No Medium (MIT Press, 2013) is an attempt to rethink the nature of media, from the modernist belief that disciplines seek the essence of their media to a post-modernist exultation in hybrid media to the currency of phrases such as “new media.” Specifically, this book looks at a number of ostensibly blank works and the negative spaces of their absent materials—silent musical compositions, clear films, de-emulsified and overexposed photographs, the architecture and sculpture of excavated or emptied space, smooth phonograph discs and blank CDs, monochrome white canvases, the poetry of erased pages, blank books published as literature—demonstrating that even the most abstract and cerebral works of conceptual art cannot be separated from their material and technical supports.
Craig Dworkin is a professor at the University of Utah whose work focuses on the artistic avant-garde, combining radically innovative subjects with such traditional critical methodologies as archival research, textual studies, and philology. Dworkin has published more than thirty articles and essays in both art history and literary journals, including October, Grey Room, Comparative Literature, PMLA, Word & Image, and Textual Practice. His book Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci is also out on MIT Press. He has a PhD in English from UC Berkeley.