Rescuing Formalism

Any intellectual position that becomes too easy to dismiss poses a problem, whether it is in religion, politics, or culture. Such dismissals end up transforming serious intellectual positions, such as liberalism and conservatism, into caricatures to which only the silliest of ideologues could hold. This does violence to the integrity of these ideas and those that are or have been deluded enough to hold them.

This is precisely what has happened to formalism and its unsavory co-conspirators "autonomy," "disinterestedness," and "art for art's sake" in art and aesthetics. Formalism holds that art is a self-contained entity sealed off from other objects in the world and that the experience of art is to be distinguished from other experiences in the world. A painting's meaning, then, is determined through its internal structure, that is, the line, forms, and color that comprise it. The eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is usually credited (or blamed) for developing the philosophical foundation for this position in Critique of Judgment (1790) and Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the twentieth century and apologist for Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, applied its principles in developing his own distinctive history of modern art. Despite the power of their thought and influence, both Kant and Greenberg are nowadays invoked by right-thinking critics, art historians, and curators (especially curators) only to be dismissed and to serve as foils for the more enlightened and progressive approaches to art, approaches which affirms its participation in broader, less "elitist" contexts, whether the artist's intentional and biographical context, historical and social context, or the viewer's own interpretive context.

Although I too am critical of Kantian and Greenbergian excesses and distortions, I have recently come to acknowledge the importance of what I would call a pragmatic, or "soft," formalism. A work of art's value cannot be reduced to what exists outside it, whether that is what the work depicts, the intentions of its maker, its historical, social and political context, or the intentions of its viewers. The work of art has  internal meaning. It is a tense and dynamic hypostatic union between form and content, between its presence as an artifact and its capacity to reference the world of meaning and experience outside it. This means that even though a painting may depict a vase of flowers, a sunset, or a human figure it always remains an artifact, a flat surface, albeit a painted one. This is not merely Kantian or Greenbergian theory. This is the essence of painting, including cave paintings and icons.

A soft or pragmatic formalism that recognizes the internal formal mechanics of painting helps keep the attention focused first and last on the painting itself and on the painting as a painted artifact.  Deprived of this tether, many critics move a little too quickly from a painting's form to its content and then from the painting itself to its myriad of contexts. Without a basic formalist vocabulary that can account for the union of form and content, that union that makes a work of art a work of art, and which can offer an analysis of the mechanics of how a painting works, then there remains in the end little reason to pay much attention to the object at all. The critic must tarry in the between of form and content.  Although his critical insights brought him into this between, Greenberg feared it and moved too quickly to the terra firma of pure form. (Philosopher William Desmond suggests that Kant too found himself in the between, the between of self and Other which terrified him and so his philosophical system is in fact an ingenious fortress to protect him from the between.)

Critics of Greenbergian formalism tend to err in the opposite direction. They dissolve this between by rushing to the safe havens of content, imagery, and context. This is often what those scholars and critics who are interested in art's religious and spiritual meaning do.They will extract an image from a painting, like a cross (or, in my own case, a chocolate Easter bunny), and perform an iconographical analysis. The problem is that such analysis doesn't actually require the particularity of that cross and its function in that painting. It thus becomes merely a visual catalyst for religious and spiritual reflection that exists outside the work. We thus can find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which the work of art is actually powerless to do anything except move us toward something else, toward religious or spiritual meaning, for example, that exists outside or beyond the work.

Many critics who eschew formalism have immense trouble standing in front of a painting and talking about how it actually works as a painting—not as a visual illustration of the artist’s intentions, or as a door that opens onto political, social, or religious "content" but its internal mechanics as a painted artifact. When I am in an artist's studio and she asks me what I think of that unfinished painting leaning against the wall, he is not asking me to riff on the iconographical meaning of the tree, seascape, or figure.  She is not asking me to reflect on her intentions or biography or to explore the institutional, social, and political contexts that determined its making. She is asking me whether the painting, as a painted artifact, actually works. Does this line work there? Does this color work there? If this sounds too "formalist," then the baby has indeed been thrown out with the bathwater. The relationship between form and content, between presence and reference should never be ignored or dissolved. The responsibility of the critic is to keep alive the movement from one to the other and back again, which ultimately reveals what is truly remarkable about painting. This does not mean that the artist's intentions, historical and social context, and the viewer's "horizon of expectation" are in any way denied. It is, however, to assert that they proceed from and return to the dynamic between of the artifact's form and content. And I am convinced that it is in this between that a painting's distinctive embodiment of transcendence, where its particular religious and spiritual presence, is found. And this requires the critical language of formalism.

Comments

[Mako Fujimura]

Good thoughts Dan...it reminds me of Miroslav Volf's "Soft Difference" paper we discussed...

[daniel a. siedell]

mako, yes, volf's idea of "soft difference" was helpful for me to think about a "soft formalism."

[millinerd]

Interesting how T.J. Clark, after leading the contextual charge against formalism, has swung back to it at the end of his career with a book length meditation on one particular painting. The object calls.

[daniel a. siedell]

yes, it is interesting. have you read the 'critical inquiry' debate on modernism between clark and michael fried, which consists of an argument about clement greenberg in the mid-80s? very interesting.

[Wayne]

I agree with your argument here, Dan. Maybe that's just because I've been addressing more formal concerns in my own work lately, nevertheless, it definitely makes sense to me.

[daniel a. siedell]

wayne, glad it seems right to you. formalism needs to be rethought within the pragmatic context of studio practice.

[David Versluis]

Dan,

Thank you so much for this post, which seems to resonate profoundly for me especially in the last paragraph. In my work with students I have discovered that they lack the ability to discuss how the formal elements and principles of art actually work in their pieces. This is common for both fine art and graphic design students and I have tried to make a concerted effort to correct this. To do this I start by showing the great contribution of the twentieth century Cubists. But, perhaps you may have insight and pedagogy for doing this.

On the other hand, students seem to be very clever at discussing their work as parody or as allusive meaning and expression.

[Josh]

Daniel, just a stab in the dark:

Formal values are inseparable from art. Even a piece of art consisting of printed text has a formal existence. An action or a spoken word exists formally. You can see it. Hear it. This is how you are aware of the artwork.

If you ignore formal values your work will probably be weak. Whether you are a portrait painter or a conceptual artist.
I think these observations are distinct from 'Formalism' as a value in itself.

You want to 'rescue' formalism? You want an end to reliance on external references to impose ideas over what is actually present in the artwork? The way to do this would be to use paint in a way which contains the meaning fully. Maybe 'shooting into the corner' by Anish Kapoor, currently at the Royal Academy in London? What you're actually doing is voicing (partial) support for Greenberg: trying to change the way we see an artwork by offering us an external reference.

[Jonathan Evens]

I fully agree with this balancing of the unified form and content of the artwork itself and the network of relationships of which it becomes part as it is seen. What I would want to argue, in relation to the previous post, is that exploring both (form and content, artwork and its relationships) involves interpretation e.g. that assessing whether the form 'works' is interpretation, as is exploration of the relationship between form and content.