Approaches to Process and the Valuation of Materials -Lecture notes

I spill my coffee on this page on which I am writing about materials and processes.

The process of dropping, the process of the paper slowly absorbing the brown, wet material, the impact –all results in an image, a record of an event, and a distinct coloured shape.

As 21st Century Sculptors we might feel that any material and any process –as well as any combination of materials and processes – is available to us.

From this bewildering field of possibilities we could begin to talk about process and materials by trying to separate them into some kind of categories.

This could be done in a number of ways e.g. traditional art processes and commercial or industrial processes, domestic processes, incongruous or global processes etc. Materials could be organised according to relative value like precious and semi-precious stones, all the way down to house dust etc.

Here, I am just going to try and make one or two separations and simply illustrate certain principles for you to take away and put to use in your own ways.

One important difference might be to separate out those materials and processes that we want the audience to know about, to see and to think about as part of the vakue of the work. And a good enough example of this could well be Coffee.

The don of Arte Povera Jannis Kounellis, placed coffee beans in the gallery, along with several other base materials of or everyday life, simply laying them out, without processing them.

They appeared in the kind of sacks that I imagine Kounellis would have witnessed as a child growing up in his home town -the busy Greek port of Piraeus near Athens.

This location gave Kounellis the child a special perception of the society in which he lived. Unlike a child of the suburbs or some land-locked city who sees the world through screens and superstores, Kounellis was able to se the coal, sugar, pulses, coffee, cement and timber from which his society was really built, and see it physically arriving in its raw state, a state prior to its processing and commodification, branding and display.

It may be also worth pointing out that the docks at Piraeus are probably no-longer the kind of place that Kounellis witnessed as a child. Another artist, called Allen Sekula made work documenting the new container-ised shipping systems by means of which commodities and base materials alike are transported world-wide using uniform containers, uniform ports and uniform trucks.

They arrive in heavily secured container ports where the public are stopped far from the dockside itself by huge strong gates, security guards and acres of anonymous-looking containers.

Instead of Kounellis’ evocative childhood experience, Sekula seems to imply, today we have to try hard to imagine what might fill the thousands of opaque containers we see there or see passing us on the motorways of the world. Everything is hidden until the point of sale when suddenly the produce, the coffee or apples or the flat screen TVs appear before us, perfect and shining, brightly illuminated and surrounded by signs that encourage us to buy.

Passing into this more efficient and profitable age coincides with the passing away of an age in which a certain romance might once have been associated with the transportation of the base materials of our lives.

Occasionally we hear of a shipwreck, when millions of rubber ducks, bound for the bathrooms of the U.S.A are spilled out onto the Pacific Ocean, or Kawasaki motorbikes in boxes are washed up on the Cornish coast. Perhaps sips full of sugar or sand DO sink, but we only seem to hear of oil, oil that fuels our society’s constant combustion, providing much of its comfort and yet simultaneously undermining its security.

Materials can change their meaning simply by displacing them. Oil, in the wrong place, immediately becomes a vile pollutant, in an Audi it gives you Vroom and in a land controlled by a hostile regime it becomes an excuse for war.

While writing these thoughts away with my fountain pen, fuelled by the remaining coffee left from the spill, and grateful for the material of the clean, lined pages that encourage me to go on, my pen becomes scratchy and dry, and I’m forced to top and refill it. In the process I spill some of this sacred liquid too.

I wonder just what the ink is, how it is made and where it comes from. I recall looking into it a while ago and deciding it was burnt wood dissolved into water, but only after a friend had suggested it was akin to the ink of the Octopus, who, like every serious writer, spends much of his life in dark places and squirts the stuff out whenever they are afraid.

As I refill the pen I wonder where I’d be without it, how I’d earn a living, how I’d organise and represent what goes through my head everyday, and about the fact that, with just a pen, some ink and some paper, and the process of writing, I can invent and give form to anything I can imagine.

