The Negation of Art
T. Nikki Cesare
In "Art and Objecthood" (1967), Michael Fried wrote, "The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theater, and theater is now the negation of art." His statement is dated, and "literalist," his term for Minimalist art, never made it much past his own use–but his words come back to haunt us as the visual arts become ever more aligned with theater. Via multimedia installation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and performance-based spectacle, postmodern art has permeated disciplinary boundaries to the point at which it barely seems to be "art" in the traditional sense any longer. Simultaneously a condemnation and astute definition of Miniminalist art, Fried’s essay offers not only commentary about the state of Minimalist art in contrast to modernist painting and sculpture, but also on art’s future. (The other disciplines are not immune to Fried’s attack, and he warns even theater against the theatrical.) It becomes necessary, then, 40 years later, when considering art’s significance, to reconsider the significance of his text.
Fried’s main fault with Minimalist art is the theatrical relationship it imposes upon the art work and its beholder, placing the latter "in a situation […that] includes the beholder"–even as it at times distances and confronts her. Works by artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris attain what Fried terms "objecthood" through their "nonrelational, unitary character […] that makes the beholder a subject and the piece in question…an object"; and through this objecthood, the works achieve a state of presentness. Tino Sehgal’s "situation" (what he terms his performative pieces) at this year’s Venice Biennale’s German pavilion, in which gallery attendants wander among spectators and Thomas Scheibitz’s modernist paintings and sculpture repeating, "Oh, this is so contemporary," 2004—2005, certainly exhibits the presence Fried warns against. Though, while the attendants’ mantra "demands that the beholder take [them] into account," as Fried writes, the work may have been intended less to be taken "seriously" than simply for what it was: an ironic commentary not as much on the state of art (though it is that as well) as on the state of art spectatorship–and possibly even art criticism.
Sehgal’s work represents one end of the spectrum of theatricality, though Minimalist it is not. Yet, the juxtaposition of Sehgal’s minions and Scheibitz’s work speaks to the conflict between Minimalist and modernist art of which Fried writes. "[M]odernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood, and that the crucial factor in this undertaking is shape, but shape that must belong to painting–it must be pictorial, not, or not merely, literal. Whereas literalist art […] aspires not to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such."
Consider the concurrent summer exhibitions at PaceWildenstein’s Chelsea gallery. Occupying two full walls of the main gallery are Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1167 Dark to light (scribbles) and Wall Drawing #1166 Light to dark (scribbles) (both works 2005), assembled over two and a half weeks by a team of 15 people. These are, as the press release notes, "the largest graphite drawings made by the artist to date." They are dramatic and stunning–literally (and literalist-ically), they stun the beholder through their size, depth, and what can only be referred to as presence. The accumulation of individual black penciled "scribbles" curve and twist into a massive, sculptural drawing that becomes the "[e]ndlessness, being able to go on and on, even having to go on and on," that, Fried writes, "is central both to the concept of interest and to that of objecthood." Like LeWitt’s earlier 49 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967—71, these wall drawings "carr[y] the implication that the units in question could be multiplied ad infinitum."
In the back room is Tara Donovan’s Nebulous, 2004, a floor sculpture entirely made of scotch tape, coiled, bent, and molded into tenuous form. Its placement, whilst including the beholder, also, in Fried’s terms, "distances" her–through the fear of inadvertently stepping on it (as the guard warns against when anyone comes too near it) and through its marking out of its own space amid the other exhibited works. One must carefully negotiate one’s way to view the photos on the wall behind it, and, as such, it implicitly becomes a part of the other works through this negotiation, this refusal to be ignored. Reminiscent of Eva Hesse and Alan Saret, Donovan’s work comes upon the beholder unexpectedly, and, by affecting the way one moves through the gallery space even at a safe distance from it, it does not let go.
Carey Young’s "Disclaimer" series, a collaboration with intellectual property lawyer Massimo Sterpi, at IBID Projects, London, not only confronts the beholder in its Conceptualist text-based imperatives, but implicates her as well. any representation or claim that this is a work of art is the exclusive responsibility of the person who asserts it, reads Disclaimer: Ontology, 2004. Words, not shape, mark the objecthood of Carey’s work, yet in its perverse claim to the right to define art, it demands the beholder to take a position on the act of viewing. As does Bernardí Roig’s Colour-Light Exercises, 2003, at Claire Oliver in Chelsea. A life-size cast aluminum, polyester resin, and marble dust sculpture of a man weighted down by a stack of lit tubes he carries on his back, it is as if he were burdened with the entire history of Minimalist sculpture (or at least Dan Flavin’s part in it). The man’s stature suggests, quite plainly, what Fried critiques as "the silent presence of another person," and, it, like the Donovan’s Nebulous, "can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting."
Each of these works partakes of the theatrical by exceeding modernist definitions of art in its relationship to the beholder. In the LeWitt, Donovan, and Roig, this excess only enhances the work, building upon modernism’s tenets while obstinately and beautifully subverting them. Yet, something else occurs in the Sehgal and Young that does inform how one perceives visual art.
Fried emphasizes the degeneration of art "as it approaches the condition of theater," and goes so far to deem Minimalist art, with reference to Clement Greenberg, "non-art." The sense of presentness that Minimalist art imbues–and that these pieces, as a continuation of the ideological tradition of that genre, imbue–upon the object, comes from "the duration of the experience." That is, while "at every moment the [modernist painting or sculpture] itself is wholly manifest," the moment of viewing–or, perhaps, experiencing–these works is the very moment the artwork exists. Thus, even as the artwork realizes its presentness, the beholder realizes her own as well; as in theater, the one needs the other in order to perform. Art, then, is no longer the historical construct of museums and galleries, but a performative event that, despite its tangible structure, becomes ephemeral and apt to disappear.
This is not the end of art; nor, truly, is it its negation. But it does bear consideration. The artwork may no longer represent something else but rather be its own endeavor (even if, in the case of Sehgal, it is an irritating one). This theatricality that plagues visual art, as it plagues the other performing arts, then, not only affects the art object, but the contemplation of the object itself.
