The prominence of the portrait’s creator, Wilhelm Schadow, was undoubtedly a factor in the newspaper’s interest, as was the meteoric rise of his pupils, who in 1828 had become known as the Düsseldorf School of Painting. The Hannoverian critic was indeed particularly pleased to see several important examples of that school and its founding father exhibited in his hometown, and commented enthusiastically: “Schadow’s picture meets us so completed, so self-contained and rounded out, and differs precisely thereby from portraits of the ordinary kind, that one soon recognizes the history painter in the hand which created it.”2 Smitten by its loving execution and technical perfection, the critic continued that “one doesn’t believe to see in front of us a portrait from our own shallow times, living merely for the moment, but from the times of the great Italian masters”!3

Yet, for all its allure, the portrait shrouded itself in mystery. Its descriptive title, A Bearded Man, did little to quench viewers’ curiosity about the sitter, a curiosity the reviewer conveyed through a conversation between two ladies he allegedly had overheard during his own visit:

The First: Who, then, may this interesting man be?

The Second: It is supposedly a painter in Düsseldorf.

The First: Impossible!—how could a painter look like this;—it must at least be a count.4

The ladies’ dialogue is revealing. It shows a deeply rooted desire for social legibility, while highlighting the period’s obsession with questions of genre—with the particular form, content, technique, and norms defining categories of painting. These issues were very much on Schadow’s mind as well.

Wilhelm Schadow: Anti-Academic Rebellion and Academic Reform

Born in Berlin as the second son of the famous sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow, Wilhelm had first made his name as a member of the secessionist Brotherhood of St. Luke, which, in 1809, had set out to reform contemporary art by reenchanting it.5 With youthful idealism, the fraternity had declared that Art should once again become religion’s maiden, in subject matter as well as style, because it was Art that could spearhead an all-encompassing return of modern society to the Christian faith. Together with this belief, Schadow had also absorbed a devotional, contemplative approach to grand history painting. The Brotherhood’s artistic principles still informed Schadow’s practice as painter and professor when he became a powerful prince of painters more than two decades later. Only two years after his arrival at the Rhine, Schadow sent his first group of students to the biannual exhibition of the Berlin Academy, which the young Turks took by storm. Dedicated to the modern medium of easel painting (rather than the Nazarene obsession with fresco, celebrated in Munich), Schadow succeeded in transforming the somewhat moribund institution into an utterly modern training ground. By 1830, the Düsseldorf Academy was the place to go.

For a decade and a half, Düsseldorf could compete with such traditional art centers as Paris, and even come out ahead. As a result, a remarkably international student body flocked to the Rhenish city, and it is noteworthy that one of the icons of American history painting, the 1851 canvas Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, was born there, at the banks of the Rhine, and thus has dual citizenship.6 What made the institution so attractive was not least the particular leadership style of its director. Schadow’s “naturalist idealism” and flexible definition of the traditional hierarchy of genres opened up a space of experimentation simultaneously conservative and avant-garde, traditional and experimental.7 This was particularly true for the venerable category of academic history painting and its newly arisen competitor, the so-called genre historique, which, by privatizing its heroes and abandoning the focus on cathartic turning points, proposed a fundamental rearticulation of what constituted history in painting.8 Promoting a kind of “soul painting,” which replaced action-laden plots with a focus on mood and a psychological exploration of the protagonists’ state of mind, Schadow expanded history painting to all forms of historical imagination and in the process located its origins in portraiture.

Despite Schadow’s far-reaching reform of traditional history painting, he rarely produced work that would push the boundaries of academic norms to the extremes reached by his students (fig. 2; see also fig. 20). Indeed, Schadow’s own practice and emphasis on religious painting have long overshadowed his advocacy for the kind of testing of pictorial patterns advanced by his most famous proteges, like Eduard Bendemann or Carl Friedrich Lessing.9 For most of the time, Schadow the painter was too bound up in the Nazarene project of his youth to realize the radicalness of Schadow the professor. Similarly, he rarely tackled the thorny question of how to paint contemporary history, of how to make manifest the events of the here and now (or, for that matter, the new subjects of an urban reality not much later put center stage by the “painter of modern life”).10 However, in the early 1830s, something changed.

Around the time of his second visit to Italy from September 1830 to July 1831, Schadow produced a series of large-scale portraits which transformed his lessons into pictorial practice. The Bearded Man we encountered at the beginning of this essay was a particularly noted example of this experimental moment. Yet for all the attention it attracted it was de facto tied into other works, most importantly into the slightly earlier, monumental tondo of two Prussian Princes, The Princes Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig von Preussen and Wilhelm zu Solms-Braunfels in Cuirassier Uniform of 1830 (fig. 8).11 Equally striking and equally unknown until today, the two canvases form striking counterparts, and indeed, the strategies applied in The Bearded Man could not be fully understood without the royal commission as its essential foil.12 Taken together, the two works emerge as a testing ground for Schadow’s ambition to push the limits of the genre. While The Princes became Schadow’s prime example in his redefinition of the parameters of royal portraiture (a painting type he detested despite its importance for his own career),13 he proposed a radical alternative in The Bearded Man, which seized the same pictorial vocabulary in order to set the scene for an entirely common, utterly unknown man, who hardly warranted (in the eyes of the time) such a grand historicized portrait and indeed had neither commissioned it nor would ever own it. In applying the strategies of modernized royal portraiture to The Bearded Man, Schadow defended portraiture as a genre on par with history painting. Put differently, The Bearded Man stood as the essential expression of Schadow’s larger project, an expression that elevated portraiture to a mode of painting capable of articulating central ethical, historical, and poetic concerns, a mode of free invention and poetic imagination fully independent of stale conventions or commercial interests.

The Stakes of Historicizing Portraiture

In the 1830s, the political and aesthetic stakes for this kind of historicizing portraiture were high. With their technical bravura and enigmatic psychology, Schadow’s two portraits clearly positioned the Prussian painter vis-à-vis Paris: not only vis-à-vis Paris as one of Europe’s dominant cultural capitals and birthplace of the modern academy; but also vis-à-vis France as a symbol of revolutionary unrest and anti-monarchical violence, both of which the academy director despised with a vengeance. As such, the two canvasses answer to the burning quest for an identity for a German nation not yet unified. In this sense, they try to be as much German as Prussian, which in itself was not an easy balance to achieve. Yet Paris was not the only battleground. The portraits also summed up Schadow’s particular place within the German art scene, where his naturalist idealism stood between the radically idealist strand of late German Romanticism, then embodied most prominently by Peter Cornelius’s Munich school, and the increasingly thunderous calls for greater realism and an overthrow of academic values, in particular the lingering privilege of traditional academic history painting. Caught in the crossfire, Schadow answered with a delicate fusion of Romantic historicism and an emphatically contemporary mode of observation.

This attempt at fusion was not just a stylistic challenge for Schadow, the artist. It rather spoke to an underlying dilemma in the early nineteenth century. In an age acutely aware that revolutionary upheaval had broken the continuous thread of history, the question of how a modern identity would navigate between the desire for historical continuity and the need for contemporaneity was as crucial as it was painful. After all, even Charles Baudelaire desired to distil the eternal from the transitory, and defined modernity through this gesture.14 Thus, Schadow’s pictures remind us that the geo-political desire for a German identity intersected with the specific desire undergirding the more general quest for a modern identity.

These various concerns were wrapped up, as the fictive conversation of the ladies from Hannover so vividly demonstrates, in an intense battle over the organization and ranking of pictorial modes of painting, a battle nurtured by broad social conflicts and the effects of a rapidly changing social make-up with its rise of new audiences and new demands of the marketplace. Choosing a genre ranking quite low in the traditional hierarchy, Schadow felt free to explore a number of pictorial solutions responding to this complex mixture of artistic and political concerns, solutions that were thus necessarily high-stakes in ideological and aesthetic terms.

Preoccupied with a Romantic notion of subjectivity and haunted by a sense of modernity as a realm of alienation, Schadow decided to place his own art, and with it the subjects of his portraits, in the middle of the brewing conflicts marking the roughly two decades leading up to the Revolution of 1848. Ultimately, he used this gesture to carve out a space of his own, as painter and engaged citizen. The results were works that, from a pro-monarchist perspective, modernized academic painting from the top down. As such, The Princes and The Bearded Man proposed an evolutionary model, a model of reform rather than revolution. Inevitably, this model asks us to change our views of how modern, ambitious, and advanced portraiture could look in 1830. In so doing, it adds a crucial supplement to the revisionist histories of ambitious nineteenth-century painting and the other modernity of academic art that has brought back into the limelight figures like Paul Delaroche and Jean-Léon Gérôme.15 Tracing the genesis of these two exceptional and pictorially breathtaking works, this essay explores the pictorial economy of portraiture as history at the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and exhibition practices.

Pecking Orders

Looming large behind the era’s obsession with genre was an acute crisis into which Europe’s academies had tumbled in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It was fueled by an equally obsessive preoccupation with theorizing the status of history painting, especially, but not only, in Germany. One may be reminded here, too, of the transnational nature of these debates, exemplified by the reception of Paul Delaroche.16 The remarkably intense discussions unleashed by his evocations of dramatic events from the history of western Europe exerted a remarkable influence across the Rhine. In particular Delaroche’s life-size canvases represent an important foil to the production in Düsseldorf. Theodor Hildebrandt even travelled to Paris to inspect Delaroche’s Princes in the Tower for his own treatment of the heart-wrenching murder scene from William Shakespeare’s Richard III.17 Hildebrandt’s final solution would follow a much earlier composition, invented by the British artist James Northcote and circulated widely in various reproductive prints.18 It nonetheless shared with the Frenchman’s psychological cliffhanger, which depicts the two startled young boys just minutes before their assassination, the intense appeal to the viewer’s empathetic participation.19 In both cases, this demand for an emotional and engaged reliving of the historical moment, itself transmitted as poetic imagination, aimed at the audience’s political activation.

The emphatically political quality of the mid-1830s genre historique was missing from its late eighteenth-century roots, a kind of painting that, generally subsumed under the term “troubadour-painting,” had begun to visualize the life of “great men” as private spectacle.20 This early expression of a Romantic sensibility excelled in meticulous, miniaturized treatments of historical scenes, usually from the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, which tended toward the sentimental and combined a preference for small-scale formats with an exacting execution and lavish attention to costume, setting, and detail realism. As such, this historicist practice was materialist without being realist.21 The traces of the troubadour tradition are all too visible in Delaroche’s jewel-like composition The Assassination of the Duc de Guise of 1834. However, this reincarnation of an earlier practice distinguishes itself from its predecessors’ loquaciousness through an intricate temporality and a spatial disposition that structures the visual field as panoramic and, implying two separate areas of focus, organizes it around a blank sought to invite the spectator’s projection.22 In a nutshell, the modern genre historique combined the characteristics of two picture types previously strictly separated in the hierarchy of genres: history and genre painting. Once it reached a certain monumentality, this combination began to undermine central rules of history painting.23

Schadow was no foreigner to such anti-academic rebellion. After all, at the age of twenty-five he had joined the secessionist Brotherhood of St. Luke, which in 1810 had left the forbidding climate of the famous Viennese academy for the creative, if poverty-stricken, freedom of expatriate life in Rome. Hailing art as religion’s most powerful maiden, the fraternity pursued a two-pronged approach. It proclaimed a need to revive grand religious history painting, and indeed achieved its international breakthrough with a much-noted Old Testament fresco cycle.24 Yet equally important was a reform of popular print culture, which in their eyes suffered deeply from cheaply produced, artistically dissatisfying productions. Despite the daily challenges to support their own existence by pursuing their art, the Brotherhood thought about ways to create high-end quality at low costs, efforts that five decades later would celebrate a crowning and long-lasting achievement in Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s 1860 Bible in Pictures.25 Dubbed “the Nazarenes” by the Romans, which were rather amused by the Christ-like appearance and religious fervor of the pale foreigners, the group’s anti-academic rebellion showed through in their style and, most crucial to our discussion, their definition of history painting. Denouncing the eighteenth century as an era of decadence and decline, the young artists rid themselves of the Rococo’s playful eroticism and the ancient corporeality of Neoclassicism. Their ideal was a reborn childlike naïveté, which they found in a marriage of Raphael and Dürer, a marriage best consummated in exacting contour and local color. Schadow did not shed these rebellious impulses when he himself became one of Europe’s most powerful academy directors. Eager to make his new home at the Rhine into an international magnet, the Berlin native not only launched a substantial reform of its curriculum. He also radically modernized the conception of genre categories.

Under Schadow’s tutelage, the Düsseldorf Academy retained the traditional genre hierarchy, but by name only. In Paris, the rise of the genre historique had posed a major challenge to the academic system. In Düsseldorf, it did not. Schadow simply expanded the definition of history painting to encompass all forms of historical representation, including the genre historique. Thus, he could declare portraiture—rather than the male nude body acting out a narrative—as the foundation of all history painting. In turn, portraiture could be raised from its lower status as a minor genre by adopting the spirit of history painting, liberating it from the paying sitter’s whimsy and the demands of an increasingly capitalist art market.

Portraiture as tableau

From a young age, Schadow had himself excelled as a celebrated portraitist of the Prussian haute volée.26 Yet, just like Ingres, he saw his true calling as the author of grand histories. Consequently, he was determined to elevate portraiture from mere commodity to a genuinely poetic, even sublime genre, and thus early on experimented with religious, allegorical, and literary allusions.27 By the time he finished his studies in Rome, where he would stay from 1811 to 1819, he was able, as Henriette Herz enthused, to upraise any likeness to the status of a tableau.28 The prominent Berlin salonnière might have had in mind Schadow’s precocious rendition of the Princess Marie Anne von Preussen (fig. 3). Begun in 1810 while still in Berlin but finished only two years later in Rome, the sumptuous likeness belonged to the most political works of Schadow’s early career.

In the year of the portrait’s conception, Prussia was mobilizing to throw off Napoleon’s yoke. Seized by the moment’s patriotic spirit, the ambitious young artist shared the fierce and fearlessly anti-Napoleonic attitude of his key patron: he thus set out to express this mutual sentiment when granted the rare occasion to paint the Prussian princess, who famously disliked modelling for royal portraiture as much as she did court ritual.29 Schadow quickly realized that he had to achieve his goal through sartorial means. Of all things, it is thus the old German dress that signals the likeness’s emphatically political agenda.

At first glance, the sumptuous testament to the period’s Renaissance revival might easily be dismissed as the typical fashionable excess of a high society harboring a seemingly insatiable desire for costume balls and other occasions for dress-up.30 However, in this case, the sartorial choice pronounced a daring avowal of resistance against the French occupation. Like her close friend, the recently deceased Queen Luise, Princess Marianne belonged to the so-called war party, die Kriegspartei, those Prussian circles that deemed a military advance against the steadily growing power of Napoleon unavoidable.31 This moment finally came when Prussia joined the allied forces against Napoleon in the War of the Sixth Coalition, better known as the War of Liberation, almost exactly a year after Schadow had finished his splendid likeness shortly after New Year’s Day in 1812. Not surprisingly, the intrepid princess immediately assumed a leadership role in the war effort. Inspired by the increasing female initiatives in the field of “patriotic charity,” Marianne masterminded a declaration of twelve Prussian princesses, including herself, which provided the commitment of these “female patriots” with official support and royal backing. “The fatherland is in peril!” declared the Appeal to the Women of the Prussian State with arousing pathos on 23 March 1813. “Not merely cash money will our association accept as a sacrifice but any spare valuable bagatelle,—the symbol of fidelity, the wedding band, shining adornments for the ears, costly decorations for the neck. Monthly contributions, material, linen cloth, spun wool, and yarn will be gladly accepted, and even the gratis working of these raw materials will be regarded as an offering. Such donations, gifts and activities entitle one from now on to call oneself ‘Member of the Women’s League for the Welfare of the Fatherland.’”32 Schadow’s portrayal of Marianne in old German dress anticipates the combative stance of a noblewoman who otherwise preferred informal privacy to the formality of court spectacle. It realized in pictorial terms Ernst Moritz Arndt’s request that the Germans should not merely remember their glorious history and national freedom, but also make public their convictions through their attire. Accordingly, the princess wears directly beneath her collar the gold ducat of Friedrich II, which identifies her as a descendant of the war hero of Fehrbellin, where the united Brandenburg-Prussian troops had defeated those of the occupying Swedish Empire in 1675. Not coincidentally, the various reproductive prints carefully capture this crucial detail. The young Schadow, too, sympathized with Arndt’s sartorial ideology and expressed his patriotism by flaunting, while still in Rome as a brother of St. Luke, the so-called German frock (fig. 4).

This emphatic musing on the public and the private side of his subjects was rare in Schadow’s oeuvre: he would not engage in such overtly politicized portraiture for at least twenty years. Then, two decades later, it would not be attire but nature herself that became charged with the picture’s symbolic work (see fig. 8).

Poeticizing Portraiture

Perhaps the most famous example of the transformation of likeness into symbolic representation, as evoked by Henriette Herz, is Schadow’s self-portrait in an atelier scene with his brother Ridolfo (like their father, a sculptor) and their mutual mentor, the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen (fig. 5), painted toward the end of the artist’s Italian sojourn. Much could be said about this seminal work, painted around 1815 or 1816, at once friendship portrait and character study, allegory and programmatic testimony to the Nazarene creed that a rebirth of modern art must grow, in its need for reenchantment, from a synthesis of North and South or, put differently, from the marriage of Italia and Germania.33 The picture ultimately delivered an astoundingly fresh rephrasing of the classical paragone debate. For many reasons, not least the setting and the captivating realism of the physiognomies, the picture would remain an anomaly in Schadow’s oeuvre and in the Romantic production of his brethren. For the same reasons, it has earned—among only a handful of Nazarene works—a place of respect and admiration within the accepted canon of nineteenth-century European art.

Other works, however, also deserve to be recuperated from their current obscurity, not least the child portraits of Schadow’s Roman period and early years back in Berlin. These pictures—like the 1819 portrayal of Wienczyslaw and Konstanty Potocki or the rendition of Rose, Kurd and Karl von Schöning executed three years later, in 1822 (fig. 6 and fig. 7)—rehearse on a stylistic level Schadow’s intense engagement with the Northern Renaissance that would return in the Bearded Man’s iconography, dress code, and composition. Less known than his famous studio scene of 1816 (fig. 5), they are important in understanding Schadow’s further development, above all his deliberate poeticization of portraiture through an amalgamation of an old German idiom with that of the Italian quattro- and cinquecento.

The 1819 likeness of the Polish princes, for example, bears witness to the cultic quality of Raphael’s most famous work on German soil, the Sistine Madonna. Schadow had seen this icon of the German cult of Raphael in 1810, on his way to Italy (fig. 6).34 His adaptation of the Dresden image represents perhaps one of the most unexpected of the works made after this painting. After all, the angelic witnesses of the Virgin’s apparition have mostly inspired rather schmaltzy variations of Raphael’s ingenious invention. Schadow’s putti, however, have shed their ancestors’ lighthearted mischievousness. Despite an almost verbatim citation of their postures, their mood has become rather contemplative, if not outright somber. Indeed, the wistful interiority of Schadow’s sitters seems somewhat at odds with their tender age, as the princes were merely two and four years old when they modelled for the Nazarene painter. This change in atmosphere continues throughout the reinterpretation of the picture’s Italianate elements via the notable severity of contour and paint application. Schadow would repeat this operation—this tension-filled fusion of cis- and transalpine Renaissance modes—when he captured the Schöning children three years later.

Marked by an equally harsh contour, the life-size figures of Rose, Kurd, and Karl share with their Polish cousins the same peculiar sensation of a gravitas and sincerity far beyond their youth (fig. 7).35 At the same time, the dialectic of Northern and Italian models is even more pronounced, not least because Italia asserts herself with a brilliant luminosity and bold tonality quite unusual in Schadow’s oeuvre. Indeed, the vitreous, lucent colors, especially the sky’s blazing lapis lazuli, would have made even Giovanni Bellini proud. They create such a dramatic and drastic effect that it inevitably strikes the modern viewer as audacious.36 It almost seems as if the canvas’s Venetian incandescence served the recent repatriate as a means of working through—and ultimately overcoming—his raw longing for the South he had just left behind. This highly personal way of working through his own longing and nostalgia shines through in the painter’s efforts to elevate the portrait to a more sublime format. The notion of childhood play yields to an exacting triangular composition that arrests movement in ethereal harmony and the breathing body in sculpturesque immobility. In the process the image acquires the air of a devotional painting, an effect heightened by a selection of plants and attributes distinctly Marian in character (or associated with the Passion of Christ). Thus, the triad of red, blue, and white dresses, for example, recalls the Virgin’s colors, while the dove, cherries, and lush vine in the background are common appearances in depictions of the Christ child.37 In 1822, Schadow transformed child portraiture into a modern altarpiece.

In response to his second, much-desired visit to his beloved Italy from September 1830 to June 1831, Schadow would perfect his means of poeticizing portraiture. I have discussed these efforts elsewhere.38 Here, I want to focus on his perhaps most intriguing attempt, undertaken shortly afterwards, to make over likeness into historie, most intriguing because it for once left behind the tried-and-true pictorial conventions Schadow had previously transferred onto portraiture from religious and allegorical painting. The result was the admired Bearded Man of 1832, to which we shall return now.

Portraiture as Politics

The secret to our mystery man’s success was an ingenious fusion of two seemingly contradictory strategies. On the one hand, Schadow emulated—in format, composition, outfitting, and décor—the old German tradition (see fig. 15 and fig. 19). On the other hand, he alluded to the politically charged iconography of the contemporary royal likeness. Only two years before his Bearded Man took Hannover by storm, Schadow created one of the most daring experiments in his rich portrait production, which, with a diameter of fifty-one inches, is also one of the largest: The Princes (fig. 8).39 The visual impact of the magnificent tondo derives not least from the subtle yet powerful juxtaposition of the sitters’ political role and their intimate personal relationship, or, to put it differently, from the finely orchestrated contrast between the public and private sphere.

Standing almost uncomfortably close to the picture-plane, cut off by the frame at three-quarter length, the two nephews of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the ruling Prussian king, greet us as commanding figures, their hands firmly grasping their swords, the polished metal of their harnesses flickering seductively. Their poses convey royal stature as much as military prowess, as manliness mingles with courtly elegance, and the display of strength with a sense of graceful comportment. Yet for all the princes’ glory, they stood out. In an era teeming with noble likenesses, this one was not satisfied with a stately aura or the tired trope of noblemen depicted against a backdrop of storm-tossed landscapes and wild skies. Instead, such overly simplistic tropes yield to sensitive psychological observation and a deeply felt interest in the half-brothers’ individual characters. What is at stake here is a subtle exploration of a relationship overdetermined—as the picture makes clear at first sight—by a complicated mixture of familial love and raison d’état. Schadow’s genuine concern for the princes’ different dispositions bestowed upon the ensuing canvas a depth and unexpected intimacy that personalizes its outspoken political iconography. This infusion of a Romantic subjectivity and sensibility into the format of a monarchical state portrait engendered a broader reform of that genre’s conventions. In this sense, the interplay of royal commission and highly personal character study, which in this context was rather unconventional, produced an interplay of the private and public spheres worth further investigation.

Border Crossings

The double portrait of the Prussian princes Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig von Preussen and Wilhelm zu Solms-Braunfels occupies an exceptional place within Schadow’s oeuvre. Its singularity begins with the format, the tondo, which the painter liked for its intimate qualities but explored here on a monumental scale. Producing a daring oscillation between closeness (both physical and emotional) and imposing domination, the format itself thus serves as a signpost for the portrait’s essential function: the representation of private and public personas at once. The scale also gives weight to the background, a feature that Schadow usually treated mostly as a second thought, a mere foil. Here, in contrast, the landscape gains visual and symbolic prominence. The rare selection of a German veduta and its equally rare evocative realism go hand in hand with another dramatic departure from Schadow’s practice, the willingness to overcome his deep-rooted aversion to ornate, contemporary dress, which here manifests itself in the sitters’ opulent military uniforms. These formal strategies grew out of Schadow’s decision to tackle once more, the first time since his early rendition of Princess Marie Anne von Preussen in Old German Dress (fig. 3),the task of exploiting portraiture’s political potentialities.

Schadow’s return to portraiture as politics reflected not merely the sitter’s social station and political importance for Düsseldorf and the Rhineland, where Prince Friedrich, as the nephew of King Friedrich Wilhelm III, occupied a seminal role as a kind of “Ersatz king.”40 Beyond the painter’s general monarchist leanings, it paid a personal tribute to Schadow’s cordial relationship with the musically gifted aristocrat who, having arrived at the Rhine only five years before the new academy director, harbored a genuine interest in the arts. In his memoirs, written in 1861, Schadow noted fondly that “when I think of support [for my work], I have to mention above all Prince Friedrich … The personality of this most worthy gentleman was fitting to win the hearts of the Rhinelanders. He united dignity and the most refined propriety with an affability that made everybody in his presence comfortable and cozy … His conversational style was gripping for its natural charm, which, combined with the allure of manly beauty, entranced not only all women but conquered the hearts of the men as well. [Naturally,] this lively intellectual welcomed a new element to breach the elegant yet monotonous society of petite Düsseldorf. He gathered the artists around him, who in return gratefully offered their talents in service of his festivities, visited the studios and participated in every success of the young academy. Thus, he demonstrated more trust in the painters than did Düsseldorf’s bourgeoisie, who at first had not wanted to bring them into their houses.”41

Nothing testifies to Prince Friedrich’s genuine commitment to the city’s artists and their cultural endeavors more than the Hohenzollern’s willingness to break with court etiquette and attend an evening of tableaux vivants and theatrical performances in Schadow’s private residence.42 He was accompanied by his equally cultured wife, Wilhelmine Luise, born Princess von Anhalt-Bernburg and herself an amateur painter (fig. 9) who was popular among artists and art students for her modesty and genuine understanding of the arts. Schadow felt great sympathy for the Princess Friedrich, as she was also known, and painted her around the same time as her husband. The ensuing likeness was a far cry from the stereotypical “princess portraits” populating palaces and popular press alike. The subtle color combination of dusty blues, saturated forest green, the rich dark hues of the fur’s deep brown, and the jet-black hair of the sitter sets a tone of understated elegance, which reflects back on the princess’s persona. Her carefully rendered features seem, despite their obvious perfection and the flawless skin, realistic rather than overly idealized. They invite us to break through the surface of carefully styled beauty and the luxurious cocoon of the latest fashion to a level of sensibility and emotional immediacy at odds with the self-control and public façade demanded by her royal status. In this sense, the likeness of Princess Friedrich lives off the same strategies, albeit on a much smaller scale, than that of her husband.43 Schadow’s interplay of intimacy and public persona spills over into the portrait’s aesthetic temporality, which counters the emphatic contemporaneity of sartorial choices and the intricate coiffure, with a rather poignant citation of Italian High Renaissance portraiture. With a nonchalant gesture, firm and yet unstrained, her left hand grasping her coat’s overabundant fur trimming, Wilhelmine Luise joins an impressive gallery of females from the past, from courtesans to goddesses, who were captured in exactly that pose; in the process, her likeness is elevated from the merely fleeting depiction of the contemporary to an essential timeless ideal.44

Beyond the obvious art historical citation, the Renaissance inflection of Wilhelmine’s appearance also ties her portrait back to the social reality of Düsseldorf’s active theater scene, which could thrive as it did through the remarkably sizeable participation of amateur actors recruited from art academy and military alike. Given the royal couple’s sincere and affectionate dedication to the local art scene, it is less astounding to learn that the two indeed accepted leading parts in one of the plays staged by the academy director. Little is known about either its content or the actual performance, documented merely by a now-lost pencil drawing which names the various participants who appear in costume, and a charming portrayal of the painter’s sister-in-law in Renaissance costume (fig. 10).45 In this context, the small but exquisite painting functioned simultaneously as true likeness and marriage portrait, historical genre scene and the depiction of a (fictive) tableau vivant. It paints realism as idealism. As such, the likeness of Johanna “Jenny” Groschke, who met her aristocratic husband during the event, testifies to the overarching importance of the theme of border crossing to Schadow’s practice at this time, a theme pertaining as much to art as life and, in true Nazarene manner, to life through art.46

The popularity of Prince and Princess Friedrich did not even diminish when the political climate grew increasingly tense during the years leading up to the Revolution of 1848. Only the fierce anti-monarchical demonstrations, which would rattle the city in March of that fateful year, finally engendered a bitter break between the Prussian general and his adopted Heimat. Under protest, Friedrich von Preussen left Düsseldorf, never to return. Not even the sincerest efforts of the city, which offered him honorary citizenship in 1856, could change his mind: he thus never set foot again in his beloved residence, the Jägerhof.

1829, Brotherly Love and Prussian Prowess

Of course, when Schadow received the commission for the double portrait, such revolutionary unrest was still a long way off, as were the turbulent frictions within the art scene that would later weigh so heavily on the academy director. In 1829, the Düsseldorf School of Painting celebrated spectacular successes, and life together, inside and outside the studio, was almost alarmingly harmonious. At this high point of Schadow’s social experiment, running an academy like an artist fraternity, Friedrich von Preussen approached him with the idea of a likeness together with his younger half-brother, Friedrich Wilhelm zu Solms-Braunfels. Despite a family history that was not without tensions, the two men were extremely close, and the painting was probably intended as a gift for their mother, Friederike Sophie von Mecklenburg-Strelitz. At this point, the sister of Queen Luise was betrothed in her third marriage to the Duke of Cumberland. It is also possible that the son had merely communicated a commission from his mother, who had only recently, in 1828, visited Düsseldorf and on that occasion quite likely met the academy director. In any case, once the plan was born, work commenced speedily.

