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Unlike the genres profiled in chapters 1 and 2, other forms of electronic music treat sound not as a sign but as an object, an entity with no preexisting semantic content. chapter 3 looks at the minimal objects in microsound, a form of electronic music that utilizes brief, usually quiet particles of sound. Microsound artists exhibit surprising consistency in their search for sounds that are supposedly expressionless. The chapter connects this predilection to a similar desire among minimalist visual artists of the 1960s for “objecthood,” Michael Fried’s term characterizing sculpture that appropriates discrete objects for their physical rather than referential attributes.

This introduction defines key terms—air, framing, incorporation—to contextualize the debates about meaning, autonomy, and politics that structure the book, while also setting out a map of its chapters, complete with brief summaries. The chapter recounts how painterly discussions of collage enabled writers to think about the text’s frame as either excluding or including particulars of the reader’s world. Through pointed discussions of Wallace Stevens, Marcel Duchamp, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Michael Fried, we examine this new conception of aesthetic autonomy. The reader’s or viewer’s relation to the art object became a way to envision the political subject’s ideal relation to liberalism and the discourse of individual rights. In addition, this chapter incorporates discussions of theoretical texts by T. S. Eliot, Theodor Adorno, Peter Bürger, and others to distinguish the book’s account of modernism from canonical accounts that focus on post-structuralism and ideology critique.

The second chapter elaborates further on Fried's theory and its negative reception and provides a critical overview of Fried's controversial theory and its ideological ramifications by questioning Fried's high-modernist narrative about the viewing experience of visual art, as either a pure optical experience or as a strong gestalt. The chapter critically examines Fried's binarism between modernist presentness and minimalism's real time by arguing against Fried's claim that the worst aspect of minimalism is the manifestation of unlimited durationality.

The first chapter charts a chronological parallel between Samuel Beckett’s piece Breath (1969), as a representative piece of minimalism in the theatre (one of the shortest stage pieces ever written and staged), and Fried’s writing in 1967 of “Art and Objecthood” in an attempt to formulate a basic framework for thinking about the intersection of critical discourses on theatricality in the visual arts and the theatre, specifically about the notion of anti-theatricalism in the theatre and the modernist anti-theatrical impulse in the visual arts. The chapter demonstrates these claims by juxtaposing Michael Fried's polemics of theatricality and Beckett's anti-theatrical strategies. Samuel Beckett is a playwright who attempted to formulate an art theory and Michael Fried is perceived as a modernist art critic, who has written about the theatre and has criticized theatricality. The focus of this chapter is on how the “Three Dialogues” can be applied to a work like Breath, so as to illuminate specific aspects of the playlet, principally, Beckett's decision to eradicate the text and the human figure, hence, the interest lies in the ways that Beckettian aesthetics translates into practice.

What Michael Fried describes as the absorptive tradition in modern art privileges the artist’s refusal to perform for the beholder, a tradition that is radicalized in the mid-twentieth century by the identification of the artist’s intended meaning as his or her effort to affect the reader, and, thus, as a kind of performance. At the same time, however, the actual effect of repudiating authorial intention is to make the reader the source of meaning, thus turning the effort to avoid the theatrical into an expression of pure theatricality. This chapter argues that this current theoretical orthodoxy also entails a commitment to a certain political orthodoxy––as exemplified in Jacques Rancière’s simultaneous commitment to the aesthetic irrelevance of the artist’s intention and to the political importance of the ways in which we see works of art and each other, especially the way we either respect or fail to respect each other. It ends by showing the emergence in Binschtok’s work of an aesthetics not of visibility but of invisibility.

This section introduces a critical framework that discusses the interplay and interconnectedness of media and the dynamic tension between theatricality and the visual arts in the spectrum of Beckett's Breath (1969). Argumentation builds upon the investigation of Fried's seminal theory “Art and Objecthood,” (1967) and Beckett's aesthetic theory in the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”(1949); both discourses are considered in relation to disciplinary or medial entanglements.

