Fried, Michael “Art and Objecthood” Artforum, vol. V no. 10, June 1967, pp12-23.

Written in 1967 Michael Fried's Art and Objecthood proclaimed that the new emerging art movement of Minimalism was a plea for a new genre of theatre which threatened to negate art. That the work wasn't concerned with art itself but with the circumstances under which it was beheld by the spectator. He suggests the survival of the arts (as he valued them) had come “increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre”(21).

  Obviously Fried's fears were largely ignored- Minimalism continued to 'perform' and artists have continued to make art but I find the piece compelling in a historical sense. It seems by identifying this newly emerging mode of art presentation/ viewership he unwittingly, despite being opposed to it, played a part in establishing a theoretical discourse for the ideas to firmly embed themselves in future activities. The idea that an artwork can conspire with its audience and its environment to be understood and/ or experienced as opposed to existing entirely on its own plane has become well and truly absorbed into main stream contemporary art- most obviously installation.

  In thinking of how artworks now so commonly operate in this way  I remembered my first visit to the Turbine hall of the Tate Modern. In its architectural makeover from power-station to contemporary art museum, the enormous hall has been reserved entirely as an installation space to exhibit year- long site specific works on a massive scale, acting as a kind of theatre. When I visited Olaf Elliasson's Weather Project was installed. The only light emitted in the hall was generated by a huge half sun on the far wall with its other half  reflected in the the mirrored ceiling. After a few moments of adjusting to the light and taking in the sight I looked down to see that the floor was covered in people lying down gazing up at their own reflections bathed in the strange yellow glow, 'experiencing' the art - Playing subject to its performance.

  The piece strikes me as an almost painfully ironic example of everything Fried despised and believed to threaten in the arts, functioning in the arts- Not only its theatricality but its size, emphasis on nature, the mirrored ceiling acting to make the audience aware of their own presence, its dependence on its environment to function and its temporality. And to add insult to Frieds injury, played out in one of western arts most influential contemporary art museums.

Fried, Michael “Art and Objecthood” Artforum, vol. V no. 10, June 1967, pp12-23.

Groys, Boris “The Topology of Contemporary Art”,  Antinomies of Art and Culture, USA:Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 71- 80.

Chris Kraus- "Cast Away", Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness.

Kraus, Chris. “Cast Away”, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, New York: Semiotext (e), 2004, pp.145- 150

When Chris Kraus describes the story of a student of a high-profile graduate programme who flees the seminar room and subsequently quits her course due to her advisor criticizing her work as 'too sentimental' and likening it to a Hallmark greeting card she writes, rather cynically, that “it never dawned on her [the student] that anything is permissible in the contemporary art world as long as it is pedigreed, substantiated, referentialized”(147). In stating this, she, an educator of such courses herself, openly acknowledges that a student studying by the typical art school model today can present almost anything as long as she is equipped with the 'right' contemporary art ideological lingo. Concurrently, only 'anything' will be acceptable and deemed valid by the institution if it is dressed up in such a way.

   This raises interesting questions about contemporary art education which generally, as described here, places critical attitude hierarchically foremost over attention to other aspects or modes of teaching. If little else is yet clearly defined about what post-modernism is, we do know by it's very nature of continually seeking self-definition that it is characteristically inward looking and self theorising. Developing theoretical critique around practice is obviously a necessary tool for making and talking about art in such a climate. But does placing it as the dominant educational model for evaluating practice and thus marginalizing attention to other ways of making and talking about art such as technique or materiality necessarily equip students for making art in an art world where, just as Kraus states, anything is permissible? And further, does it merely train artists in an ideological gamesmanship necessary to evaluate and validate almost anything whilst leaving them with a very limited skill base or ability to think about or make art outside of this inherent language?

   These are enormous questions and part of the problem that not even De Duve In his analysis of contemporary art school education, When Form has Become Attitude - and Beyond, can claim to be able to answer ( 31). But I agree with his suggestion that the current model which he describes as the triad of notions 'attitude-practice-deconstruction' ( 26) is problematic. That it is less a newly devised doctrine for attempting to educate in the art climate now, but a postulate which has evolved out of a subversion of its predecessors values -- he states “a mere after-image, as the negative symptom of a historical transition who's positivity is not clear yet” ( 31). It looks neither forward nor back but deconstructs itself and tends inevitably to place suspicion against those it has followed, namely the materiality/invention of the modernists, the technique/imitation of the academy. As a perspective for education I believe it tends to stand to limit the credibility of other ways to teach, think, learn and make art in a contemporary art world where there are, it seems, limitless ways to make art and ways to be an artist.

De Duve, Thierry. “When Form Has Become Attitude- And Beyond” (1994), Theory in Contemporary Art since 1945, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 19-31

Kraus, Chris. “Cast Away”, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, New York: Semiotext (e), 2004, pp.145- 150

Rakoff, David. “An Interview with the Artist David Fischl”. newyorkartworld.com, Oct 27 2002. Web. 2 April. 2011