The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

differentiaL i ConograPhy

indeed, a major issue seems to be whether a topical artistic concept can be formulated,
a concept suitable to produce a novel artistic visual grammar or language. That issue is
intimately linked with how a visual language is constituted in different ways by various
media perspectives ultimately considered transmedial or intermedial. To what extent
can visual language contribute to diagnosing, criticizing, or deconstructing perceptual
regimes related to medialization and cultural disciplining is still a pending research
topic? also the overarching subject of the role and position of the artistic image in
our current visual culture invites research from various disciplinary perspectives. it is
true, Rosalind Krauss has argued, that the current artistic image and image production
is determined by a post- medium condition. however, the question is whether that
statement would also imply that, for example, the photographic image could no longer
be viewed as a mere aesthetic registration of a situation in the real world. it seems to
me that the topical photographic image demands a hyper- mediated investigation of
how the photograph as an iconographic medium produces various forms of realities
still based on perspectival capacities. Research in the form of a critical re- evaluation

• either through other media or through the history of the photographic medium – of
  the photographic image as such could clarify various theoretical positions as well as the
  factual input of the photographic paradigm in the field of topical visual art.
  other medium- specific practices evoke similar research questions – whether or
  not from a visual culture determined by a post- medial condition. is reflection from
  the perspective of the painterly paradigm still relevant for understanding a topical
  artistic production? does the visual language of cinema or a screen- based reality
  influence the iconography in current visual art? how could constructive forms
  of interdisciplinarity with other visual domains be envisioned? in the light of the
  exploration of the preconditions of the artistic communication process as such, the
  issue of contextualization of the artistic image should be investigated. What is the
  optimal context for a specific, artistic image? What communicative preconditions does
  such an image require? under what circumstances should it ultimately be presented?
  Could site- specific data be explained and understood medially?
  These research questions will lead the discussion in the next sections. First,
  the photographic medium will be the core issue. From a historical perspective and
  articulated for the first time in Walter Benjamin’s work, the photographic medium was
  the medium to give a first impetus to a critical reflection and artistic investigation of
  the a priori perceptual categories of space and time.

Flash cube

since its acceptance as a form of art around the 1930s, photography has been forced
as no other artistic medium to justify its medium- specific qualities. particularly the
greenbergian heydays of modernism have produced such pressing urge for justification.
at that moment around the end of the 1930s, painting had surpassed by far its interest
in the subject of perspectivist illusion. as a consequence, twentieth- century painting
entirely concentrated on the qualities of the two- dimensional surface implying a
passion for painterly components such as planes, colours, and lines.
From that time onwards, the artistic working field of perspectivist painting would
be remediated by photography as an artistic medium and would start to be considered