Recomendaciones

Since the actors do the mimesis by acting it [out], a first aspect of tragedy [-making] would have to be arrangements for the 'look' (opsis) [of the actors and stage]; then song making (melos) and the [devising of] speech (lexis), for these are the 'matter' (in- what) the mimesis is done in. (Aristotle in Whalley 1997: 69)

Opsis, melos and lexis, perhaps more suitably translated for this context as image, music, text,27 _{are, according to Aristotle, three of the six basic media of drama.}28 _The quotation above is from a chapter dealing with the six main elements of the poetics of tragedy, ordered in what he sees as the most important to least important: Mythos

(story), Ethos (character), Dianoia (idea), Lexis (speech), Opsis (spectacle), Melos

(music). Aristotle's table of hierarchy as regards the dramatic arts is relevant to this discussion because it sheds light on what he saw as the real mimetic power of art. As mentioned earlier, even though Aristotle had more sympathy than Plato for the arts in general, he felt that true power came from a closer depiction of the 'real', in both a natural and philosophical sense. One could infer from this that any medium is inherently problematic to the experience of true immediacy, and in this hierarchy he certainly seems to favour transparency of representation in art.

The history of aesthetics from Aristotle to the present is peppered with many attempts to reorder the primacy of these three media, not only in the specific art practices prioritised in a given era, but in delineating the borders in which they are drawn. As pointed out by art historian Simon Shaw-Miller, the early modernist

27 _{The order that I have chosen to use, is as they appear in Aristotle, which also happens to be the title}

of Roland Barthes' 1977 collection of essays: Image Music Text.

28 _{When talking about poetry, Aristotle names rhythm, language and harmony as the three main}

period brought a resurfacing of attention on the function of media (Shaw-Miller 2014: 48). Two iconic critics of the period, who could be said to be on opposing sides of the fence in terms of how they considered the opacity of the media, were literary critic Northrop Frye and Greenberg.

Frye's conception of the triad of media as constantly collapsing on themselves, or elements of one appearing in the guise of another (such as musical or visual elements that appear in poetry) seems highly relevant to this discussion:

Considered as a verbal structure, literature presents a lexis which combines two other elements: melos, an element analogous to or otherwise connected with music, and opsis, which has a similar connection with the plastic arts. The word lexis itself may be translated "diction" when we are thinking of it as a narrative sequence of sounds caught by the ear, and as "imagery" when we are thinking of it as forming a simultaneous pattern of meaning apprehended in an act of mental "vision."

(Frye 1957: 243)

Since Frye is dealing with lexis as the primary medium, he sees melos and opsis as functioning within it. One could extrapolate this idea to other art forms, and seeing the constituent role played by the secondary media within that: the role that lexis and opsis play in concert music, or how melos and lexis function within painting. In regard to the latter, Greenberg, modernist art's most influential voice, was not only a strong advocate of medium purity, but also called for the greater influence of melos rather than lexis in visual art. In his essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon",29 _Greenberg suggests that opsis should be tending towards the musical rather than the narrative, because of music's inherently abstract, non-representational nature. He considered that literature had peaked as the dominant art form in the age of enlightenment, and that subsequently music had begun to play a more important role, becoming the prototype of all art. The transition of one art's position in society to another also entailed the evolution of the qualities specific to that particular art and medium, and so, according to Greenberg, music's less valued role in the twentieth century also included the transference of its qualities to the visual medium:

The dominant art in turn tries itself to absorb the functions of the others. A confusion of the arts results, by which the subservient ones are perverted and distorted; they are forced to deny their own nature in an effort to attain the effects of the dominant art. However, the subservient arts can only be mishandled in this way when they have reached such a degree of technical facility as to enable them to pretend to conceal their medium. (Greenberg 1986: 22)

29 _{This was a reference to both Gotthold Lessing's "Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and}

Poetry" (1767) which argued for greater differentiation between painting, sculpture and poetry, and Irving Babbit's 1910 essay, "Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts."

What Greenberg thought to be the dominant art of his era was the emerging abstract expressionism in painting, which had absorbed some of the attributes of music: what he considered to be the previous dominant art form. In spite of the somewhat crude analysis regarding which art constituted the most dominant in a given era, Greenberg's model of how the qualities and attributes of one medium are constantly being subsumed and evolved into another in the evolution of art is a compelling one. Fundamentally, Greenberg sees the separation of media and the aspiration towards medium purity, as the ideal of art:

Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. Thus would each art be rendered "pure," and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. (Greenberg 1993: 86)

This is a position diametrically opposed to that of Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle sought transparency towards mimesis, or the copy of the real, as the ultimate goal of art, Greenberg sought opacity of the medium itself; the medium to be defined by itself rather than anything it was representing: so-called medium specificity.

