Genre as Medium on YouTube: The Work of Grace Helbig

Genre as Medium on YouTube: The Workof Grace Helbig

ROLAND BETANCOURT

Mamrie Hart: Then, we are going to add some Fra Angelico, whichis a hazelnut liqueur.

Hannah Hart: Hazelnut, more like, haze my butt! You’ve beenhazed!

Grace Helbig: Stop crossing mediums.

– You Deserve A Drink, “Quickshots: Friendships!”, 0:59–1:08

THE ABOVE INTERACTION OCCURRED ON THE POPULAR YOUTUBE

series You Deserve A Drink (YDAD) by Mamrie Hart, featur-ing fellow YouTubers Grace Helbig of itsGrace (formerly of

DailyGrace) and Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen. In her series,Mamrie Hart teaches viewers how to concoct themed cocktails basedon a celebrity or fellow YouTuber whom she thinks deserves a drink.The series combines a traditional instructional videos with a comedyshow, interspersing the mixing of the cocktail with subject-appropri-ate puns and jokes. As such, in this episode the three YouTuberscommemorate their friendship by mixing up shots entitled “Friend-sips,” and set out to compete on their pun-making skills with jokeson each other and the various tropes and formats of their respectiveYouTube channels. At first, one may be perplexed by Grace Helbig’sseemingly loose use of the term “medium.” After all, when HannahHart cited Grace Helbig’s signature line, “You’ve been hazed!” fromDailyGrace, she was not crossing mediums given that both the

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2016© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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YDAD and DailyGrace shows are filmed, digital, online content, anduploaded onto YouTube. Hence, from the perspective of art historyor media studies, the seemingly obtuse use of the term seems to bean off-the-cuff mistake that bears little import on Grace Helbig’swork as a YouTuber. However, if Helbig’s comment is takenseriously, it represents an opportunity for conceptualizing a medium,beyond its traditional definition, for content creators on the YouTubeplatform and its community.

Medium, in art historical discourse, has traditionally referred tothe divisions of the physical, material supports on which a work ofart (or any content for that matter) is communicated and dissemi-nated. This might be the marble into which a sculpture is carved, orthe flat canvas onto which a painting is painted. In the art theory ofthe postwar period, for example, critic Clement Greenberg praisedand prioritized the self-reflexive referencing of the artwork’s mediumin artistic production:

The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and therethey have been isolated, concentrated and denned. It is by virtueof its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restorethe identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be empha-sized. . .. The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progres-sive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistanceconsists chiefly in the flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to “holethrough” it for realistic perspectival space. (Greenberg 32–34)

Initially, from an art historian’s perspective, Helbig’s use of theterm medium as anything but video or digital, online media (specifi-cally on YouTube) could be disregarded as a slip of the tongue, apassing reference of someone uninitiated into the rigors of themedium and medium-specificity. However, with more context,Helbig’s operative definition of the medium could be considered asless regulated by a traditional articulation of mediums or media, thanby more contemporary expansions of the term by art historians anddigital theorists, particularly motivated by the advent of installationart, “new” media, and the Internet.

Rather than looking at Greenberg, Helbig’s words urge one toconsider more contemporary reflections on the legacy of Greenberg’sdogmatic definition and those of his contemporaries in adjacent fields,such as Marshall McLuhan. The reflections of art historian Rosalind

Genre as Medium on YouTube 197

Krauss begin to resonate, precisely her important rehabilitations ofthe medium in her books Under Blue Cup and “A Voyage on the NorthSea:” Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. In Under Blue Cup,Krauss moves beyond the Greenbergian reduction in medium to themere physical, material support of the work of art to consider med-ium as a condition of possibility: the system of rules, guidelines, andtraining that enables for the artistic production of form to becomemanifest. The system of medieval guilds, for example, defined theseparation of different arts according to the tasks and skills of theirartists, as Krauss suggests, thus enabling a medium to emergethrough the specialization of skills rather than a material supportitself, even if at times such skill-sets coincided or clustered aroundsimilar materials. Yet, Krauss expands this further to consider howthe definition of medium has been expanded to encompass a varietyof different structures and concepts that have enabled individualartists to pursue and produce their own artistic projects. For example,Krauss argues that for Ed Ruscha, the medium is the automobile. Inhis Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the automobile operates as thegenerative condition of possibility that enables for the work of art toemerge. As such, Ruscha’s medium is not the camera or the artist’sbook, but rather the underlying conceptual system that makes it allpossible: the car which drove him down the Sunset Strip and delin-eated the project’s unfolding. Thus, medium in this expanded fieldcomes to encompass a series of things—conceptual, physical, or other-wise—that might be said to operate as the source of generation andcohesive orientation for the artwork.

Stop Crossing Mediums

Turning to Helbig’s admonition of Hannah Hart, one may reconsiderher words by taking them seriously at face-value, that Hart wasindeed crossing mediums when she used a DailyGrace trope withinthe YDAD episode. Within this context, Helbig has defined hermedium not as the short video, the Internet, or YouTube, but ratheras the structure, trope, formats, and video genres that come to defineindividual YouTube channels. Helbig and Mamrie Hart (whofounded her channel with the help of Helbig) both have very stableformats to their videos that follow consistently throughout. Most

198 Roland Betancourt

YouTubers have signature sign-on and sign-off phrases, such as vlog-ger Joey Graceffa’s Hunger Games citation, “May the odds be ever inyour favor,” or Hank and John Green’s “I will see you on Tuesday/Friday” on vlogbrothers. However, not all channels follow regular for-mats, though it is a very common feature, particularly in less-struc-tured videos, such as vlogs, since sign-ons, sign-offs, and key phraseshelp to construct narrative unity, thematic cohesion, and a shared lan-guage that can be readily deployed by fan bases.

