Abbott, Mathew (Editor) - Michael Fried and Philosophy - Absorption, Theatricality, and Modernism-Routledge (2017)

Michael Fried and Philosophy
This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians,

and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance
of Michael Fried’s art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried’s
work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality,
and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond
philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from
world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes
from Fried’s texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers
such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth
Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich
Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis
Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, and
Søren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for
philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and
continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political
philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.
Mathew Abbott is Lecturer in Philosophy at Federation University Australia.

Drawing on modern European and post-Wittgensteinian thought, his
research is concerned with intersections of aesthetics, politics, and ethics.
He is the author of Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy and The Figure
of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology.
Routledge Research in Aesthetics
1 Michael Fried and Philosophy

Modernism, Intention, and Theatricality
Edited by Mathew Abbott
Modernism, Intention,
and Theatricality
Edited by Mathew Abbott

First published 2018
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Contents
List of figures vii

Abbreviations of Works by Michael Fried viii
Michael Fried and Philosophy 1

MATHEW ABBOTT
1 Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude 18

MATHEW ABBOTT
2 “When I Raise My Arm”: Michael Fried’s Theory of Action 33

WALTER BENN MICHAELS
3 Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never

Before? On Fried and Intention 48
ROBERT B. PIPPIN
4 Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried 64

DAVID E. WELLBERY
5 Deep Relationality and the Hinge-like Structure of History:

Michael Fried’s Photographs 87
STEPHEN MULHALL
6 Becoming Medium 104

STEPHEN MELVILLE
7 Formalism and the Appearance of Nature 117

RICHARD MORAN
8 Michael Fried, Theatricality, and the Threat of Skepticism 129

PAUL J. GUDEL
vi Contents
9 Michael Fried’s Intentionality 138
REX BUTLER
10 On the (So-Called) Problem of Detail: Michael Fried,

Roland Barthes, and Roger Scruton on Photography
and Intentionality 151
DIARMUID COSTELLO
11 The Aesthetics of Absorption 171

MAGDALENA OSTAS
12 Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant) 189

KNOX PEDEN
13 Diderot’s Conception of Aesthetic Subjectivity

and the Possibility of Art 206
ANDREA KERN
14 The Promise of the Present: Michael Fried’s Poetry Now 226

JENNIFER ASHTON
15 Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater 243

MICHAEL FRIED
Contributors 260
Index 263
Figures
1.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737

(Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C.; image courtesy National Gallery of Art) 5
1.2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, L’Oiseau mort, Salon de 1800
(Musée du Louvre, Paris; photo credit: RMN-Grand
Palais, musée du Louvre/Jean-Gilles Berizzi) 6
1.3 Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment des Horaces, 1784
(Musée du Louvre, Paris; photo credit: RMN-Grand
Palais, musée du Louvre/Stéphane Maréchalle) 7
1.4 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris;
photo credit: Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/
Patrice Schmidt) 8
3.1 Thomas Demand, Poll, 2001 (VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/ARS,
New York) 54
3.2 Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York, Soho, 1978
(image courtesy Atelier Thomas Struth, Berlin) 56
11.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Blowing Soap Bubbles,
1734 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; photo credit:
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York) 174
11.2 Jeff Wall, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the
Prologue, 1999–2001 (The Museum of Modern Art, New
York City, transparency in lightbox 174 × 250.5cm;
image courtesy of the artist) 177
11.3 Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822
(Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; photo credit:
bpk Bildagentur/Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen/Joerg
P. Anders/Art Resource, New York) 182
11.4 Thomas Struth, Art Institute of Chicago II, 1990 (The Art
Institute of Chicago; photo credit: The Art Institute
of Chicago/Art Resource, New York) 183
15.1 Adolph Menzel, Unmade Bed, 1845 (Kupferstichkabinett der
Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin; photo credit: bpk Bildagentur/
Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin—
Preußischer Kulturbesitz/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resource,
New York) 256
Abbreviations of Works
by Michael Fried
AT Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of

Diderot (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
CR Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1990)
MM Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chi-
cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
MR Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century
Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002)
WPM Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
MC The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2010)
FHO Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2011)
FG Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Madame Bovary and Salammbô (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012)
AL Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014)
AC After Caravaggio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2016)
Essays collected in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998):
IMAC “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” 1–74
SF “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” 77–99
ML “Morris Louis,” 100–31
AO “Art and Objecthood,” 148–72
TSAC “Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro,” 180–4
ACTS “Anthony Caro’s Table Sculptures,” 202–9
TAP “Three American Painters: Kenneth Nolad, Jules Olitski, Frank
Stella,” 213–65
Uncollected essay:
JM “Joseph Marioni, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University,” Artfo-
rum (37: 1998), 149–50
Mathew Abbott
The work of Michael Fried has remarkable range. He made his name as
an art critic in the 1960s championing high modernist painters and sculp-
tors such as Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, engaging with
vigor and zeal in the debates that defined the moment. In the 80s and 90s,
Fried published influential studies of French pre-modernist, modernist, real-
ist, and North American realist painting. Since then he has produced a book
on the German realist painter and draughtsman Adolph Menzel, a ground-
breaking book on contemporary art photography, two books on Caravag-
gio and his aftermath, a study of Gustave Flaubert, and new works of art
criticism. Fried has regularly published poetry, producing volumes of poems
in 1973, 1994, 2004, and 2016. And he has a new monograph appearing in
2018: What Was Literary Impressionism?
As well as their range, Fried’s texts are remarkable for the intensity with
which they track a very particular set of interconnected problems: the ontol-
ogy of artwork and beholder; questions of modernism and medium; the
issue of aesthetic quality, and what it is to be convinced by a work of art;
the nature and importance of artistic intention; and the dialectical character
of artistic practices as they develop in specific contexts. As the depth of its
influence and the vitality of the discussion it has generated show, this rich
and penetrating body of work has profound significance for understanding
modern art and literature. The thesis of this volume is that it also has sig-
nificance for philosophy.
Michael Fried and Philosophy brings philosophers, art historians, intel-
lectual historians, and literary scholars together to engage with philosophi-
cal themes from Fried’s texts, to draw out their implications for problems
in and beyond philosophical aesthetics, and to clarify the relevance for
Fried’s thinking of philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell,
Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Imman-
uel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Fried-
rich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes,
Jacques Rancière, and Søren Kierkegaard. Like Fried’s own work, the
chapters in this volume range widely over different historical moments,
traditions, and figures. And like Fried’s work, they keep returning to a
2 Mathew Abbott
particular set of problems: questions of modernism; the role of intention
in art; and the tension and interplay between theatrical and anti-theatrical
artistic tendencies.
This introduction does not attempt to do justice to the range and richness
of Fried’s work. Nor does it attempt to do justice to all the issues and prob-
lems treated in this book’s fifteen chapters. As it works to introduce aspects
of Fried’s art critical and historical projects, it gives brief accounts of three
moments that have been decisive in the development of his thinking and
writing: his critical essay “Art and Objecthood”; his work on French pre-
modernist and modernist painting; and his recent foray into writing about
photography. As it proceeds, it opens a number of philosophical and inter-
pretive questions, aspects of which are taken up in the book’s individual
contributions.
Published in the June 1967 issue of Artforum, Fried’s “Art and Objecthood”
intervened with great polemical force into discussions of minimalism—or
“literalism” as Fried called it—then emerging in the US. Mistaken by some
for a dogmatic (“formalist”) dismissal of the work of artists like Donald
Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith, the essay
does make a severe case against them. But it makes that case in full recogni-
tion of the art historical (and indeed, ontological) significance of literalist
works. This was no hackneyed attack on the apparent coldness, inertness,
or inexpressiveness of literalist objects (in fact for Fried part of the problem
with literalist artists was their failure to make good on their radical claims
regarding the work: Judd and Morris’s works, for example, are attacked not
for their inhumanity but for their disavowed anthropomorphism). Nor was
this a mere application of Greenbergian ideas. Though Fried’s text bears the
imprint of Clement Greenberg, by 1967 Fried had broken with his formal-
ist mentor’s theory that the task of the modernist artist was to discover the
irreducible essence of a medium (against this he developed a non-reductive
account of medium profoundly influenced by the later Wittgenstein, whose
work Fried encountered when he met Cavell at Harvard in 1962). Differ-
ent concerns were driving Fried’s critique of the literalists, which made
use of a crucial term that had no real place in Greenberg’s critical lexicon:
“theatricality.”
The term is first invoked in “Art and Objecthood” as follows:
[T]he literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a

plea for a new genre of theatre, and theatre is now the negation of art.
Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is con-
cerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters
literalist work . . . Whereas in previous art “what is to be had from the
work is located strictly within [it],” the experience of literalist art is of
an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the
beholder.
(AO 153)
What does it mean to be concerned with the circumstances in which
beholders encounter artworks, or for this encounter to include the beholder
by definition? The descriptions can strike as bizarre because Fried’s defini-
tions of “theatrical” art just sound like definitions of art: surely artists in
general are concerned with how beholders encounter their works; surely all
artworks are encountered in particular situational contexts; surely they are
made to be experienced. Fried’s point is subtler: there is a distinction to be
drawn between artworks that appeal to the beholder, that need the beholder
to be complete, and artworks that negotiate that relationship in a radically
different way. A theatrical work is one that deliberately exploits its relation
to its beholders. It appears to solicit them, addressing them and demand-
ing their attention. Here we see the importance of the ordinary, dictionary
sense of “theatrical” in Fried’s criticism: like someone who acts for effect,
a theatrical artwork betrays a certain awareness of the fact that it is being
viewed—and so casts aspersions on its own authenticity.
The claim that literalist works are theatrical is at the heart of the cri-
tique of them laid down in “Art and Objecthood.” Importantly, however,
that critique emerges out of a recognition of the undeniable effectiveness
of literalist works. As Fried writes in his introduction to his art criticism,
literalist installations “infallibly offered their audience a kind of heightened
perceptual experience” (IMAC 40). Yet for Fried, this very infallibility—the
surefire nature of the effect they produce—was precisely the problem with
literalist works. Because the effects they produce are guaranteed, there is
no substantial way in which we might go wrong (or right) in our responses
to them. Deferring to the beholder’s experience, literalist works shirk the
very idea of meaning something by and in one’s art. Hence, for example,
the terms in which Fried praises the “antiliteralist and antitheatrical” works
of Caro: “It is as though Caro’s sculptures essentialize meaningfulness as
such—as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes
his sculpture possible” (AO 162). It should already be clear that “theatri-
cal” is for Fried an irreducibly evaluative term: to call a work “theatrical” is
to disparage it, not simply to say that it appeals to the beholder, but that it
does not manage successfully the problem of beholding. As Robert Pippin is
right to point out, Fried has “discovered a distinct way” in which artworks
“can be said to fail.”1
As we know, after the publication of “Art and Objecthood,” the art Fried
championed “became more and more beleaguered” while work he regarded
as theatrical began to “flourish spectacularly” (IMAC 14). As modernist
painting and sculpture fell out of favor, it was supplanted by a series of
interrelating movements for which the literalist intervention had cleared the
way: conceptualism, performance art, body art, post-minimalism, earth art,
and so on—all those programs some critics and art historians now try to
unify under the vague umbrella of “postmodernism.” To quote Hal Foster,
writing in 1996: “minimalism [is not] a distant dead end but . . . a contem-
porary crux, a paradigm shift toward postmodernist practices that continue
4 Mathew Abbott
to be elaborated today.”2 Along with modernist painting and sculpture, of
course, went modernist criticism, with its emphases on meaning, intention,
medium, and quality. In blunter words: Fried lost. As he has acknowledged,
there would have been little point in continuing to pursue his critical pro-
gram throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. “[I]n addition to championing yet
again the same handful of artists,” he writes, “I would have had to insist
yet again that the dominant avant-garde modes of the day were not worth
taking seriously, and that, I had the wit to realize, was unlikely to interest
anyone” (IMAC 14). So “Art and Objecthood” was the culmination of the
first, critical phase in Fried’s career. After he withdrew from criticism, Fried
switched registers, turning to studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
French painting.
The most striking aspect of this second phase of Fried’s work from the
perspective of “Art and Objecthood” is that it too turns on the category
of theatricality. Beginning with his doctoral research into Édouard Manet’s
responses to the art of his predecessors (published in a 1969 special issue of
Artforum), the first full-length monograph emerging from Fried’s research
was Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
Diderot (1980). Grounding his argument in an account of the central con-
cerns of the criticism of Diderot and his contemporaries, and by develop-
ing a series of brilliant interpretations of individual paintings, Fried shows
that anti-theatricality was a determining force in the development of French
painting in the second half of the eighteenth century. In a way that parallels
his own championing of artists like Caro, Fried finds Diderot championing
painters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Claude-Joseph Vernet, and
Jean-Baptiste Greuze in anti-theatrical terms, praising them for how their
works deny the presence of beholders.
This is the significance of the concept of absorption. As Fried demon-
strates, critics like Diderot prized persuasive depictions of subjects in states
of “rapt attention” (AT 10), such as oratory, reading, playing games, or
becoming swept up in emotion. The point of such depictions was to defuse
the potential for staginess and manipulation inherent in the very act of pro-
ducing and exhibiting a painting. Looking at an absorbed figure is supposed
to be like observing someone unaware of being observed, who could never
be said to be posing or acting for the observer. Through depicting absorbed
and therefore unaffected figures, the works themselves could come across
as unaffected, negating the fact that they (like all paintings) are made to be
appreciated, and in that sense do indeed appeal to their audiences. Diderot
celebrates Chardin, for example, for his convincing representations of sub-
jects intensely absorbed in idle pursuits (Figure 1.1).3 Though their emotional
tonality is very different from that of Chardin’s works, Diderot praised the
works of Greuze in similar terms, celebrating them for the “depth and inten-
sity” (quoted AT 59) of the states of absorption they depicted (Figure 1.2).
As Fried argues, Chardin and Greuze both confronted the same fundamen-
tal problem, but the latter had to resort to increasingly drastic measures to
Figure 1.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737

(Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; image courtesy
National Gallery of Art)
resolve it. Through the second half of the eighteenth century in France, the
pressure of theatricality grew.
As this indicates, crucial to Fried’s account is the idea that theatrical-
ity emerges out of a set of tensions that develops dialectically, such that
works that once seemed to defeat it can start to seem to fail in that regard,
or even begin to look contrived. This is why Greuze had to go so much
further than Chardin to convey absorption, painting blinded figures, or fig-
ures in extreme emotional states; this is why Jacques-Louis David repeatedly
transformed his own style, as he came to feel that certain older, often very
successful works—such as 1784’s Oath of the Horatii (Figure 1.3)—were
6 Mathew Abbott
Figure 1.2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, L’Oiseau mort, Salon de 1800

(Musée du Louvre, Paris; photo credit: RMN-Grand Palais, musée du Louvre/Jean-Gilles Berizzi)
beginning to betray theatricality.4 As Pippin argues, this grounds Fried’s

account in the vicissitudes of wider history, as the dialectical development
of the category of theatricality tracks shifts in political, social, and economic
relations: “The possibility of great art is under threat . . . in a particular,
historical social world where the chief danger to that possibility is a cer-
tain sort of falseness ever more present in that world, ever more difficult to
avoid.”5 Theatricality bears an internal relationship to the development of
modern capitalism, in which the increasing objectification, impersonality,
and abstraction of social and economic relations trouble our capacities for
authentic self-determination and mutual recognition.
Fried develops his account of this dialectical interplay of absorption and
theatricality in eighteenth-century French painting not only for its own
Figure 1.3 Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment des Horaces, 1784

(Musée du Louvre, Paris; photo credit: RMN-Grand Palais, musée du Louvre/Stéphane
Maréchalle)
historical interest. It also functions as a pre-history of modernist painting,

and so as the basis of his account of the nature of Manet’s achievement and
(though this is left largely implicit) the nature of modernism more generally.
The key claim in this account is that, by the early 1860s, the problems of
beholding that French painters were negotiating had become unmanage-
able. Their anti-theatrical absorptive strategies had lost their efficacy, as the
impossible pressures bearing down on artists such as Théodore Géricault
make clear.6 So Manet’s work registers the coming to a head of a crisis of
beholding in which “the primordial convention” (AT 93) that paintings are
made to be beheld could no longer be denied. Instead, Manet’s approach
was more complex, involving not the denial of theatricality but its reflexive
acknowledgement. His strategy was to concede the presence of beholders,
but to do so in a way that alienates and distances them; the work calls into
question the beholder’s relation with it even as it acknowledges it. In Fried’s
terms, the beholder of a Manet is placed in an “ontological double bind”
(MM 344) in which their own presence before the piece is both affirmed and
interrogated. In 1863’s Olympia, for example (Figure 1.4), the subject of
the painting seems to stare directly at the beholder, violating a fundamental
tenet of anti-theatrical painting; yet her stare is highly ambiguous, indeed
8 Mathew Abbott
Figure 1.4 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

(Musée d’Orsay, Paris; photo credit: Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt)
confrontational. Together with its strange narrative structure and emphasis

on how the work as a whole faces and strikes the viewer, this means Manet’s
painting does not allow beholders to forget they are looking at an artwork.
It thus stages a new sense of the fraughtness of that very act, as if it registers
a crisis not only of beholding but of the status of artworks more gener-
ally. Manet liquidates the Diderotian tradition of anti-theatrical painting.
As Fried argues, however, this would not liberate painting after Manet from
the problem of beholding or the wider “concerns of that tradition . . . least
of all when a final step in a formalist-modernist evolution would purport to
go beyond painting into minimalist objecthood” (MM 407).
As this remark shows, there are resonances between Fried’s account of the
anti-theatrical works of eighteenth-century France—in which “the behold-
er’s existence was effectively ignored or, put more strongly, denied; the fig-
ures in the painting appeared alone in the world . . . the world of the painting
appeared self-sufficient, autonomous, a closed system independent of, in
that sense blind to, the world of the beholder” (IMAC 48)—and the claims
he made in 1967 regarding the anti-theatricality of high modernist art. Yet
Fried himself cautions against drawing any neat equivalence between his
critical and historical projects, speaking in 1998 of an “unbridgeable gulf”
(IMAC 51) between them. As we have seen, his critical project was irreduc-
ibly evaluative, but robust verdicts regarding successful or otherwise nego-
tiations of beholding would be out of place in art history, because we must
be the contemporaries of works if we are to make full-blooded judgments
of them (see IMAC 47–54). We no longer have the eyes to judge Greuze’s
paintings as they were judged by his contemporaries; what can look to us
like sentimentality or contrivance could appear in quite the opposite way
to Diderot, and not necessarily because of some failing on his part. Yet
Fried describes himself at the time of writing “Art and Objecthood” as a
“Diderotian critic without knowing it” (IMAC 2). In other words, Fried
claims that in 1967 he was not aware of the precedent Diderot had set for
anti-theatrical criticism, and more generally of his sharing a sensibility with
the philosophe. While this would make his discovery of an anti-theatrical
tradition in French painting all the more significant, it makes it harder to
interpret his claim about the gulf between his historical and critical projects
(Fried also speaks of how, together with his poetry, his criticism and art his-
tory form parts of a “single vision of reality” (IMAC 54)). If there is a gulf
between the Fried of the critical and historical phases, there are obviously
also “certain parallels” (AT 5).
Fried’s photography book—the crux of a third phase in his work, in which
the art historian returned to criticism—recasts these problems. Proceeding
via critical accounts of individual photographs as well as detailed histori-
cal and theoretical contextualization, Why Photography Matters as Art as
Never Before (2008) makes a case for the claim that certain contemporary
art photographers—including Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand,
Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, James
Welling, Candida Höfer, and Berndt and Hilla Becher—have inherited the
problematic that was foundational for modernism. Hence the palpable and
infectious enthusiasm that infuses the book, in which Fried comes across
as quite genuinely surprised (even relieved) at the discovery that anti-
theatricality is back in the game. In 2012’s Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray,
Marioni, Gordon—which, as a book of contemporary art criticism, is itself
the result of the shift in outlook occasioned by Why Photography Matters—
Fried describes his discovery like this:
[T]here is a sense in which my early commitment to a particular canon

of high modernist painting and sculpture, once minimalism/literalism
and its successor movements had carried the day, left me stranded in
a corner, one that I saw no way of escaping short of relinquishing a
set of core values and beliefs that remained, for me, inviolable . . . My
involvement with art photography changed all that . . . [M]y sense of
things is not so much that I have finally found a way out of the corner
to which I was so long and so frustratingly confined as that over the
past three decades photography and certain other developments have
reconfigured the room; in other words, it is perhaps less a matter of my
finally having shifted my orientation (though of course I have, as will
become clear in the pages that follow) then of the basic circumstances
having become transformed along parameters that have brought them
10 Mathew Abbott
into closer alignment with the views that inspired my early art criticism.
I admit that throughout the 1970s and 80s and on into the 90s I never
imagined that this might happen—I had lost faith in the dialectic, one
might say. That turns out to have been a mistake.
(FHO 23)
As we should expect given the historical and dialectical nature of the

problematic of beholding, Fried’s claim is not that these photographers have
simply taken on the aesthetic values and goals of previous generations of
artists as their own. Rather—and this is thanks in part to the impact of
literalism—the work of these photographers demonstrates how the prob-
lematic has developed since the 60s, such that particular reflexive strategies
are now needed to engage convincingly with it. As Fried writes: “the new
art photography seeks to come to grips with the issue of beholding in ways
that do not succumb to theatricality but which at the same time register
the epochality of minimalism/literalism’s intervention” (WPM 43). An aes-
thetically successful inheritance of modernist concerns in a new historical
context must entail their modification and renewal; further, given Fried’s
emphasis on medium-specificity we cannot expect these concerns to emerge
in the same form in the context of photography (indeed, Why Photography
Matters presents a number of fascinating arguments about how photogra-
phers have inherited these concerns in distinctly photographic ways7).
The account in Why Photography Matters is both historical and critical,
appearing to complicate the positions Fried took in the first and second
phases of his work. Fried explicitly acknowledges the tension between this
and his earlier remarks about the gulf between his art history and criticism:
“the gulf in question no longer looms as it previously did; put slightly dif-
ferently, the present book turns out to be generically mixed . . . in ways that
would have been incomprehensible to me only a short time ago” (WPM 4).
Interpretive questions thus arise regarding this apparent change in Fried’s
approach, the extent to which the Fried of Why Photography Matters has
broken with the Fried of the second phase, and what this says about the
bearing of the account of theatricality presented in Fried’s art history on
his polemical deployment of the concept in his early criticism. More gener-
ally, Fried’s new texts raise again the deep philosophical question running
through all his works regarding the connection between history and ontol-
ogy. How is it that the relationship between artwork and beholder keeps
appearing as a fundamental problem in different historical moments? Are
these historical inflections of a single (properly ontological) problematic? Or
is the very nature of that problematic historically determined in some more
fundamental way?8
Questions of medium are relevant here too: will Fried’s claim that pho-
tographers have inherited the concerns of modernist painters and sculptors
trouble his earlier accounts of medium-specificity? Can a Wittgensteinian
account ground the classically modernist idea that an artwork must be
judged against the particular capacities of the medium in which it was exe-
cuted? If medium is a matter of convention, then the repudiation of medium
characteristic of contemporary art may show something important about
our relation to convention (something we could connect to Cavell’s under-
standing of skepticism as the attempt to deny “the conventionality of human
nature itself”9). But we might wonder what this says about the transposi-
tion of the medium-specific concerns of modernist artists into the context of
photography. All this is complicated further by Fried’s recent critical essays,
in which questions of medium do not play anything like the role they did in
his work of the first phase (see FHO 204).
And fascinating questions arise regarding the notion of artistic intention
running through Fried’s work in all three phases. Why Photography Mat-
ters is exemplary here: on the one hand, Fried claims the photographers he
profiles are participating in a specific historical dialectic; on the other, it is
implausible to think that all (or even most) of these photographers are con-
sciously engaging in that dialectic. What then is artistic intention, if it is not
exhausted by the intentional states of artists? That opens broader questions
about the historical and political aspects of categories of intentionality and
theatricality, insofar as the renewal of these concerns in recent art photog-
raphy must—if the claim about the internal relationship to developments in
capitalism is right—reflect wider structural social and economic changes, a
point Walter Benn Michaels outlines in “Neoliberal Aesthetics.”10
The third phase of Fried’s work also contains some of his closest engage-
ments with philosophers: Why Photography Matters engages in some depth
with Martin Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Barthes, and Hegel; Kant figures
heavily in the essay on Caspar David Friedrich from 2014’s Another Light;
Fried’s 2002 book on Menzel contains sustained engagements with Kierkeg-
aard. There is much to say about these engagements, their relation to Fried’s
broader project, and the nature of the connections they track between art
and philosophical thinking. Indeed, if there is one theme that all the papers
in this volume (implicitly or explicitly) address, it is the nature of the rela-
tionship between modernist practice and modern philosophy, and the extent
to which artistic discoveries (or failures) are also philosophical discoveries
(or failures).
Aside from my belief in the importance and interest of these issues—and
my sense that certain contemporary scholars may have had important and
interesting things to say about them—I had more specific motivations for
putting this volume together. First, now that the dust has settled on some
of the fierce debates about modernism that marked the second half of the
twentieth century, it has perhaps become possible to reconsider what was
actually at stake there, and without the platitudes that have typically been
deployed in that context. Second, Fried’s work has often been met with con-
troversy, but arguably it has been met with incomprehension just as often.
Naturally I hope this book goes some way toward rectifying this. More
than that, however, I hope it indicates what that incomprehension shows of
12 Mathew Abbott
what we have been prepared (or otherwise) to understand. Third, I think the
Cavellian reading of Wittgenstein running through Fried’s work is itself of
profound significance, and that, as the work of Pippin, Michaels, and oth-
ers has shown, it is amenable to critical theoretical, Hegelian, Marxian, and
similar interpretations (which is to say, Fried’s work can help bring Witt-
gensteinian thought into dialogue with traditions with which it has rarely
been associated). Finally, Fried does an exemplary job of resisting two of the
most prevalent intellectual tendencies of our time, charting a course between
relativistic skepticism and brute scientism. As well as brilliant accounts of
modern art, Fried has powerful ways of figuring meaning, intention, action,
conviction, and value: concepts with which neither skepticism nor scientism
are equipped to contend.
In my contribution to Michael Fried and Philosophy, I work to indicate
both the relevance of “Art and Objecthood” for analytic aesthetic theory
and the difficulty of accommodating Fried’s ideas in that context. I compare
Fried’s Wittgensteinian accounts of modernism and medium with the con-
temporaneous anti-essentialism of Morris Weitz, who was also influenced
by Wittgenstein. Fried critiques reductive essentialism, but develops out of
that critique a normative, historical conception of the essence of artistic
mediums. While Weitz makes a blunt distinction between classificatory
and evaluative aesthetic judgments, I argue that Fried can account for their
co-imbrication, and so for modernism as a series of historically inflected
confrontations with the ahistorical fact of human finitude. His attack on
literalism as a confused repudiation of convention may give us grounds
for a critique of philosophies of art that try to proceed without evaluative
commitments, stepping out of the contexts that make modernist practices
intelligible.
Walter Benn Michaels turns to Fried’s essay on Louis’s painting, where he
finds a “theory of action that is also a theory of the work of art” (33). Com-
paring Fried with Greenberg on flatness and opticality, Michaels indicates
how the former breaks with the latter’s reductionism. This allows Fried to
read the primacy Louis gives to bare canvas not as an “insistence on the
materiality of the support” but as an attempt at transforming its surface
into a “site of meaning” (37). Drawing on Anscombe’s non-causal account
of intentional action, Michaels claims that it is precisely by creating works
that appear to contain no traces of their maker’s body or personality that
Louis is able to demonstrate “the identity of the meaning of the work . . .
with the actions of its maker” (44).
Robert Pippin’s contribution is concerned with the question implied by
the title of Fried’s book on photography: why does photography matter now
as art as it never has before? Pippin grounds his response in an account of
how, for Fried, certain contemporary art photographers seek to face down
theatricality. Engaging Fried’s writing on the work of Demand, Pippin devel-
ops a non-psychological notion of artistic intention that allows for a crucial
distinction between the intention of “the artist of the work” and the mental
states of the “actual artist” (60). By allegorizing intendedness as such,
Pippin argues, Demand defends the “conditions necessary for considering
artworks as fit subjects for interpretation.” Hence he is defending nothing
less than art itself as a “self-understanding shared by artist and historical
world” (50).
In his contribution, David Wellbery presents a comparative analysis of
ideas developed in Fried’s art history and the aesthetic theories of Schil-
ler and Schopenhauer. Wellbery argues that the depth of the similarities
between Diderot and Schiller, Schopenhauer and Gustave Courbet shows
how “crucial contributions to aesthetic theory participate in the historical
dynamic that Fried’s work has brought to light” (66). Further, this dem-
onstrates that aesthetic theories in general are more than collections of
“propositions to be supported or refuted”: to do justice to them, we have
to grasp them in their responsiveness to the “animating concerns of specific
art forms in their historical moment” (82). Wellbery’s essay concludes by
reading the young Fried’s polemic against literalism alongside Nietzsche’s
attacks on Richard Wagner.
Stephen Mulhall observes that Why Photography Matters does not con-
tain a general account of the nature of photography, or of the differences
between digital and analog photography; further, Fried does not provide a
substantial explanation of how photographers could take up the medium-
specific concerns of pre-modernist, modernist, and high modernist painters.
But Mulhall argues that these apparent lacunae are only that. Emphasizing
the influence of Cavell on Fried’s thinking, Mulhall shows how his Witt-
gensteinian account of medium allows for these kinds of complexities, such
that successful works can disclose hitherto unapparent aesthetic possibili-
ties, throwing another light on the art of the past. Further, this commitment
to openness and contestability is fundamental to Fried’s own contributions
as a critic and art historian. Just as his work on pre-modernist painting
deepens and complicates his early critical arguments, Fried’s recent criticism
further reshapes the accounts of medium and modernism defended in “Art
and Objecthood,” while his work on Caravaggio—itself made possible by
discoveries he has made about photography—has disclosed new aspects of
his earlier art historical studies.
Problems of medium and historicity are also at the heart of Stephen
Melville’s contribution to this volume. Melville notes how the concept of
medium tended to “come and go” (104) in Fried’s writing after “Art and
Objecthood,” emerging again in his work on Caravaggio. After drawing out
complexities of the concept of medium in early texts of Fried and Cavell,
Melville turns to The Moment of Caravaggio, where Fried writes of how the
appearance of the “self-sufficient and autonomous gallery picture” repre-
sented the emergence of a “new medium of painting” (quoted 109). As Mel-
ville argues that for Fried a medium is the “outcome of a self-criticism that is
the actual shape of its self” (110): a formulation whose difficulty illustrates
the real conceptual difficulty of what it describes. In the last section of his
14 Mathew Abbott
contribution, Melville discusses the relevance to Fried’s concept of medium
of Hegel’s aesthetics, where he finds a parallel attempt at elucidating “what
it means to speak historically” (113).
Richard Moran unfolds fascinating paradoxes of anti-theatricality. As
well as Fried’s work on Roger Fry’s criticism, which reads his formalism
in anti-theatrical terms, Moran engages a range of figures from the anti-
theatrical tradition, including Diderot, John Keats, John Stuart Mill, and
(especially) Kant, who took a formalist approach to ethics as well as aesthet-
ics. As Moran shows, the paradoxes of anti-theatricality emerge out of the
fundamental tension between the demand that artworks avoid appealing to
their beholders and the fact that artworks are made to be beheld. This gives
anti-theatricality a constitutive instability, as the solutions artists and critics
find to the problems of beholding keep mutating into problems. Because it
is “defined by what it excludes” (117), Moran argues, the purity sought by
formalism means it must “exist permanently as a utopia” (126).
In his contribution to this volume, Paul Gudel claims that a key charac-
teristic of the modernist condition is that it “demands new terms of criti-
cism” (129), of which Fried’s “theatricality” is a paradigmatic example. He
explicates Fried’s concept by comparing it with Cavell’s concept of skepti-
cism. For Cavell, the skeptic uses words like “know” and “see” without
their normal grammar, in contexts shorn of the pragmatic features that
could indicate how the failure of a claim to knowledge might be rectified;
hence we cannot ask about the point of what the skeptic says. As Gudel
argues, literalists are like skeptics insofar as they present the beholder “with
objects to which he or she can react without responding, which make no
demands” (135). This is the connection between literalist objects and the
Kantian sublime, as “the literalist effect depends on seeing human acts as
sublime” (131).
Rex Butler’s contribution treats ambiguities of intention and how they
bear on the distinction Fried seeks to establish between art and literalism.
Butler focuses on Fried’s essays championing the contemporary American
painter Joseph Marioni, comparing his account of Marioni’s achievement
with his writing on Demand and Charles Ray. Despite the fact that they
operate in different mediums, Fried defends the works of all three artists
because of how they seek to represent their own intendedness. As Butler
indicates, however, this raises a number of difficulties, not least because
the appearance of unintendedness is one of Fried’s paradigms of intended-
ness. Just as “unintendedness is possible only because it is intended,” Butler
argues, “intentionality must look unintended” (150). He echoes some of
the claims made by Moran when he writes that art “must seek to overcome
the theatrical, but it is just this that means it is always potentially theatri-
cal” (147).
Despite their obvious differences, Diarmuid Costello argues, Fried,
Barthes, and Roger Scruton all have the same underlying conception of
photography as a medium that restricts “photographers’ ability to control
detail” (151) in their images. Unlike Scruton, of course, Fried does not draw
skeptical conclusions from this regarding the standing of photography as
an art; on the contrary, his commitment to the notion that photography is
“weak in intentionality” is part of what grounds a number of his claims
about its aesthetic significance, because photographers can intentionally
exploit this aspect of their medium. Yet Costello argues that this notion is
mistaken, and that without it, Fried has no basis for regarding “photog-
raphy as the contemporary terrain on which the dialectic between art and
objecthood plays out” (166).
Magdalena Ostas argues that the conceptual dyad of absorption and
theatricality has a philosophical resonance that goes beyond its histori-
cal context. Comparing Fried with Kant, Ostas argues it is telling that the
Diderotian problematic emerges contemporaneously with modern aesthet-
ics, when philosophers began grappling systematically with the idea of a
distinctively aesthetic form of human responsiveness. Focusing in particular
on the category of absorption, she shows how it figures fundamental onto-
logical and phenomenological questions regarding the status of artworks.
Ostas clarifies and deepens her claims as she engages with important works
by Wall, Struth, and Friedrich.
Emphasizing the distinction between intentional acts and causally deter-
mined events, Knox Peden’s contribution challenges Hegelian and histori-
cist interpretations of Fried’s work. Reading Fried’s project with Rancière’s,
Peden compares the role of the concept of grace in Fried’s aesthetics with the
role of equality in Rancière’s political thought. As unmanifest conditions of
manifestation, grace and equality form the foundation of the theatricality and
inequality of the usual order of things; they can only be “fleetingly glimpsed
or inferred” through moments of intentional action or inferred. Thus Fried
and Rancière stress “the strategic and intermittent nature of subjectivity con-
ceived as intentional agency . . . in a manner that is hostile to historical dialec-
tics” (191). Peden makes his case by putting Fried’s account of Demand into
dialogue with Rancière’s aesthetics, and showing the importance for both of
Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between nature and art.
Andrea Kern contests aspects of Fried’s interpretation of Diderot. For
Diderot, Kern argues, the task of the work of art is not simply to negate the
beholder’s presence before it; it is to efface the viewer’s very self as a “sub-
ject of acts” (216) in general. On Kern’s reading of his project, Diderot’s
concern was not merely normative and aesthetic but logical and transcen-
dental: artworks need to negate their spectators as subjects if they are to
represent worlds at all, because this is the only way they can depict the
unity constitutive of a world, which must have nothing outside it. Further,
Kern argues that when Diderot imagines himself promenading through a
landscape depicted in a painting, he is trying to meet an impossible require-
ment, because immersion in aesthetic contemplation is both “the condition
and result” of a single movement. Thus she concludes that for Diderot we
cannot “live up to the challenge with which art confronts us” (224).
16 Mathew Abbott
In her contribution to this volume, Jennifer Ashton works to show
how Fried’s poems extend his concerns with the distinction between art
and objecthood, meaning and nature. In his 1966 poem “David Smith (d.
May 23, 1965),” Fried encloses a statement from Smith about the differ-
ence between natural things and made things with poetic images of nature.
By staging a confrontation between nature and art, Ashton argues, Fried’s
poem shows how the latter can “subsume and transform” (228) the for-
mer. She compares Fried’s poem about Smith with a poem from his 2016
book Promesse du Bonheur, and with poems by Ben Lerner. As works writ-
ten “after a long passage through postmodernism” (234), Ashton argues,
these recent poems express a commitment to the whole in light of its loss. If
Lerner is “protecting the idea of the whole by refusing to locate it with any
actual expression in form” (238), however, then in Fried “the fulfilment of
the promise of form . . . turns out to be identical to its realization” (240).
Michael Fried’s contribution is on Kierkegaard. Working to show that the
Danish thinker is part of the anti-theatrical tradition, Fried analyzes remarks
Constantin Constantius—the pseudonymous author of Repetition—makes
about theater, and how it can provide the inexperienced with an opportunity
to imagine different modes of existence. As Constantius describes a farce he
saw performed at Berlin’s Königstädter Theater, a narrative develops about a
girl in the audience: though he observes her intently, she remains completely
unaware of him on account of being “so caught up, so absorbed in the
performance” (249). Fried compares some of Kierkegaard’s statements on
embodiment with the work of Menzel, arguing that the pair’s concerns were
opposing and yet complementary. He gives us a fitting image with which
to conclude a book on the complex relationship between philosophy and
art: “Kierkegaard and Menzel, those unique individuals, nodding to one
another, perhaps doffing their hats, as they walk on by” (256).
Notes
1 Robert B. Pippin, “Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art
History,” Critical Inquiry (32: 3, 2005), 577–8. Of course, this is complicated
by the fact that many literalist artists understood their projects in anti-aesthetic
terms, as troubling the very idea of “success” in art (indeed, some were quite
happy to regard their works as theatrical, though they rejected the pejorative
connotations of Fried’s use of the term). I treat this problem in my contribution
to this volume.
2 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996), 36.
3 As Pippin writes:
No one in these Chardin genre paintings appears to be acting for effect, tak-
ing account of how they look to others, looking to normative acceptance by
an audience, aiming to please or entertain an audience . . . and in just that
sense too, neither is the painting.
(After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of
Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2014), 84)
4 Though Fried does not give these transformations in David’s work an extended
treatment in Absorption and Theatricality, he has since treated them in some
detail (see “David/Manet: The ‘Anacreonic’ Paintings,” AL 7–39; see also
IMAC 49–50).
5 Pippin, After the Beautiful, 85. As Pippin shows, this means we can read Fried’s
work in Left Hegelian terms, and so as complementing the work of the Marxist
art historian T. J. Clark (see 63–95).
6 See “Géricault’s Romanticism” (AL 53–109).
7 I worked through some of these issues in relation to cinema in Chapter Five
of Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2016).
8 Properly resolving these questions would require a close engagement with Fried’s
interpretation of later Wittgenstein, and the links between Cavell’s work on
grammar and criteria and Fried’s notion of a “primordial convention.” This
phrase recurs through Fried’s works from Absorption and Theatricality onward.
In his introduction to his art criticism, he links it to Wittgenstein’s Remarks on
the Foundation of Mathematics (see IMAC 31 and 33).
9 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 111.
10 Walter Benn Michaels, “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière, and the Form
of the Photograph,” nonsite.org (http://nonsite.org/article/neoliberal-aesthetics-
fried-ranciere-and-the-form-of-the-photograph, 2011).
1 Modernism and the Discovery
of Finitude
Mathew Abbott
[T]hat value is inescapable in human experience and conduct is one of the

facts of life, and of art, which modern art lays bare.
—Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It”
In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein raises a problem

regarding definitions, and how we know what is what. He asks the reader
to “[c]onsider, for example, the activities that we call ‘games.’ ” Against the
intuition or assumption that all games “must [have] something in common,”1
Wittgenstein argues that it is not possible to specify the conditions of game-
hood, and hence impossible to offer a single definition of what counts as a
game that will cover all and only the things we want to call “games.” His
claim is that, if we consider the specificities of individual cases, we will not
find an essential attribute (or a delimited set of essential attributes)2 that all
games share but “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-
crossing.”3 Many games contain competition between players, but others do
not (consider Klondike); many games contain winners and losers, but others
do not (think of SimCity); many games are meant to be amusing, but some are
not (think of Russian roulette); many games are highly structured and/or rule-
governed, but many are not (consider the imaginative games toddlers play).
Many games involve skill, but “skill” means different things in the contexts
of different games (consider “skill in chess and skill in tennis”4), and some
games are purely games of luck (consider too the difference between “luck”
in a dice game and “luck” in games involving balls, pucks, or spinning tops).
Hence Wittgenstein’s exhortation to philosophers: “don’t think, but look!”5
If we stop and look at our linguistic practices, Wittgenstein implies, we
should come to wonder what was motivating our conviction that there must
be some feature or set of features that all and only games share. And despite
the fact that we cannot find an essence of gamehood in this sense, we know
what games are. We have no problem referring to them, identifying them,
learning them, or playing them. This is not to suggest that two people who
speak the same language and who have mastered the concept “game” could
never disagree about its application to a particular case: the point is simply
Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude 19
that, in the great majority of cases, we do not disagree.6 When we pick out
games, we do not do it with the worry nagging that our use of the concept
is problematic. We generally refer to games with complete confidence. So
Wittgenstein wants us to wonder not just at what was motivating our con-
viction that there must be an essence of gamehood, but also at our confi-
dence in applying the concept. The point should not be taken as a skeptical
one, however. I don’t think Wittgenstein is suggesting that our confidence
is unjustified.
Having exhorted us to stop thinking and start looking, Wittgenstein goes
on to introduce the idea of family resemblance:
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than

“family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members
of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc.
overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—And I shall say: “games”
form a family.7
Despite the influence of this and other passages on family resemblance

in Wittgenstein, it is not obvious what kind of work the idea is meant to
do for him. In particular, we might ask whether it could really function as
an explanation of how we know what is what in the absence of essences.
As Stephen Davies and others have remarked, many things resemble each
other in many respects: tables resemble cats in that they both tend to be
four-legged; lemons resemble domain names in that both can be purchased;
quasars resemble questions in that the English terms for both begin with the
letter q; and so on.8 The question is not whether all games resemble each
other, but how we can identify them with such confidence given that there
appear to be no clear criteria for identifying the relevant resemblances.9
On a charitable interpretation, Wittgenstein cannot be deploying the con-
cept (“metaphor” might be a more accurate term) of family resemblance
in order to resolve the problem of how we know what is what. If he were
then he has chosen his example poorly, for we do not generally identify
families on the basis of resemblances; indeed, often we notice a resemblance
between two people not before but after we discover they are genetically
related (think of learning that two new acquaintances are brother and sister,
then coming to see their similarities). The trouble is not that we cannot find
any resemblances between the different things we want to call “games.” It
is that there seems to be nothing in particular that makes games what they
are, and yet we know what they are. Rather than a solution to the problem,
then, it is closer to being a restatement of it: how do we identify things at
all, given that some (maybe all)10 of our concepts are not determinate in the
way philosophers have tended to assume?11 The idea (or metaphor) clarifies,
even sharpens the problem.
Davies’s remarks come in the context of a critique of “The Role of Theory
in Aesthetics,” a classic article by Morris Weitz from 1956, which influentially
20 Mathew Abbott
argued that “art” should be understood as a family resemblance concept in
Wittgenstein’s sense (or in Weitz’s parlance, as an “open concept”). Weitz
thus rejects the terms of the problem of the definition of art, arguing that a
theory of what counts as art—by which he means a set of jointly necessary
and sufficient conditions for something’s being a work of art—could never
be forthcoming. For Weitz this is not because of inadequacies in our theoriz-
ing, but because attempts at providing definitions like this “radically miscon-
strue the logic of the concept of art.”12 Weitz cites the formalism of Roger
Fry and others, emotionalist or expressivist theories like Leo Tolstoy’s, Bene-
detto Croce’s intuitionism, A. C. Bradley’s organicism, and De Witt Parker’s
voluntarism, all of which (he argues) either define “art” too widely, captur-
ing the wrong objects, or define it too narrowly, not capturing the right ones.
Indeed for Weitz the latter inflection of the problem shows these theorists are
smuggling into the discussion subjective judgments about what counts as the
“right” kind of art in the guise of objective definitions of art in general. As
I will try to show, this worry about subjectivity runs deep in Weitz’s account,
and is at the source of some of the deep problems it faces.
But my intention is not to resuscitate an old debate about essentialism
and anti-essentialism in aesthetic theory. It is to show how an analysis of
some of its terms and founding assumptions can help delineate fundamental
features of the defense of modernism articulated by Michael Fried in “Art
and Objecthood.” For Fried’s essay echoes a number of themes from these
debates: as well as a rejection of a kind of essentialism, the piece is quite
notorious for making polemical claims about art and non-art. Yet as I will
argue, the essay echoes these themes in a way that would be alien to Weitz
(and this despite the decisive influence of Wittgenstein on both of them), as
well as other analytic aestheticians who made contemporaneous interven-
tions in debates about definitions of art, such as Arthur Danto and George
Dickie. I think it is highly significant that, on the usual deployments of the
terms of these debates, there is no way of accounting for the position the
young critic takes in his essay. It is illustrative of what we might follow
Nietzsche and call its untimeliness.13 For not only are there intractable dif-
ferences between Fried’s way of thinking and that of analytic aestheticians:
“Art and Objecthood” also has a unique status in art theory14 as exemplary
of a sensibility that, almost immediately after its publication, nearly every-
one agreed had had its day. Of course, that this claim has been made so
many times since then might give us pause (why this need to keep insisting
Fried got it wrong?).
Consider Weitz’s worry that aestheticians who deploy definitions of
art are smuggling subjective judgments of value into ostensibly objective
accounts. After outlining his argument about how theories of art either fail
to capture all artworks or fail by capturing non-artworks, Weitz turns to a
“different sort of difficulty,” which is nevertheless connected to it:
As real definitions, these theories are supposed to be factual reports

on art. If they are, may we not ask, Are they empirical and open to
verification or falsification? . . . There does not even seem to be a hint
of the kind of evidence which might be forthcoming to test these theo-
ries; and indeed one wonders if they are perhaps honorific definitions
of “art,” that is, proposed re-definitions in terms of some chosen condi-
tions for applying the concept of art, and not true or false reports on the
essential properties of art at all.15
Weitz understands the traditional aesthetician as claiming to provide a

definition that will pick out all the artworks in the world, and only the art-
works. When Tolstoy claims that works of art are artifacts which express
the feeling of the artists who made them, for example, Weitz reads him as
attempting to give a “real definition,” and so as arguing that expressing
emotion is the distinguishing feature of artworks in general, which makes
them what they are. And such attempts quickly raise a problem regarding
verification and falsification.
Hence Weitz’s claim about subjectivity. Like all definitions of art, Tolstoy’s
only purports to tell us about art. What it really tells us about is Tolstoy’s
taste in art: that (perhaps because of his religious and moral commitments)
he happens to prefer a certain kind of art. Traditional aestheticians might
pretend to be providing objective definitions, but their definitions just pick
out the artworks that happen to appeal to them. Hence, Weitz argues, they
are not actually offering objective accounts of art (“true or false reports”),
but are disguising honorific definitions as objective accounts.16 When a tra-
ditional aesthetician applies what he claims is a real definition and claims
something as a work of art, he is covertly praising the work because it hap-
pens to accord with his taste: “Ah, now this: this is art!”
In the conclusion of his piece, Weitz attempts to explain what is never-
theless vital about aesthetic theory. While it “cannot be maintained” that
evaluative deployments of “art” are “true and real definitions” of it, Weitz
argues, they are “supremely valuable”17 because of the debates their use
provokes. Aesthetic theories implicitly foreground certain evaluative crite-
ria: criteria that naturally call for the proffering of reasons in their sup-
port, or provoke others to proffer reasons against them. Hence Weitz asks
us to stop taking traditional aesthetic theories literally: instead we should
“reconstrue” them as “recommendations to concentrate on certain crite-
ria of excellence in art.”18 Aesthetic theories may not help us in identify-
ing the objective features of artworks in general—a hopeless project, on
Weitz’s view, because it neglects “the very expansive, adventurous character
of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations”19—but they can bring
our attention to different and perhaps neglected features of artworks. Tol-
stoy cannot be right in his claim that art is expression, but in the process of
putting forward his failing theory he may get us attending to the expressive
features of certain artworks, perhaps considering anew their meaning and
significance. All the traditional aesthetic theories contain disguised evalua-
tive commitments whose own value consists in how they might compel us
to look again at artworks.
22 Mathew Abbott
Despite his claims about their supreme value, consider how bizarre aes-
thetic theories must actually look to Weitz. Theorists must either be pre-
tending to make descriptive claims, or deceiving themselves about the status
of their claims. When Tolstoy says that art is expression, for example, this
claim is not to be taken on face value. It cannot be a claim about the essence
or nature of art: taken as an objective claim, it is less than wrong; strictly
speaking, it is neither true nor false, for it is not really descriptive. Its real
purpose for Weitz is to endorse a particular set of subjective commitments.
But if this is what Tolstoy is up to—and on the most charitable interpre-
tation, he does not even know he is up to it—then how should we take
these endorsements, which tell us nothing about artworks? They may get
us attending to different features of artworks, but why should we attend to
those features?
The issue is evident in Weitz’s choice of terms: theories of art “are honor-
ific definitions, pure and simple, in which ‘Art’ has been re-defined in terms
of chosen criteria.”20 The arbitrariness of the procedure Weitz outlines is on
display in his use of “chosen,” as though aesthetic theorists just pick criteria
from a pre-given set. On the one hand, then, Weitz has a scientistic notion
of objectivity, where making an objective claim is just equated with making
a claim about how things stand apart from our subjective responses to them.
On the other, Weitz has an empty and decisionistic notion of subjectivity,
where evaluation is conceived as the expression of preferences, which make
no substantive claim about the world. By making this distinction between
objective reports and subjective expressions (which is apparently so intuitive
for him that he does not feel the need to argue for it), Weitz no doubt takes
himself to be respecting human finitude: that the world is as it is regard-
less of how we feel about it. If we conceive of finitude in terms of genu-
ine answerability to the world, however—an answerability that extends all
the way down into judgments of value, as it must into any judgment that
hopes to have purchase on it—then Weitz is engaged in its denial.21 After all,
another way of drawing Weitz’s picture of the work of aesthetic theorists
would be to say that their judgments lack all content, and hence to deny
that there is any way in which they might go (right or) wrong. Like many
others in his field, Weitz is unable to account for how aesthetic judgments
can expand “our sensitivity to how things are.”22
A similar issue arises in Dickie’s aesthetic theory. Though he rejects the
claim that there are no necessary features of artworks—against Weitz,
Dickie argues that all artworks are artifacts23—he retains a blunt distinc-
tion between classificatory deployments of the concept “work of art” and
evaluative judgments of individual works.24 Dickie of course recognizes that
the idea that all artworks are artifacts will not suffice for his project, as
such a definition would obviously capture a wide range of non-art objects.
His claim is that artworks are a category of artifacts, and the task he sets
for himself is to give an account of the categorical distinction that sets
them apart from other artifacts. His response draws on the account Danto
develops in his 1964 piece “The Artworld” which, Danto tells us, had its
genesis in his encounter with an Andy Warhol Brillo Box. The problem
raised for Danto by Warhol’s piece was its indiscernibility from real Brillo
boxes, of the type one could then find in supermarkets. So Danto argues
that what makes Warhol’s Brillo Box an artwork has nothing to do with its
intrinsic physical features. It can only be seen as an artwork with the help
of a theory: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot
decry—an atmosphere of aesthetic theory, a knowledge of the history of art:
an artworld.”25 Dickie takes this up as he turns explicitly to the problematic
that interests Weitz. In his first attempt at setting Danto’s idea to work to
outline a definition of art, he argues that a “work of art in the descriptive
sense is (1) an artifact (2) upon which some society or some sub-group of a
society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.”26 Filling out
Danto’s claim that seeing something as art now requires “an atmosphere
of aesthetic theory,” Dickie argues that the “atmosphere of which Danto
speaks . . . has a substantial content.”27 As Dickie would go on to clarify,
the “atmosphere” in question is an institutional context: the artworld—its
curators, critics, artists, galleries, and so on—is what gives the atmosphere
its content, conferring “the status of candidate for appreciation” on a par-
ticular category of artifacts, lifting them up for evaluation. That is how
Dickie purports to solve the problem of defining art. If he is right, Weitz is
wrong to claim it is unsolvable.
Despite their obvious differences, Dickie’s account and that of Weitz both
rely on a blunt distinction between classification and evaluation. As we have
seen, the latter thinks classifications only purport to have descriptive con-
tent: aesthetic theorists who claim to be deploying them are concealing the
fact that they are engaged in evaluation, merely expressing their subjective
preferences. The former thinks he can give a purely descriptive account of
classification that will provide a basis for making sense of evaluation (“for
something to be a work of art in the classificatory sense does not mean it
has any actual value”28). As on Weitz’s account, on Dickie’s classificatory
judgments have a peculiar status: if the artworld has decided that something
counts as art, then it counts as art; the artworld’s declaring an artifact “art”
is necessary and sufficient for its being art. Though he rejects Weitz’s claim
that classificatory judgments lack purchase on the world, in other words,
Dickie too may be removing them from the space of reasons. After all, on
his account it is hard to see how the artworld could ever get it wrong in its
classifications—and that is the same as saying it could never get it right.
Indeed, both accounts appear to harbor a suspicion of the very notions of
rightness and wrongness, a sense that there is something dubious about the
application of such concepts in this context (which must be why they both
end up falling into varieties of decisionism). Neither philosopher has a way
of accounting for the mutual imbrication of classification and evaluation,
which Fried argues is crucial to the modernist condition.29 To speak with
Stanley Cavell, what they cannot but miss is the deep sense in which “the
24 Mathew Abbott
problem of modernism [is] one in which the question of value comes first
as well as last”; that “to classify a modern work as art is already to have
staked value.”30
Consider the claims about essence made in “Art and Objecthood.” Note
first that Fried’s polemic against literalism is grounded in a critique of some-
thing like essentialism. The essay responds to Donald Judd’s programmatic
1965 piece “Specific Objects,” and provides a persuasive account of the
literalist project: to overcome the pictorialism, relationality, and anthropo-
morphism characteristic of painting, and which had also infected contempo-
rary sculpture, because it had taken its lead from painting. This is why Judd
describes the works he produces as Specific Objects: they are not supposed
to represent a continuation of sculptural tradition, but a response to the
painting of artists such as Frank Stella, who had pursued the possibilities of
the medium to the point of exhaustion. The abstract sculpture of someone
like Anthony Caro, on the other hand—still beholden to the concerns of a
previous generation of painters—remained a few steps behind, languishing
thanks to its employment of anthropomorphic gestural motifs and entrap-
ment in a relational aesthetic that proceeded “part-by-part.”31 What was
needed, according to Judd, was a step into three-dimensionality that would
proceed out of painting. Despite this emphasis on three-dimensionality,
Judd’s argument had its origins in a version of Clement Greenberg’s idea
that modernism at its most fundamental is the exploration of the essential
properties and limits of particular mediums, such that the cycle of modernist
painting that begins with Édouard Manet and runs through to minimalism
can be understood as a continual sloughing off of inessential elements, and
hence as a series of increasingly fraught confrontations with the physical
features of the canvas. Yet Judd thought this had led painting into an impos-
sible position. Following through on the implications of this kind of essen-
tialism, he argued that painting had nowhere left to go in its confrontation
with the support, and hence no way of continuing as painting. His radically
single non-sculptural objects were meant to resolve the problem of exhaus-
tion then bearing down on painting by projecting its disavowed physical
essence, the very thing Fried thought it was the task of the modernist artist
to “defeat or suspend” (AO 151): the objecthood of the art object.
In response Fried argued that Judd and other literalists (along with Green-
berg himself32) had failed to grasp the kind of conventionality proper to
artistic mediums, and so were responding with confused aggressiveness to a
problem they understood poorly. As he wrote in a crucial footnote respond-
ing to Greenberg’s assertion (or admission) in “After Abstract Expression-
ism”33 that, on his account, a bare canvas could count as a picture:
[F]latness and the delimitation of flatness ought not to be thought of as

the “irreducible essence of pictorial art” but rather as something like
the minimal conditions for something’s being seen as a painting . . . the
crucial question is not what these minimal and, so to speak, timeless
conditions are, but rather what, at a given moment, is capable of com-
pelling conviction, of succeeding as painting.
(AO 169n)
There is no particular feature or set of features making up the timeless

essence of any medium, and so mediums are not exhaustible in quite the
way Greenberg and Judd believed. For Fried, Judd was wrong to think that
painting had reached its fundamental limit in the work of Stella, and so
wrong to understand himself as having taken the next step in some art his-
torically necessary progression into the post-painterly and post-sculptural
projection of objecthood. Here we can see the double-edged nature of
Fried’s critique of literalism: it is as though literalist artists are simultane-
ously too Platonic—insofar as they remain committed to some version of
the notion that they have discovered and projected the irreducible essence of
art—and too skeptical—insofar as they find that the traditions of painting
and sculpture have lost all vitality, and so want to repudiate artistic conven-
tion altogether, entering a new post-medium condition between them.
Though Fried attacks essentialism, appearing to endorse a version of the
idea that art is an open concept, his differences from Weitz are just as impor-
tant. For Fried is not attacking essence in general but a certain notion of
it: specifically, he is attacking the idea that painting and sculpture have an
irreducible essence (in other words, he is attacking Weitz’s assumption that
if there is an essence of art, it must consist in a set of necessary and sufficient
conditions). Fried’s footnote continues:
This is not to say that painting has no essence; it is to claim that that
essence—i.e., that which compels conviction—is largely determined by,
and therefore changes continually in response to, the vital work of the
recent past. The essence of painting is not something irreducible. Rather,
the task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions that,
at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing his work’s identity
as painting . . . I would argue that what modernism has meant is that
the questions—What constitutes the art of painting? And what consti-
tutes good painting?—are no longer separable; the first disappears, or
increasingly tends to disappear, into the second.
(AO 169n)
For Fried, it is impossible to understand modernism except as a confron-

tation with essence, but essence is not to be conceived purely descriptively,
as though it could be grasped from a position outside of artistic practice, and
the evaluative stance so vital to it. The essence of a medium is determined
by convention, by our beliefs and practices regarding it, and the responses
of critics and artists to particular works. The essence of a medium is thus
mutable and historical, discovered piece by piece. That the right word for
this is “discovered” and not, say, “invented” is crucial—to a modernist
26 Mathew Abbott
sensibility, convention is not something we arbitrarily create or construct,
as Dickie’s account of the nature of the authority invested in the artworld
implies we do; it is precisely not “mere” convention. Though Fried rejects
the idea that the essence of a medium is timeless, he also refuses the idea
that mediums lack essences, understood as internal forces, limits, or condi-
tions determining what will suffice at a given time. Hence he can renounce
an essentialism of timeless features and the reductionist picture of progress
in art history that follows from it while simultaneously arguing that the task
of a modernist painter is to establish a work’s “identity as painting.”
Identity as painting, not as art: even as it rejects Greenberg’s understand-
ing of it, Fried’s account turns on a notion of medium-specificity. Like Weitz,
Fried is developing an account of what makes artworks count as what they
are, and challenging the idea that this entails they must meet pre-determined
criteria. Both writers are responding here to Wittgenstein, and take them-
selves to be applying his critique of an assumption about concepts that has
underpinned so much of Western philosophy, from Plato through to Got-
tlob Frege. Yet the difference between their accounts emerges in how they
frame the problem: for Weitz, the problem pertains to what counts as art;
for Fried, it pertains to what counts as “painting or sculpture or poem or
piece of music.” And that is a question of whether or not a particular work
can “stand comparison with past work within that art whose quality is not
in doubt” (AO 165). What can “stand comparison” is what convinces; a
work counts as what it is because it succeeds at being what it is; essence,
then, would disappear from the picture if we were somehow to exclude
value from it (as Fried put it in his 1966 essay on Stella: “modernist paint-
ing discovers the essence of all painting to be quality” (SF 99n)). Securing
a painting’s identity as art, in other words, requires securing its identity as
painting, and that requires it participate in a kind of dialogue with recent
painting. That gives modernist practice a dialectical character, such that
certain procedures become possible or workable at certain moments, and
particular works can represent solutions to problems thrown up by other
artists, solutions which pose new problems. It is why a successful painting
counts as a discovery about painting, about what painting is now. It is why
Fried’s work has proved so amenable to Hegelian readings,34 which empha-
size the historical determination of artistic practices (compare this with the
bloodless Hegelianism of someone like Danto, who also emphasizes the his-
torical character of art, but ends up with a very different picture of what it
consists in35). Hence another of the lines Fried takes against Judd and the
other literalists: their works fail to secure their status as artworks precisely
because they attempt to go “between the arts” (AO 164).
This claim that literalist art not only fails aesthetically but in some sense
fails to achieve the status of art separates Fried’s account further from
Weitz and Dickie, even as it echoes once again the terms of the problematic
they engage. “There is,” he writes, “a sharp contrast between the literalist
espousal of objecthood . . . and modernist painting’s self-imposed imperative
that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood” (AO 152–3). And this con-
trast, he argues, emerges because “the demands of art and the conditions of
objecthood [are] in direct conflict” (AO 153). This is why he opens his essay
with the claim that literalism represents “something more than an episode in
the history of taste” (AO 148): the arrival of literalism on the scene repre-
sents something graver than the arrival of bad art on the scene. Note again,
however, that Fried’s position is not a reductionist one: he is not claiming,
for example, that all art is necessarily pictorial, and that literalism does not
count as art because it violates this condition (Fried’s claim is precisely not
like the one Weitz finds in Tolstoy, in other words). Despite their acceptance
by the artworld, literalist works did not deserve to count as art because lit-
eralist artists gave up on the problems and possibilities that were facing art.
And they did so willingly. For though Judd and other literalists may have
taken themselves to be producing artworks, there is a sense in which their
works were meant to trouble the very category “artwork,” along with the
notion of aesthetic value. Hence Judd’s claim that a work “needs only to be
interesting” (quoted AO 165); hence Tony Smith’s report of his experience
driving on the New Jersey Turnpike:
The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be
called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art
had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to
liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that
there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art.
(quoted AO 158)
Driving on the turnpike, Smith is struck by the artificiality—by the arti-

