Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception 9781350088405, 9781350088436, 9781350088429

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Plates
Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Sacred Imagery
Chapter 1 The Beholder as Witness
Chapter 2 Of Clouds and Terrestrial Beholders
Chapter 3 The Melancholic Beholder
Part II Group Portraiture
Chapter 4 The Artist as Beholder
Chapter 5 Two Modes of Beholding
Chapter 6 Theatricality and the Beholder
Part III Abstraction
Chapter 7 Beholding a ‘Reversible’ Space
Chapter 8 Virtual Space and the ‘Literal’ Beholder
Chapter 9 On Repetition and Beholding
Part IV Intermedia
Chapter 10 The Complicit Beholder
Chapter 11 The Beholder in the Expanded Field
Chapter 12 The Dislocated Beholder
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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BEHOLDING

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BEHOLDING SITUATED ART AND THE AESTHETICS OF RECEPTION Ken Wilder

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 © Ken Wilder, 2020 Ken Wilder has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p.xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-​party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 3500​ ​ ​ ISBN: HB: 978-188405 ePDF: 978-​1-​3500-​8842-​ 9 ePub: 978-1-3500-8841-2 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To Sharon & the memory of my parents

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CONTENTS

List of Plates ix List of Figures x Preface xiv Acknowledgements xviii Introduction

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Part I  Sacred imagery

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1 The beholder as witness

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2 Of clouds and terrestrial beholders

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3 The melancholic beholder

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Part II  Group portraiture

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4 The artist as beholder

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5 Two modes of beholding

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6 Theatricality and the beholder

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Part III  Abstraction

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7 Beholding a ‘reversible’ space

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8 Virtual space and the ‘literal’ beholder

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9 On repetition and beholding

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Part IV  Intermedia

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10 The complicit beholder

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Contents

11 The beholder in the expanded field

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12 The dislocated beholder

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Notes 253 Bibliography 293 Index 305

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PLATES

1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

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Masaccio: Trinity, c.1425–​7, fresco, 667 × 317 cm. S. Maria Novella, Florence. Titian: Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, 1519–​26, oil on canvas, 478 × 266 cm. S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Titian: Assumption of the Virgin, c.1515–​18, oil on panel, 690 × 360 cm. S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Hans Holbein: The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521–​2, tempera on limewood, 30.5 × 200 cm. Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel. Francisco de Goya: La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón, 1784, oil on canvas, 248 × 328 cm. Corte di Mamiano, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma. El Lissitzky: Prounenraum, 1923 (reconstruction 1971), painted wood, 320 × 364 × 364 cm. Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. El Lissitzky: Proun 1C, 1919–​20, oil on panel, 68 × 68 cm. Museo Nacional Thyssen-​Bornemisza, Madrid. Agnes Martin: Falling Blue, 1963, oil and graphite on linen, 182.56 × 182.88 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky. Bruce Nauman: Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Spinning), 1992, three video projectors, six colour video monitors, six videodisc players, six videodiscs (colour, sound), dimensions variable, as installed at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

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FIGURES

0.1 1 .1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

2 .6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1

Nicolaes Maes: An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding, 1655, oil on panel, 45.7 × 72.2 cm. Corporation of London, Guildhall Art Gallery. 9 Giotto: Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni), c.1305–​6, Padua. 19 Giotto: Annunciation (Our Lady of the Annunciation), c.1305–​6, fresco. Arena Chapel, Padua. 22 Masaccio: Trinity (detail), c.1425–​7, fresco, 667 × 317 cm. S. Maria Novella, Florence. 27 Reconstruction of Brunelleschi’s first perspective demonstration, c. mid-​ 1420s, as drawn by the author. 34 [Giotto?]: Ecstasy of Saint Francis, c.1274–​84, fresco. Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi. 36 In situ shot of Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro within S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. 38 Titian: Entombment of Christ, c.1520, oil on canvas, 148 × 212 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. 41 Giovanni Bellini: Madonna Enthroned and Saints (San Giobbe Altarpiece), c.1480, tempera and oil on panel, 471 × 258 cm (as cut down). Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice. Photomontage of work in situ in San Giobbe, within its original stone frame. 43 Interior shot of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. 45 Correggio: Vision of St John on Patmos, 1520–​4, frescoed dome. San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma. 48 Correggio: Assumption of the Virgin, 1526–​30, frescoed dome. Parma Cathedral. 49 Correggio: Vision of St John on Patmos (detail), 1520–​4, frescoed dome. San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma. 51 Matthias Grünewald: Isenheim Altarpiece, c.1512–​16, oil on limewood, 376 × 534 cm. Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar. 57 Andrea Mantegna: The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, c.1483, tempera on canvas, 68 × 81 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. 59 Caravaggio: The Entombment, c.1602–​4, oil on canvas, 300 × 203 cm. Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome. 70 Rembrandt van Rijn: The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, 1662, oil on canvas, 191 × 279 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 76

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List of Figures

4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4 6.5

6.6 6.7 7.1

Dirck Jacobsz.: Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation, 1532, oil on canvas (transferred from panel), 115 × 160 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Cornelis van Haarlem: Civic Guard Banquet, 1583, oil on panel, 135 × 233 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Frans Hals: Banquet of the Saint George Civic Guard, 1616, oil on canvas, 175 × 324 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Rembrandt van Rijn: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, 1632, oil on canvas, 169.5 × 216.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Werner van den Valckert: Male Regents of the Lepers’ Hospital, 1624, oil on panel, 134 × 209 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Frans Hals: Regents of Saint Elisabeth’s Hospital, 1641, oil on canvas, 153 × 252 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, 320.5 × 281.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Albrecht Dürer: Draftsman drawing a nude, in Unterweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1538), woodcut. Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas (detail), 1656, oil on canvas, 320.5 × 281.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas, diagram of perspective construction, as drawn by the author. Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas, reconstruction of painting according to John Moffitt, with amendments, as drawn by the author. In situ shot of Francisco de Goya’s La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón within Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma. Rembrandt van Rijn: Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes (previously known as Artemisia), 1634, oil on canvas, 143 × 154.7 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Jean-​Siméon Chardin: The House of Cards, c.1737–​7, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 71.8 cm. The National Gallery, London. Jean-​Baptiste Greuze: La Piété filiale, Salon of 1763, oil on canvas, 115 × 146 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Francisco de Goya: Los Caprichos, #41. ‘Neither More Nor Less (Ni Más Ni Menos)’, 1797–​9, Etching, burnished acquatint, drypoint and burin, platemark: 21.8 × 15.1 cm; sheet: 37.5 × 26 cm. Francisco de Goya: La familia de Carlos IV, 1800, oil on canvas, 280 × 336 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Louis-​Michel van Loo: Le peintre Carle van Loo et sa famille, c.1757, oil on canvas, 200 × 156 cm. Musée du Chateau, Versailles. El Lissitzky: Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions, 1922, illustrated book with letterpress cover and six letterpress illustrations, published in Berlin by Skythen Verlag, 27.8 × 22.5 cm. Private Collection.

81 82 83 85 90 91 96 101 105 107 108 114

116 119 120

126 128 130

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List of Figures

7.2 7.3 7 .4 7.5

7.6

7.7 7.8 7.9

8 .1 8.2 8.3 8 .4 8.5 9.1

9.2 9.3 9.4

9.5 9.6

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Kazimir Malevich: Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.9 × 79.5 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 140 El Lissitzky: Kestnermappe Proun, 1923, lithograph on paper, 61 × 45.2 cm. Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon. 141 Necker cube, as drawn by the author. 142 El Lissitzky: Study for ‘Proun’ 8 Stellungen (8 Position Proun), 1923, watercolour and gouache over graphite on laid paper, 24.5 × 24.8 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Sam and Ayala Zacks, 1970. 143 Theo van Doesburg: Tesseract with arrows pointing inward, c.1924–​5, Indian ink, red ink and white gouache on transparent paper, 20 × 26.5 cm. Het Nieuwe Instituut, Van Moorsel donation to the Dutch State 1981. 144 El Lissitzky: Proun 2C, 1920, oil, paper and metal on panel, 59.5 × 39.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 145 Kazimir Malevich: Supremus no. 58, 1916, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 70.5 cm. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg. 148 Diagram from El Lissitzky, ‘A. and Pangeometry’ Europa Almanach: Painting, Literature, Music, Architecture, Sculpture, Stage, Film, Fashion, and Containing Some Residual Observations of No Less Importance, ed. C. Einstein and P. Westheim (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1925), as redrawn by the author. 150 Anthony Caro: Prairie, 1967, steel, painted matt yellow, 96.5 × 582 × 320 cm. 158 Anthony Caro: Midday, 1960, steel, painted yellow, 240 × 96.5 × 366 cm. 160 Anthony Caro: Sculpture Seven, 1961, steel, painted green, blue and brown, 178 × 537 × 105.5 cm. B0825. 161 Anthony Caro: Flats, 1964, steel, painted red and blue, 95.5 × 231.5 × 305 cm. 165 Anthony Caro: Early One Morning, 1962, steel and aluminium, painted red, 290 × 620 × 333 cm. Tate Collection, London. 171 Agnes Martin: Wood I, 1963, ink, coloured ink, ballpoint pen and pencil on paper, 38.1 × 39.4 cm. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Gift of Sarah-​Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky. Acc. no.: 135.2004. 180 Lenore Tawney at work in her studio in New York, 1966. The LIFE Picture Collection. 181 Agnes Martin: White Flower, 1960, oil on canvas, 182.6 × 182.9 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim, Museum, New York, Anonymous gift, 1963. 183 Agnes Martin: The Tree, 1964, oil and pencil on canvas, 182.8 × 182.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund. 184 Alexander Liberman, Agnes Martin in her New York Studio, 1960, black and white photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2000.R.19). 186 Visitors in front of Agnes Martin: White Flower, 1960, as part of the exhibition ‘Guggenheim Collection: The American Avant-​Garde 1945–​ 1980’, February 2012 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome. 188

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List of Figures

10.1 Yoko Ono: Cut Piece, 1964, film still from ‘Concept Art on Show in London’, 1966, a version of Cut Piece performed, for camera, by Yoko Ono and Anthony Cox. 202 10.2 George Brecht: Drip Music, 1962, performed during ‘Festum Fluxorum, Fluxus, Musik und Antimusik das Instrumentale Theater’, Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, February 2, 1963, gelatin silver print, 24.8 × 18.8 cm. Performer George Maciunas. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: 2069.2008. 205 10.3 Nam June Paik: Zen for Head, 1962, at ‘Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik’ in Wiesbaden. 209 11.1 Rosalind Krauss, Greimas Diagram from Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1979), 38. Redrawn by the author. 218 11.2 Mary Miss: Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, 1978, wood, earth and steel, pit opening 16′ (488 cm) sq., underground 40′ (1219 cm) sq., towers 10′ (305 cm) sq. × 18′ (549 cm) high, 8′ (244 cm) sq. × 15′ (457 cm) high and 6′ (183 cm) sq. × 13′ (396 cm) high. Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, Roslyn, New York. 219 11.3 Mary Miss: Ladders and Hurdles, 1970, wood and rope, 110 × 122 × 610 cm. 222 11.4 Mary Miss: Untitled, 1973, wood, 12′ (366 cm) × 6′ (183 cm) sections at 50′ (1524 cm) intervals. Battery Park Landfill, New York City. 223 11.5 Mary Miss: Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, 1978, wood, earth and steel, pit opening 16′ (488 cm) sq., underground 40′ (1219 cm) sq., towers 10′ (305 cm) sq. × 18′ (549 cm) high, 8′ (244 cm) sq. × 15′ (457 cm) high and 6′ (183 cm) sq. × 13′ (396 cm) high. Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, Roslyn, New York. 226 11.6 Mary Miss: Field Rotation, 1980–​81 (permanent installation), wood, steel, gravel and earth, central well 60′ (1829 cm) sq. × 7′ (213 cm) deep on a 5-​ acre site. Governors State University, Park Forest South, Illinois. 228 12.1 Douglas Gordon: 24 Hour Psycho, 1993, video installation, dimensions variable. Installation view of the exhibition ‘Douglas Gordon: Timeline’, 11 June 2006 through 4 September 2006. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, Acc. no.: IN1974.7. 244 12.2 Douglas Gordon: Play Dead; Real Time, 2003, video installation, dimensions variable. As installed in April 2007 at the exhibition ‘Douglas Gordon: Between Darkness and Light’ at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany. 246

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PREFACE

This book proposes a theory of beholding art. More particularly, it proposes a theory of beholding situated art. While perhaps unfamiliar to some, I use this qualifying term to encompass not only rare examples of site-​specific practice (a term subject to frequent misuse) but also group portraiture, painted for anticipated locations, and what we might call site-​responsive art –​works that, while subject to different iterations, engage their situation as an essential part of the encounter. These are artworks that are sensitive to their site and anticipated audience and, while not necessarily in situ in a strong sense, are purposively sited within specific contexts, drawing aspects of that situation –​not only spatial but also institutional –​into the remit of the encounter. Now, this might be thought of as being rather too heterogeneous a category of art practice to have any kind of critical purchase; indeed, even so-​called ‘autonomous’ artworks in traditional media such as painting and sculpture are affected by extrinsic factors: that is, the work’s outer apparatus, such as its frame or pedestal. Not only is an artwork’s conditions of access a factor to be taken into account, such as the ubiquitous ‘white cube’ gallery, but our experience of the artwork is also altered by variants such as the position where it is hung on the wall or placed within the room, the quality of lighting, the materiality and colour of the surface on which it is hung or placed, its proximity to other works and so forth. Moreover, the juxtaposition with other similar and/​or contrasting works –​perhaps as part of a series by the same artist, or the gathering of artworks under a curatorial theme –​will also affect our experience and understanding. In other words, extra-​pictorial or extra-​sculptural factors can profoundly affect how we perceive and interact with autonomous works of art, and in this sense all art is thus ‘situated’. These curatorial factors are not, however, the subject of the book. Rather, I impose a caveat on the works to be considered in this volume, which delimits the concern to a distinct category of art practice. My subject is works where the experience of the situation is itself constitutive of the work’s meaning. Here the ‘content of the work of art’, to use the language of Susan Sontag, does not exist independently of the situation, and of the experience of that situation. A painting being placed too near the corner of a room, or at an awkward height, while affecting our experience at some level, is not, in and of itself, a contributory factor to the work’s semantic content. There are, however, artworks that might be said to imply a representational excess, used in a non-​mimetic sense, in that the virtual space of the work extends to encompass the actual space of the beholder. Such works have an excess over and above that which is, strictly speaking, represented –​ an excess of meaning that must be enacted or performed by the contributory presence of the beholder –​and is thus dependent upon perceptual, ideational and imaginative

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processes the spatially situated encounter prompts. Here, to remove a work from its original context will, indeed, change its meaning. My primary concern is therefore with what John Shearman terms ‘transitive’ works of art (which he opposes to self-​sufficient ‘intransitive’ works) that are only completed by the presence of the beholder, such that her performative role is necessary for realizing this representational excess. This conceives of beholding as a process, such that the resulting interaction constitutes an effect to be experienced rather than an object to be defined. But with such a caveat, have I not moved from a very broad category of art to, seemingly, an extremely narrow category? Perhaps so. Nonetheless, and not insignificantly, this group of works includes some of the most prominent artworks within the history of art. This is perhaps indicative that something significant is going on here. Indeed, that we are so often drawn to such works suggests that while they often deliberately problematize the beholder position, in bringing our orientation into play (while eluding our grasp) we find such works deeply engaging –​not least because we have work to do to complete the incomplete. A key contention underpinning the book is that such situated works therefore perform a locative function, in terms of providing indexical cues as to the position the beholder must adopt in order to place herself in the requisite experiential connection to the work’s meaning. As such, they facilitate demonstrative or, more generally, indexical thought with respect to the virtual realm of the artwork (this, that, here, there, in front of, behind and so forth), which in situated works is indexed relative to the position we occupy in actual space. The artwork thus functions as  –​though is not reducible to  –​ a form of indexical sign characterized by its positional mode of operation. It is my contention that this involves the imagination. More specifically (though my general argument is not dependent upon such an assertion), I believe such artworks utilize the demonstrative potential of mental imagery: where quasi-​perceptual experiences inherit their apparent spatiality from binding processes used by the apparatus of early vision. In other words, this is an indexing that exploits a frame of reference shared with not only visual perception but also (given the body’s capacity to coordinate multiple frames of reference) other non-​visual forms of spatial orientation. Unfortunately, given the limited space I am not in a position to defend such a claim; nonetheless, it is at least consistent with the position advanced by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn. Moreover, it is deeply sympathetic to the embodied perception of Merleau-​Ponty and James J. Gibson. Crucially, the contention that need concern us here is that situated artworks utilize concurrently perceived spatial cues from our actual environment (whether visual or otherwise) to locate ourselves relative to the artwork’s particular mode of virtuality, such that aspects of our actual situation are drawn into the work’s imaginative remit. Even in the case of situated painting, where we tend to be confined (though not always) to a particular viewpoint, this binds virtual space to our own bodily frame of reference, with all the implications of an embodied perception actively enmeshed in the world. However, this does not mean that such works negate distinctions between virtual and actual space; quite the opposite, in that bringing our orientation into play is a prerequisite to constructing a tension between these two frames of reference (that of the artwork xv

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and that of the beholder), such that the distancing devices necessary for an aesthetic encounter –​a communicative situation removed from everyday constraints –​are allied to aspects of the work’s wider semantic content. Indeed, many of the works discussed set up an oscillation between the doubled-​up ‘real’ and ‘irreal’, such that the virtual is juxtaposed onto actual space, while refusing to cohere. The resulting problematizing of the beholder position operates at a phenomenological and ideational level, such that these two aspects are intimately tied to each other through the unfolding process of beholding. Written within the broad theoretical remit of reception aesthetics, the book is neither a work of art history nor a survey of situated art. As such, the book makes no claims as to comprehensiveness. I am, for instance, aware of (and apologize for) the narrowness of its focus on the Western canon. There are other, more justifiable omissions; the book excludes, for instance, the whole category of monumental sculpture, which, though generally in situ in the strong sense of the term, rarely (with exceptions, as Shearman has shown) constructs bridges from within its virtual realm to the actual space of the beholder. The book also excludes, for different reasons, the immersive and performative art of most of human history: namely Palaeolithic art, such as the caves at Lascaux of which Merleau-​Ponty writes so elegantly. In terms of painting, I have restricted myself to the remit of works incorporating what Meyer Schapiro refers to as the ‘late’ invention of the frame as a focusing device. The aim, therefore, is not to map or document the field of situated art but rather to construct a philosophically informed theory of the distinctive phenomenal encounter at least some situated or in situ art affords, and the beholder’s constitutive role therein. As such, this is an unapologetically transhistoric approach –​though not, I would argue, thereby ahistorical, in that it is sensitive to the context of the art situation. Moreover, the book is written by neither an art historian nor a philosopher, but a practitioner (albeit one who has taught practice and theory for many years) whose own work is situated somewhere between architecture and fine art practice; as such, it addresses art historical and philosophical issues that have indirectly emerged out of, and have informed, my own art installation practice, of which I will speak no further. This is a book of criticism by a practitioner about art practice, engaging (in the spirit of Sontag) the how it is what it is rather than what it means. This is not to belittle the role of theory –​quite the opposite, as hopefully will become clear –​but to underline the fact that theory is here in the service of offering insights into, rather than interpretations of, the making and reception of the works of art under consideration. The book is structured around twelve artworks and twelve texts by major theorists –​ philosophers, art historians and critics –​such that each chapter constructs an extended dialogue between an artwork and text, though other artists and theorists are referenced throughout. The aim is not to interrogate the text as such but to see what it brings to our understanding of each work in question. Some of these pairings may be familiar, others, hopefully, unexpected. Some of the texts refer specifically to the work under consideration, while others do not. In so doing, the book engages a diverse range of practices: from in situ Renaissance painting, group portraiture, modernist painting and xvi

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sculpture, to intermedia practices of installation, video and performance art, and non-​ gallery-​based site-​specific art. These various encounters allocate different constitutive roles to the beholder, bringing not only her spatial and temporal orientation into play but also a culturally and historically specific repertoire of anticipated ideas and beliefs. The chapters are thematically grouped into four parts:  ‘Sacred Imagery’; ‘Group Portraiture’; ‘Abstraction; ‘Intermedia’. The respective parts emphasize facets of beholding ‘situated’ art exemplified by the historic conditions of access under consideration. But taken together, the book makes the case for certain bodily aspects of beholding manifest by all the artworks discussed. As a phenomenological theory of beholding conceived as a process, in one way or another all the works I consider bring the beholder’s spatial and ideological orientation into play: whether through perspectival means or utilizing the organizational potential of the space of reception or demanding the beholder’s active movement through constructing a sequence of spaces that must be passed through. Collectively, the in situ and situated works considered here are juxtaposed to the Greenbergian notion of the artwork as a self-​sufficient, autonomous whole, and a major concern –​reflecting my position as the University of the Arts London reader in spatial design –​is to cite the role of the space of reception as a contributory factor in the encounters they afford.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As the University of the Arts London reader in spatial design, I have benefitted from a sabbatical and financial support for the purchasing of image rights. For their support for my research, I am grateful to Malcolm Quinn, associate dean of research, and Simon Maidment, dean of the Design School at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon (CCW). I  would like to thank Dave Beech, Cate Elwes and Stephen Farthing for generous support in relation to this publication, and to the wider community of CCW readers and professors. At Chelsea College of Arts, I have gained much from discussions with Bernice Donszelmann, Martin Newth and Colin Priest, while Ellie Pitkin has been a constant support in the CCW research office. During my time as programme director and MA course leader for interior and spatial design, I have benefitted from the open-​ mindedness of colleagues (too many to name) who fostered an interdisciplinary approach that bridges fine art and interior design/​architectural practice. For collaborations over recent years that have informed my thinking about situated art, I am indebted to Adam Kossoff, Kristina Kotov and Aaron McPeake, and also to Marsha Bradfield, Jane Collins, Neil Cummings, Julia Dwyer, Mathew Emmett, Robin Jenkins, David Littlefield, Pete Maloney, Sue Ridge, Aura Satz and Shibboleth Shechter. Undertaking my PhD at Chelsea some time ago, I had a fantastically knowledgeable supervisory team of Laura Jacobus, Brendan Prendeville and David Ryan, and excellent examiners in Rob Hopkins, Margaret Iversen and William Raban. Rob Hopkins has continued to offer valuable advice and support, and in the European Society of Aesthetics I have found a community of philosophers who have helped this practitioner think about the philosophy of art. In particular, I  have benefitted from conversations with Elisa Caldarola, David Davies, Fabian Dorsch (sorely missed), James Hamilton, Matthew Rowe, Karen Simecek, Paolo Spinicci, Jakub Stejskal and Connell Vaughan. At Bloomsbury, I would like to thank Rebecca Barden for her enthusiasm for the project and Claire Collins for all her invaluable help and patience. An anonymous reviewer helped me to clarify aspects of my argument. Many years ago, Richard Padovan inspired me to write, while I owe much to the later encouragement of Peter Stickland. A special thanks to Peter Beardsell, Pip Cronin, Ian Farmer, Simon Head, Bill Jackson, Gwendolyn Leick, Julia Mannheim, Julian Maynard-​ Smith, Heinz-​Dieter Pietsch, Michael Sanders, Ken Taylor and Amikam Toren for supporting and informing my practice over the years, and to my friends and family for their forbearance in my absence. And, finally, to my partner Sharon McDuell, not only for her insightful comments (challenging me to think through my arguments) but also for her constant support and love. It simply would not have been possible without her. The book is dedicated to her and to the memory of my parents.

1

INTRODUCTION

I To ‘behold’, used as an imperative, demands something of the person beholding. And artworks, whether paintings or sculptures, or hybrid forms such as art performances, earthworks or video installations, are meant to be beheld. While this is, of course, a truism, not all artworks acknowledge this fact. Indeed, the twentieth century witnessed a persistent strand of criticism that championed the ‘autonomous’ art object of modernist painting and sculpture. The pre-​eminent representatives of this objectivist view (where the object as art exists independently of the beholder’s perceptual experience) were the American art critics Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Their position was not, in and of itself, a denial that works are made to be beheld, but rather an insistence on the self-​sufficiency and self-​referentiality of the work in question. A modernist artwork, it was felt, must not ‘solicit’ the beholder’s attention through the inclusiveness of the literal situation. Again, this is not to negate the body as such (at least in Fried’s case), but rather the insistence that it is the work itself, in its aesthetic autonomy, that evokes bodily feeling and movement through abstract expressive gesture. The art situation, while capable of impinging upon the work negatively through poor curation, was considered extrinsic to the work’s semantic content which was determined entirely by internal relational properties. Now, as the title of my book would suggest, this is not a position I endorse. Indeed, in proposing a theory of beholding situated art, I believe the beholder –​as an anticipated presence  –​must do something:  she has a role to play, namely to complete the work. Not because the work is somehow lacking, but rather because such imaginative and ideational acts are not only anticipated by the artist (and thus licensed) but also necessary in order to be able to uncover semantic content. This is not a case of reattributing the inexhaustibility of the work from the object to the experience; rather, as we shall see, I seek to redefine the encounter with situated art as not only one involving an engagement with an object-​like entity but also one where a proper appreciation must account for something of the artist’s performance.1 In so doing, I will nonetheless distinguish my position from perfunctory postmodernist dismissal of such modernist criticism as just so much ‘formalism’. Indeed, as Hal Foster rightly states, ‘Fried is an excellent critic of minimalism not because he is right to condemn it but because in order to do so persuasively he has to understand it, and this is to understand its threat to late modernism.’2 That minimalism constituted such a threat is without doubt, to the extent that by the 1980s medium-​specific modernism was, to all critical intents and purposes, moribund: engulfed by the onrush of new modes of art practice. Of course, modernist artists continued to exhibit work in prestigious galleries

2

Beholding

and museums (and to sell their work on the art market). And yet, in art theory circles someone like Peter Osborne can contend that the campaign against a certain ‘aesthetic’ institution of spectatorship … so fundamentally transformed the field of practices institutionally recognized as ‘art’ … as to constitute a change in art’s ‘ontology’ or very mode of being. The new, postconceptual artistic ontology that was established –​beyond aesthetic –​came to define the field to which the phrase ‘contemporary art’ most appropriately refers, in its deepest critical sense.3 For Osborne, there can be no ‘aesthetics of reception’ precisely because aesthetics itself has been found wanting in meeting the challenges of the new regime of intermedia (or transmedia, as Osborne prefers to call it): an art ‘beyond’ aesthetic. Such a position is heavily entrenched within the art school context I have taught in for the last quarter of a century. This raises two important questions which underpin much of the book. The first is whether this paradigm shift in art’s ontology is an historically contingent consequence of –​to use Osborne’s term –​postconceptual art. Certainly, I would not want to deny the significance of this seismic shift in art’s very mode of being, as Part IV of this book will demonstrate. But while (with a nod to Rosalind Krauss) Osborne talks of a new ‘field of practices’ that are ‘institutionally recognized’ as art, one might ask whether this move to discussing art ‘practices’ rather than ‘objects’ is something that applies exclusively to postconceptual art. Or, might it reveal something fundamental about the widespread misconception of the ontology not only of intermedia practices but also of medium-​ specific modernism and so-​called traditional art? Secondly, by casting this change as a ‘campaign against a certain “aesthetic” institution of spectatorship’, does this not likewise grant too much territory to those who conceive aesthetics narrowly in terms of a formalist reading of Kant, via Greenberg?4 As we shall see, there are alternative ways of framing a postconceptual artistic ontology as ‘aesthetic’ that explicitly reject the premise that an aesthetic experience is founded upon objective properties of the work. I will here draw upon reception aesthetics, particularly Wolfgang Iser’s claim that representation (the term used in a non-​mimetic way) opens up a liminal space that oscillates between the real and the imaginary; here we are forced to confront not only what the artwork ostensibly presents but also what is negated –​a radical incompleteness rather than a mere omission, which requires acts of ideation and imagination conditioned not only by the work as such but (crucially) also by the situation in which it is encountered, including our own implicit social and cultural assumptions.

II The modernist criticism of situated art took two forms, and it is important to distinguish between them. Translating autonomy as a task of medium self-​definition, Greenberg 2

3

Introduction

sought to ground each art on a particular area of competence ‘unique to the nature of its medium’.5 In ‘Modernist Painting’, Greenberg famously identifies flatness as painting’s primary condition –​shared with no other art –​constituting a purely optical illusion:  a strictly ‘pictorial’ rather than ‘real’ third dimension. In renouncing illusion as ‘a depth that one could imagine walking into’, there can, for modernist painting, be no implied continuity between the space of painting and that of the beholder.6 But even with sculpture, the irreducible essence of which is its three-​dimensionality, Greenberg claims that under ‘the modernist “reduction” sculpture has turned out to be almost as exclusively visual in its essence as painting itself ’; indeed, Greenberg insists, ‘The human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space in either pictorial or sculptural art; now it is eyesight alone, and eyesight has more freedom of movement and invention within three dimensions than within two.’7 Beholding, for Greenberg, has become a purely visual and distanced affair. Fried shares Greenberg’s commitment to medium specificity and self-​sufficiency, or at least he did, until his more recent writing on video art, a ‘theatrical’ mode of engagement that Fried has had to ‘learn to appreciate’.8 In his earlier writing, Fried endorses much of Greenberg’s account; later, he is critical of Greenberg’s dual emphasis on opticality and the modernist ‘reduction’. Not without reason, Fried sees in such a reduction to ‘essence’ –​to the ‘literal’ character of the support –​the unintended opening of a backdoor to the ‘literalist’ art of the minimalists (artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Tony Smith). Indeed, turning his fire on his one-​time mentor, he states ‘that with respect to his understanding of modernism Greenberg had no truer followers than the literalists’, Fried’s term for what later became known as minimalism.9 Nevertheless, for Fried the literalness ‘hypostatized’ by minimalist art is ‘not the literalness of the support’, in that their ‘pieces cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal’;10 in other words, for Fried this sense of something abstract made concrete reality is not a modernist laying bare of the medium, a revealing of an underlying convention, but rather an engagement that specifically negates its aesthetic dimension. Fried writes disparagingly of the notion that ‘someone has merely to enter the room in which a literalist work has been placed to become that beholder, that audience of one –​almost as though the work in question has been waiting for him’.11 And of course Fried is right to register this aspect as a recurring feature of the new art he so opposed, to the extent that Claire Bishop can claim that ‘an insistence on the literal presence of the viewer is arguably the key characteristic of installation art’.12 Fried thus, albeit from a highly critical perspective, anticipates the move to an art practice that privileges the experience of ‘a situation –​one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder’.13 This is nowhere more manifest than in the work featured on the front cover of the book, Dan Flavin’s 1972–​3 installation Untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), first installed at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1973 (but shown here in the version installed for Flavin’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London, in January 2006). Here, an entire temporary architectural situation is created, expressly intended to exploit retinal reactions through the saturation of single-​coloured lights. Typical of one of his ‘barrier’ works, a corridor, 244 cm high by 244 cm wide, is all but blocked by twenty-​three pairs of 3

4

Beholding

abutted back-​to-​back full-​height fluorescent lights, yellow on one side and green on the other, such that the opposite colour is only revealed as a glowing void through a narrow vertical slot along one edge (the width of a single light fitting), which takes on a tangible physical presence. Aware that the space continues beyond the intense array of lights, the beholder must walk through an adjacent corridor of the same proportions to complete the experience by viewing the work from the reverse side. As such, the durational work can never be grasped as a whole. So, we are faced with a curious reciprocity where both sides of the debate adopt the terms of Fried’s argument –​his definitions of autonomy and theatricality –​while passionately disagreeing over his negative evaluation of minimalist art;14 moreover, both sides tend to agree that such art (alongside conceptual art), in its ‘literal’ engagement negating the autonomy of the artwork, opens the way to an art that is non-​or even anti-​ aesthetic. In challenging this consensus, I follow the example of Juliane Rebentisch, who in her Aesthetics of Installation Art has argued that ‘aesthetic autonomy is not something that can be guaranteed by production’, but rather is ‘explicable only with reference to the structure of the aesthetic experience, which must therefore also form the basis of art critical judgment’.15 Greenberg and Fried focus attention on the internal arc of the work’s manufacture, as embedded within the object, negating the role of the beholder in retrieving content through her own performative role. In so doing, they neglect what Rebentisch refers to as ‘the double structure of aesthetic representation, that is, of the aesthetic tension between what is representing and what is represented’.16 As we shall see, this tension will be a recurrent theme throughout the book: from Hans Holbein’s engagement with Reformation debates about the status of the religious image to Bruce Nauman’s staging of the sceptical problematic. What is at stake here? Fried accepts at face value the self-​declared facticity of someone like Donald Judd’s ‘specific objects’, only to be surprised by their ‘stage presence’; indeed, Fried complains that such ‘work refuses, obstinately, to let [the beholder] alone –​which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him’.17 This is the crux of Fried’s charge of theatricality, but by opening up a space that includes the beholder’s body, literalist art reveals what Rebentisch terms ‘the double and reciprocally referential presence of the aesthetic object as thing and as sign, its “stage presence” ’.18 For Rebentisch, this is characteristic of all art rather than something peculiar to postmodernist art (which just makes this doubling more explicit).19 Far from emptying out the works signifying function, minimalist art therefore reveals something fundamental about this doubling structure; I  might add that it also reveals something about the situated work of art’s prepositional or locative function.20 Nevertheless, I  am indebted to the way Fried historicizes the theatricality/​ antitheatricality debate. In an extended body of writing on the relation of the artwork and beholder, spanning some fifty years, he discusses an extraordinary range of artists, from Caravaggio to Anri Sala. Contrary to Greenberg, Fried historicizes the concept of ‘essence’. In such a light, Fried allies his own antitheatricality to the eighteenth-​century philosopher Denis Diderot, who argued that the intensity of the beholder’s absorptive engagement is dependent upon the artwork’s negation (in the sense of a nonrecognition) 4

5

Introduction

of the beholder standing before the work.21 This is a topic addressed in Chapter  6. For now, it is worth noting Fried’s acknowledgement that he was a Diderotian critic even before he knew it, later historicizing a French antitheatrical tradition from its inception to the paradigmatic challenge to this tradition from Édouard Manet and his generation. By the mid-​nineteenth century, Fried claims that the strategy of negating the beholder was no longer tenable for progressive artists such as Manet. In its direct acknowledgement of the beholder, Manet’s Olympia (1863), in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, seeks to displace this ‘imaginary possession of the work’ as a ‘private’ moment.22 Fried claims that with Manet the fiction of the non-​existence of the beholder is broken in favour of a ‘radical facingness’, such that Manet ‘wanted to make the painting itself turn toward and face the beholder’ in such a way to emphasize ‘the frontality, the problematic spatial relationships, and finally what has been seen as the flatness of Manet’s paintings’.23 While Manet is thus profoundly concerned with the relation between painting and beholder, the look ‘out’ of the painting in works such as Olympia is characterized by Fried as ‘an obduracy or opacity (or “blankness or “indifference”)’ which ‘rebuffs or at least strongly resists all attempts at hermeneutic penetration’.24 So while Manet is thus seen as a precursor to an art that insists on issues of facing (in what Fried proposes as a displacement of issues of flatness), his art is nonetheless characterized by a kind of resistance (or unintelligibility), a ‘certain double structure, at once ostensibly denying and implicitly acknowledging the beholder’s presence’.25 I want to ally this double structure, which Fried rightly identifies with Manet’s work, with Rebentisch’s own double structure of sign and thing: the aesthetic tension between that which is representing and that which is represented. My particular concern is with a class of signs that do not resemble their objects, but rather depend upon association by contiguity:  the artwork conceived as an indexical or deictic sign, which extends internal qualities and relations of the artwork by connecting them to experience. In other words, I am concerned with the circumstances, typical of situated art, where the indexicality of the sign follows from its prepositional nature:  it refers to an assumed beholder in a way that is analogous to what Charles S. Peirce describes as ‘a situation relative to the observed, or assumed to be experientially known, place and attitude of the speaker relatively to that of the hearer’.26 Indeed, Peirce, contrary to the use to which he is frequently put, emphasizes the experiential nature of such indexical reference. He argues that ‘some indices are more or less detailed directions for what the hearer is to do in order to place himself in direct experiential or other connection with the thing meant’.27 As Anne Freadman notes, Peirce thus differentiates ‘kinds of sign on the basis of their modus operandi’, such that ‘these indices “give directions for finding” their objects, that is for establishing a relationship of selective attention between the interlocutors and the object’; thus considered, Peirce offers ‘a performative construal of indexicality, consistent with the pragmatic turn of Peirce’s late work in which he sought to theorize the action of signs and through that, their power to produce action’.28 This performative construal of indexicality is, I believe, congruent with the notion of the artwork functioning as an event-​like entity. 5

6

Beholding

Moreover, if the issue of autonomy is no longer conceived as an all or nothing affair founded upon the aesthetic distance of the self-​referential object, but rather a problematic inherent to the work of art’s duality as ‘sign’ and ‘thing’, this has important consequences for how indices might structure limits to the beholder’s encounter with the virtuality of the artwork. Like Susanne K.  Langer (whose position has much in common with Peirce’s), I am committed to the idea that while different art forms construct different modes of virtual space, this virtuality  –​and its relation to ‘actual space’  –​is intrinsic to the aesthetic encounter (in what she refers to as non-​discursive, yet still ideational, symbolism of art).29 However, I  believe we need to talk here of different degrees of virtuality:  what Sven Sandström terms degrees of unreality, such that in the case of painting, an extension of such virtual space –​a liminal zone that we might occupy –​ might, in certain circumstances, even be said to encompass the space of the beholder, such that any notion of (implicit) internal and (explicit) external spectators might here, at least during the course of the imaginative engagement, be said to fuse.30 Osborne suggests that the artistic significance of the aesthetic ‘must be judged in the context of the historically shifting relations between aesthetic and other –​cognitive, semantic, social, political and ideological –​aspects of artworks’, a ‘balance of meaning’ that is ‘different in different kinds of art’.31 One might concur, but nonetheless see such differences not in binary terms of ‘aesthetic’ or ‘anti-​aesthetic’ but rather different kinds of tension generated within the internal critical structure of the artwork between the thing referring and the referent. Again, this is not to deny that artworks produced around the 1960s represent a significant shift in art’s mode of being, but rather that we see this tension as intrinsic to all works of art (despite formalist attempts to efface it). And by questioning the very notion of autonomy that both Greenberg and Fried employ, I argue that at least some forms of modernist abstraction –​including the 1960s work of Anthony Caro, held as exemplary by both Greenberg and Fried  –​might thus be reconsidered as constructing a tension between the virtual space of the artwork and the beholder’s own space. The resulting ambiguities of spatial location arise not because there are two separate domains –​the virtual and real –​but rather a miscalibration between the two. In other words, a slippage occurs, in that the respective kinetic potentials (of the work and beholder) overlap but do not quite cohere.

III As an unabashedly transhistorical (though not thereby ahistorical) account, I  seek to recast the theatrical/​antitheatrical dichotomy not as two opposed traditions but as a dialectic operational not only in the oeuvre of certain artists but also in single works of art. Nevertheless, like Fried I adopt the term ‘beholder’ throughout this book in preference to equivalent designations, such as viewer, observer, recipient or spectator  –​though sometimes I will adopt such terms for the sake of variety or when they are specifically used by the artist or theorist under discussion. This term can also encompass non-​visual modes of encountering art (such as sound and tactile art). The notion of beholding, with 6

7

Introduction

all the implications of an imperative, suggests an active process of beholding –​an act of beholding –​that demands something of the receiver or recipient, whose orientation towards the work (in its deepest sense) is thus brought into play. As already noted, contrary to Fried my emphasis is on the artwork’s functioning as an event-​like rather than an object-​like entity. Of course, it is both  –​in almost all instances there is a vehicular medium with which to engage (even with the so-​called dematerialized art object).32 But what is important, to echo David Davies, is that a manifested performance articulates a content through our engagement with such a vehicle.33 This is not couched merely in terms of the resulting experience. Rather, like Davies, we might here reference Timothy Binkley, who refers to works of art as indexed acts of ‘piece-​specification’.34 Davies states that for Binkley ‘[p]‌iece-​specification is intensional, because what are specified as pieces are not objects or structures per se, but sets of meanings or values conferred upon objects or structures through the very act of piece-​specification’.35 Davies thus adopts Binkley’s claim that ‘[w]hat counts as a work of art must be discovered by examining the practice of art’,36 an examination that, I would argue, involves physical, ideational and imaginative engagements with the vehicle via the artistic medium (in the specific sense of historically specific conventions about how we engage with art). Indeed, my concern is not only with how sets of meanings or values are conferred upon objects or structures through something equivalent to the act of piece-​specification (the articulation of an artist’s statement) but the performative role of the beholder in recovering such meanings or values through examining the vehicular medium. As such, the structuring of the experiential encounter is not an end in itself: that is, it is not a sufficient condition to determine meaning and values. Rather, it is a means to prompt acts of cognition that reflect upon the processes not only of a work’s making but also of the situation of its embodied reception. In seeking to reconcile a phenomenological approach to the aesthetics of reception with aspects of performance theories of art, I therefore seek to avoid the one-​sidedness with which both have, justifiably, been accused. The works I consider convey what we might call a representational excess –​a content beyond that which they, strictly speaking, represent, precisely because this content is dependent upon the beholder’s share (what we bring to the work).37 However, as it stands, this is insufficient. Other, non-​situated artworks (such as cinematic film or easel painting) might also be said to include blanks and negations that likewise require acts of imagination and ideation.38 The distinction here is that the situated works under consideration bring our phenomenal orientation towards the work into the remit of the encounter, often problematizing the situation we occupy as beholders. The twelve principal artworks considered in this book all construct, in Alois Riegl’s terminology, an ‘external coherence’: that is, they are artworks completed by the presence of a beholder, establishing a rapport that brings the spectator’s perceptual, projective and conceptual capacities into play. Here, an anticipated presence might be said to constitute part of the work’s representational and/​ or semantic content. Riegl contrasts this external coherence with works described as having a closed ‘internal coherence’, which present a self-​enclosed and self-​sufficient cohesion founded on the reciprocity of elements 7

8

Beholding

contained within the work, requiring no bridge to the beholder. Internal coherence is exemplified by the kind of autonomous, self-​referential painting and sculpture of high modernism (notwithstanding the above comments). Nevertheless, as Riegl notes, these inner and outer realities are not mutually exclusive, and the dynamics between them are operative in works of a single artist, and even in a single work of art.39 While Fried does not reference Riegl, in a sense his whole theatricality/​antitheatricality debate might be rethought in such terms; as will already be clear, I am drawn to works that exploit the tension between these dynamics. The aim is to establish the resulting notion of the structured encounter as fundamental to situated art in its multiple guises.

IV As the book’s subtitle suggests, the broad theoretical remit will draw upon those rare attempts to apply reception aesthetics to the visual artists, such as in the writings of Wolfgang Kemp, John Shearman and Riegl (though with the latter, the label is applied retrospectively). Emanating from Germany and the University of Konstanz in the late 1960s, and in particular the writings of the literary theorists Hans-​Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, reception theory (Rezeptionstheorie) has been far more of a critical force in literature than it has been in the so-​called ‘visual’ or ‘plastic’ arts. Michael Ann Holly, for instance, notes reception theory’s ‘curious lack of influence on [art historical] disciplinary inquiries, especially given its roots in phenomenology and predisposition towards the visual’; this is all the more surprising given the ‘litany of approaches “imported” from literary theory, the philosophy of history, anthropology and cultural studies’.40 The book attempts to redress something of this imbalance, drawing in particular upon the work of Iser (which will be addressed in Chapter 10).41 In its various literary forms, reception theory shifts the emphasis from the relation between the author and work to the relation between the text and reader. In so doing, reception theory might be said to accommodate a wider body of reader-​oriented theory, beyond the shores of Germany. What is relevant here is the important distinction between reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte), with its focus on actual readers or beholders –​in other words, the history of a work’s reception –​and reception aesthetics (Rezeptionsästhetik), with its emphasis on implied readers. The former has tended to dominate attempts to apply reception theory to art historical research and is a concern underlying Fried’s art historical writing.42 My interest, rather, is with the latter. However, the situation is made more complex when Iser claims that his emphasis on the reader entangled in a situation constitutes what is more accurately described as a ‘theory of aesthetic response (Wirkungstheorie)’ rather than a theory of reception.43 Iser maintains ‘it is called aesthetic response because, although it is brought about by the text, it brings into play the imaginative and perceptive faculties of the reader, in order to make him adjust and even differentiate his own focus’.44 Nevertheless, following Kemp, the foremost advocate of ‘reception aesthetics’ when applied to art history, I will adopt this term despite its associations with the more historically driven Jauss, who first coined the phrase.45 8

9

Introduction

As Kemp claims, a defining premise of reception aesthetics, when applied to ‘visual’ artworks, is that ‘the function of beholding has already been incorporated into the work itself ’.46 It is a premise with which I agree, in so far as it is taken to mean that a situated work structures and anticipates the reciprocal encounter between an implicit spectator and artwork. However, I am reluctant to be too narrowly bound by the methodological concerns of Rezeptionsästhetik as set out by Kemp; my reservation stems from an unease with Kemp’s interpretative bias, an overemphasis on the ‘reading’ of signs that downplays perceptual and psychological processes. Thus, Kemp argues that the beholder ‘has to discern the signs and means by which the work establishes contact with us’, which are then ‘read’ against the background of sociohistorical and actual aesthetic statements.47 I agree; my difference with Kemp is not in the discernment of such signs in itself, but rather the imaginative uses to which such discernment is put, in that my concern is with how this facilitates demonstrative thinking towards the virtual realm of the artwork. Let me give an example to make clear the difference in emphasis. Kemp has in mind something like the ‘focusing’ gesture of the maid in Nicolaes Maes’s An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding (1655; Figure  0.1), owned by the Corporation of London, Guildhall Art Gallery. The maid’s overtly theatrical gesture, where we are urged to be silent, might indeed be interpreted as an indexical sign, in that it reaches out from the fictional world of the painting to the world of the external beholder (in much the same way as a character in a play might, as an aside, directly address the audience).

Figure 0.1  Nicolaes Maes: An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding, 1655, oil on panel, 45.7 × 72.2 cm. Corporation of London, Guildhall Art Gallery. Art Collection 2/​Alamy Stock Photo.

9

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Beholding

But the indexicality of the sign follows from its prepositional nature; it acts as a kind of instruction for the beholder to orientate herself relative to the maid’s gesture. Such an engagement is undoubtedly conventionalized; to use Kemp’s terminology, such signs, while integrated into the narrative, also belong to the work’s ‘outer’ apparatus, in that they are there to be interpreted by the spectator of the picture, the viewer standing before the work.48 With Maes’s work, our role in responding to the maid’s gesture is not that of a spectator as yet internal to the fictional world, a participant within the work’s inner narrative (as is the case with, for instance, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music (c.1660–​1), in The Frick Collection, New  York),49 but as an audience member, external to the fiction, who is made aware of the conceit behind the painting’s appeal to an external beholder. The work thus foregrounds its own fictional structure. And that it is the external spectator that is here addressed is made clear from the half-​drawn curtain (a familiar Dutch genre device), a trompe l’oeil version of the covers that once protected paintings in Dutch interiors. The curtain both encourages and delimits our participation; it entices us to draw it open while detaching us from the fictional space depicted ‘behind’. So how does my position, therefore, differ from Kemp’s? While I fully acknowledge the status of such signalling elements, I want to stress their locative role in establishing a work’s conditions of access –​in other words, I want to emphasize their functional role in structuring an encounter between work and beholder. Kemp’s discursive emphasis, which focuses on the interpretation rather than the experience, underplays the painting’s use of its different levels of painted reality. Maes’s use of the gesture and curtain might rather be understood as signs which function as ideational and imaginative props, whereby we are invited to imaginatively reflect upon our spatial and psychological access to the virtual world the painting presents  –​and ultimately upon our effective exclusion. The semiotic function of the curtain cannot adequately account for our very real desire to imagine pulling it back in order to reveal more of the ‘painting’ it part conceals. The ‘thought’ this work provokes permeates the imaginative experience and in turn impacts upon how we see the work when we revert from imagination to perception. The signs are imaginatively activated as a process whereby the contradictory viewpoints are experienced (indeed, problematized) in the unfolding process of viewing, in a way that engages our spatial position directly in front of the work.

V Why has it taken so long for a comprehensive book to be written on reception aesthetics and its relation to beholding, or rather one that encompasses contemporary art practice? As Holly suggests, the ‘historiographical examples are far from numerous’, despite the fact that it is certainly not true that ‘theoretical art history pays no attention to internal gazes, compositional strategies, rhetorical tactics, etc., for eliciting patterned responses from perspective spectators’.50 An earlier answer may have been the innate conservatism of the discipline of art history, which, as Svetlana Alpers observes, in its interpretative procedures, has tended in the past to emphasize narrative and iconography over the 10

11

Introduction

nature of representation.51 As the philosopher Richard Wollheim points out, art history is peculiar as a discipline engaging the arts in defining itself in such a way as to emphasize history over criticism.52 Jauss goes further, stating that under the rubric of historicism ‘art history handed over lock, stock, and barrel its legitimacy as a medium for aesthetic, philosophical, or hermeneutic reflection’.53 Somewhat more measuredly, Kemp suggests that the erratic ‘historiography of reception aesthetics in art history’ is at least in part due to the fact that ‘reception aesthetics confronts some of the most basic tenets of the bourgeois appreciation of art: those that claim that the work can only be understood by or in itself, by the creative process, or by its producer’.54 But this is not the whole story, in that reception theory itself has at times been castigated as a conservative enterprise from the perspective of contemporary practices.55 Indeed, Holly notes that the ‘legitimacy’ of dismissing the approach of reception aesthetics is perhaps ‘in response to the cogency of critiques within literary criticism itself ’.56 Holly focuses on one such critique aimed at Iser: a paradoxical complaint that his theory is at once too rigid (in honouring the intentions of the author/​text) while being too flexible (in legitimating the experience of each and every reader). Stanley Fish’s version of reader-​response, for instance, shifts Iser’s concern with ‘blanks’ or ‘gaps’ in the text, which must be ‘filled’ by the reader, to argue not only that reading is an activity, or process, but also that the reader herself (as part of a shared ‘interpretive community’ of readers) is the source of all signification. Here, it is the reader’s cognitive activity rather than the literary text that is the centre of critical attention.57 Terry Eagleton’s polemical 1983 book Literary Theory: An Introduction, rather than attacking Iser’s notion of indeterminacy, accuses Iser of being a ‘liberal’: ‘Iser’s reception theory, in fact, is based on a liberal humanist ideology: a belief that in reading we should be flexible and open-​ minded, prepared to put our beliefs into question and allow them to be transformed.’58 But even this open-​mindedness is called into question, in that for Eagleton, ‘The plurality and open-​mindedness of the process of reading are permissible because they presuppose a certain kind of closed unity which always remains in place: the unity of the reading subject, which is violated and transgressed only to be returned more fully to itself ’.59 These much-​cited critiques misrepresent Iser’s position, in that at its heart is a concern with dehabitualization that seeks to resist the forming of entrenched ideologies by subjecting them to constant disruption and deformation. As Brook Thomas retorts, ‘Far from assuming the “unity of the reading subject” or “spiritual wholeness”, Iser posits a subject decidedly not in possession of itself.’60 Yet, Fish and Eagleton’s criticisms undoubtedly shaped the reception of Iser’s work at a time when reader-​ response criticism, with its stated concern with the aesthetic experience, was rapidly disappearing from the curriculum. And within the ‘visual’ arts, this intersected with the wider campaign, as noted earlier, against a certain ‘aesthetic’ institution of spectatorship. As Holly suggests, the critical response to historicism from within more recent art theory has, therefore, been dominated not by reception theory but rather by psychoanalytical or post-​structuralist approaches ‘securing its mode of analysis either in Lacanian theory, or in a Foucauldian sense of the mise-​en-​abîme [i.e. an image embedded within an image]’.61 This marginalization is exacerbated by a reluctance of reception theorists, as noted by 11

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Robert Holub in his survey Reception Theory, to seriously engage in dialogue with such popular currents of criticism. This has prompted Holub to suggest that ‘The reception of reception theory in the English-​speaking world, until now a restricted matter, may thus lie in the future. For if it can enter into productive relationship with other modes of contemporary thought, reception theory could again provide, as it has provided for a generation of German critics, a welcome “provocation” to literary scholarship.’62 It is a provocation made pertinent by Iser’s own shift, in his later work, towards registering a far greater emphasis on representation as a performative act, highlighting the reader’s function as a ‘performer’ of the text. This book directly takes up this challenge of attempting a productive engagement with other modes of contemporary thought but applies this to art theory scholarship rather than literary criticism.

VI The book is divided into four parts, each subdivided into three chapters. While the respective parts are chronologically organized, this is not intended as a history of ‘beholding’; rather, each part addresses a different ontological theme where the artworks considered construct a distinctive relation between work and beholder. In Part I, entitled ‘Sacred Imagery’, I address three in situ Renaissance paintings that establish what Thomas Puttfarken terms a ‘figural presence’ through depicting life-​ size figures.63 With Masaccio’s Trinity (c.1425–​7), the beholder’s role is that of witness. Theoretically framed by Sven Sandström’s Levels of Unreality (1963), Chapter 1 engages the ‘functional’ division of Masaccio’s painting into different degrees of unreality, linked to differentiated levels of access to the fresco’s religious content.64 I address limitations of Sandström’s functional account of Trinity, arguing that Sandström’s non-​linguistic syntactical division of the painting into parts needs to be supplemented by an account of how the painting delimits the beholder’s access through the use of a distancing device (a ‘gap’ in perception) associated with the representation of the supernatural. The following chapter extends this discussion through a consideration of Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro (1519–​26); here I  use Hubert Damisch’s semiological account of the function of cloud, as set out in his A Theory of /​Cloud/​:  Toward a History of Painting ([1972] 2002), to draw attention to an aspect of the painting that has received little comment.65 I consider the role of the cloud as a device used in relation to the wider organization of the host space, the Frari in Venice. I argue that the work constructs a relation to a celestial space that engages Titian’s earlier Assumption of the Virgin (c.1515–​18), drawing the wider architecture into the remit of the imaginative engagement. Chapter 3 adds into this already complex semiotic mix the issue of psychoanalysis, through an engagement with Julia Kristeva’s ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’ (1987).66 Within the context of the crisis in representation constituted by the Reformation, Kristeva argues that Holbein’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521) shifts the engagement with the religious image from one mediated by an intermediary, such as the Virgin, to one of direct imaginary identification with the dead Christ. Addressing her notion of the semiotic chora, I examine how such 12

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processes are understood in relation to a schism between transcendental imagery and a representation seemingly devoid of hope of resurrection but requiring an identification with Christ’s human suffering. This will engage contemporary Lutheran debates about the role of images as signs and the material status of the elements of the Sacrament during the Eucharist. In Part II, the concern shifts towards the secular realm and the ‘problem’ of group portraiture. This refers to the difficulty of unifying a disparate group (so that we are not merely presented with a juxtaposition of individual portraits) while maintaining the engagement of the beholder through the look ‘out’ of the painting. This will involve investigating the relation between internal and external beholders. In Chapter  4, we encounter new patrons in the form of various Dutch guilds and civic guards, highlighting the issue of the ‘pose’ –​the self-​presentation of the painted personages. This is the subject of Riegl’s 1902 work The Group Portraiture of Holland.67 With Rembrandt’s The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662), a new dynamic emerges in relation to how the artist position evolves in relation to the virtual, presented within the picture itself in such a way as to reflect upon the very processes of the artwork’s production. This theme is developed further in relation to Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), considered in Chapter 5, which famously (according to Foucault) constitutes a representation of the very process of representation. I theoretically frame the painting through Svetlana Alpers’s 1983 article ‘Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas’;68 Alpers claims that Las Meninas embraces two conflicting modes of representation, one associated with the commanding attitude of the Albertian mode of perspectival construction and one with the picture conceived as a projective surface onto which the image of a pre-​existing world is cast. In critiquing her account, I  recast it in terms of the ‘problem’ of group portraiture:  arguing that Velázquez uses the interruption as a way of reconciling the painting conceived as tableau or portrait (i.e. two different genres). In Chapter 6, I address another great Spanish group portrait, Goya’s La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1784). In contrast to Rembrandt and Velázquez’s solutions, Goya openly embraces the theatricality of group portraiture in such a way as to purposively destabilize the picture, highlighting tensions between the depicted figures. Such a proto-​modernist approach (anticipating Manet) is contrasted with the contemporary situation in France, recounted in Fried’s 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, where an antitheatrical rhetoric seeks to negate the presence of a beholder in front of the painting.69 Part III shifts the focus to abstraction. Chapter 7 considers El Lissitzky’s Proun Room (1923) as a proto-​installation, occupying a space between painting and architecture. Theoretically framed by Yve-​Alain Bois’s 1990 essay ‘From −∞ to 0 to +∞’, the chapter examines the destabilizing effect on the beholder of Lissitzky’s ‘radical reversibility’, manifest by his Proun series  –​where axonometry is juxtaposed with the uncertainty of perceptual depth of coloured planes and the rotational potential of geometric forms.70 I  examine how this destabilizing effect is translated through the beholder’s own movement, exploiting oblique viewpoints and parallax, in the three-​dimensional context of the Proun Room (a hybrid of painting and sculpture). In Chapter 8, I frame 13

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Anthony Caro’s Prairie (1967) through Langer’s notion of virtuality in her 1953 book Feeling and Form.71 By organizing the kinetic potential of the beholder, I  claim that Caro’s work from the mid-​1960s constructs a tension between the sculpture’s virtuality and the actual space of the gallery that the spectator occupies, such that the two are juxtaposed but do not –​quite –​align. As such, I confront the notion of Prairie as a self-​ relational, autonomous work and distinguish it from the more gestural practice of Caro’s later work. This juxtaposition is then applied to Agnes Martin’s Falling Blue (1963) in Chapter 9, a work that according to Rosalind Krauss constructs differentiated viewing distances. Martin’s grid paintings are theoretically framed by Griselda Pollock’s 2005 catalogue essay ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, and I attempt to reconcile such a psychoanalytically informed account with Krauss’s phenomenological approach in her 1993 essay ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’.72 Again, I suggest that the dissonance Martin’s grids suggest between ‘field and frame’ constitutes a tension between the space opened up by the virtual and the real space of the beholder, indexed (but not quite aligning) by the work as indexical sign (determining requisite viewing distances). In Part IV, entitled ‘Intermedia’, I  address three situated works that constitute a fundamental challenge to the notion of an aesthetic encounter couched in terms of inherent properties of the art object in question. In Chapter  10, I  theoretically frame Yoko Ono’s 1964 Cut Piece through Iser’s 1978 book The Act of Reading.73 I argue that Ono’s performance stages a ‘virtualized’ realm that, while removed from functional imperatives, nevertheless does not suspend illocutionary force. I investigate what this might mean for a beholder made complicit by the work’s instruction, while still required to take responsibility in a collective situation that negates conventions and opens up an associational shadow. Chapter 11 investigates a work used as a frontispiece to Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’.74 Mary Miss’s Perimeters/​Pavilions/​ Decoys (1978) is a site-​specific intervention, integrated into its landscape. While serving Krauss’s purpose at the time in the sense of defining the extent of sculpture’s expansion as a field of practices, I  argue that Miss’s work in fact confronts Krauss’s structuralist turn, which tends to negate the beholder’s constitutive role (a role so clearly defined in some of her earlier writing). Indeed, Miss requires the active participation of the beholder to enact its implicit narratives and associational imagery. Finally, Chapter 12 considers a site-​responsive work, subject to multiple iterations. Bruce Nauman’s 1992 Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Spinning) will be theoretically framed by Stanley Cavell’s 1979 book The Claim of Reason.75 In considering Nauman’s video installation through the remit of Cavell’s writing on scepticism, and in particular the role Cavell allocates empathic projection, I argue that Nauman’s destabilizing work sets out to complicate the process of identification with a figure whose very humanity is brought into question. Nauman brings our orientation into play, while removing language from everyday discourse, or any possibility of reciprocity, thus ‘staging’ but also confronting the limits of empathic projection.

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PART I SACRED IMAGERY

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CHAPTER 1 THE BEHOLDER AS WITNESS

Masaccio, Trinity (c.1425–​7) Sven Sandström, Levels of Unreality (1963)

I The genesis of this book began with a 2008 journal article on Masaccio’s Trinity (c.1425–​ 7; Plate 1), which sought to make the case for a role for the external beholder.1 For some time, this extraordinary painting has been central to my thinking about the relation between in situ art and beholder. Not least, Trinity represents a rare paradigmatic shift in the history of reception –​a work engaging an implicit beholder as integral to its semantic content. Not only is Trinity widely credited as the earliest extant painting using a systematic linear perspective,2 but it depicts a novel architectural schema where the bounding frame is fully integrated with the illusory architecture of the vaulted chapel.3 Crucially, Trinity distinguishes between those parts of the fresco depicted as being spatially in front of the supporting surface (the painted architectural frame, the two patrons and the sarcophagus on which a skeleton is laid to rest) and those implied as behind (the scene within the vaulted chapel, at the threshold of which stand the figures of the Virgin and John the Evangelist): a categorical distinction in degrees of reality that is fundamental to the work’s meaning. The illusory painted architecture is thus tethered to its host church, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, and directly related to the beholder’s address. Moreover, all the figures are life-​sized, with the painting’s centric point (what later is termed the vanishing point) somewhere in the region of 172 cm above ground (i.e. head height). However, this is not a straightforward demonstration of perspectiva artificialis; as we shall see, the location of the Trinity within the implied space of the painted architecture is impossible to verify, the implication being that it lies outside of empirical time and space. Overfamiliar, as we are, with self-​contained easel painting, cut off from the space of the viewer, we need to remind ourselves not only of the situatedness of frescos but of the role of the host religious space in priming our engagement with in situ works. Locked into its institutional context, the viewer of Masaccio’s Trinity occupies an already sanctified space, differentiated from empirical space; the beholder is thus primed not only by certain expectations as to the work’s content but also by the ritual behaviour that accompanies such a setting. Writing of how such bounded works structure a relation with an embodied beholder, Thomas Puttfarken registers the importance of taking the beholder’s position into account:

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The bounded image is thus described as a two-​dimensional structure, which somehow organizes our vision of a pictorial world behind it. Yet before we look at what is behind the picture, we must gain a clearer view of what is in front of it. We must look not only at the relationships between boundary, surface and space behind, but also at the relationships of all three to the viewer: to the fictive space behind the surface we must add both fictive and real space in front of it, between the picture and the viewer.4 Puttfarken takes his notion of the bounded image from Meyer Schapiro, who refers to the ‘late’ invention of the frame as ‘a finding and focusing device placed between the observer and the image’.5 As Schapiro notes, while the frame belongs to the space of the beholder, ‘rather than of the illusory, three-​dimensional world disclosed within and behind’, in some circumstances, ‘the frame may also enter into the shaping of that image’.6 This is particularly true of painted frames, which evolve in relation to the organizational demands of picture cycles such as Giotto’s Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni) in Padua (c.1305–​6; Figure 1.1). Here it is necessary, as Puttfarken suggests, to treat Giotto’s individual scenes not as isolated easel pictures but as part of an integrated solution with a strong centralizing tendency. It is Masaccio’s particular innovation to align the newly evolved structuring device of perspective with the work’s religious content. Indeed, that fictive space in Trinity encroaches into ‘our’ reality raises problems with Erwin Panofsky’s much-​ quoted claim that with perspectiva artificialis ‘the entire picture has been transformed … into a “window” ’.7 The simile of ‘seeing through’ fails to account for the fact that so much of a work such as Masaccio’s Trinity is implied as being on our side of the wall. The theoretical implications are drawn out by Patrick Maynard, who argues that the theoretical ‘mix-​ up of pictorial and (transmission) projection planes’ leads to a conflation of ‘pictures with their real or hypothetical projection surfaces’.8 In other words, the hypothetical projection plane used for constructing a measured perspective (i.e. the intersection of Alberti’s visual pyramid) does not have to align with the picture surface. While this conflation can occur (and does so, in part, in Trinity), Maynard notes that ‘the history of depiction shows we can imagine depicted scenes (perspectival or not), in whole or in part, to be behind picture surfaces, also at those surfaces, in front of them –​or in no spatial relationship to them’.9 This has particular relevance for Trinity, in that the space that we imaginatively ‘enter’ is not that of the religious representation, but the space of the church we ‘share’ with the donors and skeleton, depicted as being in front of the supporting wall. As Wolfgang Kemp notes, ‘perspective achieves more than connecting the space of the beholder with the space of the painting’, in that it also ‘regulates the position of the recipient with regard to the inner communications; that is to say, the presentation of the painting with its demands on how it should be viewed’.10 Indeed, throughout the book I utilize this premise of reception aesthetics in order to make a case for a work’s prepositional structuring of its conditions of access, functioning to orientate the beholder with respect to the artwork’s different levels of implied reality. As such, there 18

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The Beholder as Witness

Figure 1.1  Giotto: Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni), c.1305–​6, Padua. Getty Images/​Eric Vandeville/​Contributor.

are two performances operative here: that of the artwork, conceived not as a ‘thing’ but as an ‘event-​like’ entity; and that of the beholder, who must imaginatively enact such a performance, using cues contained within the work to orientate herself within the situated context.11 As an encounter involving both imagination and ideation, this does not, of course, exhaust our engagement with the work as painting, but rather supplements and informs the perceptual encounter it affords. Perspective, combined with framing, has a particular role in structuring our implied spatial relationship to painting; and Masaccio’s Trinity, by 19

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Beholding

allying its perspectival schema to its religious content in such a way as to acknowledge the embodied viewpoint of the beholder, constructs an unprecedented proximity to the religious image that, in turn, demands means to delimit this engagement if requisite decorum is to be upheld. While reciprocity is facilitated, our role as beholder is that of a witness. As Rona Goffen observes, ‘Renaissance verisimilitude is both psychological and physical. It concerns both the representation of emotions in a manner intended to engage the beholder’s empathy and the representation of visible reality in terms of space and light.’12

II The notion of different levels of reality being operative within the same painting is the subject of Sven Sandström’s 1963 Levels of Unreality. This book, little known outside of narrow art historical circles, sets out an analysis of the role of degrees of reality-​effect in structuring the relationship between different parts of a picture. It offers a functional account, which, despite its formal concerns, is distinguished from ‘formalist’ accounts such as that offered by Heinrich Wölfflin. Indeed, Sandström differentiates his position from Wölfflin’s by stating that the ‘concepts “degrees of reality” and “planes of reality” ’ refer to ‘the functions of a work of art, instead of being associated with the enduring properties or qualities of the painting’.13 Nonetheless, Sandström acknowledges a debt to Wölfflin, whose 1899 account of the Sistine Chapel in Die Klassische Kunst was the first to employ the concept of a ‘different level of reality’ when distinguishing between Michelangelo’s narrative scenes and his portraits of the prophets and the sibyls.14 Sandström evolves a theory where an interplay of degrees of reality is described as providing ‘structural conditions which are syntactic in a pre-​or non-​linguistic meaning’.15 For Sandström, visual images are thus ‘cognitive structures’, such that ‘viewing a scene or object must be understood as a highly structured cognitive activity which relies heavily on a variety of mental resources  –​something more comprehensive and much more intellectually qualified than what immediate perception usually is meant to be’.16 With its debt to Maurice Merleau-​Ponty and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Sandström thus seeks to distinguish his approach not only from ‘illusory’ perceptual models such as Ernst Gombrich’s17 but also from linguistic models of depiction; he identifies a non-​ linguistic notion of ‘spatial’ syntax  –​apprehending images as spatial constructs  –​as an organizational principle founded upon implied relations to (in the specific case of fresco) the mural’s surface and bounding frame. This is a graduation that concerns not so much reality itself, but ‘on the contrary to the total unreality characteristic of the forms and objects which the picture seeks to render credible’.18 Crucially, this engages the beholder’s space: The artists of the Renaissance appear to have been clearly conscious of the possibilities inherent in a marked distinction between different parts of the picture, together with the complex interweaving of essentially disparate elements 20

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The Beholder as Witness

having different degrees of reality, and the confrontation between on the one hand the picture in its several parts, and on the other the highly concrete reality of the space in which the observer stands.19 Sandström thus identifies a way to exploit a dualism operative within the same picture or narrative cycle, in that a painting is both an object –​a real thing in the world –​and a representation, essentially of a three-​dimensional world represented by a picture’s two-​ dimensional marked surface. Sandström proposes two operational scales: an objective degree of reality, founded upon the degree of object likeness of a depicted entity, and a pictorial degree of reality, founded upon a more, or less, replete fictiveness.20 A painted architectural border might have a greater degree of object reality –​a higher scale of near-​ to-​reality-​experiencing –​and a lower degree of pictorial reality, in that such a border, or painted niche, has less fictive completeness than the depiction of a scene it frames. And unlike easel painting, in situ murals, by their very situated nature, juxtapose depicted objects with real architecture; in so doing, Sandström claims that late medieval artists became increasingly sensitive to the possibilities of differentiating aspects of the same picture in such a way as to suggest that they belong to different classes of object. Sandström finds such a dynamic operative in works from antiquity, such as Roman mural painting combining imitation of architectural materials with plastic elements such as false columns, contrasted by pictorial scenes with a greater implied spatial depth. However, Giotto’s Arena Chapel constitutes an exemplar of the application of degrees of reality to religious trecento decorations. Giotto not only evolves a narrative cycle conceived on an unprecedented scale but designs the supporting architecture without protruding mouldings or interruptions, relinquishing the requirement for false painted architecture to be integrated with existing pilasters and mouldings (as manifest in earlier fresco cycles such as those of the Upper Church in Assisi). The Arena Chapel is conceived as a fully integrated scheme with the architecture acting as neutral support, such that the three pictorial tiers are treated as a single, unified unit, despite being divided by decorative borders. This is in contrast to the painted dado, which imitates stone panels and moulding, with illusory niches containing grisaille-​painted statuettes of the virtues and vices. Of direct relevance to this chapter, Sandström notes how on the chancel wall containing the vault arch, Giotto both reinforces and negates the architecture, constructing what are claimed as no less than five pictorial tiers within the same wall.21 Other than the plinth itself, the two illusionistic Gothic tombs on the lower tier, immediately above the dado, are the most ‘objective’  –​an extraordinary feat of early perspectival rendering, especially when seen from the chapel’s central axis.22 These rib-​vaulted niches are implied as being behind the wall’s surface, while integrated with painted pilasters that emphasize the wall surface. They belong to ‘our’ time and space; as such, they are experienced as having a different relation to the wall to the painted scenes of the second tier above, which are a continuation of the space’s narrative cycle (emphasized by the intense blue sky that forms a unifying constant to all these scenes, integrating them with the painted vaulted ceiling). 21

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Figure  1.2  Giotto:  Annunciation (Our Lady of the Annunciation), c.1305–​6, fresco. Arena Chapel, Padua. Getty Images/​Mondadori Portfolio/​Contributor.

