CS: Notes on Objecthood

One of the people who was recommended to counter James Elkin’s final sentences in What Photography Is that photography might actually be ‘boring’, was Michael Fried. I’d not read his work at length before, although had read the passage about him in Fifty Key Photography writers, and so have spent some time trying to introduce myself to a few of his key ideas. (Of no genuine importance unless you’re an avid Freudian, he has the same family name as my dad before he changed it when he was a young man.)

Objecthood – I suspect this is probably a subject quite close to my heart, but reading further will help talk about it using language that people writing about art tend to use. And certainly, there is a lot more to it that my constant referrals to Rovelli’s statement about relationship rather than objects. “[Quantum mechanics] does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and how they interact with each other… [] Reality is reduced to a relation.” (2014)

From a handy summary by the ever-reliable Chicago School of Art. “Maurice Merleau-Ponty breaks down Descartes system of binaries and conceptualizes the self and bodies as thoroughly intermeshed and indistinguishable, especially with respect to the body. With no clear distinction between subject and object, objects can be part of the subject’s being.” (See Klein’s object-relations).

This ties in with the quote I’d identified in Hayle’s work and which is discussed at length in various essays about cyborgs and the way we other-ise cyborgs/AI in fiction. “Only if one thinks of the subject as an autonomous self independent of the environment is one likely to experience the panic performed by Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and Bernard Wolf’s Limbo. This view of the self authorizes the fear that if the boundaries are breached at all, there will be nothing to stop the self’s complete dissolution. By contrast, when the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to dependent on the splice rather than being imperilled by it.” (1999)

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty seems to go onto say that paintings are above and beyond that – they have a special place in the world. “The special category of objects, paintings, especially eludes this process, and returns the spectator for a moment to a time when the dichotomy, between subject and object, was not yet formed. The view of a painting does not move to perceive and define the object before them.” This seems rather like Benjamin’s aura. As if some objects carry something of ‘god’ or the ‘spirit’ in them.
2. According to Fried, “During the experience of art subject and object, space and time become collapsed, negating the possibility of objects [see time, space].” [See Hoffman’s dissolution of space-time and therefore of objects within space-time. Also Rovelli, System’s theory and a number of other books I’ve read recently]
3. Apparently, “Descartes relegates color to a secondary property of reality. This allows him to construct a unitary and undifferentiated model of objects, by making shape, a spatial property, the defining characteristic” which seems a bit nuts nowadays.
4. “The essential norms or conventions of painting are at the same time the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limits can be pushed back infinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object. [11]” Modernism in these terms is the start of expressions which refute the existence of God, even though they still continue to refer to a kind of divine experience.
5. “By virtue of its opposition to the banality, worldliness, and gracelessness of objecthood, art takes on transcendental significance.”
6. Ah – here is what is at the core of my own thinking – Other writers do not distinguish art from objects by way of arguments about perception or phenomenology, but examine the way art objects behave socially to gain their status. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” depends on art as an object residing in specific spaces. The fact that forms of art such as painting and sculpture must exist in one spatial location corresponds to their social and class function. But Benjamin is still thinking in Cartesian terms because this aura relating to social class and function is tied to religion too as these institutions cannot really exist as they do without each other.
7. “This art, unlike art with an aura, has no specific spatial location, and is unable to be located as an object. It would be difficult to term the art of film as an object in the sense that has been discussed above.” Well, I am not so sure about this. A film can be seen as an object if we think about the screen on which it is shown and we begin to imagine that we might function in a similar way which is what theory likes to point to nowadays – we have a desktop (reality) and we draw on information to construct objects [icons] in our world (Hoffman, 2019) This assertion that non-aura art has no spacial location remind me of the mentality that just because something is digital its not material. If I am looking at the letter on my screen (underlined in red due to all the typos – I know exactly where it is. It is here, in my construction of space and time which my many ancestors evolved to ‘exist’ within in order to recognise what will help my system continue for long enough to procreate and take care of the little systems that emerged from me. (ibid)
8. “Rather it is a set of social practices that define and declare the object art.” Re Raymond Williams. This makes the most sense to me – art seems to be mostly about money and status and daft games. I say mostly because I am sure there is valuable work being made which has nothing to do with all of that. What is probably quite a good question is what if all of that nonsense is eschewed and just a few people see the work, perhaps in someone’s back garden in Croydon (honestly hypothetically as I know no-one there), is it art? Does something only become art when a middle-class art-history graduate deems it so? If it’s not got any fiscal value because no-one wants to buy it, is it art? Is Art just about something being a commodity? If yes, then art is a load of tosh that deserves the reputation it has amongst some people. I don’t think it is just that – but wading through it can be challenging.

https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/objecthood.htm