In 1965, Michael Fried curated a show at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard called Three American Painters, featuring the work of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella. The long and influential catalog essay he wrote for the show was an attempt to distill a series of formalist critical arguments, and in so doing to change the norms of art criticism.[1] These arguments included a claim for the importance of the “deductive structure” of the painting, a criterion of goodness having to do with the degree to which paintings “demand to be seen as deriving from the framing edge—as having been ‘deduced’ from it.”[2] The essay helped solidify Fried’s status as the formalist critic who adapted modernist art criticism to consider beholding, and to acknowledge the subjective and historical relativity of critical vantage.
So. Why would a contemporary art show that involves only one painter (Wilson Yerxa), and in fact includes mostly objects and installations collaboratively assembled by Yerxa and Qiuchen Wu, the listed artist of the show, reference this exhibition from the 1960s?[3] If I were to guess, I’d say the answer has to do with two kinds of play with “deductive structures”: the show’s composition is “deduced” from (1) its conceptual parameters and (2) Yerxa’s and Wu’s sensibilities taken as parameters, much like Fried argued painters might “deduce” their paintings from the framing edge. For Fried, this kind of self-consistent aesthetic system amounted to a rejection of the “theatricality” he saw in a great deal of the celebrated art of his own time (especially in works by the minimalists), in which the artwork “extorts” a “special complicity…from the beholder. Something is said to have presence when it demands that the beholder take it into account, that he [sic] take it seriously.”[4] Artworks, for Fried, mark their antitheatricality by declining to hail the spectator and instead unfurling their own logical and formal potential as if the viewer “were not there.”[5] If so inclined, one might read Wu’s Three American Painters as using Fried’s arguments to reflect on the function of conceptual framing in art, with mixed but interesting results. In its ambition to inhabit the problem of how parameters (whether another artist’s sensibility or an idea about limited vantage) determine what can unfold in a complex conceptual installation-and-as-curation project, I think the show largely succeeds. But to the extent that it tries to shape viewers’ interpretations according to a logic of problem solving, the exhibition wanders into theatricality, and thus undermines its own Friedian premises.
Wu staged one of Yerxa’s paintings or drawings on each floor, with other objects placed around it by both Yerxa and Wu, creating a kind of dialogue. As the guide printed for the exhibition explains, “Four objects are installed in the North Bell Tower at The First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. Each object occupies a room/floor.” But the “objects” are not only paintings: each painting is part of a little network of objects, tape, fasteners, cartoon shows, furniture, and more. By “objects” Wu seems to mean these networks, and possibly the relationships that organize the images, things, and placements as well. Wu assembled the composite drawing on the second floor from several discrete drawings by Yerxa, and Yerxa placed the pink iridescent studio light on the floor in the third-floor gallery. That’s to say, the show is not straightforwardly a “curated” exhibition of paintings by Yerxa, nor is it straightforwardly an “installation” by Wu—it’s playfully sort of both things, in a way that recalls recent work by Jessica Stockholder (with whom Yerxa and Wu both studied in the University of Chicago’s visual arts MFA).[6] Like Stockholder, Wu is interested in work that blurs the line between curating, staging, supporting, and making, in a working out of what can happen in the space of a conversation between the practices of multiple artists. Unlike relational aesthetics work or other participatory art forms Fried might have critiqued in the same way he critiqued the theatricality of minimalism, this work seems like it should make it possible for the spectator to feel as though they were not there.
But the spectator is required to collaborate, and the way this works is one of the more vexed aspects of the show, and of Wu’s practice generally. He seems torn between a desire to produce systems that are internally determined but paradoxical or open ended, and a desire to make a spectator try to work them out as though they are solvable (when in fact they usually aren’t). Perhaps there is a metaphor about the nature of life in this choreography of frustration, but I’m not sure I’m convinced. Wu’s pieces frequently incorporate cryptic and citational materials that invoke a loose network of philosophical concepts, classical parables, and historical documents. The relationship to conceptual art here is interesting: if conceptual art often sought to illustrate, embody, or synthesize a concept, Wu’s art often assembles, compiles, or, perhaps more accurately, piles, various conceptually evocative materials—inviting but ultimately refusing conceptual synthesis. His work cues a kind of (usually rather fruitless) “decrypting” activity. For example, an earlier hour-long film, fruit (2021), features a hand tracing letters onto another hand. Wu’s staging of the film, in a room with Spinoza and Maimonides quotes about authority taped to the door, gave viewers paper and a pencil and asked them to transcribe the “message,” a rambling story in vaguely biblical language about temptation and knowledge that loosely chimed with the concerns in the Spinoza and Maimonides quotes. He really did expect people to do this. Some viewers did, some didn’t. As with fruit, this show presents a box of “clues” the viewer is invited to solve or attempt to assemble into a conceptual structure, which may or may not hold water.
