Presentness is Grace: How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name

There is something that I’ve noticed in blog exchanges, which is not visible in the post so much as the evolving thread, and that is candor in an emerging dialogue. I am enjoying the sense of it, which to my mind is richer than any dream of consensus. In a recent blog thread, extending over the course of several days, Edward Winkleman addressed everyone: “The collective discussion here, facilitated by the technology that permits measured thoughtful responses (as opposed to verbal debate where immediate demand for response heats things up too much) amounts to as satisfying a statement about what's what in art today as any given solo impression (doomed to present only one point of view successfully) could ever present.” and that “You're proving that art writing can perhaps be seen in a vital new way.”

On this blog, a slower conversation has been emerging, at first in response to jargon, and Nicholas Knight responded that even “ordinary language philosophy” has its own burdens, writing: “...constant diligence is absolutely required, because any concept or term can be laden with baggage. And that baggage will ultimately function as the meaning itself. And at such times, the red flags should be flying around everywhere!” and to which I replied with the following from Stanley Cavell:

The first step would be to grant to philosophers the rights of language and vision Austin grants to all other men: to ask of them, in his spirit, why they should say what they say where and when they say it, and to give the full story before claiming satisfaction. That Austin pretends to know the story, to have heard it all before, is no better than his usual antagonists assumption that there is no story necessary to tell, that everything is fine and unproblematic in the tradition, that philosophers may use words as they please, possessing the right or power - denied to other mortals - of knowing, without investigating, the full significance of their words and deeds. (Cavell, "Austin at Criticism," in Must We Mean What We Say, p. 111, Cambridge, c. 1976.)

As Nicholas Knight points out, the infamous critic/art historian Michael Fried was a student of Stanley Cavell. Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg are together the bogeymen of formalist art criticism, and while people have begun to warm up to Greenberg again, I don’t see that happening in the dominant art critical discourse with regard to Fried. For example, Shamim Momim in the Whitney Biennial catalog:

Michael Fried's famous text "Art and Objecthood" (1967) is a seminal illustration of the spatio-temporal anxieties of the sixties. A denunciation of the phenomenological staging of Minimalist sculpture, Fried's frankly hostile view of the "temporal" was based on the idea that art must have purity of presence: read, timelessness. In its proper state, according to Fried, art would test only the limits of its discrete medium and, thus, retain what he called "presentness." This achievement Fried construed as a redemptive one: a moral stance that framed time as the culprit behind all of Minimalism's ills - the theatricality of the objects, the endlessness inherent in industrial production, the notion that meaning exists in the space around an object and is activated by a viewer's presence rather than held autonomously within the object itself. (Time Change, in Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum. c. 2008,p. 17)

Something has happened between the publication of Fried’s essay and the by now overdetermined dismissal of it as a 'hostile view of "the temporal" - and the red flags are up! Much of the disregard for Fried that I hear in this comes in what is regarded as the moral stance of his last line, “presentness is grace,” and its presumed claim for a certain notion of autonomy.

On the topic of art and Buddhism in the Vietnam war era, I gave a lecture to an audience that I knew would include practicing Buddhists, and described to them what I understood of Fried, who to my knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism. It was an interesting exercise in that in order to speak to a very specific audience that had little knowledge of art history I had to jog Fried out of the habits of my own art historical writing. This is what I came up with:

From what I can tell, Michael Fried believes very strongly in convention as the necessary means by which we face one another as human beings. Forms, such as languages, are the containers that make intimate candor possible. One might say that the container can brim over in presentness, as in the deep heartfelt bow of one zen practitioner to another, or it can appear hollow, as in a disingenuous bow. In the first, the distinction between being is and being as is held in such a tense relation that the absolute (presentness) and the relative (in this bow) are indistinct the one from the other. In the second, the ego has occupied the space where presentness might have arisen, and without this presentness, being as is a bloated mimicry that hauls others in its sphere, a sphere that has now become a theatrical event. In their own respect for their tradition, this audience is now expected to be complicit with an ego that has forced a divide between self and other.

Unlike other judgments upon the success or failure of a work of art, what makes Fried's judgment interesting is that the alienating divide he describes between subject and object is felt as an extorted complicity in a social situation. In cautious and qualified accord with the ballyhoo surrounding the Whitney Biennial catalog, perhaps we should say this of arts writing as well.

By Catherine Spaeth