The influential, intelligent and often comical sculptor Charles ray once produced a large cube which looked like a solid mass of stone or steel –echoing some of his minimalist contemporaries- until some slight tremble or reflection made the audience aware that what they were looking at was, after all, a glass cube filled to the very brim with black ink and thus had none of the resilience they had imagined. Nevertheless, it may have left them thinking –as I have done above – about the profundity of ink in our culture, of all the art and meaning and officialdom for which it is responsible and has been for thousands of years.

For the grown-up artist Kounellis, and for some of his Arte Povera fellows, base materials were an excellent way of reminding their audience of both the political and the poetic implications of considering the fundamentals of modern life (though here I am concentrating on the political aspects there is no reason why we couldn’t try to conduct a conversation related to the ‘poetic’ aspects of materials and processes too)

In this respect the ‘Povera’ of Arte Povera alludes to the modesty of unworked and commonly available materials, which are the antithesis of highly processed and thinly distributed materials such as Gold, Diamond, Lapis Lazuli etc.

Their example seem to speak of an age of mass-society centred on crowded cities, suburbs, superstores and mass production when the artist’s use of materials and processes might make the gallery into an alternative space in which to the audience might be reminded of what is going-on behind the scenes of consumerism’s spectacular and devious theatre.

For Kounellis, displaying coffee beans meant –and probably mean more than ever today -
Making some dialogue between the gallery audience –who might sp an espresso before touring the show- and the unseen workers in impoverished and sometime inhumane conditions producing the base material in Africa or South America.

Today, we have become used to making these kind of links, and Nicolas Bourriaud still refers to artists’ duties to the materials they use in these terms. Consumerism has also responded, by offering ‘Fair-Trade’, ‘Greener’ or ‘Healthier’ versions of our favourite commodities. But for Kounellis and his generation, to make such a connections must have been a very provocative use of the possibilities of art.

If we jump now into the 21st Century we might see artists tusselling with the job of transforming the mountains of crisp and complex packaging and materials that inundate our lives and seem to keep us further and further from their source by the use of imagery, advertising and design.

The eclecticism and collage techniques of the early 20th century, of Pop and of postmodernism are still alive and well in many current Sculptural practices, keen to show some response, some way of forming and perhaps defending ourselves against a seeming onslaught of materials, forms, colours, designs and processes constantly dreamed up by consumerism to maintain our desire.

Artists like Gary Webb or Martin Westwood are good examples of how this might be done. Webb’s work looks as though he scours thick trade catalogues form around the world in search of ever-more unexpected juxtapositions of 21st century materials and new processes with which to manipulate them. In one of his Sculptures c. 2002 he juxtaposed artfully folded Perspex with rubber mats and carrot soup.

Westwood meanwhile, seems to have a knack for expressing the unspeakably dry materiality of everyday office environments where printers, photocopiers, glass and steel, carpets, air conditioning, water coolers and fluorescent lights all dictate an inhuman, and yet extremely common environment for 21st Century human beings.

But at the start I suggested a separation of materials and processes into those we might want our audience to see and think about and those we might use to form our ideas but which we might like to think of as mere vehicles, almost invisible or ‘dumb’ materials, as it were without a voice of their own, materials to which make it all the easier for us to give them a voice.

Here, the perfect example might be a recent vogue for Styrofoam, cut and carved, finished with a fine layer of fine concrete, and then painted. Many sculptors today –Phylidda Barlow included- seem happy to use this light, fast process. It becomes a default or base material of the sculptors studio, much as clay or stone or wood might have done to a previous age. It becomes common to realising every idea, it becomes a given.

Nevertheless, in previous eras, much has been thought and written –by the artists and the historians- about the precise nature of the relationship between such a common, given material and the forms and ideas It assists in communicating to the world. If you think of the relationship between Rodin’s Bronze and his figures, or Michelangelo’s marble and his, you will see what I mean.

But if we attempt the same consideration of the relationship between Styrofoam and concrete and the forms it communicates we suspect that the conversation may not be so inspired. The best way to approach it might be to compare this current process with one a little closer in history.

