Research at Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, UK

Positing the formless and entropy in contemporary visual art practice formless

Introduction

In his Critical Dictionary, Georges Bataille defines the informe, or formless as"…not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit".[1]

Extending current definitions of the formless in contemporary art I seek to test its currency among practicing visual artists as an expression of entropy[2] and to determine if it is perhaps stemming from ambivalence[3] of the stain or marking. Perhaps it is the utter simplicity of the gesture as in Cy Twombly’s white oil pastel drawing on paper in Untitled, 1970[4], where the formless mark making serves to contrast with other parts of a composition or interplay with the world outside the art object.

Through primary interviews and dialog with visual artists I will construct a contemporary interpretation of the formless; and, tangentially through my own studio practice I will continue my own tactical exploration of the formless, pushing the idea of formlessness via various media and techniques. This will create a tactile record of my interpretations and stages of discovery and development.

Through my studio practice during the past fifteen years I have explored the emergence and conflation of form through the use of various drippy, goopy materials (plastics, viscous paint, detritus, markings) – perhaps in an attempt to freeze the moment between two binary oppositions that in their flux create an anomaly in language.

A central research will question how the formless is interpreted in art history and how this contrasts a priori in contemporary studio practice. In this research I am also interested in how to expand the interpretation of the formless and why formlessness continues to be such a compelling topic of interest in art making at the start of the 21^st century.

Personal experience as it motivates this research

When creating work I imagine a proto-universe: pre-human, pre-critical that yet to be perceived.  Perhaps this is my personal interpretation of the Lacanian Real. In my studio practice I pour and drip sculptures that resemble something between man-made creations and entropy-exposed natural formations. I often imagine an agency of creation that is involved that will create a non-contrived (perhaps randomly generated) expression of formlessness. Perhaps akin to Star Trek’s Enterprise transporter malfunctioning and misassembling a crewmember into misaligned protoplasm.

In both painting and in sculptural installations I seek to create gaps and holes where the formless and the primordial/ pre-symbolic can transgress. In plastic foam and plaster I create stalactites an stalagmites; assemble low-tide river scavenged bones into prehistoric mounds; and photograph cave formations underground (which I perceive as non-contrived proto-form in its most natural state) which are shapes often unfettered by human thought or careful intervention – content just to be as they are.

The formless in creative practice

The very creation of form automatically introduces the formless into the equation. Perhaps it is the volatile and unstable balance of matter/anti-matter that propels the imagination to a tide-line of edges of language that fall into an abyss at several points within an artwork as within Willem De Kooning’s Woman 1 (1950-52) where subject, foreground and background overlap and are at points indistinguishable – where the formless engulfs the subject to the point that it seems trapped between two worlds. Roland Barthes calls Cy Twombly’s autonomic writing in many of his works as alluding to writing where the artist expresses through proto-language one thing while meaning something else[5] in this case Cy Twombly is alluding to writing but conflating writing into pure gesture which appears as writing.

Possibly the formless constitutes the Real and the artist, in this case, assembles bits of order to signify a familiar microcosm reflecting a desired structure. That these islands of form are indeed symbolic life rafts in a chaotic maelstrom. The artist may then collage these two worlds – and underlying real and a rigidly structures symbolic – into one plane or structure thereby energizing the form within with its co-joined antithesis.

The spectator’s eye must negotiate unassembled pieces to create a semblance of a whole. The formless reveals a slippage or gap in construction. Its existence reveals a universe onto which we attempt to collage meaning[6] It may be interpreted as a tear in the fabric of language that reveals language as an imperfect construct (thereby calling attention to itself as a construct). As an artist I see the world as a superimposed structure placed upon a formless Real.

We give the world form and structure and we coexist with its antecedent pre-symbolic existence– that which precedes our systems of language.

A critical interpretation of the formless in contemporary art production

Artists such as Steven Gontarski with his 1997-98 vinyl sculptures played on the ambiguous in human form; Glenn Brown with his painted-head sculptures in plaster, acrylic and oil in 2004 and the sculpture: Life is Empty and Meaningless, 2005; De Kooning inheritor Cecily Brown with her "almost but not quite" depictions of images that lay on the periphery of our memory of great paintings we have seen – an indelible memory trace like a retinal after-burn on our memory. Brown’s work is a connect-the-dots drawing missing several dots; and Franz West's Adaptives as awkward looking colorful formless objects to name a few that come to mind. New contemporary artists such as Sterling Ruby who in 2006 drips urethane onto formica and wood in his sculptures including the black stalagmite drip sculpture: Recombines, 2006[7]. John Miller in his 2004 exhibition, Everything is Painted Brown uses protoform in scatoformic sculpture and wall pieces.

