“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).

[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

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.

*                                  *                                  *                                  *

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

MMXVII

During the month of April, 1971 Clement Greenberg gave nine sem­i­­nars on esthetics at Bennington College. Greenberg, then in his early 60s, was I think aware that he had little more to say as a critic of contemporary art, and he seems to have wanted to leave a legacy of a more theoretical or phi­lo­sophical kind albeit one keyed to the develop­ments in modern painting and sculpture that for more than three decades had engaged his attention. Over the next seven or eight years he worked further on the texts, eight of which eventually were pub­lished one at a time in Art International, Studio Inter­national, and Arts Magazine. The essay I want to discuss today was originally entitled “Con­vention and Inno­vation” and was published as “Seminar 6” in Arts Magazine in June 1976. (Republished more than twenty years later in a volume called Homemade Esthetics, it was again titled “Convention and Innovation.”) It begins:

Experience says that formalized art, the kind most people agree to call art, offers greater satisfaction by and large than any other aesthetic experience. Formalizing art means making aesthetic experience communicable: objectifying it, making it public, instead of keeping it private or solipsistic as happens with most aesthetic experience. For aesthetic experience to be communicated it has to be submitted to conventions—or “forms” if you like—just as a language does if it’s to be understood by more than one person.

Conventions put resistances, obstacles, controls in the way of communication at the same time that they make it possible and guide it. The particular satisfactions we get from formalized art are due, in some essential part, to the sense gotten of resis­tances coped with by dint of choices or decisions (intuited decisions or what I call judgment-decisions). Quality, the very success or goodness, of formal art derives, formally, from these decisions, from their intensity or density.1

There is much here I’m not happy with, such as the sug­gestion that the artist begins with, or in, private or even solip­sistic aesthetic experience and then, if he or she is to get beyond that (if he or she has what it takes to become a real artist), finds the means, via conventions or forms, of making that experience public—as if Edouard Manet (for example) began with the first sort of experience (as it were inside his head) and then, via the conventions of the nude, which is to say in the course of both working with those conventions and refusing to submit to them as they stood, dis­covered a way to communicate that experience to others in the painting we know as Olympia. Or as if, to take up Greenberg’s language analogy, linguistic communication begins in a private experience or feat of self-communication that then makes use of linguistic conventions to get through to others. I am going to assume that in this post-Wittgensteinian age the unconvincingness of such scen­arios doesn’t require demonstra­tion.2

But my aim in this talk is not to dwell on Greenberg’s deficiencies as a thinker about such issues. “Convention and Innovation” con­tinues:

The density or intensity of decision that goes into the making of communicable art has nothing to do with quantity or multiplicity. But it’s impossible not to resort to quantitative terms in discussing the matter: thus as when I affirm that as “much” density of decision can, in principle, go into the shaping of a box as into the carving or modeling of a representation of the human figure. The size, proportions,   material, and color of a box can bear as great a weight of intuited decision as the sculpture that fills a pediment. The fact that this has proven unlikely so far (despite the achievements of one or two minimal artists) doesn’t make it any the less possible.

To say it again: under a certain aspect, and a very real one, quality in art appears to be directly proportionate to the density or weight of decision that’s gone into its making. And a good part of that density is generated under the pressure of the resistance offered by the conventions of a medium of communication. (48)

Finally, there is this:

Most of what I’ve just said is not new. But the emphasis I’ve put on decision or choice may be. If so, that would be thanks to what’s happened in art itself in recent years. It’s the boringness, the vacuousness of so much of the purportedly advanced art of the past decade and more that has brought home—at least to me—how essen­tial the awareness of decision is to satisfying experience of formal art. For the vacuousness of “advanced” art in this time is more like that of “raw,” unformalized art or aesthetic experience, which vacuousness derives precisely from the absence of enough conventions and the want of decisions made or received under the pressure of conven­tions. (49)

“Convention and Innovation” goes on for another nine or so pages, but I want to stay with the passages I have just quoted, in particular with Greenberg’s emphasis, new in his writing, on what he calls the density or intensity or weight of decision in the making of a work of “formal” or “for­mal­ized” (please note: not “formalist”) art.

One reason Greenberg’s remarks first caught my attention is that they chime with claims that I have made in recent writings about a similar density or intensity or weight of intention—which is to say of decision—in recent sculptures by Charles Ray such as his marvelous Hinoki (2007) and in the photographic work of Thomas Demand as well as in the lat­ter’s tour de force two-minute stop-motion film, Pacific Sun (2012). Thus in the chapter on Ray in my book Four Honest Outlaws I argue that the entire point of Demand’s labor-intensive project—reconstructing certain often notorious places or settings in colored paper and card­board in such a way that the fact of reconstruction is made salient and then photographing the result at something like life-scale—is to produce photo­graphs “that are saturated with traces of nothing other than [Demand’s] own artis­tic intentions—not just the general intention to repro­duce the scene but the specific inten­tions invol­ved in remaking it at every point, so to speak.”3 And I pro­ceed to compare Demand’s project to Ray’s in Hinoki, which involved discovering by chance an especially charis­matic 30-feet-long fallen oak tree in the California countryside; sawing it into sections and bring­ing the latter to his studio; making molds of those sec­tions and then fiberglass casts from the molds, and even­tually five “barrels” that locked into each other so that the log could now be reas­sembled as a simu­lacrum of the original. These were then shipped to Osaka, where a master carver, Yuboku Mukoyoshi, and his team repro­­duced the log, first its hollow interior and then its exterior, carving the whole in cypress blocks the separateness of which can clearly be discerned in the finished work. The entire project took more than five years, before Ray decided that the piece was finished. He then had to figure out exactly how to display it (by mounting it on cypress blocks). Only then was Ray able to release the sculpture to the vagaries of time.

I go on to claim that Demand’s photographs and Ray’s Hinoki (as well as the latter’s figurative sculptures in cast alu­minum or machined steel) stand in the sharpest, most emphatic opposition to the bias toward indeterminacy in Minimalism/Literalism (my reference here is of course to my 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood”4). Caro’s sculptures, too, are anything but indeter­min­ate, as are those of David Smith and countless other sculptors and painters prior to Minimalism; the dif­ference is that none of those artists, Caro inclu­ded, ever felt called upon to thematize intentionality as both Demand and Ray have found it necessary to do. Indeed Hinoki’s remarkable authority as a work of sculpture is for me inseparable from my sense of it as an onto­log­ically extremely dense intentional artifact, the intentions in question belonging in the first place to Ray and in the second place to Yuboku and his team of carvers who worked for five years as a collective expression of Ray’s artistic will but whose traditional training and perhaps also whose personal inclinations are inevitably and everywhere inscribed in the surface of the piece, including, consistent with Ray’s intentions, the surface of its hollow core. As if the weight or density of so much concen­trated intentionality functions as an ontological counterforce to Ray’s original empathic sense of the years of sun, rain, and ultraviolet radiation that had hammered down on the original log—“the pressure was just incredible,” he once said to me—and in another five or ten years might well have driven it to the point of collapse. (103, emphasis in original)

In other words, that Ray’s and Demand’s work (including, as I argue in a later essay, Pacific Sun) foreground density of intention in this way is understood by me as at least partly a response to or reaction against the valorization of indeter­minacy in the first place in Minimalism/Literalism (my target in “Art and Objecthood”) and beyond that in Post-Modernism generally.5

Interest­ingly, Greenberg says something not dissimilar when he remarks that the emphasis he puts on decision or choice may have been inspired by the recognition that “so much of the purportedly advanced art of the past decade or more”—his reference is to the 1960s—has been thin or trivial or vacuous precisely on those grounds, a state he goes on to relate to “the absence of enough conventions and the want of decisions made or received under the pressure of conventions.” At the same time, he wants to insist—this is pure Greenberg—that there is in principle no reason why the shaping of a box (he is clearly thinking of Minimalist/Literalist works like Tony Smith’s archetypal Die or various boxes by Donald Judd) couldn’t bear just as much “weight of intuited decision” as a sculpture for a temple pediment. I say this is pure Greenberg because it is such a “formalist” remark: for Greenberg, to entertain the thought that there could, practically speaking, be a difference in this regard between a box or a cube and a temple pediment would be to attach fundamental significance to considerations of something like subject matter (in this case, the difference between an abstract cube and the gods, warriors, and centaurs on a temple pediment), which by his lights properly could have no bearing on artistic issues properly understood. This seems to me misguided for reasons that, again, shouldn’t need elabo­rating at this point in time: it is, after all, no accident that the cube or box (a strong gestalt, Robert Morris would have said) played so important a role in the Minimal­ist/Lit­eralist project as anatomized in “Art and Object­hood” (an essay Greenberg never began to try to understand; the whole argument about theatricality mostly set his teeth on edge6). In other words, Greenberg both related his claims about “how essential the awareness of decision is [i.e. has become] to the satisfying experience of formal art” to the weakness of certain recent purportedly advanced work and refused at least on this occasion to con­sider what it was spe­ci­fic­ally about that work that led or conduced to the paucity of conven­tions he so deplored.7

2

But, again, my aim in these remarks is not to critique Greenberg’s ideas. Instead I want to seize upon the thought of density or intensity or weight of intuited decision and to associate that thought with a body of work to which, on theoretical grounds, it might seem to have nothing in common—the photographic oeuvre of Robert Adams. Very briefly: Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937; his family subsequently moved to Madison, Wis­consin and a few years later to the suburbs of Denver. Adams got his B.A. from the University of Redlands in California, and went on to do a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. In 1962 he began teaching English at Colorado College but around that time became interested in taking and making photographs; by 1967 he was doing so seri­­ously, and in 1970 he stopped teaching in order to photo­graph full time. An important photobook, The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range, appeared in 1974 and a year later his work was shown in the impor­tant exhibition (in retrospect a mile­stone in American photographic history), New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). Since that time superb photobooks have appeared with some regularity (Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area [1977]; Los Angeles Spring [1986]; What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970-74 [1995 and 2009]; and Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration [2005] among them), and of course for a long time now Adams has been widely recognized as one of the most distinguished photographers at work anywhere. My personal familiarity with his art is quite recent, dating as it does from the major retro­spective exhibition, a selection of nearly 300 works, organized by Joshua Chuang for the Yale University Art Gallery, which opened in Vancouver in the fall of 2010 and over the next few years traveled to a number of venues in this country and Europe.8 (I saw it in New Haven in the fall of 2012 after having caught it some months before at LACMA. Let me also say that I had the privilege of going through the exhibition at LACMA with Jim Welling and at Yale with Josh Chuang; I’m grateful to them both for count­less insights.) Simply put, I was swept away by what I saw. Naturally I had admired individual photographs and even small shows of Adams’s work in the past. But Josh Chuang’s exhibition established Adams’s sta­ture as a major artist beyond the possibility of dispute, by virtue both of the taste, intel­ligence, and amplitude of the selection and, in both museums but espe­cially in New Haven, the effectiveness of the installation.

Before saying anything further about Adams, however, I should explain what I meant when I remarked that the notion of density or intensity or weight of intuited decision as put forward by Greenberg might seem, on theoretical grounds, to have nothing to do with work such as Adams’s. I’m referring, of course, to the emphasis in photographic theory on what is usually called the index­icality of the photograph, which is to say to the important sense, brilliantly developed in recent writings by Walter Benn Michaels, in which a photograph may be understood as not properly speaking a repre­sen­ta­tion of the thing it is a photograph of but rather an indexical, fossil-like trace of that thing. As Michaels shows, such an emphasis turns out to be linked with the post-modern cri­tique of modern­ism, understood in turn, as he remarks, “as crucially the critique of repre­senta­tion, of the pic­ture and of the categories associated with it: ‘aesthetic inten­tion,’ ‘work of art,’ ‘author­ship,’ etc.”9 Michaels’s argu­ment is cha­rac­teristically com­plex but I want to single out the issue of intention, as expressed for example by Patrick Maynard (quoted by Mich­aels) when he asks whether the pho­to­graph “‘sufficiently expresses or manifests intentional states of people, rather than other formative factors [like the] photoche­mi­cal/elec­tronic mark­ing process.’ Thus, as [Maynard] puts it, ‘there will be effects in successful photos that one does not know how to attri­bute,’ by which he means one doesn’t know whether or not they’re there on purpose. The standard example here is the profusion of detail in the photograph, the way in which the photograph shows things the eye did not see. [All the leaves on a tree, for example, or blades of grass on a lawn, or similar details of that sort.] And it is such details, Maynard says, that raise ‘the question of the kinds and proportion of controlled features relative to uncontrolled ones, as compared with drawing and pain­ting’” (13).10 (The most emphatic version of this argument is Roger Scru­ton’s in his 1981 essay “Photography and Repre­sen­ta­tion,” which essen­tially denies to photo­graphy the status of an art.11 One short quotation: “The photograph is a means to the end of seeing its subject; in painting, on the other hand, the subject is the means to the end of its own representation. The photo­graph is transparent to its subject, and if it holds our interest it does so because it acts as a surro­gate for the represented thing. Thus if one finds a photograph beau­tiful, it is because one finds some­thing beautiful in its subject. A painting may be beau­ti­ful, on the other hand, even when it represents an ugly thing” [590].)

All this is much too summary, but it is meant chiefly to prepare the ground for the counter-claim—in effect the point of this talk—that Adams’s photographs, both individually and en masse, struck me in 2012 as epitomizing Greenberg’s empha­sis on density or inten­­sity or weight of intuited decision (or judgment-deci­sion) in the strongest possible sense. And this not despite the fact that they are photographs so much as because they are, if I may so put it. Take for example the photograph Adams calls “Colorado Springs, Colorado,” from his photo­book The New West, of which it was the fron­tis­piece. (It is also the frontispiece to volume one of The Place We Live, which further suggests that Adams places great stock in it.) In various respects, it is emblematic of his work of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the setting is a suburb (often unfinished), with tract housing, undistin­guished construc­tion, unimpressive spaces—in effect despoiling nature in a more or less uncon­scious manner. (Adams means the viewer to receive such images in that spirit.) Note in this case the unattrac­tiveness of the “in-between” space with which we are presented, with scarcely a place for the two human beings (a man in glasses at the right, a woman in trousers to the left, both viewed largely from behind) to stand and talk. Not to mention the small heap of rubble directly behind the woman, which she appears to ignore, or the completely un-aesthetic juxtaposition to her left of the two exterior walls with their ill-matched horizontal striations or the strange stony interstice between the two. (The sloping metallic roof adds another quietly discordant note.) In short, scarcely a beautiful subject, in Scruton’s terminology. But Adams’s photo­graph is breathtaking. Indeed what is difficult is to know where to begin extolling its perfection. In the first place, there is the thrill of its utter clarity, its sheer sharpness of focus, throughout the entire depth of field, which of course is a function of the combination of lens opening and shutter speed choices (that is, intuited decisions) as well as the choice of film—and prior to that, the choice of camera, lens, etc. And in a photograph such as this one, as throughout Adams’s work, there is also the stunning, unexpected rightness of the composition, about which one could go on at length (in fact almost indefin­itely). So for example there is the objectively startling interplay between the man all of whom is in dark shadow save for his face and the white rectangle of the upper story of the building beyond him, the lower right-hand corner of which comes extremely close to making visual contact with his forehead, thereby telescoping the spatial separation between them, or very nearly so. Note too the way the woman’s dark-haired head breaks into the same white rectangle over toward the left, which is what gives such particular poignance to the exquisitely calibrated sense at once of distance and of communication (or should the terms be reversed?) between the two protagonists. And of course there is the towering, cut-off building at the right, which anchors the composition by virtue of its strong vertical emphasis (with horizontal striations, a hallmark of the image as a whole) while remaining at the same time somehow unobtrusive, the “action” of the image being entirely to the left. Adams himself cites the photographer Edward Weston as saying that good composition is “the strongest way of see­ing.”12 What Weston appears to have meant, Adams goes on to state, is that a photographer “wants Form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photo­grapher hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact it is peace.” And: the right set of relations is “discovered in a split second of lit­eral fact” but unlike (for example) a glimpse from a car window “it implies an order beyond it­self, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit per­fectly.” (Among those “fragments,” in this photograph, are the man and the woman; what it means that they are subsumed so acutely in the emerging order of the composition is a question without a knockdown answer. But it is a question one cannot simply put aside.) All this, I need hardly add, has everything to do with the fact that a camera such as Adams used to make this photograph had only one lens (that is, one combin­ation of lenses), not two set side by side, like constantly focusing and refocus­ing human eyes, which is to say that nothing could be less like lived vision (to use the lan­guage of Merleau-Pontyan phenomen­ology) than the fixed ultra-sharp arrangement of elements “Colorado Springs, Colorado” gives us to see. But that unlikeness itself was in effect intended by Adams, who in a sense anticipated the end result, not com­pletely, that indeed would have been impos­sible, but at least up to a point. And of course—some­thing it is easy to forget—the finished photograph reveals its perfection precisely to the human gaze, which finds in it the grounds for an exhil­aration that ordinary vision as such does not afford. (Weston’s “strongest way of seeing” is to be found only there.)

