Michael Fried and Philosophy: Absorption, Theatricality, and Modernism

276 Pages·2017·3.517 MB·English

by  Abbott, Mathew(Editor)

Michael Fried and Philosophy
This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians,
and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance
of Michael Fried’s art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried’s
work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality,
and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond
philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from
world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes
from Fried’s texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers
such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth
Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich
Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis
Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, and
Søren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for
philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and
continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political
philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.
Mathew Abbott is Lecturer in Philosophy at Federation University Australia.
Drawing on modern European and post-Wittgensteinian thought, his
research is concerned with intersections of aesthetics, politics, and ethics.
He is the author of Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy and The Figure
of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology.
Routledge Research in Aesthetics
1 Michael Fried and Philosophy
Modernism, Intention, and Theatricality
Edited by Mathew Abbott
Michael Fried and Philosophy
Modernism, Intention,
and Theatricality
Edited by Mathew Abbott
First published 2018
by Routledge
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Contents
List of figures vii
Abbreviations of Works by Michael Fried viii
Michael Fried and Philosophy 1
MATHEW ABBOTT
1 Modernism and the Discovery of Finitude 18
MATHEW ABBOTT
2 “When I Raise My Arm”: Michael Fried’s Theory of Action 33
WALTER BENN MICHAELS
3 Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never
Before? On Fried and Intention 48
ROBERT B. PIPPIN
4 Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried 64
DAVID E. WELLBERY
5 Deep Relationality and the Hinge-like Structure of History:
Michael Fried’s Photographs 87
STEPHEN MULHALL
6 Becoming Medium 104
STEPHEN MELVILLE
7 Formalism and the Appearance of Nature 117
RICHARD MORAN
8 Michael Fried, Theatricality, and the Threat of Skepticism 129
PAUL J. GUDEL
vi Contents
9 Michael Fried’s Intentionality 138
REX BUTLER
10 On the (So-Called) Problem of Detail: Michael Fried,
Roland Barthes, and Roger Scruton on Photography
and Intentionality 151
DIARMUID COSTELLO
11 The Aesthetics of Absorption 171
MAGDALENA OSTAS
12 Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant) 189
KNOX PEDEN
13 Diderot’s Conception of Aesthetic Subjectivity
and the Possibility of Art 206
ANDREA KERN
14 The Promise of the Present: Michael Fried’s Poetry Now 226
JENNIFER ASHTON
15 Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater 243
MICHAEL FRIED
Contributors 260
Index 263
Figures
1.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737
(Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C.; image courtesy National Gallery of Art) 5
1.2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, L’Oiseau mort, Salon de 1800
(Musée du Louvre, Paris; photo credit: RMN-Grand
Palais, musée du Louvre/Jean-Gilles Berizzi) 6
1.3 Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment des Horaces, 1784
(Musée du Louvre, Paris; photo credit: RMN-Grand
Palais, musée du Louvre/Stéphane Maréchalle) 7
1.4 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris;
photo credit: Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/
Patrice Schmidt) 8
3.1 Thomas Demand, Poll, 2001 (VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/ARS,
New York) 54
3.2 Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York, Soho, 1978
(image courtesy Atelier Thomas Struth, Berlin) 56
11.1 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Blowing Soap Bubbles,
1734 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; photo credit:
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York) 174
11.2 Jeff Wall, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the
Prologue, 1999–2001 (The Museum of Modern Art, New
York City, transparency in lightbox 174 × 250.5cm;
image courtesy of the artist) 177
11.3 Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822
(Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; photo credit:
bpk Bildagentur/Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen/Joerg
P. Anders/Art Resource, New York) 182
11.4 Thomas Struth, Art Institute of Chicago II, 1990 (The Art
Institute of Chicago; photo credit: The Art Institute
of Chicago/Art Resource, New York) 183
15.1 Adolph Menzel, Unmade Bed, 1845 (Kupferstichkabinett der
Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin; photo credit: bpk Bildagentur/
Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin—
Preußischer Kulturbesitz/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resource,
New York) 256
Abbreviations of Works
by Michael Fried
AT Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
Diderot (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
CR Courbet’s Realism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1990)
MM Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chi-
cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
MR Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century
Berlin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002)
WPM Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
MC The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2010)
FHO Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2011)
FG Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Madame Bovary and Salammbô (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012)
AL Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014)
AC After Caravaggio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2016)
Essays collected in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998):
IMAC “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” 1–74
SF “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” 77–99
ML “Morris Louis,” 100–31
AO “Art and Objecthood,” 148–72
TSAC “Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro,” 180–4
ACTS “Anthony Caro’s Table Sculptures,” 202–9
TAP “Three American Painters: Kenneth Nolad, Jules Olitski, Frank
Stella,” 213–65
Uncollected essay:
JM “Joseph Marioni, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University,” Artfo-
rum (37: 1998), 149–50
Michael Fried and Philosophy
Mathew Abbott
The work of Michael Fried has remarkable range. He made his name as
an art critic in the 1960s championing high modernist painters and sculp-
tors such as Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, engaging with
vigor and zeal in the debates that defined the moment. In the 80s and 90s,
Fried published influential studies of French pre-modernist, modernist, real-
ist, and North American realist painting. Since then he has produced a book
on the German realist painter and draughtsman Adolph Menzel, a ground-
breaking book on contemporary art photography, two books on Caravag-
gio and his aftermath, a study of Gustave Flaubert, and new works of art
criticism. Fried has regularly published poetry, producing volumes of poems
in 1973, 1994, 2004, and 2016. And he has a new monograph appearing in
2018: What Was Literary Impressionism?
As well as their range, Fried’s texts are remarkable for the intensity with
which they track a very particular set of interconnected problems: the ontol-
ogy of artwork and beholder; questions of modernism and medium; the
issue of aesthetic quality, and what it is to be convinced by a work of art;
the nature and importance of artistic intention; and the dialectical character
of artistic practices as they develop in specific contexts. As the depth of its
influence and the vitality of the discussion it has generated show, this rich
and penetrating body of work has profound significance for understanding
modern art and literature. The thesis of this volume is that it also has sig-
nificance for philosophy.
Michael Fried and Philosophy brings philosophers, art historians, intel-
lectual historians, and literary scholars together to engage with philosophi-
cal themes from Fried’s texts, to draw out their implications for problems
in and beyond philosophical aesthetics, and to clarify the relevance for
Fried’s thinking of philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell,
Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Imman-
uel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Fried-
rich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes,
Jacques Rancière, and Søren Kierkegaard. Like Fried’s own work, the
chapters in this volume range widely over different historical moments,
traditions, and figures. And like Fried’s work, they keep returning to a