Art and Objects. Graham Harman
Dada, though not – I will argue – with its supposed brother Surrealism. But whereas Fried pairs literalism with theatricality, I hold that the two are polar opposites. Indeed, we avoid the literalist destruction of art in no other way than through the theatricality which alone brings art to life. There is the added complexity that for Fried theatricality is not something that can be straightforwardly avoided, given that there is no art without a beholder. Nonetheless, when speaking as a critic of contemporary art, “theatrical” remains Fried’s adjective of choice for works that fail to impress him, and I do not follow him in this usage.
In Chapter 4 (“The Canvas is the Message”) we turn to Greenberg, focusing on the limitations specific to his powerful way of thinking. Turning away from an increasingly academic tradition of illusionist three-dimensional painting, the modernist avant-garde had to come to terms with the essential flatness of its medium: that of the background canvas. This shift to the flat background has at least two consequences. The first is Greenberg’s consistent denigration of pictorial content, which he tends to dismiss as mere literary anecdote that continues to suggest an illusion of depth. The second, seldom if ever noted, is that the flatness of the canvas background medium is also treated as a oneness devoid of parts. On the latter point Greenberg has much in common with Martin Heidegger, that tainted but central philosopher, who often ridicules the surface of the world and its various visible entities as “ontic” rather than ontological. Heidegger also shows a nagging reluctance to conceive of Being as pre-dispersed into numerous individual beings, whose multiplicity he tends to portray as merely the correlate of human experience. It is Greenberg’s version of this prejudice that prevents him from grasping the importance of pictorial content.
Chapter 5 (“After High Modernism”) considers several of the most prominent ways in which the High Modernism championed by Greenberg and Fried has been rejected. I will focus here on those who do not play a significant role in other chapters of this book. Something should first be said about Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg, two of Greenberg’s contemporaries, often portrayed as his rivals. I then turn to the more recent figures T.J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, and Jacques Rancière; though of necessity my treatment of each figure can only give a rough indication of where my views differ from theirs.
In Chapter 6 (“Dada, Surrealism, and Literalism”) we turn to Greenberg’s puzzling assertion that Dada and Surrealism are both forms of “academic” art. The problem with treating both movements in the same way is that, although they remain broadly linked in cultural history as overlapping currents of irreverent opposition, by Greenberg’s own principles they lead in opposite directions. While the Surrealists retain the traditional medium of nineteenth-century illusionistic painting in order to call our attention to astonishing content, Duchampian Dada offers the most banal content imaginable (bicycle wheel, bottle rack) in an attempt to challenge our sense of what counts as a valid artistic object. Using an analogy from Heidegger’s philosophy, I argue that Dada and Surrealism are diametrical opposites in how they go about dismantling literalism, while arguing further that they are not radical departures from the history of Western art.
Chapter 7 (“Weird Formalism”) concludes the book. First, we consider the present state of art as surveyed by one well-informed observer: Hal Foster. Second, given that the most unusual claim of the first six chapters is that beholder and work theatrically constitute a new, third object, this chapter asks what the implications of this idea might be. As for the term “weird,” it is no empty provocation, but a technical term drawn by OOO from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Weird formalism is a kind that pertains neither to the object nor the subject, but to the unmapped interior of their union.
Notes
1 1. Graham Harman, “Aesthetics as First Philosophy,” “The Third Table,” “Art without Relations,” “Greenberg, Duchamp, and the Next Avant-Garde,” “The Revenge of the Surface,” “Materialism is Not the Solution.” See also Timothy Morton, Realist Magic.
2 2. Harman, “Aesthetics as First Philosophy.”
3 3. Graham Harman, “On the Undermining of Objects,” “Undermining, Overmining, and Duomining.”
4 4. Harman, “The Third Table”; A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World.
5 5. Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.”
6 6. Harman, “Greenberg, Duchamp, and the Next Avant-Garde”; Graham Harman, Dante’s Broken Hammer; Clement Greenberg, Late Writings, pp. 45–49.
7 7. Robert Pippin, “Why Does Photography Matter as Art Now, as Never Before?”, p. 60, note 6.
8 8. Claire Colebrook, “Not Kant, Not Now: Another Sublime,” p. 145.
9 9. Melissa Ragona, personal communication, August 5, 2017. Cited with Ragona’s permission.
10 10. Hasan Veseli, personal communication, December 4, 2016. Cited with Veseli’s permission.
11 11. See especially Caroline Levine’s wonderful book Forms.
12 12. No less a figure than Hal Foster slips into the “fetishist” trope in The Return of the Real, pp. 108–109. See also his related attacks on OOO allies Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour in Hal Foster, Bad New Days, Chapter 5. Another recent example can be found in the second paragraph of J.J. Charlesworth and James Heartfield, “Subjects v. Objects.” For a general response to the claim that realism about objects is a form of fetishism, see Graham Harman, “Object-Oriented Ontology and Commodity Fetishism.”
13 13. David E. Wellbery, “Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried,” p. 84.
14 14. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.
15 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.
16 16. The classic example is Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy.
17 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
18 18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment.
19 19. Virgil, Aeneid.
20 20. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. There is another interpretation of modernity – or at least of its degenerate forms – that reads it in the opposite way as an improper commingling of thought with world. This can be found in the valuable polemic against “correlationism” by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude, which nonetheless resembles Latour’s position in agreeing that thought and world count for the moderns as the two basic ingredients of reality. In this book I will focus on Latour’s “purity” interpretation or modernity rather than Meillassoux’s “impurity” version, since the Latourian stance is the one more relevant to Kant’s aesthetics and formalism in the arts.
21 21. Dante, The Divine Comedy, La Vita Nuova.
22 22. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values.
23 23. Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris.”
24 24. Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, Vols. I and II; Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio.
25 25. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, Manet’s Modernism.
26 26. Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics; Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood.
27 27. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. I had the opportunity to raise this issue with Fried in person on February 10, 2018 during his visit to Los Angeles, and he was helpfully direct in his response.
28 28. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 60.
29 29. Alain Badiou, Being and Event; Meillassoux, After Finitude.