Always in pursuit of a meaningful reflection of who we are: our histories, our actions, and our creations, I navigate the intimately complex nature of our being through images. I’m constantly looking, searching, collecting, appropriating, and repurposing. As I move through the world, everywhere I'm provided with source material. If something I see resonates with me, it’s photographed, scanned, downloaded, or screen captured. Images are placed, erased, degraded, printed, and layered. There is constant movement, back and forth, between analog and digital: a compilation of image, time, place, and media.
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Being and Everythingness
I’m picturing some random point of view situated out in space at a distance from the earth that enables me to see all the signals, networks, grids, rays, pulses, flora and fauna that envelop the planet. What a remarkable vibrant glow it is.
I imagine all of this as a single machine: an orb racing through the vacuum of space. The only boundary, if there truly is one, is its epidermal surface. Conceptions of immersion and embeddedness are useless here, everything and everyone is intrinsic to the orb.
How liberating it would be to discover that in this machine all the agonies we endure are merely code embedded in the background of our avatars. Possible? Maybe. Yet, consistent with my apparent self-awareness is the question of my seemingly real connection to other beings and the planet that sustains us.
I mean, when pushed to the ground, called a faggot, and beaten with a baseball bat, it really fuckin hurts. For a moment, the sense of a body likely seems more real, more visceral than computer code. In spite of this, even if disconnected from the orb for a moment, the trauma quickly reunites avatar and corporeal body and imbues that blended being with an extreme sense of urgency.
Perhaps this blended being is a more vital political agent than I initially imagined. We are bodies that demand autonomy and empathy and want to fight back; reality impels us. Yet, at the same time, we can mine the orb’s interconnectivity to explore how it feels to inhabit the lives of “others” and envision alternate subjectivities.
Let’s make the leap and agree that our bodies and experiences are real and also agree that we are integral parts of a unified ecosystem. If we are at once one and all, we have a responsibility to both.
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On Violence
Throughout history there is great diversity in the ways in which violence has been enacted: warfare, catastrophe, torture, genocide, abuse. And equally diverse is the rationalization of how and why. Over the past several years my studio practice has been driven by questions about how we make sense of violence. What framework reflects most accurately the true nature of our violent behavior and the objects created in service of violence? In violence it’s revealed who as a species we are, who we have always been. It is part of our essence, part of the enigma of humanness where a multiplicity of voices and forces are in constant battle in both our internal and external lives.
The dark side of history tells us of a continuum of violence. Emblematic of the performative side of humanness, certain things are enacted over and over again. And the consequences of violence, laid bare in the record of human history as well as our lived experience, show the ceaseless domination of the planet by the bodies that inhabit it, and the domination of some bodies over others. However, the repercussions of violence can be as unmistakable as they are elusive. The outwardly visible effects - destruction, suffering, weaponry, starvation - are obvious, the emotional and psychological toll - depression, anxiety, fear – often exists only in some neural realm, occasionally lashing out to the surface. We know the violent story of human existence. Consciously or not, this trauma orients our thoughts, behaviors, and actions.
To enact, rationalize, or compartmentalize violence necessitates certain biases, certain starting criteria, certain ideological perspectives. The matter of death and illness resulting from a life of poverty is rarely placed in the same category as murder. Why? Are deaths from pollution any different from deaths caused by war? If pain and suffering is the criteria, then pain is pain and suffering is suffering.
There is a common assumption that humanity has become kinder, that violence and suffering have declined, and that freedom, wealth, and comfort have increased. This narrative charts a constant, triumphant, linear march across history towards a humane, peaceful future. We evolve biologically, socially, culturally, psychologically, yes? From savages to the civilized? From cave dwellers to polite citizens? From superstitious pagans to enlightened scientists? From callous torturers to empathetic teachers? Is this chronicle true? If not, why does it seem so? For many, via the rise of liberal ideas and innovation, history appears to progress as unfolding reason, economic parity, making right logical and social contradictions. Yet we need not look beyond the news of the day to question the legitimacy of this ethos.
