Walley and the Potential of Intermedia

At the end of his essay "The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema," Jonathan Walley connects his theorization of a paracinema with Rosalind Krauss's two options for making art in the post-medium age (a return to traditional media or the creation of a new medium) in positing paracinema as a third option: a sort of movement away from the material in a conceptualization or development of the "concept" of a medium (30). He also emphasizes the fluidity of these artists' work to incorporate the meanings and effects of other media (30). Therefore, in developing some transcendental, abstract notion of the medium detached from materiality, these paracinematic artists actually occupy some intermedia space.

At once, this breaching of media seems to subvert the medium as a whole, generating an art with fluid movement among material and conceptual restraints--unrestrained by the medium. On the other hand, in borrowing from multiple mediums to conceptualize a medium, this activity appears to reinforce two medium and the binaristic opposition in which the may exist in the process of this abstract medium-conceptualization. In line with (and in light of) Mary Ann Doane's assertions on the dematerialization and de-medium-ization in the digital (in her essay "The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity), this double-sided movement in Walley's intermedium space may contribute to a depoliticized and immaterial notion of art and the medium. I question the ethical and political consequences of such an abstraction in the production of art and wonder if materiality and the material even maintain a place or significance in this paracinematic space. I also question whether or not Walley's paracinema is as efficacious as he claims, in that on the other side of the coin, this conceptualization seems to reinforce the repressive and restraining nature of the medium.