A Future for Modernism?

The possibilities of re-inhabiting an abandoned

critical position

Conference organised by Manchester Metropolitan University

at the APT Gallery, Deptford, London.

17th March 2006

 Foreword

The papers that follow are in the form in which they were given by conference
speakers, with the exception of the contribution from Matthew Collings, which is
based on a transcript of his keynote address. Some of the papers were accompanied by
slides.

The starting point of the conference was the thought that the type of art criticism,
which emerged in the sixties, associated first with Clement Greenberg and then
Michael Fried, may be worth re-evaluating. It came to be identified with “High
Modernism”, a cultural moment when their critical approach, which combined the
long standing threads of modernism and formalism, encountered works by Stella,
Noland and Caro, whose non-figurative painting and sculpture was free of the
metaphysical claims made on behalf of the previous generation of abstract artists.

It’s unlikely these historical conditions will recur. However, there may still be an
ongoing role for the kind of criticism that privileges formal concerns. The virtual
disappearance of the work of the High Modernist period from British galleries and
museums, together with the triumph of other schools of criticism, which regard such
art as limited, may be signs that the abandoned artistic position is uninhabitable. On
the other hand, in a pluralist, contemporary visual art culture, an adapted type of
modernism, one less tempted by hegemonic ambition, may have something important
to add to our current range of critical strategies.

This could be “low modernism”, an art and criticism, emphasising material and
formal qualities, in the context of a history of medium-specificity.

David Sweet
Conference organiser.

2
 Contents

Introduction. David Sweet 4

Keynote Address. Matthew Collings 10

David Sweet “From Motif to Edge: The Limits of the Modernist Field”. 15

Stuart Bradshaw “Michael Fried: Proper Subjectivity and Monstrous Bodies”. 23

Craig Staff. “Notes Towards a Differential Ontology of Painting”. 38

Dean Kenning, “The Special Complicity of Relational Aesthetics”. 50

Alice Coggins, “Allegory, Repression and s Future for Modernism”. 64

Catherine Ferguson, “A Future for Formalism”. 72

Notes on Contributors and copyright information 81

Introduction

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 David Sweet

Whatever happened to modernism? In terms of critical theories and creative practices

within fine art, the standard answer may be that it was superseded, and not just
superseded but obliterated, by the spectacular success of post-modernism. Elsewhere
in the visual culture the situation appears more complex. In the press debate
associated with the V & A’s “Modernism 1914-1939” exhibition, much was made of
the failure of movement, primarily in architecture and town planning, and the dubious
totalitarian vision which lay behind it. True, several commentators pointed out that it
was only in the period of post-war reconstruction that this ideology was realised on
any scale, but it’s at this stage that modernism, in its most visible form, made its big
mistake, confidently constructing what turned out to be its most negative symbol, the
council tower block. For many, this iconic structure, its sociological insensitivity, as
well as its inorganic geometry and materials, neatly summarised all that was wrong
with the ideas and particularly the objects of modernism.

The tower block’s failure is seen as so complete and self-evident that it might be
assumed that the tendency with which it was identified could never have survived
such rejection. In respect of the domestic environment, the predominance of mock
Tudor housing estates is sometimes cited as evidence of modern architecture’s
inability to truly colonise the British sensibility. But if you go into one of those
houses, ignore the Victorian bath taps and the Mexican leather sofas, you will find
yourself in what is effectively a modernist, technological space. And if you examine
the two cars standing in the drive, apart from the fuel gauge symbol, which always
show petrol pumps of yesteryear, you will be confronting objects that existed initially
only in the modernist imagination, streamlined, functional and dedicated to speed.

These superficial anachronisms notwithstanding, most of the population live in a

modernist interior, drive modernist cars, over modernist bridges, to work in modernist
offices, in modernist cities. Work and the city are themselves inextricably linked to
modernity and to what modernity includes, mechanisation and industrialisation. Even

4
in a services orientated economy, the hair salon or the urban bar tend to be done out
like new factories, and are often housed in the renovated shells of mills or workshops,
while the engineering these premises formerly accommodated has migrated to
dominate the skyline. This is usually in the form of glass and steel office
developments, but not always. The London Eye, for example, kinetic, overtly and
explicitly mechanical, with observation pods like draft spaceship designs, strikes me
as the definitive positive modernist icon, powerful enough as an image to finally
overshadow the tower block.

The modernist Eye has been much more successful than the Millennium Dome,
although they are both products of broadly the same political culture. Architecturally,
the Dome took its visitors to a time well before modernism, to the cave form of the
pre-historical shelter, and, as a conceptualisation of the site of public exhibition, was
far more out of step with our times than the Crystal Palace, of a hundred and fifty
years earlier. Paxton’s structure anticipates the revolutionary impact of
Impressionism, of the optical Enlightenment, and one imagines its contents bathed in
multi-directional daylight, which the dark, windowless, almost theatrical interior of
the Dome systematically evaded.

From our current perspective, the abstract modernity of the Crystal Palace, as a
structure, stands out clearly, establishing an architectural meaning separate from its
function as a venue, while the significance of the various exhibits and events it housed
throughout its life, recedes. On the other hand, the Dome is relatively uninteresting as
a building, so its impact was always expected critically to rely on the quality of what
was put in it. By general consensus, this turned out to be disappointing to say the
least, but the problem was not that more spectacular or interesting material could have
been found. Rather, its formally inert design showed a dependence on content itself,
and, in a modern context, content no longer has the cultural leverage to offset formal
inadequacy. In contrast, the Eye is almost a formalist construction, and one
transparently lacking in content. It simply offers a de-familiarised vista, or series of
vistas, of a familiar capital city, for modernist viewers.

In the British, more especially the English, collective imagination, modernism is both
triumphant and denied at the same time. I’m sure someone has traced this tension

5
back to the fifties, to writers like John Osborne and Philip Larkin, who, although
strongly influenced by literary modernism, were also against it, and whose work is
sensitive to an ebbing away of Englishness, railing against the loss of some important
vernacular identity, threatened by the latent or blatant internationalism espoused by
the modernists. A similar tension might be at work in the visual arts; there is after all a
Tate Britain and a Tate Modern, which serves to institutionalise the attitudinal split
rather nicely.

Unless one considers that the triumph of post-modernism in the visual arts is
complete, then, as is the case with architecture, it might be that modernism hangs on
in some form. In the papers which follow, each contributor suggests particular aspects
of modernism that seem sustainable, while implicitly or explicitly acknowledging that
other aspects should be abandoned.

In his keynote address, Matthew Collings praises the critical writings of Clement
Greenberg, but seems to concede that Greenberg’s historical narrative, his story of
flatness and abstraction, may be no longer useful as a way of navigating the shallow
complexities of contemporary artistic production. However, the things that remain,
Greenberg’s clarity and visual acuity, his judgment, his language, and even his flaws,
still interest Collings, though he admits this goes against the grain of much current
thinking and can lead to isolation. Interestingly, he does not blame modernism’s
decline on the ascendancy of its old enemy, the Duchamp-inspired avant-garde, but
rather, with his poignant image of Marcel and Clem on the same raft, he sees both
traditions being usurped by the power of the market.

My paper, “From Motif to Edge: The limits of the modernist field”, was intended to
be a broad survey. It is also a partisan attempt to restate the claims of Greenberg and
Michael Fried in reference to medium specificity, and to recite the canon of works
that makes such specificity seem artistically valuable. Even in a period when media
forms have supposedly multiplied, the separation of the arts remains a valid critical
and practical position, oppositional to the mission-creep implied by the practice of
installation. Any effective or notable example of work in a given medium seems to

6
me to be augmented by its ability explicitly to exploit the power of that medium. I
have, however, put forward more inclusive definitions of what respectively constitute
the distinctly modernist pictorial and sculptural fields than are allowed in Greenberg
and Fried’s modernism.

In “Michael Fried: Proper Subjectivity and Monstrous Bodies”, Stuart Bradshaw deals
with the figure of the modernist viewer in crisis which inhabits Fried’s writing.
Bradshaw describes minimalism’s effect on the body of the beholder, the way
subjectivity is turned inside out as it were, from private to public, so undermining the
critical privilege of autonomy granted to the viewer by the modernist work. Bringing
this up to date, he argues that encounters with art like Bruce Nauman’s, for example,
can be readily understood in terms of the consciousness constructed by minimalism.
He paces out the ground of Fried’s 60’s anxieties, linking them to the recent theme of
the abject in the work of Julia Kristeva and picking out echoes of the earlier negativity
of Beckett and Eliot.

Through the black and white examples of Frank Stella and Robert Ryman, Craig Staff
considers cases where modernist painting and proto minimalism are harder to
separate. In “Notes Towards a Differential Ontology of Painting”, he examines the
logic of what turn out to be rhetorical statements about the ambition of a painting
practice which emphasise materiality and excludes illusion. He argues that this
analysis tends to confuse criteria of existence with criteria of identity, and takes the
view that art objects must exceed the ontological minimum of physical presence to
produce signification and get our attention. The implication of Staff’s discussion is
that theories simplifying Greenberg’s teleology, stressing the material of paint on
canvas at the “end” of painting, might be replaced by an ontological category of the
pictorial, which allows for future possibilities.

Dean Kenning, in “The Special Complicity of Relational Aesthetics”, traces how the
gallery space, which housed the original minimalist object and its audience in ways
that worried Fried, has, in recent times, acquired an institutional authority, which has
redrawn the power relationships of the art world’s dramatis persona, together with the
role of the art object. The social dimensions of art in this situation are highlighted in
Nicholas Bourriaud’s description of contemporary art practice under the concept of

7
“relational aesthetics”, where the formal properties of objects count for less than the
part they play in patterns of community exchange. Kenning’s critque of that view
recalls Fried’s (and Barthes’) observations on “presence”, as well as the more political
Greenberg of “Avant-garde and Kitsch”.

The necessity of formalism is questioned by Alice Coggins in “Allegory, Repression

and a Future for Modernism”. She follows the route taken by Rosalind Krauss, away
from the purist tendencies of Greenberg and Fried, towards adopting a hybrid set of
interpretive strategies, which she regards as continuing to be relevant in a postmodern
context. Coggins argues that the focus on form suppressed a layer of meaning that
was originally part of a broader modernism. Recovering this alternative tradition can,
amongst other things, illuminate the psychoanalytical ground linking the gestures of
Pollock and the markings of Cy Twombly, while figurative artists, like Otto Dix and
Martin Maloney, can, in her view, be shown to use allegory in a way that makes as
strong a claim to express the experience of modernity artistically as that presented by
the apologists of abstraction.

Catherine Ferguson takes the opposite line in “A Future for Formalism?” But this is
not exactly the conventional conception of form, an “ideal” object offered for
aesthetic consumption, but a “materialist formalism” associated with Yve-Alain Bois.
She argues that the works of Tim Renshaw and Bernard Frize exhibit characteristic
visual forms, which emerge, problematised, from a complex, empirical painting
process. The resulting paintings do not to demand immediate judgement and
recognition, nor illustrate a distant body of discourse, but provoke disinterested
seeing. In an effort to bring her experience of the paintings closer, rather than to
explain them away, Ferguson draws creatively on ideas from biological evolution,
particularly an interpretive model informed by biosemiotics, to do justice to the
intriguing pictorial phenomena she encounters.

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 3

Viewed through the arguments of the contributors to the conference, modernism

appears both serviceable and scattered. Its systematic wholeness has been forfeit, but
perhaps the theoretical tension required to hold “High” modernism together as a
coherent ideology, first felt in the meta-critical terms of “Modernist Painting”, was
always too much. While the edifice of modernism has disappeared, its constituent
elements remain viable. Amongst other things, these might be good habits of
criticism, a consciousness of the challenge posed by the art of the past, seriousness, an
understanding of the parameters of the medium, and an interest in visual experience.
To this list I, personally, would add the survival of the human subject which
modernism constructs: The modernist viewer. Although this group may no longer feel
they have a large body of contemporary art which answers to their interests, their role,
even when defined negatively by a refusal to be treated as a punter, to be manipulated
and be grateful at the same time, can still be culturally significant.

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 Keynote Address by Matthew Collings1

Matthew Collings began his address to the conference by saying that modernism was
a key issue now because it was “the thing we don’t have, the thing most missing from
the scene. It’s the shadow you can’t avoid.” There are various “modernisms”, he
argued, represented by writers such as Yve-Alain Bois and T.J. Clark, but these are
“the little tributaries of modernism”. We no longer have the “mainstream”, narrow
modernism, associated with the writings of Clement Greenberg, who, above all was
concerned with assessing the goodness or otherwise of works of art. In the context of
his own experience of the tedious and boring content of much contemporary visual
culture however, Collings felt himself increasingly drawn to aspects of Greenberg’s
modernism, although its wholesale return, like the return of Christianity, he regarded
as “impossible”. Even if the return of modernism were possible, he believed it would
unfortunately have to be discussed in the limited and opaque vocabulary of current
critical rhetoric, not on its own, and certainly not on Greenberg’s, terms.

Collings then broadly considered Greenberg’s career and reputation as a powerful

cultural figure, combining “the simplicity and clarity of Jesus and the anger and
difficult personality of St. Paul”. His project starts with a critique of the reduced
artistic standards promoted by an increasingly industrialised society, with “Avant-
garde and Kitsch” of 1939. Greenberg’s modernism begins with this refusal and in a
series of brilliant essays, says Colling, he “informs us of what society is, what culture
is, what history is and what art can be”. “Yet at the same time”, he went on, “he does it
in a way that appears to be a voice coming out of the works of art themselves, the
voice of an artist”. Greenberg encourages you “to look at paintings as if you were a
painter, and sculpture as if a sculptor”.

The various factors in Greenberg’s declining influence were then traced - the
reduction in his regular output, the triumph of Pop Art – leading to his acute
1
This text is based on a useful but incomplete audio record of Matthew Collings’ talk. To minimise
confusion, it is represented here in a combination of paraphrase, reported and direct speech. Collings
has also made adjustments to help with further clarification. (D.S.)

10
marginalisation in the nineties, Collings cited his own visits to Greenberg at this time
and a recording of an interview with Greenberg in which he described himself as “the
most hated critic in America”, but added defiantly “Well! So what?” In this period of
decline Greenberg remained opinionated but tended to repeat himself as if, as
Collings puts it, he was “delivering the husk of something he used to believe,
something that used to have the urgency of meaning.”

But the impression of a doddery old man is largely dispelled, in Collings’ view, in
two more recently published works of Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics2 and The Late
Writings3. These brought Greenberg up to date for a more contemporary audience and
the speaker found the writing “powerful, illuminating and exciting”. Yet he still
compares the experience of reading them to having a conversation with someone on a
raft, drifting further and further away from the land, “a land populated by Keith Tyson
and Tracey Emin, with the lights shining in the cathedral of Tate Modern”. But,
despite the sense of isolation, Collings regards the conversation with Greenberg as
engaging, with its narrow and unfashionable stress on goodness and badness, and on
the importance of following the trail of one’s own judgement, out and back, across the
serial encounters with art, both new and familiar.

Collings contrasted this discourse about our experience of good and bad art, where
visual impact is the thing, and where judgement and the possibility of failure as well
as success, are important, with the contemporary situation. Here “nondescript objects
appear to resonate” “under the effect of explaining rhetoric”. However, he does not
associate this tendency with the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, who, Collings felt, had
much in common with Greenberg, and even may be another passenger on the raft.
Both Greenberg and Duchamp exhibited refinement and a depth of education that
Collings found lacking in current critical commentary. Such commentary, he argued,
does not lead to understanding or enlightenment, however wide its references may be.
The example he gave related to the discussion around the work of the abstract
painting of Tomma Abts, a discussion which was “voluminous, semi-religious and
repetitive”. “It contained everything”, “from a sense of what reality is, what dreams
are, from the whole of art to how to get on in society, to what politics is, what

2
Clement Greenberg Homemade Esthetics; Observations on Art and Taste, Oxford, 1999
3
Clement Greenberg, Late Writings University of Minnesota, 2003.,

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feminism is, what everything in the world could be”. “What do you need Greenberg
for?” Collings rhetorically enquired, “Why have uptight narrowness when you can
have flabby everything?”

But this elaborate, all-inclusive discourse, accompanied paintings that, though initially
appearing plausibly serious, were, in Collings’ opinion, ultimately “vacuous”. Abts’
colour first seemed to him “thoughtfully muted”, but her choice of palette, he
concluded, came from a sense of art-world strategy, not from a real interest or
awareness of the qualities of colour, and the layout, which appeared to hark back to
twenties constructivism, was in reality a “shallow stylistic device”. Abts’ work was
not the product of “life experience”, said Collings, but the outcome of insight into the
values and working of the contemporary art market.

Part of what Collings found useful in Greenberg comes from the American’s refusal
to participate in elaborate rhetorical discourse of the sort associated with much writing
about modern art, and to use what seems rather simple language. From Late Writings
he quoted Greenberg’s criticism of works in the Clyfford Still retrospective of 1980 as
being “too wide”. At first this seems inadequate, but then Greenberg shows why
“wideness” could be an issue.

