does not eschew theatricality. It is hostile to a certain kind of theatricality, the theatricality of the ancien régime, the theatricality of sentiment and the picturesque. This is at the root of the idea of banishing "illusionism."
Modernist theatricality is the theatricality of realism, the artistic analogue of scientific empiricism.
Realism is deceptive insofar as it appears as to pose as something like honesty, free of theatrical appeal to sentiment, semiotically transparent. But the real is as much a fiction as the scenic or the picturesque.
So modernist theatricality is a theatricality of honesty, the staging of unstaginess. And yet, it yields very odd, very stilted results, alreadty evident in Cezanne, particularly, in his Bathers. The hallmark of modernist art is its aggressive artificiality, its pronounced voluntarism, which, if anything, is more stagey than what it supplants.
Postmodernist theatricality is a late-stage inversion of norms. The labored modernist upendings of ancien regime artistic conventions have been academicized to the point where a systemic perversity becomes the deadening norm. So everything formerly bad becomes good in a thoroughly institutionalized way.
Alfred Jarry once observed that an anarchist army could be just as disciplined as any other. Upon hearing "Left turn!" anarchist soldiers would be expected to promptly turn right.
Postmodernist theatricality is the theatricality of conformity staged to look like licentiousness, anarchy turned into regimentation.
No doubt, there are other types of theatricality. I don't think theatricality in itself has any bearing on the validity of any type of art.
When he wrote "Art and Objecthood," Michael Fried was grasping at straws. Yes, Judd's and Morris' and most of Smithson's output was vacuous, but it should have been possible to say this without the tortured invoking of theatricality as the reason. Fried, however, wanted to denounce the banality of formalism's inevitable progression into "literalism" without abondoning formalist criteria.
A cogent argument against literalism would have required from Fried a declaration that art is fundamentally symbolic and cannot be reduced to a dumb physical entity without negating its arthood. Throughout "Art and Objecthood" you can see Fried sidle up to this assertion without, however, ever making it explicit.
What was it that inhibited him?
I believe it was two things: a formalism fixated on "opticality" that foreclosed any reference to what in art transcends eye candy, and, related to this, the restrictions imposed on someone anxious to retain the image of a sophisticated, progressive intellectual immune to "mystical" ideas. And yet we know that at its origin, formalism was expressly formulated by Mallarmé and others as a refuge for what remained of the sacred in a world overwhelmed by crass materialism and the bourgeois instrumentalization (and excrementalization) of everything.
Fried's problem was that he was trying to stave off the final step in the degeneration of a formalism already descralized by Clement Greenberg and turned into a sterile cult of formal innovation for the sake of innovation. Which means that by the time Fried intervened to arrest its slide into total banality, formalism was beyond redemption, and his only recourse was to propose as alternative to the vacuity of Donald Judd the vacuity of Anthony Caro.
Art originated to give symbolic form to the sacred, to represent what is unrepresentable. Dissociated from the sacred, art simply adds to the burden of the banal. It becomes yet one more demoralizing, ugly thing in an ugly world. Theatricality is the least of art's faults. Its true fault is that it has lost its once holy purpose and become yet one more agent of spiritual degradation. This is the truth that Fried could not speak.
