Beginning on March 23, 1987, Calvin, of Bill Watterson’s comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, appeared with a simple cardboard box that Calvin called the “transmogrifier.” The transmogrifier can transform Calvin into anything; it is also a time machine and a space ship.  The empty cardboard box holds limitless potential. It is big enough for small and medium-scaled objects, including the toy-sized tiger, Hobbes. Because the box can contain any one thing of a certain size, the transmogrifier can imaginarily contain any other thing of the same or smaller size; its gestalt making the magical transformation possible. Equally importantly, by moving things in space the box effects a link to anywhere and anytime, which is how the transmogrifier enables time travel in Calvin’s world. When one transmogrifier breaks down, the reader and Calvin both rightly assume he will find another discarded cardboard box somewhere nearby to take its place. Over and again in the comic strip, Calvin works the magic of his imaginary machine. The adaptability of the manufactured box as a container for myriad things, its portability to many places over time, and the ubiquity of the box, are the most salient characteristics of Calvin’s beloved transmogrifier. These are also the three most salient features of commercial containers, at whatever scale, since containers circulate all manner of things to all manner of place in the modern manufacturing and distribution system.

Containers have become something of an obsession of mine, which means I see them everywhere and return to them again and again when thinking about art, or in this case, art criticism. From the time of its invention in the middle 19^th century, the manufactured box gradually became a widely adopted form in both consumer and art culture, the box giving material form to the homogenization of three dimensional space shaped by industrial manufacture.1 There were, to be sure, plenty of cardboard and other cheaply made boxes in American life before the middle twentieth century, but after WWII this trickle of boxes through American households became an inundation. The floodgates for this tsunami of packaging were opened by the invention of container shipping after WWII, which allowed for the expansion of global trade and shipping by road, boat and rail. “The value of this utilitarian object lies not in what it is,” according to finance journalist Marc Levinson, “but in how it is used. The container is at the core of a highly automated system for moving goods from anywhere, to anywhere, with a minimum of cost and complication.”2 The process is familiar; an object is packaged in a retail box, which goes into a wholesale crate, which goes into a shipping container, which travels by truck, train or transport ship across continent or ocean, to a distribution center where, in an unpacking of the shipping container to crate to box to thing, it finally enters the home or office, and in so doing kicks off another transmogrifier for Calvin and his imaginary friend. The box in this scenario is sufficiently open-ended (so to speak) that it inspires imaginary play. In Calvin’s world, the box is at the center of his utopian child’s world. In the last ten years or so, container architecture had proliferated across the human landscape – not in the modernist form of Corbu’s idealized containers for living, but in the form of actual shipping containers adapted as hotel rooms, refugee housing, and house additions.

Malvina Reynolds’ popular song, “Little Boxes,” of 1962 links virtually all aspects of American mainstream culture of its moment to the manufactured box in terms that resonate with a completely negative reading of the manufactured box and its scaling up to the mass produced housing  of that time (and in anticipation of today). 3 In contrast to the playful, imaginative transmogrifier of Calvin and Hobbes, Reynolds’s famous description of the houses in Daly City (just South of San Francisco, California) reversed the terms as the people subject to the proliferating logic of container culture were depicted as becoming uniform like the boxes. Homes took the form of a container; “Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.” These were containers made for mass produced people; “and the people in the houses all went to the university, where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same.”

From the widespread use of television sets (the idiot box) to skyscraper architecture (containers for living), to Levittown, NY and places like it (“Little boxes on the hillside”), and the well-stocked shelves of American stores (from TV dinners to home and office supplies), boxes of all kinds and scales have proliferated from post WWII America through the present.4   That this proliferation has its domineering aspect is no doubt implied in the present by that most muscle-bound image of  feminized  container culture,  the “Amazon.”

Objecthood and the Empty Container

This is the polarizing view of containers that I had in mind when, a few months ago, I picked up Michael Fried’s 1967 article, “Art and Objecthood,” and reread it with the benefit of fifty years hindsight. I was immediately struck by the aptness of reading it alongside the pairing of Calvin and Hobbes’s transmogrifier and Malvina Reynolds’s little boxes, which utopian and dystopian view of their respective containers tracks almost perfectly alongside the voices speaking in defense and criticism of Minimalism, or more properly Literalism, in Fried’s benchmark article — the artists affirming the adaptive and performative potential of the blank form, and Fried lamenting its standardizing, normative affect. It stands to reason that this association would have struck both the artists and the critic as bizarre, since they were engaged in making art and writing about it. But it is clear to me, and I hope to argue persuasively, that the arguments for and against containers in the arts are neither remote from nor separable from the appearance of containers in the cultural mainstream, as the various authors at the time would understandably have assumed.

In the post-war New York artworld, ambitious painting was widely described metaphorically and physically through the language of its progressive flatness (as theorized by Clement Greenberg), meaning it had less and less to do with the illusionistic worlds seen inside the perspective box (a theatrical stage of sorts), and a lot to do with the material support of the work. For painters, this logic had gone about as far as it could with regard to flatness, but the shape of painting (and sculpture) had been virtually neglected by artist and critic alike. Fried took up the issue immediately prior to writing “Art and Objecthood.” In “Shape as Form: Frank Sella’s Irregular Polygons,” for example, Fried described Anthony Caro as making work in which “The individual elements bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition,” 5 which means the internal elements are directed toward each other and achieve a certain completeness by virtue of their relationality within the artwork. When shape is form in a successful work, by this account, the work is experienced as full, complete; a successful sculpture is experienced as separate from the rest of the world because it is formally self-sufficient. It contains nothing but itself, because the shape demands it.

The problem with Minimalism in Fried’s account was that it rejected the productive friction between depicted and literal form, resulting in an empty box; “shape that must belong to painting,” he writes, “—it must be pictorial and not, or not merely, literal.”6   Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Tony Smith (among others) were described as rendering in three dimensions what had been the dialectical force of painterly modernism between the mark and the materiality of the object (not necessarily, indeed by 1967 not only, the surface). Fried’s emphasis on the fullness of work framed by shape is the basis for his critique that the Minimalists had effectively reversed Clement Greenberg’s 1954 proclamation that “pictorial space has lost its ‘inside’ and become all ‘outside’”7 by making work in which pictorial space had lost its ‘outside’ (nothing is outside the artwork) and become all ‘inside’ in the sense that anything and any situation can be placed (materially or visually) in art conceived as a container.

Because these artists created forms that opened up to the world, in other words, literalist work would be ‘shapeless’ in the sense that the form was not adequately self-sufficient to create an experience for the viewer as a discreet artwork. Instead, in Minimalism there is nothing there, or not enough for the object to rise to the level of good art. Literalists effectively framed and directed attention within the world, the artwork becoming essentially a container for any-and-everything. Nature abhors a vacuum, as the saying goes, so this ontologically shapeless, functionally empty container in effects sucks up the world and human attention alike.

Bracketing the various positions for and against Fried (which are not especially interesting to me), his commitment to experiential fullness and ontological shape raises useful questions with regard to the effects of container culture on the arts.  Bluntly…Is anything left out? Does containerization in art demonstrate the extent to which anything can be subject to the manufacture/distribution logic of container culture generally? Is container culture the same thing as commodity culture? Why does it matter, or doesn’t it? One can imagine the conversation between Calvin and Hobbes as occurring between a Minimalist artist engaging with an emerging culture of performativity and a critic. Calvin: “You step into this chamber, set the appropriate dials, and it turns you into whatever you’d like to be.” Hobbes, “it’s amazing what they do with corrugated cardboard these days.” To which the modernist critic might object, as Fried does in “Art and Objecthood,” “all that matters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest.”8

The universalizing language of hollowness and objecthood appears repeatedly in the writing by the artists. For example, Donald Judd’s 1965 essay, “specific objects,” describes three dimensionality as a universal (instead of particular or unique) vessel (which Judd calls a container).9

Three-dimensionality is not as near being simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to that. But now paint and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more defined, not undeniable and unavoidable. They are particular forms circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualities. Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative. It opens to anything…Three dimensions are real space.10

As described here, Modernist painting and sculpture had (“now” in 1965) established too clear boundaries on what was possible for ambitious artists, they had lost their creative capaciousness, their apparent neutrality as media for all manner of work. At an earlier time these established media (painting and sculpture) “seemed to be” “simply a container” that could hold a wider range of experiences. But that neutrality, or openness, has been compromised, presumably by the disciplinary limits of orthodox modernism (“they are particular forms circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualities” such as flatness, surface emphasis or an emphasis on shape). Three dimensionality, however, while “tending” to be a container in the positive sense of giving artistic production stakes, avoids these constraints because, like an actual box, “It opens to anything…Three dimensions are real space.”  This is a container Judd can live with because of its neutrality, because it is not experientially full. Like the transmogrifier, three dimensions can contain anything, anywhere, and at anytime.

Hollowness, in Fried, works just this way – it is a function the literal emptiness of the container and the blurred edge of the artwork – the place where the object surface both delineates the edge of the material while also opening up to the world around it and (by extension) pulling that world into itself. Ontological hollowness is negative for the Friedian beholder in the sense that the work has the qualities of both an artwork and whatever is near at hand that it engages relationally. Looking through a Judd, I see a chair, or a shadow on the wall, or (when scaled up) a building, Texas landscape, or another human being. By virtue of its hungry emptiness, the work confuses the ontological categories of art and life, producing, for Fried, an oppressive mashup where the life of the form and the life of the person equate to one another. Even if the artist or viewer feels liberated by the apparent openness of possible interactions, as in Judd’s above account, in Fried’s account this beholder is, in fact, trapped in a telescoping world of proliferating objects in shapeless spaces, in object-hoods. He writes “[T]he apparent hollowness of most literalist work – the quality of having an inside – is almost blatantly anthropomorphic. It is, as numerous commentators have remarked approvingly, as though the work in question has an inner, even secret, life…”11 These container artworks, in other words, have a certain power, a ‘secret life’ by Fried’s account, which contradicts their apparently abstract form and which, despite arguments to the contrary, oppresses the formal imagination.

Reading Fried’s lament against Malvina Reynold’s’ song, the line “And the people in the boxes all went to the university, were they were put in boxes and they all came out the same” recalls his reading of Tony Smith’s 1962 piece Die, for example, the famous steel cube of 6’ on each side. Fried describes that “One way of describing what Smith was making might be something like a surrogate person – that is, a kind of statue.”12 Interacting with Die asserts an insistent fluttering across surface/edge, subject/object, person/thing, now/then boundaries. It is as if the box contained the person: [person], or, rather the presence of the uniform person, […], conceived as normalized to fit into the box’s homogenizing form as a human surrogate.  This capturing of the human-presence-in-absence requires a universe conceived as a unitary space, a simple and coextensive geometry of lines, planes and cubes from which every aspect of the world we live in is carved out (maybe suspended is more accurate) and geometrically measured relative to ourselves.

This world is necessarily serial in nature, as its Cartesian nature means that the idealized geometry is universalizing. When Fried quotes Judd writing, “the big problem is that anything that is not absolutely plain begins to have parts in some way,” he is describing Judd’s idealism, a world in which perceptible parts constitute a wrinkle or flaw in a cosmic geometry of omnipresent flow.13 Fried responds: “The shape is the object; at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape.”14 The shape is the object in the everyday language of containers as well. When a package arrives (no matter the scale), the habitual response is, “the books,” “the toy,” “the _____,” has arrived. The casual comment demonstrates the extent to which the shape (or the ontological shapelessness) of the container becomes equivocal to the thing inside it, carving out (as it does), objects from the homogenized, three dimensional cube that would circumscribe whatever the container contains.  This fundamentally Cartesian logic, a geometric cube-system in three dimensions, also establishes the continuity between that unitary form and the entire world of distribution and manufacture around it. Fried quotes Morris on this point, writing: “Morris believes that this awareness is heightened by ‘the strength of the constant, known shape, the gestalt.”15 In other words, this unitary form is precisely why the work functions as an inexhaustible frame, since the world of things is infinite with the Minimalist gestalt or shape imposing a limiting awareness. Fried, rejects the logic, however, using the language of empty containers in the negative, writing “It is inexhaustible, however, not because of any fullness – that is the inexhaustibility of art – but because there is nothing there to exhaust.”16

The Neighborhood of Objecthood

The preceding examination of Fried’s argument in terms of the hollow form of containers does very little to explain why artists were engaged with the form to begin with, however that history is arguably close at hand.  Because of the advent of container shipping after WWII, by the middle 1950s lower Manhattan was losing its status as an international manufacturing and distribution hub for consumer goods. Most spectacularly, SoHo factories were shuttering up and moving elsewhere; its side streets were simply too narrow for trucks pulling shipping containers. In the wake of this industrial flight, the abandoned factory buildings stood like dark, specter-kings lording over the no-longer-necessary, abandoned piers and loading docks of the Hudson River.17 The arson-prone neighborhood was called “Hell’s Hundred Acres.” Streetlights were turned off at night. There was virtually no traffic. No stores. Few restaurants. A bar or two for a dwindling community of workers.  The container, by this reading, produced distribution efficiencies that fueled almost unparalleled economic growth, but in so doing brought an aging infrastructure and a New York neighborhood to its knees.

In SoHo, these abandoned factories and industrial remnants were available, at virtually no cost, to a handful of artists who began living in these lofts in the late 1950s. As described by painter, Chuck Close, with some hyperbole, “SoHo barely existed when I moved there in ’67. There were maybe 10 people living between Canal and Houston…rats were running everywhere.”18 Factories vacated by the arrival of containers were empty, in his account, forming a kind of urban vacuum awaiting the next occupants, the rats signifying urban decay and the artists, renewal. The description gives pause, or should, despite its being ten years late on when artists actually began moving in. Among the early arrivals were the dancer, Simone Forti, and the sculptor, Robert Morris. Forti’s 1960/61 “dance constructions” were instructional works consisting of free movements (circumscribed by instructional “rule games”) specifically linked to the environment (the abandoned industrial spaces) where these works were realized. Dancers might be found balancing together or walking among others standing on ropes looped from the industrially scaled ceiling (hangers, 1961), or seen trying to navigate (using knotted ropes) across a piece of plywood leaning steep on the wall (slant board, 1961). These works used materials left behind in the industrial spaces, while also integrating the characteristic high ceilings and open feel of the abandoned factory. One 1960 ‘dance construction’ is especially literal when it comes to the neighborly relationship between the SoHo loft and the proliferation of boxes in art. Roller Boxes (1960) was performed at the Reuben Gallery, a loft in SoHo. At that performance, two performers in leftover wooden crates on rollers were pulled across the floor. The performers, Patti Oldenberg (wife of the Pop artist, Claes Oldenberg), and Forti were pulled around the gallery on ropes.

The activation of the space using the materials and forms left behind by light manufacturing would have an enormous influence of Forti’s husband, the sculptor Robert Morris, who plays such a pivotal role in “Art and Objecthood.” In a 1994 interview with WJT Mitchell, Morris is explicit about the importance of Forti’s word-based, instructional, action-framing/generating approach to dance, called ‘rule games,’ and her influence on him with regard to the exploration of how objects and the spaces they form generate movement:

As to influence, Marcel Duchamp is obvious. Less obvious perhaps was my first wife, Simone Forti, who set the agenda for the Judson group–rule games, task performances, the use of objects to generate movement, the use of text in performance.19

Morris’s large-scale 1961/2 L beam-forms, his passageway, his planks and his box shapes display clearly Forti’s influence on her husband. Morris’s forms bend the body of the beholder, who moves around them as one might navigate a space left in a hurry by a closing factory, or at the very least shaped by such an experience. In the 1994 SoHo Guggenheim exhibition that immediately followed this interview, “The Mind Body Problem,” viewers could be seen in all manner of physical interaction with the works. Strangely, visitors are completely absent from the installation shots. A crisper demonstration of the relationship between the industrial forms of the lofts spaces and the body in Morris’s work would be found in his 1964 performance piece, “SITE,” in which the performance artist, Carolee Schneeman posed on a couch as Manet’s Olympia while Morris, dressed as a workman, moved large, plywood sheets throughout the space first disclosing, then concealing, Schneeman.20

I have used Forti and Morris as paradigmatic for the way some artists responded to the loft environment, not to say that’s all there is, but in order to demonstrate the possible integration of a few key aspects of the work environment of these artists into a more generalizable sensibility that inheres in the container. Clearly, SoHo’s founding artists engaged with the container as more than a mere box in the industrial sense, transforming it into a frame, a locus of instruction, a staging of movement, a mechanism for audience transformation, and a means of connecting to the environment. Forti’s and Morris’s creative world was a world of critical exploration, of experimentation, of games and rule games, and engagement with the materials and circumstances at hand. SoHo’s founding artists, to put it briefly with Forti and Morris as paradigmatic, would be on the Calvin and Hobbes side of what the container offered them at every scale.

The later explosion of real estate values in SoHo was unimaginable to these artists, who sought simply low rent and distance from the commercial art world and most of whom were (in any case) eventually priced out of the neighborhood. As far as the general public and city officials were concerned, however, artists in SoHo at the time were a negligible subset of beatniks and hippies. Living in theses abandoned spaces was illegal. By the middle 1960s, SoHo was slated for destruction by the urban planner, Robert Moses, who envisioned an industrial corridor running across Manhattan at SoHo, which would be reshaped by a highway built for, what else?, container trucks framed by subsidized high rises and factories shaped around the industrial container form. Moses had successfully built housing for artists in a planned community in nearby Westbeth, and was widely admired for building Lincoln Center, so he had reason to consider himself someone working on the side of artists even as the SoHo project, which would have destroyed an organically evolving artists’ colony, seemed likely to move forward.21 The first phase of this public housing project was constructed at the East end of Canal Street, where the buildings stand today in their unabashedly ugly, functionalist glory. In contrast to this planned manufacturing-and-housing scheme, artists in SoHo pushed back, inventing the live-work loft space and alternative (for the time) gallery system. “There were no subdivisions in our life,” wrote Twyla Tharp about SoHo in the early days, “We did not leave to go to work: that would have been bourgeois.”22

In his history of SoHo, Richard Kostelanetz summarized this shift in terms that speak directly to the shift in how artists described their work as linked to a formally and geographically shifting art world. Describing Soho’s artists, Kostelanetz writes:

The key word in defining their culture was ‘downtown,’ which was meant to distinguish the SoHo world from ‘uptown,’ which was everything north of Houston Street to some or 14^th Street or 23^rd Street to others. From big things to small, downtown was different. Even certain words were used differently downtown…when a SoHo artist spoke of ‘work,’ he meant his art. A ‘job’ is what he or she did for money, usually uptown, if not farther elsewhere…The epithet ‘downtown’ identified distinctly alternative styles not only in visual art but also in theater, performance art, dance, and even literary writing.23

This terminological shift, from making art to making work (as in Forti’s making ‘constructions’), was widespread. The idea for the downtown artist was to bracket, however temporarily and provisionally, whatever the artists of the downtown scene were doing from the norms of the commercial galleries uptown, which were widely associated with professionalized Modernism.

This reorientation in art making and living is described similarly by Helen Molesworth, in her description of SoHo in Work Ethic.

Wildly different in scale and effect than the garret apartments of prewar artists, loft spaces were typically abandoned light manufacturing buildings…One unique quality of SoHo was that artists from disparate artistic movements lived and worked their simultaneously. Stella occupied a loft space on West Broadway in 1958, and Alison Knowles and George Maciunas, both Fluxus artists, were some of the first artists to buy buildings in SoHo [actually Alison’s was a rental at Canal and Broadway, where I was born]. Allan Kaprow’s Happenings took place in SoHo lofts; artists involved in the new sculpture (Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra) lived and worked there, as did Conceptual artists (Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner). This highly abbreviated list suggests that no matter how divergent their aesthetic concerns and practices, the infrastructure of SoHo was a common denominator in putting pressure on artists to perform or stage their work in new ways.24

In other words, the collapse of light manufacturing and the abandoned boxes, industrial materials and machines had an explicit and demonstrable effect on artists. This infrastructure had its basis in the manufacturing sector. Using the materials of their environment, in summary, meant that these artists invented a form of art-magic of the container.