Compression, the interlocking of shapes or areas, is what Still at his best had
depended on, in the latter 1940s – that, along with “interlocking” colour. This
compression and interlocking had required a modest-sized support (no more than
six or so by three or four feet). Within these dimensions there had to be tightness
of layout…and then his kind of colour relations could come to full bloom, with
their muffling of light and dark contrasts that did so much to make his zigzag
drawing plausible. 4

Those best, modest-sized pictures of the late 1940s show him neutralising colour,
again in an original way; not using just neutral hues themselves, but neutralising,
discolouring, tarnishing reds, yellows, blues and whites – beautifully. But he got
even more beauty from colours he didn’t have to neutralise; the earths, blacks,
blue blacks, brown blacks, dead blues, and all sorts of greys. And he further
neutralised the neutrals, torturing them into something, with his knife… From
4
Ibid. p.123

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 still another angle, the heart of Still’s originality could be said to lie in great part
in the chromatic relationships he got from his neutrals and neutralised
nonneutrals. He wrested effulgence from their very lack of effulgence. Yet it was
in so few pictures that he brought this off.5

Though there is much carping and complaining in the article from which this comes,
Collings nevertheless argued that Greenberg is saying something important. And if we
want to work out why the 1952 Still in the Tate collection is good, Greenberg can
supply the vocabulary – words like “tarnishing”, “discolouration” and “neutralising”.
Yet, Collings suspects, there would be nothing in these kind of “particularist”
observations and descriptions that would be of any interest to the official support
system surrounding Tomma Abst. But they are invaluable when confronting the Still.
“You see the blue”, said Collings, but when peering at the surface “you realise there are
several blues in there, from a very misty, nothing grey, to an almost inert cobalt”, to a
blackish blue, to “a pleasant baby blue”. Then you realise Greenberg was right in his
choice of the word “muffling” to describe what is happening to the tonal contrasts.
“Slotted in that narrow, tall painting” continued Collings, “Still is doing the things that
are necessary to make it an object that declares itself in a compelling way”. And what
helps us is that Greenberg, by describing in language that seems connected to reality
what the painting is doing, gives that language to us. “From our experience of the
work” and from reading Greenberg, you can see “how wideness really was an issue”
and how wideness going wrong might have accounted for the poor quality of the work
chosen for Still’s retrospective at the Metropolitan.

As a writer, Collings said, Greenberg “has a great gift for simplifying things”. This
drive and directness “enables him to get on to the next thing he wants to say”, in
contrast to the effect of more convoluted prose style of writers coming after
Greenberg. “In the end, as with a painting, a number of simplifications are put together
to make something incredibly rich.” But, Collings still feared that, despite the value of
Greenberg’s criticism, the contemporary scene has no use for its underlying sincerity.
“What is sincerity worth anyway”, he asked. There was no easy answer for those who

5
ibid. p. 127

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want to continue to make modernist art, or critical judgements, under our present
cultural arrangements.

Collings closed by returning to the question of history, and how we might use
tradition. “Greenberg” he said, “is proposing that the purpose of the past is to
aggravate and aggress” in order “to make the present better”. “It’s obviously not to
escape from the problems of the present”. We don’t retreat into a fantasy of he past,
like conservatives. Instead, we radically attack the paltriness of the present’s fantasy
of itself with the standards that can be found in the past. He went on to say, in
conclusion

What Greenberg offers us is a peculiarly deeply felt but, at the same time,
cruelly expressed guidebook to that issue. All his books, and even his
interviews, amount to that. And that includes his unpleasant arrogance, his
big-headedness, his frequent outbursts of nastiness, but also his perceptive
powers, his good stubbornness and his magnificent clarity. They are more
than worth taking seriously even though what they lead to are very, very
serious problems with our cultural, and consequently our social,
environment.

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 From Motif to Edge: The limits of the modernist field.

David Sweet

Under the testing of modernism more and more of the conventions of the art of
painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential. By now it has been
established, it would seem, that the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but
two constitutive conventions or norms; flatness and the delimitation of flatness; and
that the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which
can be experienced as a picture…
“After Abstract Expressionism”

Clement Greenberg wrote this in 1962, when he was 53. “Modernist Painting” dates
from two years earlier and in between came the publication of Art and Culture, a
selection of critical essays he’d written over the previous two decades. Anyone who
has been 53 may have gone through a similar period of self-review, seeking some
coherent pattern, in the complex series of events that constitute their life thus far.
Greenberg had a lot to look back on, and though he had never thought of himself as a
theorist, the mood of self-reflection tempted him to relax his customary empirical
concentration long enough to make a few statements of a more general nature about
what broader principles may have underwritten the subject of his critical practice.

In isolation, and it is so often seen in isolation, “Flatness and its delimitation”, appears
a scant and schematic description of modernist painting, bearing the hallmarks of a
narrow, essentialist definition. But, in the context of Greenberg’s critical position, we
know it is misleading, because he also insisted that “space” was an indispensable
component of the medium. This should complicate our understanding of “flatness” in
the definition, but it also raises questions about what “limits” means. Flat things halt
at their edges, but space, even non-sculptural or optical space, is harder to bring to a
stop at the actual boundaries of the support. The problem of reconciling the end of

15
surface with the end of space was, of course, an issue for Impressionist painting, and
for Greenberg, though he may have admired Manet for his frankness of execution,
modernism really gets under way with Impressionism, an art dominated by the
pictorial logic of landscape.

In genres like portraiture and particularly still-life, boundaries are implicitly set before
the pictorial elements are organised. It is this characteristic that perhaps leads
Greenberg in “Modernist Painting”, to assert that the rectangle is a norm that painting
shares with theatre. However, the extensive subject of earth, sea and sky does not
easily lend itself to the conventional container. Therefore, the edges of the traditional
landscape tend to relate to its interior events in a different way. The picture is
constructed by temporarily enclosing a panorama within a rectangle, which, like a
camera viewfinder and unlike a proscenium arch, seems capable of moving freely
across the scene or prospect. In Impressionism, the relatively unfixed boundary of
landscape coincides with the edges of a newly emphatic surface, produced by the all-
over brush mark combined with reduction of surface-disrupting tonal contrast.
Cézanne’s landscapes retain the surface emphasis of Impressionism, but introduce the
motif. By slightly modifying the visible structures of the landscape, he made the
temporary picturesque of Impressionism seem more composed and permanent. But,
however consciously the motif echoed the parameters of the frame within the picture
itself, the counter action of pictorial depth in his work always manages to produce
tension and ambiguity at the margin, where space and surface end.

The Impressionist landscape, which is central to Greenberg’s concept of pictorial

modernism, has two boundaries, one marking its depth, the other its flatness, and
these mostly coincide. But, in an albeit marginal aspect of his critical practice, his
studio based advice about “cropping”, Greenberg seems to exploit the play between
these boundaries, when he occasionally suggested that the dimensions of a given work
could be reduced to make a more effective pictorial statement. In these cases he
proceeded as though one painting could be discovered inside another, in the way that
a motif could be deduced from the wider spectacle of the natural world.

Michael Fried has said that the formalist/modernist account that Greenberg puts
forward, and with which he agrees, “amounts to nothing more nor less than a

16
theoretical rationale for the Impressionist picture.” I want to argue that this doubled
boundary, exemplified by Impressionism, constitutes the limits of, and therefore
defines, the modernist pictorial field. By “field” I mean an area of operation or
activity, or more accurately, “the region in which a force is effective”, as in magnetic
field.. Further, I would credit Fried with recognising, in his analysis of Anthony
Caro’s work, the defining limits of the modernist sculptural field. Continued practice
within these fields will constitute the future of modernism itself, if it is to have one.

The presence of the modernist pictorial field is easily recognised in the art of the past.
Unsurprising instances chronologically are Monet’s “Impression Sunrise”(1873),
Manet’s “Bar at the Folies Bergere” (1881), Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
(1907) Matisse’s “Piano Lesson” (1914), Miro’s “Morning Star” (1940), Pollock’s
“Autumn Rhythm” (1950), Newman’s “Cathedra” (1951) Stella’s “Avicessa” (1960),
Louis’s “Theta” (1961) Noland’s “Magenta Haze” (1964), in other words the standard
canon, the usual suspects. But, if we apply Fried’s more liberal characterisation of the
formalist/modernist project with reference to theorised Impressionism, it’s possible to
extend this list, even if we have to construct another layer of the qualitative canon, to
include painters, not usually identified as modernist, who nevertheless operate with
modernism’s pictorial field.

Probably the most obvious candidates for this secondary canon would be Johns and
Rauschenberg. Of course they are being ironic, playing around with devices, looking
for the wrong kind of attention, but all this goes on within a pictorial context that
sticks to the Greenbergian balance of surface and space. I would also like to suggest,
courting heresy, that quite a few works by Andy Warhol could easily be
accommodated, redefining him as an exponent of colour field painting, rather than a
pop artist. Formally, if not in the grid pieces then in the portraits, he does enough
purely in terms of pictorial practice to warrant comparison with Matisse. Maybe
Warhol doesn’t come out too well in the comparison, but then nobody would.

Having the confidence to extend the canon in this way allows us to regard the
pictorial field identified with modernism, a field of “flatness” and its delimitation, a
field of theorised Impressionism, as robust and open, rather than determined by an
arid essentialism or reductive concepts of purity, with or without inverted commas.

17
Further evidence of its robustness can also be found in its ability to accommodate
relatively non-aesthetic themes and unpromising subjects, at the same time as
insisting on its medium specificity and maintaining formal emphasis. Consider its
successful engagement with Surrealism, one of the most influential, but not exactly
the most formally vital, movements of the 20th century, which found expression in a
variety of media, cinema, theatre, literature, objects, photography, etc.

Much Surrealist painting, Dali’s being the obvious example, did not operate within
the modernist pictorial field, preferring to fall back on more archaic systems of deep
space representation. Even Picasso, turns away from the spatial sophistication of
Cubism in order to register his temporary participation in surrealist sensibility, in
things like “Two Woman Running on the Beach” (1922). Jackson Pollock however,
painfully derivative to start with, was able to come up with slightly adapted versions
of forms and symbols drawn from the same iconographic source. He incorporated
them successfully in works that are always celebrated as amongst modernism’s finest
achievements, examples like, “Out of the Web” (1949) where the surrealist
components remain legible and potent in the context of a constructed, non-figurative
space, famously “accessible to eyesight alone”, as Michael Fried puts it.

The power of this opticality was, according to Fried, strong enough to defeat
objecthood, even when the literal shape of the canvas was given new prominence by
Noland and particularly Stella. In the deductive structure, favoured by Stella from
1959 to 1966, Cezanne’s use of the motif , his habit of adjusting pictorial events to
reconcile them to the frame, was taken to its logical conclusion. All elements were
made to fit the format of the support exactly, and without remainder, however
eccentric that format might be. In the “Irregular Polygons”, Fried still argues that the
principles of the modernist pictorial field are not violated, despite the complexity of
the stretcher geometry, because he regards the depicted shape as taking precedence
visually over the literal shape of the canvas.

If the place of the modernist field within the history of painting is well established,
partly because it is continuous with, and parallels, other competing spatial regimes
within the discipline, all of which rely on some kind of illusionism, the equivalent

18
modernist field of sculpture is anything but secure. This insecurity is fully ventilated
in Fried’s “Art and Objecthood”, the final text in the discourse of high modernism.

Greenberg somewhat neglected sculpture. He argued that painting should avoid

sculptural effects, like strong shading, but he also wanted sculpture to avoid the
sculptural, or at least as it had been defined by Herbert Read. Greenberg felt that, after
Brancusi, the art form could not develop further if it continued to orientate itself
towards “roundness”. Although he admitted that roundness was a legitimate sculptural
property, he believed the medium had to “mutate” in order to retain its artistic
possibilities, suggesting that it should learn from Cubism and open up its central core.
This advice seems to countermand the modernist principle that a medium should play
to its strengths, and it was some time before work that met Greenberg’s aspirations
was produced, and the modernist field of sculpture was thereby actualised: This was
done by Anthony Caro.

Caro’s work of the early sixties effectively defines the territory of modernist
sculpture, but it may have been both the first and only occupant of the fully extended
version of the field. There’s no doubting its impact on Fried. He judged all sculpture
against its standard, and the immediacy of his regard gave him an existential
benchmark of “presentness” that decided his response to Minimalism.

The sculptural field, almost single-handedly declared by Caro was challenged from
two directions, the first from sculpture itself. The paradox here is that Caro’s
modernism was subjected to a critique based on medium specificity, expressed in the
desire to recover the sculptural language and concerns as defined by tradition from the
Greeks, to Rodin, to Degas, Brancusi, and perhaps on to Smith. Caro was accused of
being too pictorial, it being often said that his work represented the mutation of
sculpture into painting. The second, and most powerful threat to Caro’s modernism
comes from Minimalism

In “Art and Objecthood”, which is of course an essay on sculpture, Fried goes to a

good deal of trouble to explain the difference between modernism and Minimalism, a
distinction very few people thought worth making. Once made however, the
difference was accepted, but the valorisation it implied was reversed. Compared to

19
literal objects installed in real space, the modernist sculptural field defined by Caro
appeared too privileged, too metaphorical, and certainly too elitist. The domain of
literalism, was in contrast, where we spent all, not most, of our lives, and art should
be encountered in this world, amongst “the chairs on which we sit or the tables from
which we eat” as Krauss later put it.

The point I want to make is that the domain of literalism, or objecthood, which
minimalism occupies is not a “field”, as defined here. There is no sense of
“delimitation”, though obviously all the normal laws of physics apply, and are obeyed
to the letter, by the various hollow open or closed structures minimalism features. No
other forces are at work, so the organisation of pieces follows the routine procedures
dictated by the requirements of installation. One thing is put down, then another; one
thing is put up, then another, eventually perhaps forming a grid or some other non-
hierarchical configuration. The same basic practises are followed in “Installation Art”
proper. Although the ultimate configurations are infinitely more varied, the style of
placing, plonking or arranging, without reference to any force beyond the practical,
follows the same literalist rite.

The difference between operating in the context of a sculptural field on the one hand
and plonking on the other is easy to demonstrate. If you look at the rectangular plate
in Caro’s early one morning you can see that is subject to various pressures, that it is
poised yet potentially unstable, that it must be maintained in a particular angle, that it
needs to be a certain size, set at a particular height to face the horizontal beam, over a
specific distance. Now look at the “W” in George Segal’s “Man on a Ladder” (1970).

One peculiarity of the modernist sculptural field laid out by Caro is that it is capable
of great extension -Prairie, for instance, is over 10 ft in one direction and 18 in the
other- yet it can also operate successfully when reduced to the scale of his table piece
series. This elasticity is related, at least in part, to the properties of the constituent,
planar and linear materials and light touch clamp and weld assembly methods.
Reaction against Caro, especially amongst British sculptors, led them towards, self-
coloured, lumpier, heavier gauge forms, and the corresponding challenge of finding
ways of joining them that was still relational, but allowed for fused rather than highly
articulated, Cubist like structures. However, with some exceptions, I think these

20
works remain in the same sculptural field as Caro. They do not actually return to
“roundness” of the kind advocated by Read, and though compact, they are anxious to
avoid the charge of statuary. But, more tellingly, they are built to reveal themselves to
a kind of critical scrutiny that is continuous with that which the formalist/modernist
project has established in its dealings with the art form.

But, even if this were all true, we have to account for the fact that in the wider
contemporary cultural context, the fields of modernist sculpture and painting don’t
seem to matter that much, though whether that matters is a question worth asking.
Even if painting and sculpture as mediums remain extant, in varying guises and forms
of exemplification, their formalist/modernist versions seem to attract a good deal
fewer adherents than practices that are carried out in the domain of the literal. Perhaps
there are many reasons that could be advanced for this, but clearly there must be
particular advantages to working outside the modernist frame of reference. What
might they be?

In a domain free of the tension, limits and forces that characterise an artistic field the
practitioner is relieved of any stock of obligations, standing commitments or duties
which might otherwise inhibit or determine action, so everything is possible, literally.
This freedom maximises the opportunities of being able to produce work ready to be
submitted to the operations of another field, where such considerations count for less.
This is what might be called the Institutional field, after the institutional theory of art.

Historically, the modernist field, in as much as it was part of the avant-garde, always
had a relationship with the institutional field, an area of operations that includes the
supporting economic and social infrastructure, the Salons, the academies, the gallery
system, museums, curators and collectors, which make up the art world. But the
institutional field, also had its own resident artists, whose reputations and status it
endorsed and sustained. Artists from the avant-garde, however radical, usually wanted
to enter the institutional field, but on their own terms. They worked out these terms in
groups and loose associations, in a cultural space that was separate from that occupied
by the official artists, and governed by different values, before presenting themselves
for wider attention and recognition. The institutional field, because it already

21
employed enough artists, usually resisted the entry of the avant-garde, even if this was
sometimes token resistance.

However, as the art world has become more developed, and, especially in Britain,
more glamorous, it has acquired the confidence to employ its own avant-gardists,
which it directly recruits from the art schools. Thus, the institutional field, which used
to renew itself by occasionally admitting the originality of the avant-garde, now does
so by systematically rewarding the originality of the art student. But the likelihood is
that the art school from which the student graduates will pride itself on the alignment
of its values with those of the art world, having long since dispensed with any
separate academic programme or ideological identity. The most ambitious students,
the rising stars, therefore, will not be burdened with any internalised compromising or
conflicting value system, commitments or obligations, and can directly progress into
the institutional field on any terms it decides, having effectively been part of it for two
or three years already.

Never mind. This just means that modernism, like other great isms of the twentieth
century, avant-gardism, Marxism, socialism, has moved into its recusant stage. It
seems to me that its two distinctive fields remain available to contemporary
practitioners, although their efforts may have to be assigned to the secondary canon.
So we may conclude that, under the testing of post-modernism, it has now been
established that the irreducible essence of modernism consists of but two constitutive
conventions or norms, one; the operation of the work within the requisite pictorial or
sculptural field, and two, the willingness to judge the work against the greatest art of
the past, and that the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an
object which can be experienced as modernist.

22
 Michael Fried: Proper Subjectivity and Monstrous Bodies.

Stuart Bradshaw

..in general an insistence on making ethically loaded distinctions between modes of

subjectivity is a leitmotif of my criticism from start to finish.

