3.3 Intermedia

To understand this aesthetic effectively, we need to explore the concept of intermedia, in particular by taking up a methodological framework first suggested by Dick Higgins, who was a member of, and theorist for, Fluxus. Intermedia can be defined as the conceptual ground between media or traditional art disciplines; as the gaps between, rather than the centers of, fields of practice; as an examination of the conditions under which epistemological distinctions function. Andreas Huyssen has suggested that Theodor Adorno’s concept of Verfransung is close to this notion of intermedia but carries with it a greater sense of dissolution and aesthetic entropy; it suggests not a unity of the arts but differentiation. This distinction is significant because, whereas the nineteenth-century aim of the Gesamtkunstwerk was an integration or merging of the arts under the banner of music, Cage allowed Fluxus to address themselves to the ground between media, that which media already have in common. It is, therefore, a less totalizing impulse; a micro-, not a macroview.