Alberti’s Window

Last night J and I went to a lecture by Michael Fried, one of the most influential art critics/historians of the 20^th century. We showed up to the lecture early, just to make sure that we could get a seat. One of the members of the museum staff noticed me there and asked me to help adjust and fix the two slide projectors for the program. I guess all my work as a TA for 201 and 202 has finally paid off – I got to meet Michael Fried and fix the slide projectors that he used! I was in art historian celebrity heaven! I wish that my friend Kiersten could have been there; she had to read everything that Fried has written (hundreds and hundreds of pages) for a graduate seminar two years ago.

I think that I understood some of Fried’s theories (and distastes!) for Minimalism better from listening to this lecture than I ever gathered from reading his seminal article, “Art and Objecthood.” Fried explained that Minimalist sculpture wants to activate the exhibition space. For example, the visitor to the gallery automatic has a relationship with the Minimalist sculpture in regards to a bodily relationship with the sculpture size (“the sculpture is bigger than me” or “the sculpture is smaller than me”) and the way the sculpture fills the exhibition space and the viewer’s space (“I can walk around this sculpture,” “The sculpture is in front of me” or “The sculpture is behind me”). Fried explained last night feels that the contrived relationship between Minimalist art and viewer is too easy and too automatic. This explanation of “easiness” and “automatic-ness” makes a lot of sense to me, especially when one contrasts the art that Fried loves (Greenbergian Abstract Expressionism and High Modernism) with Minimalism. Abstract expressionism does not easily and automatically create a relationship with the gallery visitor or surrounding space like Minimalist sculpture.

Fried also showed some paintings by one his favorite painters, Jules Olitski. He explained that the “all over intensity” throughout the canvas is what he meant when he wrote about “presentness” in “Art and Objecthood.” This made so much sense to me – I only partially grasped what he meant by “presentness” in this article. Now I’ll need to re-read the article to see if things make better sense.
Fried also promoted his new book (scheduled for January 2009), which involves the theme of absorption (a theme he has examined over and over in his work) and photography. Fried is particularly interested in how subjects in 17th and 18th century paintings seem to be completely involved (absorbed) in whatever they are doing; they are “self-forgetting” and completely unaware of the viewer. Just like paintings, photography follow this same theme of absorption. It sounds like it will be an interesting book.

I think Barbara Kruger is a really fascinating artist. Most of her work deals with the idea of the female in art, particularly as a commentary on how culture affects the reception of the female image in art. Kruger focuses on empowering her female images as “subjects” instead of “objects.” In this image shown to the right, Kruger empowers her subject by resisting the gaze of the viewer of the work.

This resistance of the viewer’s (specifically, a male viewer) gaze is in direct opposition to how females were portrayed in art for centuries. Since ancient times, the passive female image, particularly the nude female, has served as an “object” for the active male viewer in art.¹

Kruger’s work and feminist art historical practice became especially interesting to me during graduate school. As an undergrad, I thought that feminist art historians were rather “angsty” and whiny. I think I came to this conclusion mainly because I was only briefly introduced to a few feminist art historical works, primarily Linda Nochlin’s essay, “Why Have there Been No Great Women Artists?” Although I thought Nochlin made some really good points in this essay, I still came away with the overall impression that feminist art historians just liked to stamp their feet, pout, and demand equality. You have to admit, the title of Nochlin’s essay can come across as sounding a bit whiny…

Anyhow, thanks to two die-hard feminist art historians at my university, I was able to change my opinion. One of my favorite articles that I read in graduate school was by Laura Mulvey, entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”² Mulvey discusses how the female image in visual culture, particularly the cinema, encourages the male voyeur. Specifically, the way that the camera functions in film encourages the voyeur, particularly in the way that the camera captures close-ups of women. (Ha – the word “captures” is really appropriate here!). Think of close-ups in an movie – they will focus on the lips, or eyes, or legs, etc. of the female actress. The actress is not viewed as an individual or human being, rather she is reduced (physically cropped on the film screen by the camera lens) and thus fetishized.

This work by Kruger exhibits well how the fetishization and “to-be-looked
-at-ness” of women occurs in the film industry (how ’bout Marylin’s super-glossy-lips! Don’t they just grab your attention!). And the same thing can be said of many other works of art. In regards to painting, I think that the invention of the photograph (which influenced “cropped” subject matter and compositions on the canvas) also helped support this idea of female reduction and fetishization. During my second semester in grad school, I wrote a paper about how some paintings by Gauguin can fall into this study of cropping and fetishization.

Mulvey’s article is really fascinating. It was probably the first article that truly convinced me that feminist art historical/visual culture studies can be a very scholarly and engaging practice. It’s not just about angst or anger – although I’m sure that one can find bitter-men-haters in any feminist paradigm, if you look hard enough…

1Obviously, not every single image of a nude female has held erotic purpose (for example, representations of Eve in Medieval art).
2 See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

Last week before visiting the opening of the new exhibition at the MOA, “Turning Point: The Demise of Modernism and Rebirth of Meaning in American Art,” J and I listened to an interview on the radio with Campbell Gray, the museum director. I took an art theory class from Campbell last Fall, and it was one of my favorite courses in my whole graduate career. He’s a very intelligent man and ran his class in a very Socratic fashion. I felt like he was also coming to conclusions and learning along with the rest of the class – it was great.