The ever-evolving spatial logic of the box is (by definition) inseparable from the experience of time, just as the consumer container is necessarily part of a system (a logistical system) that includes other containers caught in an unfolding process of production and consumption. The sequencing of Minimalist forms, “one thing after another,” in Judd’s terms, identifies the container with time. Even scaled up minimalism works this way. They can be seen as a row of empty boxes, shapeless objects in Fried’s sense, laid out in a row as a rarified assembly line of voids awaiting person, place or thing. Fried again, “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.”25

Duration, for the Modernists, more properly belongs to poetry and music, which is why the dimension-hopping aspect of Minimalist art between two (flat), three (space), and four (temporal) dimensions predisposed the work to theatricality since “what lies between the arts is theater.”26 The influence of the American composer, John Cage, across the arts can be seen as particularly offensive to this framework. Not surprisingly, Cage’s most influential piece, 4’33” of ‘silence,’ could easily be described as transforming music into an open container for sound.

In other words, the theatricality of Minimalism for Fried had only partially to do with the effect of the hungry void, the container, on a beholder who frame-shifts and body shifts in relationship to the unitary forms of a Calvin and Hobbesian experience. But the problem is not embodiment per se, as might be supposed. Fried allows for embodied knowledge among Modernist sculptors, including especially Caro, who are “possessed by the knowledge of the human body and how, in innumerable ways and moods, it makes meaning.”27 Significantly, however, for the Modernist sculptor to succeed, s/he would necessarily bracket self-conscious awareness of the passage of time. This is what Fried is emphasizing when he writes that “The literalist preoccupation with time – more precisely, with the duration of the experience—is, I suggest paradigmatically theatrical.”28 Theatrical, here, refers to the pulse, the sequencing, the tethering of actions and objects to their situatedness in a temporal sequence (how like a manufacturing process the account is!) which is intrinsic to virtually all art of the era.

American philosopher, John Dewey, was widely read at the time by artists and describes aesthetic experience as emphatically time dependent: “All interactions that effect stability and order in the whirling flux of change are rhythms.”29   These rhythms are known both through the body and mind, which is why Dewey placed a multi-sensory pedagogically informed aesthetics at the center of his educational program. Dewey means that patterns or systems of cultural production and analysis produce sensitivities in the human animal that interact with the changing nature of the world (physical, natural, and social) perceived by the senses.  The perceptual pattern established between perceived system and non-system constitutes the core of the rhythmic basis of aesthetic experience for Dewey, whether in the domain of nature or culture. Significantly, Dewey’s description of aesthetic experience as inherently rhythmic means that experience itself is bound to the human perception of time.

Fried, in contrast, critiques the artists using experience using the language of interest: “The experience alone is what matters,” for Literalism. He continues, describing experience as triggered by interest.

For Judd, as for literalist sensibility generally, all that matters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest. Whereas within the modernist arts nothing short of conviction – specifically the conviction that a particular painting or sculpture or poem or piece of music can or cannot support comparison with past work within that art whose quality is not in doubt – matters at all.30

Interest/experience and conviction suggest opposing terms for what good art means in terms that implicity challenge the values of the container. The container, borrowing from Fried’s logic, resists conviction by bracketing the issue of material or formal conviction relative to modernism. On the other hand, it would seem we have an aesthetic system being introduced by the artists of the 1960s that, following Dewey, trains the human being for an evolving sensory world, art (by this description) assisting the human being in establishing each beholder’s place in a complex and changing social and physical environment modeled on the container (Calvin and Hobbes). On one side, we have a Modernist aesthetic system tasked with establishing conviction, with developing a particular (particularly critical) formula at the level of every medium evolving independent of the surrounding art and general culture. This is what critical distance means.

While I might differ with Fried on which movement executes the task of culture more effectively (are we better served by sensory attunement or critical distance?), he rightly identifies in his evaluation of Minimalism a persistent problematic of the time with regard to how work does or does not open up to its world. Dewey’s distinction between good and bad, socially expansive or contracting experiences that become so for reasons beyond mere interest, suggests there is a viable aesthetic position that utilizes interest to establish commitment. At its worst, in other words, the generalization of interest functions like the absorptive experiences that comingle with the entertainment spectacle of mass culture and Fried is right to mark that risk as real. Another way to say this would be that, because anything can go into the hollow container, and because these link one-thing-after-another, the Minimalist artwork can be described (at its worst and under certain conditions) as a near perfect cypher for the container’s homogenizing power, which power is in itself an amplification of the power of the individual commodity object.

From the perspective of containerization, in other words, interest and spectacle are mutually dependent terms engaging an increasingly lazy imagination. While acknowledging the rightness of Fried’s core objection (which is so glaringly obvious in so much contemporary neo-Minimalist or massively-scaled Minimalist art) however, John Dewey is useful for differentiating types of experience at the level of interest. Dewey makes a distinction between mere experience and cumulative experience: the one is essentially synonymous with spectacle and the other with educative and positively socializing experience. On the topic of experience and education, Dewey writes:

Each experience may be lively, vivid, and “interesting,” and yet their disconnectedness may artificially generate dispersive, disintegrated, centrifugal habits. The consequence of formation of such habits is inability to control future experiences. They are then taken, either by way of enjoyment or discontent and revolt, just as they come.31

We (me, many friends in the art world) have been trained to see, for example, the massive containers of Judd’s Marfa as emblematic of a universal form tuned elegantly to the planar forms and mineral colors of the desert Southwest, but also the playful, kid-friendly sculpture gardens of ultra-elite museums, not to mention the neat scaling down of the box-forms to the table-tops of lucky collectors. But Judd’s scaled up boxes could also be seen as tuning their audience to the visual pleasures of debris field and commodity alike – as amplifiers of the immersive sensation of the commodity fetish. This is what Fried means when, toward the close of “Art and Objecthood” he claims that “it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theater,”32 meaning the spectacular versions of everyday life at every scale.

Bracketing the evaluative aspect of “Art and Objecthood” about which so much ink has been spilled, this axis (interest and the commodity) suggests that there are aspects of Fried’s framework that can be productively deployed in terms of a critical perspective on an emerging, widespread container culture at the moment when the piece was written. Each aspect of Literalism/Minimalism described by Fried can, in summary, be used to describe the shipping containers and manufactured boxes of the era, which are shapeless, hollow, designed for seriality, and performative in terms of the behavior they elicit from the beholder. His critique, if extrapolated beyond the artworld, speaks volumes to the subsequent acculturation of the laborer, or, in the home, the consumer. In addition, Fried’s criticism of Minimalism as literal, offers a useful account of container culture that challenges the artist and art historian alike to move beyond the habitually celebratory accounts of ‘the everyday’ and ‘play’ as inherently and always liberating.

In thinking about containers while reading “Art and Objecthood,” Barbara Rose’s 1965 essay “ABC Art” is likewise paradigmatic for the precision with which it identified the container as expressing a generalizable experience of the time in a specific neighborhood.33   The question is what kind of experience is being described?

Judd’s latest sculptures, for example, are wall reliefs made of a transverse metal rod from which are suspended, at regular intervals, identical bar or box units…Morris’s four identical mirrored boxes, which were so elusive that they appeared literally transparent, and his recent L-shape plywood pieces were demonstrations of both variability and interchangeability in the use of standard units. To find variety in repetition where only the nuance alters seems more and more to interest artists, perhaps in reacting to the increasing uniformity of the environment and repetitiveness of a circumscribed experience. Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, silkscreen paintings of the same image repeated countless times, and films in which people or things hardly move are illustrations of the kind of life situations many ordinary people will face or face already.34

Judd’s “box units,” Morris’s abstract, spatial “standard units,” and both the form and labels of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes together express “the increasing uniformity of the environment and repetitiveness of a circumscribed experience” of ordinary people at the time – the experience of mass produced, ordinary,  people. Repetitive, standardized, and reacting to the “uniformity of the environment and the repetitiveness of a circumscribed experience,” Rose articulated the social features of container culture “as illustrations of the kind of life situations many ordinary people will face or face already.” Elsewhere, Rose expands the domain of the box within art by including the instructional nature of Judson Dance and the musical containers of composer John Cage, which would  include his students in Fluxus, who invented the reduced means, instructional performance “Event” and the small boxes of industrial cast-offs associated with the Fluxkit. By contextualizing box forms and life situations, Rose is implicitly linking the work to the culture of containerization as I’ve laid it out. Significantly, the issue is not whether the work affirms or critiques those ‘life situations,’ but rather that the work tunes the user to them.

Clearly, the many art movements of the era and time in New York (Pop, Minimalism, Fluxus and Happenings, for example) can be differentiated (and have been) with regard to their making work that affirms, criticizes, or brackets a seemingly ever-expanding, container culture. Clearly, the prevalence of actual manufactured boxes in all of these movements suggests that the container is a leitmotif of a period style in art that encompasses them all. When Barbara Rose writes that “To find variety in repetition where only the nuance alters seems more and more to interest artists,” she makes the connection between the box forms in visual art and the world at large, continuing in terms that establish motive, “perhaps in reacting to the increasing uniformity of the environment and repetitiveness of a circumscribed experience.” Container art, by this account, enables creativity and therefore forms of free play inherent in the environment of Reynolds’s ‘ticky-tacky’ container homes and people. Calvin and Hobbes can be imagined as hanging out in a back yard of just such ‘little box’ and being lulled into thinking they have created something meaningful.

Like the Minimalist object, Warhol’s boxes are adamantly empty; the silkscreen ink spread taut and flat across each plywood box surface, which box the viewer knows is empty because it is made of plywood, not cardboard as the real one would be. The container, in this case, is all about its outside, its label, which partially links it to the Modernist surface. Except that the Brillo Boxes represent, through their label, an outside world. When these empty containers were piled high at the Stable Gallery in 1964, they formed an architecture of empty containers, as depicted in Fred McDarrah’s iconic photographs of Warhol among his Brillo Boxes. In these photographs, the beholder enters an apparent warehouse of container culture, reconfigured as an image of its packaging-and-labeling-and-signifying system, but absent the goods. The French theorist Jean-Francois Baudrillard made much of the emptiness of these boxes with their signifying labels, writing that “the simulacrum is never that which conceals truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”35   Because the simulacrum is hollow, in other words, the container is empty. In and of themselves, in other words, these signs (whether Brillo box, Campbell’s Soup, or Movie Star) have no meaning, which emptiness demonstrates the socially alienating nature of commodity capitalism and its empty, but signifying, containers in particular. Not surprisingly, Pop appears in “Art and Objecthood” as “an episode in the history of taste,” which fleeting nature associates it with throw-away culture, with the commodity, the spectacle, and its boxes.36 From this perspective, the idea that there is any criticality at all in Pop Art (whether by scuff mark, punctum, or compulsive repetition of vacuity) becomes absurd. Which it is, or at least has always seemed so to me.

What are we to make, then, of Fluxus click-boxes, briefcases, cardboard containers and book objects, which are all handheld, or tabletop box objects that are opened and then used by the beholder? Significantly, the objects contained in many of the kits were purchased from the seconds bins on Canal Street. Which fact locates them very specifically in the object-hood of SoHo. In these kits, both vision and touch, or to borrow from Fried, eyesight and body, work together to make contact with more than the object’s surface. When used as intended (which they rarely are) little things inside the boxes are taken out. Click. Usually one by one, Click. Click. Then the tiny ball or pin or button or cap is handled and sniffed, or touched or prodded or used or listened to or tasted. Click. Then the small objects are returned to the box, which is then closed. Click. The bracketed experience, which is necessary for its standing as art (and which comes from the origins of Fluxus in music), is circumscribed by the physical space and time between the beholder’s encounters with inside of the box, the outside of the box and the movement of the body (hands, arms, face) interacting with its contents. The exploratory intent behind these actions embodies the mechanics of their status as objects of aesthetic interest (Fried’s term).

Clearly, the Fluxkit rejects the vision-based, Renaissance-type humanism that generated the perspective boxes that were closed up by Modernist painters and sculptors in rendering self-relational, away-from-the-world-turning artworks that gave Modernism its grace-full presentness. However, they also rejected the idealized box forms, the gestalt container aspect, of gallery-friendly Minimalism. The kits nevertheless produce remarkably absorptive, aesthetic experiences that both tune the person to the world and engender a way of being in the world that allows for critical distance from the normative sensory paradigm, as Modernism would have us do. This fulcrum of experience and critical distance results in the educative, positive, connective, effect theorized by Dewey. George Maciunas’s paradigmatic 1964 Fluxus cc fiVe ThReE Fluxkit, for example, surveys many Fluxus artists’ boxed works inside a unifying container. It has variable contents depending on when a given version was actually fabricated. Each retrofitted briefcase contains: a noisemaker by Joe Jones, an Endless Box by Mieko (Shieko) Shiomi that is made of nested paper boxes, a Finger Box by Ay-O that offers the beholder a tactile surprise inside a blind finger hole, a Bean Rolls by Alison Knowles that consist of an extended study of the legume printed on strips of paper and with a few beans in a mass manufactured cigar box, and a dozen or so other works, including performance event instructions on cards in latched click-cases. At least until they enter the museum, these boxed items remain accessible for sensory examination: things can be pulled out and put back into the box.  These are sensory games calibrated to an ever expanding sensorium. According to art historian Benjamin Buchloh, Fluxkits “foreground the accumulation of objects over the mere mapping of the painterly surface by the grid structure of the found crate.”37 Thus, this work displays what Buchloh has described as “performative enactment, one where object and subject would suddenly appear as equal actors”38 in terms that resist the problems of theatricality that would inhere, were they merely made up of a “mere mapping of the painterly surface by the grid structure of the found crate,” which I would argue is rightly identified as a risk in Minimalism as described by Fried. The Fluxkit, in other words, is no passive receptacle or staging devise. Rather, the artwork happens in the interaction of the user with the boxes’ insides and outsides, content and context, seeing and embodiment. Because they contain things engaged with in performative enactment, in summary, the container of the Fluxkit is experientially full in Fried’s terms.

The beholder uses the work, which becomes something like a Heideggerian tool through which whatever object is at hand is understood more deeply through the elicited curiosity; “Curiosity . . . does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters.”39 However, unlike a proper tool (a hammer, pliers), the Fluxus work lacks instructions. There isn’t really a single right way (though there are many wrong ways) to use it. The beholder/user of Fluxkits almost by definition uses the things in them in surprising ways – to tell stories, to make a visual joke with a friend who may be standing nearby, to establish a limit to some part of their sensory exploration. Can I hear this cotton ball in my ear? Does this prong make me sneeze if I put it in my nose? If I plunge my finger in this hole here, will it come out bloody? Ah, cotton. Ouch, nails! We had many a Fluxkit lying around when I was young and the things in them were not especially unlike the artifacts and objects elsewhere in my world, except they were framed and so we interacted with them intentionally.  I recall fondly Bracken Hendricks, (another Fluxkid and the son of Fluxus artist, Geoff Hendricks) meticulously collecting feces samples in boxes and labeling them carefully before sending them to George Maciunas for his notorious collection.

Fluxus containers, in summary, initiate the beholder (a holding, handling beholder, maybe a tool-being holder in the Heideggerian sense) to explore and take interest in the world. The boxes sensitize the user to a world where the public is overwhelmed and numbed by the excess goods proliferating, literally ad nauseum, in the world and landing in  the seconds bins along Canal Street, where Maciunas made use of them as artworks. The kits express a collective obligation (or opportunity) to repurpose the excess manufactured articles of late capitalism. The kits make this argument as artworks that track a fundamental shift in the sensorium of the time away from narrowly conceived vision-as-everything, a logic that lies very much at the core of Greenbergian flatness, but not Friedian shape, if we see shape in terms of embodied knowledge and experiential fullness. Today, we might call it recycling, precycling or object hacking. In sum, while Fluxkits use containers to organize a wealth of sensory information, they are not hollow in Fried’s sense. Therefore, while the boxes may be shapeless, the aesthetic experience the work generates through sensory exploration, does so around a range of carefully framed, sensory-cum-cognitive structures uniquely knowable in SoHo in the 1960s, which could be described as the neighborhood of objecthood.

Instead of Renaissance Humanism putting Man at the center of the world (by which logic natural resources and non-white peoples could be readily exploited), Modern work proposed a material and symbolic independence from that world. The political relevance of Modernism, for its proponents, lay in the simultaneously formal and social progress of this turning-away. Art becomes a bracket from the noise and distraction. Greenberg described kitsch, whether of the tin-pan alley, commodity, or passive realist artistic variety, in these terms.  Fundamentally, most Fluxus artists likewise rejected mass-generated popular art forms (as manipulations of the public), passive consumerism (of the Pop Art variety) and the narrowly visual definition of fine art (rejected by Modernists on account of the formal/material basis of each medium). In other words, at least with regard to Fluxus, there are some compelling overlaps with Fried’s position.

Fried and many artists in Fluxus both responded to container culture in the negative, even as Fluxus used the container to propose an alternative to mainstream container culture of both the commodity and artworld kind. Fried rejected the hallowed hollowness of the box that folded out into everything, whereas Fluxus artists (with some exception) filled the boxes with the overstocks of consumer culture. Both rejected corporate kitsch, while Fluxus artists often embraced vaudevillian and industrial low culture as an alternative to both Modernist purity and mainstream culture. Also, it should be said, both rejected theatricality (or used the term theater in the pejorative), but aimed the term at different aspects of culture, but on similar grounds. Finally, while many Fluxus artists have used boxes and containers to hold their works, it is important to understand that the aesthetic model they are working with is multisensory, and often specifically musical. Beyond the party politics of some Fluxus artists (George Maciunas, Henry Flynt for example), the thrust of Fluxus work lies often in its association with music (and the idea of the direct encounter), or more specifically with the knowledge gained through an intermedial understanding of music as a medium, which includes the written aspect of notation, the visual/graphic aspect of how it is read, the space of performance, the sensory qualities of each instrument, and the body of the performer. Intermedia, by this reading, is not the same thing as theater in the Friedian sense, since it refers to artists identifying the places where the unique aspects of established media interact across sensory boundaries.

Performativity and theatricality overlap, in other words, in the predictability, passive acceptance, spectacular scale, and affirmative values of some of each of these movements – or at least in the amped up commercial version of Minimalism, Pop Art, and (even some) Fluxus. The academic version of the postmodern [the institutionalized variant associated with today’s hyper commercialized art market] has perverted the aesthetic, social and material effects of its founding community of artists. Fried, one could argue, saw the betrayal coming, by virtue of his emphasis on a few key terms that tell us a lot about how containers work: The inside/outside relationality of the container, the everyday materials of container culture, the confusion of sign and symbol, and a particular vulnerability to theatricality. What began for these artists and their audiences as an inquisitive, intimate, funky encounter with an emerging sense of the real (the container, its things, the loft space) in and as art, was attacked in Fried’s account where he seemed (almost uncannily) to anticipate the change in kind that came with the commercialization of these art movements. Clearly the insight lay in his predisposition, as a proponent of Modernism, to reject the work. The inside/outside nature of the container became a scalable stage-set, the everyday materials of container culture became a phantasmagoria of consumerism, the examination of sign and symbol yielded to spectacle, and theatricality (intermedia) was transformed from an examination of the overlapping spheres of media practice into an utter absence of media signposts and a proliferation of the technological sublime.

“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).

When Jesus had finished these words, the crowds were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.

—Matthew 7: 28-291

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you stand between it and the mirror of your imagination.  You may not see your ears but they will be there.”

— Mark Twain

A confession has to be a part of your new life.

— L. Wittgenstein

denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
[ for there is no stance
that does not see you. You must change your life.]

