This fall, I was so fortunate as to participate in a seminar on art critic/historian Michael Fried. Without adornment, here is a modest narrative of our proceedings.
We began with a selection of writings by Clement Greenberg and his account of modernist art. By
this narrative (originally Marxian in its historical conception), an
avant-garde emerges in nineteenth century France, a historical novelty (AK 7)
dialectically generated by and negating the urban, industrial bourgeois society
to which it remains tied by an “umbilical cord of gold.” (AK 11) Since that
bourgeois society and its Protestant leanings had encouraged a dominance of
“literature” (where all arts aspire to the virtues of story-telling, to deleterious
effect [TNL 24]), the avant-garde turns inward upon itself. It becomes an
“imitation of imitating” (AK 10), fundamentally about its discrete mediums. (AK
9)
Courbet is an important origin figure in Greenberg’s
genealogy of the avant-garde; with him, we see painting renouncing its literary
desire to “have been breathed on air or formed out of plasma” (TNL 29) in favor
of insisting on its composition from—and being in—paint. “Reducing his art to
immediate sense data by painting only what the eye could see as a machine
unaided by the mind” (TNL, 29), in Greenberg’s terms, Courbet’s art exhibits
new formal characteristics: “A new flatness begins to appear … and equally a
new attention to every inch of the canvas.” (TNL 29) Manet, like the Impressionists
who followed, took this alienated, avant-gardist sensibility with its superior
historical consciousness (AK 6-7) steps further in seeing “the problems of
painting as first and foremost problems of the medium.” (TNL 30)
It is then through this medium specificity that the
modernist arts constitute their autonomy, ferociously throwing off the mantle
of literature and taking the purity of music (via theorists like Walter Pater)
as model. (TNL 32-2) Medium, as Greenberg argues here, is thus nearly coextensive
with materials. “For the visual arts,” he writes, “the medium is discovered to
be physical; hence, pure painting and pure sculpture seek above all else to
affect the spectator physically.” (TNL 32-3) The history of the modernist
plastic arts thus reads as a series of renunciations of modeling, chiaroscuro,
perspective and ultimately representation of visible entities themselves as
painters increasingly find their subjects within and as the means of their
métier:
Under the influence of the square
share of the canvas, forms tend to become geometrical—and simplified, because
simplification is also a part of the instinctive accommodation to the medium.
But most important of all, the picture plane itself grows shallower and
shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth
until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual
surface of the canvas where they lie side by side or interlocked or
transparently imposed upon each other. Where the painter still tries to
indicate real objects their shapes flatten and spread in dense, two-dimensional
atmosphere. A vibrating tension is set up as the objects struggle to maintain
their volume against the tendency of the real picture plane to re-assert its
material flatness and crush them to silhouettes. In a further stage realistic
space cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward, parallel to the
plan surface. (TNL 35)
In later writings of the early 1960s, Greenberg (at left) associated
this kind of medium specificity with a self-critical drive first announced by
Kant. (MP 85) By this telling, the alienation and rationalist undermining of
art’s religious justification forced artists to demonstrate that “the kind of
experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained
from ay other kind of activity.” (MP 86) The autonomy of the modernist arts
would be established by insisting upon the material means of making and
problems revealed within them by ruthless self-criticism. (MP 86-7)
Not only, then, were the plastic arts struggling to overcome
literature, but painting had to parse itself from sculpture to offer unique
address to “pure optical experience.” (MP 89) Modernist painting, in this view,
is utterly continuous with the past (MP 92), not at all the historical break as
the earlier advent of the avant-garde had pledged (see AK 6-7). Further, the
coming of “openness” in post-painterly abstraction from the closed forms of
synthetic Cubism suggests that abstraction itself is but another iteration of the
“cyclical alteration” (AAE 123) characteristic of art’s history as seen in
Wölfflinian, formalist terms.
For early Fried, there is much to admire in this narrative
and its attendant methods. Formalist criticism, he argues, is indeed most
appropriate to the interpretation of modernist art for the simple reason that
“modernist art in this century finished what society in the nineteenth century
began: the alienation of the artist from general preoccupations of the culture
in which he is embedded, and the prizing loose of art itself from the concerns,
aims and ideals of that culture.” (MPFC 646) Since modern art is alienated from
its social framework rendering appeal to social-historical factors (supposedly)
moot as explanatory tools, “the fundamentally Hegelian conception of art
history that is at work in the writings of Wölfflin and Greenberg” (MPFC 646)
is best poised to interpret modernism’s problems. Appealing to the work of
Lukacs and Merleau-Ponty, Fried identifies a non-teleological dialectic operative
in modernism (MPFC 646) driven by painters’ own intensely self-critical
understanding of their medium’s history, which they keep “not as an act of
piety toward the past but as a source of value in the present and future.”