factuality, we might say—of the road and the built landscape. At the same
time, he is struck by the fact that nobody would call the road or landscape
a work of art. Yet this has the effect of liberating him from his former views
of art, and motivating a new kind of practice: one in which a certain arti-
factual yet non-artistic reality could be given expression. As Fried parses
Smith’s report:
What seems to have been revealed to Smith that night was the pictorial
nature of painting—even, one might say, the conventional nature of art.
And that Smith seems to have understood not as laying bare the essence
of art, but as announcing its end.
(AO 158)
Smith’s encounter revealed the conventionality of art to him, and led him
to want to repudiate that conventionality, to show it up as mere conven-
tion. By producing artifacts that would express non-artistic reality, Smith
wants to demonstrate the artificiality of art. In the terms I developed out
of Weitz, he wants to reveal that any attempt to define the nature of art is
28 Mathew Abbott
just an arbitrary subjective decision; in the terms I developed out of Dickie,
he wants to reveal that distinguishing artifacts from art just depends on the
decrees of those who happen to be invested with the relevant institutional
authority (another title for Fried’s essay might have been “Art and Artifac-
tuality”). This is the sense in which literalist works functioned as provoca-
tions, and part of why Fried derides them as theatrical.
As well as picking up on a kind of inauthenticity, Fried’s claim that literal-
ist works are theatrical is grounded in an account of what it is to encounter
them: they have an uncanny and alienating physical presence; this activates
the space around them, effectively setting it up as part of the experience of
the work; that makes it difficult or impossible to discern what counts as part
of the work and what does not; this means the literalist work is “unexact-
ing” (AO 155). Because my experience is deframed by the literalist work,
there is no way I can get it wrong (or right) in my response to it; the work
asks nothing of me, except the attention it solicits; “the experience alone
is what matters” (AO 158). Since they do not make a case for themselves,
literalist works resist both classification and evaluation; rather than being
unconvincing (as an unsuccessful Stella is), they do not even try to convince.
Stepping out of the conviction game, they lead us out with them, asking
us to consider the artifice of it. After all, finding something convincing (or
unconvincing) means having a view about the nature of that thing: as Wal-
ter Benn Michaels writes, “compelling conviction is something the work
does.”36 To say a work is convincing as painting, for example, is not merely
to give voice to my subjective experience of it: it is to make a claim about
the work, and so a claim that might be right or wrong. At the same time, it
is a claim about the work that I have to make myself, insofar as someone
cannot be convinced of something on my behalf. Cavell writes of encounter-
ing a Caro:
The problem this raises for me is exactly not to decide whether this is
art (I mean, sculpture), nor to find some definition of “sculpture” which
makes the Caro pieces borderline cases of sculpture, or sculptures in
some extended sense. The problem is that I am, so to speak, stuck with
the knowledge that this is sculpture.37
As he beholds the Caro, Cavell does not find himself being asked to
“decide” whether it counts as art. Nor, as a reductionist essentialist might
have it, does he find himself trying to “decide” whether it fits some pre-
determined criterion about what sculpture is. Nor, as a Weitzian anti-
essentialist might have it, does he try to “decide” whether it is sufficiently
similar to other sculptures to count as bearing a family resemblance to them.
No one can just “decide” to be convinced by something: it has to do the rel-
evant work on them; in Fried’s terms, it has to compel conviction. And being
convinced by an artwork amounts to something more than simply liking it,
giving it a positive evaluation. When a work convinces me as sculpture, it
convinces me it is sculpture. It thus changes my stance on how it is with the
world, on what there is in it. Cavell discovers the work is sculpture; he finds
he knows it is. The insistence here on a kind of subjectivity is also an insis-
tence on a kind of objectivity. In this context, we need one to have the other.
Both modernist and literalist art face the problem of what art is, and they
do so in response to something we might call the discovery of finitude. When
we make this discovery (and it is the kind of discovery one can only keep
on making), we arrive at the knowledge—or approach the k nowledge—
that our concepts lack determinacy, and so that there is nothing to them
beyond our convictions about them, conventions regarding them, and prac-
tices with them. And we find ourselves confronting the problem of how we
can go on together in the same world in the face of this ungroundedness (in
Cavell’s words, we find that our going on “depends on nothing more, but
nothing less” than “sharing routes of interest and feeling”38). This gives a
way of accounting for what it means to say that modernist artworks inter-
rogate themselves as such: under modernist conditions, art’s ungrounded-
ness drives artistic inquiry, as artists try to find out what art is. Literalism
(or what, speaking too loosely, we could call “postmodernism”) responds
to the very same problem, yet it does so differently. The modernist artist
approaches the question of what art is through a particular medium. The
task they set themselves is to discover what art is by discovering what (say)
painting is at a particular historical moment: if they respond successfully to
recent painting, they will show us what painting is now and so (an aspect of)
what art is now. The literalist, on the other hand, goes straight for the prob-
lem of art: moving beyond medium, they want their works to raise the ques-
tion of art directly. Because of their suspicion of conventional context, they
want to get at the question of art by stepping out of that context. They want
to go straight for it. Because they go straight for it, however, they cannot
provide—and indeed, do not intend to provide—a convincing answer to the
question of art. They remain at the level of questioning: provoking, under-
mining, challenging, and critiquing, but not convincing. That is the sense
in which literalist art is skeptical (to use Cavell’s words again, the literalist
understands the “nothing more,” but not the “nothing less”). Unable to find
security in convention, literalism repudiates it, reveling in indeterminacy
(hence perhaps some of the characteristic features of postmodern art: rejec-
tions of the aesthetic; attacks on intentionality; a flaunting of the arbitrari-
ness of interpretation; critiques of institutional authority; an emphasis on
the role of the beholder in creatively constructing the meaning of artworks;
and so on39). Indeed the literalist artist is not unlike the analytic aesthetician
wrestling with the problem of the definition of art after stepping out of the
conventional, evaluative context in which art can be what it is. Seeking to
view our practices from outside, they lose the resources only available in
their midst. Though Weitz takes himself to be making an anti-theoretical
argument, then, there is a sense in which he remains caught in the grip of
theory: not of any particular theory, perhaps, but of the theoretical attitude
30 Mathew Abbott
itself, of theory as theoria. He wants to view the world from a “sideways
on”40 perspective, as if from a position outside it (which is to say: he wants
to get out of the world).
Just as with “game,” there are no necessary and sufficient conditions
of “art” (nor of “painting,” nor of “sculpture,” nor of “poem,” nor of
“music”). If this is right, then it was always right, but it took a particular set
of historical circumstances for it to start to manifest itself.41 Modernism is
what happens when artists confront and make art out of art’s ungrounded-
ness, going on in the face of it; literalism is what happens when artists seek
to reveal art’s ungroundedness. A difference between games and art is that
disagreements about what counts as art are relatively common. Another is
that disagreements about art have a tendency to run aground, as we reach a
point in our discussions where it seems hard or impossible to go on (which
is when we might start doing philosophy). A difference between Judd and
Stella is in the resources Stella gives us for going on, though meager they can
seem. If modernist art lays bare value’s inescapability, it is because it shows
how describing the world just is to take a position, or better: that there is no
describing the world without being in it. Modernism emerges out of skepti-
cism; skepticism takes hold as modernism ends.
Notes
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (third edition), trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (Malden, Oxford, and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), §66; 27e.
2 As Hjalmar Wennerberg observed in an early response to Wittgenstein’s
remarks on family resemblance, his claim can be interpreted in two ways. On
one interpretation, Wittgenstein is denying that there is any feature shared
by all games; on the other, Wittgenstein is denying that there is any feature
or set of features “which is common and peculiar” (“The Concept of Family
Resemblance in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Theoria (33: 2, 1967), 110)
to all games. I think Wennerberg is right to interpret Wittgenstein as making
only the latter, weaker but far more plausible claim: the issue pertains not to
whether all games share any feature (for example, it seems fair to say that they
are all activities), but to whether they have an essential distinguishing feature
(or set of them).
3 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §66; 27e.
6 Alice Crary’s Wittgensteinian account of conceptual mastery is instructive here
(see Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), 41–2).
7 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §66; 27–8e.
8 See Definitions of Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 12.
9 See Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London
and New York: Routledge, 1999), 222–4 (see also Davies, Definitions of Art,
11). The difference between Carroll’s interpretation of Wittgenstein and the
Cavellian one at work in this paper emerges in Carroll’s repeated use of the
phrase “family resemblance method,” as though Wittgenstein were claiming that
his points about resemblance could equip us with a means of distinguishing
games from non-games, art from non-art, or whatever.
10 The scope of Wittgenstein’s claim is not obvious, but it does seem obvious that he
does not take himself to be making a point about games alone. To what portion of
our concepts does it extend? Craig Fox may be right to say that Wittgenstein must
have deliberately avoided answering this question (see “Wittgenstein on Family
Resemblance,” in Wittgenstein: Key Concepts, ed. Kelly Dean Jolley (Routledge:
Oxon and New York, 2014), 55), perhaps because he didn’t know the answer. On
the other hand, Wittgenstein does make similar claims about mathematical con-
cepts, which might seem to be prime candidates for determinacy. See his remarks
about the concept “number” (Philosophical Investigations, §68; 28e), for exam-
ple, or his famous (and perhaps misnomic) “paradox of rule following,” which
emerges in the context of a discussion of a very simple mathematical concept: that
of extending a series (see the discussion through §185–242; 63–75e).
11 See the first part of G. P. Backer and P. M. S. Hacker’s piece on family resem-
blance for a useful brief history of the grip this idea has had on philosophers (in
Wittgenstein, Understanding and Meaning Part I: Essays (Malden, Oxford, and
Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 202–8).
12 Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism (15: 1, 1956), 28.
13 As Giorgio Agamben argues, in Nietzsche’s sense the term “untimely” is really
a synonym for “contemporary”: a way of expressing how a thinker’s apparent
anachronism can make their thought “more capable than others of perceiving
and grasping their own time” (“What Is the Contemporary?” in What Is an
Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40.
14 I am using “art theory” to describe the body of theoretical work (and theoreti-
cally inclined critical work) typically produced by critics, artists, and theorists
working outside the field of analytic aesthetics. I am using “aesthetic theory”
and similar terms to describe the body of work typically produced by aestheti-
cians, especially those involved in the debate around definitions of art.
15 Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” 30.
16 Though this is not directly relevant to my argument, it is worth pointing out that
this is perhaps unfair as a critique of Tolstoy, who explicitly rejected the idea
that “it is necessary to find a definition of art which shall fit the works” (What
Is Art? trans. Aylmer Maude (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1996), 45).
20 Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” 35 (see also his use of “chosen” in
the passage quoted here).
21 Following Immanuel Kant, Andrea Kern contrasts the infallible “creative knowl-
edge” that would be enjoyed by an infinite or godlike being with the kind of
knowledge finite beings can enjoy. Because it is “fundamentally knowledge-
creating,” creative knowledge “as such is true.” “Finite knowledge,” on the
other hand, “is incapable of producing by itself the contents which it knows;
it depends upon the contents of its knowledge being given to it. Hence, finite
knowledge is (in the best case) objective knowledge” (“Why Do Our Reasons
Come to an End?” in Varieties of Skepticism: Essays After Kant, Wittgenstein
and Cavell, ed. Andrea Kern and James Conant (Berlin and Boston: Walter de
Gruyter GmbH, 2014), 98.
22 John McDowell, “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,” in Mind, Value and
Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 200.
23 As Davies argues, Weitz does not really need the implausible claim that artworks
are not necessarily artifacts: for his anti-essentialist argument to work, he only
32 Mathew Abbott
needs the claim that “art has no jointly necessary and sufficient conditions”
(Definitions of Art, 11).
24 See George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly (6: 3,
1969), 253–6.
25 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy (61: 19, 1964), 580.
26 Dickie, “Defining Art,” 254.
27 Dickie, “Defining Art,” 254.
28 George Dickie, “Art as a Social Institution,” in Aesthetics: An Introduction
(Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1971), 106.
29 Paul Gudel’s as yet unpublished book Modernism and Skepticism: Terms of Crit-
icism in Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Stanley Cavell contains very
illuminating accounts of some of these differences between Fried and Dickie, and
of the connections between Fried, Cavell, and Wittgenstein.
30 Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 216.
31 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax and
New York: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New
York University Press, 1975), 183.
32 Fried writes that “with respect to his understanding of modernism Greenberg
had no truer followers than the literalists” (IMAC 36).
33 In Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 4: Modern-
ism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 121–33.
34 See Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial
Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014).
35 See Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement
of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 81–115. I don’t think he
would have minded the epithet.
36 Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 87 (my emphasis).
37 Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 218.
38 Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Must
We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 52.
39 Fried’s discussion of some remarks Hal Foster made about “Art and Object-
hood” in 1987 is instructive here (see IMAC 43–4).
40 McDowell, “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,” 207.
41 Fried’s trilogy of books on French pictorial modernism—Absorption and Theat-
ricality, Courbet’s Realism, and Manet’s Modernism—can be read as providing
an account of when and how this happened. If my interpretation of his work is
right, however, it seems there is no reason why modernism couldn’t emerge at
multiple times or in multiple places, or in multiple places at a single time, or at
multiple times in a single place, or whatever. The discovery of finitude, after all,
is a discovery of something that must have been true of human concepts from the
start.
2 “When I Raise My Arm”
Michael Fried’s Theory of Action
Walter Benn Michaels
Michael Fried’s “Morris Louis” has at its center an interest in what Fried
calls “distinctively human . . . action,” particularly, the “act of drawing”
and, more generally, “mak[ing] one’s mark” (ML122).1 But that interest
is at every moment accompanied by and even articulated through a deep
worry about (sometimes amounting almost to a refusal of) both drawing
and marking, even action itself. Thus, for example, he says that the rivu-
lets in Louis’s unfurleds not only “do not strike one as drawn” (ML 110)
but that they seem more like “the manifestation of natural forces” than of
human ones. And he says of the stripe paintings Louis was making before
his death that there is a “crucial” sense in which “they are not drawn” but
an equally crucial one in which “they can be seen as drawn” but “not . . . as
the fruit of any imaginable act of drawing” (ML 122). So, on the one hand,
Louis is all about “the will to draw”; on the other hand, no actual drawing.
On the one hand, the question of distinctively human action is the central
one; on the other hand, Louis’s paintings “more than those of any previous
painter, give the impression of having come into existence . . . without the
intervention of the artist” (ML 126). The idea that Louis is concerned above
all with acting is introduced in conjunction with what is described as his
refusal of the primary act in question—marking and, in particular, drawing.
One reason drawing is problematic in “Morris Louis” is because of how
you do it—with your “hand, wrist and arm” (ML 126). That’s why this
essay is called “When I Raise My Arm”; part of my argument will be that
Fried sees in Louis’s painting what amounts to a refusal of Ludwig Wittgen-
stein’s foundational (for the theory of action) question, “what’s left over if
I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”
and that this refusal amounts to a theory of action that is also a theory
of the work of art.2 But we can more easily approach this issue by way
of a second and more obvious reason, the problematic status in “Morris
Louis” not only of what the act of drawing is but of what drawing looks
like on the canvas. In this text, Fried associates drawing with the “plastic or
tactile identity” of “tangible entities” in “traditional space” (ML 117)—in
other words, with the “sculptural” “illusion of space into which one could
imagine oneself walking,”3 an illusion that, in Clement Greenberg’s reading,
34 Walter Benn Michaels
had been jettisoned in modernist painting’s effort to identify what was
“unique and exclusive” to “pictorial art.” Because, according to Greenberg,
“[f]latness” or “two-dimensionality” “was the only condition painting
shared with no other art,” “Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as
it did to nothing else.”4 So the refusal of drawing in “Morris Louis” can be
identified with the refusal of traditional or sculptural space.
At the same time, however, Greenberg was careful to insist on the limits
of flatness. If in “After Abstract Expressionism” he famously flirted with
the idea of an unmarked but “stretched or tacked-up canvas”5 counting as a
picture, in “Modernist Painting” he had in effect already sought to discount
that flirtation by warning that “the flatness toward which Modernist paint-
ing orients itself can never be an utter flatness” because “[t]he first mark on
a surface destroys its virtual flatness.”6 And that Fried himself shared this
reservation is clear from the fact that, describing the relation between the
rivulets of color on each side and the vast expanse of blank canvas in the
unfurleds, it’s precisely this reservation that he quotes. So if the unfurleds
are resolutely in opposition to the tangible things located in the traditional
space of drawing, they are in opposition also to the utter flatness imagined
in the “stretched or tacked-up canvas.”
Greenberg’s way of resolving this tension between what he took to be
the necessary commitment to flatness and the equally necessary violation of
that commitment was by way of a distinction between two kinds of illusions
painting made possible. If, on his view, modernist flatness works against
the “realistic” depiction of “recognizable objects” and against the kind of
“sculptural” illusion that had characterized earlier painting (that’s the “illu-
sion of space in depth that one could imagine oneself walking into”), it does
not give up illusion altogether. Rather it leaves room for what he famously
calls an “optical” or “strictly pictorial” (as opposed to “sculptural”) “illu-
sion of a kind of third dimension.” Hence even in a painter as committed
to refusing depth as Piet Mondrian, you still get the suggestion of a space
you feel you can look (albeit not walk) into—“a kind of illusion of a kind
of third dimension.” And it is this interest—in the “translation” of three
dimensions “into strictly optical, two-dimensional terms”7—that character-
izes for Greenberg the fundamental demand of modernist painting: to make
manifest both the illusion of depth and the reality of flatness.
The point for Fried is slightly different, though he too is interested in
opticality. Earlier in the Louis essay, with reference to Jackson Pollock, he
both deploys the term and describes the phenomenon (an “illusion” that is
not of “tangibility but of its opposite,” available to “eyesight alone” (ML
106)) in ways that are deeply compatible with Greenberg. But in quoting
Greenberg’s remark that “[t]he first mark on a surface destroys its virtual
flatness,” Fried is more interested in the words “first” and “destroy” than
Greenberg is. Indeed, where Greenberg, as we’ve seen, flirted with the idea
of the unmarked or empty canvas as a kind of telos for modernist flatness,
Fried, describing the “vast expanse” of precisely such a blank canvas in the
Michael Fried’s Theory of Action 35
unfurleds (as if, in fact, the unfurleds were the closest anyone had yet come
actually to offering a blank canvas as a painting), insists on the necessity
of the mark and the desirability of the violence it does to flatness. Right
before quoting Greenberg, Fried says of the “rivulets of color” on either side
of the unfurleds’ vast expanse of canvas that “they simultaneously destroy
and make pictorially meaningful” that blankness. And right after quoting
Greenberg, he says that in the unfurleds, “Louis made major art out of what
might be called the firstness of marking as such, a firstness prior to any act
of marking.” Indeed, insofar as Fried persistently identifies the blank canvas
in the unfurleds with “the blankness . . . of an enormous page” (ML 119),
the mark can be understood in part to play the structural role of writing,
where—with respect to meaning—neither sculptural nor optical illusion (or
for that matter, flatness itself) is exactly relevant.
Some thirty years later, Fried himself would describe his difference from
Greenberg with respect to opticality as a response to what he understood as
the “double role” that concept played in Greenberg’s writing. On the one
hand, Greenberg was making a “global claim about modernist painting,
which in its drive to distinguish itself from sculpture is said to have pursued
opticality along with flatness from the start” (IMAC 20); on the other, he
was deploying it only to characterize a feature of recent painters like Louis.
And it is this second, more local application with which he identifies his
use of the concept, while noting that Greenberg seemed to be undecided
about what his own position was. For example, Fried notes that in the first
(1960) version of “Modernist Painting,” right after describing what the first
mark on a blank canvas does, Greenberg claimed (in a “key sentence”) that
modernist painting seeks “to fulfill the impressionist insistence on the opti-
cal as the only sense that a completely pictorial art can invoke” (quoted in
IMAC 21). But in the later (1965) version, Fried points out, that sentence
disappears, with the effect, as he sees it, of now implying not a particular
interest in returning to the impressionists but “a consistently optical bias
from Manet and impressionism through Mondrian to the present” (IMAC
22). It’s this “global” view of opticality that he associates with Greenberg’s
reductionism—the idea that “there was a timeless essence” to painting “that
was progressively revealed”8—and that Fried wants to deny. And it’s this
reductionism that he identifies with literalism, writing that if Greenberg’s
modernism had discovered that “the irreducible essence of pictorial art was
nothing other than the literal properties of the support, that is, flatness and
the delimitation of flatness,” it’s “easy to see” (IMAC 36) how minimalism
could draw the conclusion that what mattered was not just flatness as such
but literalness as such.
If, however, we look at another difference between the 1960 and the 1965
“Modernist Painting,” the situation becomes a little more complicated. The
sentence Fried quotes in the Morris Louis essay—“the first mark made on
a surface destroys its virtual flatness”—is itself a revision. In the 1960 ver-
sion, Greenberg says not that the first mark made on a surface destroys its
virtual flatness but that “the first mark made on a canvas destroys its literal
and utter flatness.”9 So although flatness gets destroyed in both versions, in
1960 it’s the literal flatness of the canvas, while in 1965 it’s the virtual flat-
ness of a surface.
What does this revision accomplish? In at least one way, its point seems
a little clearer than does the deletion of “the optical as the only sense
that a completely pictorial art can invoke,” especially if we note that this
isn’t the only time that “literal” disappears from the 1960 text. Just as he
replaced “literal and utter flatness” with “virtual flatness,” Greenberg also
(earlier in the essay) removed “literal” from the phrase “the literal two-
dimensionality which is the guarantee of painting’s independence as an art.”
Why? The literal two-dimensionality goes because paintings aren’t literally
two-dimensional and so the literal flatness must also go because, insofar as
he is identifying flatness with two-dimensionality, they aren’t literally flat.
Which means not that the canvas (unmarked or marked) isn’t in some sense
flat but that the flatness the mark destroys is something else—not a property
of the canvas but a two-dimensionality the canvas never really had.10 In
this sense, the mark that destroys flatness by making possible the illusion
of three-dimensionality does so by destroying what it now constitutes as a
prior illusion—the illusion of two-dimensionality, what Fried calls “appar-
ent” flatness (ML 119). The first mark creates the appearance it is also
understood to destroy. Or rather, it transforms what we might call the origi-
nal literal illusion (literal because, as the trajectory of Greenberg’s revisions
suggests, it’s the illusion that the unmarked canvas is two-dimensional) into
a depicted illusion. And thus, since (as Greenberg has reminded us a page or
two earlier) “pictures themselves . . . exist in three-dimensional space,” the
first mark creates the possibility of seeing the actual three-dimensionality
of the picture as also a kind of illusion—a depicted three-dimensionality—
what Greenberg calls “a kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension.”11 In
this way, both the flatness of the painting (which isn’t real) and the three-
dimensionality of the painting (which is real) are rendered ideal. They are
both representational effects.
From this standpoint, Fried’s idea that there are two lines of thought
about flatness and opticality in Greenberg makes sense even if thinking of
one of them as global and the other as local may not be the most perspicu-
ous way to distinguish them. One way to read Greenberg’s history of paint-
ing is as the progressive confrontation with the “ineluctable flatness of the
support,” a confrontation that culminates in modernism’s valorization of
the purely optical as painting’s essence. On this reading, it’s the physical
facts of the canvas—“the flat surface, the shape of the support, the proper-
ties of pigment”12—that are dispositive, and so it’s this reading that leads
us, as Fried says, to minimalist literalism. Minimalism pierces the veil of
apparent flatness and reveals the three-dimensionality of the painting as
object, hence the irrelevance (going forward) of painting. But, in the reading
I’ve just outlined, the flatness that is ineluctable is doubly so—first as the
actual illusion (the appearance of flatness) that minimalism unmasks and
second as the depicted illusion that the first mark makes possible because
it turns the appearance of flatness into the representation of flatness and
because it turns the reality of three-dimensionality into the representation
of three-dimensionality.13
The intimacy of these two readings is visible in Fried’s characterization
of “the emphasis Louis places on the bare canvas in the unfurleds, the sheer
primacy he gives it” (ML 120). The primacy of bare canvas repeats the insis-
tence on the materiality of the support that had culminated in Greenberg’s
at least equally bare “stretched or tacked-up canvas” that already exists as a
picture and that marks the final stage in the painting’s reduction to literalist
three-dimensionality. But here that primacy is conferred on the bare canvas
by the painter (“he gives it”). It’s like the flatness that Greenberg describes
as not just destroyed but created by the first mark. Which is why Fried sees
the rivulets as simultaneously destroying and making meaningful the canvas
into which they’re stained: they turn its “apparent” flatness into a signifying
flatness. And here too, we see the relevance of his description of the blank-
ness of the bare canvas as “the blankness, one feels, of an enormous page.”
The kind of mark made on a “blank page or canvas” (ML 119) offers a dif-
ferent solution to the problem raised by modernism’s refusal of the illusion
of three-dimensionality. That problem, properly understood, was how to
avoid the collapse of the work of art into the reality of three-dimensionality,
and the replacement of sculptural by optical illusion is one way of solving
it. But the redescription of drawing as a kind of writing is another, a way of
making the surface virtual by making it in itself the site of meaning.
Which is not to say that—for painting—the idea of illusion is entirely sac-
rificed. Pointing to the experience of trying to focus intensely (“bear down”)
on the rivulets of paint in each side, Fried describes the beholder as feeling
“physically too close” to the painting to bring them into “simultaneous
focus.” You can’t, for example, compare the rivulets on one side to the rivu-
lets on the other without looking back and forth between them, so you feel
you need to step back to get a better view of the whole. But then—when you
do step back—nothing is changed. Why not? Because your sense of being
“physically too close” is “illusory”; it doesn’t matter where you are. The
“illusory closeness” of the unfurleds belongs “not to one’s actual situation
viewing them, but to the paintings themselves.” Furthermore, it’s precisely
this illusory closeness that “makes the blankness of the canvas seem like that
of an enormous page,” since the sense that you can’t focus simultaneously
and sufficiently on both banks of rivulets produces the experience of the
reader rather than the beholder. No matter how close to or far from the page
you are, there is no way you can read both the beginning of a line and the
end of it simultaneously, and in order to experience the book correctly you
don’t need to. But, transposed from writing to painting, this literal experi-
ence of the book (you can’t read it by focusing on a whole page) becomes a
way to signify the distinctive experience of the painting—you can only see
it when “your attention is brought to rest on the painting as a whole” (ML
121). And this quality of being a whole is what the painting establishes by
making the beholder’s sense of closeness illusory, by making the question of
where the beholder stands irrelevant, by making its illusion and hence its
meaning belong to itself instead of to the viewer.
Thus the question of what the first mark made on the canvas does leads
us to the description of that mark as establishing the canvas as the site
of an illusion. The illusion produced by the painting’s depiction of three-
dimensional space is repudiated but not in favor of its real flatness (since
the picture plane is flat but no picture is) and not on behalf of its real three-
dimensionality (since everything is three-dimensional) but on behalf instead
of its represented flatness. Hence the identification—in both Greenberg and
Fried—of illusion with meaning; and hence, in Fried’s Louis, the idea that
it’s your experience of the painting (the illusion of being too close) that
makes you understand the irrelevance of your experience. Fried describes
Louis as “the last major painter who did not have to deal explicitly with
the issues” raised by minimalist literalism, the last painter who did not have
to confront the possibility of his paintings being experienced as “a kind of
object” (ML 128). But both in his account of the importance of the illusion
and his account of the structure of the illusion, we can see Fried already
reading Louis against the literalist critique of illusionism. “Three dimen-
sions are real space,” Judd wrote in “Specific Objects”; “that gets rid of the
problem of illusionism . . . which is riddance of one of the salient and most
objectionable relics of European art.”14 Looking at an eight and a half by
fourteen foot canvas in real space, there’s a best place to stand to see it as a
whole; looking at Alpha Pi, you can only see it “as a whole” by discovering
that it doesn’t matter where you stand. The beholder whose illusion (when
pierced) reveals to her the irrelevance of her own position in real space (i.e.,
the irreducibility of the illusion) experiences the difference between herself
as a subject looking at an object and herself as a beholder looking at a
painting.15
But if it makes sense to see Louis not as the “last major painter” who “did
not have to confront the risk that his paintings might be seen as objects”
(ML 128) but rather as the first major painter who did confront that risk,
that’s only because, in the terms in which Fried presents him, he created that
risk for himself. We can begin to see how by remembering Fried’s descrip-
tion of the veils as giving “the impression” of having been determined “by
uniform, impersonal not just natural but elemental forces” (ML 117) and
of the rivulets in the unfurleds as “the manifestation of natural forces” (ML
122). In other words, the painting that established itself “as a whole” by
rendering the beholder’s experience of it irrelevant to its meaning seems to
render the artist’s activity in making it equally irrelevant. It seeks in fact (as
we have already noted) to give the impression that it has “come into exis-
tence” “without the intervention of the artist.” Indeed, the first mark on the
empty canvas that Fried sees as thematized in the unfurleds is even described
as something that “happens on, and to, the blank page” (ML 119), as if the
act of marking were best understood as never quite performed, as an event
rather than an act. And this desire to problematize the act of making the
first mark is given a special force by the fact that the very structure of the
phrase—“the first mark made on a canvas”—is, with respect especially to
the unfurleds, misleading since, as Fried says, they are “more accurately”
described as painted “with” rather than “on” the canvas (ML 120). What
he means by this is that Louis poured the paint onto the (blank, unprimed,
and unstretched) canvas and then controlled its flow by manipulating the
canvas itself. So, for example, the natural force of gravity plays a major
role. And any mark of the artist’s agency—anything that looks like it could
have been made by “his hand, wrist, and arm”—is refused. Or when it does
make its way in, it is criticized. The effort in general is to produce paintings
that, looking as if they’d been produced by something other than the human
body (the hand, the wrist, the arm), would look as if they had separated
themselves from the act of making them. And the point of this effort was for
Louis to make sure, Fried says, that he “didn’t allow himself to get into his
paintings in what he felt was the wrong way” (ML 126).
In other words, in order to avoid getting into his paintings in the wrong
way, Louis ran the risk of appearing not to get into them at all. Which, as
a theoretical position rather than an aesthetic decision, had its own attrac-
tions. For example, a year before Fried began writing the Louis essay, the
philosopher Monroe Beardsley (co-author along with the literary theorist
William K. Wimsatt of “The Intentional Fallacy”16) imagined “enjoying an
abstract expressionist painting” at a museum and then discovering that the
painting was “actually made by a child or a chimpanzee or a machine.” The
point of the example, he thought, was that the discovery “does not invali-
date your response.”17 It doesn’t matter whether the painter was a child or
a chimpanzee because (and this was the central tenet of “The Intentional
Fallacy”) what you’re responding to is the painting not the painter’s inten-
tions or (if the painter were a machine or a natural force) the painter’s lack
of intentions. So on this account, neither Louis nor Fried need ever have
worried about getting into the painting in the wrong way because the artist
can never get into it at all; whether the mark looks intentional or not, we
effectively treat it as if it weren’t. Hence when Fried says that “Louis’s paint-
ings, more than those of any previous painter, give the impression of having
come into existence as if of their own accord, without the intervention of
the artist” (ML 126), what, following Wimsatt and Beardsley, he should be
saying is that Louis’s paintings perform the truth of all art—looking as if
they came into existence of their own accord, they make clear that it doesn’t
matter how they came into existence. Looking as if they came into existence
without a painter having done anything, they make clear the irrelevance of
the effort to understand what the painter did.
Of course, Beardsley does not make this point against Fried but—close
enough for jazz—against Stanley Cavell, with whom Fried’s intellectual
relations at this point in their careers were extremely close. In 1967’s
“Music Discomposed,” Cavell had written that we approach works of art
“not merely because they are interesting in themselves but because they
are felt as made by someone,” and for this reason (because “they are not
works of nature but works of art”) the “category of intention” is “inescap-
able” in speaking of them: “without it, we would not understand what they
are.”18 And although Beardsley in effect doubles down on the idea that the
beholder would not know what the work was by insisting that even the
artist (as monkey or machine) need not know what it is, it’s easy enough
to see the implausibility of his idea that the beholder’s response would be
unaffected by discovering the painting was made by someone or something
who didn’t know what a painting was. That the experience of a bunch of
colors can be enjoyable is obviously true; most of us like sunsets. But insofar
as what you’re enjoying is, say, the way in which the painting refuses (or
insists on) optical instead of sculptural illusion, it’s even more obvious that
discovering it to have been made by someone (or thing) that doesn’t have
the concept of either the optical or the sculptural (or, for that matter, of
refusing and insisting) will indeed invalidate that response. Paint randomly
applied to a canvas can look like a tangible object or not; it can’t continue
the tradition of sculptural illusion, and it can’t refuse to continue it. In other
words, you can always treat the painting as if it were made by no one (this
will be part of what is meant by treating it as an object), but then you will
not be seeing it as a work.
So what is Fried getting at—or what does he think Louis is getting at—
when he insists that Louis’s paintings do not look like they’ve been “drawn
or acted on,” that instead they give the impression that they were made just
as Wimsatt and Beardsley asked us to imagine all works are—without the
intervention of the artist (as if by “natural forces,” like a sunset)? In Wim-
satt and Beardsley, the point of eliminating the artist’s act is to emphasize
the necessity of keeping the artist out of the work. But in Fried’s Louis, as
we have already begun to see, the point is not to keep the artist out of the
work but to keep him or her from entering it in the wrong way. What, then,
is the wrong way?
Fried gives that question a kind of psychological answer with respect to
Jackson Pollock, the painter who, in his refusal of drawing, Fried thinks
of as closest to Louis. Pollock’s “development,” he says, “seems to have
involved a continual struggle between the literalness and specificity of urgent
personal feeling and the impersonal and in that sense abstract demands of
painting itself.” In part, the idea here is that (impersonal) painting required
Pollock to repress (personal) feeling and thus to “dissolve or revoke” the
most “direct means of specifying feeling”—drawing. And here Louis has
an advantage since, as Fried imagines him, Louis’s most urgent personal
feelings may not have been “psychological” in the sense of being concerned
with “relationships and feelings” other than those “connected with paint-
ing itself” and hence need never have been experienced by him in the way
that they were by Pollock—as in conflict with (and therefore needing to be
“excised” from) his painting. The way Fried puts this is to say that Louis’s
“imagination” was “radically abstract” in a way that neither Pollock’s nor
any other modernist painter’s was. But of course even this radically abstract
imagination requires Louis to do as Pollock had done and refuse drawing.
Which we can begin to understand better if we remember that it’s not just
the specificity and urgency of feeling that Pollock struggled against but its
“literalness” (ML 126). And if we then remember that it’s not his psychol-
ogy but his body, not his feeling but his wrist and his hand and his arm, that
Louis struggles against.
“Louis’s eschewal of drawing,” Fried says, “amounted to the refusal
to allow his hand, wrist, and arm to get into his paintings: and this . . .
amounted to the refusal to allow himself to get into his paintings in what he
felt was the wrong way” (ML 126). Thus, for example, he says of the florals
that they fail when you come to see “the limits” of the “configurations” “as
determined by the artist’s wrist, which is to say, as drawn” (ML 117). Why
is this a failure? Because when you see the configurations as determined by
the artist’s wrist, you see the painting as a trace of the painter’s body, a natu-
ral rather than an intentional sign—literally “literal.” From this standpoint,
the attempt to make paintings that look like they’ve come into existence
“without the intervention of the artist” is the attempt to make paintings
that look like they’re meant and not just caused by the artist. In fact, it’s
precisely because Louis understands drawing as a failure to mean (the mark
on the canvas is just the index of the painter’s wrist; the painting that is just
an indexical sign of the painter’s body might as well be made by Beardsley’s
chimp) that he understands the act of meaning to require a refusal of the act
of drawing and requires the act of meaning to run the risk of looking like
no act at all.
This is why Fried’s reading of what turned out to be Louis’s last paintings,
the stripes, continues to insist that, because the stripes are “not seen as cir-
cumscribed by a cursive gesture,” “they are not drawn,” while at the same
time describing them as different from the rivulets of the unfurleds because
they are experienced “as in some important sense intentional, as issuing
from a distinctively human and not just natural action” (ML 122). It’s as if
until the stripes, the fact that Louis would not allow the paintings to look
like they were made by an intentional act (drawing) was a function of his
sense that drawing had come to look intentional in the wrong way—that it
looked in the painting like the literal effect of a feeling (Pollock) or in Louis
of a bodily act (the movement of the painter’s wrist). Which gives us what
Cavell, replying to Beardsley, called a “bad picture” of intentional acts.
Anti-intentionalists like the New Critics, Cavell said, see intention as “some
internal, prior mental event causally connected with outward effects.”19 But
that’s not only a “bad picture” of what an intention is, it’s a “bad picture”
of what a work of art is: it pictures the work as “more or less like a physical
object, whereas the first fact of works of art is that they are meant, meant to
be understood.”20 And, more fundamentally still, it’s a bad picture of what
an act is.
This bad picture is produced by the effort to answer the Wittgensteinian
question we began with: “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my
arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” If, in other words, we
understand the theory of action as the effort to say what’s left over, and the
answer we come up with is “your intention,” we have a model of the act in
which it consists of a physical movement of the body plus an intention and
a model of the work of art in which it consists of the physical object it is
plus some other thing (the artist’s intention) outside it. And if we think of
the intention as external and prior to the work, then it will be (as the New
Criticism thought it was) relevant only as a cause—it will have nothing to
do with the work’s meaning.21 And it’s precisely getting himself into the
painting as its cause that Louis resists. That is, his desire not to come into
it in the wrong way is a refusal to let the work be reduced to an effect of its
causes: the indexical marks of the arm, hand, and wrist that Fried identifies
with drawing.
But it is precisely this picture of the intention as outside the physical act—
as “an extra property” of it—that Cavell, following Elizabeth Anscombe,
means to reject. To take one of Anscombe’s examples, suppose we juxtapose
a tree waving in the wind and Anscombe herself writing “I am a fool” on
a blackboard. We might say that the movements of the tree’s leaves are like
the movement of her hand and distinguish between what the leaves do and
what the hand does by saying that in order to understand the movement of
the woman’s hand as her act, we need to add her intention to write with
it. But our account of what the woman is doing was from the start that
she is writing on a blackboard. “We notice many changes and movements
in the world,” Anscombe says, but “we have no description” of what she
calls “a picked-out set of movements or a picked-out appearance of the tree
remotely resembling ‘She wrote ‘I am a fool’ on the blackboard.’ ” The point
of the “picked-out” here is that we already see the movements of the writ-
ing hand as writing; writing is the description of them. By the same token,
we ask “What does it say?” about “a word or sentence” not about “certain
appearances of chalk on the blackboard.”22 Certain appearances of chalk
are like the tree’s leaves in the wind; they’re not what we see when we see
her writing. The idea, then, is that acts are no more physical movements to
which someone has added intentions than words are marks to which some-
one has added meanings. In Fried’s Louis, marking is meaning.
In a footnote to his claim that the “first fact of works of art are that they
are meant, meant to be understood,” Cavell imagines someone objecting:
“No. The first fact about works of art is that they are sensuous.” To which
he ends up somewhat reluctantly responding: “The first question of aesthet-
ics is: How does that ‘sensuous object’ mean anything?”23 The reluctance,
presumably, is because even that version of the assertion produces too much
of a difference (or the wrong kind of difference) between the sensuous and
the meaningful—too much of a sense that art involves adding the mean-
ingful to the sensuous when in fact there could be no meaning that was
not already sensuous. The objection to Beardsley (and to the various forms
of anti-intentionalism for which “The Intentional Fallacy” can serve as a
stand-in) is that he imagines that the work is nothing but a sensuous object,
hence the merely causal relevance of the way it was made.
Perhaps the most visible alternative to Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism at
the time was the kind of intentionalism represented by the work of the phi-
losopher and art critic Arthur Danto. Armed with his own what’s-left-over
understanding of the central problem of the theory of action—an action “is
a movement of the body plus x”—and with a parallel formulation for works
of art—“a material object plus y”24—Danto produced out of works like
Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) exemplary instances of the intention as
an extra property of both the action and the work. For Danto, the aesthetic
equivalent of what do I have to add to my arm going up in order for me to
have raised my arm is what do I have to add to the Brillo boxes in order
to have produced Brillo Boxes.25 But really that question had already been
raised in Greenberg’s account of the “stretched or tacked-up canvas” that
could in itself count “as a picture.” What do I have to add to that canvas to
make it into a work of art? How does that sensuous object mean anything?
Some thirty years after writing it, Fried himself noted that his account of
the unfurleds might “be taken as showing what in fact was required in order
that a large expanse of canvas compel conviction as painting, that is, be
endowed with specifically pictorial, not simply literal, significance” (IMAC
40). In one sense, the answer is simple: paint. It can contain vast stretches
of blank canvas but it can’t be blank—it has to be marked. But here we see
(again) both why it’s crucial that the Morris Louis essay is organized around
the question of the act and why it is so leery of allowing any actual act into
it. The blank canvas isn’t just a limit case (as far as you can go and still have
something that will count as a picture); its attraction to Louis is its utter
repudiation of drawing: you can’t come into it the wrong way. The problem
is that, not having come into it in the wrong way, you look like you haven’t
come into it at all. Or as if the only way you can come into it is with your
mind instead of your hand—as if something that happens in your head is the
way of making the sensuous object mean something.
But you can’t come into anything with your mind. Which is why Fried
turns Louis’s blank canvas into a blank page. The blankness is crucial since
it enables you to avoid not only the illusion of tangible objects but touch
itself (the reduction of painting to the action of your “hand, wrist and arm”
(ML 126)). And the rivulets of paint on the sides—made with rather than
on the canvas and themselves looking “natural” (“elemental” rather than
“intentional”)—repeat (even literalize) the refusal to understand painting as
the movement of your arm. At the same time, however, because the rivulets
of paint turn the blank canvas into an “enormous page” and thus (like Ans-
combe’s blackboard) into a site of inscription, they turn it into a sensuous
object that is simultaneously a site of meaning. It’s for this reason that these
two different modes of the refusal of drawing are described by Fried as,
together, producing not an actual drawing or even a mark, but “the firstness
of marking as such—prior to any act of marking (e.g. drawing)” (ML 119).
The transformation of canvas into page proleptically describes the act of
marking it as neither the material movement of the hand nor the immaterial
contribution of the mind.
And the terms of this description are made clear in Fried’s account of Lou-
is’s last work, the stripes, which, he says, are not drawn but can nonetheless
“be seen as drawn.” What this means is that they are not “the fruit of any
imaginable act of drawing” since what he calls “the sheer apparent velocity
of their paths across the canvas” makes that impossible; no one could draw
anything as quickly as they seem to have been made. But, “experienced”
nonetheless as “in some important sense intentional,” they are seen “as the
instantaneous, unmediated realization of the drawing impulse, the will to
draw” (ML 122). They embody, in other words, not drawing but the pos-
sibility of drawing—the concept of drawing, the desire to draw, and the
ability to draw—all the things that make it possible to pick out those move-
ments of the hand that constitute drawing (or writing).
It’s for this reason that I’ve wanted to qualify Fried’s description of Louis
as not yet having “to confront the risk that his paintings might be seen as
objects” (ML 128). What his essay argues, at least on my reading, is that
Louis sought to produce and hence confront the risk that his acts might not
be seen as acts, which is different from the question of what a painting is
but is intimately linked to it: we could never see paintings as paintings if we
didn’t already see acts as acts. This, in effect, is the critique of Beardsley’s
(or anyone else’s) anti-intentionalism; it asks us to see works of art as if they
weren’t works of art. But we can also see in what Fried calls the “radical
abstractness” of Louis’s imagination the motive for that anti-intentionalism.
Like certain modernist poets, Louis, he says, was committed to the “ideal
independence” of the work from “the personality of its maker” (ML 127).
Getting your personality into the work was getting into it in the wrong way,
just as getting your body into it was getting into it in the wrong way and as
even imagining that you could get your mind into it was getting into it in the
wrong way. It’s the refusal of these ways that led theorists like Wimsatt and
Beardsley to deny the relevance of the artist’s intentions to the work’s mean-
ing; it’s the same refusal that leads Fried’s Louis to run the risk of seeming
not to get into the work at all. The difference is that—demonstrating the
independence of the work from the personality of its maker by demonstrat-
ing the identity of the meaning of the work (of meaning itself) with the
actions of its maker—Fried’s Louis produces a right way.
We began by noting the identification of the refusal of drawing in Fried’s
Louis with the refusal of sculptural illusion (tangible objects) that Greenberg
identifies with modernism tout court. But we also noted that for Greenberg,
the refusal of illusion runs the risk of turning the painting into just such an
object, and it’s for that reason that he insists on the replacement of sculp-
tural with optical illusion. What opticality signals is the work’s ability to
mean—to represent three-dimensionality as well as to be three-dimensional.
And if opticality as such was never as central to Fried as to Greenberg,
the question of meaning certainly was. That’s why, for example, distanc-
ing himself from opticality, he will say in 1986 that it was not any “notion
of opticality” that made Anthony Caro’s work important to him, “it was
the syntactic nature of his art,”26 which he had, in “Art and Objecthood,”
identified with “meaningfulness as such” (AO 162). Hence it makes sense
that insofar as opticality matters in “Morris Louis,” it’s an opticality that,
as I’ve suggested, is identified with the emergence of the blank canvas as a
blank page (hence with writing) and less with the effect of the first mark on
that page than with the act of marking itself. The illusion that matters here
is the “illusive impersonality of Louis’s art” (ML 127), illusive not exactly
because it isn’t really impersonal but because the illusion of “natural” or
“elemental” “forces” is required to make visible the impersonality—the
abstractness—of action itself. In “Morris Louis,” the question of what a
painting is is approached through the question of what painting is.
Notes
1 A much shorter version of Fried’s essay was first published in Morris Louis, the
exhibition catalog (Los Angeles, Boston, St. Louis, 1966–7) and then in Artfo-
rum (February 1967). The larger text that I discuss here appeared first as a book,
Morris Louis (New York: Harry Abrams, 1970).
2 The whole passage reads: “Let us not forget this: when I ‘raise my arm,’ my arm
goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my
arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” Whether Wittgenstein meant
the question to be answered or whether he himself meant to suggest that, as
posed, it was misleading and should be refused is itself a real question but not
one that I address. For my purposes, the relevant fact is that some philosophers
(my interest is in Arthur Danto, partly because of his importance to the theory
of action and especially because of his importance as a theorist of the work of
art) understood the theory of action as an attempt to answer it, while some other
philosophers (I focus on G. E. M. Anscombe, partly because of her centrality to
a different version of the theory of action and also because of her importance
to Stanley Cavell) understood the theory of action as an attempt to refuse it.
I should say also that while it’s very convenient for me that Cavell was influenced
by Anscombe and that Fried was so close to Cavell, I don’t mean to rest my dis-
cussion on these connections. I would argue rather that the entailments of what
as a kind of shorthand we can call Fried’s modernism led him in this direction.
3 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The New Art, ed. Gregory
Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 73.
4 Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 69.
5 Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in The Collected Essays
and Criticism Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John
O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 131.
8 Michael Fried, “Discussion,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal
Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 73.
10 Indeed, Greenberg’s effort to replace flatness as a literal property of the can-
vas with flatness as two-dimensionality is made explicit when he alters the
1960 text—“Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with
no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to noth-
ing else”—by adding “two-dimensionality” and equating it with “flatness”:
“Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with
no other art, and so . . .”
13 Although my own emphasis here is on literal flatness as already three-dimensional
and hence on the necessity to produce the illusion of three dimensions out of an
object that really is three-dimensional, I regard this account as basically com-
patible with Michael Schreyach’s wonderful discussion of Greenberg’s use of
Hans Hofmann to produce the distinction between “ ‘meaningless’ flatness” and
“ ‘re-created’ flatness.” See “Re-Created Flatness: Hans Hoffmann’s Concept of
the Picture Plane as a Medium of Expression,” The Journal of Aesthetic Educa-
tion (49: 1, 2015), 44–67.
14 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax and
New York: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New
York University Press, 1975), 184.
15 A relevant alternative formulation would be by way of John Cage’s answer to a
woman asking where the best seat would be for a performance of 4’33”: they’re
all “equally good” (Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York:
Limelight Editions, 1988), 105). Because no set of sounds more belongs to 4’33”
than any other set of sounds, whatever she hears in back will be just as good as
what she would hear in front. But with an unfurled, the irrelevance of where you
stand works just the opposite way. Because the illusion of its closeness belongs to
it, what it shows is not that one experience of the work is just as good as another
but that the meaning of the work (the illusion of its closeness) is independent of
anyone’s experience of it.
16 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the
Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
17 Monroe C. Beardsley, “Comments,” in Art, Mind and Religion, ed. W. H. Capi-
tan and D. D. Merrill (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 104.
18 Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 198.
19 Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say?
20 Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 228.
21 On intention as cause in Wimsatt and Beardsley, and how the problem is their
mistaken view of intention and not their view of interpretation, see Jennifer
Ashton, “Two Problems with a Neuroaesthetic Theory of Interpretation,”
nonsite.org (http://nonsite.org/article/two-problems-with-a-neuroaesthetic-the
ory-of-interpretation, 2011).
22 G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1957), 83.
24 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1981), 5.
25 For a more extended critique of Danto’s conception of the work of art, see
Walter Benn Michaels, “Anscombe and Winogrand, Danto and Mapplethorpe:
A Reply to Dominic McIver Lopes,” nonsite.org (http://nonsite.org/article/ans
combe-and-winogrand-danto-and-mapplethorpe, 2016).
26 Fried, “Discussion,” 71.
3 Why Does Photography Matter
as Art Now, as Never Before?
On Fried and Intention
Robert B. Pippin
1
The temporal reference in Michael Fried’s 2008 book, Why Photography
Matters as Art as Never Before, will have an immediate double implication
for readers of his work on the history of painting and on contemporary
art. First, “as Never Before” has an obvious direct reference to today, the
present age. Photography may have mattered as art before, but it matters
in some way now as never before. Such a title suggests an attempt that goes
beyond a series of readings of some contemporary art photographers. Some-
thing about the work of these artists matters in a shared way art photog-
raphy has never mattered; has never had to matter, one might say. Clearly,
the present age referred to in such a context must especially involve the
current fate of art,1 as it exists in the production and reception of artworks,
catalog copy for gallery exhibitions, what contemporary art museums buy
and show, and the dominant theories of art in the art and philosophy world
(insofar as there is any interest in art in that latter world). This is the world
of literalism, minimalism, postmodernism, installation art, conceptual art,
performance art, and environmental art, not to mention the world of the
vast speculative art market. Second, for Fried, one expects that the pres-
ent state of the artworld (within which some art photography matters so
much) extends and is a moment in the narrative history of modern art he has
been developing for nearly fifty years. This involves a crisis, actually a series
of different but related crises, first attended to by Diderot in his reaction
against the Rococo in the eighteenth century, abstractly summarizable as the
“crisis of theatricality,” and corresponding attempts to “defeat theatrical-
ity” by successive generations of painters in many different ways. In his first
major work, 1980’s Absorption and Theatricality, Fried saw that something
was at stake in Diderot’s criticism that went far beyond localized issues at a
moment in French art critical debates. The fate of pictorial art in modernity
was at stake, and this at a level that involved ambitious philosophical issues,
especially “ontological” ones. That is, a possible, distinct mode of being
of the artwork as such, not as decoration, source of religious inspiration,
commodity, or entertainment was at stake, and this in a way that was as
On Fried and Intention 49
historically inflected for Fried as is his approach to contemporary art pho-
tography. The question of art’s survival as art in modernity was at stake, and
that meant as a significant vehicle of human self-understanding in unique
and intrinsically valuable experiences available in no other mode.
Contemporary art photography “matters,” in other words, because of
some understanding of the way visual art “matters,” or should matter.2
And, given the point just made about its self-understanding, it could cease
to matter. One can, given the modern sensibility, imagine a successful secu-
lar demythologization of art that would be as reductive and deflating as
the modern reimagining of religion in the light of psychology and sociol-
ogy. One cannot only imagine it, one can observe that such things as a
resistance to any distinction between high and low art, the studied, labored
indeterminacy in much contemporary art, claims about the “death of the
author,”3 a concentration on art as a political category, critical theory as
the deconstructive demonstration of the failure of meaning in texts, and the
treatment of art as a mere occasion for various individual responses, as in
neuroaesthetics and affect theory, have largely accomplished this reduction
in the minds of many. For Fried, this question of ontological survival turned
on the embodiment in the artwork of its own understanding of its relation
to its beholder, and so is itself inseparable from an ever-present, implicit the-
matization of conceptions of sociality and world-involvement by subjects,
itself dependent on historical conceptions of and experiences of “world.”
This set of issues is “the problem of theatricality” and occasions the general
response—the creation of the fictional (or, paradoxically, “staged”) “nega-
tion of the beholder.” Such level of abstraction does not, though, do any
justice to the historical variations in such a project, nor to the magnitude of
the stakes involved.
That magnitude resonates in “as Never Before,” already an implicit sug-
gestion, given Fried’s oeuvre as a whole, that some art photography success-
fully resists a contemporary submission to, or even an enthusiastic embrace
of, the very theatricality that Fried sees as an existential threat to art itself,
and that by such resistance is able to raise again the larger issues behind the
struggle against theatricality. How some photographers achieve this is the
main subject of Why Photography Matters.4
2
Fried notes first that certain technical innovations in photography—the pos-
sibility of large tableau format images, made to be hung on a wall, available
to be contemplated at length and closely, as well as digital manipulation
and combination of photographs5—allowed photography to invoke all the
conventions of gallery painting and many elements of artificial composition,
and so to participate in the dialectical narrative that for Fried descends from
the first crisis of theatricality in the history of painting. And he began notic-
ing in photographers like Jeff Wall, Jean-Marc Bustamente, and Thomas
50 Robert B. Pippin
Ruff (around 1980) a concern with the beholder, a thematization of the
relation of the photograph to a beholder, which unmistakably invoked the
Diderotian problematic.
To bring out and justify this invocation, Fried puts to work various theo-
retical notions he had developed elsewhere, and he applies new conceptual
tools for the range of photographers he studies. “Absorptive strategies,”
“to-be-seenness,” the representability (or not) of “mindedness,” “present-
ness” and “instantaneousness,” oubli de soi, and “exclusion” or “nega-
tion” of the beholder all make useful appearances. The notions of world and
worldhood, and of the everyday for Jeff Wall; “good” and “bad” object-
hood in Welling, Wall, and the Bechers; some thoughts from Wittgenstein
for the contrast between the lived world with the pictorial world portrayed
in Struth’s museum photographs and closed off from us (“world-likeness
versus world-apartness” (WPM 125));6 just what conventions of the tableau
form are invoked by the new photography in his accounts of Ruff, Gursky,
and Delahaye, especially the “abstracting and hypostatizing of facingness in
Ruff’s portraits” (WPM 140), an element that fits perfectly within Fried’s
interpretation of the vast significance of Manet for modernism; distance,
and photographing figures from behind in Andreas Gursky as “severing”
(and so showing a world from which the viewer is “banished” or excluded
(WPM 162), a major anti-theatrical strategy in the Diderotian project);
the way Delahaye’s photographs seem to deliberately withhold from the
viewer any indication of where to look; how Struth manages to create some
sense of self-forgetfulness on the part of the sitters for his portraits and the
uncanny role of the unintentional exhibited in their physical resemblances;
the “basic structure of photographic address” at work in Rineke Dijkstra
photographs, “rather than the tragic (or tragicomic) fact about human exis-
tence” (WPM 211). And there is much more; too much to be summarized.
But there is one notion in particular that I want to concentrate on, a
notion that has a complicated and contentious history in both aesthetics and
philosophy of mind and action: intention. It arises in Chapter Nine, in the
first section of that chapter, which discusses Thomas Demand’s “allegories
of intention” (WPM 272) in his photographs.7
3
But first I need to develop some conceptual machinery of my own, although
I believe everything that follows is either implicit in Fried’s approach or
explicitly formulated in different terminology.
The summary just given already suggests something important about the
ontological status of the artwork. Art is such as to exist as, and only as,
its own self-understanding, a self-understanding shared by artist and his-
torical world. Its self-understanding is self-constitutive. There is no art for
the artworld to understand except what is understood to be art. This does
not mean that art is “whatever a community takes it to be.” A form of
self-understanding could develop in which what had been art, and what
had mattered as art, ceases to be continuous with its history, and so ceases
to matter as it once had. That is, the fact that practices like art, religion,
and even sport are what they are only as understood to be what they are by
the participants means that the practices have a history;8 in fact are essen-
tially historical. Baseball is constituted by the rules the participants take and
have taken themselves to be following. There are variations (lowering the
pitching mound, allowing a designated hitter for the pitcher) that are not
so discontinuous as to mean that, given such a history, people are playing
another game, but it is easy to imagine changes that, once widely or offi-
cially accepted, do mean one is playing another game. (As would be the case
with the elimination of strikeouts or doubling the number of fielders.)
This is one way in which one of Fried’s most important art historical
claims can be understood; that is, his claim about the role of Manet in
the modernist revolution. Art’s central telos (what became in modernity its
central telos)9—to defeat theatricality by either absorptive depictions, high
drama, history scenes, or in Courbet’s radical suggested merging of beholder
and work—came to be exhausted, no longer worked. Manet’s new anti-
theatrical strategy was to acknowledge the inevitable theatricality of paint-
ing by confronting the beholder, rather than creating the illusion that he or
she does not exist, and to do so by a dramatic facingness in the subjects that
figures the all-over and immediate facingness of the canvas turned toward
the viewer. This acknowledgement of theatricality ingeniously avoids simply
being theatrical.10 However, for Fried, Manet also had to relate this strategy
to the great paintings of the past, to refer to those paintings as a way of
showing that a continuation of the ambition to make paintings worthy of
Raphael, Titian, and Velázquez was still possible in this greatly altered situ-
ation. This framework also suggests the possibility that a rejection of the
telos itself, even a rejection of the idea that paintings could be said to bear
meaning, and so to demand some distinctive attentiveness on the part of the
beholder (“interpretation”), could be possible within an artworld that still
called such objects artworks. But it could be shown that and why this was
not the case, that whatever new game was being played, it could not count
as art, was radically discontinuous with the great art of the past (and so with
“art” itself). I take it that this was part of Fried’s point in his 1967 essay
“Art and Objecthood.”11
A second ontological dimension of a work of pictorial art, a formulation
of why the thing is an artwork and not something else, is more well known.
We want to say: any such work has a distinct form, and it is this form, in the
standard Aristotelian sense, that “accounts” for its unity, a unity in this case
organic (“living”), not additive or mechanical. (The whole is made of parts
or elements, but the whole is also that for the sake of which the parts or ele-
ments exist. Parts and whole are mutually interdependent.)12 But as should
be obvious even from the previous hasty summary, Fried wants to attribute
a form to a work in a philosophically ambitious sense, one that can seem to
52 Robert B. Pippin
involve ascribing a dimension of reflexive subjectivity to the work. In Fried’s
terms, a work can be said to embody an intention to deny, in something
like its address to a beholder, that it is such an address. (So these two points
coincide. The self-understanding noted previously as constitutive, now
understood to involve an understanding of a relation to the beholder, counts
as the object’s form; and in this way as formal and final cause.) Its mode of
theatrical self-presentation is to defeat that very theatricality.13 This is quite
a complicated intentional state to ascribe to a painting, one that obviously
descends from the intention of the artist, but not as such an intention might
be available through biographical research, but in, and only in, the work.
(As we shall see, such an intention is not simply the expression in the work
of some mental state formulated ex ante by the artist.)
This is properly described as not only the work’s intention or form, but, as
just noted, its end or goal. That is, a work can be said to embody a concep-
tion of itself and a conception of the point of its creation and display or pub-
lication; its distinct status as something to-be-achieved. In works that unfold
over time (novels, plays, movies) one can say that a work is realizing such
a formal self-understanding over that time. And it is important that such a
form, its self-understanding, is only its progressive realization, the being-at-
work (to employ an Aristotelian term, energeia) of such a form. In the same
way that an organic being’s health and flourishing can be said to be the end
for which its systems and organs exist and function, that end is achieved
by and consists in nothing but the being-at-work of those parts, so an art-
work can be said to have such an organic form, and that form is its self-
understanding realized over time, or “having been realized” in the stopped
time of a painting. We can then say that to understand a work is to under-
stand this form, this self-realization of its concept of itself in the medium
of the work. We don’t understand such a form as something distinct, as if
a mental representation that exists first in the mind of the artist and then
realized in a sensible medium.14 We understand it only as the emerging self-
understanding of itself at work in the object. So, we “understand” Manet’s
work, or understand it much better, if we understand his work as having
such an end, a new way to deal with the problem of theatricality, and we
understand that by understanding how it can be said to go about doing that.
That is, its, the work’s, self-conception is realized in different ways in differ-
ent paintings and does not refer to what Manet thought. This is the dialecti-
cal dynamic in the ontology, the mode of being of the artwork, that Fried
discovered in the photographers he discusses in Why Photography Matters.15
But this notion of understanding implies something about the attentive
beholder, and that too involves a reflective dimension. Attending to an art-
work as an artwork is not something that can be said to happen to us, or
happen automatically or passively. If we are to have an experience of art, we
must take ourselves to be attending to something that is an artwork. This
self-understanding is not thematized or explicit, as if a second-order intend-
ing. We do not see the artwork, and then observe ourselves so attending. For
one thing, that would require an infinite regress. Nor does such an attending
involve rule-following or some method, and certainly not some worked out
theory and so concept of art. But our attention to the work is active and
interrogative as well as contemplative, and that could not happen without
our being aware of ourselves as so doing that.
Put another way, not all painted canvases count as paintings. Some might
be, could be said to be intended to be, decorations for an interior design.
And here the reflexive character of an artwork and the reflexive dimen-
sion of aesthetic experience intersect. In an active attending, we understand
the work to manifest elements that cannot be understood if the work is
ascribed an end limited to decoration or amusement or display of technical
skill alone. Something calls for such an interpretive attending. In Fried’s
corpus, such things as Caravaggio’s repeated theme of severed heads, Char-
din’s absorbed subjects, Manet’s violations of the rules of perspective and
absence of sculptural modeling, all provoke an interrogation that must
itself be self-consciously interrogative.16 And in some cases the form, the
end we see at work in the painting or photograph, even aspires to a level
of generality, general significance, that suggests an ambition that reaches
questions of the nature of art itself, the real, perception; reaches the level
of philosophy.
4
All this brings us to a claim made about the work of Thomas Demand in
Chapter Nine of Why Photography Matters, a claim that does bear on phi-
losophy. Briefly, Demand takes photographs of paper models that he and his
assistants have constructed of scenes, many famous or infamous, some as
ordinary as a kitchen sink. So, while the models evoke a sculptural intention
(Demand’s early training was as a sculptor), the photographs invoke a pic-
torial art, primarily by fixing the beholder’s point of view. A paradigmatic
example would be his 2001 work Poll (Figure 3.1).
This is a treatment of a scene in West Palm Beach where a manual recount
was underway, until stopped by the Supreme Court, to examine and deter-
mine the “intended” choice of 450,000 Florida voters in the 2000 election
contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. One notes the absence of
writing, or of numbers on the phones, or of writing on the post-its, the
absence of any referential, identifying detail, and, in the large photograph
itself, we can see detectable marks of the paper construction. These are the
elements that require the kind of active interrogation I outlined previously.
Fried provides and supplements a useful summary of Demand’s project
by Dean Sobel:
1. Thomas Demand makes large-scale color photographs. 2. His photo-

graphs are of life-size paper models he makes himself. 3. These models
are recreations of actual places. 4. He bases these models on images he
obtains from a variety of sources.
(WPM 261)
54 Robert B. Pippin
Figure 3.1 Thomas Demand, Poll, 2001

(VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/ARS, New York)
Fried goes on to complete the summary with a claim from Rosana Mar-
coci: that because Demand’s photographs are laminated behind Plexiglas
and displayed without a frame they are triply removed from the scenes
or objects they depict. This point calls the Plato of the Tenth Book of the
Republic to mind, who criticized artworks in general for their remove from
reality. If we count the object itself as the original, then Marcoci is count-
ing the image of the object (the one used by Demand to create his models)
as one remove, the model as the second, and the photograph as the third.
If we are true Platonists, however, there are really four removes, since the
original for Plato is itself a copy or image of the Idea. As we shall see, this
removal or distance bars any claim that the photograph’s “intentionality” in
the other philosophical sense, its “aboutness,” is due simply to the imprint
of reflected light from the object on photosensitive material. The aboutness
is achieved and Plato’s values are reversed. The distance allows a perspective
on the real, not a distorted image of it.
Fried then remarks on several aspects of these unusual photographs. As
already noted, Demand leaves invisible traces of the imperfection of the mod-
els, flaws that he could have fixed. He takes off any referentially identifying
sign, writing, or image. The object-models are blank, creating a dehistori-
cized endless moment, as if timeless, and an atmosphere of stillness, a kind
of dead, lifeless air. The banality and ordinariness of the objects and scene
are stressed. This creates, quoting Durand, the subject matter as a “dull,
obstinate, mysterious presence . . . a suffocating dullness,” one that cannot
“elicit any projected desire or presence on our part” (quoted WPM 266).
It is this unmistakable feature of the works, especially this last point, that
creates the perfect occasion for Fried to remind us that this indifference to,
exclusion of, the beholder (the absence of elicited desire or elicited involve-
ment) is part of an anti-theatrical strategy. There is not only an absence of
anything that would call to mind any human involvement (except, as we
shall see, exactly that unnerving absence). Rather, any such involvement
seems excluded, negated and not just absent. (The models seem constructed
with that effect in mind.) This helps account for the fact that the objects are
contextless, perhaps what it might look like if Heidegger were wrong, and
objects were not normally encountered “within a world,” a “work world,”
but were mere mute present-at-hand (vorhanden) things. Photographs of
them are the last thing that could be considered to have been presented “for
the beholder.” (Again, we must always say, even though they are.)
And there is something else of even greater importance for Fried, an ele-
ment that, I want to say, is connected in a somewhat circuitous way with the
largest theme raised by his whole project—the fate of art in modernity. That
is, in place of “the original scene of evidentiary traces and marks of human
use” Demand wants to show “a counter-image of sheer artistic intention.”
(The work manifesting its being so intended is the ontologically decisive
moment of its self-understanding discussed previously.)17 The bizarre blank-
ness of the objects “throws into conceptual relief the determining force—
also the inscrutability, one might say the opacity—of the intentions behind
them.” Or, “Demand effectively replaces real-world context with a merely
depicted one, every detail and aspect of which is exactly what he intended it
to be” (WPM 271). And, Fried erects a very important barrier to a possible
misunderstanding of these claims: “Demand’s aim is not to make a wholly
intended object—in this case, a wholly digitalized photograph—but rather
to make pictures that represent or indeed allegorize intendedness as such”
(WPM 272). Taking these points together, one can say that the felt inscru-
tability or opacity of identifiable authorial intention is just what allows the
author’s, Demand’s, general intention—to represent or allegorize intended-
ness as such, not a particular intention—to emerge. To make his point a
more general one, Fried then extends his account and shows that there is a
similar kind of dialectical structure, in which some sense of absence allows
an intentional (aesthetic) presence, in several of Thomas Struth’s early
street photographs (Figure 3.2), those “reticent, inexplicit, but meaning-
impregnated cityscapes” (WPM 281). That is, a sense of meaningfulness in
the art, in the photo having been made of this street that way, is opened by
the still, mute, eerie absences in the objects depicted.
So we can say, in the terms introduced earlier, that Fried has tried to exfo-
liate (to my mind, convincingly) in each photograph by Demand (and by
noting common concerns across many) its concept of itself to-be-realized, its
form, the end to be achieved, and he has found a typical modernist concern.
56 Robert B. Pippin
Figure 3.2 Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York, Soho, 1978

(image courtesy Atelier Thomas Struth, Berlin)
Its form is form as such, the principle of unity itself, intendedness. In a

way that echoes Kant’s famous “purposiveness without a purpose,” we have
intendedness without a distinct intention other than the fact of intendedness
as such. This has a general significance that we will discuss in the last section
of this chapter.
This allegorization of intendedness as such in the photograph is then con-
nected to the much discussed accusation that photography is “weak in inten-
tionality,” because the actual production of the detailed image takes place
mechanically, automatically. (That is, the image is created by a machine,
in a way not subject to a maker’s intention.) Given the vast array of new
technical possibilities in photographic technology for the assembling and
composition of photographs, this whole discussion is somewhat out of date,
but Fried, making use of a 2007 article by Walter Benn Michaels,18 notes the
general significance of the topic of intentions for art photography. Michaels
had pointed out that photographs raise a certain problem because it is not
clear if, and if so how, they can be said to be pictures of, representations
of, objects. The parallel example used to make this point is that of a fossil,
say of a trilobite, which we cannot say either is a trilobite nor a “picture”
of one. (That is, somewhat like a photograph, it is the impression made by
a trilobite, a trace or mark of the trilobite form.)19 But this problem is also
a photographic strength in modernity. That is, in a context where the art/
non-art distinction has become fraught, or even abandoned (e.g., in Arthur
Danto’s work),20 this art’s status as art object cannot directly or straight-
forwardly borrow from the conventions of painting or from their medium.
That does not mean that photographs cannot be art objects, but rather
means that that status has to be achieved, intended (even an evocation of
the conventions of gallery painting must be achieved and sustained), and in
a way distinctive for photography. And Fried is showing how in Demand’s
photographs, that achievement, that intended-to-be-realized, is itself what
is intended and achieved.
Now of course, every artifact bears the marks of the intention of the
maker. But that intention is manifest by virtue of those marks, the thing’s
being worked over, designed, for a function. Demand has stripped the
objects of most of those marks, or so many that he leaves them more like
spectral analogues of the original artifacts, or leaves only their being made
to be photographed. It is in being “stripped” in this way that the artifacts
address the issue of intentionality rather than merely express another deter-
minate intention. It is in that form of address, I want to say, that several
philosophical issues are at stake.
5
I understand the previous discussion to raise a number of questions. The
supervening and most important one is: if Demand’s photographs repre-
sent or allegorize “intendedness as such,” just what thereby has been repre-
sented? It would not be sufficient to say that the photographs of the paper
models represent Demand’s intention to make paper models of real places
and photograph these models. That would be equivalent to saying some-
thing like: Manet’s intention in painting the Olympia was to depict Victo-
rine Meurent in just this way, posing as a courtesan. (This is as informative
as Merle Haggard’s answer when asked why he wrote the song “Okee from
Muskogee”: “Because I was the only one who knew the words.”) As we
noted in discussing formal unity previously, we take the display (or publish-
ing) of an artwork to be purposive. This is part of the dual meaning of inten-
tion, covering what we take the work to mean (what we take “the artist” to
intend it to mean), where what it is “to mean what it does mean” is also the
end or purpose of its production, and so, in that second sense of intentional-
ity, what we want to say the painting or photograph is “about.” So we can
say that representing intendedness as such represents the idea of the bearing
of meaning by a sensible object even as it exhibits that idea by bearing that
meaning, and that the modality of it so bearing meaning is aesthetic, and
in a photographic register. This latter dimension inevitably arises from the
context of photography itself and the question of its possible intentionality,
as discussed previously.
That the register is photographic is crucial to the self-referential reflexive-
ness we have seen in art’s self-constitution, in a particular way in this case.
58 Robert B. Pippin
That is, photographing the life-size paper models accomplishes something
that an exhibition of the models themselves could not do. The photograph
presents itself to us as if the mode in which the work’s content achieves
a form of self-consciousness embodies how the photograph’s own “self-
understanding” is at work. What would look like oddly inadequate paper
copies, when photographed, when seen to be for the photograph as the end
result, or staged for the photograph, become about themselves in a much
more heightened way. Their reproduction or replication in the photograph is
what enables the distinctive reflexivity of an artwork, its realization of some
concept of itself (in this case that realization being of there being such a
concept of itself, or the concept of “intendedness as such”), to be possible.21
There are a number of ways to say what this latter specification (“photo-
graphically aesthetic”) amounts to. Fried has argued that the very absence
of referential markers, and the attending air of strangeness and vacancy, the
exclusion of the beholder or the odd self-sufficient presence and autonomy
of the made objects, intimates such an aesthetic inflection. This is because
of the association of these aspects of the work with the defeat of theatrical-
ity central to establishing the work, any pictorial work in modernity, as an
artwork; all of which is accomplished nondiscursively. Alternately put, the
work itself bears this intention or meaning. It demands something from the
beholder, and so cannot rightly be understood as simply an occasion to-be-
experienced. And this blankness prohibits the invocation of a cognitive con-
ceptual classification, in a way we can identify as having a Kantian point.22
That is, it can invite much more a “free play” of faculties, an imaginative
attending—that distinct modality of aesthetic understanding—than a deter-
minate conceptual classification of its point or purpose. In other words,
what is allegorized or represented is pictorial art itself in its distinctive,
medium-specific mode of being and being intelligible.
But the fact that aesthetic meaning is embodied in this way has a number
of presuppositions and implications. I mean that the work not only embod-
ies an aesthetic intention, but also that the work’s intention is sensibly pres-
ent, public, and requires interrogation. We have already seen the last element
at work. We are stopped short by the oddness and general “indifference”
of the photographed objects. In interrogating this, we take ourselves to be
inquiring about the artist’s intention, but this has little to do with hunting
down evidence of what mental state the artist was entertaining at the onset
of creation, ex ante. We normally have no access to that intention, and,
interestingly, in many contexts, neither does he or she, except in what has
been realized. The work is the only guide we have to its own intended real-
ization, and Fried’s work in many different contexts is as exemplary an indi-
cation of how such an interrogative attending should go on as any we have.
This is worth stressing. Our ordinary sense of intention is of something
mental, an idea in the mind of the artist. And when we say that this inten-
tion is embodied in the work, we often mean that there are signs in the
work to prompt us to think the same idea. But in this account, at least as
I understand it, such a strict distinction between mentality and materiality
is not maintained. The artist’s intention can actually be said to take shape in
the process of composing the material work, and the work demands inter-
pretation, for both the artist and the beholder, an interpretation focused on
its material details, for the work to be able to be said to bear meaning at
all. Just as in the case of intention and bodily movement, we should speak
instead of the intention being realized over time in the bodily movement,
and the determinate content of that intention in that realization to be sub-
ject to interpretive interrogation just as much for the agent as for the public
community affected by what was done. Read in Fried’s terms, Demand can
be said to have created a “snapshot” of this process of realization.
The intuitive or ordinary understanding cited previously would have to
mean that the work is first perceived as having the sensible properties it
does, and then, in a second step, an inference would have to occur to what
is represented and then a further inference to meaning or intention. But we
do not see colored rectangles and other shapes which we then infer to be
minimal representations of telephones and notebooks, and then infer that
this means intendedness as such. We see blank telephones and see them in
their strangeness, immediately detect what isn’t present as well, that they
are “there” simply as “intended.” This is all as it is when we understand the
look of another. We don’t see shifting eyes and then infer our friend is lying.
We see the lie in his face, at least we see all this in this way in the Heideg-
gerian and Merleau-Pontyean and Wittgensteinian anti-Cartesian accounts
that have influenced so much of Fried’s narrative and ontology of painting.23
To admit the obvious: this aspect of the relation between intention and
embodiment is difficult to make credible in a brief summary. The connec-
tion just stated will seem to many, intuitively, too tight. We know that, due
to some intervening contingencies, the work can turn out differently from
what was intended, and not that the work is what the intention turned out
to be.24 But the idea is not to deny that there are ex ante intentions, but that
any ex ante representation by the artist of the work to be achieved is highly
provisional, and should be understood to be realized in and expressed in the
work over time, as to-be-achieved, often in ways that could not have been
foreseen but that become extensions and variations of the original intention.
Even accidents are either left in the work or not, displayed or not, mark-
ing the work everywhere with intentionality, even without any ex ante full
formulation. I ascribe this tight imbrication of intention-in-work to Fried
because he reads the intention in the work by placing the work in the con-
text of a narrative account of the fate of art in modernity (the work in
that context manifests that intention)—i.e., the theatricality problematic—
independent of what evidence there is or is not about the artist’s aware-
ness of such a problematic. It is the evidence that he finds in the work that
realizes and so embodies the intention, and this within the historical world
struggling with theatricality at some point in time. The artworks bear the
intentions they do in and only in such a historical world, located within such
60 Robert B. Pippin
a tradition. This is so, even though the language of intention would seem to
restrict us to the artist’s self-understanding. That is misleading. An intention
can be attributed to “the artist of the work” even if forever unacknowl-
edged or even rejected by that actual artist. That is, the public character of
artworks means that the work has entered a domain of interpretability such
that there can be no putative “ownership” of the intention in the work by
the individual artist. Fried will make use occasionally of what Demand has
said in interviews (and Demand is an especially astute commentator on his
own work) but only to support points made by interrogation of the work.
6
This all only introduces the role of the concept of intention in Michael Fried’s
book on photography. But I have tried to suggest that the stakes in those first
pages of Chapter Nine are much greater than they might appear to be. The
conditions necessary for considering artworks as fit subjects for interpreta-
tion turns on the questions of intention, the expression of intention, the his-
torical context of such expression, and the distinctive aesthetic modality of
such embodied expression. That artworks can mean, that the meaning can
be interrogated, and that the mode of meaning is distinctive, “aesthetic,” are
all in play. One modest conclusion, or at least suggestion, from this discus-
sion is that attacks on the notion of intention and interpretation are often
fraught with all sorts of assumptions about the status of such intentions.
These range from assuming a kind of Cartesianism or mentalism about a
subject’s intention (originally private and subsequently transferred into the
work) or about a dualism in the work as if its material embodiment is a kind
of vehicle for some nonmaterial, thing-like, semantic entity. None of those
assumptions has anything to do with Fried’s enterprise, nor with the issue
of intention itself, as I hope this brief excursus might have made plausible.
Notes
1 I shall be discussing here pictorial or more broadly visual art. There are parallels
with the other arts but I will not be treating them here.
2 I discuss Fried’s project in a different register, one that focuses on the “authentic-
ity” or credibility of a work, and which suggests a connection with that (Hege-
lian) problem as a social problem in itself, in “Authenticity in Painting: Remarks
on Michael Fried’s Art History,” Critical Inquiry (31, 2005), 575–98.
3 The paradigmatic case, one explicit about the consequences of this “death”
for the issue of meaning, was Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “The Death of the
Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 1978), 142–8 (see 142 and 147–8).
4 Fried is very clear on two issues that should be highlighted. He does not mean
that these photographers matter so much because they make better photographs,
of greater artistic quality, than ever before. He lists many great photographers of
the past who are of the highest quality but who do not participate in what Fried is
interested in. Second, he does not mean to imply that the group he discusses are the
only contemporary photographers worth attending to. He lists several others who
are world class artists but whose projects do not involve the theatricality problem-
atic. The idea that Fried’s only interest lies in rating all artists on a scale of theatrical
to anti-theatrical is irresponsible and inaccurate. See, among many other examples,
his books Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Menzel’s Realism.
5 For an example of the significance of this possibility in thematic terms, see the
discussion of Gursky in Why Photography Matters (from 165). This is not to
say that before digital techniques, photography was “weak in intentionality.”
Daniel Morgan, in his book Late Godard (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2013), makes this point in an especially interesting way, or shows us how
Godard makes it, especially in Histoire(s) du cinéma. See Chapter Four, and
especially 163–5.
6 This contrast between what is closed off and what allows some exchange is high-
lighted by Fried’s last remarks in the Struth chapter (Five) about the audience
photographed looking at the statue of Michelangelo’s David in Florence. There
persists a myth that Fried’s work is “formalist,” indifferent to “content.” See his
closing remarks on the substance of this relation of “worlds” (WPM 142). I also
discuss the further possibilities suggested by such remarks, a possible comple-
mentarity between “politics” and “ontology,” in Chapter Three, “Politics and
Ontology: Clark and Fried,” in After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of
Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 63–95.
7 There are two other important discussions by Fried of this theme: his later
(2014) discussion of Demand’s work, Pacific Sun, the last chapter in his collec-
tion Another Light, and the second chapter of his 2011 Four Honest Outlaws,
a discussion of the work of sculptor Charles Ray. I cite relevant passages from
those discussions in the following notes.
8 It is a separate question why there should have been art at all, such that it came
to have this history. For Hegel, for example, answering that question requires
another contextualization of art practices, within Geist’s or spirit’s attempt
at comprehensive self-knowledge. In that context, a different sort of question
about discontinuity could be raised.
9 That theatricality becomes a problem for art in modernity is another independ-
ent, crucial issue. See the discussion in my “Authenticity in Painting.”
10 A good formulation of this point by Fried: “That high modernist paintings like
Louis Morris’s ‘Unfurleds’ may be said to face the beholder with extraordinary
directness makes their structural indifference to his or her presence before them
only the more perspicuous” (WPM 270). A good treatment in another medium:
Diderot’s depiction of Lui in Rameau’s Nephew (see Rameau’s Nephew and
Other Works, trans. J. Barzun and R. Bowen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001)). It
is part of Lui’s charm, not at all lost on Moi, that he calls attention to his own
theatricality and falseness, making it hard to “accuse” him of theatricality. The
far subtler point is that this acknowledgement is itself a pretense, false, theatrical
in another way. For example, he does not want to succeed in conning people that
he is a good musician. He wants to be regarded as a genuinely good musician.
This is the Hegelian moment in the exchange, something not at all lost on the
Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
11 Fried writes: “And of course it is true that the desire to distinguish between
what is to me the authentic art of our time, and other work which, whatever the
dedication, passion, and intelligence of its creators, seems to me to share certain
characteristics associated here with the concepts of literalism and theater, has
largely motivated what I have written.” He even notes a whole “sensibility or
mode of being” that he calls “corrupted or perverted by theater” (AO 168).
12 In “Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun” Fried notes that, by means of the stop
action photography used to record the event, Demand was in effect replacing
62 Robert B. Pippin
the “causality” of the original event (huge waves that caused the ship to rock to
and fro) with his intention (AL 259). It is such a transformation that requires the
logic of teleological, not efficient causality.
13 As I have tried to show in “Authenticity in Painting” and After the Beautiful,
this dialectical relation between an artwork’s theatrical self-presentation, under-
stood as an attempt to defeat theatricality, and a beholder has a deep analogue
to Hegel’s famous dialectical view of basic human sociality as a “struggle for
recognition.” The dialectic emerges because, despite the famous phrase, recogni-
tion cannot itself be the product of a struggle. Trying to be recognized as such,
especially struggling to compel recognition from the other, is futile. Recognition
cannot be coerced or “given.” One is recognized for what is worthy of recogni-
tion, and one achieves recognition most meaningfully when one is indifferent to
being recognized and achieves that for which recognition is appropriate.
14 For a fine example of what it would mean to insist on the (non-psychological)
centrality of intention in the meaning of the work (as opposed to confusing such
a meaning with the work’s effect), but “finding” such an intention only in the
work, see Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2013). See especially his Introduction, “Modernism Against
Representation,” 1–22, and Chapter One, “Painting as Affect Machine,” 23–64.
15 I mean the dynamic of theatricality and anti-theatricality, as described in the
summary remark at WPM 338. See also the remark about bringing “the entire
question of antitheatricality in contemporary art photography into the open as
regards both the works themselves, and, wherever relevant, the discourse around
them” (WPM 344).
16 To say that a work has an aesthetic form is to say that that form, the object of
understanding, is accessible only by attention to the whole work (“after” finish-
ing the poem or seeing the film), retrospectively, and must be actively sought.
Walter Benn Michaels writes: “The book, even when it’s read the first time, is
there to be reread; that’s what we mean when we say that it has a form. That’s
the mark of its insistence that we know and don’t know at the same time, a claim
that is finally not about our psychological state but about the object of our inter-
est” (“The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Christopher Nolan’s Idea of Form,”
Electronic Book Review (http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/
detective, 2007).
17 See also the discussion of such a point with respect to sculpture in “Embedment:
Charles Ray” (AL 102–3).
18 “Photographs and Fossils,” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York
and London: Routledge, 2006), 431–50 (discussed by Fried in WPM 335–8).
19 “Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflec-
tions onto a sensitive surface,” notes Rosalind Kraus in her “Notes on the Index”
(quoted WPM 268).
20 I mean such books as The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), The Philosophical Disenfranchisement
of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and After the End of Art:
Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1977).
21 Fried formulates a related, similar point in “Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun.”
Noting another “small turn in the dialectic” (AL 255), he contrasts the strict
indexicality of the photograph with the sheer artistic intendedness of the models.
(The other important dimension of Fried’s interpretation of this work is the rela-
tion between what he has called “presentness” with the “duration” of the events
modeled in the video. This, another opposition that is dialectically transcended,
would require a separate discussion.)
22 Its ungraspability, the way the work actually defeats attempts to comprehend it
conceptually, suggests the Kantian sublime, but that is another discussion as well.
23 That the medium is sensible has implications other than those concerning the
object’s sensible bearing of meaning. It also means that its mode of intelligibility
for us is itself a sensible mode. That is, some works, Menzel’s, for example, invite
an empathic imagining of our bodily relation to the world, not just an ocular or
spectatorial one. This can be affective, orientational, involve our sense of motil-
ity. See the discussion in Chapters Three, Four, and Five of Menzel’s Realism.
24 I have tried to present a much fuller account in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy:
Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), especially in Chapter Six, Section VII, where I deal with the problem of
our counter intuitions (see 170–6).
4 Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried
David E. Wellbery
Das Höchste wäre: zu begreifen, daß alles

Faktische schon Theorie ist.
—Goethe
My argument in what follows takes its point of departure from the observa-
tion that the notion of art and, centrally, of art forms (e.g., painting, pho-
tography, sculpture) operative in Michael Fried’s critical and art historical
work is an open concept. Such concepts highlight the capacity of norma-
tively organized practices to achieve meaningful projections into unforeseen
contexts, in contrast to the “closed” character of taxonomical concepts,
the meaning of which is established with reference to a fixed set of abstract
properties.1 Phrased in Hegelian patois, the thought brings art into view
as the historical exfoliation of its self-understanding or as the realization
(the becoming “actual”) of its concept. Art, on this view, is the ongoing
elaboration of a concrete answer to the question: what is art? Or better:
what can or must art be at a particular historical juncture? In the abstract,
of course, such thoughts come cheap, but for both the critic and the histo-
rian (inseparable offices) the real work is accomplished when the singular
event of innovation is seen and known as the disclosure of an unantici-
pated possibility of the practice as formerly conducted and understood. Call
this synthetic intuition. It is the crystallization point of genuine insight or
knowledge in matters aesthetic, as exhibited, for instance, in this remark by
Fried on a sculpture by Anthony Caro: “Deep Body Blue explores possibili-
ties for sculpture in various concepts and experiences that one would think
belonged today only to architecture: for example, those of being led up to
something, of entering it, perhaps by going through something else, of being
inside, of looking out from within” (TSAC 180). The specific sculptural
accomplishment is grasped as the revelation of an unheard-of possibility of
sculptural meaning. Note, however, that the idea of the disclosure of new
possibilities of meaning includes an aspect of answerability. Innovation, qua
projection or conceptual actualization, does not amount to mere deviation,
but requires responsiveness to the achievement embodied in the tradition(s)
Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried 65
the artistic innovator seeks to inherit and make his or her own. This norma-
tive demand holds even and especially for cases of the radical or revolution-
ary transformation of antecedent artistic practice. Hence the conclusion of
the just cited essay on Caro: “In the radicalness of their ambition both [the
two sculptures discussed: Deep Body Blue and Prairie] have more in com-
mon with certain poetry and music, and certain recent painting, than with
the work of any previous sculptor. And yet this very radicalness enables
them to achieve a body and a world of meaning and expression that belong
essentially to sculpture” (TSAC 184).
The interlacing of normativity and innovative projection implicit in
Fried’s open concept of artistic practice sponsors an approach both to the
criticism of contemporary work and to the study of the history of art that
can be usefully compared with dramatic emplotment. Inquiry focuses on the
challenges and impasses that must be overcome if works capable of eliciting
conviction are to be achieved. Such challenges are configured within situa-
tions of conflict among competing value investments that, in their dialecti-
cal tension, constitute the historical state of play or motivational situation
within which a given artistic project seeks to realize itself. A vivid example
is provided by the prodigious early essay “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s
Irregular Polygons” (1966). Fried’s overall strategy there is to show how the
works by Frank Stella under consideration respond to a conflict that had
emerged in the development of modernist painting in the US, a “conflict
between opticality and the literal character of the support” (SF 87). Those
few words, although they capture the essence of the matter, hardly do justice
to the richness and complexity of Fried’s construction of the “dialectical”
(his term; see SF 78) process that led to the threshold moment of Stella’s
polygon paintings, a construction exemplified through nuanced accounts
of preceding work by Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. Nonetheless, the
larger point bearing on the strategy of analysis is clear. The force field of
competing investments out of which the artistic (in the case at hand: paint-
erly) project achieves itself must be reconstructed if the specific thrust of
that project is to be understood. “It is only in the presence of this conflict
[between opticality and the literal character of the support] that the ques-
tion of whether or not a given painting holds or stamps itself out as shape
[Stella’s project] makes full sense” (SF 87).
The strategy of reconstruction of motivational complexes evinced in
the early essay on Stella remains a constant across Fried’s work, as can be
shown with respect to the groundbreaking essay on “Géricault’s Romanti-
cism” from Another Light (2014). A pair of intricately woven sentences
summarily stating the essay’s argument perspicuously displays the configu-
ration of conflict-riven situation and emergent artistic response:
But what set Géricault apart from Gros or any other artist of the Napo-
leonic generation (also from his teacher Guérin) is the overriding ambi-
tion, manifest in every stroke of his brush, to reclaim for painting certain
66 David E. Wellbery
powers that it was on the verge of losing (more strongly, that it had
in effect already lost)—above all the power of representing dramatic
and expressive action of a Diderotian stamp, action that not only was
not primarily intended to be beheld but would on the contrary be so
directed toward, so caught up in the accomplishment of its impassioned
purpose as to refute the very possibility that the beholder had been
taken into account. And what in my view largely determined the course
of Géricault’s baffled and in the end tragically frustrated and incomplete
career was an inherent tension or contradiction between that radically
antitheatrical ambition and what had become the extreme difficulty, the
near-impossibility, of realizing such an ambition in large-scale, multifig-
ure, narratively coherent tableaux that would in effect undo or reverse
the retreat from action and expression that [in the foregoing essay of
Another Light on the late David] I have traced in the Sabines and Leoni-
das and beyond them in the “Anacreontic” works.
(AL 64)
Branching out from a single historical situation, two radically different,

perhaps even antithetical pathways: a mysteriously detached, mannered,
vaguely operatic mode of presentation in the late work of Jacques-Louis
David, and the untimely (but for that very reason) heroic effort to reactual-
ize the Diderotian paradigm of self-focused dramatic intensity in Théodore
Géricault’s oeuvre. The passage is a forceful demonstration of the fact that
Fried’s inquiry has nothing to do with the rehearsal of timeless conceptual
antinomies (a common misreading) and everything to do with understand-
ing the complex intentionality realized in an artistic corpus. The event of
innovative artistic projection becomes intelligible with respect to the logic
of problem (the competing demands on artistic execution) and solution (the
achieved—or failed—artistic project), and this just is the logic of a practice
confronted by ever new challenges to its meaningful continuation. Thus, the
dramatic surmise makes salient the fact that Fried’s critical and historical
writing tends to focus on moments where something of crucial importance
is at stake and at risk. That “something” is the viability (or not) of the art
form under scrutiny, the destiny of the art form (and of art) as it is decided
in the work of particular artists or, in some cases, artist groups.
This brings me to the topic of this essay. I want to claim that not only
specific artistic projects and the criticism devoted to them but also crucial
contributions to aesthetic theory participate in the historical dynamic that
Fried’s work has brought to light. On this hypothesis, aesthetics becomes
legible as a dimension—the dimension, say, of conceptual articulation—
within the evolving self-understanding constitutive of the art system. The
advantage of such a reading is that it gives edge and urgency to theoreti-
cal work, reconnecting it to the dialectical process out of which it emerges
and to which it responds. Moreover, from this perspective the standard of
achievement is not so much theoretical purity as it is resonance with the
historical moment, even if such resonance occasionally eventuates in con-
ceptual inconsistencies. Understood in relation to practice, contorted or
opaque reflections become the source of insight and troubled writing can
prove truer than seamless argumentation. In short, my claim is that the
history of aesthetic theory becomes intelligible only when it is aligned and
interwoven with the intricate, multi-strand narrative of aesthetic moder-
nity that Fried has developed across the series of books that began in 1980
with Absorption and Theatricality. The following case studies of theoretical
works by Friedrich Schiller and Arthur Schopenhauer are intended to illus-
trate how such alignment might occur.
1
Schiller’s so-called Kallias-Letters, written to his friend Gottfried Körner
during the first two months of 1793, document his effort to order his own
ideas about the nature of the beautiful, including beauty in the arts, in the
wake of his study of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).2 Key
intellectual decisions made in these letters lay the foundation for Schiller’s
influential treatises On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Let-
ters (1795) and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795–6). Historically
viewed, the Kallias-Letters mark a transition from Kant’s construction of
the beautiful in the third Critique to the systematic philosophy of art vari-
ously developed in the work of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.3 Kant,
of course, had demonstrated that, by virtue of its logical grammar, the aes-
thetic judgment claims a validity beyond merely idiosyncratic pleasure; it
appeals to and, as it were, courts universal assent. Such assent, however, is
not, as in the case of judgments of knowledge, postulated in the act of judg-
ment itself, for there is no concept here to be truthfully applied. The implicit
claim to universality rests, rather, on the felt harmony of the faculties in the
perceptual-imaginary construal of the object under consideration and in the
felt “communicability” of that harmony. The process of reflective attention
unfolds as a free play of the imagination that, although not determined by a
particular concept of the understanding, nonetheless is attuned to that fac-
ulty and thus to knowing cognition in general (Erkenntnis überhaupt). The
argument is alembicated and philosophical debates regarding its meaning
and validity continue unabated today. In the present context of discussion,
however, a three-sentence sketch suffices to identify the source of Schiller’s
dissatisfaction with Kant’s theory. That dissatisfaction is congruent with the
complaint formulated by Hegel in “Belief and Knowledge” (1802), where
he states that in Kant’s theory “the beautiful becomes something that is
related solely to the human cognitive capacity and to the harmonious play
of the various powers, thus to something merely finite and subjective.”4 It is
no accident that in the Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel praises Schiller for hav-
ing “broken through” the Kantian “subjectivity and abstraction of think-
ing.”5 By locating the ground of the beautiful entirely within the subjective
sphere of the faculties, Kant had, to be sure, elevated aesthetic judgment
beyond mere personal preference, but he had, at least on the assessment of
his successors, provided no credible link between the object itself and the
form of subjective experience upon which the universality of the judgment
was said to rest. That this object rather than another sets the imagination
into free play comes to seem entirely accidental and beauty, isolated within
the sphere of finite subjectivity, loses its place in the world.
Of course, Schiller recognized that overcoming the limitations of what
he himself classified as Kant’s “subjective-rational” theory could not be
achieved by recurring to one of the available theoretical models that had
emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. The “objective-rational”
theory propounded in Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750–8) claimed to find
descriptive criteria—so-called “perfections”—for the application of the
concept of beauty, while Burke’s “subjective-sensuous” theory, advanced
in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (1757), amounted, as Kant too had noted, to mere empiri-
cal psychology. What was called for was a fourth theoretical option: an
“objective-sensuous” conception of beauty that would not only stress the
perceptual-imaginary nexus of the beautiful, but also successfully bind that
experience to an objective ideal. In a stunning philosophical coup de théâtre
Schiller supplies this desideratum by shifting the playing field from theoreti-
cal reason (beauty as some kind of “known”) to practical reason (beauty as
the appearance of a practical idea). Beauty, he avers in the Kallias-Letters, is
freedom in phenomenal appearance (Freiheit in der Erscheinung).
Although Schiller holds it to be deducible from the concept of reason, this
thesis constitutes a bold and surprising stroke of the theoretical imagina-
tion, the thrust of which is inextricably to unite artistic achievement with the
highest aspirations of human life. Beauty becomes the objectification or per-
ceptually accessible correlative of human freedom conceived not merely as
unconstrained play, as in Kant, but as autonomy, the capacity to act accord-
ing to a self-given law, and thus as the very character of the rational will.
But how can this be? How can freedom come to presentation in a perceptual
object or array if “freedom as such can never be given to the senses and
nothing can be free other than what is supra-sensible”?6 With this question
we encounter for the first time an indication that Schiller’s entire conception
of beauty teeters, as it were, on the brink of impossibility or, to phrase it in
a manner that echoes Fried’s discussion of Diderot, that his conception is
the design of a “supreme fiction” (see AT 71–106).7 As we shall see, later
in the Kallias-Letters this aspect of Schiller’s argument—securing the defini-
tion of beauty through a kind of ontological fiction—returns yet more insis-
tently. At this point, the theoretical bridge between sensuously accessible
appearance and supra-sensible freedom is established via the notion of sta-
tus endowment. The beautiful appearance is such that the beholder regards
it as if it were a self-determining being, as if this idea—self-determination,
the very form of a free being—were the rule for understanding the object in
question. This is not baldly to claim that the object is a free being, which
would be absurd, but to apply the idea of freedom in a regulative fashion: as
the paradigm for synthesizing the array of sensuous and significant aspects
displayed. Clearly, however, not just any object will solicit such an attribu-
tion or, to phrase the matter differently, will earn our recognition as quasi-
free. There must be something “in” or “about” (prepositions fail here) the
object apprehended to which such status endowment responds. But what?
It will not be a descriptive property such as symmetry, nor a cluster of such
properties, as in the six perfections of the beautiful identified by Baumgar-
ten. Nor, obviously, will a specific causal efficacy, as in Burke’s model, do
the trick. What is required (and the tautological ring of this formulation
is intentional) is that the object in question be thoroughly and exclusively
itself: that is, that it exhibit its self-determination. “Freedom in phenomenal
appearance is thus nothing but the self-determination of a thing insofar as
it [such self-determination] reveals itself to intuition. It is opposed to every
exogenous determination just as moral action is opposed to every deter-
mination by material causes.”8 The thought here is as remarkable as it is
difficult to express. Beauty is a predicate applied to objects that appear as
achieving their being out of themselves. In this thought Schiller believes to
have found the bridge between the subjective ground of universality in the
aesthetic judgment and the object attended to. With evident satisfaction he
writes to Körner: “I think that some of your doubts should now begin to
vanish, at least you see that the subjective principle can indeed be led over
into the objective.”9
We shall ponder the tenuousness of this bridge presently. At this point
I want to consider three important implications for the understanding of
the aesthetic (or beautiful) object that Schiller draws from the notion of
self-determination. These implications bear not on this or that property;
the method of discriminating empirical objects according to the presence
or absence of distinguishing features has been dispensed with altogether.
Rather, they characterize the aesthetic object in terms of its mode of being.
Their drift is ontological, although the formulation of the ontological issue
in each case makes use of a different vocabulary. Schiller’s discussion is of
extraordinary interest (not to mention historical importance) throughout,
but considerations of space allow for only a cursory treatment.
The crucial inference for Schiller, not the least because of its entwine-
ment with Kant’s aesthetics, is certainly the thought that the beautiful object
appears as natural. What is meant by this is not the traditional (mimetic)
notion that art in some way represents the objects of nature. A more proxi-
mate conception is the Diderotian view as explicated by Fried: “In short,
for Diderot pictorial unity was a kind of microcosm of the causal system of
nature, of the universe itself; and conversely the unity of nature, apprehended
by man, was, like that of painting, at bottom dramatic and expressive” (AT
87). Like Diderot, Schiller is concerned to align the very complexion of the
aesthetic object—not simply its represented content—with nature, but the
path he cuts toward this conceptual end does not run via the idea of the
causal nexus constitutive of nature as totality. On the contrary, a significant
(if little noticed) aspect of Schiller’s thought in the Kallias-Letters is the
abandonment of the modern scientific idea of nature as the encompassing
network of mechanical causality for the sake of a conception that can be
thought of as Aristotelian: “[The word] nature expresses only that through
which [an object] is that determinate thing that it is.”10 Nature, we might
barbarously say, is the self-being of the object, its self-determination as that
being which it is. And this implies that nature is the equivalent of freedom
(as self-determination) in the domain of sensuous objects,11 or as Schiller
puts it in a suggestive surmise: “It is, as it were, the personhood of the thing,
that through which it is distinguished from all other things not of its kind.”12
The second implication of the concept of beauty that requires mention if
the entirety of Schiller’s vision is to be brought into view may be termed the
doctrine of hermeneutic immanence: “A form is therefore beautiful only if it
explains itself; explaining itself here means to explain itself without the help
of a concept.”13 Like the concept of nature, this specification bears on the
mode of being of the beautiful object, specifically on the type of intelligibil-
ity appropriate to that mode. Qua self-determining or, in Schiller’s sense,
natural being, the beautiful object gives itself the rule that, in its appearance,
it actualizes. It is, therefore, a self-explicating appearance, not, of course,
in the sense that it wears a label declaring its intended meaning, but in the
sense that it is intelligible, and intelligible solely, in and through the very
terms (similarities, oppositions, rhythms, processes, tensions, resolutions)
that it itself provides.
The final implication to which attention needs to be directed, an implica-
tion of immense importance for aesthetic theory generally, is what I should
like to call Schiller’s notion of endogenous form. Here all “formalist” asso-
ciations must be held at bay. Recall that Schiller’s coup de théâtre was to
align aesthetic theory with the Kantian notion of practical reason. That
notion likewise sponsors Schiller’s notion of form. In his second letter to
Körner Schiller writes:
Practical reason and determination of the will from mere reason are
one and the same. The form of practical reason is the immediate rela-
tion of the will to representations of reason, that is, to the exclusion
of every exogenous principle of determination; for a will which is not
determined purely by the form of practical reason is determined from
outside, by what is material and heteronomous. To adapt or imitate
the form of practical reason thus merely means not to be determined
from the outside but from within, to be determined autonomously or to
appear to be determined thus.14
Form on this conception just is self-determination of the being in ques-