— R.M.Rilke, Archaïscher Torso Apollos

I am concerned here to explore how (and perhaps why) certain texts can come to be authoritative for me or us, to become our authority. I use the idea of a “text” here as referring to anything of which one can give a reading—which is what I understand Fried’s art criticism and history to be doing.   By ‘authority’ I mean the experience of finding that a text not only contains information and argument but that it shapes the way that I (perhaps we) understand and act in the world.  Such a text would be, in the metaphor of Ivan Illych, a “vineyard,” from which we harvest nourishment, not a container into which we put our knowledge.2  Our relation as readers to such texts is the subject of this essay.

A reading, as I will argue, is not an “interpretation.” I am not concerned here with “interpretation,” if by “interpretation” we mean standing outside and making something of a work, as in my epigraph from Mark Twain. Interpretation is a form of control, of making one’s order. As Emerson remarks in the Divinity School Address, the “doors of this temple” and the “oracles of this truth” are “guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received second-hand.  Truly speaking it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another… “3 “Instruction” comes from interpretation—I am concerned with provocation, being called out.4 Writing of Montaigne, he notes “I do not know of any book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words they would bleed.”5  Note that Emerson suggests that Montaigne’s writing approaches speech—it may overcome Plato’s strictures in the Phaedrus. If a text becomes authoritative, what has been and is our relation to it?

When Emerson uses the word “intuition” here, he means it, I think, in the sense that Kant means it, as an Anschauung, a word that is, indeed, usually rendered as “intuition.”6 But that translation does not catch what is important here: the “an” refers to a directed attention, to an attention that determines by its gaze what becomes one’s own.  Thus Nietzsche can start The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music like this: “Wir werden viel für die ästhetische Wissenschaft gewonnen haben, wenn wir nicht nur zur logischen Einsicht, sondern zur unmittelbaren Sicherheit der Anschauung gekommen sind …” and he notoriously or famously proceeds to indicate that the development of art is bound up in the marriage of the duality of Apollo and Dionysos.  In English: “We will have accomplished much for an aesthetic science [N.B. not, as in a usual translation, “the science of aesthetics”] if we have arrived not only at the logical insight but at the unmediated assurance of Anschauung….”  To experience something as an Anschauung is to incorporate it as part of how one is in the world.  As Stanley Cavell has written in relation to the work of Wittgenstein: “Either the suggestion penetrates past assessment and becomes part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds, or it is philosophically useless.”7  Such writing, if there is such, has obvious risks.  People are inconstant, unclear, self-protective, self-deceived, dishonest.  Kierkegaard writes an entire book (Authority and Revelation: The Book of Adler) about a particular case of such self-deception and what it can teach us.

In his famous—to some notorious—essay “Art and Objecthood,”8 Michael Fried advances several propositions about the variety of possible experiences of that which has been called “art.” These propositions, both in what they urge and in what they reject, continue to inform Fried’s work, including his studies of Diderot, Manet, Eakins, Menzel, David Smith, Morris Louis, and a wide range of others.9

First, Fried distinguishes what he calls “literalist” from what he calls “modernist” art. Literalist art is the art of people like Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg. Fried calls such art “theatrical” in that it enforces an awareness of the conditions in which the beholder encounters it (A&O 153).  It demands that the viewer take it into account and enforces on the viewing subject his or her distance from the object (136-7).  Its very objecthood is its theatricality.

I thus encounter literalist art as if “the work in question exists for [me] alone, even if [I am] not actually alone with the work at the time.” I have merely to enter a room in which such a work has been placed “to become that beholder, that audience of one—almost as if the work in question has been waiting for [me]. And once [I am] in the room the work refuses, obstinately, to let [me] alone—which is to say it refuses to stop confronting [me], distancing [me], isolating [me].” Such art is thus “incomplete without the beholder” (163).

Against such art, Fried instantiates works such as that of Morris Louis, David Smith and Anthony Caro.  Such art—he is referring here to Caro’s sculptures—he avers “defeats objecthood … by the efficacy of the gesture; like certain music and poetry, [it is] possessed by the knowledge of the human body and how … it makes meaning…. [It] essentialize[s] meaningfulness as such—as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes [this art] possible” (162).

Secondly, theatricality is “at war with art as such” (163). Art works that are art “as such” (by which Fried means e.g. David Smith, Anthony Caro and Elliott Carter and not Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage) are “explicitly concerned with the conventions that constitute their respective essences.” (I note here a profound difference between Fried and the thought of Arthur Danto).10 They call forth, that is, the history or genealogy that engenders them.

How do we know what counts as true to art, of “art as such”? Take a parallel case: In the sixteenth century, arguments over what counts as Scripture raised the question of precisely what makes something Scripture. What can count as proof—for one cannot ask the author, and certainly not the Author? The key here is the experience of finding oneself in (absorbed by) what has a claim to be art—or in this case in what claims to be Scripture.  “Art as such” gives this:  art is thus never primarily representation. I return to the parallel with Scripture below.

Last, literalist works are “inexhaustible… not because of any fullness … but because there is nothing to exhaust. [They are] endless the way a road might be if it were circular.” Persistence in time is “central to literalist art” which is “essentially a presentment of endless or indefinite duration.” Modernist art, however, is experienced “as if one’s experience … has no duration—not because one in fact experiences [it] … in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest” (166-167). For Fried: “We are all literalists most or all of our lives.” There are, however, possible moments of ecstasy: “Presentness is grace” (168). The position is analogous to my epigraph from Wittgenstein.

The essay raises a number of complex questions about our relation to the world of which and in which we live, for Fried’s concerns go quietly well beyond academic art criticism. Fried is concerned with 1/ our ability (or lack thereof) to “mean what we say” and do (he echoes an essay by his friend Stanley Cavell with that title); 2/ with the human relation to convention and this the weight of our past; and 3/ with temporality and its demands.  Thus his epigraph to “Art and Objecthood” from Jonathan Edwards: “It is certain within me that the world exists anew every moment: that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment renewed.”  Fried, by the voice of Edwards, raises the question of our relation to presentness (46), to that in which we are absorbed.

Rilke wrote that the stone of the archaic torso of Apollo in the Louvre “explodes like starlight” and, as my third epigraph indicates, thought that such art made claims upon any being in its presence.  To recall:

for here there is no stance
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Note that Rilke does not say that we see the statue: no matter where I am (“stance”) I feel seen, but the statue does not look at me—and not because it is “only” a torso. The German for “must” (change your life) is musst and not sollst: the change of life is not something one should do but something that must happen. My own experience verifies for me Fried’s phenomenological point (and Rilke’s poetic claim). In Florence, I was privileged to be seen by the six-foot, three-inch bronze apoxyomenos (“Scraper”) that recently had been extraordinarily restored after spending two thousand years in the sea off Croatia.  It saw me but it looked at me not. It left me alone. Fried, to put it simply, is right.

But how?  why? I want to pose two questions here: first, “on the basis of what is he right?” and, second, what is Fried’s (the man writing about his experience) relation to his experience? Experiences such as those Fried instantiates about what he calls “modernist” art, or my experience with the Florence statue, have a certain authoritative claim.  How do they accomplish this?

A step back. You may ask: “are there such authoritative texts? How does, how can, a text come to become part of how I assess the world, become, as it were, my analyst?” Are there texts such as those Samuel Beckett referred to in a letter to his director Alan Schneider as having “the power … to claw”?11 One answer is—or was—obvious.  Scripture. What would it mean not to approach Scripture with a mind to ‘interpreting’ it?  Here one must be careful. Much of the contemporary debate over the authoritative status of Scripture tends to revolve around a debate between those who regard Scripture as authoritatively inspired and those who regard it as infallible.12  The debate rages but—for my purposes here—misleads us by omitting as central the relation of the reader to the text and rather seeing it from, as it were, God’s eye. Here I need rather to consider two factors: hermeneutics and literalism.  A standard hermeneutic understanding contends at least three things: first that a text (in the broadest sense of the term) is a work that mediates meaning. (Note that I have not said written by humans, nor have I insisted on linguistics). Second, that as a text, its meaning has independence from its author. (See Gadamer, Ricoeur, Cavell.) Thirdly, that such texts are polysemous—that is the same text will fit differently with different readers—however: not anything will count as a reading.13

Not all works are open to such a reading, to, that is, the most honest and deepest critical understanding that can be brought. Some works will: indeed, it is the definition of a great work (do I dare call it such texts what we mean by “the canon”?) that it has stood up to and surpassed any critique over time. Luther could not find himself in the Apocrypha (nor for that matter could Calvin) and he was at pains to separate it out from the rest of the New Testament (and he tried also to remove Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation).14 The 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith was to follow Luther’s guidance  and there we find:  “The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings” (Article III).15 This is followed by the assertion that:  “The authority (NB again) of the holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the Author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”

What is important here is that the so-called antilegomena books are not deemed to have the authority that others had, presumably because their author was felt to be insufficiently authoritative, in this case not God.  It is the case that Luther was not alone in his doubts. Erasmus calls the books into question in his Annotationes as, ironically, did also the Roman Catholic Cardinal Cajetan, who drew up the bill of excommunication against Luther.  But not much was made of this issue before Luther and that is because, under Catholicism, authority lay not only in Scripture but also in tradition, the Pope and the councils.  It is only when authority is deemed to have as its source sola scriptura—only as a text—that such controversies become important.

And here we have a problem.  If God is the author and thus Scripture authored by God is authoritative, how do we know that the Apocrypha are not authoritative? Likewise—how will we know that Fried is right in his readings? After all, we can’t ask God and even if the artist is still alive, it is not clear that he or she is the final authority on the work.16 Hobbes is explicit on this as was Tyndale and the others. Indeed, when Anne Hutchinson claimed before court in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that she had received direct revelations from God,17 this was adequate reason to excommunicate her and banish her from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Erasmus, however, helps us on this problem.  In the Paraclesis (1516), Erasmus proposes what is in effect an art of reading for life.18  While he urges that the Scriptures must be translated into all vernaculars (for reasons not unlike those of Hobbes in Behemoth)—“I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles,”19— his edition in Latin (1514-1516) carries the Greek on the facing page. He asserts that the word-acts (as I might call them) of Scripture—the πράγματα/pragmata—themselves inscribe truth in readers. Πρᾶγμα means “deed or act to be done,” it is the concrete actuality of πρᾶξις/praxis. Thus: “And this kind of philosophy doth rather consist in the affects of the mind, than in syllogisms. It is a life rather than a disputation. It is an inspiration rather than erudition. And rather a new transformation, than a reasoning” (104). He refers to “the philosophy of Christ,” which, however, had to be spiritually incorporated (“made flesh”) rather than simply adhered to in the rituals and a mouthing of the words.  It is a life, not an argument. This, explicitly, gives a “rebirth” (renascentia). He notes that different people will read it differently and as best they can as long, which is not a problem so long as they will seek to “Comprehend what [they] can, express what [they] can.” And he further notes: “This [philosophy] adjusts itself to the capacities of everyone alike. … Yet it is not so fitted to the lowest that it does not present marvels to the very highest.” —Erasmus is doing hermeneutics. Most important: “these writings bring you the living image of His holy mind … and … render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed on Him with your very eyes” (108; my italics). The reading gives us reality, thus more than what would be merely actual. Erasmus gives us a version—but importantly now with the printed press—of what Saint Augustine reports as when hearing a voice prompting him to tolle, lege, he opened the Scriptures at random to be overwhelmed by the passage in Romans 12-15,  the “transformation of believers” section, urging a μετάνοια/metanoia, a “change of mind and correction.”20 As Fried concludes “Art and Objecthood,” “presentness is grace.”

Two thoughts follow from this discussion of pragmata.  The first has to do with literalism. What is a literal reading of Scripture, of any text that allows one?  It is standard today—and not without some reason—to cast ridicule on such a claim, along the lines perhaps of what we think to have been the exchange between Bryan and Darrow at the Scopes trial. But turning to the early Reformation period we find another, and to my mind, more important element. As Tyndale wrote: “thou shalt understand therefore that the Scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense.”  Note however how he continues:

“And that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth, whereunto if thou cleave, thou canst never err or go out of the way. And if thou leave the literal sense, thou canst not but go out of the way. Nevertheless, the scripture uses proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do; but that which the proverb, similitude, riddle or allegory signifieth, is ever the literal sense, which thou must seek out diligently: as in the English we borrow words and sentences of one thing, and apply them unto another, and give them new significations.”21

We have to, as Tyndale says, “find out the literal sense.” So literalism becomes hermeneutics.  Note that Tyndale conceives of this as an individual achievement—each has to accomplish such a reading. When Luther defended himself against the excommunication edict, he did so on three grounds. First, he argued that “Scripture alone is the true lord and master of all writings and doctrine on earth.”22 The referent for authority, in other words, was not the will of God but only the available expression of God, God as He is available to us in writing. Stephen Greenblatt refers to this as “the fetishism of Scripture preached by all of the early Protestants.”23

Second, Luther wanted to demonstrate that “we have now the right to weaken the power of councils and to contradict their acts, also to pass judgment on their decrees and to confess boldly whatever we think is true, regardless of whether it is approved or condemned by any council” (D, art. 29, p. 80). Note here that Luther sees no contradiction between confessing what one sees as true and Scripture as “lord and master.”

Finally, Luther was concerned that there be no earthly human authority that could possibly claim to be the last word. This meant most centrally the claims of the leaders of the Church. On the matter of the sale of indulgences, for instance, Luther suggests that the pope was in effect claiming the power to get people out of purgatory. “If you ask on what grounds he can do this, he says, ‘I am pope.’ But enough of this!” Luther continues, “The words of Christ expressly state that his authority is on earth, not above or beneath it” (D, art. 26, p. 75).

Luther’s stance raised the problem of the relation between that which one’s conscience found true and that which was true for the Church. He needed to reconcile the actuality of individual conscience with the existence of a church; he thus required that conscience generate a church rather than rely on the existence of one.24 His answer was to look not to what the Church said and had said but to locate the ultimate authority in the written word of God as it was available to humans, in reading. By being written and with no available author, it was not subject to human authority—and in any case, as Luther and later John Calvin persuasively argued, human authorities were many and often contradicted each other. Scripture—the text –stood there and required understanding of each human being. God could not in any case be directly known.

The problem posed by the Reformation has to do with the authority that an existing text can have for a conscience. Protestantism phrases the question of authority as the general question of what it means to read and find a text available. (We remember that Fried’s epigraph is from the great Protestant Jonathan Edwards.) I say “available” here because it is clear in Luther that this is not a matter of “interpretation.” Luther does not think that what he is offering is an interpretation of the Scripture, nor is he asserting that he must be right. “Who knows?” he expostulates, “God may have called me and raised me up [to be everybody’s teacher]. They ought to be afraid lest they despise God in me” (D, p. 8). Luther also suggests that he will recant if and when his opponents show him—that is, make available to him—what in the Scripture confutes him: he is suggesting that he will have to come to find something in his conscience that he has not seen before, a better reading.  This is what we call critique—in fact self-critique. He will himself have to encounter what Emerson called “provocation,” that is, be called forth before he can find the way or reason to change his mind. This is what William Tyndale, in 1525, called “the literal sense” of the Scripture, the sense of confidence that the meaning of the Scripture stands in front of us and that “interpretation” is a way of avoiding that directness (see R, p. 100). A literal reading is not so much the taking of every word at face value as the ability to allow the text to work on you, not to interpose an interpretation between yourself and the text.  It is to allow the text to read you.  The emphasis is on the corporeality of the human understanding of the Scripture: it is as incarnate, limited, thrown-on-this-earth human beings that we encounter God’s word, and we can and should only encounter it as embodied creatures. There is no other way; there is no special part of the human being that is somehow privileged in its access to God’s word. A Scripture-based theology is necessarily this-world oriented.25

The attention to pragmata calls us to a second consideration, that of the complexity of the difference between writing and the speech-act.  In the Phaedrus and the Theatetus Plato famously  argued that writing severs discourse from the timely and time-bound deed or act of speaking.26 Knowing what is meant is made possible by hearing and seeing the speaker.  What to do when we cannot go to the speaker for the speech act?  The problem is for the author to write as if speaking and for the reader to experience a text as if it were spoken to one: “Cut these words and they will bleed.” Not all texts will do this perhaps, but to insist that none can is, I think, quite wrong. No speech-act exists completely in isolation from its speaker and his /her contexts (note the plural), although the speaker may isolate him- or herself from his or her words—as one has increasingly the sense with the present President of the United States.  If something is meant, we can come to understand what is meant (even, by the way, the notorious snippet from Nietzsche’s note that he had lost his umbrella adduced by Derrida in Epérons/Spurs).27

But with Scripture we have a written text, for which, however, the author is not available. No matter how great our learning, we cannot reconstruct the context of God authoring.28  How are we to know what it means? I do not hallucinate here when I say that the problem is exactly the same as the one that confronted Freud when he sought to set out the meaning of Michelangelo’s Moses statue. (Neither Moses nor Michelangelo were available and more importantly everything one could know about the statue was already there.)  For a brilliant example of this how to encounter such a situation, see T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death—on reading a painting by Poussin.

What does it mean to say that a text might require an understanding of a reader?  Here I am helped by sources that might appear strange—though my references to Michelangelo and Poussin might have forewarned you.  This is obviously ( to me at least) the matter that is at hand in “Art and Objecthood” and for which Fried has been subject to criticism.  Bear with me.

I want now to take these thoughts and bring them to two authors who have occupied my thoughts.  The first might seem unlikely, Thomas Hobbes. What is the source of the authority of his writing, in particular of Leviathan?

It seems to me clear that Hobbes hoped that his work, in particular Leviathan, would become a textbook at university.  In Chapter Nine, he sets out a table of the various sciences that is modelled on the curriculum books in general use at Oxford and Cambridge.29 Notably his contribution to science is all by itself down at the bottom left-hand corner—in effect he is expanding science, developing the hitherto unset-forth science of civil philosophy. But this is not the source of the authority of the book.

He opens and closes Leviathan with the wish that it be taught at university.  In fact, all other doctrines that might conflict with Hobbes’ (including those that threaten its basic presuppositions, such as Boylean plenism, i.e. anything that suggested the existence of vacuum [i.e. nothing], or of incorporeal substances) would have to count as “discourse which . . .  represented not unto us our own conceptions” (Elements of Law, I.5), and because they do not, they are seditious teachings to be outlawed.

And there is an immediate problem.  If the substance of education must consist of “our own conceptions” and if, as he says in the Second Appendix to the Latin Leviathan, the laws of nature are written in everyone’s heart (all nineteen of them!), and it is nevertheless the case that most beings are illiterate of them, how then is education to be effective?  One is urged in the Introduction to “read thyself” (his unusual translation of gnosce teipsum) but most don’t. Hobbes seems to think that while the mind  is “white paper” and thus a blank, the heart  is the locus of the inscription of natural law (albeit law that is hard to read). The mind must be instructed—how is that instruction to become incarnate—that is read—as that which is in our yet unread heart. Much like Erasmus or Tyndale on Scripture, here it is the heart that must be read to become our life—not so the mind, which is apparently immediately available and dangerously motile and hence a particular source of political danger. The obvious question to ask is then “what is it that keeps us from knowing or acknowledging—from reading —these conceptions?” Reading, I noted above, was central to the enterprise of contemporary Protestantism. The Scriptures were now in the vernacular such that they could be read, without intermediary, directly engaged by each, man and woman alike.30 Yet, even with the text of our hearts in front of, or rather inside, us, most of us did not or could not or would not read. On the importance of the relation of a reader to a text, Hobbes comes close to joining Tyndale but with less confidence in our access to our hearts—his worry was that the text as it was written in one’s heart was not available to be read or that we would resist reading it.

