An Aside for Fraser and Sandback
a selection from On Sentence Fragmentation: A Lecture in Parts
In July I read in Iowa City at Porchlight Literary Center thanks to an invitation from the phenomenal poet and publisher Margaret Yapp (you can find more of her work here and here). Following from that reading I’ve reworked the essay/lecture I read there which is forthcoming from the digital publishing side of Prompt Press. This piece is also working toward a larger book tentatively titled Frankenstein, or The Function of Reason (both titles of previously existed books mushed together). So in anticipation of all of Prompt Press I’m publishing this small selection from the essay lecture, and look out for more pieces incoming in preparation for that larger book. I hope you enjoy, and if you’d like to read the essay to which I’m referring you can find it here.
There is an essay by Andrea Fraser that each time I remember it exists comes to me as if a revelation, and—with the understanding of a possible hyperbole on my part here—I do mean it in the, not necessarily divine or supernatural sense, but nevertheless as something of a disclosure about something relating to human existence or the world. I am myself skeptical of art more and more each day, especially as it pertains to its financialization—and according to recent work being done by Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Zun Lee its securitization.1 And yet, I still find discussions around art, especially of a critical nature, to be worthwhile. The essay I’m speaking of is titled Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry and funnily enough it speaks of him sparingly, or rather as sparingly and potently as his lines speak of the spaces they demarcate. These string sculpture demarcate space to be considered even as that space disappears. At its conception Fraser nearly put it on hold permanently. The title doubles as a note on the inciting incident which led to her thinking of the beginnings of the essay on a train ride home from the crying in question. But nearly simultaneously Fred Sandback committed suicide, and due to Fraser’s tangential relationship to the artist, felt it would be best to delay it indefinitely, Of course she didn’t thanks to the encouragement of Lynn Cooke. For this reason the essay is dedicated not to the man she did not know, but the work she did, which continues to live in all of its stark possibilities.
Fraser’s is a practice built out of institutional critique, a way of making art which challenges the core principles of its making. Art for her—and by extension herself as an artist—is an impossibility, and furthermore the violence that it enacts is what art is and does, namely:
There is a kind of violence against art and against culture that art is. It is there in the structure of art, in the structure of our field—just, perhaps, as aggression is there in the structure of our subjectivity. It is the violence of emptying the world of representation and function, communicative and material use, that is done when we insist on the primacy of form; it is the violence of separation we enact in all kinds of aesthetic distancing; it is the violence of splitting off shared culture and competence, cutting up shared language, that we perform in every narrowing dialogue with the history of our own field; it is the violence of the competitive struggles for differentiation, achievement, and recognition that so often drive our practices; and it is the violence of every intention to subvert, transgress, confront, challenge, critique, and negate.2
In Fraser we find all of the contradictions, complexities, impossibilities of art as we know it, funneled through the institutions which legitimate art. In this discussion of the work of art’s violences, we find its relationship to the work of mourning, the desire for art towards a kind of reparation of itself, towards “reconstructing lost and ruined objects, lost and ruined worlds”, much like the ego’s attempt to reconcile the love and forsaken object with the self. For Fraser this is particularly in considering the formally purified artwork, the works that come to us in the 20th century which wish to challenge art, and yet are subsumed. There is a link she comes to between the formal purification of art and the affective purification of weeping. This seems to me a generous rethinking of the purity of form that comes in the mid-century artists working in realms of minimalism and post-minimalism, etc. This if only because it steps us away from more sinister and eugenic notions of purification stemming from Greenbergian formalism. Along these lines I want to pull out three things from Fraser in her weeping essay on the institutional critique—her trying to make sense of this position against the institution, and yet the tears that come in response to the works they housed:3
Art, and by extension the artist, is an impossibility that exists within the institution of the art world that builds us up as practitioners, erecting institutions within the self. We are attached and dependent on that space.
Following from 1 this institutional self is contained within what Bourdieu called habitus: the “social made body” “social made flesh.” Therein we can arrive at the body/flesh/self as unwaveringly social, but also it opens up the attachment/dependence of this previous notion to something akin to a rewiring/reworking.
“For Lacan the cry is primarily linguistic.” Here Fraser allows us the cry which she notes is a component part of weeping along with tears as something speaking to this attachment/dependence. Quoting Lacan to make this point, “[he] linked the infant’s cry with the earliest of demands: a ‘demand of a presence or of an absence’ that ‘constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that is to say the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied.’” The linguistic as always already socially dependent on the other.
