Michael Fried: “Art and Objecthood”.

Michael Fried is an art critic and historian, who in writing this article, Art and Objecthood, was advocating for what he thought of as genuine artworks within Modernism as against the objects, which accounted for the emergence of Minimalism.  These were considered as more literal demonstrations of an antagonistic ideological-position, than as works of art: hence his preference for the term ‘literalist’ over minimalist (part I).   In many ways Fried was biting back against Minimalism’s objection to, for instance, the ‘pictorial illusion’ of painting (part I).  Quoting Morris, Fried further explicates,

Whereas in previous art “what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],” the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one which, virtually by definition, includes the beholder (part III). 

Looking back from this point in history, the ‘theater’ Fried describes in minimalist objecthood – within that captive situation of the beholder – was not necessarily ‘the negation of art’ (part III) he had thought it.  Without requiring the ‘defeat’ of objecthood (part VI) much painting has absorbed the lessons of Minimalism.  Yet I found myself asking under the shadow of this legacy, why should we deny that painting is about pictures, or picturing our experience?  I mean pictures, representations, illusions, in the broadest possible sense: including what appears on abstract surfaces.  In this I am Fried’s friend.  As Griselda Pollock points out, ‘Painting has the potential to oscillate between its materiality and its capacity to evoke an illusion of something in the world or in the imagination’ (44).  This is something I have actively counted on, and am interested in this liminal space.  I believe it is one of painting’s most important characteristics: its ability to stare back as an object before us and take us inside, as a subjective encounter.  This might be painting as ‘desiring-machine’ to use a Deleuze and Guattarian term: a connection that creates conscious action (or ‘production’) so that I am talking about more than a romantic projection onto surface.  The art world discourse, which brings painting to its own ends, is dominated by an American criticism, which sees ‘painting as object-making.  The legacy of Merleau-Ponty is that painting is subject-making, subjectivising, consciousness-creating’ (Rowley, 65).  It may be time to revisit some of what Fried understood as ‘authentic’ in a practice of painting.

Citations

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, New York: Continuum, 2004. 

Fried, Michael.  “Art and Objecthood”. Artforum, vol. V no. 10, June 1967: 12-23 

Pollock, Griselda, and Alison Rowley. “Paintng in a ‘Hybrid Moment’”. Critical Perspectives in Contemporary Painting: Hybridity, hegemony, Historicism. Ed. Jonathan Harris. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003. 37-79.

Thiery de Duve, "When Form Has Become Attitude - And Beyond"

As philosopher and art historian, Thierry de Duve examines and questions our view of modernist and contemporary art, with a particular agenda for rethinking aesthetics.  In his 1994 article, “When Form Has Become Attitude – And Beyond” he takes a particular overview of the philosophical positions at stake toward art practice as reflected through its instruction within institutions.  His conclusion that today’s currency for deconstruction, with its relativistic logic, tends toward undermining art production with its pre-emptive suspicions, finds some sympathy with me.  While there is merit in examining what a work assumes, deconstruction applied too early, as de Duve points out, before ‘an artistic culture’ has been developed within the individual (30) or, as discussed in group, before creative play and experimentation has been explored, or even before applying oneself to a particular technique – a pre-modernist notion within these terms – is paralyzing and destructive.  Creative play is hopefully a continuous part of ones practice, but it suffers when there are too many doubts about how the ‘other’ attends the work (de Duve, 31).   

Painting and theory have a history of being in competition, as de Duve hightlights in an Artforum article ‘The mourning after’ (Mar 2003).  He was, in fact, referring to Conceptual art – with its claim on theory – winning the paradigmatic position of the 80s.  Painting, yet again, was to die: this time at the hands of the Conceptualists and the ‘critic as theorist’ (9). 

David Read, in the same Artforum article, makes the comment, however, that painting has always had a ‘symbiotic relationship with various belief systems, religious and political’ (8).  I wondered about this ‘symbiosis’ in relation to criticisms I faced in employing Klein-based analysis to place the register of my work: where it could seem that I was illustrating Kleinian theory, rather than articulating painterly ideas through an activation of site.  Taking on board these criticisms it would appear the symbiosis with this theory had become a too co-dependent one, too smothering.  Employing theoretical ideas as a painter is difficult if they end up prescribing that practice, and yet painting survives today as a conceptual site, because deconstruction demands clear signifiers that are usually found in other practices.   

David Read describes painting’s absorption of influences from other disciplines as both its ‘virtue’ and ‘debasement’ (Artforum, 8).   He connects this to the medium’s continuing validity: ‘photography and other media of mechanical reproduction have been like a vampire’s kiss that makes painting immortal’ (8).  Likewise, it would seem that the rise of theory with Conceptual art  – read this to mean ‘French theory’ (de Duve, 28) of which deconstruction is a part – has not doomed painting.  It may appear more shadowy, like an un-dead thing, its zombie-materiality ready to feed on the current demand for conceptual ‘brains’.  Yet painting’s symbiosis with any theory cannot be allowed to subsume it.

Citations

De Duve, Thierry.  “When Form Has Become Attitude – And Beyond” (1994).  Theory In contemporary art since 1945.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 19-31.   

“The mourning after”.  Artforum. Vol. 41, Iss. 7 (March 2003): p. 206. ProQuest Database. University of Auckland Library Web. 25 March 2011

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