Brecht’s Anti-Theatricality? Reflections on Brecht’s Place in Michael Fried’s Conceptual Framework

Fried’s Definition of Anti-Theatricality

Fried’s persistent elaboration of the theatricality/anti-theatricality paradigm first originated in his seminal 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, a controversial critique of Minimalist sculpture, targeting in particular the aesthetic approaches of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Tony Smith and Donald Judd, which Fried attempted to sideline from the achievements of what was then known as post-painterly abstraction. Minimalist art was to be excluded from the Modernist canon because it supposedly pursued aesthetic operations and values that he saw as most at home in theatre: illusion, Naturalism, presence, spatiality, durational temporality and subjectivism. And yet, while the primary aim of ‘Art and Objecthood’ was to demonstrate the aesthetic superiority of Modernist pictorialism over Minimalist sculpture, what soon took centre stage in the course of the essay was the exploration of a pejorative definition of theatricality that for Fried stood in diametrical opposition to Modernist sensibility. The rhetorical apparatus that he built as part of this exploration consisted of multiple layers of oppositions and binaries that spiral towards denying Minimalist sculpture any Modernist qualities, and what is more, the status of an art form altogether. Implicit in this argument was also an idea of theatre as a universal kind of phenomenon that precluded any kind of historical development, innovation or Modernist potentiality. Fried’s argument involved the following steps:

One might assume that Fried’s condemnation of the theatre – a condemnation articulated in the name of the avant-garde, yet clearly reverberating ancient traditions of Western anti-theatrical prejudice as propagated by Plato and Rousseau in the name of philosophy, reason and civic responsibility ⁴ – that this universalist rhetoric would prohibit any further consideration of the Modernist potential of theatre, but it is precisely at that point that Fried remembers Brecht, irrefutable representative of theatre and Modernism at once. Yet rather than questioning the impasses that might have arisen from this inference, Fried, without hesitation, moves on to incorporating Brecht into his canon of anti-theatricality:

The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than within theatre itself, where the need to defeat what I have been calling theatre has chiefly made itself felt as the need to establish a drastically different relation to its audience. (The relevant texts are, of course, Brecht and Artaud). (‘Art and Objecthood’: 139–140, emphasis in original)

Fried does not go into great detail to illuminate his self-affiliation with Brecht and I will not have the space to demonstrate the commonalities that could indeed be pointed out, most importantly their respective pursuit of an aesthetics of the tableau. ⁵ Instead, the focus of this article will be on the incongruities between Brecht and Fried when considering the prime aesthetic concern in Fried’s critique of theatricality, which as Jacques Rancière (2009: 14) has put it, relates to a reformulation of the Modernist quest for the aeshetic principles of self-sufficiency, coherence and autonomy. It is Fried’s achievement to have shifted the emphasis from the artist’s concentration on the medium to the position of the beholder, a position that is to be situated outside the art work. Disturbed by the power of address exerted by Minimalist sculpture – an entirely new experience of frisson between the art object and the viewing subject – Fried contests such aesthetics of beholder inclusion and posits instead the idea of beholder exclusion as a crucial Modernist achievement. It is this notion of beholder exclusion as a positive marker of Modernist sensiblity that emerges as the strongest momentum of Fried’s anti-theatricality argument in ‘Art and Objecthood’ and that will serve as a platform for my comparison to Brecht.

Minimalism and the Position of the Beholder

I will now turn to the passages in ‘Art and Objecthood’ in which Fried, by negative extrapolation, articulates his conception of Modernist art as a form of practice that posits autonomy by way of excluding the beholder. This will be the basis for an enquiry into the question of whether such a notion of beholder exlusion could be seen to correspond to the spectatorial reforms undertaken by Brecht, in particular his demand for spectatorial distance, which at first sight appears to have affinities with Fried’s thinking. But can the notion of ‘beholder exclusion’ really be equated with Brecht’s notion of ‘spectatorial distance’?

