“On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 PART

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

PART 1

FEMALE 1 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the sixth in our series of lectures on the general subject of the future of art. Today’s speaker is Michael Fried. He’s assistant professor in fine arts at Harvard University. He studied at Princeton and graduated in 1959, and he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Mr. Fried is a regular contributor to Artforum, and he is the author of a forthcoming book on the artist Morris Louis, which is to published in the fall of next year. Mr. Fried also organizes exhibitions, and he has recently arranged a very successful showing of the work of Anthony Caro in London. Mr. Fried. (applause)

MICHAEL FRIED [00:01:00] Very little of the successes of Caro’s exhibition is due to me. I wish I had been able to come here for that (inaudible) sculptures. Very beautiful. The most beautiful sculpture since the work of Smith. But I hope that there will be a chance for a large Caro exhibition to be done in America sometime in the reasonable future. Now, let me preface my beginning with a kind of apology. I had hoped to have this in better shape. I had left a certain amount of time to work on it towards the end. And within the last week, of course, the [00:02:00] situation at Harvard has blown up, chiefly because the administration called in the police for a police bust on the students who occupied University Hall before there was any time to arrive at any kind of reasonable judgment about what should be done to those students or with those students. So everyone on the faculty has been meeting more or less day and night, trying to keep the situation from getting completely out of hand, which it really is already out of hand.

I don’t know what you read about it in the newspapers here. It’s hard to get an accurate idea of it. I noticed the New York Times yesterday reported, with kind of characteristic blandness, that the faculty voted — or passed a resolution disapproving both of the students for occupying University Hall, and disapproving of the university [00:03:00] for calling in the police. That’s, of course, absurd. The students are part of the university. So are the faculty. And the faculty passed a resolution disapproving of the administration for calling in the police. Well, that’s by way of apology.

I’ll actually begin by making a few general remarks. The overall subject of this series of lectures is the future of art. I don’t know whether or not previous lectures have spoken to this subject. But relatively little of what I have to say this afternoon can be described as predictions about, or even as hopes for, the future. Mostly I’ll be talking about what I take to be the present state of the art, and in particular painting and sculpture, and about what I regard as some of the most important developments in the art of the immediate or the recent past. And if there were time, I’m sure I’d find myself talking about the art of a more distant past [00:04:00] as well. But I don’t say this by way of apology.

In the first place, the question “What’s the future of art?” cannot be separated from the question “What is the present state of the art?” and that means the present state of the individual art. In general, any beliefs or intimations about the future, about where we’re heading in art or anything

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 else, presumes one or another view or understanding of where we are now, of the nature of the meaning of the present. And on that score, the nature of the meaning of the present state of the visual arts, painting and sculpture, as any reader of art magazines today is well-aware, there’s very little agreement, certainly nothing remotely like general accord or universal consensus. On the contrary, there’s a more or less constant, more or less heated, clash of divergent and often mutually exclusive views, value judgments, interpretations, critical programs, canons of important works and artists; [00:05:00] for that matter, canons of important critics. In other words, there’s just about no real agreement about the nature of the present, about the meaning of contemporary art. Now, in a way, that’s healthy, I think, because it at least forces us to realize that not just the future, but also the present, is problematic.

What I mean is that the controversy keeps us from lapsing too easily into the assumption that the present, at least, is clear, because it’s what we are living, what we can verify with our senses, because it’s present to us. Whereas, the assumption might go, the past is remote, dead, irrecoverable, and the future not yet born, not yet here. The truth is, or at least truth as I see it, is that the present is at least as hard to make out as the past, and can be even harder, because we have no [00:06:00] further perspective to view it from. We don’t have a kind of present that’s in any way secure to view the past from. Moreover, we have no body of events or work whose importance has emerged as unquestionable against which we can see it.

Now, the task of making out the meaning of the present belongs to criticism — in this case, art criticism — and it’s one of the justifications for the activity of the critic. The present doesn’t bear its meaning on its sleeve. That meaning involves making value judgments, comparisons with the past, interpretations, analyses, putting forward arguments, and all that is the province of criticism. Anyway, there are different views of the present. One might even say, that throughout the history of modern art, and with a new explicitness in recent years, [00:07:00] there has been a struggle for the present. That means a number of things. Perhaps most obviously, it means a struggle for certain rewards, commissions, big shows in museums, so on and so forth. But it’s also a struggle, waged both by artists and critics, for the right to speak for the present, to express its needs, its imperatives, its values, its priorities, and its aspirations.

Finally, nothing less than this, nothing less than this right, this prerogative, to speak for the present is at stake in critical disagreements and controversies. That’s one reason, I think, that those controversies can be as heated, and often as ugly, as they are. Traditionally, which, in this case, means since the mid-19th century, the critical struggle for the present has tended to take [00:08:00] place between men who champion different artists, different schools of painting, different movements. In other words, disagreements looked as though they amounted to or entail taking sides, backing one artist or one group of artists against another, or against whatever one took to be the academy at that time, against other critics.

Of course, this sort of controversy hasn’t disappeared, not by a long shot. One has only to think of the kind of controversy that Pop art engendered a few years ago. But in recent years, we’ve seen more and more of other kinds of controversies, in particular those instances where two or more critics claim to admire the same artist, but disagree radically as to the meaning of their art. It turns out that these disagreements are at least as violent as the others. At first, that may seem surprising, [00:09:00] since the critics involved seem to agree on so much.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

But then it turns out that, really, it isn’t surprising, and they agree on very little. One might say they agree on the names of the important artists, but on very little else. They don’t agree, for example, about what those artists are doing, what painting and sculpture mean to those artists, and in fact they don’t agree about what the nature of painting and sculpture at a given moment — simply what the meaning of both is. This, suddenly, no longer seems to be simply a disagreement of different tastes, but something more basic, more fundamental. You might say that this disagreement is inseparable from the other disagreement, when you argue about [00:10:00] different painters, but it’s kind of doubly acrimonious, since it lays bare the fact that what’s being challenges, what’s at stake, is precisely one’s right to speak for the art that one admires, or the art that one claims to admire.

In fact, what’s finally at stake is nothing less than one’s claim to admire that art itself. What’s being challenged in a disagreement like that is one’s claim to conviction about the art that one is claiming to be convinced by. It’s as if holding the wrong view, or having the wrong kind of understanding of a given body of art, in effect wipes out or invalidates or disqualifies the claim that one admires it, that one is convinced by it, even that one’s moved by it. By this, I don’t mean [00:11:00] that the claim to conviction finally rests on the ability to demonstrate some kind of understanding that has to be verbal.

But it has to be evinced, has to be demonstrated, some way or other. It’s as though one’s claim to admire something, to be convinced by it as painting or sculpture, as art, is in danger, or is vulnerable, or is open to question or attack as never before. Now, in a sense, this may have always been the case. But the fact that it’s the case is now explicit, it’s laid bare as never before, by the development of the painting of the past hundred years — development of painting and sculpture during the past hundred years. You might say that precisely because questions of feeling and experience and conviction have been revealed to be central to the whole [00:12:00] issue of art, modern art, we can no longer take the expression of those feelings or convictions at face value. They are themselves subject to test, even as they claim to be the test that the art must meet.