(MPFC 647) Modernist art, then, is not gratuitous, but fundamentally moral
insofar as its ongoing dialectic produces problems to which the self-critical
painter (and critic) mist face up to. Both demand “a state of continuous
intellectual and moral alertness.” (MPFC 648)
If this moral dimension is not entirely present in
Greenberg, Fried makes a more explicit break with his mentor ca. 1966 around
issues of materiality and medium. For example, in “Shape as Form,” Fried begins
his exploration of Frank Stella’s shaped canvases by claiming that they treat
“shape as a medium” (SF 77) (He’ll repeat this formulation in 1967 [A&O
151, 153] and, in ’69, extend a conception of medium to include “Frenchness”
[MS 52, 57]). Shape and Frenchness imagine a far less material conception of
medium than Greenberg had allowed, and this becomes crucial to Fried in the
essays of 1966-7. First, the argument he runs via Stella is that the shape of
the canvas support emerged as a crucial problem for modernist painting due to
advances in post-painterly abstraction. Noland and Olitski had to “acknowledge”
(SF 78) the shape of their canvas supports due to the presence of new kinds of
purely optical illusion in their work, which had the effect of calling greater
attention to the shape of the canvases on which they worked. (SF 78-81)
Stella’s early striped aluminum paintings then took a reiteration of canvas
shape by literal form to the brink. (SF 81) Noland responded by exaggerating
the shape of his canvases, putting them into violent relationship with his
painted forms “so that, while the physical limits of the support are assaulted
by illusion, the (depicted) boundaries between the bands are the more acutely
felt—as if absorbing the literalness or objecthood given up by the support.”
(SF 83) Olitski, by contrast, did away with internal form (in favor of sprayed
color) and combated objecthood by altering the rectangular proportions of his
canvases. (SF 84-86) Yet, these were effectively “naïve” strategies, which left
the literal canvas still “there to be felt.” (SF 87)
It is this feeling—and commensurate desire for nothing but
the literal object—that Judd, Bell and other minimalists seized upon. This,
however, was a serious misapprehension of the modernist project of which
Greenberg too was guilty. For, Fried claims, it is wrong to say that the
modernist painter aims at the “essence of all
painting, but rather that which, at the present moment in painting’s history is
capable of convincing him that it can stand comparison with painting of both
the modernist and pre-modernist past whose quality seems to him beyond
question.” (SF 99, n. 11) Literalism/Minimalism, thus, confuses the
acknowledgment of modernist art’s material composition for a simple-minded
exemplification of those materials. (SF 88) More than an epistemological act
according to Cavell (K&A 263-4), acknowledging requires possessing
knowledge and responding sympathetically to it. It is, in this sense, moral.
That moral point is evident in Fried’s account of the importance of Stella’s
later shaped paintings (pictured above), which at once register the urge and the pull of
reductivist, materialist literalism and yet still resist in favor of a kind of
illusion and play between shape and form. Objecthood is defeated … for the
moment. (SF 95-6)
What, then, is a “medium” for Fried? Following on from his
citation of Kuhn (SF 99 n. 11, see also MS], a working hypothesis is that we
might see medium not as materials but as “paradigm”—as a rule-binding framework
that generates crucial problems and makes work productive for those inside it.
(SSR 23-4) Like a paradigm, a medium in this sense can also be undermined by a
profusion of anomalies that resist resolution by the available theories and
methods (SSR 84-5), and ultimately enacts a Gestalt shift—that creates “a different
world” (SSR 111)—when one paradigm replaces another. In part, by
misunderstanding medium as mere materiality—by taking ontology (essence) to
inhere in literal, physical properties instead of paradigmatic concerns (see
A&O 169 n. 6)—minimalist art perpetrates a travesty. By capitulating to
objecthood rather than simply acknowledging it, the object inscribes the
beholder in a false ontology. The characteristic distancing of the minimalist
work “makes the beholder a subject
and the piece in question … an object.” (A&O 154)
This conception of human being as mere subjectivity,
deriving from the Cartesian cogito, flattens Dasein’s being-in-the-world in
seemingly obvious, but highly detrimental ways, according to Heidegger: “For
what is more obvious than that a ‘subject’ is related to an ‘object’ and vice versa? … While this presupposition
is unimpeachable in its facticity, this makes it indeed a baleful one.”
(B&T 86) Essentializing material presence, minimalist art also inscribes
its subject in a false temporality—a (profane) duration of the intermingled
arts of theater (A&O 153-4, 166-7) to which the (sacred) presentness and
instantaneity of modernism stands opposed. (A&O 167-8) And the stakes are
even more significant, Fried suggests, since “the more nearly assimilable to
objects certain advanced paints had become, the more the entire history of
painting since Manet could be understood … as consisting in the progressive …
revelation of its essential objecthood.” (A&O 160) Of course, for Fried,
this is a tragic misunderstanding.
