Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin by Michael FriedReview by: Stephen MelvilleThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 173-176Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177408 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 173 BOOK REVIEWS 173

Rarefaction in a mine, as Galileo had de- scribed it, meant in effect that wood appeared to become much rarer, and sulfur or water was consumed in the explosive or fiery extrac- tion of valuable metals or stones. Stelluti's

officinae naturae, equipped with the same ma- terials, simply reversed that process in a prov- idential approximation of condensation: wood became more plentiful, charcoal and the eventual bricklike stone the substances from which it was removed. As if in recom- pense for the enormous expenditure of wood in the rarefaction of gunpowder, the fossil wood excavated and lit by Stelluti burned more slowly and intensely than "any other combustible material," remaining in flames for three days before turning to stone. Some of the specimens appeared to secrete an in- censelike resin, as if here, too, Galileo's ex- pectation of the hidden but necessary con- densation of fragrant objects had been met; significantly, Stelluti compared them to a clas- sic and visible instance of the process, noting that the wood "sweats just as do freshly painted walls in humid places."13

As Freedberg emphasizes, there is a curious reticence in Stelluti's treatise; this may, in fact, derive from the uneasy relationship of the argument to the suspect doctrine of clas- sical atomism, too often associated with a uni- verse in which the divine played no real role. A letter written around Easter 1633, shortly after Galileo's abjuration, suggests that the latter struck some as an ill-disguised atomist, for it relates that in the course of a friendly conversation, when Galileo blamed his own mind for not leading him beyond the suppo- sition of a system filled with minute vacua, he provoked an outraged Sienese priest to claim that it was no longer carnival, where masquer- ades were acceptable, and that the scientist's show of humility was merely a mask for a crafty arrogance.14 And the casual depiction of the minimum particles of fire in the As- sayer, as is well known, had already led to Orazio Grassi's denunciation of him as an atomist or, at best, a fellow traveler of Epicu- rus, who, the Jesuit maintained, "had denied Divine Providence."15 While Grassi's denun- ciation was immediately followed by the tra- ditional argument about the rarefaction of explosives, Galileo's explanation of the phe- nomenon in 1634 returned promptly to that territory, being embedded in his discussion of interstitial vacua.

The Providential officinae naturae in which condensation takes place are, therefore, com- patible with Galileo's version of atomism, and certain elements of Stelluti's treatise-most notably his depictions of metallic fragments and of underground fires-actually echo the descriptions of drawn gold and of heat "snak- ing among the minimum particles" and voids of various metals in Two New Sciences. Stelluti's list of the geometric shapes of the trunks he found has a peculiar affinity with the smooth,

Rarefaction in a mine, as Galileo had de- scribed it, meant in effect that wood appeared to become much rarer, and sulfur or water was consumed in the explosive or fiery extrac- tion of valuable metals or stones. Stelluti's

officinae naturae, equipped with the same ma- terials, simply reversed that process in a prov- idential approximation of condensation: wood became more plentiful, charcoal and the eventual bricklike stone the substances from which it was removed. As if in recom- pense for the enormous expenditure of wood in the rarefaction of gunpowder, the fossil wood excavated and lit by Stelluti burned more slowly and intensely than "any other combustible material," remaining in flames for three days before turning to stone. Some of the specimens appeared to secrete an in- censelike resin, as if here, too, Galileo's ex- pectation of the hidden but necessary con- densation of fragrant objects had been met; significantly, Stelluti compared them to a clas- sic and visible instance of the process, noting that the wood "sweats just as do freshly painted walls in humid places."13

As Freedberg emphasizes, there is a curious reticence in Stelluti's treatise; this may, in fact, derive from the uneasy relationship of the argument to the suspect doctrine of clas- sical atomism, too often associated with a uni- verse in which the divine played no real role. A letter written around Easter 1633, shortly after Galileo's abjuration, suggests that the latter struck some as an ill-disguised atomist, for it relates that in the course of a friendly conversation, when Galileo blamed his own mind for not leading him beyond the suppo- sition of a system filled with minute vacua, he provoked an outraged Sienese priest to claim that it was no longer carnival, where masquer- ades were acceptable, and that the scientist's show of humility was merely a mask for a crafty arrogance.14 And the casual depiction of the minimum particles of fire in the As- sayer, as is well known, had already led to Orazio Grassi's denunciation of him as an atomist or, at best, a fellow traveler of Epicu- rus, who, the Jesuit maintained, "had denied Divine Providence."15 While Grassi's denun- ciation was immediately followed by the tra- ditional argument about the rarefaction of explosives, Galileo's explanation of the phe- nomenon in 1634 returned promptly to that territory, being embedded in his discussion of interstitial vacua.

The Providential officinae naturae in which condensation takes place are, therefore, com- patible with Galileo's version of atomism, and certain elements of Stelluti's treatise-most notably his depictions of metallic fragments and of underground fires-actually echo the descriptions of drawn gold and of heat "snak- ing among the minimum particles" and voids of various metals in Two New Sciences. Stelluti's list of the geometric shapes of the trunks he found has a peculiar affinity with the smooth, round, rough, and branched atoms cele- brated by Lucretius, to the extent that it might indeed be argued that all that he had to say to the addressee of his treatise, Urban VIII's brother Francesco, Cardinal Barberini, about the "humble matters" of the fumaroles

round, rough, and branched atoms cele- brated by Lucretius, to the extent that it might indeed be argued that all that he had to say to the addressee of his treatise, Urban VIII's brother Francesco, Cardinal Barberini, about the "humble matters" of the fumaroles

was an elaborate smoke screen for other more minute developments neither visible to the eye nor acceptable to ecclesiastical au- thorities.