Recently exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin as part of the Freidrich Christian Flick Collection the formless is celebrated in the work of Dieter Roth with his Käse multiple, 1970 with Cartesian-aligned clean acrylic cubes display a contents of cheese in various states of formless collapse. Perhaps a transparent allusion to viewing a human body with window to a ghastly uncontrollable interior. Berlin/New York-based Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera works in drawing and other media to capture drips mid-cascade often resembling fragments of almost-but-not-quite recognizable objects as in Untitled, 1998 where a blobform occludes an image of a cartoon with the identifying caption “No, Ill save SweetPea”[8] and Hiroshi Sugimoto wit his photographic works on seeing a horizon, perhaps readable as a Kantian sublime – and visually both calming and perhaps unsettling as in many the eye cannot adequately decipher the horizon which means we as the viewer may be lost. Matthew Buckingham’s The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E. explores entropy in nature colliding with the human manifest for the eternal in art, in this case, the iconic Mount Rushmore portraits of American presidents is eroded back into formlessness through time and weather. [9]

In addition to examining inertia and entropy artists in the informe are also exploring special language: incomplete sentences of form that leave the viewer hanging mid reading. This can bring the viewer to one of two critical points: “filling the gap” and using memory to read formless bits as narrative and thus creating a gestalt[10] or failing in the creation of a gestalt reading and thus confronting a disconcerting abyss. they are engaging in creating objects and images that utilize the "abandoned completion" the next step, the absence of the logical gestalt conclusive finish that leaves us hanging, swinging in a gentle limbo.

Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss drew critical connections in their book (based on their exhibition at the Pompidou) Formless: A User's Guide, 1999. The formless continues to draw from a deep well in culture and manifests itself anew over and over again.

Whereas St. Augustine in his Confessions posited the formless as an unfinished (and abominable) part of the unity of eternal form whereas Georges Bataille posits the formless as a project of incompletion which disrupts through the role of fantasy, a human tendency towards construction of systems and categories (a undoubtedly skewed view of the universe).

Bois & Krauss’s research on the formless is categorized into: Horizontality, Pulsations, Entropy and Base Materialism (Bois & Krauss, 1996[11]) is based on Bataille’s definition of the formless in Documents published between 1929 and 1931. Building upon this area of thought it is important to approach it from a new perspective as reflected by a current generation of artists.

As such, I seek to build this project not only from existing critical research but also to develop it thematically from a new perspective drawn from artists themselves. I wish to examine the formless as an ongoing force in contemporary art not as an aberration. To examine why the formless continues to arouse artists to create and viewers to engage with artwork. (e.g. is it an abject fascination or a engagement with a partially completed puzzle or yet un-deciphered word or meaning that keeps us engaged with the formless or that the formless is indeed an integral part of an expected duality in contemporary culture.

Key research questions and hypetheses identified for research

I am seeking to discover (through interview) how artists are perceiving, interpreting and employing the formless into their creative practice. The formless can be read as a reflection of chora -something pre-symbolic from which forms materialize from formless. While the idea of formlessness has been raised time and again (by writers on art) the actual artist opinions and interpretations of formlessness in the studio practice are underrepresented. As formlessness is a seminal force in so many artists work I seek to explore the artists’ view.

Perhaps the world around us is formless like an ocean and our fleeting constructions are merely temporary islands. That perhaps art creation is akin to temporary land reclamation where the seas are rising anyway. That the real is the formless and the form is a life raft to which we cling. Some preliminary questions that arise include:

 

1.     What is the role of formlessness is contemporary visual art culture? And how has this concept evolved through modernism into contemporary art of the 21^st century? Where are we today and where are we going?

a.    Including an examination of the key Western interpretations of the formless from St. Augustine to Bataille to Zizek.

2.     How do artists respond to formlessness in their art practice and how has this evolved from modernism to contemporary art? How is formlessness used as an expression of itself (perhaps best elucidated in the work of Alberto Burri, and Lucio Fontana in Concetto Spaziale)?^[12]

a.    How aware are contemporary visual artists of the formless – how do they interpret it?

b.    Which artists are now using it as a pivotal element in their work/

3.     To what extent is formlessness a contemporary construct?

a.    how is it a rebellion against the tide of popular art culture?

b.    how much of it is an ever-present element in art practice?