… what would be at stake is whether there is any art left to criticize or historicize, or whether we are left to discuss only our various responses to various objects. The historical return of theatricality as a problem for art would not simply be the resurgence of a theme but the recognition that what Fried calls “beholder-based art” is really not art at all.
Today’s quotes are from an essay, Eye of the Beholder by Robin Kelsey on Michael Fried’s book, Why Photography Matters in ArtForum (Jan 2009). At risk of confusing you, I’m going to take a bit from near the end, that I found to be most interesting, where the discussion shifts from Fried to Walter Benn Michaels because: “[Fried's] tacit acknowledgment that after ten chapters this crucial question has yet to be addressed brings a measure of relief, but what immediately follows—to this reader’s disappointment and surprise—is a lengthy discussion of a recent essay on photography by Walter Benn Michaels”. I’ll give some of the essay’s earlier (less interesting) parts following this:
… For Michaels, writing in his 2007 essay “Photographs and Fossils,” the pressing question is whether there are works of art that have a meaning we can argue about—or whether there are simply objects that have different effects on different people. He understands theatricality in Minimalism and after as belonging to a postmodern mind-set in which the experience of a work, not the work itself, matters, and thus subject positions and the politics of identity become paramount. In his view, photography has become crucial because photographs, among all modern artworks, are arguably the most like ordinary objects, the most susceptible (as Barthes explained) to being defined not by the intention of the maker but by the viewer’s affective experience. If Derrida shifted our attention from the sign to the signifier as trace, then the photograph suddenly looms large as an image that is arguably more trace than sign. Photography thus becomes a vital site for working through the crisis of art, for exploring the limits of postmodernism’s assault on ideology and meaning. The test becomes this: If photography sets the productive conditions for the work of art, can the work of art overcome them and survive?
… If Fried agrees with Michaels, we can understand why he does not clearly signal whether his book is a work of criticism or of history. It would presumably be a prolegomenon to either. In other words, what would be at stake is whether there is any art left to criticize or historicize, or whether we are left to discuss only our various responses to various objects. The historical return of theatricality as a problem for art would not simply be the resurgence of a theme but the recognition that what Fried calls “beholder-based art” is really not art at all.
But Fried is far from agreeing with Michaels completely. The divergence in their views is especially evident in their discussions of Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980). Michaels reads the book through his own sustained engagement with the fallen status of intention in the age of Derrida. For him, photography is artistically important now because it structurally compromises intention. It moves beyond absorption as an intended effect (e.g., Chardin painting a figure seemingly preoccupied with building a house of cards) to the eradication of intention as a source of meaning (e.g., Barthes finding himself pricked by accidental photographic details). This is why Michaels finds the resolute constructedness of photographs by practitioners such as Demand and Wall so vital; by saturating the photograph with signs of intention, they raise the possibility of overcoming photography’s ontological incapacity as a medium of art. According to this way of thinking, the theatricality of the photograph stems not from its production for display, but rather from its status as an indexical trace (and not a representation). Thus, according to Michaels, although the photograph as a purveyor of unintended effects à la Barthes is radically antitheatrical in the Diderotian sense, the result is pure theater because the photograph is rendered an object that depends on the affective response of viewers. Or as Michaels puts it: “It turns what Fried called absorption into what was supposed to be its opposite, literalism.”
As promised, here is a little bit from earlier in the article that is more directly about Fried:
The central claim of Fried’s new book is that in the ’70s and early ’80s, when artists began producing very large photographs for wall display, photography “inherited” the problem of beholding as Fried had described it. According to this claim, because the photographic tableau emerges in the wake of Minimalism and of new concerns about voyeurism and the inherently contaminating effects of beholding, it must acknowledge what Fried terms “to-be-seenness” even as it must continue to resist theatricality.
… What makes the elasticity of Fried’s formula especially problematic is his claim that the work of his chosen practitioners combines antitheatrical measures with an acknowledgment of “to-be-seenness.” At times, this post-Minimalist articulation of the beholder problem makes it difficult to imagine how any pictorial evidence could count against his theory. In other words, a figure not looking out at the beholder is deemed to be absorbed, while a figure looking out at the beholder is deemed to be acknowledging “to-be-seenness.” Even when we add the requirement that every instance of absorption be accompanied by signs of “to-be-seenness” and every acknowledgment of “to-be-seenness” by signs of absorption, the formula remains troublingly capacious. Although it may be useful in discussing the work of Wall, its application to the work of certain other practitioners, including Ruff and Andreas Gursky, seems less apt. For example, although Gursky often makes the beholder’s view extremely detached, this detachment seems—at least to me—less about a modernist aesthetic experience of absorption than about a global economy of disengagement.
This is a good essay, even though it’s loaded with ‘philosopher-speak.’ Recommended if you have the time. [ link ]
-Julie