tion and it is with this semantic fact in mind that a famous sentence from
On the Aesthetic Education of Man should be parsed: “Therein consists the
genuine secret of the true master’s art, that he neutralizes the force of mat-
ter through form.”15 This artistic act does not constitute an imposition of
form; that too would be an exogenous determination. Rather, it is a way of
letting the object come to itself as what it is. Thus, both morality and beauty
are achieved in accord with a single principle: “This principle is none other
than existence out of pure form.”16 In effect, there is only one form, namely
the form of practical reason or self-determination, and it is this form that is
variously realized in successfully rendered aesthetic objects. Aesthetic judg-
ment, as status endowment, acknowledges precisely such achievement.
The purpose of this all too compressed review was to provide a picture
of Schiller’s Kallias-Letters sufficiently detailed to support the drawing of
plausible connections with Fried’s narrative construction of the history of
painting since the mid-eighteenth century. There can be no question but that
Schiller’s theory constitutes an axial moment in the development of philo-
sophical aesthetics from Kant to his idealist successors. My question is: how
does this moment fit within the historical framework of Fried’s account?
The natural comparison to make is with the critical writing of Denis Diderot
as analyzed by Fried in Absorption and Theatricality. Schiller’s work, after
all, emerges out of the literary and aesthetic culture of the last third of the
eighteenth century. His dramatic writing commences in the bourgeois mode
brought to its Enlightenment pinnacle by Diderot and Lessing. An especially
revealing example of Schiller’s rootedness in mid-eighteenth-century aes-
thetic culture is his great treatise On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry which
powerfully reinterprets the concept of naiveté central to Diderot and other
Enlightenment theoreticians (e.g., Mendelssohn, Kant). The question I am
raising, however, does not principally bear on direct influence or on the his-
tory of individual ideas. I am concerned, rather, with the structural affinities
between Schiller’s theoretical project as a whole and the Diderotian prob-
lematic as reconstructed in Fried’s study. Summarizing the issues traced in
his analysis of Diderot’s criticism, Fried writes: “What is called for, in other
words, is at one and the same time the creation of a new sort of object—the
fully realized tableau—and the constitution of a new sort of beholder—a
new ‘subject’—whose innermost nature would consist precisely in the con-
viction of his absence from the scene of representation” (AT 104). This gives
us a scaffold for mounting a two-pronged comparison.
Philosophers examining the Kallias-Letters tend to view them within a
framework of timeless contemporaneity, assessing the faithfulness or lack
of same to Kant, reconstructing the steps of Schiller’s argument, judging
the adequacy of his claims, all as if the Letters had just been published
in the Journal of Philosophy.17 Fried’s interpretation of Diderot suggests
a different reading, a reading that would foreground the intellectual labor
of object- and subject-constitution. To start with the first prong (object-
constitution), Fried describes a development in the art criticism of the eigh-
teenth century that relocates serious painting in the portable, free-standing
tableau, an insular unity that achieves its meaning in independence of a
particular architectural environment (e.g., palace room, altar) and that is of
such size as to be taken in—this is important—in a synoptic glance. The tab-
leau becomes the site where (echoing my introductory remarks) the fate of
painting as art will be decided, not just for the eighteenth century, but across
the modern history of the art. The historical labor accomplished especially
in Diderot’s criticism, therefore, is the theoretical constitution of the tableau
as the “new sort of object” referred to in the sentence cited just previously.
My claim is that Schiller’s Kallias-Letters need to be seen as advancing this
ongoing theoretical labor of object-constitution. On its face this thesis seems
aberrant; Schiller, after all, has nothing to say about the tableau as such.
(His richest example is a vase, but even there a merely hypothetical vase-in-
general.) The particular objects treated, however, are less important than the
categories employed to define the object under construction and it is on this
level of analysis that we can specify the relationship between the Diderotian
project and Schiller’s aesthetic theory.
According to Fried, Diderot’s criticism as well as that of his fellow anti-
Rococo critics sets a standard of painterly achievement that can be charac-
terized as the requirement of “an absolutely perspicuous mode of pictorial
unity” (AT 101). (Hence the importance of synopsis.) The deep point here
is that not just unity of content (say, the dramatic unities of time, place, and
action) is at stake, but the unity of the tableau itself, and this unity must,
as it were, emerge out of the internal resources of the work. My conten-
tion is that precisely this insistence on an emphatic notion of unity finds
in Schiller’s theory a metaphysical deepening that brings forth the mod-
ern conception of the aesthetic object as self-standing or autonomous.
As noted previously, both Diderot and Schiller draw on the paradigm of
nature in order to secure the unity of the “object”—tableau or artwork in
general—in the course of its theoretical constitution. But whereas Diderot
appeals to the encompassing (hence unified) causal nexus of nature which
the tableau’s internal organization “microcosmically” replicates, Schiller’s
Aristotelian notion of nature constructs the beautiful object as natural in
the sense of being-in-and-through-itself. Its unity is its itself-ness. Likewise,
whereas Diderot insists that the tableau should achieve dramatic transpar-
ency through the causal motivation of action and expression, Schiller insists
that self-explication (hermeneutic immanence) is the mode of intelligibility
characteristic of beautiful objects tout court. Finally, if Diderot insists that
the “law of necessity of nature” extends to the “interaction of the various
figures in the painting” (AT 93), Schiller makes self-given necessity the hall-
mark of “an existence out of pure form.”18 I spoke before of a metaphysical
deepening of the Diderotian categories. We can now see that that deepening
has three dimensions: it is a universalization, expanding beyond the tableau
to encompass beautiful objects generally; it is a unification, forging system-
atic coherence out of Diderot’s farrago of categories; and it is, crucially, a
subjectification, in the sense that Schiller’s basal category—the concept from
which all others flow—is that of self-determination. (Note that all of Schil-
ler’s categories, including “nature,” exhibit the structure of self-relation.)
The banal truth, especially regarding the last-mentioned dimension, is that
Schiller carries aesthetic theory into its idealist phase. But that banality
metamorphoses into insight when we note that the idealist ontology of the
aesthetic object is a continuation and radicalization of the work of object-
constitution carried out by Schiller’s eighteenth-century predecessors, pre-
eminently Diderot.
This brings me to the second and more important prong of comparison:
“the constitution of a new sort of beholder—a new ‘subject’—whose inner-
most nature would consist precisely in the conviction of his absence from
the scene of representation.” Here we find ourselves on the terrain of Fried’s
most startling discovery regarding the project of Diderot’s criticism, a dis-
covery beautifully summarized in these two sentences:
As we have seen, the recognition that paintings are made to be beheld

and therefore presuppose the existence of a beholder led to the demand
for the actualization of his presence: a painting, it was insisted, had to
attract the beholder, to stop him in front of itself, and to hold him there
in a perfect trance of involvement. At the same time, taking Diderot’s
writings as the definitive formulation of a conception of painting that
up to a point was widely shared, it was only by negating the beholder’s
presence that this could be achieved: only by establishing the fiction
of his absence or nonexistence could his actual placement before and
enthrallment by the painting be secured.
(AT 103)
It is hard to see how Schiller’s theory could be understood as addressing

this issue. There is no immediately evident concern in Schiller with the exis-
tence or counterfactually assumed nonexistence (this the supreme fiction)
of the beholder. Moreover, the project of defeating theatricality, which on
Fried’s analysis is the major thematic motivation for the invention of this
critical standard, seems to be altogether absent from Schiller’s enterprise.
Thus, in order to make out the commonality between Schiller and Fried’s
Diderot, it is necessary to generalize a bit. The negation of the beholder’s
presence held to be the prerequisite of artistic achievement comes down
to the negation of the communicative framework within which art takes
place. In its barest form that framework consists of the process of making
artifacts to be exhibited to and to have an effect upon viewers (beholders).
Of course, this framework is most salient with regard to painting, but in
a generalized form it is the case for art in general. Artworks are made-to-
be-placed-before-receivers; they are intentional (not natural) objects. It is
exactly this framework that Schiller has in mind when he writes: “Free-
dom in phenomenal appearance is, to be sure, the ground of beauty, but
technique is the necessary condition of our representation [Vorstellung] of
freedom.”19 Beauty as self-determination in appearance can emerge as the
content of aesthetic attention and contemplation only within what I shall
call here the technical dispositif. But, as Schiller repeatedly stresses, tech-
nique, qua rule-governed purposeful activity, is a heteronomous determina-
tion of its product. It bends that product toward an aim, even if that aim
be only that of displaying the object to an audience in order to achieve a
certain effect. And for the very same reason it directs the attention of the
beholder toward something beyond the object: namely to the thought (the
intended purpose) that is its ground. “A perceived form that points to a rule
or can be treated according to a rule is called art-like or technical. It is only
the technical form of an object that induces the understanding to search for
the ground of the effect and the relationship between determining and deter-
mined.” If this is the case, then the conclusion is unavoidable that a negation
of the technical—that is, a suspension of that very activity of understand-
ing according to ulterior purposes—must be accomplished. The just-quoted
sentence continues: “insofar as this form awakens a need to ask about
the ground of determination, the negation of being-determined-from-the-
outside necessarily leads to the representation of being-determined-from-
the-inside or freedom.”20 This concept of negation gives us the structural
affinity between Diderot and Schiller we were looking for. The thought that
comes to the fore in Diderot as the negation of the beholder’s presence or
as the fiction of his nonexistence corresponds in Schiller to the thought that
only by virtue of the negation of the technical dispositif can that form of
attention emerge that comprehends the appearance as an analogue of self-
determination, hence as nature.
For the purposes of my argument it is not necessary to examine the vari-
ous forms of aesthetic negation discussed in the Kallias-Letters: negation of
heteronomous technique, negation of the literal materiality of the medium,
negation of the artist’s individual subjectivity. The more important issue is
to see the overriding historical process that the comparison between Fried’s
Diderot and Schiller brings to light. The theoretical labor of both, I said
before, is one of object- and subject-constitution. In Diderot, this involves
extricating the aesthetic relation from a social dispositif defined by demon-
strative visibility and deliberate, highly coded rhetorical address, all of which
had come to seem stilted, exaggerated, fake. Fried’s term for this complex is
“theatricality” and the thrust of his analysis is to show that from Diderot to
Manet painting is felt to be capable of achieving conviction only by defeat-
ing theatricality. For Schiller, the theoretical labor is devoted to a somewhat
different, albeit analogous task. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment
Kant had distinguished “art” (Kunst) from “beautiful art” (schöne Kunst),
whereby the latter is thought of as a technically produced artifact nonethe-
less regarded “as if it were nature.”21 Schiller takes this a step further in
claiming that beauty just is (without the “as if”) nature in technicity,22 but
a technicity that suspends its own intentionality and, in this sense, negates
itself. Within the experiential space opened up by this artistic bracketing of
technicity the attending subject engages with a perceptual affordance of its
own noumenal freedom. That’s theoretical subject-constitution in spades.
Schiller’s work of conceptualization, we may conclude, extricates art—here
one wants to say: in the modern sense—from the technical dispositif that,
since Plato, had determined its definition. The larger historical process to
which Diderot and Schiller contribute, decisively and in parallel ways, is the
reorganization of the semantic frame within which art and aesthetic experi-
ence make sense at all.
2
Only twenty-five years separate Schiller’s Kallias-Letters from Schopenhau-
er’s The World as Will and Representation (1818), but the latter work seems
nonetheless to inhabit a different world. Not that everything has changed.
The major task of philosophical aesthetics remains the two-pronged con-
struction of a specifically aesthetic form of object and a specifically aes-
thetic form of subjective experience, but with Schopenhauer each of these
components appears in a different guise. In evaluating this difference, it
is important to keep in mind that Schopenhauer’s influence began only in
the final decade of his life (1788–1860) and flourished during the latter
portion of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth cen-
turies. Although he was trained in classical German thought and revered
Kant, Schopenhauer’s voice had its greatest resonance in the post-classical
era of realism and scientism and then in the aestheticism of the fin de siècle.
His thought imprinted itself on the work of such major authors as Guy de
Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann,
and Franz Kafka. Both Wagner and Nietzsche are unthinkable apart from
Schopenhauer’s influence. All this is to say that in terms of Fried’s narrative
of modern art we have come a long way from Diderot and Schiller.
One measure of this distance is the fact that for Schopenhauer the nega-
tion or bracketing of the technical dispositif is no longer an issue. There
remains, of course, a distinction of experiential types and the necessity of
crossing from one to the other, but this passage is simply that between nor-
mal and exceptional and requires nothing more than an adjustment of cog-
nitive attitude. “Every single thing is beautiful,” Schopenhauer writes, even
the “most insignificant,” so long as it is regarded in “purely objective, will-
less contemplation.”23 It is as if a mental switch were available, enabling
subjects to transform their world by doing nothing more than contemplat-
ing a given object in isolation. Aesthetic isolation, however, bears immense
metaphysical and spiritual consequences. We might say that it is the isola-
tion not of things, beyond whose edges there is always something more, but
of worlds, whose edges have no other side. Expressed in Schopenhauer’s
vocabulary, this means that aesthetic attention detaches its object from the
nexus of relations that ramify along the paths set down by the fourfold prin-
ciple of reason. Although a representation, the aesthetic object is relevantly
determined neither by spatio-temporal relations to other objects, nor by
causal relations, nor by reasons, nor as a motive for action. Schopenhauer’s
epistemology teaches, however, that all empirical objects are by definition
individuated within such relational networks. To be an object just is to be
relative to others, differentially defined within a boundless web of cross-
references. Consequently, the object contemplated in aesthetic isolation is
not an empirical object at all. What is it then? Schopenhauer’s answer is that
it is an Idea or, as he sometimes specified, a Platonic Idea. This contention
hooks up, of course, with his metaphysics of nature, to which I shall return
later in the chapter.
Access to this crucial thought of Schopenhauer’s is provided by entries
Wittgenstein made in his diary on October 7 and 8, 1916.24 There Witt-
genstein claims that, just because aesthetic contemplation sequesters its
object, it apprehends that object against the background of the entire world.
This gives us the universality Schopenhauer’s notion of Idea implies: each
aesthetic object discloses, from a certain perspective, the character of the
world. Wittgenstein takes as an example (for any object will do) the stove
in the corner of his room, which, when regarded aesthetically, comes to
stand in for the world tout court. Perhaps (Wittgenstein’s notes don’t make
this explicit) the stove gives us a world that is burning within, that is slowly
but relentlessly rusting, that requires our labor and repays that labor with
warmth, and that strikes us as opaque, mute, and awkwardly squatting.
Aesthetically contemplated, these stove-features become world-features,
and something like this seems implied in Schopenhauer’s notion of Idea. For
the Idea is an intuited universal; it is intuitively grasped, but has exemplary
generality. Hence the Platonic reference: Ideas are archetypes of the Will’s
manifestation. And for Schopenhauer, of course, the Will is the inner nature
of the world. So there is indeed exceptional insight here, a state of mind and
an intentional content entirely heterogeneous to empirical knowing. One
is no longer enmeshed in the relativity of time, space, causality, and desire.
According to Wittgenstein—and here he is citing Schopenhauer—to view
the world aesthetically is to view it sub specie aeternitatis.
We have moved from an aesthetics of formal achievement and heightened
self-awareness to an aesthetics of disclosure. Art, in other words, becomes
the site where a metaphysical content inaccessible to quotidian human cog-
nition manifests itself. We can glean the basic outlines of Schopenhauer’s
aesthetics of revelation (his term is Offenbarung) from his treatment of
architecture, the lowest art because the Idea it discloses governs the sim-
plest and crudest levels of the Will’s objectivity. These are exhibited in such
qualities of the building material (stone) as weight, cohesion, rigidity, and
hardness, as well as in the opposed phenomenon of light. Such qualities
are omnipresent in experience, but, in the normal course of things, they
are desultorily perceived and recede into inconspicuousness. The artwork
brings these phenomenal features into a relationship of tense opposition
such that they come to the fore and manifest themselves as such within
the artistic array. As regards architecture in particular (Schopenhauer’s
paradigm is the Greco-Roman use of columns), a dynamic strife (Kampf)
between gravity and rigidity, secondarily between opacity and light, is dis-
closed. The aesthetic (as opposed to, say, the political or representational)
function of architecture is to produce arrangements in which the drama of
matter itself—this is its Idea—is perspicuously displayed.25 Such disclosure
takes place in each of the arts, although in each art a different level of the
Will’s objectification—a different Idea—is brought to revelation.
Readers of Martin Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” (1936) will
have noticed in the foregoing a number of striking echoes, for example, the
emphasis on disclosure, the insistence on art’s metaphysical or ontological
import, and the conception of artistic unity as strife. (These suggest that
Heidegger’s frequent dismissals of Schopenhauer were either blind or self-
serving.) Be that as it may, the important point in the present context is that
Schopenhauer’s conception of art as revelation allows us to see the specific
link between aesthetic experience and philosophy. Metaphysical inquiry, on
Schopenhauer’s view, is a hermeneutic enterprise the task of which is to deci-
pher or interpret a meaning. Art provides an intuitive apprehension of just
such meanings. For the Idea art discloses and enables me to apprehend is
not, Schopenhauer insists, the spatial array deployed before the viewer, but
rather the “pure meaning” (reine Bedeutung) informing that spatial con-
figuration, something that is itself without extension.26 Full appreciation of
this claim would require examination of the Neo-Platonic background of
Schopenhauer’s concept of Idea, a matter I cannot delve into here. But we
can take a stab at characterizing the pure meaning that art, in all its rep-
resentational forms from architecture to tragedy, makes salient, such that
even a work of architecture “speaks to me.”27 It is the conflict within the
Will (hence within all of Being), or better: the character of Will (and Being)
as self-conflict. If this meaning speaks to me, it is because I, too, am Will,
which is to say that in art the Will comes to know itself in its meaning. It is
also to say that all art, since its meaning is unavoidable and unappeasable
conflict, is, broadly speaking, tragic, and that tragedy, narrowly speaking,
is the representational art form where this tragic character is most fully
revealed. For this reason tragedy for Schopenhauer marks the transition
from aesthetics to ethics.
A brief consideration of the subjective side of aesthetic experience is in
order here. The metaphysical interpretation of nature developed in Book
II of The World as Will and Representation had shown that cognition is
a function of the higher forms of the Will’s objectification; that sensory
mechanisms, nerves, and brain, just like all other components of the organ-
ism, are in service to the Will; and that their artifact—representation—is
likewise a means for the fulfillment of the manifold needs characteristic of
animal life. Moreover, the entire relational network established according
to the principle of sufficient reason, which is to say, the world of spatially
and temporally differentiated, causally interconnected objects, is centered
on one such individuated entity, the animal or human body, with its desires
and needs. One’s very sense of oneself as an individual, then, is inseparable
from the project of self-maintenance. Viewed against this background, the
noteworthy feature of aesthetic experience is that all the urgencies that hold
an individual in their grip—the needs, desires, cares, anxieties, sufferings—
fall away within this experience. The aesthetically relevant subject is not the
individual at all, but, as it were, a disembodied, impersonal cognitive func-
tion, what Schopenhauer calls the “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject
of cognition.”28 It is hard to know how to make sense of this. A first level of
interpretation might argue that references to the pure subject of cognition
attempt to capture an essential phenomenological trait of aesthetic experi-
ence. The world of the artwork, after all, seems to concern me only insofar
as it reveals itself to me. I contemplate the aesthetic object not from a posi-
tion within a world I share with it, but, as Wittgenstein noted, as if from the
outside. My activity is replete with contemplation in the sense that I forget
all else, even and especially myself. With such phenomena in view, to speak
of the subject of aesthetic experience as the “limpid eye of the world” can
acquire descriptive traction.29
But of course Schopenhauer is not interested just in phenomenology. The
point of his entire discussion bears on what I referred to previously as the
exceptionality of aesthetic experience. He wants to make out in aesthetic
experience not merely a way of relating to a particular class of objects (say,
beautiful ones) within the world, but a categorically different sort of experi-
ence. Aesthetic experience is not continuous with the experiences human
subjects have under normal (one might say: natural) conditions. Rather, it
is the momentary suspension of that normality, which is to say: of experi-
ence as the apprehension of individuated objects from the standpoint of
incarnate subjectivity. The categorical difference at issue rests, then, on a
realignment of the metaphysical relationship between Will and cognition.
Aesthetic experience occurs when cognition (Erkenntnis) “suddenly tears
itself loose”30 from its subservience to the Will and contemplates its object
independently of the principle of sufficient reason. Both the suddenness and
the violence highlighted by Schopenhauer’s language are suggestive of the
radical heterogeneity of aesthetic experience. Getting there requires a meta-
physical leap. Commentators have pointed out that Schopenhauer’s descrip-
tion of aesthetic experience is one of the most nuanced in the philosophical
literature. For Schopenhauer, however, the philosophical task is not to get
the phenomenology right, but to solicit its metaphysical meaning. From
this hermeneutic perspective, aesthetic experience provides compelling evi-
dence that emancipation from our Will-tethered condition is a real possibil-
ity. Employing a formulation that stresses the proximity of aesthetics and
morality, but also brings out the religious sensibility that animates Schopen-
hauer’s thought, one might also say: aesthetic experience has the metaphysi-
cal significance of episodic salvation. Seldom has art been expected to bear,
and bear alone, such spiritual weight.
In order to bring the picture of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics sketched here
into alignment with Fried’s narrative a brief excursion into the jungle of
Schopenhauer’s metaphysical views is necessary. The basic thesis is well
known: the inner nature of the world is Will. The status of that claim,
however, is not obvious. An effort to unpack its significance must start by
inquiring who asks the metaphysical question. Importantly, it is not the
investigator qua subject-of-knowledge, for that subject is anyone and no
one, a “pure” subject. Rather, it is the investigator considered as a mortal
individual, an incarnate denizen of that very world whose internal nature
and meaning are metaphysically at issue. As we have seen, everything within
that world is given to the individual as an object of representation, but
among all those objects there is one that constitutes an epistemic exception,
and that is the individual’s body. Of course, it too is given as an object:
extended in space, enduring in time, causally affected by other objects. But
it is also given as my body (Leib), and to my own body I relate not as sub-
ject to object, but, as it were, in radical intimacy, in the mode of identity.
Schopenhauer describes this non-observational self-awareness as “imme-
diate familiarity” (unmittelbar bekannt). In such felt embodiment my will
manifests itself as will (not as representation). Every bodily action—waving
to someone, for example—is immediately familiar to me as an act of my
own will. The act of will and the waving of my hand do not become present
as distinct phenomena, one the cause, the other the effect. They are one and
the same. That the lived body is given in terms of these two aspects—as will
and as objective appearance—is for Schopenhauer the immediately intuited
and absolutely self-evident fact upon which his entire metaphysics rests. For
this reason, Schopenhauer refers to the identity-in-embodiment of the dual
aspects as the philosophical truth kat’ exochen. His entire metaphysics rests
on the evidence of this corporeal cogito: the revelation that the world is Will
and representation throughout.
Introducing my remarks on Schopenhauer, I casually employed the term
“realism” to designate the cultural milieu emergent in the second half of the
nineteenth century, the milieu in which Schopenhauer found his first genera-
tion of avid readers. Several motifs touched on in the course of the foregoing
have specified the sense in which the philosopher’s views fit a realist outlook:
an emphasis on force and energy, on materiality, on objectivity; the aesthetic
attention even to “insignificant” objects; a certain scientism and, more gen-
erally, a robust acceptance of worldly immanence; an unremitting pessimism
that blends into a tragic vision of human life. All this suggests that, if we
are to find in Fried’s work a source of illumination for our understanding
of Schopenhauer, we should turn to the trilogy on the realists Eakins, Cour-
bet, and Menzel.31 The guiding theme running through all three studies—the
theme that lends Fried’s notion of realism its highly original slant—is the
notion of embodiment, and this theme provides, of course, the link to Scho-
penhauer’s aesthetic theory. Each of the great realist painters inflects artistic
embodiment in a distinct way and my impression is that Courbet’s art, as
Fried teaches us to see it, provides the best framework for interpreting the
historical significance of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. Certainly Schopenhauer
shares with Courbet the audacity of spirit required to work through an idio-
syncratic inspiration in the full radicalness of its implications.
The part of Fried’s masterful account of Courbet’s art that is especially
relevant to an understanding of Schopenhauer bears on the artist’s produc-
tion of the 1840s, especially the self-portraits and related works. The core
argument can be reconstructed (needless to say, in a reduced, simplifying
version) in three steps. First, Courbet remains committed to the absorp-
tive aesthetic, which is to say: to an aesthetic program that defeats theat-
ricality and secures the “nonexistence” of the beholder within the scene
of representation by depicting figures completely absorbed in their activity,
hence oblivious to the presence of the beholder. Second, in Courbet’s work
the absorptive program is nevertheless radicalized through compression.
In other words, the positions of painted figure beheld and beholder—of
depicted actor and viewer—are now conjoined in the duality of the painter’s
being: on the one hand, the corporeal activity that brings forth the picture;
on the other hand, the act of beholding implied in the artist’s position as
first viewer of the resulting canvas. The ontological partition that threat-
ens the successful achievement of a genuinely engrossing tableau is felt to
run through the artist himself. Third, a solution to this problem is sought
in an aesthetics of corporeal merger, an extravagant program that brings
the painter into the painting (thereby suspending the role of beholder to
which his first-viewer status condemns him) not merely representationally
(as depicted figure: clearly that would be no solution), but in and through
the painterly realization of bodily gesture, especially such gestures as are
accomplished in the activity of painting. As it were, the artist strives to
materialize his own energetic activity—his embodiment as painter—in the
painted product. One might think of this as a transfusion of corporeal effort
and gesture into the painting such that embodiment bodies forth from the
canvas. This would indeed heal, if only in a kind of impossible ontological
transgression, the dehiscence between action and viewing that opened up
the artistic problematic in the first place.
My claim is that we see in Schopenhauer’s thought a kindred extrava-
gance, that is, the effort to think of aesthetic intuition (and for Schopen-
hauer aesthetic intuition is the hallmark of both the artist and the recipient)
as a kind of ontological merger: an achieved unity of the two aspects of the
world. The most remarkable account Schopenhauer offers of such intuition
unfolds across a cascade of elaborate rhetorical periods that occupies more
than three full pages of The World as Will and Representation. The follow-
ing excerpts from this breathtaking passage collect those formulations that
are most germane to the case I am making:
[W]hen someone, to employ a suggestive German expression, com-

pletely loses himself in an object, that is: forgets his individuality and
his will and then remains merely as a pure subject, a clear mirror of the
object; so that it is as if the object were there entirely alone without any-
one to perceive it and one can no longer separate the intuiting subject
from the intuited object, but rather both have become one insofar as
the entire consciousness is filled and engrossed with a single perceptual
image [anschauliches Bild]; . . . then what is cognized is . . . the Idea, . . .
the one who thusly intuits . . . is now a pure, will-less, painless, timeless
cognizing subject.
[The adequate objectification of the world in the Idea] embraces both
subject and object within itself . . . but in the Idea these two are in
equilibrium: and just as the object here is nothing but the representa-
tion on the part of the subject, so too has the subject, insofar as it is
completely taken up in the intuited object, become that object itself, in
that its entire consciousness is nothing other than the object’s distinct
image [Bild].
The Will outside of all representation and all forms is one and the
same both in the contemplated object and in the individual, who, trans-
ported by this contemplation, as pure subject becomes conscious of the
Will: both are thus not distinct in themselves; for in themselves they are
Will, which here [in contemplation] comes to know itself.32
The isomorphism of philosophical (Schopenhauer) and artistic imagina-

tion (Courbet, on Fried’s reading) jumps out from the page. We notice first
the crystalline purity in which the absorptive scenario (the object entirely
alone without anyone to perceive it) makes its appearance. I indicated
previously that the “machinery of negation” that Fried showed to be so
powerfully at work in Diderot (and that is echoed in Schiller’s negation of
technicity) is not a central concern for Schopenhauer. All that seems to be
needed, I said, was a kind of “mental switch” enabling the subject to contem-
plate an object, much in the manner the young, Schopenhauer-intoxicated
Wittgenstein contemplated his stove from an extra-empirical perspective.
Now, however, it becomes clear that the switch to the attitude of aesthetic
contemplation in fact constitutes an extreme form of negation. In a word,
the Diderotian “fiction” that there is no beholder becomes in Schopenhauer
something like the subject-beholder’s actual self-negation: his or her own
will-driven subjectivity is actually, if only episodically, defeated. This radi-
calization of the negative side of the absorptive scenario has its counterpart
in Schopenhauer’s version of Courbet’s product of radical merger. First of
all, the bifurcation of energetic activity and spectatorship that Courbet felt
so intensely has its metaphysical version in Schopenhauer’s juxtaposition
of Will (pure drive, pure doing) and representation. The “merger” is then
accomplished as the aesthetic overcoming of the ontological distinction such
that object and subject, Will and representation, interfuse. If we recall that
the Will is immediately familiar to me as my embodiment—as drive, gesture,
exertion, tension, and release—then Schopenhauer’s thought that Will and
representation are indistinguishable in aesthetic experience reads like the
program that Courbet brings to artistic realization in the self-portraits of
the 1840s. This cannot be accidental. The parallelism of the two endeav-
ors is rooted in the self-understanding of art as it unfolds, practically and
theoretically, across the nineteenth century.33 The source of Schopenhauer’s
pertinence to the realist project resides in the fact that he is the first philoso-
pher to think of the lived body as the evidential foundation of metaphysical
inquiry. Not that Courbet and Schopenhauer, both figures of prodigious
genius, are exchangeable examples of a general trend. Quite to the contrary,
their itineraries are as singular as they are audacious and compelling. The
point, rather, is that to understand in what ways Schopenhauer’s aesthetic
theory is a living thought and not simply a roster of propositions to be sup-
ported or refuted in the timeless bell jar of philosophical disputation, that
theory must be brought into contact with the dynamic of artistic achieve-
ment. But this goes for virtually every significant writer on aesthetics. We
do justice to their theoretical work only when we grasp its relevance to the
animating concerns of specific art forms in their historical moment. Just this
is to understand the concept in its actuality.
3
Through the thought that art unfolds historically as self-interpretation and
thus as the realization of its concept, Fried conceives of answerability as
responsible faithfulness to the inherited achievements of past art. In the the-
oretically most ambitious of his early essays, “Art and Objecthood,” Fried
captures this point in a sharply etched contrast:
For Judd, as for literalist sensibility generally, all that matters is whether
or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest. Whereas
within the modernist arts nothing short of conviction—specifically, the
conviction that a particular painting or sculpture or poem or piece of
music can or cannot support comparison with past work within that art
whose quality is not in doubt—matters at all.
(AO 165)
The argumentative intensity of “Art and Objecthood” springs from the

disjunction these two sentences mark, a disjunction that should be under-
stood as a crisis of answerability. Of course, answerability is a general struc-
tural feature of art conceived as a normatively organized practice. If they
are to succeed as art, innovative projections must meaningfully connect with
and respond to antecedent exemplars of excellence, and such connection
can always fail. The modernist situation, however, is characterized by the
fact that the conventional frameworks that in previous historical epochs
secured both a degree of continuity and a range of tolerable innovation—
the ritualized contexts, the generic rules, the standardized styles and subject
matters—no longer set guideposts for artistic production. Rather, in the
modernist context the art form itself is placed, perpetually and necessar-
ily, in question, exposed to a doubt corrosive even of the concept of art.
The conceptual locus of artistic practice, one might say in a Cavellian key,
is the border between authenticity and fraudulence. Such questionability,
often reflected in gestures of radical negation, is not an accidental flare-up,
but a feature intrinsic to the modernist condition of art. In the modernist
situation, art stands under the threat of a breakdown of answerability. To
read “Art and Objecthood” as decrying a particular (and by now rather
irrelevant) artistic movement is to construe its thrust too narrowly. The fact
is that Fried’s breathtaking essay is one of the two major works of aes-
thetic criticism that bring the constitutive character of the modernist crisis
of answerability to consciousness. Therein lies its philosophical importance.
Fried characterizes the core insight of “Art and Objecthood” in these
words: “[T]heater and theatricality are at war today, not simply with mod-
ernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such—
and to the extent that the different arts can be described as modernist, with
modernist sensibility as such” (AO 163). Note the generality of the claim:
theatricality not only invades the domains of painting and sculpture, its
hegemony would bring “art as such” to ruin. Theatricality, in Fried’s sense,
is the condition in which the concept of art is lost: no longer intelligible,
practically or theoretically. I said previously that “Art and Objecthood” is
one of the two major works of aesthetic criticism in which the modernist cri-
sis of answerability finds expression. The other is Nietzsche’s “The Case of
Wagner” (1888), in which we read the following: “Allegiance to Wagner is
costly . . . Its third and worst consequence: theatocracy—, the lunatic belief
in the superior rank of theater, in theater’s right to dominance over the other
arts, over art itself.”34 Across the chasm of eighty years, Nietzsche’s “Case
of Wagner” and Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” are joined in alliance against
what both writers experience not merely as an aberrant artistic movement,
but as an assault on art itself by an order of work and experience antitheti-
cal to art as a normative concept. The thought of both (philosophical) critics
is that the source of this subversion of art—the configuration that brings art
to ruin—is theatricality.
The remarkable congruence of argument between “The Case of Wag-
ner” and “Art and Objecthood” is not a matter of influence. At no point
in Fried’s early critical writing does a sustained engagement with Nietzsche
make itself felt. Moreover, in “Art and Objecthood” the passing references
to modernist debates on theater run not to the Nietzsche/Wagner complex
but to the programmatic positions of Brecht and Artaud. This is hardly
surprising, since on the face of it the distance between Richard Wagner’s
phantasmagoric grandiosity (Nietzsche’s target) and the blank literalism of
minimalist constructions (Fried’s) could hardly be greater. But it is precisely
because the phenomenological surfaces of their respective objects of criticism
are so vastly different that the deep-structural (conceptual) affinity between
Nietzsche’s and Fried’s critical insights bears such theoretical import. Read-
ing Nietzsche and Fried together we come to understand that Wagner and
Judd represent two—let us say: maximalist and minimalist—expressions of
the same crisis, the same breakdown or failure of answerability. The essence
of theatricality, Nietzsche writes, is captured in a dictum of the nineteenth-
century French actor Talma: “What is intended to have the effect of truth
must not be true.”35 As in “Art and Objecthood,” theatricality is conceived
here not merely as one artistic mode among others. At issue, rather, is artis-
tic intentionality itself. The artistic intention that realizes or fulfills itself in
the object is diverted into a pretension intrinsically devoid of substance and
truth. In Nietzsche’s deliberately drastic formulation, theatricality trans-
forms art into a “technique of mendacity” (Kunst zu lügen36). Under such
conditions, the possibility of conviction in Fried’s sense is foreclosed.
The thematization of theatricality in its antagonism to “art as such” is
certainly the core philosophical issue raised in Nietzsche’s and Fried’s essays,
but it is not by any means the only one. In fact, the parallelism between the
two essays is developed on several subsidiary fronts and is displayed (non-
accidentally) even in features of rhetorical structure. I cannot, of course,
treat these matters in detail here and must restrict myself to a single example
that indicates the philosophical interest a thorough comparison of the two
essays would have. Consider the following juxtaposition of passages. In the
first, Nietzsche is ventriloquizing a theoretician or propagandist devoted to
Wagner; in the second, Fried is developing his critique of literalism:
As far as creating an intuition of the beyond [Ahnen-machen] is con-

cerned, this is where our concept of style sets in. Above all not a single
thought! Nothing is more compromising than a thought! Rather the
condition before thought, the pressing crowd of thoughts not yet born,
the promise of future thoughts, the world as it was before God created
it,—a recrudescence of chaos . . . chaos creates intuitions . . .
In the language of the Master: Endlessness [Unendlichkeit], but with-
out melody.37
Endlessness, being able to go on and on, even having to go on and on, is

central both to the concept of interest and to that of objecthood. In fact,
it seems to be the experience that most deeply excites literalist sensibil-
ity, and that literalist artists seek to objectify in their work.
(AO 166)
The consonance of critical insight exhibited here demands philosophi-

cal interpretation and the appropriate vocabulary for such interpretation
is Hegelian. The insight shared by Nietzsche and Fried is that art as such is
betrayed and answerability fails when aesthetic effect is sought in the culti-
vation of the Bad Infinite (schlechte Unendlichkeit). The (essentially “theat-
rical”) instigation of a frustrated yearning, a vertiginous sense of transport
toward the never-to-be-achieved completion of an additive series, elicits a
form of consciousness that is essentially non-artistic. Thought, work-internal
differentiation, lucidity, and self-standing achievement are sacrificed for the
sake of the frisson of a mysteriously agitated, portentous emptiness. The
shared lesson of Nietzsche and Fried is that the submersion of artistic form
in the Bad Infinite of theatrical effect is one symptom—their essays diagnose
others as well—of the modernist situation of art.
Notes
1 For the relevant concept of projection see Stanley Cavell, “Projecting a Word,”
a section of his “Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language,” in The Claim
of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 180–90.
2 Friedrich Schiller, “Kallias, oder über die Schönheit. Briefe an Gottfried Körner,”
in F.S., Werke und Briefe, vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-Peter Janz et al.
(Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 276–329. English transla-
tion: “Kallias or Concerning Beauty. Letters to Gottfried Körner,” in Classical
and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 145–83. In the following, I quote from the English edi-
tion of the Kallias-Letters, with occasional modifications of the translation.
3 The significance of the Kallias-Letters as a bridge to idealism is brought out by
Dieter Henrich, “Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthet-
ics,” in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 237–60.
4 G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frank-
furt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), vol. 2, 324 (translations here and throughout by
D. E. W.).
5 Hegel, Werke, vol. 13, 89.
6 Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty,” 151.
7 The phrase is borrowed, of course, from Wallace Stevens.
11 He writes: “I prefer the term nature to that of freedom because it connotes both
the realm of the senses, to which beauty is restricted, and, in addition to the con-
cept of freedom, likewise alludes to the sphere of the sensuous world” (Schiller,
“Kallias or Concerning Beauty,” 162–3).
15 Friedrich Schiller, Werke und Briefe, vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften, ed. Rolf-
Peter Janz et al. (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 641 (Letter
22). My translation of Schiller’s formulation (daß er den Stoff durch die Form
vertilgt) is interpretive.
17 See Frederick Beiser, “An Objective Aesthetics,” in his Schiller as Philosopher:
A Re-Examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 47–76 and Stephen
Houlgate, “Schiller and the Dance of Beauty,” Inquiry (51: 1, 2008), 37–49.
18 Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning Beauty,” 153. Compare 166: “What would
nature be in this sense? The inner principle of the existence of a thing, which can
at the same time be seen as the ground of its form: the inner necessity of form.”
2
21 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Barbard (New York: Hafner,
1951), 145–9 (pars. 43–4).
22 “Schönheit ist Natur in der Kunstmäßigkeit” (Schiller, “Kallias or Concerning
Beauty,” 162).
23 Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Löhneysen,
5th edition, 4 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), vol. I, Die Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung, vol. I, 298, my translation. Throughout I cite from this edition
using the abbreviation WWR I, and indicating the paragraph number (in this
case: Par. 41). This method of citation makes for easy consultation of the English
translation: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans.
E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1996).
24 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werkausgabe, vol. I, Tractatus logico philosophicus,
Tagebücher 1914–1916, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1984), 178–9.
25 Schopenhauer, WWR I, par. 43.
29 Schopenhauer, WWR I, par. 36 (klares Weltauge).
31 Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane; Cour-
bet’s Realism; Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century
Berlin.
33 In Flaubert’s ‘Gueuloir,’ Fried draws on the work of the philosopher Félix
Ravaisson (1813–1900), concentrating especially on the theme (Ravaisson’s cen-
tral theme) of habit. This provides him an opportunity briefly to revisit some of
the themes of Courbet’s Realism (see FG 62–85). Ravaisson, who studied with
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, has views on the relationship between Will
and nature that deserve comparison with those of Schopenhauer, although I am
not aware of any direct influence. Taken together, Fried’s book on Gustave Flau-
bert and his studies of the realist painters, especially Courbet, broach the topic
of the metaphysical imagination of realism, a full treatment of which would
certainly have to consider Schopenhauer.
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, Digital Critical Edition of the Complete Works and Letters,
ed. Paolo d’Iorio, based on the critical text by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Ber-
lin/New York: de Gruyter 1967–). “The Case of Wagner” is available at: www.
nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/WA. The cited passage is from the “Postscript”
(Nachschrift).
35 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” section 8.
36 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” Postscript.
37 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” section 6.
5 Deep Relationality and
the Hinge-like Structure
of History
Michael Fried’s Photographs
Stephen Mulhall
Although I have written once before about Michael Fried’s Why Photogra-
phy Matters as Art as Never Before, in a short essay published as a “Critical
Commentary” in the British Journal of Aesthetics,1 I didn’t there articulate
(let alone attempt to answer) the question that his book raised for me more
insistently than any other: the question of what conception of the nature of
photography underlay its overlapping accounts of the various bodies and
series of photographic works of art that it discusses.
After all, those accounts continuously declared Fried’s conviction that
some contemporary art photography could be understood only in relation
to topics that determined the nature of pictorial modernism; and his influ-
ential account of the value of the works of high modernism in American
painting of the 1950s and 1960s located it in the way such works acknowl-
edged the essential features of their medium, and so its distinctness as one
artistic medium among others. And even if that idea of the essence of a
medium was, as it were, historicist—adverting not to the irreducible, ahis-
torical essence of all painting, but rather that which, at a given moment, is
capable of generating (in both artist and audience) the conviction that the
relevant work is a great painting, despite, for example, its refusal to provide
representational content or traces of brushwork on the painted surface—it
still involves the disclosure of some features as essential to its being a con-
temporary exemplar of that long artistic tradition, as opposed to any other.
It would seem to follow that any photographs produced by artists under-
stood to be grappling with the conditions of modernism would necessarily
constitute acknowledgements of the essential nature of photography, and
so must amount to disclosures of what essentially distinguishes photogra-
phy from, say, painting (or video or cinema). An immediate difficulty with
this conclusion is that Fried’s own account aims to disclose a deep conti-
nuity between modernist, and in particular high modernist, painting and
the relevant strands of contemporary art photography; hence it appears to
require that he apply a range of concepts (beholding, absorption, world-
hood, objecthood, theatricality) whose sense had been worked out as part
of working out how modernist painting acknowledged the conditions of
88 Stephen Mulhall
its own medium to works of art that appeared to belong to a very differ-
ent medium. A further difficulty is that the relevant photographic works
were largely produced under a very different technological regime than that
of analog photography (involving the registration of light on film): both
their scale and their content were a function of (sometimes quite radical)
advances in a variety of primarily digital photographic techniques (relating
to the capture, manipulation, and printing of the relevant images), and so
they inevitably raised the question of whether the concept of a photograph,
and so that of a distinctively photographic medium, still retained a univo-
cal sense. Might not those differences of technology and technique even be
sufficient to license the judgment that a photograph by Jeff Wall and one by
Cartier-Bresson were essentially different kinds of object—even that what
Wall calls a photograph is closer to a painting than it is to a photograph
produced by analog means?2
This might address the immediate difficulty I raised, although only at the
cost of jettisoning Fried’s conviction, patent throughout his book, that he is
disclosing the nature of a new photographic regime rather than a new phase
in long (related series of) regimes of painting. But it would only heighten
the bewilderment induced by Fried’s apparent lack of interest in explicitly
confronting this issue. That is to say, although his discussion of a given pho-
tographer’s body of work (or portion of a larger such body) always brings
out the way in which it acknowledges some determining condition or condi-
tions of its own possibility, he offers no general account of how each such
condition relates to those acknowledged in other such bodies of work (that
is, no account of what kind of work these contemporary works actually are,
if indeed they are a single kind, as opposed to being each a kind unto them-
selves), or of how they stand—aesthetically and ontologically speaking—in
relation to photographic works produced under analog conditions.
It’s worth emphasizing that this sense of something missing from Fried’s
account will persist even if one takes fully on board Wittgensteinian qualms
about the universal pertinence of the Merkmal model of definition in terms
of necessary and sufficient conditions. For one might still reasonably expect
the composer of this group portrait to say at least as much about the over-
lapping family resemblances making up the kind(s) of photographic art-
work his book aspires to disclose as he did (and assigned great importance
to being able to do) with respect to the evolving collective ontological self-
understanding embodied in the kinds of modernist and high modernist
paintings that formed the subject of so many of his previous writings.
In this essay, I will attempt not so much to fill in this apparent lacuna in
Fried’s account as to explain why it might be merely apparent. In so doing,
I will take my bearings from both my critical commentary and the longer
essay on Fried’s larger body of work that preceded it, although in ways that
will also reveal certain limitations and unidentified possibilities latent in
both.3 I will also try to take into account work that Fried has produced since
the publication of Why Photography Matters.
1. Portraits and Typologies
Looking again at Fried’s book, it now seems to me that he does in fact con-
front the frustrated expectation I have just articulated, or rather provides a
justification for frustrating it, when in the final chapter he gives an account
of the work of the Bechers, photographers of the highest interest in their
own right, and extremely influential figures for many of the German pho-
tographers discussed in other chapters (Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and
Thomas Struth were students of Bernd Becher). Beginning in the 1960s, Bernd
and Hilla Becher traveled extensively across Europe and the US to photograph
various structures—water towers, cooling towers, gasometers, lime kilns,
and so on—on industrial sites; using analog cameras with long exposures or
fine-grained film to capture real detail and depth of field, the resultant black-
and-white photographs were taken from raised, head-on vantage points, with
each structure’s environment cropped to a minimum but in such a way as to
capture its rootedness in the ground. As indicated by the title of their first
book—Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Construction—their
concern was typological: from each category of structure, they selected a small
number of photographs and arranged them in a grid structure, whose point—
as Fried emphasizes—is “above all comparative: the viewer is thereby invited
to intuit from the . . . individual instances the latent ‘presence’ or operation
of a single type and at the same time to enjoy a heightened apprehension of
the individuality or uniqueness of the particular instances relative both to one
another and to the latent or implied type” (WPM 309).
Fried interprets this typological concern in the light of G. W. F. Hegel’s
distinction between the genuine or true infinite and its spurious or bad coun-
terpart, which is designed to help us grasp the finitude or determinateness—
call it the genuine individuality—of objects. By virtue of their typological
mode of presentation, the objects depicted in the Bechers’ work are made
internally contrastive with one another, so that our perceptual mode of
address to their individual instances is strongly but non-coercively struc-
tured or directed, both within a given group and between different groups.
This format prevents us from attempting to perceive any individual object
of a given type “in itself,” as it were: for so encountered,
the category of water tower would implicitly be contrasted with every

other category of object, man-made and natural, large and small,
opaque, translucent and transparent, solid, liquid and gaseous, and so
on, to be encountered in the universe; and . . . all the specific features of
that particular water tower . . . would in principle be equally important
and moreover would implicitly stand in contrast with everything that
might be truly predicated of every other object in the universe . . . (the
water tower, one might say, would be a bare particular and nothing
more, and so would every discernible feature of its construction).
(WPM 326)
90 Stephen Mulhall
For Hegel, such bare particularity is chimerical—a fantasy of objecthood
rather than its underlying essence.
What the Bechers’ typological tableaux supply that is missing from what
Fried calls a mere world of real things encountered in the course of everyday
life “is a showing of the grounds of its intelligibility, which is also to say of
its capacity for individuation, as a world. Or, as a world, one bearing the
stamp of a particular stage in history” (WPM 327–8). For Hegel (or at least
for Robert Pippin’s Hegel as interpreted by Fried), this field of relations,
contrasts, and oppositions is a collective, greatly mediated, and deeply his-
torical field maintained by human subjects; so it is subject to evolution and
to contestation about its proper articulation and interpretation. Hence “[i]t
goes without saying that the project of creating . . . typologies [that bring
some aspect of that field to consciousness] can never be final, both on the
typological level and on that of the individual instance . . . which is to say
that the project is always . . . open to further discoveries and arrangements.
[As Pippin puts it] ‘The infinity at play in such incompleteness is of the kind
Hegel calls ‘true’ or ‘genuine’’ ” (WPM 327).
In the first instance, this Hegelian interpretation of the Bechers’ typo-
logical practice implies that the two dominant analogies in the literature
deployed to grasp its significance (Linnean comparative morphology and
Galtonian composite photography) miss something vital. However that may
be, I want to suggest that this concluding chapter also has a reflexive signifi-
cance, for it provides an illuminating model for understanding the internal
structure of Fried’s book and so the mode of address it tries to establish in
relation to its readers. More specifically, just as the book as a whole might
be thought of (as I suggested in my critical commentary, applying a thought
I originally developed in my essay to characterize one formal feature of
Fried’s book Manet’s Modernism) as a group portrait of the various photog-
raphers whose work so often assigns prominence to the role and nature of
portraiture, so its successive alignment of more than a dozen different kinds
of (series of) photographs—Wall’s near-documentaries and his street photo-
graphs, Struth’s museum photographs and family portraits, Demand’s alle-
gories of intention—can be thought of as a typology of a certain kind (more
precisely, of a certain kind of kinds) of photographic object. What Fried
calls the genuine individuality of that which is produced by the members of
this group is “a kind of ultimate ‘deep’ relationality . . . a ‘deep’ contrastive-
ness or oppositionality” (WPM 325–6); the necessarily linear typological
mode of their textual re-presentation brings out both their generic similari-
ties and their specific differences, and thereby discloses the historically spe-
cific grounds of their intelligibility as the kind of aesthetic object they are.
This relationality is not the result of conscious reflection by the human
subjects who make them, but they are nevertheless responsible for them;
their collective efforts have established the field within which their pho-
tographic objects are themselves established and grasped as inseparable
from each other, hence as part of a larger whole, one which is itself open
to further articulation and reflective rearrangement as it makes possible the
making of further, new, similar but different such objects. Here, it becomes
important to recall that the Bechers are the earliest of the practitioners Fried
discusses: their typological practice is thoroughly analog, and it is the gener-
ation of students they influenced (both directly and indirectly) who followed
their example into territory opened up by new photographic technology and
techniques of presentation. This suggests that what Fried is bringing to our
consciousness in his book is the emergence of a new kind of photographic
entity. It is one made possible by more traditional photographic entities, or
more precisely by an aesthetic possibility disclosed by a creative practice of
analog photography, without which the new aesthetic possibilities estab-
lished by the work of contemporary philosophers employing new photo-
graphic technologies would not have been graspable, but which outreaches
them and both extends and reconfigures the photographic field those analog
practices helped to establish and maintain.
In that sense, Fried’s characterization of the Bechers’ photographs is (just
like those photographs themselves) an attempt to document the inhabit-
ants of a rapidly vanishing, historically and technologically specific realm.
Precisely by presenting them in such a way as to emphasize that they belong
to a particular spatio-temporal location, however, he also brings to con-
sciousness that which replaced them, as well as the fact that the originality
of those replacements is ultimately dependent on that which they replaced.
But it is vital to appreciate that their photographic successors are emerging
rather than, as it were, fully realized—that Fried’s sense of the contempo-
rary arrangement of the photographic field is that something is struggling to
be born within it. It is not that he is struggling clearly to perceive what has
already been solidly established and needs only to be brought to critically
reflective consciousness. It is rather that the Bechers have helped him more
clearly to perceive that their successors are struggling to establish an aesthet-
ically satisfying successor to their kind of analog photographic work of art,
which accordingly means a kind of photographic entity that possesses genu-
ine individuality—a concretely specified, deeply relational, and internally
articulated mode of photographic objecthood (and that it is only his dim,
initial, and provisional perception of that struggle that enables his percep-
tion of the Bechers’ typological practice as one of its enabling conditions).
2. Mediums, Genres, and Projectivity

So understood, Fried’s avoidance of any explicit general or generic account
of the new kind of photographic object that is his concern in Why Photogra-
phy Matters is multiply determined. To begin with, that object is still subject
to determination—not only because all typological modes of presentation
show rather than say, and so leave the work of articulating the understand-
ing they embody importantly in the hands of the viewer, but also because
these photographic objects are still in the process of being brought into
92 Stephen Mulhall
existence by the subjects of his group portrait. In that sense, the question of
what this new kind of object might be is itself a matter of debate between
those involved in making it, part of the work in which they are involved in
creating their works.
An analogy here might be Stanley Cavell’s conception of the internal relat-
edness manifest by films that belong to his conception of a genre of film
(such as comedies of remarriage).4 According to him, each candidate mem-
ber offers an interpretation of the genre’s founding myth, and in so doing can
contest any other candidate’s assumption that a given clause or element of
that myth is essential to it by making an aesthetically rewarding film which
dispenses with that element but finds a satisfying way of retelling the myth
that compensates for its absence. What unites the members of the genre is
thus itself a matter of discussion between them; and that shared willingness
to converse about what relates them to one another is not only the mode of
their generic unity, but entails that the unity or individuality of each film is
itself deeply relational—impossible to grasp except as internally articulated,
hence as a specifically different inhabitant of a shared cinematic world whose
own individuality is grounded and manifest in that of its inhabitants.
We can put this point another way if we recall that Fried’s understanding
of a medium and its essential properties is not just thoroughgoingly histori-
cal but also essentially opposed to the assumption that the aesthetic possi-
bilities of an artistic medium are determined by independently given features
of its material basis. Again, there is here a helpful analogy with Cavell5: he
takes the concept of a medium to be indispensable in differentiating kinds of
artwork, and in understanding specific instances of those kinds; but it must
be seen as referring not simply to a physical material but to a material-in-
certain-characteristic-applications, and hence as having a necessarily dual
sense. Sound, for example, is not the medium of music in the absence of the
art of composing and playing music. Musical works of art are not the result
of applications of a medium that is defined by its independently given possi-
bilities; for it is only through the artist’s successful production of something
we are prepared to call a musical work of art that the artistic possibilities of
that physical material are discovered, maintained, and explored. Such pos-
sibilities of sound, without which it would not count as an artistic medium,
are themselves mediums of music—ways in which various sources of sound
have been applied to create specific artistic achievements, for example, in
plainsong, the fugue, the aria, sonata form. They are the strains of conven-
tion through which composers have been able to create, performers to prac-
tice, and audiences to acknowledge specific works of art.
Cavell’s account of cinema involves a parallel dual deployment of the
concept of a medium in relation to that of its material basis. He begins by
analyzing the material basis of film (in terms of photography in its relation
to reality); he then characterizes the medium of film as a succession of auto-
matic world projections, and identifies specific film mediums—that is, the
character types and genres whose particular applications in good movies
disclose the artistic potential of these mediums in this medium. The terms
of Cavell’s specification of the medium of film are not read off from merely
material properties of photography, but accrue their highly idiosyncratic
sense from his critical interpretations of specific films and specific achieve-
ments of film. And the same is true of his characterizations of the various
mediums of film: as we saw, he does not analyze the genre of remarriage
comedy by first specifying the features necessary and sufficient for member-
ship, and then testing individual candidate films against that specification.
Rather, each member is seen as mounting a critical study of the conventions
hitherto seen as definitive of that genre; by establishing, for example, that
the absence of one such feature can be compensated for in certain ways,
thereby discovering new possibilities of that generic medium, and hence of
the medium of film. Crucially, however, nothing can count as a discovery of
either kind unless we are prepared to count the specific object before us as
a work of art; everything comes down to specific acts of critical judgment.
Although Cavell was writing in an era in which photography and cinema
were exclusively analog in nature, a parallel point holds of Fried’s serial dis-
cussions of contemporary photographic work. He does not approach them
with an independently established conception of the material basis of this
new photographic medium (understood in terms of new technologies and
techniques of capturing, manipulating, and enlarging images), and then argue
that the work of certain individuals constitutes great art because it exploits
precisely those features of this new photographic medium. Rather, he takes
the striking success of a given work to disclose (that is, to determine) an aes-
thetic possibility of its new medium, and thereby to acknowledge something
about that medium as being of essential aesthetic significance, there and
then. It amounts, in effect, to a currently convincing but inherently contest-
able partial specification of the essence of the new photographic medium.
For this reason, aesthetic appraisal of each new work in the terms best able
to make sense of its claim on our experience and judgment is necessarily
prior to any more general characterization of the ontological field each indi-
vidual entity inhabits; hence a second reason for Fried’s apparent failure to
provide such a general account is that his reflective critical appraisal of the
relevant works was still at the stage of (as it were) compiling authoritative
individual depictions of the relevant works and asserting their interrelated-
ness, rather than being confidently able to step back, assemble, and present
a stable and perspicuous typology of the field (something that the Bechers
after all achieved only with respect to types of object always already reced-
ing into history). In this sense, Fried is still touring his sites, taking his pic-
tures, and selecting his candidates; the presentational grid is to-be-realized.
A third factor determining Fried’s refusal of generality becomes visible
once we acknowledge that no individual critic experiences such photo-
graphic objects in a vacuum. If the objects must be understood in relation to
their socio-historical location, so must the subjects they address; and Fried’s
subjectivity has a very specific genealogy whose pertinence to his critical
94 Stephen Mulhall
appraisals is explicitly acknowledged throughout the book. For the terms he
reaches for in understanding the work of these photographers are essentially
those through which he has previously attempted to grasp the high modern-
ist paintings of the 1960s, and the pre-history of modernist painting from
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin to Manet and the impressionists.
For Fried, the moment that these photographers disclosed the possibility
(inherent in various technical developments) of making photographs pri-
marily and essentially intended to be framed and hung on a wall—in other
words, to be looked at like paintings rather than merely to be examined
up close by single viewers—they were bound to confront a new question,
or rather a question long familiar to painters newly transposed into a pho-
tographic context, concerning the relation between the photograph and its
beholders. This led them to engage with a range of concerns familiar from
the context of modernist painting—absorption, corporeal merger, facing-
ness, the relationship between beholder, artist, and subject—in ways that
acknowledge, and so are inflected by, the specific characteristics of (this
kind of) photography (a photographic subject’s awareness of the camera,
the photographer’s distinctive ways of declaring his or her hand in the stag-
ing of the presented scene, the distinctive ways in which photographs pres-
ent a world, and so on). Most fundamentally, it led them to confront the
problem of theatricality and its avoidance—the issue that pressed so deeply
on Fried’s art critical writings of the 1960s, and that he associates with the
Diderotian origins of the pre-history of modernism in his art historical tril-
ogy, where he identified a battle between modernists and literalists over the
value of a theatricalized relation between artwork and audience in which
the continuation of art as an enterprise was at stake.
Given the pervasiveness with which Fried’s readings of these photographs
reach for this familiar conceptual regime, readers could be forgiven for
thinking that he had fallen upon this new artistic territory because he under-
stood it to provide a surprising but straightforward continuation of the
historical-critical narrative of modernism that most (including himself) had
judged to have come to a decisive end when minimalism prevailed over high
modernism in the artworld of the 1970s and after. But then he would surely
confront a devastating dilemma: either these photographers are engaging
with the very same issues as those faced by modernist painters, in which
case those issues float free of medium-specific constraints in exactly the way
that Fried’s own narrative denies; or the distinctive character of the photo-
graphic medium does have the significance Fried’s approach would presup-
pose, in which case these photographers can’t really be confronting the very
same problems that modernist painters and minimalists faced.
But certain aspects of Why Photography Matters suggest that Fried
would not accept the terms of this dilemma. Take his concluding chapter on
the Bechers: to be sure, the immediate significance of the contrast that
their typological practice discloses between mere particularity and genu-
ine individuality—or as Fried puts it, deploying a contrast he previously
invoked to grasp a photograph by James Welling, between bad and good
objecthood—is that it gives him a way of reformulating the critique of mini-
malism in “Art and Objecthood.” More specifically, whereas in that essay
he talked of literalists as aiming to project and hypostasize objecthood as
such (whereas modernists struggled to undo or neutralize it), he now finds it
more apt to characterize this as a conflict between bad and good modes of
objecthood. But the crucial point here is that this is a reformulation of his
original claim. As Fried puts it, “[t]his is a distinction that was not there to
be made by me in 1967, in advance of any knowledge of the photographic
practises that were already bringing it into being” (WPM 328). In other
words, the notion of objecthood as it was deployed in his art critical writ-
ings, and genealogized in his subsequent art historical work, is subjected to
potentially radical, even if enabling, revision when projected into this new
aesthetic and ontological context—to the point at which its reconfiguration
feeds back in genuinely new ways to Fried’s current best understanding of
his earlier critical stance.
Two more general issues thereby become salient. First, the dilemma that
Fried is supposed to confront by virtue of his venture into photographic ter-
ritory depends upon assuming that the key terms of the conceptual regime
he deploys in so doing must either mean exactly what they mean in the con-
text of painting, or else they must mean something essentially different (and
hence stand in need of disambiguation). Otherwise put, these terms must
either be univocal or equivocal; but to anyone as immersed in Wittgenstein
and Wittgensteinian authors (such as Cavell) as is Fried, this will appear to
be a deeply misleading picture of the nature of linguistic meaning.
Cavell encapsulates the relevant alternative in his perception of our words
and concepts as essentially projective.6 Take the word “feed”: we learn to
“feed the cat” and to “feed the lions,” and then, when someone talks of
feeding the meter or feeding our pride, we understand them; we accept this
projection of it. At the same time, however, such projections are also deeply
controlled. We can, for example, feed a lion, but not by placing a bushel of
carrots in its cage; and its failure to eat them would not count as a refusal
to do so. Such projections of “feed” and “refusal” fail because their con-
nection with other words in their normal contexts do not transfer to the
new one: one can only refuse something that one might also accept, hence
something that one can be offered or invited to accept; and what might
count as an offer and an acceptance in the context of a meal is both different
from and related to what counts as an offer and acceptance in the context
of mating or being guided. These limits are neither arbitrary nor optional;
they show how what Cavell calls a word’s “grammatical schematism” deter-
mines the respects in which a new context for a word must invite or allow
its projection:
[A]ny form of life and every concept integral to it has an indefinite num-
ber of instances and directions of projection; and this variation is not
96 Stephen Mulhall
arbitrary. Both the “outer” variance and the “inner” constancy are nec-
essary if a concept is to accomplish its tasks—of meaning, understand-
ing, communicating etc., and in general, guiding us through the world,
and relating thought and action and feeling to the world.7
This flexible constancy, or essentially non-arbitrary variation, is what

Cavell means by the projectibility of language; and it is itself a manifestation
of (what Cavell understands as) Wittgenstein’s vision of words as governed
by criteria:
[Wittgensteinian] criteria do not relate a name to an object, but, we

might say, various concepts to the concept of that object. Here the test
of your possession of a concept . . . would be your ability to use the
concept in conjunction with other concepts, your knowledge of which
concepts are relevant to the one in question and which are not; your
knowledge of how various relevant concepts, used in conjunction with
the concepts of different kinds of objects, require different kinds of con-
texts for their competent employment.8
A word’s grammatical schematism is its power to combine with other

words—“the word’s potency to assume just those valences, and a sense that
in each case there will be a point of application of the word, and that the
point will be the same from context to context, or that the point will shift in
a recognizable pattern or direction.”9 Hence when the acceptability or natu-
ralness of a new projection of a given word is in question, our final judg-
ment will turn upon the speaker’s capacity to show that and how the new
context into which she has projected it either invites or can be seen to allow
that projection by inviting or allowing (at least some modified form of) the
projection of those other words to which its criteria relate it, and which are
accommodated in familiar contexts of the word’s use.
This approach—we might call it a conception of the deep relationality
of words—plainly avoids picturing the grammar of a word as a matter of
either reiterating its current ranges of employment or of establishing entirely
new (and so essentially unrelated) applications. For that would precisely
occlude the essential openness of words to engagement with new contexts,
in relation to which further reaches of their significance (further possibilities
and impossibilities of our making sense of and with them) disclose them-
selves. In short, on Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, to say that words pos-
sess a grammatical schematism is to say with full dialectical rigor that the
meanings of words are essentially, always already to-be-unfolded; hence,
they live and move and have their being in history, with all its complex con-
ditions and vicissitudes.
Cavell and Wittgenstein thereby give us a useful analogical model for
understanding the grammatical schematism of Fried’s explanatory concep-
tual regime for painterly modernism; coming to appreciate the projectibility
of its constituent terms into a photographic context amounts to a way of
disclosing further reaches of their significance, and that in turn requires that
we view them as neither univocal nor equivocal but as analogically related
to their mode of deployment and signification in their original context.
Fried’s aesthetic responses to these new photographic objects accordingly
disclose an essentially analogical relation between these photographs and
the high modernist paintings of the 1960s (as well as the minimalist works
of the same era, and of course their modernist predecessors). Insofar as we
are compelled to characterize them by the same terms, we declare a convic-
tion of the similarity of their objects, but insofar as those terms are necessar-
ily modified by the distinctive character of their new context of application,
we also declare a sense of the specific differences of their objects. And the
discovery of such a new context for their application retrospectively alters
our understanding of the significance of those terms (and so of their objects)
in their original context; for it reveals dimensions of sense-making and sig-
nificance in both that we would otherwise never have come to appreciate.
And this brings us to the second general issue bearing on the inherent
situatedness of Fried’s modes of critical response to contemporary photog-
raphy. It is not just that his present discoveries reconfigure and deepen his
understanding of the conceptual regime he had previously brought to bear
on painterly modernism, but that this reconfigurative disclosure of past and
present opened up a particular trajectory into the future.
3. The Undecidability of Origins: Medium-Specificity,