By contrast, the Annunciation scene, divided by the chancel vault arch itself, is housed by two mirrored structures that depict rooms open to the beholder, while each structure’s diminutive balconies appear to project into the very space of the chapel. The painted curtains are tied back to allow us to see inside the rooms, the left one housing the Angel Gabriel, the right one Mary (Figure 1.2). Sandström observes that the open pavilions with their draperies –​symbols of the Virgin Mary’s purity –​ give an interesting effect of space, achieved partly by their being submerged in semi-​darkness, just as real unlighted niches in the wall of the chapel would have been. In this way, and by means of the contrast with the clear colour scheme and less marked modelling of the continuous suite of pictures, the two rooms of the Annunciation acquire something of the reality of the chapel’s space. … But over and against this effect of reality there is the effect of the second illusion-​creating factor, perspective, which can be said to be turned inside out, something that is quite functional.23 By this means Mary and the angel are turned towards each other so that contact arises between them, while at the same time each is presented directly to the observer and independently of each other. Moreover, the border of the vault arch cuts across the pavilions, thus indicating clearly that the direct contact with real space is only a pictorial illusion.24 22

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The Beholder as Witness

The notion of perspective ‘turned inside out’ refers to John White’s comments, in his ground-​breaking book The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (1957), as to the divergence of these two structures that contradict the dominant centralizing tendency of the chapel’s perspective schema: ‘The orthogonals, instead of running in towards the centre of the arch, diverge towards the outer walls.’25 That this divergence is deliberate is demonstrated by Giotto’s adept handling of the aforementioned niches and, thus, represents a choice that  –​contradicting the logic of the centralized viewpoint  –​establishes a strong psychological connection between the figures. This defies the compositional separation by the vault, while keeping ‘the overhanging balconies in harmony with the curve of the connecting arch’.26 As White suggests, ‘the great fourteenth-​century painters were always ready to sacrifice the demands of external logic to the particular compositional problem with which they were faced’, in that they were not obliged to follow a ‘fixed theory of perspective construction’ but rather were free to adopt empirical methods appropriate to the situation encountered.27 Sandström associates the resulting pictorial tension with ‘the characteristic properties of the vision’.28 This emphasizes a triangular arrangement encompassing the alcove above, where God the Father, who dispatches Gabriel to the Virgin, sits on His throne ‘garlanded by the brightness of the heavens and hosts of angels’.29 The figure of God is painted with tempera rather than fresco onto a wooden panel set into a wall opening; Laura Jacobus suggests that in Giotto’s original design this aperture would have housed a stained-​glass window, oriented towards the northeast, such that ‘at daybreak the light of the rising sun would first enter the shuttered, candlelit church through its colored glass’.30 Under such conditions the shaft of coloured light entering the chapel would have echoed the painted convention in Annunciation scenes of depicting a shower of heavenly light emanating from God towards the Virgin, reinforcing Sandström’s notion of a painted vision. Not only would God have been depicted in stained glass rather than paint, but Jacobus makes a convincing case that the Annunciation scene is itself distinguished by being the painted equivalent of a dramatic performance –​the annual ‘paraliturgical performances’ –​typically housed in temporary structures on the Feast of the Annunciation (what was known as the ‘Missa Aurea, or Golden mass’), where actual (male) actors or singers performed a sacre rappresentazione.31 Jacobus thus concurs with Sandström, stating that Giotto’s ‘method was to evoke a range of different temporal and spatial levels, each accompanied by a distinctive palette and each varying according to the relationship between wall and image in different parts of the chapel’.32 The Arena Chapel occupies a privileged place for Sandström in evolving his theory, which is then applied to detailed considerations of later Renaissance works, including Pintoricchio’s fresco cycle in the Cappella Bufalini, in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Rome (c.1484–​6), and Michelangelo’s Vatican Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–​12). However, I will now focus exclusively on Sandström’s account of Masaccio’s Trinity, which despite its brevity sets out some highly significant points in terms of the communication between different painted spheres, where a tension is created between a strategy of juxtaposition and merging of levels of reality. 23

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III In the second edition of his Lives of the Artists, first published in 1568, Giorgio Vasari describes Masaccio’s Trinity thus: In the church of Santa Maria Novella, there is likewise a fresco, painted by Masaccio; it represents the Trinity, with the Virgin on one side, and St. John the Evangelist on the other, who are in contemplation of Christ crucified. This picture is over the altar of St. Ignatius, and on the side walls are two figures, supposed to be the portraits of those who caused the fresco to be painted; but they are little seen, having been concealed by some gilded decorations appended over them. But perhaps the most beautiful part of this work, to say nothing of the excellence of the figures, is the coved ceiling, painted in perspective, and divided into square compartments, with a rosette in each compartment; the foreshortening is managed with so much ability, and the whole is so judiciously treated that the surface has all the appearance of being perforated.33 This admiration did not stop Vasari from concealing Trinity from view with his own altarpiece of the Rosary, installed in 1570 at the behest of his Medici patron, Duke Cosimo de’Medici.34 Masaccio’s painting had already, by 1568, endured the indignity of being partially covered over by gilded decorations. Vasari then adds insult to injury by completely covering the fresco. Fortunately, as Goffen notes, ‘Vasari did as little damage as possible to the work’, which was eventually uncovered by restorers in 1861.35 Ornella Casazza notes that while Vasari’s installation led to ‘losses of marginal areas on the sides of the Trinity’, he at least ‘displaced his altar’, rather than centring it between columns, ‘so that he could contain within its dimensions the essential parts of Masaccio’s painting, which is slightly to the left of the axis of its bay’.36 After its rediscovery, the bulk of the painting was detached from its wall and transferred by Gaetano Bianchi to the entrance wall of the church. However, the lower section of the fresco, including the skeleton, was never detached, remaining hidden from view until 1952. Two years later, in 1954 the two sections were reintegrated, ‘when, reversing the nineteenth operation, the Trinity was returned to the precise place where Masaccio had originally painted it’.37 Despite Vasari’s chequered relation with Masaccio’s painting, his short description is still frequently cited as a starting point for discussing Trinity. Indeed, Sandström is no different, noting, The penetration of the wall, of which Vasari spoke, must be achieved by the strength of the construction itself. The artist boldly offers a comparison … between architecture and painted architecture. By means of the low point of view –​whose relation to the observer was illusionistic from the beginning, so that it more or less corresponded with the observer’s own point of view –​there is created a powerful pull inwards towards the depths of the picture under the coffered vault. The chapel, whose architecture bears such a striking resemblance to Brunelleschi’s authentic 24

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The Beholder as Witness

work, opens out as a continuation of real space; but in the composition care is taken to put a brake on the observer’s illusion of being present; this is done by means of the ill-​defined chair of grace and the figures of Mary and John flanking it; they are inside the chapel, but near the triumphal arch, functioning as two attendants.38 Sandström maintains that faced with a bare wall, rather than a confined space, Masaccio is forced to evolve a novel solution that departs from Giotto’s approach. At the very least informed by Brunelleschi’s architecture, Masaccio creates a remarkable illusory vault that anticipates –​though should not be reduced to –​architectural trompe l’oeil painting, placing the work’s centric point just above eye level. As Sandström notes, ‘the relation to the observer was illusionistic from the beginning’; however, ‘care is taken to put a brake on the observer’s illusion of being present’.39 This brake is necessary in that our role is that of witness; the painted realities maintain a sharp divide between the parts of the space of representation that the viewer can imaginatively enter and the parts to which she is excluded –​precisely the kind of distinction illusionistic works seek to overcome. For Sandström, ‘the boundary that cannot be crossed is marked by the two figures of the donors … genuflecting on a cornice outside the chapel, and turned towards each other in sharp profile. They thus appear to exist in real space, and this is one of the first clear examples since antiquity of a mural painting in which the forms are modelled both inside the wall-​surface and outwards into real space’.40 This is no longer a relief effect through shadow, ‘but of freely-​conceived plastic figures which are given physical illusion only with the help of perspective’.41 These parts of the painting, modelled in ‘real’ space, perform a specific function. As Goffen notes, documents in the adjacent convent of the church tell us that Domenico Lenzi and his wife –​the likely patrons –​are ‘interred in the pavement before the fresco’.42 Goffen argues that the proximity of the now destroyed tomb suggests that Trinity was commissioned as a mural for the Lenzi family funeral chapel, and indeed ‘the fresco’s funerary function is visualized in a most dramatic way’ by the illusionistic sarcophagus, on which ‘a skeleton is laid to rest’.43 Both Goffen and Sandström claim that this represents Adam; as Goffen states, Christ was crucified above the tomb of the first man. In this way, Masaccio reminds us of the historical Crucifixion while simultaneously recalling imagery unrelated to that or indeed to any other specific historical event. In the medieval confrontations of the quick and the dead, the dead –​or Death himself, in the form of a skeleton  –​speaks to the living, using words much like those inscribed by Masaccio and pronounced by the Trinity skeleton: ‘I was once that which you are; and that which I am, you also will be’.44 But the work is not merely a memento mori. While the fresco thus acts as a sepulchral monument, apparently protruding into real space, the evocation of our death and the reminder –​through Mary’s gesture –​of our complicity in the death of her Son, is not without hope; as Goffen puts it, ‘In the Trinity, the skeleton’s words are addressed as 25

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much to the beholder as to the donors kneeling directly above the garrulous corpse. His warning is transmuted into hope, however, as the Virgin Mary returns one’s attention to the Savior, through whose sacrifice the faithful may anticipate redemption.’45 Within the context of a Dominican church dedicated in her honour, she offers the promise of redemption through Christ. Masaccio thus establishes a link to a contemporary reality (that of a Dominican congregation) where our confinement to one side of the wall, as threshold condition, unites the ‘living’ and ‘dead’, while reminding us of the Virgin’s role as mediator. This is entirely consistent with Sandström’s claim that ‘What is to be remarked here is that the parts of the picture which are linked up with solid contemporary reality –​the donors and the sepulchre –​are defined as existing in the church’s own space, whereas those parts that belong to the supernatural world –​the chair of grace, Mary and John –​occupy the pictorial space proper.’46 Sandström continues by stating that the ‘need for illusion does not require any transition between these two spheres, nor is there any; moreover, a transition of this kind would conflict with the single intention lying behind this separation into two layers or degrees of reality’. By this, I take him to be referring to the kind of device, typical of Andrea Mantegna, of a figure overlapping the painted frame so as to intrude into the beholder’s space. Rather, he claims that ‘the gradation of reality is made in accordance with the logic of the picture’s content only’.47 But this returns us to a weakness in Sandström’s account. Despite the temporal and spatial separation of the two spheres of reality on the basis of the religious content, that this is so powerful an experience for the beholder is precisely because it runs counter to the suggested continuity. The two are held in an unresolvable tension, such that the establishing of an ‘an illusory niche with a powerful architectonic effect’, extending into our space, runs counter to the status of the wall as threshold.48 This brings us to the issue of a further means of separating the scene of the Trinity itself, unremarked upon by Sandström, but which operates as a break from (but dependent upon) the logic of this implied spatial continuity. The ambiguity of location of the figures of the supernatural world does not merely rely on what is depicted as being in front or behind the wall, but in the withholding of the very perspectival depth cues that the architectural chapel itself so magnificently exploits. Despite a number of references to White’s 1957 The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space throughout Sandström’s book, he fails to register a crucial detail that White perceptively highlights, which might, in Sandström’s terms, be thought of as further evidence of a gradation in reality –​something applied only to the scene of the Trinity itself. White observes how it is impossible to state exactly how far back within the space the throne of grace (the sarcophagus-​like platform on which the figure of God the Father stands) is located, ‘the ends of its support being hidden by the standing figures’; likewise, the cross, supported by God the Father, lacks perspectival cues.49 However, it is an additional move which is the most significant: namely, the lack of foreshortening of the figures of God the Father and Christ (Figure 1.3). White puts this down to Masaccio not being ‘prepared to follow rules beyond the limits of their usefulness’, in that ‘where a low viewpoint is combined with a relatively high positioning of the figures in question, the distortion involved would have resulted in a bold theatricality which might distract from, rather than intensify, 26

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Figure 1.3  Masaccio: Trinity (detail), c.1425–​7, fresco, 667 × 317 cm. S. Maria Novella, Florence. Getty Images/​DEA/​G. Nimatallah/​Contributor.

the spiritual quality of the scene’.50 However, White also acknowledges a more spiritual reasoning here, in that the ‘unforeshortened setting of the principal figures … has the effect of raising [the spectator] to their own level’.51 In his 1983 book Vision and Painting, Norman Bryson expands this observation of White’s into the notion of a secondary, non-​empirical vanishing point. This is set 27

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against Bryson’s wider distinction between what he regards as the first (Albertian) and second (culminatory) epochs of perspective. He refers to works from the first epoch of perspective as advertent (i.e. ‘fully aware of an unseen witness’), where ‘the body of the viewer is positioned processionally’.52 By contrast, a work such as Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft (c.1660–​1), in the collection of the Mauritshuis, The Hague, is inadvertent: ‘the spectator is an unexpected presence’ and ‘nothing in the scene arranges itself around [the viewer’s] act of inspection’.53 Typical of the former, Bryson observes in Trinity many of the aspects already noted: the represented figures are life-​size; the vanishing point is at, or just above, eye level; the painting coheres around this point; the implied ground plan of the painted space is continuous with that of the spectator’s space; and the centric or vanishing point is placed ‘unnaturally’ low relative to the figures within the work, so that the scale, while lifelike, seems monumental. These spatial effects assume the viewing subject as an actual bodily presence, reacting to scale within the image as though to the scale of normal experience: the vocative address of the image is directly somatic.54 Yet for Bryson this physical embodiment of a viewer in the first epoch of perspective is a curious anomaly, the failure to resolve the theoretical implications of Albertian perspective. Bryson maintains that Alberti’s conception of the viewing subject is already Cartesian ‘in its reduction of the space of painting to dimensionless punctuality’.55 He thus argues, There can be little doubt that in its theoretical form, as presented by De Pictura, this is indeed the reduction Alberti intends:  the eye of the viewer is to take up a position in relation to the scene that is identical to the position originally occupied by the painter, as though both painter and viewer looked through the same viewfinder on to a world unified spatially around the centric ray, the line running from viewpoint to vanishing point. … Yet curiously, the construction of a punctual and disembodied subject is precisely what painting organised around a single vanishing point fails to achieve.56 Putting doubts about Bryson’s wider theoretical conclusions to one side, I want to pick up on his challenge to White’s pragmatic reading of the lack of foreshortening of the figures of God the Father and Christ. Bryson interprets the fact that the Trinity (which exists outside of time) conforms to a viewing position located far above our heads –​‘in a zone the body of the viewer cannot occupy’ –​as representing a ‘post-​Albertian point’, a ‘theoretical punctum’ which contrasts with the empirical perspective of the first vanishing point.57 Given the lack of corroborating evidence, it is difficult to verify the claim to fix this position at roughly ‘the height indicated by the Madonna’s extended right hand’58; regardless, Masaccio evolves an astonishing conceptualization of the very real problem that I have been arguing faced early Renaissance painters, and constitutes a novel mode for depicting the supernatural within the unified space of perspective. Allowing the cultic presence an independence from the spatiotemporal markers that locate the external beholder, Masaccio devises a novel method for implying a necessary distance within an unprecedented proximity: a proximity which directly results from the 28

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activating of the beholder’s space. The ‘visionary’ impact of such a spatial and temporal displacement refers back to earlier traditions of Christian art, while also registering the effectiveness of new perspectival means to relate the virtual space of the painting to the actual church architecture. It offers a spatial metaphor to match the symbolic message of the representation of the Trinity. And Goffen has similarly observed, Removed from time, the Trinity is also removed from space, and despite Masaccio’s dazzling perspectival illusion (or rather because of it) one cannot say with certainty where God the Father actually stands with his crucified Son. In other words, there is no precise answer to the question, ‘Where exactly is the Trinity in Masaccio’s Trinity?’59 It is only by integrating the work’s frame into its architectural context, and into both its inner and outer apparatus, that the inherent difficulty in saying ‘where the painting is’ can be applied to a discrete fragment of the painting associated with the Trinity. This ambiguity exploits an anomaly of perspective: that while it can locate with precision an object in pictorial space, it can also withhold the necessary cues required to reconstruct this position. This is why attempts to reconstruct the space of Trinity miss the point. As Goffen notes, ‘Certainly, this spatial imprecision is purposeful, and its purpose is to place the Trinity beyond spatial limits and constraints, literally immeasurable, ultimately and profoundly mysterious.’60 It is therefore no coincidence that, as noted earlier, Trinity occludes its horizon. It is the deliberate withholding of the vital information necessary to locate the Trinity in space, combined with the insistent frontal depiction of Christ and God, that introduces the required ambiguity of positioning in space –​a device entirely dependent upon an otherwise strongly felt spatial continuum, and a situated beholder. The Trinity thus occupies another realm, another reality: an impact that is particularly apparent from a kneeling position, from a height that for contemporary viewers removes us from our normal spatial relation to painting.61

IV Masaccio’s ingenious response to the representation of the supernatural uses means entirely internal to the system of perspective in order to depict states beyond perspectival means of representation. As a break from the so-​called ‘mathematical space’ of perspective, it constitutes a spatial equivalent to the role Hubert Damisch argues cloud plays, as perspective’s ‘necessary counterpart’ (the subject of the next chapter). A discrete space is opened up within the painting, a visionary ‘gap’ in reality –​the ‘unrepresentable’. Such a displacement is dependent for its effect upon the implication of an inviolable, sacred or vision-​like space to which we are excluded, both spatially and temporally. This effect, in turn, is dependent upon the kind of situated relationship and implied continuity facilitated by Masaccio’s perspective. However, such a spatial displacement is predicated upon an imaginative (rather than illusory) engagement of the external beholder, an 29

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embodied presence where internal and external spectators might be said to fuse, blurring the boundaries between real and fictive, inner and outer reality. If this situating of a viewer is largely achieved through a work’s framing, combined with perspective, then the subsequent spatial ambiguity follows from the concealment of the very means by which perspectival depth is implied, and by a corresponding rupture between such a displaced space and the work’s bounding frame. As we have seen, Masaccio’s particular achievement is to ensure that such a ‘gradation of reality is made in accordance with the logic of the picture’s content’, and this seems to me to be Sandström’s most important insight.62 Masaccio utilizes a highly resolved degree of object reality (in the rendering of the simulated frame) to not only enhance the pictorial reality of the depiction of The Throne of Grace but to simultaneously create a tension between spatial continuity and discontinuity. In such circumstances the interplay of forms is itself dependent upon the functions such forms have been assigned in structuring the relationship between the picture and anticipated beholder, such that the different degrees of reality here match the religious content, where ‘a break is put on the observer’s illusion of being present’.63 This ‘functional’ approach, where a beholder must negotiate nuanced differences in degrees of painted reality as a ‘spatial’ cognitive act, is in sharp contrast to the overwhelmingly negative evaluation of perspective in much critical theory as it emerged in the 1980s, where Renaissance perspective was characterized as a signifying system where the viewing subject is already Cartesian in conception –​the viewpoint reduced to what Norman Bryson refers to as a ‘dimensionless punctuality’, a reduction to a disembodied eye.64 This tethering of early Renaissance perspective to seventeenth-​ century Cartesian rationalism, where analytic geometry is taken by René Descartes as a model for his dualistic philosophy, is exemplified by historians like Martin Jay, who take their notion of perspective directly from figures like Bryson, in turn referencing Panofsky’s window figure. For all Jay’s nuanced account of Western visuality, and the varied responses to ocularcentrism within twentieth-​century French though, Jay still finds himself writing that The abstract coldness of the perspectival gaze meant the withdrawal of the painter’s emotional entanglement with the objects depicted in geometricalized space. The participatory involvement of more absorptive visual modes was diminished, if not entirely suppressed, as the gap between spectator and spectacle widened. The moment of erotic projection in vision … was lost as the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye’.65 And yet, as Bryson acknowledges, Masaccio’s Trinity adopts spatial effects that ‘assume the viewing subject as an actual bodily presence, reacting to scale within the image as though to the scale of normal experience: the vocative address of the image is directly somatic’.66 As noted earlier, for Bryson, this physical embodiment represents a curious anomaly; nevertheless, the anomaly is apparent only if one accepts Bryson’s theoretical emphasis placed on the apex of Alberti’s visual pyramid, a single point suspended in space.67 30

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By contrast, following the architectural historian James Ackerman, I believe it is the conception of the picture as an ‘intersection’ of the visual pyramid that represents Alberti’s key theoretical insight, rather than the notion of a fixed point located in the ‘eye’ of the viewing subject.68 It is the correlation of intersection and picture surface in works such as Trinity that affords possibilities for structuring a differentiated relation between the work and an external beholder. This is an important distinction, in that while perspective –​ combined with framing –​locates a beholder, it does not necessarily do so with the kind of precision implied by Bryson. As James Elkins notes, ‘we have grown accustomed to thinking of the center of projection as a thing that can be constructed from the painting, “swung out” from the distance point so it hangs in the air like a marker at the end of a thread’; and yet this was not how the Renaissance conceived this point: rather, ‘for the Renaissance workers, the principal point was in the painting, even if some knew what it signified in space’.69 Indeed, Masaccio utilizes the metaphysical divide represented by the correlation of the intersection with the painting’s supporting wall to heighten the work’s religious content, differentiating, ontologically, between what is depicted as being in front of or behind the picture plane. Thus, structure and content coincide, such that we are presented with different degrees of reality, or (to introduce a theme to which I  will return) different degrees of virtuality.70 The suggestion of a continuity between the virtual and actual space of the beholder is then countered by a further distancing device, registered by the use of a secondary, non-​empirical viewpoint. This distinction in pictorial reality is no longer merely a factor of the illusionistic relation, or not, to the wall (though, of course, it is the withholding of visual cues for such a relation that establishes the disconnect), but rather a shift in perspective registered as a signifying device (an indexical sign rather than symbolic form). While Sandström acknowledges the visionary aspect of the pavilions of the Annunciation scene in Giotto’s Arena Chapel, Masaccio’s Trinity offers even more compelling evidence as to how the withholding of distance cues can accommodate something a systematic perspective would seem to preclude –​namely, the supernatural. I have already noted the excessive emphasis placed on the ‘window figure’ from theorists who take their notion of perspective directly from Panofsky. Nevertheless, despite the limitations of Panofsky’s notion of perspective as symbolic form (to which I will return in the next chapter), Panofsky captures something vital of the subjective shift in how perspective affords a relation to the supernatural: Through this peculiar carrying over of artistic objectivity into the domain of the phenomenal, perspective seals off religious art from the realm of the magical, where the work of art itself works the miracle, and from the realm of the dogmatic and symbolic, where the work bears witness to, or foretells, the miraculous. But then it opens it to something entirely new: the realm of the visionary, where the miraculous becomes a direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural, visual space and so permit him really to ‘internalize’ their supernaturalness. Perspective, finally, opens art to 31

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the realm of the psychological, in the highest sense, where the miraculous finds its last refuge in the soul of the human being represented in the work of art. … Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine.71 Despite Panofsky’s neo-​Kantianism (via Ernst Cassirer), there are strong echoes here of Hegel, who writes, ‘Since the subject-​matter of painting in its spatial existence is only a pure appearance of the spiritual inner life which art presents for the spirit’s apprehension, the independence of the actual spatially present existent is dissolved and it acquires a far closer relation to the spectator than is the case with a work of sculpture’; for Hegel, the content of painting is just this subjectivity, ‘more particularly the inner life inwardly particularized’.72 But this is not quite right. While it is true that what is distinctive to painting is that it potentially affords this possibility of a point of view in a metaphorical sense far richer than that prescribed by the science of optics  –​in that it can include contents that encompass extra-​representational responses (religious, or otherwise) to the scene as represented  –​we might differentiate between (i)  those inadvertent works we must imaginatively enter into the prior virtual world of the depiction (as is the case with certain Vermeer paintings) and (ii) those that tether us to a place in front of the painting, such that the depicted world is an extension of our reality. Masaccio constructs the latter, where the reality of our situation is drawn into the remit of our imaginative encounter, but is then transgressed through the use of distancing devices. As Michael Podro notes, with such works ‘we feel the fit between our position and the picture, a fit that enables us to include our orientation in imagining the subject’.73 This orientation encompasses ontological distinctions, within the same work: differentiated conditions of access which are allied to the work’s sacred function. It is such levels of reality, or unreality, that allow the beholder to directly experience (to subjectively internalize) the miraculous, which as Panofsky suggests erupts into her own, apparently natural, visual space.

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CHAPTER 2 OF CLOUDS AND TERRESTRIAL BEHOLDERS

Titian, Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro (1519–​26) Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​([1972] 2002)

I The previous chapter was framed by Sandström’s account of how Renaissance mural painting constructs different levels of painted unreality –​an approach which identifies a non-​linguistic spatial syntax. In this chapter, I propose that Sandström’s syntactical claim for images as ‘cognitive structures’ is replicated, and deepened, in the writing of the French philosopher Hubert Damisch. Indeed, the emerging theme of the differentiation of spatial ‘access’ that I  have been developing has much in common with Damisch’s theory, which promisingly argues for an alternative ‘semiological analysis that does not set out by acknowledging its dependence upon the linguistic (phonetic) model’.1 As Damisch argues, ‘[E]‌very signifying system must be defined by its own mode of signifying’, and this raises questions about the ‘units’ it puts into play in order to produce meaning.2 In A Theory of /​Cloud/​, the text which will be used to theoretically frame this chapter, Damisch claims, Such an analysis cannot possibly proceed simply by a functional division of the painted surface into its constitutive parts, and then by breaking down these parts, in their turn, into the elements of which they are composed. On the contrary, it needs to circumvent the flat surface upon which the image is depicted in order to target the image’s texture and its depth as a painting, striving to recover the levels, or rather the registers, where superposition (or intermeshing) and regulated interplay  –​if not entanglement  –​define the pictorial process in its signifying materiality.3 Damisch cautions that his is an inductive method, where the various ‘levels or registers’ are inferred by relation to their organizational role (rather than ‘a more or less exhaustive list of terms and functions that belong to the same class’).4 Sandström, of course, is also concerned with the organizational role of different levels of pictorial and object reality, though, as Michael Podro notes, his suggestion that such painted ensembles gain their conviction from their ‘point of greatest object reality’ diminishes how we ‘slide back and forth between seeing the whole as flat wall and as illusory space, depending upon how we focus and how we are preoccupied’.5

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Might a ‘functional’ relationship between work and beholder be recast in an indexical light, circumventing the two-​dimensionality of a painting to address a picture’s newfound depth resulting from the use of a systematic perspective? Indeed, Damisch assigns a particular epistemological status to perspective in terms of its structuring potential with regard to pictorial depth. In his later work, The Origin of Perspective ([1987] 1994), Damisch puts forward a complex argument that painting is a form of thinking –​an act of thought.6 In claiming that perspective ‘functions’ as a model of thought, he proposes that it structures a picture’s situatedness. Parting with Panofsky, Damisch argues that perspective is neither a code nor, in itself, a symbolic form; rather, ‘the formal apparatus put in place by the perspective paradigm is equivalent to that of a sentence, in that it assigns the subject a place within a previously established network that gives it meaning, while at the same time opening up the possibility of something like a statement in painting’.7 This is not a recourse to a logocentric phonetic model; rather, perspective, for Damisch, provides an apparatus replete with deictic references such as ‘here, there, and over there’.8 It is a spatial thinking: the subject is ‘always posited in relation to a “here” or “there”, accruing all the possibilities for movement from one position to another this entails’.9 Within such a system, /​cloud/​ –​to use Damisch’s semiological notation indicating a word’s function as signifier, bracketed off from its content  –​plays a crucial role. By constituting ‘bodies without surface’ clouds act as a ‘remainder’ to a system of perspective into which they cannot be fitted, despite playing a foundational role in the development of Renaissance and Baroque art.10 /​Cloud/​is the excluded ‘other’ on which the system depends. For Damisch, this extrinsicality can be traced back to perspective’s so-​called ‘origin’, in Brunelleschi’s first perspective experiment of the early to mid-​1420s (Figure  2.1).11 As

Figure 2.1  Reconstruction of Brunelleschi’s first perspective demonstration, c. mid-​1420s, as drawn by the author. 34

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described by his biographer Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, Brunelleschi depicts the octagonal Church of Santo Giovanni (now the baptistery) as seen from the central door of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo di Firenze). The viewing ‘apparatus’ required the beholder, with one outstretched hand, to hold a mirror away from her body, while a panel (with an image on the reversed side) was held up to the beholder’s eye. Through a peephole, the size of a ‘lentil’, the reflected image was seen in ‘correct’ perspective, such that the viewpoint and centric/​vanishing point coincide. Brunelleschi, however, did not attempt to paint the sky, but rather applied burnished silver ‘so that the air and the natural skies might be reflected in it; and thus also the clouds, which are seen in that silver are moved by the wind when it blows’.12 Perspective, for Damisch, is thus a theory founded upon an exclusion: Brunelleschi’s experiment reduced /​cloud/​to an effect of reflection, a mirror image engineered within the figurative field by dint of a material artifice. But the significance of that reduction is twofold, both rational and symptomatic:  it was at once a consequence and evidence of the institution of perspective space as the theoretical space of (re)presentation. Far from illusionism (the limitations of which are clearly detectable here) being a principle of the system, it now appears as an effect of it, which is dependent upon the representational structure.13 As a remainder, conforming to a logic external to the pictorial order, cloud is able to take on properties associated with the visionary, or supernatural. Of course, this use of cloud as signifier predates Brunelleschi’s experiment; in the Ecstasy of Saint Francis (c.1274–​84; Figure 2.2), a fresco in the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi, the saint, enveloped in cloud, hovers between the heavenly and earthly realms.14 As Damisch notes, the ‘cloud introduces a break into the fabric of dramatic and theatrical relations: it removes the saint from the common space and makes transcendence appear as an antithesis in a representation conceived in strictly “human” terms’.15 Nevertheless, with the development of a systematic perspective, cloud’s sense of otherness takes on a more pertinent role. And importantly, as noted in Chapter 1, with artificial perspective, ‘supernatural events in a sense erupt into [our] own, apparently natural, visual space’16; depicted cloud thus represents a break within the system of perspective, a signifying equivalent to Masaccio’s withholding of perspectival cues in relation to the depiction of the Trinity, or Giotto’s ‘turned inside out’ pavilions in Padua. Damisch argues, /​Cloud/​is not necessarily depicted in such a way that it resembles a ‘real’  –​or rather, a ‘natural’ –​cloud. Its volume, its consistency, its very solidity declare that the functions assigned to it are not solely descriptive. … it provides the material, if not the means, for a construction while at the same time ensuring communication between the terrestrial and celestial levels and sanctioning figurative and plastic effects that could not be justified by reference to the order of natural reality or even to the order of supernatural vision. The illusion –​if that is what it is –​is played out on another level:  that of representation, in the theatrical sense of the term, 35

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Figure 2.2  [Giotto?]: Ecstasy of Saint Francis, c.1274–​84, fresco. Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi. Getty Images/​Universal Images Group/​Contributor.

produced by means of painting, painting that is –​to repeat –​organized in such a way as to be a representation of a representation.17 This might be demonstrated by two cupolas painted by Correggio in Parma (Figures 2.7 and 2.8). Here, Damisch proposes the notion of painting as substitute for a theatrical presentation but a spectacle composed of two registers –​‘the one terrestrial and the other celestial’, where ‘the spectator is admitted, albeit as a supernumerary, into the circle of an exclusive vision’.18 For Damisch, this constitutes an embedding of one scene within another, such as when actors in a theatrical production watch a play within 36

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a play. And rather than engineering its own destruction, ‘such is the paradoxical nature of representation that it is never more assured, as such, than when it openly presents itself as representation, or even as the representation of a representation’.19 And we might note that the beholder is allocated a particular role here in bringing the space of reception into this imaginative remit. In this chapter, I consider a work by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio; c.1488–​1576) where, despite its prominence within the composition, the floating cloud has received little critical attention. Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro (1519–​26; Plate 2) is an in situ work within the Frari, Venice. As with Masaccio’s Trinity, it is a work that implies more than one viewpoint, while engaging visionary states beyond time and space. It is the former that has generated much of the literature on the painting. Is this doubling of viewpoints another anomaly? Or does it present evidence for a Renaissance conception –​at least with certain exemplary works  –​of a peripatetic beholder? Dislocating the Albertian notion of a symmetrically placed centric point, Titian’s painting employs a radically acentric ‘vanishing point’, located, laterally, beyond the confines of the frame. Only when the painting is seen from this oblique angle does the perspective of the painted architecture appear to correspond with the stone frame (Figure 2.3), in the manner of earlier Venetian altarpieces. However, Titian also engages a beholder anticipated by the young Leonardo Pesaro, the boy who turns towards the implied presence directly in front of the altarpiece. As we shall see, these alternate positions correspond to two different functions the same painting performs: that of votive image and that of funerary monument and private chapel. However, the altarpiece is also dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. There is arguably a further oblique viewpoint, from a position in the nave, from where a visual connection to Titian’s earlier Assumption of the Virgin (1515–​18; Plate 3) can be seen, framed by the Frari’s imposing choir screen. As we shall see, from such a vantage point not only is the logic of Titian’s radical rotation of his scene revealed but the signifying role of cloud (or /​cloud/​) enacted. We are invited to engage with the wider architecture of the Frari, a church dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin, but in such a way that the architecture itself is negated through the role of painted cloud. And this, I will argue, exploits the church’s non-​conventional orientation –​entered from the east –​in order to enact a spatially situated temporal metaphor that references the morning and evening light of Venice.

II Located within the vast Frari Franciscan church in Venice, Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro was commissioned in 1519 by the principal patron depicted within the painting, Jacopo Pesaro (1464–​1547), Bishop of Paphos (Cyprus), who kneels at the steps of the Virgin’s throne. The in situ panel is located in a chapel dedicated to the Immaculate Conception and thus represents ‘the second Pesaro dedication to the Immaculate Virgin in the Frari’, the earlier one being the commission of Giovanni Bellini’s Frari Triptych 37

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Figure 2.3  In situ shot of Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro within S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Getty Images/​Dea/​E. Lessing/​Contributor.

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(1488) for the altar of the sacristy chapel, the Chapel of the Pesaro of San Benetto.20 Rona Goffen describes Titian’s work thus: Because it is both very familiar and very beautiful, one forgets how strange a scene Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro (1516–​26) presents. In an architectural setting of individually identifiable forms constituting an unrecognizable structure, the Madonna and Child are seated on a high socle or base to one side of the picture space. To their proper right, the position of honor, is the primary donor, Jacopo Pesaro, being presented by his patron, Saint Peter. To Mary’s left saints Francis and Anthony of Padua present four of the bishop’s brothers and their nephew. Francis turns to gaze upward at the Christ Child, while the face of St. Anthony is all but hidden in the shadows as he looks down upon the donors.21 Jacopo Pesaro is accompanied by figures integral to the narrative action:  ‘a warrior holding the flag of the papal fleet and by two captives, one a Turk, the other a Moor’.22 The strong diagonal emphasis sets up a dynamic crucial to the narrative content. As John Shearman notes, ‘The bishop commemorates his victory over the Turks, as admiral of the papal forces, at Santa Maura in Cyprus in 1502, and because it was a papal and not a Venetian victory he kneels first and rather pointedly at Saint Peter’s feet.’23 Goffen recounts how Titian’s use of a votive theme responds to Jacopo’s fierce rivalry with his cousin Benedetto (c.1430–​1503); while allies in the battle against the Turkish forces –​commanders, respectively, of the papal and Venetian fleets –​a dispute ensued about who should take ultimate credit for the victory at Santa Maura.24 Benedetto died shortly after the battle, but in his will exacerbated the situation by ordering a sculpted monument to be built in the Frari to frame the entrance to the sacristy from the main church, with Benedetto standing as victor at the top of the monument. As Goffen notes, ‘Long after the battle had ended and long after his antagonist’s death, Jacopo had still not forgiven Benedetto for taking credit for Santa Maura, both in life and, indeed, in death, in the decoration of his grandiose tomb.’25 This had the intended effect of demarcating this entire section of the Frari, complete with the sacristy altarpiece by Titian’s teacher Giovanni Bellini, with Benedetto’s side of the Pesaro family. Familial rivalry therefore required that Titian’s altarpiece serve the secular function of a votive image while also functioning as a funerary monument to the bishop’s brothers, all but one of whom are buried within the tomb under the floor immediately in front of the altar. Titian’s extraordinary solution was to incorporate the votive image within a Sacra Conversazione  –​a ‘holy conversation’ where the attendant saints are depicted as gathered around the Madonna and Child –​but one where the bishop’s role replicates that of a beholder incorporated within the scene. Puttfarken recounts how the solution necessitates three radical breaches with established Venetian traditions of altarpieces of this type. First, the throne of Mary has been rotated by ninety degrees, thus pushing the altarpiece type associated with the Sacra Conversazione to the very limit. Secondly, it includes painted donors, rare for a Venetian altarpiece.26 As Puttfarken observes, ‘while the presence of donors in altarpieces was well established on the mainland (even in the 39

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Venetian Veneto), in Venice itself this practice seems to have been unacceptable’27; it not only ran the risk of self-​glorification, but ‘even though the altarpiece was a donation of the Pesaro, the altar itself, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, clearly had to fulfil public functions –​the Franciscans were particularly keen to support and to spread the cult of the Immaculata’.28 Thirdly, the resulting perspective construction is ‘extremely acentric, with the vanishing point of the orthogonals, indicating the centric ray, well outside the left-​hand boundary of the picture’.29 All three features ‘seem to contribute to the undermining of the viewer’s privilege’.30 What are the spatial and pictorial consequences of combining these competing functions (votive image, funerary monument and altar to the Immaculate Conception)? And how does this relate to the issue of beholding? In order to address these questions, it is necessary first to trace something of the development of the Sacra Conversazione altarpiece in Venice. In Alois Riegl’s terms, this chronicles the shift from the kind of external coherence manifest by Masaccio’s Trinity to Titian’s resolved internal coherence.

III Riegl claims that by the beginning of the sixteenth century Italian Renaissance art achieves a consistent internal coherence, ‘even though the solution was keenly anticipated a full hundred years earlier’.31 This achievement establishes an unprecedented psychological dimension to the relations between figures now involved in a single, unified narrative action. Thus he contends, The figures in a Renaissance painting … show that they are acutely aware of interacting with each other. That is to say, there is assumed to be a viewing subject present who expects the objective figures in the painting to coalesce into a unified whole. Consequently, everything is eliminated that might disturb the impression of unity. This is why Italian Renaissance figures convey much more strongly than their antique counterparts a sense of the psychological functions that connect the figures depicted, that is, emotion and especially attentiveness.32 Certainly, by the early sixteenth century works by painters such as Titian, whether depicting religious or secular themes, typically coalesce into a single, unified action, as exemplified by Titian’s Entombment of Christ (c.1520; Figure 2.4), owned by the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Explicitly referencing Riegl’s notion of inner and outer unity, Shearman’s 1992 book Only Connect … documents a shift throughout quattrocento Italian art towards a greater reciprocity of gestures and looks.33 We need only compare three altarpieces considered by Shearman to register this historical development, including two of the works (Trinity and the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro) around which I have structured my own chapters in Part I. Putting aside any debate over whether Trinity is, indeed, an altarpiece, each work presents a unified perspectival scene employing life-​size figures, rather than, for instance, 40

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Figure  2.4  Titian:  Entombment of Christ, c.1520, oil on canvas, 148 × 212  cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Getty Images/​Editorial Image Provider/​Contributor.

triptychs or polyptychs; nevertheless, they imply varying degrees of continuity with their respective host spaces. In the case of Trinity, the figures are self-​absorbed and isolated, with only Mary’s gesture directly acknowledging our presence as witness. By around 1480, Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna Enthroned and Saints (San Giobbe Altarpiece) registers a significant extension of the ‘conversational’ demands of the Sacra Conversazione, as it evolves in Venetian painting. As Shearman notes, Remembering always that our name for the type has no reality in the period, we may nonetheless focus on the artistic invention that led eventually to a name being sought for it. And the fundamental shift that concerns us came earlier (between Taddeo di Bartolo, Masaccio, and Fillipo Lippi), when by slow degrees the relationship between Madonna and saints was recast into a unity defined at once as spatial, sentient, and social, in a word, a community, worldlike but not worldly.34 Bellini’s altarpiece invites the beholder to imagine that she is looking as if into a real chapel, exhibiting all the attributes of a work fully integrated into its architectural context:  a low viewpoint relative to the life-​ size figures, with a centric point at approximately eye height, around which the painting coheres, thus implying a spatial 41

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continuity. Masaccio’s painted architectural frame, however, is transformed into stone. Although the altarpiece has been removed from its extant surround in the church of San Giobbe, a photomontage illustrates the effect the in situ painting would have had within its original context (Figure 2.5): ‘Then it can be seen that this chapel, this functioning unit, erected partly as painted fiction, partly as real stone frame (its entrance arch), and partly as stone altar, against the right wall of San Giobbe, is a surrogate for the architectural chapels concurrently being built out from the left wall.’35 This integration of frame and painted fiction creates a more persuasive suggestion of continuity than that offered by Masaccio, further blurring the distinctions between architecture, sculpture and painting. And unlike Trinity, Bellini’s painted chapel is integral to the architectural schema for the church, which in its remodelled form is one of the earliest examples of Renaissance architecture in Venice.36 Shearman highlights another subtle distinction from Masaccio’s work: As you stand before the altar of the Trinity, the ground level of the space described above is slightly above eye level, so that you cannot see the floor, and the nearest edge begins to cut what you can see of the feet of the figures within, notionally standing back from that edge. The base line of the San Giobbe Altarpiece is fractionally below eye level, so that the saints’ feet are seen on an extremely foreshortened tiled floor. These are representations of the same logic of sight, and in one sense they do not need to be packaged in more elaborate terms than that. But it is worth pursuing the point that the occlusion of the one and the barely visible horizon of the other, which derive from that logic, are especially characteristic of Donatello’s way of thinking. In the San Giobbe Altarpiece … the rigorous logic of sight testifies to that conscious mode of representation predicated on the a priori acknowledgement of the spectator’s presence.37 This difference is significant, in that the two paintings establish a sense of shared space to different ends. While Shearman remarks on the unprecedented ‘psychological accessibility’ of Bellini’s figure group,38 he does not expand on the psychological implications of the occlusion of the horizon in Trinity. The difference is worth pursuing. In the Bellini, it is Saint Francis who ‘while displaying Christ-​like his stigmata, seems in the same gesture to invite us to approach this Throne of Grace’39; if ‘Saint Francis addresses a spectator directly in front of the altar’, then by contrast the Virgin ‘seems to turn with welcoming gesture toward others approaching from behind us on our right, from the entrance to the nave of San Giobbe’.40 This complex engaging of the spectator within the very architecture of the church emphasizes the intellectual and psychological accessibility of the figure group in the San Giobbe Altarpiece –​a unity extended to include a beholder conceived as part of a community. By contrast, the revelatory effect of the Trinity is predicated upon Masaccio’s deliberate ambiguity as to the location of the Trinity within the scene, and the restrictions thus placed on our participation. If Saint Francis both displays his stigmata and welcomes us into the community, when Mary acknowledges our presence in Trinity her gesture 42

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Figure  2.5  Giovanni Bellini:  Madonna Enthroned and Saints (San Giobbe Altarpiece), c.1480, tempera and oil on panel, 471 × 258 cm (as cut down). Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice. Photomontage of work in situ in San Giobbe, within its original stone frame. © 2019. Cameraphoto/​Scala, Florence.

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is directed to each and every beholder. The spatial continuum of the Bellini provides the spectator with an unprecedented access to a community that is ‘worldlike’ if not ‘worldly’, whereas Trinity maintains a sharper divide between two coexistent realms; the address is directed very much to an individuated beholder, even if that beholder is part of a congregation. If Bellini’s altarpiece engages a more complex set of narrative devices, its internal unity is gained, as Riegl predicts, at the relative loss of its direct address to the spectator. Yet the unity of the San Giobbe Altarpiece is not complete. This is a somewhat attenuated Sacra conversazione, in that few, if any, of the gazes actually meet. Saint Francis does not look at the viewer, but to a position to our left, while each character seems to stare into space: including the Christ child who (consistent with convention) stares at a position located some distance above the beholder’s head. The protagonists are each absorbed by their inner thoughts: the painting, while psychologically accessible, is also turned inwards. By the 1520s, however, in a work such as Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, the unity of narrative action and reciprocity of gestures and looks is complete. As Shearman notes of the Frari painting, ‘the activation of the figure group is extended much further than in Bellini’s  –​so far, indeed, as to include symbolic and historical narrative’.41 However, there needs to be a caveat here. The Louvre’s Entombment of Christ, painted around the same time as the Frari commission for the Gonzaga family of Mantua (where it originally hung in the ducal palace), demonstrates an emotional intensity through its harmonization of actions, gestures and looks:  an absorption in their shared, palpable grief that allows no room for acknowledging the beholder, other than our intense emotional engagement with the scene. By contrast, there are contrary narratives at play within the Pesaro altarpiece, which might be seen as Titian’s novel attempt to enact a compromise between the competing demands of his patron and the host Franciscans. In the next section, I will sketch out the basis of this tension, and Titian’s astonishing resolution of such competing demands, before returning to the issue of /​cloud/​.

IV Unlike Bellini’s San Giobbe Altarpiece, the fictional architecture of Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro is no longer an obvious extension of its host. On the contrary, Goffen claims that ‘rather than establishing an illusionistic continuity between the actual and fictional spaces of church and picture, Titian insisted on a disjunction between the two realms’.42 Nevertheless, there is still an acknowledgement from where the spectator has arrived. Shearman notes that, approaching the work from the nave, as the viewer passes from the third to the fourth bay on the left (Figures  2.3 and 2.6), ‘He then sees, as it were complacently, empirically, and guided by memory, what the historian of altarpieces sees with so much surprise, which is that Titian has turned the group of Madonna and saints, together with the podium and the steps of her throne, toward the main entrance of the church.’43 Through such a rotation, Titian thereby aligns the altarpiece with his 44

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Figure 2.6  Interior shot of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Getty Images/​Marco Brivio.

own Assumption over the high altar, a work framed by the choir screen; in so doing, he radically reinvents the Sacra conversazione. While it might initially appear that the Pesaro Altarpiece abandons entirely the format of centralized bilateral symmetry, in fact, as Peter Humfrey notes, ‘In a sense, what Titian is showing us is a Bellinesque figure group viewed from an oblique angle rather than frontally.’44 What are the consequences of this rotation? Here there is some dispute. Shearman argues against the notion that ‘the picture looks best, or was ever meant primarily to be seen, from forty or sixty degrees to the left of the normal axis, but was meant to be seen from dead in front’.45 But this misrepresents the Puttfarken argument to which it refers; while Puttfarken argues that the oblique approach ‘helps to confirm and heighten the presence of the large and appropriately foreshortened sacred figures’, he also recognizes that the work presents a frontal view.46 Indeed, the work would seem to imply two ‘ideal’ viewing positions, one consistent with the acentric vanishing point and one with the centralizing frame (which has, nonetheless, lost touch with the fictional space). Of course, in reality the spectator will adopt many shifting positions towards the painting: it should be stressed that these are notional positions implicit within the work. 45

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Analysis of the painting reveals that the section of wall on the right once supported a barrel vault, a scheme that would have heightened the acentric perspective construction.47 The final version lessens the impact, with the two vast columns acting, as Puttfarken suggests, as ‘a solution to Titian’s problem of reconciling the frontal view of the donors with the oblique view of the sacred figures and their perspective –​columns, in particular without foreshortened capitals, fit easily into both views’.48 I also believe the oblique view offers something that Puttfarken does not explicitly comment upon, though it would appear to support his argument: from this position (and from no other), not only are the fictional columns, as he suggests, ‘a coherent part of the perspective construction’, but they are seen as consistent with, even a continuation of, the great columns of the Frari’s nave.49 This directional emphasis, referencing the memory of our arrival, is balanced by another complex movement, again completed outside of the fictive space. The Christ child turns to Saint Francis, whose gesture commends the Pesaro family to the Madonna. As Shearman notes, the Child ‘lifts the Virgin’s veil, apparently a playful gesture but at the same time an intimation of the symbolic role of the mantle of the Madonna of Mercy, as if to take them under her protection, too’.50 This movement is completed by the youngest family member, Niccolò Pesaro, who turns to acknowledge our implied presence. As Goffen suggests, this is a ‘welcome offered by a child to the mortal congregation’.51 While not excluded, I would therefore argue that ours is a more peripheral role than the revelatory address of Masaccio’s Trinity. Our imaginative engagement is that of an acknowledged onlooker rather than a direct participant, where the principal donor plays the role of an intermediary integrated into the work’s self-​sufficient narrative. Whereas the patrons in Trinity are confined to our empirical space, excluded from the space of the Trinity beyond, in the Pesaro Altarpiece Bishop Jacopo Pesaro is being presented to the Virgin. The Titian therefore stands at the cusp of two different modes of engagement, which –​weighed down by competing demands from patrons and church –​are not quite resolved. The compromise is registered by Jacopo, who, while integrated into the work’s narrative through an exchange of glances, is still painted frontally, in profile, a noticeably static counterpart to the twisting three-​dimensionality of the main protagonists. Indeed, both donors thus hover between being integrated into the narrative and relics of an earlier Florentine tradition where the patrons belong to ‘our’ world, the real space of the church. Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro therefore constitutes an extraordinarily inventive but ultimately compromised attempt to reconcile internal and external coherence. And yet, there is a further revelatory aspect to the work, its representation of a representation, to which I now return: an aspect that demands the beholder’s share.

V The symbolic role of cloud, operating at the level of imagination (or, even, of dreaming), is the subject of Damisch’s A Theory of /​Cloud/​, first published in French in 1972 under the title Théorie du /​nuage/​. The book begins with Damisch’s consideration of 46

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two formative yet remarkably resolved works by Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489–​ 1534), an artist born within a year or so of Titian in the small town of Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia. These works are both in situ frescos, painted in cupolas of the nearby Parma: The Vision of Saint John on Patmos (in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista, 1520–​4; Figure 2.7); The Assumption of the Virgin (Parma Cathedral, 1526–​ 30; Figure 2.8). While noting that the solution had been anticipated, on a smaller scale, by Mantegna in 1472–​4, for the ceiling of the Spouses’ Chamber in Mantua, Damisch states that Correggio’s predecessors and (for a long time) many of his successors in the art of painting ceilings strove, when offered such surfaces, to affirm and emphasize the ceilings’ architectonic nature, often in an illusionist fashion –​when, that is, they did not treat cupolas, vaults, and ceilings simply as so many walls on which to arrange and paint figures and panels conceived according to the norms of a painting set on an easel. In contrast, the solution associated with Correggio amounts to a negation: of the building itself, and even of the fact that it is a closed space. This effect is created on a key part of its overarching cover, by a decor conceived in such a way as to ‘pierce’ the stone fabric and create a fake opening onto a sky that is itself painted in trompe l’oeil.52 Correggio’s two cupolas point the way for later Baroque works that aspire not only to a more extreme negation of the very form of the host architecture, but towards, as Heinrich Wölfflin puts it, ‘a completely new conception of space directed towards infinity: form is dissolved in favour of the magic spell of light –​the highest manifestation of the painterly’.53 Within such visions of celestial splendour, ‘clouds stream down with clouds of angels and all the glory of heaven’, such that ‘our eyes and minds are lost in immeasurable space’.54 Here, the proportionally balanced architecture of the Renaissance is prised apart, to the point of negating the architectural shell in a vision of a world beyond measure. Damisch traces the symbolic role of cloud in signifying an extraterrestrial realm back to works that predate the Renaissance. As earlier noted, in the Ecstasy of Saint Francis (Figure  2.2) the saint, enveloped by cloud, hovers between the heavenly and earthly realms. Cloud is used as a signifying element within a pictorial structure that is characterized by a shallowness of space  –​what Panofsky refers to as an aggregate space.55 It is the signifying role of cloud that establishes the separation of supernatural and the mundane realms. Given that the viewer’s position remains largely undefined, this separation does not yet bear upon the beholder’s implied relationship to the virtual space of the painting. Damisch argues: ‘From the motif (of cloud denoted by a signifier made “in its image”) one moves, again with no break in continuity, to the theme (the miraculous vision, the opening up to divine space).’56 It is a motif that resolves the essentially two-​dimensional division of the picture into different realms. The integration of the supernatural element into a shallow pictorial space is thus realized primarily through symbolic means. But as we have seen, perspectival 47

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Figure  2.7  Correggio:  Vision of St John on Patmos, 1520–​4, frescoed dome. San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma. Photo: Author.

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Figure 2.8  Correggio: Assumption of the Virgin, 1526–​30, frescoed dome. Parma Cathedral. Photo: Author.

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representation introduces its own difficulties with respect to depicting the supernatural. As Goffen notes, ‘Naturalism or Realism is not necessarily suited to the supernatural themes of Christian art.’57 With the shift from a late medieval aggregate space to the ‘systematic’ space of perspective, painters faced a problem in how the supernatural might be plausibly depicted within the latter’s unified spatial logic. It is a logic that now potentially includes the implied location of an implicit viewer relative to the pictorial space. While such positioning is a factor with some Proto-​Renaissance works, the viewer is not located with any kind of precision. But for in situ perspectival works seeking to establish a spatial continuity between real and fictive space, the presence of the implicit beholder fundamentally alters how the miraculous might be represented within such an implied continuum and spatial proximity. As Damisch reminds us, The problems, both technical and theoretical, posed by the depiction of an apparition or a miraculous ascension, an aerial transportation, or even a celestial gathering on a two-​ dimensional plastic screen  –​those problems are by no means secondary or subsidiary in relation to the enterprise that, according to a strongly established tradition, epitomizes the Renaissance’s contribution to the development of Western art and civilization: namely, the institution of the system for representing space that is known as linear perspective.58 And yet, it is the fact that cloud defies perspectival means to represent it that allows it to persist as ‘a constructional ploy … to introduce a divine group or symbol into a perspective construction’.59 Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin might serve by way of example. Here, the octagonal domed ring, part of the real architecture of Parma Cathedral, opens up onto a virtual space that, in contrast to the space the viewer occupies, is unbounded or infinite: an amorphous or nebulous ‘celestial’ space that abandons architectural definition. There is a radical asymmetry between the fictive and viewing space, although the work still orientates itself towards an ‘instinctive’ viewpoint, a position that Shearman observes is ‘at the bottom of the steps’ that cross the nave just prior to the western supporting arch.60 The threshold between realms is seen as one that calls into question the very reality of the supporting architecture. As Damisch notes, the work ‘pierces’ the stone fabric of the dome. And yet the work is dependent for its experiential impact upon the very architecture it seeks to negate. The beholder is situated by the processional demands of the physical building –​part of the work’s outer reality –​and the painting draws this religious architecture into its content. As such, I believe it is a mistake to assume that Correggio’s intent is purely, or even primarily, one of illusion; rather, while utilizing illusory devices, such paintings draw upon the imaginative consent of the viewer, whereby the spatial schemata is allied to the work’s religious content. This is illustrated by Correggio’s earlier The Vision of Saint John on Patmos, which similarly creates a fictitious opening onto a celestial realm. As Shearman observes, in this work, directly contemporaneous with Titian’s Pesaro Altarpiece, two viewing positions are likewise implied:  a position in the nave of San 50

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Giovanni Evangelista, Parma, where Christ –​in His second coming –​floats in a way that is consistent with the heavenly perspective, the viewer a direct recipient of the vision; and a second position, which is reserved for the Benedictines in the choir, a viewpoint from which Saint John (Figure 2.9), obscured by the overhanging cornice from the nave, is revealed as the original recipient of the vision, in a less emotionally charged but more intellectually demanding experience of the scene.61 This integration into the ceremonial

Figure 2.9  Correggio: Vision of St John on Patmos (detail), 1520–​4, frescoed dome. San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma. Photo: Author.

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functioning of the architecture acknowledges differentiated viewers, belying the notion of a work that is simply to be experienced as a trompe l’oeil. If, as Damisch suggests, cloud remains ‘a key term in the figurative vocabulary of Correggio’, then it is a theme that ‘contradicts the very idea of outline and delineation and through its relative insubstantiality constitutes a negation of the solidity, permanence, and identity that define shape’.62 Yet while the signalling role of cloud is retained, I  would argue that the spatial impact of Correggio’s ceiling paintings is dependent upon situating a beholder within an architectural context that frames the fictitious celestial space. While cloud functions as the very antithesis of perspectival construction, the affect follows from Correggio’s integration of the threshold between realms into both host architecture and fictional space (the painting’s inner and outer apparatus). As Shearman notes, with Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin ‘the assertion of the continuum between the spectator’s space and the pictorial space, through the visible bodily Assumption from one to the other, is the most complete statement possible of the transitive relationship between dome and viewer’.63 This is consistent with the type of relationship that I  have argued is afforded by works implying an external beholder as part of their content. This imaginative engagement, which draws in the spectator’s indexical awareness of the surrounding architecture, is key to the dramatic rupture of such a situated relationship that the fictitious opening onto the celestial realm represents.

VI How might Damisch’s theory of /​cloud/​inform Titian’s two great works within the Frari? Earlier, I noted the depicted crucifix in the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, a poignant portent of events to come, transported heavenwards by winged putti on the dark cloud that hovers above the Holy Family. The crucifix is cropped by the apex of the frame’s arch, suggesting that it is perhaps already in the process of disappearing beyond our view into a space that opens up to the sky; this upward trajectory is reinforced by the verticality of the two painted columns, which extend beyond the frame’s limits. Loren Partridge goes as far to state that The two most innovative and influential features of the altarpiece –​ones that were achieved only by much trial and error, as X-​Rays and a technical analysis of the underpainting show –​are the two truly mammoth, diagonally placed columns on high pedestals, which extend heavenward well beyond the top of the pictorial field. They serve as the visual equivalent of a full organ sounding a sustained, victorious fanfare, celebrating and monumentalizing the figures of St. Peter and the Holy Family and their mediating roles between the terrestrial and celestial Churches. The celestial Church is explicitly visualized in the two active angels on a dark cloud –​one looking down to earth, the other up to heaven –​who elevate Christ’s salvific cross and carry it skyward.64 52

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One might question the claim that the columns are the most innovative features of the altarpiece –​above, for instance, the rotation of the scene by ninety degrees. Nonetheless, they are undoubtedly an ingenious solution to the problem set by this radical rotation, simultaneously establishing a sense of continuity with the nave while disrupting the logic of the Frari’s architecture. The cloud casts its material shadow over these two columns, reinforcing the physical presence of both cloud and pillars; but this cloud is also brought into a problematic relation with the ‘real’ architectural space. This is not an artwork conceived of in isolation. Integrating painting and architecture, Titian explicitly references his Assumption of the Virgin –​completed a year or so before he began work on the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro –​situated on the central altarpiece, complete with its own prominent cloud. The Assumption can be seen immediately on entering the basilica through the north-​east facing doors (Figure  2.6), framed by the rood screen. Echoing Puttfarken, Jacqueline E. Jung reflects upon the religious significance of such a spatial move: Titian’s great Assunta altarpiece, displayed far back in the main choir, was aligned with the fifteenth-​century choir screen in such a way that viewers entering the church would be able to witness the Virgin’s heavenly ascent through the central arched opening of the screen. This framing imbued the painting with different content than was perceptible in the choir; once the image was visually pulled forward, into the door, the Assunta’s gaze appeared to focus directly on the sculpted crucifix surmounting the choir screen, and her outstretched hands took on the character of mourning rather than exultation. Thus, whereas when seen from the nave, Titian’s Virgin appears to gaze at the sculptured crucifix, movement into the choir removes her from the context of death; for only here is the figure of God the Father revealed above her head. The content of the picture changes, then, to mirror the viewer’s progression from the ‘Church Militant’ to ‘Church Triumphant’.65 Even from the entrance one can register the implied circle of heavenly light, described at the top of the picture by the arched frame and heavenly cherubim (subsumed into the celestial cloud), and completed by the semicircle of more material looking cloud and putti who are transporting the Virgin heavenwards. The resulting spatial sequence constitutes a choreographing of architecture, sculpture and painting, made more apparent when, as noted earlier, passing from the third to the fourth bay one first sees the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro and registers not only its radical rotation of the Sacra conversazione but also its floating cloud, thus activating the intervening spaces.66 As an in situ and dialogic painting, the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro thus establishes a complex web of extra-​pictorial relations requiring the viewer to connect with its divergent themes. It does so in such a way as to draw upon our embodied memory within the space of reception and our orientation towards two separated yet intimately connected pictures. Working across the space of the Frari, Titian constructs a tension between material and immaterial, real and unreal. After all, the Frari is dedicated to the 53

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Assumption of the Virgin: in Catholic dogma thought to be the bodily taking up of the Virgin into Heaven, at the culmination of her earthly, corporeal life, where she is assumed, body and soul, into the heavenly glory. In Titian’s Assumption, this division is signified by cloud (or /​cloud/​), which as with Correggio’s cupolas takes on incongruous material properties to support the weight of Mary as she is transported upwards by the putti (two of whom push upwards on the cloud). The drama of this separation is accentuated by the two points where these two worlds, the celestial and terrestrial, almost collide (the saint’s fingertips and the toes of a child angel); and yet Titian withholds perspectival cues as to where the celestial –​beyond space and time –​exists relative to the corporeality of the larger-​than-​life-​size figures depicted below. This celestial space (continuing the arch of the picture frame) dominates the Frari from the moment one passes through the choir facade, counterpointing the upwards pointing triangular arrangement of figures culminating in the Virgin’s upward gaze. It amounts to a naturalized aureola, a radiant halo of luminous cloud that surrounds the unhaloed Virgin. If Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin negates the architecture in which it is situated, the same may be said of Titian’s Assumption. And here, finally, Titian employs a temporal as well as spatial metaphor that exploits the basilica’s non-​conventional orientation. With the apse unusually located at the church’s south-​western end, this effect is heightened towards sunset, when its golden light is replicated by the warm glow entering the church from the apse windows, the painting’s lighting schema consistent with the direction of light entering from the windows immediately to the right of the altar (a solution no doubt inspired by Giovanni Bellini’s ingenious juxtaposition of real late afternoon light and painted light in St Jerome with SS Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, painted a few years earlier in 1513 in San Giovanno Crisostomo, Venice). This depiction of heavenly light, replicating the low evening light of the Venetian lagoon, would not have been lost on its audience, confirming Titian as an extraordinary colourist. Here I  would like to conclude by suggesting that the full significance of Titian’s juxtaposition of the two works, connecting the cult of the Immaculata to that of the Assumption, is reinforced by their respective lighting. If the Assumption connects to the evening sunset, the Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, located on the south-​eastern wall of the central nave, is depicted in low angled early morning light, broadly consistent with its orientation (and a poignant metaphor that Christ is the light). Titian thus constructs a temporal narrative operating across the architecture of the church that links two episodes in the life and death of the Madonna to the passage of time in a single day. And if the two works are united by the role cloud plays in signifying the separation of the terrestrial and celestial realms, the supernatural realm is brought into a relation with the very architecture and orientation of the basilica:  a relation dependent upon the beholder’s share as she negotiates the space of the Frari. This is an imaginative engagement that is dependent upon not so much the mere ‘reading’ of signs, but a dynamic interaction between fictional space, host architecture and embodied beholder. And once more, perspective, and its limits, ‘functions’ as a model of thought in such a way that it allows the miraculous to erupt into our own space.

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CHAPTER 3 THE MELANCHOLIC BEHOLDER

Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–​2) Julia Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’ (1987)

I The two previous chapters addressed in situ Italian Renaissance altarpieces that engage the embodied beholder within the wider architecture of their host buildings, such that the situation in which the work is encountered is brought into the imaginative remit only for the architecture to be negated. In the Masaccio, this is through the use of a secondary, non-​empirical viewpoint, by which the Trinity is implied as occupying somewhere ‘beyond time and space’ –​that is, beyond the empirical realm of the embodied beholder; in the Titian, an implied negation of the architecture opens up a celestial space beyond perspectival representation, signalled by cloud (a dynamic operational across the space of the Frari). In both cases, the devices are ingenious solutions to the problem of how to represent the supernatural within the constraints of perspectival representation. If the notion of a secondary viewpoint is utilized by these Italian works, then it is adapted, in a characteristically inventive way, by a Northern Renaissance artist born some nine or ten years after Titian. This is a painter, Hans Holbein the Younger (c.1497–​1543), known for his utilization of perspectival distortion to symbolic ends, most famously in the anamorphic skull of The Ambassadors (1533) in the National Gallery, London.1 In this chapter I discuss a work that also employs two viewing positions. The religious context for Holbein’s work, however, was radically different to the cult of the Madonna prevalent in Venice. While Holbein’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–​2; Plate 4) is now part of the collection of the Öeffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, it was in all probability conceived as an in situ work (the current frame being a later addition). The painting comprises a single panel of unusual proportions (30.5 × 200 cm), barely able to contain the life-​size image of the emaciated body of Christ. This is a body, lying stark, presented to the viewer as if in a morgue; indeed, there are few images in Christian art as graphic in their depiction of the effects of a slow death by crucifixion on the body, the agony still etched onto the face of the twisted and bent-​back head. The work’s original location or function is not known; the likelihood, however, is that it once occupied either a side chapel of a church or the north wall of the choir, and was thus approached from the left. This approach, as we shall see, is key to its perspectival schema, and its startling effect on the beholder when seen from such a peripheral position. Julia Kristeva, whose

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1987 essay ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’ will theoretically frame this chapter, notes of the work’s siting: In the Upper Rhine region there are churches that contain funerary recesses where sculptured Christly bodies are displayed. Might Holbein’s work be a painterly transportation of such recumbent statues?2 X-​rays reveal that an earlier state of the painting located the figure within a laterally arched recess; Holbein abandons this for a rectangular solution, signed and dated above the feet with the painted inscription ∙M∙D∙XXI ∙H∙ H∙.3 This revised format heightens the sense of confinement, such that we see the body as if contained within a heavy stone coffin, with the beholder’s side removed. But the earlier state of the painting reinforces the idea that the image might be a painted alternative to a sculptural Holy Grave (rather than a predella to a larger altarpiece). In Translating Nature into Art, Jeanne Nuechterlein catalogues a number of Holy Graves in what is now the Lörrach region of Germany, just across the border from Basel: ‘Each of these Holy Graves, all built in the small village parish churches in the last decades of the fifteenth century, consisted of a horizontal niche built into the north wall of the choir, with a rectangular niche usually directly above it, where the Eucharist was kept.’4 Such Holy Graves are ‘a type of monument that evolved in medieval northern Europe for the reenactment of the burial and resurrection of Christ’s body during Holy Week’.5 Many of these were walled in after the Protestant Reformation, but some have been rediscovered, and –​at the very least –​it seems likely that such niches ‘provided a visual reference, either on Holbein’s own initiative or under directions from the patron’.6 The connection Nuechterlein makes between the painting and Lutheran attitudes to the Eucharist is one to which I will return in the light of Kristeva’s account. Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener similarly speculate on the possibility that the painting once substituted for a sculpture as part of a Holy Tomb.7 And like Kristeva, they point to a likely precedent for Holbein’s theme: Holbein’s interest in macabre scenes and disturbing effects is perfectly in tune with the world of Matthias Grünewald. At a very young age Holbein must have accompanied his father to Isenheim in Alsace, for between 1509 and 1516–​17 Holbein the Elder received a number of commissions from the hospice there; the Crucifixion scene and the predella of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–​15) must have had a striking effect on the young man.8 There is evidence that Matthias Grünewald (c.1470–​1528) had spent time in the elder Holbein’s studio in Augsburg, but by 1516 the former teacher’s fortunes had changed, and Hans’s final years were ‘spent staving of destitution’.9 Holbein the Elder (c.1465–​ 1524) fled to Isenheim in that year, escaping the authorities in Augsburg where he was declared a tax defaulter, his workshop dismantled.10 No doubt the Younger Holbein would have made the 50 kilometre journey from Basel (where he relocated around the 56

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Figure 3.1  Matthias Grünewald: Isenheim Altarpiece, c.1512–​16, oil on limewood, 376 × 534 cm. Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar. Getty Images/​Heritage Images/​Contributor.

end of 1515) to Isenheim to visit his struggling father, where he would have encountered Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1512–​16; Figure  3.1), and in particular the panels visible in the altar’s closed position: the uncompromising Crucifixion, the central panel of the altar in its first state; and the Lamentation, the predella scene immediately below.11 This altarpiece revealed a depth of empathy and religious feeling lacking in his father’s more emotionally restrained work. Both the crucifixion and lamentation contained startling depictions of a body having endured unbearable pain, the skin covered in sores from its scourging. Originally housed within the choir of the monastery church of the Antonite hospital, noted for its care of plague sufferers and treatment of various skin conditions (including the condition known as Saint Anthony’s Fire), this was a body with which sufferers would have identified with. As Andrée Hayum notes, the in situ context is key to the work’s iconography, in that the altarpiece ‘functioned in the healing program at the monastery hospital’.12 Of particular relevance to Holbein’s Dead Christ is the Lamentation: an elongated panel which occupies the entire predella. Here, the open tomb awaits Christ’s body, compositionally compressing a foreground which includes the diminutive John the Evangelist, struggling to lift Christ’s mutilated body, and the discarded crown of thorns. These figures, barely contained by the shaped frame, are not alone; occupying a curiously lowered ground are the Virgin, kneeling, hands clasped in 57

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prayer, and Mary Magdalene, also praying, who cries out in pain –​a collective sadness echoed by the foreboding skies of the landscape beyond. Holbein’s Dead Christ reverses the direction of Grünewald’s Christ, ‘placing the feet toward the right’; but, as Kristeva contends, it is in ‘erasing the likeness of the three mourners’ that the real distinction lies –​specifically in Christ’s unprecedented isolation: The central panel representing the crucifixion shows Christ bearing the paroxysmal marks of martyrdom (the crown of thorns, the cross, the countless wounds), including even putrefaction of the flesh. Gothic expressionism here reached a peak in the exhibition of pain. Grünewald’s Christ, however, is not reduced to isolation as was Holbein’s. The human realm to which he belongs is represented by the Virgin who falls into the arms of John the Evangelist, by Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist who introduce compassion into the picture.13 Holbein’s removal of the mourners, characterized by Kristeva as his ‘minimalism’, forces ‘upon [his] picture the weight of human grief ’, thereby also differentiating it from Italian precursors, such as Andrea Mantegna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1483; Figure 3.2), part of the collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.14 However, I  want first to reinforce the differences between Holbein’s Dead Christ and Grünewald’s altarpiece, emblematic of the Catholic Germanic Renaissance tradition which the younger Holbein had first operated within. My concern, once more, is with how Grünewald conceives of the role of the beholder. Anachronistically for this period, the figures’ relative sizes reflect their hierarchy: the largest being the life-​size Christ, the smallest being Mary Magdalene, who kneels at Christ’s feet (her position reminiscent of painted donors).15 Grünewald’s inclusion of the pot of ointment echoes a widespread medieval conflation of the Magdalene with the unnamed woman who ‘was a sinner’ in Luke 7:36–​50 –​who washes Christ’s feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and anoints them with ointment (an attribution that was to become a major debate within the Protestant Reformation that was looming).16 Magdalene’s diminished size should not detract from the vital intermediary role she plays in both the crucifixion and lamentation scenes. First, within the dermatological context of the hospital her ointment would have specific associations with healing treatments; secondly, she prompts the beholder to kneel in front of the altarpiece. This, in turn, has noteworthy consequences for viewing the predella. When kneeling in front of the work, we see the Lamentation from its intended height, establishing a continuity between our position and that of the Madonna and Magdalene, who likewise kneel –​ thus making sense of the idiosyncratic spatial configuration within the panel. And when joined by other worshippers, our mirroring act completes the communal circle of shared grief, which has at its centre the dead body of Christ. As Hayum states, whereas ‘[T]‌he Crucifixion presents death in its immanence, the Lamentation shows the state of death’17; importantly, this is a state –​humanitas Christi –​that sanctions a relaxation of the requisite distance normally demanded of the religious image. The two linked scenes, showing two sides of death, cohere through an act of prayer on the part of the beholder, indexed by 58

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Figure 3.2  Andrea Mantegna: The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, c.1483, tempera on canvas, 68 × 81 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Getty Images/​Leemage/​Contributor.

the work itself. Such a claim, by emphasizing the beholder’s act of kneeling, is consistent with Hayum’s contention that the silhouetted figures of the Virgin and Magdalene ‘are like expressive participants in a real-​life drama that is meant as an organizing focus for a large assembly of viewers’, which thereby ‘find community in pain and suffering’, an identification made all the more intense and poignant by the hospital context.18 Holbein, by contrast, resoundingly rejects any such notion of a ‘community in pain’ with his Dead Christ; rather, we are presented with a stark encounter where we must confront not only the reality of death, but the death of the cherished God  –​forlorn, confined and unseen in the sepulchre. We encounter this image alone, without an intermediary. For the beholder, then, this is not just a compositional isolation, but one that has consequence in that we must face the unprecedented realism of the image of death without the comfort of fellow grievers. As Kristeva notes, On the basis of that identification, one that is admittedly too anthropological and psychological from the point of view of a strict theology, man is nevertheless 59

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provided with a powerful symbolic device that allows him to experience death and resurrection even in his physical body, thanks to the strength of imaginary identification –​and of its actual effects –​with the absolute Subject (Christ).19 Kristeva’s realism here is one, as John Lechte has noted, that allows the symbolic to emerge:  ‘it is only a fiction  –​and yet it places us in touch with the real’.20 This is significant, in that the semiotic ‘critique of realism had often been made according to a hermeneutics which placed emphasis on the very idea that every framework or medium was the basis of an interpretation. Reality would never be reached, in short, because it would always be mediated.’21 He contrasts this with Kristeva’s approach ‘of pointing out that a vision of reality (call it the original object) is an integral part of a viable subjectivity, one which keeps extreme melancholia at bay. The vision of reality constitutes the basis of the capacity of identification as such.’22 With Holbein, this includes an invitation ‘to become one with Christ’s suffering’23:  While such an identification is consistent with the role I assign imagination in the beholder’s encounter with situated art, it registers a shift from one of mediation (through the role of the Virgin in the works considered by Masaccio, Titian and Correggio) to an encounter which tests our very faith.

II In The Dead Christ in the Tomb, Holbein paints a Christ so realistically dead that it is difficult to reconcile the emaciated corpse with Christ’s imminent Resurrection. The effect is heightened by the painting’s unprecedented sense of figural presence, the term Puttfarken uses to describe the life-​sized presentation of bodies and things in pictures, such that their visual appearance ‘is continuous with the visual appearance of bodies and things in the real world’.24 Of course, that the depicted body is dead, unmoving, rather than that of a living body unnaturally ‘stilled’ by the painter’s art, only enhances this sense of a tangible presence. Moreover, the suggestion is that Truly, this was the face of a man who had only just been taken from the cross –​that is, still retaining a great deal of warmth and life; rigor mortis had not yet set in, so that there is still a look of suffering on the face of the dead man, as though he were still feeling it (that has been well caught by the artist); on the other hand, the face has not been spared in the least; it is nature itself, and, indeed, any man’s corpse would look like that after such suffering.25 While the temporal sequence described here might be questioned, there is nonetheless an immediacy that few other paintings have achieved –​a demonstrative reference to the ‘here’ and ‘now’. The above words are taken not from an art historical treatise, but from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, originally published in 1869; they are cited by many who have written about the Dead Christ, including Kristeva, who added the emphasis –​ part of a long passage from The Idiot which opens her essay. The startling effect that 60

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the painting had on Dostoyevsky is well documented; as Prince Myshkin proclaims in the novel, ‘some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!’26 Erika Michael writes that The stunning impact of the painting on Dostoyevsky during his visit to Basel in 1867 is recorded in Reminiscences by his wife, Anna Grigorievna. Dostoyevsky wrestled with the incongruity between the palpably mortal appearance of Holbein’s corpse and the idea of Christ as a worker of materials who overcomes death and rises from the grave.27 Dostoyevsky’s own facial expression was recognized by his wife to be one that immediately preceded one of his epileptic seizures, such that she was forced to pull him away. As Michael notes, Dostoyevsky weaves the painting into the novel’s very structure, used as a point of departure for ‘elaborate discourses about God and atheism and provided a strategic nucleus for the development of the complex interrelationships of the novel’s protagonists’.28 Kristeva’s essay, in turn, uses the long monologue from Ippolit  –​a peripheral character in Dostoyevsky’s novel who nonetheless acts as the mouthpiece of the author –​ to frame her own discussion about loss of faith and identification with our own death, a theme, established by the body’s isolation. For, as Kristeva notes, ‘The martyr’s face bears the expression of a hopeless grief; the empty stare, the sharp-​lined profile, the dull blue-​green complexion are those of a man who is truly dead, of Christ forsaken by the Father (“My God, my God, why have you deserted me?”) and without the promise of Resurrection.’29 Holbein therefore depicts a break, a hiatus, between Father and Son. And despite this ‘unadorned representation of human death’, such that ‘the well-​nigh anatomical stripping of the corpse’ so as to ‘convey to viewers an unbearable anguish before the death of God’ –​despite the fact that ‘there is not the slightest suggestion of transcendency’ –​Holbein does not slip into atheism.30 As Sara Beardsworth summarizes Kristeva’s argument, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ is a work standing on the threshold of atheism, not crossing it, but occupying the point of crisis of religious representation.’31 This crisis was manifest in Basel by the outbreak of Protestant iconoclasm in the 1520s. We have little knowledge of Holbein’s own religious convictions, though we know he was fully conversant with the Lutheran Bible, having illustrated a translation into German by Martin Luther in 1524.32 We also know that Holbein was still painting devotional works for Catholics, such as the Darmstadt Madonna (a private altarpiece for Jakob Meyer zum Hasen, the former Bürgermeister of Basel and a devout Catholic and prominent opponent of the Reformation), as late as 1526–​8.33 In London, he resided with the humanist, but Catholic, opponent of the Reformation, Sir Thomas More –​whose portrait by Holbein from 1527 is in the Frick Collection, New York. But Holbein was also profoundly influenced by the humanist Desiderius Erasmus, whom he first painted in 1522–​3, and evidently shared Erasmus’s criticisms of the irrational veneration of images and relics. As Carlos M. N. Eire notes, since ‘Erasmus regarded material objects as distractions from true piety, he saw no point in the amassment of 61

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religious treasure’; on the contrary, for Erasmus these displays of conspicuous wealth by the church amounted to a gross distortion while the poor starved.34 However, speaking in 1522, Erasmus could not have anticipated that his words ‘would be taken literally by iconoclastic mobs in Zurich, Bern, Basel, and other Swiss and German cities’35; indeed, several of Holbein’s own religious works were destroyed in the notorious ‘idolomachy’ of 1529, including the central section of his altarpiece commissioned by Hans Oberried (1520–​1), the outer wings of which were saved and are now in the University Chapel of the Cathedral, Freiburg im Breisgau.36 Regardless, while painted in 1921, Protestant iconoclasm had already left a profound impression on Holbein and his Dead Christ –​a ‘spirit of deprivation, of leveling, of subtle minimalism’.37 In the camps of both the humanists and iconoclastic reformers, ‘a tendency arose to intensify the confrontation between man and suffering and death, giving evidence of the truth of and challenge to the shallow mercantilism of the official Church’38; according to Kristeva, Holbein experienced his own revolution, manifest as an erosion of belief, bound to the latent thought that ‘God is dead’. Integrating aspects ‘from scepticism to rejection of idolatry’, prevalent in the religious and philosophical currents of the period, Holbein thus renders a death ‘that is neither dodged nor embellished but set forth in its minimal visibility, in its extreme manifestations constituted by pain and melancholia’.39 It is a depressive moment, which should be seen within the context of Kristeva’s wider theory of depression and melancholia, underpinned by her distinctive tethering of semiotics to psychoanalysis.

III Arriving in Paris in December 1965, as a young linguist from Bulgaria, Kristeva (b. 1941) ‘took the Left Bank by storm’, working with many of the most important figures within the structuralist milieu in the city, while studying with Roland Barthes.40 As a foreign woman associated with the male-​dominated intellectual circle of the Tel Quel group, she arrived with a fully formed grounding in Marx, Hegel and Russian Formalism which constituted a ‘specific and relatively unusual background that enabled Kristeva to take up a critical position towards structuralism from the outset’.41 By the early 1970s, Kristeva added into this mix a psychoanalytical discourse that drew not only from Sigmund Freud, but crucially from the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, and the more linguistically oriented ‘return to Freud’ represented by Jacques Lacan. Not insignificantly to her engagement with early child development, she became a mother while undergoing her psychoanalytical training, and in 1979 she commenced her own psychoanalytical practice.42 Kristeva established a complex, and not uncritical, relation to feminism as it emerged in France, particularly in relation to a feminist ethics and politics.43 In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva’s thesis, first published in 1974, sets out her psychoanalytically informed distinction between the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’: the former associated with the drives (positive and negative), focused on the 62

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mother and her body in the pre-​symbolic undifferentiated stages of child development; the latter embodied in the Law of the Father, associated with language acquisition. Importantly for the current discussion, and distinguishing her position from Lacan, she claims that the ‘signifying practices such as art, poetry and myth … are irreducible to the “language” project’, and thereby engage the semiotic:  the unrepresentable support for language.44 Here, Hegel’s concept of negativity, integral to his dialectic, is used as a means to theorize Freud’s death-​drive  –​the ‘separation of the death instincts from the life instincts’, as developed in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.45 The remainder of this section will summarize Kristeva’s formative text, which provides the foundations for later 1980s works such as Black Sun, of which ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’ constitutes a key chapter. Kristeva argues for a theory of the ‘subject’ which acknowledges an extra linguistic dimension that is not reducible to one of transcendental ego, but emerges from our early engagement with the world, and from the emerging signifying process. Kristeva proposes what she terms a semiotic chora as a totality of pre-​verbal drives on which language simultaneously depends, but refuses. This evolves during an undifferentiated period of child development, prior to the separation of subject and object: ‘The chora is a modality of significance [that is, a signifying process] in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic.’46 It is a modality where vocal and gestural organization is not yet subject to the law (a term reserved for the symbolic) but is already subject to ordering, where social organization imprints its constraints as a mediating force through aspects such as vocal (phonic) and gestural rhythm and repetition.47 By contrast, the symbolic, the realm of signification, is distinguished from the semiotic drives and their articulations by being propositional, that is, ‘a realm of positions’.48 The symbolic enters as a rupture, a break ‘which produces the positing of signification’, which Kristeva designates the thetic phase.49 In distinction from early undifferentiated experience, this phase ‘requires an identification; in other words, the subject must separate from and through his image, from and through his objects’.50 Thus, for Kristeva, even though a child’s first holophrastic enunciations51 are not yet subject to a generative grammar, they are ‘already thetic in the sense that they separate an object from the subject, and attribute to it a semiotic fragment, which thereby becomes a signifier’.52 If the child mimics the mother on hearing a dog, such that for a time all animals become ‘woof-​woof ’, this is ‘logically secondary to the fact that it constitutes an attribution, which is to say, a positing of identity or difference, and that it represents the nucleus of judgement or proposition’.53 These holophrastic utterances occur during the boundaries of the Lacanian mirror stage, which posits the reflected image as ‘separate, heterogeneous, dehiscent’  –​ characterized by a splitting open.54 This amounts to a form of distancing, and for Kristeva, ‘castration’ finalizes this process of separation, defined as the final cutting off from the dependency on and fusion with the mother, and her replete body, such that ‘the perception of this lack [manque] makes the phallic function a symbolic function – the symbolic function’.55 Thus, for Kristeva ‘the Freudian theory of the unconscious 63

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and its Lacanian development show, precisely, that thetic signification is a stage attained under certain precise conditions during the signifying process, and that it constitutes the subject without being reduced to his process precisely because it is the threshold of language’.56 Kristeva here adopts Gottlob Frege’s term Bedeutung (signification); she argues that Bedeutung ‘posits an object or a denotatum’, in other words a denotation.57 Importantly, she maintains that the profusion of signs belonging to the thetic phase implies ‘the very precondition of denotation, which is the positing of an object, of the object, of objectness’.58 This posits not only the signifiable object (in other words, the ‘subject’ or ‘noun’) but also a ‘positing’ (an enunciation, given in the ‘predicate’ or ‘verb’) of the displaced subject, ‘absent from the signified and signifying position’.59 Thus, Frege’s Bedeutung designates ‘the break that simultaneously sets up the symbolic thesis and an object; as an externality within judgment, it has a truth value only by virtue of this scission’.60 Therefore, Even if it is presented as a simple act of naming, we maintain that the thetic is already propositional (or syntactic) and that syntax is the ex-​position of the thetic. The subject and predicate represent the division inherent in the thetic; they make it plain and actual. But if theory persists in regarding them as independent entities, notions of the subject and predicate may end up obscuring not only the link between (thetic) signification and syntactic structure, but also the complicity and opposition between denotation (given in the subject) and enunciation (given in the predicate).61 The indivisibility of subject and predicate implies that signification (Bedeutung) is a process of thetic negativity, dependent upon an opposition of these terms, which separates ‘the signifier from what was heterogeneous to it’.62 However, the transformation from drive to signifier which produces the speaking subject as the bearer of syntax also absents the speaking subject:  ‘But when this subject re-​emerges, when the semiotic chora disturbs the thetic position by redistributing the signifying order, we note that the denoted object and the syntactic relation are disturbed as well. The denoted object proliferates in a series of connoted objects produced by the transposition of the semiotic chora and the syntactic division … is disrupted.’63 This irruption of the semiotic chora characterizes a poetic language that disrupts and transgresses signification –​a negativity that results not in a Hegelian synthesis, but in a ‘shattering and maintaining position within the heterogeneous process’, manifest in a ‘phonetic, lexical and syntactic disturbance’ that results in a proliferation of ‘mimetic, fictional, connoted objects’.64 This breaching role of poetic language –​its transgressing of the rules of grammar –​disrupts not only the denotative function of language (i.e. ‘the positing of the object’) but also meaning, ‘the positing of the enunciating subject’.65 It is still dependent upon the symbolic, and maintains signification (Bedeutung), even as this is dislocated. Moreover, while the semiotic ‘precedes’ symbolization, it nonetheless ‘exists in practice only within the symbolic and requires the symbolic break to obtain the complex articulation we associate with it in musical and poetic practices’.66 As Kristeva 64

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maintains, ‘In taking the thetic into account, we shall have to represent the semiotic (which is produced recursively on the basis of that break) as a “second” return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic, as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order and as the transgression of that order.’67 While Kristeva focuses on how this return is manifest in poetry and music –​associating the semiotic with aspects such as repetition, rhyme, intonation and rhythm –​her thesis might equally be applied to the visual arts. John Lechte, developing an observation by Kristeva herself, has applied this notion of the semiotic to the non-​geometric, non-​ symbolic paintings of Jackson Pollock, in an art that in its continuous flow resists (though cannot escape) the bounding frame.68 (In Chapter 9, I will return to consider a painting by Agnes Martin through Griselda Pollock’s account of Martin’s grids which explicitly draws upon Kristeva’s position.) But, of course, if, as Lechte notes, the ‘subject in process is a subject of flows and energy charges’, this encompasses not only ‘jouissance’ (joy) but ‘death’.69 And if modernism  –​in terms of poetry and the visual arts  –​is a site of transgressing conventions, the semiotic irruption is also exemplified by religion and by religious art. Kristeva, herself, refers to ‘Giotto’s Joy’ in relation to a work we considered earlier, Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua (Figure 1.1). Here she refers to the luminous blue that, through its short wavelengths that prevail in dim light, ‘takes hold of the viewer at the extreme limit of visual perception’.70 Giotto’s use of colour, for Kristeva, ‘acts upon the subject’s station point outside of the painting rather than projecting him into it’, thus reaching ‘completion within the viewer’.71 In so doing, it disrupts the ideological dimensions of the biblical narrative. But Kristeva also contends that ‘artistic practice considers death the inner boundary of the signifying process’.72 Subject to death, but also to rebirth, the artist’s ‘function becomes harnessed, immobilized, represented and idealized by religious systems (most explicitly by Christianity)’.73 And, of course, nothing exemplifies this thetic break more than the Crucifixion and its immediate aftermath –​ not only the killing of a man, but of The God.

