Minimalist Art vs. Modernist Sensibility: A Close Reading of Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” Merve Ünsal In his seminal essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried contends that Minimalism does not belong in the modernist narrative. Through a close reading of Fried’s essay, this paper argues that Minimalism would probably have been accepted as a part of modernism absent the convincingness of this essay. I reach this conclusion because the Minimalists’ main premise was that their ideas were a natural progression within the modernist genealogy, and the only convincing way to refute this premise was by exposing, as Fried did, the separation of the Minimalist work from modernist conceptions by using the Minimalists’ own vocabulary. Viewed in this light, the power of criticism in contextualizing movements in art – in this case Minimalism – emerges as a clear conclusion, especially when such criticism is strongly rooted in essentialist notions, in this case those of Clement Greenberg.1 In “Art and Objecthood,” Fried does not seek to discount Minimalism, but rather argues that Minimalism is essentially at odds with the modernist sensibility. Stripped of the modernist vocabulary, Donald Judd’s statement that “[a] work only needs to be interesting” becomes problematic for Minimalism.2 In order to understand this problem, it is necessary first to define Minimalism by the very terms provided by Minimalists, and in so doing, to note that these terms were first born from conceptual concerns of its primary practitioners such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd. The Minimalist Vocabulary Morris and Judd were central in formulating what came to be called Minimalism, starting in 1963, both by working on pieces that played with previous notions of three-dimensional works.3 However, Morris and Judd traced the beginnings of Minimalism to different sources and articulated varying motivations and intentions. While the two artists’ work converged formally, they were derived from different sources. In particular, while Judd and Morris both highlighted shape, they derived the notion of shape from different media — painting and sculpture, respectively. I propose that Minimalist works were a self-proclaimed development based on modernist art, whereas modernism, defined by Greenberg and furthered by Fried, is actually marked by a continuous progression and medium-specificity that Minimalists did not acknowledge in their claim to modernism.4 The foregoing observations are illustrated in the following examples of their work. Judd and Morris’s works considered within the scope of Minimalism are marked by a relationship to the viewer and to the space that they inhabit. An early example of Judd’s work from this period is Untitled (box with trough) (1963), which is a bright red box that is comparable in size to a large desk (50 x 115 x 78 in.). The work does not look additive; the red box has a solid, unified form and yet the viewer gets a sense of hollowness through the trough-like opening; the box has an inside that is distinguished from the outside of the box, i.e. the gallery space.5 Robert Morris, around the same time, exhibited five rectangular beams at the Green Gallery. The rectangular beams occupied and animated the gallery space: viewers could stand under one of the beams or lean against one of them. Morris utilized the corners, the ceiling, the floor and the walls of the room to support and frame the beams that enveloped the viewers.6 Thus both works animated the gallery space and became a visual narrative involving the viewer, illustrating the formal convergence referred to above. Despite practicing common formal elements, however, the two artists had differing views on the conceptual source of these elements. Judd believed that behind his work was a heterogeneous range of examples, ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Marcel Duchamp to Frank Stella.7 In his new work, the viewer sees a Duchampian ready-made or a Dada object at once and not part by part. Rauschenberg’s goat with the tire is a “beginning” as the painting does have a third dimension, projecting into the viewer’s space. Early monochromatic Stella stripes, on the other hand, create a unified front that does not involve pictorial space, which is a critical starting point for Judd. Stella’s “slabs” are three-dimensional; the paintings defy pictorial space and the limitations of painting. The slabs become “unitary” forms that project out of the painting’s surface.8 A most significant painting to showcase the relationship that Judd built with Stella is Cipango (1962).9 It is a square painting with smaller squares of equal width inserted inside the larger square. Although the repetition does resemble the stripe paintings, through Stella’s use of color, this painting is more about mirroring the shape of the canvas, centralizing the element of shape. The element of shape is critical for Judd’s work, as the simple, freestanding objects have unavoidable shapes that define what the work becomes. Cipango also corresponds with what it is through the repetition of its periphery. This creates