Venerable mediums still carry vital messages
THE medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously declared — so famously, in fact, that the quirky media theorist has come to be seen as an oracle: anticipating, as early as the 1960s, the proliferation of media that accompanied humankind’s later entry into the digital age. As with most oracles, his pronouncements have become cliché.
What does it mean to say the medium is the message? Is it simply an overstatement of the modest claim that the content of a message is affected by the medium in which it is expressed? Or does it mean, literally, that content is secondary, perhaps even irrelevant? In other words, understanding how a message is sent and received, why it is produced and consumed in the way that it is, constitutes the key challenge to analysts and scholars; “what” is said doesn’t really matter. This, too, is hyperbolic.
Perhaps a more useful way to apply McLuhan’s maxim is to think of the medium as constraining what can be said — or, for artists, what can be represented, what act of mimesis or abstraction can be undertaken. My daughter Hannah, who is a budding artist at all of five years old, regularly encounters this frustration. Most recently she has turned to mass-producing selfportraits, each of which exposes the shortcomings of the pencil colour palette at her disposal.
As her parents flounder and fret in trying to talk to her about race — racial identity is about more than skin colour, race matters but it doesn’t matter, the language we use about race is important, and so on — Hannah takes it in her stride. The other day she told a friend from India that she should refer to herself as a Native American, or preferably a Navajo or Cherokee or Sioux. No doubt this is the result of a lecture she once enjoyed over chicken nuggets at Spur.
Still, when it comes to pigmentation, Hannah’s trusty set of Faber-Castells aren’t quite up to the task. In her self-portraits she alternates between the bright orange of a spray-tanned Briton on some dodgy reality television show and a sort of puce (the same Brit after a holiday in Ibiza).
Another medium that never seems to satisfy when it comes to race is Facebook. Earlier this week I read with interest as a handful of Facebook friends — all intelligent and impassioned and sincere people, the kind of people who seek rigorous debate yet are willing to back down or accept when they have erred — tackled one another over some thorny issues.
The discussion veered from the ongoing challenge of “decolonising” the South African literary landscape to the protocols of the kind of semipublic, semiprivate engagement that Facebook facilitates. Along the way there were snide remarks from the social media equivalent of the peanut gallery, some hurt feelings, a hint of mutual understanding and then despair or gloating when this potential seemed to fade.
The virtual but real-time, and global but intimate, unfolding of comments on Facebook has no precedent in communication: in days past it would require fusing a series of letters to the editor with dinnertime conversation between friends and a town hall meeting between political opponents. As such, there is no consensus over etiquette. And ultimately the medium trumps the messages, however eloquent these may be.
Perhaps all this angst over the possibilities opened up and the limitations imposed by different media is unnecessary. There are forms of expression — artistic platforms, if you will — that have been around for centuries (indeed millenniums) and show no signs of being exhausted. Unfortunately, they are often described as “traditional” and, by implication, defined in opposition both to new technologies and to novelty or experimentation. As demonstrated by a new exhibition at the Wits Art Museum, however, this description is inadequate.
Beadwork, Art and the Body (on until October 11) fulfills the promise of its subtitle, Dilo Tše Dintši/ Abundance. The focus is on body adornment, but items range from multimedia installations to chandeliers. The messages encoded here emerge from, but are not limited to, this enigmatic medium.