And yet it is problematic to treat the sub- terranean world Stelluti described as a recog- nizable part of a continuum that began, as Galileo remarked in Two New Sciences, "along the road of those voids scattered around by a certain ancient philosopher."'6 An important element in the argument against petrified wood and for the subterranean trees suppos- edly generated by the earth was the issue of scale; in Two New Sciences Galileo had insisted several times that oversize trees could never have flourished as upright structures, as they would simply have fallen under the weight of their own branches. Unlike Basile's sheep- sized flea, objects could not always be scaled up or down, and the illusion of continuous magnification, suggested by the Linceans' fre- quent conflation of telescopes and micro- scopes, could not necessarily be maintained. The visible connections between the mini- mum particles of a body and its appearance to the naked eye, between its essence and sur- face, were fleeting or entirely absent.

Stelluti's "new and ambiguous" fossil woods flourish in this terrain, even as they signal the massive collapse of the Lincean project of scrutinizing, ordering, and depicting all on our planet in accordance with Galilean prin- ciples. The Eye of the Lynx is a splendid record of the magnificent work Galileo had done by others.

E I L E E N R E E V E S is associate professor of comparative literature at Princeton University [Department of Comparative Literature, 133 East

Pyne, Princeton, N.J. 08544].

Notes 1. Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific

Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xiii.

2. Benedetto Castelli, "Discorso sopra la ca- lamita," Bullettino di Bibliografia e di Studi delle Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche 16 (1883): 545-64, at 564, translation mine.

3. Galileo Galilei, Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari, in Opere, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: G. Barbera, 1968), vol. 5, 187-88, trans. Eileen Reeves and Albert van Helden, Galileo, Schei- ner, and the Sunspot Controversy of 1612-1613 (forth- coming).

4. Giambattista Basile, Pentamerone, ed. Michele Rak (Milan: Garzanti, 1987), 108-9.

5. Nancy Canepa, From Court to Forest (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 50.

6. Basile (as in n. 4), 686-87. 7. Ibid., 822-23. 8. Lina Bolzoni, "Un modo di commentare alla

fine dell'Umanesimo: I Commentaria del Campan- ella ai Poemata di Urbano VIII," Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 3rd series, 19, no. 1 (1989): 289-311.

9. John Milton, "Manso," in John Milton: Selections,

was an elaborate smoke screen for other more minute developments neither visible to the eye nor acceptable to ecclesiastical au- thorities.

And yet it is problematic to treat the sub- terranean world Stelluti described as a recog- nizable part of a continuum that began, as Galileo remarked in Two New Sciences, "along the road of those voids scattered around by a certain ancient philosopher."'6 An important element in the argument against petrified wood and for the subterranean trees suppos- edly generated by the earth was the issue of scale; in Two New Sciences Galileo had insisted several times that oversize trees could never have flourished as upright structures, as they would simply have fallen under the weight of their own branches. Unlike Basile's sheep- sized flea, objects could not always be scaled up or down, and the illusion of continuous magnification, suggested by the Linceans' fre- quent conflation of telescopes and micro- scopes, could not necessarily be maintained. The visible connections between the mini- mum particles of a body and its appearance to the naked eye, between its essence and sur- face, were fleeting or entirely absent.

Stelluti's "new and ambiguous" fossil woods flourish in this terrain, even as they signal the massive collapse of the Lincean project of scrutinizing, ordering, and depicting all on our planet in accordance with Galilean prin- ciples. The Eye of the Lynx is a splendid record of the magnificent work Galileo had done by others.

E I L E E N R E E V E S is associate professor of comparative literature at Princeton University [Department of Comparative Literature, 133 East

Pyne, Princeton, N.J. 08544].

Notes 1. Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific

Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xiii.

2. Benedetto Castelli, "Discorso sopra la ca- lamita," Bullettino di Bibliografia e di Studi delle Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche 16 (1883): 545-64, at 564, translation mine.

3. Galileo Galilei, Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari, in Opere, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: G. Barbera, 1968), vol. 5, 187-88, trans. Eileen Reeves and Albert van Helden, Galileo, Schei- ner, and the Sunspot Controversy of 1612-1613 (forth- coming).

4. Giambattista Basile, Pentamerone, ed. Michele Rak (Milan: Garzanti, 1987), 108-9.

5. Nancy Canepa, From Court to Forest (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 50.

6. Basile (as in n. 4), 686-87. 7. Ibid., 822-23. 8. Lina Bolzoni, "Un modo di commentare alla

fine dell'Umanesimo: I Commentaria del Campan- ella ai Poemata di Urbano VIII," Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 3rd series, 19, no. 1 (1989): 289-311.

9. John Milton, "Manso," in John Milton: Selections, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 146, verse 70, translation mine.

10. John Milton, Areopagitica, in Milton (as in n. 9), 259.

11. Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Still-

ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 146, verse 70, translation mine.

10. John Milton, Areopagitica, in Milton (as in n. 9), 259.

11. Galileo Galilei, Two New Sciences, trans. Still-

man Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 64.

12. Francesco Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile mi- nerale (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1637), quoted in Freedberg, p. 336.

