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My dissertation is a long response to just two short paragraphs from Michael Fried’s 1967 Artforum article, “Art and Objecthood.” Mesmerizingly descriptive, Fried’s well-known re-telling of a story told by architect and artist, Tony Smith, is an elaborate reconstruction of Smith’s experience of a nighttime drive along the unopened New Jersey Turnpike. As part of his esoteric critique of what he termed “literalist” (minimalist) art practice, Fried here equates the objectlessness of Smith’s journey with the literalist object as encountered in a gallery:
In each of the above cases, the object is, so to speak, replaced by something: for example, on the turnpike, by the constant onrush of the road, the simultaneous recession of new reaches of dark pavement illumined by the onrushing headlights, the sense of the turnpike as something enormous, abandoned, derelict, existing for Smith alone and those in the car with him [...] What replaces the object--what does the same job of distancing or isolating the beholder, of making him a subject, that the object did in the closed room--is above all the endlessness, or objectlessness, of the approach or onrush or perspective.
Aside from its almost breathless, rapid-fire style (Robert Smithson would later ironically call it “theatrical”), Fried’s response to Smith is striking for three immediate reasons. First, although it tries to swap out an experience of the road for one in the “closed room,” it is clearly an analysis of Smith’s “non-art” encounter with the built landscape (this is in contrast to Fried’s other critiques in the essay which each concern the beholder’s experience of an art object within a gallery setting). Second, this is the only passage in which Fried offers a rather peculiar definition of “objecthood” as describing both a thing and an event--objecthood as experience itself. He goes on to write:
It is the explicitness, that is to say, the sheer persistence with which the experience presents itself as directed at him from outside (on the turnpike from outside the car) that simultaneously makes him a subject--makes him subject--and establishes the experience itself as something like that of an object, or rather, of objecthood. However, it is the third aspect of the Smith narrative in “Art and Objecthood” that is perhaps most striking. Fried’s vocabulary borrows noticeably from the language of the sublime--abandoned, enormous, derelict, recession, illumined, onrushing, distancing, and isolating are some of the words he uses to describe Smith’s experience of the darkened cityscape as witnessed from inside the speeding car.
I am interested in this element of the “sublimated sublime” and Fried’s determination not to allow Smith’s experience-of-landscape-as-object to stand as just that: an experience of landscape (he insistently reads it as a stand-in for the literalist gallery experience). My writing attempts to recuperate particular aspects of Smith’s narrative as positively evidencing an encounter with the “sublime picturesque” of a contemporary industrial banality. Smith’s “dromoscopic” drive moves him at high speeds amongst the modern ruins (ruins in reverse, says Smithson) of the unfinished turnpike, the abandoned airstrips, and vast, empty drill grounds. This is an encounter not with the “theatricality of objecthood” (Fried’s proposition) but, I suggest, with the topology of objecthood--the unmappable regions of experience in which Kant’s sublime “vibration” between apprehension and comprehension, between repulsion and attraction are vaulted into a late 20th century context.
Smith was not alone in his recollection of such an experience; Robert Smithson, Robert Irwin, and Laurie Anderson, amongst others, speak of moments that were equally obscure, equally potent. In the face of the sublime picturesque, each of these artists find themselves at a loss, struggling to “put forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” which Jean François Lyotard suggests is the mark of the postmodern sublime. Clement Greenberg famously said, “As art, the sublime is banal” and so the question remains: kept as “non-art” can some (profound) experiences of the banal continue to participate in the sublime? My thesis goes on to examine this question and the implications of a re-worked objecthood that describes not the objectness of a gallery work but the objectlessness of a non-gallery experience through the work of five contemporary artists, Sophie Calle (FR), Janet Cardiff (CND), Mike Nelson (UK), Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe (CND). While each of these artists work in very different media and adopt unique approaches to their material, their work engages in aspects of a sublime picturesque that privilege duration over instantaneousness, presence over presentness, objecthood over objects—a topology of encounter that, in Smith’s words, cannot be framed, only experienced. |
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