1. FORM

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

3. Basic definition of form

4. Formal invention as marker of Modernism
Advance or Retreat?

5. FORMALISM

6. 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.

7. Significant Form
the emphasis on surface, material form of work

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

9. Form
• A pure direct, emotional
form of communication
(musical).Influenced by
‘primitive’ art and the art of
children.
• Uncontaminatedespecially
‘modern world’,
by the
the value placed on
utilitarianism.
• Art for art sake.

10. “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

11. • “they conceived of this by
emotion as aesthetic -
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)

12. Paul Cezanne
“the decorative elements preponderate at the
expense of the representative” Roger Fry

16. 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.

17. Clement Greenberg - The Primacy of Form...
The Tyranny of Form ?
17

18. 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 18

19. 19

20. • 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
Kenneth Noland,
of popular mass
Drought 1962
culture (kitsch).
20

21. Kenneth Noland, Another Line 1970.
21

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

23. 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

24. 24

25. 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..
25

26. Pop goes Purity
26

27. ANTI - FORM
27

28. THE MODERNIST BREAKDOWN
• “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
28

29. 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

30. • 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

31. Visual Muzak? Decorative wallpaper. Lobby art.
Jules Olitski “Instant Loveland”
1968
Anthony Caro “Early One Morning”
“Silence is assent”
Carl Andre

32. Minimalism
• Cool ‘expression’ over hot ‘expression’
Carl Andre Equivalent VIII (1966)
Firebricks, 12.7x68.6x229.2cm
Tate © Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2006
32

33. 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 Robert Morris
Installation at the Green Gallery, 1964
European tradition of artisanal
production, which was regarded
as being antithetical to the
ideals of democracy and anti
elitism of American culture.

34. The adoption of anti
expressionist forms of
making art - artworks that
display no signs of touch or
the hand.
Carl Andre
Equivalent VIII
1966

35. 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.

36. Conceptual Art
Idea as Form
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.

37. “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

39. Influences
Marcel Duchamp
Manzoni
Rene Magritte

40. “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 Wood
Conceptual Art
pg. 11

41. • 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
41

42. 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 Joseph Kosuth remarked that the
‘purest’ definition of conceptual art
had exhausted would be that it is an inquiry into the foundations
themselves (painting of the concept ‘art’.
and sculpture).

43. 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

44. • 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
Joyce Kozloff
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

45. 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)

46. Anti Aesthetic
“Art doesn’t require being able to
draw, or being able to paint well or
know colours, it doesn’t require any
Marina and Ulay Abramovic
of those specific things that are in
the discipline, to be interesting”
Bruce Nauman

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

48. 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’.
48

49. • “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

50. Postmodernist anti aesthetic
Jenny Holzer 50

51. 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.

52. Early One Morning
Whitechapel 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

53. Eva Rothschild Installation view at Whitechapel
Gallery

54. New Formalism? A Reactionary Turn?
“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 Evans
Tired of the Soup d’Jour?
Variant
EVA ROTHSCHILD
Early Learning, 2002

55. Form and Content the phoney opposition
“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 Beech
Artmonthly