Fried’s plea for an aesthetics of beholder exclusion was originally provoked by a statement of the Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, summing up Minimalism’s ground-breaking achievement in a reorientation from the self-referential, framed conditions of Modernist art to an aesthetic object that thematized and manifested its relationship to the beholder. The conceptual framework of Modernism was challenged by what Fried identifies as beholder inclusion:

… whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder: ‘The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision. The object … is in some way more reflexive because one’s awareness of one-self existing in the same space as the work is stronger than in previous work, with its many internal relationships. (‘Art and Objecthood’: 125, emphasis in original) ⁶

Rather than concentrate on an aesthetic relationality delimited within a frame, Minimalist artists set out to construct larger aesthetic situations that thrived on the tensions between art work and beholder. Spatial environment, art object and spectatorial subject were staged in an intricate dramaturgy that heightened the self-awareness of the beholder and their relation to the art work. The aesthetic situation thus created came to incorporate the viewer and only through that very incorporation did the art work become complete. In ‘Art and Objecthood’, Fried problematizes this dependency on the spectator as a foundation for Minimalism’s reductiveness, its lack of autonomy and self-sufficiency. Instead of providing a rich texture of intrinsic relations that the viewer may have deciphered from within a clearly bounded frame, Minimalist sculpture prompted the beholder’s attention to shift to themselves and to the relational tension arising between themselves and the art work. Poor in aesthetic content and pleading for the beholder’s attention, to Fried, such art relied on a populist appeal, raising the spectator’s sense of self-importance, as if his encounter with the Minimalist art work, existed entirely for him alone. ⁷ Such new fusion between art object and viewing subject, Fried argued, was synonymous with the essence of theatrical performance: ‘For theatre has an audience – it exists for one – in a way the other arts do not; in fact this more than anything else is what Modernist sensibility finds intolerable in theatre’ (p. 140, emphasis in original).

Whilst fine art carries within itself an axiomatic autonomy that is inherent to its genre, theatre and the performing arts only have an existence at the time of their presentation to an audience. For that reason they are always already tarnished by the expectations of an audience, thus Fried’s claim: the artist’s intentions are from the start corrupted; the critical and innovative impact of the art work is always already defused.

Theatricality and the Notion of Inclusion

And yet – whether deliberate or not – Fried’s discussion is more subtle than that. His description of Minimalist sculpture reveals a notion of ‘inclusion’ that is more interesting than it is perhaps intended to be; it is complex and full of contradiction. In some extremely nuanced passages in which Fried aims to get to the essence of the particular aesthetic effects that he experienced in the face of Morris’s sculpture, he describes the relation which Minimalist sculpture solicits from the viewer, not simply as a case of ‘inclusion’, but in fact as a mixture of different, if not conflicting and dialectical nuances, ranging from complicity and communion to aggressiveness and obtrusiveness:

… the presence of literalist art … is basically a theatrical effect or quality – a kind of stage presence. It is a function, not just of the obtrusiveness and, often, even aggressiveness of literalist work, but of the special complicity that that work extorts from the beholder. (‘Art and Objecthood’: 127, emphasis in original.)

While Fried’s ‘not only-but’ rhetoric concludes from firstly ‘obtrusive’ to secondly and more importantly ‘complicit’, his actual description of Minimalist sculpture reveals that the discomfortingly aggressive aspect by far seemed to have dominated his aesthetic experience. Indeed, it is difficult to discover the sense of communion that Fried refers to and which also Brecht would have found objectionable. ⁸ Rather, for Fried, the sense of contact seems to have been one of unexpected shock, disrupting receptorial habits and assumptions, plunging him into an uncomfortable self-consciousness. Although he finds himself locked into an unwilling relation with the art work, that relation is full of tension and contrariness. It is not one of identification and consent:

In fact, being distanced by such objects is not … entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly – for example, in somewhat darkened rooms – can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way. (‘Art and Objecthood’: 128, emphasis in original)