In “Objectionable Objects,” Douglas Mao asks what we can learn from modernist encounters with objects, or aspects of the object world, that inspire negative emotions. Focusing on a chapter in Wyndham Lewis’s 1932 novel Snooty Baronet, a pair of scenes in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée of 1938, and Michael Fried’s seminal 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” Mao observes that all three stage an opposition between the work of art or artist and mere objects—and that in all three cases, the former proves to be associated with the figure of the highly individuated, self-possessed, and coolly independent aristocrat while the latter, clamoring for the viewer to bestow significance upon them, evoke the needy masses, the importunate mob. This correlation makes a kind of sense: in a world where there is a distinction between hereditary aristocrats and other people, aristocrats have a claim to significance simply by being who they are, just as in a world where there is such a thing as art, works of art claim significance in their very existence, apart from productivity or use. But what, then, of the existential horror implied by a world of mostly meaningless things—the anxiety generated by mere objects?

This analysis of two of Jeff Wall's most important early photographic transparencies highlights the fact that his subject matter can be understood as a male artist's control of what is imagined as female-gendered physical and theoretical space. The initiation and subsequent extension of this operation in European and American critical discourse about his work is discussed in relationship to anthropological research on settler colonial societies’ territorial conflicts; specifically settlers’ need to develop cultural narratives that rationalize their control over other populations within a given geographic area. Such an approach contrasts with the prevailing commentaries by other critics, some of which are discussed at length (Donald Kuspit, Arielle Pélenc, Kaja Silverman and Michael Fried). These critics’ analyses of Wall’s work downplay or ignore the feminist subject matter in the work in favour of discussing the images' relationship to the avant-garde potential of technical reproduction or to the history of modern painting.

Chapter 4 focuses on Modernist discipline as a mechanism by which authorship is mediated. Discipline is addressed on two fronts in this chapter, first as a Modernist doctrine articulated by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried in their promotion of disciplinary imperatives such as medium specificity, historicism, and self-critique. This singular understanding of Modernist discipline is challenged by also considering its status as practice. Looking at the hard-edge, post-painterly abstractions of Kenneth Noland, a close up analysis of how doctrine unfolds in and as practice is offered. Working against the strong tendency in art history to view discipline in Modernist painting through a Foucauldian lens of “coercion,” the chapter argues that, viewed as a pictorial practice as opposed to a critical doctrine, discipline can be seen to have provided painters such as Noland with the means by which to investigate the parameters of authorship and the self it entails. Noland’s submission to the dictates of discipline is further shown to be continuous with his commitment to the psychotherapeutic practices of Wilhelm Reich. This chapter makes a strong argument for the necessity of attending to the personal relations that are embedded in the disciplinary formation of individual authors

Chapter 5 analyzes literalism in its relation to authorial presence via a study of Sam Gilliam’s stained and folded paintings of the 1960s. In 1967, Gilliam, the youngest member of the Washington Color School, moved away from the hard-edge, serial abstraction of his early career and began to work loosely and expressionistically with poured paint, often folding the surfaces of his paintings while still wet. This was the start of a career-long inquiry into the relationship between pictorial and literal space. This chapter analyzes Gilliam’s understudied interest in pictorial literalism in the context of Fried’s well-known critique of the same. Histories of literalism generally focus on the role of the viewer in relation to minimalist form. Here, literal space is considered instead in relation to Gilliam’s status as an author. His folded and draped paintings figure the literal not simply as a generalized mode of embodiment (as it is in minimalism), but also as a social and political space within which particular identities are given form. The specificity of experience that the literal opens onto mattered to Gilliam as a black artist who questioned how his paintings should be understood in relation to both late-Modernism and the Black Arts Movement.

“Temporality and Ideology” considers the timeless mode of temporality cultivated in many cultural forms in seventeenth-century France, but with a special focus on the keyboard music of Jean-Henry D'Anglebert. It begins with the problems performers face when addressing this repertory, which often seems not to make sense when compared to more familiar “French” dances of Bach. Working from within the music itself, the chapter advocates that performers adopt a quite different quality of attention, similar to what art historian Michael Fried calls “absorption.” It then proceeds to find evidence of this quality in seventeenth-century sources such as theology, philosophy, art, and literature.

This chapter gives a close reading of HBO’s The Wire, arguing that the show powerfully engages with themes of absorption and theatricality (as these are understood in the work of art historian Michael Fried and philosopher Stanley Cavell), and thereby connects to issues in modernism (as they descend from painting, photography, and film). Such a preoccupation appears in the certain key scenes in The Wire, where the camera acknowledges the viewer and thereby meditates implicitly on the viewer’s absorption. Alongside this story, the chapter shows how these aesthetic themes are, in The Wire, bound up with its political aspirations, which are (1) to present a picture of the suffering that Baltimore—and by extension all US cities—undergo due to the effects of late capitalism, and (2) to meditate on what it means to acknowledge such suffering. In this way, the chapter also develops a notion of ‘tragic reconciliation’ and argues that The Wire employs this automatism throughout exactly through and because of its aesthetic ambitions. The chapter concludes by introducing—finally, now in detail—the notion of new television, arguing that The Wire participates in this genre.