So writes Michael Fried in his introduction to the collection of his critical writings Art
and Objecthood. However, the first part of the passage – which is in parenthesis –
states, “a thematics of impersonality would later run through my analyses of
figuration and colour in Pollock, Louis, Noland, Olitski and Stella..” It certainly does.
Towards the end of his essay about Morris Louis, Fried quotes from Mallarmé and
Hart Crane in an eulogy to impersonality. Fried was a serious critic, engaged in
serious criticism. Not a purveyor of “low-grade existentialist rhetoric” or “poetic
appreciation”, as he characterised the dominant critical modes of his early student
years, in the second half of the 1950’s. In the formal criticism practised by Clement
Greenberg, Fried’s mentor, impersonality was taken as a given. Greenberg himself
was much influenced, in terms of how he defined works to make them suitable to his
approach, by T.S. Eliot. He also suggested that Eliot’s literary criticism could have
been influenced by the art criticism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the former of whom
was the initiator of “formal” art criticism in the English-speaking world and the best
known British art critic of the first third of the last century.6 Fried, then, from the
beginning allied himself with a specific tradition in criticism, one which, according to
Greenberg, writing about Eliot, was concerned not with what works of art mean but
what they do – how successfully they work as art:7 Pragmatism, not hermeneutics.
Impersonality went with the tradition to which Fried chose to attach himself.

6
Fry’s approach is described as “a modernist updating of Bergsonian formalism” by Carol Armstrong
in the introduction to Manet Manette, Yale, 2003. p xii
7
Clement Greenberg, “T.S. Eliot: A book Review”, in Art and Culture, Boston, !961 pp. 239-244.

23
It was also a feature of the work of the main artists that he concentrated on in his 60.s
criticism. In fact, the fittingness of his approach to the work he writes about – more so
than was the case with Greenberg, when you consider Greenberg’s criticism as a
whole – is one of its most notable features. Fried may espouse the impersonal but that
doesn’t mean that he denies artistic subjectivity. He frequently emphasises the
primacy of the expressive qualities of the works he admires and he’s deeply aware of
how the different personalities of artists he writes about are manifested in their work.
However, the value of that work is regarded as lying in the identification and
consequent working through of formal problems associated with the physical
characteristics of specific mediums. Artistic personality may be an accepted fact but it
is seen as being revealed through a restrictive series of formal concerns. As such it is
sidelined. (Not without some discomfort, it seems to me, especially when Fried writes
about Olitski.)8

Instead of a preoccupation with the subjectivities of individual artists, that is the

creators of the works, from the mid-60’s Fried’s writing hovers around and then
homes in on the relationship between the work and the beholder. This locates
subjectivity in terms of reception. Although Fried would doubtless disagree with
Roland Barthes’ famous essay “The Death of the Author” (in fact he’s indicated as
much in a note to a recent article about the photographer Thomas Demand, “Without
a Trace”, in Artforum, March 2005) his concern with reception in “Art and
Objecthood” is very similar to that of Barthes. Both essays, incidentally, appeared
within a year of each other, Fried’s in 1967 and Barthes’ in 1968.

II

The thesis that appeared as “Art and Objecthood” seems to have been building up
over the previous two years. It develops a set of ideas that are personal to Fried, but it
also such a sense of inevitability – especially in the light of hindsight – that it almost
seems to be the product of impersonal necessity, as if someone – if not Fried, then
someone else – had to write it. It’s certainly the most prophetic piece of art writing

8
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Chicago, 1998. See the essays “Jules Olitski” and “Three
American Painters”.

24
that I know of from the last fifty years and it prescience is only matched by some of
the passages in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (about the replacement of subject matter
by concept).9 It’s also a swansong for both American modernist art and the formalist
criticism that was its major theoretical support. It can be said that modernism ended
because of the paradigm shift in art in the mid-60’s, a major aspect of which “Art and
Objecthood” so comprehensively describes. (The other component of the shift
consisted, I think< of the turn to popular culture represented by Pop Art.) Formalist
criticism essentially collapsed because of its own contradictions, which Fried was
well aware of and sought to stave off. Basically, the underlying ideas of aesthetic
autonomy and Greenberg’s Marx-influenced narrative of historical development
proved too restrictive and too fragile to accommodate changes in art which they had
contributed to bringing about. When minimalism emerged Fried clearly saw the
consistency between Judd’s ideas and those of Greenberg and he was appalled at the
consequences.

Fried’s major essays of the mid-60’s can be regarded as attempts to head off the
disaster that he saw in minimalism. Notwithstanding Judd’s literal reading of
Greenberg and his admiration for Pollock, Newman and Stella, Fried recognised from
the outset that minimalism was an avant-garde, not a modernist, idiom. As such he
also saw it as antithetical to, and potentially destructive of, the modernist art to which
he was committed. Minimalism challenged what he regarded as the realm of the
aesthetic, the very thing that separated art works from other objects in the world. As a
concomitant, it also changed the relationship between the work and its setting – the
space in which it exists –sand further, it crucially changed nature of what it meant to
encounter work. Instead of being a viewer, or in Fried’s term, a “beholder”, the person
who encountered it became a more generalised “experiencer”. The encounter may
have been a more totalising physical experience but it was one drained of the
imaginative participation in an “otherness” which the visual aesthetic experience
offered.

9
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London, 1984. See the sections on visuality and conceptuality.
Pp. 139-145.

25
 III

I can’t once recall Fried once using the word “imagination” in his criticism. Like
“creativity”, it probably seemed too soft and general and I don’t think it was much in
use in serious writing (and talking) about art in the 60’s. Nevertheless, it seems to me
to be crucial to understanding Fried’s defence of the modernist art he admired against
minimalism (or “literalist art” as he calls it).

In “Art and Objecthood” Fried refers to the impression of hollowness created by the
works of Judd and Morris. (He then proceeds to connect this to the anthropomorphism
he sees in minimalist works, a point I’ll return to.) As David Sweet has pointed out,
this is curious because I imagine that most people, on encountering such work, would
simply accept its hollowness as a given10. If this is so, why does Fried emphasise the
point? To indicate, I think, the sense of the work’s aesthetic emptiness. Hollowness is
a fact of much minimalist art but Fried uses the term in both a literal and metaphorical
way. Furthermore, it comes to represent the nature of the person’s experience of the
work. The literal hollowness of minimalist art equates to aesthetic emptiness, which
causes the experience of the work to be one of non-aesthetic phenomenological
presence.

In the absence of sufficient aesthetic interest, the attention of the experiencer becomes
more diffuse and takes in the total spatial environment in which the work is placed.
(Robert Morris, in a passage from “Notes on Sculpture” which Fried quotes in “Art
and Objecthood” writes that although the space of the room in which minimalist work
is placed becomes important as a “structuring factor” that “does not mean that an
environmental situation is being established”, but Fried disagrees with him.)11 This,
for Fried, is a theatrical, rather than aesthetic, response. Fried sees an aesthetic
response as one which is necessarily subjective and predicated on the idea of an
individual endowed with imaginative interiority. A work of art is also considered to
possess interiority – of parts, space, relationships, light touch, etc. – even if this
interiority is attenuated or brought close to its limits. The “Shape as Form” essay is
largely about the assaying of such limits. The theatrical, on the other hand, at least as

10
David Sweet, Michael Fried’s Art Criticism, PhD thesis, University of Essex, 2003
11
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, in Art and Objecthood, p.154

26
the term is used in Fried’s critical writing, is predicated not only on the idea of the
hollow, aesthetically impoverished, phenomenological object, but on what is seen as
an equivalent transformation of the subject. The essentially subjective nature of the
aesthetic response is replaced by one which is outwardly directed towards the totality
of the spatial setting of the work. As Hal Foster has written in The Return of the Real

..the viewer, refused the safe, sovereign space of formal art, is cast back on
the here and now, and rather than scan the surface of a work for a
topographic mapping of the properties of the medium, he or she is prompted
to explore the perceptual consequences of a particular intervention in a
given site. This is the fundamental reorientation that minimalism
inaugurates12.

A little later in the same essay Foster expands on the same point

In this way the stake of minimalism is the nature of meaning and the status
of the subject, both of which are held to be public, not private, produced in
a physical interface with the actual world, not in the mental space of
idealist conception.13

For Fried, however, the “mental space of idealist conception” is the necessary
condition for the imaginative determination of anything – whether it be regarded as
an object or a surface – as a work of visual art. Without such a space an aesthetic
response is impossible.

IV

Reading “Art and Objecthood” now, nearly forty years after its first appearance, it’s
tempting to identify two aspects of Fried’s critique of minimalism – sublimity and
abjection – that have been dominant themes, to the point of overuse, in discourses

12
Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism”, in The Return of the Real, Boston, 1996, p. 38.
13
Ibid. p. 40

27
about art over the last twenty five years. Both of them throw into relief, and put
pressure on, the limits that define and give shape to experience; not least the
experience of being a “self”. Leaving aside the issue of sublimity, which arises
mainly in relation to quotes from Tony Smith, the idea of abjection can be seen to be
central to Fried’s characterisation of minimalist work itself, and the viewer’s response
to it, in terms of the body. Of course, neither the sublime nor the abject are critical
concepts that Fried himself uses. They weren’t a part of the critical vocabularies of
the time and only entered into widespread use in the 1980’s. (The “sublime” does
feature in discussions of Barnett Newman and in Robert Rosenblum’s “Abstract
Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition” but invariably within an historical
rather than critical context.)14

The theme of abjection raises concerns about physical boundaries, notions of

independence and wholeness and a preoccupation with the “proper” body which are
central to Fried’s critique. (I’d like to give this word “proper” the same wider
meanings that are possessed by the French word “proper”, which contains
connotations of cleanliness as well as containedness and self-identity.)

Julia Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror” has become the classic book about abjection and
in it she describes the abject as that that which exists between, yet at the same time
allows the definition of, the behaviours, structures of thought and moralities we live
by. Furthermore, it’s a concept that is resistant to dialectical apprehension (unlike
Freudian ideas of the Unconscious). She describes it in corporeal terms as that which
leaks through, or breaks out of, the confines of the body; that which is taken to defile;
and that which is excluded in order that form or definition – even the definition of
subject and object – can occur. Kristeva further associates it with the fantasised
formlessness of the maternal body. This assault on the body and its wholeness or
“properness” is conveyed in Fried’s introduction to his critical work in the book Art
and Objecthood. Fried writes (interestingly in parenthesis again)

14
The sublime does feature in discussions of Barnett Newman, and in relation to the paintings of
Rothko and Still, especially in Robert Rosenblum’s “Abstract Painting and the Northern Romantic
Tradition”, but this is in an historical rather than critical context.

28
 My critique of the literalists address to the viewer’s body was not that
bodiliness as such has no place in art but rather that that literalism
theatricalised the body, put it endlessly on stage, made it uncanny, or
opaque to itself, hollowed it out, deadened its expressiveness, denied its
finitude and in a sense its humanness and so on. There is, I might have
said, something monstrous about the body in literalism. (Fried’s
emphasis)15

Minimalism, then, does something to and with the body. It either does quite a lot of
things, or one big thing, which has a number of negative characteristics. Moreover,
these can’t be fully grasped even forty years after the event. (That “and so on”.) They
can only be summed up by saying that minimalism makes the body “monstrous”, a
word which Fried emphasises.

Fundamentally, it seems, minimalism challenges the integrity of the body; that is the
body as presupposed by modernist art. It creates confusion between the previously
distinct entities of subject and object, thus allowing the seepage of abjection. (“A
massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness ..Not me. Not that. But not nothing
either. A “something” that I do not recognise as a thing. A weight of
meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me.”
writes Kristeva.)16 The obdurate objectness and aesthetic poverty of minimalist art
makes inordinate demands on the modernist viewer (“the beholder” in Fried).
Minimalism is felt to close down the space of aesthetic perception and, although
individual objects – works – distance the person who encounters them (the
“experiencer” as opposed to the “beholder”), in the totality of the setting in which
they are placed they incorporate the experience in a more “outered” and active
relationship than that offered by modernist works. In reconfiguring the beholder as
esxperiencer minimalism replaces the subjective interiority of the former with the
active incorporation of the latter. This, it seems, is what Fried finds “monstrous”. The
sense of the autonomy and integrity – the “properness” – of both the work and the
viewing subject have been undermined. The imaginative space that the modernist
work still created – in Caro’s sculpture, Noland’s sequences of colour, Olitski’s

15
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”, p. 42
16
Julia Kristeva, Power of Horror, New York, 1982, p. 2.

29
surfaces – has disappeared in minimalist work. For Fried it seems to have felt like the
loss of a faculty, and, in a way, it was. In the breaching of the relationship between
the subjectivity of the viewer and the autonomy of the work the modernist viewing
subject was seen to be a specific cultural construction – one whose time was at hand.
Minimalism challenged the modernist idea of the aesthetic and, in its obdurate
physicality, demanded a new kind of subject, a more externally orientated but also
more controlled and less independent figure. For Fried, the proper, the clean,
independent subject, possessed of interiority, was replaced by an inhuman, hollow
body – a monstrous body.

In comparison with most subsequent art writing, the main positive feature of
American formalist criticism is that works of art are treated in terms that they
themselves suggest, rather than in terms of imposed ideas from other areas –
linguistics, philosophy, psychology, etc. The reverse of this is that the Greenbergian
narrative of modernist development, which is largely accepted by Fried with a couple
of caveats, was crudely materialist and severely restricted the imaginative insights
that could have been gained from the works. This is clearly apparent in relation to
colour. Greenberg makes comments about colour but in general he treats it as an
instrumental vehicle for the achievement of flatness. Similarly, Fried particularly in
his writing about Louis and Noland, whilst giving the impression that he’s constantly
aware of the primary role of colour, exercises a discretion that’s tantamount to
avoidance in his treatment of it. Only when writing about Olitski, when it really is
unavoidable, does Fried attempt to deal with colour directly. Even then, however, his
descriptions of paintings constantly pull towards the drawn aspects of colour, or its
relation to the shape of the canvas.

Colour, of course, is notoriously difficult to write about. I suspect that, had Fried tried
to do so with the seriousness that is his customary tone, the results would have been
pretty turgid. (Fried was a young writer in the 60’s, so it’s unfair to compare him to
Roland Barthes in the 70’s. However, considering the imagination and acuity which
Barthes brought to the analysis of the varieties of marks in Cy Twombly’s paintings
in his essay “The Wisdom of Art”, it does seem a shame that mo one was able to do

30
the same with regard to colour in Louis and Noland. The point is reinforced when the
comprehensive and penetrating account of colour in Kristeva’s essay “Giotto’s Joy”
is also considered.)

Instead of thematising the importance of colour, Fried concentrates on drawing in

Louis and shape in Noland, Olitski and Stella. Such a decision was obviously
deliberate and, even before “Art and Objecthood”, it indicates a concern with
definition and the establishment of limits. In “Shape as Form” (the allusion in the title
will become apparent shortly) the impression is that the stakes involved in defying the
slippage into objectness are extremely high. How high exactly would only become
apparent with “Art and Objecthood”. I think that, more than the inherent difficulty of
writing about colour, Fried’s apprehensions about the development that minimalism
represented led to the emphasis, not on structure as such, although he seems to have
seen it that way at the time, but on containment and autonomy. “Shape as Form” now
reads like an attempt to seal the idea of the work of art from the fallenness of brute
reality. It comes across as a holding operation. Fried is very adamant about the
essential separateness of art works from their surrounding real of objects; hence the
consistent and oft-repeated emphasis on the “radical abstractness” of works. Even
more than Greenberg, his use of the concept of “optical” space is infused with an
energetic determination. In relation to viewing Caro’s sculptures, he writes of an
“optical time” and further states that, although works may rest on the ground, that
ground is de-literalised by being incorporated into the work as a structural element.
(Fried writes of Caro’s Prairie

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.17

The fact that a work is a work of art and hence can be seen aesthetically – which for
Fried involves a necessary separation from the pressing reality of the world – isolates
it, from moment to moment, from that reality. The idea of the aesthetic and that of the

17
Michael Fried, “The Sculpture of Anthony Caro”, in Art and Objecthood, p. 182.

31
autonomous work are this linked. Autonomy from the world of objects – from
“functional” reality – is a condition of a particular work achieving the status of art.
The use of the term “literalist art” then, in “art and Objecthood” is a contradiction,
even though Fried gives no indication whether or not it’s meant ironically.

VI

I’d like to briefly examine Fried’s term “the beholder”. My inclination. When
referring to someone who looks at art, is to use the word “viewer”, but “beholder” is
slightly different. It’s a somewhat archaic term which implicitly carries biblical
connotations. It also shifts the emphasis away from the activity of seeing to the
presentation of something to sight. Referring to dictionary definitions, the verb “to
view” is defined as an “inspection by the eye”, or as a “survey with the eyes”,
whereas “behold” is defined as “to become aware of by sight, take notice, attend”. To
behold, then refers not simply to seeing, or looking, or even viewing, but to a change
of visual awareness and a corresponding concentration on attention. In terms of art,
the beholder is someone who attends to the work. This implies a more sympathetic
relationship to it than is implied by “inspection” or “survey”. You could say that a
certain notion of respect was involved in the idea of beholding.

If the beholder respects the work, does the work respect the beholder? This question,
I think, helps make the relationship between Fried’s art criticism and his historical
writing clearer. Significantly, it allows a link to be established between the idea of
theatricality that he associates with minimalist work and that which he identifies in
mid-18th century French painting.

In his introduction to the Art and Objecthood book, Fried writes

To the extent that the painter succeeded in that aim (depicting figures
who appeared to be oblivious to the presence of the beholder) the
beholder’s existence was effectively ignored or, put more strongly,
denied; the figures in the painting appeared alone in the world
(alternatively we may say that the world of the painting appeared self-

32
 sufficient, autonomous, a closed system independent of, in that sense
blind to, the world of the beholder.)18

Te absorptive painting that interests Fried therefore ignores the viewer. A strange
kind of respect, it would seem. However, it also presents itself as a closed,
autonomous scene which creates a space – the space of beholding, if you like – which
permits the viewer to retain some sense of his or her own independence and
autonomy. The scene represented in absorptive painting is considered to make no
demands which cross the space of beholding. The viewer is not appealed to in such a
way that his or her integrity is challenged. In that way the painting, or rather the scene
represented, respects the viewer.