To those familiar with the Brechtian vocabulary, the terminology that Fried employs here cannot but evoke notions reminiscent of Brecht’s theory of alienation and the concept of distanciation (Distanzierung), which similarly entailed a moment of disquiet. But what Fried seems to have in mind when he speaks of ‘being distanced’ does not mean detachment, or removal into a distance (as Brecht’s Distanzierung would have entailed). On the contrary, it involves an uncomfortable and excessive kind of intimacy. The aesthetic framework of the art object suddenly seems to devour the beholder, imposing a distance between the self and the art work in the form of an acutely sensed relation between those two points. Where Fried had come to the gallery expecting to behold art objects that offered a relationality internal to the artwork, he, himself, now becomes ensnared into a relationality with the art work. The art work reaches out to him, invades, ‘crowds’, as Fried says, his space. Jacques Lacan’s term of ‘extimacy’ [Extimité] captures well the dialectical tension experienced in that relation, a distance that constitutes separation and infinite closeness at once. ⁹ The object is ‘placed’ in the spectator’s ‘way’, ‘not just in his space’ writes Fried (p. 127). This erases a safe and so far unnoticed distance that the viewer had taken for granted, feeling certain to be the master of the process of beholding.

Expectations of a particular receptorial contract that was to be one-directional have become violated. Whilst the viewer had approached the process of beholding as one of extending him- or herself through the gaze towards the object of art, grasping it, examining it, taking ownership of it through the act of looking, the art work now extends itself back confronting the viewer with a discomforting kind of reciprocity, with a sense of being seen and being possessed.

Minimalist sculpture thus reverses the spectatorial direction and opens it up to both sides. Michael Newman’s illuminating extrapolation of the operations of the Lacanian concept of the ‘evil eye’ in relation to the aesthetic condition of theatricality explains well the mechanism that Fried experiences as disconcerting:

… here it is a case of the relation of beholding to being beheld, the being in the Gaze that is the condition of looking, the source of which one does not see. This Gaze can turn malign and demanding, even horrifying … Effectively the Gaze turns the spotlight on the subject who is thus placed on stage, in a theatre of cruelty. (Newman, 2011)

The disturbance that emanates from the Minimalist art work is even more pointed as it constitutes at first sight a simple geometrical object that could not be more abstract or further removed from any subjective agency. Yet it is precisely that lack of content, a sense of hollowness and a size that is levelled to human eyesight which conjures up the uncanny and confusing experience of Morris’s sculpture looking back at the beholder. Ultimate objecthood oscillates with an experience of subjecthood, abstraction with aura, evident emptiness with evocative interiority, visibility with invisibility. Those ‘dialectics of seeing’ in Minimalist sculpture have been brilliantly elaborated by Georges Didi-Huberman in his book Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992). The kind of subjectivity that the beholder experiences as looking back at them is that of an object as a ‘silent subject’ which returns its gaze, looking back at the viewer, confronting them with an emptiness, ‘un vide’ that far from opening up any discursive connectedness, withdraws syntax, offering only silence: ‘it is that human silence, the interruption of discourse, which instigates fear; that “accompanied loneliness”, inflicted on us by the presence of the dying or the mad’, writes Didi-Huberman (1992: 90, my translation). The aesthetic effect is that of a dialectical kind of visuality in which the act of seeing implies a loss: ‘it is the place, in which looking means losing and in which we are looked at by the object of irrevocable loss. It is the place of the Uncanny’ (p. 179, my translation).

In the experience of being looked at by an object – by an invisible gaze that withholds dialogue – a sense of self-consciousness emerges in the viewing subject. That sense of self-consciousness is closely associated with the experience of paranoia. Fried articulates this notion very poignantly when he describes the art work literally as a harasser; a stalker who has been waiting for the beholder with persecutory intentions:

it has been waiting for him … And once he is in the room the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone – which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him. (Art and Objecthood: 140, emphasis in original)