E.g. the hard edged- geometric glass and steel and Perspex of minimalists like Donald Judd are widely understood as being the perfect choice of materials and processes to reflect the environment of post war American city life, in which architecture was using these same materials and process to construct the kind of new world that people like Judd were living in.

Styrofoam and concrete mix however doesn’t directly reference our environment in this way, in fact it seems worrying like the amateur ‘sculpy-mix’ type base materials we can find in the local art shop, and not like a truly innovative, imaginative or idiosyncratic choice at all.

But perhaps the styrofoam and concrete CAN be celebrate as the marble, or the glass and steel of our day, in that they are not hewn from the earth or representative of architecture but are nonetheless symbolic of the light, superficial, highly packaged, colourful and inherently false/simulated environment in which we live today.

Of course, there is a lot to be said for a base material that is as malleable as a writer’s ink or a film-maker’s digital memory, something that we don’t necessarily have to think about before getting to work; something which sees invitingly passive, waiting for us to mold it with little resistance or insistence about what it should become, a material which seems to have little language of its own to interrupt the things we want to make it say.

My point however, is that, even in such cases, it is wise to be aware of the specific influence that even ink may have upon writing, even pixels may have upon films, and even Styrofoam and concrete may have upon sculpture.

Now I want to swing back to consider some more materials and processes that draw attention to their particularity and peculiarity over and above the forms they have been given.

For some reason, though you may have lived and learned and seen so many shows and artworks, on occasions like this when you are searching for appropriate examples with which to make a point, certain experiences jump to the front of your mind as most significant, even if they should have been buried in the depths of the past.

While preparing to write about processes and materials one work that I couldn’t keep from my mind was encountered in a memory of a visit to a West End gallery in the late 90s to see a show by the –then up-and-coming- sculptor Ed Lipski. The reason it came to mind was simply ‘Poppy Seeds’.

Among some early figures by Lipski – whose work at that time had a beguiling take on a feint sense of horror underlying the everyday - a small child, a boy, in shorts perhaps, life size and maybe wearing braces (if my memory serves me well), stood in the gallery looking reasonably normal apart from some disturbing clusters over the eyes. They had a quality that made them hard to define, something about their texture, the way they reflected light, their elusive colour, all made their impact more enduring. It was only later that I discovered that they were clusters of poppy seeds –something which I had previously associated only with the wholesome memory of freshly baked bread, and of carrying freshly baked bread, as a child, home for my mother, always tempted by the appearance, texture and smell of that artfully finished surface given to bread by bakers, presumably for thousands of years, to ingeniously make it more delicious and desirable.

Lipski had appropriated and perverted this baker’s art by sticking an excess of the stuff all over this child’s desiring eyes and thereby turned innocent pleasure into a fearful vision with one clever decision in the studio. As an addendum to this example of Lipski’s skill with materials at that time, in the basement space of the same gallery Lipski had placed a plaster pig’s torso on a low plinth, tightly stretched suede over its before creaming it with lipstick and illuminating the rump with a single disco light.

One more example - this time taken from a current group exhibition at Domobaal in Holborn – is a piece in which the artist used sheets of seaweed (of the kind used for domestic Sushi making) and a process which simply mixed the material with the sweat form the very hands that were trying to form it (into a book shape). The outcome was a strange sculpture (presumably VERY light) which resembled both hands, and book. It was as if the artwork wee nothing more or less than a perfect record of an attempt at transformation, bearing every trace, and nothing more, of the process, in perfect balance with the source materials, while the intention was somehow arrested in mid-act before it could be wholly realised. (This artist's name is Harald Smykla and you can find out more about him at :

http://www.englandgallery.com/artist_bio.php?mainId=170 )

(Here we diverted to mention Robert Morris’s early and well-known piece ‘Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making’ –now a far cruder-seeming piece from classic sculpture history, and yet comparable at least in that both pieces refer so directly to the process of their 'own making’)