IV How does Kristeva’s broader psychoanalytic argument manifest itself in her writing on Holbein’s Dead Christ? In ‘Psychoanalysis –​A Counterdepressant’, Chapter One of Black Sun, Kristeva argues that an aesthetic creation that seriously engages religious discourse might be seen as constituting a ‘semiological representation of the subject’s battle with symbolic collapse’; as such, ‘the literary (and religious) representation possesses a real and imaginary effectiveness that comes closer to catharsis than to elaboration; it is a therapeutic device used in all societies throughout the ages’.74 This cathartic dimension is nowhere more manifest than in Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin (Figure  2.8) considered in the previous chapter, which is –​pre-​eminently –​a work about the loss of the Mother (of Christ). Within the swirling mass of bodies carried heavenwards is the Virgin (the ‘exemplary’ image of the feminine, immortal in and beyond death) who –​in her bodily assumption –​opens her arms as she looks upwards, as if ready to 65

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embrace Christ who descends to greet her. While earthbound, we look upwards into this undifferentiated and boundless oceanic void, a celestial repository for all that is felt to be good. The beholder projects onto, and identifies with, an all-​enveloping transcendental space where inside and outside, once again, merge and where boundaries dissolve –​a work that, in its image of an unbounded jouissance, replicates undifferentiated processes of projection and introjection. And we are not entirely abandoned in our loss; in a telling detail, the putto who hugs the Virgin as she ascends smiles as he looks downwards towards us, as if to reinforce the latter’s role as an intermediary. In stark contrast, Holbein’s Dead Christ emerges out of, and in response to, the context of iconoclasm and Reformation, in such a way that Kristeva states a new conception emerges for the role of painting: ‘A new idea was born in Europe, a paradoxical painterly idea –​the idea that truth is severe, sometimes sad, often melancholy.’75 For Holbein, this ‘truth’ –​a new kind of realism –​constitutes its own, distinct beauty; and in terms of religious art, this conception was one diametrically opposed to the contemporaneous painterly we have seen emerging in Venice and Parma. Far from the transcendental vision of celestial splendour offered by Correggio, Holbein’s art tends towards the more depressive form where a gap opens up between image and denoted object. But it is this very gap that prompts acts of ideation about the relation between sign and the thing represented. This has both aesthetic and spiritual consequences. As Beardsworth argues of Kristeva, What interests her about the Holbein painting is the way in which it encounters the threat to transcendence when the God-​relationship is unsettled at the opening of a new political world. This threat is also a test of the aesthetic: how does the aesthetic respond when what it means to be artistic representation is itself unsettled as part of a surrounding symbolic and political upheaval? Her analysis of the Dead Christ turns on the ways in which this image of severance –​‘God is dead’ –​renders the severance of representation (the challenge to the aesthetic) in artistic form. At the same time, Holbein’s achievement with respect to the aesthetic test cannot be divorced from the way in which this work conveys –​presents and passes through –​ the sites of suffering, or latent loss.76 Kristeva’s tethering of semiotics to psychoanalysis opens up new thoughts about Christ’s isolation, such that ‘it is perhaps that isolation –​an act of composition –​that endows the painting with its major melancholy burden’.77 And, indeed, unlike Mantegna’s The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, Holbein’s Christ is decidedly alone. Kristeva reflects upon how these two works differ in terms of their structuring a relation to the beholder. Whereas Holbein offers us a vision of Christ’s confinement (an invisibility), Mantegna paints a prior scene, when the dead Christ has been laid out on the Stone of Unction in readiness for the preparation of the body for its entombment. As Kristeva notes, the presence of the figures, cropped at the top left-​hand corner, ‘introduce the grief and compassion that Holbein precisely puts aside by banishing them from sight or else creating them with no other mediator than the invisible appeal to our all-​too-​human 66

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identification with the dead Son’.78 Consistent with lamentation scenes, we see the praying John the Evangelist, an aged Virgin Mary, who wipes away tears from one of her eyes, and, barely visible, Mary Magdalene (an attribution signalled by the jar of ointment, placed on the other side of the slab), with gaping mouth in a cry of pain. In an audacious feat of perspectival foreshortening, the dead body of Christ has here been depicted as perpendicular to the picture plane, such that we approach from his feet –​a position from which the wounds of the hands and feet are prominently displayed. And while the foreshortening is incorrect, in that the feet (which overhang the Stone, the bent right foot in particular protruding, as it were, into the beholder’s space) should be larger given the implied proximity and angle of vision, the composition nonetheless accords with our sense of decorum. With regard to the latter, the centrality of Christ’s genitals to the composition emphasizes his very humanity  –​having suffered on the Cross like any other man. By contrast, Kristeva points out how the extraordinary elongated proportions of Holbein’s work increase the foreboding:  ‘The tombstone weighs down on the upper portion of the painting, which is merely twelve inches high, and intensifies the feeling of permanent death: this corpse shall never rise again.’79 A number of observers have noted that the body appears at its most fully three-​dimensional when viewed obliquely from the left, and from slightly below. This is not an isolated theme in Holbein’s oeuvre. Christian Müller, for instance, identifies a number of early works utilizing oblique viewpoints. He writes of The Dead Christ in the Tomb: ‘Only when viewed from the left, looking into the niche where Holbein placed his signature, does the body, which at first glance seems flat, unfold its three-​dimensional quality.’80 The oblique viewpoint brings the ‘illusionistic’ qualities of the painting to the fore. From such a position, the unrelenting realism is such that one might readily imagine that this is the dead body of Christ, humanitas Christi, the low source of lighting creating dramatic (and ‘terrible’) highlights and shadows. Palpably present in human form, we nevertheless cannot reach out to touch the dead Christ from this marginalized vantage point; we are thus separated from a body which is inaccessible despite its very realism and suggestion of immediate presence. Yet the painting is also meant to be seen frontally, consistent with the vanishing point, the placement of which seems to have received no critical attention. Given the lack of orthogonals, the clues for fixing this position are scant, but are not insignificant: including the very marks by which Holbein signals his presence as witness, painted as though incised into the side of the tomb. That this point of origin is not accidental is indicated by the fact that Christ points directly at it with His extended middle finger, which extends into ‘our’ space. (This position is consistent with the folds of the cloth on which Christ is placed.) We are reminded by the pointing finger for whom the sacrifice was made. But here, within its Protestant context, there is no intermediary. As Kristeva notes, Christ’s dereliction is here at its worst: forsaken by the Father, he is apart from all of us. Unless Holbein, whose mind, pungent as it was, does not appear to have led him across the threshold of atheism, wanted to include us, humans, foreigners, spectators that we are, forthrightly in this crucial moment of Christ’s life. With 67

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no intermediary, suggestion, or indoctrination, whether pictorial or theological, other than our ability to imagine death, we are led to collapse in the horror of the caesura constituted by death or to dream of an invisible beyond.81 And yet it is our ability to imagine death that is key in this vision of the invisible, such that ‘death reveals itself as such to the imaginative ability of the self in the isolation of signs’.82

V Earlier, I noted Nuechterlein’s claim that the Holy Graves in the Lörrach region provide a reference for Holbein’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb. These sculptural niches were accompanied by niches housing the Eucharist. Regardless of whether Holbein’s Dead Christ performed such a function, Holbein would certainly have been sensitive to the Eucharist debates at the beginning of the 1520s, even if ‘he could well have found hard to stomach the [later] extreme Zwinglian position that the Eucharist is merely a human and worldly act of commemoration, lacking Christ’s true bodily or even spiritual presence’.83 Nuechterlein contextualizes the painting within the historical context of debates about the relation between divinity and the human world, revealed by ‘Christ’s fleshly incarnation’.84 Here she argues, By turning toward a descriptive mode of representation and refusing to animate Christ’s body with the usual signs of emotional and narrative meaning, Holbein leaves the body to speak for itself  –​or to speak through our own projected imagination  –​rather than through the inspiration of art. As a result, Holbein’s panel suggests that after his death Christ’s outer form was left behind as empty material. So too were reformers arguing that the spirit of God has nothing to do with images or relics, leaving them cast down as meaningless pieces of matter. Luther’s followers similarly questioned the true nature of the Eucharist, long understood as wholly transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Luther concluded that the bread and wine remained fully present alongside the body and blood –​heresy to the late medieval church –​and within a few years, other reformers went so far as to argue that Christ was not present at all in either body or spirit: it was a mere act of human remembrance carried out with earthly materials.85 This has direct consequences for the relation of religious image to its referent, in that Fundamentally, reformers questioned whether any material object, be it relic, image, or even the Eucharist, could serve as a direct conduit to God. By painting Christ’s body as so startlingly dead, using a descriptive mode as if he were visually re-​creating a seen object, Holbein too appears troubled by the same question. Anyone approaching this image hoping to access Christ is confronted instead 68

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with a representation of dead matter –​which is precisely how reformers perceived religious images and relics.86 We might again compare Holbein’s Dead Christ with a later Italian work, Caravaggio’s The Entombment (c.1602–​4; Figure  3.3), now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome. This was an in situ work painted for S. Maria in Vallicella in Rome, its original position now occupied by a full-​size copy (which allows us to understand something of the original intention). As Puttfarken has shown, Caravaggio’s strategy of reducing his ‘pictorial world’ to darkness, where the bounding frame is lost, ‘acts as a foil against which the figures … are picked out by a realistically inexplicable bright light’.87 While figuring a presence, this threatens to disrupt religious decorum, precisely because the imaginative engagement renders the surface transparent; the disquiet this caused patrons at the time is well documented by Puttfarken.88 However, he notes of Caravaggio’s The Entombment: [T]‌he position of the man carrying [Christ’s] feet, in particular his gaze downward and out of the picture, leave us in no doubt as to where they intend to deposit Him:  they are about to lower Him out of the picture and on to the altar. Here Caravaggio’s radical use of rilievo and life-​size scale to relate his figures to the real world of the viewer is sustained and justified by Christian dogma: the altar represents the tomb of Christ on which the priest during Mass prepares the Host, i.e. the bread and wine that are transformed into (or represent, depending on the denomination) the body and blood of Christ.89 This counterexample is useful precisely because the structuring of an implied continuity is, in the context of the Eucharist, consistent with prevalent religious dogma. Nevertheless, in terms of a Kleinian understanding of religious practice, this also correlates  –​quite literally  –​with earlier stages of introjection, an incorporative phantasy of taking another’s body through the mouth which Freud refers to as ‘psychic cannibalism’:  the Eucharist as the internalization of the good object that is Christ. In earlier times, this took on astonishing extremes; as Caroline Walker Bynum notes, To thirteenth-​century women, the mass and the reception or adoration of the eucharist were closely connected with union or ecstasy, which was frequently accompanied by paramystical phenomena. To some extent, reception of Christ’s body and blood was a substitute for ecstasy  –​a union that anyone, properly prepared by confession or contrition, could achieve. To receive was to become Christ –​by eating, by devouring and being devoured.90 For the medieval believer, the Eucharist is Christ  –​‘one becomes Christ’s crucified body in eating Christ’s crucified body’.91 But as Bynum emphasizes, the Eucharist ‘was also a moment of encounter with that humanitas Christi which was such a prominent theme of women’s spirituality’.92 And it is the persistence into the seventeenth century of such a visceral identification with Christ’s humanity, his ‘corporeality’ or

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Figure  3.3  Caravaggio:  The Entombment, c.1602–​4, oil on canvas, 300 × 203  cm. Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome. Getty Images/​Print Collector/​Contributor. 70

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‘being-​in-​the-​body-​ness’ through Christ’s ‘body and blood’, that Caravaggio’s painting represents, to such startling effect, a representation that is prior to the resurrected but separated and distanced Christ. No distancing device is here required, in that Christ is here presented as humanitas Christi. As Puttfarken notes, ‘Caravaggio’s composition could thus be seen as re-​enforcing the reality of the Host: as the priest raises the Host during Mass, the figures above the altar would be seen as offering him the body of Christ.’93 In sharp contrast, Nuechterlein’s thesis supports the claim that Holbein sought ‘not to embody the divine but to stimulate inner reflection beyond what the painting immediately shows’.94 As she notes, The relevance of Luther’s arguments to an understanding of Holbein’s Dead Christ arises from his reexamination of what exactly the elements of the Sacrament were and why they took the form they did. His rejection of the Mass as sacrifice largely denied the inherent power of the bread/​body and wine/​blood:  they were only important insofar as the believer accepted them as vehicles through which God’s spiritual grace was received. Luther did not for a moment doubt that Christ’s body and blood were literally present in the Eucharist, but he came to celebrate the fact that they could not be perceived.95 Devoid of signs of any impending resurrection, Holbein’s Dead Christ might be thought of in parallel to Luther’s understanding of the Eucharist:  in other words, ‘a stimulus to discover the importance of inner faith’.96 Again, our position is indexed such that once more our orientation is brought into play, particularly as we approach the image –​ humanitas Christi –​from the left. But far from the supernatural erupting into our own space, we are faced with a sober test of our very faith. As Kristeva puts it, ‘Not a single impulse betraying jouissance. No exalted loftiness toward the beyond. Nothing but the sober difficulty of standing here below.’97 But as we move closer, a minor miracle does occur. Seen straight on from close-​up, from a position slightly to the right of the centre of the niche, consistent with the vanishing point, the spatial cohesion of the tomb starts to untangle and we are left with a sense of Christ released from our mathematical space and the ravages of time played out upon his body. Unlike the insistent three-​dimensionality of the oblique view, as our eyes move from left to right, and the rear wall of the niche aligns itself to the painted surface, Christ inches forward from his confining tomb.

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PART II GROUP PORTRAITURE

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CHAPTER 4 THE ARTIST AS BEHOLDER Rembrandt, The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662) Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902)

I Unlike the religious art considered in Part I, Part II will focus on what I am calling, after the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (1858–​1905), the ‘problem’ of group portraiture. In so doing, I  will claim that group portraiture, commissioned for particular spaces, is typically a situated art, engaging the beholder within an anticipated context. In his extraordinary 1902 work The Group Portraiture of Holland, Riegl argues that group portraiture in Holland radically transformed the relationship between artwork and beholder. As Wolfgang Kemp notes in the introduction to the first English translation (remarkably only published in 1999), Riegl develops ‘a method of analysis that qualifies as a contribution to the theory of communication, to the aesthetics of reception, and to historical psychology’.1 And despite its long neglect, Kemp rightly claims that Riegl’s treatise constitutes a founding document of Rezeptionsästhetik. Crucially, it establishes the function of the beholder –​as an anticipated presence –​as constitutive of the work’s meaning. In the Introduction, I  outlined Riegl’s distinction between artworks implying an internal or external coherence (i.e. an inner or outer unity); then in Chapter 2, I returned to this theme in relation to the drive towards a greater self-​sufficiency manifest by Italian Renaissance art. In this chapter, I address Riegl’s analysis of Dutch group portraiture, focusing the discussion on two works by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–​69): The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (1632; Figure 4.5), located in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662; Figure 4.1), now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The consideration of the earlier Anatomy Lesson will frame Rembrandt’s later development in thinking about a genre he seemed reluctant to engage with, but does so to such astonishing effect in The Night Watch (1642) and, definitively, The Syndics. This is the first of three chapters addressing the ‘problem’ of group portraiture, which Riegl identifies as that of unifying a group, so that we are not merely presented with an aggregate of individual likenesses, while still engaging the assumed presence of the beholder. As we shall see, Rembrandt and Velázquez independently evolve ingenious resolutions founded upon staged ‘interruptions’ (of sorts), whereas Goya enhances tensions between painter and sitter to thematize the intrinsic theatricality of portraiture. To recall, paintings described as having a closed ‘internal coherence’ (innere Einheit) are founded upon the reciprocity of pictorial elements contained within the picture, a

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Figure 4.1  Rembrandt van Rijn: The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, 1662, oil on canvas, 191 × 279 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Getty Images/​Fine Art/​Contributor.

self-​sufficient pattern of glances and gestures of figures engaged in a cohesive action requiring no bridge to the beholder.2 For Riegl, this kind of coherence, founded upon subordination, is typical of late Italian Renaissance painting; while Italian works can accommodate single, or even double, portraits, the Italians faced a particular problem with the group portrait in that ‘Italian artists felt compelled to create unity through a subordinate arrangement’, one that tended to separate the autonomous work from the beholder.3 By contrast, works implying an ‘external coherence’ (äußere Einheit) are completed only by the presence of a spectator and establish a rapport with the viewer based on ‘attentiveness’ –​an ethical term introducing a psychological element into Riegl’s analysis. Here subordination is replaced by coordination. The latter, however, generates works where the gestures can look clumsy and forced:  a cramped juxtaposition of individual portraits rather than a coherent grouping located in free space. Such external coherence characterizes any number of Dutch group portraits from what Riegl labels the first period (1529–​66), such as the Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation (1532; Figure 4.2), by Dirck Jacobsz., now part of The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Here, each figure is depicted in three-​quarter profile, stiffly looking outwards towards the beholder, with the exception of two bounding figures whose divergent looks suggest a collective audience. There is no unifying activity other than a rudimentary coordination of hand gestures, such that the picture feels like a composite of likenesses rather than a genuine group gathering. 76

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Such a work soon makes clear the artistic problem at hand. Yet, as Margaret Iversen summarizes, Riegl believes the group portrait represents the most complete expression of the Dutch Kunstwollen –​an artistic will or creative impulse which Riegl identifies in Dutch art as the representation of ‘attention’: The artistic problem presented by the Kunstwollen to depict the specifically Dutch ideal of inwardness is clear. The psychological attitude of attention involving suppression of the will is not one which manifests itself in action but merely in a gaze. This is a difficulty even for single portraits but with group portraits the problem is multiplied, for the motionless figures must somehow be brought into relation with one another. Riegl thinks the central problem confronting the painter of group portraits is that of finding a means of uniting the group without diminishing the individual inwardness of its members.4 Likewise, Margaret Olin has pointed out that Riegl’s theory of beholding  –​with its conjunction of terms such as ‘will’, ‘emotion’ and ‘attention/​attentiveness’ –​is therefore not a ‘formal’ theory as such, in that it contradicts formalistic preoccupations of composition, but rather a theory of the ethical purpose of art.5 Olin suggests that Riegl’s concept of pictorial conception constitutes a specifically psychological relationship into which the beholder is drawn, such that an ‘attentive bond linked a unified, gazing picture, full of individual portrait figures, to an equally individualized beholder’.6 The problem is one that Riegl claims is resolved by Rembrandt’s The Syndics. It is a solution whereby Rembrandt founds his external coherence on a fully resolved inner unity; in other words, the notions of internal and external coherence are here no longer characterized as mutually exclusive, but compatible concepts. In a key insight, Riegl claims that Rembrandt ‘must have realized early on in his career that complete and well-​defined external coherence –​meaning the connection between the viewer and the figures depicted in the painting –​depends on an already resolved internal coherence –​ meaning a subordinate relationship among the figures portrayed’.7 As we shall see, we can accept Riegl’s substantive claim, while questioning aspects of Rembrandt’s ‘staging’ of the relation between his internal and external coherence. For all its brilliance, Riegl’s account is deficient as it stands. There are intrinsic problems to Riegl’s analysis: his belief in the democratic and egalitarian character of the guilds and civic institutions portrayed; his rigid categorization of a ‘national’ Kunstwollen or artistic volition; his Hegelian view of history as one of progressive development from the objective to the subjective (albeit a teleological narrative of progress in which each stage has equal value); his validation of ‘traditional notions of representation’ to stave off what he saw as modernism’s growing ‘threat of subjectivity’ and the drive towards the optical.8 More importantly for the issue at hand, there is the problem of his ‘theatrical’ aesthetics: not his defence of theatricality as such, but rather the problem at the core of portraiture, the nature of the ‘pose’. This is an issue that Riegl raises in an unprecedented awareness of the issue of body language and gesture; the resulting account, however, is hampered by the restrictiveness of his strategies of ‘coordination’ and ‘subordination’, 77

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the latter term feeling anachronistic to modern ears (though, as Michael Podro has pointed out, we must take this term to have aesthetic as well as social implications).9 Moreover, Riegl waivers in the distinctions he draws between how different works are ‘staged’ relative to internal or external beholders –​the former engaged within an implied extension of the depicted space, the latter extrinsic to the space of representation. Let me briefly explain what is at stake. In Part I, we encountered religious works that not only confront our culpability but also raise complex issues of the relation between painting and beholder. The secular problem of portraiture  –​whether individual or group –​presents an altogether different set of implied relations between ‘patron/​sitter/​ artist/​beholder’. These relations take on a particular complexity in terms of self-​portraits, and Rembrandt’s particular resolution of the issue of ‘posing’ is informed by his wider use of himself as model and his blurring of distinctions between sitters and models.10 But they also present particular difficulties for group portraits, where such roles both coincide and are brought into conflict. At the heart of this issue is the question of the look ‘out’ of the painting. The protagonists in a group portrait are depicted as performing themselves –​ a form of self-​presentation –​in the very act of posing for the ensuing painting.11 Do they therefore look at the painter (who, after all, placed them there), or at ‘us’, a beholder they have never met (but a future presence they anticipate within the institutional context of the portrait’s location)? Or is our position already occupied by an implicit beholder, through whose eyes we see the scene before us (an unseen presence Richard Wollheim terms the spectator in the picture, occupying an extension of the fictional or virtual space, distinguished from the spectator of the picture, occupying real space)?12 And does all this self-​consciousness posing distract from the sitter’s inward psychic life? One means to confront these issues head-​on is to incorporate the artist within the virtual realm of the picture, as a means to vacate the position occupied in front of the work as the person organizing the work we see. Two of the works considered in Part II do just this, though to very different ends. This was not an option open to Rembrandt. However, I will argue, after Benjamin Binstock, that Rembrandt’s The Syndics reconfigures the painter as an implied internal beholder, occupying an extension of the virtual realm of the painting. Importantly, while this constitutes a reflexive move revealing processes of the performance of the very painting we see, it is also a means to unify the work as group portrait.

II In The Group Portraiture of Holland, Riegl sets out a theory of beholding founded upon the concept of attentiveness. While not entirely unprecedented, such a position ran against the grain of formalism’s emphasis on composition and threatened the prevalent notion of an artwork’s autonomy. Olin notes that Riegl was conscious of the consequences of the historian’s acknowledgment of the beholder. In private notes of the mid-​1980s, he identified the relationship between 78

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the beholder and the work of art as the central issue of art history, relegating the analysis of the work of art in itself to ‘aesthetics’. ‘Aesthetics’, he wrote, ‘[is the] relation of parts to the whole. [The] relation of the parts among themselves. [It] has not taken the relation to the beholder into consideration. The relation to the beholder constitutes art history. Its general principles make up historical aesthetics’.13 This would imply that much of Riegl’s previous work would thus be considered the work of an aesthetician rather than historian:  ‘[Riegl’s  1901] Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, after all, seemed to treat “aesthetics”, the relationship among parts, not “art history”, the relationship to the beholder, even if it did so historically and relativistically, not in the traditional philosophical sense.’14 Of course, Riegl’s central argument that late Roman art registered a shift from the haptic to optical is not without implications for the beholder in that it constitutes a different way of seeing; nevertheless, Riegl was clearly aware of the significance of a shift from an aesthetics of perception to the notion of a dialogic relation between artwork and beholder. Hegel’s 1835 Aesthetics:  Lectures on Fine Art had earlier considered the spectator position, distinguishing between the relation established by painting and sculpture. For Hegel, the two establish very different subjectivities: Since the subject-​matter of painting in its spatial existence is only a pure appearance of the spiritual inner life which art presents for the spirit’s apprehension, the independence of the actual spatially present existent is dissolved and it acquires a far closer relation to the spectator than is the case with a work of sculpture. The statue is predominantly independent on its own account, unconcerned about the spectator who can place himself wherever he likes: where he stands, how he moves, how he walks round it, all this is a matter of indifference to this work of art. … Whereas in painting the content is subjectivity, more particularly the inner life inwardly particularized, and for this very reason the separation in the work of art between its subject and the spectator must emerge and yet must immediately be dissipated because, by displaying what is subjective, the work, in its whole mode of presentation, reveals its purpose as existing not independently on its own account but for subjective apprehension, for the spectator. The spectator is as it were in it from the beginning, is counted in with it, and the work exists only for this fixed point, i.e. for the individual apprehending it.15 With regard to painting, this dissolving of ‘the independence of the actual spatially present existent’ constitutes the kind of subjectivity that Riegl feared in modern art (which he felt exemplified an inevitable progression towards the optic). Here, painting does not so much require the participation of the beholder to complete the work, as exist as pure appearance:  only existing for the beholder, the perceiving subject. As Iversen notes, painting for Hegel thus ‘represents not things, but appearances, not bodies, but inwardness’, such that ‘within the milieu intérieur, things are shot through with 79

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interconnections, unlike objects in the world which are extrinsic to one another’.16 This transforms the immediate subjective experience into a sort of essentialist whole, focused on the consciousness of the perceiving individual, rather than a reciprocal dialogue between the artwork and beholder. While Hegel insists that painting exists not for itself but for us, these two functions –​ that of self-​sufficiency and subjective experience –​must nevertheless be brought into a state of equilibrium; importantly, he acknowledges that this relation is historically dependent. As Kemp summarizes, [Hegel] has defined a norm, but he does not simply dismiss all deviations from the norm as bad art: he acknowledges them as historically inevitable articulations of successive stylistic phases. At one point he speaks of a (however motivated) ‘evolution [of art] in the direction of existing for the sake of others’ –​which is a special case of artistic volition. He thus explicitly acknowledges the historicity of the work-​viewer relationship and introduces an evolutionary idea.17 This evolutionary idea shifts from the ‘austere’ antique mode that only exists ‘for itself ’, to the ‘ideal’ style of the classical epoch which exists ‘for us’, to the ‘ingratiating’ style ‘in which “the desire to please, the outward effect”, becomes an end itself and a “concern” in its own right’, such that the ‘state of “most perfect” equilibrium is thereby lost’.18 In developing a theory inherited from Hegel, Kemp states that Riegl ‘fillets out its normative stiffening’, introducing national differences such that identical problems might be ‘solved in entirely different ways within the same period’.19 Hegel’s distinction between art ‘for itself ’ and ‘for us’ is transformed into the categories of internal and external coherence, the relation between which serves to define Riegl’s three evolutionary stages of Dutch portraiture. However, as Kemp notes, ‘it comes as something of a surprise, perhaps, to find that Riegl sees this closer bond [between work and viewer] as arising from the progressive adoption, by the artists of Holland, of the devices of “internal coherence” ’, culminating in the group portraits of Frans Hals and Rembrandt.20 Earlier, I noted one work characteristic of the first of these three periods, the Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation (Figure 4.2), by Dirck Jacobsz.. As Riegl notes, Jacobsz. ‘makes no attempt to engage the group in any sort of unified activity, neither in the style of history painting nor of genre painting’.21 The figures are so tightly packed in rows that we see little of the landscape they nominally inhabit, while the head of the guild is only distinguished by his central position and metal armour. There is some attempt to coordinate the hand gestures, limited to the front rows: no doubt because, as Riegl suggests, this avoids the awkwardness of all the men ‘holding up their hands around the heads of the colleagues in front of them, as the one musketeer on the righthand edge of the middle row does’.22 Nevertheless, the figures are individualized in appearance and look ‘out’ of the painting, as if seeking the beholders’ attention, in that slight variations in directions of looks suggest a collective presence rather than a singular occupancy of the space in front of the painting. But with its lack of perspectival diminution or space between the figures, the painting feels like a composite of individual portraits stacked 80

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Figure 4.2  Dirck Jacobsz.: Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation, 1532, oil on canvas (transferred from panel), 115 × 160 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Getty Images/​PHAS/​Contributor.

one upon another (which, of course, is how the work was constructed), rather than a group gathered together in real space. The second or ‘genre’ period (1580–​1624) is characterized by a shift from coordination towards a greater use of subordination, which seeks ‘to combine composition based on rows with a more spatial arrangement, as well as to combine a symbolic conception with a momentary, subjective expressiveness by means of livelier physical movements’.23 Riegl traces the increasing militarization of the old marksmen’s guilds as one factor in this shift towards a greater degree of subordination: no longer a kind of makeshift home guard required to defend their cities, they ‘were also expected to go into battle’.24 As Riegl notes, ‘The immediate effect on group portraiture is that we are never again left in doubt about who is the commanding officer.’25 Or, rather, the issue of doubt is never a factor in civic guard paintings emanating from Amsterdam, where artists were highly receptive to the idea of subordination. In Haarlem, a certain resistance to the use of subordination persisted, but rather than the coordination of the first period, this manifest itself in group portraits resembling genre scenes. The latter might be illustrated by a work such as the Civic Guard Banquet (1583) by Cornelis van Haarlem, now in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (Figure 4.3). The obvious difference to our earlier example is the intensity of interaction of the figures with each other, rather than with the beholder. Indeed, Riegl –​overstating the case –​claims 81

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Figure 4.3  Cornelis van Haarlem: Civic Guard Banquet, 1583, oil on panel, 135 × 233 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Federico Guerra Morán/​Alamy Stock Photo.

that someone ‘taking a casual look at this painting would never recognize it as a group portrait but surely assume it to be a genre scene’.26 There is no sign of the commanding officers –​though the standard-​bearer is prominently placed with his back to us –​and little evidence of subordination, other than that of the reciprocal dialogue within the context of self-​contained groups. Only four figures look outwards, and two of these figures, on the two outer edges, feel peripheral and unengaged with the animated exchanges (their divergent looks suggesting the space we occupy is equally crowded). As Riegl notes, ‘Of all the toast drinkers on the [right] side, the only one to make direct eye contact with the viewer is the one seated right next to the standard-​bearer’; however, ‘the way he is responding to the call for a toast is more visually subjective than we have seen before: with his right hand, he brings his glass up to his lips, while resting his left on the arm of the chair’.27 In other words, we are collectively invited to identify with this figure: to likewise imagine raising our glass to our lips in a toast to the company. Harry Berger humorously picks up on competitiveness of the posing within the strangely cramped space containing twenty-​two sitters. Here, what Berger calls the ‘fiction of the pose’ takes on an interpretive primacy as the various guards vie for the attention of the beholder: Flurries of hands accentuate the impossibility of posing with any facility or grace when so many sitters press together in often strained postures made necessary by inadequate space. The oversized ensign smashes the two drinkers on his right against each other. On the other side, the diagonal force of his tightly furled

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Figure  4.4  Frans Hals:  Banquet of the Saint George Civic Guard, 1616, oil on canvas, 175 × 324 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Getty Images/​Leemage/​Contributor.

standard and expressive left hand seems partly responsible for the way the man in the light doublet shrinks backward and the man above him ducks forward to preserve his visibility. Figures at either end worriedly push in or look out to assure themselves they will catch the painter’s and the observer’s eye. This group portrait does more than simply commemorate the militia’s personnel, their sociability and good morale after a term of service. It commemorates their attack on the dilemma of posing in cramped quarters.28 In the third period (1624–​62), which completes Riegl’s evolutionary cycle, strategies of internal and external coherence coincide. We can illustrate something of this shift by comparing the two earlier scenes of militia to Frans Hals’s Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard (1616; Figure 4.4), in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. This might initially appear to have much in common with Cornelis van Haarlem’s painting. However, as Riegl observes, it is distinguished by the ‘variety of active and passive relationships with the viewer: that is to say, with the arriving guests whom some of them have just spotted, but who are invisible to the viewer’.29 The reciprocal exchanges between the members of the company feel more natural, ‘capturing the casual chatter of carousing guardsman, while clearly distinguishing the talkers from the listeners’.30 This is a more convivial environment, where attentiveness is combined with good-​humoured pleasure; as Berger notes, this is something that appeals to Riegl because for him it is ‘a study in social absorption undisturbed by theatricality’, despite the ‘operatic note’ of the drawn back curtain.31 More importantly for Riegl, Hals combines the aspect of a self-​contained genre episode, ‘unified in time and place’ and no longer a mere ‘display

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of posing and posturing’, with the postulating of ‘someone on the viewer’s side of the painting whose presence, while not spelled out in the painting, is no longer ignored but openly acknowledged’.32 Nevertheless, Berger notes the residue of overcrowding –​a sense ‘that the scene is at once too large for its canvas’, exemplified by the problem of the standard, ‘one of several touches of strain that trouble the acts of rhetorical self-​ display’; for Berger these effects ‘are substantive, not accidental, properties of the drama of posing’.33 Unlike Riegl, Berger resists the very notion of participant viewers (Riegl’s dialogic approach), by contrast emphasizing the fiction of the pose as a response to the absence of the kind of unity that historical action provides. In the final section I will return to address this substantive challenge to Riegl. But first I  turn to Rembrandt’s engagement with group portraiture.

III Rembrandt painted few group portraits. We know of four extant works, one of which survives only as a fragment and a preparatory sketch.34 Given his versatility, Riegl speculates, not without irony, that ‘Rembrandt simply had no interest in the theme. After all, it was little more than the tedious and monotonous rendering of a few men who, in their position as members of the governing body of one kind of charitable organization or another, turned with expressions of benign goodwill towards an unseen party located in the viewer’s space.’35 And yet the few examples we have are undoubtedly among his greatest paintings. Rembrandt’s novel approach to the group portrait was to attempt to found an external coherence on a fully resolved inner unity, dependent upon subordination.36 Nevertheless, this faced drawbacks. Despite the ‘greater degree of individuality in their psychological connection (that is, attentiveness)’ and the much greater sense of free space and unity, Riegl regards the animated gestures of an early work such as Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (1632; Figure 4.5) as introducing too strong a sense of ‘the psychological expressions of will and emotion’ for the demands of a group portrait.37 He is particularly thinking of the leaning forward of certain figures, introducing a pathos that reveals an inner struggle. In other words, for Riegl the narrative elements –​the dramatic conflict –​are at odds with depicting the individual inwardness of the figures required of such portraits. Commissioned by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons when Rembrandt was just 25, the painting documents an event that can be dated to January 1632. Dr Nicolaes Tulp is shown lecturing to a group of gathered colleagues from the Guild, performing the second of his annual public dissections. However, the painted scene is a fabrication, unlikely to replicate the actual demonstration, where, as Simon Schama notes, the body would have been a mess: ‘the stomach cavity opened and the intestines drawn and displayed long before Tulp got anywhere near the muscles and tendons’.38 The subject lends itself to the depiction of highly absorbed states, and Rembrandt demonstrates an already resolved internal coherence. The group encircles the cadaver, a recently hanged criminal, Adriaen Adriaenszoon,39 in such a way that the painting suggests an intimacy with the implied 84

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Figure 4.5  Rembrandt van Rijn: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, 1632, oil on canvas, 169.5 × 216.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Getty Images/​Heritage Images/​Contributor.

beholder. Dr Tulp is shown dissecting the forearm in a pose that possibly references the woodcut frontispiece of Vesalius’s 1543 first edition of his seminal text on anatomy De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem. As Schama states, ‘we know from his erstwhile student Job van Meekeren that Tulp did in fact use the dissection of the forearm and the demonstration of the flexor muscles as an exemplum of the God-​created ingenuity of the body’, so that ‘[w]‌hat better way to advertise his own authority, in the chamber of the guild, than by associating himself with the master who first insisted that true understanding required direct inspection of the human body’.40 Riegl emphasizes the role of speech, suggesting that ‘the listeners are subordinating themselves to the professor; however, each of them does so in a different way; they all share the same psychological attentiveness, but it is expressed physically in ways that vary from individual to individual’.41 Of these, one can be discounted. X-​rays reveal that the awkward figure on the far left was almost certainly added, possibly by another artist, at a later date.42 And without this peripheral figure the composition gains in its sense of dramatic coherence. The 1998–​9 restoration also revealed that the figure to Tulp’s left holds an anatomical drawing, which was painted over with a list of the surgeons’ names. Unknown to Riegl, these alterations lead to a misreading of the situation, such that 85

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Binstock questions Riegl’s assumption that Tulp is making ‘a rhetorical gesture with his left hand to accompany his speech, and that several of the surgeons accordingly strain to hear his words’.43 Rather, Rembrandt’s aim is precisely to displace a rhetorical gesture by a visual demonstration, or speech by sight: ‘Rembrandt underscores this idea through the surgeon behind Tulp, who looks up from an anatomical drawing, and the surgeon across from Tulp, who looks over at an unseen illustration on the right page of the large volume at the feet of the corpse.’44 Indeed, this book, propped open on a lectern, and barely registered in Riegl’s account, takes on a particular importance; the nearest figure to the beholder, who according to Riegl turns in his seat ‘to avoid being seen in lost profile’,45 looks intently at the open folio, which in its proximity establishes a strong sense of pictorial depth. As Sarah Kofman has noted, this book ‘which, on its own, balances out the rest of the painting, communicates with the many other books found in Rembrandt’s paintings’, but in such a way that ‘the book of science takes the place of the Bible; for one truth, another has been substituted, a truth that is no longer simply confined to books, since it finds its experimental confirmation in the opening of a cadaver’.46 Indeed, as Kofman observes, in Rembrandt’s painting a once living and breathing subject has become an object: And with this dissimulation of the body, its fragility, its mortality, comes to be forgotten, even though it is exhibited in full light by the pale cadaver that is right there, purely and simply lying there naked (only the sex is modestly veiled), in the most absolute anonymity. Those around him seem to be unmoved by any feelings for him, for someone who, just a short time ago, was still full of life, had a name, was a man just like them. Their gazes display neither pity, nor terror, nor fright. They do not seem to identify with the cadaver stretched out there. They do not see in it the image of what they themselves will one day be, of what, unbeknownst to themselves, they are in the process of becoming. They are not fascinated by the cadaver, which they do not seem to see as such, and their solemnity is not the sort that can be awakened by the mystery of death.47 The cadaver is thus rendered as a ‘technical instrument’, such that ‘The fascination is displaced, and with this displacement, the anxiety is repressed, the intolerable made tolerable’ –​a displacement directed towards the various sources of knowledge on show, but overwhelmingly towards the open book.48 And yet, as Schama notes, the body is not quite ‘reduced to its role as the subiectum anatomicum, no longer a human but rather an arrangement of organs conveniently awaiting the anatomist’s instructive hand’.49 His face, while partially in shadow, is fully revealed and given as much attention by Rembrandt as the other figures. Schama observes that the devout Tulp, shown rapt in inward meditation, ‘is seen at the precise moment of demonstrating two of the unique attributes of man:  utterance and prehensile flexibility. With his right hand he is lifting and separating the flexor muscles (both carpal and digital), while with his left hand he is actually demonstrating precisely the action enabled by the relevant muscles and tendons’.50 This demonstration 86

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of ‘divine’ dexterity is thus attended to in different ways: one surgeon, as already noted, looks towards the anatomical book; three surgeons appear to attend to Tulp’s gesture; the animated surgeon, who strains forward to see better, looks at the flexor muscles themselves. But then the final figure at the rear, Frans van Loenen (who at an earlier stage was depicted wearing a hat similar to Tulp’s), looks out towards the beholder and, as Riegl states, directs the beholder towards the demonstration ‘with a subordinating point of the finger’.51 Schama interprets this gesture, pointing towards the cadaver, as fulfilling the patron’s wish to include a memento mori. Kofman, by contrast, states that ‘The lesson of this Anatomy Lesson is not that of a memento mori; it is not that of a triumph of death but a triumph over death’; rather than ‘Resurrection, Redemption, or nobility’, we are offered the ‘speculative’ rationality of science such that the ‘cut into the flayed body thus also cuts into the religious illusion of a glorious body’.52 But surely it is both. If the surgeons are professionally absorbed by the demonstration to the extent that they do not see ‘the cadaver stretched out there’, failing to register any empathy for this man’s death, then it is the beholder who is reassigned the role of witness –​to register what the surgeons singularly fail to note, the corpse of a man summarily hung on a gibbet facing the harbour. Indeed, in Derrida’s moving (though typically elliptical) tribute to Kofman, he emphasizes the use of deictic references in the long Kofman quotation used above: What is at stake here is indeed the being-​right-​there (here and over there) of the corpse. Three times the adverb là [like the musical note ‘la’ –​Trans.] comes to set the tone. Three times it comes to localize both the body of death and its taking-​ place in the work, the work of art, its representation, as we say, in a painting, although it is already, as dead, framed or displayed in the anatomical exhibition, which is also a work or operation between the eye and the hand –​gaze, surgery, dissection.53 But the anonymous body they fail to identify with, held at a distance such that they fail to see in it what they will become, is also there for us. Indeed, the surgeons ‘not seeing’ is contrasted with our own indexed point of view from a position in which we cannot see the contents of the open book, but rather identify with Rembrandt’s own presence in what, after all, is not entirely a fiction but documents (albeit in a highly fabricated way) an historic event at which Rembrandt really was present. This fact is acknowledged by a figure who, while being located at the rear, is given a prominence reinforced by Rembrandt’s adjacent signature and the work’s date, painted as though it is a notice hanging on the rear wall.54 It is this figure who is charged with establishing the work’s external coherence. And as such, Riegl states that the composition ‘demands such an absorption of the beholding subject’s consciousness in the internal psychological connections of the scene that the latter seems as though transformed from an external, objective event into an inner experience of the beholder’. But might this association of van Loenen, who looks outwards, with Rembrandt’s own signature also establish the artist’s own original presence, as witness, at the scene? After all, Rembrandt’s 87

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commission sought to memorialize the demonstration. And might this explain the fact that van Loenen does not appear to gaze outwards at us, but a presence slightly to our right? As members of the guild (the original beholders), would we perhaps be invited to imagine not only our own presence as beholder internal to the scene as staged, but that of the artist documenting the event for posterity?

IV For Riegl, Rembrandt’s The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild marks the culmination of the development of group portraiture in Holland.55 According to Riegl, the painting depicts a single moment instigated by the spokesman addressing his colleagues:  ‘a situation in which the fellow syndics can, in one and the same moment, convincingly absorb what the presiding officer is saying, while directing some of their energies toward the [unseen] party’.56 The spokesman, whose hand gesture refers to something in the open book before him, asks a question of an unseen party; this is reinforced by the official to his left, who looks out while holding the book open, while the figure on the right grasps what has been interpreted as either gloves or a money bag. However, the most active role is assigned to the syndic who rises to his feet in order to gain a better view of the interlocutor, whose response to the question posed is anticipated. Riegl thus describes a commonality extended to include the viewer as an implied presence. Olin has argued that for Riegl The Syndics ‘is a performance in which the beholder takes part’: One officer of the guild speaks to the others. They heed his words and try to gauge their effect on an unseen party, located in the same place as the beholder. Their attention to the speaker establishes internal coherence, and their attention to the beholder creates external coherence; i.e., it draws the viewer into a relationship. As the focus of so much concentrated attention, he is transfixed before the canvas, while their self-​awareness keeps the relationship in balance. The beholder and the ‘party’ exchange places so often in the analysis that it is difficult to distinguish between them.57 Here, the anticipated beholder’s psychological repertoire is again dependent upon the specificity of the original context –​the Staalhof, where the staalmeesters (who acted as a form of quality control) of the Clothmaker’s Guild met. The painting, with its life-​ size figures, was given a prominent position, hung high on the wall –​a factor registered by the low vanishing point, which prompts Riegl to erroneously suggest that the table around which the figures sit may have been raised on some form a dais. Whereas the animated physical gestures of the earlier Anatomy Lesson are considered as introducing too strong a sense of psychological expression for the demands of a group portrait, with The Syndics, the solution to the problem of group portraiture has, for Riegl, been found, in that ‘the figures charged with establishing internal coherence are the same ones responsible for external coherence, which is now perfectly specific in time and space’.58 88

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There has been much debate around the nature of the ‘interruption’ prompted by the staalmeester who appears to be within the process of rising to his feet. In 1956, one fierce response to all such suggestions was made by Henri van de Waal, who pointed out that the committee of syndics were not negotiating officials and would therefore not have met public audiences.59 Binstock observes: Van de Waal rejected Riegl’s interpretation as a Romantic ‘legend’, based on an anachronistic approach to paintings as ‘snapshots’ of real events. As a common-​ sense alternative, he offers the sarcastic description of a nineteenth-​century official who failed to obtain Rembrandt’s painting at auction: ‘five gentlemen in black who are just sitting to have their portraits painted’.60 Van de Waal thus disavows any dialogic role for the beholder. And as Binstock suggests, such an objection is ‘typical of a tendency among later scholars to dismiss [Riegl’s] arguments on the basis of minor or technical points’.61 But is there a sense in which van de Waal is right? We are now in a position to begin to confront an aspect of the argument that has been left hanging in the air. If, as Iversen notes, ‘the most innovative aspect of the Dutch Group Portrait is undoubtedly the explicit theoretical formulation of a kind of composition that presents only part of what constitutes its totality and, so to speak, reaches out to the spectator to complete the scene’,62 then we need to acknowledge that this role cannot be performed by an imaginative identification with a beholder entirely internal to that virtual world. This is because of the in-​built requirement that a group portrait address the public setting of its display. Nevertheless, we might still distinguish between those external beholders who, while building the experience of the institutional context into the imaginative engagement, are nevertheless merged with the implied internal spectator and external beholders engaged precisely as external presences. In addressing these distinctions, I  want to conclude the chapter by comparing Rembrandt’s The Syndics with two other works which it superficially resembles. Werner van den Valckert’s Male Regents of the Lepers’ Hospital (1624; Figure  4.6), in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, is a work from the culmination of what Riegl terms the second period of Dutch group portraiture. Four seated regents are accompanied by a custodian, who points at his superior. As Riegl states, All of the figures, with one exception [by which perhaps Riegl means the figure on our far right, whose gaze is arguably less certain], turn and look directly towards the viewer in modern terms as a single, not a multiple, entity. Moreover, their attentiveness betrays the tension of the moment in a way that makes it immediately clear that the regents have been placed in a self-​contained genre scene that is meant to include the viewer, that is, an unseen party who is to be imagined standing where the viewer is.63 This is the most explicit suggestion by Riegl of a spectator in the picture. But this would place us in the position of the unseen applicant who awaits the regent’s response. For 89

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Figure 4.6  Werner van den Valckert: Male Regents of the Lepers’ Hospital, 1624, oil on panel, 134 × 209 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Artokoloro Quint Lox Limited/​Alamy Stock Photo.

Riegl ‘the second officer is already reaching for a quill and a piece of paper in order to write down the appropriate instructions, while the third officer has placed his finger on the stack of coins from which the relief payment will be made’, while ‘the fourth regent is listening intently, his quill already poised on the page where the appropriate entry will be promptly made’.64 However, as Kemp notes, In terms of the history of reception  –​though not in terms of the aesthetics of reception  –​this is a highly risky interpretation, though Riegl does not seem to be aware of this. He has succeeded in finding a case of total external coherence combined with powerful inner concentration. But the idea that the viewer is expected to identify with the sick, poor, and helpless outcast could be justified only if we were to suppose that the portrait was painted for the inmates of the institution. The evidence suggests nothing of the sort. Militiamen and regents alike had these group portraits painted for the places where they officiated and feasted, and for the benefit of themselves and their peers.65 It is more feasible that the regents, as Binstock proposes, merely ‘present themselves to the [external] viewer while engaged in symbolic activities’66: in other words, that they pose (with ‘things to do with their hands’)67 for an anticipated audience (rather than an applicant) while having their portraits painted.

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Figure 4.7  Frans Hals: Regents of Saint Elisabeth’s Hospital, 1641, oil on canvas, 153 × 252 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. ART Collection/​Alamy Stock Photo.

By contrast Frans Hals’s Regents of Saint Elisabeth’s Hospital (1641; Figure  4.7), in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, makes no effort to engage the beholder (internal or external), with not a single figure looking out of the painting. It thus registers an extreme tendency to treat the group portrait like one would a genre scene. Riegl writes of the need to psychologically analyse each figure: As a result of this intense process that viewing subjects are expected to undergo and that makes demands on their whole conscious experience, they become so intimately implicated in the inner workings of the scene, so deeply invested, so to speak, in the reality of what is happening there, that what began as an external incident becomes an inner experience. In short, this is the pictorial conception of the genre painting of seventeenth-​century Holland [… that has] outgrown the device of having figures directly address the viewer. The artists espousing this brand of pictorial conception no longer thought it necessary to make a special effort to draw the viewer’s attention to the existence of the viewing subject outside the objective world of the painting.68 This passage registers a decisive shift towards an internalization of the experience of viewing. It is a very different strategy to the acts of charitable donation depicted by van den Valckert and, as Berger has pointed out, involves ‘the threat of disaggregation’, in that ‘although the signifiers of charitable work are on display, the sitters ignore them, as well

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as the observer’.69 Drawing attention to the sitter’s contribution to the creation of such an identity sign, Berger maintains that ‘the portrait’s primary “object of representation” is not the “human subject” or “human original” tout court but its (his, her) act of posing. It is the sitter’s pose that expresses the “intended relationship between the portrait image and the human original” ’.70 We are thus faced with a situation where each sitter poses (and is seen as posing) competitively against each other. This brings us back to the issue of the pose in Rembrandt, and whether it is different in any way. Berger again casts The Syndics in terms of competitive posing: ‘In this restless and uncertain world, even as the syndics try to accommodate each other they continue to compete with each other.’71 However, X-​ray analysis reveals substantial alterations to the composition of Rembrandt’s group portrait, and that Rembrandt changed his mind in the course of painting the work.72 We know of three preparatory drawings, including a roughly sketched group study of the three syndics on the left and detailed single-​figure studies of Jacob van Loon (the seated figure on the far left) and Volckert Jansz (the figure who rises to his feet in the final painting); as Binstock notes, ‘Scholars long ago assumed that Rembrandt’s single-​figure studies were drawn on account-​book paper, because of the thin brown (perhaps originally red) vertical lines at the sides.’73 Binstock’s careful analysis of the study of Jansz reveals upside-​down notations and numbers, and analysis of the dimensions of both sketches is strongly suggestive that the two detailed studies are made in the sample-​masters’ account book, such that ‘Rembrandt took the book from the opposite side of the table and turned over the left page to expose two new blank sides’ on which he drew the two figures ‘beginning with van Loon on the left page, and proceeding to Jansz on the right page, with the sample-​masters’ last accounts upside-​ down on the verso’.74 Here, the sitters almost certainly gathered as a group. Moreover, Binstock’s ingenious proposal is that ‘Rembrandt transformed the first version of his painting, in which the sample-​masters [revealed by X rays of The Syndics] were distributed along the picture plane engaged in separate activities, into the unique conception of his final painting, in which they relate to one another and to Rembrandt as viewer’; moreover this idea ‘resulted from making his studies in the sample-​masters’ book, a process he ingeniously incorporated into the narrative of the final painting’.75 This transforms Berger’s situation of ‘competitive posing’ into a work that reflects upon the very processes of group portraiture, conceived as a collaborative venture in which the sitters are seen as actively contributing. In other words, the posing is incorporated into a narrative about the act of portraiture conceived not just as an ‘event’, but an event taking place before our eyes as we imaginatively identify with Rembrandt. So while Berger is perhaps right to suggest that it is a ‘[p]‌ortrait of six gazes locked in a moment of blankness’, in that they are ‘trapped in the space between stopping their lives and starting their pose’, the ‘dreamy’ pose they hold on to is one organized by the gaze we identify with.76 At the same time, Rembrandt, in his use of a low depiction point relative to his sitters (a position corresponding to the original placement of the work), acknowledges, and draws upon, the external beholder’s bodily arrival unhampered by the kind of distracting content, external to the situation we see, that seeks to account for our presence within the work’s virtual world. It is an 92

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astonishing achievement –​a representation of the very process of representation –​that not only founds its external coherence on a fully resolved internal coherence (the very staging of the work we see), but thereby fuses notions of internal and external beholders. Such a proto-​modernist reflexivity is unprecedented in a seventeenth-​century context, with the exception of the work we will consider in the following chapter.

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CHAPTER 5 TWO MODES OF BEHOLDING

Velázquez, Las Meninas (1656) Svetlana Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas’ (1983)

I Since Michel Foucault’s widely referenced account of the painting in The Order of Things ([1966] 1970), Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656; Figure 5.1) has continued to raise complex issues about the nature of its particular point of view.1 The painting has a pre-​ eminence in philosophical debates about representation and spectatorship. Indeed, this pre-​eminence is such that it is customary to offer some kind of apology for adding to the already substantial literature on this single painting. As James Elkins notes in his 1999 book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? the literature on Las Meninas continues ‘to spiral, with readings building on counter-​readings’.2 Elkins cites W. J. T. Mitchell, who has called the painting a ‘metapicture’  –​a reflexive ‘picture about pictures’ that has become ‘an endlessly fascinating labyrinth of reflections on the relations of painting, painter, model, and beholder’.3 Elkins himself confesses that he has few answers to the question he raises, other than to note how ‘we are inescapably attracted to pictures that appear as puzzles, and unaccountably uninterested in clear meanings and manifest solutions’.4 However, he does propose that the interpretive strategies of art history might be symptomatic of a kind of Freudian phobia: a defence mechanism ‘because we can’t bear to think directly about pictures’.5 This emphasis on meaning bound to ‘interpretation’, rather than the situated encounter the work affords, is part of the problem, inherent to the very notion of the ‘reading’ of paintings (negating their status as painted representations). Although Las Meninas is undoubtedly a work that prompts acts of ideation, it is also a work that builds the experience of arrival into its semantic content.6 Despite misgivings about adding to this literature, Las Meninas has particular relevance to a book on beholding precisely because not only does it raise important questions about the relation between painting, artist, model and beholder, but it might be seen to deliberately problematize the engagement afforded internal and external spectators. As Svetlana Alpers notes, the ‘size of the figures is a match for our own’, and ‘the great size of the canvas’ therefore suggests that it is ‘intended also for the viewer’s body’7; in this respect it has something in common with The Syndics, considered in the previous chapter (a work painted some six years later, in 1662). As we shall see, Las

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Figure 5.1  Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, 320.5 × 281.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Getty Images/​Photo Josse/​Leemage/​Contributor.

Meninas likewise has an anticipated beholder, the identity of whom has been subject to much debate. And while not referred to by Riegl in his seminal account of Dutch group portraiture, Margaret Iversen observes ‘it could be regarded as a demonstration piece of his principles of coordination and external coherence’.8 However, while Rembrandt founds his external coherence on a fully resolved internal coherence (with Rembrandt himself as the implied beholder), Velázquez offers us, in effect, two modes of beholding one and the same painting. 96

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Las Meninas is (lest we forget) a group portrait, at the centre of which is the Infanta Margarita, attended by two maids of honour (the meninas of the work’s title). As such, the work offers few ambiguities. But it is also a painting about portraiture: a concern manifest in Velázquez’s conspicuous presence within the depicted scene, looking outwards towards an implied viewer, who might, thereby, as an internal presence, be imagined as the subject of Velázquez’s painting-​ within-​ a-​ painting. Surprisingly, then, Wollheim, who draws upon Riegl in proposing his theory of the spectator in the picture, writes: ‘The Foucault thesis that the royal pair constitute spectators in the picture in Velázquez’s picture is effectively argued against on intentionalist grounds in Jonathan Brown, Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-​Century Spanish Painting … which points out that any such intention involving the king and queen would have been unthinkable in the context of prevailing standards of decorum.’9 In fact, Brown later adapts his position. Berating studies of Las Meninas inspired by Foucault’s account, he states that the resulting ‘ideas tacitly assume that the picture was meant to be seen by the public-​at-​large, as if it were hanging in an important museum, as it is today’; rather, Brown claims, ‘Despite its size, Las Meninas was regarded at the time of its creation as a private picture addressed to an audience of one, Philip IV.’10 Nonetheless, I believe the picture also accommodates other beholders. In Foucault’s terms, Las Meninas is a representation of classical representation.11 This is a claim that warrants further explanation. Foucault’s account famously emphasizes that in ‘the definition of the space it opens up to us’ there is an essential void: ‘The very subject … has been elided.’12 Put simply, there is an absence of the very figures the group have (in terms of the fiction presented) ostensibly been gathered for. The royal couple appear as a blurry and distanced presence in the reflection within the mirror placed centrally on the rear wall, ‘a reflection that shows us quite simply, and in shadow, what all those in the foreground are looking at’.13 As such, the mirror refers to the device of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, a work Velázquez would certainly have been familiar with, given that it was then an important part of the Spanish royal collection. But unlike its precedent, the mirror ‘shows us nothing of what is represented in the picture itself ’:14 it has a strange detachment, while nevertheless being central to the composition and to the work’s meaning. As Foucault notes, it is ‘the reverse of the great canvas represented on the left’, displaying ‘in full face what the canvas, by its position, is hiding from us’.15 Placed symmetrically around the painting’s central axis, it is mirrored by that other rectangle of light within the gloom, the open doorway ‘which forms an opening, like the mirror itself, in the far wall of the room’.16 This introduces a further complexity, in that the doorway contains a visitor silhouetted against the bright light, poised ‘like a pendulum’ between coming and going.17 What is the role played by this figure located outside of the studio looking in, unregistered by any of its protagonists? Foucault suggests that the work presents surrogates, either side of the mirror, for further absences that he maintains are fundamental to the picture, that of the artist and beholder: That space where the King and his wife hold sway belongs equally well to the artist and to the spectator: in the depths of the mirror there could also appear – there 97

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ought to appear – the anonymous face of the passer-​by and that of Velázquez. For the function of that reflection is to draw into the interior of the picture what is intimately foreign to it: the gaze which has organized it and the gaze for which it is displayed. But because they are present within the picture, to the right and left, the artist and visitor cannot be given a place in the mirror.18 As Damisch notes, the subject is thus triply elided, ‘because “subject” should be understood here in all three senses of the word, each of them classic: that of the thematic subject of the painting only visible to the spectator from the back; that of the author of Las Meninas, who could only have executed it by removing himself from the place he occupies within it; and that of the spectator himself, before whom the scene deploys itself without his being able to discern, initially, any way to situate himself as a subject within it’.19 However, as it transpires, Foucault’s claim not only rests upon a mistaken assumption about the placement of the work’s vanishing point, but negates the distinction between virtual and actual beholders. Putting these issues aside for now, Iversen suggests that ‘these absences are a structural part of the classical episteme’, in that for Foucault ‘the subject who classifies and orders representations cannot be amongst the represented things: man is not a possible object of knowledge. For Foucault, Las Meninas allegorizes this situation’.20 In other words, the classical episteme –​which Foucault characterizes as a system of knowledge where representation is assimilated to thought –​did not include an epistemological consciousness of ‘man’ as such. ‘In Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads … is never to be found in that [picture] himself.’21 In Foucault’s characterization of the classical episteme, human beings are, therefore, the locus of representations; however, there is no way to get from the thinking self (the subject, the I) –​which for Descartes necessarily exists in the act of thinking (i.e. in a representation, since thinking is representation) –​to the empirical, historically grounded thinker (the constitutive source of representations). While we can ‘see’ the representational structure of our ideas, in that we have introspective access to their abstract structure, we cannot know the ‘I’ as source. And it is this situation that Foucault claims Velázquez allegorizes through the painting’s absences. Therefore, as Iversen states, Far from being a painting that acknowledges the spectator/​artist’s constitutive function, then, Foucault’s Las Meninas actually short-​circuits consideration of that position. It is painting’s equivalent of Benveniste’s historical utterance. Yet it must be significant that Foucault should have chosen this painting that poses so insistently the question of the viewing subject.22 This ‘paradox’ gets to the heart of the dilemma of the painting. Benveniste’s historical utterance, reserved for written language, excludes autobiographical discourse –​I: you –​ instead utilizing only the ‘third person’, characterized by the use of historic tenses such as 98

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the ‘simple past’ or ‘past definite’. In terms of painting, this is manifest most obviously in the self-​sufficiency of history painting. But this is not a history painting; and by painting himself into a composition that shows its subject only indirectly, thus vacating the gaze that has organized the picture, Iversen suggests that Velázquez achieves a precarious ‘sleight of hand’, an allegorical equivalent of a ‘classical episteme conjuring trick’.23 Here, as Foucault puts it, ‘representation undertakes to represent itself in all its elements’; yet there is a central void, such that with not only the elided subject (the king and queen) but also the invisibility of the person seeing (the organizing author and the person to whom it is presented), ‘representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form’.24

II Of the many responses to Foucault’s dazzling forward to The Order of Things, Svetlana Alpers’s 1983 article ‘Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas’ is perhaps the most pressing in terms of the issue of beholding. Alpers’s opening paragraph poses the question: ‘Why should it be that the major study, the most serious and sustained piece of writing on this work in our time, is by Michel Foucault?’25 Of course, Alpers was writing prior to an onslaught of attempts to rectify just this situation. More importantly is the answer Alpers suggests, that ‘a structural explanation built into the interpretative procedures of the discipline itself that has made a picture such as Las Meninas literally unthinkable under the rubric of art history’.26 She illustrates this claim by tracing two dominant lines of art historical argument in relation to the picture, the first of which ‘has been concerned with the extraordinary real presence of the painted world’.27 This is manifest in a quality that was felt to anticipate photography –​nature as seen in a camera obscura (which Velázquez, like Vermeer, is sometimes said to have used to compose his scenes).28 Alpers states, ‘To twentieth century eyes at least, this gives the appearance of a snapshot being taken. In the foreground, the little princess turns to us from her entourage, as does one of her maids, and a dwarf, and of course Velázquez himself who has stepped back from his canvas for this very purpose.’29 The immediacy is manifest by the way a number of the figures look at ‘us’ looking. Alpers refers to this look out of the canvas as a gaze, distinguishing it from the glance: ‘It does not attend to some occurrence; empty of expression, it is not, in short, narrative in nature. The gaze, rather, signals from within the picture that the viewer outside the picture is seen and in turn acknowledges the state of being seen.’30 And while this particular device is a consistent feature in Velázquez’s wider work, ‘the device is heightened here because it is thematized by the situation, or possibly the situations at hand’.31 The second line of art historical argument Alpers identifies is, unsurprisingly, to supply the missing narrative (where she references the aforementioned Brown, who refers to the painting as a little ‘playlet’).32 Not in terms of the identifications of each of the figures depicted, which have long been known, but rather, ‘Where are the king and queen or what is the source of their reflections, and what is the subject being painted on 99

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the unseen canvas?’33 And it is a recurring feature of such accounts to emphasize that Velázquez, by placing himself so prominently within the scene, is attempting to establish his own status within the household. As Alpers argues, It is characteristic of art historical practice that it is the question of plot to which the notion of the meaning of the work is appended, rather than to the question of the nature of the pictorial representation. Though scholars differ about the specifics of the plot –​are the royal pair posing for their portraits when the princess arrives, or is it rather the princess and her retinue who pose as king and queen arrive? –​ they are agreed that it is the presence of the king and queen with the painter that is emplotted here. And it is on this basis that the meaning of Las Meninas is today interpreted as a claim for the nobility of painting as a liberal art and as a personal claim for nobility on the part of Velázquez himself.34 Alpers claims that this reduction of meaning requires two moves on the part of art historians: first, to insist, ‘against the evidence of the picture’, that artist and king are represented together, such that ‘their proximity is seen as the central feature of the work’; and secondly, to ‘separate what they claim to be the seventeenth century meaning of the work from its appearance, which is put in its place as merely the concern of modern viewers’.35 Crucially, questions of meaning are therefore disentangled from questions of representation, which is precisely ‘what makes Las Meninas unthinkable within the established rubric of art history’ and what makes Foucault’s intervention so vital.36 For Alpers, the strength of Foucault’s philosophical account is that it begins ‘with a determinate and determining notion of classical representation’, such that ‘he finds in this painting its representation’.37 Unlike interpretations that account for Velázquez’s prominent positioning of himself within the painting in terms of social aspiration, this gives Foucault a ‘motive for looking which is lost to those who seek meaning in signs of a claim to social status’.38 Nevertheless, Alpers disputes two aspects of Foucault’s claim: that the ‘absence of a subject-​viewer is essential to classical representation’ and that there is a single canon of classical pictorial representation. Rather, she argues that in Las Meninas, the reciprocity between absent viewer and world in view is produced not by the absence of a conscious human subject, as Foucault argues, but rather by Velázquez’s ambition to embrace two conflicting modes of representation, each of which constitutes the relationship between the viewer and the picturing of the world differently. It is the tension between these two –​as between the opposing poles of two magnets that one might attempt to bring together with one’s hands –​that informs this picture.39 I will investigate these two claims in the following section and see whether, in fact, Foucault and Alpers’s accounts might be reconciled. 100

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III Alpers’s case is, at least in part, a response to what she regarded as an intrinsic art historical bias towards matters of iconography, a term closely associated with Panofsky and which tends to privilege southern and, more particularly, Italian modes of art over more descriptive northern modes. For Alpers, the former mode corresponds to the commanding attitude of the Albertian mode of perspectival construction –​where the frame, as a ‘window’ onto the world (a trope, as we saw earlier, taken from Panofsky), is conceived as integral to the conception, with the artist positioned on the beholder’s side, as represented by Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of a draftsman drawing a nude (Nuremberg, 1538:  Figure  5.2). In the latter mode, the picture is conceived as a projective surface onto which the image of a pre-​existing world is cast –​as in a camera obscura –​ where the bounding frame no longer organizes the centralizing image but arbitrarily cuts into the prior world as seen (which continues beyond the boundary edges), such as with Vermeer’s View of Delft. ‘The artist of the first kind claims that “I see the world” while that of the second shows rather that the world is “being seen”.’40 For Alpers, Velázquez’s pictorial conception is not an exception to a singular representational canon, but the construction of a tension between these two modes.41 This is registered by the fact that the ‘looker’ within the painting –​which in a Dutch interior painting such as by Pieter Saenredam does not look out of the picture (because that ‘would indeed be a contradiction, since the picture does not assume our existence as viewers prior and eternal to it’) –​is the one who ‘commands’ the world’s presence while acknowledging us before the painting.42 But this highlights a problem for Alpers’s account. As we have seen, the Albertian model was supplanted in Italian art by an inner unity that progressively relinquishes its hold on the beholder. More widely, this is manifest by the privileging of seventeenth-​ century history painting, which in its Diderotian disavowal of the beholder is the equivalent to Benveniste’s historical utterance, negating the beholder. In narrating past events, this is a mode that excludes autobiographical linguistic form. This change

Figure 5.2  Albrecht Dürer: Draftsman drawing a nude, in Unterweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1538), woodcut. Everett Collection Inc./​Alamy Stock Photo.

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mirrors Foucault’s shift between a Renaissance conception of knowledge as a matter of resemblance between things (a similitude ‘posited as a form of repetition’) towards the classical episteme (from Descartes to Kant) where representation is now assimilated to thought.43 This constitutes a shift from ‘drawing things together’, founded upon a certain kinship or attraction, towards a ‘discriminating’, which ‘imposes upon comparison the primary and fundamental investigation of difference’.44 Analysis is now founded on a system of signs which includes the emergence of systematic grammar conceived first and foremost as a relation of order. This shift from resemblance might be registered, in Foucault’s terms, as a vital change in the organization of and property of signs: Indeed, the very fact that the sign can be more or less probable, more or less distant from what it signifies, that it can be either natural or arbitrary, without its nature or its value as a sign being affected –​all this shows clearly enough that the relation of the sign to its content is not guaranteed by the order of things in themselves [that is, it is no longer bound by bonds of resemblance or affinity]. The relation of the sign to the signified now resides in a space in which there is no longer any intermediary figure to connect them: what connects them is a bond established, inside knowledge, between the idea of one thing and the idea of another.45 In other words, ‘it is within knowledge itself that the sign is to perform its signifying function’.46 This is characterized as an essential dispersion as certainty is dissipated. A dual theory of the sign, where the absolute has been replaced by a network of signs, is dependent on one condition that must be fulfilled:  ‘It must represent; but that representation, in turn, must also be represented within it.’47 This has consequences in terms of replacing a long-​established ternary mode (‘that which was marked, that which did the marking, and that which made it possible to see in the first the mark of the second’, that is, ‘resemblance’) with a ‘new binary arrangement [which] presupposes that the sign is a duplicated representation doubled over upon itself ’:48 The signifying idea becomes double, since superimposed upon the idea that is replacing another there is also the idea of its representative power. This appears to give us three terms:  the idea signified, the idea signifying, and, within this second term, the idea of its role as representation. What we are faced with here is not, however, a surreptitious return to a ternary system, but rather an inevitable displacement within the two-​term figure, which moves backward in relation to itself and comes to reside entirely within the signifying element. In fact, the signifying element has no content, no function, and no determination other than what is represents: it is entirely ordered upon and transparent to it. But this content is indicated only in a representation that posits itself as such, and that which is signified resides, without residuum and without capacity, within the representation of the sign.49

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By way of example, Foucault states ‘the picture has no other content in fact than that which it represents, and yet that content is made visible only because it is represented by a representation’.50 It is this duplicated representation, doubled over upon itself (a mise-​en-​abîme), that Velázquez, by making explicit the sign’s role as representation (by representing that link within itself), allegorizes in Las Meninas. As Foucault puts it, this is a painting ‘in which representation is represented at every point’.51 No painting prior to this had posited itself quite as transparently as a signifying element that ‘has no content, no function, and no determination’ other than as the sign of what it represents.52 And for Foucault, signs ‘are lodged henceforth within the confines of representation, in the interstices of ideas, in that narrow space in which they interact with themselves in a perceptual state of decomposition and recomposition’.53 So where does this leave Alpers’s account? She states, ‘[Foucault] argues that the absence of a subject-​viewer is essential to classical representation. This seems to me to be wrong.’54 But here she conflates Foucault’s Cartesian model of classical representation with the Albertian mode, founded upon resemblance, that it displaced. This error echoes one we noted in Chapter 1, where Bryson offers a similar distinction between what he regards as the first (Albertian) and second (culminatory) epochs of perspective, but then insists that Alberti’s conception of the viewing subject is already considered Cartesian ‘in its reduction of the space of painting to dimensionless punctuality’.55 To recall, Bryson refers to works from the first epoch of perspective as advertent (i.e. ‘fully aware of an unseen witness’)56; by contrast, a work such as Vermeer’s View of Delft is inadvertent: ‘the spectator is an unexpected presence’ and ‘nothing in the scene arranges itself around [the viewer’s] act of inspection’.57 This distinction is flawed by its suggestion that the somatic address of a work such as Masaccio’s Trinity is a curious anomaly. Indeed, Alpers (contra Bryson) is here right to suggest that the Albertian conception of a framed world is dependent upon the anticipated presence of the external beholder to which the work is addressed.58 Nevertheless, we might restate Alpers’s case. I would like to suggest that if Las Meninas does, indeed, conflate two representational modes (for which we might usefully borrow Bryson’s terms of advertent and inadvertent), it does so not only to make explicit the sign’s role as representation but also within the context of the kind of self-​presentation of the group portrait we have been discussing throughout Part II (the kind of staging Alpers acknowledges in her 1988 book Rembrandt’s Enterprise).59 We might more straightforwardly (with less chance of introducing unwanted anachronisms) argue that the painting conflates two genres, with their respective conventions and expectations as to the role of the beholder. Velázquez is certainly not the only seventeenth-​century artist to construct a tension between genres. This returns us to Iversen’s suggestion that Las Meninas could be regarded as a demonstration piece of Riegl’s principles of internal and external coherence, in the light of the two coexistent scenarios the painting presents. As such, Las Meninas might be said to present two fictions of the pose. First, the tableau, conceived as a self-​sufficient (inadvertent) narrative: the painting of a double portrait of the king and queen, seen reflected in the mirror, where the artist prominently occupies

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the space of the painting itself to reveal this as an activity held in temporary abeyance (brush poised). With its internal coherence, this negates beholders (with a caveat, as we shall see). Secondly, the (advertent) group portrait, where we are confronted by what Harry Berger characterizes as the fiction of the pose, an external coherence directed towards the beholder. This is essentially a family portrait of the Infanta Margarita and entourage, where both the painter and the external beholder are addressed through the act of posing. In the former, we see characters in a fiction to which we are excluded; in the latter, we see (in Berger’s terminology) sitters who pose as if not posing. But it is the genre-​like narrative of the first scenario, founded upon an interruption, that explains the specificity of the poses of the group portrait (because that is what they are, however natural they might appear). The figures within Las Meninas therefore both pose as themselves while playing the role of models within an internal narrative. And, of course, the mirror plays a vital role in this particular conjuring trick.

IV Foucault is not the only philosopher to have been fascinated by the role of the mirror in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. John Searle focuses his account of the painting more narrowly on the status of the mirror with respect to the displaced artist and spectator (Figure  5.3).60 Putting aside for now the fact that Searle is likewise mistaken about where the vanishing point is located (assuming that it corresponds to the position of the mirror), he interprets these absences as an unsolvable paradox, in that ‘the problem with Las Meninas is that it has all the eyemarks of classical illusionist painting but it cannot be made consistent with these axioms’.61 As Damisch notes, for Searle Las Meninas, ‘far from being a representation of classic representation, is a veritable challenge issued to the theory of representation’.62 Searle maintains that the work is unprecedented in that ‘we see the picture not from the point of view of the artist but from that of another spectator who also happens to be one of the subjects of the picture’.63 In other words, the position is already occupied by Philip IV and María Ana. Moreover, this paradox is deepened by the uncertainty about the subject the artist is painting on the large canvas of which we see only the rear. His suggestion (replicated by others) is that ‘Velázquez is in fact painting Las Meninas by Velázquez’ (a scenario that again betrays a lack of knowledge of the painting’s perspective construction, let alone difficulties arising from the required mirror size and the practicalities of flipping the horizontal axis).64 Putting the difficulties of this suggestion to one side, Searle, who acknowledges his debt to Alpers in discussing the picture, replicates Alpers’s definition of classical representation (distinct, as we have seen, from Foucault’s), drawing upon the art historian’s characterization of Albertian perspective by equating the spectator’s point of view directly with the point of view of the artist in front of the depicted scene. Searle seeks to distinguish his paradox – founded upon the prior occupation of the ‘work’s’ point of view – from the situation of mirror self-​portraits, where the artist represents a representation through the introduction of another representational device, namely the 104

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Figure 5.3  Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas (detail), 1656, oil on canvas, 320.5 x 281.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. The Picture Art Collection/​Alamy Stock Photo.

mirror. He then offers the example of van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding as a variation on this device, by claiming (again, incorrectly) that the mirror reflects van Eyck himself. Putting aside the fact that van Eyck represents two painted witnesses to the marriage (therefore constituting another prior occupation of the depicted scene’s point of view), is the claim that Las Meninas presents a paradox well founded? In an attempt to rule out just such a paradox, the philosophers Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen point out the aforementioned mistaken assumption about the vanishing point corresponding to the mirror position. It is in fact located within the open doorway, making it impossible for the mirror to reflect the royal couple from the scene’s depiction point.65 Rather, Snyder and Cohen claim that ‘the reflection must originate roughly from the central region of the canvas upon which Velázquez shows himself at work’, the implication being that the mirror thus reflects a section of the royal double portrait (though in fact the figures are simply too large according to strict optics, reminding us that this is a constructed painting rather than a photographic representation).66 In arguing that the reflection is that of the unseen painting, Snyder (in a later paper) 105

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suggests that the mirror is in fact ‘the mirror of majesty’:  an ideal or ‘exemplary image of Philip IV and María Ana, an image whose counterpart cannot be seen in the persons of the king and queen’.67 While the work is undoubtedly a representation about representation, its central paradox is therefore lost. And if, as Alpers’s claims, ‘ambiguity remains’,68 then for Snyder this misses the point in that ‘ambiguity is not a condition of paradox’.69 Searle’s paradox, as Snyder notes, is not a mere oddity, but a ‘logical closure’, and hence ‘self-​referential’.70 According to Searle, the artist and spectator cannot occupy the work’s point of view because it is already occupied by Philip IV and María Ana: the painting presents the king and queen’s particular perspective, not that of Velázquez or the viewer. By removing this supposed logical impossibility, Snyder and Cohen claim to remove the paradox. Now it seems to me that all three philosophical accounts thus far considered are, for all their respective insights, flawed by their failure to distinguish between the roles of internal and external beholders. It is just such a consideration that I will attempt to bring to this work via my engagement with Alpers’s account. Regardless of the positioning of vanishing point, Searle’s notion that the prior occupation of the depiction point of Las Meninas is in itself paradoxical would suggest that all internal spectators are therefore, by definition, paradoxical. This is nonsensical. As we have noted repeatedly, the implied internal beholder occupies an unrepresented extension of the fictional world of the painting. While Velázquez (i.e. the painter of Las Meninas) stands (or rather stood) in an adjacent space constituting a temporary studio, such a position forms part of the virtual scene (as opposed to the actual position in front of the painting itself) only if the artist had chosen to imply his presence. Conversely, the beholder of the picture now stands within the gallery space of the Prado (though this was not always the case). Snyder and Cohen do not challenge the erroneous assumption underlying this confusion of internal and external beholders, but merely seek to rule out a non-​existent paradox by challenging the correct placement of the work’s vanishing point. This has a bearing on three questions Snyder raises somewhat sceptically in relation to Foucault and Searle’s assumption that there is something unorthodox about the perspectival structure of Las Meninas:  (i) ‘Does [perspective] function in some way that it is essential to our understanding of the painting?’; (ii) ‘Must an interpreter of the painting address the particular point of view that establishes it?’; (iii) ‘More to the point, must an interpreter be concerned with the consequences of the work’s perspective structure?’.71 For Snyder, Foucault and Searle’s error in locating the vanishing point invalidates their arguments and renders these questions superfluous to the work’s meaning. And yet we can accept Snyder and Cohen’s correction while maintaining an affirmative answer to all three questions. Given the role I  have assigned perspective (combined with framing) in structuring our imaginative encounter with artworks, my position will not be too surprising. Indeed, I believe Velázquez is perfectly aware of the significance of his own perspectival sleight of hand, as is acknowledged by Snyder and Cohen, who do not dispute the possibility that Velázquez might have indeed intended it to initially appear that the mirror reflected the king and queen directly. They also accept the proposition that the painting indicates ‘the presence of the king and queen, in person, 106

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Figure 5.4  Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas, diagram of perspective construction, as drawn by the author.

in the area just before the picture plane’, arguing that the royal presence is still the most plausible explanation for the outward glances.72 The relative freedom of position we have in front of a physical work, relative to the work’s implicit point of view, might explain the deliberate confusion with the mirror; and Snyder here makes a perceptive point when he notes how Velázquez paints the reverse of the slanted canvas (Figure 5.4) in a way that obscures the left wall: ‘Had Velázquez provided even a small part of the wall on the left, it would have been immediately obvious that the viewpoint of the picture is well to the right of the mirror.’73 The resulting discrepancy is thus deliberately calculated. As Damisch notes, In this sense [of Foucault’s metaphorical use of perspective] Foucault is perfectly right to see the mirror as the painting’s ‘center,’ though … its imaginary center … If there is any representation in painting, the configuration of Las Meninas reveals it to consist of a calculated discrepancy between a painting’s geometric organization and its imaginary structure. It is this that Foucault’s critics have failed to see, as a result of their having adhered to a strictly optical, conventional definition of the perspective paradigm.74 In fact, as another commentator, Leo Steinberg, suggests there are three centres, or imaginary centres, which keep shifting: the Infanta, marking the midline of the painting, the vanishing point located in the far doorway and the mirror placed on the room’s central axis: ‘the canvas as a physical object, the perspectival geometry, and the depicted chamber’.75 Having said this, the painting’s wider geometry is clearly relevant. And here Snyder makes, I believe, an error of his own in that he maintains that the king and queen stand, on axis, immediately to the right of Velázquez’s canvas ‘looking straight into the mirror’.76 This is simply not possible, assuming (as both Snyder and Cohen undoubtedly do) that 107

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Figure  5.5  Diego Velázquez:  Las Meninas, reconstruction of painting according to John Moffitt, with amendments, as drawn by the author. Original diagram and calculations by Terry L. Fox.

the painting is ‘correct’ in its use of a systematic perspective. Snyder’s own reconstruction of the work’s perspective (redrawn by the author, with distance point added; Figure 5.4) demonstrates that the painting on which Velázquez works partially straddles the room’s central axis.77 María Ana, if not both figures, would therefore have to be tucked behind the depicted canvas. The room in which the scene is staged, while destroyed by fire in 1734, can be identified with some certainty from ground plans and from contemporary accounts. John Moffitt’s meticulous reconstructions of the ground plan in the Alcázar Palace and of the painting itself reveal two significant facts (redrawn, with amendments, by author; Figure 5.5).78 First, the overwhelming likelihood is that the royal couple stood (in terms of the fiction presented) directly opposite the work’s vanishing point, as both Foucault and Searle assume for mistaken reasons. Secondly, the viewpoint of Las Meninas lies outside of the main space, suggesting that the view was framed by an open doorway. The likelihood is that for the fictional royal portrait the king and queen stood at the threshold of, or somewhat behind, this opening (possibly a direct reference back to van Eyck’s location of the two painted witnesses, standing in an open doorway). While an objection might be made that, unlike with van Eyck’s work, there is no way of confirming this within the work itself without prior knowledge of the room, Las Meninas provides a clue in the reflected red curtain in the mirror (an echo of the curtain pulled back by the figure standing on the stairs). More importantly, both Brown and Moffitt reveal that Las Meninas was originally painted to be hung in the ‘executive office’ of Philip IV (the Pieza del Despacho de Verano), a room in the Torre Dorada immediately above the room in which it was painted.79 This floor replicated the precise spatial arrangement of that below, so that standing looking at the painting in its original location, it would have been possible to then turn 180 degrees to look at almost the same spatial arrangement as depicted by the work itself. The internal beholder thus correlates with the principal audience. If, as I suspect, the notion of arrival is key, then the proposition that these figures eagerly await an arrival in the guise of either the king or queen is made more feasible by the adjacent room theory, in that the royal couple can now appear from the beholder’s side of 108

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the painting at the open doorway. This would be consistent with either of the competing interpretations of the maid Isobel’s posture: as a ‘curtsey’80; or as a ‘leaning over to reduce parallax’, the better to see the arrival of the king and queen.81 It is also consistent with the fact that as yet not all the protagonists have noticed the royal presence. Moreover, Brown’s claim that the audience was none other than the king himself avoids the not insubstantial issues of decorum in terms of a spatial and psychological identification with the position occupied by Philip IV – this was not a work originally destined for a public gallery, but for the King’s private office. However, the painting can accommodate other viewers. As Brown notes, If this conclusion is correct, then it follows that the focal point of the picture was the king who ‘interrupted’ the figures in Las Meninas whenever he entered his summer office. The implicit assumption of his presence is recorded not only in the poses and expressions of the characters in the picture, but also in the mirror reflection. Some diagrams of the perspective locate the source of the reflection outside the picture while others identify it with the large canvas standing before the artist. This discrepancy can probably be attributed to the fact that Velázquez’ instinctive use of perspective deliberately accommodates both possibilities. The purpose of the mirror is to insinuate the presence of the king (and queen) in the atelier. If the king were present in person before the picture, he could see, as it were, his own reflection in the mirror. If absent, the picture would be understood as a portrait of the infanta and her retinue, while the mirror-​image would be attributed to the reflection from the easel.82 This provides good evidence for why Velázquez might have wanted to combine two modes of representation. The self-​sufficient narrative of Las Meninas, as described here, is therefore understood within the context of the painting as a private work, and it is the king’s presence that commands the work he faces (a place that the fictional Velázquez has conveniently vacated). When seen by others, it simply reverts to a group portrait: a group of figures posing for their ensuing portrait.

