Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried 1864870249, 9781864870244

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From his early career as an art critic during the sixties to his art historical writings of recent decades, Michael Fried has remained one of the most controversial and fascinating art writers of the late twentieth century. The theoretical and historical after-effects of Fried's art criticism continue to resonate in the discussion of contemporary art, while his art historical studies are central to many of the most pressing recent debates in art history and theory. This collection brings together for the first time a range of scholarly responses to Fried's art criticism, art history and poetry. It illuminates Fried's distinguished contribution to the study of art, while taking his work in exciting new directions. This book will be of significant interest to art historians, those engaged in contemporary art and criticism as well as critical and visual theory. "Fried's effect on art history and art criticism has been immense. But it is still incompletely acknowledged...The present anthology will decisively raise the stakes and establish a new standard of seriousness in discussion of Fried's work." T.J.Clark. Contributions by JILL BEAULIEU • KEITH BROADFOOT -REX BUTLER • HANS-JOST FREY «STEVEN Z. LEVINE • STEPHEN MELVILLE • JAMES MEYER • K. MALCOLM RICHARDS • MARY ROBERTS • TONI ROSS • ISABELLE WALLACE

Refracting Vision

Refracting Vision essays on the writings of Michael Fried

edited by

Jill Beaulieu Mary Roberts Toni Ross

POWER PUBLICATIONS SYDNEY

© Power Institute Foundation for Art & Visual Culture, and the individual authors, 2000.

Reprinted 2012.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the Power Institute. Published by Power Publications Power Institute University of Sydnev NSW 2006 Australia

Cover Design Kajri Jain Cover image Detail from Gustave Courbet, Les Cribleuses de blé (The Wheat Sifters). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ville de Nantes. Photo: P. Jean - Ville de Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts. Printed by Ligare, Sydney.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data:

Refracting vision: essays on the writings of Michael Fried. ISBN 978 1 86487 024 4 1. Art, Modern - 19th century. 2. Art, Modern - 20th century. 3. An critics. 4. Critical theory. 5. Art criticism. 6. Art - History'. 7. Fried, Michael - Criticism and interpretation. I. Beaulieu, Jill. II Ross, Toni. Ill Roberts, Mary, 1965-

701.1

Contents Editors’ preface to the 2012 reprint Acknowledgments

Introduction Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross

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CHAPTER 1

Immanence and Outsideness: The Absorptive Aesthetics of Diderot’s Existential Reverie and Courbet’s Embodied Merger Jill Beaulieu

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CHAPTER 2

The Writing of ‘Art and Objecthood” James Meyer

61

CHAPTER 3

The Difference Manet Makes Stephen Melville

97

CHAPTER 4

Before and After Pollock Keith Broadfoot

129

CHAPTER 5

“The Man Who Knows Too Much”: On Michael Fried’s “Impressionism” Rex Butler

155

CHAPTER 6

Paradoxes of Authorship and Reception in Michael Fried’s Art History Toni Ross

177

CHAPTER?

Difference and Deferral: The Sexual Economy of Courbet’s “Femininity” Mary Roberts

211

CHAPTER 8

Eavesdropping/Eve’s Dropping K. Malcolm Richards

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CHAPTER 9

Mututal Facing: A Memoir of Friedom Steven Z. Levine

289

CHAPTER io

The Outcome of the Dance: Michael Fried and the Iconoclastic Prescription Isabelle Loring Wallace 325 CHAPTER 11

Poetry and Art Theory in Michael Fried Hans-Jost Frey

361

CHAPTER 12

An Interview with Michael Fried Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross

377

CONTRIBUTORS

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Editors’ preface to the 2012 reprint

Michael Fried remains one the most inventive and controversial art writers working today. Refracting Vision was the first, and is still the only, anthology devoted to analysisoftheworkofthisprodigious scholar. Thisvolume, first published in 2000, marks a particular moment in Fried’s oeuvre. His historical trilogy (Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’s Realism and Manet’s Modernism) had just been completed, allowing the volume’s authors to engage wit^i Fried’s ambitious project of tracing the history of the painter-beholder relationship from pre­ modernism to modernism. As these texts indicated, the central issue of pictorial modernity for Fried is not so much a Greenbergian type preoccupation with medium, but rather a concern with how spectators are addressed or positioned by art works. The anti-theatricality that Fried still considers definitive of modernist art impels the artist to find ways to exclude the beholder from the space of representation, and thus secure the work’s status as art. Refracting Vision responds to such claims, but with a sense of generational distance from the polemics that surrounded the early reception of Fried’s contentious “Art and Objecthood” essay of the late sixties. What united the diverse responses within this anthology was a desire to step back from then entrenched, negative assessments of Fried’s work (especially his relationship to Greenbergian formalism), in order to thoroughly investigate the art historical, philosophical and theoretical commitments of his art writing and poetry.

Since the essays for Refracting Vision were written, Fried has produced books on Adolph Menzel, Caravaggio and another collection of poetry (The Next Bend in

the Road), each of which he forecast in the interview conducted by the editors of the present volume. Fried has also published two books on contemporary art: his book on art photography of recent decades (Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before) appeared in 2008, followed by Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon in 2011. Arguably the most significant development since 2000 is Fried’s return to writing about contemporary art that has drawn a new generation of artists, critics and art historians to his work. The book on photography has already provoked a range of interlocutors from the ranks of younger theorists of photography’s role in contemporary art. Notwithstanding these extensions of his oeuvre, Michael Fried’s recent work clearly reiterates many of the same questions and problems that essays in Refracting Vision explored. Also continued in his writings is the expression of a singular and consistent vision about modern art and its interpretation. We are delighted that Power Publications is supporting the republication of this volume so that it is available to a new generation of scholars and artists. The editors would like to again express thanks to the anthology’s contributors, and to Professor Mark Ledbury and Emma White at Power Publications for suggesting and supporting this reprint.

Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross, January 2012

Acknowledgments

The initial impetus for this collection of essays on the work of Michael Fried arose from the enthusiastic and lively response to a session convened by the editors at an Australian Art Association conference in the early 1990s. The decision to publish meant expanding the project to include contributions from other Australian scholars, as well as essays from overseas scholars who share with the editors a conviction in the importance and challenge of Fried’s writings.« The editors would like to thank all of the contributors for the quality of their papers. We also thank Power Publications, the publishing arm of the Power Institute: Centre for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney, for their support of this project, as well as allowing us the time to undertake the intellectual journey it has involved. In particular, we are grateful to Terry Smith and Julian Pefanis of the Power Institute. A special thanks should also go to Virginia Spate of the Power Institute for her encouragement, her early endorsement of the publication and her careful editorial reading of early drafts of the editors’ papers. As Managing Editor of Power Publications, Liz Schwaiger’s meticulous preparation of the manuscript for publication was essential for bringing the volume to fruition. Our thanks also to Kajri Jain for designing the cover. And finally, our sincere thanks to Michael Fried for his generous participation in the interview included in this collection. The editors, March 2000

Introduction Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross The reader coming to this volume may well ask why the editors have seen fit to anthologise a range of responses to Michael Fried’s work from the 1960s to the present. Why a thoroughgoing reappraisal of Fried’s contributions to art criticism, art history and visual theory when for many of the most influential voices in these fields his work remains anachronistic, conservative, unrepentantly formalist or idealist? It is Still commonplace to find Fried’s work identified with a past that we in the present are assumed to have left behind. Obviously, different answers to these questions are to be found within the individual essays of this collection. Broadly speaking, however, this publication arose from the editors’ fascination with the richness and diversity of Fried’s writing and their feeling that the complexity and range of his contributions to criticism, history, aesthetics, not to mention poetry, had not yet received the acknowledgment, or the detailed discussion that they deserved. Motivating this venture is the belief that a sustained engagement with Fried’s writings from the 1960s through to his studies of eighteenth-century French painting, of Gustave Courbet, Thomas Eakins, literary “impressionism” and Edouard Manet, to his less wellknown books of poetry, and finally his Art and Objecthood: Essays and Review of 1998 is both long overdue and should be of vital interest to those involved in the fields of critical and visual culture. As the contributions to this volume suggest, Fried’s work impinges on many of the most pressing and contentious debates within art discourse — debates over long-standing

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Refracting Vision

differences between formalist and historicist paradigms, the historical and conceptual parameters of modernism and postmodernism, crossings of critical theory and art historical practices, and the role of aesthetics and ethics in art history and criticism. This anthology amplifies how Fried has actively contributed to these and many other topics of inquiry, and seeks to trouble the complacency of that received wisdom which persists in portraying Michael Fried as the voice of an outmoded, high modernist orthodoxy. For those contributors who return to Fried’s reflections on abstract painting, sculpture and minimalism of the 1960s, the theoretical and historical after-effects of Fried’s early writings are still being played out in the present. And for those writers who focus on Fried’s art historical studies, he not only offers alternative readings of much interpreted art practices, but his writings also participate in a range of methodological issues pivotal to the discipline of art history. Fried’s art history stages the intersection of the traditional procedures of art historical research and various currents of critical theory. Just some of the theoretical frameworks that have featured in Fried’s writings over the years include phenomenology, feminism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and poststructuralism. Consequently, a number of the essays in this volume map out how Fried s work has engaged with the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell, as well as feminists of difference such as Annie Leclerc and Luce Irigaray. Fried’s particular enactment of the theory/history nexus is exemplary because as Stephen Melville has been insisting for some time it does not entail a simple corrective of art history in the name of the epistemological certainties of theory. Rather, by inducting critical theory into art historical discourse, Fried not only opens to question our deepest assumptions about the writing of history, but he also touches on certain blind spots of theory as it has been mobilised by art historians and visual theorists since the 1970s.

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If Fried’s writings are exceptional in this respect, they are not simply being put forward here as a model to be strictly emulated or uncritically celebrated. While many of the essays in this collection undertake the important task of explicating the complex conceptual idiom of Fried’s writings through the years, others treat his individual publications or even details therein as the catalyst for moving in other directions, for taking paths not always faithful to, nor contained by, Fried’s project. The importance of Fried’s work for these contributors is that it provides the impetus for writings on art, theory and history that are not easily categorised as Friedian, but neither are they wholly foreign to the scope of Fried’s writings. An insistent theme in Fried’s writings has been the justification of his belief, first registered in the 1960s, that the “best” wosks of art are antitheatrical, or better, that what he defines as the representational principle of absorption should not be simply superseded by the theatrical. In her paper “Immanence and Outsidedness: the absorptive aesthetics of Diderot’s existential reverie and Courbet’s embodied merger,” Jill Beaulieu offers an indepth analysis of the two texts — Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot and Courbet’s Realism — where Fried puts forward his most detailed accounts of the historical dimensions of the pictorial paradigm of absorption. Motivating Beaulieu’s essay is the question of what constitutes the coherence of the antitheatrical tradition. Examining Fried’s insistence on this coherence, Beaulieu points out that he does not stipulate the fundamental basis of the similarity between Courbet’s “merger” and the notion of “entry” articulated in Diderot’s writings on art. In the course of her paper, Beaulieu demonstrates that “forestalling self-division is the foundation of Fried’s ontological project and what underpins historical continuity within the antitheatrical tradition.” Beaulieu therefore examines entry and merger as two different strategies for the striving to forestall self­ division. Central to this examination is a concern with how

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the phenomenological theories of Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty respectively inform Fried’s terms “entry” and “merger.” Diderot describes the experience of entry as a type of reverie, an atemporal state in which one forgets oneself and is content with oneself and one’s existence. In response, Beaulieu locates a number of correspondences between Diderot’s description of entry and Rousseau’s discussion of reverie in Les Reveries where he describes reverie as the abandonment of the social self and a return to a primordial unity. Beaulieu elucidates Diderot and Rousseau’s emphasis on “forgetting oneself’ by invoking Bachelard’s “world dreamer [who] does not know the division of his being.”1 This is linked to Bachelard’s articulation of the poetic image experienced as a primordial world, as “an absolute origin, an origin of consciousness.”2 With these connections in mind, Beaulieu reads Diderot’s conception of entry as a spectatorial relationship with painting based on an imaginary immersion in nature that takes the subject back to a unified primordial world, to a state prior to any distinction between self and other. Shifting from the viewer to the painter-beholder, from entry to merger in Fried’s analysis of Courbet, forestalling self-division is now enacted in the act of painting. In his discussion of Courbet’s desire to merge with his paintings in the process of their production, Fried speaks of the act of painting as simultaneously active and passive, and of how notions of embodiedness and habit inform Courbet’s practice. Beaulieu elucidates the phenomenological significance of these conjectures. She observes that embodiedness and habit are key phenomenological concepts employed to counter a thinking of subject/object relations that privileges an objective consciousness of the world achieved by a subject positioned as anterior to, or distanced from, that world. As Beaulieu observes, for Fried Courbet’s desire for merger aims at annulling any distinction or division between embodied subject and

Introduction

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objective world. While a number of commentators have remarked in passing on the importance of phenomeno­ logical precepts in Fried’s work, Beaulieu provides a nuanced analysis of this influence within his art historical writings. Another significant contribution of Beaulieu’s analysis is that while establishing the underlying conceptual continuity between entry and merger, she also maps the subde distinctions between these two terms by remaining attentive to their historical specificity. In “The Writing of ‘Art and Objecthood’,” James Meyer offers an avowedly revisionist account of Fried’s notorious and influential assessment of minimalism first published in 1967. Meyer maintains that despite being judged negatively by early supporters of minimalism such as Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss, it was the acuity of Fried’s observations about minimalist art that to some extent informed both writers’ accounts of such practices. Fried’s early response to minimalism also facilitated attempts by subsequent critics (Hal Foster, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens) to situate minimalism as presaging a shift from modernism to postmodernism. By carefully enumerating the historical and discursive context, as well as the philosophico-ethical ambitions of ‘‘Art and Objecthood,” Meyer shows how Fried’s essay came to define minimalism for subsequent critics, thereby “establishing” it as “a signal text of contemporary criticism.” With the exception of Stephen Melville’s venture in “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism”3 to amend the largely repudiatory reception of “Art and Objecthood,” Meyer’s approach distinguishes itself from most accounts of Fried’s minimalism by analysing the ethical import of that essay. Specifically, Meyer concentrates on the ethics of communication that orientates “Art and Objecthood.” In so doing, he provides an insightful discussion of how Stanley Cavell’s ongoing philosophical reflections on scepticism, aesthetics and ethics inflected Fried’s

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reservations about the literalist sensibility of minimalism. In the process Meyer distinguishes “Art and Objecthood” from Clement Greenberg’s theory of modernist painting and its prioritising of opticality. This complicates an established tradition of negative rejoinders to “Art and Objecthood,” including the simple conflation of Fried’s philosophical stance with a humanist “subjectivity of transparent immediacy” questioned by deconstructionist and poststructuralist criticism. Rather than dismissing “Art and Objecthood” as retrograde and irrelevant, for Meyer many of the issues and intuitions Fried registered in the late 1960s are still to be considered in the present. In his discussion of the turn Fried’s work has taken in his publication — Manet's Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996) — Stephen Melville also distances Fried from Greenbergian modernism. Like Meyer, Melville, in his “The Difference Manet Makes,” locates a divergence between Greenberg and Fried that is first overtly signalled in “Art and Objecthood.” This shift involves a fracture between Greenberg’s conception of modernism as the progressive revelation of an essential identity of painting and Fried’s rather more historicist or conventionalist approach to the question of “identity” in modernist art. As Melville suggests, Fried’s studies on the prehistory and emergence of modernist painting that have appeared since “Art and Objecthood” flesh out, in historical terms, Fried’s judgments about contemporary art in the 1960s. On the other hand, while Fried’s art historical writings may be read as seeking to retrospectively validate those judgments, Melville also claims that this prolonged enterprise has resulted in some amendment of Fried’s earlier conclusions about modernism. As Melville proposes, this revisionism ensures that Fried’s later writings appear to comfortably inhabit the logic of the hermeneutic circle. Here previous historical certainties are reconsidered in a way that keeps the ever-renewable possibility of hermeneutic appropriation of the objects of art history open to successive feats of modification.

Introduction

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Certainly, it is the revisionism of Fried’s writings on realism, impressionism and modernism that for a number of contributors makes his work so valuable for energising and renovating the discipline of art history. But, for Melville, Manet's Modernism also offers something other than yet another an uninterrupted turn of the hermeneutic circle. As he puts it: “... Fried finds himself, with Manet, engaged with a practice that actively resists hermeneutic appropriation and makes itself precisely out of that resistance.” “The Difference Manet Makes” elaborates certain aesthetic and ethical questions posed by Fried’s encounter, by way of Manet, with the limits of hermeneutics and historicism as the characteristic methods of art historical writing. From a philosophical perspective, Melville’s reading of Manet's Modernism brings that text in close proximity to Kant’s reflections, not just on the beautiful, but also on the sublime and, less directly, to Philippe LacoueLabarthe’s deconstructionist account of mimesis and the subject in his Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics.4 In Melville’s discussion of Kant, the sublime opens the self-presence that distinguishes the beautiful work of art (in Greenberg’s account of modernism) to the question of art’s historicity or theatricality. This question is, in turn, deflected towards a rethinking of subjectivity at odds with the stable, a priori construct of humanist philosophies. By bringing the beautiful and the sublime into contact, a transparent conception of opticality commonly attributed to Greenbergian formalism is deferred by history (writing) and so is repeatedly turned from reaching a pure, naïve or essential condition. It is Melville’s argument that Fried discovers in Manet’s practice — in the artist’s efforts to both absorb past art and to theatricalise this subsumption — the “mutual dependence and mutual interference of the beautiful and the sublime.” Although Melville has remarked elsewhere upon Fried’s interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, his contribution to this volume favours a pluralised and

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dispersed subject typical of deconstruction over the internally divided subject of psychoanalysis. A number of other contributors, however, have sought in Lacan’s work one means of broaching Fried’s art history and criticism. Keith Broadfoot, Toni Ross and Rex Butler all draw on Lacanian psychoanalysis as a way of negotiating the challenges of Fried’s articulation of modernism and art history. In his “Before and After Pollock,” Broadfoot returns to Fried’s writings of the 1960s, specifically certain comments made about Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings in the catalogue Three American Painters (1965). Broadfoot focuses on Fried’s claim that the skeins of paint in Pollock’s canvases announce a “line that bounds and delimits nothing,” as well as his response to the cut-outs excised from the canvas that feature in Pollock’s paintings: Cut-Out (1949) and Out of the Web (1949). Broadfoot offers an argument that contains a number of important implications for how a reassessment of Fried’s early writings might contribute both to an alternative understanding of the historical import of Pollock’s art, and to a rethinking of the logic of modernism and for that matter, postmodernism. Broadfoot links Fried’s intuitions about Pollock’s drip paintings to certain formulations by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan which propose, in different ways, that an irrécupérable blindness functions as the inner, unrepresentable lining of vision. Offering a refined interpretation of Lacan’s concept of the gaze or petit objet a which he links to the paradoxical positivisation of absence enacted by Pollock s cut-outs, Broadfoot seeks to complicate a linear and progressive form of art history, as well as a purely formal or symbolic accounting of the artistic desire that has produced the objects of that history. Broadfoot emphasises, after Lacan, an impossible desire of painting that circulates around an ontological void or foundational loss that remains the same from Brunelleschi to Pollock to Jasper Johns, while generating

Introduction

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multifarious, unpredictable effects within art practice. This conception of art history is more akin to an “eternal return” than to a logic of linear succession. Consequently, the thinking of art history that Broadfoot proposes implicates the artists he speaks of — both Pollock at the so-called end of modernist painting and Johns as one progenitor of the found object — in the same impossible desire to present the Thing itself, to register, in Lacanian terms, a Real whose loss does not exist before the efforts to retrieve it. Broadfoot’s argument comprises a profound questioning, not only of the contextualism that some of Fried’s critics chastise him for neglecting, but also of any remedial attempt to relocate Fried’s “history” of modernism wholly within the parameters of historicist or conventionalist discourse. Broadfoot’« take on a convergence between Lacan and Fried is especially interesting in view of a similar claim made by Rosalind Krauss in “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution” published in October in 1996.5 Krauss also focuses on Fried’s reading of Pollock’s cut-outs and the presentation of loss they enact on the canvas. She, too, makes a connection between Fried’s account of the figured lacuna of the cut-out with the Lacanian gaze as objet a. But taking a different path to Broadfoot, Krauss orientates her argument towards substantiating the modernist orthodoxy, the anti-materialism of Fried’s reading of Pollock’s art, and perforce the general conservative drift of Fried’s writings. Alternatively, Broadfoot, along with the other contributors to this anthology, suggests some shortcomings of such univocal assessments of Fried’s project. In “‘The Man Who Knows too Much’: On Michael Fried’s ‘Impressionism,’” Rex Butler offers an analysis of Fried’s distinctive formulations about “impressionism” in visual art and literature. Additionally, he plots the “at once repressed and manifest” “presence of Lacan” that shadows the various incarnations of absorption and theatricality within Fried’s writings on the “impressionism” of painter

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Thomas Eakins and of writers Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells. Summarising Fried’s argument, Butler writes: In the work of these artists and writers, there is a simultaneous and paradoxical “eliciting and repression” of the medium in which they work. They are conscious of it and the incipient disbelief it involves, but it is a consciousness they try to suspend or overcome. In this, they are to be distinguished from what Fried calls artistic or literary “modernism,” which simply attempts to project the medium as such, make the spectator or reader aware of it.

Butler contends that impressionism is here opposed to modernism as absorption generally counterpoints theatricality in Fried’s publications up to and including Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980). Butler goes on to draw out the subtle differences in alignment between absorption and theatricality that inform Fried’s discussion of the artists he nominates as impressionist. At the same time, he proposes that virtually all of the artists Fried examines since his 1960s reflections on Jackson Pollock may be said to grapple, if in different modalities, with the same problematic relation between absorption and theatricality. This is to say, each artist seeks to overcome the literality of their medium, to cover over a “brute materiality’’ that carries with it a certain blindness or illegibility that threatens to derail "the process of identification which lies at the origin of absorption.” Two striking aspects of Butler’s paper are his discussion of a blind spot within the temporal logic that Fried employs when speaking of absorption and theatricality, and the way in which he is able to distinguish Fried’s particular brand of modernism from that of other scholars and critics — the October school for example — that has similarly concerned itself with the entry of writing, or the signifier within modernist visual art.

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Toni Ross’ contribution in “Paradoxes of Authorship and Reception in Michael Fried’s Art History” concentrates on how Fried’s book Courbet’s Realism might be read alongside Lacanian psychoanalysis. Ross’ primary area of concern is how, in his book on Courbet, Fried offers a way of conceptualising artistic production that cuts a middle path between voluntarist and determinist theories of human agency. As a result, Fried shifts the oppositional tenor of traditional debates in art history between idealist and materialist positions. Her amplification of this dimension of Fried’s art historical writings differs from those critics who continue to judge Fried’s histories as overly individualistic and idealist. According to Ross, the operation in Courbet's Realism of a paradoxical logic that coimplicates rather than disengages thê freedom and the finitude of the subject pivots on Fried’s hypothesis that Courbet’s art practice was co-ordinated by the artist’s unconscious and impossible desire to merge with his paintings in the very act of painting them. It is this founding of subjectivity upon an unrealisable, impossible desire that both aligns the Courbet study with certain Lacanian formulations and distances Fried’s recent work from those expressionist or intentionalist theories of artistic agency and subjectivity that his critics have regularly accused him of prolonging. The other feature of Ross’ response to Fried’s art historical writings is her discussion of a number of similarities between the pictorial principles of absorption and theatricality identified by Fried and the Lacanian categories of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, through which Lacan conceives the constitution of the subject. By drawing out the differences between Lacan’s account of the subject of the scopic field and the film theoretical concept of the gaze, Ross continues recent developments in Lacanian studies by claiming that both Lacan and Fried in Courbet’s Realism offer an alternative subject of vision to the owner and proprietor of the (masculine) gaze which has featured prominently in visual theory since the late 1970s.

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To speak here of the film theoretical concept of the masculine gaze is to recall the influential work of feminist art historians and theorists during recent decades. The reception of Fried’s work by feminists has been marked by both intense debate and controversy. Mary Roberts’ paper “Difference and Deferral: the Sexual Economy of Courbet’s ‘Femininity’” addresses the differences of position that inform Linda Nochlin and Michael Fried’s exchanges about Courbet’s work. The value of Roberts’ engagement with this debate is that she draws out those aspects of Fried’s discussion of “Courbet’s ‘femininity’” that might be of interest to feminist art historians while discerning the limitations, and questioning the significance for feminism of Fried’s discovery in Courbet’s art of a relation between gender and vision that disrupts entrenched binary structures. As Roberts explains, Fried distinguishes his account of Courbet’s paintings of women from a feminist, psychoanalytic interpretation, derived from Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Fried enlists phenomenology to disrupt the binary relation between woman as appropriated object of the gaze and man as owner and agent of this objectifying and controlling vision that Mulvey uncovers in masculinist representations of women within classical cinema. Fried’s account of Courbet’s libidinal investment in his paintings describes the “painter-beholder” (Courbet) as in quest of merger with his paintings in the process of their production. Therefore, when writing of Courbet’s “femininity,” Fried accentuates Courbet’s desire to overcome the oppositional distance between the painter and his images of women through metaphors of proximity and touch. Asserting, however, that this effort to merge painter and painting, to surmount any division or separation between subject and object will inevitably fail, Fried invokes a temporal movement to defer this inevitable failure. From a feminist perspective, according to Roberts, this strategy of temporal deferral is particularly intriguing

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because it amounts to an effort to retrospectively establish a proximate, undifferentiated relation between subject and object which forestalls the appropriation of woman as the object of the masculine gaze. In attempting to displace the binary relation between masculine subject and feminine object upon which the film theoretical concept of the gaze is premised, Fried’s approach to Courbet’s art offers the possibility of a radical refiguring of masculinity. Noting Fried’s equivocation about the broader feminist implications of his account of Courbet’s “femininity,” Roberts concludes that this remains unresolved in Courbet's Realism. Her response to this irresolution is to raise a pressing question for feminism, namely, what is the implied position of the female spectator in Fried’s model? Roberts answers by examining both the similarities and differences between Fried’s discussion of Courbet’s “femininity” and the work of feminists of difference (Annie Leclerc and Luce Irigaray) from which Fried’s account of Courbet’s “femininity” is partially derived. Despite a shared commitment by Fried and feminists of difference to displace a unitary, phallocentric subject of representation, the differences hinge on the feminist ambition to open up possibilities for the emergence of a female subject — whether through Leclerc’s metaphors of feminine writing, or Irigaray’s invention of a language of feminine desire from within philosophical discourse. Alternatively, Fried’s analysis of the painter-beholder’s desire for merger occludes the female spectator. This elision occurs because of Fried’s insistence on the specificity of the painter-beholder concept in the case of Courbet, a contingency that Fried resists generalising towards subsequent spectators of Courbet’s paintings. For this reason, Roberts concludes that feminists will remain ambivalent about the “feminine” posture that Fried attributes to Courbet. Roberts provides a welcome reassessment of the complex relationship between Fried’s account of Courbet’s “femininity” and various

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feminist positions, thereby opening up new potential for a productive feminist dialogue with Fried’s art historical writings. As we have already seen, the relationship between Fried’s project and Derridean deconstruction is a key issue for a number of the writers included in this anthology. For Kevin Richards and Steven Levine, the effects of deconstruction within Fried’s art history in recent years is both obvious and far from straightforward. In “Eavesdropping/Eve’s dropping,” Richards not only analyses this supposed dialogue between Derrida and Fried, but also performs it in the mode of a polylogue — a rhetorical technique developed by Derrida and a device akin to the fictional dialogues of Denis Diderot’s art criticism. Richards employs the polylogue to sustain a conflictual interweaving of different voices that respond to the question of how deconstruction has informed Fried’s art history. This allows Richards to at first flag some apparent distinctions between Derrida and Fried, specifically Fried’s oft-cited commitment to a metaphysics of presence and Derrida’s persistent attempts to deconstruct the metaphysical tradition of philosophy. As Richards proceeds, however, this apparent polarity between Derrida and Fried is gradually dismantled. For example, it is suggested that rather than simply projecting a metaphysics of presence, Fried’s project both depends upon, and explicitly registers, a structuring absence — the impossibility of absorption finally defeating theatricality. Richards’ deconstructive approach therefore produces and undoes the purported differences between Derrida and Fried. Rather than supplanting an idealist Fried with an unequivocal deconstructivist figure, Richards’ text sustains both possibilities, thereby ascribing a certain undecidability to Fried’s philosophical position. The great value of this is that a number of widely held views about Fried’s project are brought into question. For instance, one of the interlocutors in the polylogue raises the common objection

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that Fried’s history of antitheatricality privileges the relation between the artist and his work to the exclusion of broader contextual considerations. Yet another voice proposes that Fried’s art history accounts for the relationship between painter and painting, or between painting and beholder as a complex and changing history. As a result, Fried’s history of modem art might be interpreted as augmenting rather than simply proscribing Marxist, feminist, or other contextualist modes of art history. Concentrating on Fried’s speculations about Manet’s art, as well as Fried’s poetry, Steven Z. Levine in his “Mutual Facing: A Memoir of Friedom” addresses the concept of “mutual facing” that appears at various moments in Fried’s work. Allied to this is Levine’s engagement with the question of why, for Fried, Manet’s painting acknowledges theatricality in a way that is an advance on the literalism of minimalist art. Levine declares that for Fried, and in contrast to literalism, Manet’s paintings achieve “a sort of transpersonal or transcendental communion because they ‘acknowledge literalness,” whereas “Their pieces [minimalists] cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal." A productive feature of Levine’s essay is its detailed explication of the operation of the term “acknowledgment” in Fried’s writings, particularly its historical, ethical and aesthetic significance. On this matter, Levine echoes other contributors who confirm and examine the influence of Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida on Fried’s preference for art that acknowledges rather than simply projects or presents objecthood. As Levine suggests, this desire is tributary to a larger, “overarching” ambition of Fried’s enterprise: the “overcoming of that persistent metaphysical dualism which in traditional epistemology and everyday parlance has installed a seemingly irreducible gap between mind and body, matter and form, male and female, self and other, and self and world.” Like Melville and Meyer, Levine is drawn to the ethical implications of Fried’s categories of absorption and

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theatricality. This interest is parlayed through a detailed examination of Fried’s concept of “mutual facing,” a process that, for Fried, entails both joining and dividing persons and paintings. Levine proposes that from 1978 Fried’s efforts to accommodate Derrida’s deconstruction of a metaphysics of presence has occasioned a number of shifts in his work, including an increasing emphasis on a provisional, rather than prescriptive, “metaphysics of presentness.” Fried’s previous adherence to a transcendental quest for a mutual “presentness” of persons and paintings has become, in Levine’s view, a desired, but radically impossible “quasitranscendental” state of “Friedom” — “a deconstructive state of both freedom and fiefdom.” For Levine, this ethics of “mutual facing” shares a number of similarities with the Judaic ethics of alterity developed by Emmanuel Lévinas. Accordingly, Fried’s contribution to art history should be acknowledged as much for its ethical efficacy as for any achievements on epistemological or hermeneutical grounds. Fried’s art histories should be judged, not as part of an idealist enterprise based on untrammelled, unlimited human volition, but as articulating, in relation to art, the mutual implication of freedom and finitude. It is this mutual implication of finitude and freedom that Levine accentuates through his examination of the shifting meanings of “mutual facing” in Fried’s writings, and his punning play on the conflictual resonances of the proper name “Michael Fried.” In her paper “The Outcome of the Dance: Michael Fried and the Iconoclastic Prescription,” Isabelle Wallace discusses Fried’s 1984 essay “Painting Memories: On Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet” in tandem with his poetry. Wallace, like Levine, asks why Manet’s theatricality is valorised by Fried while he rejects the theatricality of minimalist art. She broaches this question, however, by examining Fried’s interpretation of how memory functions differently for Baudelaire and Manet. Wallace then extends her discussion of mnemonics and art to encompass what she identifies as Fried’s shifting attachment to both Judaic and Christian theologies and the

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aesthetics that distinguishes both. Wallace discusses two conceptions of memory outlined by Fried: one stemming from Baudelaire which is unconscious and repressed and the other from Manet which is conscious and acknowledged. Wallace deploys these two notions of memory in her argument about the self-reflexivity of Fried’s scholarly writings. She contends that Michael Fried’s relationship to his Judaic origins is both repressed and disclosed in his art writings. With this focus on the “autobiographical” dimension of Fried’s work, Wallace suggests that it is his ambivalent attachment to a Judaic tradition that may explain Fried’s “condemnation of literalism and exaltation of Manet.” Yet Wallace also insists that Fried’s relationship to his Judaic past as registered in his art writings is anything but straightforward. Tracing the shifting allegiances to absorption and theatricality within Fried’s work, Wallace links the paradigm of absorption with Christian iconophilia and that of theatricality with Judaic iconoclasm — the prohibition of an idolatrous spectatorial relation to the image. Christian aesthetics is therefore identified with a transcendental spectatorial experience of absorption and Judaism with a relation between beholder and art that is distinguished by distancing and alienation. For Wallace, Fried’s own ambivalent identification with these two apparently conflictual theological frameworks is allegorised in both his writings on art and his poetry. She proposes that in his recent Manet studies, a “Hebraic spectatorial ethic” that subtends theatricality overtakes, but does not simply eradicate the pictorial category of absorption. In this way, Fried’s interpretation of Manet’s art is said to “acknowledge,” to render visible what in his earlier privileging of an art of absorption Fried had tended to repress. This investigation of the theological underpinnings of the aesthetic or representational categories of absorption and theatricality adds another dimension to these two key terms that alternatively emerge and recede in Fried’s writings since the 1960s.

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Hans-Jost Frey, like Isabelle Wallace, is intrigued by certain, perhaps unintentional or unconscious, crossovers of theme and philosophy in Fried’s historical/critical texts and his poems. His essay “Poetry and Art Theory in Michael Fried” addresses Fried’s book of poems: To the Center of the Earths Frey discusses the poems “Wartime” and “Inside the Trap,” both of which he brings into connection with Fried’s historical texts: Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’s Realism and Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, as well as his writings on Anthony Caro’s sculpture. The point of intersection between Fried’s poems and his historicocritical writings as identified and analysed by Frey is “the question of the relation between the work [of art] and what is outside of it (surroundings, author, painter, reader, beholder) in its many nuances.” Since these various markers of an “outside” that threatens the integrity or singularity of the art work inhabit the terrain that Fried identifies with theatricality, Frey’s study, like many others in this collection, examines the permutations of Fried’s conceptual couplet; absorption and theatricality. Where Frey’s approach differs from some others included here is in the relative weight he bestows upon the desire for absorption — the desire of/for a work of art that appears ontologically independent of its beholder or reader. Frey observes that for Fried, it is precisely the work of art that appears to exclude the beholder in the name of its own internal unity that most strongly and irresistibly draws (absorbs) the beholder into the interior movement of the work. Frey confirms the view of some other contributors that the logic of absorption may circumvent the oppositional structure that characterises conventional subject/object relations. Nevertheless, he also demonstrates how Fried’s art writings, in the broadest sense, include the structural dependence of arts of absorption upon a certain externality that characterises theatricality. As Frey suggests, the imaginary world of the painting or text is not autonomous to the extent that it is generated by

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an act of production — “a specific, externally controlled arrangement of material elements.” In this respect, the writing or painting act is the hyphen that functions as a bridge between the work and what is outside it. With great subtlety, Frey reads Fried’s poetry and his writings on art as a recurrent allegorisation of this inter-dependent, but often conflictual relation between absorption and theatricality. But what he brings to the foreground is the arationalistic, non-binary temper of Fried’s understanding of the making and reception of art. As Frey states, for Fried, the art work’s artistic unity is not finally the outcome of a “mastered,” self-conscious skill on the part of the artist, but of a forgotten one.- “Forgetting himself, the writer enters what he has written and is lost there.” One of the pleasures and challenges for the editors of this publication was participating in a written interview with Michael Fried, the major portion of which took place in July/August 1996 with some follow-up questions answered by Fried in December 1997. While lacking the spontaneity and errancy associated with the spoken interview, the advantage of a written format is that questions and answers can be carefully formulated and that quite complex and extended responses may be aired. Fried was certainly generous, informative and patient with our inquiries. Since this was the first interview ever conducted with Michael Fried that dealt with his art criticism from the 1960s through to his 1996 publication Manet’s Modernism, the editors tried to touch on as much of this extensive body of work as possible. While a condition of such an endeavour was to exclude as much as we’ve included, we have addressed topics and questions that might be of interest, not just to art historians, but to those involved in contemporary art and criticism, as well as critical and visual theory. We also wanted Fried to participate in a discussion of various interpretations and criticisms of his work, as well as some of our own questions about the turns, shifts and repetitions his

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writings have enacted since the 1960s. The result is a series of responses from Fried that at certain points supplement or clarify arguments about his work made in other sections of this publication, and at other moments counterpoint claims made by different respondents to Fried’s writings. What this suggests is that the value, direction, debts, blind spots and innovations of Fried’s writings to date are still open to discussion and debate. In conclusion, the editors wish to affirm that this anthology has been put together with a view to both acknowledge Fried’s art writings as of importance and interest in their own right, and to show how his work may be generative of writings about art that are not always or obviously compatible with the angle and tone of Fried’s approach. We might say, as Rex Butler suggests in his paper, for the art historians, and literary and visual theorists included in this collection the fascination of Fried’s writings not only arises from what he says about art and history; in the revised conceptions of realism, impressionism and modernism that he offers us, but also emerges from what remains unsaid or ambiguously registered by Fried, what therefore remains for others to say. It is perhaps for this reason that Fried’s “legacy” as articulated here remains substantive yet elusive, multifaceted and dispersed, yet persistently single-minded.

NOTES Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie. Childhood, Language and the Cosmos, transi. Daniel Russell, (Boston: .Beacon Press, 1971) 175. 2 ibid., 1. 3 Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism’’ October 19 (Winter 1981) 55-92. 4 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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Rosalind Krauss, “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution" October 77 (Summer 1996) 83-96. Michael Fried, To the Center of the Earth (New York: Farrer, Strauss, and Giroux, 1994).

Immanence and Outsideness The absorptive aesthetics of Diderot’s Existential Reverie and Courbet’s Embodied Merger Jill Beaulieu Courbet’s project, as described by Fried, is based on an impossible feat — to merge into the painting he was working on in order to negate his own viewing position. The impossibility of this project governs Courbet’s continual striving to attain merger and, as Fried maintains, the impossibility is what made “quasi-corporeal merger” possible — whereby Courbet’s desire for merger becomes metaphorised in his paintings. Moreover, Courbet’s desire to merge dominates Fried’s readings of his paintings because it is a symptom of an “ontological preoccupation” — the desire to overcome self-division.1 This (unconscious) striving to overcome what Fried refers to as “inner dividedness” is the striving to overcome the division into subject and object, seer and seen. Merger is not only an ontological preoccupation but it is also an historical term in the larger context of Fried’s project, the mapping of the antitheatrical tradition. Diderot’s writings were instrumental in establishing an antitheatrical tradition which promoted an art that “ignored” the beholder. Diderot claimed that in order that painting “persuade its audience of the truthfulness of its representation,”2 the figures cannot acknowledge a beholder or they appeared “artificial.”3 Two strands make

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up the antitheatrical tradition: the dramatic and the pastoral. Diderot’s conception of the dramatic functions on the basis of the climactic moment or moments of conflict whereby the figures, totally absorbed in their activities, do not acknowledge the viewer thereby creating the effect of walling out the viewer. The pastoral relates mostly to landscape painting in which the viewer psychologically enters and enjoys the peace and calm of nature. Within the antitheatrical tradition, the dramatic and the pastoral are differing strategies to achieve absorption. Establishing the relations between these strategies within the antitheatrical tradition is important to Fried’s work on Courbet because the tradition is treated as the historical foundation of his concept of merger. The coherence of the antitheatrical tradition is one of Fried’s main theses that structures his project. Although Fried suggests a number of similarities between Courbet’s merger and the pastoral and dramatic traditions, the fundamental basis of these similarities is not elucidated. Determining what constitutes this historical continuity between Courbet’s desired merger and Diderot’s aesthetics is the focus of this paper. For Fried there is much at stake in asserting this historical continuity. It enables him to ground the concepts of absorption and theatricality as historical terms and as ontological preoccupations and to claim that artistic evolution is dialectical. Furthermore, the antitheatrical tradition determines the structure by which to claim that Courbet is pre-modernist. According to Fried’s reading, Courbet is part of a tradition that is about to be profoundly challenged by Manet’s modernism, and Courbet’s role in that tradition will make Manet’s modernism necessary. One of Fried’s major claims in Courbet's Realism is that, in attempting to overcome the theatrical, Courbet’s paintings represent a sigificant divergence from Diderot’s conception of the dramatic while maintaining a continuity with the antitheatrical tradition. Fried writes: “My basic

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claim in Courbet 's Realism is that Courbet’s art belongs to the antitheatrical tradition I have just outlined but that the strategies ... involve a radical break with the values and effects of the dramatic as such ...”4 Courbet’s break with the dramatic marks a major shift in the antitheatrical tradition because Diderot’s conception of the dramatic had dominated the attempt to negate beholding from Chardin to Millet.5 According to Fried, it is Diderot’s concept of the pastoral that has the most relevance to Courbet’s attempts to negate the beholder. In Diderot’s pastoral the negation of the viewer is achieved not by walling the beholder out, as in the dramatic, but by being drawn into the painted landscape. Given Fried’s emphasis on a “radical break” with the dramatic, one would assume that the basis of the continuity is the pastoral tradition, which would mean that entry and merger, the two strategies that draw the viewer/painter-beholder in, would be the basis of the historical continuity between Diderot and Courbet. This assumption of the continuity based on the pastoral is further reinforced by such statements as “this alternative conception (the pastoral), which plays a secondary role in Diderot’s criticism, will turn out to be pertinent to Courbet’s paintings.”6 Furthermore, paradoxically it is on the basis of two acknowledged differences between Courbet’s antitheatrical project and Diderot’s concept of the pastoral that the reader is led to believe that entry of the viewer (Diderot) is similar to the merger of the painter-beholder (Courbet) : First, Courbet’s attempts to transport himself into the paintings on which he was working were in no way limited to the landscapes, paintings of ruins, and other works in lesser genres that elicited Diderot’s fictions of inclusions; instead they found their most characteristic purchase in representations of human beings engaged in actions that in turn lent themselves to a thematization of the act of painting. And second, Courbet’s ultimate aim was not the imaginary enticement of some other

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beholder (some other Diderot) into a depicted scene but rather the all but literal merger of himself as painterbeholder with the painting on which he was working.7

The first comparison implies that the difference between merger and entry is only the subject-matter of the painting, and the phrase “transport himself* indicates that the act of entry and merger are similar. Secondly, what is implied by Fried’s phrase, “the all but literal merger,” is the specificity of the painter’s body in contrast to the fiction of entry that is addressed to subsequent viewers. Although these differences are intially misleading, they lend crucial insights into Fried’s methodology. Despite the importance of establishing an historical continuity between Courbet’s and Diderot’s antitheatrical projects, Fried emphasises Courbet’s break with the dramatic to the exclusion of establishing strong links with the pastoral. Nor does Fried systematically link the aspects of Courbet’s paintings that diverge from the dramatic to the pastoral. Fried’s claim that Courbet broke with the dramatic is a good instance of Fried’s methodology of continuity and disjunction. Although at no point does Fried state it, Courbet’s quasi-corporeal merger does not represent a total break with the dramatic but rather a fusion of the features of the pastoral and the dramatic. Courbet rejected the dramatic qualities of conflict, opposition, as well as unity and closure, but he retained the elements of action and blindness, albeit in a reconfigured way. The fusion occurs within an historically specific framework such that each is significantly redeployed. For instance, action shifted from figural action to the act of painting and blindness shifted from painting’s (or tigural) blindness to painter-beholder’s blindness. Action and blindness will prove to be key features of absorption in Courbet’s art. The differences between Diderot’s entry and Courbet’s merger stem from the retention of these dramatic elements as well as the shilt in critical perspective from the viewer to the painter­ beholder. This complex relation between Courbet and the

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pastoral and dramatic traditions signifies Fried’s emphasis on continuity and disjunction within the antitheatrical tradition.8 I would argue that entry and merger also signify strategies for the striving to forestall self-division. These different strategies denote different models of forestalling self-division: Diderot describes entry as the experience of existential reverie whereas Fried describes merger as not only the loss of spectatorhood but also the loss of subjecthood. Moreover, existential reverie is atemporal in experience, while merger, which is enacted in the act of painting, is temporal. Despite the historical specificity of these respective models, my analysis will reveal that the desire to forestall self-division motivates both entry and merger. Forestalling self-division is the foundation of Fried’s ontological project and what underpins historical continuity within the antitheatrical tradition — it is the basis of continuity between Diderot and Courbet. How entry and merger variously represent forestalling of self-divison will be the main focus of this paper, with a secondary focus on the differences between entry and merger. I have chosen to include some of the more intriguing differences which highlight Fried’s working method and demonstrate that Fried’s terms, entry and merger, are by no means arbitrary but are historically specific.

Entry

Rejecting theatrical tendencies in art, Diderot’s Salon criticism was motivated by the concern to promote art which strove to offset false, decorative and overly sentimental characteristics. In attempting to defeat theatricality, it was imperative that artists were not to be seen to be acknowledging an audience. One means in which the viewer was not acknowledged was the imaginary state of entry in which the viewer was drawn into the painting, thereby establishing the fiction that the beholder did not exist in front of the work. In Diderot s

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writings on Loutherboug, Le Prince, Chardin, Vernet and Robert, there are a number of key aspects of the pastoral conception of painting that define the conventions and experience of entry, including: solitude, silence, suspension of the sequential notion of time, recreation of the effect of nature, nature as a resting spot, and multisensory experience. These aspects also fulfill the preconditions for the forestalling of self-division. Focussing on the qualities of absorption within JeanBaptiste Le Prince’s Russian pastoral of 1765, Diderot states that “there is in it a shade, a calm, a peace, a silence, an innocence that I find enchanting.” Diderot goes on to describe the subject-matter and cites in particular the figures’ absorption in listening to the young boy play his reed pipe, and then states, “This composition goes straight to the soul.” The following passage indicates that Diderot has entered the painting: 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; and when the night draws near, all three of us together will accompany the good old man to his hut. 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.9

For Diderot this experience of entry is the mark of a successful painting. Reverie creates a state of mind for Diderot in which time is suspended and subject and object are fused, it dissolves the frames around the paintings, thereby immersing the viewer in the depicted landscape. Diderot inhabits the world of the painted landscape, where the peace, calm and tranquility of nature creates an analogous state in him. In this experience of oneness with nature, the urgencies of one’s own life are held in suspense, imparting a timeless

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quality. This profound experience of nature, which Fried characterises as the psycho-physical condition or existential reverie, is the experience of the beneficence of the natural world, of the suspension of time, of oneness with nature, and of self sufficiency.10 All of these qualities lend to the experience of forestalling self-division. I want to explore these qualities of pastoral reverie further by analysing Diderot's commentary on Vernet’s paintings. Diderot’s 1767 Salon criticism of Vernet’s paintings is one of the most fascinating and compelling pieces of writing on the experience of entry. As Diderot describes Vernet’s paintings, the critic creates the fantasy of walking through the countryside with his friend, the abbot. His Salon criticism consists of three long promenades with detailed descriptions of the vistas of six sites which become the inspiration for a number of conversations between himself and the abbot on art and morality, the sublime, and existential concerns. It is not until the last site that Diderot admits he has been describing Vernet’s paintings. Diderot begins this section on Vernet by stating: I’d inscribed this artist’s name at the head of my page and was about to review his works with you, when I left for a country close to the sea and celebrated for the beauty of its sites ...

Diderot goes on to state that, My companion for these walks was thoroughly familiar with the lie of the land, and knew the best time to take in each rustic scene, and the places best viewed in the morning hours, which were most charming and interesting at sunrise and which at sunset, as well as the coolest, shadiest areas in which to seek refuge from the burning midday sun.11

Capturing his experience before the second site, Diderot describes the effect of silence and solitude on the viewer:

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I was motionless, my eyes wandered without fixing themselves on any object, my arms fell to my sides, my mouth opened ... I shall not tell you how long my enchantment lasted. The immobility of beings, the solitude of a place, its profound silence, all suspend time; time no longer exists, nothing measures it, man becomes as if eternal.12

The factors that allow entry in turn facilitate reverie, a state in which time no longer exists. The suspension of time is a key facet of reverie and the forestalling of self­ division because temporality is the cause of the division of the self. The self generally exists divided between the past, present and future. Yet in reverie the self exists only in the present, as Diderot claims, in this atemporal state, “nothing measures [time]” so it is a timeless present in which “man becomes as if eternal.” As we will see in the next passage, Diderot describes in greater detail the emotional effect of the suspension of time. Seated in an armchair in the chateau of the fourth site of the second morning of their excursion, Diderot describes looking out at “an admirable landscape,” and says (to himself): ... the abbé is right, our artists understand nothing, since the spectacle of their most beautiful productions has never made me feel the delirium I feel now, the pleasure of belonging to myself, the pleasure of knowing myself to be as good as I am, the pleasure of seeing myself and of pleasing myself, the even sweeter pleasure of forgetting myself. Where am 1 at this moment? What surrounds me? I do not know, I am not aware of it. What am I lacking? • Nothing. What do I desire? Nothing. If there is a God, this is how he is. he takes pleasure in himself.15

The state of forgetting oneself, or what Fried refers to as “the self-sufficiency of his own existence,” is a profound state of peace in which the individual desires nothing and is content with himself and his existence.14 Diderot is also describing a thought-free state in which he is so absorbed

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in the feelings produced by painted landscape that he is no longer aware of nature, and the pleasure that he feels is no longer dependant on anything external. What is perhaps most striking is that for Diderot reverie is the state which overcomes desire and the feeling of insufficiency. Unlike merger, which the painter-beholder continually desires for but fails, Diderot indicates in the above two passages that the overcoming of desire is possible in entry due to the experience of the suspension of time, hence Diderot’s emphasis on “immobility of being” and on the stability or lack of change in nature.15

Reverie We find distinctive echoes of Diderot’s account of reverie in J.J. Rousseau’s description of reverie inspired by walks in nature in his Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire (1782). A better-known advocate of reverie, Rousseau augments our understanding of Diderot's notion of entry. Rousseau initially privileged the unique, individuated self in his Confessions (17824-1789) only to discover in his later text The Reveries that “the created self, the division of self from the world, is a strategic move finally incapable of engendering human happiness.”16 In the Fifth Promenade, Rousseau describes a state of forgetting oneself and the necessity of abandoning the social self in order to attain the experience of peace and contentment in strikingly similar terms to Diderot’s passages on Vernet: When evening approached, I would come down from the heights of the island and gladly go sit in some hidden nook along the beach at the edge of the lake. There, the noise of the waves and the tossing of the water, captivating my senses and chasing all other disturbances from my soul, plunged it into a delightful reverie in which night would often surprise me without my having noticed it. The ebb and flow of this water and its noise, continual but magnified at intervals, striking my ears and

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eyes without respite, took the place ot the internal movements which reverie extinguished within me and was enough to make me feel my existence with pleasure and without taking the trouble to think. From time to time some weak and short reflection about the instability of things in this world arose, an image brought on by the surface of the water. But soon these weak impressions were erased by the uniformity of the continual movement which lulled me and which, without any active assistance from my soul, held me so fast that, called by the hour and agreed-upon signal, I could not tear myself away without effort...

Rousseau continues by exploring the effects on the individual of this experience of nature: What do we enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence. As long as this state lasts, we are sufficient unto ourselves, like God. The sentiment of existence, stripped of any other emotion, is in itself a precious sentiment of contentment and peace which alone would suffice to make this existence dear and sweet to anyone able to spurn all the sensual and earthly impressions which incessantly come to distract us from it and to trouble its sweetness here-below. But most men, agitated by continual passions, are little acquainted writh this state and, having tasted it only imperfectly for a fewr moments, preserve only an obscure and confused idea of it which does not let them feel its charm.1"

In this passage Rousseau incorporates a number of key aspects of reverie that overlap with Diderot. Rousseau describes a thought-free state which is dominated by the enjoyment of his own existence, which he too describes as one of peace and contentment. What “lulls” him into this state is the continuous motion of the waves, which instills in him a state in which he is unaware of time, a state of non-successive time. For both Diderot and Rousseau the peace and tranquility of nature and its stability create a

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state of mind in which there is no sense of division between self and the world. Given the emphasis on feelings and on the inactivity of the mind, there is an implicit emphasis on passivity and receptivity. In an article on Délicieux written for the Encyclopedia of 1754, Diderot makes this emphasis explicit by characterising the state of self-sufficiency as repos délicieux or as passive enjoyment. After describing the state of peace and contentment, Diderot states that he enjoyed “all the sweetness of his existence ... with a completely passive enjoyment, without being caught up in it, without thinking about it, without taking pride in it.” And he describes this “situation of pure feeling” as one in which “all the faculties of the body and the soul are alive without being active.” He concludes this passage by stating that “if one could associate with this delicious quietism the idea of immutability, one would construct a notion of the greatest and purest happiness that man can imagine.”18 Diderot is describing a state or moment in which he is experiencing the present fully without reacting to the experience. For both Diderot and Rousseau, entry or absorption in nature is based on passivity, and the experience of wholeness is defined in terms of passivity. Diderot likens passivity to coming out of “a sweet and light weariness”: a pleasure so evenly distributed [in all the parts of his body] that it was distinguishable in none. At that moment of enchantment and weakness, he no longer had any memory of the past, nor desire for the future, nor worry about the present. Time had ceased to flow for him, because he existed wholly in himself ...ly

Diderot is describing the state in which the self is no longer split between temporalities, and instead experiences the self as whole. In his description of Rousseau’s experience of nature, Gutman makes the important link between passivity and a return to a primoridal unity: “Rousseau abandons the active self,

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erases the boundaries between self and not-self, and surrenders to a totality that would seem to replicate that unity which preceded the division of experience into self and not self.”20 What Diderot and Rousseau are describing, in today’s terms, is the phenomenology of the poetic image. In Bachelard’s model of phenomenology, for instance, there exists in reverie a unity in which “the world dreamer does not know the division of his being.”21 Central to reverie is the abandonment of the social self. Bachelard states: When a dreamer of reveries has swept aside all the “preoccupations” which were encumbering his everyday life, when he has detached himself from the worry which comes to him from the worry of others, when he is thus truly the author of his solitude, when he can finally contemplate a beautiful aspect of the universe without counting the minutes, that dreamer feels a being opening within him. Suddenly such a dreamer is a world dreamer. He opens himself to the world, and the world opens itself to him.22

The poetic image is created out of the poet’s reverie and imbued with the solitude of the poet’s soul. One of the key aspects of poetic reverie is that it “ situates us in a world and not in a society.”25 Bachelard’s thesis is that “reverie gives us the world of a soul, and that a poetic image bears witness to a soul which is discovering its world, the world where it w'ould like to live and wrhere it deserves to live.”24 The resultant happiness in inhabiting this world is reflected in the state of reverie which for Bachelard is an experience of w'cll-being. This is evident in Diderot’s passages where his reading shifts from describing the vista to communicating his state of contentment. For Bachelard, the poetic image is read (or experienced) as a primordial world, or as he states, “an absolute origin, an origin of consciousness.”25 Therefore, immersion in nature takes one back to the unity of the

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primordial world — to the state prior to the distinction between self and other. This is the experience of entry for Diderot — absorption in the painted landscape transcends the subject-object relationship. The resultant state of forgetting oneself is the culmination of all the pastoral qualities which create the experience of entry. In the following description of a Robert sketch, Diderot makes the link between forgetting himself and entry which dissolves any distinction or distance between himself the viewer and the painting as an object: “One forgets oneself in front of this work, that is the strongest magic of art. One is no longer at the Salon or in a studio, but in a church, beneath a vault. A calm, a silence that touches, a delicious coolness reigns there.”26 Encapsulated within Diderot’s pastoral is the paradoxical nature of absorption — at once attracting viewers and denying their presence before the painting. The fiction that the beholder does not exist — in other words, is not separate from the painting — is the fiction that transfixes the beholder in front of it.

Merger

Within the antitheatrical tradition, absorption was called upon to defeat theatricality, yet absorptive strategies had to keep changing in order to forestall theatrical excess and exaggeration. By the 1820s and 1830s the dramatic was perceived as theatrical, and Millet’s attempt to defeat the theatrical by a return to absorptive thematics of immersing the figures in their actions and states of mind was met with only partial success. So it seems that more extreme measures were needed to overcome theatricality. In other words, the forestalling of self-division was becoming more difficult. By the time of Courbet, the antitheatrical tradition demanded that the artist, as the first beholder, annul his presence before the painting by merging into the canvas before him. Given the impossibility of literal merger, Fried refers to the desire for merger as the quasi-

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corporeal merger which is enacted in the act of painting. As will become evident in this section, Fried’s notion of merger is the attempt to overcome not only the division between self and other but also the division within the subject, what Fried refers to as “inner dividedness.” The concept of merger introduces a number of shifts and changes. For instance, merger is related specifically to the painter-beholder and is not assumed to be experienced by subsequent beholders as in Diderot’s model. Forestalling self-division, the desired merger is now located around the painter’s relation to the act of painting, and the body now has a crucial role in this merger. Fried’s phenomenological reading of the self­ portraits emphasises the role of corporeal reflexivity in Courbet’s desired merger. Courbet’s (unconscious) desire to forestall self-division is read by Fried through characteristics which signify corporeal reflexivity, that the body is both subject and object, and through various strategies which avoid the confrontational gaze. Both aspects are at play in Courbet’s early self-portraits and in his later paintings. Fried's readings of Courbet's early self-portraits are crucial to his analysis of merger because they introduce the phenomenological relation that is at the core of his project of forestalling self-division. The self-portraits are therefore important in understanding how merger attempts to forestall self-division. It was initially the conventions of self-portraiture, on which Courbet was working in the 1840s, that brought into focus issues of his own spectatorhood. As Fried explains, “In particular, by calling for the depiction of a figure that would at once double and, at least approximately, face its maker, the conventions in question provoked in Courbet both as painter and as beholder — that is a painter-beholder — a heightened intuition (I don’t quite want to say awareness) of his physical separateness from and opposite orientation to the painting before him.”27

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Fried analyses Courbet’s self-portraits not from the perspective of psychological or autobiographical studies of the artist, or as a reflection of the sitter’s likeness, but as Courbet’s “desire and compulsion” to depict his own embodiedness — “to evoke within the painting his intense absorption in his own live bodily being.”28 Fried arrives at this premise by noting a number of “peculiar characteristics” across several of Courbet’s early self­ portraits, including: excessive tension evident in the sitter’s hands; an emphasis on proximity of the figure represented to the surface of the canvas; and the predominance of states of sleep, reverie or semi­ consciousness. These characteristics have either previously gone unnoticed or been dismissed as merely awkward. What is most striking in the painting, Man with the Leather Belt (Fig. 1), is the sitter’s hands, which convey much more tension than seems warranted by their activity. Similarly, in the Country Siesta (Fig. 2) the positioning of Courbet’s right hand with his palm facing upwards, prominently placed on top of his thigh, exhibits a tension that is extraordinary given his relaxed state. Fried claims that the tension evident in his hand “makes us aware of the hand as a potential locus of sensation and hence as a sign of the male sitter’s possession from within of his own body.”29 The sitter’s left hand is also given prominence in the Wounded Man (Fig. 3), due to the contrast of flesh tone against his brown cloak and the encompassing white of his sleeve. The man leans against a tree with his eyes closed in a semi-conscious state while his hand grasps a fold in the cloak. Fried interprets this hand as having a metonymic relation to the body. The hand signifies both “his body as object" and “his body as actually lived, as possessed from within.”30 Fried’s interpretation of the wounded man’s hand is applicable to all three self-portraits, that “the hand functions as a visual metaphor for the wounded man’s (nonvisual) experience of his embodiedness...”31 Therefore this hand, according to Fried, “may be read as directed simultaneously outward toward the world and inward

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Fig. 1 . Gustave Courbet L'homme à la ceinture de cuir (Man with the Leather Bell] 1845-46. Oil on canvas, 100 x 82 cm Musée d'Orsay Réunion des musées nationaux, France.

Fig. 2. Gustave Courbet Sieste Champêtre (Country Siesta) early 1 840s. Charcoal and black crayon on paper, 26x31 cm. Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie.

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Fig. 3. Gustave Courbet Portrait de l'artiste, dit l'homme blessé {Wounded Man) 1 844-54. Oil on canvas, 8 1 x 97 cm. Paris, Musée d'Orsay.

towards its own lived physicality.”52 What Fried refers to as the “double gesture” of the hand, which denotes the body as both subject and object, is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of corporeal reflexivity. Merleau-Ponty’s premise is that, in touching an object, one is also being touched by it.55 Thus the act of touching an object invokes an awareness of oneself. The body is not only the means of knowing and communicating with the world but also the means of knowing oneself.54 More explicitly, MerleauPonty claims that subjectivity is not divorced from the body: “my existence as subjectivity is one with my existence as body and with the existence of the world....”55 Another remarkable feature of Courbet's self-portraits is the consistency with which he represents his figures extremely close to the front of the picture plane. Phis proximity can be read as continuing to destabilise the fixed positions of subject and object by attempting to overcome that distance which divides the viewer from the viewed. Looking again at the Wounded Man, the upper

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half of the man’s body is depicted in the immediate foreground of the canvas, which gives the sensation of the man’s legs extending past the frame and into the viewer’s space. Fried claims that this presumed extension into the viewer’s space “calls into question the impermeability of the bottom framing-edge, the capacity of that edge to contain the representation, to bring it to a stop, to establish it at a fixed distance from both picture surface and beholder.”36 This preoccupation with nearness is evident also in Courbet’s extraordinary self-portrait Man Mad with Fear (Fig. 4), which depicts Courbet in medieval costume in the act of jumping off the edge of a cliff. The man stares outwards while his right hand thrusts forward, as if into our space. Because the painting is unfinished and the figure of the man is not clearly delineated, there is an even greater sense of the instability of his position. This act of leaping forward, as if into the viewer’s space, is interpreted by Fried as a desire “to cancel or undo all distance not merely between image and picture surface but also, more importantly, between sitter and beholder, to close the gulf between them, to make them one.”37 This attempt to annul all distance between sitter and beholder is in phenomenological terms the attempt to regain undifferentiated oneness, the primordial perception which preceded division into seer and seen, subject and object.38 For Merleau-Ponty the subject experiences a form of alienation in relation to the other’s gaze which he describes as the “‘confiscation’ of the subject by the others who look at him.”39 One means of avoiding the alienating gaze is the devaluation of sight. This is a consistent feature of Courbet’s self-portraits. Even in those portraits in which the sitter gazes outwards, the figure is not actually looking at the viewer. This is evident for instance in Man with the Leather Belt where the man’s gaze, which is directed to the viewer’s left, does not indicate vision but rather an absorption in his own thoughts. A much more dramatic example of this unseeing gaze is evident in Man Mad with Fear. Although the man

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Fia. 4. Gustave Courbet Le Désespéré (Man Mad with Fear] 1 844-45. Oil on canvas, pasted on hardboard, 60.5 x 50.5 cm. Photo: J. Lathion, © Nasionalgallenet, Oslo, 2000.

gazes directly out, he is as if blinded by his fear. Uis blindness in the act of jumping off the cliff reinforces the reading that the portrait expresses a desire to annul the distance between sitter and viewer whereas a confrontational gaze would enforce a separation between the two. Fried argues that the attempt to overcome distance or separateness is no longer an aim in Manet’s art in which “facingness” identifies the beholder's presence. Therefore the confrontational gaze is mobilised to overcome the worst consequences of theatricality by acknowledging it.40 In contrast, the motif of blindness in Courbet's paintings is a means of avoiding confrontation between the sitter and beholder. According to Fried, Courbet’s desire to escape the confrontational gaze explains the predominance ol sleep.

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reverie or semi-consciousness states in Courbet’s seliportraits and in his later paintings. It is these states that have a privileged relation to the experience of embodiedness. While the man’s hand in the Country Siesta invokes a “body liveness,” the reclining pose establishes his “primordial” relation to the world because he has relinquished the upright posture that “establishes human beings in perceptual opposition to the world.”41 What is also significant is that sleep, semi-consciousness and reverie can be seen to be about surrendering all control of bodily functions to what is termed the ‘“primordial’ or somatic order of activity — the automatic processes by which the body sustains itself, by which it lives.”42 As a consequence reverie signifies a yielding to the body regulated by habit. Surrendering the active body to the primordial body is reminiscent of Diderot’s emphasis on passivity as defining the state of entry as reverie and of Rousseau’s emphasis on abandoning the social self in order to experience reverie as an undivided unity. Returning to Country Siesta, this notion of a primordial unity is conveyed by the woman who rests againsts the man but seems to meld into his body, an effect indicated by the lack of delineation of her right upper torso and head. This lack of delineation underlines the indistinct boundaries between self and world experienced in sleep (which for Fried is analogous to reverie and semi­ consciousness) . At the end of the chapter Fried extends his phenomenological reading of the tension in the sitter's hands to the physical act of painting, which is a crucial feature of merger. In Man with the Leather Belt Fried notes that the sitter's hand is twisted around to face into the canvas, physically coinciding with the painter-beholder’s hand, despite the fact that the sitter faces the viewer in this painting. The evident tension and the positioning enacts a “positional and actional congruence” between the figure and painter that he was to discover in his later genre paintings — for instance the central sifter in the Wheat Sifters*5 Pursuing the analog}'. Fried interprets the sitter’s

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left hand actively gripping his belt as expressing the effort involved in holding a palette and brushes. Establishing an important connection between the experience of corporeality and the act of painting, Fried states that the ' act of painting ... (is) a vehicle of the painter-beholder’s determination to be true' to the lived actuality of his embodiedness for as long as he was required to produce the painting before him.”44 The importance of this link between an experience of corporeality and the physical act of painting is that it is our first indication that Fried reads embodiedness as a type of merger. Embodiedness is now discussed in terms of annulling all distance and difference between himself and the self-portrait. Fried claims further that in portraying his own embodiedness Courbet ‘‘was in effect striving to annul, if not his own identity as beholder, at any rate something fundamental to that identity: his presence outside, in front of, the painting before him.”45 Referring back to the self-portraits in the next chapter, Fried is much more definite that quasi-corporeal merger is the attempt to annul the painter-beholder’s own spectatorship: “... in Courbet’s self-portraits of 1840s the painter-beholder strove again and again to transport himself as if corporeally into the painting before him in order both to express his sense of his own embodiedness and to negate or neutralise his status as first beholder of that painting ...”46 Fried is now reading the self-portraits from the perspective of the breakthrough paintings.47 Many of the key motifs in the self-portraits continue to be signifiers of the painter­ beholder’s desire for merger in the breakthrough and later paintings but often with different emphases. I will be focusing on two of these motifs: corporeality and blindness.

Corporeality and Blindness

In the case of the Burial, Fried’s focus on the perspective of corporeality offers a very different interpretation to what has become a commonplace reading of Courbet’s application of paint. Fried cites Rosen and Zerner s

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interpretation of the materiality of the painting of the Burial. Given the thick application of paint, Rosen and Zerner claim that, Not for a moment are we allowed to believe that we dream, that we have in front of us a vivid but unreal world ... On the contrary ... we are forced to remember that we are in front of a solid work of art, a painted object, a representation.18

In other words, Courbet’s art is read as antithetical to conventions of entry in landscape painting. Rejecting the inference from Rosen and Zerner that Courbet’s project is unequivocally a theatrical one, Fried insists that the facture of the Burial is less about the act of seeing that would remind us of the painting as an object than an experience of the painter-beholder's corporeality. Fried explains that corporeality is “... mobilized around the act of painting, that sought to undo the very distinction between embodied subject and ‘objective’ world, including in the first instance, the Burial itself. (As though ideally the densely material surface of the Burial would wall the painter-beholder not out but in.)”49 Thus, for Fried there is no contradiction between Courbet’s paint handling and his antitheatrical project.50 As already noted, blindness or the devaluation of sight in the self-portraits is discussed in terms of subversion of the distancing gaze. This theme is continued in the analyses of his later paintings but is more specifically metaphorised as the desired state of merger. Blindness is metaphorised by blindspots which exist as reminders of this “limit” point of the state of merging; they are signalled by the black interior of the tarare in the Wheat Sifters, the area hovering above the open grave in the Burial and the cave openings in the cave paintings. As Fried states, “blindspots represent the denial or, better, the eclipsing of vision that would inevitably accompany the painter­ beholder’s quasi-corporeal absorption into the painting.”51 The painter-beholder’s blindness is also metaphorised by

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themes of the absorptive states of repetitive labor, sleep and reverie. In many of his later paintings it is not the gaze out of the painting that must be annulled as in the self­ portraits but the painter-beholder’s gaze. For instance, the painter-beholder’s blindness is metaphorised by the kneeling sifter in the Wheat Sifters who is absorbed and thus blind to the patch of sunlight on the wall.52 Yet a case in point in which the painter-beholder’s gaze and the painting’s gaze must both be annulled is in the Burial. In Fried’s reading of the Burial the figures of the crucifix bearer who gazes out of the painting and Buchon who is seen in profile metaphorise the two components or the “inner dividedness” of the painter­ beholder: “the painting’s gaze out at the beholder ‘in’ the painter-beholder and the painter ‘in’ the painterbeholder’s gaze into the painting.”53 It is the painter­ beholder’s oblique positioning to the canvas which enables him to ignore the gaze of the crucifix-bearer, in other words to subvert the theatricalising, distancing gaze. Thus the issue of theatricality in Courbet’s art is focused around the negation of the painter-beholder’s gaze. In contrast, Diderot offers an interesting instance of entry in which the viewer is not necessarily oblivious to the figures’ gaze, or vice versa. In a remarkable passage on Vernet’s third site, Diderot describes his return to the chateau which necessitated seamen taking them across the sea in a skiff: ... 20 pairs of opera glasses were trained on us and our arrival was anticipated with cries of joy emanating from the terrace and the top of the chateau; and we answered as is the custom.54

Rather than the figures being oblivious or blind to his presence, Diderot’s return actually gathered an audience. In other words, Diderot reads himself into the activities of the paintings so that his actions are read as generating the activity in the scene. The gazes of the figures in the landscape do not function in the same way as the crucifix­

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bearer’s gaze which identifies Courbet as a spectator outside of the painting thereby threatening to theatricalise the image. In contrast, entry relocates spectatorhood within the painting, thereby annulling distance and the distinction between the painting and the viewer. In other words, despite Diderot becoming the object of the figures’ absorption, their gaze does not break his reverie. The overcoming of “inner dividedness” of the painter­ beholder becomes a major concern in Courbet’s later paintings. The notion of automatism or habit is instrumental in overcoming the inner dividedness because it involves a shift from the objective body to the primordial body. Habit is a key concept of Fried’s model of merger and I would argue it is probably the single most important term for demonstrating the links between merger and forestalling self-division.

