On Fried's talk

Sitting at the lecture I was pondering Michael Fried’s discussion and it’s relevance to contemporary representational painting, and found that this was going to be another experience, like most lectures I attend, to take in as an experience, and an addition to my mental art history dictionary.

The video by Anri Sala, titled "Long Sorrow," was a perfect example of the experience part, which is what I think Fried was getting at in his talk. So, here I am with four friends, with interest invested in this talk, and a small auditorium of complete strangers, as Fried presents a brief overview of his earlier work, then shows Sala’s video.

The first scene in the video shows the interior space of an empty white room, from the vantage point of the middle of one wall looking out a window in the center of the opposite side, with a radiator under it, with something propping up a hinged window. There is a saxophone playing. Whatever is propping up the window is placed a little to the right of the middle of the window creating asymmetry in a symmetrical composition.

The saxophone is playing and I am staring, and having an experience. At this point I am not fully invested in the movie. The strangers are around me, and I am intrigued, confused, and aware of myself trying to be aware.

The camera slowly moves towards the window.

I am uncomfortable at this point because I am becoming part of the scene and subconsciously I don’t know if I want to be. As the camera draws nearer the window it is becoming very obvious that what is propping up the window is the head of someone playing the saxophone we are hearing. This moment is the switch from an abstract image to the conveyance of some form of narrative, but I just want the image. As the video plays on it remains very abstracted, and presence, or “presentness” as Fried calls it, is always there. There is a need though. At the very moment of my engagement I am in dialog with the director (Artist), trying to show me, where everywhere else in the video I am looking. This, and the on the spot question from Professor Raysnford after on how I liked it, followed by a sparatic answer from myself, made me rethink my experiences in general. I look, watch, listen, answer, etc. and this moment of "presentness" is everywhere, and the video, Fried’s talk, Raynsford’s question, and my paintings are all an image of "presentness."

The exterior shot of the window further on in the video shows the saxophone player cropped out of the lower left corner of the picture plane, overlapping the offset window, which is framed beautifully by the exterior of the building, and small vertical abstraction to the right of the view beyond the building. There is a relationship to this aesthetic that I think is the “presentness” we all relate to, and is Fried’s topic for discussion. These moments we grasp to, that encode our existence, which we usually take for granted, is what experience, or language is all about.

I am sitting, typing now, and as I am thinking of what else to say, and about how I need to go back again and reread Art and Objecthood, I look out the aluminum framed, old, open sliding glass door of my parent’s house. The sound of traffic from the near highway hums, and framed in the bottom of the door, cut off to the right side, is my dog sleeping on his side. Breaking the plane of the window, he also overlaps the table and chair behind him, which is framed by the darkness of the shadow further away. I look for a split second more. I laughed, and turned to write this, and looked back for that experience, and the dog walked inside.