One can see that there are various ways to arrange, prioritise or configure this triad of media, and it seems that each era, culture and ideology, might have its own preferences as to how art is served. What is interesting to extrapolate here is how one can speak of a medium in not only its material form, but in its various attributes, and how those are embodied within each other. Musical performance, for instance, no matter how 'absolute', will always involve an aspect of opsis, in how the spectacle of the concert is communicated – concert space, performance ritual, gestural actions of performers – and lexis – titles, concept of the work and other paratexts. The extent to which the secondary media play a role in influencing how one experiences the primary, comes to the fore when speaking about multimedia work, and it is perhaps useful to make an initial evaluation as to the weight and hierarchy put in each of these categories. Sometimes this is not possible, either because a form is finely balanced between two specific media (as for instance in ballet or sound poetry), or because the media use goes beyond traditional categories of text, sound, and image, to utilisation of other senses and structures (such as can be found in interactive, relational or participatory art.)

As I will explain in the next section, hierarchy of media becomes important when discussing how meaning is generated between the media in a metaphor model. In its most basic form, metaphor borrows meaning from the 'source' (the secondary medium) to understand something of the 'target' (the primary medium). This does

not have to be static, and in much multimedia work it is constantly shifting. But as a first evaluation it is useful to understand how social context, audience expectations or even the creator's intention, can affect the way the media are stacked up. In the first place, social context, or the dominant norms of the entrenched practice have a huge effect on how the hierarchy between the media are defined. Taking theatre as an example, various traditions in the 20th century have shuffled the order of

hierarchy of the media. In the case of Robert Wilson's form of theatre, taking iconic works such as Einstein on the Beach, The Black Rider, or A Dream Play, even though lexis is important, one could argue that the theatre is primarily defined through other media, such as melos and opsis, to the extent that the latter adopts a more dominant role. The theatre of Berthold Brecht, on the other hand, could be said to prioritise lexis over everything else, while the conscious separation of the media, is used to enhance distance and alienation. In traditional opera, melos could be said to take the primary role, and lexis is subsumed into the act of singing or through the narrative meaning conveyed in the orchestral score.

The expectation created by these entrenched forms is embodied in the way particular audiences experience multimedia work. In my own art practice I have come across different audience expectations, depending on the context in which a particular work is shown. In general, one could say that spectators at a fine art exhibition tend to not prioritise music or sound, expecting instead to focus on opsis, the spectacle and the way meaning is generated in relation to lexis, the narrative or concept.30 Sound is often here experienced as representational, standing for something other than itself, or perhaps used in a cinematic sense, subsumed totally into the opsis. These expectations are often entrenched in the very spaces where art work is shown, which is why the practice of taking art out of the gallery or the museum, music out of the concert hall or theatre to unusual locations, increases the possibility of destabilising the well-established hierarchy of media. The idea that I would like to reinforce here is how the context of a work, historical, social and economic, determines the hierarchy of media. The context in which we experience a work can be in harmony or dissonance with the media itself; it can amplify one medium and mask another.

The question of how one medium collapses into another is alluded in a more general sense by musicologist Kramer in his discussion of musical meaning (Kramer 1988), whether in song form sound and words collapse into a single medium, or whether they remain as distinct media. At what level of cognition does this matter, on the level of the work itself or on the cognitive or sensory level? Kramer touches on the idea of medium through the examination of the residual meaning around art. His concluding stance is that the musicological position taken in the last centuries, trying

30 _{I give an example of this in Chapter 5.3.2, discussing my work Disco Debris, and the problems}

to divorce meaning or context from pure music, is both a futile and misguided venture. Music will always burst open into its constituent parts, which will include meaningful elements such as technology, social circumstance, or historically constructed musical parameters.

The ubiquity of the problem suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with the core assumption that musical autonomy equals absence of meaning. If so, identifying that something might open the possibility of a musical hermeneutics no longer burdened by the foregone conclusion of its own futility or its inferiority to the purely musical... For although music minus meaning can be placed in its cultural context, it necessarily remains inert there; since meaning resides in the context alone, the music can at best be a symptom or token of some contextual element. (Kramer 1988: 14)

Another possible definition of what constitutes a medium, is given by philosopher Jerrold Levinson, in his essay Hybrid Art Forms, where he sets out conditions for hybridity as art forms, which arise from combinations of earlier art forms. For Levinson, the historical definition rather than material, is at the root of medium.

A medium is a developed way of using materials or dimensions with certain entrenched properties, practices and possibilities. (Levinson 1984)

How a 'historically defined art form' retains its status is a tricky assumption, since this is only temporarily assured; there is no universality to speak of here. By the same token, the way two historically defined media such as music and drama become subsumed into the medium called 'opera', whilst still retaining their constituent identities, was a centuries long trajectory with many pitfalls. Nevertheless, it is an interesting reminder of how historical use of a form of cultural practice is partially responsible for how a message is communicated, or how it is understood.

The triad opsis, melos, lexis, (mirrored in Barthes' Image Music Text), belongs in a broader category of definitions, trying to understand the function of media through a tripartite model. This triangulation also serves the purpose of highlighting a sense of mediation itself, and of breaking a too binary or dialectic approach to discussing multimedia art. Nevertheless, in the following chapter I will propose a more useful system of analysing the correlation between media in terms of a binary comparison of different parameters. This does not give us the complete picture, but it suggests a way of examining how different media compare or form metaphorical relationships. Eventually, utilizing these perspectives, one can form a more complex and complete image of the dynamic of interactions in multimedia work.