And it’s no more clear beforehand, before the experience, not just of the work, but of the criticism, or of the response, what will count, what will be acceptable, as the expression of that conviction on the part of the critic or the beholder. No more clear than is clear beforehand what will compel conviction in the work itself. And in that sense, a vital one, we’ve come to see that the predicament or the position of the artist, and that of the beholder, [00:13:00] under Modernism, are pretty much one and the same, pretty much identical. You might say that this is part of the risk which serious criticism shares with serious art today. And not just serious criticism, really seriousness as such, or anyway, in this case, seriousness about art. It must meet this demand, or at any rate, it’s open to being challenged by this demand.

All right. Controversies about the nature of the present, and about the present nature of painting and sculpture, their present identity, are the terrain of criticism. But different versions of the present rest on or entail different versions, or different visions, of the art of the past. Certainly the art of the recent past — say, since Pollock, or since Cubism — but also the more distant past — since Cezanne [00:14:00] or Manet, or even further back than that. I’m tempted to say that

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 even the most casual value judgment of present art invoke or entails a view of the past. For example, one of the things that’s very often said about the art of the 20th century, and about the present situation, is that what we have in the 20th century and what we have today is a case of extraordinary diversity. This would go along with the position of different kinds of aesthetic and moral relativism. There are different kinds of art, different kinds of equally valid aesthetic experiences.

Of course, in this kind of discussion, nothing, characteristically, is ever said about what the validity of any of those modes of expression is taken to consist in. But we have a lot of different kinds of things. We have paintings, we have sculptures, we have various [00:15:00] kinds of objects that don’t fall precisely into either of those categories. We have happenings. We have merry events of one kind or another. We have mixed media productions. And certainly, a few years ago, Pop art was not a burning, anyway a smoking, issue.

The claim is that all of those things are more or less equally valid, presumably because they all, more or less, equally exist. Now, it’s not simply that I disagree with that, which I deeply and profoundly do, and it seems to me to amount, finally, to a total abdication of any kind of critical judgment or even moral judgment. Total acceptance of anything that comes on as art, or that has any kind of claim to one’s attention. What I really want to focus on here is not [00:16:00] what seems to me the wrongness of that view, but the fact that it does imply a definite view of the art of the past. If you believe that about the present situation, then you believe something about Cubism, or Cezanne, or Manet, or all of them. Whether or not you’d ever given much thought to those subjects, Manet is simply not a significant turning point in the history of art if happenings are a profoundly vital and valid and important art form in contemporary America, or contemporary world.

Anyway, that would have to be backed up in a lot of ways, and one would have to show how all different kinds of judgments of present phenomena really entail different kinds of views and different kinds of judgments of the art of the past. What I really want to get out here is simply the sense in which they are absolutely [00:17:00] entail-able by one another. So the responsibility of the critic, or even of the serious beholder — and maybe this starts to become one of the outward and visible signs of seriousness about art — comes to be the willingness to take responsibility for the past, for the view of the past that the beholder has, whether he acknowledges it or not, and whether he knows that he has it or not. What I’m saying is that seriousness about art in the present may force one to become involved with the art of the past in particular ways.

Now, of course, like anything else, this is itself subject to parody, to fraudulence, [00:18:00] to gimmickry of one kind or another. It can become, like anything else, just another sort of move, just another sort of maneuver. I think anyone who’s been reading the art magazines over the past few years has seen that, too. Analyses which go into the past, in an essentially fraudulent way, to provide something that is meant to serve as proof of seriousness about the present. So, once again, one has the situation in which one can’t take anything at face value, but whatever is presented as serious art, or as serious criticism, or as an index of the seriousness of the criticism, must itself convince one of its seriousness. What this may mean is that what’s finally at stake in controversies over the meaning of the present, not just the identity of painting [00:19:00] or the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 identity of sculpture, or even the right to speak for them — and that would be enough — but it might also be nothing less than the meaning of the past, the meaning of the past 20 or 50 or 100 or 200 years of painting and sculpture. Now, it’s also true, I think, that a view of the present is, if not entailed, anyway implied in any viewer account of the past of these arts, so that one finds in the critical, the historical literature on — let’s take the same figure again, Manet.

One finds, I think in the literature of the last 25 years, a strong tendency to iron him out, to flatten him down, to make what he did seem less revolutionary, to see him in the context of his time, in a way that tends to make him just another artist, though maybe he had [00:20:00] kind of slicker hand and wrist abilities than most. That, of course, is a view of the past which ends up being in the service of a particular view of the present, namely a view of the present as consisting in diversity, a large number of equally valid phenomena. Maybe you even think of — if you believe that about the past, that the question of validity in the present doesn’t make sense at all. One is simply faced with a titillating situation of accepting everything. I think that’s a way in which history can lead to, or be in the service of, a particular kind of view of the present. If you make Manet a revolutionary artist, then it may turn out that only certain things really matter after Manet. That maybe the valid artists in [00:21:00] the present are a tiny handful, or anyway the valid painters, the painters who really count. And that, of course, is a view that lots of people find hideously objectionable, and may even seem to them morally intolerable. Why it’s more morally tolerable to believe that all things are equally valid, I don’t really understand.

Anyway, it’s no surprise that these controversies, both in criticism and history, are very ardent. Of course, one upshot of what I’m saying is that no separation is really possible in any clean way between criticism and history. History is, or ought to be, critical. I think one can be led from criticism to doing history. Possibly [00:22:00] it should happen more that the other happens as well. But I think history should be critical, and I think that’s never more acutely true than in the history of art, where issues of quality and value are central. Art seems to me, in general, the one cultural institution — using institution in an almost indefinitely broad sense here — which is ineluctably and profoundly involved with questions of quality and level and value and conviction.

There’s been one critical tendency afoot in recent years to try to make out a case [00:23:00] that questions of value are, in effect, imposed on art. That to ask about a work’s quality, or to interrogate oneself as to the degree of one’s belief in a given work, is somehow to obstruct one’s experience of the work, to blind oneself to the work, to escape really experiencing the work. Quality has been called a kind of crutch. What we really should do is submit ourselves to the experience of the work in such a way that permanently puts in abeyance all questions of quality. That seems to me, finally, a kind of insane critical program, though certain critics have demonstrated that it’s an entirely feasible one. More to the point, it seems to me to really misconstrue what art is. Quality [00:24:00] is not just something which we tend incidentally to apply to works of art. It’s not just a human weakness that we find ourselves asking whether a given Rembrandt is better than another Rembrandt.

On the contrary, that’s absolutely central to what art is. It’s part of the essence of art, if you like, that it aspires to quality and conviction, to be an object of conviction in this way. And of course, doing history of art then means that one’s doing the history of an enterprise which, maybe more

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 exclusively than any other, consists in the incarnating of value or quality or conviction, convincingness, in objects in the world, so that some sort of [00:25:00] value judgment about those objects is inescapable, I think, even for the historian. So history is, or ought to be, critical, and criticism must be, at the very least, the history of the present, by which I mean it must conceive of the present historically, not just as a moment out of time, a moment that has no history, that’s simply to be savored sensually, but as something that must be judged. Judgment here can mean only judgment against the standards that have been set up by the great art of the past, and that can include the immediate past.

