Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before Michael Fried

WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS
AS Art AS NEVER Earlier, 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 own ideas. The proper test, he suggests, is non the frequency with which he has deployed notions such as beholding, theatricality, absorption, and embodiment across unlike moments in mod art but whether the resulting interpretations are convincing. Then he throws downwardly a gauntlet: "I know it is too much to inquire," he writes, "but it 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 fine art critic to make. Did Fried predicate his impatience with Minimalism on his chapters to produce a better sculpture than Donald Judd? No matter. He has every right to need that his interpretations exist measured past their merit and not by the familiarity of their signature moves.

Merely Fried besides has reason to anticipate criticism, because his new book unmistakably makes theater of self-absorption. It reverberates with gratuitous cross-references and aggrandizing discussions of his past writing. Preoccupation with a handful of ideas is one thing, just preoccupation with one'southward own authorship is another: Whereas Roland Barthes gave u.s. La Chambre claire, Fried runs the risk of giving us la chambre d'écho. The best alibi I tin can devise for him—and it'south non a bad ane—is that he is among the about important art critics and art historians of his time.

Fried'south scholarship to date primarily tracks two overlapping histories in modernistic art, i concerning realism and embodiment and the other—particularly germane to this book—concerning problems of beholding. He commencement encountered these problems while grappling with Minimalism and high modernist painting (see his landmark essay "Art and Objecthood," published in these pages in 1967) and later traced them historically to disquisitional moments in the emergence of mod art going back to Diderot (run into his trilogy on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting—Absorption and Theatricality [1980], Courbet's Realism [1990], and Manet'southward Modernism [1996]). The linchpin of Fried'southward prodigious account of these moments is theatricality and its antithesis, absorption. In his usage of these terms, if a work acknowledges, addresses, or otherwise includes the beholder, information technology's theatrical; if information technology's cocky-independent and self-sufficient, information technology's absorbed. The paramount aim of modernist painting in the 1960s, according to him, was to defeat theater.

The fundamental claim of Fried's new book is that in the '70s and early on '80s, when artists began producing very large photographs for wall brandish, photography "inherited" the problem of beholding equally 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, information technology must acknowledge what Fried terms "to-exist-seenness" fifty-fifty every bit information technology 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 10 chapters, Fried builds his example across a swath of contemporary practices. Needless to say, his discovery that a bevy of acclaimed gimmicky 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 "have theory, will travel" sort of way. But just every bit there are inconvenient truths, so are in that location convenient truths, and but a grouch would begrudge a colleague who finds an old scheme newly relevant.

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

Fried's efforts to bring Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Hegel to bear on contemporary photographic practices are, in my view, less disarming. For instance, his effort to acquaintance Wall's pictures with Heidegger'due south notion that the world reveals itself when functional assignments fail or are disturbed (e.g., when the hammer breaks) prompts the question of why such breakdowns are not more evident in Wall'due south work. Although Fried suggests that the artist'southward "Diagonal Limerick" series is near such breakdowns, the neglected sinks and mop buckets of those pictures seem to be more about the loss of an incalculable "liquid intelligence" in a digital age of dry out precision—a loss that Wall has written well-nigh with laconic brilliance—than about instrumental failure and its revelatory effects. Wall's mop, one might say, seems closer to William Henry Fob Talbot's abandoned broom than to Heidegger's broken hammer.

More broadly, the volume's many shortcomings—and great merit—ultimately stalk from Fried's enormously ambitious and profoundly unresolved effort to enlarge the notions of theatricality and absorption to accommodate the photographic turn 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 convincingly connects the historic period of Diderot to Minimalism. At the same time, the potential extremity of this elasticity—theatricality and absorption tin can essentially ascertain a spectrum on which whatsoever work of fine art can exist placed—has always threatened to deadening its awarding to particular pictures. It is ane affair to narrate mod aesthetic feel as absorptive, but quite another to hunt about in art for signs of antitheatricality.

In the past, in both his critical projection and his historical writings, Fried has successfully kept his dichotomy sharp by 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 in that location is no ane beyond information technology," Diderot writes). Similarly, countless remarks by Minimalists in the '60s—such as Robert Morris'southward assertion 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 every bit he apprehends the object"—clarify again the pertinence of Fried'due south scheme. A reader may have issue with this or that attribute of Fried's arguments most French painting or Minimalist sculpture (or with the value judgments he makes virtually the latter), only the full general relevance of his conceptual apparatus to both is, I think, beyond question.

In Why Photography Matters, however, Fried's assertion that problems of theatricality are once over again vital has no such secure anchorage in discourse. Although Wall acknowledges having used "absorbed" figures in his tableaux, Fried can deliver no constellation of historically incisive voices insisting that problems of theatricality are vital to current art. Indeed, he often resists the words that artists utilize to describe their ain work or digs up textual passages from other decades or centuries to find material analogous 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 effort made to connect the art and criticism under give-and-take with the social, economic, and political reality of the historic period," he writes in Assimilation and Theatricality), his argument suffers a kind of historical weightlessness.

The anachronistic matching of passages and pictures oft 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 action—"we meet someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself, etc."—that the philosopher claims would be "more than wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage." The trouble, co-ordinate to Wittgenstein, is that wonder of this sort emerges only if an artist represents the bailiwick every bit a work of art. Although Fried understands Wall as having taken up this challenge "fifty years later," it seems to me that Walker Evans'due south surreptitious photography of subway riders from 1938 to 1941 (which Fried discusses elsewhere in the volume) is much closer to this imaginary theater than is Wall's piece of work, which traffics in the kind of artifice ("annihilation that a playwright could cause to be acted") that Wittgenstein denigrates.

