“What You See is What You See”: Constructing the Subject-Object
In his 1998 essay, “Art and Objecthood” Michael Fried mounts a critique of Minimalist (Literalist by his account) Art suggesting that it amounts to nothing more than an abstraction of theatricality that marks both the death (or suspension) of subjectivity as he sees it. Further, he argues that Literalism also provides a nemesis that Modern painting and sculpture must ‘defeat’ so that verisimilitude as he sees it, may prevail.[1] While one must certainly respect Mr. Fried’s position as a noted critic, his attack is misplaced in its paradox of juxtaposing bombastic presentation with intellectual rigor, parading the former as the latter. His observations on the work itself constitute an acute and comprehensive grasp of the singular cultural shape of the work, defined particularly by the role of art in popular culture, while his ability to understand form as Literalist art presents it, is conspicuously absent. Fried’s critique is leveled at Donald Judd and Robert Morris by example, and it is through a close reading of Judd’s Specific Objects that an argument can be made not only in praise of Literalist work, but will also reveal that such work offers an escape from the didactic relationship subject-object relationship that plagues modern perceptions of space. The Specific Object offers an autonomous definition and understanding of space and material that has been prematurely abandoned in favor of the spectacular technocratic notion of “progress” that has produced nothing more than additional distractions, additional substitutions, and additional theatres of complicity which further entrench us in a perception of reality which is not our own. Instead, it ensures the things we see are consumed in the way they are programmed to be. Judd offers an alternative; the way in which we say is able to be manipulated to free us from constructed meaning. In other words, if Michael Fried represents the desire to critique things as consumable objects, and it is impossible to create a work which is not consumable, how we consciously see (and that active sight is a choice) is the most primitive, most forgotten, and most liberating act of autonomy. Within this space, which all social constructions of meaning and value are short circuited, the viewer becomes subject and object, and the work therefore is present and absent, denying the viewer” the satisfaction of [their] vanity”[2] and places the onus of deriving “meaning” squarely on them, liberating the artist of the narrative and placing in crisis the existence and need of meaning.
“No Illusions. No Allusions.”[3] With this, Donald Judd clears a path for Literalist Art which is a rejection of the psychological and subjective realities implicit in Modern European painting and sculpture. “Three-dimensionality is not as near being simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to that. But now painting and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more defined, not undeniable and unavoidable.”[4] The descriptions of his form of art, Specific Objects, exists not as a synthesis or reimagining of these traditions but as a group of works, and more importantly a way of working, that are generally defined in negative terms in that they are neither paintings, as they are generally three-dimensional and have volume, nor are they sculpture because they lack parts which frees the work from both composition and effects as well as liberates the work itself from traditional European allusions to the body.[5] Furthermore, they locate the viewer, both the true subject and true object of the artwork in the vacillating definition the work sets forth, in the same space as the object. The new work sits directly on the floor or hung on the wall, estranging the work from its traditional means of presentation, removing the pedestal and distantiation which characterizes traditional sculpture (and is interestingly enough the watermark of modern commercial control), and projecting the painting off of the wall plane. By making what Fried calls the “literal shape”[6] if the work clearly independent of the wall, refusing to support it or be supported formally by it, the work identifies with the viewer, existing complicity though seemingly temporarily in the given space; both estranged, both objects. Judd describes this point:
- “The one thing overpowers the earlier painting. It also establishes the rectangle as a definite form; it is no longer a fairly neutral limit… The rectangular plane is given a life span. The simplicity required to emphasize the rectangle limits the arrangements possible within it… The plane is also emphasized and nearly single. It is clearly a plane one or two inches in front of another plane, the wall, and parallel to it. The relationship of the two planes is specific; it is a form. Everything on or slightly in the plane must be arranged laterally.”[7]
This is the first time that the artwork is considered coextensive with the medium which it is presented in and on. The art object then is bound by a site in the same way that a work of architecture is and has the ability to imply space outside of what is rendered on the surface. Fried fails to see this synchronous relationship ( it is now synchronous in that the shape of the canvas and the perception of it now exist in time.) He states, “The shape is the object; at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape. It is, I believe, that emphasis on shape that accounts for the impression, which numerous critics have mentioned, that Judd’s and Morris’s pieces are hollow.”[8]
Precisely. It is in the hollowness that the work itself is manifest in its projection and definition of space outside of itself. If the works were themselves full, they would contain a subject beyond their boundaries and therefore remain static in time and site. This leads to another critical point which is missed by Fried et al. The works are not intended to be seen en vaccua as objects to be contemplated, but it is their presence which activates the space around them through their orientation and material. Their identity as Specific Objects, no longer mere objects, in that their effects are extensive, not intensive; subjective, not prescriptive. Were they mere objects, then they would have no different effect in a trash bin than in the Louvre.
“Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors.- which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. “[9] Judd continues his critique by reintroducing the idea of Real Space in opposition to Literal Space. Real space is the space in which the object and the subject reside rather than the theatrical space the art object invites the subject into. Sculpture fails this test as well because its composition of parts does not allow it to be fully present and legible, denies it a level of immediacy that Specific Objects operate within. Traditional sculpture also establishes a figurative language of an object in space without ordering space. Morris himself commented that unitary forms do not mark a reduction of simplification of experience, but serve to order it in a more cohesive manner shutting off any “symbolic illusion” and focus the subject on purely formal ( read: real) issues of color, scale, volume, and the surrounding space. “This direction leads to a system which substitutes the traditional questions of what to represent where with ideas of presence and place… its role changed from that of a transmitter of objective content to a constructor of its own expressive grammar.”[10]
This expression of the work as a thing expressing its inherent qualities independent of outside influences is directly taken from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay The Phenomenology of Perception, published in the US when the Literalist sculptors were starting out. Ponty’s text quickly became a seminal text in the formative period of the artists and was attractive because it opposes the “dualism which presents consciousness as interiority and the body as a thing.”[11] For him, human experience is not made up of separate subjective and objective stimulus, but rather through a synthesis of intelligent acts and emotional perceptions. As Gonzales points out, “Thus for Merleau-Ponty, the distance and the viewpoint are not added to the object, but are an inherent part of its meaning.” Judd criticizes this separation of object and experience when he notes that abstract painting before 1946 and most subsequent painting (most likely a critique of Abstract Expressionism) there is a representational subordination of the whole to its parts, emphasizing composition. Anthony Caro, whom Fried lauds incessantly, also fails in Judd’s eyes and he compares it to architectural referents. The difference, he notes, is “like that between one of Brunelleschi’s windows in the Badia di Fiesole and the façade of Palazzo Rucellai, which is only an undeveloped rectangle as a whole and is mainly a collection of highly ordered parts. “[12]
Progressing in specificity, the material choices outlined by Judd represent and enrich physically his formal intentions. Industrial products are important to use because they do not have a precedent or variation of production that make them ideologically weighted. Also, practically, they are inexpensive and maintain a certain unalterable integrity in their homogeneity of tone and treatment. In a way, they express a quality he sees in Rothko’s rectangles and Noland’s circles (and later, Agnes Martin would champion): the limitless perception of fields as having been apparent “sections cut from something infinitely larger.” [13] This quality of the infinite is present in the industrial materials. Judd sees this use of material as aggressive and necessary for the identity of a specific object in its objectivity based in a neutral inaccessible way. In other words, the coldness and banality of the materials do not allow the viewer to identify the specific object as an artwork based in material, “They obviously aren’t art.”[14] Fried criticizes this execution of the work as theatrical because through the inaccessibility of the material, the work demands the physical participation of the viewer. Arguably, however, because the work lacks specific meaning or prescribed frontality of viewing, as well as no distraction, no payoff, no narrative, the work is not at all theatrical and does not need the viewer or the gallery. If anything, the opposite is true. The work requires only space, because it operates in producing new space from existing, and that new space is nothing more than the estrangement of the space from itself. Simply, the work is always working because it does not require anything to work. The “payoff” Fried was looking for was the reality of the space he was in. He was presented with nothing less than real space, in real time, and was frustrated because there was no distraction that would prove to be fodder for his standard methods of critique.
In this, Specific Objects posits the most exciting and dangerous premise, and indeed the way out for art and architecture: art is nothing more than space and composition, and composition is a conceit. Taken to its logical end, painting is rendered as merely pigment on substrate; sculpture is the pretense of form in mass. The meaning is what we, the viewers, have projected to give it value beyond itself, the value of popular culture. This, I believe, is why Fried cannot meet Judd on his own terms, and perhaps why Judd et al were so brazen with their output; Literalist art proclaims traditional art’s irrelevance, thereby taking all of Fried’s critical capacity away from him. Or even more extreme, and brilliant, is that the critical commentary, whether positive or negative, is a reinforcement of the very principles outlined in the text. Implicit in Stella’s famous adage “What you see is what you see”, was the unspoken “What you see is what you are able to see, care to see, can see, are willing to see.” Therefore, any praise or attack on Literalist art was as neutral to the work as its formal gesture and as powerful as the rhetorical clout of the critical voice; any commentary was galvanizing. This is perhaps the most powerful effect of the work, its transitive ability to exist outside of itself both in real space, and rhetorical space.
Finally, the text itself is a model of the principles it outlines. Within the text are images, none of which are intended to be Judd’s work. A photograph of Judd’s Untitled (1963) is included but with an asterix and a note stating “The editor, not I, included the photo of my work.”[15] To litter his text with images of his own work would appear to let the ideas behind it remain inclusive to a single practitioner and a single method. To the contrary, the images are all of Specific Objects executed by other artists, again creating the variance of subject object relationship and creating a space in front of the page itself. As if describing the body of text itself, Judd states “If there is a reference, it is single and explicit. In any case the chief interests are obvious.”
When operative, Specific Objects clears the way for the critical eye to remain critical. It requires the suspension and dissolution of any a priori definition of art, and in doing so, question the nature and role of art in our lives. In its intensification of objects as such, and their break into specific objects, Judd wishes to frame real space, and re-center the viewer in real space, through real material articulation, and through real perceptual experience contrary to the projected trope of meaning so often applied to artwork. Through these methods, the subject and object relationships are continuously changed. In a single instance, we can perceive the object in a way in which it will never be again as well as understand that our presence in space , our own perceptual faculties, have been objectified by the subjecthood of the work. We are at once in control and completely powerless. This fragility, and our ability to understand its operation, is the form of autonomy that has been too quickly lost in its commodification into a style. “If changes in art are compared backwards, there always seems to be a reduction, since only old attributes are counted and these are always fewer.”[16] The acceptance of the aesthetic into mass culture is the Trojan horse that art and architecture may now use to reclaim the autonomy of our disciplines, by producing work that is operative in its seeming reduction, subversive in its ostensible simplicity.
