- See Douglas Crimp ‘Pictures’ October 8 Spring 1979; reprinted in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (ed. Brian Wallis) New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1984; and ‘The Photographic Activity Of Postmodernism’ October 15 Winter 1980, reprinted in Douglas Crimp On The Museum's Ruins MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993.
- The press release for Crimp's 1977 show states: ‘The fundamental relationship between the artists under consideration for the show is their use of recognizable, non-abstract images, without, however, resurrecting representation as it is traditionally understood. (The return to figurative painting is at the farthest remove from this new work.)’ Thus, as early as 1982, Hal Foster was commenting on a postmodern orthodoxy of the ‘purloined image’ in ‘Re: Post’. Originally published in Parachute 26 Spring 1982; reprinted in Art After Modernism op cit, p 197.
- Though Crimp does not refer to Fried's work on 18th Century French painting explicitly, his use of the term tableau to characterise the kind of art he calls ‘Pictures’ seems too pointed to be coincidental. Fried's Absorption And Theatricality (Chicago University Press, Chicago) did not appear until 1980, though Fried had previewed most of it in lectures and articles over the previous decade. Fried takes the term from Diderot, who uses it to characterise what theatre—or better, drama—should learn from painting, in order to make itself less theatrical by refusing to play to its audience; Crimp uses it to characterise works that foreground their own staging, which he then casts in a lineage derived from minimalism—presumably because he accepts Fried's claim that minimalism is incomplete without the beholder it actively solicits. Fried has commented on this tendency of hostile critics to invert the normative dimension of his criticism while leaving its fundamental claims untouched. See Fried ‘An Introduction To My Art Criticism’ Art And Objecthood University of Chicago Press, 1998, p 52. James Meyer makes a similar point about Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss's relation to Fried's account of Robert Morris. See Meyer ‘The Writing Of “Art And Objecthood”’ Refracting Vision: Essays On The Writings Of Michael Fried (eds. Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross) Power Publications, Sydney, 2000, p 81ff.
- Crimp's relation to Fried here is akin to Krauss's relation to Greenberg in The Optical Unconscious MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993; and (with Yves-Alain Bois) Formless: A User's Guide Zone Books, New York, 1977. On the former see Stephen Bann's review ‘Greenberg's Team’ Raritan Vol. 13, No. 4, Spring 1994, and on both see my ‘Greenberg's Kant And The Fate Of Aesthetics In Contemporary Art Theory’ Journal Of Aesthetics And Art Criticism Vol.65, No. 2, Spring 2007.
- See Jean-François Lyotard ‘Answering The Question: What Is Postmodernism?’, the appendix to The Post-Modern Condition: A Report On Knowledge University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, for a persuasive account of the post-modern as a moment within the modern. For a reading of Lyotard's postmodernism as itself a form of late modernism, see my ‘Lyotard's Modernism’ Parallax 17 (‘To Jean-François Lyotard’ special issue) October 2000.
- I would like to acknowledge the importance of Thierry de Duve and Stephen Melville to this way of formulating my own project. De Duve's work on Greenberg, Kant and Duchamp, and Melville's work on Fried and Smithson are exceptions to the generalisation that postmodernism cashes out as an inverted modernism. Each engages with their target account's underlying framework, rather than merely negating its privileged terms and valuations; as a result the work of neither simply entrenches established oppositions and orthodoxies. See Melville Seams: Art As A Philosophical Context G+B Arts, Amsterdam, 1996; and ‘On Modernism’ Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1986; and de Duve Kant After Duchamp MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996; and Clement Greenberg: Between The Lines Dis Voir, Paris, 1996. For more on the latter's project, see my own ‘Retrieving Kant's Aesthetics For Art Theory After Greenberg: Some Remarks On Arthur C. Danto And Thierry de Duve’ Re-Discovering Aesthetics (eds. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O'Connor) Stanford University Press, Standford, 2008.
- The essay itself concerns mainly the writings of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, and an interview with Tony Smith. But reviewing the essay in an ‘Introduction To My Art Criticism’ Fried specifies that he had the installations of Andre and Morris in mind. See Art And Objecthood Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1998, p 40.