Obviously, there are no easy solutions to humanity’s dark side nor to the questions and problems that arise in our daily lives. The false belief that the answer is out there often leads us to resolutely cling to and defend some singular doctrine. But embracing any one idea causes us to miss out on the value and insight of contradictions – there are a multiplicity of perspectives. Perhaps all ideas and beliefs born of the human mind are flawed in some way, yet most beliefs offer something, some value, some insight, some context. It could be valuable to see what insights are garnered in the tension of conflicting ideas. In the tension is where we might find a more wholistic understanding of the human experience – and arguably where we might find some wisdom. Of course, it’s also where we’ll likely find uncertainty, confusion, and ambiguity; in this liminal space there is no clear binary of right and wrong or good and bad, and for many humans this is an uncomfortable place to be.
Thus, for me, the more telling moments are the ones where, despite our supposed progress, we seem to have degenerated in the most abject ways. After all, science, technology, and modern methods of bureaucracy are necessary for genocides to be carried out. The development of nuclear fission led to the use and proliferation of atomic weapons. In a world with unprecedented food waste as many as two billion people are starving. I prefer to grapple with the moments when enlightenment reverts to mythology, when innovation stumbles, when Prometheus gives us fire and gets punished for it. This is where I’m called out as a member of a species caught in the tripwires of its own hubris.
In the end, it seems, the project of the enlightenment is totalitarian: standardizing, commanding, colonizing, controlling - dictating a singular way of doing things. It stands in the same relationship to objects as the dictator to human beings, where, bolstered by an arsenal of finely crafted weapons it performs power. The wealthy and powerful increasingly demand law and order. The streets are expanding sites of surveillance. The vilified are legislated against. Protests are suppressed. Prisons are packed, Consumption is celebrated. Disinformation is rampant. We are continually reminded of the need to create new pathways to normalize or even eradicate those deemed “others.” Pathways littered with an alarming trail of violent objects – now and across time. So, the dark side of history - of humanity - might be measured in warfare, catastrophe, torture, genocide, and abuse. But it begins with ideology, indoctrination, and innovation. It is propelled by narratives of hero saviors and future perfect utopias.
Ultimately, though, we cannot say that violence is only a product of progress unfolding. We cannot insist that it’s a part of history as if history was something apart from us. Surely this would also confess our hubris. Our violent nature is not a sign that we’ve erred but, rather, a sign that we are who we truly are: beings in a turbulent squall of contexts, meanings, and ideas, each casting different degrees of light and shadow onto the world. Are we to bow down to violence? Embrace our innate selves? Are we to be cynical and passive to an invincible hostility? If humanity is to endure then history demands of all of us to take keen interest not only in ourselves but also in others and in our planet. Perhaps within the chaos, we can find some strength to care about others, to sacrifice for others, to be kind.
As an artist, in my self-ascribed grandiosity, I believe that I am equipped to face these dark realities of life, that I can figure it out, that I can make sense of it. Repeatedly though all that I think I can harness for my righteous purpose is simply too great, too powerful, too overwhelming and I am forced to question to what degree I am the false messiah of my own story. To believe the myth, despite it being obviously false, is absurd. Still, I argue that if we don't know the dark side of humanity, the next dark moment will likely be the darkest. My purpose is not to establish a baseline for some great human awakening. With intention I resist hope for our long-anticipated utopian future. I leave to the realm of fiction some sort of profound shift in consciousness and behavior or the arrival of hero saviors. As the agents, objects, and spheres of violence are always in a process of becoming… so are we tasked with becoming more mindful, more urgent, more resilient.
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Some thoughts on queerness
How are we referenced in the things that surround us? Why are we drawn to this and rebuffed by that? What is meaningful, revelatory, seductive? How can complexity, ambiguity, or disruption evolve us - individually and as a species? Our interpretations are dictated by our own necessities, psychology, fears, and desires. Unbound by subjective limits, interpretation is restrained only by our unique position. Our location, physically and culturally, determines our point of view and our paths of action.
