DOCSLIB.ORG

Minimalist Art Vs. Modernist Sensibility: a Close Reading of Michael Fried’S “Art and Objecthood”

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Minimalist Art Vs. Modernist Sensibility: a Close Reading of Michael Fried’S “Art and Objecthood” 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).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Anthony Caro/Jules Olitski
    Press Release Feb 12, 2019 ANTHONY CARO/JULES OLITSKI The 70s - 80s March 16 – May 11, 2019 Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro (detail), c.1964, South Shaftsbury, Vermont, USA Galerie Templon’s latest exhibition establishes a fascinating dialogue between Anthony Caro (1924-2013), pioneer of abstract sculpture, and Jules Olitski (1922-2007), master of Colour Field painting. With a collection of works from the 1970s and ’80s, the new exhibition celebrates the unique creative friendship between the British sculptor and the American painter of Russian descent, companions for close to 50 years. Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski both paved the way to a new form of abstract art. Right from the early 1960s, they stood out for their radical experiments, tirelessly exploring new methods and materials. The exhibition highlights the capacity for innovation of two artists on a quest to redefine their medium, with their friendship as one of the catalysts. In 1963, after years of mutual admiration, Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski met and started exchanging letters, ideas and artworks. The sculptures and paintings of the 1970s and ’80s reflect their research on the fundamentals of surface, space and shape, the notions of density and lightness. In Sir Anthony Caro’s view: ‘Sculpture sits midway between painting and architecture, particularly abstract sculpture. It lies in between. We have to find this place, in between.’ In the 1970s and ’80s, he focused mainly on steel, oxidised metal, the use and forms of machines and industrial elements. As for Jules Olitski, after perfecting a spray-painting technique for laying colour onto his canvases, in the 1970s he went on to develop new techniques, spreading colours with a cloth or scraper or laying them on with a roller to create thickly structured surfaces.
    [Show full text]
  • Cubism in America
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications Sheldon Museum of Art 1985 Cubism in America Donald Bartlett Doe Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs Part of the Art and Design Commons Doe, Donald Bartlett, "Cubism in America" (1985). Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. 19. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/19 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Sheldon Museum of Art at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. RESOURCE SERIES CUBISM IN SHELDON MEMORIAL ART GALLERY AMERICA Resource/Reservoir is part of Sheldon's on-going Resource Exhibition Series. Resource/Reservoir explores various aspects of the Gallery's permanent collection. The Resource Series is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of the Gallery's general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum Services, a federal agency that offers general operating support to the nation's museums. Henry Fitch Taylor Cubis t Still Life, c. 19 14, oil on canvas Cubism in America .".. As a style, Cubism constitutes the single effort which began in 1907. Their develop­ most important revolution in the history of ment of what came to be called Cubism­ art since the second and third decades of by a hostile critic who took the word from a the 15th century and the beginnings of the skeptical Matisse-can, in very reduced Renaissance.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernism 1 Modernism
    Modernism 1 Modernism Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.[2] [3] [4] Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.[5] [6] [7] Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God.[8] [9] In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an Hans Hofmann, "The Gate", 1959–1960, emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was also as a teacher of art, and a modernist theorist articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. During the 1930s in New York and California he 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of introduced modernism and modernist theories to [10] harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernism & Modernist Literature: Introduction
    MODERNISM & MODERNIST LITERATURE: INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND INTRODUCTION Broadly speaking, ‘modernism’ might be said to have been characterised by a deliberate and often radical shift away from tradition, and consequently by the use of new and innovative forms of expression Thus, many styles in art and literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are markedly different from those that preceded them. The term ‘modernism’ generally covers the creative output of artists and thinkers who saw ‘traditional’ approaches to the arts, architecture, literature, religion, social organisation (and even life itself) had become outdated in light of the new economic, social and political circumstances of a by now fully industrialised society. Amid rapid social change and significant developments in science (including the social sciences), modernists found themselves alienated from what might be termed Victorian morality and convention. They duly set about searching for radical responses to the radical changes occurring around them, affirming mankind’s power to shape and influence his environment through experimentation, technology and scientific advancement, while identifying potential obstacles to ‘progress’ in all aspects of existence in order to replace them with updated new alternatives. All the enduring certainties of Enlightenment thinking, and the heretofore unquestioned existence of an all-seeing, all-powerful ‘Creator’ figure, were high on the modernists’ list of dogmas that were now to be challenged, or subverted, perhaps rejected altogether, or, at the very least, reflected upon from a fresh new ‘modernist’ perspective. Not that modernism categorically defied religion or eschewed all the beliefs and ideas associated with the Enlightenment; it would be more accurate to view modernism as a tendency to question, and strive for alternatives to, the convictions of the preceding age.