Habit Central to Fried’s readings of Courbet’s paintings is that the act of painting is both active and passive, thereby figures are often coupled in terms of activity and reverie, will and automatism. One finds reverie coupled with activity in most of the later paintings, including: the model/little boy and the seated painter in the Studio and the seated sifter/boy and kneeling sifter in the Wheat Sifters. The coupling of these polarities are depicted in more extreme terms in the Quarry (Fig. 5): the dead roe deer, grouped together with the hunter who is lost in reverie, signifies the blindness of his absorptive state as well as representing habits and automatism involved in all action, specifically here the act of painting, whereas the piqueur, in the act of blowing a horn, represents the effort of painting the Quarry9. The initial composition consisted of only the hunter and roe deer. Fried reads the position and orientation of the roe deer as suggesting “a reflection of the hunter-painter, as if the deer came into being

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Fig. 5. Gustave Courbet La Curée (The Quarry] 1 856-57. Oil on canvas; unframed 2 10.2 x 183.5 cm. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 1 8.620, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

automatically without effort on the part of the hunter­ painter."55 The fantasy that the act of painting is wholly automatistic could not be sustained so Courbet felt “compelled” to include the piqueur. Uniting automatism and volition is the hunter who functions as the hinge, “at once separating those extremes and binding them together.”56 Given the affinities between firstly the hunter and roe deer and secondly the hunter and piqueur, Fried concludes that although automatism is independent of the painter-beholder’s control, it is only activated by the act of painting.5^ As discussed earlier, Fried referred to habit in the context of sleep, semi-consciousness and reverie which are for Fried states in which the control of bodily functions is turned over to the somatic order of activity or

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to the body governed by habit. But in his reading of Quarry, habit is that which unites activity and passivity. Fried cites Ravaisson’s analysis of habit which emphasises that it is both “the principle and the sign of the fundamental continuity of beings and nature.”58 But as Ravaisson claims, that continuity of nature is unrepresentable. For Fried what represents this continuity is Courbet’s pictorial structures that represent an “absorptive continuum”: the “inner continuity between absorptive states and conditions ... [which] thematize the mutual interpenetration of action and passivity, will and automatism.”59 Although Fried cites Ravaisson’s discussion of habit, it is Merleau-Ponty’s analysis which most clearly elucidates the importance of habit in forestalling self­ division and thus its role in merger. As Merleau-Ponty explains, habit is not about reflective deliberation but about a body which is coterminous with the world. Merleau-Ponty states that, “Habit has its abode neither in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body as mediator of a world.”60 The importance of habit is that it creates the understanding that objects do not exist in objective space but in one’s bodily space. Merleau-Ponty gives the example of driving through a narrow opening without having to compare the w'idth of the opening to the width of the car: “The points in space do not stand out as objective positions in relation to the objective position occupied by our body.”61 Habit is a means of countering a notion of an objective consciousness of the world. Merleau-Ponty states that “To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of dilating our being-inthe-world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.”62 Further clarifying the concept of habit, Merleau-Ponty claims that knowing how to type is not about knowing where the keys are on the keyboard. Typing is not a conscious activity but is based on a familiarity of patterns created in typing the words. As he

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states, habit is “knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort.”63 MerleauPonty likens knowing where the keys are to knowing where one of our limbs are, “through a knowledge bred of familiarity which does not give us a position in objective space.”64 The power of habit evident in typing (whereby “the physiognomy of visual patterns [of the text] can evoke a certain type of motor response”) is similar to touching an ear or knee, “I move my hand to my ear or my knee by the shortest route, without having to think of the initial position of my hand, or that of my ear, or the path between them.”65 There are a number of similarities between MerleauPonty’s notion of habit and the role of embodiedness in Fried’s model. Fried’s emphasis on the act of painting as the vehicle for the “lived actuality of (the painter­ beholder’s) embodiedness” and his claim that “automatism is activated in and by the effort of painting” reiterates Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the body is aware of habit only when physical effort is made. Fried’s characterisation of merger as the representation of embodiedness which aimed at annulling the “distinction between embodied subject and objective’ world, including in the first instance the painting before him” is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of habit as “being in the world” which he describes as a “pre-objective view.”66 The importance of these similarities (and there arc others) is that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of habit elucidates Fried’s model of quasi-corporeal merger. In the act of painting, the paintbrush becomes an extension of the body and the painting becomes part of the bodily space of the painter, thereby overcoming “objective space.” Thus absorption in the act of painting is that state in which there is no separation between painter and painting, there is no division between self and other.67 Furthermore, given that embodiedness and habit are enacted only in activity, the act of painting becomes the means of

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experiencing the forestalling of self-division. It is only in the act of painting that the awareness of self-division is forestalled but the act of painting also denotes the project’s inevitable failure because it cannot be sustained indefinitely and because the act produces the painting. As Stephen Melville explains: ... to perform the act is always to make the thing, and so to be at grips with the difference between act and thing, self and other. Courbet’s project is doomed and could not be otherwise; our imagination of its success is bound to be blank: paintings are only as they are failures of painting:68

The depiction of merger is the representation of both embodiedness and of the desire to retain that primordial state in which there exists no division between subject and object. This latter aspect of merger helps to explain why Fried emphasises literal merger in his account of Courbet’s realism because physical merger would be the only means for the painter-beholder to retain that state of oneness. Given the impossibility of sustaining the act of painting (thus the impossibility of sustaining a denial of the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld), Fried emphasises the prolongation of the act, the repetitive or continuous actions that have the effect of duration. {Stonebreakers is a prime example.) In the later paintings, however, there are an increased number of signs of temporality which force the acknowledgment of the impossibility of forestalling self-division. The figure of the piqueur in The Quarry, for example, conveys absorption in blowing the horn but the sound of the horn is also summoning beholders which implies imminent change and will disrupt the absorption. {Wheat Sifters is another possible example, in which the grains in the sieve are visible, thus indicating an imminent end to the central sifter’s action.) In contrast, the experience of Diderot’s pastoral seems to be atemporal and where there are activities of a temporal duration, these do not concede the impossibility

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of sustaining the act of entry.69 Thus for Diderot the paintings he discusses seem to indefinitely sustain the denial that paintings are made to be beheld. The pipe player in Le Prince’s Pastorale russe engages in a temporal activity, yet for Diderot the inevitable conclusion of this activity does not equate with the end of the experience of entry. When the piper finishes and the sun sets Diderot states that, "... all three of us together will accompany the good old man to his hut.”70 It is through the interpenetration of activity and passivity in habit that Fried's model of merger is linked to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of primordial unity. As Fried claims, the affinities between hunter-painter and piqueur call into question the absoluteness of the distinction between automatism and volition that the figures ostensibly embodied. In short, a painting that in its original form could be read as imagining a purely automatic mode of representation and in its expanded form as positing a strict separation of automatism and will turn out in the end to allegorize their necessary interpenetration.71

What interests me is Fried’s emphasis on a “necessary interpenetration.”72 Again turning to Merleau-Ponty, it becomes apparent that interpenetration of opposites is necessary for a return to a primordial unity. MerleauPonty’s work is well-known for disrupting binary oppositions.73 Elizabeth Grosz characterises MerleauPonty’s phenomenology as promoting a “lived conjunction” as distinct from Cartesian “logical disjunction.”74 In destabilising the structure of binary oppositions, Merleau-Ponty’s work is the reclaiming of the “space in between binary pairs ... the excluded middle.” Grosz explains further: This indeterminate middle ground must ... predate and make possible the binary terms, insofar as it prcceeds and exceeds them, insofar as it is uncontainable in either the

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one term or the other, insofar as it is symptomatic of the impossibility of their separation. This may explain his preoccupation with the question of how to rethink perception outside the paradigms presupposed by either empiricism or rationalism. Perception is as it were mid­ way between mind and body or subject and object, requiring the terms of both categories to be comprehensible."5

As Grosz states, the necessity of interpenetration of opposites is because: Merleau-Ponty wants to return to a pre-discursive experience, experience before the overlay of reflection, the imposition of a meta-experiential organization, its codification by reason, language or knowledge. A ‘return’ to or reconstitution of such prediscursive experience ... is necessay for the creation of a non-dualist, non-binarized ontology.76

The desire to return to a pre-discursive experience marks a major difference between the two absorptive strategies of entry and merger. Diderot’s description of existential reverie as a thought-free state conveys the belief in the possibility of attaining the primordial, whereas Fried’s description of merger as not only the loss of spectatorhood but also the implicit loss of subjecthood results in the impossibility of attaining primordial unity. At the end of Courbet’s Realism, Fried finally acknowledges that self-division within the painter-beholder can only be annulled in death?" The indicator of this difference is the persistence of temporality within merger. While Diderot's entry assumes a completed painting, the painter­ beholder’s merger is dependent on the act of painting, which cannot be sustained indefinitely. Despite these significant differences, the basis of continuity which governs both models of antitheatricality is an ontological preoccupation w ith the striving to forestall self-division.

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NOTES 1

2 3

4

The desire to overcome self-division is implicit in Courbet’s Realism and only made explicit in the last sentence of the text, where Fried discusses that the distance and difference between painter-beholder and painting is also within the painter-beholder. Fried states that, “It may be that the poignant elegiac mood of the Hunter on Horseback, which as we stand before that painting comes to seem almost tangible, expresses, if not an awareness of that self-division, at any rate an intuition that death alone could bring it to an end." Courbet’s Realism (Chicago/London: The University' of Chicago Press, 1990) 290. Thanks to Sue Best, Toni Ross and Virginia Spate for their encouragement and incisive editorial comments which were crucial to the clarification of my ideas at various stages of the project. A special thanks to Mary Roberts for her sustained support which made the completion of this essay possible. Our discussions were instrumental in untangling the complexities of Fried’s methodology. Lastly, I would like to thank my colleagues Jenny Barrett and Phillip Kent at University of Western Sydney, Nepean for their support. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 6. Describing the task of the painter for Diderot, Fried states, “However, if the painter failed in that endeavor (of establishing the aloneness of his figures relative to the beholder), his figures appeared mannered, false, and hypocritical; their actions and expressions were seen, not as natural signs of intention or emotion, but merely as grimaces — feignings or impostures addressed to the beholder; and the painting as a whole, far from projecting a convincing image of the world, became what Diderot deprecatingly called a theater, un théâtre, an artificial construction whose too obvious designs on its audience made it repugnant to persons of taste.’’ Courbet’s Realism, 7. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 46. Fried repeatedly insisted on this claim: ”... Courbet broke fundamentally with the dramatic norms of the antitheatrical tradition within French painting ...” and “Courbet’s repudiation of drama involved an almost total rejection of conflict, opposition and contrast both thematically and structurally.” Courbet's Realism, 223 and 227, respectively.

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See Chapter 1, “Approaching Courbet,” ibid., for an extensive discussion of the antitheatrical tradition from Chardin to Millet. 6 Fried, Courbet 's Realism, 8. 7 ibid., 224. 8 As Fried states, “... the evolution of painting in France between the start of the reaction against the Rococo and Manet’s seminal masterpieces of the first half of the 1860s, traditionally discussed in terms of style and subject matter and presented as a sequence of ill-defined and disjunct epochs or movements — Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, etc. — may be grasped as a single, self-renewing, in important respects dialetical undertaking.” Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press) 4. Also see the question on the dialectic in the Interview with Fried in this volume. 9 ibid., 121. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s A landscape with figures and animals offers another example of Diderot's experience of entry. After noting the nobility of certain masses of rock, the persuasiveness of the rendering of space, the lifelikeness of the animals, etc., Diderot proceeds with a monologue to his friend Grimm: “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 conversation 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 playing 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. And when the weight of the light has diminished we will go on our way again, and at some more remote time we will still remember this enchanted place and the delicious hour that we spent there.” Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. 120. 10 Fried, Courbet ’s Realism, 130-1. 11 Diderot on Art. The Salon of 1767, vol. 2, John Goodman, ed. and transi. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1995) 8Ô-"7. 5

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12 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 125 and Diderot on Art. The Salon of 1767, 92. 13 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 126 and Diderot on Art. The Salon of 1767, 98. 14 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 130-1. 15 Fried emphasises that the failure to merge was what made Courbet’s project of quasi-corporeal merger possible. As Fried explains: "... no matter what steps Courbet took to realize what I have been claiming was his central aim (to undo his own spectatorhood), he couldn’t literally or corporeally merge with the canvas before him but instead was compelled to remain outside it, a beholder (albeit a privileged one) to the end ... it isn’t merely a contingent fact about Courbet's project that it was bound to fail: on the contrary, it was precisely the impossibility of literal or corporeal merger that made that project conceivable, or rather pursuable, in the first place" {Courbet’s Realism, 269). Therefore in this instance it was crucial that desire was not overcome because it was what compelled Courbet to continue to paint. 16 Huck Gutman, “Rousseau’s Confessions-. A Technology of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed., Luther Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 116. 17 ibid., 114-5. For the French passage see, J .J. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1964) 100-2. 18 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 227-8, n.51. 19 ibid., 228, n.51. 20 Gutman, "Rousseau’s Confessions," 114. 21 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie. Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Daniel Russell, transi. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) 175. 22 ibid., 173. 23 ibid., 14. 24 ibid., 15. 25 ibid., 1. 26 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 130. 27 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 80. 28 ibid., 64. 29 ibid., 66.

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ibid., 65. ibid, ibid. For Merleau-Ponty’s statement that this relationship exists “by principle” see “The Intertwining — the Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed., Claude Lefort, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) 133. See also MerleauPonty, “The Experience of the Body and Classical Psychology,” Phenomenology of Perception, transl. Colin Smith, (London/New Jersey, Routledge, 1992) 90-7. As Merleau-Ponty states, “it is through my relation to things that I know myself.” Phenomenology of Perception, 383. ibid., 408. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 59. ibid., 61. Fried’s notion of merger is also influenced by psychoanalysis but I will be focusing on the influence of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology. The Philosphy ofArt, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 137. It is precisely this distinction between the absorptive effects in Courbet’s paintings and an acknowledgment of theatricality (facingness) in Manet's art that distinguishes Courbet’s role in the pre-modernist antitheatrical tradition and Manet’s modernism. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 67. ibid., 76. Merleau-Ponty refers to “that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.” Phenomenology of Perception, 215. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 221. ibid., 81. ibid., 79. ibid., 98. The term breakthrough refers to those paintings executed between 1848-50 that "mark simultaneously his accession to full artistic maturity and the advent of what he [Courbet] came to call Realism”: An After Dinner at Omans, The Stonehreakers, A Burial at Omans, and The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (Courbet’s Realism, 85).

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49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

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Fried structures Courbet s Realism in terms of the continuities and disjunctions between the self-portraits of the 1840s, breakthrough paintings of 1848-50 and his later paintings from the 1850s to the 1870s. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism. The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (London/ Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984) 151-2. Cited by Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 265. Fried, Courbet's Realism, 266. It is interesting to note that by the end of Manet’s Modernism, Fried has changed his mind. Summarising succinctly the crisis within the antitheatrical tradition, Fried states in the Coda, "... by 1860 the means and conventions by which French painting for more than a century had sought to establish the ontological illusion (in Absorption and Theatricality 1 called it a “supreme fiction”) that the beholder did not exist had come nearly to the end of their efficacy. In particular Courbet’s project of quasi-corporeal merger with the painting on which he was working had become increasingly untenable for the artist himself (The Quarry of 1856 is perhaps the last work in which that project was fully in force), and in any case the evident materiality of his pictures, as well as their primary reference to the painter-beholder, meant that they conspicuously failed to make themselves felt as neutralizing beholding generally." Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1966) 404-5. Fried, Courbet's Realism, 153. The patch of sunlight metaphorises the painter-beholder’s obliviousness to the product of representation. For further discussion of the significance of the patch of sunlight, see Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 218, 227. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 139. Diderot on Art, vol. 2, 96. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 280. ibid., 181. ibid. ibid., 183. ibid., 184. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 144-5. ibid., 143.

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ibid. ibid., 144. ibid. ibid. ibid., 79. Dissolving the boundaries between subject and object is represented for instance in the Studio where, as Fried states, “the implied movement of the painter’s lower body into the painting (marked by the lack of room for his legs) is reciprocated, or perhaps anticipated, by a countermovement of the painting out toward the painter.” Fried, Courbet's Realism, 161. The flow of the river out of the painting and over the legs of the seated painter and cascading beyond is metaphorised by the sheet held by the model and the positioning of the cat. Stephen Melville, “Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions” Art History 14/1 (March 1991) 120 (my italics). Interestingly, the urgency comes to the fore in the chapter entitled “Courbet’s Femininity." In some sense Courbet's images of women force the issue of temporality and the acknowledgment of the impossibility of merger. For an analysis of the relationship between temporality and the failure of merger that links Fried’s reading of the piqueur in The Quarry to The Bacchante, see Mary Roberts’ essay in this volume. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 121. Diderot's emphasis on his experiences of entry described in terms of atemporality is in contrast to Fried’s claims that “the effects of duration, of slow or repetitive or continuous actions, the very perception of which is felt by the viewer to take place over time ... characterize the temporal modality of all essentially absorptive painting from Caravaggio to Eakins." Fried, Courbet's Realism, 179 and Absorption and Theatricality, 49—51. But what is important is that when a temporal activity is the focus of the composition, as in the example of Pastorale russe, temporality is not linked to the demise of entry. Fried, Courbet's Realism, 280. An emphasis on working outside binaries oppositionalities is much more apparent in the chapter “Courbet's Femininity.” For the importance of bigendering, for instance, see Maty Roberts’ essay.

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73 Iris Young asserts that Merleau-Ponty s claim, that consciousness and subjectivity are located in the body, threatens “the mutual exclusivity of the categories subject and object, inner and outer, I and world.” Iris Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosphy and Social Theory (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990) 161. Cited in Elizabeth Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993) 41. 74 ibid., 41. 75 ibid., 38. 76 ibid., 43. 77 See note 1. An earlier sign of this inevitable conclusion is Fried’s reading of the Burial in which he acknowledges the possibility of the fear of merger on the part of the painter­ beholder, w’hich may have accounted for a second “personal” point of view’ to the left of the grave. Fried claims that, “as though the sheer magnitude of the effort to become one with the Burial, to undo both distance and difference between himself and it, gave rise to a counterimpulse that up to a point (but only up to a point) successfully resisted that effort. Understood in these terms, the second point of view might be likened to a reaction formation to the fear of disappearing into the picture, a fear that could have been exacerbated by the claustrophobic conditions in which the Burial was painted, but that can be called paranoid only in that it ignores the impossibility of the painter-beholder actually achieving his object.” Courbet’s Realism, 321, n.50. Notwithstanding this fear, Kevin Richards argues that Courbet’s desire to experience his own death is what motivated the repeated attempts to merge with his paintings. “This Derridean interpretation can be read as taking Fried’s argument to its logical, and of course impossible conclusion.” See Kevin Richards’ essay, “Eavesdropping/' Eve’s Dropping,” in this volume.

The Writing of “Art and Objecthood” James Meyer During the winter of 1963-64 a young critic named Michael Fried reviewed an exhibition of new sculpture in New York. It was the first one-person show of Donald Judd (Fig. 1). “As one might expect on the strength of Judd’s monthly criticism published in Arts Magazine, Fried noted in his «“New York Letter,” the monthly column he wrote for the Lugano-based Art International, “it is an assured, intelligent show.” Fried’s assessment was not without qualifications, however. Judd, he observed, had for some time “expressed strong suspicions that easel painting is more or less defunct,” and moreover had “championed artists whose paintings are on the verge of becoming objects, such as Frank Stella and Al Jensen.” That Judd considered the painting medium near obsolete did not, as one might expect, concern him, so much as Judd’s reply to this “crisis”: What has not clearly emerged in the criticism ... is how exactly Judd means to discriminate between the objects he admires and those he does not ... I find myself unable to discover a convincing internal rationale for the particular decisions of style and structure Judd has made.1

Judd, according to Fried, hadn’t solved the “problem” of pictorial illusionism the artist made such a fuss about in his criticism, his suggestion that painting’s framing devices and inherent compositionality projected an anthropocentric world view. If painting really was “over and done with,” as

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Fig, 1. Donald Judd One-Person Show at The Green Gallery, New York 1963-64. Photo: Rudolph Burckhardt. © Donald Judd, 1963-64. Reproduced by permission of Viscopy Ltd, Sydney 2000.

Judd insisted,2 if its rational organisational logic was at odds with contemporary philosophical models, then what had be done about it? The Green Gallery show did not clarify Judd’s aims. Fried’s confusion as to Judd's intentions is surprising, given his acute description of the artist’s work. Fried noted the sculpture’s "rectilinearity,” its ‘‘regularity of structural pulse*’ (i.e. its seriality), and its threedimensionality. As these descriptions suggest, Fried had already identified the formal vocabulary of minimal art, he was, in fact, among the first writers to do so. Yet he wasn’t convinced by the “rationale” of Judd’s art, its meeting of theory and practice. Just three years later Fried published “Art and Objecthood,” the most authoritative, as well as critical, account of minimal sculpture. Viewing the work of Judd, Robert Morris, Larry Bell and others as an assault on the modernist values he espoused, Fried disparaged minimalism as a “theatrical” or “literalist” art “at war” with art itself. At the time of his first encounter with Judd’s work in 1963,

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however, Fried’s judgement was less severe. In fact, his review ended on a positive note. Judd’s show was “one of the best on view in New York this month,” Fried wrote.5 Here and in other passages of the “New York Letters” we find an inchoate Michael Fried, whose judgments are less absolute than they would later become.4 Making the rounds of the New York gallery circuit during the early 1960s, the young reviewer was called upon to address the spectrum of New Art. Not only did Fried consider the work of Kenneth Noland, ^Morris Louis and Anthony Caro, which he would champion, but also the activities of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and others he viewed more ambivalently. Strong convictions inform these writings, yet the “New York Letters," as general reviews, reveal a certain openness to emerging artists. And among the producers Fried could recommend, if not endorse at this point, was Donald Judd. How did Fried come to write “Art and Objecthood”? How did his initially favourable view of minimal work devolve into a decidedly negative judgement that would nonetheless define “minimalism” for subsequent criticism? Even more, how did Fried’s rejection of this style expand into an antipodal vision of culture at large — a vision where art is pitted against not-art and modernism and theatre are opposed? That is, how did “Art and Objecthood” reach beyond the local topic of minimalism to articulate nothing less than a definition of art and its recognition, and the ethical import of this encounter in a w'orld where art may be said to barely exist, where theatre is the ground of experience? Finally, how did later writers reframe this argument during the 1970s and 1980s, transforming the opposition of art and theatre into a further divide — the distinction between modernism and “postmodernism” — forever mediating our understanding of Fried’s essay while establishing “Art and Objecthood” as a signal text of contemporary criticism?

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The Argument The enterprise known variously as Minimal Art, ABC An, Primary Structures and Specific Objects is largely ideological. It seeks to declare and occupy a position — one which can be formulated in words, and in fact has been formulated by some of its leading practitioners.5

From the outset of “Art and Objecthood” Fried characterised minimalism (or “Literalism” as he called it) as an “enterprise,” an entity. He was, to be sure, perfectly aware of the heterogeneity of minimal work, yet he stated up front that he would reduce this complexity for argument’s sake: “In laying out what seems to me the position Judd and Morris hold in common I have ignored various differences between them.”6 Fried, Judd later complained, cross-referenced Bob Morris, Tony Smith and myself and argued against the mess. Smith’s statements and his work are contradictory to my own. Bob Morris’s Dada interests are very alien to me and there’s a lot in his dogmatic articles that I don’t like?

Little matter. As far as Fried was concerned, the similarities of their work outweighed the differences. What these artists shared, he insisted, was an “ideology,” a position that could be “formulated in words.” This view of minimal work as a preconceived art — an art that could be described — was a common topos of minimal criticism by the late 1960s. Andre’s and Flavin’s arrangements of readymade units according to preconceived schema were often dismissed as “conceptual.” Fried’s particular inspiration here was Greenberg, however, who had recently discussed the new sculpture in this fashion.8 For Greenberg, minimal work was “ideated,” pre­ planned; it was an avant-gardist art intended to shock the viewer, and nothing more. Unlike modernist work, which supposedly resisted immediate understanding, minimalism

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was a Novelty Art (like Pop, Op, and other styles Greenberg disliked), here today and gone tommorrow. Fried did not equate minimalism with avant-gardism; rather, he claimed that minimal art had staked out a position within modernism: “It is in relation both to modernist painting and modernist sculpture that literalist art locates the position it desires to occupy.”9 Declaring itself “neither one nor the other” — as neither painting nor sculpture — minimalism claimed to be “an independent art” distinct from either medium. Fried’s allusion to Judd’s “Specific Objects” (1965), whose opening sentence praised an art that was “neither painting nor sculpture,” was clear, and indeed Judd seems to have been the initial target of “Art and Objecthood.” If Judd’s intentions had once seemed unclear to Fried, they now represented a definite challenge to the'modernist dictum of the integrity of medium.10 Morris had taken a different path. Where Judd saw the Specific Object “as something other than sculpture,” Fried noted, Morris viewed his “unmistakably literalist work” as sculpture, and indeed Morris had recently repudiated Judd’s work for this difference.11 And while Judd attempted to figure wholeness in his work through serial repetition, Morris used the “strong gestalt of unitary-type forms to avoid divisiveness”12 (Fig. 2). But in the end these differences counted less than the views the artists shared, above all their affirmation of “singleness and indivisibility.” As Fried suggested, “for both Judd and Morris, the critical factor is shape ... The shape is the object.”13 The shape is the object. Greenberg had dismissed the monochrome canvases of Rauschenberg and Yves Klein for their Novelty, their pursuit of shock value. Reducing painted surface and support to a perfect congruency, these works seemed easy, hence formally insignificant. Fried, however, took considerable interest in the monochrome’s implications for modernism, articulating his concerns around the problem of shape. His Three American

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Fig. 2. Robert Morris Corner Beam 1964. Grey plywood, 60.96 x 365.76 x 30.48 cm. Exhibition at the Green Gallery, December 1964. Photo: Rudolph Burckhardt, © Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. © Robert Morris, 1964. Reproduced by permission of Viscopy Ltd, Sydney 2000 and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Painters (1965) characterised Stella’s activity as a “deductive” art, for the stripes of the Black and Aluminum works mimicked the shape of the support. But as Fried understood only too well, Stella’s project could also appeal to Literalist taste.1-4 Judd, for one, had already characterised the shaped Aluminum and Copper canvases as “slabs.”15 While Stella resisted this reading (he claimed to have used thick stretchers and enamel paint to make the work “more like a painting and less like an object by stressing the surface”),16 he nevertheless courted Literalist sympathies during the early 1960s, participating in Bruce Glaser’s famous interview with Judd and Flavin in 1964. Appealing to opposed constituencies, the young Stella held an ambivalent position within the arena of 1960s abstraction. From the moment the Black Paintings were exhibited in the Sixteen Americans show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, artists and critics of diverse stripes sought to align his work with their own.17 Suffice it to say that Fried’s Stella was a modernist Stella, whose canvases,

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like Noland’s or Louis’, attested to the vitality of optical abstraction. This view took on a particular urgency during Literalism’s triumph in 1966, the year of the Jewish Museum’s Primary Structures show, of Andre’s first brick installation at Tibor de Nagy, and Judd’s debut exhibition at Castelli. If Judd’s comment that painting was “finished” had once seemed mildly vexing, now it was a positive threat. Fried’s reply to this Literalist resurgence was “Shape as Form’’ (1966). Noting that Stella’s Irregular Polygons had rejected the monochromatic, deductive format of his earlier work, he praised their restitution of retinal play and their counterpoising of figure and ground. By asserting a dialectical tension of depicted and literal shape, Stella had “repudiate[d] ... the literalist implications which ... his stripe paintings appear to carry,” Fried wrote.18 Thus the critique of literal shape in “Art and Objecthood” began as a defence of painting. In this respect, “Art and Objecthood” reads as an affirmation of Greenbergian modernism, and it is usually viewed as such. Yet we are beginning to see that Greenberg’s and Fried’s versions of the modernist narrative were distinct. Fried’s call for a painting that counterpoised depicted and literal shape may be seen as a critique of the Greenberg who had recently declared “flatness and the delimitation of flatness” to be the “constitutive conventions or norms” of pictorial art. For Greenberg, the painter’s observance of these conventions alone allowed the viewer to read a work as a painting. Following this argument to its limit, “a stretched or tacked up canvas” qualified as a picture, “though not necessarily as a successful one,” he wrote.19 This observation, harmlessly offered in “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962), had become objectionable to Fried by the mid 1960s, for it allowed the bare canvas to be read as a “picture” and foretold the minimal relief, as Hal Foster has observed.20 Fried’s solution to this impasse — his assertion of depicted against literal shape — was, to be sure, a Greenbergian solution, for it conceived painting’s renovation in optical terms. The problem was

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that Greenberg himself seemed to have betrayed his own position. “It is not quite enough to say that a bare canvas tacked to a wall is not ‘necessarily’ a successful picture,” Fried insisted. In order for modernism to renew itself, formal concerns besides the delimitation of flatness, such as colour or shape, must be factored in. These pursuits only became relevant at specific historical junctures, Fried insisted, in a further repudiation of Greenberg’s notion of modernism as an unveiling of the medium’s timeless essence: “The task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions which, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing his work’s identity as painting,” Fried wrote.21 “Art and Objecthood,” I am insisting, was not simply a repudiation of minimalism. It was, moreover, a declaration of independence from Greenberg, the Greenberg whose call for pictorial flatness had evidently paved the way for this unfortunate outcome - the Greenberg who “with respect to his understanding of modernism had no truer followers than the literalists.”22 As we shall see, this critique of the limitations of Greenberg's schema would lead to a more philosophical account of modernism than Greenberg had yet attempted. Literalism had still other implications, minimalism’s rejection of pictorialism implied a projection of literalness back into the viewer’s space, Fried noted. It was now Morris’s “minimalism” — a minimalism keyed to the viewer’s body, as opposed to Judd’s relatively pictorial enterprise — that came to the fore of Fried’s argument. The experience of a literalist work was “a situation” that “includefdj the beholder.”23 Fried described this incorporation of the viewer as presence. Derived from Greenberg, this suggested an “aesthetically extraneous” or anti-aesthetic effect — the allegedly shocking impact of the readymade or the machine-made minimal object, which apparently resembled one (a “chiffonier” or other furniture, Greenberg suggested).24 Like the objects we use in our

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daily lives, minimal works exist for us, demanding our recognition. For Greenberg, this solicitation of the spectator’s presence bespoke an unhappy blurring of art and everyday things. The most dramatic illustration of this point in “Art and Objecthood” is Tony Smith’s description of a nocturnal drive on the unfinished New Jersey turnpike, an experience so powerful, he suggested, that gallery art was impoverished by comparison. The “end of art” seemed imminent.25 This account became one of the most notorious passages of “Art and Objecthood,” for it provided a dramatic illustration of how 1960s art was exploring an ever-expanding physical site.26 But, as presented within the context of “Art and Objecthood,” Smith’s little tale did not so much celebrate this expansion as negate the fine art pretensions of the minimalists (Morris excepted), equating the experience of their work with the highway and confirming Greenberg’s view of minimal art as not-art. In questioning the aesthetic ambitions of these artists Fried was hardly alone. “Art and Objecthood” was only the culminating expression of the complaint, leveled since the early 1960s, that the new sculpture was formally insufficient, minimal.21 Yet it should be stressed that, within discussions of the minimal (which included various journalistic denunciations, the complaints of other artists, and so on), Fried’s analysis was idiosyncratic. For unlike many of these accounts, which decried this work’s simple form and factory production, “Art and Objecthood” focused on the phenomenological effect of minimal art — the presence exacted by the Literalist work noted by Greenberg. Fried described this experience as “a theatrical effect or quality — a kind of stage presence.”28 Thus presence in Fried’s sense was not, as for Greenberg, so much the presence of the readymade that shocks us, or awaits our use, as the theatrical presence of a performer preening before an audience. In this sense Literalist work was “anthropomorphic,” Fried insisted, for the unitary shape favoured by Judd and Morris suggested the

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wholeness of another body.29 “The entities or beings encountered in everyday experience in terms that most closely approach the literalist ideal of the ... holistic are other persons. Fried turned Judd’s anti-rationalist discourse on its head. He claimed that Literalist art was anthropomorphic for it was insufficiently abstract. This was a serious charge: for Judd, as for Fried, abstraction and formal quality were inextricably linked. Judd, in his criticism, had consistently argued that art was “abstract” insofar as it denied allusion; his own work, purged of metaphor, exemplified this view. Fried, on the other hand, argued that Caro’s sculpture was more abstract because of its allusiveness. To begin with, its coloured surfaces divested it of a mundane materialism, rendering “substance itself ... mostly optical”31 and undermining its objecthood. Caro’s work was “abstract” in another way. Fried described how Caro’s part-by-part compositions alluded to, without actually depicting, the syntax of bodily gesture: A characteristic sculpture by Caro consists ... in the mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders ... rather than in the compound object which they compose ... The identity of each element matters in somewhat the same way as the fact that it is an arm, or this arm, that makes a particular gesture; or as the fact that it is this word or this note and not another that occurs in a particular place in a sentence or melody.32

This argument, inspired by Greenbergian opticality and the later discourse of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was introduced in an essay of 1963.33 In “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” and other texts collected in the volume Signs, the great phenomcnologist had reconciled the body-based philosophy of his earlier Phenomenology of Perception with structuralist linguistics.34 As deployed by Fried, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of gesture as “indirect” language — a language that alludes rather than denotes — became an analogy for the kind of welded, syntactical

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abstraction Caro had developed in recent years. This joining of Greenberg and Merleau-Ponty allowed for a more sophisticated understanding of opticality than even Greenberg or Fried himself had yet attempted. Previous optical accounts, such as Greenberg’s 1958 paean to David Smith, “The New Sculpture,” or Fried’s analysis of Pollock in Three American Painters, proposed an allusive abstraction that appealed to “eyesight alone.”35 The viewer of a Cubi or #7, 1948 scanned the steel surfaces or drips in a glance. In his discussion of Caro in “Art and Objecthood,” though, Fried transformed the phenomenological account of opticality. To be sure, vision remained instantaneous, yet the beholder of a Caro was no longer Greenberg’s disembodied “eye.” On the contrary, he experienced a bodily identification with the sculpture’s syntactical arrange ment.36' For Fried, “theatre” implied an improper phenomeno­ logical relation between the viewer and the work. Where the modernist sculpture alluded to the spectator’s signifying gestures in daily life — to his or her status as a communicative, socialised subject — the theatrical work intruded directly into his or her existence. It existed in the same space, like “other persons.” Concurrent with this entrance into “real” space was the way the minimal object made the beholder aware of the experience of walking around it, of perceiving it in time. “The literalist preoccupation with ... the duration of the experience — is ... paradigmatically theatrical.”37 The belatedness of this observation is striking, for since the advent of Happenings and Fluxus in the preceding years, the integration of temporal flow, prompted by Cage’s performances, had become a commonplace of avant-garde practice. Yet “Art and Objecthood” did not concern itself with activities that flatly rejected modernist understanding. Literalist work was less easily dismissed, for it posed a more serious challenge; it asked to be judged as fine art, inscribing theatrical convention within the idiom of modernist abstraction.

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How to stave off this intrusion? To presence — an ambulatory spectatorship occurring in time — Fried counterpoised presentness, an “instantaneous” visuality keyed to the optical work. In this moment of perceptual immediacy one took in the work’s form in its entirety, “as if one were infinitely more acute, a single brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.” And this encounter would keep theatre momentarily at bay: “We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.”38

An Ethics of Communication

“Art and Objecthood” is remarkable for its moral tone (Fried speaks of “corrupted” literalism, “infectious” theatre), its faith in one kind of art over another, its clear dichotomies. From the moment of its appearance, critics reviled and satirised its staunch point of view.39 They dismissed Fried’s text as “wrong,” “moralistic” and so on. But these ethical attacks rarely addressed the logic of Fried’s argument on its own terms. It might now be profitable to revisit “Art and Objecthood” through a reflection on its historical, discursive context. Instead of trashing the essay’s claims, we might ask, what was the critical ambience that could foster these claims? What is “presentness” in Fried’s sense, and why is it characterised as “grace”? Greenberg, we know, had conceived modernism in ethical terms. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” had separated “genuine” from “debased” culture; “Towards a Newer Laocoon” had characterised a blurring of media as “perversion.” In the mid-1960s, “Recentness of Sculpture” and other texts defended modernism in the face of Novelty’s intrusion. Still another concurring voice was Stanley Cavell, Fried’s mentor and friend during his years as a graduate Fellow at Harvard.40 Much like Greenberg, Cavell became preoccupied with the challenges

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modernism was then facing from a resurgent avantgardism. In such essays as “Music Discomposed” (1960-1965) and “A Matter of Meaning It” (1967), presented in the volume Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell addressed the recent resurgence of anti­ compositionality.41 As Cavell noted, this modernist technique, initially explored by Schoenberg and Webern, had in recent years radicalised musical arrangement to such an extent that the medium’s very identity was being undermined. Cage’s integration of real time and arbitrariness in his performances unsettled received notions of composition, just as Kaprow’s Happenings and Warhol’s serial canvases and films challenged standard definitions of visual art. This onslaught of avant-gardist disturbance had produced a crisis of judgment: Why couldn’t we allow Pop Art, say, or Cage’s evenings, or Happenings, to be entertainments of some kind without troubling about art? But we are troubled. Because for us, given the gradual self-definitions and self­ liberations over the past century of the separate major arts we accept, Pop Art presents itself as, or as challenging, painting; Cage presents his work as, or as challenging the possibility of, music.42

The problem was to distinguish modernist work from mere avant-gardism, when both practices sought, among other things, to expose the conventions of the medium. Unlike Greenberg, Cavell did not dismiss Kaprow or Warhol, however. His concern was how these artists challenged tradition, for “the experience of the modern is one which itself raises the question of fraudulence.”43 Ultimately, Cavell believed in something like “fraudulence.” Despite (or because of) such scepticism, he asserted a distinction between the category of art and an avant-gardist activity that undermined art’s discrete identity. As Stephen Melville has observed in an important discussion of the Fried/Cavell dialogue, Cavell in these writings sought to stave off the seduction of scepticism

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even as he acknowledged its appeal, finding inspiration in this effort in the example of Kant, who overcame a halfcentury of British sceptical thought. Valorising artists who were not merely modern or avant-gardist but “modernist,” he resisted an emerging (that is, “postmodern”) impulse to reject time-honoured categories of knowledge and the possibility of valid judgment or belief.44 On the contrary, the modernist practitioner has faith in the medium and its internal history.45 Little matter that the identities of timehonoured media were in doubt. Like the philosopher of Pure Reason who, establishing the secure limits of the discipline, breathed new life into philosophy, the modernist perpetuates his art through an interrogation of the medium.46 Cavell distinguished between two contemporary impulses, one a modern or avant-gardist activity’ whose challenge to traditional media results in their abrogation, the other a modernist art that constitutes itself as a tradition developing within itself. Clearly, Cavell had assimilated Greenberg’s narrative of modernist painting as a reflexive process, and indeed he credited Fried with the introduction.47 But he now attributed a “moral motive” to this venture in a manner more reminiscent of T.S. Eliot than of Greenberg. “The unheard of appearance of the modern in art is an effort not to break, but to keep faith with tradition.”48 Modernism’s moral motive was its fealty to the medium's integrity; it “kept faith” with tradition. “Art and Objecthood” affirmed this view. At the head of Fried s essay was a curious epigraph: a citation from Perry Miller's Jonathan Edwards, one of a series of studies of Puritan culture by one of Harvard’s most eminent scholars during those years?9 Fried focused on a particular Meditation on the theme of divine destruction, an integral component of Edwards’ chiliastic conception of history’. According to Edwards, “if the world were destroyed and a new world were installed in its place, though it were to exist in every particular in the same manner as this world, it would not

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be the same.” Irrevocably altered, the world would exist nonetheless, for it is continuous. “It is certain with me that the world exists anew every moment; that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment renewed.”50 Miller argues that Edwards was unusual among New England Puritans in his empiricist orientation, attributed to the early influence of Locke.51 As a precocious child Edwards wrote an essay on the habits of spiders, and a treatise on the rainbow inspired by Newton’s Opticks. Later, as he developed his theology, he found confirmation of the Divine Presence in natural observation. In Miller’s reading, Edwards’ empirical brand of Calvinism used the persuasions of science to stave off the agnostic’s scepticism. For Edwards the continuity « of the world was evidence enough that we “every moment see the proof of a God as we should have seen if we had seen Him create the world at first.”52 Edwards’ creation narrative, placed at the head of “Art and Objecthood,” reads as an allegory of modernism: the world’s continual rebirth as a perpetual renovation. It implies that painting, as it approaches the asymptotical limit of the bare canvas, undergoes a dialectical process of self criticism, simultaneous death and renewal.53 In “Art and Objecthood,” the history of modernism is a tale of painting’s rebirth in the face of its purported, and often proclaimed, demise.54 To this tautological account Edwards counterpoised a narrative of destruction: “If the world were annihilated ... and a new world were freshly created ... it would not be the same.” Had the world been obliterated, there would be no continuity. But there is; and this constant rebirth is a sign of Grace, God’s promise of renewal, figured by the rainbow, after the Flood’s destruction. On the other side of Grace is Chaos. Within a modernist schema this suggests a dissolution of media and categories of knowledge, a forgetting of History. The modernist work sets up a counter-model to this discordance. Viewing a Caro or Olitski, one becomes conscious of one’s place in the “existence of things.” Time

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is momentarily arrested. One experiences the sensation of presentness — a presentness located in a continuous History, a greater harmony — as a feeling of momentary affirmation. For Cavell, too, the optical work offered a visual corollary of presentness. “Caro is not using colored beams, rods, and sheets, but beams and rods and sheets of color. It is almost as though the color helps dematerialize its supporting object.”55 Colour transformed Caro’s steel beams from mundane objects into art. “They are,” Cavell observes, “no longer things."56 In “Art and Objecthood” Fried notes a remark of Cavell’s, uttered in a seminar, that for Kant “a work of art is not an object.” The dialogue of mentor and student, of philosopher and critic came full circle: Fried, inspired by Greenberg, made the initial case for an optical sculpture that transcended its base materiality, and Cavell in turn substantiated the theoretical claims of this judgment. A work of art is not an object. Distinguishing between art and everyday things, between aesthetic and mundane experience, Cavell turned to the medium that shook those categories. How did theatre square with his argument? In an argument derived from Brecht, Cavell distinguished between naturalistic and modern drama: the former a theatre that solicits one’s emotions (the viewer, watching the story unfold, identifies with the actors and events); the latter an abstract drama that distances the spectator: “Modern dramatists do not rely on their audiences, but deny them.”57 Unlike naturalist theatre, modem theatre is not a literal representation of reality. Brecht and Beckett communicate indirectly, through the opacity of their articulations, and plots that do not resolve. “Beckett,” Cavell observes, “does not want what is communicated easily to be what he communicates ... His effort is not to find belief from his audience, but to defeat it, so that his meaning has to be searched for.”58 Modern theatre effectively suspends its theatricality.59 In another essay in Must We Mean What We Say?, “The

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Fig. 3. Anthony Coro Midday 1960. Painted steel, 233.1 x 95 x 370.2 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mr and Mrs Arthur Wiesenberger Fund. Photograph © 2000 The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear” (1966-67), Cavell elaborated this account in concert with Fried’s antitheatrical discourse. For both writers, modes of spectatorship had ethical claims. As Cavell suggests, “the conditions of theatre literalize the conditions we exact for existence outside — hiddenness, silence, isolation — hence make that existence plain.”60 Theatre’s ability to “literalise” or re-present human experience naturalistically is potentially harmful, for the viewer of the theatrical work risks identifying with the alienation depicted onstage. So powerful are naturalism’s conventions they may normalise, in the spectator, this unfortunate state. “In failing to see what the true position of a character is, in a given moment, we are exactly put in bis condition, and thereby implicated in tragedy,”61 In contrast, Shakespeare’s antitheatrical denial of our presence to the characters (“we are not in their presence”) while making them present to us reveals the tragic nature of their existence: “We know we are in a theatre.”62 By rendering explicitly theatrical the misguided

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actions of his characters onstage, Shakespeare attempts to defeat theatre and its potentially tragic consequences in real life. “In giving us a place within which our hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, [King Lear] gives us a chance to stop.”65 Viewing Shakespeare’s play from a distance, we become conscious of his characters’ fateful isolation from one another. We see the folly of Lear’s refusal of Cordelia’s plain expression of love and his acceptance of Goneril’s and Regan’s false protestations of feeling. We witness the tragedy of Gloucester’s blindness to the wily Edgar — the son who lies to him and precipitates his fall — and punishment of faithful Edmund, choices that lead to his blinding. And our consciousness of these characters’ foibles has the potential to illuminate our inability to express ourselves (just as we cannot fully understand the meaning of other people’s utterances), our own “avoidance” of love. Like the Caro sculpture that alludes to the body’s expressive gestures, antitheatrical theatre affirms the viewer’s presentness within a web of signifying relations. It posits a self who communicates with others: “By permitting us presentness to ourselves” antitheatrical theatre establishes a “connection” between us and the “reality” of the world.64 And yet Cavell’s scenario may conclude, like Lear itself, in tragedy, for the antitheatrical work risks the failure of not achieving its aims. Shakespeare's play exposes the “theatricality ... [it] must overcome, is meant to overcome, shows the tragedy in failing to overcome.”65 In the end, we may each respond to Regan’s and Goneril’s theatrical overtures while rejecting our Cordelias; we will each experience moments of solipsism and blindness. Passive in our witnessing of tragedy’s unfolding, we realise all the more that we “cannot do and suffer what it is another’s to do and suffer.”66 We cannot join Lear and Cordelia onstage and set things right. This is the tragedy of Lear for us: by virtue of its being theatre it confirms “the final fact of our separateness.”67 * * *

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Whence this pessimism — this suspicion of a viable “presentness” — this understanding of presentness as not guaranteed but arbitrarily and temporarily conferred, presentness as Grace? Numerous writers have characterised the conclusion of “Art and Objecthood” as a simple affirmation of a metaphysical subjectivity. But in Edwards’ Calvinist theology' (or Cavell’s epistemology', if for other reasons), presentness is hardly secured. Grace is not a given but is rather the exception, the gift of a fearsome, allencompassing God. As Miller observes, in the doctrine of Puritan New England “it had always been held that man is passive in the reception of grace.”68 An active attempt to secure grace, as propounded by Arminius, a heretical Dutch Calvinist Edwards repudiated, would in its demonstration of a knowledge of one’s salvation risk damnation. For Edwards, the htrtnan being is in God’s eyes little more than an insect. He likened a fall from Grace to a spider tossed carelessly into a fire; hell is an eternity spent in this gruesome suffering. Fried’s claim that “presentness is Grace” thus speaks of presentness as an epiphany, a presentness experienced by the rare few. (Let it be said that the aesthetic of “Art and Objecthood” is unapologetically undemocratic.) The elect tended to be children — Edwards’ most famous disciples were Abigail Hutchison, a virgin who died young, and the four-year-old Phebe Bartlet — who had not yet developed the full faculty of reason and the scepticism to which this may lead.69 Grace is at best a fleeting sensation, a momentary feeling, "as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it.”70 Like Puritan Grace, modernist presentness is anything but guaranteed.71 It is, on the contrary, a longing-for-presentness, an awareness that, as David Clarke has observed, one is never “infinitely more acute.”72 Tony Smith’s drive on the New Jersey turnpike, occurring in real time, is an experience “wholly accessible to everyone.”73 Whereas the impact of a Caro — should one

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have the fortune to experience it — is temporary at best, and will not last. The writings of Cavell, we have seen, speak of this longing-for-presentness. “The Avoidance of Love” presents a subject blind to self-knowledge and to a knowledge of others’ intentions. Language is the culprit responsible for these lapses of communication, for language can only fail the task set out for it to reflect with perfect transparency our ideas and emotions. It can only approximate — or distort — what we mean to say. “Feelings (like intentions and hopes and wishes, though not in the same way) are expressed in speech and in conduct generally,” Cavell writes, and “the (actual, empirical) problem of the knowledge of oneself and of others is set by the multiple and subtle distortions of their expression.”74 Narrating a consistent and inevitable breakdown of communication, “The Avoidance of Love” and other essays in Must We Mean What We Say? demonstrate a serious engagement with the later Wittgenstein, whose writings were becoming increasingly available to British and American readers.75 Fried, who attended his friend’s lectures, also became absorbed in Wittgenstein’s writings.76 In Cavell’s hands, Wittgenstein became a tool for assessing the challenge posed by avant-gardism (a practice that questions its intentionality) to modernism (an expressive art). Like Fried, Cavell believed theatre to be a dangerously widespread phenomenon. “The place of art is now pervasively threatened by the production of objects whose hold upon us is theatrical.”77 Deeply aware of language’s failures, he all the more advocated an art of feeling. The anti-compositional impulse of Schoenberg and others had unsettled unqualified belief in intention, to be sure; modern art in general "forces the issue of sincerity.”78 For this reason the modernist project was especially urgent. For all its radicality, its exploration of anti-compositional techniques, it remained an expressive art: “We know works of art because they are felt as made by someone.”79 The modernist artist must “find something he can be sincere

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and serious in; something he can mean” even in the awareness that his expression may misfire.”80And the composed or “made” (as opposed to readymade) work, the product of a self who means what he attempts to say, attempts to aftirm the spectator's presentness: “This ... is more than a reaffirmation of the first fact about art, that it must be felt, not merely known — or, as I would rather put it, that it must be known for oneself.”81 The modernism of Cavell and Fried, I am suggesting, was not simply an argument for the integrity of medium. It was a modernism of communication (with all the moral implications this term carried, and still carries), even if — or because — they knew this was unachievable.82 It was a belated and deeply sophisticated version of the claim of “Abstract Expressionism” as an art of feeling proposed at the moment oi* this paradigm’s “collapse.”83 In a world where Cage and Warhol were indistinguishable from Schoenberg and Caro, where the line between intention and fraudulence had blurred, the modernist artist must attempt to express himself. For the alternative to modernism was the literalness of lived life, isolation from oneself and others, a loss of belief in the possibility of knowing: everything summed up, in a word, by “theatre.”

The Rewriting of “Art and Objecthood” The most influential line of reception of Fried’s essay developed in the remarkable early writings of Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss, where an assimilation of structuralist, post-structuralist and phenomenological principles motivated a rejection of Fried’s model of an art of presentness. In Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression, the catalogue of the artist’s 1969 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery, Michelson noted how Morris’ sculpture challenged “the convention or fiction sustaining the sculpture and criticism of a preceding generation,” which had maintained a “notion of

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a space that was the medium of a predominantly visual and synthetic perception ... distinct from that of non­ aesthetic experience.”84 As Fried suggested, Morris’ work had blurred the dividing line between art and objecthood, between an instantaneous aesthetic experience and a spectatorship of literal objects occurring in real time and space. The “transgression” of Morris' work was its affirmation of the theatricality Fried had found objectionable. Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression was a powerful reversal of the cherished values of “Art and Objecthood.” Where the earlier essay valorised instantaneity, the other praised a perception occurring in real time. Where one privileged an ideal aesthetic space, the other called for actual space, justifying this position through reference to Merleau-Ponty: “Morris’s questioning of a self-contained system of virtual space is impelled by the recognition of the most profound and general sense in which our seeing is linked to our sense of ourselves as being bodies in space,” Michelson wrote.85 Michelson’s allusion to the French philosopher offered an alternative reading of his phenomenology, favouring his earlier, bodily-based model to the semiological work used by Fried. In her bouleversement of Fried’s thesis, even a different Merleau-Ponty’ was called for.86 As often occurs in such polemical debates, however, the object of critique was reduced to a straw man. The complexity of Fried's analysis suffered, just as the heterogeneity of “minimalism” was diminished in bis account. Michelson’s particular target was Fricdian presentness. Tracing the minimal perceptual model of copresence to an alternative, radical, avant-gardist past — Dada and Constructivism — Michelson equated presentness (here described as Presence) with a retrograde moralism and outmoded ontology: That which leaps to the eye is the manner in which ... “presentness" as aesthetic value, presenes, for a secular age, the attributes of the logically pre-existent, absolute

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and timeless, real Presence called into question by modernism.8"

The subtle claim of presentness as the passing and exalted experience ol one who attempts to communicate, who seeks to integrate himself into a greater sociality or system of meaning in the face of this near impossibility, was dismissed. Indeed, Michelson referred at this juncture to Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of self-presence, among the first writers to do so in a discussion of visual art.88 But it should by now be clear that the model of presentness as explored in the writings of Fried and Cavell and logocentric self-presence as described by Derrida are not the same.89 Fried's and Cavell's formulation suggests a nostalgia or a desire for presentness. It posits the imagined plenitude of a ’self who attempts to make contact with others in a world where communication misfires; it is therefore incompatible with Derrida’s notion of a subjectivity of transparent immediacy. Despite, or because of, its point-by-point opposition to “Art and Objecthood,” Michelson’s essay actually affirmed Fried’s analysis of minimalism. That Morris, blurring the distinctions between aesthetic and actual space, between an idealised model of viewing and one occurring in “real time,” had set out to destroy modernism these writers could agree. For all her objections to “Art and Objecthood,” Michelson nonetheless perceived Morris’ work through Friedian lenses. In Passages in Modem Sculpture (1977), Krauss went on to graft this notion of an art of “real time and space” onto the broader field of postwar art, if not twentieth­ century sculpture as a whole.90 In Krauss’ account, the history of sculpture from Rodin and Picasso to Nauman and Smithson becomes a narrative of the medium’s progressive rejection of an “idealist” space and self­ present viewer for a three-dimensional activity geared to a moving, perceiving body: the body of “Notes on Sculpture,” a theatricalised body. Indeed minimalism —

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minimalism-as-theatre — would dominate the book’s final chapters, functioning as both its interpretive matrix and culminating episode.91 More recently, in The Optical Unconscious and other writings, Krauss has proposed a counterhistory of twentieth-century art that subverts the instantaneous visuality of the aesthetics of presentness. Fried, she recounts, had once praised the extraordinarily acute vision of baseball hitter Ted Williams — for Krauss a perfect metaphor of opticality: To see so fast that the blur of that white smudge could be exploded into pure contact, pure simultaneity, pure optical pattern ... In that very motionless explosion of pure presentness was contained as well vision’s connection to its objects ... as a moment of pure release, of pure transparency, of pure self-knowledge.92

Krauss recalls how this exchange occurred during the early 1960s,93 and moreover how, after reading the conclusion of ‘Art and Objecthood” years later, she had felt a ‘‘sense of disbelief.” The Fried of the early 1960s and the author of ‘‘Art and Objecthood” did not seem to match: [“Presentness is grace”) seemed to shake everything 1 thought I’d understood. The healthy, Enlightenment-like contempt for piety, the faith instead in the intellect’s coming into an ever purer self-possession ... It didn’t seem to me that anything about this could be squared with most of Michael’s earlier talk about modernism.94

These recollections are tremendously useful, for they confirm that something like a transition occurred in Fried's criticism between the early 1960s — the moment culminating in Three American Painters — and the writing of “Art and Objecthood.” For Krauss, this shift from the image of Williams’ home run to the model of grace is the dead-end, or culminating expression, of opticality, its “leap” from a secular rationalism to a metaphysical subjectivity. But, in this transition opticality ended up a

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more fraught notion than it started out. The formulation of presentness in “Art and Objecthood” in relation to Caro’s work undermined belief in self-presence: once presentness became a moment of grace it was no longer assured. Even more, Fried’s account of Caro’s sculpture as bodily analogue exceeded the sense of opticality as pure visual plenitude. It posited a notion of sculpture as a syntactical corollary to our own gesturing bodies — a sculpture that would disrupt our feelings of isolation (the theatre we experience every day), reminding us of our existence within a semantic, social field. Opticality itself was transformed well beyond its significance for Greenberg, if not rejected outright.95 In “Art and Objecthood” the “faith in the intellect’s coming into an ever purer self-possession” is merely faith. The confident viewer/athlete has become a believer burdened by doubt. Opticality is no longer opticality, exactly, but has taken on a contradictory meaning. “Art and Objecthood” is the summa of Fried’s early criticism, yet its philosophical reach points in unforeseen directions. Assimilating a field of reference unfamiliar to Greenberg, it announced the end of his apprenticeship to the older critic, already predicted in “Shape as Form” (that their personal interaction “began to fray” toward the end of 1965 surely hastened this rupture).96 Fried had moved into new territory — a different modernism.97 This said, if we take the target of The Optical Unconscious to be the opticality of Greenberg, or of Three American Painters, then its account remains persuasive. Fried, in Three American Painters, describes Pollock’s line as delimiting “nothing — except, in a sense, eyesight.” But in “Art and Objecthood” visual plenitude is no longer guaranteed: theatre, not presentness, has become the ground of perception. Michelson and Krauss’ interpretation became the dominant account of “Art and Objecthood” and the late modernism it came to represent. In the early criticism of Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, and Craig Owens, Fried’s text and minimalism (minimalism-as-theatre) were said to

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mark an epistemological shift between the modern and the postmodern.98 On one side was modernism, an art that explored the constraints of the medium, projecting an instantaneous visuality or presentness; on the other was postmodernism, an art between media that solicited presence. Crimp, in the seminal essay “Pictures,” took Fried’s argument to heart, arguing that postmodernist art — epitomised by performance or the photography of Cindy Sherman and others — was theatrical in nature. If theatre is “what lies between the arts,” Crimp observed, then “we have witnessed a radical break with that modernist tradition, effected precisely by a preoccupation with the ‘theatrical’.”99 More than any single text, “Art and Objecthood” defined Greenbergian modernism for an emerging postmodernism. Fried’s essay came to be seen as the fulfillment of this paradigm, more fervently “Greenbergian,” perhaps, than Greenberg’s own writings. In fact, we have seen that the positions of these critics were distinct: Fried held Greenberg accountable for the literalist mess, imbuing opticality with a different philosophical meaning. And how did Greenberg regard Fried’s text? This essay which to later generations would seem a perfect summation of modernism in the visual arts was, for Greenberg, insufficiently empirical. “He didn’t need ‘theatre’,” Greenberg later recalled.100 In other words, Fried’s recourse to theoretical argumentation had brought “Art and Objecthood” too far from the kind of practical criticism Greenberg held dear. The Hegelian and Kantian underpinnings of his work notwithstanding, Greenberg maintained that criticism was essentially a matter of personal taste, the result of a direct encounter between the viewer and the w'ork. The critic is an “eye" that describes, and judges, what it sees. To be sure, this shift from the répertoriai writing of the “New York Letters” to the “philosophical” criticism of “Art and Objecthood”101 developed in concert with Greenberg's own academicisation in the 1960s and 1970s, reflected in his mounting

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interest in aesthetic theory and his own institutional reception — but this is another story.102 And what of minimalism? As this work’s most thoughtful denunciation, “Art and Objecthood” was also, ironically, its canonisation. The seal of a negative definition — the isolation and naming of the dread object, the discovery of “theatre” in the visual arts — became a seal of recognition. The disputatious accounts of Judd and Morris, coupled with Greenberg’s discourse and newly assimilated philosophical models, added up into something new and powerful, “minimalism” was born. Like two eternal combatants, “Art and Objecthood” and minimalism (minimalism-as-theatre) came to compose a field of opposition, a before and after-, the central divide, it could be argued, in the aesthetic debates of the postwar period. Each produced the other; each guarantees the other’s importance; each defines the other even now.

NOTES 1

2

3 4

5

Michael Fried, “New York Letter" Art International 8/1 (15 February 1964) 26. See Judd’s comments in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd," in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968) 148-64. Fried, “New York Letter,” 26. Fried had begun to write criticism for Arts Magazine shortly before joining the staff of Art International in 1962. Other authors of the “New York Letters" included Barbara Rose and Lucy Lippard, while Annette Michelson contributed a “Letter from Paris.” Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood" Artforum 5/10 (June 1967) 12. The essay appeared in Artforum of June 1967, in an issue devoted to contemporary sculpture organised by the editor, Philip Leider, in response to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition American Sculpture of the 1960s. The “Special Issue" also included such texts as Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" and Robert Smithson’s “Toward the Development of an Air Terminal Site."

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6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

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Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 12. “Complaints I" (1969), reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: The Nova Scotia College of An and Design, 1975) 198. See Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in Battcock, Mininal Art, 180-6. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 12. Fried had introduced the notion of “literalism" in connection with minimal work in “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings” Artforum 4ft (November 1966) 22. An earlier, not dissimilar use of this term, formulated in respect to Robbe-Grillet’s enterprise, appears in Roland Barthes, “Literal Literature,” in Critical Essays, transi. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern, 1972) 51-8. See Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture I and II,” repr. in Battcock, Minimal Art, 222ff. Fried, “An and Objecthood,” 12; my italics. ibid. For another account of the intertextual dialogue of “Specific Objects,” “Notes on Sculpture" and “Art and Objecthood,” see Hal Foster’s excellent “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, ed. Howard Singerman (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986) 162-83. See Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965) 43-4. See Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd," 162. ibid., 158. On the ambivalence of Stella’s role see Philip Leider, “Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella’s Retrospective at the Modern” Artforum 8/8 (April 1970) 44-51. Fried, "Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings," 24. Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism” Art International 6/8 (25 October 1962) 30. This quotation appears in Fried, "Art and Objecthood," 23n4. See Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” 168. As Fried himself later recalled: “what fascinated me about the minimalists was that they read Greenberg, valued the same recent art, but saw in it a development that projected literalness ... It was as if [they] were the ones who really believed the Greenbergian reduction — that there was a timeless essence to art that was progressively revealed. And in their reading the timeless essence turned out to be not just the delimited

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22

23 24

25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33

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flat surface of painting but the literal properties of the support." See Hal Foster, ed., Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1987) 73. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,’’ 23. For another account of this displacement, see Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism” October 19 (Winter 1981) 55-92. Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” Art and Objecthood (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 38. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 15. See Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture.” In the taped version of Bruce Glaser’s “Questions to Stella and Judd,” which also included Flavin, Glaser discussed “presence” as a positive term denoting the phenomenological effect of a powerful work, a view with which Stella and Judd concurred. See Bruce Glaser, “New Nihilism or New Art?” Radio interview with Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Frank Stella, 15 February 1964, Pacifica Radio Archives #BB3394. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 19. On this expansion see Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). The discourse of the minimal, as it emerged during the 1960s, is the subject of my Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s, forthcoming from Yale University Press. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 16. Ironically Morris, influenced by Fried’s reading, would shortly arrive at the same conclusion. In “Notes on Sculpture IV” (1968), he launched his own critique of the minimal object to argue for a deanthropomorphised scatter art incompatible with the bodily analogue of the Gestalt. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,’’ 19. Michael Fried, “Anthony Caro" Art International 7/7 (September 1963), 70. ibid. See ibid. Fried’s reception of Merleau-Ponty was mediated by the instruction of his undergraduate professor, the literary critic R.P. Blackmur, author of Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952). See Fried, "An Introduction to My Art Criticism," Art and Objecthood, 29.

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34 See “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, transi. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 39-83. Of course, Merleau-Ponty had devoted an entire chapter to gesture in the Phenomenology (1945), but it was the philosopher’s Saussurian work of the 1950s that inspired Fried’s reading of Caro. 35 See Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) 139-45. On Greenberg’s formulation — developed through the course of transforming this essay from the more materialist account of the original, 1948 version to the explicitly optical narrative in Art and Culture — see Yve-Alain Bois, “Les amendements de Greenberg” Les Cahiers du Musée dArt Moderne 45-46 (Autumn/Winter 1993) 52-60. 36 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 20. 37 ibid., 22. 38 ibid., 23. 39 Among the many replies the essay has provoked, the most notable include Smithson’s irreverent “Letter to the Editor” Artforum (October 1967), reprinted in Nancy’ Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1979) 38; Allan Kaprow, “Letters" Artforum 6/1 (September 1967) 4; Annette Michelson, Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression (Washington: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1970); Lucy Lippard, Tony Smith (New York: Abrams, 1972); and Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977) chapter 6. 40 The intensity of this dialogue, which included the musicians John and Rosemary Harbison, is documented in Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University’ Press, 1969) xiii and in numerous footnotes in “Music Discomposed,” “A Matter of Meaning It,” and “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear?' chapters 7, 8 and 10 of this volume. Fried, for his part, acknowledged these relationships in “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” 27n8 and 10, and in “Art and Objecthood”: 23nl(), 15, and 19. 41 An earlier essay by Fried, “Anthony Caro and Kenneth Noland: Some Notes on Not Composing” Lugano Review 1/3-4 (Summer 1965) 198-206, had discussed the exploration of these techniques in late modernist work. 42 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: a book of

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essays (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 219. ibid. See Stephen Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) chapter 1. Already addressing the question of scepticism in Must We Mean What We Say?, 323 ff., Cavell would develop this theme in In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Scepticism and Romanticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 27-49. I wish to thank Toni Ross for mentioning this text to me, and for her acute suggestions throughout this section. Cavell. Must We Mean What We Say?, 219. ibid. The clearest statement of Greenberg’s position is “Modernist Painting” (I960), reprinted in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 85-93. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 206. For Eliot’s account of modernism as a canonical tradition of highminded individuals see “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (San Diego and New York: Harvest Books 1975) 37-44. Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (William Sloan Associates 1949). Other relevant studies by Miller included Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933), The Puritans (1938), The New England Mind (1939) and Roger Williams (1953)Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 329-30. ibid., 52. ibid.. Recently, Fried has distanced himself from this dialectical account, which, prompted by the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Lukàs, teased out certain Hegelian underpinnings of Greenberg’s Kantian inspired view of modernism as radical self-criticism. “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” Art and Objecthood, 18. To my thinking, Fried’s “Hegelian” gloss on Greenberg, combined with Edward’s creation narrative, is more evocative than its source, inscribing doubt (and conceivedly, painting’s “death ”) as an essential ingredient — indeed, a catalyst — of modernist procedure: Louis and Noland defeat doubt by continuing to paint. In contrast, in

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“Modernist Painting" no hint of scepticism enters Greenberg's confident account. As Yve-Alain Bois has argued, the “death of painting" — a death that implies, inchoately, the medium’s renewal — is an old topos of modernism dating to abstraction's inaugural years. In offering a defence of painting in response to the Literalist challenge of minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” is a belated expression of this discourse. See Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990) 229-44. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 217. ibid. ibid., 210-11. ibid. Fried, for his part, was undecided whether Brechtian “alienation” was an effect of presence or presentness. See Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 23nl9. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 333. ibid., 313. ibid., 327. ibid., 334. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) 23. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 333. Stephen Melville has already suggested that Fried’s dialectic of absorption and theatricality is predicated on the awareness that “the absorptive project can and must be recognized as itself inherently theatrical ... ‘Theatricality’ can no longer serve as some external dumping place for the failures of painting because it is now a term internal to painting itself." Philosophy Beside Itself, 14. Cavell also recognises theatricality as the essential phenomenological convention of the theatrical medium — a convention modernist dramatists and Shakespeare suspend in full awareness of its inescapability. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 339. ibid., 339. Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 57. The salvation of Abigail Hutchison and Phebe Bartlet is discussed in Edwards’s pamphlet A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, and the Neighboring

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Towns and Villages (1737). 70 Fried, "Art and Objecthood," 22; my italics. 71 As Fried later recalled, “A sense of inner combat motivated the overtly theological cast of my essay’s rhetorical frame ... What was at stake in my invocation of [the concent of presentnessj was something other than mere instantaneousness ... The viewer’s conviction in a work’s ‘seriousness,’ its ‘quality,’ is never for a moment, or is only for a moment, safe from the possibility of doubt.” “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” Art and Objecthood, 47. 72 See David Clarke, "The Gaze and the Glance: Competing Understandings of Visuality in the Theory and Practice of Late Modernist Art” Art History 15/1 (March 1992) 80-98. 73 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,’’ 19. 74 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 69. 75 On the significance and difficulty of this reception see Cavell, Must ^e Mean What We Say?, , 44-72. The first edition of the Philosophical Investigations was published by Macmillan in 1953, followed by a second edition published by Blackwell in 1958; this was Fried’s wedding present to Frank Stella and Barbara Rose who married in November 1961. Blackwell and Harper & Row published The Brown and Blue Books in subsequent editions in 1958 and I960. 76 “It would be hard to overstate the importance of Wittgenstein’s later writings, as expounded and developed by Cavell, to my sense of my own project.” Fried, “An Introduction to My Criticism,” Art and Objecthood, 33. 77 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 333. 78 ibid., 211. 79 ibid., 198. 80 ibid., 212. Harry Cooper has made the related argument that Fried’s support for a relational mode in “Shape as Form,” 1966 (after a brief flirtation with anti-compositional method in “Some Notes on Not Composing,” Lugano Review 1 (Summer 1965) 198-206) and his account of Stella’s “deduction” in Three American Painters indicates a desire to “sav[ej subjectivity from the threat of radical deductivism” on Fried’s part by 1966. (From an unpublished seminar paper quoted in Fried “An Introduction to My Art Criticism," Art and Objecthood, n46, 64). For Fried’s comments on Cooper’s analysis see ibid. 81 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 218.

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82 The writings of Jürgen Habermas have also proposed a modernist ethics of communication. See for example, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, transi. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) chapter 11. 83 For another defence of the expressionist position at this time, see Meyer Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting” and “On the Humanity of Abstract Painting” in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Braziller, 1982) 213-32. 84 Michelson, Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression, 39. ibid., 44-5. 85 86 Michelson’s engagement with Merleau-Ponty dated to the 1950s when, as she recounts in the notes of her Morris text, she had attended the philosopher’s lectures at the Collège de France. The different readings that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology could sustain among these critics is the subject of my “The Uses of Merleau-Ponty: Fried, Michelson, Krauss,” in Minimalisms (Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1998) 178-87. 87 Michelson, Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression, 19 and 23. 88 ibid., 9. 89 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transi. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1974), and “Différence,” in Margins of Philosophy, transi. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 1-28. 90 See Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 242. Krauss’ allusion to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with reference to minimalism first appears in “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post 60s Sculpture" Artforum 12/3 (November 1973) 149-56, and resurfaces in "Richard Serra: A Translation," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985) 260-75. 91 On this point see Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism." 92 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993) 7. 93 See Rosalind E. Krauss, “The lm/pulse to See,” in Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) 51. Frank Stella uses the same description of Ted Williams ("he hits the ball right out of the park”) at the conclusion of the radio version of the Glaser interview

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with Judd and Flavin in February 1964, confirming Krauss’ memory that Fried’s and Stella’s fascination with the baseball player dated to this time. 94 Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 7. 95 Michael Fried later observed that “what there isn’t in Art and Objecthood’ is a reification of opticality; what there is in the text is some other kind of notion that has to do with relation and syntax — the way sculptures like Caro’s are formed and how that is different from the syntax of ordinary objects, which is the syntax hypostatised, reified and projected by minimalism. That’s the difference — not opticality versus object, but a radically syntactic or differential an versus the projection of objecthood.” Quoted in Hal Foster, ed., Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987) 72. However, as suggested here, Fried’s rejection of Greenberg’s proposal of a tacked-up canvas that cpuld be read as a “picture” in favour of a painting that opposed depicted to literal shape, followed by the essay’s famous passage lauding Olitski’s Bunga, are clearly a defence of opticality. As argued here, “An and Objecthood” marks a later phase within Fried's early criticism, when the formulation of opticality matures and shifts through an encounter with xMerleau-Ponty’s gestural phenomenology among other sources. To my thinking, these models were not necessarily at odds. After all, Merleau-Ponty, in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” conceived of a phenomenological art in pictorial terms as Fried would, even if he would not have endorsed opticality as such with its implication of ideal form. 96 Fried, “An Introduction to my Art Criticism," Art and Objecthood, 11. 97 Smithson dubbed this transition in Fried’s work “Mannerist Modernism.” See Smithson’s “Letter to the Editor,” in Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson, 38. 98 Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” 169. 99 See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures” October 8 (Spring 1979) 75-88. 100 Asked to comment on “Art and Objecthood,” Greenberg replied: “He [Fried] stopped being a formalist there.” “He stopped looking at art empirically?” “That’s right ... He didn’t need theatre.”’ Interview by the author with Clement Greenberg, New York, NY, 22 October 1993.

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101 The term “philosophical criticism,” coined in respect to Fried’s activity, is Cavell’s. See Must We Mean What We Say?, 313 and 333. 102 More work needs to be done on Greenberg’s reception in the 1950s and 1960s in seminars and lectures at Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard (arising in a series of encounters with Fried, Krauss, Darby Bannard, Kenworth Moffett, and Kermit Champa among others) and in institutional settings outside the US, including the Power Institute in Sydney, Australia, where Greenberg delivered the lecture “Avant-Garde Attitudes,” his most virulent critique of neo avant-gardism, in 1968. Greenberg’s interest in Kantian aesthetics has been explored in Thierry de Duve’s excellent “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” in Reconstructing Modernism, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992) and in other writings.

I wish to thank xMark Bauerlein, Yve-Alain Bois, Marc Gotlieb and Toni Ross for their editorial suggestions on previous drafts of this essay.

The Difference Manet Makes Stephen Melville [Courbet] put his century into his art so completely that he practically forced his successor, Manet, to turn toward the future before he was quite ready. — Clement Greenberg, 19491

Michael Fried’s critical writings of the 1960s have led to both what seems a permanent coupling of his name with that of Clement Greenberg, usually accompanied by some invocation of terms like “elitism,” “dogmatic formalism,” and so on, and a series of repeated efforts by Fried to break free of this cage. In fact, these efforts do not begin with his move out of criticism and into historical writing but are already in motion in the very essay, the 1967 “Art and Objecthood,”2 that is often treated as clinching the identification of Fried with the Greenbergian position and voice. The break that essay makes with Greenberg — a break already at work in the general terms of Fried’s criticism as well as his active support for the work of Frank Stella — is implicit in Fried’s valorisation of such terms as “conviction” and “theatricality” over Greenbergian “opticality" and “flatness,” and is explicit in “Art and Objecthood” in footnote 4, which rejects any putative essential core of painting in favour of a more thoroughly historicised approach to making out what it is for a work to compel conviction as a painting at a specific moment. These differences have gone on to organise Fried’s historical account of the emergence of modernist painting, and one would be entitled to expect — as has indeed proved to be the case — that this history will take a

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significantly different shape from that outlined in Greenberg’s writings. It also seems reasonable to expect that, however deep the historical intuitions underlying Fried’s critical judgments of the 1960s might be, their actual fleshing out in what now amounts to a trilogy finding its successive moments of focus in Diderot, Courbet, and Manet will lead to some degree of implicit revision to those judgments and intuitions. This is to attribute to the progress of Fried’s work a classically hermeneutic shape, proceeding from the prehensive grasp implicit in the work of the 1960s into a transformative unfolding that will end by revising in some measure the terms of the initial position and so reopen the circle in a presumably richer and deeper way. There is much that is fundamentally right about this picture, and it is strongly reinforced in Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s* by Fried’s decision to open the book by reprinting the 1970 essay “Manet’s Sources” and then to measure both his continuing closeness to and current distance from it. But the picture is also temptingly false to the extent that it fails to recognise how far Fried finds himself, with Manet, engaged with a practice that actively resists hermeneutic appropriation and makes itself precisely out of that resistance.4 The result of this is perhaps most immediately salient as a shift in Fried’s voice, as if he were now willing to let it be scattered or tentative in a new way that he is himself not fully sure how' to characterise. He is, however, quite clear that this is not a matter of, say, scholarly or historical caution — not a function of some general sceptical respect for the fact of historical distance — nor a matter of some prior methodological commitment to the value of the scattered or the tentative — not a marker of some methodological conversion to “deconstruction” or something imagined as such. When he acknowledges, in the book’s closing lines, that its mind “remains divided” and adds that “no truly serious book on Manet could be otherwise,” he is registering its division as the very shape of its conviction,

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the form and substance of its attachment to the art of Édouard Manet. Or to put it objectively, Manet’s achievement — an achievement that Fried characterises in terms of its ambitions to universality or totality, to “facingness,” and to “strikingness” — is itself, and precisely as achievement, “provisional” or “conditional,” terms Fried finds in the writing of Carle Desnoyers and willingly takes on for himself. Three points follow more or less directly from this general view of Manet’s Modernism. The first is that the primacy of hermeneutics within the humanities or human sciences arises from a deeper claim about the depth of our attachment to things — say, our “being-in-the-world” — a claim which has at least potentially the authority to undo the adequacy of our hermeneutic modeling of it. It is just because hermeneutics is grounded in this way that I can, in setting up the general problem of this essay, move with relative impunity between the presumed hermeneutical shape of Fried’s writerly career and the shape of the history those writings claim to unfold. The second is that a full reading of Manet’s Modernism must have for its implicit task a working out of the way in which a certain provisionality is profiled across, or at work within, the apparently much stronger notions of universality, facingness, and strikingness that occupy the apparent foreground of the book. The last is that one effect of such reading ought to be to significantly modify our understanding of the historicality of art history’s writing. This means that it ought to shed some light on the difference between the circular model more or less native to the hermeneutic understanding and the various images of “hinging” offered up by Manet’s Modernism. To the extent that it is successful in doing so, we can expect to see a new and deeper version of the distance from Greenberg that was opened up in “Art and Objecthood,” a version that can be seen as taking out the specifically historical consequences of the simplification of Manet’s achievement that Fried

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assigns to Impressionism and locates at the root of Greenberg’s opticality. I mean to proceed slowly in opening up these issues, exploring first the general shape of Fried’s historical account, its fitness to what are often claimed as the Kantian foundations to his critical practice, and something of what I will call the moral force of a certain number of key terms, most notably “facing” and “facingness,” before taking up Fried’s invitation to think through their relation to a particular current within the writings of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. All of this will set the stage for a certain return to Fried’s criticism of the 1960s, and a closing consideration of the kind of historical or critical object at stake in this itinerary.

1. Between Realisms Perhaps the most general claim of Fried’s work on Manet is that his achievement is to be located in a sort of hinge between two realisms — a realism of the body, with the body understood as the ultimate stake or resting point for the dialectic of absorption and theatricality set in motion in eighteenth-century French painting and given its sharpest critical formulation in the writings of Denis Diderot, and an optical realism that comes into its own in the wake of Courbet and that finds its strongest artistic realisation in the work we call Impressionist. Put this way, the general shape of the history in question can seem to recall Greenberg’s account (as it is put forward, for example, in “Modernist Painting”). There would be differences, to be sure — Greenberg sees his movement as from representation to abstraction rather than from the body to the eye — but this will not appear to come to much, particularly since both narratives would seem to agree on the basic nature of modernist painting. Of course, a notable problem for this way of assimilating the two accounts to one another is that it becomes impossible to

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understand the persistence in Fried’s critical writings of the terms “theatricality’’ and “absorption” (an uneven persistence in which the negative criterion of “theatricality” has the upper hand and the more affirmative term ‘“absorption” recedes or even vanishes entirely). What blocks this attempt at assimilation is Fried’s focus on a third term of a kind nowhere evident in Greenberg’s narratives. This third term is what Fried calls “The Generation of 1863” — a generation whose work answers adequately to neither side of the simpler two-part narrative. The work of this generation as a whole cannot be understood as a further development of the realism of the body; but neither can it be adequately understood in the terms of its optical posteriority. We might, however, expect to be able to understand much of its work as reflecting the mûtual interference of the two possibilities, one importantly exhausted and the other not yet clear as a possibility, and this is, by and large, the track Fried follows for the generation as a whole, with perhaps particular attention to the work of Henri Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros. But of course it would be a mistake to claim their divided tableaus as being made out of these two possibilities, if only because the second of them is not available as a possibility until it has been secured by the subsequent work of the Impressionists. One does better to think of most of the members of this generation as caught within — realising their paintings in, or as a measuring of — a certain wrinkle in the traditional grammar of absorption, a wrinkle that divides a painting’s capacity to arrest its viewer from what had been taken as its immediate ground in our absorption in or by it.5 The result is a series of paintings of both undeniable and problematic power, paintings that are in a certain sense incomprehensible but whose difficulties are not wholly ungraspable by the established conventions of perception and criticism, which is why Fried is able to clarify so much of their structure on the basis of the contemporary reception.

