FORM
"[...] Image-making, artistic or otherwise, does not simply derive from the optical projection of the object represented, but is an equivalent, rendered with the properties of a particular medium, of what is observed in the object."
For Arnheim, form is the shape of content. Form is itself semantically charged and so calling Arnheim's method a formal one is a misnomer. Such a view of form places high demands on the artist and is indeed the cause of Arnheim's difficulty with some of the cutting edge art of his later years. Arnheim literally required the differentiation of elements within the artistic message and then their meaningful relationship to mimic in some way "relevant aspects of human experience" (The Power of the Center). Of course, as we saw in the Excursus, this emphasis on semantic value of forms is not always a concern for contemporary art. Therefore, one is slightly in a bind in applying Arnheim's strict notion of form as shaped content. Again, we have to interpret shaping and content more liberally, because it is unquestionable that there is an intelligent binding of shape to meaning in more contemporary art; it just needs to be specified.
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Arnheim's starting point is a firm rejection of the identity of visual appearance and projective reality. He places a lot of store on the intervention of the medium, which change how something can be said. Far from Clement Greenberg for whom medial purity is normed, Arnheim instead wanted to recognize the translatory work done by whatever medium an artist was working in. Related is Arnheim's relativization of "what looks lifelike?" with an eye to the compelling modernist simplification of form.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Double Ladder Leaning against a Wall, 1964, Biella, Fondazione Pistoletto
Arnheim was interested in the way that variations from projective accuracy could be regarded as more convincing than those technically correct. Subsequently, with the rise of sculpture and eclipse of painting, the representational ambitions of painting were literalized with the brute objects of minimalism. A number of artists imported reality into their works with traced forms, body casts (George Segal, Kiki Smith) and hyper-realistic sculpture (Duane Hanson, Ron Mueck, Maurizio Cattelan). They were interested in presenting uncannily lifelike forms that merely serves the curiosity of the real, without delivering it. In a manner closer to Arnheim, Michaelangelo Pistoletto adhered two photographs to plexiglass giving a striking suggestion of a ladder. It is both ironic - part flat image and flat three-dimensional - but also a genuinely striking illusion.
Christian Marclay, Silent Rage (from the series Body Mix), 1991, printed-paper, record covers with cotton thread, 28 1/4 x 31 3/4 in. Copyright of the artist. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery. Collection of the Linda Pace Foundation.
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Arnheim's stress on the medium means that form is always translatory, and therefore finding form is a kind of invention. Once again, mediality per se has been avoided religiously in most art discourse yet one could argue that it is through pondering the sometimes surprising choices of materials that artists nevertheless find novel kinds of form. Christian Marclay, for example, made clever homages to popular culture with his series of album covers knitted together. They play on an equivalence of form but also are a way of thinking "through" the album covers as medium.
[Ingres example; Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014, foam, sugar, resin]
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As a demonstration of his method, Arnheim analyzes Ingres' La Source. He diagrams the counterpoint of the woman, with arm pointed upward, with the jug, its contents pouring downward. Arnheim is struck by the way in which Ingres presents the figure, enclosed on herself, with the contrast of the freely flowing water. This is a clever way, he argues, to present the "theme of withheld but promised femininity." To update Arnheim's approach, we will look at Kara Walker's A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an oversized sculpture made of sugar.
["Life-World" analysis of Walker's A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby]
A "subtlety" was a centerpiece made of sugar, found at dinner parties of the privileged in the 19th century. Walker's piece was created when she was invited by the Domino Sugar Co. to create an installation at their factory in New York that was closing. She took the opportunity to reflect on the painful legacy of sugar plantations and slavery in creating her own "subtlety" in the form of a Sphinx-like "Mammy" figure made of sugar. One could perhaps conduct an Arnheimian analysis of the figure of the Sphinx, noting the exaggeration of features made to be those of the traditional Mammy and, as Walker has stated in an interview, those of her own. But as with most cases of contemporary art the importance of the image lies in the number of associations it has with a number of ideas.
In general, Walker has worked with a set of historical facts related to the sugar industry and slavery, their relation to luxury consumption, ideas about blacks that accompanied this culture, leading up to the closure of the very Domino factory itself. Each element of this nexus of historical facts is counterposed by some ironic, appropriative, monumentalizing and aggrandizing gesture on the part of the artist. Unlike Arnheim's analysis of Ingres, we cannot find form by directly joining shape to content within the work. However, we can join shape to content outside of the work. The resulting non-metric analysis given above follows Lewin's ambitions for a topological psychology.