Modern: Significant Form
Rip Cronk
Chapter 1
Significant Form
Modernism is the encompassing movement accounting for most 20th century art. It began as a break with tradition by a few radical nonconformists in Paris in the 1860s. The central group of breakaway artists became known as the Impressionists, after Monet’s painting, Impression: Sunrise, 1872. In their preoccupation with the effects of light on the landscape, the Impressionists assumed a reductive strategy that disregarded the principles of the French academy. For the Modernist, the value of art was based on the response it elicited from the viewer. Through the striking stylistic innovations of Modernism, artists searched for the source of the aesthetic response. Within a few years, the reductive quest of avant-garde artists would eliminate representative subject matter completely, leaving only formal elements in nonobjective compositions. For them, art became a formal language that developed in the process of painting.
As an explanation for the aesthetic response in Modern art, Formalism developed early in the 20th century through the insights of Clive Bell. As he pondered the quality of experience shared by the windows of Chartres, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets and a painting by Cezanne, he concluded the existence of 'significant form.' It was significant form that inspired the aesthetic response. The theory substituted the concept of significant form for the concept of beauty in an aesthetic adaptation of Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. The apprehension of significant form was based on sensitivities distinct from analytic reasoning, and the viewer sought significant form through transcendent inquiry. For the Formalist, the painting created a matrix between empirical and spiritual, and between rational and symbolic. In an insight missing from much of the Formalist rhetoric that followed, Bell described the aesthetic response as the "expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion." (Bell, "Art," 1914) In the study of the perception of form, the Formalist aesthetic isolated the spiritual enigma in Modern art.
After World War II, the center of avant-garde activity shifted from Paris to New York. The increased drama and life-size scale of postwar Abstract Expressionism commanded a greater presence than the comparatively muted imagery of European Modernism. Just as with the art of the Impressionists, the intense presence of Abstract Expressionism was interpreted as an attribute of form. The innovations of Abstract Expressionism, and of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings in particular, set the agenda for Modern art and aesthetic discourse for decades to come.
Clement Greenberg, the influential critic and theorist of high Modern, adapted Bell's theory of significant form to explain the importance of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg was quick to recognize that Pollock’s innovative and provocative drip paintings were important to the avant-garde, but Greenberg’s narrow view glossed over the subjective nature of the aesthetic response and ignored the semiotic implications of the paintings as signifiers in the structural analysis of art. Pollock's paintings marked a significant juncture in the development of both Formalism and postmodern Structuralism. With the drip paintings we enter into a contemporary view of art -- one that includes both gesture and process. The paintings demonstrate that process and semiotic structure, as well as aesthetic response and significant form, were subjects of aesthetic inquiry. Revolutionary in their simplicity, the Action paintings exposed new ground for art.
Drip painting fulfilled the conditions of the evolving Modern aesthetic of significant form and at the same time incorporated the elements of other directions in art. The radical departure of the drip paintings not only cleared the way for color field and for the propositional strategies of Minimal art, Pollock’s paintings reestablished the premise set forth by Bell that the value of art lies in expression of the ‘vital force’; in the emotive connection the artist makes with the viewer through the painting. Pollock understood the aesthetic response in Jungian terms of symbol formation. This sets Pollock in the path between Bell’s view of art as spiritual enigma and the neo-modern context of the aesthetically determined art thesis, which incorporates aspects of Jung’s personality theory without the erroneous suppositions of transcendental idealism.
Pollock reenacted the Dionysian drama in his method. When he stepped up to the unstretched canvas spread out on the floor, he may have had a notion as to what he expected but he came otherwise unrehearsed. The resulting image was the direct expression of the unconscious (undirected) mind. The drips were the symptomatic tracing of unconscious desire. Aware of Jungian psychology, Pollock adopted automatic writing , which is a vehicle for the transcendent expression of unconscious symbol formation, as the subject of the composition. Pollock effectively reduced art to the cosmic dance of the primitive. He intended to strip away the facade and reveal the unknown self. The drip paintings were an extrapolation of experience composed to strike the emotive chords of aesthetic perception.
While praised for their significant form, Pollock's drip paintings followed the Dada course of automatism. In the Dada spirit Pollock offered a conceptually bracketed activity as art. By restricting the spectator's frame of reference to the painting process, the Action painter, with one eye toward history and another toward the psychology of the art experience, reduced art to the recording of an unconscious (undirected) aesthetic act. He took the underlying potential for metonymic symbolism apparent in the indexing of the photograph and in the Impressionist's attention to surface and texture, and made it the primary concern. Drip painting was no less symbolic than previous art, but the strategy was relation by causation (indexing) rather than metaphoric similarity. Pollock's drip paintings are symbols of unconscious expression in art.
Significant form is symbolic form. As a concept of the Modern paradigm, the term ‘significant form’ was appropriately applied to Pollock's drip paintings. Significant form provided a discursive context for examining the process by which the mind mediates new experience. The subtle apprehension of significant form was an awareness of the symbol forming process as it encodes experience. The symbol is the enigmatic source of formal perception. The symbolic function determines form as an instrument of thought (Jung). The apprehension of significant form is symbolism structured in the context of Formalism. Pollock understood that beneath the Formalist's aesthetic response lay the transcendent apprehension of the symbol, and accompanying feelings and emotions were the result of non-discursive content of the symbolic experience.
In the art that followed, the heated aggression and emotive content of Abstract Expressionism cooled to become Color Field. In time, the avant-garde would deny any relation to the spiritual or the symbolic (Rothko is the notable exception). The aesthetics of high Modern espoused flatness, reduced shape and reduced surface and the avant garde rid itself of excess baggage. Color Field painters attempted to eliminate everything save reference to the painting. 'Significant form' became the guiding concept for Color Field painters. How removed from the emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism were the austere rarefaction of Color Field.
After Color Field established itself as a movement in the Modern tradition of continuous innovation, where was it to go? It became evident there was no final statement, no final metaphor, no checkmate, no consciousness-negating reduction and no a priori form. Freed from the subject, freed from all but the format, Modernism had no choice but to fulfill its reductive logic and eliminate the painted image and self-referential meaning. As Greenberg's flock played out its final solutions, the Color Field painter reduced image to 'objectness.' In an at first subtle shift in direction from the perceptual preoccupation of Color Field to the conceptual concerns of Minimal art, the painting became a shallow relief object. The primary object was all that was left, and it was still recognizable as art. Structuralism ensued.
