#michael fried

"[...] a critical jargon, derived from Marx, that cries out for definition in terms of the plastic arts. I might as well state right here my belief that it is the first responsibility of the Marxist critic to try and arrive at provisional definitions of this nature; and further that it is precisely this job of definition, of demonstrating with rigor and sensitivity the usefulness to the critic of Marxist concepts, that Berger shirks almost completely—with the consequence that Marxism in his hands provides not a critical vocabulary but an arsenal of praise and abuse.

Here, for example, is Berger’s working definition of “proper criticism”:

First, you must answer the question: What can art serve here and now? Then you criticize according to whether the works in question serve that purpose or not … The question I ask is: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?

[...] He goes on to explain that a work of art can make us aware of potentialities in ourselves we perhaps never knew we had.

A classical Greek sculpture increases our awareness of our own potential physical dignity; a Rembrandt of our potential moral courage; a Matisse of our potential sensual awareness. Yet each of these examples is too personal and too narrow to contain the whole truth of the matter. … The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement.

This is offered as an objective criterion of value, as opposed to the excessive subjectivity of most bourgeois criticism today. And yet, is it possible to imagine anything more subjective? What Berger seems to contend is that every man decides for himself whether or not a given work of art increases his awareness of his own potentiality—in which event the work is valid. But the word “valid” is surely meant to carry more weight than this. By valid Berger means objectively valid. There is clearly a confusion here that goes much deeper than we have indicated.

In fact the confusion is deeply rooted in Berger’s Marxism, and influences even the most seemingly innocuous aspects of his language. In the last sentence quoted above the loaded word is “improvement”: as a committed Marxist Berger finds it impossible to conceive of personal as distinct from social potentialities for improvement. Moreover, he would dismiss any distinction between the two as the kind of falsifying dichotomy one might expect from the bourgeoisie. For Berger awareness of potentiality means awareness on the part of the spectator of the potentiality for social gains. Any other sense of the phrase “awareness of potentiality” (for example, feelings I might sustain before a Pollock) Berger would simply denounce as mere subjectivity. But the notion of subjectivity is meaningless unless contrasted with one of objectivity, which cannot merely be defined as agreement with an unexamined body of doctrine. In general, when the procedures implicit in Berger’s logic and use of language are brought into the open like this, their self-contradictory nature becomes clear.

What all this comes down to, then, is that Berger accepts a priori a militant and often staggeringly vulgarized brand of Marxism from which all his judgments about art derive, in language anyway. (Since we are never allowed to view the actual procedure by which Berger judges that one painting is “subjective” or “decadent” and another not—this would involve defining Marxist terminology in visual terms—we can say no more than this.) Furthermore, when Berger finds himself in a position that, even to the layman, is pretty obviously untenable, he is prepared to deny its apparent meaning and then reintroduce the untenable notion through the loaded use of supposedly neutral or descriptive words—such as “improvement” in the above example. My fundamental objection is not that Berger begins from a position of accepting Marxist theory. In the world we live in more and more critics of art may be expected to start from similar political premises. But what is imperative is that the critic define his terms; that he show with sensitivity and logical rigor the usefulness and, if possible, the necessity of employing Marxist concepts and terminology. Unless he can do this his judgments will reveal nothing more than the strength of his bias and the slovenliness of his mind: they can say nothing about the works of art in question. What is called for is the development of Marxist concepts in terms of the visual arts—the kind of theoretical groundwork the Hungarian critic Georg Lukacs has sought to provide for literature. Until this is done it is impossible for us to take would-be Marxist critics like Berger seriously when they use words like “decadent,” “subjective” and “formalist.” In fact, we may say that until such a groundwork has been accomplished there can be no Marxist criticism of art.

Michael Fried’s discussion (in “Two Sculptures of Anthony Caro”) of Anthony Caro’s 1967 masterpiece “Prairie” provides a useful illustration of the “tension” between modernist illusiveness and objecthood. (Except that “tension” is not the right word because to the extent a work like Prairie succeeds in suspending literalness, there is no tension.) After describing the way in which the sculpture is put together, Fried writes this:

“Once we have walked even partly around Prairie there is nothing we do not know about how it supports itself, and yet that knowledge is somehow eclipsed by our actual experience of the piece as sculpture. It is as though in Prairie … illusion is not achieved at the expense of physicality so much as it exists simultaneously with it in such a way that, in the grip of the piece, we do not see past the first to the second. This is mostly due to the nature of the relationships which make a different kind of sense to the mind and to the eye. For example, that three of the long metal poles are held up at only one end is understood to mean that the full weight of each pole is borne by a single support far from its center; but the poles are seen as being in a state of balance as they are, as if they weighed nothing and could be placed anywhere without support. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the two poles supported at one end by a bent, upward-springing metal plate are held up by different plates and at opposite ends. Similarly, the one pole supported at both ends is held up by the far corner of the nearer plate and by the near corner of the farther one; and this deliberate staggering, while perfectly understood by the mind, disconcerts the eye enough to make it see that pole as if it were not truly supported at all. That all four poles are parallel to and equidistant from one another, and that three of them are the same length, are other factors which obstruct the eye from giving weight to the specific means by which each is supported. (It should also be said that the fact that the four poles are an almost imperceptibly lighter shade of sandy yellow than the rest of the sculpture gives them an added suggestion of lift.) In these and other ways Caro on the one hand has frankly avowed the physicality of his sculpture and on the other has rendered that physicality unperspicuous to a degree that even after repeated viewings is barely credible…More emphatically than any previous sculpture by Caro, Prairie compels us to believe what we see rather than what we know, to accept the witness of the senses against the constructions of the mind.”

