On the form and Content of Visual Art. Essay.

for my Philosophy of art class.

All works of art are combinations of both form and content, but what is the difference? What is art? What is “form” and “content” and why do they have to be different?  And which one should you focus on as an artist? As a viewer? These are the questions I will answer with the following text. I will build off each point to lead into the next, explaining the ideas put forward by Bell, Feldman, and Greenburg, using them to support what I believe they would all agree on; that the form is the art, that content is not unique, and that it is people as viewers that allow art to exist.

When someone asks you to bring a work of visual art to mind, you undoubtedly picture something physical. This is because works of visual art need to be physical things that someone has arranged from materials for a purpose, and who has succeeded in that purpose, the purpose being to create a work of art. No one can see what isn’t there or which has never been presented to them before, and so no one can experience a certain emotional reaction as a result of viewing the non-existent piece, no matter how glorious it may be as an idea, as Bell says (Pg 17). It is only when an idea is represented with form, and when the idea is conveyed successfully, is it art. So naturally form is a prerequisite for art to exist. If I were to ask you to think of a square in your mind, a square in the midst of a great void so as it is not to be seen as displayed on any other medium, you would tell me you see four lines that all meet at the ends, fulfilling the requirements of a square. However, by doing this there is enclosed space, I ask you, what colour is this space? Accepting that black and white are both shades or stand alone different colours as Bell suggests (Pg19) there must be colour. Even if you were to imagine only a line, a single stand alone line may not be colourless, nor may anything else be. All form has this, and it is called content.

Content is not the medium but the message. A tall hulking shape of a man carved from marble would be the form of the statue of David; however it is David that is the content. It is the same as to say that a great mix of different coloured paints on a canvas is the form of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, but it is the figure and the landscape which is the content. Content needs form, it requires it, for you cannot have a splotch of colour on a canvas without it having shape, nor can you have a sculpture of anything without it being sculpted from something or in the shape of what it is. Bell simply says it best, “you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line.” (pg19) 

So, with two inextricably entwined ideas, which one is a better value to judge a work of art for? Well as Greenburg points out while discussing the progress of modern art in painting, “Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.” (pg24) I believe that while he was only speaking about painting that the same steps can be found in every art form as the progression is traced. With modernism works of art have become more thingly, that is to say, they are emphasising their form rather than their content since no matter which medium you choose, the same content can be shared or duplicated. There is no way that someone may paint with marble or sculpt with paint, though both painting and sculpting may both feature the same content. It is in this sense why I believe all types of art and their works have or eventually will come to focus on their form over their content.

If every piece of art can have the same content, then what sets them apart from each other? The only answer is form. So if form is all that is unique to works of art, then form is all which truly matters. So then, since form cannot exist without content, how does this affect content? The form becomes the content, or at least I believe this is what the intent is. Paintings begin to shout the fact that they’re painted, there is no attempt to hide that or distract the viewer from the medium. Sculptures become more rough and jagged, leaving behind the idea that mediums such as stone or steel are smooth and easy to work. Greenburg does touch on this on page 24 while leading into a more focused example of modern painting, saying “Each art, it turned out, had to effect this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general, but also in each particular art.” I believe that Feldman agrees with Greenburg’s idea here when while discussing Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avingnon” he says “The breast has a squarish shape. At this point the painting begins to depart from the simple imitation of appearances as the goal of painting.” (pg21) He also says in closing, “I realize that if the content of a work of art could be expressed verbally, it would not be necessary to make it in the first place.” (pg23) What Feldman is saying there agrees with what I’m saying one hundred percent. Accepting that poetry or music are forms of art as they are simply the arrangements of words or notes which both have forms (language and instruments) then what Feldman is saying is that if the content of a work of art can be duplicated through the content of language then it is less pure as a work of art and loses its uniqueness.

So with all different types of works of art being able to share the same content, they must all accentuate their form to make them unique from the other types of art, so what then, do all works of art have in common if not the potential to share content? The answer to this is simple; the fact that they are all works of art.  For something to be a work of art it must inspire in us a peculiar emotion, it must strike us as something more than just an object, and as Bell calls it, this “aesthetic emotion” is the starting point for all works of art. It is what sets apart works of art and all other classes of objects (Bell, Pg17). The forms of the works of art can all be different, but they still all share the same ability to strike people with that aesthetic emotion. It is this dependency of needing people to be struck for a piece to be labelled “art” that renders it the viewers decision as to whether something is art or not, not the artists. If the last man on earth was blind and either by some coincidence or perhaps on purpose painted an equivalent to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel it would not be art anymore than a twig would be, as there is no one to be struck by Bell’s aesthetic emotion.

I believe I have made all my points clear so far. I have shown that matter and content go hand in hand and that it is unable for one to exist without the other, that form is more true to the work of art than content is since content can be shared by any number of different works of art with different forms but form is the work of art itself. I’ve explained that a work of art should try to convey its form through its content as much as possible, and that for art to exist at all it must be viewed, not just created. In closing I hope that I have left my points open enough to be understood by all, as it is impossible for there to be any objective validity in aesthetics, (Bell, pg18) but concise enough not to be misinterpreted.

 

 

 

Goldblatt and Brown, ed., Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, 3^rd ed. (Prentice Hall, 2005).

Author's Note

did this in one night, including OPENING the book and doing all the readings (i didn't actually start writing until about 2ish) and it was graded as a B+.