The status of the art object has changed over the last thirty-five years
Beginning with Michael Fried’s arguments in his 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, consider how the status of the art object (painting, sculpture, installation, etc.) has changed over the last thirty-five years within Art History and fine practice.
Fried’s essay is a kind of riposte to Judd and Morris, who he decried as literalists, coining the term to describe attitudes in opposition to his abstractionist interpretation of Modernism. For Fried, its theatricality is a symptom of the decadence of literalist works of art, which establishes a staged relationship, in time, between object and beholder. Fried preferences a kind of Modernism which is more authentically abstract: insisting Modern artworks should be abstracted from pretence, from time and from a sense of object. The publication of Fried’s essay brought to light to divisions within the Modernist tradition, and seemed to indicate that the heart of these divisions lay in the philosophical conflicts between Idealism and Materialism.
So Fried’s dislike of the term Minimal Art, has caused him to rename it Literalist Art. He points out that the ambition of Judd and his contemporaries is to escape the constraints of painting: the restrictions imposed by the limitations of the canvas. Composition and the effort to create a pictorial illusion are never, according to Fried, quite convincing enough, quite original enough, to be satisfying. Donald Judd explained the problem:
When you start relating parts, in the first place, you’re assuming you have a vague whole- the rectangle of the canvas- and definite parts, which is all screwed up, because you should have a definite whole and maybe no parts.
Painting is doomed to failure, but perhaps some resolution will arrive with the introduction of a new dimension. In practice, the new dimension brings with it a new focus on the relationships within the work. Judd refers to the relational character of his sculptures as their anthropomorphism, speaking of the correspondence between the spaces he creates, and both Judd and Morris are concerned with unity, completeness, creating a perfect shape capable of overwhelming the fragmentary components.
In many ways nothing has physically changed in sculpture since the 1960s. There seems to be a constant effort to relate parts in Catherine de Monchaux’s recent sculpture, although her work, unlike Judd’s, is more obviously and shameless anthropomorphic in its forms. Her structures appear to be based on the human body, and her titles are like the titles of poems or fairytales. Wandering about in the future, looking forward to the past is virtually surrealist, it seems arbitrary to call this minimalist when the emphasis is not clearly on objects declaring the status of their existence, but instead on some fantasy story. Never Forget seems to be about memories, the past, things being opened up, revealed and mapped out in a symmetrical and rather beautiful way. Both these works are concerned with the impossible project of re-membering, putting things back together from their parts- and the contrast with Judd is clear- to the extent that they are about parts being reassembled into an ideal whole, de Monchaux’s sculptures are more like paintings. In many ways, her work resembles Carl Andre’s- particularly his Venus Forge.
The viewer’s experience of the work will obviously depend on whether the work is perceived as an object or a subject. In Fried’s conception, the art object becomes animated and serves the holistic aspiration of the artist. But the art work’s subjectivity does not elevate the artist- they have created an object capable of representing itself, and, like Frankenstein observing his monster, are themselves both the observers and observed.
If Hesse is, as her diaries suggest, a woman observing herself, then she has an immediate affinity with Judd. Both artists are engaged in a project of self-replication, where sculpture is an extension of themselves- something projected into space, imbued with some kind of life, in the words of Chav and Fried, written into existence. Fried’s idea can be read as gender-neutral, but the phallocentric commentaries of feminist writers such as Camille Paglia will always present a serious threat to any art theory that preferences the projection and prominence of sculpture over the restrictive bittiness of painting on canvas. For Paglia and her school, sculpture is mostly by and about men, and it is an alarming, violent world of construction, projection, erection and self-aggrandising expressiveness. Much of this might just as well read as a preliminary sculptural theory:
The sexes are caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness. Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Woman inflamed with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man’s systems and suppresses her indebtedness to him as she steals them.
Hesse’s feminist works can be read with a melancholic tone of a woman conscious of and raging about a sexual debt but they do not have to be. Paglia finds male and female equality in Eastern religious traditions: cultures built around ongoing horizontal natural rhythms, unlike the western male preoccupation with vertical climax. Hesse’s interest in the body is, in Paglia’s terms. chthonic- she claimed she wanted to keep her work in the ugly zone, her work defined by Stallybrass as all orifices and symbolic filthphysical needs and pleasures of thesexual organs.
So while Hesse works almost unconsciously as a woman, in the most natural and inevitable way finding affinity with the dirty reality of natural processes, she does not necessarily work with an agenda to liberate women- at least not through the symbolism she employs. She is not seeking illusory freedom in creating an alternative heterocosm through sculpture- she is merely expressing what is going on inside her, writing the body.
Paglia’s vision of the wholeness of femininity is irresistibly connected to Fried’s emphasis on shape, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape. In order for a work to qualify as a painting it must, Fried says, hold a shape.Without form, it is experienced as an object. Modernist painting’s mission was to stave off accusations of objecthood, and to retain shape- character- persona. Minimalist (literalist) art, on the other hand, embraces its objecthood and strains to project it at every opportunity.
Minimalist art is a new genre of theatre and includes the beholder. There is certainly something implacably theatrical about Hesse’s sculpture, the in-jokes, the sexual punning, the scale. There is also an inescapable recurrence of the void as a symbol. While it’s tempting to class all holes as signifiers of feminine anxiety or unsatisfaction, it may not always be terribly helpful. Hang Up, for example, is not even a real empty canvas- it’s been beautifully painted, just all in one colour. It lurches out at us with its alien grayness, the passage of time and its monocrome simplicity lending it an amateur dramatics eeriness, this is no painting. It is a textbook example of Fried’s notion of theatrical sculpture, and an example so clearly handmade that it recalls other hand crafted art works, and by extension a dozen other women artists- and raises the point that perhaps Fried’s theatricality theory is extraordinarily effective with female artists after all. It certainly helps to spin the boy’s club character of 60s minimalism- if craft and animation invokes the feminine and can be imposed or unveiled in the most surprising places, due to a theory, then this theory must have some value as a gender-leveling power.
In December 2001, Jonathon Freedland wrote in the Guardian: I can’t help but snigger at some minimalists’ total disdain for the craftsmanship of art. I discover that when you buy a Sol LeWitt, what you get is a set of instructions on a single sheet of A4 paper and a certificate of authenticity; you then hire a set of approved draftsmen to come and “execute” the drawing for you.
The craftsmanship, in fact, is in the supporting theory- the theory which has to become absorbed into the art for the art to be art and not, in one case literally just a pile of bricks. Andre’s Venus Forge was made in 1980 and you can almost tell. In the same article Freedland describes the work as practically baroque and doubts its veracity as minimalism at all. All of which hints at an essential, and uncharacteristic, femininity about the piece. It recalls Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson’s contrived paths of natural materials, but rather than blending into the natural landscape, it flashes in complimentary copper and polished wood. In fact it blends into the unnatural landscape of the wooden floor it’s been laid over. The path is a promise too, and its urban camouflage rewards our attention, creeping out of the floorboards and leading us back to them. Venus Forge (even the name is female and femininity) is not enclosed, but passive, we could walk over it without seeing it if we were particularly distracted, and its frame is the floor itself. In this work it is most obvious to me what Judd means by the relationship between the parts- here the floor the work is laid on is integral to the efficacy of the piece, its subtlety, its minimalism- or, in Fried’s useful term- its literariness.
Tags: art object, artists, literalist art, Michael Fried, minimalist art, modernism
