Art and Objecthood

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood (1967).”, Art and Objecthood. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 148-179. Print.

The chapter “Art and Objecthood” in the book Art & Objecthood was written by Michael Fried in 1967. It was originally published in Artforum 5 (June 1967).
Fried was born in 1939 in New York City; he is a Modernist art critic and art historian defining the contours of late Modernism (1962-1977). Fried was involved and contributed to the discourse of the origins and development of Modernism, as did Clement Greenberg who was also his mentor.

Fried has been occupied with questions regarding “modernism, realism, theatricality, objecthood, self-portraiture, embodiedness, and the everyday”(web humctr). This essay relates to a debate around minimalism. What motivates Fried is driven by the concepts of literalism and theater. He addresses several key issues in this essay but I would like to find out what he means by theatricality and the relationship between the work and the beholder.

Fried brings up the question; “What is it about objecthood as projected and hypostatized by the literalist that makes it, if only from the perspective of recent modernist painting, antithetical to art?” The answer Fried proposed is as follows: “The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art” (Fried,153).

Fried is putting up the distinction between painting and theatre. He finds that the devolution of Minimalism in objecthood, nullifies art, and shifts the focus of the debate from the temporal to the spatial. Claiming the literalist are moving the attention from an artwork towards the context of its reception. Minimalism’s adaptation of objecthood offers an experience of theatricality rather than presentness. Leading to the realization that paintings are nothing more than things. Fried disagrees painting is exhausted unless we use shaped rather then rectangular supports. He claims Frank Stella is on the right track with his shaped supports and the minimalists are not. (Rose, 129)

The experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation that includes the beholder. Morris believes this is intensified by the gestalt and the large scale of much literalist work (i.e. the larger the object the more we are forced to keep our distance from it) (Fried,153). He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into some sort of drama that detracted the viewers’ ability to be present to the artwork itself. He writes: “Morris wants to achieve presence through objecthood, which requires a certain largeness of scale, rather than through size alone” (154). The “stage” presence is obtained by being distanced by the work, also crucial are repetition, order and hollowness or secret inner life (Fried, 155-156). Fried takes a staunch opposition to what he observed as the lack of differentiation between the work of art itself and the experience of viewing it, a phenomenon he described as "theatricality" (web, theartstory).

I gather that Fried claims the Minimalists are creating an engagement outside the artwork and therefore the experience itself is of importance and becomes essentially a genre of theatre rather than Minimal Art. This is caused by the involvement of the viewer’s whole body rather then the encounter being a merely optical experience. The corporeality is distracting from the aesthetic engagement and therefore the experience becomes an event outside of the artwork itself, which Fried claims to be a form of theatre hence artistically self-defeating (Fried,163).

Michael Fried jumped on Tony Smith’s insistence that ‘you just have to experience it’ as a clear sign that Minimal Art in general increases an untrue instant involvement (Fried,158). But Robert Smithson pointed out in 1968 that Smith’s epiphany did not replace the work of art, but rather anticipated it - through a process of delimitation, of ‘de-differentiation’ (Fried, 103). Fried’s opinion was immediately challenged by Smithson in Artforum, who wrote; “What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing—namely being himself theatrical. He dreads "distance" because that would force him to become aware of the role he is playing”. (Artforum, oct ‘67).

At the end of this chapter Fried writes: ”we are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace” (168).

My understanding is that by calling attention to the unwelcome influence of sensitivity or mode of being, that Fried characterizes as theatrical, he means that art, will leave the viewer in his/hers everyday world. Fried finds the presence of the artworks of certain minimalists merely of a phenomenological nature and therefore they are theatrical (corrupted by drama) rather then authentic art. Fried claims that by being present ourselves, our feelings and emotions will be engaged and the eye enthralled. Barbara Rose writes: “Different temporal registers are precisely what concerns Michael Fried in his “Art and objecthood” a spirited defence of Modernist painting against theatricality” (Fried, 126). Fried is oriented towards the continuation of modernist (post painterly) abstraction as in Jules Olitski’s, as well as Kenneth Noland’s and Anthony Caro’s work, rather than Minimalism.

In my view he might have been overly absorbed by his own corporeality, which prevented him being able to be present to the artwork itself. With this I mean that with objecthood the literalists are sharpening the awareness of the viewer, and draw attention to the viewer’s own physical reactions even more so then the merely optical presentations of i.e. Pop art, Op art and post painterly abstractionists. If Fried could have been able to be really present to “the new three dimensional work”(Morris 833), meaning not being distracted by his inner dialogue trying to resist meaning, he might not have condemned the literalist or minimalists by calling it a negation of art and therefore artistically self-defeating. Nothing can be seen without having an effect on the subject, I think his classification is based on looking at just formal qualities instead of deeper philosophical. (Berger, 4)

Thanks to researching further into what others have written about Fried’s conclusions, I can at last appreciate this densely written essay, he reveals distinctions in art and the pitfalls of our engagement with authentic art, concepts of literalism and theatre.

Bibliography

de Antonio, Emile, “Painters Painting”1972. Arthouse Films, New York, NY, Distributed by Arts Alliance America, 2009. Documentary. Video.

Berger, Maurice. Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s” Introduction: Robert Morris outside art history, New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Print

http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/roseb.htm

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood” Art and Objecthood(1967). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 148-179. Print.

Greenberg, Clement “Post Painterly Abstraction”. An exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and sponsored by the Contemporary Art Council Los Angeles County Museum of Art: April 23-June 7, 1964 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: July 13-August 16, 1964 The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: November 20-December 20, 1964. Print.

http://humctr.jhu.edu/Faculty_Bio/michaelfried.html

http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/ehtml/ewelcome00.htm?aus_serra.htm

Morris, Robert. “Notes on Sculpture 1-3, Art in theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas”, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 828-835

Rose, Barbara. “Monochromes From Malevich to the Present”. University of California Press, 2006. Print.

Smithson, Robert. Letter to the Editor, Artform, October, 1967.

http://www.theartstory.org/critic-fried-michael.htm

Wilkin, Karen and Carl Belz. Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975.
New Haven and London, American Federation of Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2007. Print.