Objecthood....

As I worked my way through Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood, I thought he built a strong case for the ascendancy of Literalist or Minimalist art, and it’s rejection of modernist painting and sculpture. The article was written in 1967, and refers heavily to Donald Judd’s  ‘Specific Objects’ from 1965, and Robert Morris’ ‘Notes on Sculpture’. Fried starts out by stating “the enterprise known as Minimal Art is largely ideological-it seeks to declare and occupy a position, one that can be formulated in words and in fact has been so formulated by some of it’s leading practitioners”.

Last semester in 282A, Keith Daly and I presented on Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of artistic field, and Fried seems to be referring to this concept when he says “It’s seriousness is vouched for by the fact that it is in relation both to modernist painting and modernist sculpture that literalist art defines or locates the position it aspires to occupy”.

Fried moves through a series of ideas that describe literalist art, often quoting Judd and Morris.  “A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references”,” the shape is the object: at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape. What is at stake in this conflict is whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or as objects, and what decides their identity as ‘painting’ is their confronting of the demand they hold as shapes”.

On page 152-3, Fried introduces his concepts of  ‘presence’ (‘presence can be conferred by size or the look of non-art), and ‘theater’. He asks “what is it about objecthood as projected by the literalists that makes it, if only from the perspective of recent modernist painting, antithetical to art?” At this point, I began wondering if I had misread him, as he seems now to become more subtly critical of the literalists. He says “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theater, and theater is now the negation of art. Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work”.

I did some searching and found an article by Aaron Davis, “What you See is What you See”. Aaron seems to agree with my new view that Fried is anti-literalist. He says “Fried mounts a critique of Minimalist Art suggesting that it amounts to nothing more than an abstraction of theatricality that marks both the death (or suspension) fo subjectivity as he sees it. Further, he argues that Literalism also provides a nemesis that Modern painting and sculpture must ‘defeat’ so that verisimilitude as he sees it, may prevail”.

In class today, I’d like to see how the rest of the class read the article, and also to dissect what Fried really means by ‘theatricality'.