Category: language

KT – “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” And then James Baldwin says, “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense, but as a state of being, or a state of grace, not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

SJ- So amazing. You hear James Baldwin, the son of a preacher. And for him, that love that he always saw and grasped for and had hope in — that he called that grace. And what grace grasps is the thing that it’s not just a given. It really is a gift, and it has political force. It’s quest. It’s daring. It’s exploration. And James Baldwin reminds us that if we give up that hope, that quest in love, then we’ve lost.

On Being with Krista Tippett
Serene Jones
Grace in a Fractured World

Original Air Date
December 5, 2019

Presentness is grace.

Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 148-72. Originally published in Artforum 5 (June 1967): pp. 12-23.

“Michael Fried pushed the question of presence to the fore in his famous (perhaps infamous) essay “Art and Objecthood.”[2] Fried distinguishes between, on the one hand, the presentness of modernist art—art that defeats its own objecthood, that displays a conviction which avoids theatricality, that at every moment renews a claim upon the viewer; and, on the other, the presence of Minimalist, or what he called literalist, art—art that embraces (“hypostasizes”) its own objecthood, that is fundamentally theatrical, that includes the viewer in its situation and requires her for its completion.

[…] At the end of his essay, Fried seems to turn from creation to fall and the hint of redemption. He writes, “I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theater. We are all literalists most of our lives. Presentness is grace.”[5] I read Fried here as claiming that we live in a world where objects are usually present to us simply as objects, and that modernist art offers something extraordinary: an object becoming more than an object, carrying with it the presentness that comes to us as “grace.”

Natalie Carnes, Presence, Presentness, and Grace: Reflections on Art and Theology with Michael Fried and Marina Abramovic, transpositions.co.uk.

To avert one’s gaze from Piper is to refuse to hear the sound in her work of that quite specific objecthood that joins blackness and black performance. And the critique of Fried’s dismissal of objecthood and its complex, ambivalent grounding in Clement Greenberg’s in/famous assertion of the necessary optical purity of authentic modernist art is possible only by way of the exploration of that specifically black objecthood that it has been Piper’s project to inves-tigate. If, as Zora Neale Hurston suggests, the essence of the Negro is drama, theatricality, then perhaps this is how that theatricality works. (p.234)

Perhaps the real importance of the frame /support /boundary is that it divides the work from the milieu that defines and contains what Fried describes as our quotidian literalism. The parergon is, here, the condition of possibility of what Fried valorizes and hopes for: presentness as grace, presentness as opposed to presence. The literalist work /object is without or in denial of the parergon. The two relations to be thought, here, are lack and denial, parergon and milieu. (p.243)

Fred Moten, Resistance of the Object:Adrian Piper’s Theatricality, In the Break.