Then there is the light. To quote Adams again, about the photographs in The New West: after acknowledging the drabness of the suburbs and the tract housing he writes, “Paradoxically, however, we also need the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a place; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.”13 (The notion of grace is of special interest to me, needless to say.) He continues: “The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or free­ways but the source of all Form, Light. The Front Range is aston­ish­ing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivi­sions, which we hate for the obscenity of the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of the day transformed to a dry, cold bril­liance.” And: “Nothing permanently dimini­shes the affirma­tion of the sun.” Finally, he quotes Jean-Luc Godard’s cameraman Raoul Contal: “Daylight has an inhuman faculty for being always per­fect.”14

Here it is worth pausing a moment to underscore the self-evident: the light Adams celebrates in these terms is ren­dered in his photographs not in full color but in black and white (and all the myriad greys between). This is at once a radical simplification and a considerable enriching of ordinary vision: a simplification in the obvious sense that we lose the sensuous richness of color as such and an enriching in that the infinitely precise play of values, of shades of light and dark, that black-and-white photography makes possible is not something that ordinary lived full-color vision is capable of registering on its own. (Nor, by and large, is color photography, but that is another matter.) The pursuit of what Adams calls Form thus inevi­tably involves taking account both of the sharpness (the absoluteness) of the contrast between black and white and of the proli­fer­ation of minutely discriminable light/dark values between the two extremes, and let me say at once that to the best of my knowledge no photographer has ever been more in com­mand of this parti­cular resource than Robert Adams. So that while Adams is undoubtedly correct to speak as he does of the natural light of the Front Range, the fact that his pho­to­graphs make it stunningly present is an esthetic achieve­ment of a very particular sort. (As Jim Welling has made clear to me, this has much to do with Adams’s masterly printing of his own photographs—a fascinating topic that I hope Welling writes about some day.15)

Another self-evident point concerns the small scale of Adams’s photographs—for the most part a matter of inches only. Needless to say, this is a major difference between his work and the High Modernist painting I began my career as an art critic by celebrating and indeed that Greenberg would have had in mind as well—think of Pollock, De Kooning, Kline, New­man, Still, Rothko, Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Olitski, Stella, Poons—and of course it is an almost equally salient point of difference between Adams’s photographs and the new tableau-scale art photo­graphy that has come drama­tically to the fore starting in the late 1970s, I mean the work of Wall, Bustamante, Ruff, Struth, Gursky, Höfer, Demand, et al., the photographers discussed in my 2008 book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. My argument in that book is that the new tableau photography, by virtue not only of its scale but also of the fact (noted by Jean-François Chevrier) that it was made for the wall, necessarily engaged with the problem of the relation of work to beholder that I had previously tried to show emerged as central to ambitious modern (and then, subsequently, modernist) painting starting in the mid-1750s in France. I can’t go further into this here, though it should at once be clear that Adams’s photographs operate differently: they are not beholder-oriented in the tableau way even as their relatively small scale invites an intensity of close looking capable of discerning and taking esthetic pleasure in the rightness of the different sorts of relationships I have tried to evoke. Indeed there is a sense in which his photographs might be said to have been made ultimately to find their ideal place in care­fully plotted, aspirationally unified photo­books, a medium within which Adams’s lyric sensibility re­veals itself to the fullest extent.16

With respect to the recent history of photography, in other words, Adams’s photographs belong to a developmen­tal moment prior to the present one, assum­ing we can spe­cify the latter moment with any fixity. And my basic claim in these pages is that there are aspects of that earlier moment that may be seen, by a sort of Nachträglichkeit, as taking on a new and highly charged signi­ficance in the present situation (an “as never before qua­lity,” in a manner of speaking), as if Adams’s concen­trated pursuit of an absolute perfection of manifold small-scale internal rela­tions within the sharply circumscribed rectangular photographic field can today be under­stood as instan­tiating Green­berg’s notion of a density or intensity or weight of intu­ited decision—also his emphasis on the produc­tive role of what he calls conventions—with a new force­fulness and perspicuousness. This is to say that the strictly docu­men­tary character of Adams’s work, which by and large claimed viewers’ attention at the time of New Topographics, has somewhat receded in impor­tance. And it is also to suggest that the theoretical issue of the non-representational nature of the photograph as well as of the prob­lem­atic status of the photographer’s inten­tions owing to the photograph’s indexicality, on which earlier writers have laid such stress and which, inflected differently—that is to say, “positively”—has also been central to Michaels’s re­flec­tions on the medium, turns out to be not quite rele­vant to the present case. Or rather, more pre­cisely, it is as if the “weak intention­ality” of the pho­to­graph in the latter regard (to adapt a term of John Ber­ger’s put in cir­cu­lation by Michaels17) turns out to throw into relief the extra­ord­inary strength and efficacy of Adams’s esthetic perfection­ism—the density or intensity of his judgment-decisions, in Greenberg’s lingo—with respect to the appear­ance of the final print, the esthetic artifact as such. I need hardly add that this last claim requires demonstration and analysis at far greater length and, no doubt, depth than have been here provided.18

Friedel (Friedebald) Dzubas has been a superior painter for a long time. There are watercolor landscapes, done almost 40 years ago, whose limpid grays, grayed blues and greens ravish my eyes. Reminiscences of German Romantic art don’t take away from their originality, modest though that may be. Dzubas has always been original, in a surreptitious way that’s fooled everybody, including myself as well as such a good critic as Michael Fried. In his most discouraged moments Dzubas has remained—as we say in America—his own man. But it’s as though he’s tried to hide that, as though he’s tried to confuse the viewer—and himself too—on that scene [sic].1

At the end of the 1940’s he’d become part of the Abstract Expressionist “movement.” By the mid-1950’s he was ready to become one of its masters, a junior one, but a master nonetheless. That readiness is visible in the Dzubas of 1955 that the Whitney Museum in New York owns; it stands up to the Whitney’s Pollock and does more than stand up to its de Koonings and Kline. But it should have done still more than that. As Friedel himself recognized, he couldn’t keep himself from filling the picture out, fastening down all four corners of it with paint marks, when the whole urge of it was towards a certain emptiness on one side or the others, [sic]2 toward an indeterminate spaciousness. This boxing-in belonged to the notion of a well-made picture, from Cimabue and Giotto to Picasso and Pollock. (Even Hans Hofmann, in all the mastery he had won after 1950, still undermined many of his pictures with an excessive concern for the spelling out of their four corners.)

I pay special attention to this moment in the course of Dzubas’s art because it marked a “gran rifiuto.” Then and there, in the mid-50’s, he might have risen still more visibly than he did above the ruck of Abstract Expressionism in its dying throes. Not that he didn’t do good painting then and all through the later 50’s, but he didn’t drive it home, and didn’t make the fact that he was going against the tide—as he was—more evident. Then and there he could have entered the Promised Land with great, not just good, paintings.

He went along, eventually, with the linear, “hard-edged” art of the 1960’s, again producing good works, some of them may be [sic]3 better than before. At several group shows pictures of this [sic]4 startled me in the way they stood out, but each time I failed to recognize the picture as a Dzubas, for all my familiarity with his art. (Thus his canvas in the Guggenheim Museum’s collection in New York, which is one of the very best postwar items that the museums owns.) The value of a work of art doesn’t depend on the recognizability of its source, of course. But in Friedel’s case this lack of recognizability spoke for a failing on his part that lay in the failure to follow up his achievements and achievedness, the failure to put them together. He let it all lie scattered as it were. It was as though he was reluctant to take himself seriously, to settle into the way of success (I mean real artistic success, not the worldly kind). It was a though he wanted to stay in a state of promise, as though fulfillment, success, and all that would close out his options, take away the disponibilité of promise. And as it happened, and happens, people who did see how good Dzubas’s art could be did somehow sense his attitude towards himself and did therefore hesitate to take his art more seriously than he took himself. That is, they hesitated to conclude anything about the value of his art or his stature as an artist. I presume to say that it’s his own fault, almost entirely, that he hasn’t been a world-famous artist these twenty years back.

Well, all this changed with the beginning of the 1970’s, or has been on the way to changing since then. I wouldn’t want to say whether Dzubas is linear or painterly (malerisch) by native inclination. But I do say that there’s a vein of the malerisch deep inside him and that vein, after being more or less suppressed during most of the 60’s, finally and forcefully welled up in 1971. That was sudden. But it didn’t overcome his linearity; instead, a synthesis formed (to use Kenworth Moffett’s term). Dzubas had no conscious say in the matter: the synthesis just came. From that synthesis has issued the ripest and most consistently successful, and certainly the most original art he has produced. That’s saying a lot. Friedel has settled into his enduring self.

He used to wonder whether these new paintings of the 70’s didn’t look a little “old-fashioned,” too 1950-ish, out of phase with the times. Who cares? Artists will bother themselves about things like that. So Monet’s “Lilly Pads” were out of phase with the 1920s. (Curious: some of Dzubas’s newest paintings run into Monet. I say “run into” advisedly; it’s a case more of convergence than of influence; the malerish in Duzbas insists on itself more and more, to break up shapes, and to break up background too.)

But I don’t want to put too much emphasis on these pictures of the 70’s. Pictures from all stages of Dzubas’s art since the 40’s will in time to come thrust themselves increasingly into attention: enough of them to establish him once and for all where he belongs, which is on the heights. The art press, Kunstkompass, and other such awful manifestations of art-world opinion don’t indiate that yet. So what? Had Kunstcompass been present around 1900 it would have shown ever so many artists as ranking above Cézanne in point of popularity and exposure, not to say journalistic attention….

In the meantime I’m waiting for some more of Friedel’s dark pictures. His command of gray, black, and of hues that approach these is unique in my opinion. But he hasn’t yet let himself go full-blast in that direction. It’s as though he were waiting, again, to be possessed—possessed by himself even more than he is now.

November 19775

Thirty years on, in 1977, Greenberg agreed to write an essay—until now seemingly overlooked in the literature on Dzubas3—for a small retrospective, “Friedel Dzubas: Gemälde,” at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld.4 At less than a thousand words, the essay is important, not least because it addresses the career of a significant painter, one whom Greenberg included first in “Talent 1950,” an exhibition of younger artists at the Kootz Gallery (co-curated with Meyer Schapiro), and again almost fifteen years later in his 1964 exhibition, “Post Painterly Abstraction.”5 The decade-by-decade review at once summarizes Dzubas’s artistic practice up to the 1970s and casts retrospective light upon Greenberg’s 1964 accounting of the new art.6 By turns sympathetic and severe, Greenberg portrays an artist who in his estimation had yet to realize his full potential. For Dzubas, Greenberg’s opinion was unsurprising: in a letter to Dzubas accompanying the essay, Greenberg wrote with characteristic candor, “[The essay] wasn’t at all hard to write, I think because I permitted myself complete frankness & repeated things I’d already told you.”7 Greenberg’s overall tone in the essay is encouraging, if cautious: even as he reflects on his own preference for Dzubas’s early “painterly abstractions” in watercolor, he finds a Dzubas 1960s “linear” canvas at the Guggenheim “one of the best postwar items that the museum owns” (fig. 1). The key statement comes in the third paragraph and is directed to the artist, who, Greenberg insists, has yet “[to] enter […] the Promised Land with great, not just good, paintings.” Here he acknowledges Dzubas’s early originality while cleaving to the possibility that the day of major achievement will come. As he vouchsafes in the letter, “(It was written from the heart).”8 The point here is that for Greenberg to write this sort of essay was altogether unusual, an act of friendship on those grounds alone.9

Dzubas’s history is complex. He was born in Berlin in 1915, the child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother. As an adolescent during the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Dzubas (originally Dzubasz) suffered under the restrictions of Mischling status defined by Nazi race laws, which categorized such children as “mixed race.”10 A Mischling of the first degree or half Jew (Dzubas’s paternal grandparents were full Jews), Dzubas was forced to cope with the vagaries of emotional, professional, and political marginalization in pre-war Germany. Like many middle-class Jewish families at this time, the Dzubaszes—among them artists, book artisans, and graphic designers, textile managers, and translators—were politically left leaning. They identified primarily with the communists, although they were members of the official Jewish Community.11 Their anti-fascist/pro-Stalinist activities, such as attending meetings and printing and distributing pamphlets for communist-affiliated organizations, added tension to the already fraught social vagaries affecting their citizenship-status in the German Reich.12 Dzubas’s artistic training came fitfully, as anti-Semitic actions became more and more overt during the years 1931 to 1933, insinuating resistance to school and job opportunities for young people with Jewish blood that culminated in the Nuremberg Laws of September 12, 1935. When recognized as having Jewish blood, certain teachers and peers at various primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institutions ostracized Mischlinge, although their legal status was not yet threatened. Opportunities for professional training were also circumscribed in the run-up to the National Socialist Machtergreifung on January 30, 1933.13 This fact alone precluded extended study with Paul Klee who would be dismissed from the Bauhaus at its dissolution in 1933. Whether Dzubas actually attended the Akademie der Künste in Berlin—a claim Dzubas made—cannot be confirmed by existing documentation.14

Like many young people who graduated from an Oberrealschule (high school)—as opposed to a Gymnasium from which students could expect to move on to university—Dzubas was apprenticed, in his case to a decorative painting firm, the M. J. Bodenstein Wohnungs-und Dekorationsmaler.15 There he was schooled in the art of fresco and other techniques related to wall decoration. Dzubas may have learned graphic arts and book design, skills he would depend on in his early years in America, from his uncle Wilhelm Dzubas, a respected graphic designer and decorative painter in Berlin16 and from another uncle, Hermann Dzubas, who owned a Buchdruckerei in Berlin that had published Die Rote Fahne, a communist newspaper.17

The systematic persecution of Volljuden and Mischlinge put in place by the Nuremberg Racial Laws in 1935 catalyzed the hurried formation of Jewish Youth Agricultural Training Camps, the expressed aim of which was to obtain visas to the United States, Palestine, or South America.18 Between 1936 and 1938, Dzubas trained at one of the few non-Zionist youth training camps, in Gross-Breesen, Silesia.19 It was through this program that Dzubas finally emigrated—as a farmer—to the United States in 1939 at the age of twenty-four, using in addition to his given name the Americanized “Frank Durban.” He was among the first trainee émigrés to enter Hyde Park Farmlands in Burkeville, Virginia, a settlement formed in the United States explicitly for the purpose of receiving trainees from Gross-Breesen. Here he remained with his German wife, Dorothea Brasch, for his first seven months in the United States; he left the settlement for New York City in May 1940.20

In less than a year, after several freelance jobs in graphic design—while bussing tables or making food deliveries—a chance meeting with William B. Ziff, Chairman of Ziff Publishing Company, resulted in a full-time position at the Ziff publishing house in Chicago, where for the next four years he worked as a commercial artist leading a book design team. Dzubas fell in with “a very aware, very sharp intellectual group of writers in Chicago, and I got very close to them and they were very well informed [in] thought, politics, literature, etc. Also art.” It was through this group that Dzubas began reading the Trotskyist New York intellectuals who wrote for the Partisan Review. At the same time, Dzubas was working in watercolor and had been accepted into several “Annuals” under the aegis of the Art Institute of Chicago.21 Returning to New York late in 1945, he engaged marginally with artists painting in the Abstract Expressionist style. By 1948, Dzubas had entered into a productive personal and professional relationship with Katherine S. Dreier, contributing his graphic services and art to her organization, Société Anonyme, and had in effect launched his artistic career in New York by befriending Clement Greenberg that same year at the offices of Partisan Review.22

So what did Greenberg actually say about the work? It’s important to understand that for the greater part of thirty years, Greenberg believed in this artist. But by 1977, his claim was that Dzubas had yet to construct a solid foundation for his future artistic development; that he had failed to “follow up on his achievements and achievedness”; that, instead, he had “let it all lie scattered.”23 Greenberg felt Dzubas had not yet done what would have been necessary—had in a sense refused to bear down on, to dig deeper into a clear artistic identity. This is what perplexed the critics and what earlier in his career had provoked the English art dealer John Kasmin’s exasperation: “You’re here, you’re there…. And it’s difficult for us to cultivate a certain taste if it seems that jumpy.”24 Dzubas’s seeming inconsistencies in approach—his shifts from expressionistic cursive gestures in the 1950s, to clean-edged, lucid color shapes against large areas of active white space in the 1960s, and on to loose, dynamically-arrayed color blocks in the 1970s—ultimately prompted Greenberg to aver that Dzubas’s art was indeed original, but this originality was somehow “surreptitious.” Dzubas had “fooled everybody, including myself as well as such a good critic as Michael Fried.” What he meant, of course, was that over the years, Dzubas had allowed himself to be seen as a less impressive painter than was in fact the case.25

In eight paragraphs, the narration goes like this. As an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1950s, Dzubas was poised to “become one of its masters, a junior one, but a master nonetheless.” Greenberg points to Dzubas’s 1955 [sic] painting in the Whitney Museum collection, Yesterday, (1957; fig. 2), a large (44 ½ by 108 ¾ in.) horizontal abstract, as evidence, comparing it favorably to the museum’s Pollock and their “de Koonings and Kline.”26 Immediately, however, he gets to the crux of the problem as he sees it—Dzubas’s tendency to compose his canvases, to “fasten […] down all four corners,”27 to fill up spaces rather than leave them open, to, in effect, preclude the “indeterminate spaciousness” that the critic valued at that time.28 Yet Dzubas finally stepped beyond these self-limiting mannerisms when, in the 1970s, he combined his 1960s linear style with what Greenberg called a malerisch or painterly tendency.29 (See fig. 3.)

Greenberg had suggested that such a synthesis originated within the practices of painterly abstraction, the idea being such a revision was effected through a fusion of “clarity and openness.”30 Exemplary in this regard were works by artists “like Still, Newman, Rothko…” et al.31 Dzubas extended these artists’ revisions by using contrasting “instrumental qualities”—thinned paint surfaces and bare areas of canvas as against “the density and compactness” of Abstract Expressionism—thereby achieving the “freshness” characteristic of the new art.32

Greenberg looked beyond the context of Cubism to Venetian art for the soil in which “painterliness” had taken root: “The painterliness itself derived from a tradition of form going back to the Venetians. Abstract Expressionism—or Painterly Abstraction, as I prefer to call it—was very much art, and rooted in the past of art.”33 In describing Dzubas’s melding of old and new, then, Greenberg might have drawn on this very notion, for Dzubas was in thrall to fresco mural painting, not only by Giotto, but also by Titian and Giambattista Tiepolo, in particular the latter’s frescos created for the Residenz at Würzberg. Frank Stella took up the notion that Dzubas folded his early training as a Dekorationsmaler into his painterly vision when he wrote, “Early watercolors, decorative house painting, and commercial illustration all came together for him.”34 Like Greenberg, Stella understood that the foundation of Dzubas’s style lay in the artist’s early training and apprenticeship in wall painting and graphic design, which he expressed in his pictorial responses to the rhythmic disposition of massed color groupings so characteristic of Venetian fresco painting.

