Formalism is an interpretive method that emphasizes the form of an artwork as opposed to its content. Formalist criticism excludes external considerations such as symbolism, history, politics, economics, or authorship, focusing instead on the forms structuring a work of art. Two main camps of literary critics greatly determined formalism’s significance for visual art: the “New Critics” (e.g., I. A. Richards, C. P. Snow, and T. S. Eliot) and intellectuals in Prague and Moscow (e.g., Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Viktor Shklovsky). In the spirit of “New Criticism,” the American art critic Clement Greenberg argued stringently that art should divest itself of its representational and illusionistic aspects. Beginning in the late 1970s, after the wane of Greenberg’s influence, formalism was often allied to structuralist modes of thinking that sought to understand the workings of an artwork, or group of artworks, based on properties internal to them. Reinterpreted by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Shklovsky in particular became very important for his ideas about the technical support as well as his connection between form and social practice.
Among these strains of formalism, it was Greenberg’s—especially in the United States and Western Europe—that came to represent modernism so totally as to become synonymous with it. Thus did critics’ appropriation of Shklovsky represent an attempt to pry formalism away from its identification with Greenberg: to resist throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Still, the postmodern reaction against formalism in the 1980s largely condemned it on the basis of its hermeticism and disinterest in worldly affairs. By the 1990s, with the rise of identity politics and methodologies like postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and queer theory, formalism was seen as part of an essentialist tradition that marginalized a significant amount of art.
Nevertheless, formalism has become important once again—but with key differences. This is the landscape that Jan Verwoert addresses in his text “Form Struggles.” In it, he seeks to reorient the North American, Western European-centric model of formalism, and to recover other, more local, and profoundly historical, understandings of artistic form. Likewise, Anne Ellegood’s essay “Formalism Redefined” takes a long view of the history of contemporary art in order to show that formalism—as inherited from “significant form”—can never be considered without content. Finally, Joan Kee proposes, in “The World in Plain View: Form in the Service of the Global,” that formalism might also be reconceived as a methodology by which to understand radically different contemporary practices on a global scale.
In the modernist tradition, definitions of what form means to art are legion. What these definitions tend to have in common though is their polemical function: The artist or writer will formulate a contentious idea of what—by virtue of its new and specific form—a good work of art could be and do; and this idea will be expressly defined in opposition to tastes and styles that are marked out as bad but prevalent. In order to grasp what is at stake when a new notion of form is advanced, one needs to tap into the politics of the struggle out of which that notion emerged. Canonical accounts are typically premised on the belief that there are only a few select places—Paris, then New York—in which such struggles become visible and hence recognized as historically significant. The chance of a new city inheriting this status keeps people hedging their bets: Could it be Berlin? None of the postmodernist mockery of the quest for the new seems to have effected the “make-it-or-break-it” mentality that bolsters the canonical belief in the significance of key style wars in select cities. As big art market booms recur periodically, this mentality has arguably only become more endemic.
That this unholy hope for art history to obtain in one chosen place only should be entertained today is particularly ironic, now that, after 1989, the true width of the horizon of global art production is no longer obscured by Cold War isolationism. If anything, these changing circumstances should have made us think differently. True, in the last two decades, Western money moving into new countries has very rarely helped create sustainable structures for local cultural production (and local art markets). The material conditions for alternative career paths remain limited. But they exist. And it is up to contemporary art historians and critics to provide an intellectual forum for the appreciation of work produced in the continuation of historical avant-gardist struggles that haven’t yet been fully acknowledged in the more visible schools of art historical thought because they cannot conveniently be arranged along a New York to Paris axis. To this end we also need to rethink the terms we use to describe the stakes of avant-gardism: The belief in global centers and cult of competitive innovators are part and parcel of the same rhetoric. What concepts could permit us to avow the undiminished value of avant-gardist experiments with—and struggles over—artistic form, yet relocalize them in alternative, less exclusive, less high-strung, less lofty scenarios?
Let’s start from the Polish city of Łódź, a textile industry town. In 1929, a group of artists work in abstraction, and call themselves the a.r. (awangarda rzeczywista: the real avant-garde). The sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, her husband, the painter Władysław Strzemiński, fellow painter Henryk Stażewski, and the poets Jan Brzękowski and Julian Przyboś put together a contemporary collection of international avant-gardist art by asking friends from different countries for donations, making the collection one of the first of its kind in Europe (if not worldwide) when it is presented to the public in the local Muzeum Sztuki in 1931.
If we look more closely at the work and writing of Kobro, we encounter a most engaging philosophy of artistic form, formulated via abstract sculptures and polemical essays alike. Disarmingly clear and simple, yet highly dynamic and versatile in construction, Kobro’s sculptures articulate alternative ideas of how space could be rhythmicized. She usually used little more than small slates of wood or metal, which she glued or welded together to compose structures that echo the look and scale of architecture models while remaining strictly nonrepresentational. Kobro aptly called the main body of her works “Spatial Compositions” (1925–33) and describes their form as based on the principle of composing “space-time rhythms.”
The beauty of this concept lies in the way Kobro expands the idea of sculpture to encompass time, and then synthesizes temporality with spatiality, by relating it to a concrete material logic of form: rhythm. In rhythm, timing equals spacing (of notes within the metric measure). And indeed, the sequential arrangement of rectangular and curved forms in the abstract architectural space of Kobro’s sculptures reads like a movement score, or rather an algorithm for events occurring both in space and time. As well, she could be seen to draw on basic formal principles of the new medium of film-making (the splicing together of celluloid strips in the process of editing film)—a new process of sequencing that helps her discard the age-old drama of the artist “giving form to matter” together with its associated pathos of “mind triumphing over material world,”1 In her work, the medium in which ideas evolve is material: rhythm is mind and matter, inherently. There is no need for the former to dominate the latter.
Yet, Kobro always also published writing to advance her philosophy of form. In “Rzeźba stanowi …” (A sculpture is …), for instance, she describes her work of Spatial Compositions as “a laboratory experiment that will define the architecture of future cities” and thereby aims at changing “the rhythm of human movement in space”.2 Yet, these visionary lines are written from a polemical perspective. Kobro instantly proceeds to name her enemy and passionately attack the ideology she sees reflected in the principles of form that find the approval of the powers that be:
Shall I talk about the Warsaw academic official-bureaucratic art, about these frontal blocks of wood, stone or bronze, heavy like a bureaucrat’s mind, carefully chiselled into busts or heads of the “responsible” or “influential” lords of bureaucracy? […]
The “national” art of all countries is surprisingly similar. Its common feature is the rejection of the achievements of modern art, a stabilization at a level from decades ago, and the elimination of all flights of creativity.3
These passages render the stakes of Kobro’s struggle tangible: Dedicated to the speculative spirit of an international modernist form of art and thinking, the artist finds herself forced to fight for the acceptance of that form in a context determined by the national conditions of political power and repression. While her writing, like her work, by virtue of its clarity and imaginativeness instantly appeals to a contemporary reader and viewer, it equally testifies to its specific historical experience. The concerns Kobro voices are global; the fate of a politically marginalized artist and intellectual, however, is historically condemned to be local.
In Kobro’s case this meant that she had to fight the cultural bureaucrats of her time; even more, her background—she was born in Moscow, her father being from Riga (today the capital of Latvia) and of German descent—put her in a difficult position. When forced to declare her identity during Nazi occupation, she refused to capitalize on her German ancestry and instead claimed herself as Russian, a gesture for which, after liberation, she was tried in court (the new authorities interpreted it as an act of disloyalty towards Poland). Larger parts of her oeuvre, moreover, exist only as reconstructions based on photographs; some originals were lost when Kobro and Strzemiński fled Łódź in 1940 and the new occupants of their apartment threw out the pieces they found in the basement, and still more were burned when, in January 1945, lacking firewood, Kobro was forced to feed them to the fire.