13. Stelluti (as in n. 12), 7, 9, translation mine. 14. Galileo (as in n. 3), vol. 15, 186. 15. Lothario Sarsi [Orazio Grassi SJ.], Ratio pon-

derum librae et simbellae, in Galileo (as in n. 3), vol. 6, 414.

16. Galileo (as in n. 11), 34.

MICHAEL FRIED

Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin London: Yale University Press, 2002. 320

pp., 70 color ills., 100 b/w. $55.00

When I was a child, the pond where I spent many summers was alive with small orange salamanders. When I return there now, the salamanders no longer appear. I don't know that they are actually gone. It may well be that I am simply no longer in any position to see them, in which case "position" would evi- dently mean two things, clearly intimately in- terlaced but nonetheless separable. On the one hand, there's the brute fact of my being twice the height I once was-too far from the ground I once shared with the newts (but the fact here is not simply height; it's a compli- cated matter that includes, say, my feet no longer being within natural hand's reach, my coming to sit on rather than in chairs, or of "falling" coming to name a different kind of accident, a new constellation of balance and overbalance, stability and vertigo, and so on). On the other hand, there's the cultural fact of no longer being a child, of having reoriented my self to the distance and frontality of projects and interests (idling, my eyes unfo- cus toward the horizon and no longer track the immediacy of my limbs). The artistic no- ticing of these things is a hallmark of Roman- ticism, most pronounced in its English and literary incarnations but nonetheless still there for the feeling in, say, John Constable or Caspar David Friedrich.

Probably the simplest way to begin noticing Adolph Menzel's pictures is by making one- self alert to how fully they remain answerable to the general physical shape of the child's embodiment, where, for example, "under- foot" is always also essentially in sight rather than passed over, forgotten, or elided by a gaze aimed essentially elsewhere. But if we can pin this much to Menzel's freakish phys- ical fact-"gnomelike, with a huge head on an undersized body- he was four foot six or seven" (p. 5)-nothing in his art or life lets us imagine him as actually a child, so one way to put the question of what Michael Fried un- equivocally identifies as his "Realism" would be to ask how a participation that Roman-

man Drake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 64.

12. Francesco Stelluti, Trattato del legno fossile mi- nerale (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1637), quoted in Freedberg, p. 336.

13. Stelluti (as in n. 12), 7, 9, translation mine. 14. Galileo (as in n. 3), vol. 15, 186. 15. Lothario Sarsi [Orazio Grassi SJ.], Ratio pon-

derum librae et simbellae, in Galileo (as in n. 3), vol. 6, 414.

16. Galileo (as in n. 11), 34.

MICHAEL FRIED

Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin London: Yale University Press, 2002. 320

pp., 70 color ills., 100 b/w. $55.00

When I was a child, the pond where I spent many summers was alive with small orange salamanders. When I return there now, the salamanders no longer appear. I don't know that they are actually gone. It may well be that I am simply no longer in any position to see them, in which case "position" would evi- dently mean two things, clearly intimately in- terlaced but nonetheless separable. On the one hand, there's the brute fact of my being twice the height I once was-too far from the ground I once shared with the newts (but the fact here is not simply height; it's a compli- cated matter that includes, say, my feet no longer being within natural hand's reach, my coming to sit on rather than in chairs, or of "falling" coming to name a different kind of accident, a new constellation of balance and overbalance, stability and vertigo, and so on). On the other hand, there's the cultural fact of no longer being a child, of having reoriented my self to the distance and frontality of projects and interests (idling, my eyes unfo- cus toward the horizon and no longer track the immediacy of my limbs). The artistic no- ticing of these things is a hallmark of Roman- ticism, most pronounced in its English and literary incarnations but nonetheless still there for the feeling in, say, John Constable or Caspar David Friedrich.

Probably the simplest way to begin noticing Adolph Menzel's pictures is by making one- self alert to how fully they remain answerable to the general physical shape of the child's embodiment, where, for example, "under- foot" is always also essentially in sight rather than passed over, forgotten, or elided by a gaze aimed essentially elsewhere. But if we can pin this much to Menzel's freakish phys- ical fact-"gnomelike, with a huge head on an undersized body- he was four foot six or seven" (p. 5)-nothing in his art or life lets us imagine him as actually a child, so one way to put the question of what Michael Fried un- equivocally identifies as his "Realism" would be to ask how a participation that Roman- ticism can grasp only in various shapes of mourning and nostalgia might nonetheless find its adulthood. And just as the noticing of Menzel's pictures repeatedly pulls us out of our habits of painterly vision and obliges us to explicitly remark such nearly physical facts as

ticism can grasp only in various shapes of mourning and nostalgia might nonetheless find its adulthood. And just as the noticing of Menzel's pictures repeatedly pulls us out of our habits of painterly vision and obliges us to explicitly remark such nearly physical facts as

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174 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 1

our active shifting of attention among multi- ple centers or a new orientation to-perhaps the discovery of a new weight to-the bottom of the picture or page (so that the reader will inevitably be struck at one moment or an- other by the physical orientation Fried's book and pages shares with so many of the pictures presented in it or on them), so also the book's larger argument asks in no small part about our ability and willingness to find other, novel or unaccustomed, postures within our adulthood-about, for example, our capacity to take what we often call our "alienation" as something not to be defeated (to be overcome, denied, or refused) but as a condition only ever to be assumed.