Any new work of art that’s put forward today has to shape up to the sculpture of David Smith, which is sitting out in the Guggenheim right now, or Pollock, or Louis, all of these artists who have died relatively recently. [00:26:00] And there’s even more recent art than that, which already has for us the character of some kind of standard. I’m inclined to think that, as a historian and critic of sorts, in some ways the great exemplar of this combination of history and criticism is probably Marx. I’m not thinking now so much of Marx’s actual doctrine as of what the character of his history is, when he writes something like his account of the 18th brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, dealing with France between 1848 and 1851. One reads that — that was written around 1851, ’50, ’51. It really does put any art criticism that was written in the 19th century, or anyway, written in any vicinity to it, in the shade. Baudelaire is very great, but you feel [00:27:00] a certain — well, let me not make any kind of negative judgment of Baudelaire here. I’ll simply say that Marx has resources of power which are given to him by the particular way in which he’s able to combine history and criticism, do both at the same time. He has resources and power in his criticism, in his ability to make acute critical judgments of events, which are only imperfectly open to Baudelaire.

Baudelaire, in his Salon of 1846, section one, “What is the Good of Criticism?” has a remark that’s been very often quoted. “To be just, that is to say to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate, and political. That is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.” [00:28:00] It reads very much like a description of Marx as a critic. Anyway, to talk about point of view brings up the matter of the terms in which the past is seen, so that just is in criticism one can agree about the present artists who matter, who really count, but disagree about the meaning of their art. So, in history, one can hold the same canon of significant events or figures or works of art, and disagree about the meaning of these, the terms in which they ought to be seen. Disagreement about Manet, or about Cezanne, or about Cubism, or about [Davide?], or about [Chado?], is exactly of this kind. In other words, prediction and present bearings in past history are inextricably involved with, entailed by, one another. That’s maybe to say no more than that the future will be a kind of fruition of the present, just as the present is of the past.

But it also points out the complex responsibilities entailed by criticism [00:29:00] or history or prediction, and it ought to go without saying by now that I can’t meet those responsibilities here today. But these are the responsibilities that any critic or historian of art has finally to meet. Now, having said this, however obscurely, and at whatever length, I now want to try to put it simply as I can what seems to me the most important, the central artistic issue of the present moment. Now, obviously, I’ll be putting it somewhat schematically, and I know perfectly well that my views will strike many as dogmatic. They’ve already —

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

MALE 1 Right.

MICHAEL FRIED Excuse me?

MALE 1 Right.

MICHAEL FRIED Right. Now, do I take that as agreement that they’re dogmatic?

MALE 1 [Right?].

MICHAEL FRIED OK. I want you all to appreciate the deep diffidence and sense of relativity with which that point of view was just put forward. [00:30:00] So let me state very clearly at the outset that they’re based on my experience of the art in question. They aren’t a priori. I didn’t formulate them before I looked at the art, but rather came to understand my experience of the art in question only gradually and with great difficulty in these terms. I tried to account for my feelings and my convictions and my experience, and to generalize somewhat, from a thousand small, ineffable experiences. OK. I’ll just say that.

Now, almost two years ago, I wrote an essay called “Art and Objecthood,” which was published in Artforum, and what I want to do is partly just to restate some of the conclusions that I came to in that essay, because obviously I can’t expect more than a very few people to have read it. Anyway, I argued that the Modernist arts, and in particular painting and sculpture, are today at war [00:31:00] with a pervasive and deep-founded condition which I call theater. I closed that essay by putting forward three related propositions. One, the success, even the survival, of the major arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater. Two, art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater. And three, the concepts of quality or value, to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself, are meaningful, or fully meaningful, only within the individual art, for what lies between the art — and you can take that to refer to things like mixed media — is theater.

I believe these propositions still hold, and if I have a prediction to make about the future of art, it’s this: I expect the opposition between the high arts and what I mean by theater, which these propositions express, to worsen, [00:32:00] or anyway intensify, to become more explicit, more nearly inescapable from here on out, as far as this culture is concerned at any rate. The rest of what I want to say will be largely a gloss on these terms. Now, by theater or theatricality, I refer to a particular mode of self-evidence in a work of art, a particular way in which the art presents itself to the beholder, a particular mode of being present to the beholder, which is, among other things, essentially situational. Work that I want to call theatrical characteristically makes the beholder aware, in a variety of ways, of the total situation in which it’s encountered.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

A situation that includes not just the work itself, and the space or room in which it’s sited, but the actual — and by that I mean physical, psychological — presence in [00:33:00] that space, or in that room, in that situation, of the beholder himself. You might say that, by becoming aware of himself in this way, the beholder is made a kind of audience for the work, a kind of audience of one, and the work itself, or the total situation, is a kind of performance, a performance that involves the beholder, in which the beholder himself participates. Now, the movement, if I can call it that non-journalistically, as minimal art — and I’m referring now to the work of people like Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Tony Smith, lots of others — has been described by Morris himself, in Artforum a number of years ago, as deliberately seeking to take relationships out of the work itself in order to make them a function of all the circumstances in which the work is actually met. For example, the shape, the size, bareness of the room in which it’s placed, its position in relation to all of these, the precise arrangement of the lighting, [00:34:00] and so on. A function of those circumstances, and of the viewer’s field of vision, which changes as he moves.

Now, this is a crucial sense in which minimal art — or at any rate, the art of these men — is situational. By that, I mean something other than environmental. Let me speak for a moment to a distinction between a situation and an environment. This may — well. Roughly, an environment is more passive, inert, and in a sense large-scale, or even architectural. What I mean by a situation, it simply surrounds the beholder, and he moves through it [in habity?]. It’s as though the environment is constant, as though it’s always there, and, so to speak, eternal, even if it’s constantly changing. It’s prior to anyone, and in particular, prior to the [00:35:00] beholder’s actually being there, being in it. In that sense, it doesn’t need him. It doesn’t exist for him. A characteristic environment is outside, out of doors.

For example, some kind of plaza. We use the term to include factors which the beholder may in fact be unaware of. For example, the quality of the atmosphere, the noise level, and so on. So we talk about the urban environment. Now, a situation, on the other hand, in the sense that I’m using the term, is something more compressed, more intense, heightened. It’s characteristically indoors, and in particular it tends to be, or to take place in, some kind of room. Moreover — and this is important — it’s as though a situation is directed towards the beholder, as though it exists for him, as though it isn’t prior to him at all. As though until he is there, until he enters the room, [00:36:00] there simply isn’t anything that can be called a situation at all. And as though the situation, once it exists, is his situation. It belongs to him.

It’s, in a way, generated by him, by his presence. All that is simply not true of an environment. It’s as though, before the beholder entered the room, something was waiting for him, specifically to declare the situation, to make it a situation. In that sense, to realize it or to complete it. Now, I hope, as I say these things, that you would put against it your own experiences of minimal art, or the art of the men I named. If you think of what it’s like to enter, say, the Castelli Gallery with some of Robert Morris’s pieces in it, or other galleries that have shown minimal art over the last three or four years. What it’s like to come into [00:37:00] a bare, white room with a large, impassive, virtually featureless, white, cubical form placed on the floor, in such a way as to make you extremely aware of it, but precisely aware of it in relation to everything else in that room, and suddenly, you realize, in relation to yourself as well. It’s as if your own body, your own physical being in that situation, becomes a kind of burden, which you’re constantly made aware

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 of as its relation to everything else in that situation changes as you move. If this all strikes you as simply false or irrelevant to your own experience in the room, then that seems to me the nub of a very important and basic kind of disagreement.

