Fried, Michael, “Art and Objecthood”. Artforum, Vol. V No.10, June 1967, pp 12-23.
Michael Fried discusses Minimalist or ‘literalist art’, as largely ideological in relation to painting and sculpture. That “[ ]... in relation both to modernist painting and modernist sculpture ... literalist art defines or locates the position it aspires to occupy.”[1] He adds, “Painting is here seen as an art on the verge of exhaustion, one in which the range of acceptable solutions to a basic problem – how to organize the surface of a picture – is severely restricted. [ ] The obvious response is to give up working on a single plane in favour of three dimensions”.[2]
Fried’s concerns here are the spatial qualities of literalist art, being not object and furthermore not architecture. As a conjuncture, Fried uses theatre as a reference for how literalist art relates to its audience. He states “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art. [ ] Furthermore, the presence of literalist art, which Greenberg was the first to analyse, is basically a theatrical effect or quality – a kind of stage presence. It is a function, not just of the obtrusiveness and, often, even aggressiveness of literalist work, but of the special complicity which that work extorts from the beholder”.[3]
The engagement with the audience that Fried and Greenberg describe here, of the theatrical qualities of literalist art, call to mind what Antonin Artaud was trying to do to theatre back in the 1920’s. “Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them”.[4]
Literalist art is directly related to the human body and therefore is experiential. What separates literalist art from theatre, architecture or any traditional art form is its materiality. The materials at play here are essential to the work itself. The use of industrial materials and techniques for production impart an element of disembodiment in the viewer which is something that literalist art can do and theatre cannot.
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