objecthood essay

QUICK VIEW: Synopsis Michael Fried is one the most established and reputable art critics and historians alive today. His approach to criticism is closely linked with that of his mentor, the late Clement Greenberg, who Fried first encountered while an undergraduate at Princeton. Much like Greenberg, Fried was suspicious of academics and critics who insisted on critiquing modern art within a historical and/or cultural context, instead of formally examining the work of art on its own terms. Another of Fried's notable contributions was his staunch opposition to what he observed as the lack of differentiation between the work of art itself and the experience of viewing it, a phenomenon he described as theatricality. Key Ideas / Information Fried was wary of the dangers of categorizing art as an event. When this happened, he thought, viewers don't appreciate the artwork itself, rather its broader cultural context (i.e. Abstract Expressionism, color field painting, as opposed to a specific painting by Pollock or Rothko.). If art becomes nothing more than a cultural event, then it adversely compromises the way in which art can be appreciated; reactions will be conditioned by surrounding socio-historic circumstance, which will avoid consideration of the artwork as an independent entity. Fried believed that great art is an untangling of historical forces, the result of a Hegelian dialectic or a synthesis of many different points in history all coming together to form something new and original. Fried was highly critical of art critics and historians who asserted themselves as objective observers of art, which is to say, most of them. He defined the duties of the critic in the following manner: It is. imperative that the formalist critic bear in mind at all times that the objectivity he aspires toward can be no more than relative. This statement was fairly provocative, given.
Contents List of IllustrationsPreface and AcknowledgmentsAn Introduction to My Art Criticism Pt. 1: 1966-77Shape as Form: Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons (1966) Morris Louis (1966-67) Jules Olitski (1966-67) Art and Objecthood (1967) New Work by Anthony Caro (1967) Ronald Davis: Surface and Illusion (1967) Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro (1968) Recent Work by Kenneth Noland (1969) Caro's Abstractness (1970) Problems of Polychromy: New Sculptures by Michael Bolus (1971) Larry Poons's New Paintings (1972) Anthony Caro's Table Sculptures, 1966-77 (1977) Pt. 2: 1965Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (1965) Pt. 3: 1962-64Anthony Caro (1963) Frank Stella (1963) New York Letter: Oldenburg, Chamberlain (October 25, 1962) New York Letter: Louis, Chamberlain and Stella, Indiana (November 25, 1962) New York Letter: Warhol (December 25, 1962) New York Letter: Johns (February 25, 1963) New York Letter: Hofmann (April 25, 1963) New York Letter: Noland, Thiebaud (May 25, 1963) New York Letter: Hofmann, Davis (December 5, 1963) New York Letter: Kelly, Poons (December-January 1963-64) New York Letter: Judd (February 15, 1964) New York Letter: De Kooning Drawings (April 25, 1964) New York Letter: Olitski, Jenkins, Thiebaud, Twombly (May 1964) New York Letter: Brach, Chamberlain, Irwin (Summer 1964) Writings by Michael Fried, 1959-77, Exclusive of Poetry Index of Names in An Introduction to My Art Criticism For more information, or to order this book, please visit.
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Merve Ünsal In his seminal essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried contends that Minimalism does not belong in the modernist narrative. Through a close reading of Fried’s essay, this paper argues that Minimalism would probably have been accepted as a part of modernism absent the convincingness of this essay. I reach this conclusion because the Minimalists’ main premise was that their ideas were a natural progression within the modernist genealogy, and the only convincing way to refute this premise was by exposing, as Fried did, the separation of the Minimalist work from modernist conceptions by using the Minimalists’ own vocabulary. Viewed in this light, the power of criticism in contextualizing movements in art – in this case Minimalism – emerges as a clear conclusion, especially when such criticism is strongly rooted in essentialist notions, in this case those of Clement Greenberg.1 In “Art and Objecthood,” Fried does not seek to discount Minimalism, but rather argues that Minimalism is essentially at odds with the modernist sensibility. Stripped of the modernist vocabulary, Donald Judd’s statement that “[a] work only needs to be interesting” becomes problematic for Minimalism.2 In order to understand this problem, it is necessary first to define Minimalism by the very terms provided by Minimalists, and in so doing, to note that these terms were first born from conceptual concerns of its primary practitioners such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd. The Minimalist Vocabulary Morris and Judd were central in formulating what came to be called Minimalism, starting in 1963, both by working on pieces that played with previous notions of three-dimensional works.3 However, Morris and Judd traced the beginnings of Minimalism to different sources and articulated varying motivations and intentions. While the two artists’ work converged formally, they were derived from.
Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried's art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains twenty-seven pieces, including the influential introduction to the catalog for Three American Painters, the text of his book Morris Louis, and the renowned Art and Objecthood. Originally published between 1962 and 1977, they continue to generate debate today. These are uncompromising, exciting, and impassioned writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture. Ranging from brief reviews to extended essays, and including major critiques of Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, these writings establish a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the viability of Clement Greenberg’s account of the infralogic of modernism, the status of figuration after Pollock, the centrality of the problem of shape, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, and the relationship between work and beholder. In a number of essays Fried contrasts the modernist enterprise with minimalist or literalist art, and, taking a position that remains provocative to this day, he argues that minimalism is essentially a genre of theater, hence artistically self-defeating. For this volume Fried has also provided an extensive introductory essay in which he discusses how he became an art critic, clarifies his intentions in his art criticism, and draws crucial distinctions between his art criticism and the art history he went on to write. The result is a book that is simply indispensable for anyone concerned with modernist painting and sculpture and the task of art criticism in our.