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'