Inscribed, intended, or normative meanings are not fixed. This has the potential to shift our point of view, sensitize our bodies, and interrogate authority. What I describe here is, for me, the foundation and meaning of queer: the ability to orient, reorient, and disorient people and spaces, images and objects.
Alternate positions have the potential to empower and transform us, they offer up the criticality to question and subvert dominant networks. Even in the early days of queer theory, many people understood that the reclamation of queer as a term of empowerment was not merely meant to be uplifting for sexual and gender others nor as validation of a particular lifestyle. Queer is political, epistemological, phenomenological, social, aesthetic, and textual. It’s a position from which we restructure the world and rethink the many ways in which bodies desire, move, read, speak, learn, and perceive.
Art and technology are vital tools in support of queer looking, queer reading, and queer action. Through visual language, text, accessibility, or interactivity, we are positioned within and around the dominant discourse.
Art and technology can leverage the dexterity of our interpretation, pointing us toward alternative ways to be in the world. Art and technology enable us to envision futures.
Whereas much of the ideology expressed in mass media is contrived to direct people onto an established normative path, art and technology can be used in provocative and disruptive ways: new paths may be constructed, new relationships established, and alternative criticalities articulated. The ways in which these actions operate are decidedly queer: queer in their ability to reshape signs, signification, and communication, queer in that they construct quasi-identities and irreconcilable discrepancies, queer in their defiance of authorship and notions of truth. Art and technology together comprise an evolving techno-aesthetic-queerness. They offer up a lens of criticality and can reveal the mutability of language, objects, images, and spaces.
Neither art nor technology nor queerness is truth. They are positions and points of view. The paths that extend out from these positions can be traveled or bypassed, they can be readable or encoded. There is an inherent potential in art and technology to point toward a queer assessment of the world.
Our power as queer subjects, queer makers, queer viewers and readers is revealed in how we process information. How we access it, re-contextualize it, re-propose it, re-imagine it and re-format it. Our power is in our perceptions and interpretations, in our desires and interactions. It’s in the stories we tell and the secrets we keep. It is in our fractures and multiplicities. It is in our histories and our possible futures.
In a sense, images, objects, and texts, in and of themselves, mean nothing in particular. It is only the action of appropriating, juxtaposing, making illegible that imbues them with agency. And interpreting, relating, and questioning that make them meaningful. This is the power of art and technology: to help us identify and rebuke the normative structures that operate forcefully to shape us. It is our chance to become (re)(dis)oriented.
Our interpretation of situations, language, and things is dictated by our own necessities, our own psychology, our own fears and desires. Queer identity is a position of power from which we can consider a multiplicity of meanings. Normativity demands separateness, distinction, and clarity: clear role representations, clear politics, clear religious beliefs, clear displays of patriotism. Clarity is used to suture some people into and exclude others from the normative narrative. Queerness, however, questions and mistrusts clarity, sees clarity as an insidious form of discipline. Things are not always what they seem. Thus, queerness is a lens of criticality. It is a challenge to look intently, to feel deeply and to question aggressively.
Unbound by subjective limits, interpretation testifies to the fact that inscribed, intended or normative meanings are never fixed. The binaries of normative and alternative, self and other, force and power prove far too simplistic. Perception and identity are malleable. Queerness operates in the world to show how complexity and ambiguity break down our notions of the world around us. This has the potential to disrupt public space, subvert the norm, and construct new subjectivities.