What we’re disagreeing about then is precisely the experience of the work. We’re not disagreeing about any [00:38:00] point of dogma. If the experiences remain completely different, and different beyond any possibility of compromise, then we just have a good, solid disagreement. But again, it’s a disagreement which is rooted, grounded, absolutely, in experience of the art, not in any sort of a priori intellectual structure about what art should be. Once the beholder is there, in the situation, it’s as though the question is raised, what’s he to do now? What’s he to make of the situation? How is he to pass through it? How long will he let it go on? How exhaustively will he explore it? When will he break it off? These are all things which I’d certainly been made to feel in confronting art of that [00:39:00] kind.

I realized that a great deal is being left up to me to decide how much of it I want to take. There’s a kind of heightened consciousness of time in this. A heightened consciousness of duration, and in particular, the duration of the actual situation. I think it’s probably no exaggeration to say, just simply, in the nature of a simple definition, to say that the concept of situation, which one tends to think of at first as simply being a concept of place, or a spatial concept, is also a temporal one, a durational one. It’s a concept of time. It’s not just that a situation is located at a certain point or in a certain room, but a situation, unlike an environment, essentially lasts for a particular length of time. [00:40:00]

A situation is the case for a particular length of time, and in this case, it lasts as long as one is willing to remain there in the situation. But all this is to say that the art in question, if I am right that it’s essentially situational, if you would agree that your experience of it was situational, or is situational, is a kind of time art. It’s involved with time, with duration, in a way that other art today — for example, David Smith’s sculptures, painting of various people — is not durational art. Now, I also said that a situation is, in a sense, directed toward the beholder. I could give lots of examples, again, from minimal art. But maybe one [00:41:00] example that’s both dramatic and kind of properly fatuous is that of Walter De Maria’s two white lines painted onto the desert, or whatever they were painted on — all flat — and running for a considerable distance, two simple, parallel, white lines, maybe, I don’t know, 10 feet apart, 6 feet apart, and just running straight for a long distance.

Now, you may have seen them photographed and reproduced in art magazines as a kind of work, but you will always see them photographed from between the white line. You are always made to look down those lines. You would never have been shown them, for example, from the side, or simply from some kind of angle. Now, they only have their completely predictable, and I would say theatrical, effect if the beholder stands between them [00:42:00] at one end and looks down them, so that they seem to recede in a kind of dramatic perspective, which photographs, of course, taken from that position further intensifies, further soup up. Now, of course, it’s only then that the lines seem to be directed toward the beholder, as if they were a kind of schematic highway. So that even a work this apparently simple, this apparently minimal, this apparently hard-nosed and uncompromising and tough to take, requires the most specific and artful and soft- nosed and contrived staging in order to have whatever kind of small effect it finally succeeds in

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 having.

Well, this is another aspect of the way in which a situation may be said to belong to the beholder, to be his situation. [00:43:00] It’s also why theatrical art, or situational art, often takes place in a room, where things can be limited, compressed, kept from dissipating. The beholder can be made to feel the room, even a large one, as his room, or as part of a situation which is his, in a way that he simply couldn’t be made to feel that about some kind of external circumstances, unless they were especially contrived as those parallel white lines. I think one of the things that all these developments have made clear, minimal art has made clear, or have made interesting, as never before, is the very notion of a room itself. I think one has become alerted by this art, and this is a kind of service. Has become alerted to the importance of art often being in a room, of a notion of a room, what a room is. It starts being very different from what we normally think of as space. [00:44:00] We talk about the relation of any piece of sculpture, for example, to space. Handling of space and so on.

One of the ways in which it is a service is it starts revealing to us how special our notion of space is, how neutral, and in a way abstract, and how loaded the notion of a room is. I’ll say a little bit more about that later on. One of the things that one comes to be aware of is the prevalence of room, for example, in a lot of Surrealist painting, in which you have rooms depicted, events taking place in rooms, again, with a slightly souped-up camera perspective in the paintings. This, I think, has to do with an affinity between minimal art, or theatrical art in general, and the sensibility that created Surrealism. [00:45:00] They are extremely close.

Now, a second major characteristic of the work which I call theatrical — and this is one that’s at least as important as, and intimately related to, the whole issue of the situational — is the issue of literalness. The concentration of theatrical art very often upon the literal, upon what’s simply, literally, and in that sense minimally, there. The notion of literalness here is being contrasted to a number of notions, including that of illusion, or of depiction of any kind. Literal is also opposed, in effect, to the concept of the pictorial, the whole realm of painting, because painting is always, and inevitably — and the minimalist artists made this clear in their critical writings. Judd and [00:46:00] Morris spelled this out. In their eyes, the realm of the pictorial paintings were always inevitably tainted with illusion, tainted with depiction.

This would relate to a remark by someone like Clement Greenberg, that any mark on a flat surface immediately gave rise to some sort of — however reduced, however schematic — illusive space behind that surface, so to speak. The literal is also opposed to the important sculpture of our time, precisely because that sculpture, like Smith’s, has tended to be relational, and to have various intimations of illusion in it. For example, the intimation that the actual pieces of steel joined together were weightless. All of which seem to deny, [00:47:00] in some ways, the complete literalness, the total expression of simply this literal object being literally here, in the most impassive way that the minimalists went after in the early and mid-’60s.

In fact, one might describe the tendency that I’m characterizing here as an attempt to make art which consists in nothing other than what might be called literalness as such. It’s a projection or a presentation of nothing but literalness. I’m saying that something like that was the aspiration behind it. Here again, the work of people like Morris and Judd and Tony Smith is a case in point.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

Think of the closed, solid, cubical or rectangular solid forms that they showed, all of which had, really, as their underlying program, the isolating, and in a way the essentializing, [00:48:00] of what I’ve called objecthood, the quality of just simply being an object. So that I would argue that when Tony Smith made, simply, a six-foot cube — six-foot in every dimension — part of the impulse behind it, one of the things about that cube that was looking very good to him, and looking very good to a lot of people — and I think it still does look very good to a lot of people — is it seemed to be a kind of irreducible or essential object. You couldn’t make something that was more simply an object, or an object in a more heightened and intense and pure and, so to speak, abstract way.

So the pieces themselves amounted to essentialized objects, objects which, because of this process of essentialization [00:49:00] and abstraction; because of their being simple wholes in this way; and also because of the way which they were presented to the beholder, in closed rooms, rooms which were often themselves rectangular in form, with special lighting, with all the things that made them the foci of what I called situation; as a result, all these objects were experienced by the beholder in a heightened way. One of the words that one used to describe that, one of the words that grew up around these objects, was the word “presence.” These pieces were said to have presence. That became a kind of important quality word for art. One cared about whether or not something had presence, or at least there was a lot of talk about that. I think what finally emerged was that presence was exactly the quality, was precisely the quality, which these essentialized objects had. [00:50:00] And now presence, here, starts coming to mean a kind of stage presence, a way of presenting something to the beholder, of imposing on him, of existing for him. I say that presence here is inseparable from the concept of a situation. Presence is what something can seem to have, the kind of quality of there-ness that it can seem to have in a situation.

