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Introduction: The Medium before Modernism

Medium and its specificity have oriented the discourse on the arts throughout various historic and historiographic periods. Clement Greenberg, for example, was one of the most vocal and notorious representatives in recent history to advocate for the specificity of the medium as the legitimating drive of artistic production.1 For him it was a self-reflexive study of painting’s two-dimensional picture plane that was the only true driving force for an avant-garde in the late twentieth century: namely, around issues of flatness and opticality. The critical discourse that emerged around Greenberg and his followers focused on the various articulations and possibilities of the medium as an orienting tactic for artistic production in the face of trends, such as minimalism and conceptualism, which challenged the predominance of medium-specificity, particularly the role of painting in modern art history. This was certainly manifested in the works of Greenberg’s acolytes, such as in Michael Fried’s take on minimalism and the enduring problem of theatricality.2