ABSTRACT

One of the most thoughtful essays from the 1960s, Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” with its opposition between Minimalism’s distancing literalism and formalist painting’s imbuing presentness, has been understood in terms of the embodied perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, advanced primarily by Robert Morris. This perspective came under the critical lens of Fried and his mentor Clement Greenberg. While this polarization characterizes one important aspect of this essay’s orientation, there is another, heretofore unrecognized division between the early Merleau-Ponty Fried discerns in minimalist art and his own emphasis on the later Merleau-Ponty, with its focus on an ongoing and personal dialectic of perception and reflection. This chapter analyzes the terms of Fried’s debate by considering both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Morris’s “Notes.” In addition, the essay suggests a basis for considering Fried’s later art historical elaboration of essential differences between early and late Merleau-Pontian thought, which he has termed “theatricality” and “absorption.”