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kino or bust 

Art and Objecthood 

- Michael Fried  

Art and Objecthood is an essay presented by Michael Fried in the summer of 1967 in Artforum. He presents his case for the invalidity of the rising minimalist movement. Of Fried’s many arguments the one I found to be most interesting was under his third section of the text, the relationship that minimalist artworks have to theatricality and the intricate care that is placed on the presentation of these works in accordance to the space of which they inhabit.

The relationship that is forged between the viewer and the artwork according to Fried includes a variety of variables in relationship to a works theatricality, ‘the largeness of the piece, in conjunction with it’s non-relational, unitary character, distances the beholder - not just physically but psychically.’
A work that I think holds a very interesting response to the theatricality and the relationship to the nature of strict presentation and seemingly perverse notions of antibacterial cleanliness exhuming the basis of art criticism from its unmanageable characteristics of expression and unconscious exploration of the human condition through the brush strokes of cluttered romantic souls. This work is Kino.

‘KINO’ (1997) is a work by Austrian artist Peter Friedl and was presented at Documenta X in 1997 and involves a large red block lettering of the word ‘KINO’. Kino which is the German for Movie Theatre is a great acknowledgement to the theatre of contemporary art itself, a cynical self aware gesture to the frivolity and issues around authorship and entrapranuership of the latter half of the past century.  

To end I will quote Roger M. Buergal in conversation with Peter Friedl: ‘...where poetic meaning of the world as langauge becomes visible but is not in the world. The four illuminated letters celebrate the autonomy of one institution being superimposed by another.’

Peter Friedl. “A Conversation with Roger M. Buergal - 2001.” Secret Modernity. pg 148-159.
Michael Fried “Art and Objecthood” Artforum, vol. V. no.10. June 1967, pp 12-23