A reading of Kobro’s work that does it justice—from a post-1989 perspective that understands modernist discourses on form to have emerged from a multiplicity of particular sited struggles—needs to meet two conflicting demands. On the one hand, it would have to account for how Kobro formulated her position in the specific struggles of her time in Poland. On the other, to view Kobro’s work exclusively in light of such circumstances would effectively disrespect the spirit of internationalism to which she dedicated her work, writing, and curatorial initiatives, and to relegate her to the very confined conditions that she sought to overcome. So, while the attentiveness to the formative role of local struggles would demand a close look at Łódź as a potential epicenter of artistic modernism, to pin Kobro down to one place would be to symbolically re-enact the violence of the authorities demanding to know: “What are you now, Polish, German or Russian?” If the only apt response should be “each, all, and none of these,” what form of thinking is adequate to this?
The question is pressing, and it arises not only because of the demand to rewrite the histories of modernism after the end of the Cold War, but also because the contradictions that the muddled complexities of those histories have left behind still haunt us today. I recall a symptomatic incident from my first visit to Łódź in 1999. The Polish Cultural Institute had invited a group of German curators, critics, and gallerists to visit different cities around Poland. Our guide took us to an alternative apartment gallery in Łódź, where the arrival of our motley crew of professionals felt like the entry of the Spanish inquisition (think Monty Python). The art-world status associated with our group had provoked awkward situations before. Only here this sense of power imbalance was instantly thrown into relief by the manner in which the group of young artists we met greeted us: Wordlessly they handed over their portfolios, withdrew to the adjacent space and let clouds of marijuana smoke gently drift back over. Mildly upset, I recounted the scene to Polish art critic Piotr Rypson later that night in a bar back in Warsaw. Whereupon Rypson, beer in hand, broad smile on his face, declared, with all due seriousness: “Jan, you have to understand, artists from Łódź have a long tradition in non-participatory art!”
In its poignant irony, this remark put a whole set of contradictions into perspective: First of all, it was a reminder that a purposefully enacted non-exchange can indeed be a powerful form of exchange, as it abruptly renders unspoken hierarchies tangible. And precisely this kind of enacted non-exchange has always been a medium for avant-gardists to alienate people who rely on established codes of cultural exchange. Further, the sheer flippancy of Rypson’s comment exemplifies the spirit in which we may have to imagine the inception of avant-gardes. I still regret that we didn’t take the opportunity to, there and then, draft the first Global Manifesto of Non-Participatory Art (if only to annoy anyone who still feels a need to defend or contest a concept as toothless as relational aesthetics).4 Kobro, for instance, within fifteen years, started and/or joined seven(!) different avant-gardist movements, some of which she initiated together with her partner and friends.5 In this light we could indeed look at avant-gardism as a medium for collective improvisation, that is, for initiating a multilateral, international discourse on the possibilities of artistic form, if need be, in an impromptu manner.
It is sad to see this quality overshadowed by the fact that the power struggles within artistic communities notoriously produce(d) authority figures (the likes of an André Breton or Guy Debord) who attempt to brand, pitch, and promote their own ideas of form as artistic capital; and, worse still, in retrospect, make it seem as if the history of ideas revolves around the primacy of author and ownership. Unfortunately, such (predominantly male) territorial posturing is then, often enough, rewarded by art historians who mistake the pitch for the conditions of production, and hence recount these histories as if they were relay races in which single great minds passed on the scepter of innovation to their appointed successors.
When, after 1989, local biennials for international contemporary art began proliferating worldwide, and artists, curators, and writers were invited to travel to places to talk to people, all parties involved had to try and find a lingua franca within situations of improvised exchange6—a scenario that intimately resonates with the spirit of international avant-gardist experiments locally enacted.7 This window of potentiality seems now to gradually be closing, due to the increasing push towards the professionalization of artistic careers and repatriation of global centers. Still, one could at least hope to, through valorizing a notion of collectively improvised avant-gardisms in art historical writing, contribute to an atmosphere in which international experiments with artistic form continue to appear possible and attractive.
In terms of the sociopolitical dimension of the struggle over form, there is yet another aspect to be considered: the negotiation of generational contracts. The canonical scenario associates the dismantling of once dominant principles of form with the rise of a new generation overthrowing the old. Despite the theatricality and obvious Oedipal overtones, this scenario continues to influence how artistic practices come to be reviewed, marketed, and historicized. The momentum of the “post”-modernist polemics against “high” modernism, for example, seems inseparable from a generational shift in the New York art world of the 1970s. The art writer here resembles a legal aid who must grasp the terms of negotiation (i.e., principles of form) and draft a contract accordingly, to authorize the transition of power from one generation to the next. Like in any good farce, the plot is clear, the assignment of roles understood, and the outcome guaranteed to be a coherent narrative. Can alternative models be found in the expanded field of avant-gardist histories that has come into view after 1989?
To be sure, the generational logic of different art scenes around the world need not be mapped on the dominant model of a post-1970s New York, for the simple reason that the influence of a competitive art market has not been uniform. In environments where it does not really exist, no immediate material reward is gained from pushing a previous generation off the stage. On the contrary, when recognition is primarily awarded via communication, everyone profits from keeping as many people in the loop as possible, including the members of older or intermediary generations. In the place of money, inter-generational exchange then becomes a key currency.8
Apart from economical limitations, the political conditions in a given country may bar a discourse of progressive art practices from ever reaching a wider public. Be it simply because of a lack of personage to play the part of the spectator, different generations then provide each other with an audience. In such a scenario, the avant-gardist discourse keeps itself alive because different generations come to share their mutual dedication for struggle. While surely also a potential hotbed for intrigues, art scenes that are not centered around market dynamics make it much more likely for the acknowledgment of a basic need for living together to constitute the terms of the generational contract, rather than the sheer competitive urge to, as it were, “roll” the previous generation “out of town.”
If we were continue recounting the story of Kobro’s circle of friends once more in light of these reflections, there would be another highly exemplary situation to discuss: Kobro’s associate, the abstract painter Henryk Stażewski, later moved to Warsaw where he occupied a rooftop studio flat on 64 Aleja Solidarnosci (Solidarity Boulevard). Towards the end of his long life (he was born in 1894), he shared this place for fourteen years, from 1974 to his death in 1988, with a pivotal figure in the post-1960s discourse on installation-based and conceptual art practices, Edward Krasiński (who, living a long life, from 1925–2004, in his turn continued to be a presence in the neo-conceptual discourse of the 1990s). The rooftop studio flat is preserved as a permanent installation (under the name Avant-Garde Institute).9 It is a time portal of sorts, a zone in which two long lives overlapped. To claim that the conceptual practices of the 1960s continued certain tendencies of modernism is then to say too little; they actually coincided with them, sharing and transposing their principles.
Instead, one needs to look very closely at how the works of Stażewski and Krasiński converse with each other. Stażewski was un-dogmatic in his painterly abstractions; Krasiński in turn evoked a sense of total formalist rigor at first glance that nonetheless betrayed a strong awareness of the context of his artistic gestures. Indeed, while he continued to intermittently produce surreal sculptural pieces, Krasiński made it his trademark gesture to apply an uninterrupted strip of blue scotch tape onto the walls of a given space as a horizon line. Often the strip was also stuck across artwork already installed on these walls. (Daniel Buren one day came to visit and left some of his signature red stripes on one of the studio windows.)
As this example of a first-generation abstract painter sharing a studio flat with a first-generation conceptualist shows, there don’t have to be (or perhaps never really were) clear cuts between different generations of avant-gardists. On the contrary, if we regard the shared studio flat as a paradigmatic situation, the challenge it poses to art historical writing would be to cease reproducing juridical scenarios of power transfer, and instead move closer towards kitchen stories of the kind that would account for generational contracts like the one Stażewski and Krasiński negotiated. After all, it’s easily verified by experience that abstract debates on the implications of artistic forms and concepts can gain a particular quality when conducted in an environment where domestic issues are equally contentious.
To insist on the need of breaking with officious scenarios of avant-gardist exchanges underscores that the work made in the course of such exchanges should not merely be considered a product of the given historical conditions. Some of the most exciting work created by artists in the process of determining their mutual relationship in fact incorporates those conditions. Criticality in such instances means more than just showing how things are. It rather furthers an awareness that we are not fatefully bound by the conditions of our own discourses, but that, in making these conditions the subject matter of a work, they become material to be owned, acted upon, and played with.
