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.