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If, then, this work is able to open up the historical incoherence of the received schema, it cannot, of itself, open a future. That act depends on the appearance of work still more radically incomprehensible, work that significantly exceeds both the past that gives rise to it and the future to which it will appear to have belonged, so to speak, all along. And this is the position in which Fried finds Manet. A question — one that might interest us greatly, since it is perhaps the question of any putative postmodernism — is how far it might continue to exceed the future that claimed it.6 Fried assigns a particular description to Manet’s excessiveness by saying that his ambition is directed towards making paintings that “face us everywhere and as a whole.” The general capacity of such figures of “facing” and “the face” to mediate between a realism of the body and an optical realism of the disembodied eye ought to be clear enough, as also should be the reduction involved in glossing this, with the Impressionists and Manet’s own later self, as “flatness” or “opticality.” Less obvious perhaps, but certainly clear once remarked, is its capacity to rework the apparent threat of theatricality, particularly the “grimace” that appears so prominently in Diderot’s attacks on theatre, so as to enable a description of Manet s achievement in terms of a certain acknowledgment of theatricality. “Acknowledgment” would seem to entail something like the recognition that “grimaces” are not alien to ordinary human expressivity and, conversely, that the faces theatre presents are sometimes our own, so we cannot proceed, in art or in life, by extirpating theatricality from them. More precisely, any attempt to do so would amount to an attempt to draw a line between theatricality and ordinary expressivity, between stage and audience, that is in fact the very ground of that which is most objectionable in theatre.7 In thinking over these matters, it is perhaps useful to dwell on just why Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix and Toast (to the Truth) and the supporting studies for

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them provide such a powerful entry to the Manet of the 1860s, as Fried sees him. These are paintings that aim to present to us both people and people as posed before and in some sense mobilised by — gathered and posed before — works of art (a portrait of Delacroix, paintings by Rembrandt and Velasquez, a more or less generic allegorical sculpture). They want, one might say, to know or show something about the conditions under which these things — people and works of art — face one another. They want to get the line between the people and the works right (as against, say, The Old Musician, which seems to want only their scrambling or blurring), and they want to imagine their personages facing each other as wholes (say, in the round). They want to do this imagining in something that will itself be a successful painting but they also perhaps imagine succeeding in working out such mutual facing as a kind of precondition for successful painting (they are, in this way, something like manifestoes). In wanting all this, they are at the same time also aimed against themselves and towards sculpture which is, after all, more nearly able to take up such possibilities of mutual facing.8 This would be the sense of the overall movement of the work represented in these paintings, from Delacroix through the juxtaposition of Velasquez’s painterly claims on three-dimensionality with Rembrandt’s claims on presence and self-presence to sculpture itself. These are works that want to present us with the possibility of our facing one another everywhere and as a whole, and they want to present that possibility as itself enabled by, or dependent on, the work of art. What they cannot imagine — and this inability is a condition for their project and condition — is that some part of our mutual facing is caught precisely in and as painting. It is just this imagination that finds realisation in a painting like The Old Musician — and that is lost again when painting retreats to recording our seeing of the world. This is to say that Manet’s painting, as Fried understands it, does capture or recapture something of

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Courbet’s enterprise — the sense, say, that we (painter, beholder, painter-beholder) are implicated in our object. But that implication is no longer animated by the blindness of the body: it has been displaced into something more difficult, something more like the exposure of the face and the very visibility of our separateness. If the Diderotian tradition takes it that painting owes us something like a world our bodies can inhabit and if the presumptively modernist tradition that follows on Manet takes itself to owe us a world we can see, then Manet’s painting seems to aim altogether elsewhere — towards something that is less a world than a kind of tracing of those limits that make the place we inhabit something less or other than a world. Were it a world, one is tempted to say, painting's presence in it would be inconceivable; as it is, its presence is a mark of that place’s internal limits, variously suturing or revealing them.9 In the present context, Manet’s location “between realisms” can appear as a negative version of the chiasmatic negotiations Merleau-Ponty attributes to Cézanne. As in Merleau-Ponty’s account (whose influence on Fried is in evidence throughout his work), one gains access to this “between” only through the acknowledgment that the being that sees the world is also exposed to it.

2. Kant

The thought of painting — or the experience of art and beauty more generally — as a mark of how what wc inhabit is a world is at least loosely Kantian, and in shifting towards an exploration of this dimension of Fried’s work I want to focus on two terms he attributes to Manet’s ambition, one easily attached to Kant and one less obviously so: “universality” and “strikingness.” The notion that a work of art should claim a certain universality is, of course, one with clear Kantian resonance, although its resonance in aesthetics is hardly

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confined to Kant and it remains to be seen whether Fried, hesitating between “universalisation” and “totalisation,” is in fact particularly close to Kant. That a work should be “striking” does not have any such obvious resonance, and indeed the term seems in some ways altogether too casual to carry that kind of burden — just one of a very large set of terms with which one might choose to register one’s appreciation of a work. Indeed, it seems fair to say that any number of people have read the Salon criticism of the 1860s without feeling that the French word “frappant” signalled anything special; it is presumably a hallmark or idiosyncrasy of Fried’s reading that it emerges with particular weight and salience. Given its presence in that criticism and the connections Fried draws around it, its good fit with certain dimensions of Kant’s aesthetics is worth remarkirfg on, as is the fact that Kant himself has good, albeit nontechnical, use for it. The heart of the good fit is simple: when Kant says that our aesthetic judgment is disinterested, a good bit of what he means is that it is a judgment that more nearly happens to us than is made by us. The beautiful object catches the structure of our mind just where it can be put in motion without having to order itself to that motion, and so the Kantian registration of beauty is particularly open to those elements of our aesthetic vocabulary that impute agency or something like agency to the object rather than its beholder or maker (this would include a word like “striking” as well as a word like “graceful” if we hear the working of grace in it, something Fried insists on in “Art and Objecthood”). The Kantian notion we can on occasion render as “strikingness” is thus closely keyed to his notion of universality: what is striking is what exerts its effect on us apart from our laboring at it, therefore what addresses us not in our varied interests but in our shared structures of receptivity. Meredith’s translation of the Critique ofJudgment uses the English term “striking” at least twice — once in relation to the “peculiar fancies with which the mind

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entertains itself, while it is continually being aroused by the variety which strikes the eye” (here “strikes” renders stoßen auf), and, later, in the assertion that “to call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do, merely by what strikes the eye {was der Augenschein zeigt)." This last Kant gives a curious further gloss: “if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heaven; if it is restless, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything,” which itself repeats the movement of an earlier statement about the sublimity of the sky: “we must regard it, just as we see it, as a distant, all-embracing vault.” In both cases, we have an assertion of something that seems to impose literality, a kind of bare positivist perception, which is then filled out precisely by the non­ literal, the metaphorical. This is in a certain sense demanded by Kant’s argument for the sublime as an experience engendered by that which cannot be taken in and so is recovered only as the discovery of a kind of capacity for excess. As such, it is a peculiar capacity that is perhaps better put as “a capacity of being exceeded” — especially if one can hear the difference between this and simply “being exceeded.” A body of water we can apprehend as such will not open toward the sublime, and the body of water that does so open will remain significantly uncomprehended within or by that experience while nonetheless not escaping it entirely. Metaphor here is not, or not simply, an evasion of the literal, or better material, fact; it is, perhaps also, its only possible mode of registration, its proper translation. Meredith’s earlier use of “strikes” to render an admittedly different German verb seems nonetheless apt insofar as it also measures a certain wandering in the registration of literal or material fact closely related to the sublime (roughly what we come to mean by “the picturesque”): “Again, beautiful objects are to be distinguished from beautiful views of objects (which often on account of their distance cannot be more clearly cognized). In the latter case taste appears, not so much in

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what the imagination apprehends in this field, as in the impulse it thus gets to fiction, i.e. in the peculiar fancies with which the mind entertains itself, while it is continually being aroused by the variety which strikes the eye.” The experience here is of neither the sublime nor the beautiful; concealing the absence of the former inside the false appearance of the other, the actual pleasure it offers is that of “charm,” a pleasure taken in the workings of our imagination without discovering any new capacity in us. If something like “strikingness” is at work within Kant’s account, it is interesting that the particular path it opens into Kant’s text seems to run more nearly through the analytic of the sublime than that of the beautiful — as opposed, we can imagine, to “grace,” which in its apparent distance from questions of power and potential violence seems more nearly fitted to Kant’s experience of beauty.10 As such, it finds itself in interesting relation to the whole array of notions that “border” the beautiful — not only the sublime and the charming but also the ugly, which is glossed by Kant as that which obtrudes itself on our attention. This last may help underline the particular effectiveness of “strikingness” as a way of registering a mode of conviction bound to an acknowledgment of theatricality. Further, if we can indeed recognise a Kantian aptness in the invocation of strikingness as a transformative intervention in the field previously structured by the pseudodialectic of absorption and theatricality, it may be useful to recognise that most of what we have tended to take in our recent critical history as “Kantian formalism” has assumed a leading role for the judgment of taste rather than the judgment of the sublime. That is, to the extent thar we can seriously pursue Greenberg’s description of his own practice as Kantian, we have tended to take it — correctly enough — as oriented to the more or less instantaneous pleasure of a receptivity set into harmonious play by the contingent absoluteness of a work that is just what it is and nothing else. Striking work

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works, in Kant and in Fried’s Manet, otherwise. But striking work is also work rather than nature, and so it is important to say that if we approach it in some sense along the path of the sublime as opposed to the path of the beautiful, the judgment in question is finally neither a pure judgment of taste nor a pure judgment of the sublime. Presumably, it is a critical judgment, the kind of judgment we make of works of art rather than nature; it may be that such judgment weaves itself oddly out of the interplay of the beautiful and the sublime in ways we, “formalist” or “antiformalist,” have yet to work through. Certainly, seeing “strikingness” as implicated in Kant’s aesthetics in something like the ways I’ve sketched lets us say a bit more about what Fried takes to be Manet’s impulse towards universalisation, perhaps clarifying its ambiguities, although not resolving them. Here too, after all, our notion of the universal claims of formalist criticism seem deeply committed to the terms of the analytic of the beautiful and so seem implicitly tied to a narrative in which art progressively purges itself of the merely conventional in order to arrive at what is purely natural or essential in it, what can give itself to us through our most deeply shared receptivities. The sublime is not like that: the capacities it discovers are universal, constitutive of human being, but the occasions of their discovery are irreducibly cultural and historical. The universal consent claimed by a judgment of sublimity is always made somewhere, is marked by and marks a moment; the claim it enters is to a shared culture as a consequence of shared nature, and because of this it will always fall short of a complete totalisation of language and history, towards which it nonetheless necessarily aspires. This thought is neither simply foreign to the Third Critique nor fully explicit in it, receiving a certain airing in §54’s rewriting of the beautiful and the sublime as the naive and humorous, and coming to explicitness when that opposition is rewritten by Schiller as between the naive and sentimental and taken as the dialectical ground of the aesthetic education of mankind.

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Fried’s fullest attempt to address what is at stake here is to be found in an important and difficult supplement to Manet s Modernism, the essay “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet.”11 The leading claim of this essay is that a certain kind of memory functions as a key criterion for Baudelaire in his Salon of 1846; the further claim set up by this first assertion is that Manet breaks with this Baudelairean system in his painting of the 1860s. Fried is particularly interested in what he reads as the Baudelairean demand that, “the perception of new work must trigger or activate an endlessly regressive sequence of memories of earlier works, but not only must those memories not be allowed to overwhelm or otherwise displace that perception ... they must remain below the threshold of conscious awareness, investing the present with the aura anti significance of memory without for a moment appearing on its stage.” As the last phrase makes clear, a work whose memory of painting is too explicit will be experienced as participating in a certain theatre or theatricality; successful work, by contrast, will embody a memory of painting that it does not announce and perhaps even denies or represses. The Kantian issues here are those surrounding the notion of genius and originality in the creation of compelling works of art. In addressing these matters, Kant is, in effect, caught between his commitment to an experience of beauty that happens in and as a moment of pure presence and a nagging but unthematised awareness of the essential historicality of art. The result is a repeated attempt to distinguish between art-making that is merely historical — variously described as the mere imitation, copying, or aping of earlier works — and something that cannot escape imitation but which nonetheless does not count as — is not experienced as — simply the recognisable continuation of an already settled body of past conventions, forms, or themes. This is the work of genius, a work that is “original” without veering into the nonsense from which it is distinguished precisely by its actual

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ongoing relation to a past it does not explicitly evoke. Kant thus writes: Since, then, [the artist’s] natural endowment must give the rule to (fine) art, what kind of rule is this? It cannot be couched in a formula and serve as a precept, for then a judgment about the beautiful could be determined according to concepts. Rather, the rule must be abstracted from what the artist has done, i.e. from the product, which others may use to test their own talent, letting it serve them as their model, not to be copied but to be imitated. How that is possible is difficult to explain. The artist’s ideas arouse similar ideas in his apprentice if nature has provided the latter with similar proportions in his mental powers.12

This is indeed hard to explain, not simply because the distinction between “copying” and “imitating” is hard, if not impossible to make out (so that, Fried suggests, Baudelaire is forced both theoretically and practically into a certain bad faith13), but because Kant’s way of justifying it seems to be to say that the apprentice, the genius-to-be, experiences what the rest of us take as beauty precisely as the sublime, discovering through such work a capacity theretofore concealed from himself. This at least appears to be within the terms of the Critique ofJudgment the best gloss we can give to the language of power and proportion Kant gives us here.14 The work of genius is in these terms “exemplary” — not an example of anything but something that puts itself forward as capable and deserving of emulation — and its most powerful historical effect will be to enable work that does not show itself as an emulation of it precisely because this work’s appearance will be itself “original” and “exemplary.” The history of art so conceived divides from itself at every moment into sequences of mere imitations both enabled and disrupted by the force of exemplary genius, and thus gives rise in, for example, Baudelaire’s prose to a “certain complex of spatiotemporal metaphors

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... that carry with them more than a hint of paradox,” most notably the pairing of something called “originality” with something else, called “true memory” and understood to be radically distinct from, yet deeply entangled with, what we will now want to call “mere memory.” The most tempting way to resolve this tension will be in terms of a recognisable hermeneutic schema: In addition, we are better able to interpret the conflation of proximity and remoteness in Baudelaire’s key figures: on the one hand, the special evocation of the past [called] true memory is available only in and through an experience of the present; on the other hand, the quotation [by Baudelaire of E.T.A. Hoffman] suggests that our present perceptions not only are receptive to but perhaps staçd in need of reinforcement from the past. What is nearest to hand is thus our only access to what is remote, even while it may require the assistance of the latter to be truly present.15

Which is to say that with Baudelaire we find ourselves, in effect, in passage from Kant to Heidegger. To say that Manet breaks with this system is then to say that the relation to the past he sets in motion must be thought otherwise. Fried’s formulation here is precise: For there is an important sense in which Baudelaire’s stricture against any overt acknowledgment of previous works has for its ultimate rationale the production of a memory-effect by virtue of which the art of the past, far from being kept in quarantine, is, on the contrary, brought into intimate commerce with the art of the present, supporting the latter precisely by not giving itself away. Conversely, it is possible to see in Manet’s attempts at totalization across national schools evidence of a desire, if not exactly to break with or be quits with the past, at any rate to subsume the past synecdochically and, by so doing, to transform fundamentally the terms of its relation to both present and future.16

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It will take some time to unpack this passage fully. For the moment, it is perhaps enough to note that Fried sees this transformative work as it appears in, for example, The Old Musician unfolded along two dimensions: On the one hand, in contrast with the Baudelairean system, the painting manifests a clear will to admit the past (that it has been, that it stands over and against the present) — Fried glosses this in part in terms of a will “to assume responsibility for the entire history of painting since the Renaissance.” On the other hand, the painting explicitly brings that past before us so as not to allow evasion of the ways our beholding is necessarily marked by memory. In both these senses, it is strongly confrontational. This joint configuration is what Fried calls “painting altogether” — a name for something that might be (has been) mistaken for “pure painting,” but whose “frankness” is evidently of a significantly different kind. This section opened by asking how far the criteria disengaged by Fried’s analysis might be considered “Kantian.” The answer to this point would seem to be twofold: (1) if by “Kantian” we mean subsumable more or less directly under the terms of the judgment of taste, then we are, at a minimum, moving on more complex ground, ground on which such judgments are everywhere shadowed or disturbed by elements of sublimity; and (2) Fried's way of putting Manet’s historical distinctness entails rejecting any hermeneutic or dialectical accommodation of this disturbance. Manet, as Fried presents him, can be said to release a certain reading of Kant, but this reading is one that does not fall out according to any simple choice between the beautiful and the sublime; rather, it demands thinking through something that appears as their mutual dependence and mutual interference. We may be tempted to say this reading is something Impressionism offers to simplify in such a way that a historical narrative oriented by it will be tempted to understand the critical judgments it supports exclusively in terms of a judgment of taste and so be blind to its own interest in the sublime.17

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3. Typography Several years ago, in a review of Fried’s Courbet book, I su&gested that the picture of Courbet argued in it had certain affinities with the theoretical work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.18 In particular, I suggested that the impulse in Courbet s work that Fried called “anti-mimetic’’ could be redescribed in terms of Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of mimesis as essentially metonymic, as a mode of prolongation of the object necessarily mistaken for an act of metaphoric substitution for it.19 More recently, in responding to an early version of the Manet book, I tried to push this convergence a bit further, suggesting that with the emphasis on “strikingness” as a critical dimension of Manet’s work Fried had moved further onto ground usefulfy considered in light of Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion of “typography.” As I understand Lacoue-Labarthe here, this notion of typography necessarily opens both towards the “absolute vicariousness” he attributes to mimesis and towards the mistaking of that continuous openness to alteration for a specular and theorizable moment of imitation or representation. In the present context it is particularly important that the inevitable moment of mimetic mistaking (inevitable because proper to the impropriety of absolute vicariousness) is at once strongly visual or optical, inherently theatrical, and thoroughly theoretical: Hence the oldest and most constant gesture vis-à-vis mimesis, which is the attempt to circumscribe it “theoretically,” to put it on stage and theatricalize it in order to try to catch it in the trap of (in)sight [(sa)voirj. Far from covering up or masking mimesis, theatricality “reveals" it — which means that it fixes it, defines and “presents” it as that which, in all events, it never is on its “own.” More rigorously, to mask and to reveal, regarding mimesis, to betray and to unveil: these are — as finally we could never hope to say better — to go from like to same. Mimesis is always from like to same. For such is the

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law of representation — or of (re)presentation ... : there is “presented” in it what does not present itself and cannot present itself, that is, there is represented in it what has always already represented itself. This is why there is only one remedy against representation, infinitely precarious, dangerous, and unstable: representation itself.2,1

A footnote to the first sentence of this passage brings much of this to a point: “Let us say, provisionally, even though this is much too simple, that it is a matter of attacking the optic, scopic, theatrical model of (in)sight, the exemplarity of the eye — but not, however, with the idea of reaching any hither side of representation.”21 Should one be persuaded of the proximity of Fried and Lacoue-Labarthe, no small part of the interest of that convergence will be the way in which Lacoue-Labarthe seems to display a certain inner communication between notions of opticality and theatricality capable of rereading and rethinking their complex availability and deployment around the art of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. This is far from the only point where Lacoue-Labarthe and Fried appear to read one another interestingly, and I want to focus at least briefly on two more. The first is around the issues of memory, originality, and imitation charted in the previous section. The issue between Baudelaire and Manet, as Fried poses it, is about whether the subject — the artist — is better imagined as having absorbed or internalised the past and so become capable of repeating it as his own or is to be understood as marked by it in a wray that cannot be simply interiorised. To put it slightly differently, the question is whether the past gives rise to a subject or whether the fact of the past is already a limit on the possibility of the subject. As Lacoue-Labarthe puts it: The “character” — if between ethos and tupos, this is what is really involved in every discourse on the “subject” — struck from the outside, derives from the always

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anterior circulation of discourses.... [Tjhe subject, traversed from the beginning by a multiple and anonymous discourse (by the discourse of the others and not necessarily by that of an Other) is not so much (de)constituted in a cleavage or simple Spaltung ... as it is splintered or dispersed according to the disquieting instability of the proper.22

It is around this notion of typographic character in contradistinction to any imagination of the underlying stability and interiority of a “subject” that a number of issues in Fried’s treatment of Manet may be gathered or regathered: for example, the relation to the past, the relation to prints, and the willing (it seems to me “willed” is too strong here) heterogeneity of such paintings as The Old Musician, the Déjeuner sur Therbe, or, different as it is, the Bar at the Folies Bergères. Lacoue-Labarthe’s continuation of the discussion generates a description that can seem surprisingly close to a description of Manet: What is threatening in mimesis, understood in these terms, is exactly that kind of pluralization and fragmentation of the “subject” provoked from the outset by its linguistic or “symbolic” (de)constitution: an effect of discourses, the “self’-styled "subject” always threatens to “consist” of nothing more than a series of heterogeneous and dissociated roles, and to fraction itself endlessly in this multiple borrowing. Thus, the mimetic life is made up of scenes from the life of one who is suitedfor nothing... 25

When Lacoue-Labarthe goes on to recognise that a part of what is involved here is nothing other than “the classical problem of exemplarity,” he has, in effect and for our purposes, knotted the whole problematic of typography back into the Kantian issues of genius and imitation we explored earlier and set in relation to the odd chiasmus of sublimity and beauty in the experience of the artist. And so we come to a question about the status of the sublime in Lacoue-Labarthe’s writing. The sublime has

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been a much rehearsed topic in contemporary theoretical writing, so it may be useful to begin on it with a pointed contrast. While Lacoue-Labarthe does not reject outright Lyotard’s formulation of the sublime as “the presentation (of this): that there is nonpresentable” (a reading he links to Kant’s invocation of the Mosaic ban on images), he is interested in bringing out the ways in which the sublime can be posed as “the presentation of this: that there is presentation” (which he then links to Kant’s other instance of a sublime utterance: “I am all that is and that was and that shall be, and no mortal hath lifted my veil”). He sees the difference between the two in terms of the relation they establish with truth — the ban on likenesses poses truth that way, in terms of adequacy, while the inscription on the Temple of Isis poses it as a matter of veiling and unveiling, terms far closer to Heideggerean notions of “unconcealment” and “alethia.”24 Indeed, Lacoue-Labarthe makes out this difference through a reading of Heidegger, while admitting that its presence in the relevant texts is to a high degree concealed by Heidegger’s more or less Hegelian will to hand everything over to the beautiful and remain blind to his own invocations of the sublime. More particularly, as LacoueLabarthe puts it, Heidegger transfers all of this into the account of the beautiful: the path from was ist to daß ... ist, from “what the being is” to “that the being is,” means for him the path from the beautiful in its philosophical, eidetico-aesthetic determination to a more original determination of the beautiful.”25 The 'philosophical eidetico-aesthetic determination" is here shorthand for the assimilation of beauty to onto-theology that Heidegger criticises as “aesthetics” and finds coming to its fullest form in Kant. But just because it does come to its fullest form there, Kant is also the place Heidegger finds closest to the experience and account of beauty suppressed within the philosophic tradition from Plato on, and so Kant serves him also as his strongest pointer to the “more original determination of the beautiful.” What intrigues

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Lacoue-Labarthe here is the way in which Heidegger cannot bring himself to see how the sublime is, within the Kantian critique, the bearer of “a comprehension of the beautiful which is more original than its Platonic interpretation in terms of eidos-idea" and so reflects or enacts a “concern to (re)discover that which, in the beautiful, is manifestly irreducible to its eidetic apprehension.”26 What is so variously called “eidetic” or “eidos-ideal” or “eidetico-aesthetic” in these passages is everything about the appearance of a being that can be captured in or as its cutting itself out from other beings or some ground against which it appears to stand, everything that, we might say, lets a being be recognisable as the being it is (its form, its idea). It is this cutting-out, in the pure state in which the being is cut otft by nothing other than itself in all its contingency, that Kant calls “beautiful.”27 The doubleedgedness of Kant’s position is that it, on the one hand, unfolds the experience of the beautiful wholly under the regime of beings and refuses any question of the Being of this being that so beautifully subsists within itself even as — and this would be the other hand — it pushes this imagination of self-adequacy to the point where it must be conceived otherwise, as an act of self-presentation prior to any possibility of aspectual adequation. It is this, one might say, that Heidegger wants us to see and so be able to count as a more original determination of beauty. But for LacoueLabarthe there is nothing to be seen that way here, we are once again caught in the complexities of a mimesis that necessarily veils itself in its revelation and so cannot but give itself over to — but also in — aspectuality. The “more original determination” is then importantly not there — either back then in its priority or for us in some recoverable way — but is only to be remarked, always belatedly, by the supplement of the sublime.28 There are a number of ways to go on from here, and the ones Lacoue-Labarthe takes up involve working through questions about what for both Kant and Longinus

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must be the “fundamental enigma of art ... the enigma of the transmission of genius, that is, if you like, the enigma of the history of art”29 with an ultimate view to a surprising conjunction of Heidegger and Benjamin on veiling, unveiling, and the metaphorics of light. But we have already traversed some part of this terrain in other terms, so I want to break off the discussion here (we will come to veils again in our own way soon enough). The results of this tour through Lacoue-Labarthe seem to me in some ways unclear. That there are distinct convergences between Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical work and elements of Fried’s discussion of Manet will, I hope, be plausible and perhaps even obvious, as also the thought that these convergences are systematic, products of a common orientation in thought. However, pushing for any tighter conjunction than this seems to me to be asking for more than one can reasonably expect from two enterprises as disciplinarily distinct as these. It is enough, for me at least, that these two bodies of work should be capable of standing, however partially, in one another’s light.

4. Aspect and Regard A footnote to “Art and Objecthood” recalls Stanley Cavell remarking in a seminar that “for Kant in the Critique of Judgment a work of art is not an object.”30 The thought is clearly central to the whole thrust of that essay, and if the counter-thought that, if this is so, a work of art is perhaps then more like a subject, is less explicit, something like it surely informs Fried’s dealing with the difficult double topic of anthropomorphism and its hiddenness in literalist work. Some of Cavell’s own writings on contemporary art look useful here, particularly his remarks on “flatness” and “candour” in the excursus on modernist painting in The World Viewed.The discussion opens by wondering what kind of “discovery” Pollock’s all-over line actually is, and,

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more or less following the established Greenbergian account, moves quickly to explore it as a discovery of “flatness,” glossed as “total thereness.” But this is, as Cavell puts it, a fact of painting that is “as primitive as any,” so we ought still to be puzzled by the claim that it is “discovered” in Pollock — it is, after all, not as if we didn’t know that paintings were flat or that they hold themselves out for vision in some fundamental way. If there is something special to be said in this respect about Pollock, it belongs not to the discovery itself but to its modality, to the way in which that discovery needs making and the fashion of its registration — as a discovery not of something hidden but of something precisely not hidden and needing registration for that reason.32 Such registration cannot, within our normal grammar, be called “recognition” because that lûmes what is already at work in the self­ evidence of painting. What is called for here is more nearly an owning (or disowning) of that evidence. Cavell calls this “acknowledgment,” and he takes its explicitness in our dealings with modernist painting to be a central feature of such work. This is, of course, also a central feature of Cavell’s attempt to address the problem of scepticism, especially as it bears upon other minds or persons, so there is at this level a pretty clear analogy between persons and paintings. And this analogy has at least one important consequence: whereas my recognition of another person is merely an epistemological matter, my acknowledgment (of that recognition) of that person carries with it some burden of action or obligation (albeit as simple as tipping my hat33). If modernist painting is fundamentally oriented to acknowledgment — if that is how it makes its sense or exerts its claim on us — then our dealings with paintings border on the ethical pattern of our lives with one another and touch upon our capacity to address or be addressed by someone or something other than our self. It is in this context that Cavell is moved to characterise the painting of Morris Louis in particular as engaging its flatness, its total thereness, through a certain candour.

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This is explicitly a historically specific characterisation, one aimed at capturing the particular weight and form of Louis’ presence,and I will return to its force as such in the ensuing section. For the moment, it is the sense of such a characterisation — particularly as it bears on a body of work that is frequently seen as divided into “Veils” and “Unfurleds” — that I want to explore. The implicit analogy is with persons and particularly with the human face or expression as the place where candour, or its lack, is in play. There are, 1 imagine, two questions one might put somewhere between the work and the appeal to the human visage that shadows it here: What can it mean for a veil to be a vehicle of candour? What difference can one imagine between an unfurling that somehow counts as candid and one that does not? Speaking of Louis, Cavell suggests that the two cases are essentially the same, that candour is a matter of a simultaneous openness and closure. What is candid is both all there and apart from me. Candour is not available to beings that are not essentially finite and separate from one another, having that separation as the form of such mutual belonging as may be or may be possible. While the Veils and the Unfurleds may seem in their quasi-representational content (the thing our names for them capture) to give one or another of the underlying terms of candour the lead, their success as paintings lies in their joint refusal to let those terms fall apart: the Veils are no less open than the Unfurleds, which in their turn are no less closed than their predecessors. This folding of each term back on the other is the inner logic of what we are taught to call their “flatness,” their way of construing — acknowledging — the primitive facts of painting, say, bounded two-dimensionality. And what are we to say of veiling and unfurling as human facts? One thing that has been said, in a tradition that evidently interests Fried and runs alongside his work on French painting in an indeterminate but clearly not simply external relation to it,35 is that when the face

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comes into question its showing and its veiling become undecidable. We find a version of this in Hawthorne’s minister, veiling himself, he says, to remark his face — so the veil ought to count as a showing of that face — except that the face that the veil remarks he takes as also a veil, so that the townspeople are not simply wrong to take the veil as concealing that face. By the same token, the reader is surely right to suspect something like allegory at work here and equally surely wrong to fall into that suspicion and so obliged to make his peace with what the veil of text shows otherwise. And we can perhaps find the “unfurled” response to this in Henry James’ “Beast in the Jungle,” where May’s face always shows and yet remains unseen by Marcher until, too late, he sees it as her tomb, falling — in two balanced phrases I take to mime her eyes and so to place the reader before the gaze or regard of the text — “on his face, on the tomb.” In saying what is at stake in these texts, we are perhaps in a difficult place. What I find myself tempted to say is that they are staked against that shock of the face to which each of us is at every moment open — the possibility of being struck by the other, by a vertiginous opening into nothing that has not been there all along that carries with it the experience of a radical scattering of the self. It is something like this sense that will make my suggestion about the closing phrases of “The Beast in the Jungle” persuasive (or not); and if it is found persuasive, what will have been discovered is something better described in terms of the reader’s exposure to the text’s regard than in terms of any imposition of “the gaze” as currently understood in much contemporary theory, or even in terms of any reciprocity of gazes.36 Which is to say that, if what is at stake here is something one will want to call an acknowledgment of human facing, it is important both that this is not a simple recognition and that the terms of this acknowledgment are not wholly contained within the human but are crucially relayed through the thing we call a text or a work. It is a matter, then, not of mirroring but

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of something other than that, something that has to do with contiguity and alteration. The misreading we call humanist is the one that, reducing this regard to a moment of mutual recognition extended between author and reader, is a failure to read — a failure to enter into the internal play of mimesis in favour of its theatrical fixation. And the misreading we might call theoreticist is the one that, in its opposition to “humanism,” refuses the acknowledgment of the human on the grounds of its mediation through the inhuman.57 The reading that slips between is one that in its uncertainty, in its willingness to take on the simultaneous openness and closure of the text, at least borders on the sublime, offering to discover within the reader a capacity that touches, in reading, on the terms of our freedom and agency.58 In these last paragraphs I have, I hope obviously enough, let the language of Lacoue-Labarthe’s readings of Heidegger and Kant infiltrate a problematic of candour and facing started by Cavell, which is perhaps to say that I have been trying to show how that problematic is a specific version of Lacoue-Labarthe’s more grandly metaphysical concern with the limits of the “eideticoaesthetic” and the hegemony of aspectual vision. And one might, of course, reverse this now and suggest that Lacoue-Labarthe’s concern is continuous (continuous enough, anyway) with the Wittgensteinian concern for aspectuality and aspect-blindness that informs Cavell’s interest in Louis’ facing of us.59

5. Generations of 63 and 67 So where are we now with Fried? And with Manet and his facing of his beholder? Taking it by degrees: 1. We can understand, perhaps not entirely newly but with something like a new depth or purpose, just what is

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being posed how in ‘Art and Objecthood.” The historical and conceptual priority of “facing” over “flatness” shows us what “literalism” meant as it also shows us just how deep the question of anthropomorphism and its hiddenness really is (we understand, again or anew, how the hiding of the human is one of the human’s crucial internal dimensions). And because we understand this, we perhaps also understand — and now I would say, in a new way — how the “sensibility” informing minimalism cannot be simply wished or argued away even as we also understand with a new sharpness the necessity or urgency of the attempt to do so. 2. We are able to understand — again I would say in a relatively new way — how the issues of “Art and Objecthood” do indeed mesh with those of its crucial pendant, “Sh^pe as Form,” and in pursuing those connections we will bring into relief — render readable — bits of Fried’s language that could not earlier be seen — by him or us — as counting that way. For example: And by viability of shape, I mean its power to hold, to stamp itself out, and in, as verisimilitude and narrative and symbolism used to impress themselves — compelling conviction. Stella’s undertaking in these paintings is therapeutic: to restore shape to health, at least temporarily, though of course its implied “sickness” is simply the other face of the unprecedented importance shape has assumed in the finest Modernist painting of the last several years ...40

Without venturing to read this passage, or “Shape as Form” more largely, one can, I think, make out the lines of a new scattering of accents across it — on stamping out and in, on impressing, on “the other face,” and on a play of shape and aspect — the relation of which to the rhythm of the passage’s meaning is a question. 3. Our sense not only of the sense of the history we are accustomed to see stretching from Manet to the (nineteen) sixties (a sense that was captured by “flatness”

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and is now given over to “facing”), but also of the shape of that history, has been altered. It is in particular no longer ordered to some imputed final fact or facts of painting, but is given over radically to figuration — to the necessity that painting appear as painting and the recognition that the “as” that hinges the formulation answers to the logic not of metaphor but of metonymy and so marks neither a homecoming nor any prospect of it. As with the inheritance of minimalism to which we are pledged by the first of these points, this one too implies a task for thinking — in particular, a re-imagining of medium and the possible terms of its specificity. 4. We have reached a kind of internal limit to Fried’s historical project as well as to the sense we can assign his trajectory. That is, if that trajectory and project has appeared classically hermeneutic — and nothing in the Manet book or this essay undoes that appearance — it is also the case that with the Manet book that circle, as it is traditionally cast, has opened beyond itself, towards a future that “Art and Objecthood” constitutively could not imagine, as well as a past it could only exclude. These openings are not simple: they carry with them the full complexity of the renewed position outlined in the first of these points, so it is, for example, less a matter of an exclusion being lifted than of its having to be counted in. 5. And finally, it is perhaps possible on this basis to understand something of the Manet book’s most peculiar features — its retreat from the kind of strongly asserted and firmly closed argument of Fried’s earlier work, its tendency to blend in a new way fierce concentration and something like argumentative scattering, or its failure to find any one work (like the Studio in the Courbet book) in which everything can be spelled out in some central way. Here, I want to say, it is as if, faced with Manet, Fried finds himself enacting a different relation between being struck and the expression of the conviction such striking entails.

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NOTES 1

2 3 4

5

6

7

Clement Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Gustave Courbet,” The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 2. Arrogant Purpose. 1945-1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 276. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism, or. The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). This general view places Fried in a certain proximity to work by both Jean Clay and T.J. Clark. Insofar as Clay takes Manet's work as “a borderline art, always reactive” and so radically foreign to any tradition and profoundly indescribable — a statement of resistance that amounts for Fried to a studied refusal to recognise Manet as painting — Fried rejects his view vigorously (see especially 583-4nl69, which includes the longer citation from Clay from which the quoted phrase is taken). On the other hand, Fried’s way of bringing together resistance and provisionality does indeed bring him closer to Clark’s account of Olympia than one might have expected. Laying out this grammar is the work of Fried’s first major historical study, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). This position has certain affinities with that assigned to Marcel Duchamp by Thierry de Duve in his Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, transi. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). The more recent Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) carries the implications of his argument forward to the controversies around minimalism in ways Fried addresses in his closing footnote. The relation of de Duve’s work — which in effect plunges through the opening created by “Art and Objecthood’s break with Greenberg — to Fried’s is too complex to explore here. On this — as on Fried’s use of “theatricality” more generally — see Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), especially the essays “Knowing and Acknowledging" and “The Avoidance of Love.”

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10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17’ 18

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The contrast between sculpture and painting assumed here is close to that forwarded by G.W.F. Hegel. See, for example, the introductory treatment of the system of the arts in Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, transi. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). I suppose I hope this can go through as a point about the grammar of “world,” but there is obviously more packed into the thought than that, including but not limited to a way of putting the difference between modernism and tradition. Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses, transi. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially the essays “Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One” and “Painting in the Grotto,” seems to me highly pertinent in this context, particularly in its balancing between Hegelian concerns with the system of the arts and Heideggerean concerns with worldliness. It is, of course, the word “grace” that closes “Art and Objecthood." Michael Fried, Critical Inquiry 10/3 (March 1984) 510-42. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, transi. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987) §47. The translator’s note is a good index to the difficulty: Kant’s manuscript actually opposes “Nachahmung” to itself, which editors have “corrected” to “Nachmachung" vs. “Nachahmung,” although elsewhere in the text it appears as “Nachahmung” vs. “Nachfolge." Fried, Manet ’s Modernism, 522. For a discussion of closely related points, see Timothy Gould, “The Audience of Originality: Kant and Wordsworth on the Reception of Genius," in Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, eds, Essays in Kant 's Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Fried, Manet ’s Modern ism ,515. ibid., 530-1. This would be a way of reading Greenberg. See “Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions” in my Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context, ed. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1996). “That is to say, the ruse or trope in which the very will to capture the mimetic evasion simultaneously marks and betrays itself, is caught in its own device and recovers itself. This operation already has a mirror, a theoretical trap — a

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20

21

22

23 24

25 26 27

28

29 30 31

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“thaumatic” machine—in it. An extra one. And because of this, everything is also lost and swallowed in an abyss." Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 134. ibid., 116-7. The use of the word "remedy” (pharmakos) in this passage marks the intersection of Lacoue-Labarthe’s typographic problematic with the Derridean problematic of writing. Notice, however, that a typographical problematic communicates with the visual and the visual arts in a significantly different way: its invocation of “printing” is particularly interesting and important in the context of Manet. ibid., 117nll8. The translator’s “(in)sight" does a nice job of capturing the play between theory and vision at work here, but it is useful to bear in mind that the most straightforward translation pf “savoir” is simply “knowledge” and that Derrida uses "sa” throughout his Glas as a glyph for “Savoir Absolu,” Hegel’s “Absolute Knowledge." ibid., 128. The references to “an Other” and “a cleavage or ... Spaltung” mark the distance Lacoue-Labarthe is taking from certain Lacanian formulations. ibid., 129. Lacoue-Labarthe’s emphasis. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Sublime Truth,” in Courtine et al., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, transi. Jeffrey Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) 71-4. ibid., 96. ibid., 96. Derrida calls this the “the sans of the pure cut” (le sans de la coupure pure). See his The Truth in Painting, transi. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Lacoue-Labarthe reads this in both Longinus and Kant, although not in Burke. This is a way of remarking his difference from Lyotard. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Sublime Truth," 100. Fried, “Art and Objecthood," 136. See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enl. edn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), chapters 15 and 16. “Is it a case of something hidden in unconsciousness

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36 37

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becoming conscious? It is like something hidden in consciousness declaring itself’ (The World Viewed, 109). (A Lacanian may want to say here that the first option presents a bad picture of how the Unconscious is, and to that extent the sequence is, as it were, badly hinged: what appears as an alternative is in fact a further glossing of the opening question.) The parenthetical example is not neutral, but means to recall Panfosky's treatment of just that act in opening his “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art “ (in Meaning and the Visual Arts [New York: Doubleday, 1955J). Any full attempt to explore this characterisation of Louis’ work would have to take into account its relation, presumably mediated through the etymology of “candour,” to Fried’s assimilation of Louis’ work to the Mallarmean page. See Michael Fried, Morris Louis (New York: Abrams, n.d.) 40-1. See Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) as well as “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane, and Norris” Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990) 193-236. For further on this, see my "Division of the Gaze, or Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary Theory’,’’ in Seams. I see this theoreticism as characteristic of the work of Paul de Man. On all this, see also Steven Z. Levine's “Memoir of Friedom,” in this volume. For an interesting treatment of these matters, see Stephen Mulholland, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990). . Michael Fried, “Shape as Form” Artforum 5/3 (November 1966) 21.

Before and After Pollock Keith Broadfoot In a relatively small section of his 1965 catalogue essay, Three American Painters, Michael Fried proposed his now classic interpretation of Pollock’s all-over drip paintings. In the course of his discussion of the work of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella, Fried offered an astute commentary on the nature of the line in Pollock’s work: There is no inside or outside to Pollock’s line or to the space through which it moves. And this is tantamount to claiming that line, in Pollock’s all-over drip paintings of 1947-50, has been freed at last from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes. It has been purged of its figurative character. Line, in these paintings, is entirely transparent both to the non-illusionistic space it inhabits but does not structure, and to the pulses of something like pure, disembodied energy that seem to move without resistance through them. Pollock’s line bounds and delimits nothing.1

This passage is one which has been subject to much discussion, yet I think that today, perhaps more than ever, it is particularly suggestive. Reading this passage today, we can find the means to give not only a renewed insight into the nature of Pollock’s work, but indeed, as in Fried’s extraordinary catalogue essay, the history of modernist painting itself. My re-reading of this passage will be guided by two theoretical reference points — Jacques Derrida’s

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catalogue essay Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins, and Jacques Lacan’s writing on art, or more specifically, what he terms the gaze as objet a. Although I will here restrict my reference to Fried’s comments on Pollock, 1 also wish to implicidy suggest that Lacan’s concept of the gaze provides the means for a general reassessment of the strategies of interpretation that occur throughout Fried’s writing. To begin to approach, then, the remarkable insights of Fried in this cataolgue essay, what was Lacan in the process of formulating at approximately the same time? What is the gaze? What is the objet a — this object that Lacan initially classified, after Heidegger and Freud, as das Ding, the Thing? There is a perfect exemplification of it in the Memoirs of the Blind where Derrida confronts what he claims to be the two great “logics of the invisible” at the origin of drawing: the transcendental and the sacrificial. The transcendental is “the invisible condition of the possibility of drawing, drawing itself, the drawing of drawing.” The paradox of this condition as Derrida presents it, however, is that any such invisibility could “never be thematic. It could not be posited or taken as the representable object of a drawing.” To do so, the second logic of the sacrificial is required. Derrida therefore proposes: The second, then, the sacrificial event, that which comes to or meets the eyes, the narrative, spectacle, or representation of the blind, would, in becoming the theme of the first, reflect, so to speak, this impossibility. It would represent this unrepresentable.2

From this proposal we could in turn posit that this unrepresentable object is precisely that which Lacan has designated as the objet a that lies at the origin of the gaze. Indeed, the two logics of the transcendental and the sacrificial find themselves intertwined in Lacan’s conception of the gaze as objet a. This object is, on the one hand, as Lacan stresses, a “non-specular” one, remaining essentially invisible:

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These objects [included under the category of the objet a] have one common feature in my elaboration of them — they have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity. It is what enables them to be the “stuff,” or rather the lining, though not in any sense the reverse, of the very subject that one takes to be the subject of consciousness.3

And, on the other hand, this object arises from a sacrificial economy of separation and loss: It is here that 1 suggest that the interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which determines it — namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the real, whose name, in our algebra, fe the objet aj

In what follows, the implications of these two “logics of the invisible” as conforming to the structure of the gaze will be developed. To initially establish a relation, however, we need to consider how Derrida proceeds to demonstrate that all drawing is blind, or rather, to be able to draw implies that one does not see. Derrida claims that the eye of the artist is subject to three types, or aspects, of disability. To perceive the subtlety of Derrida’s argument on this point, one must first realise that these are quite paradoxical disabilities because they do not prevent an action, but on the contrary, provide the very possibility and means for drawing to take place. Indeed, it is through not being able to see — the lack of sight — that one may be able to see more. The artist is at times like a visionary, Derrida suggests, who is able to see without eyes what others cannot see with them. In matters of art, therefore, a loss can be a gain, a lack a surplus, a shortcoming an advantage. Derrida gives to these three aspects the following titles: the aperspective of the graphic act; the withdrawal or eclipse, the differential inappearance, of the line; and, finally, the rhetoric of the

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line (trait).5 For the purposes of my analysis of Fried’s commentary on Pollock, I wish to consider the first two aspects. With the first aspect — the aperspective of the graphic act — Derrida draws attention, initially in a rather naïve manner, to the fact that at the moment of drawing there is a disappearance of the presence of perception. One cannot see what one is drawing, either what is there in front of oneself as model nor there on the surface on which one is drawing. At the instant of putting pen to paper, the artist no longer has any object in view. The artist’s look is not directed towards any scene to be depicted, but towards the work coming into being. What happens in this in-between time? It is at this point of the momentary loss of anything to see that Derrida pauses. This moment, Derrida imagines, places the artist in a potentially unsettling position, for it is at this instant that the artist is between the past — that which has been seen — and the future — that which will be seen. At the time of contact with the surface of inscription, the artist enters the dividing line of the present, and on this line there is nothing to see. Thus, Derrida writes: in its originary, path breaking moment, in the tracing potency of the trait, at the instant when the point at the point of the hand (of the body proper in general) moves forward upon making contact with the surface, the inscription of the inscribable is not seen. Whether it be improvised or not, the invention of the trait does not follow, it does not conform to what is presently visible, to what would be set in front of me as a theme. Even if drawing is, as they say, mimetic, that is, reproductive, figurative, representative, even if the model is presently facing the artist, the trait must proceed in the night. It escapes the field of vision.6

From a certain perspective, therefore, inasmuch as the artist enters a zone of darkness, the pencil of the artist becomes equivalent to a blind man’s cane. Or, following on

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from this, one can see how it is possible to interpret a drawing such as Antoine Coypel’s Study of the Blind (Fig. 1), which pictures a blind man using his outstretched hand as a potential guide, as a self-portrait of the artist at work. With a work such as this, representation approaches its own limits, for to follow Derrida’s argument on the relation between the two logics of the invisible, when an artist chooses a blind person, or some image of blindness as subject matter, what is being drawn is in fact a representation of the very process of drawing, which is to say, representation itself. There is a relation between theme and process, a reflection even, if one considers that, in the process of representing, the artist is as blind as the blind subject that is represented. In this particular example, therefore, the hands of the blind man are the poetic equivalent of the hand of the artist as it begins to draw.

Fig. 1. Antoine Coypel L'Aveug/e (Study of the Blind! c.1684. Black, red and white chalk on gray paper, 34.5 x 25.5 cm. Louvre Museum.

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Let us pause to consider such a reading. This sounds like a very modernist proposal — representation approaching its own representation — and indeed, we could perhaps find no better exemplification of such “blind self-reflexivity” than in the work of Jackson Pollock. It is interesting, for example, to compare Coypel’s drawing to the famous photographs by Hans Namuth depicting Pollock in the process of working. What does such a comparison suggest? Could we not say that Pollock works within that arena of blindness that Derrida outlines? This is a seemingly inescapable conclusion if we consider the more infamous aspects of his practice. With Pollock the canvas is no longer an easel which would be set up with the figurative pretence of comparing what is to be seen on the canvas to what is presently in front of the artist. When Derrida suggests that during the act of drawing it is possible that the artist “has seen” and “will see” but “presently does not see,” it can be understood that Pollock has laid down the canvas to enter the night of this present where he does not see. Pollock paints blind. Yet, and this is an important qualification which affects, I would argue, the history of subsequent modernist painting, Pollock paints blind insofar as it is the invisible element of drawing in painting that his paintings desire to present. In a certain fashion Pollock paints as others would draw. But his work is more than that. It is a form of painting which produces the truth of drawing. In the light of Derrida’s proposals, it is interesting to speculate on the many claims that have been made concerning the role of drawing in Pollock’s approach. What does it mean to say, for example, to quote Bernice Rose, that with Pollock there is a “translation of drawing into painting — the radical fusion of draughtsmanship with paint and colour to create a technique that was linear in execution, painterly in effect”?7 Similarly, with Fried’s analysis, it is intriguing to re-read his argument and realise how much of it is implicitly concerned with the status of drawing in Pollock’s work.

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Before examining some of the implications of this presence of drawing within painting, it is necessary to consider the two interpretations that Derrida gives to the inter-relation between blindness and drawing. When Derrida says that the line must proceed in the night and that it consequently escapes the field of vision, this is so, he explains, not only because it is not yet visible, but because it does not belong to the realm of the spectacle, of spectacular objectivity — and so that which it makes happen or come cannot in itself be mimetic. The heterogeneity between the thing drawn and the line in the process of drawing remains abyssal, whether it be between a thing and its representation or between the model and the image. The night of this abyss can be interpreted in two ways, either as the eve or the memory of the day, that is, as a reserve of visibility (the draughtsman does not presently see but he has seen and will see again: the aperspective as the anticipating perspective or the anamnesic retrospective), or else as radically and definitively foreign to the phenomenality of the day. This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility'.8

It is with this second interpretation of the invisible that I wish to make the connection with Lacan’s idea of the gaze. In this passage Derrida is suggesting that, on the one hand, the blindness within drawing can be understood as the display and recall of memory, it brings back to life, so to speak, that which has been seen; yet on the other hand — and this is the more insightful interpretation — the blindness within drawing is there to mark a fundamental loss within memory itself: that which has never seen the light of day. It is with this conception of a foundational loss that it is possible to find a relation to Lacan’s re­ reading of Freud on memory and desire. In his writing, Freud seems to suggest that there is an original experience of satisfaction, which leaves memory traces behind it such that a faint and indistinct image of

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the satisfying object can be formed. For Freud, this image is all important, because it forms the subject’s desire and drives him or her to seek, that is, re-find, that which has been lost. After Freud, Kleinian psychoanalysis developed this notion of an empirically lost object, attempting to give a full explanation to the subject’s desire by making all psychical mechanisms the direct or indirect means of re­ finding the object which was originally capable of satisfying the child’s desire. The Kleinian psychoanalysts’ conclusion was that the lost object is the mother’s body. Lacan, however, questions the direction of this approach, and specifically the attempt to give an empirical status to the lost object. As Russell Grigg has succinctly explained, the question Lacan asks is how could this irreplaceable object — whose empirical reality is taken for granted — ever have become obliterated to the point where its loss affects not only the original lived experience but the image of the experience itself?9 It is faced with this situation that Lacan introduces the objet a — a strange object which is not really an object, or not what we would expect an object to be. This object is introduced by lacan to represent what is unrepresentable, what has not entered into the play of signifiers, and what is not to be confused with any empirical object of desire. The metonymy of desire, the mechanism of substitution governing desire, concerns only desire as the desire for an empirical object. The objet a, on the other hand, concerns loss as such, one that is prior to that which is lost. As Russell Grigg again explains: Lacan's thesis is that while desire does indeed follow the principles of metonymic substitution within the signifying chain, this is not because of the loss of any kind of first, primordial object, but because it is the loss itself that is original. To contrast it with the empirical, we might call this a pure loss.10

What I wish to suggest is that there is just such a loss in Pollock’s work. To see how we need to turn to Derrida’s

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second aspect: the withdrawal or the eclipse, the differential inappearance, of the line. Derrida’s first aspect is thought of in relation to the “potential tracing of the line.” With the second the focus shifts to seek what remains once the line has been drawn. Yet even with this change of tense, an essential blindness and invisibility still exists. Why is this? Because once the line has been drawn, it disappears to allow the possibility of it becoming a contour or border, that which is between the inside and outside of a figure. If it reaches this limit, then the line itself is not to be seen. It is drawn to its own invisibility and disappearance. It is with such a condition of withdrawal that the line is deprived of possessing any stable identity. There is no inherent essence to the line, for any attribute of its existence lies only in the qualities it gives to that'which it divides. Hence, we arrive at Derrida’s general conclusion on the art of drawing: Nothing belongs to the line (trait), and thus, to drawing and to the thought of drawing, not even its own “trace.” Nothing even participates in it. The line (trait) joins and adjoins only in separating.11

At this point we can profitably return to Fried’s commentary on the line in Pollock, the line which has been purged of its figurative character and that bounds and delimits nothing — nothing, we could now add, other than perhaps itself, which is of course nothing. We are now in the position to suggest that in Pollock’s “all-over” works, it is this line to which nothing belongs that appears in its very disappearance. The all-over is the presentation of the nothing of the line. This is, undoubtedly, a proposition at the very borders of sense. Yet it is from this position at the limit that we can begin to approach what is there in the work itself. Thus if, for example, 1 have specifically chosen to consider Derrida’s two aspects, it is because Pollock’s practice is to be located at some impossible point between the two. The first aspect is, if we recall, the potential tracing of the line,

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while the second is the line once drawn. What is there between the two? I would like to suggest that it is through asking what lies between these two aspects that we can begin to realise the significance of Pollock’s drip technique. Why the dripping, pouring, splattering of paint? Firstly, the process of dripping is the means for suspending the potential tracing of the line, withholding, that is, that moment when the inscription has begun but the inscribed is yet to be seen, that instant, to repeat our Derrida quote, “when the point at the point of the hand (of the body proper in general) moves forward upon making contact with the surface.” Here Pollock’s rejection of the brush as an implement of contact is obviously of decisive importance. Yet with this rejection, what has happened to the status of contact? This is a question which becomes even more intriguing if we consider the other miraculous quality of the line in the all-over paintings. Fried says that the line delimits nothing. What this implies is that there is no thing drawn, hence the moment of the line once drawn does not arrive. How is this? How can this be so? Is it not impossible, for if this time does not arrive, then there is no contact, nothing has happened, the painting never painted? Indeed, to say, as Fried does of Pollock’s all-over drip paintings, that “we tend to view the raw canvas as not there,” is to allude to this absence of contact. Fried does not, however, directly confront this absence, although the necessity for him to do so is even more marked if we consider what it also means for him to say that line, in these paintings, is entirely transparent both to the non-illusionistic space it inhabits but does not structure, and to the pulses of something like pure, disembodied energy that seem to move without resistance through them.12[my italics]

How can a line be transparent? How is it that we can see through a line in its very presence? How can a line be invisible in its very visibility? I would propose that to

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understand the nature of this line it is necessary to consider that the line is there to delimit and encircle what Lacan refers to as the gaze as objet a, or, before he theorised the nature of this object, what he called the phallic signifier. The peculiar quality of this signifier, which is also the attribute of the gaze, is that it is that which gives body to a certain fundamental loss in its presence itself. Put simply, it incarnates a void. Here we can follow Slavoj Zizek’s precise definition and note its relation to Pollock: The phallic signifier is, so to speak, an index of its own impossibility. In its very positivity it is the signifier of “castration" — that is, of its own lack. The so called prephallic objects (breasts, excrement) are lost objects, while the phallus is«not simply lost but is an object which gives body to a certain fundamental loss in its very presence. In the phallus, loss as such attains a positive existence)*’

Pollock’s line is the same. It is an index of its own impossibility. This is why the trace in Pollock, as an index of a passage of movement which erases its contact, negates its existence as a trace. The trace is there to incarnate a void. Hence, Fried’s observation of the raw canvas as not being there: the line is never traced inasmuch as it gives body to a void which is there, which is present, which is all-over the painting. What the all-over is, therefore, is something other than a purely formal quality. This demand of the present that is placed all-over, the potential hysteria of Pollock as he is required to turn in all directions at once, is nothing other than the impossible simultaneity’ of the phallic signifier that gives body to a presence at the same time as to an absence. The quest that drives Pollock in his all-over drip paintings can consequently be stated as the attempt to recreate an originary loss. Painting is undertaken to perform an impossible work of mourning insofar as this originary loss is the loss of that which was never possessed to be lost in the first place. The loss comes to be through presence, and the presence through

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loss. It is within the “double bind” of this impossible work of mourning, to return at this point to Derrida’s initial hypothesis, that the transcendental and the sacrificial also find their coincidence. Thus, what of Pollock’s work, his work of mourning, is not the end-point to his painting just this very coincidence? The ultimate concern of Fried’s analysis of the all-over drip paintings was to show how Pollock was primarily engaged in what, Fried says, “seems, on the face of it, impossible: to achieve figuration within the stylistic content of his all-over, optical style.”14 So, for example, in paintings such as The Wooden Horse, Summertime and White Cockatoo (all 1998), we see how Pollock, in certain areas that are accidentally circumscribed through the crossing of lines, fills in the spaces with colour to give a figurative suggestion to the line. This forms part of Pollock’s paradoxical project, to achieve figuration through a procedure that is the denial of it, to restore to line its figurative capability in a style that is the renunciation of that capability, and, Fried significandy specifies, to ultimately give back to the line of traditional drawing its figurative dimension. This contradiction is for Fried fully realised, however, in only two works. Cut-Out and Out of the Web. In Cut-Out (Fig. 2), Pollock presents the contradiction by literally cutting into the canvas itself so that a figure is produced from what is removed. Contact with the canvas is thus restored, yet there is no sight regained, for this contact effects a blinding cut. With this inscription a figure which is there only in its absence as a cut-out appears. It presents itself within an absence which, because there is nothing to see, paradoxically reinforces for Fried the aptness of the category of the “optical” that he had applied to Pollock’s all-over style. With Cut-Out, Fried writes: The result is that the figure is not seen as an object in the world, or shape on a flat surface — in fact it is not seen as the presence of anything — but rather as the absence, over a particular area, of the visual field. The figure is something we don’t see — it is literally, where we don't

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Fig. 2. Jackson Pollock Untitled (Cut-Ouf) c. 1 948-50. Oil, enamel, aluminum paint, and mixed mediums on cardboard and canvas, 77.3 x 57cm. Ohara Museum of Art, Japan. ©Jackson Pollock, 1948-50 / Reproduced by permission of Viscopy Ltd, Sydney 2000.

see — rather than something, a shape or object in the world, we do see. More than anything, it is like a kind of blind spot, a kind of defect in our visual apparatus; it is like part of our retina that is destroyed or for some reason is not registering the visual field over a certain area.15

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Thus, blindness returns, and with it the invisible that always haunts and is the very essence of the visible. What appears is an object that is not of this world. It is, I would suggest, the type of object which Lacan was attempting to designate with his theory of the gaze as objet a. Fried describes Pollock’s removal of part of the painting’s fabric in Cut-Out as the “most radical surgery imaginable.” It is only by this surgical — sacrificial — cut that the contradiction underlying Pollock’s painting project is realised. What can come after this gesture? Do Pollock’s “all-over” paintings, as many art historians have stated, herald the arrival of a modernist end to painting? After Pollock, is painting simply caught in the modernist bind of the repetition of its end? To offer here a different understanding of what comes after Pollock let us first return to an event that took place well before Pollock. What is rather intriguing about Fried’s suggestion that in Cut-Out Pollock performed the most radical surgery imaginable, is that although this gesture may indeed be radical, it should be noted that Filippo Brunelleschi, whom history has credited as the “inventor” of perspective in painting, was the first to offer a theoretical demonstration of the practice of perspective in painting by one day, sometime towards the beginning of the fifteenth century, piercing a hole in a painting he had painted. With this action Brunelleschi effectively removed part of the painting’s surface. How, therefore, does this gesture relate to that of Pollock? Does Pollock’s surgical operation place him in a historical association with Brunelleschi? Is it that Pollock’s name should be added to the list of those artists whose work Hubert Damisch, in his structuralist inspired book The Origin of Perspective, has analysed as figuring a return to the origin of perspective? One way of answering these questions would be by proposing a relation between anamorphosis and the ultimate trajectory of Pollock’s work as it is so defined by Fried.16 On initially encountering perspective it may seem, Lacan suggests, that a history of painting could be

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organised around the progressive mastery of the illusion of space. But there is something that remains to subvert this mastery. Around the moment of the discovery of perspective, Lacan adds, ‘one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus ot pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history, insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we are implicated in it....” This point is what the appearance of anamorphosis represents. Anamorphosis, as described by Lacan, is a turning point when the artist completely reverses the use of that [perspective’s] illusion of space, when he forces it to enter into the original goal, that is to transform it into the support of the hidden reality — it being understood that, to a certain extent, a work of art always involves, encircling the Thing.17

What, then, do we see in anamorphosis that is hidden in perspective? In his writing on art, Lacan was particularly drawn to a description given by Baltrusâitis of a spectator’s reaction to Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. What caught Lacan’s eye was the temporal factor and, crucially, the process of “return” involved in the perception of the anamorphic image. The spectator viewing the painting front on sees a stain in the foreground of the image, a stain which, although capturing the interest of the spectator, remains an incomprehensible form. As Baltrusâitis describes the spectator’s encounter with the painting, it is only upon leaving the room through a door located beside the painting and “turning around” for the final time that the spectator, at the required oblique view, sees the image appear from within its former distortion.18 As we know, when The Ambassadors is viewed from the side, the image of a skull miraculously appears. What is so astonishing about this appearance is not simply that from an incomprehensible stain a recognisable image is formed, but that the image which appears does so in front of the plane of representation of the painting, that is, it presents

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itself beyond the limits of representation in a space in front of the painting itself. It is with this movement from representation to presentation that there is for Lacan a return to art’s original end. There is here something that “presents itself as nihil, as nothing.” With anamorphosis there is an “incarnated form” that gives body to nothing. What is this nothing? Could it not be that anamorphosis gives body to the hole with which Brunelleschi pierced his tableau? Yet, is this not precisely what a spectator such as Manetti — the first biographer of Brunelleschi — would have done in placing his eye not just to the surface of the back of Brunelleschi’s panel but actually inside the hole? Would that eye not have filled the hole (or at least attempted to fill it as it was placed to the surface of the hole as a result of its desire to see through the hole)? What anamorphosis images, therefore, is this eye, or rather, this eye as it is blinded by the gaze. To suggest this constitutive blindness of the eye at the origin of perspective, the following question could be posed: in the utilisation of Brunelleschi’s model, does the spectator discover, when placing his eye behind the panel and looking through the hole, the reflection of his own eye? Damisch suggests that Lichtenberg’s paradox — how can you see yourself in a mirror with your eyes closed? — found a possible solution with photography. But Damisch suggests this only to pose and consider the more peculiar paradox of Brunelleschi’s demonstration: how, in being opposite a mirror and captured by the sight of what is reflected there, to not see oneself seeing?19 If one does not, then it is because ultimately Brunelleschi’s demonstration is. not concerned with that “self-reflexive” philosophical condition where thought grasps itself as thought and for which seeing oneself seeing forms a ground of certainty, which is to say, it is not concerned with the condition of “the seeing oneself seeing” which Lacan specifies as the elision of the gaze. Quite to the contrary, there is here an opening to the gaze. What one thus fails to perceive is the gaze with which the tableau was pierced.

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It is precisely this failure, this blindness, that perspective’s “other” — anamorphosis — attempts to figure. Thus, for example, what is intriguing about the skull in The Ambassadors as the materialisation of the gaze is that when the spectator does see the skull, he sees its gaze directed towards the place where he was standing in front of the painting. At the moment the spectator sees the image of the skull, there is the retrospective realisation that this image of death was “always already” looking at the spectator without the spectator being able to see it. Therefore when turning to view the painting from the side, the spectator is, in a certain sense, seeing the appearance of a figure of his former blindness. It is the skull's gaze — and it is precisely a gaze because it is obviously the substance of an eye that the skull lacks — that is the haunting figure of this blindness. To offer a summary of the relation between anamorphosis and perspective that is here being proposed, it would be useful to present one more general observation made by Lacan on the nature of painting. This is a truly remarkable observation, for with it Lacan seems to be unintentionally, and perhaps even unconsciously, returning to Brunelleschi’s original model. He offers his own rewriting of perspective’s origin with this statement: Indeed, there is something whose absence can always be observed in a picture — which is not the case in perception. This is the central field, where the separating power of the eye is exercised to the maximum in vision. In every picture, this central field cannot but be absent, and replaced by a hole — a reflection, in short, of the pupil behind which is situated the gaze. Consequently, and in as much as the picture enters into a relation to desire, the place of a central screen is always marked, which is precisely that by which, in front of the picture, I am elided as subject of the geometral plane.20

This observation effectively captures what anamorphosis attempts to see. In relation to the practice of anamorphosis,

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it is highly significant that Lacan should here write that it is by means of the central screen which marks the hole that I am elided as subject of the geometral plane in front of the picture, because what does anamorphosis wish to see from the side of the painting if not this very elision, that is to say, to figure this hole which is the reflection of the pupil behind which is the gaze? To now return to Pollock after this brief detour. Does his work not have the same relation to the origin of perspective as anamorphosis? The “impossible” desire that Fried presents Pollock’s all-over work as being governed by can, like anamorphosis, be interpreted as the desire to present the gaze. To follow the trajectory of Pollock’s work that Fried presents, it is significant that the terminating blindness of Cut-Out can be read as Pollock’s confrontation with the gaze which necessitates that the “central field” of every picture “cannot but be absent.” The sensation of the spectator’s blindness when viewing Cut-Out is heightened, Fried suggests, if we ask ourselves where, in this painting, the cut-out area seems to lie in relation to the painted field. For me, at any rate, it does not lie behind the field, despite the fact that where the field is cut away we see the mostly blank canvas-board behind it; and it does not seem to lie on the surface, or in some tense, close juxtaposition with it, as in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism. In the end, the relation between the field and the figure is simply not spatial at all: it is purely and wholly optical: so that the figure created by removing part of the painted field and backing it with canvas-board seems to lie somewhere within our own eyes, as strange as this may sound.21

What then is Cut-Out if not a reflection of the pupil behind which is the gaze? But then of course, Cut-Out may be seen as a return to and repetition of Brunelleschi’s lost model, for it was Brunelleschi who inaugurated modern painting by the subtraction of an element from

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the visual field. This return, however, is like the re-tuming point of anamorphosis, for what Pollock circles around as he paints is the desire to present the original absence of the vanishing point. Pollock’s quest, therefore, is the attempt to figure the hole — to figure absence itself. Thus, if there is a fundamental contradiction underlying Pollock’s project, it is that he wants to present the absence of the central field which defines the gaze, the cut-out of the objet a. Alberti concluded Book 1 of Della Pittura with these words of advice for the painter: Never let it be supposed that anyone can be a good painter if he does not clearly understand what he is attempting to do. He draws the bow in vain who has nowhere to point the arrow.22

If we consider the importance of Alberti’s outlining of the theory of perspective in this work, we may understand that the point to which he is referring is the vanishing point. Does Pollock follow Alberti’s advice? Definitely not, for as has often been noted, in Pollock’s all-over paintings there is a certain aimlessness. Fried, for example, writes that the “homogeneous visual fabric’’ of Pollock’s paintings is such that it both invites the act of seeing on the part of the spectator and yet gives the eye nowhere to rest once and for all. That is, Pollock s all-over drip paintings refuse to bring one’s attention to a focus anywhere.23

Without any terminating point of focus, his paintings could be said to be lacking a vanishing point. With such a lack, painting becomes, according to Alberti, a useless activity. It is in vain that the painter paints without any vanishing point to direct the brush. The painter is at a loss. Thus, to repeat, what Pollock can be understood to be circling around, in a manner which dramatically extends a spectator’s requirement to turn around an

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anamorphic image, is the absence of a vanishing point. Or rather, Pollock does not so much paint around the absence of this point as this absence is the painting as a whole. This is what the painting is in its very presence. 1’he expanse of the canvas is itself a tilling in of that hole with which Brunelleschi introduced perspective. Rather than a localised anamorphic stain, the canvas is in its entirety an anamorphic stain, but without there being any point of view from which a recognisable image could form, no matter where the spectator or painter may stand. With the all-over, therefore, the vanishing point has vanished. It is no longer there as a foundational absence to enable the construction of a pictorial field. What are the effects of this removal? At its limit, it induces a profound anxiety — an anxiety which should be understood in relation to the particular inflection that Lacan gives to this term. Lacan developed an account of anxiety which differs from a straightforward understanding which would constitute anxiety in relation to the loss, or to the threat of the loss, of something. For Lacan, anxiety is rather the loss of the loss that produces objective reality’ in the first place. Anxiety is the lack of the support of the lack. In the all-over, the lack which founds perspective is lacking. The lack lacks. It is the same with anamorphosis. When the anamorphic image of the skull appears, the void of perspective has been materialised such that the defining lack of perspective is lacking. It is with this proposal that it becomes possible to understand Lacan’s cryptic reference to the image of the skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors as the “phallic ghost” and the “imaged incarnation” of the lack of castration. The lack itself is given body, anamorphosis in this manner attempts to see the lack itself. With Pollock as well, if Cut-Out marks a return to Brunelleschi, it is a return which reverses the original panel so that the hole is no longer there to be hidden behind and looked through but rather is there to face the spectator. Would this be the ultimate gesture of return? If Brunelleschi inaugurated

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modem painting, as Damisch claims, with the reversal of the canvas, does Pollock announce its end? We cannot expect such a linear unfolding. If there is an origin with Brunelleschi and an end with Pollock, these are really two sides to the same ongoing question posed by art’s relation to the gaze. To evidence this, we should consider what comes after Pollock. Jasper Johns’ Target with Four Faces (Fig. 3) is often interpreted as a critique of Pollock and the gestural dynamics of abstract expressionism. This is a misleading reading, for in this painting there is the same quality of presence as there is in Pollock. In Target with Four Faces the lack of perspective is lacking. The target is all too present for any arrow to take aim; and indeed, any aim is in fact reversed as the bull’s eye becomes 3. gaze which blinds, and is itself blind to,* the spectator’s own look.24 This is a blindness which is figured in the work itself because the title “Target with Four Faces” is actually a misnomer. We do not see a full face, as each is cut just below eye level. No sight is given to these faces. Like the skull in The Ambassadors, therefore, each is a reflection of the spectator’s blindness. Indeed, to complete the association with anamorphosis, it is far from coincidental that the blindness figured in this work should also in turn be an effect, as Johns suggests through the equation implicit in Target with Plaster Casts which replaces the faces by “castrated” body parts, of the memorialising of the fragmented body. What Johns is offering, therefore, is not an ironic commentary on Pollock’s gesture but rather its repetition, insofar as the gesture is again functioning here — according to the demands of the phallic signifier — as “an index of its own impossibility.” Like Pollock, Johns’ artistic project can be defined as the attempt to present the gaze. There is thus a similarity between Pollock and Johns which suggests something other than that which a standard linear history of art could account for. Johns’ response to Pollock is another exemplification of Lacan’s proposal concerning anamorphosis — the gaze — as a turning point in the history of art. With anamorphosis art

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Fig. 3. Jasper Johns Target with Four Faces 1955. Assemblage; encaustic on newspaper and collage on canvas with objects, 66 x 66 cm, surmounted by four tinted plaster faces in wood box with hinged front. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift ot Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull. Photograph © 2000 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Jasper Johns, I 955 / Reproduced by permission of Viscopy Ltd, Sydney 2000.

returns to what lacan defines as its "original end, which is to project a reality that is not that of the object represented.”25 What is beyond the object represented is the objet a, an object that sometimes makes its miraculous appearance in art via means of presentation. Thus, if it is often claimed that Pollock’s work is the sign of a modernist end to painting, such an end needs to be read against a linear history of art because this end is simply another turning back to art’s original end — the presentation of the gaze as objet a. To

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here just suggest what follows from such a return, we can note that it is through the blindness of Target with Four Faces and Target with Plaster Casts that Johns re-found Duchamp’s found object — the readymade. Why this transition from painting to the object — to the found object? What is found? Does what is lost in (or even lost to) painting return in the object? If we follow Freud, he states that any finding of an object is always a re-finding, caught up as the process is in that impulse to find again that constitutes the basis to his formulation of the pleasure principle. But this is not enough, for to this observation Lacan adds that the fact that the object has been lost is only a consequence of its re­ finding — that is, there is no object which is originally lost, for what occurs, paradoxically, is that the object only comes to be lost through its very presence. The appearance of the found object in art signifies, therefore, one more expression of the impossible desire to present the Thing itself. All that distinguishes Johns from Pollock is that he actually attempts to present the gaze as an object. He moves from painting to find that elusive object which will fill out the void of the gaze as objet a. Thus, between the end of painting and the found or readymade object — an alternative which characterises much of the art which is located at modernism’s so-called end — art circulates once again around the “originary void” of the gaze. After this condition is acknowledged, however, we are led to further ask what this would mean for a far more extensive reviewing of developments in modernist painting. Fried’s ‘history” of modernist painting, which he has been pursuing ever since he wrote the catalogue essay for the Three American Painters exhibition, provides some interesting answers. At the conclusion of this article, after having returned to re­ view one of the starting points to Michael Fried’s critical and historical investigations, one of those points to which it could be argued — and I would like to suggest — his work itself also returns, one is even more acutely aware of the fact that the implications and insights of his writing are only just beginning to be realised.

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NOTES *

1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

I completed this chapter as a staff member of the Department of Art History and Theory and the Power Institute, at the University of Sydney. Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Fogg Art Museum, Haiyard University, 1965) 14. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins, transi. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 41. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, transi. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 315. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transi. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1977) 83. In this article I will be following the translation by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. The translators indicate that the word trait is often left untranslated “to preserve its range of meanings from a trait or feature to a line, stroke, or mark.” See Translator’s Note, Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 2. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 45. Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980) 7. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 45. Russell Grigg, “The ethics of desire" Analysis 3 (1991) 33. ibid., 33. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 54. Fried, Three American Painters, 14. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989) 157. Fried, Three American Painters, 16. ibid., 17. Since this article was written a number of articles concerned with the topic of Pollock and anamorphosis have appeared. In maintaining my original article for this publication I have not been able to address the important arguments contained in these articles. For further discussion of Pollock and anamorphosis see Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997), Chapter 5, “The Cut”; and Rosalind Krauss, “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution" October 77 (Summer 1996).

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17 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, transi. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992) 141. 18 Jurgis Baltrusâitis, Anamorphic Art, transi. W.J. Strachan (New York: Abrams, 1977) 104-5. 19 Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 126. 20 Lacan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 108. 21 Fried, Three American Painters, 17. 22 Leon Battista Alberti. On Painting, transi. John R. Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1956) 59. 23 Fried, Three American Painters, 14. 24 For an analysis of the anxiety-inducing effects of this presence, see Leo Steinberg, Other criteria: confrontations with twentieth century art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), Chapter 1: “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public," and Chapter 2: “Jasper Johns: the First Seven Years of His Art.” 25 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 141.