To characterise this as a voyeuristic situation is misleading. Instead, it’s rather a

relationship that encourages contemplation. The clearest examples of this are
probably some of Chardin’s figure paintings, which Fried writes about in Absorption
and Theatricality in this way

..perhaps it is simply that Chardin found in the absorption of his figures

both a natural correlative of his own engrossment in the act of painting
and a proleptic mirroring of what he trusted would be the absorption of
the beholder before the finished work.19

The expression “proleptic mirroring” can be carried forward to the critique of

minimalism in Art and Objecthood”. Minimalism doesn’t respect the autonomy and
independence of the beholder. It closes down the space of contemplation and replaces
it with the real, the literal, outer space of the setting of the work. In the mirror of
minimalism the body becomes monstrous – and hollow.

18
Michael Fried, At and Objecthood, p. 48.
19
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot,
Berkeley, 1980, p. 51.

33
 VII

There are occasional instances in Fried’s criticism where, deliberately or otherwise,

he suggests something that, because of his probity and the restrictions of his chosen
approach, cannot be stated explicitly. One instance of this occurs in the quotation
from Mallarmé at the end of the Morris Louis essay. The quote is about the idea of
the disappearance of the artist in the work. Fried relates it to Louis’ approach to his
painting, whilst stressing that there is no conscious connection to Symbolist ideas in
Louis’ work. However, what the introduction of Mallarmé suggests is a further,
unstated and wilder comparison with Louis’ work for which there is no evidential
basis at all but which the viewing imagination throws up. This is the sensed similarity
between the importance of the whiteness of the page in Mallarmé, and the use of that
whiteness, especially in “Un coup de des” and the vast expanse of raw canvas in
Louis’ “Unfurled” paintings. The relationship between the two may be factually non-
existent. Yet as soon as the imagination has connected the one to the other it cannot
be erased. I don’t know whether Fried consciously intended to allude to this
connection on his part; or whether the connection didn’t exist at all in Fried’s mind
and he simply introduced the quotation from Mallarmé to make his stated point about
impersonality.

Something similar, but even less definite, occurs in “Art and Objecthood”. In fact, I
think that the continuing fascination which the essay exerts is not simply due to
Fried’s prophetic insight but also because it contains puzzling disconnections and
suggests ideas that are counter to the main argument. I’ll end by mentioning a couple
of these.

Fried characterises minimalist work not simply as hollow but also as

anthropomorphic. He compares the presence of “being distanced, or crowded, by the
silent presence of another person” (Fried’s emphasis). Distanced or crowded. These
are the polarities of an encounter. Moreover, they imply a lack of recognition or
acknowledgement. The viewer is placed in this uncomfortable position by an object
that has the presence of a person but which is also hollow. A hollow man, maybe. In
turn, for Fried, the viewer’s body is hollowed out and, in an unsettling act of
mirroring, is made “opaque to itself” and “denied…its humanness..”

34
 Shape without form, shade without colour
Paralysed face, gesture without motion;

These lines are from T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Hollow Men”: A poem of
visions of death in a blighted landscape.20

Once again, it’s difficult to know how conscious the allusion to “The Hollow Men” is
in “Art and Objecthood”, although it must obviously be deliberate in the title of
“Shape as Form”. However, the reference to Samuel Beckett towards the end of “Art
and Objecthood” is so unmistakeable that it must have been intentional. Fried doesn’t
mention Beckett in that part of the essay which deals with what he sees as the attempt
of theatre itself to defeat theatricality. (He refers instead to the writings of Brecht and
Artaud.) A couple of pages later, however, when he describes the sensation of time
embodied in minimalist work, the echo of Beckett is all too clear

Endlessness, being able to go on and on, even having to go on and on, is

central both to the concept of interest and to that of objecthood. In fact,
it seems to be the experience that most deeply excites literalist
sensibility, and that literalists artists seek to objectify in their work
…Smith’s account of his experience on the unfinished turnpike records
that excitement all but explicitly. Similarly, Morris’ claim that in the
best new work the beholder is made aware that “he himself is
establishing the relationship as he apprehends the object from various
conditions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context”
amounts to a claim that the beholder is made aware of the endlessness
and inexhaustibility if not of the object itself at any rate of his
experience of it.21

20
“The Hollow Men”, 1925, in T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems, London, 1954. p. 77-80.
21
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 166.

35
Personally, I’ve never thought that minimalist work operates like this, but
minimalism was already historical by the time I became involved in art. Clearly, for
Fried, though, minimalism conjures up an awareness of endless duration – I can’t go
on. I must go on – and bleakness that seems thoroughly Beckett-like.

These unacknowledged and, in the case of the allusion to “The Hollow Men”, perhaps
unintentional, references cast minimalism in a different light to that of the overt
argument of “Art and Objecthood”. If the idea of the sublime, which characterises the
quotes from Tony Smith, is also considered, then it is possible to argue, against the
grain, that Fried has constructed a case for the imaginative validity and existential
relevance of minimalism to the period. Furthermore, its status in these respects has
been achieved precisely because it doesn’t operate according to the aesthetic
principles of modernism, nor does it accept the autonomous subject of the beholder.
“Art and Objecthood” thus becomes, beneath its surface polemic, a quieter act of
mourning, as if, although Fried is still raging, on another level he’s already accepted
the dying of the light.

VIII

Fried’s writing of the late 60’s is art criticism, not philosophy, psychology, or social
theory. Moreover, his field of interest was a particular area of contemporary
American and British art, not European art with its history of political engagement
and avant-gardism. Nevertheless, from his position as a critic committed to a specific
tradition of aestheticised modernism – or, as he saw it, “radical abstraction” - he
identified the tectonic shift in American art which not only changed the nature of
what art was considered to be (more comprehensively than the emergence of
“happenings” and Cageian “events” some years previously had done), but which also
radically changed the nature of what it meant to encounter a work of art. The
consequence of this was that the subjectivity of the viewer – who was no longer truly
a viewer – was also transformed. Fried never speculated about the reasons for these
developments; to have done so would have been to have gone beyond what he
considered his role as a critic to be.

36
The real antithesis to the modernist in American art was already forming as Fried was
pursuing his arguments against minimalism. It’s hard to think of a greater contrast to
the Friedian idea of the beholder than the experiencer/lab rat/victim of Bruce
Nauman’s work. The work of Judd and Morris could be accommodated on the
perimeter of Fried’s field of interest – in fact, it constituted that perimeter – but
Nauman’s work must have been way beyond it. Yet, as things turned out, history, or
machinations of the art world (which, in the short and medium term, are probably the
same thing) has flowed Nauman’s way and away from the artists to whom Fried was
so committed.

I don’t think this necessarily belittles Fried’s criticism. The wrongness of its
Greenbergian historicist narrative is glaringly obvious now, but Fried’s passion, his
descriptive brilliance, his concern to reveal the value of the work which he admires,
and, perhaps most of all, his amazing prescience, particularly in “Art and
Objecthood” will all ensure that his criticism will occupy a major place in American
art writing fore some time to come.

For the moment, though, after the appearance of a couple of tantalising articles about
Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand, I, for one, am looking forward to Fried’s next book
about artists who work with photography, and wondering whether, finally, Fried may
have found a subject which brings together his critical and historical interests.

37
 Notes towards a differential ontology of painting

Craig G. Staff

The efficacy of formalist criticism, a form of criticism represented by figures such as

Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried and specifically formalism’s desire for
transparency, for legibility, was dependent upon the delimitation of the object within
singular terms. To this end, Greenberg's formulation of modernist painting entailed the
identification of the medium's essence to be its "flatness." (This claim was
subsequently qualified to include "the delimitation of flatness.")22 More specifically,
as Rosalind Krauss has noted, the singularity of the object, on one level, was keyed
into and given through the primacy of vision:

"If the Renaissance had diagrammed the punctuality of [a] viewing point,
it was modernism that insisted on it, underscored it, made the issue of the
indivisible instant of seeing serve as a fundamental principle in the
doctrine of aesthetic truth. Modernism was to absolutize this "now" to
insist that painting exist within the indivisible present of the extremist
possible perceptual intensity…"23

That such a conception of vision had become underscored by a specific temporality is

evident in Art and Objecthood, Fried’s riposte to and attack on what he termed ‘literal
art,’ a pejorative term Fried coined in 1967 for minimalism:

“It is as though one’s experience of modernist painting has no duration –

not because one in fact experiences a picture by Noland or Olitski…in no
time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly
manifest. {…} It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as

22
Clement Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism," in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Edited by John O'
Brian vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 35.
23
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 213-214. For an example of
the syneticity that underwrote Greenberg's criticism. See "On Looking at Pictures: Review of Painting and
painters: How to Look at a Picture: From Giotto to Chagall by Lionel Venturi" quoted in The Collected Essays
and Criticism. Edited by John O' Brian vol. 2 Arrogant Purpose, 1945-9 (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 34-5. For examples of its prevalence within the discourses of modernism generally, see Robert
Mangold, Flat Art, quoted in James Meyer, Minimalism. (London: Phaidon, 2000), 230-1. See also Barbara Rose,
"Quality in Lewis," Artforum 10 (October 1971): 62-3.

38
 it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind
of instantaneousness…”24

Broadly speaking, and I say broadly as I am conscious not to wilfully over-

compartmentalise what in fact were a complex set of debates, what Fried’s assertion
demonstrates is the fact that in effect, there were two accounts of modernism, an
abstractionist account that Fried pitted against by what was in 1967 a literalist account.
Both accounts were respectively rendered concrete through two mutually exclusive
conceptions of the artwork. It is not an entirely novel claim to make to state that the
paintings of Frank Stella, and specifically the black stripe series of paintings began in
1958, were, to a certain extent at least, complicit with and appeared to have a vested
interest in both camps. In fact, such ambivalence, such ontological indeterminacy is
more generally representative of what amounted to a crisis in abstract painting, a crisis
whereby, according to Charles Biederman, abstract painting could not ”go any
further.” For the purposes of today’s paper, I would like us to take, as a critical point
of departure, the hypothetical assumption that Stella did in fact attempt to continue the
teleology set out by Greenberg, a teleology which generally entailed painting’s
entrenchment within its own area of competence and specifically its orientation to
flatness, to what was perceived to be its irreducible core. Or, in Stella’s own words,
that he continued to ‘force illusionistic space out of painting at a constant rate.’25 To a
certain extent this is a proposition not entirely lacking credibility – the shadow of
Greenbergian criticism would have loomed prominently over both Stella and his
fellow minimalists and most, if not all of whom, began their career as painters.

The means by which this claim will be tested out will be through a brief consideration
of how the object of late modernist painting became theorised. To this end what I hope
to demonstrate through consideration of Stella’s, and certain figures introduction of
numerical identity as an interpretive framework is the fact rather than the continuation
of a tradition, to assert that the work “is what it is” whilst still being keyed into the
work’s materiality, necessarily engenders an antithetical account of the work’s status
than the one purportedly set out by both Greenberg and Fried.

24
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1990 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood,
ed., (Great Britain: Blackwell, 1994), 832.
25
Frank Stella, Pratt Institute Lecture, in Harrison and Wood, 806.

39
“Warsaw is the capital of Poland” is an example of numerical identity because
Warsaw and the capital of Poland are the same thing. This is categorically separate
from qualitative identity. Qualitative identity may be best demonstrated by two copies
of the same book. Whilst each book may appear identical, the conditions of possibility
for numerical identity are bracketed out because there are two, as opposed to one of
them.

As we shall see, the theorisation of the object through numerical identity became the
means by which any perceived difference within and without the object could be
collapsed, rendered obsolete. To this end, by ontologically ‘shoring up’ the work, as it
were, the perceived primacy of painting, a primacy given through its singular and
untrammelled condition, could be potentially safeguarded. Framing the object through
such a positivistic set of terms, on one level equally meant that modernism’s insistence
upon the individuation of the object, (albeit an individuation that was now not strictly
given through the dictates of vision but through its potential ‘objecthood’), would not
have to be relinquished.

As it was then, the framing of the work through identity was a way within which
formalism's credo of medium specificity could be played off against minimalism's own
emphasis upon the artwork's obdurate materiality without relinquishing the set of
critical implications held by either position. It was as if, having forced its hand,
abstract painting responded to minimalism through adoption of a coterminous set of
sensibilities which included both a "painterly formalism" and a variant form of
realism.26

In 1958, the artist Frank Stella began a series of paintings that were entirely regulated
by a uniform series of black stripes. In addition, the width of each stripe was
equivalent to the width of a housepainter’s brush the artist had used. It was with these
paintings, made over the course of three years that Stella attempted to attach a type of
foolproof guarantee that befitted the programmatic (and pragmatic) logic of the work
itself. This was evidenced by the claim he made for painting in 1964: “My painting is

5
See Douglas Crimp, "Opaque Painting,' quoted in James Meyer, ed. Minimalism (London: Phaidon, 2000), 258.

40
based on the fact that what is there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an
object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the
objectness of whatever it is he’s doing. He is making a thing.”27

Another artist who has reverted to the theorisation of identity in order to, as it were,
pre-empt the possibility for literal or in this case associative meaning is Robert
Ryman. Although Ryman’s statements to this effect have occurred very much after the
likes of Stella were attempting to establish a critical terrain within which the
legitimisation of painting, as a medium, could be maintained, Ryman, according to the
art historian Yve-Alain Bois, “stands guard at the gates of modernism.” Moreover,
within the case of both Stella and Ryman, the work appears to be foregrounded by its
lack of equivocality, a lack figured through its incessant and anti-illusionistic
materiality. Indeed, one of the first instances whereby the work was posited within
such an interpretive framework occurred the same year that Art and Objecthood was
published. Writing in 1967, Lucy R. Lippard claimed that: “[The canvases of] Ralph
Humphrey, Robert Ryman and Brice Marden…emphasise the fact of painting as
painting, surface as surface, paint as paint in an inactive, unequivocal manner.”28

Quite clearly, painting’s radicalisation within the American avant-garde, specifically

the imperative to develop a non-representational model of painting of which I have
sketched out that was both obdurate and self-contained, carried with it a number of
ramifications. None the least of which was the fact that the terminology both artists
and writers had recourse to underwent its own sea change. For example, and as
Stella’s statement demonstrates, the term “thing” gained a significant amount of
currency within the critical discourses at that time. As early as 1939, George L. K.
Morris, writing about the recent efforts of American abstract artists at the Third
Annual Exhibition in New York makes this observation: “Their works are reticent, for
their expressive ends have purposely been carried no farther than their simplified
fabric will allow. Yet through such limited means they have destroyed the old

6
Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” in, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock
(London: Studio Vista, 1968), 158.
28
Lucy R. Lippard, “The Silent Art,” quoted in Frances Colpitt, ed. Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 58.

41
conception of the “picture”; each has substituted a thing – an object that is at rest
completely, - and thus some day can a way be cleared for a new reality.”29

Fried’s own adoption of such a ‘working term’ initially was used as just that. Writing
in the catalogue essay that accompanied the exhibition Toward a New Abstraction, he
describes Frank Stella’s paintings in terms of their “thing-nature.’30 Writing about
Stella again two years later in the catalogue essay which accompanied the exhibition
Three American Painters, an exhibition that Fried himself curated, such a working
term resurfaces, but now is used only in the pejorative sense. In what is, on one level a
rehearsal of his critique of minimalism that would be so vehemently put in place in Art
and Objecthood, Fried notes how the “progression [of Stella’s paintings] from black to
aluminum to copper metallic paint in his first three series…can be fitted neatly into a
version of modernism that regards the most advanced painting of the past hundred
years as having led to the realization that paintings are nothing more than a particular
sub-class of things…"31

As well as the debates that centered upon the thing-like nature of painting, one other
working term that was prevalent within this period and was theoretically coterminous
with the strategy of ascribing numerical identity to the object is the recapitulation of
realism within painting. This is evident in the exhibition The Art of the Real.

Opening in 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, E. C. Goosen’s claim
that the painter Ray Parker’s intention was to “make his art as palpably real as
possible” seemed to embody the main curatorial axis of the exhibition as a whole.32 In
fact, such was the sense of uncertainty felt about the status and condition of painting
at this time that the work of an ‘abstractionist’ like Noland was read in terms of its
“tactile, objective existence."33

29
George L. K. Morris, “Art Chronicle,” Partisan Review 6 (Spring 1939): 64.
30
Michael Fried, “Frank Stella,” in Toward a New Abstraction, ed. Alan Soloman (New York: Jewish Museum,
1963), 28.
31
Michael Fried, Fried, Three American Painters. (Cambridge, Mass: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), 43.
32
E. C. Goosen, The Art of the Real (New York; London: Museum of Modern Art; Tate Gallery Publications,
1968), 8.
33
Goosen, 9.

42
Realism then, became one such working term that was intrinsically bound up with the
theorisation of late modernist painting through the law of identity. Nowhere is this
more evident than in the work of Robert Ryman.

One strategy Ryman has employed in order to maintain the fidelity of his project to
these founding principles involves the introduction of a specific interpretation of
realism, a category of which is roughly comparable to the type first instituted by
Goosen. This works to further embed the non-representational painting within the
realm of the actual rather than the imagistic. It is worth quoting Ryman in full to
understand how realism, in the context of his non-representational paintings, becomes
figured.

