Perception As Grounds Of Aesthetic Experience example essay topic

Well, Frieds book is nothing if not brave. In its embrace of an affirmative aesthetics it recalls Hans Robert Jauss epochal Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (1977). In that book, a polemic against Theodor Adorns aesthetics of negativity, Jauss rehabilitated empathic identification, and the pleasure of an enhanced, de conceptualized perception, as grounds of aesthetic experience. In the same spirit Fried beats back any possible Marxist censure of Menzels bad materialism. He summarizes, and then dismisses as inapplicable to Menzel, the warnings of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who saw the appurtenances of bourgeois life as untrustworthy phantasmagoria and empathy as a modality of commodity fetishism. At one point Fried concedes that Menzels images might possibly register a modernist disenchantment with modernity, here following Benjamin and T.J. Clark, who brought in Menzel on the very first page of his recent magnum opus, Farewell to an Idea (1999).

But Fried immediately retracts this and credits Menzel instead with re-magicking the world by saturating it with his projected bodily self. With his phenomenological aesthetics Fried runs into a real problem, one that Jauss himself acknowledged: How is one to differentiate finally between aesthetic experience and ordinary experience? After all, we project our bodily sensations onto other people and things all the time, all day long, often to powerful effect. What, then, is the work of art other than a mere intensification of sensuousness, as Vischer put it? (Graham 57) I prefer to think of the artwork working against experience and perception, and to think of Menzel not as a realist- as Nietzsche pointed out, all artists imagine they are realists- but as a very late rococo painter.

The connection to rococo discloses the true figural themes of all of Menzels works: entropy, anamorphosis, arabesque. The anachronisms and the wit, the boiling painterly confusions, the indifference to green nature, all these themes were mobilized by the historical rococo, just as they were by Menzel, against myth, transcendence, and the academy's iron conventions of spatial illusion and composition. There is excellent recent writing (by Werner Busch, Werner Hofmann, and Francoise Foster-Hann, among others) that is highly sensitive to fragmentation, complication, irony, and indeterminacy in Menzels work, themes that Fried keeps at arms length. Certainly the affirmative embodiment effect that Fried prefers was one of the tools in Menzels kit. But it was not enough, for in the end the art work can never connect. Fried actually shows this himself in his sensational account of the great Iron Rolling Mill, 1872-75, a mighty industrial tableau.

At the center, a team of workers forces an indecipherable white-hot rod, an anamorphic blur, into the maw of a laminating cylinder. The metal attracts the eye by confounding it. Human strength meets machine, and the eye bears down on paint, with unresolvable torque. It is an experience. Thereafter from the conceptual standpoint we may conclude that Michael Fried was indeed a very concerned person as soon as it goes to arts.

He was supporting the assumption that duration is very important in arts because of its direct relation to the completed works of art and their message to the target audience. The artist supports his assumption by the arguments that were presented in his works, which show a direct pass to the understanding the significance of duration. Time is a very valuable notion as well as space for people engaged in art creations. Thus duration as one of the concepts of art gives light to the artworks and makes it more enriched with a sense of beauty.

Bibliography

Michael Fried, Menzels Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, in Art and Objecthood, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998 Will F inly, Michael Frieds Art, From Ontario Statesman, Issue: January 1987 Joe Graham, On Painting, New York: Viking Press, 1984.