Refracting Vision : Essays on the writings of Michael Fried

Rating:
Summary: overdue evaluation of Fried
Review: Who are the seminal figures in twentieth-century art history that have changed the way we think about the relationship between art and history? Most lists would surely include social historians of art such as T. J. Clark and Griselda Pollock, but how many would include the American art historian Michael Fried? The exclusion of Fried would be a grave mistake, if an understandable one. It is understandable because there is still a tendency in art history to divide the discipline into two camps: those who connect art to its historical circumstances as symptom, expression, or reflection of the times (Arnold Hauser et al. ) and those who see art as an autonomous realm (Heinrich Wölfflin, Clement Greenberg, etc.). Fried is usually aligned with the latter group, characterised as formalists in opposition to the historians.

No doubt this misalignment accounts for the fact that there has been no major study of his work or its contribution to the discipline of art history. Art historians routinely read Fried's work through his seminal essay on minimalism of 1967 "Art and Objecthood" as if this essay holds the key to his particular brand of Greenbergian formalism. When this essay is used to disparage Fried's project, the argument goes something like this: the anti-theatrical tendency in art he praises there (the denial of the spectator, as against art that stages or theatricalises spectatorship) is simply a formal connivance, akin to Greenberg's will to flatness, which he imposes on earlier art in order to justify his taste in modern art. His historical trilogy, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s, is then read against the grain as unhistorical speculation rather than a careful tracing of the fate of the anti-theatrical project in French painting. The historical grounding of his interrogation of spectatorship is thereby missed.

But academic times have changed; with the so called `visual turn' in the humanities, and the concomitant interest in theories and histories of vision, Fried's project is ripe for reevaluation. This challenge is taken up by Refracting Vision, the first in depth analysis of his work by three Australian scholars: Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross.

This anthology of essays complicates the polarisation of the art historical field into two camps. For that reason alone, it is essential reading for all art historians who are interested in the theoretical and methodological basis of their discipline. And shouldn't that mean everyone in any case? The collection also does much more than this: it contextualises Fried's practice, draws out some of his more recondite terms and themes, and takes his work into areas that he could never have anticipated. Very highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: overdue evaluation of Fried
Review: Who are the seminal figures in twentieth-century art history that have changed the way we think about the relationship between art and history? Most lists would surely include social historians of art such as T. J. Clark and Griselda Pollock, but how many would include the American art historian Michael Fried? The exclusion of Fried would be a grave mistake, if an understandable one. It is understandable because there is still a tendency in art history to divide the discipline into two camps: those who connect art to its historical circumstances as symptom, expression, or reflection of the times (Arnold Hauser et al. ) and those who see art as an autonomous realm (Heinrich Wölfflin, Clement Greenberg, etc.). Fried is usually aligned with the latter group, characterised as formalists in opposition to the historians.

No doubt this misalignment accounts for the fact that there has been no major study of his work or its contribution to the discipline of art history. Art historians routinely read Fried's work through his seminal essay on minimalism of 1967 "Art and Objecthood" as if this essay holds the key to his particular brand of Greenbergian formalism. When this essay is used to disparage Fried's project, the argument goes something like this: the anti-theatrical tendency in art he praises there (the denial of the spectator, as against art that stages or theatricalises spectatorship) is simply a formal connivance, akin to Greenberg's will to flatness, which he imposes on earlier art in order to justify his taste in modern art. His historical trilogy, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s, is then read against the grain as unhistorical speculation rather than a careful tracing of the fate of the anti-theatrical project in French painting. The historical grounding of his interrogation of spectatorship is thereby missed.

But academic times have changed; with the so called 'visual turn' in the humanities, and the concomitant interest in theories and histories of vision, Fried's project is ripe for reevaluation. This challenge is taken up by Refracting Vision, the first in depth analysis of his work by three Australian scholars: Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross.

This anthology of essays complicates the polarisation of the art historical field into two camps. For that reason alone, it is essential reading for all art historians who are interested in the theoretical and methodological basis of their discipline. And shouldn't that mean everyone in any case? The collection also does much more than this: it contextualises Fried's practice, draws out some of his more recondite terms and themes, and takes his work into areas that he could never have anticipated. Very highly recommended!