Decapitation, and Religion
The essentially enabling and productive nature of his encounter with the
photographers captured in the group portrait presented in Why Photog-
raphy Matters is clear in the work Fried has published since that book’s
appearance. On the one hand, there has been Four Honest Outlaws, another
book on contemporary artists—two video artists, one of whom did make a
brief appearance in Why Photography Matters (Sala and Gordon), together
with a sculptor (Ray) and a painter (Marioni); and on the other, he has
published substantial art historical works on Caravaggio and the body of
work produced in the decades after his death (The Moment of Caravaggio
and After Caravaggio).
Further exploratory work in the same vein as that embodied in Why Pho-
tography Matters is essentially unsurprising; but Four Honest Outlaws is
surprising in that it doesn’t examine any further specifically photographic
work, but does address new work in the more familiar mediums of painting
and sculpture. This leads Fried to more explicit specifications of the ways
in which Why Photography Matters had reshaped his sense of both the
contemporary art scene and of the modernist context with which his earlier
work was concerned. He describes the former as one in which his early
commitment to a particular canon of high modernist painting and sculpture
98 Stephen Mulhall
had “left me stranded in a corner, one that I saw no way of escaping short
of relinquishing a set of core values and beliefs that remained, for me, invio-
lable” (FHO 22–3); but his experience of the new photography opened up
work in other mediums, so that his current sense is “not so much that I have
finally found a way out of the corner . . . as that over the past three decades
photography and certain other developments have reconfigured the room”
(FHO 23). In other words, both the basic circumstances of the world of art
and Fried’s basic orientation or mode of address toward it have altered; on
the one hand, genuinely valuable work in a variety of mediums has begun
to repudiate the facile post-minimalist rejection of modernism, and on the
other, Fried himself has thereby been enabled and compelled to discrimi-
nate more finely between those aspects of his conceptual regime that only
appeared to be essential to the continuation of modernist anti-theatricality
and those that really (here and now) are essential. Most interestingly, he cites
the three famous theses proposed toward the end of “Art and Objecthood,”
and specifically distances himself from the third—the one which declares:
“The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central
to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only
within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre” (AO 164).
Initially, this thesis’s insistence on medium-specificity is only reconfigured
typographically: Fried says that “I wish I had put ‘between’ in scare quotes
instead of italics” (FHO 10). This is hardly a perspicuous qualification, but
it at least suggests that what he had then regarded as a term whose meaning
was so uncontroversial he could simply emphasize its importance he now
regards as one whose meaning can and should itself be held up for inter-
rogation. And later, he goes further: in the book’s conclusion, he declares:
Although this book singles out artists whose work seems to me to prove
the current vitality of high modernist themes and issues, it also dem-
onstrates that that vitality is not tied to a specific medium, or to put
this more strongly, that the question of medium-specificity, while not
exactly irrelevant to the artists I discuss—Ray’s commitment to sculp-
ture and Marioni’s to painting are definitive for both of them, while
Sala’s pursuit of presentness finds a perfect home in video—no longer
plays the kind of role that it did at an earlier moment in the history of
modernism. That is, I would no longer wish to argue that for a work of
contemporary art to matter deeply it has in all cases to be understood
as doing so as an instance of a particular art or medium. My conviction
as to Sala’s accomplishment is in no way dependent on an appreciation
of a standing canon of previous video art; and in the case of Gordon, it
is not at all clear how the concept of a medium bears on my analyses of
Play Dead; Real Time or Déjà vu.
(FHO 204)
This is, of course, a highly qualified concession, given that it really

excludes only Gordon from the conceptual matrix in which the aesthetic
significance of a modernist work hangs together with its acknowledge-
ment of the possibilities of its medium. One might also wonder why Fried
thinks that his analysis of Déjà vu doesn’t involve the concept of a medium,
given its argument that Gordon’s treatment of D.O.A in that installation
foregrounds the exemplary absorption of its actors in their roles, and so
acknowledges the relation between actor and character that is a condition
of the possibility of movies, and so of Déjà vu. But it certainly amounts to a
reconfiguration of what Fried holds to be essential to the modernist project;
and other reconfigurations hang together with it—for example, on Fried’s
account of what he still thinks of as modernist contemporary work, what
makes it modernist is increasingly seen as its investment in the struggle to
avoid or overcome bad objecthood and theatricality while acknowledging
its relation to its beholder, rather than the more specific strategies it deploys
to do this. Indeed, Fried even suggests that his present conception of the
essence of modernism is even more general: that it lies in its pursuit of what
he calls “the ultimate stakes of serious art—to attach us to reality. Modern-
ism from Manet onward aimed at nothing less, under conditions it knew
to be unpromising. Presentness, theatricality and . . . embedment concern
nothing else” (FHO 24).
Once one ascends or descends to such a general or basic characteriza-
tion of artistic modernism, it certainly becomes easier to acknowledge a
greater variety of more specifically differentiated realizations of it in differ-
ent works in different mediums; but such reformulations of earlier attempts
to characterize the essential nature of modernism in the light of later artistic
developments give us no reason to reject those earlier characterizations tout
court. On the contrary, a willingness to engage in such retrospective revi-
sions of an initial understanding is positively demanded of anyone who sees
such characterizations as ultimately grounded in his experience of individ-
ual works, who sees the projection of the relevant terms into new contexts
which require their adaptation and thereby elicit further reaches of their
significance as exemplary of how words function, and who thinks of mod-
ernism not only as determining what the essential nature of a given medium
is in a given historical context, but as itself possessed of an essence that is
equally bound to evolve, adapt, and unfold new reaches of significance as it
encounters new historical circumstances.
The other focus of Fried’s post-Why Photography Matters work is
Caravaggio—or more precisely, the work that eventually culminated in Why
Photography Matters interrupted and was interrupted by work on Caravag-
gio, although the two book-length versions of the latter only appeared in
print well after Why Photography Matters. However that may be, what
is striking about Fried’s account of Caravaggio’s work is the extent to
which it employs versions of themes and terms drawn from the conceptual
regime long familiar from his account of modernism. So, for example, Fried
argues that Caravaggio’s persistent use of the self-portrait is an attempt to
acknowledge his own generative role in the production of his paintings,
exemplifying an immersive drive (compare this with the account of Gustave
100 Stephen Mulhall
Courbet given in Courbet’s Realism); he uncovers a persistent interest in
absorption—the depiction of figures engrossed in their own activities and
hence oblivious to the viewer; and he finds that Caravaggio returns repeat-
edly to the question “which way does a painting face (towards the viewer or
into the depicted scene)?” (AC 11)
However, Fried is quick to point out that these outcroppings of famil-
iar concepts do not have their familiar significance. In Caravaggio’s work,
we see the invention of absorption: absorptive themes and effects emerged
as central to the enterprise of painting as never before. But the concept
of theatricality has no direct purchase, because, unlike the situation in
eighteenth-century France, “whatever intimation of unawareness [of the
viewer] there may appear to be goes hand in hand with a new . . . thema-
tization of pictorial address” (MC 2), the repeated deployment of figures
openly looking at their viewers without any hint of suspicion attaching to
that stance. Likewise, the immersive thrust of Caravaggio’s work is—unlike
Courbet’s—balanced by a specular counter-thrust, whereby the picture is
given up to visuality or spectatordom. And Caravaggio’s attempts to estab-
lish the independence and autonomy of his paintings do not, as analogous
struggles in Denis Diderot’s era did, generate a pursuit of ideals of dramatic
unity, as manifest in the tableau format.
On the one hand, then, Fried is no more prone to think that disclos-
ing pre-Diderotian contexts in which versions of his modernist conceptual
regime can find fruitful application entails univocity of sense than he did
when finding an equally fruitful context for their application in post-1960s
photography. On the other hand, the successful projection of that regime
back onto 1590s Rome does indicate a significant continuity: as he puts it,
Caravaggio is revealed as the inventor of absorption, and so as a profoundly
fateful historical source for the pre-modern phase of European painting out-
lined in Fried’s mighty trilogy on the roots of Manet’s modernism. And what
enables this perception—call it a further extension of the pre-modern roots
of modernism—is Fried’s work on contemporary photography.
For at least two crucial features of Fried’s account of Caravaggio patently
have their counterparts in Why Photography Matters. First, having appre-
ciated that the new photography (and so a new kind of photographic
object) emerges once it is made primarily for the wall, so Fried can see more
clearly that the problematic of absorption and address emerges in Cara-
vaggio because he is confronting the emergence of the gallery picture—a
new cultural context, importantly comprising ambitious, highly cultivated
collectors and the construction of personal galleries for the exhibition of
their work, which encouraged the development of framed and portable, less
large and not necessarily devotional paintings capable of bearing up under
a new level of unusually close scrutiny (the precursor of the “homeless”
easel painting with which Diderot was concerned). Second, having had to
resort to a concept of “severing” in order to grasp Gursky’s response to
photographic to-be-seenness (WPM 158–65), Fried then finds that a central
aspect of Caravaggio’s response to the gallery mode of painterly scrutiny—
his mode of acknowledgement of its framed, portable independence from
its surroundings—is to deploy representations of severed heads (John the
Baptist, Medusa, Holofernes) to thematize the viewer’s relation to the paint-
ing itself as a conjunction of decapitation and presentation.
How, then, should one understand the internal articulation of the new
tripartite historical schema that results from this dual extension of the range
of application of Fried’s modernist conceptual regime—so that his familiar
narrative of the problematic of theatricality from Greuze to Manet to 1960’s
high modernism is now flanked both by an account of pre-Diderotian Euro-
pean painting and by one concerning post-high modernist photography?
More specifically, how are we to assign relative creative priority between
these three phases of Fried’s current story?
The crucial clue is to be found in an aspect of Fried’s own account of
Manet to which he gives prominence in his book of that title by devot-
ing its final chapter to the topic. As I emphasize in “Crimes and Deeds of
Glory,” that chapter discloses “a complexly recursive three-part hingelike
structure” (MM 410) operative at various levels in Fried’s narrative wher-
ever questions of origins or sources are at stake—whether it be the origins of
high modernism (which Fried attributes to the triad of Courbet, Manet, and
impressionism), or of modernism more generally (where Fried invokes both
Courbet and his post-Diderotian predecessors in accounting for Manet’s
achievement), or of the pre-modernist tradition of denying the beholder by
dramatizing absorptive scenes (where Fried finds that Greuze’s initiating
achievement can be grasped only in relation to that of Chardin before him
and David after him).
According to Fried, this hinge-like structure involves “a relation in which,
conceptually, the first and third ‘moments’ precede the second, and thus
jointly determine its meaning” (MM 411–12). Although the second moment
appears genuinely determinative, it only acquires that originary status retro-
spectively: it can appear as originary solely from a point of view constructed
by the work of those whose labors it makes possible—indeed, until that
work is done the supposedly originating moment hasn’t actually originated
anything. But once the third moment confers originary status on the second,
it inevitably reveals the second’s dependence on the first, for insofar as the
second moment originates a tradition, it distinguishes itself from the preced-
ing moment and thereby reveals a shared frame of reference (as Diderot’s
anxious denial of the beholder is what makes it possible for Manet to break
decisively with him by finding a way to acknowledge that relation without
theatricalizing it).
Here we can see Fried’s general sense that the development of an artis-
tic tradition involves a continuous process of revisionary reconstitution of
the nature and achievements of its past through the contemporary work
that that past enables. And I want to suggest in conclusion that this is one
element of his modernist conceptual regime that persists in his post-Why
102 Stephen Mulhall
Photography Matters work, and so helps to account for its structure. For
his discovery of contemporary photography as a continuation of the high
modernist project not only reveals that 1960s body of work as originating
or creative (rather than the final phase of a project whose origins lie far in
the past, in the complex historical nexus that links Jean-Baptiste Greuze,
Courbet, Manet, and impressionism); it also reveals Caravaggio as an origi-
nary figure in relation to the pre-history and so the history of modernism,
including that contemporary photographic work. In other words, by see-
ing Caravaggio and the new photography as the first and third moments
which reconfigure the meaning of the second moment that is the unfolding
of modernism from Diderot to Frank Stella, we disclose a new register of
significance—and a new dimension of creativity—in that second moment.
As we just saw, however, we cannot identify the origin of an artistic
regime or tradition without invoking a further instance of the hinge-like
historical schema. So to characterize Caravaggio’s work as initiating the
thematization of absorption may distinguish him from his predecessors, but
it also directs our attention to them, and to the role they play in making
it possible for him so to distinguish himself. And here it is hard to avoid
being struck by the sheer violence implicit in the modes of severance to
which Fried finds that Caravaggio is compelled to resort in asserting his
own autonomy by asserting the autonomy of his works. For the emergence
of the gallery picture—the ontological development that Caravaggio deter-
mines and is determined by—is primarily the displacement of painting from
churches and devotional contexts; and Fried’s invocation of decapitation in
characterizing that process presents it as an uncannily traumatic disembed-
ding or dismemberment. A closer examination of how and why this fateful
diremption of art from religion came to seem not only possible but neces-
sary in the inauguration of modernity, and yet in the first instance not only
made possible but definitively inflected a mode of thematizing absorption
that avoids any pre-modernist anxiety about theatricalization (call it skepti-
cism), might—among many other things—give us a deeper understanding
of the ease with which Fried’s narrative of modernism as in search of attach-
ment to reality recurrently reaches for a religious register. If we are ever fully
to grasp the significance of the citation in “Art and Objecthood” of a Protes-
tant preacher’s declaration that “presentness is grace,” such an examination
seems all-but-unavoidable.
Notes
51: 1 (2011), 95–8.
1
2 This last suggestion is a possibility emphasized and exploited in Diarmuid Costel-
lo’s fine essay “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley
Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts,” (Critical Inquiry (34: 2, 2008),
274–312), although in ways that differ significantly from (as well as overlap with)
the response canvased in this paper.
3 That essay is “Crimes and Deeds of Glory: Michael Fried’s Modernism,” British
Journal of Aesthetics (41: 1, 2001), 1–23.
4 See the introduction to his Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of
Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 1–42.
5 See Chapters Five, Eleven, and Fourteen of The World Viewed: Reflections on the
Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
6 See The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 168–90.
7 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 185.
9 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 77–8.
6 Becoming Medium
Stephen Melville
Michael Fried’s art criticism of the 1960s is widely understood to depend

on notions of “medium” and “medium-specificity” that he takes over from
Clement Greenberg. These notions, taken in conjunction with what is seen
as a shared appeal to Kantian “self-criticism,”1 form the core of what is still
far too often presented as “Greenberg and Fried’s Kantian formalism”—a
view of modernism given one strong summary by Greenberg in his 1960
essay “Modernist Painting”:
The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of

each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from
or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered
“pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality
as well as of its independence.2
This, scare quotes and all, is a good enough representation of the frame-
work within which Fried’s thinking about art “gradually found its voice”
(IMAC 28)—but the finding of that voice entailed breaking that frame
apart, placing the notion of medium in a new, difficult, and still largely
unanswered question.3
For all its centrality in Fried’s early criticism, the notion of medium has
tended to rather come and go in his subsequent, largely but not entirely,
historical writing, frequently seeming to be eclipsed by the quasi-dialectic
of absorption and theatricality that first becomes fully explicit in his 1980
book on painting in the age of Diderot, is continued in the studies of Gustave
Courbet and Édouard Manet that follow it, and plays a leading role in his
later critical writings on contemporary photography. The passage between
the emphasis on medium and the accounts cast in terms of absorption and
theatricality is essentially operated by a certain appeal to “the tableau,” a
term whose historical basis is clear enough—the French art and criticism of
the eighteenth century—but whose weight in relation to “medium” is, at
best, uncertain. And this uncertainty brings others in its wake—both about
the relation between the critical and the historical in Fried’s work and about
Becoming Medium 105
the scope and limits of the modernism to which the notion of medium had
seemed so central.4
The distinct re-emergence of the term “medium” in Fried’s recent work
on Caravaggio at a historical moment well outside the normal purview of
modernism and prior to the emergence of the tableau offers, I think, a valu-
able opportunity to explore its possible centrality both to Fried’s work and
to our dealings with art more generally. This essay will thus proceed in
three steps: an initial review of aspects of the notion as it emerged out of
conversations between Fried and Stanley Cavell around the time of “Art and
Objecthood”; a look at the term as it figures in the rather different context
of Caravaggio; and an attempt to make some sense of these gleanings by
appealing to elements of G. W. F. Hegel’s aesthetics which couple historical
concerns with a focus on the individual arts in ways that both answer well
to the full range of Fried’s work and can pose distinctive questions to it.
1
One might start by simply noting that both Fried’s and Greenberg’s general
sense of the word “medium”—as at least roughly naming what one might
otherwise call “the individual arts” (painting, sculpture, architecture, and
so on)—is itself a notably late extension of the word’s meanings: at its core
is the (itself fairly late) use of “medium” for the element in which a pigment
was bound and suspended—water, oil, albumen, or whatever—which was
itself further extended to something like “the physical basis of an art” and
then opened out to the various previously distinct senses of “medium” as an
intervening form or substance through which something is communicated—
so that when we now speak of painting as a medium, we end up pointing,
all at once and not always entirely happily, to a somewhat shaky physical
basis (“pigment on a surface”) and something like a general capacity for
meaning or expression.5 This lateness of the word may be an accident. But
it might also be a dimension of it—as if a certain belatedness were internal
to its meaning or to its capacity to mean.
As early as 1965’s “Three American Painters,” Fried remarks of his own
argument that
the notion that there are problems “intrinsic” to the art of painting is,
so far as I can see, the most important question begged in this essay.
It has to do with the concept of “medium,” and is one of the points
philosophy and art criticism might discuss most fruitfully, if a dialogue
between them could be established.
(TAP 262n)
Introducing his 1998 collection of essays and reviews, Fried recalls

this remark, wishes that he had said more straightforwardly “that the
106 Stephen Melville
inadequacy of my way of putting things called for a certain development
of that concept,” and notes that he didn’t “pursue the topic, which had to
wait for Stanley Cavell’s remarks on the concept of a medium in The World
Viewed roughly five years later” (IMAC 18). In fact, the ongoing conversa-
tions between Fried and Cavell on this topic are already clearly in evidence
in Cavell’s paired papers “Music Discomposed” and “A Matter of Meaning
It,” where he advances the key formulation that “the medium is to be dis-
covered or invented out of itself.”6
This is, of course, not a definition but the description of a task that arises
within a particular situation, and Cavell has worked his way up to its state-
ment along an interesting path. Working more or less sentence by sentence,
we have:
Whether or not there is anything to be called, and any good purpose in

calling anything, “the medium of music,” there certainly are things to
be called the various media of music, namely the various ways in which
various sources of sound . . . have characteristically been applied: the
media are, for example, plain song, work song, the march, the fugue,
the aria, dance forms, sonata form.7
[The uncertainty about the value of speaking of “the medium of music”

is interesting here. There are places where we seem to speak easily of an
art’s medium (painting, film) and places where the term’s transport may
feel distinctly more forced (music, architecture). Does such unevenness in
the term’s scope matter, and if so how? Are we inclined, for example, to
think that music and architecture do not have physical bases? That seems
unlikely. Do we then feel that they are not borne by (born of) those bases
the way painting and film are, that their expression does not work that way
(whatever “that way” may be)? We may feel that unnaturalness even more
sharply in Cavell’s speaking of “the various media of music.” The instances
he adduces are notable as well—they are instances of musical utterance or
action, and not, as one might have expected, varieties of musical language
or idiom (as, for example, “jazz” or “serialism”). The emphasis on action,
and so also on expression, is deeply shared by Cavell and Fried and is cru-
cial, in both instances, to getting the full sense of their claims and actual
shape of their writing right.]
And then:
It is the existence or discovery of such strains of convention that have

made possible musical expression—presumably the role a medium was
to serve. In music, the “form” (as in literature, the genre) is the medium.8
[The play of tense and voice here can seem odd: the first sentence is
devoid of agency and cast largely in the past; the second appears to speak
more directly from (and for?) the present; the question of medium seems to
Becoming Medium 107
slide—weaving or slipping—uneasily between. In Cavell’s subsequent work,
genre and its kin will play notably larger roles than medium. The balancing
of the one with or against the other is a particular and interesting feature of
his writings on film; in music and literature, it appears that form/genre more
nearly supplants or masks medium.]
And finally:
Grant that these media no longer serve, as portraits, nudes, odes, etc.
no longer serve, for speaking and believing and knowing. What now is
a medium of music?9
[Cavell’s shift to stipulation dissolves the play of tense and agency in the
earlier sentence into the simpler statement of a problematic present, and
in that statement implies the only sensible answer: when nudes and por-
traits no longer serve, painting emerges; when odes no longer serve, poetry
emerges; when work songs and arias no longer serve, what emerges will be
music (or it will be nothing). And that last, at least in the moment of Cavell’s
writing, remains a task unaccomplished: that medium is yet to be discovered
or invented out of itself. If we take the then-and-now seriously, we should
want to say that before the medium can be discovered or invented out of
itself, it must have been discovered or invented within itself and that it must
have been discovered there in the things people have done—things they have
made or said or sung or played.]
This whole movement of thought has followed on the opening remark
that “what needs recognition is that wood or stone would not be a medium
of sculpture in the absence of the art of sculpture”—which is to say, in gen-
eral, that medium is a consequence before it is a condition of work.10 It is a
shape or condition an art assumes in both senses; that’s what it means to say
that a medium is essentially self-critical.
To say in this way that a medium is always becoming medium is to say
that it is essentially historical, and it is at least not clear that this recogni-
tion is adequately served by Cavell’s more general framing of the issues in
terms of an opposition of the modern and the traditional. Cavell writes, for
example, that “it is perhaps fully true of Pop Art that its motive is to break
with the tradition of painting and sculpture; and the result is not that the
tradition is broken, but that these works are irrelevant to that tradition,
i.e., they are not paintings, whatever their pleasures.”11 While that can seem
powerfully right, it can also seem to miss out on or render unthinkable the
actual force of rupture as constitutive of any medium’s history.
In particular, the term “tradition” is being asked, or permitted, to do
too much work here, standing both for something one has good reason
to call “tradition” and as a broader and less clearly justified term for the
way the art of the past hangs together. When Cavell writes, for example,
that “when there was a tradition, everything which seemed to count did
count,”12 he must mean that the given forms within a culture are in fact
fixed—representations of the god just are things that look like that and
questions of their being painting or sculpture, of their being rendered in one
style or another, simply do not arise, have no ground upon which to arise,
and so whatever—however different or outré it may appear to us—counts
for the keepers of such tradition (priestly caste, artistic guild, common or
nascent practice) will count (and if it doesn’t, then it is simply not part of the
tradition—is irrelevant or botched, breaking never among its possibilities).
It’s not, after all, that cultures we describe as “traditional” don’t change; it’s
that whatever change they do absorb or undergo doesn’t count as rupture—
so one might, in a certain mood, say that the obvious success of Pop Art
bears witness to what continues to be deeply traditional in us—that Pop Art,
whatever its claimed motives in relation to the past of sculpture and paint-
ing, finally participates deeply and unproblematically, even comfortably, in
our complex rituals of decoration and prestige.
The point, of course, is not to choose between versions of Pop Art but to
refuse the equivocation on “tradition” that makes both versions plausible,
and that drives Cavell to the further, deeply uneasy assertion that
what looks like “breaking with tradition” in the successions of art is not
really that; or is that only after the fact, looking historically or critically;
or is that only as a result and not as a motive: the unheard appearance
of the modern in art is an effort not to break, but to keep faith with
tradition.13
Where an art “really does challenge the art of which it is the inheritor and
voice”14 (and this is clearly the strong line through Cavell’s thoughts, the
line along which Caro’s work, and not Duchamp’s, places sculpture as such
in question), the appeal to tradition can only ever undercut the real force
and consequence of such challenges. Cavell’s phrasing of this challenge in
terms of inheritance and voice seems usefully closer to the mark, suggesting
that the difficulties here are more nearly those of keeping faith with some-
thing like one’s self.
The point shows particularly clearly where we imagine the relations that
hold together the successions of art to be essentially “interpretive.” Gadam-
er’s formulation here is exemplary:
Historical consciousness is aware of its own otherness and hence fore-

grounds the horizon of the past from its own. On the other hand, it
is itself, as we are trying to show, only something superimposed upon
continuing tradition, and hence it immediately recombines with what it
has foregrounded itself from in order to become one with itself again in
the unity of the historical horizon that it thus acquires.15
When we instead recognize the modern as the leading edge of a historicity

that everywhere undoes the appearance of tradition, we may find ourselves
forced to refigure the unifying circle of Gadamer’s fused horizons as, for
Becoming Medium 109
example, “ ‘a very long series of rings suspended from one another’ . . . They
are unchained (in every manner one can imagine it), and they hold together:
here the magnetism is the riddle.”16 This is Jean-Luc Nancy, citing Plato’s
Ion, at a particular moment in a larger argument directed against Gadamer,
and it is crucial that “interpretation” is now being made answerable first
of all to the performance, the utterance or expression, of a work—say, its
repetition. “Magnetism” here has a force very close to the “grace” that is
the last word of “Art and Objecthood” (AO 168) even as “the long series
of rings suspended from one another” can appear to turn back to Fried’s
difficult opening epigraph from Perry Miller.
2
In The Moment of Caravaggio, Fried writes that a number of features he
takes to be characteristic of Caravaggio’s art, and particularly clearly on
view in his Judith and Holofernes,
indicate or allegorize not just the specular “moment” of separation and

recoil [a key element in Fried’s extended account of Caravaggio] but,
going beyond that, the violent emergence or coming into prominence of
a new material and artistic entity, a new medium of painting, the self-
sufficient and autonomous gallery picture.
(MC 207)
This sentence itself repeats and gathers together several earlier sentences
making essentially the same point, the most interesting of which modifies
this emergence as “decisive and irrevocable” (MC 153), terms I take to
specify this event as historical in the strong sense that it marks a change
not in what may be predicated of a thing but in the subject of any future
predication, with the new subject here identified both as “a new medium
of painting” and as “the gallery picture” (a term opposed on the one hand
to a prior subject, the altarpiece—and to a lesser degree the fresco—and on
the other to the tableau or easel picture that will emerge in its place or on
its ground). That is, I understand Fried’s claim for Caravaggio to be wholly
of a piece with the claims made in his criticism, for example, of the work of
Morris Louis—that in it we see an act of self-criticism sufficiently radical to
count as a discovery or invention of painting: “discovery” because it’s not
as if painting does not already exist, and “invention” because it is as if what
has been called painting is shown in this moment to have fallen short of
actually being painting (a moment, then, of painting’s becoming medium).
The grammar of such moments is difficult: there is, or should be, a strong
temptation to say of this moment—of any such moment—that it is a matter
of painting’s becoming medium tout court (that is, whatever it was prior to
this moment, it was not a medium), just as there should be a temptation to
imagine this moment as the emergence of a new medium within painting
and assimilate that new medium to a particular format (the gallery picture)
or technique (say, stain painting in the case of Louis, a formulation Cavell
seems repeatedly drawn to in his discussion in The World Viewed17). The
first temptation is, at a minimum, overly dramatic (in the current instance
leaving us at a loss before, say, Titian), while the second risks losing the full
force of the considerations that inform our interest in questions of medium
in the first place (in effect opening the way toward the view of medium
advanced by Rosalind Krauss, drawing heavily on certain of Cavell’s for-
mulations, which effectively reduces medium to what we now more often
call “a practice”18). It’s difficult to find the right way to speak of a medium’s
becoming, its being the outcome of a self-criticism that is the actual shape
of its self.
When we can hold on to this thought, we can see that what eventually
emerges in European art as the tableau is a certain consolidation and, in
some measure, defense against what Caravaggio has made of painting and
does not raise the question of painting’s medium in anything like the way
Caravaggio’s work does; we have to wait on Édouard Manet before painting
finds itself in such deep question again. And we may also see more clearly
what it is we take Caravaggio to have broken with or deeply transformed—
a painting that is inarguably painting but is so, for better and for worse,
only by being also a continuous negotiation, above all as fresco and altar-
piece, with architecture and sculpture, thus not yet autonomous, not yet
articulated within and against itself.19
We can hold talk of medium and format properly together only insofar
as we recognize that the gallery picture is itself simply the most obvious
feature and effect of a considerably more complex transformation that can
be summarily put in terms of a series or system of cuts both integral to Cara-
vaggio’s act of painting (between what Fried calls absorption and address,
immersion and specularity, painter and painting, painting and beholder,
painting and architecture) and repeatedly figured within that painting (most
prominently, but far from solely, as beheading). One effect of this complex
cutting is the emergence of painting as, in a new sense, autonomous, bound
to its internal division from itself. Another is its opening on, so to speak,
both sides of the canvas, into what can now only be called “experience”—
that which is obliged to expression and has no existence apart from it.
Put this way, it becomes clear that “medium” has to do some part of its
meaning in opposition to some other term—say, “individual art”—that it
both repeats and reaffirms and moves significantly beyond in the direction
of its “self”—as if, in each instance, operating a passage from an art that
may be more or less conscious of itself to an art that has the shape of a self,
finding itself over and against an other that is also, always, internal to it.
3
The difference thus posed between an art conscious of itself and an art
assuming the shape of a self is of some consequence. In The Self-Aware
Becoming Medium 111
Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting Victor Stoichita, draw-
ing on and continuing the work of Hans Belting, has recently offered a
strong account of the emergence of the tableau through the image’s devel-
oping meta-pictorial consciousness of itself (so the works that interest him
turn on a variety of explicitly reflexive moments where paintings figure
themselves—as, for example, doors or windows and so on).20 The implicit
outcome of this history, beyond the book’s historical scope but strongly
foreshadowed in its closing, will be art’s dissolution into its own philo-
sophical self-understanding: the Dantoesque position Belting and Stoichita
share. Fried shows a considerable and somewhat surprising sympathy for
Stoichita’s project, but there is in fact nothing in common between Stoi-
chita’s reflexive tropes and the complex figurative work done by, to choose
an example that can appear fairly close to some of Stoichita’s, Caravaggio’s
David holding Goliath’s/Caravaggio’s head before him.21
The self-consciousness that matters to Fried’s construal of medium is
much closer to the self-consciousness of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit—essentially movement, unable to grasp itself except through its rela-
tion to an otherness it also is, its identity a goal and not a given.22 Nothing in
Stoichita’s account comes close to the pivotal role of severance, of painting’s
cutting itself out from itself, that Fried finds in Caravaggio, and indeed Car-
avaggio does not figure at all—cannot figure at all—along Stoichita’s path.23
And Hegel is a useful guide not only here. He is after all the only major
philosopher to have taken a sustained interest in questions of the individual
arts in both their historicity and their expressive specificity. And just because
Hegel does not have a distinct notion of medium, he provides a ground on
which to begin to ask about “medium” as a shape one or another individual
art might assume under one condition or another.
Like Fried, Hegel understands the history of art to be a part of the history
of thought. In particular, he takes it that the specific task of art is to think
or work through key questions about the materiality of expression. The
Lectures on Fine Art thus takes off, in both its historical and formal aspects,
from questions of the apparent arbitrariness and problematic materiality
of the mark and finds such resolution it does in an achieved peace with the
terms of linguistic, and specifically philosophic, expressivity—“the prose of
thought,” Hegel says: Hegel’s prose.24
Hegel has no particular story to tell about the origins of the individual
arts; they are more or less given as things people do.25 An individual art
can be described in three general ways: (1) it is a very general kind of form;
(2) as such, it manifests an affinity for particular kinds of content; and (3)
it carries within itself a particular relation to the other arts among which
it finds itself. This last is not particularly emphasized by Hegel, but plays a
clear role throughout his aesthetics and opens up a particular approach to
questions of medium and medium-specificity.
The affinity for content establishes for Hegel an important historical
dimension to the arts, and, without subscribing to any particular view of
the actual history he proposes, it seems worth holding on to the thought
that particular “moments” may bring one or another form of art to the
fore—to a certain kind of dominance—because of the content proper to
that moment. Thus, for example, Hegel takes it that art’s earliest moment
must be one in which content is more or less inchoate and so demands a
container that is above all accommodating—can hold whatever you can put
in it, whether those contents can hold themselves together or not: a bucket
perhaps, or, more to Hegel’s point, an essentially arbitrary measure that
does the minimal job of rendering the sheer flood of the world articulate and
addressable. This is the core of what Hegel will call “architecture,” which is
thus first of all an art of marking, orientation, and procession, as in a field
of menhirs or the Temple of Luxor. In its independent, or dominant, mode
architecture takes its relation to the other arts to be of a piece with its rela-
tion to the world; they are simply part-by-part components of it—sculpture,
painting, and writing have no independent standing but simply contribute
their bits to the architectural articulation of the world. So, for example,
Hegel writes of the Egyptian temple:
In a way these gigantic buildings might be called a collection of sculp-

tures, yet they generally occur in such a number and such repetition
of one and the same shape that they become rows and thereby only in
this ordering in rows acquire their architectural character, but then this
ordering becomes an end in itself again and is not at all just a support
for architraves and roofs.26
And this is of course also to say that architecture as an independent indi-

vidual art lacks the specificity of a medium—it stands in the wrong rela-
tion both to itself and to the individual arts that are not other to it, and
so equally is incapable of harboring within itself anything resembling an
inclination toward “purity.”27
Sculpture in its classical appearance likewise has for Hegel its own distinc-
tive shape as a moment of absolute plastic expression, its content fully given
in and as an externality that finds only further expression in the other arts
that are now distinct and distinctly subsidiary to it (the temple ceases to be
processual and reshapes itself around the sculptural centrality it expresses
and prolongs). Having, typically, launched the lectures on art by distancing
himself from Immanuel Kant’s account of the beautiful, it’s striking to see
crucial Kantian terms re-emerge at the heart of Hegel’s address to classical
sculpture, which he describes as “beauty at once free and necessary.”28
Painting—and the other “Romantic” arts29—withdraw from such com-
plete expression in response to a content that exerts an irreducible claim on
“inwardness”—the Word made flesh appears before us subject to the limita-
tions of flesh, and so Jesus finds his representational home not in sculptural
presence but as painted surface, as, for example, a man of sorrows, the
weight of which goes beyond anything painting can directly render.30 And
Becoming Medium 113
this means not only that painting makes itself in and of finitude, but that
painting so made finds its self only among other selves that also admit their
limitation—it is an art among other arts, one medium among others. The
same complex cut that frees Caravaggio’s painting from architecture reart-
iculates the whole of art as a matter of mediums distinct from one another
and bound to make themselves out of their limitations—so with Caravag-
gio’s discovery or invention of painting, sculpture, as with Bernini, becomes
likewise elliptical, finding its audience no longer as the culture it can claim
to found but as a gathering of beholders obliged to negotiate between their
individuality and the recognitions they can and cannot share.31
This will, of course, not really do as art history. Hegel does imagine
that an adequate art history might actually be written this way, but the
position we’ve arrived at is, at best, orientational. If we want to say—and
under certain circumstances find good reason to say—that with Caravag-
gio painting becomes medium and so also brings into being medium as
such (as the necessary shape of any individual art), we also know that in
any actual writing of art’s history we will not say this once only; we’re
getting the shape of a moment right, and we do not know the limits or
recurrences of a moment that is already a repetition at the moment it first
happens: that’s what it means to say that Caravaggio and Louis are impor-
tantly the same—each moment inaugural, each discovering an autonomy
defined precisely not by its definitive achievement but its continuing open-
ness to overcoming.
What Hegel and Fried can seem to offer us are lessons in what it means
to speak historically—what it means to have an object that can only be dis-
covered, invented, or acknowledged within and through the complex condi-
tions of form (shape and matter, tense and aspect, earliness and lateness, the
rupture and grace of achievement). Taken one way, this amounts to offering
elements, at least, of the grammar of a discipline that has no consequential
existence apart from the capacity for expression that grammar enables—an
art history then that grounds itself not by the weight of its scholarship but
in the plasticity of its writing.32 Taken another way, it amounts to a demand
for a philosophy of art willing and able to take its chances on its modernity,
finding its own expression only among others. But this is to say that disci-
pline and medium are entangled problematics, art history or criticism and
philosophy entangled fields—as if the necessity of, and responsibility for, the
expression of finite objectivities were no longer simply a matter of the arts
but of what we used to call “the humanities.”
Notes
1 The tendency to invoke some shared reference to or foundation in Kant has,
I think, been particularly unhelpful.
2 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criti-
cism Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86.
3 The break with Greenberg is most explicitly marked in “Art and Objecthood” ’s
frequently cited footnote 6, which rejects any claim about a presumed essence
of pictorial art in favor of “what, at a given moment, is capable of compelling
conviction, of succeeding as painting” (AO 168–9n). The current essay can be
thought of as moving almost entirely within the phrase “at a given moment,”
particularly as its sense may seem deepened and transformed by Fried’s lectures
on Caravaggio, published as The Moment of Caravaggio.
4 Fried addresses the question of criticism and history in the introduction to his
1998 collection of the early critical writings (see IMAC 47–54).
5 Stanley Cavell introduces “medium” as “a material-in-certain-characteristic-
applications” (see “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say?
6 Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 221. Fried cited both of the Cavell essays as
forthcoming in “Art and Objecthood.”
11 Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 207.
13 Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 206.
15 Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method (second, revised edition), trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshal (New York: Continuum Press, 1989), 306.
16 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Sharing Voices,” in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context:
From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. G. Ormiston and A. Schrift (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1990), 234.
17 See particularly his discussion of automatisms (The World Viewed: Reflections
on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1979), 101–7).
18 See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-
Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
19 In The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting
1400–1800 (London: Yale University Press, 2000), Thomas Puttfarken argues
that Renaissance painting lacks pictorial composition, which is to say that it
aims at “an impression of real presence, an appearance of life-size figures stand-
ing out, in relievo, from the surface on which they are painted” (124) and not at
the “formal, geometry-based or planimetric pictorial composition” (8) he takes
to be embodied in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tableau. It seems to
me that the more accurate and powerful phrasing of the argument takes it as ask-
ing not about composition but about medium, about a passage from something
imagining itself as sculpture to something obliged to call itself painting. It’s very
much to the point that Puttfarken sees himself as defending what he takes to be
real painting against the Greenbergian dead end implicit in the emergence of the
tableau.
20 See Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-
Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Hans Belting,
Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E.
Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For both Stoichita and
Puttfarken, the emergence of the tableau is a key moment in the history of paint-
ing in a way it is, I think, finally not for Fried.
21 So, for example, Fried writes that
Goliath’s expression might be said to “reflect” David’s, or perhaps it is
David’s that does the “reflecting,” as is hinted by the mirror-like gleam of
Becoming Medium 115
David’s naked sword . . . And this is to say that even as David with the
Head of Goliath allegorizes the specular “moment” of the handing over of
the painting to the realm of visuality, it also allegorizes the inseparableness of
that “moment” from the notionally prior one of immersion, here associated
with the mutually “reflective” rapport between the two antagonists.
(MC 63–4)
What we are asked to see here is not a painting’s more or less adequate reflexive
grasp of its format but its active struggle for the visibility that is its achievement,
its active thinking itself through what Fried calls “the internal structure of the
pictorial act” (MC 206). Fried has at times been fairly strongly drawn to Sto-
ichita’s way of putting things: in the same footnote to “Three American Paint-
ers” that I cited at the beginning of this essay, he writes, “I am convinced . . .
that it makes sense to speak of painting itself having become increasingly self-
aware . . . during the past century or more,” before redirecting the reader’s atten-
tion to the question of medium, and it is worth noting that the claim for Frank
Stella’s “deductive structure” advanced in “Three American Painters” can be
assimilated to Stoichita’s terms in a way the subsequent revision occasioned by
the experience of Stella’s Irregular Polygons in “Shape as Form” cannot.
22 Hegel writes: “But in point of fact self-consciousness is in the reflection out of
the being of the world of sense and perception, and is essentially the return from
otherness. As self-consciousness, it is movement . . . self-consciousness is Desire
in general” (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 105).
23 Caravaggio can and does figure for Puttfarken insofar as his painting takes the
ambition to real presence to a new extremity. What Puttfarken does not see is
how, in this effort to (as Cavell would put it) “keep faith with the tradition,”
Caravaggio ends by breaking it (Fried comments briefly on this issue in AC
206n).
24 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1: 89. It is not accidental that Hegel’s descrip-
tion of the achievement of classical sculpture echoes his frequent descriptions of
dialectical argument:
[E]ach part is completely there independently and in its own particular char-
acter, while, all the same, owing to the fullest richness of the transitions it
remains in firm connection not only with its immediate neighbor but with the
whole. Consequently the shape is perfectly animated at every point; even the
minutest detail has its purpose; everything has its own particular character, its
own difference, its own distinguishing mark, and yet it remains in continual
flux, counts and lives only in the whole.
(2: 725–6)
25 The most pertinent origin story—about a boy who “throws a stone into the
river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he
gains an intuition of something that is his own doing”—is cited and interestingly
discussed by Fried in his Courbet book (see CR 276–7 and Aesthetics, 1: 31).
26 Hegel, Aesthetics, 2: 644.
27 Minimalism can in this light appear distinctly architectural.
28 Aesthetics 2: 718. While Greenberg’s actual relation to the Kant of The Critique
of Judgment is, at best, muddled, Fried’s relation to Kant, who is not a terribly
insistent presence in his work, is considerably sharper and better informed; but
it’s not clear how important that relation finally is to him. What is clear—clearer,
in any case—is the pivotal place the experience of Anthony Caro’s sculpture
holds in his criticism. Arguably both Fried and Hegel place what they take to be
art’s fullest achievement and deepest standard in notable tension with its actual
historicity.
29 I am of course implicitly taking Hegel’s “Romantic” to be our modern and fur-
ther taking that to mean essentially historical, momentary in its structure.
30 See, for example, Hegel’s contrast between Mary as a painterly subject and
Niobe as sculptural in her grief (Hegel, Aesthetics, 2: 825–6).
31 Ellipsis, both grammatical and geometrical, is one of the major figures through
which Fried articulates aspects of Caravaggio’s achievement.
32 On this, see Fried’s recent essay “No Problem,” Representations (135: 1, 2016),
140–9.
7 Formalism and the Appearance
of Nature
Richard Moran
In aesthetic discussion, the term “formalism” has a role that is at least as

much polemical as theoretical. Something called “formalism” has had its
defenders for a long time, but I think it’s fair to say that more often it serves
as an accusation to be deflected, the very word “form” always seeming to
have the inflection of the “mere” trailing before it as a diminution. This is
not Roger Fry’s or Michael Fried’s usage, of course, but the polemical con-
text of the term registers its presence in their writings in various ways.
I don’t know that Fried himself has ever explicitly defended something
called “formalism” in art or criticism, and it certainly seems an inapt term
to characterize his brilliant readings of French painting since his first book
Absorption and Theatricality. But the appearance of that book follows by
several years Fried’s deeply influential writings on contemporary American
painting in the wake of Jackson Pollock. In that context the polemical func-
tion of the term “formalism” is inescapable, and the fires lit by those battles
have not died down today.1 So although I was surprised and intrigued to
learn that “Roger Fry’s Formalism” would be the title of Fried’s Tanner Lec-
ture,2 the connection seemed a natural one. What I didn’t expect was that
this lecture would be an opportunity to examine the relations between “for-
malism,” of Fry’s variety anyway, and the other major term of art at play
here, that of “theatricality” itself. For although both terms have been active
in Fried’s writings since the publication of his essay “Art and Objecthood”
back in 1967, I’m not aware of any previous occasion where Fried has used
them to illuminate and question each other as in this lecture. On Fried’s
reading, Fry belongs to the tradition of anti-theatrical criticism, a tradi-
tion which gains its first great expression in the writings of Denis Diderot,
and his formalism develops as a progressive attempt to give expression and
defense to the underpinnings of this sensibility. Formalism of any kind is
defined by what it excludes, and early in his essay Fried makes clear how,
on his reading, this works in Fry’s criticism: “The counter to form, form’s
‘other,’ is not primarily subject matter, content, illustration, literariness, or
representation as such—though at times he speaks of all of these in this
connection—but drama, that is dramatic expression.”3
118 Richard Moran
It’s because I find Fried’s orientation here so convincing that I want to
interrogate it further, particularly in relation to difficulties the anti-theatrical
tradition has in making out the terms of the autonomy of the artwork, a
concept that is central to the formalist project. Having thus invoked the
concepts of autonomy and form, it will surprise no one that I mean to talk
about Immanuel Kant. Perhaps more surprising is the pervasiveness of anti-
theatrical themes in Kant’s own writings on philosophical aesthetics.
But first let me say something about the concept of “theater” in question
here. In his 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality, Fried charts a tradi-
tion of painting and criticism in eighteenth-century France which sought to
defeat what was seen as the inherently theatrical nature of painting. Paint-
ings are made to be beheld, but within the convention that the beholder is
witnessing a (depicted) scene, the implicit awareness of being beheld, on the
part of the (depicted) figures in a painting, threatened the depiction with
what Diderot characterized as the merely theatrical in human expression:
that is, the false and the mannered. Painting will be most successful, and
our conviction in the genuineness and reality of the depiction will be all the
greater, when it manages somehow to defeat what he saw as the inherent
theatricality of the medium. One prominent strategy for doing so, which
Diderot championed, was the depiction of figures in various states of emo-
tional absorption, either by being in the grip of some powerful emotion or
by having their attention wholly occupied with some task, and whose obliv-
iousness to their surroundings (within the painting) figuratively includes
their unawareness of being beheld by an implied beholder outside the paint-
ing, and thus seeks to establish what Fried calls “the supreme fiction” (AT
103) of the absence of the beholder before the canvas. The defeat of the-
atricality aims at once at the sense of the reality of the scene, or the sense
of the genuineness of a particular human expression, and the beholder’s
emotional participation in the scene (paradoxically, by being placed outside
its world).
However, given the “primordial convention” (AT 93) that paintings are
indeed made to be beheld, and the fact that it can never be more than a
“supreme fiction” that the beholder is absent, we should expect that Dider-
ot’s solution to the problems of theatricality would be an unstable one. Its
instabilities relate in various complex ways to the internal requirements
of painting itself. In the “absorptive” tradition of painting, the conviction
accorded to overt displays of passion is purchased at the eventual cost of an
enhanced sense of the artificiality of the entire contrivance of painting. For,
as critic or beholder, one cannot reflect on (let alone, praise) the impression
of genuineness and reality in the expression without thereby recognizing this
impression as something deliberately and skillfully produced for our eyes,
for the very impression it makes. But then this recognition on the part of the
critic reveals the inherent theatricality of the whole production, and hence
subverts the sense of reality in the depiction. At this point some other artistic
solution must be found.
Formalism and the Appearance of Nature 119
What is meant by “theater” in this context should not be confused with
what we understand today as the “fourth wall illusionism” of naturalis-
tic drama (and was not so in Diderot’s world). For indeed, the illusion of
the fourth wall at the edge of the stage is precisely the embodiment of the
“supreme fiction” that the beholder is not present, that we in the audience
are peering into and overhearing another world that doesn’t register con-
sciousness of our presence. Closer to the meaning of the “theatrical” in the
critical context of Diderot and others is the situation of dramatic oratory
or rhetoric, the heightened address of the audience and display of emotion
before them, in order to secure the self-delight of moving them, dazzling
them, redirecting their desire. The orator is an actor as well, but his art
involves a facing of the audience, and a direct appeal to them, rather than
real or feigned unconsciousness of their presence. And that is because his art
has its end in something outside the performance itself, in his self-conscious
concern with its effect on his audience. In this sense the figure of the dra-
matic orator is the embodiment of something essentially unartistic for critics
in the anti-theatrical tradition. Here we may recall Fry’s complaint of the
figures in a canvas by Andrea del Sarto that “[o]ne feels . . . that they are
arranged entirely with a view to the effect to be produced on the spectator,”4
or in contrast his praise for El Greco’s “complete indifference to what effect
the right expression might have on the public.”5
And yet, of course, if it is in the nature of painting to be produced in order
to be beheld, what can there be to object to in the painter’s concern with
“the effect to be produced on the spectator”? The painting is something
addressed to a beholder, so attention to this ought not to seem per se a viola-
tion of the artist’s or work’s autonomy. Naturally there are familiar failings
and corruptions of the artist’s imagined relation to his public, and these go
by various names. But likewise there are corruptions in the artist’s imagined
relation to the work itself, considered apart from its relation to an audi-
ence. In neither case is the cure to be found in the obviation of that relation
itself. How, then, can unconsciousness of an audience, or rather pretended
unconsciousness of their presence, come to seem a model for authenticity in
artistic production?
The opposition that guides the practice of Fry’s anti-theatrical criticism is
given one classic formulation in the famous contrast between “poetry” and
“eloquence” in John Stuart Mill’s 1833 essay “What Is Poetry?”, which Fry
must have been familiar with, but which I am unaware of him citing. Here
the term “poetry” stands for art in general, and “eloquence” is the name
for the fall from this condition, the ever-present possibility of its decline into
something other:
Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of

feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that
eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audi-
ence; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter
120 Richard Moran
unconsciousness of a listener . . . All poetry is of the nature of solilo-
quy . . . But no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must
be visible in the work itself. The actor knows that there is an audience
present; but if he acts as though he knew it, he acts ill . . . But when he
turns round and addresses himself to another person; when the act of
utterance is not itself the end, but a means to an end,—viz. by the feel-
ings he himself expresses, to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief,
or the will, of another,—when the expression of his emotions, or of his
thoughts tinged by his emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by that
desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases to be
poetry, and becomes eloquence.6
Among other things, this passage registers a deep ambivalence about the
power of poetry, and the very idea of submitting oneself to this power, an
ambivalence which threatens to spread to a generalized anxiety about the
influence of another person on one’s feelings or belief at all. Within the
terms given here, it is difficult even to describe the situation of direct artistic
address to an audience which doesn’t collapse into some form of the intent
to pander to or manipulate them; or in Mill’s deliberately aggressive terms
“to work upon the feelings, or upon the belief, or the will, of another.” It is
not that every utterance which is directed upon the feelings of another can
be rightly described as seeking to “work upon” those feelings, but in Mill’s
essay the naturalness and spontaneity of poetic utterance are conceived as
precluding any consciousness of such an aim. This cannot be a stable solu-
tion, even in Mill’s own terms. He tells us that the poet’s utterance is not
made with “the desire of making an impression upon another mind,” and
yet it is clear from elsewhere in the essay that “making an impression upon
another mind” is quite an important criterion of value in poetry. As we
might expect, poetry that fails utterly to do this fails as poetry.
In the anti-theatrical tradition, how does “making an impression” as such
get cast in terms of the exhaustive options of either vain self-display or
emotional manipulation? This question applies equally to Fry, for whom
the artist must indeed address our emotions, and yet must somehow appear
not to do so, or do so without “a view to the effect to be produced on the
spectator”; or he must somehow make a difference to what we feel while
exhibiting a “complete indifference to what effect the right expression might
have on the public.” And yet Fry is equally insistent that the artist is in the
business of making a difference to what his audience feels, that he aims at
making a particular impression, and indeed that the experience of art is
characterized by the audience’s recognition of this aim:
It may be objected that many things in nature, such as flowers, pos-

sess these two qualities of order and variety in a high degree, and these
objects do undoubtedly stimulate and satisfy that clear disinterested
contemplation which is characteristic of the aesthetic attitude. But in
our reaction to a work of art there is something more—there is the
consciousness of purpose, the consciousness of a peculiar relation of
sympathy with the man who made this thing in order to arouse pre-
cisely the sensations we experience. And this recognition of purpose,
I believe, is an essential part of the aesthetic judgment proper.7
Hence not only does Fry insist that the artist “made this thing in order to
arouse precisely the sensations we experience,” and that “sensations are so
arranged that they arouse in us deep emotions,”8 but he equally insists that
our recognition of this purpose is essential to the aesthetic judgment proper:
When the artist passes from pure sensations to emotions aroused by

means of sensations, he uses natural forms which, in themselves, are
calculated to move our emotions, and he presents these in such a man-
ner that the forms themselves generate in us emotional states, based
upon the fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological
nature. The artist’s attitude to natural form is, therefore, infinitely vari-
ous according to the emotions he wishes to arouse.9
Various relations between formalism and the anti-theatrical begin to

emerge from these passages. The critique of the “theatrical” artist takes a
number of different forms: moral, psychological, political, and aesthetic.
This figure of the artist is active and deliberate in his aims, which seems to
construe his audience as something passive to be worked upon. Insofar as
his activity is directed upon the “feelings, or upon the belief, or the will,
of another,” it will seem that he is either aiming to gratify his audience (in
which case he is accused of pandering and flattering), or he is seeking to
dazzle and impress this audience (in which case he is accused of the vanity of
self-display). And even if he has some nobler purpose in mind in seeking to
make an impression on another mind, he will then be found guilty of didac-
ticism, of reducing his poetry, his art, to a mere vehicle of some idea, some
philosophy. In all these cases, poetic or artistic effectiveness becomes indis-
tinguishable from some form of manipulation, so long as the artist stands
in a conscious, deliberate relation to such effectiveness. Even when the
audience itself stands in no danger of malign influence here, there remains
what is perhaps the most damning (or hurtful) criticism of all, which is that
strictly as a matter of taste there is something unseemly in the direct appeal
to the audience, in overtly soliciting their response, courting their approval.
Once again the critique centers on the overtly active role of this artistic fig-
ure, not because his activity threatens harm, but because of what is abject or
off-putting in his overt soliciting of our attention and approval.
As it happens, virtually every element of this critique can be found within
the brief lines of one of John Keats’s more famous letters, which is itself a
central document of the anti-theatrical tradition:
It may be said that we ought to read our Contemporaries. That Word-

sworth &c should have their due from us. But for the sake of a few fine
122 Richard Moran
imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain
Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist—Every man has his
speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them
until he makes a false coinage and deceives himself . . . We hate poetry
that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to
put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unob-
trusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or
amaze it with itself but with its subject—How beautiful are the retired
flowers! How would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the
highway crying out “Admire me I am a violet! Dote upon me I am a
primrose!” Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this.10
In spirit this is not too far from an outburst of Diderot’s which Fried
quotes in his first book, by way of compactly illustrating the relations of
absorption and the contrary terms of self-consciousness, theatricality, self-
display, and mannerism:
It is rare that a being who is not totally engrossed in his action is not
mannered.
Every personage who seems to tell you: “Look how well I cry, how
well I become angry, how well I implore,” is false and mannered.
(AT 99)
And, as we’ve seen, in the words of both Keats and Diderot, as well as
other figures in the anti-theatrical tradition such as Mill and Fry himself, the
self-conscious display of itself on the part of the artwork is read not simply
as mannered or vain, but also in terms of some ulterior motive, some base
instrumentality in the artwork’s relation to us. Keats puts it in terms of
“poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” and Fried picks up on the spe-
cially inflected senses of the words “design” and “having designs” in Fry’s
language (beginning with “Vision and Design”): “unconsciousness lines up
with antitheatricality, not having a design on an audience.”11
Part of what I think we can hear in such passages is the anti-theatrical crit-
ic’s proper anxiety over the question of how it is that an artist gains the right
to the attention and response of an audience at all. In the encounter with the
work of art we are indeed solicited, appealed to, and a kind of responsive-
ness is asked of us that we don’t normally feel simply obliged to provide
even to the perfectly real people we encounter in our daily lives. Outside
of aesthetic contexts, courting or soliciting some emotional response from
a person is not something done for free, but presumes some prior relation-
ship of trust, shared history, and mattering to each other. Without such a
context, such an appeal is normally not only an affront of sorts, like being
buttonholed in the street, but fails even to make ordinary sense. Why should
it be different in the case of the artist? How can he simply show up, come
before us with his “expression or utterance of feeling,” and think that he has
earned the right to ask us to respond?
But this anxiety, whatever it ultimately is, has to spread much more gen-
erally. That is, the suspicion of this or that aim or design on the part of the
artwork, this or that instrumentality, is destined to evolve into or reveal
itself as a quite general rejection of any “external aim” or objective to the
work of art. This is the formalist moment in the anti-theatrical dialectic.
It is this thought which gives us the very distinctions between something
internal and something merely external to the enterprise, as well as the
ideas of autonomy, existing for-its-own-sake, and self-sufficiency. For Fry as
well as for Kant “form” itself is the name for what remains after we have
abstracted from whatever contingent external relations and aims the art-
work may have attached to it, and revealed its internal necessities. “Form”
is the artwork nobly refusing to serve any master but itself, and too proud
and self-sufficient to need to solicit the admiration or tears of an audience.
The thought is that if we speak of art as determined by any aim or purpose
at all, then art is being reduced to something merely instrumental, a means
to an end, and hence in principle a replaceable means.
In Fried’s lecture, we can see Fry’s rejection of theatrical display and
appeal as taking him further into a formalist conception of painting, laid out
in the markedly Kantian terms of autonomy, necessity, internal relations,
unity, and law. For instance, Fried describes Fry’s recasting of the rhetorical
art of the High Renaissance as involving “an appeal to qualities of form or
design, which being closed in on themselves, in that sense wholly internal
to the work in question, rather than addressed to a beholder, provided an
antitheatrical ‘core’ that far outweighed in significance all other aspects of
the work.”12 And later Fried invokes a further range of Kantian concepts in
saying that “Fry imagines the finished painting to be wholly autonomous
with respect to the real world.”13
One strain in the idea of “autonomy” is in the idea of independence. In
the case of painting we can identify three dimensions of independence. As
with the work of art generally, a painting is different from other artifacts
such as instruments, clothes, or furniture in that it is not created to serve
any end that precedes it. The meaning and value of a work of art are not
determined by how well it serves any end, whether practical, moral, or reli-
gious. Second, in the case of painting, the modernist period is characterized
by various struggles of emancipation from the dependence on the visual
world, from the idea of pictorial representation itself. The meaning or value
of the painting is explicitly and self-consciously presented as independent
of visual appearance and its “faithful” depiction, and the visual world is
conceived of as “external” to the painting, as much as any instrumental aim
is to the work of art as such. And finally, the work of art is independent of
the audience itself, whether the solicitation of the audience, the pleasure, the
taste, or perhaps even the comprehension of the audience. Here in a differ-
ent but related register, the “audience” is figured as “external” to the work
of art and for the artist to turn his attention there and seek its applause (or
understanding?) can be no less a corruption than would be to treat a work
of art as a tool in the service of some external aim. The painting as art is
124 Richard Moran
independent of any instrumental aim (rejection of art as either moralistic or
mere entertainment), independent of the representation of the visual world
as a criterion of value, and independent of the taste of the audience, or the
need to gratify its needs or gain its applause.
The “autonomy” of the work of art, like the “autonomy” of the Kantian
moral agent, does not merely imply that the work of art or the person is
“independent” with respect to something else, whether an audience or other
people generally. For what is being rejected in the declarations of indepen-
dence here is a kind of normative dependence or subordination. A practical
aim, faithful representation, or the responses of an audience are all denied as
criteria of success for the work of art; the success or failure of a work of art
is not determined by anything “outside” the work of art itself (which con-
cept is thus being re-defined, as separate from the world of crafts) but by its
own “inner necessities.” As with the characterization of the Kantian moral
agent, “autonomy” is first of all the notion of “self-rule,” and the meaning
of “independence” in these other contexts will be dependent on the under-
standing of the specific conditions of self-rule. Success or failure, goodness
or badness, is determined by nothing that is not internal to the concept in
question, whether that be good action, moral personhood, or the work of
art. It is determined by no laws that it has not given itself. In his address to
the British Psychological Society in 1924, “The Artist and Psychoanalysis,”
Fry is chiefly concerned to reject a notion of the artwork as having its mean-
ing outside itself, that is, in some symbolism, and insists on the work of art
as “completely self-consistent, self-supporting, and self-contained.”14 Both
symbolism and dramatic appeal count as external dependencies which the
work of art may partake of but are impurities obscuring what the artwork
is in and of itself: “None the less in proportion as an artist is pure he is
opposed to all symbolism.”15 Fried argues persuasively that “Fry’s notion of
pictorial unity is itself essentially anti-theatrical”16; what this shows is that
“theater” and its appeal to an audience function as the name for external
dependencies of the artwork quite generally, “unity” being now a figure for
the completeness and self-sufficiency of the work of art. Hence the anti-
theatrical critic, in his rejection of any heteronomous aims for the artwork,
sees his work as the paring away of such external dependencies so as to
reveal the operation of a unifying law: pictorial unity, Fry tells us, is “a unity
where all the parts are bound to each other inevitably,”17 and “this percep-
tion of unity and necessity is very like the perception and comprehension of
a natural law.”18
The insistence on unconsciousness of any deliberate aim on the part of
the artwork or performer is itself an important stage in Kant’s developing
formalist argument, and grows out of an anti-theatrical animus he inherits
from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Throughout The Critique of Judgement Kant
notoriously privileges both the beautiful in nature over the beautiful in art,
and the “naïve” expression over any deliberate expression with an intent to
convey something. In both cases the active intervention of the human will is
pictured as a basically corrupting or falsifying barrier between us and some-
thing genuine. Passivity or unconsciousness in expression has a probative
power necessarily lacking in any deliberate self-display. Given its status as a
human artifact with an internal relation to a possible audience, the work of
art is under constant threat of revealing itself as “intentionally aimed at our
liking,”19 and therefore both flattering and falsifying. The language of the
anti-theatrical is unmistakable in passages like the following:
But in art a product is called mannered only if the way the artist conveys
his idea aims at singularity and is not adequate to the idea. Whatever
is ostentatious, precious, stilted, and affected, with the sole aim of dif-
fering from the ordinary (but without spirit), resembles the behavior
of those who, as we say, listen to themselves talking, or who stand and
walk as if they were on a stage so as to be gaped at, behavior that
always betrays a bungler.20
The solution to this dilemma is a radical one: if art is to have a legitimate

claim on our attention it must not appear to solicit our response at all; and
thus in a culminating moment of the analytic of the beautiful the beautiful
in art is defined by excluding the appearance of human intention altogether,
and a fortiori excluding the appearance of soliciting the attention of an
audience. The heading of this chapter states that “Fine Art is an Art Insofar
as it Seems at the Same Time to be Nature.” Kant writes: “Therefore even
though the purposiveness in a product of fine art is intentional, it must still
not seem intentional; i.e., fine art must have the look of nature even though
we are conscious of it as art.”21 “Nature” here is thus the figure both of the
natural and unconscious in expression, that which is without any designs
upon us, and of the unified and self-sufficient realm governed by necessities
internal to itself. As with Mill, the audience may be assured that its thought
and emotion are not being worked upon because the pretense is that they
are not being addressed at all.
The idea of the “self-contained” is central to formalist motivations, and
it bears an uneasy relation to the critical imperative to purge the descrip-
tion of one’s experience of any dependency on what, properly speaking, lies
“outside” the artwork. In Fry it gives rise to an idea of a kind of chemical
analysis applied to the experience of painting: “It seems to me that this
attempt to isolate the elusive element of the pure aesthetic reaction from
the compounds in which it occurs has been the most important advance of
modern times in practical aesthetic.”22
We have seen the idea of the work of art or the idea of the beautiful
arrived at by a process of subtraction from various “external” dependencies
which characterize our practical lives and the humanly produced artifacts
which serve them. This construction gives rise to a corresponding set of
“purifying” or “subtractive” critical imperatives which oblige the beholder
of a painting to ensure that his response to the painting is determined solely
126 Richard Moran
by its “internal” or properly aesthetic properties, and is not influenced by
what is properly seen as “external” to the painting as work of art. Kant’s
formalist project in aesthetics is defined by a similar task of paring away
a disparate set of motivations contributing to one’s delight in some object
before one can tell that this delight belongs to the aesthetic at all. The judg-
ment of taste is indeed based on pleasure, but it is rendered independently
of any desire for the object, any empirical interest in it, any concepts under
which the object may fall (including that of goodness or perfection), and any
belief in the actual existence of the object.
And it is because of this commitment to purification that formalism seems
to exist permanently as a utopia in art criticism, a place we have never
arrived at, but can just barely keep in view; something announced as a cor-
rection of the ordinary contexts in which we experience and come to care
about works of art, which is incurably messy and promiscuous in the actual
influences and concerns which inform it. The trope of purity and contami-
nation which defines the rhetoric of formalism ensures that the triumph and
reign of the formalist project must forever exist in the hereafter, something
gestured at but never enacted, perhaps not even describable. For any purity
is of course defined by what it excludes, and hence among other concep-
tual problems, the formalist critic must, in subjecting himself to proof of
what has been excluded from his practice or his sensibility, involve himself
in all the familiar logical problems of proving a negative: demonstrating
somehow that the appeal of non-formal considerations, while undeniably
pressing, played no role or were rendered inactive in his aesthetic response.
This is a difficulty which Kant, the father of formalism in both ethics and
in aesthetics, saw more clearly in the case of moral motivation than he seems
to have in the case of the response to beauty. If a morally admirable action is
one undertaken solely from the motive of duty, and not out of any personal
or sentimental inclinations we may have, then it may seem that for any
action of another person or even of our own we are faced with the problem
of demonstrating that respect for the moral law was in this case the sole
operative motive for the person. And this, Kant sees, is something which
cannot be demonstrated even to oneself in the first-person case, where one
might think that facts of one’s reason for action might be more immediately
open to view:
One still cannot show with certainty in any example that the will is here
determined merely through the law, without another incentive, although
it seems to be so; for it is always possible that covert fear of disgrace,
perhaps also obscure apprehension of other dangers, may have had an
influence on the will. Who can prove by experience the nonexistence of
a cause when all that experience teaches is that we do not perceive it?23
In the case of ethics we can take this as counsel against complacency in

our moral assessments of ourselves and other people, since the conclusion
seems to be that in principle we can never know the moral truth about our
own action or that of others. And in the case of aesthetics we may take it
to mean that the problems of identifying the properly aesthetic, which Fry
wrestles with in terms of the analogy with chemical analysis, cannot be
handed over to the experimental psychologist, as he suggests at the end of
his “Retrospect.”24
But anti-theatricality and formalism share a deeper conflict within them-
selves, stemming from their understanding of the task of abstracting the
work of art from any external end it may find itself appealing to or in the
service of, and returning it to the faithful pursuit of its own internal necessi-
ties. For unavoidably they find among these internal necessities the relation
to an audience itself, which re-opens all the old questions of dependency
on an end “outside itself,” instrumentality, and heteronomy. As with math-
ematics or morality itself, we can see the work of art as defined by its own
internal necessities, by its own self-given laws. And the various failures or
corruptions of the internal autonomy of the work of art, when it submits to
laws or interests outside its own realm, take many familiar forms. But the
problem remains that, while all of these forms of failure can indeed be seen
as compromises of aesthetic autonomy, with the genuine work of art serving
no master but its own internal requirements, one such requirement of the
visual work of art is that it exists to be beheld; it comes into being and exists
for some audience. Beauty may serve no purpose, and may be defined by an
internality as strict as the internal requirements of mathematics or moral-
ity, but unlike mathematics or morality, the artwork is defined by internal
requirements which themselves include a relation to some beholder. And the
interplay between anti-theatrical and formalist motivations shows how this
inclusion threatens to compromise the very idea of aesthetic autonomy, as
if aesthetic autonomy and independence themselves included a fatal depen-
dency, and among art’s internal requirements themselves was a necessary
relation to something outside it.
Notes
1 Indeed, in his introduction to his art criticism, Fried expresses reservations about
his early invocation of “formal criticism,” particularly in “Three American
Painters” (see IMAC 17).
2 I will be referring to the text of “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” Fried’s original lecture
delivered on November 2 and 3, 2001 at the University of Michigan, and which
has since been published in modified form in Another Light (195–223). The lec-
ture is available at the University of Utah’s library of The Tanner Lectures on
Human Values at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/lecture-library.php. Fried’s text
is available at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/f/fried_2001.pdf.
3 Fried, “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” 7.
4 Roger Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics,” in Vision and Design, ed. J. B. Bullen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 17.
5 Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics,” 8.
6 John Stuart Mill, “What Is Poetry?” in Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 56–7.
128 Richard Moran
7 Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics,” 21 (my emphasis).
8 Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics,” 26
9 Fry, “An Essay in Aesthetics,” 26 (my emphasis).
10 John Keats, “Letter to J. H. Reynolds (Feb 3, 1818),” in Selected Letters of John
Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 86–7.
11 Fried, “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” 21 (see also AL 210).
14 Roger Fry, “The Artist and Psychoanalysis,” in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Chris-
topher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 362.
15 Fry, “The Artist and Psychoanalysis,” 362.
17 Quoted in Fried, “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” 18.
18 Quoted in Fried, “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” 18.
19 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis/
Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), 168; Ak. 301.
20 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 188; Ak. 319.
21 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 174; Ak. 307.
22 Roger Fry, “Retrospect,” in Vision and Design, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981), 209–10 (see Fried, “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” 12).
23 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 30; Ak. 419. Earlier he
insists that “it is absolutely impossible by means of experience to make out with
complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action otherwise in
conformity with duty rested simply on moral grounds and the representation of
one’s duty” (19; Ak. 407).
24 Fry, “Retrospect,” 210.
8 Michael Fried, Theatricality,
and the Threat of Skepticism
Paul J. Gudel
I begin with the assumption, which this essay will try to clarify, that the phe-
nomenon of modernism in the arts demands new terms of criticism, beyond
the traditional “good art” and “bad art”; understanding the necessity of
these new terms of criticism is one way of gaining access to the nature of
modernism itself. These new terms include Clement Greenberg’s “decora-
tion,” “entertainment,” and “kitsch”; Stanley Cavell’s “fraudulence”; and
Michael Fried’s “theatricality.”
The concept of theatricality structures not only Fried’s writings on
contemporary art,1 but his work on the development of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century French painting as well.2 The main task of this essay,
then, will be to explicate this crucial notion. As the very title of Fried’s
most famous essay itself indicates, theatrical works present themselves as
“objects,” which Fried understands as being in opposition to “works of
art.”3 The key characteristic of theatrical (or “literalist”) art is that it proj-
ects “objecthood as such” (AO 151).
Let me follow a clue contained in a tantalizing but undeveloped claim
from David Carrier that while modernist art exemplifies the beautiful, the-
atrical art for Fried is “based loosely upon the notion of the sublime.”4 By
this Carrier means that theatrical art is “formless”:
Theatrical artworks seem formless because the spectator is left to find

form in them. Studying the shadows on a roughly textured wall would
be endless, for nothing could count as “finishing” such a task.5
This simple idea of “formlessness,” however, does not capture most of

the works that Fried considers theatrical. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal is hardly
formless in any obvious sense; indeed, its “pleasing” form is precisely what
George Dickie claims is capable of being appreciated.6 Without more, it is
hard to say how looking at Robert Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat with a tire
around its middle, which for Fried is a theatrical work, provides an experi-
ence similar to looking at the starry sky or the ocean, to take two of Imman-
uel Kant’s examples of the sublime. Carrier is correct in seeing a connection
between theatricality and the sublime, but the idea of “formlessness,” won’t
provide the connection between the two.
130 Paul J. Gudel
I want to begin my explication of Fried by considering a famous passage
by minimal artist Tony Smith, which the Fried of “Art and Objecthood”
takes to be a prototypical expression of what he calls the “literalist” sensi-
bility, a form of theatricality:
When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the
fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jer-
sey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the
Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no
lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the
dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by
hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and col-
ored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much
of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of
art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done.
At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from
many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a
reality there that had not had any expression in art.
The experience on the road was something mapped out but not
socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the
end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no
way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Later I discov-
ered some abandoned airstrips in Europe—abandoned works, Surreal-
ist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function,
created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural
precedent began to dawn on me. There is a drill ground in Nurem-
berg large enough to accommodate two million men. The entire field is
enclosed with high embankments and towers. The concrete approach is
three sixteen-inch steps, one above the other, stretching for a mile or so.
(quoted AO 157–8)
Fried says that Smith’s turnpike experience revealed to him the “conven-
tional nature of art.” Smith experienced the turnpike and drill ground as
“empty situations,” “as though [they] reveal the theatrical character of lit-
eralist art, only without the object; that is, without the art itself” (AO 159).
In other words, the essence of the literalist experience consists in the very
fact that it puts you in the position of a theatrical spectator, rather than in
what is presented to you when you are in that position. It is as if what is
gratifying about the experience is precisely the sense of being a theatrical
spectator, it no longer mattering very much what you are actually watching
“on the stage.”
Smith says about his turnpike experience: “The road and much of the
landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art.” Why
not? We probably don’t feel much of a temptation to call the turnpike a
work of art in the first place. What is most striking about Smith’s account
Fried, Theatricality, and Skepticism 131
is that he appeared to find the discovery that the turnpike couldn’t be called
a work of art surprising, even revealing. Fried remarks that Smith felt he
had “no way to ‘frame’ his experience, that is, no way to make sense of it
in terms of art, to make art of it” (AO 131). Smith could not “frame” his
experience because it is already framed, already artificial or artifactual. Yet
for Smith it’s not art. This experience seemed to suggest to Smith both the
end of traditional art (“Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that”) and
an alternative approach to art making that would capture the openness and
endlessness of his drive on the turnpike.
The key phrase that explains Smith’s experience is “something that had
nothing to do with any function.” What attracts Smith are things made by
humans that seem to have no relation to any human purpose. What attracts
him are objects that are human-made, artificial, but which are freed from
the burden of meaning anything. Carrier is right, therefore, to see a connec-
tion between literalist art and the sublime. This is not because literalist art
just is “formless matter.” It is not. Rather, the literalist effect depends on
seeing human acts as sublime. This is done by taking them completely out
of context.7 Not just out of their normal context, but out of all contexts.
There is therefore a striking parallel between what the literalist does and
what, according to Cavell in The Claim of Reason, the material object skep-
tic does. Cavell argues that the assertions that get the classic arguments of
material object skepticism going are assertions made in what he calls “non-
claim contexts.”8 Cavell finds that the skeptical argument in philosophy
generally begins with an appeal to a certain kind of example, the postula-
tion of a situation in which we can be brought to see that the validity of
human knowledge as a whole is at stake in the example of knowing under
consideration. Cavell characterizes this situation as one in which I am to be
imagined as having no reason for making a claim to know that, for example,
I see an envelope here, or that I am seated before the fire. In other words, the
epistemologist’s classic examples are kept so bare of context that there is no
point to my saying, “I know I am sitting here before the fire,” except that it
is apparently true that I am sitting before the fire.
Cavell takes up one example of the typical argumentative moves of classic
epistemology; his argument would be equally applicable to any other of the
array of usual moves. The example Cavell uses is: “Do you see all of it?” The
philosopher first asks you to imagine a situation in which you are to make
a claim to know something. For example: “I know that there is an envelope
here before me,” when the envelope is in plain view in front of you. The
philosopher will then ask, “How do you know it is there before you?” The
desired answer, and seemingly the only available answer, is, “Because I see
it.” The skeptical argument then consists of an undermining of this basis for
the knowledge claim, but this must be done in such a way as to undermine
all claims to knowledge, otherwise the result is not philosophical skepti-
cism. The philosopher will say, “Do you see all of it?” The interlocutor is
forced to admit she does not. (She does not, for example, see the back of it.)
132 Paul J. Gudel
It follows that we cannot be certain that an envelope is there. If we could
see the back, perhaps we would find no back half of the envelope at all! We
can’t be certain it is there if we can’t see it, can we?
Cavell responds to this traditional scenario by arguing that the philos-
opher’s example must be an actual, particular claim to know something,
because the philosopher’s sense of having made a discovery about human
knowledge, his sense that his conclusion conflicts with what we ordinarily
think we know, depends on his showing that our ordinary methods of assess-
ing knowledge claims, when applied to such a claim, produce the skeptical
result. Yet the philosopher’s example is not an example of a particular claim
to know, because the supposed knowledge claim, “I know there is an enve-
lope here before me,” does not meet the grammatical requirements for the
use of the expression “I know.” Just as it is part of the grammar of “volun-
tary” that it only has application to an action when that action is fishy,9 so
it is part of the grammar of what it means to make an assertion that what
is asserted be informative to someone (the intended hearer). Asserting, like
any other activity, has its conditions. Cavell makes the point this way:
Do I know (now) (am I, as it were knowing) that there is a green jar of

pencils on the desk (though I am not now looking at it)? If someone had
asked me whether the jar was on the desk I could have said Yes without
looking. So I did know. But what does it mean to say “I did know”? Of
course no one will say that I did not know (that I wasn’t knowing). On
the other hand, no one would have said of me, seeing me sitting at my
desk with the green jar out of my range of vision, “He knows there is
a green jar of pencils on the desk,” nor would anyone say of me now,
“He (you) knew there was a green jar” . . . apart from some special
reason which makes that description of my “knowledge” relevant to
something I did or said or am doing or saying (e.g., I told someone that
I never keep pencils on my desk; I knew that Mrs. Greenjar was coming
to tea and that she takes it as a personal affront if there is a green jar
visible in the room. . .).10
The fact that something is true is not a reason for saying anything; you
must in addition have some point you are trying to make.11
The philosopher imagines us saying “I know there is an envelope before
me” in a situation in which there is no reason to make that claim.12 This
is what Cavell means by saying the philosopher’s context is “non-claim.”
Moreover, the philosopher’s context has to be non-claim. If the philosopher
were actually to imagine a context in which it were really appropriate to say
“I know there is an envelope before me because I see it,” the failure of that
knowledge claim would not give rise to a general skeptical conclusion. The
context itself would dictate how the failure of the claim could be corrected.
This is because we would ordinarily say “I know because I see it” only in
cases where there is some specific reason to believe the thing is not there, or
that I am not in a position to see it (perhaps the light is bad, or it is hidden
by some other object). In that situation, when it is shown to me that I do
not know the object is there because “I don’t see all of it,” the appropriate
response is not to conclude “we can never know with certainty.” It is to turn
on the light, for example, or go over to the object and pick it up. The skeptic’s
argument must begin with an example that asserts a claim to knowledge that
looks ordinary enough; that is the basis of its plausibility. But the skeptic’s
argument also requires that his example not assert a genuine claim to knowl-
edge, since if it did, doubts cast upon this particular claim would not under-
mine the status of human knowledge as a whole. The philosopher’s dilemma
is that he must be using “know” and “see” in our ordinary sense if the skepti-
cal conclusion is to have any sense of conflict with our ordinary beliefs, yet
if his conclusion is to have the desired generality, and lead to the skeptical
conclusion, these words must be used apart from their normal grammar.
The point of this is not that the philosopher “cannot say” the things he
does. Rather, it is “you cannot say something, relying on what is ordinarily
meant in saying it and mean something other than what would ordinarily
be meant.”13 And note also that Cavell is not arguing that what the skeptic
is saying is false. We certainly do not want to say I do know there is a green
jar on my desk. Rather, we don’t have presented to us a situation in which
a claim of knowledge seems to have any application one way or the other.
And Cavell is not arguing that what the skeptic says is nonsense or mean-
ingless. We all can understand what the traditional epistemologist is saying.
What I want to claim is that the traditional philosopher’s assertions are
theatrical in just the sense in which Fried uses the term. That is, these asser-
tions are made in contexts wholly detached from any discernible need or
purpose in making them.14 They can only be made sense of as pure “dis-
interested” observations, statements made from a place removed from the
scene of human interests and concerns. They purport to be speech acts with-
out action. Cavell’s intent in The Claim of Reason is not to “refute” the
skeptic but to show that to speak in a non-claim context is to act, and to act
in a self-defeating way.
Likewise, Fried’s literalist acts, produces an object, and presents it to us
and for us. For the skeptic, the question that has no application to his asser-
tions (such as “You don’t see all of it”) is, “Why do you say that?” You
cannot ask about the point of the skeptic’s statements. If there were such a
point, the general skeptical conclusion would not follow. Likewise for the
literalist, you cannot ask, why do you present that object to us? The literalist
object defeats these questions. This is the source of its specific effect.
Let me try to expand on these ideas by going back to somewhat more
familiar deployments of them. In expounding Wittgenstein’s thought about
the relation of pain and pain behavior, Hannah Pitkin says:
[W]hy does Wittgenstein say we attribute pain only “to human beings
and what resembles them,” rather than “to animate creatures”? What
134 Paul J. Gudel
it suggests is that the concept of pain did not originate in our detached
observation of animal behavior, as a label for referring to what animate
creatures sometimes are observed to do, but in our human need to com-
municate about our own pain or that of the person to whom we speak. It
suggests that we don’t talk about pain primarily out of scientific curios-
ity, just commenting on the passing scene, but in order to get someone
to take some action. Talk about pain occurs among human beings who
experience and express pain and respond to it, in contexts involving such
activities as comforting, helping, apologizing, but also warning, threaten-
ing, punishing, gloating. Part of what we learn in learning what pain is,
is that those in pain are (to be) comforted, gloated over, and the like, and
that we ourselves can expect such responses to indications of our pain.15
If you do not respond to pain in the normal (“conventional”) ways, you

don’t know what pain is. It is not the case that one first comes to recog-
nize, to identify, to know (“descriptively”) pain and then to respond (“emo-
tively”) to it.
The core of skepticism is the failure to acknowledge this interconnect-
edness between our concepts and our responses, which is a failure to
acknowledge the limits of knowledge or, more accurately, of knowing as an
approach to the world. This leads to a basic insight into the nature of the
theatrical: the theatrical or literalist sensibility is one in which this failure to
acknowledge the limits of knowing as a means of connection to the world is
converted into a basic, positive stance toward the world.
The literalist work is one which purports to be revelatory about the fun-
damental nature of the human condition.16 That condition is one in which
skepticism is true, a condition in which we most basically do observe the
world as a “passing scene.”17 Literalist works are meant to make us realize
that this is our true condition and give us a feeling of exhilaration in that
realization. I think that the exhilaration is supposed to come from a feeling
of liberation from the demands of action in the world. It is as if David Hume
found an exhilaration in the “cold speculations in his chamber” because
they released him from the burden of “sympathy.”18
An approach that links literalism and skepticism explains Fried’s reli-
ance on the concept of “objecthood” in describing literalist art. Fried says
of literalist art that it aspires not just to be an object but rather that it
“aspires . . . to discover and project objecthood as such” (AO 151). Literal-
ist works “project objecthood as such” not in being formless or in being
“raw matter” but in providing for a theatrical experience in which what is
“staged” for the viewer is just the theatrical relationship itself. This presents
the viewer with a vision of himself as a passive knower set over and against
the entire world as an object. This is the sense in which the literalist work
projects not (just) its own objecthood but “objecthood as such.”
To repeat: the literalist or theatrical work does this by presenting the
viewer with objects to which he or she can react without responding, which
make no demands. Our reaction to them purports to take place outside of
the sphere of action, the sphere of human responses and necessities. They
are simply there to be interpreted, where “interpreted” is given a purely
subjective sense. That is, “interpretation” here is an action that entails no
commitments and no responsibilities. In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell gives
this description of the human condition as it is depicted in Frank Capra’s
film It Happened One Night:
Only of an infinite being is the world created with the word. As finite,
you cannot achieve reciprocity with the one in view by telling your story
to the whole rest of the world. You have to act in order to make things
happen, night and day; and to act from within the world, within your
connection with others, foregoing the wish for a place outside from
which to view and direct your fate. These are at best merely further
fates.19
The literalist work gives you the experience of being in “a place outside,”
and gives you the feeling that it is in this place that you are most authenti-
cally yourself (because most autonomous, least limited or oppressed by con-
vention). In contrast, Cavell insists that accepting the world, and becoming
a self, entails accepting the claims of the world upon us.
This explains some of what Cavell says in the difficult and enigmatic chap-
ter in The World Viewed entitled “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting.” In
denying there that modernist paintings can be said to share a “style,” Cavell
says:
Various anti- or quasi-art figures—in particular minimalists or literalists—

can, on the other hand, be said to share or deal in a style. Not, I think,
directly because of the way the materials in question are handled, but
because of the way emotion is handled, in particular its mass conversion
into mood. The premises they propose are to the ending of industrial
society what ruins were to its beginning: that we work our contempt
and fear of the present into a nostalgia directed to the future.20
Nostalgia is a way of regarding the past that makes it seem completely

lost, cut off from one, irrecoverable. Further, nostalgia takes a sort of plea-
sure from viewing the past in this way. A nostalgia for the future, then, is a
way of making the future seem closed to us, as if it will happen without us,
as something we just watch unfold, and it takes a pleasure in this passivity.
This attitude converts emotion to mood, because what Cavell means by
“mood” here is emotion for its own sake, unhinged from any human con-
text, any connection to action, something one might wallow in.
What I have wanted to bring out in this chapter is that the use of “theatri-
cal” as a term of criticism is strictly analogous to the terms of the Wittgen-
steinian critique of skepticism. We can see this by asking whether for Fried
136 Paul J. Gudel
theatrical works are art or not. As we have seen, for Fried theater is opposed
to art; art is the negation of theater. On the one hand, for Fried, the ultimate
critical question in a modernist situation pertains to whether a work is art
or not. This appears to relegate theater to the realm of non-art. On the other
hand, Fried has always maintained that modernist works of art can only
succeed as art by acknowledging their own inherent theatricality. So how
can theatrical works be banished from the realm of art altogether?21 There is
a paradoxical quality in saying that a modernist work of art succeeds as art
by acknowledging its own inherent theatricality. It is as if one can become
healthy by acknowledging that one is sick.22
This is a topic for a separate essay, but for now I would just like to note
that the connection between Fried’s critique of theatricality and Cavell’s cri-
tique of skepticism allows us to see something important about “theatrical”
as a term of criticism. The “art/not art” distinction is not the ultimate form
of criticism in a modernist situation. The nature of Fried’s criticism of the
theatrical is neither that it is “not art” nor that it is “bad art,” two terms
which for analytic philosophers exhaust the range of relevant criticisms that
can be made of objects presented as art. To say that theatrical works are
“bad art” is like saying (as did G. E. Moore) that the skeptic’s statements are
just false. It is to assume that we apply to the skeptic’s statements the same
criteria we apply to ordinary assertions like, “There’s a goldfinch in the gar-
den.” To say that theatrical art is “not art” is like saying that the skeptic’s
statements are just nonsense or meaningless: it is to assume that there is
no continuity between the skeptic’s statements and ordinary assertions, no
continuity between theater and art, that the skeptic can be ruled altogether
out of bounds. To call a work “theatrical” is a more specific form of criti-
cism than either. It is also a term of criticism that was not possible before the
advent of modernism, when the necessity for acknowledging the conditions
and nature of one’s art became a pressing matter for artists (as well as phi-
losophy for philosophers), when acknowledgement became something that
could either be done or specifically not done, evaded.
Notes
1 See ML, AC, TAP, and AO.
2 See MM, CR, and AT, as well as “Painting Memories: On the Containment of
the Past in Baudelaire and Manet,” Critical Inquiry (10: 3, 1984), 519; “Thomas
Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th Century French Painting,”
Artforum (10: 1970), 36; and “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859–
1865,” Artforum (7: 1969), 28.
3 Fried says that “modernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat
or suspend its own objecthood.” When modernist paintings fail as art, it is
because they are “experienced as nothing more than objects” (AO 151).
4 David Carrier, “Greenberg, Fried, and Philosophy: American-Type Formalism,”
in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. G. Dickie & R. Sclafani (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 464.
5 Carrier, “Greenberg, Fried, and Philosophy,” 466.
6 George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1974), 42.
7 This is what Smith is referring to when he speaks of “created worlds without
tradition,” i.e., without a context to provide any meaning for them.
8 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 217.
9 See Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We
Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 6–14.
11 See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 206.
12 Traditional epistemologists often feel the oddness of the example, and deal with
it by saying that the assertion “I know there is an envelope before me” is not one
we would ordinarily make because the fact it records is so obvious. But to say an
assertion is obvious is not to give that assertion a normal context. Rather, it is an
alternative to providing such a context (see Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 214).
14 Cavell writes:
There must, in grammar, be a point in your saying something, if what you say
is to be comprehensible. We can understand what the words mean apart from
understanding why you say them; but apart from understanding the point of
your saying them we cannot understand what you mean.
(The Claim of Reason, 206)
The shift in focus from what your words mean to what you mean, Cavell calls
“restoring the voice” to its proper place in philosophy—a philosophical project
which is more revolutionary than has often been appreciated (see 205–6).
15 Hannah Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Witt-
genstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 1972), 137–8.
16 Perhaps this is why Fried calls it “ideological” (AO 148).
17 A perfect description of Tony Smith’s turnpike experience. The purity of the
“passing scene” quality of that experience revealed to Smith that this was the
truth of human existence.
18 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Lewis Amherst Selby-Bigge
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1888), 268–71.
19 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 109.
20 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged
edition (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 240n.
21 Stephen Melville has discussed this paradoxical quality of Fried’s thought with
great sensitivity (see Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modern-
ism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986), 8–18).
In parallel fashion, Cavell has argued that philosophical skepticism can never
be refuted once and for all, but can only be acknowledged as an inherent temp-
tation in human thought and language, an inherence which is a condition of
humans’ ability to make meaning (see “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must
We Mean What We Say? 238–66; see also Stephen Mulhall, “Wittgenstein’s Pri-
vate Language: Grammar, Nonsense and Imagination,” in Philosophical Investi-
gations §243–315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
22 But this would not be so paradoxical in psychoanalysis, for example.
9 Michael Fried’s Intentionality
Rex Butler
In an essay on Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun (2012), published in his