With Manet's Modernism, or The Face of Paint- ing in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1996), Michael Fried completed a trilogy on the origins of modernism that clearly took a considerable part of both its motive and its interest from the terms and judgments of his controversial criticism of the 1960s.' Menzel's Realism in effect completes a second trilogy that intersects the first at right angles, offering an exploration of Realism as an artistic mode bound in various and com- plex ways to the artist's and viewer's embodi- ment, as well as the broad historical ground on which the 19th century brings such em- bodiment to a problematic centrality. While the trilogy on French painting had the shape of a distinct project from early on, the three Realism books-including the 1987 Realism,

Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane alongside the studies of Gustave Courbet and Menzel-are more nearly the product of an interest emergent across the course of their writing, with the result that a significant portion of Menzel's Realism is given over to measuring the ground traversed and trying to formulate its underlying sense. Among the notably shared features of the three books are a relative suspension of ques- tions of painting as such as well as of medium more generally (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration takes up Eakins in relation to writing, while Menzel's primary medium, drawing, in Fried's treatment spills easily over into both painting and printing) and a renewed focus on the vicissitudes of "absorption" as it works apart from the French tableau's harnessing of it to theater (to this extent, the Menzel book-and the Realism trilogy over all- aligns well with Fried's recently evidenced in- terest in aspects of contemporary photogra- phy). The picture of two series of books intersecting in Courbet is undoubtedly a little too tidy: the Eakins book posed itself in its initial presentation partly in relation to the problematic category of "literary impression- ism" (and Fried is explicit in the Menzel book about his continuing difficulty with the art historical fact and category of Impression- ism), and the particular shape and interest of the Menzel book are clearly strongly marked by the more open-ended approach to issues of modernism and the modern that resulted from Fried's working through of the question of the tableau as posed by and for "the gener- ation of 1863" in the Manet book.

None of this is to say that Menzel's Realism is

simply without relation either to Fried's crit- icism of the 1960s or to the view of modern- ism 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 narra- tive 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 at- tempts 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 struc- ture and voice as imitations or prolongations of its object. In particular, Menzels fifteen chapters and coda strongly invite one to imag- ine their sequence as a form of the "brick- work" 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 Kierke- gaard's Either/Or, with a Postscript on Fon- tane's Effi Briest"). In an exceptionally long note, Fried recognizes that his appeal to "the repetitive, ongoing, temporally extensive op- eration of bricklaying may remind some read- ers 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 theatrical- ization of duration he continues to find de- fining of Minimalism (and it then opens, per- haps somewhat surprisingly, into a discussion of Hanne Darboven's work as inviting com- parison 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 "pres- ence" should now appear as a contrast be- tween two modes of temporal extendedness. Seeing this, one will see also that S0ren Kier- kegaard 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 extraor- dinary summary of much of what Fried shows to be Menzel's art but also an extraordinary capacity to evoke, as if in dreamerly conden- sation, something of the stakes in passage from Jackson Pollock's allover defeat of draw- ing 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 chap- ter includes what is perhaps Fried's most sus- tained engagement with the writings of Stan- ley 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.

In its immediate context the appeal to Ei- ther/Or does the very particularjob of carrying Fried and his reader from a range of closely related images of objects Fried takes to bear with particular explicitness the marks of time and use-furniture heaped on a sidewalk, books and papers stacked in a chest-to a further range of images oriented to bricks and the task of laying bricks. Within the larger structure of Menzel's Realism it hinges the book's sustained opening work of descrip- tion and contextualization (setting Menzel in relation to notions of empathy circulating in late-19th-century Germany; the status of the visual in that same period; the Realisms of Eakins and Courbet; and the terms of con- temporary French criticism) to the broader and more speculative characterizations that come to one conclusion in a sustained con- sideration of claims about modernity and "the disenchantment of the world" as ad- vanced by Walter Benjamin and further taken up by T. J. Clark. The symmetries here are striking: Old Documents in a Chest directly re- lays the book's opening image-Dr. Puhl- mann's Bookcase-and the concluding chapter turns strongly back to Kierkegaard (as well as Henry David Thoreau, a figure Fried sees as closely related).

Either/Or is a notably strange book, even within Kierkegaard's highly unorthodox body of writing. It consists, its putative editor Victor Eremita tells us, of "a mass of papers" acci- dentally discovered in a used writing desk-a number of short writings by someone Eremita calls A and whose name turns out to be Jo- hannes, and a series of letters, presumably to A, written by B, better known as Judge Wil- liam. Among A's writings is a particularly long piece entitled, by Eremita, "The Seducer's Diary," and Eremita obligingly points out in his editor's preface that A declares himself not the author but only the editor of this diary-"an old literary device to which I would not have much to object if it did not further complicate my own position, since one author becomes enclosed within the other like the boxes in a Chinese puzzle."4 It may well strike one that Menzel's chest of old documents is already a notably Kierkegaard- ian kind of object well in advance of his ren- dering of it.5

Reading Either/Or-and setting aside all the difficult questions about, for example, the place of Eremita and his companions within Kierkegaard's larger "authorship"6-we are witness to (at least) an argument about art and life, about how and how far life might be inhabited "aesthetically," played out within the conventions of the epistolary fiction na- tive to the seducer and supplanted, in the

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BOOK REVIEWS 175

19th century, by the "realistic" novel that dis- covers its most urgent subject matter in the possibility and conditions of the marriage as understood and defended by Judge William. I've put "realistic" in scare quotes here be- cause it's important that the epistolary novel has its own, quite different claim to a certain realism that we might better qualify in the present context (and for more than one rea- son) as a certain "literalism"-just as we may well want to qualify the difference between Johannes and Judge William as a difference in "sensibility," a word that comes into literary historical prominence in the transition from, say, Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen and does so in very active relation to a meaning- "alert receptivity"-now mostly worn away from the word but arguably central to Fried's use of it in "Art and Objecthood."