- At one point Fried suggests that it is a concern with duration, and in particular with the consciousness or presentiment of endless duration, such that time itself is hypostatised, rather than just a concern with time per se, that makes such work literalist. See ‘Art And Objecthood’, originally published in Artforum June 1967, and reprinted in Fried's Art And Objecthood, op cit, pp 166–7.
- For an account that teases out the contradictions engendered by trying to resist or deny ‘the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld’ see Stephen Melville ‘On Modernism’. Stanley Cavell develops this theme of the self-sufficient modernist work, the work that is ‘complete in itself’ and in that sense ‘closed to me’ in ‘Excursus: Some Modernist Painting’ The World Viewed (enlarged edition), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979. For a discussion see Jonathan Vickery ‘Art And The Ethical: Modernism And The Problem Of Minimalism’ Art And Thought (eds. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen) Blackwell, Oxford, 2003.
- Fried ‘Art And Objecthood’ op cit, p163. Melville has commented perceptively on this attempt to present minimalism as non-art as opposed to bad art. Melville's deconstructive strategy is to show that when Fried tries to consign minimalism to the non-art no-man's land of theatre, the very gesture by which he does so immediately re-inscribes that domain within the sphere of autonomous art itself: it redraws this line within art, rather than between art and everything else, in so far as those works that Fried deems successful are such in virtue defeating their inherent theatricality as entities made to be beheld, making this the internal motor of art in the modern period, by Fried's own account. See Melville ‘Notes On The Reemergence Of Allegory…’ October 19 Winter 1981, pp 157–60, and especially ‘On Modernism’ op cit, pp 8–163.
- Fried ‘Art And Objecthood’ op cit, pp 163–4.
- Less charitably than Melville, De Duve claims that Fried's response to minimalism exemplifies a refusal to judge aesthetically that has dogged the criticism of modern art; on de Duve's account, it therefore comes into effect prior to aesthetic judgement. See De Duve ‘The Monochrome And The Blank Canvas’ Kant After Duchamp op cit, p 241. Where De Duve sees Fried's relation to minimalism as a refusal of judgement that reveals the limits of his theory as to what can count as art, arising from the fact that judgements honed on the specific practices of painting and sculpture can find no purchase on it, Stephen Melville reads ‘Art And Objecthood’ not as a conclusion derived from a theoretical position about what can and cannot count as an object of aesthetic judgement, but as a description of the experience of minimalism that is itself the elaboration of a judgement to the effect that this is not an experience of art. See Melville ‘Michael Fried’ Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (eds. Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery) Berg, Oxford, 2007. I believe that Melville and de Duve are both right, and hence also both wrong. Melville is right about the argument from theatricality; it is a negative aesthetic judgement to claim that minimalist works set up an invidious relation to their spectators. De Duve, on the other hand, is right about the argument from theatre; the programmatic claims Fried makes towards the end of his essay suggest an a priori conviction that the concepts of quality and value cannot be predicated on works that fall between artistic media. But both are wrong about what the other is right about because neither disentangles the argument from theatre from the argument from theatricality. On this distinction see my earlier ‘On The Very Idea Of A “Specific” Medium’ op cit.
- It is my intention that everything I say here be as compatible with the critical view that Fried was right about minimalism as it is with the view that he was wrong. No assumptions about my own critical views are warranted one way or another simply because I criticise Fried's theory. Fried's objections to Greenberg operated at this level, and I would like to do Fried the courtesy of responding in kind.