"The two main procedures artists have used in painting are representation
and abstraction. While abstraction has been used in many ways, the two
procedures still employ a similar aesthetic, one which involves illusion.
Even the most abstract painting uses a picture–based approach. The
painting I make is based on a different approach. It has to do with using
real light on real surfaces, rather than creating an internal illusion of
light. If I use line in my work it is to do with line itself, not line as a
representation of something else. I think of this as working with an
outward aesthetic rather than with an inward one. I work with the
painting plane in relation to the wall plane. Everything points to an
approach which is a real situation rather than an illusion of the kind you
get in pictures." 34

Within this interpretive framework, a conception of painting is posited by the artist

divests painting of any remaining illusionistic vestiges. According to Thomas
McEvilley: “The painting is called “Realist” because it is simply and directly a real
object, referring to nothing outside itself, stating nothing but its own identity.”35
Although Ryman’s adaptation of the term “Realism” today falls neatly into line with
the dialectic that constituted the origination of the late modernist object, clearly it

13
David Batchelor, "On Paintings and Pictures: An Interview with Robert Ryman." Frieze 10 (May 1993): 42-6.
14
McEvilley, “Absence Made Visible,” 93.

43
remains a point of debate as to whether the paintings produced by Stella and Robert
Ryman could entirely purge themselves of illusionistic space.36

However, the fact remains that Stella, and artists that followed after him like Ryman
were able to at the very least formulate and preface, if not fully institute and maintain
a very specific ontology of painting. That they were able to do so stemmed from the
ascription of identity, specifically numerical identity to the object.

As I have already noted, the law of identity is a relation that anything has with or to
itself. Expressed in mathematics as =, the statement 3+4=7 can be translated as the
number produced by adding 3+4 being identical with the number 7. When the law of
identity is transposed into the field of logic, the theoretical correlate in this context is
the word “is.” However, if the transposition of the law of identity from its expression
in mathematics to its expression in logic results in the word ‘is’ being used, it is
important to note that this word can be ascribed a categorically separate set of
meanings in addition to the context within which it is understood above.

For example, to state that a train is a form of transport is qualitatively different to

stating that a train is late. Fundamentally, ‘is’ is a word that carries with it three
discrete usages. When someone says that Paris is the capital of France, the ‘is’, which
carries the same sense as ‘is the same as’ indicates identity. When someone says that
the baby is crying, it indicates predication and finally, when someone states that there
is a mountain in Africa, it indicates existence. The success of being able to distinguish
the import behind the word ‘is’ partly resides in the fact that it is given within a
standardised system of language. The extent at which the efficacy of these categorical
distinctions remains in place within the context of the critical and artistic practice of
late modernist painting, however, becomes an urgent question.

36
See for example, Crimp: "The problem for painting’s survival in the mid 1960s was the perennial problem of
illusionism. In fact, a major impetus to Minimal sculpture was the feeling among its practitioners (some of whom
had previously been painters) that painting could never be successfully anti-illusionistic…In a sense, the very
success of Minimal sculpture depended on is ability to define itself specifically as a mute object, i.e., as an object
which bespeaks only itself. This, it was thought, was something which painting as an inherently opposed medium
could not do; a painting will always evoke, if nothing else, a virtual space from that real space which it actually
inhabits." Crimp, 257. On one level such a reading of painting stems from the assertion originally given by
Donald Judd. According to Judd, it was precisely because painting's "main purpose" was the suggestion of
something in and on something else, that it remained problematical. See Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” quoted
in Harrison and Wood, 811.

44
In fact, Thomas McEvilley has noted that artists who critically foreground their work
through the agency of identity have in fact fundamentally mistaken its operative logic.
To this end, whilst the statement “it is what it is” can be construed as an analogue of
numerical identity within the purview of everyday language, the presence of the same
statement within the realm of aesthetic discourse becomes problematical: “The law of
identity applies equally and alike to everything in the realm of discourse. Everything,
insofar as it is anything, is itself and not not-itself. The application of the principle to
art in other words does not constitute a claim for special status. On the contrary, it
demonstrates that art exists on the same ontological footing as everything else.”37

Which, some might claim, is exactly why a figure like Fried found the dialectic of
minimal or in his case 'literal' art to be problematical.

However, McEvilley continues:

“[Ad] Reinhardt, [Joseph] Kosuth, and others who have made statements
of this type have misunderstood an underlying ground rule of thought for
a reasoned conclusion of thought. The error might be paralleled by
mistaking the axioms of Euclidean geometry for its conclusions.
Recognition of the law of identity does not mean we have come to the
end of a line of reasoned thought, but that we are now ready to begin
thinking.”38

The unpacking of the programmatic logic of identity qua painting, and specifically the
extent at which such a theorisation of the object purports to render the object mute,
untheorised (to the extent that in its positivistic reality, there is no need to theorise its
condition or status) is developed by Arthur C Danto.

16
Thomas McEvilley, “Heads its Form Tails its Not Content,” Artforum 21, no. 3, (November 1982): 55.
17
McEvilley, “Heads its Form Tails its Not Content,” 55. See for example, Ad Reinhardt, The Selected Writings of
Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Viking, 1975), 203-206; Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,”
Studio International 178, no. 915 (October 1964): 134-137.

45
Interestingly, an opposite set of conclusions are drawn to those of McEvilley. This
stems from Danto's basic assertion that an aesthetic system of language and a
standardised or ‘everyday’ system of language are, ipso facto, mutually exclusive.
Taking this as the basis within which a work of art is legitimised as such, Danto
directs his analysis of the necessary ontological conditions of an artwork, and
specifically painting, towards the loci wherein this transaction can take place. By
proposing that the word ‘is’ is one such locus, Danto puts forward a classification of
the word that is separate from the three already identified:

"There is an is that figures prominently in statements concerning

artworks which is not the is of either identity or predication; nor is it the
is of existence, of identification, or some special is made up to serve a
philosophical end. ... It is the sense of is in accordance with which child,
shown a circle and a triangle and asked which is him and which his sister,
will point to the triangle saying “That is me”, or, in response to my
question, the person next to me points to the man in purple and says
“That one is Lear”; or in the gallery I point, for my companions benefit,
to a spot in the painting before us and say “That white dab is Icarus.”…
For want of a word I shall designate this the is of artistic identification."39

What is of relevance within this statement is the fact that this classification of the word
‘is’ can equally be applied to artworks that are non-mimetic or non-representational.
To demonstrate this claim, Danto introduces the hypothetical figure of the olfactory
artist, a figure first invoked by Marcel Duchamp in 1961 whose conception of
paint(ing) is remarkably similar to Ryman’s:

“Paint, since the beginning of art, was always transformed into

something – martyred saints, arranged apples, mountains, maidens – as
though it were a magical substance that was anything the skilled painter
wanted it to be. And spectators always disregarded it, looking past and
through it to whatever the artist may have made of it. The olfactory artist
wants to render it [paint] opaque…[wherein] to miss the paint, to seek to

18
Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 37-38.

46
 see through it, is to miss the work entirely, which is, as the plain man
himself would say, the paint itself. That, the plain man is supposed to
say, is black and white paint, and nothing more. And this is just what the
olfactory artist himself wants to say: black and white paint, and nothing
more.”40

However, whilst McEvilley’s construal of the law of identity seems to imply that the
artwork as such, if it is considered through this critical prism remains latent, the
conclusion that Danto draws appears to be the opposite:

"When the olfactory artist says of his work that it is black and white
paint, and nothing more, that the painting is the painting, that it is not
about anything, it may seem to the superficial observer that he is
saying what the plain man is saying. But if we have learned to
establish differences between optically indiscernible objects…we
ought not to hesitate to apply the same strategies to sentences which as
such seem indiscernible but which may be used to make quite
different statements, and to have accordingly different forces."41

For Danto, the implications mean that the ““olfactory artist” has returned to the
physicality of paint through an atmosphere compounded of artistic theories and the
history of art (which he knows), and that he is in an artistic way rejecting a whole class
of statements, a whole class of attitudes, which are attitudes taken toward art
objects.”42

In effect, the respective conclusions that are drawn by McEvilley and Danto result in
an antinomy. For McEvilley, the presence of the law of identity presupposes that the
ontology of art is coextensive to the ontology of “everything else.” For Danto, because

19
Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 132. Marcel Duchamp originally used the term “olfactory
artist,” somewhat disparagingly, in 1961: “The idea of the artist repeating himself is, for me, a form of
masturbation. It is quite natural after all; it is an olfactory masturbation, if I can call it that. In other words, each
morning, on waking up, a painter needs beyond his breakfast a sniff of the smell of turpentine. And he goes to his
studio because he needs this smell of turpentine – or, if not turpentine, some oil paint, but whatever the case may
be, it is clearly an olfactory need.” Unpublished radio interview with Georges Charbonnier, Radio–Télévision
Française, January 1961, quoted in Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage From
Painting to the Readymade (USA: University of Minnesota, 1991), 198.
20
Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 133.
21
Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 133.

47
of the inescapable fact of art’s contingency to an act of interpretation, the presence of
the same law demonstrates something qualitatively different. However, where the two
theories conjoin is in their assumption that any attempt at the figuration of the object
by its numerical identity fails because the object is necessarily conditioned by excess.
That is, the operation of painting, and specifically a type of painting that is
foregrounded by its materiality takes place, (and by which we might also say a taking
of place) in both cases outside of the categorical borders of numerical identity.

Because McEvilley interprets the presence of the word “is” within aesthetic discourse
as merely representative of the state of everything, at any given time, painting resides
in a state, in one sense, prior to meaning. That is, prior to being classified as “art.” In
the case of Danto, the only possible legitimisation of the object through the word ‘is’
is by its relation to an act of “artistic identification” that involves “a readiness to
acquiesce in a literal falsehood.”43 Taken this way, and because ultimately for Danto,
“nothing is an artwork without an interpretation,”44 the object necessarily exceeds the
boundaries circumscribed by identity in order to become conjoined to a world of
signification.

Although they approach the task at hand from opposing sides, what both McEvilley’s
and Danto’s observations demonstrate is numerical identity’s unsustainability.
‘Formalism,’ or the theorisation of the object that foregrounds the object's materiality,
works to differentiate the very singularity that painting qua painting ostensibly has.
As such, it passes over the unicity of the object to a system of difference that
consequently inscribes it within plural terms.

This basic opposition in terms of identity’s operation educes not so much the fact that
a theorisation brackets out the possibility for meaning, but more fundamentally that
the actual site of the production of meaning is necessarily contested. The corollary that
we are then presented with centres upon the fact that identity, far from being the
harbinger of the singularity, of indivisibility and of transparency, rubs against the very
grain of the conditions of such a possibility. But it is in this very process that a more
ambivalent formalism, a formalism predicated upon equivocality, is figured.

22
Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 132.
23
Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 132.

48
By now it has become commonplace to discuss the meaning of a work not in positive
terms, but in relation to the difference between any set of terms. However, whilst I
acknowledge the influence of a type of structuralism that was first formulated by
Ferdinand de Saussure, 'difference' here, and a differential model of painting that this
paper, through unpacking the programmatic logic of identity has attempted to sketch
out, would be equally concerned with addressing how painting might "differ from
itself."45

Such a ‘working through’ of numerical identity’s theorisation, a theorisation given

through painting’s materiality, in one sense recasts and requires that we think anew a
basic admission that coloured Rainer Maria Rilke’s own notes on the work of Paul
Cézanne:
“In this hither and back of manifold influence, the interior of the picture vibrates, rises
and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part. Just this for
today…You see how difficult it becomes when one tries to get very close to the
facts.”46

45
See Andrew Blauvelt, Painting at the Edge of the World, Douglas Fogle, ed., (Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre,
2001).
46
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke; trans. Joel Agee. (New York: Fromm International,
2000), 82.

49
 The Special Complicity of Relational Aesthetics

Dean Kenning

Literalism vs. Illusion

Michael Fried, in Art and Objecthood, appears like a man fighting a battle which is
already lost.47 As his own analysis makes explicit, he’s up against no mere formal
deviation but the expression of a pervasive sensibility extending beyond the limits of
the gallery. Minimalism is not bad art, its something else entirely—it’s the antithesis
of art, or at least the antithesis of ‘modernist’ art. Fried accepts the self-definitions of
what he terms ‘literalist’ art—as laid out by Judd, Morris and, less programmatically
Tony Smith—theories which for him form with the work itself an indivisible ideology
of this insidious new condition. Literalist art is 1, against pictorial illusion; and 2,
against the compositional relations of form within artworks. For Judd, of course, the
relational character of abstract art depends upon an underlying a priori system which
betrays a rationalist ideology: at heart it is nature painting. For Fried, Minimalism
crosses the threshold of art by becoming an object: shape becomes synonymous with
object. Modernist painting, on the other hand, aspires to defeat or suspend its own
objecthood through the use of pictorial shape.

Such ultimate discussions about shape are as lost to the contemporary inheritors of the
new sensibility as theological disputes over the number of angels dancing on the head
of a pin. It’s as if the Greenbergian orthodoxy that painting aspire to its limiting
condition of flatness—a logic which conditioned the emphatic or ‘pure’ formal
counter-move of Minimalism (one might even say confined it)—meant that the only
illusion left for the post-painterly abstraction that Fried defends was the illusion of not
being an object. What Fried calls the ‘literalist sensibility’ has, by contrast, been
widely adopted as a kind of ethic. Here the precise opposite of an object clinging to
shape applies: when an artist today produces what we might describe as a convincing
‘world’, it is essential that the ‘trick’ be simultaneously apparent. To use Walter

47
Michael Fried ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Minimal Art. A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock
(Berkely, LA, London: University of California Press, 1995).

50
Benjamin’s terms, this amounts to an artistically constructed world without an aura, or
what could be called an estrangement effect (one is never ‘absorbed’ by the work). It
is essential that the structure and literal qualities of the elements making up the work
be revealed lest the work seem ‘theatrical’ in the sense of appearing like stage
props—the job of which is to create a believable illusion, but which look fake and
unconvincing close up.

The work of Mike Nelson might serve here to exemplify such anti-illusionist worlds.
He produces labyrinthine installations (although the term itself has misleading
associations)48 consisting of a series of interlocking familiar spaces (waiting rooms,
cab-station offices, cinema foyers etc.) which possess a strange intensity once one is
inside—an effect not so much of the objects and their arrangement therein as of the
signs of dilapidation that infect the whole: damp patches, dust on the light-fittings,
frayed carpets, marks on the wall etc. But what we should note is that these effects are
never ‘theatrical’ in the illusionistic sense: the damp, the dust, the pock-marks on the
wallpaper at no point turn into something other. They are what they are, however
close one gets to them. And upon stepping out of the room, or outside of the labyrinth,
one is, as if by an ethical duty, confronted with the timber joists and MDF sheets
which form the sturdy shell of the simulated world within. Nelson’s constructions are
the starting point for Borgesian convolutions—that is to say they are concerned with
how the world is made up of meanings— but I should like to emphasize that Nelson’s
endeavour is one that requires great technical expertise, in the aesthetic sense.

Fried introduces his killer anti-art term ‘theatrical’ to describe Minimalist works and
the ‘situational’ effect they induce, one that includes the beholder by definition and
exists in real time. Literalist art, as Morris says, ‘takes relationships out of the work
and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.’49
However, the wandering around and sizing up of large, unitary objects located within
a gallery room that accounts for what Morris calls the ‘extended situation’ seems very
far from the frozen focus upon the representation of time unfolding within a fixed
duration upon a traditional theatre stage. In his ‘Work of Art’ essay Benjamin writes:

48
Nelson’s ‘worlds’ serve’ to eclipse the white cube gallery space as an active agent, rather than
depending upon it for its meaning and value.
49
Quoted by Fried ibid, p.125.

51
‘a clock that is working will always be a disturbance on the stage. There it cannot be
permitted its function of measuring time’.50 Benjamin is interested in the clock’s on-
screen role whereby, through editing, it can be made to seem as dramatic as any actor,
and thereby demonstrates ‘how matter plays tricks on man’.51 The literalist sensibility
‘defeats theatre’ by showing matter undramatically in ‘operational’, that is natural
time. For example, in his performance Second Hand from 1971, Vito Acconci faced
away from the audience and, as his eyes followed the second hand of a clock, turned
his body in an analogous circle as the hand revolved. Here Acconci renders as literal
as possible the temporal condition that Fried so abhors, the inescapable reality which
the art object and the viewer share.

Traditional theatre is about illusion, precisely what Minimalism rejects, and what
Fried’s modernist aesthetic hangs upon in its rejection of objecthood. On this point,
Fried quotes Greenberg writing about the sculptor David Smith:

To render substance entirely optical…brings anti-illusionism full circle.

Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered the illusion of
modalities: namely that matter is incorporeal, weightless, and exists only
optically like a mirage.52

Anthony Caro takes this development further, says Fried, through a juxtaposition of
elements which escape their own literal, material objectness by a mutual inflection
amounting to a syntax. His sculptures, we should note, do not signify; they
‘essentialize meaningfulness as such’.53 Apart from shape and supposedly non-
naturalistic relations of form, colour offers the modernist artist another means to hold
objecthood at bay. Thus Jules Olitiski optically transforms the literal shape and
material of a sculpture by using colour to focus attention on the surface.

50
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), p.240.
51
Ibid.
52
Quoted by Fried ibid, p.137.
53
Ibid, p.138.

52
If Robert Smithson, in his response to Art and Objecthood called Fried ‘a naturalist
who attacks natural time’,54 perhaps we could add that he is a defender of the art of
illusion who attacks theatre. This is not to play with definitions. The term ‘theatrical’
serves a legitimate function in Fried’s essay as a description of a mode of experience
induced by Minimal art. But it acquires a falsely rhetorical purpose when this
experience is identified with the effect of traditional theatre, enabling Fried to equate
Minimalism with an artistically reactionary ideology anathema to the critical impulse
of modernist art. Fried’s own argument begins to unravel in a final footnote when he
invokes Brecht’s ‘non-illusionistic theatre’ as an effort to defeat duration through
what Fried calls ‘presentness’: ‘a continual and perpetual present’55 amounting to a
state of ‘grace’. Brecht’s non-illusionistic theatre is exemplified, for Fried, by ‘stage
lighting [made] visible to the audience … [by] actors [who do] not identify with the
characters they play’56 and by a new temporality described by Brecht as follows:

It should be apparent all through [the actor’s] performance that ‘even at

the start and in the middle he knows how it ends’ and he must ‘thus
maintain a calm independence throughout’.57

‘But’, concludes Fried,

just as the exposed lighting Brecht advocates has become merely another
kind of theatrical convention … it is not clear whether the handling of
time Brecht calls for is tantamount to authentic presentness, or merely
another kind of presence—i.e., to the presentment of time itself as though
it were some sort of literalist object.