In an early essay, Stanley Cavell takes up Kierkegaard's methodological claim-the claim that supports, among other things, his pseudonymous authorship-to "necessarily indirect communication," and he argues that such a claim makes sense only in a situation in which "while there is only one vehicle of ex- pression, there are two thoughts it can ex- press, and moreover the thoughts are incom- patible, mutually defeating" (this is, then, in

general the difficulty Kierkegaard finds for the Christian in what calls itself Christendom, why for him Christianity is obliged to take form in part as an assault on Christendom).7 Call what traverses the expressions of central interest to Kierkegaard-Cavell offers such instances as "Truth is subjectivity" or "Faith is greater than knowledge"-a difference in sensibility. And here's a well-known sentence by Menzel to which Fried recurs throughout his study: "'In short, there is a lack of any kind of self-made bond [or glue; the German is Klebestoff, literally 'attachment-stuff] between me and the outside world."' It's a statement, Fried says, that "has invariably been taken simply as an acknowledgment of a deep sense of estrangement and alienation" (p. 5). Can we find our way to hear-does seeing Menzel help us to hear-another accent running through this sentence, such that its core form is not an assertion of the "lack of any ... bond" but rather that whatever bond there may or may not be is above all not self-made, is neither the work of a self (as if attachment to the world were a matter of choice) nor a matter of any past either given or achieved? In that absence one makes do- makes shift-with what is to hand and with the hands one has.

This is for Fried something like the inner spring of Menzel's virtually continuous draw- ing of the world, his ongoing construction of it as indivisibly, thus unromantically, both es- tranged and open to sense and inhabitation. "In Menzel's art," Fried writes, measuring that art against the terms of Benjamin's thought, "traces are a two-way street" (p. 239).

Kierkegaard's Judge William tries to per- suade the seducer of the case for what he calls "the aesthetic validity of marriage," and he does so both because and in despite of what he takes to be its essential unrepresentability. It's as if he's trying to give voice to a dimen-

sion of the aesthetic that is evidently not vis- ible or not fully visible from within it; thus, his letter, at least as I understand it, does not argue that marriage ought to become an ob-

ject of aesthetic representation, but rather that its absolute unavailability for such repre- sentation is nonetheless integral to what is so available. "First love"-the seducer's repeated joy, with all its openness to the literary and dramatic and overtly "aesthetic"-plays itself false if it tries to find all its conditions simply within itself and apart from its exposure to the publicness and conventionality and sheer duration the seducer imagines he must con- tinuously flee. Talk about art has often fa- vored "marriage" as a figure for how a work holds itself together (as, for example, in speaking of form and content), but we have tended, particularly lately, to favor "mourn-

ing" as a figure for its historicity. If we say that Kierkegaard is perhaps not exactly reversing these figures but certainly trying to show that a first love closed against its own conditions (against its own repetition, its own extension) will only ever be its own mourning, and if we say that Kierkegaard is thus offering marriage as a figure for the work's historicity-the ex- posure, repetition, and conventionality that is its openness to construction and interpreta- tion-then we may want finally to say that what Fried in a certain sense discovers in Menzel is an argument for the aesthetic valid- ity of history: a way of understanding how a work might imagine or realize-admit or ac- knowledge-its own standing in time, its con- tinuing submission to seeing, to criticism, to construction.

Picking up on Menzers claims this way- that is, in the partial light of Fried's early criticism and with a particular emphasis on the appeal to Kierkegaard that opens or re- opens an engagement with Cavell's writings not just on Kierkegaard but also on Roman- ticism and Thoreau and marriage-may ap- pear to make short schrift of what is more properly historical in the book, notably, the locating of Menzel within a specific 19th-cen- tury German intellectual and literary culture that prominently includes, much more prox- imately than Kierkegaard, Robert Vischer, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Theodor Fon- tane. Nonetheless, it has perhaps the virtue of casting into the foreground the particular terms Fried takes to underlie Menzel's histor- ical presence and importance, his participa- tion in the 19th-century discovery of "the ev- eryday," that to which we may be at once unthinkingly bound and still also feel our- selves in more or less constant need of return to.8 The philosophical voice or practice that has taken its particular orientation from this discovery is that of "ordinary language," as advanced byJ. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgen- stein and, for Fried, crucially extended and complicated by Stanley Cavell. The animating voice of Menzel's Realism is perhaps best taken as a particular, scholarly variation on the phi- losopher's appeal to ordinary language, one that finds its deepest task in the finding of descriptive words-makeshift constructions, one brick after another, one course upon another. To this end, Fried's most pro-

nounced "methodological" device is the re- current questioning whether, or expression of hope that, certain words or postures as- sumed before the work are shared or shar- able. In this sense, the appeal to Kier- kegaard-and the appeals even further afield to, say, Thoreau-are finally pieces of the same work of description that begins as di- rectly as this:

That is, the different spatial zones I have just described [in Menzel's drawing The Schafgraben Flooded] are distinguished from one another not simply by their implied distance from the artist and viewer as de- termined by their relative placement on the page (there would be nothing note- worthy in that), or even by the stark, al- most schematic separation between zones (that would be unusual but not otherwise significant), but also by the clarity with which each of the four zones, or at least the three main ones, posits a specific angle of vision, meaning by that an angle of the gaze itself, relative to the object or objects that are there represented, the angles be- coming much steeper, downward-looking, as they approach the bottom of the sheet.