Now, this can be a very strong and intense experience. One can have a quite vivid experience of the presence of one of these bland cubes. I think part of the force and attraction of minimal art was precisely the fact that the actual experience one was being offered was often extremely powerful. I would also say that that experience is very similar to the kind of (inaudible) [00:51:00] that one receives looking at certain kinds of small paintings by Dalí or other Surrealists. And of course, I would argue that presence is an essentially theatrical quality. It’s something that theater offers one. I might mention that in an essay of about five years ago, Judd wrote forcefully on behalf of what he saw as a development towards what he called specific objects. That was his loose rubric, in a very interesting and intelligent essay, for the new art that he was creating and working towards, though I would like to put “new art” in inverted commas here. I don’t believe it succeeded in being that. Robert Morris, in the most recent, the April issue of Artforum, has described his own undertaking, and that of the other artists associated with him during the early ’60s, as the [00:52:00] task of — and I’m quoting now — “reconstituting the object as art,” unquote. Which seems to justify, as much as it can, one’s seeing that art in terms of the quality which I’ve been calling objecthood. They really were involved with the notion of an object and making things which were, in some essential, pure way, more purely and more essentially than ever before, just objects.

Now, in that essay that I mentioned, I tried to explain exactly how this came about, and I mean how this came about historically, because that seemed to me part of what understanding the art

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 entailed at that point. How artists like Morris and Judd came to feel that the only way in which they could make art in which they themselves believed was to base that art on literalness, and specifically to reconstitute the object, in Morris’s [00:53:00] words. Now, very roughly, I’ll just summarize that very briefly here. They saw the development of modern art, and in particular modern painting, from, say — anyplace you want to start, but say Manet, through the Impressionists, and Cezanne, and Cubism, and Pollock, and finally through Noland and Stella. They saw all that painting, all that art, as consisting in the increasingly explicit, increasingly deliberate and naked, acknowledgement of the literal character of the picture itself, which meant the literal character of the support. By that I mean the flatness of the canvas, the shape, and the precise size of the support, the shape and the size and exact location of the framing edge. Even the thickness of the framing edge.

Now, in a general sense, they agreed in this with the criticism of, say, Clement Greenberg, who, more than any [00:54:00] other man, has articulated those developments, who’s laid them out with great refinement in essays which are, I think, undeniably — though there are still people who would like to deny it — permanent classics of art criticism. But now seeing the development, the history of Modernist painting in these terms, led them, by something like a kind of wrong inference, to the conclusion that — it’s as if they made a wrong step in their thinking, roughly as follows. If all this painting seems to move on by different kinds or increasingly explicit acknowledgements of the physicality of the painting, of the literalness of the painting itself — if, in Manet, one finds a new frankness about the fact that the paintings are made with paint, the image is related to the shape of the support in particular ways, the [00:55:00] liberation of the pigment is carried still further in Impressionism. In Cezanne, the flatness of the picture is asserted, emphasized, becomes visible in a new way, even more so than in Manet — far more so than in Manet. Drawing in Cezanne is deformed. The look of objects are deformed in order to, in some way, acknowledge, respond to, the rectangular limits of the support, so that you get a kind of stress in the drawing that seems, in some way, to be responsive to the shape of the support, just as you find a stress and tensions in the space of the painting that are responsive to the virtual impossibility of creating a completely convincing illusion of depth at that point, on a surface which is, after all, flat. All these problems reaching a kind of utter head in Cubism, coming to a kind of absolute crisis in 1910 and 1911, when [00:56:00] painting was on the verge of abstraction and drew back from it. And so on and so forth. Finally, you could end up talking —

PART 2

MICHAEL FRIED — on a surface which is, after all, flat. All these problems reaching a kind of utter head in Cubism, coming to a kind of absolute crisis in 1910 and 1911, when painting was on the verge of abstraction and drew back from it. And so on and so forth. Finally, you could end up talking about Stella’s stripe paintings, where the entire organization of the painting is being generated by the shape of the support. Now, they saw this work in these terms, and they concluded that it seemed to them that the critical factor in all this was precisely various aspects of the literal character of the painting itself, the literalness of the pigment, the literal flatness of the picture

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 surface, the literal shape of the picture.

And now, since that was the case, why not, [00:01:00] in effect, simply present literalness itself? Why not isolate and put forward and make a new art out of nothing but literalness? Why make that literalness have to compromise itself, have to render itself impure by combining it with illusion, or depiction, or kinds of material which were less pure in their materiality? Less pure in the sense of not being simply literal. Being something else as well. For example, illusive. It’s as though the history of Modernist painting and sculpture — but above all, painting — seem to them to amount to the progressive revelation of literalness as a kind of unique or only source of conviction, [00:02:00] as if literalness were the essence of painting in some timeless way, the core of painting, and the painting of the past hundred years uncovered that fact. Suddenly, one saw that what really mattered was literalness. And then you can get rid of painting, now that you know that. You can just go for the literal.

I think this is the kind of conclusion that these men drew from their very heightened and acute and intelligent and aware sense of the history of art over the past hundred years. The Minimalists — because of this, I prefer to call them literalists — the literalists wanted an art that would be just what it seemed to be. That is, literal. An art which would, in a sense, go beyond painting and sculpture. The basic texts here [00:03:00] are Judd and Morris. There’s a lot of work that would be seen in these terms. The significance of their art resides largely in their relation to the past, and in particular the Modernist past, the relation I just tried to describe. I’d say that that’s unprecedented in the history of Modernism. Now, obviously, my own belief is that they were wrong to construe the development of Modernist painting and sculpture the way they did. They had the right objects, even the right artists, the right artists and works, and even, in a way, the right aspects of those works, but finally the wrong terms for describing those developments, and as it were, the wrong experience of the developments in question. I said it’s as though they drew a wrong inference from those developments. That makes it too intellectual. It was their feeling, their experience of the art in question, that, so to speak, drew the wrong inference, that led them astray.

I would argue that they did go astray in that. [00:04:00] Because the way in which I would want to see that development would be as follows. I’d argue that what was really important was the concept of acknowledgement. When one says that these different painters, in different ways, acknowledged the literalness of the support, say, acknowledged the shape of the support, acknowledged its flatness, I’d say that the notion of acknowledgement is at least equally important, at least as important, as the notion of literalness, and that the big question is, at every moment, what constitutes true or meaningful acknowledgement of the literal character of the support? Not everything that claims to be an acknowledgement, that presents itself as one, is one, and I think, here, art is just like life. Sometimes it’s just lip service, just ritual, something mechanical, just convention in a pejorative sense, and you’re forced yourself to discover what counts as an acknowledgement, what you’re prepared [00:5:00] to count as an acknowledgment, what you’re prepared to receive as an acknowledgement, and that includes having to discover what exactly is being acknowledged. You have to know how to make them, how to make acknowledgements, and you have to know how to receive them. One might even say that under Modernism, painting and sculpture have largely become media for acknowledgement of various kinds.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

Media in which acknowledgements are made, and found convincing, and received. Also repudiated, also denied. Part of the pressure of the demand of Modernism is to discover new forms of acknowledgement. You might say that the making of new art consists in the making of new objects of acknowledgment, just as it consists in the making of new objects of conviction. Anyway, from within this perspective, it doesn’t follow from the development that they saw that [00:06:00] painting and sculpture are exhausted or obsolete or impure because involved with illusion or depiction. And the revelation of Modernism is not that a painting is really or essentially a kind of object, that the essence of painting is its objecthood, but rather the essence of painting — and this is here taken to mean what will count as convincing in painting — must be discovered in the moment by the artist and the beholder. It turns out that it will be largely a function of what has counted as painting or counted as sculpture in the past. But anyway, that’s how I think the literalists were led to want to base their art on literalness alone, literalness as such. That meant for them, at the time, objects. That meant for them objecthood as such.