A close look at Dzubas’s surfaces is key. Dzubas did not stain his canvases. Rather, he primed them with two, sometimes three layers of gesso.35 As he clearly stated to Charles Millard in 1982, “I never stained. The only time I stained was when I was still working with oil on, on, not on canvas but on old bed sheets, you know, when I soaked the bed sheet, practically, in turpentine and then stained with cheap house paint that I had into the soaked surface.”36 (See figs. 4 and 5.) Which isn’t to say he was opposed to the method of soaking and staining. He clearly rubbed and pushed his pigments into his ground. This is obvious from the finish of his work, where the weave of the cotton duck remains exposed. But Dzubas relied for this effect on the double characteristic of liquescence and resistance in his mediums, whether watercolor, oil, or later with Magna acrylic, which he began to use in 1965. Characteristic of the opaqueness he sought in his early gouache-like watercolors from the 1940s that feature wet into wet, frankly figurative or allusive images in a loose expressionistic style (fig. 6), his later surfaces, no matter how thinly painted appear opaque even as he scrubbed his medium into the warp and weft of the fabric.37 Dzubas’s primed and gessoed canvases in the 1960s held his color shapes on the surface, pooled, controlled, and contained by their serrated or smoothed edges (fig. 7). In the 1970s, Dzubas feathered out the opaqueness, in a gesture he referred to as “fading off” or “fading out.”38 That is to say, Dzubas molds, pushes, and eases his pigments into forms that meld with, even as they resist, their material surrounds (fig. 8). This would change in the early 1980s when he directed his assistant to prime the canvas in a new way. As he told the curator Charles Millard in 1982, “Instead of priming it so it would, it will hold the turpentine on the surface and kept it on the surface for a while where I can work it. It’s primed now so meagerly that the medium immediately sucks in and you can’t, really, you can’t dance around… you have to put it down and leave it, so to speak. Whatever you put down, it it’s not open to manipulation and you’re stuck with it.”39

Dzubas generally divides his production into decades.40 When the artist took up oils in earnest in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he created an overall calligraphic, painterly surface with multiple foci in the spirit of Pollock’s early surrealist automatism. From gestural abstraction in the 1950s, Dzubas moved into a short-lived stylistic phase in the early 1960s, in which he filled his canvases with tightly woven, black linear markings coursing through white or off-white grounds (fig. 9).41 Paintings from the later 1960s feature close-valued hues laid out in two or more shallow fields of color, each bounded by either serrated or clean edges on an otherwise bare primed canvas, so that while color shapes nest, overlay, or touch, they are held in check by what Barbara Rose characterized as “arrested motion” or “dynamic stability.”42 “Emptying-out” the canvas, leaving a few large color areas gently abutting or in kinetic tension seemed to the artist necessary “after the indulgences and the semi-organic chaos of Abstract Expressionism.”43 Simultaneous “centers” exist within a large white space, which for Dzubas became an “essential first…. where the immaculate white, the virginity of the white, plus the strength of the white provides the strength of the whole. The untouched surface, the unedited surface was a very important active element, the way I felt things, the way I saw things.” Each color area is activated by proximity to its neighbor, the entire surface fixed within a square field. Color per se gains prominence, which Dzubas situated in dialogue with the revealed areas of white, the white acting as “the emotional element to deliver my message.”44

Dzubas’s paint medium from 1965 to the end of his life in 1994 was an early version of the first acrylic paint, Magna, developed by Sam Golden and Leonard Bocour between 1946 and 1949. Morris Louis was among the artists, who include Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Kenneth Noland, to use this experimental medium.45 What Dzubas liked about it was that it displayed the fullest saturation available at the time while holding its color when thinly applied.46 Nearly as fluid as oil paint, the resin compound added resistance. “It doesn’t let itself be pushed around that easily…it will not let itself be violated, and an additional inducement was, you never quite know what you will get…. [And it is] never quite know[ing] what you get that prevents you also from being too facile.”47 Working with hues that held and yet could be laid down in thin applications allowed Dzubas to achieve the shallow space he sought, even as he insisted on retaining evidence of the brush not only in his color shapes, but also in the dappled surrounds he would develop in the next decade.

By the 1970s, Dzubas was creating overlapping or contiguous, attenuated tesserae and large, elongated rectangular shapes with rounded or modified corners using brushstrokes that left a clean edge, but for feathering generally at one end. Poised in tight relational groupings, these “phalanxes,” as curator Ken Moffett described them,48 are placed vertically, diagonally. Contrasting color groups in close values seem to thrust forward and recede in a contre-jour effect brushed in with pigment.49 Crossing (Apocolypsis cum Figuras, A. D. 1975) (1975), for example, is essentially a picture of shallow spaces that through motivic repetitions, group divisions, and directional thrusts achieves a gait simulating all-over spatial agitation, as if figures were not so much traveling across the surface as assembling for immanent action.

Turning to a tradition centuries old, Dzubas often worked from small sketches (or modelli)50 that he would scale up to gargantuan size. From color tests (fig. 10) to painted sketch (fig. 11), he then moved to tacking a canvas to the floor (fig. 12), applying gesso layers, and measuring and at times outlining his shapes in gesso.51 He would then prop the modello on a low easel and with paint brush in hand loosely scale up the color scheme he had previously worked out—as can be seen in a photo of the artist transferring his acrylic sketch (fig. 13). This working sequence was followed in the creation of Crossing, a painting thirteen and half feet high by fifty-seven feet across, commissioned by philanthropist Lewis P. Cabot and contracted by Joseph Henderson, president of the Artcounsel, Inc. for the Shawmut Bank in Boston.52 The process proceeds in several stages: a sheet of color tests and an acrylic sketch (fig. 14), a scale study in red crayon, charcoal, and graphite, conveying measurements used for transferring the shapes to canvas (fig. 15).53 Then a “cartoon” mock-up on which the outlined tesserae enclose numbers that correlate with the colors that would fill them, following an age-old stained-glass technique. Photographs of Dzubas at work on the painting show paint cans, brushes, oil sketch, and painted contours.54 Wes Frantz, Dzubas’s studio assistant from 1980 to 1987, viewed Dzubas at close range: “Friedel…liked the freedom to interpret both what he did and what he saw with the moment in mind. But it didn’t mean he was totally spontaneous. When I first saw his sketches that he turned into larger paintings I thought he was abandoning his motion of spontaneity, but quite the contrary. With Friedel’s painting the devil was in the details. If you compare closely a small sketch to a large painting, the large painting will have all the details that the small ones don’t. And it’s in those details that Friedel sought his identity.”55

It’s interesting that Dzubas had considered creating a fresco when the monumental Apocalypsis Cum figures/Crossing was first proposed for Shawmut Bank in 1973. He felt an affinity with master fresco painters such as Giotto and Tiepolo, with the whole of “Western tradition, rather than the visual phenomena of the last ten years in Europe and America.”56 He admitted having in mind Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, which he had visited in the 1960s and early 1970s, claiming he wanted “to outdo Giotto… to put in everything I knew and felt, for better or for worse…. It felt right and good. A gut reaction, not intellectualization.”57 Not only with Crossing, but also with most of his ambitious compositions from this period, Dzubas complemented his relationship to historic mural painting and fresco by drawing on their pictorial compression, the structural symmetries and asymmetries of their figural arrangement and cross-surface dialogues, and the sheer complexity of surface incident. Historic murals and large-scale paintings are significant visual resources for Dzubas, which he brought forward into contemporary painting to mobilize their formal content. When Charles Millard asked him about influences, Dzubas remarked, “But there are very few really that, I mean, I have, I always fall back on, on, on other centuries; now, if I say, ‘Whom do you like?’ Well, whom do I like, I mean, I like Tiepolo.”58 So, for example, one senses that Tiepolo’s frescos may well have been models, models that reinforced the wall-decoration techniques Dzubas learned early in life. For just as the intaco layer of lime plaster in buon fresco holds pigment, so the gesso layer in Dzubas’s paintings traps it. It is in this sense that Dzubas’s surfaces differ from Louis’s: they do not, in the Greenbergian sense, seem like “fabric… [that] becomes paint in itself…like dyed cloth…” as Greenberg described Louis’s facture, but rather, like matte layers that lock pigment in. Dzubas’s colors both meld with, yet do not entirely soak into, their cotton duck support.59

Contemporary responses to Dzubas’s work often posit a link to historical painting and, if not specifically to the Venetian tradition, to “European” painting on a grand scale.60 In what way Dzubas would develop the illusionistic, imagistic, compositional, and malerisch elements was anyone’s guess in 1977. Which brings us back to Greenberg’s thoughts on the artist. From the vantage point of 1977, Greenberg wrote that Dzubas had allowed the “Malerisch deep in him” to surface and fuse with the linearity apparent in work from the previous decade. From this merging “issued the ripest and most consistently successful, and certainly the most original art he has produced.”61 This is not only to praise the current over the earlier work, but also to urge the artist on. In fact, Greenberg’s entire essay reads like a personal plea to an artist he cared deeply about and whose earliest watercolors had genuinely touched him. If only Dzubas would return to “gray” and “black” or the “grayed blues and greens” that “ravished” Greenberg thirty years earlier. It’s as if Greenberg’s heightened, all but sentimental sensitivity to the hue, value, and saturation of Dzubas’s “dark” palette could return the artist to himself, so that he would become “possessed, possessed by himself even more than he is now.”62

Needless to say, here I cannot review the many formalisms in art history (let alone artwriting more broadly defined) by proceeding text by text and writer by writer, even if I were competent to do so. In addition to Wölfflin, and speaking only of writing published in his lifetime, one would have to deal with texts by Aloïs Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Albert Barnes, Hans Sedlmayr, Henri Focillon, and Clement Greenberg among others, not to speak of practices on the part of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Hans Hofmann and art teachers such as Denman Ross and Jay Hambidge—a hugely diverse group. I cannot attempt even the  most minimal exegesis that would be needed. Selective overviews are readily available.2

Instead I will offer an analytic commentary on the claims of art-historical formalism as an analytic construction in art history, and possibly as a tactical methodological construction. In turn this will enable me to situate “post-formalism” as a philosophy of art history today.

I take a special interest in Wölfflin’s formalism because it integrated the crucial post-formalist manoeuver as I will identify it: the form-making capacity of human intuition—especially if intuition simply is form making—must be historicized. Stated most simply, form is a history. Of course, there have been several “post-formalisms.” For example, art critics and art historians who reacted specifically against Greenberg’s modernism might be called post-formalists, and sometimes they have been. (Indeed, one might even argue that Kant inflected his formalism—a transcendental psychology of the form-making capacity of human intuition—with a post-formalist psychology of the form that is constituted specifically in aesthetic judgment of works of fine art.) In the present essay I take the view that post-formalism in art history became possible at the very moment of the principal inception of formalism in the work of Wölfflin. I will be concerned mostly to say how this possibility has been realized in recent years.

§1. Formalism and Post-Formalism. The overall gist is this. Post-formalism as I will describe it attempts to shift ground from the history of artworks to the history of visual imaging and imagining—what Wölfflin in 1915 in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe called Sehformen (a neologism often translated as “ways of seeing” or “modes of vision”) and in 1923 revised to Formen der Vorstellungsbild (“modes of imagination” in the English translation of 1932, but probably better rendered as “forms of imaginative appearance” or even “forms of representationality”).3

This shift as I will describe it also involves a movement from an aestheticist “formalisticism” (though this is not a term used in the current self-description of art history) to formalism proper, a sub-Kantian psychology of intuition—of the “forming” activity of sensibility. Formalisticism effects a partial reification of what I will call “formality” (the apparent configuratedness of material things) as “form” in a specialized art-historical sense: form is a unity organized materially (and visibly apparent) in man-made things on the basis of essential habits of intuition, notably (for Wölfflin) sensitivity to “rhythm,” though Wölfflin also believed that some of these habits of intuition vary historically.4  (The things in question, of course, need not be artworks, and in Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment they need not be man-made things at all; still, works of fine art have sometimes been deemed to be impossible without form.) What many writers usually denote by “formalism” in art history is a wholesale reification—full-bore formalisticism in my sense. It puts form “in” the things, converting it from an aspect seen (or formality) to an attribute made. Instead of speaking of the formality of the thing for us as we see it, then, we come—in the formalist conversion forced by the reification of formalisticism—to speak of being aware of its form. (I expand on this briefly in §2 below.) It follows analytically that “post-formalism” in art history and artwriting would certainly try to get beyond formalisticism. Whether and how it gets beyond transcendental formalism is another question.

Given its post-formalisticism, post-formalism (whether post-Kantian or not) should be able to state the relation between artworks and Sehformen. Or at least it sets out to do so. The crucial point here, in my view, is that seeing, visual imaging, does not just have a history an sich or “in itself”—the history of the “optische Schichten,” or “strata of vision,” that Wölfflin said it was the first-order task of art history to uncover. (I will call this “vision historicism”: “Das Sehen an sich hat seine Geschichte und die Aufdeckung dieser ‘optischen Schichten’ muss als die elementarste Aufgabe der Kunstgeschichte betrachtet werden.”5) Imaging also has an art history, which I have tried to describe as the “successions” and “recursions” of “formality,” “pictoriality,” and other aspects of things made specifically to be seen in the seeing that sees them. In a sense, then, post-formalism is also pre-formalism—a grounding of the history of artworks in the art history of seeing. I will address this matter in the middle sections of the essay.

The challenge today is that the art history of seeing (such as it is) is confronted by an expansive foundationalist neurology of seeing that is merely aesthetic, and in a sense aestheticist within its domain, or formalist—a visual neuropsychology that is now sometimes called “neuroaesthetics.” Post-formalism might best be defined, then, as post-neuroaestheticist. (In addressing this side of the story, the present essay follows on my “Neurovisuality,” published in nonsite in 2011.6)

Wölfflin tackled a similar problem in the terms of the psychophysiology of his own day, as did some of the other early formalists already mentioned. (Some were expert psychologists, and formalism is a psychological theory—a method of “virtual historical psychology,” as I have put it elsewhere.7)

But he did not quite solve it because of his tendency toward formalisticism, and the circularity of the analysis that resulted: the form of artworks (identified in the reification of formalisticism) became Wölfflin’s evidence for the historicity of vision (an open question for formalism in psychology) at the same time as the historicity of vision explained the form of artworks. Post-formalism seeks to avoid this circularity. It tries to state a historical relation and therefore in my terms a recursive relation between the form of artworks and the historicity of vision, at least so far as we limit ourselves (rather artificially) to formality or formal aspects. I will deal with this matter in the final section of the essay.

§2. Formalism Proper and Formalisticism. In Kant’s system and in the Kantian tradition—what we might call formalism proper—form belongs to intuition. As Kant expressed the point in the First Critique, form can be defined as “the manner [die Art] in which we are affected by  objects”—die Art as distinct, that is, from our knowledge of “content” let alone our empirical contact with the real matter of the objects. As Robert B. Pippin has put the point in Kant’s Theory of Form, in Kant’s doctrine “form is inextricably linked with the knowing subject”; it is the condition of the possibility of our sensory awareness of anything.8

Responding to the First Critique, in 1787 Johann Georg Schlosser sharply criticized what he called Kant’s “Formgebungmanufaktur,” his “pedantic” invention of a forming capacity of the mind—what we might call Kant’s “mere formalism” in transcendental psychology, or formalism proper. In 1796 Kant responded equally sharply and reiterated his primary claim: “If the thing is an object of the senses,” he insisted, “so its form is in intuition (as an appearance).”9  Responding to the First Critique, in 1787 Johann Georg Schlosser sharply criticized what he called Kant’s “Formgebungmanufaktur,” his “pedantic” invention of a forming capacity of the mind—what we might call Kant’s “mere formalism” in transcendental psychology, or formalism proper. In 1796 Kant responded equally sharply and reiterated his primary claim: “If the thing is an object of the senses,” he insisted, “so its form is in intuition (as an appearance).”10

In the terms of the aspect psychology that I have adopted in A General Theory of Visual Culture, constitutive form (when converted from space and time to color, shape, etc.—to color, shape, etc., as constituted in space and time in intuition) is “formality”: the apparent configuratedness (the “appearance” of configuratedness) in things. Needless to say, some of these things have been made specifically to be seen: they have been colored and shaped by someone with a “forming” sensibility who has produced them for the prospect of a “formality”—seeming form—that they might afford to sight. But it is crucial to preserve the theoretical sense in which this relay is a complex recursion—the succession of formality in the visibility of things in historical visualities.11

In the reification, form in this sense—Kantian forms-in-intuition; formal aspects (“formality”) as described in aspect psychology—gets transferred or translocated to the object, as if we perceive—receive or pick up—its “form.” The apparent configuratedness of an object as we constitute it becomes our seeing of its configuration or formedness. Many commentators on art history and criticism use the term “formalism” to designate the reification (or objectification). But it might better be called “formalisticism” (as I will do here) because formalism need not objectify form. It is “formalistic”—but not inherently “formalist” in the transcendental-psychological sense—to proceed analytically as if form subsists primordially in the object, even if it was put there (as one might say) by the intuitional activities of its maker and beholders in visualizing or visibilizing it.

It should be noted, however, that formalistic reifications are not wholly unwarranted in art history. At least, they should not be unexpected; there is a credible reason for them. In its methodological self-invention as a second-order archaeology, art history conjures a real thing (i.e., “form”) to dig up for display to its “looking” when the first-order object (i.e., “the manner in which objects affect us”) cannot be proffered as any (properties of a) physical thing. Formalisticism literally creates a material object as objectified form(ality). Philosophical tradition has enabled art history to trade on this shuttle, as Kant himself had done. As Pippin has put it, “should the object of knowledge be an object of the senses, its ‘form’ is not a property of the object, but is the intuiting activity of the subject. Nevertheless, by his association here with the tradition, Kant admits that knowledge of this form will reveal something like the ‘essence’ of the object—for Kant the universal conditions necessary for it to be an object at all (space and time).”  By “association with the tradition,” Pippin specifically means Kant’s starting-points in Aristotelian and scholastic philosophies. To use the very words with which Kant opened the remarks of 1796 that I have already quoted “[a] the essence of things consists in their form (forma dat esse rei, as is said by the Scholastics) [b] insofar as this thing might be known through reason.”13  As I understand the matter, the passage from (a) to (b) qualified the tradition in Kant’s special philosophical terms. Marking the beginning of his formalist transcendental psychology, it introduced what Kant called his “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. But (b) is not intelligible without (a).

Now let us suppose that art history (not to speak of art criticism) understands its primary objects to be material works of art and perhaps, in an extension, items of visual and material culture that need not be identified specifically as works of art. (Recall that Wölfflin said that these things are not the theoretical object of the project of art history, at least considered in themselves; the “elementary datum” of art-historical inquiry is their optische Schichten. In principle this is vision historicism in formalism proper.) In turn it is obvious that art history at that level or in that register can (and perhaps must) proceed archaeologically from (1) form “in” the object to (2) “form” as intuited (“seen”) by the beholder-historian to (3) “form” attributed to the intuiting activity of the historical maker, though psychologically the order—the business of Kant’s transcendental psychology and other formalisms proper—is partly inverse to this (i.e., [3] to [1] to [2]).