a continuation between the space that the work occupies and the work itself. Judd’s interpretation of this correspondence with the space is by placing the three dimensional objects in the space. Judd believes that the presence of these objects solves the problem of illusionism that is a painterly concern and as he sees the work as relational to painting. Although the works more readily resemble sculpture, Judd relates the new work with painting as the work alludes to space and describes in a more generalized manner.10 Sculpture, according to Judd, is composed of different elements, which are visibly separated from each other. The additive process of the sculptor is one that Judd disowns; his objects have a single form that is in relationship with the environment. For Judd, the work’s “assertion” of itself by the single form is more powerful than that of a work consisting of many elements. There is one thing to look at, creating a single impact.11 The work derives its value from the absolute wholeness of the assertion of form. Robert Morris, on the other hand, relates the new work to sculpture rather than Judd’s formulation of the new work as a development within painting. He is particularly influenced by the work of Russian Constructivists, such as Vladimir Tatlin, who had challenged the limitations of figurative sculpture and explored possibilities within the industrial materials and commercial products. The constructions of Tatlin marked a break with pictorialism, toward a form that “countered” painting, sculpture and architecture, activating materials with a marked independence.12 The Constructivists did not refer to the figure or architecture. This “autonomy” identifies a condition of “independence” from architecture that Morris sees absent from the work of David Smith, “the greatest American sculptor.”13 While Judd saw the additive composition of Smith’s sculptures as being problematic, Morris wanted to return to the independence of the sculpture from the environment that he saw as missing in Smith’s work. Both artists are removed from Smith’s work, but for different reasons. Morris also challenges Piet Mondrian’s notion of the property of establishing “relations between sensations”. He draws attention to “certain forms” that do not disregard the many relations between textures, mass and color and yet also do not comprise of clearly separate parts. For Morris, it is the simplicity of these forms that triggers “strong gestalt sensations” as the viewers cannot perceive different components. The single gestalt hence has a bigger impact on the viewer than any number of relations between different elements.14 Morris’ assertion that the simplicity of the forms creates a complicated, unique experience for the viewers actually echoes Judd’s conception of the inherent ambiguity of these works.15 The aesthetics of the new work is defined by the spectator: “[the major aesthetic terms] are not in but dependent upon this autonomous object and exist as unfixed variables that find their specific definition in the particular space and light and physical viewpoint of the spectator.”16 The artists do not define what the final work exactly is; the work’s aesthetic values are contingent upon the many variables that shape the viewer’s experience. Morris identifies the relationship a viewer establishes with the different elements in a sculpture by the term “intimacy.”17 The new work rejects these intimate relationships in order to reinforce the interaction between the work and the space it occupies, co-existing with the viewer. The intimate relationships, Morris implies, can only be with a component. The “intimate mode” is not open and is exclusive.18 Exclusion here refers to the exclusion of the viewer as the work is closed to the outside and has an inherent structure. The elimination of these additive components means that the viewer can relate with the whole, having a more encompassing experience determined by the work, the space and the viewer. The differences between Morris and Judd’s ideations of the new work highlight a fundamental characteristic of Minimalism: that the represented ideas, in relationship with the past work, are critical. The work is valuable as it is a natural “progression” of past work. However, Michael Fried, in his essay “Art and Objecthood” argues that Minimalism deviates from modernism, by using the very terms posited by Morris and Judd themselves. Fried first shows that Minimalist work is not a natural progression of modernism and second, uses the example of Frank Stella, who represented the epitome of the newer generation of modernism for Fried himself but at the same time was cited as the source of many Minimalist ideations by Donald Judd. Using Minimalist Vocabulary Against the Minimalist Claim to Modernity Michael Fried formulates the relationship between Stella and the modernist genealogy in his essay “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons.” Fried champions Stella’s new work (1963-66) as he believes that Stella develops relationships between the literal shape (the silhouette of the support) and depicted shape (the outlines of elements in a given picture).