At the time when minimal art first burst on the scene, say five years ago, four years [00:07:00] ago, there was no distinction that had yet emerged between the literal as such and the object as such. Literal meant object. That was the form in which literalness presented itself to these men and through them to us.

But, now, what’s happened in more recent years, and with a vengeance, I think, within the past year or two, is that it’s become clear that objecthood is only a special case of literalness. Literalness is a more general and embracing term, and objecthood is only a kind of literalness. Maybe, you might say, its most concrete or specific form. In recent years, within the past two or three years, we’ve seen the extensive spread of an art based on literalness, in which the object has, if not exactly disappeared, anyway been softened, ripped to shreds, scattered, [00:08:00] disintegrated, pulverized, spread across a considerable expanse, in different ways, so that there’s no longer anything that you could exactly call an object, certainly nothing that’s an object in the heightened sense that a six-foot cube is an object, but which is nevertheless absolutely an art of literalness. For example, Morris’s felt hangings at Castelli’s Gallery last year were a step on the way towards this. His rooms full of wool, all kinds of shards of things, are a case in point. Lots of other artists. One has only to look at the magazines. I mean, Barry Le Va scattering tiny fragments of felt across an enormous room, and so on. The whole rage that we have today for this kind of phenomenon.

All of which seems to me absolutely in keeping with what went before. If objects are a kind of heightening, [00:09:00] or anyway a concentration of literalness, these developments amount to a diffusion, a scattering, a flattening of literalness, in some cases even below its normal level. It’s a kind of diffused, generalized, all-over presence, instead of a kind of concentrated, focused, directed presence. When I say “all-over” and talk about material here, one can see that these artists might look to someone like Pollock as a great precedent for what they did. And again, Robert Morris is in the van in this development, and it’s the underlying current of literalness that enabled him to move as effortlessly as he did from an art based on the object to an art of literalness as such. Anyway, there are lots of different manifestations of this, and we’ll be seeing a lot more. All equally academic, I think, all equally vain, empty, and theatrical, all equally literal, and ultimately situational. They’ll be justified, they’ll be defended, in lots of ways. For

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 example, one of the things that will be said is that, in any art of this [00:10:00] kind, we’re doing away with the idea of art as object, and therefore we’re doing away with the idea of art as a commodity.

Therefore, there’s something, it’s implied, anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois in this, so the art picks up an added aura of revolutionary fervor, and claims to be even more directed against the system, and the artist can come on all the more in a kind of guise as revolutionary. Of course, it’s true that there may not be a commodity in that sense. Maybe what was exhibited was a piece of ice that gradually melts. But of course, what’s taken the place of the work of art as commodity is the artist as commodity. He becomes the commodity. It’s the fact that he did it. One finds a lot of these people asserting very strongly that they are artists, as if that fact might be missed. [00:11:00] So anyway, their complaints that society assimilates their art too quickly are finally, I would say, ludicrous, and in kind of ultimate bad faith. So one is talking about the emergence of an art based on situations and literalness, and these reinforce each other. They’re different aspects of one in the same thing. I’ve probably been going a long time. I’ve got more here than I really could have got through, I see now. I was going to go on and talk a bit more about situation as a temporal concept.

Let me just say that I think literalists, or theatrical art, is involved with time, with duration, in a way that other kinds of art aren’t. Even that literalist art, while apparently eschewing imagery, or symbolism, [00:12:00] or illusion, or depiction, or metaphor, denying all of these, saying that all of these amount to essentially corrupt [modes?], amounts itself to a kind of rendering of or metaphor for a particular kind of temporality, and in particular, namely endlessness. It’s as if time goes on and on forever. It’s as though the experience of literalist art is itself endless, inexhaustible in this sense, that it doesn’t come to an end in the work itself. One simply decides to break off, to turn away, to stop the situation, to abort it. One might say that a literalist’s work stops rather than ends. It doesn’t have an ending. It just goes on repeating itself, or revealing itself, emptily, forever. And even spatial recession, even perspective, which is one of the basic devices of Minimalist art, is itself a kind of natural metaphor for temporality. One sees this in Surrealism. One sees this in the work of de Chirico. [00:13:00] Spatial recession and perspective can create the sense of the endlessness of time, its rushing towards and away from us.

And I think — though I’ll just truncate the argument here — I think that the art in question is, in many ways, essentially Surrealist, is involved with Surrealism. One might say that the same sensibility that created Surrealism 40 years ago, 45 years ago, has gone into the creation of this art today. Now, against this art, and against this sensibility, I would oppose a very small body of contemporary work, which seems to me to contain just about all that there is of really high value in the contemporary situation, and which also seems to me to comprise just about all the hopes that we can have for the future of art. All of that work falls into the categories of [00:14:00] painting and sculpture.

In painting, I’m talking about the work of men like Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, younger men like Frank Stella, Darby Bannard, Ron Davis, Larry Poons. In sculpture, I’m talking about, above all, the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who I mentioned at the start of this lecture, and a small group of younger English sculptors, in particular Tim Scott, whose work will be shown

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 here next month, and a few other artists, like David Annesley, Michael Bolus, Phillip King some of the time. The art of all these people is the opposite of what I’ve been describing. It’s anti- theatrical, anti-situational, anti-literal. The single notion [00:15:00] by which I would describe it is to say that the work of all these people aspires towards a new kind of abstractness. I realize I can’t go on and read the rest of what I have here. That would just more than exhaust your patience. I’ll just sum up very quickly and say that if, in the art of the past, the art earlier this century, abstract art has tended to mean an art which wasn’t representational, which didn’t represent the world, reality, that was simply what one meant by abstract. It was synonymous, in effect, with non-representational.

What’s happened within the last, say, 10 years or less — 6, 7, 8 years — is that art has come to be made [00:16:00] which is absolutely, in a way, abstract. Think now of Morris. Think now of Tony Smith’s six-foot cube. It’s perfectly abstract. It’s not like a statue of a person in any simple sense, though I think in other ways it’s rather deeply like a statue of a person. But never mind. But that work turns out to be, I would say, not as deeply abstract, not as profoundly abstract, not as meaningfully abstract, not as truly abstract, as the work of other men, such as, for example, Caro, if one were to see a Caro sculpture next to that Tony Smith six-foot cube. It’s as if the art itself has produced a distinction between different kinds of abstractness. All of a sudden, it’s as if one wants to say the Smith cube is only nominally abstract, or only trivially [00:17:00] abstract. It’s not radically abstract. It’s not truly abstract. And it’s not truly abstract precisely because it is literal, precisely because it is a kind of object, a kind of thing.

So that, finally, I would say, that what the new definition of abstractness that’s emerged in the painting and sculpture, the best painting and sculpture of the ’60s, is a definition of abstractness which essentially depends on not being a kind of thing, not being a kind of object. I think there are deep senses in which the sculpture of Caro, or of Tim Scott, or the painting of, say, Noland or Olitski, in which those works are not objects. That would take a long time, and lot of detailed argument and slides, to try to really — or preferably, the works themselves — to really try to make out the case in which that’s [00:18:00] so. I don’t feel terribly guilty about this, because I’ve tried to make out that case in articles which exist. But I would say that it is the case that these men have tried to make art, which has aspired to, almost at any cost, not be objects, and in that sense, not be literal. And in that sense, be abstract. And that if there’s any imperative demand on art today, it’s to be abstract in that way. Not be literal. And by being abstract in that way, defeat both literalness and theatricality. OK, I realize that’s, as a closing, probably hopelessly obscure. But I’ll take questions now, if there are any, and try to answer them [00:19:00] as best I can. Yes?