In the artistic biography of Krasiński we do indeed find a particularly strong, beautiful, and funny example for such an act of seizing the conditions, contradictions, and ironies of one’s own discourse: In 1967 Tadeusz Kantor invited Krasiński to take part in the performance piece Panoramic Sea-Happening, to be staged on a beach by the Baltic Sea near Osieki. Involving the people on the beach in an anarchic mixture of beach activities and choreographed theatrical acts, Kantor managed to channel the collective energies into a mock-grandiose gesture that closed the event. This gesture he convinced Krasiński to perform: With the participants on the beach comfortably reclining in their deck-chairs, watching, Krasiński, suitably dressed for the occasion in a tailcoat, stood on a step ladder in the surf and, facing the horizon line, played his part as a majestic conductor; convincingly enough—the photographs of the performance at least suggest that much—to momentarily make it seem as if the ocean were an orchestra and the rhythmical sound of the waves a symphony that an artist could direct, for the pleasure of the audience.
By itself, this gesture already poignantly mocks the artistic desire to engage the sublime. If we now contextualize the gesture, however, and look more closely at what it means for these artists to work together, the gesture becomes newly legible as an exuberantly self-ironic reflection upon their antagonism. While Kantor created all-inclusive, physically excessive and emotionally provocative theatrical events in pursuit of a (Hegelian) vision of total synthesis, Krasiński espoused the exact opposite: He redrew the line between art and life in the form of a universal blue scotch tape equator. Economical in his use of means, analytical in his (Kantian) insistence on there being categorical borderlines, Krasiński presented himself as the somewhat dandified embodiment of a critical intelligence.
For an artist like Krasiński to even accept being drawn into the immersive mayhem of a Kantor-happening therefore is a gesture with equally strong symbolic implications as the final pose he was asked to take. By casting Krasiński in the role of an ocean-horizon-orchestra-conductor, Kantor made patent the following: What is the universal blue scotch tape line but a symbol for the horizon and therefore an invocation of the sublime? What motivates the analytical mind in its search for universal principles of distinction, if not a romantic yearning to touch on an ultimate horizon of truth? Does the analytical mind not finally derive its pleasures from the fantasy that it could control the forces of dynamism by means of rigidly orchestrating their principles of form?
By playing the role Kantor assigned to him, Krasiński consigned to having his distinguished analytical position portrayed (if not caricatured) as romantic. By arguably making a very good show out of it, however, Krasiński in turn used the possibility of being challenged—on someone else’s terms—to publicly advance and embody his own agenda. Countering the fatal tendencies of antagonistic discursive positions to become ossified and self-serving, Kantor and Krasiński used the medium of a happening—and the form of theatrical (self-)caricature enabled by it—to seize, expose, and model the principles of form at the heart of their antagonism.
If we imagine the Panoramic Sea-Happening to have been animated by the laughter of two antagonists acknowledging their dependency on the engagement of their antipode, and if we then also imagine that laughter to have been shared by the participating audience on the beach, we do actually arrive at a blueprint for transforming the exploration of avant-gardist struggle into a truly gay science.
A characteristic of that laughter seems to be that it travels through time and space to puncture the putative of prevalent discursive dichotomies wherever it reappears and resonates. Equally poignant, Nancy Holt’s video piece East Coast West Coast (1969)11 may be a good example to show how, around the same time, artists in the United States took on the conditions, contradictions, and ironies of their discourse in a spirit similar to that of Kantor and Krasiński. Holt shot the video with the help of a group of friends. It’s set in the kitchen corner of a studio flat; Peter Campus is operating the camera, and Joan Jonas, Holt, and her partner, Robert Smithson, are reclining around a table engaged in talk. The conversation for the most part unfolds between Holt and Smithson (with Jonas intermittently supporting the former). Both speak in character, Holt impersonating the type of an unforgiving analytical and rhetorically skilled, but somewhat over-anxious, artist from the East Coast (New York) while Smithson plays the West Coast type (Los Angeles), claiming intuition, experience, and the love for beautiful people as the principles behind the form of his work, using terminology that synthesizes the personal with the cosmic.
The conversation that unfolds on the basis of this conceptual typecasting, however, is more than just a spoof. As Holt and Smithson, improvising in character, egg each other on, they run through practically the entire inventory of contemporary American discursive positions. Comparable to an exorcism ceremony, moreover, the spirits summoned start making their appearance, as a truly awkward tension builds up between the two contenders. Sharp as a knife, Holt cuts through the West Coast metaphysical slur, cornering Smithson; while his character initially seems infinitely likeable in his unabashed embrace of the experiential, he comes to seem increasingly more self-indulgent, when, at a loss for arguments, he resorts to passive aggressive counter-attacks. In his turn, however, he perfectly frames the exclusive focus of the New York artist type on theoretical legitimation as motivated by the desire to find the perfect sales pitch. In response to the (East Coast character’s) admonition that artists should have clear concepts of what they do, he grunts back: “You talk like Madison Avenue (… man)!”
To see Holt and her friends seize the very grammar of critical discourse and expose how neither the analytical nor the experiential position is, per se, more justified than the other is profoundly effecting. At no point, however, does the exposure suggest a disavowal of the need to argue over the principles of artistic form. On the contrary, the piece delivers its point so strongly because both its key performers go at their debate with an unmitigated passion. But what adds a particular poignancy to the work is the irony that underpins the conditions of its making: It is a study in discursive antagonism, produced in a situation of relaxed conviviality, in a free form of collective improvisation. So, while framing the dual set of (false) alternatives given by the standards of legitimatory discourse, Holt, Smithson, Jonas, and Campus, by virtue of the very form of their improvised collaboration, performatively point towards an unmapped third possibility: to realize the passion and humor of avant-gardist struggle over form—and (re-)write history in the making—in a very particular setting and therefore in a very special key, somewhere in a studio kitchen, together with friends.
Notes
1 Regarding this point, I am indebted to the insightful comments by Linda Quilan and Susana Pedrosa after a seminar presentation by Ania Okrasko.
2 Katarzyna Kobro: “Rzeźba stanowi …” (A sculpture is …), originally published in the magazine Głos Plastyków, no. 1–7 (1937), here quoted from Katarzyna Kobro 1898–1951 (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 1999), p. 169.
3 Ibid.
4 Arguably one of the few overarching, yet painfully vague, concepts on offer to theorize the form of certain tendencies in the mid-1990s, proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: les presses du réel, 2002).
That a particular form could be given to a work by an artist for the sole purpose of annoying a contender was a notion I first heard clearly formulated by Albert Oehlen. In an interview Jörg Heiser and myself conducted with him in 2003, he argued that Dali “cobbled his ‘dream’ images together – in some cases purely to startle André Breton” and offend the latter’s ideals of authenticity. Albert Oehlen, “Ordinary Madness,” frieze 78 (2003), pp. 106–111.
5 Kobro co-founded the real avant-garde in 1929 and Unism in 1931, ran a local branch of Malevich’ Unovis movement from 1920–2, became affiliated with the groups Blok in 1924, Praesens in 1926 and Abstraction-Création in 1932 to finally undersign the manifesto of Dimensionism in 1936.
6 I develop this perspective more fully in “The Curious Case of Biennial Art.” In Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebo, eds., The Biennial Reader (Hatje Cantz, 2010), pp. 184–197.
7 In his curatorial statement to the 2nd Manifesta biennial, Robert Fleck in this sense argued that after 1989 contemporary experimental practices were in fact reviving a spirit of free internationalism that had only seemingly been quelled by the repressions and enforced separations during the Cold War. Robert Fleck, Art after Communism, in Manifesta 2 exh. cat., Luxembourg 1998, pp. 193–198.
8 The experience that first made me consciously aware of such intergenerational arrangements was a residency in Yerevan, Armenia, to which I was invited in 2005 by the curator Eva Kachatryan. The community of artists I met was to equal parts composed of performance artists of the 1970s (like Grigor Kachatryan), punk-poet-painters of the 1980s (like Arman Grigoryan), and neo-conceptualists of the 1990s (like Vahram Aghasyan or Sona Abgaryan).
9 The studio flat was saved due to the initiative of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, curatorial collective, Andrzej Przywara, Joanna Mytkowska, and Adam Szymczyk.