For most YouTubers, it would seem then that genre and mediumoften overlap. Grace Helbig’s DailyGrace series, however, is structuredon five weekday videos, each with a particular theme correspondingwith the day of the week and modeled on common YouTube videogenres, such as the vlog, the review video, the how-to video, etc. Com-paratively, Mamrie Hart’s own series has a regular flow and style ofediting, and her channel is composed exclusively of her comedic how-to, instructional videos for cocktail recipes. The videos begin with anopening monolog that introduces the person of the day, it weaves theprocess of the drink’s concoction with extended jokes, concludes witha well-rehearsed monolog that includes consistent hand-gestures and asignature crossing of the eyes, and is followed by an appendix of bloop-ers and extended jokes from the show. Likewise, Hannah Hart followsa similar structure with signature openings, closings, and narrativeediting. As such, it could be surmised that Helbig sees each of theirmediums precisely as this conglomerate of format, fusions of genres,and tropes that comes to define their unique identity as YouTube per-sonalities. In this case, the “You’ve been hazed!” is an inexorable partof Tuesday’s “Commenting on Comments” video from DailyGrace, andthus synonymous with the DailyGrace medium and its genres. There-fore, when Hannah attempted to “haze” Mamrie she was not only“citing” or “borrowing” from DailyGrace, but in a sense crossingmediums.

Notably, Grace Helbig terminated her contract with her networkMy Damn Channel, which ended on December 31, 2013, thusfamously dissolving the DailyGrace medium for her personal work(Johnson “Grace Helbig Breaks Up,” Johnson “As Daily Grace Dies,”Green “Daily Grace is Dead”). When she turned to her old channel(graciehinabox), rebranded as itsGrace, Helbig was legally forced toeschew the structure and format of DailyGrace, which belongedto My Damn Channel as part of the DailyGrace brand, rather than to


Grace Helbig as its content creator. In the first several months ofher new channel, Helbig nevertheless still attempted to follow theDailyGrace format as closely as possible. Throughout the final monthsof DailyGrace and the initial months of itsGrace, Helbig thereforeproduced work that was constantly and consistently operating quiteself-reflexively, pointing first to her contractual obligation to con-tinue producing content for a channel she would no longer own atthe end of the year, and then producing content on her new channelthat legally could not be identical to that of DailyGrace, while stillattempting to preserve that structure as closely as possible.

Through this chiasm of contractual obligation and legal prohibition,Grace Helbig came to best articulate her recursive theory of the medium.For Rosalind Krauss, a medium condition emerges as such through thelogic and system of rules that enable artistic production, yet such rulesare a model of and model for the medium. As Krauss addressed in herstudy of late-modern art’s strategies of pointing-to-itself:

Since pointing was meant to direct attention to the medium assupport for the representation, we can speak of it as recursivelyrepresenting that support, or, as I will term this, ‘figuring it forth.’Modernist theory held this self-definition to be a recursive structure—a structure some of the elements of which will produce the rulesthat generate the structure itself. (Under Blue Cup 4)

The recursive nature of the medium figures as a crucial operant inKrauss’s thinking, given that it allows her to conceptually distancelate-twentieth-century artistic production from the confines of med-ium as matter or medium as mediation while nevertheless retainingthe self-reflexive tactics of medium-specificity on which art of theperiod thrived.

This recursive function likewise comes to distinguish mediumfrom genre, given that medium in this expanded field should not beunderstood merely as a pre-existent or given condition. Unlike genre,which shares similarities with medium in terms of recurring conven-tions and meaningful action, as discussed by Carolyn Miller, mediumoperates as a substratum for the manifestation of form that can neverbe wholly described or identified as such, but rather can only come tobe recursively recognized through breaks and lapses in its operation.Medium, as a condition of possibility for the creation of form, is thusrecursively enabled through productions of form in and among


genres, and consequently must both partake and encompass new andpre-existing genres. In its scope and scale, medium incorporatesdiverse genres within it and is not limited or delineated by the divi-sions of said genres, whether internal or external. Like painting andliterature, which G. E. Lessing’s Laoco€on articulated as the paradig-matic division of mediums and came to be foundational in ClementGreenberg’s thinking on the matter (Lessing; Greenberg), thesetraditional mediums are neither limited nor defined by genres.

Nevertheless, a confusion between genre and medium can, andoften does, emerge from a predilection on the part of creators to over-lap genre and medium, deploying their particular genre as a mediumfor reflection and self-criticality (Killoran 80; Graham 67–71). Yet,genre operates as a micromedium, which while nestled within a lar-ger condition of possibility can come to regulate a program of artisticproduction by serving as a recourse to a medium, but not as a recur-sive medium proper. John Guillory in his extrapolation of a theory ofmedia for the premodern world, precisely grapples with an under-standing of Aristotelian medium and the question of genres as thingsthat occur “in different things,” the latter being what modern histori-ans have come to translate as medium (323). In such circumstances,however, genre in general or a particular genre specifically must besaid to be operating as a medium condition, rather than understandthat medium and genre are interchangeable or coextensive. Sincemedium is the relationship between figure and ground that makesform perceptible, genres themselves analogously partake in this struc-ture of perceptibility against a ground, a ground that is composed ofvarious types and forms of genre. Hence, genre cannot be said to be amedium in its own right, even though it may come to be deployedin a particular circumstance as if a medium.

Grace Helbig’s work recursively configures the YouTube medium,not as the online video-sharing ‘platform,’ but rather as a logic thatis tautologically generated as a structure from the work producedwithin it. Helbig’s comment to Hannah Hart is thus one of thosemoments through which an artist figures forth the medium by point-ing to itself although the self to which that act points need not havebeen previously constituted as such. Instead, it is that very act ofpointing—the act of reasoning why precisely that comment crossedmediums—that in turn comes to recursively constitute what thatmedium is to begin with.