“The Man Who Knows Too Much”: On Michael Fried’s “Impressionism” Rex Butler "Blindness is an assumption” — Jacques Dernida, Memoirs of the Blind

What is “impressionism” for Michael Fried? In a series of three recent studies devoted to the topic,1 he speaks of it as a loosely linked artistic and literary movement that occurred between the 1890s and the First World War, which included such figures as the painter Thomas Eakins and the writers Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells. In the work of these artists and authors, there is a simultaneous and paradoxical “eliciting and repression”2 of the medium in which they work. They are conscious of it and the incipient disbelief it involves, but it is a consciousness they try to suspend or overcome. In this, they are to be distinguished from what Fried calls artistic or literary “modernism,” which simply attempts to project the medium as such, make the spectator or reader aware of it.3 If modernism admits the physical reality of the art work, impressionism is engaged in the attempt to deny or neutralise this obvious fact. To use the two terms Fried mobilises throughout his career, we might say that impressionism is opposed to modernism as absorption is to theatricality.

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Seen in this light, the work on impressionism is the latest instalment in Fried’s long narrative of Western artistic modernism, all the way from the anti-Rococo rebellion of Chardin and Greuze in the 1760s in Absorption and Theatricality, through the 1840s in Courbet’s Realism and up to Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s. All of these books, as we know, were written as an attempt to explain and justify Fried’s initial critical judgements concerning the American art of the 1960s in such texts as “Three American Painters” and “Art and Objecthood.” And with Fried’s recent collection of early critical writings, this material on artistic and literary impressionism forms a crucial link between Manet in the 1860s and post-War American art. But, we might argue, this writing on “impressionism” is already about this art, and particularly that work with which Fried began his critical project, Jackson Pollock’s Cut-Outs. For what Fried takes up there is precisely the entry of writing, the graphic, drawing — let us say the signifier — into art, and with this the whole question of the cut, lack, desire, the gaze. Fried asks in his essay “Almayer’s Face: On Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane and Norris” what effect impressionism in the sense that he gives it might have on the way in which it is usually understood, and answers that it will have to be completely rethought on its basis;4 but we might say that post-war American art and perhaps even art in general will also have to be rcconceptualised. What could it mean to say Pollock is an “impressionist” in Fried’s sense, that what is at stake in his work is the whole problematic of the “impression,” writing or the trait? Or, to invert this, what could it mean to say that Thomas Eakins, as shown in Fried’s analysis of him, is already grappling with the same issues as Pollock, that what we see in his The Gross Clinic is a forerunner of Pollock’s Cut-Outs? * * *

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But in order to answer these questions, let us look at three of the texts Fried has published so far on this artistic and literary impressionism: 1. In “Realism, Writing and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic” Fried looks at the well-known painting by Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, in which we see the surgeon Samuel D. Gross performing an operation, before a packed amphitheatre, involving the removal of dead bone from a patient’s thigh. The patient, a young man, lies horizontally along an operating table, exaggeratedly foreshortened, surrounded by Gross’ assistants. Gross himself stands dramatically poised mid­ incision, gleaming and bloody scalpel in hand, in an obvious analogy to the act of painting. To the side of the man, a woman identified as the patient’s mother shies away from the scène in front of her, holding up her hands as though to shield herself from what she has just seen. To the back of the picture, an official observer sits with pencil in hand recording what is before him; and to the extreme right Eakins himself is depicted doing the same thing, doubtless in preparation for the picture before us. What is at stake in the comparison made here between Gross and Eakins, the scalpel of the surgeon and the brush of the artist? Through a detailed examination of Eakins’ oeuvre and the cultural background to his practice, Fried is able to argue that what is crucially at stake in his work is the relationship of writing and drawing to painting.5 The two are neither to be seen as separate activities nor opposed as low to high art. Rather, for Eakins, it is a matter of painting overcoming writing/drawing and the threat of blindness it contains. The horizontality and incisiveness of drawing, which is associated with such things as perspective and seeing to infinity, must be healed by the restorative verticality of painting, which in its shadows and folds reminds us that not everything can be rendered visible.6 And this is evidenced in The Gross Clinic, where it is a matter of overcoming the threat to sight posed by the scalpel of

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Gross and the horizontally aligned wound of the patient. That is, although Eakins must identify with Gross, he must also attempt to surpass him, to incorporate him within his practice. And this would be like the Oedipal drama implied in his relationship to those other “father-figures” of similarly striking realist canvases (Caravaggio, Velasquez, Ribera, Rembrandt, Gérôme), whose achievements are at once so great and yet no longer able to convince, no longer available to Eakins himself.7 As Fried writes, summarising Eakins’ task: What this meant in practice was that painting, in obvious respects the more comprehensive enterprise, had to be made to contain or subsume writing/drawing, which in one sense it couldn’t fail to do even while in another, ultimately more important sense the disparity between the “spaces” of writing/drawing and of painting was such that no true containment or subsumption, certainly no perfect dissolving of the first into the second, could be accomplished. Thus the proliferation of images of writing in Eakins’ pictures may be seen both as representing an effort at containment — painting depicting writing and thereby mastering it — and as an index of the less than complete success of that effort — writing investing painting and thereby escaping its control.8

2. In “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” Fried looks at the work of the American novelist and short story writer Stephen Crane. Here too, he finds a similar “surfacing and repression”9 of the medium in which Crane works. That is, through a close reading of several of Crane’s texts, Fried is able to discern an extraordinary number of metaphors for its actual writing, both making it visible and, as metaphors, obscuring this literality, allowing us to enter the fiction that would be rendered unreadable by a too-close attention to it. Thus, in the description of the battle scene in “Death and the Child,” a line of soldiers is spoken of as coming out of an “inky mass”10 like the very words through which this is expressed; or in the same story a bandoleer which a man is

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trying to remove is said to grip him like a “serpent”,11 again like that snake-like line of prose from which indeed it would be impossible to extricate himself. This is particularly so for the striking images of the upturned faces of soldiers about to be buried or lying dead on the battlefield we see throughout Crane’s work.12 These bloodless feces are metaphors for Fried for the white sheets of paper with which Crane was confronted, and the act of turning them over or burying them is analogous to the task of the writer in overcoming his consciousness of the page in front of him and covering it with the words of his tale. And every aspect of the writer’s situation — the words he shapes his story out of, his position vis-à-vis the page he wxites on, even the financial and institutional context in which he works13 — must be covered over and rendered invisible by him, taken up and absorbed by the narrative he constructs. As Fried asks, citing Crane’s friend Joseph Conrad’s credo for literary impressionism, which was, “above all, to make [the reader] see”: But what if, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Crane’s very commitment to a version of the “impressionist” project — his attempt, before all, to make the reader see — at least intermittently led Crane himself to see, by which I mean fix his attention upon, and to wish to make the reader see, by which I mean visualise in his imagination, those things that, before all, actually lay before Crane’s eyes: the written words themselves, the white, lined sheets of paper on which they were inscribed, the marks made by his pen on the surface of the sheet, even perhaps the movement of his hand wielding the pen in the act of inscription? Wouldn’t such a development threaten to abort the realisation of the impressionist project as classically conceived? In fact would it not call into question the very basis of writing as communication — the tendency of the written word at least partly to “efface” itself in favour of its meaning in the acts of writing and reading? But now imagine that instead of recognising the objects of his attention for what they were — instead of understanding himself to be seeing and representing writing and the production of writing —

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Crane unwittingly, obsessionally, and to all intents and purposes automatically, metaphorised writing and the production of uniting (and the viewing of these) in images, passages and, in rare instances, entire narratives that hitherto have wholly escaped being read in these terms.14

3. In “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane and Eakins,” Fried again finds a similar “declaration and disguise”15 of writing in the works of authors Frank Norris and Joseph Conrad. In Norris’ A Man ’s Woman, it is, as with Crane, a matter of the metaphorising or covering over of writing and the white sheets of paper on which the writer inscribes his marks.16 In Conrad, however, things are a little different. Here it is not the métaphorisation of a blank sheet of paper that is at issue, but the erasure of a sheet already covered over.17 And we can see this allegorised in the plot of Conrad’s novel Almayer’s Folly, which concerns the attempt by Kaspar Almayer, having married a native woman upon coming over to Malaysia, to return to the society from which he came with his half-caste daughter, Nina. It is, of course, impossible to pass his own wife off as white, but the question is posed for him as to the status of his daughter. The denouement of the story, fittingly, is Nina’s refusal of his attempt to deny her blackness, after which Almayer vows to forget her — to forget her, more precisely, but never to forgive her.18 And in all of this — in moving from the métaphorisation of whiteness to the erasure of blackness — we see Fried’s modernism, the way that for him previous aesthetic solutions are no longer viable for subsequent generations. The attempt to create a state of absorption for Conrad is perhaps more difficult than for Eakins and Crane because the artist is no longer working in a blank, untouched field but must begin from the knowledge that it is already theatricalised by previous efforts. As Fried says, contrasting Norris (and implicitly Crane) and Conrad in this regard: More broadly, blankness in Almayer’s Folly emerges both as the product of a representational act the novel calls

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erasure and as a particular representation in its own right, not as a brute material fact signalling the collapse of representation (as the wilderness of ice — Norris’ version of blankness — connotes such a collapse in A Man's Woman}. At the risk of getting ahead of myself I will go further and suggest that the restoration of an original and in a sense originary blankness that is never merely a material blankness functions as a hyperbolic ideal not just in Almayer's Folly but throughout Conrad’s oeuvre. Indeed, a conception of erasure both as the disfiguring of a prior representation and as the restoration of an originary blankness is implicit in the unexpected image of Almayer’s silent shout, which I read as hinting at an analogy between silence and blankness at the same time that it depends for its effect on the contrast between the absence of sound and the sight of Almayer’s moving lips.19

* * *

What is Fried’s argument in each case here? It is that the artist or author must somehow overcome the literality of the medium in which he works. In Eakins, it is by containing and subsuming the graphic within the wider enterprise of painting. In Crane, it is by metaphorising writing by means of an image that comes to cover it over and take its place. In Conrad, it is by erasing it with another layer of writing. Faced with the threat of blindness or illegibility that a too-direct confrontation with the medium would pose, he must substitute for actual writing metaphors of writing, for the invisibility of the graphic the illusionality of paint. To paraphrase Fried’s famous statement from Absorption and Theatricality, the artist or author must suspend the “primordial convention”20 that paintings are made to be beheld and stories to be read. Again, it is not that this moment of literality is simply unnecessary or able to be foregone. Rather, it is just that threat of blindness it poses that forces both the artist and the characters within his fiction to begin the process of identification which lies at the origin of absorption.

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But in a subtle inversion of Fried’s argument, we might ask whether this brute materiality exists before these very attempts to overcome it, whether this blindness only has meaning within sight. In “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” for example, Fried is able to find a virtually endless series of analogies to the supposedly literal qualities of Crane’s text — the “rubyred snakelike thing”21 of The Monster, the procession of cable-cars of “An Experiment in Misery”,22 the swarm of ants upon the dead soldier’s face in The Red Badge of Courage25 — but we might ask whether we would be able to see these literal qualities before their métaphorisation like this or whether they are only metaphoric from the very beginning? Does the fact that we are only able to represent writing within writing mean that we are never entirely able to say what writing is?24 Or, in the same essay when Fried speaks of the relationship of the writer to the page on which he writes as repeated by that of the soldier to the upturned faces of his comrades, we might ask whether this set-up is itself only metaphoric, not necessarily true, in the end no more real than, only able to be seen through, the very relationship of a soldier to one of these upturned faces? All of this, we suggest, would be to open up a certain inversion of Fried’s argument, for it is not now absorption that arises in response to a prior literality, but absorption that produces its own literality or literality that arises as an effect of absorption. And this is indeed the true limit to the absorptive project: not something that could not be looked at or read,25 but the fact that absorption is possible only because of the assumption of a prior literality or can only end up producing a certain literality. The limit to absorption is not external, a literality that can never be absorbed, but internal, a literality that is the embodiment of a split within the absorptive project itself. What the absorptive project cannot admit, what it must remain blind to, is

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not something that exists before it that cannot be seen, but the fact that nothing comes before it. It is not merely blind, but blind to its own blindness, to the fact that there is nothing to be seen before its own blindness.

* * *

But in order to see how this inversion operates in more detail, let us go back to those three texts we looked at before: 1. In “Realism, Writing and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic," Fried argues that it is the threat of blindness involved in looking at something horrible — in this case, the wound in the patient’s leg and Gross’ knife — that forces us to overcome it and begin the process of absorption. It is by identifying with this threat, as we identify with the mother who turns away from it in the painting, that we are able to represent it to ourselves. As Fried writes: In my discussion of the Oedipal scenario that partly structures the composition, I characterised Gross’ right hand holding the scalpel as both a precise source of menace and, on the strength of a further analogy to Eakins’ right hand wielding a brush or palette knife, an immediate channel of access for the artist s impulse to introject and thereby to identify with the threatening (and healing) paternal power.26

It is a logic that Fried has earlier associated with the sublime, “according to which a sense of menace — typically a natural phenomenon — is capable of yielding delight when viewed from a position that affords safety, though it is also a feature of the paradoxical logic of the sublime that too absolute an assurance of safety tends to vitiate the experience being courted by these means.”27 Yet, we might argue, using the same “deferred”28 logic Fried mobilises, that this experience is only able to be

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narrated, that is, only exists at all, insofar as it has been survived. That threat that it poses can only be retrospective; and we would say the same thing about that threat of blindness Fried speaks of in Eakins’ painting. It too could only be seen and recognised insofar as it had already passed. To the very extent that we were able to feel threatened by that horrible sight the literal offers us, the process of identification has already begun. This would be the meaning behind that “effacing of seeing in the act of looking”29 of the mother’s gaze in the picture. On the one hand, as Fried says, the sight of the operation is a kind of blinding which it is impossible to look at, from which we turn away before we see. On the other hand, wre are only able to be threatened or blinded insofar as we see and keep on seeing. We identify with this woman, or this woman is representative of our seeing, because there is nothing to be seen before this turning away, or it is this turning away that suggests there is something to be seen. Hence, the equivalence between the woman and the wound in the painting:30 the first does not stand in for the second, is not an absorptive metaphor for it, but both take the place of that blinding thing itself, which is nothing outside of its substitutes. The effect of these metaphors, these tropes, these turnings or turnings away, however, is to suggest that there is something behind them. Horror arises as an effect of them, as a result of our projection onto them. And if there is a kind of blindness implicit in the image, it is that what we do not — and in a way cannot — see is ourselves there; that where the painting is at its most horrible is where we already are. We see this in Fried’s discussion of the glistening droplets of blood on the hand and scalpel of Gross, which for him in their blinding — for where the blood reflects there is literally nothing to be seen — call for an identification and absorption by the viewer: We find concentrated [in The Gross Clinic} the very essence of reflectiveness: shining highlights that confer an extra, in a sense gratuitous, degree of illusion [for

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Fried, paradoxically, physicality, reality] on the representations of blood and steel (and, in contrast, flesh) that simultaneously attract and repel our fascinated gaze.”31

For what should we see reflected there, what are we blind to? Precisely ourselves, the viewer. It is this blindness that is Fried’s absorption; but it is a blindness that exists only in retrospect, for insofar as we see the hole at all we do not see it but only something standing in for it, reflected in it as it were.32 2. In “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” Fried is again concerned with a kind of sublime unrepresentability, though this time it appears not as a doctor’s scalpel or the wound of his paient, but as the upturned faces of soldiers lost in battle. It is these faces that force Crane to his greatest absorptive efforts, that have to be covered over or metaphorised. And yet here too a certain inversion is possible. Fried’s argument is that, as with the scalpel or wound, it is through these faces that we enter Crane’s fiction. Like the soldiers on the battlefield, we identify with them, adopt their point of view, imagine what they would see if they could see. This is why they threaten us and why they have to be buried. Indeed, we would say that it is only by identifying with these faces, with the threat of blindness they pose, that we see or follow the plot at all. As Fried says of the short story by Crane, “An Experiment in Misery,” in which a dead man and a young boy seem to exchange stares: “Another feature in common with the passage from The Red Badge of Courage is the pointedly ambiguous use of pronouns in the sentence: ‘“To the youth it seemed that he and this corpse-like being were exchanging a prolonged stare and that the other threatened with his eyes.’ This has always been read as meaning that the corpse-like being seemed to threaten with his own eyes, but of course the sentence can just as well be read as stating that it seemed to the youth that the sleeping man threatened with his, the youth’s, eyes.”33

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This, as we say, is Fried’s understanding that we see only through an identification with the prior look of another, something he aligns with the absorptive overcoming of the blank page with which the writer is confronted. But can we not also read that passage above against Fried and say that what it shows is not so much that the youth only begins to see because he feels threatened by the imagined look of the corpse as that the youth is only threatened by the gaze of the corpse insofar as he has already identified with it, given it his eyes? Or, to put this another way, is it not true that, insofar as we do see those dead or sleeping men’s faces, we do not see the real horror, the real blindness, but only something standing in for it, as it were our own projection onto it, a reflection of ourselves? But, of course, it is just this that cannot be seen. The rhetorical trick of Crane’s style, where at certain points things are covered over, erased, disfigured, described as indescribable, is to make us look as though there is something to be seen, when in fact there is something to be seen only after we have looked at it, invested it with our sight. This is why Maurice Blanchot, in a statement cited by Fried, says that the cadaver is its own “image,” that the “thing or object must move away or even disappear (i.e., “die”) in order to be grasped again in the relation of resemblance.”34 For it is to suggest that we see these staring corpses only in retrospect, that the initial threat that makes us identify with them comes about only after it has passed. In this sense, we would say that the corpse — like all the other figures in Crane s fiction — is anamorphic, only able to be seen from the side. What is meant by this is that, by the time we see it, it is too late. That fundamental equivalence between the work and us by which it comes about has already occurred. And these figures stand in for this blindness, are literally where we cannot see (ourselves). We would say this too for those signifiers of writing that Fried argues Crane has to cover over and repress: at the very moment we think we see the signifier, we do not see it but

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only the signified. An example of this is to be found in Fried’s account of Crane’s hand seemingly deliberately tracing out the letters of his stories, as though drawn along by another gaze.35 If Crane’s hand goes too quickly, we do not see the signifier at all. If it moves too slowly, we cannot follow the story — and, as Fried emphasises, without “narrative continuity,” the “writing in question would cease to be writing and would become mere mark.”36 The signifier, thus, is to be found somewhere between these two times. But this would be just when it leaves Crane’s hand, beneath which it would be invisible. That self-reflexivity whereby the signifier would equal the signified cannot be seen. It is too late by the time we grasp it. Like the cadaver, like the upturned face, it comes about only in passing away. 3- In “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane and Eakins,” Fried argues for something a little different than with Eakins and Crane: not for the necessity to metaphorise a blank sheet of paper, but to erase a sheet of paper already covered over. It is in this that the absorptive task of Almayer’s Folly lies. And yet here too a certain inversion is possible. For, it could be argued, this blackened surface would not exist before the attempt to erase it. It is this absorptive writing that leads to the literality to be absorbed; or this absorptive project would be never-ending because the very means required to accomplish it — the erasure by covering over of a layer of writing — would itself need to be erased in turn. And we can see this allegorised in the plot of Almayer’s Folly. As we say, much of the narrative of the novel revolves around Almayer’s attempt to forget his daughter Nina after she rejects his efforts to transform her — or, more exactly, to forget her but not to forgive her. But there is a certain contradiction or limit here in that the thing that allows him to forget also means it is impossible. The paradox to which the injunction to forget but not to forgive points is that Almayer must not forget to forget. There is one thing preventing him from a complete forgetting, and that is the very thing that allows it: the desire to forget.37

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But here too, if there is nothing to be absorbed before the act of absorption, what can be seen is the whole range of narrative evasions and effacements that produce the illusion of there being something behind what is. Fried writes: “I see in the novel’s indirection in this regard something akin to Mrs Almayer’s action of ‘[throwing] her head-veil over the upturned face of the drowned man’, which is not to say that the dead man’s facelessness has been made less vivid on that account: my point is rather that the effect of vividness is achieved by these particular means.”38 In fact, in a key passage of the book, one already cited by Fried as the very emblem of the absorptive project, there is the image of Almayer’s silent mouth working, that is, the idea that although nothing is actually being said we must imagine a certain sound or meaning.39 We see the same thing in another passage dealing with Almayer’s passive face, and the notion that such indifference is impossible because we always imagine something behind it: “A face can be expressionless but not inexpressive: its capacity for representing depths’ is so to speak ineffaceable.”40 But perhaps the most extraordinary example of this in the book is the scene with which Fried begins his analysis, that of the two logs crushing the head of the Malay, whose sightless eyes continue to haunt Almayer and which in a sense neither Almayer nor Conrad is ever entirely able to erase. Why this persistence of the gaze — in all of our texts — despite it being covered over by earth or writing, despite it not even having the physical means for its support? Because, we would say, the very means for its absorption or identification is the gaze itself. That is, if these eyes would not have their uncanny power until we identified with them, in this identification itself something else is produced: the feeling that there is something else to be seen (as something lies behind the silence of Almayer’s mouth, the indifference of his face, and even the sheets of paper on which Conrad writes).41 * * *

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1 his is the final fate of Fried’s long narrative of absorption and theatricality. At the beginning of his career, in texts like ‘Three American Painters” and “Art and Objecthood,” the two are seen as antithetical, opposed. Then, as his argument develops, they are seen as intertwined, indissoluble.42 Fried admits in an article on Frank Stella that “depicted shape may be said to have become dependent upon literal shape.”43 Or, in his recent book on Manet, he concedes that already by Manet’s time antitheatrical painting could only be guaranteed by a certain notion of “strikingness” or “facingness,”44 And here too in these texts on literary impressionism, we can see the historical development from Eakins (and Crane) to Conrad as the gradual coming together of absorption and theatricality: in Eakins they “coincide through and through but do not merge,”45 while in Conrad they are “indistinguishable,”46 separated only by the thickness of a sheet of paper (the very writing that renders them equivalent also introduces another layer of writing to be absorbed). This development — the inability of absorption finally to be detached from theatricality — is Fried’s modernism, the way art history progresses. But what Fried is unable to do is explain why neither absorption nor theatricality can triumph, why the struggle between them is perpetual, why the absorptive process always has to be repeated. And the reason is because theatricality does not exist before absorption, because absorption produces a kind of theatricality (as writing can only be seen through its metaphors, the blindness we identify with does not exist before our attempt to occupy its place). And behind all this — at once repressed and manifest — is the presence of Lacan. For what else is Fried doing in these essays on literary impressionism than replaying Lacan’s own arguments concerning the gaze in the section “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a" in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis^1 Indeed, this is what we can see Fried doing even from the very first of his writings. What, for example, is his difficulty with minimal art in “Art

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and Objecthood”? It is minimalism’s belief that it is the spectator who endows the work with meaning, that the work does not exist before the spectator comes to it, that it is through the work that the spectator is somehow able to become conscious of his looking, to see himself seeing. As opposed to this, Fried insists that the spectator does not unilaterally determine the meaning of the work, but is able to see it only insofar as he identifies with its point of view, insofar as he imagines it looking at him. That is, as opposed to minimal art, where there is nothing unclear to the spectator’s point of view because the work is only that point of view (which is why Fried calls it “anthropomorphic”48), in absorptive art there is no longer any distance the spectator can take from the work, but rather a blindness or otherness in his experience of it, something in it that cannot be seen. And it is this blindness with which we identify that Lacan calls the stain or gaze, that which simultaneously allows the spectator access to the work and makes any final grasping of it by him impossible. For Lacan, there is always something in the work which seems to attract and solicit the viewer before he comes to it. The spectator does not simply look at the work from the outside, but is already caught up in it (and it is minimalism’s lack of this kind of inferiority that leads Fried to dub it “hollow”49). The cultural critic Slavoj Zizek sums up Lacan's argument at this point in terms that should remind us of those unseeing eyes with which we identify, that are able to see those who approach them in advance; of the way that when we look at those eyes we are in a sense only looking at ourselves, are already “framed” by our own look: The gaze marks the point in the object (in the picture) from which the subject viewing it is already gazed at, i.e., it is the object that is gazing at me. Far from assuring the self-presence of the subject and his vision, the gaze functions thus as a stain, a spot in the picture disturbing its transparent visibility and introducing an irredeemable split in my relation to the picture: I can never see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at me, i.e., the

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eye and the gaze are constitutively asymmetrical. The gaze as object is a stain preventing me from looking at the picture from a safe, ‘‘objective’' distance, from enframing it as something that is at my grasping view’s disposal. The gaze is, so to speak, a point at which the very frame (of my view) is already inscribed in the “content" of the picture viewed.51’

But to get morc exactly to the analogy between Fried’s argument about impressionism and Lacan’s concerning the gaze, the point to be made here is that this blind spot with which we identify, that place in the picture where we cannot see, is us ourselves. That blindness to which we attach ourselves and that causes us to see comes about only after we look. It is this argument we have been trying to make against Fried throughout: that if he very brilliantly diagnoses the limits of that Imaginary relationship to the work of art in minimalism with its phantasmatic plenitude of the look and its centred, autonomous subject — basis of its liberatory political ambitions — in opposing to this the Symbolic order of the gaze where sight is structured by lack and desire, what also needs to be taken into account is the Real, which is that retrospective aspect of the Symbolic whereby the very thing to be absorbed, the gaze with which we identify, exists not before but only after us. Once more, we might quote Zizek in terms that remind us very much of Fried (we might think here of that uncanny doubling of meaning Fried finds in the texts he reads, where things are at once what they are and only stand in for a hitherto unsuspected drawing or writing): Here we have [in one of Hitchcock's films] the effect of what Lacan calls the point de capiton (the quilting point) at its purest: a perfectly “natural” and “familiar" situation is denatured, becomes “uncanny,” loaded with horror and threatening possibilities, as soon as we add to it a small supplementary feature, a detail that “does not belong," that sticks out, is “out of place,” does not make any sense within the frame of the idyllic scene. This “pure” signifier without signified stirs the germination of

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a supplementary, metaphorical meaning for all the other elements: the same situations, the same events that, till then, have been perceived as perfectly ordinary acquire an air of strangeness. Suddenly we enter the realm of double meaning, everything seems to contain some hidden meaning that is to be interpreted by the Hitchcockian hero, “the man who knows too much.” The horror is thus internalised, it reposes upon the gaze of him who “knows too much.”51

What to say to conclude here? The endless paradox of Fried’s project is that it is the very attempt to overcome the “primordial convention” of the spectator that causes him to look in the first place. Or, to put it another way, this absorptive overcoming of the spectator in front of the work is necessary only because of the spectator himself. In either case, the contradiction of this symbolic act of absorption — its “effect of doubling meaning, of conferring on every element of the image a supplementary meaning that makes the interpretive movement work”52 — is that it retrospectively produces its own initial cause. In other words, this interpretation is able to go on forever, as Fried is able to show in his extraordinary readings where every aspect of the picture or text becomes allegorical of absorption, but only because something is left out of it, remains unabsorbed — that pure “signifier without signified,” writing or the gaze as objet petit a. As Zizek says, it is just this equivalence between the spectator and the work that must drop out for this symbolic reality to be possible, to allow that “effect of the real” brought about by the absorptive métaphorisation of the work’s literality. And to turn to Fried’s own position in all of this as that “man who knows too much,” this is what we see with him too: what he cannot see in order to produce his own readings is that, if the work appears to have this absorptive problematic that it does not see itself and that allows his own absorption (let us say transference) with regard to it, this is because he does not see that the work’s unawareness or blind spot

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is only an effect of him, does not see his own desire, is blind to himself, there.53 But what is all this to say about us, our own relationship to Fried? In the same way, we think we point out this blind spot with regard to him — the fact that this symbolic doubling produces the very stain it tries to overcome. However, as we suggest, it is just this blind spot that attracts us to him, makes us transfer onto him, allows us to think we have something to say about or add to his work. We identify’ not so much with what he says as with what he does not say or says without saying it, this more-X-than-X, this more-Fried-than-Fried. It is this that appears meant for us to see and decipher, that might allow us to continue the Friedian argument beyond or even against Fried himself. And yet, as with the blind spot in the pictures and texts we have been looking at, if this appears meant for us, in retrospect part of the text, it is also not before us, is only our own blindness to ourselves there. As with Fried, who at the same time speaks of absorption and yet is unaware that he is an effect of its transferential effects, so we are necessarily blind to this — and even in speaking of it here there is perhaps something we do not see. We cannot but think of it as in Fried’s own text, something to do with Fried himself. This is why we have tried to evidence it here — as in Fried’s own extraordinary efforts of scholarship with regard to his objects of study. This knowledge is not “true” — who could say Fried in his rejection of minimalism was “right”? — but is produced under the illusion that it is already there, that it is something we were otherwise blind to. Knowledge, we might say in a final inversion, is not a form of rigorous intellectual self-reflection — as it was for minimalism and perhaps even for Clement Greenberg — but a kind of suspension of disbelief, a form of blindness to ourselves.

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NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

Michael Fried, “Realism, Writing and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic" (hereafter "The Gross Clinic") and “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces”, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane and Norris” Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990). Fried has also written a reply to a critic of “Almayer’s Face,” “Response to Bill Brown,” in Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992), and another essay on literary impressionism we do not discuss here, “Impressionist Monsters: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau," in Stephen Bann (ed.), Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity (London: Reaktion Books, 1994). Fried, "The Gross Clinic," xiv. Fried, “Response to Bill Brown,” 406-7. Fried, “Almayer’s Face,” 197-8. Fried, "The Gross Clinic," 76-7. ibid., 87. ibid., 88-9. ibid., 80-1. Fried, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces," 132. ibid., 111. ibid., 112. ibid., 94, 96-7, 114. ibid., 137 ibid., 119-20. Fried, “Almayer’s Face,” 198. ibid., 202-3. ibid., 211. ibid., 208. ibid., 213. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 93. Fried, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces," 95. ibid., 103. ibid., 122. 1 his is not Bill Brown s point that Fried’s definition of writing is historically contingent (Bill Brown, “Writing, Race and Erasure: Michael Fried and the Scene of Reading” Critical

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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Inquiry 18 [Winter 1982]). Rather, this would be an absolute limit to the whole possibility of saying what writing is because it is writing itself that allows us to speak of its métaphorisation (Fried) or to construct its history (Brown). But this is also why Fried has to defend so strongly against Brown the specificity of literary impressionism and its distinction from a more generalised modernism: because in advocating the necessity of overcoming the literality of the medium, Fried must make it seem — like the effects of horror in the artists and authors he analyses — that there really is such a thing, that this literality could actually be presented. Fried, "The Gross Clinic," 65. ibid., 88. ibid., 65. ibid., 53ibid., 65. ibid., 11. . ibid., 56. We might relate this to Fried’s discussion of Rembrandt Peale’s Graphics, the art textbook Crane used at school, which recommended the tracing of a scene on a sheet of glass and looking through “a small hole permanently fixed” (Fried, "The Gross Clinic," 80). Here also it is a matter of identifying with a wound or hole, but insofar as we see at all this hole cannot be seen or seen only as a reflection of something else. And all this might be taken up in terms of such questions as perspective as symbolic form, Brunelleschi’s optical box, the hole as Lacanian Real, etc. Fried, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,’’ 102. ibid., 186. ibid., 145. Fried, "The Gross Clinic," xiv. Fried, “Almayer’s Face,” 208. ibid., 207. ibid., 212. ibid., 213. For another essay taking up Conrad in terms of this impressionist visuality, and the way that “what the beholder sees before him/her is also inside him/her”, see Frederic Regard, “Facing the Image: Joseph Conrad’s ‘Ineluctable Modality of the Visible ” Paragraph 20/2 (1997) 152. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Geoffrey Battcock

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(ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968) 136-7. Michael Fried, "Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings” Artforum 5/5 (November 1966) 19. Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 186-222 (on “facingness”), 280-302 (on "strikingness”). Fried, "The Gross Clinic," 77. Fried, “Almayer’s Face,” 211. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concept of PsychoAnalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). “Art and Objecthood,” 129. ibid., 119. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1991) 125. ibid., 88. ibid., 94. But it is for this reason that Fried’s work is so good, able to be read forever: not because it is perfect, foresees all objections, but because it is incomplete, flawed, does not follow the very rule it sets out. And we might say, perversely, that it is just the ability to create this kind of blind spot that Fried means by “quality” and “conviction” in his aesthetic judgements. If Lacan speaks about art as involving an essential void and Derrida of certain texts as deconstructible, we might say that Fried understands this as meaning only if the work of art is successful, only if the text is good. It is this that is lacking in the work of so many of Fried’s opponents, especially the October school. Despite their use of Lacan, they are unable to create anything of the same effect in their work, anything for us to transfer onto. They exhaust all the possibilities they set up there; there is nothing left unsaid. Rosalind Krauss has recently written that Fried’s work is complicit with the collapse of art history into a generalised Cultural Studies through its “elision of the material support for the sign” ("Welcome to the Cultural Revolution” October 77 [Summer 1996] 84), but we W'ould say that it is this necessary occlusion that Fried is already analysing, the impossibility of directly presenting or speaking about the signifier, as Krauss attempts to do, for example, in her work on Cindy Sherman. In fact, it would be very interesting to address Sherman’s work, and particularly her recent “horror" photographs, in terms of Fried’s arguments concerning the “upturned faces" of impressionism.

Paradoxes of Authorship and Reception in Michael Fried’s Art History Toni Ross A number of responses to Michael Fried’s 1990 publication Courbet's Realism confidently conclude that the organising premises of Fried’s art criticism of the 1960s endure unchanged in his subsequent art historical writings. Feminist art historian Kathleen Adler finds such a continuity at work in two aspects of the Courbet book. She asserts that the transposition to the Courbet study of the pictorial principles of “theatricality” and “absorption” developed in Fried’s earlier history of eighteenth-century French painting — Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) — imposes Fried’s specific terms and interests upon incompatible fields of study. Adler therefore finds Fried’s approach to Courbet’s art unhistorical, and guilty of diminishing the artist’s authorial prerogatives in favour of the speculative inventions of the art historian. Adler then invokes Fried’s infamous critique of minimalist art in “Art and Objecthood” of 1967, declaring that Courbet’s Realism, like “Art and Objecthood,” equates antitheatricality with the “best” art of the past and the present.1 Charles Harrison’s criticisms in his largely positive review of Courbet’s Realism differ from Adler’s but are no less overdetermined by a common view of Fried as an unrepentant “civic-humanist."2 Not only does Harrison

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assert that Fried has made Courbet’s art; that of a self­ professed socialist, coincide with an idealist perspective, but he also determines that for Fried, ... history is in the last instance only real to us in individualistic terms, as a process of change in human thoughts and emotions, and that works of art are precisely the things that enable us to sample this process in its most intense manifestations.5

Each of the aforementioned criticisms of Fried’s art historical writings pivot, to some degree, on questions of human agency. For Adler a contest between the authority of the artist and the art historian is at issue, while Harrison introduces long-standing debates over what constitutes the causal factor in the production and reception of works of art. Do we treat art as the outcome of individual acts or should interpretation focus on the conditioning of individuals by historical or material circumstances? My own interest in Courbet's Realism is also concerned with how Fried’s study articulates the agency of both the artist and the art historian. It will be my claim, however, that the criticisms of Adler and Harrison are difficult to maintain if one attends carefully to certain methodological innovations of Fried’s approach to Courbet. As it turns out, Fried may be slightly ahead of his critics when it comes to negotiating the commonplace division between voluntarist and determinist conceptions of human agency. The central hypothesis of Courbet’s Realism is that the organising impetus of Courbet’s art arises from the artist’s unconscious and literally impossible desire for “quasicorporeal merger” with his paintings in the very act of painting them? Fried’s hypothesis that Courbet’s art is impelled by an unrealisable desire would seem to beg a psychoanalytic reading, since the centrality of desire in the formation of subjectivity remains an abiding theme in psychoanalytic discourse. Therefore, despite the fact that

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Jacques Lacan rarely gets a mention in Courbet’s Realism, and notwithstanding Fried’s claim that his study is indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, I want to isolate a number of points of similarity between Fried’s art historical writings and Lacan’s formulations about subjectivity, desire and vision.5 While Courbet’s Realism may not be Lacanian in any straightforward way, by bringing certain psychoanalytic concepts alongside that text I hope to extend the conceptual implications of Fried’s challenging art historical writings. One interesting aspect of Fried’s three-part study of the pre-history and emergence of modernist painting in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France relates to the importation from film theory into art historical discourse of the concept of .the “gaze.” In his trilogy of publications — Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’s Realism, Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996) — the operation of Fried’s categories of absorption and theatricality offer a way of modifying this concept as it typically functions in film and visual theory. I refer to those theories for which the concept of the gaze services, as Jacqueline Rose puts it, an antihumanist “critique of the ideology of mastery” that focuses on the visual field.6 It is arguably this demystificatory approach to cultural objects that has become definitive of feminist art history, as well as those forms of art history informed by structuralist and poststructuralist discourse.7 In a co-authored essay titled “Feminism and the Exquisite Corpse of Realism,” Bill Readings and Stephen Melville question demystificatory practices of art history in two ways. Melville observes that critiques of visual representation informed by structuralist and poststructuralist premises, especially those critical of pictorial realism, have become all too obvious and unexceptional.8 Readings is more concerned with the enunciative position of mastery over both the past and art objects assumed by the visual theorist. He writes:

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Over the past twenty years, American “theory,” whether political or deconstructive, has gained considerable momentum from a repeated assault on realism; in both forms theory authorizes itself at the expense of objects. The pretended reality of objects is discounted in favour of theory’s desire for self-recognition.9

The following elaborates how Fried’s Courbet book in its addressal of a particular mode of realist painting offers an alternative to the speaking position of the visual theorist as defined by Readings. Without pretending to divest art history from the grasp of theory, Fried’s interpretation of Courbet’s realism resists giving the upper hand to the sceptical vision of the theorist. In the process, another way of thinking about pictorial realism emerges. On this matter and in terms of current methodological debates in art history I feel that Fried’s writings have something to teach us.

“Art and Objecthood” in Retrospect

As my introductory remarks suggest, many of Fried’s critics find nothing to distinguish between his art historical writings and the premises of “Art and Objecthood,” and certainly there are some important continuities between his early and later writings. “Art and Objecthood” introduces the categories of absorption and theatricality that have preoccupied Fried since the late sixties.10 Nevertheless, Courbet’s Realism does not carry’ over the evaluative function nor the binary structuring of these terms as they operate in "Art and Objecthood.”11 Consequently, the Courbet study, as well as Fried’s subsequent book on Manet’s art approach issues of artistic agency and modernism a little differently to Fried’s critique of minimalism. Specifically, Courbet’s Realism and Manet’s Modernism do not proscribe the principle of theatricality as aggressively as Fried’s criticism of the late sixties. To examine this partial shift between Fried’s early

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and later writings, we need to return to “Art and Objecthood” and the evaluative hierarchy that Fried sets up there between theatrical and antitheatrical art. In 1967 Fried sought to expel what he deemed the theatricality of minimalist art beyond the pale of legitimate modernism. “Art and Objecthood” plays off minimalism against the work of those artists who Fried considered the true inheritors of modernist tradition in abstract painting and sculpture. Here certain features of minimal art as well the declarations of artists Tony Smith, Donald Judd, and Robert iMorris were negatively defined as theatrical. Contrasting the effect of illusionistic “presentness” generated by the work of Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, David Smith and Anthony Caro among others with the overbearing “presence” of minimalist objects, Fried endorsed an art of abstraction — severed from the natural world — that ultimately transcended or overcame the “objectivity” of art’s supporting medium. It was this literalising of the art work’s physical or material properties that Fried isolated as a distinguishing trait of minimalist practices. Citing an exemplary art that avoided hypostatising objecthood, Fried writes of how Anthony Caro’s sculptures defeat, or allay, objecthood by imitating, not gestures exactly, but the efficacy of gesture; like certain music and poetry, they are possessed by the knowledge of the human body and how, in innumerable ways and moods, it makes meaning. 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.12

For Fried, the material properties of Caro’s sculptures undergo a process of transfiguration in order to become works of art as opposed to mundane, literal or ordinary objects. It is only this that will ensure that the meaning of the work as an admittedly indirect articulation of the artist’s intentions may be communicable. Numerous

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critics has argued that an expressionist and idealist conception of modernist art and artistic agency is endorsed by Fried in “Art and Objecthood.” The artist here is first and foremost a maker of meaning, a maker whose interiority may be articulated, albeit allusively, through the materials, techniques and conventions of art. It is therefore notable that in Manet’s Modernism Fried locates an intimate connection between antitheatricality and a strong reading of artistic intention operative in French art and criticism of the nineteenth century.13 In contrast to the literal materialism that Fried attributes to minimalist art, “Art and Objecthood” is normally said to take an idealist position that seeks in abstraction a moment of instantaneous, mutual recognition between artwork and spectator. The “state of grace” that may on rare occasions issue from the encounter between work and viewer proceeds from the successful transmission of the content of one consciousness (the artist) to that of another (the spectator).14 This is despite Fried’s awareness that the modernist emphasis on the medium makes the communicative capacity of art an uncertain process to be strived after rather than claimed in advance. In contrast to the semantic fullness of modernist abstraction, Fried observed that the signifying potential of minimalist objects remained inert and passive. They presented a non-signifying obtuseness that blocked the beholder’s access to any resolved or completed meaning. In other words, minimalist objects impeded rather than incited the viewer’s search for meaning.15 Fried also characterised as theatrical the role of the spectator as performed by minimalist art. Concurring with Robert Morris, he observed that minimalist installations made the involvement of the spectator explicit and so exposed as a condition of art what Fried will later phrase in his art historical writings as “the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.” Again citing Morris, Fried writes: “Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had

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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."16 With a strong situational emphasis, Morris spoke of minimalist installation as dramatising a web of spatial and perceptual interactions where the setting that housed the work and the registration of the embodied viewer’s passage through this environment combined to make the spectator aware that they were an integral part of the staging of the work. As Fried asserts, “theater has an audience — it exists for one.”17 Theatrical art therefore addressed the spectator from the start, making the viewer’s participation part of the game from the very beginning, instead of a factor anterior to the authority and priority of the autonomous work of art. As a consequence, minimalism threatened the expressionist and voluntarist maxim that works of art arise from a pre-formed authorial agency, and are thus the locus of an inherent meaning that pre-exists processes of reception. By performing perception as embodied and circumstantial rather than transcendental or universal, and by asserting that the work of art was from the start fashioned for an audience, minimalism questioned the view that the meaning and identity of the artwork stood apart from rituals of reception and exhibition. This rendering contingent of the identity of the art work was equally applicable to the perceiving subject supposed by minimalism’s phenomenological orientation. The situational preoccupations of minimalism, the endless deferral or blocking of meaningfulness, and the obdurate “presence” of minimalist works generated, according to Fried, an experience of “endlessness, of inexhaustibility, of being able to go on and on letting, for example, the material itself confront one in all its literalness, its “objectivity,” its absence of anything beyond itself.”18 As Rosalind Krauss has claimed, minimalism opened up an unbridgeable gap between the material means of the work and the viewer’s desire to access the

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intentions of the artist. This problematised that coalescence of matter and consciousness central to expressionist philosophies of art.19 We shall return to these issues at a later stage, but they are sketched here to preface the following discussion of Courbet’s Realism which proposes that while the categories of absorption and theatricality certainly underpin that text, they are no longer structured in oppositional and mutually exclusive terms.

Courbet’s Realism The introductory chapter of Courbet’s Realism reprises the history of eighteenth-century French painting that Fried offers in Absorption and Theatricality, a narrative organised by the Janus-like categories of absorption and theatricality. Much of Absorption and Theatricality focuses on the writings of Denis Diderot, and in Courbet’s Realism Fried reminds us that the paradigm of absorption received its first systematic articulation in Diderot’s Salons of the 1760s. Here Diderot nominates certain criteria to be followed if painting was to recover, in the wake of the decorative artifice of Rococo art, a reinvigorated social and moral function. Writing within the frame of the Enlightenment, Diderot envisaged the future of French painting as a contest between the antagonistic pictorial principles of absorption and theatricality. Taking up the cause of the former, he set out those features of absorptive or “naive” painting that would continue to convince audiences of the truthfulness of the events pictured on the canvas. For Diderot, painting needed to convince its audience that it presented believable images of the world, rather than artificial fabrications “whose too obvious designs on its audience made it repugnant to persons of taste.”20 One way of inducing this belief was for the painter to depict human figures so thoroughly (self)absorbed in their actions and states of mind that they

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manifested no awareness of being seen by or produced for the sake of an audience.21 Fried goes on to detail the themes and compositional devices with which anti-Rococo artists such as Greuze and Chardin maintained the “supreme fiction” that the spectator does not exist. As the polar opposite of arts of absorption, theatrical pictorial practices explicitly acknowledged “the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.” Responding to Fried’s thesis in Absorption and Theatricality, Frances Ferguson has confirmed that during the period in question the beholder began to be conceived as a “destinatory intruder” who confronted paintings and artists, not with the authenticity of their ventures, but their potential mendacity.22 As Ferguson emphasises, in Diderot’s writings theatricality acts as a metaphor for lying, where the display *of any consciousness of being seen by another was equated with the archness of a performance produced merely for the sake of an audience. Ferguson observes that in Diderot’s time a suspicion began to emerge that art and representation generally were untruthful, duplicitous activities.23 In response to this situation, the artists Fried writes of painted subjects that appeared unconscious of their surroundings, whether inside or outside the pictorial space. This included the subject’s lack of awareness of the presence of the beholder standing before the painting. Such subjects were depicted according to a visual rhetoric of narcissism — self­ containment, inaccessibility to others, self-absorption — so as to repress the beholder’s presence as an external threat to the veracity of representation. At this juncture we might begin to reflect on the way Fried’s history of French painting echoes certain broad historical and conceptual speculations from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things and Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. In the former case I want to draw attention to Foucault’s account of what separates the classical age from the period of modernity.

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Foucault asserts that what distinguishes the classical and modern eras is the way each construes representation. In the classical period, representation is widely conceived as pre-established, neutral and objective. Words or images are taken to manifest both the being of worldly things and ideas of the mind. Modernity interrupts this epistemic matrix when with the emergence of philology in the late eighteenth century, language — the most ubiquitous representational system — becomes a specific object of epistemological inquiry. Henceforth, linguistic signs would no longer be accepted as the invisible, “colourless network” that Foucault denominates as classical representation. Instead, words become externalised, objectified and folded back on themselves, coalescing into an opaque screen that severs representation from the being of things.24 In other words, as the focus of a new scientific discipline, the role of language as a medium and mechanism of representation becomes visible rather than taken for granted. Fried’s studies of the pre-history and emergence of modernism similarly infer that the theatrical axis of painting brings a certain duplicity into the frame of classical representation, a duplicity that implies a lack of fit between being and representation, between life and its depiction. This threatened to undermine a key feature of the paradigm of absorption; its conception of human actions and intentions in terms of artlessness and authenticity. Fried’s account of the active promotion in late- eighteenth century art and philosophy of a “natural” subject whose being and appearance coincide and who thus remains uncompromised by the newly suspected unreliability of representation indicates that the objective, undistorted template of classical representation was being destabilised. The standard of absorption endorsed by Diderot therefore sought to protect the priority and unity of the humanist subject from the corrosive doubt of theatre, that is, from a theatrical (modern) conception of representation as disconnected from the being of things.

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This ambition is exemplified in Diderot’s description of 1767, cited in Absorption and Theatricality, of his experience before Claude-Joseph Vernet’s landscape paintings. Here Diderot writes of a delirious pleasure derived from ... belonging to myself, the pleasure of knowing myself to be as good as I am, the pleasure of seeing myself and of pleasing myself, the even sweeter pleasure of forgetting myself. Where am I at this moment? What surrounds me? I do not know, I am not aware of it. What am I lacking? Nothing. What do I desire? Nothing. If there is a God, this is how he is, he takes pleasure in himself.25

The above passage describes a profoundly fulfilled subject who sees in Vernet’s paintings an idealised reflection of his own self-adequation, here metaphorically allied to an autarchical God. This perceiving subject, distinguished by a lack of receptivity to any outside, models the classic humanist qualities of an autonomous, unified, undivided subjectivity. In psychoanalytic terms, Diderot articulates the viewing subject as a specular ego or consciousness which encounters in Vernet’s paintings an idealised image of its own priority and omnipotence. As a result, the pleasure that Diderot repeatedly declares is highly reminiscent of Lacan’s account of the Imaginary level of subject formation. The constituents of the Lacanian Imaginary are familiar enough to require but brief summary here. This dimension of subjectivity encompasses the domain of images, of visual appearances, perceptions and fantasy, along with a particular conception of ego formation. For Lacan, the genesis of the ego emerges from the subject’s identification with an external mirror image which holds out a prospective ideal of a unitary Self. The logic of the image that structures the Lacanian Imaginary is Gestalt based, and thus constructs the image (mirror-other) as a unified, bounded form, and as that which offers the subject the appearance of immediate visual or perceptual

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legibility. Moreover, the naturalistic illusion fostered by imaginary relations assumes the complementary (reflective) co-presence of two self-sufficient terms: subject and object, representation and ‘nature,’ image and idea. Governed by the homeostatic, harmonising aspirations of what Freud termed the ‘pleasure principle,’ the psychic pleasure specific to the Imaginary seeks the minimisation of any “external” tension, pressure or impediment that would derail the ego’s quest for self-unification and completion. Diderot’s compelling account of his captivation by Vernet’s pictures and the particular pleasures they inspire would thus seem to conform closely to the Imaginary dimension of subjectivity formulated by Lacan. However, the self-enclosure of painting and beholder eulogised by Diderot, the mirror-like relation between painting and perceiving subject he describes is interrupted when the beholder is acknowledged as an anterior intruder, a “foreign body” who exposes the unreliability of representation. Here Fried’s account of the historical turns of absorption and theatricality intersects with Lacan’s hypothesis that the operation of the “gaze” within the scopic field implies, not a mimetic doubling of self and other or of representation and ‘nature,’ but a suspicion directed at representation as deceptive and duplicitous.26 The difference between Foucault’s thesis in The Order of Things and that of Lacan and Fried lies in Foucault’s structuring of history as a series of breaks where one episteme replaces another, as with the eclipse of a classical thinking of representation by that of modernity. Alternatively, while Fried’s pictorial categories of absorption and theatricality arguably overlap with those of the classical and modern eras, he does not posit a clear break between the two. Although for Fried the relative weighting of absorption and theatricality may have shifted during the modern period, they remain coimplicated in modern(ist) art. The modem does not simply surpass or supersede the

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classical as in a developmental or evolutionary model. For Lacan as well, his two levels of subject formation: the Imaginary, which I have linked to the principle of absorption elaborated by Diderot and made salient by Fried, and the Symbolic which, as I shall argue, may be aligned to the paradigm of theatricality, operate together, although heterogeneously, to constitute the psychoanalytic subject.27 Moreover, Lacan develops a third level of subject constitution: the Real, which may be brought into connection with Fried’s hypothesis that Courbet’s art is the outcome of an impossible desire. These links between Lacan’s formulations and Fried’s art history will be fleshed out shortly, but for now Fried’s specific arguments about Courbet’s painting require summary. First, Fried contends that Courbet’s practice as a whole may be interpreted as a mode of self-portraiture, his works are “displaced and metaphorical representations of the activity, the mental and physical effort of painting.”28 Second, Courbet’s brand of realism is characterised as “anti-mimetic,” and thus differentiated from a classical model of representation based on a specular relation between painting and that which it depicts. Third, Fried insists that the libidinal economy allegorised by Courbet’s paintings is not narcissistic despite the fact that some respondents to Fried’s book have taken his argument in this direction. And fourth, in line with a number of affinities I wish to claim between Fried’s approach to Courbet and certain Lacanian precepts, Courbet is cast as a self-conflicted subject submitted to the imperatives of an unrealisable desire. Related to this is Fried’s conclusion that while Courbet’s practice belongs to the paradigm of absorption, his art emerges at a time when the tradition of absorption is manifestly in crisis.29 Accordingly, specific to Courbet’s absorptive enterprise is the way that the problematic status of the beholder becomes internal to the painter himself. This suggests that the threat of theatricality is no longer deposited in a beholder who comes from the outside, but is lodged within both painter

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and painting. Fried writes of Courbet as internally divided, as both a painter and beholder who inhabit the same body, although this body in its partition can no longer be described as self-same. This means that Courbet’s paintings can only accede to the criteria of absorption by drawing what Fried calls the “painter-beholder” into themselves from the outset. Following from this is Fried’s conjecture that the unconscious impetus of Courbet’s art was his quest for “quasi-corporeal merger” with his paintings in the very act of painting them.30 The implications of Fried’s characterisation of Courbet’s self-portraiture as driven by the artist’s self­ annihilating desire to become one with the other, “to undo his own identity as beholder of his pictures by transporting himself quasi-corporeally into them”31 may be elaborated by attending to a number of Lacanian maxims.

Lacan, the Psychoanalytic Subject, and the Scopic Field As previously stated, Lacan partitions the constitution of the subject into the triad Imaginary-Symbolic-Real. Lacan’s thinking about how vision, the image and ego formation are configured within the Imaginary has also been sketched. I now want to summarise how the Imaginary has generally been instituted within contemporary visual theory and art history, especially those modes seeking to critique realist aesthetics. I shall then indicate how Fried's approach to Courbet’s realism, and Lacan’s concept of the “gaze” depart from these efforts. In an Anglo-American context, Lacan’s ideas about vision and subjectivity first took hold within psychoanalytic-structuralist film theory and were subsequently imported into art historical scholarship. Perhaps the most informative and trenchant recent account of the limitations of the film theoretical assimilation of Lacan’s thinking about the subject of the

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scopic field is offered by Joan Copjec in her book Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. As Copjec contends, in film theory the Imaginary constitution of the ego has typically been posed as the primary basis of subject formation in the visual field.32 This adaptation of Lacanian concepts emphasises an epistemological and an amorous dimension to Imaginary relations. The Imaginary encompasses the subject’s ability to make sense of itself and others through processes of recognition and identification, as well as the subject’s loving absorption in an image or object that guarantees the ego’s quest for self­ fulfilment and completion. In film theoretical discourse informed by Lacan’s ideas, the optical schema that exemplifies this congruence of image, knowledge and the subject’s ego-inspired desire for mastery over itself and its world is the geometric mapping of space of Renaissance perspective. Within film theory, the “gaze” has typically referred to that all-seeing point of view, occupied by a subject­ recipient of a seemingly instantaneous visual legibility that the spectator of perspectival optics is offered. In this context, the gaze is located on the side of a perceiving subject who occupies a fixed, central position from which representations and their meaning emerge fully formed within the visual field. Notable, too, in this account of the gaze are the similarities between the Lacanian Imaginary and Foucault’s analysis of that co-presence of representation and world, of image and idea that sets classical representation apart from that of modernity. For Lacan, the ego-consolidating side of imaginary relations is reorganised at the Symbolic level of subjectivity. The category of the Symbolic addresses the subject’s discharge, from the beginning, into preestablished structures of language, of communication and social organisation. Here Lacan privileges a field of linguistics and symbolisation that infiltrates the visual metaphors and processes of specular captivation that operate the primary identificatory mechanisms of the

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Imaginary. It is important to reiterate at this point that the Imaginary and the Symbolic are not related in a developmental way where one stage follows the other, or where the Symbolic either emerges out of the Imaginary or entirely eclipses it at some point in the subject’s evolution. Rather, the Imaginary and the Symbolic denominate two different logics — that of the image, and that of the linguistic signifier — which, according to Lacan, normally function together throughout the life of the subject. For example, even before the human infant acquires speech its familial environment installs a range of Symbolic limitations and interventions that displace and reorganise the homeostatic aspirations of the “pleasure principle.’’33 The Symbolic order, which Lacan also names the big Other, comprises those systems of signification and social inscription which mediate the subject’s interactions with other subjects and its milieu. The result of gaining a place within a particular symbolic “reality” as a speaking, socialised and gendered being is that the subject’s identity and desire is not simply modelled on a visual image of an ideal other, but is also contoured by the differential and substitutive structure of language. Following certain findings of structural linguistics, Lacan casts the agency of the signifier as that which extorts from the subject any direct or immediate relation to its own being or that of its surrounding world. While the Imaginary sustains what for Lacan remains an illusion of instantaneous perception, the Symbolic introduces a process of substitution and displacement within this appearance of the immediate presence of “reality.” In this way, the closed circuit of the Imaginary, the subject’s striving after psychic pleasure is breached by interference from a third party; the big Other. As well as denominating the structural properties of language, the Other includes those prohibitions and limits, the norms and conventions that make up a specific symbolic “reality,” and which the subject consciously and unconsciously internalises as second nature.

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To put this process alongside the subject supposed by the paradigm of absorption — with the intrusion of the Other, the unified, non-desiring subject described by Diderot is pressured into casting an eye on the world outside itself. The ego is thereby turned out of a state of autarchy into a connection with and awareness of how its surroundings (rather than itself) frame and co-ordinate its existence. This encounter with alterity is remarked in Fried’s dialectic of absorption and theatricality as an acknowledgment of the beholder’s role that makes of painting an artificial fabrication produced for another rather than a mirror of the world or the subject as they truly are. The congruence between art and world, between the artist’s intentions and external appearances that underpins the paradigm of absorption is thus destabilised. Confirming Foucault’s characterisation of the episteme of modernity, language is conceived by Lacan as a system disconnected from the “real” of being. The linguistic field is made up of dialogic signs that have no meaning in isolation, but only in relation to each other. Therefore, the domains of speech and socialisation produce a desiring subject that is lacking in being, since symbolic mechanisms displace and disperse the subject’s being when conceived in terms of substance, oneness or unity. This brings us to the Lacanian category of the Real which while linked to the Imaginary and the Symbolic exceeds both. For Lacan, the Real as the “raw” state of the human organism is originally foreclosed by the symbolic order. He speaks of the “lethal” operation of the signifier within the subject, of how the signifier introduces the alterity of death into the living being of the human organism. This is because the subject can only manifest or represent itself symbolically by giving up its being to the substitutive, differentiating logic of the signifier.34 Importantly, however, this process, which sees the subject gain its definition from the Other produces a subject unconsciously attached to and desirous of those remnants

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of being made impossible or inaccessible by the Symbolic. This is a key point to consider both in terms of Fried’s study of Courbet and for any attempt to modify the film theoretical concept of the gaze. I have previously described how in the film theoretical account of the scopic field, the gaze — as an unlimited locus of vision and knowledge — belongs to a subject wholly absorbed in the Imaginary, a subject represented within geometric and perspectival optics. This type of representation facilitates the subject’s narcissistic apprehension of otherness according to what Lacan describes as “a point by point correspondence of two unities in space.”35 As Copjec insists, however, although this version of the gaze owes something to the Lacanian Imaginary it supposes a thinking of narcissism not entirely compatible with that of psychoanalysis.36 If, as previously claimed, the tradition of absorption mapped out by Fried shares certain attributes with the Lacanian Imaginary, we would expect that the antitheatrical orientation of Courbet’s realism would be susceptible to that demystificatory approach to realist aesthetics analysed by Bill Readings. Fried, however, does not follow this path. He interprets Courbet’s realism as allegory rather than as an enterprise in search of pictorial or optical verisimilitude. Fried therefore broaches Courbet’s painting in a way that recalls Lacan’s conceptualisation of the scopic field as the intersection of two orders: “geometral” optics on the one hand, and semiotics — the order of the signifier — on the other. This also means that in Courbet's Realism the artist emerges as a divided subject rather than the unified owner of the “masculine” gaze that features in critiques of classical and/or realist representation. Additionally, although Fried observes that a number of interlocutors conclude that he situates Courbet in a narcissistic relation to his paintings, he counters that this places far too much emphasis on seeing and not enough on doing.37 This underplaying of vision is confirmed by Fried’s tendency to

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speak of Courbet's desire for merger more in terms of blindness than vision. Nevertheless, instead of maintaining that narcissism remains utterly foreign to Fried’s interpretation of Courbet’s art, I feel it more helpful to suggest that a different conception of narcissism informs his study. This alternative idea of narcissism follows from Lacan’s theory of the gaze. For Lacan, the scopic field is divided up between two divergent terms “that act in an antinomic way — on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them.”58 Located on the object side of subject-object relations, the gaze intervenes to break down illusion that the subject sees and therefore knows all that it surveys. Whereas the subject of the Imaginary seeks in the other a stable and recognisable form, the gaze marks a point of non-knowledge or invisibility within the field of vision. Importantly, however, Lacan does not define the gaze as a positive, substantial or empirical entity. Rather, at the subjective level, the gaze is a fantasmatic object imagined by the subject to exist in or beyond the field of the Other — the order of symbolically structured reality.59 Because of its lack of concrete existence, any object may occupy or activate that vacuity of meaning within the visual field that announces the operation of the gaze. This suggests that Lacan conceptualises the subject of the scopic field as internally split between knowing and its absence, between vision and blindness, and that the subject’s desire for the “object-gaze” is linked in some way to the signifier’s traversal of both the subject and optical models of vision. We may elaborate this point by turning to a distinction Lacan makes between the image of “geometral optics” and the metaphors of picture, screen or stain with which he characterises the scopic field.40 The picture as stain or screen invokes the second structure of the scopic field that Lacan describes as intervening in and rearranging that of “geometral” optics. This second structure refers to the Symbolic order of

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“graphics” or writing which for Lacan is necessarily entangled with vision, since it is only language that enables us to give meaning to what we see.41 Moreover, according to the semiotic model that Lacan privileges, signifying systems, including those of graphic arts such as painting, are assemblages of material marks (signifiers) that are opaque rather than transparent or invisible. Consequently, the scopic field as formulated by Lacan cannot be simply seen through, but is punctuated by points of obscurity for the perceiving subject. In this respect, and as Copjec emphasises, the signifier appears to function as a stain or screen that conceals another field behind it, thus inducing the subject to imagine that something (the gaze) is hidden or disguised by representation. This results, in turn, in a suspicion directed at the picture as that which dissimulates or lies. We are touching here on the turns of theatricality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting that Fried has brought to our attention. Copjec stresses that Lacan’s theory of the scopic field differs from that of film theory, where the subject remains trapped in the Imaginary because it remains satisfied that (its) being and representation harmoniously coincide within the image. For Lacan, however, the subject also apprehends visual representation as a screen or veil which camouflages something behind it: pictures are thus apprehended as a form of tronipe-l'oeil that as artifice or disguise gestures to something missing fr.om representation.42 This lacking, non-signifying element designates the point of the Lacanian gaze, and returns us to my previous discussion of how the psychoanalytic subject, despite being constituted at the Symbolic level, remains unconsciously attached to and desirous of those remnants of being annexed and displaced by the signifier. As Copjec attests, the gaze is that which the subject may desire and fear in equal measure: For, beyond everything that is displayed to the subject,

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the question is asked: what is being concealed from me? What in this graphic space does not show, does not stop not writing itself? This point at which something appears to be invisible, the point at which something appears to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the point of the Lacanian gaze. It marks the absence of a signified; it is an unoccupiable point at which the subject disappears. The image, the visual field, then takes on a terrifying alterity that prohibits the subject from seeing itself in the representation.43

All of this suggests that the subject’s desire is inclined, not simply by that which comes forth within pictured “reality” as a visible manifestation, but by something imagined to lie beyond or behind representation. Crucially, hojvever, Lacan claims that there is in fact nothing tangible or substantial beyond the signifying networks that make up the scopic field. Here Lacan follows Hegel, who in rejecting Kant’s positing of the actual existence of an unrepresentable “Thing-in-itself” beyond the phenomenal realm, asserted that we cannot ultimately know whether some substantial or transcendental being exists beyond the veil of representation. In this respect, the gaze, as a substitute object of the Real does not refer to a “raw” presymbolic substance or experience, but materialises as a signifier devoid of meaning within the Symbolic structure. Because for Lacan symbolic processes necessarily divide and partition being, the Real can only be registered negatively, as a blockage or void within symbolic constructions of reality. Furthermore, it is desire that produces evidence of the Real — desire takes off on its wayward path when something, a blot or stain (point of the gaze) registers a certain nothingness or lack within a particular order representation. Yet as Copjec attests, in itself, the gaze does not exist, since it is nothing but the registration of a distortion, confusion or question introduced by desire into symbolic reality. The gaze as the object-cause-ofdesire does not pre-exist symbolisation, but is produced

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by the operation of the Symbolic, by the fact that a veil of material signifiers appears to conceal something behind them. The subject’s desire for the gaze is thus a byproduct of the partitioning action of the signifier within the visual field.44 Although the previous discussion of the Lacanian gaze may seem overly digressive as a way of addressing Fried’s study of Courbet, the pertinence of my approach ultimately bears on Fried’s description of this artist’s desire as impossible or unrealisable. This central premise of Courbet's Realism echoes the Lacanian maxim that the subject’s desire is motivated by a lack in being. The formation of the subject and its world through the agency of the signifier ensures that being and language, or the Real and representation never quite coincide. Consequently, Lacan’s theory of desire differs from those expressivist models of human agency that treat desire as the consummation in art or any other signifying form of an attainable goal or intention sought by the subject. Contrarily, the ontology of the psychoanalytic subject is characterised by an impossible desire, a desire that seeks to overcome the impossibility of being and signification merging as one.

Courbet’s Self-conflicted Act of Painting

The Courbet of Fried’s study recalls the self-conflicted, internally divided subject of psychoanalysis specified by Lacan, a subject who impossibly strives to make his singular being and its presentation (self-portraiture in Courbet’s case) correspond, to fuse inner being with external appearances. We are now in a better position to speculate on why Fried defines Courbet’s practice as “antimimetic’’ and to expand on that other modality of narcissism remarked upon earlier. This alternative to specular narcissism involves a subject who fails to recognise himself mirrored in representation because of a

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suspicion that some “real” or “Thing-in-itself” is camouflaged by or evacuated from the picture. Such a subject unconsciously believes that their being exceeds the duplicity of symbolisation and therefore seeks that being beyond the scopic field, as something prior to or beyond symbolisation. As Copjec puts it: Narcissism, then, seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject constantly finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize itself ... Thus is narcissism the source of the malevolence with which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity it unleashes on all its own representations. And thus does the subject come into being as a transgression of, rather than in conformity to, the law.45

This suggests that Courbet’s quest for merger with his paintings in the act of painting them does not indicate that he wished to see himself mirrored in his pictures. Rather, it implies that he sought to melt into the otherness of his paintings before he and they could be exposed to the sight and desire of others, and prior to their being discharged into a world of symbolic exchanges which displace and disperse being. Courbet strove to become a mute, unseeing, non-signifying body — a “Thing-in-itself’ — prior to the displacement of being that distinguishes the Symbolic dimension of both painting and subjectivity. And as Fried proposes, access to the “Thing-in-itself’ entailed for Courbet an undifferentiated state of bodily immersion in Nature.46 In short, Courbet strove to be at one with nature, not to paint and therefore divide that being from itself. A further implication is that Courbet did not seek to shelter himself from the alienating intervention of the Symbolic via absorption in the Gestaltist landscape of the Imaginary (Diderot’s solution to theatricality); rather, Courbet strove to overcome his internal division as at once painter and beholder by questing after direct immersion in a Real (beyond representation), by striving

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to occupy the point of the gaze as that which precedes scenic externalisation. The course Fried attributes to Courbet’s realism therefore contains a particular strategy for neutralising theatricality — the “primordial convention” that paintings are made to be beheld by another. The attempt to suppress this encounter with an otherness that internally divides painter and painting is signalled for Fried by Courbet’s “hyperbolic desire to escape beholding altogether,” and his concomitant quest “to escape the eyes of others.”47 For if Courbet had been able to subsume himself as first beholder within his paintings, then his own corrupting, objectifying vision, itself a surrogate for the mortifying effect of symbolic exchanges, would have been overcome. But as Fried maintains, Courbet’s drive towards merger was bound to fail from the start, forcing the painter to remain a beholder outside his paintings to the very end. Fried insists, however, that Courbet’s quest for merger did not fail simply because paintings are resistant objects, literally impossible to merge with. Instead he follows a logic of paradox when he writes of the unrealisable desire allegorised by Courbet’s art: For it isn’t merely a contingent fact about Courbet’s project that it was bound to fail: on the contrary, it was precisely the impossibility of literal or corporeal merger that made that project conceivable, or rather pursuable, in the first place. (The impossibility’ of corporeal merger was the condition of possibility of the project of quasicorporeal merger.) To put this another way, had transporting oneself into a painting been physically feasible, which is to say had paintings traditionally been altogether different sorts of objects from what they are, the issue of theatricality would have taken a wholly different form or indeed wouldn’t have arisen.48

Here, instead of opposing absorption and theatricality, Fried acknowledges the inescapability of the latter as the

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condition of possibility for Courbet’s art of absorption. Yet this acknowledgment is absent from Courbet’s practice, the implication being that the existential phenomenological impetus that Fried retrospectively attributes to Courbet’s art meant that the artist unconsciously privileged being or the in-itself over processes of symbolic exchange and the communication of meaning. This also sets Courbet’s mode of realism apart from the magisterial subject of perspectival optics, making his art resistant to prevailing critiques of visual realism. Fried’s interpretation of Courbet’s practice thus prompts a rethinking of positivist theories of vision which art historical discourses based on the film theoretical concept of the gaze claim to leave behind, but which they tend to redouble in their own demystificatory procedures.49 As Bill Readings has asserted, the speaking/viewing position of the visual theorist ensures that art objects, especially those identified as realist, become little more than vehicles of “theory’s desire for self-recognition.” Alternatively, rather than assimilating otherness as an ideal image of himself, Courbet’s quest for merger involved a defaulting of his ego-identity in favour of immersion in the field of the other.50 At the same time, however, Courbet’s unconscious choice of being over the historical contingency of the symbolic field suggests that he strove to locate the act of painting prior to all cultural convention, as a frameless, spontaneous, undivided event. By insisting on the failure of this endeavour, Fried suggests why Courbet’s art is not modernist and marks his own historical, if not emotional, separation from Courbet’s particular enactment of the paradigm of absorption.51 This might be better put as Fried’s acknowledgment of the necessary coimplication of absorption and theatricality rather than their mutual negation, or the elevation of one above the other. In Courbet's Realism, Fried infers that had painting not been a symbolic activity that diverts and divide’s the artist’s being in the process of articulating (portraying)

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himself and others, then Courbet’s quest to overcome his internal division as painter and beholder may have been fulfilled. But for Fried’s Courbet there is little sign of the “state of grace” that such an eventuality would signify. Shifting his emphasis on the values of transcendence and harmonisation that conclude “Art and Objecthood,” Fried closes Courbet’s Realism with a picture of the artist, and by implication the beholder, as subjects turned by an impossible, but no less compelling desire. Courbet’s practice is here structured by the artist’s unconscious, self-annihilating impulse to fuse with the otherness of his paintings and the failure of this desire to realise itself, a failure installed by the symbolic, theatrical dimension of painting. The artist’s will or desire is therefore conceived as a self-defeating process rather than a heroic, forward movement towards self-realisation. Moreover, the failure of Courbet’s desire facilitated his success as a producer of paintings, since it is precisely because of the impossibility of the artist’s desire to wholly absorb himself in the act of painting that the materialisation of a painting occurs at all. Here painting is disconnected from the conscious or unconscious intentions of the artist, as well as the Real, a breach that makes Courbet’s antitheatrical project both possible and unrealisable.52 These aspects of Courbet 's Realism make the common view of Fried’s approach to both history and art as simply idealist and individualistic less than convincing. For Fried does not write of Courbet’s paintings as though they were generated by mental or physical acts of untrammelled individual creativity, as pure manifestations of either meaning or the artist’s will. Instead, Courbet’s painting is situated as a particular response to a tradition of western painting in the process of mutation — a mutation on the cusp of modernism that the artist as a finite being contributes to but does not ultimately control. On the other hand, Courbet’s art, at least in Fried’s hands, exposes the limits of those historicist or materialist

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models that define the subject as entirely determined by its symbolic, discursive or economic universe. Underlying such approaches is the premise that the agency and desire of subjects are wholly contoured by the historical framework of their existence. As a result, the subject’s agency can only be conceived in a way that opposes finitude and freedom and then subsumes the latter under the former, a theoretical path that Fried also attributed to minimalism.53 This, of course, recapitulates a long-standing liberal criticism of materialist philosophies of human agency. But the typical response of liberalism to materialism is to reverse the latter’s emphasis on the finitude of the subject in favour of the subject’s unlimited volition as a free individual. I want to suggest instead that Fried’s allegorization*of the artist’s agency in Courbet’s Realism and Lacan’s ontology of the psychoanalytic subject offer a way out of this conceptual impasse. Fried’s argument that Courbet’s practice is impelled by the artist’s impossible desire for merger with his paintings indicates that the artist’s desire is split between the subordinations of symbolic convention and that lost part of his being that he unconsciously imagines the Symbolic order of meaning and social exchange to have evacuated. Courbet’s non-reconciled attachment to the foreclosed Real (of being) indicates that his desire, his unconscious does not entirely coincide with the social dictates and artistic conventions of his time. This emulates the Lacanian hypothesis that rather than either form on the one hand, or history on the other, being the single basis of the subject’s causation, it is the non-signifying opacity, let’s say, the theatricality of representation, that also constitutes the subject. As Copjec asserts: Lacan locates the cause of being in the informe-, the unformed (that which has no signified, no significant shape in the visual field) and the inquiry (the question posed to representation’s presumed reticence). The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is

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lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see. The gaze, the object-cause of desire, is the object-cause of the subject of desire in the field of the visible. In other words, it is what the subject does not see and not simply what it sees that founds it.54

The agency of the psychoanalytic subject follows a logic where the cause of the subject’s desire for detachment from its framing historical horizon would not arise without the subject’s limitation by that horizon. Thus does psychoanalysis coimplicate rather than disengage and oppose ontology and historicity, freedom and finitude. The paradoxical logic that coimplicates finitude and freedom or theatricality and absorption as heterogeneous principles of equivalent value figures in Fried’s argument that Courbet’s art was only possible because it was conditioned by impossibility and in his phrasing of “the primordial convention [my emphasis] that paintings are made to be beheld.” In Fried’s interpretation of Courbet’s art, it is this primordial convention that the artist repeatedly and impossibly sought to overcome and whose acknowledgment as, in Fried’s words, the “inescapable fate of painting” will feature in Manet’s “revolutionary masterpieces of the 1860s.”55

NOTES 1 2

Kathleen Adler, review of Courbet’s Realism, Word and Image'll^ (October-December 1991) 383. The term “civic-humanist” is employed by Thomas Crow in his “On the Public Function of Art," where he reiterates the familiar charge that during the 1960s Fried, like Clement Greenberg, endorsed an aesthetics derived from the ability of an “elite minority” to judge and appreciate art from a “masculine” subject position of uncompromised mastery and control. Dia Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987) 4.