    [Show full text]
  • PAJ78 C-04 Ho
    DAN FLAVIN’S CORNER SQUARE Before and after the Mast Christopher K. Ho o begin with an omission: that of Dan Flavin’s comments to Bruce Glaser during a 1964 radio interview entitled “New Nihilism or New Art?” A T participant along with Frank Stella and Donald Judd, Flavin rarely inter- vened, later requesting that even these infrequent comments be excised from the published manuscript.1 Usually seen as an act of deference to his polemical and more articulate peers,2 might this recusal alternatively be read as a determined refusal of the reductivist rendition of modernism proffered if not in practice than in theory by Stella and Judd? Certainly, the shifts Flavin undergoes from the earliest light pieces (produced one year before the Glaser interview) to his later, trademark 1974 corner pieces, testify to this; further, it would appear that Flavin’s proposed alternative circles around, precisely, the notion of omission. I If the notion of omission was always lodged within the narrative of modernism in the form of a kind of ever-receding horizon, the impossible situation that art found itself in the 60s was that this horizon was arrived at in the guise of the monochrome and blank canvas. By 1962, Clement Greenberg declared, “a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one.”3 This shift in strategy—from positing art as an internally motivated formal progression towards flatness to a far more idiosyncratic assessment of success or failure—not only bespeaks a breach, perhaps irreparable,
    [Show full text]
  • Colorful Language: Morris Louis, Formalist
    © COPYRIGHT by Paul Vincent 2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED To UNC-G professor Dr. Richard Gantt and my mother, for their inspiration and encouragement. COLORFUL LANGUAGE: MORRIS LOUIS, FORMALIST CRITICISM, AND MASCULINITY IN POSTWAR AMERICA BY Paul Vincent ABSTRACT American art at mid-century went through a pivotal shift when the dominant gestural style of Abstract Expressionism was criticized for its expressive painterly qualities in the 1950s. By 1960, critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried were already championing Color Field painting for its controlled use of color and flattened abstract forms. Morris Louis, whose art typifies this latter style, and the criticism written about his work provides a crucial insight into the socio-cultural implications behind this stylistic shift. An analysis of the formalist writing Greenberg used to promote Louis’s work provides a better understanding of not only postwar American art but also the concepts of masculinity and gender hierarchy that factored into how it was discussed at the time. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my thanks Dr. Helen Langa and Dr. Andrea Pearson for their wisdom, guidance, and patience through the writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Juliet Bellow, Dr. Joanne Allen, and Mrs. Kathe Albrecht for their unwavering academic support. I am equally grateful to my peers, Neda Amouzadeh, Lily Sehn, Kathryn Fay, Caitlin Glosser, Can Gulan, Rachael Gustafson, Jill Oakley, Carol Brown, and Fanna Gebreyesus, for their indispensable assistance and kind words. My sincere appreciation goes to The Phillips Collection for allowing me the peace of mind that came with working within its walls and to Mr.
    [Show full text]
  • The Canonisation of Surrealism in the United States
    The canonisation of Surrealism in the United States Sandra Zalman In a pointed assessment of the first show of Surrealism in New York, in 1932, the New York Times art critic asked, ‘How much of the material now on view shall we esteem “art,” and how much should be enjoyed as laboratory roughage’?1 The question encompassed the problem Surrealism posed for art history because it essentially went unanswered. Even after the 1936 endorsement by the Museum of Modern Art in a show organized by its founding director Alfred Barr (1902-1981), Surrealism continued to have a vexed relationship with the canon of modern art. Above all, the enterprise of canonisation is ironic for Surrealism – the Surrealists were self-consciously aiming to overthrow the category of art, but simultaneously participating in a tradition of avant-gardism defined by such revolution.2 Framing his exhibition, Barr presented Surrealism as both the most recent avant-garde export, and also as a purposeful departure from the avant-garde’s experimentation in form. Instead, Barr stressed that Surrealism focused on an anti-rationalist approach to representation. Though Barr made a strong case to integrate Surrealism into the broader understanding of modernism in the 1930s, and Surrealism was generally accepted by American audiences as the next European avant-garde, by the 1950s formalist critics in the U.S. positioned Surrealism as a disorderly aberration in modernism’s quest for abstraction. Surrealism’s political goals and commercial manifestations (which Barr’s exhibition had implicitly sanctioned by including cartoons and advertisements) became more and more untenable for the movement’s acceptance into a modern art canon that was increasingly being formulated around an idea of the autonomous self-reflexive work of art.