Am I Doing It

Perhaps Helbig’s most medium-reflexive video on DailyGrace was her“Commenting on Comments” video from November 19, 2013, enti-tled, “Am I Doing It” (DailyGrace). The video begins with her usualnon-sequitur opening, followed by the Tuesday theme song, endingin her iconic ding and “Graceface.” However, instead of commentingon comments and hazing her “viewsers,” as she calls them, Helbigbreaks with the prescriptions of her medium and goes on to a slide-show of elderly drivers. Over this montage of images culled from aGoogle image search, Helbig continually asks in a choppy, irritatedmonotone:

Am I doing it? How is it doing it? What’s happening? Is it doingit? Am I doing it? How is it doing it? But am I doing it? What?How is it doing it? Who’s doing it? How is it doing it? Am I thedoing it? How and why? (0:29–0:46)

The monolog ends abruptly, over the image of an elderly man star-ing head-on into the camera and giving the middle finger, as GraceHelbig says, “I’m also here.” After this, the video cuts back to Helbigsitting at her desk. Staring into the camera, she covers her face toocclude her sheepish grin. Looking up at the camera through herfingers in shame, she squeals, “Bye!” This unorthodox break with thetheme of “commenting on comments” consciously subverts her ownmedium as defined here so that the video—precisely and ironicallythrough its inquiry of “Am I doing it?”—actually fails to do it (i.e.,the day’s theme). In a sense then the video is itself a commenting on“commenting on comments,” breaking down the format of the epi-sode through a manic investigation into the very doing of that com-ment video genre.

This process is perhaps best exemplified by the key moment wherethe divergence from the ordinary occurs: the climactic moment of theding-cum-Graceface that usually initiated DailyGrace’s Tuesdaythrough Thursday vlogs. In this liminal, transitional moment fromthat which is expected to the unexpected, Helbig self-reflexively com-ments on this act by tacitly asking the audience: Am I doing it (i.e.,the Graceface)? Her hand moves slowly down her face, buildinganticipation for that moment in which the ding will strike—a


moment that one assumes will occur once her knuckles reach the baseof her chin (Fig. 1a). Given the structure and editing of the video, itis possible to surmise in fact that Helbig had already produced or atleast sketched out the montage that followed, as it would be custom-ary in a video such as this to produce the core content first and thenfilm—as she did—the opening and closing materials in one sitting.As such, one must keep in mind the monolog of rhetorical questionsas one watches the opening sequence. In the slow-moving Graceface,

(a)

(b)

FIGURE 1. DailyGrace, “Am I Doing It,” YouTube (19 Nov. 2013).


every time her hand moves down a millimeter across her face, it is asif she is already/again asking the viewer, “Am I doing it?”

However, Helbig seems to deny the spectrum of revelation thatthe viewer expects as they await the culminating ding. She com-pletely dismisses this act of slow emergence by moving her handaway the minute that one would expect the ding—that is, when shereaches her chin. With this gesture it is as if she resets the process.Then, firmly placing the knuckles of her fist back on her chin sheperforms the iconic Graceface—smile, ding, and all (Fig. 1b). Thisall suggests that the iconography of the Graceface cannot emergefrom a spectrum of signification. In other words, Helbig does notGraceface just because her fist is simply on her chin. Instead, theGraceface can only be read as such when it is driven by a forceful andconcrete intentionality. In this moment, the Graceface is defined notjust as a sign that emerges from relations between body parts, fromthe mere placement of knuckles upon the chin, but rather the Grace-face emerges from a gestural, performative act of self-identification.Thus, we could see this particular video as drawing attention andagency to the video’s author as sole creator and owner of her content.It is as if Helbig is struggling with her own artistic intentionality inthe face of her terminated contract with My Damn Channel thatstripped her of the control of her own creative content.

This video was in fact published exactly one week before theonline-video trade-magazine VideoInk first reported Helbig’s splitfrom My Damn Channel, which would become effective on December31, 2013 (Johnson, “Grace Helbig Breaks Up”). As such, this videoemerges right around the period when negotiations broke-down andperhaps after the split had been finalized. Thus, it can be seen asshowing an early indication of Helbig’s frustration and resistance toher contractually obligated content production, leading to a subver-sion of her own medium as a product of her need to confront andoperate alongside the rigid rules of her network.

This medium-specific tactic played precisely with what the mediumof DailyGrace was capable of representing now and how it might cometo represent. By drawing attention to her agency, Helbig metaphori-cally struggles with the autonomy and automatism of her DailyGracemedium—a medium that after her departure would start uploadingold DailyGrace videos from the My Damn Channel website on You-Tube following the 5-day format, making it perhaps the first instance


of YouTube syndication. Thus, by placing the agency of the ding inher field of production—that is, not just because her knuckles were onher chin, but rather because she chose to Graceface—Helbig seemed tomove the true medium of her work away from My Damn Channel’sDailyGrace, defined as a corporate entity, and back onto her creativeagency as an individual. This would come to pave the way for the aptlynamed itsGrace channel. Even at face-value, this video must be seen atthe very least as an intentional subversion and contortion of the formatby which Helbig was simultaneously fulfilling her contractual obliga-tion to produce content, while still not producing said content.

What Helbig’s inquiry offers to the field of visual culture andmedia studies is that through this example one may come to perceivethe autophagy of the medium’s recursive definition, as a structurewho in its acts of self-definition and self-reflexivity comes to annihi-late its own operation as a medium for representation. In pointing toitself, the image breaks the fourth wall, drawing attention to itsstructure and artifice, as such sacrificing (or at least qualifying) itsability to make manifest anything other than itself.

