What Exactly Is Intermedia? (assignment 1, part 3)

For this blog post, I was supposed to focus on how ideas of intermedia can be applied to modern technologies and/or my own writing. But I find that I'm having a hard time actually understanding what intermedia is in the first place. So instead I think for this post that I'll focus on wrapping my head around "intermedia" as a concept.

In her essay, "The Crux of Fluxus: Intermedia, Rear-Garde," Natilee Harren defines intermedia as:

1. "the earliest major attempts at a self-consciously post-modern art practice";
2. "a cultural environment in which artistic mediums and forms have become, depending on one’s position or mood, either monstrously or joyously hybrid, uncategorizable, and overtly, complexly, perhaps even overly technological"; and
3. (for critics) "the codeword for a veritable international plague of multimedia* installation art, itself a symptom of global capitalism."

*But see below about multimedia versus intermedia.

Essentially, it sounds like intermedia art is art that doesn't neatly fit into prescribed categories: "music which is not Music, poems that are not Poetry, paintings that are not Painting, but music that may fit poetry, poetry that may fit paintings," etc.

Referring to Dick Higgins, who first coined the term in 1965, Harren points out: "Across his writings, Higgins was adamant that intermedia—“inter” as opposed to “multi”—was not to be confused with multimedia, in which mediums coexist simultaneously yet separately (for this he would often give the example of the coexistence of music, theater, and dance in opera)."

So it's more that intermedia is art that crosses boundaries, sort of a fluid medium rather than a rigid set of options. She clarifies further that "concrete poetry was seen as a fusion of visual art and poetry; Happenings a fusion of visual art, music, and theater; and sound poetry a fusion of music and literature."

I don't know. Even after reading Harren's examples of intermedia art, I still find myself not quite getting it. Here my old friend, the internet, stepped in to help me. Lo and behold, I found a video of Alison Knowles and Hannah Higgins performing an intermedia piece back in 1983:


Loose Pages (1983) from Other Minds on Vimeo.

This helped, a little bit. I get that it's a performance, but it's also a poetry reading, and it's also about all the interesting sound/auditory stuff going on. It's all of those things all at once: cool.

But I still feel like I don't quite get it. What am I supposed to take away from it? Or is the point that I'm not supposed to take anything away from it at all? After all, Harren tells us that "'Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretention [sic] or urge to participate in the competition of one-upmanship with the avant-garde.' It must be 'simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.'"

In a follow-up response to his own original essay, Higgins wrote: "unless the public had a way of seeing into the work by causing it to stand still for a moment and be classified, the work was likely to be dismissed as 'avant-garde: for specialists only.'"

This is, indeed, how I find myself reacting: wanting to dismiss these examples as "for specialists only," or, put another way, too Artsy for me. (Which is kind of a ridiculous thing for me to think, as I am a very artsy person, compared to most. But I am artsy, not Artsy, Artsy being that too-cool-for-school type.)

It's that there's something in these artworks that feels exclusionary to me. I realize that the idea behind them is to be the opposite -- inclusionary as opposed to exclusionary -- and yet, I feel like what they're saying is, "We're too cool for you" and "Only the truly elevated can understand us" and "You weren't invited to this party."