In sum, Fried’s description of what he terms Minimalism’s plea for beholder inclusion and more specifically, his critical notion of distancing, thus involves an uncomfortable displacement of the subject as an unquestioned beholder to a subject that experiences itself as being beheld by a subjectivity it cannot see, producing a sense of self-consciousness that Fried defines as theatrical. In critical reaction to the Minimalist move towards including the beholder into the aesthetic operations of the art work, Fried thus posits as a prime demand for Modernist art a conscious exclusion of the spectator, so that undisturbed attention could return to the appreciation of the art work alone. If the starting point of ‘Art and Objecthood’ may have consisted in the defence of a framed kind of pictorialism, the outcome entailed a new aesthetic value defined by beholder exclusion. What may have been an unconscious expectation to begin with, a kind of tacit receptorial contract between art work and viewer, namely that the spectator could contemplate the qualities of the art work from a separate and autonomous position, had been seriously injured and therefore was to be carved out as a new principle within Fried’s art historical vocabulary and the discourse of art theory at large.

But how does this attempt to assert the notion of untouchable beholder exclusion, which secures the integrity of a supposedly autonomous gaze, relate to Brecht’s rethinking of the actor–spectator relation in the context of Modernist theatre practice? Is the autonomous distance advocated by Fried identical with the distance pursued by Brecht? If for Fried the notion of distancing is pivotal to his definition of anti-theatricality, implying a destructive reciprocity of the gazes in the aesthetic rapport between art object and viewer, can we find a parallel in Brecht’s thinking?

Brecht, the Gaze and Alienation

In order to investigate these questions, I will turn to some of Brecht’s theoretical notes, in which he draws attention to the operations of the gaze as one of the devices of his alienation-effect (Verfremdungs-Effekt). In response to a performance by the Chinese actor Mei Lan Fang in 1935, Brecht published an essay ‘Alienation-effects in the Chinese art of acting’, which allowed him to elucidate the operations of his new technique of alienation. Chinese acting, here, substantiates the possibility of an anti-mimetic acting technique that succesfully prevented the workings of Naturalism, staving off the spectator’s identification with the actor. The question of the beholder’s autonomy is in the foreground as it would be for Fried in 1967. And similarly, Brecht advocates an aesthetics of distance. Yet, whereas for Fried such aesthetics of distance, or what he termed ‘exclusion’, are incommensurable with what he called distancing (the return of the gaze to the spectator), Brecht’s very first example of an alienation-effect alludes to precisely an aesthetic operation that resembles closely Fried’s pejorative notion of distancing, namely the actor’s direct address of the spectator:

The Chinese actor doesn’t act as if there was a fourth wall apart from the three walls that surround him. He shows that he knows he is being watched. At once, any sense of illusion familiar from the European stage is removed. No longer can the audience have the illusion to be an unseen spectator present at an event that truly takes place. As a result, a rich technique of the European stage – concealing the fact that the scenes were constructed so that they could be comfortably viewed – this technique becomes redundant. (Brecht, 1993, XXII.i: 201, ‘Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst’, my translation)

Brecht emphasizes the importance Chinese actors assign to the scenography of their gaze, sometimes markedly observing their own gestures, as if they were their own audience, and sometimes looking out into the audience, making eye contact with the spectator:

The artist clearly expresses that he knows he is being observed. He observes himself. For example, whilst representing a cloud – its unexpected appearance, its soft and strong development, its rapid yet gradual changes – he, every once in a while, looks out to the spectator as if he wanted to say: isn’t it just like that? (Brecht, 1993, XXII.i: 152, ‘Bemerkungen über die chinesische Schauspielkunst’, my translation)

The crucial point in this employment of the gaze is the disruption of the spectator’s identification and the achievement of spectatorial distance:

The artist’s device of observing himself, an artificial and artful act of self-alienation, prohibits an identfication so extreme that it leads to the spectator’s loss of self. It creates a magnificent kind of distance to the dramatic actions. (Brecht, 1993, XXII.i: 202, ‘Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst’, my translation)

The actor, looking back at the spectator, unleashes indeed the same effect as the Minimalist art work, which is to be evaluated as constructive. It disturbs the spectators in their absorption into the art work. Whilst it ‘includes’ by way of an inter-subjective address, it also creates distance to the object of art. The intermittent inclusion into the art work through the gaze prevents an inclusion that Brecht considered to be far more dangerous, namely the spectator’s unconscious inclusion into the unquestioned ideological premisses of aesthetics. So what do these excerpts on Brecht’s aesthetics of alienation tell us about the in/congruities between Fried and Brecht’s respective notions of theatricality?

