Notes
- Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 1998.
- Michael Fried, ‘Art and objecthood’, reprinted in G. Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, New York: Dutton, 1968, pp.116–47.
- Fried, Art and Objecthood, p.46.
- ibid, p.16.
- ibid, p.42.
- In his ‘On the public function of art’, Thomas Crow repeats the familiar charge that during the sixties Fried, like Clement Greenberg, endorsed an aesthetics based on the ability of an ‘elite minority’ to judge and appreciate art from a ‘masculine subject position of uncompromised mastery and control’ (in Hal Foster (ed.), Dia Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no.1, Seattle: Bay Press, 1987, p.4).
- Stephen Melville, ‘Aspects’ in Russell Ferguson and John Alan Farmer (eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995, pp.229–45.
- In Art and Objecthood (p.33) Fried also emphasises how important Wittgenstein's later writings as ‘expounded and developed’ by Stanley Cavell have been for his sense of his project as both a critic and art historian.
- In ‘Art and objecthood’ (pp.130–31) Fried offers a lengthy citation of Smith's recounting of his drive along the turnpike. I think it worth citing in full to impart a sense of the aconventionality and unboundedness of the experience as articulated by Smith:When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, towers, fumes, and coloured lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art. The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that's the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe—abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me. There is a drill ground in Nuremberg large enough to accommodate two million men. The concrete field is enclosed with high embankments and towers. The concrete approach is three sixteen-inch steps, one above the other, stretching for a mile or so.
- Melville, ‘Aspects’, p.236.
- Fried, ‘Art and objecthood’, p.131.
- Melville, ‘Aspects’, p.240.
- Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, Harvard: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965, note 3, p.49. In a long endnote addressing the ‘realism’ of Manet's painting, Fried asserts: But where Velásquez and Hals took for granted their relation to the worlds they belonged to and observed and painted, Manet is sharply conscious that his own relation to reality is far more problematic. And to paint this world with the same fullness of response, the same passion for truth, that he finds in the work of Velásquez and Hals, means that he is forced to paint not merely his world but his problematic relation to it: his own awareness of himself as in and yet not of the world. In this sense Manet is the first post-Kantian painter: the first painter whose awareness of himself raises problems of extreme difficulty that cannot be ignored: the first painter for whom consciousness itself is the great subject of his art.
- Slavoj ŽiŽek, The Plague of Fantasies, London/New York: Verso, 1997, p.237.
- ibid, p.238.
- Melville, ‘Aspects’, p.242.
- Thierry de Duve, ‘Performance here and now: minimal art, a plea for a new genre of theatre’, Open Letter, Summer/Fall 1983, pp.252–53.
- ibid, p.253.
- Fried, Art and Objecthood, p.46. Here Fried acknowledges that, ‘in its embrace of object- hood and temporality—also by virtue of its frankly situational character—[literalism] is imagined to have established not only a new paradigm of art making but a new, more “contemporary” (e.g., nontranscendental, embodied, “externalized”, entropic, divided, decentred) model of the subject or self’. He asserts, however, that the sense of a subject divided internally by both its limitation and a desire to overcome this finite condition also informs ‘Art and objecthood’.
- Melville, ‘Aspects’, p.242.
- Fried, Art and Objecthood, p.42.
- This more or less coincides with De Duve's description of the way in which the spectator of minimalist sculpture is positioned as a passive participant (‘Performance here and now…’, pp.255–56): De Duve writes: ‘…the sculpture includes the spectator as an inhabitant, but a coerced inhabitant, to whom it addresses a violent demand of space. He is an intruder, and if he wants to introduce himself into a network of relations that are already conspiring without him, he must so to speak carry his space with him, and play the same game: not to pretend to more than objecthood, being present, simply, physically. If he resists and persists in wanting to be a subject, all he can do is split himself, and see himself taking part in a created situation.’
- Fried, ‘Art and objecthood’, p.143.
- In the opening sections of his Seminar XI published as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan stresses that the real exceeds what he describes as the ‘automaton’ of signifying systems (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), Alan Sheridan (trans.), David Macey (Introduction), London: Penguin Books, 1994, pp.53–54). Lacan writes: ‘The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle. The real is that which always lies behind the automaton, and it is quite obvious, throughout Freud's research, that it is this that is the object of his concern.’
- Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994, p.127.
- ibid, p.128.
- Slavoj ŽiŽek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991, pp.203–04. Glossing the fantasmatic and retrospective aspect of the subject's unconscious belief that a piece of its being is lost to the Other, ŽiŽek asserts: ‘What we conceal by imputing to the other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us; the lack (“castration”) is originary, enjoyment constitutes itself as “stolen”, or, to quote Hegel's precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it “only comes to be by being left behind”.’
- ŽiŽek, The Plague of Fantasies, p.217.
- Copjec, Read My Desire, p.129.
- Mladen Dolar, “I shall be with you on your wedding-night”: Lacan and the uncanny’, October, 58, p.16.
- Copjec, Read My Desire, p.131.
- ŽiŽek, The Plague of Fantasies, p.238.
- Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism, Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, p.48.
- ŽiŽek, Plague of Fantasies, pp.216–17.
- Copjec, Read My Desire, p.188. In her discussion of the operation of drive in film noir, specifically the film Double Indemnity, Copjec describes how the hero in the film, Walter Neff, in his transgression of the law that he initially works on the side of, ‘clings not to the community with which speech puts him in touch but to the enjoyment that separates him from that community’.
- Susan Best, ‘Banality, burn out, and intensification’, in Sue Best and Charles Green, In the Everyday: Critical and Theoretical Speculations on the 11th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney: Artspace, 1998, unpaginated.