In other words, the reification might have a tactically valid methodological status: formalisticism functions as a forensic archaeological method for an art history framed theoretically as a history of forming activity in sensibility. The problem arises when the methodological reification (that is, the forensics of the recursions of formality) is treated as primary foundation—gets ontologized. This risks mischaracterizing the intuiting activity of the subject (“forming” the object in space and time) as the intuiting of objective form. More exactly for my purposes, it risks conflating them in such a way that the “elementarste Aufgabe” of art history—the historicity of forming, and its specific historicality as it were—becomes hard to identify, and perhaps will be cut out of the story entirely. In §4 below I will return to this matter in the case of Wölfflin’s formalism.

There is another reason for art-historical formalisticism aside from its status as a forensic method of formalism proper. The contiguity between the hugely general terms of Kantian formalism (laid out in the First Critique) and the highly specialized terms of Kantian aesthetic judgment in constituting the “perfected ideals of beauty in the fine arts” (spelled out in one short section of the Third Critique) may have motivated some formalisticist reifications of art as an empirical object specifically made to affect us in its form, that is, as a putatively aesthetic object. But the contiguity does not fully justify the reification. Kant did not simply identify form and artwork as the subjective and the objective faces of sensibility. If anything, the perfected ideal of beauty in art is form reformed—detached from any interest we have in the empirical existence of the object. And this reformed form (the specifically “normative” form) is not “in” the object that is an ideal artwork, just as it was not “in” the images of things that we find appealing from which the ideal artwork is built. It is in sensibility. Still, because the reformed form—ideal art—is not a mere emanation of immediate subjective intuition (instead it is a product of “subjective universality”) it has some claim to be regarded as an objective form afforded to the subject for his or her intuition. Perhaps this model of the history of the forming of artworks as idealizations can be reconciled analytically with the history of their optische Schichten. After all, Kant admitted that his model of the perfection of ideals of beauty in the fine arts invoked an “optical analogy” of the intuitive superimposition of visual images of appealing and attractive things. Taken literally, then, the consolidation of perfected ideals of beauty in an artwork simply is the historical constitution of an optische Schicht as a particular aesthetic horizon. But it will be difficult, maybe impossible, to make this case by indulging the formalistic reification. 

§3. Post-Formalism Proper. In the sense that I use the term here, the term “post-formalism” first cropped up (for me anyway) in David Summers’s book Real Spaces, published in 2003—a post-formalist world art history (as he called it) partly intended to describe the “rise of Western modernism.”15  Real Spaces is not only art-historically post-formalist. Summers not only tried to get beyond the formalist reification in art-historical formalism, or what I have been calling formalisticism. It is also philosophically post-formalist, that is, post-Kantian. Summers did not want to start from the forms of intuition (i.e., space and time) as described by transcendental psychology, or to be required always to return to them as the ground. Even Martin Heidegger had done so, though he thought that he had analytically managed to constitute “original time”—over and against space—as the privileged or primary route of the understanding (and its final existential constraint). In turn, Ernst Cassirer severely criticized this view—what he took to be extreme onesidedness. Partly in this light, Summers hopes to redescribe space (one of the “two basic pillars” of the understanding, as Cassirer insisted after Kant and against Heidegger) in terms of what he calls “real space,” that is, the geometrical-optical organization and sociocultural architectonics of topographical “place” and the man-made configurations set up in it, notably pictures.16 He takes his analysis to break decisively from art histories that reify form, thereby opening new art histories—new lineages, for example, of the “rise of Western modernism” that has been treated so often by art historians.

Art historians have usually connected Western pictorial naturalism to the forms of Classical Greek sculptural contrapposto and pictorial construction of fictive depth. In one of the most innovative of his new histories, Summers partly derived it instead from planar constructions of ancient Egyptian depiction. As he put it, “Egyptian painters and sculptors made choices that were to establish the basis of Western naturalism . . . accomplished by the development of planarity into the virtual dimension, with consequences reaching to the present day.”17 I want to emphasize the striking novelty of this art-historical claim. Ancient Egyptian depiction has sometimes been said to constitute “the origins of Western art.” But it has been far more usual (largely under the influence of Hegel’s aesthetics) formally to contrast Egyptian “symbolic” or “conceptual” procedures in picture making with the naturalism of Classical Greek art as the formal “birth of Western art,” that is, of one of its characteristic formalities in visual culture.18

According to Greenberg, for example, “of all the great traditions of pictorial naturalism, only the Greco-Roman and the Western can be said to be sculpturally oriented. They alone have made full use of the sculptural means of light and shade to obtain an illusion of volume on a flat surface.  And both these traditions arrived at so-called scientific perspective only because a thoroughgoing illusion of volume required a consistent illusion of the kind of space in which volume was possible.”19  “Sculptural means of light and shade,” “illusion of volume on a flat surface,” and “illusion of the space in which volume is possible” are overly formalistic—reifications of formality. We can convert them (post-formalistically) to modeling in light, flat surface seen as voluminous, and virtual volume seen in space under specified optical, geometric, and architectonic conditions in real space; Summers set out a demonstration in terms of the “axis of direct observation” that he took to be maintained in Egyptian “planarity.” If we do this—I will not rehearse Summers’s careful analysis here—we can see how the Egyptians produced illusion of volume set it in a space in which it is possible. To be sure, this virtual space was organized on the metricized “virtual coordinate plane” that Summers has identified in Egyptian depiction, not in “scientific perspective” in the sense that Greenberg meant. Still, “metric naturalism” and optical naturalism can now be described more accurately relative to each other, and no longer as mere opposites; Summers’s explications of “relief space” in Classical Greek pictorialism, of the “optical plane” in medieval pictoriality, and of “painter’s perspective” in Italian Renaissance pictoriality benefit from—depend on—his antecedent identification of the virtual coordinate plane in Egyptian pictoriality.20  Any phenomenal, technological, and sociohistorical continuities between metric naturalism and optical naturalism can be explored archaeologically (for example, by investigating the transfer of technologies for constructing proportions on the plane from Saite Egypt to Archaic Greece). They need not remain juxtaposed as polarized à la Greenberg, who pushed each formalistic category of immanent form to its “full,” “thoroughgoing,” and most “consistent” self-realization. Real Spaces exemplifies Summers’s training in the traditions of archaeological Strukturforschung, which I share: my first undergraduate teacher at Harvard, G. M. A. Hanfmann, was a student of Friedrich Matz, the best mid-twentieth-century exponent of Strukturanalyse, which he imbibed from Sedlmayr and Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg. Strukturanalyse might be the first post-formalism in art history.21 But Summers’s teacher at Yale, George Kubler, was right to say that Matz and others practiced a kind of Weltanschauungsgeschichte—“idealist archaeology” as Kubler called it. That is, they tended to derive the optische Schichten from preexisting Weltbilder, or at least from a “central pattern of sensibility” to be found among poets and artists living at the same time. This was more or less empty. Analytically Weltbilder simply are the optische Schichten.

By contrast, Kubler saw his overall project in examining “some of the morphological problems of duration in series and sequence” as making good on a question that art historians had put aside “when [they] turned away from ‘mere formalism’ to the historical reconstruction of symbolic complexes”—that is, to iconology. His scare quotes imply, it seems to me, that for him “mere formalism” had certain analytic advantages, at least when it was reconstituted as archaeological method. It had advantages, that is, if one could shake off its tendencies to universalize about  sensibility (as in Strukturforschung) and to indulge formalisticism in the ontology of (art)making—to treat form as a feature of the artifact, often unique, rather than as an emergent morphological boundary of its artifact-type (or “form class”), in which each artifact is “formed” as much under constraints of its serial position as in virtue of its maker’s sensibility.22

Following Kubler, Summers works inversely to “idealist archaeology”: a worldpicture emerges historically within an optical stratum in human imaging, or as it. (The two most general strata identified in Real Spaces, “planarity” and “virtuality,” would seem to be modifications on the second of the five polarities Wölfflin had set out in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe to describe the realization of form, namely, plane [or surface] and recession [or depth].) This is a history in imaging, not—or not essentially—a history of ideas or beliefs or worldviews that precede and determine it. As Wölfflin had already urged, excavating this history is the primary task of art history. And Summers did so in a “post-formalist” way, as he saw it, because for him the serial making of assemblages (or environments) of things in real spaces in history is the elementary (quasi-Kublerian) datum of our archaeology, not the form of the artwork as put into it by a spatializing sensibility said to precede the agent’s experience in the world and especially the agent’s experience of socially shaped topography—of particular cultural “places” in “real space.” Stated another way, Summers wants to “world” form (that is, put it in the world) whether or not his “world art history” succeeds in each and every one of its genealogies and chronologies of artmaking considered globally.23

Of course, Summers’s Real Spaces is not the only example of recent post-formalism, though it is notable because it explicitly described itself as such. By now many teachers of art history must have gotten used to hearing students call themselves “post-formalists,” though many of these teachers (including me) probably described themselves as “anti-formalists” when they were students. When I ask my students what they mean, some cite Summers. Others cite Hans Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie of 2001: it proposed Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft said by him to be an “anthropology.” There is considerable overlap between Belting’s and Summers’s descriptions of the functions of images (both writers deal extensively, for example, with substitutive effigies) and in turn with Horst Bredekamp’s recent Theorie des Bildakts, also markedly post-formalist. I will not rehearse these projects here, however. Suffice it to say that the art-historical attainments of post-formalism are now quite clear. In each case—Summers, Belting, Bredekamp—we find the art historian identifying affiliations or even historical connections and cultural interactions between productions that formalism had sometimes overlooked—could only overlook when formalistic.

Certainly Belting and Bredekamp proceed post-formalistically. In Belting’s account of the force of effigies, what counts is the functional substitutability of material effigy and prototype, even if there is no visible “formal” congruence between the visible features of the former object (a thing with “form”) and the latter (which may not be visible at all). It is not so much that form is  objectified in the effigy, though effigies have formality. The prototype is objectified when the effigy functions. Belting insists that he does not identify images with pictorial artifacts; indeed, he identifies images primarily with the body and mental imaging. This could allow formalism proper. But it should be “anthropological.” The forms of intuition do not precede bodily awareness in the social field. In anthropology, intuition simply is the body’s imagemaking in the social field.24

If I have any objection to Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie, it is simply that his historical anthropology might not be radical enough to displace transcendental psychology. Of course, Belting’s anthropology situates the transcendental activity of intuition within the bounds of historical cultures that he differentiates one from the next. But this anthropology tends to reify each cultural tradition as a priori collective intuition within its bounds—a “common pattern of sensibility” as Kubler put it in describing the idealist archaeology of Strukturforschung. Indeed, it objectifies that intuition as supposed cultural tradition. Therefore it does not quite issue in a radically historical analytics of imagemaking.

For his part, Bredekamp collates objects that formalistically would not be affiliated as iterations of the same kind of artifact. Rather, they replicate images. To explain this history Bredekamp would appeal as much to the agent’s visual experience (in complex interaction with fantasies, desires, beliefs, and concepts) as to formal sensibility. Indeed, the agent’s formal sensibility  simply is this history in his or her visual experience. Bredekamp’s history of Charles Darwin’s diagrammatic visualizations of transmutation exemplifies this theory of the action of images: set down in Darwin’s notebooks of the mid 1830s, the diagrams (according to Bredekamp’s archaeology of the replications) relayed images dating to earlier periods in Darwin’s experience and in the experience of other agents whose imagemaking he encountered historically. According to Bredekamp, then, the image is not so much formed in intuition as primary; rather, it is formed in the relay of images. Better, the historical account of the relay of images simply is an analysis of intuition as essentially historical.25

If I have any objection to Bredekamp’s Bildakttheorie, it is simply that he still requires formalisticism to do some of his historical work. Bredekamp sometimes takes mere morphological similarity in the form of images (regardless of their diverse historical locations in the Sein und Zeit and the Zeit und Ort of the agents) to be the evidence forsituating them as relays of images, as replications. It turns out, then, that the radically historical genealogy that supposedly situates form historically is simply an ordinary formalisticist history of reified form. We’re back where we started. To be sure, in Bredekamp’s history of images, the transcendental psychology of forming intuition is limited to—bounded by—a history of a mind that forms. He offers no “anthropology,” let alone reifications of “collective sensibility.” Still, it is not enough to say that a human mind is held together merely in virtue of the consistency and continuity of its forming activity. This assumes the consequent, and a more radical history of mind might radically dispute the very idea of any such coherence. Images have their effect on us—their “power”—not only because they replicate the form of images that we have assimilated (let alone produced as objects). They also affect us precisely because the form of the image has not already been integrated. (If it has been integrated, “we’ve seen it all before.”) This history needs to be excavated beyond purely morphological (merely formalisticist) descriptions of the images. Again we find that a radically post-formalistic history of imagemaking remains to be written.

Both of these kinds of Bildwissenschaft offer philosophically sophisticated responses to art-historical formalisticism and to formalism proper; whether or not they fully succeed, they seek to address Formen der Vorstellungsbildung nonformalistically. They are post-formalist to the degree that vision—or bodily awareness more generally—has been historicized, or more exactly in the degree to which they can offer a historical analysis of intuition as such. Needless to say, then, they operate in conceptual proximity to psychology and even to neurology and evolutionary biology, though they are not mere applications of the formalisms that can be found there. If anything, in fact, they would seem to demand in the end that we apply art history to psychoneurological formalism. I will turn to this very question in the final section of this essay (§5).

§4. Formalism and the “Wölfflinian method.” A historical question intervenes, however—a loose end in my account so far. What about Wölfflin’s formalism, his history of Formen der Vorstellungsbild, in relation to his formalistic method? Just as postmodernism in art criticism partly involved the rejection of Greenberg’s aesthetics, one might take post-formalism in art history to involve the rejection of “Wölfflinian method.” I refer, of course, to the comparative juxtapositions of photographs or other illustrations of artifacts that Wölfflin used to clarify our comprehension of the optische Schichten. Still, this way of construing post-formalism could mislead us. As I have already suggested, formalisticism may have certain tactical methodological values. And it is not formalism anyway.

Juxtaposition was ubiquitous in Wölfflin’s array of methods. But it was not essential. Wölfflin’s theory did not require it. To expose the Vorstellungsbild of Albrecht Dürer (when the artist was working on his master engravings of 1513-14) to readers in 1926 only required that Wölfflin make a single presentation: an illustration not of the artwork per se, such as a photograph of Dürer’s Ritter, Tod, und Teufel of 1513, but a visual demonstration for us of the artist’s optische Schicht in making it, which Wölfflin included in his later editions of Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers, first published in 1905. (In this demonstration Wölfflin removed all depicted figures and landscape except for the figure of the Knight himself, hoping to dramatize—to visibilize—its linear profile silhouette.) For the theoretical comparison in Wölfflin’s art history is not only between two different pictures constituted in the same or different optical strata in history. It is also between two imagings of the same picture, one clarified—relative to the other—by recognizing the optical stratum to which the picture historically belongs. This phenomenal clarification can be helped by the juxtapositions. But more generally it requires “formal analysis”—specification of the ways in which the artwork exemplifies Vorstellungsbildung, however the analysis is carried out. (Perhaps it is a specification in written discourse and perhaps it is a simulation in visual diagram or model, or perhaps both, as in Wölfflin’s formal analysis of Dürer’s Ritter, Tod, und Teufel.) As Wölfflin’s student Panofsky recognized, what really counts is the distance one travels between seeing the picture outside the horizons of the optische Schicht in which it was constituted historically and considering it within them—moving from our optical stratum (or Daseinserfahrung as Panofsky put it with a nod to Heidegger) to the picture’s visuality. As Panofsky put it in 1938, “this is rational archaeological analysis at times as meticulously exact, comprehensive, and involved as any physical or astronomical research.”26

Panofsky thought that Wölfflin was overly confident about this transfer—about the warrants that enable art historians to shuttle among optische Schichten of different pictorial styles. (For Wölfflin these warrants included experimental psychophysiologies of rhythm in optical stimuli, or in responses to them.) Panofsky condemned “pseudo-formalism,” as he called it when stating his objections in English in 1939 in rewriting a major programmatic statement published in German in 1932: formalism that proceeds from Daseinserfahrung, our imaging of the object given our Sein und Zeit (our being, and especially our aesthetic valuation, in our existentially limited historical time), and never breaks out of it—never reaches the optische Schicht of the object in its proper Zeit und Ort, its historical time and place. He repeatedly instanced the way in which Wölfflin had overlooked the historically particular aesthetic theory—an idiosyncratic canon of proportions—by which Dürer had created visible rhythm in his picture. Wölfflin thought that we can just see the rhythm, or see it with a little help from formalism in its presentation of the artwork analytically clarified to reveal the form imposed by Dürer in imaging the picture. But Panofsky insisted that this analysis was not helping us to see Dürer’s rhythm (as configurational) by way of the artist’s own theory of proportions. That theory had not been art-historically identified until 1915 and by Panofsky himself (or so he supposed—there had been other proposals). Wölfflin’s formal analysis, then, was pseudo-formalism: objectified Daseinserfahrung passed off as analysis—even visual presentation—of “’what we see’” when we see Dürer’s form. Presumably he intended his scare quotes here to designate the tendentious formalistic reification, as if “form” is something that we can see in the object (or can see). As formalism or formal analysis, Wölfflin’s illustration was an analytic simulation of the artist’s forming activity—activity of intuition—in making his picture. But it risked being interpreted as an actual visual presentation of the form—giving us the form the picture can be seen to have if we look through some kind of non- or paraformal visual material, thereby overlooking much of the picture and its symbolism.

As I have argued in A General Theory of Visual Culture, pseudo-formalism in Panofsky’s sense—what Richard Wollheim has called “Manifest Formalism”—generates an infinite regress. Treated as visual presentation of form-as-visible, Wölfflin’s simulation nonetheless is simply another “formed” object (maybe an artwork in its own right) to be looked at in terms of its own form, if we continue to extend the fallacy. By the terms of the formalistic (or Manifest Formalist) analysis, there would have to be another formal analysis (discovering and presenting the form of the formal analysis . . .), and so on without end.