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Charles Harrison, review of Courbet’s Realism, The Art Bulletin LXXIV/2 (June 1992) 344. 4 Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1990) 48. 5 In a review essay on Courbet ’s Realism Stephen Melville also observes that certain conjectures in the book “may put one in mind of Lacan, a theorist who clearly matters to Fried ..." See “Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions” Art History 14/1 (March 1991) 118. It should be said, however, that Melville does not take the discussion of Fried’s interest in Lacan much further than this, and in his impressive contribution to the present volume the affinities he draws between Manet s Modernism and certain theoretical claims found in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s enactment of deconstruction downplays Lacan’s role in Fried’s writings on modernism. 6 Jacqueline Rose, “Sexuality and Vision: Some Questions,” in Vision and Visuality, Dia Art Foundation, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) 120. 7 See Griselda Pollock, “Beholding Art History, Vision, Place and Power,” Vision and Textuality, eds. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (London: MacMillan, 1995) 62. Here Pollock asserts: “Feminist interventions in and against art history involve precisely the production of a radical, critical position for looking at art, analyzing it and excavating its multiple registers.” See also Linda Nochiin, “Women, Art, and Power,” in Visual Theory, eds. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) 43. Nochlin writes: “It is only by breaking the circuits, splitting apart those processes of harmonizing coherence that, to borrow the words of Lisa Tickner, ‘help secure the subject to an ideology,’ by fishing in those invisible streams of power and working to demystify the discourses of visual imagery — in other words, through a politics of representation and its institutional structures — that change can take place.” 8 Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, “Feminism and the Exquisite Corpse of Realism” Strategies 4./5 (1991) 243. 9 ibid., 284. 10 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968) 141. Although the term “absorption” only

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makes a fleeting appearance in “Art and Objecthood,” its polar category theatricality is identified as a hallmark of minimalist, or what Fried calls “literal” art. Here Fried writes of cinema, rather than abstract art, as an "absorbing (my emphasis) refuge to sensibilities at war with theater and theatricality.” Interestingly, in Manet’s Modernism Fried gives the starkly oppositional tenor of the theatre/antitheatre duality historical weight by observing that it was a primary convention in practices of aesthetic judgment in French art and criticism for much of the period in which the paradigm of absorption prevailed over that of theatricality. See Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996) 619n22. Fried, “Art and Objecthood," 138. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 298-9, 310. Fried is just as explicit about the way in which Manet’s painting broke this emphatic link between artistic intelligibility and psychological intention that characterised the tradition of absorption. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 146. ibid., 143. Fried writes: “Like the shape of the object, the materials do not represent, signify, or allude to anything: they are what they are and nothing more. And what they are is not, strictly speaking, something that is grasped or intuited or recognized or even seen once and for all.” Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 125. ibid., 140. ibid., 143. Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility — Reflection on Post ‘60s Sculpture” Artforum 12/3 (November 1973) 47. Fried, Courbet 's Realism, 7. ibid, 7. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) 130. ibid., 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) 304, 311. Foucault asserts: “The threshold between Classicism and modernity (though the terms themselves have no

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importance — let us say between our prehistory and what is still contemporary) had been definitively crossed when words ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things. ” Cited in Absorption and Theatricality, 125-6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transi. Alan Sheridan, Intro. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 1994) 102. Here Lacan affirms: “From the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincident, but, on the contrary, a lure.” ibid., 118. Fried, Courbet s Realism, 172. ibid., 286. For example, Fried finds that the antitheatrical allegiance of Courbet’s practice is manifested in the artist’s recurrent tendency to.depict figures immersed in unconscious or barely conscious states of absorption. There is also Courbet’s predilection for depicting figures from the rear and in a way that doubles the bodily orientation of the painter before his canvases. Fried, Courbet's Realism, 246. Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994) 15-38. The shape of my argument in this section is deeply indebted to Copjec’s important intervention in the application of Lacan s theories to visual culture. Lacan contends that the subject is submitted to a series of traumatic cuts and bodily alienations or separations that operate from the earliest stages of life. For example, he refers to the process of toilet training where through the interdictions of its carers the human infant is schooled to “give up” its urine and faeces. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 104. ibid., 207. Here Lacan writes: “The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the subject of its signification [the speaking subject]. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject.”

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35 ibid., 86. 36 Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” 23. 37 Fried, Courbet s Realism, 275. Fried writes: “Put as simply as possible, a reading of Courbet’s art as narcissistic would claim that the proliferation of explicit and (especially) metaphorical self-representations in his paintings came about because the painter saw himself wherever he looked, loved what he saw, and painted what he loved." 38 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 72. 39 ibid., 84. 40 ibid., 96, 97. 41 Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” 34. 42 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 103, 111-2. Lacan illustrates the deceptiveness that the subject attributes to representation in his interpretation of the classical fable of artistic mimesis that finds the artists Zeuxis and Parrhasios in competition. Zeuxis paints a bowl of grapes that so perfectly resemble real grapes, birds fly down to peck at the fruit. Alternatively, Parrhasios paints a veil upon a wall that compels Zeuxis to demand that he reveal what is concealed behind it. Lacan’s reading makes a distinction between the sleight of hand that attracts the birds who are drawn to the painted grapes because they so exactly resemble actual grapes and a “human" way of apprehending representation. We might say that the birds like the film theoretical subject remain enclosed within an imaginary construction of the signifying field. Conversely, Lacan says that the motif chosen by Parrhasios indicates what else is at stake in the mimeticism of painting. He asserts that the example of Parrhasios “makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is .behind it.” This mode of deception tricks the eye of the spectator, not by pretending to perfectly resemble some pre­ existing object, but by pretending to conceal something from the spectator’s view. This concealed, inaccessible something is the point of the Lacanian gaze. 43 Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject," 27. 44 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 72-3. Lacan writes: “The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on

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the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety.” Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” 37. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 282. Fried asserts ”... in Courbet’s realism the world or nature possesses the quality of omnipresence that St. Amselm defined as [existing] as a whole everywhere’ and attributed only to God — that is, expressly not to the world — and that what takes the place [in Courbet's realism] of the a priori conception of God as the supreme being on which Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence relies is the phenomenological a priori of the lived body ..." ibid., 271-2. ibid., 269. ibid., 258. In Manet’s Modernism Fried links his anti-specular reading of Courbet’s Realism to a “pre-originary” mimesis whose effects upon the subject are “abyssal and radically destabilizing” and which is discussed by Philippe LacoueLabarthe in “Typography,” published in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, transi. Christopher Fynsk, with an introduction by Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1989). See Manet’s Modernism, 328-9. Courbet’s Realism, 50. Here Fried admits that the phenomenological focus of his study of Courbet with its privileging of a primordial embodiedness of painting and artist requires modification by the Foucauldian argument that the body must be understood, not as a primordial substance, but as “the target and relay — of historical forces, which is to say it must be understood as culturally coded, even culturally produced, in the most intimate recesses of its * primordialness. ’ ” This might seem to suggest that in Courbet’s Realism Fried has fully accepted the theoretical claims of minimalism. But this matter is not so simple. Certainly, Fried now speaks of the coimplication of theatricality and absorption rather than their mutual exclusion. However, if we consider one of the central suppositions of “literal” art we may affirm that Fried has not ceded all ground to the minimalist legacy. Minimalism’s sceptical demystification of the illusion that the work of art (or the subject) contains a substantial being prior to or beyond its

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staging within a finite symbolic universe, and the claim that the spectator fostered by minimalism gives up this mistaken belief by becoming self-conscious of its imaginary status, is closer to the speaking position of the visual theorist described by Bill Readings than to that dramatised in Fried’s art history. Rather, Fried’s posture on this matter seems more akin to Lacanian psychoanalysis where the subject’s desire for some real evacuated by representation cannot be simply laid to rest through the reflexiveness of consciousness. In fact, this reflexiveness recommends a subject that locates philosophical certainty in the act of seeing itself seeing, a position that Lacan identifies with perspectival optics and which minimalism, when read in terms of phenomenological reflexivity, may also be said to occupy. The point is rather that a suspicion of duplicity directed by the subject towards representation endures precisely because it is the operation of the screen of material signifiers that appear to veil something beyond them that causes the subject’s desire, that brings the subject into existence. This process entails a form of misrecognition that is constitutive rather than disposable — it can only be submitted to and staged, but never entirely dispatched. Therefore, the acceptance of minimalism as artistic precursor of the demystificatory practices of visual theory summarised in my introductory remarks is questioned in Fried’s art historical writings. 53 Fried recently reminds us of this assessment of minimalism in his Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) 42. Here he repeats that minimalism announced the possibility "of seeing works of art as nothing more than objects." In 1967, Fried linked the reification of "objecthood" that he saw enacted by minimalism as implying, by association, the objectification of the beholder. He writes "... the experience [of minimalist art) presents itself as directed at him [the viewer] from the outside ... that simultaneously makes him a subject — and establishes the experience itself as something like that of an object, or rather, of objecthood." See Fried, "Art and Objecthood,’ 135. 54 Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject," 35-6. 55 Fried, Courbet ’s Realism, 286-7.

I wish to thank my co-editors Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts for many stimulating conversations about Michael Fried’s work, and also Professor Virginia Spate for reading an early version of this paper.

Difference and Deferral The Sexual Economy of Courbet’s “Femininity” Mary Roberts Michael Fried’s essay “Courbet’s Femininity’” has provoked a great deal of controversy.1 In this essay Fried extends his model of the painter-beholder’s (Courbet’s) desired merger with his paintings in the act of painting them to an analysis of his images of women, thereby venturing into the terrain of feminist inquiry. Here Fried radically questions entrenched assumptions about Courbet’s images of women by attempting to overcome gendered oppositions through his model of the feminised painter-beholder. However the feminist implications of his argument are anything but self-evident. Despite the controversy surrounding this part of Fried’s study (or perhaps because of it) there has been little sustained consideration of the relationship of “Courbet’s ‘Femininity’” to Fried’s broader project in Courbet's Realism.2 There are a number of issues that come to the fore in this chapter. For instance, it is clearest at this point in Fried’s book that his project is premised on the desire to forestall binary oppositions, and it is here that the inevitability of the failure of the artist’s desired merger becomes most insistent. Also in “Courbet’s Femininity’” Fried makes an intriguing transposition of the desire for merger into an erotic register. “Courbet’s Femininity’” is both troubling and

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intriguing for feminist inquiry: intriguing because it profoundly challenges conventional readings of Courbet’s images of women; and yet troubling because, as Fried himself has acknowledged, what he describes as Courbet’s “femininity” is potentially a masculinist appropriation of the feminine,3 and thus ultimately may be a more subtle permutation of patriarchal modes of visuality. At the outset and in his concluding statements, Michael Fried is equivocal about the relationship of his argument to feminism. This is signalled in the initial pages where he poses the question: “To what extent, we may ask, did Courbet’s project even at its most unimpeded call into question the gender oppositions I have just enumerated, and to what extent did it involve merely occupying, some would say colonizing, the feminine position?”4 At the end of the chapter Fried revisits his earlier equivocation, writing: “Here as elsewhere in Courbet’s art, the difficult question — in this context inescapably a political one — is how exactly to assess the force of that all but [merger of painter­ beholder and painting].”5 These moments of hesitation and uncertainty suggest that Fried himself is aware of the potential problems of his argument for feminism and that his argument is by no means seamless. One of the purposes of this essay is to investigate to what extent we might consider Fried’s account of Courbet’s “femininity” as descriptive of a masculinist visuality, and to what extent it might provide a way of contesting such modes. This essay will establish some of the implications of Fried’s “all but” merger for our understanding of sexual difference in Courbet’s images of women by firstly examining the problems feminist art historians have had with Fried’s argument. In their assessment of his essay, Linda Nochlin and Kathleen Adler have raised the crucial question of the role of the female subject, and yet their focus on this issue has in my view resulted in a misreading of his project. Secondly, I want to assess the ways in which Courbet's “femininity” constitutes a redefined masculinity in order to determine the extent to which

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Fried’s approach is distinct from existing models. And thirdly, I shall examine Fried’s model in relation to the feminist sources he cites, in particular Irigaray and Leclerc/Gallop in order to define more clearly the “limits” of “Courbet’s ‘Femininity.’”

I feminism (like marxism) is politically motivated — it examines new tools for their use value6

The debate between Linda Nochlin and Michael Fried engages with one of the most significant and enduring questions for feminist art historians — “how are the processes of sexual differentiation played out across the representations of art and art history?”7 In her essay “Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading ‘The Painter’s Studio,”’ Nochlin argues that “Courbet’s ‘Femininity’” provides no resources by which to reread Courbet’s images of women. She is so utterly unconvinced by Fried’s thesis that she does not entertain the possibility that his argument has anything to offer for our understanding of the processes of sexual differentiation. Unfortunately she dismisses his work without significantly engaging with its central concepts, most notably that of the painter­ beholder. For instance, Nochlin claims that “to say that Courbet enters into the bodies of the women in his paintings is hardly to say anything new about the male representation of women, or of Courbet specifically.”8 Here Nochlin conflates Fried’s concept of the painter­ beholder’s desired quasi-corporeal merger with entry and in so doing she overlooks the fact that merger is a more radical process of transformation than entry implies.9 Later in her essay Nochlin dismisses Fried’s phenomenological readings (which emphasise corporeality and the striving to overcome oppositionality), reaffirming instead her conviction that Oedipal rivalry and the opposition between man as bearer and woman as

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object of the gaze were the fundamental (and implicitly universal) structuring features of Courbet’s images of women. She states: The gender rules inscribed in the center of the Painter’s Studio — the artist is male and active, his model is female and passive — are, in my reading, manifestly in place in the construction of the erotic in Courbet’s oeuvre as a whole.10

Nochlin’s feminism of oppositionality prevents any consideration of the complexities of Fried’s model. Her analysis contains an underlying assumption that Courbet’s relation to his images of women is aligned with the male viewer’s point of view.11 For Nochlin a consequence of this alignment between male painter and male viewer is the exclusion of the female spectator and feminist reader. But for Fried there is no simple alignment between the painter-beholder and subsequent viewers, this relation remains unresolved. While Nochlin raises the crucial issue of the exclusion of the female subject, because her reading conflates the painter-beholder and the male spectator’s privilege, she does not illuminate precisely how this exclusion occurs in Fried’s text. As I shall demonstrate in Part II, this reductive set of alignments misrepresents Fried’s project and ultimately does little to challenge its fundamental premises. I would argue that Fried’s project is interesting precisely because of the distinctions and differences between the painter­ beholder’s relationship to his images of women and the modes of viewing these images proffer to subsequent male spectators. In reading Courbet’s nudes, Nochlin argues that the female spectator is offered a problematic set of positionings: she can assume the masculine spectator s position; she can identify with the woman depicted (as object); or, as a feminist she can reject these masculinist stereotypes of femininity, thereby adopting a position of exclusion.12 Adopting the third possibility, Nochlin

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concludes that feminine desire is completely colonised by the canonical images of nineteenth-century realist and modernist painting. Fried’s analysis only confirms her view that late nineteenth-century avant-garde painting is constituted as a transgression “enacted (by men) on the naked bodies of women.”15 Undoubtedly this masculinist transgressive strategy is a feature of late nineteenth­ century realism and modernism, yet a feminist art history that assumes the universality of this strategy risks replicating the double bind Laura Mulvey reached in her analysis of Hollywood cinema. Reflecting upon her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey recognised that the model of patriarchal visuality articulated therein was so “undifferentiated” that it closed off other avenues of inquiry. This reading which negated questions of feminine desire and female spectatorship underestimated the complexity and ambiguity of Hollywood cinema.14 For similar reasons Marcia Pointon has questioned the rigidity of Nochlin’s position: Linda Nochlin’s statement that “Woman’s body has never ‘counted’ in itself, only with what the male artist could fill it with, and that, it seems, has always been himself and his desires ...” does not allow any manner of organizing function for woman in the production and deployment of her own image.15

The rigidity of Nochlin’s stance prevents different ways of articulating female subjects of art history and a more nuanced understanding of masculinity. Like Nochlin, Kathleen Adler finds Fried’s argument completely unassimilable for feminism, even though she recognises the intriguing originality of some of his readings. Fried’s text represents for her a “master narrative” that one is required to endorse in total.16 Adler rejects Fried’s argument on the grounds that it colonises feminist territory without addressing the central concerns of feminist inquiry. Here again it is Fried’s silence on questions that have been so central to feminist art history

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that Adler finds particularly troubling — questions such as “the positions of the woman spectator, the woman artist, the woman reader, necessarily questioning masculinity as well as femininity.”17 It seems that feminist aspirations are inevitably frustrated by the trajectory and commitments of Fried’s essay because, as he readily acknowledges, his interests ultimately lie elsewhere.18 Fried’s commitment is to track the painter-beholder in its various metaphorical incarnations through Courbet’s art, rather than establishing the political and feminist implications of that model in its feminine manifestation. However, rather than opposing Fried completely or submitting to Fried’s “master narrative,” I would argue that what is required is a way of approaching this issue in a different way in order to assess the “use value” of Fried’s project for feminism. For feminists any model of masculinity has implications for the female subject, and yet Nochlin’s and Adler’s frustrations with the absence of an address to this issue in Fried’s argument blind them to what Fried is doing. By contrast my own approach is to analyse the similarities and divergences between Fried's model and the feminists of difference to whom he is indebted in order to track the precise points at which an exclusion of the female subject occurs. However before that it is important to first re-examine Fried’s concept of Courbet’s “femininity” and its role in displacing the persistent oppositional structure of woman as object and man as subject of the gaze.

II: Gendering Merger: redefining masculinity

Fried’s interpretation of Courbet’s images of women is based on feminine metaphors which represent both the act of painting and the painter-beholder’s desired corporeal merger. This gendered interpretation of the painter’s desired merger is one manifestation of the

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overarching antitheatrical project which for Fried is evident across Courbet’s oeuvre. This central preoccupation with merger in Courbet’s art is understood historically as part of the antitheatrical tradition which began in the mid-eighteenth century. What Courbet’s art shares with that tradition is the (unconscious) desire to overcome the “primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld”19 and therefore to defeat theatricality through absorption. However, as the dénouement of that tradition, Courbet’s efforts to achieve this goal of defeating the “primordial convention” became more extreme. What constituted absorption within the antitheatrical tradition was not static but constantly changing. Effects that were once absorptive were later seen to be theatrical as absorption became increasingly difficult to maintain. By the mid-nineteenth century the relationship between painting and beholding was more strongly implicated in theatricality. For this reason the project of defeating theatricality in Courbet’s art was focused around the first beholder (the painter-beholder). According to Fried, Courbet strove to forestall his own role as beholder by means of an emphasis on the corporeal act of painting. Attempts to defeat theatricality in Courbet’s art were focused on an unconscious (and ultimately impossible) desire for physical merger with the canvas on which he was working. Merger has at its core a striving to overcome the distinction between subject and object, between painter-beholder and painting. It is this unconscious desire for merger that is articulated metaphorically through Courbet’s art in his self-portraits, “breakthrough paintings” (of 1848-50), and his later paintings including landscapes, still-life paintings and images of women. The feminised allegory of merger complicates and extends the project of defeating theatricality in a number of significant ways. For instance, rather than merger being metaphorised as a blind spot indicating the loss of spectatorhood and subjecthood, the desire for merger in

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“Courbet’s Femininity’” is rearticulated in terms of an erotic desire, as the desire for sexual union. The implication of the genre of the female nude in a masculinist regime of visuality seems to force a recognition of the impossibility of the project, hence the failure of the merger. Instrumental in this broader project of merger, Courbet’s “femininity” is a form of self­ representation in which the artist is metaphorised as both feminine and masculine, active and passive, thus displacing the oppositionality of those terms. I would suggest that, from a feminist perspective, this redefinition of masculinity is of interest because in attempting to annul the division between painter-beholder and painting, the feminised allegory of merger poses an alternative to a conventional reading of woman as object of the male gaze. An important way in which Fried poses alternatives to conventional readings of Courbet’s images of women is through his phenomenological interpretation of Courbet’s visual metaphors, in which the haptic and optic are enmeshed. Phenomenology is crucial for Fried’s analysis because it disrupts the distancing gaze, as distinct from a particular feminist psychoanalytic approach which stresses specular relations to the exclusion of other sensory registers. In effect Fried is posing an alternative to an entrenched feminist reading which is informed by the Lacanian concept of the phallic economy which emphasises vision as a gendered activity — where the split between seeing and being seen is mapped onto clearly separated masculine and feminine subject positions, and where the masculine subject is offered a distanced mastery of the visual field. Fried’s analyses displace the distancing masculine gaze through a feminised corporeal metaphor for the painter­ beholder, instanced in his reading of the central sifter in the Wheat Sifters (Fig. 1). Fried argues that the central sifter invokes metaphors for the act of painting through an emphasis on bodily productivity (menstruation)20 and

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Fig. 1. Gustave Courbet Les Câbleuses de blé [The Wheat Sifters) 1 855. Oil on canvas, 131 x 167 cm. Photo: P. Jean, © Ville de Nantes - Musée des Beaux-Arts, 2000.

agricultural labour (sifting). According to Fried, the shower of grain suggests the flow of menstrual blood as well as the fall of pigment onto the canvas from the sieve. The central sifter’s exertion in the act of sifting is likened to the painter’s physical immersion in the act of painting, while the metaphor of menstruation construes painting as a bodily process. For Fried, the central sifter is also read as a surrogate for the painter-beholder because her positioning is congruent with his before his canvas. She faces into the canvas with her back to the viewer and her kneeling position with her arms extended out in the act of sifting are analogous to the painter’s position in the physical act of painting. Consequently, Fried argues that the wheat sifter thereby phenomenologically embodies the painter-beholder rather than being the object of his controlling gaze.21 Further evidence for the dissolution of the boundary between sifter and painter-beholder is the coexistence of both masculine and feminine traits within

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the central sifter which Fried terms a process of bigendering.22 Bigendering transforms the masculine and feminine binary by resituating sexual difference “within” the painter-beholder, rather than between him and the object of his desire. In Sleep (Fig. 2), Fried argues that the bigendered painter-beholder is signalled by the masculine traits of the woman with the darker hair and tanned skin. What is significant about this reading of the painting is the notion that the bigendered painter-beholder is so implicated within the painting that he no longer has a distanced psychic or physical command of the pictorial field. Similarly the motifs of the painter-beholder’s bigendered tools (his palette and brush) are another means by which Courbet’s “quasi-identification” with the painting is metaphorically indicated. For instance, in Portrait of Jo, the woman’s hair is construed as the figuratively feminine paintbrush while “the mirror, the face of which we don’t quite see, invites being understood (provisionally) as an image of a palette and (more profoundly) as a figure for a painting capable of all but physically absorbing the painter-beholder into itself’.23 The paintbrush is transformed from its commonplace signification as a unitary phallic emblem of the painter’s active willful mastery over the process of representation. The brush is often feminised in Courbet’s images of women, and it is no longer unitary because of the consistent use of metaphors for both paintbrush and palette which signal the painter-beholder’s active and passive relation to the process of painting.24 An important consequence of the association of the painter’s brush and palette with the woman’s hair and mirror in Portrait of Jo is that it disrupts a fetishistic reading of woman because, as Fried argues, these elements invoke, “a quasi-identification with the image that forestalled any disruptive consequences of the sort alluded to by Freud in ‘Medusa’s Head’.”25 Further disrupting the feminist psychoanalytic conception of the female nude as fetish is Fried’s focus on internal bodily

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Fig 2. Gustave Courbet Le Sommeil {Sleep} 1 866. Oil on canvas, 1 35 x 200 cm. Petit Palais, Musée desßeaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

relations rather than on the external visibility of the female body. For example, in his analysis of the Sleeping Blonde Girl. Fried states that "the body’s integrity of outward form is sacrificed to an evocation of its sensuous presence to itself.”20 Rather than simply construing passivity as the negative of activity, and refusing a conventional match of the active with the masculine and passive with the feminine, Fried’s reading of the drowsy seated sifter in the Wheat Sifters valorises the sleep-state as a privileged signifier of the painter-beholder s absorption. Fried argues that there is a continuity and necessary interpenetration of activity and passivity in Courbet’s art wdiich is evident in his reading of Portrait of Jo. This figure combines both activity and passivity. Jo’s hair is read as a metaphor for the activity of the brush, her mirror is interpreted as both palette and painting. Thus is her gaze into that mirror read as an allegory of the painter-beholdcr’s absorption. In this instance, the distancing gaze is disrupted through an identification of the painter-beholder with “feminine’’ absorption. What also disturbs the operation of the distancing gaze is the notion of the painter-beholder’s “absorptive

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continuum” which implies connections between figures in a painting and the painter-beholder by means of the predominance of a unifying mood and a series of metaphorical equivalences within Courbet’s paintings. A thematics of absorption pervades the Wheat Sifters, in which each of the figures are so absorbed either in sifting, drowsily plucking chaff, or peering into the tarare that they are oblivious to all else. Through this notion of the absorptive continuum differences (for instance between the active and passive sifters) become part of a continuum rather than being oppositional.27 A different strategy for breeching the demarcation between painter-beholder and painting is evident in Sleep. The entwining of the two women depicted enacts a “virtual merger” — implying “a single (bigendered) female body, embraced by a single pair of arms.”28 This “virtual merger” of the two women ensures that there is neither one figure, nor two, and that they are neither completely subject nor object, feminine nor masculine. Furthermore the vaginal motif, suggested by the exposed underside of the rose-pink coverlet on which the sleeper’s hand rests, extends bodily metaphors across the painting, contributing to what Fried describes as the painter-beholder’s “fantasy of total corporeal presence.”29 (This body metaphorics is given particular prominence because it is on the edge of the bed that is closest to the front of the picture.) Fried extends this féminisation of the pictorial field to include Courbet’s paintings of caves. The Source of the Loue (Fig. 3) not only invokes a morphological resemblance to the vagina, but Fried also identifies a reciprocal movement of the outward flow of water and the implied inward movement of the painter-beholder into the painting.30 The movement of the eye into this painting, by following the cave wall, becomes a visual metaphor for the painter-beholder’s corporeal merger. In Fried’s speculations on Nude with White Stockings and The Origin of the World the metaphor of the sexual act is also interpreted as congruent with the painter-beholder’s

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Fig. 3. Gustave Courbet La Source de Io Loue (The Source of the Loue} co. 1 864. Oil on canvas, 107.3 x 137.5 cm. Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY. George B. and Jenny R. Mathews Fund, 1 959.

desire for merger. Feminist art historians and literary theorists have alerted us to the fact that an erotic metaphorics of the act of painting or writing is a familiar masculinist strategy — for instance the commonplace metaphor of the “brush/pen/penis writing the virgin page.”31 Fried’s model is different from these more familiar masculinist metaphors because it is motivated by a desire for the dissolution of the distinction between subject and object. This desire emphasises a prolongation of the experience of painting which stresses the process of painting rather than the end product. Thus Fried’s readings accentuate the artist’s immersion in the act of painting rather than the object-status of the women depicted. In the case of Courbet’s erotic nudes, Nude with White Stockings and The Origin of the World, this immersion in the act of painting is articulated as the ‘blindness of sexual union” — that moment of the “complete undoing of distance and hence of spectatorship.”32 The blindness of merger is also evoked by the dark interior of the caves which for Fried

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signifies the extreme limits of this project of merger, “the undoing of spectatorhood — that would be concomitant with the bodily absorption of the painter-beholder into the painting on which he was working.”33 Fried is compelled to acknowledge that this extreme limit — the desired merger — is an impossibility.34 His analyses of Courbet’s images of women force this acknowledgment by recognising a failure to definitively displace conventional gender binaries in these images. For example, Fried admits that the signifiers of the painter­ beholder’s merger in Sleep could easily be appropriated as a “new and powerful technology for the production of erotic, even semipomographic effects ... [for] ... the masculinist public at large.”35 The painter-beholder’s desire to escape beholding (the merger) is theatricalised because the desired merger has become a spectacle for subsequent male viewers. Similarly Fried attests that both Nude with White Stockings and The Origin of the World “go farther in the direction of outright pornography than any other works in Courbet’s oeuvre.”36 At this point in Fried’s text the efforts to describe Courbet’s desired merger become strained and the co-implication of absorption and theatricality is becoming increasingly apparent. Fried is still interpeting these images as allegories of the desired merger, but his reading is haunted by the inevitable failure of this “all but” merger. This is not a tale of triumph, nor of mastery but of failure, albeit a productive failure. Fried makes one last attempt to forestall the failure of merger in his reading of The Bacchante (Fig. 4). He negotiates the inevitability of the “pornographic effect” of some of Courbet’s paintings through a temporal strategy. Whereas the sexual act in Origin and Nude is interpreted as a metaphor for the corporeal congruence between painter-beholder and painting, The Bacchante is said to depict its aftermath, the mutual falling back of painter and painting into separate realms. The female figure’s transition back into the painting is suggested by her unusual positioning — her legs, right hand and lower

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Fig. 4. Gustave Courbet la Bacchante (The Bacchante} 1 844-45. Oil on canvas, 65 x ol cm. By courtesy of the Lefevre Gallery, London.

torso are at the very front of the picture plane while her upper body is further back. Fried argues that The Bacchante implies an intermediate moment rather than a complete reversal back to a clear distinction between subject and object, because the tangibility of the woman’s body is “less a provocation to possession than the form of a memory” of the merger.37 Memory establishes the desire for merger, but also its inevitable failure through a temporal process that can only evoke the merger retrospectively. Temporal deferral as an absorptive strategy is most clearly articulated in Fried’s reading of The Quarry. The piqueur s act of horn blowing is read metaphorically as signalling absorption in the activity of painting: the horn blower is “putting his whole being into his task.”38 The horn blowing is also said to invoke the time prior to the arrival of any beholder because the piqueur summons beholders who have not as yet arrived — as if to keep theatricality at bay by momentarily escaping “the eyes of

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others.”39 Where for Fried The Quarry suggests temporal deferral through the action of the piqueur, temporal deferral in The Bacchante hinges on the role of memory. This memory is still a form of absorption, as yet undivided from the act (or event) of sexual union because the bacchante appears unconscious of any division or separation. She is the embodiment of the painter­ beholder’s unconscious memory of merger.40 This notion of memory, like the piqueur's horn blowing in The Quarry, establishes absorption through a complex recursive process. When the bacchante wakes up the separation will have been completed, her waking will establish a consciousness of herself as separate from the other and the inevitability of this happening is marked by the figure positioned in the process of falling back. The function of memory in relation to the fall-back position operates as a way of retrospectively invoking a prior merger as well as a marker of the merger’s inevitable failure. In other words, through this notion of memory Fried proposes a reading of this image that forestalls the more conventional reading of woman as the object of the male gaze. This pre-theatrical, pre-specular moment entails a more intermediate relation between painter-beholder and The Bacchante, which, even if only temporarily, resists the interpretation of woman as desired object "open to and designed for the pleasure of the desiring male gaze.”41 Thus even in the acknowledged failure of Courbet’s project of merger, Fried creates a crucial distinction between "Courbet’s femininity” and a typical designation of woman as merely the object of the male gaze.

Ill Although Fried’s approach is important because it contests the primacy of the distancing male gaze in visual theory and art practice, it does not resolve the question of the relationship of Courbet's “femininity” to the female

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subject. Even though analysing the female subject is not Fried’s project, a feminist approach recognises that masculine subject-positioning is relational and that any theory of the masculine subject will also imply a role for the female subject, even if the latter is constituted in erasure.42 Thus in a feminist assessment of the significance of Fried’s project a number of questions arise: what is the relationship of the feminised (and bigendered) painter-beholder to the female subject? What are the implications for feminine desire in this model which emphasises an erotics of merger governed by the painter­ beholder’s desire? In other words, what kinds of relations to other beholders are implied by this model which is specific to the painter-beholder? Fried does not directly address these issues in his discussion of Courbet’s images of women, even though he cites numerous feminist film theorists for whom the question of female spectatorship and feminine desire is vital.43 We may begin to answer these questions by examining Fried’s selective use of his feminist sources. Responding to Linda Nochlin in the Coda to his essay in Courbet Reconsidered, Fried appeals in his own defence to a practice of reading differently and allies his argument with feminists of difference, making extensive references to their work in the footnotes to his essay.44 Although Fried persistently suggests analogies between his notion of the painter-beholder and these feminist sources, in general the connection between the two is an oblique one. I would also argue that their differences result from their respective commitments — feminists to the female subject and Fried to the painter-beholder model. A case in point is Fried’s attempt to make an analogy between Mary Ann Doane’s analysis of the position of the female spectator and his painter-beholder construct. Fried footnotes Mary Ann Doane’s observation that, for “the female spectator there is a certain over­ presence of the image — she is the image,” and implies that there are similarities between her model and his

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own.45 There are two aspects to Doane’s analysis. First, she identifies the problematic position for woman in the western regime of representation — her over­ identification with the image as object of the gaze. Second, her response to this problematic position is the notion of the masquerading woman who creates the distance between woman and image through masquerade. Fried’s analogy only incorporates the first part of her analysis by suggesting that the position for the female spectator is akin to the painter-beholder’s desire to become one with the image. Doane’s argument about the masquerading woman who simulates the missing gap between woman and image moves in a contrary direction to Fried’s painter-beholder, whose desire is to annul (or forestall) the distance between painter-beholder and painting. What is clear from this comparison is that the divergences between Fried and his feminist sources are as significant as their points of convergence. These divergences are key indicators of the points at which there occurs an elision of the female subject in Fried’s text, an elision that is kept below the surface because of Fried’s investment in establishing an alliance with feminisms of difference. I would argue that Fried couldn’t ask the question of the female subject because his model is premised upon an exclusion of the female subject. Isolating the similarities between Fried and his feminist sources, specifically Irigaray and Gallop/Leclerc,46 is a crucial first step to ensuring a better understanding of his project. However, attending to certain divergences will enable us to track the precise places in which an exclusion of the female subject occurs in Fried’s study. What Irigaray, Leclerc and Gallop have in common with Fried is a desire to establish an alternative to the model of the writer/painter/subject that is premised on phallic unity. However, this alliance can only go so far before the models diverge. Given Fried’s emphasis on bodily or haptic metaphors for the relation of painter-beholder to painting, one can

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see why he would be interested in Irigaray’s feminine body metaphors. Irigaray’s project is a tactical en8agement with male philosophers that seeks to deconstruct phallocentrism and open up the possibilities for languages of feminine desire. Contesting the primacy of the phallus in the Lacanian schema, which construes woman as lack, as “nothing to see,”47 or as an inferior version of the masculine model, Irigaray produces a series of metaphors for a feminine syntax derived from feminine morphology. Fried notes a number of similarities between his account of the feminised painter-beholder and Irigaray’s feminine syntax: I am struck by the coincidence between certain aspects of my reading of Courbet and Irigaray’s (essentialist) speculation that what she calls a feminine syntax “would involve nearness, proximity, but in such an extreme form that it would preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation” ... As Irigaray also puts it, “We would thus escape from a dominant scopic economy, we would be to a greater extent in an economy offlow," a remark that might be applied not only to Courbet’s paintings of river landscapes but to an entire metaphorics of flow in his art.48

I would argue that the points of connection Fried establishes based on proximity and metaphors of flow can be extended to include similarities between Fried’s reading of the “erotics of merger” in Sleep and Irigaray’s metaphor of the “two lips.”49 Both Irigaray and Fried deploy a corporeal metaphor that stresses doubleness. Irigaray activates the metaphor of the “two lips” to displace notions of the unitary subject: “within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other.”50 In Fried’s study this doubleness is evident in his concept of bigendering where masculine and feminine traits are combined within the painter­ beholder through his identification with his images of

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women (as for instance with the brunette woman in Sleep}. Both models are premised upon displacing the objectifying gaze through a metaphorics of intimacy and touch. Irigaray invokes a relationship of proximity, contiguity and touch that makes impossible a clear distinction between activity and passivity, between what is touching and what is touched, between inside and outside.51 Similarly Fried maintains that there is a dissolving of boundaries between both the two women in Sleep in their “virtual merger,” and the painter-beholder and painting in this erotic “fantasy of total corporeal presence.” The two women appear to be embraced by a single pair of arms and their embrace is construed as a metaphor for the painter-beholder’s desired merger. Thus, as Fried states, “the lesbianism of Sleep may perhaps be seen as a transposition into an entirely feminine and manifestly erotic register of the aspiration toward merger.”52 In this reading the individualisation of distinct forms is blurred through an erotics of touch. Integral to both Irigaray’s and Fried’s analysis is a notion of dispersed body pleasure. Resisting the positing of a fixed category of feminine sexuality, Irigaray stresses fluidity, plurality and dispersal: “Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural ... woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.”53 I am struck by the similarity between Irigaray’s emphasis upon plurality and the dispersal of feminine sexuality and Fried’s insistence that the erotics of merger in Sleep is suggested not solely by the two figures but also through a dispersal of body metaphors across the painting (for instance the vaginal motif of the coverlet), so that the effect of Sleep is a féminisation of the whole pictorial field. Both Fried and Irigaray also emphasise process rather than the priority of outcome (or object). Irigaray deploys a notion of woman’s pleasure(s) to disrupt her role as a commodity for exchange among men within phallocentric discourses. As Irigaray states, female desire “involves a different economy more than anything else, one that

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upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal­ object of a desire, diffuses the polarization towards a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse ...”54 This emphasis on process (on ceaseless exchange) rather than goals, outcomes and objects to characterise woman’s pleasure is similar to Fried’s reading of the link between pleasure and the process of representation in Sleep. Fried argues that across this painting there are a multiplicity of sensuous effects, diffuse pleasures which convey the “pleasures of representation.”55 The painting also invokes an erotic fantasy of merger, of the complete dissolving of any distinction between subject and object. Fried describes the erotics of merger as the painter­ beholder’s fantasy, “that a sufficiently sensuous, which for him meant a spectacularly feminine, object ... could at the very least eliminate all sense of difference between himself as painter-beholder and what lay before his eyes, thereby resolving at a stroke the issue of theatricality framing Courbet’s endeavours from the first.”56 In the context of other erotic nudes Fried metaphorises the desired merger as the “blindness of sexual union” — thus denoting an extreme limit in which the ecstatic moment of sexual union implies a continuity between self and world. This metaphor of blind union implies the eclipsing of spectatorhood and an overcoming of the discrete existences of self and other, male and female, painter­ beholder and painting.57 To focus solely on the correlations between Fried’s reading of merger in Sleep and Irigaray’s metaphor of the “two lips” is to ignore the inevitable failure of merger that informs Fried’s reading of Courbet’s erotic nudes, and thus the particular sexual economy of his model in light of these difficulties. Fried recognises that the model of merger metaphorised in Sleep is compromised because it is unable to escape the enmeshing of the genre of the female nude “in a masculist [sic] regime of specularity and control.”58 As Fried notes, the elements in this painting that signal the painter-beholder’s aspirations towards

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merger could also function as new “semipornographic effects” for subsequent male viewers.59 This involves a theatricalisation of the painter-beholder’s desired merger in Sleep. Thus in Fried’s reading of Sleep the “feminised” version of the painter-beholder’s desire is retrospectively an affirmation of the male spectator’s desire. In Irigarayan terms, this results in a retrospective regrouping “under the primacy of the phallus.”60 In this model of the feminised painter-beholder, which is still implicated in a masculinist regime of visuality, there is no place for the plurality of woman’s sexuality as Irigaray metaphorises it, except in so far as it expresses aspects of the feminised painter­ beholder’s desire. Thus the painter-beholder’s desire is feminised while feminine desire is rendered absent. The difficulties of the genre of the female nude for Courbet’s project of merger, which are raised in Fried’s analysis of Sleep, necessitated the strategies for temporal deferral enacted by The Bacchante. In The Bacchante the painter-beholder’s feminised memory is mobilised to forestall the inevitable theatricalising of masculine spectatorhood. This reading establishes more clearly the distinction between the painter-beholder and subsequent spectators. However, in this effort to establish the painter­ beholder’s merger it is evident that the female spectator will always arrive too late because she is offered only the conventional masculine position, the fall-back into theatricalising spectatorhood. While the analogy between Irigaray and Fried is clearest in his reading of Courbet’s erotic nudes, the parallels between Leclerc/Gallop and Fried are established in his interpretation of the Wheat Sifters. Fried suggests a connection between his own model of the bigendered painter-beholder in the Wheat Sifters and Jane Gallop’s analysis of Annie Leclerc’s écriture féminine. Fried refers specifically to one aspect of this analysis — the image of “the woman writer ... split between masculinity and femininity by the act of writing ... [which] is embodied in the difference between the writer’s two arms.”61 Leclerc’s

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conception of écriture féminine is derived from an interpretation of the woman writer in Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter, with Her Maid. She describes the woman writer’s right arm, poised in the act of writing, as “virile,” while her left hand, which is passively positioned on the table at a small distance from the writing hand, is described as “if it were a feminine object of desire” (this latter reading is established by associating the writer’s left hand with the maid who is the focus of the woman writer’s desire).62 Through this interpretation Leclerc produces a metaphor for the woman writer’s access to the domain of writing as a split subject, bodily decentred in the act of writing. By not privileging the masculine over the feminine and combining both within the woman writer, Leclerc’s reading offers an alternative to the more familiar metaphor of writing as phallic unity. For both Fried and Leclerc/Gallop a unitary, phallic model of writing (or painting) is eschewed in favour of a body metaphor of writing/painting which emphasises doubleness within the writer/painter. Besides the bigendering there is another analogy between the doubleness within Leclerc’s woman writer and Fried’s model — where he interprets the two wheat sifters as active and passive surrogates for the painter-beholder. Yet Fried secures the analogy between Courbet’s “femininity” and Leclerc’s model of écriture féminine by appropriating one aspect of her reading (the difference within the woman writer) and ignoring the second element of the “double image of difference” that for Leclerc enables feminine writing — the differences between the woman writing and her maid. According to Gallop, “in Leclerc’s picture women’s writing takes its place in a tableau of the difference between women.”63 Leclerc’s metaphor of feminine writing rejects the autonomy of the writer through a recognition of both the connection and disjunction between the maid-servant and the woman writing. Leclerc recognises the woman writer’s debt to her maid servant whose labour enables her to

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write. The maid is also interpreted as embodying a selfcontained, feminine knowledge, a plenitude signalled by her linked arms, which the woman writing (herself a split subject) desires. This reading signals a form of feminine desire premised on an acknowledgement of the differences between the women.64 Thus in Leclerc’s reading the maid servant assumes a number of roles in relation to the woman writer — her labour provides the enabling conditions for writing, while (as object of the writer’s desire) she is also the inspiration for the writer’s letter and its addressee, its reader. What is significant for Gallop is that Leclerc’s metaphor of feminine writing, produced by her poetic interpretation of Vermeer’s painting, transposes the intimacy of letter writing and reading into the public domain of discourse while, at the same time, recognising differences between women.65 The second crucial aspect of Leclerc’s interpretation (which emphasises the continuities and differences between the woman writing and her maid), has no part in Fried’s analysis of the Wheat Sifters, because his reading of the feminised painter-beholder’s desired merger is premised on establishing the convergences and annulling the differences between the painter-beholder and his figures of women. While the two sifters are interpreted as signalling different aspects of the painter-beholder’s absorptive act of painting, these differences are combined within the painter-beholder ’s absorptive continuum.66 Fried argues that the absorptive continuum “comes close to effacing individual differences not only among the figures themselves but also, in a manner of speaking, between them and the painter-beholder.”67 Whereas Leclerc’s approach is premised on sustaining the differences between the two women, differences that also signal the female writer’s desire, there is no place in Fried’s reading for this articulation of feminine desire because the two women are read solely as active and passive surrogates for the painter-beholder within the absorptive continuum.68 Thus the category Woman

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emerges as homogeneous in order to signal Courbet’s “femininity,” even, ironically, as it signals aspects of differences within the painter-beholder.69 A similar exclusion occurs in Fried’s reading of the central sifter. He argues that her bodily orientation, her movement into the painting and her effort establish a “positional and ‘actional’ congruence” with the painter­ beholder.70 Absorbed in her actions, the sifter is oblivious to the patch of sunlight on the wall, which is a metaphor for the painter-beholder’s desired merger through absorption in the act of painting and she is hence blind to the product (a painting).71 This reading of the sifter/painter-beholder allegorises the desire to forestall the beholding function within the painter-beholder. Fried reminds us that this reading is premised on establishing the congruence between the central sifter and “a specific beholder, the painter-beholder.”72 There is an important distinction here between subsequent spectators viewing the patch of sunlight and the metaphors for the painter­ beholder blindly absorbed. Here again the temporality of merger is inscribed through a distinction between the painter-beholder and subsequent spectators. In contrast to Leclerc, who proffers a role for both reader and writer through the intimacy of letter writing, Fried’s model of the feminised painter-beholder sustains a much more problematic relation to subsequent beholders. Because the beholding status within the painter-beholder needs to be reconfigured the relation to subsequent beholders is also problematic. Even though feminine productivity (in this instance sifting and menstruation) is not cast in opposition to the painter-beholder’s activity in Fried’s reading of the central sifter, it cannot signal anything beyond the male painter-beholder. While the feminine signifies process in Fried’s reading of the central sifter, all potential links with the female subject are severed. The exchange between women in Gallop/Leclerc’s analysis involves an acknowledgment of the alterity ol the other. But what of the failure of merger in Fried’s analysis

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— in this failure to secure the union of painter-beholder and painting, isn’t there some form of recognition of alterity?73 While the failure of merger in Courbet’s art implies the inevitability of the difference and distance between painter-beholder and painting (hence the alterity of the other), and will make its acknowledgment necessary in Manet’s modernism, Courbet’s art has not incorporated such an acknowledgment. For Fried, what constitutes Courbet’s relationship to the premodernist tradition is its striving to overcome the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld, and Courbet’s art took that desire to overcome theatricality to its extreme limits by attempting to annul the painter­ beholder’s own status as first beholder. Manet’s art incorporates an acknowledgment of the primordial convention, whereas Courbet’s art is haunted by alterity in its striving to overcome this primordial convention.74 Having examined the relationship between Fried and some of his feminist sources, it is timely to revisit the questions that I raised at the beginning of this section about the relation of the feminised painter-beholder to subsequent spectators, in particular the female subject and the role for feminine desire in the erotics of merger. As my analysis has shown, the female subject and feminine desire are elided in Fried’s reading because of the painter­ beholder’s persistent attempts to overcome beholding. While Fried’s reading of Courbet’s “femininity” constitutes a significant challenge to phallocentrism, in particular through its persistent attempts to disrupt a dominant reading of male spectatorhood, his model is premised on a displacement of the female subject and feminine desire. 5 Feminine metaphors are severed from any connection with the female subject and it is in the failure of the desired merger that this displacement becomes particularly apparent. For this reason Fried’s reading of Courbet’s “femininity” remains ambivalent for feminism.

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NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9

Most notably the debate between Michael Fried and Linda Nochlin that was originally sparked in their catalogue essays for the exhibition Courbet Reconsidered. Nochlin explicitly engaged with Fried’s essay “Courbet’s Femininity’” in Part Two of her essay in a section titled “Ending with the Beginning: The Centrality of Gender,” in Courbet Reconsidered, eds. Linda Nochlin, Sarah Faunce, et al (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 31-8, and Michael Fried responded to her criticisms in a postscript to his own essay, ibid., 52-3. The debate was kept alive in the footnotes to the version of Fried’s essay published in Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1990), especially 334nl0. 1 would like to express my sincere thanks to Virginia Spate for her support and astute editorial advice on an early draft of this paper. Thanks also to Toni Ross for constructive dialogues about Fried’s work and for help in fine tuning a late draft of this essay. My sincere thanks to Jill Beaulieu whose insights were instrumental in crystallising my thinking on “Courbet’s ‘femininity’” and for the shared adventure of this project. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, expecially my Head of Department, Gordon Bull, for encouragement and support throughout. The exception to this is Stephen Melville’s essay “Feminism and the Exquisite Corpse of Realism” Strategies 4/5 (1991) 242-69. Melville analyses Fried’s essay in relation to his broader project. However, it is an abbreviated discussion of Fried’s chapter because Melville’s focus is on engaging with the debate between Linda Nochlin and Michael Fried as a way of opening up a new reading of Mary Cassatt’s work in relation to the ukiyo-e print tradition. Fried, Courbet ’s Realism, 189-90. ibid., 189-90. ibid., 222. Lisa Tickner, “Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference” Genders 3 (Fall 1988) 94. ibid., 99. Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, 32. Nochlin argues that Courbet’s desire to “enter” the bodies of

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women is absolutely conventional (ibid., 32). In fact, as Fried reminds us early in his book, Courbet’s project of “merger” was necessarily a more radical response to the absorptive tradition stemming from Diderot because, by the late nineteenth century, the project of “entry” was no longer a viable strategy to annul the “primordial convention that paintings were meant to be beheld.” For an astute analysis of the profound differences between Diderot’s concept of “entry” and Courbet’s “merger” see Jill Beaulieu’s paper in this volume. Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, 33. The notion of the gaze assumed here is familiar in feminist art history and feminism film theory. Informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis (in particular Lacan’s notion of the “mirror stage”), this approach assumes that the male spectator is offered a positon of distanced mastery over the visual field. According to this reading of patriarchal visuality, the male spectator is both owner and agent of the gaze and woman is its passive object. For an alternative feminist psychoanalytic reading of the visual field that engages with Lacan’s later rewriting of the mirror phase in his essays on the Gaze as objet petit a, see Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995) 15-38. Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, 37. This is in fact constituted as a question: “Why must transgression — social and artistic alike — always be enacted (by men) on the naked bodies of women?” ibid., 37. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989) 29-38. Marcia Pointon, “Killing Pictures,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture. New Essays on British Art, 1700-1850, ed. John Barrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 60-1. Adler asserts that Fried’s work constitutes “a master narrative that requires that one be prepared to follow the teachings of this master wherever they lead or be cast from the fold." Kathleen Adler, review of Courbet's Realism, Word and Image 7/4 (October-December 1991) 383.

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17 ibid., 385. 18 I his is evident where Fried states: “What chiefly interests me, in any case, are the precise dynamics by which Courbet’s antitheatrical project issued in paintings of women and related subjects that in certain fundamental respects depart from traditional gender thematizations, whatever the ultimate political meaning of that departure may turn out to be.” Fried, Courbet ’s Realism, 190. 19 ibid., 13. 20 Fried establishes that menstruation is a sign of bodily productivity by citing advanced scientific thinking in Courbet’s day which held that menstruation was an indicator of woman’s fertility, equivalent to heat in animals, ibid., 336nl6 in which he cites Thomas Laqueur’s “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology” Representations 14 (Spring 1986) 27. 21 Fried, Courbets Realism, 227. 22 Bigendering is distinct from bisexuality because the latter term “implies a doubleness of object choice,” whereas the former addresses the problematics of self-representation. Fried, ibid., 191. 23 ibid., 199. 24 What also becomes clear in Fried’s reading of the metaphors for palette and brush in this chapter is the persistence of metaphors of painting as a bodily production, the productivity of nature, or an automatistic process — this is why Fried invokes Buchon’s reference to Courbet painting like a tree bears fruit, ibid., 196. 25 ibid., 339n32. Fried connects his reading of this image to Courbet’s Desperate Man — where the man is looking out not at us but as if into a mirror and is therefore akin to Portrait ofJo. 26 ibid., 207. This interpretation has striking parallels with Fried’s phenomenological reading of the Country Siesta which emphasises the male sitter’s “possession from within,” ibid., 66. This absorption establishes equivalences between the 27 figures themselves and between them and the painter­ beholder that are akin to the psychophysical continuity between the male figures and the painter-beholder that Fried detects in An After Dinner at Omans (1848-49), ibid., 92.

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28 ibid., 207. 29 ibid. 30 Although Fried notes the similarities between Hertz’s psychoanalytic reading of the cave paintings and his own, he specifically distinguishes between Hertz’s emphasis on specularity and his own reading emphasising corporeality: “Where I perhaps still differ from [Hertz], or at least wish to assert a different emphasis, is the weight I give to the notion of a double movement into and out from the painting, and more broadly in my insistence on the importance of corporeal as distinct from specular and/or psychoanalytic considerations in my reading of Courbet’s pictures.” ibid., 341n45. see Lisa Tickner, “Feminism, Art History and Sexual 31 Difference,” 109. 32 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 220. 33 ibid., 217. 34 In a succinct explanation for the impossibility of merger, Stephen Melville states: “The paintings are visual just because this continuity of the self and its activity [the activity of painting] cannot be realized without remainder: there will always be, in the end, not painting but a painting ... because paintings exist, initially and finally, to be beheld, and even painting blind, a metaphorical description that tempts Fried repeatedly, cannot deliver the process from vision.” Stephen Melville, “Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions” Art History 14/1 (March 1991) 118. 35 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 209. 36 ibid., 221. 37 ibid. 38 Fried recognises the co-implication of absorption and theatricality in his reading of the role of the piqueur. As Fried states, “Because the ‘moment’ depicted in the Quarry is thus defined as one before that audience has arrived, we are led to understand it as antitheatrical or better, a pretheatrical one, which is to say that a certain denial of beholding is achieved by way of a temporal strategy that concedes the impossibility of indefinitely sustaining that denial in the face of what 1 earlier called the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld." ibid., 179. 39 ibid., 272.

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40 This issue of unconscious memory has some parallels with a Baudelairean conception of unconscious memory that Fried examines in “Painting Memories,” although the emphasis on spectatorship in Baudelaire’s account is foreign to Fried’s reading of Courbet. See Michael Fried, “Painting Memories” Critical Inquiry (March 1984) 510-42. 41 Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered, 34. 42 Many feminist art historians and film theorists are aware that any attempt to redefine masculinity raises the thorny issue of how the feminine is constituted in relation to these revisions. This, for example, was the issue that Laura Mulvey felt compelled to address in her “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, inspired by King Victor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)." Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 29-38. 43 Fried addresses the question of the relationship of his model to subsequent spectators in his final chapter (ibid., 263-74), not in his chapter “Courbet’s ‘Femininity.’” In this later chapter he recognises that the pictorial devices which signal the painter-beholder’s merger are not univocal in their effects, and therefore he favours the view that, “there is no specifiable connection between the first beholder’s project of merger and the experience of subsequent beholders.” ibid., 264. 44 Fried argues: “What she fails to consider, in other words, is that both within the field of art history and outside it strategically by far the most subversive sense that can be given to the program of ‘reading as a woman’ is that of reading not oppositionally, but differently, a point made over and over in the writings of nonreductive, nonessentialist feminists. But of course to embrace such a program requires a willingness to countenance the unfamiliar, and it also means accepting the fact that reading differently will not be the prerogative only of women.” Fried, Courbet Reconsidered, 53. 45 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 332-3n5. In the text Fried suggests that “there is in Courbet’s Realism, as it has emerged in the previous chapters an emphasis on nearness to the image, even on a relation of something like identity with it, that feminist film theorists have frequently associated with the position of the female spectator in the Western regime of representation.” Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 190.

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46 It is Jane Gallop’s analysis of Annie Leclerc’s “La Lettre d’amour” to which Fried refers. My analysis also focuses on Gallop’s interpretation of Leclerc’s text. Jane Gallop, “Annie Leclerc writing a letter, with Vermeer” October 33 (Summer 1985) 103-18. 47 Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One, transi. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 26. 48 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 333n5. The issue of whether or not Irigaray’s account is essentialist has been extremely contentious in the Anglo-American reception of Irigaray’s work. For a summary of the divergent viewpoints in this debate see Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray. Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991) 170-3. 49 In another context Lisa Tickner has also suggested a potential connection between Irigaray’s body metaphors and the process of painting: “It is not difficult to see how, on the one hand and at the cost of some sweeping generalization, Irigaray’s arguments about women’s alienation from the fixity of the “scopic regime” might lead to the identification of femininity with activities like writing and music. On the other hand it would be possible to adapt her arguments to the notion of a peculiarly feminine relation to the fluid, tactile, painterly trace (Her prose is full of liquid metaphors by analogy with what is perceived as the fluidity and diffuseness of the female body) The pulsations of an écriture féminine could easily find their echo in a feminine painting.” Lisa Tickner, “Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference,” 115-6. 50 Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 24. 51 ibid., 24 and 26. “[Irigaray’s metaphor of the two lips] demonstrates that what has been conceived oppositionally — the distinction between clitoris and vagina, one and two, inside and outside, visible and invisible — need not be regarded oppositionally. Rather, such oppositions may be seen as, for example, poles within a continuum.” Elizabeth Grosz, “Derrida, Irigaray and Deconstruction” Leftwrite (Sydney: Intervention, 20, 1986) 76. Note the parallels here with Fried’s concept of the absorptive continuum. 52 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 206. 53 Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 28. Further extending her strategic reading of feminine sexuality, Irigaray states

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55 56 57

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that, “the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined — in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness.” ibid., 28. ibid., 29-30. Irigaray states: “Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either. This puts into question all prevailing economies: their calculations are irremediably stymied by woman’s pleasure, as it increases indefinitely from its passage in and through the other.” ibid., 31. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 207. ibid., 207. Fried’s most direct influence for this reading is Leo Steinberg’s “The Algerian Woman and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) 125-234. This reading of blindness is akin to his reading of the black tarare in Wheat Sifters and the grave in the Burial at Omans — although these other instances of blindness are without the sexual dimension that Fried infers through his reading of blindness in the erotic nudes. In his final chapter Fried concludes this in the context of a discussion of the relation between the painter-beholder’s project of merger and subsequent beholders, in which he examines Courbet’s choice of settings as scenes of privacy. Fried states: “I understand the turn toward privacy as motivated by a desire to escape the eyes of others, as if the issue of theatricality could be if not resolved at least ameliorated by the proper choice of milieu, though ... even the most identificatory of Courbet’s nudes — Sleep, for example — can’t be said to escape the fundamental implication of the genre in a masculist [sic] regime of specularity and control.” Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 272. ibid., 209. This is a recontextualisation of Irigaray’s comment which is made about the “polymorphous perversion of the child in which the erogenous zones would lie waiting to be regrouped under the primacy of the phallus." Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 31. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 334n8.

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62 Gallop summarises Leclerc’s meditation on the woman writer in Vermeer’s Lady writing a Letter with her Maid as follows: “The right arm, the writing arm is for Leclerc ‘virile’ ... She is by no means fully masculine: it is only her right hand ... Leclerc describes her left hand as if it were a feminine object of desire ... Leclerc wants her right hand to copy down what the left hand knows.” Gallop, “Annie Leclerc Writing a Letter, with Vermeer,’' 115-6. 63 ibid., 109. Like Irigaray, the unity of the subject is being redefined. What Leclerc shares with other proponents of écriture féminine is the continual “grounding of writing in the erotic body.” ibid., 108. 64 Gallop raises the doubt as to “whether the other woman here is anything but a projection of a woman who would be truly immanently feminine, who would not be split like the writer.” ibid., 117. 65 For Gallop Leclerc’s model is of interest because in acknowledging the differences between women her version of écriture féminine goes part way in redressing the ethical issue Gayatri Spivak raised from a postcolonial feminist standpoint in her essay “French Feminism in an International Frame." This is the issue of the tendency within French feminism to homogenise and universalise femininity. In response to this tendency Spivak posed what she argued were key questions for feminism: “not merely who am I? But who is the other woman?” ibid., 109 and ll7. 66 The sifter and her companion become part of the absorptive continuum which is “ideally ... continuous with the absorptive act of painting.” Through the absorptive continuum a set of congruences are established between the painter-beholder and the two women, that allows bigendering to be distinct from bisexuality. Fried, Courbet's Realism, 228. 67 ibid., 225. 68 Fried’s model is premised on annulling differences between the painter-beholder and the figures of women while simultaneously acknowledging differences within the bigendered painter-beholder. 69 I see implicit analogies here with Fried’s conclusions regarding The Burial, about which he states: “Courbet’s attempt ... to enforce a clear separation between himself as painter-beholder and some other, more abstract or universal beholding agency or function was crucially at odds with the

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internal dynamics of his Realism, which even in that most ambitious of all his pictures up to that time left little scope for references to a wider viewership.” ibid., 271. ibid., 227. ibid., 154, 218 and 227. ibid., 227. As Melville puts it: “The discovery — the failure and achievement — of Courbet's work is that this mutual implication |of the body of painting and painter] can never be sealed over into identity, and carried within this discovery is the further fact that ‘our’ bodies likewise never quite seal themselves into a merely human identity but remain gendered.” Melville, “Feminism and the Exquisite Corpse of Realism,” 253- I would argue that this (unrecognised) exclusion of the female subject in Fried's reading of Courbet’s images of women structures Stephen Melville’s resppnse to the debate between Linda Nochlin and Michael Fried and his feminist rereading of Mary Cassatt’s prints. Melville challenges a feminist foreclosure on Fried’s reading of Courbet, focusing on the possibilities this interpretation of Courbet might offer for feminist analysis. Yet the feminist reading informed by Fried’s essay that Melville offers is not a reinterpretation of Courbet’s art, instead it takes place in the wake of Manet’s Modernism in the prints of Mary Cassatt. This is where the Lacanian concept of the gaze as objet a is pertinent to an analysis of Fried’s reading of Courbet. See Toni Ross’ paper in this volume. I see some significant analogies here between my approach to Fried’s model and Spivak's recognition of both the importance of Derrida’s critique of phallocentrism and its limitations for feminism because of the “double displacement” of woman that structures his reading. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. M. Krupnick (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1983) 169-95.

Eavesdropping/Eve’s Dropping1 K. Malcolm Richards (.... ) —Shh!....They’ll hear us. —Who? I don’t see anybody. —Jacques and Michael. I know they are hiding about here somewhere. I can hear them, barely, but I have not spotted them. I l>elieve the voices are coming from that direction. —I have been waiting for the two of you to show up. You should have heard what they were talking about. —What? I’m all ears. What have they been saying? —Well, it would be difficult to say. It is not as if they are talking to each other directly. Everything seems cryptic and the connection is bad, like an overseas phone conversation. Every time I think I’ve made a connection the line breaks up, and 1 can’t seem to track them down, to keep track of them. All their meetings take place in out of the way locations: footnotes, the back of books.2 It’s all very maddening. Even when you think you can expect a meeting to take place, when the time and location have been determined, it does not quite take place.3 I don’t think I am getting anywhere with them. —Are they fighting? —I wouldn’t say that. Jacques talks of fratricide and patricide, but it seems little to do with Michael.4 In fact, Michael would have little to do with it. He ascribes all to the autos. He is just along for the ride. It is just an adventure for Michael5 and, while he is all into being sporting, he is really into hunting, especially with

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Courbet. He spots Courbet everywhere. —Or is that the beholder? Michael seems to be tracking down the beholder, cornering her, taking aim at her.6 His aim is to do away with the beholder. The beholder is a criminal who threatens the ontological status of the work of art and Michael is a bounty hunter hired by Diderot. I wouldn’t turn my back on that one. He is liable to sneak up behind you.7 —I thought the work of art threatens the ontological status of the beholder and Michael was out to protect the beholder, to master the painting’s voiding gaze that empties his presence, marking his demise, leading him to his ruin, to ruins.8 —Whose ontological status is at stake? The beholder’s or the work’s? Who(se) is at risk? Is this another hunting and haunting scene of Diana and Acteon?9 Who bears the guilt of the gaze? The seer or the seen? Doesn’t this whole scene reek of an attempt to preserve an already lost purity, an impossible authenticity whose loss has always already been inscribed by the Fall? Isn’t Fried describing the Fall?10 —I am not sure that I can answer any of your questions. I would, however, suggest that the relation between painting and beholder is not a simple matter concerning the ruin of the one or the other, but a scene of doubling, a ruining of the one, a doubled ruin, at least two ruins, both the painting and the beholder. Everything and everyone is ruined, and Fried seems to direct everything towards delaying this inevitable ruin.11 He is the director behind this theatrical production. Everything comes back to him. He re-members.12 . —Yes, Fried seems to have a desire to render everything back to painting. Everything for him returns to painting, but in Absorption and Theatricality, in a revealing and revelatory gesture, the truth is rendered back to Diderot, the art critic who has been wronged by art history, and, through this gesture, back to Fried, the art critic who has been wronged by art history.13 Fried is out for justice, out to justify art criticism.

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And yet, in Courbet's Realism, everything isn’t rendered back to Baudelaire, the art critic, even though it could be. Baudelaire is in the wrong for having committed Courbet’s art to mere Realism, saying that Courbet neglected the role of Imagination in art,14 condemning Courbet to the school of Realism, and cordoning Courbet off from further inquiry.15 Yet, Baudelaire had it right. Allegory, as Baudelaire describes it, was Courbet’s project, as Fried describes it. Baudelaire and Courbet were just blind to this.16 Fried restores this sight, rendering insight back to Courbet, bringing to light Courbet’s allegorical project. Everything is restored and everything comes back to Fried.17 It is all about the return, the hunt or the haunt, a return of the dead, of the repressed, and how you make the argument return, how to make a return on the argument, how the investment pays.18 Fried re-members everything, sends the paintings back to their rightful owners, buying stock in the whole corporeal enterprise, an enterprise in which there is a great return to Fried for this speculative, specular project mobilised and made mobile by the hermeneutic circle, even if his account seems a bit over-drawn.19 —But it is precisely a question of being overdrawn, of the temporality of Being, of trying to fix the beholder’s gaze, correcting the reader’s gaze, of medusalising the beholder, placing the beholder in a trance, and inducing a catatonic state that is laid out in Diderot.20 How does one make the beholder stay put? The paradoxical answer is that you make the beholder take notice by denying that she is there. This is the “Supreme Fiction”: the denial of the beholder’s existence, an existence that is intimately tied to the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.21 They are not made to be sniffed, to be touched, to be tasted, to be listened to. They are made to be beheld. —Derrida turns to Diderot in his account of blindness, as well as to Baudelaire, and perhaps we could bring Fried and Derrida together, while also pushing them

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apart, if we remain blind to Fried’s argument for the moment and turn our attention towards blindness. Blindness would seem to be a common ground for Derrida and Fried. Fried even says as much,22 but I see this similarity as spelling out an important difference between the two of them, a difference that could be focused around the type of body assumed by their accounts of blindness. For Fried, blindness is another theme directed towards an ideality of absorption, while for Derrida blindness is another mark of the body’s finitude, another repressed margin that reveals the ordering of Western philosophy. This all could be related to a differing conception of the role of vision in MerleauPonty, a reading that may be tied to differing conceptions of the body.23 Fried is not concerned with the body, or, rather, he is all too concerned. Fried dreams of a body that is physically fit. It does not suffer. Blindness is another absorptive state that is tied to the fullness of this body’s experience, an athletic body bounding through and bound into Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, a body that Fried seems to aspire to.24 This body is masculine, virile, and erect.25 It stands up and gazes knowingly at the world. Its experience of the world is that of a continuity.26 It is full, filling, and fulfilling. Fried re­ members everything, returning everything to an all consuming corporeal experience of the world. Derrida, on the other hand, is consumed by the body, a body that is consumed by disease. The body is crippled, blind, paralytic, a body that Fried wishes to forget, but that Derrida insists upon, a body that is un-sound. It limps. It is limp, weak. It is always in a process of decay. Blindness is something that befalls us, a blindness to our own aging, a memory of our own experience that does not remember, but only re-members through a process of mourning and loss, a loss of memory, a body only as a memory, never re-membered, always a re-presentation of an unpresentable body. The eye and the body need

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prosthetics: glasses, microscopes, telescopes.27 These prosthetics would, at one moment, suggest an extension of the body, while at the same moment, they bear witness to an extinction of the body, the body as a relic. This would loosely gather together blindness, ruin, and mourning, a language of the tear, which is both a fluidic mark of the body’s permeability, its lack of permanence, and also a tear, a rip, Kiss, within our very existence, an existence marked by tears and re-marked on through tears.28 Thus, Derrida remembers and re-members the body. That is to say, Derrida tries to remember the body, its mortality, but this remembering is always marked by a gap, the gap produced in the hyphenation of re­ membering.29 This would be a different re-membering from that at play in Fried. It would be an acknowledgment of ruin, of the inability to put the body back together, a body that is always scarred, always falling apart. This brings me to another point of convergence/ divergence in this vertiginous, virtual encounter between Derrida and Fried that is always on the verge of taking place. This is tied to the role of vision in their work. While they both question the privileged status of vision within the West, Fried merely prioritises making over seeing, seeing the bet of art historians and raising the stakes around making.30 Derrida, however, privileges blindness only momentarily in order to put into question the oppositions structuring the eye. Here Derrida turns to Merleau-Ponty, pointing to Merleau-Ponty’s positing of an absolute invisible that would displace the opposition between the visible and the invisible, while being the very basis for such an opposition.31 There emerges from Derrida’s reading an inability to keep blindness and seeing separate, which leads him to suggest that the eye is not about sight, but tears. Both the blind and those who have sight can shed tears, tears that may also be tied to memory, mourning, and the body, to the experience of ruin, a ruin that is experience.32 This would be a displacement of the role of vision that does not occur in

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Fried’s account of painting and beholder, as well as an insistence on an experience that is not structured around the fullness of the body, but a body-in-pieces, in ruins.33 —These differences may also be tied to the role of difference and the other in the writings of Fried and Derrida, but here 1 will have to be a little more hypothetical than you. I would suggest that what would be ordering our conversation is a difference between the ear and the eye. The eye would be about the T,’ the subject, part of a monocular system perpetuating an illusion of wholeness, an Imaginary dyad, a tradition of the eye I “I” that would move through Kant, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, while the ear would be aligned with the other, with a fragmentary existence cut across by the Symbolic, by having subjectivity determined by and through an other.34 Nietzsche will have already suggested the importance of the ear in his philosophy, that his books would only be understood by those who could properly hear them, a notion of the ear of the other developed further by Derrida in not only addressing Nietzsche’s use of the ear, but also through incorporating a language of the ear into his philosophy.35 This division between eye I “I” and ear/other would appear to structure a number of myths, most notably that of Narcissus and Echo, as well as those of Odysseus, Perseus, and Orpheus.36 For Derrida, everything is directed towards the ear of the other, hearing the call of the other, having this call shatter the illusory deception of the gaze that desires, a gaze of blindness, blind to its self, as with Narcissus, deaf to the difference that is the voice of the other, the difference of Echo’s repetitions.37 At another level, I would suggest that the eye is about confrontation or exclusion, while the ear is about an opening up to community, an attempt to accommodate the foreignness of the other,38 a foreignness that reverberates along the tympanum of the ear, shaking the very bones of the self. There are any number of confrontational eyes, all sorts of evil eyes, stare downs,

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looks that kill, the gaze of Medusa. The ear “hears/heres you.” Says there you are. Message received. It allows for communication. From the testimony of those who have experienced both blindness and deafness, losing one’s hearing cuts one off more from community. The ear is also tied to our sense of balance, maintaining our equilibrium, like Justice, who, blindfolded, keeps the scales in balance. While light is faster than sound, the eye locks the seer in one direction, whereas the ear can hear objects behind and to the side of the head, so that we often hear a thing before we see it. The ear would, in some cases, like that of bats, be able to “see” better than the eye. —Yet I would be careful about setting up too strict an opposition between the ear and the eye. The ear may fall victim to seductive voices like your Sirens and I fear that we, like Odysseus* would risk destruction, being led astray if we fall prey to your voice for too long. —Yes, I am not suggesting a strict opposition between eye and ear. They are both senses that have ranges, senses that are more sensitive in other animals, and, by speaking only of vision and hearing, we do not take into account the other senses of smell, taste, and touch. All I have wanted to suggest is that, for Derrida, there is a play of the ear that may be gathered about the other. This play of the ear involves a structure of difference to which the eye I “I” may be indifferent, and which may fall onto deaf ears in Fried’s case, a case that is still, in a way, a story of the eye / “I.”59 —I’m sorry to be late. I hope I haven’t missed anything. You see, I was completely absorbed by Absorption and Theatricality.40 I couldn’t believe my eyes. In fact, I couldn’t get beyond the first few pages. Did you hear what he had to say?41 It is quite a show, all Fried’s talk of delicate points, all of his reassurances, his talk of being aware of how his argument may sound to others, how unsound it may appear, how he did not want to rehearse his argument again. It left me on the edge of my seat. I was hanging on his every word. It is a very delicate situation, indeed. Fried seems a little defensive.

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Even a bit guilty, for it all may seem self-serving, a justification for the show he staged during the Sixties. Three American Painters haunts this confessional that does not quite take place, for he is not confessing. That this whole scene should be haunted is not coincidental. For Fried, art has been haunted by the beholder for two hundred years. In fact, Fried’s previous argument grows out of the present argument. Yet, cause and effect still function. The effect still follows the cause, despite all appearances to the contrary. Diderot is the cause of it all, even though the argument about Diderot may seem to be the effect of Fried’s cause during the Sixties. In fact, according to Absorption and Theatricality, the Sixties were a belated effect of the late eighteenth century, not the other way around. Everything is still functioning in the right order. The 1760s come before the 1960s, even though 1980 comes after 1965.42 But the haunting does not stop there. Spectres hang all over the place. There is all this talk of reading the book in a certain spirit, or as a certain spirit, preferably Diderot, who in this theatrical production is being played and plagued by Fried.45 Fried is playing the role of Diderot, who is the star of this show, and we should read everything in this spirit, see all the ghosts that Fried is seeing. Fried wants us to behold as he beholds. Fried is staging a battle to the death between two warring factions, the painting and the beholder. The one is out to get the other, before the other sees it. There is great intrigue involved. The painting is in danger of being beheld and must eliminate the beholder before the beholder condemns it to theatre. It is a battle at one level between body and spirit. Only one will survive. Physical presence must be sacrificed for the absorption of the mind. The body must be forgotten. There must be a forgetting of the body before the painting in this quasi-religious experience.44 There must be a forgetting of the body before there can be painting. I must forget that I am standing there before a work of art.

