Harris Writing Back to Modern Art ~ After Greenberg, Fried and Clark

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.Modernist criticism, I shall argue, is the artic-23 ulation of this division between part and whole, sign and meaning, the24 visible and invisible, object and subject.Listen to Ernst Cassirer, for25 instance, declaring in 1918 that the principle of an artwork s coher-26 ence , as in any scientific inquiry, was to be found in the resolution of27 the subjective and objective factors.This was a principle2829 according to which we have some totality of consciousness,30 perhaps some general cast of mind, from which all factors should31 be seen to follow.In aesthetic feeling a totality of conscious-32 ness and its powers is discovered, which is prior to and is a basis33 for all analysis of consciousness into individual, reciprocally34 connected propensities.In each of these two modes of thought the35 whole with which it is concerned is so seen as not to appear as36 if put together of its parts, but as if it is itself the source of its37 parts and the grounds of its concrete determination.112 [My italic.]3839 Are there shades of neo-Impressionist scientism here, in which the40 pointillist dot is revealed to be the true means of showing reality? Shades,1 too, perhaps of Heidegger s fears of the groundlessness of modern art?37I NTRODUCTI ON1 Merleau-Ponty, puzzling away at C�zanne s attempt to paint the means2 of seeing, asks doubtfully, like Heidegger, after the proof of knowing3 the truth of what we know [Plate 3].Could it really be the highest4 point of reason , he speculates, to realize that the soil beneath our feet5 is shifting, to pompously name interrogation what is only a persistent6 state of stupor, to call research or quest what is only trudging7 in a circle, to call Being that which never fully is? 113 The Latin8 concept of the complexum significabile significant object represents9 an analogous attempt, carrying strong metaphysical connotations, to10 think the unity of subject and object.Medieval scholars invented the11 term to try to give substance meaning to certain ideas that, though12 they lacked physical referents, were still considered to be important in13 the world.For example, it was held that God had thought the exist-14 ence of the world before the world came into being: its weighty existence15 as an idea in His mind should therefore be recognized.114 Tableau is16 a kind of complexum significabile, and its achievement in modern art,17 though inveterately promised, will remain for Clark though not18 Greenberg or Fried unrealized.All three are believers in modern19 art s critical complexities, but the good complexity of Greenberg20 and Fried posits an occluded totality that is the sign, finally, of the21 sublime, subject-centred, positive, humanist tradition.Clark s bad22 complexity , in contrast, posits an occluded totality that is the sign23 of contradiction, even incipient meaninglessness; it is subject-decentred,24 anti-humanist , negating and episodic or conjunctural.It specifically25 resists the historicist attractions of a notion of enduring tradition and26 evolution in modern art.Despite this abyss between them, how-27 ever, Greenberg s, Fried s, and Clark s critical complexities all inherit28 an enlightenment model of human emancipation metaphorized in29 aesthetic (that is, critical) sensibility and in modern art.115 The following30 chapters might be said to anatomize moments within this metaphoric31 model.32 Consider again Richard Wilson s 20:50 [Plate 9].Disorientation33 seems to be one of the artist s goals.Wilson had made earlier versions34 of this installation, which in some fundamental sense really is an idea35 that can be realized in a variety of spaces without loss to that idea s36 integrity and significance.From Fried s position (which I set out further37 in Chapter 2) the qualities of this installation, and the presumed inten-38 tions of its originator maker seems problematic when used about an39 idea put the artwork beyond, after, and against modernism in a funda-40 mental way.Greenberg, Fried, and Clark all decide, though in different1 ways and for different reasons, that modernism came to some sort of38I NTRODUCTI ON1 end in the 1960s.This was a matter of what the aims of artists became,2 and why, and how, they had changed.It was also a matter of a changed3 culture of writing about art the Conclusion will explore these changes4 through a final case study.5 Installation art, or that art which Fried in 1967 called literalist ,6 is art of an object in a situation, and one which, virtually by definition,7 includes the beholder.20:50 requires, for example, the presence of a8 beholder literally physically in the work for its purpose to be realized.9 The minimalist objects created in the mid- and late 1960s had these10 qualities.Robert Morris, one of Judd s contemporaries, said that this11 new work took relationships out of the work and makes them a12 function of space, light, and the viewer s field of vision.116 Such13 work Fried condemns as theatrical his chief term of critical oppro-14 brium. Theatricality functions within a sequence of terms he mobilizes15 in order to set what he calls modernist art against literalism. Presence16 is another term Fried also used negatively, though it is rather con-17 fusingly close to the positive term presentness which he applies to18 great modernist painting or sculpture.I come to the detail of these19 terms and their usage in the next two chapters.Fried s fundamental20 claim is that literal or theatrical art is both part symptom and part21 cause of the sensibility or mode of being which is corrupted or22 perverted by theater.117 It is hard not to see a whole social order indicted23 here on ethical, if not political, grounds, though Fried stops short24 of this.25 In his Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the26 Age of Diderot (1982), Fried provides a hint that his notion of theatri-27 cality shares something with Clark s situationist critique of the society28 of the spectacle.For the philosopher and proto-art critic Denis Diderot,29 writing before the French Revolution, Fried asserts, the object-beholder30 relationship, the very condition of spectatordom, stands indicted as31 theatrical, a medium of dislocation and estrangement rather than of32 absorption, sympathy, self-transcendence.The future of painting and33 drama depended, for Diderot, on whether the painter and dramatist34 would be able to undo that state of affairs, to detheatricalize beholding35 and so make it once again a mode of access to truth and conviction.11836 A parallel social criticism, I believe, permeated Fried s own perspective37 on culture and society around 1967 when he began to use the term38 theatricality about developments in contemporary art and the wider39 culture [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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