10 By speaking of “irony” in this section I wish to describe the distinctive quality of works of art which incorporate, articulate, and reflect the consistent logic of contradiction governing people’s lives and ways of talking in a given social environment—neither to resolve these contradictions nor to judge them from a distanced vantage point, but to objectify them and thus put them up for grabs. (Dostoevsky’s style of writing being paradigmatic for this deep form of irony.)
11 The work was recently shown in the retrospective Nancy Holt: Sightlines (curated by Alena J. Williams) at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe. I thank Daniel Pies for drawing my attention to the piece.
The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.
Frank O’Hara, Personism: A Manifesto (1959)
Formalism in art, over the past half-century or so, has been highly contested. The primary existence of form—the shape, line, color, and materiality of the artwork—has not been debated; rather, at stake has been the value of form in relationship to other aspects of the artwork, and by extension, the role form plays in understanding and evaluating works of art. Much more than an epithet for mere description, formalism has, at times, become a kind of ideological position arguing for the primacy of a specific approach to making and interpreting art, one that looks within the object for all meaning. By looking exclusively within to focus only on the physical attributes of the artwork, the type of formalist methodology espoused in American modernism—as gestured to in the epigraph—oftentimes deliberately ignored other aspects of the work, most notably its content, or meaning. The subject matter or ideas outside the work itself—whether it be the landscape, a historical event, a personal memory, or any number of other possible inspirations—was deemed superfluous to the work’s meaning, even when it informed the artist’s decisions about the very form the work would take. Formalism thus engendered a reductive binary between form and content and opened itself to critique on the basis of its willful exclusion of the content and, moreover, the context in which the artwork came into being. This hermetic stance—promoted most famously by the American critic Clement Greenberg in his writings that championed a self-reflexive “medium specificity”—occasioned the rejection of formalism in much postmodern discussion.1
Nonetheless, form is understood to be fundamental to art. Indeed, in recent years, efforts have been made to resuscitate the term “formalism” and to consider the vital questions it raises about artistic production, display, and reception. Even a cursory review of recent exhibitions that specifically take up questions of formalism in contemporary art reveals a groundswell of interest in the subject. These include Formalismus at the Kunstverein Hamburg (2004); Formalism: Modern Art Today at Salzburger Kunstverein, Hamburg (2004); Gone Formalism at the ICA, Philadelphia (2006); Make It Now: New Sculpture in New York at the SculptureCenter, New York (2005); Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005); my own show, The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2006); Unmonumental at the New Museum, New York (2007); and While Bodies Get Mirrored: An Exhibition About Movement, Formalism and Space at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2010); to name but a few. These exhibitions argue for the extent to which the charge that artists are ideologically committed to form or content—that they must choose to foreground one over the other—no longer carries much currency. Here and elsewhere, both form and content are recognized as equally vital, and in fact, inextricable from one another. While these exhibitions are distinct in many ways, each endeavored to evaluate how contemporary artists tackle formal decisions in their work. Rather than reside in a strictly inward looking brand of formalism, the formal strategies in the works were largely argued to be informed by the culture at large. Whether responding to artworks of the past or reacting to the vernacular, the works in these exhibitions were selected by the curators for their distinct materiality and physicality but also for what they had to say about contemporary life. After a period of time in which the very term “formalism” was generally avoided in exhibition practice for its perceived automatic association with a Greenbergian reductionism, it is notable how many of these exhibitions actually used the word in their titles, an indication that a new era has emerged in which a desire to closely evaluate formal concerns and decisions is wholly embraced.
This essay thus attempts to identify how formalism operates in artworks of the past decade or so and how it expands the consideration of medium-specificity promoted by Greenberg in the wake of the challenge to his orthodoxy. The radical redefinitions of art that punctuate its history from the 1960s forward have had an enormous impact on contemporary art. The past fifty years of avant-garde practice has taught us that form is a priori structural in the visual arts and that any type of formalist analysis must reach beyond morphology to grapple with form’s essential ties to content. In order to understand how artists today grapple with the question of formalism and its role in their artistic output, it is worth looking back to some of the debates around formalism that have taken place during the past few decades and how they have informed artists’ practices today.
In some cases, formalist revision was a direct reaction to Greenberg, as it was for Yve-Alain Bois, who argued that Greenberg’s formalism could, at times, devolve into descriptive morphology. He also claims the critic was, ironically, “not such a great ‘formalist’ after all” for his calculated blindness to aspects of the work. If something about an artist’s formal approach did not suit the argument Greenberg wanted to make, he would simply ignore it. For example, Greenberg’s claims for flatness and opticality as fundamental to painting relied upon the classical verticality of the picture plane. Because of this, he failed to address Pollock’s relationship to the ground: his reliance upon horizontality for his working process, but also, importantly, his incorporation of detritus—of earthly, base objects such as cigarettes, matches, and coins—on the canvas of Full Fathom Five (1947) and other paintings.2 Despite his criticisms of Greenberg, Bois resolutely upholds the vital importance of formal analysis within art-historical discourse. When accused of being a “formalist,” and therefore “anti- or a-historical,” Bois addressed the claim that formalism and meaning are somehow irreconcilable.3 He writes, “even one’s most formal descriptions are always predicated upon a judgment and that the stake of this judgment is always, knowingly or not, meaning. And it is my contention that the reverse is also true: it is impossible to lay any claim to meaning without specifically (and I would say initially) speaking of form.”4
Drafted in the 1990s, Bois’ stance would be unthinkable without the art that happened in Greenberg’s stead. To take just one example, the horizontality of Pollock’s paintings—in his famous dance-like dripping of paint while hovering over a prone canvas—preoccupied the next generation of artists, who encountered Pollock through Hans Namuth’s photographs of the artist at work, Allan Kaprow’s eulogy of Pollock (in which he read his work as an expansion of art, not a contraction into painting), and through his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. The exploration of informe, or formlessness, begged by Pollock’s drip technique, was also paramount for artists like Robert Morris whose stacked and hung sculptures were designed to respond to gravity.5 Of course, an interest in formlessness was not an outright rejection of form; rather it grew out of a desire to resist certain ingrained expectations about the form a specific medium should take. While historically art was understood as the outcome of precise planning, so-called “anti-form” artists increasingly incorporated elements of chance into their working procedures. They experimented with materials—from dirt and leaves to rope and molten lead—and were at times more invested in process than outcome. Morris concluded his essay “Anti Form” from 1969 with these words: “Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work’s refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.”6 Exhibitions such as Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art and When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head curated by Harold Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern, both in 1969, focused attention on these new more open and unstructured modes of practice.
The West Coast had by the 1960s experienced a proclivity for so-called “junk art”—assemblages of found materials—and “finish fetish” works inspired by the car and surf cultures in Southern California. These experimental modes of practice seemed to strike at the heart of notions of history and good taste.7 More broadly, conceptual art and Fluxus challenged traditional notions of form, foregrounding the generating idea and often relying on instructions and systematic structures (or directives issued from the artist) to bring the work to fruition. Sol LeWitt proposed that the idea itself was the most important thing—indeed, was the work itself—while the execution was secondary: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”8 His wall drawings, for example, begin as a set of directions that articulate the materials, shapes, lengths, and frequency of the lines. Fundamental to the work is the fact that the artist is not required to create it, or even be present during its execution. Lawrence Weiner developed his own rules-based articulation of conceptual art:
Weiner and others such as Joseph Kosuth gravitated to language as their primary subject of investigation. Others, like Robert Barry, for a brief period of time resisted the object altogether, engaging in activities like trying to communicate telepathically with an artwork or going out into the landscape and releasing gas into the air. Lacking an actual object, these artworks existed only through documentation, or in people’s minds. An important component of Weiner’s open-ended approach to the production of his work is the emphasis of the “receiver.” It marks a growing interest in the viewer as a participant in the work—one who is empowered to fabricate the work, interact with it, or if they choose, simply imagine it.
At the same time, artists began to articulate the inextricable connections between form and content. In 1971, Lee Lozano wrote, “I can’t be interested in form for form’s sake … Form is seductive; form can be perfect. But there’s no justification for form … unless it’s used to expose content which has meaning.”10 The same year, Adrian Piper proclaimed, “I can no longer see discrete forms in art as viable reflections of what seems to be going on in this society. They refer back to conditions of separateness, order, exclusivity, and the stability of easily-accepted functional identities which no longer exist … I’m interested in the elimination of the discrete form as art object … with its isolate internal relationships and self-determining esthetic standards.”11 Interested in immediacy, process, and catharsis, Piper’s public performances were ideas for which the final form was deliberately left open, residing in the viewer’s reaction.