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Moreover, there must be a denial of the materiality and mortality of the body that bleeds, that breathes, that breeds, that defecates, that vomits, that cries. It is a forgetting of tears, of the tear between body and spirit, an attempt to redeem this tear by forgetting the body, denying the body. The painting redeems me by denying that I am there, that my body is decaying while I am standing there before the painting. —But here we are. Someone always comes before the painting. And this is where I think we need to part company because you seem to be parodying Fried, oversimplifying his account, and I can already see where you are trying to lead us. You will try to suggest that Fried’s own “theatrical” presentation desires an impossible escape from theatricality, failing to acknowledge that there is no escape from theatricality. But Fried already anticipates this in his account of Géricault’s Raft. It is all there in his language. All of Fried’s talk of the fall into theatricality as “insuperable.”45 Instead, I would contend that Absorption and Theatricality maps out the emergence of the problem of painting and beholder, staging both Diderot’s elucidation of this problem and the naïveté of his belief in a solution. The solution is fictive. It is the “Supreme Fiction” of non­ existence in the name of staving off our immanent all-tooreal-non-existence, a fiction of escaping our all-too-timebound-body by entering into the fictive world of the painting, a world which is marked by a tear, the tear of Chardin’s Draughtsman, marking an inseparable separateness, an impossible passage.46 It is this language of the impossible that must be attended to when reading Fried, because it acknowledges that the artistic projects Fried is mapping out in Absorption and Theatricality and Courbet's Realism are bound to fail, to reveal a return of the repressed, the return of the real of the corporeal body.47 —But Fried does not embody this language. He does not acknowledge that this is his story as well. Even in

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Courbet’s Realism, where he speaks of the impossibility of this project, there is a sense that Fried is saying that this is what Courbet is doing, no matter how impossible it may sound.48 This is Courbet’s experience before the painting. —But this is the problem. Courbet has an experience before the painting. The painting is secondary, a re­ presentation of an experience that is lost, that cannot be represented, that is lost in representation, a loss structuring representation. Painting would be a mourning of this loss of authentic experience, this elusive experience that escapes and founds all representational systems, and cannot be found or represented as such within the representation. It is beyond representation. At the same time, while Courbet is before the painting, spatially and temporally, the painting is also there before Courbet spatially, staring at him with an evacuating, evocative, vacuum of a gaze that voids Courbet of his presence, sucking his presence away, a vampiric parasite that Courbet cannot live with and without which he cannot live.49 The painting would also be before “Courbet” temporally, a Courbet who is the product of this painting, a Courbet who is product. “Courbet” becomes a fictive entity attached to this painting, a ghost haunting the work through the spectre of his signature.50 This “Courbet” is also an after-effect of Fried’s discourse, a product of Fried’s looking at paintings, standing before paintings, and also writing about absent paintings. It is this temporality and spatiality of before and after that has to be registered, a temporality and spatiality tied up with mourning, ruin, and blindness. In this sense, the parasitical painting is a para-site, a location that allows for a “Courbet,” but a Courbet who only exists in a sort of half-life, an absent-presence tracing out this “before” and “after” that we are trying to elucidate. This is a “Courbet” who is always different, always a difference, a “Courbet” who is produced through a structure of difference. —Or is Courbet the parasite of the painting, a para-site

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to which the painting is returned, re-membered, for the painting cannot exist without the parasite? Is Courbet the para-sitical entity here? —They would haunt one another, not letting the other go in this spectral economy ordered around a para-sitical process of here-ing, an attempt to make Courbet present, here, and an attempt to locate Courbet in the painting or the painting in Courbet, here, one before or after the other. The one would always mark a difference from the other, an other-ing of the other, frustrating a moment of congruence that remains forever impossible, a scene of hunting and haunting, where a meeting never takes place, marking an irreparable rift between painting and painter. This detachability between painting and painter causes a problem for a discourse on art, a discourse that would be a matter of stabilising the relation between subject and object, asserting that subjectivity falls on the side of the maker, the painter, who makes an object, a painting. This assertion involves a denial of the para-sitical nature of the painting that comes to act on the painter, to contour the painter’s subjectivity, granting the painter’s existence, while contaminating this existence, displacing it, placing it in doubt, having this existence live on and live in the painting, and transforming the painter into an object of study. Painting and painter, neither being simply subject and/or object, would be tied up in the production of subjectivities, as well as the production of objects of study, beyond questions of painter and painting, and even beyond the subjectivity and objectivity of the one who writes on art. —This raises a whole question of restitution around Courbet’s paintings.51 Who(se) are they? Gustave(’s) or Michael(’s)? Or are they always detached, detachable, a ruin, remains, and is the Friedian project simply one of re­ membering, putting back together, a process of restitution, a memorial, part of a larger project of mourning? —In one sense, painting and painter are separated, and a discourse on art would want to make restitution,

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give the painting back to the painter. This would be done in an attempt to stabilise the relation between subject and object, order it, give it orders. Stay! Go back to your owner! The painting has gone astray. It is a stray. The art historian finds the painting and calls up the owner, returning it to an owner, to a painter, who is produced by this very discourse of return, a fictive owner who will always be separated from the painting and by the painting. The relation between painter and painting is marked by a tear, an unbridgeable gap that is opened up in the very act of painting, that is opened up by the gap marked by the “and” of painting and painter. Courbet’s Realism would be marked by an impossible attempt to close this wound, a wound marked by the blood of Courbet’s signature.52 —Am I too late? I got lost looking for Courbet. He seemed to be everywhere, but ultimately he was nowhere to be found. He seemed to be a virile and viral presence that both fed and ate away at Fried’s story of him, even when Courbet was a “she.”53 Courbet’s presence was everywhere in Fried’s account, permeating everything, leaving an unmistakable odour. It seemed an easy matter to hunt Courbet down, this healthy, fully present body present everywhere, full of experience, experiencing a fullness, a fullness of his being there before the painting. According to Fried, Courbet’s presence flows into and out of the painting, overflowing his body, spilling over, destabilising the frame while stabilising his presence.54 Courbet’s presence is not just marked by the physical traces of paint, but metonymically through any number of objects.55 It is this play of stabilising and destabilising that I found so fascinating and infuriating about Courbet s Realism, a double gesture that distances it from the monolithic manoeuvrings of Absorption and Theatricality. In Courbet s Realism, Fried’s reading and writing are much more conflicted, or rather this conflict is much more conflated, the tensions within Fried’s writing being much more apparent.

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And yet, while Fried posits Courbet as this virile presence throughout the paintings, there is little recognition of the viral workings at play, no recognition of the process of decay at work in these paintings, marking and making Courbet an absent-presence, hard to track down, dangerous, even contagious. This recognition involves not only an affirmation of the process of decay at work in the paint, the very marks of presence, but a recognition that the metonymic signs of Courbet’s presence reveal a repressed decay; in particular, the blood red of the signature and the narcosis of the pipe.56 All paths lead to death. It is around this death, its ever present potentiality that we could mark another relation between Derrida and Fried, for in the end all this hunting results in death. Courbet is dead. This may or may not be an important fact, but we could suggest that to be able to paint one has to die, or at least be able to die, if not wish to die.57 But, for the moment, let’s delay the inevitable by drawing our attention to a question that seems important for Fried: “What is it to paint?” —Or is Fried’s question, “What is a painting?” —I would say rather that we are suspended between two questions, “What is a painter-beholder?” and “What is a painting?”. This relates back to the temporal issues of “before” and “after” that were raised earlier, and where we seem unable to determine which comes first, the painting or the painter. Here we could locate a structure of aporia that is traced out in Courbet’s Realism, if not the whole Friedian discourse, a non-passage, a passage that does not allow passage.58 This aporia involves the relation between the painting and the painter-beholder, a relation that inscribes and is inscribed by the impossible. To the questions “What is a painting?” and “What is a painter-beholder?” Fried would respond with the same answer, staging/stag-ing59 an impossible experience of aporia that would be the impossible congruence of Courbet with his paintings. In

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this impossible transaction, painting and painter­ beholder become one. This “structure” of aporia, ordering and ordered by the impossible, would be a scene of Courbet before the painting and the painting before Courbet, separate and inseparable in an inseparable separateness that marks a doubling at the origin, a doubling that would be the relation between painting and painter-beholder. They come together, but remain detached, in an impossible moment of merger. A similar aporia could be said to structure the relation between painting and beholder in Absorption and Theatricality, an aporia that inhabits the “Supreme Fiction” of the beholder’s absence from the scene of painting. —Couldn’t this aporia be connected to an impossible experience of death? It seems that a spectre of death haunts this passage that is not a passage, just as a spectre of death hangs over the hunt for Courbet. Could we even be so bold as to say that the answer to these two questions is death? —Yes, if we read this from a Derridean point of view, this impossible corporeal merger with the painting would be an attempt to experience one’s death, an attempt to have an experience of full presence that is tied to death, that is death for the subject.60 What Courbet is doing by trying to merge with the painting is to have an impossible experience of his own death. Courbet is trying to experience his own death, and, moreover, he is trying to die. He is trying to neutralise the painter-beholder by merging the painter-beholder with the painting. . —Would beholding and death be intimately linked? —For the moment, I think we need to return to the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld, because all of these questions about painter­ beholders, beholding, and merger may be connected to this formula. First, I am interested in the “are made” aspect of the primordial convention because it hints at a passivity involved in the act of painting. This passivity

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could be related to a destabilisation of the relation between subject and object discussed earlier. The question of passivity also comes up in Fried’s discussion of automatism within Courbet’s practice,61 a passivity that may also be tied to Fried’s insistence that Courbet was not even aware of what he was doing when he was painting, a passivity that pervades the whole ideality of absorption, a radical passivity that is tied to being so absorbed in an activity that one is oblivious to everything. This passivity is marked by the oblivion of consciousness.62 This emphasis on making is also interesting not just for a proto-modernist current that courses its way through Courbet's Realism,63 but because it insists that what Courbet is doing is making paintings, and that these paintings, regardless of what Courbet is thinking, are about Courbet’s own embodied experience of the act of painting. Within Courbet’s Realism, Fried’s insistence on making questions a whole tradition of Marxist/Clarkistfeminist-psychoanalytic interpretations of Courbet’s work, without denying their validity,64 and states that what has been forgotten in this tradition of writing on Courbet is the fact that Courbet was painting.65 Regardless of whatever else Courbet may have been thinking, we can be sure that Courbet was painting. We have the proof, a painting. This is a very insightful analysis by Fried, not just for its simplicity, but for recognising that this has somehow been overlooked by a whole discourse on art. Courbet made paintings. Now pushing aside for the moment the question of whether the paintings made “Courbet” or who is making “Courbet” now, I would suggest that there is one more thing that we can be certain Courbet is doing when he is painting. Courbet is dying. Here we could address the question of what it means to make a painting, to be a painter, by saying that the painting bears witness to the death of the painter.66 While marking and embodying Courbet’s physical presence, the painting also marks his absence, his decomposition, his death, his ruin. This may

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all be tied to an impossible mourning, a pre-emptive mourning for one’s own death that is opened up by the Baudelairean discourse and linked to Courbet through Champfleury.67 —This does not sound like Fried’s Courbet. None of this is spelled out. —But it is there and it emerges at the end, ironically, in one of the most magnificent passages in the book.68 Courbet’s work is marked by this death. —If the painting and painter-beholder are linked by death, and if the scene of Courbet’s attempted merger with the work of art is an attempt to experience his own death, there is still the role of the beholder in the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld. That is to say, there is a question of the other implied in this convention, an other who attends this meeting, the meeting of the gaze and the painting, whether this other is the beholder or the painter-beholder as other, and what we behold in Fried’s work is a desire to deny the beholder’s existence, especially in Absorption and Theatricality, where Diderot insists on the need to negate the other’s existence, in order to incorporate the other into the painting. Fried wants to eliminate the other. —And yet, we must always proceed with caution when dealing with Fried, for it may be argued that Fried is staging the impossibility of negating the other, a certain need to acknowledge the priority of the other, the way the other is always there before us, an other who also remains after us, haunting us, and again this ties in with a speculum of death that haunts the Friedian discourse. The other bears witness to my death, whether she survives me or I survive her. Death marks and is marked by the other’s existence. There can no longer be any illusions of immortality. The other disrupts these illusions and is also the sign of an alterity that escapes all systems, including the relation between painting and beholder. —And this “to be beheld” also involves a complex

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temporality, a future-passive in which we could trace out a movement from Diderot to Courbet. In one instance, the late eighteenth century, the “to be beheld” suggests that paintings are made and then they are beheld at some future moment. This implies a gap between making and beholding. The supreme fiction offers to rescue the painting from being beheld, negating the beholder’s existence, an intrusion of the other. With Gericault, there is no rescue. The “to be beheld” state has been rendered explicit, in this proto-deconstructive moment, where the gaze of the other is always already there. The theatrical is the time-boundness of absorption, a realisation of the always already theatrical nature of absorption, of the inevitability of the theatrical.69 Courbet takes this problem of the “to be beheld” a step further, marking the realisation that ’it is the painter’s own beholding that dooms the painting to being beheld, that marks the painting as always already being beheld. Courbet’s attempt to escape theatricality would be the negation of the painter-beholder, which would be a denial of his own existence before the painting. —And this is the process that I was trying to describe above. Courbet is trying to die before the painting, before the painting becomes theatrical, before the painting dies, ceasing to exist before the painting, a death that has always already occurred. It is a complete abdication of existence, of the autos that mobilises and authorises the work. The work authorises this erasure of Courbet, mourning Courbet, witnessing Courbet’s death. The painting incorporates Courbet into itself, taking part in an impossible process of mourning Courbet’s death, a death that Courbet tries to bear witness to, but cannot experience; Courbet’s own death is an impossible experience before the painting that the painting bears witness to, an experience of the impossible opening up a spectral economy that haunts all our attempts to account for this disappearance, which would in one sense be Courbet’s death.

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—And what we do through the production of a book is to try to make an account of our disappearance, our own impossible experience of death. We say, “Look! Bear witness to my death for I cannot gaze on my dead body.” Courbet’s Wounded Man would be only the most literal attempt at this impossible gaze, a gaze that experiences the death of the one who bears the gaze.70 —Yes, and Fried is trying to make an account of this impossible gaze, which is the attempt to deny the existence of the painter-beholder, a project even more improbable and impossible than the one laid out in Absorption and Theatricality. Courbet is trying to paint from the grave, a zombie-like automaton.71 Courbet is already dead by the time he is painting.72 Or at least Courbet is attempting to die, but dying is impossible. Even suicide is not a possibility.73 So there would be a way of reading Fried’s reading of Courbet as a staging/stag-ing of Courbet’s impossible experience of his own death. Hence the images of dying stags and Fried’s insistence on identifying Courbet with the dying stag as a surrogate for the painter-beholder. This is all quite a remarkable project. —But I don’t think Fried re-marks on how his own authorial self is marked by this project, how Courbet’s work in its absence-presence, in his attempt to stage his own death, shows how Fried’s own project is marked by mortality, by the ruin of the body, the fact that he too is mortal.74 Fried is doomed as we all are and there is no escape. All we are doing is writing accounts of the one who survives and is survived by others, accounts by and for the survivors in the name of those who do not survive, haunted by those who do not survive. —We could again return to Gericault and the Raft, which serves not only as a paradigm of an inescapable theatricality, the theatricality of all representation, but also as a paradigm of the survival account, the accounts of those who survive the disaster and are marked by the disaster forever, and this would serve to tie theatricality to

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a problem of surviving, of going on in the face of the disaster, acting as if the disaster were not imminent.75 This would also be tied to how paintings and the accounts of them are subject to the work of time, how, as Fried points out, certain works that seemed to escape theatricality were later seen to be theatrical,76 revealing that there is no escape from theatricality, no escape from being beheld, no escape from the gaze that will look over and after our stone-cold-dead body. —This is all becoming a bit morbid, but in the face of all this extinction, I have to raise the ethical question of why write on art? Why write on Fried? Why write on Courbet? And if I have been following all these meanderings through the texts of Fried, Derrida, Blanchot, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and others, this perhaps is tied to what I would posit as an ethics of surviving which entails a certain re-membering, an emphasis being placed on the hyphen. This would comprise a remembering of the dead which is also a re­ membering of the other in mourning, a process of rememberance. But this re-membering would also be a process of reminding ourselves of our own mortality, of how we are tom and only re-membered by an other who survives, surviving only through memory and memorial, a memorial of the other, a memory of our self as other. This would be a re-membering that is a putting back together that never quite takes place. The self is always in ruins, always tom, always separated by and from an other who will re-member us and whom we re-member through a process of memory and mourning. This process is never complete because our memory and mourning of the other is always an extension.77 So this ethics of survival is at once an attempt to re­ member the other, the duty of survival, a selfless act, while, at the same time, a selfish act of re-membering ourselves, mourning our own death, a re-membering through tears that nonetheless leaves the self in ruins. Even while such an ethics of finitude would seem to go

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beyond the discipline of art history, touching on philosophy, such an ethics of survival would seem to be called for by the study of art, not as its justification, but as its very possibility, for this discourse is precisely interested in survival, the survival of works of art, the survival of the arts, and the re-membering of works of art, even where they have not survived as is the case with the Stonebreakers. History is a survival story. —I fear that we have moved very far from Michael Fried, and, after all, I thought when you invited me here we were going to talk about his contribution to the history of art? All this talk of the other, survival, re-membering, death, what does this have to do with art history? —For me, Fried seems to provide a double gesture, a doubling that is very slippery. In one moment, his gesture is very conservative. Artists make paintings. In the late eighteenth century, this was a concern about the fact that paintings were meant to be beheld and that they somehow had to trap the beholder’s attention, to keep the beholder from merely walking by. Paradoxically this was done by denying the beholder’s existence. For Courbet, the problem was his own beholding, how to merge with the painting, how to represent his physical existence before the work of art, which again was paradoxically affirmed by negating his existence. This is at one moment very conservative. It says that painting is not about social conditions, class structure, Courbet’s relation to the past, to his parents. Painting is about the act of painting. And yet by the way he goes about all of this Fried opens up the analysis of art to many subtle possibilities, making possible a radical moment where the work of art addresses all of these ontological/phenomenological/ existential questions, where the status of the work of art as a made thing, as a thing in its thingness, is broached, where the very ontological status of the work of art is seen as a problem, or as an opening up to problems beyond those addressed by art history over the past twenty years. He opens up a discussion that goes beyond art history,

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while questioning the very grounds of art history, at once both negating and affirming the limits of art history. —In a sense, this double gesture could be tied to mimesis, to a suspense between a conservative moment and a destructive moment, to being faithful to nature and destroying the purity of nature, to being suspended between the two, by the two.78 —But I think we will have to suspend this conversation. —But I wanted to consider Fried’s books as objects made to be read, the relation between book and reader or writer-reader, and the relation between art and the writing on art, the disappearance of the thing before the naming of the thing, a consideration of the ineffable, a consideration of silence and an inability to be silent, a silence that is tôo much and too little, of it always being too late to be silent before the work of art. —But it is too late. —Am I too late? —Always already. —I don’t think we’ve reached any kind of agreement. —And isn’t this the play of difference? —Shh I think I hear them.

NOTES 1

This essay is a polylogue with n + 1 participants, a form of presentation most closely associated with the work of Jacques Derrida. Derrida uses the polylogue in the following works: Derrida, “Restitution of the truth in painting,” The Truth in Painting, transi. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) 255-382; Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” in On the Name, transi. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 35-85; Derrida, Cinders, transi. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, transi. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). In doing this, we are aligning our work with Derrida, while also making allusion to Diderot’s use of fictionalised dialogues between characters in his writings on art. Unlike the work of Diderot, however, the identities of the voices in our essay become ambiguous, detached, possibly not returning to an authorial subject that would somehow ground the arguments dispersed throughout this polylogue. In using the polylogue, we hope to give voice to several different arguments concerning Fried’s work, embracing the tensions within Fried’s work, even theatricalising these tensions. The title “Eavesdropping/Eve’s Dropping” would refer on one level to eavesdropping, the act of listening in on a conversation in secret, where voices are heard but one cannot safely attach an identity to the voice or even be sure of how many people are speaking. In addition, the voices at play in this essay are eavesdropping in on a conversation between Derrida and Fried, or at least, they believe they are listening in on this conversation, even while doubting whether such a conversation is taking place, unsure of the identity of the relation between Fried and Derrida. Through “Eve’s dropping” we wish to at once make the eavesdropper aware of the possibility of mishearing voices, of the ambiguity of language, drawing attention to the materiality of language, while also drawing attention to physical matter, to droppings and the Fall, a fall into a state of physical existence that absorption tries to escape. Absorption would be an attempt to escape the Fall marked and embraced within this essay’s reference to Eve’s dropping, to waste, to everyday physical experience. We realise, however, that the arguments and meanings produced through “Eaves­ dropping/Eve’s Dropping” far exceed what is laid out here and are beyond our ability to watch over or police. 2 . Derrida cites Fried four times in Memoirs of the Blind: The SelfPortrait and Other Ruins, 26n26, 72n67, 97n73, and 110n86. A brief passage by Fried on Memoirs of the Blind appears on the back cover of the book. Fried cites Derrida three times, as well as making one reference to Derrida’s “speculation" around artists’ names in the main text of Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 107, 267, 314 n35, and 337n22. Derrida is not cited in Michael Fried, Absorption and

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Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Derrida is cited twice in Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), but this book remains beyond the scope of the present essay. The relation between the work of Fried and Derrida is tough to determine, a relation opening up to several possibilities, none of which have been made manifest in any of their work Part of the purpose of our essay is to tease out some of these possible relations. We are referring to Michael Fried, “Between Realisms: From Derrida to Manet” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994) 1-36. This essay was presented at a conference on Derrida’s work since 1980, and is peculiar, for, in one instance, Fried acknowledges how Derrida brings out a complexity to the self-portrait, showing how an impossible gaze is at play in the self-portrait, aod that the assumption that the artist is looking into a mirror cannot be made. Yet, at a later moment, Derrida disappears from the essay and Fried says that we can assume that Fantin-Latour was using a mirror, disregarding Derrida’s doubt and tying the mirror to a literalness that we don’t believe is at play within Derrida’s writing. These themes are woven through the texture of Memoirs of the Blind. See especially, 37-41. Derrida takes up the themes of patricide and fratricide often within the context of reading Freud, a reading that at once both affirms and negates the Freudian text. In the Friedian text, Freud is relegated, for the most part, to footnotes, and in doing so, distances his reading from Freudian and Lacanian interpretations. See Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 327n36, 333n6, 334nll, and 338-9n32. It is in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration that Fried takes up the Freudian discourse most directly, but this work remains beyond the scope of the current essay. On the back cover of Memoirs of the Blind, Fried refers to the book as “A brilliant, challenging, intensely personal (at times autobiographical) book ... a further, indispensable chapter in the ongoing adventure of Derrida’s thought. ” In this essay, we feminise the beholder in order to emphasise the beholder as an alterity, an irreducible difference. In doing this, we want to draw attention to the question of whether Fried, in addressing the relation

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between painting and beholder, opens up to a play of difference. It is our contention here, and one of the issues we’re trying to address through the use of the polylogue, that Fried both acknowledges a play of difference and negates a play of difference. In negating difference, Fried’s work falls back into a tradition of presence and the unity of the subject. In affirming difference, Fried’s work fits into a questioning of this tradition, a questioning carried out in the work of Derrida. Yet such an oppositional structure gives way to readings of Fried’s work that are suspended between the affirmation and negation of difference. In other words, there are at least two ways of interpreting Fried’s relation to difference and otherness at work within this essay. 7 The theme of figures with their backs turned to the viewer arises on several occasions in Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet’s Realism, and Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. Fried ties this theme to an ideality of absorption, of figures so absorbed in physical or mental activity as to be unaware of the beholder’s presence. Such a state would, on the surface, seem to negate the beholder, to negate the other who stands before the work, but, as Fried maps out, this process of negation becomes problematic, beholding becoming an inevitable process. 8 Here we are suggesting that Fried is trying to salvage the status of the beholder in the name of a thematic of presence, an Idealist tradition. This would place Fried’s work in opposition to Derrida’s project of pointing towards the absence of presence, towards a thematic of an absent presence. 9 On the myth of Diana and Acteon and the gaze see Steven Z. Levine, “To See or Not to See,” in Colin B. Bailey, ed., The Loves of the Gods (New York: Rizzoli, 1992). There are at least two traditions within the myth of Diana and Acteon. In one tradition, Acteon is to blame for viewing Diana bathing, for desiring to see her at the bath. He is the one who wants to look and is punished by being transformed into a stag (an important subject in Courbet's oeuvre and Fried’s reading of Courbet), who is in turn killed by his own hunting dogs. In another tradition, Acteon is the victim, encountering Diana by accident, and Diana’s punishment is viewed as excessive. Acteon did not intend to look. There are also other versions

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of the myth between these two poles, dealing to varying degrees with the role of the gaze in stabilising or destabilising the subject. Within the present essay the gaze may be viewed as trying to stabilise the subject, but that, in this process of stabilisation, opens the subject up to destabilising effects, placing the subject outside of itself, a subject that is both the bearer of the gaze and subject to the gaze. 10 Here we are not only making reference to the Fall and the Garden of Eden, as in our title, but also to the scene of a lesser fall in the garden. This is the fall from being the one who sees to the one who is seen that Jean-Paul Sartre describes. In both cases, we are trying to suggest that the unity of the subject falls into a state where one is both subject and object, where agency is determined through an other, a subjectivity at once determined and ruined through and by the gaze. 11 In one instance, we would suggest that this is a key difference between Fried and Derrida. Fried tries to reinstate a thematic of presence in the wake of ruins, while Derrida embodies a thematic of ruins. This would be a difference between a tradition that views subjectivity as stable and a tradition that views subjectivity as fragmentary. We will, however, argue that Fried acknowledges the state of ruins on occasion, especially in Courbet’s Realism, but there still remains an attempt to delay ruin within Fried’s work. Derrida, on the other hand, while not necessarily embracing ruins, tries to look at how the subject experiences this state of ruins. 12 The term re-member will be used often in this essay and within different contexts. Through this term we wish to refer to several ideas. First, it refers to two different concepts of memory. In one instance, re-membering suggests a process of memory that is recuperative, that tries to preserve the past. This idealising process opens up, however, to a second notion of memory, one emphasised through the hyphenation of the word. This process of re-membering is imperfect, a process of stitching together a fiction of the past, a subjective memory tied to how the subject wants to view the past. This second form of memory is and is not recuperative. It is not recuperative in that the past that is re­ membered is not the past as it happened. It is re-cuperative

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in that it produces an idealised memory of a past that the subject would like to believe to have happened. There is also a sense that re-membering is structured around forgetfulness, the loss of memory, a process filled with gaps and lapses. Secondly, we want to tie re-membering to bodily experience. In one instance, this is linked to a re-membering of the body, preserving the body in its ideality and an experience of the world as a fullness, as a presence. On the other hand, the hyphenation of re-membering should suggest a process of dis-embodiment and loss, an attempt to put back together a dismembered body and discontinuous experience. This second form of re-membering points towards the loss of an idealised body; indeed, the non­ existence of such a body except as a memory. Instead, the body is sewn together, even while it is in a process of falling apart. It is this suspension between putting together and falling apart that we wish to suggest by the term re-member, an undecidable situation where the subject is suspended between these two positions. 13 Derrida raises these issues in his essay “Restitutions," within the context of Martin Heidegger’s and Meyer Shapiro’s interpretations of a painting of shoes by Van Gogh. See The Truth in Painting, 255-382. There is a question of truth at play in Fried’s work, a question of history and how history is viewed, and who is doing the viewing. In other words, there is a question of subjectivity and agency at play in the process of interpretation. 14 “Baudelaire and Courbet probably met for the first time in the late 1840s and for a while were friends, but by the middle of the 1850s Baudelaire had turned against Courbet’s painting because realism as such seemed to him to leave no place for the exercise of the imagination, which he called the queen of faculties and regarded as crucial to art properly understood.” Fried, Courbet's Realism, 4. 15 “In short I find in Baudelaire’s attacks on realism in the name of the imagination terms of criticism that bear an altogether different relation to Courbet’s art than Baudelaire intended, a relation that until recently made invisible not only by the nature of Courbet’s Realism but also by the

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unbreakable spell of a certain conception of realism as such.” ibid., 5. “Now it is a basic claim of this study that Courbet’s paintings are eminently imaginative in Baudelaire’s sense of the term and that it’s therefore ironic, to say the least, that Baudelaire not only failed to recognize that this was so but regarded Courbet as the arch exemplar of the realist/positivist/ materialist esthetic he deplored ... A similar historical irony hovers about Baudelaire’s characterization of the realists or positivists as seeking to depict reality as it would be if they didn’t exist, a formula that, applied to Courbet, 1 shall argue is almost exactly wrong. But just as Baudelaire’s advocacy of the imagination turns out to be pertinent to Courbet’s work in ways neither man could have suspected, so his introducing the topic of the realist painting’s relation to its maker’s existence engages with the issue I claim lies at the heart of Courbet’s enterprise.” ibid., 5. Fried uses the rest of the introduction to Courbet’s Realism to show how his current argument fits within his larger project. In particular see Fried, Courbet ’s Realism, 6, 46-8. We are trying to point to how Fried’s argument always returns, how the issue of the beholder constantly returns, while also making allusion to the importance of Courbet’s scenes of hunting within Fried’s interpretation and the importance of the theme of death in relation to the negation of the painter-beholder. We are also referring to some of the themes of Derrida’s essay, “To Speculate-on Freud’” in The Post Card, transi. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 259-409, an essay which discusses Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, looking at the way Freud makes his argument return repeatedly, tying this process of repetition to the theory of the death drive that Freud is developing. In making these connections, we are suggesting that there is a way in which Fried’s work, through its repetitions, attempts and fails to repress the body and mortality. Again we turn the reader’s attention to Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, in order to suggest how Fried’s desire affects how he interprets works of art. It becomes a question of difference, of seeing how a play of difference unravels Fried’s argument, opening Fried’s interpretation to meanings beyond his control and transforming the relation

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of painting and beholder into a relation open to difference. There is a tension within Fried’s work between a monolithic reading of art that reinstates a thematic of presence, and a reading that opens up a play of difference. “For Diderot and his colleagues, as we have seen, the painter’s task was above all to reach the beholder’s soul by way of his eyes. This traditional formulation was amplified by another, which like the first was widely shared: a painting, it was claimed, had first to attract and then to arrest and finally to enthrall the beholder, that is, a painting had to call to someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself, and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move.” Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 92. “All this may be summed up by saying that Diderot’s conception of painting rested ultimately upon the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist, that he was not really there, standing before the canvas; and that the dramatic representation of action and passion, and the causal and instantaneous mode of unity that came with it, provided the best available medium for establishing that fiction in the painting itself.” ibid., 103. Fried, “Between Realisms,” 5. We could tie these differences to shifts within MerleauPonty, shifts that may be mapped out in the essays “Cézanne’s Doubt,” “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” and “Eye and Mind," shifts that are dealt with in part in the volume (which includes Merleau-Ponty’s essays), Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993). To be reductive, it may be suggested that Fried uses an earlier conception of Merleau-Ponty, while Derrida turns to a later Merleau-Ponty, but this would not be quite right. It would be more accurate to say that it is an encounter between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger that haunts the issues being discussed here, an encounter that takes place in the 1961 essay, “Eye and Mind.” To be reductive, Derrida’s use of Merleau-Ponty would be more infected and inflected with Heidegger than Fried’s use of Merleau-Ponty, or, rather, the differences between Derrida and Fried would be intimately tied to the differences between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. There would be a moment of congruence between Derrida

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and Fried. Both would address the body as a means of accessing experience, an idea linking them to the work of Merleau-Ponty. The difference between them would be the nature of this experience, of whether it is an experience of fullness (Fried, Merleau-Ponty), or an experience of loss, of Being-towards-death (Derrida, Heidegger). Related to this is the role of vision. Within Fried’s reading of Merleau-Ponty, vision provides access to an experience of the world. Derrida, on the other hand, points to an absolute invisible that structures the visible and the invisible in Merleau-Ponty, an absolute invisible that provides a structure of blindness constituting our experience of the world. 24 Fried asserts his debt to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, especially around the notion of the body, while moving beyond Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body by considering how the body is addressed in the work of Michel Foucault. Fried does not suggest that Courbet’s relation to his embodiedness is the ultimate meaning of his work, but he does acknowledge this as an important factor in his interpretation. Fried’s reading differs from a phenomenological reading in that it moves from this reading to a consideration of the relation between painting and beholder. Still, Fried’s reading is very much indebted to Merleau-Ponty, and, more importantly, to a phenomenological notion of the body as granting access to experience. See Fried, Courbet's Realism, 49-50. Also on Fried’s use of the body as given in the work of MerleauPonty, see Courbet’s Realism, 307-8n7, 308-9nnll-12. 25 John Caputo offers a criticism of the healthy, masculine, athletic body assumed and presumed in the work of Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, setting this conception of the body in opposition to the “Jewgreek” body of Derrida and Levinas. See John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 194-219. Fried makes note of the importance of the upright body in Courbet’s Realism, 308nll. 26 Fried cites Merleau-Ponty: “Thus the permanence of one’s own body, if only classical psychology had analyzed it, might have led it to the body no longer conceived as an object of the world, but as our means of communication with it, to

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the world no longer conceived as a collection of determinate objects, but as the horizon latent in all our experience and itself ever-present and anterior to every determining thought." Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 3O9nl2. Derrida plays on the theme of prosthesis, limping, and decay within The Post Card. The theme of glasses, microscopes, and telescopes, a thematic of prosthesis, also arises in Memoirs of the Blind and The Truth in Painting. The theme of tears is played out in Memoirs of the Blind. The tear is a fluidic mark of bodily experience structured around loss and mortality. In addition, the tear, as in rip, or Riss, is a concept from Heidegger that Derrida touches upon. Riss has to do with Being, an experience of Being that is torn from authentic experience. On the theme of tears and tears, also see Mark C. Taylor, Tears (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Besides Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida's Mémoires for Paul de Man, transi. Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) takes up the themes of memory and mourning that are critical to our conception of re-membering. Our reference to the gap produced through re-membering may also be tied to a gap between the ideal and the real, as well as a gap between the signifier and the signified. One could map two traditions of thought in relation to these gaps. One tradition would suggest that these gaps can be closed, that the distance between representation and what is represented may be negated. The other tradition would insist on these gaps, showing how these gaps become productive of meanings outside of the relation between representation and represented, signifier and signified. Derrida suspends his readings within these gaps, searching for the margins and other minutiae where meaning is suspended, held in suspense by the undecidable. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 275. In bringing into play making and the status of vision, a question arises concerning the relation between Judaism and Christianity, as well as the relation between Judaism and Hellenism; in sum, a relation between the worship of idols and iconoclasm. One tradition (Christian/Greek) privileges vision, while the other tradition (Judaism) questions the status of vision and the visual object. Derrida’s work often plays on the tensions between

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these traditions. On the question of Christianity and Judaism in Fried’s work, see Isabelle Wallace’s essay in this collection. We are indebted to both Isabelle Wallace and Steven Z. Levine for the crystallisation of the ideas refracted throughout our essay. “The invisible is there without being an object, it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the visibles’ themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence.’’ Merleau-Ponty quoted in Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 52. Also, “What [consciousness] does not see it does not see for reasons of principle; it is because it is consciousness that it does not see. What it does not see is what in it prepares the vision of the rest (as the retina is blind at the point where the fibers that will permit the vision spread out into it).” Merleau-Ponty quoted in Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 53. In citing Merleau-Ponty, Derrida points towards a blindness at the very core of vision. “The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.” ibid., 69. Here there would be an echo of Lacan s corps morcelé within Derrida’s reading of experience as ruin. On Lacan’s corps morcelé, see Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic theory in Lacan's return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991). Here Derrida’s work would touch on Lacan’s notions of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, and on how subjectivity is determined through a relation to the other and language. See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). These issues of subjectivity and language also relate to the writings of Maurice Blanchot, whose work is an important influence on Derrida, and who, like Derrida, has been greatly influenced by Heidegger. Blanchot’s work addresses the ways in which subjectivity is both determined and destroyed through representation. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, transi. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1988) and “Tympan" in Margins of Philosophy, transi. Alan Bass (Chicago:

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University of Chicago Press, 1982) ix-xxix. 36 The play of the ear and the eye in these myths would map out a very complex scenario, one that we cannot go into now, a course charting the Sirens in the Odyssey, whose song must not be heard, the blinded Polyphemus, who does not recognise the sound of “Nobody” in Odysseus’ “name," and the dog’s “gaze” that recognises Odysseus; in the story of Perseus, the shared eye of the Graiae, sisters to the Gorgons, and the deadly gaze of Medusa; and in the story of Orpheus, his mistrust of the ear and his gaze backwards towards Eurydice, as well as his mastery of song and his beautiful voice. All these eyes and ears would call for closer attention. All we want to suggest here is the importance of the eye and the ear within both these myths and the work of Derrida. In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida addresses all of these myths. See 17-8, 63-5, 73-88. Also see Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, transi. Lydia Davis (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1981). 37 These issues surrounding the gaze could be summed up around a difference between a notion of the gaze as providing access to the world and a notion of the gaze as only providing an illusion of the world, an illusion formed through the subject’s desire, the subject’s will, a will that is formative and deformative. This latter tradition, one that Derrida’s work more easily fits within, may be traced through the work of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan. A question in our essay is how the gaze forms and deforms subjectivity, and how these tensions between formation and deformation arise within Fried’s work. 38 On this notion of community and opening up to the other within Derrida’s work see Derrida, The Other Heading, transi. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 39 This is a reference to Bataille s Story of the Eye, which would trace out many of the themes around the body, the eye, and the “I,” being played out here, themes around the “real” of the body that may be set in opposition to the “ideal” of the body at play in Fried, an ideal that tries to recuperate the subject. See Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, transi. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987). Derrida mentions the play of ruins and blindness in Bataille’s novel. See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 17nl0.

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40 There is a way in which Absorption and Theatricality, or any book, may also be subject to a play of absorption and theatricality. In other words, the relation between painting and beholder that Fried discusses may also be applied to the relation between reader and text. In theatricalising our presentation of Absorption and Theatricality, we are, at once, trying to point to the theatrical nature of Fried’s presentation of the relation between painting and beholder, while also drawing the reader’s attention to the relation between reader and text. 41 “The last point I want to make is a somewhat delicate one. In several essays on recent abstract painting and sculpture published in the second half of the 1960s I argued that much seemingly difficult and advanced but actually ingratiating and mediocre work of those years sought to establish what I called a theatrical relation to the beholder, whereas the very best recent work — the paintings of Louis, Nolan, Olitski, and Stella and the sculptures of Smith and Caro — were in essence an/7-theatrical, which is to say that they treated the beholder as if he were not there. I do not intend to rehearse those arguments in this introduction. However, as my title once again makes clear, the concept of theatricality is crucial to my interpretation of French painting and criticism in the age of Diderot, and in general the reader who is familiar with my essays on abstract art will be struck by certain parallels between ideas developed in those essays and in this book. Here too I want to assure the reader that I am aware of those parallels, which have their justification in the fact that the issue of the relationship between painting (or sculpture) and beholder has remained a matter of vital if often submerged importance to the present day. Read in that spirit, this book may be understood to have something to say about the eighteenth­ century beginnings of the tradition of making and seeing out of which has come the most ambitious and exalted art of our time." Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 5. 42 Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Meriden: Meriden Gravure Co., 1965). And the early nineteenth century comes before the 1960s, even though 1970 comes after 1965 if we also consider Fried’s essay on Géricault and Thomas Couture. See Michael Fried, “Thomas Couture and the

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Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century French Painting” Artforum 8/10 (1970) 36-46. At one level, it may be suggested that Fried is justifying his points of view, that his own vision is being affected by a desire to see the issue of painting and beholder throughout the past two hundred years. At another level, however, the question of whether the relation between painting and beholder is central to art during the last two hundred years is not so important. Instead, the discussion that Fried opens up around these issues and how these issues can further the discussion of art may be of a greater importance in assessing his work. 43 “Chapters two and three ... as well as the last portion of chapter one, are mainly devoted to a sustained effort to see the painting of his age through his eyes." Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 3. 44 We would suggest that the state of absorption could be related to a religious experience through the themes of temporal and bodily transcendence. This aspect of absorption is made most explicit in “Art and Objecthood": “We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.” Fried, “Art and Objecthood” Artforum 5/10 (1967) 23. Also, by making this connection between absorption and religious experience, we are pointing to a reading of Fried as trying to recuperate presence, wholeness, and unity, themes related to a traditional conception of religion. 45 “The presence of the beholder does not emerge as an insuperable problem for painting for some time. I think of Gericault as the first painter who found himself compelled to assume the burden of that problem in its insuperable or tragic form and of the Raft of the Medusa as the principal monument to that compulsion. By this I mean that the strivings of the men on the raft to be beheld by the tiny ship on the horizon, by startling coincidence named the Argus* may be viewed as motivated not simply by a desire for rescue from the appalling circumstances depicted in the painting but also by the need to escape our gaze, to put an end to being beheld by us, to be rescued from the ineluctable fact of a presence that threatens to theatricalize even their sufferings." Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 153-154. On Fried’s reading of Gericault also see “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century

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French Painting,” and Courbet’s Realism, 22-32. 46 “In Chardin’s art that necessity [the illusion of absorption] remained mostly implicit: it was satisfied by seeming merely to ignore the beholder — the tom jacket, unpinned apron, and half-open drawer that 1 have characterized as signs of absorption show that Chardin himself was not forgetful that his paintings would be beheld — and by portraying ordinary absorptive states and activities with remarkable fidelity." Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 66-7. 47 We will cite just one example of this language of the impossible that pervades Courbet’s Realism. “But it can’t be emphasized too strongly that all such efforts were doomed to failure — that no matter what steps Courbet took to realize what I have been claiming was his central aim, he couldn’t literally or corporeally merge with the canvas before him but instead was compelled to remain outside it, a beholder (albeit a privileged one) to the end.” Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 269. Even this passage, with its reference to Courbet’s privileged status, opens up a complexity within this impossibility that this present essay is trying to work out. 48 While Fried may make a distinction between what Courbet did and what Courbet desires, there is no consideration of Fried’s desire and how this infects his view of what Courbet desires. 49 Here it is suggested that the gaze of the painting destabilises Courbet’s subjectivity, placing his subjectivity outside of himself, the painting determining Courbet’s subjectivity, and producing effects outside of Courbet’s subjective control or will. The painting becomes a parasitical entity that both affirms and negates Courbet’s subjectivity. On the parasite see, in particular, Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., transi. Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 50 Fried discusses Courbet’s signature, bringing into play Derrida’s work on signatures and their effects on an artist’s work as material signifiers in and of themselves. Fried, Courbet ’s Realism, 107-8. 51 Here we are again raising issues brought up by Derrida in The Truth in Painting. There is an element to Fried’s work that tries to return the truth to Courbet’s paintings, rendering their true meaning back to them. But this process

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of restitution, of sending the truth back to Courbet, involves bringing the truth back to Fried, bearer of the truth of Courbet’s work. Restitution would suggest that there is an original truth to the work of art that the interpreter restores, giving back to the work a truth that had been lost. On restitution see Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions,” in The Truth in Painting. “He almost always did so [sign his paintings] in carnal red, in letters that have an obdurate corporeality of their own: the signature in Courbet’s paintings and drawings is never merely a verbal signifier." Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 108. The signature becomes a signifier marking Courbet’s absent presence, an absence of Courbet marked by his signature in red, a corporeal mark of the dismemberment of artist from painting, and painting from artist. Fried, “Courbet’s ‘Femininity,’” Courbet's Realism, 189-222. “More radically, the overriding aim of Courbet’s enterprise in my account — to undo or at least suspend his own spectatorhood — led to repeated attempts by him as painter-beholder to merge as if corporeally with various figures in his paintings, and, as my readings of the Wheat Sifters, the Source, and, from a different angle, the Studio have made clear, the personages in question could as well be female as male.” ibid, 190. On the impermeability of the frame within Courbet’s œuvre see Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 53-84, 155-71. On the thematisation of the act of painting in Courbet’s self­ portraits see Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 81-4. On the book as a palette in the Wheat Sifters see ibid., 167. On flowers as a stand-in for a paintbrush and palette see ibid., 197. On the pipe see Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 77-8. Here, if space permitted, we could include a discussion on whether it is a pipe or not, taking into account Ceci n’est pas une pipe, as well as a discussion of smoking that would take up Baudelaire and Freud, or that could take up a history of smoking, of narcotics and narcosis, which would in one instance be tied to what may be called an ideality of absorption, while, in another instance, it would be tied to the destruction of the body, the body dying and surviving only through its addictions, and here we could take up a legal history around drugs, the determination of which drugs are legal. On the questions of smoking, narcotics, and

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narcosis see Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992) and Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” transi. Michael Israel in Points..., ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 228-54. 57 Pertinent to this discussion, if there were space, would be the work of Maurice Blanchot and his analysis of the possibility and impossibility of death within the creative process, which influences Derrida’s use of the themes of loss and mourning. In particular, see Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, 21-62. 58 Aporia plays an important role throughout Derrida’s thought. It would be difficult to cite any particular example, but two recent works by Derrida where this concept is visibly at play are “Force of Law: The ’Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” transi. Mary Quaintance, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility ofJustice (New York: Roudedge, 1992) 3-67, and Aporias, transl. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Aporia is a structure that both allows and does not allow passage. In this way, it is similar to the structure set up by Fried in both the pastoral mode (Diderot) and the mode of corporeal merger (Courbet). In the pastoral mode, the passage into the painting is impossible and yet it is structured around this impossibility. In Courbet’s project, the process of corporeal merger with the painting is impossible, and yet is predicated on this impossibility. It happens, but it can’t happen. It creates a tension between the possible and the impossible, an experience of suspension that would bring Fried’s work more in alignment with a Derridean reading, as we are suggesting in this passage, and through aporia, this passage that is not a passage. 59 . In this staging/stag-ing, we wish to bring to attention Fried’s remarkable discussion of Courbet’s The Death of the Stag, for it is in Courbet’s attempted identification with the dying stag that the relation between painter-beholder and painting, in its impossibility, is eloquently brought into play. See Fried, Courbet 's Realism, 184-8. “But if we shift our attention from the human actors to the dying beast, it

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becomes apparent, at least I claim it does, that Courbet has identified massively and unreservedly with the latter — with its struggles, its exhaustion, its agony, its immanent death.” ibid., 186. 60 Here we are offering an interpretation of Fried’s work that would bring it into a correspondence with the work of Derrida, an exchange that would extend Fried’s discussion of corporeal merger to a consideration of full presence. Derrida relates presence and death, tying this to the body as being unstable. In discussing Van Gogh, Derrida writes: “So what I would call the body — I am happy to talk about the body from that point of view — isn’t a presence. The body is ... an experience in the most unstable sense of the term; it is an experience of frames, of dehiscence, of dislocations ... Presence would mean death. If presence were possible, in the full sense of a being that is there where it is, that gathers there where it is, if that were possible, there would be neither Van Gogh nor the work of Van Gogh, nor the experience we can have of the work of Van Gogh. If all these experiences, works, or signatures are possible, it is to the extent that presence hasn’t succeeded in being there and in assembling there. Or, if you wish, the thereness, the being there, only exists on the basis of this work of traces that dislocates itself." Jacques Derrida, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” transi. Laurie Volpe in Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 16. 61 See Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 181-4. Fried aligns the passivity at play in Courbet’s work with the writings of the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. “1 suggest, however, that Courbet’s predilection for pictorial structures that evoke an inner continuity between absorptive states and conditions, and even more his tendency to thematize the mutual interpenetration of action and passivity, will and automatism, have much in common with Ravaisson’s views.” ibid., 183-4. While aligning the interplay of action and passivity in the work of Courbet with the writings of Ravaisson, Fried distinguishes this passivity from a current of nineteenth­ century thinking concerning photographic automatism, ibid., 278-83.

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62 Fried addresses an "active passivity,’’ a term derived from Merleau-Ponty; ibid., 191. This interplay between activity and passivity would open Fried’s work up to the writings of Derrida, which often focus on how subjectivity is suspended between activity and passivity, especially a radical passivity that would be beyond both activity and passivity, while being the basis for such a relation. This theme of passivity also is important to the thought of Blanchot. In particular see Maurice Blanchot, The Step/Not Beyond, transi. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) and Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, transi. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 63 Fried takes up the ghost of Clement Greenberg that haunts his work in Courbet’s Realism, 284-7. It is in this context that Fried brings into play the work of Stanley Cavell and the notion of acknowledgment. 64 Throughout Courbet’s Realism, Fried addresses the interpretation of Courbet’s work by other art historians, but by shifting the attention to making, Fried shows how he can modify these earlier interpretations without negating them. In particular, see Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 116-8, 149-50, 189-90, 209-14, 255-6, 261-2, 274-5. 65 Here we are playing on an equivalence in English between the act of “painting” and the result of the act, a "painting.” Sentences like “Courbet was painting” and “Courbet is painting” embody the Friedian scene of a merger between painter-beholder and painting. Courbet, in the act of “painting,” becomes a “painting.” Courbet is painting, both in the act of painting and embodied in the result of this act, a painting. This raises a hypothetical question of whether this equivalence in English between the act of “painting” and the result of the act, a “painting,” has informed Fried’s project at some un/sub/conscious level. 66 This spectre of mortality would be tied to the passivity implied by the “primordial convention” that paintings "are made to be beheld.” 67 “We are each of us celebrating some funeral.” Baudelaire quoted in Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 116. 68 “Finally, I see the theme of tracking a wounded animal and specifically the motif of the converging tracks in the snow as figuring the painter-beholder’s project of seeking to undo both distance and difference between himself and the

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painting ... At the same time, the temporal and spatial disjunction that hasn’t been closed, and perhaps also the evident threat of greater violence to come, suggest the necessary failure of that project, though not of course of the hunt itself. And what of the association between the drops of blood, Courbet’s missing signature, and the hunter’s red scarf, an association that hints at the corporeal identity of hunter-painter and quarry? This would seem to imply that the distance and difference that can’t be overcome are also within the painter-beholder, a possibility that first emerged in my reading of the Burial. It may be that the poignant elegiac mood of the Hunter on Horseback, which as we stand before the painting comes to seem almost tangible, expresses, if not an awareness of that self-division, at any rate an intuition that death alone could bring it to an end.” Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 290. With Géricault, there is no escape from theatricality, as beholding becomes inevitable, “insuperable.” Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 153-4- See n44. This painting offers an attempt to represent the experience of death that Courbet can’t witness, can’t experience, except through representation. Fried points to this painting as exemplary in his discussion of the negation of the painterbeholder within his discussion of the Hunter on Horseback. “So for example I see a figure for the act of painting in both the tracks and the blood in the snow, but even more than is usual what gives this reading such plausibility as it has is the recall of other works, notably the Wounded Man and the Wheat Sifters ...” Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 288. This is a reference to Fried's allusion to automatism and the loss of consciousness, as well as a reference to his discussion of the open grave in Courbet’s Burial at Omans. ibid., 140. . We could rewrite the Cartesian cogito, “I think, therefore 1 am” as “I paint, therefore I ain’t” in an attempt to get at the experience of corporeal merger that Fried opens up if interpreted from a more deconstructive point of view. . This impossibility of death and suicide is discussed by Blanchot in The Step/Not Beyond and is also taken up in his essays “Reading Kafka” and “Kafka and Literature” in The Work of Fire, transi. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) 1-26.

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74 Is Courbet, like the stag for Courbet, a surrogate for Fried, that Fried employs in an attempt to experience his own mortality? Does mortality inflect and infect all attempts at representation? While Fried's work opens up this relation to mortality within Courbet’s œuvre, this relation to mortality creates a cascading effect that leads to a consideration of how death effects representation at a more fundamental level, both verbal and visual, impacting not only on Courbet’s production of art, but our own production of books on art. 75 The theme of living on in the face of finitude is taken up explicitly in Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, transi. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Also see Derrida's essay on Blanchot, “Living on,” transi. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979) 75-176. 76 Fried, Courbet'sJRealism, 15. 77 There are at least four senses to the extension involved in memory and mourning: 1) the other as an extension of the self; 2) the extension of the other through our memory of her; 3) an extension of the self through surviving the other, a stay of execution; and 4) being survived by the other, executor of our (e)state. See Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man. 78 On this double gesture of mimesis see Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” transi. R. Klein, Diacritics 11/2 (1981) 3-25. In one instance, mimesis would be faithful to nature, staying close to nature, trying to imitate nature. But in this moment of repetition, the authenticity of nature is spoiled, authenticity becoming an after-effect of mimesis, a by­ product, secondary to the representation. In this moment of reversal, the representation of nature comes first, and authentic nature is secondary. In sum, mimesis would involve a suspension between these two moments, the preservation of authentic nature and the destruction of authentic nature, not a resolution of these two moments.

Mutual Facing A Memoir of Friedom Steven Z. Levine From Three American Painters (1965) to Manet’s Modernism (1996), the enterprise of Michael Fried “may be grasped as a single, self-renewing, in important respects dialectical undertaking,”1 each passionately affirmed but provisional stage of Fried’s meticulous formulations being subsequently taken up in retrospect — nachträglich — by way of an act of deferred reaffirmation, dialogical modification, or critical transformation.2 And yet, through all its vicissitudes of more than thirty years, “an overarching and obsessive aim of [Fried’s] enterprise”3 can be said to be the transcendence or overcoming of that persistent metaphysical dualism which in traditional epistemology and everyday parlance has installed a seemingly irreducible gap between mind and body, matter and form, male and female, self and other, and self and world.4 The paintings of Edouard Manet have repeatedly provided the singular occasion for the renewal of Fried’s meditation on what he has most recently called “the primordial encounter, the inescapable or quasi-transcendental relation of mutual facing” which both cleaves together and cleaves asunder the entities we have come to call persons and paintings.5 Acknowledging the many-faceted manifestations of this faceto-face encounter — at once a historically situated ontology of painting and an ethically inflected phenomenology of being — is the moral and formal stuff of which Fried’s memorable fictions have been made.6 Tracing Fried’s thirty­ year path to the self-transcending encounter with the face of the other is the winding itinerary I will follow here.

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The encounter of mutual facing isn’t yet there to be named in the catalogue Three American Painters, the record of an exhibition of paintings by Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella which Fried organised for the Fogg Art Museum while a Junior Fellow at Harvard University in 1965. Fight years younger than Fried, I was a freshman at Harvard that year and don’t remember whether 1 ever wandered into the exhibition on my way to my dormitory half a block away. The next year I spent in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University, in flight from a premedical requirement in organic chemistry and enraptured with the discovery of the history’ of art in the paintings of my cousin Moshe Rosentalis, the lectures of Moshe Barasch, and the writings of another Jew from Harvard, Bernard Berenson. Back again in Cambridge I began to take art history courses but didn’t become aware of iMichael Fried until 1969, at which time, in my second semester of graduate study in the department of Fine Arts, 1 found myself in the first of many classes I took with him and repeatedly audited until we both left Harvard in 1975, he to go to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and me to Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. He was my teacher; and of course I’ve been his student ever since. In 1965, then, before the words of his written texts were firstly words, for me, that I had heard him speak, the singularity of the gaze of Manet's paintings was glossed under the sign of an individual’s alienation rather than the mutuality’ of encounter. Said at the time to be “situational” — a word soon to take on a famously opprobrious inflection in the polemic against theatricality in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) and other essays — Manet’s paintings are seen to present “a tableau vivant constructed so as to dramatize not a particular event so much as the beholder’s alienation from that event. References in the text and notes to Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, and Merleau-Ponty evoke the engaged political context of postwar Marxism and existential phenomenology in this youthful essay written at the age of tw'enty-six. Fried goes on to write of

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“the inhibiting, estranging quality of self-awareness” not only on the part of Manet — “the first post-Kantian painter: the first painter whose awareness of himself raises problems of extreme difficulty that cannot be ignored: the first painter for whom consciousness itself is the great subject of his art” — but also on the part of his depicted figures, most notably in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia in “the distancing calm stare of Victorine Meurend.” In this text Manet’s art serves to inaugurate the cultural paradigm of the self-conscious, self-interrogative, self-critical modernism of Noland, Olitski, Stella, and their immediate predecessors Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Morris Louis, but Fried also promises in 1965 to deal more fully with the particular problems associated with Manet’s art “as soon as possible.”8 Thirty years latêr, in Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, we are finally able to reap the longripening harvest of that “soon,” but an initial marker was already set down in 1969 in the form of Fried’s doctoral dissertation, “Manet’s Sources.” Published to the reported consternation of the art historical establishment as well as the subscribers of Artforum, Fried’s dissertation took up the entire March issue of that magazine but for a few unrelated letters to the editor by Hilton Kramer, Leon Golub, Cindy Nemser, and others, as well as the routine contingent of gallery ads for exhibitions of the work of Pollock, Newman, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, and, ironically, a floor­ wrapping by Christo on the back cover. I bought my copy for $2.00 at the newsstand in Harvard Square, and its much-underlined, asterisked, and annotated palimpsest looks up at me now as I write from the dead eyes of Manet’s toreador lying prostrate on the front cover. For what “Manet’s Sources” insists on is that it is not only a depicted gaze whose face we face in facing Manet’s work, in facing up to Manet’s work, “it is as though the painting itself looks or gazes or stares at one — it is as though it confronts, fixes, even freezes one.”9 With this repeated “as

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though” we are fully in the allegorical realm of Fried’s most fundamental rhetorical practice, a signature-effect of metaphysical metaphor, of the carrying over or transference of an apparently guileless formal description of frontality into an urgent moral discourse of confrontation.10 Fried characterises the “particular mode of confrontation” he experiences and admires in the face of Manet’s art “as essentially theatrical,” a theatricality rooted in the conventions of the realist strain of French painting from Clouet to Le Nain to Watteau to Manet, in which there is a “direct but restrained, relatively undramatic confrontation of the beholder” by the depicted figures.11 In contrast to Manet’s candour with regard to his literal situation as the painter of a scene to be seen by us (“as though in Manet’s art the very fact of posing, or fact of being represented, was for the first time revealed as ineluctably theatrical — as inescapably, even when inadvertently, a performance”),12 Fried had already encountered the wrong kind of confrontation, the wrong kind of theatricality, the wrong kind of literalism in the socalled minimal art of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Tony Smith. Whereas Manet acknowledges the aesthetic situation we find ourselves in when we face a work of art — a work whose indispensable effects of illusion enable it to transcend its literal properties as an object, minimal art merely puts into operation the literalness with which we encounter ordinary objects in the everyday world: Literalist sensibility is theatrical because ... it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work ... And once he is in the room • the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone — which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him. (Such isolation is not solitude any more than such confrontation is communion).13

Not only docs Fried’s alienating confrontation with, say, Judd’s obdurate object not yield the sort of transpersonal or transcendental communion that might

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be achieved in the face of a work of art by Manet, another free human subject, or, for a believer, the “wholly other” that is God,14 such a confrontation of a localised subject and a mundane object is not to be counted as revelation, as acknowledgment: “The literalness isolated and hypostatized in the work of artists like Donald Judd and Larry Bell is by no means the same literalness as that acknowledged by advanced painting throughout the past century. .. Their pieces cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal.”15 Fried’s metaphysical foundation in these years is the axiom that “a work of art is not an object,” and the dialogical context of this transcendental Kantian premise is the writing, teaching, and conversation of Stanley Cavell without which “the present essay — and not it alone — would have been inconceivable. ”19 “Manet’s Sources” is dedicated to Cavell, and it was in the close intellectual comradeship of these two men that many of their systematic concepts first quickened into conversational life. Cavell and Fried have consistently acknowledged the “community of concept and purpose” that animates their writings from the mid-1960s to the present,17 but the suspicious and sometimes hostile response to Fried’s work within the worlds of art criticism and art history has largely not troubled to inquire into the aims and assumptions of his and Cavell’s philosophical work. An immensely popular teacher whose lectures I often attended and whose graduate students I knew very well, Cavell in his writing sets out to overcome the deleterious consequences for human mutuality of an epistemological scepticism which appears to make impossible one’s certain knowledge of other minds and the world: “Whereas what scepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.”18 Acknowledgment of the other as a key principle of

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ethical human action is a legacy of the speech-act theory and ordinary language philosophy of Cavell’s teacher, J.L. Austin, coupled with the meditation on human finitude of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations'. [Wittgenstein] wishes an acknowledgment of human limitation which does not leave us chafed by our own skin, by a sense of powerlessness to penetrate beyond the human conditions of knowledge.... Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.) ... [In theatre] what is revealed is my separateness from what is happening to them; that I am I, and here. It is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them.19

Like Fried, Cavell takes theatre to name what occurs when face-to-face acknowledgment of human mutuality is “corrupted or perverted”20 into a sceptical relation of one human subject to one who is taken to be, dualistically and nonreciprocally, merely an alien, perhaps even hardly human, object. Israel and Palestine comprise such a televisual theatre of the inhuman object today; in his early volume of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), Cavell plots theatre s tragic dimensions most forcefully in “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear": For what is the difference between tragedy in a theater and tragedy in actuality? In both, people in pain are in our presence. But in actuality acknowledgment is incomplete, in actuality there is no acknowledgment, unless we put ourselves in their presence, reveal ourselves to them ... When we do not, when we keep ourselves in the dark, the consequence is that we convert the other into a character and make the world a stage for him ... The conditions of theater literalize the conditions we exact for existence outside — hiddenness, silence, isolation — hence make that existence plain ... But in

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giving us a place within which our hiddenness and silence and separation are accounted for, it gives us a chance to stop.21

Accounted for, acknowledged, revealed, not simply literalised. For Cavell, this acknowledgment of separateness in the art of theatre can also yield an instantaneous even if illusory conviction in the overcoming of this same separateness by way of the heightened immediacy of the dramatic moment: “The perception or attitude demanded in following this drama is one which demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now ... I think of it as an experience of continuous presentness. Its demands are as rigorous as those of any spiritual exercise.”22 Or, as Fried notoriously writes in ending “Art and Objecthood”: “We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.”23 In Kantianese, human freedom of mind redeems and transcends the body’s empirical limitations and causal determinations.24 For Fried and Cavell, facing the actors on the stage makes evident (“perspicuous” in the technical language they inherit from Wittgenstein) the irreducible facts of human separateness (“We are not, and cannot put ourselves in, the presence of the characters”), as well as the equally irreducible impulse to bridge that gap, if not by way of an impossible traversal of space then by way of a possible simultaneity of time (“but we are in, or can put ourselves in, their present”).25 Facing them in a shared moment of time is what we do vis-à-vis Manet’s paintings too: “In ‘Manet’s Sources’ ... I referred above all to the relationship — roughly one of confrontation, of mutual facing — which Manet seems to have found himself compelled to establish between each painting in its entirety (the painting itself, the painting as a painting) and the beholder.” In this crucial postscript to “Manet’s Sources” of 1970 Fried adds that “the relationship may be described as one of reciprocal and instantaneous disclosure.”26 And Cavell amplifies Fried’s intimate but elusive notion of mutual facing in his

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contemporaneous essay on film, The World Viewed (1971), in which he again insists on the shared “aesthetic, epistemological, and theological contexts” of their concerns for acknowledgment, presentness, and theatricality: Painting, being art, is revelation; it is revelation because it is acknowledgment; being acknowledgment, it is knowledge, of itself and of its world ... For example, a painting may acknowledge its frontedness, or its finitude, or its specific thereness — that is, its presentness; and your accepting it will accordingly mean acknowledging your frontedness, or directionality, or verticality toward its world, or any world — or your presentness, in its aspect of absolute hereness and nowness.27

Seeing a painting that acknowledges not simply its material specificity, but more fundamentally the complex historical conditions and conventions with respect to which it comes into being as a painting, is mirrored in a reciprocal acknowledgment in me and you of the conditions and conventions (moral, formal, and otherwise) of our personhood here and now. Fried and Cavell are adamant about the specificity with which acknowledgment must occur for it to be counted as acknowledgment in a particular artistic medium and at a particular time and place. Responding to suggestions made by Fried in his 1965-66 lecture course on French painting from David to Manet, Cavell characterises modernism in the various arts as the self-critical effort to discover in the light of their particular past traditions what will count now, in the late 1960s, as a convincing continuation, or dialectical contestation, of that medium: ”... poetry wishing the abstraction of and immediacy of lyricism; theater wishing freedom from entertainment and acting; music wishing escape from the rhythm or logic of the single body and its frame of emotion.”28 Trained as a professional musician, Cavell had much to teach Fried on that score; a longtime practicing poet, Fried embodies in his poems of the period the self-acknowledging (that is,

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the historically situated, convention-acknowledging-andcontesting) imperative also articulated in the discursive writings of the two men. Powers, a collection of forty-eight poems, was published in 1973 in England where Fried had been a Rhodes scholar between 1959 and 1961 and where he began publishing art reviews as well as poetry around 1962. In the future it will have been said, perhaps, that the late twentieth-century poet Michael Fried also wrote on art, like Charles Baudelaire or Stephane Mallarmé, say; perhaps I will have been among the first to say this, but it will only have become true if others say it too. This is the hope and the risk of modernist fecundity, a doctrine Fried inherits from Hegel by way of MerleauPonty: “History, according to Hegel, is the maturation of a future in the present, not the sacrifice of the present to an unknown future, and the rule of action according to him is not to be effective at any price, but above all to be fecund.”29 Fried’s poems have already proven to be marvellously fecund inasmuch as twenty-nine of the poems from the small edition of Powers have been recently republished with twenty-eight new ones in a major edition, To the Center of the Earth (1994). Collectively they mime the urgent yet tragic trajectory from one to another that is both the dream and doom of the confrontation, the mutual facing via the intermediate work of art, that for Fried obtains between the painter and beholder or poet and reader or teacher and student or lover and lover: Loving as I do the nauseous moment Before the green wave destroys itself, When it is held upright only by my Imploring glance through to its brown viscera, How could I fail to answer The same annihilating clarity in you, Once having glimpsed behind your green irises Something brown and vast heaving over?

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These verses on mutual facing, “The Answer,” opened Fried’s volume of poetry in 1973 and now comes second in the edition of 1994 to “Other Hands,” a poem of 1962: My hands on your body encountering other hands Take sanctuary in fistfuls of your thick hair. You stare because it hurts and my hands drop. This dumbness after pain is our true element. And now it’s my skin moving under your hands, And my lips opening between your bitter teeth, And mine the awkward tense features softening In the uncertain focus of your gaze. 50

Poems about the presentness of “reciprocal and instantaneous disclosure," poems manufactured into a compactness of shape and singleness of gesture that reembody that absent presentness of love and loss in lyric form, “The Answer” and “Other Hands” display precarious moments of unsustainable duration whose instantaneous intensities prolong nowhere but on the page the fleetingly incarnate encounter of an I and a you. These fragile moments, these momentous fragments of prolonged presentness are held back from their implacable, ineluctable, inescapable march forward through the finite duration of literal time by the wordless force of a glance answering a glance, a gaze resting in a gaze, the sort of gaze and glance exchanged not only by lovers and others but also by a viewer and a painting like Manet’s Olympia or the portrait of Victorine Meurend in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, “one of his most electrifying small paintings,”31 “a ravishing piece of painting,” “about as good a picture as you'll ever see,” according to my notes from Fried’s lectures in 1970 and 1975. It was in the face of that small painting in Boston that my teacher Michael Fried first showed me what might be glimpsed and glossed in the infinite instant of a glance (Fig. 1). My effort here is not to reduce Fried’s poems to illustrations after paintings by Manet nor to force his

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Fig. 1. Edouard Manet Portrait of Victorine Meurent 1 862. Oil on canvas, 42.9 x 4j,7 cm. Gift of Richard C. Paine in Memory of his father, Robert Treat Paine 2nd. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Reproduced with permission. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved.

discourse on art into the rhythms of his verse. My effort here is to consider “what Derrida has called the ‘structural unconscious' of the text” in order to discover points of insistence, of repetition, which stitch together a multifariousness of utterance into a manifold.52 Mutual facing is the ethical and erotic trope or turning — “It is as though the frontality, the problematic spatial relationships, and finally what has been seen as the flatness of Manet’s paintings arc at bottom just this facing-ness, this turningtoward”55 — wherein two that are separate — “But we arc severed,” Cavell writes54 — become, if only in art, one: Our bodies arc the closed eyes of a single animal, Our states of mind so extreme they are the same. Like the arts, we lend each other new powers.

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Now the I and the you and the my and the your of “The Answer” and “Other Hands” are redoubled to the power of the we and the our, here in this titular poem of Powers.55 Unlike the vehement denunciation, in “Art and Objecthood,” of the “theatrical sensibility” which applauds “the illusion that the barriers between the arts are in the process of crumbling” (as in the work Fried abhors of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage),36 in the three-line scenario of “Powers” the overcoming of traditional dualisms of mind and body, male and female, and self and other is endorsed by way of a borrowing (“we lend”) from the critical writing of Baudelaire. In the century-separated work of the two poets we have a right kind and a wrong kind of confrontation, of mutual facing, of intermedia cross-borrowing, with Victor Hugo wrongly, because deliberately, pursuing the effects of pictorial imagery in his poems, whereas for Baudelaire Eugene Delacroix “is often, without knowing it, a poet in painting.” “On the one hand,” Fried writes in 1984 of Baudelaire, “he asserts boldly that, since the advent of Romanticism, ‘the arts aspire, if not to take one another’s place, at least to lend one another new powers’ ... on the other, he continually deplores what he regards as the illegitimate exploitation of the means of poetry by painters such as Ary Scheffer and the ‘apes of sentiment,’ though he finds it extremely difficult to distinguish in principle between their procedures and those that underwrite the triumphant literariness of his paragon, Delacroix.”3" The same difficult conceptual distinction or undecidable theoretical difference between the reviled theatricality of Judd and the revealed theatricality of Manet characterises the radically empirical conviction or faith that provides the groundless ground of Fried’s critical-historical-ethical practice. Just as any estranged confrontation or mundane mutual facing of the couple in “Powers” is eclipsed in the corporeally merged blindness of “the closed eyes of a single animal,” “it’s as if the painting itself,” Fried has recently written of Manet’s multifigured compositions,

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“the tableau conceived now as a single instantaneously apprehensible facing entity, gazes at the beholder through a single pair of eyes.”38 The particular mode of confrontation or mutual facing between the beholder and the painting in Manet is never allowed to harden into the wrong kind of dualistic confrontation or duelling face-off despite the fact that by way of “a radical, almost Brechtian acknowledgment of the inescapable theatricality of the painting-beholder relationship,” as Fried writes in 1984, “painting and beholder are posited with a vengeance as separate entities.”39 How does the vengeance of separation lead to the mutuality of freedom and peace? How does the violence of ontological difference steadily lead to the ethical welcome of the face? The criticism of Denis Diderot, to which Fried devoted a trio of studies'in 1975-76 culminating in his book, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), provides him with a literary counterpart to his own poetic attempt to transcend the discrepancy of the I and the you in the instantaneous unity of the we, the one, and the none. Fried’s wellknown name for this anti-dualistic, hence antitheatrical, unity is absorption, and it is rooted in Diderot’s use of the term “in a figurative sense of being absorbed in God, or in the contemplation of some object, when one gives oneself up to it with all one’s thought without allowing oneself the least distraction.”40 Fried’s espousal of this metaphysical signature-concept is also kin to Cavell’s account of the plight of the world-estranged Cartesian sceptic whose “old absorption in the world” has been tragically lost in the doldrums of epistemological doubt.41 Freed from epistemological doubt by way of a compelling conviction in the felt authenticity 6f ethical human action, seeing could once again become a modality of belief; and in the art of painting as in life Diderot could thus affirm that “the human body in action was the best picture of the human soul”. Indeed, in its powerful illusion of dramatic unity and instantaneousness of human feeling a successful

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painting might even seem metaphysically equivalent to Diderot’s “own sense of himself as an integral, yet continuously changing being ... capable ... of confronting him on equal terms.”42 Such a painting would “detheatricalize beholding and so make it once again a mode of access to truth and conviction”; yet, crucially, Fried acknowledges in an appendix to his book what he earlier fails to concede in the polemic of “Art and Objecthood,” namely “that there can be no such thing as an absolutely antitheatrical work of art.”4^ “The art of painting is inescapably addressed to an audience that must be gathered,” he somewhat later writes in “How Modernism Works” (1982), an acknowledgment of a prior critique of his position by Stephen Melville. Nevertheless, “the impossibility of a pure or absolute mode of antitheatricality” does not discredit its manifest approximation: “(Effects of presentness can still amount to grace).”44 The practical impossibility of absolute absorption in no way forestalls the pursuit of this dream on the part of a line of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painters from Chardin to Greuze to David to Géricault to Millet whose antitheatrical projects Fried tracks and retracks in his overlapping essays of the 1970s and 1980s.45 Among these artistic efforts the most extreme is Gustave Courbet’s enterprise of quasi-corporeal absorption of himself into the material surfaces and immaterial spaces of his art in his dual capacity as both painter and beholder, an enterprise indeed so extreme as to have engendered its own dialectical negation: In Edouard Manet’s seminal masterpieces of the first half of the 1860s, Courbet’s enterprise is reversed in almost all respects. Most important, Manet seems intuitively to have recognized that Courbet’s attempt to abolish the very possibility of spectatordom was doomed in every instance to (ontological not artistic) failure, or at any rate that success in that attempt was literally inconceivable, and that it was therefore necessary to establish the

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beholder’s presence abstractly — to build into the painting the separateness, distancedness, and mutual facing that I have associated with the painting-beholder relationship in its traditional or unreconstructed form — in order that the worst consequences of the theatricalization of that relationship be averted.46

This 1978 formulation of Manet’s abstract, and thus preemptive, acknowledgment of the potentially theatricalising convention of mutual facing follows Fried’s contemporaneous description of a similar situation in the sculpture of Anthony Caro in which the human scale of his table sculptures “needed to be secured abstractly” so that their relative smallness of size would not seem to be merely a contingent fact of their literal existence as small things. One aspeçt of Caro’s solution was to introduce handle-like elements into his work in such a way that “we are led to take hold of the sculpture imaginatively instead of corporeally, as an artistic entity and not as a material object.”47 One of the worst consequences of the failure to acknowledge “abstractly” the mutual facing of painting and beholder would be for Manet’s “exalted” enterprise of making art to collapse into a mere making of painted things.48 The mere it-ness and there-ness of the object or thing is repeatedly overcome, for both Fried and Cavell, by “what might be called a metaphysics not of presence but of presentness.”49 This negation of presence is by way of resisting the critique of Fried’s project that might appear to be forthcoming from the critique of the metaphysics of presence of Jacques Derrida. Absent in the Harvard writings but present in the work of the Hopkins years, the agonistic accommodation of Derridean deconstruction will remain, from 1978 on, an ongoing challenge for Fried (and, more recently, for Cavell too).50 Just as Manet’s acknowledgment of the beholder parallels the enterprise of Caro, so Manet’s manufacture of an effect of presentness in paint parallels the modernist procedures of Larry Poons. In a painting by Poons of 1972

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the layerings of colour are said to “compete for presentness across its entire expanse”; in a painting by Manet of one hundred years earlier “each stroke of the brush competes for presentness with every other.”51 The paintings of Poons acknowledge “not merely that paintings have surfaces, or that those surfaces are flat, resistant to touch and face the beholder, but that paintings consist in or are limited to their surfaces in ways that distinguish them, as it were absolutely, from other kinds of objects in the world.”52 Similarly, the paintings of Manet “acknowledge perhaps more deliberately than any paintings before them that they are made to be beheld,” as paintings, that is, never simply as seeable things: “And yet the extreme provocation that his works continue to offer to all with eyes to see consists more than anything else in their ontological completeness, which in a manner of speaking makes the literal presence of the beholder supererogatory.”53 In contrast to the completeness and autonomy of Manet s art, the “literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him.”54 Thus, in spite of its acknowledgment of the beholder, in the face of Manet’s painting it is as though the beholder at this stage of Fried’s work is not there. In this move of 1978 Fried appears to modify his earlier formula of mutual facing in Manet’s art, that of “reciprocal and instantaneous disclosure,” in favour of an ultimate relegation of the spectator in view of the selfsufficient unity of the painting as a whole. The trope of mutual facing is given a further twist in this direction in 1982 when it first appears in the reverse-context of Courbet’s effort to absorb “painter into painting,” and where it functions as a convention to be negated rather than acknowledged: “I would claim that it was ultimately the need to negate or neutralize the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld that invested Courbet’s posture before the canvas with originary significance and in particular put a premium on obliqueness as a means of subverting the relation of

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mutual facing implicit in that convention.”55 In this essay Courbet’s unfacing or corporeally oblique and literally contiguous relation to the two painted figures in Stonebreakers, for example, is seen to be further amplified in its absorptive effect by way of the miming in the postures of the depicted figures of the manual gestures of the painter’s left and right hands engaged in the act of painting. Moreover, the leaning and bent-over postures of the depicted figures are seen to embody both the literal orthography of the painter’s initials, G.C., as well as the conventional meaning of the homonym of the painter’s name, courbé. Wondering, or perhaps worrying, whether “all this seems too far-fetched to be taken seriously”, Fried cites an article by Geoffrey Hartman on Lacan and Derrida from which Fried takes the suggestion or speculation “that an artist may be productively if unconsciously in conflict with his own name.”56 Far­ fetched or not, this is nonetheless the moral fulcrum, the steady level, on which my paper has been tottering from its title on, for the vicissitudes of mutual facing I have proposed to trace in its contradictory manifestations in Fried’s accounts of the art of Manet and Courbet simply limn the contours of my allegory of the conflictual resonance of a proper name: that of Michael Fried. “‘Courbet is one of those men who have made a name become a thing’.”57 Fried too: “In Derrida’s formulation: ‘The grand stakes of discourse (I mean discourse) that is literary: ... the transformation of the proper name, rebus, into things, into the name of things’.”58 And just as we now say Derridean to refer to a new world of difference, trace, supplement, margin, dissemination that an old world has irrevocably become, so too Fried will have transformed an old world by manufacturing a new one, a new thing — a rich storehouse of discursively linked motifs of absorption, theatricality, presentness, and mutual facing — that after more than thirty years of labour will have come to bear his name. After Wölfflinian, Panofskyan, Gombrichian, Greenbergian, we will now

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have Friedian as well to name the dynamic movement of a new world of art. This massively fashioned Friedian dialectic vibrates between matter and form, memory and fantasy, masculine and feminine, mother and father, in the name of the messianic future of a mutual facing, a transcendent overcoming, a desired state of grace that is necessarily, however, also “the mutual falling back of both partners ... into separate realms,” “very much as if the Diderotian imperative to negate or neutralize the beholder, to establish the fiction of his nonexistence, had all along entailed relations of deadly mutual hostility between the two.”59 It is this crucial acknowledgment of the radical impossibility of his own passionate, metaphysical quest that doubles and divides the quasi-transcendental state of Friedom, a deconstructive state of freedom and fiefdom, of freed agency and unfreed finitude. In Fried und Freud, in peace and amity, Friedom is also the palace of death {Friedhof), of disruptive Freudian jouissance (Jewessence), of “war” with the idolatrous worship of the base material thing, the mute icon of presence rather than the aniconic moment of presentness.60 The multiform signature of Michael Fried necessarily embodies fraud and freedom both, its urgent velleities of instantaneous unity always deferred by the durational, differential structures of pictorial and textual inscription. “He finds that it vanishes exactly with the effort to make it present"; “They can be cut but not held"; “We never see ideas or freedom face to face.”61 “Michael? Michael isn’t here!"62 Is he present or absent in the haunting query of the archangel's Hebrew name, "Mi ka-El?,” Who is like God?: "The abiding assurance is that ‘we every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have seen Him create the world at first’.”65 “‘[Existing] as a whole everywhere’,” “at once everywhere and nowhere,”64 God is invoked across the entire span of Fried’s work, a singular, zealous, lingering manifestation of “the scandal of theological survivals in even the most

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secular thinkers.”65 For Cavell, who has recently lectured in Jerusalem about the conflictual allegory of his own changed Jewish-American name and of the hitherto silent relation of his Jewishness to the stranger-welcoming and self-surpassing ethos of the American transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau to which he has devoted so much of his philosophical enterprise over many years, God, the wholly holy other, would be the name of “the necessity of acknowledgment”: “The withdrawals and approaches of God can be looked upon as tracing the history of our attempts to overtake and absorb acknowledgment by knowledge; God would be the name of that impossibility. ”66 Facing that impossibility, the impossibility of totally absorbing the infinity of the other, is also the project of my nominal alter ego in the fashioning of this text, Emmanuel (“God-with-us”) Levinas, whose gesture of acknowledgment of the face of the other I have awkwardly tried to repeat, remember, and work through, a loving levitical lament, a gift of words to a magnificent friend of peace.67 And here too Derrida, or Reb Derissa as he sometimes signs his name, is my mediator with a form of diasporic, not necessarily Jewish but nonetheless Freudian and Friedian memory that “begins only when mere repetition of the past has been brought to an end,”68 a memory that acknowledges the post-Enlightenment and post-Holocaust conflictual w/hole of what we are: “‘Jewgreek is Greekjew. Extremes meet’.”69 Our bodies are the closed eyes of a single animal, Our states of mind so extreme they are the same. Like the arts, we lend each other new powers.

