Many artists clarify the themes of their works by exploiting the associations elicited by substance.  Perhaps artists are driven to gather unlikely materials because they recognize that art has lost its exclusivity as a source of invented images.  It is not necessary to step into a museum to be exposed to pictures.  Two-dimensional images are emitted from multiple, completing sources, conveying information and providing entertainment.  The result is a cacophany of optical stimulation.  Pictures are stamped on placemats, tissue boxes, billboards, napkins, T-shirts.  They decorate packages selling CD's, toiletries, medicines, foods, housewares, tools and myriad other consumer items.  Technology has provided ever more sophisticated means to transmit them.  Images are projected, xeroxed, photographed, faxed, digitized, and scanned.  Film, video, and computers have contributed motin and tempo.  High resolution television, fiber optics, CD-Roms and virtual reality have further accelerated their proliferation.  Other burgeoning forms of transmission are digital, infrared, ultrasonic, thermal, soner, and stroboscopic.  Each waking hour, visual messages race into our field of vision.  Most are rebuffed because they exceed the capacityof our bodies' sensory apparatus to absorb and process them. 

 

Nontraditional art materials resuscitate images and arouse optically exhausted viewers. 

 

Medium replenishes the power and immediacy of art in an age of unprecedented image proliferation.  For the artist it offers an exhilerating frontier of artistic exploration.  For the art observer, exploring medium offers a key to unlock the enigma of many contemporary works of art.

 

Linda Weintraub, Art on the Edge and Over:  Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970's to 1990's