recent collection Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand,
Michael Fried makes a series of remarks on what he calls a “new emphasis
on intention (or intentionality)” (AL 256) in contemporary art. Pacific Sun,
as is well known, is a video in which Demand recreates, using his trademark
technique of paper cut-outs, CCTV footage recorded aboard the cruise ship
Pacific Sun as it was hit by a series of enormous waves off the coast of New
Zealand, causing all sorts of objects (and in the original footage crew mem-
bers and passengers) to slide wildly back and forth. In his version, Demand
meticulously moves from frame to frame hundreds of small paper replicas
to recapture the chaotic, almost random effect of the original. It involved,
obviously, an extraordinary amount of effort—Demand employed an army
of assistants and took some three and a half months to complete the work—
to reproduce as closely as possible the just over two minutes of the original.
The result looks almost like an accident, a work of art with no apparent
underlying order and that might even present the breaking down of any
such order. This is Fried toward the beginning of his essay on the particular
kind of intentionality he finds in Demand’s work: “By photographing the
objects and situations he constructs, Demand effectively replaces the real-
world context with a merely depicted one, every detail and aspect of which
is exactly what he intends it to be” (AL 255).
Fried sees Demand as sharing a project with a number of artists today,
perhaps most notably the American sculptor Charles Ray, whose work he
had written on previously in his Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni,
Gordon. Fried takes up there Ray’s Hinoki (2007), a recreation down to its
smallest details of a thirty-two foot long oak tree he had come across one
day lying in a field while he was out taking a walk. Like Demand’s Pacific
Sun, Ray’s replica involved an enormous amount of labor and expertise: he
employed a small team of traditionally trained Japanese woodcarvers, who
worked for five years to reproduce as closely as possible the original tree
that Ray brought back to his studio. (We are tempted to say that it would
be like Duchamp not merely selecting the particular mass-produced copy
that would become Fountain (1917), but employing someone to recreate
Michael Fried’s Intentionality 139
the original, which is actually what happened when Duchamp wanted to
include the work in his 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum—
the original had been lost, and the type of urinal he had originally used was
no longer being made.) Fried says of Hinoki: “What is most compelling
about the surface [of the work] is the extent to which the viewer perceives
literally everything that has been done to it—every join, gouge, cut, or hole,
in short every mark or trace of making, however large or minute—as a signi-
fier or, better, a carrier of authorial intention” (FHO 102).
Fried can be seen aligning both Demand and Ray here with a certain
post-postmodernism, which he understands as coming after the critique of
intentionality characteristic of postmodernism. In this he identifies not just
with those artists he sees as embodying this shift, but also with a number of
contemporary theorists, who have similarly revived the question of inten-
tionality, some of whom (Walter Benn Michaels, Jennifer Ashton, and Todd
Cronan) are inspired by Fried, and one of whom inspired him: the “ordi-
nary language” philosopher Stanley Cavell. Indeed, Fried does not just see
the work of Demand and Ray as intended, but suggests that something like
intention is the very subject of their work. It is why he speaks not so much
of “intention” or even “intentionality” as being at stake in the work, but
rather of the work as an “allegory of intention” (Al 254), or as “thematis-
ing intent with a vengeance” (FHO 47), which is to say that these works are
somehow about their intentionality.
But intentionality is also at stake in the work on which Fried writes in
another, less obvious way, insofar as it now has to be insisted upon with
regard to it. That is to say, the idea that the work of art is intended can no
longer be taken for granted, but has to be asserted against the prevailing
(and countervailing) attitude that works of art are merely objects, like any
other in the world. Fried critiques this attitude in his essay on Demand,
echoing his original critique of minimalism (or what he called “literalism”)
in “Art and Objecthood.” In that essay, Fried distinguishes between two
kinds of experience produced by art (or what calls itself art): the instan-
taneous and aesthetic experience of art, and the durational and physical
experience of literalism. The first is framed by and arises in response to the
work: “The rightness or relevance of one’s conviction about specific mod-
ernist works [is] a conviction that begins and ends in one’s experience of the
work itself” (AO 158–9). The second, by contrast, is unframed and open-
ended, and the kind of experience it offers is not so much defined as merely
pointed to by the work, as in Tony Smith’s evocation of driving down the
New Jersey Turnpike. “The experience alone is what matters” (AO 158).
For all of the polemical energy Fried invests in the conflict between art
and literalism, however, the distinction between them is fine, and perhaps
getting finer. In order to demonstrate this—and to address more generally
the question of intention in Fried’s work—we might consider another exam-
ple of the kind of work he now advocates. As Fried describes it, the work
bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Demand and Ray, for all of its
140 Rex Butler
obvious differences in appearance, medium, and technique. We are refer-
ring to the “monochrome” painting of the American Joseph Marioni, which
Fried originally reviewed in Artforum in 1998 and 2006 before treating it at
considerable length in Four Honest Outlaws. And we might begin by attend-
ing to the distinction, which Fried acknowledges but does not make much
of, between Marioni’s work and the traditions of “radical” or “concrete”
painting it appears to come out of. We will then proceed through a series of
contrasts between Marioni and another painter, who at various times helped
and encouraged him: the American monochromist Robert Ryman, who met
Marioni when he was working in Cincinnati in 1971, helped him get his
first American gallery show at the Artists Space in New York in 1975, and
is undoubtedly the artist Marioni at once is closest to and from whom he is
most concerned to distinguish himself.
But to set Marioni’s work within an even wider context and to pro-
vide another precedent for it (even if it is not a direct influence on him, it
undoubtedly lies behind the “radical” or “concrete” painting of German
artists like Peter Tollins and Gunter Umberg, with whom Marioni aligned
himself early in his career), let us cast back to the 1920s and 30s Polish
“Unists,” and in particular to an essay written on the movement by the
French-American art historian Yve-Alain Bois, “Strzemiński and Kobro: In
Search of Motivation,” now collected in his Painting as Model. The Unists
can in fact be considered precursors to a certain Greenbergian conception
of art that will lead to the “process”-based art of 1960s America, in which
a pre-determined procedure or technique is systematically followed to pro-
duce the work. Unists like Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzemiński
attempted—and this, of course, is the significance of their term “Unism”—
to unify all aspects of their practice, so that each individual element would
be justified by the resulting whole. Thus, for example, Kobro’s sculptures
seek a “union with space,”1 and Strzemiński’s paintings look for a way to
“motivate the division of the canvas.”2 As a result, each element of the
work is rendered legible or transparent. It is as though it were the reflection
of a larger whole, while this whole itself would be made up of a series of
entirely consistent elements selected on its basis. As Strzemiński writes in
one of the group’s manifestoes, in words cited by Bois: “Against the dual-
istic conception [of painting], attempting to connect things that cannot be
connected . . . we have to oppose a conception of a picture as a reconciled
and organic unity.”3
And yet, as Bois goes on to argue, the great lesson of Unism is that the
work of art can never entirely be explained in this way. An element of
ambiguity always enters, which is unable to be explained by the rest of the
work. As Bois writes of Kobro’s Space Compositions (1929–30), an “entire
stream-of-consciousness novel would be necessary to describe the transfor-
mations that occur as we circulate around the works.”4 Or as he writes
of Strzemiński’s procedure in Unist Compositions (1931–2), in seeking to
“push the limits of arbitrariness further back, in one stroke he made his
entire system crumble into pieces. If the divisions of the painting are deter-
mined by its dimensions, then what motivates these dimensions?”5 Hence
the endless adjustments of the work by the artists after it had notionally
been “finished,” its forever “incomplete” status, and perhaps even the his-
torical failure of Unism. This failure—the obscurity and lack of consequence
of the movement, which had only recently been rediscovered by the time
Bois wrote his article—would partly be explained by the political situation
of Poland in the twentieth century, first invaded by the Nazis and then fall-
ing under Communist rule, and partly by its particular “lesson” or “tech-
nique” being unable to be passed on, or passed on only as its failure or
inability to be acknowledged. We would have perhaps the same “break”
in historical causality as we have in the making of the work, with us being
unable to go seamlessly from idea to outcome or indeed one moment to
the next. And this would be the meaning of the revival or rediscovery of
Unism and its artists for Bois, as he makes clear by including his essay on
Ryman, “Ryman’s Tact,” soon after “In Search of Motivation” in Paint-
ing as Model. For although there is no evidence directly linking Ryman to
Unism, Bois writes on Ryman as though he had drawn the vital lesson of
the failure of the movement. But, therefore—and this again is why Unism
and its historical lesson must remain lost—for Ryman this failure would not
be unexpected and not really a failure. It is aimed at part of the logic of the
work. Put otherwise, the work is programmed or destined to fail and thus
there is a sort of deliberate giving up on it on the part of the artist.
Like the Unists, Ryman starts off by seeking to make his works entirely
legible and self-reflexive (and here we can undoubtedly say that this is a
response—whether over-faithful or deliberately provocative—to Green-
berg). In a typical Ryman work such as Mayco (1965) or Untitled (1965)
there is a series of brushstrokes either down or across the canvas that simply
end where the canvas cuts off. There is a direct correspondence between the
canvas and the brushstrokes covering it in an apparently exemplary instance
of “process”-based art. Again, it is as though the construction of the work
is totally pre-determined and the final painting is merely the playing out of
a pre-determined idea. As with the Unists, however, this procedure fails.
The particular combination of elements that Ryman puts together produces
something unknown or unexpected, something more than their mere addi-
tion or accumulation. As Bois writes, setting out the terms of this failure:
“Ryman shows that scarcely has a pictorial element been examined—given
a motivation by virtue of its formative process—than that which was with-
drawn as being arbitrary and unmotivated threatens to return elsewhere.”6
Nevertheless—and unlike the Unists, for whom this failure went against
what they stood for—for Ryman this is the very point of the work. In a
deliberately self-contradictory manner, he actually intends or expects this
turning against of his original plan. This would be the proper subject of the
work, its aim or desired outcome, even though it cannot directly be aimed
at. This is undoubtedly why the signature and more particularly the artist’s
142 Rex Butler
signature is a favored object of study, one of the particular mediums or tech-
niques, like paint, the frame, the brushstroke, and the mounting of the can-
vas on the wall, that Ryman seeks to make the subject of his work, as seen
in Untitled (1958) and To Gertrude Mellon (1958). For the genuineness of
the signature is nothing that can be intended in advance, when it would be
merely a false copy of itself, but must be executed each time instinctively,
free from the control of the signatory’s hand. No signature is a copy of any
other, but rather is authentic only in its difference from all of the others, and
this from the beginning, when one is asked to “reproduce” one’s signature.7
Marioni, as we say, was an early follower of Ryman and openly acknowl-
edges the assistance he gave him when he was in Cincinnati and later when
he moved to New York. But in Friedian terms, in the end they are decisively
different. Marioni makes his paintings by running a series of variously col-
ored pigments mixed with acrylic down the canvas. While the painting is
running down the surface, which subtly leans forward off the wall, Marioni
occasionally redirects it by having it move around either his fingers or the
handle of the roller with which he applied the paint. Through variously
diluting the acrylic with water he can produce different viscosities of paint
and through selecting different weaves of canvas and occasionally even
shaving its surface he can produce different resistances to the flow of the
paint (and Marioni slightly tapers the canvas from top to bottom and bevels
its bottom edge where the paint accumulates to ensure it holds the surface
in a particular way). Finally, he mixes different hues of the same color to
make up the successive layers of his painting, almost like a ceramic glaze.
As can be imagined, however, his ability to control the medium, effectively
to “paint” his canvases in the sense we usually mean, is strictly limited.
How his work looks is largely the effect of gravity and the specific proper-
ties of materials he uses (for example, there is a certain maximum size that
a bead of paint can visibly attain and therefore a certain maximum-sized
canvas that he can use insofar as he wants the texture of the paint as it
dries to “hold” the canvas). And this for all of Marioni’s ability to adjust
certain parameters of his execution, his immense and continually developing
knowledge of the particular properties of the paint he uses and how it will
look and perform when it is taken out of its jar or bottle and put to work
on the canvas.
Nevertheless, despite all of this, Marioni will insist that he has total con-
trol of his process and is entirely responsible for every aspect of the work.
As he says wittily in interviews, his favorite part of the process is “watching
the paint dry in the end,”8 as though it were not finally a matter of anything
physical that he does but that his work is entirely a creation of his mind. As
one of Marioni’s more prominent commentators, the literary scholar Henry
Staten says of him (recalling a well-known remark concerning Shakespeare),
Marioni is “everywhere present but nowhere visible”9 in his work. And all
of this can easily devolve into a form of idealism, as though the work were
in fact the manifestation of Marioni’s mind, or that the aim of the work is
merely to surpass or transcend its material determinants. Indeed, Marioni’s
practice has been spoken of by a number of commentators in this way, and
Marioni himself has on occasion come close to this kind of rhetoric. A series
of exhibitions with explicitly religious titles, such as Private Icons at the
Kunstmuseum in St Gallen in 1996 and Noli me tangere! at the Kolumba
Museum in Cologne in 2010, may indeed have encouraged this reading.
But this is not the meaning that Fried takes from Marioni. Rather, Fried’s
account, both in his original Artfortum reviews and later in Four Honest
Outlaws, represents a detailed, material, ekphrastic evocation of the work,
both of what it looks like and the particular ways in which it is made. There
are moments of intricate technical description, based both on a close famil-
iarity with the work and, in all likelihood, long conversations with the artist
himself. We might recall, for example, Fried’s remarks in his original review
concerning Blue Painting (1998): “Marioni, using a large roller, laid down
four separate waves of acrylic paint: an indathrone ground, blue-black; a
layer of ultramarine, a reddish blue, completely transparent, virtually sub-
stanceless; a layer of thalo blue, a green-blue, relatively thick; and finally
an extremely thin layer of cobalt blue, an opaque color but at that degree
of dilution rendered translucent, almost but not quite a glaze” (JM 149).
Indeed, in Marioni we find the same facticity, the same reality, the same
substantiality as we have in Demand and Ray. That is, for all of Fried’s
assertion of the “painterly” aspect of Marioni’s work and emphasis on his
technical control, there is the same material determination with him as with
those others, as though, if the work is composed, it also merely retraces
another more physical fact or process. For all of Fried’s assertion of the
compositionality of Marioni’s work, it does indeed at first encounter look
like the product of the largely unimpeded fall of paint. Certainly, there is no
obvious or discernible sense that the painting is ordered, and it is difficult
to see signs of the intervention of the artist. There is no reason to doubt the
momentary stopping or deflecting of the vertical flow of paint, but this is
usually covered over or at least de-emphasized by subsequent layers, so that
the overall effect is simply that of an unchecked coursing from top to bot-
tom, with the result that our experience remains on the same level as what
we can take to be Fried’s from that previous description: haptic, granular,
tactile, embodied.
And yet, Fried insists, Marioni’s works are not examples of minimal art
and do not make literal objects. They are not monochromes, something sim-
ply material or concrete in the manner of those German artists with whom
Marioni associated early in his career. Rather, they are in Fried’s declarative
words from his Artforum review “paintings in the fullest and most exalted
sense of the word” (JM 149). And throughout his various commentaries
on Marioni Fried stresses the unity, organization, and all-overness of the
work. He will speak about its color or let us say opticality beyond the mere
materiality of the particular colored paints he uses and their sheerly physical
properties. He will account for the specific composition of particular works,
144 Rex Butler
the interleaving of their various layers of paint, the disposition of this paint
across the surface, the relationship of this surface to the edges of the canvas.
But, again, where is all of this to be seen in the work? As we have just been
suggesting, it can appear as though it is simply the physical flow of the paint
down the canvas that we are observing with Marioni, just as with Demand
it was the sliding of objects back and forth across a camera, and with Ray
the detailed recreation of the inside and outside of a fallen oak. But what we
want to assert here—and this would be a way of putting together those two
opposed readings of Marioni’s work previously discussed—is that we would
not have this materiality unless it was underwritten by or, better, seen from
the point of view of a certain intention. That is to say—and here is where
we might begin to think of the difference between Ryman and Marioni—the
materiality of the work does not exist outside of an assumed intention, just
as this intention is only the remarking of the material.
We might say this again more slowly. In Four Honest Outlaws, Fried
speaks of how Marioni puts together separate elements to form one unified
whole, laying down successive layers of paint to form one indivisible surface;
how the interplay of support and pigment “gives rise to an impression of
aesthetic coherence and autonomy,” while “at the same time, that interplay
compels a recognition of the separateness of the elements, which is to say of
the composite nature of each individual work” (FHO 140). However, our
point—and Fried’s too—is that we would not notice these separate elements,
would not be aware of the successive layers of paint, unless they had been
brought together in this way. The unity just is these separate elements, just
as these elements could not be seen until brought together as a whole. And
this might be understood as the final stage in Fried’s argument, which has
run all the way from the apparently unambiguous “defeat” of theatricality
in “Art and Objecthood” through to the admission in his later criticism that
the distinction between theatricality and absorption is “less all or nothing”
(FHO 22), and that perhaps it is not simply a matter of defeating theater
after all. Indeed, if we go back to the original argument of “Art and Object-
hood” in the light of these later developments, we might see that “depicted”
shape, which allows the work of art to break with its “literal” shape and thus
escape the status of objecthood, is not so much some specific compositional
device as the very acknowledgement of literal shape. As Fried writes, for
example, of Frank Stella’s shaped canvases: “Depicted shape may be said to
have become dependent upon literal shape—and indeed unable to make itself
felt as shape except by acknowledging that dependency” (SF 81). But this
“depictedness” is nevertheless treated at this stage of Fried’s career as some
identifiable procedure on the part of the artist, as though it stands unambigu-
ously outside of the work and breaks with any materiality. As Fried goes on
to say in “Shape as Form”: “Literalness in [Stella’s shaped canvases] is pri-
marily experienced as the property not of the support but of the shapes them-
selves. All this makes Stella’s new paintings radically illusive in that what is
rendered illusive in them is nothing less than literalness itself” (SF 94).
None of this is any more the case with the work Fried champions after the
“extraordinary efflorescence” (IMAC 43) of minimalism. It is the great chal-
lenge of the postmodern aesthetic of indeterminacy that came to dominate
the subsequent thirty years of art making, which originally saw Fried stop
writing art criticism, fearing that he had nothing more to say about the art
of his present. Now, Fried recognizes, the visible difference between art and
objecthood has shrunk to virtually nothing and it may be impossible ulti-
mately to defeat theater. He speaks, for example, of opticality and material-
ity “implying” or “containing” each other in Marioni and of the “mutually
motivated attunement” of literal and depicted shape (FHO 159), and says
something similar of Demand and Ray. And all of this is perhaps ultimately
to speak to a kind of circularity between the two apparently opposed terms,
which nevertheless can be seen to take the form of a historical progression;
that although it might appear to be a matter of the consistent advance of
a depicted art through the continual overcoming of the literal, it is in fact
the same dialectic each time in a different form. In one way it is to say that
we cannot have the material—colored pigment, seams, or layers of paint—
outside of the depicted—color, seamlessness, or glazing. But it is also to sug-
gest that the depicted just is this colored pigment, these seams, these layers.
So where is the intention to be found? How can Fried assert that what dis-
tinguishes the works in question from minimalism is that they are intended—
or indeed, if we can coin a phrase, meta-intended? We might begin to think
of this question from what appears to be the opposite point in Fried’s work,
and what indeed might suggest a certain contradiction or at least something
not reconciled within it. For while Fried is arguing for a certain visible or
at least assumed intention with regard to the works of artists like Demand
and Ray, in much of the rest of his work he appears to be arguing against
intention, against the spectator seeing any visible or obvious intention on
the part of the artist. This, for example, is Fried’s argument with regard to
Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum in Why Photography Matters as
Art as Never Before. In that book, Fried seeks to align Barthes to his own
long-running anti-theatrical project, insofar as what Barthes appears to be
arguing for is the involuntariness of the punctum, which the photographer
cannot deliberately put into their photograph, as opposed to the intention-
ality of the studium, which the photographer can. As Fried writes, summa-
rizing Barthes’s distinction: “In short in order for a photograph to be truly
anti-theatrical for Barthes it must somehow carry within it a kind of onto-
logical guarantee that it was not intended to be so by the photographer . . .
The punctum, I am suggesting, functions as that guarantee” (WPM 102).
However, as Walter Benn Michaels has argued in “Photographs and Fos-
sils,” Fried could no sooner say that the punctum is anti-theatrical because
it cannot be put there by the photographer than it turns theatrical, is what
is sought by both the photographer and the spectator looking at the pho-
tograph. Its unintentionality cannot but look intentional. As Michaels
writes: “[W]hat I have just described as the radicalisation of absorption (the
146 Rex Butler
radicalisation of the refusal of performance) turns out in Barthes to be dia-
lectical: it turns the antitheatrical into pure theatricality; it turns what Fried
called absorption into what was supposed to be its opposite, literalism.”10
In other words, we are no sooner able to remark the unintended than it
becomes intended—and this reversal lies at the heart of the long narrative
set out in Fried’s work: the lapsing of what was originally absorptive into
the theatrical, the continuous and unappeasable sense that previous solu-
tions to the problem of theatricality no longer suffice. As Fried writes, for
example, toward the end of Courbet’s Realism (and here we might say that
this sense of the insufficiency of prior artistic solutions drives forward both
art history and the very sequence of Fried’s books, each of which can be
seen to be responding to the perceived “failure” or perhaps “dividedness” of
the one before): “Again, my point isn’t that Millet’s art [insofar as it is sur-
passed by Courbet’s], despite its concern with absorption, at bottom is the-
atrical. But I suggest, first, that his art emerges as divided against itself . . .
and, second, that it’s for this reason that a number of contemporary critics,
including someone like Théophile Gautier who had previously been admir-
ers, came to attack Millet’s work for what they saw as its especially galling
brand of self-importance” (CR 44). Fried’s work has often been spoken of
as—and, of course, in many ways is—a complex mediation of art history
and criticism, but perhaps as Michaels implies what fundamentally is at
stake in it is a simple aporia: that we could no sooner remark the absorptive
than it would turn theatrical.
By this stage perhaps we can see both the circularity of Fried’s argument
and the solution to what appears as a contradiction within it, insofar as with
regard to certain works of art (Demand, Ray, Marioni) he appears to be
arguing for intentionality, while in another strand of his work (his writing
on photography, the sequence of art historical books from Absorption and
Theatricality on) he appears to be arguing for unintendedness. For what we
have seen is that the unintended is possible only because it is intended (just
as the intended must appear unintentional). It is only, as we say, because of
the intention of the artist that we are aware of the detail, the materiality, the
indexicality of the work. In Demand’s Pacific Sun, the randomness is per-
ceptible only because it has been remade by the artist. In Ray’s Hinoki, the
texture of the oak comes to our attention only because it has been recreated
by the artist and a team of craftspeople. And in Marioni, the gravity-bound
density of the paint as it falls down the canvas is observed only because it
has been willed by the artist. The very aim of the artist is to make us aware
of the arbitrariness, errancy, and contingency of what is. The highest—and
only—aim of art is simply to remark the world without altering it.
However, on the other hand, as seen in Why Photography Matters—or at
least as Michaels argues with regard to that book—absorptive unintention-
ality is no sooner remarked than it turns theatrical. The same intentionality
that allows the work’s materiality to be seen is also what means that this
materiality is an effect, put on, insincere. This, of course, is the basis of
Fried’s long battle against literalism, the gradual slide of what was once
absorptive into theatricality; but what must also be acknowledged is that
this absorptiveness itself is only the effect of a certain theatricality or intend-
edness, can only be seen from the point of view of a certain theatricality or
intendedness. Absorption is never simply what it is in Fried but an effect,
a paradoxical “supreme fiction” (AT 103). Art must seek to overcome the
theatrical, but it is just this that means it is always potentially theatrical
and this task is possible only because of this theatricality. The same thing
that makes absorptive materiality possible (intention) is also what makes it
impossible. Indeed, in a way it is not so much the historical succession of
later works that reveals that what was previously absorptive is now theatri-
cal. It is more that—or also that—the same work is internally divided and
that what is really at stake is a circularity or mutual implication of absorp-
tion and theatricality. And indeed, Fried even admits this at moments, as in
the return in the essay on Pacific Sun of the theology of Jonathan Edwards,
originally cited at the beginning of “Art and Objecthood,” and his notion
that what underlies the universe is a logic of “perpetual destruction/cre-
ation” that gives rise to a “same” that is each time radically “new,” of a
repeated or reiterated “oneness” that Fried for his part opposes to the “end-
lessness” of minimalist literality (AL 265).
And if we return to Fried’s description of those three artists, we can see
indicated in the very details of his descriptions the internal shift or ambigu-
ity we have been noting, the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of
bringing literal and depicted together. With regard to Demand’s Pacific Sun,
Fried points to how, after an initial soundtrack that simply replicated the
sound of objects sliding back and forth in front of the camera, Demand
went with another that was at once “one of intimate commentary on what
is visibly happening and at a palpable distance from it” (AL 266). Similarly,
with Ray’s Hinoki, after at first seeking an “almost photo-realistically accu-
rate finish,” the completed piece was left in “a less regimented, more diversi-
fied state, with deep and shallow gouges, cuts, chisel marks, drill holes, and
even numerous bits of wood shaving left in place” (FHO 97). Finally, with
Marioni’s paintings, the “interplay” or “aesthetic harmony” between the
physicality of the support and the materiality of the pigment allows us to
recognize the “separateness of the elements or, say, the composite nature of
the painting as a whole” (JM 149). In each case we have at once materiality
and the remarking of that materiality from somewhere else, the equivalence
of theatricality and absorption, literal and depicted, and the impossibility of
stating this equivalence. It is perhaps this circularity itself and not any final
defeating or overcoming of the theatrical by absorption or the literal by the
depicted that Fried wants from the work he argues for.
Going back to the origins of this concern with intention or intentional-
ity in art, at least for Fried, we might think of Cavell’s “Must We Mean
What We Say?” from his eponymous collection of essays. In that essay,
Cavell engages in a critique of the American philosopher Benson Mates to
148 Rex Butler
elaborate a theory of how language conveys meaning. Although it is not
directly remarked upon in the essay, what Cavell is working out or working
toward is the question of Wittgensteinian rules or criteria. It is not any set
of objective and unchanging “rules” that defines the meaning of a word, but
its various “uses,” based on the possibility of creating a mutual understand-
ing with another. It would be a “diagnosis”11 of the skepticism that usually
reigns that would be judged by nothing other than the holding of the two
parties together so that they might continue to work to overcome any mis-
understanding between them. They might “objectively” be misunderstand-
ing each other, but they can nevertheless think that they are understanding
each other. That is to say, what is at stake is their understanding of what
they take to be the intention of the other, which insofar as there are no final
criteria means that they could always be misunderstanding each other. But,
of course, it is just this remarking of skepticism and misunderstanding—or
the ability to do so—that not only leads to the possibility of its overcoming
but already is its overcoming. That is, in Cavell there is the same simultane-
ity of historical progression and circularity as we find in Fried.
And perhaps to pick up on the other, Austinian side of Cavell’s argument,
this is a situation in which the possibility of meaning (and reciprocally of
the failure to mean) is at stake. Henceforth—we would want to say without
any actual meaning or at least at the same time as any such meaning—
there would be not only some particular meaning but also the intention
to mean. All of this, to use Austin’s language, would be a matter not of
description but of prescription. That is to say, after a certain assumption
of intention, there arises at once meaning and non-meaning, or rather the
failure to (correctly) mean. These two possibilities are necessarily circular,
able to be stated only in terms of each other, but what needs to be explained
is how this circularity arises. And this is the brilliance of Cavell’s fusion of
Wittgenstein with Austin, for if the great insight of Wittgenstein is that there
is no final resolution of the criteria for meaningfulness but only a certain
intention to mean (indeed, a remarking of the failure to mean), it is Austin
who allows us to think of the sudden arising of this situation in which we
can sense this intention to mean on the part of the other and therefore the
failure to mean, or even the impossibility of knowing for sure what the
other means, which keeps us searching for meaning. We can only grasp this
Austinian “prescription” in terms of Wittgensteinian “uses,” as though it is
already meaningful, as though there is already an intention to mean, but this
itself is only the effect of a certain Austinian assumption of meaning not yet
based on any empirical evidence.
Of course, what Cavell is speaking of here with regard to meaning is what
is otherwise called the symbolic order. And the point we want to make is
that, like any other symbolic order (for example, the self-referential system
of language), there is nothing before or outside of it—or, more precisely,
this before or outside, on the basis of which it is set up and which it is
understood to be the solution to or resolution of, is possible only because
of it, arises only as a retrospective effect of it. This is ultimately Cavell’s
point concerning those “categorical declaratives”12 underlying the system
of description: that we are not only within an order of intention, but that
even non-intention is only to be understood as another form of intention.
Precisely the effect of suddenly entering the order of intentionality—Cavell’s
Austinian point—is both that non-intention is effectively an intention (we
are always able to see an intention, even in what is apparently unintended)
and intention must appear as a non-intention (there is no “objective” inten-
tion, and we can never finally determine another’s intention). In other
words, we are never entirely within intention—there is never any finally
determined meaning or intention behind our words or actions—and we are
never entirely outside of intention—non-intention can always be read as
intention, and there is always another possible intention.
This is another reason why we might speak of “meta-intention” with
regard to Fried’s arguments about Demand, Ray, and Marioni. It is to sug-
gest that intention is never to be seen directly, but only either as an appar-
ent non-intention or as the remarking of non-intention. Or more exactly,
it is not ultimately any particular intention but rather a whole regime of
intentionality that is at stake here (see AL 311–12n). That is to say, the
introduction of the symbolic order has the consequence not only, follow-
ing Wittgenstein, that the particular failure to mean is merely the occasion
for an ongoing negotiation, but that the very lack of meaning, following
Austin, can itself only be read as a meaning, as the attempt to hide some
other meaning. And it is perhaps this that ultimately constitutes Fried’s real
objection to minimalism. In his analysis of Tony Smith’s driving down the
New Jersey Turnpike, it is not so much its particular failure to mean or even
its general meaninglessness that Fried objects to as the refusal to understand
this as a failure to mean or a lack of meaning. It is precisely that it is pre-
symbolic, which is what Fried means by it not being art or subject to the
“cut” or “framing” of art: “There was, he [Smith] seems to have felt, no
way to ‘frame’ his experience on the road, no way to make sense of it in
terms of art, or make art of it, as least as art then was. Rather, ‘you just have
to experience it’—as it happens, as it merely is” (AO 158). And by contrast
we might therefore understand what Fried is arguing for—against him but
also with him—as not so much the victory of absorption over theatricality
or the intended over the unintended as the very inseparability or circularity
of these two.
This is why, to conclude, like Cavell’s problem of skepticism, Fried’s system
of absorption and theatricality is not fundamentally historical and descrip-
tive but symbolic and prescriptive. The modernism it constitutes establishes
a complete break with what comes before it, or this before or outside (this
is the real logic of Fried’s book on Caravaggio which notionally deals with
a period before the anti-Rococo rebellion of Absorption and Theatricality)
is now thinkable only because of it. Theatricality is possible only because of
absorption. But absorption is only prompted by theatricality. This is what
150 Rex Butler
we have seen in the works of art we have been looking at here: they take up,
repeat, and record what appears to be unintentional—an accident, nature,
the purely physical—not so much to show that they are intended as to show
that their very unintendedness is possible only because it is intended. And
all of this just as intentionality must look unintended (the other, “absorp-
tive” side of Fried’s argument). After Fried, everything is suddenly different:
things are no longer what they appear to be but hide that intention that
makes them possible, just as intentionality must always appear unintended.
There is a kind of doubling of what is, as though the world needs to be
explained from another place or for another reason. It is a transcendental
(perhaps even theological) and not historical strategy: to think of the condi-
tion of possibility of things, which can never be definitively stated because
it is also what allows us to think it. It is rather like Cavell’s question: “Must
we mean what we say?”, in which the meaning would lie not in any particu-
lar answer but in the very possibility of asking the question.
Notes
1 Cited in Yve-Alain Bois, “Strzemiński and Kobro: In Search of Motivation,” in
Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 146.
2 Bois, “Strzemiński and Kobro,” 139–41.
3 Wladyslaw Strzemiński, “Unism in Painting,” cited in Bois, “Strzemiński and
Kobro,” 137.
4 Bois, “Strzemiński and Kobro,” 151.
5 Bois, “Strzemiński and Kobro,” 151.
6 Yve-Alain Bois, “Ryman’s Tact,” in Painting as Model, 224.
7 See Edward Colless, “The Imaginary Hypermannerist,” in The Error of My
Ways: Selected Writing 1981–1994 (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1995),
69–70.
8 Quoted in Ingrid Goetz, “Written Interview with Joseph Marioni,” in Mono-
chromie Geometrie (Munich: Sammlung Goetz, 1996), 66.
9 Henry Staten, “Joseph Marioni: Painting Beyond Narrative [Joseph Marioni:
Malerei jenseits von Narrativität],” Kunstforum International (88, March–
April, 1987), 184.
10 Walter Benn Michaels, “Photographs and Fossils,” in Photography Theory, ed.
James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 438.
11 Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We
Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 250.
12 Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We
Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31.
10 On the (So-Called) Problem
of Detail
Michael Fried, Roland Barthes,
and Roger Scruton on Photography
and Intentionality
Diarmuid Costello
The photographer . . . who aims for an aesthetically significant representa-

tion must also aim to control detail; “detail” being here understood in the
wide sense of “any observable fact or feature.” But here lies a fresh difficulty.
The causal process of which the photographer is a victim puts almost every
detail outside of his control. Even if he does, say, intentionally arrange each
fold of his subject’s dress and meticulously construct, as studio photogra-
phers once used to do, the appropriate scenario, that would still hardly be
relevant, since there seem to be few ways in which such intentions can be
revealed in the photograph.
—Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation”
There is no detail in photography.

—Jeff Wall at the National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne, January 13, 2015
1. The Problem: Scruton, Barthes, and Fried

on Detail in Photography1
As anyone reading a volume devoted to Michael Fried and philosophy will
know, Roger Scruton is not—to put it weakly—the kind of philosopher with
whom Fried would typically be associated. Even setting broader questions
of philosophical orientation, tradition, and temperament aside, and focus-
ing solely on their respective claims about photography, Scruton is pho-
tography’s arch aesthetic skeptic, Fried the leading champion of its newly
elevated artistic status and centrality.
Scruton’s skepticism regarding photography’s status as a “representational
art,” where this requires the fully articulated expression of thoughts about
what is depicted, pivots on his claim that the mechanics of photographic
image-generation restrict photographers’ ability to control detail through-
out the image. Because automatically captured images do not admit of non-
systematic selection—that is, selection according to parameters subjectively
determined by the agent, rather than engineered into the apparatus, film
stock, or software—one can never be certain what to attribute significance
152 Diarmuid Costello
to in the resulting image. Much of what appears may only do so because
it was in the shot alongside the intended subject, and this undermines our
confidence about what the photographer intended to communicate. Should
we take everything in the image as relevant to its intended meaning? What
about the out of focus shrubbery in the background, the stones along the
roadside, faint signs of wear on the furniture, or grime on a shirt cuff? The
photograph itself does not tell us whether the photographer even noticed
them, or so the standard story goes. This has been a recurrent worry in
reflection on photography.2
Lee Friedlander put it this way:
I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear
day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry, and
Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous
begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the drive-
way and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.3
As often as photography has been criticized, down the years, by conserva-

tive critics such as Elizabeth Eastlake and Scruton for putting such minu-
tiae beyond the reach of photographers, however, it has been celebrated
for just the same reason. Thus Oliver Wendell Holmes, a contemporary of
Eastlake’s:
This distinctness of the lesser details of a building or a landscape often

gives us incidental truths which interest us more than the central object
of the picture . . . The very things which an artist would leave out, or
render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with.4
Or take Fried himself:
Barthes’s observation . . . that the detail that strikes him as a punctum

could not do so had it been intended as such by the photographer is an
anti-theatrical claim in that it implies a fundamental distinction, which
goes back to Diderot, between “seeing” and “being shown.” The punc-
tum, one might say, is seen by Barthes, but not because it has been shown
to him by the photographer, for whom it does not exist; as Barthes rec-
ognizes, “it occurs [only] in the field of the photographed thing,” which
is to say that it is a pure artefact of the photographic event—“[the pho-
tographer] could not not photograph the partial object at the same time
as the total object” is how Barthes phrases it.
(WPM 100)
I shall come back to the stakes of this claim for Fried. But note here that
all parties to this debate agree, more or less, in their underlying conceptions
of photography; where they disagree is in the conclusions they draw for its
On the (So-Called) Problem of Detail 153
standing as art. The significance they attach to the fact that photographs
routinely include much that was not intended by the photographer is a
case in point: what strikes a photographer like Friedlander as the medium’s
“generosity” may strike a critic like Scruton, hyperbolically, as making the
photographer a “victim” of her own process, but the understanding of pho-
tography underlying these evaluations is the same. Note, for example, that
Barthes and Scruton agree on this score: there is much in the photograph
that the photographer cannot control, so could not have intended. So much
the better, according to Barthes, so much the worse according to Scruton;
for Fried, it turns out, it is rather harder to say.
Call this the “Orthodox” conception of photography. Underlying different
emphases, it is the view that photography is at bottom an automatic process
in which a mechanical apparatus, rather than a human being, is responsible
for the projection of a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional,
light sensitive surface that records momentary states of that scene accord-
ing to a set of agent-independent protocols. “Agent independent” not in
the sense that photography reduces to a set of natural processes—as call-
ing photography a “discovery” rather than an “invention” implies—since
human designers determine the parameters according to which cameras,
lenses, film stocks, and computer algorithms operate; but in the sense that
once initiated the process of image-generation takes place independently of
the photographer. Call this the “encapsulation thesis”: photographers can
determine input, and they may subject what is output to various forms of
manipulation, but the informational channel from input to output is imper-
vious to human intervention. Note that this applies, mutatis mutandis, to
digital post-production: one must first have the outputs to go to work on.
Because the mechanics of photographic image-formation bypass the fal-
lible mental states of human beings, it is not susceptible to false beliefs,
non-systematically selective attention, subjective preferences, negligence,
or other forms of unreliability, epistemic or otherwise. The upshot is that
photography delivers images that depend causally and counterfactually on
what was before the camera during the moment of exposure. This, taken in
conjunction with the laws of optics and chemistry, and how the variables
of camera and image-processing are set, causes the photograph to look the
way it does, and, assuming all are held constant, had what was before the
camera at the moment of exposure been different, the image would have
differed accordingly.
This set of assumptions is implicated by the writings of Scruton, Fried,
and Barthes alike. For Scruton, the upshot is that while we can take an
aesthetic interest in the objects or scene that the photograph makes per-
ceptually available, we cannot take an aesthetic interest in the photograph
as a representation of those objects or scene. For the photograph is not an
expression of the artist’s thoughts or feelings about those objects or scene,
which we might take as an object of aesthetic appreciation; it is a record
of how that scene looked under certain conditions. Rather than being a
window onto the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, or intentions of the photog-
rapher, the photograph is a window onto the world it makes perceptually
available. To this way of thinking, when we take what we believe is an aes-
thetic interest in a photograph, we unwittingly treat it as a surrogate for the
objects or scene it makes available.
This set of claims is manifestly false, but my goal is not to demonstrate
this here; it is to point out how naturally they fall out of the standard way of
conceiving photography.5 Though Fried is rightly critical of Scruton’s views
about the possibility of photographic art, he actually shares the concep-
tion of photography that motivates them. This is hardly a claim that Fried
himself would endorse, of course, but that may be because the conception
I have in mind is so pervasive, and so basic, as to seem more a statement of
the obvious than anything amounting to a “theory” properly so-called; yet
it nonetheless entails a set of commitments about the nature of photography
that can be traced all the way back to photography’s pioneers. Indeed, that
it can may explain its air of self-evidence; it all but grounds contemporary
folk theory of photography.6 That he shares these underlying assumptions
may explain why, for example, Fried is exercised by a similar set of concerns
about photographic detail, notably the opacity to intention that photogra-
phers’ inability to fully control it is taken to occasion—even if he draws
quite different conclusions to Scruton:
As Friedlander’s remarks suggest, [John] Berger’s “weakness in inten-

tionality” is correlative with an extraordinary copiousness built into
the technology (the photographer in this view always gets more than
he or she bargained for), a feature of the medium that it has been the
genius of certain photographers, Friedlander among them, to exploit
to the full. (So, whatever “weakness in intentionality” means, it does
not preclude photography being the vehicle of the strongest imaginable
intentions on the part of gifted photographers. At the same time, it is
precisely that feature of the ontology of the photograph that under-
writes Barthes’s notion of the punctum.)
(WPM 272)
Such concerns only arise if one believes the standard story about photo-
graphs coming into being is basically correct. Berger’s “weak intentionality”
thesis, for example, is the contention that photographs originate in a “single
constitutive decision” on the part of photographers as to when to capture
an image.7 That this is the extent of the photographer’s control over the
image is as clear an expression of Orthodoxy as one might hope for. Fried
effectively grants this thesis, with respect to the determination of detail,
and in this he concurs with Scruton. Unlike Scruton, he does not take this
to preclude using photography to convey “the strongest imaginable inten-
tions.”8 Indeed, it is something that talented photographers exploit. This
pattern of granting the basic assumptions of Orthodoxy, while contesting
the anti-aesthetic conclusions often—though by no means universally—
taken to follow from them, permeates Fried’s work on photography.9 Locat-
ing Fried’s settled position on the significance of intention for photography
is nonetheless no simple matter, as his references to Barthes’s punctum, once
set alongside his reading of Thomas Demand, bring out.
2. An “Ontological Guarantee” of Non-Theatricality:

Fried’s Barthes
Fried reads what is at stake in Camera Lucida—its “central thought” (WPM
95), whether Barthes was aware of it or not—as consonant with the animus
of the anti-theatrical tradition that it has been one of the major goals of
his own art historical work to trace from Denis Diderot and eighteenth-
century French painting through to its crisis in Édouard Manet’s canvases
of the 1860s. Until its dramatic recasting in Manet, the central problem
facing painters in this tradition, according to Fried, was how to secure the
complete attention of their viewers before the work. Painters sought to do
this by “neutraliz[ing] the primordial convention that paintings are made to
be beheld” (AT 93).10 This was to be achieved by means of their pictures’
internal drama, specifically their depicted figures’ intense absorption in the
fictional world of the painting, rather than any hint of self-conscious pos-
ing, staginess, or projection toward their viewers in the non-fictional world
before the work. Only by refusing to pander to the anticipated presence of
their works’ viewers in this way could painters succeed in arresting those
same viewers before the drama unfolding in their paintings.
It is important to grasp that what counts (honorifically) as “dramatic”
rather than (pejoratively) as “theatrical” on this narrative is a thoroughly
historical variable, changing constantly in response to work of the recent
past and its reception. This is why Fried calls anti-theatricality a “structure
of artistic intention” on the part of artists and a counterpart “structure of
demand, expectation, and reception” (IMAC 50) on the part of their audi-
ence, rather than a set of determinant properties that works do or do not
possess once and for all. Whether a work is seen as one or the other can
change over time, sometimes quite rapidly, in part as the result of changing
artistic, social, and cultural sensibilities.
Fried’s interpretation of Camera Lucida should be read in this light. It
seeks to draw out those aspects of Barthes’s final book that Fried takes to be
consonant with his own anti-theatrical commitments. For Fried, the pivotal
claim comes in §20:
Certain details may “prick” me. If they do not, it is doubtless because

the photographer has put them there intentionally. [T]he detail which
interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and proba-
bly must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing
like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not
necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photog-
rapher was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not pho-
tograph the partial object at the same time as the total object . . . The
Photographer’s “second sight” does not consist in “seeing” but in being
there. Above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at
what he is leading—what he is giving to me!11
Fried takes the presence of a punctum, so understood, to function as

“a kind of ontological guarantee” (WPM 102) of a photograph’s non-
theatricality for Barthes. Unlike the studium, which operates at the level
of intention and instruction, and circulates as part of a broader production
of cultural knowledge, the punctum, in Fried’s formulation, is “seen but
not shown” (WPM 100). As such, it cannot be a performance on the part
of either the photographer or her subject: the latter is not performing, self-
consciously, for the camera; the former is not performing for the viewer.
The punctum is also not something sought out by a viewer, but that “ele-
ment which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces
me.”12 Barthes offers a bewildering variety of terms to characterize this
peculiar, disorienting detail: it is a prick, a mark, a puncture, a point, a
wound, a sting, a speck, a cut, a little hole, a tiny shock or detonation,
a disturbance, or series of such—a photograph may even be “speckled”
with multiple such sensitive points—before concluding: “A photograph’s
punctum is that accident, which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant
to me).”13 To understand a photograph’s studium, by contrast, is “inevi-
tably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony
with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand
them.”14 It is the non-intentional quality of the punctum, one that disturbs
the otherwise placid, cultural, and intentional expanse of the studium, that
fascinates Fried.
In stressing the punctum’s non-intentional nature, Fried plays down both
its affective dimension and its personal significance for Barthes himself, this
being the canonical reading of Camera Lucida against which he pitches his
own. I suspect that this is the aspect of Fried’s reading that is likely to strike
some readers as more than a little motivated, given the explicitly subjective
framework of Camera Lucida, and the highly idiosyncratic associations that
Barthes adduces to several of his key examples. Barthes’s responses to André
Kertész’s The Violinist’s Tune. Abony, Hungary (1921) and James van der
Zee’s The Family Portrait (1926), for example, pivot on triggering recol-
lections of his youthful travels in Hungary and Romania, and memories
of a sad “maiden aunt,” respectively; memories called up by the dirt road
on which the blind violinist walks in the former, and the thin braided gold
necklace worn by one of the sitters in the latter.15
In the teeth of these responses, which arguably reveal more about Barthes
than the photographs that occasion them, Fried singles out the punctum’s
non-intentional nature—the fact that it gets into the photograph despite
the photographer—as what does the heavy lifting in Barthes’s account. But
one may wonder, especially in light of some of Barthes’s more gnomic pro-
nouncements, whether the punctum is really “in” the photograph at all.
“I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am look-
ing at,” Barthes claims, before concluding: “Ultimately—or at the limit—
in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your
eyes.”16 Modifying Fried, one might say that the punctum is “felt rather
than shown”; perhaps even that it is not the kind of thing that could be
shown, because not in candidacy to be seen. But if is not to be seen, and
not in the photograph, what and where is it? The punctum, if it may be
said to reside anywhere, seems to reside in the affective response triggered
in a particular viewer by some incidental detail in a photograph. Indeed
the punctum appears to pick out the event of being bruised or cut by such
a detail. Or rather, Barthes sometimes frames it in these terms—“this ele-
ment which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces
me”—only to go on to characterize it, as if interchangeably, as an object:
“A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made
by a pointed instrument.”17 So understood, “punctum” sometimes picks
out a causal relation—what the photograph does to me—and at other times
the wound or cut I suffer as a result. In neither case, however, is it simply a
feature of the photograph.
But the innocuous detail that affects one viewer in this way need not
affect other viewers in the same way. In the unlikely event that it does, this
cannot be for the same reasons, unless—per impossibile—those viewers also
share both their histories and a disposition to respond to those histories in
the same way. But how many of us can claim sad maiden aunts with slender
gold chains or to have traveled the dirt roads of Mitteleuropa in our impres-
sionable youths, not to mention Barthes’s disposition to respond to both in
certain characteristic ways? The punctum, as Barthes describes it in Part I of
Camera Lucida, clearly implicates the associations that particular viewers
bring to particular photographs: “Last thing about the punctum: whether
or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and
what is nonetheless already there.”18 Thus, of Lewis Hine’s Idiot Children
in an Institution, New Jersey (1924), Barthes observes: “[W]hat I add—
and what, of course is already in the image—is the collar, the bandage.”19
Barthes does not literally add them, of course; what he adds is their signifi-
cance, their intense meaningfulness to him personally.
That it is in the nature of such associations, being private, to be beyond
the reach of the photographer, however, has no implications for whether the
detail in the photograph that triggers them is or is not intended. That my
associations to something in a photograph cannot be intentionally targeted
(unless known in advance) does not entail that the detail itself cannot be.
For how can we know that the photographer did not try out (could not
have tried out) various necklaces, belts, or pumps before settling on the
combination that best suited his purposes? We cannot know this. What we
can know is that the photographer could not have intended Barthes’s, or
anyone else’s, private associations, given their highly personal nature and
the fact that in many cases the origin of those associations will post-date the
photographer’s own death. But whether a given piece of jewelry or clothing
has such an effect is a psychological fact about the viewer, and his or her
personal history; it is not a fact (certainly not a necessary fact) about what
the photographer did or did not intend.20
For this reason, the presence of a punctum cannot function as the kind of
“ontological”—which I take, in this context, to mean “cast iron”—guaran-
tee that Fried takes Barthes to be after. From the fact that a photograph has
a punctum for me, I cannot infer that the detail that triggers it must have
been unintended; all I can infer (assuming I am unknown to the photogra-
pher) is that the photographer did not intend whatever it is to trigger this
reaction in me. Conversely, from the fact that a photograph has no punctum
for me, I cannot infer that everything in it must have been intended; all I can
infer is that there is nothing in it, intended or otherwise, given my history
and disposition to respond in certain ways, to so affect me.
Everything that I have said so far assumes that Fried gets Barthes basi-
cally right on the question of intention. But what if he does not? Those who
find Fried’s reading motivated, in downplaying Barthes’s own stress on sub-
jective experience in favor of the non-theatrical because unintended detail,
will think that he is hardening up Barthes’s claims in the service of his own
project. And this is true. What Barthes says in §20 is typically weaker than
the more trenchant views that Fried attributes to him. Thus Fried stresses
Barthes’s opening remark: “certain details may ‘prick’ me. If they do not it
is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally.”
But Barthes himself continues: “the detail that interests me is not, or at least
is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so . . . it does not nec-
essarily attest to the photographer’s art” (my italics). This is considerably
more hedged with qualifications than Fried’s interpretation would suggest,
and correspondingly more defensible. But this is hardly news; it is a stan-
dard trope of strong reading.
An alternative response is offered by Walter Benn Michaels, who grants
Fried’s interpretation, but takes the remarks he alights upon as pointing
to a quite different conclusion to the one that Fried himself draws. For
Michaels, Barthes’s commitment to subjective experience—such that what a
photograph means to you need have no bearing upon what (if anything) it
means to me or, indeed, whatever it may have been intended to mean by the
photographer—should be regarded as of a piece with the literalist stress on
subjective experience to which Fried is otherwise so opposed. If a literalist
work is structurally incomplete without the participation of its animating
subject, to the extent that the “participant viewer” is not only a component
of the work, but the work can be said to reduce to the experience it elicits
in a given subject, then it becomes hard not to read Barthes’s valorization
of the punctum as an expression of a literalist sensibility.21 For on Barthes’s
account, a moving photograph is not merely incomplete but inert without a
particular viewer’s response to bring it to life.22 Barthes’s consignment of the
entire realm of intention, otherwise so valorized by Fried, to the preserve of
studium makes it hard to see Barthes—champion of the reader’s birth from
the ashes of the author’s death—and Fried as fellow travelers in any obvious
sense. By bracketing the photographer’s intentions in favor of the viewer’s
response, Barthes seems to identify what is valuable in photography, as he
understands it, with what is meretricious in minimalism, as Fried under-
stands it.23 It is not clear what we should make of this, but Fried’s reading
of Demand’s photographs as “images of sheer authorial intention” sheds an
interesting sidelight on these issues.
3. “Allegories of Intendedness as Such:” Fried’s Demand

As is well known, Demand makes his images by photographing models
and sets that he and his assistants construct from paper and card. These
constructions are typically based on images derived from newspapers and
magazines of seemingly anodyne or undistinguished looking places. Though
sometimes referred to as “crime scenes” they are as often places in which
events of some social, political, or historical importance have taken place:
the tiny kitchen in Tikrit used by Saddam Hussein while hiding from US
Armed Forces; the Emergency Operations Center in Palm Beach, Florida,
in which the infamous “hanging chads” from the Al Gore versus George
W. Bush election were examined; the aftermath of Claus von Stauffenberg’s
failed bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944; the looted offices of the Stasi
following the collapse of the GDR; the corridor of the Milwaukee apart-
ment block in which the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer committed
his crimes; and so on.
From such socially or politically charged scenes Demand makes images
that seem almost pointedly cold and lifeless. Barthes would no doubt have
hated them—no punctum, and certainly no “blind field,” or so it would
seem. The question Fried poses is simple, but fundamental: why? Why go
to so much trouble to produce images that not only purge their referents
of most of their identifying features, but remove all signs of everyday wear
and tear, and more general historical accretions, that might distinguish them
from other such objects and scenes? For the upshot is images that, in at least
one respect, resemble one another more than they do the scenes from which
they derive—for whatever is rendered, it is rendered in the same anodyne
fashion.
The answer Fried gives eschews any reference to the deadening effect of
mediated images on our lives, or our engagement with politics and history,
and instead situates Demand’s way of making photographs as a refutation
of standard worries about photography’s “weak intentionality.”24 Accord-
ing to Fried, Demand addresses the standard worry head on, by assum-
ing responsibility for everything that appears in his images. There is no
possibility of a punctum in such images, as Fried reads Barthes, because
there is no room for the unintended detail: after all, if Demand or his assis-
tants had not made and positioned whatever it is just so, it could not have
shown up in the image in the way that it does. The upshot is images that
express a commitment to the very idea of intendedness: “Demand’s aim is
not to make a wholly intended object [Fried is thinking of the control that
digital technologies are widely believed to afford], but rather to make pic-
tures that represent or indeed allegorize intendedness as such, and this turns
out to require exploiting the ‘weakness’ of the traditional photographic
image precisely in that regard” (WPM 272).
Demand does this by leveraging our knowledge that his images are
straightforward documents of what was before the camera at the moment of
exposure—as all photographs must be on the Orthodox account. As such,
his images are bound to record, impartially and non-selectively, whatever
was in frame at the moment of exposure. But given that they can thereby
record only what Demand and his assistants are responsible for, they remain
monuments to Demand’s intentions nonetheless. The imperviousness of
such images to unintended details of the kind that are “seen but not shown”
could hardly be clearer. Fried’s reasoning fully accords with that of Barthes
and Scruton here: Demand may succeed where Scruton claims photography
must fail, but it is only because photography does indeed suffer—or so at
least it is thought—from the problem that Scruton identifies that a demon-
stration such as Demand’s has bite. Demand’s practice, as Michaels notes,
would make little sense in painting; that painting is intentional is not exactly
news.25 Similarly, it is only because photography is widely believed to suffer
such an intentional deficit that—anomalous practices like Demand’s aside—
the punctum remains a standing possibility. That Fried shares these widely
held beliefs about photography goes some way to explaining why he reads
Demand’s images as he does. If he did not, there would be less to get excited
about in such a demonstration:
Simply put, [Demand] aims above all to replace the original scene of
evidentiary traces and marks of human use—the historical world in
all its layeredness and compositeness—with images of sheer authorial
intention, although the very bizarreness of the fact that the scenes and
objects of the photographs, despite their initial appearance of quotidian
“reality,” have all been constructed by the artist throws into conceptual
relief the determining force (also the inscrutability, one might almost
say the opacity) of the intention behind it . . .
[P]erhaps the best that can be said is that Demand seeks to make pic-
tures that thematize or indeed allegorize intendedness as such.26
This curious dialectic between allegorizing intention as such and thereby

rendering the artist’s actual intentions—I take this to refer to Demand’s rea-
sons for allegorizing intention as such, or what he might mean by doing
so—opaque or inscrutable strikes me as the most intriguing aspect of this
reading. Those familiar with Fried’s early criticism cannot but hear an echo
of his celebration of Anthony Caro here: “It is as though Caro’s sculptures
essentialize meaningfulness as such—as though the possibility of meaning
what we say and do alone makes his sculpture possible” (AO 162). “Essen-
tializing meaningfulness as such”—that is, not projecting this or that par-
ticular meaning, but an understanding of what it is to be capable of meaning
at all—is clearly a close cousin of “allegorizing intendedness as such.” Both
involve not so much a particular act of intending or meaning, as foreground-
ing what is distinctively human about the capacity for intending or meaning
(our lives, actions, or utterances) at all.27 This commonality is hardly coinci-
dental. For both are pitched in Fried’s mind against the literalist disavowal
of final responsibility for their work’s meaning, and its theatrical projection
toward the anticipated spectator required to complete it instead.
Though Demand’s practice seems, at least morphologically, a much less
obvious candidate to counter-pose to minimalism than Caro’s, focusing nar-
rowly on morphology would be to miss Fried’s point. Fried’s account of the
contrast between taking responsibility for a work’s internal relations, by
fully intending them to be as they are, rather than any other way, versus a
situation in which “although conditioned in a general way by the circum-
stances of exhibition,” the relationships set up between work and beholder
on any given occasion are understood as “emphatically not determined by
the work itself, and therefore as not intended as such by its maker” (WPM
270–1), suggests it is more a matter of the respective practices’ attitude or
spirit. Literalists such as Carl Andre and Robert Morris, according to Fried,
were masters at creating theatrical installations to be completed by their
anticipated viewers’ passage through them. But while the meta-intentions
animating their installations may have been clear, the meaning of individual
works within them was left open to viewers to determine.
But consider Demand’s images again in this light. Demand’s practice of
photographically documenting paper and card reconstructions of existing
photographs may express a strong commitment to artistic intentionality for
all the reasons Fried gives, but what about the meaning of individual works?
The works themselves seem to be reduced to ciphers for the meta-intention
animating the project as a whole on this account. While the corpus emerges
as something expressing a clear artistic purpose, the meaning of individual
works within it remains blank: cold, alienating, inscrutable, opaque. Isn’t
something very similar true of minimalism? From Fried’s perspective, one
wonders why such opacity of meaning, at the level of the individual work,
does not raise the worry that it invites viewers to project their own, subjec-
tive interpretations—whatever these may be—upon it.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that the meaning of Demand’s images
can—or should—be reduced to whatever subjective associations they
happen to trigger in the individual viewer, in the way that the punctum
clearly does on Barthes’s account; but, rather, that what Demand means by
showing us (say) a pared down view of the hallway outside Jeffrey Dahmer’s
apartment, or a depopulated view of the aftermath of the failed Valkyrie
bomb plot against Hitler, remains opaque. Are we supposed to take the
two images—produced according to the same general intention, if Fried is
right—as on a par? Are we being invited to view, say, Dahmer’s crimes as
somehow comparable to a failed bomb plot that might have ended the war
a year earlier and, if so, according to what possible reasoning? We are left
none the wiser as to what individual works might mean, however strong a
case Fried makes for the intentions underlying the project as whole. That is,
the ways it might matter that Demand chose this image rather than that to
reconstruct, of this event rather than that, and, perhaps especially, why he
made these rather than any other editorial decisions in their transcriptions.28
This seems to align Demand’s practice with minimalism, rather than vice
versa. If what we are to make of specific images remains this indeterminate,
it is hard to see Demand’s practice as “fundamentally, not to say hyper-
bolically, opposed to the literalist attitude.”29 For the minimalists, by Fried’s
own account, had just as strong a general intention—to create a theatrical
mise-en-scène to be activated by the viewer’s presence—while leaving it up
to viewers to decide what to make of the works themselves.
A common elision may underlie this result: Fried’s reading reduces the
meaning of Demand’s works to that of the intention animating the proj-
ect as a whole. The sticking point may be an ambiguity in the notion of
intentionality itself, especially as used in debates about art. Scruton makes
essentially the same reduction, albeit in the course of underplaying, rather
than celebrating, the role of intentionality in photography. When Scruton
claims that the causal basis of photography precludes intentionality, he con-
ceives it in such a way as to rule out both expressing a thought about or
attitude toward what is depicted by means of the way it is depicted (the
possibility that photographs have meanings or that photographers can use
them to express meanings) and photographs themselves being products of
intentional action (the possibility that photography as an activity could be
fully agential). But these are distinct in ways that Scruton’s account fails to
acknowledge. Expressing a thought or attitude is often intentional, but need
not be: a Royal portrait may betray an attitude toward the sitter (“power
corrupts”)—this would be part of the work’s meaning—that the court artist
might not be aware of holding, and certainly does not intend to express if
she is. And there are a great many intentional actions, such as tying one’s
shoes or cutting one’s food, that need not express any attitude toward a
mental content. Fried’s reading of Demand makes the same reduction. It
reduces the question of what individual images mean to the question of
what Demand intends by making images in this way, thereby rendering the
former opaque:
[T]he primacy of experience . . . meant that meaning in literalism was

essentially indeterminate, every subject’s necessarily unique response to
a given work-in-a-situation standing on an equal footing with every
other’s. Viewed against this background, Demand’s project . . . comes
into intellectual focus . . . [H]e aims above all to replace the original
scene of evidentiary traces and marks of human use . . . with images of
sheer authorial intention.30
Fried views Demand’s stress on intention as a response to what he per-

ceives as the minimalists’ failure to take responsibility for their work’s
meaning. My point is that not only can these not be identified (since they
often come apart) but that Demand’s emphasis on intention over meaning,
notably the ways in which the former seems to come at the cost of the latter,
if Fried is right, might instead be regarded as consistent with minimalism.
Certainly, nothing in Fried’s interpretation rules this out.
4. The Original Problem Reconsidered

I want to conclude by noting a basic tension between Fried’s reading of
Barthes and Demand, before considering what might explain it. Recall that,
according to Fried, Barthes wants the punctum to function as “ontologi-
cal guarantee” of a photograph’s non-theatricality, because it pertains to
a marginal detail that could not have been intended. The modal nature of
this claim is key: it is because this detail cannot have been intended that the
punctum is even in candidacy to serve as a guarantee of this kind. But the
claim in this modal form is false: we cannot know that the detail was not
intended; all we can know is that the associations that a given detail may
or may not provoke in a given viewer, being private, could not have been
intended. And this seems, as Michaels notes, to align Barthes with, rather
than against, literalism.
On Fried’s reading of Demand, by contrast, it is the fact that everything
in the photograph is only there because the photographer put it there, the
fact that his images are fully intended, that is supposed to resist the threat
of theatricality. By constructing his “allegories of intendedness” from the
ground up, Demand forecloses the possibility exploited by literalism that
each viewer might make what they will of his images. I have argued that
much in Fried’s own reading suggests the opposite; as Fried reads Demand,
the meta-intention animating the project as a whole is clear, but what any
specific image within it might mean is rendered curiously opaque. In effect,
intention comes at the cost of meaning.
So much for my criticisms: set aside the question of whether either is on
target and return to Fried’s claims. Taken at face value, they certainly seem
to be contradictory: on the one hand, we have the non-theatrical as what
cannot have been intended, and on the other, we have the non-theatrical as
what must be fully intended. Can the contradiction be defused? A philoso-
pher’s solution might be: the punctum is sufficient but cannot be necessary to
defeat theatricality, since Demand’s photographs succeed in doing so despite
being bereft of puncta. So having a punctum suffices to rule out theatricality,
but is not required to do so. To take an obvious example: modernist paint-
ing and sculpture resist theatricality on Fried’s account, but not by virtue of
possessing puncta. Although consistent with what Fried says, this does not
help with questions internal to photography; and whatever may be true of
Demand’s practice is unlikely to generalize, given its idiosyncratic nature.
An alternative solution would be to see whether the idea of theatricality
is being used in a number of different ways that do not always align.31 In
Fried’s reading of Barthes, “theatricality” picks out the way in which a pho-
tograph might be thought to perform for, pander to, or be otherwise pro-
jected toward a viewer; if the detail that touches the viewer is not intended
it cannot be such a performance. In his account of Demand, “theatricality”
picks out the way in which a work might be thought to depend on the viewer
for its completion; Demand’s work is anti-theatrical because it does not
leave this open. I have taken issue with each of these claims separately, but
the salient point here is that while these two descriptions of theatricality—
being self-consciously directed toward the viewer, and requiring a viewer for
the work’s completion—do not come to quite the same thing, since some-
thing that is already complete in itself can nonetheless be directed toward
an audience, and something can be incomplete in other ways, without being
so directed, they are clearly consistent. They pick out two ways in which a
work or image might be thought to “wait upon” its viewer.
This is the core of the idea, and while what counts as theatrical may have
changed down the years, as has the term’s relation to others in the Friedian
corpus, this much has been clear from the get go. But therein lies the deeper
problem; for if the idea of theatricality is being used consistently through-
out, how could one and the same relation be defeated both by an image
being unintended and by an image being fully intended? It is hard to see how
both claims could be true.
But could this perception result from not taking Fried’s own account
of the historical vicissitudes of theatricality seriously enough? Given that
Fried stresses the historical nature of what counts as theatricality—take the
contrast between Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Manet—need there be
any contradiction in claiming that this can be achieved in different ways in
Barthes and Demand? This is a serious response, but it nonetheless misiden-
tifies the worry. I am not claiming that there is any conflict in what counts
as theatrical on Fried’s account of Barthes and Demand; indeed my point
arises from acknowledging that there is not. Rather, the tension resides in
how theatricality relates to intentionality. It concerns whether it is coher-
ent to characterize theatricality as both the kind of thing that can only be
defeated intentionally, and the kind of thing that can only be defeated unin-
tentionally. The analogy to Chardin and Manet is thus misplaced; not only
is there no conflict between what counts as theatrical in Fried’s accounts of
Barthes and Demand, but it is questionable whether they are even concerned
with (or engaged in) the same activity. Barthes is interested in vernacular
photographs that are expressly not works of art; Demand makes photo-
graphs in a way that would make no sense outside the artworld. It seems
equally implausible to see Demand as in dialogue with Barthes as it does to
think of Demand as reconfiguring an entire artistic tradition in the way that
Manet’s epochal canvases of the 1860s did.
The conflict with respect to theatricality’s conditions of possibility
remains. My suggestion for defusing it is straightforward: Fried should give
up trying to recruit Barthes for the anti-theatrical cause; that the punctum
is structurally incomplete until activated by a particular viewer required for
its completion could not be clearer. With this the inconsistency dissolves:
Barthes’s celebration of the punctum (though not his account of photogra-
phy per se) is theatrical, because non-unary photographs require particular
viewers for their completion; Demand’s work is not, because it does not put
the same burden on its viewers. If I remain to be persuaded that the latter
claim is in fact true, that amounts to a critical difference with Fried; it has
no implications for the consistency of his theory. There is no doubt more
to say about what specific Demands might mean; it simply remains to be
demonstrated either way.
The tension between Fried’s treatments of Barthes and Demand prompts
an interesting question: could there be a punctum in Demand? Prima facie,
the answer would seem to be no. If everything is intended how could there
be a punctum, when that requires some unintended detail to be seen despite
not being shown? But if, as I have argued, it is only one’s private associa-
tions that cannot be intended, then nothing prevents even images as “satu-
rated” with intention as Demand’s from triggering unexpected responses in
their viewers. Perhaps this seems unlikely, but consider the viewer who, as
a child, spent long summer evenings with her maternal grandfather (now
deceased) building elaborate doll houses from wood and card—ein typisch
deutscher Zeitvertrieb. For such a viewer, certain imperfections—a way of
joining two cardboard facets to create an edge, perhaps indicative of an
unsteady (elderly?) hand, or a youthful haste to finish before being called to
table—may one day trigger associations and memories long since forgotten,
perhaps a whole Proustian armature of gut bürgerliche Küche, the pervasive
aroma of pipe smoke, muffled sounds from the neighborhood Spielplatz.
Perhaps this viewer may one day feel all this “with her whole body” on
coming across some insignificant detail that no one else might notice, let
alone see fit to remark, in a work by Demand.32 Note that, if she does, her
response would have nothing to do with the meaning of the work that trig-
gers it and, in this, it would be no more wide of the mark than Barthes’s
responses to Kertész or Van der Zee in its idiosyncrasies.
But my title refers to the “so-called” problem of detail in photography.
How does all this bear on that problem? Throughout I have noted the
respects in which the three views under consideration implicate what I call
the “Orthodox” conception of photography. It is the associated view of
restricted photographic agency (Berger’s “weakness in intentionality”) that
brings in train the usual worries about photographers being unable to exert
sufficient control of their images, and how far this compromises their stand-
ing as art. This may be most obvious in Scruton, but it is equally true of the
assumptions driving Barthes’s understanding of the punctum, in both its
formulations and Fried’s take on the significance of intention in Barthes and
Demand respectively.
Could Fried’s commitment to this view be responsible for some of the
tensions I have diagnosed here? It is only because Fried and Michaels are
committed to this view, for example, that they see photography as the con-
temporary terrain on which the dialectic between art and objecthood plays
out. In their exchange about the respects in which photographs might be
understood as traces, imprints, or fossils rather than pictures of their refer-
ents proper—the Orthodox view in nuce—Fried remarks: “this basic fea-
ture of photographs can be taken as raising fundamental doubts about their
status as works of art: is not a mechanically produced artefact . . . closer
in essence (closer ontologically) to an object than to any kind of represen-
tation?” (WPM 335–6).33 That is, the mechanical nature of photographic
image-generation pushes its products closer to mere artifactuality, or object-
hood simpliciter. Hence the title of Fried’s book on photography: when the
photographic tableau became a staple of contemporary artistic production,
the need to defeat objecthood became the internal motor animating pho-
tographic art. Because what makes photography photography—according
to the Orthodox account—calls into question its standing as art, it is the
natural site for this showdown today. None of this follows, of course, if
one does not share Fried’s basic modernist outlook, but in that case the
competing claims simply pass one another by. But even from within Fried’s
perspective, these claims would be put in question if any of the assumptions
about the nature of photography underpinning Orthodoxy turned out to be
mistaken.34 And they do.
Perhaps the key respect in which they are mistaken concerns the con-
ditions required for a photograph to come into existence. It is standardly
assumed that a photograph comes into existence when a light sensitive sur-
face is exposed to light. This is why the photographer’s agency is, on this
view, strictly speaking external to what makes a process photographic; it is
not internal to the formation of the image itself. In the typically brief, but
nonetheless decisive, moment in which information from the scene is being
recorded, the photographer’s beliefs, intentions, and desires are irrelevant;
what determines what will show up in the final image is what was in fact
before the camera, in conjunction with lighting, film stock, camera variables,
and so on, applied. But this foundational assumption—as common to folk
theory as it is to Orthodoxy proper—turns out, on inspection, to be false.
In the case of analog photography, exposing the film to light creates a
latent image, but the film needs to be processed before that image becomes
visible. Open the camera back in a misguided attempt to see the image, prior
to processing, and all one will succeed in doing is fogging the film. Moreover,
if the film in question is negative or color reversal, it not only needs to be
processed; it also has to be printed before it can be appreciated by anyone
other than a specialist lab technician—and then only with respect to techni-
cal variables such as exposure, density, saturation, and the like. In the case
of digital photography, exposing the camera’s CCD sensor to light causes
the capacitors that make up its surface to transmit electrical charges; but the
charged or uncharged state of those capacitors not only needs to be recorded
in binary form, the resulting code has to be fed through several stages of soft-
ware processing before it will generate a visible image. This process, though
too quick to be humanly detected, nonetheless comprises distinct stages that
can be distinguished both functionally and conceptually: output the same
code through a different set of algorithms and it need not generate an image
file. Processed differently, the same strings of 0s and 1s could be output as
sound, and this shows there is a distinction to be drawn between the infor-
mation stored and the algorithms required to output that information in
visual form. In neither the analog nor the digital case is a photograph gener-
ated simply by exposing a light sensitive surface to light. More is required.
Why does this matter? It matters, for philosophy and theory of photog-
raphy alike, because it means that the photographer can invest his or her
agency in any of the stages necessary for the production of an image that
can be visually appreciated, and have what he or she thereby does still count
as strictly photographic. Since neither the formation of a light image on a
camera’s film plain or censor nor the recording of a momentary state of that
light image are, even taken together, sufficient to generate a photograph—if
that requires something amenable to visual appreciation—then any subse-
quent stage of image-processing, without which there could be no image,
must be internal to photography stricto sensu. If one cannot generate a pho-
tograph without such means, they can hardly be incidental to photography
proper. Consider standard darkroom practices or digital post-production
in this light; these can, but need not, be automated; indeed for much of
photography’s history neither was. And when they are not—which is to
say, when a photographer chooses to invest his or her agency in the render-
ing stage of the photographic process—then the photographer can exert
as much or as a little—strictly photographic—control over detail as he or
she likes. There is nothing epochal about digital processing in this regard,
for all the millennialism that greeted its widespread uptake by artists some
quarter century ago. In sum: there is, and never has been, any peculiarly
photographic problem of detail. Instead, we might say, a certain picture held
us captive. It seems that at least Jeff Wall agrees.35
Notes
1 I would like to thank Mathew Abbott, Jason Gaiger, Dominic McIver Lopes, and
Stephen Mulhall for their comments on this paper in draft, and the audiences of
the first Frankfurt-Warwick Seminar in Aesthetics (Frankfurt, April 2017) and
the Art, History and Perception workshop (Toronto, May 2017).
2 See, for example, Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography” (1857) in Classic Essays on
Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980),
or Peter Henry Emerson’s retraction of his earlier defense of photography’s
artistic capacities in “The Death of Naturalistic Photography” (1891) in Pho-
tographic Theory: An Historical Anthology, ed. Andrew Hershberger (Oxford:
Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 89. For the conceptual history, see “Pictorial and Pure
Photography,” in my On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Rout-
ledge, 2017).
3 Friedlander, “An Excess of Fact,” in The Desert Seen (New York: D.A.P, 1996), 104.
4 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” The Atlantic
(June 1859) in Trachtenberg, Classic Essays, 78–9.
5 On what is wrong with these claims see: Dominic McIver Lopes, “The Aesthetics
of Photographic Transparency,” Mind (112, 2003), 433–48; Dawn M. Wilson
(née Phillips) “Photography and Causation: Responding to Scruton’s Scepti-
cism” and David Davies, “Scruton on the Inscrutability of Photographs,” British
Journal of Aesthetics (49: 4, 2009), 341–55; Peter Alward, “Transparent Repre-
sentation: Photography and the Art of Casting,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism (70: 1, 2012), 9–18; and “Aesthetic Scepticism and Its Limitations,” in
On Photography.
6 See “Foundational Intuitions and Folk Theory,” in On Photography.
7 See “Appearances,” in Understanding a Photograph, ed. Berger (London: Pen-
guin, 2013), 65, as discussed in Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and
the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1988), 236–8.
8 Fried rarely cites Scruton directly, but see “Density of Decision: Greenberg
with Robert Adams,” nonsite.org (http://nonsite.org/article/density-of-decision,
2016) for an exception.
9 “By no means universally” because not all versions of Orthodoxy end in aes-
thetic skepticism. See “Transparency and Its Critics,” in On Photography.
10 See also AT 103, 131, 153, and 157–8. For an overview, see IMAC, 47–54.
11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), §20/47e. Look back at
my epigraph from Scruton: Barthes may celebrate what Scruton condemns, but
they agree on the underlying facts about photography.
12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, §10/26e.
14 Barthes, Camera Lucida, §11/27–8e.
15 Barthes, Camera Lucida, §19/45e, §19/43e, and §22/53e.
18 Fried is alive to this implication. Immediately after my citation from “Barthes’s
Punctum” (WPM 100), he continues: “Perhaps, more precisely, [the punctum]
is an artefact of the encounter between the product of that [photographic] event
and one particular spectator or beholder.”
20 Michaels, who stresses the centrality of individual experience to the punctum,
nonetheless believes “privacy is not . . . the central issue” and that the punc-
tum is not “intrinsically private.” This is because understanding the punctum
in these terms rules out Barthes’s second punctum, the “that has been.” But
this is only a worry if one thinks the two halves of Camera Lucida add up to
a single, internally coherent theory. See Michaels, “Photography and Fossils,”
in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007), 439.
See also his The Beauty of a Social Problem (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 1–42.
21 Michaels, “Photographs and Fossils,” 431–450. Fried acknowledges the worry
in “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry (31: 3, 2005), 572–3, but has yet to
really engage with it. See also WPM 270–1 and 345–6.
22 When a viewer animates a photograph in this way, they endow it with what Bar-
thes calls a “blind field,” or life beyond the frame. See Camera Lucida, §23/57e.
23 For Michaels, not only does this make the significance of photographs depend-
ent on the response of particular viewers, it pushes Barthes’s interest in photog-
raphy beyond the realm of art. This is not a worry for Barthes, given that his
interest in photography is expressly not an interest in photography as art; but
it ought to be a worry for Fried, given that “theatricality” pertains explicitly to
modes of artistic address. See Michaels, “Photographs and Fossils,” 440.
24 In a more recent paper on Demand’s reconstruction and reanimation of just over
two minutes of onboard footage from one of the dining rooms of the ocean liner
Pacific Sun while being buffeted by high swells, Fried stresses the scale of such
an undertaking: the amount of expertise, labor, and sheer will required to pull
off this seemingly simple, but in fact immensely complex, task (see AL 251–69).
25 Michaels, “Photographs and Fossils,” 443–4.
26 Fried, “Without a Trace,” 202–3.
27 This is reminiscent of Stanley Cavell’s idea of “attunement in judgement,”

underlying the possibility of agreement or disagreement in this or that particular
judgment. See, for example, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–36; and
“Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” in This New Yet
Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albu-
querque: Living Batch Press, 1989), 40–52.
28 Demand’s source images reveal that he does much more than simply “recon-
struct” pre-existing scenes. This seriously underplays the degree of editorializing
undertaken in their three-dimensional realization. To take just one example: the
disappearance of not one but three kettles and two milk or coffee pans from
Saddam’s kitchen. What does this signify?
29 Fried, “Without a Trace,” 202.
30 Fried, “Without a Trace,” 202 (my italics). On the difference between mean-
ing and intention in debates about photography more generally, see Michaels:
“I Do What Happens: Anscombe and Winogrand,” nonsite.org (http://nonsite.
org/article/i-do-what-happens, 2016), Lopes, “Making, Meaning, and Meaning
by Making,” and Michaels, “Anscombe and Winogrand, Danto and Mappletho-
rpe: A Reply to Dominic McIver Lopes,” nonsite.org (http://nonsite.org/article/
making-meaning-and-meaning-by-making, 2016).
31 I pursue a similar question concerning the relation between “theater” and “theatri-
cality” in “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell
on Painting and Photography as Arts,” Critical Inquiry (34: 2, 2008), 274–312.
32 The reference is to Barthes’s response to Kertész (see Barthes, Camera Lucida,
§19/45e).
33 Compare Michaels’s remarks on the photographic image being as close to a
fossil as a picture of a fossil in “Photographs and Fossils,” 435–6, and 440n.
Michaels is excellent on Barthes and Fried, but everything he says about Walton
is better said of Scruton. Photographs may be “transparent” for Walton but,
unlike for Scruton, they are still a kind of picture. The paper is called “Trans-
parent Pictures.” For Walton photographs are both pictures and traces; for
Scruton transparency entails invisibility. See Walton, “On Pictures and Photo-
graphs: Objections Answered,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. R. Allen &
M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60–75. On the distinction
between “skeptical” and “non-skeptical” Orthodoxy, see “Transparency and Its
Critics,” in On Photography.
34 What follows is the outline of an argument developed more fully in “What’s
So New about the ‘New’ Theory of Photography?” Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism (75: 4, 2017). The origins of this argument can be traced, via
Wilson (née Phillips), in “Responding to Scruton’s Scepticism,” back to Patrick
Maynard’s account of photography as a branching family of technologies for
marking surfaces through the agency of light in The Engine of Visualisation:
Thinking through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). It has
been developed in more or less restrictive ways by Paloma Atencia-Linares, “Fic-
tion, Non-Fiction, and Deceptive Photographic Representation,” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (70: 1, 2012) and Lopes, in The Four Arts of
Photography: An Essay in Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016). For an
overview see “Aesthetic Scepticism and Its Critics,” in On Photography.
35 My epigraph is taken from a discussion between Wall and Demand; Wall is
disputing Demand’s observation that his (Wall’s) photographs are full of detail.
More fully: “I don’t think that there are details in photographs . . . there is no
detail in photography, there’s only focus—because once there is a focal plain,
given a certain resolution of the film and lens and so on everything in it is sharp.
Therefore what’s a detail? There is no detail, everything in it [the focal plain] is
the same.” See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Uu_TQPORk, at 27.55.
11 The Aesthetics of Absorption
Magdalena Ostas
Michael Fried has returned to the distinction between “absorption” and