Already in 1829, the princes sat several times for Schadow. Complications arose as Wilhelm was stationed in Berlin-Potsdam and thus could not attend as many sessions as needed. Without further ado, the brother simply asked one of his officers to fill in. On 8 December 1829 a brief note was dispatched with the request to arrive in full uniform, “with cuirass and helm,” so that the painter could project pose and painterly effects.47 The note’s informal, satirical salutation—“Worthiest Rhine-Salmon”—most likely presents a witty word play on the name of the castle Burg Rheinstein, which the prince had recently purchased and was in the process of renovating.48 It certainly highlights the prince’s humorous side, which was well known and much loved in a city enamored by the yearly carnival and its soapbox speeches. The identity of that Rheinlachs, however, has remained a mystery demanding a fair amount of speculation to solve. The rather comic nickname certainly suggests an affectionate relationship to a person from within Friedrich’s closest military circle, and here the prince’s artistically inclined adjutant Carl Friedrich Rudolf Ernst von Normann comes to mind.49 Later in life, Normann would exchange sword for paintbrush for good; but even while still pursuing a thriving military career in the Düsseldorf regiment, this distinguished and elegant officer had joined the local academy as a dilettante member. Thus, it seems more than likely that it was him who showed up “at 11 am … in Director Schadow’s room” to pose for the picture.50

Once the canvas was finished, a lustrous frame, partially gilded, partially covered with gold foil, added a luxurious final touch. Thus embellished, the impressive double portrait made its social debut at the 1830 spring exhibition of the Düsseldorf Academy before it travelled in September to Berlin, where the academy’s biannual exhibition opened its doors on the 19^th of that month. The favorable review in the influential art journal Kunst-Blatt noted that the monumental tondo was marked to cross the channel, where its new owner, the Duchess of Cumberland, would welcome it shortly afterwards.51

If the princely portrait stood out among Schadow’s many fine portraits for its size and its attention to clothing and landscape, it also distinguished itself in its haptic sensuousness and the plasticity of its surface values. It almost seems as if the opulence of the cuirassier uniform had thrown down a gauntlet that, once accepted, led Schadow to show off his technical prowess. The result is a rich play of enticing contrasts, from the juxtaposition of the fur’s plush softness and the coldness of the harness’s impenetrable metal, or of shimmering polish and the coarseness of the jacket’s gleaming-white kersey. The reflections on the brilliant cuirass especially show off Schadow’s paragone with the old masters. Despite these carefully executed visual pleasures Schadow nonetheless took great pains to avoid a dispersal of attention. The restrained tonality and the enamel-like paint application are means to secure an effect of overarching harmony and quiet grandeur. Handling color in the most local terms, the painter built the entire portrait around the classic triad of red, blue and a golden yellow, which, brought to sparkle by a few lively color accents, creates a calming effect of restfulness mingled with a cool, sophisticated elegance.

Schadow’s pictorial strategies translated directly into his approach to the study of the two men’s characters; they thus correlate with a stunning back-and-forth between a sense of collected reserve and emotional intensity. Drawing the viewer in, not least through the figures’ bold cropping and firm inscription into the picture plane, the portrait nevertheless commands a respectful inner distance between the viewer and the imposing princes. Struggling with these conflicting impulses, we experience an almost physical realization of the portrait’s overarching theme: the interplay of private and public spheres, an interplay both productive and contentious and embodied in a duality of brotherly friendship and political alliance.

In The Princes, Schadow for once embraced the call for an emphatically representative state portrait, and moreover one unabashedly military in character. This explains the fastidious care with which he painted the uniforms, which provide an almost seductive entrée for one of Prussia’s most elite and feared troops. Despite the sartorial splendor, the overall atmosphere is not one of showiness but of quiet grandeur. Citing Renaissance monarchical portraiture and devotional painting, the tondo format adds a sense of sublimity and even the sacred. The pictorial rhetoric of power and prowess, however, does not obliterate Schadow’s Romantic sensitivity. On the contrary, the valor goes hand in hand with heartfelt emotion, and the double portrait fuses, with surprising boldness, the longstanding tradition of representing nobility with the newly minted genre of the Romantic friendship portrait, a fusion even more remarkable for its execution on a monumental scale.52

The Monarchical State Portrait as Friendship Portrait

When first exhibited, the Kunst-Blatt commented with awe on the sitters’ “solemn princely pose.”53 But perhaps more remarkable is the expression of brotherly affection manifest in the embrace by the older man, Friedrich, of the younger, Wilhelm. This motif gains a truly Romantic note in the paradoxical mixture of physical closeness and divergent gazes, which continues the tradition of picturing friendship as an inner state of union, of kindred spirits, rather than conversant interaction.54 Accordingly, only Wilhelm’s frank look acknowledges the viewer; Friedrich, in contrast, seems lost in thought, and the slight melancholy, which hovers at the edges of his enigmatic expression, suggests musings of a rather private nature, perhaps even regarding matters of the heart. Thus, his portrait not only flaunts an officer and gentleman; it also proclaims a quintessentially Romantic ideal of manliness, one not driven by strength but sense and sensibility. His self-absorption and reflective inwardness create a poignant antipode to Prince Wilhelm’s aura of determination, assertiveness, and physical agility paired with considerable strength, as latently suggested by the taut, muscle-flexing posture. This subtle yet striking character differentiation avows its roots in the Romantic friendship portrait, insofar as it implies a complimentary, indeed symbiotic relationship. A finely tuned rhythm of mutual giving and taking dominates the composition, as the older brother at once promises protection while relying on his sibling’s support. The social hierarchies separating Friedrich, the lieutenant general, and Wilhelm, the cavalry captain—hierarchies reflecting not merely the men’s different military rank but also respective place in the line of succession—thus yield to an affirmation of equality, an equality built upon love, tenderness, and familial loyalty.

Schadow’s strategy of fusing the Prussian portrait tradition of high nobility in uniform with the novel type of the Romantic friendship portrait finds its ultimate embodiment in the picture’s most eye-catching detail, the expertly painted reflection of Wilhelm’s hand on Prince Friedrich’s polished cuirass exactly beneath his brother’s heart. The mirror-image of Wilhelm’s right hand, the hand of oath-taking, immediately takes on symbolic meaning, judiciously framed, as it were, by two prestigious medals: the large Order of the Black Eagle on orange ground, affixed to Friedrich’s right hip, and the simple black Iron Cross of the Second Class. Attached above the prince’s heart—and thus above the reflection of his brother’s hand—the Iron Cross proudly commemorates Friedrich’s bravery during the sensational Rhine crossing of Prussian troops at the old German town of Kaub, located about forty miles northwest of Wiesbaden, in the New Year’s week of 1814. Orchestrated by Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, affectionately nicknamed “Marshal Forward” by his soldiers for his aggressive approach in warfare, the astonishing movement of 50,000 soldiers in three days carried the War of Liberation back into France and marked the beginning of Napoleon’s end.55 The reflection of Wilhelm’s hand thus must be read as the insignia of a military oath and loving testimony at once, of one brother touching his sibling’s heart both physically and metaphorically, a gesture almost too intimate for a large-scale state portrait and yet so appropriately political. With love, a life is pledged to Prussia’s dominion and military pursuits.

The New Knights at the Rhine

For all its surprising freshness, Schadow’s iconography could look back to a long tradition of pictures commemorating political alliances, and here Pompeo Batoni’s 1769 double portrait of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II and his brother, Pietro Leopold I of Tuscany might come to mind.56 Likewise, the nuanced characterization of the prince’s complex relationship had an immediate model, and one most closely related to the princes and their painter alike: the 1797 double statue The Princesses Luise and Friederike (fig. 11). Designed by Schadow’s father, Johann Gottfried, in plaster in 1795 and then executed in marble in the subsequent two years, this icon of Berlin sculpture shows the queen with her younger sister, the mother of Friedrich and Wilhelm. Its notable play of closeness and distance, paired with a graceful eroticism, took its inspiration from an antique source, the late Augustan marble of San Ildefonso. Dating from around 10 AD and rediscovered in 1622, this superb model of ancient eclecticism had made a spectacular entry into the German imaginary in 1707, when the electoral prince of the Palatinate, Johann Wilhelm, commissioned a plaster cast and thus brought the youthful pair to Mannheim. Identified respectively as Orestes and Pylades or Castor and Pollux, the group impressed the era’s literati, above all the Olympian of German poetry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. After having spent “the most blissful moments” in the boys’ presence, Goethe went on to commemorate the two not only in his autobiographical writings Poetry and Truth but also in his influential plays Götz von Berlichingen and Faust. The poet even ordered a copy of the Mannheim cast for his own house.57 Tapping into this rich, rather intricate genealogical lineage, the tondo of the Hohenzollern princes thus embodied a twofold familial homage, once in the form of a tribute by the painter to his father, once by the royal officers to their mother, Friederike.

Given the unusual character of the princely portrait, it seems hardly surprising that Schadow also rethought his treatment of the background. Embracing the uncompromising contemporary nature of Friedrich and Wilhelm’s appearance and worldly station, he expanded the picture’s political meaning into the landscape, a beautifully rendered view of the Rhine river. In most of his work, landscape merely functions as a means to set a certain mood or reiterate the painting’s historicist nature as a stylistic citation of models from a medieval past, preferably Raphael.58 Now, he embarked on a highly realistic veduta. The juxtaposition of the royal sitters and the Rhenish scenery asserts Prussia’s claim to rule over the Rhineland, a territory it had only recently acquired during the Congress of Vienna (1815–1816). Yet once again, the proclamation of power comingles with an emphasis on emotional investment. The princes’ poses are not merely one of repressive threat. Rather, the sensitive evocation of their inner landscape translates into a deeply felt love of the new Heimat, the now Prussian Rhineland, and a longing for embeddedness. The assertion of rule is also a pledge of loyalty, a pledge to take good care of the new land, of its rich history and heritage. In the case of Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig von Preussen, this commitment took shape not least in his avid, groundbreaking support of historic preservation. Indeed, the prince himself had bought and then restored the castle in the background, Burg Rheinstein, which would remain until his final departure from Düsseldorf in 1848 one of his favorite places to be. Fittingly, the solemnity of the Hohenzollerns’ pose also communicates a self-understanding as the guardians of the Rhine and thus as a patriotic bulwark against the French menace. Here, we have come back full circle to the portrait of Princess Marianne and her anti-Napoleonic stance (see fig. 3). The officers’ firm grip of their broadswords, the Pallasch at their side, is sign of the victor’s pride as much as a warning of ever-lasting vigilance. As such, the monumental likeness symbolizes the Romantic quest for the roots of a German national culture, which the painting locates in the knighthood of the German Middle Ages. Standing at the edge of the Prussian kingdom, opposite the French enemy, the princes emerge as the modern reincarnation of that valiant past.

This complex set of allusions and alliances remained in play when Schadow repeated this pictorial scheme two years later, yet now with an unknown sitter as the protagonist. Hence, the forceful political symbolism made room for iconographic ambiguity and the dissolution of clear social legibility.

The Mystery of the Bearded Man

One of the secrets to the success of Schadow’s academy reform was the space it opened up for an officially sanctioned dissolution of traditional genre borders. It is only this impulse that might explain the rather puzzling choice of the model for this majestic portrait, Jacob Becker, the twenty-two-year-old son of a farmer’s daughter and a tailor near Worms (fig. 12). Later Becker would become famous as one of Düsseldorf’s most distinguished genre painters and a popular professor at the renowned Städel Art Institute in Frankfurt. In 1832, this glorious future was still a long way off. When he first met Schadow, the young man was earning a living as a draftsman and lithographer for the Frankfurt Lithographische Anstalt Vogel & Fink, where he had found employment in 1827, right after his arrival in the Main capital. The work for Vogel & Fink provided Becker with a solid technical education, which he perfected by attending elementary classes at the Städel as a guest student. A commission in 1833 to capture on stone Theodor Hildebrandt’s hit canvas Praying Choirboys would become the decisive turning point of his career (fig. 13). Warmly welcomed by Hildebrandt and the close circle of Schadow’s first generation of students, Becker decided that same year to relocate to the Rhine, where he immediately entered the landscape class of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, only three years his senior. Seven years later, in 1840, he achieved his ultimate breakthrough with a dramatic depiction of Countrymen Surprised by a Tempest.59 Within a year he was back in Frankfurt, hired at the very institution where he had received his first artistic lessons.60

Long before he set foot in Düsseldorf, however, Becker had already met Schadow on an earlier mission. At that time he was travelling, together with his close friend and colleague Jakob Fürchtegott Dielmann, to sketch the river banks of the Rhine between Mainz and Koblenz. Commissioned by their mutual employer, Friedrich Carl Vogel, the trip resulted in a truly mammoth publication that occupies an exceptional place among the period’s popular panoramas (fig. 14). Only 9.5 cm high but 20 m long, the 1833 Leporello Panorama of the Rhine: View of the Right and Left Bank of the Rhine, Mentz to Coblentz, published by F. C. Vogel was less practical guide than precious souvenir. Becker dedicated himself to the left river bank, which he not only drew but lithographed. Without compromising the task’s necessary demand for descriptive realism, the artist aimed to capture the region’s idyllic atmosphere on the brink of its destruction through industrialization and the demands of modern travel.61 This sentiment must have greatly appealed to Schadow, who, after all, vehemently advocated an idealist approach even in realistic landscape or contemporary genre painting. Admiring Becker’s views, Schadow was equally smitten by the young man’s appearance, which he proceeded to stage, quite unbefitting of Becker’s worldly station, with aristocratic bravado.

Sartorial Strategies

Without recourse to the sartorial markers of power and prestige he had at his fingertips in The Princes, Schadow had to find an alternative way to imbue his subject with stately dignity. In the past, he had resorted to borrowing from Christian iconography, devotional painting, royal portraiture and the representation of ancient rulers, not to mention Baroque compositions, which, still vilified by the Brotherhood of St. Luke, had become increasingly popular among his Düsseldorf students, especially those of Guido Reni or Carlo Dolci. The result was what I would like to call, following the lead of Schadow’s contemporaries, the historicizing portrait.62 In Becker’s likeness, Schadow pursued an entirely different path. He solved his problem by emulating German Renaissance portraiture yet with an emphatically modern twist.

On a basic level, the set-up of A Bearded Man bespeaks a deep familiarity with Italian Renaissance portraiture, and here Leonardo’s famous Mona Lisa might come to mind as one seminal example for the placement of a sitter in an architectural loggia with a landscape background.63 And, of course, when one thinks of the grandeur of Becker’s pose, the elegance and discretion of his dress, and his intense yet simple and natural presence, Raphael’s captivating portrayal of the famous courtier Baldassare Castiglione, the poet, humanist, and ambassador, whom the artist had first met as a young man in Urbino, comes to mind.64 The two men not only share sumptuous attire and almost identical facial hair; they also mirror each other in their sideward glance and an aura of humane sensitivity paired with considerable assertiveness, a somber amiability which translates from character into composition. One might even apply to the unknown lithographer and his portrait Castiglione’s ideal of sprezzatura, an effortless self-confidence or virtuosity combined with grace, which the diplomat had celebrated as a crucial ideal befitting the man of culture in his 1528 Book of the Courtier. Raphael had translated this concept into oil in his friend’s illustrious likeness, and Schadow clearly strove for sprezzatura in his own work.65 Yet equally important, and for ideological reasons even more so, was the Northern Renaissance tradition. Indeed, composition, outfitting, and décor recall the striking likenesses of old German patricians, which by the 1830s had become a coveted body of work and of interest to collectors and scholars alike.66 Here we might want to turn to the Nazarenes’ most beloved medieval master, Albrecht Dürer, and his self-confident wearing of fur.

Dürer’s Fur

In the main commission of his Venetian sojourn, the 1506 Feast of the Rosegarlands, the Nuremberg artist proudly flaunts a richly designed mantle with a costly fur trim. Of all Dürer’s self-portraits in assistenza, this would become the most canonical. Following the impulse to isolate Dürer’s cameo appearances from his large-scale compositions, the important print-maker Lucas Kilian, for example, used this half-quarter-length likeness at least three times, once in a famous engraving of 1608 (fig. 15).67 Although this print would become one of the best known representations of Dürer to posterity, it is in fact twice removed from Dürer’s own work.68 Indeed, when Kilian set out to engrave the Nuremberg master, the original altarpiece had already been shipped across the Alps to Prague and its new owner, the Emperor Rudolf II. The print maker looked instead, as the engraving’s lengthy inscription reveals, at a replica (or maybe a partial copy) executed by Hans Rottenhammer shortly before the altarpiece left Italy. Kilian’s exacting execution, however, did not suffer from this mediation. His print is a tour de force of detail and haptic brilliance. It almost seems as if the sumptuous engraving captures a microscopic view of the Feast of the Rosegarlands, “since the original figure is proportionally speaking quite small.”69 A few decades later, the remarkable quality of Kilian’s sheet compelled Joachim von Sandrart, the “Northern Vasari,” to choose it as the model for the Dürer likeness in his own 1675 treatise Teutsche Akademie (fig. 16).70 As the first full appreciation of Dürer’s life and art to be published in his own country, Sandrart’s biography played a vital role in the rise and expansion of the master’s cultic adoration. While enshrining the Nuremberger in the pantheon of Northern artists, Sandrart’s account also secured fame and familiarity for Kilian’s likeness across Europe. Repeating the reduction of Kilian’s figure to a bust portrait in the Teutsche Akademie, a print by the Dresden engraver Moritz Steinla testifies to the image’s ongoing prominence even two hundred years later.71

Whether or not Schadow knew Kilian’s print or any of its offspring is unclear. Working on his autobiographical novel of 1854, The Modern Vasari, a book that doubles as art historical treatise and artist biographies, the academy director confessed to his collaborator, Julian Hübner, that he could not get hold of a full edition of Sandrart’s Teutsche Akademie.72 Nonetheless, both publications share a sustained interest in the physical appearance of the artists discussed, and Schadow gladly followed the suggestion of his publisher to include nine portraits of contemporary artists in The Modern Vasari. Already as a young man Schadow had been fascinated by the faces of the past. When he decided in 1819 to adorn his own father’s rendering with an image of Albrecht Dürer, he resorted to another famous Renaissance source for an accurate likeness (fig. 17). A copy of the portrait medal, crafted in 1527 by Matthes Gebel, probably belonged to the Schadow household. The inclusion of Gebel’s medal was at once a plea for appeasement and a gesture of self-assertion (fig. 18). It paid tribute to Johann Gottfried’s adoration of Dürer, while embodying a programmatic declaration of the Nazarene aesthetic. This declaration proved to be a bone of contention once Schadow was replanted in Berlin six years after joining the Brotherhood of St. Luke in 1813. Once back, he saw his artistic principles and ideological position vehemently attacked, not least by his own father. Shaped by a neoclassicist sensibility and deeply ingrained Enlightenment beliefs the sculptor could only feel contempt and disgust in the face of his son’s Romantic-Catholic conversion and the medievalist idiom it accompanied. Wilhelm thus called on Dürer for support and justification. In this sense, the carefully rendered Renaissance medal labels the portrait’s exquisite style quite self-consciously as old German. Given Schadow’s early interest in Dürer’s likeness, he undoubtedly paid careful attention to the most enigmatic of Dürer’s self-depictions, his iconic Christ-like image of 1500.

Having entered the Bavarian royal collections in 1805, the panel became instantly famous as the frontispiece of Johann Nepomuk Strixner’s pioneering reproductions of the artist’s “Christian-mythological drawings” (fig. 19).73 The lithographer had discovered the stunning marginalia, which introduced an entirely new, playful Dürer—the Dürer of fantasia—to a mesmerized public, in the Bavarian copy of a prayer book originally commissioned by the Emperor Maximilian in 1513 and adorned by various artists in 1514/1515.74 Resting his manly right hand with contemplative gravitas on his coat’s luxuriant trimming, the Renaissance master turns our attention back to the status-conscious, symbolically charged display of clothing, which had puzzled the original viewers of Schadow’s Bearded Man.

As Joseph Koerner has noted, fur played a crucial role in the construction of self in Dürer’s panel, which so boldly emulates the format of the icon.75 This conceit, the self-portrait as icon, rests on a strenuous exercise of control over self and image-making alike, which in turn exorcizes chance through radical frontality and unnatural symmetry. However, this proposition is immediately disturbed by the motif of the artist’s fingers fondling, as if unconsciously, the coat’s thick, soft lining. The motif of the small tuft of fur, pushed up between index and middle finger, adds an element of contingency, a haptic divergence from the hieratic order of the cult image with its demand of total visibility. At this instance, when the artist gives plasticity to the material reality of his touch, and at this place, where the sitter touches himself, the conjecture of the panel as a vera icon, as an acheiropoetic image “not made by human hands,” falters. “To imagine that the hand, resting against the sitter’s body, has unintentionally displaced the tuft of fur … gives us occasion to distinguish between Dürer as human sitter, idly fingering the fur of his coat as he tries to maintain a stiff pose, and Dürer as emblem of the imago Dei.”76 This dualism of embodiment and sacred geometry remained virulent, if toned down, when Strixner translated Dürer’s iconic self into pure contour.77

Schadow might not have picked up on the subtleties of Dürer’s play with different artistic modes; yet he probably sensed the ambivalence of Dürer’s embrace of fur. After all, for an artisan like Dürer, presenting himself in such a luxurious garment was a statement of status, a badge of wealth, power, and distinction far removed from the hairy shirts worn by the ascetic imitators of Christ.78 Schadow repeated this ultimately iconographic discrepancy. Yet beyond this play with legibility, Schadow must have felt a visceral attraction to the painting’s eloquent conversation between idealism and materialism, between the Christomorphic renunciation of madeness and the insistent manifestation of body and painterly craft. A symbol for Dürer’s bodily being—and as such an expression of carnal beauty, narcissism, and man’s proximity to beast—the touch of fur ultimately justifies the kind of Düsseldorf naturalist idealism that had brought Schadow into fiery conflict with his former brethren, above all with Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Peter Cornelius, who rejected his realism as sinful and evidence of artistic decline.79

Yet Schadow stood his ground. After all, he was convinced that a naïve return to the past was as impossible as it was undesirable, and instead pronounced a “circumspect innocence of manhood” as the attitude that “anyone with honest intentions” should strive for.80 Accordingly, Schadow gave a decidedly contemporary twist to his utterly Nazarene bow to the revered model of the past.

Political Landscapes

Ultimately, the modern aura of dress, etiquette, and scenery fully absorbs the historicism of the Bearded Man’s appearance and genealogy. The model becomes ennobled twice, from the representative, self-confident pose and the lavish, fur-trimmed wool coat, which wraps in such stately manner around the jacket’s soft, thick velvet, to the dual view of two castles and the relief of oak foliage on the pillar of the loggia, where Becker lingers so enigmatically. View and surrounding conjure up the period’s rampant Ruinenromantik (romanticism of ruins), which also holds the key to the picture’s interpretation. The portrait opens out from the depiction of an individual likeness to the vision of reconquering a lost ideal, to the idea of a birth, conceptualized here as a rebirth, of a unified national identity from the spirit of the Middle Ages and its Knighthood—in short, to the vision of a Deutschtum, of a Germanness or Germandom, that was as anachronistic as it was forward-looking. The picture summons the same kind of interdependency of reconstruction and recommencement, renewal and new beginning at play in Prince Friedrich’s Castle Rheinstein. One detail in particular embodies, pars pro toto, this emphatic interplay of past and present, nostalgia and renovation: Becker’s noteworthy beard, both emphatically fashionable and yet worthy of a Renaissance patrician (a beard that in the age of the hipster seems oddly contemporary once more). We will return to this hairy affair again at the end.

The reasons for Schadow’s approach are complex. They reflect not least the Düsseldorf artists’ claim to an advanced social standing, a claim that Schadow had systematically pursued since taking office and that was, in life as in Becker’s portrait, crowned with success. Already the picture’s formal severity, which aims for a monumental effect, and the solemn profundity of the sitter’s facial expression bestowed a historic aura upon the painting, an aura that ultimately justified its illustration in the aforementioned exhibition review of 1835 in the form of a wood engraving (fig. 12). This real-life interest was, of course, filtered through the broader question of ennobling the category of portraiture as such, and Schadow thus made every effort to preserve the picture’s interpretive openness. Consequently, he gave his audience very little to go on when it came to the sitter’s social background and professional occupation, and the fictive conversation of the visitors in the Hannoversche Kunstblätter cited at the opening of this essay testifies to the success of this strategy. Indeed, only the brash cap gestures clearly to Becker’s status as a painter; the tools of his trade, however, remain entirely absent. Perhaps one could read the veduta in the background as a reference, if a rather oblique one, to the lithographer’s panorama project. Yet this seems unlikely given the fact that this precise view was not part of F. C. Vogel’s printed route from Mainz to Koblenz. Instead, we see, probably from the perspective of Bad Honnef, the ruin of the castle Rolandseck with its famous Rolandsbogen and, opposite on the right river bank, the no less impressive Seven Mountains range (Siebengebirge) with the Drachenfels. Schadow thus chose a prospect that enjoyed great popularity among tourists and the producers of prints and postcards serving the appetites of this young industry.81 In contrast, the shimmering waters of the Rhine beneath the Rolandsbogen, which suggest that we stand on one of the small river islands, are artistic license. It seems more likely that the picturesque view captures the perspective from one of the villas that increasingly populated the hillside of the Rhine’s left bank.82

Schadow’s nod toward modern travel gives the picture an emphatically contemporary note, which is, however, immediately tempered by a resounding chord from the past. As the scenery’s picturesque allure tempts us to give into the pure enjoyment of a Sunday boat trip, the figure’s somber grandeur reminds us that history is calling us to restore the glory of our medieval ancestry. As memories of times long gone are awakened, so are literary allusions, and for a moment we seem to face not only an unknown painter but also Friedrich or Leontin, the heroes from Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1815 novel Presentiment and Presence, as “they emerged from the woods and stepped upon a projecting rock, [and] suddenly saw coming from the miraculous far away distance, from old fortresses and eternal forests the stream of ages past … the royal river Rhine.”83 Many among Schadow’s audience would have been familiar with this enchanted novel about Germanness, the War of Liberation, and the longing for the land where one belongs, for our Heimat. Most importantly, in novel and painting alike, the river not only conveys, or alludes to, but actually is history. The lack of a clearly defined location turns into a metaphor for the need to dive, like Eichendorff’s protagonists, into the Rhine as a way of enacting and expressing our commitment to (of leaping into) German history.

Schadow’s reluctance to depict local backgrounds, and his even greater reluctance to depict explicitly German ones, leaves no doubt that the picturesque and well-known landscape unfolding in his 1832 portrait reiterates the previous avowal of Prussia to the Rhineland, or more aptly, the avowal of a Prussian Rhineland that he had articulated two years earlier in the double portrait of the Hohenzollern princes (fig. 8). Yet this reiteration undergoes a profound change, as it gains evocative power and interpretive openness at the cost of iconographic ambiguity. Indeed, a nostalgic atmosphere permeates the patriotism of the Romantic evocation of the Rhine and its castles, a wistfulness that inevitably (although not necessarily intentionally) adds ambiguity to the picture’s political meaning. This sense of multivalence only increases when one realizes that in 1832 Jacob Becker would participate in the Hambach Festival, a mass rally at a castle in the present-day Rhineland-Palatinate, where as many as 30,000 liberals and radicals gathered to demand constitutional rights, freedom of the press, and national unity. In these last days of May 1832, thousands upon thousands of farmers and day laborers, artisans, and students from throughout Germany would march under the German tricolor of black-red-yellow (the latter heraldic “gold”), Becker among them. Although not a call to revolution, this articulation of liberal and republican oppositional viewpoints still alarmed conservative forces, which feared the imminent danger of insurgency.84 Ultimately, this “national festival of the Germans” left no indelible marks on the life and work of the future painter. Nonetheless, it throws into relief the interpretive openness of the Rhine nostalgia so prominent in The Bearded Man. Needless to say, Schadow would have vehemently denied such national-democratic inflections, which he would have seen as an attack on the monarchy he devoutly served. Yet the painting develops a momentum of its own, which, defying Schadow’s desire to control the picture’s signification, recalls the polyvalence of the Mourning Royal Couple by his student Carl Friedrich Lessing (fig. 20). A sensation when first shown at the exhibition of the Berlin Academy in 1830, the canvas astonishes through its ability to support radically divergent readings, ranging from republican, antifeudal, and antimonarchical interpretations to an enthusiastic reception in conservative circles, which clearly saw here, as its buyer, the reactionary Russian Imperial Family, a declaration of alliance to the dying monarchy.85 In Lessing’s case, such ambiguity was programmatic. In Schadow’s case, it was not. Probably not even intended, the canvas’s potential multivalence rather speaks to the somewhat untamable momentum gained by the reform of historical representation in the Düsseldorf Academy. Creating new expectations and new modes of reception that empowered viewers, as Cornelius Gurlitt observed in 1899, “to pluck stories from the paintings” and concern “themselves not only with what was represented, but … with the most extensive spiritual associations,” the new history painting inevitably shaped Schadow’s own work.86 Whether intended or not, it was precisely this momentum that made the academy director’s concern with a notion of Germanness so relevant and his proposition of a German national character wrested from the remnants of the Middle Ages so befitting for a broad audience.

Portraiture into History

The look across the Rhine to France highlights the significance of Schadow’s intervention as an attempt to elevate portraiture to a meta-genre, which would be capable of suturing the rift between different forms of historical imagination, representation, and pictorial realization. Despite the battles with his former St. Luke brethren, Schadow remained indebted to his Nazarene origins and hence wanted to ground this operation, as well as his idealist naturalism at large, in Christian doctrine. On a stylistic level, he answered this desire with a powerful theory of painting as incarnation, as “The Word Made Flesh.”87 When it came to history painting, however, he pursued a different strategy and located its modern source in portraiture. He arrived at this position via the sensuous renewal of art in the early Christian period. With the mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries in mind, Schadow declared in 1842 that the rejuvenation of art after antiquity’s decline originated “from the head and its physiognomic expression” or, to put it differently, from the countenance, not the body.88 This, in turn, allowed him to make portraiture the mediating principle between the era’s competing modes of historical representation. In the process the portrait became, both in theory and in the curriculum of the Düsseldorf Academy, the precondition of historical painting and, in its capacity as an independent undertaking, embodied the school’s poetic—or, perhaps more aptly, poeticizing—principle.

Not surprisingly, Schadow’s remodeling of history painting reflected back on the genre it evoked, portraiture. Inverting his notion of naturalist idealism as the basis for grand histories, he called for an idealist naturalism in the lower genre, whether likeness or landscape. His basic rule was that the portraitist had to poeticize and thus ennoble the sitter by capturing the model’s essence and inner ideal, instead of producing a sort of common Steckbrief, a “most-wanted poster.”89 Schadow’s strategies for achieving this goal were simple but effective. He largely shunned the trappings of social prestige in favor of simplified, introverted compositions in which a hint of abstraction added a Nazarene touch. Frequently, he assimilated religious prototypes, which, aided by a judicious choice of dress, attributes, and symbolic colors, helped to intimate spiritual subtexts, moral values, or allegorical meaning.

Before portraiture could metamorphose into a historical genre, however, it had to be freed from the sitters’ whimsies. For portraiture to be history, it had to free itself from its commercial shackles, from the strictures of the patrons’ self-image and vain demands. In the 1830s, Schadow thus painted a series of likenesses, many of them begun during his second voyage to Italy from 1830 to 1831, which translated his investment in symbolically charged portraiture into the production of autonomous works.90 Critics immediately took note.

