Michael Fried - Absorption and Theatricality

Absorption and Theatricality

In "Art and Objecthood" Fried criticised the "theatricality" of Minimalist art. He introduced the opposing term "absorption" in his 1980 book, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Drawing on Diderot's criticism, Fried argues that whenever a self-consciousness of viewing exists, absorption is compromised, and theatricality results. As well as applying the distinction to 18th century painting, Fried employs related categories in his art criticism of post-1945 American painting and sculpture. Fried rejects the effort by some critics to conflate his art-critical and art-historical writing.

Stephen Melville follows Fried in suggesting that theatricality has been construed as a threat to the autonomy of art; he also argues that Fried's analysis is limited by accepting on its own terms the response of art to this threat. Like Fried, Melville contends that theatricality is an ontological character of art that can be temporarily neutralized but never denied and that absorption is itself a particular mode of theater. Martin Puchner holds that Fried's distinction rests on a Modernist resistance to interference from the public sphere and a defence of the artist's control over the external circumstances of reception.

Fried revisits some of these concerns in a study of recent photography with Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (London and New Haven 2008). In a reading of works by prominent art photographers of the last 20 years (Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand among others) Fried asserts that concerns of anti-theatricality and absorption are central to the turn by recent photographers towards large-scale works "for the wall.".