“theatricality” in all of his art historical work since he first introduced the
dyad in 1980 to illuminate the dynamics of the relationship between painting
and beholder in eighteenth-century French painting and the critical writings
of Denis Diderot. The remarkable historical reach of Fried’s work since then,
coupled with the attentiveness of the readings of individual artworks that
comprise his arguments, demonstrates that, in Fried’s hands, the distinction
between “absorption” and “theatricality” can yield a range of insights that
are fully receptive to the particularity of the works they take up even as
they seek to alert us to a foundational problem motivating and alive in all
of them. In this sense, there is a rare convergence of formal, historical, and
philosophical receptivity in Fried’s writing on art. Another way to underline
this achievement in Fried’s work is to say that his consistent returning to
the distinction between “absorption” and “theatricality” has the effect—
very unexpectedly—of particularizing and thus illuminating works of art
rather than subsuming them under the critic’s matrix. We see something
new in Caravaggio or Jeff Wall (to name the outer ends of Fried’s historical
range) because each speaks to a similar problem so distinctly grounded (like
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jacques-Louis David, Gustave Courbet, and
Édouard Manet had been) in the developing historical and material dimen-
sions of a specific art form. We see this distinctiveness as Fried elucidates
the way each artist becomes oriented toward a horizon of cares that are
indeed analogous and overlapping, but that always demand an individu-
ated response, in a concrete medium, bound within specific circumstances.
As Fried moves in his art historical writings from Chardin, Jean-Baptiste
Greuze, David, and Diderot, who help him in Absorption and Theatricality
to first uncover this horizon of cares, through to Courbet and Manet, he
tells a story about “absorption” and “theatricality” that helps us see how
paintings grapple with being paintings, and how they in effect fight for their
own “ontological status” so as to be able to claim belonging in “the class of
objects that we call paintings” (AT 159). The horizons of “absorption” and
“theatricality” that direct Fried’s readings of art history thus do not amount
to revealing a set of recurrent formal features or details, structural principles
172 Magdalena Ostas
of organization, thematic concerns, shared motifs, or ongoing conceptual
preoccupations. Instead, Fried’s concern with the very ontology of paint-
ing draws our attention to the fact that for him a painting can become a
different kind of object because of or by virtue of its specific handling of
absorptive and theatrical concerns. While certainly related to some thematic
occupations or structural principles, this is more fundamentally a change in
how a painting acts like or becomes a painting. The concept “absorption”
and its counter-concept “theatricality” thus point beyond common themes
and toward a more primary grappling with what Fried frequently calls “the
primordial convention that paintings are meant to be beheld” (AT 93; MM
405). The two concepts for Fried name ways in which being-for and being-
seen become critical problems in the history of the visual arts.
In a certain sense, then, and contrary to the thought that faults Fried for
a too-general framework for understanding widely disparate figures in art
history, it may be that Fried’s terms “absorption” and “theatricality” actu-
ally have not been understood broadly and widely enough. A more capa-
cious understanding of the concept of “absorption” especially can help us
see that the term is rich with a philosophical significance that echoes central
concerns long at play in philosophy’s thinking about the status of art objects
and the singular, sometimes puzzling role of aesthetic experience in ordinary
life. For at stake in Fried’s concept of “absorption” is the coming into being
of a new understanding of what it means to have or undergo an aesthetic
response and, correspondingly, a new understanding of what comes to con-
stitute the aesthetic object as an aesthetic object for us. As Fried describes
“absorption” across artworks and movements in his art historical writing,
the ontology of works of art—or a concern with what works of art “are”—
emerges not as an investigation into modes of classification or states of
being but into our own orientation toward and interests in certain kinds of
objects and the ways those objects elicit and sustain such forms of attention.
This essay focuses on how Fried thereby dramatically reconceives the place
of the beholder in the task of understanding what works of art are, so that
he effectively shifts the burden of ontological definition from its traditional
source in an object’s inherent qualities to, instead, the activity of a specific
and uncommonly indirect kind of human responsiveness and engagement.
“Absorption” and “theatricality,” therefore, serve not only as registers
of a work’s grappling with the primordial convention that paintings are
meant to be seen or beheld but also as expressions of another conven-
tion, possibly an even more primordial or primary one: that in the West-
ern tradition a work of art is a work of art and not some other kind of
thing that one responds to in another way. It is worth noting that the very
moment—the eighteenth century—that Fried pinpoints as the beginning of
the anti-theatrical tradition’s upholding “absorption” as an ideal is the same
moment in the history of philosophy when aesthetic responsiveness is first
conceived as a form of human experience different and separate from other
kinds of experience. Like the beautiful and sublime objects in Immanuel
The Aesthetics of Absorption 173
Kant’s Critique of Judgment that draw out of the subject a form of disinter-
ested reflection, the artworks in the tradition Fried traces do not “address”
us as ourselves, standing tied to the world by our usual psychological preoc-
cupations, cognitive tasks, practical worries, sensuous reactions, emotional
attachments, ethical cares, social affiliations, and personal idiosyncrasies.
Such artworks and objects demand our engagement at the same time that
they ask us precisely to interrupt or momentarily dissipate (“negate” is
Fried’s term (AT 108)) the kinds of engagement that anchor us to the ordi-
nary world. Through a range of absorptive techniques and structures, such
paintings do this by presenting us with the “supreme fiction” (AT 103) that
we aren’t where we actually are: standing before the painting. For Fried the
work of art cannot betray that it knows we are positioned before it, and
it thus becomes the work’s burden to convince us of something difficult:
that we are not actually present. Unlike natural objects whose identity in
the world is guaranteed or nonnegotiable—they simply are what they are,
and we are or are not present to see them—aesthetic objects in both Kant’s
and Fried’s understandings contrastingly stand under the continual threat
of not being or counting as what they are (that is, as works of art) or not
sustaining their status as aesthetic objects by drawing from us the mode of
responsiveness that defines their identity. Unlike other kinds of objects in
the world, artworks might be said to have an ongoing responsibility for the
solicitation of their own identity. In this way, their compositional force and
formal work are a crucial part of what Fried repeatedly calls “ontological
work” (WPM 3).
The portrayal of human figures immersed in absorbing activities is only
the beginning for Fried of representational strategies used in painting and
photography to evoke absorptive themes and structures, but understand-
ing absorption as a literal theme as distinct from absorption as a form of
“ontological work” is a good place to begin teasing out the philosophi-
cal significance of Fried’s central term. The human figures in the class of
mid-eighteenth-century French paintings that occupy Fried in Absorption
and Theatricality, for example, make known their attentiveness, arrest,
enthrallment, and literal absorption in a number of ways: they might be
pictured listening, reading, sketching, daydreaming, writing, witnessing,
judging, or perhaps, as in Chardin’s archetypal painting, blowing and gaz-
ing abstractedly into a soap bubble (Figure 11.1). In these early examples
of what we might call “classic” absorption, primarily evident in Chardin’s
genre paintings, Fried finds an important thematic dimension to the rep-
resentation of absorption, and it usually involves the human figures’ sus-
pension of distracted activities. The figures that interest Fried in Chardin’s
paintings of the 1750s are characterized singularly by a self-forgetting and
self-abandonment (both are terms Fried employs; see AT 13 and 60–1) that
are vividly written on their faces and bodies, so that, paradoxically, their
“psychological absence” (AT 35) from the scene is what the painter sig-
nals. If their absence is at issue in the painting, where are these figures
174 Magdalena Ostas
Figure 11.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Blowing Soap Bubbles, 1734

(Los Angeles County Museum of Art; photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York)
understood to be “present” instead? Since they have forgotten the world

around them, and since they are wholly pulled away by whatever has
grasped their intense attentiveness, we as beholders might be said to have
unique access to these figures’ minds as their thoughts and preoccupations
wander away from the very world we can see right there in the painting.1
Fried’s figures are “off” reading, drawing, or intently blowing into soap
bubbles (if they are alone in the composition), or reflecting, conversing,
observing, or witnessing (if they are subsumed in a scene with others). It is
as though they have abandoned their physical environments, despite being
pulled into them, so that we can see those environments bare and without
the look of being-seen. Similarly, one has the sense that they have forgotten
that their faces orient outward and that their bodies are expressive. As Rob-
ert Pippin remarks, such figures’ deeds and gestures have the look of not
anticipating our gaze and are instead uniquely “their own” as the painter
puts out in the open the unself-conscious, “nonalienated” way in which
they seem to inhabit their bodies.2 The painting’s assertion of these figures’
obliviousness to their surroundings also ensures the sense of their resilience
against any distractions, including the danger that our own looking and
bustling before the canvas suddenly seems to pose. Because these figures’
immersion in a singular task or singular scene is what orients them fully
and entirely within the painting, we as beholders, threatening to disturb or
unsettle this fixated scene, are indicted by our very presence. The figures,
therefore, have to be convincingly absorbed or reabsorbed into the world
of the painting, and our presence as spectators has to be negated, “coun-
teracted,” “obliviated,” or “neutralized” (AT 67 and 68)—in other words,
made into an imaginary or imagined absence—so that we no longer pose
this suppositional but sensed and consequential threat. It is in this way that
the fact that paintings are meant to be beheld first emerges as the central
problem in the age of Diderot.
For Fried, sustaining the absorptive values that maintain the fiction of the
beholder’s absence involves much more than the representation of human
figures caught in unself-conscious reflection or reverie, and in Absorption
and Theatricality his emphasis quickly shifts from a motif-driven analysis
of human figures fallen into inwardness to the wider strategies whereby a
painting, now conceived as “a unified compositional structure” or “a closed
and self-sufficient system” (AT 132), convinces us that we are, in effect,
not present before it. Fried shows that in the 1760s Greuze inherits from
Chardin the value of absorption and transforms it into something new and
nearly unrecognizable. Greuze’s use of highly dramatic narrative structures
that often involve morality, emotion, and sexuality contrasts abrasively with
Chardin’s more simple understanding of the essence of absorption. The con-
trast leads Fried to his most consequential philosophical point in Absorption
and Theatricality, as the concept of absorption allows him to reveal a deep
metaphysical-formal-historical overlap between Chardin’s intensely quiet
canvases and Greuze’s unruly scenes. Both artists ultimately belong for Fried
to the same anti-theatrical tradition. Nowhere is the leap in thought that
allows Fried to make this connection more apparent than in his discussion
of Diderot’s understanding of the tangled concept of tableau. Fried describes
the structure of tableau clearly: “the grouping of figures and stage proper-
ties that constituted a tableau stood outside the action, with the result that
the characters themselves appeared unaware of its existence and hence of its
effect on the audience” (AT 95). Here Fried follows Diderot in the powerful
insight that the figures in a tableau themselves are never aware of the tab-
leau of which they are a part, immersed instead in the action and emotion
of the scene that embeds them, and since the tableau—that is, the embodied
compositional intention of the painting—is consequently only visible from
the beholder’s point of view, the tableau brings into relief for the beholder
the fact that the world to which the figures in the painting belong and the
world to which he or she belongs are entirely distinct. Theirs is a world from
which we begin to sense our total exclusion as we perceive that the figures
in the tableau can’t see at all what we see about them. It is exactly this sense
of their utter self-enclosure that arrests and enthralls us, or that generates
and sustains our enthrallment, so that the painting comes to absorb us in the
same way that the world around the figures fully absorbs them. Toril Moi
176 Magdalena Ostas
underlines this important parallel “between the work of art’s representation
of absorption and the viewer’s or reader’s ability to lose him or herself in
the work of art” and claims that being “held” or spellbound by a painting
importantly rests on being unacknowledged by the figures pictured in it,
since their disregard for us is what confirms their unbreakable immersion in
the world before them.3 W. J. T. Mitchell notes (with an admittedly different
emphasis) that Fried’s concept of absorption in this way is like the processes
of desire or seduction, which succeed in proportion to their “indirectness,”
so that for Mitchell the paintings that interest Fried “get what they want
by seeming not to want anything” and “pretending that they have every-
thing they need.”4 We inhabit the space before the painting, and the figures
inhabit the world of the painting, absorbed in their own apparent interiority
(as in Chardin) or subsumed within the work’s sealed and unified composi-
tional structure (as in Greuze).
This understanding of a painting’s compositional unity, one that is
grounded in the modality of the beholder’s responsiveness as much as in the
formal dynamics of the painting itself, finally transforms in Fried’s explo-
rations of contemporary art photography into the philosophical idea of a
“world.” The perception of formal self-enclosure out of which the concept
of absorption arises deepens in Fried’s later work into the foundational
thought that a work of art can display, constitute, or itself stand as evidence
of a world. Fried’s conception of compositional unity in Absorption and
Theatricality centers on closure and self-containment, so that “absorption”
seems to name the relation of the parts or aspects of a painting, ones that
have the effect of sealing it off, as much as it describes the state of enthrall-
ment or reflectiveness such a composition works to prompt in the beholder.
The beholder is “absent” in the sense that the painting’s self-containment is
concretely apparent and impenetrable. But through his studies of Courbet
and Manet, and conclusively in his readings of contemporary art photog-
raphy, Fried discovers that the demand for the beholder’s imagined absence
conflicts too absolutely or outrightly with the very conditions of (or spatio-
temporal “facts” involved in) human beings encountering and looking at
works of art. The demand for the beholder’s imaginary non-presence also
conflicts with the way artists in the nineteenth century re-confront the con-
tours and values of absorption and especially theatricality, an orientation
toward the beholder crucially distinct for artists in the periods just preced-
ing modernism from a painting’s ability to “face” or “strike” its viewer.
Thus the complete absence of the beholder Chardin, Greuze, and Diderot
had demanded is replaced in Fried’s later thinking by an attention to the
beholder’s own perceived condition of difference, exclusion, or “confine-
ment from” (MC 106) the work, what in his writing on contemporary pho-
tography Fried concisely calls “the depiction or evocation of a separation of
worlds” (WPM 30). The artwork no longer weaves the fiction of our actu-
ally not being there and instead simply declares its “world-apartness” (WPM
124 and 129). The existence of this “world” on which the artwork stakes
its ontological “apartness” hinges in Why Photography Matters as Art as
Never Before, as it does in Absorption and Theatricality, on the artwork’s
handling of what Fried calls the dimension of “to-be-seenness” (WPM 35).
The convention that artworks are meant to be beheld thus remains at the
center of the image’s “ontological work.”
Fried helps us see with clarity the connection between an artwork’s han-
dling of being-seen and its ontological force in the work of the contem-
porary photographer Jeff Wall. The extensive labor of construction and
staging that Wall’s near-documentary photographs entail, Fried claims,
actually makes it possible for Wall to realize compelling depictions of
human beings unaware of being seen or pictured. As Fried suggests, the
staggering preparations Wall undertakes in his works underline that in
the contexts and environments that interest this photographer, the infer-
ence that a human being might be conscious of being beheld can “con-
taminate” (WPM 35) a world. Yet Fried reminds us of the distance between
the images in Wall’s lightboxes and a true documentary practice or even
everyday snapshot-taking. In his reading of Wall’s After “Invisible Man”
by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (Figure 11.2), for example, Fried claims
that Wall seeks to recreate the “world” of the Invisible Man, so that the
depicted figure is not acting but being in his world: “As if only by virtue of
the Invisible Man’s seeming obliviousness to his world could the latter have
Figure 11.2 Jeff Wall, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999–2001
(The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, transparency in lightbox 174 × 250.5cm; image
courtesy of the artist)
178 Magdalena Ostas
yielded itself up to depiction” (WPM 47). In this reading Fried contrasts
the Invisible’s Man’s own reserved pose of absorption as he sits turned
away from us and toward the interior picture-space, his face mostly unre-
vealed, with the unbelievable profusion of sheer objects and elements in his
surrounding environment, so that the Invisible Man’s “hole” comes into
view for us as viewers just as we have manifest evidence of it receding for
him. The Invisible Man’s reflectiveness strangely becomes an abstract con-
dition of the possibility of his “hole” and the immense volume and clutter
of objects within it appearing so materially in the image for us. Both the
Invisible Man and his “hole” shed their invisibility, in a sense, by seeming
to be unseen. All of the physical elements and objects that populate the
room and comprise the composition of After “Invisible Man,” in addition,
reflect a very elaborate orchestration, one that in the photograph has the
unmistakable look of an unreality. As a collection of objects, the scene is
also self-evidently (and allusively) fictitious, so that the thought of Wall’s
picture being some version of a snapshot or documentary photograph does
not occur to its viewer. That is not the logic of Wall’s near-documentary
work. Fried thus shows that the implausibility of the pictured room in After
“Invisible Man” surprisingly does not obstruct the sense of the image’s giv-
ing us what he, following Heidegger, calls the “worldhood” (WPM 49) of
the world that surrounds the depicted figure.
We can see that theatricality, absorption’s counter-concept, emerges here
as something different from a register of artistic principles, values, or inher-
ited interests. “Theatricality” in Fried’s writing on photography names a
threat to an artwork’s world, its very existence, as it describes the possible
puncturing of that world by the look of the beholder. The perception of
such a look threatens not just to disturb or unsettle that world, but now to
void it and deflate its integrity entirely, rendering it unconvincing, uncom-
pelling as that world. With the insinuation of the beholder’s look, such a
world becomes a world just waiting to be looked at, already conscripted and
camera-ready, figuring on the viewer’s likes, dislikes, and various expecta-
tions. For this reason it is important for Fried to differentiate painting and
photography’s elementary visuality—their being artistic mediums that nec-
essarily are seen—from theatricality in the sense he develops. In his readings
of Manet, Fried describes the elementary situation of looking that paint-
ing involves as “the inescapable or quasi-transcendental relation of mutual
facing between painting and beholder,” and for Fried it is only the most
simplistic understanding of what “mutual facing” entails that grasps the
situation of beholding as “essentially visual” (MM 397). Manet’s commit-
ment to the quality of “strikingness” in his paintings, for instance, has a
metaphysical consequence for Fried that is not at all the same as visual
impactfulness. This is a central axis of distinction in Why Photography Mat-
ters, where Fried argues that contemporary art photography inherits the val-
ues of the Western anti-theatrical tradition at the same time that it confronts
“to-be-seenness” with a renewed imaginative seriousness. Fried makes the
wonderfully vivid suggestion at one point in a related discussion of Cara-
vaggio that a painting can actually face away from its viewer:
A further dimension of the issue of embodiment in these canvases might

be framed as a question, one that was implicit in the previous lecture:
which way does a painting face? It might seem that the answer is obvi-
ous, beyond all question: it faces out from the wall on which it hangs,
directly toward the viewer; more precisely, easel paintings do that. (I am
here using the term “easel painting” in its most general acceptation.)
But the opposite may also be true. To the extent that a representational
or, for that matter, an abstract painting evokes a space that opens up
toward an illusionistic distance—to the extent that the depicted or vir-
tual space is felt to be an extension of the lived spatiality of the painter
(and viewer)—the painting in question may be felt also to face away
from the painter (and viewer).
(MC 143)
In Absorption and Theatricality Fried imagines that an artwork can

secure the beholder’s interest by dramatizing that it is not concerned with
his presence at all, so that it works hard to foreground its active indiffer-
ence and lack of consideration for him. In the image Fried offers here of the
way in which a viewer can sense that a painting faces away from him, the
painting’s attitude is anything but indifferent or indirect. This is so because
the painting makes a forceful claim to its world, one it constructs in a space
the beholder senses is over there away from him or her and bizarrely not
right there on the outward surface of the canvas in front of which he or she
stands. Now the painting (or photograph) does appear to have a stake, and
while it refuses to address or conscript the beholder, it also hopes at the
same time for the emergence of a particular form of responsiveness from
him or her that bespeaks a conviction in the world it constitutes.5 As early as
“Art and Objecthood” Fried categorizes the artwork’s confrontation with
or direct appeal to its viewer as the very “negation of art” (AO 153)—the
theater with which real art is at war. In his readings of Fried’s art history,
Pippin instructively traces the continuing lines of Fried’s interest in such
distinctions between “genuine” and “false” ways of being an artwork, and
how “theatricality” for Fried captures the way in which an artwork can be
thought to fail.6 Through the remarkable play with space and perspective
that characterizes his condensed image of a painting that hangs on the wall
impossibly facing away from us, Fried conveys how such a painting actu-
ally anchors itself in a world other than our own. This paradoxical paint-
ing disavows the theatrical impulse and summons us in a different manner.
Neither an image for the creations of the imagination nor a picture of an
allegorical illusion of some kind, the idea of a painting that faces away from
its viewer that he or she still continues to see elucidates the essential differ-
ence between seeing and beholding.
180 Magdalena Ostas
This distinction between our usual responses to the world (seeing, think-
ing, liking, caring) and a different responsiveness (here, “beholding”) that
uniquely requires us to suspend or “neutralize” (AT 68), as Fried puts
it, these everyday functions and attachments first comes into view at an
important moment in the history of philosophy in the foundational text
of modern aesthetics, Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The laborious opening
sections of the “Analytic of the Beautiful” in Kant’s third Critique concisely
illustrate the importance for Kant of defining aesthetic experience by rigor-
ously isolating what it is not: it is not a form of cognitive, conceptual, or
logical judgment (§1); it is not an agreeable or gratifying sensation that
elicits a liking from us (§3); it is not our estimation of what is morally
good and respectable in the world (§4); it is not what we can approve of
or endorse (§5); and, later on, it is not evoked by an object’s perfection
or commensurateness between its function and form (§15).7 Kant’s under-
standing of aesthetic judgment as a form of responsiveness that strangely
requires us to disengage our actual engagement with the object before us
finds numerous echoes in Fried’s discovery that some works of art seem to
demand our absence or come to insist on their separateness from us. It is
as if such objects depend for Fried, as for Kant, on evidence of our disen-
gagement from the solid coordinates of our world and our disinterest in the
objects’ literal existence. In the break Kant posits in the subject’s experience
of beauty from intellectual activity, emotional bonds, sensuous responses,
or moral investments, he—like Fried—demands that the subject take him or
herself away from before the object as if his or her physical presence in that
particular place were somehow surmountable or interruptible. For Kant
the subject must withdraw his or her usual forms of empathy, pleasure,
curiosity, excitement, enjoyment, confusion, or elation, since this is how
freedom from intellectual and sensible experience is realized. At the same
time the object, correspondingly, is freed from its normal relations to and
determinations by thought, sensation, and desire. Standing before a work
of art for Kant entails relinquishing the sense that the object is beautiful
“for me,”8 a form of what Hannah Arendt in her reading of the Critique of
Judgment pinpoints as the “liberation from private conditions” that enables
aesthetic judgment to ground meaningful community.9 Kant is clear in his
opening remarks that the central issue in aesthetic judgment is “whether we
or anyone cares, or so much as might care” about the thing’s existence.10
This is an idea Fried mirrors in “Art and Objecthood” when he argues that
art (unlike an object) is never “concerned with the actual circumstances in
which the beholder encounters [the] work” (AO 153). Our actual care or
concern with the object reduces it to a “literal” (Fried) or merely “real”
(Kant) thing,11 so that as Walter Benn Michaels appositely claims, looking
at artworks in effect “demands a subject who is as little a subject as the
object is an object.”12 Instead of being a subject who occupies the world, the
beholder becomes a spectator or onlooker onto the world, both drawn into
but also distinctly shut out by it. The cognitive powers in Kant’s Critique
of Judgment engage in “free play” before the aesthetic object, and this play
amounts to a refusal to subsume that object by conceptual thought or to
reduce it to simple sense perception. Instead, the faculties aimlessly “lin-
ger” and contemplate the object, activated and stimulated by it without the
constraint of a deliberate aim.13 Kant gives this pleasantly undirected state
the name “reflection.” He uses it throughout the third Critique to designate
the subject’s immersion in the complex state of the “feeling of life”14 in
which the subject is filled with a sense of his or her own existence yet mark-
edly (intellectually, sensually, morally, ordinarily) absent from the experi-
ence. A kind of self-forgetting is involved in Kant’s conception of reflection
as a nonintellectual, nonemotional state, and it strongly parallels Diderot’s
understanding of the “psycho-physical” feeling that absorption in an art-
work elicits through which the subject “comes to experience a pure and
intense sensation of the sweetness and as it were the self-sufficiency of his
own existence” (AT 130–1). The artwork gives rise to reflectiveness in the
subject for both Kant and Diderot as it goes about the “ontological work”
that convinces a mere viewer (or see-er) to further behold.
The difference between our usual ways of seeing the world and the kinds
of responsiveness that a painting or photograph can call for—grounded in
seeing but not solely visual—becomes vivid if we compare two images that
interest Fried in which the human act of “looking-at” is placed at the cen-
ter. There are clear points of compositional overlap between Caspar David
Friedrich’s Woman at the Window (Figure 11.3) and Thomas Struth’s Art
Institute of Chicago II (Figure 11.4), yet these points work to found very
different worlds, so that the differing ontological stakes of the painting and
photograph become all the more pronounced on account of the superfi-
cial parallels that appear to undergird both of them. In both Friedrich’s
painting and Struth’s photograph, a woman is depicted from the rear gazing
at a scene that in some evident way excludes her and disallows her from
entering into it. In Woman at the Window the figure depicted gazing out
of the window is like the figures in many of Friedrich’s well-known paint-
ings (Monk by the Sea, Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, Woman before the
Setting Sun) whose gazes consistently mark the natural landscape before
them as something-viewed. The act of looking gives form to the landscapes
and scenes they occupy. These Rückenfiguren, or figures pictured from the
rear, make evident that landscape for Friedrich is only made meaningful
through order-bestowing acts of the eye and mind. Friedrich is so insistent
about populating the foregrounds of his paintings with onlooking human
figures that as a group these paintings read like a serious rhetorical argu-
ment for the primacy of the human response in the encounter between mind
and world, or consciousness and nature. The Kantian echoes in Friedrich’s
obsession with the world-ordering gaze do not escape any of his best critics,
including Fried. Joseph Leo Koerner, for instance, emphasizes the “human-
izing plot” that Friedrich’s rear-view figures necessarily impose on nature,
so that the landscapes in his paintings are never “settings” peopled with
men and woman or “places” narratively encountered by individuals but,
instead, are framed as visual fields subject to the ordering function of human
182 Magdalena Ostas
Figure 11.3 Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822

(Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; photo credit: bpk Bildagentur/Nationalgalerie,
Staatliche Museen/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resource, New York)
vision.15 Fried also reads Friedrich’s insistence on placing the act of looking
at the center of his compositions as an “allegory of subjective orientation in
Kant’s sense” (AL 122):
To enlarge briefly on the essential point of the affinity between Kant’s

remarks and Friedrich’s paintings as I understand it: the felt difference
Figure 11.4 Thomas Struth, Art Institute of Chicago II, 1990

(The Art Institute of Chicago; photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York)
between right and left is also, by its very nature, an experience of one-
self as a subjective center, a fact reflected in Friedrich’s commitment to
the central axis—to uprightness—in picture after picture. One might
think of that centeredness and uprightness as a kind of universality but
not the universality of what the world might be imagined to look like
if cognition were not grounded in subjective feeling as Kant suggests
(that is, if it were wholly objective, without reference to the experienc-
ing subject); by the same token, the subjectivity in question is not mere
subjectivity, a kind of unanchored and essentially formless responsive-
ness to visual or say sensuous stimulus in all their multifariousness and
profusion.
(AL 136)
Fried argues that the natural landscapes in Friedrich’s paintings seem to

conform to what we might call the felt geometry of human cognition, and
this leads him to the conclusion that Friedrich’s figures are not viewers or
beholders but more aptly “cognizers” (AL 118). They structure the world
and give it form through the subjective orientation of their minds and bod-
ies, and Friedrich’s paintings bear the evidence of this essentially human
orientation through the forms of symmetry by which they are arranged. As
184 Magdalena Ostas
in Kant, the natural world in Friedrich’s paintings, again, appears neither
as a setting (the place wherein people carry on) nor as a place simply there
(an assemblage or scene of natural objects) but always as something expe-
rienced through a form of perception that imposes its own rules of sense.
What makes Woman at the Window one of Friedrich’s most revealing
paintings is that the painter sustains such a relationship between an order-
giving figure and a corresponding landscape in a context where the land-
scape at issue barely comes into view. The natural landscape in the painting,
in fact, is obstructed almost entirely in a manner that mounts like a con-
spiracy against our desire to see. Woman at the Window is a painting that
is essentially about something we cannot see because it is not rendered in
the painting. The woman standing before the window is fixated on a part of
the world that Friedrich hardly reveals to us, so that, unlike his other Rück-
enfiguren, she emphatically does not represent or mirror our own sense-
making gaze and point of view. Instead, the woman occupies the position
that the painting suggests we might like to occupy, ideally, but that it works
hard nonetheless to bar us from, as if she represents a concrete wish the
image taunts us with. The majority of the canvas is taken up by the somber,
dark, bare, and monotone wood planks in the interior space that physically
keeps the woman exiled from the bright scene outside. Thus the room pic-
tured in Woman at the Window is a physical obstruction to her, but it also
acts as a screen for us since the small size of the window frame makes our
seeing what she sees impossible. The view out of the window would have
been our only way “in.” Furthermore, Friedrich’s figure, centered in the
double frame of painting and window, herself blocks our view of the outside
scene. In addition, her subtle left leaning, apparent because it departs from
the otherwise strict angles of the painting’s details (planks, frames, shrouds),
makes us want to ask her to lean even further or even nudge her as if to
advance a plausible hope of seeing a bit more. We cannot help but follow
her gaze outside the austere room into the open air, despite the fact that
the composition only foils our progressive visual advances. She thwarts our
own confrontation with the scene that the painting itself takes up as its sub-
ject. Her sense-making gaze in this painting structures a world that for us is
only obliquely or partially represented through a glimpse of a row of trees, a
partial ship mast and shrouds, and a simple sky. The painting veils the world
it reveals to her. Koerner makes sense of Friedrich’s strategy here by suggest-
ing that, in this way, Friedrich locates sublimity not in the natural world but
singularly in the effect of the world on the viewer. In the strategies through
which he confines his figure and sequesters his viewer, Friedrich is actually
“repeating the experience of exclusion” that marks sublimity.16 The painting
thus holds out the utter “alterity” of the landscape from which we are shut
out since the woman’s gaze defines the outdoor scene as something from
which she is constitutively distanced. The natural scene outside the window,
writes Koerner, is “a domain set radically apart from the woman.”17 She
stands in the painting on the physical edge of a world she cannot join. She is
positioned in the bare room looking out at a scene that the window frames,
like a picture, and from which she is barricaded.
But no matter how committedly and absolutely the composition of
Woman at the Window wants to lock us out of the landscape outside the
window, entrapping us indoors along with Friedrich’s figure, it is a basic
fact about the painting that its centrifugal pull comes from the mostly
unpainted, only partially depicted outdoor scene. The world out there on
the other side of the window simply is felt to be the locus of the woman’s
longing and of our own suppositional frustrations with having our line of
vision blocked and thus being so concretely left out of what the painting
itself posits is really worth our regard. Perhaps Friedrich’s painting is so
emblematically a Romantic work because of the logic that centers its com-
position unmistakably around obscurity or mystery and human yearning.
In contrast to this, the painting pictured on the museum wall in Struth’s
photograph Art Institute of Chicago II, Gustave Caillebotte’s well-known
Paris Street; Rainy Day, simply does shut out the depicted viewer standing
in front of it. Caillebotte’s painting in Struth’s photograph is not a painting
that stirs and encourages the beholder’s imaginative entry but appears to
act instead, as Fried convincingly shows, like a wall for the woman in the
foreground. Paris Street in Struth’s photograph almost seems to physically
project just slightly from the museum wall on which it hangs in an effect
that makes it seem to subtly push back at the depicted viewer. This push
moves in a direction we perceive runs in oppositional parallel to the way the
outside scene in Friedrich’s Woman at the Window pulls the figure into it. In
Friedrich’s painting, the implied river scene outside is nearly recessed within
the painting and seems to occupy an actual world-space behind the canvas.
The museum masterpiece Struth photographs, as Fried notes, is contrast-
ingly “actively indifferent” (AL 120) to the existence of the viewers who
have taken an interest in it. The painting seems satisfied with its “cut-offness
from whatever might be taking place in the world of the museum-goers”
(AL 128), as if it too could see and were intentionally passing over them in
the gallery. Fried concludes that the depicted couple in Paris Street and the
viewers in the museum “belong absolutely to two disparate and uncommu-
nicating realms or . . . ‘worlds’ ” (AL 119). The photograph puts on display
the separateness between the world of the gallery space and the closed-
off, complete world of a painted Paris street. The couple in Paris Street,
in fact, constitute a point of contrast to the individuated painting-viewers,
one of whom has paused while pushing a stroller while the other occupies
an entirely different space away from her, much closer to the painting. As
the man and woman in Paris Street together throw a glance from under
their shared umbrella to something off to their right that catches their atten-
tion, their subtle connection distinguishes them from the few remote figures
who have paused to look at the painting. In these ways Struth’s photograph
brings the unique act of beholding into relief as a mode of encounter with
an artwork that, strangely, insists on its ontological distance in order to
186 Magdalena Ostas
absorb us in its world. The painting in Struth’s photograph stands content
in its world-apartness and its separation from the beholder whose attention
it seizes.
The viewers depicted in Struth’s photograph and Friedrich’s painting,
both fixated before a scene, make vivid the difference between our varied
responses before nature and our responsiveness before works of art. This
essential difference between the ways we engage various kinds of objects in
the world importantly motivates Kant to isolate aesthetic experience from
other kinds of experience in the Critique of Judgment, where he gives aes-
thetic experience a philosophical vindication commensurate with the unique
qualities of aesthetic reflection. The objects that populate Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason, written ten years earlier, come into view as they are assimi-
lated by the subject’s cognitive and intuitive faculties, just as the natural
scene outside the window in Friedrich’s Woman at the Window arises from
the woman’s reaction to the landscape’s direct address. She longs after the
world out there precisely as she remains exiled indoors, tied to the physical
and psychological conditions of her barren interior confinement. One might
say that the pull of the bright outdoor river singles out her own response, so
that we as viewers of the painting don’t even have to lay eyes on the scene
to realize the weight it carries as she stands at the window. Our evidence for
the fact that she inflects the world out there with her form-giving, projec-
tive gaze of longing is that we are not even needed to be co-conspirators,
co-creators, or even confirmers of the form she finds in the natural world,
since Friedrich will not let us actually see the scene that lies along the path
of her visual gaze. The painting, in this sense, is about her condition of
world-apartness from the outside scene but only as an actual condition that
must be either tragic or overcome, as though the painting expressed a wish
from some point of view or other to unconfine this particular human figure.
Its compositional logic turns on understanding her confinement-from as a
strictly circumstantial and not an ontological condition. None of it would
be the same were the woman not standing within the plain and monoto-
nous interior at the window, her feet anchored firmly to the unvarying solid
planks she stands on. Thus there is nothing hypothetical about the response
the river scene elicits from her, as it seems to engage precisely the emotional,
psychological, personal, social, gendered, cognitive, and sensuous responses
that might for her be actual within the world the painting seeks to represent.
In Kant’s terms, the river scene for the woman is a merely real thing, one
subsumed by the mechanisms of human sense perception, cognition, and
desire. It is an object in the world before her, one whose actuality is not
diminished by its status as the object of intense longing and unattainabil-
ity. As such the unpainted outdoor scene demands the same sets of human
responses as the other natural objects with which we share the world and to
which we, their see-ers, are also anchored.
Contrastingly, the woman standing in the museum pictured in Struth’s
photograph pausing to look at Paris Street stands beholden to an image
that refuses and even rebukes the abstract pull of her gaze and preemptively
announces its independence from it. The ground of the nineteenth-century
Paris street and the gallery space of the contemporary museum in Chicago
nearly revel in their ontological separateness in Struth’s photograph, even as
that sense of utter dividedness is what compels the viewer in the gallery to
behold and linger. Caillebotte’s painting establishes its viewer’s conviction in
the world it constitutes by seeming to pass her over in the gallery, as though
the museum-goer might threaten to puncture the saturation of Paris-street
existence that the painting renders were that “world” not guarded by indif-
ference to her presence. When Fried calls this the artwork’s establishing a
“world,” he underlines that the formal and compositional force of images
that belong to the absorptive tradition relies on the “ontological work” of
disavowal. Like Kant, Fried posits that the artwork in this way asks for an
interruption, suspension, or neutralizing of our intellectual cares, sensuous
experiences, and moral frameworks. But art demands this neutralizing and
asks for a mode of responsiveness that remains deeply and intimately tied
to all these parts of us, completely and categorically, despite being itself
incomprehensible as any of them. This means that the work of art makes a
demand as a work of art, an object in the world interrelated with and con-
nected to other kinds of objects but also distinguishable from them in sin-
gular ways. It is part of Fried’s achievement to show us that there is nothing
strange about this, since we are not confined in experience to extensions of
our physical and conscious presence in the world. Art itself, as the endeavor
that it is, sets out to remind us of this inventive aspect of our capacities and
forms of attention all the time.
Notes
1 Lisa Zunshine reads Fried’s concept of absorption as a way of thematizing our
access to others’ minds in a suggestive but strangely situated way that seems to
miss the stakes of Fried’s concept. Because she attributes the beholder’s inter-
est in the representation of absorbed human figures to our common cognitive-
evolutionary adaptations and neural circuits, Zunshine bypasses altogether
how absorption emerges as a horizon of concern for painting specifically in
response to questions of form, medium, and art historical context. She argues
that Fried’s concept of absorption captures the cognitive-evolutionary impulse
to render the human body transparent by catching it in moments of sponta-
neity and self-forgetting, and that the paintings Fried reads in Absorption and
Theatricality actually “flatter our mind-reading adaptations” (192) and offer
“sociocognitive satisfaction” because they “present us with an illusion of direct
unmediated access to the subjects’ mental states” (195). There is something to
Zunshine’s emphasis on the paradox of evident or external inwardness in the
paintings Fried considers, but her insistence on understanding this visual strat-
egy and complexity as a pseudo-biological “cognitive paradox” (183) is per-
plexing. Why should this biological paradox structure threads in the history of
the visual arts? What does it mean to say, more generally, that an art form or
a particular artwork evidences our evolutionary inclinations? Are there other
strategies, for instance, whereby painting engages the philosophical problem of
other minds and deciphering others’ bodies? Why does painting become centrally
188 Magdalena Ostas
occupied with complex visual strategies for representing and eliciting absorption
specifically in the eighteenth century? Zunshine does not offer guidance on such
questions, which her cognitive-literary account raises (see “Theory of Mind and
Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Notes toward a Cognitive His-
toricism,” in Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis
Aldama (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 179–203).
2 Robert B. Pippin, “Authenticity in Painting: Remarks on Michael Fried’s Art
History,” Critical Inquiry (31, 2005), 591.
3 Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 115.
4 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chi-
cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 42.
5 My reference here is to the notion of “conviction” that Walter Benn Michaels
develops in his discussion of Fried’s criticism:
[T]he address to the subject becomes the appeal to the subject’s interest, while
the address to the spectator appeals to his or her sense of what is good, of what
compels conviction. And if one more or less inevitable way to understand
this distinction between paintings he likes and paintings he doesn’t, Fried’s
insistence that good paintings compel conviction seems designed precisely to
counter this objection, to counter the criticism that the difference between
interesting and convincing objects is just the difference in our attitude toward
those objects. For what makes conviction superior to interest is the fact that
interest is essentially an attribute of the subject—the question of whether we
find an object interesting is (like the question about how the waterfall makes
us feel) a question about us—whereas objects that compel conviction do not
leave the question of our being convinced up to us. Compelling conviction is
something the work does, and it is precisely this commitment to the work—it
is good regardless of whether we are interested—that Fried wants to insist on.
(The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 87)
6 Pippin, “Authenticity in Painting,” 578.
7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. and trans. Werner Pluhar (Indian-
apolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). For a discussion
of the connection between Kant’s development of the idea of aesthetic judg-
ment and Fried’s argument in Absorption and Theatricality, see my analysis in
“Kant with Michael Fried: Feeling, Absorption, and Interiority in the Critique of
Judgment,” Symploke (18: 1–2, 2010), 15–30. See also Michael Thomas Taylor,
“Critical Absorption: Kant’s Theory of Taste,” MLN (124: 3, 2009), 572–91.
Taylor also argues with different emphases that Kant’s theory of taste describes
an intensification of absorption (577).
8 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 55.
9 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 73.
11 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 44; and Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” and AO 151.
12 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 89.
15 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd
ed. (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 11 and 76.
16 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 212 and 247.
17 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 138 and 135.
12 Grace and Equality, Fried
and Rancière (and Kant)
Knox Peden
Jean-Paul Sartre once said that Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of

our time. That may or may not be true. What certainly seems true is that
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is the unsurpassable horizon of
contemporary reflection on art. Philosophers tend to come late to Kantian
aesthetics, as if it were a limit toward which their work tends. Theodor
Adorno’s masterpiece Aesthetic Theory was published posthumously. Jean-
François Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime consummated a
career of radical skepticism in a text posing as mere commentary. Hannah
Arendt’s lectures on Kant’s political philosophy are all we have of a projected
third volume on the “Life of the Mind” devoted to—what else?—judgment.
To this list we can now add Jacques Rancière, who has been pursuing
for nearly two decades an inquiry into aesthetics that recasts modernism
and builds on a career of heterodox political thought devoted to the con-
cept of equality. A student of Louis Althusser’s in the 1960s, Rancière came
into his own in the 1970s in a rejection of his mentor’s claims to epistemic
privilege in the pursuit of Marxist science.1 He spent the next decade pro-
ducing and defending a peculiar historiography, deployed in free indirect
style and devoted to presenting the voices of dead artisans and workers
shorn of conceptual schemes that would apportion them a place in the hier-
archies described by social science, Marxist or otherwise.2 The 1990s saw
Rancière turn explicitly to political thought.3 Here he challenged all modes
of political philosophy that treat equality as a goal to be achieved, rather
than a presupposition essential to the intelligibility of all political collabora-
tion and conflict. To understand the command to obey and submit presup-
poses that one participates equally in the sense-making fields of speech and
understanding. The putatively natural inequalities of social hierarchy are
sustained by an equality of intelligence that sanctions their construction and
challenges it intermittently.
This concern for sense—what makes sense and what doesn’t—led Ran-
cière into the field of aesthetics. Here his core apothegm has been “the dis-
tribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible).4 Much like a Foucauldian
episteme or the historical a priori, a specific distribution of the sensible
is what allows certain forms to be intelligible and others to be excluded
190 Knox Peden
or denied any sense-making capacity. Where Michel Foucault’s focus is
epochal, Rancière is concerned less with periodization and more with the
distributions of the sensible that structure any scene. A “scene” is a term of
art for Rancière with a vast range, covering a conversation at a café table
as well as a shop floor meeting or a Loïe Fuller performance at the Folies
Bergère. Each scene is a scene only insofar as it is marked by relays of sense-
making and sense-perception; these relays are just so many distributions,
which are mutable and historically contingent.5 They are amenable to repur-
posing as a matter of fact and principle because all forms of sense-making
are, in Rancière’s view, essentially common. This is why scenes are always
porous, lacking fixed borders, even as they evince unity through a concen-
tration of aesthetic activity that temporarily binds actors together. There is
only one world, divisible and distributed in infinite ways. Such redistribu-
tions are imbued with the rationality that actors bring to them. Infusing
Rancière’s free-flowing prose and anarchic conception of politics is a more
fundamental rationalism that bears comparison with Althusser, as well as
the rationalist philosopher of language, Donald Davidson. Intelligibility is
not simply a consequence of natural causality, but specific motivated inten-
tional actions as well.
Rancière is a difficult thinker to place, a fact which no doubt pleases him
for its consistency with his most fundamental ethos. Most interpretative
effort compares him with his French compatriots; the present discussion
is no exception. His writing on aesthetics has found a warm reception in
various quarters of artistic practice and his political thought has proven
congenial to many of a “continental” stripe, especially those who find off-
putting the doctrinairism of his post-Althusserian alter ego, Alain Badiou.
The historians have kept their distance. It’s also the case that Rancière’s
fundamental challenge to modernism as a subject and concept for art
history—consummated in his masterpiece Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aes-
thetic Regime of Art—has found hardly any reception, beyond puzzlement,
among those with a stake in modernism as an aesthetic regime with a past,
present, and future.6
The present essay pursues yet another comparison in an attempt to gain
a fuller measure of this work. It might be questioned why so much atten-
tion should be focused on Rancière in a contribution to a volume devoted
to Michael Fried and philosophy, especially when Walter Benn Michaels has
already undertaken such an effort in order to specify the content and conse-
quences of “neoliberal aesthetics.”7 The first reason is that I think Michaels
misrepresents some aspects of Rancière’s project and overlooks others that
are pertinent, perhaps even congenial to his own (and Fried’s). Needless to
say, this is not the place to level correctives to Michaels’s interpretation,
although the points of divergence between his account of Rancière’s views
and mine will become clear in due course. But given that Michaels effectively
triangulates his own position on the politics of aesthetics off of Rancière’s
and Fried’s, he provides a useful avenue for thinking about the ontology of
Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière 191
the artwork and its relationship to various efforts (not least Fried’s) to place
that ontology in a historical scheme. This points to the second, better reason
for pursuing the comparison. I think that by bringing these thinkers into
dialogue, or at any rate by staging a juxtaposition of their theoretical and
descriptive practices, we find a concern that is common to both projects.
Despite taking myriad names and forms in their respective oeuvres, the most
fundamental term for Fried is grace, and for Rancière it is equality. Grace
and equality each name moments that are also principles, events that are
also concepts, contingencies that are also passions. What the concepts pick
out and collect are instances that escape dialectical recapture, even as they
provide the theoretical ground for their putative negation in the mundane
world of literalist or social causality. If there is grace in absorption—and
I recognize that a case could be made that absorption is the more fundamen-
tal term than grace—the phenomenon of absorption is that through which
we understand its alternative, the theatrical. The theatrical pulls away from
presentness toward presence; it puts us back in time and duration. But such
experiences are what they are only because presentness first is what it is (first
conceptually, logically, not necessarily temporally). Likewise, for Rancière,
all those hierarchies and manifestations of inequality which form the stuff
of our durational existence are what they are only because of the founda-
tion that is equality. Such a foundation is never manifest, but a condition
of manifestation as such, fleetingly glimpsed or inferred in those moments
when distributions of the sensible are rearranged.
I hope to make the proximity of these views clearer later in the chapter,
in a comparison of Fried’s and Rancière’s readings of various artworks. But
first a few more words on the broader parameters are in order. To focus on
this common concern between Fried and Rancière is to emphasize the way
in which both thinkers, while paying homage to Kant and G. W. F. Hegel in
various respects, limn an approach to aesthetics that departs from the legacy
of German idealism. It doesn’t just depart from it; it shows, by contrast, the
limitations of a tradition that will always subordinate the content and sense
of aesthetic experience to a broadly historicized metaphysics of subjectiv-
ity. The alternative on offer stresses the strategic and intermittent nature of
subjectivity conceived as intentional agency—be it aesthetic or political—in
a manner that is hostile to historical dialectics. In some cases, such as Ran-
cière’s or Althusser’s, the hostility is explicit; in others, in Davidson’s, for
example, it is no less forceful for being implicit.
So, what is Kantian about Fried and Rancière? There is grace in absorp-
tion and equality is at stake in moments of genuine play, those instances of
the care-free that recur through Rancière’s writings. The key idea, however,
is that grace and equality each indicate moments of suspension and a par-
ticular kind of suspension at that—a suspension from the order of natural,
causal determination. If we read the copula in “[p]resentness is grace” (AO
168) as forging an identity, rather than, say, attributing a property, it helps
us grasp the force of Fried’s recent description of presentness as “a quality
192 Knox Peden
it is impossible exactly to define but which in any case I understood to be
at the farthest pole from an emphasis on duration” (AL 257–8). Grace qua
presentness is a kind of exemption, outside time and its order of form of
phenomenal manifestation. The problem of grace as presentness is strictly
analogous to the Kantian problem of freedom. Secular thought in its myriad
forms struggles to find a place for freedom in the natural order, often resting
content to treat freedom as a norm or convention at best. The overriding
idea is that a free act cannot be caused or externally compelled if it is to merit
the designation “free.” It must in some sense be self-caused, autonomous,
voluntary. But what natural object is actually self-caused? This is why for
Spinoza the only entity that acts freely is God or Nature (or Substance, in
any event the infinite totality of existence). But since such Spinozism seems
indistinguishable in practice from a pure necessitarian determinism, think-
ers from Kant onward have sought ways to find a space for freedom that is
not so much demonstrable as inferable. Kant located freedom in the noume-
nal sphere in the form of the moral law. Setting aside paradoxes arising from
a freedom bound to the categorical imperative, it’s clear that Kant found in
the aesthetic sphere a locus or site of union between the domains of theoreti-
cal and practical reason, those defined by nature and freedom respectively.
Thus the centrality of the Critique of Judgment to philosophical modernity.
Fried has begun to write about Kant in recent years, but at a distance and
with an appropriate measure of reserve given the overwhelming force that is
Kantian thought.8 By and large, the relationship between Fried’s work and
Kantian aesthetics has been mediated by other interlocutors, chiefly Robert
Pippin, whose book After the Beautiful treats Fried’s account of modernism
in terms consonant with Hegelian social thought.9 True to dialectical form,
the book does this by mediating Fried’s art historical internalism—its almost
exclusive focus on paintings themselves—with T. J. Clark’s externalist con-
cern for art’s negating relation to the social. In the background of all of this
is the effect of Wilfrid Sellars at Pittsburgh and the links between his con-
tested legacy, most pronounced in the work of John McDowell and Robert
Brandom, and the approach to philosophy pioneered by Fried’s confidant
in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Stanley Cavell. The consequence of this
constellation of influence and interpretation is an ongoing absorption of
Fried’s work into a kind of dialectical pragmatics that is part-Hegelian, part-
Wittgensteinian, and uniquely Friedian. Absorption and theatricality form a
dialectical pair par excellence and intention is a cornerstone of Fried’s think-
ing about aesthetic experience; which is to say, the interpretative orientation
emergent around Fried’s work is not unjust and certainly not ungrounded.
But there are good reasons to resist a too dialectical conception of Fried’s
writing on art in what we might call its self-relation, and this notwithstand-
ing Fried’s own recourse to turns of the dialectic to explain artistic struggles
with anti-theatricality. In many ways, Fried has spent the last fifty years his-
toricizing the problematic laid out in “Art and Objecthood” in precisely such
terms. But there are other aspects of Fried’s work that square awkwardly
with this dialectical-historical schema. Not coincidentally, I think they can
be illuminated by looking at another key influence on his early thought, a
philosopher who occupies an important place in Rancière’s genealogy as
well: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see IMAC, especially 28–9).
This gives us our roadmap. Before comparing Fried and Rancière further
in pursuit of common theoretical ground, it’s important to consider the com-
mon genealogical ground their thinking has in Merleau-Ponty’s example.
After looking at Fried’s and Rancière’s readings together, I’ll then return to
Michaels’s account and Fried’s first tentative responses to it. In Fried’s view,
Michaels remains fixated on antinomies that suggest ill-conceived aesthetic
agendas, whereas Fried himself is keen to distinguish such antinomies from
the unfolding dialectic of absorption and theatricality. But it might be the
case—paradoxically, given his antipathy to Rancière—that Michaels’s own
skepticism toward a dialectical recasting of Fried’s work is not unrelated to
the political potential he finds in it.
1. Our Mediocre Planet

A skeptic of historical dialectics and a thinker at the cusp of phenomenology
and structuralism, Merleau-Ponty penned an essay shortly before his death
in 1961 that was, by Fried’s own account, formative: “Indirect Language
and the Voices of Silence.”10 In this essay, we find an exploration of the unity
of phenomenological experience in the encounter with art that bears com-
parison with Fried’s descriptions of those moments of suspension, grace,
and négligence that, in his view, comprise the best pictorial art. (Think
Chardin’s Soap Bubbles (Figure 11.1) or Greuze’s Young Woman Blowing a
Kiss by the Window, as interpreted in Absorption and Theatricality.) Fried’s
autobiographical account stresses the themes of fecundity and gesture in
Merleau-Ponty’s work, which he notes helped him spot “certain Hegelian
assumptions behind Greenberg’s avowedly Kantian reading of modernism”
(IMAC 18). In Merleau-Ponty’s vision, the work is the encounter of two
ephemera that comprise a singular moment, a peculiar unity:
The accomplished work is thus not the work that exists in itself like a
thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take
up the gesture which created it and, skipping the intermediaries, to
rejoin, without any guide other than a movement of the invented line
(an almost incorporeal trace), the silent world of the painter, henceforth
uttered and accessible.11
The finished work is no mere thing in the world, no natural object. It

remains imbued with an intention, which gives it a quality that invites reflec-
tion. Kant pursued analogies between nature and the artwork structured
around the idea of a presumed purposiveness dependent on a creator. Hegel
forged a dialectical relation between art and nature through the historical
194 Knox Peden
medium of the social. Merleau-Ponty is more interested in the distinction
between nature and art, a distinction that is ontological and not to be
resolved through history or time’s cunning. The problem of nature is that it
is complete. The task of science is to know its laws, to affirm and in some
sense reify its closure. Whence the opening, then, the avénement that allows
us to see otherwise? “Modern painting presents a problem completely dif-
ferent from that of a return of the individual: the problem of knowing how
one can communicate without the help of a pre-established Nature which
all men’s senses open upon, the problem of knowing how we are grafted
to the universal by that which is most our own.”12 The problem of art is
the problem of communication; it is the problem of how the event of sense
occurs in a domain that proceeds and exists just fine without it, which is
to say, nature. Giles Deleuze will develop this problem in innovative ways
in Logic of Sense. And it’s close to the heart of Rancière’s concerns. This
desire to provide an ontologically non-reductive yet robust account of the
event of meaning ties Fried’s work to a current of French thinking that is
not exhausted by the materialism or literalism that he finds anathema in
this tradition. Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Rancière are no more friends of
brute experience and literalist aesthetics than Fried is. Indeed, all three are
committed to a version of rationalism that takes very seriously the capacity
of action to bend nature and create meaning. Far from advocating an “aes-
thetics of indeterminacy” (AL 257), such determinations are precisely what
they’re aiming to specify.
Merleau-Ponty turns to André Malraux for a description of his goals:
“There is signification when we submit the data of the world to a ‘coher-
ent deformation.’ ”13 Malraux’s writings on artistic creation serve Merleau-
Ponty’s purposes because they emphasize the centrality of form to the cre-
ation of the work and the relationship between form and nature. It’s not
coincidental that Malraux worked with a universalist conception of art,
which is to say a conception that was neither dialectical nor historicist.
Nature’s forms are not art. Givens, evidence, data—les données du monde—
are not art. It is the coherent reworking, reforming, deformation of nature
that makes the artwork and that has been undertaken by rational animals
(those with “culture,” broadly construed) since time immemorial. And such
deformation only counts as such to the extent that it is purposive. Here
Merleau-Ponty sees something like the birth of intention, a birth which tra-
verses history (and art history) ad infinitum. And just as the moments that
take us out of nature in art point to the universal, they also account for the
inexhaustible quality of the artwork:
But already with our first oriented gesture, someone’s infinite relation-
ships to his situation had invaded our mediocre planet and opened an
inexhaustible field to our behavior. All perception, all action which pre-
supposes it, and in short every human use of the body is already primor-
dial expression. Not that derivative labor which substitutes for what
is expressed signs which are given elsewhere with their meaning and
rule of usage, but the primary operation which first constitutes signs
as signs, makes that which is expressed dwell in them through the elo-
quence of their arrangement and configuration alone, implants a mean-
ing in that which did not have one, and thus—far from exhausting itself
in the instant at which it occurs—inaugurates an order and founds an
institution or a tradition.14
This characteristically Proustian passage is replete with Friedian themes.

We are all literalists most of the time here on our mediocre planet. But as
soon as something takes place on purpose (notre premier geste orienté) a
field is opened that is inexhaustible. Such a field is inexhaustible not despite
its unity, but because of it. This unity is formed by the gesture that creates
it.15 The descriptive boundaries of an event are by and large conventional,
shaped by interpretative needs at a given instance. This is the significance of
Davidson’s example about flipping on the light switch and alerting the bur-
glar that you’re home being two descriptions of the same event, descriptions
that, in their very distinction, appear to expand or contract the borders of
the event without in any way disrupting its ontological identity.16 By con-
trast, an action is more restricted in the descriptions it can plausibly sustain.
If I alert the burglar to my being home, I do so inadvertently. My action was
turning on the light, justified by (which is, in this case, also to say caused
by) the combination of my desire to see the room and my belief that flipping
the switch would achieve that end. Fried’s concept of aesthetic reflection
eschews the inadvertent, turning us to the creation of the artwork as a con-
sequence of gestures or actions, depending on whether we prefer a Merleau-
Pontyian or Davidsonian idiom.17 It is the finite, bounded quality of the
action—the desire to make a work, combined with beliefs about what it is
to make it—that makes it interpretable, rather than a mere natural event or
coincidence. Moreover, the fact that its interpretability is entirely dependent
on its being the action of an artist conceived as a locus of intention suggests
that displacing that locus into a broader category of the social is unneces-
sary and potentially misleading. A Hegelian will want to see such intention
as socially mediated; the approach I’m describing here is more focused on
artistic strategy, irrespective of prevalent social forms. We could turn to any
number of artists Fried endorses to see these themes pursued, but I’ll focus
on one of Fried’s most recent readings to develop this point further, and to
suggest finally what it has to do with Rancière.
2. Another Light, Dance of Light, Cruel Radiance

Fried’s 2014 collection Another Light closes with a remarkable reading of
Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun (2012), a piece of video art that stages, via
sculpted cardboard and paper captured in stop motion photography, the
events that transpired in a café aboard the Pacific Sun ocean liner in 2008
196 Knox Peden
when it was buffeted by waves of more than twenty feet in a South Pacific
storm. Building on the account of Demand’s commitment to “allegories of
intention” argued for in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before,
Fried finds in this work an intransigent commitment on Demand’s part to
“transform causality into intention” (AL 259). What this means is that
Demand takes an exemplary instance of raw, sublime nature at work—an
ocean storm—that is also evidence of a sequence of causes and effects that
dwarf those of human intention, and stages it in such a way so that each
frame, each moment, which is to say, each effect, is exhaustively determined
by the deliberate actions of actors who have placed the material objects in
a specific position in order to be photographed. The twist ending of Fried’s
account of Demand’s work is that this effort to create an exhaustively inten-
tional scene was repeatedly foiled by natural causality in virtue of being
staged in Southern California, where nightly tremors would disrupt the
placement of Demand’s paper models from their positions at the conclusion
of the previous day’s work.
Fried’s account of Pacific Sun is a virtuoso reading that occupies a clear
place in his corpus of perennial concerns: the struggle between causality
and intention; the importance of a frame that terminates a “purely subjec-
tive experience” that would otherwise go “on and on with no end in sight”
(AL 265). But what should surprise us about the reading is its similarity to
the kind of scenes staged and proliferated in Rancière’s Aisthesis. What’s
important about the scene for Rancière is that it provides a way of situat-
ing the artwork in a broader setting that nevertheless remains in some sense
bounded. Fried undertakes something similar with Pacific Sun. The reading
does not focus on the video alone, but refers constantly to the mechanics
of its construction and builds on an allusion to its putative referent in the
events on the actual ocean liner and the YouTube clip of the episode that
went viral. To be sure, Fried’s reading of Demand’s practice emphasizes the
manipulation of conventions, in this case, of sculpture and photography, in
order to create a bounded, finite (though obviously still durational) work.
By contrast, there is no denying that Rancière is interested in the break-
down of conventions, the potentials for transmissibility in a way that is
suggestive of the going “on and on” that Fried deems is contrary to art.
But the scenes of Aisthesis are chapters with beginnings and ends, and they
describe temporally bound and ontologically overlapping events and actions
that yield particular unities, from the Belvedere Torso to The Red and the
Black. My point is that—formally—there are more similarities than differ-
ences between the two kinds of aesthetic reading being pursued by Fried and
Rancière. And the way the readings proceed owes more to a tradition stem-
ming from Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the event of meaning—the avénement
of the work—than any historico-dialectical account of pictorial modernism
that would replace the experience of a discrete subject of experience with
an idea of art as a historical subject that itself goes “on and on with no end
in sight.”
Exemplary here is Rancière’s account of Loïe Fuller’s “serpentine dance,”
in a chapter titled “The Dance of Light.”18 An American by birth, Fuller
became a star in belle époque France with her innovative and brazenly the-
atrical performances that combined technical developments in stage light-
ing with an ingenious use of costuming that sent up swirls of fabric from
the space of her undulating body. Forms clashed and collided in her effort,
which galvanized Paris with its quintessentially modern quality. Following
Burke, Rancière writes, “the serpentine is the destruction of the organic as
the natural model of beauty.” Rancière pursues the link between Fuller’s
dance and the advent of Symbolist poetics. “Symbolism is not the use of
symbols. It is the suppression of the difference between symbolic and direct
expression.”19 Likewise, Rancière sees in Fuller’s art a recasting of fiction
that eschews representation without thereby having done with mimesis.
Mallarmé’s enthusiasm for Fuller is crucial in this regard:
[W]hat the art of the serpentine dance illustrates for Mallarmé is no

longer a deviation in relation to a fictional norm, it is a new idea of fic-
tion: this substitutes the plot with the construction of a play of aspects,
elementary forms that offer an analogy to the play of the world . . . But
if [these forms] get rid of stories, they do so in order to serve a higher
mimesis: through artifice they reinvent the very forms in which sensible
events are given to us and assembled to constitute a world. The “transi-
tion” from music to fabric is the recapturing of the power of abstrac-
tion, of music’s power of muteness, by mimetic gesture itself. The body
abstracts from itself, it dissimulates its own form in the display of veils
sketching flight rather than the bird, the swirling rather than the wave,
the bloom rather than the flower. What is imitated, in each thing, is the
event of its apparition.20
In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty stages an exchange between Emile

Bernard and Cézanne in which Bernard asks, “But aren’t art and nature
different?” To which the artist replies: “I want to make them the same.”21
Crucial here is the tacit acknowledgement, if not concession, that art and
nature are not the same. They are as metaphysically different as actions
and events. But the artistic act strives to makes them the same to the extent
that it saturates the work with intentional acts that reproduce, not the
things themselves—the bird, the wave, or the flower—but the event of their
apparition—the flight, the swirling, the bloom.
Similarly, Demand does not reproduce the chair that crashes across the
room, but the event of the crash. He replaces the natural event with his own
staging, accentuated all the more by the absence of humans or any repre-
sentation of them. In this sense, again, Fried’s reading of the scene that is
Demand’s work seems Rancièrian to the extent that it positions the work
in relation to its own outside, not simply the event of the actual Pacific Sun
ocean liner, but the event of its construction and the existence of an art
198 Knox Peden
market with sufficient capital to support such a Herculean scheme of produc-
tion. The object of the artwork in both instances—Demand’s photographed
sculptures; Fuller’s dance—is a suspension decoupled from duration, and
more a suspension that is not natural, but intentional, and indifferent to
historical norms and prevailing conventions. What gives Demand’s video
its power, among other things, is the presentiment communicated by the
image itself that it is the result of the belabored effort that is stop motion
photography, that this is the mechanism by which the illusion of duration
is achieved. Where Demand turns to antiquated techniques, Fuller develops
new ones. But the innovations themselves are in a way beside the point
common to both efforts, which is that the work of art no longer aims to
represent things but to absorb us in an event of apparition. Such events are
ephemeral by nature. Both works aim to formalize ephemera, to give form
to the event of form.
In both cases, then, you have art that challenges the autonomy of form or
the “project of separation” that is putatively central to modernism. Demand
combines sculpture, photography, and video; asking after the genre of the
piece seems wrong. In Rancière’s reading, music, poetics, and theater com-
bine at the Folies Bèrgere. The point is not that either of these artists is
thereby not modernist, but instead that modernism is not a matter of formal
conventions.
The rejection of modernism in such terms is more explicit in the conclud-
ing scene of Aisthesis, devoted to James Agee and Walker Evans’s 1945
book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It should be stressed, however, that
Rancière focuses solely on the text of this work and not the photography,
even though the generic heteronomy of the book serves his purposes.22
Rather, Rancière’s approach to this work again invites comparison with
Fried’s account of Demand, and this for two reasons. In the first instance,
the form of the artwork itself acquires its aesthetic properties through a
deft negotiation with its own outside, in this case the actual experience of
three poor sharecropping families in Alabama in the 1930s. Second, both
works focus our attention on an aesthetic of suspension—a present grace
or a moment of equality—precisely if paradoxically by focusing our atten-
tion on the overwhelming force of natural causality that is reworked and
repurposed in the artworks themselves. Finally, Rancière’s approach to Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men is central to Michaels’s criticism of his views.
Hence a focus on this work will help us gain purchase on the multiple con-
ceptions of aesthetics now in play.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is canonical not least for the questions
it poses about the relation between art and non-art and the ethics involved
in generating beauty from harm. Michaels argues that the significance of
Evans’s photographs is that their beauty is not available to the subjects of
them; their properties as art are the index of the inequality that obtains
between Agee and Evans and the sharecroppers.23 By contrast, Agee’s
ingratiating prose is solicitous, if not obsequious—and hence, theatrical.
He wants to be accepted by these families; he wants to be among them in a
way that bears no appeal to the urbane Walker Evans. He also wants to be
accepted by the reader, forgiven for the injustice that is the project of report-
age itself. Where Michaels focuses on the photography of the work, deal-
ing with Agee’s prose only for contrastive effect, the thematization of these
dilemmas is central to Rancière’s account of Agee’s writing. Acknowledging
Agee’s self-description as “frivolous” or “pathological,” Rancière writes:
This way is precisely, says Agee, the only serious attitude, the attitude of
the gaze and speech that are not grounded on any authority and do not
ground any; the entire state of consciousness that refuses specialization
for itself and must also refuse every right to select what suits its point of
view in the surroundings of the destitute sharecroppers, to concentrate
instead on the essential fact that each one of these things is part of an
existence that is entirely actual, inevitable, and unrepeatable.24
“Beyond science and art,” Rancière continues, “beyond the imagined and
the revisive, the full state of consciousness that perceives the ‘cruel radi-
ance of what is’ must still pass through words.” Refusing specialization
and disparaging the revisive, the concern here is aesthetic precisely in its
exclusion of the epistemological. This is the unity of an aesthetic that works
contrary to selection, but is no less purposive for it. We can contrast this
with Michaels’s approach, where the aesthetic is marshalled in the service
of the epistemological by formalizing the fact that economic inequality is
to be known inferentially rather than grasped or “known” through affec-
tive sympathies. Evans’s photographs promote this separation in their for-
mal beauty. Agee’s aesthetic is motivated by the problem of how meaning
traverses heteronomous forms, how nature becomes deformed to become
art, in this case the art of prose. Rancière finds in Agee something like the
Cézannian imperative to make art and nature the same:
Words must go beyond the compromise of description and imitate this

embodiment, which they know is impossible: sentences must expand
indefinitely in order to mirror the movement that would link each insig-
nificant detail of impoverished life not to its causes or contexts, which
are always already known, but to the uncontrollable chain of events
that creates a cosmos and a destiny.25
As with Fuller’s serpentine dance, Agee’s prose is not invested in repre-

sentation (“the compromise of description”), preferring instead to create
and deliver a radiance that undermines, indeed compromises for its own
part, the authority of the gaze of one who knows, be it Agee’s or Ran-
cière’s. The rejection of “causes or contexts” in this context is an exemplary
200 Knox Peden
gesture for Rancière, whose most fundamental political principle amounts
to a rejection of ideology critique in the conviction that everyone always
knows how and that they are being exploited. Yet to inscribe the sharecrop-
pers’ existence in an uncontrollable chain of events that creates a cosmos
and a destiny appears to naturalize it, to de-politicize it in a way that will
invite Michaels’s criticism. After all, it’s not the cosmos that impoverished
the sharecroppers; it’s capitalism.
Central to Michaels’s critique of Rancière’s account of Evans’s photo-
graphs is the presumption on Rancière’s part that we don’t know what was
going through Evans’s mind as he took his photographs and that this non-
knowledge is significant in its own right for the attention it puts on the inde-
terminate beauty of the arrangements and material textures photographed
in the sharecroppers’ homes. The risk here is that beauty becomes an emer-
gent natural property rather than the aesthetic consequence of the formal
framing of “a social problem.” It is crucial to Michaels’s reading that the
sharecroppers not perceive the beauty that is in the Evans photographs, nor
by implication that (arguably) found in Agee’s overwrought prose. This dis-
tinction is the index of the class inequality that obtains between the artists
and the subjects of their work. Rancière’s sin is to treat class as an identity
among others, a matter of place, that is rendered superfluous by the forms
of vision promoted in Agee and Evans’s art.
Michaels focuses on Rancière’s account of Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men in “Notes on the Photographic Image,” but Aisthesis takes a differ-
ent tack on these issues, not least in turning attention from Evans to Agee.
Against a sociological investigation that links poverty to its causes, Agee
pursues a different concern:
The problem is not to link everything to everything else, but to capture

the great weight of necessity that crushes human beings, and the art
with which they respond to it, in each detail. The problem is to restore
each element of the inventory to the dignity of what it is: a response to
the violence of a condition, simultaneously the product of an art of liv-
ing and doing and a scar from a double-wound—a wound from being
subject to necessity and the pain of knowing that the response will never
match the intensity of the violence.26
Here we see Rancière accentuating the indistinction between the art that
is produced by artists, i.e., the artwork that is Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, and the “art” that is produced by the sharecroppers themselves. Lit-
eralism threatens because, if the arrangement of cutlery on a wooden shelf
is deemed beautiful, as beautiful as a Greuze painting (or at least inviting
comparison), then the unity of the action that is essential to art is undone.
But the point is that these images aren’t beautiful in themselves, not least
because they aren’t images prior to the “coherent deformation” that Evans
undertakes with his camera and Agee with his pen.
Rancière continues: “To see each thing as a consecrated object and as a
scar: for James Agee, this programme demands description that makes sen-
sible at the same time both the beauty present at the heart of misery and the
misery of not being able to perceive this beauty.”27 Rancière understands
full well that these people are “damaged,” a damage that extends to their
aesthetic capacities. The difference between James Agee and Floyd Bur-
roughs is ineliminable, a consequence of fate—a crushing weight of neces-
sity that proceeds by division and, in capitalism, takes particular forms.
“In order to sense this beauty, one has to be there accidentally, a specta-
tor coming from elsewhere with eyes and a mind filled with the memory
of performances and pages that have already consecrated the relationship
between art and chance.”28 Rancière is stressing the fortuitous quality of the
encounter between Agee’s gaze and the Burroughs’s kitchen. But to stress
the fortuity of the encounter is not at all to suggest that Agee’s vision is not
imbued with intention (in both Fried’s sense and the broader phenomeno-
logical one). What is more, a similar description—in fact the same exact
description—could express the relationship between Demand’s Pacific Sun
and the ocean liner Pacific Sun. In order to sense the potential for beauty
in an uncanny scene on YouTube, of unpredictable motion filmed from a
fixed point, one has to be there accidentally, in the sense of being one con-
sumer among others of memes and viral images, a spectator coming from
elsewhere with eyes and a mind filled with the memory of performances
and pages that have already consecrated the relationship between art and
chance. An education in art school and a career as an artist ought to cover
it, in Demand’s case.
The political function of art requires this discrepancy, the one borne from
the fortuitousness of a double encounter between different knowledges,
between artist and subject (-matter) and artist and spectator. Rancière
writes: “The aesthetic idea is the indeterminate idea that connects the two
processes that the destruction of the mimetic order left separated: the inten-
tional production of art which seeks an end, and the sensible experience of
beauty as finality without end.”29 Michaels treats Rancière as purveying an
aesthetics of indeterminacy, one that can be traced to Roland Barthes’s privi-
leging of the punctum over the studium. But Rancière’s point, pursued oddly
enough in a critique of Barthes (among other places), is that such indeter-
minacy is merely an index of the fortuity of the encounter, a fortuity that
evaporates once the determinations of intelligibility take hold and form.30
This fortuity is the equality of intelligence, the fact that anyone could see or
could have seen, that anyone could have been or could be exposed to signs
and images that lead one to see otherwise. But what happens in the encoun-
ter is precisely the forging of the unity that is dear to Merleau-Ponty, and to
Fried. The intentional production of art which seeks an end is essential to
the production of art; it’s pleonastic to say it. But once produced, the result
is a finality without end: a bounded unity that is inexhaustibly interpretable,
but only interpretable because it is the consequence of actions.
202 Knox Peden
3. After Kant
In a long endnote in Another Light, Fried responds to Michaels’s assess-
ment of his position in “Neoliberal Aesthetics,” focusing in particular on
the idea that John Cage’s 4’33” is a radicalization of the antinomic collapse
of absorption (deny the beholder) into pure theatricality (all that matters is
the beholder’s experience) first ventured in Barthes’s Camera Lucida via the
primacy accorded the punctum. Fried’s response is instructive, for in a first
instance it eschews a historicizing vision of art, focusing instead on “aes-
thetic strategy” as a local, intentional matter for particular artists, only to
reassert that the “moments of crisis” in which we see such strategies put to
work are cases in which the absorptive tradition “as a historically develop-
ing force . . . most fully emerges” (AL 274n).31 In the first instance, again,
Fried counters his “necessarily dialectical” approach to the antinomic one
Michaels sketches, but insists that his dialectical stance is on the side of the
Diderotian angels against the Kantians devoted to “avoiding any manifesta-
tion of intention, indeed of rejecting intention as such.” This is a powerful
moment—buried in an endnote, naturally—in that it pushes back against
the absorption of Friedian aesthetics into the Kantian-Hegelian, at any rate
German idealist framework being pursued by Pippin and others. What com-
plicates matters is that Fried uses the term “dialectical” to describe his posi-
tion against the Kantians. But what I see here in this Diderotian dialectic is
formally isomorphic to the concern for reversibility that is at the heart of
Rancière’s concerns, which also trace back to Kant. The reversibility of the
aesthetic between subject and object, spectator and work, is not a dialectical
relationship for being binary. It is not a dialectic that stresses the active and
the passive around the medium of negation; rather the sense of the work is
made in the encounter between actions, the action that made the work and
the action that regards it. Hegelian dialectics requires privileging one rela-
tion above others: negation. A consequence of this is that one unit of the
relation is active and the other passive. One negates; the other is negated.
And thus art (but not just art) history proceeds in a way that is endowed
with sense that is legible after the fact. Yet crucial for Rancière is the idea
that the spectator is never passive, but always active, negotiating the forms
he or she brings to the scene with the forms he or she finds in the scene.32
The legibility is never settled. To say “the aesthetic idea is the indeterminate
idea” is not to promote an aesthetics of indeterminacy. It is to highlight the
strategic nature of the aesthetic as such, as the place where the finite and the
infinite negotiate in bounded unities, unities that are formed by the work in
its existence as art, which is to say, in its existence as an object made for the
purpose of being beheld.
Personally, I find it regrettable that in the next beat in his note Fried
goes back to describing the absorptive tradition as “a historically develop-
ing force” in notes that ring Hegelian. It’s too metaphysically historicist,
but a charitable reading acknowledges that such a force is but a metaphor
for a roster of heroic efforts, rather than a cipher for art historical Spirit.
Rancière too rejects any teleological framework, within aesthetics or with-
out, much to the chagrin of his political detractors. Rancière and Fried both
point back to Kant, but they do so in ways that suggest other avenues out of
Kantian aesthetics beyond the Hegelian.33 In some sense, they point toward
an Althusserian or Davidsonian rationalism, in which conceptual dualism is
premised on ontological monism, and which is also a way of pointing back
to Spinozism. Moments of suspension, when equality rearranges distribu-
tions, are intermittent or they will not be.34 Regardless, they don’t endow
history with meaning. If history names anything unique at all, it is but the
agglomeration of such intermittencies. Likewise, presentness is only pres-
entness to the extent that it is not all the time; otherwise it would be the
unformed, mere presence of the literalists. But these instances of grace do
nothing to disrupt or undermine the natural world; they are not metaphysi-
cal exceptions in virtue of being aesthetic experiences. As Rancière writes,
“the exceptional is always ordinary.”35 What they do is point to the finitude
of our knowledge and awareness and the possibility that it could always be
otherwise, not merely in fact, but also in principle. For Spinoza, miracles
are consequent on a dearth of knowledge, but they are no less miraculous
for being so. The encounter with something that seems to be beyond form—
sublime nature, or literalist art—will aggravate our demand for form. By
contrast, instances of equality and absorption stimulate it; they remind us
that we can’t do anything in the world without it.
Many will find it surprising that I have striven to establish common
ground between Fried and Rancière, given the discrepancies between their
projects. But the surprise is part of the point. According to Davidson, any
animal can be startled, but only rational animals can be surprised.36 To be
startled is to have the force of natural causes impinge on the senses. But to
be surprised requires becoming aware that a previously held belief is false,
in this case, the belief, perhaps not explicitly formulated in the mind, of
what the most immediately subsequent moment in time beckons. A similar
experience confronts the emancipated spectator who becomes absorbed in
aesthetic experience. One is surprised to learn that a world that is meta-
physically exhausted by natural causes is not actually exhausted by them.
One discovers that action is possible.
Notes
1 Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Con-
tinuum, 2011).
2 Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-
Century France, trans. John Drury (London: Verso, 2012); The Names of His-
tory: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1994).
3 Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso,
1995); Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013).
204 Knox Peden
5 The implications of this methodological dispositif are explored in Jean-Philippe
Deranty and Alison Ross, Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The
Philosophy of Radical Equality (London: Continuum, 2012).
6 See, for example, Hal Foster, “What’s the Problem with Critical Art?” London
Review of Books (35: 19, 2013), 14–15. The most illuminating review of Ais-
thesis is Jean-Philippe Deranty’s “The Symbolic and the Material: A Review of
Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art,” Parrhe-
sia (18, 2013), 139–44.
7 Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Auton-
omy, Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 43–70.
8 See “Orientation in Painting: Caspar David Friedrich,” in Another Light (111–
49), which takes inspiration from Kant’s essay “What does it mean to orient
oneself in thinking?” Fried suggests the polemic with Spinozism in this piece is
incidental to what he finds of value in it. I’m not so sure.
9 Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial
Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Compare Eli Fried-
lander, Expression and Judgment: An Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Friedlander also finds common ground
between Fried’s work and Kant’s aesthetics, but without any gestures toward
a historicization or socialization of the aesthetic in Hegelian terms. This is not
surprising given that Friedlander’s concern for the place of the aesthetic in the
production of meaning is informed by the deeply anti-historicist position of Wal-
ter Benjamin. More surprising are the points of connection between this view
and my own, which stresses rationalist elements.
10 In Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 39–83 (French edition: Signes (Paris: Gal-
limard/Folio, 1960). Compare Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
11 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 51; 83f.
13 Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 54; 87–8f.
15 Despite his hostility to Merleau-Ponty, Althusser makes a similar point in his
programmatic introduction to Reading Capital regarding the field of vision
within a given problematic, be it ideological or scientific: “In other words, all its
limits are internal, it carries its outside inside it. Hence, if we wish to preserve
the spatial metaphor, the paradox of the theoretical field is that it is an infinite
because definite space, i.e., it has no limits, no external frontiers separating it
from nothing, precisely because it is defined and limited within itself, carrying
in itself the finitude of its definition, which, by excluding what it is not makes
it what it is” (Louis Althusser et al., Reading Capital: The Complete Edition
(London: Verso, 2016), 25). For Fried, the frame of the artwork is crucial to the
extent that it bestows unity, thereby allowing for an inexhaustible exercise of
interpretation. For Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, and indeed Rancière the unity is
not dependent upon physical features but rather this inexhaustible boundedness
as a matter of what Georges Canguilhem called “the function of a form” (as
opposed to simply “a form”). Compare as well Badiou: “I would even happily
argue that the work of art is in fact the only finite thing that exists—that art cre-
ates finitude” (Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11).
16 Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 3–19; 207–25.
17 Compare Mark A. Wrathall, “Motives, Reasons, and Causes,” in The Cam-
bridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N.
Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111–28.
8 Rancière, “Aisthesis,” 93–109.
1
19 Rancière, “Aisthesis,” 95.
21 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (London: Rout-
ledge, 2004), 276.
22 Rancière, “Aisthesis,” 245–62. Evans’s photographs are given their due in

Jacques Rancière, “Notes on the Photographic Image,” Radical Philosophy
(156, 2009), 8–15.
23 Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem, 133–43.
27 Rancière, “Aisthesis,” 253 (my emphasis).
29 Rancière, “Notes on the Photographic Image,” 15.
30 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London:
Verso, 2007), 10–11.
31 The key passage is worth quoting in full:
In other words, there is a crucial distinction to be made between the inher-
ently, necessarily dialectical (i.e., non-antinomic) status of antitheatricality
as an aesthetic strategy and the (not at all Diderotian; rather, more nearly
Kantian) project of avoiding any manifestation of artistic intention, indeed
of rejecting intention as such, a project that, as Michaels says, is bound to
emphasize the beholder’s response in precisely the respects castigated in “Art
and Objecthood.”
(AL 273n)
32 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London:
Verso, 2009).
33 On Rancière’s ambivalent relationship to Hegel, see Alison Ross, “Equality in
the Romantic Art Form: The Hegelian Background to Jacques Rancière’s ‘Aes-
thetic Revolution’,” in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene, ed. Der-
anty and Ross, 87–98.
34 Compare Andrew Gibson, Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason
in Recent French Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012),
220–2.
35 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum,
2010), 213.
36 Donald Davidson, “Rational Animals,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95–105.
13 Diderot’s Conception of Aesthetic
Subjectivity and the Possibility
of Art
Andrea Kern
In Absorption and Theatricality, Michael Fried adopts a distinction which,

as he acknowledges, is initially surprising. On Denis Diderot’s conception of
painting, which Fried understands not only to serve as a commentary on the
painting of his time, but also to formulate a normative aesthetic ideal, two
different approaches can be distinguished which appear, on the face of it, to
negate one another. On the one hand, we find a dramatic conception of paint-
ing; on the other hand, a pastoral idea, the latter of which, as Fried phrases
it, “goes against almost everything” (AT 118) that characterizes the former.
The dramatic conception of painting charges art with the task of depict-
ing a self-contained unity of figures and objects that are related to each other
dramatically—that is, through the figures’ actions—and whose dramatic
disposition is essentially expressed by the “index of absorption” (AT 31) by
which they are marked. This index, as Fried understands it, is the strategy
an artwork employs in showing people engaged in particular activities—
reading, playing the violin, or meditating, for instance—with their attention
entirely focused on themselves and their activity; in extreme cases, they may
even be depicted with closed eyes or as blind. The flipside of this strategy is
the particular relation in which these works stand to the spectator. They are
meant to negate the spectator in front of the painting by way of what they
represent. Their depictions are based upon their refusal to acknowledge the
fact that they are beheld.
The pastoral conception of painting, on the other hand, appears at first
glance to be concerned with precisely the opposite effect. It attributes to
art the power to integrate the spectator into the painting, to invite him to
enter into the artwork and to become part of the work himself. The pastoral
strategy, it appears, is concerned precisely not to negate the spectator, but
to address him instead. Diderot makes this so-called pastoral conception
of painting a particularly evident feature of his analysis of Claude Joseph
Vernet’s landscape paintings by casting his critical comments as a fictional
account of an imagined promenade through the countryside, which he
undertakes with a companion. Diderot writes as though he were actually
strolling through landscapes, which he then reproduces in prose.
Diderot and Aesthetic Subjectivity 207
This approach is initially perplexing, and it appears as if Diderot, with his
pastoral program, were revoking all that his dramatic conception of paint-
ing had called for. Fried proceeds to argue convincingly that this first impres-
sion is misleading. In truth, the pastoral conception of painting represents
a particular species of the dramatic conception rather than its opposite. In
what follows, I will support Fried in his claim that an art that negates the
spectator and one that incorporates him into the painting do not instantiate
two different conceptions of art. In contrast to Fried, however, I will argue
that neither is it the case that what is at issue are two different aesthetic
strategies for realizing one and the same normative aesthetic ideal—namely,
the ideal of an art that negates the spectator. Rather, I will claim that what
is at issue are two different ways of describing one and the same aesthetic
principle which, in itself contradictory, is constitutive for the being of an
artwork that claims to represent a world.
What is shared by the two conceptions of painting Diderot delineates
becomes comprehensible first, in my assessment, when we understand them
both not simply as articulations of a normative aesthetic ideal, as Fried sug-
gests, but as the attempt to grasp the constitutional principle of a particular
kind of art. This is an art that claims to represent a world. Thus, in what
follows, I will be concerned, with and against Fried’s Diderot interpretation,
to unfold the intimate connection between the two aesthetic strategies that
Fried describes and the claim of an artwork to represent a world. The pasto-
ral conception of painting, as I would like to show, does not contradict the
dramatic conception. The former rather distinguishes itself from the latter in
that it describes as a process that which the dramatic conception describes
as static, a process that makes the paradoxical nature of its governing aes-
thetic principle manifest. This is a principle that can only make possible
what it tries to create—namely, works that depict a world that has been
made to be beheld—in such a way that that which has been made possible
bears, at the same time, the marks of its impossibility.
1
One of the first paintings that Fried uses to introduce the idea of a dramatic
aesthetic approach is Chardin’s Un Philosophe occupé de sa lecture (1753).
None of the painting’s commentators have failed to notice the obliviousness
of the reading philosopher it depicts. So, for example, Abbé Laugier writes:
The painter has given him an air of intelligence, reverie, and oblivious-
ness that is infinitely pleasing. This is a truly philosophical reader who
is not content merely to read, but who meditates and ponders, and who
appears so deeply absorbed in his meditation that it seems one would
have a hard time distracting him.
(quoted AT 11)
208 Andrea Kern
Another representative example of absorbed reading can be found in
Carle Van Loo’s La Lecture espagnol (Reading from a Spanish book), whose
exhibition at the Salon of 1761 prompted this praise from an anonymous
contemporary critic in the Journal Encyclopédique:
M. Carle Van Loo opens before us a garden in which we see a fam-

ily engaged in a reading. A young man dressed in Spanish costume is
reading aloud from a small book, which, on the evidence of his keen
attention and that of the company, can be recognized as a novel deal-
ing with love. Two young girls listen to him with a pleasure expressed
by everything about them. Their mother, who is on the other side of
the reader and behind him, suspends her needlework in order to listen
also . . . Meanwhile, a young child to whom all this means nothing plays
with a bird. She has tied a long string to its leg and is amusing herself
watching it fly.
(quoted AT 27)
The structural similarity of an overwhelming number of mid-eighteenth-

century French paintings, headed by the work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon
Chardin, Carle van Loo, Joseph-Marie Vien, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and
for which the two paintings described previously are representative, is inter-
preted by Fried in his study as the well-nigh obsessive representation of
figures immersed in activities that are such as to naturally absorb those who
are engaged in them, activities such as reading, meditation, violin playing,
or painting. What characterizes these activities that are the topic of all these
paintings is that they quite naturally tend to be performed in the very state
of absorption which is depicted in these paintings—in contrast, for example,
to activities such as brushing one’s teeth or riding a bicycle. Although one
might occasionally enter into an absorbed state while engaging in these lat-
ter activities, the activities themselves do not naturally suggest a state of
absorption. In this context, “absorption” means a state in which one’s sur-
roundings as well as one’s self are completely forgotten. One is entirely pres-
ent to the object of absorption without remaining conscious of anyone else
or of oneself as someone who engages in any particular activity.
The flipside of this kind of representation is the particular relation to the
spectator it exhibits. Fried calls it a relationship of negation. The precondi-
tion for these paintings’ contents, he argues, is their denial of the fact that
they are being beheld. The depicted figures are presented to the spectator in
attitudes that depend upon the fiction that the latter does not exist. No one
can play the violin with such absorption if he knows someone is observ-
ing him; no one can meditate so absorbedly if he is aware that he is being
watched and even, perhaps, discussed. Thus, when we come upon someone
who is depicted as fully absorbed in her activity, we are able to behold her
as being so absorbed only by presupposing that we are not doing so. And
this, as Fried argues, is the essential point of the topic of absorption that
is exhibited in these paintings. The state of absorption that these paintings
depict has the effect of bringing the spectator into a particular relationship
to the painting, a relationship in which he himself, as spectator, is negated.
For these paintings can only depict what they do—figures fully and com-
pletely absorbed in themselves and in their occupations—if the content of
these paintings presumes that there is no spectator for the paintings. That
which these figures represent requires and implies that no one observes them
in their tasks. Otherwise, they would not do what they do in the way they
do it—namely, fully immersed in themselves and their activities.
The less the content of what is depicted is thinkable together with the
presumption of a spectator, the more explicit does the strategy of negating
the spectator become. This strategy of negation becomes most clear in the
case of sexual themes, according to Fried, which portray a self-divulgence or
exposure that would be impossible if one were to be conscious of observa-
tion. Diderot’s remarks upon Greuze’s painting of a young lady who blows
a kiss to her lover from a window, Une Jeune Fille qui envoie un baiser par
la fenêtre, appuyee sur des fleurs, qu’elle brise (A Young Woman Throwing
a Kiss from Her Window) (1765), make exactly this point:
It is impossible to depict for you all the voluptuousness of this figure.