Here we must be careful, I realize. It is possible that one of the intellectual claims of formalism (as formalisticism)—one of its critical resources—is that it accepts the logical possibility of its endlessness, perhaps as an argument (or at least a belief) about the sensuous inexhaustibility of art, perhaps as a philosophy of the irreconcilability of human knowing in its discursive and nondiscursive registers, or perhaps as a practical sociology of varied human interactions when  we show art to one another or tell one another about it. Here again we find that formalisticism might be a valid tactical method of formalism proper—even its necessary social and discursive forum (formalisticism is the pragmatics of transcendental formalism) and to an extent the evidence for it (without formalistically defined objects—even as objects of disagreement—one might doubt the very existence of a forming subject). If we drop the formalism proper, however, the formalisticism can be abandoned. Indeed, it need never arise. Rather than having to ask how the artwork “looks,” or “’what we see’,” we can ask different questions. Above all (and if we stick somewhat artificially to the register of visual and visible aspects) we can ask what it looks like. To the extent that we suppose the form of an artifact is constituted in essential primary movements of intuition, the question of how an artifact looks can receive a partly transcendental answer. Indeed, it must receive such an answer if there is no material account of historical variation in the forming capacity as such. But the question of what it is like can never receive anything but a historical answer.28

As late as 1951, Panofsky continued to criticize Wölfflin, at least for American readers. And his influence in America (given the strong pragmatist orientation of art history in the United States) reinforced worries about the supposed subjective origins, scientistic appeals, and transhistorical claims of Wölfflin’s formalism, regardless of its pedagogical appeal as integrated (for example) into the “Fogg Method” of training the art historian’s “eye.” In Panofsky’s wake, then, many North American art historians combined formalism with iconology—an unstable blend of transcendental psychology, critical phenomenology of art, and art-historical positivism that eventually imploded, though not without severe pressure exerted by critics who considered themselves to be anti-formalists.

Should we call Panofsky a post-formalist, then? For my purposes, probably not. Panofsky’s objection to pseudo-formalism in the “formal analysis” of artworks—whether or not it was the “Wölfflinian method” of comparative juxtaposition—was limited to its pre-iconological application without requisite iconological correction, as in Wölfflin’s simulation of Dürer’s Ritter, Tod, und Teufel. There is little evidence that Panofsky wanted to jettison formalism proper, or that he had a philosophical vocabulary in which to do so—at least one that he was willing to accept as a historian and a humanist. And there is considerable evidence that he took iconology to be the historical and humanistic application of formalism proper—that is, to be a culturally particular account of the interaction of “concept” (or symbol) with sensibility in the pathways of transcendental deduction, as Cassirer’s neo-Kantian “philosophy of symbolic form” had proposed. (Of course, Panofsky admitted—insisted—that freely created aesthetic values vary from one human group to another; but both Winckelmann and Kant had said the same thing, and in part as the very motivation for art-historical archaeology conceived as correction of aesthetic judgment.) In my terms, then, the dispute between Wölfflin and Panofsky was mostly about formalisticism in Wölfflin’s occasionally unqualified Manifest Formalism, such as his simulation of Dürer’s forming sensibility in making Ritter, Tod, und Teufel. Panofsky could have had other formalist fish to fry, such as Fry or Barnes. But perhaps it was self-evident to him that their formalisms were historically oriented even though they did not deploy the “rational archaeological analysis” that he recommended.

The “New Art History” of the 1980s also criticized “Wölfflinian method.” For example, in his Rethinking Art History of 1989 Donald Preziosi said that it set up art history as a technological “Panopticon.” On this view, the discipline of art history surveys an archive of illustrations of visual and material culture from around the world—an archive created by the Olympian gaze of missionaries, ethnologists, collectors, curators, and art historians, usually colonial-imperialist and maybe racist. (Of course, the art-history Panopticon also involved photography, expositions, museums, art handbooks, and other institutions beyond the one specifically associated with Wölfflinian pedagogy.)29

In 1989 art history undeniably needed postcolonial rethinking, and for some readers at the time Preziosi’s critique was decisive. But it has lost force in post-formalism, especially in so-called “object biography” (such as Richard Davis’s Lives of Indian Images of 1997), in transcultural art history (such as Barry Flood’s Objects of Translation of 2009), and in world art history (such as Summers’s Real Spaces). Post-formalists can treat the results of nonformalistic comparison not so much as a Eurocentric Panopticon as a postcolonial kaleidoscope. Indeed, object biography, transcultural art history, and world art history would be unthinkable if they could not undertake nonformalistic comparisons. Thus we have already found Summers—to stick to my main example of post-formalism—comparing Egyptian metric naturalism and Classical Greek optical naturalism in terms of the axes of observation adopted relative to the virtual coordinate plane, however one contextualizes the continuities (or not) between these optische Schichten.

§5. Post-Formalism as Art History Proper. In excavating the optische Schichten in which artworks—that is, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and so on—are constituted, and to return to my starting point, post-formalist art history calls for histories of the aesthetic orders and structures (as it were the “art”) of human vision, of imaging and envisioning, that is, of its active imaginative force whether or not any actual historical artwork was (or is) in vision or in view. The optical appearance of visual artworks—the supposed object of Wöfflinian formalism—is becoming less important analytically than the configuring force of imaging, regardless of what is imaged: an artwork; another kind of artifact; a person; a state of affairs in nature. Stated most dramatically, then, in a post-formalist history of imaging it would be perfectly possible for an art historian not to write about artworks or “objects” at all, at least if they are taken to be the primary object of study or the basic unit of analysis—als die elementarste Aufgabe der Kunstgeschichte, as Wölfflin specifically said they are not (situating him as a pre-post-formalist or as the very first post-formalist avant la lettre). In no central theoretical respect would this compromise the post-formalist’s identity as an art historian—as a historian of imaging as artful. In Summers’s analysis of planarity in ancient Egyptian depiction, what counts is the optical “axis of direct observation,” “completion” of volumes, and virtualization of the “coordinate plane”—parameters in imaging and productions of imaging. Any depiction constituted within these parameters of imaging will be so produced, even if “formally” it is a perspective projection. (In this case, an ancient Egyptian beholder accommodated to the optische Schicht of planarity would likely see it—optically “form” it—to be optically incorrect in specifying the real size of the objects depicted on the coordinate plane, or, alternately, would try to “form” it in such a way as to see their social and symbolic status in the size they are depicted to have.) Anything that we say art-historically about the objects—say about the colors of the painting used to “sculpt” virtual volumes in relation to the depicted space—must follow from the primary relations of their optische Schicht.

Of course, the question of “The Object” remains. Artifacts such as artworks do not have the same “materiality” as imaging, even if visual perception should be described as aesthetically ordered. But the aesthetic force of visual art is constituted in imaging it: in seeing it, or in imagining its visibility—aspects it might have when seen. Therefore the question of the art object lies within the questions of imaging as aesthetic. To repeat, then, in a post-formalist art history it is possible—sometimes desirable and maybe essential—not to write about any particular objects at all. This isn’t news in Strukturforschung after Wölfflin or in the archaeology of art (conceived, for example, on Kublerian lines). It is unnerving mostly for formalists mired in formalisticism. Having put the formality in the artwork or object, obviously they have to start with that thing. “Formal analysis” of an artwork, “close looking” at objects, an “iconic turn” to their “presence”: all of these court formalistic fallacy—formalism rampant.

It will not escape notice, however, that I have come close to depending on the same circularity that bedeviled Wölfflin. Sometimes it derailed his art-historical practice: as we have seen, his formal analysis of Dürer’s engraving—supposedly reporting empirically on the historical order of Dürer’s formal sensibility—was mocked by Panofsky as the very nadir of “pseudo-formalism.” How do we excavate the optische Schichten—the visual strata of art as historical—without “formally analyzing” the configuration of artworks? Isn’t imaging, including the constitution of formality, just a black box? Isn’t artistic object-form its manifest correlate? If optical strata are the objects of analysis, aren’t artworks our data?

Yes, artworks—and the wider field of artifacts—are data. But no, we do not use their formality—their form for us—as evidence for the optische Schicht in which they were constituted. Rather, we look at what people in the past did with the things, what they used them to do, in order to infer the network of aspects that the things had for them—aspects not limited to formality but including pictoriality and visible style. We look especially at how they replicated things: which features they chose to preserve, what they allowed to vary. Perspectival effects were not replicated in Egyptian depiction even though they would have to be ubiquitous in imaging the very same pictures. (Summers’s diagrammatic analysis of the virtual coordinate plane in ancient Egyptian “metric naturalism” adopts a natural visual perspective on the depiction in order to illustrate the phenomenon; given specified architectural conditions, anyone—including the Egyptians—could see the picture at this visual angle. But this is not pseudo-formalism because it isn’t showing “what we see”—that is, what the Egyptians saw when beholding these pictures. Rather, it virtualizes the real-spatial parameters of the optische Schicht of Egyptian pictoriality.) We can therefore infer that the optische Schicht within which its pictorial formality was constituted—the apparent configuratedness of such pictures—was not perspectival. On this virtual coordinate plane, “depth” does not mean diminution. One did not and could not use the virtuality to tell him how far away the depicted objects are from the plane of the format, though he could use it to show that they are separated in space—even to show how “big” they are relative to each other.30

Moreover, imaging is not really a black box. Vision science and perceptual psychology bring a mass of anatomical, experimental, and clinical data to bear on vision treated as active configuring of information in light reflected into the eyes, as if Wölfflin’s Sehen an sich were a painter painting a picture. This metaphor has been fully exploited (indeed analytically integrated) in Semir Zeki’s formalist neuroaesthetics, though the “Painter,” of course, is the human visual brain and the “Painting” is the world it sees. Because I have commented on this elsewhere, here I can go straight to the implications for post-formalist art history.31

As I see it, post-formalist art history is post-the-formalism of neuroaesthetics, or it should be. The mass of neuroaesthetic data was not collected in terms of Wölfflin’s theory that vision has a history. In fact, much of it was collected in terms of an opposite hypothesis, namely, that the processing of reflected light in the visual brain can be treated as a historical invariant (barring neuropathology) even though the things it makes to be seen are historically variable—formally multiform. If we extend Zeki’s metaphor, one Painter—the brain—paints all the paintings that have ever been made—that ever will be made for a very long time.

How does the theory of optische Schichten square with this? Wölfflinian vision- historicism, if it is accepted at all, would commit post-formalist art history to the metaphor that there have been many different Painters Painting Pictures—many neurologically real “visions.” And why?

Because literally there have been many different real painters painting different real paintings in the world—people making things to be seen, to be used visually, including pictures and artworks. When the Painter (vision) sees these things, and finds out what can be done with them or how they can be used visually, it will—if adaptive and intelligent—Paint differently. Indeed, it must Paint differently (in greater or lesser measure) in order to find out what can be done with these things or how they can be used visually, especially if the things were made by painters (and Painters) other than himself or herself. Of course, when it Paints differently he or she will paint different real paintings to be seen by other painters (and Painters). The historical cycle will spiral on. New optical strata will be laid down in the accumulated repertory of the Painter that each real painter is (and that each Painter has), and as the art history of his or her seeing: Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunstgeschichte.

Indeed, we might derive the historicity of vision from mere variance in the replication of pictures that accrue in the visible world and demand to be used pictorially in ways that seem to be commensurate not only with their apparent configuration as we see it but also with their historicity—that is, with our historical awareness that we haven not yet seen what they can show us. It is possible that vision has an art history because pictures can be historical for us: erupting in and rupturing our visual field, our Painting, they create its optical strata. Seeing them as such, we are asked—maybe required—to see things anew.

Blue Threads

Attentive viewers of Jackson Pollock’s Number 27, 1950 (figs. 1-2), will notice a blue thread running almost parallel to the right framing edge until it meets the edge about half way up the picture. It then very closely tacks the corner fold of the canvas without ever quite disappearing from view over the tacking margin. Such blue selvage threads—which indicate the upper and lower limits of a bolt of canvas, while protecting it against fraying—are sometimes noticeable in other paintings by Pollock, especially along the top and bottom edges of his classic 1950 drip, pour, and spatter paintings, which utilize the full vertical dimension of a standard nine foot bolt of canvas and extend laterally to over seventeen feet. Number 27, 1950 is four by nine feet, which orients the threads to the left and right edges, rather than to the top and bottom. In addition to being differently placed in relation to the pictorial field, the thread in Number 27, 1950 appears to be more conspicuous here than in the larger works. It is not that it is conspicuously used as an element in the overall composition: standing a few feet away, the thread is difficult to see. Rather, at close range it seems meant to indicate the edge as a limit beyond which the representation cannot, literally, extend. Obviously, the material surface of the canvas is framed by actual limits, as all painted surfaces ultimately are. The object, Pollock reminds us, has a frame. But the artist’s inclusion of the thread seems to acknowledge this fact in a pointed way. In calling our attention to the actual frame by matching its edge so precisely with a common manufacturing detail—yet one which also slips under the painted skeins it abuts—I’d like to suggest that Pollock encourages us to imagine another kind of frame. That “frame” is of a pictorial (as opposed to literal) nature. Its “limits” should be thought of a qualitatively different from those of the actual material because, unlike physical limits, they do not first operate as constraints. The apparent limits of Pollock’s pictorial fields do not necessarily, and indeed rarely do, coincide with his paintings’ actual limits.1 Those apparent limits—which have an important role in establishing what I’ll later call the format of the picture—are generated by the activity of painting itself, and thus emerge as a result of artist’s expressive purposes. The selvage thread helps mark the difference between the two different kinds of frames, and the limits they imply.2

I’d furthermore like to suggest that the demarcation facilitated by Pollock’s blue thread between the actual and the representational—the literal and the pictorial—is analogous to another important distinction: namely, between the empirical viewer’s experience and the artist’s meaning. What we might call the validity of the artist’s expression—its truth, at least insofar as the viewer is compelled to feel or understand it—depends largely upon how effectively he convinces the viewer that the experience to be derived from the framed work of art is independent of the viewer’s experience at large, unframed as it is likely to be. Maintaining a sense of separateness between the artist and the empirical viewer also helps ensure the independence of the meaning of the work of art from the viewer’s meaning. In Pollock’s case, formalist criticism—especially that of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, but also by William Rubin—provides a crucial platform for interpreting the meaning of the work of art, because it provides the most compelling accounts of how Pollock’s paintings achieve that independence. It is perhaps needless to point out that the formalist insistence on the independence or separateness of Pollock’s work from the viewer runs counter to the pervasive tendency to see Pollock’s visual fields as absorbing or engulfing the viewer, creating an immersive effect in which the viewer loses a sense of herself. On such accounts, Pollock establishes so powerful a continuity between the viewer and the painting that the distinction between them collapses, leaving only an anti-representational immediacy the gestalt psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig famously described as “undifferentiated oceanic envelopment.”3

Although formalist criticism provides the strongest account of how Pollock’s works achieve their independence from the viewer, the implications of that independence for interpretation remain underdeveloped. Why does it matter if we see Pollock’s works as continuous with or separate from the viewer? In what follows, I suggest an answer to this question, first by reviewing key aspects of formalist accounts of Pollock, and second by pursuing the theme of self-grounded meaning those accounts imply.

Cubism and “re-created flatness”

Greenberg’s criticism of Pollock is scattered over a twenty-five year period, and rarely takes the form of sustained analysis. Articulating his “account” of Pollock, then, is a somewhat speculative enterprise. One constant: the critic never abandoned his initial impression that Pollock’s work, as he put it in 1962, had “an almost completely Cubist basis.”4 As early as 1948, Cathedral (1947) (fig. 3) reminded him of Picasso and Braque’s works from 1912-15, although he did not at that time say why.5 But twenty years later, again referring to Cathedral, Greenberg suggested the connection resulted from the painting’s “oscillating movement between different planes in shallow depth and the literal surface plane,” a movement he identified with Cézanne and analytical cubism.6 The high degree of control Pollock exhibited over this oscillation—a control consolidated by the development and mastery of the drip, pour, and spatter technique—sustained the comparison. In “all-over” works such as Number 27, 1950 and Number 1A, 1948, Pollock, according to Greenberg, wanted

to achieve a more immediate, denser, and more decorative impact than his late Cubist manner [i.e. paintings such as Gothic (1944) (fig. 4)] had permitted. At the same time, however, he wanted to control the oscillation between an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion of depth beneath it as lucidly and tensely and evenly as Picasso and Braque had controlled a somewhat similar movement with the open facets and pointillist flecks of color of their 1909-1913 Cubist pictures.7

Pollock’s “impact” depended on the degree of control he exhibits over the play between literal surface and illusionistic depth, between the material and the pictorial. To help draw out the implications of Greenberg’s description, I’d like to consider a key—but somewhat idiosyncratic—term the critic used in his analysis of cubism, namely “re-created flatness.”

It is of no passing interest that Greenberg first used the term “re-created flatness” in a 1947 review of Pollock’s work.8 (The term had a pedigree, originating as it did in the teaching of Hans Hofmann.9) Commenting on such paintings as Shimmering Substance (1946) (fig. 5) and Eyes in the Heat (1946), the critic noted the “consistency and power of surface” the artist’s pictures exhibited. “As is the case with almost all post-cubist painting of any real originality,” he went on, “it is the tension inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the surface that produces the strength of [Pollock’s] art” (“Review, 1947,” 124-125). The significance of that thought-provoking term may perhaps be illuminated by turning to Greenberg’s later account of cubism, where he most fully pursues the concept of re-created flatness in relation to pictorial meaning.

In two key articles from the late 1950s, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (1958) and “Collage” (1959/61), Greenberg holds that the Cubist project, at base, is motivated by a desire to preserve “an art of representation and illusion.”10 But, he claims, it was evident to Picasso and Braque by 1910 that the “fictive depths” of Cubist pictures were becoming so shallow that they seemed to be in danger of coinciding with the literal, flat surfaces of their canvases.11 If that happened, Greenberg thought, illusion would capitulate to decoration—to mere “surface pattern[s]” (“Pasted-Paper,” 62) or “cadences of design” (“Collage,” 71).12

Braque’s solution to the problem of preserving illusion is to “spell out” or make explicit the literal flatness of the physical canvas. Applying stenciled letters and numbers to his surfaces allowed him to specify literal flatness to the degree that other pictorial elements were “pushed into illusioned space by force of contrast” (“Pasted-Paper,” 62) (fig. 6). Once the “brute, undepicted flatness” of the literal surface was in view, Braque’s paintings could preserve the illusion of a very shallow—but still salient—fictive depth between that literal flatness and what Greenberg now called “depicted flatness.” (These points might recall to the reader’s mind Pollock’s decision to leave the selvage thread visible in Number 27, 1950. He could just as easily hidden it in the tacking margin, as he did on the left side of the painting. Perhaps it functions somewhat like Braque’s stenciled letters do.)

