space

Michael Fried’s “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans” meticulously dissects Courbet’s masterwork. Fried’s argument focuses on two specific perspectives, that of the Beholder and Painter-beholder, which ultimately merge into a unique perspective that challenges, pushes, and pulls viewers from the painting.

I agree with Courbet’s critique of the painting as a complex work that serves to contradict the theatrics of baroque illusionist techniques. He believes that the works of painters like Caravaggio, who instead of “absorbing” viewers like Courbet’s masterworks, project the image out to the viewer using “dramatic chiaroscuro and extreme foreshortening and crucially involving elements in the immediate vicinity of the picture plane, by which the painter aimed to call into question, one might say to dissolve, the boundary between the space or “world” of the representation and that of the beholder, and by so doing to enforce the suggestion that both are equally actual, equally present to our astounded senses”.





Fried goes on to say that this technique allows for “illusion(s) free reign” which is substandard to the “absolute proximity” of Courbet’s specific painting techniques which are said to absorb the viewer.

I disagree with this statement on the grounds that this supposed “free reign” which Fried associates with Baroque painting style as a weakness. It gives the viewer what I believe to be a unique point of view by allowing the spectator gaze to be influenced by subjective nuances that ultimately absorb the viewer in different ways then Courbet’s “Burial”. This is further driven by Fried’s specific usages of “Beholder” and “Painter-Beholder” which seems to attribute these perspectives to almost objective like qualifications that force and limits the viewers from seeing beyond Courbet’s specific intentions. To Fried, the Beholder is a universal objective vantage point from which one sees, and I think that this is a major gaffe within Fried’s argument that limits the true subjective power of illusion within the pictorial arts to convey empathy.

This ultimately brings me to contemporary culture, with the recent influx of stereoscopic films that portray similar, although technically, and ontologically distinct, tactics of theatrically, which Fried used to describe Caravaggio’s “Baroque illusions”.

I recently watched one of these film’s with a similar skepticism of Courbet. I believed that these types of theatrical projections do nothing to extend empathetic reactions from the viewers gaze. This could be said of past 3D features such as “Captain Eo”, which fixates on projecting objects out of the plane such as spaceships and explosions, ultimately jarring and disconnecting the viewer from the screen.



I was surprised to find myself emphatically engaged with this form of stereoscopic illusions as found within "Coraline", as I found that images where not in fact projected out as a curiosity, but the space was carved out to create depth backwards. I would argue that these new stereoscopic films convey empathy in different ways then traditional film, not necessarily for the better or worse because the feeling of depth and new planes within the space of these films provide a more democratic plane from which the spectators gaze can make their decisions of what to view, increasing subjectivity and ultimately strengthens emphatic responses. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus works the same for me.