Her eyes, her eyelids are fraught with it! . . . She is intoxicated; she is
no longer there; she no longer knows what she is doing; nor, almost, do
I know what I am writing.
(quoted AT 59–60)
I will return to this comment again in what follows. Let us first determine
how Fried understands it. Depicting a woman whose body is so animated
by her infatuation, as Diderot writes, that she almost appears to have lost
any conscious idea of herself, the picture can only be beheld if the spectator
(that is, oneself) is negated. Insofar as these works’ contents depend on the
fact that they can only be beheld by assuming the absence of observation,
they create precisely that which they need in order to make the depiction
of such content possible: namely, a spectator who forgets himself. Because
the negation of the spectator is the condition that makes possible the con-
tents of these works, it also represents the condition of possibility of the
works themselves. In other words, these works are constituted such that
they enable their own contemplation and, with that, enable themselves as
works, precisely by calling forth a spectator who has no conscious sense of
himself as spectator. As Fried writes of the Greuze painting cited previously:
“The denial of the beholder that her condition implies is given added point
by the way in which, although facing the beholder, she appears to look
through him to her lover” (AT 61).
We find this aesthetic strategy most fully spelled out, according to Fried,
in Diderot’s dramatic conception of painting. Diderot describes an aesthetic
imperative in his essays, Fried claims, to which works of art must bend in
210 Andrea Kern
order to be judged to be successful, or beautiful. This imperative is meant
to apply in equal measure to the fine arts and the theatrical arts. It relates
to the content of the depiction as well as to the manner of representation
as this relates to the spectator. In relation to the content of the depiction,
the imperative takes effect as the demand for dramatic unity, which in the
broadest sense refers to the idea of a unity of elements that are essentially
related to one another and conveyed together through actions and emo-
tions. In relation to the manner of representation, the imperative becomes
operative as the demand to represent the content thus determined in a way
that refuses to acknowledge the fact that the artwork was created for a
spectator to behold it. A “fourth wall,” so to speak, should stand between
the scene of the painting or the scene being staged, on the one hand, and the
spectator, on the other. Diderot makes his now famous theory of the fourth
wall explicit in his consideration of the Dutch painter Laîresse:
Laîresse claims that the artist is allowed to make the spectator enter
the scene of his painting. I don’t believe that at all; and there are so few
exceptions that I would gladly make a general rule to the contrary. That
would seem to me to be bad taste, as much as if an actor addressed
the parterre. The canvas encloses the entire space and there is no one
beyond it. When Suzanne reveals herself naked to my eyes, countering
the gazes of old men with all the veils enveloping her, Suzanne is chaste
and so is the painter; neither one of them knew that I was there.1
Before undertaking a more thoroughgoing analysis of Diderot’s aesthetic

approach, in what follows I would first like to call to mind a few addi-
tional passages from Diderot which provide us with the concepts necessary
to explicate his understanding of art. I will also bring these into critical rela-
tion with Fried’s interpretation.
In a letter from 1766 to the actress Marie-Magdalene Jodin, Diderot for-
mulates the aesthetic imperative in the form of the following injunction:
Let the stage have neither foreground nor background, but let it be a site
set aside for you instead in which no one sees you. Once in a while, one
must have the courage to turn one’s back on the audience, and must never
think of it. Every actress who addresses herself to her audience deserves
to hear a voice from the parterre crying: “Mademoiselle, I am not here!”2
And in his text De la poésie dramatique (On Dramatic Poetry) from

1758, Diderot writes programmatically:
Whether in composing or acting, one takes as little notice of the specta-

tor’s existence as if he weren’t there. One imagines a great wall along
the edge of the stage that separates him from the orchestra and plays his
part as if the curtain had never been raised.3
What is the basis for this imperative? Why should the actor perform as
if the curtain never rises? And what is to be achieved by it? Fried’s thesis
declares that the aesthetic strategy sketched here finds its explicit expression
in the demand for a fourth wall between stage or painting, on the one hand,
and spectator, on the other. This is meant to explain at once the basis and
objective of Diderot’s imperative. The reason for the imperative consists,
according to Fried, in the thought that the sole purpose of artworks, and
the reason that they are created, is to be beheld. The aim of this imperative
is to formulate a strategy according to which artworks can most optimally
achieve the purpose for which they were created.
The insight meant to encapsulate Diderot’s imperative can be formulated
as follows: artworks achieve their purpose—namely, to be beheld—most
optimally when they depict something or present that depiction in such a
way that the spectator is negated in this representation. In other words, they
achieve their aim of attracting the attention of the spectator precisely by
pretending not to notice her; even more, they behave as if she didn’t exist.
Fried writes:
The recognition that paintings are made to be beheld and therefore pre-
suppose the existence of a beholder led to the demand for the actual-
ization of his presence: a painting, it was insisted, had to attract the
beholder, to stop him in front of itself, and to hold him there in a perfect
trance of involvement. At the same time . . . it was only by negating the
beholder’s presence that this could be achieved: only by establishing the
fiction of his absence or nonexistence could his actual placement before
and enthrallment by the painting be secured.
(AT 103)
The aesthetic imperative articulated in Diderot’s essays is thus interpreted

by Fried as a particular aesthetic strategy which is meant to provide a solu-
tion to a problem for which painting in the mid-eighteenth century devel-
ops a conscious sense for the first time. The relationship between the work
of art and the spectator becomes problematic because the former is now
understood explicitly as something that by its very nature seeks access to a
spectator. And that introduces the question of how a work can succeed in
creating this access in a way that allows the spectator to become involved
in what Fried calls, speaking generally, the “spirit” of the work (AT 104).
In other words, the work of art is now explicitly understood as something
that only exists as such when it stands in a specific relation to a spectator.
We can understand this idea in rough analogy to the concept of a friend.
To be a friend means that I stand in a relation of friendship to someone.
Only as part of such a relation can I be a friend. The concept “friend”
describes a particular mode of relation between a pair. Fried wants to argue
that the concept of artwork has a similar structure. Only as part of a par-
ticular mode of relation between work and spectator does the artwork exist
212 Andrea Kern
as artwork. For an object to be a work of art means that it is related to
a spectator who is caught up in the “spirit” of the work. Fried does not
say much about the idea of “spirit” that is relevant here. According to my
understanding, he uses this notion in an abstract and purely formal manner.
It serves to indicate that works of art, whatever else they are, are not identi-
cal to material objects, which they also are. They are meaningful objects of
a specific kind and in that sense they exhibit “spirit.” It is in light of this
conception of what an artwork is that Fried puts forward his central claim
that the aesthetic imperative that Diderot describes is the description of a
normative aesthetic ideal, unfolded at a certain historical moment, that aims
to respond to the relational character of art’s existence. “The success of both
arts,” he argues, “in fact their continued functioning as major expressions
of the human spirit” (AT 104), made it necessary for the arts to explicitly
reflect upon their relation to the spectator and to formulate an aesthetic
ideal that responds to the spectator’s awareness of this relation. The impera-
tive that Diderot describes—i.e., that works become objects of a dramatic
unity that rests upon the fiction that no spectator exists—is interpreted by
Fried thereafter as an answer to the mid-century’s newfound awareness of
the problem of the spectator.
2
I mentioned in my opening remarks that Fried distinguishes two aesthetic
conceptions in Diderot’s writings that appear to stand in prima facie tension
with one another, but which he then claims represent two ways of achieving
the same purpose—that is, both conceptions strive to realize a particular
mode of relation between work and spectator that he believes constitutes
the normative ideal of Diderot’s aesthetic theory. Beautiful works of art are
those that negate the spectator. However, Fried suggests, there are two dif-
ferent ways to achieve this purpose and hence two different conceptions
of art reflecting this difference. Fried calls the second conception, which
Diderot outlines in exemplary form in his description of particular land-
scapes by Vernet, the “pastoral” conception of painting. Diderot describes
Vernet’s paintings, it will be recalled, via the fiction of a promenade during
which he discusses the “view” (or the painted landscape) with an imaginary
companion. In other words, Diderot frames his description of these paint-
ings with the claim that he is merely describing various areas famous for
“the beauty of their landscapes.”4 As he and his companion progress, he
repeatedly breaks off his descriptions of the scenery to insert fictional con-
versations. Among other things, the wandering companions discuss whether
Vernet would have been able to paint the first scene they come upon as
“beautifully” as it appears in nature, or whether he would, as the first-
person narrator claims to his dissenting companion, have rendered it even
more beautiful in paint. Thus the pictorial representation of the scene might
have “doubled” the “enchantment” they experience in contemplating the
natural scene itself.5 For it is in this, according to Diderot, that all works
that cause us aesthetic pleasure consist, whether artificial or natural: they
must enable the spectator to enter into a state of enchantment. It is a state of
enchantment, as Diderot seems to argue in this passage, in which aesthetic
experience, at every moment of its performance, consists. No experience
of beauty, Diderot thinks, be it of nature or of art, occurs without a state
of enchantment. The point of the subsequent narrative between the com-
panions is thus to unfold the relevant notion of enchantment and to give a
deeper account of it.
The companions initially wonder how a “work of nature” and a “work
of art” compare in their ability to transport the spectator into a state of
enchantment. In his description of the second scene they encounter, Diderot
provides the answer, which appears perplexing on the face of it. The first-
person narrator claims that this view produces an effect on him that oth-
erwise only the very best paintings manage, namely, it liberates the “fiery
powers of the imagination.”6 Diderot writes:
My excited imagination envisions at the entrance of the cave a young

girl emerging with a young man; she has covered her eyes with her free
hand, as if she feared the light and wanted to encounter the young man’s
gaze. These people were not there . . . but a woman was resting close
to me with her dog at her side; and continuing along the same bank,
to the left, on a small, slightly elevated beach, was a group of men and
women such as an intelligent painter would have imagined them . . .
I stood there motionless . . . my arms fell to my sides, and my mouth
stood agape . . . I cannot tell you how long my enchantment lasted; the
motionlessness of the people, the solitude of the place, and its profound
silence suspended time, and it no longer existed.7
The import of Diderot’s answer to the question raised previously is thus

to be found in the way he recasts the very nature of the question, ground-
ing the beauty of both nature and art in their common ability to generate
a state of enchantment. For Diderot praises the beauty of the scene in this
passage precisely by claiming that it has an effect on him of which only the
best paintings are otherwise capable. If a work of nature is beautiful, then it
is so for the same reasons and in the same way as is a work of art. But what
makes either work beautiful?
Fried remarks with reason that the fiction with which Diderot operates in
describing these paintings—that of stepping quite literally into the depicted
scenery—should not be understood as a merely incidental rhetorical strat-
egy, as has generally been the case.8 On the contrary, this fiction represents
a constitutive element of his aesthetic theory (see AT 119). Several further
examples of similar descriptions to support this claim should be mentioned
here. In his discussion of Philippe-Jacques Loutherbourg’s Un Passage avec
figures et animaux (Landscape with Figures and Animals) from the year
214 Andrea Kern
1763, Diderot again makes formal use of a fictional conversation between
friends who take an imaginary stroll through the scenery of a painting:
Ah! My friend, how beautiful nature is in this little spot! Let us stop
there. The heat of the day is beginning to be felt, let us lie down next
to these animals. While we admire the work of the Creator, the con-
versation of this shepherd and this peasant woman will divert us. Our
ears will not disdain the rustic sounds of the cowherd who charms the
silence of this solitude and beguiles the tedium of his condition by play-
ing the flute. Let us rest. You will be next to me, I will be at your feet,
tranquil and safe, like this dog, diligent companion of his master’s life
and faithful keeper of his flock.
(quoted AT 120)
And in the Salon of 1765, Diderot describes a painting by Jean-Baptiste

Le Prince, whose creations he generally does not rate highly, in the follow-
ing words:
There is an old man who has stopped playing his guitar in order to
hear a young shepherd playing his reed-pipe. The old man is seated
under a tree . . . A young girl stands next to him. The boy is seated on
the ground, a short distance away from the old man and the girl. He
has his reed-pipe in his mouth . . . The old man and the girl are listen-
ing intently. On the right-hand side of the scene are some rocks at the
foot of which a few grazing sheep can be seen. This composition goes
straight to the soul. I actually find myself there. I shall remain leaning
against this tree, between this old man and his young girl, as long as the
boy plays. When he will have stopped playing, and when the old man
places his fingers on his balalaika once again, I shall go and sit next to
the boy . . . A painting with which one reasons in this way, which puts
you in the scene, and from which the soul receives a delicious sensation,
is never a bad painting.
(quoted AT 121)
Understanding these descriptions as Fried does, rightly, as the essential

expression of Diderot’s aesthetic conception and not simply as a rhetorical
strategy designed to hold the reader’s interest, we are faced with an initially
unsettling question. How can the aesthetic understanding evoked here be
made to harmonize with the view which we previously reconstructed, the
view Fried denotes as the dramatic conception of painting? It would appear
that an approach that defines the normative aesthetic ideal by way of the
capacity to bring the spectator to negate himself stands in nearly unbridge-
able tension with a view that defines it by ensuring the spectator’s sympa-
thy with—to the point of quite literal participation in—the content of the
painting. According to the first view, a work is beautiful when it succeeds in
helping us forget ourselves; according to the second, it is beautiful when it
succeeds in transporting us into what transpires in the painting and becom-
ing present to it.
Fried tries to resolve this apparent contradiction by arguing that both strat-
egies aim at one and the same objective, namely, to generate the fiction that the
spectator as such does not exist in front of the painting. This fiction facilitates
a connection between painting and spectator that is less an act of unengaged
and alienated beholding than one of immersion in the spirit of the work. In
the first case, this objective is realized as the painting disavows the spectator in
what it depicts and how it depicts it; in the second case, the painting draws the
spectator into the painting and in this way dissolves her identity as spectator.
This claim is also meant to explain why Diderot occasionally—in his descrip-
tion of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting Corésus et Callirhoé (The High
Priest Corésus Sacrificing himself to Save Callirhoé), for example—seems to
combine features of both approaches unproblematically (see AT 145).
In what follows, I do not wish to contradict Fried’s argument. On the con-
trary, I consider it a helpful insight to claim that both characterizations of
what a beautiful work should achieve agree that what is at stake is the pro-
duction of a spectator who loses all conscious sense of himself as beholder.
I believe, however, that a closer analysis of the connection between the two
conceptions prompts a different understanding than the one Fried suggests
of the kind of negation for which Diderot strives: the negation that Diderot
is after, as I will argue in what follows, is not merely a negation of the
beholding subject as a subject of beholding, but a negation of the beholding
subject as a subject of whatever kind of act.
3
Fried argues that the two conceptions of painting—the dramatic and the
pastoral—are unified in their striving to achieve a common objective, one
which rests upon a shared consciousness of a problem in the relationship
between work and spectator. However, one might want to object, contra
Fried, that it makes a difference whether a work attempts to pull the spec-
tator into the painting and turn him into a participant in it or whether it
makes an effort to exclude him from the painting instead. In the former
case, the work should call forth a spectator who interacts with the things
of the depicted world, and in the latter case, it should elicit a spectator
who stands before it passive and absorbed. That both spectators lack a con-
scious sense of their contemplation admittedly indicates a similarity in the
two conceptions. Yet it is implausible that this overlap renders the differ-
ence between the two ways of beholding a work irrelevant. Let us observe,
therefore, how Diderot describes the dramatic and pastoral conceptions of
painting more precisely.
Diderot describes Greuze’s young lover throwing a kiss to her beau as
follows: “She no longer knows what she is doing; nor, almost, do I know
216 Andrea Kern
what I am writing.” Just as the absorbed lover who is the object of my
attention no longer knows what she is doing, so am I no longer sure what
I am doing while I behold a successful work, nor how I might summon it
before me here again as I write. Thus, according to this passage, a certain
kind of absorption is not merely the topic of this painting, but identified
with the very state of mind into which I should fall when beholding suc-
cessful works. But what sort of absorption is indicated in this case? Fried
wants to say that the negation of the spectator that successful works should
achieve, according to Diderot, consists in the spectator’s lack of a conscious
sense of himself as spectator. Thus, being in front of a successful work is to
be in an absorbed state of mind in the following sense: one is conscious of
the figures and events of the painting without being conscious of oneself as
a beholder of these events and figures. In this sense one is fully absorbed in
what one does, namely beholding. But when Diderot says that he no longer
has any conscious connection to his current act of writing, he confronts us
with a paradoxical speech act which suggests a more radical conception of
the state of absorption he has in mind—for precisely by writing that he is
unconscious of his activity, he reveals that he is conscious of it. So I believe
that he has in mind a more radical understanding of what is at stake when
he thinks of the spectator as someone who has to be negated than the kind
of negation we have explored thus far. What Diderot describes, as I will
argue in what follows, is an effacement of the self not only as the subject
of an act of beholding, but as the subject of acts in general, whether these
are acts of doing and desiring or acts of thinking and feeling. This type of
negation is logically impossible, which Diderot points to explicitly when he
writes that he no longer knows what he is doing as he writes. At the same
time, this type of negation is logically necessary for something to be an art-
work in Diderot’s sense.
The reason for this simultaneously impossible and necessary “efface-
ment” lies in Diderot’s fundamental conception of what it means to be an
object of aesthetic contemplation, whether this is a work of nature or of
art. That something is an object of aesthetic contemplation means, accord-
ing to Diderot, as we saw previously, that while beholding it we enter into
a state of “enchantment” in which we encounter a depicted unity of fig-
ures and actions, objects and feelings, which Fried describes, as a matter of
course, as the unity of a “world” (AT 61). That which we see when we view
an artwork in Diderot’s sense is a “world”; in other words, the figures we
observe move in a world that is constituted by their actions—the world of
the artwork or “the world of the painting” as Fried calls it in multiple places
in his book (AT 61, 64, 65, 68, 107, 150). As we will see in what follows,
much depends upon this fundamental determination of an aesthetic object
as something whose unity constitutes a world that has been made to be
beheld. It is this determination that Fried unquestioningly assumes, without
recognizing that it is precisely this determination of the kind of unity that
characterizes an aesthetic object—the unity of a world—which grounds the
aesthetic imperative formulated by Diderot.
The central question to which Diderot seeks an answer is this: how is it
possible that works, either of art or of nature, are able to depict a unity of
things, figures, and events that, qua unity, has the character of a world? The
idea of “world” at work here is that of a totality which contains a principle
of unity and meaningfulness which leaves nothing outside. The aesthetic
imperative that Diderot outlines is meant to articulate the logical precondi-
tion that must be fulfilled for a work, whether of nature or of art, to be able
to represent a world rather than simply this or that object within a world.
If this is right, then it means that we should see the meaning of the abun-
dant depictions of absorbed figures in the art of the mid-eighteenth century
revealed to us by Fried not so much as the realization of an aesthetic ideal
of spectator negation, but as self-representations of the spectator himself. It
is for this reason, I believe, that Diderot explicitly equates the absorption of
the young lover with his own absorption while he writes. The depiction of
the lover immersed in her infatuation does not just realize an aesthetic ideal,
namely one that negates the spectator, but moreover reflects the mental state
of the spectator that constitutes, entirely independent from this depiction
and this theme, the logical precondition of a work that claims to represent
a world.
The thought that artworks are made to be beheld, and the consequences
that arise for art as a result—for example, that they depict a dramatic
unity—are to be understood essentially from the point of view of art’s claim
to represent a world. Fried, too, admits that the interest exhibited in the
idea of unity by Diderot and his contemporaries is not to be understood, as
has commonly been the case, as the unfounded and unquestioned point of
departure for Diderot’s theory of art. Instead, it is the result of an idea which
is more fundamental than the sense of unity that informs a dramatic unity.
Fried writes: “The preoccupation with unity is itself to be seen in terms of
the accomplishment of an ontologically prior relationship, at once literal
and fictive, between painting and beholder” (AT 76).
In contrast to Fried, however, I believe that the basic idea that grounds
the demand for dramatic unity is not to be understood as a response to the
question of how art has to be in order to realize itself as that which is to be
beheld. Rather, it responds to the question of how a work that strives to rep-
resent a world is possible. The idea that this requires a specific relationship
between work and spectator and the idea of dramatic unity which Diderot
has in mind when he subjects art to the laws of unity are to be under-
stood as implications of what it means and how it is possible to bring forth
works that depict the unity that constitutes the unity of a world. The clas-
sic demands for the unity of space, time, and action are not to be grasped,
therefore, as fundamental in themselves, but as derived from this latter idea
of unity and comprehensible solely in relation to it.
218 Andrea Kern
It is not the case that Diderot begins, therefore, with the definition of a
work, whether of art or of nature, and then demands that it be organized
according to the particular rules of unification that negate the spectator as
spectator in order to pass as successful. The question for which Diderot
seeks an answer is more fundamental. The question is not what constitutes
a successful work. Rather, the question is how is a work in the sense of
a depiction of a world possible at all? Fried’s interpretation of Diderot’s
aesthetic theory supposes it to be the articulation a normative ideal of art,
i.e., an articulation of what makes a work of art into a good one. Diderot’s
conception of aesthetics, however, results instead from a more fundamental
question. It springs from a question regarding the conditions of possibility
of a particular kind of art, an art that claims to represent a world. It is the
possibility of speaking of what Fried multiple times, as a matter of course,
calls “the world of painting” that Diderot seeks to understand. Diderot is
concerned with what we might call a transcendental question, as opposed to
a merely normative question.
Read in this way, the theory of the so-called fourth wall between work
and spectator does not only serve to describe what constitutes a successful
work of art. More than that, it articulates the logical precondition for art-
works in general whose ambition it is to represent a world. For the logical
precondition that must be fulfilled in order to depict something like a world
is that what is represented must constitute a unity in the following sense:
it forms a unity for which there is no outside. For a work of art or nature
to depict a world in the sense that is relevant here, no exterior can exist for
that which it depicts. The idea of a world that is relevant here is the idea of a
totality that has no exterior, no outside. Thus, a world in this sense can only
become the content of a representation when what is represented is depicted
such that it negates the idea of an “outside” of the representation. When
Diderot writes, in the form of a demand, “[t]he canvas encloses the entire
space and there is no one beyond it,” he articulates precisely this thought.
The work of art can first become a work of art that depicts a world for the
spectator when nothing external to the canvas exists, and when the canvas
has become the entirety of space perceived to exist. That which the absorbed
spectator beholds, according to Diderot, is a totality which has no outside.
That distinguishes the kind of unity that constitutes a world from the kind
of unity, for example, of a room, beside which another room could exist, or
a house, next to which one could find a garden or the like. The idea of the
world that is relevant here is the idea of a whole that makes no demands as
to particular contents, but which is characterized by the precept of a par-
ticular form: it is a unity with respect to which the idea that something could
exist that is not itself part of this unity is logically foreclosed. How is the
depiction of this sort of unity possible? What does the idea of such a unity
demand in the way of modes of representation?
When Diderot characterizes the particular type of contemplative con-
sciousness that artworks are bound to call forth as a form of absorption, he
does so because, as I wish to lay out in what follows, this form of absorption
constitutes the logical precondition that enables artworks to be representa-
tions of a world. The artwork depends on a contemplating consciousness
that does not think of that of which it is conscious as an element within a
world, next to many other things in that world, but as something that is like
a world instead. When absorbed in Diderot’s sense, one beholds the depic-
tion of a world which it would be impossible to behold in the absence of
such absorption. If one takes absorption to be the logical precondition of
art understood in this way, then it follows that this must be an absorption
in which the spectator can have no conscious sense of himself as spectator
outside of the beheld world. For otherwise, that which he beholds would
necessarily not be a world. Neither can the spectator retain a conscious
sense of himself as a part of the same spatio-temporal world of action to
which the object of her contemplation belongs. For then she would be able
to behold something inside this world—that very world which contains,
among other things, the subject of spectatorship as one of its elements—but
she would not behold a world itself. Therefore, what is indicated must be a
form of absorption in which the spectator forgets her own status and iden-
tity as subject. She must forget her identity as a subject in space and time
who is able to desire and think, to do or refrain from doing one thing or
another, and who finds herself in any particular relation to the other objects
that surround her. Only such a “subject” can behold a world. A subject who
beholds a world can only behold a world when that subject does not appear:
neither in the world he beholds nor outside of it.
4
Let us turn once again, against the backdrop of these considerations, to that
idea of painting which Fried calls the pastoral conception. Fried argues,
rightly, that this conception of painting is not so much opposed to the so-
called dramatic conception as it represents another mode of the same. Recall
how Diderot describes the state of “enchantment” into which he tumbles
while contemplating the landscape painting by Vernet, in which he imagines
a stroll through its depicted scenes. Diderot describes himself as standing
there “motionless,” gradually losing control over his body: “my arms fell to
my sides, and my mouth stood agape.” In other words, he describes himself
as a subject robbed of the ability to approach the things he sees. He is pre-
vented from engaging with them, desiring something of them, or interacting
with them in any way. Instead, in his enchantment he transcends this sort
of consciousness. He is no longer an intentional subject. Furthermore, the
scene he observes is characterized as “isolated”; Diderot remarks on “the soli-
tude of the place.” Thus the place he perceives is not surrounded by others;
it is not one from which one could step into others or into which one could
enter from them. There is no way from somewhere else into this place, nor
is there a path that extends from this place into any other, because there is
220 Andrea Kern
no further space outside the depicted one. Moreover, “its profound silence
suspended time, and [time] no longer existed”; that is, the spectator does
not perceive what he observes as an occurrence in time, for which a before
and an after can exist, or one that has a beginning and an end. Just as little
does he understand his own actions as something that unfolds in time. There
is no time in which events occur, nor a time in which their contemplation
takes place. There is no temporal spectatorship which, like the event itself,
can begin and end. That which the spectator contemplates has neither a
beginning in time nor an end. Just as little does his contemplation have a
beginning or an end. Time is suspended; it “no longer” exists.
After dwelling in detail upon his sensations, his involuntary, visceral
motions of participation and sympathy up to and including the tears shed
in the midst of his reverie, Diderot ends his description of the sixth scene
through which he ostensibly passes in his contemplation of Vernet’s paint-
ings with the following words:
Who knows how long I remained in this state of enchantment? I believe

that I’d still be immersed in it but for a confused babble of voices that
summoned me away: they belonged to our little students and their
instructor.9
Diderot makes it plain here that it is the suspension of time, and not a par-
ticular length of time, that the work of art should achieve. For that reason,
the so-called pastoral conception of painting is not simply about suspend-
ing the spectator’s consciousness of himself as spectator in order to enable
himself to be involved in the representation. If we consider the descriptions
more closely, we see that Diderot does not aim to depict himself as someone
who is part of the representation or who is engaged in the depicted scene,
as Fried assumes. Rather, the descriptions that flesh out the pastoral concep-
tion attempt to characterize the spectator as someone who, while he ini-
tially steps into the depicted landscape, does not do so to participate in the
depicted events, or even to be in their presence, but simply to find his way
to them. His aim is not to be present at the depicted event, but to be absent
in a state of absorption. In none of the descriptions is the spectator depicted
as someone who belongs to the pictorial scene. All descriptions result in
the same injunction, an invitation to sit down, relax, and stop speaking, to
cease to exist in any way for the figures which might interrupt or impinge
upon their world. What is interesting in his remarks on Loutherbourg is
that Diderot sees the ideal spectator as occupying the same position as the
dog in the painting. The spectator wishes to be like this painted dog, “dili-
gent companion of his master’s life and faithful keeper of his flock.” Why
like a dog? Loyal and untiring, entirely dependent upon the master in the
painting, given over to the painting entirely, the dog lacks an independent
understanding, an independent will, and all consciousness of itself. With the
dog as image of the ideal spectator, Diderot reflects once more on the fact
that the painting demands a spectator or mode of spectatorship which is
logically impossible for the spectator to achieve.
The same condition is reflected in the change of place Diderot mentions in
his contemplation of the painting by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince quoted previ-
ously. At first, he props himself against the tree that stands between the old
man and his daughter. As soon as the youth finishes his playing, however,
he changes his position and takes his place across from the youth. In my
opinion, this is not to be understood as Diderot’s suggestion that he himself
takes part in these events by moving within the dramatic scene and traveling
from one figure to another in order to make contact with them. Rather, he
wants to clarify the process required to make oneself disappear for the work
of art. As the youth ends his recital, Diderot changes places. The spectator
wishes to be present to the action, but in such a way that it is not affected
by his presence, so he waits until the youth has ended his playing to shift
his position. It is only then that he moves to the spot from which he can
contemplate the youth most fully. It is not the fact that the spectator moves
about in the painting that Diderot wishes to highlight, but rather that he
first makes a move at the moment when it has the least chance of affecting
the depiction. It is only then that he places himself in the optimal position
for spectating. The optimal position vis-à-vis a work of art is the position
in which the spectator not only does not appear as spectator in front of the
painting but, more than that, is effaced as subject in space and time entirely.
In contrast to Fried, I would thus like to suggest that the pastoral concep-
tion of painting is not to be understood as merely an alternative strategy
to the dramatic conception, which is interested in achieving the same aim.
This aim, to repeat, would be to bring forth a spectator who does not take
himself to be a spectator confronted with a strange or alienating object, but
who, in participating in the drama of the painting, immerses himself in its
events and is engulfed by them. In contrast to the dramatic conception, the
pastoral conception of painting describes a processual rather than a static
transposition of the logical precondition to which artworks that claim to
depict a world are subject. In the pastoral conception of art, Diderot figures
the entry into a state of aesthetic spectatorship as a process, a process of the
gradual disappearance of the spectator as subject.
The absorption constitutive of the aesthetic spectator and the depiction
of a world that is the aim of the work of art are described here as two sides
of a single process whose completion the work of art and the spectator must
perform together. This task is characterized by two mutually supplementary
and simultaneously opposed movements, whose common telos is the grad-
ual disappearance of the spectator as a self-conscious, intentional subject.
In a first motion, the spectator must enter into the artwork, for only in this
way is he able to fulfill the logical precondition which makes the work of art
into a depiction of a world. The spectator can only succeed in entering into
the work of art, however, if it accommodates him. It must overcome the dis-
tance between it and the spectator. According to Diderot, it must therefore
222 Andrea Kern
address itself to his soul; it must move him. In addition, the spectator may
not enter into the work of art in order to be present in it as a subject who
is part of the action. He must remain a spectator no one notices. Only then
can the work of art serve as a depiction of a world that has been created in
order to be beheld by him. To achieve this first movement, then, a second
motion is required. The spectator, who, in an initial step, enters the world of
the artwork, must “sit himself down,” remaining quiet and still. The specta-
tor must enter into the work of art, that is, but not in a way such that he
then appears within it. Instead, he must remain unobserved. The spectator
must forget himself as a subject who is part of any sort of world in which
he might appear as subject. Only in this way can the spectator behold the
depiction of a world. This second movement, like the first, is only achieved
in cooperation with the work of art. The work of art must ignore him so
that he can ignore himself in it.
Each movement—that of the spectator and that of the work of art—
completes the other. Both are necessary in order for the work of art to achieve
its telos, to become the depiction of a world that is created in order to be
beheld. Or, to formulate the same idea from the point of view of the specta-
tor, both are necessary to bring forth a spectator who beholds the depiction
of a world. The first movement causes the spectator in front of the painting
to disappear by drawing him into the world of the work of art, which is nec-
essary for it to become the depiction of something that has no outside, i.e.,
a world. The second movement causes the spectator within the painting to
disappear, which is necessary in order to ensure that the spectator is not part
of the world that constitutes the work of art, but instead that it, for him, is
the depiction of a world, i.e., something that is created in order to be beheld
by him. Only when the second movement is complete does the first arrive
at its goal. Thus, the two movements complement and complete each other.
At the same time they strive in different directions. While the first move-
ment draws the spectator into the painting and includes him within it by
addressing him as a sensing, thinking, and acting subject, the second move-
ment excludes him by negating him as this sort of subject. According to the
second, he is supposed to sit down, turn to stone, and remain motionless.
The movements strive in different directions because they describe two anti-
thetical ways in which spectator and work of art are related to one another.
By describing the fulfillment of the logical precondition of art processu-
ally rather than statically, the pastoral conception of painting brings two
aspects of aesthetic subjectivity into view. First, it shows that the being and
nature of a work of art are not simply given to the spectator to uncover, but
represent a task referred to a spectator, who assigns it to himself in order to
fulfill it. Second, however, it makes apparent that the task that a work of art
as such represents is one that it is impossible for any spectator to fulfill. The
two movements upon which the work of art depends according to Diderot’s
analysis previously discussed—the step into the work of art and the move-
ment back out of it—stand in a relation to one another that is paradoxical
in itself. That is, they stand in a relationship to one another that makes it
impossible that the logical precondition of the artwork—causing the specta-
tor to disappear—can be fulfilled.
The reason for this is not that these two movements address the subject
in different ways, once as a subject whose soul is to be affected and once
as a subject that is to be negated, but rather that the process of constituting
a work of art, which Diderot attempts to describe with the fiction of his
promenade through the landscapes of paintings, does not consist in two
movements that stand in temporal sequence with one another. It is not that
we are first welcomed into the work of art and then, in a second step, forget
ourselves completely. It is not that we are first within the world of the work
of art and then, when we have that behind us, forget ourselves so completely
that we no longer realize what we are doing. Rather, the two movements,
which we distinguished from one another analytically earlier, mutually con-
dition one another. For this reason, it is entirely correct for the dramatic
conception of painting to foreground an idea of absorption in which the two
movements are not distinguished from one another. For it is this absorption
which, according to the pastoral conception of painting, too, is to be found
at the beginning as well as the end of the aesthetic process. What the pastoral
conception, in contrast to the dramatic, helpfully reveals is that this immer-
sion into aesthetic contemplation, the being of an aesthetic subject which is
no longer recognizable as a subject, is no simple state that the work of art
can call forth immediately by way of a pre-determined strategy. Instead,
absorption represents a task that is only realizable through a process of two
movements, each of which serves as the precondition of the other.
The pastoral conception makes clear that the effacement of subjectivity
in which aesthetic subjectivity consists depends upon a movement of the
affected soul into the work. The work of art can only have the sense of
representing a world for me when I attend to the work of art in such a way
that it touches my soul. A step into the world of the work of art is what is
required for the work of art to represent a world for the spectator. Without
this step, the spectator would only be aware of the material entities that
make up the work of art, but not a world. The disappearance or dissolu-
tion of the spectator in front of the painting must take place in the form of
his being touched or moved by the world of the painting and thereby being
immersed into the painting.
But how can I be absorbed into the painting? How can I cry over it? Only
a subject that has already forgotten himself in a certain sense can enter into
the painting and cry over what he sees. He must forget what he is currently
engaged in, namely, in beholding a work of art. The participatory entry into
the work, the state of being moved, and the fact that I am touched and cry,
depend on a form of absorption which itself is only made possible by way
of this absorption or entry into the work. In other words, the process that
Diderot describes in his pastoral conception of painting is not a process in
which two complementary steps unfold, one after the other, but a process
224 Andrea Kern
of two movements which presuppose each other. My disappearance in front
of the work of art, i.e., the movement of absorption into the work of art,
my participation and my tears, is only possible when I forget myself as an
intentional subject that is engaged in various activities and sensations within
a world that contains the work of art I behold as one of its elements. If I am
to immerse myself into the world of the work of art, then the work of art
cannot be one of the elements that make up my world. The work of art
can only achieve this, however, if I forget myself as a subject that beholds
a work of art. I must therefore already have disappeared from my position
in front of the work of art in order to be absorbed into the work of art. Put
differently, my very ability to disappear from my position in front of the
painting depends upon the fulfillment of precisely that condition which is
first achieved by way of this disappearance. The absorption of the spectator
which Diderot attempts to delineate in his aesthetic theory as the logical
precondition of art thus emerges twice: once as the condition of the process
of contemplation of a work of art and again as the result of precisely this
process.
To become an aesthetic subject, as Diderot conceives of it, is the condi-
tion and result of a movement whose reality is not to be grasped logically.
The kind of subjectivity that an artwork requires is one that one can only,
as it were, experience. The conceit of becoming the dog in the painting, the
“diligent companion of his master’s life and faithful keeper of his flock,”
is—one is tempted to say—the expression, at once ironic and desperate, of
the necessary failure to live up to the challenge with which art confronts
us.10 It is a challenge, yet not a challenge for oneself, because the one who
can experience art cannot be oneself.
Translation from German by Leigh Ann Smith-Gary
Notes
1 Denis Diderot, “Pensées détachées sur l’art et la peinture,” in Oeuvres esthé-
tiques, ed. P. Vernière (Paris: Classiques Carnier, 1994), 792.
2 Denis Diderot, “Aus den Briefen der Jahre 1765–1767,” in Ästhetische Schriften
1 (Berlin: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1984), 244 (translation from German here
as elsewhere by L. A. Smith-Gary).
3 Denis Diderot, “Von der dramatischen Dichtkunst,” in Ästhetische Schriften 1
(Berlin: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1984), 284.
4 Denis Diderot, “Aus dem Salon von 1767,” in Ästhetische Schriften 2 (Berlin:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1984), 72.
5 Diderot, “Aus dem Salon von 1767,” 74.
8 The conventional reading of Diderot’s fiction understands the promenade
through the paintings as an exclusively rhetorical strategy with which Diderot
attempts to capture his reader’s attention. Otherwise, a description of these
paintings, due to their rather mundane content, might be suspected of boring the
reader.
10 This is a revised version of a paper that has been published in German as “Die
Welt der Kunst. Diderots Konzeption ästhetischer Selbstvergessenheit,” in Tran-
szendentalphilosophie. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen, ed. R. Langthaler and M.
Hofer (Hrsg.). Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie, Band XLIV, 2012. I am grate-
ful for helpful comments on this paper by James Conant, Irad Kimhi, Christoph
Menke, Robert B. Pippin, and David E. Wellbery.
14 The Promise of the Present
Michael Fried’s Poetry Now
Jennifer Ashton
1. Previous Art
In 1962 Ian Hamilton, along with Michael Fried, John Fuller, Francis
Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, and Gabriel Pearson, founded The
Review, where nearly three dozen of Fried’s early poems would appear over
the eleven-year run of the journal.1 Included in a group of seven poems by
Fried in the 1966 issue is a very short lyric whose title—“David Smith (d.
May 23, 1965)”—names the well-known sculptor and refers to his death
the preceding year:
The granite hill inside of the hill of pine.

“Listen. Do you want to know why I like nature—
The mountains and the trees and all that?
Because they’re already made. I don’t have to make them.”
The rose light branching in the thunder orchard.2
I want to start with this poem because it dates to the moment when
Fried’s landmark Artforum essay, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), was being
conceived, and because, as we’ll see, it engages a set of problems that stem
precisely from the distinction between art and objecthood theorized in that
essay. That is, because the nature that figures so prominently in the poem
also falls, in Fried’s larger philosophical framework, squarely on the side of
objecthood, this poem—like many of Fried’s poems—enacts a separation of
art from both nature and objecthood, and it does so along the axis of what
it means for something to be, or in some sense not to be, “made.” Indeed, as
we’ll see, what it means in “David Smith” for a work of art to be “made” is
for it not only to declare its separation from both nature and objecthood but
to establish its autonomy in relation to the reader or the beholder. “David
Smith” in this sense will be about the kind of madeness that’s required for
a work of art.
But “David Smith” is written when—and “Art and Objecthood” is writ-
ten because—that idea of what a work of art is (let’s call that idea, as Fried
does, “modernism”) is already being consigned to the past. “In previous
Promise of Present: Fried’s Poetry Now 227
art,” declared the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris (and by “previous art”
he meant, above all, modernism: sculpture like David Smith’s and poems
like Michael Fried’s), “what is to be had from the work is located strictly
within it” (quoted AO 153). In the new art—what Fried called “literal-
ism”—what mattered was all the things that had been excluded: nature,
objecthood, the beholder. And it’s a matter of pretty uncontroversial fact
that for the rest of the twentieth century, some version of what Fried called
literalism (call it what everyone else eventually did: “postmodernism”) did
indeed consign the idea of modernist autonomy to the past.
In the twenty-first century, however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that
some version of the commitment to autonomy has survived or reinvented
itself. This is visible, as Fried suggests in his 2008 Why Photography Mat-
ters as Art as Never Before, in the mediums of both photography and video,
but it’s also visible, as the 38-year-old MacArthur winning poet and novelist
Ben Lerner suggests, in poetry. Lerner, in fact, takes up the question of the
work of art in explicitly Friedian terms, and it’s noteworthy that his most
recent collection is a collaboration with the German photographer Thomas
Demand, about whom Fried has written at length, both in Why Photogra-
phy Matters and in 2014’s Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas
Demand. Furthermore, Fried has himself continued to write poetry, and his
most recent collection (also produced in collaboration with a photographer
about whom he has written, the American James Welling) takes up, as I will
show, the modernist problematic adumbrated in the work of the 60s. But
modernism meant one thing before postmodernism; it cannot and does not
mean the same thing after it. In the first half of this essay, then, I’ll show
how “David Smith” understands making the work of art in the twentieth
century; in the second half, I’ll show how Fried and Lerner (and in some
ways Welling and Demand) understand that ambition now, which is to say,
what it means for poetry “to matter as art.”
To say that “David Smith” is “about” Smith (or about Smith’s death)
might immediately seem off the mark in that the poem proper makes no
explicit reference to either. Nevertheless, the natural imagery introduced in
the first line, “the granite hill inside the hill of pine,” is readily identifiable
with the wooded, hilly area of upstate New York, where pine and granite
abound, and where Smith spent three decades living and making his art.
There’s also a connection to Smith’s death in that it is the area where he
was killed when his truck overturned, colliding, one could say, with “the
granite hill inside the hill of pine.” The three middle lines of the poem,
which appear between quotation marks and take up most of the poem’s
very short space—“Listen. Do you want to know why I like nature—/The
mountains and the trees and all that?/Because they’re already made. I don’t
have to make them”—are also obviously not about the artist in that they
read as speech that issues instead from the eponymous subject of the poem.
Thus the quoted lines, unlike the nature to which they refer, also read as
in some sense “made” by Smith, even as those words, operating between
228 Jennifer Ashton
quotation marks as they do, themselves carry the force of being, like nature,
“already made” (a graduate student in a seminar where I taught the poem
suggested the quotation functions as a kind of “readymade”).3 And by the
same token, the quoted words are rendered distinct from the actual works
the artist made in that the latter are precisely not “already made” (or he
wouldn’t “have to make them”). In short, if the poem is about something,
it seems to be less about Smith or his art specifically than about the differ-
ence in general between nature, which Smith identifies as “already made,”
and art, which is not (readymades notwithstanding). And here we can’t help
but notice that the poem raises a further question: in what sense is nature
“already made”? Hills and trees already exist, to be sure, but they haven’t
come into their existence the way that art does, or even, for that matter, in
the way that a literalist object or a Duchampian readymade does. But if we
think yet further about what it means to align the idea of nature with the
“already made” (and Smith’s words themselves, by putting quotation marks
around them), the readymade and the literalist object begin to look like they
have a lot more in common with nature than with art.
Teasing out the poem’s staging of the opposition between nature and art
also leads us to see how Fried enables the one (art) to subsume and trans-
form the other (nature, but also the quotation from Smith), to produce a
sense of the poem as a whole that is entirely different in kind from the
nature and the “already made” words it contains. We can see this instanti-
ated in the treatment of the natural phenomenon in the poem’s last line,
“The rose light branching in the thunder orchard,” which takes the meta-
phor for the appearance of lightning across the sky (“branching”) during
a thunderstorm and condenses it with the word for a cultivated grove of
trees (“orchard”), to produce what appears to be a purely poetic phenom-
enon. The formal rows, moreover, that we would associate with any literal
orchard (not to mention the rows that the lines of the poem form on the
page) are here conveyed homophonically in the “rose” color of the light-
ning, whose “branching” form alludes also to the trees we associate with
orchards. “Thunder orchard” in turn suggests that “orchard” is a figurative
form thunder takes or else that there is a figurative kind of orchard in which
thunder might be said to grow.
On the one hand, then, the orchard planted at the end of the poem is
entirely of the poet’s making and thus, importantly, not “already made” by
nature or by Smith. On the other hand, based on photographs and reported
accounts of Smith’s estate at Bolton Landing (where Fried happened to have
visited with his wife, Ruth Leys, within a few years before Smith’s death),
one can easily read the last line as an attempt to depict the artworks Smith
did make, in that the clusters of sculptures that famously stood on the
grounds of his estate were, as Smith’s daughter described them, “planted” in
orchard-like “rows”: “On the right was the north, or upper, field where, in
the last years of his life, Smith planted dense rows of sculpture . . . Arrayed
against the mound on the hill, finished pieces might ‘cure,’ as he called it,
over the winter into the desired state of rust.”4 If we consider the environ-
mental moisture that would cause such rust (also an effect of rain-producing
thunderstorms), it’s possible to cast the final line of the poem in a different
light, as it were. For “The rose light branching in the thunder orchard”
describes the natural visual effect of light reflecting from Smith’s rust-cured
artworks as it reinscribes that effect within a figurative logic that only the
poem can render.
The poem thus reimagines the world that is external to it (the one that
includes granite inside hills of pine, orchard rows, branching lightning, but
also Smith’s own art and words) as constituents of an imaginative and linguis-
tic order that is completely internal to the poem, hence the closing conceit as
an effort to condense the visual appearance of Smith’s “made” works (light
reflecting on rusted metal surfaces) with features of the “already made” nat-
ural environment (trees and thunderstorms) in which Smith placed them.5
But far from collapsing the distinction between art and nature, the made
and the already made, the poem’s enclosure of both within itself enacts
instead an absolute separation between what is internal to the poem (what
the poet intends to put there) and what is external to it (physical causes and
effects). We can see how the poem formally achieves this separation if we
consider more carefully its first and last lines—not only their difference from
the three lines between them (minimally, the difference between quotation
and not-quotation), but also their likeness to each other (the adjective-plus-
noun phrases—“granite hill” and “rose light”—that begin each line, fol-
lowed in each case by a similarly parallel prepositional phrase). From this
vantage, the words we understand as Smith’s appear to inhabit a kind of
double frame: an inner frame formed by the quotation marks and an outer
one formed by the structurally parallel lines that bookend the poem, so that
Smith’s words are enclosed within the frame of the poet’s.
This assertion of a frame by formal means in “David Smith” carries a
special force in the context of the poem’s proximity to the composition of
“Art and Objecthood.” That is, the modernism Fried champions in art-
ists like Smith and Anthony Caro is defined by its commitment to exactly
the kind of separation between world and work that is achieved formally
in “David Smith”—and for which the frame serves as a key index—while
the opposite effect, unframeability, is aligned explicitly with the literalist
art that Fried criticizes. This opposition is the whole point of the famous
anecdote about Tony Smith, where the minimalist sculptor describes driving
down the as-yet-unfinished New Jersey Turnpike and declares there is “no
way you can frame it, you just have to experience it” (quoted AO 158)—a
remark that doesn’t so much represent literalism’s desire to repudiate the
frame as such as to point to the general conditions under which any work
could be made to express a complete continuity with, or indivisibility from,
the experience of the viewer. Indeed, the most provocative claim of “Art and
Objecthood”—that literalism is fundamentally “antithetical to art”—hangs
on a claim about the role that internal order plays in the artwork’s relation
230 Jennifer Ashton
to everything else that surrounds it: “Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be
had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist
art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes
the beholder” (AO 153). That characterization of “previous art” comes, as
we already noted, from the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, but the con-
ditions under which “previous art” fails for Morris are what Fried, writing
at the moment of minimalism’s attempt to destroy those conditions, enlists
as the basis on which the modernism he defends succeeds as art.
“[W]hat is crucial” in the modernism of artists like (David) Smith and
Caro, according to Fried, is the “mutual inflection of one element by
another,” such that “[t]he individual elements bestow significance on one
another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition: it is in this sense, a sense
inextricably involved with the concept of meaning, that everything in Caro’s
art that is worth looking at is in its syntax” (AO 161–2). If “meaning” is
another way of referring to “what is to be had from the work,” we can eas-
ily see the force of the analogy with “syntax.” For modernism, the internal
order of the work that syntax represents is the form by which that meaning
is expressed, and it operates independently of any given beholder’s experi-
ence of the work. Under the minimalist dispensation, by contrast, the very
concept of a syntax becomes incoherent, for there is nothing to distinguish
any part of the work as a part; nothing belongs to the work any more (or
any less) than it belongs to the entire situation in which the beholder experi-
ences it. A simple way to put this is to say that for modernism, the form of
the work is dispositive with respect to “what is to be had from it,” which
cannot be said of the literalist work, where “what is to be had from it” is
located in its continuity with the beholder’s experience and situation and
therefore in nothing that could count as “strictly within” or for that matter
strictly outside the work. Or we can turn this around to say that in order
for “what is to be had from the work” to be “located strictly within it” the
work must be separate from the world and from the beholder (hence one of
several ways in which modernism is also identified with aesthetic autonomy,
and more specifically autonomy from the beholder). For Fried, the aesthetic
power of Caro’s sculptures comes from their insistence on that separation:
“[They] inhabit another world from the literal, contingent one in which we
live, a world which so to speak everywhere parallels our own but whose
apartness is perceived as all the more exhilarating on that account” (ACTS
205; see also IMAC 32).
Caro’s table sculptures are particularly successful in achieving that sepa-
ration, and they do so precisely by acknowledging “syntactically,” as Fried
puts it, “the conventional conditions of their inescapable ‘framedness’ ” even
in the (also conventional) absence of a frame: “[T]he tabletop needed to be
incorporated into the sculpture, not literally, although eventually Caro did
that too, but syntactically, on the plane of ‘form’: only then would a simple
phenomenological truth, that objects of a certain size tend to be found on
tables, be invested with sculptural significance. And that was accomplished,
at a stroke, by going below the plane of the tabletop” (IMAC 32–3). In
other words, through the “syntax” that juxtaposes the elements within the
sculpture with one another, but also with what lies without (the tabletop),
Caro is able to conscript the “literal, contingent” elements of the world that
includes the beholder and, rather than render them continuous with one
another, reinscribe them within the work’s own formal vocabulary. Thus
the extension of the work below the surface on which it rests registers the
difference between the literal surface—again, a purely contingent element
in the situation of the artwork—and the necessary surfaceness, or some-
thing like the “made-for-a-surface-ness” that is expressed within and by
the form of the work itself. The effect is analogous to that of a frame (what
Fried means by the “framedness” of Caro’s sculptures) in that both serve to
announce the categorical separation between the world that exists “on the
plane of ‘form’ ”—of which the artwork itself is the expression—and the
literal world of objects and the subjects who experience them.
As Fried himself suggests, a further effect of this separation between “the
plane of ‘form’ ” and what we might call “the plane of objecthood” is a
form of autonomy—the autonomy of the aesthetic work from the world of
objects:
Note, by the way, what this account [of] Caro’s table sculptures implies
about the issue of esthetic autonomy. It is sometimes assumed that
because in “Art and Objecthood” I criticized Minimalism’s foreground-
ing of what might be called situationality or exhibitionality, I believed
and perhaps still believe that modernist works of art exist or aspire to
exist in a void. But I didn’t and I don’t.
(IMAC 32)
It’s possible, of course, to see in these remarks an effort to align the

commitment to aesthetic autonomy with the existence in a void that Fried
rejects. But if part of the point of the “framedness” of Caro’s sculptures is
that in separating the work from the world, that gesture also establishes
the autonomy of the work from that world, Fried also makes clear that
that autonomy does not consist in the removal of the work from the world
(what it would mean to aspire to exist in a void); rather it consists, in Fried’s
account of Caro, in the order of relations that is expressed in and by the
sculpture itself. And for Fried the fact that this raises “the issue of esthetic
autonomy” has everything to do with his claim that that order of r elations—
what I am also calling the form of the work—does not depend for its realiza-
tion on any given beholder’s experience of it. The internal order of relation
among the parts of the work that for Fried marks its autonomy from the
world is nevertheless a function of the form the work actually takes in the
world. The status of the meaning of the work (what is to be had from it)
in relation to what we understand as its form, along with the question of
what actually counts as the work (whether the work could be said to exist
232 Jennifer Ashton
somewhere other than in the form it takes in the world—in, for example, a
void), remains central in the twenty-first century, as the project undertaken
by Lerner and Demand will make clear in the second half of this essay.
We’ve already begun to see how the poem “David Smith” achieves a simi-
lar effect to the “framedness” Fried admires in Caro’s sculptures, and does
so by means of what is nothing if not a syntax. Obviously there’s one kind
of syntax at work in the poem, at the level of linguistic usage (fusing the
meanings of “thunder” and “orchard,” for example, to achieve a stunning
image), but there’s also the kind of syntax that occurs “on the plane of
‘form’ ”: the purely graphic separation of the middle lines from the two
outer lines by means of quotation marks, and the identification of the first
and last lines with each other by purely grammatical means. In sealing off
Smith’s words about nature from the rest of the poem—that is, in formally
distinguishing the words of Smith from the words we take to be the poet’s
own and, in effect, making the latter serve as a frame around the former—
Fried has achieved, and precisely “on the plane of ‘form,’ ” the same kind
of “apartness” that he identifies with Caro’s sculptures: a separation, in
this case, between the world of the “already made” (the literal, contingent
world, the world of nature) and the world of the “made” (the world of art).6
The conceptual distinction between the “already made” and the “made”
and the formal gestures (quotation marks, syntactical patterns) that divide
the poem into parts and make them recognizable as parts thus also function
in the service of our recognition of the whole—which is to say, our recogni-
tion of the poem as a whole. The question of how or whether the elements
of any work function in relation to some idea of the whole will become
increasingly important after we pass through the half a century in which
postmodernism, including the literalist effort to nullify the grounds for any
commitment to wholes or wholeness, more or less dominates the landscape
of ambitious art. In “David Smith” the syntactically formed separations
we see within the poem dramatize the extent to which the relation among
parts (in the terms of “Art and Objecthood,” the “mutual inflection of one
element by another” such that their relation is not incidental or contingent,
but rather “inextricably involved with the concept of meaning”) is essential
to the very idea of the poem counting as a whole, and in a manner that
insists on its difference from things in nature like rocks or trees or—just as
important for our purposes—things like readymades or literalist objects.
But that separation of the literal from the formal becomes especially acute
in poems that thematize an even more literal separation—indeed, we need a
more violent term for it: a severing—of part from whole, particularly when
the whole in question is figured as a literal body. Hence the rather surprising
number of poems across Fried’s career that involve severed limbs, like this
early one, “Inside the Trap”:
“I am the right foreleg of a great wolf

Caught in one of God’s traps and gnawed off
Through most of an otherwise mild night.
The rest of him still goes
On three legs through the game preserves
Of heaven, making up with guile
What he lacks now in natural gifts.
But the piece of meat that fell
Onto the bloody snow inside the trap—
What cunning could help me to forget
The rocking motion of my wolf’s body
As I ran, cradled in speed and hunger,
Across the sleeping fields
Or the warm hare dying without a wound
Between my long jaws?”
(Powers 24)
Here the first thing we encounter in the poem is an open quotation mark,
which we are now well positioned to see as another version of the formal
frame we find in “David Smith.” Along with the closed quotation mark
placed at the very end of the poem, however, here it serves to contain the
entire poem within that frame. But while that gesture of confining the
whole poem within the frame of quotation also marks a separation between
what is interior to the whole and what is exterior to it, the separation itself
is effected, paradoxically, by attributing the entire utterance to a part, a
“right foreleg,” that has been detached from the whole to which it properly
belongs: “my wolf’s body.” Another way to put this is to say that integrity
of one whole, the formal body of the text, is predicated on the violation of
another whole, a purely corporeal one.7
“Inside the Trap” is thus another example of a particularly dense engage-
ment with the question of what counts—or counted for Fried circa 1965—
as “located strictly within” the work (to recall Morris’s remarks about
“previous art”). And if we continue to peer “Inside the Trap,” we can now
make out a set of very familiar gestures signaling the aesthetic commitments
we have already seen borne out in a poem like “David Smith” and in the
modernist painting and sculpture that Fried famously defends in “Art and
Objecthood.” For “Inside the Trap” repeats in inverted form the same kind
of gesture Fried observes in Caro’s table sculptures, which involves taking
something from the contingent situation outside the work—for Caro, the
tabletop—and reinscribing it as a formal feature of the elements within the
work. Which is to say that we begin with the severed foreleg inside (not
outside) the trap, and the whole to which it belongs roaming outside (not
inside) the trap. But by the time we get to the “long jaws” holding the oth-
erwise unviolated whole of another body, that of the “warm hare” at the
end of the poem, it’s unclear whether “my long jaws” are literally those of
the disfigured wolf or metaphorically those of the trap. The jaws are an
internal mechanism—a crucial part of both the wolf’s body and the body
234 Jennifer Ashton
of the mechanical trap. But they are also part of the poetic utterance itself
as a whole, insofar as it exists, contained between quotation marks, inside
“Inside the Trap.” At the same time, that uttered whole is “Inside the Trap,”
in that it is numerically identical to the entity that bears that name.
2. Post Previous Art

“Inside the Trap” dramatizes the violation of one whole in order to sub-
sume both the violated whole and the cause of its violation (a removed part)
within the frame of a more complete and categorically distinct whole (the
poem). But as I have already begun to suggest, that gesture looks impor-
tantly different in the wake of a half century of postmodernism having more
or less won out. For the problem to which the gesture of violating one kind
of whole (a literal body) in order to show what is required for another kind
(a formal one) to be inviolable is a solution to a problem that literalism
simply renders moot. There are no coherent stakes for wholeness under
the literalist dispensation. That is, no threat to wholeness exists in the first
place, if what is to be had from the work is continuous with everything else
(what even counts as “else”?) in its ever-changing situation. There are no
parts that figure in such a relation, and therefore no question of a whole to
contain them or, more to the point, to suffer through their loss.
The return of a commitment to the whole after a long passage through
postmodernism is something we might well characterize as a return of mod-
ernism, but not quite, since what returns is not exactly what went away
(i.e., it’s not what Morris meant by “previous art”), but it’s also not sim-
ply a return to the whole. For the force of what it might mean to achieve
the whole depends first on the sense of its loss. We can begin to see this
in what is easily the most palpable and striking feature of the form that
Lerner and Demand’s Blossom takes: the uncut pages of the volume which,
as the publicity pictures on the publisher’s website make clear, are intended
to remain uncut.8 But what makes this feature so striking is that it lends a
sculptural element to the work that simultaneously raises the question of
what is required for the work’s integrity as a whole and what it would mean
to damage that whole. While some of the interior facing sides of these uncut
pages are blank, many of them also contain images—close-ups of what
seems to be the same blossoming cherry tree that appears in the images on
the exterior facing pages alongside Lerner’s poems. Without being able to
see any one of the interior images in its entirety without cutting the pages—
in other words, we can only view the images from along the open edges of
the pages to increasingly darkened portions within—the reader understands
the photographic portions of the book as partially inaccessible. The reader
understands, moreover, that to access all of the images (say, by cutting the
pages) would in some way violate the integrity of the work.
The poems of Blossom, for their part, announce an interest in formal consis-
tency (if not integrity, as we’ll see) through the regularity of their appearance.9
Without exception they are constructed of seven three-line stanzas, and they
are positioned throughout the volume always on the recto face of the page.
But when we look more closely within the poems (as when we peer between
the uncut pages at parts of images) we see that the appearance of consistency
in the stanzaic form of the poems is troubled by a kind of rupture from within
the lines. When Lerner periodically and with no discernible regularity inserts
the backslash or virgule—which also happens to be the symbol used in the
quotation of poems in literary criticism to indicate line breaks without actu-
ally reproducing the lineation of the original—the reader is offered the pos-
sibility of imagining the lines broken differently from how they are actually
broken on the page. As one of the poems self-reflexively implies, it’s akin to
moving or altogether removing the frame around an image:
The leaves move/are moved in small

Increments between frames, easy to mistake
For traditional wind, the invisible hand
The phantom limb/A bomb or blazon
Breaks the beloved into parts
“Referred pain” is the beautiful phrase
All photographs bring to mind
In Blossom, not just this poem but all of the poems in the book oper-
ate analogously to the accompanying images by Demand in that it’s as if
(and the hypothetical formulation is effectively required by the work) the
reader is asked to imagine the virtual existence of both an unimaginable
total image of the fabricated cherry tree and an unimaginable total poem
(Blossom), to which any given actual poem or image, and even the book
itself as a whole, can only serve as an index or reference. Thus the “the invis-
ible hand/The phantom limb” that is introduced in the passage here refers
less to the violent cause of the hand’s invisibility (amputation, say) than to
its invisibility as such. What makes the hand a “phantom limb” here is its
lack of presence, whether as reality or as representation. And it’s by virtue
of its virtuality that the hand/limb refuses both frame and form.
Lerner makes prodigious use of the virgule (which, it’s worth pointing out,
is also the symbol of a kind of textual amputation) in his fiction as well as his
poetry, but its utility in the service of the virtual emerges all the more sharply
in a remark by the protagonist and narrator of Lerner’s first novel, a poet
who lives a life that closely parallels Lerner’s own. The passage that follows
comes directly on the heels of the opening episode of Leaving the Atocha
Station, in which the narrator, on a writing fellowship in Madrid, wonders
at the spectacle of a museum-goer at the Prado who begins to weep hysteri-
cally as he stands before Rogier Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross:
I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experi-

ence of art and I had trouble believing anyone had, at least anyone
236 Jennifer Ashton
I knew . . . Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed
talent had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of
poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the
essays professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were
replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a par-
ticular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.10
Lerner suggests that passages from poems quoted in this way function
like the phantom limb in Blossom, in that they remain invisible in their
entirety, even as their visible remains constitute, quite literally, a violation
of the intended form of the whole (a slash appears, like a scar, in the place
of the line break that was originally there). Unattributed quotation is also
prevalent throughout Blossom, allowing a host of absent texts to hover in
its ether. Self-quotation is prevalent throughout Lerner’s work in general,
too, redoubling the commitment to virtuality by rendering his own texts as
ghostly absences. Indeed the last sentence of this particular passage reap-
pears, this time as an unattributed quotation, in Lerner’s 2016 book-length
essay, The Hatred of Poetry, which makes the argument that poems them-
selves are “the fatal problem with poetry.” If Blossom is any indication of
how Lerner envisions a poetic address to that “fatal problem,” it suggests
that even the salient features of form within the work (the regular order and
length of the poems, the ostentatious repetition of devices like the slash and
the inclusion of quotation) are not so much formal presences as indices of
absent formal possibilities.
The virgule in Blossom, for example, mainly follows a pattern where it
occurs before a phrase beginning with a capitalized word, like the words
that begin all of the lines of each poem in the book (as in “The phantom
limb/A bomb or blazon” in the poem I quoted from earlier). The virgule in
these instances suggests, if we follow the reasoning of Lerner’s own remarks,
that there’s some alternate absent poem containing a line that, following the
line break signaled by the virgule, begins with “A bomb or blazon.” But
there are also a much smaller number of instances, like the one that starts
that same poem—“The leaves move/are moved in small”—where what fol-
lows begins with an uncapitalized word, or where the slash separates words
or phrases that are clearly intended to represent alternatives to one another:
Morphine is sold under a hundred names

But is undistributed due to the tacit fear
Of the daily disappearance of the sun/the sung
Beneath the horizon/earth
The upshot of these effects is likewise to suggest both that whatever poem
one is actually reading is not the actual poem and that whatever the actual
poem might be it could never actually be read.11
If we turn now to Fried’s Promesse du Bonheur, we find that it offers
its own variations on the trope of the “phantom limb” (a recurring theme
throughout Fried’s work, as I have already suggested). The most sharply
illustrative of these, a poem called “September Sky,” culminates around a
literal—indeed, historical—severed limb (a “missing hand”) and the phan-
tom pain its loss causes:
One A.M. Alone in the barn

