Alas, Michael has fallen for the Significant Form Theory of Clive Bell (1914) Bell argued, just as Michael does, that form is superior to subject and it's form, visual form (or literary form) that is the core of aesthetic value and meaning. I have called that the significant form Fallacy because it's impossible to show a definitive difference between significant form and insignificant form except by individual response or the "because I say so" proof. Bell was following a Kantian argument that the aesthetic response is involuntary. It occurs even when we don't want it. It occurs even when we hate the subject-matter. Trouble is, this involuntary aesthetic response cannot be objectified. No universal formal properties, always significant, never insignificant, can be found. In fact, it always leads to the surrender to the resignation that "one man's beauty is another man's beast".
Although the Significant Form theory is deeply embedded on modernist art, at least, and in culture as a whole, it is a very slight theory and is contrary to the natural 'story-telling make-believe impulse". Anything looks "like" something else and no matter how supposedly abstract an image is, or even a cluster of random words or sounds, we will try to make something of it. We will try to explain it or enjoy the fun-fear of making up a story. Even any rectangle has a wonderful back-story. The immediate Kantian involuntary aesthetic response is momentary and almost immediately gives way to our natural quizzing and confabulations or interpretations. I say subject matter counts. But whose subject matter? There are many subjects and we choose which to make up. Some may be encouraged by what we individually regard (or are habituated to regard) as significant and insignificant form, some not. All are valid. I am on a campaign as an artist against the Significant Form theory. It is the false "objective" alternative to a similar and correct notion of subjective Inner Necessity formulated by Kandinsky (see his Concrning the spiritual in Art, 1911). Kandinsky at least recognized that what makes anything significantly meaningful as art is mainly subjective and constructive act. The two theories were developed around the same time in the early 20C, but Bell was trying, I think, to come up with a workable, objective theory of art. It fails. All purely formal arguments about art (Greenbergian cult) fail. ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, August 29, 2011 11:40:19 AM Subject: Re: Fiction >> Michael -- You're probably less obscure than simply over my head. I've been > imposing a simple-minded interpretation of your question as being > essentially this: Did any caveman ever paint an image that was not simply an exact > replica (as close as he could make it; or, who knows? -- SHE could make it) of > something she'd seen? Such mysteries of prehistory fascinate and frustrate. > > Tell me again: Is there a practical reason (and there doesn't have to be) > why you want to know when fiction/imagination first moved artists like > painters and storytellers? I believe that art is fictitious, as I've explained before (and not in William's more generalized way that all representations are fictions, insofar as they are not the actual thing represented). Art re/presentations are provisional, entirely arbitrary (even those that seem to be entirely contingent, which brings in the problem of "In Cold Blood" and other hybrids), and thus they are not vitiated when the depictions do not correspond well with reality, that is, when depictions are unreliable, as would happen with, say, police photos. For these kinds of arbitrary manipulations to be possible or feasible, for them to be sufficient for the artist's purpose (e.g., picking the name of a protagonist, details of his or her description, the color of the sky in a landscape or the number of trees or branches on the trees in a painting, etc.), they have to be detachable from their referent. They have to become ends and interests in themselves. The curve of the naked body has to be pleasing apart from the scene depicted (e.g., Bronzino's "Luxury," Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa," etc.), the style of delineation has to be pleasing in itself (cf. e.g., drawings by Ingres, Schiele, Hockney, Rivers, etc.), etc. I find that these visibly stylized portrayals strongly suggests that the formal qualities of works of art supersede the referential qualities: the beauty of the shapes, colors, diction, disposition of actors on the stage, and all the other stuff become the end, and the represented subject becomes one of the formal elements in the work. (BTW, who remembers the political ramifications of the Raft of the Medusa? of the Oath of the Horatii? Gone, dissipated. All that's left is admiration of the artistic skills on display. Which, moreover, is part of why I really like Christo's work: their awesome scale, audacity, and clear visual presence could only be produced by the other part of his work, the tedious efforts to get permissions, variances, etc.) In other words, the underlying mechanism or structure of art is formalism and fiction. That is why I am interested in the early manifestations of fiction. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