What makes the elasticity of Fried's formula peculiarly 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 trouble 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 exist absorbed, while a figure looking out at the beholder is deemed to be acknowledging "to-be-seenness." Fifty-fifty when we add together the requirement that every example of assimilation exist accompanied past signs of "to-be-seenness" and every acknowledgment of "to-be-seenness" by signs of absorption, the formula remains troublingly capacious. Although it may exist useful in discussing the work of Wall, its awarding to the work of sure 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 economic system of disengagement.

UNTIL THE VERY END of the book, Fried'south argument remains curiously indeterminate in two respects. Showtime, it is non entirely articulate whether he is writing as a critic or a historian. This matters because he has admonished readers not to confuse the two. Indeed, every bit he asserted in the introduction to his volume of collected essays from 1998, "betwixt myself as historian of the French antitheatrical tradition and the critic who wrote 'Art and Objecthood' there looms an unbridgeable gulf." Is the present book, then, a continuation of his "genealogy" of art and theatricality, or is information technology criticism of gimmicky art? Considering he occasionally renders judgments on particular pictures or practices (as when he says that he has "stiff reservations" about Gursky's photographs of works by Turner, Pollock, and Lawman), we tin presume that this is a work of criticism, and yet it bears petty of the certain and vigorous advocacy that marks his other disquisitional writing. Second, Fried's argument is indeterminate with respect to the grand promise of his championship. It is non immediately obvious why inheriting bug of beholding would make photography matter every bit art as never before.

This indeterminacy places smashing 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 as never before?" His tacit acknowledgment that after ten chapters this crucial question has notwithstanding to be addressed brings a measure out of relief, but what immediately follows—to this reader'due south disappointment and surprise—is a lengthy discussion of a recent essay on photography past Walter Benn Michaels. This extensive reliance on Michaels'southward 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 set on on theatricality, Fried, in Michaels, evidently at present has a double on his side of the drinking glass.

Although the pass to Michaels is surprising, it is also helpful, because Michaels has been clear near what he thinks is at stake in photography. For Michaels, writing in his 2007 essay "Photographs and Fossils," the pressing question is whether there are works of art that accept a pregnant nosotros tin argue about—or whether in that location are only objects that have unlike effects on different people. He understands theatricality in Minimalism and after equally belonging to a postmodern mind-set up in which the experience of a work, not the work itself, matters, and thus field of study positions and the politics of identity go paramount. In his view, photography has get crucial considering photographs, amongst all modern artworks, are arguably the nigh like ordinary objects, the most susceptible (as Barthes explained) to being defined not by the intention of the maker but by the viewer'south affective experience. If Derrida shifted our attending from the sign to the signifier as trace, and so 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 crunch of art, for exploring the limits of postmodernism's assail on ideology and meaning. The examination becomes this: If photography sets the productive conditions for the work of fine art, can the work of art overcome them and survive?

If Fried agrees with Michaels, nosotros tin can understand why he does non clearly signal whether his book is a work of criticism or of history. Information technology would presumably exist 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 talk over only our various responses to various objects. The historical return of theatricality as a trouble for art would not but be the resurgence of a theme but the recognition that what Fried calls "beholder-based art" is actually not art at all.

Only Fried is far from agreeing with Michaels completely. The divergence in their views is specially evident in their discussions of Barthes'south Camera Lucida (1980). Michaels reads the book through his own sustained date 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 across assimilation every bit an intended effect (eastward.g., Chardin painting a effigy seemingly preoccupied with edifice a house of cards) to the eradication of intention equally a source of meaning (eastward.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 then vital; by saturating the photograph with signs of intention, they raise the possibility of overcoming photography'due south ontological incapacity equally a medium of fine art. According to this way of thinking, the theatricality of the photograph stems not from its product for display, but rather from its status as an indexical trace (and non 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 event 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 exist its opposite, literalism." As a result, according to Michaels, Barthes has been a crucial figure non but for Fried and his critique of postmodern art merely also for Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and others committed to defending the postmodern.

Contra Michaels, Fried wants to go along Barthes in his camp. Although he agrees that Barthes insightfully shows the theatricality inherent in photography, he argues that an "antitheatrical animus" nonetheless 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 afterwards passage in Photographic camera Lucida in which Barthes substantially imputes what he terms "the pose" to all of photography:

[West]hat founds the nature of Photography is the pose. . . . [L]ooking at the photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real matter happened to be motionless in forepart of the eye. I project the present photo'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 volume's "antitheatrical animus" to the theatricality Barthes discusses in this passage. In other words, he would have us understand the passage as describing an inherent theatricality of photography—the "pose"—that photography must still somehow resist. This interpretation emphasizes the kinship between Camera Lucida and "Fine art and Objecthood" and allows Fried to imagine sure practices of art photography that emerged effectually 1980 as a response to a challenge that Barthes was simultaneously articulating.

But Barthes's book gives us little reason to think that his contempt toward sitting before a camera extends to the beholder's projection of the photograph'southward stillness on the by event it depicts. On the contrary, although Barthes uses the discussion pose (or, in French, poser) in both passages, nowhere in his discussion of the projection of arrested fourth dimension on the photograph does he propose that this form of the pose is undesirable or must be resisted. Indeed, the pose he describes, which he declares to be photography's noeme, or essence, accords precisely with his mad love of photography, his moving melancholia 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 effort to metaphrase recent photographic practise every bit embroiled in problems of theatricality succeeds but modestly. Nonetheless, Fried's book––more than than whatever other I take read—challenges its readers to interpret more cogently the resurgence of the tableau in photographic grade. The gauntlet has been tossed.

Robin Kelsey is an acquaintance professor of the history of fine 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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