Now I can conclude with a kind of corollary to the Kounellian considerations with which we began. If you visit the V&A’s Sculpture courts, and the small Sculpture gallery that vaults between and above them like a bridge, you will find a wide range of historically utilised sculpture materials –from Bronze, to stone, to plaster, to terracotta, to ivory, to mother-of-pearl, and other semi-precious stones, as well as instructive films on processes such as bronze casting or gold-lacquering. What seems relevant to our talk and to contemporary sculpture however is not just the particular technical possibilities of each material and process, but the relative moral value of the materials on offer.

e.g. it’s clear that the audience for contemporary art has changed the way it feels about ivory, and the same can now be said for coral, which –though there are amazing examples of how to carve both materials – has also recently become a sign of shame and extinction rather an a symbol of wealth and exoticism (we could more simply say the same for a provocative material like fur, but to do so is only again to point to cultural and historical shifts –which are continuously shifting- in our moral responses to materials).

Though these cabinets seem to represent a distant past, they also refer to our own time by reminding us of our present moral responses to materials and processes (what might an immoral process be, we seem to have skipped over this?), just as we could see Kounellis’ placing of coal in the gallery (or even live horses, as he once did) in a similarly political and ethical light.

Whether Judd’s steel, Charles Ray’s ink, Rodin’s bronze, Michelangelo’s marble, Lipski’s poppy seeds, or pervasive styrofoam and concrete all operate in the same way to speak not only of a time’s technology but in some way of its ‘heart’ (or heartlessness perhaps?), is a question which this writing has merely discovered and by no means exhausted.

MONDAY 30th November - Approaches to Process and the Valuation of Materials -some quotes to discuss.

A quick look through the recent publication Modern Sculpture Reader throws up an array of quotes (see below) relating to process and materials in the history of modern Sculpture. We can draw out these themes and see how they apply to or differ from current (or 'contemporary') practices as well as to our own emerging practices.

Don't worry that they appear to all belong to the late modern and early post-modern period we will simply use them as a kind of grounding from which to speculate on Contemporary practices. So as well as discussing Donald Judd's hard-edged steel or the standard 'contemporary' fayre of styrofoam & concrete we are just as likely to talk of Poppy Seeds & Seaweeds, contest the apparent deathliness of bronze, anxiety over Ivory, or consider Coral in an age of global warming.

Please read and discuss the quotes below with your peers prior to the session. I may add some more using the books 'Unmonumental' and 'Art in Theory' as alternative resources.

Feel free to bring your own quotes, ideas and examples to the Speculecture session. I will write and deliver -as usual- my own 'Speculecture' on the theme before inviting questions and generating discussion.

"In casting I always like the parting lines and the seams'
Bruce Nauman, p. 409 Modern Sculpture Reader

" ... it is obvious that I've never ... included myself in the lines of descent traced from Henry Moore. yet I have always used a concept of 'truth to material' which ... was always attached to his work when I was a student [...] if 'truth to material' was taken as the overriding criterion or value in sculpture, he said, 'a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a Rodin or a Bernini."
Susan Hiller, p.493 Modern Sculpture Reader

"A bale of hay is as much a man-impressed work as a brick or an ingot of steel."
Carl Andre p. 309-19 Modern Sculpture Reader

"...people kept saying of the white styrofoam, 'Oh it's so like pentelic marble' They couldn't say that about the Orange styrofoam. ... things have practical, explicit origins. There was not doctrine or dogma but the necessities and conditions I was working under that led me to styrofoam'
Carl Andre, pp 310-11 Modern Sculpture Reader

" Prairie (1967) consists of four long poles of aluminum tubing suspended parallel to one another about eleven inches above a sheet of corrugated metal [...] which runs north-south to the poles' east-west and is itself suspended about twenty-one inches above the ground. If we approach Prairie from either end of that sheet, the physical means by which these suspensions are accomplished are not apparent; but as we move around the sculpture it becomes clear that the sheet is held up by two sharply bent pieces of metal plate, one on each side, which spring out and down from the underside of the sheet until they touch the ground, whereupon they angle upward and outward until they reach the height of the poles, which they support also. Two of the poles are supported at only one point, about twenty inches from the end; a third is supported about twenty inches from both ends, that is, by both of the ben, upward springing metal plates; while a fourth is not supported by these at all but is held by a large upright rectangle of metal which stands somewhat apart from the rest of the sculpture and in fact is not physically connected to it in any way. But grasping exactly how Prairie works as a feat of engineering does not in the least undermine or even compete with one's initial impression that the metal poles and corrugates sheet are suspended, as if in the absence of gravity, at different levels above the ground."
Michael Fried, p.259 Modern Sculpture Reader