With this we can reconceptualize the role that fear plays in Hobbes thought.  Fear is Hobbes’s remedy for the failures of knowledge. As most will not or cannot read their hearts, what we need, in order to respond to that which is in our heart, is first of all for fear of what will happen if we do not act according to what is in fact in our hearts. (Hobbes has written down for us the text to which we should respond.)  Fear, however, cannot be the final stopping point nor the grounding of the polity.  Hobbes closes the Introduction as follows:

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be onely to consider, if he also find not the same in himselfe. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.

What is striking here is the claim that the proof of what Hobbes has written—which he declares in effect to only be what he, Hobbes (as particularly skilled), has read in our heart (the text is the same in all)—is to be obtained by looking into oneself honestly and critically and finding there what Hobbes has only, if eloquently, transcribed. The Sovereign, properly read, is us.  He uses the demonstration again in the following passage that follows immediately in Chapter 13 on the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there bee Lawes, and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words?

What Hobbes wants, in other words, is for his words to so strike you that you realize that they are your words.  But this “your” is misleading:  they are not precisely my words as they are the words of anyone (the laws of nature being in everyone’s heart the same).  We encounter here a problem that is relevant to Fried’s work: is the experience that a reading makes available my experience, or is it the experience of some particular our, or is it an experience that is valid for all should one be able to acknowledge it? Back to Fried’s claim that in the presence of literalist or theatrical art one is an “audience of one.” Theatrical art produces an isolated audience of one. When, however, Fried closes the “Introduction” to Absorption and Theatricality, he states that the essence of the “anti-theatrical”—thus of the absorptive— is that it treats “the beholder as if he were not there.”31 In Hobbes, the “one” remains barely present, possibly available to be read, but only as a universal, God created.  It occupies, we might say, a space between the theatricalized isolate and the “not there” of absorptive art.

The frontispiece to Leviathan is the iconographic correlative of the book as a whole. Hobbes seeks to make the Leviathan—the sovereign—an object of sight such that what all see there will, in fact, be what could have been read in their heart.  The sovereign is thus each of our selves joined together and constructed as an object of sight. You come out in the morning to pick up your milk and what you see is the Sovereign—it cannot be missed. And when we see the Leviathan on the horizon, we are in fact seeing ourselves as making the body of the Sovereign, much in the way that we might see ourselves present on stage in a theater—as a kind of chorus of the heart, say.

That the sovereign is seen is significant for our understanding of our experience of the glory of its authority.  (Note that Fried’s work is centrally about “beholding.”) The glory of God is something that is always seen.  When Christ is transfigured on Mount Tabor (Matt 17:2) his glory shines forth as a blinding light: “He was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his garments became white as the light.” What is important here is that one can do nothing before the glory of God but acknowledge it.  There is no choice in the matter—it simply overwhelms.32  The intention of Hobbes’s book is to provide a reading such that one is awed and instructed by the Sovereign: a whole book to do what Fried tries in each essay.

Glory in this sense (of God, Christ, the Sovereign) is then something beheld and is an intransitive relation33:  I mean that while one sees the glory of God, one is not seen by God.  (I am the analysand). Similar thoughts hold true for more earthly examples: a Roman triumph, for instance, is the presentation of a great war victor as almost a god for the acknowledgment of the crowd.34  The theatricality of the Sovereign as he towers over the landscape is central to his sovereignty.  In a like manner, when one reads accounts of the theatricality of the self-presentation of the King in English Courts (see the description of the court of and of Henry VIII in Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning) the glory of the king could not but produce awe.35  See the portraits of Henry VIII at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool and Elizabeth I, in Royal Museums Greenwich.

Hobbes wants this book to strike you the way Holbein intended to show the monarch in his portrait, to accept it the way one accepts the actuality of what is on stage.  You will acknowledge that it is a faithful transcription of what is in your heart.

But while these considerations might make sense for early Protestants, or for sovereign-centered civil philosophy à la Hobbes, can we—people like those reading this book, and not just us for we are not as different as we might wish—find a text in ourselves?

I turn here to my third case: Nietzsche. Here the problem is the same but framed quite differently.  If we have changed such that we do not accept that the Scriptures are God’s words, if we do not accept that what is in each heart is the same as each other heart and that it is possible to give one reading that is true, if these changes are our actuality, then what text can possibly stand authoritatively for us?  We might admit to individual experiences that have this quality but not ones that generate a Church or a polity, nor even what Nietzsche called a publicum.

Yet this was clearly a problem that exercised Nietzsche.  The intention of The Birth of Tragedy was to generate the elements of a cultural revolution.36  This had been the import of tragedy for Athens, and tragedy was, in Nietzsche’s reading, able to accomplish this transformation by means of its birth from the Geist of music.  Note the direction of these considerations—we go from a text authored by God, to a text written in each of us and read from that heart, to music.  But is music a text—i.e. does it mediate meaning?  We seem to be in over our head.

Still, we might sense some ground in coming across this passage in Wittgenstein (something I find happens more than once). “Music appears to some as a primitive art, with its few notes and rhythms.  But it is only simple on the surface: its substance (Körper) on the other hand which makes it possible the meaning of this manifest content, has all the infinite complexity that we find suggested in the external forms of other arts and that music conceals. There is a certain sense in which it is the most sophisticated [raffieniert] art of all.”37

Well, it is true—at least in my experience of reading Nietzsche and in observing the response of others—that one does have the sense that, as David Allison says, “Nietzsche write exclusively for you. Not at you but for you. For you, the reader. Only you.” 38 (Think back to my citation of Fried).  This is an individualization of a basic principle of classical rhetoric extending here to an argumentum in omnesque partes—the argument on all sides.  Emerson writes that “eloquence is speaking the truth such that the person to whom one speaks will understand it.”  With Nietzsche, he seems to speak to each and everyone. If Allison is correct, this says that Nietzsche’s text addresses each person individually.  Nietzsche formulates his rules for writing in an explicit set of commandments to Lou von Salome.39 Among them: “Style must in retrospect be appropriate for you in relation precisely to the particular person with whom you wish to share yourself (der du dich mitteilen willst).”  He calls this “the law of the double relation.” One must shape what one says according to the particular qualities of the person or persons one is addressing and the circumstances. In the same text, he insists that “wealth in life betrays itself in a wealth of gestures.  Everything, the length and brevity of sentences, punctuation, the choice of words, pauses, the sequence of arguments—must be learned to be understood as gestures.” (Remember the pragmata).  Presumably, to the degree that Nietzsche was able to follow this rule in his published work (note by the way that it calls into some kind of question how one should approach the Nachlass) it means that everything that is there is there for a purpose and crafted as such.

I have noted elsewhere the presumption of this claim.  It is a bit like saying that there is nothing in Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda that is not essential to that painting and there is nothing that is not there that could have been part of it.  It is like saying that every word in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” is exactly necessary to that poem.  Or it is like Robert Schumann’s response when asked, upon finishing a piano piece, as to its meaning.  He played it again.  Or like Fried saying of Caro’s Deep Body Blue that it manifests, makes available, the quality of being open (A&O, 180). To the degree that one can accept this possibility, it means that prima facie nothing in what Nietzsche published can be dismissed as “overblown rhetoric” and that it is all fashioned with an audience in mind. Nor can any element of the Caro sculpture be overlooked.

In a lecture course of 1874, Nietzsche calls rhetoric “an essential republican art” and suggest that rhetoric was the culmination of the education of men of antiquity: “the highest spirit activity of a gebildeten political man.” He calls this “an odd notion for us” and then quotes Kant from the Critique of the Power of Judgement (# 51): “The speaker gives notice of a matter to be considered and in order to relate to his listeners presents it as if it were a play with ideas.” I have published fairly detailed analyses of examples of the working of Nietzsche’s rhetoric and will not rehearse them here. What they show me is precisely the fact that one’s first reading of Nietzsche tends to lead either to a sense that one understands it (whether one accepts or rejects it) or to further reading.  But even in the latter case the sense of having gotten it (either accepting or rejecting) generally takes hold.  I remember vividly starting to teach the Genealogy for the nth time, sure that I could do it in my sleep, as it were, only to come upon a passage that had never been in my text before.  It is the section 14 of the first essay—the little dialogue about the fabrication of ideals.  I was subsequently delighted to find that Quentin Skinner cites this as an example of paradiastolic redescription—the reframing of something (often a virtue) as its opposite or as something different (often a vice).40  Two remarks: First, the matter may be even more complex than Skinner adduces, for the passage does not stop with this apparent reversal about ideals being fabricated but continues: “—NO! One moment more!” and it turns out that the speaker who has come to this paradiastolic conclusion is explicitly said to be in danger of concluding too quickly—after all s/he is the speaker named “Mr. Rash and Curious—Herr Vorwitz und Wagehals, which could be rendered as Mr. Presumptuous Daredevil.” Secondly and more importantly for this essay: suddenly encountering section 14, for, as it were, the first time, brought me up short as I realized I did not understand it at all (in relation to the rest of what I wanted to say) and that meant I had to start all over again.  So also, the conclusions to which Fried arrives, while for some giving at times the feeling of being off the cuff, are in fact the product of lengthy and self-critical reflection. The formulation at which he arrives grows from returning again and again—not for nothing is psychoanalysis four times a week. (A full account of this process can be found in T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death.)

In this process of reading one’s first reading, I revise my understanding, but the revising is not the end: More importantly: I have had to reflect on why I had thought I understood him.  Nietzsche engenders then a Selbstkritik—which is what he calls his essay that becomes a new preface to his first book.  (Almost) all of Nietzsche can and should be read like this. Even the Birth of Tragedy presents itself in sections 23 and 24 as a test for the reader—can you respond to this?41  One has to hear the text with one’s eyes.  In reading Nietzsche, and perhaps especially in reading Nietzsche about science, morality, and politics, this means the following. When one thinks that one understands Nietzsche (whether affirmatively or negatively) the first thing one should do is ask oneself “why is it that I want to think that this is what Nietzsche means?” Typically, one will find that one has left something out, and a conclusion about which one was confident finds itself undercut. This requires a self-examination as to why it is that I was drawn to find my initial conclusion correct. Nietzsche’s writing would thus generate a self-critical relationship of the reader to the conclusions that he or she wishes to draw. In this way it has a therapeutic aim—it requires the reader to be (self-)critical.  It also means that what Nietzsche writes does not spring from a position in which Nietzsche has assumed the position of a final arbiter, something he avoids, paradoxically, most often by writing in such a way that you think that this is what he is precisely what he is doing.42  At his best, which is often, Nietzsche forces the reader to come to grips with his or her own unexamined needs and desires: to be self-critical and thus to become his or her own authority. The multiple understandings of Nietzsche are all (shall I say “almost all”?), to some degree, understandings of those who have not adequately turned their understanding back on themselves.  At his best, which is often, Fried forces the reader to ask him- or herself if this in not in fact how the work is available to us and we to it. Fried often sounds as if he is claiming to be the last word: I hear him rather empowering the reader.

I am not arguing that each of us has his or her “own” Nietzsche. Nietzsche tells us he is a proponent of the lento in reading and he lures you on at times shamelessly: as he says in the Foreword to Ecce Homo: “Nitimur in vetitum:  under this banner my philosophy will triumph one day; for that which has hitherto been most strictly forbidden is without exception the truth.”43 He purposively writes in such a manner as to make many of those whose read him think that they have understood Nietzsche, only to find, on further careful or more careful reading or rereading –– that they have made something out of Nietzsche after their own image, an image or an idol that they must now call into question. In the section of Ecce Homo in which he explains what he writes such good books, he says:

Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear.  Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even rare experience—that it is a first language for a new series of experiences.  … This is in the end my average experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience.  Whoever thought he had understood something of me, had made up something out of me, after his own image…44

If what I say about his texts producing a self-criticism is correct, then by reading them—by engaging them—I have in effect become the author of myself, which is one version of the Kantian notion of autonomy.  This is not, as Alexander Nehamas put it in his wonderful book on Nietzsche, “life as literature,” although one can see why Nehamas was moved in that direction—it is rather the basis for freedom and autonomy in an age that knows no transcendence but does not fully know that it knows none.  Such would be no small achievement for our age, for it retains as it does the categories of moral judgment but in the context of a relativized transcendence, and runs the risk of justifying anything.  But that is another topic.

A Columbo-esque parting thought: the previous paragraph leaves me with a question for Michael Fried.  The parallels I have tried to draw between his work and that of Hobbes and Nietzsche each culminate in a political vision in those two thinkers.  Should one, can one, find a politics in Fried’s work?

Mr. Nowel [assistant to the Court]: How do you know that was the spirit?

Mrs. H.: How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?

Dep. Gov.: By an immediate voice.

Mrs. H.: So to me by an immediate revelation.

Dep. Gov.: How! an immediate revelation.

Mrs. H.: By the voice of his own spirit to my soul. [Trial transcript is online at http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/154/Trial_of_Anne_Hutchinson_1.html

Zuletzt kann Niemand aus den Dingen, die Bücher eingerechnet, mehr heraushören, als er bereits weiss.  Wofür man vom Erlebnisse her keinen Zugang hat, dafür hat man kein Ohr.  Denken wir uns nun einen äussersten Fall, dass ein Buch von lauter Erlebnissen redet, die gänzlich ausserhalb der Möglichkeit einer häufigen oder auch nur seltneren Erfahrung liegen, —dass es die erste Sprache für eine neue Reihe von Erfahrungen ist.  …  Dies ist zuletzt meine durchschnittliche Erfahrung und, wenn man will, die Originalität meiner Erfahrung.  Wer Etwas von mir verstanden zu haben glaubte, hat sich Etwas aus mir zurecht gemacht, nach seinem Bilde,…

Looking back fifty years later at the 1967 publication of “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum, it is hard not to see the absence of a conversation between Fried and film studies as something of a missed connection. 1967 was in a sense the watershed of Fried’s role as a critic of modern art, especially painting and sculpture, but it was also the moment when film studies was beginning to emerge not only as an academic interest but as a discipline of its own. The English-language translation of André Bazin’s seminal What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 came out that year, and the Society of Cinematologists—which would become the current Society for Cinema and Media Studies—founded Cinema Journal as a vehicle for producing and transmitting ideas about film to a more academic audience.1  Programs at colleges and universities were being started, courses were being taught—most notably, for this story, at Harvard, where Stanley Cavell had already taught a graduate seminar on cinema in 1963.

The conditions for an encounter were certainly there. Fried had arrived at Harvard in 1962 and quickly become friends with Cavell, auditing the seminar on cinema. The two sustained an intense dialogue throughout the next decade (and more), one that was focused not least around their shared interest in the arts and questions of modernism.2  Fried, though still a graduate student, was already an established critic. His writing for major art journals was widely known, and variously praised and criticized. On its publication in Artforum, “Art and Objecthood” would help to shape (and sharpen) many of the debates within contemporary art criticism over the years to come. As a result, many film scholars—especially those living in the New York area—were familiar with Fried and his writing, and would likely have read “Art and Objecthood” upon its publication.

Yet if the stars were aligned, no real engagement occurred. Film scholars by and large ignored Fried, and the emergent force of film studies had little, if any, effect on Fried’s writing. To the extent that Fried addressed cinema at all in these years, it is with a brief digression in “Art and Objecthood” that summarily dismisses the medium from his concerns: “cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.”3  This may be a familiar gesture with critics of high art, but while their rejection is often due to ignorance (or simple elitism), the point of the above narrative is to make clear that this was not the case with Fried. It was a considered, albeit mistaken, judgment; the point of this essay is to show that it had consequences.

The failure to establish a connection between Fried and film studies was a real loss, which wound up being detrimental to each side: avenues for exploration were closed off; methodological opportunities were missed; and a rich dialogue that ought to have taken place never happened. This essay aims to explore some of the reasons for the failed encounter, looking at the surrounding intellectual context at the time as well as at the details of Fried’s key essay on modernist aesthetics. In doing this, I also try to sketch out something of what an encounter between Fried and film studies might have been able to achieve, and why the possibility for a belated and overdue encounter still holds excitement.

* * *

Despite the missed connection, there have always been film scholars deeply influenced by Fried’s work. For this group, and I include myself among them, there were at least two major ways of thinking about film that Fried’s art criticism made possible. The first involved the central concept of acknowledgement he drew from Cavell’s writings. As Cavell put it, “Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.)”4  From this model, Fried extracted a way of talking about reflexive, modernist art that eschewed a reductivist strain in the account of the relation between an artwork and its physical material (one that marked even such a text as Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting”). Engaging with the conditions of a medium, Fried argued, did not mean that a work needed only to display them in order to know them—as if it were sufficient to simply point a camera at a mirror. Rather, acknowledgement meant doing something with the knowledge of these conditions, producing a creative response to them. And in the way the acknowledgment took shape, a viewer would be able to grasp something new about the deep conventions that structured that medium. For example, in accounting for what he describes as modernist painting’s “continuing problem of how to acknowledge the literal character of the support,” Fried saw Frank Stella’s paintings as one solution for understanding “what counts as that acknowledgement.”5  Stella, he writes,

by actually shaping each picture… was able to make the fact that the literal shape determines the structure of the entire painting completely perspicuous. That is, in each painting the stripes appear to have been generated by the framing edge and, starting there, to have taken possession of the rest of the canvas, as though the whole painting self-evidently followed from not merely the shape of the support, but its actual physical limits.6

In no way is Stella finding the key to showing how painting draws on and makes explicit the essential feature of its physical medium. Rather, Fried understands Stella’s aesthetic strategy, at the intersection of paint and shape, to be a way of doing something with the basic knowledge of how painting works, of creating a painting that acknowledges—in some way—how the materiality of the medium matters. It’s precisely in this that the activity of criticism is located: the specific account of how acknowledgment functions within a given work, and what it means there.

This strain of Fried’s thought was formative for my own work. His adaptation of acknowledgment, translating the term from epistemology and ethics to aesthetics, provided me with a range of resources to rethink a set of debates within film theory, especially for figures who blurred the line between theorist and critic. It gave me a model, in particular, for reimagining the way medium-specific theorists were often take to hypostasize the basic facts of cinema, seeing in them instead a model in which the given conditions of a medium could be set out yet the terms of a film’s relation to them not determined in advance. In my work on Bazin, this allowed me to argue that the ontological commitments of his reliance on film’s photographic basis, and its connection to reality, did not inherently conflict with the diversity of his critical insights. There was no capacious critic and naïve theorist: the theory provided a fulcrum, not a constraint, for the criticism to work around. Even more, Fried’s example let me see how a devotion to medium specificity that marked realist film theory, and that was generally taken to be anti-modernist in nature and ambition, closely matched the logic of key exemplars of modernist aesthetics.7

A second line of Fried’s work is less overtly formulated but no less central to his importance for some film scholars. This is his commitment to description, and a sense of the necessity for prose that would not only be adequate to the complexity of the artworks being described but that could thereby reveal the philosophical significance within the very logic of the artwork. Cavell labeled this project “philosophical criticism,” with the explicit recognition that in Fried’s hands it often proceeded through nothing other than “uninterrupted descriptions.”8  Take, for example, Fried’s extraordinary discussion of Anthony Caro’s Carriage (1966):

the use of mesh enables Caro simultaneously to delimit—almost to enclose or box in—a tract of space and to assert its continuity with the rest of the sculpture’s immediate environment. How one ought to describe the mesh itself is a nice problem: for example, although there is an obvious sense in which one can see through it, there is another, perhaps less obvious (or obviously important) sense in which one cannot. It is not transparent, but opaque; one looks both at and past it—as opposed to the way one looks through a pane of glass. By partly superimposing at an angle two meshes of different degrees of openness, Caro establishes a plane of variation, not of transparency exactly, but of visual density. It is as though the mesh is seen as cross-hatching—as literal but disembodied shading of value. In this respect Carriage is intimately related to Jules Olitski’s spray paintings, in which fluctuations of value are divorced from their traditional tactile associations. More generally, an adequate discussion of Caro’s use of mesh would relate it to the opticality both of his own work since 1959 and of the most important painting since Jackson Pollock, whose Number 29 (1950), a painting on glass, deploys mesh in the interests of accessibility solely to eyesight achieved by his allover paintings as early was the winter of 1946-47.9

When I noted at the outset of this essay that it was Fried’s descriptive prose, and the way it created at one moment an account of an artwork, an artistic lineage, and a sense of philosophical importance, it was with passages like this in mind. Working through the basic elements of Caro’s sculpture, Fried’s description conveys a sense of its visceral power while also making two large arguments: about the connection between sculpture and painting, about the place of Caro within a modernist lineage marked by Clement Greenberg, and about the difficulty of critical language in articulating these relations. It’s a complex argument contained within a descriptive account of a single sculpture. Moving beyond the terms of a reductive medium specificity, he shows how two distinct media—painting and sculpture—might be taken to share a common project, and a common set of materials. In this move, in describing the way the mesh produces a sense of touch through sight—and in providing prose that is able to convey the power of that cross-sensory insight—Fried begins to push into a kind of tactile phenomenology that is missing from other instances of modernist criticism at the time (Greenberg’s emphasis on the centrality of opticality for the modernist project is one example).10

For those of us for whom Fried’s criticism matters, it is about more than the specifics of his account of modernism. Such passages pose a key methodological challenge: your own descriptive prose needs to carry the philosophical (or theoretical) weight of the argument. Fried’s writing showed not only the power but also the difficulty of this way of placing criticism at the center of theoretical and philosophical arguments about the terms and appeals of art.