(p. 19)

In his closing pages, Fried worries that some of his readers may well accept the per- tinence of this kind of description but "not imagine that anything artistically or intellec- tually profound could be at stake," and he takes such a response to be partially constru- able as an effect of Menzel's art itself-as if a certain possibility of distancing went hand in hand with the demand for empathic projec- tion or imagining at its heart. Against this objection, he makes no stronger appeal than to his "self-assigned task... to make the strongest possible interpretation of Menzel's core enterprise" (p. 258). All this is, on the face of it, fair enough, and it is surely right that for some readers "description" and "in- terpretation" will fall apart in just this way, and "imagination" (mere, or empty, or spec- ulative) will seem to be standing in for proper "history." Those readers and viewers who do come to share Fried's grasp of Menzel's art will likely discover that they have been brought also to a different sense of how "de- scription" and "interpretation" and "history" hang together and of what it might or might not mean to imagine them as "construc- tions."9 Such readers will be entitled to take this as an ultimate outcome of Menzel's drawn refusal of the Ruskinian distinction be- tween knowledge and ocular truth that Fried places at the center of his marvelous opening pages on the "invisible though, if I am right, not quite unrepresentable imprint of Dr. Puhlmann's touch, his gaze, even his thought" (p. 4) in Menzel's rendering of his friend's bookcase. It is certainly one of the great plea- sures of Menzel's Realism that the book's de- sign and superb illustrations allow one to go pretty much as far as possible in the absence of the works themselves with the testing of such description and the imagination it de- mands, just as it is one of its many satisfactions

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176 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 1 176 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 1

that its own makeshift brickwork continually opens up ways to go on.

S T E P H E N M E L V I L L E is professor of theory, criticism, and contemporary art at the Ohio State University [Department of History of Art, 100 Hayes Hall, 108 North Oval Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210].

Notes 1. The other two books forming the trilogy are

Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) and Courbet's Realism (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1990).

2. In Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984).

3. Now most readily available, along with a sub- stantial selection of Fried's criticism of the 1960s, in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

4. Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of a Life, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), vol. 1, 9. Eremita's position is still further complicated by the emergence of a number of significant sequels to A's writings in Stages on Life's Way, found, once again, in an old box by their compiler, Hilarius Bookbinder. Stages on Life's Way also introduces Frater Taciturnus, "creator" of Qui- dam, another writer in the Chinese boxes of Kier- kegaard's pseudonymous authorship and an explic- itly religious repetition of the figure of the seducer from Either/Or. Along this chain of "double reflec- tion" the term repeatedly at stake is "construc- tion"-both as a name, in Judge William's writing, for the seducer's shortcomings and, in Frater Taci- turnus's account, as a name for the interest inform- ing his authorship (Frater Tactiturnus offers his account as a "Letter to the Reader" appended to "Guilty?"/"Not Guilty?" which he had editorially introduced by claiming to have found it in a box fished up from the bottom of a notably "inclosed" lake).

5. All of this amounts, then, to a version of the context in which one might find oneself wanting to sort out how to measure the familiar line Fried cites from Perry Miller's Jonathan Edwards-"Therefore, because there is continuity, which is time, 'it is certain with me that the world exists anew every moment; that the existence of this every moment ceases and is every moment renewed"'-against Kierkegaard's remark, in the voice of Judge Wil- liam, that the seducer's self-contradiction "is as if someone were to separate the letters 'b' and 'e' in the syllable 'be' and then want to discard the 'e' and insist that 'b' is the whole. The moment he enun- ciates it, he says the 'e' also. So it is with true love; it is not a dumb, abstract inexpressible something, but neither is it a weak wavering indeterminate. It is an articulated sound, a syllable" (Kierkegaard, 1987 [as in n. 4], vol. 2, 149).

6. James Conant has done notable work, in a Cavellian vein, on the structure and function of Kierkegaard's authorship. See "Must We Show What We Cannot Say?" in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989); "Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense," in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen et al. (Lubbock, Tex.: Texas Tech University Press, 1993); and "Putting Two and Two Together: Kier- kegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View of

that its own makeshift brickwork continually opens up ways to go on.

S T E P H E N M E L V I L L E is professor of theory, criticism, and contemporary art at the Ohio State University [Department of History of Art, 100 Hayes Hall, 108 North Oval Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210].

Notes 1. The other two books forming the trilogy are

Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) and Courbet's Realism (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1990).

2. In Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984).

3. Now most readily available, along with a sub- stantial selection of Fried's criticism of the 1960s, in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

4. Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of a Life, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), vol. 1, 9. Eremita's position is still further complicated by the emergence of a number of significant sequels to A's writings in Stages on Life's Way, found, once again, in an old box by their compiler, Hilarius Bookbinder. Stages on Life's Way also introduces Frater Taciturnus, "creator" of Qui- dam, another writer in the Chinese boxes of Kier- kegaard's pseudonymous authorship and an explic- itly religious repetition of the figure of the seducer from Either/Or. Along this chain of "double reflec- tion" the term repeatedly at stake is "construc- tion"-both as a name, in Judge William's writing, for the seducer's shortcomings and, in Frater Taci- turnus's account, as a name for the interest inform- ing his authorship (Frater Tactiturnus offers his account as a "Letter to the Reader" appended to "Guilty?"/"Not Guilty?" which he had editorially introduced by claiming to have found it in a box fished up from the bottom of a notably "inclosed" lake).

