Authenticity in painting: Remarks on Michael Fried's art history

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 575-598

  Pippin, Robert ^a  

^a The University of Chicago

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EID: 34249428344     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/430985     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Denis Diderot, "What Everyone Knows about Expression and Something Everyone Doesn't Know," Notes on Painting, in Diderot on Art, tranS. John Goodman, 2 volS. (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 1:214
2. Diderot, "On Mannerism," The Salon of 1767, in Diderot on Art, 2:320, 323
3. A later, better known, similar claim: Nietzsche's in The Birth of Tragedy that, to speak with Diderot, ancient tragedy had ceased to be drama and had become theatre, that tragedy had died from a kind of suicide, had become untrue to itself by becoming philosophical, by addressing the audience, as if with problems and puzzleS. There are many other permutations of the claim of a false or dead life. Theodor Adorno was willing to go very far. "Our perspective on life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer" (Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, vol. 4 of Gesammelte Schriften [Frankfurt am Main, 1951], P. 13; my tranS. )
4. This air of paradox is only intensified by the epigraph for Minima Moralia, from the Austrian writer Ferdinand Kürnberger: "Life does not live." Such an evaluation is not unprecedented, although one sees it mostly in modernist literary contextS. T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land had compared modern office workers crossing London bridge with the lost souls described in Dante's Inferno ("I had not thought death had undone so many" [T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York, 1952), P. 39]). And the accusation (that we have become the living dead) is prominent in George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, Nietzsche of course, and many other modernistS.
5. On the general issue of responding to pictures, or "physiognomies, " or even words, as like responding to another human being, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), P. 355
6. Some of the anxiety in philosophy about philosophy is clearly like this worry about seeming a Quixote figure, playing the role (the ancient role) of rather than being philosopherS.
7. See Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), pP. 148-72
8. See Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, in Rameau's Nephew and Other Works, tranS. Jacques Barzun (Indianapolis, 1956)
9. For reasons of space I am going to ignore other important features of Fried's interpretation, especially the importance of absorption in establishing a graspable unity, a closed composition within the frame, and the strategy of the tableau in effecting thiS. I do not think that will lead to any distortion of Fried's claimS.
10. See Fried, "An Introduction to My Art Criticism," Art and Objecthood, P. 51, on the "unbridgeable gulf" between the two FriedS.
11. I mean that these painters are actively exploring such possibilities; they are not footnotes to various philosophical theories; indeed they are often exploring the issues even more fruitfully than philosophy could
12. In general, we won't know what the "it" was that happened without some sort of adequate genealogy. Stephen Melville, in "Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism," in Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context, ed. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (New York, 1996), has written that Diderot was glimpsing a possible future for painting- "wallpaper, Muzak for the eyes, panels of vague and pleasant prettiness" (P. 156)
13. But there is no inherent connection between a painting's status as beheld object and the dominance of lowbrow expectations about art. That would be true of only a very specific sort of beholding and seems to have nothing to do with beholding an sich. Likewise, paintings-all art objects-never had such a problem with their status as beheld objects before. We need a historically inflected account of why this anxiety, and eventually the connection or future Melville points to, should have occurred then and there. The reasons Melville gives are more typical of Clement Greenberg in essays like "Modernist Painting," The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian, 4 volS. (Chicago, 1993), 4:85-93
14. It certainly can't be accounted for just by pointing to the brutally obvious fact that the ideas of physically merging with the painting or literally extending the painting act are incoherent, as if that had to be "discovered."
15. Stephen Mulhall notes the great importance of these narrative terms but fails to pursue the question of their full meaning or what justifies them; one can note: "had become so pressing," "were forced to resort to intensified and elaborated versions," "more extreme strategies," "ever-intensifying need," "not any longer," and so on. These terms all suggest some claim about something approaching historical necessity (or at least "impossibility") that requires some account. Something like "increasingly exhausted powers of traditional modes of creating absorption" is an unexplained explainer (Stephen Mulhall, "Crimes and Deeds of Glory: Michael Fried's Modernism," British Journal of Aesthetics 41 [Jan. 2001]: 10, 11)
16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in The "Discourses" and Other Early Political Writings, tranS. and ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), P. 187
17. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago, 1980), P. 61; hereafter abbreviated AT
18. These assumptions are not just in Fried's account but, I would argue, necessary for its success, something that becomes especially clear, I think, in the book on Adolph Menzel; see Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 2002)
19. René Girard's notion of reflected or imitated desire is certainly relevant to these dimensions of the threat; see his Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Studies, tranS. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1988)
20. and Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1999), chapS. 1-2
21. Another strategy is the fantasy of separation from and mastery of nature, with other persons considered merely further natural obstacles to be overcome. This requires a Cartesian picture of mindedness as spectatorship (and so the world as simply object, standing over against such spectators) that is also captured by theatrical versions of such mindednesS.
22. Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago, 1990), P. 23; hereafter abbreviated CR
23. The Heideggerean and, later, Kierkegaardean resonances are everywhere in Fried's work, but what is of most importance is the possibility of a distinction between a "good" everyday (absorbed, authentic) and a "bad" everyday (mindless, forgetful) in Thoreau and Kierkegaard as well as Heidegger, which is discussed explicitly in Fried, Menzel's Realism, P. 159. That is the issue I want to return to as the "Hegelian" difficulty with these categorieS.
24. The most concentrated discussion of these issues is in Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, 1996) and the development there of what Fried calls Manet's "facing" strategy, although the issue was already quite prominent in his discussion of Courbet's A Burial at Ornans in CR. For a summary of the Manet argument, see Mulhall, "Crimes and Deeds of Glory," pP. 15-17
25. Compare the corresponding remark about the sculptures of Anthony 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" (Fried, "Art and Objecthood," P. 162). See also Fried's remarks on modernist painting as "a cognitive enterprise" in Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark," Critical Inquiry 9 (Autumn 1982): 223 n. 8
26. See the helpful remarks Fried makes about some of this in discussing Melville in "How Modernism Works," pP. 229-30
27. These two dimensions-that the beholder is being addressed ("invited") in being ignored or negated and that the terms at issue are so ambitious ("ontological")-are sometimes missed in criticisms of Fried, as if he (Fried), in commenting on ignoring the beholder, is approving of something like the "suppression of desire" or even has modernist paintings themselves aspiring not to be paintings (beheld objects), the temptation Fried sees and criticizes in literalism. See W. J. T. Mitchell, "What Do Pictures Really Want?" October, no. 77 (Summer 1996): 79-80
28. and Fried's comments in "An Introduction to My Art Criticism," pP. 72-73 n. 75
29. Compare also Fried's remarks on David's Horatii about the historical instability of these theatrical/antitheatrical distinctions in "An Introduction to My Art Criticism," pP. 49-50
30. There are such dialectical ironies throughout Fried's work, for me a measure of how accurately his reading of the paintings tracks corresponding and fundamental dualisms in the late modern world. Compare the account of the corporeal and yet also ocular "realism" of Henri Fantin-Latour in Fried, Manet's Modernism, pP. 379-80
31. I note that at a similar point in Cavell's account of the modern the astonishing scope and reach of the "Hegelian" ambitions are even clearer. Cavell speaks in "Music Decomposed" of the "necessities of the problems faced by artists, of the irreversibility of The sequence of art styles, of the difficulties in a contemporary artist's continuing to believe in his work, or mean it" (Cavell, "Music Decomposed," Must We Mean What We Say? [Cambridge, 2002], P. 210)
32. He then goes on to describe Beckett's task-the denial of audience-in terms similar to Fried's, a common interest they have both commented on and that at various points unites and divides their respective interpretation of modernism in the arts and its philosophical significance. This (the Hegelian themes without much of a Hegelian reception in America) is all not to mention such extraordinary claims as that by Greenberg when he describes the aftermath of what he calls the "avant-garde's" "break" with imitative realism: "so inexorable was the logic of the development that in the end their work constituted but another step towards abstract art.... All roads lead to the same place" (Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," Partisan Review 7 [Jul.-Aug. 1940]: 309-10; my emphasis)
33. See my discussion in "What Was Abstract Art (From the Point of View of Hegel)," Critical Inquiry 29 (Autumn 2002): 1-22
34. I am disagreeing here with Melville's review of Courbet's Realism; see Melville, "Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions," pP. 187-98
35. Their other differences are also quite interesting. Greenberg's basic position on modernism remains Kantian; modernist painting discovers the ultimate conditions of-essence of-painting itself (flatness, and so on), the conditions necessary for the possibility of a painting, whereas I understand Fried's position to be basically Hegelian. Painting is the product of the tradition of trying to make and understand paintings, and modernism is what it is by understanding what it is to stand inside this narrated development-that modernist painting is a result of what painting had become: "Rather the task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions that, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing this work's identity as a painting" (Fried, "Art and Objecthood," P. 169 n. 6). Fried on Manet remains the paradigmatic exemplification of what I am calling this basic Hegelianism. (Basic and not essential because Fried understands the role of contingency in art history differently than does Hegel.)