After the rise of itsGrace, this project of medium-specificity like-wise articulated itself as a negative project under the proposition:How can Grace Helbig produce DailyGrace content without actuallyproducing any content that would legally overlap with the old chan-nel? This methodology was corroborated nearly a year later in aninterview at Google, where Helbig explicitly describes that when shestarted itsGrace she was “trying to make it as similar as legally possi-ble as [she] could to DailyGrace” (AtGoogleTalks 44:56–45:01).Thus, in the months following Helbig’s return to YouTube asitsGrace on January 6, 2014, Helbig’s work consistently and methodi-cally was built on a reflection of what her medium was and what itcould become. Her daily themes and their names (merely DailyGracethemes renamed, but kept in the same order), while consistent in theinitial months of the project, were nevertheless depicted by Helbig asif being in a constant state of flux. Appropriately, her sign off becamesimply, “I don’t know,” recalling that crucial moment after her “AmI doing it?” montage where she raised her hands up before the cameraas if already saying to her viewers there: I don’t know.

While the “I don’t know” sign-off is staged as a nonchalant andimpromptu choice at the end of her inaugural itsGrace video, themethodical choosing of this phrase (which had been one of many


recurring tropes in older DailyGrace videos) is made evident by thefact that in her third and eighth itsGrace videos, filmed previouslywhile she was visiting her family in New Jersey for the holidays, shealso uses the sign-off (itsGrace “Making Men” and “Golden GlobesReview.” cf. “Welcome to It’s Grace”). Here, she has managed to sub-limate a critical, medium-reflexive methodology of artistic productioninto the very nature of her humoristic approach. Her medium reflex-ivity could hardly be called “meta” for it does not rely on banal“pointing to itself” tricks, but rather uses the medium of her humorto reflect on the corporate stresses and factors at work in her videos—such as when she points out that a random object featured in a videois now a tax-deduction (DailyGrace, “Story of My Life” 5:51–5:54).The very aberration in format that the “Am I doing It” video pre-sented reads to the average viewer as a mere break intended for come-dic effect. However, beyond it having been carefully staged andplanned out, it becomes necessary to understand how it is that thevery act of crossing or breaking of mediums translates in Helbig’swork as a humoristic tactic. In this context, all the structures, orders,and rules that Helbig cultivates in her regularly structured videos areput into place precisely so that she might come to violate them.

This reticent, resistant quality of the medium is something whichKrauss compares to the hard retaining-wall of the pool’s sides uponwhich a swimmer might kick themselves off to begin their laps (UnderBlue Cup 86). Medium in this metaphor constitutes then not the matrixof water that suspends the swimmer and constitutes the act of swim-ming itself, but rather the structures that circumscribe and contain theplaying field, and from which all the ensuing actions emerge even ifthat wall is never perceptibly present in the action itself. By followingalong the path of her contractual obligations and the structures of herpre-existent medium, Helbig is able to delineate the containing,circumscribing forces of her medium indexically—that is, evidencingtheir existence by the way in which they push, pull, and direct her body,even if they in no way constitute the content or focus of her work as such.

You’ve Been [Pr]azed!

In Helbig’s play on what is not DailyGrace, one crucial elementcomes to the forefront, which is that her Commenting on Comments’


“You’ve Been Hazed” has been turned into “You’ve Been Prazed.”This self-reflexive, intellectual-property joke is best embodied by hericonic “You’ve been Hazed” shirt produced by the YouTube-orientedmerchandise company District Lines, which she goes on to alter into“You’ve Been Prazed” by the addition of two taped-on post-it notes(Fig. 2). The gag plays with the laziness and aloofness that Helbig’scharacter embodies, yet in reality is a potent sign of resistance againstMy Damn Channel in demonstrating that while they might own therights to “You’ve been hazed,” the shirt, its revenue, and the defunctmedium it points to, she can legally use the shirt and the phrase bychanging the shirt and partially obscuring a portion of the logodesign. This was driven home in her “You Deserve the MiddleFinger” video from March 11, 2014, where she did not bring theshirt with her while traveling so she drew the phrase onto a whitemen’s V-neck shirt. However, here she does not merely write thephrase but rather produces a skeuomorphic rendition of the “You’veBeen Hazed” shirt with the taped-on letters (Fig. 3). Thus, she driveshome the intentionality of the erasure—while still seemingly operat-ing on the level of the shallow gag. Compare this action to Helbig’ssimilar move when she covered her MacBook’s Apple logo with awhite sticker written in pen that says “Not Apple Logo” (itsGrace,“How I Like My Eggs”) (Fig. 4a). This simple joke, which is hardlylegible in many of her videos, acquires its greatest potency with the

FIGURE. 2. itsGrace, “Vomiting on Your Comments,” YouTube (7 Jan. 2014).


fact that the sticker itself does little to obscure the glowing Applebehind it (See itsGrace “Bathrooms with no Locks”) (Fig. 4b). Never-theless, by defacing it and occluding it partially from view she hasachieved the necessary negation of the logo to eschew any potentiallegal concerns, much as she did with the “You’ve been hazed” shirt.

Like the television series Arrested Development, which developsslowly a canon of material that later is riffed upon, Helbig similarlyproduces an autopoetic humor that is founded on first constitutingthe groundwork of what should be described as a “medium condi-tion.” As such, the show can then go on to play with its self-estab-lished motifs by building on them or circumventing them, whilemaking it clear every step of the way precisely how it is that theshow is achieving this play on its recursive medium condition. Forexample, in her first itsGrace video from January 6, 2014, Helbig hasa digression where she ponders how the Hamburger Helper glovemascot masturbates. This is in fact a reference to her first YouTubevideo, also published on the graciehinabox channel, now rebranded asitsGrace. In that first video, she cites Hamburger Helper as one of thethings she dislikes. And over the next several months, Helbiginserted quiet references to earlier content found on graciehinabox,which was her original channel before joining My Damn Channel andthen served for a period of time as a supplementary secondary

FIGURE. 3. itsGrace, “You Deserve the Middle Finger,” YouTube (11 Mar.2014).


channel. Thus, acknowledging a change in medium, she then directsself-referentiality toward that older content so as to reconstitute forherself a new medium condition on the it’sGrace/graciehinabox chan-nel.