"This is the point at which to emphasize the pre-eminence of stone as the material to be carved. I am not thinking of its durability, nor even of the shape it will allow. I am thinking of the equal diffusion of light that, compared to most objects, even the hardest and darkest stones possess; I am thinking of hand-polished marble's glow that can only be compared to the light on flesh-and-blood. the sculptor is led to woo the marble. Into the solidity of stone, a solidity yet capable of suffused light, the fantasies of bodily vigour, of energy in every form, can be projected, set out and made permanent. Most other statuary materials, bronze and terra-cotta, are far higher mediums of manifestly reflected light, as if their light were not their own light. the majority of stones, on the other hand, are faintly or slightly translucent so that their light seems to be more within them [...] The great virtue of stone is that unlike other hard materials it seems to have a luminous life, light or soul."
Adrian Stokes, p.115 Modern Sculpture Reader

"Any art work of significance, regardless of whether it embraces qualities that we see as sculptural or actively negates these, is caught up in a very basic contradiction, momentarily bringing to life alternatives to the pervasive reifications shaping the world of art and the world of everyday experience while also being embedded in these reifications. For artist and viewer, art involves a process in which material substance is given to impulses, ideas and apprehensions of things. As such, it is inevitably caught up in the forces that shape the artificially fabricated environments viewer and artist inhabit, forces permeated by the imperatives of modern capitalism. Like other imaginatively charged materializing processes in which people engage form time to tie, art can momentarily project them beyond and perhaps even able to resist these imperatives, but it cannot do so on a permanent basis. An artistic phenomenon that is seen to have achieved stable significance or value, like any other phenomenon that has become a fixed feature of the world we inhabit, is inevitably absorbed back into the indifferent, ready-made environments from which it once briefly stood out."
Alex Potts, p xxviii Modern Sculpture Reader

30th November Approaches to Process and the Valuation of Materials

I will be placing some quotes again on this site in the next day or so for students to use in preparation for the next Speculecture on Monday 30th November.

The Priority of Form - Speculecture Three

" .. An endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness ... " Frantz Fanon

It my appear confusing to present quotes relating to form in two ways: (1.) the understanding that art and design require what Clive Bell refers to simply as ‘lines and colours’ via which, by means of which to communicate a work’s function or content.

(2.) the understanding that, in Plato, ‘Form’ means the origin or source, model or ideal of any worldly thing, an abstract idea that belongs in a realm inaccessible to men, but which they are able to draw upon and copy from.

In this brief presentation I will try to clarify this distinction while pointing to any way in which the two interpretations of form might influence each other. If things become too complicated we can bracket off the Platonic model and come back to it in a separate session as it deserves much consideration if only because of sculpture’s tradition of engagement with copying and multiples.

When Clive bell coined the term ‘significant form’ it was a s a member of the early English modernist group, in the early years of the 20th century, sometimes known as the Bloomsbury group. His prioritisation of form was typical of a certain strain of modernism but was also building on a long art-historical tradition.

Using books like Harrisson & Wood’s ‘Art In Theory’ series you can see that similar concerns date all the way back to at least the Renaissance and the foundation of the first Academy of art in 1648.

It is at the academy that the process of professional-isation and theorisation of art seems to have begun.. Academic debates included discussion of the relative importance f drawing or colour as well as discussion about what or who were appropriate subjects (content) to be included in art works.

Here you can already see the distinction between formal issues (colour and line) and content.