Brecht and Fried’s Notions of Distance

Whilst Brecht’s Modernism intended indeed, as Fried claims, to restructure the relation between representation and beholder, contradictions emerge between both theorists in the aesthetic operations that achieve spectatorial distance. More importantly, divergences become apparent in what they actually mean by spectatorial distance. The terms of distanciation (Brecht) and distancing (Fried), as well as Fried’s notion of beholder exclusion shed light on the fundamentally contrary aesthetic orientations that prevail between the two thinkers.

Fried strictly wants to see any stimulation of self-consciousness prohibited. He rejects Minimalism’s innovative achievement of an aesthetics that returns its gaze, thereby drawing attention to the viewer’s sense of self within the receptorial process. The sense of subjective agency perceived in the Minimalist object, which reaches out and stops spectators in their tracks, must be curtailed as it creates a disquiet so intense that it disturbs any reflective capacity. Fried’s beholders do not want to be seen in the process of beholding. They do not want to become entangled in an attempt to make sense of their own relation to the art work. Instead, they want to give uncompromised attention to their reflection on it. The direction of beholding is determined by a one-way system that flows from the beholder to the object of art. Theatricality comes into play when the purity of that one-way system is disturbed.

Brecht, on the other hand, in his aesthetics of alienation, welcomes the momentary sense of self-consciousness triggered by the art work returning its gaze. His aesthetics, therefore, are more closely aligned with Minimalism than with Fried’s striving for beholder exclusion. The device of the actor gazing back at the spectator constitutes a moment in which the audience is reminded that they are not alone in their experience of the fiction that unfolds before them, but that they form a participatory component within the optical apparatus of the theatre. Aesthetics confidently look back at the beholder. The self-consciousness raised in the audience is instrumental to disrupting the flow of absorption that draws them into dramatic illusion, holding them captive there. Brecht thus proposes a two-way system of the gaze. The audiences concentrate their gaze onto the actor’s performance as the object of representation and the actor might at moments look back into the spectators’ eyes, making them aware that they are being seen. In that sudden encounter of the two gazes, it is not an identificatory inclusion that takes place, as Fried would define it pejoratively with the notion of distancing, but what Brecht aims to accomplish here is what he calls distanciation (Distanzierung). The viewer is momentarily removed from the internal relationality of the dramatic tableau. The closure and coherence of the framed fiction that crystallizes on the other side of the proscenium and that unfolds on a disembodied plane within the mind of the viewer, breaks open and reminds the viewers of their own presence as a witness of a real event. The momentary locking into inclusion facilitates politico-aesthetic freedom. It is precisely here that Brecht’s attempt to awaken his audience’s alertness and active participation within aesthetics becomes most tangible. It presents the foundation of a sociologically politicized understanding of aesthetic production, in which each participant – be it on the side of production or that of reception – critically reflects on their position and role as a co-producer of the aesthetic event. Fried’s ideal of receptorial solitude or freedom cannot have any place within that political framework of Brechtian aesthetics.

The kind of disquiet that is indeed noted by both theorists as a response to the gaze, for Fried, destroys distance, collapsing objective spectatorship into an intersubjective short circuit that may only distract from the actual superficial vacuousness of the art work. But for Brecht, the intervention of the gaze constitutes a means of the alienation-effect, facilitating distance as detachment. Through the confrontation with the Other, the audience are pulled out of their absorption and prompted to return to themselves in order to think more critically about what they witnessed. The gaze facilitates an opening onto another viewpoint of the dramatic tableau, releasing the dialectical complexity that Brecht was after. The potential for such a device lies in the dual nature of acting; the schism between actor and role; between the fictional character and the more enigmatic subjectivity of the actor.