It seems clear enough that what is going on in Brecht is very similar to the aesthetic
imperative of art today which follows in the footsteps of the anti-illusionistic
literalism of Minimalism (whilst being more open to signification): namely to expose
the mechanics in the same time and space as the artificial ‘world’ which has been
54
Robert Smithson, ‘Letter to the Editor’, in The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, (Berkeley, LA,
London: University of California Press, 1996), p.67. (The letter was published in Artforum, where
Fried’s essay had appeared a few months earlier.)
55
Ibid, p.146.
56
Ibid.
57
Quoted by Fried ibid, p.146.Brecht is quoting Schiller against himself.

53
constructed. In this respect it is worth correcting Fried’s somewhat incongruous
summoning of Brecht and Artaud to the team of Caro, Olitski and co. (the defenders
of ‘modernist’ art), to suggest that it is Minimalism, via John Cage, Merce
Cunningham and others, that shares with those heavyweight avant-gardists of theatre,
if not a politics, then at least a certain artistic ethic.

If Fried’s attack on objecthood seems overly defensive, even fearful, today, his
analysis of the modes of attention Minimal art inaugurates offers us an interesting
perspective from which to reflect upon the role of the institution, particularly as it is
embodied by the gallery space. For Fried, the presence of Minimalist sculpture is a
function above all of ‘the special complicity that [the] work extorts from the
beholder.’58 He goes on:

Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder

take it into account, that he take it seriously—and when the fulfilment of
that demand consists simply in being aware of it and, so to speak, in
acting accordingly.59

It is the sense that the Minimalist object resembles a human presence that accounts for
the paranoid-sounding description of its operation:

…the work exists for the beholder alone, even if he is not alone with the
work at the time…Someone has merely to enter the room in which a
literalist work has been placed to become that beholder, that audience of
one—almost as though the work in question has been waiting for him.
And inasmuch as literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete
without him, it has been waiting for him. And once he is in the room the
work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone…refuses to stop confronting
him, distancing him, isolating him.60

58
Ibid, p.127. My emphasis.
59
Ibid, ps.127-128.
60
Ibid, p.140.

54
I would like to compare this harassment, this imposition on the part of the literalist
work with a strikingly similar account of how myth—that is the operation of ideology
in everyday forms—is experienced, as related by Roland Barthes:

Myth has an imperative, buttonholing character…it is I whom it has come

to seek. It is turned towards me, I am subjected to its intentional force…If,
for instance, I take a walk in Spain, in the Basque country, I may well
notice in the houses an architectural unity, a common style, which leads
me to acknowledge the Basque house as a definite ethnic product.
However I do not feel personally concerned, nor, so to speak, attacked by
this unitary style: I see only too well that it was here before me, without
me…But if I am in the Paris region and I catch a glimpse…of a natty
white chalet with red tiles, dark half-timbering, an asymmetrical roof and
wattle-and-daub front, I feel as if I were personally receiving an imperious
injunction to name this object a Basque chalet…The concept…comes and
seeks me out in order to oblige me to acknowledge the body of intentions
which have motivated it and arranged it there as a signal of an individual
history, as a confidence and a complicity…61

Modernist art, for Fried, might be thought of as an autonomous product, which

doesn’t attack one, as it were, upon merely entering the space in which it is contained,
and yet which possesses an aesthetic power to hold you, which Fried describes as the
ability of work to ‘compel conviction’. It doesn’t need the beholder in the way that
Minimalism does. This, however, does not make Minimalism mythical in Barthes’s
sense. Myth takes a form and distorts it through a process of displacement, so as to be
recognised as an essence—in the example quoted the essence of Basquity. The
purposefulness of Minimal art heads in an opposite direction: it functions as a
demonstration—a demonstration of how the world is made up of discrete objects
before being subsumed under a rationalist, anthropomorphizing impulse; the way
perception is embodied and produces, rather than passively receiving, the world
around us. What Fried calls complicity—the situational aspect which implicates the
viewer—Morris calls reflexivity: a phenomenological self-awareness. What Barthes

61
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, ed. and trans. Annette Lavers (Paris: Vintage, 1993), ps.124-125.

55
describes by complicity is one’s powerlessness before an excess of signification: the
motivation underlying mythical form which is passively acknowledged as intended;
there is no freedom to make meaning, to produce signification—which for Barthes is
the ontological definition of man. In its very simplicity, Minimal art—as has often
been said—opens up to the world by instigating a mode of attention very different to
that of compositional, illusionist art. It might even be called a ‘realist’ art. However, it
simultaneously activates the gallery space in a new way. The space where art is shown
becomes present in a way it hadn’t previously been. It becomes, we might say
motivated, infused with the concept ‘art’, able, as if by the magic invested by its
authority, to turn objects into art. It becomes the a priori of art.62 This, rather than the
fact that Minimalism’s forms are concerned to reveal their objectness, and to make
temporality and perception present, is the danger which Fried’s concerns about the
spaces or rooms where Minimal art lies waiting should alert us to.

Relational Aesthetics vs. Form

Relational Aesthetics is a term coined by critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud to

describe and make claims for a range of art, prevalent since the early 90s, the common
denominator of which—for Bourriaud at least—is an involvement with ‘human
relations and their social context, rather than [the production of] an independent and
private space’.63 Two main points should be garnered from Bourriaud’s writings.
Firstly, he sees relational art as continuing the experimental and political legacy of
modernism, while challenging what is seen as the latter’s ‘dogmatism’ and
‘teleological doctrines’. Whereas the historical avant-garde64 wished to usher in a new
world, contemporary relational art places itself within society to create or model
‘micro-utopias’, everyday zones of resistance against the ‘general reification’ of
human relations; or, otherwise put, art is a place where we can ‘lear[n] to inhabit the
world in a better way’.65 Where modernism was ‘based on conflict’, this new version

62
Brian O’Doherty has famously investigated the gallery’s increasingly visible ideological motivation
in his book Inside the White Cube.
63
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (les presses du réel), p.113.
64
Bourriaud does not distinguish between modernism and the avant-garde; in emphasizing its political
aspect, he sees modernism in a more radical light than Fried.
65
Ibid, p.13.

56
of the avant-garde is ‘concerned with negotiations, bonds and co-existences’;66 with
‘inventing models of sociability’, and producing ‘forms of conviviality’.67 Such forms
are often manifested via the set of relations that make up the art world itself: artists,
curators, gallery dealers, collectors belong to what Bourriaud terms ‘a ‘friendship’
culture’.68

The second point to make concerns the sense of the word ‘form’, which as is clear
from what has just been laid out, moves beyond a description of visible marks or
elements held together in an exact arrangement, and into an amorphous field of inter-
subjective, social and institutional relations:

Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between

people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all manner
of encounter and relational invention thus represent, today, aesthetic
objects likely to be looked at as such, with pictures and sculptures
regarded here merely as specific cases of a production of forms with
something other than a simple aesthetic consumption in mind.69

Elsewhere, Bourriaud says that with contemporary practice,

…we ought to talk of ‘formations’ rather than forms. Unlike an object that
is closed in on itself by the intervention of a style and a signature, present
day art shows that form only exists in the encounter and in the dynamic
relationship enjoyed by an artistic proposition with other formations,
artistic or otherwise.70

Such formations in the art world context have, as Bourriaud explains, increased the
importance of such previously marginal phenomena as the invitation card and the
opening.

66
Ibid, p.45.
67
Ibid, p.16.
68
Ibid, p.32.
69
Ibid, ps.28-29.
70
Ibid, p.21.

57
Relational aesthetics clearly comes out of Minimalism’s impulse to ‘open out,’ or, as
Morris put it, to take relationships out of the work and into an extended situation. The
problem with relational aesthetics is not its conception of form as extending beyond
the manipulation of traditional materials, but the fact that Bourriaud pays insufficient
attention to the specific ways that the artistic production of forms (in a more
conventional sense) bring about these formations; that is to say, relational forms
become formulaic in Bourriaud’s theory—to the extent that the emptier, or one could
say purer the form, the happier Bourriaud is to talk about it. The opening in general,
the invitation card, the gallery space, the interactive work, come to exemplify ‘forms’
of conviviality and exchange. There are as many ways to produce an invitation card—
that is to say there are as many forms that it can take through unlimited possibilities of
the combinations of marks, colours and language—as there are to make a painting.
But as the forms become interchangeable in Bourriaud’s relational theory—a
hammock, a Frisbee, a pile of books in a gallery (all representing an opportunity for
‘exchange’)—so the works which illustrate best the relational role that art is seen as
playing in society will be the most insipid.71 It is no surprise then that it is the gallery
space itself which functions as the glue cementing the general benevolence running
through relational aesthetics. The gallery becomes the site of random encounters—
with art works, with people. ‘Art is made in the gallery, the same way that Tristan
Tzara thought that ‘thought is made in the mouth’72 writes Bourriaud, presumably
trying to sound like a materialist but actually reinforcing the performative authority of
the art institution. The paradox of relational aesthetics is that whilst making claims for
a more socially relevant type of practice, the art space itself becomes the zero degree
condition of its functioning. It is not a spatio-temporal presence which infects this
work, as Fried thought in relation to Minimalism; it is the institution which is too
‘present’, but not in any sense of an exposure or critique. To put it into the terms by
which Barthes describes myth: everyday objects, relations and activities—whether it
is a beanbag, a yoga class, or a picnicking Turkish family—are displaced from their
context, deprived of their meaning deriving from their use, and are turned into
‘gestures’; empty forms. These things take on a ‘benumbed look’,73 just as mythical
speech does. They are ‘motivated’, like Barthes’s ersatz Basque chalet—motivated

71
Exemplary for Bourraiud are Rikrit Tiravanija and Felix Gonzales-Torres.
72
Ibid, p.40.
73
‘Myth is speech stolen and restored…It is this brief act of larceny…which gives mythical speech its
benumbed look’, Barthes, Mythologies, p.125.

58
not simply by art but by a concept of ‘relationality’, or ‘conviviality’ etc., not through
the form they take but by the context they are placed in.

Furthermore, relational works must also, as with Minimal sculpture, be, as it were,
‘activated’ by an audience. Because readymade forms and activities do not
demonstrate anything through their sensual qualities of shape, colour, materials etc., it
will not be enough here to simply enter the room where they stand. The usual form the
‘special complicity’ takes in relational art is inter-activity. By interacting, by ‘playing
the game’—often literally—you consolidate the injunction that the form in its art
context has already thrown at you. Through participation you accept the terms and
conditions of the ‘contract’ the artist has drawn up. Relational art needs a response, as
Bourriaud is keen to emphasize—its claims to sociability depend upon it, and by
complying with the offer—by picking up that Frisbee, lying in that hammock, or
making that cup of instant soup—you become complicit in fulfilling the aim that
motivates this work of being ‘critical art’. Such interactivity usually appears forced,
and the inter-human relations they engender self-conscious, mere gestures. In a word,
and despite appearing novel in a context where you are usually forbidden to touch
what’s on display, it all comes across as far too precious, thus reinforcing, rather than
challenging, the notion of the gallery as a zone which is cut off from everyday cultural
activity.

The main trouble with most of the art written about by Bourriaud is the particular
institutional space it exists within. There is a more authentic sense of conviviality and
models for living when the relations under discussion remain limited to groups of
people trying to make art within a limited field, even, or especially, when the group
forms something of a cult. It is only when an audience are invited to ‘participate’ that
such conviviality comes across as false. Despite Bourriaud’s contention that relational
art inherits the mantle of situationism and mail art, its actual zone of existence is not
external to, or on the peripheries of art venues; neither is it the artist-run space, nor
even the commercial gallery but large public galleries and the ever growing number of
international art fairs and biennials. That is to say, this art inhabits what is both a
highly professionalized and exclusive institutional space. This is why the ‘friendship
culture’ that Bourriaud admires can come across as complicit in another sense.
Relational art is, strangely, both obsessed by the institutions of art and reticent about

59
them. What Bourriaud does not consider is how art relates to society first and
foremost through its divided position within the wider culture, and how the art world
itself is defined in terms of hierarchical divisions. Amidst all the talk of mutual
amiability Bourriaud appears wilfully ignorant of the intense and disagreeable
competition that underlies a system where a gallery space suffices to transform
something into art. Such an institutional condition means that energy is increasingly
siphoned from the production of new forms and fed into the efforts to secure a space
to be shown in. There is an interest in all this in not rocking the boat—in not
questioning and in not seeking to transform the institutional conditions of artistic
production. The so-called ‘friendship culture’ of relational art can give the impression
of a complacent mutual appreciation society for the institutionally legitimated. It is
symptomatic in this respect that Bourriaud does not discuss the activities of the 90s art
group Bank, whose output consisted to a large degree in just those forms which
engage with the networks and groupings which were once considered external to the
art itself: the press release, the opening, the invitation, the gallery image, the décor
and curation etc.; the only difference being that Bank used these forms as
opportunities to attack what they saw as the idiocies, inadequacies and contradictions
that are inherent to contemporary art in its broad sense. What is interesting is not the
fact that they exposed these conditions but that they did so through an inventive
explosion of form, using everything from cartoons to sculpture, graphics to language.
Bank were too antagonistic to be part of the relational aesthetics club: they named
names and were rude about people as a condition of forming alliances with who they
considered to be interesting artists; but their production was also far too formally
complex to serve as a formula for Bourriaud’s general theory of relationality. No
opening was ever like a Bank opening, and no Bank opening was ever like any
previous Bank opening. The opening becomes a condition from which work can
proceed, a blank canvas—in the same way that space and duration became concerns
of artistic production in the 60s—rather than a mere fact presented as if it were a
priori good (‘convivial’ etc.). To think of an opening (to use this example) as form,
one must proceed according to the self-critical rule that defines modernism: the
specific opening becomes a reflexive critique and development of the opening as
such. The opening is no longer a backdrop, but neither does it become a means of
purifying art of ‘artworks’—of reflecting in a neutral way that no one comes to an
opening to look at art, but rather to meet people, have a (possibly free) drink and

60
‘network’. By way of analogy, a couple might not sit in the back row of a cinema to
get a better view of the film, but this does not invalidate the efforts required to
produce a film consisting of necessarily specific forms, nor the judgement that would
value one film more highly than another. (If it did then Bourriaud’s theoretical
guiding-light Deleuze would not have produced two volumes of close analysis of
hundreds of films.)74 It is simply the case that, in so far as the opening plays an
important role in the economy and discourse of art, it can become part of the extended
situation; a ‘material’ which artists manipulate and work with.

A Future for Modernism

I would like to finish by emphasizing the difference between the artistic production of
form and the formations which are held together by the performative authority of the
art institution in a gallery space. Michael Fried sensed this authority in talking about
the special complicity which was a function of the room the Minimalist object was
placed in rather than of the qualities of the object alone, but it was artists of the new
sensibility such as Robert Smithson who saw the implications this had in terms of the
need to include within the extended situation of art the ‘apparatus the artist is threaded
through’.75 It has been the case, however, that the investigation of this apparatus has,
through a devious dialectic, reinforced the authority of the institution as a result of
diminishing formal interest. Thinking about form as signification, the way Barthes
did, allows us to get beyond the hollow dichotomy of realism vs form which still
clings to relational aesthetics. The opposition Bourriaud proposes between an art
involved with the real world and a private art work ‘closed in on itself’ no longer
holds if we consider that all form is significant, it produces meaning—which means

74
Bourriaud quotes Godard at the beginning of a chapter in his book Postproduction: ‘If a viewer says,
“the film I saw was bad,” I say, “it’s your fault; what did you do so that the dialogue would be good?”’
(Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, (New
York: Lukas and Sternberg), p.35.) Here Bourriaud continues a misreading, inherited from ‘anti-
aesthetic’ art and criticism, of Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ thesis. Barthes’ conception of literature
being actively produced rather than passively consumed is dependent upon a certain potentiality, or
richness, in the work itself; what it has come to mean for art and art theories since the 80s is a focus on
the ‘myths’ of artistic creativity and originality of art to the detriment of a production of form. The
‘hands’ of the artist must remain clean, even if this means that art is reduced to the status of an
academic demonstration. (From this perspective the legacy of Minimalism is not to open up to the
world, but to become comfortably insular as institutionally ‘correct’ practice.)
75
Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, p.263.

61
that it is inherently social and inter-subjective. It is also therefore historical: there is
no essence of art. As Philip Guston said, after he had started to produce his late mad
(but thoroughly ‘serious’, thoroughly ‘compelling’) figurative work, ‘you can
represent abstract art too’. When art starts to resemble art it becomes mythical.
Barthes understood, likewise, that what had been called ‘realism’ was really only a
‘realism effect’, an arrangement of forms signifying ‘reality’. For Barthes, the
responsibility and politics of art resides in its forms, not in any stated intention. He
writes:

Was it really his Marxism that was revolutionary in Brecht? Was it not
rather the decision to link to Marxism, in the theatre, the placing of a
spotlight or the deliberate fraying of a costume?