If you visit the National Gallery you can see one room filed with paintings by the 17th Century master of line Nicolas Poussin. And here you can see the work of someone for whom drawing and the precise arrangement of figures within a given space almost overcomes considerations of colour and even those of content. So when we look at Poussin we seem to see formal issues first and content only second.

But Poussin’s painstaking drawing and arrangement of figures is in fact only as ‘formal ‘ as any parents’ ‘Once Upon A Time’ or ‘beginning, middle and end’ with which they make clear to a child that a story has begun and that a story is being told. Form, in this respect, is always a vehicle, carrying and presenting the content and should perhaps –in this respect- draw attention to itself.

It is wise for any artist, of any era, to be aware of these distinctions and to be able to decide when the problems they are facing concern either form or content or some dialogue between the two. To begin to do so is to begin to master a practice.
It would be a mistake to believe that content can be constantly renewed while forms remain established and traditional however. Forms themselves require constant parallel updating and attention, and as we will see, new eras produce and demand new forms with which to deliver new contents.

We may feel we have mastered a certain Form and are subsequently able to apply it to new content, but nevertheless, invariably our forms require tweaking and adaptation to the demands pf the new content, and in this way both are subject to constant revision and innovation.

In terms of painting we have talked simply of line and colour, but of course for a Sculptor issues of scale and placement, multi-dimensional shape etc. also arise, while for the film-maker or writer form involves questions of pace, speed, loops and turns, and all the conceivable shapes a narrative might take.

Without considerations of form we might be reduced to being merely expressive and therefore less able to connect with an audience. Form, in this respect, enables a greater degree of objectivity and provides an interface with others (and in this respect at least Form seems Platonic.)

Now, to return to our brief history of form, in our previous ‘Speculecture’ we discussed the impact of Charles Baudelaire on the birth of Modern art as he called artists to attend to everyday subjects and themes of modern life. In doing so he refereed not so much to formal issues as to content and subject mater.

Nevertheless, the rush of experimentation he inspired demanded that artists in search of new contents developed new formal approaches to their work. We could cite the obvious example of painters wanting to capture the rush of crowds in the new city and new suburbs of Paris by painting quickly in the open air with dabs of unmixed colour. The result is a collision of new formal values with new content that looks today quintessentially of its time.

The influence of photography also encouraged painters at this time to use sharp angles and to cut-off figures at the edge of the canvas, both of which are really formal innovations but which again have an important dialogue with the content –modern life- that was being portrayed.

Form the late 19th century on to the early 20th from Manet to Matisse you might say, artists increasingly allowed formal experimentation to influence, disturb and eventually overcome content, so that by the time you reach the painting of Mondrian (or we could equally say Contstructvist sculpture) we have a high formalism that is synonymous with a high modernism.

Here modernism has rejected untamed expression and embraced formalism as the ultimate face of modernism. In Mondrian you see an art of pure line and colour and little else. At the same time the Bauhaus establishes a way of teaching art and design based on a rigorous and quail-Platonic notion of primary forms, forms on which all art and design emitting form the Bauhaus will be based.

If we look for content in the output of Constructivism, or the Bauhaus, in Mondrian or in the more organic-looking abstract sculpture of high modernist sculpture like that of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth the content must only be art itself or some indication of humanity or society referred to only in the most abstract manner. Form is victorious we might say, overcoming all content.

When we speak of modern art’s apotheosis (highest point) as abstract we are always speaking of formalism because to abstract is to reduce and separate, to remove elements in search of fundamentals, and form is always regarded AS fundamental (and again, in this way Platonic) (whether this procedure can be reversed is an interesting question however).

Post War modern art is sited in the victorious US where theorists like Clement Greenberg (whom we also met in the previous ‘Speculecture’) continue to assert the values of abstract formalism and an art that refers as much as possible only to art, and in this way rejecting all content.

In a second phase of the assertion of a truly American art Minimalists artists produce a sculpture that continues to be primarily formal, but nevertheless admits its dialogue with the real and contemporary environment. It also sets up new debates about the relationship between objects and audiences and thus, inadvertently produces new political content.

