" .. 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
(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.
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