That the beholder did not exist

I’m interested in the way Michael Fried interprets Diderot’s Salon reports of the late eighteenth century. When I first read Fried’s 1980 essay Absorption and Theatricality I was trying to make objects to go in a room and was stirred by Diderot’s imperative:

Whether you compose or act, think no more of the beholder than if he did not exist. Imagine, at the edge of the stage, a high wall that separates you from the orchestra. Act as if the curtain never rose. (p. 95)

More recently I’ve started thinking about Fried’s essay in the context of J.L. Borges’s God of the Labyrinth and John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse.  Its thesis is broadly that “Diderot’s 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.” (p.103)

Uncanny Valley

Look at this:

Versions of the Imaginary

This is in a bid to close in on some matter.

I’ve found a text I remember reading a couple of years ago, from an essay by Maurice Blanchot called Two Versions of the Imaginary. Let me try to summarize what I find interesting about it, and bring it towards these ideas of crossing out and leaving gaps, which we’ve been discussing for the Silence talk.

Blanchot homes in on the cadaver as a unique instance of signification. He says “someone who has just died is first of all very close to the condition of a thing – a familiar thing that we handle and approach”, but shortly after death a moment comes when the cadaver’s relations with the world cease, as “our care and the prerogative of our former passions, no longer able to know their object, fall back on us”. The cadaver cannot be known, and yet he still appears within the world, and I think what Blanchot means is that the cadaver becomes a signified thing with no signifier. Or rather, it becomes its own signifier – a thing that is its own image – “the equal, equal to an absolute, overwhelming and marvelous degree”.

Activity!

The Skin of the Work

It isn’t helpful to think about my work in the context of a gallery. Nothing is given. My work may have no relationship with a gallery-type space: it may be on paper, or said, or just in my house.

For the time being it may be unhelpful to think about any physical context for my work. The project I’m working on at the moment – the forks writing – is still too softened to have an outside surface, and so thinking about where to contain the outside surface can only threaten it.

And by context I mean not just the physical space but the skin of the work. Whether the words will be sung, and have sound, and have a tune; or just have the sound of being said; or be typed or handwritten, and on paper or card or inside little boxes … I don’t feel like I have enough of an idea of the work yet to allow it into physicality.

But here’s the problem again: here I am putting off the aesthetics of the work again.

*  *  *

I have to be careful. I think there’s a danger in thinking about the viewer too early. The mechanics of the work – whether it’ll be easily taken in in a gallery, whether it will suit the viewer, questions of commercial value – are the threatening bits. The skin of the work, the close, integrated surface of the work, which is kindly and which is mindful of the work’s inside, is a friend of the work, and is the work. Whether or not my fork writing is filed away quietly on index cards is a question to take seriously; whether or not it will be easy for people to see the writing if the card file were put in a gallery is a question to ignore until the last possible moment.

Aesthetics

The other day I read a very idealistic and enthusiastic discussion of aesthetics by a group of graduates who are going to show together in October. They claimed that aesthetics linked their work and I couldn’t understand how they could say such a broad thing as that.

There is strength in the way they say what they say. It is difficult for me to finish sentences without trailing off, as though I’m either worried someone will be able to catch me out if I say anything too definite, or I want to show that I know so much that I know nothing’s straightforward enough to actually be said. It is stupid to do this.

I think that I am sure about my artwork, and that I can be decisive about it. But there is something reluctant about my work, it seems to trail off too. It’s always the final stages of visually perfecting my work that are lacking. I seem to lose interest in the work once I’ve had the idea, and I make it and don’t want to remake it.  I think it would be worthwhile making myself focus on the visual exterior of my work, the aesthetics, we might say. It’s at the edge of the work, the outside of it, that the pivot is: the junction between viewer and maker. So it’s not something I should leave unsatisfactory. I will work at it.

But there’s another interesting thing to consider: why it is that I have such trouble with finishing my work. Since that’s the direct product of my brain – more direct than the worked-at finishing I’m going to have to learn – there must be something worthwhile to it, and so I’d like to explore it.