I am the outcome of that dance.70

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NOTES 1

2

Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1980) 4. The context of Fried’s remark is “the evolution of painting in France between the start of the reaction against the Rococo and Manet’s seminal masterpieces of the first half of the 1860s.” On the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit, or posttraumatic deferred action, see Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 53, 170n47, where the après-coup is positioned in relation to Eakins' unconscious “fantasy of origination — of his art if not of himself— in and by the figure of the father.” Such vexed fantasies of paternity — or Achings — are also at issue here. I discuss my transference to Fried (and Freud) in Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and SelfReflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and idem, “Virtual Narcissus: On the Mirror Stage with Monet, Lacan, and Me” American Imago 53/1 (Spring 1996) 91-106. With respect to the dialogical aspect of Fried’s writings it needs to be stressed how extraordinarily public his work has been from the beginning, his essays often being first presented before audiences whose critical response he acknowledges in the published versions which themselves often elicit further critical response and counter-response from Fried. For the critical interventions that have directly challenged Fried to reaffirm, modify, or transform his views, see Theodore Reff. "On * Manet 's Sources'" Artforum 8 1 (September 1969) 40-8; Stephen Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism" October 19 (Winter 1981) 55-92; T.J. Clark, “Arguments about Modernism: A Reply to Michael Fried,” in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 239-48; Richard Shift, “Remembering Impressions" Critical Inquiry 12/2 (Winter 1986) 439-48; Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and Benjamin II.D. Buchloh, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop," in Discussions of Contemporary

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Culture, ed. Hal Foster, no. 1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987) 55—87; Linda Nochlin, “Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading ‘The Painter’s Studio’,’’ in Courbet Reconsidered, ed. Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Brooklyn Museum, 1988) 17-41; and Bill Brown, “Writing, Race, and Erasure: Michael Fried and the Scene of Reading” Critical Inquiry 18/2 (Winter 1992) 387-402. Fried’s responses are noted below. Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 129. The context of Fried’s remark is the art of Courbet. For the critique of Cartesian dualism, see Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 104; idem, “The Beholder in Courbet” Glyph 4 (1978) 124nl0; and idem, Courbet’s Realism, 307-8n7. In Three American Painters (exhibition catalogue, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass., 1965) 20, Fried describes the achievement of the work of Morris Louis as “the transcendance (sic) of the traditional dualism between line and color — an ambition that has haunted painting since Delacroix." The suggestive misspelling of transcendence yields the deconstructive “trance-and-dance” of Fried’s characteristic fixation on the apparent plenitude of an artistic phenomenon which is subsequently discovered to be riven from within and engaged in a mobile exchange with its negative yet supplementary other. See Michael Fried, “Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation” October 37 (Summer 1986) 90n3, 93n5. Michael Fried, “Between Realisms: From Derrida to Manet” Critical Inquiry 21/1 (Autumn 1994) 34-6; and idem, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 397. On the “quasi-transcendental implications” of Fried’s “historical project,” see also p. 370. In Derrida, “the ‘quasi-’ always tells us something about a nature’s dissimulatory exit from itself’; in Kant, the point of “the term transcendental’ ... would be to elucidate the conditions of possibility of experience"; see Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 270. Fried’s use of the term “quasicorporeal” throughout Courbet's Realism to describe the painter-beholder’s absorption into the painting is to be understood in this “double and divided" Kantian-Derridean

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sense, an unstable notion that he repeatedly puts to deconstructive work in key parts of Manet’s Modernism, e.g., 195, 198, 235, 238, 243, 248, 251, 257, 267, 277, 280, 407, 562n23. 6 “The formal critic of modernist painting, then, is also a moral critic not because all art is at bottom a criticism of life, but because modernist painting is at least a criticism of itself’; see Fried, Three American Painters, 10. Also see Fried’s untitled symposium presentation in Art Criticism in the Sixties (New York: October House, 1967) n.p. The key Friedian trope of “in retrospect” appears prominently in these two early texts. 7 Fried, Three American Painters, 49; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 465-6n62. On the theatricality of the “situational,” see Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967) in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968) 134, 144; idem, Anthony Caro (exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, 1969) 12-15; idem, “Caro’s Abstractness” Artforum 9/1 (September 1970) 33; and idem, “Anthony Caro’s Table Sculptures" Arts Magazine 51/7 (March 1977) 97n7. 8 Fried, Three American Painters, 49-50; and idem, Manet 's Modernism, 465-6n62. As Fried acknowledges, his formulations here are still very close to those of his thenmentor in art criticism, Clement Greenberg, who contemporaneously describes Kant as “the first real Modernist” because “he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism,’’ and Manet’s paintings as “the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted”; see Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (I960) in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 4 vols. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986-93) • 4: 85-6. 9 Michael Fried, “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865" Artforum 7/7 (March 1969) 69n27; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 469n26, in which Fried reprints his unrevised 1969 text not in order to reaffirm without reserve its much-disputed claims concerning Manet’s sources but in order “to come to grips with my earlier self (and with an earlier phase of art history)”; to acknowledge “my failure to distinguish sufficiently between instances of alleged

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12 13

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quotation that are vital to my larger argument and ones that are not”; and thus to “be free to say whatever else 1 wished to say about Manet and his generation” (xxvi, 136). On the ethical opening of the “as though,” see n67 below. Fried, “Manet’s Sources,” 70n46, 75nl45; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 471n44, 49In 142. Fried,’’Manet’s Sources," 70n46; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 471n44. Fried, “Art and Objecthood," 140. Also see idem, Anthony Caro, 13: “It provided the wrong kind of immediacy — the literal, situational immediacy of a direct confrontation — and thereby heightened the incipient theatricality which I am suggesting Caro already sensed and wanted to avoid.” On the “two theatricalities, one good and one bad,” see idem, Manet’s Modernism, 237n. Stanley Cavell, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969) 170. Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings” (1966) in Henry Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (New York: E.P. Dutton and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969) 414. Fried, "Art and Objecthood,” 136nlO. As noted in n8 above, another key source of Fried’s anobjective axiom is the writing and critical practice of Clement Greenberg; see “Picasso at Seventy-Five” (1957) in Collected Essays, 4: 33: “Like any other kind of picture, a modernist one succeeds when its identity as a picture, and as pictorial experience, shuts out the awareness of it as a physical object.” Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 182nl3. Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," in Must We Mean What We Say?, 324. Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” “Knowing and Acknowledging,” and “The Avoidance of Love,” in ibid., 61, 257, 338. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,’’ 136, 147. Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” 332-4. ibid., 322. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 147. See Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” 317-8: “Kant tells us that man lives in two worlds, in one of which he is free and in the other determined. It is as if in a theater these two

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worlds are faced off against one another, in their intimacy and mutual inaccessibility ... What has become inevitable is the fact of endless causation itself, together with the fact of incessant freedom. And what has become the tragic fact is that we cannot or will not tell which is which.” On “perspicuous” see Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 85. Also see idem, “The Avoidance of Love,” 337. Michael Fried, “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century French Painting” Artforum 8/10 (June 1970) 45, 46n46; and idem, Manet's Modernism, 589nl95. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971) 110, 169n40. In “Arguments about Modernism,” 247-8, 248n7, T.J. Clark acutely suggests à propos Fried’s writing that “there is an essay to be written” on what he calls “the religious attitude in criticism." I have tried to take Clark at his word. On revelation, see Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 364nl25: "I think of Manet as having attempted to make his paintings face the beholder everywhere and as a whole. And I think of that attempt in turn as involving ... a pursuit of effects of instantaneousness (as of the painting's total revelation to the beholder)"; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 292. Also see Michael Fried, To The Center of the Earth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994) 30: “Suddenly there is nothing that is not revealed by faces alone." For more on revelation, see n67 below. Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It," in Must We Mean What We Say?, 220 and n3. Fried, Three American Painters, 9. For more on fecundity, see n67 below. The legacy of Hegel and Merleau-Ponty is also inscribed in these lines from “Embryo: After William Harvey," in Michael Fried, Powers (London: The Review, 1973) 25: “Shuttling silently/ Between the visible and the invisible,/ Between being and not being,/ Its pulses mime the commencement of life." Merleau-Ponty’s essays on art are conveniently collected in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and transi. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993). The quoted passage on fecundity is from "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952) 109.

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30 Fried, To the Center of the Earth, 3-4. Also see “Nothing More (Rome, I960)’’: “So they said it and said it/With words and without words/ Accompanied by urgent meaning stares/ And by an absence of expression/ That could have made an angel groan” (58). 31 Michael Fried, “Manet in His Generation: The Face of Painting in the 1860s” Critical Inquiry 19/1 (Autumn 1992) 53- In this article Fried also adduces a text by Stéphane Mallarmé in order to stress several supplementary points regarding the face: “(1) The association between painting and the face is mediated by woman-, the faciality of painting is essentially feminine. (2) ... Mallarmé’s logic of femininity and faciality construes (open-air] impressionism — to which he attaches Manet — as an antitheatrical movement.... (3) The connection between painting, femininity, faciality, and natural light and air is established by way of the notion of [woman’s] complexion." In relation to the overcoming of the traditional opposition between masculine and feminine, Fried points to Mallarmé’s use of the male-connoting term “pollen” in order to sustain the suggestion that it is “as if the faciality Mallarmé evokes were somehow bigendered, or as if the presumed masculinity of the beholder’s gaze were thus inscribed within his evocation of woman’s and painting’s respective complexions” (68-9n55); and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 410n (wording slightly changed). For more on the controversial thematics of the gendered gaze, see Fried’s comments on Rousseau’s Lettre sur les spectacles, in Absorption and Theatricality, 167-71; and idem, “Courbet’s ‘Femininity’,” in Courbet’s Realism, 189-222. I have written on the gaze in Manet (and Fried), in Steven Z. Levine, “Manet’s Man Meets the Gleam of Her Gaze: A Psychoanalytic Novel,” in 12 Views of Manet’s "Bar”, ed. Bradford R. Collins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 250-77. 32 Michael Fried, “Forget It: A Response to Richard Shiff” Critical Inquiry 12/2 (Winter 1986) 452. 33 Fried, “Manet’s Sources,” 72n98; and idem, Manet's Modernism, 479n96. Also see idem, Courbet’s Realism, 364-5nl25. On turning toward the face of the other, see n67 below. 34 Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” 337. 35 Fried, To the Center of the Earth, 55.

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36 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 141. 37 Michael Fried, “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet” Critical Inquiry 10/3 (March 1984) 518, 535-6nl5. Fried, “Manet in His Generation,” 61; and idem, Manet's 38 Modernism, 289 (wording slightly changed). 39 Fried, “Painting Memories,” 532, 542n45. 40 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 183-4n6. 41 Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” 323. 42 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 91. This Friedian Diderotism of the body in action as the best picture of the human soul echoes a favorite Wittgensteinian epithet I recall from the lectures of Cavell: “The human body is the best picture of the human soul"; in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition, transi. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1973) 178. 43 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 104, 173. 44 Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works: A Response to TJ. Clark," in The Politics of Interpretation, 234nl7. Also see Stephen W. Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 27 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). This is an appropriate place to acknowledge the challenging exchanges on Fried, Cavell, Derrida, and other topics from which 1 emerged the much enriched beneficiary during Melville’s year of residence at Bryn Mawr College as J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow in History of Art and the Humanities in 1985-86. 45 Also see “Géricault’s Smile," in To the Center of the Earth, 56, in which Fried evokes The Raft of the Medusa as “the spiritual center of French Romanticism; also its carnal heart" and extends this dialectical, deconstructive image of the transcendence of categorical opposition to the artist himself, characterised as “in the grasp of warring emotions" and “whose irresistible feminine attractiveness moved him (the studio assistant and the poet] like a revelation." 46 Fried, “The Beholder in Courbet,” 121. Also see idem, Courbet’s Realism, 200, where Manet’s alleged intuition is turned into the thoroughly Friedian form of “as though," and, contrariwise, the personal arrogation of the “1 have associated” is transformed into the ‘had always

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characterized’ passive voice of historical narration. This crucial passage from 1978 and 1990 is twice more recycled in 1996 in idem, Manet's Modernism, 265, 343. Fried, “Caro’s Table Sculptures,” 94, 96. Fried, “How Modernism Works," 230. See Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 88: “The accomplished work is thus not the work which 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 idem, “Eye and Mind" (1960) in Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 126: “For I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it.” Fried, “The Beholder in Courbet,” 124n4. Also see Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” 333n 16. Here Cavell characterises Fried's enterprise (and his own) as “philosophical criticism," namely “bringing the world of a particular work to consciousness of itself.” In 1987 Fried acknowledges deconstruction’s “healthy suspicion of oppositional thinking" such that he could “no longer reify the distinction” he had made “between good art and theatrical art” twenty years before; see Fried, “Theories of Art After Minimalism and Pop,” 56, 84. For Cavell’s ambivalent relation to deconstruction, see Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995). Michael Fried, “Larry Poons’ New Paintings" Artforum 10/7 (March 1972) 50; and idem, “The Beholder in Courbet,” 122. Fried, “Poons’ New Paintings,” 50. In a late footnote in Courbet's Realism, 267, Fried attenuates the “absolutely” of his earlier remark and relates picture surfaces to “what Jacques Derrida has called ‘parergons’ (sic), supplementary entities or structures that ‘come against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait), the fact (fait), the work, but they do not fall to one side, they touch and cooperate within the operation, from a certain outside ”; see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, transi. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 54. Fried, “The Beholder in Courbet,” 122.

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54 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 140. 55 Michael Fried, “Painter into Painting: On Courbet’s After Dinner at Omans and Stonebreakers" Critical Inquiry 3/4 (Summer 1982) 646nl8. The famous Friedian condensation “primordial convention” is by way of Merleau-Ponty in its first term and Wittgenstein in its second. On “primordial experience,” see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945) in Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 64, 66; on convention, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 113n355. Also see Fried, “How Modernism Works,” 235nl9; idem, “Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro” Artforum 6/6 (February 1968) 25; and idem, Manet's Modernism, 190, 265, 405. If the Friedian axiom is that “the primordial convention [is] that paintings are made to be beheld,” I would instead laconically (Lacan-ically) reverse Fried’s phenomenological vector and propose that the primordial convention is less that paintings are made to be beheld by the painter-beholder than that they are made to be shown to the Other’s gaze. See Steven Z. Levine, “Between Art History and Psychoanalysis: 1/Eye-ing Monet with Freud and Lacan,” in The Subjects of Art History. Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 197-212. 56 Fried, “Painter into Painting,’’ 643, 649n38; and idem, Courbet's Realism, 107. In 1972 Hartman commented on the lecture in which Fried introduced the idea of “the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld,” and he is acknowledged in the published essay; see Michael Fried, “Toward a Supreme Fiction: Genre and Beholder in the Art Criticism of Diderot and His Contemporaries” New Literary History 6/3 (Spring 1975) 571, 585. In “Painter into Painting” of 1982 Hartman is once again acknowledged in a note, this time for his suggestion “on the determining force of names,” but in the revised version of Courbet's Realism of 1990 Derrida now comes first in the text as the source of the speculation. See n58 below. In Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, dedicated to Stanley Cavell (S.C.), Fried finds the initials S.C. unconsciously at play in the literary enterprise of Stephen Crane (124-6, 147-50), an American writer whose obsessive figuring of “upturned faces" — the title of Fried’s chapter on

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Crane — superimposes the various narratives of his texts with the “impressionist” (that is, impression-making) gesture of their own material inscription. Also see idem, “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane, and Norris” Critical Inquiry 17/1 (Autumn 1990) 193-236; idem, “Response to Bill Brown” Critical Inquiry 18/2 (Winter 1992) 403-10; and idem, “Manet in His Generation," 61n48, where he acknowledges “a certain partial affinity between the respective problematics of facing" in his writings on art and literature. I would add his poetry and conversation as well. 57 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 347nll. The author of the remark is the painter Bram van Velde. 58 ibid., 314n35. The comment, à propos Hegel and Genet, is from Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1974) 11, as cited in Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derriçla/Philosopby (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 102. Hartman’s “saving” is to be read as redeeming, as indeed it is to be read throughout Fried’s and Cavell’s writings as well. See Fried, “Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro,” 24: “The heart of Caro’s genius is that he is able to make radically abstract sculpture out of concepts and experiences which seem — which but for his making are and would remain — inescapably literal and therefore irremediably theatrical; and by so doing he redeems the time if anyone does. Not only is the radical abstractness of Caro’s art not a denial of our bodies and the world: it is the only way in which they can be saved for high art in our time, in which they can be made present to us other than as theater.” For more on redemption, see idem, Absorption and Theatricality, 132, 167; and idem, Courbet’s Realism, 262, 286. Also see n67 below. 59 Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 220; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 358. The chapter “Courbet’s ‘Femininity,’” from which the first passage is taken, contains an extraordinary number of locutions in which the traditional opposition of masculine/feminine is “all but” collapsed: “My basic claim in this chapter is that although Courbet in ordinary life was a representative male of his time, the measures he was forced to take meant that the art he produced is often structurally feminine, or at any rate is often more closely aligned with the feminine than with the masculine side of the above

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oppositions” (189); “just as the phallus/paintbrush in those paintings is characterized by feminine attributes and thus is other than the unitary masculine entity phallic objects have classically been theorized to be, so possession turns out to have unexpected consequences as the painter-beholder all but becomes his female surrogates” (222). The m/f interplay is also evident throughout the notes to this chapter in which Fried adduces a virtuoso series of citations from feminists and nonfeminists in film theory, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, many of which both deploy and dismantle the traditional masculine/feminine opposition; for example, Naomi Schor’s reference to “the proliferation of effeminate male characters and viriloid female characters” in the nineteenth-century novel (335nl4). I also see a less manifest merger fantasy of m/f in “the multivalent, metaphoric, even metamorphic nature of representation in Courbet’s art” (341n45), in the last repeating rhythm of which the syncopated m/m/f beats out the initials of Michael Martin Fried. But perhaps I “go too far” (156, 237, 241) in the "projection of critical fantasy,” see Fried, “Manet in His Generation,” 48; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 222. Elsewhere in this book the “mutual facing” of m/f repeatedly returns as “Manet’s Frenchness,” “my failure,” “Michelet’s France,” “more firmly,” “my focus,” “Manet’s figures,” “Manet’s failure" (128, 136, 142, 265, 267, 287, 334, 343, 397, 404, 589nl95, 594n214). Above all, Michael Fried, m/f, insists that he is not to be confused with his negative double, f/m, the much faulted “formalist-modernist,” whose ahistorical and essentialist (that is, Greenbergian) view's of Manet’s “flatness" and “opticality” Fried repeatedly spurns on the grounds that it is rather the aftercoming "flatness" and “opticality” of Monet and Impressionism in the 1870s that has retrospectively burdened us with an historically inappropriate and radically simplified understanding of Manet’s “much more profound phenomenology" in the 1860s of “facingness” and “strikingness” (6, 13-4, 18-9, 267, 404, 407-10, 415-6, 460-ln40, 462-3n51, 465-7n62, 583-4nl69). See Steven Z. Levine, "Manet’s Modernism” (forthcoming). 60 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 139, 141; and idem, Courbet’s Realism, 361nlO4. On Fried’s negotiation with the disruptive vicissitudes of the death instinct in Freud, see 187, 330n55. The aggressive repudiation of the thing, the

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theatrically staged object or “statue” (“An and Objecthood,” 128), is to be related to Cavell’s Emersonian renunciation of the hypostatisation of the meaning of a text (or painting) as lying wholly outside the subject: “To think otherwise, to attribute the origin of my thoughts simply to the other, thoughts which are then, as it were, implanted in me — some would say caused — by let us say some Emerson, is idolatry. (What in ‘Politics of Interpretation’ I call the theology of reading is pertinent here).” See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism: The Cams Lectures, 1988 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 57; and idem, “Politics as Opposed to What?,” in The Politics of Interpretation, 200. The opposite of idolatry, here related to the insight of psychoanalytic therapy, is “freedom from the person of the author.” Friedom would name that possible/impos^ible task. 61 Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” 323 (“he” here is the sceptic); Fried, To the Center of the Earth, 14 (“they” are perhaps lines of music); and Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 75. On fraud, see Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It," 220, where he relates fraud (or doubt or the loss of traditional faith) to the advent of modernism: “But so far as the possibility of fraudulence is characteristic of the modern, then the need for a grounding of our acceptance [of something as a successful work of art] becomes an issue for aesthetics.” Fraud in Fried is taken up in the context of the putative priority of the masculine in modem life; here he quotes Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction-II,” in Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose and transi. Jacqueline Rose (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1982) 40: “The subject has to recognise that there is desire, or lack in the place of the Other, that there is no ultimate certainty or truth, and that the status of the phallus is a fraud (this is, for Lacan, the meaning of castration)." 62 Fried, To the Center of the Earth, 15. Of the two phonemes of the first name, “Mi” is embodied as “my" repeatedly in the poetry and other writings. It recurs forty times in the fifty­ seven poems published in 1994, m/f appearing as “my fingers,” “my face,” “my foot," and, four times, “my father"

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(32, 49, 50, 61, 68). The last poem in the collection, “A Block of Ice” (68), is the most reiterative of “my" and one of the most moving of all for me: “I stamp my foot and a black wave races across the field, I close my eyes and white stones spring up that I must avoid, My hand in the freezing water gropes for but fails to find a block of ice On which to sign my name and the date and hour of my death." “My" also locates Fried’s “particular history” and “individual psychology” throughout his criticism; see Michael Fried, “Courbet’s Metaphysics: A Reading of The Quarry” MLN W/4 (September 1984) 793. In idem, Courbet’s Realism, it appears an extraordinary seven times on p. 47 (“my selectiveness,” “my engagement.” “my work,” “my approach,” “my work,” “my concern,” “my insistence") and eight times on p. 155 (“my discussion,” “my interpretation,” “my claim,” “my larger argument,” “my argument," “my other readings," “my approach,” “my larger argument”). As for the second phoneme of “Michael,” see p. 174 where, in regard to The Quarry, Fried identifies “the enterprise of painting as a kind of killing.” This sadomasochistic insight is further developed in Manet’s Modernism in Fried’s “double and divided" discussion of The Execution of Maximilian (1867), in which “the nearness of the firing squad to the victims belongs to a metaphorics of spectatorly aggression against Manet’s paintings” and in which “the nearness of the firing squad to the victims may also be read as picture-p«in/fng distance, which would associate the act of painting with an act of violence on the part of the painter against the painting itself’ (357, 597n233). And why not on the part of the writer against the writing, too? 63 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 116. The quotation is from a text important to Fried from his undergraduate years at Princeton; see Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949). Miller’s teaching is also a link avant la lettre to subsequent conversations on American transcendentalism with Cavell. 64 Fried. Courbet's Realism, 282, quoting the ontological argument for God's existence by St. Anselm, and adjacent to Cavell-citing comments on “the omnipresence of nature" in

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Thoreau; and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 358, where the sublime Kantian antinomy of the fmite-yet-infinite universe of space and time refers to the absent presence and/or present absence of the once-living painter Manet in the still enduring Manet painting. In Latin “manet” means “he/it endures" (598n234). 65 Hartman, Saving the Text, 99. 66 Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love," p347, 358. Also see idem, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994). In these lectures given in Jerusalem Cavell relates his efforts to reclaim the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau “for the contemporary spirit” to Gershom Scholem’s efforts to reclaim the mystical tradition in Judaism so as “to regenerate fixated religious institutions” (x). He further identifies “the ways my Jewishness and my Americanness inflect each other” in terms of “a philosophy of immigrancy, of the human as stranger ... beginning no doubt with the strangeness of oneself’ (xv, 187). Invoking his own “diaspora sensibility” and his father’s “inner ghetto” (11), he notes the attribution of “infiniteness to the other” by Emmanuel Levinas (12), and tells the story of how he came to change his name (23) and thus “become, not simply accept, the one you are to be known as” (26). Cavell inscribes Fried and Freud on the same page as together “in struggle with the mind as an unerasable slate” (166), and also acknowledges the “surprising weight” of the Lacanian registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real (105). These correspond in Fried to the well-known dyad of absorption and theatricality, supplemented triadically and hence undone by “a certain obdurate, unsubsumable, in that respect unintelligible remainder"-, see Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 322, 359, 401. For more on the uncanny material subsistence of the unspecularisable, unsymbolisable objet a of Lacan, see Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London and New York: Verso, 1996). 67 On redemption, revelation, the face of the other, and other quasi-transcendental encounters with the ethical in the postphenomenological work of Levinas, see Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas

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(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). Also see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, transi. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 68 Fried, “Painting Memories,” 531, relating Manet’s explicit acknowledgment of the art of the past to the “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (1913) of Freudian memory as opposed to the nonovert workings of Baudelairean memory in the face of which Fried finds himself in “a giddy, disorienting, mainly ‘spiritual’ space in which nothing like a confrontation [or mutual facing or acknowledgment] between painting and beholder could ever quite take place” (532). Furthermore, the transcendence of the particularism of Jewish history in the name of a universal, messianic ethics of the other is paralleled by a central theme in Fried according to which Manet “wished to go beyond the art of France to comprehend and in effect subsume the painting of the other major national schools and, by doing so, to establish explicitly the internationalism or, better, the universality of his own painting” (526); and idem, Manet’s Modernism, 126, 141, 403. This messianic factor in Fried could be productively related to similar inflections of Jewishness and Frenchness in Greenberg; see “The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision” (1955), in Collected Essays, 3: 206, in which Kafka, unlike Fried’s Manet, is seen as tragically unable to move beyond the constraints of the particular to the freedom of the universal: “Kafka, the Jew of Prague, could not be so disloyal to what his immediate experience told him. His sense of the world around him was the sense of a trap, and as a Jew he was right, as the Jews of Europe had reason to know twenty years after his death, and as those in Prague ten years later still had reason to know.” For more on Kafka, Freud, and the Judaic problematic of trauma, repression, and remembering, see Harold Bloom, “The Pragmatics of Contemporary'Jewish Culture,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 108-26. For Reb Derissa, see Jacques Derrida, “Ellipsis,” in Writing and Difference, transi. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 300; on Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Bloom in the post-theological context adduced here, see Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of

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Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modem Literary» Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 69 Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, 153. The quotation is from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Morris Louis (born Morris Bernstein) numbered his series in both the aleph-beth of Hebrew and the alpha-beta of Greek; see Michael Fried, Morris Louis 1912-1962 (exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1967). 70 Fried, To the Center of the Earth, 35, 49: “And I, who wouldn’t have known where to look Had I been there, have no difficulty visualizing, A handsome Jewish couple in their late twenties (younger By an age than we are now) captivating an entire ballroom As the band plays on. I am the outcome of that dance.” “I have always Relieved that the poems, the art criticism, and the art history go together, that they share a single vision of reality. More than that isn’t for me to say.” See Michael Fried, letter to the author, 7 October 1995, and idem, Art and Objectbood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 54. On freed and freedom, see 63-64n46, 317, 320. In urging upon me the importance of “The Dance” I would like to acknowledge the invaluable impetus given me by conversations with Isabelle Wallace of Bryn Mawr College, who gave me my title “Friedom”; her colleague Kevin Richards, who showed me how to read Fried and Derrida together as in a fugue; and Susan Getze and the students in my seminar on criticism — Vance Bell, Rachael Jablo, JuiCh’i Liu, J. Gregory Mohr, Kara Rennert, Rebecca Tuynman, and Suh Kyung Yoon — who helped me reread Fried through other eyes: “Eyes that blunt themselves/On sky bluer than steel/Sharpen again in eyes’” (Fried, Powers, 38). 1 would also like to thank my former student Jill Beaulieu for inviting me to participate in this project; and especially the writers Kim Benston, Sue Benston, and Susan S. Levine for their generous deconstruction at a penultimate moment of the soliloquy of my metafiction. Seventy, the number of this note, is the number of the sages who inaugurated the translation of the Torah from Hebrew to Greek. Their work still goes on.

The Outcome of the Dance Michael Fried and the Iconoclastic Prescription Isabelle Wallace

I: Writing Memories In the 1984 essay “Painting Memories: On Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet,” Michael Fried asserts that memory is the unremarked but guiding principle within Baudelaire's extrapoetic endeavours.1 In the essay that follows, I reach a similar conclusion with respect to Fried’s extrapoetics, arguing that Fried’s conception of Modernism as developed in his art critical and art historical prose is silently underwritten by the art historian’s unconscious engagement with the cultural memory of iconoclasm. Indeed, my essay assumes a self­ reflexive notion of art historical scholarship, and will therefore read Fried’s writings as if his own history as critic, historian and poet is as much at issue as his designated objects of study. As such, I understand “Painting Memories” to have implications beyond the simple suggestion of memory’s import within the art writing of Fried and Baudelaire, reading the particular conceptions of memory Fried ascribes to the art criticism of Baudelaire and art of Manet as a displaced and retrospective account of Fried’s evolution from one

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mnemonic structure to the other. Should this approach level an assumed difference between art criticism and practice, then it is a fortunate and immediate revelation of terms already complicated by Baudelaire’s embodiment of the two subject positions that Fried will himself occupy through his doubly determined identity as both scholar and poet. In “Painting Memories” Fried posits a significant difference between Baudelaire's conception of memory and memory’s enactment as reflected in the paintings of Manet. On Fried’s account of Baudelaire, “memories must remain below the threshold of conscious awareness, investing the present with the aura and significance of memory without for a moment appearing on its stage.”2 In contrast, Fried ascribes a different system of memory to the paintings of Manet, reading their frank declaration of sources as a mnemonic alternative to Baudelaire’s insistence on unconscious repetition.3 The difference with respect to memory is substantial; for Baudelaire, memory, or one’s relation to the past is unconscious, enacted, and in Freudian terms repressed; for Manet, memory is acknowledged, unimpeded, and in Freudian terms conscious.4 At essence, this essay argues that these two conceptions of memory have informed the writing of Michael Fried and further, that they have structured Fried’s evolving relation to his Judaic heritage; for on my account, it is this particular fact, the fact of Fried's Jewishness, that is both eclipsed and revealed within his evolving art historical project. Put otherwise, I read Fried’s art historical publications as an enactment of two divergent conceptions of memory, which alternatively render Fried’s continuous relation to a Judaic origin both below and above the threshold of conscious awareness.

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II What lies in the spectator’s soul are the memories of poems. — M. Fried, “Painting Memories"5

After baldly asserting that memory is the central criterion of Baudelairean criticism, Fried sets a tenuous stage for his most compelling evidence to that effect: In an extraordinary footnote ... Baudelaire provides, by way of a quotation from the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, an account of the workings of memory that is presumably meant to illuminate the argument of the Salon as a whole. (Although Baudelaire nowhere says that this is how he means the quotation to be taken, it is impossible not to take it in this spirit; however it is also true, as we shall see, that its precise relevance to the rest of the Salon is far from self-evident.)6

Using the anxiety that surrounds Fried’s attempt to recover the premise of Baudelaire’s criticism as an opportunity to call attention to the fictions contained within my own willful reading of Fried’s scholarship, 1 offer the Hoffmann quotation that Fried and I now share as evidence of our respective truths.True memory ... consists, 1 think, in nothing else but a very lively and easily-roused imagination, which is consequently given to reinforcing each sensation by evoking scenes from the past, and endowing these scenes, as if by magic, with the life and character proper to each of them ...7

Granting Hoffmann’s comments a central position within Baudelaire’s Salon, Fried fills Baudelaire’s blanks, arguing that Baudelairean spectatorship is an endless regression of spectatorial memory. Put in other words, Hoffmann’s citation allows Fried to infer that art commits itself to Baudelairean memory by conjuring up pre-existing

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memories, that were in turn established as memories through a similarly regressive process.8 Hoffmann’s conception of memory is also central to Fried’s understanding of Baudelaire’s suggestion that the great work of art is already a part of our store of memories, even in the first spectatorial instance: if spectatorship is a regressive experience of memory, then it is, in the first moment of vision, a recollection of things already known. As such — and this is the fundamental point I want to stress — it is the spectatorial past which illuminates, and in that sense predetermines, our experience of the visual present.9 If it is Hoffmann who illuminates Baudelaire for Fried, then it is Hoffmann and Baudelaire who illuminate Fried for me, for on my account, it is the Hoffmann/ Baudelairean conception of spectatorship, which is to say it is their shared notion of a remembered past experienced through and revealed by an aesthetic present, that is fruitfully applied to the early scholarship of Michael Fried. In other words, I would like to posit that Fried’s experience of art, as manifested in his art historical writing, can be seen as an effect and experience of memory, a memory of the past that is instigated by, and intensified through, a retrogressive reverberation in the present. Yet where in the oeuvre of Michael Fried might one locate such a memory? Moreover, how is it possible to pinpoint such a memory in light of Fried’s assertion that there is no primordial experience from which all memory' originates? As Fried quizzically notes: one might wish to argue that such a chain of reinforcement must have a point of origin, a first memory' (or primal scene) that provides the grounding for all the rest. But on the Hoffmann-Baudelaire account of the nature of memory, it is impossible to explain how a truly originary scene can have assumed the status of a memory7 at all, much less how it can have established itself as the master memory that any attempt to ground this chain as a whole requires it to be.10

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As this passage suggests, Fried remains unclear about how to reconcile the regressiveness of memory with the notion of a primal scene. If memories inspire an infinite regression, and if memories are only formed through the recollection of other memories, then how would a primary scene, a scene for which there is no available precedent, establish itself as the memory to which all others refer? At this point I would like to propose that both of our questions, that is, my question, “where,” and Fried’s question “how,” might be answered by recourse to a single text. That is to say, I would suggest that there may be a scene to which Fried’s scholarship refers and further, that this particular scene may provide a means of understanding how a primal memory might function as such while simultaneously originating from another remembrance» I would further propose that Fried leads us to the possibility of this shared answer when he notes of Baudelaire’s discussion of Delacroix that “what lies in the spectator’s soul’ are the memories of poems.”

Ill: The Dance My father has been dead just over six months But last night my mother dreamed that they were dancing. “Ben was never actually a very good dancer,” She says, astonished by her romantic unconscious, “Yet in my dream he was indescribably graceful And we glided across the floor in picture-perfect synchrony." And I, who wouldn’t have known where to look Had I been there, have no difficulty visualizing A handsome Jewish couple in their late twenties (younger By an age than we are now) captivating an entire ballroom As the band plays on. I am the outcome of that dance. — M. Fried, To the Center of the Earthn

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Published in 1994, The Dance is a romantic memory of Fried’s young, soon-to-be parents, which is to say, it is, in a certain sense, a memory of Fried’s conception. Yet, it is important to note that Fried, the not-yet-born child to emerge from this dance, cannot possibly remember such an evening. Thus, Fried’s primal memory is only available to him through the memory of his mother’s romantic narration, which is in turn available to him through her memory of a dream.12 On Fried’s account of Baudelaire, a primal scene cannot establish itself as memory because as primal scene it lacks precedent memories. Yet what Fried offers us in his poem is primal scene as memory, reminding us that the truly primal scene of conception cannot be witnessed by the conceived, and is therefore only available to the conceived by the mediated memory of another. Ultimately then, one might suggest that it is Fried who circumvents or resolves the logic of Baudelaire’s system, for it is The Dance which illustrates how a primal memory might be formulated as such while simultaneously existing as a chronological or biological point of origin within a regressive, Baudelairean conception of memory. More importantly, The Dance elucidates Baudelaire’s assertion that the present is inescapably informed by the remembrance of things past. As the last line of The Dance suggests, the band, which had never played for Fried, and which has long since ceased playing for his parents, plays on in the experienced present of Michael Fried s poem. Similarly, we might assume that the soon-to-be parents of Michael Fried, at whom he could not and would not have looked, continue to impress themselves upon his present as the always dancing and always Jewish couple. As I have noted, it is the Jewish component of Fried’s poetic recollection that I will trace in his scholarly writing, and although I am wary of asserting the ultimate, art historical primacy of Fried’s Judaic origins, there is a wray in which this assertion is supported when one applies what I take to be Fried’s self-reflexive commentary on

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Baudelaire to the originary thcmatics of The Dance. Fried’s poem logically implies that the moment of conception and indisputable biological origin is inextricable from his historical identity as a Jew.13 Put otherwise, Fried’s biologically primal memory, the memory of his conception, refers to and invokes yet another, more primal memory. This chronologically ultimate memory is a vision of his parents who, because they are not yet parents, must simply remain in the words of Michael Fried, “a handsome Jewish couple.” Thus, it is not only the conception, but also the inextricable and inherited identity of his Jewish parents which serves as primal scene w'ithin the memory of Michael Fried. Assuming for Fried a Baudelairean conception of memory which insists that a spectatorial present is experienced through a sériés of retrogressive remembrances, I suggest that it is the primordial memory of Fried’s otherwise unarticulated Jewishness, which inescapably informs his spectatorial experience of the present. In short, I submit that it is not only Fried, but also Fried’s art historical publications which are the outcome of this remembered but never present dance.

IV When “historian" and “critic” act together in the role of art historian, a third identity joins them, that of “artist.” — Richard Shift14

If the memory of the Baudelairean spectator is endlessly regressive, so too is the memory of the Baudelairean artist.15 As Fried notes, it is not only the critic who engages with memory in the process of looking, it is also the painter who in, or as, the very experience of creation recalls his own sequence of remembrances. According to Baudelaire, these remembrances take the form of other paintings in the great tradition of Western art and should

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therefore manifest themselves discretely upon the surface of the canvas. As Fried states of the Baudelairean aesthetic system, a painting in the Western tradition “at once asserts and denies [its] relation to [a] past”16 which will nevertheless remain “ineffable [and] unanalyzable.”17 This essay began with a purposeful conflation of artist and art historian, and as I now turn to a thematic discussion of Fried’s work, I wish to suggest that just as the painter’s relation to an aesthetic past is present yet concealed within his paintings, so Fried’s relation to a Judaic past is extant but obscured within his art historical publications. That is to say, as I turn to a discussion of “Art and Objecthood,” I would argue that it is the ineffable primal scene configured in The Dance which is both “asserted” and “denied” within the early publications of Michael Fried.

V: The Outcome of the Dance Nearly thirty years ago Michael Fried wrote one of the most famous couplets in modern art criticism: “We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace.”18 Striking initially for its declamatory force, Fried’s proclamation has remained vital for its frequent evocation within contemporary art historical discourse. Most recently, Rosalind Krauss has recalled her initial experience of the final sentence of “Art and Objecthood” as one of vertiginous disbelief, observing that Fried’s proclamation had at essence destabilised the oath sworn between the Modern and the secular.19 Krauss is certainly right in characterising Fried’s evangelical dictum as a moment of ideological rupture within the seemingly seamless narratives of modern art and Modernist art history. Yet, by the same token, the rhetoric of Fried’s early text should not be taken as the theological manifestation of a personal ideology that is itself static and whole, for as I will argue, a large portion of Michael

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Fried’s scholarship can be read as the symptomatic and ambivalent product of a man divided between an unconscious and inherited loyalty to a Judaic tradition of iconoclasm and a conscious, professional loyalty to a Christian tradition of iconophilia.20 Written in 1967, “Art and Objecthood” is devoted to a discussion of minimal, or in Fried’s words, literalist art and is in large part a polemic directed at the alienating experience designated by the term “theatricality.”21 Within the essay’s limited critical context Fried’s spectatorial preference is unambiguous: art and the absorptive experience of transcending one’s literal circumstance is clearly preferred over the mundane experience engendered by the literal object. The problem with minimal art, or as Fried would have it, with minimal objects, is that they deny the phenomenological plenitude of the former by insisting on a theatrical acknowledgement of the beholder’s role as beholder and the object’s role as beheld. Paradoxically, it is a spectatorial dynamic of this variety that Fried lauds in his contemporaneous account of Manet. In the 1969 essay, “Manet’s Sources,” Fried celebrates Manet’s frank acknowledgement of painting’s ontological status as two-dimensional image, heralding the father of Modernism for his theatrical,22 indeed literal insistence on “the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.”23 Thus, within Fried’s critical framework, it is not only the aggressive sculptures of the 1960s, but also the theatrical “masterworks” of the 1860s which insist on the alienating fact of their existence as viewed objects. Given this correlation, how can we reconcile Fried’s abhorrence of the former with his uncompromising reverence for the latter? In other words, what is it about the minimalist appropriation of theatricality in particular that inspired the infamous invective of “Art and Objecthood”?24 A brief theological digression will go some way towards answering these questions. In a provocative

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article from the 1970s, Jean-Joseph Goux notes a fundamental distinction between Christianity and Judaism: Judaism marks, inscribes, [and] affirms an irreducible schism ... and this is the key difference between Judaism and the theological anthropomorphism of Christianity, for in the Christian thematics of Father and Son, there is an identification of God and Man: God is made man ... [but] in the Judaic religion ... the schism remains irreducible.25

If Christianity’s reduction of the distinction between God and Man places it in theological opposition to the Judaic belief in the radical alterity of the Eternal, then a related, perhaps symptomatic difference can be found in their respective attitudes towards the image.26 The Christian God can be represented by, and contained within, the material presence of the icon, which is to say the Christian God can be made visible by human labour; as such He is the literal “reflection and product of Man.’’27 In contrast, the Judaic schism between God and man is maintained in part through a radical insistence on the Eternal’s unrepresentability. In short, Judaism remains opposed to the anthropomorphic identification of God and man through a continued adherence to the prescription against the creation and worship of graven, which is to say, anthropomorphic images.28 As the second commandment states, images of the Eternal as well as representations of anything found in the heavens, earth or sea constitute a violation of Judaic law.29 That said, consider the following statement from “Art and .Objecthood”: “I am suggesting that a kind of latent, or hidden naturalism, indeed anthropomorphism, lies at the core of literalist theory and practice.”30 Unlike the paintings of Manet, which engage Fried with “the painting as a painting,”31 the literalist work denies its status as inanimate object through the assumption of human qualities; as Fried notes: an experience of such objects is not “entirely unlike the being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of

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another person.”52 Given what one might thus term the Christian anthropomorphism of literalist art — Fried goes so far as to describe Tony Smith’s sculptures as “surrogate person[s|” — it seems essential to note that minimal sculpture nevertheless remains, in the words of Michael Fried, “hollow with a vengeance.”55 A clear disparity thus exists between the anthropomorphic promise and hollow deliverance of literalist sculpture. Literalist anthropo­ morphism threatens to endow representation with characteristics forbidden by the Hebraic God and thus purports to offer a blasphemous aesthetic experience. Yet insofar as literalist sculpture reveals itself to be “hollow,” and thus negates its anthropomorphic facade, it denies an idolatrous moment and thus preserves the Judaic schism between God and man. Here one might wish to extend the parallel between Manet and minimalism, arguing that each embrace a Judaic ethic of a-transcendent immersion in the world of literal objects. This is perhaps true, but a fundamental difference remains: in the case of the literal object, Judaic alienation is a direct result of failed idolatry. In other words, the alienation of beholder and beheld occurs after idolatrous impulses have been solicited by the false lure of minimalist anthropomorphism; as Fried notes: the minimal object extorts a ‘special complicity’ from its beholder.54 Thus as I see it, it is neither the ‘literalism,’ nor even the theatricality of minimalist sculpture that troubles Fried. Instead, it is literalism’s duplicity, for it is this duplicity that both compels and unveils the culpable desires of a beholder complicit in the blasphemous act of idolatry.55 Such a reading of “Art and Objecthood” allows us to reconcile Fried’s approval of Manet with his critique of literalist theatricality. In contrast to the duplicitous dynamic of literalist sculpture, Manet’s paintings unambiguously declare their status as man-made, inanimate objects; as a result, the idolatrous aspirations of the beholder are neither extracted, nor revealed — let alone realised. Seen from this perspective, Fried’s

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condemnation of literalism and exaltation of Manet emerge as products of a consistent, if unarticulated, critical framework. In short, if one considers Fried’s early art criticism as the unconscious product of Judaic anxiety in the face of a potential idol, then one can understand Fried’s endorsement of Manet and criticism of literalist sculpture as the respective assuagement and exacerbation of theologically indexed and ineffable fears. Yet to assert Fried’s investment in the iconoclastic prescription is not to suggest an exclusively Judaic thematic within the early writing of Michael Fried, for what ultimately emerges in Fried’s work is a theological paradox. On the one hand, Fried’s account of Manet’s art suggests an investment in the iconoclastic thematics of spectatorial alienation within the world of literal objects. On the other hand, Fried’s explicit espousal of absorptive spectatorial “grace” suggests an equally potent investment in a Christian spectatorship of idolatrous transcendence. Turning to Absorption and Theatricality, I would argue that this dual investment becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, claiming that the iconoclastic anxiety of “Art and Objecthood” will resurface and intensify as we follow Fried’s critical trajectory on its cyclical path back towards the uncompromising theatricality of Édouard Manet.56 Published in 1980, Absorption and Theatricality is a historically grounded account of the ways in which certain artists sought to repress theatricality within a specifically French tradition of absorptive painting.57 Whatever the “facts” of eighteenth-century aesthetics, Absorption and Theatricality continues to privilege an experience of absorptive plenitude, and as such, one might argue that it perpetuates Fried’s comfortable investment in a Christian experience of idolatrous transcendence. However, what quickly reveals the Judaic subtext within this investment is Fried’s unique assertion that the absorptive tradition of French painting depended upon the “Supreme Fiction” that no one stands before the canvas.58 Citing Diderot as exemplary of contemporary aesthetic

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concerns, Fried argues that the eighteenth-century spectator was highly attuned to the artificial, or theatrical nature of the spectatorial relationship. As a result, painters felt compelled to take up with new intensity the increasingly difficult task of suspending the “primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.” As Fried sees it, it was only through the institution of what he calls the “Supreme Fiction” of the beholder’s “absence or nonexistence” that this task could be accomplished: what [was] called for ... [was] at one and the same time the creation of a new sort of object [by which Fried means one absorptive in its effects, that is, one which absorbs the spectator into pictorial fiction] — and a new sort of beholder — a new “subject” — whose innermost nature wrould consist precisely in the conviction of his absence from the scene of representation.39

In short, spectatorial pleasure, the pleasure of being before the image, is here dependent upon the belief that one is elsewhere. Thus, within an otherwise blasphemous investigation of an absorptive art historical tradition, Fried is nevertheless attentive to the Judaic injunction that the spectator be absent from the culpable space of adoration. Seen from this perspective, it is not only the critique of “Art and Objecthood,” but also the hermeneutic of Absorption and Theatricality which reveals the anxious signs of a repressed and ineffable Judaic origin. Yet if Fried is enacting a Baudelairean system of regressive memory, and if that regression leads to the primal memory configured in The Dance, then what of my assertion that The Dance reveals an inextricable relation between the memory of Fried’s Judaic origins and the memory of Fried’s conception? In other words, if Fried’s early scholarship is an enactment of a primal, but doubly determined memory, then where might we find the evidence of this inextricability within Fried’s art historical writing? In my discussion of The Dance I suggested that the poem configures a memory of Fried’s conception. As such,

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it may also represent the displaced and potentially traumatic memory of the mother’s castrated form; as Fried notes, “I wouldn’t have known where to look had I been there.” Under a Freudian model, the ramifications of such a sight are essential to individual and societal formations, for it is the sight of the castrated mother that triggers the son’s fear of castration, producing both an identification with the father and a repression of desire for the mother. Using Freud to read The Dance not only as a memory of Judaic origins, but also as a repressed desire for maternal incest, I would like to take one final theological detour, for it is a renewed examination of the iconoclastic prescription which will reveal the ways in which Fried’s early publications are, in a Baudelairean sense, an enacted product of the Judaic and incestuous thematics of the poem. Returning to the historic origins of the iconoclastic prescription, Goux considers the idolaters Moses banished from the community at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Linking these idolaters with those who practice so-called rites of nature and asserting that these rights invariably included symbolic acts of incest with the great mother goddess, Goux identifies the castigated idolaters with the cult of the female and with the incestuous rituals that characterised her worship. On this account then, the resultant prohibition of anthropomorphic figuration in favour of an abstract and unrepresentable God was the Judaic means of repressing an extant desire for the maternal. Thus, the iconoclastic prescription is not only a means of preserving the Judaic schism between God and Man, it is also a reified and specifically Judaic repression of incestuous desire, for if the prohibition of incest depends upon the absence of the maternally-indexed image, then Christianity’s acceptance of the icon can be seen to sanction a forbidden relation with the maternal.40 Seen in this light, Fried’s investment in the absence of the eighteenth-century beholder can be understood not only as his adherence to the incest taboo, but also as his inextricable obedience to the religious tradition that

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enforces it. Thus, just as the originary thematics of The Dance were inextricable from Fried’s inherited identity as a Jew, so too Fried’s investment in the absence of the potentially incestuous beholder maintains an inextricable and derivative relation to a specifically Judaic proscription. In short, “The Supreme Fiction’’ is, in the fullest sense, a Baudelairean enactment of ineffable memories linked within the primal scene of The Danced It is under the aegis of one additional fact about the Baudelairean conception of memory — namely, Baudelaire’s assertion that the intensity of memory increases with time — that 1 would like to continue my investigation of Fried’s investment in the absorptive tradition of art.42 As I see it, Fried’s 1987 text, Reading, Writing, and Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane ts best characterised as an effect of this mnemonic intensification, insofar as it enacts, in the most dramatic terms possible, the spectatorial conflict engendered by Fried’s continued investment in the absorptive tradition of art.43 As “evidence” of this climactic moment, I offer Fried’s words, for it is his testimony which best describes his spectatorial predicament: we find ourselves unable to tear our eyes away from (Eakins’ The Gross Clinic) — rather we compulsively shift our gaze from the probing of the wound to Gross’ hand and scalpel and back again — until at last it becomes apparent that something in all this must be distinctly pleasurable, which is to say that the act of looking emerges here as a source of mingled pain and pleasure, violence and voluptuousness, repulsion and fascination.44

It is, as Fried says, “the act of looking” that bears the burden of his conflict; that is to say, it is not Fried’s empathetic identification with an admittedly traumatic pictorial scene that causes his mix of pain and pleasure, rather it is the act of looking itself that here emerges as the source of deeply conflicted emotions. Further, it seems important that Fried has collapsed the mechanics

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of seeing into a single, instantaneous act which is only separable from its consequence in the realm of gender; pleasure is here indicated by adjectives that describe an experience of the female body, while consequence is indicated by adjectives that signal the threat of male authority. In sum, it would seem that Fried offers an Oedipal account of looking that perfectly articulates his own spectatorial stalemate, for what he describes is the endlessness of a moment where the pleasure of looking is forever matched by the fear of being caught. As is often the case, Fried sums this up nicely when he says, “it is above all the conflictedness of our situation that grips and excruciates and in the end virtually stupefies us before the picture.”45 Interestingly, the height of Fried’s spectatorial dilemma coincides with his resumed investigation of Manet.46 That the effects of an iconoclastic heritage are intensified within Fried’s return to this particular artist is interesting not only for the association I have forged between Manet and a Judaic spectatorship of atranscendence, but also for the association that Fried has himself formed between the art of Manet and the memory of his parents. In the final footnote to the published version of Fried’s dissertation, he concludes: “Finally, I want to close by mentioning my parents, to whom I owe my first acquaintance with the art of Manet.”47 In addition to perhaps explaining why the experience of Manet should count as Judaic within the framework of Michael Fried, these words can also be seen to articulate the ultimate premise of my paper, condensing as they do two distinct moments of looking. That is to say, by invoking his parents and Manet under the rubric of spectatorship, Fried unwittingly links the Freudian trauma of looking at the couple, or coupling of one’s parents with the iconoclastic trauma of looking at images. Or to put this in slightly different, and perhaps more focused terms, Fried unconsciously links the repression of maternal desire that results from the sight

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of the mother’s lack with the repressive prohibition of the anthropomorphic and maternally-indexed image. That these issues came to coalesce within Fried’s scholarship on Manet simply underscores Goux’s assertion that it is the Judaic — in this case the Judaic spectatorship of Manet’s a-transcendent spectatorial distance — which links the prohibition of incest to the iconoclastic prescription. Having read Fried’s interpretation of The Gross Clinic as a paralysed account of his irreconcilable investment in both a Christian enactment, and a Judaic proscription of incestuous idolatry, I wish to further argue that it is Fried’s subsequent account of Courbet which constitutes the acknowledged failure of Fried’s absorptive enterprise and thus provides the opportunity for an unconflicted return to a Judaic spectatorship of theatrical distance. Published in 1990, Courbet's Realism, signals Fried’s return to the French tradition of antitheatrical painting, and is propelled by the following basic claim: Courbet’s paintings evidence his desire to eliminate all distance between himself and the object of his labour, or, as Fried interestingly puts it, they reflect the artist’s unconscious desire to “quasi-corporeally merge” with his canvas in the process of its making. Central to my reading of Courbet's Realism is the association Fried makes between the art of Courbet and the ‘‘Supreme Fiction” of the eighteenth century: alongside the principal, dramatic conception of painting in [Diderot’s] Salons there exists a seemingly opposite but in fact complementary conception that I call pastoral, according to which the beholder was to be negated not by denying his presence — by walling him out — but on the contrary by making him imagine that he had entered the depicted scene and so was no longer standing before the painting looking on. Now there is an important sense in which Courbet’s art can be seen as a delayed fulfillment of Diderot’s pastoral conception....48

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As in Absorption and Theatricality, the absence of the beholder is of paramount importance to Fried’s interpretation of painting within the absorptive tradition. Although this interpretive continuity is interesting for the credence it lends to my assertion of iconoclastic anxiety, 1 would like to instead concentrate on what I take to be a significant difference between these two accounts of absorptive painting; put simply, I assert that Courbet's Realism is distinguished from its predecessor by the relentless pessimism of its rhetoric. Fried’s account of Courbet is marked by an abundance of the following phrases: “the inescapableness of beholding,” “the inescapable fate of painting,” “the impossibility of effectively negating or neutralizing the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld,” “the constitutive impossibility that [the] feat of transport could ... be achieved, “the impossible objective of Courbet’s antitheatrical enterprise,” “the inevitable failure of a project of merger,” and finally and most explicitly, “Courbet’s project ... was bound to fail.”49 Given this roster, it would be almost impossible to defend an assertion of Fried’s continued investment in enacting the Christian thematics of incestuous absorption, for what this rhetoric overtly performs is the unambiguous defeat of Courbet’s absorptive enterprise. As absorptive paintings inevitably fall into irrecoverable theatricality, so Christian grace ultimately lapses into inconsolable Judaic doubt.50 That Courbet s Realism is also marked by the ever­ more graphic rhetoric of incestuous desire is unimportant: desire is not a culpable offence under the law of the Oedipal or Judaic Father, for on this account, desire for the mother, familial or representational, is the neutral a priori of both psychoanalysis and religion. As a result, desire itself can never be an index of religious affiliation, for it is the fundamental condition upon which it depends and to which it responds. It is one’s relation to the object of desire that determines one’s Father: for the Christian, desire is an occasion for a transcendent

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experience of the maternal, for the Jew it is an occasion for her repression. For Michael Fried, it has been until now an occasion for both.

VI: Acknowledgment

In the preceding pages I have treated Fried’s scholarship as the manifestation of a Baudelairean conception of memory which sought to unconsciously re-enact the unspoken memories of an iconoclastic Judaic origin. At this juncture I would posit that Fried’s recent literature on Manet employs a different conception of memory, arguing that his latest work reveals not an obscured enactment of the originary and Judaic thematics of The Dance, but rather the assimilated effects of The Dance's acknowledgment.51 On Fried's account, memory as embodied in the paintings of Manet can be understood as an integrated acknowledgment of an articulated past: implicit in Manet’s practice was the belief that true memory, not in a Hoffmannesque but in a certain Freudian sense, begins only when mere repetition of the past has been brought to an end.52

Read in the specific interpretive context of “Painting Memories,” Fried is making a critical distinction between Baudelaire’s insistence that painting bear a repetitive, “ineffable and to all intents and purposes undetectable relation to the past,” and Manet’s “deliberate, specific, and perspicuous reference to the art of the old masters.”53 In short, Fried is positing that Manet’s relation to the visual past is not a Baudelairean attempt to keep memories present but unrealised; instead it is an overt acknowledgment of their present significance. Fried’s similarly novel relationship to the past as manifested in the products of a scholarly present will be the subject of the pages that follow. In the 1992 article “Manet in his Generation: The Face

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of Painting in the 1860s,” Fried says this of a critic contemporary with Manet: what seems merely contradictory in Astruc’s thought — his passion for absorption and his advocacy of the portrait, his idolatry of Millet and partisanship of Manet — may be understood as ... a paradigmatic expression of the new double or divided sensibility I’ve been trying to evoke.54

It is no doubt tempting to read this account of Astruc as a displaced account of Fried’s conflicted investment in the Judaic experience of Manet and the now acknowledged “idolatry” of Christian absorption.55 Yet what is evident in the above quote, and typical of Fried’s larger commentary on Manet’s generation — critics and artists alike — is an unprecedented reconciliation of absorption and theatricality. From my perspective, what is truly interesting about this aesthetic accord is the implicit relegation of absorption to theme and theatricality to spectatorial dynamic. Take Fried’s account of Millet, for example. Reviewing the artist’s contemporary reception, Fried argues that the exaggerated quality of Millet’s antitheatrical thematics — he cites The Gleaners, for example — tended to deny the possibility of an absorptive spectatorial experience by inadvertently calling attention to, or in fact confirming the theatrical convention that paintings are made to be beheld.56 From a theological perspective, one might argue that Fried’s double sensibility is best characterised as a Judaic recuperation of absorptive pictorial content. In Manet’s Modernism, Fried maintains that this divided structure characterizes virtually all ambitious painting within Manet’s generation; “in fact, [he] take[s] that structure to be perhaps the defining ‘formal’ feature of their art.”57 As a result, Fried is able to uncover several additional strategies for preventing an absorptive experience of the painted image. Fried will note of an otherwise absorptive image like Whistler’s Woman in

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White, for example, that formal elements — that is, the “flattened space,’’ or the “unusually close cropping of the image by the framing edge” — prevent the viewer from using Whistler’s entranced female as an occasion for his or her own absorption into pictorial fiction.58 More aggressively, Fried will say that the compositional frontality of Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix of 1864 functions as a “willfully nonabsorptive” structure.59 Invoking the religious rhetoric that Fried and I now share, I would submit that what emerges in Fried’s treatment of Manet’s peers are interpretations that recognise absorptive thematics without also partaking in incestuous idolatry. In other words, Manet’s Modernism, or from Fried’s historically-minded point of view, Manet’s generation, denies the possibility of “idolatry” by grounding spectatorial experience within the inculpable realm of literal objects. Fried’s re-emergent affinity for a spectatorial paradigm of alienation and distance allows us to conclude that the manifest impossibility of an absorptive, transcendent spectatorial dynamic occupies a central position within his treatment of Manet’s absorptive peers. Such an impossibility is most clearly understood in the context of Fried’s discussion of Legros’ Ex-Voto, for it is here that he elaborates on the “double structure” that both unites and separates Manet and his generation. Fried summarises: The excessiveness and intensity that characterize the ExVoto's treatment of absorption finds further expression not just in the compositional forcing ... but also, crucially, in a double or divided relationship to the beholder ... In short I find in Legros’ [painting] a double structure of denial of and direct address to the beholder, a structure that by its very nature is consistent with the logic of excessive thematization of absorption ... To put this slightly differently ... excessiveness ... turned out to seek expression in a kind of theatricality — not, however, the theatricality traditionally associated with excess (rhetorical or gestural overkill of the sort often called

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melodramatic) but the more abstract or presentational theatricality otfacingness as sucha}

At essence, Fried’s account of the Ex-Voto is similar to his commentary on Whistler’s Woman in White. In both instances, the representation of absorbed females — a perfect and not atypical medium for incestuous absorption — is effectively neutralised by a composition that exaggerates the fact of painting’s (viewed) objecthood. Put otherwise, the spectatorial promise of absorptive transcendence is negated even as it is articulated, for the consumption of anthropomorphic content has been made inextricable from an acknowledgment of painting’s essential identity as an object of the frontal gaze. Thus, whether by exaggerated absorptive thematics or compositional forcing, the generation of 1863 has inadvertently provided, or, on my account, the interpreter of the generation of 1863 has intentionally secured an a-transcendent, Judaic experience of the maternally-indexed image. That absorptive thematics no longer translate into absorptive spectatorial experience is a significant deviation from Fried’s earlier investigation of the relationship between painting and beholder and can therefore be taken as an index of a novel relation to a Judaic heritage that insists on the fundamental ‘‘objecthood” of art. Once restricted to the exceptional, and insistently material paintings of Manet, Judaic alienation can now be said to characterise Fried’s interpretive stance towards nearly all painted images.61 Grace is thus forsaken by a universal hermeneutic which conspires to ground painting in the atranscendent realm of the literal. In conclusion 1 turn, or more accurately, re-turn to Fried’s account of Manet, for it is there that Fried locates a split within the generation of 1863, and similarly, it is there that I locate a corresponding split within the self­ reflexive project of Michael Fried. Pinpointing Manet’s singularity Fried observes:

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In Manet’s pictures of the 1860’s ... [there is] an acknowledgment of the inescapableness of beholding as painting’s fate ... [and] that act of acknowledgement holds the key to Manet’s picture’s alleged flatness: as though what has always been taken as a declaration of flatness is rather the product of an attempt to make the painting in its entirety — the painting as a painting, that is, as a tableau — face the viewer as never before ... The decisive difference between Manet and the others [in his generation], it now becomes clear, is that from the outset he tended strongly to reject absorption as a vehicle of that pursuit and those values ,..62

If Manet is linked to the generation of 1863 by his rejection of absorptive spectatorial dynamics, then he is separated from them by his emphatic and virtually universal rejection of absorptive pictorial thematics.63 Thus, although the entire generation of 1863 makes paintings that ultimately deny an absorptive, transcendent experience of the image, it is only Manet who is said to make that denial the thematised premise of his work. That is to say, it is only Manet who embraces, on both a thematic and spectatorial level, the Judaic “spirituality” of a-transcendent immersion in the literal and everyday.64 In effect, Fried’s interpretation of Manet offers us an unfailing vision of Hebraic spectatorial ethics. Characterised by their ability to establish an “ideal distance” between beholder and beheld, Manet’s paintings are praised for their ability to orchestrate their own spectatorial consumption: his paintings, with their strong compositional gestalts, unorthodox drawing, naked contrasts of light and dark, often clashing colors, and virtuoso but unfinished seeming composition ...forced the spectator to look at them: but the terms in which they did so, in the absence of the kind of content absorption would have provided, seemed to all but a few critics superficial and meretricious.65

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“Forcing” a spectatorial acknowledgment of their status as a-transcendent, material objects, Manet’s paintings are seen to control the conditions of their reception; what other paintings do by default, Manet’s do by design.^ As Fried notes toward the end of Manet's Modernism, “in general he appears to have done all he could to underscore, and in a sense to dramatize, what I have called the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.”67 Fried’s exaltation of Manet’s singular achievement is perhaps most apparent when the language of myth surfaces within the otherwise historical rhetoric of Manet’s Modernism. Note, for instance, the familiar claim of the artist’s heroic dedication to an impractical, but ingenious aesthetic vision: “I described Manet’s art as seeking to deny the values and effects of absorptive closure at a historical moment when the alternative values and effects he put in their place were literally indescribable except in negative terms...”68 Undeterred by professional ramifications, Manet felt free — or compelled, depending on one’s perspective — to pursue his own artistic vision. Every good story has a hero, and Manet’s Modernism is no exception. This is all to say that I see something more in Fried’s account of Manet, something beyond history or interpretation that nevertheless infringes on both. Yet to leave it at mythology is not quite right either, although certainly that is at play here. To be blunt, I read Fried's continuous account of Manet — remember that, for Fried, there has never been a time before Manet — as an idealised portrait of the artist: Manet and Fried. But this is not to suggest a perfect coalescence between the two; that gap, in its unbridgeability, seems crucial. Metonymically represented by Fried’s interpretation of his painting, Manet is what Fried can never be. Never tainted by the thematic effects of absorption, and never concerned to promote the concomitant “values” of Christianity, Manet is the interpretive screen for a projected

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ego-ideal which does not, indeed cannot fail to obey the Law of the Judaic Father.69 In their alienating superiority, one might ultimately say that Manet’s paintings are the Father, reflecting to Fried the face and fact of a newly acknowledged Judaic past. If the “face” of Manet’s paintings is the projected face of a now acknowledged Judaic father, then the asymptotic narrowing between Fried’s account of Manet and Fried’s account of Manet’s peers is perhaps the ultimate index of Fried’s revitalised investment in his Judaic heritage.70 That is to say, I read Fried’s insistence on a narrowed but unbridgeable gap within the generation of 1863 as an interpretative projection of a significantly narrowed, but always unbridgeable gap between Judaic God and subject. Put otherwise, I read the narrowed gap between the always Judaic Manet — it must be recalled that Manet has never failed to play the a-transcendent role in Fried's theological drama — and his absorptively-minded generation, or more directly, the narrowed gap between Fried’s spectatorial experience of the two, as a reflection of a similarly asymptotic narrowing between the spectatorship of Michael Fried and the mandates of an acknowledged iconoclastic origin. In conclusion, I submit that the “facingness” of Manet’s generation is not only a term to describe a new relationship between beholder and painting, but also a term to describe a new relationship between beholder and himself. With [this] ... I reach the limit of my reading, at least for the time being, of a critico-aesthetic “system” that no one, neither its operator nor its interpreters, may be said to command.71

NOTES 1

Michael Fried, “Painting Memories" Critical Inquiry (March 1984) 510-42. For a critical response to “Painting Memories,” see Richard Shiff, “Remembering Impressions”

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Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter 1986) 439-48. Fried’s response entitled, “Forget it: A Response to Richard Shiff,” immediately follows in the same issue, 449-52. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 521. ibid. Also, for a more developed and specific account of Manet’s relation to the art of the old masters, see Fried, “Manet’s Sources” Artforum (March 1969) 28-82. For Fried’s reconsideration of “Manet’s Sources,” see Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996) 136-84. The invocation of Freud is not whimsical. Fried refers to Freud in the body of the text and cites Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through (Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis),” Standard Edition, 12: 145-56 in the notes. See “Painting Memories,” 531, 54. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 519. The context of the quote is Baudelaire’s discussion of Delacroix. ibid., 514. ibid., 515. For an alternative discussion of an infinitely regressive spectatorial memory see, E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon, I960) 314ff. See Fried, “Painting Memories,” 514-5. ibid., 515-6. Michael Fried, To the Center of the Earth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994) 49. Interesting here is the relationship between the narrative thematics of Fried’s poem and Freud’s suggestion that Leonardo da Vinci’s memory of a vulture visiting him in his crib was in fact a fantasy projected onto the memory of his mother’s narration. See Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,” Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey, transi. Alan Tyson (New York: W.W'. Norton and Co., 1964) 33n2. Also, the Freudian concept of deferred action or Nachträglichkeit is relevant here in so far as Fried’s “memory" only comes into existence when it is symbolically repeated in the form of his mother’s narration. On these topics see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993) 65-8. Here one might draw an interesting parallel between Fried s

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silence with respect to his Jewishness and his extensive discussion of Manet’s relation to his “Frenchness,” a condition that Fried interestingly calls “the historical accident of his birth.” See “Manet’s Sources” 66. Also in this regard it is striking that Fried’s mentor, Clement Greenberg, said the following, “And we shall have a better chance of surviving Jewishly’ if the truth that is our Jewishness becomes one we prefer rather than one that is felt as due only to an unfortunate ‘accident’ of birth.” See Clement Greenberg, “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism: Some Reflections on ‘Positive Jewishness’,” in Clement. Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, ed. John O’Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 57. Richard Shiff, “Art History and the Nineteenth Century: Realism and Resistance’’ Art Bulletin 70 (March 1988) 48. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 514-22. For an alternative account of the relationship between memory and aesthetic tradition see also Norman Bryson’s discussion of David in Tradition and Desire from David to Delacroix (Cambridge . Cambridge University Press, 1984) 32ff. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 520. ibid., 519. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” Artforum 5/10 (Summer 1967) 23. Also, for Fried’s reconsideration of “Art and Objecthood” as well as a discussion of the essay by Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh, see “1967/1987: Genealogies of Art and Theory, Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop" in Discussions in Contemporary Culture Vol. 1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987) 54-87. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 6-8. Additionally and perhaps most famously, T.J. Clark has noted the religious tenor of “Art and Objecthood” in the context of a highly polemical debate between Clark and Fried on the nature ot Modernism. The debate appears in its entirety in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) and the critical passage appears on page 88 of this edition in footnote 7. Margaret Olin has also noted the religiosity of Fried’s criticism; see Olin, “Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness" Art Bulletin 71 (June 1989) 297ff. For a secular response to “Art and Objecthood,” see Howard Singerman, “Seeing Sherrie Levine” October 67 (Winter 1994) 103ff.

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20 For an alternative account of Friedian spectatorship see Margaret Iverson, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 131-6. 21 For the purpose of this discussion I am assuming a basic familiarity with the term “theatricality,” which Fried uses to describe a given enterprise that seems dependent on, or falsified for an assumed audience. 22 “The kind of relationship ... between the beholder and the work [of Manet] ... may be thought of as essentially theatrical.” See Fried, “Manet’s Sources,” 70. 23 Although Fried uses this phrase and several variations countless times in the course of his writing, it is slightly anachronistic to cite it here insofar as the phrase debuts in Absorption and Theatricality (1980). 24 Fried would question the legitimacy of these questions by arguing that his work simply records historical difference between the 1860s and the 1960s. It is perhaps already clear that I am sceptical of art history’s claims to empiricism; as a result, the only chronological progression important for my fiction will be that offered by Fried’s writing. 25 Jean-Joseph Goux, “The Temple of Utopia,” in Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, transi. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 161-2. 26 For discussion of these topics see Goux, “The Temple of Utopia,” and “Moses, Freud, and the Iconoclastic Prescription," in Symbolic Economies. 27 Goux, “The Temple of Utopia,” 161. 28 There are several historical exceptions to this theological mandate. Most notable among them is the synagogue at Dura Europas which contains murals that depict humans, animals and most significantly, the hands of God. For a deconstructive approach to the historiography of DuraEuropas see A.J. Wharton’s provocative article: “Good and Bad Images from the Synagogue at Dura Europas: Contexts, Subjects, Intertexts” Art History 17 (March 1994) 1-25. Wharton’s discussion of Dura-Europas challenges the traditional, Western conception of Jews as anti-iconic and forces Western art historians, myself included, to examine their investment in the notion of the anti-iconic Jew. Whatever the inaccessible truth of the matter, the myth of Jewish Iconoclasm has persisted with such force that it seems appropriate to write about its legacy.