This MOA exhibition is really fabulous and ground-breaking in its theoretical base. I just hope that the museum audience realizes how fantastic this is – I have already discussed how a large part of the BYU student populous has a distaste for modern and contemporary art. Perhaps this show will help people to realize the theories and ideas that are behind the modern and minimalistic aesthetic. I’m just glad to see an exhibition in the MOA displaying art that isn’t from the 19th century!

Anyhow, in this interview Campbell made an interesting point about conceptual art. For those of you who are unfamiliar with conceptual art, it is a movement which started in the 60s that stressed emphasis on the concept or idea behind the work of art (instead of the artistic object itself). A famous example of conceptual art is “One and Three Chairs” by Joseph Kosuth. Here, Kosuth includes three manifestations of a chair: a dictionary definition of a chair, a physical chair, and a photograph of a chair. Essentially, Kosuth is examining the nature of a “chair” or the concept of “chairness,” if you will. Campbell said in this interview that this shift to conceptual art was a radical change in the art world, mainly because the work of art now is located in the mind of the viewer and not in the physical manifestation of the object. The physical objects shown in the gallery are only material “triggers” to help bring about the actual work of art – the concept.

When hearing this, J said that he had never thought of conceptual art this way. Although he understands the concepts proposed by these works of art, he also finds the physical manifestation of the concept (the object) to hold aesthetic value and beauty – in other words, he can have an aesthetic response through sensory interaction with the object. I can see what he’s saying, and I wonder how much conceptual artists considered visual aesthetic effects when creating their art. Obviously, some visual elements need to be considered in regards to the organization and display of the object itself. But how much would aesthetic beauty be considered? Would that detract from the concept itself and have the object serve as more than just a “trigger?”

Does anyone else find conceptual art to be aesthetically pleasing? I find conceptual art to be more intellectually stimulating and interesting than physically beautiful, but I can see where J is coming from and wonder if other people feel the same way.

Along these same lines, where does the concept of beauty fit in regards to ideas and concepts? Isn’t it interesting that ideas can be beautiful, but it is a different type of beauty than aesthetic beauty and taste? I’d love to discuss this subject with Kant and hear what he has to say.

As an art historian, I’ve always been interested in Hegel’s concept of the Geist. For those of you unfamiliar with Hegel, he was an 18th/19th century philosopher who believed that there was a “world spirit” that manifested itself in art, religion, and philosophy. The Geist continues to develop and evolve throughout history; essentially, due to the Geist (almost as a type of driving force for the history of the world), things develop and evolve at the time and rate that they are supposed to.

One reason why Hegel is important to art history is because of his classification and discussion of how art has developed. Hegel found that art developed in three stages: Symbolic (prehistoric, Egyptian), Classical (Greek), and Romantic (post-Classical, i.e., Christian). In this final Romantic phase, Hegel discusses how art has become spiritualized in nature. Had Hegel lived into the early 20th century, I wonder if he would have added an additional phase which could have focused on formalism.

I began thinking about the concept of Geist and the 20th century last night on a walk with J. He was telling me about his music history lecture which focused on the 20th century composer, Schoenberg. Although Schoenberg was friends with expressionistic painters and dabbled in expressionistic painting himself, his explorations in atonal music (particularly his development of a twelve-tone method) indicate his interest in formalism. Schoenberg felt that this evolution from tonal to atonal was a natural development for music.¹

Perhaps a musical or formalist Geist was driving this change in music. Schoenberg began dabbling in atonality in 1908. That same year, independently of Schoenberg, a Russian composer (and synesthete, Katherine!) named Scriabin also broke with tonality.²

The thing I find so fascinating about these formalistic changes in music is that the same thing happened art historically. In 1907-08 (note the date again!), Picasso created “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” the seminal early Cubist painting which revolutionized the meaning and creation of art. The Cubist style, with the breaking down and exploration of forms, is also formalist in nature. Even the flatness associated with the Cubist style is a recognition of the flat form of the canvas – a flatness which artists tried to escape or deny with illusionistic art that began in the Renaissance.

Doesn’t it seem like the Geist was bringing about these artistic and musical changes in the early 2oth century? I wonder if Hegel would think so…

1 Schoenberg said, “I am convinced that eventually people will recognize how immediately this ‘something new’ is linked to the loftiest models that have been granted us. I venture to credit myself with having written truly new music which, being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition.” (See J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th ed., (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006, 804). It is also interesting to note that Schoenberg was against using the term “atonal.” He said, “The word ‘atonal’ could only signify something entirely inconsistent with the nature of tone. . . . [T]o call any relation of tones atonal is just as farfetched as it would be to designate a relation of colors aspectral or acomplementary. There is no such antithesis.” (See Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, translated by Roy Carter, (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978, 432)). Therefore, it appears that Schoenberg did not feel like he was “going against” anything musical with his usage of tones.

2 This information was given in J’s lecture, so I can’t cite a specific source. It appears that his “Poem of Ecstasy” was written in 1908, so this may be the work to which J’s teacher referred. I will need to do a little more research though. From what I have found on this less-credible source, however, Scriabin began working on atonality from 1903-08. Even if this was the case, the close connection between Scriabin and Schoenberg’s interests in atonality can still fit into this idea of Geist. It would just be cooler if it all happened in 1908.