Y Tanaka - Form Matters

When critiquing art works, we look at forms first whether it’s a painting, sculpture or other media. Forms can be the physical form of a sculpture, as well as formal elements, such as scale, shape, size, composition, and color. Formalism emphasizes these formal elements in art and art making process. It can hinder a narrative content but also be self-referential. The modernism changed the value of formalism. Visual elements were celebrated and embraced rather than a reference to create an image, which was the focal point for pre-Modernists. Abstraction is not self-referential because it doesn’t remind one of something else. On the other hand, realism is self-referential, which can be easily associated with characters or something familiar, therefore, it helps developing a story, just like how a novel works. However, the definition of realism is depending on how artists view “reality”.

When critiquing a painting, we should consider edges, line, color, composition, fields, scale, format, surface, gesture, and process. The painting is also an object, rather than surface. It can be a platform for a performance act. It is also a mechanism to deliver a narrative content. Critiquing sculptures are conducted in a similar fashion. The criteria includes, the object as well as discrete object spatial/compositional relationships, footprints, gravity, suspended pieces, pedestals, and prop-ups, ratio, the room spatial relationship, fields, the expanding, exploding, or meandering form, formal considerations within the object, mass and shape, material and process, construction, material/process as form, as action, and illusion and integrity of material. When an installation can take up an entire exhibition space, the installation piece becomes architecture. Material and process are a very integral part of the form, as well as developing a concept. For example, I constructed miniature trees, one made out of a thread, the other computer wires. I deliberately selected these materials, which I coiled one by one around tiny-trees. Both materials and the process support my concept, which depicts a technological transformation, nature versus man-made materials.

Kendall Buster and Paula Crawford often associate their content with music or writing practices, which I thought was fabulous. They said, “Greenberg argued for a kind of painting that refuses to be the carrier of a narrative, much the way a symphony is a complex structure whose emotional and expressive content relies purely on the structural relations set up by the composer. Color, line, repeated motifs are orchestrated across the surface of the canvas much the way melody, harmonic textures, and repeated motifs are arranged by the composer.” An individual visual element doesn’t mean much, just like a simple notation. But if it’s combined with one or more elements (e.g., one or more notations), it gives a meaning/life, just like creating a complex the structure/system or having an orchestra. Interesting comparison…… and yes, form matters.