- To say that Fried's claims, read minimally, need only entail that ‘minimalism is not (good) art’ remains equivocal between claiming that minimalism is bad art and minimalism is not art. I put it this way because Fried himself equivocates in places as to whether minimalism fails as painting or sculpture, and hence is merely meretricious as art, or, more damningly, fails to even be art. Ultimately, the former is too close to Greenberg's view, which Fried rejects, to be his own. Fried writes, apropos Greenberg's claim in ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, that ‘a stretched or tacked up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one’, that ‘it is not quite enough to say that a bare canvas tacked to a wall is not “necessarily” a successful picture; it would… be more accurate to say that it is not conceivably one. It may be countered that future circumstances might be such as to make it a successful painting, but I would argue that, for that to happen, the enterprise of painting would have to change so drastically that nothing more than the name would remain. it is, I want to say, as though unless something compels conviction as to its quality it is no more than trivially or nominally a painting’. See Art And Objecthood op cit, pp 168–9, fn6. Here Fried does not equivocate between the descriptive and evaluative; he collapses them. Under the testing conditions of Fried and Cavell's modernism, if a work fails to ‘compel conviction’ as painting, as sculpture, etc., it courts the charge of fraudulence tout court. On Cavell's formulation, in the absence of established criteria for judging whether or not something is a painting, sculpture, etc., modernism raises the issues of fraudulence and sincerity with a vengeance: such that it is not only the work, but also the judge, who is put on trial in the act of judging. A work judged fraudulent on this account is no work at all; it is at best the illusion of one. See Cavell ‘Music Discomposed’ and ‘A Matter Of Meaning It’ Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979.
- This pattern of critical insights generating unwanted theoretical commitments is familiar: Fried himself draws attention to it in Greenberg. See ‘How Modernism Works: A Reply To T.J. Clark’ Critical Inquiry Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 1982.
- I use designations such as ‘early’ and ‘mature’ as descriptive, and never evaluative terms. For a division of Greenberg's work between ‘early’, ‘mature’ and ‘late’ periods see my ‘Clement Greenberg’ Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers op cit. For an overview of Fried's work see Stephen Mulhall ‘Crimes And Deeds Of Glory: Michael Fried's Modernism’ British Journal Of Aesthetics Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2001; and Robert Pippin ‘Authenticity In Painting: Remarks On Michael Fried's Art History’ Critical Inquiry Vol. 31, No 3, Spring 2005.
- See §122 and §133 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations Blackwell, Oxford, 1953; see also Cavell's remarks on modernist painting as wholly open in ‘Excursus: Some Modernist Painting’ op cit.
- ‘Presentness’ is Fried's way of formulating a standard trope of post-Kantian conceptions of aesthetic experience, namely the idea that such experience is in part the felt transcendence of space and time. This is implied in Fried's conception of modernist works as entirely manifest at every moment. Fried's conclusion—‘We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.’—acknowledges that, in a disenchanted world, the aesthetic experience of art becomes a privileged space for encountering value in the world. That ‘presentness’ figures such experience as a momentary transcendence of finitude no doubt explains the heat that remark has drawn.
- See, for example, ‘Barthes's Punctum’ and ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein And The Everyday’ Critical Inquiry Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring 2005, and Vol. 33, No. 3, Spring 2007, respectively.
- As I imagine Fried would be the first person to balk at that last statement, I should clarify that I am not claiming that Fried's current position cannot be distinguished from Crimp's historical position—that would be absurd. Rather, I am suggesting that there may be more structural isomorphism at the level of the role the medium plays in their respective accounts than is immediately apparent. If so, that is worth exploring, given Fried's recent ‘photographic turn’.
- On the distorting impact of contemporaneous painting on Crimp's early essays on photography, see my ‘Aura, Face, Photography: Re-reading Benjamin Today’ Walter Benjamin And Art (ed. Andrew Benjamin) Continuum, New York and London, 2005, pp 164–84.
- Arthur Danto recalls Greenberg making an analogous claim in his own terms in 1992: namely, that for 30 years art had been ‘nothing but Pop’. See After The End Of Art: Contemporary Art And The Pale Of History Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997, p 105.
- This is something that I address in greater detail in Part I of my forthcoming monograph, Aesthetics After Modernism. Chapters I and II provide a conceptual reconstruction and internal critique of Greenbergian theory.
- See Greenberg ‘Modernist Painting’ The Collected Essays And Criticism Vol. IV Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1993, p86.
- Greenberg ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ The Collected Essays And Criticism Vol. IV op cit, p 131.
- For Thierry de Duve this explains the bastard Greenbergianism of Judd's idea of the ‘specific object’, which is Greenbergian in so far as it claims for itself a kind of specificity, but anti-Greenbergian in so far as its specificity is that of an object, and hence neither distinct from non-art, nor sanctioned by an established modernist medium. See De Duve ‘The Monochrome And The Blank Canvas’ op cit, pp 230–7.
