Fried Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before

WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS
AS Art Equally NEVER Before, By
MICHAEL FRIED. NEW Haven, CT:
YALE UNIVERSITY Press, 2008.
410 PAGES. $55.

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS LATEST BOOK, Michael Fried bemoans the "facile criticism" that he is "excessively preoccupied" with his ain ideas. The proper examination, he suggests, is not the frequency with which he has deployed notions such as beholding, theatricality, absorption, and embodiment across dissimilar moments in modern fine art but whether the resulting interpretations are disarming. And so he throws down a gauntlet: "I know it is too much to inquire," he writes, "only information technology would be useful if readers impatient with what I have done were to experience compelled to offer superior interpretations of their own." This is an odd claiming for a famous art critic to make. Did Fried predicate his impatience with Minimalism on his capacity to produce a amend sculpture than Donald Judd? No matter. He has every right to demand that his interpretations exist measured by their merit and non by the familiarity of their signature moves.

Just Fried likewise has reason to anticipate criticism, considering his new book unmistakably makes theater of cocky-assimilation. It reverberates with gratuitous cross-references and aggrandizing discussions of his past writing. Preoccupation with a scattering of ideas is one matter, just preoccupation with one's ain authorship is another: Whereas Roland Barthes gave the states La Chambre claire, Fried runs the take a chance of giving us la chambre d'écho. The all-time excuse I can devise for him—and information technology's not a bad one—is that he is amid the nigh important art critics and art historians of his time.

Fried's scholarship to appointment primarily tracks ii overlapping histories in modern art, ane apropos realism and embodiment and the other—especially germane to this book—concerning problems of beholding. He start encountered these bug while grappling with Minimalism and high modernist painting (see his landmark essay "Art and Objecthood," published in these pages in 1967) and afterward traced them historically to critical moments in the emergence of modern fine art going dorsum to Diderot (see his trilogy on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting—Assimilation and Theatricality [1980], Courbet'southward Realism [1990], and Manet's Modernism [1996]). The linchpin of Fried's prodigious account of these moments is theatricality and its antithesis, assimilation. In his usage of these terms, if a work acknowledges, addresses, or otherwise includes the beholder, it's theatrical; if it'south cocky-independent and cocky-sufficient, it'due south absorbed. The paramount aim of modernist painting in the 1960s, according to him, was to defeat theater.

The central claim of Fried's new book is that in the '70s and early '80s, when artists began producing very big photographs for wall display, photography "inherited" the problem of beholding as Fried had described it. Co-ordinate to this claim, because the photographic tableau emerges in the wake of Minimalism and of new concerns well-nigh 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. Hence, Jeff Wall has produced pictures of figures absorbed in their own world, while the artifice of the pictures—the fact that the figures are actors posing in a contrived scene—is obvious. Throughout x capacity, Fried builds his case across a swath of gimmicky practices. Needless to say, his discovery that a bevy of acclaimed contemporary artists working in photography (including Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Demand, and Hiroshi Sugimoto) are trafficking in "a Diderotian thematics of absorption" is conspicuously convenient in a "accept theory, volition travel" sort of way. Simply simply as there are inconvenient truths, and then are there convenient truths, and merely a grouch would begrudge a colleague who finds an old scheme newly relevant.

Fried is at his best in this book when he is training his extraordinarily acute powers of observation on particular pictures or on the relationships betwixt works past different artists. In the beginning affiliate, he deftly weaves together Sugimoto'south movie theaters, Cindy Sherman'southward film stills, and Jeff Walls's Pic Audience, 1979, to argue cogently that these artists were investigating theatricality in cinema in a mode that cinema itself cannot. Elsewhere in the volume, he trenchantly addresses the relationship between fictive space and museum space in Struth's museum pictures and sensitively distinguishes Dijkstra'southward embankment portraits from the related piece of work of Diane Arbus. In these and other similarly attentive passages, he contributes signally to our literature on contemporary photographic fine art, and anyone interested in the subject will find the book indispensable.

Fried's efforts to bring Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Hegel to impact contemporary photographic practices are, in my view, less disarming. For instance, his attempt to acquaintance Wall's pictures with Heidegger's notion that the world reveals itself when functional assignments fail or are disturbed (east.g., when the hammer breaks) prompts the question of why such breakdowns are non more evident in Wall's work. Although Fried suggests that the artist'southward "Diagonal Composition" series is about such breakdowns, the neglected sinks and mop buckets of those pictures seem to exist more about the loss of an incalculable "liquid intelligence" in a digital historic period of dry precision—a loss that Wall has written virtually with laconic luminescence—than most instrumental failure and its revelatory effects. Wall's mop, i might say, seems closer to William Henry Fox Talbot's abandoned broom than to Heidegger'southward broken hammer.