Brecht: Theatricality Is Modernist

What Fried bemoans as a concealed subjective element in the Minimalist object – deceptive because of Minimalism’s explicit claim for pure objecthood – and what Didi-Huberman conceives of as constitutional for a dialectics of seeing, such dialectics in the epic theatre are deliberately pried open, so that the actor as a subject and as a creator of the role could be perceived as separate from his creation of the character. Rather than doing harm to it, Brecht considered such a dialectical split as invigorating and energizing to the receptorial process. Indeed, it points towards the existence of a positive notion of theatricality in Brecht’s theatre, which was first recognized by Walter Benjamin and which acknowledges the self-consciousness of the medium as a sign of Modernity, rather than the opposite as Fried suggests:

The naturalistic stage … is a thoroughly illusionistic one. Like any other dynamic stage, it must repress its self-consiousness of being theatre. It is unable to use it productively. By contrast, epic theatre … incessantly derives a lively and productive consciousness from the fact that it is a theatre. (Benjamin, 2003[1964]: 4)

Here Benjamin refers to a notion of theatricality that must be distinguished from what Fried meant and he points to the anti-illusionistic devices that intended to remind the spectator that they were located in a theatre rather than being transported to a distant location represented on the scene: open costume changes, exposed stage technology, the device of the semi-high Brecht curtain, but above all, the self-consciousness of the actor. All these devices were markers that emphasized the mediality of the medium, creating a form of theatricality that unmasked the theatre by a distinct lack of concealment. ¹⁰

But if Benjamin’s positive definition of theatricality, a definition that is founded on the self-consciousness of the medium, implies a constructive destabilization of illusion, what does that entail for Fried’s concept of anti-theatricality and its supposed critique of figuration and illusion; what does it say about Fried’s definition of Modernism?

I would argue that those aspects of Fried’s critique of Naturalism, which are the starting point of his attack on Minimalism in ‘Art and Objecthood’, become superseded by the question of the beholder’s position. Whether art is figurative or abstract, naturalist or anti-illusionist matters less than the position that the spectators see themselves occupying in relation to the art work. In other words, ‘Art and Objecthood’ is less a critique of the reemergence of illusion in Minimalist aesthetics than it is the propagation of an aesthetics of beholder exclusion. Whether Fried’s spectator beholds an abstract non-figurative sculpture or becomes immersed into a naturalistic figurative painting is not the mark of distinction; what in fact matters, is that the beholding subjects can experience themselves in that process of reception as unquestioned observers, fully focused on the art work and undisturbed by an anxiety of becoming an object of observation themselves.

Brecht’s ‘theatrical’ device of turning the self-consciousness of the medium inside out as a way of controlling the flow of theatrical illusion thus stands in opposition to Fried’s anti-theatricality paradigm. Their at first similarly appearing demands for spectatorial detachment can be revealed as being situated at the opposite ends of aesthetics through their contrasting evaluations of what they mean by the terms distancing and Distanzierung.

This also makes it possible that from ‘Art and Objecthood’, Fried could move on to writing his 1980 study Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, constructing a longer continuum from the pictorial figurative naturalism of the 18th century to a defence of 20th-century abstract Modernism, and beyond that, in Why Photography Matters, to the photographic tableau as the most recent example of an overriding aesthetic defined by the striving for beholder exclusion.

