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An essay kindly contributed by Allen Solomons:

THINGS OR NOT THINGS

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, the object-value of art was a thing that was central to much critical debate. At the high water-mark of minimalism, sometime in the sixties, it might have been assumed that object-value had become the defining aspect of art itself- as unshakable as all of the monochromes, the mute glass and steel and paint filling the galleries and public spaces of the period. And then, suddenly, the critical mass of objects was reached, and then, with nuclear speed, they were gone. The overpressure of dematerialisation swept both objects and the very debate itself surrounding them away into the ether. So complete was the change, then in 1994, Andrew Benjamin noted that "Today the question of the art object seems a distant concern". And, yet, as time passes, the half-life of the art object seems longer than anyone might have imagined in 1968.

The notion presented above is, of course, a simplified one. What is hard to deny, however, is the fact that an almost paradigmatic shift in the debate surrounding art did occur through the late sixties and early seventies - one that underlies many current attitudes. However, with further investigation, it becomes possible to see that the "objecthood" of art is a more slippery and contentious thing than it might, at first glance appear.

Nobody Knows

Minimalism provides a useful starting point for this investigation because of the way minimalist art put the object at its very core. The critic of an earlier generation found this a disconcerting tendency. Michael Fried's 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood" - a sort of rearguard action against the likes of Robert Morris - is very specifically critical: "the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art." While Fried's critique does have a feeling of futility, in his recognition of the "theatricality" of minimalism, he hits on a vital point. The way in which minimalism operates is one that "takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision." (Robert Morris) Thus the pieces, in asserting their objecthood, begin to operate not internally but, instead, resonate with those things and even those people around them. The process that occurs is one that is akin to theatre - but rather than being the weakening force that Fried sees it as, this "theatricality" seems to me to be a stressing of the unavoidable object value of art. Fried desires art that is self contained and self important, while minimalism lays bear its own spatial interaction with its audience. A useful parallel here can be found in the aesthetics of Brecht and his conception of the "epic theatre". Brecht's conception of a form of theatre that is strongly anti-illusory is not unlike the naked objecthood of high minimalism. This attitude is also clearly visible in the conceptual successors of minimalism - Brecht's declaration "Petroleum resists the five act form" is at the heart of it - but is almost equally relevant to the realm of the conceptual artists of the 60's - in the politically charged arena of the 60's/70's art world it was probably true that Vietnam also resisted five-act resolution.

All of this provides us with a partial view of what the "art-object" might be. Yet, as Andrew Benjamin's comments suggest, after this point the idea of "object" seems to slip from view as though, having dematerialised, it could not longer be of any interest. We are left in 1970 with a dichotomy - Fried's Greenburgian desire for self-contained art in opposition to the minimalist/conceptualist view of art as part of its physical or intellectual surroundings. Yet there is something profoundly unsatisfying with the way in which the debate has fallen into morbidity- like Mathew Collings on formalism, when we consider what the art-object is in a contemporary setting, we are forced to conclude "What is it anyway? Nobody knows."

Please Tell Me Your Personal Code

In an attempt to get beyond this deadlock, it is useful to consider the work of Peter Halley - an artist who seems to lie right in the middle of the "nobody knows, nobody cares" attitude of the post-conceptual art object. Halley is an artist of many contradictions - the theory-boy reading Baudrillard and Foucault whilst painting big dumb paintings which seem more related to Greenburgian high formalism that to the art of 1981. Everything about Halley's position seems designed to deny the "object-value" of the work. Much of the context for this is provided by Halley himself, as he provides commentaries which continually encourage the viewer to see the work as signs, as a kind of brightly coloured text. Ultimately, Halley's painting stands in a new space for geometric, abstract art - in a world of language and symbol, rather than in the silent, speechless land of formal arrangement.

Despite the vigour with which this reading of Halley is put forward, we are not really getting the whole story. Halley's presentation of his work, using an installation approach which declares "we've reached a state where the exhibition has become the integer of meaning" has the result of silently stressing the physicality of the work itself. (Indeed, if Halley's work had no interest in object-value of some sort then, would they need to be painted? Could they not just be printed or shown on a screen?) Moreover, given Halley's own theoretical knowledge, it is hard to escape the feeling that there is a sort of wry humour in his attempts to pin down his work through his almost 19th century novelish authorial "interjections". Halley's work seems to show us how object-value remains a central part of art itself - but one that flickers in and out of being as the conceptual side of the work comes in and out of focus.

A Thing To Describe A Feeling

So where does all of this leave the object - what is its contemporary position? This question is not easily resolvable. WJT Mitchell's Picture Theory, provides a useful starting point, recognising as it does, that part of the problem lies in the lack of a truly appropriate way of discussing or theorizing the visual itself. As he notes: "Although we have thousands of words about pictures, we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of them" The problems encountered with the object-value of Peter Halley's work have their foundation in this problem. Ultimately, it is my feeling that the "object-value" of a work might also be described as its visual content. Damien Hirst's description of the shark used in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living as "a thing to describe a feeling" is an interesting one. It recalls Peter Halley in the way it suggests that the work may be constructed as a symbol, a signifier for something else. It goes further than this, though, in the suggestion that an object or image may function in a way that suggests a particular type of descriptive discourse. This is not to suggest some sort of associative realism - rather it recognises the underlying way in which meanings may be produced by an object and its position in interweaving social, economic, or theoretical circuits. Hirst's statement, though rather expressionist in tone, recognises the thing at the heart of this process. Indeed, as we can see from conceptualism, even if this thing is an empty space, that space becomes objectified by those things that are contiguous with the empty space.
In a contemporary context, we become fully aware of the complexity of the art-object. It is not the truth-to-materials of Stella and keeping it "as good as it was in the can". Nor is it the empty "theatrics" that Fried saw displacing the self-contained, almost subjective art that he desired. Rather, it is possible to view the "objecthood" of art as a vital part of its visuality- a visuality that is dangerously uncertain from a verbal point of view. As Mitchell suggests, there is along history of attempting to bring images under the domination of the verbal realm; but ultimately it is the visual nature of images that continues to push them outside this cage. This is perhaps at the heart of the way in which art-objects are often portrayed as dangerous things - their unsubvertible "objecthood" means that they continue to escape the verbal structures of any theory that seeks to describe them. If we consider the work of artists today, again and again it is this - the slipperiness of objects and objecthood itself that renders them as powerful, and purposeful and uneasy things.

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