theatricality, somewhere in between empathy and the uncanny

FRIED
Not fitting the canon of Greenberg for seeking the autonomy of painting Painting is proper art Its autonomy is its distinction/separation/abstraction from the actual (literal) spatial environment Literalist work not (modern) painting , not (modern) sculpture Literalist work then objects painting works are acknowledged as objects

BUCK-MORSS
[Kant] The moral being is sense-dead from the start. Kants trascendental subject purges himself of the senses that endanger his autonomy. Senses unavoidably entangle the subject in the world, and make him susceptible to sympathy and tears. Benjamin is saying that the sensory alienation lies at the source of the aestheticization of politics, which fascism does not create, but merely manages. We are to assume that both alienation and aestheticized politics as the sensual conditions of modernity outlive fascism and thus so does the enjoyment taken in viewing our own destruction. Benjamin demands from art to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanitys self-preservation () not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them.

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface Donald Judd (150) I wish to emphasize that things are in a space with oneself, rather than one is in a space surrounded by things. Robert Morris (154) Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. (153) Literalist work makes evident the collapse of Greenbergian pictorial cannon, which required painting not to be visually illusionist and illusory Fried exposes a different kind of illusionism, which is somatic or kinesthetic the illusion of absent presences that he names theatricality.

Presence Size Scale Bodily proximity Visual distance Demands to be taken into account (seriously) Hollowness / Insinuated inside

Literalist work not strictly within producing a situation relational to the beholder including the beholder beholders body and not only beholders gaze relational to the architecture and space obtrusiveness and agressiveness

PERFORMATIVE ELEMENTS DESCRIBED BY FRIED

The barriers between the arts are in the process of crumbling The arts are sliding towards a final, implosive, desirable synthesis (164) The experience in question persists in time, and the presentment of endlessness that, I have been claiming, is central to literalist art and theory is essentially a presentment of endless, or indefinite, duration. (166) Theatricality is concerned with the sense of temporality: of time both passing and to come, approaching and receding. (167)

Audience of one The work has been waiting for him The work refuses to let her alone Confronting/isolating/distancing her

BUCK-MORSS

Walter Benjamins understanding of modern experience is neurological. It centers on shock. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less they are to have a traumatic effect. Under extreme stress the ego employs consciousness as a buffer, blocking the openness of the synaesthetic system, thereby isolating present consciousness from past memory. Without the depth of memory, experience is impoverished. The problem is that under conditions of modern shock the daily shocks of modern worldresponse to stimuli without thinking has become necessary for survival. Perception becomes experience only when it connects with sense-memories of the past. (17)

The body under general anaesthetics Tripartite splitting of experience / three different phenomenologies agency / bodiliness / cognition AGENT agency the operating surgeon MATTER object as hyle the docile body of the patient OBSERVER perceiving and acknowledging the accomplished result

SOMATIC ATTENTION (Csordas) The body is a biological, material entity, while embodiment can be understood as an indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and the mode of presence and engagement in the world. Embodied experience is the starting point for analyzing human participation in a cultural world. Phenomenology considers embodiment as the existential condition in which culture and self are grounded. The ways we attend to and with our bodies, and even the possibility of attending, are neither arbitrary nor biologically determined, but are culturally constituted.

EMPATHY (Susan Foster) - Piety - contagion of the imagination - feeling anothers feelings - Compassion - Shared sensibility - Feeling into the world Actions executed by nullification or empathic inability: Massacre Enslavement Torture Abduction

Allan Kaprow

Text by Allan Kaprow in: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen6A/pushAndPull.html

Push and Pull. A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann

1963

Ana Roldn

Two long weapons without armor, 2004

My favorit antagonist, 2008

The plot of the five masquerades, 2009

Cmico, mgico, musical, 2008

Cmico, mgico, musical, 2008

Doris Salcedo

Abyss, 2005 brick, cement, steel and epoxyc resin Installation: T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin

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Abyss, 2005 brick, cement, steel and epoxyc resin 441 x 1386 x 1624 cm Installation: T1 Triennial of Contemporary Art, Castello di Rivoli, Turin

Damin Ortega

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The Independent, 2010 Installation The Curve, London

The Independent, 2010 Installation The Curve, London

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Damin Ortega

The Independent, 2010 Installation The Curve, London

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Mike Nelson

MAGAZIN, Byk Valide Han, 2003 Found space with constructed darkroom, various media including photographs

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MAGAZIN, Byk Valide Han, 2003 Found space with constructed darkroom, various media including photographs

MAGAZIN, Byk Valide Han, 2006 (Frieze Art Fair) Found space with constructed darkroom, various media including photographs

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Simon Fujiwara

Selective Memory, 2012 Tate Saint Ives, Exhibition 1982

17

Welcome to the Hotel Munber, 20082010 Tate Saint Ives, Exhibition 1982

Mothers, of Invention (detail), 2012 Tate Saint Ives, Exhibition 1982

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Buck-Morss, Susan, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered in October, Vol. 62, Autumn, 1992. pp. 3-41. Csordas, Thomas J. Somatic Modes of Attention in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 8, No. 2, May 1993. pp. 135-156. Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London / New York: Routledge, 2011. Fried, Michael Art and Objecthood (1967) in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Illinois: University Of Chicago Press, 1998. pp. 148-172. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 1992.

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