Medium in its root sense, indicates what is in the middle or in the center. From this simple idea of a locus, stems the complex definition of medium. Broadly, it is something positioned halfway between extremes; it is also an intervening substance, a conductor, through which something is transmitted; or else, it designates the surroundings in which an organism thrives. According to the perspective, the concept of medium continuously cascades, layers, curls on itself, is ever redefined. By bringing together and orchestrating a diversity of individual angles, we examine content, question form. Through art, “Site Specific” wants to highlight the numerous permutations of the concept and generate a coalescent interpretation on what a medium is.

At first we are named by the sound of a voice, our skin is touched, caressed, we are gazed at by the Other: through our senses, we become subjects. To formulate a demand for more, more caresses, more love, more recognition, we acquire language. As talking beings, it is through language that we look to define who we are. Language, articulated by desire, is the medium of our identity. But we can never fully find ourselves. As Jacques Lacan states, “There is no way to say it all. […] It is materially impossible: words miss it”. There is always a deception, a lack masked by substitute objects, that ever incites our desire. Senses, desire and signifiers, those are our most fundamental media. In art, communication, politics and life in general, they remain at the essence, the ground layer of all social exchange.

Medium also refers to the substances, materials and techniques involved in the artistic creation. Our very tactile subjectivity reacts and interacts differently according to the texture of the sign. The see/saw relation at play is of desire and projection. If the mediation always begins within the self of the artist, it is however activated by being projected to the spectator: the eye of the viewer on the object viewed, is the necessary external component for the medium to exist and work internally. According to Roland Barthes' theory of the punctum, when this interrelation fully flows, the medium pierces the skin of the viewer, causing him to feel intimately touched, even injured.

In the vast experimental field that contemporary art provides, the concept of medium can be apprehended by means of sabotage. Voluntary sending out a carrier void of its content, or using the wrong course of action to achieve an unrelated end, plays up the ambiguous aspect of the medium. What if there is no end to his cascading, layering, curling on itself ? What if, as Marshall McLuhan argues, the “content of any medium is always another medium”? What if “the medium is the message”?

Valerie Candau 2013