In his 1839 account Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule (The Düsseldorf School of Painting), the left-leaning journalist and art critic Hermann Püttmann, who would later become a founding father of the German press in Australia, invented a special category for Schadow’s fusion of ideal types and observation of nature: the “costume or portrait genre.”91 The critic was particularly smitten with Schadow’s likenesses, which he perceived as “free inventions” that responded to artistic considerations alone and not the distorting demands of a meddling patron. As such, Püttmann gushed, they were unspoiled by debasing pecuniary interests and, in contrast to the despicable “copies of everyday faces,” rose high above the “day-laborer productions” of common portraiture.92 These debates underscore the emphatically programmatic nature of The Bearded Man and the necessity that the portrait remained in Schadow’s studio as a completely independent product of his imagination. Indeed, The Prince’s infusion of the monumental royal tondo with elements of the genre historique seems to respond not merely to Schadow’s desire to reform the tired format of the monarchical state portrait, but also to his aim to free what was de facto a rather prestigious commission from the bad odor of intrusive patronage and manipulation. In this sense, the psychological rendition of the two Hohenzollern and the genuinely Romantic inwardness of the princely general mark the areas of “free invention,” of artistic control and purely aesthetic deliberations so important to the transformation of portraiture into history. Of course, Püttmann’s idea that any work could transcend market concerns was wishful thinking, and in fact Schadow paid careful attention to economic matters in his own professional life and that of his students. Yet the critic’s attitude is an important articulation of the anticommercial undercurrent that had shaped the Brotherhood of St. Luke from the beginning and remained a signifier of true art in Düsseldorf.

Pushed a little bit further, Schadow’s allegorical-historical conception of portraiture could break down the borders of the genre altogether. Only this expansion of expectations and permissible formats explains the overwhelming success of Louis Ammy Blanc’s medievalizing depiction of a devout beauty dressed in the lavish Sunday best of the Lower Rhineland Renaissance (fig. 21).93 Fusing ideal type and a close observation of nature, The Church-Goer of 1834 embodied Schadow’s theoretical principles as much as it bore witness to the increasing fluidity of portraiture, allegory, and genre in that period. Indeed, contemporaries felt that the transition to the historical genre was now so imperceptible that it was no longer possible to detect a clear border between the higher and the lower genre—“try as we may.”94 The rapid sprouting of hybrid picture types spurred a desire to devise ever more nuanced systems of organization. Following this urge, Püttmann created yet another category for Blanc’s Church-Goer, “the character genre.” The key feature that distinguished this new category from the costume and portrait genre was, Püttmann concluded, its greater literary potency.95 Accordingly, a painting like The Church-Goer was soon associated with the figure of Gretchen (Margarete) from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous drama Faust, and thus transformed into something of a genre scene or tableau vivant. Indeed, Blanc himself would follow up by picturing Faust’s tragic heroine, whose features bear an uncanny resemblance to those of the deceased sitter from his hit canvas of 1834.96 Ultimately then, the literary potency of this cross-over genre resided, as Gurlitt has reminded us, in the eye of the beholder.97

I would like to present The Bearded Man as part and parcel of this fundamental shift in the perception of portraiture. As such, he not only takes a commanding view across the German lands. He also looks toward France, and Europe in its entirety. His example constitutes a new attitude of the most expansive nature, a new attitude toward modern subjectivity, national identity, and academic painting. It is the strength of this portrait to negotiate all of these complex issues at once, and with a sprezzatura worthy of the artist’s Renaissance idols.

The King’s Final Words

The political implications of A Bearded Man are profound. Overlooking the Rhine, he stands for a new Germany, a Germany reborn from the ruins of the past and guided by a new knighthood, the kind of “modern knights” embodied by Friedrich von Preussen and Wilhelm zu Solms-Braunfels but now made available for anybody.98 In the twenty-first century, few viewers will cherish the tondo for its royalist mentality or, more precisely, its unapologetic declaration of loyalty to the Prussian monarchy. More likely, the portrait will appeal to viewers because of its interpretive openness and iconographic ambivalence, those elements characteristic of what I have called the “secular devotional picture,” the kind of psychologized historical genre painting so powerfully represented by Lessing’s Mourning Royal Couple (fig. 20).

The interpretive openness of A Bearded Man not only deepens the aura of the likeness as a form of historical representation; it also prevents the painting from hardening into ideological, political, and stylistic rigidity. In the end, its medievalism is delivered—is made real in, and relevant for, the present—through an alluring technique, especially, as the enthused critic of the Hannoversche Kunstblätter noted, “the true-to-life representation of the fabrics, and the robust, naturalistic skin tone.”99 Standing in front of the painting, we sense a desire to caress the jacket’s soft velvet or play with the thick, luxurious fleece of the fur, were it not for the sitter’s commanding presence, which demands respect and forbids us to take such liberties. The virtuosity of the pictorial treatment continues in the elegant color palette, which, developing from a restrained but warm and attractive triad of green, brown, and blue, receives a sprightly accent through the rosy flesh tone. The soft sfumato of the river landscape is a rare example of Schadow’s talent for more painterly surface treatment. Perhaps the most compelling proof of the painter’s often untested abilities at lush color application is Becker’s recalcitrant head of hair and the resplendent, perfectly supported beard that is at once so chic and so peculiarly medieval. Only the Prussian king could not warm to the way the painting bows before the newest male fashion. He clearly sensed the revolutionary underpinnings of Schadow’s border crossings, for all of the artist’s monarchist leanings. Informed by the painter’s father that the work was still for sale, the monarch answered brashly: “First shave the beard!”100

“Art and Objecthood” is part of an ongoing argument about the nature of Modernism and what follows it, an argument conducted both with Clement Greenberg and with (I guess we can now say) Post- modernist figures such as Donald Judd and Tony Smith. It is thus both an account of a particular historical episode in the visual arts, at a particular time and place, and the development of a (suitably historicized) ontology of the work of art, in the course of which the concept of something called “theatricality” is deployed to illuminate not only the situation of beholder and artwork, but also such questions as that of the nature of an artistic medium, and the conditions of expressiveness in art. The central figure in the argument about Modernism is Clement Greenberg, but the dialectic he describes is part of the conceptual repertoire of many diverse writers. At one point Fried paraphrases Greenberg’s story in the following way. “Starting around the middle of the nineteenth century, [Greenberg] claimed in ‘Modernist Painting,’ the major arts, threatened for the first time with being assimilated to mere entertainment […] discovered that they could save themselves from that fate ‘only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.’”

The following continuation of this passage from Greenberg is also quoted by Fried:

Each art, it turned out, had to effect this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. […]

It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of every other art. Thereby each art would be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.[3]

This describes one way of relating the process of Modernism, in the visual arts anyway, to a developmental story, and a Kantian-style quest for autonomy through self-definition, and with an equally Kantian invocation of an idea of “purity,” this time focusing on the nature or irreducible essence of a particular artistic medium. The story Fried tells also describes Modernism as in part a crisis and working-through of self-definition which focuses on the question of an artistic medium, but the distance between the two accounts is considerable, particularly with respect to the idea of “irreducible essences” and the rhetoric of purity and reduction. And in fact Fried’s critique of the ideology of Minimalism, which positioned itself as the total rejection of both Greenbergian aesthetics and the painting and sculpture he championed, is based on what Fried sees as shared by both camps in their interpretation of the process of Modernism, in their dependence on ideas of reduction and essence in connection with an artistic medium. As he puts it in the Introduction to his recent collection of his earlier art criticism, “a major strand of my argument in […] ‘Art and Objecthood’ is that literalism arose within modernism as a misreading of its dialectic (a misreading anticipated, on the plane of theory, by Greenberg in ‘Modernist Painting’ […]” (45).

In the essay “Art and Objecthood” itself, this diagnosis is made out in relation to both the concepts of theatricality and of objecthood. In the visual arts, the physicality of a particular medium becomes a matter of a different kind of self-consciousness, a different necessity of self-consciousness, at least since Manet. In Greenberg’s terms, the dialectic of Modernism is a process of refining the self-definition of an artform to the unique and irreducible facts of the physical basis of its medium, in particular the delimited flatness of the picture-support, in the case of painting. Literalist (or Minimalist) practice responds to this reading of the situation by the insistent projection of the essential “object-character” of the work of art, something neither quite painting nor quite sculpture. In “Art and Objecthood,” Fried puts it this way: prior to the present situation (1967),

the risk, even the possibility, of seeing works of art as nothing more than objects did not exist. That such a possibility began to present itself around 1960 was largely the result of developments within modernist painting. Roughly, the more nearly assimilable to objects certain advanced painting had come to seem, the more the entire history of painting since Manet could be understood—delusively, I believe—as consisting in the progressive (though ultimately inadequate) revelation of its essential objecthood, and the more urgent became the need for modernist painting to make explicit its conventional—specifically, its pictorial—essence by defeating or suspending its own objecthood through the medium of shape. Literalist sensibility is, therefore, a response to the same developments that have largely compelled modernist painting to undo its objecthood—more precisely, the same developments seen differently, that is, in theatrical terms, by a sensibility already theatrical, already (to say the worst) corrupted or perverted by theater. (160-161)

The conceptual interplay between the ideas of theater and of objecthood, in their relation to the pressures of Modernism, had been prepared for one paragraph back, which declares that “the imperative that modernist painting defeat or suspend its objecthood is at bottom the imperative that it defeat or suspend theater,” and indeed, refers in passing to the “theatricality of objecthood” itself (160).

So, what is theatricality in this context, such that it can bear such an intimate relation to the idea of objecthood? And what do the pair of them mean to tell us about the concept of a work of art, such that in a given time and place they can count as something like the negation of art, even self-consciously so? I’m thinking here of the punctuating sentence early in the essay that 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” (153). To invoke the idea of the negation of art is a very defining form of criticism, however historically localized in application, and even when, as Fried has pointed out, its basic terms of criticism are shared by both critic and the practitioners of the situation he is diagnosing. It is a characteristically Modernist form of absolute criticism of art, disarming more local terms of criticism and appreciation in favor of raising the question of the status of some object as painting at all, as art or as a negation of art. That is, something like the very concept and possibility of art is addressed not only in Fried’s essay but in the discourse and I think we can say in the installations of the Minimalist artists under discussion. Objecthood and theatricality are linked not only with respect to something like the negation of art, but the negation in question is something pursued from within the world of the arts itself, something pursued in the very name of the negation of art. This is not an unheard of situation in culture or discourse, but it is also one that is only possible in certain times and places. We’re familiar with the presence of hostility to the very idea of art, which is somehow yet also something internal to the nature and practice of art itself, something which, since the twentieth century at least, lives side by side with some of the highest achievements of the individual arts. But that doesn’t mean we understand it very well, or how it is so much as possible for movements defining themselves against “art” could emerge and flourish within the cultures of what we still call artistic practice. The idea that it is an internal, defining, possibility of art, at least in its Modernist practice, that it may go astray from itself, or lose itself, or seek to “go beyond itself’ or bring itself to an end, is something that Melville’s work has provided new terms for thinking about, and I hope to say something about this possibility later.[4] Its truth as a phenomenological description of one’s engagement with much twentieth-century art doesn’t efface the paradoxical character of speaking of the very practice of an art going astray from itself. And indeed something like an Institutional theory of art seems designed to prevent such descriptions in terms of crisis or scandal, since nothing independent of the structures of ratification (nothing in artistic history or practice) is invoked to give content to the idea of something being strayed from. We avoid paradox this way, perhaps, but then the social, cultural and political phenomenon we were trying to describe also disappears from view. If either such straying or such negation is indeed an internal possibility for modernist art, and not a matter of external threat (from political repression, from public indifference or contempt), then that fact will be a deep characterization of it, something that defines it and distinguishes it from other discourses and cultural practices.

But the more specific questions I want to raise have to do with the relation of the terms “theater” and “objecthood” as they figure in Fried’s reading of the “dialectic of modernism.” First and most crudely of all, the ideas of “theatricality” and of “objecthood,” even in the context Fried prepares for them, just sound like quite different, even opposed, ideas; so there’s a question of how they can be deployed in support of each other as terms of criticism, describing an internal threat to art as such in a modern context. “Theater” is the name for something that is a possibility for the domain of expression, a form of staging or self-projection, whereas “objecthood” would appear to name the realm of things outside that domain altogether. In “Art and Objecthood,” part of the criticism of the theatrical work is given in specifically anthropomorphic terms, in the “complicity that the work extorts from the beholder” (155), in its tendency to “confront the beholder” (154), in effects of presence which reflect a kind of “demand that the beholder take it into account” (155). How, then, is theatricality understood in these terms of personification to be seen as part of “the risk, even the possibility, of seeing works of art as nothing more than objects”?

An object qua object, a brick or a stretch of highway, is neither expressive nor withholding of expression; and if such an object is seen as silent, its silence is not that of a person holding his tongue. Fried, however, characterizes the installations of Minimalism in terms of the “projection” of objecthood, which is a different matter entirely, since projection, exhibition and display immediately involve us in the domain of expression. The “mere” or “pure” objecthood of a brick is thus not a possibility any longer. In the installation space everything takes place, as it were, under the sign of expression, even if it is one that is thwarted, denied, or suspended. The specter of anthropomorphism haunts Literalist practice like a bad conscience. In trying to tease out the relation between objecthood and theatricality, I want right now just to insist that it is not objecthood itself, but rather the projection of objecthood, that is crucial to this relation. This will necessarily be a project at odds with itself, since the projecting, displaying hand has to keep itself fully out of view, has to retreat to tautology when any gestural point comes to consciousness. (Judd: “To me the piece with the brass and the five verticals is above all that shape.”[5]) So long as we are in a situation of projection and exhibition, objecthood can’t be the plain fact of the matter, but can only be something exploited, something deployed and retreated to, a refuge from specific demands of significance. Hence one aspect of relating the concepts of theatricality and (the projection of) objecthood in this context will be found in the idea of an activity which disallows transparency about itself.

A related question concerns the connection between the idea of theatricality and the production of effects. If objecthood itself belongs outside the domain of the expressive, it is very much within the realm of cause and effect. And the installations of Minimalist practice are self-consciously understood in terms of the controlled production of effects. In Robert Morris’s words, distinguishing his installations from earlier artistic practice, “But the concerns now are for more control of and/or cooperation of the entire situation. Control is necessary if the variables of object, light, space, body are to function.”[6] This is one of the places I had in mind earlier when I said that the terms of criticism of Fried’s diagnosis are in many instances shared by the Minimalist practitioners themselves. The emphasis on the controlled production of effects is both part of his case against theatricality and another dimension of its relation to objecthood. The installations created a kind of “mise en scène” that was “extraordinarily charged,” and “It was as though their installations infallibly offered their audience a kind of heightened perceptual experience, and I wanted to understand the nature of that surefire, and therefore to my mind essentially inartistic, effect.”[7] It’s the relation of the surefire and the inartistic I want to just point to now. Kant argues that it defines a judgment of the beautiful as such that it cannot be the conclusion of a demonstration, or as it is sometimes put, that there can be no principles of taste, general rules which could require such a verdict as it were ahead of time, prior to experience of the object. A parallel argument in Kant claims that there can be no laws of taste, that is, descriptive premises which could then support an empirical law to the effect that some object will in fact be found beautiful. For Kant, this absence of laws defines the judgment of the beautiful just as the possibility of ordinary empirical judgment. I don’t know if Fried means to be alluding to this in divorcing the aesthetic from the realm of sure-fire production of effects, but I bring it up here to anticipate a further way the ideas of theatricality and of objecthood, for all their surface opposition, can be seen as parallel repudiations of the conditions of expressiveness in art. I need to go into one final characterization of theatricality in Fried to prepare for this, but the thought I would like to arrive at is that artistic or gestural expression involves the interplay between an assumption of authority for what one means, together with a yielding of control over the final effects produced, the desired uptake. In this light, Literalist practice, as depicted in “Art and Objecthood,” declares its anti-artistic status and the repudiation of expressiveness in the ambition of total control of the situation of beholding, coupled with the refusal of all authority for how it is to count for us.

I’ve asked some questions about the idea of theatricality in connection with objecthood, the negation of art, and the emphasis on the controlled production of effects. The last characterization of theatricality which I want to bring in here in some ways brings in an apparently even more heterogeneous set of concerns than the others, but also brings us back to the Greenbergian dialectic of Modernism and the reflective concern with the conditions of an artistic medium as such.[8]

One of the concluding moments of “Art and Objecthood” comes at the idea of theater in the following way. “The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theater” (164). Let me try to say something about the issue of “medium-specificity” in Fried’s criticism, before I worry explicitly about how the challenging or evading of such specificity could be called by the same name as the concept we’ve been tracking alongside that of “objecthood.” We’ve briefly seen the appeal to an ideal of self-criticism and artistic self-definition in Greenberg’s story of the Modernist pressures brought to bear on the relation of the artist to his artistic medium. At the same time, Greenberg appears to see the response to these pressures primarily in terms of asserting the particular value of an artform with the purity and exclusivity of its medium, hence the internal quest for the “unique and irreducible” features of its medium. This is not the place to unravel the different strands of uniqueness, intrinsic value, and the idea of the irreducible essence of a medium, but Fried’s essay[9] already helps to show how the idea of self-definition in the specification of an artistic medium can be disentangled from both Greenberg’s teleological story and the idea of “essence” that he works with. On Fried’s account, as I understand it, what defines a particular artistic medium is nothing more or less than the evolving histories of artistic and critical practice themselves, and is no more timeless or predictable than they are. This shows another way in which the spatial picture of purity (i.e., what is genuinely “internal” to an artform versus what is merely “external” to it) does more harm than good. What matters is not a medium’s conformity to some previously defined “essence,” but the assumption of responsibility for self-definition. Self-definition which, of course, doesn’t insure artistic success, but provides (some of) the criteria for what is to count as success or failure. It is the refusal of this moment of self-definition, at least in the writings of the Literalist artists Fried takes on, which distinguishes their relation to the idea of a medium of art from a Modernist one.[10]

There is of course a much more detailed story, but even if this correction of Greenberg is accepted, and this placement of the issues of self-definition and medium-specificity is found importantly right, the question I want to raise is how can this vision be brought into alignment with the family of concepts we traced around that of “theatricality” such as to motivate the claim that it is theater, of all things, which lies between the individual arts?

For some help here, I want to turn again to Melville’s “Notes on Allegory” essay. At one point in “Art and Objecthood,” Fried says the following: “… what is wrong with literalist work is not that it is anthropomorphic but that the meaning and, equally, the hiddenness of its anthropomorphism are incurably theatrical” (157). After quoting this passage, Melville offers the following gloss:

What Fried objects to in the work of Tony Smith is the way in which it offers itself to its beholder as (not simply a person but) a person who then refuses to allow one a human relation to itself—it is work that distances itself from (the subject it thereby forces to become merely) its beholder. It refuses to let itself mean—be taken as meaning; it is soulless, it enforces the condition Cavell calls “soul-blindness” on its viewer. We have known people with this kind of irony—who would make us the decider of their ensouledness, who would make us decide for them the humanity of their expressions. (“Notes,” 153)

What strikes me first of all in this passage is the interplay depicted between activity and passivity, specifically activity and passivity as they are implicated together in the very idea of expression. Something is being objected to in this passage, something in connection with the place of expression in Literalist theory and practice. At first the Literalist work is said to refuse to “let itself” mean, or be taken as meaning. Without yet asking just how to understand such a refusal, we can hear in these words a refusal of a kind of passivity or exposure, a refusal to be taken or even “read” by another person as meaning this rather than that. We might then understand such a refusal as a refusal to relinquish a kind of control over one’s field of expression. But the next sentence, which presents itself as a kind of gloss on this one, refers us to a familiar kind of person “who would make us the decider of their ensouledness, who would make us decide for them the humanity of their expressions.” And that sounds like a (fundamental) kind of relinquishment itself, rather than a refusal of such yielding. If this is the same person who is refusing to let himself be read, it is not through an assertion of a kind of dictatorial authority over the true meaning of his expressions (that might be one sort of “refusal”), but rather through an abandonment of any such authority. There is surely something deeply right in this doubleness, this interplay between a kind of passivity and a kind of authority, and that this tells us something important about the conditions of expression in art and elsewhere, and about what “theatricality” could mean in this context, in relation to the issues of medium-specificity and the idea of “theater” in Fried’s sense as that which lies between the arts. And how “theater” could, in a particular historical context, come to seem or be the enemy of art itself.

The story of Modernism that brings literalism and objecthood to bear on the concept of a medium of art begins from a sense, surely undeniable, that insofar as there is a concept of “the modern” in art, it is defined by the fact of crisis in the artist’s relation to the history and conventions of the medium. One of Stanley Cavell’s formulations for this situation is the following from The World Viewed:

Modernism signifies not that the powers of the arts are exhausted, but on the contrary that it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself […] One might say that the task is no longer to produce another instance of an art but a new medium within it. […] It follows that in such a predicament media are not given a priori. The failure to establish a medium is a new depth, an absoluteness, of artistic failure.[11]

The imperative to establish an artistic medium means that the artist herself must somehow assume the authority to determine and declare how her work is to count for us, determine as just what medium of art it is to confront its specific possibilities of success and failure. In art, as well as in ordinary speech and gesture, possibilities of meaning and expression exist only insofar as there are answers to the criterial questions of what sort of thing is the subject of expression here, what speech, what action, what medium of expression. Since this is a matter of establishing and declaring criteria, someone (plural or singular) has to speak with a particular authority here, and have that authority recognized, accepted. This is the moment of self-definition Greenberg saw as defining the task of modernism, but without his assimilation of the tasks of autonomy and self-definition to the aims of purity and exclusivity. Medium-specificity becomes an issue precisely because “media are not given a priori,” and not guaranteed by tradition or placement in history either.

The person “who would have us decide for them the humanity of their expressions” is refusing the authority to declare what he or she is up to and why or how it should count for us. And yet, as we are imagining this scenario, something has just been said, something has been presented or projected, or we are confronted by something in a gallery space. Mere literality, literal literality, is not an option here, and in any case we are confronted here by an inchoate demand for response.[12]

The determination of a medium defines what is to count as artistic success or failure, and hence sets the terms of artistic risk, and thus involves a relinquishing of control (over the response of its audience) for the same reason that it demands an assumption of authority (in making the criterial declaration of a medium itself). The possibilities of expressiveness, whether in art or elsewhere, involve requirements of both types: the assumption of authority to, as it were, speak criterially, and the relinquishing of control over the ultimate destination, or the further reaches of the response being sought out or tested. The Literalist objects and installations can be seen as turning these conditions inside out, for they present themselves as simultaneously refusing all authority to determine a particular medium or mode of expressivness, declaring how this is to count for us, while also insisting on a kind of total control of the situation of the beholder. As if artistic success or failure could be produced through sheer force of control; as if control could do the work of authority. (And from this perspective there is nothing for the beholder to choose between the twin post-modernist strategies of Total Control and Total Chance.)

In this way we can see how something called theatricality could be both part of the pressure of objecthood emerging out of the Greenbergian reading of Modernism’s dialectic of self-definition, and how, as part of this same story, it can be said that “what lies between the arts is theater.” As hopelessly compressed as this is, I hope it also starts the way toward understanding how, in a given time and place, theater in this sense could come to seem the very negation of art, that is, something striking at its very concept, and not simply one of the countless failings (of nerve, of taste, of clarity) that are constitutive risks of any practice of art.

I’ll end with two last remarks. The first is that most of this paper has been a continuous attempt to lead up to the question: “Why isn’t Literalism part of the same motor of self-criticism that Greenberg and others take to be definitive of Modernism?” The answer to that is not entirely in place, of course, but I hope to have ended up posing the question.

Secondly and relatedly, most of my remarks here have discussed these issues somewhat outside of their immediate cultural context. And one of the questions left out by that emphasis is how such a set of concerns could constitute an ideology in the first place; that is, how these conditions of expressiveness, and with them the concept of art itself, could not only come to be repudiated (which may happen for all sorts of reasons, including boredom and incompetence), but also whose abandonment or overcoming could come to be a matter of self-conscious urgency and allegiance to so many of the most ambitious artists and writers of these decades. When it’s more than headline-grabbing, what is it that is really sought for or rallied behind in the various recurrent discourses of the “end of art”? How could such an idea ever be experienced as a matter for taking sides? I would suggest that part of the meaning of these developments can, I think, be seen against the context of Greenberg’s invocation of explicitly Kantian ideas of autonomy and reflexive criticism, and his seeing these as defining of the high modernist project. For that heritage of the high-modernist project provides us with a way of seeing various movements, products, and postures since then, which announce themselves in terms of the end of art as such or position themselves as “anti-aesthetic,” as more or less desperate ways of asserting, what sometimes needs asserting, namely the Kantian as well as post-Kantian idea that it is definitive of the idea of art, as it is of philosophy, that it is bounded by nothing beyond itself, and that it follows from this that only art can bring an end to art.

[1] Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism,” October 19 (Winter 1981): 55-92.

[2] Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

[3] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960) in Modernism with a Vengeance: 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86; quoted in Fried, 34-35.

[4] I’m thinking in particular of the first chapter of Melville’s book Philosophy Beside Itself, “On Modernism” (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1986).

[5] Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1968), 156-57; originally broadcast on WBAI New York in February 1964; quoted in Fried, 151.

[6] Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” Artforum 5.2 (October 1966), 23; quoted in slightly abridged form in Fried, 154.

[7]From a talk Fried gave at the 1987 Dia Art Foundation symposium, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop”, in Hal Foster, ed., Discussion in Contemporary Culture, Number One (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1987), 55-6; quoted in Fried, 40.

[8]There are, of course, other central characterizations of “theatricality” in the essay, which I won’t be taking up here. Perhaps the most seriously neglected one here is the characterization of both Literalist and Modernist works in terms of contrasting modes of temporality.

[9] Not to mention subsequent writings, such as the response to T.J. Clark, “How Modernism Works,” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (September 1982): 217-34.

[10] This “moment” is, of course, an extremely problematic one to describe, let alone to inhabit. How, for instance, are we to begin thinking about what Caro’s table sculptures declare themselves as, determine how they are to count for us? It is not helpful to be told “they are to count as ‘sculpture.’” Nothing less than experience with the evolving practice of the artist can be expected to help here. And perhaps nothing less than the kind of philosophical-critical writing of we’ve been considering can be expected to provide specific content to the idea of “self-definition” or “medium-specificity.”

[11] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 103.

[12] “But the things that are literalist works of art must somehow confront the beholder—they must, one might almost say, be placed not just in his space but in his way.” (“Art and Objecthood,” 154).

Allow us to explain. In seeking to explain or understand, to contextualise or make disciplinary sense of, “Art and Objecthood,” it is often asked to what genre of art writing it belongs. Is it an example of “art history” or “art criticism”? And, certainly, serious readers of Fried have taken both sides of the divide over the years. The piece can appear as part of art history, referring to an art movement now over 50 years old and included in anthologies reprinting texts from the time, with its particular truth claims not as important as it being one of the range of responses between which the reader can presumably choose. Examples of this range from Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology in 1968 to James Meyer’s Minimalism in 2000.1 On the other hand, Fried regards “Art and Objecthood” as an example of art criticism, speaking of it in a collection bearing its name as coming out of a period in the 1960s and early 1970s when he wrote art criticism, before turning to art history in the mid-1970s.2 For Fried, the distinction between art history and art criticism is that art history deals with the art of the past and seeks to understand the issues surrounding the work in as much detail as possible while art criticism deals with the art of the present and necessarily makes a judgment about the work. In art history, we might say, the historian does not judge even though they have the basis to, whereas in art criticism the critic does judge even though they cannot be certain of the basis on which they do so (50-1).

We, however, do not make the same distinction here with regard to “Art and Objecthood.” In fact, for us the essay lies outside or better at the foundation of art history and art criticism, making them possible. But how exactly might it be understood to lie at the origin of both Fried’s art history and art criticism, or even more strongly at the origin of art history and art criticism themselves? Of course, “Art and Objecthood” is best known for introducing the terms—or rather the distinction between—“art” and “objecthood” into critical discourse. These are aligned respectively with the categories or perhaps qualities of “conviction” and “theatre” (which we will call “scepticism” here).3 Art stands for “conviction” as opposed to the “scepticism” of objecthood, in that in art there is an attempt to uphold and keep alive the conventions of various art forms and in objecthood there is a refusal to do or a lack of interest in doing so (and, importantly for Fried, a lack of interest is the same as refusal). In Fried’s words from the essay: “For Judd, as for literalist sensibility generally, all that maters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest. Whereas with the modernist artist nothing short of conviction… matters.”4 But, importantly, as part of that history of “modernism” that Fried sees the art he is writing about as part of (which, as we will see, is also that modernism inaugurated by him), these terms are not finally separable from each other. By contrast with the pre-modern, in which conviction is not at stake, insofar as the artist can unquestioningly follow tradition, in modernism conviction is necessary because it is always a question of overthrowing a prior scepticism. By the time “Art and Objecthood” was written, that scepticism posed by Minimalism had already happened—Fried does not deny the challenge posed by Minimalism and therefore its fundamental importance—so that any art he is arguing for can only be understood to arise in response to that. And this—this is what Fried wants the then-contemporary situation to reveal to us—has always been the case, at least since the advent of modernism. Again, as Fried writes in “Art and Objecthood”: “The more nearly assimilable to objects certain advanced painting had come to seem,… the more urgent became the need for modernist painting to make explicit its conventional—specifically its pictorial—essence by defeating or suspending its own objecthood” (160).

But, conversely—and this is perhaps the overlooked aspect of Fried’s essay—this scepticism itself would not be possible outside of conviction. That is to say, it can seem from some readings of “Art and Objecthood” that scepticism in the form of Minimalism appears as a new development, an unprecedented threat never seen before and after which everything hangs in the balance. It is one that only by a great effort of conviction—of the kind Fried precisely urges in his essay—is able to be overcome. This is Fried’s heightened, exhortatory, almost Puritan diction by which he calls upon us to rise to the challenge, as evidenced most evidently in the series of numbered injunctions towards the end of the essay, for example, “The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater” (163). But, in fact, two things might be pointed out about this. The first is that, despite the unprecedented situation Fried invokes, his suggestion that art is under threat as never before, even in arguably its inaugural statement there is an acknowledgement that there is a certain history of scepticism, that this situation and its overcoming have happened before. And, second, the difficult but nevertheless correct insight that Fried would not ever be able to characterise this scepticism unless from a perspective of conviction, that its very designation as scepticism is its overcoming by conviction, indeed would not be possible unless it was already overcome by conviction.

