Catherine Spaeth - Blog - Presentness is Grace: How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name

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Apr182008

Presentness is Grace: How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name

Friday, April 18, 2008 at 10:05AM

There is something that I’ve noticed in blog exchanges, which is not visible in the post so much as the evolving thread, and that is candor in an emerging dialogue. I am enjoying the sense of it, which to my mind is richer than any dream of consensus. In a recent blog thread, extending over the course of several days, Edward Winkleman addressed everyone: “The collective discussion here, facilitated by the technology that permits measured thoughtful responses (as opposed to verbal debate where immediate demand for response heats things up too much) amounts to as satisfying a statement about what's what in art today as any given solo impression (doomed to present only one point of view successfully) could ever present.” and that “You're proving that art writing can perhaps be seen in a vital new way.”

On this blog, a slower conversation has been emerging, at first in response to jargon, and Nicholas Knight responded that even “ordinary language philosophy” has its own burdens, writing: “...constant diligence is absolutely required, because any concept or term can be laden with baggage. And that baggage will ultimately function as the meaning itself. And at such times, the red flags should be flying around everywhere!” and to which I replied with the following from Stanley Cavell:

The first step would be to grant to philosophers the rights of language and vision Austin grants to all other men: to ask of them, in his spirit, why they should say what they say where and when they say it, and to give the full story before claiming satisfaction. That Austin pretends to know the story, to have heard it all before, is no better than his usual antagonists assumption that there is no story necessary to tell, that everything is fine and unproblematic in the tradition, that philosophers may use words as they please, possessing the right or power - denied to other mortals - of knowing, without investigating, the full significance of their words and deeds. (Cavell, "Austin at Criticism," in Must We Mean What We Say, p. 111, Cambridge, c. 1976.)

As Nicholas Knight points out, the infamous critic/art historian Michael Fried was a student of Stanley Cavell. Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg are together the bogeymen of formalist art criticism, and while people have begun to warm up to Greenberg again, I don’t see that happening in the dominant art critical discourse with regard to Fried. For example, Shamim Momim in the Whitney Biennial catalog:

Michael Fried's famous text "Art and Objecthood" (1967) is a seminal illustration of the spatio-temporal anxieties of the sixties. A denunciation of the phenomenological staging of Minimalist sculpture, Fried's frankly hostile view of the "temporal" was based on the idea that art must have purity of presence: read, timelessness. In its proper state, according to Fried, art would test only the limits of its discrete medium and, thus, retain what he called "presentness." This achievement Fried construed as a redemptive one: a moral stance that framed time as the culprit behind all of Minimalism's ills - the theatricality of the objects, the endlessness inherent in industrial production, the notion that meaning exists in the space around an object and is activated by a viewer's presence rather than held autonomously within the object itself. (Time Change, in Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum. c. 2008,p. 17)

Something has happened between the publication of Fried’s essay and the by now overdetermined dismissal of it as a 'hostile view of "the temporal" - and the red flags are up! Much of the disregard for Fried that I hear in this comes in what is regarded as the moral stance of his last line, “presentness is grace,” and its presumed claim for a certain notion of autonomy.

On the topic of art and Buddhism in the Vietnam war era, I gave a lecture to an audience that I knew would include practicing Buddhists, and described to them what I understood of Fried, who to my knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism. It was an interesting exercise in that in order to speak to a very specific audience that had little knowledge of art history I had to jog Fried out of the habits of my own art historical writing. This is what I came up with:

From what I can tell, Michael Fried believes very strongly in convention as the necessary means by which we face one another as human beings. Forms, such as languages, are the containers that make intimate candor possible. One might say that the container can brim over in presentness, as in the deep heartfelt bow of one zen practitioner to another, or it can appear hollow, as in a disingenuous bow. In the first, the distinction between being is and being as is held in such a tense relation that the absolute (presentness) and the relative (in this bow) are indistinct the one from the other. In the second, the ego has occupied the space where presentness might have arisen, and without this presentness, being as is a bloated mimicry that hauls others in its sphere, a sphere that has now become a theatrical event. In their own respect for their tradition, this audience is now expected to be complicit with an ego that has forced a divide between self and other.

