Objectified Bodies: Unruly Objects

Compared through Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood and Damon Willick’s Still Live: Theatrics of the Keinholz Tableaux

Donald Judd
Team 3, 8
1968

Robert Morris
Untitled
1969

Michael Fried addresses minimalism and specific objects, or what he calls literalist art through Donald Judd and Robert Morris’s work and their specific words on the subject.
Through Morris’s and Judd’s statements, Fried addresses the objecthood of sculpture versus the shape of painting. The key point in Fried’s discussion is when he addresses the beholder [viewer] of the work as being part of the work. I think this point is especially important for our work as makers of artwork on the body, since we consider the body on a physical scale since the work exists on the body. Fried says “the entire situation means exactly that, all of it – including, it seems, the beholder’s body (826).” Fried is concentrating on the points made by Morris and Judd that the viewers body is necessary in understanding the whole of their work. This makes me think of a discussion made by Glenn Adamson in the book, Thinking Through Craft, where he points out that the frame of a piece of autonomous artwork doesn’t always stop with the physical thickness of wood holding the canvas with paint up. This frame extends out to the space in the gallery, the carpeting, the lights and the street outside. Ed and Nancy Kienholz’ Still Live goes much farther to make the viewer aware that they are part of the frame. In Still Live the viewer must sign a waiver before entering because after moving around the space one realizes that there is a rifle pointed at your head with a warning that the gun is rigged to go off once ever hundred years. So instead of including the viewer in an abstract way, by making the work human size, the viewer is thrust into this direct confrontation aggressively staged by the artist. Willick also addresses the issue of theatre and theatricality, which the Kienholz work directly engages with because it is a staged work that is actively theatrical. The purpose, Willick argues is to “disrupt the common passivity of traditional art viewing in order to expose repressed aspects of everyday life… (23).” I feel like this active engagement with the viewer is more direct than a Judd or Morris work, therefore that theatricality is stronger in the installation style work of Kienholz than the objecthood work of Judd or Morris.