The Overturning of Ritual, Time, and Theatricality

Presence and Meaning after Michael Fried

Concept and term “Post-Vanitas” coined by Jiya Lim, Maison Philosophe, Busan (2025).

In 1967, the art critic Michael Fried published his influential essay Art and Objecthood, mounting a forceful critique of the minimalist sculpture then coming into view. The central term of that critique was “theatricality.”

For Fried, theatricality did not mean that a work merely resembled theater. It named a condition in which the work no longer existed as an autonomous work of art, but depended instead on the situation and temporality experienced by the viewer in space.

In his view, minimalist sculpture did not stand as a self-sufficient and complete form. It produced, rather, a scene that came into being only when the viewer walked around it, lingered before it, and encountered it in time.

Fried regarded this shift as a threat to the essence of art. What he called good art had to possess “presentness”: a condition in which the work existed wholly in and of itself. The work, in other words, had to constitute a complete temporality even before the viewer arrived.

And yet, in the decades that followed, contemporary art moved decisively in another direction. Rather than rejecting theatricality, many artists began to accept time, action, and ritualized experience as constitutive elements of the work itself. The artwork no longer remained a fixed object, but expanded into a structure through which event and experience were composed.

It is within this expanded field that Jiya Lim’s work must be situated.

Her practice does not stop at the production of sculpture or object. It constructs a ritual field. The ceramic forms centered on the black-glazed skull do not function merely as symbolic objects; they operate as elements that compose an event through a sequence of acts: slow movement, the strike of the hammer, rupture, sealing, and transformation.

In this context, theatricality becomes not a weakness, but an intentional structure.

In Jiya Lim’s moving-image works, slowness is not a mere slow-motion effect. It is a ritual rhythm that dilates time in order to disclose the meaning of the act. Gestures that might otherwise appear mundane or violent are transformed, within this slowed temporality, into contemplative scenes in which the aftermath of the event can be thought. The viewer does not simply watch something happen; one passes through the flow of time with the work, encountering the manner in which meaning remains.

Such a strategy reorients theatricality in a direction Fried could not have anticipated.

Fried understood theatricality as a reduction of the artwork to mere situation. Lim’s work, by contrast, shows how theatrical structure can become the very condition under which meaning remains once more as structure. Meaning here is not a completed message already lodged within the object. It accumulates gradually within rhythms that persist after the event—within repeated gestures, within the structures of rupture and sealing.

We live, today, in an age of excess: excess information, excess images, excess capital, and an unstable political reality. Under such conditions, meaning is consumed rapidly and disappears with equal speed. A powerful scene may be exhausted at the instant of its appearance, only to be covered over by the next.

Jiya Lim’s work resists that speed.

The strike of the hammer is not simply an act of destruction. It becomes the point at which the boundary between form and fragment, between object and event, is disclosed. The black-glazed skull, likewise, exceeds the status of a conventional Vanitas symbol. It functions instead as an icon repeatedly recalled after rupture. The skull is displaced from the representation of death and repositioned as the place of a face that remains after rupture—as the form of a being that persists as residue.

Here, meaning is not discovered; it remains. Within slow action, repeated gesture, and the rhythm of rupture and sealing, meaning accumulates as structural residue, resistant to reduction into explanation. It is less a message than a condition that does not finally disappear from the place through which the event has passed.

In this sense, Jiya Lim’s work may be said to occupy an artistic position after Fried. It neither simply accepts theatricality nor reduces it to visual spectacle. Instead, it transforms theatrical structure into a ritual of perception, a temporal field in which the aftermath of the event can be thought.

In an era in which meaning is so easily consumed and distorted, such work proposes a crucial possibility: that meaning is not something fixed within the object, waiting merely to be found, but something that may take shape slowly through the repetition of time, action, rupture, and reconfiguration—and may, in the end, remain as structure.

At that point, theatricality is no longer the enemy of art. On the contrary, it becomes one of the means by which a structure is prepared in which meaning may persist after collapse. In Jiya Lim’s work, theatricality functions precisely as the ritual framework that makes such persistence possible.

Jiya Lim — Maison Philosophe, Busan, 2025.

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