V Nonetheless, I  don’t think this is the whole story. My proposal is founded upon the premise, implied but not fully elucidated by Brown’s account above, that there is no reason to assume that in the fictional scene presented by Las Meninas the royal couple need be present at the moment the painting depicts. If the reflection in the mirror is not that of the king and queen, but the painting on which Velázquez works, then they really might be absent. But then whose view, if any, is thus presented if the work is experienced (as it undoubtedly is) as a subjective point of view? In terms of the scene as tableau, then it is entirely feasible that this position is, indeed, absent, and that what we experience 109

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is a form of ‘ghosting’ as the figures await the arrival of the royal presence. And yet, as Steinberg states, we certainly do not feel excluded; but are we still, as he suggests, ‘part of the family, party to the event’?83 Well, Steinberg’s speculation as to whether we have ‘just walked in to interrupt them’ is alternatively explained if we identify not with the remote and distant royal couple, but with the palace steward who would surely have preceded them, in order to announce their imminent arrival.84 This intriguing possibility would directly ‘mirror’, along an axis from viewpoint to vanishing point, the presence and actions of the figure in the far doorway, who we know to be another Velázquez, don José Nieto, steward to the Queen. One of his roles was precisely to open the doors for the king and queen. Perhaps in this identification with a corresponding figure also unambiguously within the work, we likewise pull back a curtain to prepare for Philip IV and María Ana’s eagerly awaited arrival. This would provide an internal spectator entirely consistent with the fiction presented, meeting any objection about prevailing decorum. Paralleling the otherwise curious presence of the figure in the far doorway, it offers a considerably less onerous psychological repertoire for viewers other than the king to identify with. But the problematizing of the beholder position does not stop there. It is also feasible that we are being asked to identify with a spectator internal to the other scene: not the fictional painting of the royal portrait, which we see only in the mirror as the reverse (in two senses) of the depicted canvas, but to the group portrait that confronts us, posed and organized by Velázquez. Despite his presence within the work, perhaps Velázquez (like Rembrandt) is inviting us to identify with the position from which he is painting the very work before us. And of course, Velázquez’s responsibilities with respect to the royal painting collection would have made him a frequent spectator of the work. There is a possible clue here. If the painted ‘visitor’ on the stairs, located at (or, rather, above) the work’s vanishing point, mirrors a steward arriving, he might also be said to mirror Velázquez himself. Not only do they share a name, but as Damisch notes this figure also seems to mimic the very posture of an artist.85 Brown’s and Moffitt’s adjacent room theories would add weight to Damisch’s notion of a mirroring along this axis between viewpoint, the work’s point of conception and vanishing point (though whether this refers back to the origin of perspective, as Damisch suggests, is an open question, especially given the discrepancy in viewing heights). Velázquez, the painter of Las Meninas, is likewise positioned behind a threshold, looking in. If the other Velázquez, José Nieto, is likened to the spectator position in one painting, he is linked to the point of origin of the other. And if, as Foucault observes, the whole painting, like Velázquez’s stance, brush held mid-​air, is, itself, suspended, then perhaps we are asked to identify, from its point of origin, with the suspended encounter that painting provides. Intriguingly, each of Foucault’s absences –​king and queen, artist and spectator –​is thus provided a possible place, through spectatorships internal to one or the other of the two respective works presented: that of the painting of the royal portrait and that of the staging of Las Meninas itself. Far from excluding us, while the work may offer a mode of ‘internal’ spectatorship limited to the king (or queen), it also offers other potential spectators, with which to identify, unrepresented counterparts to Foucault’s surrogates 110

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depicted either side of the elided subjects presented by the mirror. Not a paradox as such, in that each encounter has its own consistent internal logic, but a choice of imaginative identifications that in their very indeterminacy establish the painting’s modernity. And here it is worth noting that, regardless of competing interpretations, the role of imagination is fundamental to the reciprocity implied by all of these possible identifications; moreover, while these encounters are undoubtedly internal to the work, structured by the work’s framing and perspective, the genius of Velázquez (and at least one of the reasons this is such a great work) is that they are given added psychological charge by the viewer’s own physical sense of arrival and engagement in front of the work (the same device used by Rembrandt’s The Syndics). The work (especially in its original location, where the low vanishing point may have perhaps corresponded to eye level) draws upon our positioning in space relative to the virtual world it presents. It has a processional dimension, not in terms of its iconography or interpretation but in terms of an experiential ground. And as Steinberg suggests, it presents an encounter where we experience A kind of reciprocity, then: as if we on this side of the canvas and the nine characters in it were too closely engaged with each other to be segregated by the divide of the picture plane. Something we bring to the picture –​the very effectiveness of our presence –​ricochets from the picture, provokes an immediate response, a reflex of mutual fixation evident in the glances exchanged, the glances we receive and return.86 If, as both Brown and Moffitt suggest, this is a work that claims painting as ‘a legitimate form of knowledge’,87 where ‘painting is the demonstration of a mental concept, or “idea” ’,88 then it does so in a way that incorporates the presence of an individuated viewer into its semantic content. Idea and reciprocity –​dependent upon an imaginative identification –​fuse, but importantly refuse to definitively cohere around one option. The notion of two paintings might thus be reconciled with Alpers’s proposal that the work describes two modes of engagement, presented in a ‘fundamentally unresolvable way’.89 Rather, they offer parallel, but not incompatible, ways of experiencing the work –​ different indexical ‘uses’ of the work as imaginative prop.

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CHAPTER 6 THEATRICALITY AND THE BEHOLDER Francisco de Goya, La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1784) Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (1980)

I In the last chapter, I addressed a work that many would agree to be the greatest, and certainly the most cited, Spanish group portrait, Velázquez’s Las Meninas. In this chapter, I address another seminal Spanish example of the genre, Goya’s La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1784; Plate 5), a less-​known but equally inventive work which is now part of the collection of the Fondazione Magnani-​Rocca, housed in an eighteenth-​century villa at Mamiano di Traversetolo, Parma (Figure 6.1).1 It will be no surprise to discover that Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–​1828) references the work of an artist he sought to emulate, not least in his ambition to become a royal court painter. And this connection is made for good reason. Both painters portray surprisingly informal arrangements of family members and attendants of royal households:  the latter the ‘mini-​court’ in exile of the Infante Don Luis Antonio de Borbón (1727–​85), the youngest child of Philip V and his second wife, Isabella Farnese.2 Goya replicates Velázquez’s prominent inclusion of a self-​portrait within the composition, complete with poised brush, ready to work on a scene other than the one that we look at as the beholder of the painting. Goya’s ‘fictional’ subject, Doña María Teresa Vallabriga (1759–​1820), the morganatic spouse of Don Luis, more than thirty-​two years younger than her husband, is having her hair prepared for a portrait that will ensue. This is again a portrait about the process of portraiture; however, the inclusion of the painter and the reflexive references to portraiture operate to different ends, in that here the very ‘staging’ does not unify the scene, but rather pushes the theatricality of portraiture to the fore. If anyone was familiar with the intricacies of Las Meninas then it was Goya. The artist from Aragon made a series of studies after Velázquez’s painting in the Royal Palace in Madrid, including a preparatory red chalk drawing and a subsequent etching and aquatint (1778). However, as Xavier Bray notes: Goya found it almost impossible to reproduce the painting as an etching and aquatint because of the exceptional subtlety of the effects of light and shade in the original. He overworked the copper plate and was eventually forced to abandon it. The act of copying this masterpiece, however, gave Goya the opportunity to think hard about Velázquez’s approach to portraiture.3

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Figure 6.1  In situ shot of Francisco de Goya’s La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón within Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma. Photo: Author.

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Not least among the lessons to be learned was how a group portrait might become a fully realized tableau. And yet while Bray describes Goya’s work as ‘an elaborate example of a conversation piece or tableau vivant rarely seen in Spain’, I would argue that Goya pointedly rejects the tableau conceived as the product of a unifying act, where the figures are oblivious of the beholder.4 In an eighteenth-​century context, portraiture was widely seen as an inferior genre to history painting, deemed antithetical to the very notion of a tableau: not least because the typical look ‘out’ of the painting asserted a theatricality at odds with the tableau’s requirement for self-​sufficiency. The pejorative use of the term ‘theatrical’, which Fried adopts from Diderot, is used in a different sense to the ‘theatrical model’ of Rembrandt’s studio practice.5 Indeed, for Fried, Rembrandt (like Velázquez) is, ‘supremely’, an absorptive and hence antitheatrical painter.6 Fried associates theatricality less with ‘staging’ as such, but with works that within their staging acknowledge the audience directly, as with a theatrical aside by a character on stage; for Fried, portraiture, in its self-​presentation of a subject to the beholder, is therefore intrinsically a theatrical genre. The issue of group portraiture is a minor, though contributory, theme to Fried’s 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot  –​ the first of a series of volumes in which Fried documents the drive, in post-​Rococo France, towards non-​theatrical devices and their eventual rejection. It traces an evolution from portraying states of absorption, in the manner of Jean-​Baptiste-​Siméon Chardin (Figure  6.3), to actively seeking to establish the fiction of the non-​existence of the beholder standing before the canvas through the urgency of the action portrayed. Fried considers only one group portrait, Louis-​Michel van Loo’s Le peintre Carle van Loo et sa famille (c.1757; Figure 6.7), owned by the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. And yet this example is representative of all that Goya seeks to negate through his espousal of overtly theatrical devices. But does Goya, thereby, also seek to reverse the very examples of group portraiture by the painters he most admires, namely Velázquez and Rembrandt? Not quite. Rather, I  want to argue that he transforms their ‘staging’ from a unifying action (where external coherence is founded upon a fully resolved internal coherence) into the very content of the painting such that intrinsic social tensions are made explicit. Now we know of Goya’s great admiration for these two artists, famously claiming nature, Velázquez and Rembrandt, as his only masters. While the reference to Velázquez is unsurprising, as Isadora Rose-​de Viejo notes, ‘Rembrandt’s designation as the third authentic “master” is somewhat more puzzling’, in that there ‘was just one authentic Rembrandt painting in peninsular Spain during Goya’s lifetime’ –​Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes (1634; Figure 6.2), acquired by Charles III (Don Luis’s brother) in 1769, and now part of the collection of the Museo del Prado.7 This scarcity was a consequence of the ‘traditional political and religious hostility between Spain and the Netherlands’; nonetheless, from around 1790 Goya would have seen the newly acquired Rembrandt etchings owned by his close friend Ceán Bermúdez, and some of these rare prints were given to Goya as a valuable gift in the late 1790s.8 These etchings were to have a profound influence on Goya’s Los Caprichos (1797–​9), the set of eighty satirical engravings and aquatints published as an album in 1799. Before 1790, while ‘there is no visual evidence 115

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Figure  6.2  Rembrandt van Rijn:  Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes (previously known as Artemisia), 1634, oil on canvas, 143 × 154.7 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Getty Images/​Print Collector/​Contributor.

indicating that Goya could have examined Rembrandt prints’, he certainly would have studied the aforementioned Judith.9 And as Rose-​de Viejo suggests, Goya’s portrait The Count of Floridablanca (1783), his first official commission, does bear a striking compositional relationship to Rembrandt’s painting. Goya paints himself into the picture, holding a small canvas, in a way that directly recalls the position of Rembrandt’s servant girl holding out an elaborate goblet of wine. And it is a theme replicated by La familia del Infante, not least in the highlights on Goya’s face and the positional echoes of his diminutive and deferential presence. Nevertheless, Goya pointedly rejects Velázquez’s resolution to the ‘problem’ of group portraiture; rather, La familia del Infante employs a radically different strategy manifest not only by the painting’s divergent pattern of looks but by Goya’s awkward presence within the scene, which –​while acknowledged by four of the work’s sitters –​ might be seen as an intermediary to our role as beholder. His presence confounds 116

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interpretation, in that while he is presumably there to paint Doña María Teresa, the position where he sets up his canvas makes little sense spatially. And yet, in a quintessential modernist move, Goya thereby lays bare the conceit at the heart of group portraiture –​in Harry Berger’s terms, he reveals the fiction of the pose, laying bare the work’s staging.10 What are the consequences for the beholder? I  want to suggest that our access to the painting is mediated through Goya’s dual presence (both within the work and in an implied extension of the virtual space) and the sitter/​artist relation. But our imaginary presence is not a stable or fixed one; Goya’s wilfully inconsistent perspective refuses a single point around which the scene coheres. Yet the painting engages complex and conflicting narratives that require us to negotiate, as beholders, our subjective relation to the scene through Goya’s eyes. Thus, far from seeking a ‘resolution’ to the inherent theatricality of group portraiture, Goya embraces it as a means to critique the kind of self-​presentational pretence inherent to the very act of posing. Here I recall arguments advanced by Berger, which he acknowledges trespass on Fried’s property, since they are ‘a version of the contrast [Fried] draws between theatricality and absorption’.11 I will put forward three main points. First, unlike, Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c.1665–​8), the effect of Goya’s vacating the point of origin by depicting himself within the scene is not to negate the presence of the painter by rendering the staging of the scene we see as a self-​sufficient narrative, but on the contrary to highlight Goya’s organizing role. Secondly, the resulting instability arises from the manner in which Goya’s reflexive act constructs a deliberately ambiguous presence. Goya (and the canvas on which he works) has been painted from an unfeasibly low viewpoint that contradicts the perspectival logic of the painting and makes little sense with respect to the task at hand. Goya’s diminutive presence, both an intrusion into the family scene and a curious act of deference, is nonetheless essential to establish the real centre of the painting as María Teresa, and to insist that this is a painting about the processes of portraiture. Thirdly, Goya’s curious presence might be conceived in terms of the overtly theatrical device we encountered in the book’s introduction, in relation to Maes’s An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding (1655). This is what Louis Marin terms a ‘figure of the frame’: an internal figure aligned with the work’s boundary, who ‘theatrically’ addresses the spectator of the painting, drawing our attention to the work’s narrative content.12 But here it is the artist himself who plays such a role, occupying a liminal zone belonging to neither the virtual realm of the painting nor ‘our’ space in front of the painting. Our access to the scene is mediated by a kind of complicity between Goya and the figures he portrays, his organizational role thus brought to the fore. This constitutes a theatricality radically at odds with the antitheatricality of Diderot (1713–​84), who died the same year that Goya painted his group portrait. Diderot famously introduced the theatrical convention of the fourth wall, the invisible wall that separates the actors from the audience, demarcating the self-​contained virtual realm of the drama: Whether you compose or you perform, do not think of the spectator. Imagine, at the edge of the theatre, a great wall that separates you from the parterre. Perform as if the curtain were not raised.13 117

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Diderot’s instruction for painters is to likewise seek to negate the presence of the beholder, standing in front of the work, by uniting the characters –​absorbed by their allocated roles  –​into a single action, such that none look ‘out’ of the scene. This is a stipulation that Goya wilfully transgresses. While it is Goya’s satirical or political prints, such as Los Caprichos (1797–​9) or Los desastres de la Guerra (1810–​20), that are most frequently cited as evidence of the artist as a precursor to modernism, La familia del Infante therefore prefigures themes that were to find their culmination in the work of Manet, some eighty years later. II Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality constitutes a major reinterpretation of the history of French painting in the second half of the eighteenth century, and its relation to the emergence of art criticism in the sense that we know it today. In addressing the first reaction against the Rococo associated with the court of Louis XV, which would eventually culminate in the art of Jacques-​Louis David, Fried seeks to rehabilitate a number of artists whose work has not fared well with modern critics, such as Jean-​ Baptiste Greuze: much derided as a ‘sentimental’ artist. The book, which contextualizes the art in question in the light of contemporary criticism, is exemplary of reception theory focused on the history of reception. Fried documents the seriousness with which contemporaneous judgement was undertaken, demonstrated by Diderot’s four volumes of critiques of the Salon –​the official exhibition of members of the Académie, held in the Salon Carré of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Having first been invited in 1759 to contribute by his close friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the period which Diderot’s writings cover encompasses the biannual Salons between 1759 and 1771, and those of 1775 and 1781.14 Diderot, whose writing was key to the revival in history painting, was a great admirer of Chardin, and particularly the ‘sublime technique’ of his still lifes, despite the low esteem in which the genre was considered. This admiration runs deeper than the mere matter of taste: ‘O Chardin, it’s not white, red or black pigment that you grind on your palette but rather the very substance of objects.’15 While Chardin is not an historical painter, he is someone who can instinctively halt and –​importantly –​transfix the beholder before the work. And what Diderot most admired in Chardin’s art, beyond its realism, was its depiction of absorptive states. Fried writes that Chardin (like Vermeer before him) employs activities involving a natural ‘pause’ to suggest not only the obliviousness of the depicted figure to anything other than the object of their absorption but also the actual duration of absorptive states. By way of example, Chardin’s The House of Cards (c.1736–​ 7:  Figure  6.3), part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art, London, shows a youth precariously balancing a card. Such moments come close to translating literal duration, the actual passage of time as one stands before the canvas, into a purely pictorial effect: as if the very stability and

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Figure 6.3  Jean-​Siméon Chardin: The House of Cards, c.1737–​7, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 71.8 cm. The National Gallery, London. Getty Images/​Photo Josse/​Leemage/​Contributor.

unchangingness of the painted image are perceived by the beholder not as material properties that could not be otherwise but as manifestations of an absorptive state –​the image’s absorption in itself, so to speak –​that only happens to subsist.16 However, this absorptive state (at least according to Fried) does not as yet extend to the beholder of the canvas, such that the scene might at any time revert to self-​conscious apprehension; for Diderot ‘disregarding the beholder was not enough’.17 By the mid-​ 1750s, the theme of absorption had emerged in criticism as an explicit ideal, while at the same time it was increasingly deemed to require ‘a special kind of virtuosity to be brought off ’; in other words, ‘It began to emerge as such a desideratum at the moment when it could no longer be taken for granted as a pictorial resource.’18 This second phase demanded more extreme measures. In the 1760s absorptive effects are intensified as part of a wider shift from ‘the primacy of absorption toward the primacy of action and expression –​more accurately, from the representation of figures absorbed in quintessentially absorptive states and activities toward the representation 119

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Figure 6.4  Jean-​Baptiste Greuze: La Piété filiale, Salon of 1763, oil on canvas, 115 × 146 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Prisma Archivo/​Alamy Stock Photo.

of figures absorbed in action or passion (or both)’.19 The latter is exemplified by the work of Greuze, who adopts dramatic solutions characterized by a compositional unity of action that seeks to overcome, or negate, any residual presence of the beholder that might distract the dramatis personae from the activities in which they are engaged. The extreme measures that were thought necessary might be illustrated by Greuze’s La Piété filiale (Salon of 1763: Figure 6.4), now in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. This is an overt display of filial affection that, as Fried notes, at the time ‘literally moved beholders to tears’.20 The scene depicts an old, paralysed man, confined to his armchair, who is fed by his son-​in-​law who has come to visit him. The whole family have halted their activities to observe this one moment, their individual actions merged ‘in a single collective act of heightened attention’.21 In other paintings, Greuze applies these extreme states of absorption to single female figures, in heightened states of near ‘obliviousness’ with thinly veiled sexual themes, such as the Wallace Collection’s Une Jeune fille qui a cassé son miroir (Salon of 1763), London. Fried states that for Diderot, such a conception of painting ‘rested ultimately upon the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist, that he was not really there, standing before the canvas’.22 This represents a paradox. Paintings are made to be beheld, and thus anticipate the beholder’s presence. Indeed, ‘a painting, it was insisted, had to attract the beholder, to stop him in front of itself, and so to hold him there in a perfect trance of

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involvement’.23 But only by negating this presence could the absorption of the beholder, through her absence, be secured. As Fried notes, This paradox directs attention to the problematic character not only of the painting-​ beholder relationship but of something still more fundamental –​the object-​beholder (one is tempted to say object-​‘subject’) relationship which the painting-​beholder relationship epitomizes. In Diderot’s writings on painting and drama the object-​ beholder relationship as such, the very condition of spectatordom, stands indicted as theatrical, a medium of dislocation and estrangement rather than of absorption, sympathy, self-​transcendence; and the success of both arts, in fact their continued functioning as major expressions of the human spirit, are held to depend upon whether or not the painter and dramatist are able to undo that state of affairs, to detheatricalize beholding and to make it once again a mode of access to truth and conviction, albeit a truth and a conviction that cannot be entirely equated with any known or experienced before.24 Of course, the irony is that, unlike the supreme studies in absorption of someone like Chardin, stilled by a natural pause, the wilful gestures of Greuze’s absorptive scenes appear to modern eyes as overtly theatrical. As Riegl states, ‘The psychological expressions of will and emotion are more easily translated into physical movements in explicit and lively ways than are the neutral expressions of pure, selfless attentiveness.’25 The attempt to ‘detheatricalize beholding’ only succeeds in drawing attention to the work’s staging as a kind of painted tableau vivant; to use Berger’s terms, we are offered a theatre of absorption  –​as opposed to the theatre of theatricality typical of group portraiture26  –​ where the models are all too present in their held poses, as they affect absorption by exaggeratedly leaning forward or angling their heads. And unlike Jan Steen’s ‘staged’ scenes of domestic chaos, where, as Berger suggests, the ‘result is to encourage viewers to focus as much on the role of models in Genre as we do on the role of sitters in portraiture’27 –​such that we are in on the act –​with Greuze the pretence is undeclared (though seemingly oblivious to a contemporary audience moved to tears).

III I want now to address how Goya, contrarily, presents a theatre of theatricality in such a way that the resulting dissonance is transformed into the content of the painting. Goya’s La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón gives us intimate access into the domestic world of the extended royal family and its immediate entourage. During the course of two stays at the family residence at the Palace of La Mosquera at Arenas de San Pedro, Goya painted a number of individual portraits of the family and was evidently treated well by the family; in a letter to his friend, Martín Zapater, dated 20 September 1783, Goya writes of the first of these visits:

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I have just returned from Arenas, very tired. His Majesty has lavished upon me one thousand marks of honour; I painted his portrait, that of his wife, his boy and small daughter with unexpected success, for other painters had tried but were not successful in this enterprise. … I spent a whole month with them: they are angels, they gave me a present of a thousand duros and a dressing gown for my wife, all embroidered in silver and gold, worth thirty thousand reales.28 Don Luis was a discerning patron, and the family clearly valued Goya’s abilities as a portraitist. The Infante had amassed a significant art collection and shared Goya’s admiration for Velázquez –​owning a version of Velázquez’s portrait of the court dwarf Sebastián de Morra.29 Don Luis’s advisor was the German-​born painter Anton Rafael Mengs, and in all likelihood it was through Mengs that Goya received his commission. While Goya differentiated himself from the older artist’s Neoclassicism, he had been invited by Mengs in 1774–​5 to work on tapestry cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Factory at Santa Barbara, an initial connection made through Goya’s studio teacher and brother-​ in-​law, Francisco Bayeu. Despite his credentials as a collector, Don Luis was better known for his philandering than his art patronage, even featuring in Giacomo Casanova’s Memoirs. Casanova, who travelled to Spain in 1768, notes the affection by which the Infante was considered by Charles III, but states ‘the King has the greatest horror of illegitimate children, and his brother has three already’.30 As Bray recounts, Things came to a head in 1775 when the Marquis d’Ossun, the French ambassador at the Spanish court, reported that the Infante, with the help of his closest servants, had arranged for three mujerzuelas, or prostitutes, to meet him in the woods on alternate days while hunting with the King. Learning of these escapades, Charles III sent several members of the Infante’s entourage who were implicated in the scandal … into exile. As for Don Luis himself, the King decided he must marry. But any marriage posed a further problem to the King as Philip V’s Slaic Law of 1713 excluded from the succession members of the royal family not born and bred in Spain. Since Charles III’s son and heir, the Prince of Asturias, had been born in Naples, he would have found it difficult to press his son’s claim to the throne in the event of Luis producing a legitimate Spanish heir.31 Don Luis was ordered by the King to choose a wife from one of three women of lesser nobility, and the Infante opted for Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas, from an Aragonese family, and just 17 at the time of the marriage in 1776. Prior to authorizing the union, the King ‘published a decree excluding the couple’s future children from any rights of succession to their father’s titles and dignities, or the use of the name Borbón (although the children were later allowed to use it)’; moreover, ‘Don Luis and his family were obliged to live away from the court and only the Infante was permitted to visit Madrid’.32 Goya’s group portrait therefore depicts a family in exile. While Don Luis was said to have settled into married life, and the couple had three surviving children, contemporary 122

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accounts suggest that María Teresa seemed –​unsurprisingly –​less than happy with her situation, and that the marriage soon deteriorated. Referring to Goya’s 1783 portrait of her, Bray writes: ‘His rapport with his sitters was crucial to the success of his portraiture, and the direct and open relationship expressed here suggests admiration and fondness for this strong woman, whose kindness towards himself and his wife are recorded in his letter, and for whose humiliating marital situation he may well have felt a particular sympathy.’33 It is perhaps such sympathy that influenced the decision to grant María Teresa such prominence in the family portrait. And it is into this complex web of social relations that Goya invites us, such that we feel ‘let in’ on the tensions and secrets concealed behind an outward facade of contentment and cohesion. The more one looks, the more one realizes that this is not a stable picture, and that all is not quite what it seems. Commentators have pointed to the instability of the card table, seemingly supported on just two legs.34 Bray, meanwhile, suggests that the flickering candle might be seen as ‘a vanitas emblem, an allusion to the brevity of life possibly fitting in with the Infante’s own frame of mind, given his relatively advance years, poor health [he died just a year later], and the age gap separating him from his much younger wife’.35 Indeed, the candle is barely credible as the only visible source of light in the darkened scene. Others have referred to the curious presence of the two interlopers on the right, who seem disengaged from the activities of the main protagonists. I want to argue that a substantial factor in the disquiet produced by this enigmatic painting arises from the difficulty of negotiating our orientation as beholders towards its virtual world. The resulting unease in not a failure of resources, but rather a deliberate engagement of theatricality that could not be further from the intended evocation of absorptive states manifest by Greuze’s La Piété filiale (notwithstanding comments above). Despite Don Luis’s frailty, having noticeably aged since the profile portrait painted by Goya just a year earlier, there is little attention paid to his condition, or to his game where he lays out cards onto the green baize of the gaming table. Bray suggests that only the two figures on the other side of the table pay ‘polite, if minimal, attention to the Infante’s game of cards’; and yet even this is doubtful, in that the ‘ruddy-​complexioned’ man on the left, identified as Don Luis’s official secretary, seems to be looking past his employer towards Goya’s canvas, while the ‘dashing, aristocratic-​looking man next to him’, who has not been definitely identified, appears to be exchanging looks with Goya.36 In so doing, the latter is joined by the governess, Isidra Fuentes y Michel, ‘who holds in her arms the couple’s third child, María Luisa, born on 6 June 1783, who would have been about one year old’.37 The undoubted focus of the composition, however, is María Teresa, who, in a radiant white dressing gown, appears to be the one being prepared for her portrait, as evidenced by the attentions of her hairdresser and the imminent arrival of adornments: a bonnet and a silver box, containing powder for her hair, carried by the two maids.38 Seated on the grandest chair, she looks out of the painting to an anticipated audience, commanding centre stage. By contrast, Don Luis is painted in static profile, absently looking ahead into space. In an article written in 1945 (and not without errors) Diego Angulo Iniguez mulls over the significance of this choice: 123

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Be it by a spontaneous desire on the part of the Infante, or simply by assent to an initiative of the painter or his wife [that is, María Teresa], it is evident that this canvas represents, in a way, a spiritual answer to the attitude of the monarch [Charles III]. The woman who was not allowed to tread the real stage thus entered history, triumphant in her proper setting. Goya’s canvas is, in reality, a portrait of the family of María Teresa Vallabriga, since it is she undoubtedly who is cast to play the leading part, a part that the painter knew to emphasise immensely through the medium of violent light effects.39 Commenting on the ‘choice of hairdressing as the central theme of the scene’, Iniguez suggests that while it might ‘correspond to a real moment in the life of the family at Arenas’ it is also suggestive of mythological references.40 Referring to Goya’s Mythological Scene, painted the same year as the group portrait, and often identified as a scene of Hercules and Omphale (now in a private collection), Iniguez continues: In this connection, it is curious to record that in 1784 … he signed the story of Hercules threading a needle overwhelmed by the charms of Omphale, in the Collection of the Duke of San Pedro de Galatino, or what amounts to the same, the theme of the beauty and the feminine triumphant over bravery and strength. The allegations made by Secretary Aristia and by Friar Urbano de los Arcos that the countess abused the weakness of Infante’s character, or, in other words, that she ruled him, translated freely into the language of the Greek fable, do in fact make a story analogous to that of Hercules and Omphale.41 Juliet Wilson-​Baraeau likewise argues that: ‘It seems not impossible that Goya’s Hercules and Omphale alludes to the circumstances of their marriage, arranged by the King.’42 The widespread eighteenth-​century fear of a woman ‘ruling’ her husband is a misogynous feature of much contemporary commentary; and the theme of gender relations (to which Goya consistently returns) might, indeed, have been uppermost in his mind. Elsewhere, Victor I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch write of Goya’s fascination with this mythological tale of emasculation and gender reversal, associating such gender reversals with the upside-​down world of the Carnival –​the period from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday –​with its ‘aesthetic of licentiousness and the culture of laughter’; they note that Goya’s Los Caprichos series was published on Ash Wednesday in 1799:  that is, on the last day of the final Carnival of the century.43 Goya’s ambivalence about the relations between men and women features in many of the plates. As C.  Christopher Soufas, Jr., writes, In Los caprichos Goya weds his vision of an impotent patriarchal order to an active, destabilizing counterforce identified with feminine power that subversively undermines rational intentions and affirmations. Instead of exposing society’s faults, however, Goya exposes himself and the negative revelation that men and

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women do not simply fall asleep to Reason, they self-​destructively embrace Unreason.44 Significantly, at least two plates in the series seem to comment upon aspects of his experience at Arenas: one, the very processes of portraiture, and the artist’s role in its intrinsic pretence; and the other, the theme of an aging patriarch and his beautiful young bride. In Capricho #41, Ni más ni menos (No more no less), a crouched monkey, holding a brush and palette, is painting the portrait of an ass (Figure 6.5). As Bray comments, ‘While the ass sits proudly, feeling rather pleased with himself, the monkey portrays him with a wig, adding a symbol of social standing that is in reality not there. The “monkey painter”, as Don Luis jokingly referred to Goya in 1783, can turn anybody into somebody.’45 And the ‘monkey painter’ does seem to replicate Goya’s curiously crouched pose, with arched back, in our picture.46 Meanwhile, Capricho #2 depicts a masked young woman who is being married off to an older man, her father apprehensively leading her by the arm. The accompanying text states Ei si pronuncian y la mano alargan /​Al primero que llega (They pronounce their ‘yes’ and offer forth their hand to the first comer) –​the final two lines from a verse by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, published in the periodical El Censor in 1786, which satirizes young women marrying for money while the older man is mocked for being a fool (thinking she may have married for love). As Janis A. Tomlinson notes, the ‘placement of this image in the published series –​immediately following the self-​portrait of the artist that serves as a frontispiece –​attests to the importance that Goya assigned to this theme’.47 But Jovellanos’s poem also parodies the widespread fashion for the cortejo among the nobility.48 And here Bray notes that the second figure on the right in La familia del Infante, who, with hand behind his back, knowingly smiles at the painter/​beholder (perhaps as a confidant), has been identified as the then 31-​year-​old Francisco del Campo: It has been suggested that Francisco del Campo was María Teresa’s cortejo, a manservant with special privileges that allowed him close contact with the lady of the house, sometimes to the extent of being her lover. This is based in part on the evidence of the correspondence of Alonso Monroy, a resident of Arenas who was closely associated with Infante’s family. Writing a year after the Infante’s death, he mentions María Teresa’s affection for Francisco del Campo and his apparent sadness that the Infante had felt when he heard about it. This theory is supported by another letter from the Infante’s personal confessor, Urbano de los Arcos. He reported to the court in Madrid after the Infante’s death that there had been ‘unpleasant scenes’ (‘orden indecoroso’) at the palace and that María Teresa had on occasion spoken harshly to her husband in front of his servants.49 Goya himself describes Campo, brother of Marcos del Campo (who had married one of Goya’s sisters-​in-​law), as playing a prominent role within the family:  ‘He is the boss, and they say he is a man of great talent.’50 Perhaps this explains something of his self-​satisfied  smile.

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Figure 6.5  Francisco de Goya: Los Caprichos, #41. ‘Neither More nor Less (Ni Más Ni Menos)’,

1797–​9, Etching, burnished acquatint, drypoint and burin, platemark:  21.8 × 15.1  cm; sheet:  37.5 × 26 cm. Artefact/​Alamy Stock Photo.

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IV We do not know where La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón was first hung, or even whether the final work was seen by Don Luis. We do know that Goya met Don Luis for a final time in Madrid in April 1785, some four months before he died. Writing to Zapater, Goya states, ‘The poor Infante Don Luis … is very ill; today I  kissed his hand to bid him goodbye … and from what I have seen and observed these last few days, because he seemed to like seeing me often, he will not recover.’51 After his death, María Teresa was tragically barred from seeing her own children, the two daughters ‘sent to the convent of San Clemente, outside Toledo, while Luis María was dispatched for tutoring under Cardinal Lorenzana in preparation for an ecclesiastical career’.52 Nevertheless, despite the group portrait’s enigmas, and the prominence of María Teresa, it would appear not to have hindered Goya’s long-​term ambition to gain royal patronage, with the commissioning of La familia de Carlos IV (1800: Figure 6.6), now in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. The relation of La familia del Infante to its current location in the Fondazione Magnani-​ Rocca demonstrates that this is a work that does, indeed, engage its situation (Figure 6.1). While perhaps loosely based on a real room within the Palace of La Mosquera, Goya gives us a fabricated space, revealed by the painting’s curious perspective. The difficulty of orienting ourselves towards the scene is compounded by its spatial ambiguities –​a curiously compressed pictorial space with inconsistent depth cues. For instance, the shadow of the maid carrying the silver box, cast on the rear wall, suggests a shallower space than that implied by the wall on the right (partly concealed by the green curtain), while the visual continuity with the cloth that covers the table is contradicted by the grey figure who stands behind the table (pushing the far wall back even further). Moreover, Goya’s canvas does not cohere within the space, its vanishing point lower than the rest of the painting (lower even than Goya’s crouched point of view). Raised off the ground on its easel, it is inconsistent with the box/​stool on which Goya sits (which thus appears to float). By contrast, the card table conforms to a vanishing point somewhere in the region of María Teresa’s hair adornments, at a height consistent with her eye level and with the foreshortening of the three standing figures immediately to the right of the table (though these are also further back in space than is first apparent). As if to compound these inconsistencies, Don Luis, his eldest son Luis María and the disputed figure on the other side of the table are all painted in profile –​contrary to the rules of perspective, a fact made apparent by the discrepancy with the chair on which Don Luis sits.53 Goya thus gives us multiple viewpoints and pictorial depths that refuse to cohere into a stable scene, as if emphasizing the constructed nature of the compiled image in a manner that Manet was to replicate with his own deliberate spatial inconsistencies. Remembering that the point of origin is, like the scene itself, a fabrication (given that the figures are unlikely to have gathered collectively as a complete group, the portrait having been compiled from individual studies in Goya’s studio), what does it mean for Goya to vacate this position? Earlier, I maintained that the effect is not to negate the presence of the beholder, but rather to construct a tension between contrary viewpoints. Of course, the ‘real’ painter (like the external beholder) stands in front of the canvas 127

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Figure 6.6  Francesco de Goya: La familia de Carlos IV, 1800, oil on canvas, 280 × 336 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Getty Images/​Christophel Fine Art/​Contributor.

we see; the implied painter only occupies an extension of the depicted scene (and thus part of the painting’s virtual world) if the painter chooses to put her there. But Goya does just that. In a telling detail, the youngest daughter, María Luisa, unselfconsciously, with no sense of what it is to ‘pose’ for a future beholder, looks out towards the painter, thus implying his presence within the scene. In an ingenious mirroring of this (as if to underline the point that María Luisa does not look ‘out’ at the beholder), the older daughter, María Teresa, looks directly at the painted artist, but unlike her younger sibling (whom we feel might turn away at any moment) she is completely absorbed in her act of looking. I want to suggest that these two ‘innocent’ looks are an essential foil to the whole theatre of self-​presentation that Goya gives us. No less than five adult figures look out: the two maidservants (though the one on the right seems to look slightly past us); the furtive grey-​clad figure on the right, who shiftily places his hand in his jacket (possibly one of the rival painters attached to Don Luis’s household, such as Alejandro de la Cruz or Gregorio Ferro, ‘both of whom Goya arrogantly dismissed as not being able to paint portraits as well as he did’)54; and then, of course, María Teresa and Campo. Here, we might note the difference between 128

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the adult gazes (addressing the external beholder) and the youngest child’s curious gaze, replicated by the look her sister gives Goya (whose later portrait of her as an adult, as The Countess of Chinchon (c.1800) was one of his greatest portraits, now part of the collection of the Museo del Prado). With the exception of María Teresa and Campo, all the adults looking out seem nervous, uncomfortable in their supporting roles. By contrast, the two ‘lovers’ seem unabashed, Campo positively relishing the moment and drawing us into the intrigue through his unsettling smile.

V I want to briefly return to Louis-​Michel van Loo’s Le peintre Carle van Loo et sa famille (Figure  6.7), which depicts the artist’s uncle at work (the most famous member of a highly successful dynasty of painters). As already noted, portraiture was considered troubling by French art critics of the 1750s and 1760s, who questioned its status in relation to history painting. Fried states, ‘One objection frequently raised was that almost all contemporary portraits required the exercise of merely mechanical skills and so were unworthy of serious consideration as works of art’, and that the resulting likenesses were usually only of interest to the person commissioning the portrait and their friends and family.55 More importantly, there was, I  suggest, still another source of critical misgiving  –​the inherent theatricality of the genre. More nakedly and as it were categorically than the conventions of any other genres, those of the portrait call for exhibiting a subject, the sitter, to the public gaze; put another way, the basic action depicted in a portrait is the sitter’s presentation of himself or herself to be beheld. It follows that the portrait as a genre was singularly ill equipped to comply with the demand that a painting negate or neutralize the presence of the beholder, a demand that I have tried to show became a matter of urgent, if for the most part less than fully conscious, concern for French art critics during those years.56 There were, however, exceptions. Van Loo’s family portrait was highly praised for utilizing a coordinating activity by which the work was ‘rendered proof against the consciousness of being beheld that compromised the genre’.57 As Fried notes, we might now view the binding together of the ‘six figures in a single quasi-​dramatic scene’ as ‘less than fully successful’, in that Mme. van Loo, a renowned singer, ‘seems to take no part in the proceedings and instead gazes directly out of the canvas’.58 And yet ‘three of the most prominent ­figures –​Carle Van Loo at work on a portrait drawing of his daughter, the daughter posing for him but not for us, and the son who looks on, engrossed over his father’s shoulder –​form an absorptive group of a type familiar to us’, while the other son mischievously seeks to distract his sister from her pose. The resulting composition prompted Grimm to claim that Louis-​Michel had discovered the secret of transforming a collection of portraits into a history painting.59 129

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Figure 6.7  Louis-​Michel van Loo: Le peintre Carle van Loo et sa famille, c.1757, oil on canvas, 200 × 156 cm. Musée du Chateau, Versailles. © 2019. Photo: Josse/​Scala, Florence.

The posing in van Loo’s painting (with one notable exception) is therefore accounted for by the internal elements of the narrative rather than an act of self-​exhibition. That one boy tries to disturb his sister, who diligently poses for her father, only reinforces this internal narrative. However, there is none of the tension that Velázquez’s great work 130

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generates between the two modes:  the work as self-​sufficient scene (or tableau) and group portrait. And the exception to van Loo’s depiction of absorptive states, Mme. van Loo, who looks out of the painting, is deserving of some comment. Perhaps she is just too well known by her public to be allocated a role to play and requested an attribute of her profession, the open music book, to match her husband’s poised pen. But that she looks at the beholder of the painting rather than an internal presence underlines a problem with the wider philosophical plausibility of Fried’s thesis (and, by implication, that of Diderot’s). This has been addressed, at length, by the philosopher Anthony Savile. As Savile points out, the problem is that the conviction of the absence of the beholder, on Diderot’s thesis, ‘is the effect of my appreciation of the states of mind of the depicted characters’,60 but this raises a key question: How could they be potentially aware of me standing there before the canvas, unless they thought of themselves as characters in a picture? Anything less than this, such as intense absorption in their own affairs, would lead me to see the picture as suggesting no more than the absence of any internal onlooker, and that is a long way from persuading me of my own absence before the canvas. Yet the moment I start to attribute to the depicted personages the dispositional awareness of their place in a picture, I am making my interest in them theatrical, in the sense that I am regarding them as actors rather than characters in their own right. To do this, Diderot would be the first to allow, is to undermine the goal of self-​transcendence, and to undermine it from within.61 As Savile notes, this is compounded by the fact that throughout Fried’s writing there is ‘an unresolved uncertainty of reference in the expressions “the represented scene” and “the beholder” ’, in that the first is ‘used indifferently to designate the events that are depicted or the depiction of the events on the canvas itself ’, while the latter does not distinguish between internal and external beholders: the spectator in the painting and the spectator of the painting.62 Again, this failure replicates Diderot’s own, revealed by his attempts to engage a painted figure in conversation (such as in the case of Greuze’s images of ‘distraught’ young women, where  –​notoriously  –​Diderot seeks to console her for her sadness and to determine the real reason, implied as being the loss of her virginity). This confusion has consequences for van Loo’s painting. That Mme. van Loo refuses to ‘perform’ an allocated role within the narrative of the fictional portrait of her daughter, but rather reverts to a pose of self-​presentation, gives the game away, revealing her dispositional awareness of her place in a picture through her very resistance to the blurring of roles of model/​sitter. And yet even if this was not the case, the scene, in its self-​conscious adoption of absorptive poses, would still feel ‘staged’, but staged without reflexive acknowledgement (unlike Velázquez’s Las Meninas, where the logic of its poses is integral to the work’s meaning). To again co-​opt Berger, it is against such a ‘theatre of absorption’ that Goya reacts with his unabashed ‘theatre of theatricality’, that not only 131

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takes the condition of self-​presentation inherent to portraiture as a given, but reveals its contrary guises –​from the innocence of a young child who stares at the painter (unaware of what it is to pose), to the knowing and self-​satisfied smile of the cortejo (all too aware of his self-​presentation), to the classical allusions (and self-​aggrandisement) of Don Luis’s painted profile (with its classical allusions), to the enigmatic smile of María Teresa, who constitutes the literal and metaphorical centre of both the actual and fictional painting. And unlike van Loo’s depiction of the family of his uncle (named First Painter to Louis XV of France in 1762), with its prominent attributes of newly acquired cultural capital, Goya lays bare (in an unprecedented way) the very social construction of an image that problematizes the beholder-​position while simultaneously allowing us into a world that we are otherwise excluded.

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PART III ABSTRACTION

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CHAPTER 7 BEHOLDING A ‘REVERSIBLE’ SPACE

El Lissitzky, Proun Room (1923) Yve-​Alain Bois, ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’ (1990)

I In Part II, I addressed the issue of group portraiture, which in its intrinsic engagement of the outward gaze –​the look ‘out’ of the frame –​makes it an obvious subject for a book on beholding. And yet group portraiture’s import for the development of modernism, the subject of Part III, has not always been registered. Group portraiture, after all, held particular significance for Édouard Manet, the artist widely held to be the first true modernist painter. Manet greatly admired Rembrandt’s The Syndics and Velázquez’s Las Meninas, but it is from Goya that he inherits a model for both the ‘inattentiveness’ of his figures towards each other and his radical compression of pictorial space. Timothy J. Clark refers to Olympia (1863) as representing a ‘displacement of the spectator from his accustomed imaginary possession of the work’, which in turn raises complex issues (prefigured by Goya) around the anticipated class and gender of the beholder, and the relation of the artist to his or her model.1 For Clark, the notion of Manet’s ‘uninhabitable’ viewpoints constitutes a singular failure to signify, such that Manet’s ‘subversive refusal of the established codes’ represents a conscious practice of negation  –​constituting a more troubled interpretation of the dawn of modernism than that offered by someone like Greenberg.2 For Greenberg, Manet’s flatness is valorized as an early drive towards the purity of medium; Greenberg’s formalism, however, diminishes the fact that Manet’s push towards flatness happens within the context of a shift in social relations manifest in the Paris of the 1860s, immediately prior to the Paris Commune of 1871, and its brutal suppression. In Clark’s 1982 article ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, published in Critical Inquiry, he challenges Greenberg’s sense of art as an ‘independent source of value’  –​ in other words its autonomy from everyday life  –​and the narrowness of Greenberg’s ‘reductive’ notion of medium in relation to avant-​garde art.3 For Clark, the flatness and resistance of Manet’s painting was not just a formal engagement with the medium, but rather drew upon extra-​pictorial values derived from elsewhere than art, ‘because it was made to stand for something: some particular and resistant set of qualities, taking its place in an articulated account of experience’.4 And crucial to this experience was the key avant-​garde practice of negation. Clark states, ‘What I shall point to here –​not to

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make a mystery of it –​are practices of negation in modernist art which seem to me the very form of the practices of purity (the recognitions and enactments of medium) which Greenberg extols.’5 Clark’s outwardly negative assessment of Olympia in The Painting of Modern Life is often misunderstood, in that for Clark Manet’s failure is exemplary. If ‘the medium has appeared most characteristically as the site of negation and estrangement’, it is because the medium’s ordinary consistency, bound up by conventions embedded into the entire social fabric, is negated ‘by pulling it apart, emptying it, producing gaps and silences, making it stand as the opposite of sense or continuity, having matter be the synonym for resistance’.6 But at the same time, surely that dance of negation has to do with the social facts … [such as] the decline of ruling class elites, the absence of a ‘social base’ for artistic production, the paradox involved in making bourgeois art in the absence of a bourgeoisie. Negation is the sign inside art of this wider decomposition:  it is an attempt to capture the lack of consistent and repeatable meanings in the culture –​to capture the lack and make it over into form.7 Here, Clark lays out the full extent of his disagreement with Greenberg, in that while he acknowledges that the critic recognizes ‘the rootlessness and isolation of the avant-​ garde’, unlike Clark he believes ‘that art can substitute itself for the values capitalism has made valueless’.8 Clark thus offers a stark warning about the descent into form. Rather, he focuses on the notion of the ‘uninhabitability’ of the contrary viewpoints of Olympia in the light of the exchange of capital exposed by Manet in its most brutal form:  the ‘professional’ stare that –​crucially –​withholds the self. This chapter will address a work constructing a comparable sense of uninhabitability, again conceived as a modernist negation of the beholder position, in relation to an artist of which Clark has also written extensively (albeit with some ambivalence).9 El Lissitzky’s Proun Room (Prounenraum) of 1923 (Plate 6) might likewise be considered a failure, in that while it constitutes a powerful challenge to the medium specificity of painting –​negating its conventions of support –​it never quite severs its ties to the virtuality of painting. And yet, in so doing, it activates and negates the beholder’s space in an unprecedented manner, enacting a kinetic potential more usually associated with sculpture. This argument will be framed within the theoretical remit of Yve-​Alain Bois’s essay ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞: Axonometry, or Lissitzky’s Mathematical Paradigm’.10 This was written for the 1990 exhibition ‘El Lissitzky (1980–​1941) architect painter photographer typographer’ organized by the Municipal Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and develops Bois’s earlier 1988 article for Art in America, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’.11 The resulting uncertainty as to where the artwork is relative to the beholder (another challenge to inhabitability) underpins all the works considered in Part III, which will play out this dynamic in relation to modernist abstraction. I shall argue that a similar phenomenological uncertainty is manifest in the best work of Anthony Caro of the 1960s, particularly his 1967 Prairie, which I frame through Susanne K. Langer’s writing 136

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on the virtual mode of sculpture; it is also a factor of the differentiated viewing distances of Agnes Martin’s grids, an uncertainty given an extraordinary psychoanalytic twist by Griselda Pollock which (in her evocation of Kristeva) will return us back to the kind of limits of representation addressed in Part I.

II Often considered a precursor to installation art, Lissitzky’s Proun Room was a self-​ contained space created for the 1923 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung.12 No longer extant, two full size replicas of the original room have been reconstructed according to research carried out by Jean Leering, former director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. The first facsimile, fabricated in 1965, was in 1995 purchased by the Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, in Berlin; the second, with slight modifications, was constructed in 1971 (Plate 6) and still forms part of the Van Abbemuseum’s collection.13 Lissitzky uses the term Proun (an acronym for the Russian phrase ‘Project for the Affirmation of the New’) to refer to a body of work made between 1919 and 1927, comprising oil/​gouache paintings, prints and drawings. They occupy a zone at the ‘interchange between painting and architecture’, where negation is conceived in quasi-​ mathematical terms as a challenge to perspectival space: one that is not without ideological consequences in its deliberate problematizing of the beholder position through what Bois refers to as Lissitzky’s ‘radical reversibility’.14 And, of course, Lissitsky’s Prouns evolve against the utopic context of a revolutionary shift in social relations. While this is a situation already subject to the horrors of the civil war and the economic ramifications of War Communism, it is a situation prior to the Kronstadt rebellion and suppression, and the disastrous imposition of Stalin and Bukharin’s socialism in one country, after the defeat of revolutionary forces in Europe and Lenin’s death in January 1924 (a defeat later registered in Lissitzky’s notorious photomontages celebrating the achievements of Stalin). The opportunity to construct a three-​dimensional Proun Room fulfils a wider avant-​ garde desire to blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture:  a proto-​installation reconciling Lissitzky’s Kazimir Malevich-​inspired suprematism with a more materialist-​based Russian constructivism, the latter increasingly hostile to the ‘outdated’ medium of painting.15 While in 1919 Malevich was already proposing applying a suprematist system to the walls of an entire room,16 Lissitzky’s approach was more radical in treating space as an immersive volume rather than juxtaposed painted walls. Certainly, in the text accompanying the exhibition Lissitzky claims the Proun Room to be a complete spatial entity rather than a design on which to hang pictures: Thus, the organization of the wall cannot be conceived as anything like a representative picture-​painting. Whether one ‘paints’ on a wall or whether one hangs pictures on it, both actions are equally wrong. New space neither needs 137

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nor demands pictures –​it is not a picture transposed on a surface. This explains the painter’s hostility toward us: we are destroying the wall as the resting place for their pictures.17 While Lissitzky does, in fact, paint onto the walls, he also introduces materials such as painted and unpainted timber, which stand away from the surface, echoing the constructivist reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin. The Proun Room nevertheless owes much to Lissitzky’s background as a typographer and graphic artist.18 In its directional orientation one might interpret the design as an inhabited surrogate for one of his suprematist children’s books, such as the seminal Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions (conceived in Vitebsk in 1920, but published in Berlin, 1922, by Skythen Verlag; Figure 7.1). Here, the communist red square establishes itself upon the black square of Malevich’s suprematism, thus uniting the political and aesthetic. Lissitzky integrates what he claims are two aspects of the word: ‘As sound it is a function of time; as exposition, of space.’19 As the commentary to The MIT Press’s facsimile of The Story of Two Squares states, Lissitzky’s tale thus reads as an allegory of the fourth dimension, transposed onto a three-​dimensional world. As we shall see, this is also the case with the Proun Room, its own ‘narrative’ journey which ends with the suprematist black square (Figure 7.2). It was through such suprematist-​inspired typographic experimentation that Lissitzky understood the value of ‘blank’ space, and crucially how images work across the sequential pages of an open book or the reversible sheets of a folded-​out pamphlet. This connection is no more apparent than in the extraordinary ‘fold-​out’ axonometric drawing of the Proun Room design (Figure 7.3), one of six lithographs from the First Kestner Portfolio (1923). This print is vital to understanding the logic of Lissitzky’s intervention into the room. Like the Necker cube (Figure 7.4), a wireframe drawing that acts as an optical illusion (a psychological test first published in 1832 by the Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker), the Prounenraum drawing –​an impossible three-​dimensional ­figure –​ oscillates between contrary readings of the spatial configuration, switching between a view notionally from ‘above’ and one from ‘below’. As the viewing orientation (given that axonometric projections do not have a viewpoint as such) switches, the two side walls alternately swing –​as it were –​back and forth, a topological transformation between negative internal and positive external corners, while the ceiling and ground plane likewise ‘fold’ back so as to be seen from above or below. Referring to both the Proun Room axonometric and Lissitzky’s axonometric representation of the Hannover Abstract Cabinet (1927)20  –​a drawing that has to be physically turned upside down to perceive alternate views of the juxtaposed projections –​ Bois states that the ‘oscillation of a plane in opposite directions, its change from bi-​to tridimensionality and back again, is essential to the Proun’, an effect that is ‘based, as Lissitzky suggested, on the multiplication of projection axes, which greatly increases the protension/​retension effect characteristic of axonometry’.21 Bois here uses temporal terms inherited from Edmund Husserl’s dialectic: the former associated with the near-​ future, the latter with the fading-​out past, but in Husserl’s phenomenology both manifest 138

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Figure 7.1  El Lissitzky: Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions, 1922, illustrated

book with letterpress cover and six letterpress illustrations, published in Berlin by Skythen Verlag, 27.8 × 22.5 cm. Private Collection. Getty Images/​Heritage Images/​Contributor.

within a ‘thick’ present.22 Bois adapts this protension/​retension dialectic as a plus/​minus effect exploited by Lissitzky’s use of axonometry (or, more accurately, his use of a range of orthographic and oblique techniques, including axonometric and isometric projections). As we shall see, part of the oscillation of Lissitzky’s Proun paintings follows from the uncertain perceptual depth of coloured planes relative to the surface of the image, both in a forward (+) and backward (–​) direction. But Lissitzky also challenges painting as a ‘wall-​based’ practice, made apparent in Prouns that can be rotated like a map. Lissitzky’s ‘Proun’ 8 Stellungen (8 Position Proun) (1923: Figure 7.5), shown here as a study in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, implies four square positions (each side of the square potentially acting as a base) and four positions relating to each endpoint when oriented as a lozenge form. Bois argues that such a potential represents a shift ‘from a simple intensification of the plus/​minus effect inherent to axonometry to the concept of radical reversibility’.23 Bois here cites Lissitzky: We saw that the surface of the Proun ceases to be a picture and turns into a structure round which we must circle, looking at it from all sides, peering down from above, investigating from below. The result is that the one axis of the picture 139

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Figure 7.2  Kazimir Malevich: Black Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 79.9 × 79.5 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Archive PL/​Alamy Stock Photo.

which stood at right angles to the horizontal was destroyed. Circling round it, we screw ourselves into the space. We have set the Proun in motion so we obtain a number of axes of projection.24 Seen thus, from various oblique angles rather than from straight on, the ambulatory potential of the beholder is enacted. However, it is important to note that the rotational potentiality of these alternate views is retained even when the Proun is fixed to a wall. Indeed, one is reminded of cognitive spatial tests that require mental imagery to rotate a figure through 360 degrees.25 Many Prouns exploit this potential for mental rotation, indexed to a bodily frame of reference. A  number of commentators have emphasized Lissitzky’s mathematical grounding of 140

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Figure  7.3  El Lissitzky:  Kestnermappe Proun, 1923, lithograph on paper, 61 × 45.2  cm. Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon. Getty Images/​Heritage Images/​Contributor.

such concerns. Richard J. Difford, citing Lissitzky’s 1925 essay ‘A. and Pangeometry’,26 considers Lissitzky’s wider Proun work within the context of mathematical treatises dealing with the fourth dimension, casting it as ‘an attempt to find an architectural expression for the reconfigured notions of space that this geometry inspired’.27 As Difford observes, Lissitzky’s interest in the four-​dimensional hypercube replicates that of Dutch artist and architect Theo van Doesburg (Figure 7.6), who Lissitzky befriended upon his arrival in Berlin in late 1921. This representational collapsing of four dimensions into two (like the potential for rotation) allocates a central role to the imagination. Of course, this notion of an inherent uncertainty as to where the artwork is, relative to the beholder, is an ongoing theme throughout this book. Indeed, we might recall here Sandström’s distinction (noted in Chapter 1) between two scales operational within the same work: an objective degree of reality, founded upon the degree of object likeness of a depicted entity (such as a painted marble panel, depicted as lying parallel to the picture plane, having a high objective degree of reality); and a pictorial degree of reality, founded upon a more, or less, replete fictiveness.28 While we might view Lissitzky’s vehement rejection of perspectival space –​‘a rigid three-​dimensional view of the world based on the laws of Euclidean geometry’ –​as a refusal of the very notion of virtuality in favour of the ‘real’, thus rejecting any such distinction between objective and pictorial degrees

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Figure 7.4  Necker cube, as drawn by the author. of reality, it is clear that his Prouns, in their use of axonometric projection, for all their reversibility employ just such a distinction (which, of course, like orthogonal and oblique projections themselves, predate the development of a systematic perspective). Here, ‘real’ materials are employed to emphasize the materiality and reflexivity of the painting process: an assemblage of textures and montaged elements which exponents of the early Russian avant-​garde, such as Mikhail Larionov (and, subsequently Malevich), termed faktura. Lissitzky’s Proun 2C (1920:  Figure  7.7), part of the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, uses oil, paper and metal on panel: Bois notes that ‘the wooden support sometimes appears as wood, and sometimes is treated to look like daub; in which glued pieces of paper or metal adopt all the characteristics of construction materials’.29 Benjamin Buchloh contrasts faktura with the so-​ called factography of Lissitzky’s later photomontages, typical of arts adhering to the mechanical presentation of ‘facts’ propagating the increasing industrialization of the single-​state Soviet Union and the subordination of art to production.30 Vladimir Markov, in a 1914 text ‘Icon Painting’, explicitly referring to ‘the assemblage of textures (faktura)’, argues that: ‘The real world is introduced into the icon’s creation only through the assemblage and incrustation of real tangible objects and this seems to produce a combat between two worlds, the inner and the outer.’31 For Markov, this takes on a ‘religio-​transcendental’ function; however, Buchloh proposes that

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Figure 7.5  El Lissitzky: Study for ‘Proun’ 8 Stellungen (8 Position Proun), 1923, watercolour and

gouache over graphite on laid paper, 24.5 × 24.8 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Sam and Ayala Zacks, 1970. Bridgeman Images.

What qualifies the concern for faktura as a paradigmatic feature (differentiating it at the same time from previous concerns for facture in the works of the cubists and futurists in western Europe) is the quasi-​scientific, systematic manner in which the constructivists now pursued their investigation of pictorial and sculptural constructs, as well as the perceptual interaction with the viewer they generate.32 One means by which this engaged Lissitzky’s particular adaptation to constructivism was an obsession with the mathematical paradigm of infinity. Unlike perspectival projections, the axes of axonometric projection do not converge –​theoretically extending to infinity. They do, however, appear to orientate the viewer towards the depicted object despite 143

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Figure  7.6  Theo van Doesburg:  Tesseract with arrows pointing inward, c.1924–​5, Indian ink, red ink and white gouache on transparent paper, 20 × 26.5 cm. Het Nieuwe Instituut, Van Moorsel donation to the Dutch State 1981. The History Collection/​Alamy Stock Photo.

corresponding to no one point of view. Lissitzky utilizes this consistency of angle of orientation, which nevertheless shifts with the viewer position, to imply (rather than ‘represent’) infinity. Lissitzky thus grapples with two unrepresentable mathematical concepts, inaccessible to human perception:  infinity and the representation, in two dimensions, of four-​dimensional space. Later, we shall see how such an attempt informs Lissitzky’s Proun Room.

III Of Lithuanian Jewish origin, Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1890–​1941), later known simply as El Lissitzky, was born in Pochinok, near Smolensk, Russia, to educated middle-​class parents. He grew up in Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk Belarus), where he befriended his fellow student Marc Chagall. Both artists studied with the painter Iurii (Yehuda) Mosseevich Pen, a leading figure in the Russian and Belarusian Jewish Renaissance in art.33 Denied access to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, where institutional anti-​Semitism 144

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Figure 7.7  El Lissitzky: Proun 2C, 1920, oil, paper and metal on panel, 59.5 × 39.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Art Collection 2/​Alamy Stock Photo.

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imposed a quota on Jewish numbers, from 1909 to 1914 Lissitzky studied architectural engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. Returning to Russia at the outset of the First World War, from 1915 to 1916 he continued his architectural and engineering studies in Moscow.34 Despite working in various architectural offices, Lissitzky’s early work mainly focused on illustrating Yiddish children’s books, evolving Chagall-​inspired figurative designs that, nonetheless, from the start integrated text and image, dissolving the boundaries between verbal and visual communication.35 Lissitzky’s relation to the 1917 October revolution is complex. Victor Margolin differentiates Lissitzky from his contemporary, the constructivist Alexander Rodchenko, one of the first artists to directly support the Bolsheviks, taking on ‘various functions within the newly formed Fine Art Department (IZO) of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment’.36 Lissitzky’s own engagement with the revolutionary forces is subject to speculation, not least because a lack of conclusive evidence is compounded by issues emerging from his Jewish identity during this period. Margolin is sceptical about the extent of Lissitzky’s immediate support for the Revolution, citing his engagement with the organization Kultur Lige, founded in Kiev in 1918, which represented ‘a range of Jewish nationalist and socialist tendencies’, supporting ‘the development of a secular Jewish culture using Yiddish’.37 Increasingly, the aims of Kultur Lige conflicted with Evsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party, such that in 1920 the latter ‘took over its presses, cut off its paper supply, and disbanded its central committee’.38 More significant was the capture of Kiev in the summer of 1919 by Anton Denikin, a leading general of the White Army; as Clark notes, It was a time of pogroms. Some say that over 200,000 Jews were done to death in the Ukraine between 1918 and 1921, over 300,000 children orphaned (a grisly context for El Lissitzky’s nursery stories) and over 700,000 Jews made homeless. These figures may be underestimates. It was the worst killing of Jews since the seventeenth century.39 As Clark notes, only against such a horrific background does the imposition of so-​called War Communism –​‘a set of expedients in a time of cold and death’ –​make any sense.40 In 1919 Lissitzky was invited by Chagall to teach architecture and graphics at the Vitebsk Popular Art Institute, where he was joined later that year by Kazimir Malevich (1879–​1935), who was to have such a profound effect upon Lissitzky’s future output. In a fractious transitional period, Malevich took over the directorship from Chagall, initiating the short-​lived collective UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art), which became synonymous with the school, represented by its iconic seal, the black square. This, of course, referred to Malevich’s pre-​revolutionary Black Square, often dated as 1913 but now thought to be painted in 1915 (Figure 7.2). Owned by the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the monochrome painting was first exhibited at the pioneering ‘Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10’ in Petrograd in 1915. Malevich had developed a specific form of painting he termed suprematism, launched in his 1915 manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. After visiting Paris in 1912, his 146

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painting rapidly transformed from overt cubist and futurist influences  –​integrating figurative elements, typography and collage  –​towards on the one hand a dynamic abstract geometry liberated from the ‘dead weight of the real world’ (in the double sense of the pull of gravity and of reference to real things) and on the other a kind of painted nihilism manifest by Black Square, as a kind of ‘icon’ (or ‘non-​icon’). At the ‘0.10’ exhibition, the Black Square was placed in the same position as a traditional Russian Orthodox icon in the top corner of the space –​a full stop, therefore, both to orthodox religion and the history of painting. These two artistic tendencies overlap, as is made clear by the installation shot of ‘0.10’. As Clark notes, the former tendency is manifest by certain statements: ‘ “We can only be aware of space”, says Malevich at one point, “if we break away from the earth, if the fulcrum disappears”.’41 This dynamic is evident in works such as Supremus no. 58 (1916; Figure 7.8), owned by the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg. At the same time, the square marks the reduction of composition to painted sign, albeit one that on close inspection reveals its materiality. As Clark states, ‘What is uncanny about Malevich … is the coexistence of the more complex “composed” or “dynamic” Suprematist works with the icons of the new non-​being; and the fact that the orderliness of the multi-​element paintings does register as part of –​necessary to –​the new picture of the world.’42 With Malevich’s mentoring, Lissitzky started to develop his own version of non-​ objective abstract art and to design propaganda posters, aligning himself more straightforwardly with the aims of ‘War Communism’ as instigated by the Bolsheviks. Their visual approach, with minimal use of text, was aimed at a population with high rates of illiteracy, particularly in rural areas. A  photograph exists of a lost propaganda board, based on an earlier Prouns (The Town), placed in front of the entrance to a factory in Vitebsk in 1919–​20, with the slogan ‘The Factory Workbenches Await You’.43 Other examples include the famous lithographic poster design Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, which probably dates to the summer of 1920. Bois maintains (after Jean-​François Lyotard) that with Beat the Whites Lissitzky forecloses mechanisms of identification typical of socialist realism:  ‘The deconstruction of the oriented space of writing by that of the figure, and vice versa, physically disorients the spectator, and forces him or her into a relationship with the image that is no longer passive.’44 If the UNOVIS experiment at Vitebsk generated some of Lissitzky’s best work, it was also short lived, not least because of disagreements between Chagall and Maleivich. Returning to Moscow in 1921 to teach architecture at the newly established VKhUTEMAS, Nancy Perloff writes: This was a period of great artistic ferment and debate in Moscow. Lissitzky’s arrival coincided with the emergence of the radical First Working Group of Constructivists … which advocated a utilitarian and socialist platform of art for industry. In September 1921, at INKhUK … Lissitzky put forward his own program in an important lecture, outlining the connections between suprematist painting and construction in his Proun works.45 147

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Figure 7.8  Kazimir Malevich: Supremus no. 58, 1916, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 70.5 cm. State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg. Mariano Garcia/​Alamy Stock Photo.

These constructivists included Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, who in their radical rejection of the ‘composition’ of the artwork as a ‘sanctified’ entity proposed the problem of construction:  an art transformed into production, of activity rather than reflective contemplation, fusing ideological and utilitarian imperatives geared to the needs of the postrevolutionary order. While in 1925 Malevich also taught at VKhUTEMAS in the art faculty, he was the subject of fierce criticism as suprematism and constructivism vied for influence within the school. 148

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The teaching at VKhUTEMAS was delivered via loose groupings of free workshops, focused around professional disciplines, with sessions open to the public. In terms of architecture, Lissitzky argued that the basic elements of Russian architecture were tied to the social revolution of October 1917, rather than the technological revolution characterizing the most progressive architecture in Western Europe and America.46 For Lissitzky, this required different criteria:  ‘The whole field of architecture has now become a problem … faced by a country exhausted by war and hunger and tightly sealed off from the rest of the world.’47 But despite the primacy of economic factors and the impossibility of any substantial building in the early 1920s, for Lissitzky the synthesis ‘between utilitarian tasks and architectural concepts of space’ was needed to address the new interrelationships between the arts that schools such as VKhUTEMAS provided. We can see this as an attempt to unify the concerns of Lissitzky’s particular version of suprematism with the anti-​art and design-​oriented approach of the constructivists, and Lissitzky’s multidisciplinary practice (including architecture, painting, print and photography, along with stage, exhibition and graphic design) placed him in a key position to attempt to unite the two factions –​at least in terms of the school’s international profile. In late 1921 he travelled to Berlin, ostensibly to play the role of cultural ambassador for the communist regime in Weimar Germany. Here, in 1922 he founded and designed a periodical Veshch’/​Gegenstand/​Objet with the Russian writer Il’ia Ehrenburg, the two editions of which included an editorial announcing a new internationalism, seeking to construct a bridge between Russia art and the most advanced avant-​garde art of the West. As Christina Lodder has argued, Lissitzky –​despite his close connections to UNOVIS and suprematism –​therefore plays a crucial role in the export of constructivism: ‘The term itself, and many of the attitudes with which it was associated, quickly came to be adopted and elaborated by artists in Western Europe. Yet, as it moved across geographical and ideological boundaries, the notion of constructivism underwent subtle but fundamental changes.’48 Importantly, Lissitzky and Ehrenburg used Veshch’/​ Gegenstand/​Objet as a platform not only to connect with the most progressive Western movements in architecture and design (with contributions by the likes of Le Corbusier and Theo van Doesburg) but to affirm a continuing role for art, with an implicit criticism of the Moscow constructivists’ manifesto of death to art: ‘we have nothing in common with those … painters who use painting as a means of propaganda for the abandonment of painting. Primitive utilitarianism is far from being our goal’.49 Nonetheless, during his time in Germany Lissitzky continued to paint Prouns, while the Proun Room represents his most overt attempt to reconcile the UNOVIS experiment with constructivism, via his idiosyncratic interpretation of planar suprematism.

IV El Lissitzky’s first painted Prouns, such as the Museo Nacional Thyssen-​Bornemisza’s Proun 1C (1919/​20; Plate 7), are tangible evidence of the profound effect of Malevich on Lissitzky’s output –​and the consequent waning of Chagall’s long-​standing influence. 149

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Indeed, rather than Lissitzky’s Prouns constituting a misinterpretation of Malevich, as Clark suggests, an example such as Proun 1C might be said to merge the two tendencies Clark identifies in Malevich’s work, translating the latter’s static ‘iconic’ forms through oblique projections that  –​while never losing a sense of a fulcrum in the sense Clark applies to Malevich  –​float forms against an ambiguous white background which, in its painted materiality, both affirms and negates the painting’s support. This process of transformation into a three-​ dimensional suprematism is even more evident in Lissitzky’s preparatory drawings, which frequently retain projection lines. Certainly, such three-​dimensional projections have no place within Malevich’s paintings; unlike his monumental plaster architectons of the mid-​1920s, Malevich rarely represents implied volume within his two-​dimensional work. While no doubt the use of axonometry reflects Lissitzky’s architectural training in Germany, it is the ambiguity of spatial reference on which Lissitzky insists  –​an ambiguity implicit to the wireframe constructional grid underlying axonometric construction. This ambiguity is manifest in two ways:  as a potential for rotation, as evident in ‘Proun’ 8 Stellungen (the final realized painting in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), and in terms of depth, as manifest by Proun 2C (Figure 7.7). In his 1925 essay ‘A. and Pangeometry’ (where ‘A’ stands for Art), Lissitzky describes something of the mathematical-​inspired process of transformation of suprematist form, which unlike the ecstatic stacking of Malevich’s Supremus no. 58 (Figure 7.8) projects forms into an inherently ambiguous depth. Lissitzky’s essay is the starting point for Bois’s own catalogue essay, ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’, which starts with a key quotation from Lissitzky’s text, illustrated with a simple diagram (Figure 7.9): Suprematism has advanced the ultimate tip of the visual pyramid of perspective to infinity. It has broken through the ‘blue lampshade of the firmament’. For the colour of space, it has taken not the single blue ray of the spectrum, but the whole unity –​ the white. Suprematist space may be formed not only forward from the plane but also backward in depth. If we indicate the flat surface of the picture as 0, we can describe the direction in depth by –​(negative) and the forward direction by

Figure 7.9  Diagram from El Lissitzky, ‘A. and Pangeometry’ Europa Almanach: Painting, Literature,

Music, Architecture, Sculpture, Stage, Film, Fashion, and Containing Some Residual Observations of No Less Importance, ed. C.  Einstein and P.  Westheim (Potsdam:  Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1925), as redrawn by the author. 150

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+ (positive) or the other way round. We see that Suprematism has swept away from the plane the illusions of three-​dimensional space, and has created the ultimate illusion of irrational space, with its infinite extensibility into the background and foreground.50 There is good reason that Bois’s article should start with this particular quotation, and like Bois, we need to unpick some of its assumptions. First, such a generic use of ‘Suprematism’ is misleading, in that, as Bois notes, such a description does not match Malevich’s ‘planimetric’ paintings, which do not employ ‘any kind of projection for depicting the third dimension of space’.51 Lissitzky is clearly describing his own system, employing what was once termed by sixteenth-​ century engineers as cavalière perspective, which Bois characterizes under the form of orthographic projection known as axonometry, where solids are represented without foreshortening. It was a system also adopted by van Doesburg, and Bois notes how the two artists/​architects (among others) can be credited for its widespread adoption as a form of projection with particular aesthetic (and theoretical) potentialities by modernist architects. Crucially, it was a system where the scale of the object does not depend upon its depicted position in space along any of its axes, such that orthogonal objects can be measured however far ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ (or ‘upward/​downward’) the depicted object might be. Secondly, Lissitzky conceives ‘the various modes of representation of space in art as related by a kind of negative engendering, each one evolving from and superseding the precedent, in the manner of the Hegelian dialectics’.52 Here, he borrows a metaphor borrowed from the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler, whose Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) asserts that conceptions of space, central to all cultures, involve a specific ‘mathematical style’.53 Bois writes, ‘This metaphor is that of mathematics, or rather, of the numeration systems of various epochs and civilizations, as analogous in some ways to the artistic achievements of those specific eras.’54 It is a metaphor that underpins Lissitzky’s account of the conceptions of the space of art in relation to the mathematics each culture evolved. For Lissitzky, plastic form, ‘like mathematics –​begins with counting. Its space is made up of physical, two-​dimensional, flat surfaces. Its rhythm, the elementary harmony of the natural numerical series 1, 2, 3, 4…’.55 In the art of Antiquity, this starts to presume space, which Lissitzky illustrates with a diagram of overlapping cows, each occluding part of the animal on which it is overlaid, giving ‘a mathematical series 1, 1½, 2, 2½ …’.56 This numerical progression is then to be contrasted with perspective space, which rather ‘resembles a geometric series, and objects are perceived according to the relationship 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32…’.57 Lissitzky states, Perspective representation of space is based on a rigid three-​dimensional view of the world based on the laws of Euclidean geometry. The world is put into a cubic box and transformed within the picture plane into something resembling a pyramidal form. (During the Renaissance one-​point perspective was most 151

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commonly used and highly developed, the cube being represented by placing it parallel to our face. This is a façade view of the world, where depth becomes a stage viewed statically, which is why at that time perspective and stage design had so much in common.) Here, the apex of the visual cone has its location in our eye, i.e., in front of the object, or is projected to the horizon, i.e., behind the object. The former approach has been taken by the East, the latter by the West.58 Putting to one side Lissitzky’s limited characterization of the historic use of perspectival representation, perspective thus ‘limits space; it has made it finite, closed’.59 As such, perspective does not deal with an infinite space, precisely because its orthogonal lines recede to a single point, thus closing space off. By contrast, suprematism, in its radical critique of perspectival space, represents the first manifestation of an expansion in the ‘body of numbers’ of art, representing an expression of the possibilities afforded the new non-​Euclidean geometries developed by the likes of the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. Axonometry, for Lissitzky (if not Malevich), fulfils this purpose, and in the process revealing what he regards as a major contradiction within perspectival representation; as Bois states, [I]‌ n the system of monocular perspective, based on Euclid’s geometry, the vanishing point is the representation of the infinite, of the non-​existing point at which parallels meet. But if the infinite is represented, if the meeting of parallels is actually portrayed for our human perception, how could one state that they never meet in the phenomenal world axiomatized by Euclid? The fraud of perspective, for Lissitzky, is that while it is constructed as an analogon to human perception, it pretends to give us an equivalent of the infinite and continuous extension of space through the receding patterns of the foreshortened lines. But this is impossible: the infinite is inaccessible to human perception, and cannot be apprehended via a system grounded on the subjectivity of human vision.60 For Lissitzky, perspective petrifies the beholder by fixing her to a single point of view, in such a way that even the phenomenal aspect of distance objects appearing bluish establishes the perspectival system as one bound to earth where blue ‘is the color of distance, which is antithetic to the notion of infinity in so far as it presupposes a point of view and an object’.61 It is thus a subjective perceptual mode. By contrast, as Bois summarizes, Only a fully abstract, conceptual system of the representation of space, a system which would claim its independence from human vision, could lead us to such an apprehension: it would not try to let us see the infinite, for that is impossible, but grasp it. This is what axonometry achieves, for Lissitzky, via the virtual extensibility of receding lines forward or backward:  from the picture surface, it sets forth the virtual possibility of the negative infinity (in depth) and of positive infinity (towards beyond us).62

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Key for Lissitzky here is the role played by the numeral zero, which he traces back to its Indian roots and reflects upon its contemporary theorization within mathematics. As a ‘real number’, zero is directly equated by Lissitzky with Malevich’s black square, the zero degree of painting: ‘And only now, in the twentieth century, has the ☐ been recognized as a plastic quality, i.e. the 0 of the total body of A [i.e. art]. This fully color-​saturated ☐ on a white background has begotten a new conception of space.’63 It is the positional possibilities of its Sanskrit origins that Lissitzky equates with suprematism, where the stable zero of the picture-​plane is contrasted with the uncertainty of distance of blocks of colour of different intensity: ‘New optical experience has taught us that two surfaces of different intensity must be conceived as having a varying distance relationship between them, even though they may lie in the same plane.’64 And, importantly, these coloured planes might equally be conceived as being in front of as well as behind the picture surface. As Bois summarizes, We then come to the third interpretation of the zero, and, finally, to the diagram of the absolute ‘body of numbers’, the continuum of numbers and the unbroken line. Reading from left to right, it proceeds from the notation of minus infinity, to negative numbers, then to the zero, to positive numbers, and finally to the notation of plus infinity.65 For Lissitzky, this therefore opens up a new theoretical model for revolutionary art. Painting had only dealt with depth, reduced to the optical and to a subjectivity confined to a fixed point of view. The Proun is therefore an ‘index of the world to come’; as Bois states, ‘If the minus infinity refers to the absence of human point of view in axonometry, the plus infinity refers to the infinite potentiality of the material culture which has to be shaped once painting (the zero) has been overcome.’66 And for Lissitzky, through the Proun we finally come to architecture, and ‘real’ space.

