and the literalization of the art object can be read as feeble rearguard action against the impending symbolic destitution of the art object, feeble because it is constrained by formalist concerns and, consequently, incapable of apprehending that the literal object is the logical and necessary outcome of the desacralization of art.
The literalization of the art object (whose reduction to formal object was already an impoverishment) transforms it into something that imposes itself on the viewer as a physical ordeal. But this literalization, this debasement of the object, is inevitable once the premodern symbolic order in which the object used to be enclosed and from which it derived its metaphysical meaning, disappears. This becomes fully evident when the literalized, debased object is the body.
Literalizing the body involves its subjection to endless masochistic indignities in an effort to establish its strict materiality and, therefore, it total availability to instrumental use and abuse. Chris Burden’s early performances are exemplary. As are those of countless others.
Why this compulsion to debasement? Because it reenacts the impoverishment that all objects suffer when nothing is left of the sacred and the entire world has been profaned and reduced to just so much matter, i.e. to pure quantity. The putative de-aestheticization of art does not bring “art” closer to “life.” It brings it closer to shit.
Fried's fixation on "theatricality" is a deflection, a distraction. Once it is deprived of symbolic connotation, the object cannot rely on anything but brute physical presence to make a fleeting impression. But this diminishment and eventual extinction of art's symbolic function had been in process for quite some time before the advent of the literal object. Donald Judd et al simply made the logical outcome of this process explicit.
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