5. All of this amounts, then, to a version of the context in which one might find oneself wanting to sort out how to measure the familiar line Fried cites from Perry Miller's Jonathan Edwards-"Therefore, because there is continuity, which is time, 'it is certain with me that the world exists anew every moment; that the existence of this every moment ceases and is every moment renewed"'-against Kierkegaard's remark, in the voice of Judge Wil- liam, that the seducer's self-contradiction "is as if someone were to separate the letters 'b' and 'e' in the syllable 'be' and then want to discard the 'e' and insist that 'b' is the whole. The moment he enun- ciates it, he says the 'e' also. So it is with true love; it is not a dumb, abstract inexpressible something, but neither is it a weak wavering indeterminate. It is an articulated sound, a syllable" (Kierkegaard, 1987 [as in n. 4], vol. 2, 149).

6. James Conant has done notable work, in a Cavellian vein, on the structure and function of Kierkegaard's authorship. See "Must We Show What We Cannot Say?" in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989); "Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense," in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen et al. (Lubbock, Tex.: Texas Tech University Press, 1993); and "Putting Two and Two Together: Kier- kegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View of Their Work as Authors," in The Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. D. Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).

7. See Stanley Cavell, "Existentialism and Analyt- ical Philosophy," in Cavell (as in n. 2), 195-234.

8. This "discovery" would be only barely distin-

Their Work as Authors," in The Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. D. Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).

7. See Stanley Cavell, "Existentialism and Analyt- ical Philosophy," in Cavell (as in n. 2), 195-234.

8. This "discovery" would be only barely distin-

guishable from that other modern "fact" we have the (Romantic?) habit of registering as "alienation."

9. These readers may hear in Fried's phrase "self- assigned task" less an appeal to the self and the unaccountability of its choices than a complex echo or consequence of Menzel's "no self-made glue" (the translation of the central term-Klebestoff-of Menzel's testament that Fried favors as he turns to the motifs of bricklaying and brickwork that will, in effect, propose its still further translation as "mor- tar").

ROGER BENJAMIN

Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 352 pp.; 16 color ills., 123 b/w. $49.95

Scholars of Western imagery of lands and peoples beyond the conventional West oc- cupy a position in the study of 19th- and 20th-century art both central and marginal, both straightforward and uneasy. Their focus is a class of art and visual culture that is by definition exceptional and different from the norms of a given home culture. Defining the nature and boundaries of such exceptional- ism in its own time is a challenge in its own right. Such now familiar terms as Orientalism and primitivism, while they mark the begin- ning of a consensus, are by no means com- pletely defined or delimited. In fact, as per- haps best demonstrated by a succession of major exhibitions, exoticism is an artistic phe- nomenon that can be found much more widely diffused throughout the art of Europe and North America during the period, broadly imbricated under many forms in a variety of contexts beyond those best known today.

It is hardly surprising that the art of the period that began with European expansion and colonialism displays a considerable inter- est in the peoples and places then coming into view for the European public. But forjust the same reason, considering it today be- comes all the more complicated. For much exoticist imagery is replete with the tendency toward stereotyping, racism, and general as- sumptions of cultural inequality taken as given during the time. Exoticism, in its many varieties, is in this sense far more "loaded" than, say, Cubism, and thus a further chal- lenge to the historian. The exotic, too, must be understood in its proper historical con- text, even if that may require a degree of suspension of more contemporary assump- tions. At the same time, one could hardly wish to ignore how exoticist imagery still plays an often disquieting role in contemporary cul- ture, in which entertainment, fashion, and cigarettes, as well as broader economic and even military actions are sold and partly jus-

guishable from that other modern "fact" we have the (Romantic?) habit of registering as "alienation."

9. These readers may hear in Fried's phrase "self- assigned task" less an appeal to the self and the unaccountability of its choices than a complex echo or consequence of Menzel's "no self-made glue" (the translation of the central term-Klebestoff-of Menzel's testament that Fried favors as he turns to the motifs of bricklaying and brickwork that will, in effect, propose its still further translation as "mor- tar").

ROGER BENJAMIN

Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 352 pp.; 16 color ills., 123 b/w. $49.95

Scholars of Western imagery of lands and peoples beyond the conventional West oc- cupy a position in the study of 19th- and 20th-century art both central and marginal, both straightforward and uneasy. Their focus is a class of art and visual culture that is by definition exceptional and different from the norms of a given home culture. Defining the nature and boundaries of such exceptional- ism in its own time is a challenge in its own right. Such now familiar terms as Orientalism and primitivism, while they mark the begin- ning of a consensus, are by no means com- pletely defined or delimited. In fact, as per- haps best demonstrated by a succession of major exhibitions, exoticism is an artistic phe- nomenon that can be found much more widely diffused throughout the art of Europe and North America during the period, broadly imbricated under many forms in a variety of contexts beyond those best known today.