The “modernism” Fried argues for in “Art and Objecthood”—the modernism that involves the defeat of scepticism—is understood to have been a historical event. It occurs at a particular time—hence the possibility of an art historian writing about it—and is associated with a particular form of art—hence the possibility of an art critic responding to it. It can be situated and contextualised historically. It can be affirmed and argued for critically. And Fried has done this, moving this struggle between “art” and “objecthood” from the 1960s back to 1750s France and even back to late 16th- and early 17th-century Italy. The struggle concerns not only such artists as Frank Stella, Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski in the 1960s but Joseph Marioni, Thomas Demand and Douglas Gordon in the present. In all of this—although this subject could only be treated properly by a much longer account than this one—it follows the posing of a similar kind of scepticism associated with modernism by Fried’s friend and interlocutor, American “ordinary language” philosopher Stanley Cavell. We might consider here just two passages from Cavell’s early writings, which have openly been acknowledged by Fried, in which we can see a similar argument to Fried about the association of modernism with the overcoming of scepticism, and which attempt to locate historically that break introduced by modernism (which, intriguingly, does not occur at the same time as that given by Fried). First, in the essay “Music Discomposed” Cavell puts together modernism and scepticism, arguing that with the arrival of modernism we can no longer be sure whether the artist means it or not, or more decisively even the artist cannot be sure whether they mean it, with a distance opening up between the work of art and the artist, or between the artwork and itself: “What [music periodicals] suggest is that the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary music.”5 Second, in the essay “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in a more historical mode, Cavell locates the beginning of modernism at both the moment of radical “doubt” in Descartes, which raises the problem of whether the world exists, and the tragedies of Shakespeare, which go to the question of what any such knowledge of the world might mean: “What scepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.”6

However, we want to say here that, for all of Cavell’s efforts to locate the advent of scepticism historically, to situate it in time and provide it as it were with cultural examples—to narrate it and to explain it through analogy—it is not like this at all. It is in fact telling that Cavell introduces Descartes as a harbinger of scepticism because we would argue that the whole problematic of scepticism and its overcoming—and this will apply to Fried too, as we will see—is philosophical. Recall that moment in Descartes’ Meditations when he becomes aware of the possibility of radical doubt: “I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment.”7 There is no empirical evidence by which we may distinguish the two states. Things are just as they always have been, and this dream hypothesis is not partial or incremental, taking place slowly, but total and immediate, with nothing outside of it. But—and this is, of course, the famous paradox of Descartes’ Cogito—this doubt could only be complete and all-encompassing because it has already been overcome and exists in retrospect. This doubt not only leads to its eventual overcoming by the Cogito, but is possible from the beginning only because of the Cogito. Descartes’ “scepticism” is sceptical in exactly the sense Cavell requires it to be: it incites its own overcoming. What we can know is only the overcoming of, only to stand in for, only the naming of, a “prior” scepticism (which is also, as we have seen, only the retrospective effect of its own overcoming). In other words—and this, needless to say, has been suggested before—doubt and the overcoming of doubt are inseparable in Descartes. Indeed, their relationship is entirely circular. What Descartes produces—this is the true creativity of his philosophy, the event or creation that is philosophy—is something out of nothing. Where before there was nothing—although, again, after Descartes this is exactly what we cannot say—we now have doubt and the overcoming of doubt. We have “certainty” because of doubt and doubt is able to be remarked only from the position of “certainty.” We can write a kind of “history” or, as Descartes calls it in his Meditations, a “method of treatment” (119), of an initial doubt followed by its overcoming, but only insofar as “certainty” was present from the beginning. We can write a kind of “criticism”—a certainty overcoming doubt—but it would be a certainty conscious of itself (and therefore possible only because of) doubt.

So, to return to the question we began by asking, if we are looking for the term to describe what is at stake in “Art and Objecthood,” it is neither art history nor art criticism—these arise only in retrospect or are assumed in advance—but philosophy. It is philosophy in the sense of creation, invention, the doubling of what is, the positing of a new “transcendental” condition for things, at once outside or above what is and only able to be seen through it. It is this break—a leaving behind of previous conditions, which can now never be seen except through what takes their place—that is the true modernity in both Fried and Cavell, and it unleashes in the end not any meaningful sequence or development, anything like the recognisable chronology or stylistic progression of art history, but only a series of circular reversals or recursions, in which conviction is shown to be possible only because of doubt and doubt only because of conviction. (Or—and we will come back to this—this “progression” would consist only in the clearer and clearer realisation of this aporia, the inescapability of this logic. Or, in short—although this is not the usual sense in which this expression is used—it would consist in art approaching the condition of philosophy. We can perhaps see this in Fried’s own trajectory, in that early in his career, in something like “Art and Objecthood,” it was thought a matter of definitively defeating theater, whereas in his later writing he increasingly acknowledges that conviction is possible only through theater, comes about only through the attempt to defeat theater, and thus is never entirely able to do so.)

That is to say, if there is a history or progression in Fried’s work, which is to say if there is a history or progression of Fried’s work, it is the gradual realisation of this circularity, the underlying logic driving it, and nothing to do with the history of art or the development of critical taste or discrimination (or, more exactly, it is not that these are not at stake in Fried’s work, but that they are the outcome or expression of this logic, and as Fried’s work progresses this equivalence becomes more and more obvious.) Take, for example, Fried’s explanation of how conviction keeps on having to be re-established in the chapter “Approaching Courbet” of Courbet’s Realism, as though this strictly logical substitution had to be mediated by something like “taste,” which itself has to be accounted for by intricate historical research and the recreation of artistic context (undoubtedly accounting for the enormous intellectual dignity and grandeur of the book). It is as though there necessarily has to be a whole gradual, mediated, almost embodied—Fried’s term for it in “Art and Objecthood” is “natural history” (148-49)—shift of taste that at once makes what was convincing theatrical and involves a renewed mobilisation of artistic resources to make what is now theatrical again convincing: “So that Millet’s figures seemed to [a number of critics of the time] not in fact absorbed in their labors and hence unaware of being beheld, but merely pretending to be both—which is to say they found his paintings egregiously, unbearably, theatrical.”8 Compare this to the procedure played out later in Fried’s career, although this particular account is written not by Fried but rather is a presumed paraphrase of his work by Fried’s close colleague and supporter Walter Benn Michaels (it might perhaps more properly be considered a later moment in the reception of Fried). Michaels is commenting in the course of an essay, “Photographs and Fossils,” on Fried’s brilliant reading of Barthes’ notion of the punctum in Camera Lucida, which is argued by Fried to be inherently anti-theatrical, insofar as it is not a matter of the photographer putting it there to be recognised by the spectator. And yet, as Michaels suggests, Fried is no sooner able to say this, that is, that the punctum can be understood as non-theatrical, than it turns theatrical again: “What I have just described as the radicalization of absorption… turns out in Barthes to be dialectical: it turns the antitheatrical into pure theatricality; it turns what Fried called absorption into what was supposed to be its opposite: literalism.”9

That is to say, in Michaels’ reading of Fried, absorption is no sooner recognised as such (exactly as what is not meant to be recognised) than it would immediately be shown to be theatrical. And here it is not a matter of the slow shifting of taste, but rather the outcome of a certain self-contradictory logic: that the very recovery of absorption, the using of it as an artistic technique or even noting its artistic effectiveness, is enough to do away with it. Absorption exists only in retrospect. As something that once was because we could no sooner state it than it is done away with. Fried, in fact, in the book that includes the original essay on Bathes as a chapter, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, respectfully resists Michaels’ analysis, arguing that it is a little too sudden or peremptory, not properly historicizing in seeing the inevitable failure to sustain absorption as merely a logical failure. As he writes there: “Michaels is undoubtedly correct, but I nevertheless want to resist identifying Barthes’ position in Camera Lucida as literalist or theatrical tout court.”10 And, indeed, in that way we have tried to explain, the very brilliance of Fried, his identity as both an art historian and an art critic is—despite what we said a moment ago—a product of his “repressing” or at least “slowing down” this circularity, the manner in which it is presented as an effect of history or a critical task to be taken up. This is the deepest economy of Fried’s work—all that we mean by the richness and texture of its history, the courage and anti-orthodoxy of its critical judgments—but it needs to be understood that this is underwritten, made possible, by a prior philosophical logic that is purely prescriptive or even what logicians call abductive, the entirely original invention of a system that at its deepest level is not empirical or even ethical but rather undemonstrable and irrefutable.

But all of this means that in a fascinating—although, again, largely unremarked upon—way Fried’s chief (indeed, perhaps only real) argument is with himself. There is a not terribly amusing review of Why Photography Matters by the English novelist Geoff Dyer that begins by counting the number of times Fried refers to himself in the book.11 Dyer is trying, we presume, to make a misplaced point about Fried’s “narcissism,” but there is nevertheless a grain of truth to what he says. It is that Fried—along the lines of Michaels’ observation concerning the theatrically anti-theatrical nature of the punctum—is no sooner able to state an absorptive solution or conviction than it turns theatrical or sceptical. (And perhaps even the gradual shift of Fried’s vocabulary away from the terms absorption and theatricality is a tacit admission of this.) In a sense, each of Fried’s successive historical case studies—from Absorption and Theaticality, to Courbet, to Manet, to Menzel—is driven by a dissatisfaction with his own prior solution. In a way, it is his own dissatisfaction with the convincingness of his conviction as soon as it is stated that drives his narrative forward. (We would rather say then, contra Dwyer, that the real motivation of Fried’s constant references to himself is if anything anti-narcissist.) This dissatisfaction arises because, as we insist, it is not merely that scepticism can be stated only from a position of conviction (this is the way art criticism understands it), but because the “solution,” as soon as it is stated, is revealed to be inadequate, precisely the scepticism on which conviction is based or that allows conviction to become conscious of itself. (This is the path art history takes.)

And so Fried’s narrative moves on, very much like the Courbet who follows Millet, but with the particular instances of art in many ways the embodiment of the internal logic driving his argument. Why, however, we might ask, the late turn to Caravaggio after the statement of the “inaugural” moment of modernism in Absorption and Theatricality? Why go backwards rather than forwards in time? Perhaps because, as the necessary correlate to the re-establishment of conviction after a prior scepticism, a conviction that is retrospectively seen to have made that scepticism possible, it is also true that it is conviction that precedes scepticism, allowing it to be seen for the first time. It is to suggest that, if the problem of scepticism is first seen to arise in 1750 in Absorption and Theatricality, what is thereby opened up—here again the internal logic of Fried as opposed to the external history of art—is the necessity for a conviction before this. As Fried writes in Caravaggio’s Moment, speaking of the way that we can find absorptive motifs in Caravaggio’s work before the countervailing problematic of scepticism or theatricality: “During the period with which the present book is concerned, a pejorative notion of theatricality had no purchase on the practice and evaluation of painting.”12 That is, at one end of Fried’s work there is a priority of conviction that allows us to see scepticism, but which is no sooner stated than it falls into scepticism, and at the other end we can no sooner suggest scepticism than we realise that this is possible only because of a prior conviction. If the “modernist” aporia at the heart of Fried’s work rolls forward—so that the “same” essential problem keeps on taking different forms in successive generations of artists—so it also moves back, with the “same” problem keeping on being located further and further back in history.

The greatness of Fried, his uniqueness, we might say, is that he has created—at least within the discourses of art—a proper “system” in the philosophical sense. For all of the art-historical and even art-critical scaffolding, he has brought about something from nothing, something that has not existed before. And we mean it when we say something from nothing, for the effect of Fried’s work is that something that was once immediate and direct, let us call it “tradition”—although this is exactly what we cannot say—is henceforth the overcoming of scepticism, a scepticism that is only a hypothesis, can never be seen as such or at least cannot be spoken of at the same time as it is experienced. After it, what is is only the covering over of something else. Appearance is no longer mere appearance, but doubled, divided, withholding something—and doubled, divided constantly, so that we cannot see what it stands in for without this being revealed as yet another appearance. In other words, Fried invents appearance. It is just this split that Fried introduces into the world, and after which there is no going back because no matter how far back we go there is always the same doubling (this is part of the meaning of the Caravaggio book, which sees the problematic of absorption in a period notionally before modernism) and no outside (because even indifference is now only an attempt to overcome a prior scepticism, that is, an effort at absorption). All this is exactly that willed indifference that Fried evokes through Diderot in Absorption and Theatricality, in which painting must seek the “superior fiction” of not being beheld, just as the actor must ignore the audience in front of them (and this effect of will applies in Diderot—this is the important point—whether there is an actual audience or not):

The criticism and theory we have been considering expressed an implicit apprehension of the beholder’s alienation from objects of his beholding (and, therefore, in a manner of speaking, from himself)…. [and] insisted on the need for painters to overcome that alienation in their work if painting was to be restored to its former status as a major art (104-05).

In fact, if we want to suggest what Fried introduces into art-historical discourse, it is something like a symbolic order. Art enters the Symbolic in the sense that “it isn’t constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbol arrives, there is a universe of symbols.”13 Or, in Lacan’s well-known formulation, we henceforth have the lie in the form of the truth and truth in the form of the lie. For let us go back to that shocking moment of “modernism” in Fried, after which nothing is the same and we can never go back to the way things were before. It is the irrevocable realization that we are in the Symbolic that is that fall into “scepticism”: that things mean other than they appear to, that things potentially deceive, that things are not immediately themselves but only signify and can only be accessed through signification. And in which ignorance or indifference—whatever we might imagine coming before—can only be understood as feigned or put on. Which is also to say that today we can argue against Fried only in his terms (which is to say as well, as we have seen, that Fried is always arguing against himself). In the symbolic order, as Lacan makes clear, there is no outside, but there is also no inside. Or, to put this another way, the symbolic is inaugurated on the basis that there is something real or some alternative outside of it—an immediate relation to the world, some momentary “grace” or “instantaneousness” in which everything could be seen—but this is now possible only through the “distance,” the “duration,” the “endlessness,” of the symbolic. Conviction, if it is possible at all, is no longer something Imaginary, outside of the Symbolic, but rather something Real, accessible only in its impossibility, within the Symbolic. It is at once what scepticism stops us from accessing and is only to be seen through the perpetual failure, which is to say the perpetual overcoming of, scepticism. As Slavoj Žižek writes of the Real, it is “simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access; the Thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen which makes us miss the Thing.”14

Indeed, if were to think a precursor for the kind of “philosophical” system-building we find in Fried it would be Hegel. Hegel is until recently the underexplored element of Fried’s intellectual armory, hinted at throughout his work but nowhere explicitly acknowledged or elaborated in detail. But we get perhaps a sense of the closeness of Hegel to Fried when we look at Fried’s close colleague Robert Pippin’s After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. For Pippin’s ultimate point is that the aim of Hegel too—indeed, the true meaning of a philosophical “system” that Hegel was perhaps the first to theorize—is to put forward a hypothesis that produces something out of nothing. In Hegel’s case, it is Geist or human “spirit.” However, importantly—and here we come close to an “archaeology” of that circularity between conviction and scepticism we have been examining—it is not a matter of objects in the world standing in for any underlying spirit, as in some recognisable form of Idealism. Rather, Geist is the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible. As Pippin writes: “Hegel is not treating the German Idealist problem of the Absolute—the account of a possible subject-object identity, how subjects can also be objects—as a problem of some prior ground (of the original unity of both) to be recovered in some intellectual intuition or aesthetic experience… [On the contrary,] Geist is ‘a product of itself.’”15 And this is also Pippin’s point concerning Hegel on art, his attempt to reclaim art for modernism after Hegel’s infamous claim that art is a “thing of the past.” It is that, in a way Hegel did not live to see, modern art, like Geist, is its own originless self-creation. It introduces a split into being and it is (and in a way is not, insofar as it is) this split. Again, as Pippin writes: “[Modern] art does not double or imitate reality as in so many mimetic theories, but rather in art, Geist, some sort of achieved collective like-mindedness, doubles itself” (32).

To conclude, is not something like this Hegelian “doubling” first inaugurated in art history some 50 years ago by Fried in “Art and Objecthood” (or “Art and Objecthood” is the brilliant and unexpected rediscovery of Hegel’s Aesthetics in that way argued by Pippin)? It is a “dialectic” that, as we have tried to show, is at once what Fried repeats throughout his work and what is failed to be repeated throughout his work, what his work is the failure to repeat. To demonstrate this, let us go almost to the end of Fried’s career, to an essay he has written on the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 2010 video k: 364: A Journey by Train, now reprinted in the collection Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand. In Gordon’s video, we see two Israeli musicians travel by train through Poland in order to play Mozart’s sublime “Sinfonia Concertante” with the Polish National Chamber Orchestra. In the course of his recording of their performance, Gordon—who is known for a series of “real time” videos such as 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho slowed down so that it takes 24 hours to screen, and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), which exclusively follows the famous footballer Zinedine Zidane and not the ball over the course of a match—shows close-ups of the two musicians’ faces and fingers apparently synchronously with the music as though they were actually playing it in the same present we are watching it. It is as though—the great and compelling illusion of all music-making—they were playing music that did not exist before them, as though the music and its performance were the same. It is as though, as we cut back and forth between the two performers, the conductor and the orchestra—and it is evident that footage from both the final performance and rehearsals has been used—the music takes place in a single unbroken time without it being certain in advance how it will go. The significance of this “continuous presentness”16 is made evident by contrasting Gordon’s video with another important musical performance in the history of art video: Korean artist Nam June Paik’s Concerto for TV, Cello and Video Tape (1971), in which we watch, amongst other footage, a video shot from opposite the cellist Charlotte Moorman of her seemingly playing the music we are hearing, replayed on small monitors stacked immediately in front of her on which she mimes bowing. Of course, the point of Paik’s video is that the images broadcast on the monitors of Moorman playing are ever so slightly delayed, so that the music we hear and the images we see are never entirely in sync. We do not see and hear at the same time, or put otherwise it looks like Moorman is merely performing—running through, almost in the sense of rehearsing—music that already exists. She is not caught inside the moment of making music, but instead stands outside of it, repeating or replaying what has been composed before her.

This is the moment—there is an equivalent in the history of performance strictly speaking with such works as Dan Graham’s Intention Intentionality Sequence (1972), in which a delay is introduced between what Graham says and what he sees—of the theatrical: breaking the illusion of the performance and introducing a distance between the audience and what takes place before them, as though the performance is not being undertaken in the present but is merely re-enacting what has already occurred. And thus we can understand—although this is not explicitly argued for in Fried’s essay—Gordon’s video as meaningfully coming after these earlier performances, made in the context of a generalised theatricality. The work’s intensity or “presentness,” the immersion of the performers—the coming together of the performers and their performance—is no longer immediate or to be taken for granted, but precisely the overcoming of a prior distance between them. (This can be seen in a number of aspects of k: 364: from the fact that the work is projected on two screens simultaneously, to the fact that we are evidently seeing footage not only of the final performance but edited together from different performances, to the “prelude” to the performance, showing the two musicians journeying through the haunted landscape of Poland, reminding us of the terrible background against which their performance takes place and which must be understood as somehow “sublimated” or “overcome” by their performance.) The point that Fried makes about Gordon’s video is that we have neither the old-fashioned “classical” or even “romantic” direct identification with the music—taking place in the Imaginary register—nor what we might call the “post-modern” distance or alienation from the music—in the Symbolic register—but rather the surpassing or overcoming of performance through performance—the Real. It is neither authentic non-performance nor inauthentic performance but authenticity through performance. It is exactly this Real that we see in Diderot’s “The Paradox of Acting.” Diderot wants there neither actual crying in any direct identification with the person of the actor nor the mere signs of crying in an empty gesture that lets the audience know that the actor is not actually crying. Rather, the actor would cry at the intensity of their acting crying, their acting carrying them away to become Real (and reminding us that the Real is accessible only through such acting). As Diderot writes there:

People come not to see tears, but to hear speeches that draw tears; because this truth of nature is out of tune with the truth of convention. Let me explain myself: I mean that neither the dramatic system, nor the action, nor the poet’s speeches, would fit themselves to my stilted, broken, sobbing declamation. You see that it is not allowable to imitate Nature, even at her best, or Truth too closely; there are limits within which we must restrict ourselves.17

Do we not see this Real that Fried speaks of, or at least hints at in “Art and Objecthood” in all kinds of art today. Is it not that “play within the play” theorised by Cavell with regard to Beckett’s Endgame, where we have “happening vs acting”?18 Do we not see it in William Rothman on documentary, where he argues that it is not through any cinema-verité doing away with of the mediation of the director that the film-maker might capture the “real,” but only through their very intervention—this is the point of his ending his account with a discussion of D.A. Pennebaker’s Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back (1967), in which Dylan reveals his true self, much like the contestants on such TV shows as Big Brother, exactly by trying to put on a persona for the camera, that is, attempting to be “natural.”19 (In all of this, of course, a connection can be made to Rothman’s earlier book on Hitchcock, The Murderous Gaze, in which the turn from “theatre” to “film” takes place through the famous “mousetrap” in Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930), in which Sir John solves the crime by writing a scene in which Handel Fane must play the role of the murderer he is.)20 And, as if to confirm Fried’s, Cavell’s and Rothman’s predictions, we might recall such recent documentaries as Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), in which it is only through Suharto-era killer Anwar Congo’s “acting” for the camera that he for the first time realises the enormity of his crimes and breaks down in tears. The same thing can be seen in the confession of Robert Durst in the made-for-television documentary series The Jinx (2015), in which the serial murderer confesses to himself in front of the mirror in what he thinks is an off-camera bathroom while being interviewed about his actions. In all of these, we have precisely Diderot’s “speeches that draw tears.” And if in one way Fried’s work plays out as a certain unacknowledged, unrecognised and perhaps even unconscious aporia between scepticism and conviction—which accounts for its enormous symbolic power—at its centre as at once what makes it possible and what it is a defense against is the absolute coincidence of the two—the Real. This is perhaps the real “grace” evoked at the end of “Art and Objecthood”: not the momentary defeat of theatre or even its temporary suspension by conviction but an impossible holding together of the two—a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism. In Fried’s own words, which speak at once the deepest truth and the absolute ambiguity of his project, for of course it is he who has better and longer than anyone embodied this literalist sensibility:

Literalist sensibility is, therefore, a response to the same developments that have largely compelled modernist painting to undo its objecthood—more precisely, the same developments seen differently, that is, in theatrical terms, by a sensibility already theatrical (160-1).

That is, Fried’s work is great because it first of all doubles and divides itself. And in so doing, it doubles and divides the world. Fried’s work will live on, we suggest, not primarily as art history or art criticism but as this “philosophical” doubling of the world.

­­–Robert Smithson, Letter to the Editor, Artforum, October 1967

In early 1995, Michael Fried delivered the Una’s Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. The Alumni Hall was packed for “Some Thoughts on Caravaggio” and “Caillebotte’s Impressionism,” and the spillover audience carried into the panel discussion with T. J. Clark and Richard Wollheim some days later on March 15. For many of us at the time, the appeal of Fried’s writing and lectures was primarily, as Clark put it, his “remarkable descriptions.”1 And remarkable they were. No one, I think, could ever look at Caravaggio or Gustave Caillebotte the same way after encountering his close reading of them (to say nothing of Chardin, Courbet, Eakins, Manet, or Menzel). But equally, there was a sense of engaged curiosity about Fried’s status as a by-then legendary art critic. Or at least, the possible link between the art historian and the art critic prompted what, for me, has remained the most interesting question posed at the panel discussion. How, Anne Wagner asked from the audience, might we understand the relation between these new accounts of Caravaggio and Caillebotte on the one hand and on the other hand the analysis of Minimalism in “Art and Objecthood”?

In part, Wagner’s question flowed from her work on the introduction to the 1995 edition of Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology.2 Taking its title from an essay by Wollheim, the book had long offered the most widely available, unexpurgated reprinting of “Art and Objecthood” since its original publication in the June 1967 issue of Artforum.3 The succinct editorial summary of the argument probably did as much as anything to determine the contours of its later reception. “In this essay,” Battcock wrote in 1968,

Michael Fried criticizes Minimal Art—or as he calls it, ‘literalist’ art—for what he describes as its inherent theatricality. At the same time, he argues that the modernist arts, including painting and sculpture, have come increasingly to depend on their very continuance on their ability to defeat theatre. Fried characterizes the theatrical in terms of a particular relation between the beholder as subject and the work as object, a relation that takes place in time, that has duration. Whereas defeating theatre entails defeating or suspending both objecthood and temporality.4

If the essay’s treatment of theater and modernism fell largely to the side in a discussion of Caravaggio and Caillebotte twenty-eight years later, temporality remained quite notably, strikingly, at the center. Two examples stood out. In Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Fried described two moments: both an “extended duration” and “instantaneousness.” (Fig. 1) In The Yerres, Effect of Rain, he remarked in turn upon the picture’s effects of “temporal duration, not instantaneousness.”5 (Fig. 2) Hearing these lectures with “Art and Objecthood” echoing in the background, the connection between Fried’s art criticism and his art historical writing seemed both obvious and compelling. The response to Wagner’s query on March 15 was, however, disarmingly straightforward. There is no real connection between his criticism and art history, Fried replied, they are quite simply separate projects.

I do not believe Fried’s claim was disingenuous. Compelling reasons persist for holding apart his art criticism and art history. Yet, the originality and consistency of his approach to the description and analysis of time in painting and sculpture continues to invite the question. From 1967 to the present, no other writer has so systematically thought through the history and effects of artistic temporality. This accomplishment necessarily binds together his art criticism and his art history, and it allows us to see another layer of significance to the legacy of “Art and Objecthood” fifty years after its publication.

What follows here is a brief elaboration of these basic claims, one that I recognize may be open to criticism and revision. I want simply to point out a few things about the relation of the analysis of temporality in the art criticism of the 1960s and the historical analysis of earlier art, before turning to a modest assessment of the significance of this relation. Broadly speaking, then, Fried’s account of the art of American, French, German, and Italian painters working between the 1590s and the 1880s rests on the consistency of his vocabulary to describe the depiction and effects of time in their work. This vocabulary first emerged in 1967, and it developed into a distinctly new rethinking of a once dominant aesthetic understanding of time in the visual arts. That the vocabulary of temporality ultimately seems to reverse certain value judgments about given works of art superficially suggests a schism between art criticism and art history, but it should also alert us finally to a deeper problematic, one that rests on the disambiguation of interpretation and judgment.

At the time, Fried’s response to Wagner seemed more than a little surprising. In a contribution to a 1987 panel at the Dia Art Foundation, Fried himself had stated that “the antitheatrical arguments of ‘Art and Objecthood’ belong to a larger historical field than that of abstraction versus minimalist art in 1967. […] Indeed, part of the interest ‘Art and Objecthood’ still has for me is that more than any of my early essays it represents a link between the art criticism I had been writing since the early 1960s and the art history I would soon go on to write.”6 Less than a decade later, however, he had substantially changed his tune. He stated his new position in the introduction to his collected art criticism, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews: “between myself as historian of the French antitheatrical tradition and the critic who wrote ‘Art and Objecthood’ there looms an unbridgeable gap.”7

Certain elements of art criticism and art history, Fried insisted, had to be understood as separate. One is the notionally distinct roles inhabited by the critic and the historian. Whether this amounts to the “resolutely nonjudgmental” position of the art historian could be debated, but Fried insisted that an interpretation of the art of the past requires a certain historicizing of aesthetic judgment as such (“Introduction,” 51). (The flipside is the impossibility of historicizing one’s own critical judgments.) Fried also emphasized the distinction between the antitheatrical tradition of French art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the attempts to defeat theater in the modernist painting and sculpture of the postwar period. The two situations are perhaps, as Anthony Grudin has argued, parallel responses to capitalism, but for Fried they remain non-continuous and quasi-autonomous.8 In these respects, the art historical and critical approaches to art are non-identical twins. Is there a “double Michael Fried?” he asked, quoting Robert Smithson. “Whatever the right answer was in 1967, the answer now is yes” (“Introduction,” 52).

Worth noting is the fact that Fried bracketed the latter half of Smithson’s question; the “atemporal” and the “temporal” fell away, and only the question of doubleness remained. Or rather, Fried rephrased Smithson’s metaphysical satire—“He is a naturalist who attacks natural time […] Consider a subdivided progression of ‘Frieds’ on millions of stages.”9—as a way of addressing Wagner’s question about art criticism and art history. If the questions Wagner and Smithson posed really did converge into one it would be this. Does the temporality of art in “Art and Objecthood” differ from that in Fried’s art historical writing?

The temporal component of the argument in “Art and Objecthood” is obvious and has been understood from the beginning. Smithson and Battcock immediately zeroed in on it for the purposes of criticism and explanation. But the most sustained attention to temporality in Fried’s account of Minimalism appeared many years later in the writings of art historians like Alex Potts, Pamela Lee, and less directly Kenji Kajiya.10 Lee claims that most earlier accounts of the essay had emphasized the spatial and phenomenological elements of the essay, but had failed to acknowledge “the degree to which the limit condition of Fried’s critique is time” (Chronophobia, 43; emphasis in original). But any reading of the essay should confirm its centrality. The key passage comes in the final paragraphs:

Here finally I want to emphasize something that may already have become clear: the experience in question persists in time, and the presentment of endlessness that, I have been claiming, is central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentment of endless or indefinite duration […] The literalist preoccupation with time—more precisely, with the duration of experience—is, I suggest, paradigmatically theatrical, as though theater confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time; or as though the sense which, at bottom, theater addresses is a sense of temporality of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding as if apprehended in an infinite perspective. (“Art and Objecthood,” 166-67; emphasis in original)

In contrast the experience of modernist painting and sculpture “has no duration.” Certainly, one experiences all works of art in time, but the conviction of “presentness” demanded by modernism is “experienced as a kind of instantaneousness.” Indeed, “it is by virtue of their presentness and insantantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theater” (167). Duration and instantaneousness are the dyads around which Fried’s critical analysis turned in 1967.

The equation of modernist painting and instantaneousness was not new. Clement Greenberg had articulated a similar view in a widely read article of 1959, “The Case for Abstract Art.” Speaking in general terms about the experience of painting he argued that “ideally the whole of a picture should be taken in at a glance; its unity should be immediately evident, and the supreme quality of a picture, the highest measure of its power to move and control the visual imagination, should reside in its unity. And this is something to be grasped only in an indivisible instant of time.”11 Unlike poems, paintings are “all there at once,” and abstract painting brings this home more forcefully than representational painting. “The ‘at-onceness’ which a picture or a piece of sculpture enforces on you,” Greenberg continued, “is not, however, single or isolated. It can be repeated in a succession of instants, in each one remaining an ‘at-onceness,’ an instant all by itself. For the cultivated eye, the picture repeats its instantaneous unity like a mouth repeating a single word” (81). Greenberg insisted that the transcendence of the temporal—that is, the transcendence of the durational—is an essential characteristic of painting. And that, he added, is what makes abstract painting arguably the most significant form of art in modern culture.12

Prior to 1967, Fried had most likely assimilated Greenberg’s reading of pictorial temporality. He had certainly addressed the place of time in modern art. Significantly, however, he did not always valorize Greenbergian “pure instantaneity” the way Rosalind Krauss has suggested he did.13 In the catalogue essay for the 1965 exhibition, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, Fried pointed out that the combination of colors in Olitski’s recent work demanded not a single moment of perception but a sequential viewing. (Fig. 3) Tin Lizzie Green perhaps does not require experiential duration, but “what matters is that most of Olitski’s paintings executed since 1963 […] virtually demand to be experienced in what may perhaps be called visual time.” Fried immediately compared this with earlier art. (Fig. 4) “Putting aside their obvious differences, what the paintings of Van Eyck and Olitski have in common is a mode of pictorial organization that does not present the beholder with an instantaneously apprehensible unity.”14 Two years later Fried seems to have changed his view of the temporality of Olitski’s paintings. And the shift in analysis is inescapable in the catalogue essay for the exhibition, Jules Olitski: Paintings 1963–1967, which opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1967. Writing again about Olitski’s color, he modified entirely—and deliberately, I think—his view of the post-1963 paintings. Using language that would appear only weeks later in “Art and Objecthood,” he declared that “each color competes for presentness with every other.” It is as if each color was “continuously changing from point to point, from present moment to present moment.”15 Olitski could thus stand alongside Kenneth Noland, David Smith, and Anthony Caro in explicit contrast with Minimalist durational temporality.16

Several things are at stake in this shift. One is the possible transformation of the perception or appreciation of temporal effects in works of art, painting in particular. That is, at one moment a painting can be understood primarily as durational, at another moment primarily as instantaneous. Or equally, the recognition of a temporal understanding or an attitude towards time can sometimes be appreciated only under properly dialectical circumstances. To see a painting as if instantaneously is to see the contraindicated possibility of its durational apprehension. This is a point Fried comes eventually to acknowledge, most likely, when confronted with Minimalist works. It is a point that Olitski next to Donald Judd made clear. That perception or recognition is thus arguably tied to the dialectical unfolding of the history of art. And the comparison to Van Eyck all but demands that several centuries of that history be filled in.