V How is such a radical reversibility manifest within the three-​dimensional context of the Proun Room? Lissitzky’s Proun Room might legitimately be seen as an attempt to transfer ongoing concerns with reversibility to a cubic space in which the beholder is placed at the centre, as an ambulatory presence. While axonometry plays no role here, the room utilizes the actual bodily orientation of the beholder, as indexed to a frame of reference given by the installation, as an analogue for the kind of rotation and spatial uncertainty the two-​dimensional Prouns imply. Crucially, this exploits oblique viewpoints that destabilize the beholder as she moves in the prescribed anticlockwise direction through the space, terminating at the Malevich-​inspired black square immediately to the right of the entrance/​exit door (grounding the whole experience while acknowledging Lissitzky’s intellectual debt).

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In an article documenting the work, published in G1 in 1923, Lissitzky describes space thus: ‘That which is not looked at through a keyhole, nor through an open door. Space does not exist for the eye only: it is not a picture; one wants to live in it.’67 He continues: Given were the six surfaces (floor, four walls, ceiling); they are to be designed, but, mind you, not as a living room, for there is an exhibition going on. In an exhibition people keep walking all around. Thus, space has to be organized in such a way as to impel everyone to perambulate in it. … The space (as exhibition space) was designed by using elementary forms and materials:  line, surface and rod, cube sphere, black, white, grey, and wood; in addition, surfaces were applied flat to the walls (color), and other surfaces were placed at right angles to the walls (wood). The two reliefs on the walls provide the theme and focus for all the wall surfaces. (The cube on the left wall is juxtaposed to the sphere on the front wall and, in turn, is placed in juxtaposition to the rod on the right wall.)68 While this is a work that engages the body in terms of orientation, it also feels curiously devoid of scale. While one is aware of the physical dimensions of the room, and the proximity of the wall surfaces, the painted and material elements of the design float free of the supporting architecture, suspended within an implied virtual realm. This disjuncture is registered by Lissitzky when he feels obliged to clarify that he is talking about the ‘exhibition space’ rather than the paradigmatic mathematical space of infinity. And the beholder is very aware that there is a tension between virtual and real, such that the two coalesce –​particularly around the material elements –​and diverge. No longer dependent upon axonometry, the painted blocks of black or grey are all rectangular rather than shown as oblique projections. However, there is an equivalent, as Difford notes, in that ‘the viewpoint of the observer sets these forms on end and twists them such that it is no longer readily apparent whether their visual form is the product of their actual shape or the perspectival distortion of the view’.69 And while the supporting wall –​the white space of suprematism –​cannot but assert itself as a factor of our perception of the real cubic space, this registering of the beholder’s movement is heightened by the material elements set off the wall, such that The parallax movement of one panel against another creates a dynamic image, and defines the boundaries of an altogether different form. As the observer moves to the right, so the position of a panel relative to the wall appears to move to the left. Black rectangles painted on the walls act like markers, against which relative positions may be measured; for every movement in the observer there would seem to be an opposite movement in this antithetic space. This then is a space created from the relation of objects and because its form is directly linked to the movement of the observer, it therefore exists, coincident with the space of the room, as if superimposed upon the existing walls yet intimately linked to their arrangement.70

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If the reversibility of the space of axonometry is dependent upon what Wittgenstein refers to as a seeing-​as, that is, ‘half visual experience, half thought’,71 then the Proun Room, by contrast, exploits forms in themselves subject to perspective distortion. This effect is apparent through not only rotation but the changing perspective as one moves backwards and forwards. This is not a depiction of movement, as with the Italian Futurists; rather, it requires the beholder to circumambulate the space (preferably in an anticlockwise direction according to Lissitzky), thus activating the work’s innate kinetic potential, choreographing our movement through space and encouraging us to constantly alter our angles of vision relative to the material elements. Difford claims that in its allusion ‘to the imaginary experience of other geometries’, this provides an illusion of four-​dimensionality ‘in the same way that an axonometric of a cube is an illusion of three-​dimensionality’.72 But its utopic ambitions, manifest in a ‘conceptual eclecticism’, might equally be seen, as Éva Forgács suggests, as the result of Lissitzky’s ‘desire to knit together every important feature of every progressive art trend of his time’.73 Indeed, as Forgács notes, ‘Proun Room is one of the last artworks made in the quest of a utopian totality, although it dates from a moment when the prospect of such a utopian society had already dimmed’.74 And while it might be said to be still bound by conventions of an expanded painting (a hybrid of painting and sculpture), it constitutes an extraordinary attempt to activate the space of the beholder through its very spatial uncertainties.

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CHAPTER 8 VIRTUAL SPACE AND THE ‘LITERAL’ BEHOLDER

Anthony Caro, Prairie (1967) Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (1953)

I In the last chapter, we saw how El Lissitzky utilized axonometry in order to displace the viewer from the ‘privileged’ position implied by perspectival representation –​plunging the beholder into a perceptual space that, in its radical reversibility, refuses to cohere. While I have sought to question the ahistorical association of Renaissance perspective with Cartesian disembodiment, Lissitzky’s use of oblique projections opened up a new ambulatory relation with the beholder, which in his Proun Room of 1923 is applied to three-​dimensional space. If this proto-​installation suggests a move towards the dissolution of distinctions between painting and sculpture, the next two chapters register the persistence of twentieth-​century medium specificity; this is evidenced by the works of Anthony Caro and Agnes Martin, artists who maintain an intense engagement with the materiality of, respectively, sculpture and painting. Nevertheless, the two works I will consider, far from asserting the kind of autonomy from the beholder associated with Fried and Greenberg, construct a phenomenal encounter that engages differentiated viewing distances/​positions: where the virtual and real are juxtaposed in an inherently problematic –​though transformative –​manner. By now, the reader will be familiar with my inclusion, in a book on situated art, of works that, while not site-​specific, engage the beholder in her own space: that is, the space of the gallery or room which the work occupies. The inclusion of Caro’s Prairie (1967; Figure 8.1), however, might seem doubly odd. Not only is this a sculpture conceived independently of any particular site, but it is a work by a sculptor associated with the kind of self-​sufficient relational art requiring no bridge to the beholder’s space; indeed, such a claim to autonomy is made by supporters and distractors of Caro’s oeuvre. And yet engage the beholder in her own space, and in her own body, is precisely what Prairie does. As such, I will focus on tensions arising from the means by which Prairie juxtaposes the virtual and real. Caro’s work of the mid-​1960s is characterized not by the evocation of bodily gesture (something his works from the 1970s increasingly do), but rather by constructing a tension between the ‘illusory’ virtual space of the sculpture and the actual space of the beholder. The virtual thus constitutes an abstraction from the contingencies and complexities of the real, a ‘virtual kinetic volume’ which nonetheless organizes its surrounding space.

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Figure 8.1  Anthony Caro: Prairie, 1967, steel, painted matt yellow, 96.5 × 582 × 320 cm. © Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Ltd. Photo: John Goldblatt.

Such a notion is taken from American philosopher Susanne K. Langer’s Feeling and Form, published in 1953. Langer conceives of such a kinetic volume as an organizing of the kinetic possibilities of sculpture, whereby –​with strong echoes of Merleau-​Ponty –​ the immediate ‘environment derives all proportions and relations from it, as the actual environment does from one’s self ’.1 However, I will argue that with Caro’s work from this formative period there is a superimposition of this organizing potential onto the beholder’s own kinetic potential –​and relation with ground as support –​in such a way as to instigate a tension whereby these kinetic potentials (of work and beholder) overlap but refuse to cohere. I refer to this as a miscalibration, in that the two do not (quite) align. In proposing a phenomenological account of Caro’s work from the 1960s informed by Langer’s theory of virtual space, I not only differentiate my position from Fried’s championing of Caro’s sculpture in ‘Art and Objecthood’ –​at the expense of the so-​called ‘literalists’ –​but seek to re-​evaluate the backlash from a generation of minimalist and conceptual artists who uncritically take Fried’s account of Caro’s autonomous art as verbatim.

II Despite its size (96.5 × 582 × 320 cm), and the logistics of installing and dismantling such a substantial painted steel structure, Prairie is a work that has crossed the Atlantic 158

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for shows in Europe and the United States, as well as travelling to Brazil and Japan.2 It is a work that has site presence (a term I use pointedly), whether encountered indoors (Caro’s preference) or, on rare occasions, outdoors: the latter which was the case when Prairie was installed in the Trajan Markets, Rome, in 1992.3 Significantly, Caro argued that Prairie was best experienced from close up, in such a way that it restricted the beholder from obtaining a distanced view. As William Rubin puts it, It is, in part, the maintenance of a certain proximity between the work and the viewer, a proximity less intimate than Caro’s own in the making of it –​and yet based on that –​which leads him to prefer indoor settings for his sculptures, despite their frequent large size. Caro doesn’t want his worked viewed from distances that reduce it to a small segment of the visual field, as may be the case outdoors. On the other hand, he is not an intimist. Nothing in the configuration or facture of the work invites savoring its parts and surfaces from very close up. Rejecting the notion of ‘environmental sculpture’, Caro does not wish the viewer to enter the spaces articulated by the extensions of his pieces; even less does he wish to elicit any desire to touch them. He wants the experience to be totally optical.4 Now, I will have cause to question this claim that the experience is entirely ‘optical’ –​a claim that divulges Rubin’s debt to Greenberg at a time when Rubin held the post of director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Nonetheless, Prairie emerges out of a discrete phase in Caro’s career where Greenberg’s influence is paramount. Despite its brevity, this creative period witnesses not only his most important sculpture but a body of work that addresses issues of real philosophical substance. As such, we might regard Prairie as the apotheosis of modernist sculpture; certainly, it would be difficult to find a more fitting example of what Greenberg termed ‘the new sculpture’ with its modernist ‘reduction’ conceived as a constructed assemblage.5 Prairie was first exhibited in 1967 in the ‘Recent Sculpture’ exhibition at Kasmin Gallery, at 118 New Bond Street in London, in a space allocated to two works by Caro, the other being Deep Body Blue (1967). John Kasmin was a prominent supporter of American colour field painters, but it was largely through the writing of the young American critic Fried, who first met the older Caro when just 22 in London in the autumn of 1961, that Caro was introduced to a wider American audience.6 This body of writing included the enthusiastic review of the exhibition in the February 1968 issue of Artforum, where Prairie was given the distinction of being selected for the front cover of the influential magazine, founded in 1962.7 Fried recounts how he had been invited to view Caro’s sculpture when the pair met in London. Upon arriving at the courtyard to Caro’s Hampstead house, the garage of which served as his studio, Fried encountered two of Caro’s early steel pieces, Midday (1960) and Sculpture Seven (1961) (Figures 8.2 and 8.3): I was alone with these for several minutes before Caro came out of the house. But that was long enough to experience the unshakable conviction that they were 159

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Figure 8.2  Anthony Caro: Midday, 1960, steel, painted yellow, 240 × 96.5 × 366 cm. © Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Ltd. Photo: John Riddy.

two of the most original and powerful sculptures I had ever seen, that Midday in particular was nothing less than a masterpiece, and that the aggressive character in the restaurant –​whom I had never heard of –​was a great sculptor.8 This epiphany anticipated the central role Caro’s work was to play in the evolution of Fried’s own ideas about art. Throughout the 1960s, Fried championed Caro’s work and was invited to write the introduction for the exhibition of Caro’s abstract sculptures at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1963  –​an essay that first identified Caro’s art as being intrinsically about syntax, that is, the internal relation of its discrete parts (an interpretation taken up by Greenberg).9 And, of course, Caro’s work –​which inspired Fried’s theory of relational syntax, later given a Wittgensteinian bent –​was destined to play a prominent role in Fried’s 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’: an unambiguous attack on the ‘literalist’ attitude (the theatrical address to the spectator as a literal presence) seen as underpinning the enterprise that has become known as minimalism.10 In the minds of many progressive artists Caro’s work thus became permanently tainted by its association with Fried’s attack on minimalism, to the extent that it was seen as synonymous with Fried’s so-​called antitheatricality cause. This situation was not helped by a tendency, acknowledged even by his admirers, for Caro’s later work to adopt an 160

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Figure 8.3  Anthony Caro: Sculpture Seven, 1961, steel, painted green, blue and brown, 178 × 537 × 105.5 cm. B0825. © Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Ltd. Photo: Jonty Wilde.

overt pictorialism. And yet works such as Prairie are rightly considered revolutionary in the way they transform the work/​beholder relation –​albeit emanating from an artist who was, in the words of Rubin, a ‘reluctant revolutionary’.11 A number of points emerge from the above. Fried’s confrontational essay is almost always cited in relation to its negative critique of ‘literalist’ art. Its account of modernist sculpture –​focusing almost exclusively on work by Caro –​is rarely scrutinized, beyond paying lip service to the idea of an art of internal relations. By seeking to overturn the negative evaluation of minimalism, contemporaneous challenges to Fried’s position took, at face value, not only Fried’s designation of minimalist work as theatrical12 but also his claim that Caro’s work is, indeed, ‘autonomous’ of the beholder. But how is such autonomy to be understood in relation to Caro’s work from the 1960s? After all, Caro’s removal of his sculpture from the plinth –​still a feature of even the foremost modernist American sculptor David Smith’s 1950s work –​has implications for how such autonomy might be understood. The radicalness of such a move was overshadowed by the onslaught of more fundamental challenges in the 1960s to conventional media-​based definitions of the work of art: not only challenges represented by minimalism and conceptual art but also (as we shall see) performance, site-​located and intermedia art. Caro’s breakthrough in generating an ‘abstract’ sculpture distinguished by its ‘radical unlikeness to nature’13 came too late to be recognized as such, unlike equivalent breakthroughs in painting made in the late 1940s to the early 1950s. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate the 161

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ontological significance of Caro’s literal dislodging of sculpture from its pedestal into the space of the beholder. In this chapter, I want to reframe Fried’s characterization of Caro’s art as autonomous. In so doing, I will confront the presumed aesthetic unity upon which such autonomy is founded. I want to claim that heteronomous factors intrude into autonomous aesthetic judgement; moreover, they do so in ways that utilize indeterminacies integral to how the encounter is structured. I believe these extra-​aesthetic factors include the prepositional or locative aspects of Caro’s 1960s sculpture. This will involve confronting the terms of Fried’s syntactic appeal to Wittgenstein (a philosopher cited by both critics and supporters of conceptual and so-​called postconceptual art), where Fried removes meaning from situation. In so doing, I  will draw upon a book that  –​in contrast to the ubiquity of Fried’s essay –​is little known: Langer’s aforementioned Feeling and Form. I will focus on two chapters that engage sculpture, entitled ‘Virtual Space’ and ‘The Modes of Virtual Space’.14 Given the status of Langer as the first woman professionally recognized as a philosopher in the United States, it is surprising (and, depressingly, not) that her work has received such little critical attention in the visual or plastic arts; this is doubly so in that her concerns, which draw upon both Wittgenstein and the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, particularly his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–​1929), cross analytic and continental schools of philosophy.15 As we shall see, Langer’s anthropological approach to symbolization, and her notion of the virtual, has strong echoes in Iser’s work (considered in Chapter 10). Importantly, both emphasize the embeddedness of the constantly evolving processes of the symbolic transformation of experience. And it is how the virtual and real enmesh that will inform the discussion of Caro’s Prairie.

III Born in 1924 (d. 2013), Caro’s Prairie is the work of someone already in his early forties. In the 1950s Caro had been an assistant to Henry Moore, and his early work adopted many of Moore’s working methods. By 1960 Caro had begun working in steel, famously with his experimental welded steel piece Twenty-​four Hours (purchased by Greenberg), an insistently frontal work remembered more for its significance in terms of Caro’s development than its intrinsic qualities as a piece of sculpture. This major shift in practice, away from the modelling and casting in bronze of figurative works such as Man Holding His Foot (1954), followed an extended visit to the United Sates in 1959 at Greenberg’s instigation after the two had met in London. In the States, Caro encountered the work of established sculptor David Smith and befriended the painters Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. As Rosalind Krauss notes, ‘The speed and decisiveness with which Caro grasped the formal meaning of Smith’s sculpture seems to have depended on the younger man’s own experience of discontinuity which he had been trying to express through more traditional plastic means.’16 Caro returned to London determined to erase figurative references; not only did he begin to work with new materials –​steel and aluminium –​but he also eradicated (at least for an extended period) the vestiges of 162

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anthropomorphism still found in Smith’s totemic work such as his Cubi series. Caro did this through the elimination of the plinth, combined with a corresponding emphasis on horizontality and the relation with the supporting ground –​a conscious move away from Smith’s verticality. As Krauss notes, In the sculptures that followed Twenty-​four Hours, Caro began to discover areas where his sensibility diverged from Smith’s. He began to sense, for example, that while Smith’s art established or maintained an enforced distance between viewer and sculpture, a distance whose point depended on the felt relationship between the sculpture and the human form (the sculpture being experienced as something like a surrogate for the human body), his own feelings did not demand that totemic presence.17 If in Smith’s work the sculpture is a surrogate for the body, about which the beholder circumnavigates and, often overshadowed, looks up, Caro’s 1960s sculpture enacts a much stronger sense of lateral kinetic potential, obliging the beholder to look down in such a way that the ground on which we walk is brought into the bodily engagement with the work. Fried claimed Midday (Figure 8.2) to be the stronger of the two works he had seen on his visit to Caro’s studio. And yet it is Sculpture Seven (Figure 8.3) that exemplifies a more fundamental shift. Less gestural than Midday, it is experienced not so much as a ‘construction’ as a stacked pile of different sized ‘I’ and ‘T’ steel sections (literally cut-​ offs) painted green, blue and brown (rather than the unifying yellow of Midday). Indeed, such is the informality of the assemblage that the painting of the steel was perhaps deemed necessary not only to protect the work (as Caro claims) but to ensure its status as sculpture. Sculpture Seven is arguably more redolent of Fried’s notion of syntax, in that it is recognizably comprised of disparate pieces, both alike and unalike, fused together into a single entity, but in such a way as each section retains its independence (and can be discerned as such). By contrast, Midday seems self-​consciously composed and figural. These two early steel works present two contrary tendencies apparent in Caro’s 1960s work right from the start:  one towards something dangerously approaching Fried’s ‘theatricality’, and the other towards composition, gesture and image (the anthropocentric pictorial mode that figures such as Donald Judd and Robert Smithson would dismiss in the factional context of the late 1960s and 1970s). The former comprised stacked elements, visually reliant on gravity (such that the one diagonal steel that cantilevers beyond its support introduces a precariousness despite the discreet bolting together of the elements); the latter is more overtly ‘constructed’, with prominent bolts connecting the separate sections, the overall form reminiscent of a reclining figure (reminiscent of Moore) despite its abstraction. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that Fried would favour Midday, with its more overtly gestural upright pieces, in his assessment. While Caro would later pursue the more image-​or pictorial-​based mode, the floor-​ based pieces of the 1960s are, I  believe, extraordinary in enacting a tension between theatrical and antitheatrical modes, directly acknowledging the presence of the 163

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beholder –​a tension that Caro thereafter largely abandons, as gesture increasingly comes to dominate Caro’s production. The work made at Bennington College, as part of his 1963–​64 residency, exemplifies this strand of Caro’s work. Various commentators have noted this. In the catalogue that accompanied the 1975–​76 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Rubin states that ‘Perhaps the proximity of Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, with whom he spent a good deal of time during his Bennington stay, reinforced Caro’s instinct for economy. In any event, an emphatic spareness marks the series of sculptures executed that winter in an abandoned garage where he was able to set up a welding studio.’18 Noland’s work, such as the concentric circle paintings (or targets) which Twenty-​four Hours had explicitly referenced, contrasted with Caro’s stronger asymmetry. Rubin notes that ‘while Caro’s configurations were arrived at improvisationally, the symmetry of Noland’s was both a priori and absolute. The three-​ dimensional counterpart of Noland’s symmetry, like that of the early work of Stella, is rather to be found in Minimal sculpture, which shares with such painting an instantaneous givenness wholly alien to Caro’s compositions’.19 It is perhaps not surprising that Caro’s work, under Noland’s influence, would therefore approach minimalism more strongly than at any other time in his career. Caro himself noted, ‘When I  started working I remember Ken saying to me, “Don’t do what you did before, in the last three years. Make a series, work in a series, because you get through more and you can develop ideas and you don’t need to put it all into one thing”.’20 While for some time Caro resisted this advice, it was a way of working that arguably generated his best work. Unsurprisingly, this shift in Caro’s practice was also noted at the time by Greenberg (always an astute critic), who states, Five of the seven pieces he made in this country during 1963–​64 (while teaching at Bennington College) show a marked change of manner in which lightness and regularity override nearly everything else. Relationships become almost altogether rectangular and boxlike, and there is a plain, emphasized symmetry. This forthright symmetry has a starling effect in so far as it suggests a syntactic massiveness, so to speak, that takes over the work of the literal massiveness of heavy steel in Caro’s English-​made sculpture. Caro’s American pieces are for the most part smaller and made of much lighter and thinner steel, but the foursquare squatness that is imposed on them by their rectangular symmetry makes them less fragile than one would expect. The spectacular inner and outer play of Caro’s English-​made sculpture is missing, but the effect is almost as new intrinsically.21 I would argue that all seven of Caro’s Bennington works adopt such a way of working. And one might go further; it is undoubtedly the case that this phase comes closest to the kind of serialism prevalent in minimalism, not only in terms of successive works repeating themes but in terms of duplicated elements within the same composition. Flats (1964; Figure 8.4), which has received little critical comment, exemplifies this dynamic, with its repeated geometry and notable absence of gesture. The work comprises just two repeated elements: two forms each made from two rotated pre-​folded ‘Z’-​shaped steel 164

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Figure 8.4  Anthony Caro: Flats, 1964, steel, painted red and blue, 95.5 × 231.5 × 305 cm. © Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Ltd. Photo: John Riddy.

sections welded together along one edge –​replicated as a single element in other works from 1964, such as Titan, Sunshine and First National –​and three thin ‘L’-​shaped angled sections (painted blue), which connect and stabilize the folded sheet steel elements. Flats is strongly reminiscent of the kind of rotational logic manifest by El Lissitzky’s Prouns, some of which likewise employ folded ‘Z’-​shaped elements –​such as Proun GK (c. 1922–​ 3), in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In perhaps the simplest work from Caro’s series, Pulse (1964), two of these same basic ‘Z’-​shaped forms are tilted and joined at just two corners, connected by the same angle section used in Flats such that the whole work balances on just four points that lightly touch the ground. Caro’s ‘loosening up’ generated an extraordinary playful set of works distinguished not only by their lightness but also by the way the ground (and gravity) takes on an unprecedented role for Caro as a fully integrated element. Three of the Bennington works, plus two made in London, were included in Caro’s first New  York show at the André Emmerich Gallery, which opened in December 1964. In a somewhat ambivalent review, Judd writes, ‘this is a good show –​but I don’t agree with the further belief that his work involves a great change in sculpture’.22 And, of course, Judd is right, in the sense that Caro’s work represents a culmination of the 165

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modernist ‘reduction’ of sculpture rather than a fundamental challenge to sculpture as such. Nevertheless, Caro’s work did constitute a significant challenge to sculpture’s received ontological status. Although constructed back in the courtyard to his London home studio, Prairie might be seen as the culmination of this body of work and is inconceivable without Caro’s American episode. Painted a matt yellow ochre (after first being painted blue, ‘which was all wrong’),23 Fried, in his customary precise manner, describes Prairie thus: Prairie, consists of four long poles of aluminum [in fact, steel] tubing suspended parallel to one another about eleven inches above a sheet of corrugated metal –​ more exactly, a flat sheet with four channel-​like depressions in it –​which runs north-​south to the poles’ east-​west and is itself suspended about twenty-​one inches above the ground. If we approach Prairie from either end of that sheet, the physical means by which these suspensions are accomplished are not apparent; but as we move around the sculpture it becomes clear that the sheet is held up by two sharply bent pieces of metal plate, one on each side, which spring out and down from the underside of the sheet until they touch the ground, whereupon they angle upward and outward until they reach the height of the poles, which they support also. Two of the poles are supported at only one point, about twenty inches from the end; a third is supported about twenty inches from both ends, that is, by both of the bent, upward-​springing metal plates; while a fourth is not supported by these at all but is held up by a large upright rectangle of metal which stands somewhat apart from the rest of the sculpture and in fact is not physically connected to it in any way.24 The effect is one of weightlessness, founded upon the motif of its ‘floating’ elements that seem not only to defy gravity but to suggest a datum overlaid onto the gallery space. As Rubin notes, ‘So convincing is the sense of weightless extension in Prairie that one almost loses sight of the frankness with which its mechanics are avowed.’25 This includes a visual connection between the four poles (painted a slightly lighter shade of ochre) and the four depressions in the sheet, such that the former ‘appear as “positive” counterparts of the “negative” channels of the corrugations’.26 Shifting from description to evaluation, Fried states, But grasping exactly how Prairie works as a feat of engineering does not in the least undermine or even compete with one’s initial impression that the metal poles and corrugated sheet are suspended, as if in the absence of gravity, at different levels above the ground. Indeed, the ground itself is seen not as that upon which everything else stands and from which everything else rises, but rather as the last, or lowest, of the three levels which, as abstract conception, Prairie comprises. (In this sense Prairie defines the ground not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant.)27 166

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It is not that the means of support are concealed; on the contrary, they are openly declared within the work’s cantilevered structural logic. Fried thus contends that Prairie constitutes ‘an extraordinary marriage of illusion and structural obviousness’, in that once ‘we have walked even partly around Prairie there is nothing we do not know about how it supports itself, and yet that knowledge is somehow eclipsed by our actual experience’.28 But, as we shall see, it is the resulting tension, so well described by Fried, that I contend contradicts any easy notion of the work’s autonomy.

IV What might Langer contribute to this discussion? Langer fuses her distinctive semiotic framework (with its strong echoes of Peirce) with both the phenomenological and biological. Her morphology of sign-​configurations recognizes two distinctions that take on particular significance as axial modes throughout her work:  between indexicality (indication) and symbolicity (symbolization); and between what she calls discursive and presentational forms.29 For Langer, symbols are ‘not proxy for their objects, but are vehicles for the conception of objects’, such that when we talk ‘about things we have conceptions of them, not the things themselves; and it is the conceptions, not the things, that symbols directly “mean” ’.30 So, for instance, while a word –​in and of itself a symbol associated with a conception –​may be used as a sign, its ‘signific character has to be indicated by some special modification –​by a tone of voice, a gesture (such as pointing or staring), or the location of a placard bearing the word’.31 In other instances, the meaning of a word is dependent upon its situation. For Langer, then, ‘The fundamental difference between signs and symbols is this difference of association, and consequently of their use by the third party to the meaning function, the subject; signs announce their objects to him, whereas symbols lead him to conceive their objects.’32 This is a functional distinction, a concern, not just of reference but the ‘relations of terms to their objects’, through the ‘principle of viewing meaning as a function, not a property, of terms’.33 This is a key distinction. Langer continues: ‘The fact that the same item –​say, the little mouthy noise we call a “word” –​may serve in either capacity, does not obliterate the cardinal distinction between the two functions it may assume.’34 And for Langer, a sign functioning in an indexical mode ‘indicates the existence  –​past, present, or future  –​ of a thing, event, or condition’.35 As Robert E. Innis notes, ‘this way of thinking about indication is fully consonant with Peirce’s formulation’.36 But what of the difference between discursive and presentational forms of symbolism? This distinction acknowledges that meaningful experience is not limited to things accessible through discursive language, but encompasses the semiotics of art as well as ritual and dreams. For Langer, discursive symbolism is ‘the vehicle of propositional thinking’,37 a position which builds upon a theory of symbols set forth by Wittgenstein; presentational symbolism, by contrast, while still bound to the logical formulation of conceptualizing, ‘as a normal and prevalent vehicle of meaning widens our conception of rationality far beyond the traditional boundaries’.38 The latter accommodates ideation 167

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(and can therefore encompass the propositional and tautological concerns of conceptual art). However, within such a system, ‘feeling’, which has definite forms, emerges as a central semiotic concept. And as Innis notes, ‘One of the most important distinctive features of Langer’s feeling-​based approach to minding is the contention that the structures of feeling are both accessed and exemplified in paradigmatic, though not exclusive, form in the rise of the art symbol.’39 Langer relates her concern with sign-​configuration to the art symbol in her book Feeling and Form, where the art symbol ‘negotiates insight, not reference; it does not rest upon convention, but motivates and dictates conventions’.40 Thus, she clarifies that her position ‘has nothing to do with the iconographic functions usually assigned to symbols in art’, but rather is consistent with her more general foregrounding of the role of activity or agency.41 Here, she stresses that ‘what art expresses is not actual feeling, but ideas of feeling; as language does not express actual things and events but ideas of them’.42 Art is therefore not mere affect. Rather, something emerges in the art symbol which is more than its ‘combination of material parts, or a modification of a natural object to suit human purposes’:43 an impression of ‘otherness’ that abstracts its phenomenal character, even ‘where the element of [mimetic] representation is absent’, such as in a work of architecture or a patterned textile.44 As such, an artistic image is a ‘semblance’ or ‘appearance’, estranged from the actual.45 This has clear consequences for a theory of beholding. In Feeling and Form, Langer distinguishes various modes of ‘virtual’ space, which she considers ‘the primary illusion of all plastic art’.46 I will focus here exclusively on her distinction between the virtuality of painting and sculpture. The former she characterizes as a perceptual space conceived as virtual scene, an entirely visual affair rather than an experiential space; the latter, she characterizes as ‘the image of kinetic volume in sensory space’, such that ‘sculpture makes virtual “kinetic volume” out of actual three-​dimensional material’.47 Langer insists that both notions of virtuality are abstractions from actual three-​dimensional space; whereas the virtual space of painting has no sense of continuity with the space in which we live, the ‘real’ three-​dimensional space of sculpture –​where volume rather than scene is the issue –​constructs a semblance of kinetic space, such that we can experience it, spatially, from multiple positions (rather than the single point of view that painting typically presents). Nonetheless, for Langer this is still a semblance of kinetic volume, in that ‘[a]‌ piece of sculpture is a center of three-​dimensional space’ in such a way that (to repeat the earlier citation) the immediate ‘environment derives all proportions and relations from it’, rather than from the embodied beholder (i.e. our experiential space).48 While a semblance, the immediate space around, for instance, a Rodin figurative sculpture is seen as a three-​dimensional virtual extension of the artwork, distinct from the actual space we occupy. The most systematic evaluation of Langer’s account of sculpture has been conducted by Robert Hopkins. Hopkins sees in Langer’s account the potential for completing an ‘account of sculpture’s and painting’s differing relations to surrounding space’, which for Hopkins is crucial to distinctions in the aesthetic encounters afforded.49 However, Hopkins suggests that Langer fails to embrace her own thoughts, so reminiscent of 168

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Merleau-​Ponty. Langer argues that ‘the kinetic realm of tangible volumes, or things, and free air spaces between them, is organized in each person’s actual experience as his environment, i.e. a space whereof he is the center; his body and the range of its free motion, its breathing space and the reach of its limbs, are his own kinetic volume, the point of orientation from which he plots the world of tangible reality –​objects, distances, motions, shape and size and mass’.50 However, she then fails to follows this through in her distinctions between the virtualities of painting and sculpture, because otherwise ‘she would see that all visual experience is experience of “kinetic volume”, that is permeated by a sense of possible movement and action. And this includes pictorial experience, the experience in which we grasp the content of pictures’.51 Langer’s account therefore needs adapting. First, Hopkins states that the claim that ‘the space we experience as organized by the sculpture is gallery space’, which is unclear in her account, is nevertheless open to her and should be made explicit. Secondly, he suggests that the respective kinetic organization Langer proposes for sculpture involves the imagination (a contention that I am deeply sympathetic to). Thirdly, he fleshes out the consequent distinctions with painting. Noting that ‘painting can certainly evoke an environment as organized kinetically’, Hopkins locates the differences thus: First, in painting the environment seen as so organized is not actually surrounding the picture, but that depicted within it. Second, the center around which it is organized will lie at the point of view from which the scene is depicted, a point the actual viewer imaginatively occupies. In the sculptural case, in contrast, the viewer does not see gallery space as organized around the sculpted object by imagining herself in that object’s shoes: her own actual point of view remains the relevant one. From that point of view, she experiences the space around the sculpture as shaped by the sculpted object’s potential to move and act in various ways.52 Reflecting upon the strengths and weaknesses of Langer’s account, Hopkins considers types of work that Langer’s account might struggle to accommodate. These need not concern us, other than the one most relevant here: the kind of non-​gestural ‘abstract’ work that Caro’s Prairie represents, where in contrast to the kinetic potential of a sculpted Rodin figure, there is a question as to what we might experience in terms of a ‘semblance of living form’.53 Without adjudicating between them, Hopkins offers two options for dealing with this problem. One is to consider a potential for movement organized around broad capacities of movement within abstract work, which might seem to apply to some of Caro’s more gestural work. The second is to accept a ‘fracture’, such that Langer would be ‘forced to offer a different account of our experience of these [abstract] sculptures from that, at least in our elaboration of it, she is offering for sculpture of other kinds’.54 Here, rather than ‘claiming that the gallery space is experienced as organized around the kinetic potential of the sculpted object’, Langer ‘must say that it is experienced as organized around the potential of the sculpture itself’.55 This distinction is subtle, but important. The former accommodates that sense of ‘ghosting’ we experience when entering between a group of sculpted figures who seem 169

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to see through us (confirming our invisibility within their world) despite organizing our experience within the gallery space (such that we are encouraged to explore the work from different positions); the latter can accommodate minimalist work by someone like Judd that while declaring their status as ‘specific objects’ also bring not only the space between objects into the work’s content but the gallery situation itself –​the very relation that Fried complains of.56 Intriguingly, Caro’s Prairie would thus, for someone like Fried, seem to fall on the wrong side of this divide. But crucially this is not a problem of ‘literal’ space, in that such work also creates a virtual space; rather, as a corrective to Fried’s position, we might state that the real situation is brought into the imaginative remit of the virtual through the sculpture’s capacity (rather than the sculpted object’s capacity) to organize gallery space. This echoes a point made in the Introduction, in relation to what Juliane Rebentisch refers to as ‘the double structure of aesthetic representation, that is, of the aesthetic tension between what is representing and what is represented’.57 Nevertheless, this is not necessarily a stable relation, and our experience of Prairie oscillates between our imaginative and perceptual engagement. This affords another kind of spectral presence, where the sculptural object makes us question our very relation to the ground on which we stand. This seems entirely consistent with David F.  Martin’s claim, cited by Hopkins, that ‘the space around a sculpture, although not a part of its material body, is still an essential part of the perceptible structure of that sculpture’, such that ‘the perceptual forces in that surrounding space impact on our bodies directly, giving to that space a translucency, a thickness, that is largely missing from the space in front of a painting’.58 And it is the impact upon our body (and its kinetic potential) that seems relevant here (rather than any potential movement through gesture). We might acknowledge a divide between Caro’s gestural work which falls on the one side, and the ground-​based work of his Bennington period, and its immediate aftermath, on the other. But this divide is not that of autonomy versus non-​autonomy. Here we might reframe the discussion of Langer (via Hopkins) by two related moves. First, to claim that what is aesthetically significant in Caro’s sculpture from the 1960s is precisely the tension constructed between the virtuality of the artwork (involving the imagination) and the concurrently perceived beholder’s space. I want to argue that it is this tension that generates the ‘thickness’ that David Martin refers to. It is a thickness that in the next chapter I claim applies, in a distinctive way, to the phenomenal engagement with Agnes Martin’s grid paintings, which might likewise be seen as being organized not around the kinetic potential of the depicted scene but rather the painting itself. Secondly, reinforcing a point made in the Introduction, it helps to understand what is meant here when we re-​categorize a work such as Prairie as an ‘event-​like’ entity. I  want to argue that there are two performances here:  first, on the part of the artist (Caro’s processes of improvisation in the space of his studio), and secondly by the beholder. What is aesthetically important (and generally distinctive between the two media) is how the performance of the original sculpture/​painting (both in terms of its making and how it orientates or positions the beholder) is recovered through the beholder’s own performance, which crucially involves the imagination. As Langer notes, virtuality emerges in painting 170

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from the very first mark, and we shall see in the next chapter that it is the recovery of the rhythm and repetition of mark making that is important in the recovery of content in the case of Martin’s grids. By contrast, the ‘syntax’ of Caro’s sculpture might be reconceived as one not just of gesture (the sculpted object’s potential for movement and action) nor the relation between the constitutive parts, but rather one that accounts for the role of the situated beholder in recovering the kinetic potential this spatial performance enacts: which, in the case of Prairie, involves negotiating its particular superposition of real and unreal, which threatens the very ground on which we walk.

V In the light of this discussion, I want to conclude with a comparison between Prairie and Caro’s Early One Morning (1962; Figure 8.5). Krauss’s astute reading of Early One Morning likewise uncovers an underlying tension between two contrary modes of perceiving the work. She argues that

Figure 8.5  Anthony Caro: Early One Morning, 1962, steel and aluminium, painted red, 290 × 620 × 333 cm. Tate Collection, London. © Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Ltd. Photo: John Riddy.

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there are three elements in Early One Morning that are superfluous to its structure as a physical object. One of these is a large vertical plate that rides the two ‘legs’ at one end of the work like a fixed sail. Another is a spar-​like elevated beam that crosses the vertical support at the opposite end of the sculpture. And the third is a pair of thin, bent tubes that jut off the ‘table plane’ at something like a forty-​ five degree angle midway down the course of that plane. It is with these three nonstructural elements that Caro addresses the issue of verticality –​but addresses it in a way that is very different from the reality of posts and beams.59 One might want to add that the other bent tube, despite touching the ground, is also structurally superfluous. Regardless, Krauss claims that the verticality Early One Morning addresses ‘is quite different from that achieved by systems of physical weight and support’, central to its sculptural status as a work of abstraction.60 Rather, Caro introduces the spatially compressed verticality of painting through the easel-​like plate, a shape-​making ‘borne by the vertical surface of the canvas’, such that If the viewer stands at one end of the work, so that the sail-​like plane is the element farthest from him, he does indeed experience the space that the work occupies as enormously collapsed or contracted. The back-​most surface appears as a picture plane against which the horizontal line and the slender projecting tubes become major elements.61 As the beholder shifts her position, these relations against the easel-​like form shift and vibrate, while the perceived contraction of space (consistent with perspectival foreshortening) increases the further the beholder steps back, bringing these elements into a closer alignment. Here, the long square-​sectioned tube connecting the various parts –​the most significant orthogonal –​recedes towards a ‘vanishing point’ which shifts relative to the fixed ‘picture’ plane, while the spa-​like elevated beam destabilizes through its being skewed from the horizontal. For Krauss, the work thus offers two mutually incompatible possibilities of relating, spatially, to the construction: one highly differentiated, consistent with the narrow range of this particular vantage point; the other undifferentiated, an experience available from any other position (and thus relating more directly to the beholder’s space). It is worth quoting Krauss at length on this difference: From the ‘side’ the viewer looks down on the construction, much the way he would look down on a table or any other article of furniture. He senses the work in terms of its mass because it shares the same space that he does and clearly relates to a ground that is the same as his own. From the ‘front’ this orientation to a horizontal ground changes completely. The work becomes a vertical assembly, and thus its space is no longer occupied by the viewer. Just as there is a gulf between a viewer’s space and the space of a painting –​a break between his own ground, which he sees as he looks down to his feet, and the beginning of the ground of the picture’s 172

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space, which he can only see by raising his head –​so the pictorialized space of Early One Morning is not only sensed as flattened but as irrevocably distanced as well. The thin tubular elements become the major visual factors within this view of the work, partly because their fanlike configuration seems to enact that transposition of horizontals into vertical, which I mentioned before as the fact of picture-​making.62 Here, the linearity imposed by the axis of the long square section bar reinforces the incompatibility of modes of viewing, such that ‘the axis along which one relates to the work as a physical object is turned ninety degrees to the axis which establishes its meaning as image’.63 Krauss therefore ties Caro’s pictorialism closely to the connection with the space of the viewer’s own body, and the resulting tension between the two; she goes on to argue that as more extreme forms of ‘pictorialism’ are employed in Caro’s later work, this tension is diminished –​a decorativeness not apparent in his 1960s work.64 (It is worth noting that even by 1969, in a work such as Caro’s Orangerie using multiple curved ploughshare forms, this aspect of pictorialism –​in forms strongly reminiscent of Matisse –​has already come to the fore, constituting a kind of painting in space in a work that now definitely has a ‘front’ and a ‘back’.)65 How might Krauss’s critique be reframed by Langer’s account (as revised by Hopkins)? I want to argue that the gestural elements in Early One Morning suggestive of the notion of ‘scene’ are the very same elements implying that the gallery space is experienced as organized around the kinetic potential of the sculpted object (consistent with a liberal reading of what it is for an abstract work to have representational content). While the pictorialism takes on a particular overt form from the orientation that Krauss describes, it is a feature that is not confined to this one view. At the same time, other aspects of the sculpture are experienced as organized around the kinetic potential of the sculpture itself:  requiring, as Hopkins surmises, an amendment of Langer’s position, in that nothing here is ‘represented’ definitively enough to have a kinetic potential as sculpted object.66 Early One Morning might therefore be said to straddle the ‘fracture’ noted in the previous section. By contrast, Prairie, with its concerns with various horizontal levels (noticeably devoid of expressive gesture), constructs its perceptual tension entirely through the miscalibration of the kinetic potential of its virtual and real worlds, that of the sculpture itself and the ‘real’ space of the viewer. In so doing our actual orientation is acknowledged as a contributory factor in the work’s semantic content and destabilized, in that in its disconcerting floating the various levels appear misaligned with the geometry of the gallery floor, despite the fact that the work relates to a ground that we share. To repeat a section of Fried’s critique used earlier: ‘In this sense Prairie defines the ground not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant.’67 And, of course, the sculpture’s title is not, in and of itself, without associations. As Caro acknowledges, ‘the word “prairie” had the feel of extension and extension was what 173

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the sculpture was about, at different levels –​to do with spread … those wide expanses, a floating thing  –​yes, floating’.68 The resulting effect, not unlike the experience of a certain kind of landscape on a hot day, constitutes a kind of ‘shimmering’, reminiscent of a mirage, where the real and illusory merge and pull apart. But it is an effect dependent upon the kind of embodied perception that I  have been arguing for throughout the book, where spatial cues bind  –​but not entirely  –​the kinetic potential of the work itself, such that actual space is brought into the work’s imaginative remit. And this has consequences, in that it is dependent upon the literal presence of the beholder. For Fried, Prairie escapes literalness through its illusory defying of gravity. But this reduces the relation between the ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ to a binary. Rather than resisting the intrusion of the literal (which was to find its apogee in the minimalism Fried found so threatening), we might state that Caro destabilizes the actual space we occupy. And this is something replicated by minimalist works, such as Flavin’s 1972–​3 installation Untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), featured on the front cover of the book, which likewise construct a tension between the virtual and our embodied situation within the space of the gallery.

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Agnes Martin, Falling Blue (1963) Griselda Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’ (2005)

I So far in Part III, I have considered abstract works that set out to problematize the beholder position. The axonometry of El Lissitzky, considered in Chapter 7, sought to displace the viewer from the ‘privileged’ position implied by perspectival representation –​plunging the beholder into a perceptual space that, in its radical reversibility, refuses to cohere. In the last chapter, I developed a phenomenological account of Anthony Caro’s Prairie in the light of Langer’s characterization of the virtual space of sculpture as organizing a kinetic potential such that the immediate ‘environment derives all proportions and relations from it’1; significantly, I argued that in Caro’s best work of the mid-​1960s, a dissonance is produced in the way such a kinetic organizing overlaps, but does not quite calibrate, with the beholder’s own kinetic potential. I thereby challenged Fried’s reductive notion of ‘autonomy’, arguing that his championing of Caro’s work against the minimalist incursion of the ‘literal’ spectator misrepresents the contributory role of the beholder in ‘completing’ Caro’s sculptures made during and after his residency at Bennington. In this chapter, I develop an equivalent phenomenological account of the beholding of the 1960s paintings of the Canadian-​born Agnes Martin (1912–​2004), in a period prior to her departure from New  York in 1967 and her abandonment of painting for some seven years. To echo Brendan Prendeville, who in writing of this period in Martin’s output references Merleau-​Ponty and James J. Gibson, such an account is committed to the idea that perception, whether habitual or spontaneous, ‘rather than being locked up in the individual, is enmeshed in a world, and a present’.2 Our acts, including our perceptions, involve a continual orienting of ourselves towards the world, and thereby ‘carry meanings we do not need to make explicit’.3 This encompasses our orientation towards the ‘semblance’ constituting the virtuality of the artwork, while simultaneously being distanced by that very enmeshment within the ‘real’. Indeed, I have been arguing that this is not a binary question of autonomy versus non-​autonomy, but rather the negotiation of degrees of reality/​unreality. And this dynamic, where perception is conceived as integral to an active body, emerges in a distinct way with regard to our engagement with the extraordinary paintings of Martin.

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I will focus this discussion on one work in particular, Falling Blue of 1963 (Plate 8), in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Like Caro, who participated in the ground-​breaking 1966 show ‘Primary Structures’ at the Jewish Museum in New  York alongside sculptors later associated with minimalism, Martin’s 1960s work has an uneasy relation to minimalism; while it is still routinely hung alongside serial works by artists such as Judd, she later claimed to regret such an association. Rather, Martin aligned herself with the aspirations of the abstract expressionist generation; and yet this is equally misleading, in that her paintings emerge from a very different mode of practice, evidenced by her ‘repeated disavowal of any specific expressive aims’.4 In developing this phenomenological account, I  draw upon Rosalind Krauss’s 1993 essay ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’.5 Krauss’s oft-​cited essay offers what is widely regarded as the definitive phenomenological reading of Martin’s works  –​albeit one that draws heavily upon the insights into Martin’s differentiated viewing distances offered by Kasha Linville’s earlier ‘appreciation’ in a short Artforum essay of 1971.6 Krauss, as might be guessed from her essay’s title, references a book I considered at length in Chapter 2, Damisch’s A Theory of /​Cloud/​.7 Krauss notes that: ‘By a curious coincidence, it was just when Linville was noticing Martin’s production of the three [viewing] distances that Hubert Damisch was completing his study Théorie du /​nuage/, a book that rewrites the history of Renaissance and Baroque painting according to a system in which the signifier /​cloud/​plays a major, foundational role.’8 She reiterates Damisch’s identification of a ‘remainder’ as ‘the thing that cannot be fitted into a system but which nevertheless the system needs in order to constitute itself as a system’, which finds its exemplary manifestation in the reflected cloud in Brunelleschi’s first perspective demonstration (Figure 2.1). By analogy, Krauss claims that the fabric of Martin’s grid serves to make the optical  –​as signifier  –​‘a function of the tactile (kinesthetic) field of its viewer, that is to say, the succession of those viewing distances the observer might assume’.9 In other words, the beholder’s visual engagement with the movement and rhythm of the marks shifts as she moves forwards and backwards. Close-​up to the canvas, it engages with (and imaginatively re-​enacts) the tactile cues of the original performance, as the trace of the painted/​drawn line responds to factors such as speed and surface condition; further back, these individual lines merge into a sort of ‘mist’ or ‘atmosphere’; further back still, the marks become as ‘impermeable’ as ‘stone’, as the painting as object asserts itself. In so doing, this active engagement moves beyond a mere visual encounter. Nonetheless, while drawing upon Krauss’s persuasive essay, this chapter is framed by another seminal text on Martin’s work, Griselda Pollock’s ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, itself sympathetic to Krauss’s wider writing on grids. While Pollock references Krauss’s earlier October essay on grids from 1979,10 her psychoanalytically informed account might be said to transmute Krauss’s identification of the /​cloud/​as ‘a differential marker in a semiological system’ –​manifest in a figure/​ground fluctuation intrinsic to the ‘three distances’ Martin’s grid paintings imply –​into something redolent of Kristeva’s semiotic disposition (as first encountered in Chapter  3).11 More particularly, such a disposition is manifest through repetition, which  –​differentiated from the seriality of 176

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minimalist works of the 1960s –​Pollock claims constitutes the core of Martin’s practice, such that we read her repetition as something that is not serial, not intended only to insist on the impersonality of the system, but as a practice –​inciting itself to repeat –​that each time transgresses the structure that defines its specificity –​graphite lines on canvas or paper in relation to washes and to colored fields to produce an effect that is also an affect:  happiness or enjoyment, which in French resonates more multiply –​ jouissance.12 And joy is, indeed, something that Martin unambiguously states as her goal. Nevertheless, this is not an expressive aim as such, in that it is dependent not on the expressiveness of gestural mark-​making, but rather upon the condition of the beholder: ‘The responsibility of the response to art is not with the artist.’13 By way of Kristeva, Pollock correlates Krauss’s phenomenological account of the perceiving mechanisms of physiological optics, triggered by Martin’s viewing distances, into an affirming practice of affect. To recall, for Kristeva the prelinguistic semiotic, associated with a child’s development prior to the separation from the maternal body, is a modality contrasted with the symbolic order, even though it only manifests itself within the symbolic field (in that the semiotic and symbolic are ‘inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language’).14 As Sara Beardsworth has pointed out, for Kristeva semiotic functioning in the symbolic field through art practice ‘rests on the claim that the heterogeneous contradiction of the semiotic and symbolic is recovered when significations –​the meanings that compose prevailing discourses –​are dismantled and thereby returned to their nonsignifying, drive-​invested elements, which are then made available to a reconfiguration’.15 This is, unerringly, what Martin’s practice does, her individual lines refusing depiction but without, thereby, suppressing connotation or acts of ideation associated with the original performance, and its recovery as the beholder orientates herself towards the canvas. These claims will need unpicking, not least because of the complexity of the language used. Indeed, it is a language far removed from Martin’s own disarmingly straightforward way of talking about her work, which focuses on terms such as ‘beauty’ and ‘inspiration’ (a way of talking that unfortunately also led to an unhelpful form of deification that isolates Martin’s practice from its roots in the community of artists living in New York in the 1950s and 1960s). Nevertheless, I  believe Pollock’s account, in its allying of Kristeva’s notion of semiosis to Krauss’s phenomenological account, has a potential to connect with a theme I have been developing throughout the book: a concern with how the performance of the original work (realized as ‘practice’) is recovered through the beholder’s own situated performance. This is an encounter that dehabitualizes perception while nevertheless revealing something of how the work is made. And rather than efface the body as a site of desire or pleasure, it engages the ‘real’ in a way that, as Pollock suggests, counters the spiritual, sublime and classicizing readings of Martin’s work, bringing the orientation of the active, perceiving body of the beholder into play. 177

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II Accounts of Agnes Martin’s work are punctuated by a plethora of biographical references. Few artists have been subject to so much scrutiny in the light of such a paucity of detail about both their personal life and working practices. The mental illness she experienced for much of her adult life was concealed beyond her close circle of friends; having been diagnosed with schizophrenia, Martin was hospitalized several times from the mid-​1960s onwards, experiencing paranoia and, occasionally, catatonia. However, as Christina Bryan Rosenberger notes, understanding the iterative nature of scholarship, Martin was keen to shape the narrative surrounding her work, frequently contradicting previous statements through evasive answers to questions:  ‘Hers is a story of gaps, pauses, deletions, and omissions, of which Martin’s sexuality and mental health are the most important.’16 The extent to which the latter affected her work is far from clear, though it is known that she suffered a major psychotic episode in 1967 prior to her temporary abandonment of painting and New York. In 1968, she resettled in a remote mesa (without running water, electricity or a telephone) near Cuba, New Mexico.17 In her biography of Martin, Nancy Princenthal notes the burden the artist’s mental health placed on her given the fractured system of care and the prevailing misinformation that surrounded her condition. ‘As is often the case with schizophrenia, Martin was subject to auditory hallucinations, and although the voices she heard didn’t tell her what to paint –​they seemed to steer clear of her work –​the images that came to her through inspiration were fixed and articulate enough to suggest a relationship between visions and voices: she heard and saw things that others didn’t.’18 Princenthal is referring here to Martin’s much repeated claim that her ‘inspiration’ –​which she had to wait for by calming the mind –​took the form of a mental image of a completed grid, which then had to be transcribed through calculations into a full-​sized painting. Nonetheless, Martin was keen to avoid any direct connection between her mental illness and her creative process; as Princenthal observes, ‘there is absolutely no reason to consider her work spontaneously cathartic or in any other way therapeutic’, not least because it was ‘meant to express universal rather than personal experience’.19 Martin’s withdrawal from New York life in 1967 fed her status as a ‘recluse’. Though far from damaging her career, Martin’s extended interruption from painting only increased her allure as an ‘outsider’, such that the ‘pilgrimage’ to see her in New Mexico became something of a rite of passage.20 Yet in reality Martin’s detachment was short-​lived, such that she ‘soon began to make regular contacts with old acquaintances and new ones’, later acknowledging that withdrawal was not at all the ‘enlightening’ experience she had sought.21 And while Martin continued to make an extraordinary body of work for thirty more years in relative isolation, it is worth noting that Martin’s most productive period –​ the period where she first ‘dreamed’ the grid –​corresponded to the period she spent in New York from 1957 to 1967, when she was part of an extended community of artists. This is not to downplay her earlier connections with artists such as Ad Reinhardt from 1951; rather, as Prendeville observes, it is to make the point that she evolved a particular way of making that arose not from isolation but ‘from her involvement in a social and 178

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creative world of which she was an intimate part, a world within which she found her direction’.22 When the gallerist Betty Parsons purchased enough paintings by Martin to fund her move to New York, she became friends with Barnett Newman, who Parsons allocated the role of mentor in the period prior to her first solo exhibition at Parsons’s Gallery in December 1958. Prendeville notes that ‘Newman, at the time he was helping Agnes Martin hang her first shows at Betty Parsons, was himself just beginning to exhibit again, in the wake of a badly received solo exhibition’.23 Newman introduced Martin to a group of artists that included Mark Rothko (whose work she had studied in 1951–​ 2); the influence of these two established artists on Martin’s pre-​grid works is manifest in works such as Untitled of 1957 (with its direct homage to Newman’s ‘zips’) and The Spring of 1958, with its rectangles using ‘subtle, modulated layering of paint; the feathery brushstrokes; the articulated edges and the sense of forms “hovering in space” ’.24 However, Martin’s creative world increasingly centred on younger artists living in the cheap lofts on Coenties Slip in south Manhattan, who set themselves up as an alternative to the Tenth Street crowd dominated by the abstract expressionists. Martin rented a loft on the Slip after a brief stay at Parsons’s studio. This world is captured in photographs by the German émigré Hans Namuth, who had been commissioned to photograph Ellsworth Kelly for a pictorial essay.25 These photographs show Kelly, alongside Martin and artists such as Robert Indiana and Jack Youngerman, and capture an extraordinary ethos of friendship among the closely knit group. Martin was particularly close to Kelly, and the two sometimes took breakfast together in each other’s studios. Here, Martin found a community where her sexuality was less of an issue, despite the prevalence of anti-​gay prejudice on the wider New  York art scene (manifest by homophobic verbal attacks on the likes of John Cage and Cy Twombly). Kelly and Indiana were openly gay, as were other artists (less openly) living nearby on the Slip such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (whose relationship from 1954 to 1961 coincided with an extraordinary period of creative invention). Princenthal recalls that the Greek American sculptor Chryssa Vardea and fibre artist Lenore Tawney were said to have had relationships with Martin and that, indisputably, ‘she had close associations with both’.26 These relationships, despite Martin’s protestations to the contrary, might be seen to have had a profound influence on Martin’s evolution towards the grid. Chryssa, who like Martin was hospitalized several times for mental illness, made a series of prints and drawings from 1959 to 1962 using newspaper grids, often working from discarded metal newspaper plates.27 These not only resemble the grids of Johns, but have something in common with Martin’s later work. Nevertheless, as Rosenberger notes, Martin ‘predicated her use of the grid not upon cultural or anthropological associations of newspapers, as Rauschenberg and Chryssa did, but upon the interpretive possibilities offered by the consistent, symmetrical geometric format of the grid as a structural device’.28 Stronger connections have been made between Martin’s work, such as the ink on paper Wood I (1963; Figure 9.1), owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the woven textiles of Tawney (Figure 9.2). Not only did Tawney financially support Martin at various times, but as Rosenberger recounts, ‘Tawney named many of Martin’s works 179

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Figure 9.1  Agnes Martin: Wood I, 1963, ink, coloured ink, ballpoint pen and pencil on paper, 38.1 ×

39.4 cm. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Gift of Sarah-​Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky. Acc. no.: 135.2004. © 2019. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/​Scala Florence.

when Martin was too ill to help prepare one of her exhibitions’; Martin reciprocated by naming some of Tawney’s pieces and writing the ‘introductory brochure for Tawney’s solo exhibition at Staten Island Museum in 1961’, her first published text.29 In this text Martin, borrowing ‘rhythms of the Bible and Gertrude Stein’, could be describing her own work: ‘trembling and sensitive images are as though brought before our eyes even as we look at them’, such that ‘deep, and sometimes dark and unrealized feelings are stirred in us’.30 Frances Morris, writing in the catalogue accompanying the Martin retrospective at Tate Modern in 2015, argues for a close connection between Martin and Tawney: 180

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Figure 9.2  Lenore Tawney at work in her studio in New York, 1966. The LIFE Picture Collection. Getty Images/​Nina Leen/​Contributor.

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In 1961 Tawney began the experimental weaving that would result in a series of tall, hanging, fabric sculptures  –​‘woven forms’, as she described them  –​which Martin herself ‘named’ for her: The King, The Queen and The Bride. These were delicate works in which light flowed through the weave, allowing the pattern of individual threads to appear like lace. Around the same time Martin made drawings that evoke quite specifically the intersections and terminations of warp and weft on the loom. The way in which she indented her margins –​in a drawing such as Balconies 1962 –​appears to demonstrate exactly what happens when the warp is put under pressure by the weft, an innovative technique that Tawney made her own in these years.31 Such analogies with textiles –​with warp and weft –​were noted by a number of critics at the time, including Natalie Edgar, Lawrence Alloway, Eleanor Munro and Donald Judd. And yet when interviewed by Joan Simon in Art in America in 1996, Martin refutes such a connection, claiming that somebody is undercutting her by ‘saying it was like weaving’.32 While the vehemence of the denial reflects a wider gendered bias against textile design as an ‘applied’ art, both Morris’s and Munro’s literal reading of the connection is, perhaps, overstated. As Prendeville suggests, ‘A more defensible view would be that the paintings draw on our intuitive sense of how made things cohere –​among them things woven.’33 Regardless, as Rosenberger notes, ‘Tawney’s support allowed Martin to create some of her most celebrated grid paintings.’34 Among these early grid paintings is White Flower (1960), owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Figure 9.3). Here, on a grey/​brown background, she constructs a grid in a thinned white paint where alternate rectangles (on the vertical axis) are filled with four white dabs of paint, two at either ends. Prendeville describes the work thus: In counting, I  retrace her steps, following where she had once measured and subdivided. To make a whole reiteratively, like this, rather than cumulatively, like [Jackson] Pollock, a long premeditation would have been necessary: the first step commits the rest  –​though in this case there was a false start and a change of plan, evident where a few small marks have been over-​painted at top right. The subdivisions upward look like half-​inch intervals; measuring marks show at the edges, the ruled lines waver slightly. Within alternate horizontal bands, short paired marks like equals signs are brushed outward at a slight distance from each vertical line, though leaving a column and a half unmarked at either side. The over painting at top right shows she had at first thought to put such marks in all the horizontal bands, with marks touching the vertical lines, but this would have made the columns more emphatic, standing like a figure upon a ground, something she was always concerned to avoid.35 A characteristically terse review by Judd, with a thinly veiled criticism of the work’s ‘decorative’ tendencies, describes works such as White Flower (and The Islands) 182

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Figure  9.3  Agnes Martin:  White Flower, 1960, oil on canvas, 182.6 × 182.9  cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim, Museum, New York, Anonymous gift, 1963. © 2019. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/​Art Resource, New York/​Scala Florence.

as ‘simply attractive, a word which is usually, and is here, used both as a derogation and a compliment’.36 Nonetheless, as Rosenberger notes, ‘Judd’s support for her work would give Martin’s grid paintings credibility among artists and critics interested in an increasingly spare, linear mode of abstraction.’37 Whether responding to comments by Judd or not, Martin eliminated the margins to her work that were so suggestive of the weaving analogy; as Morris observes, ‘Martin progressively pared away these distractions from her compositions, in 1963 and 1964 eliminating incidental marks and extending lines to the edge (or, near the edge) of her canvases, finding therein the coincidence between image and object that Judd found lacking.’ An example of this is Tree (1964; Figure  9.4), part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New  York. Martin 183

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Figure 9.4  Agnes Martin: The Tree, 1964, oil and pencil on canvas, 182.8 × 182.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund. 5. 1965© 2019. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/​Scala Florence.

uses fine pencil lines on a white background, with alternate horizontal bands having three additional pencil lines in each rectangle, such that they are perceived as a subtle grey band from a distance. Here, all connections to weaving are removed, with just the thinnest of unmarked borders. Morris couches this shift in terms of an internal struggle: In 1962 and 1963, for example, Martin made three large paintings, including Friendship 1963, using gold leaf and gesso, materials rich in historical associations. By the following year, however, Martin had pulled back from such ‘excesses’, once again adhering to the grid as her ‘ready-​made’ template, but settling for the more seemingly prosaic combination of acrylic and graphite. Acrylic’s fast drying time would have allowed Martin to work without interruption on as single canvas and it

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was in acrylic that she finally achieved the remarkable visual effects of translucency and tremelo that characterise her subsequent work.38 It was a struggle that was to culminate in an extraordinary productive period in which she gained increasing critical attention, leading to her being included by Victoria Dwan (at the suggestion of Ad Reinhardt) in the influential 1966 10 exhibition at the Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles and New  York).39 Nevertheless, it was an inclusion  –​alongside Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Reinhardt, Robert Smithson and Michael Steiner –​that Martin, while ‘flattered’, later regretted, feeling that it led to a misreading of her work as minimalist.40

III Alexander Liberman’s black and white photographic portrait of Martin in her New York studio in 1960 (Figure  9.5) portrays her with back turned towards the camera as she faces the canvas, wearing a ‘shapeless quilted suit’.41 Martin is shown as a beholder of her own work; the slight tilt in Martin’s head suggests that her contemplation of the work is genuine rather than staged for the camera. Commenting upon this photograph, Anne Wagner notes that she can hardly be unaware of the photographer’s presence within the studio; nevertheless, her stance hints at ‘her total absorption in the painting hanging before her on the splattered studio wall’, therefore taking us ‘as close as we are likely to get to a documentary record of Agnes Martin’s creative progress’.42 Moreover, it is very likely that this canvas, with its curiously tilted grid (belying the spirit level she prominently holds in the two other photographs Liberman released), is just one of the many that Martin systematically destroyed if they did not meet her expectations. How does the issue of viewing distance relate to the recovery of the artist’s practice? Krauss rejects the tendency to read Martin’s work through the rubric ‘abstract sublime’, a covert allusion to a romanticized nature that Krauss traces back to the catalogue essay of Alloway that accompanied Martin’s first museum retrospective, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, in 1973.43 Krauss states, ‘In the exceedingly superficial and repetitive literature on Agnes Martin there is one arresting exception. It is Kasha Linville’s careful phenomenological reading in which for the first and only time there is a description of what it is actually like to see the paintings, which, she explains, “are sequences of illusions of textures that change as viewing distance changes”.’44 Linville conceives the shifting orientation of the beholder towards the canvas as affording non-​illusionistic experiences of the works conceived ‘as vehicles for tactile, sensory memories on a very private level, a level closer than the shape of things’; here Martin does not so much exploit nature as subject matter, but rather ‘evokes it intimately for each viewer’.45 As Linville infers, Once you are caught in one of her paintings, it is an almost painful effort to pull back from the private experience she triggers to examine the way the picture is 185

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Figure  9.5  Alexander Liberman, Agnes Martin in her New  York Studio, 1960, black and white photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2000.R.19). © J. Paul Getty Trust.