During this remarkably innovative period for artists, Roland Barthes articulated the burgeoning prominence of the viewer. Suggesting a new era in which meaning is not determined by the author, but rather, remains open and unmoored, Barthes put the power of interpretation in the hands of the reader (or viewer), stating, “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”12 Barthes’s resistance to conventional notions of the heroic autonomous artists, his belief that a work of art exists as a pastiche of past works, and his advocacy for the pleasure and complexity to be found in these more multidimensional and intertextual spaces become central to practices that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly those of the artists who have come to be identified as the “Pictures Generation.” Enacting what Michel Foucault called a de-centering of the author, these artists often appropriated recognizable images and forms from art history, news sources, and popular culture, creating a discursive space in which questions of authorship are intertwined with critiques of systems within the art world as well as the social and political hierarchies of the day.13 Much more, however, than simply a desire to break down barriers between “low” and “high” art, these artists highlighted how the visual languages that saturate our culture—whether it be items stacked on a supermarket shelf or images of conflicts that appear daily in our newspapers—carry with them particular values that influence how we understand and operate in the world. Their perspective is one of criticality, and it is this level of engagement with the meanings located within both the content of the work and its form that has been inherited by younger generations of artists.
For some in the Pictures Generation (and arguably artists from earlier generations outlined here), content, or subject matter, dictated form. Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of a Walker Evans photograph necessarily had to be a photograph, too. Barbara Kruger’s borrowed images overlaid with bold text in familiar Futura and Helvetica type traffic in the language of graphic design. The renewed attention to the fruitful marriage of form and content reverberated into the 1990s, and while the decade witnessed a resurgence of insistence that art should take up subjects revolving around the urgent issues of the day—the persistent inequities of race, class, and gender, for example—form and content were no longer conflicting agendas. What Bois argued in the mid-1990s—that formal considerations always imply meaning and that meaning is contingent upon formal descriptions—was largely embraced.
The profound impact of the media and the abundance of visual information that infiltrates our daily lives acknowledged by the Pictures Generation have continued to influence artists’ formal decisions. We see it in the recent sculptures of Isa Genzken, who piles everything from glassware to dried flowers, statuary trinkets to baby dolls atop pedestals and then loosely wraps the bases with materials such as photographs, plastic sheeting, and mirrored appliqué until the entire thing appears to be on the verge of toppling over. And it is evident in the collaborative practice of Ryan Trecartin, whose video installations frantically blend references to everything from reality television to experimental film and employ a staccato editing that keeps the mystifying narrative moving at a frenetic pace. From different generations and working with different mediums, both artists traffic in a manic visual language, addressing the glut of visual input and preponderance of commodity culture—if for divergent reasons. We could argue that Genzken’s incorporation of toy soldiers and injured babies into her dynamic sculptures is a poignant commentary on our culture’s disconnection from the impact of the violence inflicted by war, while Trecartin is more concerned with questions of identity and revels in the expressive and transgressive possibilities of embracing a profusion of imagery. While their reasons for enacting a sort of visual overload may differ, each approaches this strategy through specific formal questions. In this sense, formalism functions in the work as a type of challenge, whereby the artists push the formal capacity of their medium nearly to the brink of viability. Genzken’s longstanding engagement with questions of sculpture’s particular attributes and Trecartin’s ability to seemingly effortlessly adopt and exploit the techniques and technologies of video reveal a level of perspicacity within their chosen mediums that lies at the heart of many contemporary artists’ practices today. And it is their knowledge of the history of their medium that forms the foundation for their ability to create a fresh visual language.
Rather than reduce a medium to what are alleged to be a few essential characteristics, as Greenberg had it, artists like Genzken and Trecartin are extending their mediums beyond their perceived boundaries and limitations, asking sculpture, for example, to balance precariously, barely able to stand under the weight of its copious parts. Artists today reject the endgame of earlier types of formalism in favor of a formalism that allows new possibilities for a given medium to flourish. These artists’ in-depth involvement with medium-specific questions has resulted not in “purity” but rather what we might call “contamination.” In many cases, explorations into one medium will suggest its relationship to others, resulting in a type of cross-disciplinary or multi-form process. By incorporating one medium into another or by creating a dialogue between them, similarities as well as crucial differences are drawn out.
Shannon Ebner, for one, delves into the possibilities for photography by linking it to both sculpture and language. Offering new insights into common photographic genres such as landscape and street photography, she incorporates sculpted words and phrases to interrupt the legibility of her images. Her sculptures oftentimes become the subject of her photographs, underscoring how an image of any three-dimensional object is by necessity flattened so that information is lost, thereby questioning our assumptions that representational photography is by its nature easily comprehended. Similarly, it is not unusual to find a photograph of a popular celebrity, current news item, or close-up of a meal adhered to one of Rachel Harrison’s sculptures. Sometimes awkwardly attached to a mottled surface or somewhat obstructed from view, her work points to the pronounced differences between producing and presenting two- and three-dimensional work and how each circulates in the world differently. For these artists and many others, it is the site of medium investigation where the formal innovation resides. Moreover, an association with formalism no longer suggests an unremitting commitment to one medium over another or a desire to traffic only in the languages of a given medium. Ian Kiaer’s installations comprise constellations of divergent objects put into careful juxtaposition, some decidedly sculptural and placed directly on the floor and others paintings or drawings hung on the wall or leaning against it. Likewise, Amy Sillman has acknowledged her debt to the language of sculpture and the influence of film and video on her paintings.
What becomes apparent when viewing works by these artists is a sense of freedom with formal experimentation. Artists of earlier generations—particularly those who participated in the pronounced expansions to the definitions of art that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s—clearly paved the way for artists today. But this feeling of freedom may also result from our distinctly heterogeneous and dispersed cultural moment. We have fully inherited and adopted what were once avant-garde approaches to art-making so that a desire to resist convention is widespread today. One outcome of this more open environment has been an increased comfort with precariousness and instability, which may manifest itself through material choices or structural decisions. Artists like Franz West and Charles Long have commonly turned to vulnerable materials such as papier-mâché and plaster. And these preferences indicate more than just a harvesting of the many material options available to artists: They reflect an ideological position. Sometimes described as “un-monumental,” these artists’ sculptures resist the expectation that art must be heroic, stable, complete, and autonomous. This rejection of autonomy is also apparent in a turn towards artworks that are composed of constellations of objects—individual forms that are incomplete and incomprehensible on their own and instead rely upon the connections between their numerous parts for their meaning.
Greenberg’s favored word “opticality” is also rarely heard today. Despite the infatuation with a level of instability and a quality of potential incompleteness, we have returned to looking and thinking closely about artists as object makers. One result of this renewed infatuation with the object is an intention, on the part of artists, to make their processes visible so that an aspect of viewing the work becomes imagining its making. The careful attention to materials, acute physicality, and integration of laborious techniques like sewing, knitting, and weaving in the paintings of Sergej Jensen, Mark Barrow, Sarah Crowner, and Ruth Laskey deliberately foreground process. Dianna Molzan’s propensity to dismantle and reassemble the canvas and stretcher bar before adding pigment to the surface makes viewers acutely aware of the distinct physicality of the painting’s ground. Even photographers—Eileen Quinlan, Liz Deschenes, Dirk Stewen, and Matt Saunders—are turning to explorations of the material, or physical, specificities of their medium. Rather than rely on the definition of the photograph exclusively as a two-dimensional image, these artists make visible the processes of production and create decidedly tactile objects, working through the many nuances of their medium to consider its component parts. Deschenes has embraced time-consuming processes like long-exposure photograms and the use of reflective silver toner so that the photograph will change over time, the work transforming with each viewing. Stewen paints photographic paper with dark ink and decorates the surface with confetti and colored thread, emphasizing the capacity for the photograph to be a unique object rather than an endlessly reproducible image.