* * *

This reception of Fried, however, was always in the minority. In truth, it’s not hard to see why Fried was left outside the emerging discipline of film studies. As it began to develop its disciplinary boundaries during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the differences with Fried were stark and deep. Two in particular stand out. The first has to do with how the major artistic movements of the twentieth century were defined and championed. Both Fried and film studies—despite the diversity of its trends, I use “film studies” here to mark its central thread—worked to uphold the banner of modernism, but their accounts of what modernism was were irreconcilable. Whereas Fried drew on a line of modernist art that culminated in Abstract Expressionism and work by contemporary sculptors such as Anthony Caro, film scholars were driven by an aesthetic (and political) sensibility that favored a different tradition, seizing on the politically radical and avant-garde movements of the 1920s: constructivism; suprematism; surrealism; Dada; even expressionism.11  This legacy, solidified by the growing importance of Walter Benjamin—who was part of and emphasized these movements—and Bertolt Brecht, defined the artistic inheritance of the twentieth century for film studies on widely different terms than for Fried. And it led to a contemporary valuation of precisely the minimalist (or literalist) artists that Fried opposed in “Art and Objecthood,” such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Tony Smith, and Carl Andre.

Second, modernist-inclined film theories of the late 1960s and 1970s were overtly concerned with the way that cinema seemed predicated on the forceful positioning of the spectator with respect to the screen. Jean-Louis Baudry’s work was emblematic of this trend, in which the pleasures of cinema, and its claim to provide a sense of reality, were dependent on the structural positioning of the spectator within an apparatus of projection.12  To talk about the cinema meant to talk about the way an individual film works with the viewer’s expectations, fantasies, and fears. Thus, much of the academic writing on cinema at the time took up the question of how films position the viewer: apparatus theory; models of suture; psychoanalytic theory; cognitive theory… the list goes on. Even Bazin found himself working through this topic when he defended his preferred technique: deep focus, he says, automatically makes the spectators’ relation to the screen close to what their relation is to reality.13  By contrast, Fried dismissed such structural concerns from the orbit of modernist aesthetics. Writing about the new “literalist” sculpture he found mistaken, he claimed that for it “the beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended—and unexacting—relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall or floor” (155). More succinctly, he argued that “the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder” (153). For Fried, to the extent that art was interested in these questions—and, by extension, to the extent that critics were interested in discussing them—they were failing in their duties to the material and the history of their medium. “Art and Objecthood,” in this way, was a polemic in an extended battle for what important contemporary art was going to be recognized as, whether it was about creating a situation for a relation of beholding—what Fried pejoratively called “literalism” or “theatricality”—or producing an experience out of the formal articulation of the art object itself. Fried advocated what we might describe as a dual defense of modernism on the grounds of formalism—“the individual elements [of an artwork] bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition” (161)—and immediacy—“the condition… of existing in, indeed of evoking or constituting, a continuous and perpetual present” (167).

Fried’s account, whatever its powers, felt woefully inadequate or naïve to many contemporary critics, and the position he espoused seemed anathema to many film scholars. Given the way cinema was understood to produce an inherent sense of presentness—the “there it is” that Roland Barthes singles out to contrast with photography—Fried’s description of the struggles of modernist aesthetics seemed irrelevant at best.

* * *

The striking thing is that it’s not clear that Fried would disagree with this assessment. Even for film scholars sympathetic to Fried’s account of modernism and his critical method, there has been a large and seemingly intractable obstacle to bringing Fried into thinking about film. This is Fried himself.

When Fried does talk about cinema in “Art and Objecthood,” it is with the intent of removing it from consideration in his broader account of the modernist project. Fried takes cinema to be something of a puzzle: why have so many modernist artists found untroubled and uncritical pleasure in movies, whether major works of art cinema or (especially) genre films from Hollywood cinema? How can artists who demand excellence in their own media, or any of the media associated with key modernist movements, be content with run-of-the-mill films? Fried’s answer revolves around the struggle he sees modernist artists engaged in with theatricality. Despite its inherent theatrical setting, “cinema escapes theater—automatically, as it were—it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theater and theatricality” (164). The idea of a refuge is a common trope for intellectual film viewers (think of Wittgenstein’s descriptions of going to the movies to escape the burdens of philosophy). But what matters here is the small phrase: “automatically, as it were.” Unlike modernist art, for Fried cinema does not have to defeat theater; it is simply outside its aesthetic arena. The refuge is “automatic, guaranteed” by the nature of cinema itself; we are absorbed simply by being present in a movie theater. (Curiously, this is close to theories of the apparatus, which take absorption not to be a principle of style or an effect of narrative but a basic donnée of the viewing situation itself.) And so, because cinema is “a refuge from theater and not a triumph over it,” Fried concludes that it “is not a modernist art.” All the formal dynamics and art-historical stakes that apply to “painting, sculpture, music, and poetry” do not hold when it comes to the movies.14

This is the challenge for Fried’s admirers within film studies: if you want to adopt Fried’s terms, categories, and methods for thinking about films, you face the problem that he explicitly refuses to countenance such a gesture. To be sure, one could—as many have done—just ignore Fried’s comments on the cinema, and regard them as a view simply disconnected from the history of film. That is certainly fair: from the in-jokes of Hollywood film, to the meta-cinematic reflexivity that spans comedies like Hellzapoppin’ (1941) and movements like the French new wave, to the radical deconstruction (and reconstruction) of the cinematic apparatus in a film like Daisies (1966), to the American avant-garde of Deren, Brakhage, Snow, and Frampton, to the Brechtian tradition of filmmaking that wound up with late-60s Godard and Straub-Huillet (among others)—there is no shortage of filmmakers who have taken the absorptive qualities of cinema less as a given than as a problem to be negotiated, even defeated, in their filmmaking.

I’ve also been tempted to write off Fried’s rejection of cinema’s modernist potential. However, even if Fried’s views about the cinema are wrong—and I think they are—I’m not sure that the reasons behind them have been fully understood. And that’s to miss something important. Less an account of a viewing space, a reading that draws on the repeated description of the cinema as a “refuge,” Fried’s argument in fact turns on a particular understanding of how cinema negotiates a relation to its own past.

In many ways, the question of a past is at the heart of Fried’s account of a modernist sensibility; time and time again, he will argue that the distinctive quality of modernism is the need to create art that stands up to the best instances in the history of the medium. This is central to Fried’s major essay on Manet in 1969, and it runs throughout his work on modernist painting. Fried claims that painting under the conditions of modernism means that the modernist artist is under an obligation to justify him- or herself in relation to the great art of the past. In other words, painting, if it is to have importance in the modernist moment, can no longer be minor; it must be major or not at all.15  To do this means finding new solutions to problems that previous great art had encountered and resolved in its own way. This is the modernist burden of seriousness, in which a failure to produce work that stands up to the great art of the past results in the failure of the modernist enterprise as a whole. And this dynamic is what, for Fried, cinema avoids.

Fried’s insistence on the idea of a necessary relation to the past can sound antithetical to familiar rhetoric about modernist claims to novelty, to creating radically new art. It sounds almost like it should be part of the anti-modernist vocabulary, of a piece with reactionary trends against new artistic forms. But there is an important, if sometimes overlooked, modernist inflection to this emphasis on the past, one that finds its fullest articulation in T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Tradition, for Eliot, means something quite specific: an understanding of the past in relation to creative activity undertaken in the present. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”16  The past is also, and importantly, unstable: “when a new work is created something happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. [They are] modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them… the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.”17  Because the past exists for and through the present, the nature of the tradition—the very terms of the history of an art—changes in response to the contemporary works being made. So, it’s not just that Tennyson influences Eliot; as Eliot writes poetry, he changes Tennyson’s significance—in a sense, he changes what Tennyson is.

I think this idea is hovering around Fried’s account of modernist art (however much the influence of Greenberg supersedes it), though to show that would take me too far afield. What I want to do here is give a sense of how this way of thinking shapes his approach to cinema. And to see that we need to turn to Cavell. In the opening chapters of The World Viewed, Cavell makes his strongest case for film’s philosophical significance, using classical Hollywood cinema to stake a claim for film’s uniqueness among the arts. This claim is, not least, based on a particular form of its popularity: “The movie seems naturally to exist in a state in which its highest and its most ordinary instances attract the same audience… in the case of films, it is generally true that you do not really like the highest instances unless you also like the typical. You don’t even know what the highest are instances of unless you know the typical as well.”18  This condition, he notes, is uniquely true of cinema—“anyway until recently”—and it is part of what separates cinema from the modernist programs happening in the other arts at precisely this time. It structures film’s status as “the last traditional art,” a position Cavell rehearses throughout the book.19

Cavell isn’t forthcoming about the influence of Eliot, but it is there throughout the book. He even embeds the name of Eliot’s essay early on, but without being explicit that he’s doing so. Discussing the way films relate to the history of their medium, and placing this in relation to the emergence of the auteur theory, he observes: “Each of the arts knows of this self-generation, however primitive our understanding remains about the relation between tradition and the individual talent.”20  What marks cinema is its ability for individual works to negotiate their place within a tradition without any of the self-consciousness of the avowedly modernist arts, or what Cavell glosses as cinema’s “natural relation to its history.”21

We can see this line of thinking in Fried’s brief remarks about cinema in “Art and Objecthood.” Note how Fried highlights what Cavell emphasizes, that the key feature to understand about cinema is the indiscriminateness of its pleasures. His puzzlement is not about why great movies have appeal, but over the fact that “movies in general, including frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility” (164). Movies are beyond good and bad, beyond the categories of value that so centrally comprise the modernist project. They are something else entirely.

This is where it’s worth returning to Fried’s striking phrase: “cinema escapes theater—automatically, as it were.” The appeal to the “automatic”—an appeal that anticipates Cavell’s emphasis on the term in The World Viewed—suggests a claim that is grounded in the physical basis of the medium, structured by what Fried describes as the phenomenology of movie-going (the place of the screen, etc.) (171n20). But this is in fact dependent on a view about the relation of films to their past, the fulcrum around which Fried’s rejection of cinema as a potentially modernist art turns. Note that, for Fried, movies entail “absorption not conviction”—not, in short, the kind of claims that modernist art has to make toward its past, the justifying of each instance of art in light of the major art that has come before, but the pleasures of a kind of simple immersiveness. Cinema doesn’t “automatically” escape theater solely because of its viewing situation; it has to do with the way, at least within classical cinema, there is nothing fraught in its relation to past instances—what Cavell refers to as a “natural relation” to its history. (That is, Billy Wilder doesn’t feel the need to equal Ernst Lubitsch, to surpass him, in claiming him as an influence; Lubitsch is part of an inheritance that Wilder can draw upon without anxiety.) This is what Bazin was getting at when, pushing against what he saw as the fetishism of directors that was coming to define French film criticism, he isolated the power of Hollywood film as “the genius of the system.” The power was not in the mythic success of individuals but in a way of making film, an art form that thrived on the industrial system behind it.

I focus on Fried’s argument here, and its links to what will be the core of Cavell’s The World Viewed, because it allows us to better see the yawning gap between “Art and Objecthood” and the path of film studies over the next decades. Not only did Fried explicitly reject what so many film critics and theorists argued for—that cinema was an essentially modernist art, and that it needed to be understood as such—but he essentially bracketed off the role of the historical study of film. After all, if the unique feature of cinema was that it had no issue with its own past, what need is there to seriously investigate that history? to see it as anything more than a straightforward progression? And so when the first waves of the New Film History began to emerge in the late 1970s, and in many senses offered a radical phenomenology of the history of cinematic forms—think of Tom Gunning’s influential idea of the “cinema of attractions”—it could have been a moment for a rapprochement with Fried’s enterprise, one that combined description, historical awareness, and new aesthetic models. That such a rapprochement didn’t occur was in part due to the way a focus on the historical specificity of film-going entailed a range of different aesthetic models, and so was antithetical to the appeal to cinema tout court in “Art and Objecthood.”

* * *

The point of showing how Fried and film studies failed to interact is not to criticize either, to show blindspots, or to talk about differing evaluations of artistic media. I think something was lost in this missed connection, something that would have benefitted both. The absence is more evident, though tricky to get out, with Fried, since he clearly missed, for close to four decades, the opportunity to engage with ambitious photographic media. In his 2008 book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Fried explicitly acknowledges a longstanding lack of interest in writing about photography. What changed, he noted, was the way that, “starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, art photographs began to be made not only at large scale but also… for the wall…. [As a result,] such photography immediately inherited the entire problematic of beholding” that he had traced from eighteenth century French painting to the conflict between modernism and minimalism described in “Art and Objecthood.”22  Two things are worth noting here. The first is the key condition that allowed Fried to pay attention to photography as an art: the creation of large-scale images—especially Jeff Wall’s lightboxes—that were hung on the wall as if they were paintings. The second is the conclusion Fried drew from this fact, namely that as a result such photographs “immediately”—he might have said “automatically”—inherited an artistic past, a tradition out of which they could work. And indeed the bulk of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is devoted to showing how a selection of contemporary photographers negotiate the historical dialectic between absorption and theatricality.

In this context, it’s not surprising that when Fried finally turns to moving images it’s only when he sees them on the gallery wall. In the discussions of video art in the photography book, as well as in the subsequent Four Honest Outlaws, the importance of the gallery as a viewing site is key.23  Even in his extensive discussion of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait (2006), Fried makes clear that his interest in the film stems from his encounter with Godard’s previous work in gallery spaces.24  I draw attention to this not because of any problem in talking about video art, but to note the way Fried seems to require the space (or the idea) of the gallery in order to be able to take seriously the claims of moving images to engage the viewer in a complex way. In all this, the existence of the cinema goes missing: even when Fried opens himself up to the discussion of moving image works, the vital institution of the twentieth and twenty-first century is absent.

Yet Fried’s treatment of Zidane also points to the difficulties inherent in this act of bracketing. Unsurprisingly, he is largely keen to pull the film into the orbit of his concerns. Responding to the filmmakers’ invocation of Warhol’s screen tests, he pushes against their significance: “[That they were an influence] is doubtless true, but grasping the significance of Zidane also requires viewing it against the background of” the dialectic of absorption and theatricality, and what he describes as “the interest of coming to grips with the ongoing problem of portraiture.”25  This is familiar terrain for Fried, yet a strange move occurs as he goes on. Noting Gordon and Parreno’s almost obsessive interest in images of Zidane’s feet as he walks, runs, scuffs, and stands, Fried writes: “His gait becomes intimately familiar to us by the end of the film. (Somewhere in the neighborhood is Robert Bresson’s magnificent Au Hasard, Balthazar [1966]).”26  It is a moment of brilliant critical insight, evoking complex issues of intention, physicality, and desire that structure each film. The sense of the donkey Balthazar here is not a diminution of the skills of Zidane but a recognition of the deep ambitions—what does it mean to be human? how might a portrait show this?—on the part of Gordon and Parreno. (Fried will again refer to Bresson’s film in Four Honest Outlaws (2011), in the context of a discussion of the “‘human-related’ animals” in the works of Gordon and Anri Sala.)27  The alignment of Zidane with Balthazar also makes both into figures of absorption, of the kind that Fried has been interested in throughout his career: figures turned inward, seemingly oblivious to the (self-evident) fact that they are being beheld.

Yet in making this apt critical gesture, Fried implies something that he otherwise denies: that theatrical cinema, not just of the 2000s but of the 1960s as well, can be involved in the dialectic of absorption and theatricality. Without his having been explicit about it, we are far from the ban on cinema’s modernist aspirations in “Art and Objecthood,” a ban that was rooted in a claim about the capacity of cinema to engage critically and self-consciously with its own past. Fried, that is, allows Zidane to engage with a tradition in the way that, for example, he traces the “sources” of Manet. And this is exactly right. What Fried seemingly stumbles onto, struck by his deep insight of criticism, is a recognition of the way that films—like painting—have always been engaged in evoking and revising their own history (and the history of the media around them). This has been true throughout the history of cinema: Cecil B. DeMille’s parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) in his comedic adventure Male and Female (1919), where the famous Babylonian episode is evoked in the guise of parody; Chris Marker’s revision of the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) in Grin without a Cat (1977), his account of the rightward turn of French politics after May ’68; or the shared insight between Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock about the dark aspect of Jimmy Stewart’s persona (developed especially in the films of Frank Capra). The point about the examples is not their uniqueness but that they are profoundly ordinary, part of the warp and woof of film history. Many recent historiographic accounts, like Miriam Hansen’s idea of “vernacular modernism,” have emphasized the complex ways that films have drawn inspiration from a wide range of international sources, creating their aesthetic structures not out of a unique vision but out of an amalgam of pre-existing sources.28  (As Cavell puts it, “a movie comes from other movies.”)29

Of course Fried knows—and has known—that references happen in film, that films refer to one another in all sorts of ways. That kind of knowledge is not a trade secret. My point is somewhat different. When Fried assumes that such work within films happens “of itself,” that it takes place “naturally,” he brackets off the way films self-consciously engage in an artistic project he recognizes in other media. I mean here not just the dynamics of reference, the interest in past artworks against which the success of the present can be measured—though certainly that does matter. The point is even more specific. Films—not some idealized notion of “cinema” but actual films—have sought to work through the dialectic of absorption and theatricality that Fried isolates as the central engine behind modern (and modernist) art. This takes place not so much through characters and events, or even narrative organizations; it has to do with formal structures.

In lieu of a more extensive discussion, let me offer one example. This is shot/reverse-shot, one of the fundamental building blocks of the “continuity” or “invisible” editing technique that dominates classical Hollywood cinema. In its most basic form, we see a character looking, then a shot that isolates what the character is looking at, followed by a shot that returns us to the initial set-up. In one of its most prominent uses, the depiction of a conversation, we often begin by looking over the shoulder of one character at the face of the person they are talking to, followed by the reverse over-the-shoulder shot that gives us the face of the character the camera had been initially positioned behind. This is straightforward, part of what we expect when we see a movie; a range of critics and theorists have argued that it works by showing us what we “naturally” want to see.30  Phrased differently, we could say that shot/reverse-shot constructions are basically absorptive, immersing the viewer in the viewpoint of a character within the world of the film. This sense was the basis of Laura Mulvey’s famous essay on the logic of the “male gaze” in Hollywood cinema: by forcing us to look with a particular character, films made us inhabit their worlds in a particular (and invariably masculine) way.31  More recently, James Chandler has argued that shot/reverse-shot constructions work as a basic form of sympathy, a way of putting the spectator in the mind of the character.32  All of which should call to mind some of Fried’s discussions, especially in Absorption and Theatricality, of the way that artists position figures within their paintings so as to provide an access to that world for the viewer—creating what he called the “supreme fiction” that the ontological barrier between work and world could be overcome.