And this extraordinary insight:

…grasping exactly how Prairie works as a feat of engineering does not in the least undermine or even compete with one’s initial impression that the metal poles and corrugated sheet are suspended, as if in the absence of gravity, at different levels above the ground. Indeed, the ground itself is seen not as that upon which everything else stands and from which everything else rises, but rather as the last, or lowest of the three levels which, as abstract conception, Prairie comprises. (In this sense Prairie defines the ground not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant.)

Art and Objecthood, pp. 182-83.

[Concerning Fried’s remarks on the concept of "ground" in the second quoted passage, what Caro discovered in making Prairie, and what Fried discovered in looking at Prairie, is what Wittgenstein recorded in Philosophical Investigations, § 226: “What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life.” “Forms of life” are “conventions” in a sense but unlike conventional conventions, they do not themselves require support in anything else, such as an explicit agreement among parties, or something external, such as nature. The ground is what is itself ungrounded, which is why human existence is inherently precarious.]

Fried’s discussion of Prairie demonstrates that at thing’s being “abstract” is not a characteristic that is attributed to the thing but refers rather to the way the thing is experienced – a modality of experience. For example, “abstract” does not mean “non-representational”. A piece of non-representational sculpture doesn’t resemble anything in the world with which we are familiar; for that reason, we tend to see the non-representational sculpture as an object of some kind. We see it in its literalness. (This is exactly the way in which Minimalist sculpture (e.g., a box by Tony Smith) is supposed to be experienced; because it doesn’t resemble anything else, it simply is what it is in the most literal sense.)

Krauss begins by positioning sculptor Donald Judd's own perspective on the importance of objecthood, explaining

Thus object-art would seem to proscribe both allusion and illusion: any reference to experiences or ideas beyond the work’s brute physical presence is excluded, as is my manipulation (through the prescribed observation of that presence) of apparent as opposed to literal space.

She then proceeds to gush over the beauty of Judd's work, despite the seeming sterile contextualization Judd gestures towards in his aspirations. Krauss continues on, citing fellow critic and historian Barbara Rose's more nuanced take on Judd's work, exploring the "sensuous confrontation".

Krauss mentions Judd's work at  Castelli Gallery, founded in 1957, known for showing and representing minimalist artists and works. and reiterates:

...to put it another way, the work itself exploits and at the same time confounds previous knowledge to project its own meaning.

She traces a through-line from the Renaissance perspective to french philosopher Merleau-Ponty, for the importance of architecture both on and in Judd's minimalist articulation and importance of viewers relation to the piece (ie: side, front, distance etc) . Somewhat tangentially, or in what I see as more or less misplaced comparison to fellow sculptor, David Smith, and painter Kenneth Noland. All this in service of introducing fellow critic Michael Fried's notion of the '"deductive structure”: the derivation of boundaries within the pictorial field from the one absolute boundary given by the physical fact of the picture itself—its framing edge." Which, links the minimalist sculptor to the minimal colorfield painters, praising their collective abilities to prioritize the sensory without abandoning meaning.

-Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works”

One of the most difficult features of “Art and Objecthood”’s writing is its abundant use of quotations. Students typically do not see any special problem here: Fried appears to them to be in no way at odds with the artists he quotes, and that seems right enough. What puzzles them is how the essay then turns, as it seems to them, so arbitrarily against that agreement, so their question tends to be how he can get the art right and the judgment so wrong; their difficulties here go deep enough that some of them wind up confused even about what that judgment actually is. The underlying expectation here—notably fueled by a certain training in “good” academic writing—is that a quotation should figure as a piece of evidence in an argument that will draw a conclusion in keeping with it. Since Fried seems to be in agreement with the artists he quotes, every year I find myself faced with at least a couple of students who come to class having simply missed the actual tenor of the thing altogether. v This mistake is understandable, at least to the extent that Fried is indeed doing something funny with these quotations. He is, let’s say, not exactly taking them as they are offered—as if, in insisting on the artists’ words he is also somehow taking them away from their speakers, turning their words against them. While many first-time readers don’t see this clearly enough to ask about it directly, they do tend to register it, and they tend to register it as “rhetorical,” underhanded, a violation of some etiquette. Friendlier readers may be equally inexplicit about what Fried is doing here and to simply accept the quotations as something like proof of or support for Fried’s own descriptions of the work. If challenged about this, they will tend to say that Fried is simply taking the artists seriously—but here the hostile readers certainly have the edge: they see that “seriousness” is precisely what is in question. That’s what they mean, more or less, when they say Fried is doing something “rhetorical.”