce new technical supports.
The shift from a hidden medium to a confining category, and then to the overlapping of different media shows a continual development. It demonstrates how one idea of medium is not enough for art – it must continually redefine itself by exploring the qualities and possibilities of new tools.
n.d., Paintbrushes and palette, n.d., Courtesy of acrylicartworld.com.
The Multisensory and Multidimensional Nature of the ‘Medium’
All artists create a bond with the materials, tools and techniques they use. It is by experimenting, testing and developing their own sensibility that they choose their path, following their senses and their ideas while they do this. Art is produced and perceived through sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and intuition. The image, the texture, the shadows, the light, the sound of the brushstrokes or the feeling of the chords of a musical instrument: all of these aspects make a medium unique.
This is the limit of categorising the Arts according to their medium. It reduces the piece to just a few characteristics, by forcing the artist’s work into pre-established categories. But what about everything which does not fit in these ‘boxes’? We should rather see the ‘Medium’ as the refined and varied tool kit which every artist creates and matures over time.
There are many aspects which are not considered by these ‘boxes’. The materials or new tools which form an artist’s medium are complex. Paint is tri-dimensional, the auditory evokes the visual for some and literature can sometimes be more about sounds than the meanings of the words. It is the multisensory and multidimensional nature which actually communicate something when we admire and engage with an artwork.
The digital art, virtual reality pieces or NFT artworks (read more about NFT’s in the Art Market on Kooness), are not even considered in this old understanding of the medium. They are not only verbal or auditory and cannot be described as spatial. They exist in the virtual. The archaic classification is limited for these ground-breaking new genres. Like Intermedia Art, they do not fit in these categories. Today artists can mix technological, traditional and performative aspects without limits.
The ‘Medium’ is every ‘mode of expression’ or ‘raw material’ an artist wishes to use, in all its richness. And artists will always question and push boundaries.
Beeple, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, 2007-2021, Courtesy of artforum.com ©Beeple / Christie’s.