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Queerness and Electronic Literature
Historically, many literary movements have explored alternative types of texts. The works of Apollinaire, the Dadaists, Concrete poetry, Oulipo, and Fluxus all investigated new forms of writing and, thus, new forms of reading. While redefining the role of the reader, these movements pointed us toward new ways to conceive of, present, and experience the world. Similarly, the very nature of texts in the digital realm creates a dynamic relationship between writer and reader. It is not merely our ability to read texts on a computer monitor or a device that marks the difference, even though this is an undeniable shift in materiality, the key is in a newfound interaction. In electronic literature the fixity and boundaries characteristic of the traditional printed book are broken down in favor of interactivity, appropriation, manipulation, readability, kinetic movement, and visual form. Additionally, whether an emergent text is performed by code, reader interaction, or a combination thereof, there is a phenomenological experience that is simply not possible with printed texts. As digital texts are freed from the delimited surface of the printed page, so is queerness freed from the delimited boundaries of normativity. Lacking a determined location, generating difference, and open to multiple readings, digital texts and queerness disrupt the dominant discourse. Both instances of liberation are opportunities to become (re)(dis)oriented.
If we consider the rules and expectations of normativity as being authored by hegemonic forces, it follows that the defiance of authorship is a defiance of normativity. As technology makes possible active participation on the part of the reader through interaction and post-production, electronic literature moves us beyond the passive reading of a printed page. This disruption to our common notion of authorship exposes opportunities to challenge the normative narrative and guides us toward opportunities to challenge the dictatorial preciousness and pervasiveness of authorship. Technology has always had the power to position us within and around the dominant discourse. However, in the case of electronic literature we not only have the potential to recognize the ways in which we are constrained by authority and authorship but also the ways in which we can extract from, intervene in, piece together, and write our own narratives. Electronic literature - like queerness - shows us that inscribed, intended, or normative meanings are not fixed.
Our engagement with text positions or orients our bodies and behaviors. If, in fact, new technology intervenes in how texts are made and consumed causing them to disrupt traditional assumptions of authorship then, through these disruptions, we are likely to find ourselves reoriented or disoriented. This act of (re)(dis)orientation points us toward alternative world views. Thus, the connection between queerness and electronic literature is not that the technology is a prosthesis or an appendage of the queer body. It’s not that electronic literature is simply a tool or a mechanism through which queerness is further enabled. Rather, electronic literature and queerness illustrate, inform, and empower each other creating a combined force with the capacity to map strategies to disrupt hegemony and manifest real action - individually and collectively. And, when our perspective, behavior, and desires are dictated by our unique circumstances, rather than normative forces, we are freed from many illogical societal constraints. Our location, literally and symbolically, determines our point of view and our paths of action.
The interaction and post-production in electronic literature is indicative of process and becoming. Likewise, as seen in electronic literature, technology continually presents new opportunities to imagine and experience the world. The fast-paced development of what technology is able to do seems always to be eclipsed by what technology will surely make possible. When technology supports queer looking, queer reading, and queer action it adds to the building blocks of queer futurity. Whereas much of the ideology expressed in mass media is contrived to direct people onto an established normative path, technology can intervene as a potent provocateur: new paths may be constructed, new relationships established, and alternative criticalities articulated. The ways in which these actions operate are decidedly queer in their ability to reshape signs, signification, and communication; queer in that they construct quasi-identities and irreconcilable discrepancies; queer in their defiance of authorship. Altogether, this new lens of criticality reveals the mutability of bodies, realities, and futures.
Another uniquely shared trait of electronic literature and queerness is found in their hybrid, unresolved, dislocated, and rearranged nature. Both celebrate a lack of site specificity and fixity. Texts experienced through technology are transitory and multiple; parts are (re)assembled, (re)constructed, (re)arranged, and (re)read. They are also encoded, processed, uploaded, retrieved, rewritten, saved, and deleted. Unlike printed texts, electronic literature incorporates kinetic and performative aspects that evolve from and subsequently disrupt well-established literary norms. Similarly, queerness stands in defiance of established societal norms by pioneering alternative bodies, alliances, and perceptions. It’s a shared quality of malleability. Queers are, often out of necessity, adept at playing a multiplicity of roles: family persona, work persona, school persona, community persona, private persona. Where clarity of one’s beliefs, gender, political affiliations, desires, etc. is demanded by the normative narrative, malleability is a necessity in the lives of queers. Camouflaged, fractured, often invisible, always malleable - these traits exemplify the tension between what we see and what is actually being shown. Electronic literature and queerness are less about what we see and more about how we see: physically and culturally.