Nevertheless the minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and Robert Morris is severe in removing as much as possible all traces of European influence form American art, including Surrealism, Expressionism and composition, so that geometric objects, cutting edge processes and repetition is all that is left. It is at this end point of course that the audience reappears to disrupt any attempt at perfection. We might call this part of a return of content, of the social and the political into a purely formal art.

At the same time new voices in art were using a neo-Dadaist strategy to produce POP and feminist artists and critics challenged the macho formalism of Judd with a soft-edged repetitious sculpture –sometimes called post-minimalism- that purposefully questioned the possibility of a ‘totally’ formal art.

The work of Eva Hesse is exemplary in this regard as it follows many of minimalism’s rules but only to break them introducing idiosyncractic and hand-made surfaces, unreliable materials, uncontrolled elements and gendered content. (all far removed form the control displayed by Poussin that Judd may have admired).

When form breaks down, something else creeps in. Perhaps it is a trace of the human body or personality that is making the work. Perhaps it is an appeal to consider art as an ongoing activity rather than a finished object. Where form is allowed to lose itself we are invited to consider that life, the world, the universe may ultimately avoid or evade form after all, and that form was only ever an ideal, something we would like to exist but are unable to prove –like those in Plato.

Eve Hesse’s work plays a central part in the curation titled ‘Formless’ (by Rosalind Krauss and others) in which a challenge to high formalism and high modernism is played out using examples of numerous artist’s practices and philosophical ideas that challenge the priority of form in modern art and thought.

If we look at Pop we can see it provides yet another kind of challenge to high modernism as high formalism in that it celebrates the formless cornucopia of post war life, inviting an unformed mass of new content –derived from media, style, fashion, music, advertising and cinema – into art (more aligned perhaps with Baudelaire’s original cal.)

The messy and confusing paraphernalia or post WW2 life in booming economies becomes rather slammed together after the style of the Dadaist collage and a purposeful disregard for form is celebrated in Pop as a messy response to the compliant and repetitious mechanism of consumerism. Pop artists find form and discipline only in their embrace of the machines they use to produce graphic images. Sculptors like Claes Oldenberg –churning out soft Sculptures and messy parodies of cheeseburgers- however can easily be included in a ‘formless’ catalogue alongside the work of Eva Hesse.

Today, Nicolas Bourriaud seems to call for a return to a kind of Formalism. His rhetorical refutation of postmodernism satirises postmodernism as a formless and valueless period for art which produces new political and aesthetic content but without the necessary attendant forms by which to empower artists in their communications.
Artists, without form, it seems, are unarmed in a battle to represent the world using ‘counter-images’ against the ‘official image of reality’ promoted by Neoliberalism for example.

We might say that Bourriaud wants artists to use the past 20-30 years of intellectual social critique as a way of understanding their environment but to return to their role as –form-provides for a newly emerging society. F artists do not provide forms or ‘counter-forms’ then the oppressive forces of Neoliberalism will simply monopolise all media and communications, including the special domain of art, and thereby create a totalitarian ideology without any possibility of exception or challenge.

So what are the forms Bourriaud sees emerging as available to 21st century, Alter-modern artists. Perhaps he means the ‘translation’, ‘nomadism’ or ‘screen culture’ terms that he has borrowed from other philosophers and cultural theorists, or the tired metaphor of the mixing DJ he has been using for far too long. Perhaps he means the J-Pegs and Fed-Ex service used by artists in the recent Tate Trienniale exhibition, Most of all Bouriaud makes these suggestions as the tip of an iceberg of possible forms available to artists today, forms which surround us but as yet have not been identified AS forms available to use as such.

He is certainly not talking about the circles, triangles and squares on which the Bauhaus course was based, the expanded content of art requires forms to be much more than that today, and as it refers to and responds to an increasingly complex world the forms it requires to shape its communications become equally complex and diverse.