Art constantly adopts new forms so that it doesn’t resemble itself—an empty form
motivated by a concept; so that it doesn’t become immediately commodified and its
meanings consumed. This might be one way of thinking about modernism, rather than
as a teleology. In this light, ‘postmodernism’ defines a socio-economic shift which re-
aligns the position art inhabits with wider social and cultural factors. For example
‘modernism’ names a historical set of practices; the ‘avant-garde’ becomes
institutionalized through museums of contemporary art; popular mass reproduced
culture comes to have a more powerful social impact; marketing and mass media
adopt ‘avant-garde’ forms and strategies; etc. Contemporary art continues the legacy
of modernism through a social dialectic of form, altering its frame of formal
possibilities as society itself changes. This is why there can be no formal prohibitions
in art, no ‘limiting conditions’, whether the flatness of a canvas, or what is considered
to be the most socially relevant media (e.g. photography). Modernist art functions as
social critique, or else it is loses its claims to seriousness and becomes, in a definite
sense, not art76—as Greenberg himself saw clearly in his early essay Avant-Garde and
Kitsch. Form is historically contingent.

But along with the invention of new forms which outpace ready made meanings, it is
also necessary to learn the lesson of what we might call Brecht’s vulgarity; his

76
Despite being in a gallery.

62
making brutally present of what goes unsaid. The antagonism of modernism should be
maintained. Before art is too readily embraced as a benevolent network of operators
providing society with models of conviviality outside of the general reification of
inter-personal relations, it must undergo an estrangement technique of its own,
whereby its ‘sore spots’ are exposed.77

77
These ‘sore spots’ might include: art’s relation to money; its social ‘obsolescence’; its cultural
exclusivity; its ‘spectacular’ media reality; its ‘winner-takes-all’ economy of success; etc.

63
 Allegory, Repression and a Future for Modernism.

Alice Coggins

If there is a future for modernism then there might be a critically valid future for
painting due to the demise of formalist modernism being so closely related to the
death of painting. A future modernism requires a re-evaluation of past modernism.
This re-evaluation should not necessarily be limited to formalism or high modernism.
Rosalind Krauss and Matthew Biro have put forward alternative criticisms to
formalism, the roots of which originate during the 1920’s, before the establishment of
formalism as the mainstream. Both Krauss and Biro suggest that the alternatives they
have uncovered have been suppressed by mainstream modernist or formalist critique.
If other critiques existed at the beginnings of modernism, critiques that are very
similar to some post-modern traits, then perhaps modernism and painting ‘died’ only
in one formalist strand of critique. If so, rather than resurrect formalism to find a way
forward for modernism and a critical future for painting, we should perhaps look at
alternatives that existed outside of formalism in order to establish a critical platform
to support this possible future.

To give you a little background, my interest in a re-evaluation of modernism lies in

the effect that this might have on current painting. On my journey through various art
institutions, I have found myself increasingly frustrated by the critical limitations of
painting. Although I agree that painting as a medium might stand alone on formal
concerns, there is also a necessity for a more non-reductive critical validity. Painting’s
death, coinciding with the demise of formalist modernism, has led to the confinement
of recent painting to critically redundant rhetoric and vapid aestheticism, for instance,
paintings such as Mark Wallinger’s ‘Q’ series or Jason Martin’s monochromes. This,
however, leaves the unanswered question that surely painting, due simply to the fact
that so many still choose the medium to express their concerns, deserves a higher
position in current critical circles.

This exploratory paper will outline how a multi-faceted understanding of modernism

may indeed point to its future, and the future of painting, by allowing it an alternative

64
critical history. I support the notion that modernism should be re-evaluated and agree
that modernism has unused mileage but I am not convinced that a reassessment of
modernism should be limited to formal concerns. Exposing unconventional but
continuous strands of discourse other than high modernist formalism may uncover the
survival of modernism and permit an alternative critical future. To this end I will
outline two alternative critical approaches that have been traced and mapped from the
early twentieth century. Approaches rooted before the establishment of formalism as
the mainstream. These two alternative approaches are Rosalind Krauss’s Repressed
Modernism78 and Matthew Biro’s Allegorical Modernism79.

Modernism is predominantly associated with a formalist or Greenbergian

understanding of originality, autonomy and, in terms of painting, vertical flatness.
Rosalind Krauss has reassessed this dominant idea of anti-referential form. She has
done this by exploring a psychoanalytical reading of modernist art in her collection of
essays ‘The Optical Unconscious’ from 1993. During chapter six Krauss analyses
Pollock’s drip paintings. As is well known, she states that a formalist reading of
Pollock was only possible once the work had been raised from its horizontal position
to its vertical position on a wall, it only became painting, and therefore a work of art,
once it had become a vertical plane and it is on this premise that formalism claimed
Pollock’s work for its own80. Krauss argues that this process of raising the horizontal
to the position of vertical has parallels with the Freudian concept of sublimation;
sublimation being the act of the human gaze becoming vertical and therefore
dominant, and about looking, once the human stature had been raised from the
horizontal, or animal gaze. It is this forging between the act of making vertical, and
therefore making a formalist visual plane, with sublimation, that enables Krauss to
claim a psychoanalytical reading for painting.

78
Y-A, Bois & R, Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (L'informe: Mode d'emploi), Centre Georges
Pompidou, distributed in English by The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 1997. L'informe: mode
d'emploi or Formless: A Users Guide is a book/exhibition catalogue written by Rosalind Krauss and
Yve-Alain Bois in conjunction with the show of the same name held at the Centre Geroges Pompidou
in 1997. The book consists of a number of short essays, the titles of which follow in alphabetical order,
creating a dictionary of sorts. This format is appropriated from Carl Einstein’s Critical Dictionary or
Dictionnaire Critique published in Documents 1, no. 2, Paris, 1929.
79
M, Biro, ‘Allegorical Modernism: Carl Einstein on Otto Dix’, Art Criticism, 15/no.1, 2000, pp. 46-
70
80 80
R, Krauss, ‘Six’, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge Massachusetts: October Books/MIT Press,
1993, pp. 242-329

65
Krauss continues her analysis by looking at the work of Warhol and Twombly, among
others, claiming that artists who were influenced by Pollock did not necessarily read
his work with a formalist understanding, that actually, the work was read rather more
subjectively by some and on many different levels by others. Krauss explains Cy
Twombly’s experience of Pollock’s marks as violence. Krauss states, “By 1955
Twombly … had started using the sharp points of pencils to scar and maul and ravage
the … surface of his canvases… He had begun … down the attack route which is that
of the graffitist, the marauder, the maimer of the blank wall. And he had made it clear
that the maimer he had taken as his model was Jackson Pollock”.

Krauss also cites Warhol’s Piss Paintings of 1961 and the Oxidation Paintings of the
late 1970’s as being directed by Warhol’s interpretation of Pollock’s horizontal
painting technique. That Pollock’s dripping and splashing, as she puts it, was read by
Warhol, “as the residue of a liquid gesture performed by a man standing over a
horizontal field … peeing had become [Warhol’s] way of decoding this gesture”. Her
main point being that Pollock’s painting was only read as flat, autonomous, vertical
picture planes by formalist critics and that there were other readings, which take a
different view.

Krauss’s idea of an alternative psychoanalytical reading of modernist art is explored

further in the 1997 exhibition and book ‘Formless: A User’s Guide’. Krauss employs
Georges Bataille’s idea of formlessness or informe to illustrate that modernist art can
be understood psychoanalytically. Krauss reiterates sentiments set out in ‘The Optical
Unconscious’ specifically in her entry H: Horizontality in ‘Formless: A User’s Guide’
but the project as a whole identifies a psychoanalytical alternative to formalism. Not
from a typical post-modern view, but, by returning to the 1920’s and 30’s, from
within the very discourse of early modernism. This alternative critique is named
Repressed Modernism81, repressed not only because of its suppression by mainstream,
or formalist, critique but also because of its employment of the operation of
formlessness.

81
Y-A, Bois & R, Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (L'informe: Mode d'emploi), Centre Georges
Pompidou, distributed in English by The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 1997

66
Krauss uses Pollock again as her example, she states, “In the name of the
unconscious, Pollock wished to strike against form, and thus against the axis of the
human body” which reiterates the concept of sublimation: the raising of the horizontal
to the vertical, but here she goes one step further stating that “equally in the name of
the unconscious, Pollock needed to strike against culture”. Krauss describes the
striking at the body, by raising the canvas, as the vertical axis and culture as the
horizontal axis. It is in “attacking the axis” by striking at it with paint that Pollock
“undermines” both form and content. It is here that Krauss suggests that the formless,
or informe, operates.

Bataille’s informe, in the context which Krauss employs it, is an operation

destabilising form from within, displacing both form and content. Krauss illustrates
her use of informe with Twombly’s picture ‘The Italians’ from 1961, in which
Twombly’s fragmentation of the body demonstrates the displacement of form and
content.
.
In a nutshell then, Krauss’s deconstructive manoeuvre, using Bataille’s informe to re-
evaluate modernist art, has suggested the possibility that there were alternative forms
of modernist criticism other than formalism.

I am now going to introduce another suggestion supporting alternative modernist

critique which has been put forward by Matthew Biro. This suggestion concentrates
on the idea of allegory and appropriation. In Biro’s paper ‘Allegorical Modernism:
Carl Einstein on Otto Dix’, Biro reveals a critique of modernist painting as
essentially, “appropriationist”82 and “represententational” which is, needless to say,
on an opposing platform to formalism. Biro’s paper is specific to the history of the
Weimar Republic in the 1920’s and 30’s and thus differs from Krauss in this respect.
Krauss maps her Repressed Modernism across the twentieth century and the
conclusion of ‘Formless: A User’s Guide’ suggests how the informe might operate in
current art. Biro’s project, not being as extensive, leaves us with the task of applying
his Allegorical Modernism to more recent practice. Nevertheless, Biro’s methodology
is similar to Krauss in that, through his analysis of Einstein’s article on Dix, he has

82
M, Biro, ‘Allegorical Modernism: Carl Einstein on Otto Dix’, Art Criticism, 15/no.1, 2000, pp. 46-70

67
identified an alternative to formalist critique, not from a post-modern point of view
but, like Krauss, from within modernist discourse during the 1920’s and 30’s. What
is interesting here is that Bataille and Einstein were editors and main contributors to
the short lived Parisian journal Documents, published during 1929 to 1930, the
significance of which is of current concern. Documents, particularly Carl Einstein’s
contribution, has been reviewed in the periodical October no.107, in 2004,
predominantly by Rainer Rumold83 and Charles W. Haxthausen84, and the Courtauld
propose to hold a conference in June discussing the use value of the magazine85.

Just as Krauss explored Bataille’s notion of informe in order to establish a

psychoanalytical line of critique, Biro explores Einstein’s notion of allegory to reveal
a representational mode of modernism. Biro acknowledges the importance of Walter
Benjamin’s definition, where allegory is a dialectical device which depicts the present
and future by referring to or appropriating the past, dialectical therefore by looking
forward and in the same moment looking back86. Biro uses the phrase Allegorical
Modernism in reference to Benjamin, in order to name the dialectical form of
representation that he has uncovered in Einstein’s analysis of Dix. In general allegory
is a term attributed to a style that involves a literal or symbolic representation.
According to Biro, Benjamin’s definition of the term involved a “modern and secular
mode of representation”. The nature of Benjamin’s allegory is to combine various
historical perspectives in order to “undermine” a linear reading of history. That
separate fragments of the past define an understanding of the present. Fragments that
are inaccessible, lost and mourned as a time better than the turmoil of the present and
the vision of the future. This type of allegory, Biro argues, is essentially modern as it
attempted to halt historical “narrative movement”. Biro writes, “Benjamin suggested
that a growing subjective sense of the world made a feeling of separation from the
past fundamental to the experience of modernity”..

83
In particular R, Rumold, ‘Painting as a Language. Why Not? Carl Einstein in Documents’, October
107, Winter 2004, pp. 75-94, for analysis of Einstein’s informe or verformen and his critique of
Picasso, Braque and Masson.
84
For further reading on Benjamin and Einstein see, C. W. Haxthausen, ‘Reproduction/Repetition:
Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein’, October 107, Winter 2004, pp. 47-74
85
‘Bataille/Einstein/Leiris: The Use Value of Documents’, 23-24 June 2006 conference at the
Courtauld Institute of Art, organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its
Legacies in collaboration with the University of Nottingham and the Courtauld Institute of Art
86
M, Biro, ‘Allegorical Modernism: Carl Einstein on Otto Dix’, Art Criticism, 15/no.1, 2000, pp. 46-
70

68
Einstein employed Benjamin’s concept of allegory to enable a representational
critique, concluding that Dix’s work was an allegorical response to and a
representation of the turmoil of a modern age, the contemporary moment of the
Weimar Republic. To quote Biro, “Through critical representations of the
contemporary moment, and the constant evocation of multiple traditions from which
they indicated partial distance and separation, [Einstein and Dix] hoped to imagine
new forms of identity and society commensurate with their experience”. Biro suggests
that Einstein and Dix viewed their contemporary moment as a sick “period oriented
toward glorifying both body and commodity” and they illustrated this “by linking
painting and mass culture and by using fragments torn from different historical
contexts to stand as signs of larger constellations of meaning”.

Take for example Otto Dix’s ‘Big City’ triptych from 1927/28. It is allegorical in
Benjamin’s terms as it depicts a fractured present by referring to lost fragments of the
past. For instance, the fact that this work is a triptych depicting a secular scene is a
direct reference to the loss of religion after the First World War. Through devises
such as this, and the media used, Dix refers to the practice of German Renaissance
artists and through critical realism Dix could be said to follow in the tradition of
Hieronymus Bosch and Goya.

Biro concentrates on the idea of the fragmentation inherent in Allegorical Modernism

being a “melancholy and retrospective mode of representation” which “longed for a
past in which the world was still whole”. Qualities he then goes on to attribute to
contemporary post-modernism. If we compare Otto Dix’s paintings with some current
practitioners, Muntean & Rosenblum for instance, or perhaps Martin Maloney, an
Einsteinian analysis might be applied, although this is by no means a link without
difficulties.

Martin Maloney paints scenes from everyday life, anecdotes that are colourful and
mixed with tragedy. In Maloney’s painting “Rave (after Poussin’s Triumph of Pan)
from 1997. Maloney states, “I was thinking of the 17th Century Dutch group portraits

69
and I wanted to work out how that sort of painting would be painted now”87. This is a
painting of contemporary scene coupled with the reference to past forms of
representation, in this case 17th Century portraiture.

In Poussin’s original the figure of Pan takes centre stage performing as the central
allegory. The representation and embodiment of debauched, Godless behaviour. In
Maloney’s picture Pan has been deleted. The omission of Pan from his painting
suggests that contemporary culture is itself a symbol of debauchery and Godlessness
and therefore does not need a literal representation. A reference to a 17th century
painting is more than enough to illustrate the point.

Maloney’s ‘Rave’, read with Einstein’s allegorical critique in mind, becomes a

dialectical representation of the banality of contemporary life. Dialectical precisely
because it uses the past in order to depict the present. Not only does Maloney employ
easily accessible forms of contemporary visual language such as mimicking the flat
colours of magazines and advertising, but also Maloney’s treatment of his
contemporary subject is similar to that of Otto Dix.

Both Dix and Maloney’s pictures show human interaction on a superficial level. Both
are pictures of the artist’s contemporary urban culture and both speak of something
uncomfortable, something missing. Einstein identified the something missing in the
paintings of Otto Dix as the mourning of history, the separation of contemporary
modernity with the past. In Benjamin’s allegorical terms, separate, inaccessible,
fragments of a lost past, mourned as a better time than the fragmented banality of the
present and outlook for the future. As Biro puts it, “Dix’s allegorical modernism …
was a project of representing a simultaneously disintegrating and reconfiguring
present by means of broken and appropriated forms. Critically crossing the boundaries
between fine art and mass culture”.88

This application of Benjamin’s allegory to the paintings of Otto Dix at the early stages
of modernist criticism suggests another alternative discourse, very different from the

87
Press Release for Solo Exhibition and artists talk held at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 28th January
to 11th March 2000 http://www.doffay.com/artists/maloney/maloney_press.html
88
M. Biro. “Allegorical Modernism, Carl Einstein and Otto Dix^, Art Criticism, 15/no 1, 2000, pp. 46-
70.

70
formalism we have come to associate with modernism. I think one of the most
interesting aspects of Biro’s Allegorical Modernism lies with using the appropriation
of fragments of the past to depict contemporary culture. If appropriation, most
commonly attributed to post-modernism, can be found within modernist discourse
during the early part of the twentieth century, then there might be a possibility that
this appropriationist strain of modernism, continued in some form into post-
modernism, where it became a predominant critical and practical device. Ultimately
suggesting that strains of modernist discourse were perhaps continuous, survived and
have a future.

To sum up, these two forms of alternative criticism, that I have just outlined, which
originate from within early modernist discourse: Krauss’ Repressed modernism and
Biro’s Allegorical or appropriationist modernism, could bolster the opinion that
modernism is closer to post-modernism than is generally accepted.

If it can be demonstrated, using these deconstructive methodologies, that modernism,

from its inception, was as multi-faceted and fractional as post-modernism, then the
suggestion that post-modernism is an outcome or continuation of modernism and not
a complete turnaround and disavowal of ideology may become the accepted model.

My main point is that, although the mainstream formalist ideology which has defined
our understanding of modernism for so long, has been crushed by post-modern
thought, alternative streams of modernism, other than formalism, may have in fact
continued into and formed part of what we now understand as post-modernism.
Modernism by the back door, as it were. I think that there is enormous scope here, not
only for critical and theoretical research, but also for practice. If painting and its
critique can be traced through alternative modernisms to today then perhaps there is
not only a future for modernism, but a critically valid future for painting also.

Notes
I would like to thank Dr Steven Adams for his comments on this paper

71
 A Future for Formalism?

Catherine Ferguson

Because, from an artist’s point of view matters of form are necessarily pressing
whether conscious or not, the hope must be that there can be a mode of discourse that
is relevant to the inevitability of those formal concerns and, for me, relevant to the
activity of painting.