Her March 31, 2014, lip dub of Frozen’s “Let it Go,” for instance,is one example that also carefully plays with the manner in whichYouTubers often stage their videos as being fan-requested or buildingupon precedents, such as the various tag or challenge videos. Yet,

(a)

(b)

FIGURE. 4. itsGrace, “How I Like My Eggs,” YouTube (21 Mar. 2014).


immediately after saying that she is doing this lip dub because “somany of you have requested it,” the text flashes upon the screen stat-ing the exact opposite: “none of you have” (Fig. 5). This draws atten-tion to Helbig’s penchant for playing with the YouTube medium’sillusory cultivation of feelings of interactivity, participation, andaccess. In doing this, Helbig stresses not only her creative agency butalso plays with the expectations of fans and cynically addresses theshallow tactics that fellow creators deploy to give their fans a sense ofinvolvement despite their tight control over the content they createand the larger economic forces that lead production. Furthermore,this lip dub could similarly be read as a reference to her eighth You-Tube video on her graciehinabox channel (before pairing with MyDamn Channel) where she did a lip dub of Kanye’s “Stronger,” a songthat is itself full of samplings from Daft Punk’s “Harder BetterFaster” (graciehinabox). Thus, connecting itself to a long chain ofreferential materials that address YouTube’s unique fondness of thecover video, she internalizes the logic of virality and the cover in herproduction of generative chains of (self-)referentiality.

The cultivation of an auto-poetic medium condition in Grace Hel-big’s work must be seen as coming from the intersection of Helbig’straining in improvisation and sketch-comedy, particularly via herrelationship with her collaborator Mamrie Hart. Not coincidently,Arrested Development, for example, is a show that emerges precisely at

FIGURE. 5. itsGrace, “Let It Go – Lip Dub,” YouTube (31 Mar. 2014).


the intersection of improvisation and sketch comedy—having a writ-ten script that is repeatedly revised as actors improvise on set andthat generates its content by producing story arcs and situations thatbuild on pre-existing givens. These are both medium-specific pro-jects, and Helbig takes this method to its breaking point in hervideos using reductio ad absurdum as a tactic for enabling the logic ofthe system to collapse upon itself and expose its intricate inner work-ings in the ruins.

In this sense, Mamrie Hart and Hannah Hart’s predilection forpuns in their own series speaks to a more potent and ingrained logicat work here. For what else is a pun but a medium-reflexive tactic atthe level of language itself? The pun takes a word or phrase andthrough phonetic homology constructs ulterior meanings and resolu-tions. The pun arrests understanding in its tracks and redirects signi-fication. The humor of the pun comes not from what is said, butrather in the act of tripping the viewer and in the act of manifestingthe speaker’s agility with words. It is an exposition of skill and bra-vado through the tripping of language itself. It is a project rooted onliteralism that trips literalism. Thus, punning might be seen as anoverarching medium condition that comes to operate in an expandedfield across the work of Grace Helbig, Hannah Hart, and MamrieHart, despite the individual genres they might deploy to articulatetheir investigation of the pun-as-medium. Thus, when Helbigadmonishes Hart for crossing mediums through the logic of the punthat hazing involves, one is slammed against the edge and wall of themedium and made to realize the depth and art of Helbig’s work andalso the very acute and sensitive understanding that Helbig hasprecisely of her medium.

Solid Medium Use

On April 2, 2014, Grace Helbig published on itsGrace her weekly“Once Over Wednesday” (OOW) video, itself a revision of the Daily-Grace channel’s “Review Wednesday,” entitled “Reviewing How IMet Your Mother.” Here, Helbig opens the video by stating that hercamera battery is about to die and thus the video will result fromwhatever footage she is able to capture and upload. This technicallimitation operates as a traditional medium-specific tactic, whereby


Helbig plays with the mechanical confines of a traditional medium soas to produce a video not regulated by content or narrative, but rathersimply by the impending death of the camera. More broadly, it riffson the work of YouTube vloggers whose cameras often die through-out the day and who must then supplement their videos with text oradditional footage to complete the day’s entry. She even speaks to thismedium condition by opening the video saying: “My battery is aboutto die so let’s play the game of how much content I can shoot beforeit dies” (itsGrace “Reviewing” 0:00–0:04). With these words sheclearly lays out a structure of the medium that is both orientedtoward the material support of her work (i.e., recorded, digital film)and as a condition of possibility: as a “game” whose only rule is howmuch content can be filmed before the technical medium fails.

Grace Helbig’s articulation of medium as a ludic space is a crucialarticulation that stages her actions of subversion and play within thelegacy of game theory narratives in media studies. By playing accord-ing to prescribed rules, established conventions, learned strategies,and subversive tactics, Helbig allows for the emergence of what KatieSalen and Eric Zimmerman have termed “meaningful play,” wherebythe actions of a player and their outcome in a game are both inte-grated and discernable: to be discernable, actions in a game must belegible and understood to have occurred, and to be integrated theseactions must have results in the context of the game itself (Salen 31–37). In the case of the “Am I Doing It” video, not only were Helbig’sactions integrated into the My Damn Channel system by achievingher contractual obligation but her actions were also made discernableas such by virtue of her well-defined and articulated medium. Hermedium not only made these aberrant moves discernable in reliefagainst the usual conventions of her videos, but also gave value tothese moves within her medium’s self-reflexive and critical humor. Asimilar structure of play occurs as Helbig’s battery dies, yet thereplayfulness is consciously articulated as meaningful play. Thisdemonstrated the shift in her medium condition from the game ofbeating My Damn Channel’s prescriptions to a play with the physicalmedium’s technical proscriptions via the dying battery. This modeloutplays the binary of play/seriousness established by classic works onplay, such as Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and to a lesser extentBrian Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of Play (Huizinga; Sutton-Smith),by demonstrating not only that there can be serious players but also


serious play that need not affect society directly in its educationalresults. Instead, meaningful play can operate subversively as structureof cultural production through the mere rhetoric and conditions ofplay itself (Bogost, Persuasive Games 52–59).