More broadly, the book's many shortcomings—and corking merit—ultimately stem from Fried's enormously ambitious and profoundly unresolved effort to enlarge the notions of theatricality and absorption to accommodate the photographic plough in contemporary fine art. Until now the elasticity of these notions has mainly been a virtue. It has made his famous dichotomy valuable to scholars in various fields and enabled Fried to construct a theory that more or less assuredly connects the historic period of Diderot to Minimalism. At the same time, the potential extremity of this elasticity—theatricality and absorption can essentially define a spectrum on which any work of art tin be placed—has always threatened to dull its application to particular pictures. It is one thing to characterize modern aesthetic feel equally absorptive, but quite some other to hunt about in art for signs of antitheatricality.

In the past, in both his critical project and his historical writings, Fried has successfully kept his dichotomy sharp past focusing on discursive moments of salient concern for the artwork's autonomy. The criticism of Diderot and his contemporaries as proffered and discussed in Assimilation and Theatricality renders incontrovertible the viability of Fried'due south dichotomy for understanding the painting of their time ("The canvas encloses all the space, and at that place is no ane beyond information technology," Diderot writes). Similarly, endless remarks by Minimalists in the '60s—such as Robert Morris'southward exclamation that the best of the new Minimalist work "takes relationships out of the work," thus making the beholder "more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships equally he apprehends the object"—clarify once more the pertinence of Fried's scheme. A reader may take issue with this or that aspect of Fried's arguments virtually French painting or Minimalist sculpture (or with the value judgments he makes about the latter), but the general relevance of his conceptual apparatus to both is, I think, beyond question.

In Why Photography Matters, yet, Fried'south assertion that problems of theatricality are once over again vital has no such secure anchorage in soapbox. Although Wall acknowledges having used "captivated" figures in his tableaux, Fried can deliver no constellation of historically incisive voices insisting that problems of theatricality are vital to electric current art. Indeed, he frequently resists the words that artists use to describe their own work or digs up textual passages from other decades or centuries to find material coordinating to what he sees. Given that he abides by his long-standing practice of disregarding larger social and historical developments ("nowhere in the pages that follow is an attempt made to connect the art and criticism under discussion with the social, economic, and political reality of the age," he writes in Absorption and Theatricality), his argument suffers a kind of historical weightlessness.

The anachronistic matching of passages and pictures often seems arbitrary. Take his chapter on Wall and the everyday: Fried quotes a 1930 text from Wittgenstein in which the philosopher imagines a theater of ordinary activity—"we encounter someone alone in his room walking upwards and downwardly, lighting a cigarette, seating himself, etc."—that the philosopher claims would be "more than wonderful than anything that a playwright could crusade to exist acted or spoken on the stage." The trouble, according to Wittgenstein, is that wonder of this sort emerges only if an artist represents the subject as a piece of work of art. Although Fried understands Wall every bit having taken upward this challenge "50 years later," information technology seems to me that Walker Evans'south hole-and-corner photography of subway riders from 1938 to 1941 (which Fried discusses elsewhere in the book) is much closer to this imaginary theater than is Wall's piece of work, which traffics in the kind of artifice ("anything that a playwright could cause to exist acted") that Wittgenstein denigrates.

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-exist-seenness." At times, this post-Minimalist articulation of the beholder trouble makes it difficult to imagine how any pictorial evidence could count confronting his theory. In other words, a effigy not looking out at the beholder is deemed to exist absorbed, while a figure looking out at the beholder is deemed to be acknowledging "to-be-seenness." Even when we add together the requirement that every instance of absorption be accompanied past signs of "to-be-seenness" and every acknowledgment of "to-exist-seenness" by signs of absorption, the formula remains troublingly capacious. Although it may be useful in discussing the work of Wall, its awarding to the piece of work of certain other practitioners, including Ruff and Andreas Gursky, seems less apt. For example, although Gursky often makes the beholder'due south view extremely detached, this disengagement seems—at to the lowest degree to me—less near a modernist aesthetic experience of absorption than about a global economic system of disengagement.

UNTIL THE VERY Stop of the book, Fried'due south argument remains curiously indeterminate in two respects. First, it is not entirely clear whether he is writing every bit a critic or a historian. This matters because he has admonished readers not to misfile the ii. Indeed, as he asserted in the introduction to his volume of nerveless essays from 1998, "between myself equally historian of the French antitheatrical tradition and the critic who wrote 'Fine art and Objecthood' there looms an unbridgeable gulf." Is the present book, then, a continuation of his "genealogy" of art and theatricality, or is it criticism of contemporary art? Considering he occasionally renders judgments on particular pictures or practices (as when he says that he has "strong reservations" near Gursky'south photographs of works by Turner, Pollock, and Lawman), we can assume that this is a piece of work of criticism, and yet information technology bears lilliputian of the sure and vigorous advocacy that marks his other critical writing. 2nd, Fried's statement is indeterminate with respect to the grand promise of his title. It is not immediately obvious why inheriting issues of beholding would make photography matter equally art as never before.

