Anthropomorphism, Art and Objecthood

(Not Original)

Michael Fried observed:

“[A] kind of latent or hidden naturalism, indeed anthropomorphism, lies at the core of literalist theory and practice," and "We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace." -M. Fried, Art and Objecthood.

As an observer/viewer, I inevitably relate to and see objects in figural terms or see figural relationships in objects, even where effort has been made to deny the figure/relation to the figure; that is, to only mark and see the dot or line or plane.
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Other notes to think about from Art and Objecthood:

Continuum of Illusion and Literalness?

• Relational character of almost all painting & inescapable pictorial illusion
  

• “[W]orking on a single plane in favor or three dimensions... automatically ‘gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around mark and colors ... The several limits of painting are no longer present... Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.’”

The whole as a single object, even if comprised of units?

• Literalists “are opposed to sculpture that, like most painting, is ‘made part by part, by addition, composed’ and in which ‘specific elements ... separate from the whole, this setting up relationships within the work.’” (quoting Judd)

• “Judd and Morris assert the value of wholeness, singleness, and indivisibility -- of a work’s being, as nearly as possible, ‘one thing,’ a ‘Specific Object” => Morris through a strong gestalt or unitary type form to avoid divisiveness and Judd via wholeness through repetition of identical units. (The whole as a single object?)
  

• Characterizes “Shape” as controlling and central to Judd and Morris’s Minimal Art: “The shape is the object: at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape.”

Painting/Pictorial and Object perception as in opposition?

• “What is at stake in this conflict is whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or as objects: and what decides the identity as painting is their confronting of the demand that they hold as shapes. Otherwise they are experienced as nothing more than objects. This can be summed up by saying that modernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood and that the crucial factor in this undertaking is shape, but shape that must belong to painting -- it must be pictorial, not, or not merely, literal.” In contrast, “literalist art stakes everything on shape as a given property of objects, if not, indeed as a kind of object in its own right. It aspires... to discover and project objecthood as such.”

• “Whereas in previous art, ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it]’, the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation -- one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder...” (quoting Morris)