No Medium

About this book

Close readings of ostensibly blank worksfrom unprinted pages to silent musicthat 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 Cocteaus Orphe to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenbergs Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurstons erased copy of Maurice Blanchots The Space of Literature (in which only Thurstons 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 Cages 433 Dworkin links Cages composition to Rauschenbergs White Paintings Ken Friedmans Zen for Record (and Nam June Paiks 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 media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.