The Materiality of the Artwork

Even if Theodor W. Adorno and Michael Fried belong to different generations and intellectual contexts — Adorno, exercised a decisive influence on a politically oriented writing on art, while Fried has been heavily attacked by a critical art history for his adherence to modernism — there is an interesting relationship between Fried’s central postulate that art needs to transcend its factual objecthood and Adorno’s analysis of the thinghood (Dinghaftigkeit) of the artwork in the modern world. (27) From different perspectives, both reflect the modern claim to art’s autonomy and the resulting tensions, from which the artwork cannot escape. “The perennial revolt of art against art has its fundamentum in re,” (28) Adorno writes in the Aesthetic Theory that he was working on in the 1960s around the same time that Fried published Art and Objecthood.

In Adorno’s view, the thinghood of the artwork is inevitable, and at the same time it is that which art must always turn against.

“If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an impotently powerless impulse and flounder in the empirical world.” (29)

Without a doubt there are essential differences between Adorno’s concept of the thinghood of art and the mere objecthood that Fried ascribes to the objects of Minimal Art. Nonetheless the polarities that Adorno assesses — the artwork as mere “thing” and the dissolution of its thinghood in the “subjective impulse” — parallels Fried’s claim of the literal objecthood of Minimal Art and its unsubstantial, theatrical effects. Fried suggests the existence of a higher plane on which the antagonism between the artistic and the object character can be transcended in the work itself even if only for rare and short moments; as he writes in Art and Objecthood, “presentness is grace.” (30) For Adorno this transcendence of objecthood can occur only in negativity. To succeed in being art, art must turn against itself, against its own thinghood, and negotiate this antagonism in its form.

“What appears in artworks and is neither to be separated from their appearance nor to be held simply identical with it – the nonfactual in their facticity – is their spirit. It makes artworks, things among things, something other than thing. Indeed, artworks are only able to become other than thing be becoming a thing, though not through their localization in space and time but only by an immanent process of reification that makes them self-same, self-identical.” (31)

According to Adorno, the integrity of an artwork lies in its constant aspiration to resist the inevitable process of its own reification. Adorno’s reflections on the objecthood of art stem from a Marxist theory of reification. Therein lies an essential difference to the literal objecthood of which Fried speaks. Adorno situates the structural tensions within a larger cultural and societal process of reification to which the artwork is subject. Both the appearance of an artwork as well as its perception is decisively determined by reification. “Only a philistine and stubborn faith in artists could overlook the complicity of the artwork’s thing-character with social reification and thus with its untruth: the fetishization of what is in itself a process as relation between elements.” (32) Adorno is not concerned with the property of the artwork as a physical object, but rather with the societal process that allows it to emerge and makes it perceivable as an artwork, a process through which it is constituted as a commodity. The only artwork in Adorno’s view that can satisfy is the one whose individual moments of sensuous particularity are not related to each other in a unifying manner and thus never become a whole. ”This objectivity grants entry exclusively to the membradisjecta (orig.) of the world of objects, which only in a state of decomposition becomes commensurable to the law of form.” (33) It is not surprising that Adorno finds his examples for this idea of a consequent negation of thinghood predominantly in theater (Beckett) and music – which is, according to Beckett, the “most immaterial of the arts”— as it is difficult for visual art to satisfy the claim of a consistent and sustainable negation of thinghood. Art cannot exit this context of the material object and its commodity status. In every artwork something is materialized and it is only then that it becomes an artwork, but thereby it is also structurally a thing and thus available to the commodity form.

The critique of the object status of the artwork is one of the central themes of art in the 20th century. It reappears periodically, but it becomes especially virulent in the late 1960s and 1970s with Fluxus, Performance and Conceptual Art. What are the defining features of this critique? What was achieved, and what made these new art forms fail? The Happening and Fluxus events of the early 1960s tried to replace the object with the processual; Performance Art utilized the body of the artist as material and signifier instead of the object. Conceptual Art, however, carried out the critique of the object within the object itself and thereby led to lasting changes — but also to unresolved contradictions in the critique of the object status of the artwork.