The Brooklyn Rail

In the epilogue added later to his 1936 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Martin Heidegger raised this question:

Is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?

Heidegger’s formulation refers to his own controversial claims about art as a “happening of truth” and “decisive for our historical existence,” but in the most general terms, he is asking whether great art will ultimately matter in the West.

It certainly has mattered and still matters to the art historian, art critic, poet, and literary critic, Michael Fried. In a three-volume boxed set, Eris Press has provided us with a comprehensive reflection on why art matters to Fried, and why it ought to matter to anyone (“now as never before,” to cite the subtitle of his 2008 book on art photography), and how historical trends since the 1960s have made it harder to appreciate how and why it matters.

To some extent, all three works, the essays (The Antitheatrical Imperative and Other Essays), the prose poems (The Edge of the Table), and the Exit Interview, are works of memory and memorialization. Fried’s style has always been “personal,” as it has to be given the way in which both his art history and art criticism attempt to do justice to artworks conceived as having an intrinsic authority, making a demand on the beholder that should prompt a response in experience that does justice to such authority and demand. Since no significant criticism and art history should claim anyone’s attention if strictly limited to historical context, patronage, meaning-paraphrase, or technical details (although the erudition on display in Fried’s essays is staggering), critical prose must do justice to one’s own informed experience if it is to inspire in a reader a constant re-experiencing of a work that deepens understanding. The artwork’s authority, its claim to mattering, has to be at the center of any appraisal, so the “problem of the beholder,” a work’s address to a beholder, has been at the heart of Fried’s concerns since his early art critical essays, and since his ground-breaking 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot and the completion of the trilogy that followed with Courbet’s Realism and Manet’s Modernism.

I mention the issue of great art mattering in a wide cultural sense, even though it is not one of the many terms of art Fried has introduced into the analysis of how paintings “work” (e.g. absorption, theatricality, facingness, embodiment, presentness, conviction, the tableau problem, empathic projection, embedment, among others). However, throughout the 240 prose poems, the interviews and the essays, a singular voice emerges. In the prose poems especially, Fried’s recollections of a life in art express an intensity of commitment to art (and to friendships that often have art at their center) that, I would wager, is unparalleled in all the postwar years. Fried’s memories (his recall is other-worldly) are lyrical, graceful, and quite beautiful. The poems crystallize moments in memory that involve an aperçu that often explodes at the viewer in the last sentence, call to mind places that serve as sites of particular meaning, evoke artworks as forms of thought, present what seem like short essays on paintings or photographs but which seem to always bring to mind the issue of art itself, offer a distillation of Conrad in one sentence, and many times provoke the simple pleasure of a well-turned phrase (“especially toward the end of the day, to an atonal chorus of despairing air conditioners”). The French prose poets whom Fried clearly admires, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and their successors such as Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein, wrote poems that are often suffused with fragmentation, doubt, fantasy, an element of the surreal, and the disruptions and pain of an emerging modernity. Fried’s are suffused with a sublime gratitude for his life, his parents, his teachers, his friends, his wife, his daughter, and above all for his life in art. There is a kind of intense drama involved in coming to understand a work, a moment, a friend, a sense of mattering, even a sound or a sight, and those dramas are crystallized, concentrated in the poems in a way that grabs the reader every bit as much as the paintings Fried loves grab the beholder. The same sentiment, gratitude, tinged with both amusement and frustration at his fraught relation with the profession of art history, is prominent in his Exit Interview.

The Antitheatrical Imperative refers in its title both to Fried’s singular discovery about how French painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth century tried to solve the Diderotian problem of “theatricality,” the way, paradoxically, that a painting can fail as a painting, fail to engage the beholder as an artwork; as well as to his most influential essay, “Art and Objecthood,” published in 1967 when Fried was twenty-eight years old. In that essay, still one of the most controversial and discussed of all his work (and reprised in the 2014 essay that gives the Eris Press volume its title), he senses a looming threat to the status of artworks themselves: the threat of “objecthood” posed by the new trends of Minimalism, literalism, Pop art, Op art, Conceptual art, and the growing art world consensus (typified most of all by Arthur Danto’s work in the sixties and seventies) that the distinction between art and non-art had collapsed (together with the distinction between high art and its contrary) and that artworks were to be understood as occasions (the temptation always to write “mere occasions” is irresistible) for a beholder’s subjective experience, in effect surrendering the work’s claim to authority and thus to any claim that the work mattered as art. It is impossible to summarize in any efficient way Fried’s lifelong concern with this issue, and especially the re-animation of the issue when Fried realized that advanced art photography (beginning for him with the work of Jeff Wall) was engaged with the same problem and was experimenting with various novel anti-theatrical strategies.

This problem returns us to the issue involved in the question of how art matters and how it could cease to matter. The way in which an artwork arrests the attention of the beholder, stops beholders in their tracks, interrupts ordinary experience, demands sustained attention, is characterized in any number of ways in the essays, starting with the issue of Jackson Pollock’s “intensity” in the drip paintings of his prime period (1947–50), Clement Greenberg on “density of decision,” and Fried on “density of intention,” especially in photography; the persistence of the “magic of absorption” in the clearly posed observers in Philippe Parreno’s short film, June 8, 1968; Fried’s exemplification of such attentiveness in his indispensable piece on description in attending to painting, including his reflections on its theory-laden nature and its role as a form of argument; his demonstration of the way the way high-modernist art achieves a moment of “presentness”; his case for the philosophical seriousness of Charles Ray’s hyper-realist sculptures; his invocation of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory in discussing Thomas Struth’s technology photographs, just to cite a few examples.

Heidegger claims in his “Origin” essay that “Whenever art happens—that is whenever there is a beginning—a thrust (Stoß, a shock, an impact, a blow) enters history; history either begins or starts over again.” It is hard to imagine a more ambitious claim about art mattering, especially when coupled with Heidegger’s claim that “Art is considered neither an area of cultural achievement nor an appearance of spirit; it belongs to das Ereignis [the event] by way of which the ‘meaning of Being’ can alone be defined.” In the most general sense imaginable, Heidegger is talking about the way in which the world makes sense to us, or fails to, and he is assigning art a major role in awakening us to dimensions of sense, can bring to light a non-discursive attunement to such sense or dimensions of mattering. There is a distinctive Friedian tone in Heidegger’s further claim about this moment of shock or Stoß, his claim that “The setting-into-work of truth [in art] thrusts up [aufstoßen] the awesome and at the same time thrusts down [umstoßen]the ordinary and what we believe to be such.” Heidegger’s ambition is matched by Fried, with far more detailed attention to how painting, photography, and literature can inspire something like the same experience Fried relates when he first saw the works of Anthony Caro, as much the hero of his essays as Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Adolph Menzel, or Caravaggio: his “almost instantaneous conviction” that he was in the presence of great art, an art that mattered deeply, or in this reflection on an encounter with Caravaggio.

Rather, I want simply to leave us all with a vivid sense of what a high-stakes business it can be even to contemplate coming to grips “descriptively” or otherwise with certain works of art—and yet what choice does one have, when the works in question lie smack in one’s path? Or exert their call on one in some other way? High-stakes but far from hopeless, that’s my message. And that it is a privilege to live and write in their light.

High stakes, indeed.