The Rethinking On "Art As Form" In Western Art Theory

The period from the late 19th century to the early 20th century sees an intense turn of Western art. The long art tradition of pursuit of lifelike portrait and Realism is broken through, replaced by the emerging Post-impressionism. The Realism which highlights on lifelike portrait is sided against by Post-impressionism, which expresses emotions following the order from an objective representation to a subjective expression and from visually to abstractly through harmonious structural relations between lines and colors instead of merely copying or imitating objective things. Cubism and Abstractionism, etc. that follow suggest that the Representationalism can no longer keep paces with the development of modern art.At that time, Formalism emerges as an interpretation for the emerging art creation practices and plays an important role in the history of aesthetics by seeking for theoretical basis for artistic creation and replacing Mimesis and Representationalism whose representative Clive Bell believes that the measure of artistic work is whether it has "meaningful forms". Formalists neglect contents and go off the deep end due to their emphasis and interpretation of forms. Although the Neo-formalism that follows provides a valuable supplement to Formalism and recognizes the importance of content, it still fails to explain a series of artistic works.This paper aims to seek the rationality of "art as form" from the framework of Western modern art and to prove with the use of a series of examples that none of Formalism, Mimesis or Representationalism is the essential theory of art.This paper can be divided into four chapters. The Introduction mainly provides a problem overview. Chapter One concerns on the background of "art as form". With the emergence of Post-impressionism, Cubism and other new art schools, Representationalist artistic works have been out of the market, which triggers a modern art revolution. Impressionism loses the integrity of painting first and later artists even simplify their works into geometric shapes. Abstract art begins to dominate with the emergence of Cubism.Chapter Two focuses on the views of Formalism which influences emerging art most. We criticize Formalism from the purpose of art, the meaning of meaningful forms, and the relationship between form and representation. First is the purpose of art. Formalism argues that the purpose of art is an intentional representation of forms, but we all know that the creation intention of many works seem too have nothing to do with forms. Formalists remove "intentional" from the purpose of art to avoid extreme and believe that as long as there is a good art representation form, whether it is intentional or not is not important. Even so, Formalism can not get rid of other blames - if art were only a representation of form, then there would be no distinctions between the good and the bad and all are good, thus the bad would be kept away. Another mistake formalists have made is to include the nature into art. According to formalists, something that displays form is art, including the natural things like flowers, trees, mountains and rivers. However, we all know that the nature is not art.Second, we discuss what the "meaningful form" is. Formalists attempt to attribute it to a special mental state or a daily language intuition that everyone can feel but does not work in some occasional arts. If we are to enjoy the form of some things that are placed disorderly, we need to determine whether they are artistic works or a heap of garbage first. Formalists had intended to measure whether an object is an artistic work by the "meaningful form" while now they must determine an object is an artistic work before appreciating it, which leads to a confusion in logic. In order to avoid the generation of such a logical confusion, formalists remove "meaningful" and only retain "form", believing that an object is an artistic work as long as its form is displayed. However, if this definition worked, everything in the world would be artistic works.Finally, formalists argue that form is the most important to art and representation is completely a client of art, which leads them to go off the deep end because there are indeed some artistic works having both forms and contents, but their artistic status precisely relies on the representation contents. Their forms would not be displayed without contents.Chapter Three provides an introduction to and refutation against Neo-formalism. Formalism is widely criticized due to formalists' excessive pursuit of form. So Arthur C. Danto puts forth Neo-formalism in order to compensate. Neo-formalism puts equal emphasis on content and form and is able to explain some cases that Formalism can not explain, but it still fail to perfectly interpret the nature of art. We refute Neo-formalism mainly from the following three perspectives - content, form and appropriate manner. Its too much emphasis on content makes it easy to be refuted by abstract art that has no significance. Neo-formalists bring forward "reflective" theory to make a reasonable explanation and believe that the reason why people can get aesthetic feelings from the works that seem to have no contents is people's sensitivity and reflection of the works, through which people are able to deepen their understanding of the artistic works. However, not all artistic works is reflective. Some attract us indeed, but they are not worth our reflection. Besides, Neo-formalism's highlight on content leads to the fact that form relies on content too much, or even that only by relying on content can form be represented. However, there are still some abstract works that have no valuable contents or can not represent their forms through contents, but we can not deny that they are not artistic works. The third point of view of Neo-formalism is that form and content are connected with each other in an appropriate manner, but what extent is "appropriate"? It is difficult to judge. If the measure for art were to judge whether it is appropriate or not, then there would not be distinctions between the good and the bad, but the artistic and non-artistic. Neo-formalists do not leave room for the bad to exist and as a theory for defining art, it is obviously too tolerant.Chapter Four introduces and analyzes some other theories on form including "art as description" and "art as function". "Art as description" summarizes all relations existing in artistic works as artistic forms, which is not realistic because it is impossible for us to find the relations one by one, and even if it is possible, this goes against the original intention of art appreciation. Compared to "art as description", the progress of "art as function" lies in the fact that it connects the form and function (theme) of the artistic works together, and thus the form is displayed through the expression of the theme, which undoubtedly provides an important condition for the judgment of work form.