What allows shot/reverse-shot to resonate with Fried’s work, especially his multi-volume account of what he describes as the unfolding dialectic of absorption and theatricality, are the permutations that have been wrought on its structure. Some of this is extreme: Eisenstein rejected the technique out of hand as part of what he took to be the bourgeois ideology embedded in Hollywood cinema—even though he used it himself—as it created too close an identification between the viewer and a single character (rather than seeing the mass as subject).33  But there are more subtle variations as well. A number of films have experimented with using split-screens to incorporate shot/reverse-shot constructions within a single frame, from Lois Weber’s placing of several lines of action within the same frame in Suspense (1913) to Norman Jewison’s use of multiple frames to depict telephone interactions in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) to Ang Lee’s mimicry of the look of comic panels in Hulk (2003). Or take the way the Bourne trilogy and other contemporary films eschew the stable logic of continuity editing for a series of rapid shots with hand-held cameras, where the identification with characters happens less through access to an optical point of view than through the way that the form of the film conveys their state of mind. This is a kind of filmmaking that has been described variously as “intensified continuity,” “post-continuity,” and “chaos cinema,” and which forms the stylistic template for much of the mainstream narrative films and videos today. In each of these examples, we could say that filmmakers found the basic way of identifying with characters through shot/reverse-shot to be lacking, and that an alternate structure had to be invented for the new conditions so as to continue to draw the viewer into the film.

The truncated story is not exactly like the one that Fried tells of the modernist artist, engaged in a relation to the past as part of the necessity to create major work. Jewison and Lee do not respond to Weber (or to other early examples) in that way. Yet all the same it is a technique that is about relating to the beholder, and one that changes in response to the circumstances—historical, aesthetic, technological—around it. There is, in short, nothing “natural” here, nothing that happens “of itself”; what we see is a carefully constructed formal technique articulated in relation to past examples. (Other techniques could be addressed in this way as well, from subjective shots to parallel editing to jump cuts.) Thinking in this way, we might recast Fried’s wonder about why modernist artists went to the cinema. Perhaps they were not (just) seeking refuge from the burdens of the seriousness of their work; perhaps they saw in the cinema a range of different ways of negotiating the same questions about the relation of artwork to beholder that they were themselves preoccupied with. On this view, cinema does not stand apart from Fried’s modernist history; it continues that history by other means.

* * *

This open-ended query about missed opportunities goes in both directions, and leads to a question about what film studies lost in its failure to take Fried’s criticism into consideration. As I discussed at the outset, the period following the publication of “Art and Objecthood” was characterized by the emergence of “theory,” the belief that the primary object for analysis was not the individual film itself but the structures that governed it (whether mental, political, cultural, etc.).34  That’s not to say that there were no significant works of descriptive analysis. But many—Alfred Guzzetti’s study of Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her (1967), William Rothman’s account of Hitchcock in The Murderous Gaze—fell by the wayside, while the ones that were taken up—Raymond Bellour’s studies of Hollywood films, for example—were characterized by the way they brought established practices of theory to bear on individual films.35  It was in the wake of these tendencies that a strain of philosophically inflected film analysis emerged, part of the broader trend often grouped under the term “film-philosophy.” In it, film scholars sought to give an account of the ways in which individual films could lay claim to philosophical significance, how films could be understood as doing the work of philosophy itself.

My conjecture is that Fried’s example as a critic, especially his writings clustered around “Art and Objecthood,” could have helped film scholars avoid a set of difficulties attached to this approach. Writing about how films had philosophical ambitions has tended to make one of two problematic assumptions: to treat films as, in a sense, glorified thought experiments, complex representations of familiar philosophical problems that can help sharpen and enliven existing debates; or to posit a “mindedness” to films that gives them the agency needed to ground the “making” of an argument. The first fails to take the complexity of films seriously; the second makes an implausible, even incoherent, claim about the intentionality of the film as object. I think it is in the sense of their inadequacy that scholars have recently turned to Cavell’s writings on film (and, in a similar way, to Deleuze). What Cavell does is to make the work of criticism central in eliciting the philosophical stakes implicit in the basic operations of films—whether that has to do with the way films employ conventions, work through references and allusions to other films, or provide insights into to the medium itself. The kind of philosophical work films can do is not given in advance; it is only discoverable, Cavell insists, through critical engagement—the providing of a compelling reading with a philosophical backdrop in mind—with the films themselves. But Cavell’s writing has its own in-built limitation, as it focuses on what we might call, adapting a title from Donald Davidson, “actions and events.” To read Cavell’s criticism is to work through the significance of what people do in a film and how this is shown through the film’s narrative structure (and the attendant thematic features). The critical insight is breathtaking, but it often ignores the details of images and sound that make up the formal textures of a film.

This is Fried’s difference from Cavell. The power of Fried’s writings on modernist art is to take this kind of philosophical and critical project and to show how it can work as a mode of formal analysis. This is a formalism in which the description itself brings with it the philosophical stakes. Again we can listen to Fried on Caro, this time from “Art and Objecthood”:

A characteristic sculpture by Caro consists, I want to say, in the mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders, lengths of piping, sheet metal, and grill that it comprises rather than in the compound object that they compose. The mutual inflection of one element by another, rather than the identity of each, is what is crucial—though of course altering the identity of any element would be at least as drastic as altering its placement. (The identity of each element matters in somewhat the same way as the fact that it is an arm, or this arm, that makes a particular gesture, or as the fact that it is this word or this note and no another that occurs in a particular place in a sentence or melody.) The individual elements bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition: it is in this sense, a sense inextricably involved with the concept of meaning, that everything in Caro’s art that is worth looking at is in its syntax. (161-2)

From the point of view of a film scholar, it’s hard not to see in this description an account of montage, of the way that individual units of a film hang together—where the meaning is less in any individual shot than in their juxtaposition. (Eisenstein’s writings on film and art, and the way they embody principles of montage, may be the closest comparison.36 ) What Fried brings to this description is a sense of aliveness, the way that the particular object—here, Caro’s sculptures—not only motivates but also furnishes the very terms of a wider account of juxtaposition. The philosophical question is about meaning, about how it emerges from visual form. That account is not given in advance, derived abstractly, but elucidated through an encounter with the specificity of the art objects themselves. Fried achieves his philosophical—and art theoretical—insights by staying with the critical act of looking his prose seeks to capture.

This is what has stayed with me from “Art and Objecthood.” Beyond the account of modernism and the evocation of presentness, what opened a door is Fried’s demonstration of how criticism could work, how art and philosophy could come together through the practice of description. In Fried’s writings, we get a sense not just of why art matters, but also of why talking about art—in the most fine-grained way—matters for a philosophically inclined aesthetic project. This is the as yet unfulfilled promise that “Art and Objecthood” has for film studies.

[H]ypostatization is not acknowledgment. The continuing problem of how to acknowledge the literal character of the support – of what counts as that acknowledgment – has been at least as crucial to the development of modernist painting as the fact of its literalness, and that problem has been eliminated, not solved by the artists in question [the literalists]. Their pieces cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal.

—Michael Fried

As we acknowledge the importance of Michael Fried’s critical writings on this fiftieth anniversary of his seminal essay “Art and Objecthood,” it seems opportune to return to one of the fundamental concepts that he wields in his art criticism, that of acknowledgment. Although the term is used only rarely in “Art and Objecthood” itself (once, in footnote 16), it constitutes, through its regular presence in his other critical articles at the time, an essential element of the theoretical framework of the essay. And beyond the utility of reconstructing that framework for our understanding of the essay’s argument, the concept of acknowledgment as used by Fried merits attention in itself as one of his most important insights into the dynamics of the artwork.

As is appropriate for a concept such as acknowledgment, which is predicated upon the interaction of two entities, its role in Fried’s writings has a counterpart in its role in those of Stanley Cavell. In his introduction to Art and Objecthood, Fried speaks of the mutual interest that the two brought to the subject during their conversations that began in 1963.[1] For his part, Cavell speaks of their common focus on acknowledgment as “a continuing discovery of mutual profit.”[2] It is not my intention to enter into a discussion of the relations between the two theorists’ uses of the idea, which would be too long for this essay.[3] Rather I’ll remain with Fried’s analyses of modernist painting and sculpture in which a dynamic within the artwork is understood in terms of acknowledgment, in order to grasp the stakes of this concept when applied to art.

In his 1966 essay “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons” and elsewhere in his early criticism, Fried describes the ways in which various elements of paintings and sculptures, such as a painting’s depicted shapes or a sculpture’s configuration, “acknowledge” the conditions or literal aspects of the medium, such as a painting’s flatness or the shape of its canvas, or a sculpture’s groundedness or placement on a table. For example, the stripes in Kenneth Noland’s diamond-shaped paintings [fig. 1] and in Frank Stella’s early stripe paintings [fig. 2] are said to acknowledge the shape of the support by paralleling it and thus in a way echoing and repeating it: “[Noland’s] four relatively broad bands of color run parallel to one or the other pair of sides, thereby acknowledging the shape of the support” (AO, 83); “Stella’s stripe paintings […] represent the most unequivocal and conflictless acknowledgment of literal shape in the history of modernism” (AO, 88). Likewise, the “zips” or thin vertical lines in Barnett Newman’s paintings [fig. 3] “amount to echoes within the painting of the two side framing edges; they relate primarily to those edges, and in so doing make explicit acknowledgment of the shape of the canvas” (AO, 233). Stella’s irregular polygons take this dynamic a step further by making the relationship between depicted shape and the literal shape of the support more intimate. In Moultonboro III [fig. 4] “the triangle itself comprises two elements – an eight-inch-wide light yellow band around its perimeter and the smaller triangle, in Day-Glo yellow, bounded by that band – both of which seem to be acknowledging, by repeating, the shape of the support” (AO, 89).[4] In these passages, Fried is describing the relation that obtains between the literal shape of the canvas and the shapes of the colored elements within; the colored lines echo, repeat and in a certain way refer to the shape of the support, and thus literal shape is acknowledged by depicted shape.

The analysis highlights the interdependence between these two elements in such a way that they enter into a non-arbitrary relation and are “made mutually responsive” (AO, 77), thereby creating a continuity between the interior and the exterior of the painting which overcomes the duality. This continuity may be seen clearly in the Effingham series [fig. 5], in which the colored bands in some places coincide with the edge of the painting, suggesting the frame and echoing the literal shape, and in others they are integrated into the depicted elements of the painting. The intertwining of the interior and exterior shapes in these paintings “radically recasts, we might say deconstructs, the very distinction between inside and outside” (AO, 63), as Fried wrote concerning Anthony Caro’s sculptures as seen from a Derridian standpoint. Caro’s sculptures likewise acknowledge the conditions of their physicality, whether situated on the ground without a plinth, or on a table. According to Fried, Caro wanted to create sculptures whose actual conditions of placement would not be arbitrary and extrinsic to the particular identity of the work, but would be integrated into, or acknowledged by, its “syntax” or the relations between its parts. His table sculptures [fig. 6] succeed in making their small size a non-contingent aspect of the work – they are not just large sculptures that have been shrunk – by incorporating the table edge into the sculpture’s configuration so that part of the sculpture necessarily hangs off the table, and thus it could not be placed on the ground. That is, their physical conditions and situation are acknowledged by their structure: “the distinction between tabling and grounding, because determined (or acknowledged) by the sculptures themselves instead of merely imposed upon them by their eventual placement, made itself felt as equivalent to a qualitative rather than a quantitative difference in scale” (AO, 190). And, “in the table sculptures, for example, Caro found himself compelled to acknowledge – to find or devise appropriate means for acknowledging – the generic conditions of their inescapable ‘framedness’” (AO, 32-33). It is possible to see this dynamic of acknowledgment at work also in Caro’s ground sculptures, such as Prairie [fig. 7], in which the two horizontal planes created by the row of poles and the sheet of metal echo or acknowledge the horizontality of the ground below, similarly to the way in which Stella’s or Noland’s stripes repeat the literal shape of the canvas. In general, Fried writes, Caro’s abandonment of the plinth participates in this desire to make sculptures that directly acknowledge the literal conditions of their situation: “he was the first to make sculptures which demanded to be placed on the ground, whose specific character would inevitably have been traduced if they were not so placed” (AO, 203). Thus the dynamic in which the work’s literal framing is acknowledged by its interior configuration results in a non-arbitrary relation between the two, overcoming the duality.

In Fried’s careful, detailed analyses of late modernist artworks, he describes various ways in which the literal (physical, material, situated, contingent) properties or conditions of a work are incorporated into it; thus contingency is integrated – and not abolished. His insight recalls Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous integration of chance into poetry in Un coup de dés (“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance”) and Le Livre, in which the contingent nature of the medium of language – and the impossibility ever to abolish this contingency – is acknowledged by the words, syntax and structure of the poems. This is a way of staving off the arbitrariness of the literal medium by integrating it (“absorbing” it, in one of Mallarmé’s formulations); the result is paradoxically a less arbitrary relation between the contingency of the medium and the particular elements of the poem than would have obtained without the direct acknowledgment of that contingency.[5] Thus we might understand Fried’s statement: “Caro on the one hand has frankly avowed the physicality of his sculpture and on the other has rendered that physicality unperspicuous” (AO, 183). Although Fried does use the terms contingency and arbitrariness, (“literal” and “contingent” are associated in his discussion of Caro, for example [AO, 205]), this terminology is not key in his analyses; however, I believe that he would not entirely disagree with their application here. Through the acknowledgment of its own contingency, the work is experienced as being less arbitrary, and (to use Fried’s terms) may thus inspire the beholder’s conviction.

This is the context in which we must understand Fried’s attack on literalism. It is important to recognize, when reading his critique of literalist sensibility in “Art and Objecthood,” that his view of literalness and contingency is not that these should be abolished from artworks (as though that could ever be possible! Mallarmé reminds us that it’s not), but that the literal and contingent properties of a work should be acknowledged and incorporated into it, creating an intimate and non-arbitrary relation between a work’s literal conditions and its configuration, between its situation and its syntax. The problem is not literalness, but what one does with it. The difficulty with minimalist works is that they cannot acknowledge their own literalness – not because there is nothing to acknowledge (they do have literal conditions and shape) but because there is nothing in them to do the acknowledging. They have no parts, no configuration, no syntax capable of entering into relation with their literalness; they are “hollow” (AO, 151). As unitary works, they “hypostatize” literalness as such, simply manifesting their literal conditions, and thus remain arbitrary. The trouble is not literalness itself, then, but literalness in itself. This is how we should understand the phrase cited in my epigraph, “hypostatization is not acknowledgment,” which is key to understanding “Art and Objecthood” and might ring as somewhat cryptic if this background isn’t clear. “[Literalist] pieces cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal” (AO, 88). In Stella’s irregular polygons, on the other hand, literalness “is no longer experienced as the exclusive property of the support. Rather, it is suffused more generally and, as it were, more deeply throughout them” (AO, 92-93). As Mallarmé would say, it is “absorbed,” thus overcoming the distinction between outside and inside. Literalness is not antithetical to the modernist artworks that Fried advocates, which do not abolish but rather acknowledge their literalness and contingency. This is what is meant when Fried states that shape “must be pictorial, not, or not merely, literal” (AO, 151, emphasis added). Objecthood, then, in Fried’s terminology, is not synonymous with literalness, but would be the result of the simple hypostatization or manifestation of literalness, rather than its acknowledgment.

Fried insists on the historically contingent nature of the literal conditions and properties that a given artwork may be said to acknowledge at any given time. That is, the object of acknowledgment is proper to every work and not generalizable to any ahistorical, essential qualities of a medium, which do not exist. (See Fried’s critique of Clement Greenberg’s essentialism [AO, 33-40].) Furthermore, the process of acknowledgment, the dynamic of relations that may be created between the inside and outside of a work, is also proper to every work, artist and period. “It is a historical question what in a given instance counted as acknowledging one or another property or condition of that medium, just as it is a historical question how most accurately to describe the property or condition that the acknowledgment was of. (The determining properties or conditions of a medium in a given instance might be virtually anything; at any rate, they can’t simply be identified with materiality as such.)”[6] That which is acknowledged, as well as that which a beholder may perceive as a dynamic of acknowledgment between the configurations, images, “syntax” or other elements and their literal conditions – ultimately, that which compels a beholder’s conviction in this dynamic – is historically contingent and changing.[7]

Fried’s focus on historicizing the properties of an artwork and the dynamic of acknowledgment participates in his critique of Greenberg, for whom the development of modernism consisted in the progressive manifestation of a medium’s “irreducible essence” – which, Fried argues, resulted in literalism.[8] According to Fried, the literalists’ hypostatization of literalness is simply the endpoint of Greenberg’s modernist reduction of a medium to its essential and literal qualities. It is important to note that despite a certain similarity of vocabulary, the process Greenberg describes in “Modernist Painting” and elsewhere is quite different from the dynamic of acknowledgment that Fried analyses.[9] For Greenberg, art’s movement of self-declaration is one of gradual, “radical simplification” of the medium; a modernist work explicitly indicates its properties “in order to exhibit them more clearly as norms. By being exhibited, they are tested for their indispensability.”[10] If not indispensable, they will be shed. The evolution is toward purification and ever greater explicitness of the medium’s “essence.” Whereas Greenberg describes a sort of hollowing out of the insides of painting as it becomes all surface, Fried emphasizes the intimate relations created between the interior configuration of a work and its material conditions, as its literal properties are acknowledged by its depicted elements.

In his later writings, Fried associates the idea of explicitness with Greenberg’s version of modernist self-criticism and the literalism it produced, and attempts to keep it separate from the concept of acknowledgment. In a footnote to his introduction to Art and Objecthood Fried laments that in his early critical writings he often used the two together.[11] However, the concepts are indeed difficult to separate, and ultimately he need not worry. The problem with Greenberg’s theory was not the concept of explicitness, but his idea of a progressive purification or reduction to mere explicitness. (Just as the problem with literalness is not the fact of literalness, as I argued above, but mere literalness, nothing but literalness.) It would be impossible entirely to separate the concepts of acknowledgment and explicitness; acknowledgment implies the act of bringing something to light, expressing something, rendering something clear either in deed, words or conscious awareness. In art, the relations between depicted elements and physical conditions become evident to a beholder through the dynamic we have been calling acknowledgment. As Cavell writes, “Acknowledgment ‘goes beyond’ knowledge, […] in the call upon me to express the knowledge at its core, to recognize what I know, to do something in the light of it, apart from which this knowledge remains without expression, hence perhaps without possession.”[12] And elsewhere, acknowledgment “goes beyond [knowledge] in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.”[13] The act of acknowledgment inevitably involves something passing from a less to a more explicit state, even if that takes place only within one’s own consciousness. Cavell, again: “[Acknowledgment] is like something hidden in consciousness declaring itself. The mode is revelation. I follow Michael Fried in speaking of this fact of modernist painting as an acknowledging of its conditions.”[14] While acknowledgment always comprises (can never abolish) some kind of explicitness, neither can it be identified with simple exhibition, mere explicitness. As with literalness, what counts with explicitness is what one does with it; literalism does nothing but explicitly exhibit its partless singularity, while in modernism a work’s configuration explicitly integrates – acknowledges – its conditions. Thus we may prize the concept of explicitness away from Greenberg’s use of it.