This depicted flatness “transforms” the literal, undepicted kind. Cubism “re-constructs” or “re-creates” flatness, “endowing self-confessedly flat configurations with a pictorial content” (“Pasted-Paper,” 66).13 For Greenberg, that content derived from the way cubism “isolated” plasticity, preserving generalized illusion—illusion as such—independently of conventional, three-dimensional representational means (“Collage,” 77). A crucial point of Greenberg’s account is that in order to achieve pictorial content under the conditions he attributes to the Cubist project (that is, under the charge of retaining illusion without resorting to the conventional representation of three-dimensional space and of avoiding mere surface pattern or decoration), literal flatness must be continually “re-created” or “reconstruct[ed]” (“Collage,” 77 and “Pasted-Paper,” 65). The literal surface must perpetually be transformed into a “picture surface” proper. (“Collage,” 80 and 77).

To the degree that painters accomplish this transformation, they give pictorial form “an autonomy like that hitherto obtained through illusion alone” (“Pasted-Paper,” 66). If plasticity, “isolated,” now sustains pictorial content, my inclination would be to construe this content as self-grounded by the artist in painting as a medium. Given the theoretical weight Greenberg gave to re-created flatness, I hazard to guess at least something like this conception of the artist’s self-validated meaning was at stake. To re-create flatness was to render the material an autonomous medium by which an artist could express himself. 

Greenberg’s sociology of formalist space

In his comparison of Pollock’s all-over pictures to those of Picasso and Braque, Greenberg noticed something else about drip, pour, and spatter technique—an observation which bears directly on the issue of the painting’s framed independence from the world and the viewer. The continuously dripped or poured line, creating meshes or skeins that contained bold oppositions of dark and light, allowed Pollock, as he later put it, to “hold [his] surface[s] with inevitability” (“Inspiration,” 248).  Pollock, he said, exhibited a

capacity to bind the canvas rectangle and assert its ambiguous flatness and quite unambiguous shape as a single and whole image concentrating into one the several images distributed over it. (“American-Type,” 225)

Here I take “bind[ing]” the canvas rectangle to be intimately related to “holding” the surface with inevitability. But there’s a difference, too. While “bind[ing]” might certainly convey the gist of the painting’s confinement by a literal frame, I think it also points to Pollock’s achievement of an “unambiguous shape” that is more than just the “canvas rectangle.”14 Yet in both these cases, the sense of the word is tied to a demarcation of the painting’s area (its proper zone) from the world which laterally surrounds it, beyond all four of its edges. “Holding,” on the other hand, suggests something about the way the pictorial field, the “whole image,” composes itself—as if automatically (“inevitably”)—in anticipation of being beheld. (As I see it, this composure is not unlike a kind of holding back, as when one feels that the object of one’s regard prepares for, and thus resists submitting to, one’s gaze.) It helps separate the painting from the viewer, and to distinguish the painting’s specific intended effects from the viewer’s responses in general. Which is to say that the effects of binding and holding contribute to establishing what I referred to above as its format (I’ll soon elaborate on the special meaning I give to this word).

Greenberg’s terms for what Pollock’s surfaces achieve—binding, integrating, holding, concentrating, asserting, and controlling the painting’s ambiguous flatness, its shape, and its imagistic unity—are similar to those he uses in regard to cubism’s re-created flatness. But it is important to recall that these terms do more than just describe a formal achievement. They underpin Greenberg’s sociological interpretation of Pollock’s work. In 1952 he wrote:

Tautness of feeling, not “depth,” characterizes what is strongest in post-Cubist art… [T]he ambitious contemporary artist presents, supposedly, only that which he can vouch for with complete certainty.15

Tautness is not just a useful word to describe the way a canvas is stretched around and tacked to its frame; it is meant to designate expressive content. The need to vouch for the certainty of one’s feeling, the critic explains, is a reaction to living in an urban world where every field of human activity is organized for profit, which flattens and empties human endeavor until nothing is left except, as he memorably phrased it in 1947, the “dull horror of our lives” (“Prospects,” 163). At that time, Greenberg was looking for an art the would “release” his feelings, one that did not rely for its intensity on “sensibility confined.”16

It was the drip, pour, and spatter paintings of just over a year later that more fully satisfied Greenberg’s wish for an art that conveyed valid feeling. In 1948, he described the all-over or “polyphonic” style evident in the work of Pollock and others:

[The] dissolution of the picture into sheer texture, sheer sensation, into the accumulation of similar units of sensation, seems to answer something deep-seated in contemporary sensibility. It corresponds perhaps to the feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been exhausted, that no area or order of experience is either intrinsically or relatively superior to any other… the only valid distinction being that between the more and the less immediate.17

Given his recent assessment of the deleterious effects materialism and societal rationalization had on a healthy sense of life, Greenberg’s description of a style of painting that “corresponds” to contemporary sensibility would seem, on the face of things, to imply a negative judgment. Still, that style also “answer[ed]” sensibility, flattened as it was, yet still seeking the “immediate.” There was something to be gained from the new polyphonic painting, in which the artist’s expression took the form of “sheer sensation” experienced by the viewer. Richard Shiff has suggested that in calling Pollock’s surfaces “emphatic,” “positivist,” and “concrete” (“Prospects,” 166), Greenberg seemed to reason that the artist’s work confronted modern materialism on material terms—as if his paintings could provide the culture with a pictorial intensification of its own matter-of-factness, inoculating its viewers against the shocks of modern urban experience by conveying ever more “naked” sensations. From this perspective, Pollock’s paintings are like a homeopathic remedy for those no longer sure not merely of what they feel, but whether they feel at all.18

Discerning what is more or less immediate is a matter of personal experience. Similarly, proclaiming the validity or certainty of one’s own feeling necessarily must be a self-grounded judgment. It is important to distinguish, however, between the “tautness of feeling” the artist presents—something “he can vouch for with complete certainty,” as Greenberg reminds us—and the viewer’s response.  Greenberg does not valorize “immediacy” in the way many postmodern critics do, who seem take Pollock’s art as the occasion for an affective experience independent of any consideration of the effects the artist intended to produce. Greenberg is not giving license to the empirical beholder’s affective responses. Nor is he saying we should see Pollock’s marks as literal traces either of his presence or his procedure. Some version of this latter account can be found, most obviously, in the writings of Harold Rosenberg and Allan Kaprow, who take his characteristic webbed field to be nothing more than a kind of map of action. But the idea of the mark as a trace is pursued to an extreme by Rosalind Krauss. Pollock’s marks, she says, are not to be understood “representationally,” but as literal indexes of the “horizontal” which “invad[e] and undermin[e]” the “optical axis” of the finished painting. Which is to say that the idea of “immediate experience,” recast as an index or trace, goes to war with the idea of pictorial format, exposing a near inflexible tension between formalist efforts to understand the autonomy of the work of art and its meaning and post-modern efforts to flatly deny it and wish it away.19

Michael Fried’s account of Pollock’s line

Fried, like Greenberg, stressed that feeling, the “all-or-nothing urgency of [Pollock’s] desire” is paramount in assessing the painter’s works (“Allusions,” 97). So powerfully could that feeling be conveyed as a picture that it “leave[s] the viewer with no choice other than to accept it or reject it in its entirety” (perhaps we might say: to vouch for it or not). That suggestion came in 1999, in a review for Pollock’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective.  Pollock felt “a drive to realize pictorial intensity at any price,” and he experienced that drive as “an existential demand” (“Allusions,” 97).20 Although Fried has reservations about some aspects of Greenberg’s account—particularly the older critic’s description of Pollock’s alloverness, and his insistence on the artist’s connection to cubism, which I will discuss momentarily—I’d like to point to one suggestive continuity between their views. I find a resonance between Fried’s observation of what he called a “layered impactedness, mobile intensiveness, and experiential density of the painted surface” (“Allusions,” 97) in the painter’s works of 1947-50 and Greenberg’s description of Pollock’s ability to “hold” a surface with “inevitability.” To my mind, what connects the remarks is their mutual relation to the problem of bounding figures and shapes with contour lines, an issue Fried has done the most to explicate.

Greenberg’s comment about Pollock’s ability to hold the surface with inevitability was directly connected to an observation he made about the way dripped lines, which “resulted from the falling or flowing of paint,” allowed Pollock to abandon the use of “marked lines or contours” (“Inspiration,” 248). The critic did not elaborate on why he singled out contour as impediment to Pollock’s vision, but just a couple of years earlier, Fried had pursued the same issue in Three American Painters. A main concern of the critic’s unsurpassed formal analysis of Pollock is the character of Pollock’s line in relation to contouring shapes. Of Number 1A, 1948 (fig. 7), he wrote:

[the] allover line does not give rise to positive and negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure… against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is no inside or outside to Pollock’s line or to the space through which it moves. And this is tantamount to claiming that line… has been freed at last from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes…. [T]here is only a pictorial field so homogenous, overall, and devoid both of recognizable objects and of abstract shapes that I want to call it optical, to distinguish it from the structured, essentially tactile pictorial field of previous modernist painting from Cubism to de Kooning and even Hans Hofmann. (Three American Painters, 224)

Pollock’s works, by radically inhibiting our ability to discriminate figure from ground, achieve a new kind of space, “if it still makes sense to call it a space,” Fried cautions (Three American Painters, 224). The critic’s hesitation prompts me to think that rather than facilitating a viewer’s imaginative entry into this space, it thwarts such effects—as if sealing pictorial space against the projections of a viewer and thus holding itself apart from her (this impression is not unqualified). In his later articulation of Pollock’s pictorial intensity, Fried suggests as much when finds the artist’s pursuit of pictorial intensity to be “from the outset correlated with the essential facingness” of his paintings, a facingness I construe to be predicated on a sense of the independence of the work of art from the beholder (“Allusions,” 144).

Fried stresses another important basis of the virtual autonomy achieved by the all-over, optical field. Again, it’s worth quoting him at length on this issue:

The skeins of paint appear on the canvas as a continuous, allover line which… [creates] a kind of space-filling curve of immense complexity…. [The] other elements in the painting…. are woven together… to create [a]… homogenous visual fabric which both invites the act of seeing on the part of the spectator and yet gives the eye nowhere to rest once and for all. That is, Pollock’s allover drip paintings refuse to bring one’s attention to a focus anywhere. This is important. Because it was only in the context of a style entirely homogenous, allover in nature, and resistant to ultimate focus that the different elements in the painting—most important, line and color—could be made, for the first time in Western painting, to function as wholly autonomous pictorial elements. (Three American Painters, 223-224)

Despite his disagreement with Greenberg on the legacy of analytic cubism in Pollock’s work, I take Fried’s description of the painter’s autonomization of line and color as parallel to Greenberg’s suggestion that Pollock, like Picasso and Braque, isolated plasticity—thereby liberating it from conventional, three-dimensional representational means and re-creating flatness in the drama of oscillation between the literal surface of the support and the illusion of shallow depth. Furthermore, I see Fried’s insistence that Pollock wanted to preserve figuration within the context of an optical style that works against it (a problem solved, according to Fried, in Out of the Web [1949]) as analogous to Greenberg’s insistence that Picasso and Braque wanted to preserve illusion within the context of a style that—by making fictive depth increasingly shallow—worked against it.21

Arguably, in each case the pursuit of a paradoxical project was neither arbitrary nor merely a formal exercise, but motivated by a demand to discover new means by which the work of art and its pictorial meaning—the artist’s meaning—could be secured as something separate from and independent of the viewer’s experience. (For example, in Carl Einstein’s account of cubism, the effect of a beholder’s exclusion from the pictorial world figures largely.22) Fried’s description of Pollock’s drive to realize “pictorial intensity” strikes me as congruent with my suggestion that the painter aimed to establish the validity of his expression in the face of the viewer’s experience—as if Pollock felt that the viewer’s recognition of the validity of his meaning hinged upon the degree to which he convinced the viewer of the independence of the work of art.

William Rubin’s formalist frameworks

The most detailed formal account of Pollock’s all-over style remains William Rubin’s “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition,” a four-part series published in Artforum in 1967.23 He followed Fried in suggesting that Pollock’s signal achievement was the unprecedented degree to which the artist established the independence of his formal means from conventional description. But the basis upon which he asserted that claim differed. For Rubin, it was Impressionism—and specifically of the late Monet—that was key to understanding Pollock’s pictorial space.

Monet’s advances beyond classic Impressionist pictorial structure, Rubin argued, had to do with maintaining pictorial cohesiveness in the face of an extreme increase in the size of his paintings. Classic Impressionist structure had depended on the juxtaposition of a variety of pure colors, held at an approximately even value. Form was articulated primarily through changes in hue. As Monet dramatically increased the size of his pictures (Rubin reproduces three of the Orangerie’s Nympheas paintings [1916-1926]), he began to reverse this proposition. Because the sheer size of the multi-panel works threatened their compositional unity and cohesiveness, Monet’s solution was to hold them together by varying value within a dominant hue. This all-over tonal quality prefigures Pollock’s similar tendency to absorb color into a tonal framework of blacks, whites, and middle-value aluminum, and to avoid strong, saturated colors. But unlike Monet, whose use of light and dark—despite what we may see as the nascent abstraction of the motif—was still associated with a model in nature, Pollock renders such modeling autonomous by disengaging line from contouring, and by implication, from shading. (There is a Greenbergian echo here. As I mentioned above, he too had noticed that the light-dark oppositions of Pollock’s skeins and meshes work to “hold the surface with inevitability” without capitulating to conventions of chiaroscuro. Which is to say that even though Greenberg did not make it an explicit theme of his analysis, he implicitly recognized Pollock’s autonomization of the elements of pictorial convention. Insofar as he did, his analysis shares something important with Fried and Rubin, despite their double rejection of the older critic’s assertion of Pollock’s debt to analytic cubism.)

Let me qualify immediately. Rubin was more amenable than Fried was to the cubism connection, and made a particular effort to track how cubist space was modified by Pollock via Mondrian. Rubin argues that Mondrian’s plus-and-minus pictures of 1913-14 rendered cubism’s conception of a shallow, illusionistic, atmospheric space more absolute, and, as a consequence, isolated it so that it could be “discarded” (or “drained off” [III, 31 n. 20]) in favor of the “non-illusionistic optically spatial scintillating web of sensations” that “coalesce[s]” in Pollock. (And, there’s evidence that Pollock himself considered Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean series pivotal for his own drip works.24) Rubin concludes:

The very shallow optical space of [Pollock’s] pictures is not a matter of illusion but of the actual overlapping of different color skeins and the tendency of certain colors to ‘recede’ or ‘advance.’ Pollock worked to minimize any sense of spatial illusion by locking the warm colors literally inside the skeins of the non-hues, of which the aluminum in particular was used to dissolve any sense of discreteness the space of the web might have—in effect to ‘confuse’ it into a unified mass of light sensations. (III, 25)

The oscillation Greenberg noticed in Pollock’s works between an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion of illusionistic depth beneath it—an oscillation that was the chief means of connecting Pollock’s drip, pour, and spatter paintings to cubism—has been abandoned by Rubin in favor of a shuffling of colored layers that tend to recede or advance in visual perception. That optical emphasis brings a part of his account into alignment with aspects of Fried’s. Still, because Rubin found the sensational effects of Pollock’s scintillating webs to be rooted in cubism at one remove, through Mondrian, his account also owes something to Greenberg. The nuances of each account are instructive, but even more important in the present context is to note the formalists’ collective targeting of some specific ways Pollock’s paintings achieve their independence from the viewer.

At the outset of this essay, I suggested that the blue thread along the right edge of Number 27, 1950 helped us distinguish between two kinds of frames. The first was connected to the literal boundaries of the canvas—its actual edges, a physical limit beyond which the representation could not extend. The other kind of frame, I claimed, was of a pictorial nature, and was generated through the activity of painting itself. The second kind of frame is thus intimately connected with intention (the artist’s meaning), insofar as it finds pictorial expression. And, it serves to make that meaning independent of the viewer by asserting the separateness of the work of art from the viewer’s experience at large. The two kinds of frames entail competing notions of pictorial structure. The first depends upon the degree to which the elements within a composition are seen to be adjusted to each other and to an external limit, specifically to the literal frame. The second is a matter of how the total array, the allover visual field—which is something more than just the accumulation of separate marks—creates its own frame, achieving independence from the literal frame. I will use the term format to signify the qualitative difference. Format, like re-created flatness, has to do with the self-grounded meaning of the work of art.25

Gothic

It’s not hard to agree (as did Fried and Rubin) with Greenberg in seeing a cubist logic in Pollock’s pre-drip paintings, such as Gothic (1944) (fig. 4). Part of that logic, as I’ve recounted, is prizing apart the means of representation from their conventional functions, rendering them increasingly autonomous. Yet the elements that comprise the compositional array, independent of conventional description as they might be, appear strongly related to each other and to the framing edges of the canvas. In Gothic, I see the bold black arcs in orbit around an implied yet insistent central vertical to suggest the symmetrical massing of a body. Despite the titular reference to cathedrals and stained glass windows, the arcs more convincingly suggest the presence of hips, shoulders, possibly breasts, a head, and legs (possible in multiple sets). Smaller bulbs outlined in red near the upper left framing edge, and a series of short, black marks along the lower edge, resemble the crude toes and fingers Pollock often attached to his figures around this time, and might indicate the ends of otherwise difficult to discern arms and legs. Passages of a bright green-yellow and a rusty but vivid orange conform themselves to the black arcs and suggest modeling, but the cool blue-violet Pollock used to fill in the areas defined by the arcs fails to contribute to the illusion of volume. Instead, the blue-violet reads as a background glimpsed, as it were, through the interstices of the diagrammatic or stenographic anatomy.

If we see in Gothic an instance of autonomization of pictorial elements—of line being freed from the role of contouring shape, and light-dark contrasts being separated from the role of shading volume—that liberation is not unqualified. For that emancipation generates the problem of representing the “body” within pictorial space. Pollock had grappled with the problem throughout his career: viewers of Gothic might be reminded of the lessons the artist took from his mentor Thomas Hart Benton, whose 1924 “Mechanics of Form Organization” rehearsed a technique of dynamically controlling a body’s centrifugal and centripetal forces (fig. 8). Rather than shoring up a sense of the body’s integrity, though, the radical schematization of the body (or bodies) in Gothic seems to suggest a kind of uncontainment of the figure. The drift of this uncontainment appears to proceed laterally from a mesial vertical with which the spread of the arcs maintains an increasingly attenuated, but still salient, compositional relationship, to finally be braced by the picture’s right and left framing edges. Or rather, not exactly braced: I want to say that the way field meets the edges establishes those edges as comprising a pictorial frame. In attempting to explain exactly what I think occurs in Gothic as regards to this claim, I’ll turn to a recent account of how cubism handled a related problem.