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made. The desire to simply let yourself flow through it, or let it flow through you, is much stronger. But even at its evocative best, her work holds for its own beauty, for the extraordinary skill and delicacy of her line and surface. Her paintings exert themselves differently, depending on their line, their pattern, and the quality of the ground color on the canvas.46 Often these individual lines ‘blend’ into ‘a single tone’ suggestive of a quality of light –​ ‘a beautiful gray or gray white that still carries the emotive impact of the lines that have by this time almost disappeared from sight’ –​while others construct an unresolved tension; some ‘suggest spaciousness or vast space’ but without ever resorting to ‘illusionistic devices or the egotistical implication of infinitely extendible surface’.47 Most importantly for our purposes, Martin’s practice is informed by an embodied and responsive tactility towards surface. In a pertinent passage, Linville proposes, Line is where she speaks most personally. It is her vocabulary as the grids are her syntax. She shows such sensitivity to subtle differences in touch that the tactility of her paintings increase by inference. At close range, you can feel her hand moving, her touch-​judgments. She makes touch tangible and visible. Sometimes her line is sharp, as in an early painting, Flowers in the Wind, 1963. Sometimes its own shadow softens it –​that is, it is drawn once beneath the canvas grain, skimming its surface without filling the low places in the fabric so it becomes almost a dotted or broken line at close range. Sometimes she uses pairs of lines that dematerialize as rapidly as the lighter drawn single ones. As you move back from a canvas like Mountain II, 1966, the pairs become single, gray horizontals and then begin to disappear.48 Krauss extracts from Linville’s account the notion of three distances. First, a close-​ to reading, where one discerns the individual lines, in their materiality, ‘in all their sparse precision’. Then a second ‘moment’, further back, from where the paintings are ‘atmospheric’; Krauss again cites Linville:  ‘I don’t mean “atmosphere” in the spatially illusionistic sense I  associate with color field painting’, but rather ‘a non-​radiating, impermeable mist’.49 Finally, a distance from where the painting become opaque, ‘produced by a fully distant, more objective vantage on the work’, dispersing the former atmospheric stage to one of impermeability (Figure 9.6).50 Drawing upon the language of Damisch and semiotic notation, Krauss makes clear that Martin’s atmosphere, which like cloud can be observed from any vantage point, is not something that is represented (as a content signified) but rather a signifier  –​/​ atmosphere/​: The landscape subject, no matter how reduced or abstracted, simply defines the work, is an objective attribute of it, like the color blue, or red. But Linville’s three distances make it clear that /​atmosphere/​is an effect set within a system in which an opposite effect is also at work, and that both defines and is defined 187

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Figure  9.6  Visitors in front of Agnes Martin:  White Flower, 1960, as part of the exhibition ‘Guggenheim Collection: The American Avant-​Garde 1945–​1980’, February 2012 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome. Getty Images/​Gabriel Bouys/​Staff. 188

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by that opposite. Linville’s three distances, that is, transform the experience from an intuition into a system, and convert atmosphere from a signified (the content of an image) into a signifier –​/​atmosphere/​ –​the open member of a differential series: wall/​mist; weave/​cloud; closed/​open; form/​formless.51 And at this point Krauss draws upon Damisch’s notion of /​cloud/​having no meaning or value other than ‘that which comes to it from those serial relations of opposition and substitution that it entertains with the other elements of the system’.52 If the nebulous space of Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin (Figure 2.8) amounts to a negation of the architecture of Parma Cathedral, it is also dependent upon that architecture to situate the beholder towards this autonomous celestial space beyond perspectival representation. And the same is true for Martin’s grids, dependent as they are on situating the beholder relative to a space that fluctuates between its differential states of opposition and substitution:  wall/​mist; weave/​cloud; closed/​open; form/​formless. Here, Krauss draws upon another art historian encountered earlier in this book, Alois Riegl.53 She argues, The development Riegl charts goes from what he calls the haptic objectivism of the Greeks –​the delineation of the clarity of the object through an appeal to and a stimulation of the tactile association of the viewer –​to the optical objectivism of Roman art  –​in which the need to set the figure up in space as radically freestanding led to the projection of the rear side of the body and hence the use of the drill to excavate the relief plane. It arrives finally at the most extreme moment of this opticalism carried out in the service of the object. When the relief plane itself becomes the ‘object’ whose unity must be preserved, this leads, in examples Riegl drew on from late Roman decorative arts, to the construction of the object itself in terms of a kind of moiré effect, with a constant oscillation between figure and ground depending –​and here is where this begins to get interesting for Agnes Martin  –​on where the viewer happens to be standing. Writing that now ‘the ground is the interface’, Riegl describes the fully optical play of this phenomenon once what had formerly been background emerges as object.54 Krauss notes that as ‘this figure/​ground fluctuation varies with the stance of the viewer one might argue that the object, now fully dependent upon its perceiver, has become entirely subjectivized’; but in fact, for Riegl, this is ‘still the Kuntswollen of objectivism at work, but in the highest throes of its dialectical development’.55 It is a dialectical development which might potentially reconcile Martin’s formlessness with ‘her affiliations to a classicism that, in Riegl’s terms, would commit her to an objectivist vision’  –​what Krauss goes on to call an ‘objectivist opticality’.56 Here Krauss claims that this ‘makes the optical a function of the tactile (kinesthetic) field of its viewer, that is to say, the succession of those viewing distances the observer might assume’, such that in Martin’s work ‘it also remains clear that the optical, here marked as /​cloud/​, emerges within a system defined by being bracketed by its two materialist and tactile 189

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counterterms: the fabric of the grid in the near position and the wall-​like stela of the impassive, perfectly square panel in the distant view’.57

IV How does Krauss’s notion of differentiated viewing distances play out in terms of Martin’s 1963 painting Falling Blue (Plate 8)? And what does Pollock’s account contribute to this discussion? I want to consider these two questions together, not least because they coalesce around notions of ‘practice’ and ‘repetition’. We have already seen how Krauss’s phenomenological account, manifest at a physiological level, operates as a signifier in terms consistent with the notion of indexical sign that I have been arguing throughout the book. As signifiers, Martin’s grids coordinate the movement of the beholder back and forth in a way that recovers something of the originating performance of the artist in front of the canvas. For Pollock, the language of psychoanalysis provides the only means she knows to articulate what she terms the resulting ‘shadow’ of a subjectivity ‘rooted in a body, a psyche, a history, a memory of its own structuring’, and hence ‘in a difference that does not pre-​exist the making of the art work, but occurs performatively in the practice at all its levels’.58 But it is also recovered –​performatively –​through the beholder, who thereby completes the work. Falling Blue is typical of Martin’s six-​foot-​square paintings (182.56 × 182.88  cm), a size that she adopted in the 1960s and continued until 1993, when she reduced the format to five-​foot-​square because of difficulties in manoeuvring a canvas on her own in her eighties. Martin states, ‘I just think it’s a good size because it’s as big as everybody, you know, you can just feel like stepping into it. It has to do with being the full size of the human body.’59 While this of course reflects a gendered assumption, the point of the work enveloping the body is well made. Falling Blue is painted using oil paint and graphite on linen. The background colour is a pale, earthy yellow ochre, onto which there is overlaid a dense horizontal hatching of alternating blue paint and graphite lines. The lines fall short of the edge of the canvas, such that a border is implied by the unmarked perimeter. As Pollock notes, ‘Threaded almost imperceptibly through this shimmer of violet blue are vertical, graphite lines: a drawn gesture and a mark of drawing.’60 These five thin lines establish the grid, dividing the painting into four sections of equal width. Pollock writes of the ‘shimmering’ canvas thus: Variations in the ground, and additions of its brown made more saturated as paint irregularly underlying the bands of blue, again set up an effect of movement across a surface that I intellectually know to be produced by establishing a method of applying lines to a flat surface. Close up on detailed areas, I cannot hold the color still. I cannot keep paint and ground from merging and dissolving, from generating a third dimensional effect, a shimmer, an instability, a flicker, a radial disturbance to optical vision. Before the moment that the mark, the line, the paint touched 190

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it, there was only a dead, inhuman material surface. After the mark, the painted and hence drawn line, we see space that becomes capable of interesting/​attracting/​ pleasuring a viewer when there is ‘nothing’ at all to see: I play here with the fact that there is no thing, no object, no resemblance, no motif to see and the fact that we are seeing is the creation of nothing, a kind of zeroing out of what accrues, afterwards, as image.61 Pollock’s description conjures up a sense of the artist (as the original beholder) and viewer’s movement, backwards and forwards. Krauss’s figure/​ground fluctuation is manifest here by the alternating of the painted blue lines –​which in their density occlude the background ochre –​and the thinner, less opaque drawn graphite lines (which do not fill the gaps); the latter not only reveal the background of the primed canvas through the line itself, dependent upon the strength of the mark, but vary in their position within the negative bands left between the denser blue lines. The pale ground therefore appears unevenly between these closely spaced lines, creating the flicker and variation across the surface. That we can see exactly how the different materials are applied does not diminish the resulting effect. As Pollock notes, Something has been made by a hand moving across a surface either already imbued with color, or washed with color, or now marked by color. Whatever is produced at any level of connotation that even the most rigorous of formalisms cannot suppress, whatever is created by these hand movements across a surface are simultaneously ideas available for cognition: This is what composition allows to be there, an effect of space, tending towards the condition of sensory perception and its inevitable affective traces in the viewing subject. In that space an event is taking place. What it is, it cannot be said otherwise. That it takes place is registered only in the fact that between me and this no-​thing, something happens. To say it happens is to say that there is not just an object.62 It is not just an object, in that the effect of space reveals the work’s event-​like character; this draws upon the performance of its processes of making, in turn prompting our own spatial performance as a function of the tactile (kinesthetic) field of the beholder. A  figural presence is manifest not only by the canvas size but by the traces of bodily practice both of the artist  –​including the grease marks that impact upon the lines  –​ and our own shifting orientation relative to the fabric of the grid. And here Pollock states that ‘the register of the event is at the level of the dimension of human –​hence sexed –​subjectivity, that there is something humanizing/​subjectivizing that has affected me through a perception, through the visual modality of this encounter, with a space made before my eyes of nothing but the mark and its field’.63 It is an extraordinary transformation. Here Pollock references Luce Irigaray, and in particular her feminist rereading of Merleau-​Ponty’s notoriously difficult chapter ‘The intertwining –​The Chiasm’, from his final, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible.64 As Pollock notes, Irigaray seeks 191

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to ground Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenological approach, applied to the pre-​discursive beginnings of consciousness, in a psychoanalytically informed project conceived as a ‘bringing into language, at last, the hidden dimension of the maternal-​feminine’.65 Pollock argues that for Irigaray, vision is substance, substrate, embodied as an impossible lining of the being of the sensate, seen subject in a world that envelops a consciousness of this condition made possible by its double fate of seeing and being seen, what Merleau-​Ponty names the intertwining of vision and movement that creates what he calls ‘flesh’ to which the strangest of activities, Modern painting, persistently aspired. Between his phenomenological enquiry and her feminist psychoanalytical recasting lies a shared interest in the arising of the human, as consciousness in the one, as subjectivity and sexual difference in the other.66 This is no more manifest than in relation to the role of colour, which as Irigaray describes ‘pours itself out, extends itself, escapes, imposes itself upon me as the reminder of what is most archaic in me, the fluid’, that which enveloped me ‘in my prenatal sojourn, by which I have been surrounded, clothed, nourished, in another body’.67 As such, Color resuscitates in me all of that prior life, the preconceptual, preobjective, presubjective, this ground of the visible where seeing and seen are not yet distinguished, where they reflect each other without any position having been established between them. Color bathes my gaze, which sees it, perceives it more or less well, changes it in its visibility, but can never delimit it, bend it to its decisions. Color constitutes a given that escapes from the subjective realm and that still and always immerses the subject in an invisible sojourn in the visible, a sojourn that cannot be mastered: whether infernal or celestial, preceding or following, a determinate incarnation into subject-​object duality. This color, the correlative of my vision, far from being able to yield to my decisions, obliges me to see.68 Irigaray here seeks to break out of Merleau-​Ponty’s labyrinthian solipsism, manifest when he asks:  ‘How does it happen that my look, enveloping them [i.e. things], does not hide them, and finally, that veiling them, it unveils them?’69 Positing the role of the ‘other’ here, as ‘touched and touching’, Irigaray comments on Merleau-​Ponty’s notion of a ‘fleshly atmosphere’: Indefinitely, he has exchanged seer and visible, touching and tangible, ‘subject’ and ‘things’ in an alternation, a fluctuation that would take place in a milieu that makes possible their passage from one or the other ‘side’. An archaic fleshly atmosphere, a sojourn that it is difficult not to compare once again to the intrauterine or to the still barely differentiated symbioses of infancy.70 Irigaray might thus be thought to recast this reciprocity –​the look that Merleau-​Ponty states ‘envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things’71  –​through a body haunted by 192

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imaginary connotations and associations that not only belong to the pre-​discursive, but to the invisibility of the prenatal. Alluding to such an atmosphere, Pollock highlights Martin’s effect of ‘screening or veiling’, that ‘evokes a novel relation between a psyche and a body’ that –​‘corporeal and affective’ –​‘give this work a relation to sexual difference at a level far removed from reference and deeply related to structure’.72 Indeed, Merleau-​Ponty’s dual terms ‘reversibility’ and ‘flesh’ thus involve the paradox of envelopment and distance that Martin’s work affords, such that the ‘seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen’.73 It is this intertwining of vision that explains Liville’s sense, cited above, of being ‘caught in one of her paintings’, such that ‘it is an almost painful effort to pull back from the private experience she triggers to examine the way the picture is made’. And here there is an undoubted ‘joy’ (and pain) in relation to this practice of repetition that might be couched in terms, as noted in Chapter 3, of the rhythmical space of what Kristeva terms the chora. Making this very connection, Pollock states, Art as signifying practice is a dynamic process of transformation that operates at the hinge between the body and the law, between what is not subjective and what is the condition of subjectivity. It precisely stands opposed to those forms of knowledge, claiming objective or transcendent status, that efface the body as heterogeneity, desire, and pleasure. This is the site where I would like to open up a relation to Martin’s adamant refusal of the spiritual, sublime, and classicizing readings of her work. She talks of a real beauty linked to the mystery of life, and thus presents her work as a work with the ‘real’ that is not about the body/​mind, matter/​spirit divide. It is about an experience of joy in things that is only ever imaginable as a memory of something lying beside, but attained through, the thinking grid of subjectivity.74 As a practice employing factors such as rhythm and colour, Martin’s repetitions thus represent a return to the non-​symbolic ‘negativity’ where an irruption of the semiotic chora disrupts and transgresses signification and ideation. Pollock states that ‘For Kristeva, aesthetic practice is both subjectified and subjectifying because practice is the site and sign of disunity, the shifting signifying body stretched between the constitutive restraints of a symbolic law that makes language mean and a libidinal economy that is its necessary dialectical condition:  the semiotic disposition and potentiality that always moves towards signification and yet equally escapes it to move again, elsewhere, otherwise.’75

V Martin’s practice thus exemplifies Krauss’s claim that ‘[t]‌he grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)’.76 193

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Pollock allies such an associational release to Kristeva’s irruption of the semiotic chora through a pre-​discursive practice (though one that disrupts ideation rather than being non-​ideational). This is manifest through an /​atmosphere/​constituted of luminous and chromatic differences, where the semiotic disposition ‘moves towards signification’ but ‘escapes it’ as the beholder orientates her own body towards the work in question. I want to conclude the chapter by briefly reflecting upon how this relates to Langer’s notion of virtuality considered in the previous chapter (itself, in its very semblance, redolent of the fictive), and specifically how a painting (rather than a sculpture) might here reveal a kinetic potential in terms of the space it opens up virtually and between actual material surface and beholder. I  earlier noted Langer’s distinction between the virtuality of painting and sculpture: the former she characterized as a perceptual space conceived as virtual scene, an entirely visual affair; the latter she characterized as ‘the image of kinetic volume in sensory space’, such that ‘sculpture makes virtual “kinetic volume” out of actual three-​dimensional material’.77 Martin’s grids confound such a distinction, opening up a particular ‘thickness’ or ‘translucency’ that David F.  Martin claims is ‘largely missing from the space in front of a painting’.78 Martin’s grid paintings might therefore be seen as not being organized around the kinetic potential of a depicted scene, but rather the production of the painting itself. This reinforces the contention that the particular illusion here is not one of landscape or abstracted nature (as someone like Alloway claims)79, but a thickness/​atmosphere that is physiological (in the oscillation between figure and ground) while not without associations. While there is an affective subjectivity, in that the painting’s immediate environment derives proportions and relations not from what is represented (in a Hegelian sense of a subjective experience as a sort of essentialist whole, focused on the consciousness of the perceiving individual), but as a reciprocal exchange (a non-​discursive, non-​propositional ‘feeling’) which foregrounds the beholder’s performative activity in realizing this potential as she moves backwards and forwards. Semblance, or appearance, is thus not construed in relation to mimetic function (to resemblance) but is permeated by a potential for movement towards the field the painting opens up, with all its traces and echoes of Martin’s own actions. As Prendeville notes, ‘The field one might enter, in this way, is ambivalently the visual field and the experiential field of my co-​existence with others’; it brings our orientation into play, but ‘does not need to recapitulate hers, and indeed cannot: the irreversible acts of painting and illimitable acts of looking comprise incongruent histories whose only common term is the given work’.80 And yet the paintings, in their variations of mark-​ making, undoubtedly evoke ghosts of the originating practice and imagined shadows of Martin’s presence in front of the physical canvas we face. And as Prendeville notes, there is a ‘ “dissonance” between the tenuous inner formation that subsists only in the viewer’s attention, and the containing square’: a dissonance cast as that ‘between field and frame’.81 While we are drawn inexorably towards the field (i.e. away from the frame), we step back and the frame –​the containing square –​re-​emerges and semblance dissipates. I would like to conclude Part III by again suggesting that this dissonance (or ‘thickness’), as with Caro’s Prairie discussed in the last chapter, constitutes a tension between the 194

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boundless space opened up by the virtual and the real space of the beholder, indexed by the common element of the work not only as object but as indexical sign; this places us in an experiential relation to Martin’s own bodily orientation in the performance of painting, such that we might recover something of its process, while acknowledging that we occupy a space temporally removed. As Pollock puts it, Thus a Kristevan reading of Martin’s reiteration of the constitutive tension of line, mark, system, grid, and color  –​as opposed to the otherness brought into play as the boundless space these grids temporarily make visible in their momentary emergence as the antithesis of the signifying gesture of drawn line –​allows the subjective affectivity of her seriality to be theorized as we aesthetically experience its affects at the level of the participating co-​affecting subject of the event that is her work, one by one.82

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PART IV INTERMEDIA

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CHAPTER 10 THE COMPLICIT BEHOLDER

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964) Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (1978)

I In the remaining three chapters, I switch attention away from established media such as painting and sculpture, to address three examples of intermedia art. These include a work of performance art from 1964, a site structure from 1978 and a video installation from 1991 –​situated works that illustrate some of the new possibilities for making art that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. Some critics, such as Krauss (encountered in the last two chapters, and the subject of the following chapter), refer to a ubiquitous post-​medium condition, which she characterizes, negatively, as a ‘leeching of the aesthetic out into the social field’  –​a condition she regards as founded on the saturation of images in late capitalism and ‘a profusion of forms joined by conceptual art’s contempt for [medium] specificity’.1 Krauss responds with a call for artists to ‘invent’ their own medium. I will have cause to question the viability of such a claim, not least in that what she characterizes as the invention of those artists she champions is arguably a factor of the intrinsic hybridity intermedia practices afford. Indeed, the works by the three artists I  consider in Part IV  –​Yoko Ono, Mary Miss and Bruce Nauman  –​are exemplars of new opportunities afforded by novel juxtapositions of existing media. I have already considered one example of a hybrid practice, El Lissitzky’s Proun Room. Nonetheless, while this work blurs the disciplinary boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, the experience it affords is still bound by conventions of painting, albeit translated into three dimensions. In Chapters 8 and 9, the boundaries between sculpture/​painting and minimalist object were discussed in relation to Caro’s 1967 Prairie and Martin’s 1963 Falling Blue. I argued that Prairie constructs a palpable tension between the kinetic potential of sculpture’s virtual space (as described by Langer) and the literal space of the beholder (in Fried’s terms). The distinction between Caro’s mid-​1960s sculpture and minimalist objects hinges on the extent to which the wider reality of the spatial situation is seen as constitutive of the work’s meaning  –​a more nuanced distinction than the rhetoric of the period allowed. In Chapter 9, I considered Martin’s Falling Blue in the light of Griselda Pollock’s psychoanalytic account, itself indebted to Julia Kristeva; this was correlated with Krauss’s phenomenological account of distinctions in the viewing distances Martin’s paintings suggest. Here I  argued the

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beholder’s share (her performance) was precisely in recovering Martin’s extraordinary practice of rhythmic repetition. If the orientation of the beholder is crucial to the phenomenal encounter Caro and Martin’s works afford, despite their resisting the incursion of the real, then minimalism opened up more explicit ways of conceiving the space of reception –​and the embodied experience of the ‘literal’ spectator –​as contributory factors of situated art. Dan Flavin’s 1972–​3 installation Untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), an image of which is used on the cover of the book, exemplifies this shift. However, the 1960s offered other challenges threatening the very status of the aesthetic as a factor in encountering contemporary art. In the Introduction, I challenged Peter Osborne’s contention that a postconceptual artistic ontology should be characterized as ‘beyond aesthetic’. In order to make good the promise of that challenge, I conclude the book with three examples of intermedia art that are symptomatic of what I am calling the configurational encounter. Such examples are representative of an attempt to shift the ground for an aesthetic experience of at least some significant forms of contemporary art from the judgement of aesthetic properties to a situated ‘encounter’ conceived as a structured performance. This encounter foregrounds configurational properties of the artwork’s production and reception, by revealing material processes, rules, instructions, appropriations and/​or its situated reception and apparatus of display.2 The encounter is one inflected by definition, precisely because it brings into question its own status as art; the encounter is ‘configurational’ in that it involves a ‘laying bare’ of its ‘devices’, to use a phrase adopted from the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky –​a process of defamiliarization that establishes the necessary distance on which the aesthetic encounter is premised.3 Shklovsky saw the ‘device’ as a means to dehabitualize perception; for Shklovsky, perception, when associated with ordinary practical language, becomes automatic or habitual, and it is therefore the function of art to defamiliarize such everyday engagement with objects. Nevertheless, two things are worth noting here. First, while the spatial/​durational dynamic of the situated encounter typically introduces something of the real (the extra-​aesthetic) in a way that is defamiliarized, thus dislodging us from the automatic or habitual perception associated with literal objects, this is not merely a perceptual process. In a corrective to Shklovsky’s argument about a protracted perception, Wolfgang Iser  –​whose 1978 book The Act of Reading will theoretically frame this ­chapter –​states ‘art does not complicate or protract the perception of objects, but through its different degrees of complexity it impedes the acts of ideation which form the basis for the constitution of meaning’.4 It does so by disrupting conventions, problematizing the beholder’s orientation towards the work. The space art opens up is virtualized, and thus involves the imagination (image-​building) which is itself impeded in terms of the process of accommodating the reader’s (or beholder’s) shifting, and conflicting, perspectives. As Iser notes with regard to the literary text, Since the world of the text is bound to have variable degrees of unfamiliarity for its possible readers (if the work is to have any ‘novelty’ for them), they must be placed in a position which enables then to actualize this new view. This position, however, 200

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cannot be present in the text itself, as it is the vantage point for visualizing the world represented and so cannot be part of that world. The text must therefore bring about a standpoint from which the reader will be able to view things that would never have come into focus as long as his own habitual dispositions were determining his orientation, and what is more, this standpoint must be able to accommodate all kinds of different readers.5 The intermedia works discussed in Part IV likewise construct a problematic orientation towards a virtualized space in a situation where conventions are disrupted, and must be renegotiated: recognizing that different beholders will bring different perspectives to the work. Secondly, it is important to note that the reflexive laying bare of the device is not an end in itself. By problematizing the dispositional orientation of beholders towards the work, the configurational encounter can, and in the most interesting case does, evoke the artwork’s wider associations. In other words, the often contradictory, or withheld, perspectives intrinsic to the work, that require the ideational activity of the beholder (with her repertoire of beliefs and historical norms), not only draws the beholder inescapably into the world of artwork, but are brought into a ‘particular kind of tension produced by the real reader [or, in this case, beholder] when he [or she] accepts the role’.6 The positions that the beholder must adopt towards this world, as we shall see, are not always comfortable, but intentionally destabilizing in their durational nature, in order to confront our habitual thinking. Thus considered, and hence countering the claims of philosophers of contemporary art such as Osborne, I am claiming that this encounter is aesthetic precisely because it involves the imaginative and ideational activity of the beholder. These are works that require structured acts on behalf of a beholder who is brought into a problematic orientation towards the artwork, entangling the beholder in a situation while also –​by revealing the device which structures the encounter –​keeping her at a certain distance (on which the aesthetic encounter depends). In constructing this position, I draw not only on Iser’s The Act of Reading, but also on his later, more anthropologically driven Prospecting (1989).7 While Iser writes primarily about literature, I believe his reader-​oriented approach, with its emphasis on negation as a productive matrix, offers a suitable model for establishing the necessary distance for aesthetic reflexivity on which my notion of the configurational encounter is founded.

II Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (Figure 10.1), first performed in Kyoto in 1964, is premised on a different mode of aesthetic encounter to contemporaneous works I have considered thus far. Ono’s work is associated with Fluxus, the international collective of artists founded in 1960 by the maverick Lithuanian/​American artist George Maciunas. However, while Ono shared modes of practice with Fluxus, she remained independent of the group, 201

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Figure 10.1  Yoko Ono: Cut Piece, 1964, film still from ‘Concept Art on Show in London’, 1966, a version of Cut Piece performed, for camera, by Yoko Ono and Anthony Cox. © British Pathé.

despite being invited to join by Maciunas, whose short-​lived AG Gallery in New York hosted her first solo show in 1961. Cut Piece evolved during a turbulent period after Ono returned to Japan in March 19628; as we shall see, its initial staging triggers associations particular to its Japanese context. Confronting conventional notions of ‘stage’ and ‘audience’, it is a piece that instructs the beholders, one-​by-​one, to come to the stage and cut away small pieces of her clothing –​a ‘gift’ which they can keep. As Julia Bryan-​ Wilson notes of the first performance, After these verbal instructions, she remained silent for the duration of the piece. Her posture, with her legs folded underneath her so that her body rested on her shins, replicated the polite Japanese sitting position seiza, assumed in formal or respectable environments. Significant pause elapsed between each hesitant cut, and the piece ended when the audience stopped cutting –​long stretches punctuated by the quiet sounds of scissors slicing through the cloth. Ono’s own silence was thrown into relief by the anxious titters of audience laughter. As her body was eventually bared, viewers descended the stage steps clutching the remnants of her dress and underclothes.9 202

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Ono, born in Tokyo in 1933, had already established herself as an emerging artist in New York when she met John Cage through her first husband, the Japanese avant-​ garde composer Ichiyanagi Toshi. Ichiyanagi was one of Cage’s compositional students in the late 1950s, and in the early 1960s had scores featured in Fluxus publications.10 Ono became friends with Cage –​a significant influence on many artists associated with Fluxus –​and mixed within a circle of artists who attended Cage’s seminal classes (see below), who were later to constitute the core group around Fluxus. Before her return to Japan, she hosted a series of performance events at her loft in lower Manhattan, curated with the composer La Monte Young.11 Collectively, the artists around Fluxus initiated key aspects of what came to be known as postmodernist art practice. This included intermedia (a term initiated by Dick Higgins to describe activities that fall ‘between the media’)12 and concept art (first coined by Henry Flynt)13; equally, Fluxus was important for the development of performance art (such as Alison Knowles and Carolee Schneemann), video art (the Korean artist Nam June Paik and Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota), happenings (conceived by Allan Kaprow), sound art (such as George Brecht, inventor of the Event score, and Benjamin Patterson, composer and performer), Décollage (a term adapted to art practice by the German Wolf Vostell), installation art (such as German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys) and concrete poetry (such as Emmett Williams, European coordinator of Fluxus and part of the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry from 1957 to 1959). These categories of art making were to have a profound impact upon late twentieth-​century art practice. While clearly indebted to Dada, Fluxus embraced a wider range of intermedia practices than the ‘officially’ sanctioned Fluxus publications of the mercurial Maciunas would suggest. Constructing a precise lineage is complicated by the fact that the self-​ appointed organizer of Fluxus was notoriously prone to ‘excommunicating’ artists.14 As George Brecht notes, Each of us had his own ideas about what Fluxus was and so much the better. That way it’ll take longer to bury us. For me, Fluxus was a group of people who got along with each other and were interested in each other’s work and personality.15 Owen F.  Smith refers to the intentional ‘fuzziness’ of boundaries at the very heart of Fluxus practices, manifest by the name devised by Maciunas in 1961  ‘for a proposed magazine that would publish works by experimental artists, writers, and musicians.’16 And, of course, it is this blurring of boundaries, generating work at the edges of what might be thought of as ‘art’ practice, that is so vital here. This commitment to a continual process of evolution informed Maciunas’s Fluxus manifesto, copies of which were thrown into the audience during the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus in Düsseldorf in February 1963.17 The manifesto called for action to ‘purge’ not only the dead art of illusion and imitation but also ‘abstract art’ and ‘mathematical art’ (a thinly veiled attack on minimalism and conceptual art).18 Key to the early development of Fluxus was the aforementioned series of classes in experimental composition offered by Cage at the New School for Social Research in 203

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New York, held between 1957 and 1959. These were committed to the kind of ‘purposeful play’ Cage saw as crucial to the creative process.19 As Hannah Higgins notes, the ‘class included [what were to become] Fluxus artists and associates George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Scott Hyde, Allan Kaprow, and Florence Tarlow, with frequent visits by the [future] Fluxus poet Jackson Mac Low and occasional visits by other artists (Harvey Gross, George Segal, Jim Dine, Larry Poons, and La Monte Young)’.20 The class conducted experiments not only in sound, using Cage’s well-​known chance experiments, but in poetry and performance. However, as Higgins comments, ‘The most durable innovation to emerge from that classroom was George Brecht’s Event score, a performance technique that has been used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist with varying degrees of success. In the Event, everyday actions are performed as minimalistic performances or, occasionally, as imaginary and impossible experiments with everyday situations.’21 These might be enacted by a single person, or within the context of an orchestrated collective; they can take place in private, or in public in front of an audience. Some of these actions are in the absurdist spirit of Dada. This is true of works by Brecht, who had been teaching with Kaprow within the experimental art department at Rutgers University. By way of example, Brecht’s Drip Music (1959, 1962), performed in 1962 by Dick Higgins at the Fluxus Festival, Nikolai Church, Copenhagen, typified this notion of disruptive play, utilizing humour through what Maciunas termed ‘gags’ or ‘games’ (Figure  10.2 shows a 1963 performance of the piece by Maciunas at the ‘Festum Fluxorum, Fluxus, Musik und Antimusik das Instrumentale Theater’, Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf). Here, a performer carried a stepladder onto a stage, proceeded to climb the ladder and, from a suitable height, poured water from a full watering can or jug into an empty bucket placed on the floor. As Higgins notes, as scored by Brecht the work ‘may occur by chance or by choice and in accordance with almost any circumstances, being neither site specific, performer specific, nor specific to a performance situation’22; however, the critical purchase of such a performance is nonetheless dependent on its situation. As performed, in particular, at Copenhagen, the Event takes on (but mocks) the conventions of the music recital, with a set duration (the time taken for the watering can to empty), a stage onto which the performer makes an entrance, and a seated audience (separated from the performance), who clap at the end. The piece operates in a kind of suspended state between two worlds, of negation, through humour, and affirmation: a potential new soundscape opened up to the listener. Kristine Stiles has documented the intimate connections between Fluxus events and the wider development of avant-​garde performance in the visual arts: ‘Fluxus originated in the context of performance and the nature of its being –​the ontology of Fluxus –​is performative.’23 In locating such performativity in the ‘interaction between the material and mental worlds’, such that ‘its actions negotiate degrees of human freedom in relations between the private and the social worlds’, Stiles offers an explanation of why the overused term ‘performative’ is here used appropriately.24 Hers is an account that stresses ‘the phenomenological character of the body as an instrument acting in the world’.25 Moreover, Stiles captures how Fluxus performances embrace indeterminacy –​through

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Figure  10.2  George Brecht:  Drip Music, 1962, performed during ‘Festum Fluxorum, Fluxus,

Musik und Antimusik das Instrumentale Theater’, Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, February 2, 1963, gelatin silver print, 24.8 × 18.8 cm. Performer George Maciunas. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: 2069.2008. © 2019. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/​Scala Florence.

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their manipulation of objects by a series of scripted actions that exceed their denotative capacity: But whether conceptual, corporeal, or verbal, private or public, simple or complex, Fluxus performances often center around the manipulation and use of objects in the enunciation of auditory and visual experience. The condensation of behavioral signals into single gestures that are produced in the interchange between action and object enhance the visual character of these performances, and in so doing, engage codes of visual representation that communicate in highly condensed, simultaneous, and multiple modes rather than in linear narrative.26 This clearly applies to Brecht’s Drip Music, where a quotidian action of pouring water connotes a challenge to a conventional framing of what constitutes an artwork: transforming the Duchampian readymade as object (relying, as it does, on the framing of the gallery and plinth) into a performative action where the audience’s role is one of witness. Here, the performance situation is a contributory factor. As David T. Doris notes, other Fluxus performances transform humour or nonsense into a more intense ‘forum for the investigation of boundaries, a site of transgression in which received, unspoken codes are simultaneously revealed and overturned’.27 Before moving on to consider Ono’s Cut Piece, in the next section I want to briefly address three performances by Paik, not least because of the similarities and significant differences to Ono’s work.

III Nam June Paik, a key figure in the early development of video art, was in the 1960s closely associated with Fluxus via its German connections. Born in Seoul in 1932, Paik had attended a course by the German serialist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Darmstadt (1957–​58), along with La Monte Young, and ‘shared an orbit with the experimental Darmstadt Circle of poetry and theater that in the late 1950s included Fluxus artist Emmett Williams’.28 Paik also attended, and performed in, the influential Cologne performance atelier of Stockhausen’s wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister, which in the early 1960s acted as an extraordinary platform for a range of artists and composers associated with Cage, Stockhausen and Fluxus.29 Compared to Brecht’s whimsical Event scores, Paik’s 1960s work represented a more destructive tendency, reminiscent of the political art of the London-​based Gustav Metzger, whose auto-​destructive manifesto was written in 1959.30 Maciunas, himself, was not opposed to creative acts of destruction, as in the Piano Piece #13 (1962), where the ‘performer nails down each key of the entire keyboard starting with the lowest note and ending with the highest note’.31 But whereas the performance of Maciunas’s work invariably generates laughter, Paik’s actions earned him, from Kaprow, the dubious accolade of ‘the cultural terrorist’. The laughter here, if any, is rather more nervous. Mari Dumett documents how, in one performance at Bauermeister’s studio in Cologne in 206

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October 1960 in a piece entitled Étude for Pianoforte, Paik broke off from playing Chopin on the piano to grab a pair of scissors and leap into the audience, where, ‘[in] what can be constructed at once as a bizarre homage and Oedipal killing of the father, Paik cut off Cage’s tie.’32 A  photo of the event by Klaus Barisch shows a smiling Paik also cutting Cage’s shirttail, the accosted Cage leaning forward in self-​defence. As Dumett notes, Cage later recalled that he ‘determined to think twice before attending another performance by Paik’.33 Paik’s One for Violin Solo, scored in 1961, and premiered by Paik at the proto-​Fluxus Düsseldorf Neo-​Dada in der Musik concert in 1962, was more tightly scored, though no less shocking to its audience. It required that the performer raise a violin almost imperceptibly until overhead, before smashing the instrument down with considerable force to pieces. Dumett offers a detailed description of the debut performance, worth citing at length: On June 16, 1962, Nam June Paik entered the stage of the Düsseldorf Kammerspiele. He stood behind a table facing the audience, with his eyes closed and body taut, one foot in front of the other in a slight lunge, as if channeling all his energy. He held a violin by its scroll, extending it out in front of him parallel to and just inches above the table. Ever so slowly, with an almost imperceptible movement and a highly concentrated manner, he raised the violin until it was above his head in line with his body, testing the viewer’s patience and building anticipation as five minutes ticked by. Suddenly, in a single lightning-​fast motion he thrust the violin downward, smashing it on the table. Wood splinters flew in all directions just as the lights went up in the auditorium. With that, the performance was over. Even before Paik’s culminating act, some viewers could not contain their anxiety. As Paik lifted the violin higher and higher, one audience member –​the conductor of the Düsseldorf City Orchestra –​burst out, ‘Don’t destroy the violin!’ From another row came an immediate rebuke, ‘Don’t interrupt the concert!’ The second voice was that of Joseph Beuys, the German artist and recently appointed professor of sculpture at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie.34 The work had a profound effect on Beuys. The following year, Beuys himself is seen violently attacking a prepared piano with an axe at the Exposition of Music-​Electronic Television (11 March 1963).35 However, it would be wrong to think of this as merely a transgressive act aimed at the Western music which Paik, inspired by Schönberg, had come to Germany to study. As Hannah Higgins states, ‘Many Fluxus accounts are flawed in their overemphasis on the iconoclasm or destructiveness of the Events, which are simply dismissed or heralded as mere anti-​painting’ –​or, in this case, anti-​music.36 While Higgins places Paik at one end of a spectrum from destructive to non-​destructive works (Brecht being at the other), Paik’s work also engages a set of complex political and racial undercurrents that are not simply about iconoclasm. While Paik performs highly symbolic acts, such destructive actions accompany more considered affirmations of Paik’s own identity as an Asian 207

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man in a 1960s German context, against a backdrop of a shared interest in the negating potential of art in post-​war Germany (a situation where a whole once cherished cultural tradition had irrevocably collapsed). But, again, as Iser reminds us, a ‘negative aesthetics’ (a turning of a tradition upside down) has to move beyond mere binaries of negation/​ affirmation. As the Iser scholar Winfried Fluck notes, Iser proposes a ‘transformation of negativity from a concept of radical resistance to an enabling structure and productive matrix’.37 This is manifest in the highly controlled nature of the performance of One for Violin Solo described above; lasting nearly five minutes, almost the entire performance comprises a nervous anticipatory silence as the violin is slowly raised –​other than, of course, the environmental sound, as with Cage’s seminal 4’33” (1952). Here, Paik appears to reflect upon Cage’s work, which, of course, was famously inspired by Zen Buddhism. But the homage to 4’33” is a prelude to the sudden and violent end that interrupts this sustained silence: a possible comment on Cage’s appropriation of such Eastern philosophical practices, and Paik’s own ambivalence towards Zen at a time of political turmoil.38 (Paik’s family had fled Korea in 1950 prior to the invasion of Seoul by the North Korean army, relocating to Tokyo  –​itself the ‘land of Korea’s former ruler’.)39 But it is also worth bearing in mind, as Doris notes, that ‘like Fluxus, Zen regards laughter as an important index of understanding’.40 Zen for Head (1962) was performed at the 1962 Fluxus International Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, where Paik enacted an extraordinary version of an original 1960 score by La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #10 (to Bob Morris), with its single line instruction: ‘Draw a straight line and follow it.’ Paik gives the instruction a more disturbing edge by painting the line on a scroll of paper with his head, dipping his hair into a bowl (a chamber pot, to be precise) of red ink and tomato juice and then, bent over on hands and knees, using it like a brush to draw the line (Figure 10.3). Elizabeth Armstrong describes the scene: On the stage in the auditorium of the Städtisches Museum in Wiesbaden, West Germany, Nam June Paik dipped his head, hands, and necktie into a bowl of ink and tomato juice, then dragged them along a length of paper. It was 1962, and Paik was a participant in what is often considered the first Fluxus festival …. Zen for Head was his interpretation of a composition by fellow composer La Monte Young, whose 1960 score simply directed the performer to ‘Draw a straight line and follow it’. For pure shock value alone, Zen for Head is memorable. But this piece, which begun as a composition, took form as a performance, and ultimately was preserved as an object in the Museum Wiesbaden, is most significantly a relic of its artistic meaning.41 While the audience laughs, and there is certainly humour here, the performance again has a more serious subtext. Clearly, there are connotations of Asian calligraphy (underscored by the scroll of paper, which was retained, and displayed, by the museum)42 that both posits the body’s gestural capacity while also reducing such a gesture to a brute 208

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Figure 10.3  Nam June Paik: Zen for Head, 1962, at ‘Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik’ in Wiesbaden. dpa picture alliance/​Alamy Stock Photo. Photo: Harmut Rekort.

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action that involves the subjugation of an Asian body in front of a largely white audience in the context of early 1960s overt Western imperialism and US segregation. Again, there is deliberate ambiguity in Paik’s appropriation of (without crediting) La Monte Young’s own appropriation of a Zen-​inspired Cagean score. Added to this complex mix is the status of the preserved scroll (a ‘relic’ of the performance), which in its framing might be seen as a reference to Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953), itself a response and challenge to notions of gesture prevalent within Abstract Expressionism. Rauschenberg’s act predates, but conforms to, Young’s instruction; that it was none other than Cage who Rauschenberg instructed to drive his Model A Ford car in a straight line over the twenty-​two-​foot strip of glued together paper only adds to the complex web of references and questions about authorship that Paik subsequently enacts. As an ‘outsider’, Paik’s work, therefore, might be seen as explicitly establishing negation as a creative strategy that folds back on itself, in such a way as to engage with but also criticize wider Fluxus-​inspired practices, dehabitualizing not only the traditional Western music in which he had been trained from a young age but also the avant-​ garde’s own respective conventions. Paik thus politically confronts an audience all too comfortable within its own avant-​garde skin. At times, the seemingly unstructured and unpredictable nature of the performances left the audience merely confused; but with the most powerful scored works of this period, Paik forces the audience to confront its own complicity towards an Asian body which subjugates itself for their entertainment.43

IV Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece takes the complicity of the beholder one step further, in that the audience, rather than recipient, is required to act (within the remit of the instructions) for the performance to even take place. Unlike Paik’s symbolic act of cutting Cage’s tie, it is the beholder who wields the scissors in Cut Piece. Conceived in 1961, the piece was first performed at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto in 1964. Between 1964 and 1966 Ono performed the piece three more times: at the Sogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo in 1964; at the Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, in 1965; and at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966. Then, in September 2003, she performed the piece once more, at the Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris. In addition, Ono and Anthony Cox staged the piece for the camera in a little-​known film for Pathé News in London in 1966, in a clip entitled ‘Concept Art on Show in London’ (Figure 10.1). Perhaps unsurprisingly given the sparing nature of Ono’s deceptively simple instruction, Cut Piece has been interpreted in open-​ended ways. Some have suggested that despite its close connections to Fluxus, it runs counter to the anti-​egoistic allegiance of the Event. Higgins, for instance, argues, The performances of Yoko Ono likewise run counter to the disembodied idea of mainstream conceptual art. Typical is the Event Cut Piece (1961), a striptease of 210

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sorts, but instead of watching a woman undress, the audience is called upon to remove her clothing with scissors  –​a disconcerting actualization of voyeuristic language (‘I undressed her with my eyes’). Unlike Brecht’s Events, this work is clearly about the person of Ono and the specific identity of each audience member who engages (or not) in the act of cutting. As a comparatively ego-​based piece, it runs counter to the anti-​egoistic basis of the typical Event. Nevertheless, Cut Piece, which is performed frequently in concerts of historic Fluxus work, certainly belongs to the transactional domain linking Events and conceptual art.44 Daughter of Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, Higgins’s evaluation is both informed by and reflects inside knowledge of tensions within Fluxus towards Ono’s later role within the group. And she is certainly right to identify Ono’s biographical identity as an important factor in the original reception of the work. However, in Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings, Yoko Ono (speaking in the third person tense) describes Cut Piece thus: This piece was performed in Kyoto, Tokyo, New York and London. It is usually performed by Yoko Ono coming on the stage and in a sitting position, placing a pair of scissors in front of her and asking the audience to come up on the stage, one by one, and cut a portion of her clothing (anywhere they like) and take it. The performer, however, does not have to be a woman.45 Indeed, Cut Piece has been performed numerous times by women and men.46 But, within the context of this book, I would argue that to remove the work from its original 1960s context is to lessen its import, and negates how the dynamic subtly shifted within its various iterations in its four locations. More contentious is how the work relates to the issue of voyeurism. Ono’s enacting of the piece at Sogetsu Kaikan Hall in Tokyo under the ironic title Yoko Ono Farewell Concert:  Strip-​Tease Show (1964) no doubt fuelled the controversy about the work’s objectification of Ono’s body laid bare, and whether  –​or not  –​the piece is a proto-​ feminist performance. In ‘Fluxus Feminus’, Kathy O’Dell cites the exclusion of certain women artists from the canon of Fluxus production, recalling how Ono felt her work was rejected for being ‘too animalistic’; nevertheless, by ‘ironically replicating stereotypically male practices of voyeurism, as well as stereotypically female states of passivity, [Ono] competed with traditions of voyeurism and demonstrated another form of mastery over visual space’.47 Stiles develops at length the theme of objectification of the ‘other’: Ono’s performance … brought the theme of physical and emotional pain into the actual interplay of human intersubjectivity. The performance opens itself to a number of interpretations. It may be read as a discourse on passivity and aggression, on the presentation of the self as a victim connected to the reciprocity between abuse and self-​denigration, or on the relinquishment of 211

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power required in sadomasochistic exchange. It vividly demonstrates, as well, the potential for objectification of the ‘other’ in the militarization of feeling that dislocates compassion from acts of brutality. It also comments on the condition of art and becomes that denouement of the relationship between exhibitionism and scopic desires that disrobes the imagined self-​referential edifice of art and reveals it to be an interactive exchange between beholder and object. Cut Piece visualizes and enacts the responsibility that viewers must take in aesthetic experience.48 Part of a collective audience, the piece demands an ethical response from the beholder –​ a point that I will develop in relation to Iser in the next section. We are made complicit, but we are also made responsible. In her 2003 article ‘Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, Bryan-​Wilson opens up a very different way of thinking about the work. She asserts an active engagement on Ono’s part with political themes, particularly in relation to how its initial performance ‘cites the visual culture of atomic war in order to confront the influence of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on post-​war Japanese art’, such that the performance is ‘not only gendered, but formed by nation, race, and history’.49 Bryan-​Wilson thus questions interpretations that generalize Ono’s body as representing all female bodies, to the extent that ‘Ono’s body is taken as a body stripped, scrutinised, and violated by the audience’s gaze, and the work is described as “really quite gruesome –​more like a rape than an art performance” ’.50 As Bryan-​Wilson notes, such a reading leaves little space for the work as ‘a gift, a gesture of reparation, or a ritual of remembrance’.51 Here, she has in mind the photographs of post-​bomb survivors with fragments of clothing ripped from their bodies by the blast, taken by US Army inspection teams:  images that had been suppressed in the aftermath, but later constituted a powerful testimony to the horror unleashed. And women (and children), of course, were intended victims of bombs that had purposefully attacked non-​military targets. As Bryan-​Wilson states, ‘Cut Piece does not simply accuse the audience for taking up the scissors, and it does not unmask the audience as merely sadistic. Indeed, the viewer’s participation is vital to the piece’s reciprocal ballet. By accentuating the violence of the situation, these readings [where Ono’s body is scrutinised as object] elide the more complex dynamic of simultaneous destruction and memorialisation.’52 And here Bryan-​Wilson cites Paik as another artist apprehensive about the future, noting, 1964 was the year of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and increasing United State government intervention in Vietnam, and the year that Buddhist monks immolated themselves to protest this intervention. And for Paik and Ono  –​ expatriates dividing their time between Asia, Europe, and the US –​in 1964 each year was threatened by war which hung over head like a knife. In this context, then, the scissors-​wielding man at the Kyoto concert [who made a motion as if to stab Ono] reads the performative circumstances of Cut Piece correctly, as he transforms the piece into a meditation on threat and destructive potentiality.53 212

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Bryan-​Wilson’s interpretation is, of course, entirely dependent upon what the beholder brings to the situation; none of this is written in the ‘score’ or articulated by Ono. But she is surely right to suggest that, whether consciously or not, this was an associational shadow that Ono –​who had lived, in poverty, in Japan throughout the Second World War (and was 12 years old when the bombs were dropped on towns she had visited) –​ inevitably brought to the staging of the work. This does not negate the piece as a feminist performance (far from it), but to recognize how the situation is constitutive of the work’s meaning. Nor does it negate the misogyny of the man in the New York audience (revealed in the film by Albert and David Maysles) who becomes increasingly sexually aggressive in removing the clothing of the young Asian performer in a conventionally passive pose, ‘playing’ to the audience and thus enacting his own ‘theatricality’.54 (Even when viewed in the documentary footage, the viewer is uncomfortably implicated, the staging disclosing aspects of the ‘real’ extrinsic to the work’s instructions but which nevertheless intrude upon the work’s meaning.) Rather, it adds another level of associational complexity to this encounter. In this light, in the final section I  want to reflect upon how Ono’s performance forcibly reminds us that in such circumstances illocutionary force, while framed, is decidedly not suspended.

V How might Iser’s ‘aesthetics of response’ frame the issue of what it is for the beholder to take responsibility within such a context? While developed in relation to certain forms of avant-​garde literature to which Iser is drawn, I believe his argument has direct relevance to the aesthetic encounter afforded certain forms of contemporary art, including Ono’s performance. There are two aspects I want to bring out: first, the asymmetry inherent to Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’; secondly, the issue of suspension –​or, rather, non-​suspension –​ of illocutionary force within works of fiction, and by extension performance art. Again, my aim is not to evaluate Iser’s account as such, but to see what work it might do in relation to a work such as Cut Piece. Iser introduces the blank within the context of the gaps that arise from the asymmetry between text and reader, in the absence of the face-​to-​face social interaction. His starting point is the incompleteness of a text, and the fact that there is no extrinsic frame of reference governing the text–​reader relationship: ‘on the contrary, the codes which might regulate this interaction are fragmented in the text and must first be reassembled or, in most cases, restructured before any frame of reference can be established’.55 The resulting gaps –​not mere omissions but ‘constitutive’ blanks –​invite the reader’s projections, such that out of a process of continual reformation arises a definite, though inherently unstable (through its very indeterminacy), frame of reference: ‘It is only through readjustment of his own projections that the reader can experience something previously not within his experience, and this something … ranges from a detached objectification of what he is entangled in, to an experience of himself that would otherwise be precluded by his entanglement in the pragmatic world around him.’56 213

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Iser claims that negations produce two categories of blanks, such that they relate not only to a repertoire of norms but also to the reader’s position, precisely because the invalidation of established norms constructs a new relation between the reader and her familiar world.57 He identifies two varieties of negation: ‘primary negations’, which invalidate or disrupt norms or conventions, and ‘secondary negations’, arising out of the resulting dehabitualization of the reader, such that ‘the text runs counter to the reader’s familiar modes of orientation’.58 For Iser, ‘These two types of negation cannot be separated, for their interrelationship is essential to the communicatory intention of the literary text’. Indeed, the secondary negations are necessary to ‘actualize the theme to the extent that they bring about corrections to the disposition and transform the theme into an experience.’59 This has important implications for the issue of representation. Iser here maintains (with echoes of Langer) that aesthetic semblance ‘neither transcends a given reality nor mediates between idea and manifestation; it is an indication that the inaccessible can only be approached by being staged’.60 As such, Representation is therefore both performance and semblance. It conjures up an image of the unseeable, but being a semblance, it also denies it the status of a copy of reality. The aesthetic semblance can only take on its form by way of the recipient’s ideational, performative activity, and so representation can only come to fruition in the recipient’s imagination; it is the recipient’s performance that endows the semblance with its sense of reality.61 This adds an additional level of complexity to the notion of semblance (of degrees of virtuality) discussed in Chapters  8 and 9, which likewise stressed the role of the imagination in the recipients’ ideational, performative activity. Thus, for the duration of the ‘performance’, our thoughts and feelings are in service of an unreality, but where extrinsic factors (such as everyday prejudices) intrude but are also potentially scrutinized. As such, Iser refutes the proposition that with fiction –​or, by extension, performance art –​illocutionary force (the intention behind performative phrases or actions) is thereby ‘bracketed’ because it cannot invoke conventions or accepted procedures. Whereas fiction, for the philosophers John R.  Searle and J.  L. Austin,62 is ‘parasitic’, implying that it is pseudo-​real, Iser contends, [S]‌peech acts, as long as they are considered to be performatives, actually produce reality. If speech acts are able to produce realities, one could just as well say that fictions are not parasitic in relation to reality. Rather, by intervening into reality they also produce realities –​just as a lie produces realities.63 Here, fictional language is not devoid of reality, but engages conventions differently from ordinary performative utterances. It does so by ‘selecting’ conventions, and then constructing them ‘horizontally’, whereby, deprived of their situational context and normal regulatory capacity (typical of the vertical structure of normative stability), 214

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they in themselves become subjects for scrutiny. This has important consequences for the role of reader. Crucially, Iser claims that the ‘iconic signs of literature constitute an organization of signifiers which do not serve to designate a signified object, but instead designate instructions for the production of the signified’.64 How does this apply to the work in question? Ono’s Cut Piece also stages a ‘virtualized’ realm that, while removed from any functional imperative, compels the beholder to acts of ideation. Bringing our orientation into play, this problematizes our dispositions in ways that implicate ourselves within the social relations revealed. While this undoubtedly has ethical as well as aesthetic dimensions, such perspective shifting necessitates an imaginative engagement with ideas through associative play:  that is, a coming to ‘fruition in the recipient’s imagination’.65 Here, primary negations disrupt the ‘staged’ conventions of performance (the asymmetry between stage and audience): an asymmetry confronted  –​in that the beholder must break the fourth wall to become part of the performance (which the misogynist in New  York is well aware of, in his theatrical asides to the audience) –​but reinforced by Ono’s impassive gaze throughout her performance, refusing to respond to anything the beholder might say or do. But it is in the realm of secondary negations that an associational penumbra is uncovered –​the kind of excess of connotation discussed in the previous section in relation to Bryan-​ Wilson. And as Fluck notes, for Iser, ‘It is through such blanks that the negations take on their productive force’, in that old negated meaning ‘has been changed by the negation back into material for interpretation, out of which the new meaning is to be fashioned’.66 Hence, the transgressive (though sanctioned) acts of the beholder, constrained by Ono’s instruction, likewise do not suspend illocutionary force, in that they have ‘real’ force, embedded within prevalent social attitudes. Unlike Paik’s performance, Ono shifts any notion of ‘threat’ from the performer to the beholder, made complicit not just by association but by the role he or she is allocated. I want to conclude by relating such a position to Lara Shalson’s recent account of Cut Piece in her book Enduring Performance, which offers a comprehensive review of the literature on Ono’s work. While she makes no reference of Iser, her position is, I believe, compatible –​not least in her emphasis on the asymmetrical relation Ono’s performance establishes. In a subtle distinction, Shalson uses Cut Piece, along with Marina Abramović’s Rhythm o (1974), to offer a ‘feminist argument about how body art works by women, specifically works involving the enduring body, challenge objectification, not through the hyperbolic presentation of the mechanisms of voyeurism and objectification, but through an insistence upon coming to terms with objecthood itself ’.67 This is an argument that likewise raises ‘a number of questions about the implications of inviting audience members to participate in such an “actualization” ’.68 Here, Shalson references Fried’s critique of objecthood, and particularly the duration he found intolerable  –​a duration so ‘central to the performance of objecthood’.69 Through a detailed analysis of the film of the Carnegie Hall performance, she argues that Ono demands that the beholder endure the encounter with objecthood by staging her female body as object. This takes place within a situated context where (collective) responsibilities are still operational: ‘Through her presentation of her own enduring body, Ono challenged her 215

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audience to discover an appropriate mode of engaging with objecthood. It is a challenge they took up through their individual acts, but it is also something they had to negotiate in relation to each other and under the watchful gaze of other audience members, making clear that interpersonal relations are always embedded within broader group structures and dynamics.’70 If Shalson explicitly acknowledges the communal aspect of beholding, Iser likewise recognizes that a reader’s potential responses range from detached objectification (here represented by Ono’s enduring body) to an experience precluded by our entanglement in the real, such that we critically reflect upon the conventions the work establishes by being forced to confront, head-​on, our collective responsibility. If, as noted earlier, for Stiles Cut Piece ‘enacts the responsibility that viewers must take in aesthetic experience’, then Shalson stresses that ‘rather than being demonstrated by the work responsibility is surely called into question in its live enactment’, in circumstances where participants are instructed ‘to engage in the very act of destruction the work would seem to condemn’.71 For Shalson, we must therefore confront (and endure) the work’s inherent ambivalence. But we can say more here, precisely because Ono’s deceptively simple instruction compels the beholder to find connections and relations for what is intentionally disconnected, through acts of ideation which (while open ended) are constrained not only by the Event score but by a collective situation that confronts theatrical conventions. It is the latter that endows the work with concrete meaning, dependent upon context, such that the piece establishes a dissonance between the virtuality of the space of the performance (where the beholder is required to cut away Ono’s clothing for the performance to happen) and extrinsic factors that inevitably intrude while simultaneously deformed. Here, the circumstances of reception are central to the production of the aesthetic ‘object’ along lines established by the work’s functional situation, such that the beholder is made complicit by the very act he or she is ostensibly required to do.

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CHAPTER 11 THE BEHOLDER IN THE EXPANDED FIELD

Mary Miss, Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys (1978) Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979)

I Despite its brevity, Rosalind Krauss’s essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, which first appeared in the spring 1979 issue of October, has become a canonical text within art theory. The article registers Krauss’s structuralist turn from her more phenomenologically driven Passages in Modern Sculpture, which had been published just two years earlier in 1977. Having left the editorial board of Artforum to co-​found the art journal October, which began publishing in 1976 (with Krauss as its founding editor), for some years she had been on a self-​confessed ‘rampage against the notion of pluralism’.1 Pluralism had been a fallback position for many of her co-​editors at Artforum when faced with the ‘post-​medium’ proliferation of art practices characterizing emergent art in the 1960s and 1970s. Reacting against the perceived lack of criticality at the heart of such pluralist approaches, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ attempted to organize, and delimit, the ‘field’ into which such a diverse range of different sculptural practices were operating. Krauss did so through her celebrated first use of a Greimas diagram (Figure  11.1), a semiotic tool of structural analysis.2 In so doing, she sought to encompass minimalist and site-​specific works within an expanded field of sculptural practices. While Krauss now tends to cast minimalism as a break with modernism, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in the words of Hal Foster, projected ‘a minimalist recognition back onto modernism so that she can read minimalism as a modernist epitome’.3 Krauss defended artists such as Robert Morris and Richard Serra against the likes of her one-​time mentor Greenberg and colleague Fried, both of whom, as we have seen, regarded minimalism –​as a ‘situational’ art –​as a threat to the autonomy and medium specificity of high modernism. While Krauss’s structuralist turn represented a displacement of the kind of formalism associated with Greenberg, the shift from an aesthetic towards a theoretical formalism registered by ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ conceives of sculpture not as a set of relational properties belonging to the sculptural object as such, but as constructing a set of relations operational in defining sculpture itself. This might be seen within the context of the wider development of Krauss’s position –​and her more recent championing of artists who, in ‘reinventing’ medium, counter what she terms the ‘post-​medium condition’.4 As such, Peter Osborne suggests that the essay’s ‘historical meaning is to be found less in what

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Landscape

Architecture Axiomatic structures

Marked sites

Not-Landscape

Complex

Not-Architecture

Neuter

Figure 11.1  Rosalind Krauss, Greimas Diagram from Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1979), 38. Redrawn by the author.

the analysis itself proposes than in its inadvertent effects in supporting the expansion not of the field in which “sculpture” is located –​its topic –​but the institutional definition of sculpture itself; and thereby, the ideological reappropriation of all those practices of object-​making that were against “sculpture” ’.5 Osborne’s criticism reflects his own anti-​ formalist (and anti-​aesthetic) position; nevertheless, with the benefit of hindsight it is true that Krauss’s argument was not the straightforward rejection of medium it first seemed. When Krauss states that ‘it is obvious that the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material’,6 while this seeks to draw a line under the word medium in Greenbergian terms of defining its essence, it was arguably in the service of a renewal of sculpture rather than a championing of intermedia. Krauss’s essay opens with a brief description of a key work of ‘expanded’ practice by the American artist Mary Miss: Toward the center of the field there is a slight mound, a swelling in the earth, which is the only warning given for the presence of the work. Closer to it, the large square face of the pit can be seen, as can the ends of the ladder that is needed to descend into the excavation. The work itself is thus entirely below grade: half atrium, half tunnel, the boundary between outside and in, a delicate structure of wooden posts and beams. The work, Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, 1978, by Mary Miss, is of course a sculpture or, more precisely, an earthwork.7 In fact, not all of Miss’s ‘earthwork’ was underground. Installed at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, Roslyn, New York, the temporary work incorporated two earth mounds and three timber towers of different scales, unmentioned by Krauss despite the fact that the mounds and two of the towers appear in the background of the first of the two accompanying photographs used. Nevertheless, it is the image of the pit as a 218

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poignant ‘negative’ –​a void within the landscape –​that serves Krauss’s wider purpose (Figure 11.2). Miss’s work is just one of a surprising variety of things that, over the course of the late 1960s and 1970s, were called sculpture: ‘narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert’.8 Registering the problematic of applying the term ‘sculpture’ to such a range of art practices, Krauss notes that this difficulty is insurmountable unless ‘the category can be made to become

Figure 11.2  Mary Miss: Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, 1978, wood, earth and steel, pit opening 16′

(488 cm) sq., underground 40′ (1219 cm) sq., towers 10′ (305 cm) sq. × 18′ (549 cm) high, 8′ (244 cm) sq. × 15′ (457 cm) high and 6′ (183 cm) sq. × 13′ (396 cm) high. Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, Roslyn, New York. © Mary Miss. 219

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almost infinitely malleable’.9 She claims that this is precisely the critical task that has accompanied post-​war American art, by which ‘categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity’.10 This stretching had contorted categories to the point where the term sculpture had lost criticality, despite sleights-​of-​hand by which a covert but incessant ‘historicism’ constructed lineages from the past (a ‘paternity’) as a means –​hiding behind an ideology of the new –​to mitigate differences. As Krauss pithily notes, with the onset of minimal and postminimal sculpture, this evocation of parenthood  –​‘the ghosts of Gabo and Tatlin and Lissitzky’  –​had become increasingly difficult to perform, such that in aligning earthworks with ancient monuments the lineages were now measured in ‘millenia rather than decades’.11 ‘Primitivizing’ works from the earlier part of the century, such as Brancusi’s Endless Column, were called upon to mediate this atavistic referencing: But in doing all of this, the very term we had thought we were saving –​sculpture –​ has begun to be somewhat obscured. We had thought to use a universal category to authenticate a group of particulars, but the category has now been forced to cover such a heterogeneity that it is, itself, in danger of collapsing. And so we stare at the pit in the earth and think we both do and don’t know what sculpture is.12 Faced with the imminent collapse of sculpture as a meaningful category, Miss’s work therefore enacts a rich metaphor for Krauss, not least because –​as one stares into its void –​one is reminded that this is an exemplary anti-​monument made by a young woman artist (34 at the time) self-​consciously challenging the paternal fathers of modernism. For Krauss, Miss’s work confronts, head on, the ‘logic of sculpture’, which she claims ‘is inseparable from the logic of the monument’.13 But for Krauss, this does not mean abandoning the term; rather, she attempts to rescue sculpture by determining its already expanded limits, mapping out the field. The following two sections will contextualize Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys against Miss’s wider oeuvre. I argue that Miss engages the beholder in a way that is not only distinct from gallery located works but also from other outdoor installations of the period, such as those by Robert Smithson, Robert Morris and Michael Heizer. In the final section, I then shift the focus to the wider significance of Kruass’s essay; I outline her mapping of the expanded field through the use of a semiotic square, and consider the continuing relevance of the ‘Expanded Field’ in light of Krauss’s more recent hostility towards installation art.14 In so doing, I hope to uncover an unresolved tension between Krauss’s formalism –​a term she states that she is not afraid of –​and the phenomenological approach of Passages in Modern Sculpture (referenced at length in Chapter 8).15 II Born in New York in 1944, but growing up in the western United States, Miss returned to New York in 1968, having received her M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College 220

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of Art in Baltimore. Miss emerged from her studies during a period where minimalism was already well established. The influence of minimalism on Miss is reflected in early works such as Grate (1966), an assemblage combining a ‘found’ steel grate and thick wooden frame, reminiscent of works by Carl Andre. Indeed, Miss openly acknowledges minimalism (and Andre in particular) as an important ‘stepping-​stone’.16 Minimalism, as we have seen, opened up the art situation to include a consideration of the beholder. Nevertheless, Miss was quick to distinguish herself with respect to one significant point: ‘Minimalist artists attempted to divest their work of associative and referential content, and content was important to me, from very early on.’17 Now, one might question the degree to which this non-​associative rhetoric was actually operative elsewhere; nevertheless, as early as 1966, Miss was explicitly referencing everyday objects such as deckchairs in her sculpture Awning, combining canvas, wood, steel and cement. Largely excluded as a woman from the closed world of the New York gallery system, Miss tended to work outdoors, using inexpensive and portable materials. Stakes and Ropes (1968), for instance, employed poles and attached ropes, typically used to mark off public areas, to address issues of boundaries and occupation. Her outdoor constructions in the public realm cross disciplinary boundaries, blurring the territory between art, landscape architecture, urban design and architecture; but they also address spatial aspects of demarcation or measuring. As Miss notes, ‘from a very early stage I’ve been interested in integrating myself into the context, the environment, rather than imposing on it or standing separate from it. … One of my primary things is trying to make intimate spaces within the public domain, make a connection between public life and interior life’.18 Such traces of human inhabitation were also prevalent in those rare works brought into a gallery context, such as Ladders and Hurdles (1970) (Figure  11.3), constructed from wood and rope. Miss’s natural proclivity was towards the non-​specialist audience of a public who could not only encounter, but –​importantly –​inhabit, her work. This engendered a different relation to the beholder than the more imposing interventions of male contemporaries likewise working outside of the gallery. Not least, her adopted vernacular language of everyday rural architecture –​wooden stakes, ropes, fences, gates, enclosures, troughs, ladders, silos, screens, benches, towers, trellising, grating –​contributed to the sense of her work being inherently of the landscape rather than something imposed onto it; thus Miss was drawn to ‘occupied’ rather than ‘unoccupied’ sites, where the familiar marks of labour and inhabitation provided traces of a human-​scale experience. This was in stark contrast to someone like Heizer, who sought dramatic landscapes and extreme locations, exemplified by Double Negative (1969–​70) at Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada. As Eleanor Heartney notes of Miss, She tended to place her works in well-​ traveled locations and she preferred intimate paces and vernacular materials and forms that stirred the memory and imagination. In opposition to what might be regarded –​especially in the context of the feminist stirrings of the 1970s –​as an overwhelmingly masculine desire to 221

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Figure 11.3  Mary Miss: Ladders and Hurdles, 1970, wood and rope, 110 × 122 × 610 cm. © Mary Miss.

assert the artist’s ego and dominate the environment, she represented a female sensibility.19 It is ironic, then, that Miss’s first project of a significant scale followed from an opportunity to temporarily intervene into land newly reclaimed from the Hudson River, in what became Battery Park. Untitled (1973; Figure 11.4) comprised a series of parallel wooden barriers, placed 50 feet apart, containing circular voids which when viewed from one end appear to sink into the ground. This environmental intervention registers a break with the object-​centred orientation of the minimalists. Lucy Lippard describes the experience of encountering the work: You are standing outdoors; you have approached something which appears flimsy and small in its vast surroundings, and now you are inside of it, drawn into its 222

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Figure 11.4  Mary Miss: Untitled, 1973, wood, 12′ (366 cm) × 6′ (183 cm) sections at 50′ (1524 cm) intervals. Battery Park Landfill, New York City. © Mary Miss.

central focus, your perspective aggrandizing magically. The plank fences, only false facades nailed to supporting posts on the back, become what they are –​not the sculpture but the vehicle for the experience of the sculpture, which in fact exists in thin air, or rather in distance, crystallized. … Although the piece is about sight, the camera cannot catch it, because being there physically and seeing that sight is more important than perception in any abstract sense’.20 Lippard clearly sees the work through the remit of her thesis about conceptual art’s dematerialization of the art object, expounded in a book first published in the same year as Miss’s intervention.21 And Miss’s own words echo Lippard’s evocation of the ephemeral: It appeared as though a column of air was being defined as it tunneled into the ground; the circles are marking out the distance to materialize the space.  All the bulk of a traditional monument or monolith had been cut away from this temporary work.  The viewer was engaged in the making of the piece; movement was necessary for it to become visible.22 The beholder’s orientation towards the work is key to shifting the emphasis from material properties to the work as vehicle for an ‘event-​like’ experience. However, 223

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this is not merely an illusion of a space that is not there: the conjuring up of an absent geometric figure. The makeshift hoardings in themselves evoke quotidian memories of field enclosures or timber groynes superimposed upon an ambiguous place (or non-​ place) recently reclaimed from the sea, and as yet devoid of other signs of inhabitation. Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys (Figure  11.2), installed some five years later, therefore employed a language of rural and/​or temporary architecture that Miss had by then been evolving for over a decade. As noted earlier, the ‘earthwork’, to use Krauss’s misnomer, employed three tower-​like structures, two semicircular mounds and an underground courtyard, all located within a four-​acre site at the Nassau County Museum on Long Island. Importantly for Miss, the Museum was primarily used as a park by the local residents, an audience unfamiliar with contemporary art. Again, constructed out of inexpensive vernacular materials (timber and metal) the installation evokes associations with pragmatic structures, such as smoking or drying huts, or forest fire observational towers. But the narrative is left open. As Miss explains, The route through the temporary piece is unscripted:  it is necessary to walk through the entire complex to assemble the parts, draw comparisons, structure the information. Coming through the trees into the field one finds an eighteen-​ foot high tower made of wood and metal screening. In the distance, at the edge of the clearing, are two additional towers. Together the three seem to have the field ‘staked out’. As the viewer approaches these structures which are presumed to be the same, their different sizes become apparent. The second is fifteen feet high, while the most distant is only twelve feet high and can barely be entered because of the narrow spacing of the supports. Climbing into one of these towers, it is possible to survey the tree-​ringed field from behind the screens rather than being the one observed. Moving through the field it is clear that these structures are not as straight forward as they seem.23 Again, we encounter the structures as though they belong to a working landscape. And while Miss is not so much interested in the function as rather ‘how a person walking through that space would be affected’,24 there are strong functional resonances evoked by structures encountered in much the same way that one might discover an abandoned industrial site. The towers not only afford different relations to the body, internally and externally, but like the earlier landfill project employ an aspect of perspectival illusion by confounding the beholder’s sense of distance. The journey continues thus: Passing through the opening between the earth mounds, which subtly encloses the upper field, a sixteen foot square hole in the ground with a ladder protruding becomes visible. On descending the ladder a large courtyard below is revealed. Going further back from the overhead opening there is a wall surrounding the court with a door in each side.  Behind that wall is a passage which circles the courtyard. In the innermost wall of the passage slot-​like windows look into a dark area of undetermined size which is obviously open. The viewer becomes aware that 224

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the ground s/​he has just walked across and presumed to be solid is undermined. The movement itself becomes important going through the layers of space from light to dark. There is a bodily as well as visual perception of the place. The work makes one unsure of one’s position as boundaries and perceptions of distance are brought into question.25 Once again, in setting up a dialogue with the site Miss sets out to disorientate the beholder, problematizing the experience in a bodily way. Here, the uncertainty is not so much perspectival as a literal undermining of the certainty of the supporting ground we have crossed and a disorientation as we descend into the confusing darkness of the pit, the limits of which are uncertain (Figure 11.5). This prompts emotional responses (including fear) redolent of abandoned structures encountered as children. While Miss draws upon her own repertoire of memories (and photographs), she also seeks a response from the beholder. In an interview with Alvin Boyarsky in the publication accompanying an exhibition of her drawings at London’s Architectural Association in 1987, Miss states, The public will not necessarily be aware of [my] particular sources, but I think it important to make a place of some cogency, so that people are moved by it. We could speak of this process as autobiographical –​I obviously use my own strange collection of memories –​but hopefully it is something more than that. Since I’ve been involved in trying to define a new sense of public art I have been interested in how to make places which contain a strong and accessible experience so that people can relate to the information provided. Most interesting, of course, is the idea of memory and how people will connect these places with what they have previously experienced or what they might see in the future. … My fantasy is to be able to build something that triggers memories. Since we don’t have any consistent body of information to draw upon, it’s usually the physicality of the structure I rely on and the emotional, psychological and physical impact it has.26 In this light, Heartney notes the importance of the idea of ‘decoy’ in the work’s title, in that this is a ‘structure that is not of importance in itself, but functions as a trigger to create rich physical and psychological experiences for the viewer’.27 The artwork thus opens up an associational penumbra with all the attendant ‘dangers’ of narrative dismissed by the minimalists. Heartney contends: This emphasis on experience over structure marks Miss’s departure from the conventions adopted by the more established artists of the day. Minimalists like Richard Serra and Carl Andre were interested in the viewer’s response to their work, and in fact had been roundly condemned for the cultivation of ‘theatricality’ or active spectatorship by Michael Fried, a powerful spokesperson for the previous intellectual regime. But while their works had to be circumambulated to be fully perceived, the minimalists were still, in Miss’s view, overly tied to the monumental 225

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Figure 11.5  Mary Miss: Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, 1978, wood, earth and steel, pit opening 16′

(488 cm) sq., underground 40′ (1219 cm) sq., towers 10′ (305 cm) sq. × 18′ (549 cm) high, 8′ (244 cm) sq. × 15′ (457 cm) high and 6′ (183 cm) sq. × 13′ (396 cm) high. Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, Roslyn, New York. © Mary Miss.

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tradition of sculpture and to the authoritarian position of the artist which that tradition implied.28 One might add that the term decoy also suggests a trap, intended to lure or entice someone or something (such as an animal). The ‘pit’, of course, evokes fears that someone might remove the ladder as the only means of exit. Miss’s notebook, dated May–​October 1976, is full of theatrical references. Indeed, the whole project was conceived using ‘apparatus sort of like stage sets’, or ‘changing stage-​sets’ whereby a different ‘scene’ is constructed in a series of staged sequences whereby a ‘total narrative’ comes through, rather than ‘having to come up with a single construction/​structure’.29 Set into its natural environment, the multiple elements progressively reveal themselves, while also declaring their ‘staging’, such that while ‘blending in from a distance, at close range the artificial is very apparent’.30 The catalogue accompanying the installation alludes to gaining deep views within a confined space, specifically as a play on the imagination, while it is no coincidence that Miss photographed dilapidated ‘old stage sets from film studios in southern California –​amazing places with fake fronts’.31 And it is perhaps the exemplar of the film or theatre set from which Miss develops her idea of a play of scale to heighten or confound our sense of distance. However, we are not transported to a self-​contained ‘dream scene’ (such as in the immersive installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov),32 but rather offered an opportunity to draw out latent aspects of the site in which we are located, enacted by the beholder who must draw upon her own embedded memories of such places. Such a dynamic is again played out in later works such as Field Rotation (1980–​81; Figure 11.6), located in land surrounding the Governors State University, Illinois. This also plays upon the subtle topography of the site. From the University parking lot, a large mound, a tower and a field of posts are visible in the midst of seven hundred acres of flat, former prairie. The posts have been cut to achieve a perfectly level plane that contrasts with the subtle contouring of the land in which they sit; they are four feet tall at one end, and sixteen feet tall at the other. The difference in height reveals the sloping topography of the field that would otherwise be barely noticeable. These posts, which have a familiar relation to the local landscape as utility poles and property markers, trace the space of the field rather than fill it.33 The eight rows of round posts, which radiate out in a pinwheel fashion, act as a datum:  a measuring of the site, where the beholder’s eye height varies relative to this virtual horizontal plane which hovers just above the height of the mound. From the approach, one is unaware that the mound conceals a sunken court (the height of the enclosing retaining wall taken from the mound’s highest point). Two metal ladders facilitate descent, ‘which allows an intimate interior after the exposure and vulnerability of the open landscape’.34 This notion of shelter is reinforced by a cruciform series of platforms/​benches, inviting inhabitation while, in its orientation relative to the court, revealing the dynamic rotation of the design. At the centre is a twelve-​foot-​deep central 227

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Figure 11.6  Mary Miss: Field Rotation, 1980–​81 (permanent installation), wood, steel, gravel and earth, central well 60′ (1829 cm) sq. × 7′ (213 cm) deep on a 5-​acre site. Governors State University, Park Forest South, Illinois. © Mary Miss.

well with another protruding cruciform ladder: ‘The well allows the descent to continue visually or physically; the level of water in it reflects the amount of rain that has fallen recently.’35 This provides a further, otherwise unseen datum of ground water; indeed, the whole installation is reminiscent of an apparatus juxtaposing ‘nature and artifice  –​at once physically integrated into the land and at the same time obviously constructed’.36 As with Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, in taking her cues from environmental features of the existing site, Field Rotation constructs a tension between notions of shelter and exposure that engage the imagination of the beholder as she negotiates the different perspectives the intervention affords. Miss’s phenomenologically informed approach engages the body directly (in terms of our requirement to climb into and over the installation), and the different relations it constructs to our orientation in space, while unashamedly drawing upon the beholder’s own emotional responses to site.

III That Krauss utilized Miss’s work as the frontispiece of ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, thereby raising the profile of the young artist, did not stop Miss from wryly noting that the ‘decade was almost over by the time art criticism and history knew what to do with 228

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the 1970s’.37 The confusion of disparate practices was something that bothered critics such as Krauss far more than it did practitioners. Indeed, if ‘ “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” was against pluralism’, overlaying of an organizing structure onto the diversity of emergent ‘sculptural’ practices, Miss was not averse to taking structures apart, ‘whether these structures were the role of women, the idea of sculpture, or the notion of appropriate content’.38 While this desire was not exclusively confined to women artists, during the late 1960s and 1970s ‘there was certainly a readiness [among women artists] to challenge how art was made, who made it, and what its role would be’:39 a dynamic that intersected with the burgeoning women’s movement and identity politics emerging from the post-​Stonewall fight for gay liberation. Miss, along with Jackie Winsor and Alice Aycock (artists with whom she is closely associated) participated in one of Lippard’s earliest feminist exhibitions, Twenty-​Six Contemporary Women Artists, hosted by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut in April 1971. In the accompanying catalogue, Lippard referred to ‘eccentric abstraction’ –​a term devised by Lippard for an earlier exhibition she organized at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966 –​as one of the aesthetic manifestations of ‘latent differences in sensibility’ the exhibition highlighted. The term sought to describe the sensual expression that minimalism had repressed, manifest in organic works associated with minimalism but introducing humour (and sex) into the structural idiom (of which Eva Hesse’s work is exemplary).40 But while Miss recalls that this was the first time that she had felt part of a larger circle of artists, her work had little in common with the other artists selected. The exceptions were: Aycock, whose Maze (1972) had also been illustrated in Krauss’s ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’; Cecile Abish, who made a number of site-​ specific earthworks between 1972 and 1975, including Field Quartering (1972); and to a lesser extent, Miss’s friend Winsor, in works such as Brick Square (1971).41 These artists’ engagement with site and building materials distinguishes their work from Lippard’s identified theme. However, their work does readily admit the imagination. As Alexandra Schwartz notes, such work ‘mined new territory in the relationship between the body, space, and sculptural form, exploring the physical and the psychological impact upon viewers and raising the difficult question of whether this work –​the result of intense physical labor by the artists, and thus reflections on the scale and strength of the artists’ own, specific bodies –​might also be considered in some way gendered, like those bodies themselves’.42 Reflecting upon the difficulties of characterizing their work as feminist, Schwartz states, ‘The question of whether such gender-​based categorizations are helpful (granting them exposure that they might not otherwise have had) or hurtful (ghettoizing them based on their sex) is perennial and irresolvable, but it is an issue that resonates powerfully in their work.’43 With Miss and Aycock, this included a stronger sense of allowing us to enter a work, probing the relationship between inside and outside in a way that we must walk on, pass through, crawl over and climb up and down. This physical engagement is certainly a feature of Aycock’s work from the 1970s, which like Miss’s necessitated climbing up ladders into towers or down into networks of underground tunnels through which one had to crawl. Aycock’s A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels (1975), constructed in cement blocks, concrete and 229

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earth, comprised three open shafts (with wooden ladders and covers) and three closed shafts, connected by underground tunnels too low to stand up in. Originally sited at Merriewold West, Far Hills, New Jersey, in 2011 it was permanently reconstructed in Ghent, New York. Aycock describes the work thus: For me it was about making an architectural sculpture which existed in the world, and at the same time creating something that relies on archaeology and the history of architecture, the romanticization of ruins, and photographs of ancient ruins, tombs, and tunnels in Greece, and Rome, and Egypt. It was an underground structure in which you could crawl in the dark, trying to remember once you get down there what you had seen above ground and the kind of structures that you had encountered in the descent. The configuration appears at first to be simple and clear, geometric and rectilinear. But the actual experience is not. As you moved from light to dark you entered a much more mysterious place in which you must physically and psychologically engage the sculpture. And then you finally could emerge from below, joining thoughts and feelings about what is above and what is below.44 Robert Hobbs identifies a ‘critical edge’ characterizing Aycock’s work he claims is lacking in Miss’s, the latter perceived as having a more benign connection to site. Hobbs constructs a biographical reading of Miss’s ‘great need to make a pact with distinct places’, which he interprets as a response to Miss’s migratory childhood (as daughter of military parents), such that her works are ‘sanctuaries, testifying to the illuminating and soothing permanence exuded by specific locales’; this is then contrasted to Aycock’s temporary structures that refuse ‘such romantic and sentimental overtones in her earth-​sited pieces, instead emphasizing the frustrations of embodied perception in Maze [Aycock’s 1972 labyrinth constructed in timber fencing, installed at Gibney Farm near New Kingston, Pennsylvania] and claustrophobia in Low Building [Aycock’s 1973 work fully titled as Low Building with Dirt Roof (for Mary), installed on the same site]’.45 This perhaps reveals more about Hobbs’s own ambivalence towards what he castigates as ‘reactionary’ site-​specific art, insisting that Aycock’s best work (unlike Miss’s) ‘cannot be considered truly site-​specific’ in that it could be located on a number of sites.46 Hobbs’s criticism also reflects his own allegiances to the work of Smithson, whom Miss, surprisingly, distances herself from.47 By contrast, Aycock (a former student of Morris) states that Smithson ‘cracked open minimalism’, such that he enabled her ‘to get out of its prison house’.48 An example of this is Smithson’s seminal ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, first published in Artforum in 1967 as a first-​person narrative of his trip to his birthplace in New Jersey, which drew attention to ordinary ‘found’ situations, ironically experienced as monuments  –​from a bridge with wooden sidewalks, concrete abutments, a sand-​ box, a series of pipes gushing water into a pond, to a set of holes ‘that define, without trying, the memory-​traces of an abandoned set of futures’ (in that they constitute traces of buildings ruined before they are even complete).49 As Ann Reynolds notes, the ironic juxtaposition of his monument typologies found in the decaying industrial landscape of 230

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his home town with ‘the formal homologies of the New York art world’ (i.e. minimalist art) ‘are so startling and unstable that the reasons one desires to pass over the landscape become unavoidably clear’.50 Aycock’s darker sensibility, drawing upon her own dreams, is drawn to Smithson’s notions of disruption and negation. However, while Hobbs is right to point out differences in the respective artist’s attitudes to site, to describe Miss’s work as creating ‘mere sanctuaries’ does a disservice to overlapping themes shared by both artists (and Smithson), evident in works such as Miss’s Sunken Pool (1974) and Aycock’s Circular Building with Narrow Ledges for Walking (1976). If Miss draws upon a more benign reading of patterns of inhabitation, then it would be a mistake to see her work as simply a concern with ‘shelter’.51 In 1979 the sculptor Michael Hall captures an important aspect of a group of artists including Miss, Aycock, Siah Armajani, Robert Stackhouse, George Trakas and Hall himself which, utilizing architectural–​structural signs, he labels ‘Suprastructionism’.52 Despite the awkward title (which, unsurprisingly, did not stick), Hall identifies a consistent body of work engaging the language of everyday architecture and construction sites, which while not site-​specific establishes a relation to site. Importantly, Hall reiterates the notions of use and association: ‘Suprastructions function most like a set of clues to be combined by viewers into sets of assumptions and presumptions. These responses in turn must be filtered through the viewer’s memory, experience and bias, finally to align into active patterns of meaning.’53 This seems apposite, not least in terms of catching this important sense of the work acting as a prompt for the beholder’s own acts of ideation and imagination, exemplified by Miss’s reference to film or stage sets.

IV Miss recalls how she invited Krauss to see Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, though she did not know her personally at the time. The invitation had been premised on Krauss’s ‘phenomenological mode of approaching a work’, which Miss was familiar with through Passages.54 Indeed, her concern (echoing Krauss’s) was very much oriented towards the beholder in all her guises and to the notion of ‘passage’ that Krauss’s book identifies as a recurring feature of contemporary practice: Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys was about this whole variety of encounters, and the way they began to weave themselves together across the landscape. I was thinking about the audience. It was important for me that people, who maybe knew nothing about art, could come to this place and could viscerally, physically, emotionally engage it.55 While Miss was grateful for the exposure Krauss’s essay had afforded, she reveals that she was somewhat taken aback about its emphasis:  ‘As someone who is discussed in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, I have always thought it was somewhat ironic that the text is based so heavily on structuralism, on setting up differences and hierarchies, but 231

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at the same time I was thinking much more about in-​between space, about negotiating differences rather than articulating them.’56 And yet Miss’s work clearly served Krauss’s theoretical purpose at the time of the writing of ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, not least because it was a work in which she was able to ‘bury’ talk of medium ‘like so much critical toxic waste’.57 Indeed, Krauss later writes that medium as a term ‘seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too dogmatically, too discursively loaded’.58 How does ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ therefore inform the discussion of Miss’s work, given their very different starting points? While Krauss is now sceptical about the structuralism she once helped introduce into the United States, her commitment to the explanatory power of the diagram endures.59 Faced with the variety of artworks loosely categorized as sculpture in the 1970s, Krauss’s diagram offered a theoretical framework that would delimit this heterogeneous field. As Krauss reflects in Under Blue Cup, Criticism took this profusion [of artworks] at face value, some critics robotically understanding it as a collective rejection of the medium of sculpture, while others mediated on the paradigm of /​sculpture/​trying to discover the unified field –​or specific medium  –​to which, of necessity, all this diversity must have belonged. The unity of the paradigm, structuralism teaches us, can be sustained through many permutations of the original binary, as it is expanded into a logically related ‘group’. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ … is this kind of meditation, structurally reducing /​sculpture/​to the underlying paradigm that serves as a binary or logic so I could build its expanded ‘group’.60 Casting /​sculpture/​as signifier, Krauss’s starting point was to identify the logic of sculpture as an historically bounded category, which she ties to the logic of the monument, bound to a site condition. By the late nineteenth century, this logic had started to fail, such that with the emergence of modernism it enters into its negative condition, conceived as ‘a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place’.61 Thus, for Krauss, ‘it is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-​referential’.62 Krauss argues that ‘Through its fetishization of the base, the sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself and away from actual place; and through the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction, the sculpture depicts its own autonomy.’63 However, by around 1950 this strategy had started to be exhausted. One response, as we have seen, was Caro’s removal of the plinth and integration of the supporting ground into the work’s virtuality; however, Krauss claims that by the 1960s, in works such as Morris’s Green Gallery Installation of 1964 or his exterior work Untitled (Mirrored Boxes) of 1965, sculpture had entered the full condition of its inverse condition of the logic of the monument:  namely, a negativity represented as the not-​landscape and the not-​ architecture. For Krauss, ‘sculpture itself had become a kind of ontological absence, the combination of exclusions, the sum of the neither/​nor’; however, she contends ‘that does not mean the terms themselves from which it was built  –​the not-​landscape and the 232

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not-​architecture  –​did not have a certain interest’.64 Krauss uses this binary to occupy what in the semiotic square is termed the neuter axis (Figure 11.1), expressing ‘a strict opposition between the built and the non-​built, the cultural and the natural, between which the production of sculptural art appeared to be suspended’.65 Expanding this original binary of the neuter access, Krauss constructs a quaternary field that ‘both mirrors the original opposition and at the same time opens it’;66 this involves establishing the so-​called ‘complex’ axis of landscape and architecture, an expanded field which had previously, in the ‘closure of [Western] post-​Renaissance art’ been ‘ideologically prohibited’.67 Krauss’s diagram thus suspends four terms whereas previously there had only been sculpture: between landscape and architecture we have site-​construction, to which Krauss assigns works such as Aycock’s Maze, Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and Morris’s Observatory (1970); between landscape and non-​landscape we have marked sites, characterized by works such as Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) and Richard Long’s walked lines; between architecture and non-​architecture we have axiomatic structures, to which Krauss assigns works by Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Serra and Christo. Many artists are acknowledged as occupying, successively, different points within this field. Krauss at the time defended such a shifting of position from the charge of eclecticism:  ‘For within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium –​ sculpture –​but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium –​photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself –​ might be used.’68 As various critics have noted, Krauss’s identification of the ‘monument’ as elemental to sculpture  –​and its subsequent negation  –​might be contested, with very different fields being generated from, for instance, a dynamic such as that between sculpture and the scale of the body.69 Nonetheless, it would be churlish to deny the sheer inventiveness and productiveness of Krauss’s resulting diagram. Indeed, even the harshest critic, such as Osborne, is forced to concede that ‘[t]‌he combination of logical simplicity and taxonomic productiveness of the structure of this diagram is extraordinary, especially in the context of the categorical chaos of critical discourse at the time, in response to the multiplicity of new practices of the previous decade (1967–​77)’.70 But given Krauss’s recent antipathy to the very notion of installation art as a feature of what she calls the post-​medium condition, does Mary Miss’s Perimeters/​Pavilions/​ Decoys still serve her purpose?71 Interestingly, it is certainly possible to interpret Miss’s work from this period, along with that of Aycock, as not so much ‘inventing’ a medium,72 but (consistent with the more coherent aspect of Krauss’s recent position) borrowing a ‘technical support’ that constitutes a systematic use of a particular technology: namely, the vernacular language of rural architecture. Krauss takes her recurring image of the knight’s move, used throughout Under Blue Cup, directly from Shklovsky: ‘the best writer on the conventions of art’.73 The chess analogy refers to how the knight is restrained by the board (its technical support) and the conventions of permitted moves. For Krauss, a medium is just such a support, articulated through conventions, and she uses this as a substitution for the traditional idea of a physical medium. But even putting aside 233

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concerns about the viability of Krauss’s notion of artists ‘inventing’ a medium, her use of Shklovsky is, in and of itself, partial. As noted previously, Shklovsky saw the ‘device’ as a means to dehabitualize perception. For Shklovsky, perception  –​when associated with ordinary practical language –​becomes automatic or habitual, and it is therefore the function of art to defamiliarize such ordinary engagement with objects; but I have argued that it does so within a context where the organization of signifiers does not designate an object, but rather (in Iser’s terms) designates ‘instructions for the production of the signified’, requiring the input of the beholder to connect what is intentionally disconnected.74 Such a role for the beholder was precisely what was omitted in Krauss’s structuralist turn, which arguably represented a move away from issues of reception towards a production-​ oriented model, and which eventually leads to her renewed emphasis on medium; this might be contrasted with Shklovsky’s reader-​or beholder-​oriented approach, which is precisely why he is widely cited as a precursor to reception aesthetics as it developed in Germany, shifting the emphasis from the work and its production to the relationship between text and reader (or work and beholder). Here, we might reflect upon the kind of social situation we encounter in a work such as Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys. This situation is not merely the result of a set of relational terms, or the exploitation of a particular technical support:  namely, the vernacular language of rural architecture. Rather, it is something that draws upon the associational memory of both the artist and the work’s beholders. This is something Miss shares with Aycock. As Hobbs notes of Aycock, specifically in reference to Shklovsky’s notion of making objects ‘unfamiliar’ and prolonging the duration of perception, ‘Aycock willingly abrogates part of the artist’s traditional responsibility as the prime generator of a work’s meaning when she enlists viewers as her ongoing collaborators in this process.’75 This feels right to me, and something that I  believe Miss’s work also does. And this was something that few male artists at the time were willing to do. Miss’s work therefore has the capacity to confront Krauss’s negation of the beholder when she slips into her formalism. And yet phenomenological and semiotic approaches are not incompatible, as we saw in Chapter 9 in relation to Krauss’s own brilliant essay ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’. Indeed, we might recall that here Krauss claims that the fabric of Agnes Martin’s grid serves to make the optical –​as signifier –​a function of the tactile (kinesthetic) field of its viewer:  where different viewing distances offer distinct phenomenal engagements that exploit the beholder’s perceptual mechanisms. If ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ at times gravitates towards an analytical reductiveness, it is surely not inconsequential that the artwork which opens the essay is one that rather than offer the kind of distanced opticality of minimalism demands inhabitation. As Christian Zapatka notes, With Miss, not only does the object/​subject become part of the viewer’s province but the viewer in invited literally to occupy the very space created by the object. It goes beyond the framework of the perspectival cone of vision within which the viewer experiences other minimalist works and offers the viewer the opportunity 234

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to inhabit these objects. It is this condition that allows the viewer to make the leap into the realm of place as occupied as opposed to object to be viewed.76 Zapatka here emphasizes the physical engagement a work such as Perimeters/​ Pavilions/​Decoys demands, where one has to climb down the ladder into the subterranean courtyard, ‘offering the viewer/​user the option of either engaging the work itself or moving on to the realm of the imagination’.77 And this physical engagement –​as an extreme form of the locative function I  have been exploring throughout the book  –​is in itself key to unlocking the surfeit of association that I believe is crucial to the work’s signifying function. Here, the aesthetic semblance again relies upon the beholder’s ideational, performative activity, such that (to repeat a quotation from Iser used in the previous chapter) ‘representation can only come to full fruition in the recipient’s imagination; it is the recipient’s performance that endows the semblance with its sense of reality’.78 It is just such a performance that Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys prompts, distinguishing its non-​ functional structures from the architecture it superficially resembles while exemplifying its relation to site.

