CRITICAL RESPONSE: I

Summer 2001
Volume 27, Number 4

Response to Caroline A. Jones
by Michael Fried

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Jones's article operates from first to last on a mistaken and prejudicial premise, namely, that the footnote to my 1966 article "Shape as Form: Frank Stella's New Paintings" in which I allude to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an "anxious" attempt to defend myself--which is to say my previous writings--against the charge of reductionism. (She uses the adjective "anxious" twice, on pages 488 and 523, and introduces the noun "anxiety" in a related context on page 489). As she also puts it,

Fried wielded Kuhn in order to fend off the accusation that what he was proposing was in some way "a reductionist conception of Modernist painting." But it was manifestly too late. That reductionist enterprise was one in which Fried was already mired--an interpretation that held Modernism to be an inexorable progression toward "the irreducible essence of all painting" [a phrase I use in the footnote to encapsulate the view of modernism I claim is wrong]. [P. 495]

Here are the sentences in the body of "Shape as Form" that immediately precede the footnote:

I suggest that it is one of the most significant facts about his new pictures that Stella seeks in them to repudiate not literalist taste or sensibility exactly, but the literalist implications which, in the grip of a particular conception of the nature of modernist painting, his stripe paintings appear to carry. This is not to claim that his new pictures are chiefly a response to the drawing of those implications by Judd and others. Rather, I am suggesting that it was in his own unwillingness, even inability, to pursue beyond painting what were to him as well, if not indeed before anyone else, his stripe paintings' apparent implications in that direction that Stella discovered both the depth of his commitment to the enterprise of painting and the irreconcilability with that commitment of what may be called a reductionist conception of the nature of that enterprise.1

There are certain younger artists to whose sensibilities all conflict between the literal character of the support and illusion of any kind is intolerable and for whom, accordingly, the future of art lies in the creation of works that, more than anything else, are wholly literal--in that respect going "beyond" painting. It should be evident that what I think of as literalist sensibility is itself a product, or by-product, of the development of modernist painting itselfÑmore accurately, of the increasingly explicit acknowledgment of the literal character of the support that has been central to that development. But it ought also to be observed that the literalness isolated and hypostatized in the work of artists like Donald Judd and Larry Bell is by no means the same literalness as that acknowledged by advanced painting throughout the past century: it is not the literalness of the support. Moreover, hypostatization is not acknowledgment. The continuing problem of how to acknowledge the literal character of the support--of what counts as that acknowledgment--has been at least as crucial as to the development of modernist painting as the fact of its literalness, and that problem has been eliminated, not solved, by the artists in question. Their pieces cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal. And it is hard to see how literalness as such, divorced from the conventions which, from Manet to Noland, Olitski, and Stella, have given literalness value and have made it a bearer of conviction, can be experienced as a source of both of these--and what is more, one powerful enough to generate new conventions, a new art.2

I think Jones has a polemical axe to grind that seriously biases her potentially useful account of Kuhn's contribution to the modernism discussions of the 1960s (her remarks on Kuhn himself are the best thing in her article). As far as my work is concerned, it invalidates what she has to say from beginning to end.

1. Michael Fried, "Shape as Form: Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons," Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), p. 95.

2. Ibid., p. 88.

Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. He has just completed Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (forthcoming in 2002).