It is hardly surprising that the art of the period that began with European expansion and colonialism displays a considerable inter- est in the peoples and places then coming into view for the European public. But forjust the same reason, considering it today be- comes all the more complicated. For much exoticist imagery is replete with the tendency toward stereotyping, racism, and general as- sumptions of cultural inequality taken as given during the time. Exoticism, in its many varieties, is in this sense far more "loaded" than, say, Cubism, and thus a further chal- lenge to the historian. The exotic, too, must be understood in its proper historical con- text, even if that may require a degree of suspension of more contemporary assump- tions. At the same time, one could hardly wish to ignore how exoticist imagery still plays an often disquieting role in contemporary cul- ture, in which entertainment, fashion, and cigarettes, as well as broader economic and even military actions are sold and partly jus- tified via tropes and gambits much like those familiar to any student of modern exoticism. The study of Orientalism, then, confronts us with an aspect of the 19th century that is in many ways still present, indicating something of the stakes involved in writing today on the

tified via tropes and gambits much like those familiar to any student of modern exoticism. The study of Orientalism, then, confronts us with an aspect of the 19th century that is in many ways still present, indicating something of the stakes involved in writing today on the

representation of places and peoples colo- nized by Western powers.

In art historical literature Orientalism has most often been conceived as a primarily 19th-century phenomenon (lingering, per- haps, into the early decades of the 20th cen- tury). This has many causes, among them the disciplinary and institutional distinction that has always kept art history a bit aloof from the art of the contemporary world. Not the least effect of this development has been to rele- gate Orientalism to history, distancing its con- cerns from those of contemporary represen- tation and cultural life.

However, a countertendency is also at work: the effect of postcolonial studies. On the inspiration of works such as the last sec- tion of Edward Said's seminal Orientalism of 1978, provocatively entitled "Orientalism Now," we have a clear precedent for ap- proaching the history of exoticist representa- tion in present-centered terms, as a way of connecting with and making relevant the past to the present. This does not in any way ob- viate the writer's debt to the historical nature of her or his material but rather complicates and enlarges its relation to the contemporary reader. In a way that might seem out of place in other topics, much writing on the exotic today strives to make clear the writer's own stance to the material in question.

Roger Benjamin's work clearly encom- passes such contemporary tendencies, and it is worth considering both in its own right and as a response to the quandaries posed in con- temporary historiography of the exotic. As even its intriguing title suggests, Orientalist Aesthetics is conceived as a synthesis between the overtly political concerns signaled in its first word (which, after Said, tends to be taken not as merely descriptive but as a negative, judgmental term) and the more traditional concern with aesthetic valuation, which has long cast Orientalism as a paradigmatic art of the later-19th-century Salonniers. Just as it stands between past and present, Benjamin also roots his study between concerns of pol- itics and aesthetics. Precisely how he positions himself within this framework is telling, as we shall see.

Orientalist Aesthetics, an account of a variety of representational projects staged in and on behalf of French North Africa, is in many ways an important contribution to the literature on Orientalism. Clearly the product of years of painstaking labor in museums, libraries, and archives, it is the first detailed study to offer anything like a full picture of the com- plexities of art and representation during half a century in French-colonized North Africa. The author follows many European artists, from Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse through Eugene Fromentin, Gustave Guillau- met, and other established Orientalist artists (notably, Etienne Dinet, much of whose life and work was focused on Algeria), to many others with shorter-lived interests in the area.

representation of places and peoples colo- nized by Western powers.

In art historical literature Orientalism has most often been conceived as a primarily 19th-century phenomenon (lingering, per- haps, into the early decades of the 20th cen- tury). This has many causes, among them the disciplinary and institutional distinction that has always kept art history a bit aloof from the art of the contemporary world. Not the least effect of this development has been to rele- gate Orientalism to history, distancing its con- cerns from those of contemporary represen- tation and cultural life.

However, a countertendency is also at work: the effect of postcolonial studies. On the inspiration of works such as the last sec- tion of Edward Said's seminal Orientalism of 1978, provocatively entitled "Orientalism Now," we have a clear precedent for ap- proaching the history of exoticist representa- tion in present-centered terms, as a way of connecting with and making relevant the past to the present. This does not in any way ob- viate the writer's debt to the historical nature of her or his material but rather complicates and enlarges its relation to the contemporary reader. In a way that might seem out of place in other topics, much writing on the exotic today strives to make clear the writer's own stance to the material in question.

Roger Benjamin's work clearly encom- passes such contemporary tendencies, and it is worth considering both in its own right and as a response to the quandaries posed in con- temporary historiography of the exotic. As even its intriguing title suggests, Orientalist Aesthetics is conceived as a synthesis between the overtly political concerns signaled in its first word (which, after Said, tends to be taken not as merely descriptive but as a negative, judgmental term) and the more traditional concern with aesthetic valuation, which has long cast Orientalism as a paradigmatic art of the later-19th-century Salonniers. Just as it stands between past and present, Benjamin also roots his study between concerns of pol- itics and aesthetics. Precisely how he positions himself within this framework is telling, as we shall see.

Orientalist Aesthetics, an account of a variety of representational projects staged in and on behalf of French North Africa, is in many ways an important contribution to the literature on Orientalism. Clearly the product of years of painstaking labor in museums, libraries, and archives, it is the first detailed study to offer anything like a full picture of the com- plexities of art and representation during half a century in French-colonized North Africa. The author follows many European artists, from Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse through Eugene Fromentin, Gustave Guillau- met, and other established Orientalist artists (notably, Etienne Dinet, much of whose life and work was focused on Algeria), to many others with shorter-lived interests in the area. Further, Benjamin allots an entire chapter to the work of two leading indigenous artists, Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim, who have long deserved more notice. An- other equally innovative chapter treats the

Further, Benjamin allots an entire chapter to the work of two leading indigenous artists, Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim, who have long deserved more notice. An- other equally innovative chapter treats the

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