Thursday, March 5, 2009

Minimal Ideas Turn to Maximum Theatrics.

How sad it was to read that Tony Smith’s cube in "Die" was nothing more than a never-ending proposition of inexhaustible “hollow” endlessness. In other words a big human size “nothing”.
Fascinating theory indeed that I am sure could unsettle a few people in the class. What I find fascinating however, is that so much of the theory is based on this idea of the theatrical space, created by Literalist works. But what happens in this space remains extremely subjective. The beholder’s act of experiencing the work could lead to many different outcomes. Some could offset this notion of the beholder becoming the subject while facing the object.
What about the relationship with the presence? What about the relationship with the nature of the piece? Isn’t this at the core of his argument. If you call it the “presence” because of its “seriousness” then you must consider a sensory reciprocity that is extremely subjective. An ownership of the work from each and everyone of us is therefore a possibility. There can be a kind of participation that goes beyond the objectification of the beholder. We don’t have to be distanced since our relationship with the object is personal. If the theory is based on a personal perception, should Michael Fried generalize it to an unavoidable phenomenon denying the minimalists their light under the sun of aesthetics.

Tony Smith "Die" 1962.


Another question along the same lines presents itself. Is it possible to react to the elements of control of the work? Can one combat its “obtrusiveness” and “aggressiveness” and not become irrelevant faced with such potency. Why couldn’t one fight the anthropomorphized attack of these “shapes”? Tony Smith and Anne Truitt talk of presences but don’t mention anything about these presences being menacing or threatening.

Anne Truitt "Sculptures" c. 1963.

Lastly, when he writes of Tony Smith’s car ride and his “Literal epiphany”. Was his experience theater? Maybe his experience was theater but does it mean the work is theater too?
It is an experience that will trigger inspiration that in turn will trigger another experience. The experience of the artist that leads him to create HAS NOTHING TO DO with the experience of the viewer that is looking at the piece. These are two separate experiences One can arguably be “theater” but its artistic translation can be “owned” by a beholder who has only limited empathy for the work.

space

Michael Fried’s “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans” meticulously dissects Courbet’s masterwork. Fried’s argument focuses on two specific perspectives, that of the Beholder and Painter-beholder, which ultimately merge into a unique perspective that challenges, pushes, and pulls viewers from the painting.

I agree with Courbet’s critique of the painting as a complex work that serves to contradict the theatrics of baroque illusionist techniques. He believes that the works of painters like Caravaggio, who instead of “absorbing” viewers like Courbet’s masterworks, project the image out to the viewer using “dramatic chiaroscuro and extreme foreshortening and crucially involving elements in the immediate vicinity of the picture plane, by which the painter aimed to call into question, one might say to dissolve, the boundary between the space or “world” of the representation and that of the beholder, and by so doing to enforce the suggestion that both are equally actual, equally present to our astounded senses”.





Fried goes on to say that this technique allows for “illusion(s) free reign” which is substandard to the “absolute proximity” of Courbet’s specific painting techniques which are said to absorb the viewer.

I disagree with this statement on the grounds that this supposed “free reign” which Fried associates with Baroque painting style as a weakness. It gives the viewer what I believe to be a unique point of view by allowing the spectator gaze to be influenced by subjective nuances that ultimately absorb the viewer in different ways then Courbet’s “Burial”. This is further driven by Fried’s specific usages of “Beholder” and “Painter-Beholder” which seems to attribute these perspectives to almost objective like qualifications that force and limits the viewers from seeing beyond Courbet’s specific intentions. To Fried, the Beholder is a universal objective vantage point from which one sees, and I think that this is a major gaffe within Fried’s argument that limits the true subjective power of illusion within the pictorial arts to convey empathy.

This ultimately brings me to contemporary culture, with the recent influx of stereoscopic films that portray similar, although technically, and ontologically distinct, tactics of theatrically, which Fried used to describe Caravaggio’s “Baroque illusions”.

I recently watched one of these film’s with a similar skepticism of Courbet. I believed that these types of theatrical projections do nothing to extend empathetic reactions from the viewers gaze. This could be said of past 3D features such as “Captain Eo”, which fixates on projecting objects out of the plane such as spaceships and explosions, ultimately jarring and disconnecting the viewer from the screen.



I was surprised to find myself emphatically engaged with this form of stereoscopic illusions as found within "Coraline", as I found that images where not in fact projected out as a curiosity, but the space was carved out to create depth backwards. I would argue that these new stereoscopic films convey empathy in different ways then traditional film, not necessarily for the better or worse because the feeling of depth and new planes within the space of these films provide a more democratic plane from which the spectators gaze can make their decisions of what to view, increasing subjectivity and ultimately strengthens emphatic responses. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus works the same for me.






NIKK BALLERE