Unlike other judgments upon the success or failure of a work of art, what makes Fried's judgment interesting is that the alienating divide he describes between subject and object is felt as an extorted complicity in a social situation. In cautious and qualified accord with the ballyhoo surrounding the Whitney Biennial catalog, perhaps we should say this of arts writing as well.

By Catherine Spaeth

Catherine Spaeth |

20 Comments |

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Reader Comments (20)

Is it fair to note here that after the 1960s Fried moved to the domain of art history, applying the notion of theatricality to the 18th and early 19th century? While his larger narrative has the effect and, no doubt, aim of establishing the unique achievement of Modernism, it also read rather like an advocate's case for another frame as well.

April 21, 2008 |

John Haber

Thanks, John - there have long been worries in the academy that academic jargon had become a marketing tool in a publish or perish environment, and that an entire press such as Routledge, could become its vehicle. What I admire about Fried's word theatricality is that the Minimalism he was describing called for it, and knowing that something was there he goes back to Diderot, who in the early days of criticism, when a public sphere was just emerging for such writing, is very concerned with theatricality. A simple word, but complicated in that it also a very plastic word - the meaning of it changes with regard to the work one describes. So one has to use it carefully, and in the choice to use it, know that it has a history extending all the way back to Diderot! And there would be something at stake in adopting this tradition, it is a kind of lineage of its own, one that is deeply committed to words and how/what they mean.

For me, the adoption of this particular tradition is not to "believe everything I read" or to have an unquestioned attachment to words such as theatricality. It is to respond to a work of art as it appears, to the words that are summoned by this appearance, and to ask where this appearance comes from without any need for the one true origin. If Modernism is Fried's project, I believe it is this one: "The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."

Fried can be trapped by his won theories as much as anyone, I think I see this in his essay writings on Jeff Wall. But his contribution is that art history and criticism belong together as practices that are generated by how objects summon the words that they do.

April 22, 2008 |

Catherine Spaeth

Fried's was a great theory, and in fact shows why theory isn't a bad way to approach art. It makes you think about the work, gives it a lineage, and allows you to experience it differently. Besides, it allows you to argue with it. That's really all that's wrong with bad writing: how do you argue with Carol's quotes from the Biennial catalog, when they don't really say anything?

I love Fried's idea that a pre-Romantic moral theater addressed the viewer, whereas breakthrough works of Modernism such a Olympia and Les Demoiselles implicate the viewer. I'd just argue back, then, that Minimalism's theater allows an entirely different relationship from what he has in mind, in which awareness of the art object's materials is essential, in which moralism is no longer possible, and yet in which specifically temporal experiences as in theater are relevant. It's a little like the art object as actor and viewer have jumped together into the orchestra pit.

But I guess that's another topic to pursue one day, about Minimalism and not jargon! Whether the entertainment complex of trashy installations now still fits the model is yet another open question.

April 22, 2008 |

John Haber

OK, so now this is really me responding to the above - apologies for having to haul things over from my mail like that! (?)

First, to John Haber and the idea that Fried proves “theory isn’t a bad way to approach art.” But this is excatly what Fried doesn’t prove! For example, picking something short, when Fried writes about Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, he begins with the oddity of the prominent scribe to the left of Gross, a writer whse actions mimic the hand of the surgeon as he holds the scalpel, and then again to the right is Eakins himself, freakishly attentive over his drawing board. Fried notices that not only doesthis horizontal appearance of writing/drawing appear elsewhere in Eakins’ paintings, but that the subjectivity of the artist is implicated as well. In unpacking the different visual registers of writing and painting -horizontal and vertical registers of our vision - medium-specificity makes its appearnace inside of the melodrama of the artist’s own subjectivity. Freud is summoned by the painting, not the other way around.

And Justin, I very much like the thought that the post-modern decoder ring would be useless, as the text itself is non-committal. I take this to mean that its words are slippery and distant in their relation to the objects they intend to support.

Finally - Fried as a moralist. The word is so inflected by its contingencies you don’t even need scare quotes any more! But isn’t there a demand for tending to the fact that our complicity might be extorted from us? Is this not a pertinent issue in today’s art world?

April 23, 2008 |

Catherine Spaeth

Nice! I can see you know how to teach this material. Now if we can only ditch the moralists like Fried (or Suzi Gablik) and the immoralists, so to speak, like Cai Guo-Qiang we can finally get around to looking at a lot of nice art.

April 24, 2008 |

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