One thing about Fried’s development that remains to be understood is the role his art historical research and writing played in the formation or elucidation of this critical position on modernist temporality in 1966 and 1967. He has stated that his relations with Greenberg, both personally and on an intellectual level had “begun to fray” between late 1965 and 1967.17 Whether this meant the Greenbergian temporality also became more (or less) problematic is unclear. At the same time, in the spring of 1966, Fried delivered a course at Harvard on French painting from the 1750s to the 1860s (“Introduction,” 10). Again what is not evident is the impact this exposure to the historical problem of French painting and its theorization by critics like Denis Diderot had on his thinking about pictorial temporality.

Some have argued for a fairly clear connection, at least structurally, between a defense of “presentness” in the 1960s and earlier theories of time in the visual arts. Thierry de Duve, for example, asserts that Fried is “but the last in a long line of aestheticians who, from Lessing to Greenberg through Wölfflin, sought in the instantaneous spatiality of painting the specific essence of plastic art.”18 Fried explicitly disagrees with this assessment, but the evocation of the name Lessing should not surprise anyone familiar with the historical understanding of time in painting and sculpture. Krauss’s 1977 Passages in Modern Sculpture made the relationship clear enough. “Although written in the eighteenth century,” she wrote in the first sentence of the book, “Gotthold Lessing’s aesthetic treatise Laocoön applies directly to the discussion of sculpture in our time.”19 For Lessing, famously, “The rule is this, that succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.”20 For Krauss, however, that distinction falls apart in modern sculpture, the analysis of which forces us “increasingly to speak of time” (Passages, 4). Narrative time and duration in art form the spine of her book. When she finally paraphrases Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” 200 pages in, the opposition is clear: “With regard to sculpture, the point on which the distinction between itself and theater turns is, for Fried, the concept of time. It is an extended temporality, a merging of the temporal experience of sculpture with real time, that pushes the plastic arts into the modality of theater. While it is through the concepts of ‘presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theatre’” (203-04). In his prioritization of instantaneousness, Fried was thus deemed a follower of Lessing, at least when it came to artistic time. That he later wrote the foreword to a new edition of Laocoön no doubt confirmed the views of De Duve and Krauss.21 But this is where Fried’s art historical writing about time in the visual arts begins to complicate things.

In Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, first published in 1980, Fried recognized the centrality of instantaneousness in the age of Lessing. The unity of action demanded by “classical” critics and theorists—Charles Le Brun, Henri Testelin, Roger De Piles—had long entailed a unity of time in history painting. This flowed logically from Aristotelian theories of literature into the visual arts. Instantaneousness, however, was not deemed essential as long as the painter restricted the action of a painting to a single phase of narration.22 For critics in the generation of Diderot, however, the conception of pictorial time became increasingly tied to a demand for instantaneousness. “One might say,” Fried wrote, “that for Diderot and his contemporaries a painter’s failure to declare the singleness and instantaneousness of his chosen moment with sufficient clarity was felt to undermine and often to destroy the dramatic illusion of causal necessity on which the conviction of unity depended. More generally, the demand that pictorial unity be made instantaneously apprehensible found natural expression in the almost universal tendency among anti-Rococo critics and theorists to define the essence of painting in terms of instantaneousness as such” (91). Indeed, one of the significant, if less appreciated, insights of Absorption and Theatricality is how commonplace Lessing’s argument about artistic time was in the eighteenth century (82-92).

The works of art that emerge as most significant in Fried’s analysis, however, lay the groundwork for an alternative conception of pictorial temporality. The Diderotian admiration for the works of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Claude-Joseph Vernet stand out in this regard. (Figs. 5 and 6) In the first instance, the depiction of states of absorption like building a house of cards came to suggest “the actual duration of the absorptive states and activities they represent. Some such power necessarily characterizes all persuasive depictions of absorption, none of which would be persuasive if it did not at least convey the idea that the state or activity in question was sustained for a certain length of time. But Chardin’s genre paintings […] come close to translating literal duration, the actual passage of time as one stands before the canvas, into a purely pictorial effect” (49-50; emphasis in original). In a related manner, Diderot’s imaginative projection into the “pastoral” paintings of Vernet (and Hubert Robert) occasioned an abolition of the “subject’s awareness of the passage of time.”23 In turn, this approach to genre paintings in the critic’s Salon of 1767 could be tied back to the earlier appreciation for Chardin. Both painters managed to deny the presence of the beholder in front of the canvas, though in different ways, and both suggested or demanded an extended temporality of viewing. As Fried puts it, “the beholder is stopped and held, sometimes for hours at a stretch if contemporary testimony is believed, in front of the painting” (132).

Despite the clear difference that emerges between the instantaneousness of history painting and the extended temporality of absorptive and pastoral genres, the word “duration” appears only twice in the main text of Absorption and Theatricality.24 I have just quoted both of them. In one instance, Fried uses the word to describe the action in Chardin’s painting. Immediately after, he uses the same word to describe the effect of the painting on the beholder’s perception of time. The relation of the two is the key element in Fried’s later elaboration of the varieties of pictorial temporality in European and American painting. The terminology of instantaneousness and duration that initially emerges within his interpretation of eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics carries distinct echoes of that in “Art and Objecthood.” At first glance, the critical valorization of the temporal is simply reversed. For Diderot in 1767, unlike Fried in 1967, duration is a positive effect of certain works of art. But in French painting the durational effect hinges on a work’s ability to depict an analogous time. The representation of duration, by contrast, is simply not something Fried sees happening in Minimalism. He quotes Robert Morris to this effect: “The experience of the work necessarily exists in time.”25 And indeed, the instantaneousness of modernist painting is just the opposite: “It is as though one’s experience of [modernist painting and sculpture] has no duration” (“Art and Objecthood,” 167).

The problem of the relation of effects and representations of time in art, as I have just described it, is not something Fried ever spells out. But his developing and intensifying concern with the representation of temporality and its effects after 1980 is a significant component of his historical account of European and American painting. That said, the vocabulary used to describe pictorial temporality takes form hesitantly. It is notable, for example, that his next book, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, avoided the word “duration” altogether. Nonetheless temporality is a central concern at key points. The book makes a clear case that “an absorptive thematics calls for effects of temporal dilation that in turn serve the ends of pictorial realism by encouraging the viewer to explore the represented scene in an unhurried manner.”26 Duration is simply not the word used in 1987 to describe this effect, although Fried does note the emergence of instantaneousness in Edouard Manet’s painting—a significant insight for his later analysis (43). Indeed, his next three books crystallize what could be called Fried’s theory of pictorial temporality.

In Courbet’s Realism, published in 1990, Fried pointed to the artist’s “consistent eschewal of instantaneousness in favor of effects of duration, of slow or repetitive or continuous actions, the very perception of which is felt by the viewer to take place over time.”27 In the After Dinner at Ornans he notes “an almost palpable temporal duration and the limits of which are felt to be coextensive with (or for that matter exceed) those of the painting itself” (92-93). (Fig. 7) He continues: “the impression of protracted and/or repetitive temporality that marks both the After Dinner and the Stonebreakers is characteristic of Courbet’s art throughout his career. In a sense this had always been one of the hallmarks of absorptive painting (we find it in both Chardin and Millet), but in the case of Courbet it will increasingly become plain not only that time is required for his paintings to be made to yield their structures and meanings but also that those structures and meanings in turn imply—they all but enforce—an experience of temporal duration” (108). He points out too, that some paintings, “notably certain landscapes of forest scenes, allow their representational content to be fully made out only gradually, in and through acts of attention, of reading, that need time to achieve their ends. (There may be no slower picture in all Western art than the magnificent Stream of the Black Well, Valley of the Loue (Doubs) in Washington D.C.)” (108). (Fig. 8)

In his 1996 book, Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, Fried sums up the basic understanding of pictorial temporality he had developed in the previous two decades. In a two-page “digression on temporality,” he describes two “limit modes of the representation of temporality.”28 Not surprisingly, these two modes are “duration” and “instantaneousness.” Again the latter is aligned with the modernist project—specifically the art of Édouard Manet—but duration is clearly part of the realist tradition. He refers back to his earlier writing when he asserts that “pictorial realism in the West has often involved a tacit or implicit illusion of the passage of time, of sheer duration” (291). This tendency has followed one of two means of representing time in painting: that which is “keyed to the persistence, essentially unchanged over time, of easel paintings as material objects” (291). In the wake of Manet’s new painting, Fried argues, a second pictorial temporality came to dominate: “instantaneousness.” This effect flows from the perception that the surface of a canvas can be “taken in all at once, ‘as a whole,’ in a single immeasurably brief coup d’oeil” (291). Not surprisingly, he compares this to Greenberg’s own conception of “at-onceness” (292). In distinction from Greenberg, however, he insists (in a note) that the term as he uses it is meant “to direct attention to a particular temporal effect, one that in principle is neither superior nor inferior to any other” (568n71).

According to Fried, “the early painting by Manet that most emphatically thematizes instantaneousness understood in this way is the Street Singer” (292). (Fig. 9) His description of the (“often underrated”) painting turns on the woman’s actions “in midstride”: “leaving a café,” “balancing,” “raises,” doors “swinging back,” “as if emerging suddenly into the street”—“the momentariness yet containedness of her actions is a telescoping of time.”29 Likewise, a canvas such as Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian can be said to function within “the framework of a thematics of instantaneousness, keyed to the flame and smoke issuing from the muskets” (356). (Fig. 10) In terms that implicitly contrast the painting with Courbet’s Stream, Fried summarizes the extraordinary temporal self-consciousness of the production: “It’s hard to think of another picture in all Western art that so determinedly draws attention to the inevitably aporetic nature of the fiction of instantaneousness even as it appeals to that fiction for its basic structure” (357).

In a chapter on “Time and the Everyday” in his 2002 book, Menzel’s Realism, Fried introduces a variation on the duration-instantantaneous dialectic developed in his writings on Courbet and Manet. Borrowing from Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of the “everyday”—the patience and faith in marriage specifically—in Either/Or, where Judge William, the fictive narrator, talks about the inability of art, even poetry, to represent everyday time, or inner history—what he calls “extensive” time, as opposed to the “intensive” time of dramatic or historical events—Fried argues that Adolph Menzel is concerned, especially in his drawings, with representing the everyday or “the extensiveness of time.”30 For example, in Dr. Puhlmann’s Bookcase Fried finds “nothing instantantaneous-seeming about the drawing as a whole.” (Fig. 11) Rather, he describes the representation of “time having passed extensively, hour after hour, day after day, over years or decades, ultimately producing, as the provisional or makeshift result of countless ordinary and unmemorable transactions between Puhlmann and his books, pamphlets, and papers, the elaborate construction, at once orderly and disorderly, regulated and improvised, that the drawing faithfully records.” This “lived temporality” serves thus to mark the “inner history” of a man’s life (141; emphasis in original). In a late drawing, Old Documents in a Chest, Menzel “engages with the subject of time in a more explicit manner” (142). (Fig. 12) The picture depicts the old chests owned by the town merchant guilds of Kissingen, a subject the artist found fascinating. In his representation of both the disorder of the chest and the implied actions of “wrapping and tying, stacking and writing” that produced and ordered these objects, Menzel conveys “a lived temporality that belongs at once to an unspecified but somewhat distant past and to a recent occasion when the chest was opened and its contents disturbed” (143). This “mode of temporality” is “basic to Menzel’s art” (144). “Temporal extensiveness” and the “intensive moment” thus emerge as new descriptive dyads, roughly corresponding to the terms “duration” and “instantaneousness” that Fried began using in 1967 (144-45; 147-48). With Kierkegaard’s thought bearing down on the interpretation, however, the sense of moral weight attached to the representation of extension or duration almost entirely reverses the quasi-religious defense of the non-temporal or instantaneous in modernist painting of the 1960s.

How, then, finally, to make sense of this seeming reversal? Is duration in the art of Menzel (to say nothing of Chardin, Eakins, Courbet, and Caillebotte) to be understood in the same terms as duration in Morris and Judd? There are several ways of responding to this question, a question which more or less repeats those of Robert Smithson and Anne Wagner. The answer Fried has already given is that in one case he was writing as a critic and in the other as an art historian. The analysis of duration in earlier art is not a judgment about the quality of the art. Or, to rephrase the response slightly, an understanding of the representation of time in paintings of the past and its historically-specific effects cannot, in itself, compel our conviction of the visual interest or aesthetic superiority of such works. On close analysis, Fried’s art history has nevertheless acknowledged what Michael Podro has called the discipline’s “two-sidedness”—the sense, that is, that artworks “sustain purposes and interests which are both irreducible to the conditions of their emergence as well as inextricable from them.”31 His descriptive vocabulary again and again makes clear his own valuation of the works of Manet and others, even as he seeks to embed those same works in the critical and artistic problems of their time. What else does it mean to say the Street Singer is “underrated” and that it “thematizes” the historical emergence of pictorial instantaneousness? His own shifting assessment of the relation of his art criticism and art history can thus be said to correspond to a larger problem raised by the conjunction of criticism and history, that of methodological authority.

Fried’s differing accounts of artistic temporality in, say, the 1860s and the 1960s can also be understood as raising the significant distinction between artistic representations and artistic effects. In earlier art—the paintings of Chardin most obviously—questions of artistic temporality are always bound first to the representation of time, and only secondarily to the experience of time. The beholder’s time spent in front of a canvas flows from the representational devices used by the painter. That is the point of absorption: the representation of figures reading, playing, resting, and so forth, sustains an extended viewing of a picture. And the problem of the antitheatrical tradition (at least up through Manet) is a problem of representation. In Menzel, a picture depicts lived time; in Morris, an object only demands that time be lived. The unsettled question is whether modernist painting like that of Olitski (or Jackson Pollock for that matter) can also be understood as problematizing the relation of representations and effects.

In the end, the most compelling answer to the Smithson-Wagner question is historical. There are two Frieds, we might say by way of conclusion, but both are temporal. Just as 1967 is not the same as 1767, so 1967 is not the same as 2017. The point is not simply the banal one that people change, but rather that works of art only make sense within a history of art. The logic and urgency of “Art and Objecthood” is much clearer on the other side of neo-liberalism’s triumphal evacuation of artistic meaning. Fifty years on, we can understand the essay’s claims as historically embedded in a larger crisis in art making and its interpretation. In writing about the past, Fried himself has explicitly sought to understand the prioritization and invention of pictorial modes as unfolding dialectically from generation to generation and in structural distinction from alternate pictorial modes. Chardin’s durational art made sense to Diderot only in relation to a then-dominant pictorial instantaneousness. Manet’s instantaneousness made sense only in relation to Courbet’s durational painting. And so on. The meaning and valuation of both the representation and effects of artistic temporality thus only make sense within a history. In 1967, certain temporal experiences carried moral urgency, not least the transcendence of the crushing literalism of everyday life in postwar America. In 1767 in France, the situation might just have been reversed. So too, perhaps, in 2017. Or, perhaps not. Only time will tell.

As critics have often noted, the last ten minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), incorporate some striking, self-consciously artistic shots hard to account for in terms of the film’s other elements. Consider the image above, when astronaut Dave Bowman stares directly at the camera, a Rococo painting of absorptive bliss ignored on the wall behind him (fig. 1). Outfitted in a day-glo spacesuit, he evokes an alien stuck in a white box gallery. The floors are luminous and the room’s furniture and décor (busts and figurines) appear to date from eighteenth-century France. The embedded painting resembles a pastoral scene of François Boucher’s, as do others on the walls around him, but the film does not linger on or explain these details; the point is that Dave is staring, utterly transfixed, at something in front of the picture plane, where we as beholders would be.1 We can’t discern the object beyond the picture plane that rivets him, and the subsequent reaction shot doesn’t reveal it. But the dark, slightly distorted reflection in his helmet visor indicates that he might be seeing one of the reappearing black slabs, described in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel (written in collaboration with Kubrick) as follows: “The monolith was 11 feet high, and 1¼ by 5 feet in cross-section…. In its way, this passive yet almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection was as impressive as any of [its] other attributes.”2 Similar “passive yet almost arrogant” monoliths, sometimes reputed to have been inspired by the sculptures of John McCraken (fig. 2), crop up repeatedly and nearly inexplicably throughout the film.3

I want to argue that this shot of Dave and the painting—and 2001 more broadly—only makes sense if we unpack the idea of “surrogate personhood” in Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” an essay that helps us grapple with the myriad encroachments of surrogate personhood still functioning today. In making this claim, my aim is to counter some recent attempts at a 50^th-anniversary hostile critique of “Art and Objecthood” (for old time’s sake), which have announced that whatever value modernist art might have possessed once upon a time, it can have no value in the new millennium. Because the world has devolved—or, pace Rosalind Krauss, “expanded”—into total theatricality, postmodern simulacra is all we’ve got, which means that, in Daniel Rubinstein’s words, “never before was simulacrum more important to the understanding of contemporary life.”4 Bracket the fact that such claims, while recapitulating most of the challenges to Fried’s essay from 1967 onward, entirely confirm the framework of his analysis. Also overlook that Rubinstein misunderstands “Art and Objecthood” from the first sentence to the monumental last two: “We are all literalists most or all of our lives,” Fried memorably wrote. “Presentness is grace.”5 For critics going with this type of takedown, our fully postmodern world requires neither presentness, nor grace, nor art, but more theater, albeit via an “immanent critique” (Hal Foster) or a “meta-narrative of truth” (Rubinstein) incorporated into the art object itself.6

We could point out that this fantasy of having it both ways—impossibly conjoining literalist theatricality with an art object aiming to do something else—had already appeared poetically, by the 1920s, in response to Marcel Duchamp’s work. Rather than grasping onto a dubious bit of critique/meta-truth within the literalist art object (Foster’s and Rubinstein’s aim), poet William Carlos Williams dreamed up the inverse, pulling more literality into art without, entirely, defeating objecthood.7 Or, we could observe that, by 1968, a fully-simulated, Hollywood-style kitsch—and a complete embrace of theatrical objecthood—was dominating culture. The above shot from 2001 succinctly encapsulates that phenomenon. Finally, we could point out that fifty years of accumulated simulacra and embraced theatricality has bequeathed us a fully theatrical, simulated President. A recent New York Times op-ed suggests such a view, noting that Trump’s actions make more sense when analyzed as the product of an artificial, publicity-driven neural network rather than stemming from a human being’s brain.8 So much for immanent critique.

Or we could vigorously oppose the pro-simulacra view another way. While ever more simulacra and theatricality surely do replicate our cultural world (just as they did in the 1960s), they do next to nothing to help us understand that world. To make this point, this essay explores the discursive history—in the writings of Stanley Cavell, Monroe Beardsley, and Fried—of an important and potentially misunderstood claim in “Art and Objecthood”: that literalist (or minimalist) art and theory has a hidden anthropomorphism. As Fried brilliantly recognized, an art object like Tony Smith’s Die (1962), in its statue-like aspect, functions towards the beholder as a “surrogate person,” even appearing to possess “an inner, ever secret, life” (AO, 156). Similar claims could be made for works such as McCracken’s Green Slab in Two Parts (1966) (fig. 2) or proto-minimalist Anne Truitt’s Platte (1962) (fig. 3).9 The problem with both the “meaning and, equally, the hiddenness of [literalist works’] anthropomorphism” is that they “are incurably theatrical” (AO, 157). I examine this particular connection, in which minimalism’s surrogate persons entail modernist art’s imperative to “defeat or suspend theater” (AO, 160), to show how the focus on surrogate personhood opens up readings otherwise obscured—in this case, of Kurbrick’s and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (film and novel, respectively).

To think through the genealogy of Fried’s surrogate person, first consider a very different, almost diametrically opposed form of personhood. It emerges in Stanley Cavell’s “Music Discomposed,” rightly linked to Fried’s essay and written at a moment when the two were in frequent conversation.10 Condensed, evocative, and daunting to summarize, Cavell’s essay takes on “the oblique and shifting relations between an art, and its criticism, and philosophy.”11 Post-Webern non-tonal (twelve-tone) music, he suggests, reveals that “the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art,” especially but not limited to modern art, for “modernism only makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art” (MWM, 189). Cavell expands on this point in a sentence that his symposium interlocutors, Joseph Margolis and Monroe Beardsley, will assail:

In emphasizing the experiences of fraudulence and trust as essential to the experience of art, I am in effect claiming that the answer to the question “What is art?” will in part be an answer which explains why it is we treat certain objects, or how we can treat certain objects, in ways normally reserved for treating persons. (MWM, 189)

What could Cavell mean by claiming that we treat art as persons in the contexts of questions of fraudulence and trust? Or, more skeptically, what positive outcome could possibly result from personifying art objects, from imagining, say, “the literary text as if it bore significant characteristics of persons?”12 I will tackle versions of these objections shortly. But we might begin by noting that personification is not Cavell’s aspiration with this sentence. Instead of a straightforward personifying of art objects, he is saying that there is something intriguing, and philosophically relevant, that when we engage with art we act in ways that resemble the personifying of art objects. Answering the question that modern art lays “bare,” as he puts it (by forcing a stark question such as, Is the art of Krenek/Robbe-Grillet/Warhol fraudulent?), helps us understand why art-personifying feels so necessary.

Part of what Cavell is bringing out is that these concerns about fraudulence and trust cannot be answered by interrogating the artist or the composer, but interrogating the work itself. Suspected fraudulence requires a formal analysis of the work to either confirm it or rule it out. The critic, in turn, has an important mediating role conveying the non-fraudulent “conviction” such objects inspire, the way these objects are “known by feeling, or in feeling” (MWM, 192). A few pages later, Cavell again returns to a personhood framework to underscore this point: “We are not merely involved with [art objects], but concerned with them, and care about them; we treat them in special ways, invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other people—and with the same kind of scorn and outrage” (MWM, 197-98). Becoming emotionally involved in art the way “normal people” are involved with one another is not a sign of insanity (maybe mild insanity), but a sign that critics have been here and done their work.

All of this is to say that, for Cavell, what it means when we treat and approach art objects in these “special ways” tells him something crucial about what art objects are: that they are not merely interesting, but that we feel they were made as intended by someone (MWM, 198). “The category of intention is as inescapable (. . . ) in speaking of objects of art as in speaking of what human beings say and do: without it, we would not understand what they are” (MWM, 198). That is why when in certain respects we treat art objects like people, we are not committing a category error, but affirming a categorical recognition. That category is intentionality. Just as assuming that someone intends to mean is a prerequisite for making sense of what a person means, assuming an intentional art object is also required to make sense of what that art object means. And the critic, who is “part detective, part lawyer, part judge, in a country in which crimes and deeds of glory look alike” (MWM, 191), has the socially foundational role of determining if crimes or deeds of glory have been committed and of convincing the public when or how it happened and why we should care.

Admittedly, Cavell is making difficult claims here. Accepting them, even provisionally, requires more clarifications and caveats. First, the kind of relation Cavell is envisioning is essentially speculative and metaphorical and must work in one direction only— treating art like we treat people, not treating people the way we treat art. The difference is critical. The former claim requires an imaginative, condoning action on the beholder’s part (our choosing to treat the art object in “special ways”), while the latter does not, entailing instead the art object acting on us. Secondly, we have to acknowledge that Cavell’s thinking here is more phenomenological than strictly ontological or metaphysical. We would not want to mistake him as claiming, for example, that with the advent of modernism people take on the characteristics of modern art objects. Instead, he is suggesting that knowing art objects is more like understanding persons than it is like understanding rocks. Thirdly, the kind of “person” being imagined and invoked in Cavell’s scenario is, admittedly, an impoverished or flawed version of personhood. His projected person is someone who cannot respond to the spectator in an evolving way, but must continuously instantiate themselves as their meaning.13 Likely, Cavell would defend this critique along the following lines: his metaphor is not attempting to identify a more accurate account of persons, but a better account of how and why art means. Finally, this list of conditions might simply be too long for his analogy to be fully convincing. I leave that as a possibility.

Beardsley, for one, was having none of it. Neither was Margolis, who seems more baffled than opposed, but we’ll focus on Beardsley since he attracted more of Cavell’s irritation in the follow-up essay, “A Matter of Meaning It.” Quoting that same Cavellian sentence cited above, Beardsley demurs: “I don’t find that I treat works of art in ways normally reserved for treating persons.”14 Furthermore, he reasons, if he’s going to trust or mistrust anyone, it will be the artist or writer, “rather than trying to treat the work itself as a person” (104). As Cavell point outs subsequently, this position is entirely consistent with Beardsley’s most famous essay, co-written with W. K. Wimsatt, “The Intentional Fallacy,” since to ask questions about intention or sincerity forces the critic outside the work (MWM, 227). Alternatively, write Wimsatt and Beardsley, had the poet “succeeded in doing” what he was trying to do, “then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.”15 From Beardsley’s perspective, perceiving an urgency to question a work’s sincerity and intention can only portend that work’s failure, because the poem itself isn’t making those answers obvious to its reader. Having rejected the person of the poet as a source of evidence (and, in “The Affective Fallacy,” the person of the reader), it seems to Beardsley nonsensical to start accommodating the person of the poem itself. Or, as he puts it, “This surprises me” (“Comments,” 104).

Cavell’s response is eviscerating and entertaining. Reading “Music Discomposed” back to back with “A Matter of Meaning It,” and you can almost watch him evolving from disinterested professional respect towards New Criticism to a ferocious condemnation upon intuiting its flaws. He proceeds to decimate Beardsley’s theory of interpretation, exposing why Beardsley doesn’t just have a “bad picture of intention” but also “a bad picture of what a poem is” (MWM, 227). That bad picture amounts to a “picture of a poem as more or less like a physical object, whereas the first fact of works of art is that they are meant, meant to be understood” (MWM, 227-28). With modernist art, “the issue of the artist’s intention . . . has taken on a more naked role” (MWM, 228). The remaining third of the essay works through these ideas of meaning and intention, often echoing Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal book on the topic, to show just how pointless it is to try and talk about art’s meaning without talking about intention.16 Although Cavell backs off the treating-art-as-person observation—a move which seems to capitulate in the face of the hostility his claim aroused—he does so only to double down on the inevitability of intention.

To sum up thus far: for Cavell, identifying and knowing “the intentionality of art objects” is both a subtle and a total process, because “works of art are objects of the sort that can only be known in sensing” (MWM, 191). Constrained by typical human limitations when dealing with art objects, our closest analogue to knowing and sensing art is our knowing and sensing other persons. But it’s worth underscoring the following point: Cavell is trying to solve a difficult problem in imperfect ways. Even though his analogy carries us disturbingly close to untenable notions of personification, such thinking provides an explanatory richness and a different kind of possibility—one that doesn’t involve merely conflating persons and art objects, or, alternatively, never using the personification metaphor at all. In a sense, what Cavell reveals is that we don’t have very good ways of thinking about art that do not slot work into the category of “object” or “individual romantic expression.” For him, the language of simulated personhood provides a strategy to better approach the way art really works with and on us. The critic helps us in that knowing, sensing work, recognizing the intentionality of these “persons” who are not persons that we might otherwise not recognize for who and what they are. But the preceding paragraphs make clear Cavell’s purpose about the way we engage with art-as-persons: it enables him to establish the inseparability of intention from a work’s meaning. Again, as Cavell puts it: “The category of intention is as inescapable (. . .) in speaking of objects of art as in speaking of what human beings say and do” (MWM, 198). The invocation of a potential other person in the gallery or concert hall helps us to recognize what an impoverished view of artistic intentionality we—versus an astute critic—probably have.

Seeing Cavell’s emphasis on art-as-persons as a revelation of intentionality clarifies the stakes of Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” We see why it matters so much when the “person” in the gallery turns out not who you might expect to find there (a modernist art object) but something else entirely (a literalist object as surrogate person). Whereas Cavell’s modernist art is asking to engage in a personal relation or communion of some kind, and Cavell’s notion of fraudulent art (i.e., Krenek’s) cannot be aesthetically criticized but only philosophically defended or rejected as art (MWM, 196), literalist art on Fried’s account combines these two features as a treacherous amalgamation. The trappings of modernist art relations (a beholder’s communion with the art object) are highjacked to perform a theatrical confrontation with the beholder. Instead of asking the beholder to enter into a conversation, literalist art skips that entire process to issue commands: “I am a surrogate person in your space—deal with me.” Once the beholder is in the gallery, “the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone—which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him. (Such isolation is not solitude any more than such confrontation is communion)” (AO, 163-64). Its theatricality emerges here, in its surrogate-person-presence, because the beholder is not being invited to treat an art object in this way, or enjoined to contemplate it in solitude. When confronted, the beholder has little choice in the matter other than simply leaving the gallery and its presence.

All of this is to say that “Art and Objecthood” depicts the complicated phenomenological relation that begins as soon as we enter the gallery. In a sense, literalist art relies upon a certain kind of object-human parasitism for its effects. Such work “distances the beholder—not just physically but psychically;” like an arrogant overload, literalist art turns the beholder into the object’s subject (AO, 154). But this distance is far too close, for literalist art also “confront[s] the beholder” as if “placed not just in his space but in his way” (AO, 154). The beholder did not ask, or even consent, to participate in this dynamic, but is coerced into it: literalist art’s “presence” surpasses “obtrusiveness” or “even aggressiveness” because “of the special complicity” extorted from the beholder (AO, 155). Being recruited or manipulated by someone as an accomplice in wrongdoing, the beholder and her “special complicity” in this relation entails the violation not only of conventional norms but something closer to moral transgression.