That violence from before now understood differently as art’s ability to make strange the world to use language given to us by Victor Shklovsky the Russian Formalist writer; strangeness understood as a violence against those who would view otherness/difference as dangerous to their self. My revelation with this essay as caught up with Fraser’s discussion of Stendhal Syndrome, experienced by American visitors to Europe, and tied to the original account by Stendhal of the celestial sensations and physical symptoms which accompanied his visit to Santa Croce Cathedral; revelation another word for having become strange (estranged). Our divorce from the world of the social when engaging in the aesthetic world of the artwork is an impossibility challenged by art’s impossibility. Even in the formally reduced works which Fraser evokes in the essay, Sandback especially, we are still ourselves linked up in the world. The weeping comes not from the art, but from what cannot come from it, that lost (and fictional) artifact of transcendent art constantly being recuperated only to fall away again. In Sandback’s work, and how he did not a little with a lot, but so little, (a paraphrase of Fraser) we see an example of that retrieval of what he called the “pedestrian space,” the mundane of life, back into the art experience, which, rather than spoiling the art experience, returns us to the beauty of a more secular (to borrow a word from Edward Said) or worldly experience of art in the social made flesh, the linguistic cry, the thing made strange. To bring it back again to Fraser’s phrasing:
The extreme reticence of Sandback’s work is not something I experience as an act of withholding but rather as an act of extraordinary generosity. By removing himself to the extent that he does, he makes a place for me. It’s not a place in front of his work, or next to his work, or inside his work…It makes a place for me inside the institution that the work is inside. It is a place that exists between fact and illusion, between reality and fantasy—what D.W. Winnicott called a transitional space, where loss can be renegotiated in the re-creation and reparation of things.4
We refuse the solid. It is like the notes of something else ferments in the abstract, the loose, the poetic. I can only think that it is in the very fragment of the lives, and of Sandback’s lines, and of the sentences marked by periods, commas, semicolons, that we start to get at truths too big for the grand. As if in the attempts to pump oneself up to the status of saying something, not much gets said at all, or rather a corrupting of the meaning happens; the thing said stays said only insofar as its saying affirms and continues the ability to say it, power begets power. Displeasure is needed to instigate the pleasure in others. It’s a question of violence, but not the violence wielded to decimate peoples, to wield control, for underneath a standard definition of violence, that immediate meaning, encased beyond it, behind it there is the violence that understands itself beyond its weaponization. Violence as an emotional force of energy which when understood in line with Fraser’s evocation of the cleansing act of weeping, is rather something which is itself a violence against the violence. It is logically in line with a sense of violence that only comes definitionally as discussed in Black Radical and anticolonialist senses, and while not equatable, the logics are similar. Something demarcated as violent is only so when it is used against structural, engrained violence. When asked how abstract art can be political, the artist Sam Gilliam remarked that “it messes with you, it convinces you that what you think isn’t all. It challenges you to understand something that is different.” These are differences of degree, not kind, its why abstraction so often has been utilized to get at the violence of imaging. I think of Frank Bowling, or Robert Houle, or Gilliam. Forgetting the relationship in kind can be what causes the everyday to feel insignificant in the face of the monumental, even as it is in all the pedestrian moments that something else can begin to arise.
Lying within the virtual planes, that which is not said, floating in the sentence’s relation whispering something possible.
“We would like to offer an invitation to you to join us where we already find ourselves together - in and around an art world that is rapidly undergoing not just financialization but an emerging securitisation. Although we have long experienced the art object as a commodity and an investment, and even come to terms with the artist as, at least in part, commodity labour, what we are experiencing today is something different. We no longer confront what Marx called the formal subsumption of the art world but the real subsumption of this world, in which the indifference of capital and abstract labour increasingly reigns.”
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney and Zun Lee, “Fred Moten and Stefano Harney with Sun Lee,” 2024 Busan Bienalle, Sep 2024, https://busanbiennale2024.com/en/exhibition/artists/9b82d57a-fb2a-4344-b9c1-cfe3e76b3c1b.
Andrea Fraser, “Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?,” Grey Room, 22 (2006): 30-47, https://doi.org/10.1162/152638106775434431. p43
She comes to the idea that it is precisely this recognition of the institution and her place in it that made her cry with the Sandback as it makes space for her within that space of the institution and not just with, next to, or inside his own work.
Fraser, “Fred Sandback,” p45