We should distinguish the concept of acknowledgment from that of self-critique, as theorized by Greenberg, as well as from the other “self-” prefixed terms he uses such as self-declaration, self-definition, self-confession. This focus on the self-activity of a medium or an artwork foreshadows minimalism’s wholeness or unitary character, criticized by Fried in “Art and Objecthood.” The problem, again, is that this self-manifestation is conceived as not having parts or internal relations; there is only one element (or, for Greenberg, extraneous elements will eventually be discarded). I began by mentioning the fact that acknowledgment is predicated upon the interaction of two entities (x acknowledges y), and have gone on to show how in Fried’s analysis of art this process leads to a mutual responsiveness and a continuity between the two which overcome the duality. Ultimately, in a sense, both minimalism and modernism sought non-dualism, though through radically different routes – minimalism by manifesting simple, literal singularity and wholeness, modernism by entering into a dynamic of co-implication, intertwining and acknowledgment. Minimalism pretends to arrive at non-dualism by simply eliminating duality and positing unity by fiat; modernism by the much more difficult route of acknowledging alterity and overcoming duality through creating non-arbitrary relations.

Acknowledgment is an anthropomorphic concept when applied to art, as it is normally a human act. It implies notions of consciousness, communication and sincerity. Fried’s criticism of the anthropomorphism of literalism in “Art and Objecthood” is not aimed at anthropomorphism as such, but at the insincere and theatrical manifestations of it he saw in literalist art (“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” [AO, 157]). What would an anthropomorphic artwork be like that is not hollow or just a theatrical surface, but one that is human and sincere?[15] One answer is a work that explicitly acknowledges its own conditions, framedness, contingency. And to follow out the analogy, what would it mean for a human to acknowledge her or his own literal conditions, situation, materiality, framedness (in time…), internal alterity? Acknowledging one’s own contingency is not a simple matter (try it). Nor is it simple to create artworks that invite beholders to ask such questions, and to search themselves for answers. These are the stakes of modernist acknowledgment.

[1] Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37 (henceforth AO).

[2] Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 239. He writes, “The concept of acknowledgment first showed its significance to me in thinking about our knowledge of other minds, in such a way as to show (what I took to be) modern philosophy neither defeating nor defeated by skepticism. It showed its significance to Michael Fried in characterizing the medium or enterprise of the art of painting” (239).

[3] For Cavell’s discussions of painting and film in terms of acknowledgment, see especially The World Viewed, 108-26; on the role of acknowledgment in his arguments on skepticism, see Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 238-66, and The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 329-496.

[4] The term “acknowledgment” was intended to replace Fried’s earlier conception of “deductive structure,” a more deterministic or mechanistic formulation, referring to the way in which the stripes in Stella’s early stripe paintings, for example, echo or are derived from the literal shape of the painting. (See AO, 23-4.) A lingering association of the idea of acknowledgment with this form of simple (parallel) repetition seems to explain the statement in “Shape as Form” that Stella’s irregular polygons do not acknowledge literal shape (AO, 94); however, a few pages earlier Moultonboro III is analyzed in terms of acknowledgment.

[5] Stéphane Mallarmé, “Igitur,” in Oeuvres Complètes, 2 vols., ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2001), 1:478.

[6] Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 285.

[7] For example, he sees in Manet’s paintings of the 1860s an acknowledgment of “the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld,” Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 405; see also Courbet’s Realism, 286.

[8] Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 131. See also “Sculpture in our Time” and “Modernist Painting” in the same volume, as well as Fried’s discussion in AO, 33-40 and 66. “Literal” is a term used often by Greenberg in his criticism (for example, in “Sculpture in our Time”) although not with the consistent philosophical charge used by Fried.

[9] It is possible that in the concept of acknowledgment we may witness Fried prizing the term away from Greenberg’s theorizing, with Cavell’s help, thus overcoming the influence of the elder critic.

[10] Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 89.

[11] “Unfortunately, I continued to deploy the concept of explicitness in connection with that of acknowledgment in ‘Shape as Form’ and subsequent essays, which I think was a mistake: part of the point of stressing acknowledgment in those contexts was to avoid the pitfalls of the idea of making explicit, and I wish I had kept the two terms rigorously separate. And yet the fact that I did not, indeed that the phrases ‘explicit acknowledgment’ and ‘explicitly acknowledge’ came so readily to hand, suggests that the distinction in question was (and, I think, still is) conceptually insecure. I’m not sure what to do about this other than to call attention to the problem” (AO, 65). See also Courbet’s Realism, 285.

[12] Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 428; cited by Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 364.

[13] Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? 257.

[14] Cavell, The World Viewed, 109.

[15] See Lisa Siraganian, “Art and Surrogate Personhood,” nonsite.org 21 (July 2017): n.p.; https://nonsite.ecdsdev.org/article/art-and-surrogate-personhood-2

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.

Of the three artists Fried sees as representative of literalism, Donald Judd is surely the central or main target. He it is who declares “the new [literalist] work obviously resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but it is nearer to painting.” (137) Judd is the obvious spokesman for the delusion, as Fried puts it, that modernist painting’s history is one of a revelation of its essential objecthood. In my opinion Judd’s problem is (was) clearly that he either didn’t understand, or just could not stand, paradox. To the extent that modernist painting sought to reveal or assert the side of painting that is an object, it was in order to defeat it. Moreover, or so it seems to me, Judd could neither take into account the involuntary nor perhaps grasp that one can’t display a negative. It is difficult if not impossible to stare at a blank surface and not see it turn into a depth, just what he didn’t want. While the thrill of abolishing pictorial space and replacing it with a work that was continuous with the undifferentiated space around it could only occur as long as one remembered—or knew—the spatial tradition and conventions to which it was opposed. Otherwise it was just a thing that sat there like a chair—and this is indeed true of a great deal that has been made since, where deadness is also regarded as cool. Judd’s alleged indebtedness to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and how they were displayed is I think not irrelevant.

The other two artists have little in common with Judd, or with wanting to abolish pictorial space, and while I see why Fried includes them they aren’t so essential to what he has to say. Tony Smith’s work was indebted no doubt to his friend Barnett Newman and his idea of the sublime, particularly with regard to indeterminacy but also I think to Newman’s cherished image of the Native American dance in which the dancer dances around a pole in an open landscape, and in this one may talk of a however tenuous relationship to modernist painting. But that’s as far as that goes, Smith’s background was in architecture, he studied with Frank Lloyd Wright and the scale of Die is taken from Le Corbusier, while whatever he may have said about the New Jersey Turnpike, the genesis of the work began with a drunken dream in which a little black file box that sat on Eugene Goosen’s desk flew through the air with wings. Drawings (or more precisely watercolors) exist, the dream followed Smith falling asleep after receiving a talking to from Goosen (the Chair of the Hunter College Art Department) about being drunk and misbehaving. Robert Morris was originally a dancer and for a time was Robert Rauschenberg’s assistant, so not too much about modernist painting to be found there, except of course for the part played by Marcel Duchamp in both Morris’ and Rauschenberg’s thinking.

It is in any case surely against Judd that Fried pits Caro, and that when he does so he opposes an art made out of juxtaposition to Judd’s logically problematic idea that wholes oughtn’t be subdivided. In noting that Caro’s work is made out of juxtaposing elements, Fried opposes it to Judd’s notion of completeness in that juxtaposition does not make an indivisible form, nor is it one thing after another. Fried describes Caro’s sculpture as a specific gathering of forms or shapes that are only seen in relation to others, where from some vantage points these are seen to be partly covered and from others in some cases the opposite. Caro is seen to be a sculptor in whose work there is an inside and an outside, and where the passage from the one to the other is and cannot be straightforward in that sometimes where the distinction between the two is inevitably shifts from vantage point to vantage point. This is of course part of the immediacy which the sculpture maintains as one goes around it, and contrasts with the hollowness that Fried says may be attributed to some works as a result of their literalist ambition. The works in question would of course be Judd’s, who avoids the charge by in practice being an artist of slight complication, so that the interior is not entirely empty. That is perhaps what he learned from Newman, whose works were never not paradoxical, and whom he seems in that respect if not others to have fundamentally failed to comprehend. Onement is made of two colors, for example, and one may go on from there.

In his old age Judd contradicted his earlier self and made work that is entirely about relating and composing elements, but that is of interest only in passing. What I should like to say here is that I think it’s a pity that Fried didn’t have the time or space to develop what he says about Ronald Bladen and Robert Grosvenor, whom he describes as sort of half-way between the positions represented by Caro and Judd. Bladen made some historically significant paintings in the early sixties but did his best work as a sculptor (and for the last two decades or so of his life only made sculpture,) and the work is “relational” in Judd’s terms. Grosvenor was, like Smith, trained as an architect (marine architecture in Grosvenor’s case, an intriguing beginning for a sculptor in that one might wonder where else one would learn to think of the ground of the work as fluid.) In the early seventies Grosvenor did make work which, consisting of a single plank with a partial break at one point along it, is very minimal and might properly be thought of in terms of Carl Andre or Morris rather than Caro. But most of his work since, and especially the more recent work, involves like Bladen’s an interruption of the ungeneralized space in which the viewer is standing. An interior is there which changes one’s sense of scale, separating the work from the world, whether or not it is to some degree penetrated or otherwise entered by it. These artists represent what was repressed by Judd, and largely still is now that the minimalist look has become the standard backdrop or support for nearly everything endorsed by the establishment—again the connection between Judd and Warhol is germane. They were (or are in Grosvenor’s case) the artists who were dissatisfied with the simple and dogmatic, while looking for something that was not as close to David Smith as was and is Caro. Fried disparages Susan Sontag in “Art and Objecthood,” but I think he would agree with one of the last things she said to me personally, which was that if it isn’t difficult it isn’t worth bothering with. Bladen and Grosvenor in my view offered difficulty, rather than implausible dogma or the already a bit familiar.

“Art and Objecthood” reminds us that the past is a foreign country, as the (now) quite obscure British author L.P. Hartley was the first to say. It belongs to an era in which Artforum was full of writing about art, and where the question of whether what was being discussed was worth considering as—or, as Fried’s essay asks, even was—art, was thought to be important. There could be no hint in the essay, or of any thing or of the artists to which it refers, of the anthropological haze moist with sanctimony that has since descended, obscuring and diluting questions having to do with aesthetic judgment while seeking to wash them away altogether. Thanks perhaps ultimately to Kojève, our art world is not like that one. It is much more concerned with social power rather than phenomenal force. One has the impression that in the art world we have collectors who run hedge funds fly to the Venice Biennale in private planes while artists and theorists who quote Marx (by way of Lacan’s internalization of Kojève’s nutty reading of Hegel) fly first or at least business, and once there they all have a fulfilling time talking about freedom and inequality while not bothering with class warfare, which is obviated by the need to wait for Alain Badiou’s “authentic event,” or something of that sort. Meanwhile, and as a result, Artforum is full of socially responsible writing about culture in general. Not a word any more about whether anything is worth thinking about because it’s art, not to mention whether it is.

­­–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.

Specifically, “Art and Objecthood” was meant to offer a corrective to an overly simplistic understanding of modernism that had taken hold in the decade or so prior to the essay’s publication. Minimalism, Fried suggested, was a product of that misprision. He explained:

[O]bjecthood has become an issue for modernist painting only within the past several years. This, however, is not to say that before the present situation came into being, paintings, or sculptures for that matter, simply were objects. It would, I think, be closer to the truth to say that they simply were not. 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 paintings 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… (160)

Although the text implies 1960 is merely a ballpark date, it seems relevant to note that Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” was published in precisely that year.1 Recalling this, we may be tempted to hear the sentence in question punctuated somewhat differently: “That such a possibility began to present itself around 1960 was largely the result of developments within ‘Modernist Painting’.” I have to think that, whatever Fried’s allegiances at the time to Greenberg, he could only have been dismayed at the form Greenberg’s argument had taken in that essay.2 Instead of a nuanced account premised on the careful observation and description of specific works, “Modernist Painting” offered an overly reductive, insufficiently dialectical and fundamentally misleading understanding of the modernist project. In many ways the charge that Fried would level at Minimalism, that it sought “to declare and occupy a position—one that can be formulated in words” (148), might just as easily have been directed at Greenberg’s essay. As presented there, modernism entailed an incremental, “purifying” reduction to its essence of each individual medium. “Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures,” Greenberg asserted, “by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.”3 “Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art,” he continued, Modernist painting oriented itself to “the ineluctable flatness of the surface” as it did to nothing else (“Modernist Painting,” 87).

I’d like to think it goes without saying that this formulation amounts to a caricature of the models of modernism put forward in many of Greenberg’s other critical writings. In “Collage,” for example, which was written only the year before “Modernist Painting,” the picture is considerably more complicated. Rather than recounting a simple linear progression to an essence, “Collage” presents Cubism’s development as fully dialectical. There, the medium of painting is seen to draw in certain (self-)critical moments on the resources of, first, sculpture and, subsequently, papier collé. Even more importantly, “Collage” discusses the literal flatness of its material support as a condition that modernist painting felt obliged to own up to, but with which it refused to be fully reconciled. “Painting had to spell out, rather than pretend to deny, the physical fact that it was flat,” Greenberg writes in “Collage,” “even though at the same time it had to overcome this proclaimed flatness as an aesthetic fact” were it to become a successful painting.4 It was, in this accounting, precisely its non-reconciliation to “the ineluctable flatness of its surface” that drove the production of modernist painting. Far from serving as the essence of the medium, the literal or material support was something that had to be negated or otherwise undone.5

A related logic can be seen at work within “Art and Objecthood” and Fried’s other critical writings of the period—although in them literal shape and, by extension, objecthood have taken over the role played by physical or “undepicted” flatness in Greenberg’s “Collage.” In both cases what is fundamentally at stake is a distinction between the realized work of art and other, more superficial sorts of things (wallpaper, for example, as Picasso’s papiers collés make clear, or mass-produced commodities).6 Admittedly, Fried doesn’t phrase matters this way. He continues to refer to “literalist art” and to associate it with theater—which is to say, not with non-art but simply with another recognized artistic form—thereby holding the greater threat at bay and effectively inoculating Minimalism against any more serious charge.7 Still, as Stephen Melville has argued, the anxiety driving the critical projects of both Greenberg and Fried is indissociable from the context of late capitalism.8 It is also wholly understandable; “it is based,” Melville writes, “on the way things of culture increasingly do appear to die, to cease to count, in our world: not with a bang, but a whimper. It is, among other things, fear of Muzak” (Philosophy Beside Itself, 8).

Again, it seems to me that Fried’s antipathy toward Minimalism is fueled by just such concerns. For him, the work of art is successful only insofar as it’s able to both acknowledge its factual objecthood and to somehow defeat or suspend it. In the case of the paintings he most admires, that conflict is played out principally within the “medium” of shape. As he explains it in his discussion of Frank Stella’s irregular polygons, it “is only in the presence of this conflict that the question of whether or not a given painting holds or stamps itself out as shape makes full sense—or rather, only here that the issue of ‘the viability of shape as such’ characterizes a specific stage in resolving or unfolding problems of acknowledgment, literalness, and illusion which…have been among the issues of modernism from its beginning.”9 If the irregularly shaped canvas of Stella’s Moultonboro III (1966) raises the prospect of objecthood—much as had his earlier metallic stripe paintings (e.g., Ileana Sonnabend, 1963)—Moultonboro III nonetheless manages to neutralize any temptation on our part to regard its depicted shapes as dependent on its literal one. Rather, Fried points out, the depicted and the literal appear wholly continuous with one another. We immediately perceive Moultonboro III as comprising a triangle superimposed upon a square, those shapes “acknowledging, by repeating, the shape of the support” (89). Yet it seems even truer to our experience of the painting to say that the depicted shapes undo the primacy of the literal support: “The beholder is in effect compelled not to experience the literal shape in its entirety—as a single entity—but rather to perceive it segment by segment, each of which is felt to belong to one or another of the smaller shapes that constitute the painting as a whole” (90).

Furthermore, in Moultonboro III those smaller shapes seem to exist in uncertain relation in depth both to one another and to the surface of the picture. Fried describes the spatial relation between “the light yellow triangular band” and “the turquoise blue Z-shaped band into which it fits” as “ineluctably ambiguous” (“Shape as Form,” 93). (Note that, in choosing that particular word, “ineluctably,” Fried is not only describing an aspect of Moultonboro III but also marking his growing differences with Greenberg, especially the Greenberg of “Modernist Painting.” Where the latter had identified the “ineluctable flatness of the support” as the very essence of painting, Fried suggests that what appears most ineluctable in the paintings he admires is their pervasive ambiguity.) The beveled ends of the Z, and the fact that its top and bottom segments do not run parallel to one another, introduce suggestions of obliquity that undermine the factual certainty of the shape. In this regard, too, Fried says, Moultonboro III is exemplary of Stella’s irregular polygons, the best of which make “literalness illusive” (95). “[B]y so doing,” he adds, “they unmake, at least in the event and for the moment, the distinction between shape as a fundamental property of objects and shape as an entity belonging to painting alone…” (96).

Despite their status as mere prepositional phrases, Fried’s qualifying “in the event and for the moment” signal another significant departure from Greenberg. Even the Greenberg of “Collage” had implied that the optical illusiveness of the papiers collés resolved once and for all the conflict between literal and depicted flatnesses that had driven earlier Cubist production. However much Fried may feel that Stella’s irregular polygons constitute a similarly compelling response to the “unfolding problems of acknowledgment, literalness, and illusion” characteristic of modernism, he knows that those problems will continue to unfold. “Solutions” are ever only provisional because history is ongoing. In their unfolding, even the problems themselves are bound to change their shape.

Today, half a century after the publication of “Art and Objecthood” and “Shape as Form,” Fried’s characterization of Minimalism still holds sway—except, of course, for his negative assessment of that work. As he himself has remarked, the terms of his argument have gone largely untouched, even (or perhaps especially) among his critics; they have merely reversed the terms’ original values (“An Introduction,” 43). My own relation to the essay is rather less straightforward. On the one hand, I’m reluctant to subsume Judd’s work in particular to the category of the merely theatrical. It seems to me preferable to discount much of his rhetoric and so to see his wall pieces, as others have, in relation to sculpture or painting rather than as “specific objects.”10 Viewed from this angle, the wall pieces frequently evince a pictorialism or perceptual excess that might well be regarded as continuous with modernism’s earlier unfolding. On the other hand, I deeply share Fried’s concern that art might become—or might now, in 2017, have already become—trivialized, all but entirely displaced by a set of “openly theatrical productions and practices” (“An Introduction,” 43). Here Carsten Höller’s giant slides for the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern readily come to mind…

Hegel believed that it was incumbent on anything that wanted to be taken seriously to “prove its object,” which is to say, to show itself to be the kind of thing that it in fact is. I am enough of a Hegelian (and a modernist) to feel that art must still “prove its object,” each work somehow making visible a claim for its existence as a work of art rather than some other sort of thing. I take it that what Fried has wanted to show us, not only in his early writings but throughout his art-historical career, is that such “objectivity” is at consequential odds with mere “objecthood,” and that both art and art history need to be clear about those stakes, at least if they hope to be taken seriously. In that sense above all “Art and Objecthood” continues to be for me an extremely consequential text.

What we have in the tradition of this comparative understanding is a deeply entrenched syncretic belief system. It is a system that mixes two different forms together, like the uniting of early Christian religion with Roman law to produce the Roman Catholic Church. The art of painting has been married to the structure of language since the early church declared painting acceptable as the visual bible for the illiterate. This system unites “painting”—a site-specific material-based form of art—with “language”—a form of communication that is separate from what it signifies, and defers materiality to the category of mere craft. This syncretic system interprets all the arts as being language-based, and this justifies the art of painting as a picture-language. Picture-paintings tell a story.

The origin of the concept of a scholars’ library for the study of the arts comes from the nine daughters of Zeus, the first four of which are forms of poetry, two of theater, two of music and dance, and the ninth, astronomy. These muses preside over learning and the creative arts. There is, in this tradition, no muse of the material arts, no muse of painting or sculpture.