The ways humans interact, and the repercussions of those interactions are played out over and over in endless pages of literature. And, when these narratives reflect normative values, it is from them that we are constrained and measured. As electronic literature performs queerness it both interrogates authorship and reveals new potential. In rethinking authorship, whether that of texts or that of behaviors, we have the potential to be released from normativity. As we become conscious of how we are referenced in the things that surround us, we question why we are drawn to this and rebuked by that. We begin to understand how complexity, ambiguity, or disruption evolves us. When challenged, our assumptions can begin to break down exposing alternative ways to see, read, make, and act. This can sharpen our awareness and sensitize our bodies. What I describe here is, for me, the foundation and meaning of queer: the ability to orient, reorient, and disorient, the potential to empower and transform, the criticality to question and subvert dominant networks.
As our understandings of queer/text evolves, so does society. We find this in the way queer ideas, actions, spaces, and bodies become more visible in and through technology. As a broadly defined and empowered identity, queerness moves further out of the private realm and into the public; queerness expands beyond a specificity of personal or sexual desire to a realm of world-making. Together, queerness and electronic literature extend interpretation and the discontinuity is profoundly impactful: personally, politically, socially, and psychologically.
For me, both queerness and electronic literature ably reposition texts and bodies. Queerness and electronic literature unveil multiple paths, peripheries, and gravitational pulls. They mobilize our bodies and minds to question authority and normativity. Queerness and electronic literature strip texts and bodies of their specificity and, in doing so, expose how signification, identity, and authorship are multiple, personal, and malleable. Our power as queer subjects, queer makers, and queer readers is evidenced in how we process information: how we access it, re-contextualize it, re-propose it, re-imagine it, re-format it. Queerness and electronic literature free us to be (re)(dis)oriented.
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Jena Osman's Public Figures
Point of view, interpretation, and the circumscribed space of collage are at the forefront of my thoughts these days. Inscribed, intended, or normative meanings are never fixed and, when we find our point of view shifted, our notions of the world around us may begin to break down. In Public Figures, author Jena Osman uses the gaze of monuments to construct a network of observations that possess the power of transformation. In a mix of writing styles and images, she restages history, redefines violence, repositions the reader, and reveals the complexity of and our complicity in the gaze. Structurally the book weaves together art, journalism, photography, mapping, politics, and poetry. But - truth, hypocrisy, ideology, morality, and memory - are the revelation of Osman’s odyssey.
Compelled by the idea of seeing the world through other’s eyes, Osman formulates her research project: to photograph the gaze of monuments in her hometown of Philadelphia. She rigs a mop handle with a disposable camera at one end so that she can access the often out of reach eyes of the monument’s protagonist. We see photos of the monuments, mostly military statues, juxtaposed to images of what they see. The accompanying text is at first very matter of fact; Osman briefly describes the monument and presents a few details of relevant history. In several instances she makes a specific connection between the gaze and the historical back story. Her first entry – Major John Fulton Reynolds – is gazing at trees. According to Osman’s research, although Reynolds was a respected military figure, he fell asleep under a tree and was taken prisoner by the enemy, an embarrassment for Reynolds and the army in which he served. It may be purely coincidental, but nonetheless it’s poetic that this war hero is positioned to spend his time looking at the object of his humiliation.
Not long into the book, Osman begins to consider specific details: uniform, weapon, bible, inscription, pose. Every detail suddenly seems calculated to support a certain narrative, a particular ideology. This is reflective of not only how the institutional gaze is positioned but also how the public’s gaze is positioned by the institution. Our perception of history is shrewdly constrained. Osman admits that the details, and what they signify, are coming into focus only as her project evolves; it’s not far-fetched to assume that the public has little regard for the monuments encountered in their daily comings and goings. The text beneath a photo of the author photographing, notes the impact of her actions on passersby as they catch on to what she’s up to, “They gasp and laugh.” Osman’s simple gesture, regardless of the back story or the details, is enough to incite some sense of raised consciousness. Observing Osman paying attention, the public is provoked to pay attention too.