As a student reading essays by Greenberg was valuable because of the overwhelming

sense that he was referring to experience and not to a distant body of theory that
painting merely illustrates. This was exciting because I was convinced by the idea that
the process of making art should be primarily experiential rather than a matter of
communicating statements derived from a world of ideas far removed from the studio
– a dominant position when I was first a student.

Having said this, what seemed to start off as empirical and open seemed to turn into
the imperative to judge according to an a priori aesthetic; with the declaration of
flatness a necessary condition for success. It seemed to me that the emphasis on
immediate judgments of value was to close off other perceptions because of the
requirement to conform to a set of a priori principles.

Not wanting to be rid of the formalism that got me interested in Greenberg’s writing
in the first place but feeling the limitations of, what became for me, Modernist
rhetoric Yve Alain Bois’ collection of essays from the 90s Painting as Model seemed
to provide a way forward. In the lengthy introduction to that book he makes a clear
distinction between Greenberg’s formalism which he terms ‘Idealist’ and a formalism
which the essays in that book demonstrate which he calls ‘Materialist’. The
distinction rests on form as a set of relations that pre-exist projection (in Greenberg’s
case) and form as a set of relations that are produced by the work and which are
inseparable from its other aspects. This is implied by Bois’ mentor Roland Barthes
when he wrote:

72
 ‘The formalism I have in mind does not consist in “forgetting”, “neglecting”,
“reducing” content… but only in not stopping at the threshold of content…content is
precisely what interests formalism, because its endless task is each time to push
content back… to displace it according to a play of successive forms.’89

As Bois demonstrates his ‘materialist formalism’ is the investigation of what counts

as form in a specific work; a process that includes inventing or importing theoretical
models, in part or whole, from other disciplines; what he calls a ‘right-to-store-up’
policy. The important point to make is that the interpretative model does not come
first but a problem that the work itself raises so that the model is used to determine
that problem more fully, not to represent the work but to become more intimate with
it. The implication is that form as a set of relations that are produced by the work can
only be established by an enquiry into the problematic nature of the work; into
precisely what cannot be given.

I am going to follow Bois’ example by importing ideas developed in the study of

biological evolution to consider a question raised by Tim Renshaw’s painting which
has led to me to re-visit the work of Bernard Frize.

I find this painting, Hotel by Tim Renshaw, intriguing because it appears to have been
planned in advance of being made leaving little room for visual invention along the
way. Yet, for me, the painting produces something very opposite as if, paradoxically,
prescriptive guidelines create something that can’t be prescribed. It is as if there is a
‘principle of formation’ internal to the work so that decisions about materials and
process are not immediately ends in themselves but establish the conditions of
possibility for sensible happenings to emerge in an indirect way outside of the artist’s
control.

Despite the very different modes of construction and appearance Frize’ paintings from
the late 1990s have a similar sense that materials and process have been decided in
advance and that within this combination there is embedded a sort of code that
structures the interesting, sensible, things that happen as the work unfolds.

89
Roland Barthes, ‘Digressions’ in The Grain of the Voice, p115

73
The idea that there might be an invisible code which generates form from the inside
suggests that a theoretical model borrowed from genetics might be useful to
investigate the nature of what could just be a fanciful idea. Furthermore, concepts and
models drawn from evolutionary research have been developed with scientific rigour
to examine how individual organisms mature and diversify over time. It may be a
stretch but if paintings could be said to express the species of cultural production
known as a Western pictorial tradition, as organisms within that species, individual
paintings could be discussed as if they both have relations with that tradition and also
with the environment in which they ‘mature’. The purpose of referring to biology in
this way is not, strictly speaking to make an analogy with art in a global sense but to
address local questions that concern individual paintings; a methodology that adopts
Bois’ right-to-store-up policy.

Most people are familiar with a general idea of Darwin’s theory of natural selection:
an organism that is best suited to survive in its environment will be able to pass on its
advantageous form in reproduction. Subsequent scientific discoveries (the discovery
of DNA, for example) have inevitably changed evolutionary studies but two important
principles continue to underpin what has become known as neo-Darwinism:
mechanism and finalism. Finalism posits a direction to evolution towards greater
complexity which is a process that is causally explained by the mechanism of natural
selection.

With reference to Greenberg’s often caricatured essay ‘Modernist Painting’ a parallel

could be drawn, perhaps, with the finalism implied by the teleology of purity and the
mechanism of self-criticism whose rationale ensured the functionalism of form in
securing that end(?)

Thus the challenge to neo-Darwinism which comes from the field of biosemiotics
could provide a way of thinking of painting without these conditions which impose on
form a transcendent purpose. As the name suggests biosemiotics has introduced
theory from cultural studies into scientific study. In their papers on the semiotic
metaphor in biology Emmeche and Hoffmeyer approach a critique of natural selection
by questioning the logic of such a mechanism as a way of understanding how new

74
forms are generated90. They argue that formal diversity cannot be produced by an
incremental process based on the gradual improvement of function because this
mechanism only modifies patterns already given. This is to suggest that natural
selection is not enough to determine what new life forms will develop - only those
that are not viable. They argue that the creation of new form is actually the creation of
new formal patterns not substances. Accordingly, for biosemiotics, the organism is
not formed by obeying the command of DNA as if it passively receives instructions.
This is not to deny the importance of DNA but to argue that its importance is to
inform the system about itself in such a way that its development involves the
subjective interpretation of information from its environment. Thus DNA is
understood within an alternative concept of information which is based on difference.
The number of potential differences that surround the system is infinite, however, so
that for differences to become information they must first be selected by some kind of
‘mind’; the recipient system. For example, reading is a response by the sensory organ
of the eye to multiple differences in ink and paper, not to ink itself. Information is
conceived of as difference that makes a difference to the recipient. In this case
information is not substance or energy but ‘news of difference’ or a sign.

This is difficult to grasp because which comes first the chicken or the egg? The
system forms itself dynamically by interpreting information in the course of its
development, but how does it come to know which differences to select? Emmeche
and Hoffmeyer suggest the idea of genetic code-duality to account for this. This
duality consists of a phase of the code that is digital which re-describes the system as
a set of structural relations in space and time, it is the ‘memory’ of the system; and a
phase of the code that is analogue according to which this memory is expressed by the
selection of actual differences from the environment by which the organism develops.

This model seemed to have the potential to unravel the sense of this work as
generating what can’t be planned in relation to what can. This painting Staircase
Living by Renshaw could be called abstract but only for want of a better word because
it does not demonstrate Modernist values – more visual than aesthetic, perhaps. A
connection can be made to the Western tradition but using what vocabulary? How can

90
‘Code-Duality and the Semiotics of Nature’

75
this connection be understood as specific to this work? Looking at the painting the
system that is re-described seems to involve figuration on some level, most noticeable
the inverted T shapes. The sense of figuration is indirect and momentary, however,
because the clear spaces are the absence of inscription and a break in the pattern of
repeated ‘units’ rather than drawn figures distinguished from a ground. Line no longer
determines inside and outside or indicates a viewpoint but is passive as the boundary
of one surface meeting another. The lines of a smaller scale fragment the surfaces so
that they don’t so much capture light as become surfaces of inscription (like a page)
and, along with the repeated units (like writing with no symbolic or iconic meaning)
signify the act of inscription itself. According to this logic, other conventions of
Western painting have also lost there original function in the analogue phase: the
difference in scale of the two ‘figures’ does not depict space but signifies the
‘memory’ of spatial illusion; chromatically and tonally the brown and yellow modify
one another reciprocally to create luminosity as a differential rather than spatial
relation. I am suggesting that the digital code re-describes the Western pictorial
tradition as a system of differences whose components relate to one another to create
meaning but it also re-describes painting as a system that creates non-meaning –
demonstrated here by the refusal of a figurative function and by the act of inscription
that inscribes nothing: a ‘non-meaning’ that is actually the repetition of a system that
in the creation of meaning creates visual excess that cannot be captured by the
interpretative apparatus.

This is not simply a matter of playing with conventions and negating meaning, which
would itself be a meaning and which would be to conceive of painting as a closed
system of concepts bounded by knowledge and recognition. The realisation that the
code-duality model gives is that the idea that the work has a plan is in fact a fiction
born of the desire to represent the experience of the work in spatial terms (so that a
plan comes ‘before’ a painting as a sort of antechamber in the imagination).
According to the temporal conundrum of code-duality the conscious decisions can be
thought of as implicated in a past but not as an object preceding and separate from the
work. Rather this past is an impersonal past encoded digitally which belongs to the
interior of the work that is expressed in an exterior environment that is both co-
existent and not fixed so that the ‘unplannable’ is in principle included at the outset.
This is not the unplanned as a set of unforeseen possibilities based on probability but

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an unplanned that could never have been planned. We could say that the unplanned is
what cannot be functional. The biosemiotic model rejects a mode of formal
development based on functionalism. Instead organisms are understood to evolve as
self-organising, self-referring systems or ‘autopoietic entities’. The ‘unplanned’ (in its
lack of functionality) is the site of formal development; it is the expression of the
system in its interpretation of its environment – not a reference to that environment
but an interpretation for the sake of the system itself; so that for painting, perhaps, this
development moves towards a visibility beyond any function of interested vision.

This may be speculative but if information or knowledge is based on difference then

information is created by selection not reception. In the creation of knowledge we also
create non-knowledge which is the unselected. Deleuze makes a related point in his
discussion of Bergson’s work when he notes that for Bergson, ‘perception is not the
object plus something, but the object minus something, minus everything that does not
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interest us.’ . Looked at with this in mind the sense of looking without purpose or
conclusion, a disinterested vision, seems to involve being forced to think beyond
perception, beyond experience if that is defined as conceptual recognition which,
paradoxically, in Deleuze’s terminology is to operate as ‘sign’; as something that can
only be felt or sensed.92

Paintings by Bernard Frize demonstrate this idea in a different way to Renshaw’s (for
example, Unmixte, 1999, Otona, 2002). What connects these two painters work is the
sense that a strategy has been developed in which inventiveness is separated from
process: as if invention becomes a function of code-duality: a memory of painting
interpreted by materials and process rather than invention expected from an empirical
memory which is more likely to be limited as a repetition of forms rather than their
underlying structural relations. In contrast to Renshaw’s use of oil paint Frize has
designed a process that depends upon the most up-to-date painting materials. It’s
difficult to see from a slide but first hand what is most striking about the paintings is
the surface which is perfectly smooth and continuous, almost like that of a
photograph, which contradicts the evidently painted patterns. It is technically difficult

91
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, p25
92
An full discussion of this can be found in Daniel Smith’s essay ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation:
Overcoming the Kantian Duality’ in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p32

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to create a surface like this because it is not possible to paint wet into wet and lose the
texture and thickness of a brushstroke whilst retaining the image unless the different
properties of ground and paint are carefully worked out in advance. Unless the
viscous ground has a firm consistency it will be displaced by the pressure of a brush.
The paint on the brush must be fluid enough so that the brush gives it up and the wet
ground must be viscous enough to hold together during the painting process. Here, in
the process of drying the pigment sinks into the ground which captures the image of
action but also removes its texture; the brush strokes have been done quickly and
mechanically with no attention to ‘touch’ - all of which creates an indirect or
mediated brushstroke which makes the paintings seem impersonal, as with
photography there is an in-built indifference to the ‘subject’ in relation to the medium.

However, this trickery is not post-modern irony as processes and materials are not
aesthetically redundant signifiers. Clearly Frize’ painting could not have been made
without the technically sophisticated resin that covers the white surface at the outset
which gives a particular visibility to the surface. The pictorial depth of Old Master
painting depended upon a certain ‘invisibility’ of the painted surface, Frize turns this
around by making the fact of paint and brush explicit but, rather than destroying
illusion, the literal participates in an illusion; the illusion of its own lack of substance.
This move revolves around the expectation that the paint has been applied onto a
surface and that the trace produces both image and a thickening of the surface. The
causal relation which associates what is given in experience to what cannot be given
in experience is damaged.

This lack of a causal relation is significant in the way the relation between the planned
and the unplanned was discussed in Renshaw’s work. Just as we could not expect the
‘plan’, the set of decisions made before the painting was started to have caused
Staircase Living or Hotel because that idea imposed a narrative that misrepresented
the nature of the interior and the exterior of the work as the before and the after, we
cannot understand the painting to be simply caused by the painter’s action. From the
point of view of the model of code-duality, then, the question is what memorised
description of painting as (open) system is translated to the physical actuality of Frize’
painting?

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The claim that the painting references art historical/critical practices and discourses
such as expressionism, and the anti-formalist practices of the 60s which emphasised
process and performance would usually go unchallenged. This may be a form of
‘Darwinism’, however, in that such comments are, ultimately, often made in order to
contain the work according to interpretative interests established from the start, rather
than what the art historian and teacher of Bois, Hubert Damisch would see as the
opportunity to ‘…allow oneself to be educated by…[the work]’93. So that if, on the
other hand, such connections to other practices are made from the perspective of
biosemiotics the relation between the work and its outsides becomes a point of
enquiry rather than given. According to biosemiotics a species develops in a physical
environment that is filtered or transformed by the living system according to what is
important or ‘significant’ to it (in what the 19th C ethologist von Uexkull terms its
own Umwelt or objective world)94. Therefore living systems that live in the same
physical environment do not live in the same Umwelt. Accordingly, rather than the
causal logic of natural selection (for which the environment is a given) the living
system develops by a process of semiosis (or sign-action) which is a process of
communication between itself and what is significant to it. Looked at from this
perspective Frize’ painting interprets only what is significant to it from the range of
practices that could be said to exist.

One idea could be that the digital aspect of the code re-describes painting as system
which forms a relation between convention and invention. We could take the
interpretation of expressionism as a difference in the environment that makes a
difference to this re-described system (as if expressionism is a ‘perceptual sign’ rather
than a causal impulse). As a general concept expressionism is not, however, a
difference that could be selected by the system from its environment but an identity
(or substance if we refer back to our earlier discussion). But as a discourse, both
verbal and visual, constructed from dialectical terms (relations of opposition) it
becomes open to interpretation: immediacy/mediation, nature/culture,
arbitrary/motivated, spontaneity/premeditation. Through the materials and processes
the digital code is translated in its analogue phase: ‘immediacy’ is well-planned, the
‘expressive individual’ becomes various studio helpers that execute the drawings, the

93
Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p262
94
Paul Bains , ‘ Umwelten’, p138

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felt and purposive gesture is upstaged by the arbitrary flow of paint, the loaded
(gendered) subject becomes an everyday motif or a pattern.

In a complex essay on the work of von Uexkull Paul Bains makes a distinction
between human and non-human use of signs which is significant here because what
also needs to be said is that the interpretation of ‘expressionism’ that I suggest as one
‘perceptual sign’ (amongst others I’m sure) becomes separate from its terms. The
sense of the painting is affirmative of its own systematic unity (in an open not closed
sense) as an autopoietic unity; expressionism or even the idea of post-modern irony
are ideas that could be associated with the work but the work neither affirms nor
negates these meanings – they remain external to it.

As Bains explains, what characterizes human language is the ability of signs to be

transferred from one object to another; they become infinitely ‘mobile’ rather than
‘adherent’. However, I am not arguing that the painting communicates linguistically
as if the painting creates signs that can be read in terms of a meaning system that
precedes or is outside the work. On the contrary the idea is that signs are created by
the (open) system by virtue of its autopoietic nature; so that a perception formed
outside the work, so to speak, (such as a brushstroke) is undone by the work. If the
perception ‘brushstroke’ is ‘something minus everything that does not interest us’
then the sign is the inclusion of everything that perception does not see. It is as if what
the painting system interprets is not perceptions but pre-perceptual intensities that no
longer adhere to perceptions but are made mobile by the work.

With this paper I have taken Bois’ ‘materialist formalism’ as my point of departure. I
have tried to demonstrate a mode of analysis that begins with the specificity of
painting or more precisely a problem that it specificity raises. The use of a theoretical
model from a different discipline has provided the opportunity to think about the
operations of the work, what it does, rather than to establish grounds for judging what
it is, how good it is and so on. The usefulness of this methodology from a painter’s
perspective is as a form of criticism but not directed towards the work so much as
towards the values, assumptions and clichés which always seem to threaten the ability
to act creatively in the studio.

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 Notes on Contributors

Stuart Bradshaw trained at the Slade School of Art and has taught at Chelsea and
Hull. He is a painter and lectures in Fine Art at MMU.

Alice Coggins is a research student who studied painting at Winchester School of Art,
and has an MA in Fine and Applied Art. She is doing her PhD at The University of
Hertfordshire and lecturing in Art and Design ay North Hertfordshire College.

Matthew Collings is a painter, broadcaster and art critic. He is a regular contributor

to Modern Painters and the author of “This is Modern Art”, “Blimey – From
Bohemia to Britpop” and books on Sarah Lucas and Ron Arad.

Catherine Ferguson holds a Master’s degree in art theory from Chelsea School of
Art, where she currently teaches, and is completing a PhD on Deleuze and painting at
MMU. She is a practising painter who lives and works in London

Dean Kenning is an inter-media artist and writer based in London, completing a PhD,
which looks at idiocy in political and aesthetic terms. He is a visiting lecturer at
UCCA Canterbury and has written for Art Monthly, Modern Painters and Art Review.

Dr Craig G Staff is an artist and writer, lecturing in art history at the University of
Northampton and the Open University. His research interests include contemporary
painting and the issue of modernism, as well as 15th century Renaissance painting and
theory

Dr David Sweet studied painting at the RCA in the sixties and completed a PhD on
Michael Fried at the University of Essex in 2003. Currently he runs the BA Fine Art
programme at MMU where for several years he was Head of Painting.

Information on Copyright

The copyright for each paper is owned by the individual contributor.

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