- See ‘My Double Critique Of Greenberg's Theory Of Modernist Painting And Of Minimalism's Greenbergian Advocacy Of Literalism’ in Fried's introduction to Art And Objecthood op cit, pp 33–40.
- On the difference between ‘acknowledging’ and ‘hypostatising’ the literal properties of the support, which Fried takes to distinguish Stella from minimalism, see ‘Shape As Form: Frank Stella's New Paintings’. Originally published in Artforum November 1966; reprinted with the amended subtitle ‘Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons’ in Art And Objecthood op cit. The question of how to ‘acknowledge’ the shape of the support pervades the essay, but see especially p 88 and pp 92–5.
- This is where I would want to draw a line between my own critical engagement with Fried, and Caroline Jones's recent exchange with Fried in Critical Inquiry. Jones's reconstruction of the significance of Kuhn for modernist theory is a genuinely illuminating and original contribution to understanding the period, but her critique of Fried begins from a bizarre underlying premise. Namely, that by 1966, when Fried was still a graduate student in his mid-late 20s, and had been writing art criticism regularly for all of four years, it was already ‘manifestly too late’ (p495) to mark his differences from Greenberg or to change his mind about how modernism should be theorised. Regardless of whether Jones's reading of Fried circa 1965–6 is correct—and to my mind it appears to conflate Fried's idea of ‘perpetual revolution’ with Greenberg's idea of ‘reduction to essence’, with which it is incompatible, since the idea of permanent revolution precludes the possibility of reduction to an essential underlying nature-Jones's motivating assumption raises a prior question. That is, were Jones right, and Fried had indeed changed his mind, are we supposed to regard it as intellectually incriminating to finesse one's views over time? This suggests a strange view of intellectual development: were we not generally inclined to hold the contrary, we would have to revise our view of more than a few major thinkers. See Caroline Jones ‘The Modernist Paradigm: The Artworld And Thomas Kuhn’ Critical Inquiry 26 Spring 2000; Fried's ‘Response to Caroline A. Jones’ Critical Inquiry Vol. 27, No. 4, Summer 2001; and Jones's reply ‘Anxiety And Elation: Response To Michael Fried’ in the same issue.
- Wittgenstein Remarks On The Foundations Of Mathematics (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe) Blackwells, Oxford, 1956, pt1, § 74, p23e. In the introduction to his criticism, Fried uses this remark of Wittgenstein's—taken from a discussion of the kind of conviction elicited by geometrical proofs—to underwrite his claim that Anthony Caro's Deep Body Blue (1966) captures the abstract nature or ‘essence’ of a door, which he goes on to gloss as ‘discover[ing] the conventions—corresponding to deep needs—that make something a door’. See Art And Objecthood op cit, pp 30–1. The previous remark from Wittgenstein reads: ‘it is not the property of an object that is ever “essential”, but the mark of a concept’.
- See, for example, Stanley Cavell The Claim Of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality And Tragedy Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, pp 86–125. Though Fried tends to present this way of thinking as a radical departure from Greenberg, I believe that it is frequently implicit in Greenberg's work. Compare Greenberg's ‘the limiting conditions of art are altogether human conditions’ (‘Modernist Painting’ op cit, p 92) with Cavell's ‘underlying the tyranny of convention is the tyranny of nature’, by which he means human nature (The Claim Of Reason op cit, p123).
- That this was not a one-way process may be gleaned from the contrasting treatments of Anthony Caro and Pop art—in toto—in ‘A Matter Of Meaning It’, and what amounts to the philosophical endorsement of Fried's canon in The World Viewed. See Cavell ‘A Matter Of Meaning It’ Must We Mean What We Say? op cit, p222; and ‘Excursus: Some Modernist Painting’ The World Viewed op cit.
- Cavell The Claim Of Reason op cit, p 111.