Charles Palermo’s recent analysis of Picasso’s Composition with Skull (1908) (fig. 9) is a useful way to get the cubist lesson in focus. Palermo argues that Picasso’s theme is “the ability of art to contain the human body.” Additionally, he suggests that Picasso’s concern with human presence in pictorial space is also a concern “with the autonomy of painting,” its separateness, in relation to the breadth of the experienced world.26 Palermo draws our attention to the way Picasso dramatizes the theme of containment by highlighting how the corner of the fictional painting, as well as the elbow of its depicted figure, acknowledge the top framing edge. The contour of the human figure—its limit—urges us to identify it with the limits of both the depicted as well as the literal framing edges within which it is set. Slightly differently, in Three Women (1908-09) (fig. 10), the figures are “engage[d] in a drama of mutual definition,” in which the contours of bodily form function not as limits to a thing, but as the beginning of another thing, as if, Palermo writes, “there were no negative spaces, only saliences” (“Wholeness,” 30). (I’m prompted here to think of Fried’s claim about Pollock’s line, as if it were a radical version of Cubist contour: a line that has neither inside nor outside, that is detached from defining any thing. I’m also compelled to note the remarkable formal correspondence established by the play of arcs that contour body parts in both Three Women and Gothic.) But note, too, how those saliences—the “pleats and ridges… [of] an irregular lattice of arrises” that are the condition of volumetric effects—seem to be produced by internalizing the division enacted by the framing edge between the world of the picture and the world we imagine to persist beyond its borders.27 Palermo suggests that the discontinuity both physically acts upon and simultaneously is brought inside the bodies: the compression of the edges causes the women to buckle, just as their volume is created by the internal division represented by the arrises. The net effect is to remove all sense of continuity between our space as viewers and the painting’s space, rendering it radically independent of us.

The suggestion that Picasso’s handling of the contours of objects and bodies in relation to the framed space of the picture allegorizes the problem of painting’s autonomy strikes me as a useful way to think about Gothic. In fact, I find the schematic suggestion of a body to share something, by way of reversal, with Three Women. In Picasso’s painting, the division enacted by the literal edges between the space of the painting and the world outside it is internalized by the represented body. Consequently, the painting’s autonomy can be understood as allegorized by the represented body’s containment within or openness to the pictorial space surrounding it. The expanding effect of Gothic’s isolated figure, though, meets the edge from the other direction. Instead of internalizing the division, the all-over field swells to meet the framing edges. The effect imparts to those edges a role of containment, transforming the literal edge—where the picture has to end—into a pictorial limit—where the represented body finds its end. The division between the space of the painting and the visible world outside it, including the viewer’s space, is enacted by the uncontained body seeking its limit. The pictorial limit of Gothic, that is, is self-determined.

Number 1A, 1948

I have been suggesting that Pollock’s literal framing edges do not automatically function to divide the world of the picture from the world outside of the picture. In each case, those edges must be established as a pictorial frame. The allover visual field, in its total array, is a means by which Pollock accomplishes this task. And, as I hope to have suggested in my summary of the formalist positions on Pollock, expression—the artist’s meaning—plays a crucial role in this regard. Now I want to claim that the expressive meaning of Pollock’s works, whether we understand it as “pictorial intensity” (Fried) or “tautness of feeling” (Greenberg), is intimately bound up with the problem of formatting the work of art and establishing its independence from the viewer’s experience. Number 1A, 1948 (fig. 7) tests my claim.

It has become standard procedure to assert that Pollock’s all-over style, characterized by a seeming uniformity and lack of hierarchy, challenges the power of the painting’s internal structure and external boundaries to establish pictorial coherence. (In contrast, I suggested that the arcs of Gothic provide a certain emergent structure, as if its pictorial structure—its format—is internally self-generated.) In her attack on the idea of structure in Number 1A, 1948, Rosalind Krauss made an even stronger claim. Taking Pollock’s handprints as indexes of a vertical, figural, “schema” lying below the dripped, poured, and spattered skein, Krauss contended that the web not only struck at and “cancel[led]” that figural schema, but “operate[d] instead on the very idea of the organic, on the way the composition can make the wholeness of the human form and the architectural coherence of the painting into analogues of one another.”28 Krauss’s “organic” seems to refer to a correspondence between the painting’s “capacity to cohere” and the unity of the human form we expect figuration to produce. To her, Pollock’s webs dismantle both. I mention Krauss’s views at this juncture merely to point out that in rejecting the capacity of Pollock’s paintings to cohere, Krauss does more than strike at unconventional techniques of composing paintings. She also implicitly rejects the idea that Pollock’s paintings can establish their independence from the viewer, because apprehending a sense of the painting’s integrity is directly related to perceiving it as a discrete, contained, framed work of art. In failing to see the integrity or coherence of Number 1A, 1948, Krauss denies its ability to achieve an ontological status of separateness from the viewer. Which is to say that she “cancels” Pollock’s meaning, converting it into a matter of a viewer’s experience. Her position thus entails abandoning the idea that paintings can serve as means of expression.

Recalling Greenberg’s analysis of the cubist’s effort to re-create flatness by controlling the oscillation between literal flatness and illusioned depth, it would not be difficult to see the handprints along the upper right framing edge of Number 1A, 1948 as functioning analogously to Braque’s stenciled letters. Similarly, they might be taken to work like the blue selvage thread in Number 27, 1950. As indexical signs of Pollock’s palms, they make the literal flatness of the support explicit, helping to differentiate the physical nature of the canvas from the pictorial field. It is this distinction, I have been arguing, that conditions our apprehension of the painting as a medium of expression.

But the handprints also function representationally. That is, Pollock intends to signify something about the relation of his mark-making procedures to both figuration and abstraction. Counter to what may be our initial impression that the painting was made without traditional techniques or implements, it is important to note that Pollock utilized a brush to create a diagrammatic figure just emerging from or sinking into the web at the upper left corner. Given the artist’s tendency to bracket the interior space of his pictures on either side with standing figures like this one, we might reasonably assume it to have a mate. In using his palm—the limit of a body’s reach and touch—to create a sequence of prints, Pollock pairs the iconic figure with indexical marks. But the marriage complicates the stability of the categories. By convention, it’s easier to take the painted figure as part of the representational world of the painting, since we rarely take paint strokes that define an object or a figure—however schematic—as indexical signs. They are often invisible to us, supplementary to the object or figure we behold and identify. But such strokes are indeed indexes. Focusing our attention on the marks that comprise an object or figure—detaching those marks from the iconic image they collectively make—we can see that they index the angle of a brush, the pressure with which it is applied to the canvas, the speed and direction of an artist’s stroke, and other material properties. There is an oscillation, one might say, between taking a sign as indexical or iconic.29 It is this oscillation which helps us now see Pollock’s handprints not as indexes of his palm, but as iconic signs belonging to the world of the picture. He represents the hand and its multiple touches; he does not just index a causal activity of marking.

And, the handprints do more than indicate the flatness of the support. The manner in which they tack the right-side and upper framing edges, as if pushing or spreading parts of the webbed field towards the corner in an effort to secure it there (notice the oblong passage of heavy black that further anchors the web to the corner), serves to express something about the painter’s approach to a limit. Consider the fact that as he painted, the framed edge as a literal limit was not yet in place. Pollock made Number 1A, 1948 while the canvas was on the floor of his studio, only framing it after its composition was complete. He was thus at liberty to choose how his handprints—as well as other marks on the surface, including the overall web—would exist in relation to the edges, the frame. The expressive power of those choices has not gone unnoticed. T.J. Clark explained the relevance of such an adjustment to the top framing edge in Number 1A, 1948 (fig. 11): “The central black whiplash with its gorgeous bleep of red, and the final black spot to the right of it,” Clark wrote, “condens[e] the whole possibility of painting at a certain moment into three or four thrown marks.”30 Given my own stress on the establishment of the edges as pictorial limits that can sustain expressive content, and thus formats the painting as a work of art, I’m tempted to indulge in Clark’s hyperbole.

Establishing those limits, as I have hoped to explain, does everything to separate Pollock’s painting from the world at large and from our experience at large. Number 1A, 1948 is the meaningful expression of an artist, and our evaluation of the validity of that expression—its truth, insofar as we think we understand or feel it—is not an act that consummates the meaning. The meaning is independent of us. But I tend to think that Pollock’s project of separateness is not motivated by a radical renunciation of communicability. Rather, it originates in the desire to insist that one’s own meaning, and its expression, is not contingent upon a viewer’s interpretation. The commitment with which Pollock pursues pictorial intensity and tautness of feeling asserts his expression, and his meaning, as his own. In the difference between the indexical and iconic interpretations of Pollock’s paintings is the difference between the literal and the re-created framing edge, between the shape of the canvas and its format, between limits that are actual constraints and limits that are created—paradoxical as it may sound—as the condition of expression.

We have now had over 100 years to come to terms with Analytic Cubism, to make sense of its fragmented forms and shallow, intermittent spatiality, its dense value gradations and heavily worked surfaces.  Despite having had that century for reflection, however, there exists little consensus today regarding either Cubism’s underlying intentions or its successes and failures.  Picasso himself offered relatively little explanation of his project, and Braque was no better.  Presumably they talked to one another, even daily, and at considerable length; but neither ever penned a manifesto of the movement, say, or offered interviews elaborating their intentions, at least not until long after the fact. (In that regard, they were virtually unique among early twentieth-century artists, whose paintings were almost invariably accompanied by some written explanation—instructions, as it were, for the uninitiated.)  In the case of Analytic Cubism, interpretation was left to others: other artists, or critics, who felt the need for an account of this work that looked so radically different from everything preceding it.2

The first serious attempts at explanation tended to fall into two opposing camps—or frequently, as Christine Poggi has pointed out, into both at once.3 On the one hand were claims for Cubism’s heightened “realism,” principally through its purported ability to offer multiple views of objects, rather than remaining confined to the singular vantage point normally considered endemic to painting.  According to this account, in a work like Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe [fig. 1], the “glass” in question—that conglomeration of black-outlined forms situated about two-thirds of the way between the leftmost edge of the canvas and the right—was to be understood as given both in “plan” (the circles and semi-circles suggesting the round base and the stem seen in cross-section) and in “elevation” (the vertical lines between and above the circular forms indicating the upright orientation of the glass).  Whether this was interpreted as indicating the painter’s movement toward and around the object or as the result of that object’s conceptual (rather than merely perceptual) apprehension, the implication was that Cubism had overcome painting’s earlier limitations, and so could now provide a more complete grasp of things in their totality.

On the other hand there was the widespread assertion that Cubist paintings were themselves totalities, autonomous things in their own right, “real,” if you will, because no longer tied to illusionistic description of the natural world.  Carl Einstein, in his “Notes on Cubism,” perhaps summarized this position best: “The totalization of the painting comes about,” he said, “as a consequence of its unverifiability, and the fact that the spectator never exits from the reality of the picture.”4 The claim was that, in contemplation of a work such as Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe, the viewer cuts him- or herself off from the external world, which consequently recedes in memory.  That world then ceases to be the yardstick against which the painting is measured.

Again, these two views—on the one hand, that Cubist pictures give us better or truer depictions of things as they actually are; on the other, that they are themselves independent or autonomous things—would seem inherently contradictory.  (The first emphasizes the representational function of the image, the second all but denies it.)  Of course, that didn’t prevent both views from being voiced by one and the same individual, often in the space of a single essay.  Rather than seeing this as a flaw of the criticism, however, I want to suggest that the contradictions inherent in the early interpretations of Cubism actually reveal something very important about the works in question.  They help us to see that Cubism was an art built out of, and sustained by, contradiction.  Consequently, the very best accounts of it we have are precisely those that emphasize the things most contradictory in its aims and ambitions.

As far as I know, the first person to explicitly acknowledge the contradictions of Cubism and to offer a compelling account of its development based on their interplay, was the critic Clement Greenberg.  In his 1959 essay, “Collage,” Greenberg described the dilemma he saw confronting Picasso and Braque over the course of their shared enterprise.  Every Cubist work, he said, in contradistinction to centuries of Western paintings preceding it, “had to spell out, rather than pretend to deny, the physical fact that it was flat”—that it was, in other words, a “real,” tangible object—“even though at the same time it had to overcome this proclaimed flatness as an aesthetic fact and continue to report nature.”5 We should pause briefly to take stock of that rather peculiar phrase in the last line: “aesthetic fact.”  It, too, has a hint of the contradictory or oxymoronic about it.  Plainly, in using it, Greenberg hoped to give the painting’s aesthetic qualities a weight comparable to that of its physical or factual existence.  It was not enough, he felt, for the Cubist work to be flat; a blank canvas, an ironing board, a piece of wallpaper, for that matter, are all flat.  To be a painting, the Cubist work would have to confess its flatness but also—somehow—overcome or negate it.6

Greenberg’s concerns at the beginning of his essay were with Picasso’s and Braque’s paintings from 1911, which is to say, with those from the height of what is sometimes referred to as Cubism’s “hermetic” phase.  According to Greenberg, works of this period took the particular form that they did as a result of an effort to achieve a balance between, on the one hand, flattened “facet-planes” that would echo and therefore emphasize the two-dimensionality and rectilinearity of the canvas and, on the other, a modeling that could potentially disrupt our awareness of the surface.  The modeling should do nothing more than that, however.  Were it to function successfully, creating a plausible illusion of solid, volumetric form, the painting would have to be deemed in denial of its physical flatness—masquerading as sculpture, then, rather than owning up to being the painting that it actually is.  Greenberg’s terminology is nicely counter-intuitive here: “The main problem at this juncture,” he said, “became to keep the ‘inside’ of the picture—its content—from fusing with the ‘outside’—its literal surface” (“Collage,” 71). If Greenberg designated the surface of the canvas as outside, and the work’s representational content within, it was presumably to emphasize that, for Picasso and Braque, representation remained the proper purview of painting.  Conversely, any work that abandoned that function would become simply an object and, as a result, fall outside the domain of art.

At the same time Greenberg wanted to call our attention to the way that “inside” and “outside” were coming into increasingly close proximity, and so he referred not to the painting’s “illusionistic depth” but rather to its “depicted flatness.” “Depicted flatness,” he said, “—that is, the facet planes—had to be kept separate enough from literal flatness to permit a minimal illusion of three-dimensional space to survive between the two” (“Collage,” 71-72). Early on, Braque had tried to address the problem by means of trompe-l’oeil.  In his Still Life with Violin and Pitcher [fig. 2], he painted a tack at the top of the canvas casting a highly illusionistic shadow below.  By effectively conflating the wall of the room—in other words, the rearmost of the painting’s represented planes—and the physical plane of the canvas itself, Braque was able to suggest a space forward or on top of the picture’s rendered flatness, between the depicted planes and the space that we ourselves inhabit.  But such devices, Greenberg felt, were mere “expedients,” more gimmick than actual solution to the problem at hand.  Still, they did bring Picasso and Braque to a crucial realization—namely, that there might be a way to overcome literal or physical flatness by, paradoxically, bringing it to the fore. It’s worth quoting this part of Greenberg’s argument at some length:

If the actuality of the surface—its real, physical flatness—could be indicated explicitly enough in certain places, it would be distinguished and separated from everything else the surface contained.  Once the literal nature of the support was advertised, whatever upon it was not intended literally would be set off and enhanced in its non-literalness.  Or to put it still another way: depicted flatness would inhabit at least the semblance of a three-dimensional space as long as the brute, undepicted flatness of the literal surface was pointed to as being still flatter. (“Collage,” 72)

Hence the printed or stenciled letters and numbers that, in 1911, first Braque and then Picasso began introducing into their compositions [see fig. 3]; the point was to draw attention through those inscriptions to the literal surface of the painting, so that everything less obviously adhering to that surface would appear to recede in depth as a result of the comparison.

The only problem, according to Greenberg, was that familiarity seemed to weaken the effect.  By 1912 Picasso and Braque had begun selectively adding sand to their paint so as to give it a visible texture [see fig. 4].  The hope was that, by introducing an explicitly tactile element, still larger areas of the actual surface could be emphasized, thereby prolonging the desired spatial illusions everywhere else.  As Greenberg tells the story, this strategy too eventually proved insufficient; and, of course, it was bound to.  Insofar as the intention was to overcome (and not merely to deny) the literal flatness of the painting’s material support, the project was doomed to failure from the start.  Ontological failure, I hasten to add—not aesthetic failure.  On aesthetic grounds, I think we can agree, most of the works manage quite nicely.  Yet it was their nonreconciliation to flatness—to, we might say, the unavoidable conditions of their own existence—that Greenberg regarded as their most distinctive feature.  It is also what he saw motivating Cubism’s development.  Faced with the impossible demand to simultaneously spell out and overcome its literal flatness, Cubist painting was driven to ever more extreme measures; its history appears, as a result, as a succession of retrospective, dialectical responses to its inability to free itself from its all-too-literal, material support.

In the end, as Greenberg tells the story, the accumulation of stenciling and textures threatened to overwhelm and thereby collapse the distinction between depicted and undepicted flatnesses that it had been the explicit purpose of those devices to produce.  But it was just at this point, and presumably as a direct result of those earlier failures, that Picasso and Braque hit on the idea of papiers collés [see fig. 5].7 To be sure, the new ploy raised the stakes considerably.  The pieces of paper that were affixed quite tangibly to the surface declared that surface with an unprecedented literalness.  The risk was even greater now that undepicted flatness would become “the main event of the picture,” effectively subsuming any and all implications of depth (“Collage,” 75). The brilliance of the new medium, according to Greenberg, was that within the narrowing confines of an opposition between literal surface and illusionistic depth—and at the very moment when literal surface seemed on the brink of becoming the only term—papier collé delivered a solution in which illusionism was transformed but thereby preserved.  Again I think it’s worth quoting Greenberg at some length on these matters, particularly as he sees them playing out in a specific work:

In the upper center of Braque’s first collage, Fruit Dish [fig. 5], a bunch of grapes is rendered with such conventionally vivid sculptural effects [or at least effects sufficiently “sculptural”] as to lift it practically off the picture plane.  The trompe-l’oeil illusion here is no longer enclosed within parallel flatnesses, but seems to thrust through the surface of the drawing paper and establish depth on top of it.  Yet the violent immediacy of the wallpaper strips pasted to the paper, and the only lesser immediacy of the block capitals that simulate window lettering, manage somehow to push the grape cluster back into place on the picture plane so that it doesn’t “jump.”  At the same time, the wallpaper strips themselves seem to be pushed into depth by the lines and patches of shading charcoaled upon them, and by their placing in relation to the block capitals; and these capitals seem in turn to be pushed back by their placing, and by contrast with the corporeality of the woodgraining.  Thus every part and plane of the picture keeps changing place in relative depth with every other part and plane; and it is as if the only stable relation left among the different parts of the picture is the ambivalent and ambiguous one that each has with the surface. (“Collage,” 76)

Greenberg’s language in this passage is particularly compelling; it also signals a major turning point in his narrative.  Over the course of the next several pages of his text, he will go on to claim that the papiers collés managed to achieve, at last, what the earlier works had not, namely, an overcoming of the opposition between literal and depicted flatnesses that, until that moment, had been presented as the insurmountable contradiction driving Cubism’s development.  The key to the reconciliation, according to Greenberg, was papier collé’s peculiar illusionistic potential.   In the pasted-paper works, he conceded, “flatness may monopolize everything, but it is a flatness become so ambiguous and expanded as to turn into illusion itself” (“Collage,” 77). Mind you, the illusion at issue in these works is, for Greenberg, no longer pictorial, achieved through perspective and sculptural modeling as in the works of the past.  Rather, it is an optical illusionism, arising within formal configurations that openly declare their two-dimensionality, an illusionism capable of displacing surfaces so that they seem to hover in an imaginary (and decidedly non-physical) space.  In the later papiers collés, according to Greenberg, the last vestiges of sculptural shading that still clung to Braque’s Fruit Dish were progressively eliminated, thereby demonstrating that optical illusion could be produced without the aid of any pictorial illusion whatsoever—that the physical surface could be displaced and re-created out of shapes that were wholly and unimpeachably flat.