In this light, it is not surprising that we next see Fried
turning to a historical account of Manet—rewriting this history in his own
terms. What certainly is surprising about “Manet’s Sources” is the nature of
argument Fried makes. Rather than the haughty indifference or insistent
flatness that Greenberg had foregrounded (TNL 30), Fried’s point of departure
is the way in which Manet makes persistent references to art history in his
paintings of the early 1860s. Stressing the importance of pictorial precedents
by Antoine Watteau and Louis Le Nain in Manet’s Old Musicians (1862; at left) above the more obvious relations to Velazquez,
he goes on to make a highly peculiar argument. Manet, Fried claims, is moving
in an avant-gardist milieu far more aware of and open to 18th
century painting than one might think. It took new interest in Watteau as a
serious painter (MS 37); it used puppet theater to call for a return to 18th
C. theatrical conventions. And while no less than Baudelaire shows up as a closet
buff of the Rococo (MS 43), Manet moves in circles where rococo theatricality
can be seen as “realist” insofar as it is “naïve.” (MS 48)
The leading idea in all this is that Manet has to be seen
within a moment of formation of an art-historical infrastructure and
consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century—one that took definitions of the
“national school” and the quintessence of national traditions to be of the
utmost import. (MS 48) Exemplified by his mustering of Watteau and Le Nain in
the Old Musician, then, Manet needs
to be seen as consolidating his own canon of distinctively French painting. (MS
50) This struggle to articulate a French canon not only provides the necessary
context for a better apprehension of Manet’s so-called “eclecticism” (MS 50-1),
but also explains how the painter then proceeds to embrace the art of other
national traditions with this medium (i.e. paradigm) of Frenchness in pace:
“His genius … enabled him to make Frenchness itself the medium through which
Frenchness was transcended and access to the great paintings of other nations
secured.” (MS 52)
Manet’s historicism, in this way, is inescapably related to
his realism—the more familiar term, as Reff’s critique makes abundantly clear.
No longer, Fried claims, is it possible to think of the influence of the past
on Manet. Instead, we need to recognize how art from the past gives Manet
“sanction” since “his problem was not how to overcome the power of the past to
determine the present; but what to make of a past that had lost the power to do
just that.” (MS 70 n. 47) Yet, once he had worked the medium of Frenchness out
through his paradigmatic canvases of the early 1860s, Manet accomplished a
revolution—an autonomous paradigm for modernist painting that resolved its relations
to the Old Masters once and for all: “No painter since Manet has been faced
with the need to secure the connectedness of his art to that of the distant
past, to the enterprise of the Old Masters. With Manet’s paintings of the first
half of the sixties, that simply and without notice disappeared as a problem
for painting.” (MS 66) Alienated from society, modernist painting and its
autonomy against the precedents of the past had been established.
But, given the highly pejorative reading of theatricality
outlined in A & O, what are we to make of Fried’s repeated associations of
Manet’s valorized art with theater? Further, given the critique of
anthropomorphism and incessant unity leveled against the minimalist object, how
do we make sense of the animism and embodiedness that Fried attributes to
Manet’s paintings? Noting how Manet resolutely restrains more than one figure
from gazing out of the picture, he claims:
Manet seems … to have felt that to
have more than a single figure look
directly at the beholder would in effect be to establish a number of
individual, and so to speak merely psychological, relationships between the
beholder on the one hand and the figures in question on the other. Whereas
Manet seems to have wanted to establish a particular kind of relationship
between the beholder and the painting as
a whole, in its essential unity as a
painting. In this sense it is as though the painting itself looks or gazes or stares at one—it is as though it
confronts, fixes, even freezes one—…
and as though this was an essential source of Manet’s conviction … that the
pictures in question really were
paintings. (MS 69 n. 27)
Authority as painting derives from an integrated totality
that seems to look at the beholder, to “make the painting itself turn toward and face the beholder … It is as though
the frontality, the problematic relationships and finally what has been seen as
the flatness of Manet’s paintings are at bottom just this facingness, this
turning-toward.” (MS 72 n. 97)
So, if Manet’s paintings take their authority from an
ability to face the beholder, to turn toward us as single entities, why aren’t
they simply theatrical? In part, the claim seems to be that what Manet reveals
is the fundamental theatricality underpinning any act of depiction no matter
how “straight” it seems: “In Manet’s art the very act of posing, or fact of
being represented, was for the first time revealed as ineluctably theatrical—as
inescapably, even when inadvertently, a performance.” (MS 70 n. 46) In this
way, though, what looks like theatricality ends up being closer to the naivety
and the realism of Watteau and Le Nain whose figures gaze out from the picture
plane “innocently” because they do not yet take the beholder as a problem. (MS
79 n. 114) By squaring up to what Fried will come to call the primordial
convention of painting that it is made to be seen and self-consciously building
his autonomous project on the naïve tradition of the Old Masters, Manet is thus
engaged in the fundamentally moral program of acknowledgment and sanction key
to modernism.
Abbreviations:
AK: Clement
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [1939], in Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume I. Perceptions and Judgments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 5-22
TNL: Clement
Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocöon” [1940], in Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume I. Perceptions and Judgments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 23-37
MP: Clement
Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” [1960], in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol. 4. Modernism
with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. J. O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 85-93
AAE: “After
Abstract Expressionism” [1962], in Clement
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol. 4. Modernism with a
Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. J. O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993), 121-133
MPFC: Michael Fried, “Modernist
Painting and Formal Criticism,” The American Scholar 33, 4 (1964):
642-648
SF: Michael
Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons” [1966], in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 77-99
A&O:
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” [1967], in Art and Objecthood, 148-172
MS:
Michael Fried, “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of his Art, 1859-1865,” Artforum 7 (March 1969): 28-82
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