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29 “You are not to have any other gods before my presence. You are not to make yourself a carved-image or any figure that is in the heavens above, that is on the earth beneath, that is in the waters beneath the earth; you are not to bow down to them, you are not to serve them, for I, YHWH your God, am a jealous God ..." Exodus: 20: 3-5, The Schocken Bible: Vol. I, The Five Books of Moses, transi. Everett Fox. For further discussion of the Judaic relationship to images see Goux, “Moses, Freud, and the Iconoclastic Prescription,” 140. For a comprehensive discussion of the iconoclastic prescription, and its role for French theorists, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 546fif. 30 Fried, “Art and Objecthood," 19. 31 The context of the quote is Fried’s discussion of Manet’s particular relation to the genre of portraiture: ”... Manet had special problems with the portrait as a genre, precisely because direct confrontation of the beholder was built into it as one of its conventions; as a result the special mode of confrontation which Manet wanted his paintings to compel tended to be undercut, neutralized. Moreover, a portrait traditionally depicted the character or personality of its subject; and this too led to the wrong kind of confrontation as far as Manet was concerned — with the subject instead of with the painting as a whole (the painting as a painting, not as portrait).” See “Manet’s Sources,” 71-2n91. 32 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 16. 33 ibid., 19. Also, for a feminist, but secular critique of minimal art that also insists on minimalist anthropomorphism see Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” in Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (New York: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1992) 264-81. 34 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 16. 35 In this regard it is interesting to consider Fried’s assertion that a formal critic of modern painting is also a moral critic. See Michael Fried, “Three American Painters,” Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992) 773. 36 If Manet is the particular artist who counts for “safe looking” within the art historical framework of Michael Fried, then art history is perhaps the discipline in which that looking can

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be acknowledged. In fact, Fried’s project — the writing of art history — can be understood as evidence of a desire to attenuate the sensual, theological danger associated with an experience of the maternally-indexed, anthropomorphic image by subsuming it within a hermeneutic law. 37 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). One can read Absorption and Theatricality as an extension of the critical concerns voiced in “Art and Objecthood.” In fact, the introduction to Absorption and Theatricality notes the thematic similarities between the two texts; yet for Fried, the commonalities between his critical assessments of the 1960s and his historical account of the 1760s suggest not a personal investment in defeating a certain mode of theatrical painting, but rather the objective and historical import of the antitheatrical imperative. See Absorption and Theatricality, 5. In Fried’s defence, one might point to Absorption and Theatricality 's ample citation of Diderot in light of which it is interesting to consider Fried’s commentary on the prolific use of quotation within another art historical text. Noting Baudelaire’s unwillingness to reconcile his admiration for “Delacroix’s unembarrassed quotation of [an aesthetic] past" with his preference for a less overt historical reference, Fried observes that this contradiction is perhaps why, “at certain crucial junctures in the Salon, Baudelaire deploys quotations from the writings of others, as if in order to absolve himself, not precisely of responsibility for those quotations but, rather, of something like the full consciousness of what they say and entail.” See Fried, “Painting Memories,” 522. Without confirming or denying the possibility that an antitheatrical sentiment existed in eighteenth-century French painting, 1 will simply say that this particular paper is unconcerned with the irrecoverable “truth” of the matter, for from my point of view the task of interpreting Fried's investment in identifying and perhaps perpetuating an absorptive art historical tradition is indifferent to “historical fact.” That said, I am pleased to construct yet another parallel between Fried and Baudelaire, imagining that Fried’s profuse citation of Diderot similarly absolves him of full consciousness of his personal, and on this account blasphemous investment in the absorptive aspect of Diderot’s transcendent art criticism.

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38 For Fried’s discussion of the “Supreme Fiction” see his eponymous chapter in Absorption and Theatricality. 39 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 103-4. 40 In making the icon available as an image of worship in the house of the Lord, Christianity can be seen to condone a sublimation of maternal incest under the authority of the Father. See Goux, “Moses, Freud, and the Iconoclastic Prescription,” 138-49. For an alternative discussion of the cultural prohibition of incest see, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, transi. James Bell and John von Stunner (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969). Also, for an account of the concept of idolatry within Judaism, see Moshe Halbertal & Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, transi. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 41 Before leaving my discussion of Absorption and Theatricality^ I should note that Fried posits a second conception of painting and spectatorship alongside that of the absorptive. Called the “pastoral” and characterised by the fiction of the beholder's “entrance” into the space of representation, this mode of painting at first seems — as Fried himself notes — fundamentally at odds with Fried’s notion of absorptive painting and spectatorship. See Absorption and Theatricality, 118ff. Fried nevertheless subsumes this potential contradiction by noting that in either mode of painting the space of spectatorship is emptied of its beholder, either through the painting's indifference to the beholder, or through the beholder’s metaphoric transportation away from the space of “looking” into the space of “painting.” From my point of view, Fried’s discussion of the pastoral is fascinating, not only for its ability to surmount what might be a formidable inconsistency within Diderot’s critical project, but also for its revelation of Fried’s unshakable investment in the beholder’s absence from spectatorial space even when, or perhaps especially when that absence results from the crime of incestuous merger with the maternally-indexed image. 42 Fried, “Painting Memories,” 514. 43 Michael Fried, Reading, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 44 ibid., 61-2.

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45 ibid., 65. 46 It is in 1984 that Fried publishes “Painting Memories,” the first in a series of articles on Manet, the bulk of which reappear in some form in Fried’s recent book on the same artist. For pages that loosely correspond to “Painting Memories" in Manet’s Modernism see 164ff. 47 Fried, “Manet’s Sources," 79n258. In Manet’s Modernism Fried reprints this acknowledgement with this fascinating addendum, “My memories otMlle V... in the Costume of an Espada in particular go far, far back.” That Fried’s first memory of Manet’s painting is in fact a memory of a crossdressed female is particularly interesting to me in light of the argument that follows. See Manet’s Modernism, xxviii. 48 Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990) 224. For another account of Fried’s interpretation of Courbet see, David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University State Press, 1991) 164-9. Craig Owens situates Fried within the dawn of postmodernism and likens Fried’s work on Courbet to the Freudian task of mourning — the mourned object here being modernism. Read against my paper, Owens’ argument raises the possibility of an affinity between modernism and Christianity on the one hand, and postmodernism and Judaism on the other. See Owens, “Representation, Appropriation, and Power,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1992) 109-11. Also interesting in this regard are Singerman’s comments on the postmodern embrace of theatricality. See Singerman, “Seeing Sherrie Levine,” 103ff. 49 I should note that this language first surfaced in Fried’s “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in Nineteenth-Century French Painting,” but in that text the pessimistic rhetoric was largely directed at the inevitably theatrical representation of action; see Michael Fried, “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in Nineteenth-Century French Painting” Artforum 8 (June 1970) 36-46. In contrast, the rhetoric of Courbet's Realism is directed at the enterprise of painting as a whole and thus constitutes a more complete disillusionment with respect to the absorptive enterprise. Moreover, it seems important to point out that this pessimism resurfaced, albeit discretely,

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in the second appendix of Absorption and Theatricality in the context of a discussion of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften., in this context Fried acknowledges that there is no such thing as an absolutely antitheatrical work of art. See Absorption and Theatricality, 173. By way of a more extensive and dramatic citation, refer to the final paragraph of Courbet’s Realism. Speaking of Courbet’s Hunter on Horseback, Fried concludes: “Finally, I see the theme of tracking a wounded animal and specifically the theme of merging tracks in the snow as figuring the painterbeholder’s project of seeking to undo both distance and difference between himself and his painting ... At the same time, the temporal and spatial disjunction that hasn’t yet been closed, and perhaps also the evident threat of greater violence to come, suggest the necessary failure of that project, though not of course of the hunt itself. And what of the association between the dfops of blood, Courbet’s missing signature, and the hunter’s red scarf, an association that hints at the corporeal identity of hunter-painter and quarry? This would seem to imply that the distance and difference that can’t be overcome are also within the painter-beholder, a possibility that first emerged in my reading of the Burial. It may be that the poignant elegiac mood of the Hunter on Horseback, which as we stand before the painting comes to seem almost tangible, expresses, if not an awareness of that self-division, at any rate an intuition that death alone could bring it to an end.” See Courbet’s Realism, 290. Here I should note that the bulk of this essay was written before the publication of Manet’s Modernism. As a result, I formulated the present argument from three preliminary articles published in Critical Inquiry. Had I based my argument from its inception on Manet’s Modernism, I might have altered certain particulars — chosen different examples, used different terminology, found different emphases — although I feel fairly confident that the gist of the present argument would have remained intact. All of this is to say that I think the present argument engages with the thrust of Manet’s Modernism and therefore remains viable when read against it. Fried, “Painting Memories,” 531. ibid., 530. Michael Fried, “Manet in His Generation” Critical Inquiry

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19 (Autumn 1992) 53. Also, see Manet’s Modem ism, 235. 55 In addition to adding “idolatry” to his interpretive rhetoric, I should further note that this essay considers the possibility that the faciality of painting is essentially feminine. See “Manet in His Generation,” 69n55. 56 Fried, “Manet in His Generation,” 27ff. Also see Manet’s Modernism, 190ff. 57 Fried, Manet ’s Modernism, 196. 58 Fried, “Manet in His Generation,” 47ff. Also see Manet’s Modernism, 222ff. 59 ibid., 38. Also see Manet’s Modernism, 202. 60 ibid., 33-4. Also see Manet’s Modernism, 196. 61 That Fried’s relation to the past shifts within his examination of the generation of 1863 is interesting in light of the fact that Fried credits this generation with the historical task of advancing art from a dynamic of corporeal merger, or a realism of the body (Courbet) to one of visual separation, or as he calls it, a realism of the eye. Within the interpretive framework of this paper, I read this pictorial passage in theological terms, as a transition from a Christian, bodily realism of incestuous merger to a Jewish, ocular realism of division and distance. However, Fried is careful to point out that vision is ultimately inextricable from its corporeality, arguing that “a certain relation to the body persisted within and beyond (the ocular realism of) impressionism.” Here I see a further correlation to the argument of this paper in that an acknowledgment of Judaic origins regulates rather than eliminates the continuous presence of desire. See Michael Fried, “Between Realisms: From Derrida to Manet” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994) 1-36. Also see Manet's Modernism, 365-98. 62 Fried, “Manet in His Generation,” 53. Also see Manet’s Modernism, 265-6, 280. 63 Fried acknowledges that Manet’s rejection of absorptive thematics wasn’t entirely absolute. See “Manet in His Generation,” 53. 64 . In this regard it is interesting to consider Fried’s statement that Manet’s paintings employ a “quasi-transcendcntal relation of mutual facing” as though that particular combination of words would remain within the parameters of Jewish law while intimating something of the spirituality that permeates the Judaic immersion in day-to-day routines

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sanctified by God. See Manet's Modernism, 397. 65 Fried, “Painting Memories,” 55-7. For discussion of the ideal spectatorial distance, see “Painting Memories," 542n45. 66 Here I should like to stress that this conception of Manet has been constant throughout Fried s art historical writing. For example, Fried says this of Manet in 1965, “But Manet’s desire to make the estranging quality of self-awareness an essential part of the content of his work ... has an important consequence: namely, that self-awareness in this particular situation necessarily entails the awareness that what one is looking at is, after all, merely a painting. And this awareness too must be made an essential part of the work itself. That Ls, there must be no question but that the painter intended it to be felt; and if necessary that the spectator must be compelled to feel it.” See “Three American Painters,” Art in Theory 1900-1990, 775n2. 67 Fried, Manet 's Modernism, 405. 68 ibid., 399. 69 Here I should acknowledge Manet’s occasional flirtation with explicitly Christian subject matter — The Mocking of Christ, The Dead Christ. In terms of my argument, I would maintain that these paintings can be recuperated for a Judaic reading of Manet insofar as Manet’s “perspicuous reference to the art of the Old Masters” prevents the viewer from considering his paintings outside the grounded, temporal progression of tradition. In other words, Fried’s account of Manet’s relation to tradition does not allow for the spectatorial possibility of an a-temporal, transcendent, Christian experience of the image — even when that image is emphatically Christian in subject matter. 70 Actually, it is the publication of The Dance which is to me the most striking evidence of Fried’s novel relation to his Judaic origins. As far as I know, it is the only printed acknowledgement of Fried’s Jewishness. 71 Fried, “Painting Memories,” 522. I would like to thank Steven Z. Levine to whom 1 owe my first acquaintance with the art of Michael Fried; his support for my work made this essay possible. Additionally, my thanks to Lisa Saltzman who patiently read the present manuscript at a difficult moment in its development.

Poetry and Art Theory in Michael Fried Hans-Jost Frey translated by Georgia Albert

Michael Fried’s work is remarkable for its variety. Aside from essays on modern painting and sculpture,1 it includes three books which investigate the relation between artwork and beholder, respectively, in the eighteenth century {Absorption and Theatricality),2 at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in Courbet {Courbet’s Realism)* and in Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane {Realism, Writing, Disfiguration).4 The literarycritical study on Crane is completed and expanded by an essay on Crane, Norris, and Conrad.5 Finally, Fried has also published many poems, the most comprehensive collection of which has appeared in 1994.6 One can ask how these diverse texts belong together. With respect to the critical and theoretical texts, the answer is not difficult, since it soon becomes clear that they ask over and over the question of the relation between the work and what is outside of it (surroundings, author, painter, reader, beholder) in its many nuances. The relation between these texts and the poems is less obvious. The following reflections aim to identify such a link, although no claim at all is made that the connections that become visible are due to the author’s intention or even just present to his consciousness. Rather, what can result is an insight into the underlying unity of a mind whose way of getting involved with people, works, and things confirms and proves itself, without any need for this to happen in

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an intentional and controlled way. A chance for unity exists only where unity produces itself without the help of an opposing entity that dominates it, and that breaks it up precisely by standing in opposition to it. Several of Fried’s poems are so pithy that it seems difficult to say something about them. But precisely for this reason they bring one back to the quite simple and elementary relationships whose experience they are and tell. This decided orientation towards simplicity allows fundamental and far-reaching issues to arise from these texts. One such poem is Wartime7-. Shadows of leaves on a cement wall Tremble in the shadow of a breeze.

These lines are the description of a visual perception: leaves fluttering in the breeze cast their shadow on a cement wall. A shadow is a copy and refers back to the object by which it is cast. The cement surface that receives the shadow might be understood as a sheet of paper being written on, or better perhaps, if one takes seriously the verticality of the wall, it reminds one of a canvas being covered with paint. Against such a metaphorical interpretation of the shadow as writing or painted picture the objection could be raised that it is a natural phenomenon, different from artistic representation. Precisely this difference is decisive for the understanding of this text as a poem, but it concerns less the interpretation of the image on the cement wall than the relation of this image to its description in the poem. The poem, as description of the shadow picture, is the representation of a representation. If it were a question of mere copying or describing, the distance from what is represented would grow with each further degree of representation. But this poem is in no way simply a representation of something seen; rather, it is a transformation of the latter into a linguistic construct, whose utterance can no longer be visualised. The

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shadows of the fluttering leaves are visible; the shadow of the breeze that makes them move, however, is not. This shadow exists only in the language of the poem. It is the poem's original contribution and cannot be derived from the previous experience of an image. In the shadow picture the breeze is certainly present; not as a shadow, however, but in the trembling of the leaves, as whose cause it can be deduced by the beholder. Not the breeze, but its effects, are visible. Only in language can the invisible cast a shadow. Freeing the poem in this way from its dependence on the visual image prevents it from being reduced to what it describes, and forces one to take it seriously as what it is, namely, a text: that is, to read it with an eye for what can be experienced only in it and through it. This does not mean that thé image of which it speaks becomes unimportant. Rather, the autonomy of the poem poses precisely the question of what has happened with this image in the poem, and how it has been transformed by its transposition into language. The picture on the cement wall cannot be understood on its own terms. Since it is the shadow of its surroundings, it remains dependent on them at least to the extent that the breeze, which causes the leaves to flutter, remains excluded from it and must be supplied by the beholder. In contrast, the poem takes the breeze into the image as shadow and thus lends the image an autonomy that the scene in the realm of the visible does not have. 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. This transfer of the breeze to the inside of the shadow picture gives the latter a completeness beyond reality which allows it to distinguish itself from its surroundings as a new and distinct order. But this self-sufficiency is attained only in the poem. The fact that the shadow of the breeze makes the shadows of the leaves flutter is readable, but not visible. The poem

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transposes the perceived image in such a way that it constitutes itself as a framework that follows its own laws and cannot be explained from the perspective of another order exterior to it. This autonomy of the poem is achieved by the inclusion of the breeze into the described shadow picture, for the shadow of the breeze, although it is here attributed to the visible image, is possible only linguistically. But precisely the fact that the shadow is not possible in the realm of the visible, and that therefore what is described cannot be visualised, reinforces the autonomy of the linguistic dimension in relation to the image. Only an insufficient understanding of the poem, then, can be attained from the picture it describes. Precisely what is lacking in the picture makes it into a poem, and it is in these terms that one needs to read it. The element in the poem that cannot be translated into a mental image is what is only possible linguistically in it. This is, first of all, the shadow of the breeze. One can attempt to explain it rationally. Shadows are produced by opaque objects which do not let light through. They are an effect of such objects. The breeze, however, is not a visible, and certainly not an opaque object, but a force. As such, it has effects, consisting for example in its causing certain objects to move. This effect could be described, metaphorically, as the shadow of the breeze. But this is precisely what does not happen in the poem. It is not the trembling leaves or their shadows that are understood as the shadows of the breeze, since this would be relating in a quite ordinary way the movement inside the image to its cause outside. Rather, it is the shadow of the causing force itself that that poem incorporates into the image and which, in the image, assumes the role of the breeze: the shadow of the breeze makes the shadows of the leaves tremble. Only by transferring both the force and its effect inside the image does the poem constitute both the image and itself as an independent order. Precisely the fact that the invisible force of the breeze is not only readable from its effect, but casts a shadow in the picture in its own

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right, is the force of the poem. Through the perfectly parallel relation between “the shadows of leaves” and “the shadow of a breeze," the natural relation between the leaves and the breeze crosses over into the shadow world of linguistic representation, but in such a way that it produces itself in a wholly new manner exclusive to the poem. This relation between force and effect that is represented in the poem, but does not exist in detachment from it, functions as the force of the poem and is what makes it into a poem. The poem, then, in contrast to the shadow picture on the cement wall described in it, sets itself loose from its surroundings by taking up into itself the cause of the movement of which it speaks, thus replacing the relation toward the outside with an internal one. This process brings the poem in the proximity of certain artworks that Fried values and that he has examined in his critical writings in terms of their structure. What interests him there is always the relation of the painting or the sculpture to its surroundings and thus also to the beholder. The kind of art that turns to the beholder and in this way makes itself dependent on him is disparaged as theatrical.8 The work that stages itself, so to speak, for an entity exterior to it, remains incomplete to the extent that it depends on being seen, and needs the beholder, who brings it to completion. This is not the case with the work that ignores its surroundings and frees itself from dependence on the beholder by being an autonomous order of inner relations. The work can, for instance, take up into itself its relation to its surroundings. The best example for this is provided by Anthony Caro’s table sculptures,9 originally sculptures of small dimensions, but which have to be set up on a table not because they are small, but because some of their parts reach down below the surface of the table and prevent the sculptures from being installed on the floor. The work integrates the way in which it is installed in its own structure and thus justifies its own size. In a later phase Caro has exploited

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this principle for large sculptures as well, by including in the sculptures forms resembling tabletops, in relation to which the parts of the work are ordered. Procedures of this kind can easily be brought in relation with what happens in Fried’s poem. While the observed picture on the cement wall cannot be understood on its own terms — not just because, as shadow, it is not independent, but because the breeze, which explains its motion, is not present in it — the image transposed into the poem contains in itself all the relationships that are necessary to understand it. The closure that is thus attained excludes the reader from any collaboration on the poem, in the same way as the beholder of a work that does not pay attention to him is in some ways banished from it. But this exclusion can at any moment turn into its opposite. This instantly becomes clear if one considers that precisely because one can no longer gradually approach the work the way one would an object, the only way to have access to it is to enter it and perform one’s understanding from inside. Reading is this performance. The poem does not sketch a picture opposite which one can stand; rather, it takes place as a movement of language, and the only way to experience it is to go along with this movement. In just the same way a Caro sculpture is not an object, but the whole of the relations that obtain among its parts.10 One performs an understanding of art; one cannot experience it as an object. The artwork that excludes the beholder takes him entirely inside itself at the same time, and precisely through its refusal to be approached from the outside. The performance of understanding from the inside is the experience of the work’s autonomy. The relations that establish themselves in it produce at every moment an awareness of the whole between whose elements they are at play. Thus it makes no difference from which perspective one looks at one of Caro’s sculptures, because they are completely present from every angle. This presence, enabled by inner continuity and coherence, lifts

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the experience of the work out of time. Or better: the inner order of the work creates its own time, a time that frees it from the time outside, in which the perception of objects takes place. Talking about music, Schelling gave the “transformation of the accidental character of succession into necessity” the name of rhythm; “through [rhythm] the whole is no longer subject to time, but rather contains time within itself,”11 Although Fried does not talk about rhythm, this concept does seem to capture adequately his understanding of the autonomous order as the continuous presence of the art-whole. The poem Inside the Trap12 can be read in terms of the w'ay in which rhythm is produced and threatened in it. “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 wolfs body As I ran, cradled in speed and hunger, Across the sleeping fields Or the hot hare dying without a wound Between my long jaws?”

The poem is between quotation marks and is thus to be understood as the reported speech of the severed leg of the wolf, left inside the trap. The poem is not the description of a situation from a distance; it speaks from the trap, and thus re-performs the experience that it reports. Not only the leg of the wolf is inside the trap, but also the writer who identifies with it and, by speaking in its name, allows it to take on the role of the speaking “I.” This relationship suggests clearly its reversibility: not only does the writer put himself in the leg’s place, but the leg

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stands for him, too. The poem could then be read as an allegory of writing. Such a reading would be supported by the fact that the leg in question is the wolfs right foreleg, which suggests a relation to the writing hand, and that the blood stains on the snow can be understood as an allusion to writing. Fried himself, writing on Courbet, interprets blood tracks in snow as a possible representation of the act of painting, which is also evoked in other scenes in which something coloured falls on a white background.13 The difficulty in reading Inside the Trap in this way arises because the writing hand appears here as a severed limb, as though writing had an at first obscure connection with mutilation. The isolated limb is a fragment, and the fracture separates connected elements, destroys an order, and in this way disrupts the coherent wholeness of the complete body. If the poem that is produced through an act of writing is understood as a coherent whole, as Fried’s theory of art suggests, then the question arises of why the relation between the poem and the act of its production is a torn one. In his critical texts, Fried pursues this question in a variety of contexts, by reading paintings and texts for the way in which they confront the material conditions of their production. In several of Courbet’s paintings one can sense the attempt to overcome, as much as possible, the distance between the painter and the painting. In some cases, certain objects that are represented in the perspective space of the painting are moved so close to the lower margin, that is, to the surface of the canvas, that the painter standing before the painting almost steps into the imaginary space of the image. Sometimes, the painter imagines and represents himself in this space in the attitude that he has with respect to the painting while working on it. It is not so much self-portraits as figures that are wholly or partly shown from the rear, or whose hand position can recall that of a painter holding a paintbrush. Fried understands this attempt to bring the act of painting

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into the painting itself as a manifestation of the wish to resist the structure of opposition that characterises every relation to objects and to overcome the theatricality that characterises the dependence on the spectator, a theatricality without which the painting can be neither painted nor observed.14 The resulting representation of the act of painting in the picture has an oddly paradoxical status. By taking up into itself the activity of painting, the picture draws attention to it, but the aim of this thematisation is precisely to shield the picture against its relation to its own being painted, which is a relation toward the outside and therefore theatrical in nature. This tension between the need to show and the underlying wish to hide is the reason why the act of painting is not usually shown in unmistakable form, but is mostly alluded to in a shrouded manner. This is also the reason why the interpretation of such allusions is impossible to prove; at most it can be shown to be plausible, and in several cases other interpretations are possible.15 One can recall here the shadow of the breeze in the poem Wartime, with which something that is actually a cause of the image is brought into the image itself. Here too one can think of a shrouded representation of the production of the poem. But the rhythmic autonomy of poem and painting depends precisely on the fact that the integration of the act of production into the work is veiled; otherwise the structure of the work would crack. The metaphorical allusion attempts to avoid this. It remains to ask what such a crack would imply. Michael Fried’s main thesis is that the artwork is antitheatrical, which means that it strives to overcome its own characteristic as object; that is, it is not concerned with what is outside it, but constitutes itself as an internally consistent structure of relations. This thesis, already formulated in the early essays on modern art, is reaffirmed in the analysis of eighteenth-century paintings and Diderot’s art theory and later tested on Courbet, Eakins and Manet; it also leaves its mark on Fried’s

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interpretation of literary texts. The artwork’s characteristic as object threatens to take the upper hand whenever the work is in relation to something that stands opposite it. This relation is unavoidable at the two moments of its production and its perception. Painter and beholder, author and reader are entities outside the work that enter into a relation with it which the work cannot escape. It can come into existence only because it is produced by a force exterior to it. The imaginary world of the painting and the fictional world of the text are not autonomous to the extent that they originate through a specific, externally controlled arrangement of material elements. The painting or writing act that performs this does not simply disappear without remainder in the result of its production. By being dependent on this act, the work maintains a relationship towards the outside, through which it remains object-like and theatrical. When Courbet paints as though he were stepping into the space of the painting, this is his attempt to break the connection of the work to the outside by moving the outside, in some way, into the painting, in order to make the one disappear inside the other. Stephen Crane, in whose work Fried finds a conspicuous accumulation of metaphorical representation of the wxiting act, is struggling with the same problem. With obsessive insistence, his texts evoke over and over again the materiality of writing. Writing, however, is what makes possible the fictional network of relations and is thus exterior to it; to the extent that it is thematised, it disrupts the coherence of the fiction. Out of the wish to preserve, unbroken, the wholeness of the fiction, arises the tendency that runs counter to that towards thematisation: to make the writing act elude attention and render it unrecognisable through metaphorical veiling. The undeciphcred metaphor can be integrated seamlessly in the fictional context, yet, when recognised, it is nonetheless able to represent the writing act, so that the latter, although it remains outside the fiction, is at the same time part of it.16

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The writing act shows itself here as the critical bridge between the work and what is outside it. It is taken into the work in order to render the work independent from the outside, yet it is suppressed because it breaks into the order of fiction as an extraneous element. This brings us back to Inside the Trap. The hand that writes is in the trap. It remains caught in that from which its writing frees itself. In favour of such an allegorical reading one can say at least that it is akin to the way in which Fried interprets paintings like Courbet’s Les cribleuses de blé or La curée. In the end, the only possible criterion for the admissibility of such interpretations is that the text or painting permit them and that it is enriched by them. The gnawed-off leg of the wolf in Fried’s poem unifies in itself irreconcilable elements. On the one hand, it is a piece of meat — “the piece of meat tha’t fell/Onto the bloody snow’’ — and as such has the materiality of the dead object; on the other, it is the metonymical evocation of the powerful grace of the hunting animal to whom it used to belong. The second part of the poem performs the transition from the bloody lump of meat to the rhythmically balanced, selfsufficient image of the wolf. What is represented here is the coming into being of rhythmic order, which both takes into itself and also expels from itself the act that engenders it. The image that takes shape in memory is that of the wolf rocking in its own motion: “The rocking motion of my wolfs body/As I ran, cradled in speed and hunger, /Across the speeding fields ...” According to the fiction posited in the first line of the poem, the speaking “1” here is the leg in the trap. But it is not certain whether this fiction can still be preserved at this point. The expression “my wolfs body” is ambiguous. It can mean “the body of my wolf.” In this case, the leg that has remained in the trap remembers the animal whose part it was. This is the usual and harmless way of reading which retains the difference between the remembering part and the remembered whole as well as the distance between them. But it can also mean “my, a wolfs, body.” In this

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case, the remembering entity coincides with what is remembered and is subsumed in it. It is no longer the severed leg that speaks, but the wolf with which it identifies itself in its act of remembrance. While one can still refer the words “as I ran” to the leg which has an important task in the animal’s forward motion, this is no longer possible with the phrase “my long jaws” in the final line. The jaws can only be the wolf’s, who has now overcome his mutilation and regained his wholeness. The completeness of the restored animal, however, is illusory to the extent that it is based on forgetting the remembrance. The wolf resuscitates only to the extent that the trapped leg forgets its present situation and disappears in its remembrance. The overcoming of the temporal distance that is linked to this can be read, in the poem, out of the fact that “I ran” still refers to the past, while everything that follows it, and most of all the verb form “dying,” can no longer be attached to a specific time. The forgetting of remembrance is, put in terms of writing, the erasure of the act of creation in the interest of the integrity of the fiction. If the writing hand stands for this act, the movement of the poem is the process of its elimination, whose success enables the construction of an intact fiction. What is particular to this poem, however, is that the writing hand which would disrupt the closure of the fiction appears in it as severed. This thematisation of the process that is supposed to prevent the disruption of the fiction introduces into the poem precisely the break whose overcoming it is supposed to represent. The fiction of the poem, thus mutilated and sore, can be healed only if the thematised writing hand is united with the fiction it creates by being now really forgotten. This occurs in the second half of the poem, where the hand forgets itself as the remembering, writing instance in the written remembrance and precisely in this way, as forgotten, is able to enter the whole. The forgetting of writing proves to be the condition of the poem. The poem’s artistic unity is finally not the result of a mastered skill, but of a

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forgotten one. Forgetting himself, the writer enters what he has written and is lost there. The absorption of the remembering entity in the remembrance, the writer’s becoming one with what he has written, is apparently a supreme state of being and an expression of productive energy for Michael Fried. The emblematic representation of this energy in the poem Inside the Trap is the wolf. It is in just the same way that Fried understands the representations of animals that take on exceptional importance in Géricault, one of his favourite painters. The animal, fully one with itself, escapes theatricality because it has no distance from itself and is completely absorbed in the rhythmic performance of his movement. Thus it becomes a privileged theme for the painter and allows for the tightly coiled closure of the artwork: “... the representation of animals, whether active or in repose, provided Géricault with something like a natural refuge from the theatrical, as if for him the relation of animals to their bodies and to the world precluded the theatricalizing of that relation no matter what.”17 The relation of the animal to its body finds its counterpart in the repeatedly endeavoured fusion of artist and work. This fusion is nowhere clearer than in Géricault’s Mazeppa, whose two versions Fried chose as illustrations to his poems. The human body fettered to the horse is at the same time deprived of power and entirely one with the power of the animal, with which he appears to have grown into one. The linguistic version of this animalistic superhumanness is delivered by the poem Powers18-. Our bodies are the closed eyes of a single animal, Our states of mind so extreme they are the same. Like the arts, we lend each other new powers.

The animal is the packed power in which the bodies are bound together. They experience themselves as the closed eyes of the animal, because the binding power is neither directed towards the outside, nor does it receive

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something from the outside, but operates in the closure of the structure in which the two bodies become part of a superordinate whole. The extreme state of mind that accompanies this union frees them from their separate self-sufficiency and allows them to disappear into the relationship from which they gain the power that brings them together. The final line of the poem indicates that the erotic relationship also signifies that of the arts, which help each other unfold their common middle in their separate appearance.

NOTES Among others, “Art and Objecthood’’ Artforum (Summer 1967) 12-3; “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s new Paintings” Artforum (November 1966) 18-27; “Caro’s Abstractness” Artforum (September 1970) 32-4; Morris Louis, Text by Michael Fried (New York: Harry N. Abrams, New7 York, [1970J). 2 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980). 3 Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). 4 Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 5 “Almayer’s Face: On 'Impressionism' in Conrad, Crane, and Norris” Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990) 193-236. 6 Michael Fried, To the Center of the Earth (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994). 7 ibid., 34. 8 Cf. for example "Art and Objecthood,” 15: “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theater; and theater is now the negation of art.” 9 “Caro’s Abstractness.” 10 “Art and Objecthood,” 20: “The mutual inflection of one element by another, rather than the identity of each, is what is crucial ... 'Ihe individual elements bestow significance on

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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.” Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter, 3rd supp. vol. (Munich, 1959) 144. Fried, To the Center of the Earth, 11. Fried, Courbet's Realism, about Hunter on Horseback, 288: “So for example 1 see a figure for the art of painting in both the tracks and the blood in the snow, but even more than is usual what gives this reading such plausibility as it has is the recall of other works, notably the Wounded Man and the Wheat Sifters, in which a not dissimilar imagery plays a comparable role ...”; 152: “But whereas the smashing of large stones into a profusion of smaller ones in the Stonebreakers appears to bear no relation to the physical production of a painting, the kneeling figure in the Wheat Sifters deposit« a steady shower of grain onto a whitish ground cloth, an action that invites being read, once the context I have been elaborating is even tentatively accepted, as a representation of the project of transporting and applying paint to canvas.” In Courbet's Realism, 132, Courbet’s aim in certain early paintings is characterised as follows: “to absorb the painterbeholder as if bodily into the painting; and to do this, so I have argued, at least partly in the interests of combating theatricality at a basic level — that of beholding as such, of the impersonal or objective conditions constitutive of the very possibility of spectatorsbip. (A beholder literally absorbed into the painting, made physically one with it, would no longer be a beholder in any meaningful sense of the term.)” In Courbet’s Realism, this necessarily unsure status of the interpretation is discussed in various ways (for example, 266 and 288). Cf. Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, esp. 119 ff. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 24. Fried, To the Center of the Earth, 35.

An Interview With Michael Fried Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross 1. “Art and Objecthood” and its interlocutors

TR: In “Art and Objecthood” you distinguish the kind of spectatorship encouraged by modernist art from that fostered by minimalist practices. For example, when making Tony Smith’s account of his drive along the unfinished New Je/sey Turnpike analogous to the viewing experience produced by minimalist art, you write: It is the explicitness, that is to say, the sheer persistence with which the experience presents itself as directed at him from the outside [on the turnpike from outside the car] that simultaneously makes him a subject — makes him subject — and establishes the experience itself as something like that of an object, or rather, of objecthood.1

I understand this as suggesting that the literalism of minimalist art produces a viewing subject whose capacity to make decisions and judgments is stymied by a passively receptive relation to external demands and received ideas. Allied to this is the inference that with minimalism a critical subject of modernist art is replaced by a spectator satisfied that they have direct access to an empirical object or experience. Again this implies the evacuation of any potential for criticism or doubt. Is this a reasonable summary of your argument? Do you still hold these views? If so, could you elaborate on why you were disturbed by this aspect of minimalism, and how do you situate your argument in relation to another view of minimalist art that sees it making the spectator

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aware that they are a participant in a staged situation? Also could you amplify the political resonances, if any, of your description of the viewing experience produced by minimalist work?

MF: You ask about my account in “Art and Objecthood” of the viewing subject of minimalism — I didn’t mean to suggest that such a subject was “stymied” in his/her capacity to make decisions and judgments but I did think (and tried to say) that he or she was absolved from responding to the modernist work of art’s posing the question of conviction (to put this as succinctly as possible). Of course, as I observed at the time, what takes the place of the demand for conviction is, in part, “making the spectator aware that they are a participant in a staged situation.” But I didn’t see the value or even the deep interest of that experience then, and to tell the truth I don’t now. I’m leery of saying anything about the political resonances of all this — that is, I might point to Tony Smith’s admiration for Nazi drill-grounds, but someone else might counter that my views are elitist (Donald Kuspit, that mighty mind, once called them fascistic) and that the “situational” aspect of minimalism implies a spectator trained to be critically aware of his/her circumstances in the broadest sense of the term — in short it’s a morass. I know it goes against contemporary doxa to say this, but I don’t think politics bears on the issue at all. TR: Something that strikes me about the discussion that followed a 1987 Dia Foundation forum on “Theories of Art after minimalism and Pop” is that a number of respondents to your paper expected repentance on your part regarding your aesthetic judgments in the late 1960s. For instance, Benjamin Buchloh implies that you should recant because the modernist practices you supported in the late 1960s have been invalidated or marginalised by the alternative path(s) contemporary art has taken since

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that time. This infers that history has proved you wrong and casts your allegiances in the late 1960s as anachronistic in the late 1980s. What intrigues me is your insistence on keeping the anachronism of your stance on record, despite conceding some shortcomings of “Art and Objecthood” in retrospect.2 Why do you feel it important to, as you say, stand by “Art and Objecthood” even now as it is written?

MF: Apropos of the discussion after the 1987 Dia Foundation forum, yes, there was a general sense that (as you put it) “history has proved me wrong,” and how can I protest that it hasn’t? Everything I stood out against went on to triumph, and everything I most believed in came to be regarded as invalid or marginal (to use your terms). But of course I continue to think that it’s history that’s wrong, not “Art and Objecthood,” by which I mean that I have found little to admire in the art that’s dominated the scene for the past twenty-five years and that I continue to believe that the artists I championed have done most of the work that really matters during that time. In that sense my stance doesn’t feel “anachronistic” at all. The serious weakness of my position, as I said in the open discussion after the Dia forum, is that I can’t point to a comparable group of significantly younger painters and sculptors (men and women in their thirties and forties, say) who seem to me of equivalent distinction to Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, Olitski, Caro, Stella, and Poons. But this isn’t to say there aren’t outstanding painters and sculptors in that general “line” working today, artists whose achievements far outstrip those of their more successful contemporaries. But perhaps more important than the issue of a proper “succession” to the artists I champion in my art criticism is what I see as an increasing desire on the part of artists in several media to produce works that call for and reward sustained and intensive looking instead of merely resting content with stating a theoretical/ ideological position. Jeff Wall’s lightboxes, James Welling’s

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photographs, and Joseph Marioni’s monochrome paintings all belong to this development, which I find deeply encouraging. What relation their work bears to the issues elaborated in “Art and Objecthood” is an open question. (The last three sentences were added to this text in late May 1998.)

2. Shifts and continuities in your conception of art history and modernism

JB/MR: Throughout your work the dialectic is generally the mode by which you characterise the way modernist painting undergoes a process of change through radical self-criticism. In your early work you acknowledged a renovating tendency in modernist art while privileging a continuous historicist model. Yet in your most recent book on Manet’s art you increasingly stress disjunction, thus forcing a recognition of a “plurality of modernisms.”3 (a) What is the significance of this increased emphasis on disjunction and does it constitute a rethinking of the role of the dialectic in your work? (b) Furthermore, does Manet’s art bring your prior understanding of modernism into crisis in particular ways that requires this recognition of discontinuity? If so, does this emphasis on discontinuity significantly recharacterise modernism after Manet? MF: Let me begin by saying something about the notion of the dialectic. It’s true that when I started out writing art criticism in the early and mid-1960s I found such a notion an immensely attractive tool for characterising the development of the stretch of modernist painting I was thinking about. And it’s also true that there’s a sense in which my account of the evolution of a central antitheatrical tradition within French painting between the mid-eighteenth century and Manet might be called

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dialectical, in that I describe the work of a succession of major figures — painters and critics — as responding to the changing terms of a single ongoing problematic. But in the first place, I moved away from the Greenbergian notion of modernism as radical self-criticism (in the sense of testing and discarding outworn conventions in pursuit of the irreducible essence of painting) as long ago as 1966. And in the second, my art historical writings have no stake whatever in the idea of the dialectic as such, at least 1 don’t think they do. In fact in the coda to Manet’s Modernism I stress the way in which something like Nachträglichkeit structures the triads Chardin-GreuzeDavid and Courbet-Manet-Impressionists with respect to the issues that concern me, a development that, although perhaps not fundamentally at odds with a notion of the dialectic, nevertheless complicates it. Another way of putting this is that from the first my account of those developments has stressed both continuity and disjunction (this in itself is “dialectical”), so what you call an increasing emphasis on disjunction in my Manet book does indeed have to do with the fact that I see Manet as the figure in whose art the entire antitheatrical project was forced to confront its impossibility; that is, was forced to acknowledge as never before the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld. I won’t rehearse those arguments here, but my claim in Manet’s Modernism is that in Manet’s paintings of the 1860s the antitheatrical tradition that had begun more than a century earlier came to a close, which however is not to say that after him the issue of the beholder or even of antitheatricality simply disappeared as a problem from ambitious painting. But the impressionist redefinition of the aims and essence of painting means that later manifestations of that problem can no longer be understood in terms of a single overarching narrative (they no longer lend themselves to a “dialectical” account), and it also means that the absorption-versustheatricality dyad that had been conceptually in force

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since Diderot and Greuze can no longer be taken as organising the relevant discursive field.

JB&MR: In Manet’s Modernism a three-part hinge-like structure is central to your characterization of the process of historical change. A concept borrowed from Derridean deconstruction, the hinge denotes key moments in which a new tradition both separates and connects from the paintings which precede it.4 You specify two key instances in which a hinge-structure operates: the first between Chardin, Greuze and David which inaugurates the antitheatrical tradition and the second between Courbet, Manet-plus-generation of 1863 and Impressionism which articulates the shift from pre-modernism to modernism. (a) Would you clarify the role of the hinge in relation to the dialectical model — does the hinge disrupt the dialectic or does it in any way modify your conception of historical change as mapped out by the dialectical model?

MF: Yes, as I’ve said, the three-part hinge-like structure, because of its relation to the issue of Nachträglichkeit, does at least complicate the dialectical model which nevertheless is loosely in force throughout my trilogy. As for Derrida, I wasn’t actively thinking of his work when I used the notion of a three-part hinge: what impelled me to it was my growing realisation that although Manet’s paintings of the 1860s marked a break with what had gone before, he became identifiable as the first modernist painter or even the first great simplifier (the avatar of flatness, etc.) only from the perspective of the radical (also the immediately intelligible) formal innovations of the early Impressionists, innovations which themselves proved crucial to the discursive field of what came to be called modernist painting. So that if one wants to locate the advent of modernist painting it’s neither Manet alone nor Impressionism alone but the two together in this recursive way, to which we can also add Courbet, Manet's predecessor, as the initiator of the modern movement

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generally. Similarly, at the outset of the antitheatrical tradition the innovations of Greuze may be seen to “activate” structures that were already present in Chardin’s genre paintings but that didn’t yet bear the significance they came to assume in the 1750s and after (I already made this point in Absorption and Theatricality), plus it was only with David’s history paintings of the 1780s that the antitheatrical project became installed at the heart of the pictorial enterprise in a way that, again partly recursively, justifies the word “tradition” (not an ideal term but a useful approximation). I said a moment ago that I wasn’t thinking of Derrida when I worked this out, though of course that’s not to deny that starting in the mid-1970s his writings have been extremely important to me. But is it certain that my account of the hingelike structures in Manet's Modernism isn’t consistent, more or less, with Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on the dialectic in an essay like “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” which I read in French in my early twenties and which made a lasting impression on my thinking? I say a lot more about that essay in the introduction to a selection of my early art criticism, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. [In fact Fried’s book was published in early 1998 — eds.) (b) Given that the hinge-structure calls into question any “absolute distinction”5 between one tradition and another, if you were to undertake a deconstructive reading of your art criticism of the 1960s would you see a hinge operating in the work of the American abstract expressionists, or indeed in late twentieth-century art?

MF: What are the implications of the hinge-idea for my art criticism of the 1960s? Here too I have no stake in the idea of the hinge as such but it occurs to me that in “Shape and Form,” “Art and Objecthood," Morris Louis, and other writings of those years two painters, Pollock and Stella, emerge as hinge-figures of different kinds: Pollock between

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abstract expressionism and color-field painting, in that I claim that my “optical” interpretation of his all-over drip pictures of 1947-50 was made possible by the work of subsequent figures such as Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, and Olitski, and Stella between modernist painting and minimalism (or literalism), in that his stripe paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s lent themselves to a literalist reading even as they remained within the bounds of painting, an act of restraint given added force, again by Nachträglichkeit, by the perspicuous “paintingness” of his irregular polygons of 1966 (the hinge metaphor functions differently here but it still seems appropriate). Would I still want to draw an “absolute distinction” between modernist painting and sculpture on the one hand and literalist objecthood on the other? My answer is that, even at the time, the distinction I drew between the two was ontologically absolute but historically more complex: modernism and literalism were seen as implacable foes even as the literalist Weltanschauung was understood as based on a Greenbergian reading of the recent history of modernist painting, which is to say as finding support not only in painting “itself’ but also in two master texts of recent modernist theory “Modernist Painting” and “After Abstract Expressionism.” This is why my critique of literalism inevitably entailed a critique of those essays — as you well know. (I say more about all this too in the introduction to Art and Objecthood.6} No doubt there is room for deconstructive readings of my essays of those years, as Steve Melville has brilliantly shown. But I’d hope that those readings would try to acknowledge the complexity of what I actually wrote rather than settling for a crude caricature (Melville’s work is exemplary in that respect). TR: For those who might still see your work as predominantly formalist, your approach in the books on Courbet and especially Manet would be surprising. With your focus on the historical vagaries of the pictorial

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paradigms of “absorption” and “theatricality” you map out a discursive context of production and reception for the work of each artist. In fact, as you suggest in the Manet book, the discursive setting (here the decade of the 1860s) is often given more attention than the formal features of Manet’s paintings. Could you talk about why you have approached the study of Manet in this way? Is there something about Manet’s art that calls for a discursive orientation?

MF: I’d hope that those who think of my work predominantly as formalist have been surprised by my books on Courbet and Manet, and indeed by my approach in Absorption and Theatricality and for that matter in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. In fact nothing frustrates me more than being called a formalist by people who probably haven’t read anything I’ve written since Three American Painters. I won’t go into the whole vexed topic of formalism here, but yes, the central aim of my antitheatrical trilogy has been to lay out a kind of prehistory of modernism by “mapping out a discursive context of production and reception” keyed to the problem of the relation between painting and beholder for a succession of major and lesser artists between Greuze and Manet (to forget the hinges for the moment). The first and third books in particular pay special attention to the art criticism of their respective moments (throughout the period art criticism in France bore a close relation to the art it treated, which makes that criticism invaluable to the historian), and in Manet's Modernism I delay a certain confrontation with Manet’s painting until I have developed an account of the work of other artists of his generation, notably Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Alphonse Legros. You ask why I approached Manet in this way, and the answer is because I came to believe that current interpretations (including Greenberg’s modernist one) of his art and specifically of his seminal pictures of the 1860s were largely based on an impressionist view of

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his achievement, and that in order to dissolve the hold of that view it was necessary to reconstruct Manet’s relation to the collective “project” of his generation as regards the ongoing problematic of painting and beholder that by then had reached a point of severe crisis. Another factor was the realisation that Manet’s pictures of the 1860s were unintelligible to their contemporary viewers to an extent that it’s difficult for anyone today to imagine, and that therefore what needed to be done was in a sense to recover the precise terms of that unintelligibility by reinserting the pictures in their original discursive and pictorial context, which of course involved seeking to make the context itself intelligible as never before. Put slightly differently, Manet’s canvases of the 1860s have long been considered among the most singular paintings in all modern art — but the nature of their singularity has been misconstrued partly because no one ever tried to understand the basis of that singularity in their own time, which is what I attempt to do in Manet's Modernism. TR: In Manet’s Modernism you introduce a concept of a “remainder” of art historical discourse. You nominate certain details within Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, View of the Races at Longchamp and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe that have resisted hermeneutic "penetration” in terms of the paintings’ nineteenth-century reception and your own study of them. I'm interested in the status of this “remainder,” a motif that you attribute in a footnote to Jacques Derrida.7 Although you locate this surplus of meaning empirically — within Manet's paintings — could it not also function as a theoretical device that registers a limit to historical discourse whether it be conceived as continuous, disjunctive or both? Also, could the “opacity” that you impute to some of Manet's paintings, a surplus that resists and therefore begs future interpretation, operate as a criterion for the judgment of quality? MF: About the notion of a “remainder” as it figures in Manet’s Modernism, I meant it as a way of characterising

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Manet’s paintings, not as a “global” theoretical device of the sort you describe. And I don’t imagine it implying anything at all with respect to the question of quality. TR: Despite an often generous response to your art historical studies, some art historians have been critical of your style and method in Courbet’s Realism and Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, on Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. It has been asserted that your “invented” categories of “absorption” and “theatricality” synthesise incommensurable fields of art history, while your imposing authorial voice has been said to overpower that of the work you are studying. What is your response to this kind of criticism? Also, how would you distinguish the latter criticism from that you level at Jean Clay in Manet’s Modernism, that is, his tendency to interpret Manet’s art through, as you put it, “... later developments and theories (Pop Art, Benjamin on aura) ...”?8 MF: There are two or maybe three separate criticisms here. In response to the first, my answer is that I have taken pains to use the absorption/theatricality opposition only in my work on French painting between the mid­ eighteenth century and Manet (in fact the terms themselves remain useful for describing certain subsequent painting, Caillebotte’s for example, even if the opposition in its “classic” form no longer holds as it did earlier). I do feel free to speak of absorptive painting in connection with Eakins, or more recently with Caravaggio (I’m fascinated by what I see as the strong link throughout much Western painting between absorption and realism), but in both cases absorption is not opposed to theatricality: in my chapter on Eakins the question of theatricality simply doesn’t arise, while in the case of Caravaggio nothing could be more futile than to try to distinguish “absorptive” from “theatrical” elements in his art. By the same token, “Art and Objecthood’’ and related writings of the 1960s deprecated minimalism as theatrical

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but in those essays nothing whatever is said of absorption — the contrasting term is antitheatrical (also presentness) which isn’t at all the same thing. As for the charge that these are wholly invented terms, it wouldn’t trouble me if they were so long as they seemed to me justified by the works themselves, but in fact my entire account of the struggle against theatricality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting is anchored in a reading of the art criticism of the time (also of Diderot’s writings on theatre of the 1750s) — so at least as far as my trilogy is concerned, the charge of invention falls to the ground. The charge that “my authorial voice overpowers that of the works I study” is a somewhat different matter: if someone actually feels that it does (as distinct from merely saying that it does as a means of not engaging with my art historical arguments), who am I to tell them that they’re wrong? But of course my view of the matter is altogether different: I would say that what I am doing is bringing all my perceptual, intellectual, and, yes, rhetorical energies to bear on the task of making historical sense of the art in question — and besides, the works I deal with invariably strike me as powerful enough in their own right not to need to be treated with kid gloves. In fact when I am reading other art historians the only thing I ever feel “overpowers” (though maybe “underpowers” is more like it) the works in question is a failure of vision, or intelligence, or rhetorical energy, or indeed all three, on the part of the interpreter. So I can’t really take that complaint about my work other than as a compliment. In this connection, my criticism of Jean Clay’s very intelligent essay on Manet is not that he interprets Manet’s art from a point of view informed by later developments and theories, which not only is unavoidable but can be highly productive, but that all too often he bypasses historical inquiry in favour of simply ascribing to Manet ideas and attitudes that belong to subsequent moments in modern art or thought (Clay’s remarks on Manet’s use of sources in earlier art is a case in point). My complaint, in other

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words, isn’t that his voice “overpowers” that of Manet’s art, but that his tendency to draw unjustified parallels between that art and later developments leads him astray.

TR: You say that you have only used the absorption/ theatricality opposition in your work on French painting from the mid-eighteenth century to Manet and that in “Art and Objecthood” “nothing whatever” is said of absorption. Instead the contrasting term to the theatricality of minimalism is antitheatricality or presentness. If we turn back to “Art and Objecthood,” however, you do say there that “it is the overcoming of theatre that modernist sensibility finds most exalting and that it experiences as the hallmark of high art of our time.” You then identify cinema as one art form that entirely escapes theatrê, suggesting that: This helps to explain why movies in general, including frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility whereas all but the most successful painting, sculpture, music, and poetry is not. Because cinema escapes theatre — automatically, as it were — it provides a welcome and absorbing [my emphasis] refuge from sensibilities at war (my emphasis] with theatre and theatricality. At the same time, the automatic, guaranteed character of the refuge — more accurately, the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theatre and not a triumph over it, absorption [my emphasis] not conviction — means that cinema, even at its most experimental is not a modernist art.9

Despite the explicit qualifications you make here, doesn’t this passage suggest that absorption and a modernist sensibility at odds with theatricality are linked in some way, and therefore that something like absorption is already at work in “Art and Objecthood” well before your historical studies of French painting? If this is the case, do you see any relation between how you characterise cinema in “Art and Objecthood” and your later

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conception of absorption and realism in the trilogy of publications on French painting? Would you maintain that there are no parallels whatsoever in the way you speak of cinema in opposition to theatricality in the late 1960s and your historical research into pre-modernist art? MF: I take your point. But of course in the passage you quote absorption refers to the way movies may be said to absorb the viewer, not to the representation of absorption in movies, though it’s also true that I suggest in Absorption and Theatricality that the representation of absorption in Chardin’s genre paintings serves as a model for the (future) absorption of the viewer before the painting. So it’s probably useless for me to insist that nothing like absorption is already at work in “Art and Objecthood.” On the other hand, the contrast I draw in that essay between the automaticity of absorption in cinema and the difficulty of achieving conviction in or before works of modernist art would seem to work against the idea that absorption ca. 1760 and ca. I960 had anything like the same significance.

3. Questions of aesthetic judgment

TR: Although your thinking about Modernism appears to have shifted somewhat since the late 1960s, on the issue of aesthetic judgment you have remained consistent. Your view, reiterated in the Manet book, is that the success or failure of a work of art depends on its ability to sustain comparison with art of the past whose quality is not in doubt. My question is, does this comparative process necessarily imply medium specificity? I ask because in Manet's Modernism you observe that in “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas” Thierry de Duve endorses the “formalist criterion” of aesthetic judgment that you support, but, as you acknowledge, de Duve locates Duchamp’s readymade, Fountain, within a history of western painting, and argues for its aesthetic quality on that basis.10

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MF: Let me respond briefly. First, it isn’t quite right to say that in Manet’s Modernism I reiterate the view that the success or failure of a work of art depends on its ability to “sustain comparison with art of the past whose quality is not in doubt.” Rather, in the coda to my book I show how that idea, in its modern (or modernist) form, came into being at a particular moment, which I identify as that of Manet’s retrospective exhibition of 1884, the key text being Theodore Duret’s introduction to the catalogue. I also note that such a notion has been crucial to my own writings on modernism, and I further suggest that I see no way (for me) not to continue to subscribe to it, even as I’m forced by my own investigations to acknowledge its historical “facticity.” Isn’t that right? In any case, you ask whether the comparative process implies medium specificity, and fny short answer is that it does. The further question, I take it, is what do I make of Thierry de Duve’s arguments, which (as you note) I cite in Manet’s Modernism, to the effect that Duchamp’s readymades, which aren’t medium-specific in the ordinary sense of the term, nevertheless must be understood as responding to a major technological development in the history of painting, namely the invention and marketing of tubes of paint. My short answer is that historically speaking I find his arguments suggestive insofar as they are meant as illuminating Duchamp’s invention of the readymade. But de Duve goes on to argue that Duchamp’s great achievement was to break with the very notion of medium-specificity by establishing the category of the work of art as such, which is a different matter and for me bypasses the question of quality entirely. De Duve of course would disagree. TR: This question pertains to the category of past art whose quality is beyond doubt. I’m wondering about the infallibility and consistency of this consensus on what constitutes the best art of the past. First, how do you see this consensus being formed? And second, if we take the

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way art historical discourse “discovers” new objects - the situation of an artist, say Mary Cassatt, whose work due to the attention of feminist art history has only quite recently become a serious contender within what we might loosely accept as a lineage of exemplary modernist artists - how would a case like this fit within the category of past art whose quality is not in doubt? In other words can a heretofore unacknowledged art practice become part of this canon?

MF: I see this consensus being formed in all sorts of ways — more than I or anyone could possibly identify. And “can a heretofore unacknowledged art practice become part of this canon” of “past art whose quality is not in doubt”? Yes of course — but the way you phrase these questions makes me think that you are taking the idea of such a canon much too seriously or say systematically. What matters in the “sustaining comparison” notion is the idea of comparison, of a certain sort of act of evaluation, in which previous works that are regarded as exemplary provide the relatively stable term. But I want to stress that Manet’s Modernism doesn’t reiterate the comparative idea so much as it historicises it. 4. Pre-modernism

JB&MR: In the introduction to Absorption and Theatricality you reject the Marxist interpretation which claims that the emergence of a middle-class public accounts for stylistic change in the second half of the eighteenth century. Instead you claim that your account of the relationship between painting and beholder “layjs] the groundwork for a new understanding of how the ‘internal’ development of the art of painting and the wider social and cultural reality of France in the last decades of the Ancien Régime were implicated and so to speak intertwined with one another.”11 As far as we are aware noone has taken up the challenge of formulating this new

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linkage that you envisage between the painting-beholder relation (absorption and theatricality) and the “wider social reality.” If this paradigm of representation is to be brought into play in the study of eighteenth-century European painting, how would it transform current notions of the social history of art?

MF: Your question is a pertinent one, given my remarks in the introduction to Absorption and Theatricality, but I can’t begin to answer it here. (De Duve tells me that he is currently at work on an account that focuses on the Salons as a mediating arena between the problematic I analyze and the “wider social reality.”) What I can say is that if I am right the issue of beholding was central to a significant body of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting, and that to the extent that that issue is neglected by the social history of art, the latter inevitably simplifies the works in question, which is also to say that it risks treating them less as paintings than as painted images (a tendency in no way confined to social art history: one of the deepest, most systemic weaknesses of art history as a field consists precisely in this). Exactly how the issue of beholding relates to the social and political context is a question for historical investigation, and it may well be that at certain moments no clear-cut answer to that question can be given, but at certain other moments the problem of theatricality seems directly charged with political significance. So for example I have argued that the rise to power of Napoleon and the concomitant demand for propagandistic painting, which is to say for painting that depicts deeds meant to be beheld, in effect delayed the onset of a “crisis” of beholding for roughly a decade. (Or to turn this around, the struggle against theatricality had only to be bracketed for “Davidian” painting to lend itself perfectly to Napoleon’s purposes.) A terrific recent book that brings together a concern with social and political history and a sensitivity to questions of beholding is Martha Ward’s

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Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the AvantGarde (Chicago, 1996). Ward is a former student of mine as well as an admirer of the work of T.J. Clark, and her evident belief that it isn’t necessary to choose between us or our respective emphases is perhaps a harbinger of more such work to come.

JB/MR: In considering the broader significance of Courbet’s “femininity” for feminist art histories one of the important issues is the relationship between the painterbeholder’s merger and subsequent modes of beholding. Your reading of Sleep suggests that there is a clear distinction between the painter-beholder’s desired merger (the overcoming of gendered oppositions) and the distanced position of subsequent viewers, and as you state the merger serves as a “new and powerful technology for the production of erotic, even semi-pornographic effects” for contemporary male viewers.12 In contrast, your reading of Woman with a Parrot suggests that the metaphors for the painter-beholder's merger potentially disrupt patriarchal conventions of masculine spectatorship and yet there is an ambiguity about your conclusions on this issue. On the one hand in noting the unusual orientation of the woman’s body and her disquieting expression you suggest that this painting struggles against the conventions of this genre that offers male viewers distanced, perspectival command of the visual field. On the other hand, you later state that the painting’s overall effect is not “significantly different” from other contemporary paintings of the same genre.13 Would you clarify the implications of your reading ot Woman with a Parrot for our understanding of masculine spectatorship? On a general level does the quasicorporeal merger in Courbet s images of women have the potential to disrupt conventional masculinist viewing relations? MF: My larger point about Courbet’s nudes of the 1860s, notably Sleep and the Woman with a Parrot, was

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that they too demonstrate in different ways the force of Courbet’s desire to “merge’’ with the painting before him, but that the basic conventions of the female nude allowed that desire only limited play. That is, I didn’t intend to draw a sharp distinction between Sleep and Woman with a Parrot, other than to suggest that Sleep was the more “erotic” of the two (also the more interesting pictorially) and that the effect of “eroticism” was in effect rendered all the more salient by the very dynamics of quasi-corporeal “merger,” something that doesn't quite happen, or at least not to the same degree, in Woman with a Parrot. I hope this makes sense. “On a general level does the quasi-cor­ poreal merger in Courbet’s images of women have the potential to disrupt conventional masculinist viewing relations?” My short answer is, in the “pure” nudes, including The Origin of the World, probably no. (I use the term “pure” nudes to distinguish those pictures from the figure of the naked model in the Painter’s Studio, which because of its position in the larger composition I read in altogether different terms, though as Linda Nochlin’s commentary on that picture in the Brooklyn Museum catalogue goes to show, a “masculinist” perspective on the figure of the model — hers in that essay — remains a live possibility. But I think it gets the painting wrong.) JB/MR: In Courbet’s Realism the phenomenological concept of the embodied subject is a crucial component of the painter-beholder. You claim that Courbet as painter­ beholder is “compelled” to corporeally merge with the painted world in order to overcome the primordial convention that paintings are meant to be beheld. However, as you state, your approach is not simply “phenomenological in the sense of finding in Courbet's relation to his embodiedness the ultimate meaning of his painting.”14 It seems that phenomenology is one means of overcoming theatricality but that your use of merger is more complex than the phenomenological proposition ol the coming to awareness of one’s existence in the world.

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Given that you wouldn’t describe the state of merger solely in phenomenological terms, how else would you characterise it?

MF: I would say that a phenomenological perspective allows us to recognise Courbet’s project of representing his own bodily liveness, which turns out to mean (or to be indistinguishable from) his project of trying to transport himself quasi-corporeally into the painting before him in and through the act of painting. Nevertheless, as you quote me as stating, my approach doesn’t find in Courbet’s involvement with his own embodiedness “the ultimate meaning of his painting.” I locate that in the relation of his commitment to the representation of his own embodiedness to the larger, more impersonal, indeed chronologically overarching issue of theatricality, in the sense that were it possible for the painter actually to transport himself into the canvas before him (and of course it isn’t), beholding as such would necessarily come to an end: the painter or, as in my book on Courbet I prefer to call him, the painter-beholder would no longer be “this” side of the picture surface looking on but rather would be incorporated within (the self-portraits) or disseminated throughout (the Realist works of 1848-56) the painting itself. To put this slightly differently, the issue of theatricality “frames” Courbet’s preoccupation with embodiment and gives it a significance, a historical weight, it wouldn’t otherwise have. JB/MR: Encapsulating the significance of the act of painting you refer to Hegel’s passage of the boy throwing a rock into a river which disrupts its surface. You emphasise this analogy to reject the Narcissean model of self-representation and to promote your claims that the act of painting is about the primacy of action over seeing and that self-representation is understood in non-mimetic terms. In his review of Courbet’s Realism, Stephen Melville discusses another facet of Hegel’s analogy which

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is the notion of the child discovering himself through action.15 Does Melville’s interpretation of action as the discovery of self (hence his emphasis on metonymy or prolongation in the act of painting) play a role in your notion of merger? If not, why have you rejected this facet of Hegel’s analogy?

MF: Wait, I feel I’m being ever so slightly hustled into a corner. I take it you understand perfectly well why I interpret the marvellous Hegel passage the way I do; the notion of self-discovery seems to me to bear less immediately on Courbet’s art (though perhaps I’m wrong here); but in any case, Melville’s emphasis on metonymy or prolongation comes directly out of my account of Courbet (and Hegel), not by way of an alternative reading of either. It’s perfectly true that the notion of metonymy he introduces as a means of capturing the relationship of something like continuity between painter and painting is offered in contrast to my stress on metaphorical representations of the painter painting throughout Courbet’s art. But it’s a gloss (and a brilliant one) on my basic account of Courbet’s enterprise as seeking quasicorporeal merger with the painting, not in any sense a challenge to that account, and in any case both metaphorical and metonymic structures are in play throughout Courbet’s oeuvre. TR: In Courbet’s Realism you make the methodological point that the art historian, far from projecting his or her present interpretive horizon on the past, needs to understand past art in its own terms. Could you discuss the reasoning behind this argument? And, do you think that past art can be fully understood in its own terms either during the period of its emergence or from a retrospective point of view? MF: In response to this methodological question about my claim in Courbet ’s Realism that the art historian ought

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to try to understand past art “in its own terms,” I refer you back to my earlier remarks about Jean Clay’s essay on Manet. Everything depends on what one means by “projecting his or her interpretive horizon on the past” (your formulation, not mine). As Arthur Danto remarks in a recent review of Manet’s Modernism, “we can only revisit the past trailing with us the future [also, I would add, future methodological perspectives], which those we visit cannot have known, and which deeply separates us from them.”16 But this doesn’t mean that the attempt to understand the past “in its own terms” is misconceived or doomed to failure or anything of the kind. Rather, it’s what you might call the condition of possibility for the very project of historical understanding (there would be no such project if we were not separated from the past in the way Danto describes). Moreover, one consequence of trailing the future with us is that we are enabled to see aspects of the past that either weren’t visible at the time or that couldn’t have been described in our language but that “belong” to the past just as surely as other aspects of which, so to speak, it was aware. So for example my reading of Courbet presumes a phenomenological perspective that wasn’t available to Courbet or his contemporaries, but my claim in Courbet ’s Realism is that such a perspective allows me to bring to light an absolutely crucial dimension of his enterprise. I also try to explain why Courbet's art not only wasn't but couldn’t have been seen in these or equivalent terms in his own time (my claim is that the discourse of pictorial realism was overdetermined by various positivist/materialist assumptions in a way that, for example, the contemporary discourse of literary realism was not, or not to the same degree). Now all this is, to my mind, consistent with an attempt to understand his art “in its own terms," understanding that phrase to include the sense of what could not have been articulated at the time — and of course “framing” my account of Courbet and embodiment, as I have said, is the larger issue of theatricality, which

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demonstrably is part of the pictorial discourse of the period, even if it plays almost no role in contemporary discussions of Courbet. Manet’s Modernism, as I’m sure you realise, I make a different sort of effort to understand the past “in its own terms" in that there I’m bent on recovering the precise terms of criticism in which Manet’s paintings and those of his co-generationists were seen in the 1860s, before impressionism changed the rules of the game. But I wouldn’t want to draw too strict a distinction between my Courbet and Manet books: in the latter contemporary criticism plays a crucial role, in the former contemporary criticism is all but irrelevant because of its historically determined inability to recognise what we can now see and describe as going on in Courbet’s paintings. But in both cases the attempt at understanding is a historical one, arid in the long run both books will stand or fall on those grounds. Finally, the notion of “fully” understanding past art “in its own terms’’ is a red herring: ask yourself what it would mean to “fully’’ understand a present-day work of art, or even to “fully” understand your own situation at a given moment, and you’ll sec the problem at once. What is “full,” which is to say absolutely exhaustive, understanding? The very idea is incoherent. 5. Realism JB/MR: You have characterised both Courbet’s and Eakins’ realism as based on a non-mimetic, allegorical thematics of self-representation.17 However your reading of Eakins’ Gross Clinic emphasises “the tensions that result from his attempt to subsume” writing/drawing and painting,18 whereas (with a few exceptions) your reading of Courbet’s realism stresses that the “repudiation of drama involved an almost total rejection of conflict, opposition, and contrast both thematically and structurally.”19 How does this difference between the resulting tensions in Eakins’ efforts to achieve continuity between writing and painting and the persistent rejection

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of conflict in Courbet’s attempt to achieve the painter­ beholder’s merger impact upon the practice of self­ representation in each artist’s work? MF: You rightly note that my account of Eakins’ realism emphasises a constitutive tension between the “systems” of writing/drawing and painting, whereas my reading of Courbet’s Realism stresses the rejection of conflict, opposition, and contrast. How does this affect the practice of self-representation in each artist’s work? In a variety of ways. For example, Courbet is likely to portray himself with eyes partly or wholly shut, in some implied bodily relation to the act of painting, in circumstances that suggest a certain “oneness” with his surroundings, whereas Eakins tends to present himself as a marginal figure in somewhat complex compositions, in a tense or watchful relationship to other figures, and explicitly or allegorically involved with writing/drawing, not painting (I’m thinking of The Gross Clinic and Max Schmitt in a Single Scull).

JB/MR: Rejecting standard accounts of Courbet’s and Eakins’ oeuvre, you stress the corporeal nature of both forms of realism.20 Yet the modes of realism differ. You invoke the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to characterise the way Courbet’s paintings displace the primacy of sight in favour of the act of painting. Whereas in your reading of Eakins there is a greater emphasis on ocularity (the drama of visibility which you identify in the Gross Clinic) and the inscription of self through conflict, both of which you characterise by invoking the psychoanalytic narratives of the oedipal drama and paranoiac structures. Are there other forms of realism that stress a corporeal thematics of self-representation in nineteenth-century art that you would contrast to Eakins and Courbet?

MF:

This question is one I’ve thought about a lot. It’s

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still too soon for me to say anything coherent on the subject, but for years now I’ve been fascinated by the Berlin painter and draughtsman Adolf Menzel, and sooner or later I would like to work on him and see what happens. [Actually, I began writing a book on Menzel last summer and I hope to complete it in the Fall of 1998 — M.F., Dec. 1997 ] Another 19th-century “realist” I think about a lot is the American photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, and I would like to spend some serious time with him too.

6. Poetry

JB/MR: In your most recent poetry anthology To the Center of the Earth there are a number of motifs from your poems that can be seen to intersect with some of the central concerns of your art criticism and art historical writings. For instance, a fascination with the process of writing (“my best moments are those when in default of inspiration, my hand rests lightly on the wrist of the one who writes”;21 provocative moments of confrontation with the reader (“like a glass of wine that breaks against my teeth”;22 images of heightened sensory experience (“to crucify the already unbreathable atmosphere”).23 Given these parallels one strongly suspects that your poetry is indeed linked to your art writing. Would you discuss what you see as the similarities between these two seemingly different forms of writing: what role does your poetry play in relation to your art historical writing? MF: Yes, I agree that my poetry (which I began writing as an undergraduate at Princeton) is linked to my art writing, but I have an almost superstitious reluctance to say anything about the relation between them. What I say in the introduction to Art and Objecthood is that I feel that my poems, art criticism, and art history “share a single vision of reality” — let me leave it at that.

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7. Future research

JB/MR: Do you see ‘Manet’s Sources” first published in Artforum in March 1969 and your most recent book Manet’s Modernism as the beginning and end of your project to map the modernist and pre-modernist antitheatrical traditions? Do you consider this project at an end? MF: I see Manet's Modernism as the culmination of my project to map the pre-history of modernist painting by tracking the vicissitudes of the antitheatrical tradition between Greuze and Manet, but that doesn’t mean that I’m no longer interested in painters “belonging” to that tradition whom I’ve not yet written about at length — Géricault, for example. But I would want to have something more to say than an account of his relation to issues of beholding.

JB&MR:

What future projects are you planning?

MF: When I first responded to your questions, I had just finished compiling the selection of my art criticism I mentioned earlier, which is scheduled to appear in just a few weeks (in January 1998). At this present moment I’m putting the last touches to a long essay on Gustave Caillebotte which I’ve been presenting in lecture form for several years now; the time has come to get it out. My two larger projects, however, are the book on Menzel that I’ve just mentioned and a second book on Caravaggio, the first instalment of which has just been published in Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1997) under the title “Thoughts on Caravaggio.” In addition there is a literary-critical book that will go on from the Stephen Crane chapter in Realism, Writing, Disfiguration as well as from an essay on Joseph Conrad that I published in Critical Inquiry in 1990 to consider ten or so English-language writers between 1890 and 1914, all of whom fit a certain

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conception of what I call “literary impressionism.” (The working title is Almayer ’s Face. Rewriting Literary Impressionism.} Finally, I’ve been writing poems more or less steadily since the publication of To the Center of the Earth, and am about halfway towards completing the manuscript of a new book. — Michael Fried, Buskirk, NY August 1996 and December 1997

NOTES 1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood" in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Studio Vista, 1968) 134-5. Michael Fried et al, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop,” Dia Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987) 84. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) 410. ibid., 413. ibid., 410. Michael Fried, “An Introduction to my Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) 1-74. Fried, Manet's Modernism, 322nl62. ibid., 583nl69. Fried, “Art and Objecthood," 140. Fried, Manet ’s Modernism, 619n22. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholding in the Age of Diderot (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) 5. Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990) 209. You argue that Woman with a Parrot “struggles ingeniously if almost surreptitiously against the basic conventions of the genre, in particular against the convention that would have the woman display herself for the delection of a male viewer

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19 20 21

22 23

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located unproblematically at a distance from the painting that allows him easy command of the pictorial field.” (Courbet's Realism, 204) Fried, Courbet s Realism, 49. Stephen Melville, “Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions” Art History 14/1 (March 1991) 118. New York Times Book Review, 4 August 1996. Fried, Courbet’s Realism, 51. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1987) xiii. Fried, Courbet ’s Realism, 227. ibid., 51. Michael Fried, To the Center of the Earth (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994) 61. ibid., 5. ibid., 17.

CONTRIBUTORS Jill Beaulieu is currently a practicing artist living in Massachusetts. After several years behind the lectern teaching nineteenth-century French art, she is now behind the easel painting portraits and the figure. She has studied with Diane Panarelli Miller, Margaret McWethy, John Kilroy and Scott Ketcham. She is preparing for a show at the Plymouth Guild. Keith Broadfoot teaches in the Department of Art History

and Film Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published on Australian conceptual and contemporary art, and late modernist American painting. Rex Butler is Associate Professor in the School of

English, Media Studies & Art History at the University of Queensland. His book publications include Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999); A Secret History of Australian Art (2002); SlavojZizek: Live Theory (2005), and Borges' Short Stories (2010). He has edited two volumes on Australian art of the 1980s and 1990s: What is Appropriation? ( 1996) and Radical Revisionism (2005). Hans-Jost Frey is Professor Emeritus of Comparative

Literature at the University of Zurich and has taught at several universities in the United States. His recent publications in German include Maurice Blanchot: das Ende der Sprache schreiben (Engeler, 2007) and Dante: füfundzwanzig Lesespäne (Engeler, 2008). Two of his books, Studies in Poetic Discourse (Stanford University Press, 1996) and Interruptions (SUNY Press, 1996) have been translated into English. Michael Fried is J.R. Herbert Boone Professor in the

Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His many books include Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980); Courbet's Realism (1990); Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s ( 1996); Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment

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in Nineteenth Century Berlin (2002); Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008) anà Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (2011). He is also the author of a number of books of poetry, the most recent being The Next Bend in the Road (2004). Steven Z. Levine is the Leslie Clark Professor in the

Humanities at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Lacan Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (LB. Tauris, 2008). Stephen Melville is Professor Emeritus of the History7 of

Art at Ohio State University and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He is the author of Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (1986), Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context ( 1996), As Painting: Division and Displacement (2001, with Philip Armstrong and Laura Lisbon), and Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures (2010, with Margaret Iversen), as well as numerous articles on contemporary art and art history. James Meyer is the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics

in the Sixties (Yale University Press, 2004) and the editor of several books. Formerly Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Art History7 at Emory7 University, he is currently a curator of modern and contemporary7 art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. K. Malcolm Richards is Assistant Professor and Graduate

Critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is an art historian, art critic, curator, artist, and experimental musician in the Philadelphia area. His areas of research span nineteenth-century painting, contemporary French theory, film, and contemporary art. His publications include Derrida Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (LB. Tauris, 2008). Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor of

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British Art at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, Duke, 2007 and has co-edited three other books, The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Pera, 2011), Edges of Empire (Blackwell, 2005) and Orientalism’s Interlocutors (Duke University Press, 2002). Her current book project is on the artistic exchanges between Ottomans and Orientalists in nineteenth-century Istanbul. Toni Ross teaches art history at The University of New

South Wales. Her recent publications include ‘From Classical to Postclassical Beauty: Institutional Critique and Aesthetic Enigma in Louise Lawler’s Photography,’ in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, eds. B. Hinderliter et. al. (Duke University Press, 2009); ‘Image, montage,’ in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. J.P. Deranty (Acumen, 2010). She is currently working on a book on Jacques Rancière’s theory of the politics of artistic modernity and contemporary art. is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Georgia. Her research attends to broad philosophical questions about the nature of representation and subjectivity, and her publications have considered many artists in an effort to address these issues: Manet, Duchamp, Wim Delvoye, Paul Pfeiffer and, most intensively, Jasper Johns, the subject of her forthcoming book. Professor Wallace is also co-editor, with Jennifer Hirsh, of Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate, 2011). Isabelle

Loring

Wallace