- See Cavell The Claim Of Reason op cit, pp 120–1. Again, it bears remarking that Cavell's contention that conventions may not be changed by mere fiat—as if they were nothing more than contracts mutually consented to, as opposed to practices that have gradually evolved over time in response to human needs and capacities—is consonant with Greenberg's thought that only an artist who is thoroughly immersed in, and so possessed of, existing conventions can truly transform them. That is, from the inside—from necessity rather than design—when they find they are unable to say what they have to say within the constraints they have inherited. See Greenberg ‘Contemporary Sculpture: Anthony Caro’ The Collected Essays And Criticism Vol. IV op cit, p 208; and ‘Convention And Innovation’ Homemade Esthetics: Observations On Art And Taste Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p 53. Something like this thought also underpins Fried's recent work on Jeff Wall. See, Fried ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein And The Everyday’ op cit.
- Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations op cit, §217. For Cavell's use of this remark in the context of the conventionality of language see ‘The Availability Of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy’ Must We Mean What We Say? op cit, p50.
- Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations op cit, p 226.
- Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations op cit, §242: ‘If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgements.’ For a detailed discussion of ‘agreement in judgement’ and its relation to ‘forms of life’ see Stephen Affeldt's ‘The Ground Of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgement And Intelligibility In Stephen Mulhall And Stanley Cavell’ and Mulhall's ‘The Givenness Of Grammar: A Reply To Steven Affeldt’, both in European Journal Of Philosophy Vol. 6, No. 1, 2000; see also Mulhall's ‘Stanley Cavell's Vision Of The Normativity Of Language: Grammar, Criteria And Rules’ Stanley Cavell (ed. Richard Eldridge) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.
- See Cavell ‘The Availability Of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy’ op cit, p52; and ‘The Argument From The Ordinary: Scenes Of Instruction In Wittgenstein And In Kripke’ Conditions Handsome And Unhandsome: The Constitution Of Emersonian Perfectionism University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990, p 80ff. For Cavell on ‘agreement in judgement’ and ‘forms of life’ more generally see ‘Criteria And Judgement’ The Claim Of Reason op cit, especially pp 29–36; and ‘Declining Decline: Wittgenstein As A Philosopher Of Culture’ This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein Living Batch Press, Albuquerque, 1989, pp 40–52.
- Fried ‘Art And Objecthood’ op cit, pp 168–9, fn6. Fried's presentation of the difference between his own and Greenberg's position here is arguably over-stated. His claim that ‘flatness and the delimitation of flatness ought not to be thought of as the “irreducible essence of pictorial art”, but rather as something like the minimal conditions for something's being seen as a painting’, for example, is reminiscent of Greenberg's claim, in ‘Modernist Painting’, that ‘the essential norms of a discipline are at the same time the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture’ (‘Modernist Painting’ op cit, p89), though the thought is less philosophically fortified in Greenberg's account. This lack of fortification is apparent in the way Greenberg slides from glossing modernist self-criticism as an attempt ‘to determine the irreducible working essence of art and the separate arts’, a thought that can be read as consonant with Fried's own (and has been so read by de Duve) to talking about ‘irreducible essence’ per se, which cannot. De Duve maintains that Greenberg's qualification of this as a ‘working’ (hence necessarily provisional) essence counts against Fried's depiction of his position. See ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ op cit, p131, and de Duve ‘Silences In The Doctrine’ Clement Greenberg: Between The Lines op cit, pp 70–1. Fried replies in ‘An Introduction To My Art Criticism’ op cit, see pp 65–6, fn51.
- Fried ‘Shape As Form’ p 99, fn11.
- See Cavell ‘A Matter Of Meaning It’ Must We Mean What We Say op cit, p219. If there are no a priori criteria that guarantee something will count as a painting, then modernism cannot be understood as an attempt to locate the ‘unique and irreducible’ properties of artistic media; instead, modernist artists are best understood as seeking to discover those criteria capable of securing their work's identity as painting, sculpture, etc, at a given historical moment.
- Cavell The Claim Of Reason op cit, p 123.
- Wall is a highly strategic artist, and it is notable how this aspect of Wall's self-presentation, which saw him aligned in certain respects with T.J. Clark and the social history of art, has receded as he has more recently emphasised the ‘near documentary’ goals of his work. This is the move that Fried has picked up on, though it has taken a virtuoso critical reading on Fried's part to show the consonance of this ambition with the anti-theatrical tradition, which would otherwise have been far from apparent.