Photographs by these artists—while maintaining the integrality of their given subject matter (from early film stars to tombstones at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris)—are also about photography. Likewise, the videos of artists like Omer Fast, Candice Breitz, and Pierre Huyghe similarly mine the technical capacities of their medium and reveal the strategies of the work’s making that would traditionally be hidden from view or made seamless. Aggressive and jarring editing is a common characteristic in contemporary video, as is the visibility of “backstage” activity and the artifice of makeup and special effects. These exacting formal accomplishments in the work are not, however, understood to usurp content. Formal languages may have, to some extent, become content, but always with an awareness that the forms themselves come from the outside—from the rich moments that make up our history and the onslaught of visual stimulation that distinguishes contemporary life—not by means of a solely hermetic interior view. The divide between form and content enacted during modernism has been successfully bridged. For these artists, it would be unthinkable to diminish the importance of one or the other, and of one to the other. Formalism today upholds its invaluable and integral role in the analysis of art declared by Greenberg and others but has cracked it open so that its marriage to content and meaning is further brought to light.
Notes
1 By prioritizing form and eschewing narrative and the pictorial, Greenberg intended to free art from the expectation that it should have a particular meaning. Having witnessed the use of art as propaganda in the first half of the twentieth century, Greenberg was intent on “saving art” from a role in political agendas. Later in the century, however, Greenberg’s position was believed to be too navel-gazing, to have pushed art into a formalist corner, one that neglected to acknowledge art’s capacity to engage with the issues of the day, a position condemned by cultural critics of the 1970s and 1980s.
2 See Yve-Alain Bois, “Whose Formalism?” The Art Bulletin 78: O.1 (March 1996) (www.egs.edu/faculty/yve-alain-bois/articles/whose-formalism/) and Chapter 6 in Rosalind Krauss The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Another concern for Bois and Krauss was how Greenberg’s argument relied upon outmoded notions of painting’s transcendent potentialities and his emphasis on opticality. While Bois and Krauss are both highly critical of Greenberg’s formalism, both have been proponents of rigorous formal analysis, and like Greenberg, their writings have meaningfully explored the properties and operations within specific mediums. See also Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
3 Bois cites the following critics: Patricia Leighten, “Cubist Anachronisms: Ahistoricity, Cryptoformalism, and Business-as-Usual in New York,” Oxford Art Journal XVII: 2 (1994), p. 91; Joseph Kosuth, “Eye’s Limits: Seeing and Reading Ad Reinhardt,” Art and Design, no. 34 (1994), p. 47; and Jed Perl, “Absolutely Mondrian,” New Republic (July 31, 1995), p. 29.
4 Bois, ibid.
5 See Georges Bataille, “Formless,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, edited and with an introduction by Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 31. Originally published as “Informe” in Documents 7 (December 1929).
6 Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum 6 (April 1968), pp. 33–35. The essay was given its title by the magazine’s editor at the time, Philip Leider.
7 At the center of this artistic upheaval was the energetic sculptor Ed Kienholz, who began organizing exhibitions of his friends in the mid-1950s, and met the visionary curator Walter Hopps in 1956. Together they opened the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957 and by 1958 Irving Blum had joined the ranks to help run the gallery. The gallery lasted less than a decade, but it paved the way for a slew of innovative artists including Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman, Jay Defeo, Llyn Foulkes, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses, and Ken Price, among many others.
8 Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1992), p. 846; originally published in Artforum 5: 10 (Summer 1967), pp. 79–83.
9 Lawrence Weiner, “Statements,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 894; statement was originally made in 1969.
10 Lee Lazano, “Form and Content,” in Lucy Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 217; original date July 19, 1971.
11 Adrian Piper, untitled essay, in Lippard, op. cit., p. 234; original date January 1971.
12 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York:Noonday Press, 1977), p. 147. Originally written in 1968. See also Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text“ in Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), pp. 155–164. Originally written in 1971.
13 See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?“ in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 101–120.
I was impatient with Yang Haegue’s DINA4/DINA3/DINA2 Whatever Being (2007). Six rectangular white monochromes made of fiberboard protrude from a wall into the space of the gallery. The title of the work tells you that each fiberboard panel is scaled according to standard paper measurements designated as A4, A3, and A2, respectively. Vertically oriented and modestly sized, the panels recall the shape and dimensions of a small windowpane, and their color echoes the white walls on which they are shown. The panels are angled in different ways. Some turn laterally while others tilt downwards or upwards so that you are not looking only at the panel’s front, but above it, below it, and around it. The work seemed to belabor the simple point that these were, in fact, six panels devoid of color.
DINA4/DINA3/DINA2 Whatever Being looked so contained, so absorbed in confirming its own material presence, so formalist. The shape and color of the panels immediately made me think of the monochrome, whose position in modern art history depends on its supposed role as the alpha and omega of all painting. I also thought of Ann Gibson’s observation that monochromes are “fearfully self-sufficient, refusing congress with the world.”1 I wondered what her comment might mean now and in relation to Yang’s stubborn formalism. Would it be possible to refuse congress with the world even if you wanted to? Yang is working in a time when the art world has expanded like never before. The geographical scope of this expanded world is especially well denoted by the heightened visibility of artists whose country of national or ethnic origin would have formerly doomed them to a life on the margins. This visibility is further abetted by the physical mobility of artists like Yang Haegue. Korean by birth and nationality, educated in Germany, she seems to travel effortlessly to exhibitions in all parts of the world, from São Paulo to Moscow, Łódź to Seoul.
The mobility and professional success of artists like Yang reflect “the world” as many would like to envision it, an approach that might be described as globalism. Like veganism, hedonism, and communism, globalism refers to a belief in a particular way of doing things. In this respect it differs from globalization, a word often used pejoratively to refer to totalizing processes requiring conformity to a certain practices or attitudes. Globalism also differs from longstanding forms of supranational circulation facilitated by a few powerful actors as proposed by commentators like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their wildly popular Empire (2000). Here globalism refers to the constellation of attempts to realize an ideal kind of world order based not only on mandates for inclusion, but also on ensuring parity among those included. It is a project that within the domain of the visual arts has gained extraordinary momentum during the past fifteen to twenty years and whose most lasting effect has been the increased visibility of artists hailing from parts of the world deemed peripheral under rubrics of empire or the avant-garde.
For all its idealism, globalism is hardly an epic of triumph. Standards of evaluation have not always been equal or equally applied to those newly admitted into the “world” as fashioned by institutions based in the rich countries of the West, including Japan. If “standards of evaluation” sounds suspiciously like “quality,” it is because I want to call attention to issues of judgment that bear ever more firmly down on a contemporary art history whose growth is nothing short of exponential. But as Max Friedländer observed more than half a century ago, the very idea of quality “arrests the flow of words of even the most garrulous.”2 Silence reigns now when old ideas of inclusion enjoy new life through concepts of relationality or that of the network. Even those whose job it is to pass judgment rarely divulge their criteria for choosing one work over another, particularly when the work is identified with parts of the world known as the “non-West.” Critics, historians, and curators tiptoe around the issue of quality for fear of being called a racist, sexist, xenophobe, or worse yet, a conservative. This is especially the case where the critic, historian, or curator in question is supported by public money. The main exception to this rule are collectors who freely voice their opinions about why they buy one work and not another, although the very platform that allows them such freedom of expression is also that which often prevents their opinions from being taken seriously. They are private individuals, after all, expressing their own personal tastes. In cases where the scope, quantity, or nature of a collection imbues its owner with quasi-public status, personal taste takes on the aura of serious judgment comparable to specialist assessments.
No matter the status of the decision-maker, whether she is a curator working at a government institution or a private collector buying works at auction, what remains is the problem of ambiguity when it comes to actually specifying what makes one work stronger, more effective, or simply better than another. Many judgments revolve around the word “interesting.” Innumerable studio critiques, art history classes, and exhibition reviews use it liberally to refer to both very good and very bad work. The word is both praise and alibi, as well as a common courtesy, like asking someone how they are without really expecting or wanting an answer. It is also an expression of judgment. Donald Judd declared that “a work need only be interesting,” to which Michael Fried retorted, “all that matters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain [his] interest.”3 Anything can be called “interesting,” but whether it matters depends on who’s speaking.