MALE 1 I can’t tell whether you’re saying that the criteria for criticizing (inaudible) the literal — are you suggesting that the criteria for (inaudible) is something different than what you used for the historical art [for art?]. (inaudible) the level of art. What are you saying?

MICHAEL FRIED Right. I’m saying something more like the second. That is to say, when I go and look at that, try to get with it, try to have the experience, I discover that I can, indeed, have an experience. There’s a kind of thing which is happening, which I won’t deny. That six-foot cube just looks

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 good enough to eat. But I [00:20:00] can’t finally believe in it [as any?]. It’s not just what (inaudible). I don’t have a different (inaudible). In a way, I’m judging it just negative. I’m putting it against the work that I believe in, and it doesn’t come up to the level of that work. But then, I also want to account — again, what I’ve tried to get into — I also want to account for the experience that I am having. And it’s also my feeling that, although I think it’s ultimately (inaudible) and unsuccessful in part, it does seem to me to have a kind of importance as a phenomena, and a kind of relation to the serious art of the time that a lot of other art, it seems to me, failed or bad art, doesn’t have. It’s not simply trivial. It’s really based on a serious view of the art of the past. It’s based on what seems to me (inaudible). Maybe it would be more accurate [00:21:00] to say (inaudible) statement theory about the art of the past. And as such, it has kind of a [constructed importance?]. I don’t think quite this has happened before, that a body of work grew up in this relation to the past. It’s exactly the same body of work (inaudible) that the artist —

MALE 1 I was just (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED Sorry?

MALE 2 I was just (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED What?

MALE 2 (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED Oh. Sure. The last thing in the world I’m saying is that there’s never been theatrical art before. This is important, and I no doubt didn’t make it clear. I feel that it’s only been recently, because it’s a new development, that theater has become the [enemy?] of art. I’d say (inaudible). I’d say there’s a lot of theatricality in Manet. [00:22:00] The Cubists (inaudible) the notion of art — of the painting as a kind of object. And there’s certainly intense theatricality in (inaudible). I couldn’t agree more. I think what one has is a historical development, in which [I’m realizing?], at some point in the really recent past, theatricality and high quality of visual art has become increasingly (inaudible). In fact, I was thinking one of the major events in the early ’60s is the development of painting and sculpture.

MALE 2 Why is that?

MICHAEL FRIED What does “why” mean? Sorry, that’s not said contentiously.

MALE 2 Why simply take a polarity that you have observed accurately in terms of quality, and then make

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 a value judgment for one to get to another? (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED [00:23:00] Right. I would say that the order in which I did that was the reverse. That is to say, it was after making the value judgment that I was coming to see that in fact — I mean, it isn’t obvious to begin with that a six-foot cube, and felt scattering on the floor of a room, and two parallel lines running in the middle of the Mojave Desert in fact belong exactly in the same [bed?], as I think they do. It was only after having made certain judgments about each of those kinds of things — the lines weren’t drawn and the felt wasn’t scattered when I would have written this article years ago. But they are equally diverse phenomena, which, I discovered in my experience of the phenomena, I regarded as closely related. I felt the same kind of things about them. I wanted to put them down in terms of quality, because they just didn’t convince me. But at the same time, [00:24:00] I felt they had some kind of significance in relation to the important art at the time, and in relation to each other, that they were connected. Trying to generalize, this is what I arrived at. But it wasn’t starting with a perception that they were two kinds of art, and then deciding, one of them’s got to be good, the other’s got to be bad; I’ll opt for this one being good. The feeling of something being convincing as as art and something being unconvincing was the first thing, not the last.

MALE 2 (inaudible) react negatively about the work. But why is theatricality itself a negative feature of the art? Or is (inaudible)?

MICHAEL FRIED I couldn’t give a simple answer to that. I’m not suggesting that someone use that as a criterion. [00:25:00] I’m not suggesting that someone go out, and if there’s theatricality, therefore say it then. It seems to me theatricality is a quality which all this particular kind of bad art, failed, ambitious art shares, and I start being forced to the conclusion that something is the matter with theatricality. Now, I’ll agree with you. I don’t want to be disingenuous. Of course, there’s something that I’m not liking about theatricality as such. I have a feeling it’s a very corrupt artistic mode, partly because it completely sidesteps the whole issue of conviction. Convincingness immediately starts being not to the point, if what is to the point is a completely surefire, predictable, attainable effect. If you draw two white lines in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and you walk to the middle of the Mojave Desert and get between those two white lines, it is going to look great, and everybody is going to have, in a certain sense, the same [00:26:00] experience of that. But it’s not going to be an experience that one can feel conviction about. That’s what I would argue. You couldn’t finally say, “This is great.” In that sense, it’s not going to be coming up, able to stand comparison with, the really good art of the past. There’s all kinds of things about theatricality as a mode that I would find just personally objectionable. A particular kind of complicity that the work is asking for, and what seems to me a kind of profound dishonesty in the work itself. That is to say, the way in which all this work comes on as radical, comes on as hard-nosed, comes on as really tough and really hard to take, and is in fact sitting there ensconced in the perfect certainty that you can’t fail to be struck by it, and you can’t fail to be affected by it in a particular way. It’s, in fact, anything but hard-nosed. [00:27:00] It’s, in fact, really very winsome and winning and appealing work, and it takes the full effort of the media to present it as hard-nosed or radical. Those would be a set of feelings about them.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

MALE 3 Wouldn’t you say that the (inaudible)?

MICHAEL FRIED Sorry?

MALE 3 Wouldn’t you say (inaudible)?

MICHAEL FRIED I would feel no, it isn’t. I know that there could be a line of objection to Caro as — one of the things that’s normally objected to in Caro is the work looks gestural and anthropomorphic. One might try to construe that in Caro or in Smith — you have to take them together — as being a kind of theatricality. I certainly think an art which is based on [00:28:00] various kinds of gestures in any way runs the risk of theatricality, and I would say certain works of, say, (inaudible) fail in this way. They have an absolute (inaudible) gestural aspect, where they see and hold such a thing, and seem to me to be open to a charge of that particular kind of theatricality. I’ve seen lots of art which isn’t minimal, which is gestural, which may even be Caro-influenced, which isn’t this time. I would feel that one of the things I most admire about Caro, that seem to me an index of the extreme maturity of his feelings in a work, is the kind of beautiful [reticence?] and delicacy in the work themselves, that they almost never — I’ll say virtually never — really the art finally holding to that charge. I think it’s something which Caro — he’s constantly making [00:29:00] all kinds of decisions within a given subject, and presents them [in an emotionally aesthetic?] and pure and un-theatrical kind of way.