- Jeff Wall, cited from ‘Representation, Suspicions And Critical Transparency: Interview With T.J. Clark, Serge Guilbaut And Anne Wagner’ (1990) Jeff Wall Second Edition, Phaidon, London, 2002, p 112.
- Jeff Wall op cit, p124.
- I have in mind Wall's recent autobiographical piece ‘Frames Of Reference’ in which he claims, to my mind unpersuasively: ‘People who write about art often think my work always derives in some direct way from nineteenth century painting. That's partly true, but it has been isolated and exaggerated in much of the critical response to what I'm doing. I'm totally uninterested in making reference to the genres of earlier pictorial art’ (my italics). Wall goes on to say that what he derives from painting is chiefly ‘a love of pictures’ and ‘an idea of the size and scale appropriate to pictorial art’. If the latter seems convincing, the former is surely overstated, perhaps as a result of trying to offset an equally overstated claim in the opposite direction (say, that he is only interested in referring to the genres of past painting). But to deny any such interest flies in the face of both his practice and his previous claims for it. See Jeff Wall ‘Frames Of Reference’ Artforum September 2003, p 191; reprinted in Jeff Wall Catalogue Raisonné 1978–2004 Steidl, London, 2005.
- ‘Frames Of Reference’ op cit, p190.
- See Michael Fried ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein And The Everyday’ op cit. Fried discusses Adrian Walker, Artist, Drawing From A Specimen In A Laboratory In The Dept. Of Anatomy At The University Of British Columbia, Vancouver (1992) and Morning Cleaning, Mies Van Der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona (1999); he also quotes from ‘Restoration’, Wall's 1994 interview with Martin Schwander, in which Wall cites Fried himself. One could also cite Volunteer (1996), After Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison, The Preface (1999–2001), A Woman With A Covered Tray (2003), even Untitled (Overpass) (2001). Though it is also fair to say that this dimension of Wall's practice has become more dominant over the clearly staged, theatrical dimension of Wall's earlier work.
- Gerhard Richter ‘Interview With Rolf Shön’ (1972) The Daily Practice Of Painting: Writings 1962–1993, Thames and Hudson, London, p73. Though this interview dates from 1972, the sentiment it expresses about photo-painting is as common as Wall's professions to a painting modern life, and runs like a leitmotif throughout Richter's interviews and notes on painting.
- Theorists who have held this view, or versions of it, include Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin and Roger Scruton, among others. The notable exception to this way of approaching photography is, of course, Joel Snyder, who has made it something of a mission to defeat this approach to the medium. Of the many relevant papers, see the classic ‘Photography, Vision And Representation’ (with Neil Walsh Allen) Critical Inquiry Vol. 1, No. 2, 1975; ‘Photography And Ontology’ The Worlds Of Art And The World (ed. Joseph Margolis) Rodolphi, Amsterdam, 1984; and most germane to Cavell himself, ‘What Happens By Itself In Photography’ Pursuits Of Reason: Essays In Honour Of Stanley Cavell (eds. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putnam) Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, 1993.
- All the terms in quotation marks are terms Cavell regularly uses to describe photography. The latter fact, that Richter chooses what images to transcribe, is not a bar to the analogy, given that the photographer has to select what to capture (has to point the camera, at the very least) just as Richter has to chose an image to transcribe. For Cavell on the camera's sterility, see The World Viewed op cit, pp184–5.
- ‘Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether; by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction.’ The World Viewed op cit, p23.
- See The World Viewed op cit, p21: ‘It is essential to get to the right depth of this fact of automatism… photography satisfied a wish… to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another.’
- I owe this way of formulating the relation between between photography and scepticism for Cavell to Stephen Mulhall's discussion in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting Of The Ordinary Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994, pp 228–30. See Cavell The World Viewed op cit, Chapter 2, especially pp 20–3.
- I say ‘if’ because, for all the allure of the ‘automatic’ reading of Richter pursued here, I remain reluctant to assert (in my own voice, so to speak) that Richter is a sceptic: not least because it flies in the face of his well-documented hopes for painting.
