to Fried, and am undoubtedly not the last.
Notes
1 1. Stephen Melville, “Becoming Medium,” p. 104; Richard Moran, “Formalism and the Appearance of Nature,” p. 117.
Introduction Formalism and the Lessons of Dante
This is the first book to address in detail the relation between art and Object-Oriented Ontology (hereafter OOO), in the wake of a number of earlier publications on the topic.1 For the purposes of this book, “art” means visual art, though the principles developed here could be exported – mutatis mutandis – to any artistic genre. What ought to make OOO’s relation to art of especial interest to the reader is that this new philosophy treats art not as a peripheral subfield, but as the very heart of our discipline, as in the well-known OOO call for “aesthetics as first philosophy.”2 But what does it mean for aesthetics to serve as the basis for all philosophy, and why would anyone accept such an apparently deviant thesis? To develop these questions is the purpose of this book.
The title Art and Objects was recommended by an editor at Polity, and I could hardly refuse such a straight-to-the-point suggestion. Nonetheless, it could lead to one of two possible misunderstandings. The first is the verbal similarity of the phrase “Art and Objects” to the titles of two other works that lead in different directions from my own. One is Richard Wollheim’s 1968 book-length essay Art and its Objects, a lucid piece of analytic philosophy not discussed directly in the pages that follow. The other similar title, no doubt more familiar to readers of this book, belongs to the provocative 1967 article “Art and Objecthood” by Michael Fried. This latter coincidence is more important, since Fried unlike Wollheim has had a significant impact on my thinking about artworks. Nonetheless, our respective uses of the word “object” have precisely the opposite meaning. For Fried, “object” means a physical obstacle literally present in our path, as he famously complains in the case of minimalist sculpture. For OOO, by contrast, objects are always absent rather than present. OOO’s real objects – as opposed to what we call sensual objects – can only be alluded to indirectly; they never take on literal form, and need not even be physical.
That brings us to the second and broader misunderstanding to which the title of this book might lead. Positive talk of “objects” in an arts context is often assumed to mean praise for mid-sized durable entities (sculptures, statues, glassworks, easel paintings) at the expense of what seem to be more free-form art media (performances, happenings, transient installations, conceptual works). In a OOO setting, however, “object” has a far broader meaning than solid material things. For the object-oriented thinker, anything – including events and performances – can count as an object as long as it meets two simple criteria: (a) irreducibility downward to its components, and (b) irreducibility upward to its effects. These two types of reduction are known in OOO as “undermining” and “overmining,” while their combination – which happens more often than not – is called “duomining.”3 OOO holds that nearly all human thought involves some form of duomining, and tries to counteract it by paying attention to the object in its own right, apart from its internal components and outward effects. This is admittedly a difficult task, since undermining and overmining are the two basic forms of knowledge we have. When someone asks us what something is, we can answer either by telling them what the thing is made of (undermining), what it does (overmining), or both at once (duomining). Given that these are the only kinds of knowledge that exist, they are precious tools of human survival, and we must be careful not to denounce these three forms of “mining” or pretend we can do without them. Yet my hope is that the reader will come to recognize the parallel existence of forms of cognition without knowledge that somehow bring objects into focus, despite not reducing them in either of the two mining directions.
Art is one such type of cognition; another is philosophy, understood in the Socratic sense of philosophia rather than the modern one of philosophy as a mathematics or natural science manqué. As I wrote in “The Third Table,” art has nothing to do with either of the famous “two tables” of the English physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington: one of them being the physical table composed of particles and empty space (undermining), the other the practical table with distinct sensible qualities and the capacity to be moved around as we please (overmining).4 For precisely the same reason, the celebrated distinction of the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars between the “scientific image” (undermining) and “manifest image” (overmining) cannot do productive work for us.5 Instead, art like philosophy has the mission of alluding to a “third table” that lies between the two extremes of cognition recognized by Eddington and Sellars. Already, those familiar with Fried will see that art in the OOO sense entails the exact opposite of the literalism that he associates with objecthood, though this is a mere difference in terminology that does not yet run counter to Fried’s core principles.
It is well known that the OOO program emphasizes objects considered apart from their relations, which cuts against the grain of today’s relational fashion in philosophy, the arts, and nearly everywhere else. By “relational” I mean the notion that an artwork (or any object) is intrinsically defined by some sort of relation with its context. In philosophy these are called “internal relations,” and OOO upholds the counter-tradition that takes relations to be external to their terms: so that, in all but exceptional cases, an apple remains the same apple no matter the context in which it occurs. Now, to consider an object apart from its relations obviously sounds like the well-known “formalism” in art and literary criticism, which downplays the biographical, cultural, environmental, or socio-political surroundings of artworks in favor of treating such works as self-contained aesthetic wholes. In this connection, I have written some admiring things about the long unfashionable Greenberg, who deserves the title “formalist” despite his own resistance to the term.6 We will see that the same holds for Fried, who is also a formalist in my sense despite his ongoing displeasure with that word. Robert Pippin’s complaint that “there persists a myth that Fried’s work is ‘formalist,’ indifferent to ‘content’” certainly hits the mark, but only if we accept Fried and Pippin’s definition of formalism as denoting indifference to content.7 It is true that no one should accuse Fried of suppressing the content of paintings in the way that Greenberg usually does, but I will claim that there exists a more basic sense of formalism than this.
Given OOO’s emphasis on the non-relational autonomy or closure of objects from their contexts, it is no surprise that there has been some wariness toward object-oriented thought in those aesthetic quarters where formalism is in low repute, even among those who feel sympathy for us on other grounds. Claire Colebrook, the prominent Deleuzean, worries aloud that OOO literary criticism will merely amount to a continuation of formalist business as usual.8 My friend Melissa Ragona at Carnegie-Mellon University reacted as follows when I first posted the cover of this book on social media: “Excellent move from the old days of discussing Clement Greenberg to Joseph Beuys!”9 Some months earlier, the Munich-based artist Hasan Veseli had interrupted an otherwise positive email to express the following reservation about my past writings on art:
My art friends and I can’t understand why you go on and on about Greenberg, although we do get your point (background, flatness). In retrospect it feels that his writings were already assigned an expiration date at the time that he wrote that stuff (probably because of his problems with subject matter, making art just a formalist exercise). Notable critics, from today’s perspective, are the likes of Rosalind Krauss, David Joselit, Hal Foster, Arthur Danto …10
In my continuing fondness for Greenberg, I am outnumbered in the art world by his detractors. Nonetheless, I would respond by saying that there are perfectly good reasons to “go on and on” about him, even if his theories seem linked with a kind of art that lost its cutting-edge prestige a half century ago, and even if some of his theories can be shown to be wrong. The issue,