In Three American Painters, there are two interlocking conceptual structures, one having to do with the recognition of multiple, partial models of truth or reality, the other having to do with the idea that all vantage involves or is determined by fantasy. With Wu, conceptual structures tend to arrive at this level of “having to do with,” or suggestive clues that point toward various routes that usually turn out to be dead ends, or like Möbius strips that direct the viewer, after a circuitous route, back to the initial framing questions and ideas. The gallery guide features text that reads like “hints” for solving a puzzle: quotes from Leo Strauss on the nature of probity versus truth, and a passage from an article about the Unabomber’s idea of FC or “Freedom Club” (i.e., destroy technology!)—which, Wu points out, has the same initials as “Freedom City,” the setting of Nobita’s fantasy in the Doraemon episode playing on the TV on the ground floor. One begins to imagine a sort of crimeboard-with-red-string.
As Wu explained on our walkthrough, the choices of objects and their arrangements were made according to several different logics, something I felt in my own wandering through the show. Sometimes the work feels formal, as in the iridescent mauveish pink of the third-floor studio light, which matches the iridescent patch on the painting in that room, which also matches the mauve tiles in the room’s stained-glass window. Sometimes it feels associative (there’s a proliferation of various types of cat imagery). Sometimes it seems to transpose a relational dynamic across sets of terms (figures are depicted either fighting or having sex, 2D and 3D compositions interpenetrate, and the show as a whole just is a kind of working out of terms between artists). And sometimes it is rigorously conceptual, exploring ideas of miniaturization, control, and vantage. The latter is the case on the ground floor of the exhibition, where Wu’s interest in concept and his interest in experience successfully meet each other. I do not have to solve any “puzzles” or decrypt any messages to feel the way the arrangement of this room unfolds from the frictions and coincidences produced by the conceptual questions and multiple practices involved in the show.
The ground floor features a weathered floral couch facing a ’90s TV in a pegboard box, which is playing a Doraemon episode about a miniature fantasyland (Freedom City). It’s a parable about wish fulfillment: a group of children want to play freely in the streets of their town, so Doraemon (a kind of magical companion, or a companion so technologically advanced as to be quasi-magical) creates a device to shrink the children so they can play in a miniature model of the place. They’re happy for a while, but even before “Freedom City” gets swept away by a parent on a cleanup mission, one has the sense the children realize there’s an expiration date on the pleasures offered by miniaturized total freedom. Hanging off the back of this assemblage is a 2′ × 3′ landscape painting on posterboard by Yerxa, depicting a miniature house next to the siding of a much larger house (and, in the bottom left, a barely visible tiny house farther off in the grass), framed by various painted-on maps and national flags. Wu suspended the painting from the back of the TV using paintbrushes, so that it moves gently in the air like a dangling sign in front of a business, or a very thick flag.
The painting, the episode, and the arrangement of the room all evoke a fantasy of comfortable miniaturization, control, and boundedness. The couch-and-TV setup feels like a living room from the ’90s, and like the heart of a house: a room of repose, comfort, or nostalgia. There’s a defined and delimited loop of a TV show Wu watched in his childhood. It’s a kind of delimitation-as-miniaturization at the level of installation: everything that appears in this space, and the composition of the space itself, points (in varying and interestingly offset ways) toward a larger whole from which it has been cropped, or which it miniaturizes. The episode is about a childhood fantasy of total freedom and indulgence inside a miniaturized replica of the world the children know. The painting depicts literal miniaturization, while also gesturing toward the ways the simplifying and bounding activity of the nation-state (flags) organize (miniaturize?) our experience of the world and its people(s). This all feels vulnerable and temporary; a judgment or comment is being made, but being made with reflective tenderness, in a way that draws interesting new parallels between literal scale and control. We, whether as children or adults, can only know the world in this miniaturized or simplified way, the piece seems to say; and, moreover, we can only understand this cropped vantage as a limitation in a conceptual way. That’s to say, it’s possible to know that one’s way of seeing or knowing is limited the same way one can know that the earth is round: as a fact or concept which is not ordinarily available to experience. And this implicit foregrounding of limits is also the place where the concern with multiple models of truth, questions of vantage and fantasy, and the collaborative nature of the show come together: it is in a sustained encounter with another person’s reality that the limitations or specificities of one’s own come closest to experiential availability. Even if the eye in the field can never see itself, it can see another eye seeing from someplace else, and also the refracted version of the field and oneself that appears through the other’s activity.
I think the success of the ground floor derives from the way its playfulness meets its layered reflexivity. One gets the sense that both artists are playing a kind of childhood game, not unlike the kids in the Doraemon episode. But it works well here because it’s also the place in the show where the conceptual work (with vantage, reality models, deductive structures, etc.) is most complex and layered, and relies least on the show guide. If this project experiments with “deductive structures,” they’re complex: form arises not simply from the parameters of a single framing edge, but from the edges given by Wu’s and Yerxa’s sensibilities, practices, and ways of relating to the world, and from the conceptual concerns Wu used to frame the show.
Notes:
[1] Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965).
[2] Fried, Three American Painters, 23.
[3] This show, featuring Yerxa, is the first of three that Wu plans to produce.
[4] Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): online at https://www.artforum.com/features/art-and-objecthood-211317/, original italics.
[5] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 5.
[6] Since 2003, Stockholder has frequently created “works” that include the work of other artists. For example, her show Table Top Sculpture at Gorney, Bravin + Lee (2003) included work by more than thirty-five artists, and more recently her stage-like sculpture “For Events,” originally shown at Kavi Gupta in 2015, again functioned as a stage for various performances in April and May of 2024 at the University of Chicago.