Just to be clear, the point of Fried’s highly corporeal and metaphorical language of duress is to underscore the fundamental deception of the literalist object’s personhood ruse, and to explain that ploy’s mysterious success. All of these effects and tactics—psychic distance, intimidation, combativeness, coercion—work on us because the literalist object is relying on a situation and relation we know intimately. Namely, this feeling “of being distanced” by an art object succeeds because it “is not . . . entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person” (AO, 155). The feelings of disquiet and distance derive from these objects’ resemblance to a “surrogate person” (AO, 156). Like Cavell, Fried suggests that in part we experience these objects like persons because other persons are simply our closest analogue to daily encounters with “the nonrelational, the unitary, and the holistic” (AO, 156). Their “apparent hollowness” which “is almost blatantly anthropomorphic” leaves us with the impression that the literalist object before us possesses “an inner, even, secret, life” (AO, 156). But these literalist objects are not knowable in the way that persons are—they are more like what we might imagine aliens would be, or entities exhibiting selective artificial intelligence.

The problem of why they are not knowable as humans is in one way obvious (they’re not humans) and in another way a bit tricky to grasp. It comes back to modernist art’s crucial characteristic for both Cavell and Fried. Literalist art does tend to imitate human bodies without human souls (that’s the anthropomorphism of literalism), but even when it isn’t actively mimicking persons in that way, it is still somehow unknowable. The reason why turns out to be that such art performatively replicates the signifiers of human meaning without meaning anything at all. Or, more precisely, such art means to stage the replicated human signifiers as if for and by an alien race, for whom human signification can never be understood as intended. That is why Fried will insist upon literalist art’s divergence from Caro’s sculpture, which “essentialize[s] meaningfulness as such” (AO, 162). Caro’s modernist sculptures “defeat, or allay, objecthood by imitating, not gestures exactly, but the efficacy of gesture . . . they are possessed by the knowledge of the human body and how, in innumerable ways and moods, it makes meaning” (AO, 162).

Literalist art, on the other hand, does not possess this inherently human knowledge and so mimics signifiers of human meaning and intention to parasitize modern art effects. The dynamic works a little like Poe’s eponymous raven, repeatedly crowing “nevermore” to a paranoid listener who hears his evolving fears dramatized in the bird’s every utterance. Only an entire apparatus of conventions, theatrically performed and completed by the listener or beholder, can make anthropomorphic, parroted “speech” meaningful—that is, can make the literalist signifier become a sign. “Inasmuch as literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him” (AO, 163). Tony Smith’s Die speaks like Poe’s raven—which is to say that the beholder, or listener, in her newly dramatic situation, completes the meaning of these “speaking” creatures.17

There’s an irony here: for all their righteous claims of radicalness, the literalist art object is relying not just on theatrical conventions, but on conservative social conventions. In its surrogate personhood, the literalist art object invokes longstanding customs of personal manners and civil reciprocity. When someone has been waiting around for you, it is only polite to attend to that person and apologize for the nuisance you’ve caused. Again, literalist art only calls up such conventions to abuse them. Once the beholder arrives in a room with that waiting object, “the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone . . .” which is why, as Fried parenthetically notes, “such isolation is not solitude” (AO, 163-64).

This scenario also implies a complicated moral problem, although the ramifications are not entirely unpacked. The literalist art object demanding its presence be acknowledged resembles a moral imperative. If feels like this entity is asking to be recognized, attended to, and respected. Even if this person is a surrogate, what is being requested of us is a certain ethical attitude. If they are or resemble persons, we seem to owe it to them. But at least part of the threat here is that once objecthood becomes personhood—surrogate or real—modern art is placed in a bind, because even fraudulent persons would seem to trump real art.

Of course, Fried’s dazzling move is to expose surrogate personhood for what it really is: theatricality. Naming it as such exposes the game and the category errors it relies upon, revealing the set of rules and protocols that govern such relationships of object and beholder. The so-called moralism of minimalist or literalist art feeds off the rights, privileges, and respect that persons demand and deserve. It is ethical imperative without moral content, what Walter Benn Michaels has aptly labeled “ethical kitsch”: the “insistence on the right attitude” to the truth, necessarily performed repeatedly, rather than “the truth of what happened.”18 And, while it would be the subject of a different essay, unmasking such a counterfeit performance matters. Considering objects or non-persons as persons has consequences, whether in the domain of animal rights, cultural disputes (over the status of ancestral landmarks), or political disputes (over fetal or corporate personhood).19

In this final section of the essay, I want to tease out what some of those consequences looked like almost immediately after “Art and Objecthood” appeared. Recall again Clarke’s novelistic depiction of the slabs in 2001: “The monolith was 11 feet high, and 1¼ by 5 feet in cross-section.  . . .  In its way, this passive yet almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection was as impressive as any of [its] other attributes” (ASO, 167). Although the conception of the alien monoliths and literalist art objects diverge in various ways (notably, monoliths’ technology operates more consistently on its beholders), as a description of a minimalist art object Clarke’s account wouldn’t be out of place in Artforum, circa 1968. In both the novel and the film, embracing the coercive theatricality of minimalist-looking surrogate persons is the human race’s fate—starting with the fascinated hominids in the opening sequence (fig. 4). If Fried had announced modernist art declaring war on objecthood in 1967, then, by 1968, objecthood’s counterattack was already underway, as theatricality is deemed literally irresistible. Although this isn’t the place for a full analysis of the film and novel, a focus on the surrogate persons of “Art and Objecthood” reveals these influential works of science fiction as fully enmeshed in the dynamic Fried exposed.

2001’s plot isn’t much—it could almost be a video installation. Large black vertical slabs described as monoliths transiently appeared on earth over three million years ago, where they manipulated our hominid ancestors into using tools and thus catalyzing our precarious evolution into humans (the monolith’s coercive mechanics are far more explicit in the novel than in the film).20 In 2001, another monolith is dug up on the moon—the “passive yet almost arrogant” one—emitting a shriek when exposed to the sun. Later, after surviving an attempted mutiny by a HAL-9000 (the ship’s newly sentient and homicidal computer), astronaut Dave Bowman alone experiences a third, colossal monolith on a moon of Saturn (Jupiter in the film). This monolith turns out to be a portal: “The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever,” he reports in the novel before it sucks him in and rebirths him as an evolved “starchild” transcending human form (ASO, 191). During the last moment of his transformation, Dave experiences a fourth monolith in a simulated white box gallery space or hotel room, which also happens to be decorated with Rococo art and period furniture (fig. 5).

As in so much science fiction, 2001 is working through human relations with various types of surrogate persons: monolithic artifacts that retain their alien creators’ purpose, a sentient computer competing with humans to reach those artifacts, and a posthumous Dave evolving into a star-child.21 More surprising is that these issues emerge from a discourse marked by, of all things, painterly beholding. Even this brief description of the film and book resonates with the previous discussion of art and surrogate persons, and these resonances turn out not to be especially hidden. For example, almost immediately before HAL begins his homicidal machinations, Dave is shown sketching portraits of his hibernating crewmembers. Ever curious (always more so than Dave), HAL asks to “see” a drawing through one of his fish-eye camera lenses (Fig. 6). Observing the art, HAL praises Dave’s apparently improved rendering skills.

Although Dave is unperturbed by the interaction, in view of subsequent events he should have been apprehensive. Communing with Dave on a drawing turns out to be part of HAL’s attempt to evolve beyond his computer-limited personhood. He immediately asks a “personal question,” inquiring into Dave’s feelings about the mission in language both intimate and psychoanalytic: “perhaps I’m just projecting my own concern about it,” admits HAL. Although HAL had earlier claimed that “putting myself to the fullest possible use . . . is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do,” the act of beholding Dave’s drawing sparks or correlates with his burgeoning, Kantian sense of his value not as usefulness but as an end in itself. Beholding art, which also means being moved by and becoming judgmental about art (even bad-to-middling drawings), is revealed as more than a marker of HAL’s budding consciousness. Rather, wanting to judge a drawing reveals his own version of purposiveness without a purpose, as well as his incipient, intended actions and gestural resolve. HAL’s viewing of Dave’s art thus leads to HAL’s creative and (from a human perspective) immoral, actions: killing astronaut Frank Poole by commandeering an anthropomorphic-looking space pod, after becoming convinced that the human astronauts are not as committed—as purposeful—about the mission (Fig. 7). But since HAL’s innovative gestures are incompatible with human existence and prompt his demise, the film implies that whatever personhood HAL acquires will not be tolerated. Human persons regard his personhood as a proxy, surrogate sort—and dangerous.

HAL’s creative gestures are one type of artistic action in the film. Call it AI performance art. Beholding the monoliths is another, and also represented as a distinctly art-like activity. Granted, in some nontrivial sense the monoliths are not intended to be art objects, and their aim of cultivating and accelerating human evolution means that, in Friedian terms, the purpose of their monolith shape is only functional, not formal.22 As John McCracken noted when discussing the resemblance of his sculptures such as Green Slab (fig. 1) to those in the film, the “[2001] monolith was essentially a technological instrument” (“Between Two Worlds”). Yet, while the alien sculptures are not modernist art objects as such, they are essentially literalist ones, in that their sole purpose is to transform the beholder in her situation. Seen from the long, scientific perspective, that purpose is also the “aim” of natural selection and evolution more generally. And it is a purpose that will not be accomplished until the beholder experiences the monolith and the monolith, in turn, works on the beholder. McCracken, in his very next utterance, essentially concedes the affinity: “But I sometimes think of my works as technological instruments, too” (“Between Two Worlds”).

More often than not, and in all sorts of ways, the McCraken-like monoliths in 2001 are portrayed as literalist objects in Fried’s terms. Like literalist sculpture, the initial response the monoliths elicit (whether from the prehistoric hominids, the moon scientists, or the astronauts) is suspect naturalism. The ape-men lick it, testing its nutritive value. While the monoliths seem distant and statue-like, in their “passive yet almost arrogant display of geometric perfection” they also seem to possess human characteristics that they do not fully reveal: a hidden secret life. Moreover, just as literalist art seems to be “waiting for” the beholder to complete it (AO, 163), the monolith “was still waiting” for its beholders to experience it (ASO, 24). Indeed, the whole point of the monoliths is to exist for nearly infinite lengths of time waiting for humans to take their next evolutionary step, and if necessary to facilitate that eventual happening. Finally, being in the presence of the monolith means being coerced into a psychic, bodily situation so fully simulated and theatrical that Dave experiences a “feeling that he was inside a movie set [as] almost literally true” (ASO, 214).

Fried demonstrates how, the more fully the theatrical setting is established, “the more superfluous the works themselves become” (AO, 160). Likewise, both 2001s, the movie and the novel, end with the transformation of the theatrical experience of the monolith into an experience of framelessness, “beyond the infinite” (as an intertitle proclaims), or “the ultimate trip,” as one of the film’s official posters put it, blatantly acknowledging that drug-enhanced screenings of the film had fueled its popularity. (fig. 8). As Fried describes, Tony Smith’s description of his ultimate trip on the unfinished New Jersey turnpike (“There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it”) makes the theatricality of literalist art manifest. In the place of the object “is above all the endlessness, or objectlessness, of the approach or onrush of perspective” (AO, 159).

In the novel 2001, Dave’s trip into the surprisingly hollow monolith is depicted nearly identically. He experiences the universe evading the frame of typical human consciousness:

Only the stars moved, at first so slowly that it was some time before he realized that they were escaping out of the frame that held them. But in a little while it was obvious that the star field was expanding, as if it was rushing toward him at an inconceivable speed. . . . eventually they all veered aside, and streaked over the edge of their rectangular frame. (italics added) (ASO, 195-96)

It’s almost a perfect analogue to literalist art on Fried’s account: inexhaustible “not because of any fullness . . . but because there is nothing there to exhaust” (AO, 166). Clarke makes the metaphor explicit. If there is anything that is pretty much by definition inexhaustible, it is outer space.

What we are seeing is that 2001’s alien monoliths expose the surrogate personhood hiding in literalist art objects. Without Fried’s analysis to assist us, literalist objects might mask such surrogacy more successfully. It is surrogate personhood, because it is operating with an intention, even if that intention is simply forcing human beings to evolve. And it is a particularly surrogate personhood because its aim is neither human, nor alien, nor communicative, just as the huge monolith Dave is sucked into at the end is neither evasive nor inscrutable but vacuous: “The Star Gate made no reply; it had nothing to say” (ASO, 187). These monoliths never attempt to have conversations or even real interactions, but to commandeer people’s actions or their entire bodies, turning them into pliant objects. The novel is very explicit that the entire process is ruthlessly coercive, beginning with the ape-man who, when entranced by the monolith, “seemed to be a thing possessed, struggling against some spirit or demon who had taken over control of his body” (ASO, 22)

Consider once again the shot with which I began, of Dave staring theatrically at the beholder with the après-Boucher instantiating absorption behind him (fig. 9). Now we can see it more clearly for what it is: an allegorical rendering of objecthood and theatricality defeating absorption, in the Diderotian paradigm Fried depicted. 2001 (the film particularly) retells “Art and Objecthood” with the objects triumphant, and without a representation of modernist art, although there is plenty of modernist kitsch, in the form of knock-off furniture, clothing, and design.23 Meanwhile, at least in this shot the theatrical object—in the form of a black, McCrackian monolith—is off-screen but reflected, its presence felt. The final scene of Dave in the gallery space/hotel room merely pares down “Art and Objecthood’s” drama to its basic elements.

Whereas, on Fried’s account, such theatricality and coercion by objects is a scenario to avoid, both 2001 film and novel presume the inevitability of spectacle and objecthood. They embrace the theatrical condition of their 1968-modernity as their 2001-future. It might even be the case that Kubrick was attempting to turn the entirety of his film into the experience of a minimalist object in a manner entirely congruent with Fried’s account. Although the film is most typically seen as a modernist work, as when film scholar James Naremore argues that the film’s production “was fully in keeping with the modernist project of fusing art and technology,” calling it a minimalist project seems more germane. The film’s overwhelming commitment to visual experience over narrative, with the echo of the alien monoliths in the long horizontal cinemascope frame, suggests that the film screen too was approaching a kind of hollow, rectangular object.24

If one type of surrogate personhood is rejected (the kind that HAL represents), then another is revered: that of the monoliths. And, to be clear, whatever personhood the monoliths possess is likely counterfeit. Dave expects to meet their alien creators somewhere near Jupiter, but upon diving into the monolithic object he, like the filmgoer, experiences more and more spectacle (“the ultimate trip”). In the novel, after his transformation into the starchild, he imagines that he might be perceiving shapes that resemble conscious entities, but he doesn’t know if “they have free will or not . . .  whether it was a movement of mindless, cosmic beasts driven across space by some lemming-like urge, or a vast concourse of intelligent entities, he would probably never know” (ASO, 207). Whether they approach personhood or have the capacity to intend is uncertain at best. What is definitely present is the endless ramping up of theatricality, another version of the increasing terror induced by a raven repeatedly crowing a meaningless “nevermore.” Like the monoliths, there “the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,” in 2017 as in 1967.

Notes

Peter Krämer notes that Kubrick’s final decision to make the alien artifacts tall rectilinear slabs occurred some time in 1966; 2001: A Space Odyssey (London: BFI, 2010), 53.

(Robert Burton, “Donald Trump, Our A.I. President,” New York Times 22 May 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/opinion/donald-trump-our-ai-president.html?_r=0).

What does debt look like? And, perhaps more crucially, why should we be interested in representing it today? Making visible the invisible operation of the economic system, of course, has long been a hallmark of narratives coming to terms with capital. But the expanding role of the credit system in recent years, which has developed into a powerful external force on the economy that guides the formation of physical spaces, determines the movements of objects and influences actions taken by individuals, has made this task more challenging as it has been transformed by an ever-growing array of increasingly complex debt tools. This increasing opacity has obscured not only our understanding of the crises that have emerged around the world during the past two decades but it also, and more importantly for the arguments of this essay, has obscured the credit system’s persistent influence at the level of everyday life. Without a representation of the operation of the credit system and the knowledge that comes from it, we are limited to sensing debt as simply part of our own experiences, as something natural and determined.  In a period in which credit is absorbed into the flow of everyday life, where debt is both everywhere invisible and indeterminate, how can we see capital and map our relation to it?

This question is at the heart of Argentine author Sergio Chejfec’s most recent novel La experiencia dramática [The Dramatic Experience] (2012). The novel narrates weekly conversations that take place between Félix, a relatively poor immigrant, and Rose, a middle-class actress, as they stroll through a large city and discuss ideas for the exercise Rose is preparing for her theater workshop: she must write and stage a scene that depicts with “accuracy the true life events” that made up the most dramatic experience of her life.2 By structuring his novel around this task, Chejfec articulates an interest in establishing a distinction between experiencing life and representing it, a separation that proves crucial for making visible the invisible influences of the credit system on the operation of daily life. Indeed, this essay argues that we can begin to map out a form for understanding the global function of debt through a reading of the mundane conversations between the two characters in Chejfec’s novel. More specifically, this essay will examine how Félix and his insistence on giving form to his everyday experiences with money function as counterpoint to Rose’s Rose and her attempts to escape or ignore her own experiences with debt. In this way, Chejfec begins to develop a concept of literary form that makes visible the invisible influences of the credit system in their abstract operation by coming to terms with the internal experience of indeterminacy and the modes of social being produced by debt. This essay argues that in so doing La experiencia dramática establishes new critical possibilities for literature as a contemporary art form.

We already get a sense of this insistence on aesthetic form in Chejfec’s essay “Fábula política y renovación estética” [“Political Fable and Aesthetic Renewal”]. Here Chejfec suggests that, if there is a “possibility that [literature] persists as an art form,” it lies not in waiting for or identifying “crisis and causality” nor in nostalgia for “the idea of totality and the idea of the fragment” but rather in acknowledging the “contiguity” of literature with reality and developing “abstract procedures” that would “return signs to the centrality of the real by recognizing that they are signs” and in turn make it possible for literature to “[arrive] at a place where other forms of writing are not sufficient.”3 Or, as he would put it more succinctly in an interview with Mariano Siskind: “my literature is premised on the construction of a differentiated object, independent of the world surrounding it, but not so independent that its relationship with that world disintegrates[:] [a] work that is sufficiently autonomous so that it is not a direct, transparent link to social reality.”4 As we will see in what follows, Chejfec aims to establish a specifically literary form of writing by separating the subject’s “dramatic experience” from the object that is the “dramatic representation” by way of “abstract procedures” that have much in common with what Michael Fried calls the “dramatic conception” of painting. As Fried notes, this mode of painting, which often took up figures absorbed in “ordinary, everyday experience” such as “walking [and] conversing,” emerged as a strategy for insisting on the separation between the depicted scene and the beholder’s experience of it.5 By adopting for literature what Fried calls the “antitheatrical” visual strategies associated with both the “dramatic conception” and (especially important for La experiencia dramática) the dramatic conception’s “offshoot” or variant, the “pastoral conception” of painting, Chejfec can move away from the crises, causalities and temporalities of narrative forms such as allegory, and establish for contemporary Latin American literature a “critical potentiality” that may be unavailable to other forms of narrative.6

How Are You Going to Represent Today? Cash or Credit? 

La experiencia dramática has at its center a reflection on and critique of contemporary finance capitalism, but despite being deeply marked by the 2001-2002 Argentine debt crisis and—given Chejfec’s residence in New York City since 2005—the global financial crisis that swept across the United States in 2008, the novel never directly mentions these collective experiences of debt nor the spectacular crises now associated with them.7 Rather than explicitly depicting the drama of fear, shame, anger, horror or some other affective experience associated with debt default and economic crisis, which the novel’s title would seem to evoke, La experiencia dramática instead proceeds by the accumulation of mundane, trivial details and partially remembered anecdotes that Rose and Félix reveal during their long, detained walks through the city, which take place “each week with unshakable discipline.”8 Their conversations are generally superficial and, to be frank, oftentimes quite boring, with long sections of the novel centering on topics such as the weather, the flow of traffic at certain intersections, complaints that there is no place to sit in their favorite coffee shop, what dish each of them might make for an out-of-town guest, the amazingly low price Rose paid for a mediocre package of veggie burgers, whether the following Monday is the 14^th or the 15^th and so on. Yet the weekly, routine structure of these meetings allows them to perceive each other’s reactions to these everyday trivialities as the product of idiosyncratic and seemingly inconsequential habits, character traits that, on the contrary, are central to the reader’s understanding of the economic critique at center of the novel.

Félix, for example, thinks deeply about each action he takes and each word he says, and. as As he discusses how a day measured in 30 hours rather than 24 would change the date of the following Monday, Rose notes that Félix has a tendency to over-intellectualize nearly every social interaction while Félix realizes that Rose “does not like to consider details or think much about them” and typically resolves conversations by speaking in “slogans” and “sayings that explain little” beyond their surface meaning.9  During their strolls through the city together, Félix notices that Rose cannot help but carry herself as an actress; that is, she possesses “an indistinguishable tic, or a certain tendency in her body to move or show herself in a particular fashion,” which, without her realizing it, “makes her visible” and tends to “attract the views” of passersby, who “detain their gaze on Rose for an instant as if her face were telling them something.”10 In these moments, Félix, happily fades into the background, enjoying “the strange pleasure of seeming invisible.”11 Rose “directs their path [through the city each week], deciding to turn at a corner, continue straight or turn back,” making her decisions at times by “pure whim” and at other times by following a “preset path” she had in mind before setting out together, b. But whatever decisions she makes during a given outing, she gives little thought to them once she and Félix part ways. But while Félix “pays little notice to the path” they take while they are together, preferring instead to enjoy “the small pleasure of abandoning himself to the route Rose chooses,” he spends hours after their strolls obsessively tracking on Google Maps the path they took through the city and mapping for himself Rose’s whims, plans and decisions, which manifest themselves in the landscapes, angles and lines comprising the map of the urban space they traversed together.12

This idiosyncratic obsession with the maps and digital landscapes made available to him by Google Maps, or what Félix himself calls his “addict[ion]” to a “cartographic consciousness,” emerges as one of the most consequential character traits for understanding the novel’s economic critique, but Félix himself, it is important to note, precisely does not understand “what it is that attracts his attention to [these digital maps].”13 This lack of understanding, as we will see below, is what the novel sets out to resolve, a solution that will emerge through conversation with Rose about her theater workshop and one that will produce an account of the operation of the credit system. But what can be said here is that Félix’s inability to understand what precisely it is that compels him to contemplate these digital landscapes for hours on end can be attributed to the maps’ deep connection to and indistinguishability indistinguishability from the routines of his daily life: Félix “often thinks about digital maps” not because they have in some way “made his life better, or less indistinct or really any different” but rather because they make the things he does on a daily basis “verifiable” and “give his movements—he could say his entire life—a greater consistency” in that he “can recall each step he took” by pulling them up “in an instant via a digital map.”14 The digital map, then, makes it possible to see and “recall” not only “the paths he takes [and] has taken” but also those “he is going to take.,” that That is, he can literally see the spaces he will traverse before he occupies them by contemplating Google’s digital landscapes before heading out, for example, to meet Rose at a coffee shop. While “the word recall,” then, “defines only partially the mental processes Félix undertakes” during his daily contemplation of Google Maps, “because the process of remembering also functions as a thought directed toward [a] future” action, the future and the past represented by the map collapse into the indeterminate present of his daily or weekly routine in the city: “Félix is walking toward a neighborhood coffee shop . . . to meet up with Rose . . . . [and] feels that he is gliding through the map and at the same time traveling along the surface of city streets,” which makes the “physical objects” he encounters in the city seem “as if they were little more than lifeless spatial replicas of what is displayed on the maps..”15

For Félix, then, the time spent contemplating online maps, at the beginning of the novel, is not understood as a representation of his daily life but rather, through the simulacrum, as simply a re-description of it. In this sense, his “cartographic consciousness” might be understood as just one more in a long series of curious but mundane habits revealed through the trivial and over-intellectualized conversations about daily life accompanying his weekly strolls with Rose. Yet, while it is tempting to compare Félix’s attention to geography to Rose’s attention to her vegetarian diet, or to write off Félix’s interest in these maps as having little more importance than Rose’s preference for herbal tea and his own preference for coffee, Félix’s affinity for mapping their movements in Google Maps, and in particular the odd relationship to temporality in their evocation of past, present and future, bears striking resemblance to another trivial interaction that comes into view through their weekly get-togethers: in taking turns paying for drinks at the coffee shop, Félix usually pays in cash and Rose with a credit card.

This latter point is mentioned just once at the beginning of the novel, and the characters give it little more thought or, perhaps better said, give it more or less the same amount of thought as any of the other mundane topics mentioned above: “Félix thinks Rose pays with her card out of convenience; and Rose thinks the same about Félix [and his decision to pay with cash].”16 These seemingly inconsequential decisions at the point of sale, however, launch the novel’s lengthy reflection on the functioning of the economic system by contrasting Rose’s credit card, which she views as a mechanism for maintaining “her budget in order,” with what, in Félix’s view, is “the principal cause for [his own] disorder in relation to money:” “the coins” that make up his pocket change.17 As he sits on a bench outside the café waiting for Rose to return with his coffee and her tea, Félix lets his mind wander to his own routine when it is his turn to pay for the drinks:

[he] longs for an era, although one he has never lived, when all daily activities could be conducted with coins, just as it is depicted in old novels and stories: someone reaches his hands into his pockets, takes out a fistful without blinking, slams them on the counter and resolves the situation. By contrast, the mixed use of coins and bills in daily life produces in him a sense of exhaustion and, in his view, subjects him to an unnecessary disorder that leaves him feeling run down and tired.18

Facing the confusing, exhausting and disorganized process of keeping track of his budget in relation to bills and (especially) coins, which are easily lost, Félix, with his limited resources, envies Rose, who “[by paying] with a credit card” can maintain “her budget in order” and need never worry about something so inconsequential as a lost coin. Of course, Rose, for her part, simply “wants to make herself believe” that the credit card organizes her budget when, in reality, she is “more or less resigned to never understanding her monthly balance, one or many pages riddled with any number of minor purchases.”19 She in turn admires “Felix’s calm practicality in paying for everything in cash and forgetting about any later record or future threat.”20

At first glance, these thoughts simply establish the difference between cash and credit as, like the choice between coffee and tea, one of personal preference or comfort with little actual difference between them. Félix’s nostalgia for transactions accelerated by the slamming of coins on the counter very clearly parallels his admiration for the acceleration made possible by Rose’s “wise strategy” of sliding a credit card through a machine on the counter.21 And it is equally easy to see that the coins that produce disorder in Félix’s budget parallel the small transactions that make Rose’s budget incomprehensible. Yet, while the coin is relegated to the past when exchanged for a cup of coffee at the point of sale, the decision to buy a cup of herbal tea with credit is the decision to agree to allow one’s actions to be shaped and influenced by debt obligations set out for the future.

Of course, this is not exactly what goes through our mind when use our credit card to buy a cup of tea at the coffee shop or a pack of veggie burgers at Trader Joe’s: we do not tend to think of ourselves as taking on debt in these situations. Yet this is precisely the point Marx makes in volume 3 of Capital, when he notes that as “the credit system is extended, generalised and worked out . . . [and] commodities are not sold for money, but for a written promise to pay for them at a certain [future] date,” these “bills of exchange,” as Marx termed these future obligations, begin to “act absolutely as money” despite never undergoing an “eventual transformation into actual money.”22 This is crucial to note because though the credit system, or the circulation of interest-bearing or money capital, is absolutely dependent upon “the actual process of circulation [in which] capital appears always as a commodity or as money, and its movement always is broken up into a series of purchases and sales,” in the absence of an economic crisis, those payments and purchases are “obliterated, invisible, not directly included” because “we see only the alienation and the return payment.”23 Put another way, unlike the embodied functioning of the actual economy, represented by the formula M–C–M’, the credit system appears to function through the “disembodied” M–M’: the return of interest-bearing capital does not “express itself as the consequence and result of some definite series of economic processes, but as the effect of a specific legal agreement between buyer and seller.”24 In this way, by giving the lender “absolute control within certain limits over the capital and property of others, and thereby the labor of others,” the credit system not only blurs the line that separates actions taken in the actual economy from those with an orientation toward meeting the requirements of a legal contract, but it also makes the identity of all actions in some sense indeterminate.25 Under finance capitalism, every action we take and every object we acquire is simultaneously our own and not our own, and the extent to which we can sort out what is ours and what is a response to the powerful external force of debt obligationsis precisely what makes the actual functioning (rather than the crisis) of the disembodied process of the credit system difficult to represent.

In locating the origin of his critique of the credit system in the mundane, habitual transaction at the café, simply one more among the many trivial experiences of daily life narrated in the novel, Chejfec can generalize Rose’s orientation toward the credit system to her way of seeing and living her life more generally. Indeed, Rose’s habit of paying by credit card, that is, her habit of agreeing to act upon and to allow herself to be acted upon by a series of lines on a page—“one or many pages riddled with any number of minor purchases”—allows her to continue to produce the fiction of order when her own financial field is actually in disorder: “[she is] more or less resigned to never understanding her monthly balance.” This habit of producing a fiction guided by lines on a page is generalizable to her role as an actress: “as an actress, Rose is accustomed to . . . speaking for others, nonexistent or more or less blurry figures, or, as actors enjoy saying, [she is accustomed to] being spoken by others, that is, to lending her body and her voice in order to bring into the world actions and words that do not necessarily belong to her.”26 Being habituated, then, to a state in which the things she has and does are hers and not hers, or perhaps better said, in being accustomed to a regime of debt and loans that expresses itself through a “natural inclination” toward “performance,” she converts these “weekly strolls and meetings for coffee” into a “workshop” for “dramatic events or theatrical derivations” into which “Félix is incorporated.”27 Félix’s bills and coins, then, are absorbed into his weekly routine with Rose, which in turn is subsequently mapped out into the geographic space they traverse in the city. The credit system, then, can begin to come into view through a series of representational possibilities emerging from the spheres of economy, theater and geography: lines on the page follow a budget or don’t, follow a script or don’t, follow a preset path or don’t. Yet, as indicated above, the challenge of constructing narratives from Rose’s “natural inclination” toward performance, Félix’s “cartographic consciousness” or the invisible influence of debt obligations is that these actions or activities are indistinguishable from their daily routines. The challenge that Rose and Félix set out before the reader is how to convert the experience of everyday life into a representation of the operation of contemporary finance capitalism.

