International man of mystery Todd Gibson commented on Michael Fried's most recent article in the March Artforum (not online) regarding the Thomas Demand exhibit currently on view in New York. I'm too frazzled right now to give a proper response to either Todd or the article, and I'm not particularly engaged by Demand's work, but a few thoughts have been rolling around in my mind I'd like to get out.
- First, I'm kind of fascinated by Fried's return to criticism and his claim to find (in his terms) a non-theatrical, absorptive artistic practice in contemporary photography. One could look at the article (and others he's written lately) and see conclusive evidence for Fried as a monstrous hedgehog, endlessly exploring one idea through different periods and contexts. Or perhaps what we are seeing is an attempt at a very long-term critical flanking manuever.
- Todd concludes his comments by saying that "Fried leaves out the human experience and actually implies that an object is better—more pristine—if it doesn’t have a viewer. That approach is how art is treated in the academy, in its journals and in its classrooms." I'd have to say that in my experience, whatever deficiencies academic approaches to art may display, following Fried's approach is almost never one of them. While he's obviously an eminent scholar, and his work is frequently cited, "Art and Objecthood" is as routinely reviled within academia as without.
- Fried's argument that Demand's photographs "thematize or indeed allegorize intendedness as such" echoes almost exactly his description of the impersonality of the paintings of Morris Louis. In the introduction to the collection of his critical writings, Fried notes that, although he didn't realize at the time, Robert Smithson's writings presented the most perceptive criticism of his positions (a point that's very clear in Amy Newman's Artforum book.) At the conference on color field I attended some months ago, one speaker argued that Smithson himself was deeply attracted to this "impersonality" in Louis's art and sought to expand upon it in his own work.
- If Fried were to reply to Todd's criticisms, I think he would emphasize a couple of points. First, he would note, as he does of other critics in the introduction mentioned above, that Todd doesn't really dispute his analysis, just the judgment made upon it. Second, he would object to the idea in Todd's quote above that Fried leaves out human experience. It's true that he attacked the way Minimalist art involved the spectator within it. Though he doesn't use such terms, I don't think it would be going to far to say that Fried considered the theatrical as involving a distortion, or even domination, of the spectator's body. And while he often objects to arguments that conflate his art historical work with his criticism, I don't think it's out of line to note that Fried has made it abundantly clear that he is aware of the primordial convention that pictures are made to be looked at. What's more, the suspension of this convention is always an unstable one. The internal referentiality of the artwork creates a sense as if it existed without viewers; but that sense can change. (In a somewhat different context, another critic associated, like Fried, with Clement Greenberg once said to me that the problem for their group was when the avant-garde they championed started to look like kitsch.)
- A related point that adds some weight to Fried's arguments but also causes problems for them is his insistance on the phenomenological cast of his criticism. Again, this is a topic he goes into in detail in the introduction to Art and Objecthood, in many ways addressing the same sorts of points that Todd raises. And he's right to say that, especially in relation to the sculpture of Anthony Caro, he focuses a great deal on how artwork can echo and evoke the body (I don't have the volume handy, so you'll have to take my word on it for now.) What doesn't quite make sense to me, however, is how this phenomenological grounding can be held at the same time as his critique of theater. It seems to me that the sort of bodily interaction he finds so objectionable (and that Todd praises) could be, and often has, cast in phenomenological terms itself (consider the article on scale that ran in Artforum's Summer issue last year, for instance.)
- As I said above, Fried takes comfort in claiming that his critics only attack the conclusions he draws while leaving his analysis undisturbed. Even if true, perhaps they do so because the intemperance of his judgements overshadows all else? At another point in the opening to Art and Objecthood, he tosses off a comment to the effect that all of his criticism may be considered as involved with the drawing of ethically loaded distinctions between different modes of subjectivity. And when you consider how he reacts to the difference between how his preferred modernist art and Minimalism relate to the viewer, you think: he's right. And: he's crazy. I'm on record as acknowledging the propriety, or at least inevitability, of aesthetic judgements involving other kinds of interests as well. Fried takes that phenomenon to an extreme level. The amount of ethical weight that he brings to bear on his very fine distinctions is staggering.
- And lastly: Artforum in the '60's the Fleetwood Mac of art criticism?
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