    [Show full text]
  • John Mccracken Born in 1934, Berkeley, US Biography Died in 2011
    John McCracken Born in 1934, Berkeley, US Biography Died in 2011 Education 1965 California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, US 1962 California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, US Solo Exhibitions 2017 'John McCracken' , David Zwirner, New York 2016 ‘John McCracken’, The Elkon Gallery, New York, US 2015 ‘Red, Black, Blue’, Franklin Parrash Gallery, New York, US 2013 ‘Works from 1963-2011’, David Zwirner, New York, US 2012 ‘John McCracken’, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK 2011 ‘John McCracken : A Retrospective’, Castello di Rivoli - Museo d’Arte, Rivoli, Turin, IT 2010 ‘New Works in Bronze and Steel’, David Zwirner, New York, US 2009 ‘John McCracken’, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh 2008 ‘John McCracken’, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, US 64 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris 18 avenue de Matignon, 75008 Paris [email protected] 2007 - ‘Documenta 12’, Kassel, DE Abdijstraat 20 rue de l’Abbaye Brussel 1050 Bruxelles [email protected] 2006 - ‘Donald Judd & John McCracken: Selected Sculpture’, John Berggruen Gallery, San Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House Francisco, US W1K 3JH London ‘New Work’, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, US [email protected] - 39 East 78th Street 2005 New York, NY 10075 ‘Early Sculpture’, Zwirner & Wirth, New York, US [email protected] - 27 Huqiu Road, 2nd Floor 200002 Shanghai China [email protected] - www.alminerech.com ‘Eighties’, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, IT ‘John McCracken + Paul McCarthy’, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, CH ‘Turrell + McCracken’, Godt-Cleary Projects, Las Vegas, US 2004 ‘John McCracken’, S.M.A.K., Gent, BE ‘New sculpture’, David Zwirner, New York, US 2003 ‘New Sculpture’, L.A.
    [Show full text]
  • Treatment of Donald Judd's Untitled 1977
    Article: Treatment of Donald Judd’s Untitled 1977: Retention of the original acrylic sheets Author(s): Eleonora E. Nagy, Bettina Landgrebe, and Shelley M. Smith Source: Objects Specialty Group Postprints, Volume Eighteen, 2011 Pages: 113-125 Compilers: Sanchita Balachandran, Christine Del Re, and Carolyn Riccardelli © 2011 by The American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works, 1156 15th Street NW, Suite 320, Washington, DC 20005. (202) 452-9545 www.conservation-us.org Under a licensing agreement, individual authors retain copyright to their work and extend publications rights to the American Institute for Conservation. Objects Specialty Group Postprints is published annually by the Objects Specialty Group (OSG) of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works (AIC). A membership benefit of the Objects Specialty Group, Objects Specialty Group Postprints is mainly comprised of papers presented at OSG sessions at AIC Annual Meetings and is intended to inform and educate conservation-related disciplines. Papers presented in Objects Specialty Group Postprints, Volume Eighteen, 2011 have been edited for clarity and content but have not undergone a formal process of peer review. This publication is primarily intended for the members of the Objects Specialty Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works. Responsibility for the methods and materials described herein rests solely with the authors, whose articles should not be considered official statements of the OSG or the AIC. The OSG is an approved division of the AIC but does not necessarily represent the AIC policy or opinions. TREATMENT OF DONALD JUDD’S UNTITLED 1977: RETENTION OF THE ORIGINAL ACRYLIC SHEETS ELEONORA E.