Fried was actually speaking of authority, a subject which he, as one of the main keepers of a particular kind of formalism, was familiar. It seems ironic to quote Fried, given how those most commonly associated with the idea of formalism tend to be most dismissive of the art most frequently celebrated as examples of globalism. A particularly notable example was the glaring omission of non-Euro-American art from Art Since 1900,4 the influential history whose main contributors included some of formalism’s staunchest adherents. But Fried’s words ring true for an art world that still operates according to startlingly unequal configurations of power. Take, for example, the international biennial curated by a well-known individual typically based in a major city or at an institution in Western Europe, the United States, or Japan where non-Euro-American works tend to play the role of metaphor, conveying information about their makers’ national, ethnic, and racial origins. They are deemed “interesting” because they fulfill our desire to be tourists; they bring us temporarily to a distant, or lesser-known part of the world.
To be fair, some curators endorse a standard of native relevance, whereby “the work selected has to be defendable as being of high quality according to values held in the place where it is shown.”5 The standard sounds fair enough. Patrick Flores, a historian of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, for example, condemns “the revival of the connoisseurial sequestration of art.”6 But like many others, he is uneasy with the arbitrariness of the native relevance standard. One of a handful of commentators to directly address quality as a matter of real urgency in so-called non-Euro-American art, Flores is skeptical of the native relevance standard, not only because it allows critics, curators, and historians to avoid having to explain their decisions, but also because it presumes non-Euro-American art as somehow beyond comprehension, and thus outside the domain of what is commonly accepted as modern or contemporary.
Consider, too, the legions of non-Euro-American artists whose primary strategy appears to consist of taking an object indigenous to their cultural background and then multiplying it, enlarging it, or reducing it. We see, for instance, the enlarged “Mao” jackets of Sui Jianguo, the miniaturized sterling silver prisons of Carlos Garaicoa, or Subodh Gupta’s endless piles of shiny tiffins. The range and number of artists who employ this strategy is vast, and it may in fact be the most common idiom among artists whose cultural origins identify them as global. Its prevalence speaks more to the nature of the global contemporary art field and its standards for judgment than to the capacities of the artists responsible for such works. Why invest real thought into the problem of form when everyone just wants to know where you’re from? Going further, if a particular kind of low-level iconography is indeed all that’s expected, why not meet these expectations with a vengeance?
That so many artists are profiting handsomely from this situation may be a kind of poetic justice. Rightful payback, perhaps, for all the times critics, historians, and curators insisted that a “non-Western” artist offer up their ethnicity, nationality, or race for consumption, or rather, delectation. The artist and critic Olu Oguibe implied as much in his imagined recreation of an interview between Ouattara, the Ivorian artist who has resided in New York since 1989, and the critic Thomas McEvilley. In Oguibe’s account, the latter appears to strong-arm the former into talking only about biography. He imagines the artist holding his breath and gritting his teeth, “vigorously crossing out the dozen F-words bombing his brain while warning himself to take it with calm.”7 The artist, Oguibe speculates, “stakes his final but ultimately futile claim: I prefer to talk about my work” (Oguibe’s emphasis).8 His dramatization vividly illustrates one of the main ironies of the globalism project. Humanist as it seems, it denies that which its presumptive beneficiaries want most—serious consideration of the artwork—in favor of reifying the artist through her biography.
Byron Kim tried to force the matter with Synecdoche (1991–present), an enormous grid composed of small, rectangular monochrome canvases. Painted in what first appears to be various shades of pink, brown, yellow, and black, the format and shape of the canvases bring back form with a vengeance, especially if you don’t know why the work was made or how. Paint is applied smoothly and consistently so that the canvases together seem as self-contained and self-sufficient as any championed under formalism’s banner. Displayed in I. M. Pei’s modernist mausoleum, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Synecdoche sits congenially near the all-white monochromes of Robert Ryman, or the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt which Kim very much had in mind during the making of Synecdoche.
Yet if Kim is looking at Reinhardt he is doing so through the prism of Reinhardt’s fixation with the idea of art having limits in the 1960s, which Max Kozloff once described as a face-off between the Day-Glo “decadence” of Andy Warhol and Reinhardt’s “reckless sobriety.”9 Kim’s take is to present a self-nullifying proposition that perfectly emulates Reinhardt’s suppression of touch, but also undermines it by applying colors distinctly attributable to certain extra-artistic references. Contrary to the works of Kazimir Malevich, Yves Klein, and Reinhardt which tend to be painted in primary hues, variations of such, or noncolors like black and white that seem calculated to be as nonspecific as possible, the panels of Synecdoche are painted in such a range of hues so as to direct viewer attention to the choice of color. Not only are the colors so specific as to again breach the question of intention, which Kim himself described as “an adulterated aspect” that might provoke the viewer to speculate over their meaning, Kim juxtaposes the monochromes in seemingly random order so that each panel registers more as an intense version of the color in which they were originally painted.10 Dark monochromes, for instance, appear even darker when paired with lighter monochromes, while high chroma colors seem clearer next to low chroma panels: “Instead of using the color field to represent something universal, spiritual, something too large for words, I use it to represent an idiosyncrasy.”11
In Synecdoche, that “idiosyncrasy” is the presence of race and ethnicity. Famously shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an event alternately applauded and reviled for its explicit foregrounding of visual art’s relationship to race, ethnicity, gender, and to a lesser extent, class, the colors used to paint each monochrome in Synecdoche were extrapolated from the skin tones of those who sat for the artist. That Kim chose to frame this presence in the language of pollution (“an adulterated aspect”) touches directly on Warhol’s legacy of cheerfully violating the lines separating high culture from low. In addition, the understated, nearly deadpan nature of Kim’s transgressions provoked viewers to liken the monochromes to paint chips—which, in fact, is what the paint colors are actually based on.
Not everyone appreciated what Kim was trying to do. The philosopher Arthur Danto, for example, dismissed the work as trendy and without substance. “Issue-related art,” he called it, a work only able to ask large questions without answering them.12 Danto’s dismissal of Synecdoche invoked a distinction between art entrenched within a particular understanding of art history and art having an extra-artistic, sociopolitical agenda. Kozloff’s formulation of the Warhol–Reinhardt axis of public infuriation where both artists “touched an exposed nerve in what might be called the art tolerances of this country” has new meaning through Synecdoche.13 Made by someone whose surname distinctly indicates certain ethnic and racial origins, Synecdoche was created to “respond directly to those who ask me, ‘Why are you making abstract paintings?’ The ‘you’ meaning Asian-American-artist, artist-of-color, artist-with-something-to-say.”14
Still, Danto’s objection is worth considering. The 1993 Whitney Biennial thrust upon viewers a system of evaluation whose primary index was efficacy. Inherent in Danto’s objection was the question of whether a given artwork could be an effective means of enacting social and political change. Under such criteria, quality is reframed as an ethical matter so that the question to be asked of an artwork was whether it was a moral good. This kind of thinking was hardly limited to the United States or to the early 1990s; we need only look at the enormous popularity of theories like relational aesthetics which emphasized participatory, interactive works aimed at cultivating relationships between otherwise unrelated groups of people.
Problems arise, however, when ethics precludes any critical examination of the works in question, let alone discussions of artistic quality, an issue on which Claire Bishop has written extensively in relation to collaborative artistic practices.15 The very idea of basing interpretations on questions of form would strike many as deeply suspicious: Form invokes aesthetics, which in turn raise old fears of a market that regards the artwork as nothing more than another item for sale. Form is put into quarantine, isolated as an unwanted vestige of a previously elitist art world. To Monica Amor, a specialist in Latin American art, it is an “absurd dichotomy of form and content” in which artworks, particularly by non-Euro-American, or nonwhite artists, were studied only in relation to content.16 The turn against form must have staggered Kim, Ouattara, and many other artists for whom form was a critical means of reframing globalism. Mere recognition of racial, national, and ethnic difference was insufficient to realize a truly global art world; there must also be serious consideration of the actual work, including careful examination of its forms.
