Journal of Visual Culture

This article explores the relations between philosophy, criticism and art history in the work of Arthur Danto, on the one hand, and Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried on the other, arguing that in the 50 years since the publication of ‘Art and Objecthood’, that essay’s terms of argument and expression have become increasingly hard to make out.

Fried’s assertion that Constructivism was a source for Minimalism is supplemented by Donald Judd’s interest in Suprematism. By reading Judd’s review of Kazimir Malevich’s 1973 exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum, this article locates similarity between the two artists’ fascination with painting’s inbuilt objectness that drove them into three-dimensional art. Judd’s reading of Malevich’s work that the author supplements with her own historical analysis reveals that Fried’s characterizations of Minimalism as theatrical, reliant on a viewer, and not interested in ritualizing a single painting, was accurate. Another theme of this article is Judd’s realization – shortly before his death – that damaged Soviet objecthood, a leftover of the Suprematist Utopia, was an antithetical partner to ‘Specific Objects’.

In ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), Michael Fried articulates an uncompromising rejection of the theatre. His critique reaches as far as to expel the theatre from the realm of the arts and excludes it from the Modernist project. However, he exempts two theatre vanguardists from his argument, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, who in his view developed anti-theatrical strategies as part of their aspirations to reform the theatre. This article examines whether Fried’s inclusion of Brecht into his anti-theatrical paradigm was justified or whether it was mere appropriation. It furthermore probes into Fried’s category of anti-theatricality within the conceptual framework of Brecht’s dramaturgical reflections and its validity as a key marker of Modernism.

In this article, the author explores the metaphysical underpinnings of Fried’s Art and Objecthood (1998[1967]) in order to tease out its reliance on several of the tenets of conservative art criticism: Plato’s theory of forms, Kant’s aesthetics and the unquestioning acceptance of subjectivity and representation. He argues that it is due to these investments that Art and Objecthood fails to come to terms with the condition of art in the age of advanced technology and virtual (simulated) reality. This argument develops by means of clarification of three key concepts: simulacrum, theatricality and truth.

In this article, the author uses a key moment in Michael Fried’s essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ – Fried’s reference to Tony Smith’s car ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike with his Masters of Fine Art students – to think about the possibilities offered to art education by psychoanalysis. In considering Smith’s experience and Fried’s interpretation of it as instances of both pedagogy and Winnicottian ‘use’, the author allows this analogy to echo and expand throughout three different pedagogical moments in which she has put ‘Art and Objecthood’ to use within her teaching, and back through to Sigmund Freud’s idea of ‘after-education’. In this article, she asks: How have I used Fried’s text? How, in turn, do art students use it? How and why do we as teachers and students use theory? What does all this using tell us about art education and the academy? And, ultimately, what is the role of psychoanalysis within art education?

The title of this article alludes to Jacques Lacan’s text ‘Kant avec Sade’ (1963). With that in mind, the author compares Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood (1998[1967) to Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, also published in 1967. Whereas Fried unleashes his criticism against ‘the condition of theatre’ and its mounting presence in the realm of visual culture, Debord accuses spectacle of ‘becoming a life style’, endorsed by power structures and fuelled by the media. Chances are that neither art nor objecthood, but rather the spectacle itself is ‘the chief product of present-day society’. Or should we agree that human beings are homo theatricals, for whom ‘the condition of theatre’ is an inalienable part of their ‘social contract’. Among the issues discussed here are ‘Heterotopia of the spectacle’ (e.g. play within a play) and the ‘theatrical drive’, which plays a fundamental role in balancing the rivalry between libido (Eros) and the ‘death drive’ (Thanatos) in the playhouse of our psychic life.

One of the striking aspects of the trenchant legacy of Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ is its status as a piece of art criticism. Widely perceived as difficult and personal, philosophical and explicatory, doxa or sermon, the essay stands out. To explore its singularity, this article compares Fried’s conception of the period criticism of 18th-century French painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and the method of criticism enacted in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) which he saw as connected. The author pursues this and other crossings between Fried’s art historical writings and art criticism, tracking it to an extended endnote in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002). ‘Art and Objecthood’ is a key essay in this story aimed at Fried’s thinking about criticism, its history, theory and practice. Doing this matters because it puts the critic in a particular relation to art and to Fried’s idea of an ‘ontologically prior relationship between painting and the beholder’.

This article considers the small run of experimental films made by Robert Morris in the years immediately after the publication of Michael Fried’s essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’. The author argues that Morris’s films were a form of reply to the essay and enact, on screen, many of the issues at play in the discussions between Fried and Morris and other Minimal artists from the time, such as theatricality, the mobility of the viewer and medium specificity. With the films by Morris as a starting point, the article goes on to consider parallel concerns within Structural Film and the historical and aesthetic crossovers between sculpture and the then new concern with cinematic media. As such, the author explores the cinematic condition of sculpture after Minimalism and the ways in which images ‘moved’ within the cultural and economic discourse of what was then contemporary art.