    [Show full text]
  • Untitled (To Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on Not Seeing Anyone in the Room), 1968
    THE EMPTY ROOM AND THE END OF MAN THE EMPTY ROOM AND THE END OF MAN Robert Slifkin The Empty Room and the End of Man It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Sigmund Freud, 1915 1 The spotless gallery wall . is a perfect surface off which to bounce our paranoias. Brian O’Doherty, 1976 2 “I can see the whole room! . And there’s nobody in it!” These words, borrowed from a dime-store detective comic book, where they float above the head of a man gazing out of a peephole, become in the 1961 painting of the same title by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) a potent allegory of the ideal conditions for aesthetic experience in the postwar era (fig. 1). By imagining the elimination of any beholders in front of the canvas, Lichtenstein’s painting slyly parodies the modernist 1 principle of a disembodied and disinterested mode of spectatorship in Roy Lichtenstein, I Can See the Whole which the subjective contingencies of personal experience in no way Room and There’s influence the work’s ultimate significance. Beyond its engagement Nobody in It, 1961. with the legacy of the monochrome and color field painting, the work Oil and graphite on presents a decidedly forward looking vision of the seemingly depopu- canvas, 48 × 48 in. (121.92 × 121.92 cm). lated spaces that would serve in the ensuing decades as the privileged Private collection. sites for experiencing and understanding the avowedly 158 Robert Slifkin The Empty Room and the End of Man 159 Pictorialism as Theory 2 Dan Flavin, untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room), 1968.
    [Show full text]
  • Clement Greenberg “Modernist Painting”*
    Summary: Clement Greenberg “Modernist Painting”* The Definition of “Modernism” Greenberg’s concern in this essay is to argue that there is a logic to the development of modern- ist art and, in particular, modernist painting. He identifies the essence of Modernism as “the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself—not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”. (85) It is the intensification of a self- critical tendency that began with the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. “Modernism”, Greenberg tells us, “criticizes from the inside [rather than from the outside], through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized.” (Ibid.) This starting point has impor- tant implications for the thesis of autonomy. [See the handout on Clive Bell: “The Aesthetic Hy- pothesis”.] Self-Justification According to Greenberg, every “formal social activity” requires a rational justification, i.e. there must be reasons given to justify a particular activity. Without this justification, the activity in ques- tion (e.g. painting, philosophy, physics, poetry, mathematics, etc.) is discredited and weakened. Many take the view that this is what happened with religion. Post-Enlightenment art (i.e. roughly speaking, art produced after the Eighteenth Century) was at once in precisely this situation of needing a justification. Thus, it was called upon to establish its own autonomy by means of a “deduction”, i.e. an argument for its legitimacy and its capacity to provide us with experience that cannot be obtained through any other art or social practice.
    [Show full text]
  • If Materialism Is Not the Solution, Then What Was the Problem? a Response to Harman Robert Jackson
    If Materialism Is Not the Solution, Then What Was the Problem? A Response to Harman Robert Jackson abstract What follows is a cursory response to Graham Harman’s article “Materialism is Not the Solution.” It seeks to branch out his conception of ‘form’ and more specifically, ‘aesthetic form’ whilst expanding on Harman’s principal objections to the materialist account of change, and how this may challenge the contemporary aesthetic trajectory of relational encounter: par- ticularly Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002). Quite generally, Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology might be understood through two chief aesthetic mechanisms; the contingency of counterfactuals complimented with the preliminary development of a nonmodern formalism. The latter is briefly cashed out in a philosophical juxtaposition to Greenberg and Fried’s mod- ernist principles. keywords Formalism, Materialism, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology, Relational Aesthetics, Specula- tive Realism Counterfactuals Navigating any contemporary philosophical system is hard, as it is navi- gating a new computing language or cityscape. No-one really knows what it can do, at least not without experimentation. Systems of thought do not operate any differently. Object Oriented Ontology (hereby referred to as OOO) requires a good deal of navigation, and playful experimentation before it can be used as a platform for doing things with other things. Amongst many pragmatist experiments, one of the more famous OOO devices is the ‘Latour Litany’ (coined by fellow OOO veteran Ian Bogost), to describe Bruno Latour’s strange ontographical practice of list naming: the rhetorical function of which reveals the “inherent partition between things.”1 And it is a use- ful practice for sure: enumerating different, potentially infinite lists of things before critique can inspect their ontological validity.
    [Show full text]