FORM

ʻNewtonʼ by William Blake (1795-1805) 460 x 600 mm. Collection Tate Britain

Basic definition of form

Formal invention as marker of Modernism

Advance or Retreat?

FORMALISM

Significant Form (Formalism)• English art critics Clive Bell and

Roger Fry.

• Bell’s contention was that the form was more important than the content. The combination of line and colour was what mattered not the mimetic representation of the real.

• The power of the combination of these elements was an artworks ‘significant form’ and this form produced an aesthetic emotional’ response in a viewer.

Significant Formthe emphasis on surface, material form of work

Alexander von Wagner “The Chariot Race” 1898Manchester City Art Gallery

Form•A pure direct, emotional

form of communication (musical).Influenced by ‘primitive’ art and the art of children.

•Uncontaminated by the ‘modern world’, especially the value placed on utilitarianism.

•Art for art sake.

“To those that can hear Art speaks for itself...To appreciate a man’s art I

need know nothing whatever about the artist’

Clive Bell

• “they conceived of this emotion as aesthetic - by which they meant relevant to the experience of art as art - to the extent that it was distinct from what Bell called ‘the emotions of life’

• Charles Harrison, Significant Form in Modernism (Tate Publishing)

Paul Cezanne

“the decorative elements preponderate at the expense of the representative” Roger Fry

Form over content?

Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 223.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Clement Greenberg - The Primacy of Form...The Tyranny of Form ?

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Greenbergian Modernism (formalism)• American critic Clement

Greenberg.• Key texts ‘Avant Garde

and Kitsch’(1939) and Modernist Painting (1960).

• Extends Bell and Fry’s analysis. Like them stresses that the what of an artwork is less important than the how. An artwork should ‘orientate itself to ‘effects

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• For Greenberg the value of art lies in its independence and autonomy from the everyday.

• He celebrates art by comparing it with the negative aspects of popular mass culture (kitsch).

Kenneth Noland, Drought 1962

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Kenneth Noland, Another Line 1970.

Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959. Magna on canvas, 101 1/8 x 149 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 64.1685

Typical features of Modernist Art

• Medium specific - the established time honoured disciplines of painting and sculpture

• The production of autonomous art objects

• Purely optical / visual - form over content.

• “The ideal modernist spectator was a disembodied eye, lifted out of the flux of life in time and history, apprehending the resolved (‘significant) aesthetic form in a moment of instantaneity” Paul Wood

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The World comes flooding in

Jasper Johns. (American, born 1930). Flag. 1954–55 (dated on reverse 1954). Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric, mounted on plywood. 42 1/4 x 60 5/8" (107.3 x 153.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr..

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Pop goes Purity

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ANTI - FORM

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• “If I could sum up the shift that occurred in art and criticism in 1967, it would be the widespread assault on the dogma of Modernism as an exclusively optical, art-for-art’s sake, socially detached, formalist phenomenon that inevitably tended toward abstraction’

•Barbara Rose, The Critical Terrain of High Modernism

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THE MODERNIST BREAKDOWN

The reaction against..........

• The domination of American abstract expressionism

• For a younger generation this works formalism was read as being academic and by virtue of its ‘muteness’ complicit with political power. Impotent and institutionalised. Foyer decoration for corporations.

• Lucy L Lippard described post painterly abstraction as visual muzak

• 1968

“A year that marked every generation on every continent. ..it was a year of hope, when those who accepted the world as it is were the ones who felt disinherited, while the wretched of the earth, the dispossessed, began to discover their inheritance”

Tariq Ali

Marching on the Streets

Anthony Caro “Early One Morning”

“Silence is assent” Carl Andre

Jules Olitski “Instant Loveland” 1968

Visual Muzak? Decorative wallpaper. Lobby art.

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Minimalism • Cool ‘expression’ over hot ‘expression’

Carl Andre Equivalent VIII (1966)Firebricks, 12.7x68.6x229.2cmTate © Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006

Robert MorrisInstallation at the Green Gallery, 1964

An embrace of manufacturing techniques (serialisation, industry materials and fabrication techniques) that reflected something about the realities of post war American industry culture. As the artist Robert Morris stated “clear decision rather than groping craft”. Implicit in this adoption of standardised industry material and procedures is rejection of a European tradition of artisanal production, which was regarded as being antithetical to the ideals of democracy and anti elitism of American culture.

The adoption of anti expressionist forms of making art - artworks that display no signs of touch or the hand.

Carl AndreEquivalent VIII1966

Criticisms of Minimalism

1. Minimalism replicated the cold, impersonal, alienating properties of capitalist culture.

2. An alienating masculine aesthetic which despite the claims of the artists was perfectly suited to be co-opted by an art market / corporate art market for furnishing their offices and spaces with an artistic stamp of approval.

3. Minimalism appeared compromised in its continued devotion to the production of objectsʼ. Objects which could be exchanged traded and which like abstract expressionism were largely politically mute.