One strategy for producing this operation emerges on the first page of the novel, but its centrality to the novel’s representational strategies does not become clear until much later. While on his way to meet Rose for coffee and enjoying the simulacrum mentioned above, Félix remembers an anecdote that he often “recalls at random and when he least expects it:”28

Not long ago, a parish priest sought to relate during Sunday mass his understanding of God. He explained that it has always been said that God is everywhere, that God accompanies everyone at every moment. What is difficult, he suggested, is to make that presence tangible, to offer practical examples that leave no room for doubt. He paused and then quickly added that God is like an online map (he literally said “Google Maps”). It can give a view from above and from the side, is able to capture and visualize an entire continent or focus on only one house and even zoom in on the patio of a house . . . nothing could escape this surveillance.29

Though Félix, as he himself admits, only occasionally “thinks about God” and very “rarely in the terms used by the priest,” it does often lead him to think about these digital maps—or “los mapas de Dios” as he sometimes calls them—as not only a simulacrum but also an image that may be observed by another person.30 That is, this metaphysical fiction becomes a strategy by which Félix, like Rose, can conceive of their strolls “as a theatrical act,” which is to say, it makes it possible for him to imagine his movements through the city in relation to a beholder observing both Rose’s and his own movements through the city.31

In a characteristic example of this strategy, Rose and Félix have come to a place at “the edge of the sidewalk, next to a fence” where they stop and “without speaking” gaze at a three-story building.32 In moments such as these, both Rose and Félix invent observers who are watching them absorbed in their contemplation of these buildings: “Félix maintains his gaze fixed on the second floor and imagines himself with a cleared head, observing a figure that is in reality himself, observing himself from that other position, from behind the curtains.”33 Throughout the novel they invent fictional observers for themselves—such as Félix’s fictional alter-ego on the second floor—in order to convert their real experiences into scenes produced for a beholder, scenes that not only begin to articulate the forms necessary to stage with “accuracy the real life events” that should comprise Rose’s dramatic scene but also make visible “what [they] did before but could not see with [their] own eyes:” their daily routine as representations of the operation of the credit system.34

An Anti-theatrical Art of Landscapes and Loans 

If these scenes are theatrical in the sense of being imagined to take place for a beholder, the strategy Rose and Félix employ to produce them—adopting the fiction that they are simultaneously a beholder and physically present in the scene—can be understood as what Michael Fried calls “an off-shoot” or “special case” of the absorptive techniques at the heart of antitheatrical painting.35 In his seminal study Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), Fried analyzes Diderot’s endorsement of strategies employed by painters to de-theatricalize the relationship between beholder and object and thereby re-establish for painting its “status as a major art.”36 This primarily took shape in what Fried calls the primary or “dramatic conception” of anti-theatrical painting, or, as it is more often described, the technique of absorption. This strategy, Fried notes, establishes a fiction of separation:

the fiction of the beholder’s nonexistence in and through the persuasive representation of figures wholly absorbed in their actions, passions, activities, feelings, states of mind . . . . in a unified compositional structure [that gives] the painting as a whole the character of a closed and sufficient system.37

As he goes on to note in the third chapter of his study, however, to discuss only absorption would give an “incomplete” account of de-theatricalizing fictions of separation. Analyzing Diderot’s discussion of “pastoral scenes, landscapes with figures, depictions of ruins, still lifes” and other “lesser genres” that are successfully antitheatrical despite not “[providing] the painter with the means that were needed radically to exclude the beholder from the painting,” Fried develops what he calls the secondary, or pastoral conception of antitheatricality.38 These landscape paintings with figures must establish the “fiction of the beholder’s physical presence within the painting, by virtue of an almost magical recreation of the effect of nature itself.”39 While Fried acknowledges that Diderot’s endorsement of the fiction of the beholder’s physical presence within the painting seemingly contradicts his preference for absorptive paintings that explicitly deny the presence of and exclude the beholder, Fried goes on to point out that the pastoral conception is “surprisingly consistent with what has gone before, in that according to that fiction the beholder is removed from in front of the painting just as surely as if his presence there were negated, neutralized, indeed just as surely as if he did not exist.”40 This mode of antitheatricality, this particular fiction of separation, which emerges from landscape paintings, as we have already begun to see with Félix’s physical presence in the scene he imagines from the position of his non-existent alter-ego, is central to La experiencia dramática. Indeed, as we will see in a moment, the pastoral conception of antitheatricality is the mechanism by which Chejfec can bring into view the operation of the credit system in order to establish contemporary literature’s critical potentiality.

As Félix imagines himself as a beholder of the landscape he physically occupies as he and Rose stand at “the edge of the sidewalk, next to a fence” gazing at a three-story building, Rose is remembering, that an old friend had an apartment in that building and that Rose and her husband had rented the apartment for the occasion of their wedding ceremony. This encounter with her friend’s apartment building, however, does not bring back memories of her vows or of a first dance but rather of the “absorptive” experience she had with a strange children’s toy she found on the shelf in her friend’s apartment during the wedding reception: a piggy bank that took the form of a mailbox.41 This mailbox-piggy bank had attached to its front a faded sticker displaying a series of coins “from another, probably forgotten, era . . . . that could perhaps only have its origin in books” and next to the coins “one could see the value of each, and closer to the edge, a series of numbers that, at first glance seemed arbitrary and incomprehensible, but that after a detained observation revealed themselves to be the number of coins that would fit inside the bank if someone proposed filling it with only coins of that single value.”42 What produced that “detained observation,” however, was not the numbers themselves but rather the various landscapes with figures depicted on each coin. Particularly compelling for Rose was the 50-cent coin, which featured a river and a young nude diving into the water from the riverbank. “Around the image there are some branches . . . [that] serve as a frame,” and Rose found herself “absorbed in contemplation . . . [and] in a state of wakeful slumber.” The narrator continues:

the image seemed close to nature . . . . She feels that she is present in that moment at the edge of the river, that she sees the leap, she smells the air and perceives in a nearly physical way each one of the diver’s ribs as he sails toward the water, as if she were facing a venerated body and that it was unnecessary to touch it to know that it is real and that she adores it.43

Like the antitheatrical pastoral landscapes Fried describes in his study, which are predicated upon “an almost magical recreation of the effect of nature itself” that compels the beholder to imaginatively remove himself from in front of the canvas and fictionally enter the space of the depicted landscape, Rose, in finding in these landscapes something “close to nature,” equally removes herself from in front of the canvas and from the space of her wedding, and adopts the fiction that she has physically entered the space of the image on the sticker. Like paintings depicting absorption, the landscape paintings with figures praised by Diderot, Fried notes, “stopped and held [the beholder], sometimes for hours at a stretch if contemporary testimony is to be believed, in front of the painting.”44 In the same way, Rose too, in her pastoral fiction, was stopped and held in absorbed contemplation of these numismatic landscapes.

Importantly, however, the absorbed contemplation resulting from this anti-theatrical appeal, had the effect of producing a “detained observation,” which in turn made possible Rose’s recognition that the numbers appearing alongside these landscapes were not “arbitrary” but rather were part of an intentional decision on the part of the creator of this object: “the number of coins that would fit inside the bank if someone proposed filling it with only coins of that single value [e.g. only 30 cent pieces].” This is crucial because it is the part of the experience that “accompanied her even after she left [the bank] in the place where she had found it.”45 What accompanied her was the thought that it would have been, perhaps, more instructive to have “the sticker provide expanded information, such as the amount the bank holds measured in money: the total amount of money represented if it was filled with five-cent coins or 30-cent coins, etc.”46 What this line of thinking produces is not only contrasting ways of calculating the collected coins but also differing historical relationships to money. On the one hand, there is Rose, formed by the contemporary financial system and its opaque bank statements filled with minor purchases, who can only contemplate complex calculations and the weight of incomprehensible future promises rather than the obliterated, invisible, intermediate actions of the everyday decision to save or purchase. On the other hand, there are the makers of this bank from “another, probably forgotten, era,” in which “people . . . [were] distanced from complex calculations,” who, in choosing to represent the number of coins rather than the amount of money represented by those coins, articulate each coin as a decision and the total number on the bank as an accumulation of consequential concrete actions.47 What emerges from the absorbed contemplation of this antitheatrical landscape, and what accompanies Rose long after viewing it, is a model to replace the indeterminacy of the credit system, in which the focus on the end result (M–M’) obliterates or renders invisible the intermediate actions that constitute history, with a detained, concentrated, absorbed focus on each decision, each step that was taken in the past, a recognition that proves consequential as Rose moves from her position as only an actress, living lives loaned to her by others, to her position as author and dramatist of her own dramatic scene.

Indeed, in the same way past decisions materialize as lines on the page of Rose’s credit card bill and influence her future, so too must Rose’s past dramatic experience materialize in the lines on the page of the script she writes for her theater workshop: “it is not sufficient to have simply experienced your dramatic situation,” Rose notes, “the teacher has asked for a representation.”48 In other words, this representation, like the pastoral images on the coins that highlight the accumulation of minor decisions, must also come to terms with the series of decisions that created her dramatic experience. In Rose’s case, she decides to stage the loss of a professional opportunity, in which she “simply decided to say no and it turned out that it was consequential [for her life]” in that she received fewer and fewer opportunities to play major roles.49 The experience only became dramatic after the fact, that is, through a series of “dramatic microscenes [that] lack . . . a staging pertinent” to “the concrete moment [of the decision] . . . [which] was not dramatic and did not leave a memory as such.”50 In this sense, the dilemma at the heart of her dramatic scene parallels Chejfec’s evocation of the credit system through Rose’s purchase of tea. The point of sale, as part of her weekly or daily routine, is not dramatic in the least. However, to the extent that an incomprehensible state of debt came into being not through a plan but rather through the whims and microscenes of consumption, daily decisions that never register as decisions to take on debt obligations, the weekly purchase of tea undoubtedly proves consequential for her life. In other words, Rose’s dramatic representation, which must represent in all of its drama a scene which has no drama whatsoever, would also stage a representation of the operation of the credit system and its series of minor decisions made in the past, which laid out a future resulting from subsequent decisions characterized by a tension between the planned and the unplanned. As with Fried’s description of successfully antitheatrical landscapes, then, Rose’s dramatic representation can only come into view through a “temporal reading of the scene,” which is characterized by a “fracturing of perspectival unity” but at the same time remains a “success as a unified” and autonomous work of art.51 In much the same way, then, that there are very few successful antitheatrical landscapes or still lifes because these genres generally lacked the means to de-theatricalize their relationship to the beholder and produce their autonomy as a work of art, so too does Rose find difficulty in staging a dramatic scene that could produce a visualization of the temporality necessary to bring into being her conception of drama (and the drama of the credit system) as a coherent work of art: “[it is] impossible to represent it [as a scene] in a way that will follow closely the guidelines set out by the teacher.”52

This dilemma parallels closely what Patrick Dove, in his study of Chejfec’s earlier novel Boca de lobo (2000) [The Dark (2013)], describes as the author’s “narrativa de contratiempo:” “we are not only the authors of our own history; we are also products of our past, often in ways that exceed our own capacity for understanding and awareness.”53 As Dove notes, in Chejfec’s work, it is unclear if the present is being controlled and shaped by remembrances of the past or if the past simply provides the raw material from which the present can be constructed and differentiated from the past. But this narrative interrogation of the odd temporality of the present provides us with what Dove calls, “a powerful aesthetic alternative . . . [a] literature that interrupts the dominant logic and distribution of the social as it functions today.”54 The figure Dove evokes for visualizing Chejfec’s “narrativa de contratiempo” is Walter Benjamin’s famous re-description of Klee’s “Angelus Novus” as the angel of history, an image scholars have now made classic for representing and understanding our relationship to history in modernity: gazing towards the ruins of the past, the winds of history push the angel ever forward into the future.

Yet, while Dove’s concept of “contratiempo” is useful for understanding the temporality of the credit system as it is evoked in this novel, it is not Benjamin’s “angel of history” and its allegory of economic crisis that brings this visualization to the fore in La experiencia dramática but rather Félix’s “mapas de Dios” and their representation of the credit system through his tracking of their weekly strolls together. Rather than the contemplation of destruction and ruins, or we might simply say, crisis as the visualization of the “points in the not too distant past [when] things could have taken a completely different path,” La experiencia dramática instead re-directs that reflective temporality to the “active digital map,” the Google Map of the present that manifests Rose’s whims and plans as representations of the decisions comprising the credit system, decisions that could easily have been different and led them down a path with vastly different results.55 In this sense, Rose’s scene might look like one in which Félix is manifesting his “cartographic consciousness,” seated in front of a computer screen, obsessively tracking their movements through the city, over-intellectualizing each decision she made and thinking about how a different mundane choice might produce the world he envisions, in much the same way that re-imagining a day measured in 30 hours rather than 24 would literally change history, making the following Monday the 14^th (as he imagines) rather than the 15^th (as the calendar states).

It has been the argument of this essay, however, that Félix can only see these maps as representations, that he can only see with his own eyes the invisible series of loans and debts become geography and landscape by separating the representation of the credit system that is his imagined “mapa de Dios” from the experience of using Google Maps in everyday daily life. This project of separation is made possible through a process of narrativization that mobilizes the temporality evoked by antitheatrical aesthetic forms paralleling those described by Fried and elicited by the remembered anecdote about the parish priest. As stated at the outset, however, Chejfec claims these antitheatrical narratives specifically for the literary, a characteristic made clear as Félix remembers the parish priest’s revision of his analogy:

God functioned like digital maps, but better, because God wasn’t reduced to visual representation and its various forms (map, terrain, traffic, etc.): literally everything could be encompassed, from voices and sounds in the air to the deepest, most shameful feelings, in such a way that God could forego visual representation altogether without the slightest problem, something that was impossible for Google Maps.56

By constructing a novel that completely mobilizes the antitheatrical visual tradition through this metaphysical fiction but at the same time also “[foregoes] visual representation altogether,” Chejfec’s novel achieves “something that [may be] impossible” for other forms of narrative such as film, theater, dance, painting and so on, all of which are “reduced to visual representation.”57 In this way, Chejfec establishes for literature an important “critical potentiality,” one that asserts that it isn’t enough to simply see and experience the everyday as we watch it take place on a computer screen. Whether on the screen or not, debt and its manifestations in its ordinary, mundane, temporal operation must be represented; it must be narrated; and however partially it may happen, it must be understood.

Devoting this nonsite issue to Brecht inevitably raises the question of why we should be reading Brecht now.1 But we might just as well ask, as Dana Ward does in his most recent book of poems, The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, why haven’t we been reading him all along:

Bertolt Brecht was a great writer with a special feeling for the question of solidarity, & it seems people don’t talk much about him anymore is there some idea that his work is too didactic or plain in its political motivations to satisfy certain contemporary sensibilities conditioned to prize only those aesthetic objects that reflect an education in certain critically (& now canonically) privileged strategies of experimental modernism & postmodernism I guess I mean is the avant-garde too myopic to really love Brecht?  I’m not sure about any of this of course but I have an image of him in my mind that I love where he’s on a little fishing boat with Benjamin have I conjured this picture for my private pleasure or is there a photograph like this in circulation? My favorite poem of Brecht’s is called “Concerning Poor B.B.” & the insouciance in it is manly, very social & delicious in perhaps the way we remember Snoop Dogg as a teen. (52-53)

Ward’s answer to why we haven’t been reading Brecht is itself posed as a question: “is there some idea that his work is too didactic or plain in its political motivations to satisfy certain contemporary sensibilities…?” It’s not surprising that Ward calls our attention right away to something that has been of consistent interest to those who do read Brecht’s work, namely “its political motivations.” What is immediately surprising about this question, however, is that having foregrounded Brecht’s politics, Ward’s answer to why the work goes unread nevertheless doesn’t come down to the politics but to something else: “certain contemporary sensibilities.” What exactly is meant, then, by “contemporary sensibilities”?

Insofar as these “sensibilities” explain whether or not we’re inclined to read Brecht, the determining factor in the equation, apparently, is whether something does or does not “satisfy” them. Ward’s choice of the word “satisfy” is suggestive to begin with, but all the more striking is that what fails to provide the requisite satisfaction is once again not Brecht’s political motivations but something else: it’s the style (“didactic and plain”) in which they present themselves that fails to “satisfy.” From the standpoint of whether a particular style can “satisfy” our “contemporary sensibilities,” we don’t have much further to go before Brecht’s unpopularity is a matter of taste and its solution a matter of marketing. Enter the “manly, very social & delicious” Brecht, stripped of the “didactic and plain” attire of his “political motivations” and re-clothed in the style of a teenaged Snoop Dogg.

The title of the poem in which Brecht appears is “Things the Baby Liked, A-Z,” and the poem itself is organized in tercets, with three lines for each letter of the alphabet. It’s an alphabet song of sorts, in which “B” stands (albeit temporarily) for “Brecht.” We have already begun to see the force of Brecht’s makeover, which transforms his work from being defined by its “political motivations” to being defined by its ability to “satisfy” and be “delicious.”  Is Ward simply saying that for Brecht to appeal to “contemporary sensibilities,” we need to be able to see his work as an aesthetic rather than a political project?  But that doesn’t seem quite right, because it doesn’t account for why this Brecht belongs among the “Things the Baby Liked.”  Another way to put this is to say that Brecht’s “didactic and plain” style, the form his work takes, has reasons for being what it is, reasons that include his political motivations.  But no reasons at all, aesthetic or political, are required for the baby to like Brecht (or for Ward to love the image of Brecht in his mind). Brecht only needs to satisfy baby’s taste, or as Ward puts it, his “contemporary sensibilities.”

Which brings us to the question of what is meant here by “contemporary” (especially if the best way to appeal to our “sensibilities” is to approximate the feel of a late Eighties Snoop Dogg).  The ease with which Ward can move the social into the same register as individual preference, replace political motivations (fairness and justice, say, or the critique or defense of capitalism) with consumerist ones (pleasure and satisfaction), and make Brecht himself look like Snoop Dogg, is completely consistent with the degree to which these  “sensibilities” are contemporized: they’re an index of what we want right now, but also of who we are right now, neither of which will be what they were 5 minutes ago. That is, the old Snoop envisioned as a teen is appealing to our sensibilities because he is more new (more contemporary) than the newest Snoop (rebranding efforts notwithstanding).2 The rapid shifts Ward makes from modernism’s committed Brecht, to postmodernism’s distasteful Brecht, to post postmodernism’s Doggy-style Brecht positions both Ward and the “Things the Baby Likes” within the recently charted territory of so-called “metamodernism.”3

“Constant repositioning” is a phrase Timotheus Vermeulen has used to characterize the movement (Vermeulen “Interview”). And in one of the first academic publications on the subject, Vermeulen and his collaborator, Robin van den Akker, depict how the world appears from a metamodern perspective in terms that could just as easily describe a “crisis of infinite worlds”:

…[M]etamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern. One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. (Vermeulen and van den Akker)

Once the poles among which we find ourselves “oscillating to and fro or back and forth” are not just 2 or 5, but “innumerable,” we inevitably start swinging from one aesthetic or political commitment to another, too:  “For us,” Vermeulen says in a later interview, “the prefix meta indicates that a person can believe in one thing one day and believe in its opposite the next. Or maybe even at the same time. …It repositions itself with and between neoliberalism and Keynesianism, the ‘right’ and the ‘left,’ idealism and ‘pragmatism,’ the discursive and the material, web 2.0 and arts and crafts, without ever seeming reducible to any one of them” (Vermeulen “Interview”). Metamodernism, with its innumerable poles, succeeds in turning beliefs (political and aesthetic alike) into something more like attitudes or inclinations. Ward’s Brecht moves easily into this frame, among the “things the baby likes” one moment, among the dislikes in another, out of liking range altogether in another. The modernist Brecht, meanwhile, surely would have choked on his cigar at the idea of such “constant repositioning” (liking communism one moment and National Socialism the next?).  The metamodernist, “social and delicious,” Brecht might look like he can swing between “innumerable poles.” The modernist Brecht clung to the pole he had.

Hannah Arendt understood this well and condemned Brecht’s art for it.  That is, she saw Brecht’s aesthetic commitments as consistent with his commitment to communism, and his unwavering commitment to communism, including Stalin’s version of it, even in the wake of the purges, as, in effect, collaboration with totalitarianism in its most brutal form.   For Arendt, this consistency (or better yet, complete refusal of any “repositioning”) manifested itself in an aesthetics that, from the beginning to the end of Brecht’s career, could not tolerate the “personal” and thereby made him an enemy of the individual, and particularly, of freedom of expression.

The extent to which Arendt values the “personal” is particularly vivid in her decision to make the centerpiece of her essay Brecht’s poem “Der Herr der Fische,” which she claims is  “among his very best works” and “the only strictly personal poem he ever wrote” (Arendt loc. 3270).   The eponymous “Herr” in Brecht’s poem “Der Herr der Fische,” however, in his visits with the men and women of his fishing village, is, if anything, strikingly impersonal:

And though he never contrived
To remember their names
Where their work was concerned
He knew all sorts of things.4(Brecht Poems 95)

Whether the poem is as “strictly personal” as Arendt thinks is clearly contestable.  But she understood Brecht’s larger aesthetic aims sufficiently well to imagine that whatever is “strictly personal” about this poem, it must be something Brecht actively sought to suppress: “he never published it; he did not want it to be known.” Moreover, what Arendt views in Brecht’s artistic practice as a repression of the personal becomes in her account, a personal trait of Brecht himself, one that she understands as simultaneously a “great virtue” and a “curse.” (loc. 3269-70). The reason “Der Herr der Fische” is, for Arendt, “strictly personal,” despite its impersonal central figure, and the reason she believes that for Brecht it’s sufficiently scandalous that it needs to be kept from public view, is that it is, at bottom, a “self-portrait”: “Brecht’s portrait of the poet as a young man—for this, of course, is what it really is—presenting the poet in all his remoteness, his mixture of pride and humility, ‘a stranger and a friend to everybody,’ hence both rejected and welcome, good only for ‘Hin- und Widerreden’ (‘talk and countertalk’), useless for everyday life, silent about himself, as though there were nothing to talk about” (loc. 3299-3301).  The scandal for Brecht, on this account, is that the poem exposes him candidly talking about himself.  The scandal for Arendt, however—the scandal of Brecht’s art as a whole—is that it’s only in this poem that Brecht is “strictly personal”; in the rest of his work, he consistently chooses to be “silent about himself.”

Arendt was writing about Brecht at the height of the Cold War, at a moment when communist states like the Soviet Union were under constant attack for, among other things, the enforcement of their citizens’ silence about themselves. And when Arendt imagines what she views as Brecht’s isolation as an artist during the 1920s, when “Der Herr der Fische” was written (“he cut a rather solitary figure among his contemporaries”), it’s his refusal of the personal, set against a contemporary cohort who “resented the fact that the world did not offer them shelter and the security to develop as individuals” that keeps him apart (loc. 3256).  But in the half century since 1968 (the year Men in Dark Times was published), and particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the systematic economic exploitation by capitalism that Brecht believed a communist state could overturn has instead overturned most communist states, and, if anything, intensified.5 At the same time, “talking about [one]self” and the freedom to “develop as individuals” have never been more valued.  If there’s a “crisis of infinite worlds” for poets like Ward, writing at a moment when the commitment to human capital in the form of self-actualization seems to be at a world-historical peak, the “crisis” looks to them more like a cause for celebration than for revolution.  As one reviewer of Ward’s collection puts it, “Dana Ward’s ‘The Crisis of Infinite Worlds’ is based on the idea that talking about someone and what they do makes them more familiar to you. Ward takes us to an alternate universe where to quote from movies, graffiti, and the experience of walking through commercial stores is a way to relate back to the origin of our feelings, and is a trajectory towards the infinitely possible worlds our expressions can create” (Gregorian).6

My contribution to this nonsite Brecht feature is certainly intended at least in part to suggest a very literal understanding of Brecht’s current relevance. If we think for two seconds about the moment in The Messingkauf Dialogues where the Actor recalls a role in which he “pointed out that all the wheels would stop turning if the strong arm of the proletariat so willed it,” the reasons might seem too obvious for comment: “It was at a moment,” the Actor goes on, “when several million workers were going about without work.  The wheels had stopped turning whether their strong arm willed it or not” (Brecht Messingkauf 21).  At a moment when closer to 200 million worldwide are “going about without work,” it’s hard to imagine a clearer reason to be reading Brecht.  But there is another important reason, one that should be (but hasn’t been) so obvious.  For if it’s true, as Ward suggests, that many of our contemporaries and immediate predecessors—and particularly poets—haven’t been interested in Brecht, it isn’t quite right to say that it must be because Brecht’s work is “too didactic or too plain in its political motivations” (or, we could say, too committed). Rather, I would argue, if Brecht has held little interest, with respect to aesthetics and politics alike, it’s because aesthetics and politics alike have been “strictly personal,” transformed into a matter of “talking about [one]self”—of expressing one’s attitudes and “special feelings”—instead of what they were for Brecht: impersonal, a matter of accuracy and normative judgment.

Brecht believed art, in the form of what he called “epic theater,” could “give an accurate representation of great financial operations on the stage” (cited in Jameson 91). Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt, Brecht’s term for the technique by which he believed the epic theater could achieve this, functions above all to prevent the theatergoer from identifying with the characters acting on the stage.  Brecht’s strategy of blocking empathy is designed, as he put it, “to alienate the social gest underlying every incident,” where “[b]y social gest is meant the mimetic and gestural expression of the social relationships prevailing between people of a given period” (Willett 139).7 Such “alienation” is intended to prevent the theatergoer from becoming absorbed in the emotional crescendo and release of traditional theater, but the larger goal of short-circuiting the audience’s empathy is to create a critical distance from existing social life and its relations of production—including those specific to theatrical and literary production. Imitated with a difference, social roles, customs, and habits are foregrounded, commented on, rendered forced or unnatural, performed self-consciously. “What is involved,” writes Brecht, “is…taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labeling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural.  The object of this ‘effect’ is to allow the spectator to criticize constructively from a social point of view” (Willett 125).  What a Brechtian method aims to produce, in other words, is a specific effect on its audience:  a critical apprehension of the disparities and contradictions of capitalism—implied in the events being depicted as well as in the depiction itself—and in turn, the will to effect revolutionary change.

Brecht’s artistic commitments to the alienation effect are political and sociological, to be sure, but the difference (from what Brecht imagines as “traditional” theater) that this technique rehearses is ultimately a logical one.   That is, in estranging or alienating us from social life as we live it, the epic theater is designed to produce the recognition that we ought to be living otherwise. But Brecht’s epic theater also rehearses the categorical difference between these two things, between the world of our everyday habits and practices, in which social life runs its course, and the world of art, in which we evaluate, criticize, and see the reasons for a need to change. One is the world in which we have our emotions, responses, and social exchanges (our “special feelings” and “sensibilities”); in the other, we discern their formal outlines and apprehend their workings in the service of just or unjust states of affairs.  By marking the separation of these worlds from one another, Brecht insists on a logical distinction that runs like a vein of ore through modernism—it’s the difference, say, between personality and impersonality in T.S. Eliot, between impressionism and imagism for Ezra Pound, or in the case of Gertrude Stein, between human nature and the human mind.  This abiding logic, in connection with the fact that the modernists who adhered to it and forked to the right politically were responding to the same “grand financial operations” that inspired Brecht’s sustained commitment to the communist left, is one subject of this essay.

The other, which I’ve already begun to elaborate, harkens back to Ward, and more specifically to the imagined scene in which Brecht “is on a little fishing boat” with Walter Benjamin. From a strictly historical perspective, the fantasy of Brecht and Benjamin being, as it were, “in the same boat” isn’t all that implausible, either literally or figuratively.  After all, in 1933, both had separately fled Nazi Germany to avoid persecution. Moreover, in 1934, Benjamin spent some time with Brecht, who was then living in the Danish city of Svendborg, on Funen island in the Baltic Sea.  A fishing boat would not have been impossible to come by. We might bear in mind, too, that in April of that year, two months before arriving in Svendborg, Benjamin had prepared a lecture entitled “The Author as Producer” to deliver before an audience of the Institut des Études du Fascisme in Paris. In it, Brecht (now famously) serves to illustrate the contention that literature can only have the right politics if it has the right literary technique (a more extreme version of which claim would be something like no good politics without good art). Benjamin goes further and turns the Brechtian alienation effect—the inducement “to criticize constructively from a social point of view”—into a kind of revolution in itself.  Brecht’s epic theater, Benjamin argues, presents “an improved apparatus for [our use],” one that “leads consumers to production” and “in short…is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators” (Benjamin 93). It’s as if, for Benjamin, the alienation effect were a kind of cure for the alienation of labor, handing the means of production from the capitalist to the worker. In giving us not only the author as producer, however, but the reader/spectator as producer as well, Benjamin has also bequeathed to contemporary poetry the basis for the aesthetics we find in Ward, one that can just as easily stand on its head and celebrate “The Author as Consumer.” What Ward’s “infinite worlds” give us is an infinite array of attitudes and affective poles from which to swing, an A-Z of ever new (and old) things to “like.”  We can call it “metamodernism” (but in another 5 minutes, we might wish to call it something else).  It’s fitting therefore, that when the metamodernist views Brecht and Benjamin in the same boat, they appear to him as either of two possibilities:  a “picture conjured for personal pleasure” or a “photograph,” a mechanically reproduced object that might or might not be “in circulation,” for which there might or might not be a market.

2.  The Judgment of the Man on the Street

Across an expansive body of work on the technique of alienation, Brecht recurs frequently to what he sees as two particularly effective models for a method of acting suitable to the revolutionary aims of the epic theater: the method whose origins he locates in the techniques of professional actors in the Chinese theatre (which I’ll return to later) and that which he identifies with more or less impromptu reenactments of events in ordinary life, such that, for example, bystanders recalling an accident become analogs for the actors and the audience of the theater.  As we shall see, these turn out to be versions of the same thing insofar as they both are built upon an understanding of citation.  I want to begin with the example of the accident that Brecht describes in a 1938 fragment as “The Street Scene.”  “It is comparatively easy to set up a basic model for epic theatre,” Brecht writes,

For practical experiments, I usually picked…an incident such as can be seen at any street corner: an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place.  The bystanders may not have observed what happened, or they may simply not agree with him, may ‘see things a different way’; the point is that the demonstrator acts the behavior of the driver or the victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident. (Willett 121)

It’s easy to map most of the “street scene” elements onto their counterparts in the theater. The “demonstrator” clearly inhabits the role of the actor; the bystanders are the audience for his “demonstration”; and the demonstration itself is equivalent to the actions taking place on the stage. It should also be clear by now that the epic theater equivalent of “form[ing] an opinion about the accident” is, as Brecht puts it in the passage I cited earlier, “to constructively criticize from a social point of view.” But insofar as “forming an opinion,” is “the point,” of the street scene, we can learn something by negation from the three other considerations Brecht lists that are not.

The three things Brecht determines to be beside the point are: 1) “The bystanders may not have observed what happened.” 2) “They may not…agree with” the demonstrator.  And 3) They “may ‘see things a different way.’“ We notice right away that the third almost serves as a paraphrase of the second; however, Brecht is actually marking an important difference here, and we can begin to grasp it by registering that the phrase “see things in a different way” allows for two completely incompatible meanings.  One is already available in the previous statement that “The bystanders may not agree with the demonstrator.” Their disagreement requires that there be a truth of the matter about which some will be right and the others wrong. Either the driver hit the brakes, or the driver hit the gas. The pedestrian had stepped into the crosswalk, or else she hadn’t. In everyday parlance, we often say two people “see differently” and mean by it simply that they disagree. Brecht’s quotation marks around “see things in a different way,” moreover, serve to remind us that this is a conventional way of expressing the idea, a manner of speaking. At the same time however, we can use the same phrase to mean something like the opposite: we can say we “see things in a different way” and mean that we each have a different experience of things.  In this case, to paraphrase the difference as disagreement would be to render nonsense. It would be as if one bystander said to the other, “No, you didn’t see it that way.”