36. It should be stressed again that this failure-in-theatricality is not a manifestation of philosophically false viewS. It is false in the way a life can be false, and understanding that such a comportment is false is not a matter of understanding that a person does not really believe what they say they believe. (For one thing, their really believing it may make them even more false.)
37. See Fried, Menzel's Realism, P. 109
38. Cavell, "Music Decomposed," P. 211
39. Lionel Trilling's distinction between sincerity and authenticity is relevant here; see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MasS., 1982). Sincerity can be in some straightforward sense genuine-A truly believes she is feeling C-but still self-deceived, a result of manipulative advertising, or whatever. The horrible thing about, say, Barry Manilow songs, is not that people are being conned by a fake but that that register of emotion about love is, sincerely, what they recognize as the real thing. Sincerity won't get us very far on this issue, prompting the fascination with situations in extremis, where we will really find out what we believe, are committed to, and so on
40. I pass over quickly here the vexing issues of the many Rousseaus in Rousseau, including the Spartan, legislator-oriented, not-so-democratic one
41. See Fried, Menzels Realism, pP. 84-94
42. See, however, Roger Fry's remarks linking '"conscious and deliberate study'" of design itself with the "'decadence of Italian art'" after the High Renaissance in his "Dürer and Company," quoted in Fried, "Roger Fry's Formalism," The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City, 2004), P. 32
43. Stated in a very compressed way in the language of the Balkonzimmer: the details and furniture of the room and the reflection of the room in the mirror on the right are both in the room. Even the hint of defeasibility in the experience, the possibility that the reflected objects do not correspond to the real objects is, in effect, an element of what one experiences when one looks at the room
44. See the comments on self-portraiture in CR, chaP. 2
45. Because I have noted often (as they both do) the way these themes intersect concerns of Cavell and Fried, I should say that this issue-said pictorially, working out the right human logic of the seeing/being-seen relation-is what gives me pause about the invocation of Thoreau and Emerson, who are close to what Hegel calls the beautiful soul and the knight of virtue in the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is right to note that the failure to overcome theatricality is the failure of love, and the avoidance of love, the triumph of theatricality, but such a fate has not simply happened to us, and it does not await the proper sort of acknowledgement of "separateness"; see Cavell, "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," Must We Mean What We Say? pP. 338, 339, 350, and esP. 352 where, after Cavell says, "The world whistles" over Hegel and Marx, he adds, "We cannot hear them." I am not sure we have learned yet how to listen
46. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, pP. 36-37
47. Attempting to place Fried's project in this sort of philosophical and historical context raises two further issues that cannot be treated here. First, and most obviously, the painterly struggle with this question of what I have called authenticity tracks a certain kind of historical, relatively continuous problem in modern painting, one that extends up to and through abstractionism and, as Fried has begun to show, in much important modern photography. But that is not the only modern tradition in painting, and it would be interesting to try to understand the relation between this strand and the bewildering proliferation of schools and styles in twentieth-century art (to borrow a list made by Arthur Danto: "Fauvism, the Cubisms, Futurism, Vorticism, Synchronism, Abstractionism, Surrealism, Dada, Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Op, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Conceptualism, Photorealism, Abstract Realism, Neo-expressionism" [Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986), P. 108]). Second, a kind of abstractionism can be said to be the culmination of this sort of antitheatrical tradition, but a culmination also implies an ending of sorts such that the deep familiarity of the category of abstraction and its widespread commercialization inevitably retheatricalize any such attempt. And the Hegelian framework suggested here would thus have to ask similar sorts of philosophical and sociohistorical questions about post-1960s art (on the assumption that it is as open to Hegel as to anyone else to invoke categories like phoniness, con jobs, kitsch, fraud, a racket, or a wheel-spinning, uninteresting period in art history, if that is where the analysis would lead such a contemporary Hegel)