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This chapter is a re-evaluation of the concept of indexicality as introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce and revived by Rosalind Krauss’s ground-breaking two-part article, “Notes on the Index”, of 1977. The photographic index came under sustained criticism during the 1970s and 80s as it seemed to fix the meaning and establish the truth of the image. More recently, as in the writing of Mary Ann Doane, the index has been rehabilitated as a type of sign caught up in contingency, chance, and accident. It is understood as a type of sign really affected by its object, but non-mimetic. An excursus on Leo Steinberg’s conception of the ‘flatbed’ picture plane as a model of creative receptivity is followed by a survey of artworks composed of the accumulation of dust. This includes discussions of works by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Mary Kelly, and Gabriel Orozco.

This concluding chapter looks at the function of the grid in relation to authorial intention. Analyzing Agnes Martin’s highly personal use of the grid, alongside Rosalind Krauss’s description of the “grid’s mythic power” in the history of Modernist painting, this chapter challenges a strictly structuralist reading of the grid. In working with the grid, Martin used that idiom most frequently associated with the author’s death. After first historicizing the strong link that is assumed between the grid and the death of the author thesis through an analysis of Aspen Magazine’s “Minimalism Issue,” where Barthes’s essay was first published, the history of the grid in 1960s practice is complicated by taking seriously Martin’s insistence that she was Abstract Expressionist. In doing so, this chapter offers a unique account of the grid as a mechanism by which an author’s place in the Modernist field could be asserted. Tracking Martin’s very careful self-presentation as a definitely Modernist painter, from her earliest exposure to Modernist art in Manhattan in the 1940s, through her time in New Mexico, and into her institutional framing as a minimalist painter in the late 1960s, Martin is positioned as a knowing subject, actively fashioning herself within the Modernist identity

Since the mid-‘90s, contemporary art practice and criticism has been engaged in a widespread reformulation of the concept of “site-specificity.” At the same time, the vast proliferation of artists’ film and video installation has given rise to an anxiety over the proper material, institutional, and discursive location of these works as they abjure the traditional conditions of the art gallery’s white cube or the film theatre’s black box. The introduction endeavors to bring these two apparently disparate threads together by recalling their historical conjunction within a theory and practice of 1960s Expanded Cinema.

The introduction presents the book’s primary concepts: depth of field, expanding field, photographic practices. It considers the work of critics such as Rosalind Krauss, Nelly Richard, John Tagg, Susan Sontag, and Ariella Azoulay. It begins by explaining the depth of field; then, it analyses the mechanisms devised by the military and officialist media to control the visual field and the depth of field. Two publications produced by the military after the coup (Libro Blanco, Chile Ayer Hoy) are considered. The analysis underscores the prominence photography had in the fabrication of cover-ups and in the consolidation of the military message. In the second part, the terms "expanding field" and "photographic practice" are explained and the significance of the documentary mode is emphasized. I reconsider key critical formulations that emerged in the Chilean cultural field in the mid-seventies that were inspired by the incorporation of photography into artistic practices, but that were nevertheless dismissive of documentary practices that did not emerge within the artistic field. In the last part, I introduce the organizations and the different photographic practices they devised to disseminate their denunciatory work, challenge the dictatorship, and counter the spread of cover-ups and misinformation by the military and officialist media.

This chapter examines recent work by Victor Burgin as a questioning or interrogation of the concept of medium in artworks that hold perception in an interstitial space between stillness and movement, image and text. The principle question is: what is a virtual Image? The analysis begins by reviewing Rosalind Krauss’s canonic essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” and George Baker’s more recent account of transformations of photographic media in his essay, “Photography’s Expanded Field.” The chapter continues in examining the variety of ways in Burgin’s artwork challenges normative concepts of the visual not by rebalancing the relation of image to text, but rather in investigating the relation between sense and Image. The argument begins with an analysis of Burgin’s earlier conceptual works like Photopath, and continues with close analyses of more recent moving image installations like Hôtel Berlin, Listen to Britain, and A Place to Read. In these works, what Burgin calls the remembered film acts as a force of memory where the experience of the work does not lie in any one formal element—whether textual, acoustical, photographic, videographic, or 3D computer modeling—but rather hovers between them in mobile acts of perception and memory.

Returning (with Rosalind Krauss as guide) to the subcinematic projections of Marcel Broodthaers in the first phase of Conceptual art, discussion tracks his resistance to the moving image down through the postfilmic anatomy of celluloid in installation work by Canadian film and theater director Atom Egoyan: namely, his mulit-format restaging of his film version of Samuel Beckett’s metamedial Krapp’s Last Tape.

This chapter examines the relation between the ‘second moment of authorship’, in which the author ratifies the work as his or her own, and another crucial but often overlooked aspect of authorship, which is artwork completion. These two moments are logically separate but often collapsed, both in theory and in practice. The chapter explains what is at stake for authors, audiences, and philosophers in determining whether an artwork is finished or not. Finally, it turns to the philosophical debate surrounding the necessary and sufficient conditions for artwork completion. While it finds much to agree with in their work, the author finds that both Hick and Livingston, the chief interloctors in this debate, commit a fundamental error in ontology when reasoning about artwork completion. The chapter argues, contrary to the prevailing theories, that artwork completion is ultimately provisional.

As many contemporary artists have rejected traditional artmaking techniques and materials, some theorists have complained about the decline of medium, which structures artists’ projects and provides standards according to which we can understand and assess their works. I argue that rules function as medium in contemporary art: they are symbolic supports whose use is governed by community practices and conventions. Rules serve all the functions of traditional artistic media: they provide a framework within which the artist’s choices are meaningful and they partially (or wholly) constitute the work. Rules are expressive in themselves and also help to highlight the relevant meanings of the diverse array of objects and materials the artwork might include.

This introduction offers readers a series of key concepts that run the gamut of this book. These include “documentary’s expanded fields,” which are inspired by the writings of Gene Youngblood and Rosalind E. Krauss, and the “twenty-first-century documentary,” an array of the nonstandardized documentary practices and artifacts that emerged during this period thanks to the digital technologies for production and postproduction of images and the nontheatrical experiential platforms, such as VR interfaces, the gallery, video-sharing services, and interactive websites. While contextualizing these nascent practices and artifacts within the sociocultural crises and the technological changes of the twenty-first century, the introduction also identifies five domains of the conventional documentary film that they refashion and transform, namely, “image,” “vision,” “dispositif,” “archive,” and “activism.”