This indeterminacy places great stress on the book's conclusion. "In what sense, then," Fried asks in its first paragraph, "does photography—some photography—since the late 1970s matter as art every bit never before?" His tacit acknowledgment that after x chapters this crucial question has yet to be addressed brings a measure of relief, but what immediately follows—to this reader'southward thwarting and surprise—is a lengthy discussion of a recent essay on photography by Walter Benn Michaels. This extensive reliance on Michaels's piece of work at such a crucial juncture is puzzling. Whereas Robert Smithson once posited "a double Michael Fried" in the sense of a mirror paradigm that Fried sought to vanquish through his attack on theatricality, Fried, in Michaels, manifestly now has a double on his side of the glass.

Although the pass to Michaels is surprising, it is also helpful, because Michaels has been clear about what he thinks is at stake in photography. For Michaels, writing in his 2007 essay "Photographs and Fossils," the pressing question is whether in that location are works of art that have a meaning we tin can contend about—or whether at that place are simply objects that have dissimilar effects on dissimilar people. He understands theatricality in Minimalism and after every bit belonging to a postmodern heed-prepare in which the experience of a work, not the work itself, matters, and thus field of study positions and the politics of identity become paramount. In his view, photography has become crucial because photographs, among all mod artworks, are arguably the most like ordinary objects, the about susceptible (as Barthes explained) to being defined not by the intention of the maker but by the viewer's affective feel. If Derrida shifted our attention from the sign to the signifier as trace, and so the photograph suddenly looms big every bit an prototype that is arguably more trace than sign. Photography thus becomes a vital site for working through the crisis of fine art, for exploring the limits of postmodernism'south assault on ideology and pregnant. The test becomes this: If photography sets the productive weather for the work of fine art, can the work of fine art overcome them and survive?

If Fried agrees with Michaels, nosotros can understand why he does not conspicuously betoken whether his book is a work of criticism or of history. Information technology 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 hash out simply our diverse responses to various objects. The historical render of theatricality as a problem for fine art would not simply be the resurgence of a theme simply the recognition that what Fried calls "beholder-based art" is really non fine art at all.

But Fried is far from agreeing with Michaels completely. The deviation in their views is especially evident in their discussions of Barthes's Photographic 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 of import now because it structurally compromises intention. It moves beyond absorption every bit an intended consequence (eastward.chiliad., Chardin painting a effigy seemingly preoccupied with building a firm of cards) to the eradication of intention as a source of meaning (due east.g., Barthes finding himself pricked past accidental photographic details). This is why Michaels finds the resolute constructedness of photographs past practitioners such as Need and Wall and 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, co-ordinate to Michaels, although the photograph as a purveyor of unintended effects à la Barthes is radically antitheatrical in the Diderotian sense, the upshot is pure theater because the photograph is rendered an object that depends on the affective response of viewers. Or as Michaels puts information technology: "It turns what Fried called absorption into what was supposed to exist its opposite, literalism." As a result, according to Michaels, Barthes has been a crucial figure not only for Fried and his critique of postmodern art but too for Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and others committed to defending the postmodern.

Contra Michaels, Fried wants to keep Barthes in his camp. Although he agrees that Barthes insightfully shows the theatricality inherent in photography, he argues that an "antitheatrical animus" all the same runs through Camera Lucida. In making this argument, Fried strongly emphasizes the passage in which Barthes discusses with evident displeasure his discomfort as a subject before the camera. But Fried as well discusses a crucial and much later passage in Photographic camera Lucida in which Barthes essentially imputes what he terms "the pose" to all of photography:

[W]lid founds the nature of Photography is the pose. . . . [L]ooking at the photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the idea of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye. I project the present photograph's immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes the pose.

To maintain his interpretation of Camera Lucida, Fried implicitly extends the book's "antitheatrical animus" to the theatricality Barthes discusses in this passage. In other words, he would have us understand the passage equally describing an inherent theatricality of photography—the "pose"—that photography must even so somehow resist. This interpretation emphasizes the kinship between Camera Lucida and "Art and Objecthood" and allows Fried to imagine certain practices of art photography that emerged effectually 1980 equally a response to a challenge that Barthes was simultaneously articulating.

But Barthes's book gives us trivial reason to recollect that his contempt toward sitting before a photographic camera extends to the beholder's projection of the photo'southward stillness on the by event it depicts. On the contrary, although Barthes uses the word pose (or, in French, poser) in both passages, nowhere in his discussion of the projection of arrested time on the photograph does he suggest that this course of the pose is undesirable or must exist resisted. Indeed, the pose he describes, which he declares to exist photography's noeme, or essence, accords precisely with his mad love of photography, his moving affective response to the "this has been."

In the end, Fried wants a modernist Barthes to anticipate and endorse a modernist struggle in contemporary photography. Although I am sympathetic to Fried's belief that the struggles of modernism remain vital, his endeavour to construe contempo photographic practice every bit embroiled in issues of theatricality succeeds only modestly. Nonetheless, Fried's book––more any other I have read—challenges its readers to interpret more cogently the resurgence of the tableau in photographic form. The gauntlet has been tossed.

Robin Kelsey is an associate professor of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/200901/michael-fried-s-why-photography-matters-21710

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