I wake for the usual reason then as usual
I step out onto the deck,
which faces due East. A half-moon has risen,
it’s still relatively low in the sky
and the line of division cleaves upper left
to lower right, like an accent grave.
(The term comes unbidden
because before going to sleep
I had been reading my favorite French
twentieth-century poet, Blaise Cendrars,
whose constellation was Orion because it had the form
of his missing hand.)12
The form gestured toward at the end of “September Sky” is both the
form of the literal missing hand of the poet Cendrars (who lost his right
arm fighting in World War I) and the refiguring of that hand as the constel-
lation of Orion, whose form the “missing hand” is said to take. The hand
also assumes that form in and as a poem called “Orion” by Cendrars. In
all three respects form is rendered anything but virtual. Moreover, Fried’s
own poem insists on performing (as it were) the very act of giving form by
poetic means. Form issues literally from Cendrars’s “Orion” in the penul-
timate line on the page, and what issues from that form—the form of the
constellation Orion—is “his missing hand” (the severed hand belonging to
Cendrars). That missing hand is now no longer missing—it is no phantom
limb but is reinscribed, both in its severed state—cut off both by the line
break that precedes it and by the parenthetical sequence of lines that con-
tains it—and in the poetic form Cendrars gave to it (the poem “Orion”),
such that the hand and the poem alike are subsumed within the frame of
Fried’s “September Sky.”
The reincorporation of Cendrars’s corporeal “missing hand” into the for-
mal body of “September Sky” is all the more impressive when we consider
Cendrars’s poem “Orion” in its entirety:
It is my star [constellation]
It has the form of a hand
It is my hand risen to [mounted in] the sky
238 Jennifer Ashton
During the entire war I saw Orion through a loophole
When the Zeppelins came to bomb Paris they always came via Orion
Today I have it overhead
The main mast pierces the palm of that hand which must suffer
As my cut-off hand makes me suffer pierced as it is by a continual sting13
The loss of limb that makes the poet suffer has been metaphorically
removed, “mounted to the sky,” and reconstituted as the constellation
Orion, which in turn is endowed with a hand-like form (“it has the form
of my hand”), which then is reimagined as the literal hand itself (“it is my
hand”). The hand, by means of this figurative exchange, has taken the place
of the constellation Orion, so that now this displaced, figurative hand can be
pierced in the same way as the poet feels in the absence of his severed hand.
It has been reincorporated, in effect, within a new and perfectly complete
body, that of the poem itself.
As I have already suggested, both Promesse and Blossom involve the
renewal, post-postmodernism, of a modernist commitment to the whole.
And as we’ve seen, that commitment also involves an element that doesn’t
fully comport with modernism’s modus operandi, namely that for both
Fried and Lerner, the whole importantly emerges by passing through a dra-
matization of its violation. Another way to put this would be to say that
what’s consistent across Fried’s career, and what makes the modernism of
his poetry different from the modernism he defends in “Art and Object-
hood,” is that what we see in the modernist art itself at that time is simply
the effort to assert the whole, and not yet the effort to defend the whole;
whereas Fried, writing from the vantage of someone actively diagnosing the
opposition that was only just coming into view, was in the position to see
modernism under a specific attack. In the years that followed, of course, the
modernism versus literalism battle was largely won, and not by modernism
but by what came to be known as postmodernism.
The difference it makes to be committed to the whole on this side of
postmodernism is what we find in Lerner and his generation, for whom
postmodernism is not an upstart threat (as it was for Fried), but their donné.
In the wake of postmodernism, the whole is no longer an object of attack
because it appears always already unavailable, and according to precisely
the logic that enabled the postmodern attack in the first place.14 That is, the
very indeterminacy entailed by the continuity of the beholder’s experience
with the work of art—the indeterminacy that so many varieties of post-
modernism, from literalism to language poetry, are inclined to celebrate—is
also what makes it look as if any work available to experience is unable to
cohere as a whole. The lesson Lerner takes from this state of affairs involves
protecting the idea of the whole by refusing to locate it with any actual
expression in form. And within this gesture, what is to be had from the
work is no longer to be found within it, but is removed instead from the
plane of form (the actual work) to the plane of the concept (the virtual
work). Blossom thus insists on both the poem and the photograph as unre-
alized and unrealizable in any actual expression through form; “what is to
be had” from the work, so to speak, is conceivable only as the horizon or
prospect of form.
Obviously the title of Promesse du Bonheur is highly suggestive in this
regard, if only because all promises are in some sense directed toward the
future. But as two key photographs in the volume help us to see, the prom-
ise of Promesse is importantly retrospective as well as prospective. The two
pictures in question are both of Fried’s wife Ruth Leys (to whom Promesse
is dedicated), taken, as Fried notes in the Acknowledgements, “by me in
the Alhambra the summer of 1967,” shortly after the publication of “Art
and Objecthood” (Promesse 149). Part of the book’s point then has to be—
insofar as the stunning young woman in the photographs represents the
titular promise of happiness, and Promesse as a whole regards her from the
standpoint of looking back—that the promise has been kept. And it’s in this
respect that we can fully register the force of the gesture we’ve seen enacted
so vividly in the early poem “Inside the Trap,” but also why that same
gesture, as we’ve seen in “September Sky,” lies at the heart of Promesse du
Bonheur. These poems establish their form precisely by registering the pos-
sibility of—indeed, by violently enacting—a version of its loss. The kind of
loss—the damage to form—that Fried registers is something that also regis-
ters in Lerner. But while for Fried that loss is the gateway to a categorically
different whole that is the poem itself, for Lerner all actual poems remain in
a damaged state, and it’s only the virtual poem whose form counts as whole.
We can link Fried’s and Lerner’s shared interest in the potential failure
of form with another shared interest in one of the great but still underap-
preciated poets and theorists of the late twentieth century, Allen Grossman.
Grossman is a figure of tremendous importance in Fried’s last two volumes
of poetry, where a number of poems are either about Grossman or dedicated
to him. He is also central to Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry, whose claim that
actual poems not only risk failure but inevitably fail is attributed directly
to Grossman. More precisely, Lerner associates the claim with the legend-
ary seventh-century Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon, and the account given
of Caedmon is based on an essay by Grossman titled “My Caedmon.”15
Caedmon, according to Grossman, learns to sing by divine instruction in a
dream, but his waking song remains a forever inadequate translation of the
dream. For Lerner, the point of the Caedmon story is that the true poem will
always be the one that remains in the dream, in a form conceivable only in
terms of possibility. Actual poems, therefore, invite our hatred because the
forms they take will never be adequate to their original conception. While
the precise relationship between Grossman’s work and Fried’s (beyond the
fact of Fried’s admiration) remains an open and important question for
further study, what matters for our purposes is that for Fried one kind of
failure of the whole—a failure that occurs, as it does in the Caedmon story,
in some sense on the plane of the literal—becomes the basis for the success
240 Jennifer Ashton
of another kind of whole that occurs precisely on the plane of form. And
the point of running the promise in both directions (prospectively and ret-
rospectively) in Promesse is to dramatize how the integrity of the whole is
established in Fried’s poems, in effect, by reestablishing it in the form of the
poem. The fulfillment of the promise of form in Promesse, far from being
deferred, and far from being relegated to the plane of the virtual (or to exis-
tence in a void), turns out to be identical to its realization; it is a promise
kept by and within the work itself.
Notes
1 These poems would eventually be collected with a handful of others in Powers
(London: The Review, 1973), the first of Michael Fried’s four books of poetry.
The founding committee for the review, along with the journal’s individual
issue contents, are listed on the Ian Hamilton Website at www.ianhamilton.org/
review/.
2 Michael Fried, “David Smith (d. May 23, 1965),” The Review (16, 1966), 26.
The poem’s title was changed slightly for its subsequent publication in Powers
to “David Smith (1906–1965)” (Powers 29), indicating more explicitly Smith’s
early death. Two decades later, it was included in To the Center of the Earth as
“A Visit to David Smith,” with a small change replacing “trees” with “birds”
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 13.
3 Nick Van Zanten, a UIC studio arts student.
4 Candida N. Smith, “The Fields of David Smith,” in The Fields of David Smith,
ed. Smith, Irving Sandler, and Jerry L. Thompson (New York: Thames & Hud-
son, 1999), 24. I came to know of Fried’s visit from his response to an inquiry
about the origin of the quotation (email message to author, April 19, 2017).
5 Fried himself acknowledges the line as an allusion not only to the appearance of
Smith’s sculptures, but also to their making: “I always thought of it too in terms
of the sky, massive clouds, maybe toward dusk, irradiated with rose light, that
sort of thing; & the thunder as somehow connoting the making of sculpture, the
sound steel would make if you worked it on a forge, like Vulcan & his helpers—
something like that” (email message to the author, August 2, 2017).
6 Although scholarly engagements with Fried’s poems remain scarce, I’m not the
first literary critic to notice the parallels between Fried’s poems and his writing
on art. In a 2000 essay, “Poetry and Art Theory in Michael Fried,” Hans-Jost
Frey discovers in another early poem, “Wartime,” effects very similar to what we
have already observed in “David Smith.” The poem consists of only two lines,
which, like the last line of “David Smith,” construct a dense image in deceptively
simple terms:
Shadows of leaves on a cement wall
Tremble in the shadow of a breeze.
We can see at first glance how the very structure of the poem, turning as it
does upon the erection of the “cement wall” at the line break, is built on a firm
divide. In this case it is the “wall” itself that marks the separation between the
familiar world of the reader’s experience, on the one hand—the world where a
breeze will cause leaves to tremble and light will cast shadows on walls—and a
world of poetic construction, on the other. For it is only in the latter world that
a cement wall, for which movement of any kind would require a force a great
deal stronger than a mere breeze (artillery, say), can be linked logically with the
kind of “trembling” a breeze might cause in a leaf. The connection in the poem
occurs by means of the parallel sounds of the off-rhyme between “cement wall”
and “tremble” (“cem-” and “trem-”; “wall” and “-ble”). The logic of cause-and-
effect that orders the natural world outside the poem (and to which the poem’s
imagery refers) is thus displaced by a connection that is internal to the poem and
purely formal. While Frey does not address these sonic effects, he arrives at a
similar conclusion based on the (syntactically generated) transfer of the shadow
in the poem’s imagery from the “shadows of the leaves” to the “shadow of a
breeze”: “What the poem does is to turn the relation between the leaves and
the breeze, which in the experience of the image that constitutes the basis of the
poem leads out of the image, into a relation that takes place inside the image”
(in Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried, ed. Jill Beaulieu,
Mary Roberts, and Toni Ross (Sydney: Power Publications, 2012 (first published
in 2000)), 363). “Wartime” appears in Fried’s second collection, To the Center
of the Earth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 34. In Fried’s much
earlier first volume, Powers, an otherwise identical version of the poem car-
ries the title “War” (45). I’m aware of only two other essays on Fried’s poetry,
Steven Levine’s “Mutual Facing: A Memoir of Friedom” (in Refracting Vision,
289–323) and my own “Poetry of the Twenty-First Century: The First Decade,”
The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945, ed. Ashton (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 216–30. It’s worthwhile noting
here that Fried’s early editorial collaborator, Ian Hamilton, in a jacket blurb for
Powers, makes this general observation about Fried’s poems: “They are to be
seen and heard. And their brevity, their present-tense insistence on the totality
of the poem (by which I mean that the whole poem can, like a painting, or a
gesture, or a vision be experienced at once. . .)”
7 I would point readers interested in exploring the poem further to Frey’s superb
reading of it and particularly to the connections he draws between the wolf’s
“right foreleg” and various figures for the painting and writing hand that Fried
analyzes in Courbet’s Realism and in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration (see in
particular Frey, 367–74).
8 Ben Lerner and Thomas Demand, Blossom (London: MACK, 2015). Images
showing the uncut pages in action can be viewed at https://collectordaily.com/
thomas-demand-blossom/.
9 I’m opting for the plural “poems” in my reading, but the uniform segments that
make up the text of Blossom can also plausibly be viewed as a single poem (as
some responses to the book have done). Blossom itself does not help to settle the
question, but a selection by Lerner and Demand published prior to the book’s
release refers to the text as “poems” and describes them as “part of a larger
cycle.” See “Sample Trees,” Paris Review (212, 2015) (www.theparisreview.org/
art-photography/6364/sample-trees-thomas-demand-ben-lerner).
10 Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press,
2011), 8–9.
11 If we recall Fried’s remark about the implications for autonomy in Caro, Lerner’s
would appear to be a form of autonomy that actually does require the work
to exist in a void. I don’t have room to explore this here, but my intuition is
that one of the entailments of the insistence on the virtual—on removing, so to
speak, “what is to be had from the work” to the “echo of possibility”—is that
the autonomy sought after actually collapses into a form of heteronomy and
indeterminacy, in other words, into a state of affairs literalism actually shares:
I remember speaking a word whose meaning I didn’t know but about which
I had some inkling, some intuition, then inserting that word into a sentence,
testing how it seemed to fit or chafe against the context and the syntax, roll-
ing the word around, as it were, on my tongue. I remember my feeling that
I possessed only part of the meaning of the word, like one of those frag-
mented friendship necklaces, and I had to find the other half in the social
242 Jennifer Ashton
world of speech . . . To derive your sense of a word by watching others adjust
to it: Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two
people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signi-
fied? I think that’s poetry. And when I felt I had finally mastered a word,
when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn’t poetry
anymore—that was something else, something functional within a world, not
the liquefaction of its limits.
(Hatred of Poetry, 78–9)
To understand poetry as a liquefaction of the limits of the world—whether it’s
the world that exists on the plane of objects or a world that exists on “the plane
of ‘form’ ”—is a version of unframeability, and in that respect compatible with
Tony Smith’s New Jersey Turnpike fantasy, both of which would entail the liq-
uefaction of syntax, parts, wholes, and for that matter anything that could be
identified with or as form.
12 Michael Fried and James Welling, Promesse du Bonheur (New York: David
Zwirner Books and nonsite.org, 2016), 139.
13 The translation is Fried’s and appears in a tour-de-force essay-length analysis of
“September Sky” by Fried himself: “Encountering ‘September Sky,’ ” nonsite,
January 8, 2017 (http://nonsite.org/feature/encountering-september-sky). The
sense of the original poem by Cendrars is understandably difficult to capture in
translation:
C’est mon étoile
Elle a la forme d’une main
C’est ma main montée au ciel
Durant toute la guerre je voyais Orion par un crénau
Quand les Zeppelins venaient bombarder
Paris ils venaient toujours d’Orion
Aujourd’hui je l’ai au-dessus de ma tête
Le grand mât perce la paume de cette main qui doit souffrir
Comme ma main coupée me fait souffrir percée qu’elle est par un dard continuel
(Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1924), 41
The poem originally appears in Feuilles de Route
14 None of this is meant to suggest that early twentieth-century modernism is some-
how born out of nothing, and that postmodernism is just the response to it that
emerged at mid-century, followed in turn by a late twentieth- and early twenty-
first-century response to postmodernism that in many ways resembles forms
of modernism. The questions raised by these movements during this extended
period, and the lines of attack and defense that were their answers to those ques-
tions, matter, to be sure, for the history of art and for purposes of periodization,
but these opposing positions are also logical entailments of the very question of
the ontology of the work of art. That point is borne out, for example, in Todd
Cronan’s superb analysis of early twentieth-century French literature, philoso-
phy, and painting—particularly in the work of Henri Matisse and Paul Valéry
(who respond directly to the pressures of indeterminacy arising from the work
of art’s uncontrollable effects), and the degree to which they anticipate the
problem-set that underpins the so-called “turn to affect” in late postmodern
theory. See Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
15 Allen Grossman, “My Caedmon: Thinking About Poetic Vocation,” in The Long
Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1997), 1–17.
15 Constantin Constantius
Goes to the Theater
Michael Fried
A basic assumption behind the remarks that follow is that Søren Kierkeg-
aard’s writings, especially Either/Or (1842) and Repetition (1843), contain
long stretches that deserve to be recognized as among the most luminous
and far-reaching adventures in aesthetic thinking, reflection on the arts, in
the entire nineteenth century. This is true, or so I contend, despite the fact
that the aesthetic as such is for Kierkegaard the least or lowest of what in
Stages on Life’s Way (1845)—a sequel to Either/Or—he calls three “exis-
tence spheres.”1 The aesthetic, he writes, is the sphere of immediacy, the
ethical that of requirement, and the highest, the religious, the sphere of ful-
fillment, though of course the actual relationships among these, especially
between the first two and the third, is anything but incremental (the crucial
notion, of course, is that of a “leap of faith”). And in fact Kierkegaard’s
most original aesthetic thinking, in the ordinary, not Kierkegaardian sense
of the term, sometimes lies elsewhere than in the aesthetic existence sphere,
where one might expect to find it. Thus in my book on Kierkegaard’s con-
temporary, the German painter and draftsman Adolf Menzel (1815–1905),
I try to show that Judge William’s ethical reflections on marriage in part II
of Either/Or, specifically his claim to the effect that the everydayness of a
successful marriage—the absence in the latter of events that are essentially
momentary (the absence of intensiveness is how he also puts it)—defeats
what he calls aesthetic representation, amount to a marvelously original
contribution to aesthetic thinking in the ordinary sense of the term (see
MR 141).2 Indeed I go on to relate those reflections to Menzel’s thema-
tization in numerous paintings and drawings of the subject of brickwork
(another version of the everyday, one more or less identical item laid along-
side another, in principle endlessly), which is to say that I suggest that Men-
zel in effect finds a way around Judge William’s strictures (as regards the
representation not of marriage but of the everyday). And I associate those
strictures more directly with Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest (1896),
which I understand as engaging with Kierkegaard’s thought in the narra-
tive’s almost complete elision of more than six years of Instetten’s marriage
with Effi following their move from Kessin to Berlin, a transition that put an
end to her affair with the practiced seducer Crampas, about which Instetten
244 Michael Fried
knew nothing. When by chance he learns of the affair he kills Crampas in
a duel and breaks off relations with Effi, despite recognizing—it is hard to
know how to put this—that the six-plus years of Judge William-style mar-
riage that he and Effi have just experienced render his actions absurd, or at
the very least mindlessly conventional and destructive. (I shall bring back
Menzel briefly at the end of this paper.)
Constantin Constantius’s “report” in the first half of Repetition, how-
ever, takes place entirely in the existence sphere of the aesthetic, so that it
is without the inbuilt ethical “seriousness” of Judge William’s reflections.3
(The second, shorter half mostly comprises letters from a young man to
Constantius, who has been making a study of him; the subtitle of the book
as a whole is “A Venture in Experimenting Psychology.”) The pages I have
in mind, fifteen or so in the Hongs’ translation, begin with Constantius’s
ruminations about the naturalness of an as yet unformed young man’s (any
young man’s) interest in the theater, which allows such a person—quite
properly, it is implied—to imagine multiple existences. In Constantius’s
words, “the individual’s possibility wanders about in its own possibility,
discovering now one possibility, now another. But the individual’s possibil-
ity does not want only to be heard . . . it wants to be visible at the same
time.” And beyond that, “in order not to gain an impression of his actual
self,” the hidden individual (the as yet unformed young man) needs a spe-
cial sort of environment, full of shadowy shapes and unresonant words—in
short, the stage.4 (Let me note in passing the importance right from the start
of the concept of “the individual”—more about this shortly.) Constantius
further remarks that although such a penchant for the theater is a mark of
immaturity, it comes back at a later stage,
when the soul has integrated itself in earnest. Yes, although the art may
not then be sufficiently earnest for the individual, he may at times be
disposed to return to that first stage and resume it in a mood. He desires
the comic effect and wants a relation to the theatrical performance that
generates the comic. Since tragedy, comedy, and light comedy fail to
please him precisely because of their perfection, he turns to farce.5
Constantius analogizes this to a taste for Nürnberg prints, a kind of popu-

lar image, which he goes on to describe as producing “an indescribable
effect, since we do not know whether to laugh or to cry [the prints lying
outside ‘our,’ the cultured viewer’s, canon of familiar works], and the whole
effect depends upon the observer’s mood”—a suggestive formulation that
highlights another key concept for this text, that of mood. (Just imagine if
Constantius were not a defective pseudonym but Kierkegaard himself—how
seriously we would have to take him. I’m being ironic.)
We are now arrived at a crucial juncture, the introduction of the König-
städter Theater in Berlin, where farce is performed.6 There follow two or
three pages on the aesthetics of farce that are nothing short of dazzling in
Constantin Constantius Goes to Theater 245
their unexpectedness and originality. I see no alternative to quoting at some
length:
Farce is performed at the Königstädter Theater, and quite naturally a

varied audience goes there—yes, anyone wanting to make a pathologi-
cal study of laughter at various social and temperamental levels ought
not to neglect the opportunity offered by the performance of a farce.
The cheers and shrieks of laughter in the second balcony and gallery are
entirely different from the applause of a refined and critical audience;
it is a sustained accompaniment without which farce simply could not
be performed. Farce generally moves on the lower levels of society, and
therefore the gallery and second balcony audiences recognize themselves
immediately, and their noise and cheers are not an aesthetic appraisal
of the individual actor but a purely lyrical outburst of their feeling of
well-being. They are not at all conscious of themselves as audience but
want to be down there on the street or wherever the scene happens to
be. But since this is out of the question because of distance, they behave
like children who only get permission to look out of the window at the
commotion on the street. The orchestra and first balcony audiences are
also moved to laughter, although it is considerably different from that
Cimbrian-Teutonic vulgar hooting, and even in this sphere the variation
in the laughter is infinitely nuanced in a way quite distinct from what is
found at the performance of the best comedy. Whether it is regarded as
an excellence or a defect, the difference is nevertheless so.
Then this, spelling out the stakes, or part of the stakes, of the previous
observations:
Every general aesthetic category runs aground on farce; nor does farce
succeed in producing a uniformity of mood in the more cultured audi-
ence. Because its impact depends largely on self-activity and the viewer’s
improvisation [i.e., on a wholly personal response to what is taking
place on stage], the particular individuality comes to assert himself in
a very individual way and in his enjoyment is emancipated from all
aesthetic obligations to admire, to laugh, to be moved etc., in the tra-
ditional way.7
The result goes entirely counter to the norms of other genres of theater,
all of which, to a greater or lesser extent, are predictable and all of which
presume a relative uniformity of taste and indeed of appropriate response
on the part of their audiences:
Nor is farce in the least ironic; on the contrary, everything is naiveté.

Therefore the viewer must be self-active solely as an individual, for the
naiveté of the farce is so illusory that it is impossible for the cultured
246 Michael Fried
person to relate naively to it. [A tricky formulation: roughly, the cultured
person must somehow undo his or her acculturated default setting, the
basis of his or her customary “naiveté.” There is also the suggestion
that the actual structure of farce is not naïve but sophisticated in its
ostensible naiveté, though this isn’t spelled out.] But the amusement
consists largely in the viewer’s self-relating to the farce, something he
himself must risk, whereas he seeks in vain to the left or the right or in
the newspapers for a guarantee that he actually has enjoyed himself.
Nevertheless, farce will perhaps have a very singular meaning for the
cultured person who also has sufficient unconstraint to dare to enjoy
himself entirely solo, sufficient self-confidence to think for himself with-
out consulting others as to whether he has enjoyed himself or not. For
him the farce will perhaps have a very singular meaning, because his
own mood will be affected in various ways, at times by the copious-
ness of the abstract and then again by the interjection of a tangible
actuality. Of course, he will not come with a firm and fixed mood and
make everything have an effect in conformity with it, but he will have
achieved perfection in mood and will maintain himself in the state in
which not a single mood is present but a possibility of all.8
It is tempting to unpack these pages at length but I will settle for a few
basic points. First, I’ve already suggested that at times it is far from easy
to discriminate stylistically or argumentatively between the limited pseud-
onym Constantin Constantius and the rising world-historical genius Søren
Kierkegaard. This has to do with the almost unassayable intelligence of
the writing, of course, but also with the fact (as it seems to me) that the
tone of the passages just cited carries no suggestion of a limited point of
view. My thought, by no means an original one, is that this poses a con-
tinual, sometimes an insuperable, problem for readers of the pseudony-
mous works.
Second, the farce is described in these passages as a kind of technology for
producing or, at the very least, stimulating and sustaining a heightened mode
of individuality—a more “playful” one in a Schillerian sense?—a “very indi-
vidual” one, in any case—specifically as regards a certain sort of “cultured
person.” (I take Constantius to be distinguishing rather sharply on social or
say class grounds between the bulk of the audience, or at least the “gallery
and second balcony” portion of it, whose response to the doings on stage is
unrestrained laughter based on spontaneous identification, and those in the
“orchestra and first balcony,” for whom identification is out of the ques-
tion and whose laughter is of a different, subtler nature. Constantius also
says that without the first audience’s response the farce “simply could not
be performed,” and although he doesn’t state in so many words that the
presence of the first audience is crucial to the response of the second, that
is plainly the implication of his remarks.) Now, no one at all familiar with
Kierkegaard’s intellectual trajectory needs to be told that the category of
“the single individual” emerges within a few years virtually as the key to
his religious thought: the task of the church, in his view, is simply to enable
the single individual to make a leap of faith and achieve a personal rela-
tionship to God; as he puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846),
let the religious speaker in church contribute how he may to elucidating
the task at hand, “the main point still is that the single individual will go
home from church willing wholeheartedly and eagerly to battle in the living
room.”9 And in A Literary Review (1846), “salvation comes only through
the essentiality of the religious in the single individual.”10 (Also: “Reflec-
tion [i.e., taking thought about the possibilities of one’s existence short of
the religious, a project or activity that is in principle infinite, full of endless
twists and reversals] is a sling one is strapped into, but through the inspired
leap of religiousness things change, and it becomes a sling that throws one
into the embrace of the eternal.”11) And this raises the intriguing question
of the relation of farce’s producing or stimulating the heightened mode of
individuality in the sphere of the (Kierkegaardian) aesthetic that Constan-
tius describes to “the single individual” as a religious category. Was some
such relation at work even at this early date?—more precisely, did an intu-
ition of a possible religious dimension to the concept of individuality incline
Kierkegaard to recognize in the dynamics of the farce and the responses it
elicited a phenomenon worth analyzing in depth? If so, nothing whatever
is said by Constantius to indicate as much, which is hardly surprising given
the latter’s restriction to the aesthetic existence sphere. And in any case there
would not be the remotest possibility of getting directly from one mode of
individuality to the other, from farce to God. But it is hard to shake off the
thought that something exceeding Constantius’s understanding of the issue
may be at work in these pages. (In a sense, this undercuts the first of my
basic points, at least to some extent.)12
And third, there is the importance of the notion of mood in Constan-
tius’s account of the cultivated viewer’s response to farce, culminating in
the statement that such a viewer “will have achieved perfection in mood
and will maintain himself in the state in which not a single mood is present
but a possibility of all.” I don’t know what quite to make of this but the
interest of it seems clear, even without going on to consider the larger ques-
tion of the role of mood in Kierkegaard’s reflections on religion; my sugges-
tion would be that before summoning Martin Heidegger to our assistance
a more immediately relevant comparison might be with Kierkegaard’s older
contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, as read by our contemporary Stan-
ley Cavell. (Cavell’s early essay on Emerson, “An Emerson Mood,” would
be a place to start.13 For both Emerson and Kierkegaard, the concept of
mood concerns the subject’s fundamental relation to the world. The great
difference between them, of course, is that for Emerson—I follow Cavell in
this—the importance of mood is to be understood philosophically whereas
for Kierkegaard the existence sphere of the religious is where ultimate mean-
ings reside.)
248 Michael Fried
There follow a stunning few pages on the actual performance of farce at
the Königstädter Theater, which by way of showering praise on the comic
actors Beckmann and Grobecker further specify that farce
requires a cast of special composition. It must include two, at most

three, very talented actors or, more correctly, generative geniuses . . .
They are not so much reflective artists who have studied laughter as
they are lyricists who themselves plunged into the abyss of laughter and
now let its volcanic power hurl them out on the stage. They have not
deliberated very much on what they will do but leave everything to the
moment and the natural power of laughter . . . They know that their
hilarity has no limits, that their comic resources are inexhaustible, and
they themselves are amazed at it practically every moment.14
In short they are the Marx Brothers; I mean this seriously in that I take
these pages—which I have excerpted brutally—to provide the best account
I know of the particular power of those Jewish-American geniuses’ improvi-
sations in their most inspired films (remember, too, that the Marx Brothers
began in vaudeville and also took part in stage productions like the original
anarchic Animal Crackers of 1928). (Constantius even says of Beckmann,
his favorite, that he “comes walking”15—a formulation that for an Ameri-
can reader of my generation inevitably recalls Groucho’s restless comic
prowl, though doubtless Constantius had something else in mind.)
And then a simple narrative begins: “One enters the Königstädter Theater
and gets a place in the first balcony, for relatively few sit there, and in see-
ing a farce one must sit comfortably and in no way feel hampered by the
exaltation of art that makes people jam a theater to see a play as if it were
a matter of salvation.”16 In fact he goes on to recommend boxes five and
six on the left, adding that “in a corner in the back there is a single seat
where one has an unsurpassed position. So you are sitting alone in your
box, and the theater is empty”—which evidently means that most of the
audience is somehow out of sight, though of course waves of laughter fill the
hall. There follows a short “poetic” passage addressed to his “unforgettable
nursemaid” who lived in the brook that ran past his father’s farm when he
was a child and recalling lying by her side and losing himself “in the immen-
sity of sky above”—leading quickly to: “Thus did I lie in my theater box,
discarded like a swimmer’s clothing, stretched out by the stream of laughter
and unrestraint and applause that ceaselessly foamed by me. I could see
nothing but the expanse of theater, hear nothing but the noise in which
I resided”—and so on.
At which point an unexpected transition occurs. “By itself this was bliss-
ful,” he writes,
and yet I lacked something. Then in the wilderness surrounding me

I saw a figure that cheered me more than Friday cheered Robinson
Crusoe. In the third row of a box directly across from me sat a young
girl, half hidden by an older gentleman and lady sitting in the front row.
The young girl had hardly come to the theater to be seen, since in this
theater one generally is spared these odious female exhibitions. She sat
in the third row; her dress was simple and modest, almost domestic.
Constantius further explains that when he had been convulsed by laugh-

ter to the point of exhaustion, “my eyes sought her, and the sight of her
refreshed my whole being with its friendly gentleness.” Or when “a feeling
of greater pathos burst forth, I looked at her, and her presence helped me
to yield to it, for she sat composed in the midst of it all, quietly smiling in
childlike wonder.” Apparently she attended the farce as often as he did (a
strange thought on the face of it). But the crucial point, it quickly becomes
clear, is that she had no awareness of being observed:
She did not suspect that she was being observed and even less that my
eyes were upon her; it would have been a sin against her and, worst of
all, for myself, for there is an innocence, an unawareness that even the
purest thought can disturb. A person does not find this out by himself,
but if his good guardian spirit confides to him where such primitive
privacy hides, then he does not intrude upon it and does not grieve
his guardian spirit. If she had even suspected my mute, half-infatuated
delight, everything would have been spoiled beyond repair, even with
all her love.17 [With all her love? A strange thought; we’ll return to it.]
In other words, after giving a quite detailed and by any standard intel-
lectually compelling account of the operations of farce, the gist of which
would seem to be that by its very nature, which is to say by virtue of the
sheer individual-by-individual unpredictability of its effects, farce defeats
all previous attempts to formulate an aesthetics for the theater, Constan-
tius attends a performance that has everything to commend it—and finds
something lacking. And goes on to supply that lack by fastening his atten-
tion upon a young woman sitting across from him in the audience who is
unaware of being beheld by him—put slightly differently, who is so caught
up, so absorbed in the performance (in her own way: it seems to provoke in
her a kind of thoughtful wonderment) that she has no awareness of anything
else. Anyone acquainted with my work on Denis Diderot and the anti-the-
atrical tradition in French painting and art criticism and indeed modern art
generally (and theory of the stage, though I don’t pursue the topic) from the
middle of the eighteenth century down to the present will grasp at once why
I find this twist of events so particularly striking.18 For what Constantius’s
narrative comes to is that the experiencing of a best case of farce turns out to
be somehow wanting—it leaves him, personally, unsatisfied—and that what
turns out to satisfy that want is an almost parodic version of the Diderotian
dispositif: in this case not the performance of a team of actors who manage
250 Michael Fried
to convey the impression of being wholly caught up in the fictive action of
the play and therefore oblivious to the presence before them of an audience,
but the simple existence of a young woman who really is unaware of being
observed by Constantius. As if (1) even in what I am tempted to call the
representation-sphere of farce the Diderotian project could not simply be
discarded; and (2) by the early 1840s in Copenhagen and Berlin, if not else-
where, that project could no longer meaningfully be pursued on the stage
or say within the conventions of traditional stage drama (in Kierkegaard’s
view, at any rate; or should we say in Constantius’s?) but could only be
imagined actualized as if by chance in the space of the audience—a space
structured, it would seem crucially, by the performance of a farce.
It remains an open question to what extent if at all Kierkegaard was
familiar with Diderot’s anti-theatrical doctrine either in the original or in
a derivative form. Certainly no evidence exists that suggests that he was.
But by the 1840s, not only in Paris, versions of the great philosophe’s ideas
about the stage and painting were in broad circulation, and in any case what
is of interest is less the conjunction of Kierkegaard and Diderot than the fact
that at this particular juncture in Repetition Constantius supplements the
farce in the way he describes.19 And he is not quite done. The text continues
without a break:
I know a place a few miles from Copenhagen where a young girl lives;
I know the big shaded garden with its many trees and bushes. I know a
bushy slope a short distance away, from which, concealed by the brush,
one can look down into the garden. I have not divulged this to anyone;
not even my coachman knows it, for I deceive him by getting out some
distance away and walking to the right instead of the left. When my
mind is sleepless and the sight of my bed makes me more apprehensive
than a torture machine does, even more than the operating table strikes
fear in the sick person, then I drive all night long. Early in the morning,
I lie in hiding in the shelter of the brush. When life begins to stir, when
the sun opens its eye, when the bird shakes its wings, when the fox
steals out of its cave, when the farmer stands in his doorway and gazes
out over the fields, when the milkmaid walks with her pail down to the
meadow, when the reaper makes his scythe ring and entertains himself
with this prelude, which becomes the day’s and the task’s refrain—then
the young girl also appears. Fortunate the one who can sleep! Fortu-
nate the one who can sleep so lightly that sleep itself does not become
a burden heavier than that of the day! Fortunate the one who can rise
from his bed as if no one had rested there, so that the bed itself is cool
and delicious and refreshing to look at, as if the sleeper had not rested
upon it but only bent over it to straighten it out! Fortunate the one who
can die in such a way that even one’s deathbed, the instant one’s body
is removed, looks more inviting than if a solicitous mother had shaken
and aired the covers so that the child might sleep more peacefully! Then
the young girl appears and walks around in wonderment (who wonders
most, the girl or the trees!), then she crouches and picks from the bushes,
then skips lightly about, then stands still, lost in thought. What wonder-
ful persuasion in all this! Then at last my mind finds repose. Happy girl!
If a man ever wins your love, would that you might make him as happy
by being everything to him as you make me by doing nothing for me.20
This very nearly covers the ground that interests me. In the next para-
graphs Constantius returns to the Königstädter Theater but has to sit else-
where than in his preferred place; his immediate neighbors are unsure of
their response to the performance, which Constantius finds boring; the
young girl is nowhere to be seen; and even Beckmann fails to make him
laugh. He then goes back to his apartment but finds that it has become
dismal to him because it is a repetition of the wrong kind (he had returned
to Berlin to try to capture the excitement of a previous visit); he visits a
familiar café and a restaurant, but their sameness is depressing; and when
the next evening he goes to the Königstädter Theater once more the moral
becomes clear—“the only repetition was the impossibility of a repetition.”21
(Again the young girl is absent; at any rate I take that to be the meaning
of the intriguing statement, “The little dancer who last time had enchanted
me with her gracefulness, who, so to speak, was on the verge of a leap,
had already made the leap.” (By “last time” I take him to mean “on earlier
visits.”) As already mentioned, the concept of a leap—of faith—will soon
become central to Kierkegaard’s religious thought. The little dancer’s leap
went where, though—into womanhood? Earlier Constantius had referred to
“all her love”—not for him, of course. Are we to imagine her now engaged
or married?)
One way all this plays out in the secondary literature is in the generaliza-
tion that Constantius discovers to his chagrin that returning to Berlin was
the wrong kind of repetition (a view seemingly endorsed by Kierkegaard
himself22), by which I mean that, to the best of my knowledge, commenta-
tors on this extraordinarily challenging text haven’t considered it reward-
ing to pay close attention to the pages we have just skimmingly considered
for the simple reason that it is hard to see exactly how they bear on the
larger question of the meaning of Kierkegaardian repetition (the right kind
of repetition, so to speak)—but is that sufficient justification for giving them
short shrift? Not to my mind, both because of the extreme brilliance of the
reflections on farce but also because it seems likely that we are meant to
understand Constantius’s dealings with the two young girls—the first in the
Königstädter Theater and, especially, the second in the “big shaded garden”
a few miles outside Copenhagen (itself a repetition; but of what sort?)—in
a critical light. Simply put, his relation to both can be termed voyeuristic,
which is not at all true of the Diderotian project as such. Indeed the whole
point of the account of spying on the girl in the garden, for that is what
Constantius’s actions amount to, is—as I read it—to underscore the base-
ness of his motivation, not that it is easy to state in so many words exactly
what his motivation is. That is, his noticing and becoming fascinated by the
252 Michael Fried
young girl in the theater apparently happened by chance. But nothing could
be more deliberate, not to say compulsive, than his repeated drives into the
countryside outside Copenhagen (deceiving his coachman in the process)
to feast his eyes in privacy on the second of his young objects of displaced
or indeed unacknowledged desire. In fact the habit of those drives precedes
the discovery of the girl in the theater. Here it is surely relevant that what
I earlier called the tone of the writing shifts palpably when it moves from
Constantius’s panegyric on the two geniuses Beckmann and Grobecker to
the narrative of his adventures that begins, “One enters the Königstädter
Theater and gets a place in the first balcony, for relatively few sit there,”
etc.—the reader being invited to perceive a difference (may we say: an “ethi-
cal” difference, despite the fact that the entire first half of the book is in an
aesthetic register?) between the reflections on farce, which I have suggested
are only nominally in the voice and persona of the pseudonymous Constan-
tius as distinct from those of his ventriloquizer Søren Kierkegaard, and the
narrative that follows, which turns on the felt inadequacy of the farce to
satisfy Constantius and crucially involves spying on the two girls. (Why the
sense of inadequacy, though? Because mere individuality even of the height-
ened variety made possible by farce was not enough for him? Of course,
such individuality does in fact fall far short of individuality in the religious
sense of the term, so perhaps Constantius is right to feel as he does, if not in
his response to those feelings. A conundrum.)
There is, of course, a further point that bears on the topic: the mention
of young girls inevitably recalls the fact that in 1841 Kierkegaard had bro-
ken off his engagement with Regine Olsen, without question the decisive
event in his affective life.23 Indeed the basic fiction of Repetition is that Con-
stantius, an older man, contracts a friendship with an extremely promising
young man who has engaged himself to a young girl but now has doubts
about whether he should marry her, doubts which to say the least Con-
stantius encourages. Furthermore, in part II of Repetition we learn from a
series of letters from the young man to Constantius that the young woman,
soon after being in effect abandoned by the young man, married someone
else, leaving the young man elated for reasons that need not concern us
here (basically he feels absolved from guilt)—a denouement reflecting the
announcement of Regine’s engagement to Johan Frederik Schlegel, who had
been her teacher before she met Kierkegaard.24 Clearly, Kierkegaard in 1843
was haunted by the figure of the innocent yet also somehow threatening
young girl, who without ever saying a word reigns over the text.
To return briefly to Constantius’s account of his early morning visits to
young girl number two’s garden, there are two moments that still require to
be looked at more closely. The first is when he writes:
Fortunate the one who can sleep! Fortunate the one who can sleep so
lightly that sleep itself does not become a burden heavier than that of
the day! Fortunate the one who can rise from his bed as if no one had
rested there, so that the bed itself is cool and delicious and refreshing to
look at, as if the sleeper had not rested upon it but only bent over it to
straighten it out! Fortunate the one who can die in such a way that even
one’s deathbed, the instant one’s body is removed, looks more inviting
than if a solicitous mother had shaken and aired the covers so that the
child might sleep more peacefully! Then the young girl appears.25
(According to the Hongs’ translation; the Lowrie translation reads, “Who

could sleep!” etc.26 A more literal translation might be: “Who is it that
would be able to sleep!”—the Danish using an unusual form for “who”
which gives each sentence a somewhat exaggerated rhetorical grandeur
that, as often in Kierkegaard’s writing, itself threatens to become somewhat
farcical.27)
How are we to understand this? Let me make a stab at an interpreta-
tion: the passage suggests a denial or transcendence of the body—as if the
ideal would be not to sleep at all (not to require sleep); or if one must sleep,
to do so almost impossibly lightly: so that the bed when one rises from it
bears no trace of its having been lain upon; indeed so that even after having
died, one’s deathbed, the instant one’s body was removed, would seem posi-
tively inviting—more so “than if a solicitous mother had shaken and aired
the covers so that the child might sleep more peacefully!”—a confounding
simile given the anti-sleep gist of the passage as a whole (pure Kierkegaard,
in other words). The further import of that denial or transcendence would
seem to be that only thus was the young girl to be conjured into manifesta-
tion, her own hyperbolic innocence requiring the guarantee of an equally
hyperbolic disembodiedness on the part of her secret observer.
And then there is this, immediately following the description of the young
girl crouching and picking from the bushes, then skipping lightly about,
then standing still, lost in thought: “What wonderful persuasion in all this!
Then at last my mind finds repose. Happy girl! If a man ever wins your love,
would that you might make him as happy by being everything to him as
you make me by doing nothing for me.” What I want to focus on are the
first two sentences: “What wonderful persuasion in all this! Then at last my
mind finds repose.” My suggestion is that these, most obviously the first—
a literal translation of the Danish would be, “What wonderful persuasion
doesn’t lie in all of this!”28—are in an all but explicitly aesthetic register in
the ordinary sense of the term: the young girl’s actions are not characterized
as charming or touching or otherwise affecting but rather as persuasive, as
a work of art may be felt to be, or, put more strongly, as a work of art will
soon be required to be under the conditions of an emerging modernism. The
year 1843 is early for this, I admit. But persuasiveness in the sense of anti-
theatricality—persuasively neutralizing or bracketing beholding through the
agency of the absorptive tableau—emerged as central to French dramatic
and pictorial thought as early as the 1750s. And Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846,
a modernist text par excellence, is just around the corner. (Let me be clear:
254 Michael Fried
I’m not claiming that Constantius steps forward at this moment as a mod-
ernist critic of the arts; my suggestion is rather that the notion of persuasive-
ness, coming where and as it does, points however fleetingly in the direction
of a modernist frame of mind.) The second sentence makes perfect sense in
this context: “Then at last my mind finds repose”—the phrase “at last” cast-
ing its implication back to the scene in the Königstädter Theater of Constan-
tius discovering, despite the excellence of the performance, that he “lacked
something”—a “something” that ultimately turned out to be a version of
the Diderotian tableau located not in a theater (the young girl in the audi-
ence was not enough to supply the lack) but in the “real” world, or rather
in a voyeuristic fiction of a world that differs from our own (or does it?)
mainly in the possibility it offers of an extreme fantasy of disembodiment.
This may seem to make a lot out of a few sentences but just a few pages
later Constantius takes up the theme of the impossibility of ever feeling
completely satisfied (“so it is better to be completely dissatisfied,” he writes)
in a long passage that begins:
At one time I was very close to complete satisfaction. I got up feeling

unusually well one morning. My sense of well-being increased incom-
parably until noon; at precisely one o’clock, I was at the peak and had
a presentiment of the dizzy maximum found on no gauge of well-being,
not even on a poetic thermometer. My body had lost its terrestrial grav-
ity; it was as if I had no body simply because every function enjoyed
total satisfaction, every nerve delighted in itself and in the whole, while
every heartbeat, the restlessness of the living being, only memorialized
and declared the pleasure of the moment. My walk was a floating . . .
My being was transparent, like the depths of the sea, like the self-
satisfied silence of the night, like the soliloquizing stillness of midday.
Every mood rested in my soul with melodic resonance. Every thought
volunteered itself, and every thought volunteered itself jubilantly, the
most foolish whim as well as the richest idea.29
(Note the Emersonian motifs: transparency, mood, whim.) And so on,

until suddenly something began to irritate one of his eyes, an eyelash or
speck of dust—which plunged him into an abyss of despair, an experience
that forever destroyed the hope “of ever feeling satisfied absolutely and in
every way.”30
And then in the last sentences of part I we read:
Why has no one returned from the dead? Because life does not know
how to captivate as death does, because life does not have the persua-
siveness that death has. Yes, death is very persuasive if only one does
not contradict it but lets it do the talking; then it is instantly convincing,
so that no one has ever had an objection to make or has longed for the
eloquence of life. O death! Great is your persuasiveness, and there is no
one who can speak as beautifully as the man whose eloquence gave him
the name [persuader to death], because with his power of persuasion
he talked about you!31 [The reference is to the Cyrenaic philosopher
Hegesias, who the Hongs tell us “spoke so attractively about death that
some of his followers committed suicide.”32]
What are we entitled to conclude from these passages? In the first place,
that Constantius himself seems to recognize that the fantasy of weightless-
ness, transparency, and disembodiment (and beyond that, of the perfectly
innocent and forever sequestered young girl?) is exactly that—in Cavellian/
Wittgensteinian terms, a fantasy of escaping human finitude, which from a
Kierkegaardian perspective, not available to Constantius, cannot be escaped
but only overcome in the leap of faith to the religious. As for the (to my
mind, wholly unexpected) return of the concept of “persuasion,” this time
in connection with eloquence rather than art, it shows in the first place how
closely Kierkegaard in the process of composition rereads his own w riting—
as if having written earlier of the second young girl “What wonderful per-
suasion doesn’t lie in all this!” he goes on (having evoked bodilessness again
several pages after that) to have Constantius associate persuasion with
death, which of course would be one way of characterizing the leap in ques-
tion (out of this life, into eternal life; out of the aesthetic, into the religious),
again beyond Constantius’s scope, so to speak. Here I reach the limits of my
own analysis of this prodigious text.33
Let me close with a drawing by the artist I mentioned earlier, the great
German painter and draftsman Adolf Menzel, whom Kierkegaard might
well have passed in the street during one of his several visits to Berlin (I pic-
ture this happening on Unter den Linden, not far from Gendarmenmarkt,
where Constantius’s rooms were located). The drawing I have in mind is
Menzel’s superb Unmade Bed from 1845 (Figure 15.1), a work I discuss
in Menzel’s Realism (41–2). As my title suggests, I see Menzel’s oeuvre as
consistently foregrounding a thematics as well as a stylistics of embodi-
ment: so, for example, in Unmade Bed Menzel has depicted a bed with
its bedsheets, pillows, duvet, and countless creases and folds in a manner
that empathically evokes—more persuasively than one would have thought
possible—the experience of lying on those sheets, resting one’s head on
those pillows, covering one’s body with that duvet. Simply put, nothing
could be further from the imaginative content of Menzel’s graphic tour
de force than Constantius’s apostrophe to lightness verging on disembodi-
ment in his remarkable sentences in the young girl’s garden (“Who is it that
would be able to sleep!” and so on). And yet the very antithesis between
the two relates them to one another dialectically, to use another of Kierkeg-
aard’s favorite terms—that is, the fantasy of leaving no mark or impress
in a bed (after sleep, even after death), as well as the restatement and then
somewhat overwrought revoking of a version of that fantasy in the pages
that follow, reveal their sheer oddness most fully when juxtaposed with
256 Michael Fried
Figure 15.1 Adolph Menzel, Unmade Bed, 1845

(Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin; photo credit: bpk Bildagentur/Kupfer-
stichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz/Joerg P. Anders/Art
Resource, New York)
Menzel’s brilliantly realistic drawing, every square millimeter of which

conveys a sense of the living body’s form and pressure. It may be, too,
that fantasy and drawing together declare the antithetical imaginative or
say spiritual limits associated with a certain time and place, post-Hegelian
Copenhagen and Berlin—and now I imagine Kierkegaard and Menzel,
those unique individuals, nodding to one another, perhaps doffing their
hats, as they walk on by.34
Notes
1 Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 476. See also 440–3 and pas-
sim. There is, of course, a large secondary literature on these issues, which I won’t
pretend to have mastered. See, however, George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aes-
thetic and the Religious (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982).
2 See also Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 2: 87–184.
3 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling / Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983),
125–231.
4 Kierkegaard, Repetition, 155–6.
5 Kierkegaard, Repetition, 158.
6 This is not the place for a discussion of farce as a genre but it should at least
be noted that it was pioneered in France in the early nineteenth century (the
master of the genre being Eugène Scribe) and was introduced into Copenhagen
(under the designation “vaudevilles”) in 1825 by the highly influential writer
and philosopher John Ludvig Heiberg, a figure who plays a major role in
Kierkegaard’s intellectual life, especially during the 1840s. See in this connec-
tion Tonny Aagaard Olesen, “The Prelude to Heiberg’s Critical Breakthrough”;
András Nagy, “Johan Ludvig Heiberg, “Homme de théâtre”; Kirsten Wechsel,
“Questions of Value in Heiberg’s Vaudevilles”; and Leonardo Lisi, “Heiberg
and the Drama of Modernity,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littéra-
teur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, ed. Jon Stewart (Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, 2008), 211–45, 357–94, 395–417, and 421–48 respectively.
Eventually I shall want to write something about Kierkegaard’s extended analy-
sis of Scribe’s comedy Le Premier Amour (actually Les Premiers Amours) in part
one of Either/Or, 231–79.
9 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Frag-
ments, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 1: 465.
10 Søren Kierkegaard, A Literary Review, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Pen-
guin Books, 2001), 78.
11 Kierkegaard, A Literary Review, 80.
12 Note, however, that the theme of the individual recurs in the fifth of the young
man’s letters to Constantius (dated December 14), in which the former writes:
How, then, is Job’s position to be explained? The explanation is this: the
whole thing is an ordeal [Prøvelse]. But this explanation leaves a new dif-
ficulty, which I have tried to clarify for myself in the following manner. It is
true that science and scholarship consider and interpret life and man’s rela-
tionship to God in this life. But what science is of such a nature that it has
room for a relationship that is defined as an ideal, which viewed infinitely
does not exist at all but exists only for the individual?
(Repetition, 209)
And on the next page:
This category, ordeal, is not aesthetic, ethical, or dogmatic—it is altogether
transcendent. Only as knowledge about an ordeal, that it is an ordeal, would
it be included in a dogmatics. But as soon as the knowledge enters, the resil-
ience of the ordeal is impaired, and the category is actually another category.
This category is absolutely transcendent and places a person in a purely per-
sonal relationship of opposition to God, a relationship such that he cannot
allow himself to be satisfied with any such explanation at second hand.
(Repetition, 210)
Consider also the excerpts from Kierkegaard’s unpublished open letter to Johan
Ludvig Heiberg, especially the paragraph beginning, “But as soon as one consid-
ers individuals in their freedom . . .” (in Repetition, 288).
13 Stanley Cavell, “An Emerson Mood,” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed.
David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 20–32. See also
in the same volume “Finding as Founding,” where Cavell characterizes Emerso-
nian moods as categories “in which not the objects of a world but the world as
a whole is, as it were, experienced” (124).
18 See, for example, Absorption and Theatricality and Why Photography Matters
as Art as Never Before.
258 Michael Fried
19 According to Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard owned Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
collected works and so would have been familiar with the latter’s Hamburgische
Dramaturgie (1767–68), a gathering of 106 articles written by Lessing while
employed as a critic by the National Theater in Hamburg; Hannay’s point is that
Kierkegaard would therefore have been familiar with Lessing’s frequent refer-
ences in that text to Aristotle’s discussion of the relation of poetry to history. But
it would equally be true that he might well have been directed to read Diderot
on the theater, the French philosophe being the focus of no less than six of the
articles (the first of which opens with a reference to Diderot’s “Conversations on
The Natural Son,” a key anti-theatrical text). See Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biog-
raphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 276.
22 From the unpublished open letter to Heiberg:
The young man’s problem is whether repetition is possible. Meanwhile I par-
odied this for him in advance by undertaking a journey to Berlin to see if
repetition is possible. The confusion consists in this: the most interior prob-
lem of the possibility of repetition is expressed externally, as if repetition, if
it were possible, were to be found outside the individual when in fact it must
be found within the individual.
(Repetition, 304)
23 See Hannay, Kierkegaard, chap. 7, “The Breach and Berlin: Either/Or,” and
chap. 8, “Faith and Tragic Heroism [on Fear and Trembling and Repetition],”
154–206. See also the Hongs, “Historical Introduction, Fear and Trembling /
Repetition,” xii–xx; and Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans.
Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005),
173–251.
24 According to the Hongs, a new ending to Repetition, which was to have con-
cluded with the suicide of the young man, had to be written to replace the origi-
nal pages. They state: “Now Constantius and the young man become parodies
of each other: Constantius despairs of aesthetic repetition because of the contin-
gency of life, and the young man, despairing of personal repetition in relation to
the ethical, obtains aesthetic repetition by accident” (see “Repetition, xx).
26 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans.
Walter Lowrie (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1941), 73.
27 My thanks to Leonardo Lisi for this information. Let me take this opportunity to
thank Professor Lisi for his aid and encouragement throughout my engagement
with Repetition.
28 Another point I owe to Leonardo Lisi.
33 For characteristically stunning remarks about “persuasion” see Kierkegaard, A
Literary Review, 16–17. By what means does “persuasion” take place, Kierkeg-
aard asks, apropos of a novel he admires, A Story of Everyday Life (by Heiberg’s
mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg, though Kierkegaard leaves that unsaid). His
answer:
By the use of common sense, so as to gain for suffering a more merciful
aspect, by having patience, a patience that expects good fortune to smile
again; by the friendly sympathy of loving people; and by the resignation that
renounces its claim not to everything, but to the highest, and through con-
tentment transforms the next-best into something almost as good. And none
of this is put across—it just happens—and it is for this very reason that, if one
gives oneself up to it, the persuasion is so powerful. No orator can persuade
like this, simply because he has a motive, and contemplation always gives
birth to doubt. Here, however, persuasion is not a matter between two per-
sons but the pathway in the life-view, and the novel leads one into the world
that that view creatively sustains. But, then again, this world is precisely the
actual one; so you have not been deceived by the view; it has simply per-
suaded you to stay where you are.
He goes on to write:
Persuasion is a movement on the spot but one that changes the spot. Aestheti-
cally, the individual is led away from the actual world and translated into the
medium of the imagination; religiously, the individual is led away and trans-
lated into the eternity of the religious. In each case the individual becomes
alien to the actual world. Aesthetically, the individual becomes alien to the
actual world by being absent from it; religiously, the individual becomes an
alien and a foreigner in the actual world.
(A Literary Review, 17)
There follows more of interest on the topic (Kierkegaard can’t help himself),
but I want to point out, first, the anti-theatrical implications of Kierkegaard’s
remarks about the motivatedness of the orator and more broadly of his claim
that the persuasiveness of the novel is a function of its not seeming to have
designs on the reader, which is what it means to say of its world-view that it “is
not put across—it just happens.” And second, that the notion of being made
“absent from” the actual world also has an anti-theatrical edge—we might think
of it as the very opposite of Constantius’s all too “present” voyeuristic relation
to the two young girls, especially the second. Put slightly differently, Diderot
calls for a beholder of a painting or a member of an audience in a theater to be
rendered aesthetically “absent from” the representations in question. In general,
there is reason to think of Kierkegaard as an anti-theatrical thinker, and not just
in the realm of art.
34 This essay first appeared in MLN (128: 5, 2013), 1019–37, as part of the pro-
ceedings of a symposium on Kierkegaard organized for the Humanities Center,
Johns Hopkins University, by Leonardo Lisi.
Contributors
Mathew Abbott is Lecturer in Philosophy at Federation University Austra-

lia. Drawing on modern European and post-Wittgensteinian thought, his
research is concerned with intersections of aesthetics, politics, and eth-
ics. He is the author of Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy (Edin-
burgh 2014) and The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question
of Political Ontology (Edinburgh 2016).
Jennifer Ashton teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the
author of From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry in the
Twentieth Century and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to
American Poetry since 1945. Her current book project, which deals with
twenty-first-century poetry and its politics, is tentatively titled Poetry and
the Price of Milk: Lyric, Labor, and the Market in the 21st Century.
Rex Butler is Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art, Design and
Architecture at Monash University. He is currently writing a book on
Stanley Cavell and art.
Diarmuid Costello is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Warwick and Co-Director of the Centre for Research, Literature and the
Arts. He is a recipient of AHRC, Leverhulme, and Humboldt research
fellowships and has co-edited special issues of Critical Inquiry, Art His-
tory, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on photography.
His On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry was published by Rout-
ledge in 2017.
Michael Fried—poet, art critic, art historian, and literary critic/historian—is
the J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Johns Hop-
kins University. His most recent books are After Caravaggio, What Was
Literary Impressionism?, and Promesse du Bonheur, a book of poems
with photographs by James Welling.
Paul J. Gudel is Professor of Law at California Western School of Law. He
is the author (with Ian R. Macneil) of Contracts: Exchange Transactions
and Relations (Foundation 2001).
Contributors 261
Andrea Kern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig and the
Co-Director of the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism (FAGI).
Her research interests lie in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of per-
ception, skepticism, and aesthetics. She has published numerous articles
as well as two monographs, Schöne Lust. Eine Theorie der ästhetischen
Erfahrung nach Kant (2000) and Sources of Knowledge: On the Concept
of a Rational Capacity for Knowledge (2017).
Stephen Melville is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at The Ohio
State University, and the author of Philosophy beside Itself: On Decon-
struction and Modernism (1986), Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context
(1996), As Painting: Division and Displacement (with Philip Armstrong
and Laura Lisbon, 2001), and Writing Art History: Disciplinary Depar-
tures (with Margaret Iversen, 2010).
Walter Benn Michaels teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His
most recent book is The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography,
Autonomy, Economy (Chicago 2015).
Richard Moran is the Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Har-
vard University. He is the author of Authority and Estrangement: An
Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton 2001), The Philosophical Imagina-
tion (Oxford 2017), and The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony,
and Intersubjectivity (Oxford 2018).
Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of New College,
Oxford. His areas of research include the relation between philosophy
and the arts; his most recent publications are The Self and Its Shadows
(Oxford 2013), The Great Riddle (Oxford 2015), and On Film: 3rd Edi-
tion (Routledge 2016).
Magdalena Ostas is Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College,
where she works and teaches at the crossroads of literature and philoso-
phy. She has written on a wide range of figures in aesthetics, nineteenth-
century literature, Romanticism, and literary theory.
Knox Peden is Gerry Higgins Lecturer in the History of Philosophy at the
University of Melbourne. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenom-
enology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford 2014)
and the co-editor, with Peter Hallward, of a two-volume work devoted to
the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (Verso 2012).
Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Pro-
fessor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philoso-
phy, and the College at the University of Chicago, and has been the
Chair of the Committee on Social Thought for the past twenty-three
years.
262 Contributors
David E. Wellbery is LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson Uni-
versity Professor in Germanic Studies and in the Committee on Social
Thought at the University of Chicago. His most recent monographic pub-
lications are Goethe’s ‘Faust’: Reflexion der tragischen Form (Munich
2017) and Goethe’s ‘Pandora’: Dramatisierung einer Urgeschichte der
Moderne (Munich 2017).
Index
Note: Italicized page numbers indicate a figure on the corresponding page.
absorption 4 – 9, 15, 16, 50, 51, 53, 53, 55, 58 – 9, 61n10, 62n13, 66, 68,
80 – 2, 87, 94, 99 – 102, 104, 110, 71, 73 – 4, 80 – 1, 87, 94, 99, 100 – 1,
118 – 19, 122, 144, 145 – 7, 149 – 50, 113, 118 – 19, 123, 125 – 7, 155,
155, 171 – 9, 185 – 7, 187 – 8n1, 158, 161, 168n18, 171 – 81, 185 – 6,
188n7, 191, 192, 193, 198, 202 – 3, 187, 187n1, 202, 205n31, 206 – 24,
206 – 24, 248 – 53, 259n33 226 – 7, 229 – 31, 238, 253, 259n33;
acknowledgment 7, 28 – 9, 51, 60, criticism of 1, 2 – 4, 8 – 11, 12, 13, 14,
61n10, 71, 87 – 8, 92 – 4, 99, 101, 17n8, 20, 23 – 6, 28 – 9, 31n14, 48 – 9,
113, 134 – 5, 136, 141, 144, 176, 64 – 6, 71 – 3, 82 – 5, 91, 93 – 5, 97,
206, 210, 230, 252 104 – 6, 108, 109 – 10, 113, 114n4,
action 12, 14, 15, 33 – 45, 45n2, 50, 115n28, 117 – 19, 121 – 2, 124 – 7,
53, 59 – 60, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 127, 129, 131, 135 – 6, 138 – 9, 140,
79, 80, 93, 96, 106, 115n21, 120 – 2, 140 – 1, 143 – 5, 145, 146, 149, 150,
124, 126 – 7, 128n23, 131 – 6, 149, 152, 153, 161, 165, 171, 172, 181,
151, 153, 161, 162, 165 – 7, 175, 188n5, 206 – 7, 208, 209, 209 – 11,
177, 181 – 2, 190, 191, 192, 194 – 7, 212 – 17, 219 – 21, 223 – 4, 226, 227,
201 – 3, 206, 208 – 9, 210, 215 – 17, 229 – 33, 238, 249, 254; duration and
219 – 24, 237, 244, 245 – 6, 253 52, 62n21, 76, 78, 81, 84, 139, 147,
Agee, James 198 – 201 191 – 2, 196, 198, 213, 217, 219 – 21;
agency see action essence and 2, 10, 12, 18 – 30, 30n2,
Althusser, Louis 189, 190, 191, 203, 31n14, 31 – 2n23, 35 – 6, 53, 65,
204n15 87 – 8, 91 – 4, 99, 105, 114n3, 166,
Andre, Carl 2, 161 178; historical context of 1, 3, 4, 5,
Anscombe, Elizabeth 1, 12, 42, 43, 6 – 7, 9 – 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17n5, 21,
45n2, 169n30 23, 25 – 7, 29, 30, 36 – 7, 48 – 52, 55,
anti-theatricality 2, 3, 4, 7 – 10, 12 – 13, 57, 58, 59 – 60, 61n8, 64 – 7, 71 – 5,
14, 16, 48 – 9, 50 – 2, 55, 58 – 9, 79 – 83, 85, 87, 91, 92 – 6, 98 – 102,
60 – 1n4, 62n15, 66, 73, 80, 83 – 5, 104 – 13, 114n4, 115n28, 116n29,
94, 98 – 9, 100 – 1, 117 – 27, 144 – 6, 145 – 6, 148, 149 – 50, 155, 159 – 60,
149, 152, 155 – 6, 158, 163 – 5, 164, 171 – 2, 175, 187 – 8n1, 190 – 4,
172 – 6, 178 – 9, 192, 205n31, 196, 198, 202 – 3, 204n9, 212, 227,
249 – 50, 253, 258n19, 258 – 9n33; 238 – 40, 242n14, 249 – 50, 253 – 4,
see also theatricality 256; history of 1, 2, 3, 4 – 11, 13,
architecture 64, 72, 76 – 7, 105, 106, 14, 15, 17n5, 36, 48, 49, 51, 61n8,
110, 112, 113, 115n27 64 – 6, 71 – 2, 94 – 5, 97, 100, 102,
Art: beholding of 1, 2 – 3, 4, 7 – 10, 14, 104 – 5, 110 – 12, 114n20, 115n28,
15, 21, 28, 29, 37 – 40, 49, 50, 51 – 2, 140 – 2, 145 – 6, 155, 167, 171 – 6,
264 Index
178 – 9, 187n1, 190, 192, 194, cinema 17n7, 52, 61n5, 87, 92 – 3,
202 – 3, 212, 242n14; objecthood 99, 135
and 2 – 3, 8, 14, 15, 16, 24 – 7, 36, 38, Clark, T. J. 17n5, 192
40, 41 – 5, 46n13, 50, 84, 87, 89 – 91, convention 7, 11, 12, 17n8, 24 – 7,
95, 99, 129 – 31, 133 – 6, 136n3, 139, 29 – 30, 49 – 50, 57, 64 – 5, 82 – 3,
143 – 5, 166, 180, 187, 193, 212, 92 – 3, 106 – 7, 118, 130, 133 – 5, 155,
221, 226 – 32, 242n11; presentness 172, 177, 192, 195, 196, 198, 230,
and 50, 62n13, 62n21, 98, 99, 244, 250
102, 139, 191 – 2; time and see art, conviction 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 18 – 19,
duration and; worldhood and 8, 15, 24 – 6, 28 – 9, 43, 65, 71, 73, 74, 82,
49, 50, 55, 61n6, 63n23, 75 – 6, 78, 84, 87, 93, 97, 98, 114n3, 118, 139,
87, 89 – 90, 94, 118 – 19, 130, 134 – 5, 173, 175, 178 – 9, 181, 187, 188n5,
137n7, 146, 150, 155, 173 – 87, 253 – 5, 258 – 9n33
207, 215 – 24, 229 – 32, 240 – 1n6, Courbet, Gustave 13, 51, 79 – 82,
241 – 2n11, 247, 254, 257n13, 258 – 9 86n33, 99 – 102, 104, 146, 171, 176
artifactuality and 21, 22 – 3, 27 – 8, Cronan, Todd 62n14, 139, 242n14
31n23, 57, 73, 74, 77, 123, 125,
130 – 1, 166, 213, 226, 227 – 9, 232 Danto, Arthur 1, 20, 22 – 3, 26, 32n25,
autonomy of 8, 13, 58, 72, 100, 102, 43, 45n2, 47n25, 56 – 7, 111
109 – 10, 113, 118, 119, 123 – 4, David, Jacques-Louis 5, 7, 17n4, 66,
127, 144, 198, 226 – 7, 230, 231, 101, 171
241 – 2n11 Davidson, Donald 190, 191, 195, 203
Aristotle 51 – 2, 70, 72, 258n19 decapitation see severing
Demand, Thomas 9, 12 – 13, 14, 15,
Barthes, Roland 1, 11, 14 – 15, 60n3, 50, 53 – 60, 54, 61n7, 61 – 2n12,
145 – 6, 151 – 61, 163 – 6, 168n11 – 20, 62n21, 90, 138 – 9, 143 – 7, 149, 155,
169n21 – 3, 201 – 2 159 – 66, 169n24, 170n35, 195 – 8,
Beardsley, Monroe 39 – 41, 43 – 4, 46n21 201, 227, 231 – 2, 234 – 5, 241n8 – 9
beauty 67 – 75, 78, 85n11, 112, 122, dialectics 1, 5 – 6, 10 – 11, 15, 26, 49, 52,
124 – 7, 129, 172 – 3, 180, 197 – 201, 55, 62n13, 65 – 6, 96, 104, 115n24,
209 – 10, 212 – 15, 235, 236, 254 – 5 123, 145 – 6, 160 – 1, 166, 191 – 4,
Becher, Berndt and Hilla 9, 50, 89 – 91, 196, 202 – 3, 205n31, 255 – 6
93, 94 Dickie, George 1, 20, 22 – 3, 26, 28,
Bois, Yve-Alain 140 – 1 32n24 – 9, 129
Diderot, Denis 1, 4 – 6, 8 – 9, 13, 14, 15,
Cage, John 46n15, 202 48, 50, 61n10, 66, 68 – 70, 71 – 5, 81,
capitalism 6, 11, 197 – 8, 200 – 1 94, 100 – 2, 104, 117 – 19, 122, 152,
Caravaggio 1, 13, 53, 97, 99 – 102, 155, 171, 175 – 6, 181, 202, 205n31,
105, 109 – 11, 113, 114n3, 115n23, 206 – 24, 224n3 – 9, 249 – 51, 254,
116n31, 149, 171, 179 258n19, 259n33
Caro, Anthony 1, 3, 4, 24, 28 – 9, 45, drama 51, 65 – 6, 69, 71 – 2, 77, 100 – 1,
64 – 5, 108, 115n28, 161, 229 – 33, 117 – 19, 124, 155, 175, 179,
241 – 2n11 206 – 12, 214 – 19, 221 – 3, 232, 234,
Carrier, David 129, 131 238, 240, 250, 253
Cavell, Stanley 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, 14, drawing 1, 33 – 4, 37, 40 – 4, 174, 243,
17n8, 18, 23 – 4, 28 – 30, 30n9, 255 – 6
32n29, 39 – 40, 41 – 3, 45n2, 83, Duchamp, Marcel 108, 129, 138 – 9,
85n1, 93 – 4, 95 – 6, 105 – 8, 110, 228
114n5 – 14, 115n23, 129, 131 – 3,
135 – 6, 137n8 – 14, 139, 147 – 50, embodiment 12, 16, 33, 39, 41 – 4,
169n27, 192, 247, 255, 257n13 45n2, 59, 63n23, 77 – 8, 79 – 81,
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 4 – 5, 5, 82, 94, 143, 165, 173 – 4, 179, 183,
16n3, 53, 94, 101, 164, 171, 173 – 6, 187 – 8n1, 194 – 5, 197, 209, 219,
174, 193, 207 – 8 232 – 5, 237 – 8, 241n6, 250, 253 – 6
Index 265
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 247, 254, 179; “Morris Louis” 33 – 45, 45n1;
257n13 Powers 1, 232 – 4, 239, 240n1,
Evans, Walker 198 – 200, 205n22 241n6; Promesse du Bonheur 1,
16, 237 – 40, 242n12; “Roger Fry’s
film see cinema Formalism” 117, 119 – 27; “Shape as
finitude 12, 22, 29 – 30, 31n21, 32n41, Form” 26, 65, 115n21, 144; “Three
89, 113, 135, 148, 203, 204n15, 255 American Painters” 105, 136n3;
Flaubert, Gustave 1, 86n33 “Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro”
form 16, 51 – 3, 55 – 6, 57, 62n16, 64 – 5; Why Photography Matters as
70 – 2, 74 – 6, 85, 85n15, 111, 113, Art as Never Before 1, 2, 9 – 11, 13,
114n3, 117 – 18, 123, 129, 131, 134, 14 – 15, 48 – 50, 52 – 3, 54 – 5, 61n5,
171 – 2, 173, 175 – 6, 180 – 1, 183, 62n21, 87 – 100, 102n2, 145 – 6,
186, 187n1, 194, 196 – 200, 202, 151 – 67, 168n18, 169n23, 173,
203, 204n15, 218, 228 – 40, 241n11, 176 – 8, 196, 227, 257n18
242n14 Friedlander, Lee 152 – 4
formalism 2, 8, 14, 20, 61n6, 70, 104, Friedrich, Caspar David 11, 15, 181 – 6,
117 – 18, 121, 123 – 7 182, 204n8
Foster, Hal 3 – 4, 32n39, 204n6 Fry, Roger 14, 20, 117, 119 – 27
Foucault, Michel 189 – 90 Fuller, Loïe 190, 197 – 9
Fried, Michael (works by): Absorption
and Theatricality 1, 4 – 7, 9, 17n8, Gadamer, Hans-Georg 108 – 9
32n41, 48 – 9, 67 – 9, 71 – 5, 100, 104, grace 15, 102, 109, 113, 191 – 3, 198,
117 – 18, 122, 146, 147, 149 – 50, 203, 251; see also art, presentness and
155, 171 – 7, 179 – 81, 187 – 8n1, Géricault, Theodore 7, 65 – 6
188n7, 193, 206 – 24, 257n18; After Gordon, Douglas 97, 98 – 9
Caravaggio 1, 97, 100; Another Greenberg, Clement 2, 12, 24 – 6,
Light 1, 11, 17n5, 61n7, 61 – 2n12, 32n29, 33 – 8, 43 – 5, 46n10, 104 – 5,
62n21, 65 – 6, 127n2, 138 – 9, 147, 114n3, 115n28, 129, 140 – 1, 193
182 – 3, 185, 191 – 2, 194, 195 – 6, Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 4 – 6, 6, 9, 101 – 2,
202, 204n7, 227; “Anthony Caro’s 171, 175 – 6, 193, 200, 208 – 9,
Table Sculptures” 230 – 1; “Art and 215 – 16
Objecthood” 1, 2 – 4, 9, 12, 13, Gursky, Andreas 9, 50, 61n5, 89, 100
20, 24 – 30, 32n39, 45, 51, 61n11,
82 – 5, 95, 98, 102, 105, 109, Heidegger, Martin 11, 55, 59, 77, 178,
114n6, 117, 129 – 31, 134, 136n3, 247
137n21, 139, 144, 147, 149, 161, Hegel, G. W. F. 1, 11, 12, 14, 15,
179, 180, 191 – 2, 205n31, 226 – 7, 17n5, 26, 60, 61n6, 62n13, 64, 67,
229 – 30, 231, 232, 233, 238, 239; 84, 89 – 90, 105, 111 – 13, 115n24,
To the Center of the Earth 1, 240n2; 116n29, 191, 192, 193, 195, 202 – 3,
Courbet’s Realism 1, 32, 86n31, 205n33, 256
99 – 100, 146, 241n7; Flaubert’s
“Gueuloir” 1, 86n33; Four Honest intention 1, 2, 4, 11, 12, 12 – 13, 14,
Outlaws 1, 9 – 10, 11, 61n7, 97 – 9, 14 – 15, 15, 29, 39 – 45, 46n21, 50,
138 – 9, 140, 143 – 5, 147; “An 52 – 60, 61n5, 61 – 2n12, 62n14,
Introduction to My Art Criticism” 66, 70, 73 – 4, 76, 84, 90, 94, 120,
3 – 4, 8 – 9, 17n8, 32n32, 35, 43, 124 – 5, 138 – 9, 141 – 50, 151 – 67,
104, 106, 114n4, 127n1, 145, 169n30, 175, 185, 190 – 8, 201 – 3,
155, 168n18, 193, 230 – 1; “Joseph 205n31, 219, 221, 224, 229,
Marioni” 140, 143, 147; Manet’s 234, 236
Modernism 1, 7 – 8, 32n41, 90, 100,
101, 178; Menzel’s Realism 1, 11, Judd, Donald 2, 24 – 7, 30, 38, 82, 84
61n4, 63n23, 79, 243 – 4, 255; The
Moment of Caravaggio 1, 13, 97, Kant, Immanuel 1, 11, 14, 15, 31n21,
100, 109, 114n3, 114 – 15n21, 176, 56, 58, 63n22, 67 – 71, 74, 75, 104,
266 Index
112, 113n1, 115n28, 118, 123 – 7, 189 – 90, 192, 193, 196, 198, 226 – 7,
128n19, 129, 172 – 3, 180 – 4, 186 – 7, 229 – 31, 233, 234, 238, 242n14,
188n7, 189, 191 – 2, 193, 202 – 3, 253 – 4
204n8, 205n31 Morris, Robert 2, 161, 226 – 7, 230,
Keats, John 14, 121 – 2 233 – 4
Kierkegaard, Søren 1, 11, 16, 243 – 56, music 26, 30, 40, 57, 61n10, 65, 82,
256 – 7n6, 257n12, 258n19, 92, 106 – 7, 197, 198
258 – 9n33
nature 15, 16, 33, 43, 38 – 41, 45,
Lerner, Ben 16, 227, 232, 234 – 40, 69 – 70, 72 – 4, 76, 77, 78, 85n11,
241n8 – 10, 241 – 2n11 86n33, 120 – 1, 124 – 5, 149 – 50, 153,
literalism 2 – 4, 8, 9 – 10, 12, 13, 14, 173, 181, 183 – 4, 186, 190 – 9, 203,
16n1, 24 – 30, 32n32, 35 – 8, 40 – 1, 212 – 14, 216 – 18, 226 – 9, 232 – 3,
43, 46n10, 48, 61n11, 65, 74, 82 – 5, 240 – 1n6
94 – 5, 97, 98, 129 – 31, 133 – 6, Neoliberalism 11, 190, 202
139 – 40, 143 – 7, 149, 158 – 9, 161 – 3, Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 13, 20, 31n13,
180, 191, 194 – 5, 200, 203, 226 – 32, 75, 83 – 5
234, 238, 241 – 2n11
Louis, Morris 1, 12, 33 – 45, 45n1, painting 1, 2 – 11, 12, 13, 13 – 14, 14,
61n10, 109 – 10, 113 15, 16n3, 17n4, 24 – 30, 33 – 45,
Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques 46n10, 48, 49 – 50, 51 – 3, 57, 59,
213 – 14, 220 – 1, 224 61n10, 62n13, 64, 65 – 6, 69, 71 – 5,
79 – 80, 81, 82, 86n33, 87 – 8,
Manet, Édouard 4, 7 – 8, 8, 24, 32n41, 94 – 102, 102n2, 104 – 13, 114n19,
35, 50 – 3, 57, 74, 94, 99, 100 – 2, 114 – 15n21, 115n23, 116n30,
104, 110, 155, 164 – 5, 171, 176, 178 117 – 19, 123, 125 – 6, 127n1, 129,
Marioni, Joseph 14, 97, 98, 140, 130 – 1, 135, 136n3, 140 – 7, 149,
142 – 7, 149 155, 160, 164, 171 – 6, 178 – 9,
Marx, Karl 12, 17n5, 189 181 – 7, 187 – 8n1, 188n5, 192,
McDowell, John 22, 30, 192 193 – 4, 200, 206 – 24, 224n8, 233,
Menzel, Adolph 1, 11, 16, 63n23, 79, 241n7, 242n14, 243, 249 – 50, 255,
243 – 4, 255 – 6, 256 259n33
medium 1, 2, 4, 10 – 11, 12, 13, 13 – 14, persuasion see conviction
14, 14 – 15, 24 – 6, 29, 52, 56 – 8, 74, photography 1, 2, 9 – 11, 12 – 13, 13,
87 – 8, 91 – 4, 97 – 9, 102n2, 104 – 13, 14 – 15, 48 – 50, 52, 53, 53 – 8, 60,
114n19, 114 – 15n21, 118, 140, 60 – 1n4, 61n5, 61 – 2n12, 62n15, 64,
142, 151 – 5, 160, 165 – 7, 171, 178, 87 – 102, 102n2, 104, 138 – 9, 143 – 7,
187 – 8n1, 227 149, 151 – 67, 168n2, 169n23,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 15, 59, 170n34, 173, 176 – 9, 181, 183,
193 – 7, 201, 204n10 – 15 185 – 7, 195 – 201, 205n22, 227, 234,
Michaels, Walter Benn 11, 12, 28, 235, 239, 241n9
56 – 7, 62n16, 139, 145 – 6, 158 – 9, poetry 1, 9, 16, 26, 30, 44, 62n16, 65,
160, 163, 166, 168n20, 169n33, 82, 107, 119 – 20, 121 – 2, 197, 198,
180, 188n5, 190, 193, 198 – 203, 210 – 11, 226 – 40, 240n1, 240 – 1n6,
205n31 241 – 2n11, 242n15, 248, 254,
minimalism see literalism 258n19
Mill, John Stewart 14, 119 – 20, politics 6, 11, 15, 49, 61n6, 77,
122, 125 121, 141, 159, 189 – 91, 193,
modernism 1 – 4, 7 – 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 199 – 201, 203
23 – 30, 32n41, 33 – 45, 45n2, 46n2, Pippin, Robert 3, 6, 12, 16n1, 17n5,
50, 51, 55 – 6, 61n6, 65, 83 – 5, 87 – 8, 26, 90, 174, 179, 192, 202, 204n9
94 – 102, 104 – 5, 123 – 4, 129, 135 – 6, Plato 25 – 6, 54, 75, 76 – 7, 109
136n3, 139, 149, 164, 166, 176, Pollock, Jackson 34, 40 – 1, 117
Index 267
postmodernism 3 – 4, 11, 16, 29, 48 – 9, Struth, Thomas 9, 15, 50, 55 – 6, 56,
139, 145, 227, 232, 234, 238 – 9, 61n6, 89, 90, 181, 183, 185 – 7
242n14 sublime, the 14, 63n22, 129, 131,
Proust, Marcel 75, 165, 195 172 – 3, 184, 196
Rancière, Jacques 1, 15, 189 – 91, 193, theater 16, 83 – 5, 119, 125, 130,
194, 195, 196 – 203, 204n15, 205n33 197 – 8, 210 – 11, 244 – 55, 258n19;
Ray, Charles 14, 61n7, 62n17, 97, 98, see also drama
138 – 9, 143 – 7, 149 theatricality 2 – 8, 10, 11, 12 – 13, 14,
reductionism see art, essence and 15, 16n1, 17n4, 26, 28, 48 – 9,
religion 21, 48, 49, 51, 78, 84, 102, 51 – 2, 58 – 9, 60 – 1n4, 61n9 – 10,
123, 143, 147, 150, 243, 246 – 7, 62n13, 73 – 4, 80, 83 – 5, 87, 94,
251 – 2, 255 – 6, 256n1, 258 – 9n33 98 – 9, 100 – 2, 104, 117 – 19, 121 – 4,
Ruff, Thomas 9, 49 – 50, 89 129 – 30, 133 – 6, 144 – 7, 149, 155,
Ryman, Robert 140 – 2, 144 161 – 5, 169n23, 171 – 2, 178 – 9,
191 – 3, 197 – 8, 199, 202, 249 – 50;
Sala, Anri 97, 98 see also anti-theatricality
Schiller, Friedrich 1, 13, 67 – 75, 81, Titian 51, 110
85n2, 86n22, 246 Tolstoy, Leo 20, 21 – 2, 27,
Schopenhauer, Arthur 1, 13, 67, 75 – 82, 31n16, 75
86n23 tradition 1, 8 – 9, 12, 14, 16, 24 – 5,
Scruton, Roger 14 – 15, 151 – 4, 160, 33 – 4, 40, 59 – 60, 64 – 5, 87, 101 – 2,
162, 166, 168n5, 169n33, 170n34 107 – 9, 115n23, 117 – 22, 130 – 1,
sculpture 1, 3, 4, 9 – 10, 24 – 6, 28 – 9, 137n12, 138, 140, 151, 155, 165,
30, 33 – 5, 37, 40, 44 – 5, 53, 61n7, 172 – 3, 175, 178, 187, 191, 194,
62n17, 64 – 5, 82, 83, 89, 97 – 8, 195, 196, 202, 249, 250
105, 107 – 8, 110, 112 – 13, 114n19,
115n24, 116n30, 138 – 40, 143 – 7, Vernet, Claude-Joseph 4, 206, 212,
149, 161, 164, 195 – 6, 198, 226 – 34, 219 – 20
240n5, 241 – 2n6
severing 50, 53, 100 – 2, 110, 111, 113, Wagner, Richard 13, 75, 83 – 5
149, 232 – 4, 237 – 8 Wall, Jeff 9, 15, 49 – 50, 88, 90, 151,
skepticism 11, 12, 14, 19, 25, 29, 30, 167, 170n35, 171, 177 – 8, 177
102, 131 – 6, 137n21, 148, 149 – 50, Warhol, Andy 23, 43
189 Weitz, Morris 1, 12, 19 – 23, 25 – 30,
Smith, David 16, 226 – 30, 232 – 3, 31n12, 31 – 2n23
240n5, 240 – 1n6 Welling, James 50, 94 – 5, 227
Smith, Tony 2, 27 – 8, 130 – 1, 137n17, Wimsatt, William 39 – 40, 44, 46n21
139, 149, 229, 241 – 2n6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 2, 10 – 11,
spectatorship see art, beholding of 11, 12, 13, 17n8, 18 – 20, 26, 30n2,
Stella, Frank 1, 24 – 5, 26, 28, 30, 65, 31n10, 32n29, 33, 42, 45n2, 50, 59,
102, 114 – 15n21, 144 76, 78, 81, 88, 95 – 6, 133 – 4, 135 – 6,
Stoichita, Victor 110 – 11, 114n20 148 – 9, 192, 255

Abbott, Mathew (Editor) - Michael Fried and Philosophy - Absorption, Theatricality, and Modernism-Routledge (2017)

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Michael Fried and Philosophy

This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians,

Mathew Abbott is Lecturer in Philosophy at Federation University Australia.

1 Michael Fried and Philosophy

Edited by Mathew Abbott

List of figures vii

Michael Fried and Philosophy 1

1 Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude 18

2 “When I Raise My Arm”: Michael Fried’s Theory of Action 33

3 Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never

4 Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried 64

5 Deep Relationality and the Hinge-like Structure of History:

6 Becoming Medium 104

7 Formalism and the Appearance of Nature 117

8 Michael Fried, Theatricality, and the Threat of Skepticism 129

10 On the (So-Called) Problem of Detail: Michael Fried,

11 The Aesthetics of Absorption 171

12 Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant) 189

13 Diderot’s Conception of Aesthetic Subjectivity

14 The Promise of the Present: Michael Fried’s Poetry Now 226

15 Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater 243

1.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737

AT Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of

[T]he literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a

Figure 1.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737

Figure 1.2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, L’Oiseau mort, Salon de 1800

beginning to betray theatricality.4 As Pippin argues, this grounds Fried’s

Figure 1.3 Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment des Horaces, 1784

historical interest. It also functions as a pre-history of modernist painting,

Figure 1.4 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

confrontational. Together with its strange narrative structure and emphasis

[T]here is a sense in which my early commitment to a particular canon

As we should expect given the historical and dialectical nature of the

[T]hat value is inescapable in human experience and conduct is one of the

In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein raises a problem

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than

Despite the influence of this and other passages on family resemblance

As real definitions, these theories are supposed to be factual reports

Weitz understands the traditional aesthetician as claiming to provide a

[F]latness and the delimitation of flatness ought not to be thought of as

There is no particular feature or set of features making up the timeless

For Fried, it is impossible to understand modernism except as a confron-

Driving on the turnpike, Smith is struck by the artificiality—by the arti-

1. Thomas Demand makes large-scale color photographs. 2. His photo-

Figure 3.1 Thomas Demand, Poll, 2001

Figure 3.2 Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York, Soho, 1978

Its form is form as such, the principle of unity itself, intendedness. In a

Das Höchste wäre: zu begreifen, daß alles

Branching out from a single historical situation, two radically different,

Form on this conception just is self-determination of the being in ques-

As we have seen, the recognition that paintings are made to be beheld

It is hard to see how Schiller’s theory could be understood as addressing

[W]hen someone, to employ a suggestive German expression, com-

The isomorphism of philosophical (Schopenhauer) and artistic imagina-

The argumentative intensity of “Art and Objecthood” springs from the

As far as creating an intuition of the beyond [Ahnen-machen] is con-

Endlessness, being able to go on and on, even having to go on and on, is

The consonance of critical insight exhibited here demands philosophi-

the category of water tower would implicitly be contrasted with every

2. Mediums, Genres, and Projectivity

This flexible constancy, or essentially non-arbitrary variation, is what

[Wittgensteinian] criteria do not relate a name to an object, but, we

A word’s grammatical schematism is its power to combine with other

List of figures vii

Michael Fried and Philosophy 1

1 Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude 18

2 “When I Raise My Arm”: Michael Fried’s Theory of Action 33

4 Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried 64

6 Becoming Medium 104

7 Formalism and the Appearance of Nature 117

8 Michael Fried, Theatricality, and the Threat of Skepticism 129

11 The Aesthetics of Absorption 171

12 Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant) 189

14 The Promise of the Present: Michael Fried’s Poetry Now 226

15 Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater 243

Figure 1.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737

Figure 1.2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, L’Oiseau mort, Salon de 1800

Figure 1.3 Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment des Horaces, 1784

Figure 1.4 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

Figure 3.1 Thomas Demand, Poll, 2001

Figure 3.2 Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York, Soho, 1978

2. Mediums, Genres, and Projectivity

3. The Undecidability of Origins: Medium-Specificity,

Various anti- or quasi-art figures—in particular minimalists or literalists—

1. The Problem: Scruton, Barthes, and Fried

2. An “Ontological Guarantee” of Non-Theatricality:

3. “Allegories of Intendedness as Such:” Fried’s Demand

4. The Original Problem Reconsidered

Figure 11.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Blowing Soap Bubbles, 1734

Figure 11.3 Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822

Figure 11.4 Thomas Struth, Art Institute of Chicago II, 1990

1. Our Mediocre Planet

2. Another Light, Dance of Light, Cruel Radiance