Writers on the comparison of the arts were, of course, looking at picture-paintings, and most of them readily admit that they are not actually referring to painting per se, but rather to the visual image in general. Lessing, in his introduction to “Laocoön,” states clearly that by “painting” he means the visual arts in general, and by “poetry” the arts whose composition is progressive in time. The problem inherent in the belief that painting is a picture-language can be played out in the Galilean drama of seeing versus perceiving. In 1632, when Galileo presented his support of the Copernican heliocentric model of our solar system, his argument was based in part on his direct observations of the planets through the new technology of his telescope, and this was done against the fixed authority of the established theory. Now consider that Maffeo Barberini, who was schooled in the traditional Ptolemaic geocentric system, could have said to Galileo, “Everyday I see the sun rise in the East, move across the sky, and set in the West. I observe the sun revolve around the Earth.” His argument would not only have been backed by 1,400 years of tradition, but also by what he saw. Had Pope Urban VIII made this argument in 1633, he may not have understood that his interpretation of what he sees in the sky was not evidence of the sun revolving around the earth. The reason we think we see the sun rise is not that the sun revolves around the earth, but rather that the earth rotates on its own axis. The problem lies in perceiving the power of the earth’s turning. When looking at a picture-painting, do you perceive the power of its material? If you don’t recognize the painting as a material object, you might as well be looking at a photographic reproduction. The reproduction (adjusted to fit the format of your screen) will also give you the information of the picture. It too tells the story.

There are now more reproductions of the visual arts in the world than there are original works, and these reproductions are an established educational tool that serves a very useful function (as any art historian will tell you). But keep in mind, the photographic reproduction of the visual work of art is to the original object what pornography is to sex. The actual painting is material-based, and therefore motivated by sensibility. Everything else is virtual reality.

We think of a painting as a picture-language not as a dismissive pejorative, but rather because of our fundamental belief that a painting is an image rather than an object, and that its energy is derived from the viewer’s imagination. Our concept of image separates the image from what it is an image of, and what we defer is our attention to materiality of the image. The questions we often hear asked about abstract painting—what does it represent, or what is it trying to express?—are seeking to know what its identity is abstracted from.

In the visual arts, our understanding of image is based on the Greek concept of mimesis, and is derived in part from Plato’s concept of ‘eikonos,’ icon, which is defined by shadow and reflection. The concept of image has only a resemblance or an allusion to a prototype, and the idea of re-presentation. So our sense of the unity of the picture-painting is dependent on something outside the sensibility of the actual paint material.

The invention of the camera allowed the separation of the binary coupling of picture and painting, and like Galileo’s telescope, which helped the science of astronomy to divorce itself from the ninth daughter of Zeus, painting no longer had to represent itself as a theater tableau to be judged by the standards of some other form. So its successful realization now does not depend on the establishment of the supreme fiction of its own nonexistence as an object on the wall. In the pursuit of modern art, we should recognize that not only do we have a habit of speech that informs our method of discovery, but also a belief system that paintings, no matter how abstract, are composed like a language. They are understood as tribal images that convey meaning. So many of the questions we ask are seeking a criterion of correctness, some Rosetta Stone that will allow us to interpret the inferences and shared beliefs of the culture the painting represents.

You can trace the liberation of painting from the structure of a picture-language by simply following the gradual removal of the picture frame from the practice of painting. Through the 20^th century, it is a transition out of the composition of a picture-form and into the structural identity of the painted-form, a paradigm shift from pictorial representation to concrete actualization.

By the time Michael Fried published “Art and Objecthood” in 1967, this transition had been in development for over 50 years and was beginning to take on a life of its own. Some painters were investigating the materials of their practice, not in terms of the craft of the painting’s making, but rather in recognition of the force with which those materials affect the viewer. It was to bring into the conscious forefront of the experience of the painting considerations of the conditions of application, boundary, color, scale, and presentation.

There was also an acknowledgment on the part of some art world intellectuals that in order for something to be understood as a modern painting, it required the recognition of certain unalienable conditions of the painting itself. This notion questioned issues such as the construction of the support, its relationship to the wall, its shape and surface, and how the fact of its materials could identify the object as a painting. It brought to the forefront of the discourse on modern art the body problem, not the fictitious body of the image, but rather the concrete actuality of the painting on the wall as an object, and by extension, what is required for it to be recognized as a successful painting.

Many of the painters and writers on modern painting at that time tried to imbue the work with the rhetoric of mystic transcendence or psychological expression, because once you begin to address the body problem of the painting itself, it immediately raises the more fundamental and deeply rooted question as to what then motivates that body and what is the effect of its power.

It is clear that our concept of image and our understanding of language are compatible theories, in that neither is dependent on the specificity of the material’s visual sensibility. All the paintings that Wallace Stevens makes reference to in 1951 are also pictures/images, and in his view, they are motivated by the imagination. Today his remarks about painting might also apply to television, movies, and computer games, which are all forms of picture-language. And would Lessing now have to classify those forms of image-making in the category of poetry, because their composition is progressive in time?

This change from a concern for the relationship between the arts, in which all the arts come under the umbrella of language in order to neutralize the material difference between them, to the acknowledgment of the discrepancy between the image and its materiality, seems to center in the visual arts on the investigation of the specifics of each art form’s physical identity. By the mid-20th century, the subject of modern painting was, at least in part, the recognition of the painting itself as a sensory object on the wall. This, of course, raised questions about the independent nature of sensory experience, and its relationship to understanding.

*

In 1962, Clement Greenberg published an article in Art International titled “After Abstract Expressionism,” focusing on the materiality of modern painting. This came after his 1955 article in Partisan Review, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which he embraces the work of the abstract expressionists, and his 1960 essay, “Modernist Painting,” in which he presents the rationale of (but does not advocate for) modern art. Greenberg’s critique of modern art in part comes from his understanding of Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” The aesthetic condition of art, Greenberg believed, should be valid solely on its own terms, and so as a guarantee of its quality, the art needed to distance itself from the culture in which it was produced. This meant that it had to dispense with any unwanted conventions in order not to dilute the intensity and seriousness of its art. The art was to maintain the continuity of each form, while at the same time discarding all the unrelated stuff from that form. The enterprise of painting was subject to the self-critique of its own practice.

Greenberg proposed in “After Abstract Expressionism” that “by now it has been established, it would seem, that the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness.” For the art of painting, he concluded, “the observation of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture: thus a stretched or tacked up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one.” This proposition about the irreducible essence of pictorial art became somewhat axiomatic in the account of modern visual arts. It is easy to imagine yourself standing in a room with two other objects, a sculpture on the floor, and a painting on the wall. The question is then posed as to their unique difference. It was no longer about their common identity as works of art—it was, rather, what sets each form apart from the others. For Greenberg, in this instance, it is simply the fact of them as physical objects.

Greenberg argued that “to achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture.” He rejected color as an essential element specific to painting, because sculpture and theater also have color. He acknowledged that paintings are material objects in the world, like sculpture, but unlike sculpture paintings have this particular quality of flatness as an object: a “two-dimensional entity in space.” His acknowledgment of painting as an object, albeit a flat wall object, is to the history of painting what Copernicus’ recognition of our solar system was to the history of astronomy. It is the recognition that a painting is not just a surface wall decoration, in the same way that a sculpture is not just an extended gargoyle of a building. A painting is an object that has a relationship to a wall in the way a sculpture is an object that has a relationship to a floor, and these are related but different functions. This acknowledgment, that the recognition of the physical body of the painting is essential to our understanding of painting as a modern work of art, is crucial for the understanding of the transformation that the practice of painting is making towards its own actualization.

One of the things about the history of the easel form of painting that is often overlooked is that the painting itself became independent of architecture and could be transported from one place to another. However, the painting’s physicality was understood merely as making it possible to transport cultural cargo through time and space. Most of the art historical theories focused on the cargo, not the vessel. For Greenberg, it was a particular condition of painting as a vessel that distinguished it from sculpture: “flatness and the delimitation of flatness.”

Greenberg defined modern painting to be independent of other art forms, and stressed the development of painting’s uniqueness as being only accessible to sight. As he said, the experience of the painting is “one of purely optical experience, against optical experience as revised or modified by tactile association.” This seems to me a clear rejection of the now-fashionable art-world reference to Freud’s notion in “Sexual Aberrations” that seeing is “an activity that is ultimately derived from touching.” While that may be true for pornography and photographic reproductions, consider the fact that if I put a painting into the hands of a blind person, they could tell you that it is a flat object. What they cannot tell you is what color it is. So again, imagine yourself in a room with two other objects. This time, a chair on the floor, and a flat-screen TV on the wall. The question again is posed as to their unique difference. Since they do not share the common bond of being works of art, the tendency is to think of their use-function. Their difference is that you sit down in the chair to watch images on the television. But should we now also consider the flat-screen TV to be a painting, albeit not a successful one until it is turned on? The problem, of course, is obvious. Not only did Greenberg have a habit of speech in referring to paintings as pictures, but he conceives of the art of painting as a picture-language, and for image-making, his axiom about “pictorial art” seems essentially true.

The art historian Rudolf Arnheim points out in his essay “The Expression and Composition of Color,” in reference to picture-painting, that “the medium favors a basic flatness, like that of the surface to which it is applied…Left to its own devices, the medium discourages overlapping of shapes, because it cuts off parts of objects, and it prefers frontality because oblique positions squeeze the objects.” His argument, it would seem, is that a picture is flat for reasons of clarity and full disclosure of subject matter. This seems essentially true for static images. But Greenberg states that, “a stretched or tacked up canvas already exists as a picture.” This is understandable only if you believe that the function of the flat plane is to have an image put on it, so that in the imagination, a blank movie screen, television or computer screen already exists as a picture.

To those schooled in the traditional reading of picture-language, the focus on the physical properties of a painting may seem a meaningless exercise of technique because they define the materials only as property to be used in the free enterprise of their imagination. The modern painter, however, is seeking the unalienable conditions of the painting itself: i.e., the integrity of the painting as a material object and the autonomy of its material to affect the viewer. Henry Staten points out in “Clement Greenberg, Radical Painting and the Logic of Modernism,” that the crucial philosophical reference for this tradition would not be Kant but rather Aristotle, “the original theorist of art as tekhne who is much more plausibly considered the predecessor, even if not the actual inspiration, of the modernist idea of the specific medium.”

Greenberg set the parameters for the understanding of modern art and put the investigation of painting squarely within modernism’s attempt to overturn the hierarchy of western civilization. For the art of painting this meant stripping away the cultural cargo from the vessel and examining the unique character of the vessel’s form. The problem is not in recognizing the flatness of the vessel. It is in the conclusion that that is somehow its essence. In the end, Greenberg gives us a conclusion for the experience of an empty vessel. We are left sitting in Plato’s cave, waiting for the next movie to begin.

*                                             *                                              *

In 1967, Michael Fried published an essay in Artforum titled “Art and Objecthood,” in which he offers a correction to Greenberg’s axiom. This came after Fried’s essay in 1965, titled “Three American Painters,” in which he states that it is the responsibility of the modern critic to assume the same burden of self-critique that the modern painter must have and they may also call attention to the formal issues that demand to be grappled with. In footnote number 6 of “Art and Objecthood,” this is exactly what he does.

Like Galileo’s support of Copernicus, Fried says that Greenberg in his broad outline is undoubtedly correct—with certain qualifications, however. He suggests that, “flatness and the delimitation of flatness ought not to be thought of as the ‘irreducible essence of pictorial art,’ but rather as something like the minimal conditions for something’s being seen as a painting.”

Two things are immediately evident. First is the obvious shift in terminology from “pictorial art” to “being seen as a painting.” Second is the shift from flatness as a conclusion, some sort of endgame, to that of its use-function within the game. This seemingly simple shift in understanding is of major importance for the development of the art of painting towards its new paradigm.

In the body of his text, Fried rails against the literalism and theatricality of presentation of the objects that were beginning to emerge out of the minimalist intervention in the American art world. These non-art objects, fostered by the idea of the “found object” (readymades) that could be seen as art by simply placing them in an art-world context, or the “specific object” that supposedly existed in the space between painting and sculpture, were, in part, reflections of a vast wasteland of products in a post-industrial society. These “objects of art” could be made by anonymous workers on a factory production line. They are conducive to the mass production of multiple lookalikes and are unrelated to the artist’s intimate working of material. This idea appealed to the growing middle class that was entering into the art world, because it seemed as though anything could be a work of art, and anyone could be an artist. All you needed was to tell a story about the object. The theater of this was embraced by Generation X, which produced artworks commonly labeled “mixed-medium.” In the contemporary art world, it was a wholesale rejection of traditional forms, and seemed to negate the problem of self-critique in maintaining the continuity of a form. All of these forms of “installation art,” as many of them came to be known, are essentially sculpture, and Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” is often cited to explain, justify, or negate such works.

In footnote number 6, however, he directly addresses Greenberg’s axiom, and the specific condition of painting. There is a sense in it of an intuitive recognition that for the enterprise of modern painting, Greenberg had the cart before the horse. We know the horse is in front of the cart because the pulling function of the horse is attached to the steering mechanism of the carriage. Greenberg, in this instance, like Joshua Reynolds, seemed more concerned with the status of the carriage, that is, painting as an Art, than with its use-function. What we can glean from Fried is that flatness and the delimitation of flatness is a functional mechanism of the art of painting, and was, at the time, steering the direction that painting was going in.

We can understand that in the tradition of easel painting, the rendering of perspective to create the pictorial illusion of objects in space requires a flat surface, because the particulars of the illusion would be distorted on a three-dimensional object. Pictorial space needs a degree of flatness for clarity and full disclosure of the illusion. Does this mean, then, that the condition of flatness is merely something left over from the death of easel painting, and rightfully understood as a condition taken up by the movies? A kind of found condition accepted by the modern bourgeoisie because it is related to the flat, poster-like images of the everydayness, the ordinariness, of the bourgeois’ idea of culture, as T.J. Clark would argue? The flat plane itself represents their condition as subject matter. If so, then it is precisely the flat plane as subject matter that allows movies to be the dominant art form of the bourgeoisie, as it doesn’t seem to matter as to the quality of the movie so much as it does the fact that they are moving pictures telling a story. But, as Michael Fried points out, movies, by their very nature, escape the tension of theater and by their very nature provide a refuge from modern art. In that regard, for the bourgeoisie, the flat movie screen already exists as a pictorial art.

According to Fried, the problem for modern painting and all the individual arts that are explicitly concerned with the conventions that constitute their respective essences, is that their survival had become increasingly dependent on their ability to defeat theater. This requires that you embrace the internal construct of the painting itself; the only story to be told is the one concerning the very nature of its own form. Modern painting is a very specific and difficult form to achieve, and the important issue for modern painting is to visually perceive the power of its own being. Its understanding requires the recognition that the art of painting turns on its own material axis. This means the questions about its condition of being are related to the function of the materials, and with Fried’s claim that recognition allows for the most obvious question of all: If painters no longer need to create an illusion of an image in space on a flat surface, why do paintings still need to be flat?

Greenberg’s axiom that a stretched or tacked-up canvas is in itself a painting does not take into account the reason for laying out the canvas in the first place. To consider that something could be a painting without having any paint on it flies in the face of common sense—at least for any practitioner of the art. The reason the surface is presented is that it is to-be-painted. After all, the art of painting has the medium “paint” in its title. Fried’s claim suggests an interconnectedness of the elements of painting so that the condition of flatness has to be understood in relationship to the application of a paint medium, its articulation in relationship to the delimitation of flatness, and finally, the actual function of the medium itself. Ultimately the question this line of thinking is seeking is the one embedded in Greenberg’s broad outline. What is it about the condition of flatness and its delimitation that we can experience in a painting but that we cannot get in any other art form?

Fried’s claim in 1967, that flatness and the delimitation of flatness ought to be considered a condition for something’s being seen as a painting, presented three basic options for understanding the abstract construct of a painting.

One: The paint medium is used as a drawing substance to leave a mark on a flat surface. This invites a close reading of the surface with a mimetic tendency to repeat the gesture of the performer. It is about locating the surface and has no objective of establishing boundaries. You can easily consider the expansive blackboard paintings of Cy Twombly, from the mid to late 1960s, as examples. The paint medium is used for the specific performance of the mark. This is an understanding of painting as primarily a drawing form.

Two: The paint medium is used to fill in the delimitation of its flatness. There is a tendency to back away from the surface to view the whole object. It is about determining the boundaries of the surface and shape differentiation within the object. There is no objective of an intimate working of the paint medium. You could consider the interlocking shapes of Frank Stella’s powerful “Irregular Polygons” from 1966 in that regard. This is the recognition of painting as a compositional form.

Three: The relationship between the flat surface and its delimitation is determined by the application of the paint medium. This means the type of medium and the tool used to transfer the medium to the surface will in turn affect the delimitation of the plane. It is about locating the limits of the surface within the reach of the paint application. You could consider, for example, the very large horizontal spray paintings of Jules Olitski from the mid to late 1960s, as a balanced relationship between paint medium, tool of application, surface receptacle, and scale of object. This is a painterly form.

Fried set the conditions for understanding the body construct of abstract painting: flatness in its delimitation is a condition for seeing something as a painting; not its irreducible essence. His implicit recognition of the interconnectedness of the elements has allowed for the further clarification of painting that leads us to the recognition of its structural identity as concrete painting. It is an approach to painting somewhat analogous to the Socratic dialectic on governance. If the art of painting is no longer based on the traditional hierarchy of a picture-language, and is now seeking the full realization of the unalienable conditions of its own form, then how are we to understand it as a work of art? You can’t answer the question as to the purpose of a painting, per se, until you have established what kind of object it is. And you can’t determine that until you know the function of its materials.

So just briefly consider for a moment Greenberg’s rejection of color as an essential element specific to painting because sculpture and theater also have color. This seems odd when you consider that for the art of painting, color is generally thought of as a condition of paint. You can only reject color if you have already rejected the paint medium and don’t understand the actual material function of a medium itself. It is not a question of the fact of color, nor how the paint medium can be used. It is first a question of the function of the paint medium, and then its relation to flatness and its delimitation.

While the paint medium can be used as merely fluid property to express the poetry of the artist’s imagination, its actual function as a material substance is to carry pigment; a paint medium is the binder that adheres the pigment to a surface. The pigment divides light; it hold some wavelengths and reflects back others. That light is revealed to us as color. A three-dimensional object reveals the direction of the light source by the shadow of its form. Its color is seen in relationship to the form and movement of the object, as in sculpture and theater. So the particulars of its color, and their understanding, are altered by the dimensionality and movement of the object the paint medium is attached to.

Unlike a sculpted three-dimensional object, paintings, as two-dimensional entities in space, have a specific function for color. In relation to the flat plane, the pigmented paint medium is seen as an open membrane of divided light. The flat plane of painted color allows us to see the inner movement of the light itself. Light is the energy that activates the pigmented paint, and is the radical opticality of the painting. It is not derived from or verifiable by touch. So the painting is flat for visual clarity and full disclosure of its color. We are all immersed in light, most or all of our lives. Painting’s delimitation is to see a particular moment of the light. So that, in the architecture of concrete painting, function follows light.

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I have labored the point of Fried’s qualification to give some idea of where it fits into, and its historic importance to, our understanding of modern painting. In the midst of the transition that painting has made through the twentieth century, Fried separated the enterprise of painting from the imaginary world of the muses, and like Galileo, opening our solar system to the new science of astronomy, Fried opened the pathway to understanding the new paradigm for painting. Today, we seek to reveal the essence of the art, and this is rooted in the tekhne of painting’s practice. The pressing questions are related to the function of an art whose objectness is a moment of light. The painting’s stance is for acquisition. We are indebted to Michael Fried for his insight into this form. One of the difficulties for the contemporary art world is that this art of painting is a form of communication that is not language-based, and this might be part of the reason they have been mute on his point for the last 50 years.

The irreducible essence of the art of painting is its moment of light. Light is the arbitrary constant within the parameters of the form, and is the energy that motivates the body painting. In Aristotelian terms, it is the soul of the form. Presentness is grace.

Joseph Marioni

painter

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