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MICHAEL FRIED Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin - Book Review
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2004 by Stephen Melville
None of this is to say that Menzel's Realism is simply without relation either to Fried's criticism of the 1960s or to the view of modernism staked there and further elaborated in the French trilogy, but it certainly does mean that the book opens a significantly different grasp of these things--one that is less narrative but very possibly more deeply historical. It is perhaps symptomatic in this regard that Fried chooses to introduce certain crucial Cavellian notions about the everyday from the rather surprising angle of a very short and somewhat marginal essay, "The Ordinary as the Uneventful," in which Stanley Cavell attempts to bring his own terms to bear on Paul Ricoeur's critique of what the latter takes to be the Annales school refusal of event and narrative. (2)
Like the Courbet book and, even more explicitly, the study of Manet, Menzel's Realism develops significant aspects of both its structure and voice as imitations or prolongations of its object. In particular, Menzel's fifteen chapters and coda strongly invite one to imagine their sequence as a form of the "brickwork" that the coda takes as its title, that the book itself takes as its half-title emblem, and that Fried argues in a pivotal chapter to be both an object of central interest to Menzel and a major figure for his enterprise (the title of this central chapter can seem itself to mime the placing of one brick after another: "Time and the Everyday; Menzel and Kierkegaard's Either/Or, with a Postscript on Fontane's Effi Briest"). In an exceptionally long note, Fried recognizes that his appeal to "the repetitive, ongoing, temporally extensive operation of bricklaying may remind some readers of ... the Minimalist or literalist art of the 1960s" (Fried cites in particular Carl Andre's 1966 brick piece Lever). The note goes on to assert a distinction between the extensive time Fried finds in Menzel and the theatricalization of duration he continues to find defining of Minimalism (and it then opens, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, into a discussion of Hanne Darboven's work as inviting comparison with Menzel's "in a different, more nearly positive spirit," pp. 283-86). This may, of course, appear to be nothing more than a simple confirmation of Fried's well-known relegation of Minimalism to theatricality and duration in "Art and Objecthood," (3) but one should be surprised that what had appeared in that essay as a contrast between a gracelike "presentness" and the mere duration of "presence" should now appear as a contrast between two modes of temporal extendedness. Seeing this, one will see also that Soren Kierkegaard has come in some way to hold down the place seemingly once held by Jonathan Edwards. And one may equally find oneself tempted to see in the drawing Old Documents in a Chest, which opens and motivates much of the appeal to Either/Or, not only an extraordinary summary of much of what Fried shows to be Menzel's art but also an extraordinary capacity to evoke, as if in dreamerly condensation, something of the stakes in passage from Jackson Pollock's allover defeat of drawing through the ambiguity of Frank Stella's Black Paintings to the hollowness of Tony Smith's Die, not to mention the shadowing or haunting of the "opticality" that seemed to dominate that earlier moment's narrating by a "writing" whose measure we are perhaps still taking. Given these intuitions, one will finally not be terribly surprised to find that the chapter includes what is perhaps Fried's most sustained engagement with the writings of Stanley Cavell since the early conversations that so clearly informed his criticism in the 1960s. Surely I cannot be the only one so inclined over these pages.