In Absorption and Theatricality, Fried examines the striving for anti-theatricality in the context of mid 18th-century French painting and art criticism. Whilst in ‘Art and Objecthood’, Fried had intimated that anti-theatricality enabled the autonomy of the beholder in the appreciation of abstract non-figurative work, in Absorption and Theatricality, anti-theatricality is shown to facilitate absorption into figurative painting. De-theatricalization is achieved by artists, such as Chardin, Greuze, Van Loo and Vien by arranging figures in a way that they avert their gaze from the beholder. The simultaneously literal and metaphorical introversion of the figures is combined with a form of composition that unifies all the different pictorial elements, creating a sense of stillness that arrests the beholder before the painting. What is crucial to such anti-theatrical composition is the fiction that the figures, represented on the canvas, exist alone in their pictorial world, untouched by the gaze of the beholder. Fried argues that it is this aspiration for aesthetic self-sufficicency that constitutes a persistently robust theme defining Modernity all the way into the 20th century and with the photographic tableau even into post-Modern contemporary arts. Such an aesthetic scheme involves an hermetically closed structure that seals off the space of the art work from the space of the beholder, thus enabling the spectators to fully immerse themselves into the art work. Only the observers who feel unobserved may fully devote themselves to the task of aesthetic reflection.

The main theoretical voice referenced in Absorption and Theatricality is the Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot. In his early dramaturgical writings, ‘Conversations on the Natural Son’ (‘Entretiens sur le fils naturel’, 1980[1757]: 83–162) and ‘On dramatic poetry’ (‘De la poésie dramatique’, 1980[1785]: 323–427), Diderot had articulated an hierarchy between fine art and theatre – between the pictorial and the theatrical – that corresponds closely to Fried’s preferences in ‘Art and Objecthood’. It is precisely in these writings that Diderot inaugurates the aesthetic dispositif of the fourth wall that will become crucial for a longer tradition of naturalism in Western culture. That Fried’s inclusion of Brecht into his canon of anti-theatricality constitutes a case of appropriation becomes perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the references that both theorists make to the fourth wall, which we have already encountered above in Brecht’s ‘Alienation-effects in the art of Chinese acting’. The core idea of Diderot’s trope of the fourth wall involved the highly problematic demand that the actor actively forget the presence of the spectator, imagining a fourth wall in place of the proscenium that opens out to the auditorium (‘De la poésie dramatique’, 1980[1785]: 373). Fully absorbing himself into the illusion of the dramatic action, he would thus plunge the spectator along with himself into the fictional world of the play.

For Brecht, the trope of the fourth wall epitomized one of the most problematic foundations of European naturalism, an aesthetic legacy characterized by the pursuit of falseness, political inefficacy and the passivity of the spectator, issues which he addressed, exposed and contested throughout his work. For Fried, the fourth wall represents a prime aspiration that continues to determine Modern aesthetics from the 18th century to today, sealing off the space of the beholder from the space of representation so as to facilitate absorption. Distance, which for Brecht is the interruption of an absorption into the art work, is thus the opposite of what Fried means by beholder exclusion. Brecht is not a Friedian anti-theatricalist, but the advocate of a kind of theatricality that leads to detachment in the theatre.

But how does the previous discussion contribute to our understanding of the place of anti/theatricality within a discourse of Modernity? I hope to have demonstrated that ‘theatricality’, at least in the thinking of Brecht as one of Modernism’s key theorists, needs to be considered as a lead concept rather than as an aesthetic failure or antidote to Modernism. To return to Puchner’s (2002) initially referenced hypothesis of Modernist theatre turning against itself, this may be true in so far as Brecht conducted a systematic auto-critique of the aesthetic and political conditions of the medium itself. But, I would argue, this typically Modernist impulse implied of a move of turning the medium inside out rather than turning it against itself. It certainly did not involve an overcoming of the medium in its totality as Fried suggested. The distinction is significant because what we end up with is a positive Modernist category of theatricality, one which could be described as hollow (von Held, 2011: 60, 72, 77), but which nevertheless constitutes an aesthetic device that is constructively employed in the theatre as a strategy of Modernist intentions. Whilst Brecht was critical of the theatrical legacy of naturalism, his vision of theatre as a genre was grand and took stock of many historical turns and forms: it allowed him to be astutely critical of certain ‘theatricalities’, most importantly the one associated with fascism, but it also allowed him to carve out a highly idiosyncratic kind of theatricality that became identified with the sensibilities of Modernism itself.