Admittedly, there are problems with this account of Cubism (including the reality that neither Picasso nor Braque ever did actually produce papiers collés devoid of all sculptural modeling).8 Still, it seems to me that Greenberg’s larger narrative, especially the part concerning the paintings of 1911 and 1912, is able to accommodate many of the eccentric features of those works—their stenciling, for example, and the addition of sand to their surfaces—that demand explanation yet that, prior to Greenberg’s essay at least, had seemed particularly inexplicable.  My own feeling (obviously enough) is that, because of this explanatory power, “Collage” deserves rather more attention than it has received, particularly over the last several decades.

The essay’s disregard or disfavor during that extended period is plainly the result of a kind of collective dissatisfaction over what we might call its “optical dénouement.”  Unhappy with the story’s conclusion, scholars have tended to overlook or discount even its more promising beginnings.  Certainly one way to understand the several semiotic interpretations of Cubism that appeared in the 1970s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s—notably those by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois—is as reactions to Greenberg’s “opticality” (and, we might add, his tendency to measure all modern painting against that single standard).9 Precisely at the moment where Greenberg saw the triumph of optical illusion—in Picasso’s and Braque’s papiers collés—Krauss and Bois would have us see instead Cubism’s unprecedented engagement with quasi-linguistic signs.  Indeed the very turn to papiers collés is to be understood, in their view, as driven by a desire to develop, if not for painting per se, at least for picturing, discrete signifying units analogous to the words or phonemes of written and spoken language.  They regard each shard of paper in Picasso’s Violin [fig. 6], for example, as just such a unit, neatly delimited, in contrast to the generally seamless continuity of an oil painting’s surface.  For Krauss especially it was also important that Picasso wasn’t using just any kind of paper; his preferred material was newspaper, the printed text insinuating that an analogous process of signification was operating in the context of each individual collage.

It seems to have been important, too, for both Bois and Krauss that Cubism’s experiments with papiers collés were being conducted more or less concurrently with major developments in structural linguistics, notably in the work of Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure.10 Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which was offered three times at the University of Geneva between 1907 and 1911 before its publication as a book in 1916, emphasized that language constituted at any particular moment a formal system, the elements of which drew their meaning only oppositionally, as a result of their differences from one another.11 Language was not, then, the simple naming process it was commonly taken to be—not a matter of a simple one-to-one correlation between a word (the Latin word “arbor” or “equos,” for example [see fig. 7]) and some thing in the world (i.e., the tree or the horse standing over there in the field).  In actuality, things are more complicated than that.  In his course [see fig. 8], Saussure distinguished, first, between the concept (designated as “arbor” in the lower left of his diagram) and the written or spoken word (“tree”); and, then (in the right-hand ellipse), between the concept (below) and its referent in the world (above).  He also underscored the fact that different languages cut things up differently, as illustrated in the diagram reproduced here as fig. 9: “A” represents the undifferentiated field of possible concepts, “B” the range of signifiers (sounds) that might potentially be used to designate them.  Again, different languages divide those streams differently.  English, Saussure pointed out, has two separate words—“sheep” and “mutton”—for the living and cooked forms of the animal, whereas French has only one: mouton. (The other example everyone always trots out—although, factually, it stands on shaky ground—concerns Eskimo languages, which purportedly have many different signifiers for everything encompassed by our one word “snow.”12)  These linguistic differences occur because the relation between signifier and signified is wholly arbitrary, which is to say, the word “tree” (whether written or spoken) in no way resembles the maple outside on the lawn.  Images, of course, are typically not of this order; they signify something precisely by resembling it.  One of the upshots of that condition, however, is that images, no less than words, are often taken to have a one-to-one correspondence (in effect, a quasi-nominal relation) to the things that they denote.  Patently enough, even Saussure, when he wanted to refer to a real tree rather than its linguistic signifier, used an image of a tree [fig. 8].  The metaphor of the painting-as-window, ubiquitous throughout the Western mimetic tradition, has similarly encouraged viewers’ tendency to regard images as more or less transparent to the things that they portray.

But is painting necessarily rooted in mimetic likeness?  Might it be possible for painting to develop and make use of essentially “arbitrary” signs, signs that, like words, would be capable of referring to things in the world but in the absence of illusionism, perhaps even foregoing resemblance altogether? These questions are the ones explicitly raised, according to Krauss and Bois, by Picasso’s papiers collés.13 From one work to the next, Picasso often re-used nearly identical shapes but had them signify different things in their different contexts.  Evidently enough, a shape such as the leftmost newspaper fragment in the Violin [fig. 6] could easily serve in another collage—were it re-positioned slightly rightward—not as the notched silhouette of a violin but rather as the front face and sound-hole of a guitar.  In that case we would want to say that the pieces in their separate contexts function like homonyms, like words that sound alike but have distinctly different meanings.  Historically, paintings and other works of visual art have not functioned in this manner, because mimetic resemblance precludes such multiple significations.14 In fact, Picasso’s Violin may represent the limit-case in Cubism’s effort to create an arbitrary visual sign.  As Krauss pointed out, the two newspaper fragments employed in the work evidently once belonged to the same sheet; we are readily able to re-join them in our imagination.  (Having scissored them apart, Picasso simply turned one over before pasting them both down onto the surface.)  Again, the leftmost piece designates in the context of this collage the surface and silhouette of a violin.  But what about the rightmost fragment?  Krauss convincingly argued that we are meant to see its parallel lines of type as more or less continuous with the charcoaled hatchings below (an effect that was undoubtedly even stronger before the newspaper yellowed with age), and therefore as signifying the shadowy space alongside of the instrument.  We have, then, two signifiers—materially indistinguishable in that they once belonged to the very same sheet of newspaper—but that in the context of this single work have been made to signify not just different things but opposites, objects and qualities essentially antithetical to one another: on the one hand, flat opaque surface and, on the other, shadowy, atmospheric depth.

Krauss presented her reading of Picasso’s Violin at a 1989 symposium held in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art’s blockbuster exhibition, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism.15 As his contribution to that same symposium, Yve-Alain Bois provided an account of Cubism’s development, from roughly 1908 through 1912, which also drew heavily on semiotics.  (I should add that the more or less simultaneous presentation of those two papers contributed to the impression at the time that the semiotic angle was fast becoming the reigning orthodoxy among interpreters of Cubism.)  For his part, Bois wanted to show that, from the outset, Cubism had been working toward the development of a system of arbitrary signs, the discrete signifying units of papiers collés being but the culmination of that effort. What Bois designated the first phase of Cubism, represented by Picasso’s Three Women [fig. 10], was characterized, he said, by the repeated subdividing of the painting’s surface, the figures or other representational elements of the work seeming to emerge only as a result of that division.  In the case of the figures in the Three Women, Bois argued, their anatomical features are patently a byproduct of the canvas’s partitioning into multiple, triangular segments. That it was a matter of dividing a single, continuous surface is underscored not only in those places (e.g., in the area of the leftmost nude’s upraised elbow) where the figures still seem attached to their background, but also by that odd, shared contour that serves simultaneously to delineate the breast and torso of the rightmost woman and the buttocks and thigh of her sister alongside.16

In what Bois called Cubism’s “second semiological phase” the units became rectangular and, in certain instances, such as Picasso’s Still Life with Liqueur Bottle [fig. 11], the artist selected objects that were particularly well suited to the new geometric paradigm.  (That is, the cut-glass of the depicted bottle of liqueur was, in some sense, already Cubist.)  Over the course of the next ten or twelve months, the rectangular units of these Cubist paintings increasingly took on the overall form of a grid [see fig. 12].  As a result, they took on too a kind of double signification, simultaneously referring to the figure or objects represented (however elusively) and to the rectangular shape of the canvas itself, which the grid effectively replicated in miniature.

At this point, according to Bois—following the summer that Picasso and Braque spent together in Spain, in the town of Cadaqués—Cubism arrived at a crossroads.  It could abandon representation altogether—stop figuring the world outside of the work—or somehow devise a means of signification that would allow painting to retain its representational function but without having to return to the illusionism of the past.  Clearly both Picasso and Braque felt that, were painting to renounce its traditional representational function, there would be neither any rules governing its production nor criteria by which to measure its success.  Any decisions regarding the placement of this line or that color could only ever be arbitrary, now in the negative sense of “entirely random.”

It was at this point that Picasso and Braque both began introducing into their paintings small pictographic elements: in the case of Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler [fig. 13], for example, the black linear configurations denoting moustache, hair, watch chain, hands, etc.  These “signs” or, better, signifying elements are all still “iconic,” which is to say, they all represent something (a watch chain, for example) by resembling it; but they are doing so now in the conspicuous absence of sculptural modeling or any other form of illusionism.  Bois designated this Cubism’s “hieroglyphic” stage—precisely because, like hieroglyphs, the pictographic elements of these paintings seem to inhabit a territory in between illusionistic images and the arbitrary or unmotivated signs of writing.

Again, like Krauss, Bois regards the papiers collés of the following year as being different in kind, in that, he says, they fully inhabit the territory of the arbitrary sign.  But he sees Picasso’s Still-Life with Chair-Caning [fig. 14]—a work of collage that preceded the papiers collés (indeed it was the very first collage ever produced)—as importantly transitional in this whole process.  As Rosalind Krauss first noted, the Still-Life with Chair-Caning makes itself available to two contradictory readings.  On the one hand, we can regard it as a more or less traditionally oriented still-life, a painting of so many objects (a glass, a newspaper, a pipe, a slice of quiche or tart) arrayed on a table at some distance in front of us, the line of our gaze at those objects being, then, essentially perpendicular to our upright bodies.  But it is also possible to see the painting otherwise.  That is, we might instead regard the rope-encircled, oval-shaped canvas as referring to the top of the table, perhaps a glass table, with the collaged piece of caning-imprinted fabric suggesting the edge of the chair pushed underneath.  In that case, we would not be looking out at the still-life objects but, rather, down at them, our line of sight now running more or less parallel to our upright bodies.   Christine Poggi has aptly described this collage as offering itself as both table and tableau, that latter term implying precisely the vertical orientation of the works historically associated with easel painting.  Bois, for his part, describes Still-Life with Chair-Caning as marking “the moment when something is about to topple, for in the collapse of the vertical and the horizontal, what Picasso is inscribing is the very possibility of the transformation of painting into writing—of the empirical and vertical space of vision, controlled by our own erect position on the ground, into the semiological, …horizontal space of reading” (“Semiology of Cubism,” 186-87). Again, for Bois, that “horizontal” space of reading and writing is the one that the subsequent papiers collés would come to fully inhabit.

Bois’s argument played an important role in shaping the last of the art-historical accounts of Cubism that I want to discuss, the one advanced by T.J. Clark in his essay “Cubism and Collectivity.”17 In a footnote to that essay, Clark explicitly credits Bois’s work with having helped him to sort out “the strengths and weaknesses of the semiotic account of Cubism, and the ways it does and does not connect with previous ‘modernist’ [i.e. Greenbergian] descriptions” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 424, note 9). In contrast to either Bois’s or Greenberg’s narratives, a certain “disconnected quality” characterizes Clark’s own, “precisely because,” he says, “it is the opposite quality that I most distrust in the accounts…we already have: that is, the way they are driven by a basic commitment to narrative continuity, by a wish to see Picasso’s works from 1907 to 1912 as possessing a logic or forming a sequence, as not being broken or interrupted in any important way—not, above all, encountering failure” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 175). If the Cubist works “are historical at all,” Clark adds a bit later in his text, “it is only insofar as they constantly seem to be moving toward some declaration of epoch-making failure—painting at the end of its tether, so to say, or in an ether where its means are hopelessly clotted or more and more impalpable” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 187).

Clark actually agrees with Bois that in Cubism the pictorial signs become highly—unprecedentedly—arbitrary.  But he insists that the works themselves suggest only a grudging acceptance of that arbitrariness, and do so always in a dark or sardonic mode. “The freer and freer play of the signifier is represented,” he says, “at the same time as it is embraced, as a mereness, a mechanizing or automatism of markmaking, an overall-ness which registers as the opposite of liberty or even ‘autonomy’” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 185), Clark’s basic claim is that Cubism never did achieve the status of a language, though, importantly, he says, it pretended to have done so.  It was essentially the counterfeit of such a language, feigning to offer some truer or more accurate description of the phenomenal world but in fact being unable to deliver anything of the sort.18

As Clark tells the story, in the summer of 1910, the one spent at Cadaqués, where Picasso’s work in particular became as arbitrary or abstract as it ever would—where paintings such as The Rower [fig. 12] perched on the edge of a wholly “unverifiable” relation to the things they purported to describe—the artist came “face to face with the disenchantment of the world.  Which meant, in Picasso’s case,” Clark says, “the disenchantment of painting—the revealing of more and more, and deeper and deeper, structures of depiction as purely contingent, nothing but devices” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 220). Subsequently light (and not just the stale academic simulacrum of it that was present in the works from Cadaqués) would return to illuminate Picasso’s paintings.  The representation of specific objects or figures was also reasserted, via the introduction of Bois’s “hieroglyphic” elements [see fig. 15]—all of those preposterous moustaches, cleft chins, and little beady eyes showing us quite explicitly, according to Clark, “what the pursuit of likeness looks like, in a situation where all versions of such a pursuit have proved impossible to sustain” (“Cubism and Collectivity,” 221).

For all his care to separate himself from the so-called “semioticians,” Clark’s position here looks, at least from my vantage point, not so very distant from that of Rosalind Krauss.  In her essay “The Motivation of the Sign,” Krauss had presented Picasso turning to quasi-linguistic signifiers as a kind of last resort, a way of “writing” /depth/ on a field from which its illusionistic invocation had been effectively banished.   If we’re to grasp the full weight of her argument, it’s extremely important we recognize that the only claims Krauss made for wholly arbitrary signification pertained to precisely those signifiers that indicated depth or the related notions of obliquity and luminosity.  In “The Motivation of the Sign,” she is very clear on this point:

This matter of motivating the sign, raised by my title does not, then, refer to the import of the semiological turn heralded by collage.  Rather, it addresses the specific set of signifieds that Picasso seems most insistently to organize in the opening years of his exploration of collage.  Those signifieds—/depth/ and /atmosphere/ or /light/—are in no way random, but are prepared for, motivated if you will, by the experience of the preceding five years. (“The Motivation of the Sign,” 271-72)  —She means by the way that three-dimensionality had been progressively drained from the picture.  So, for example, when Krauss points to the two mismatched f-holes in Picasso’s papier collé Violin [fig. 6] and suggests that they are arbitrary signs, it is emphatically not the case that they are arbitrary signs for f-holes.  If they signify those holes, it is because they resemble them, however much the “typographic” quality of the rendering insinuates some connection to language and writing.  The mismatched f-holes remain, then, iconic signs insofar as they refer to those particular features of the violin.  In their disparity, however—in the mismatching designed to suggest the violin’s oblique turn into space—they become fully arbitrary signs, but now signs specifically for /depth/.  Together, the f-holes signify space or depth even as they assert its absence, even as they cannot or will not conjure it illusionistically for the composition.

In Krauss’s account, Cubism’s progressive flattening—and so also its recourse to a form of arbitrary signification—is accompanied by a profound sense of loss.  Krauss would have us see that a distinctly melancholy air pervades works such as Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin [fig. 16], a melancholy made all the more poignant by those few places—in the area of the woman’s right arm, for example, or along the curve of her breast—where the machinery of illusionism is not malfunctioning, and so is yet able to conjure, miraculously, a palpably believable, tangibly present form.

Again, in Krauss’s description of these passages, we are not so very far, it seems to me, from the “dark mood” that Clark sees coloring Cubism, particularly in those years from 1910 to 1911 that are the focus of his attention.  In fact, I would argue that we are not on ground so very different, either, from that covered by Clement Greenberg in his essay on “Collage”—at least before “Collage” took its turn toward a triumphant “opticality.” In all three cases it is a matter of a kind of negative dialectic within Cubism, the works increasingly forced into a position of grudgingly acknowledging that which they most fear or revile: Clark calls it an abstract “unverifiability”; in Greenberg’s account, it is mere flatness; in Krauss’s, a two-dimensionality devoid of any carnal connection to the world.  In all three accounts, however, the works manage in such a way that both the acknowledgement and the antipathy are fully on view.  The works’ achievement—“triumph,” we might even say—resides precisely in their ability to make both things simultaneously apparent.  Admission or acknowledgement alone would have amounted to mere acceptance, resulting in something simply, flatly decorative, and detached from any engagement with the world.  Conversely, antipathy or avoidance on its own would have been tantamount to a denial of how much painting (and the world around it) had changed in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.  It is finally this doubledness, I would argue—the works’ acknowledgement of loss and their stubborn refusal to be reconciled to it—that makes them the compelling, occasionally haunting, images they are.  I tend to think that Krauss, Clark, and Greenberg might even all agree that it is also what makes them so wholly exemplary of modernity.