Therefore, by virtue of Helbig’s articulation of a ludic medium,she is able to enact a transgressive project of play in keeping with herhumor that comes to continually subvert and outplay the logics ofthe existing medium that each of these successive moves are in them-selves enacting. Like a video game, in which every action produces anew reality and in which reality the game now continues to beplayed, Helbig’s content production is one of self-competition anddefacement. Huizinga considered this function of play-forms in art,poetry, and philosophy, stating quite derisively about modern art andits esoteric structures: “In other words, esoterics requires a play-com-munity which shall steep itself in its own mystery. Wherever there isa catch-word ending in -ism we are hot on the tracks of a play-com-munity” (Huizinga 203). In this model of an art-form, Huizinga seesplay as a closed-system of initiates and concedes to art’s auto-poeticludic logic, yet he denies the seriousness of these practices by pre-cisely understanding a ludic art, rather than a ludic medium. Whileludic art is art as play, a ludic medium allows for the very structuresand rules of that system to actively respond to and change with theplayer’s moves, a shift from strategies to tactics, following Michel deCerteau’s useful distinction (xix). This ludic medium is thus anunderstanding of art via its medium, which thus places play as thetactics of artistic production against the limiting and circumscribingstrategies that a medium condition may present a creator. However,as a ludic medium these strategies are subject to the perpetual con-struction of revolutions and new medium horizons that ever shatterand remake the play-ground. In the ludic medium, the game does notpre-exist the player, and it never exists the same once it is played.

Not coincidently, the ludic nature of digital games have allowedtheorists such as Ian Bogost and Janet Murray to argue for “the digi-tal” as a unique and congruent medium, beyond the mystified ambi-guity of the term “new” media. Janet Murray sees the digitalmedium’s uniqueness and defining characteristics precisely as deter-mined by its four affordances: the procedural, participatory, spatial,and encyclopedic (Murray 51–86). These are the qualities that sepa-rate, distinguish, and unify the digital medium by virtue of what it


allows for designers and users alike. In his analysis of videogames, IanBogost exemplifies this perspective by proposing a representationalsystem that lies outside the logic of static, mimetic depiction. Bogostdescribes this as a “procedural rhetoric,” a “practice of authoringarguments through processes” (Persuasive Games 29). In such a system,as Bogost goes on to describe: “arguments are made not through theconstruction of words or images, but through the authorship of rulesof behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation,those rules are authored in code, through the practice of program-ming” (Persuasive Games 28–29). However, this ludic theory of thedigital medium is not relegated in Bogost’s theorization to the digi-tal alone, given that procedural representation in his work can mani-fest itself in any product that uses an extant body of knowledge togenerate nonmimetic depiction along its guidelines, which unfurland manifest themselves uniquely through use. Therefore, in Bogost’sthinking, the construction of a code as a generative field of produc-tion and manifestation embodies precisely Rosalind Krauss’s ownmatured stance on the medium as a condition of possibility thatcomes to be recursively made manifest through its very actions, ratherthan by an externally defined substratum. One might therefore seeKrauss’s thinking as a broader cultural iteration of the rules likewisearticulated by Bogost in his own work on videogames.

In the case of Grace Helbig, one witnesses a perspective on themedium that seemingly unifies both the technical substratum of herwork and the conceptual, orienting tropes that have come to defineher medium simply as the very landscape of working as a YouTuberand being subjected to all the market forces, legal proscriptions, anddemands that this entails. Thus, between her “Am I doing It” videoand her declaration of her dying battery as a “game,” one encounterswithin Helbig’s work the twinned discourses on medium specificitywithin academic discourses in art history and digital media, whichhave yet to be fruitfully put into dialogue with one another. As such,Grace Helbig allows us to unify these various theorizations on themedium to understand the shared intersection of these theories onthe inexorable concept of the medium’s encrypted recursive nature,which can only be teased out through close analysis and use. Also,Helbig’s work reiterates the medium’s manifestation not as a physicalsubstratum, but rather as a condition, a state of manifestation thatonly can present itself through direct contact and interactive play.


Helbig has in the past evidenced a very acute understanding ofthis unified definition of the medium as encompassing both a concep-tual and physical system. This is made clearest in her interview withNew Media Rockstars. In interviews, where she has been asked toaddress the future of YouTube and online media, she describes, in herwords, “the digital medium” and its relation to “old/traditionalmedia,” such as movies and television, as a tension between mutualannihilation or sexual consummation. In fact, much of her ongoingefforts to diversify into “traditional” media speaks to projects thatwould blend online media with television and film. Thus, her diversi-fication projects speak to an eloquent view of the medium as both amaterial and conceptual frame of operation that both refers to theaffordances of the various technical platforms that she can deploy,while still understanding her medium as being dominated by herbroader character or persona, what one might superficially describe asa form of brand-identity.

This is iterated explicitly in Helbig’s video on her dying battery.When Helbig’s camera finally does die, she closes the video with aseries of five text slides. The sequence is as follows:

And then my battery died.Excellent use of face today, stranger.SIKEsolid medium use I don’t know. (“Reviewing” 3:22–3:26)

In the second slide of the sequence, Helbig chooses to acknowledgedirectly the interactive, participatory affordances of her platform byspoofing the notion of YouTube enabling a direct contact with view-ers in their personal space. There she addresses viewers (here as “stran-ger”) directly, something which she does often in many of her videos—and then seemingly goes on to prank them with the subsequent,“SIKE,” another signature element in her videos since DailyGrace andalso emphasized in itsGrace videos following the increased popularityof the prank video as a contemporary YouTube genre. Then, in reflec-tion of this interaction, the fourth slide simply reads: “solid mediumuse.”