These attempts, as well as the beleaguered status of form, shed further light on Yang’s stubborn insistence in pointing out that monochrome panels are, in fact, monochrome panels. She graduated from Seoul National University’s art school in 1994, by which time globalism seemed to unfold through a system of value that pegged a given artwork according to its perceived capacity to visibly reflect the origins and location of its maker. This was spectacularly demonstrated by the kinds of works included in what was then the revitalization of the international biennial circuit, for example, Takashi Murakami’s unabashed bastardizations of Japanese animation culture and traditional screen paintings and Cai Guo-Qiang’s epic installations of gunpowder. If artists like Murakami and Cai emerged from the 1990s as globalism’s poster children, it was partly because their works brilliantly performed as signs of cultural consciousness. Moreover, they helped make real the newly iconic figure of the cosmopolitan artistic nomad, able to move with enviable ease from one metropole to another.
But even as non-Euro-American artists began to show more frequently in places like New York, it was still painfully evident to some artists and critics how little flexibility the new breed of global nomads had. Many artists were limited to exhibitions that focused on the mobility of their bodies as opposed to the fluidity of their minds as demonstrated in their works. In several cases, the global nomad was allowed to be global within the limited framework of exhibitions organized around themes of race, ethnicity, and (tacitly) nationality, which for decades was the main vehicle through which non-Euro-American artists entered into global artistic commerce. In 1993, the artist and critic Bahc Mo caustically remarked that “it was better to show than not show,” a comment later interpreted by fellow critic Alice Yang as a symptom of a broader “failure” in the New York art world to integrate Asian artists into a discursive system able to “cut across racial boundaries.”17 The world was larger than before, but formed exclusively around a narrow set of parameters. Bahc’s dissatisfaction anticipated what by the late 1990s would be a critical mass of conscientious objectors to globalism’s present shape. One of British multiculturalism’s fiercest critics, Rasheed Araeen vented his frustrations over what he argues is a postcolonial fetishization of the figure of “the power of the mule which always carries the burden and the sign of its breeding.”18 No matter how well traveled the non-Euro-American artist, she is forever bound to her cultural origins, and most importantly to what others make of those origins.
Working in 2007, Yang Haegue enjoys a measure of physical and psychological freedom greater than that of artists working in 1993, or even in 1999. Yet her gravitation towards the monochrome can hardly be written off as personal choice for she remains bound to a discursive context that insists upon geopolitical separations even as it champions cultural difference through tropes of circulation, including transnationalism, diaspora, and more recently, the network. The ability to encounter such art in ways other than those framed by inferences of cultural difference is as urgent as the need to approach contemporary art made by white artists with an eye to their own possession of ethnicity.19 Interestingly, we are reminded of the words of Rosalind Krauss, one of the critics most associated with a brand of formalism apathetic, and even hostile, to the globalism project. Attempting to recuperate the specificity of Richard Serra’s artwork as experienced through the viewing encounter, Krauss takes aim at the “world-wide homogenization” of culture which she located under the sign of the “international.”20 Though made in 1978, her point still holds for an artist like Yang, only that this time, “homogenization” has everything to do with the remarkably narrow set of interpretative tools used to discuss those works whose contextual origins are most responsible for validating the idea of the global.
Yang is not so naive as to think that simple indifference or outright refusal of this situation would be enough. “To be engaged without dogma,” she says, one must carve out a space for oneself by preventing one’s position from being “fully definable or cultivated, therefore [preventing it from being] instrumentalized by anyone else.”21 What Yang wants is to be left alone in a space specifically of her own making, not for its sake alone, but as an escape from the trespasses of globalism. What she desires is autonomy, not aesthetic autonomy, but freedom, or at least respite from a world in which she exists only to the extent that her artwork can serve as a metaphor from which we can glean information about her origins and subjectivity.
It is this desire to escape that underwrites her insistence on showing six fiberboard panels from various angles. In many ways DINA4/DINA3/DINA2 Whatever Being is an excessively didactic work, one that threatens to become what Fried described as “merely interesting.”22 But perhaps this only attests to Yang’s desperation. Only such an extreme response will get viewers to abandon otherwise standard measures of judgment. Writing on art made by African American artists, Darby English has recently urged that attention be squarely centered on form lest the artwork be permanently indentured to generalizations regarding the artist’s ethnic, national, and racial origins.23
We might read these concerns as veiled calls to bring back formalism, a term that despite its long history cannot be mentioned without resuscitating the ghost of Clement Greenberg and his attendant biases against art that failed to fulfill an extraordinarily rigid set of criteria. Greenbergian formalism seems as far away from the project of globalism as one could possibly get, and incongruent too, given how few art worlds outside the Euro-American sphere actually knew of, or cared for, the ideas of Clement Greenberg. But the fear remains. It may never be possible to think of formalism outside the writings of a very small, yet astonishingly influential, circle of art historians and critics, nor is it possible to forget that certain approaches to form are partly to blame for the exclusion of much of the world’s artistic production. The strong association between the very word formalism and a particular body of art criticism hostile to considerations that might undermine the artwork’s autonomy undermines arguments urging close formal analysis. Too often, calls for close formal reading are misinterpreted as reactionary calls to purge considerations of sociocultural context altogether. These criticisms miss the point of works like DINA4/DINA3/DINA2 Whatever Being, which doggedly remind us that we are looking at objects made specific by their hardness, the sharpness of their edges, and the starkness of their color. Whatever might be said of the work, it is clear that Yang has an investment in making us see.
Again, we may wonder whether this isn’t a regressive turn towards aesthetics and away from politics. To cite Flores once more, the “notion of an aesthetic” makes possible a different view of the artwork as something other than a spokesperson of a particular context, and thus something other than evidence. In asking whether the problem of aesthetic might “posit a form of difference … that resists the conditions under which form is expected to materialize and be received by an experiential community,” he proposes that the artwork be allowed to operate as something other than complicit.24 If Yang has such an investment in making us see it is because only then can we see the world more clearly. As she and many other artists ask, is it possible that form might actually be central in realizing the dream of globalism? Can the aesthetic be fodder for a transformative politics of its own? And if we believe that globalism means more than inclusion or geographical expansion, then shouldn’t we at least entertain the ideas of those trying to do just that? Indeed, to explore form’s potential to facilitate dialogues between artworks that might otherwise lie at opposite ends of the world has all the force of an ethical imperative that grows stronger by the day.
Notes
1 Ann Gibson, “Color and Difference in Abstract Painting: The Ultimate Case of Monochrome,” Genders 13 (1992), p. 137.
2 Max J. Friedländer, “Artistic Quality: Original and Copy,” Burlington Magazine 78: 458 (May 1941), p. 143.
3 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (1967), p. 21.
4 Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004).
5 David Elliott, statement from 1999 cited by Robert Flores, “Presence and Passage: Conditions of Possibilities in Contemporary Asian Art,” International Yearbook of Aesthetics 8 (2004), p. 50.
6 Flores, op. cit., p. 51.
7 Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2004), p. 11. Originally published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art in 1995.
8 Ibid., p. 11.
9 Max Kozloff, “Andy Warhol and Ad Reinhardt: The Great Accepter and the Great Demurrer,” Studio International 181: 931 (March 1971), p. 141.
10 Byron Kim, “Ad and Me,” Flash Art 172 (October 1993), p. 122.
11 Ibid., p. 122.
12 Arthur C. Danto, “The 1993 Whitney Biennial,” The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998), pp. 173–174.
13 Kozloff, op. cit., p. 141.
14 Ibid., p. 34.
15 For a specific explanation of this problem, see Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum 44: 6 (February 2006), pp. 178–184.
16 Monica Amor, “Whose World? A Note on the Paradoxes of Global Aesthetics,” Art Journal 57: 4 (Winter 1998), p. 31.
17 Quoted in Alice Yang, Why Asia? Essays on Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art, eds. Jonathan Hay and Mimi Young (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 94, 95.
18 Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” Third Text 50 (Spring 2000), p. 9.
19 Among the few initiatives to explore this latter point is “White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art,” held at the International Center for Photography, New York, October 9, 2003–January 10, 2004.
20 Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra: A Translation,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 261.
21 Yang Haegue, interview with Binna Choi, “Community of Absence: Conversation with Haegue Yang,” BAK Newsletter 2 (March 2006).
22 Fried, op. cit., p. 21.
23 Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 7–8.
24 Flores, op. cit., p. 51.