Notes and Quotes -preparation for Speculecture- Monday 9th November 'The Priority of Form'

In this session I will give another reading of my own reflections on the current understanding of 'form in art, including a brief history of the term's use and current rejuvenation in the writing of Nicolas Bourriaud (see Bourriaud quotes below) . We can consider form as something of importance for artists at least since Plato's theory of art (cited below). We can explore its high point (apotheosis) in high modernism (see Clive Bell below) and subsequent rejection in the 'anti-form' of post-WW2 art (see Harrison & Wood below). We can also trace form in its relation to origin and reproduction, authenticity and simulation - a dialogue that has been central to artists of recent generations and represented below by quotes from Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard.

To prepare for the session, please read, share, discuss and consider the quotes given below.

"We need to be clear that nomadism, as a way of learning about the world, here amounts to much more than a simplistic generalisation: the term enshrines specific forms, processes of visualisation peculiar to our own epoch. In a word, trajectories have become forms. "
Nicolas Bourriaud Altermodern introductory essay.

"There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. sophia and the windows of Chartres, Mexican sculpture,. and the masterpieces of Poussin, Pierra della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a certain way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call 'Significant Form', and 'Significant Form' is the one quality common to all works of art."
Clive Bell pp. 107-109 Art In Theory 1900-2000


"... the (Altermodern) exhibition assembles works whose compositional principle relies on a chain of elements: the work tends to become a dynamic structure that generates forms before, during and after its production. these forms deliver narratives, the narratives of their very own production, but also their distribution and the mental journey that encompasses them."
Nicolas Bourriaud p.14 Altermodern.


"A materialism focused on the processing of mute stuff turned the hyper-formalism of the Minimalist object into 'anti-form'; a materialism reminiscent of nothing so much as Bataille's earlier valorization of the 'informe'. attention turned towards 'making': a concern with processes of manipulation of materials rather than their constitution into some object."
p. 814 Harrison & Wood - Art In Theory 1900-2000

"Technical reproduction can put the copy of an original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. the cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room."
Walter Benjamin 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'.
p.221 Illuminations

"Exhibiting a work as a network of signs -like a computer screen reacting to a sequence of hypertext links - allows us to bypass another form of contradiction that has become unproductive: that of form and narrrative. Liam Gillick defines this new structure as a 'discursive framework' or a 'discursive model of practice'. this is not to be understood as a an urge to replace form with the formulaic, for the 'discursive is what prodices work but is also the produced work itself in the form of critical and impromptu exchanges." Nicolas Bourriaud Altermodern introductory essay.

"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of simulation."
Jean Baudrillard p. 25 Simulations

"...the two world Trade Centre towers, perfect parallelipeds a 1/4 mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. the fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference. Paradoxically, if there wee only one, the monopoly would not be incarnated, because we have seen how is stabilizes on a dual form. For the sign to be pure it has to duplicate itself,: it is the duplication of the sign which destroys its meaning. this is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also: the multiple replicas of Marilyn's face are there to show at the same time the death of the original and the end of representation."
Jean Baudrillard p.136 Simulations

"It must be admitted that each of us now intuitively perceives existence as a collection of ephemeral entities, far from the impression of permanence that our ancestors, whether rightly or wrongly, formed of their environment. Paradoxically, however, the political order that governs this chaos has never seemed so solid: everything is constantly changing, but within an immutable and untouchable global framework to which there no longer seems to be any credible alternative."
Nicolas Bourriaud p. 80 The Radicant

" 'You know that we always postulate in each case a single form for each set of particular things, to which we apply the same name?'
'Yes I know'
'Then let us take any set you choose. For example, there are many particular beds and tables.'
'Yes'
'But there are only two forms, one of bed and one of table.'
'Yes'
'Then we normally say that the maker of either of these kinds of furniture has his eye on the appropriate form when he makes the beds and tables we use; and similarly with other things. For no craftsman could possibly make the form itself, could he?'
'No' "
Plato 'Theory of Art'

Monday 9th November

Dear students,
please watch this space for imminent posting of readings and quotes to help you prepare for Monday 9th Speculecture number 3 'The Priority of Form'.