MALE 3 What about (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED I think if he did that, that would happen. What pieces do you think about? I would say that in fact —

MALE 3 I’m thinking of the difficulty of getting around (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED That, I think, has more to do with [the space?]. I never quite feel that it’s getting in the way of my footwork. On the contrary. The very way the piece is, is such that I am always backing around it like this. I’m never stepping over it towards something. I’m always trying to give it whatever room it needs. But I never feel that that’s something that the work itself wants. I might [00:30:00] wish, I wish they put this piece in a bigger room. I wish I didn’t have to do this. Obviously, any work of art, put in a small enough or inappropriate enough space, is going to be causing that type of feeling.

MALE 3 (inaudible)

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

MICHAEL FRIED I think the (inaudible) — it’s not making a situation, or at least making a certain problem (inaudible). I’m not saying that Caro should be in the middle of the desert. For example, in his recent showing at Hayward Gallery in London, I don’t think you would have felt that about the way — one simply had whatever room they wanted to let the pieces work. I think Caro can be seen very well enclosed. I don’t think they demand vast amounts of space. But I can remember shows where — at the (inaudible) Gallery in the kind of (inaudible) which I never felt I really fully saw. There’s a great difference [00:31:00] between one’s wish to have more space there and the kind of way in which is literally thought, or minimally thought, to feel everything is imperfect. If that cube gives you only a limited amount of room, enough to force a conversation, you know that that’s (inaudible). If you have no room, [you’re forced to participate?]. That’s not true with Caro. With Caro, you’re constantly subtracting the situation out. You’re constantly wishing the floor was more (inaudible) and even more (inaudible). You wish (inaudible) but what it wants to be is just that black horizontal, whereas the psychology of the floor, in a literal for example (inaudible). I’m not saying that the literalists painted on the floor, and Caro (inaudible). (inaudible) [00:32:00] Yeah?

MALE 4 (inaudible) highly theatrical and highly (inaudible) I don’t try and [00:33:00] (inaudible) same level I think (inaudible) meaning of the word theatrical?

MICHAEL FRIED I’m not (inaudible) trying to put forward what’s going to be an all-purpose —

MALE 4 Do you think there might be a diversity in theatricality? There might be a Minimalist theatricality. (inaudible) theatricality (inaudible) about that.

MICHAEL FRIED I think the point that this gentleman made about there being a possibility of a gestural theatricality, being, in that very simple sense, theatrical, is absolutely a possibility. [I just haven’t seen it before?] (inaudible) and I’m hoping to find that. Yeah?

MALE 4 [00:34:00] (inaudible) what would you think the responsibility of, say, people like Kenneth Noland and — they seem to be hung up (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED Well, if you’re (inaudible) and you feel that, it’s a ridiculous situation to (inaudible) urging you not to feel that. I do think that we get kind of screwed up by the (inaudible). It’s the fact that (inaudible) [00:35:00] —

MALE 4 (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED I’d say that a lot is going on in [color?]. (inaudible) the past. And then to move too quickly (inaudible). He could have gotten more depictions out of it than he did get out of it. I think he

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 tended too much to push onto the new thing before he really exhausted what he was doing. I’m delighted that (inaudible) I think it’s tremendous. Greatest thing he’s ever been in (inaudible). They certainly have to do with various (inaudible) criticism that we all (inaudible) [00:36:00] but I think he is willing (inaudible).

MALE 4 (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED (inaudible) He goes on (inaudible) That’s just not true. (inaudible)

MALE 4 (inaudible) [00:37:00]

MICHAEL FRIED Well, we disagree, but it’s exciting. I’m starting (inaudible) —

MALE 4 (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED Any other questions? Yeah?

MALE 5 (inaudible) other than what seems to be (inaudible) what you mean by literal, and I wonder if there’s something [00:38:00] else besides just another meaning of literal that makes objects (inaudible) in terms of consideration of form.

MICHAEL FRIED If I understand the question — this is all really complicated stuff (inaudible). I don’t know how (inaudible) but to answer it as best I can, I’d say that the opposition between serious art and what I’ve been calling convincing (inaudible) and something (inaudible) just seems to me something that has [a word?] in the art of the past 10 years. It’s not that I can say, what is it about? [00:39:00] That is to say, if I try to say, what it is about something being an object, it’s kind of (inaudible). Everything I say can be certain. In this sense, I say, what’s an object that becomes theatrical in a situation (inaudible)

MALE 5 I think, at some point, what you’re saying (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED Where it gets (inaudible) we’re in a situation where what I’m saying, art, the serious, the best art of the past 10 years, has come to assume for itself the (inaudible) not be an object anymore, and that it be radical abstraction. Now, being alert to this definition having emerged as not being an object, that seems to me art (inaudible), but I think there’s also the other side of that. In a very [00:40:00] (inaudible).

MALE 5

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969

Those great artists, as you’ve pointed out, has their avoidance (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED I think, probably, in a lot of things, absolutely not, which is what makes it all the more significant. If what they were doing was the application of some sort of beforehand conceptual criticism, it would start not looking very —

MALE 5 (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED Yeah. I think it’s precisely because what they’re trying to do is just make a painting or a sculpture that they believe in, and in order to do that, in order to make something which, for them, can really back up against the best stuff in the past, they find themselves having to make all kinds of decisions which ultimately (inaudible)

FEMALE 1 [00:41:00] (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED (inaudible)

FEMALE 1 (inaudible)

MALE 6 (inaudible)

MICHAEL FRIED When you say conviction, sir — and here’s where one gets into a kind of circularity which I think is a real circularity — it’s not a logical circularity to be deployed, but it’s a circularity of experience, which is to be accepted (inaudible). When I say I find a painting convincing, I ultimately mean I find it convincing [of the painter?]. [00:42:00] I find it convincing [of the sculptor?] (inaudible) in that sense, that’s art. One of the things that ultimately means is that I can see it as being able to stand comparatively in terms of quality with art of the past. Good quality is not in doubt, which doesn’t seem to us subject to conviction in quite the same way. Though, in fact, I think it is, but it’s less (inaudible). It doesn’t strike us that when we go look at (inaudible). Whether or not we believe in (inaudible). Certain things happened which were suddenly (inaudible) a particular painting, whether or not we’re convinced by it. For example, one of the most drastic instances you could imagine is that there suddenly emerged a possibility (inaudible). Then you suddenly (inaudible). You’re treating that picture [00:43:00] in a new way. You’re suddenly realizing what’s at stake in your experience of that picture is whether or not [you really depict that?]. OK, so conviction — that’s what I mean. I do think it is a circle in that way, and I think it’s a circle like that for the artist, what he’s trying to do, to make something that he believes in, and can stand behind, and that ultimately means to stand behind his art, stand behind (inaudible) be compared with the work of the past (inaudible). Acknowledgement. I think the kinds of acknowledgement that one made and receives (inaudible) many different

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “On the Future of Art” by Michael Fried, 1969 times. There, I think, it depends on the very specific art that one is talking about. For example, acknowledgement of the literalism of support, which in a particular thing might mean a very particular sense of the flatness of the support. [00:44:00] It all has to do with the [close?] development of Cubism. See the extremely complicated shifts that go on. But in that sense, those are both kind of (inaudible) conviction and acknowledgment that the artist tries to develop (inaudible). Does that answer your question? Yeah, somewhat. Thank you very much.

(applause)

END OF AUDIO FILE 9009680_01_A_edited_9009680_01_B_edited-On-the-Future-of-Art.mp3

On the Future of Art / Michael Fried. 1969/4/13. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York