Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art

If you attend a contemporary art exhibition today, you're unlikely to see much traditional painting or sculpture. Indeed, artists today are preoccupied with what happens when you leave behind assumptions about particular media--such as painting, or woodcuts--and instead focus on collisions between them, and the new forms and ideas that those collisions generate.

Garrett Stewart in Transmedium dubs this new approach Conceptualism 2.0, an allusion in part to the computer images that are so often addressed by these works. A successor to 1960s Conceptualism, which posited that a material medium was unnecessary to the making of art, Conceptualism 2.0 features artworks that are transmedial, that place the aesthetic experience itself deliberately at the boundary between often incommensurable media. The result, Stewart shows, is art whose forced convergences break open new possibilities that are wholly surprising, intellectually enlightening, and often uncanny.

Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters in the English Department of the University of Iowa and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance.