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Embodiment takes us back to the very start of Fried's critical path. In his recent essay An Introduction to My Art Criticism Fried says that Anthony Caros sculptures made him feel that he was about to levitate or burst into blossom and that the phenom enologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided philosophical sanction for taking those feelings seriously. Phenomenology licensed Fried to hold up subjective experience as an authoritative ground and origin for art. The lived body- first Menzel's, then the beholders- becomes for Fried the source... of primordial intentionality. Menzel's realism, for Fried, is solipsism, no more, no less: All you can count on, in the end, are modalities of the self. (Graham 156) Art-historical scholarship in a wide range of fields has come to share many of Fried's preoccupations.
His Menzel book resonates, for example, with recent work on medieval devotional art, such as Jeffrey F. Hamburgers The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (1998), which casts the affective icon, with its often graphic appeal to somatic experience, as a challenge to a discursively or theologically constructed divinity. There is also important new scholarly writing on embodiment and nineteenth-century art: I will mention only Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (2000), Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812 - 1824 (2001), and above all two powerful books by Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (1999). Fried pitches directly into a debate with Crary about embodied vision.
Crary says that the autoionization of vision and the concomitant regulation of the spectator were contrivances designed to deactivate the truth, newly recognized in the nineteenth century, of embodied vision. Fried dislikes the paranoia of this and argues instead that the embodied ness of seeing was not suppressed but rather widely embraced in Menzel's day and was indeed central to art making. He points in particular to the empathy theorists Vischer and Wolfflin and to the work of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, contending that Crary unfairly dismisses Helmholtz as a normalizing figure who conceals the reality of the ongoing autoionization project (which is also what Crary would say about Menzel, Fried predicts). This difference is not going to be resolved by more historical research, or by alignments between painters and theories of vision. For Crary's ultimate question is historical and political: How did ideas about the embodied does or autonomy of vision figure in the production of the modern subject?
Whereas Fried's question is philosophical: Does aesthetic embodiment provide any privileged access to the ground of being? (Graham 17) To pursue Fried's question we may need to get beyond the authority of Merleau-Ponty. Fried cheerfully ignores, because it is so familiar, Jacques Derridas crippling critique of phenomenology. Edmund Husserl argued that the present is given to us through intuition of bodily presences. Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, wondered whether certain works of art might not guide us toward such a radical reduction of experience. But phenom enologists, according to Derrida, forget that signs operate precisely by leaving the present behind and that therefore intuition can never be stabilized. In the early 1960 s Merleau-Ponty's thought posed a forceful challenge to all the rash rhetoric about optimality and pure visibility that swirled around modernist painting.
But phenomenology finds no traction today. (Graham 98)
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Research essay sample on Merleau Ponty Nineteenth Century Fried