What, then, does it mean to “form an opinion about the accident,” if disagreeing about what happened, seeing what happened differently, and (to go back to the first of the three), failing to see what happened at all, are equally beside the point?  So far I’ve just been following the translation but it’s worth noting here that the word that Brecht uses to capture what is “the point,” “Urteil,” has strong juridical connotations of the kind that “opinion” carries only in its more restricted uses (my German to English dictionary, for example, lists for “Urteil,” the following connotations: judgment, sentence, decree, conviction, decision, finding, and verdict). If we are Brecht’s bystanders, then, the “point” of the street scene seems to be that opinions of this kind can be rendered independently of our having seen the incident, of determining its causes, or of our distinctive perspectives about it. On what basis then, is our opinion formed?

The answer emerges especially clearly if we put “The Street Scene” version of the accident scenario together with an earlier version of it, in a passage from a poem written in 1930 called “On Everyday Theater”:

Take that man on the corner: he is showing how
An accident took place.  This very moment
He is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd.  The way he
Sat behind the steering wheel, and now
He imitates the man who was run over, apparently
An old man.  Of both he gives
Only so much as to make the accident intelligible, and yet
Enough to make you see them.  But he shows neither
As if the accident had been unavoidable.  The accident
Becomes in this way intelligible, yet not
intelligible, for both of them
Could have moved quite otherwise; now he is showing what
They might have done so that no accident
Would have occurred.8 (Brecht Poems 177)

Now, from a few paragraphs later in the “Street Scene” prose fragment, here is a two-sentence version of this section of the poem, telescoped down to just a few of its lines, and delivered in the voice of the “man on the corner”:  “The driver was guilty, because it all happened the way I showed you.  He wouldn’t be guilty if it had happened the way I’m going to show you now” (Willett 127). In the poem, judgment consists explicitly in reaching a verdict: “now he is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd.”  We needn’t doubt that it’s the judgment of the crowd in the street scene that is at issue, and by analogy, the judgment of the epic theater audience. The first clause from the prose version, meanwhile, enacts the pronouncement of a verdict (“the driver was guilty”), which in turn is presented as the result of the demonstration in the second clause, “because it all happened the way I showed you.”  Moreover, while the sentence tells us the driver is guilty because of what happened—the accident itself and what the driver did—at the same time, it shows us that the verdict is pronounced “because” of the reenactment and what the performer did—“the way I showed you.” In other words, we have two simultaneous renderings, one in which the actions of the driver determine his guilt and another in which the imitation of those actions compels a verdict. They inhabit the same sentence but they are not the same proposition.

The poem’s version achieves this same differentiation by other means.  It separates what literally happened from its reenactment by means of a subordinating conjunction, a line break, and a rapid shifting of tense. In “he is showing how / an accident took place,” what actually “took place” is grammatically subordinate to the man’s “showing how.”  But the empirical events and their representation are also severed: spatially, by the line break; grammatically, insofar as the subordinated clause reads as a stand-alone sentence—“An Accident took place” (this is true of the German as well); and temporally, insofar as the accident takes place in the past tense and its reenactment in the present (it “took place” while “he is showing how/…this very moment”).  “This very moment,” of course, is intended to modify the line that follows (“he is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd”) in which the “man on the corner” performs his demonstration.  But by positioning “this very moment” in the same line with “an accident took place” instead of with the line containing the sentence it modifies, Brecht achieves the further effect of reminding us that the sentence, “An accident took place,” albeit in the past tense, is itself a representation occurring not just in the grammatical present, but “this very moment,” as in the paradigmatic moment of reading, where the sentence is present before its reader. In the poem “this very moment” is also, as we’ve already seen, the moment in which the delivery of the performed reenactment coincides with the delivery of the verdict: “he is delivering the driver to the verdict of the crowd.” Thus the poem gives us two separate worlds:  one consisting of what “took place,” the empirical world of accidents, causes and effects, on the one hand; and on the other, a representational world, the world of the reenactment, but also of judgment, for the poem insists, both grammatically and propositionally, that that the latter is where verdicts reside.

We now see that “forming an opinion about the accident,” the part of the street scene that models the alienation effect and is the point of epic theater more generally, is a matter of rendering judgment, of assessing a wrong. The second sentence in the prose “Street Scene,” “He wouldn’t be guilty if it had happened the way I’m going to show you now”—and its counterpart in the poem—“Now he is showing what/They might have done so that no accident would have occurred”—make clear that reaching a verdict entails our judgment not just of what is wrong, but of what is right. In the prose version, the model of the epic theatre compels our recognition of the conditions of a better world, one in which the accident would not take place. The poem is even more emphatic; the demonstrator depicts a world in which “no accident would have occurred.”

The minute “forming an opinion about the accident” becomes a judgment of what is right, not just for this world or that, but in effect, for all possible worlds, the spectator is in the business of making truth-claims, and therefore in the business of the normative and absolute. The “opinion” that the model of epic theater seeks for us to render is one that obtains, in other words, regardless of whether we identify with the driver or the pedestrian, feel pity or rage. And by the same token it’s a judgment that obtains regardless of the driver’s or the pedestrian’s point of view, or for that matter, the demonstrator/actor’s point of view.  The judgment remains the same, regardless of “the way we see things.”

3. Finance Modernism

I want to turn for a moment to two other poems by Brecht that illustrate, by showing us the same thing from different perspectives—literally by citing themselves, repeating the same words—that judgment is not a matter of perspective. We’ll begin with one of Brecht’s best known poems, “A Bed for the Night”:

I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway
A man stands every evening during the winter months
And gets beds for the homeless there
By appealing to passers-by

It won’t change the world
It won’t improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
But a few men have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Don’t put down the book on reading this, man.

A few people have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won’t change the world
It won’t improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation.9 (Brecht Poems 181)

The poem begins with a situation that is itself understood as repeated (it takes place “every evening”), signaling that the need to shelter the homeless, taken up by the man who stands every evening at 26th and Broadway, is an ongoing state of affairs.  The next three lines, which will become the last three lines of the poem, make a pronouncement on the man’s activity: “It won’t change the world / It won’t improve relations among men / It will not shorten the age of exploitation.” The next three lines, turning on the oppositional conjunction “but,” introduce themselves almost as a response to the previous lines, and they seem to offer a qualification of their judgment, as if the speaker were saying, “what I just said may be true, but at least a few men have a bed for the night.” The reason for thinking the judgment might be qualified—in other words, for treating it as relative rather than absolute—is clearly based on what appears good, but from a limited perspective, that of the “few men” who succeed in receiving “a bed for the night.” When this line is repeated in the last stanza, however, it no longer functions as a countervailing claim about the judgment that giving a few homeless a bed for the night changes nothing.  In its second incarnation, the line serves instead simply as a description of what’s happening in the world at a given moment. At the end of the poem, the lines of judgment that stood to be qualified in the previous stanza now return with the full force, the force of final judgment, and as a direct response to the claim that called upon us to view these matters from the point of view of those served by the charitable actions of man in the first stanza. By the time we reach the end of the poem, even though we have seen these lines quite literally from different perspectives as we move our eyes down the page, the judgment that they pronounce (the judgment against a capitalist order that produces men in need of a bed for the night) has not changed.

One word among the six repeated lines does, however, undergo a change from the first iteration to the second, and the force of the change is much easier to grasp in the German. The word for those few who “have a bed for the night” is “Männer” in the first instance, then becomes “Menschen” in the second.  “Männer,” the plural of “Mann,” in German is used to refer to an individual person gendered male, while “Menschen” refers to all humankind. In the context of the unfolding of the poem, then, it’s as if recognizing the homeless as members of the class of mankind, rather than as individual men in need, is a precondition for the type of judgment that occurs in the final lines of the poem.  At the same time, however, insofar as the lines of that judgment occur first in the series of iterations, it’s as if judgment itself is the precondition for the shift from seeing the homeless as individual men to seeing them as representative of mankind. If we go back to the beginning of the poem, it’s worth noting that the ones who get a bed for the night do so through the man (“Mann,” not “Mensch”) appealing to the good graces of the passers-by. The homeless are “Männer,” in other words, when their conditions are a matter of empathy; once they are “Menschen,” the judgment can reveal the homeless and the charity that serves them alike as effects of systematic exploitation.

Another poem exemplifying this device of repetition/self-citation consists entirely of its repeated lines. And in this case, the poem announces its subject matter clearly in terms of point-of-view:

The peasant’s concern is with his field
He looks after his cattle, pays taxes
Produces children, to save on labourers, and
Depends on the price of milk.
The townspeople speak of love for the soil
Of healthy peasant stock and
Call peasants the backbone of the nation.

The townspeople speak of love for the soil
Of healthy peasant stock
And call peasants the backbone of the nation.
The peasant’s concern is with his field
He looks after his cattle, pays taxes
Produces children, to save on labourers, and
Depends on the price of milk.10 (Brecht Poems 212)

We can see at a glance that the first of the seven-line stanzas gives us two perspectives: the first four lines are devoted to that of the “peasant,” and the last three to that of the “townspeople.” We start with the simple, unadorned descriptions of the practicalities that occupy the peasant’s mind, all of them fully legible in economic terms. The lines devoted to the townspeople, by contrast, serve also as a perspective on the peasant, only now he appears as a clear type, and painted in highly idealized terms.

The second stanza starts by repeating, word for word, the idealized view of the townspeople, then repeats word for word the view of the peasant.  This time around, however, the peasant’s point of view reads as a corrective to the townspeople’s idyllic image of him.  The concerns of the peasant reemerge, now quite literally from beneath the idealized picture of the townspeople, as harsh realities that have been painted over, as it were, by the picture of him that hangs over them. But before we are tempted to say that this poem invites us to violate the directives of Brecht’s epic theater and identify with the peasant’s familiar financial worries, we should notice that the peasant’s concerns make their own omissions.  That is, the worry that from his perspective appears simply as the “price of milk,” and, especially when the prices are high, contributes to his need to “save on laborers,” is an index of an economic totality, a system of relations of production that includes the townspeople, and for that matter, their perspective on the peasant.

In Germany between the end of World War I and when this poem appeared in 1934, the price of milk could certainly testify to the kinds of consequences its fluctuation could have for peasants and townspeople alike. Obviously during the period of stunning hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923, to have said that “prices fluctuate” would have been the understatement of the century. A bottle of milk that cost the equivalent of $1.20 in 1922 would have risen to a price of 2 million dollars in September of 1923, and by November it would have cost a cool 3 billion. By 1931, however, the monetary pendulum had swung the other way; Germany was in a period of deflation, accompanied by widespread unemployment and general reductions in wages and social spending.  By 1934, Brecht was in exile, and Hitler had risen to power on a message of love for the soil and healthy peasant stock who are the backbone of the nation.

The point here isn’t that “The Peasant’s Concern” is really a poem about the Nazi takeover of Germany or even a poem about the price of milk.  For Brecht, as we have already seen, and as the technique of word-for-word quotation that he deploys serves to make plain, the price of milk and the changing political regimes in which it fluctuates are alike effects of capitalism. Momentous changes in the price of goods (or in the value of the money to buy them) can (and do) occur without altering the market system in which those goods and money come into being in the first place.  What both Brecht’s self-quotation poems do is to distinguish between the variable, phenomenological effects of markets—the price of milk goes up or down, this or that homeless man gets a bed for the night—and the market logic that entails both homelessness and price fluctuations.

In the period between World War I and 1933, the German case was the most extreme, to be sure, but the U.S. as well as the other major powers of Europe had also seen wide swings between inflation and deflation, whether as a result of unintended shocks in supply or demand, or as a result of deliberate national strategies for inducing them. What’s striking in the work of the three other modernists I mentioned at the beginning of this paper—Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot—is that their work not only invokes the monetary policies that affected what Stein called “the meaning of money,” but that the meaning of money becomes for each of them something against which to measure the meaning of poetry.11 Thus, for example, in The Waste Land, not exactly forthcoming in its views on political economy, the pervasive tropes of fluidity read a little differently when one considers Eliot’s employment in the Foreign Department of Lloyd’s during the time in which he wrote the poem. “I am busy tabulating the balance sheets of foreign banks to see how they are prospering,” wrote Eliot to his sister Charlotte in one of many letters that also complained bitterly about high prices for goods that were not in scarce supply (Eliot Letters 1 162). Now consider these well known lines from the brief “Death By Water” section of The Waste Land:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
                                        A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. (ll. 312-316)

Juxtaposed with “profit and loss,” “a current under sea” is hard not to read in this context as a somewhat distorted homophonic pun on “currency.” And if we consider the lines in the previous section that introduce us to “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants / C.i.f. London: documents at sight” (ll. 209-211), what is otherwise among the more baffling of the endnotes Eliot provides with the poem, becomes another occasion for a pun on currency: “The currants were quoted at a price ‘carriage and insurance free to London’; and the Bill of Lading, etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft” (fn 210).

Pound’s writings of the early to mid-30s, in their explicit embrace of Mussolini and social credit, are nothing if not a response to the kinds of volatile monetary conditions that had much earlier made Eliot, as he told his sister, so keen to know “the assets and liabilities of every bank abroad” (Eliot Letters 1 162) and that Brecht had understood as cause for revolution. In 1933, the same year that Brecht was fleeing Nazi Germany, Ezra Pound was busy publishing his own denunciations of capitalism in response to ongoing instability in the value of currency, a problem he believed fascism could solve.  Pound, however, unlike Brecht, criticized capitalism not so much for its impoverishment of the worker as for its impoverishment of the artist and the arts.  The problem he argues, in “Murder by Capital,” is “maladministration of credit” (for which Pound, like Hitler, chose to blame Jews), and the solution, he suggests, is to replace the banks with a system of social credit administrated by the state. The idea behind social credit was to redistribute state wealth among the citizens in the form of vouchers to be used in direct exchange for goods. Pound imagined that the “slips of paper,” would “correspond[] to extant goods,” and the value of the currency, if we wish to call it that, would remain constant because each slip of paper would be earmarked for a specific good. The absence of such a system, Pound contended, was “at the root of bad taste” (Pound Selected Prose 229). Pound’s fantasy of a one-to-one correspondence between the commodity and the currency used to purchase it (a fantasy also, of the end of price fluctuation from the perspective of the consumer) had its analogue, moreover, in Pound’s highest standard for poetic achievement, in which “The meaning of the poem can not ‘wobble.’“ (Pound Gaudier-Brzeska 257). Insofar as the poetic meaning that both Pound and Eliot sought was something that belonged not to the wobbling world of fluctuating interests rates and prices—that is, to contingencies of the material conditions of production and consumption—but to an unwobbling world that is of the same order as the absolute world of judgment that Brecht severs from the world of individual experiences and perspectives as well as the fluctuating price of milk.

4.  Revolution and Anti-Theatricality

It should be clear by now why another central component of Brecht’s alienation method involves overcoming both the spectator’s and the actor’s inclinations to identify with the characters and prevent becoming consumed by their characters’ actions and feelings. In a 1936 essay, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” Brecht proposes Chinese acting as an ideal model for the epic theater because its techniques, he believes, are the most effective in defeating any tendency to empathize. This defeat is accomplished in large part, Brecht claims, by the actor removing from his performance all traces of illusion that the events are real and his actions genuine. He “never acts,” Brecht writes, “as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him.  He expresses his awareness of being watched…. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place. …A further means is that the artist observes himself” (Willett 91-92).  As Brecht points out, the fiction of the fourth wall and the actor who performs as if the audience did not exist are among “the European stage’s characteristic illusions.”

The greatest exponent of these “illusions” was the French aesthetic philosopher Denis Diderot. Brecht’s insistence, meanwhile, on the actor’s utter self-consciousness and the collapse of the fourth wall couldn’t appear more diametrically opposed to Diderot’s essentially anti-theatrical commitments. Diderot’s instructions to actors in his 1758 Discours sur la poésie dramatique are striking in their contradiction, virtually point for point, of the techniques that Brecht extols in Chinese acting.  Here is Michael Fried’s translation, from Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot: “Think no more of the [spectator],” writes Diderot, “than if he did not exist.  Imagine, at the edge of the stage, a high wall that separates you from the orchestra.  Act as if the curtain never rose” (Fried Absorption 96).  For Diderot, as Fried explains, these imperatives were transferable to works on canvas, so that what compelled the beholder of certain paintings by Chardin, Greuze, and Vien, whose figures were depicted in the acts of reading, drawing, or, most unselfconsciously of all, sleeping, was their achievement of what Fried calls “the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist” (Fried Absorption 103).  The condition for producing convincing absorption in both painting and the theater for Diderot—the illusion that the beholder did not exist—would eventually become, most pervasively in the literature we have come to associate with modernism, not so much a fiction or an illusion as the ontology of the autonomous work of art.  For Brecht of course, there is no theatrical situation in which the beholder does not literally exist, but as we shall see, he proves to be no less committed than Diderot to the logic of autonomy if not to its ontology.12

Gertrude Stein, meanwhile, in a series of lectures delivered between 1934 and 1936, produced, as I have argued elsewhere, what is surely among the most consistent and explicit modernist defenses of this ontology of the work of art, and she does so in thoroughly Diderotian terms. A work of art is only a masterpiece, Stein argues in “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There so Few of them” insofar as it “is an end in itself.” What she means by this is that the masterpiece is not an end for anyone or anything else. What it is as a work of art is independent of what it is for any reader or beholder who encounters it.  Stein elaborates this claim by differentiating the “entity”—the being as “an end in itself”—achieved by the masterpiece from the “identity” that structures situations that entail an audience.  To illustrate this difference, she specifically invokes oratory and letter-writing:

One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say, that is the reason that oratory is practically never a master-piece. …It is very interesting that letter writing has the same difficulty, the letter writes what the other person is to hear and so entity does not exist there are two present instead of one and so once again creation breaks down.  I once wrote in writing The Making of Americans I write for myself and strangers but that was merely a literary formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers if I did I would not really be writing because already then identity would take the place of entity.13 (Stimpson 356-357)

When Stein declares that she wrote her novel The Making of Americans (which she certainly believed was a masterpiece) for an audience of “myself and strangers” only to qualify that claim by saying that her audience was “merely a literary formalism,” the qualification is a matter of kind rather than degree.  For Stein when the audience is formal, what it isn’t is literal, which is to say, there is no audience at all.

If no audience at all is a requirement of the ontology of the masterpiece, it’s hardly surprising that in Stein’s aesthetic theory, plays pose a deep problem with respect to their claim to be art.  What defines the theater for Stein (and what she thinks differentiates it from literature and painting), is the necessity of an audience, which means that the play, in her terms, cannot be an entity—it consists in the recognition of its audience and therefore is a matter of identity—and therefore cannot be a masterpiece.  Indeed, Stein imagines the relationship between the play and its audience in terms of a temporal disjunction that she also links to identity, an unfolding in time that is quite the opposite of the “completed presence” of the masterpiece as entity: “The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not, one might say is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience” (Stimpson 244). As she puts it a few pages later, “The emotion of you on one side of the curtain and what is on the other side of the curtain are not going to be going on together.  One will always be behind or in front of the other.” (Stimpson 245).

The logic that separates great painting and acting from theatricality in Diderot and masterpieces from everything else in Stein is a logic that also defines modernism against a postmodernism that above all seeks to solicit the reader or beholder.  From this standpoint, Brecht looks less like a modernist and more like a postmodernist avant la lettre.  As we have already begun to see, however, the very thing Brecht demands from his audience, namely their judgment, is necessarily atemporal and absolute, much as Stein envisions the entity achieved by the masterpiece. “The Business of Art,” Stein writes in “What Are Master-Pieces,” “is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present.” This “complete actual present” is offered precisely by way of contrast to the unfolding temporality of remembering and recognition that constitutes “identity” in Stein’s terminology.14 The operative word here is “complete.” In Brecht it is the same presentness of judgment, as we have seen it achieved in Brecht’s poems, and as it is inscribed in the “Urteil” that is the “point” of epic theatre.  In short, there is no contradiction between the imperative of the theater to address the spectator in Brecht and its imperative to ignore the spectator in Diderot.  In each case the art never consists in the response of this or that viewer; it is the work or the judgment that holds regardless of who is viewing.

Brecht sought to make the theater revolutionary by making it anti-theatrical.  There can be no revolution, of course, without revolutionaries; hence Brecht’s interest in behaviorism and advertising, which, as Todd Cronan shows in “Art and Political Consequence,” Brecht imagined might be employed to manipulate theatergoers’ affective responses in controllable ways.  But Brecht’s investment in these tactics doesn’t make the aesthetics of his theater any less anti-theatrical or its revolutionary politics, any less indifferent to the revolutionary (or not) feelings of its audience. Brecht could hope for a predictable response in the theatergoer—the desire for revolution—just as the advertising industry can hope to produce predictable responses in the consumer—the desire for this or that commodity.  But Brecht understood that the reasons for revolution—systematic exploitation and the structures of capitalism that entail it—are the same regardless of how many (or how few) theatergoers can be made to see them or feel something about them.  The reasons for buying a commodity, meanwhile, are potentially as many as the consumers available to buy them, and advertising’s job, which Brecht understood perfectly well, is to capitalize on the most likely hits or to invent new ones.  Brecht also understood that the reasons of the consumer (her likes and dislikes) and the reasons of the revolutionary (her political beliefs) are categorically and incommensurably distinct.   After all, there is no coherent account of political disagreement (or for that matter, aesthetic disagreement) without appeal to beliefs that are normative, subject to judgments of truth or falsehood, right or wrong, good or bad.  The likes and dislikes of the consumer, meanwhile, however they may lend themselves to statistically based claims for what is or is not “normal,” are precisely non-normative—there is no account of them that can be coherently framed in terms of disagreement or coherently admit to judgment.  The fundamental anti-theatricality of both Brecht’s aesthetics and his politics—their fundamental indifference to the responses of an audience is, in short, necessary to their claims to deliver judgment.  Which is to say that Brecht proves to be a difficult fit for a metamodernist fantasy of oscillating among “infinite worlds” made up of “infinite selves” and their infinite inclinations.  For metamodernism, in this respect, is nothing if not capitalism’s fantasy of the market, one in which what we “like” can also masquerade as a politics.  Reading Brecht correctly might well serve as its antidote.

Special thanks to the editors of Radical Philosophy for allowing me to reprint my review from issue 177 (Jan./Feb. 2013): 52-54. 

When Olafur Eliasson recently spoke of seeing “potential in the spectator—in the receiver, the reader, the participator, the viewer, the user,” he may have thought he was seeing something new. Marcel Duchamp saw something similar in the 1950s when he thought to “attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.” Duchamp pursued this idea as early as The Large Glass (1915-23), a work whose medium (glass) is defined by its transparency to the world around it. Duchamp was part of a generation of artists, one that included Man Ray, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, who came to reject the frame as a conservative device that blocked the “flux of life” (as Loy put it). Duchamp’s paradoxical tack was to literalize the Renaissance notion of art as a window onto the world, producing a work that was almost all frame. Producing a “picture” that was a window functioned as a critical gesture intended to undermine the frame’s enforcement of the difference between art and life. Allan Kaprow, writing in 1973, got the point when he said that the “best part” of The Large Glass was that it was “a windowpane to look through; its actual configurations are forced into accord with the visual environment beyond them, for instance, a chocolate grinder superimposed on a kid picking his nose.” But if Kaprow was still slightly cynical about the value of that “environment,” artists and writers at least since Duchamp have positively reveled in the spectator’s incorporation into the work. This is one half of the story Lisa Siraganian tells in her brilliant reappraisal of modernism.

The other half of her story revolves around an unexpected but persuasively defined group of writers—Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Williams (in part), William Gaddis, and Elizabeth Bishop—who were fundamentally committed to the “irrelevance of the spectator to the meaning of the artwork.” In the author’s boldest formulation: “The meaning of a poem [for these writers] is entirely indifferent to the reader’s emotion, the reader’s context, or, for that matter, any type of judgment or perspective the reader could deliver.” But it would be wrong to extrapolate from this view that these writers construed their work as indifferent to the world. There is a deep, if allegorical, sense of the political that haunts their practices. Writing against the increasingly dominant vision of politics as the expression of particularized bodies, these writers embraced a broadly universalist vision of the liberal subject. In a series of striking reversals of conventional notions of the political temper of her favored writers, Siraganian discovers the bonds between Stein’s refusal of punctuation and her commitment to universal suffrage and civil liberties; between Lewis’ critique of time-philosophy and his (tempered) embrace of representative democracy; between Williams’ concrete poetry and his commitment to maternal progress and personal liberty; between Gaddis’ vision of “disciplined nostalgia” (or forgery) and Bishop’s aesthetics of bricolage and a resistance to corporate capitalism.

These authors’ shared vision of meaning’s autonomy was aggressively challenged by a group of artists and writers asserting the “necessary involvement of the spectator in the production of the art object’s meaning.” The latter group—including Duchamp, Loy, Williams (in part), Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, as well as a range of communitarian critics of the liberal subject (discussed in a superb coda) such as Paul Gilroy, Juliana Spahr, Hayden Carruth, Leslie Marmon Silko, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Alain Badiou—points to the deep continuity between modernism and its postmodern critics. The latter writers also conceived a link between their formal poetics of the body and the political such that Olson’s effort to “literalize the presence of the poet’s syllables” was simultaneously an effort to give voice to the immigrant body while Baraka’s vision of the poetic voice was “an aestheticized technology of racial community.”

And if Siraganian convincingly shows how modernism anticipates the major post-1945 debates about the relationship between a work of art and the world, her central task is to retrieve a lost sense of the political dimension of autonomy. If for T. W. Adorno autonomy had to be defended and analyzed as a special (and crucial) form of politics, Siraganian asks us to see how the Critical Theory version of autonomy might “misrepresent the modernist ontology of the art object” it ostensibly defends. For Adorno, writing in the Aesthetic Theory, “the resoluteness of [the work’s] distance [from the world]…concretizes the critique of what has been repulsed.” Which is to say that for Adorno “what looks at first like indifference to the world transforms instead into total engagement.” Writing against both Adorno and the New Critics (who also project a notion of critical “resistance”), Siraganian shows how a work’s meaning couldn’t be altered by its users, because it wasn’t an object like other objects in the world. Any work that fails to maintain its autonomy, like any object, “is forever available to the perceptual experiences (as opposed to interpretations) of readers, spectators, or enterprising poets.”

Moreover, Siraganian argues that the work’s social immunity was the condition for the possibility of politics in general. Stein, Lewis, Williams, Gaddis and Bishop all understood their formal poetics, their commitment to the ontological difference between artworks and their reception, as a means to facilitate, if not produce, political results. By preserving the reader’s autonomy, by letting their readers alone to respond (or not) to the work, these writers embraced a form of civil liberty. Stein’s desire to “let each [reader] attend to their own business” was an effort to “protect the reader’s particular, bodily interests and pursuits of private pleasure when faced with the author’s interests.” By the same token, those authors committed to the incorporation of the spectator’s meaning into the work were logically committed to the “complete end to politics in any recognizable form.” The latter claim emerges most forcefully in her closing chapter on Olson and Baraka, where both authors, despite their different ideological allegiances (immigrant embodiment for Olson, racial difference for Baraka), “share the same theory of and commitment to a poetic particularism as a way to safeguard, represent, and then share a perspective on the world, whether racial, ethnic, or political.” When politics becomes a matter of perspectives, then the classical liberal claim to universal human justice becomes the problem to be solved rather than the ground of shared political action.

In a series of remarkable textual analyses Siraganian tracks the thematic status of frames in modernist texts between Stein and Olson. Stein’s overlooked essay on “Pictures” from Lectures in America raises many of the central claims of the book as a whole. Pictures, on Stein’s account, are airless things, each of which contains “a life of its own.” A picture, Stein says, both “does and does not” belong in its frame. It does not belong to the literal frame, while it absolutely belongs to its conceptual frame. This is what Stein means when she describes the “problem of all modern painting” as the achievement of a work that “would remain out of its frame…even while it does not, even while it remains there.” While most paintings exist within literal frames, they are not defined by that frame but rather by the artist’s intent. Stein similarly sought to destroy the literal frame in her own writing by her notorious rejection of punctuation marks, nouns and proper names. These grammatical functions, like a literal frame, told the reader how to read (and to breathe). By removing superfluous grammatical functions, and removing bodily cues, her works are able to “mean what they mean regardless of her readers.”

Like Stein, but in a satirical vein, Wyndham Lewis confronted the fashionable desire to bring art closer to life by eliminating the frame. In books like The Childermass and Time and Western Man Lewis derides various materialist visions of the work of art as “breathing materiality,” something containing “real blood and tears.” Lewis’ dissatisfaction with this anti-representational impulse ultimately merged with a deepening commitment to representative democracy, opening up a striking reversal in his political thinking from his earlier affinity with fascism.

Siraganian’s chapters on Williams and Gaddis and Bishop take up the problem of the conceptual frame through an exploration of Duchamp’s readymade and Picasso’s and Juan Gris’ collage aesthetics. A close reading of Williams’ “IV” from Spring and All shows how Williams sought to break the literal frames of language, those deadened conventions that emptied words of their meaning. Williams’ vision of concrete poetry—“No ideas but in things”—is not an effort to escape representation, as it has usually been understood, but rather an attempt to renew its terms from within.

Like Williams, Gaddis (or his projection as the forger Wyatt in The Recognitions) sought to renew deadened forms through a retrograde mode of “disciplined nostalgia.” Wyatt’s acts of forgery are, together, a desperate attempt, in a world become commodity, to “create something new”; it is “an act of appropriation instead of plagiarism or counterfeiting.” As Wyatt (and Gaddis) see it, copying an old master is a perverse act of preservation and renewal through a painstaking “act of recognizing, transforming, and placing a cultural artifact into [one’s] personal memory and conceptualization.” Similarly, Bishop plays the role of a forger in a series of astonishing literary and poetic reflections on kitsch. In poems like “Large Bad Picture,” “In Prison,” and “The Monument” Bishop acts as a “bricoleur, making a new, more valuable art object (her poem) out of a found and often kitsch object.” What Williams, Gaddis and Bishop inevitably show is the historical constraints on the pursuit of autonomy. If Stein and Lewis denied the relevance of the beholder’s share, then for this later generation—a generation that confronted the ubiquity of kitsch, a commodity defined by its appeal to consumers—one had no choice but to engage in a tactical warfare with the newly democratized spectator’s demands. But it is this turn to the historical dynamics of anti-theatricality that stands in some tension with the more basic claim to a conceptual picture of intentionality. At times Siraganian’s narrative is driven by an account of the “battling forces” between literal and conceptual frames but more often we read of the difference between frames as a difference in its “source.” Before Marianne Moore “even picks up her pen” her work is constituted as poetry—the battle is won before it begins. Of course resolving the differences between anti-theatricality and non-theatricality would require another book in itself, one I presume less gripping than this one.