With this slide she acknowledges the issues addressed so far, whileprivileging here not so much the structure of her content, but ratherthe experience of the YouTube viewer-user (which DailyGrace


perfectly captured with the term “viewser”), and that illusory interac-tive relationship with the “viewser” as the “medium.” This is indeeda seemingly more traditional use of the term medium. However,what it demonstrates in this context is the alleged interactivity thatYouTube operates on, which here is subverted by the act of demon-strating that this participatory interactivity is in large parts a mirageof the platform itself, when it is understood as a medium. Grace Hel-big cannot see the viewer, the viewer might be seduced into believingin this closeness, but the “SIKE” shatters this illusion, drawing atten-tion to the platform’s realities. While the viewers can see her, shecannot see them, and yet even now because of her dead battery, infact not even they can see her.

Thus, in this autophagic void of representation, the medium has ina sense collapsed upon itself. The subsequent slide with its all-lower-case “solid medium use,” confronts the viewer precisely with the wallof the black screen behind it, drawing attention to nothing but itself.This reading of platform as medium is that of medium-specificity inits most materialist reduction, like Clement Greenberg’s predilectionfor the flat plane of the canvas, accessible in two-dimensions throughopticality alone. The “solid medium use” flutters in between sincerityand sarcasm, given that on the one hand it operates as a self-congratu-latory reference to the prank’s success and play with YouTube’s mythof interactivity only to reveal said interactivity to be non-existent, yeton the other hand it also demonstrates the lithe agency of this jokesince it was not really a solid use of the medium given that she doesnot trick or prank the viewer in any way that would read as a possibleplay on said medium—like removing sound from a video so that a userattempts to raise the volume, or simply placing blank slides to makethe viewer believe something is wrong with the video. Instead, thetotality of the joke points to Grace Helbig’s operation outside of thisbanal reduction of medium to the technical support and recaps the les-sons of her previous deployment of the term in the You Deserve a Drinkvideo and the lessons of the “Am I Doing It” video.

Grace Helbig’s articulation of medium is a telling bifurcationbetween medium as a condition of possibility that can be recursivelydefined, as articulated by Krauss, and medium as a more traditionaldefinition of mechanical substrata defined along lines of online media,television, and film. This bifurcation may appear jarring or contradic-tory, but in fact what it demonstrates is that Helbig herself is


engaging in concerted acts of remediation. Jay David Bolter andRichard Grusin coined the term “remediation” to describe exactly thedouble logic of “new” media as a desire for immediacy and hyperme-diacy. This is to say, a process by which, in Bolter and Grusin’swords: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase alltraces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very actof multiplying them” (Bolter and Grusin 5). Helbig’s acts of remedi-ation emerge in large part from her ongoing efforts to diversify intotelevision and film, while also seizing the opportunities that the con-ceptual expansion enabled by “new media” has provided for creatorslike herself, and the consequent need then to rearticulate a mediumcondition in light of this Wild West of media.

Conclusion

Nearly twenty years later, Bolter and Grusin’s observations on newmedia seem somewhat out dated. Yet, Krauss, Bolter, and Grusin allseem to have been struggling with the same problem at the turn of themillennium: how does one come to understand cultural production ina sphere that thrives on a decentralization of medium in exchange forthe multimedia event? For Bolter and Grusin, the answer lies in thecreation of a body that is able to subsume a plurality of forms into anonhomogenous aggregation of forms. For Krauss, the answer is to doaway with the question of media and construct a singular and tetheringdefinition of medium that can be reparatively supplied ad hoc. WhileBolter and Grusin’s theory thrives on the cultural processing andconsumption of media, Krauss sees cohesion in the creation of a sort ofprosthetic medium condition that can order and center artistic produc-tion. In many ways, remediation precisely enabled this conceptualwork for Bolter and Grusin by allowing new media’s schizophrenicoperation to repair itself as a body of remediation, retrieving into itsstructure the act of remediation as its medium condition. Instead, JanetMurray and Ian Bogost have seen medium as offering up a “possibilityspace,” in Bogost’s words (How to Do Things with Videogames 3). Murrayand Bogost’s views are similar to Krauss’s view of medium as a “condi-tion of possibility,” yet in keeping with this lineage of media theoryMurray and Bogost stress the cultural maturity of a medium as relyingupon its types and diversity of uses (Krauss, Under Blue Cup 18).


Other art historians working on contemporary art and media havelikewise favored the media theory approach. David Joselit, in Feed-back, came to define media as separated from medium by virtue ofthe type and magnitude of social investment in the audiences andnetworks they cultivate (Feedback 27–41). Yet, in his treatise AfterArt, Joselit resolutely states: “First, we must discard the concept ofmedium (along with its mirror image, the postmedium), which hasbeen fundamental to art history and criticism for generations” (2).Joselit makes this proposition precisely to allow art to encompass, ashe continues, the “heterogeneous configurations of relationships andlinks” for which medium and postmedium are not adequate tools todescribe such hybridity. Nevertheless, what Joselit is preciselyattempting to achieve here is simply a medium defined through theact of remediation itself. A business of art that thrives upon the ensu-ing doubled logic of remediation as a plurality of media that seemsto annihilate discrete mediums. It is this illusion or mirage of newmedia’s postmedium condition that Joselit and others have beenlulled into seeing, yet which is the defining tactic of new media’sdouble-bind of proliferation and annihilation. As such, Joselit movesfrom initially seeing media as defined through the discrete acts ofproliferation, but then that proliferation seems to have implodedunder its own weight and no longer perceptible as such, although itsimperceptibility is precisely what defines it as such. And that is whatnew media’s remediation at the turn of the millennium wanted us tobelieve. Such mirages and tactics are what Krauss attempts to wrestleagainst the mat and pin-down to a new form of specificity thatexceeds the rubrics of medium—having more in common with theFoucaultian episteme than the Greenbergian medium of art historicalcriticism. Hence, we can see Grace Helbig’s strategies as charting outa new terrain for the medium. Helbig is then what Rosalind Krausswould call a knight of the medium, soldiering toward new articula-tions of specificity in the medium’s expanded field (Under Blue Cup101–30).