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CHAPTER 12 THE DISLOCATED BEHOLDER

Bruce Nauman, Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Spinning) (1992) Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (1979)

I Throughout Part IV, I have been describing how intermedia art of the 1960s and 1970s constituted a paradigm shift in possibilities for making art, and in so doing presented a crisis for the kind of medium-​specific ‘aesthetic’ judgement associated with Greenberg and Fried. Unlike the ‘self-​sufficient’ art of high modernism, where internal relational properties are claimed to construct an indifference to both the presence of the beholder and the space of the gallery, intermedia art explicitly sought to address the subjective experience of the spectator within the space of reception. Indeed, as we have seen, it is with the development of a ‘situational’ art in the 1960s that the literal presence of a beholder is theorized as both definitive of the new art and inherently problematic.1 Now, I have questioned aspects of this account as it is characteristically presented: first, in relation to the supposed autonomy of modernist works such as Caro’s Prairie, which I countered through the notion of degrees of virtuality, where the virtual space and actual space of the beholder overlap but do not quite cohere (the work’s critical purchase arising from the resulting tension); secondly, I have questioned the uncritical co-​opting of Fried’s pejorative term, the ‘literal spectator’, as a defining feature of much contemporary art practice –​such as installation art –​by theorists hostile to his position. Using examples drawn from performance and site-​specific art, I  have argued that such artworks also construct their own virtuality, where illocutionary force is not so much ‘suspended’ as brought into sharp focus –​constitutive of the work’s meaning, as a means to reflect upon the beholder’s constituent role with respect to the boundaries and conventions the work establishes. If the hybrid nature of intermedia practice poses difficulties in terms of characterizing the phenomenology of the experience of the artwork, then this is particularly true of a type of work that has become a staple of gallery art, the video or film installation. In this final chapter, I  focus upon a key example:  a seminal installation combining multiple video projections and television monitors.2 Bruce Nauman’s Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New  York, in 1991; the following year, Nauman exhibited a smaller but more animated version of the installation, Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Spinning) (1992; Plate 9), a keynote work of

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documenta 9 installed within the lobby of the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. Both variations have had iterations in numerous venues; Anthro/​Socio might thus more accurately be described as a site-​responsive rather than site-​specific work.3 Nevertheless, each new showing impacts upon the host space, spatially and acoustically. Even when allocated its own space, this is not a ‘black box’ installation as such, pointedly excluding seating and requiring the viewer to actively move around the gallery. Anthro/​ Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) formed part of MoMA’s seminal 1991–​ 92 DISLOCATIONS exhibition, curated by Robert Storr.4 Reflecting wider political uncertainties at the time, the show was described in the press release thus: DISLOCATIONS leads us to question some of the familiar mental landmarks by which we orient our thinking. The term dislocation implies calculated shifts of location and point of view. In the exhibition DISLOCATIONS, artist and audience collaborate in mapping previously unimagined spaces or remapping those taken for granted as self-​evident.5 Spatial allusions abound in Storr’s description. Located in an empty, darkened gallery on the lower level of MoMA, Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) is a work that demands acts of position-​taking, both literally and metaphorically. This follows from its spatial configuration: the work combines three large video projections and three pairs of stacked monitors, distributed such that one is constantly surrounded by images (some inverted). A preparatory sketch by Nauman, with its scrawled text and multiple arrows, captures something of the immersive intent. As the artist states in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, It’s a pretty aggressive piece, and the aggression comes from these three different places and keeps shifting, which makes it hard to focus. It’s not easy to decide where to put your attention; seeing things out of the corner of your eye; knowing something is going on behind you.6 This sense of dislocation is reinforced by the filmic content. The screens and monitors tightly frame the multiple looped films, cropping the head of the classically trained opera singer and performance artist Rinde Eckert. Facing the camera, confronting the implied beholder, Eckert alternates chants of ‘feed me/​eat me/​help me/​hurt me’, ‘feed me/​eat me/​anthropology’ and ‘help me/​hurt me/​sociology’. We are immersed in the resulting cacophony of sounds emanating from these nine disembodied heads, imploring the viewer to intervene but (given the asymmetry of the situation) with no obvious means with which to reciprocate. This is a work that at one and the same time elicits but irrevocably complicates ‘empathic projection’. Should we really be watching this, and what are we to make of these ambiguous pleas, delivered like incantations in varying tones by Eckert? Unwittingly, we become embroiled in a profoundly unsettling situation that  –​despite the space of reception being drawn into the encounter  –​confounds our attempts to orientate 238

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ourselves towards this (sometimes) upside-​down world and its impossible demands. This dislocation is even more extreme in the alternative version of the work shown at documenta 9, where Eckert’s disembodied head disconcertingly spins on its axis. In both iterations, we are hypnotically drawn in while simultaneously repulsed: the work demanding a certain distance. Indeed, Nauman’s installation operates at the juncture between the immersive and the expulsive. I will return to consider Anthro/​Socio from the theoretical remit of Stanley Cavell’s writing on scepticism and the role Cavell allocates empathic projection in Part IV of his 1979 book The Claim of Reason.7 In the intervening sections, I first summarize Cavell’s position on scepticism about ‘other minds’, setting out something of Cavell’s distinctive interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein and its relevance to works of art; I then address a surprising account of video beholding from Fried, which likewise explicitly draws upon Cavell. In countering its marginalization in Fried’s account, I examine the role of technology in establishing what I have been calling the configurational encounter. When I  return to Nauman’s installation, I  will argue that the ‘staging’ of empathic projection is itself dependent upon something video art introduces into contemporary installations: a sense of figural presence, considered as a means to bring the beholder’s spatially situated orientation (or disorientation) towards a projected figure into play. Anthro/​Socio reveals its staging of the encounter with such a figural presence through an acknowledgement of the configurational properties of film, with its pointed juxtaposition of scales between the large projected heads and life-​size heads ‘enclosed’ within the monitors; it does so, moreover, in such a way as to ‘stage’ the sceptical problematic in relation to other minds, thus drawing the space of reception into the encounter it affords.

II For the philosopher Stanley Cavell, empathic projection is inexorably linked to overcoming human finitude:  as Fried puts it, ‘the often painful fact of the necessary separateness of persons and their consequent opacity to one another’.8 This sense of finitude, with its spatial implications of distance, lies at the heart of Cavell’s ‘ordinary language’ take on what is known in philosophy as the ‘skeptical problematic’, and particularly that aspect of scepticism associated not with the external world as such, but with our relation to ‘others’. In other words, Cavell engages the acute problem of whether it is truly possible to know ‘other minds’ and thus overcome the innate condition of human separateness. In his notoriously difficult 1979 book The Claim of Reason, Cavell notes that in any encounter my taking you for, seeing you as, human depends upon nothing more than my capacity for something like empathic projection, and that if this is true then I must settle on the validity of my projection from within my present condition, from 239

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within, so to speak, my confinement from you. For there would be no way for me to step outside my projections.9 This often painful sense of confinement, of being enclosed within my own experience, not only places limits on my possible knowledge but inflects human relations, potentially leading to a withdrawal of acknowledgement. As an active form of identification with the other, empathic projection –​a mental effort to project beyond our bodily limits –​ attempts to bridge this intrinsic separation, to the extent that it is conceived as essential to comprehending what is distinctively human. If I  stopped projecting, I  would no longer take anything to be human, or rather I would see no radical difference between humans and other things. I am, after all, very selective about this already. Only a small proportion of the things I see, or sense, do I regard as human (or animated, or embodied). Projection already puts a seam in human experience; some things are on one side of the seam, some on the other.10 Cavell contrasts two forms of scepticism:  one, about the existence of other minds, involves a recognition that I, myself, am an instance of that which I struggle to know; the other, a scepticism with respect to the existence of an external world, involves a difficulty in imagining what the object of knowledge is, in that it is a thing that lies beyond my subjective experience. This, in turn, implies a duality of perspective in relation to our scepticism about the existence of others, in that we are necessarily both an outsider to someone else and an insider to ourselves. This is the intractable problem of knowing and of being known.11 Of particular relevance to Nauman’s Anthro/​Socio, Cavell applies this scepticism of other minds to the issue of pain. This forms an integral part of Cavell’s consideration of Wittgenstein’s much discussed ‘denial’ in Philosophical Investigations of the possibility of a private language, a passage which Nauman also references within his oeuvre.12 Here, Wittgenstein discusses questions about the very nature of privacy; indeed, Cavell goes so far as to suggest that ‘the correct relation between inner and outer, between the soul and its society, is the theme of the Investigations as a whole’.13 And as I shall go on to argue, this relation between inner and outer, the mind and its society, underpins Anthro/​Socio, registering Nauman’s own engagement with Wittgenstein’s philosophy.14 Non-​ controversially, Cavell argues that the Investigations are permeated by Wittgenstein’s attempts to come to terms with scepticism. However, as Espen Hammer observes, Cavell’s position is unorthodox: ‘as opposed to most commentators, [Cavell] denies that Wittgenstein is trying to refute skepticism, or show that it is a pretence; rather, skepticism, if not fully correct on its own terms, contains something like a truth of its own: indeed, it is essential to the way we possess language’.15 As we shall see, this point hinges on the very nature of what Wittgenstein terms ‘criteria’. So how does scepticism of other minds relate to the issue of pain? In relation to Wittgenstein’s much discussed comments about knowledge of pain, in The Claim of Reason Cavell states, 240

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When Wittgenstein remarks ‘It cannot be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain’, he does not –​how could he? –​deny that I alone can express my pain. He will, however, raise questions about which pains are mine.16 Indeed, the remark ‘I know I  am in pain’ is nonsense for Wittgenstein just because it means nothing other than ‘I am in pain’: knowledge is not at issue. Conversely, while it is logically consistent to state of others that they ‘know when I  am in pain’, this is said without the certainty with which I know it of myself.17 In making these remarks, Wittgenstein is challenging a deeply rooted assumption that the first-​person utterance of a speaker gains its authority from introspective knowledge.18 This convention takes such knowledge to be direct and non-​evidential. However, as Wittgenstein scholar P. M. S. Hacker states, ‘If it makes no sense to say that one knows that one is in pain, then the epistemic explanation is a non-​starter, since it explains the special authoritative status of a person’s avowal of pain by reference to the putative fact that the subject of pain knows, normally knows, or cannot but know, that he is in pain when he is.’19 Rather, as Hacker notes, Wittgenstein proposes a grammatical elucidation, thus ‘locating such utterances in the web of our concepts’, such that this ‘would obviate the apparent need for philosophical explanations by rendering perspicuous the conceptual structures involved’.20 Statements such as ‘I am in pain’ are thus characteristic of expressions, rather than assertions founded upon one’s beliefs, and are thus ‘logical criteria for the “inner” ’.21 They are directly equivalent to non-​linguistic expressions of pain. And, crucially, the cry of pain is not a sign of pain; rather: ‘It is a manifestation of pain, and a logical criterion, not an inductive symptom, of pain.’22 Now, many ordinary language philosophers have taken this appeal to criteria as a basis for the refutation of scepticism. Yet an appeal to criteria is not a basis for refuting scepticism; a groan of pain, for example, may be from someone who is merely feigning pain. Criteria are in operation regardless of whether pain is real or feigned, and therefore criteria cannot provide certainty. Moreover, Cavell states, Criteria are ‘criteria for something’s being so’, not in the sense that they tell us of a thing’s existence, but of something like its identity, not its being so, but of its being so. Criteria do not determine the certainty of statements, but the application of the concepts employed in statements.23 Thus conceived, criteria are thus integral to use, which in itself is dependent upon circumstances  –​from the situation in which we encounter them. As Hammer notes, ‘The insight that criteria are not, as it were, expressions of the order of things, but of the order of human conventions, of what we say and do as mutually intelligible beings, is of tremendous significance for Cavell’s thinking about skepticism.’24 Scepticism thus emerges from the very function of language in its ordinary social use. This has consequences for Cavell in terms of what an ‘Outsider’ can know, but also for how artworks (as non-​discursive presentational forms) construct virtual situations that, in their suspension of certain aspects of reality, explicitly bring meaning into question. 241

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The Outsider is a device Cavell adopts to characterize a possible position outside of my own ‘sealed’ realm of experience. Following Wittgenstein, Cavell therefore believes that there are limits to an Outsider’s knowledge, such that while she can perhaps (albeit without certainty) know when I am in pain, she cannot (ever) know my pain. And here Cavell is forced to concede that while nothing could be better than the feat of cognition that empathic projection represents, ‘I do not know whether empathic projection is, or is not, a sufficient basis for acknowledging the other’s existence’.25

III Importantly for the remit of this chapter, Cavell’s conviction (reciprocated by Fried) is that the sceptical problematic lies at the heart of certain works of art and is fundamental to the development of Shakespearian tragedy. The latter directly engages with the sceptical problem of how to live in a groundless, non-​theistic world. Cavell argues that his writing on Shakespeare is not merely an application of a preconceived philosophical position to the realm of theatre, because scepticism is itself drawn towards the tragic. As Cavell writes, ‘If Shakespeare’s plays interpret and reinterpret the skeptical problematic –​ the question whether I know with certainty of the existence of the external world and myself and others in it –​it follows that the plays find no stable solution to skepticism, in particular no rest in what we know of God.’26 For Cavell, Shakespeare makes available to us the recognition of a necessary human condition of separateness, such that the limits of our knowledge of others, and their motives, underpin the very notion of tragedy. Repeatedly, Shakespeare’s characters are forced to live out the consequence of their words and actions. Theatre offers not only the possibility of acknowledgement of others and willingness to respond empathically but also the staging of its avoidance and tragic withdrawal by certain characters within the plays. Commenting upon Cavell’s position here, Hammer notes that in this case, not only is the ‘other lost but the world itself recedes from the skeptic, or he from it’.27 Here, the work’s conditions of access come into play in terms of the play’s staging. Cavell notes that our extraneousness to the closed world of characters might seem to jeopardize any attempt at acknowledgement; unlike the actor, whose presence we might acknowledge at the curtain call, the character she plays occupies a fictional realm removed from our reality. Cavell’s response is to insist upon the asymmetry of this relation, in that while we are excluded from their presence within the performed scenario, we are at the same time given privileged access to the characters’ world and motives (including information unavailable to the characters themselves); in a very real sense, the characters, absorbed within their world, are ‘present’ to us, through a shared intimacy afforded the audience despite, and, in an important sense, because of, our very helplessness in the face of the characters’ suffering. Thus, ‘the conditions of theatre literalize the conditions we exact for existence outside  –​hiddenness, silence, isolation –​hence make that existence plain’.28 There are clear echoes here of Iser (and, indeed, the two reference each other), despite the fact that Cavell does not hold out 242

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the possibility for the kind of interplay  –​through perspective shifting  –​between the fictive, the real and the imaginary that Iser suggests. But Cavell brings out something equally important; in an act of redemption (underpinning Cavell’s ethical consideration of theatre), Shakespearian theatre makes plain this separateness through our communal, shared experience as audience members. It becomes a cathartic experience. And, as Juliane Rebentisch notes of Cavell’s position, in certain experiences of theatre ‘the theatrical structure of the ontological separation between the auditorium and the events on stage shifts to fulfill a different function, becoming the condition not of aesthetic distancing but instead of an experience of existential separateness from the other’.29 It thus ‘purifies us from a “theatricalizing” –​that is to say, a voyeuristic –​attitude that we may adopt outside of the theatre’.30 This brings us back to Fried’s more recent claim with regard to the staging of empathic projection in moving image installations. That Fried, the erstwhile champion of medium specificity and opponent of ‘situated’ art, should find himself evolving a theory of video art is especially surprising, not least to Fried himself: it is a theatrical mode of engagement that Fried has had to ‘learn to appreciate’.31 It is especially unforeseen given Gordon’s frequent use of found footage –​a kind of cinematic readymade –​and his employment of projection or projections that engage both the beholder’s movement and the architectural space of the gallery. Yet in his 2011 book Four Honest Outlaws, Fried uses Anri Sala and Douglas Gordon’s work to suggest that the ontological issues of absorption that came to the fore with the encounter between modernism and minimalism in the 1960s are once again at the top of some contemporary artists’ agendas.32 If Cavell and Fried associate the ‘modernist’ laying bare of the conditions of an artwork’s own existence with the development of a medium  –​such as the acknowledgement of the support in painting  –​then how might the hybridity of video installation offer new means to lay bare the psychic mechanism of empathic projection through an acknowledgement of its own staging? Fried response is to claim that a work such as Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993; Figure 12.1) might be said to ‘anatomize’ film acting. In this installation which first brought Gordon’s work to a wider audience, the artist stretches the running length of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho to twenty-​four hours, projected onto a single screen which might be approached from both sides. 24 Hour Psycho frustrates our attempts to engage narrative, insistently refocusing our attention on the film’s configurational presentation. Fried notes that here ‘the import of the two-​ frames-​per-​second slow motion in combination with the absence of a sound track is precisely to show –​to bring to the viewer’s awareness –​the extreme difficulty, verging on impossibility, of distinguishing between the intentional behaviour of the actors in their roles and a whole range of unintentional actions such as breathing, blinking, swallowing, and other automatisms taking place before the camera at the same time’.33 Fried therefore seems to be suggesting that one way by which the experience of video installation might be said to differ from cinema is the structuring of a work’s ‘to-​ be-​seenness’ (i.e. its staging) in such a way that it provides a new source of interest, specifically by highlighting the film’s construction:  rebuffing the illusory pull of its narrative representation, the pull by which Fried has always claimed cinema escapes 243

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Figure  12.1  Douglas Gordon:  24 Hour Psycho, 1993, video installation, dimensions variable.

Installation view of the exhibition ‘Douglas Gordon:  Timeline’, 11 June 2006 through 4 September 2006. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, Acc. no.: IN1974.7. © 2019. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New  York/​Scala Florence. Photo:  Jonathan Muzikar.

theatricality. While this might be said to heighten what I have been calling the conditions of access, this is not (at least with Gordon’s work) an end in itself. Fried states: ‘I think of that “opaquing” as a kind of theatricalizing of the movie itself, a theatricalizing that is then unexpectedly and ingeniously defeated or overcome  –​to use the language of “Art and Objecthood” –​by the reorientation of the viewer’s attention.’34 In other words, it is the literal presence of the spectator, her freedom physically to wander through the gallery in real time and space (the experience which characterizes so-​called literalist art), attending to the projection(s) but distanced from the narrative, which facilitates this intense engagement with how film is constructed. It allows us to experience a very particular sense of the image’s absorption in itself, via our involvement with the actors’ absorption in their roles. But why does Fried (and, indeed, Cavell) need to revert here to talk of theatricality ‘defeated or overcome’? As Vered Maimon notes, ‘regardless of Fried’s new position that absorption and theatricality are now mingled, his analysis is conducted in a manner that emphasises, yet again, the hierarchical opposition between absorption and theatricality’.35 Indeed, Fried does not seem to have good grounds for arguing that one phenomenal experience is overwhelmed by another. Rather, we might contend that a work such as 24 Hour Psycho ‘stages’ a film (in this case Hitchcock’s) in such a way that we attend to the

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configurational properties of the film’s production in a way that is diametrically opposed to the collapse of ‘seeing-​in’ on which cinema (unlike theatre) is so often predicated: that is, where we see only the characters, putting aside not our awareness of the film’s photographic presentation, but rather our knowledge of the configurational properties in terms of its staging (the acting, the props, the operation of camera and lights and so forth).36 And it is only through technical aspects of its staging that we are granted an intense experience of the actors’ gestures and facial expressions  –​one that alternates between moments of deep involvement with the slow-​motion imagery and attending to the situated context of the gallery, and to the screen’s materiality and object status in a way that counters the projected image’s supposed transparency.37 Indeed, the screen’s double-​sidedness allows us to approach from the rear without our shadow obscuring the projected image, allowing us to see close hand the texture of both the original film (made apparent by the slow motion) and its digital reconstruction. The experience not only reveals configurational properties of the film’s production, but its situated reception. This, I argue, is the real import of Gordon’s refusal of the ‘black-​box’: it is not that simply a reaction against the ‘self-​forgetting darkness of the movie-​house’38 but a revealing of the wider situated conditions of access. This theatricalizing of a film’s reception has particular significance for Fried’s claims about the ‘staging’ of empathic projection. Gordon’s 2003 installation Play Dead; Real Time (Figure 12.2), for instance, comprises two free-​standing screens and a floor-​placed monitor (an arrangement with clear echoes of Nauman’s installations). On the large rear-​projection screens, images are presented of an elephant that continually falls and then struggles to get up again; by contrast, the footage on the monitor focuses on close-​ ups of the animal’s seemingly mournful eye. In a reflexive gesture, the staging of the elephant’s ordeal was shot in the very space in which the work was first installed, that is, the Gagosian Gallery in New York. The two large projections approximate the life-​sized presence of the animal within the space, a figural presence that reinforces the continuity between the implied filmic space and the space of reception/​production. However, the double-​sidedness of the screens, and the insistent rotation of the camera encircling the animal, complicates this connection between the filmic images and gallery space; moreover, the low viewpoint of the camera dolly likewise serves to disconnect the floor edge, as it appears in the film footage, from that of the installation space –​a distancing enhanced by subsequent reiterations of the installation in various venues where there was even less of a ‘fit’ between the two spaces. Fried suggests that such a work ‘lays bare  –​all but forces on one’s attention  –​the empathic-​projective mechanism that lies at the heart of one’s response to often minimally demonstrative absorptive motifs’.39 Here, the elephant is ‘absorbed’ in the considerable exertions necessitated by her role of ‘playing dead’ –​exertions that not only make the spectator feel uncomfortable as ‘Minnie’ rocks back and forward, struggling onto her knees, but engenders a powerful (and unexpected) emotional response. This comprises revulsion and fascination at the cruelty of the act, but also an engrossment with the spectacle and its staging. Fried insists that Play Dead; Real Time is not merely an appeal to the viewer’s ‘experience’, but a laying bare that is ‘structural’ –​that reveals the psychic 245

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Figure 12.2  Douglas Gordon: Play Dead; Real Time, 2003, video installation, dimensions variable. As installed in April 2007 at the exhibition ‘Douglas Gordon:  Between Darkness and Light’ at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany. dpa picture alliance archive/​Alamy Stock Photo. Photo: Peter Steffen.

mechanism (rather than the emotions engendered) at play.40 As such, the work offers ‘a powerful thematization of to-​be-​seenness’, in that not only is the scene clearly staged for the benefit of the beholder, but ‘the viewer is led to intuit the presence in the depicted space of others whom he or she never is shown’.41 There must, at the very least, be a trainer, camera operator and crew, all encircling the animal, following the camera dolly in order to remain out of shot. That this ‘staging’ is, without doubt, for our benefit confirms our complicity in the elephant’s ordeal. Fried observes that ‘Minnie was aware of her trainer and others sharing the gallery space with her’, but the nature of this awareness is problematic in that it does not (and cannot) amount to an awareness of being filmed.42 Indeed, for Fried this very lack of awareness makes Minnie an ideal candidate for that of absorbed ‘protagonist’. While the elephant cannot be said to be ‘acting’ as such, she is required to play a role, that is, to ‘play’ dead. Of course, Fried is not implying she has any conception of what it is to play a role. Oblivious to the significance of the camera (with no awareness of what it is to be filmed), she is fully absorbed in the exertions necessitated by the task required of her by her trainer. At the same time, in Gordon’s work we are encouraged to anthropomorphize such an action and feel empathy and revulsion at her treatment. This returns us to Cavell, and the role of empathic projection in ‘seaming’ the human from the non-​human; moreover, it raises precisely the kind of mis-​categorization that follows from our attempt to empathically project onto an animal through the kind of 246

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explicit anthropomorphism Play Dead exploits. The body of Minnie is ever-​present as she dutifully obeys her trainer’s commands, a struggle reinforced by the insistent focus on that single, apparently mournful eye, framed by the monitor. As Wittgenstein states, ‘Only of what behaves like a human being can one say it has pains. For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like, of a soul which some body has.’43 Gordon thus might be said to stage a categorical error (between human and animal) that not only reveals the very conditions of the work’s existence, but ‘makes us palpably, disturbingly aware of our own empathically projective role in the process by which something like pain gets a foothold’.44 This ‘structural’ revealing of the mechanism at play moves us beyond so-​called apparatus theory (i.e. the literal and/​or ideological revealing of the apparatus of projection and filming), to engage the beholder’s share as a psychologically complex process of position-​taking in which our own culpability is evoked. In the next section, I will argue that Nauman’s Anthro/​Socio not only lays bare the structural mechanism at play in its staging, but does so in such a way that the theatrical/​antitheatrical dichotomy is revealed as fundamental to the complexities of acknowledging, or failing to acknowledge, the pain of others. This brings together the kind of political acts of ideation addressed in relation to Ono’s performance Cut Piece with a Cavellian notion of the role of empathic projection in overcoming –​or, more poignantly, failing to overcome –​human finitude. It is to such a failure that I now turn in relation to Nauman, and in particular to the residual sceptical doubt as to the sufficiency of empathic projection when confronted with the dislocation engendered by Nauman’s Anthro/​Socio.

IV Gordon’s work would certainly not be alone among contemporary artists in referencing the work of Nauman. Play Dead not only echoes Anthro/​Socio in its combination of large screens and monitors but also replicates the complicity of the beholder as recipient of the staged spectacle. Nauman’s installation exemplifies the kind of immersive/​expulsive dynamic founded upon a figural presence. Whereas with Play Dead the engagement encompasses both revulsion and fascination with the cruelty of the staged act, with Nauman’s work our engrossment enacts a more fundamental engagement with the sceptical problematic of which Cavell, after Wittgenstein, writes. Anthro/​Socio, at one and the same time, elicits but irrevocably complicates the process of empathic projection; as noted earlier, the shaven heads in the monitors appear life-​sized, seemingly confined within the depth of the monitor, while the decapitated projections take on the kind of monumental scale of Classical sculpture. This is a profoundly unsettling space; after even a relatively short time in the space, Eckert’s tonally differentiated voice really does get inside your head, problematizing any empathy we may feel towards the replicated figure, and his (its?) dreadful fate and impossible demands.45 In the introduction to her book Un/​common Cultures (2010), Kamala Visweswaran writes of Anthro/​Socio: 247

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It seems impossible to imagine even disciplinary knowledge without the intercession of the media form. For Nauman stages a reflection not only on the mass-​mediated forms of culture, but also on the mass-​mediated explanations of culture that announce themselves as anthropology and sociology. Nauman’s deft use of parody reduces disciplinary organicisms like ‘culture’ or ‘society’ to Durkheimian or Lévi-​Straussian functions:  feed:eat::  help:hurt. It is as if the disciplines, as a paradoxical success of their mass mediation, had doubled back on themselves, yielding productive and populist displacements of their central concepts.46 This parodying of an embedded disciplinary language is consistent with Nauman’s wider utilization of speech-​act theory. One might contrast Nauman’s play on Wittgenstein-​ like language games with someone like Joseph Kosuth’s more narrowly propositional art. Whereas the latter’s use of language operates at the level of the constative utterance, Nauman’s utterances establish deictic references that implicate and position the beholder. Nauman consistently uses directive or imperative verbs, a trend that might be traced right back to the early installation Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968). Here, an empty room contains only Nauman’s voice, yelling, growling and grunting the threatening instruction of the work’s title. As Janet Kraynak writes, ‘throughout Nauman’s practice, statements of address, assertions, demands, and commands abound, a verbal play so ubiquitous that it cannot be mere coincidental’.47 Anthro/​Socio spatially situates the language games so typical of Nauman’s wider oeuvre. With its impossible demands –​feed me/​eat me, help me/​hurt me –​it implores the beholder to intervene, even as she is explicitly manipulated by the work, physically and psychologically. This is entirely consistent with Storr’s instruction that each work in the MoMA show should test our vision for impatient habits of observation and the reflex need for reassurance when confronted by unfamiliar circumstances or familiar but hard-​to-​endure causes of anxiety. Each requires the individual beholder to reconsider their identity in light of a given situation and the freedom or restriction of movement –​hence, perspectives –​imposed upon them within it.48 This also feels remarkably close to Iser’s notion of ‘play’ through textual games, where free play and instrumental play combine to construct a tension between openness and closure.49 Not surprisingly, both Iser’s theoretical position and Nauman’s language games are heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett. With its debt to Beckett, Nauman’s use of language operates in a kind of shifting ground between the conceptual and the physical sign. Anthro/​Socio spatially situates this language, with its demonstrative referencing, demanding something of the beholder even as she is repulsed. Visweswaran’s notion of disciplines doubling back on themselves has strong echoes of Iser’s notion of doubling as defining the aesthetic encounter of literature. To reiterate an argument made in Chapter 10, we have to construct mentally not only the situation 248

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of the artwork, which also itself appears in negation through what is left unsaid, but also the situation that has been transplanted, and thus which is negated. ‘The one discourse becomes the theme viewed from the standpoint of the other, and vice versa.’50 As Iser writes, Every word becomes dialogic, and every semantic field is doubled by another. Through this double-​voiced discourse every utterance carries something else in its wake, so that the act of combination gives rises to duplication of what is present by that which is absent –​a process that often results in the balance being reversed and the present serving only to spotlight the absent. Thus what is said ceases to mean itself, and instead enables what is not said to become present. The double meaning engendered by the act of combination opens up a multifariousness of interconnections within the text.51 For Iser, literature constructs a complex web of relations, involving the switching of perspectives on the part of the implied reader, that invokes and simultaneously deforms ‘extratextual fields of reference, thereby given rise to the aesthetic quality’, whereas through ‘inscribing the absent into the present’ the act of combination ‘becomes the matrix of that aesthetic quality’.52 This provides a ‘continual oscillation between the bracketed world [of the fiction] and that which it has been separated [the actual world]’.53 This constitutes an advance on Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization, shifting it beyond the mere perceptual, while capturing a tension I  have been arguing for throughout the book. Nauman, likewise, clearly provides an oscillation between the ‘bracketed’ world of the installation and that from which it has been separated, the world outside. Removed from the situation of everyday discourse, Nauman’s words open up ambiguities that play upon their dislocation. Cavell’s thoughts seem apposite here:  ‘We can understand what the words mean apart from understanding why you say them; but apart from understanding the point of you saying them we cannot understand what you mean.’54 This recalls Cavell’s own writing on Beckett’s Endgame.55 For Cavell, meaning cannot come apart from the situation in which it is used; and yet Nauman provides us with a situation in which use cannot be determined, and thus meaning floats free within this space of oscillation between the virtual (or ‘bracketed’) and real. And, like the continually spinning heads in Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Spinning), there is no resolution or cessation. This hellish virtual realm, a place outside of normal time and space, is nevertheless strangely familiar, and internalized. Yet the experience does not simply ‘stand-​in’ for the work. This is an encounter where the structuring mechanism is explicitly ‘staged’, but opens up a space where the ‘real’ and ‘irreal’ are doubled up. Through its impossible demands, Nauman’s work prompts acts of ideation and imagination in bringing forward something that is not given, such that the installation effects an interplay between the sensory demands of the work and our mental projections, between reference and negation. Not only is such an encounter intrinsically aesthetic, but it might be said to explicitly stage the sceptical problematic in relation to other minds. As Cavell notes, ‘I must settle on the 249

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validity of my projection from within my present condition, from within, so to speak, my confinement from you’.56

V I want to conclude by briefly reflecting on the issue of medium specificity and the implications of the dominant shift in post-​1960s art towards intermedia. I have already noted shortcomings in Fried’s account of video art, which despite its newfound openness to certain situated practices (radically at odds with the Fried we encountered in earlier chapters) still demonstrates a certain myopic concentration on the need to defeat theatricality (a refusal to recognize the dialectic at play between theatrical/​antitheatrical modes of beholding); I believe a related problem arises from a lingering disregard for conceptual and minimalist strategies that underlie the hybrid medium.57 This disregard manifests itself in a contradictory acknowledgement of the contemporary relinquishing of medium specificity while at the same time denying any kind of precedent for Gordon or Sala’s work (allied to a dubious claim that these video artists’ works are distinguished by a commitment to high modernist themes and issues). Thus, the question of medium-​specificity, while not exactly irrelevant to the artists I discuss … no longer plays the kind of role that it did at an earlier moment in the history of modernism. That is, I  would no longer wish to argue that for a work of contemporary art to matter deeply it has in all cases to be understood as doing so as an instance of a particular art or medium. My conviction as to Sala’s accomplishment is in no way dependent upon on an appreciation of a standing canon of previous video art; and in the case of Gordon, it is not at all clear how the concept of a medium bears on my analyses of Play Dead; Real Time or [Gordon’s 2000] Déjà vu.58 In a footnote to the above statement, Fried states that this ‘is not to endorse the notion of “post-​medium” first introduced and then repudiated by Rosalind E. Krauss’; Fried goes on to distance himself from Krauss’s ‘recent attempts to re-​theorize a viable notion of medium-​specificity via the concept of “technical support” ’, which for Fried ‘leave all the crucial questions unanswered, indeed unasked’.59 This disagreement throws retrospective light on Krauss’s ‘disgust at the spectacle of meretricious art called installation’.60 We have already noted that the issue of medium is a renewed concern in Krauss’s recent position. And in a curious reversal, it is now Fried who outwardly defends certain non-​medium-​specific practices; but both Krauss and Fried make similar claims for individual ‘invention’, a denial that artists such as Gordon are working within any kind of identifiable tradition. Fried refers to Gordon as some ‘sort of genius’, working independently from a known canon; Krauss, by turn, refers to her so-​called ‘knights of the medium’ –​artists that, in ‘inventing’ a medium, seek to counter a ‘post-​medium condition’ now conceived as the collective amnesia 250

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of contemporary art (an amnesia which has, as its object of loss, the engagement of a medium). And yet –​confusingly –​these knights also include artists working specifically with video and film installation, such as Harun Farocki, but also Nauman. Diarmuid Costello’s has convincingly argued that Krauss’s contention that individual artists must invent entirely new media is untenable precisely because it negates the intrinsically public, shared nature of a medium. To remove it from its cultural practice is to slip, as Costello suggests, into ‘a form of artistic solipsism analogous to fantasies of a private language’.61 Rebentisch has likewise highlighted Krauss’s confusion between the invention of media and genres, and associates this back to the extra-​aesthetic (where we might indeed think ‘animated films, automobiles, investigative journalism, or movies’, to adopt Krauss’s own list referring to works by William Kentridge, Ed Ruscha, Sophie Calle and Christian Marclay).62 In noting the proliferation of genres in contemporary art, Rebentisch states, But I  think it is characteristic of these new works of art, which simultaneously constitute new genres, that their means of (re)presentation are explicit about and even exhibit the fact that they precisely do not constitute a distinct domain separate from other arts or from the extra-​aesthetic. In most cases, these are intermedial phenomena that, moreover, often also employ means of (re)presentation that are also in use outside the aesthetic.63 Krauss also states that contemporary technical supports are, indeed, ‘borrowed from available mass-​cultural forms’ while incongruously insisting that they thereby establish distinct domains within art. This is untenable. And as Costello concludes, ‘redescribing what such artists are doing as modifying and thereby extending or transforming –​even beyond recognition –​existing media remains an open and compelling option. But it is not an option available to Krauss’.64 And yet it is an option for my own position. And here the concept of technical support plays a crucial role not only in drawing from the extra-​ aesthetic, but in such work’s construction of different degrees of virtuality through what I describe as the configurational encounter (revealing its apparatus through ‘staging’). This has one final consequence. With Nauman’s Anthro/​Socio we are made complicit to the protagonist’s suffering; the demands, with their quasi-​religious connotations, are endlessly looped. But whereas for the beholder of a work like Masaccio’s Trinity, salvation is offered in the form of what the scene represents, with Nauman’s installation no such redemption is possible; consistent with Cavell’s most pessimistic sceptical claims, we are destined to face the full consequences of our necessary opacity to one another, without the compensatory cathartic sense of a shared experience (in that the audience comes and goes). Here, we are not purified of any ‘theatricalizing’ tendencies. Even Holbein’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb, considered in Chapter 3, negotiates the depressive moment through an identification with the person that once inhabited the body we contemplate. Nauman’s installation, by contrast, addresses the problem of ‘knowing’ other minds in an era without a compensatory belief in God. If scepticism of the external world is founded upon doubt about what our senses deliver, scepticism about other minds has 251

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a much less clear basis for knowing that the other possesses a mind or soul. ‘It seems that I must do more than simply identify what is before my eyes, I must also identify with the creature I  see, see a kinship between it and myself, see it as a creature just like me.’65 Nauman irrevocably complicates this process. As such, empathic projection is necessary for acknowledgement, but painfully insufficient to the task. And Nauman makes it extremely hard to identify with these imploring heads –​a sufficient doubt about the status of Eckert’s duplicated and disembodied heads in an age desensitized by the constant barrage of images of suffering. Whether held (Rinde Facing Camera) or rotating (Rinde Spinning), it is enough to make us question Eckert’s humanity –​to open up the possibility of a miscategorization of a virtual, digitized image as a non-​human artificial construct. Nauman therefore brings our orientation into play to different ends. While Masaccio’s painting functions within its ‘conditions of access’, drawing the institutional context into the encounter, Nauman confronts us with a language situation deliberately removed from everyday discourse. Despite our understanding of what the individual words spoken by Eckert mean, they are puzzling –​in the same way that, Cavell might state, philosophy is puzzling. Following Cavell, we might ask ourselves what do Eckert’s words really mean? This is not a case of determining the circumstances in which they make sense, in that on Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein meaning and use cannot be thus separated. As Cavell notes in Must We Mean What We Say?, ‘The profoundest as well as the most superficial questions can be understood only when they have been placed in their natural environments.’66 Nauman offers no such situation, in that Eckert’s utterances are reduced to primitive language games, devoid of context. Yet they also affect us, as well as reminding us of the necessary uncertainty of such context-​dependent language. This returns us to the beholder’s share as a constantly evolving set of ‘licensed’ imaginative and cognitive projections: a process of ideation prompted by the work and the complexities of its conditions of access, constituting the inherently problematic embodied space of reception.

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INTRODUCTION 1. In so doing, my position has something in common with David Davies’s position. In Art as Performance, Davies claims that artworks (all of them) should be considered not as products made by artists through generative performances but rather as the performances themselves. A performance ‘articulates a content through a vehicle via an “artistic medium” ’, a term which Davies uses to describe ‘a system of articulatory understandings in a system of the artworld, in something like Danto’s sense’. David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 253. One can take much from Davies’s account of the appreciation of artworks without necessarily endorsing its stronger ontological conclusions. My own view is that a performance theory might best describe a particular function of the artwork, where the beholder’s own performance enacts something of the originating performance (thus articulating a content) through our engagement with the vehicle. 2. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-​Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 53. 3. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All:  Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London:  Verso, 2013), 37. 4. See Ken Wilder, ‘The Configurational Encounter and the Problematic of Beholding’, in The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life after Bourdieu, ed. Malcolm Quinn, Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Carol Tulloch and Stephen Wilson (London: Routledge, 2018). 5. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in Clement Greenberg:  The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–​1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993 [1960]), 86. 6. Ibid., 90. 7. Clement Greenberg, ‘Sculpture in Our Time’, in Greenberg:  The Collected Essays and Criticism’, 59. 8. Michael Fried, Four Honest Outlaws:  Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2011), 64. 9. Michael Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, in Art and Objecthood:  Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36. 10. Michael Fried, ‘Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 88. 11. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1998), 163. Originally published in Artforum 5 (June 1968): 12–​23. 12. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005), 6. 13. Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 153 (Fried’s emphasis). 14. Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, 43.

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Notes 15. Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson (Berlin: Sternberg Press, [2003] 2012), 76. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 162. 18. Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, 69. 19. Ibid., 22. 20. One might add that minimalism, thus considered, facilitates a particular kind of symbolic functioning that is ‘aesthetic’ in something like Nelson Goodman’s sense; not only is a physical engagement necessary to retrieve its aesthetic content, but it also exemplifies material and serial qualities without denoting (something minimalism shares with architecture). See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976). 21. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). We might note that Diderot’s engagement with painting, despite the public nature of the Salon, represented a privatization of the aesthetic experience:  a move away from art’s functional role, in service to church or state, towards the burgeoning private sphere, and the kind of intensely subjective experience characterized by Diderot’s lack of awareness of himself within the pleasurable throes of the imaginative engagement certain works afford. Not only was the beholder as a constitutive presence negated, but the virtual realm of the artwork was thus untethered from its institutional situation and collective audience. See, for instance, Julia Simon, Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 165. 22. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1984] 1999), 79–​80. 23. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), n. 96, 479. 24. Ibid., 401. 25. Ibid., 17, 405. 26. Charles S. Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic’, in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. R. E. Innis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 16. 27. Ibid., 15. 28. Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk:  Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2004), 108, 115. We might thus treat the artwork as part of a class founded, in Wittgenstein’s terms, on ‘the “family resemblances” theory of class membership’. Ibid., 109. 29. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form:  A Theory of Art (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953). 30. I take the phrase ‘degrees of unreality’ from Sven Sandström, Levels of Unreality:  Studies in Structure and Construction in Italian Mural Painting during the Renaissance (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1963). 31. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 45. 32. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1973] 1997). 33. Davies, Art as Performance, 253. 34. Timothy Binkley, ‘Piece: Contra Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 265–​77.

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Notes 35. Davies, Art as Performance, 54. 36. Binkley, ‘Piece: Contra Aesthetics’, 271. 37. As with Wolfgang Iser’s usage, the term representation should be understood here in the sense of the German Darstellung, that is, without its mimetic associations. Iser states, ‘The English term representation causes problems because it is so loaded. It entails or at least suggests a given that the act of representation duplicates in one way or another. Representation and mimesis have therefore become interchangeable notions in literary criticism, thus concealing the performative qualities through which the act of representation brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object’. Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 236. 38. See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1978). 39. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland. Introduction by Wolfgang Kemp, trans. Evelyn M. Kain (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, [1902] 1999). 40. Michael Ann Holly, ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2002), 448. See also:  Wolfgang Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder:  The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception’, in The Subjects of Art History:  Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984). 41. See, for instance:  Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader:  Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD:  John Hopkins University Press, 1974); Iser, The Act of Reading. For an extensive bibliography, including precursors and followers, see Holub, Reception Theory. 42. For an account of this trend, see Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder’, 181–​3. 43. Iser, The Act of Reading, x. For the often confusing proliferation of terminology, see Holub, Reception Theory, xii. Holub uses ‘reception theory’ as an umbrella term encompassing both Jauss and Iser’s projects, reserving ‘aesthetics of reception’ in connection with Jauss’s early theoretical work. 44. Iser, The Act of Reading, x. 45. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception. I  therefore deviate here from Holub’s usage, as noted above. 46. Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder’, 181. 47. Ibid., 183. 48. Ibid., 191. 49. See Ken Wilder, ‘Vermeer: Interruptions, Exclusions, and “Imagining Seeing” ’, Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics LII/​VII, no. 1 (2015): 38–​59. 50. Holly, ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, 452–​3. 51. Svetlana Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas’, Representations, no. 1 (1983): 30–​42. 52. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 8. 53. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, 48–​51. Cited in Holly, ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, 453.

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Notes 54. Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder’, 183. 55. See Holub, Reception Theory, 163. 56. Holly, ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, 454. 57. See, for instance, Jane P. Tompkins, ‘An Introduction to Reader-​Responsive Criticism’, in Reader-​Response Criticism:  From Formalism to Post-​Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1980), xvii. For Fish’s critique of Iser, see Stanley Fish, ‘Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser’, Diacritics 11, no. 1 (1981): 2–​13. 58. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, [1983] 2008), 69. 59. Ibid. 60. Brook Thomas, ‘Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early Work, or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic’, New Literary History 31, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 28. 61. Holly, ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, 453. 62. Holub, Reception Theory, 163. 63. Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition:  Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–​1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 64. Sandström, Levels of Unreality. 65. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​:  Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [1972] 2002). 66. Julia Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 105–​38. 67. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland. 68. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 30–​42. 69. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. 70. Yve-​Alain Bois, ‘From −∞ to 0 to +∞: Axonometry, or Lissitzky’s Mathematical Paradigm’, in El Lissitzky 1890–​1941: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer, ed. Jan Debbaut et al. (Eindhoven: Municipal Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1990). 71. Langer, Feeling and Form. 72. Griselda Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming:  Dreaming Agnes’, in 3 X Abstraction:  New Methods of Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2005). 73. Iser, The Act of Reading. 74. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (Spring 1979):  30–​ 44; Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’, in Bachelors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1993] 1999). 75. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason:  Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, [1979] 1999).

CHAPTER 1 1. Ken Wilder, ‘The Case for an External Spectator’, British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (2008): 261–​72. Reprinted in Painting: Critical and Primary Sources, ed. Beth Harland and

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Notes Sunil Manghani, 4 Volumes (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015), vol. 3:  Critical Perspectives, pt. 3: Phenomenology, ch. 16. 2. This might not be quite true, in that the two illusory chapels on the chancel wall of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua (more of which later) might be said to conform to what Hoffmann terms a ‘progressive costruzione legittima’:  Volker Hoffmann, ‘Giotto and Renaissance Perspective’, Nexus Network Journal 12, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 5–​32. 3. That an illusory painted architecture should inspire such an important new architectural type is symptomatic of the Renaissance development of a metrical architecture to be viewed as though it were a painting. See, for instance, Rudolf Wittkower, Idea and Image:  Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London:  Thames and Hudson, 1978), 125–​35. It has long been suggested that Masaccio’s architectural solution was evolved with the assistance of Filippo Brunelleschi  –​see, for instance, Martin Kemp, ‘Science, Non-​Science and Nonsense:  The Interpretation of Brunelleschi’s Perspective, Art History 1 (1978): 131–​61. 4. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 24. 5. Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art:  Field and Vehicle in Image-​Signs’, Semiotica 1 (1969): 225–​42. Reprinted in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 6, no. 1 (1972–​3): 11. 6. Ibid. 7. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 27. 8. Patrick Maynard, ‘Perspective Places’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 1 (1996): 27. 9. Ibid. 10. Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder’, 187. 11. I want to be clear that such a structuring of the conditions of access is not the same as grounding depiction upon a system of rules or conventions that connect image to object. I am not offering a semiotic account of depiction, but rather an account of how certain artworks function as indexical signs. 12. Rona Goffen, ‘Introduction:  Masaccio’s Trinity and the Early Renaissance’, in Masaccio’s Trinity, ed. Rona Goffen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. 13. Sandström, Levels of Unreality, 10. 14. Heinrich Wölfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, [1899] 1952), 53. 15. Sven Sandström, Explaining the Obvious: A Theory of Visual Images as Cognitive Structures (Lund, Sweden: Scripta Minora Regiae Societatis Humaniorum Litterarum Lundensis; vol. 2007/​2008: 1, 2007), 19. 16. Ibid., 95 n. 10. 17. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion:  A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1960). 18. Sandström, Levels of Unreality, 7. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. In a review of Sandström’s book, Michael Podro questions this assumption of five pictorial levels, and is more widely critical of the premise that the interaction of a more illusionistic foreground with a less illusionistic background is always assumed as being a juxtaposition of

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Notes pictorial levels. He proffers counterexamples where rather than the juxtaposition of pictorial levels –​where one is ‘relatively real and the other “only a picture” ’ –​there is a merging of foreground and background. Michael Podro, Review of Levels of Unreality: Studies in Structure and Construction in Italian Mural Painting during the Renaissance, by Sven Sandström, British Journal of Aesthetics 4, no. 2 (1962): 190. 22. See the earlier note with regard to these Proto-​Renaissance illusory chapels predating Masaccio’s Trinity as the first extant works using a consistent linear perspective. 23. Sandström here references John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, [1957] 1972), 60. 24. Sandström, Levels of Unreality,  24–​5. 25. White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 59. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 60. 28. Sandström, Levels of Unreality, 26. 29. Ibid., 25. 30. Laura Jacobus, ‘Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena Chapel, Padua’, Art Bulletin 81, no. 1 (1999): 105. 31. Jacobus, ‘Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena Chapel, Padua’, 93–​5. Jacobus notes how the Virgin’s ‘pose lacks the implicit dynamism of Saint Anne’s [in the Apparition to Saint Anne, part of the chapel’s narrative cycle] and her face is masklike, without emotion. The Virgin’s immobility and impassivity seem to run counter to Giotto’s achievements in conveying the psychology of the human figure, amply illustrated in depictions of the Virgin and others elsewhere in the chapel’; ‘One striking detail confirms that Giotto’s Virgin Annunciate may be understood as an actor in costume, for close examination shows that she is wearing a braided hairpiece. Stray locks of the actor’s own shoulder-​length hair fall down the back of her neck, and the curls of his own fringe escape at the front.’ Ibid., 97, 100–​2. 32. Ibid., 102. 33. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists:  Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, trans. Mrs Jonathan Foster, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1967] 2005), 25. 34. Ornella Casazza, ‘Masaccio’s Fresco Technique and Problems of Conservation’, in Masaccio’s Trinity, ed. Rona Goffen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 69. 35. Goffen, ‘Introduction: Masaccio’s Trinity’, 12. 36. Casazza, ‘Masaccio’s Fresco Technique and Problems of Conservation’, 70. 37. Ibid., 76. 38. Sandström, Levels of Unreality,  29–​30. 39. Ibid., 30. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Goffen, ‘Introduction: Masaccio’s Trinity’, 13. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.,  13–​14. 45. Ibid., 14. 46. Sandström, Levels of Unreality, 30. 258

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Notes 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 29. 49. White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 139. 50. Ibid., 139–​40. 51. Ibid., 140. 52. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting:  The Logic of the Gaze (London:  Macmillan Press, 1983), 111. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 108. 55. Ibid., 104. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 108. 58. Ibid. 59. Goffen, ‘Introduction: Masaccio’s Trinity’,  22–​3. 60. Ibid., 23. 61. See Ken Wilder, ‘Neither Here Nor Elsewhere:  Displacement Devices in Representing the Supernatural’, Estetika:  The Central European Journal of Aesthetics XLVIII/​IV, no. 1 (2011): 46–​62. 62. Sandström, Levels of Unreality, 30. 63. Ibid. 64. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 104. 65. Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 8. See also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-​ Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 66. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 108. 67. This is precisely the kind of reading that later codified perspective schemas tend to emphasize: see, for instance, Hans Vredeman de Vries, Perspective (Amsterdam, 1604–​5). 68. James S. Ackerman, ‘Alberti’s Light’, in Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 59–​96. 69. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 143. 70. Langer, Feeling and Form. 71. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 72. 72. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 805–​6. 73. Michael Podro, Depiction (New Haven, CT: Tale University Press, 1998), 64.

CHAPTER 2 1. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 14. 2. Hubert Damisch, ‘Eight Theses for (or against?) A Semiology of Painting’, Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 2 (2005): 261. Originally published as ‘Huit thèses pour (ou contre?) une sémiologie de la peinture’, Macula, no. 2 (1977): 17–​23. 259

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Notes 3. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 14. 4. Ibid. 5. Podro, Review of Levels of Unreality, 189–​90. 6. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, [1987] 1995). 7. Ibid., 446. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 53. 10. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 124. 11. Manetti’s account is written in the 1480s, some 60 years after the experiment itself. 12. White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 114. 13. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 183. 14. The attribution of this painting to Giotto is not secure. 15. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 101. 16. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 72. 17. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 64. 18. Ibid., 63. 19. Ibid. 20. Rona Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 107. 21. Ibid., 110. 22. Shearman, Only Connect, 100. 23. Ibid. The painting thereby replicates aspects of an earlier votive image by Titian, also commissioned by the bishop, and celebrating the same naval victory: Jacopo Pesaro with Pope Alexander VI before St Peter (c.1503–​7), in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. 24. For an account of this rivalry, see Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, 62–​72,  132–​7. 25. Ibid., 136. As Goffen notes, ironically the victory was Pyrrhic in that ‘the island was returned to the Turks as part of the peace settlement of 1503’. 134. 26. See, also, Peter Humfrey, Titian (London: Phaidon Press, 2007), 86. 27. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 138. 28. Ibid., 138–​40. 29. Ibid., 140. 30. Ibid. Moreover, the personal and civic function of the votive image had to be reconciled with the demands of the host Franciscans. Goffen suggests that the solution not only represented a kind of one-​upmanship in Jacopo’s family dispute with Benedetto but served a darker political purpose. Not only was Jacopo ‘genuinely grateful to the pope who had been his early sponsor’, but by including within the work Muslim captives being presented to the Madonna, the painting exploited the order’s commitment to ‘the conversion of the “infidel” to the faith’ and was thus ‘pertinent to the Franciscan setting of the Pesaro Madonna, as well as having personal, biographical relevance to the patrons’. Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, 133.

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Notes 31. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 77. 32. Ibid. 33. Shearman, Only Connect. 34. Ibid.,  98–​9. 35. Ibid., 95. 36. Commissioned by Doge Cristoforo Moro, the remodelling was begun by Antonio Gambello in the 1470s and continued by (among others) the workshop of Antonio Rossellino and the sculptor Pietro Lombardo. 37. Shearman, Only Connect, 97. 38. Ibid., 98. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 100. 41. Ibid., 99. 42. Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, 112. 43. Shearman, Only Connect, 99. 44. Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 188. 45. Shearman, Only Connect, 99. 46. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 145. 47. Ibid., 145–​7. Indeed, some art historians, such as Staale Sinding-​Larsen and David Rosand, have claimed that the two columns were not Titian’s, but a later addition  –​a theory, as Puttfarken notes, that X-​rays have revealed to be wrong. See Staale Sinding-​Larsen, ‘Titian’s Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro and its Historical Significance’, Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, I (1962): 139–​69; Rosand, ‘Titian in the Frari’, 201–​2. 48. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 147. 49. Ibid. This is something difficult to capture in photographs. 50. Shearman, Only Connect, 101. 51. Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, 114. 52. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 1. 53. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (London: Collins, 1964), 64. Cited by Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 4. 54. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 64. Cited by Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 5. 55. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 63. 56. Ibid., 20. 57. Goffen, ‘Introduction: Masaccio’s Trinity’, 2. 58. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 82. 59. Ibid., 42. 60. Shearman, Only Connect, 186. 61. Ibid.,  183–​4. 62. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 15. 63. Shearman, Only Connect, 188.

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Notes 64. Loren Partridge, The Art of Renaissance Venice, 1400–​1600 (Oakland, CA:  University of California Press), 143. 65. Jacqueline E. Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–​1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 92–​3. 66. Ibid., 93.

CHAPTER 3 1. For less well-​ known examples, see Christian Müller, ‘It Is the Viewpoint That Matters: Observations on the Illusionistic Effect of Early Works by Hans Holbein’, in Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. M. Roskill and J. O. Hand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2001). 2. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 111. 3. Ibid. Kristeva here references Fridtjof Zschokke, ‘Der Leichnam Christi im Grabe, 1522’, in Die Malerfamilie Holbein in Basel, ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Ausstellung im Kunstmuseum Basel zur Fünfhunderjahr Feier der Universität Basel, 1960), 188–​90. The X-​ray also reveals that Holbein changed the date from 1522 to 1521, covering over the final Roman numeral of the inscription. 4. Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 90. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 92. 7. Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein: Revised and Expanded Second Edition (London: Reaktion Books, [1997] 2014), 137. 8. Ibid.,  136–​7. 9. Derek Wilson, Hans Holbein:  Portrait of an Unknown Man (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 20. See also Horst Ziermann, Matthias Grünewald (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2001), 36. 10. Bätschmann and Griener, Hans Holbein, 7. 11. Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, with its folding wings, can be configured into three positions, the third view which reveals the wooden relief sculpture of Nikolaus Hagenauer. An in situ work, painted for the main altar of the monastery church at the Antonite hospital and monastery in Isenheim, it is now housed in the Chapel of the Unterlinden Museum at nearby Colmar (where it was moved to in 1794). 12. Andrée Hayum, ‘The Meaning and Function of the Isenheim Altarpiece:  The Hospital Context Revisited’, The Art Bulletin 59, no. 4 (1977): 504. 13. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 116. 14. Ibid., 117. 15. See, for instance, The Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), by Hugo van der Goes, now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. 16. See Carolyn Osiek, ‘Mary 3’, in Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha/​Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament, ed. Carol Meyers, Toni Craven and Ross S. Kraemer (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2002),  120–​2. 262

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Notes 17. Hayum, ‘The Meaning and Function of the Isenheim Altarpiece’, 509. 18. Ibid. 19. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 134. 20. John Lechte, ‘Kristeva and Holbein, Artist of Melancholy’, British Journal of Aesthetics 30, no. 4 (October 1990): 348. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 349. 24. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 89. 25. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Viking Penguin, 1955). Cited in Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 108 (Kristeva’s emphasis). 26. Dostoyevsky, The Idiot. Cited in Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 107 (Kristeva’s emphasis). 27. Erika Michael, ‘The Legacy of Holbein’s Gedankenreichtum’, Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. M. Roskill and J. O. Hand (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2001), 232. 28. Ibid. 29. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 110. 30. Ibid. 31. Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity (Albany, NY: Sate University of New York Press, 2004), 145. 32. Holbein’s woodcuts for this version of Luther’s translation were cut by Hans Lützelburger. 33. For an intriguing analysis of the painting, see Wilson, Hans Holbein, 116–​19. 34. Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin, trans. H. Grieve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 44. 35. Ibid., 45. 36. See Wilson, Hans Holbein, 160. As Kristeva notes, Paul Ganz has claimed  –​without real supporting evidence –​that the Dead Christ may have been the predella for this altarpiece. Paul Ganz, The Paintings of Hans Holbein (New York: Phaidon, 1950), 218–​20. 37. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 124. 38. Ibid.,122. 39. Ibid.,  122–​3. 40. Toril Moi, ‘Introduction’, in Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 1. 41. Ibid., 2. 42. Ibid.,  6–​7. 43. See, for instance, Sara Beardsworth, ‘Kristeva’s Feminism’, in Julia Kristeva:  Psychoanalysis and Modernity, 217–​66. 44. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, intro. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, [1974] 1984), 21. 45. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick, intro. Mark Edmundson (London: Penguin Books, [1940] 2003). 46. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 26.

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Notes 47. Ibid.,  26–​7. 48. Ibid., 43. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. That is, linguistic elements learnt as combined blocks, such as ‘allgone’, but also gestures such as pointing. 52. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 43. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 46. 55. Ibid., 47. 56. Ibid.,  44–​5. 57. Ibid., 52. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 54. 60. Ibid., 53. 61. Ibid., 54. 62. Ibid., 55. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 56. 65. Ibid., 58. 66. Ibid., 68. 67. Ibid., 69. 68. John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990), 124–​7. 69. Ibid., 124. 70. Julia Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, in Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists, ed. Christopher Kul-​ Want, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 207. This first appeared in Peinture, nos 2–​3 (January 1972). 71. Ibid., 212. 72. Lechte, Julia Kristeva, 120. 73. Ibid. 74. Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis  –​A  Counterdepressant’, in Black Sun:  Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 24. 75. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 127. 76. Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva, 146. 77. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 112. 78. Ibid., 117. 79. Ibid., 110. 80. Müller, ‘It Is the Viewpoint That Matters’, 27. The effect is somewhat lessened by the work’s frame, which is not original. This oblique viewpoint, while contradicting the vanishing point, is consistent with the fact that the return side of the niche is absent, although this does not in

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Notes itself explain the missing section of the tomb’s frame, which is also absent from the top of the recess. 81. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 113. 82. Ibid., 138. 83. Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, 14. 84. Ibid., 88. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 149. 88. Ibid., 148–​50. 89. Ibid., 152. 90. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 129. 91. Ibid., 146. 92. Ibid., 129. 93. Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 152. 94. Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art, 89. 95. Ibid., 108. 96. Ibid., 110. 97. Kristeva, ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’, 138.

CHAPTER 4 1. Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Introduction’, trans. David Britt, in The Group Portraiture of Holland, Alois Riegl, introduction by Wolfgang Kemp, trans. Evelyn M. Kain (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, [1902] 1999), 1. 2. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland,  220–​1. 3. Ibid., 80. 4. Margaret Iversen, ‘Alois Riegl: The Synchronic Analysis of Stylistic Types’, in Structure and Gestalt:  Philosophy and Literature in Austria-​Hungary and Her Successor States, ed. Barry Smith (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V., 1981), 51–​2. 5. Margaret Olin, ‘Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness’, The Art Bulletin LXXI, no. 2 (June 1989): 285–​99. 6. Olin, ‘Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness’, 287. 7. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 253. 8. Olin, ‘Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness’, 293. See also Kemp, ‘Introduction’, 9–​14. 9. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1982), 88. 10. See, for instance:  Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise:  The Studio and the Market (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

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Notes 11. See Harry Berger, Jr, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2000); Harry Berger, Jr, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 12. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, ch. III. 13. Olin, ‘Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness’, 286. 14. Ibid. 15. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art,  805–​6. 16. Margaret Iversen, ‘Spectators of Postmodern Art:  From Minimalism to Feminism’, in Postmodernism and the Re-​Reading of Modernity, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 183. 17. Kemp, ‘Introduction’, 12. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 13. 20. Ibid.,  13–​14. 21. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 127. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 174. 24. Ibid., 173. 25. Ibid.,  173–​4. 26. Ibid., 204. 27. Ibid., 205. 28. Berger, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief, 93–​4. Berger cites Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 207. 29. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 322. 30. Ibid. 31. Berger, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief, 98. 32. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland,  322–​3. 33. Berger, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief,  98–​9. 34. Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman (1656), in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, survives only as a small fragment after a fire damaged most of the painting. 35. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 282. 36. The degree to which Rembrandt revolutionizes the genre might be registered when we compare his version of an anatomy lesson to one completed less than thirty years previously, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Sebastiaen Egbertsz. (1603), by Aert Pietersz., part of the collection of the Amsterdam Museum. This seeks to accommodate all twenty-​eight attendant surgeons in three rows, in addition to the presence of Egbertsz. himself. As Riegl notes, with the exception of the professor, who with posed scissors at the ready looks out into the distance, every figure ‘subordinates’ themselves to the viewer (rather than Egbertsz.) by looking outward to what evidently is a collective audience –​in what Riegl refers to as ‘the best illustration of the artistic volition in Holland, and especially Amsterdam, at that time.’ Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 197. 37. Ibid., 258.

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Notes 38. Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:  Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), 352. 39. Ibid., 351. 40. Ibid., 342. 41. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 256. 42. See, for instance, Benjamin Binstock, ‘Seeing Representations; or, the Hidden Master in Rembrandt’s Syndics’, Representations 83, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 8. The X-​ray also shows that the dead man’s left arm ended with a rounded stump, over which Rembrandt painted a hand (which explains why this arm is considerably shorter). 43. Ibid., 8. 44. Ibid. 45. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 256. 46. Sarah Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death: Remarks on The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolas Tulp (1632)’, in Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 238–​9. 47. Ibid., 238. 48. Ibid. 49. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 351. 50. Ibid., 352. 51. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 256. 52. Kofman, ‘Conjuring Death’, 239. 53. Jacques Derrida, ‘Sarah Kofman (1934–​94):  …….’, in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-​ Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 178. 54. Albeit there is some doubt about the authenticity of the signature itself, in that not only is the spelling unusual (without a d), but that it was itself overpainted. See Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research project, A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings II (Dordrecht:  Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 182. 55. Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) occupies a mid-​point within this development. Here, an internal coherence is provided by the subordination of figures to the captain, so that the painting can only (in Riegl’s terms) be truly considered a double portrait rather than group portrait as such, in that ‘the subordinating effect of the spoken work (in this case the command [to move forward]) operates directly on a psychological level only for one figure (the lieutenant); for all of the others, it takes the form of physical activity’ –​something fundamentally at odds with the group portrait. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 267. 56. Ibid., 285. 57. Olin, ‘Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness’, 287. 58. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 285. 59. Henri van de Waal, ‘The Syndics and Their Legend’, in Steps Towards Rembrandt, trans. P. Wardle and A. Griffiths (Amsterdam: North-​Holland, [1956] 1974), 260. 60. Binstock, ‘Seeing Representations’, 1. 61. Ibid., 5. 62. Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 127. 63. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 229–​31.

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Notes 64. Ibid., 231. It is a suggestion to which van de Waal states: ‘It is really not worth making the effort to refute such nonsense.’ van de Waal, ‘The Syndics and Their Legend’, 255. 65. Kemp, ‘Introduction’, 49–​50. 66. Binstock, ‘Seeing Representations’, 7. 67. Berger, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief, 60. 68. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 344. 69. Berger, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief, 71. 70. Ibid., 11. 71. Harry Berger, Jr, The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 288. 72. See Jonathan Bikker and Anna Krekeler, ‘Experimental Technique:  The Paintings’, and Marjorie E. Wiesman, ‘Artistic Conventions’, in Rembrandt: The Late Works (London: National Gallery Company in Association with the Rijksmuseum, 2014), 132–​51, 98–​31. 73. Binstock, ‘Seeing Representations’, 12. Binstock here references Wilhelm Valentiner, Rembrandt, des Meisters Handzeichnungen (Stuttgart, 1925), 2: 426. 74. Binstock, ‘Seeing Representations’, 16. 75. Ibid. Binstock’s article includes a detailed reconstruction of the account book. 76. Berger, The Perils of Uglytown, 292.

CHAPTER 5 1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:  An Archeology of the Human Sciences, English translation (London: Tavistock, [1966] 1974), 3–​16. 2. James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (London: Routledge, 1999), 40. 3. W. J.  T. Mitchell, Picture Theory:  Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 58; cited in Elkins Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, 40. 4. Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, 258. 5. Ibid., 250. 6. See, for instance, John Moffitt, ‘Velázquez in the Alcázar Palace in 1656: The Meaning of the Mise-​en-​scène of Las Meninas’, Art History 6, no. 3 (1983): 292–​5. 7. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 31. 8. Iversen, Alois Riegl, 142. 9. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 363, n. 1; Jonathan Brown, ‘The Meaning of Las Meninas’, in Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-​Century Spanish Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 10. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez:  Painter and Courtier (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1986), 259. 11. Foucault, The Order of Things, 16. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 15.

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Notes 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 11. 18. Ibid., 15. 19. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 430. 20. Iversen, Alois Riegl, 144. 21. Foucault, The Order of Things, 308. 22. Iversen, Alois Riegl, 144. 23. Ibid., 145. 24. Foucault, The Order of Things, 16. 25. Ibid., 31. 26. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 31. For a sense of how this thinly veiled attack on the limitations of entrenched art historical methods fits within an ongoing theme Alpers had already developed elsewhere, see Svetlana Alpers, ‘Is Art History’, Dædalus 106, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 1–​13. 27. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 31. 28. See, for instance, William Stirling, Annals of the Artists of Spain, 3 vols. (London: John Olliver, 1848), 771. 29. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 31. 30. Ibid., 32. 31. Ibid. 32. See, for instance, Brown, ‘The Meaning of Las Meninas’. 33. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 33. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid.,  33–​4. 37. Ibid., 36. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 37. 41. These two models, though conceived in terms of representational modes rather than formal categories, have much in common with Heinrich Wölfflin’s classic distinction between the tectonic and a-​tectonic: where the work is constructed just ‘for this frame’, as a ‘self-​contained entity’, appropriate for the ceremonial, against the notion of the ‘open’ composition, where ‘the filling has lost touch with the frame’. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History:  The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 125. 42. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, [1983] 1989), 68. 43. Foucault, The Order of Things, 17. 44. Ibid., 55.

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Notes 45. Ibid., 63. 46. Ibid., 59. 47. Ibid., 64. 48. Ibid., 65. 49. Ibid., 64. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 307. 52. Ibid., 64. 53. Ibid., 67. 54. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 36. 55. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 104. 56. Ibid., 111. 57. Ibid. 58. Here we might also note that a work such as Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music (c. 1660–​1), while inadvertent in the sense of not arranging itself towards the external beholder’s act of inspection, does imply a spectator in the picture in its particular use of an interruption (a reciprocity that can only be experienced not through perception alone, but through an imaginative engagement). See Wilder, ‘Vermeer: Interruptions, Exclusions, and “Imagining Seeing” ’. 59. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise. 60. John R. Searle, ‘ “Las Meninas” and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation’, Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 477–​88. 61. Ibid., 483. 62. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 431. 63. Searle, ‘ “Las Meninas” and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation’, 483. 64. Ibid., 485. For a further refutation of Searle’s thesis, based on the canvas size, see Moffit, ‘Velázquez in the Alcázar Palace in 1656’, 286–​7. 65. Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, ‘Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost’, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 434–​6. 66. Ibid., 441. 67. Joel Snyder, ‘Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince’, Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4 (June 1985): 559. 68. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 42, n. 10. 69. Snyder, ‘Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince’, 567, n. 11. 70. Ibid., 546. 71. Ibid., 543. 72. Snyder and Cohen, ‘Reflexions on Las Meninas, 443 (Snyder and Cohen’s emphasis). 73. Snyder, ‘Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince’, 553. 74. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 438. 75. Leo Steinberg, ‘Velázquez’ Las Meninas’, October 19 (Winter 1981): 51. 76. Snyder, ‘Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince’, 553. 77. Ibid., 549. 270

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Notes 78. Moffitt, ‘Velázquez in the Alcázar Palace in 1656’, 277–​83, figs. 2–​4. 79. Brown, Velázquez:  Painter and Courtier, 259; Moffitt, ‘Velázquez in the Alcázar Palace in 1656’, 286. 80. Steinberg, ‘Velázquez’ Las Meninas’, 53. 81. Searle, ‘ “Las Meninas” and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation’, 484. 82. Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier, 259–​60. 83. Steinberg, ‘Velázquez’ Las Meninas’, 48. 84. Ibid., 50. 85. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 436. 86. Steinberg, ‘Velázquez’ Las Meninas’, 50. 87. Brown, ‘The Meaning of Las Meninas’, 109. 88. Moffitt, ‘Velázquez in the Alcázar Palace in 1656’, 292. 89. Alpers, ‘Interpretation without Representation’, 37.

CHAPTER 6 1. The painting was acquired by Luigi Magnani (1906–​84) for his collection in 1974, directly from the Italian descendants of Don Luis. See Xavier Bray, ‘Goya: The Family of the Infante Don Luis’, Information booklet on the occasion of the loan from the Magnani-​Rocca Foundation, Parma, to the National Gallery, London, 1 December 2001–​3 March 2002 (London: National Gallery, 2001), unpaginated. 2. See Xavier Bray and Alison Goudie, Goya: The Portraits, with contributions by Xavier Bray, Thomas Gayford, Alison Goudie and Manuela B. Mena Marqués (London: National Gallery Company, 2015). Don Luis’s mother was Princess of Parma, hence the family connection to Parma referred to in the footnote above. 3. Ibid., 31. 4. Ibid., 51. 5. See Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise. 6. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 43. 7. Isadora Rose-​de Viejo and Janie Cohen, Etched on the Memory: The Presence of Rembrandt in the Prints of Goya and Picasso (Blaricum and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Aldershot, Hants: V+K Publishing, The Rembrandt House, Amsterdam, and Lund Humphries, 2000), 14–​15. Rose-​de Viejo uses the now disputed Artemisia attribution of this painting. 8. Ibid., 15, 16. 9. Ibid., 28. According to the Museo del Prado, this attribution is consistent with the 1768 inventory of Anton Rafael Mengs, and Francisco Bayeau and Goya’s inventory for Charles IV in 1794. 10. Berger, Fictions of the Pose. 11. Harry Berger, Jr, ‘Fictions of the Pose:  Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture’, Representations no. 46 (Spring 1994): 101–​2. 12. Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, [1977] 1995), 83–​4.

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Notes 13. Denis Diderot, ‘De la poésie dramatique’, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann, Jean Fabre, Jacques Proust and Jean Varloot (33 vols, Paris: Hermann, 1975), X:373. Cited in Andrew H. Clark, Diderot’s Part (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 15. 14. See Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 3.  As a prominent Enlightenment philosopher, Diderot was chief editor, and one of the founders, of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné. 15. Denis Diderot, in Art in Theory 1648–​1815:  An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger, trans. Kate Tunstall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 604. 16. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality,  49–​50. 17. Ibid., 103. 18. Ibid., 107. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 55. Fried bravely attempts to provide a contemporary context for this (to our eyes) overtly sentimental painting. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 103. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid.,  103–​4. 25. Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, 258. 26. Berger, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief,  19–​20. 27. Ibid., 41. 28. Francisco de Goya, Cartas a Martín Zapater, ed. Cartas a Martín Zapater, ed. Mercedes Águeda Villar and Xavier de Salas (Madrid: Istmo, [1982] 2003), doc. 106, 143–​4; cited in Victor I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch, Goya:  The Last Carnival (London:  Reaktion Books, 1999), 219. 29. Bray, ‘Goya: The Family of the Infante Don Luis’, unpaginated. 30. Cited in Bray, ‘Goya: The Family of the Infante Don Luis’, unpaginated. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Bray, Goya: The Portraits, 39. 34. The position of the second leg appears to have been altered, in that a ghost of the original position can still be seen as it crosses in front of the Infante’s white stockings. Such eighteenth-​ century green baize flip-​top card tables, with protruding and rounded corners for placing candles, utilize swing-​out gate legs on one side (or sometimes a pull-​out leg). If there are two legs at the rear, one which is hidden behind María Teresa’s long peignoir and the other behind the Infante, then the asymmetrical arrangement is in fact entirely feasible. 35. Bray, Goya: The Portraits, 48. 36. The latter figure has often been identified as the composer Boccherini, though according to Bray he may be ‘Don Luis’s valet, Gregorio Ruiz de Arce, or possibly Estanislao de Lugo y Molino, the tutor of Luis María [Don Luis and María Teresa’s son], whose profile pose he echoes across the canvas’. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. Bray names these as Antonia Vanderbrocht and Petronila Valdearenas.

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Notes 39. Diego Angulo Iniguez, ‘The Family of the Infante Don Luis by Goya’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 87, no. 513 (1945): 305. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Juliet Wilson-​Bareau, Goya:  Truth and Fantasy, the Small Paintings (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1994), 154. 43. Stoichita and Coderch, Goya: The Last Carnival, 7, 187. 44. C. Christopher Soufas, Jr, ‘With This Ring: Woman as “Revolutionary Inseperable” in Goya’s Caprichos and Valle-​Inclán’s Tirano Banderas’, in Ramón María del Valle-​Inclán:  Questions of Gender, ed. Carol Maier and Roberta L. Salper (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), 227. 45. Bray, Goya: The Portraits, 105. 46. Both Goya and Don Luis would have known two paintings, The Monkey Painter (c. 1660) and The Monkey Sculptor (c. 1660), by the Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger (who became court painter to the Spanish governor general in Brussels), now part of the Museo del Prado but which were acquired for the Spanish Royal Collection by Isabella Farnese (Don Luis’s mother). Goya would no doubt have realized that in Teniers’s work it was, in fact, the monied patron –​and his classical taste –​who was the real object of satire. 47. Janis A. Tomlinson, ‘Images of Women in Goya’s Prints and Drawings’, in Goya: Images of Women, ed. Janis A. Tomlinson (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Yale University Press, 2002), 58. 48. Like the Italian cicisbeo or cavalier sirvente, the cortejo was an established, and officially sanctioned, custom (often in the face of the indifference on the part of the husband). As an unmarried companion of the same social class, he was expected to engage in conversation, and to fill out the time of his mistress, and to act as an escort, accompanying her to public entertainments. See Carmen Martín Gaite, Love Customs in Eighteenth Century Spain, trans. Maria G. Tomsich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1972] 1991). 49. Bray, Goya: The Portraits, 50. 50. Goya, Cartas a Martín Zapater, doc. 42, 146. Cited in Bray, Goya: The Portraits, 48. 51. Sarah Symmons (ed.), Goya:  A Life in Letters, trans. Philip Troutman (London:  Pimlico, 2004), 162. 52. Bray, Goya: The Portraits, 53. 53. Stoichita and Coderch reflect upon the associations of such profile portraits with contemporary analysis associated with the Swiss pastor Johann Lavater, claiming that Goya’s ‘experimental style was formed by incorporating certain analytical procedures from the physiognomical discourse into the art of the portrait’. Stoichita and Coderch, Goya: The Last Carnival, 226. 54. Bray, Goya: The Portraits, 48. 55. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 109. 56. Ibid., 109–​10. 57. Ibid., 111. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Anthony Savile, ‘Painting, Beholder and the Self ’, in Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim, ed. Jim Hopkins and Anthony Savile (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 297.

