Michael Fried Modernism

Michael Fried introducing some of his early criticism:

"I further suggest that the best model for the evolution of modernist painting is that of the dialectic understood as an unceasing process of perpetual radical self-criticism or, as I also put it, 'perpetual revolution'; and I gloss my invocation of the dialectic by insisting on on the latter's nonteleological nature: thus, I say that 'the work of such painters as Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella... aspires to be judged, in retrospect, to have been necessary to the finest modernist painting of the future.' The decisive criterion of quality or value is thus a certain effectiveness or 'fecundity' that in the nature of the case can be known only after the fact; indeed, something of the same situation prevails with respect to 'formal' or 'stylistic' discriminations themselves, in that we are able to make such discriminations within a given body of work only where subsequent modernist painting has invested certain differences with a significance they did not originally have (I make this point in the opening paragraph of part 2 of the Fogg introduction and, focusing specifically on the relationship between Pollock and Louis, in a footnote to 'Morris Louis')."

In these two sentences (!) Fried does a reasonably concise job of explaning why Freud (and to a lesser extent Marx) has been so vital to cultural criticism during the last half-century or so. The value of an artist can be determined only ex post facto, and only by evaluating his (nearly always his--not necessarly due to any sexism in Fried particularly, but sexism at large certainly) ability to procreate.

We learn from Derrida and Spivak that this family picture--the modernist painter valued at how many children he has--isn't necessarly as straight forward as it seems. More to the point, there's a reason Fried says "fecundity" instead of "virility." For the artist simply to be the Freudian father, there would need to be a material site--a woman--upon which the artist could imprint his form to produce his offspring. The canvas is not that site, because the painting is not the child (the painting is a child of a different story, a form taken shape on a material canvas through the application of the artist's moist stylus). The child in question is the future artist (we might also suggest that the artists aren't people, but paintings, but that elides a few complications I won't try to address here). What's at question here, in Spivak and Derrida's terms, is an act of compensation: men, dominant in nearly every cultural and social corner, cannot give birth, cannot reproduce; so we tell a story that puts production, not reproduction, in the superlative position. A good artist is fecund, spawning children from his own womb, not from his stylus--though of course both he and his children carry pens, or brushes, or whatever (and no, it's not the shape that makes these object phallic).

A few questions worth asking:
Can the production narrative be retained without subverting or devaluing reproduction?

I'm suspicious of this posibility, though maybe only for empirical reasons. First, it's worth noting that the dominant discourses on production--particularly the Germanic theories of genius during the 19th century--are organized not only around evaluating male artists, but also around explaining why women are essentially incapable of high artistic achievement. Now I don't know enough to claim that these two agendas are imbricated, and I expect you'd find different mechanisms in different sources. Fried, for his part (and Greenberg, his father-figure), didn't exclude women from his favorite artists (a notable inclusion is Cindy Sherman, who flat rocks), and I've never come across gendered theories in what little of him I've read so far (not the case in Greenberg, who uses gender to poor effect in reviewing Anne Truitt). However, Fried is quick to admit that, especially in his early years, his understanding of philosophy (etc.) wasn't as strong as he might have hoped, and there's no reason to assume that a patriarchal bias in Goethe (for example) would or would not impinge upon Fried's thought through an intervening figure.

Can the production narrative be separated from the art it values? Is such a separation ethical or desirable?

The first mistake it would be easy to make here is to marry the production narrative generally to Fried's specific manifestation of it; there are many good reasons why Fried's criticism has been so enduring, and one of them surely is that his modernist values had already been adopted on a fairly big scale by society at large. Even if I could (or wanted to) counter Fried's work point by point, that wouldn't constitute a thoroughgoing deconstruction of production (indeed, Fried, toward the late 60s, began to do just that to Greenberg, who also aligns himself with production as value). Indeed, the deconstructive line (if there were one) would be that production--or phallocentrism generally--is too deep to root out: it informs our thinking on such a deep level that even thinking about not thinking about production is to think from the perspective of production (and this might apply even outside discourse on art).
The second half of the question comes down to a question of honesty. Reworded, If a body of work is produced under a cultural regime that values Fried's work--that is represented to some extent by Fried's work--does this theory of production then so thoroughly permeate the work in question that it becomes dishonest to try to sweep it away? Still again, Can we talk about modernism without modernist values? I'm gonna leave that one hanging for now.

More on Postmodernism

In my own little discipline, music, we find the term "postmodern" attached most frequently (or second-most frequently) to something that was called, ten years ago, "new musicology." This was an ostensibly diverse and diffuse collection of scholars interested in liberating the field of musicology from what they came to see as a dogmatic and restrictive tradition. New musicologists were interested in using a larger tool kit than the academic study of music had previously permitted. Consequently, they came to talk of "postmodern modes of analysis," which included narrative of personal experience, overt politicization of criticism, and hermeneutics.

Now, the marriage of postmodernism to these specific sites (narratives, politics and hermeneutics) is a strange one indeed. One will quickly note that these are precisely the hallmarks, as Gilles Hooper has noted, of modernism in so many other fields. The problematics of narrativity and its dissolution or delegitimization are central concerns in both Jameson's and Lyotard's texts on postmodernism; Adorno (to pick an easy one) is amongst the most political of music critics/philosophers (and, not coincidentally, is a favorite father for many of these postmodernists); and Derrida--maybe one of the strongest thinkers we might be able to call postmodern, if that word will end up meaning anything useful--has, from a certain point of view, organized his intellectual carreer around dismantling hermeneutics, and has said so explicitly in interview. So why, if the modernist tradition has so greatly enjoyed political, hermeneutic narratives, would a group of scholars trying to find a space for that sort of work appellate themselves as postmodernists?

The answer, I believe, can be found in the broader use of the term, and is, of course, strategic. In the broader field, as in music, postmodernism was coined to claim a historical rupture at the cite of a repetition. (I'm putting aside the very useful architectural meaning of the word, where it refers to a more or less specific style, and instead examining it as a "mode of analysis.") Now modernism is itself based on a sort of rupture, and perhaps this is why there is confusion. Habermas remarks that modernism emerges from the appropriation of the classical away from antiquity. The word "modern" came into general use to distinguish a particular culture's relationship to a very specific past: most commonly this is between Europe and the ancient Greeks and Romans. As time wore on, this comparison lost its edge. Culture was changing rapidly enough, and was leaving such a (comparitively) good record of its movements, that there needed to be more recent comparisons. Modernism is the cultural practice of these shifting comparisons, where the vanishing present constructs itself in relationship to its own mythical past. It is Schoenberg composing after Brahms and Mahler composing after Wagner; it is Pollack after the Social Realists, and Stella after Mondrian; it's every poet that Bloom talks about in The Anxiety of Influence--maybe it is influence. The moving targets of the past are martialled to justify and motivate the cultural production of the present (this conception of modernism is at least partially at odds with Greenberg's distinction between modernism and the avant-garde, but I'll have to think through that elsewhere).

Postmodernism, to a very large extent, does the same thing. This is particularly true, I think, in cases of postmodern analysis or criticism, where the author is searching, in vain or otherwise, for a way to talk about art without simply being Michael Fried or Allen Forte. The same anxiety that can be read in the arts can be read in these analyses, and often is precisely what gives them strength and beauty.

In the arts it may be a different story. When James Meyer talks about Fried's notion of modernist painting, he talks about modernism giving itself life by facing the possibility of its own destruction. Much work that is considered postmodern cannot, I believe, be honestly considered in this light. Indeed, a great deal of postmodern work seems driven by the thought that art itself is stagnant and decaying. Which is often precisely what gives it strength and beauty.