Richard Grusin in an edited volume on YouTube aptly titled hiscontribution to the conversation as “YouTube at the End of NewMedia.” There, Grusin asks the crucial question: “Is YouTube a Med-ium?” (61). Grusin unenthusiastically resolves that YouTube is aremediation of television and since he and Bolter came to define med-ium as that which remediates, then it would follow that YouTube is


indeed a medium. It certainly is, but not one that seeks to be definedby its operation as media or as an individual platform. It does notthrive on remediation alone. Grace Helbig is certainly a remediator,her overall project is structured around the diversification and expan-sion of media so as to allow such proliferation to be subsumed underthe singularity of her brand identity—in a sense, this is preciselywhat a good brand identity does when it sees itself not merely as aplatform or persona, but as a congruent and unified medium condi-tion in its own right. However, beyond this definition of medium,there is also the idea of medium that Helbig was relying upon whenshe chastised Hannah Hart for crossing mediums.

Using Krauss’s expanded definition of medium as a foil to thesemedia theorists reveals the recursive tautology of the medium as asystem that by definition must be created ad hoc and therefore canclaim no ontological ground for the YouTube platform beyond whatis laid out by the content producers themselves, that is the self-defined field of each YouTuber. What is crucial about medium, how-ever, is that it enacts a relationship of figure and ground: it enablesus to understand a “daily” format to Grace Helbig’s videos, her con-tractual obligations, her personal relations, the various genres shedeploys, and so on, which in turn allows us to perceive the self-con-scious and internal aberrations and fractures in that matrix as mean-ingful action through the discernable methods and integrated movesof what Salen and Zimmerman have termed “meaningful play” (Salen31–37). What this suggests then is that a medium condition is whatallows one to perceive as meaningful all those small details that with-out a structure and framework would not be perceptible as such norwould they be meaningful in any way. As such, this theory of med-ium is a reification of the event as an artistic manifesto. DailyGrace oritsGrace are not necessarily artistic projects overall, but rather the art-work emerges or occurs within these mediums—just as paint on canvasis not an artwork until they occur as such: either through the act ofpresentation or reception. It is precisely the act of crossing and trans-gression then that transforms this medium into the event of the workof art.

In describing the landscape of architecture in the age of multime-dia, Sylvia Lavin sees the emergence of architecture or “superarchitec-ture,” as she calls it, as an act of “kissing,” of mediums comingtogether, touching, embracing, entangling, but still needing to be


discrete entities and perceptible as such so that the embrace can occur—for how could one touch another body if that body is indistin-guishable from the self (110–11). This could be described as an erotictheory of remediation, where instead of an antisocial annihilation ofeither old or new media these mediums “have sex,” as Grace Helbigdescribed it in her interview with New Media Rockstars(NewMediaRockstars 11:49–12:42). Thus, it could be perceived thatin Helbig’s “stop crossing mediums” there is encrypted a recursivedefinition of medium, but that this statement is also then an artisticmanifesto. The admonition to “stop” merely performs that eventnessof work of art in the age of virality as an exceptional transgression.Emerging as a performative violation, “stop crossing mediums” mani-fests itself as the event of the artwork within a medium conditionthat makes it recognizable as such, evidencing that the artworkemerges from such acts of “kissing,” of crossing mediums by forceful,intentional, and disruptive action.

We cannot speak of a YouTuber then as an artist working in amedium given that their work is what comes to define their individ-ual medium. Instead, we must consider that at times they produceartistic works by virtue of having (the rest of the time) been able todefine for themselves a medium condition—whether they be a vlog-ger or a scripted comedian. And this may well be the case for all arttoday. The lessons learned from Grace Helbig thus allow us to liftthe possibility of artistic production from the realm of the artist, anduse the logic of the medium’s recursive tautology to understand thatsince art requires a medium and a medium produces art, if we canconceptually delineate a medium recursively for a YouTuber or anyother cultural producer, then we can go on to identify events withinthat structure that may be meaningfully discerned and integratedinto that system as art.

Note

I thank Sarah Urist Green for her insight, support, and encouragement of this overall project at

a crucial juncture. Additionally, Samuel Ray Jacobson, Alec Magnet, Trevor McLemore, Elaine

McLemore, Devin O’Neill, Tara Prescott, and Chester See all deserve acknowledgment for the

many passing conversations that have contributed and enriched the context and future of this

work. Finally, Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks merit particular mention for creating the space

for my work on popular culture to develop and thrive early on. Without them this work would

have not been possible, and thus this article is dedicated to them.


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Roland Betancourt (PhD, Yale University) is Assistant Professor of ArtHistory at the University of California, Irvine. Among other projects, he isa coeditor of the volume, Byzantium/Modernism (Leiden: Brill, 2015), and isthe editor of two forthcoming special issues in postmedieval and West 86th.


He has presented extensively at conferences, and his published work hasappeared or is forthcoming in Gesta, Speculum, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Greek,Roman, and Byzantine Studies, Word & Image, Orientalia Christiana Periodica,and several edited volumes. His work and methodology focus on bothByzantine and contemporary discourses on the ontological valences of theimage, its medium, and temporality. Currently, he is preparing a mono-graph on YouTube that addresses the emergent culture and community ofYouTubers.


Genre as Medium on YouTube: The Work of Grace Helbig

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