- Barthes famously dubbed the conviction elicited by photographs, the ‘that has been’, the noema of photography. See Roland Barthes Camera Lucida Fontana, London, 1981, pp 76–7. Analogously, Cavell speaks of the photograph presenting a ‘world past.’ See Cavell The World Viewed op cit, p23.
- Wall's use of the medium in its digital form is—with a couple of notable exceptions—the very antithesis of surrealism: not for Wall the striking juxtaposition. For this reason one cannot be sure of even the most naturalistic images, which may consist of fragments shot over a number of months or years and in various locations, such that they neither document a place nor a time. This has been well documented in interviews: see, for example, Wall's discussion of A Sudden Gust Of Wind (After Hokusai) (1993), in ‘Wall Pieces’ Art Monthly September 1994. This work turns out to consist of some 50 digitally montaged fragments, shot over several seasons so that each component could be photographed under similar lighting conditions. More recently, interviews have been accompanied by ‘production stills’ that reveal the artifice behind Wall's constructed images: see, for example, Jan Tumlir's interview with Jeff Wall concerning The Flooded Grave (1998–2000) ‘The Hole Truth’ Artforum March 2001.
- For arguments to the effect that this distinction, as it stands in the full complexity of Peirce's own work, never really did this work see James Elkins, ‘What Does Peirce's Sign System Have To Say To Art History?’ Culture, Theory And Critique Vol. 44, No. 1, 2003; and Joel Synder ‘Pointless’ Photography Theory (ed. James Elkins) Routledge, London, 2007. In Peirce see, for example, ‘Logic As Semiotic: The Theory Of Signs’ The Philosophy Of Peirce: Selected Writings (ed. Justus Buchler) Routledge, London, 2000, and ‘The Icon, Index And Symbol’ The Collected Papers Of Charles Sanders Peirce: Volume H: Elements Of Logic (eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss) Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1932.
- I am grateful to the audience of the 2006 British Society of Aesthetics annual conference, notably Carolyn Wilde, Aaron Meskin and John Hyman, for pressing me on the relation between Richter's photopaintings and the negation of previous conventions of painting. One of the most interesting treatments of this issue I have come across is Rosemary Hawker's work on the ‘idiomatic’ in Richter's negotiation of photography and painting. In ‘The Idiom In Photography As the Truth in Painting’ South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 101, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp 541–54, Hawker argues that it is by failing to translate photography into painting without remainder that Richter's work reveals what is idiomatic (or irreducible) to photography. For an Adornian account of Richter's practice in terms of the negation or double-negation of painting see Peter Osborne's ‘Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter's Negatives’ October 62 Autumn 1992.
- This lies behind Wall's 2002 coinage of ‘near documentary’ to describe his recent work. Fried has paid close attention to this coinage, finding in Wall's claim that such works purport to show what the events depicted were like when they passed without being photographed an anti-theatrical intention. See Fried ‘Being There’ Artforum September 2004, p 53; and Fried's discussion of Wall's Adrian Walker in ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein And The Everyday’ op cit. Wall addresses the issue of his relation, past and present, to what he calls a ‘classical aesthetic of photography as rooted in the idea of fact’ in his 1998 interview with Boris Groys in Jeff Wall op cit. There are many aspects of that interview that are relevant here, not least Wall's claim that he tried to put this claim in suspension ‘by emphasizing the relations between photography and the other picture-making arts, mainly painting and the cinema. In those the factual claim has always been played out in a subtle and more sophisticated way. This was what I thought of as a mimesis of the other arts…’ (pp 151–4). The idea that photography might be employed mimetically, in relation to the other arts, is as non-modernist a proposal as one can imagine. See also ‘Three Thoughts On Photography’ (1999) Jeff Wall Catalogue Raisonné op cit.
- Hence, giving up medium-specific categories as a pre-condition of aesthetic judgements does not, in itself, entail backsliding into ‘theatre’, in the pejorative sense of that term for Fried, nor embracing the ‘theatrical’ in the sense that Crimp champions against him. Assuming that it does is to run together the meaning of the terms ‘theatre’ (what lies between the arts) and ‘theatrical’ (art that plays to the beholder) in Fried's account.
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Published online: 18 May 2015
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