4. The critic Michael Fried regarded minimalism as the ʼopposite of artʼ. For Fried Minimalismʼs concentration on making the viewer aware of time and place was ʻanti-modernʼ and inherently theatrical.

Greenbergian modernism had placed too much emphasis on feelings generated by art, as well as a concentration on the how as opposed to the what - it had down played the cognitive aspect of art -especially the role of language in creating meaning and value around art.

Idea as FormConceptual Art

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form in art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair”

Sol LeWitt ‘Paragraphs’ 1967

InfluencesMarcel Duchamp

Manzoni Rene Magritte

“Who has the authority to say whether a particular configuration of shapes and colours constitutes a ‘formal harmony’, an ‘aesthetic totality’ - or whether it fails to do so? In practice this came down to the word of one artist, or more pointedly, the art critic. A system dependent on critical authority is also clearly a system ripe for lampoon. Hence the early avant gardist joke of tricking a critic into waxing lyrical over an ‘abstract painting’ made by a brush tied to a donkey’s tail”

Paul WoodConceptual Art pg. 11

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• Drawing attention to the function of ideas and language within the production and interpretation of art

• Anti optical - a suspicion about the power of images and the visual

Joseph Kosuth remarked that the ‘purest’ definition of conceptual artwould be that it is an inquiry into the foundationsof the concept ‘art’.

Investigation of the status of the art object -the ontology of art. A self consciously reflective approach to the idea of ‘making art. Exploration of non-traditional forms for ‘expression’. The idea that the old forms had exhausted themselves (painting and sculpture).

New mediums - the embrace of non conventional forms for artistic communication - text, photography, video, performance- the search for more democratic forms and sites for communication.

‘Bringing the war home’ Martha Rosler, 1976-72

• A self consciously reflective approach to the idea of ‘making art’.

• What might an art object look like? What materials were viable as art. Exploration of non-traditional forms for ‘expression’.

• A rejection of the idea that ‘authentic’ art production was rooted in the acquisition and learning of traditional skills

• Keith Arnatt “Trouser Word Piece”1972

Joyce Kozloff

The dematerialisation of the art object. Resistance to the art market / to corporate buying power. Critique of the institutions of art (museums, critics, dealers)

Valie Export – Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969)

“Art doesn’t require being able to draw, or being able to paint well or know colours, it doesn’t require any of those specific things that are in the discipline, to be interesting”

Bruce Nauman

Anti Aesthetic

Marina and Ulay Abramovic

John Baldessari

A re-imagining of the role of the spectator - a shift from a passive consumer of aesthetic objects- to an active ‘reader’ and interpreter.

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The Sociology of Art• Demonstrates the

ideological dimension to aesthetics. Politicising dominant modernist ideas about autonomy and the aesthetic.

• Specifically makes link between class exclusion and the exercising of ‘good taste’.

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• “The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile -in a word, natural enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. This is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social difference’.

• Pierre Bourdieu, Introduction to Distinction 49

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Postmodernist anti aesthetic

Jenny Holzer

Dave Hickey• Key texts “Air guitar” “The Invisible Dragon - Four

Essays on Beauty”• A critique of the austere, censorious politically

correct culture that has, for Hickey, engulfed American art since the early seventies.

• Hickey’s writing aims to place questions of aesthetics - of visual pleasure, experience, fun and most importantly for him beauty, back on the agenda.

• “A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and was soliciting my opinion as to what “the issue of the Nineties” would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, “Beauty”, and then more firmly. “the issue of the nineties will be beauty [..] the total, uncomprehending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate credence for me. “ (Enter the Dragon, On the vernacular of beauty pg. 11)

• His essays aim to invoke a relationship to art based on enthusiasm and being a fan, rather than theoretical interpretation, critical deconstruction or a demonstration of arts social usefulness.

Early One MorningWhitechapel Gallery

London 06 July - 08 August 2002

Their work demonstrates a sensuous enjoyment of materials, which they activate in dynamic and unexpected configurations. Largely abstract in composition, their work reclaims beauty and pleasure, sampling from the formal strategies of Modernism at the same time as design, fashion, music and advertising. Their works can be spatial, tactile and riotously colourful.

http://www.whitechapel.org/images/disappearer360h_0.jpg

Eva Rothschild Installation view at Whitechapel Gallery

“Why is that whilst the world outside spirals in ever tighter circles of terror and repression, and the potential avenues of avoidance or resistance become squeezed by the growing dominance of capital and its civil and military bulldogs, artists retreat further into a hermetic world of abstraction, formalism, deferred meanings and latent spiritualism?”

Nick EvansTired of the Soup d’Jour?Variant

EVA ROTHSCHILD

Early Learning, 2002

New Formalism? A Reactionary Turn?

“There is a danger in this rivalry of thinking that art which is not visually interesting must ipso facto be

clever, or alternatively of discarding visually

interesting art as being ipso facto not clever.“

Dave BeechArtmonthly

Form and Content the phoney opposition