jones

CRITICAL RESPONSE: II

Summer 2001
Volume 27, Number 4

Anxiety and Elation: Response to Michael Fried
by Caroline A. Jones

While conceding the "potentially useful" core of my essay on Kuhn and the artworld, Michael Fried contests two aspects of my analysis: he argues that I assign the wrong emotion to his essay from 1966 and that I misattribute the cause for that emotion to concerns over his own reductivism. Fried would correct the feeling of "anxiety" I located in his essay on Stella in order to substitute "elation" (p. 000). Perhaps Clement Greenberg was justified when he once opined that "feeling is all,"1 but although I respect Fried's desire to see the emotional valence of his important history set straight, my central argument remains intact. Anxiety, I argued, was the mark of a paradigm in crisis. But elation is merely the other side of that same coin.

Elation, then, describes the author's recollected emotion at getting "fairly complex states of affairs exactly right" (p. 000; emphasis added). It is Fried's major point that the problems leading him to Kuhn turned not on the reductionism risked by his own criticism (my argument), but on the reductionism of others--those artists he calls literalists (whose motives we may, presumably, continue to impute freely without fear of rebuttal. Indeed, many of the key players are now dead). It was exhilarating for Fried to get "exactly right" what the literalists (who came to be called minimalists by everyone else) were doing wrong. But if it is putatively nonreductive, Fried's "right" modernism is still a hegemonic structure that must be protected from incursions from without--defended from those who would deflect it from paradigmatic self-sufficiency.

Kuhn, the main subject of my essay, remains entirely unexamined in Fried's response. Nonetheless, it may be useful to continue Fried's digression and to review briefly the arguments he revives from his 1966 "Shape as Form" essay. We are reminded by the extensive citations in his response that in this essay he offers an exquisite parsing of Frank Stella's aggressively shaped canvases--an exegesis that built on his own slightly earlier theory of "deductive structure,"2 but necessarily departed from that reading in its analysis of Stella's challenging new paintings. To sum up this complex argument: shape is not a problem that Stella sets for modernist self-reflexivity, shape is suddenly a part of the solution. These paintings produce a "therapeutic" healing (Fried's phrase) of a modernist tradition that they would otherwise appear to have ruptured.3 The earlier striped canvases, Fried averred, were now to be seen as having invited the literalist/minimalist project and as having initiated a reduction that the shaped canvases can now be seen as entirely avoiding--through "the depth of [Stella's] 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" ("SF," p. 95). (Here, remember, enters Kuhn). To conclude: in 1966 Stella's early paintings are "reframed" as vulnerable to being "merely literal" (and thus fuel for the minimalist engine). The later shaped canvases are staged as refusing that reductionism through conviction and commitment to the enterprise of (modernist) painting. Shape becomes suddenly "capable of holding, or stamping itself out, or compelling conviction.... It has become, one might say, an object of conviction, whereas before it was merely . . . a kind of object" ("SF," p. 78). Feeling is all, and feeling conviction and commitment is the ticket to paradigms.

As my essay argued, Kuhn gave Fried legitimation for this "antireductionist [and] antipositivist" view of the proper "kind of cognitive enterprise modernist painting is" ("SF," 99). What emerges from our exchange is thus a paradox: Fried will survey modernism's boundaries to keep out the reductionists, but in so doing he will, perforce, reduce the purview of what modernism may contain. So, I have argued, was Kuhn read into the artworld, and so must he (in this particular subculture) be understood. For all the readings of Kuhn that open on to postmodernism, or polyvocality, or relativism, or any of the fruitfully "fuzzy" thinking courted since modernismÕs fall from hegemony, the most powerful implications of Kuhn's account for the artworld center on the crucial need to practice science (or art) with the "right" paradigm. The shift from one paradigm to another was, as Kuhn made central to his book, revolutionary--cataclysmic, sudden, a leap of faith that could not be secured by positivist data. Fried was deeply engaged in supplying the adjustments needed to secure Stella in an elaborated modernist paradigm in order that such a cataclysmic shift need not be seen as occurring. Others saw such complex tweaking and backfilling as yet more evidence of anomalies--anomalies whose very accumulation foretold the coming of a paradigm shift. Reinforcing the main point of my essay is this fact: Kuhn's model of history governs both accounts.

Rosalind Krauss was, until the early 1970s, part of the same intense intellectual circle that included Fried (a group of Harvard graduate students and their faculty sometimes known as the Fogg school). In 1972, she wrote an early memoir of the period that should have been cited in my original article, as Yve-Alain Bois has since gently pointed out.4 Although the personal conflicts revealed in Krauss's piece are irrelevant to my argument, her own reliance on a Kuhnian model of conviction and commitment is crucial. Equally revealing are the major ingredients of her opening anecdote: Fried, Stella, Kuhn, and the history of modernist painting:

One day while the show, "Three American Painters" was hanging at the Fogg Museum in Harvard [in 1965], [its curator] Michael Fried and I were standing in one of the galleries.... A Harvard student . . . [pointed at a Stella and] confronted Michael Fried. "What's so good about that?" he demanded. Fried looked back at him. "Look," he said slowly, "there are days when Stella goes to the Metropolitan Museum. And he sits for hours looking at the Velàzquezes, utterly knocked out by them and then he goes back to his studio. What he would like more than anything else is to paint like Velàzquez. But what he knows is that that is an option that is not open to him. So he paints stripes." Fried's voice had risen. "He wants to be Velàzquez so he paints stripes." ["VM," p. 48.]

The Stella paintings at hand were not the irregular polygons that Fried would be dealing with in 1966 (those had yet to be painted). The paintings then at the Fogg were the "deductive structure" works: the early banded black canvases (1958-59), the subsequent notched silver ones (1960), and the radically shaped, but still biaxially symmetric copper paintings (1960-61, which Krauss beautifully describes as having luminous surfaces "burnished by the light which flooded into the room" ["VM," p. 48]). These objects, soon to be identified as perilously open to the literalist/minimalists' reductive readings, were here unproblematically sutured to the known sweep of Western painting. As Krauss points out, it was after this exhibition that minimalist Donald Judd would accuse Krauss, Fried, and other "Greenbergers" of a reductionist doctrine Judd called "modernism" ("VM," p. 49).5 It was only then, I presume, that accusations of reductionism began to have such punitive rhetorical power (for Fried). Greenberg and Judd, polar opposites, both become emblems of reductionism in Fried's post-1966 account. It was at this precise moment that the former formalist began to dissociate himself explicitly from both.

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