Michael Fried’s "absorption and theatricality."

Briefly: I just came from a lecture by Michael Fried, and in the discussion session afterward, the question of subject/object interaction kept coming up in Fried’s constant employment of the pair “absorption and theatricality”–Yves-Alain Bois described it as “the engine that allows you to see.” This was challenged at several points–it seems that your (Fried’s) criticism only takes into account the presence of a single beholder. What about a crowd viewing the work? Similarly important to Fried’s “absorption and theatricality” is the staging of a kind of absorption. But in so doing, how do you ascribe the intentionality of the artist to that work and stage a sort of direct one-on-one confrontation with it? Fried keeps going back to the art object ‘performing’ these types–performing the address to an observer (anything else is virtually impossible?), performing a kind of intentionality of its creator. The art Fried is interested in does not provide raw access to intentionality, but thematizes intentionality itself.

It strikes me that this debate never seemed to be resolved in discussion–the various partisans remained entrenched. And it also strikes me that Benjamin seems to easily skate across this binary of subject-object interaction in his discussion of folk art and kitsch, when he writes “Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch teach allow us to see outward from within things.” And it’s even more striking to me that the media through which Benjamin ‘solves’ this problem, or at least finds a way to think beyond it, is through a (sort of) technics of mass art, through collective, popular culture.

Neil Armstrong’s physiology of floating

Apropos the recent death of Norman Mailer, I figured I’d cite a passage of his from his 1970 book Of a Fire on the Moon, which grew out of his coverage of the Apollo mission for Life Magazine. Initially bored to tears by NASA’s alphabet soup of technical terminology, Mailer’s penchant for sweeping statements is reinvigorated when Neil Armstrong describes a recurring childhood dream he had. As it did for Mailer, this dream has stuck with me since I first learned of it. In this dream, Armstrong is able to hover just above the ground when he holds his breath. Mailer is blown away by this first sign of life from the otherwise mechanically dry man:

On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality (which is to say that world where every question must have answers and procedures, or technique cannot itself progress) yet to inhabit—if only in one’s dreams—that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself.
–Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, pp. 46-47

For Mailer, the opposition of this image of floating while holding the breath with the language of technology and “technique,” distills the very essence of that 1960s dream of existence in outer space. This opposition no longer holds today. If anything, the plane has shifted and its poles have been synthesized. As the media of technique shifts from code to sound/image/text, the deployment of technique itself is moved from the outer to the inner:

The literally unheard-of is the site where information technology and brain physiology coincide. To make no sound, to pick your feet up off the ground, and to listen to the sound of a voice when night is falling–we all do it when we put on a record that commands such magic.
–Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), p. 36