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Notes 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 298.

CHAPTER 7 1. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 79–​80. For a response that also engages issues of race, in terms of the maid ‘Laure’, see Griselda Pollock, ‘A Tale of Three Women: Seeing in the Dark, Seeing Double, at least with Manet’, in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 285. 2. Timothy J. Clark, ‘Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of “Olympia” in 1865’, Screen 21, no. 1 (1980): 39. For Clark’s disputes with Greenberg and Fried over the restrictedness of their high modernist account, in turn taken on by their postmodernist detractors, see Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),  25–​69. 3. T. J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 149. 4. Ibid., 152. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 154. 8. Ibid. 9. See T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea:  Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1999), ch. 5; T. J. Clark, ‘El Lissitzky in Vitebsk’, in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2003). 10. Bois ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’. 11. Yve-​Alain Bois, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’, Art in America 76 (April 1988): 160–​81. 12. See, for instance, Bishop, Installation Art,  80–​1. 13. A further reconstruction was made for the 2010 exhibition ‘On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century’, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 14. Bois, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’. 15. As Éva Forgács notes, ‘The tension between the two movements was rooted in a rivalry between Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, dating from the mid-​1910s, but it went beyond a personal conflict. There was a fundamental difference between Malevich’s concept of reality, as the ultimate source of the spiritual meaning of the universe, and the constructivists’ materialist understanding of reality as comprising only actual, tangible, and, ultimately, utilitarian objects.’ Éva Forgács, ‘Definitive Space: The Many Utopias of El Lissitzky’s Proun Room’, in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 55. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. El Lissitzky, ‘El Lissitzky: Proun Space, The Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1923’, in Russia: An Architecture for Revolution, trans. Eric Dluhosch (London: Lund Humphries, [1929] 1970), 140. Originally published in G1, ed. Gräff and Lissitzky (Berlin: H. Richter, 1923).

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Notes 18. Lissitzky successfully merges suprematist forms with typographical experiments in works such as the 1919 lithographic cover of the report of the Komitet po bor’be s bezrabotitsei (Committee to Combat Unemployment), a copy of which forms part of collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 19. El Lissitzky, ‘The Future of the Book’, New Left Review 1, no. 41 (January–​February 1967): 41. The article was first published in the Gutenberg-​Jahrbuch (Mainz: 1926–​7). 20. This room, and its representation, builds upon the earlier installed design for Raum für konstruktive Kunst, Internationale Kunstausstellung, Dresden, 1926. For a detailed account of the two rooms, see Maria Gough, ‘Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky’s Dresden and Hannover Demonstrationsräume’, in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 77–​125. 21. Bois, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’, 174. 22. See, for instance, Russell West-​Pavlov, Temporalities (London: Routledge, 2013), 94. 23. Bois, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’, 174. 24. Bois, ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’, 31. Bois here cites El Lissitzky, ‘Proun –​ Not world visions, but world reality’, in El Lissitzky  –​Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-​ Küppers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 343. 25. Experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging have shown such mental rotation as activating the parietal cortex. See, for instance, the seminal figures used by Shepard and Metzler to introduce the concept of mental rotation into cognitive science: Roger N. Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler, ‘Mental Rotation of Three-​Dimensional Objects’, Science 171, Issue 3972 (19 February 1971): 701–​3. 26. El Lissitzky, ‘A.  and Pangeometry’, in El Lissitzky, Russia:  An Architecture for Revolutiom, trans. Eric Dluhosch (London: Lund Humphries, [1929] 1970), 142–​9. Originally published in Europa Almanach: Painting, Literature, Music, Architecture, Sculpture, Stage, Film, Fashion, and containing some residual observations of no less importance, ed. C. Einstein and P. Westheim (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1925). 27. Richard J. Difford, ‘Proun:  an exercise in the illusion of four-​ dimensional space’, in Narrating Architecture: A Retrospective Anthology, ed. James Madge and Andrew Peckham (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 73. 28. Sandström, Levels of Unreality, 18. 29. Bois, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’, 176. 30. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October 30 (Autumn 1984): 82–​119. 31. Cited in Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, 86. 32. Ibid., 87. 33. Nancy Perloff, ‘The Puzzle of El Lissitzky’s Artistic Identity’, in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 6. 34. Ibid. 35. See Alexander Kantsedikas, El Lissitzky: The Jewish Period (London: Unicorn, 2018). 36. Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia:  Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-​Nagy:  1917–​1946 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 13. 37. Ibid., 27. 38. Ibid. 39. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 239–​40. 275

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Notes 40. Ibid., 240. 41. Ibid., 277. 42. Ibid., 280. 43. Clark views the poster as representative of ‘the true root of El Lissitzky’s utopianism:  that is, his sense of the possible relations, in spring and summer of 1920, between the two great forms of established sign language in the culture at large  –​visual and verbal, picture and text’: Clark, Farewell to an idea, 237. 44. Bois, ‘El Lissitzky:  Radical Reversibility’, 169. Bois here refers to Jean-​François Lyotard, ‘Espace plastique et espace politique’ (1970), reprinted in Dérivé à partir de Marx et de Freud (Paris: U.G.E., 1973), 300–​3. 45. Perloff, ‘The Puzzle of El Lissitzky’s Artistic Identity’, 7. 46. El Lissitzky, Russia:  An Architecture for Revolution, trans. Eric Dluhosch (London:  Lund Humphries, [1929] 1970), 27. 47. Ibid. 48. Christina Lodder, ‘El Lissitzky and the Export of Constructivism’, in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 28. 49. El Lissitzky and Il’ia Ehrenburg, ‘Die Blockade Russlands geht ihrem Ende entgegen’, Veshch’/​ Gegenstand/​Objet nos 1–​2 (1922): 1–​2; translated as El Lissitzky and Il’ia Ehrenburg, ‘The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to an End’, in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. and trans. Stephen Bann (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 55–​6. 50. Lissitzky, ‘A. and Pangeometry’, as cited in Bois ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’, 27. Bois has modified the original translation. 51. Bois ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’, 27. 52. Ibid., 28. 53. See Peter Nisbet, El Lissitzky (Cambridge, MA: Busch-​Reisinger Museum, 1987), 29. 54. Bois ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’, 28. 55. Lissitzky, ‘A. and Pangeometry’, 142. 56. Ibid., 143. 57. Ibid., 144. 58. Ibid., 143. 59. Ibid. 60. Bois ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’, 29–​30. 61. Ibid., 30. 62. Ibid. 63. Lissitzky, ‘A. and Pangeometry’, 144. 64. Ibid. 65. Bois ‘From − ∞ to 0 to + ∞’, 32. 66. Ibid. 67. El Lissitzky, ‘El Lissitzky: Proun Space’, 138. 68. Ibid., 139. 69. Difford, ‘Proun: An Exercise in the Illusion of Four-​Dimensional Space’, 94.

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Notes 70. Ibid.,  94–​5. 71. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E.  M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, [1953] 2001), 168e. 72. Difford, ‘Proun: An Exercise in the Illusion of Four-​Dimensional Space’, 98. 73. Forgács, ‘Definitive Space’, 70. 74. Ibid.

CHAPTER 8 1. Langer, Feeling and Form, 91. 2. See Sarah Stanners, ‘Sight Unseen: Anthony Caro’s Prairie, 1967’, British Art Studies, issue 3 (Summer 2016). 3. See Anthony Caro, ‘Anthony Caro in Conversation with Peter Murray’, in Caro at Longside:  Sculpture and Sculpitecture, ed. Peter Murray (West Bretton, West Yorkshire:  Yorkshire Sculpture Park in collaboration with Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 2001), 13. 4. William Rubin, Anthony Caro (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1975), 79–​83. 5. Clement Greenberg, ‘Sculpture in Our Time’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4:  Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–​1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58. Originally appeared in Arts Magazine, June 1958. 6. Michael Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, in Art and Objecthood:  Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6. 7. Michael Fried, ‘Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro’, Artforum 6 (1968): 24–​5. 8. Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, 9. 9. Clement Greenberg, ‘Contemporary Sculpture: Anthony Caro’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–​1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 205–​8. Originally appeared in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965; Studio International, September 1967. 10. Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’. 11. Rubin, Anthony Caro, 102. 12. In ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’ Fried states that ‘it seems clear that literalism did represent a break with modernism as regards the terms of its appeal to the viewer. In fact, commentators who have taken issue with “Art and Objecthood” are in agreement with it on that score:  where they disagree hotly is with respect to my evaluation of Minimalist theatricality. This is to say that the terms of my argument have gone untouched by my critics, an unusual state of affairs in light of the antagonism “Art and Objecthood” has provoked’. Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, 42–​3. 13. Greenberg, ‘Contemporary Sculpture: Anthony Caro’, 206. 14. Langer, Feeling and Form, ch. 5 and ch. 6, 69–​85 and 86–​103. 15. Despite being born in Manhattan, New  York, German was Langer’s first language (née Knauth; 1895–​1985). 16. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, [1977] 1981), 186.

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Notes 17. Ibid. 18. Rubin, Anthony Caro, 133. 19. Ibid., 65. 20. Noel Chanan, ‘Anthony Caro:  Interview for Granada Record’, unpublished transcript (September 1974), 4/​5. Cited in Ian Barker, Anthony Caro:  Quest for the New Sculpture (Aldershot, Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2004), 127. 21. Greenberg, ‘Contemporary Sculpture: Anthony Caro’, 207. 22. Donald Judd, ‘In the Galleries’, Arts Magazine (January 1965). Cited in Barker, Anthony Caro, 138. 23. See Chanan, ‘Anthony Caro:  Interview for Granada Record’, 6/​16–​19. Cited in Barker, Anthony Caro, 174. 24. Fried, ‘Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro’, 25. 25. Rubin, Anthony Caro, 148. 26. Ibid. 27. Fried, ‘Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro’, 25. 28. Ibid. 29. See Robert E. Innis, Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 2. 30. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New York: Mentor Books, The New American Library, 1948), 49. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. (Langer’s emphasis). 33. Ibid., 45 (Langer’s emphasis). 34. Ibid., 49. 35. Ibid.,  45–​6. 36. Innis, Susanne Langer in Focus, 37. Innis adds: ‘Langer chose –​and she admitted it later –​an unfortunate set of terms for making her principal contrast, and perhaps even compounded the error later. Her principal contrast between signs and symbols, she later said, should have been between signals and symbols, with signs being the generic term of which signals and symbols were species. But I think that more sense could be made of Langer’s real intention by foregrounding the notion of “ways of meaning” or “ways of signing” rather than what is in effect already a distinction types of signs. This would enable us to avoid reification of signs, turning them into things’. Ibid., 38–​9. 37. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 54. 38. Ibid., 79. 39. Robert E. Innis, ‘Signs of Feeling:  Susanne Langer’s Aesthetics Model of Minding’, The American Journal of Semiotics 28, nos 1–​2 (2012): 44. 40. Langer, Feeling and Form, 22. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 59. 43. Ibid., 40. 44. Ibid. 45. 45. Here Langer refers to what Schiller terms ‘Schein’ (i.e. semblance). Ibid., 50. 278

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Notes 46. Ibid., 72. 47. Ibid., 92, 95. 48. Ibid., 91. 49. Robert Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’, in Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Dominic Lopes (London: Routledge, 2003). See also: Robert Hopkins, ‘Painting, Sculpture, Sight and Touch’, British Journal of Aesthetics 44, no. 2 (April 2004). 50. Langer, Feeling and Form, 90. 51. Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’, 283. 52. Ibid. 53. Langer, Feeling and Form, 89. 54. Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’, 287. 55. Ibid. 56. Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–​1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 181–​9. 57. Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, 69. 58. David F. Martin, ‘The Autonomy of Sculpture’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art criticism 34, no. 3 (1976): 282. Cited in Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’, 279. 59. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture,  188–​9. 60. Ibid., 189. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 191. 63. Ibid., 192. 64. Krauss also ties this shift in practice to the imposition of a horizon-​line in the smaller table pieces that Caro developed from 1967, such as Table Piece (1970), owned by the André Emmerich Gallery, New  York:  ‘That is, the edge of the table establishes a rigidly frontal aspect within which the image is organized, and because the frontality contains within itself a horizontal midpoint, it calls to mind the specific composition of landscapes or still lifes in painting’. Ibid., 194. 65. See Chanan, ‘Anthony Caro: Interview for Granada Record’, 6/​20, 38. Cited in Barker, Anthony Caro, 186. 66. Hopkins, ‘Sculpture and Space’, 287. 67. Fried, ‘Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro’, 25. 68. Chanan, ‘Anthony Caro: Interview for Granada Record’, 6/​16–​19. Cited in Barker, Anthony Caro, 174. The title, as Caro informs us, originally derived from Caro’s intended use of the trade paint named ‘Prairie Gold’, which he abandoned for another shade of yellow ochre.

CHAPTER 9 1. Langer, Feeling and Form, 91. 2. Brendan Prendeville, ‘The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans’, Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (2008): 53. See also Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of

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Notes Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:  Routledge, 1962); James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 3. Prendeville, ‘The Meanings of Acts’, 53. 4. Ibid., 55. 5. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’. 6. Kasha Linville, ‘Agnes Martin: An Appreciation’, Artforum 9 (June 1971): 72–​3. 7. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​. 8. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’, 82. 9. Ibid., 82, 89. 10. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October 9 (Summer 1979), 50–​64. 11. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’, 85. 12. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 177. 13. Agnes Martin, ‘Reflections’, Artforum 22, no. 8 (April 1973): 38. 14. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 24. 15. Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity, 46. 16. Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 8. 17. Ibid., 1. 18. Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015), 9. 19. Ibid., 172. 20. See Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 4. Pollock’s own journey to meet Martin was just one of many. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 162. 21. Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 178–​80. 22. Prendeville, ‘The Meanings of Acts’, 54. 23. Ibid., 68. 24. Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 113. 25. Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 78. 26. Ibid., 73. 27. Ibid., 77. 28. Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 151. 29. Ibid., 153. 30. Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 75. Princenthal cites:  Agnes Martin, ‘Introduction’, in Lenore Tawney (New York: Staten Island Museum, 1961). 31. Frances Morris, ‘Agnes Martin:  Innocence and Experience’, in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell (London: Tate, 2015), 60–​1. 32. Joan Simon, ‘Perfection is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin’, Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996): 88. 33. Prendeville, ‘The Meanings of Acts’, 64. Prendeville here references Anna C. Chave, ‘Agnes Martin: “Humility, the beautiful daughter … all of her ways are empty” ’, Agnes Martin, ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), 131–​53. 34. Rosenberger, drawing the Line, 154.

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Notes 35. Prendeville, ‘The Meanings of Acts’, 66–​7. 36. Cited in Rosenberger, drawing the Line, 163. 37. Ibid. 38. Morris, ‘Agnes Martin’, 62. 39. Rosenberger, drawing the Line, 164. 40. Ibid.,  166–​7. 41. The phrase is by Anne Wagner, who begins her chapter on Martin with this image. Wagner notes that ‘In the nearly fifty years between Agnes Martin’s solo exhibition, which opened in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery in December 1958, and her death in December 2004, it seems possible that no one –​Liberman included –​ever saw the artist hard at work.’ This is not quite true, however, as attested to by archival footage of Martin at work. Anne Middleton Wagner, A House Divided: American Art Since 1955 (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012), 202–​3. 42. Ibid., 202. 43. Lawrence Alloway, Agnes Martin, exhibition catalogue (Philadelphia, PA:  Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1973). Krauss also refers to Carter Ratcliff ’s juxtaposition of Martin’s work with Edmund Burke’s Inquiry on the Sublime; see Carter Ratcliff, ‘Agnes Martin and the “Artificial Infinite”, Art News 72 (May 1973): 26–​7. 44. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin:  The /​ Cloud/​ ’, 78. Krauss cites Linville, ‘Agnes Martin:  An Appreciation’, 72. 45. Linville, ‘Agnes Martin: An Appreciation’, 72. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 73. 49. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’, 78; Linville, ‘Agnes Martin: An Appreciation’, 73. 50. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’, 78. 51. Ibid., 82. 52. Damisch, A Theory of /​Cloud/​, 69. Cited in Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’, 85. 53. In works such as Stilfragen (Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament) and Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Late Roman art industry), the latter which introduced the controversial term Kunstwollen. 54. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin:  The /​Cloud/​’, 87. Krauss cites Riegl as quoted in Barbara Harlow, ‘Riegl’s Image of Late Roman Art Industry’, Glyph 3 (1978): 127. 55. Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​Cloud/​’, 87. 56. Ibid., 88. 57. Ibid., 89. 58. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 180. 59. Agnes Martin, ‘Oral History Interview with Agnes Martin’, conducted by Suzan Campbell, transcript (Washington, DC:  Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, May 15, 1989). 60. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 171. 61. Ibid., 172. 62. Ibid.

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Notes 63. Ibid. 64. Luce Irigaray, ‘The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible’, ‘The Interwining –​The Chiasm’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London and New  York:  Continuum, [1984] 2004), 127–​53; Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 65. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 173. 66. Ibid.,  173–​4. 67. Irigaray, ‘The Invisible of the Flesh, 130. 68. Ibid., 131. 69. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible’, 131. 70. Irigaray, ‘The Invisible of the Flesh, 133. 71. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible’, 133. 72. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 174–​5. 73. Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible’, 139. 74. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 178. 75. Ibid.,  177–​8. 76. Krauss, ‘Grids’, 54. 77. Langer, Feeling and Form, 92, 95. 78. Martin, ‘The Autonomy of Sculpture’, 279. 79. Alloway, Agnes Martin. For a rejoinder to such a position, see Krauss, ‘Agnes Martin: The /​ Cloud/​’,  77–​8. 80. Prendeville, ‘The Meanings of Acts’, 72. 81. Ibid., 71. 82. Pollock, ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’, 178.

CHAPTER 10 1. Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’:  Art in the Age of the Post-​ Medium (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 56; Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 18. 2. Wilder, ‘The Configurational Encounter and the Problematic of Beholding’, 79. 3. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, translated and introduced by Alexandra Berlina, Poetics Today 36, no. 3 (September 2015): 151–​74. 4. Iser, The Act of Reading,  187–​8. 5. Ibid., 35. 6. Ibid., 36. 7. Iser, Prospecting. 8. This included:  divorcing her first husband, Ichiyanagi Toshi; helping John Cage organize, and performing in, his six-​week concert tour of Japan in 1962 (with Ichiyanagi); depression, an overdose from pills and a period spent in a mental institution (her release secured by

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Notes Anthony Cox, an American musician/​filmmaker); marrying Cox in November 1962, only for the marriage to be annulled because of the delays to her divorce; remarrying Cox in June 1963; the birth of her daughter, Kyoko, in August 1963. Ono divorced Cox in 1969, their marriage famously collapsing after Ono met John Lennon in 1966. 9. Julia Bryan-​Wilson, ‘Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 101–​3. 10. See Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex, intro. Robert Pincus-​Witten (Detroit, MI: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 271–​274. 11. Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 2. 12. Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, Something Else Newsletter 1, no. 1 (February 1966): 1–​3. 13. Henry Flynt, ‘Essay: Concept Art’, in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young (New York: George Maciunas and Jackson Mac Low, c.1962). 14. See, for instance, Kathy O’Dell, ‘Fluxus Feminus’, The Drama Review 41, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 43–​60. As O’Dell documents, despite the outwardly inclusive nature of Fluxus, women were more likely to be blacklisted by Maciunas. 15. George Brecht, interviewed by Irmeline Lebeer; reprinted in Henry Martin, An Introduction to George Brecht’s Book of the Tumbler on Fire (Milan: Multhipla edizioni, 1978), 68. 16. Owen F. Smith, ‘Fluxus: A Brief History and Other Fictions’, in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins, published on the occasion of the exhibition In the Spirit of Fluxus, organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Centre, 1993), 24. 17. This event was jointly organized by Maciunas and Joseph Beuys, who was a faculty member at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. See Owen Smith, ‘Developing a Fluxable Forum’, in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, West Sussex:  Academy Editions, 1998), 5. At the event, Beuys performed two actions (the first of his career), including his Siberian Symphony, 1st Movement (1962–​3), played on a grand piano but with Beuys also scribbling sentences on a blackboard to which a dead hare was attached. 18. George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, 2008 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1963). 19. John Cage, Silence:  Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, [1961] 1973), 12. 20. Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 1. 21. Ibid., 2. 22. Ibid., 49. Brecht’s original score of 1959 reads: ‘A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into a vessel.’ 23. Kristine Stiles, ‘Between Water and Stone’, in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins, published on the occasion of the exhibition In the Spirit of Fluxus, organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Centre, 1993), 65. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. David T. Doris, ‘Zen Vaudeville:  A Medi(t)ation in the Margins of Fluxus’, in The Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998), 121. 28. Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 11. 29. Ibid. 283

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Notes 30. Gustav Metzger, ‘Auto-​ Destructive Art’ (London:  4 November 1959). The manifesto accompanied an exhibition of Metger’s art in London, at 14 Monmouth Street, constructed out of discarded cardboard packaging. Metzger, born in Nuremberg in 1926 to Polish-​ Jewish parents, was a stateless refugee, after being sent to England in January 1939, aged 12 years. His family members remaining in Germany were all subsequently murdered in Nazi concentration camps, including both his parents. 31. Tulane Drama Review Vol. 10, No. 2 (1965). The cover of the review, with Fluxus fold-​out, was designed by Maciunas. 32. Mari Dumett, Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 225. 33. Ibid., 224. 34. Ibid., 218. 35. See the photograph by Manfred Leve, reproduced in John G. Hanhardt (ed.), Nam June Paik (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with W. W. Norton, 1982), 20. 36. Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 49. 37. Winfried Fluck, ‘The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory’, New Literary History 31, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 188. 38. See, for instance, Nick (London: Routledge, 2007).

Kaye,

Multi-​media: 

Video–​Installation–​Performance

39. Dumett, Corporate Imaginations, 228. 40. Doris, ‘Zen Vaudeville’, 120. 41. Elizabeth Armstrong, ‘Fluxus and the Museum’, in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins, published on the occasion of the exhibition In the Spirit of Fluxus, organized by Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Centre, 1993), 14. 42. See documentation: Nam June Paik, Zen for Head (1962), ink and tomato on paper, 160 × 14, Collection Museum Wiesbaden. 43. Here we might question Paik’s later performances with his frequent collaborator, the avant-​ garde cellist and artist Charlotte Moorman, which Stiles refers to as ‘the most aggressive assertions of the eroticism of bodies  –​an eroticism that often included the willing objectification of both Moorman and Paik’s bodies’. Stiles, ‘Between Water and Stone’, 84. 44. Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 118. 45. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (New York: Simon and Schuster, [1964] 1970), unpaginated. 46. For an extended note on this issue, see Lara Shalson, Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), n. 48, 51. 47. O’Dell, ‘Fluxus Feminus’, 53. 48. Stiles, ‘Between Water and Stone’, 81. 49. Bryan-​Wilson, ‘Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, 103. 50. Ibid. Here Bryan-​ Wilson cites Martha Schwendener, ‘Yoko Ono’, Artforum (January 2001): 139. 51. Bryan-​Wilson, ‘Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, 103. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 114. 54. See the film: Cut Piece, 16 mm, directed by Albert and David Maysles, 1965. 284

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Notes 55. Iser, The Act of Reading, 166. 56. Ibid., 167. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 221. 59. Ibid. 60. Iser, Prospecting, 243. 61. Ibid. 62. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, [1955] 1975); John R. Searle, ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’, in Expression and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 63. Iser, cited in Richard van Oort, ‘The Use of Fiction in Literary and Generative Anthropology: An Interview with Wolfgang Iser’, Anthropoetics III, no. 2 (Fall 1997/​Winter 1998). 64. Iser, The Act of Reading, 65. 65. Iser, Prospecting, 243. 66. Ibid. 217. 67. Shalson, Performing Endurance, 44. 68. Ibid., 47. 69. Ibid., 58. 70. Ibid., 69. 71. Ibid., 65.

CHAPTER 11 1. Rosalind Krauss, contributing to ‘The Expanded Field Then: A Roundtable Conversation’, in Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture, ed. Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 2. 2. See, for instance, A. J. Greimas and François Rastier, ‘The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints’, Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 86–​105. 3. Foster, The Return of the Real, 42. 4. Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’. 5. See, for instance, Peter Osborne, ‘October and the problem of Formalism’, Quaderns Portàtils 28 (Barcelona: MACBA, 2012): 10. 6. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 43. 7. Ibid., 31. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.

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Notes 14. See, for instance, Claire Bishop, Installation Art. 15. For Krauss’s adoption of the term, see Krauss, ‘The Expanded Field Then:  A Roundtable Conversation’, 13. 16. Avis Berman, ‘Space Exploration’, ARTnews 88, no. 9 (November 1989): 130–​5. 17. Mary Miss, cited in Berman, ‘Space Exploration’, 132. 18. Mary Miss, ‘Interview with Anne Barclay Morgan’, Artpapers, 1994. Cited in Eleanor Heartney, ‘Beyond Boundaries’, in Mary Miss (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 10. 19. Heartney, ‘Beyond Boundaries’, 11. 20. Lucy Lippard, ‘Mary Miss: An Extremely Clear Situation’, in From the Center (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 212. 21. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. 22. Artist’s notes, ‘1973: Battery Park Landfill’, on Mary Miss’s official website, accessed 9 March 2019, http://​marymiss.com/​projects/​battery-​park-​landfill/​. 23. Artist’s notes, ‘1977–​1978:  Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys’, on Mary Miss’s official website, accessed 9 March 2019, http://​marymiss.com/​projects/​perimeterspavilionsdecoys/​. 24. Mary Miss, ‘Conversation: Alvin Boyarsky with Mary Miss’, in Mary Miss: Projects 1966–​1987 (London: Architectural Association, 1987), 11. 25. Artist’s notes, ‘1977–​1978:  Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys’, on Mary Miss’s official website, accessed 9 March 2019, http://​marymiss.com/​projects/​perimeterspavilionsdecoys/​. 26. Miss, ‘Conversation: Alvin Boyarsky with Mary Miss’, 25. The exhibition was supplemented by a public installation in Bedford Square, constructed by Architectural Association staff and students. 27. Heartney, ‘Beyond Boundaries’, 11. 28. Ibid. 29. Mary Miss, extracts from notebook dated May-​October 1976, cited in Mary Miss: Projects 1966–​1987, 56. 30. Ibid. 31. Mary Miss, Perimeters/​Pavilions/​Decoys, exhibition catalogue (Roslyn, NY: Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, 1978), 15, 18. 32. See Bishop, Installation Art,  14–​20. 33. Artist’s notes, ‘1980–​1981: Field Rotation’, on Mary Miss’s official website, accessed 9 March 2019, http://​marymiss.com/​projects/​field-​rotation/​. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Mary Miss, ‘Responses’, in Retracing the Expanded Field, 179. 38. Heartney, ‘Beyond Boundaries’, 9. 39. Miss, ‘Responses’, 180. 40. Lucy R. Lippard, preface to Twenty-​Six Contemporary Women Artists, exhibition catalogue (Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 1971); reprinted in Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 39. ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ was the title of an exhibition Lippard had organized at the Fischbach Gallery in

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Notes New York in 1966, including works by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. See also Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, Art International X, no. 9 (November 1966). 41. See Mary Miss and Annette Leddy, ‘Oral history interview with Mary Miss, 2016 July 18 and 20’ (Washington, DC:  Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2016), accessed 10 March 209, https://​www.aaa.si.edu/​collections/​interviews/​ oral-​history-​interview-​mary-​miss-​17363#transcript. 42. Alexandra Schwartz, ‘Mind, Body, Sculpture: Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Jackie Winsor in the 1970s’, in Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, eds. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 415. 43. Ibid., 415–​16. 44. Alice Aycock, ‘Indelible Marker, Palimpsest, Thin Air’, in Spatial Recall:  Memory in Architecture and Landscape, ed. Marc Treib (New York: Routledge, 2009), 88. 45. Robert Hobbs, Alice Aycock:  Sculpture and Projects (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2005), 139–​40. 46. Ibid., 140. 47. Hobbs has written extensively on Smithson. See Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 48. Interview between Alice Aycock and Robert Hobbs, cited in Hobbs, Alice Aycock, 55. 49. Robert Smithson, ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, Artforum 7, no. 4 (December 1967): 55. 50. Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson:  Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 118. 51. See Lucy Lippard, ‘Complexes: Architectural Sculpture in Nature’, Art in America 71 (April 1983): 86–​97. 52. Michael D. Hall, Stereoscopic Perspective:  Reflections on American Fine and Folk Art (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988). See also Hobbs, Alice Aycock, 149–​50. 53. Hall, Stereoscopic Perspective, 33. 54. Miss, ‘Responses’, 180. 55. Ibid., 181. 56. Ibid. 57. Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’, 5. 58. Ibid. 59. Rosalind Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 128. 60. Ibid., 17. 61. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 34. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid.,  35–​7. 65. Ibid., 37. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 38. 68. Ibid., 42. 69. Osborne, ‘October and the problem of Formalism’, 12.

287

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Notes 70. Ibid., 11. 71. See Krauss, Under Blue Cup. 72. For a critique of such a notion, see Diarmuid Costello, ‘Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts’, Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 819–​54. 73. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 101. 74. Iser, The Act of Reading, 65. 75. Hobbs, Alice Aycock, 2. 76. Christian Zapatka, ‘The Art of Engagement in the Work of Mary Miss’, in Mary Miss: Marking Place, compiled by Christian Zapatka, photographs by Mary Miss (New  York:  Whitney Library of Design, 1997), 22. 77. Ibid. 78. Iser, The Act of Reading, 243.

CHAPTER 12 1. Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, 12–​23. 2. This chapter reworks aspects of two published articles:  Ken Wilder, ‘Michael Fried and Beholding Video Art’, Estetika:  The Central European Journal of Aesthetics XLIX/​V, no. 1 (2012): 5–​25; Ken Wilder, ‘Projective Art and the “staging” of empathic projection’, Moving Image Review and Art Journal 5, nos 1&2 (2016): 124–​40. There is also some overlap with Wilder, ‘The Configurational Encounter and the Problematic of Beholding’. 3. My first encounter with Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) was at the Bruce Nauman retrospective held at the Hayward Gallery in London (1998). 4. The other artists were Louise Bourgeois, Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, David Hammons, Ilya Kabakov and Adrian Piper. 5. Original press release from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (September 1991). 6. Bruce Nauman, ‘Artist’s Notes’, in Dislocations, Robert Storr (New  York:  The Museum of Modern Art, 1991). 7. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Part Four. 8. Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2010), 104. 9. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 423. 10. Ibid., 425. 11. As the Cavell scholar Richard Moran puts it, ‘as both knowers and things sometimes known, there is the fact that the object of understanding (a person, or a practice) is already an intentional phenomenon, something already constituted by certain forms of description and explanation’. Richard Moran, ‘Cavell on Outsiders and Others’, Revue internationale de philosophie, 2:256 (2011): 252. 12. In fact, as Cavell notes, ‘Wittgenstein does not say that there can be no private language. He introduces his sequential discussion of the topic, at §243, by asking: “Could we also imagine …” The upshot of this question turns out to be that we cannot really imagine this, or rather there is nothing of the sort to imagine, or rather that when we as it were try to imagine

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Notes this we are imagining something other than we think.’ Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 344. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, 75e. 13. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 329. 14. For a notoriously negative evaluation of Nauman and Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’, for instance, see Arthur C. Danto, ‘Bruce Nauman’, The Nation (8 May 1995): 642–​6. 15. Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 31. 16. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 330. Cavell here references Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, §246, 76e. 17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, §246, 76e. 18. See, in particular, P. M. S. Hacker, ‘Of Knowledge And Of Knowing That Someone Is In Pain’, in Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works, eds. Alois Pichler and Simo Säätelä (Bergen, Norway:  Working Papers from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, 2005), 244. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 245. 21. Ibid., 246. 22. Ibid. 23. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 45. 24. Hammer, Stanley Cavell, 42. 25. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 428. 26. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3–​4. 27. Hammer, Stanley Cavell, 75. 28. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 104. 29. Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, 29. 30. Ibid. 31. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 64. 32. Ibid., chs. 1 and 4. 33. Ibid.,  186–​7. 34. Ibid., 191. 35. Vered Maimon, ‘Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory of Photography’, History of Photography 34 (2010): 390. 36. I agree with Hopkins that the ‘illusionistic’ nature of cinema is at the level of its theatrical presentation (the term ‘theatrical’ used here in a different sense to that of Fried’s pejorative use), not its photographic presentation  –​what Hopkins refers to as ‘collapsed seeing-​in’, where through the subject’s engrossment in the narrative she no longer attends to the film’s configurational properties. These properties include aspects such as the film set and props, the operation of the camera and lights, the framing of scenes and the acting. While we certainly can attend to these aspects of two-​tier film (and with ‘art’ films frequently do), with many films we focus on the story told. In other words, we see a photographic representation of a staged story, but in a way where the collapse means we only attend to the latter. See Robert Hopkins, ‘What Do We See In Film?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 149–​59. 289

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Notes 37. Fried conflates his argument that photographic transparency is dependent upon its mechanical nature with a separate argument that conceives of such transparency in relation to the photographic surface: ‘photographic transparence means … that the material surface is put out of play as a bearer of pictorial meaning’. Fried, Why Photography Matters, 188–​9. Richard Allen has also argued for a similar notion of transparency, while rejecting Walton’s claim that we see the object itself through the photograph or motion picture. See Richard Allen, ‘Looking at Motion Pictures’, in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 76–​94. 38. V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York: Da Capo, [1972] 1993), 134. 39. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 198. 40. Fried first develops this mechanism in relation to minimally demonstrative works by Caravaggio. See Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio. 41. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws,  171–​2. 42. Ibid., 173. 43. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, §283, 83e. 44. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 199. 45. Many of my own video installations specifically set out to explore ambiguities of location through the possibility of embedding within the sculptural object something that sculptural experience specifically lacks, a distinct perspective or point of view. I attempt to construct a complex relation between the external spectator and a notional implicit beholder, anticipated by the work, by integrating elements into both the work’s inner and outer reality. These works exploit a strong sense of figural presence of projected figures through duplication of aspects of the filmic and real space. See Ken Wilder, ‘Filmic Bodies: Transgressing Boundaries Between Filmic and Real Space’, Architecture and Culture 2, no. 3 (2014): 361–​78. 46. Kamala Visweswaran, Un/​ common Cultures:  Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1. 47. Bruce Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, writings and interviews edited by Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 23. 48. Robert Storr, Dislocations, 20. 49. Iser, Prospecting, ch. 12. 50. Ibid., 237. 51. Ibid., 238. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 239. 54. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 206. 55. Stanley Cavell, ‘Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame’, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 107–​50. 56. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 423. 57. While I am less concerned with Fried’s ‘ahistorical perspective’ than Maimon, he makes very similar points in relation to Fried’s writing on photography: ‘The most striking feature of his interpretations is the way they downplay how contemporary photography has assimilated conceptual and minimalist strategies and models of practice. Fried is less interested in offering comprehensive interpretations of contemporary photography than in “proving” that it falls within the anti-​theatrical tradition of art’: Maimon, ‘Michael Fried’s Modernist Theory’, 391.

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Notes 58. Fried, Four Honest Outlaws, 204. 59. Ibid., n. 2, 234. 60. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, ix. 61. Diarmuid Costello, ‘Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts’, Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 847. 62. Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 16. 63. Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, n. 15, 85. 64. Costello, ‘Automat, Automatic, Automatism’, 844. 65. Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 131. 66. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 41.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics denote Figures Abish, Cecile 229 Abramović, Marina 215 absorption. See theatricality abstract expressionism 176, 179, 210 abstraction 6, 13, 133–95, 203, 232 eccentric 229 non-objective 147 Ackerman, James 31 aesthetic(s) 9, 11, 65–6, 78–9, 138, 199, 193, 215–17, 229, 249 anti- or non-aesthetic 2, 4, 6, 200, 218 and distance 6, 200, 243 encounter/experience 6, 11, 14, 168, 195, 200–1, 212–13, 216, 248 extra-aesthetic 162, 200, 251 and installation art 4–5 as an ‘institution of spectatorship’ 2 and judgement 162, 237 negative 208 and representation 170 theatrical 77 see also aesthetic response; reception aesthetics aesthetic response 8, 213 see also reception aesthetics aesthetic semblance 214, 235 Alberti, Leon Battista 13, 18, 28, 30–1, 37, 101, 103–4 Alcázar Palace, Madrid 108 Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut 229 Alloway, Lawrence 182, 185, 194 Alpers, Svetlana 10 ‘Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas’ 13, 95–111 Amsterdam 81 Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons 84 Andre, Carl 203, 221, 225 André Emmerich Gallery, New York 165 Angulo Iniguez, Diego 123–4 apparatus theory 247 Architectural Association, London 225 architecture 13, 137, 146–7, 168, 199, 221, 224, 230–1, 234, 253 illusory 17, 21–6, 29, 41–2, 44, 47–52 negation of 47, 50–2, 54, 189 and not-architecture 232–3 revolutionary 149, 153

rural language of 221, 224, 233–4 and supporting role of in painting 12, 21, 23, 26, 29, 37, 42, 46, 51–6, 89 Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni) 18, 19, 21–3, 31, 35, 65 Artforum 159, 176, 217, 230 art history 8, 10–11, 78–80, 95, 99–101, 118, 228, 232 Armajani, Siah 231 atheism 61–2, 67 atmosphere (/atmosphere/) 176, 187, 189, 192–4 Austin, J. L. 214 autonomy 1–6, 8, 14, 76, 78, 135, 157–8, 161–2, 167, 170, 175, 217, 232, 237 axonometry 13, 138–9, 142–3, 150–5, 157 and infinity 143–4, 150–4 and plus/minus effect 139 and projection axes 138–9, 143, 151 rotational potential of 140–1 see also viewpoint(s) Aycock, Alice 229–31, 233–4 Baer, Jo 185 Barisch, Klaus 207 Baroque 34, 47, 176 Barthes, Roland 62 Basel 56, 61–2 Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi 21, 35 Bätschmann, Oskar and Pascal Griener 56 Bauermeister, Mary 206–7 Bayeu, Francisco 122 Beardsworth, Sara 61, 66, 177 Beckett, Samuel 248–9 beholder absence of 97–8, 100, 103–4, 110, 131 activating space of 28–9, 53, 155, 175, 177 artist as 78, 87–8, 92–3, 110, 117, 127–8, 191 as bodily presence 5, 7, 25–8, 30, 42, 44, 50, 54–5, 92–3, 95, 111, 154, 173, 193–4 complicit 14, 25, 210, 212, 215–16, 246–7, 251 Diderotian fiction of the non-existence of 4–5, 101, 120–1, 131 dislocated 238–9, 247 enduring 215–16 implied/anticipated 1, 7, 30, 37, 75, 78, 82–4, 88, 96, 106, 110–11

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Index internal/external 6, 10, 28–32, 78, 80, 87, 89–93, 95, 97, 106, 110–11, 127–8 kneeling 29, 58–9 literal 1, 3–4, 160–1, 174–5, 199–200, 237, 244 memory of 44, 46, 53, 231 psychological engagement of 9–10, 20, 31–2, 77, 225, 229–30, 247–8 role/function of 1, 4, 7, 9, 28–9, 46, 75, 234 and shared space (painting) 6, 17–18, 22, 25–32, 42, 44, 50, 58, 69–70 and shared space (sculpture) 157, 168–71 and subjectivity 32, 60, 77, 79–80, 91, 109, 152–3, 190–4 as witness 12, 20, 25, 28, 41, 87, 103, 206 virtual 98 see also Riegl: internal/external coherence; spectator in the picture; viewpoint(s) beholding communal/collective 14, 42, 58, 76, 80, 82, 212, 215–16, 243 detheatricalizing 121 as durational process 1, 4, 7, 118, 200–2, 204, 214–15, 234 problematizing of 5, 7, 110, 121, 123, 137, 157, 200–1, 225, 237, 252 as physical engagement 229–30, 234–5 Bellini, Giovanni Frari Triptych 37–9 Madonna Enthroned and Saints (San Giobbe Altarpiece) 41–4, 43 St Jerome with SS Christopher and Louis of Toulouse 54 Bennington College 164–5, 170, 175 Benveniste, Émile 98, 101 Berger, Harry 82–4, 91–2, 104, 117, 121, 131–2 Berlin 141, 14 Beuys, Joseph 203, 207 Binkley, Timothy 7 Binstock, Benjamin 78, 85–6, 89–90, 92 Bishop, Claire 3 blank 7, 11, 213–15 Bois, Yve-Alain ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’ 136 ‘From – ∞ to 0 to + ∞’ 13, 135–55 Bolsheviks 146–7 Boundaries blurring of 30, 203 disciplinary/conventional 137, 146, 199, 221, 237 dissolving 66 edges of 101, 117, 154 ideological/ideational 149, 167, 203, 206 physical 218, 221, 225 psychological 63, 65 in relation to wall surface 18, 25 bounded image. See framing

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Boyarsky, Alvin 225 Brancusi, Constantin 220 Bray, Xavier 113–15, 122–3, 125 Brecht, George 203–4, 207, 211 Drip Music 204–6, 205 Brown, Jonathan 97, 99–100, 108–11 Brunelleschi, Filippo 24–5 perspective demonstration 34–5, 34, 176 Bryan-Wilson, Julia 202, 212–13, 215 Bryson, Norman 27–8, 30–1, 103 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 142–3 Bukharin, Nikolai 137 Bynum, Caroline Walker 69 Cage, John 179, 203–4, 206–10 4’33” 208 Calle, Sophie 251 camera obscura 99, 101 Campo, Francisco del 125, 128–9, 132 Caravaggio 4 The Entombment 69–71, 70 Carnegie Hall, New York 210, 215 Carnival (Epiphany to Ash Wednesday) 124–5 Caro, Anthony 6, 175–6, 199–200, 232 Deep Body Blue 159 Early One Morning 171–3, 171 First National 165 Flats 164–5, 165 Man Holding His Foot 162 Midday 159–60, 160, 163 Orangerie 173 Prairie 14, 136, 157–74, 158, 175, 194, 199, 237 Pulse 165 Sculpture Seven 159, 161, 163 Sunshine 165 Titan 165 Twenty-four Hours 162–4 Cartesianism 28, 30, 103, 157 Casanova, Giacomo 122 Casazza, Ornella 24 Cassirer, Ernst 32, 162 catharsis 65, 178, 243, 251 Cavell, Stanley on Beckett’s Endgame 249 The Claim of Reason 14, 237–52 Must We Mean What We Say 252 and Shakespearian theatre 242–3 see also empathic projection; scepticism Céan Bermúdez 115 Chagall, Marc 144, 146–7, 149 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 115, 118, 121 The House of Cards 118–19, 119 Charles III 115, 122, 124 Chopin 207 chora 12, 63–4, 193–4

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Index Christ 26, 28–9 Ascension of 50–1 as child 39, 44, 46 crucified/crucifixion of 24–5, 29, 55–8, 65, 69 death of 12, 55 entombment of 40, 44 forsaken 61, 67–8 as humanitas Christi 58, 67, 69, 71 identification with body of 55, 57, 59–60, 66–7, 69–71 isolation of 58–9, 61, 66 as light 54 redemption through 26 and salvific cross 52 suffering of 13, 55, 57–8, 60 Christian art 29, 50, 55 Christo 233 Chryssa, Vardea-Mavromichali 179 Clark, Timothy J. 135–6, 146–7, 150 classical pictorial representation 97, 100, 103–4 cloud (/cloud/) 12, 29, 34–7, 46–54, 176, 187–90 Coenties Slip, Lower Manhattan 179 coherence (internal/external). See Riegl Cologne 206 colour 3–4, 13, 22–3, 54, 65, 139, 150, 153, 190–4 conceptual art 4, 158, 161–2, 168, 199, 203, 210–11, 235, 250 conditions of access (of an artwork) 10, 18, 32, 242, 244–5, 252 configurational encounter 200–1, 239, 251 configurational properties 243–5 constructivism 137, 143, 148–9 coordination. See group portraiture Copenhagen 204 Cornelis, van Haarlem, Civic Guard Banquet 81–3, 82 Correggio, Antonio da 36, 47, 54, 60 The Assumption of the Virgin 47–50, 49, 54, 65–6, 189 The Vision of Saint John on Patmos 47–52, 48, 51 Costello, Dairmuid 251 cortejo 125, 132 crucifix role of, in Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro 52 sculpted crucifix, in Frari 3 Cuba, New Mexico 178

demonstrative reference. See indexicality de Morra, Sebastián 122 Denikin, Anton 146 denotation 64, 206 Descartes, René 30, 98, 102–3 Destruction in Art Symposium, London 210 Diderot, Denis 4–5, 101, 115, 117–21, 131 Difford, Richard J. 141, 154–5 Dine, Jim 204 disembodiment 30, 157, 210, 238–9, 252 dissection (public) 84–8 distancing 63, 87, 152–3, 175, 193, 223–5, 239 aesthetic 6, 239, 243, 245 devices of 12, 18, 20, 26, 28, 30–2 and religious imagery 58, 71 withholding cues as to 31, 127 see also viewing distances Doña María Teresa Vallabriga 113, 117, 122–9, 132 Doris, David T. 206, 208 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Idiot 60–1 Duchampian readymade 206 Dumett, Mari 206–7 Düsseldorf 203–5, 206 Dürer, Albrecht, Draftsman drawing a nude 101, 101 Dwan, Victoria 185

Dada 203–4, 207 Damisch, Hubert 29, 98, 104, 107, 110 A Theory of /Cloud/ 12, 33–54, 176, 187, 189 Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry 203, 206 David, Jacques-Louis 118 Davies, David 7 death-drive (Freudian) 63 dehabitualization 11, 177, 200, 210, 214, 234

faktura 142–3 Farocki, Harun 251 feminism/women’s movement 62, 191–2, 211–213, 215, 221, 229 Festum Fluxorum 203–4, 205 figure/ground 189, 191, 194 figural presence 12, 60, 69–71, 191, 239, 245, 247 see also Puttfarken; scale

Eagleton, Terry 11 earthworks 1, 218, 220, 224, 229 Eckert, Rinde 238–9, 247, 252 Edgar, Natalie 182 Ehrenburg, Il’ia 149 Eire, Carlos M. N. 61–2 elided subject (of painting) 97–9, 104, 111 Elkins, James 31, 95 embodiment 7, 17, 20, 28, 30, 53–5, 168, 174, 187, 192, 200, 230, 252 empathic projection 14, 57, 238–40, 242–3, 245–7, 252 see also Cavell empathic-projective mechanism 245–7 envelopment 35, 57, 65–6, 190, 192–3 Erasmus 61–2 Eucharist 13, 56, 68–71 Euclidean geometry 141, 151–2 Event score/Event 203–4, 206, 210–11, 216 Evsektsiya 146

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Index Fish, Stanley 11 Fischbach Gallery, New York 229 Flavin, Dan 185 Untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) 3–4, 174, 200, Cover image Fluck, Winfried 208, 215 Fluxus 201–11 Flynt, Henry 203 Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, Parma 113, 114, 127 foreshortening 24, 26–8, 42, 45–6, 67, 127, 151–2, 172 see also viewpoint(s) Forgács, Éva 155 formalism 1–2, 6, 20, 77–8, 135–6, 191, 217–18, 220, 234 Russian 62, 200 Foster, Hal 1, 217 Foucault, Michel 13, 95–100, 102–4, 106–8, 110 and classical episteme 98–9, 102 knowledge as resemblance 102 sign as duplicated representation 102–3 see also representation fourth dimension 138, 141, 144, 155 frame/framing 106, 111, 206 bounded image 17–18, 20, 30–31, 69 and degrees of reality 17–21, 23, 25–6, 29–32 figure of the frame 9, 117 filmic 238 integration with architecture 17–18, 21, 26, 29, 37, 42, 53, 69 and performance art 213 and structuring an imaginative encounter 106 and visual field 194 see also conditions of access; perspective; virtuality Frari, Venice 12, 37, 38, 44–5, 45, 52–4 Freadman, Anne 5 Frege, Gottlob 64 Freud, Sigmund 62–3, 69, Fried, Michael 1, 3–8, 157, 199, 217, 225, 237, 242 Absorption and Theatricality 13, 113–32 ‘Art and Objecthood’ 158, 160–1, 215 on Caro 158–63, 166–7, 170, 173–5 on video art 239, 243–6, 250–1 Gabo, Naum 220 Gagosian Gallery, New York 245 gay liberation, homophobia 179, 229 gender and artist’s body 229 and beholder 69, 135 biases 182, 190 and patriarchal order 124–5 of performer 212 reversals 124 and sexual difference 193

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and subjectivity 191–2 see also sexuality, sexual difference genre devices/scenes 9–10, 80–4, 89–91, 104, 118–19, 121 Gibson, James J. 175 Giotto 25, 65 Annunciation (Our Lady of the Annunciation) 22, 22–3 Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni) 18, 19, 21–3, 31, 35, 65 [Giotto], Ecstasy of Saint Francis 35, 36, 47 God 23, 61, 68, 85, 242, 251 the Father 23, 26, 28–9, 53, 61 spiritual grace of 68, 71 Goffen, Rona 20, 25–6, 29, 39, 46, 50 Gombrich, Ernst 20 Gordon, Douglas 243–7, 250 24 Hour Psycho 243, 244 Déjà vu 250 Play Dead; Real Time 245–7, 246, 250 Gothic 21, 58 Governors State University, Illinois 227 Goya, Francisco de 13, 75, 135 Los Caprichos 115, 118, 124–5 Los Caprichos, #2 125 Los Caprichos, #41 125, 126 The Count of Floridablanca 116 Los desastres de la Guerra 118 La familia de Carlos IV 127, 128 La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón 13, 113–32, 114, Plate 5 Mythological Scene (or Hercules and Omphale) 124 grammar (role of) 63–4, 102, 241 Greenberg, Clement 1–4, 6, 135–6, 157, 159–60, 162, 164, 217–18, 237 Greimas diagram 217, 218 see also semiotic square Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 118, 129 group portraiture 13, 73–132, 135 as collaborative venture 92–3 commissioning of 13, 75, 81, 84, 127, 129 Dutch 75–132 and issue of posing 78, 82–4, 91–2, 100, 103–4, 109, 117, 121, 129–31 problem of 75–8, 80–4, 88–93, 115–17 public/private setting of 89, 97, 109 self-portraits (within) 78, 97–8, 104–5, 113, 116–17 Spanish 13, 97, 113 and tableau 13, 103–4, 109–10, 115, 121, 130–1 theatricality of 13, 75–8, 113–8, 120–1, 128–32 and unifying activity 13, 75–8, 80–4, 113, 115 see also portraiture; Riegl; theatricality Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 118, 120–1, 131 Une Jeune fille qui a cassé son miroir 120

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Index La Piété filiale 120, 120, 123 Gross, Harvey 204 Grünewald, Matthias, Isenheim Altarpiece 56–8, 57 Haarlem 81 Hacker, P. M. S. 241 Hall, Michael 231 Hals, Frans 80, 83–4 Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Civic Guard 83–4, 83 Regents of Saint Elisabeth’s Hospital 91–2, 91 Hammer, Espen 240–2 Hansen, Al 204 Hayum, Andrée 57–9 Hayward Gallery, London 3 heaven/heavenly 23, 35, 47, 51–4, 65 Hegel 32, 62–4, 77, 79–80, 151, 194 Heizer, Michael 220–1, 233 Hesse, Eva 229 Higgins, Dick 203–4, 211 Higgins, Hannah 204, 207, 210–11 Hiroshima 212 historiography 10–11 history painting 80, 99, 101, 115, 118, 129 Hitchcock, Alfred 243–4 Hobbs, Robert 230–1, 234 Holbein, Hans 4 The Ambassadors 55 The Dead Christ in the Tomb 12, 55–71, 251, Plate 4 Holbein the Elder 56–7 Holly, Michael Ann 8, 10–11 holophrastic utterances 63 Holub, Robert 12 Holy Graves 56, 68 Hopkins, Robert 168–70, 173 Husserl, Edmund 20, 138–9 Hyde, Scott 204 hypercube 141 Ichiyanagi Toshi 203 iconoclasm 61–2, 66, 207 ideation 1–2, 6–7, 10, 19, 66, 95, 167–8, 177, 193–4, 200–1, 214–16, 231, 235, 247, 249, 252 illocutionary force 14, 213–15, 237 illusionism. See perspective: illusory imagination 10, 19, 46, 106–7, 141, 169–70, 200, 227, 229 and the anticipated/internal beholder 6, 46, 88–9, 97, 117 and the artist’s performance 7, 176, 191, 194 and the beholder’s role/share 1, 8, 19, 50, 201, 214–15, 228, 235, 252 and blanks/negations 7 and connotations/associations 192–3, 202, 221 and death 68

and host architecture 12, 52, 55 and identification 12, 60, 68, 92, 111 as prop/prompt 10, 111, 231, 249 and the real 2, 65, 170, 243 and spatial displacement 29 and the spatial situation 2, 18, 25, 32, 37, 41, 60, 69, 169, 174 and the use of signs 9–10, 54 Immaculate Conception 37, 40, 54 indexicality 5–7, 9–10, 14, 18, 31, 34, 52, 58–60, 71, 87, 111, 140, 153, 167, 190, 195 Indiana, Robert 179 Infanta Margarita 97, 104 Infante Don Luis Antonio de Borbón 113, 115, 121–8, 132 Innis, Robert E. 167–8 in situ art 12, 17, 21, 37, 42, 47, 50, 53, 55, 57, 69 see also site-specific art; situated art installation art 3, 174, 203, 220, 224, 227–8, 233, 237, 248, 250 proto-installations 13, 137, 153, 157, 200 video installations 1, 14, 199, 237, 239, 243, 245, 247, 249, 251 Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania 185 institutional context 17, 78, 89, 218, 252 intermedia 14, 161, 197–252 interruptions 13, 75, 89, 104, 109–11 introjection 69 Irigaray, Luce 191–3 Irwin, Robert 233 Isabella Farnese 113 Isenheim, Alsace 56–7 Iser, Wolfgang 2, 8, 11–12, 162, 234–5, 242–3, 248–9 The Act of Reading 14, 199–216 Prospecting 201 Iversen, Margaret 77, 79–80, 89, 96, 98–9, 103 Jacobsz., Dirck, Group Portraiture of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation 76, 80–1, 81 Jacobus, Laura 23 Japan 202–3, 212–13 Jauss, Hans-Robert 8, 11 Jay, Martin 30 Jewish Museum, New York 176 Johns, Jasper 179 John the Baptist 58 John the Evangelist 17, 24–6, 47, 50–1, 57–8, 67 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de 125 Judd, Donald 3–4, 163, 165, 170, 176, 182–4 Jung, Jacqueline E. 53 Kabakov, Ilya and Emilia 227 Kant, Immanuel 2, 32, 102 Kaprow, Allan 203–4, 206 Kasmin Gallery, London 159

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Index Kelly, Ellsworth 179 Kemp, Wolfgang 8–11, 18, 75, 80, 90 Kentridge, William 251 kinetic potential (of artwork/beholder) 6, 14, 136, 155, 157–8, 163, 168–75, 194, 199 Klein, Melanie 62, 69 Knowles, Alison 203, 211 Kofman, Sarah 86–7 Kosuth, Joseph 248 Krauss, Rosalind 2, 193, 199, 250–1 ‘Agnes Martin: The /Cloud/’ 14, 176–7, 185–91 Passages in Modern Sculpture 162–3, 171–3, 217, 220, 231 ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ 14, 217–35, 218 Under Blue Cup 232–3 Kraynak, Janet 248 Kristeva, Julia 137, 176–7, 193–5, 199 Black Sun 63, 65 ‘Giotto’s Joy’ 65 ‘Holbein’s Dead Christ’ 12, 55–71 Revolution in Poetic Language 62–5 Kubota, Shigeko 203 Kultur Lige 146 Kyoto 201, 211–12 Lacan, Jacques 11, 62–4 Lamentation 57–8, 66–7 landscape, not-landscape 221, 224, 227, 231–3 Langer, Susanne K. 6, 136, 175, 194, 199, 214 Feeling and Form 14, 157–74 Lechte, John 60, 65 Le Corbusier 149 Lenin, Vladimir 137 Lenzi family 25 LeWitt, Sol 185, 233 Liberman, Alexander 185, 186 Linville, Kasha 176, 185–7, 189 Lippard, Lucy 221–3, 229 Lissitzky, El 220 ‘A. and Pangeometry’ 141, 150–3, 150 Abstract Cabinet 138 Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge 147 First Kestner Portfolio 138, 141 Proun 1C 149–50, Plate 7 Proun 2C 142, 145, 150 ‘Proun’ 8 Stellungen (8 Position Proun) 139–40, 143, 150 Proun GK 165 Proun Room (Prounenraum) 13, 136–55, 157, 199, Plate 6 Prouns (The Town) 147 Suprematist Story of Two Squares in Six Constructions 138, 139 Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet 149 literary criticism 8, 11–12 Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich 152

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locative function 4, 10, 21, 25–6, 31–2, 42, 52, 58–9, 71, 87, 162, 235 Lodder, Christina 149 London 61, 159, 162, 165–6, 206, 210–11 Long, Richard 233 look out of the painting by a child 128–9, 132 confronting the beholder 5 and Diderot 118 in genre works 101 in group portraits 13, 76, 78, 80, 82–3, 87–9, 91, 97, 99, 115, 123, 128–9, 131, 135 in religious works 44, 46 Lörrach region, Germany 56, 68 Louis XV 118, 132 Luther, Martin 13, 56, 61, 68, 71 Lyotard, Jean-François 147 Maciunas, George 201–6 Mac Low, Jackson 204 Maes, Nicolaes, An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding 9–10, 9, 117 Magdalene, Saint Mary intermediary role of 58–9, 67 Malevich, Kazimir 137, 142, 146–53 Black Square 138, 140, 146–7 Supremus no. 58, 147, 148 Manet, Édouard 5, 13, 118, 127, 135 Olympia 5, 135–6 Manetti, Antonio di Tuccio 35 Mantegna, Andrea 26, 47 The Lamentation over the Dead Christ 58–9, 59, 66–7 Marclay, Christian 251 Margolin, Victor 146 Marin, Louis 117 Markov, Vladimir 142 Martin, Agnes 65, 137, 157, 200 Falling Blue 14, 175–95, 199, Plate 8 Flowers in the Wind 187 Friendship 184 The Islands 182–3 Mountain II 187 The Tree 183–4, 184 White Flower 182–3, 183, 188 Wood I 179, 180 Martin, David F. 170, 194 Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore 220–1 Marx, Karl 62 Masaccio 41, 60 Trinity 12, 27, 17–32, 35, 37, 40, 42, 46, 55, 103, 251–2, Plate 1 mathematical concepts/space/progressions 29, 71, 137, 140–1, 144, 150–1 Maynard, Patrick 18 Maysles, David 213

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Index medium and conventions 3, 136 and hybridity 250 inventing of 233–4, 250 physical/vehicular 7, 135, 137, 218, 232–4, 243, 250–1 and post-medium condition 199, 217, 233 specificity 1–3, 7, 135–6, 157, 199, 217, 232, 237, 243, 250 melancholia 60, 62, 66 memento mori 25, 87 Mengs, Anton Rafael 122 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 20, 158, 168–9, 175, 191–3 Metzger, Gustav 206 Michael, Erika 61 Michelangelo 20, 23 minimalism 1, 3–4, 158, 160–1, 164, 170, 174–7, 185, 199–200, 203–4, 217, 220–2, 225–7, 229– 31, 234–5, 243, 250 mirrors 35, 97–8, 103–11, 219, 233 Lacanian mirror 63 mirror of majesty 105–6 Miss, Mary 199 Awning 221 Field Rotation 227–8, 228 Grate 221 Ladders and Hurdles 221, 222 Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys 14, 217–35, 219, 226 Stakes and Ropes 221 Sunken Pool 231 Untitled (Battery Park) 222–4, 223 Mitchell, W. J. T. 95 modernism 1–3, 5–6, 8, 65, 77, 135–6, 220, 232, 237, 243, 250 and architecture 151 and painting 3, 5, 135 proto-modernism 13, 93, 117–18 and sculpture 3, 159, 161, 165–6, 217 modes of representation 13, 100–1, 109–11 Moffitt, John 108, 111 monastery hospital (and treatments) 57–8 monument 25, 37, 39–40, 56 anti-monument 220, 223 found 230–1 logic of 220, 232–3 Moore, Henry 162–3 More, Sir Thomas 61 Morris, Frances 180–5 Morris, Robert 3, 185, 208, 217, 220, 230, 232–3 Moscow 146–7, 149 Müller, Christian 67 Municipal Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 136–7 Munro, Eleanor 182 Museum Fridericianum, Kassel 238 Museum of Modern Art, New York 164, 177, 237–8, 248

Nagasaki 212 narrative content 10, 14, 39–40, 44, 46, 68, 84, 92, 99–100, 103–4, 109, 117, 130–1, 224–5, 227, 243–4 narrative cycles (in painting) 20–1, 65 Namuth, Hans 179 Nassau County Museum of Fine Arts, Long Island 218, 224 Nauman, Bruce 4, 199, 233 Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) 237–8, 252 Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning) 14, 237–52, Plate 9 Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room 248 Necker cube 138, 160 negation, negativity 2, 7, 63–5, 135–7, 151, 193, 201, 204, 208, 210, 214–15, 231–3, 248–9 Neuchterlein, Jeanne 56, 68, 71 Newman, Barnett 179 New York 175, 177–9, 185, 202–4, 211, 213, 220–1, 231 Noland, Kenneth 162, 164 objecthood (and the ‘literalists’) 158, 168, 215–6 objectification 86–7, 211–16 objective degree of reality 21, 30, 33, 187 see also Sandström objectivist view of art 1, 4, 6, 77, 121, 141, 189 objectivity (artistic) 31, 87, 91 object(s) of knowledge (man as) 98 posited/denoted/connoted 64, 66 and the Reformation 61, 68–9 and their relation to symbols 167 October 176, 217 O’Dell, Kathy 211 Olin, Margaret 77–8, 88 Olitski, Jules 162, 164 Ono, Yoko Cut Piece 14, 199–216, 202 Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings 211 ontology 2, 12, 31–2, 161–2, 166, 200, 204, 232, 243 Osborne, Peter 2, 6, 200–1, 217–18, 233 Paik, Nam June 203, 206–10, 212, 215 Étude for Pianoforte 207 One for Violin Solo 207–8 Zen for Head 208–10, 209 painter, position of 28, 78, 87–8, 92–3, 101, 104, 106, 109–10, 117, 127–8 Panofsky, Erwin 18, 30–2, 34, 47, 101 parallax 13, 109, 154 Paris 62, 135, 146 Parma Cathedral 47, 49, 50 Parsons, Betty 179 Partridge, Loren 52 Pathé News 210

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Index patrons (role of) 17, 25–6, 37, 39, 46 Patterson, Benjamin 203 Peirce, Charles S. 5–6, 167 performance art 1, 14, 161, 199, 202–16, 237 performance (of the beholder) 14, 19, 88, 170, 176–7, 190–1, 200, 215–16, 235 performance theory of art 1, 5, 7, 18–19, 170–1, 176–7, 191, 195 performativity 4–5, 7, 12, 190, 194, 214–15 Perloff, Nancy 147 perspective Albertian 13, 18, 28, 30–1, 37, 101, 103–4 anamorphic 55 Cartesian 28, 30, 157 definitions of 28 critique of 141, 150–2 and distortion 55, 154–5 illusory 18, 21, 24–6, 29, 31, 67 linear 17–18, 21, 24, 50 metaphorical use of 29, 32, 107 origins of 17, 21, 23, 28, 34–5, 110, 176 perspectiva artificialis 17–18, 35 and placement of centric/vanishing point 17, 24–5, 28, 35, 37, 40–1, 45–6, 67, 71, 88, 98, 104–11, 127, 152, 172 and projection plane 18, 31 as spatial thinking 34, 54 as structuring device 18–21, 23, 29–31, 35, 50, 55, 106 turned inside out 22–3 unstable 117, 123, 127 and visual cone/pyramid 18, 30–1, 150–2, 150, 234 and withholding of depth cues 26, 29, 31, 35, 54 see also frame/framing; representation; viewpoint(s) perspective shifting 200–1, 215, 228, 242–3, 249 Pesaro family 37, 39–40, 46 Petrograd 146 phenomenology 7–8, 14, 20, 136, 138, 158, 166–7, 173, 175–7, 185, 190–2, 199, 204, 217, 220, 228, 231, 234, 237 Philip IV and María Ana 97, 99–100, 103–11 Philip V 113, 122 pictorial instability 117, 123, 190 pictures as puzzles/paradoxes 95, 104–6, 111, 120–1 piece-specification 7 Pintoricchio 23 Podro, Michael 32–3, 78 poetic language 64–5 pogroms 146 Pollock, Griselda 65, 137, 199 ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’ 14, 175–95 Pollock, Jackson 65 Poons, Larry 204 portraiture 113, 115, 123

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‘inferiority’ of 115, 129 problem of 78 processes of 125 as reflexive practice 92–3, 97, 113, 117 and self-presentation 13, 78, 103, 115, 117, 128, 131–2 theatricality of 75, 77, 113–15 see also group portraiture; theatricality posing. See group portraiture postconceptual art 2, 162, 200 postmodernist art/critique 1, 4, 203, 218, 233 post-structuralism 11 practice bodily 191, 193, 195 as repetition 65, 171, 176–7, 190, 193, 200 Prado, Museo Nacional del, Madrid 106 Prendeville, Brendan 175, 178–9, 182, 194 Princenthal, Nancy 178–9 Protestant Reformation 4, 12, 56, 58, 61, 66 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic 11–2, 14, 62, 65–6, 137, 176, 190, 192–3, 199 psychological function (of work of art) 40, 42, 44, 59–60, 76–7, 84–5, 87–8, 91, 109–11, 121 Puttfarken, Thomas 12, 17–18, 39–40, 45–6, 53, 60, 69–71 Rauschenberg, Robert 179, 210 realism 50, 59–60, 66–7, 118 Rebentisch, Juliane 4–5, 170, 243, 251 reception aesthetics 2, 7–8, 9–12, 18, 75, 90, 213, 234 see also aesthetic(s); aesthetic response reception history/theory 8, 11–12, 17, 90, 118 Reinhardt, Ad 178, 185 Rembrandt 96, 103, 110, 115 The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp 75, 84–8, 85 Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes 115–16, 116, 135 The Night Watch 75 The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild 13, 75–93, 76, 95, 111, 135 Renaissance 12, 20, 23, 28, 30–1, 33–4, 37, 40, 42, 47, 50, 55, 58, 75–6, 102, 151, 157, 176 representation beyond perspectival 28–9, 31–2, 47–52 representation of a representation 36–7, 46, 92–3, 97, 99–100 see also Foucault resurrection 13, 56, 60–1, 71, 87 Reynolds, Ann 230–1 Riegl, Alois 7–8, 40, 44, 97, 121 attentiveness 40, 76–8, 83–5, 89, 121 The Group Portraiture of Holland 13, 75–93 haptic/optic 77, 79, 189–90 internal/external coherence 7–8, 40, 75–7, 80, 83, 88, 92–3, 96, 103–4, 115 and Kunstwollen 77, 189

313

Index Spätrömische Kunstindustrie 79 and subordination/coordination 76–8, 80–7, 96 see also group portraiture ritual/processional 17, 28, 50–2 Rococo 115, 118 Rodchenko, Alexander 146, 148 Rosenberger, Christina Bryan 178–80, 182–3 Rothko, Mark 179 Rubin, William 159, 161, 164, 166 Ruscha, Ed 251 Sacra Conversazione 39–45, 53 sacred imagery 12, 15–71 Saenredam, Pieter 101 Saint Francis 35, 39, 42–4, 46–7 Sala, Anri 4, 243, 250 Salon (Paris) 5, 118, 120 Sandström, Sven 6, 33, 141 Levels of Unreality 12, 17–32 San Giobbe, Venice 41–4, 43 San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma 47, 48, 50–1, 51 Santa Maria Novella, Florence 17, 24 Savile, Anthony 131 scale ambiguous 154 human-scale 221, 229, 233 life-sized representation 17, 28, 30, 40–1, 54–5, 58, 60, 69, 95, 239, 245, 247 measured 151 monumental 257 play of 227, 239 see also figural presence scepticism 14, 62, 239–42, 251–2 see also Cavell Schama, Simon 84–7 schizophrenia 178 Schneemann, Carolee 203 science 32, 86–7 Schapiro, Meyer 18 Schwartz, Alexandra 229 sculpted objects (and kinetic potential) 136, 168–74, 194 sculpture 1, 3, 8, 32, 42, 53, 56, 79, 137, 199 and Caro 157–74 as expanded field 14, 217–35 fabric 182 monumental 225–7, 247 see also beholder: and shared space (sculpture); virtuality: and sculpture Searle, John 104–6, 108, 214 Segal, George 204 semblance 168–9, 175, 194, 214, 235 semiological analysis 33–4 semiotic (in Kristeva’s usage) 62–6 semiotics, semiotic function 10, 12, 60, 62, 167–8, 176–7, 187, 193–4, 217, 234

semiotic square 217, 218, 220, 233 see also Greimas diagram Seoul 206, 208 Serra, Richard 217, 225, 233 sexuality, sexual difference 178–9, 191–3, 229 see also gender Shakespeare 242 Shalson, Lara 215–16 Shearman, John 8, 39–46, 50–2 Shklovsky, Viktor 200, 233–4, 249 signification 63–4, 167–8, 194 signifying function/processes 4–6, 9–10, 30, 33, 47, 54, 63–5, 102–3, 177, 193–5, 215, 235 see also atmosphere (/atmosphere/); cloud (/cloud/) site-specific art 14, 157, 217, 230–1, 237–8 see also in situ art; situated art situated art 1–2, 4–5, 7–9, 14, 19, 21, 29, 34, 60, 75, 157, 199–200, 215, 243, 245 see also in situ art; site-specific art Smith, David 161–3 Smith, Owen F. 203 Smithson, Robert 163, 185, 220 ‘The Monuments of Passaic’ 230–1, 233 Smith, Tony 3 Snyder, Joel and Ted Cohen 105–7 Snyder 105–8 socialist realism 147 Sogetsu Kaikan Hall, Tokyo 210–11 Soufas, C. Christopher, Jr. 124–5 space of reception 37, 53, 200, 237–9, 245, 252 spectator. See beholder spectator in the picture 10, 78, 89–90, 97, 131 see also beholder: internal/external speech-act theory 248 Spengler, Oswald 151 Staalhof, Amsterdam 88 Stackhouse, Robert 231 staging of configurational properties 245, 247, 251 of empathic projection/sceptical problematic 4, 14, 239, 243, 245–7 of painting 77–8, 93, 103, 110, 113, 115, 117, 121 of performance art 202, 213, 215 of site-specific works 227 of theatre 242 of a work’s to-be-seenness 243, 245–6 Stalin, Joseph 137 Steen, Jan 121 Steinberg, Leo 107, 110–11 Steiner, Michael 185 Stella, Frank 164 Stepanova, Varvara 148 Stiles, Kristine 204–6, 211, 216 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 206 Stoichita, Victor I. and Anna Maria Coderch 124

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Index Stone of Unction 66 Storr, Robert 238, 248 structuralism 14, 62, 217, 231–2, 234 subject and object (separation of, duality of) 63–4, 192 subjectivity. See beholding subordination. See group portraiture supernatural. See visionary suprastructionism 231 suprematism 136–8, 146–54 symbolic 29, 31, 34, 44, 46–7, 55, 60, 62–6, 81, 90, 162, 167, 177, 193 symbolization 64, 162, 167–8 syntactic disturbance 64 syntax 20, 33, 64, 160, 163, 171, 187 tableau. See group portraiture Tarlow, Florence 204 Tatlin, Vladimir 138, 220 Tawney, Lenore 179–82, 181 Tel Quel group 62 temporality 23, 54, 138 separation/displacement of 26, 29, 195 temporal metaphor 37, 54 theatre, theatrical conventions 36–7, 216, 227, 243 Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris 210 theatricality 123, 213 and absorption 83, 115, 117–21, 131, 243–4 and antitheatricality 4–6, 8, 13, 117–21, 160, 163, 247, 250 and beholder as literal presence 160–1, 225 gestural 9, 121, 215 as mode of engagement 3–4, 8, 75, 115, 117, 163, 243 and representation 35–6 of studio practice 115 theatre of theatricality/absorption 121, 131–2 and video installation 244–5 see also group portraiture; portraiture thetic 63–5 Thomas, Brook 11 throne of grace 26 Titian 60 Assumption of the Virgin 12, 37, 45, 53–4, Plate 3 Entombment of Christ 40, 41, 44 Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro 12, 33–54, 38, 55, Plate 2 Tokyo 203, 208, 211 tomb(s) 39, 230 of Adam 25 of Christ 55–7, 67, 69, 71 Gothic 21 Holy Tomb 56 Tomlinson, Janis A. 125 Trakas, George 231 transitive relationship 52 Trinity 17, 24, 26, 28–9, 35, 42, 46, 55 Twombly, Cy 179

314

UNOVIS 146–7, 149 van den Valckert, Werner 89–91 van de Waal, Henri 89 van Doesburg, Theo 141, 149, 151 Tesseract with arrows pointing inward 144 van Eyck, Jan, Arnolfini Wedding 97, 105, 108 van Loo, Louis-Michel, Le peintre Carle van Loo et sa famille 115, 129–32, 130 Vasari, Giorgio 24 Velázquez, Diego 75, 113, 115–16, 122 Las Meninas 13, 95–111, 96, 105, 107, 108, 113, 130–1, 135 Velázquez, don José Nieto 110 Vermeer, Johannes 32, 99, 118 The Art of Painting 117 Girl Interrupted at Her Music 10 View of Delft 28, 101, 103 Vesalius 85 video art 3, 203, 206, 239, 243, 250 see also installation art: video Viejo, Isadora Rose-de 115–16 viewing distances 14, 97, 137, 157, 159, 163, 173, 176–7, 184–5, 187–90, 199–201, 227, 234 see also distancing viewpoint(s) 30, 37, 41, 50–1, 106–8, 110, 138, 154 ambulatory 153–5 centralized 23, 28, 35, 152 contradictory/incompatible 10, 127, 172 embodied 20 kneeling 29, 58–9 low 26, 41, 117, 245 oblique 13, 37, 55, 67, 71, 153 multiple 123, 127 reversibility of 138–9, 141–2, 153, 155 secondary, non-empirical 31, 37, 55 uninhabitable 135–6 vacated 78, 109, 127 see also foreshortening Virgin Mary 17, 22–5, 42, 46 Annunciation 23 Assumption of 12, 37, 47, 50, 52–4, 65, 189 mourning of 57–9, 67 purity of 22 role as mediator 12, 25–6, 41–2, 60, 66 Virgin’s throne 37, 39, 41, 44 virtuality degrees of 31, 175, 214, 237, 251 and digitized image 252 and experiential field 194–5 extensions of 128 and imagination 200 and infinity 152 juxtaposition/tension with real 6, 14, 29, 31, 78, 141–2, 154, 157, 162, 170, 173–4, 201, 249 modes of 6, 9, 154, 162, 168, 194, 241

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Index orientation toward 117, 123, 153, 238–9 and painting 32, 47, 50, 78, 89, 92, 106, 111, 136, 168–71 and performance 215–16 and sculpture 14, 136–7, 157, 162, 168–71, 173, 175, 199 theory of 158, 167–71 see also frame/framing visionary 23, 26–9, 31–2, 35, 47–54, 65–6 Visweswaran, Kamala 247–8 Vitebsk 138, 144, 146–7 VKhUTEMAS 147–9 Vostell, Wolf 203 votive image 37, 39–40 Wagner, Anne 185 War Communism 137, 146–7 White, John 23, 26–8 Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 160 Wiesbaden 208–9

Williams, Emmett 203, 206 Wilson-Baraeau, Juliet 124 Winnicott, D. W. 62 Winsor, Jackie 229 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 160, 162, 167, 239–42, 247–8, 252 Philosophical Investigations 155, 240–1, 247 Wölfflin, Heinrich 20, 47 Wollheim, Richard 11, 78, 97 X-ray analysis 52, 56, 85, 92 Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto 210 Youngerman, Jack 179 Young, La Monte 203–4, 206, 208, 210 Zapater, Martín 121, 127 Zapatka, Christian 234–5 Zen 208, 210 zero (number) 153

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Plate 1 Masaccio: Trinity, c.1425–​7, fresco, 667 × 317 cm. S. Maria Novella, Florence. Getty Images/​Mondadori Portfolio/​Contributor.

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Plate 2 Titian: Madonna di Ca’ Pesaro, 1519–​26, oil on canvas, 478 × 266 cm. S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Getty Images/​De Agostini Picture Library/​Contributor.

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Plate 3 Titian: Assumption of the Virgin, c.1515–​18, oil on panel, 690 × 360 cm. S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Getty Images/​DEA/​F. Ferruzzi/​ Contributor.

Plate 4  Hans Holbein:  The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521–​2, tempera on limewood, 30.5 × 200 cm. Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel. ©2019. De Agostini Picture Library/​Scala, Florence.

Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma. ©2019. Photo Scala, Florence.

Plate 5  Francisco de Goya: La familia del Infante Don Luis de Borbón, 1784, oil on canvas, 248 × 328 cm. Corte di Mamiano,

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Plate 6  El Lissitzky: Prounenraum, 1923 (reconstruction 1971), painted wood, 320 x 364 x 364 cm. Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

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Plate 7 El Lissitzky:  Proun 1C, 1919–​20, oil on panel, 68 × 68  cm. Museo Nacional Thyssen-​ Bornemisza, Madrid. Getty Images/​Heritage Images/​Contributor.

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Plate 8  Agnes Martin:  Falling Blue, 1963, oil and graphite on linen, 182.56 × 182.88  cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky. © Estate of Agnes Martin /​Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Don Myer /​DACS 2019.

Plate 9  Bruce Nauman: Anthro/​Socio (Rinde Spinning), 1992, three video projectors, six colour video monitors, six videodisc players, six videodiscs (colour, sound), dimensions variable, as installed at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Bridgeman Images /​© Bruce Nauman /​Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London 2019.

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