Osman’s collage includes a more cryptic text that runs along the bottom of many of the pages. It’s not initially clear whose voice is being transcribed in the collections of phrases, printed in a different font. Constantly referring to a “target” and using words like “roger wilco,” “weapon,” “impact,” and “bombs” one is quick to recognize the military lingo. In actuality the military text is excerpts of drone pilot’s narration that Osman has appropriated from YouTube videos. Here we see through yet another set of eyes. The language is unemotional and exacting. The voice seems far removed from the destruction and loss of life to which it is inextricably connected. The relevance of the drone pilot’s text suddenly becomes clear: the disconnect of the monuments from the real-world consequences they represent, let alone from the truth, parallels the disconnect of the drone pilots from their targets. The action of the drone appears on a screen like a television show, a video game, or a movie. How easy it is to write history from a distance.
As the book progresses, we are primed to ask questions, to read between the lines. This acquired position feels enlightened, privileged even. Amplifying the complexity of her story and our experience, Osman interweaves photographs of actual soldiers engaged in military maneuvers as well as diagrams of the monument’s locations in relationship to each other. At a couple of intervals, the photographs are omitted and replaced by text. Osman sets up the “story,” writes the photographic “image,” and provides the “caption.” We are, at this point, primed to insert the image using our imagination: engrossed in Osman’s storytelling it’s a task we happily take on. From text to pictures to maps, there is constant movement. The patinated bronze and solid stone fluctuates between past and present; the public navigates its way around the monuments and through history; the drones stealthily fly, look and act; the soldiers invade, rescue, carry out, and execute; the reader travels from Philadelphia to Venezuela to Ancient Greece to Vietnam to Europe to Iraq. Osman’s concise book is unfathomably expansive.
Public Figures wraps up with several pages of transcribed drone pilot narration that subtly, beautifully, transform into poetry. We are left with the final thought:
everything relies on visual confirmation, action no longer
Ultimately Osman’s photography project, compelling in and of itself, becomes a catalyst for something much deeper, far more complex. We are objects in a constructed, collaged space that encompasses time and place, fact and fiction, ambivalence and action, sight and gaze. Yet, we don’t have to exist as romanticized markers in fixed locations. We have the ability to observe, self-reflect, and verify. We are poised to take action and, more importantly, to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions.
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Michael Fried, Minimalism, and a Trip to Dia:Beacon
Prior to a recent trip to Dia:Beacon I re-read Michael Fried’s famous essay Art and Objecthood. Fried makes a passionate case for art and against objecthood, “There is a war going on between theatre and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial—a war that, despite the literalists' [minimalists] explicit rejection of modernist painting and sculpture, is not basically a matter of program and ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility.” It sounds to me like Mr. Fried was not coping well with the art revolutions of the 1960s. But he’s a smart guy and more than capable of presenting his case. First, he distinguishes modernist works of art – composed of different elements, autonomous, independent from their location - from minimalist works which are whole, free of individual parts, relying solely on shape and presence to occupy a specific location in the world. This matter-of-fact distinction is vital to Fried’s argument as it establishes his own grounds for considering the meaningfulness, or lack thereof, of art and objecthood. Art, I was reminded by the critic, is meaningful based on the very nature of the relationships of the elements. The essential nature of objecthood finds meaning only in relation to the space it occupies, including the space of the viewer. He is proposing here that bjecthood requires the viewer to be an integral part of the experience without whom the object has no meaning. According to Fried – and this is the crux of his position - the requirement of an audience in order for a work to have meaning is theater. “What is it about objecthood,” he asks us, “as projected and hypostatized by the literalists that makes it antithetical to art?” His answer is a scathing reduction of minimalism to nothing more than “a new genre of theater”… non-art.