Chapter 1 ("Thinking with the Heart: Sirk and Pictorial Reception) analyses some of the still moments that have been built into many of this director's most arresting cinematic tableaux in relation to three different models of pictorial reception (two contributed by Michael Fried, one by the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl). Evans's discussion of Fried's divergent notions of "absorption" and "theatricality" (the two ways in which a contemporary painting may address its beholder, according to the American critic) and Riegl's more complex conception of the possibility of attaininga state of "sympathetic attention" isused to elucidate a crucial scene in Sirk's 1953 film All I Desire, before being correlated with current research on the film spectator's "affective" response to melodrama to some degree.

This chapter produces an initial discussion of photography and how the viewer’s gaze is constructed by photographic images of war ruins that are more than seventy years old. It considers several specific photographs in the book, and texts on photography by such writers as Michael Fried, Walter Benjamin, Stanley Cavell, Ariella Azoulay, and Roland Barthes. The chapter also considers the haunting knowledge of the dead lying beneath the ruins, and of the victims of the Holocaust. The chapter ends with the questions of what is “undeserved suffering” and whether humanitarianism is determined by victimization.

Boyce begins with the familiar thought that literary art that enters the condition of modernism also enters the condition of philosophy in the sense that what literature is becomes a necessary subject for literature itself. It is perhaps a less familiar thought, she suggests, that philosophical investigations that enter the condition of modernism also enters the condition of art—in the sense that the form of judgment at stake in philosophical work is more aesthetic than theoretical. Yet it is precisely such a turn, Boyce argues, that Wittgenstein’s philosophical project and some paradigmatic modernist works, both literary and philosophical, make explicit: the investigation of what literature (or philosophy) is takes the form of investigating what aesthetic judgment is. Boyce reads Henry James’s The Sacred Font as a taxonomy of ways in which candidates for aesthetic judgment can fail: by seeking to transfer to others one’s own responsibility for one’s feelings, for example, or by failing to reveal one’s vulnerability to and powerlessness to compel another’s response.

Demand’s practice of photographing three-dimensional models of photographic documents is supposedly aimed at subverting notions of photographic indexicality and automaticity. Michael Fried, for instance, views Demand’s elaborate procedure as a way of distancing the image from any referent. The artist’s paper constructions guarantee that every aspect of the photograph is through and through intentional and this, in turn, ensures its status as art. The counter argument proposed in this chapter attempts to explain why the vast majority of Demand’s photographs concern some traumatic historical event or site. It is suggested that his work explores how technology, including mass media coverage of atrocities, has invisibly impinged on us, damaging our capacity for authentic experience and memory. The argument takes up Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” for an account of contemporary art practices which aim to produce experience retrospectively under today’s social conditions.

The introduction sets forth the double aim of the book: to present the different kinds of letters and postal systems available in Dürer’s time, and to propose a way of thinking about the communicative efficacy of his works of art. The selection of Dürer as the protagonist of this narrative is explained by the survival rate of his correspondences as well as his tendency to include text within the images he made and to write upon those he collected.

This chapter argues that Cavell’s treatise on film is a highly organized and systematic treatment of the cinema. After setting out the structure of Cavell’s book at length, the chapter critically assesses the book’s key conclusions.

The chief heuristic of Situated Listening is what art historian Michael Fried calls the primacy of the “single dramatic imperative.” Such a heuristic entails a focus on dramatic situations on the one hand and the construction of an unmarked, absorbed spectator on the other. This is to allow the emergence of the characters as situated listeners that are the main subject of this book. Absorbed spectators are themselves situated. In committing their attention to a fiction film, they take part in a socially sanctioned game of make-believe. The appreciation of the particular qualities of a character’s listening experience is contingent on their performance as spectators. Their situatedness is shared with others whom the representation summons as a collective before an ideally joint effort. The experience and subsequently interpretation of films are in this respect examples of collective intentionality.