Embodiment takes us back to the very start of Frieds critical path. In his recent essay An Introduction to My Art Criticism Fried says that Anthony Caros sculptures made him feel that he was about to levitate or burst into blossom and that the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided philosophical sanction for taking those feelings seriously. Phenomenology licensed Fried to hold up subjective experience as an authoritative ground and origin for art. The lived body- first Menzels, then the beholders- becomes for Fried the source … of primordial intentionality. Menzels realism, for Fried, is solipsism, no more, no less: All you can count on, in the end, are modalities of the self.
(Graham 156) Art-historical scholarship in a wide range of fields has come to share many of Frieds preoccupations. His Menzel book resonates, for example, with recent work on medieval devotional art, such as Jeffrey F. Hamburgers The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (1998), which casts the affective icon, with its often graphic appeal to somatic experience, as a challenge to a discursively or theologically constructed divinity. There is also important new scholarly writing on embodiment and nineteenth-century art: I will mention only Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (2000), Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (2001), and above all two powerful books by Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (1999).
The Term Paper on Fredric Jameson and the No Wave Art Movement
In postmodern art, history is self-consciously reappropriated and re-fashioned into new forms. Postmodern art, Jameson argues, was a logical outcome of late-capitalism, which in its late stage has allowed society to abolish the distinction between high culture and mass culture, producing a culture of degradation. This was first taken up as an aesthetic by Andy Warhol. In the text, Postmodernism: ...
Fried pitches directly into a debate with Crary about embodied vision. Crary says that the autonomization of vision and the concomitant regulation of the spectator were contrivances designed to deactivate the truth, newly recognized in the nineteenth century, of embodied vision. Fried dislikes the paranoia of this and argues instead that the embodiedness of seeing was not suppressed but rather widely embraced in Menzels day and was indeed central to artmaking.
He points in particular to the empathy theorists Vischer and Wolfflin and to the work of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, contending that Crary unfairly dismisses Helmholtz as a normalizing figure who conceals the reality of the ongoing autonomization project (which is also what Crary would say about Menzel, Fried predicts).
This difference is not going to be resolved by more historical research, or by alignments between painters and theories of vision. For Crarys ultimate question is historical and political: How did ideas about the embodie dness or autonomy of vision figure in the production of the modern subject? Whereas Frieds question is philosophical: Does aesthetic embodiment provide any privileged access to the ground of being? (Graham 17) To pursue Frieds question we may need to get beyond the authority of Merleau-Ponty. Fried cheerfully ignores, because it is so familiar, Jacques Derridas crippling critique of phenomenology. Edmund Husserl argued that the present is given to us through intuition of bodily presences. Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, wondered whether certain works of art might not guide us toward such a radical reduction of experience. But phenomenologists, according to Derrida, forget that signs operate precisely by leaving the present behind and that therefore intuition can never be stabilized.
In the early 1960s Merleau-Pontys thought posed a forceful challenge to all the rash rhetoric about opticality and pure visibility that swirled around modernist painting. But phenomenology finds no traction today. (Graham 98).