This is what was on my mind as I began my journey to Dia:Beacon. The train made its way up river, the urban density thinned, the season became more identifiable and the river, flowing aggressively against the direction of the train, was an apt metaphor for my entering into what might prove to be treacherous waters. Leaving behind the distractions and noise of life in the great city of New York for the quickly quieting landscape seemed to heighten my senses. To a city boy like me Beacon feels like the wilderness. The old factory space that has become the museum is an all too perfect fortress for the art: solid, spacious, industrial, crispy-clean, light-filled. I thought about how much time has passed since this work was made, all the ‘posts’ and ‘isms’ that have staked their claim. Art movements endlessly evolve, respond and react to both art history and art potential, to cultural changes and economic realities. Tasmil Raymond, curator at Dia Art Foundation writes, “…the artist works within a historical development, providentially decodes and proposes a reading of present conditions, and ultimately shifts art into a realm of experience.” Bingo! This may be the Achilles heel of Fried’s argument. It strikes me that he is unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge the appropriateness of time and place in regard to minimalism.
However, looking closely at the all-star cast of minimalist artists' work I realized that Michael Fried is also right – sort of. The works, especially those by Andre, Judd, Heizer, and Serra are not autonomous, nor moveable, nor contained within a frame, they are definitely not tableau. The work is for and about the viewer, it engages the architecture, it is meant to be experienced, seen, walked on, walked through, and peered into. It is, in this sense, theatrical and performative. However – and this is where Fried and I truly part company – I find these attributes provocative, critical, and revealing. They are revolutionary to me, even today; they are still capable of asking the questions: What is art? How is art made? Where can art exist? This work is demanding of both viewer and critic. And, even though these once controversial minimalist works are commodified and monetized, residing comfortably in museums and corporate lobbies, there was a profound sense of joy knowing that, at one time, the work’s non-artness threw into turmoil the institutional idea of an artwork’s value, validity, and authenticity.
Of course, some works are more challenging than others. Perhaps this is most notable in the nearly invisible and deceivingly simple works by Fred Sandback. He was a master of creating objects with essentially no mass, non-objects that somehow confidently delineate and fill space. Sol Lewitt as well whose nearly imperceptible and ephemeral wall drawings fill several galleries. I can’t just pass these by, curiosity gets the better of me; I’m compelled to know, to look deeper, to question, to converse. And, for anyone who thinks Lewitt, Judd, and Serra embody minimalism, what of the diversity seen in works by Joseph Beuys, John Chamberlain, Robert Smithson, or Louise Bourgeois. Altogether Dia is adept at clearly displaying the complexity of the movement. Minimalism, like all art movements, has no singularity. No doubt, I find some works more compelling or successful than others, a privilege I’m willing to extend unconditionally to Michael Fried. Yet I cannot help feeling that Fried’s short shrift of minimalism is a great disservice to art history and himself. Despite Michael Fried’s essay, Dia reminded me of the incredible breadth of art making: its objects, its ideas, its functions, its appearances, its timeliness. I rediscovered for myself that the expansive realm of art is, in its entirety, how and where meaningfulness is made manifest.
My journey to Dia:Beacon was transformative and enlightening. Carl Andre wrote, “Art is not only the investment of creative energy, but the sharpening of the critical faculties… Things have qualities. Perceive the qualities.” Words to live by. And, as much as Fried may have been challenged and even threatened by minimalism, in Art and Objecthood he makes no effort to consider minimalism’s historical poignancy or relevance. He is desperately clinging on to not only modernism as it trips and stumbles but also to ideas of 18th century France, Diderot, and the tableau. I believe there is much to learn from ideas and artifacts of the past. But let’s not forget that past and present are deeply interwoven in a continuum that constantly feeds on and devours itself. Perspectives change, attitudes morph, new interests emerge, technology advances, and meaningfulness shifts. What is radical today will likely be ubiquitous tomorrow. It’s all meaningful. As the art world of the 1960s was quickly evolving, apparently Michael Fried was not.
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