In her book-length essay, A Voyage on the North Sea, looking on the question of the medium in dialogues of modern-day art, Rosalind Krauss, a critic and art historian, hypothesizes or to be more precise in her manner of consternation, makes dark projection that from 1960s art has gone into a post-medium condition. Krauss uses the term post-medium to describe the broad field opened by critique on conceptual art, claiming that the vital guarantee of autonomy in art lies in striving for unity formally and a means that is pure. Cynical of the appealing values of modernism and a predominantly narrow comprehension of contemporary art that declared artworks by modernist to be “about nothing but their essence…. Necessarily disengaged from everything outside their frames”, the inquiries of conceptual artists changed to definitions of art categorized as philosophical (idea perceived as art).
In several ways, the post-medium condition sums up the domain of opinion of practice by post-conceptualist. It suggests that artists are simply artists and are no longer obligated to work in a particular tradition to be considered ambitious or advanced. Nonetheless, diagnosis by Krauss indicates that due to freedom, a conceptual framework for coming up with a value in art has lost its meaning in the modern world. In the body of the article, Krauss explains three narratives that describe post-medium position via the work of Marcel Broodthaers. While the term post-media is not well defined, Krauss puts forward several breaks from ideas in the past related to artistic media together with an ironic breakdown of the dissimilarity between sculpture stemming and painting from Greenberg’s conceptual art (art may be immaterial), medium-specificity (an object and a painting that is imageless are similar), installation, mixed media, and aggressive media (video and film) that don’t have support from any material. Krauss discusses how broodthaers came up with a fake museum that was called “The Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Division” that was full of objects associated with eagles and added text to show how media-specificity became unreliable for discussing modern-day art.
In her conclusion in the article, Krauss suggests that medium-specificity, both modern and traditional ones, must be comprehended as self-different and different. She supports making use of outdated technology since it has a spirit of improvisation and a measure of capitalism freedom. Supporting her idea of differential specificity concerning the medium will lead to a re-articulation or reinventing.
“The kid” is among the most exceptional achievements of Charles Chaplin and is still beloved by audiences and critics alike. The film is a perfect mix of drama and comedy, and without a doubt, it is Chaplin’s most autobiographical and personal work. A lot of the themes and settings from the film emanate from Chaplin’s makeshift childhood in London. Nonetheless, it was the mishmash of two diverse events in his life that made Chaplin come up with the tale of the lonely Tramp and an abandoned child. The activities included joyful one (meeting with Jackie Coogan) and one which tragic (his infant death). The end of his infant son, Norman Spencer, who was three years old, undoubtedly had a significant impact on Chaplin and emotional pain that resulted afterwards did trigger his creativity. Ten days after the death of his son, he started auditioning child actors in his studio, and it was during that time he came across Jackie Coogan, who was four years old by then.
The scene in the film where Jackie gets kidnapped and taken away from Charlie is the most renowned episode in “The Kid”. Jackie and Charlie go through a stout struggle where Jackie wield a hammer and which was against the officials mandated to provide security in the orphanage. As a result, they are overpowered, and Jackie is forced into a truck where he begins to plead to be freed to be with his father. The performance is raw and powerful, and until to-date, it has not lost its emotion. Jackie is driven away by the officials who make Charlie come up with an innovative way to rescue him where he goes across the rooftops in an attempt to save Jackie from the authorities. The peak of the episode finds the Tramp thoroughly beating the officials and getting his child back. Tears of joy, exhaustion, and relief stream down in their faces after the Tramp kisses the child who was trembling at the time.
The victorian setting from the film undoubtedly reflects Chaplin’s youth in London and precisely the attic room where he had lived. In his pictorial volume in 1974 titled “My Life in Pictures,” Chaplin highlighted the attic the Kid and the Tramp shared and also he said that a set meant so much to him since he used to think of himself into a thing and what resulted was often influenced by the environment he had lived in. The attic was based on the places in Kennington and Lambeth where Charlie and Sydney had lived together with their mother when they were young.
“The Kid” is still relevant to the art of film even today not only due to innovative nature of Chaplin to incorporate dramatic sequences in a comedy but also due to the revelations the film gives about him. Unquestionably, when Chaplin wrote the preface to “The Kid” which stated “A picture with a smile and perhaps, a tear,” artistic ideology was in his mind and which he implements in the whole film.