The Move Beyond Form

Creative Undoing in Literature and the Arts since 1960

M. Hughes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137310170
• eBook ISBN: 9781137329226
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Fictional narratives of the late twentieth century oftencross boundaries. This study argues that the undoing of structure in postmodern art form demands a different way of thinking and represents a commentary on the material and social conditions of the late twentieth century and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

THE MOVE BEYOND FORM IN CONTEXT

Something happened to the arts in the last third of the twentieth century. They began to escape their boundaries. Think of the kinetic expansion of a Frank Gehry building like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Its outlines all but completely elude our attempts to conceptualize them. It is as if the museum is poised to take flight altogether, its distorted and ambiguous shapes soaring past our attempts to conceive them. This is an analogue for the move beyond form in the arts since 1960 that is our subject here. The museum at Bilbao provides a metaphor for a structure that seems to defy completely most familiar associations with form or structure. It takes off into the surrounding air, refusing all delineation.

Gehry’s work is hardly alone among visual examples. Though there is no real place to begin, the trend has clearly intensified since the 1960s. We might take the enormous murals of Jackson Pollock as transitional examples. Though often associated with high modernism, Pollock’s paintings, as one reviewer noted disapprovingly, seem to have no beginning or end. Pollock took this critic’s disapproval as a compliment, and so did his wife, Lee Krasner. “That’s exactly what Jackson’s work is,” she commented. “Sort of unframed space.”¹ “Unframed space” represents an important clue to the move beyond form in all media. Such works of art represent spaces that bleed into the surrounding territory, all borders insufficiently defined. For Pollock, the easel was “a dying form,”² and with that move off the easel and onto the floor, where paint spattered and spilled as if beyond the frame, his work started to defy its own apparently rectangular outlines. Thus, the formalism of abstract art began to undo itself.

Land Art directed the same impulse toward outdoor constructions. Artists like Robert Smithson and Cristo created vast structures in the landscape that defied any capacity to absorb their outlines as a whole. Smithson took that impulse even further. Underscoring his resistance to the tendency of museums and galleries to be disengaged from the outside world, he created “nonsites” in the galleries in the 1960s that directed the viewers outside to his earthworks in the landscape, arguing that the resulting dialectic between these sites and his “nonsites” undermined any “purist, abstract tendency.”³ The point was to get beyond self-containment in favor of movement through time and space, as well as interaction with a changing environment. This is another version of the move beyond form. Andy Goldsworthy, a later example, defers to “movement, change, light, growth and decay” as the energies he seeks in his work.⁴ The results highlight the permeability of the barrier between the work itself and its surroundings, as if to refuse the distinction between art and its context. His work is interwoven with nature, defying any notion of the artwork as an enduring, circumscribed little world. Goldsworthy’s Roof (2005) literally moves between inside and outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., echoing the domes of surrounding buildings and refusing to delineate an inside and an outside, even obscuring the point where Roof stops and the city begins. This is another kind of spilling beyond the frame.

While Land Art initiated the impulse to blend into its natural surroundings, in New York a more urban form of art emerged in the 1970s that challenged the boundaries between art and non-art by its very being. Crews of graffiti artists sprawled their colorful, cartoonlike pieces across subway cars and abandoned buildings, braving the city’s attempts to expunge them as fast as they could be produced. Artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, formerly the graffiti artist SAMO, collaborated with more established figures like Andy Warhol,⁵ whose silk screens themselves indicate an endlessness that defies their formal limits.

One of the impulses uniting these different examples is the desire to escape from the boundaries imposed by assumed formal constraints, and even erase the distinction between one art form and another. Frank Stella’s paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s seemed to want to break out of the canvas and curl up, subverting the idea of a painting as a rectangle in a frame. Gradually Stella’s paintings led to the making of reliefs, and then to sculptures, which began to assume architectural status. As Paul Goldberger wrote for the catalogue of a Stella exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2007, “it is hard not to look at his paintings and feel that what has most intrigued him, all along, has been space: the space between lines, the space left out of the canvas, the space you imagine as you look at his shapes, and the real space that exists between the painting and the viewer.”⁶ Stella’s focus in these works, Goldberger seems to suggest, is not so much the self-contained integrity of the piece as much as it is its impact on its immediate surroundings, its relations to what lies beyond the borders of the work itself. In order to explore these relations, his paintings morphed into reliefs while sculptures aspired to architectural status, reaching out to carve and shape space. This emphasis on what lies outside the work represents a key step in a new direction.

The same crossover gestures can be seen in the work of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, whose firm Diller, Scofidio & Renfro was commissioned to redesign major areas of Lincoln Center. Before that, Diller and Scofidio had created installations that blurred the lines among performance art and architecture, and collaborated on dance choreography with choreographer Frédéric Flamand. In suggesting this collaboration, Flamand had been attracted to the idea that Diller and Scofidio defined architecture as “everything between the skin of one person and the skin of another.”⁷ Again we see an interest in space itself, in what lies between and around the work of art, an interest that propelled its creators to escape the constraints of any one form.

The same challenging of formal limits characterizes the work of architectural engineers who, in the era of computerized design, have played a key role in fashioning postmodern buildings. Cecil Balmond, the trustee of Arup, an international engineering firm collaborating with such architects as Rem Koolhass, Daniel Libeskind, James Stirling, and others, explained his desire to break out of “the Cartesian cage”—the geometrical grid of columns and beams on which most construction depends. “Why not skip a beat?” he wrote. “Incline the vertical, slope the horizontal. Or allow two adjacent lines of columns to slip past each other. … Let’s see other possibilities, other configurations of how buildings may be framed and stabilized.”⁸

This impulse led Balmond and Arup to unexpected mathematical solutions to structural problems, ones that even seem to defy expectations of load limits. For Toyo Ito’s (temporary) pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London, Balmond employed the use of algorithms, emulating nature as it builds cells algorithmically, as one cell becomes two, two four, and so on. He favored this method as a way of discovering new means of construction that avoid falling back on established geometrical solutions to structural problems. Some of these designs are made possible only with an unusual degree of collaboration between engineers and architects, sometimes with teams in opposite parts of the world working on a project already in construction, collaborating via computer around the clock.⁹

In fact collaboration often accompanies the move beyond form. Whether that collaboration is actual or in a sense solicited or created by the work in question, it acknowledges the surrender by any one artist to absolute control over the limits of his or her work, which as we shall see in the following study, seems to constitute one of the impulses behind permeable boundaries and limit-defying forms.

Sometimes that collaboration exists between the work and its surroundings, not just between human collaborators. The earthwork artist Robert Smithson, who along with his friend Richard Serra famously favored sculpture that engages in dialogue with its environment, wrote an essay in which he defined elements of what he considered earthwork art. Most of these elements anticipate or help to define the move beyond form in all artistic media, including the fictional examples that will be our principal subject here. In his essay of 1973, Smithson identified Frederick Law Olmsted as America’s “first ‘earthwork artist,’ ”¹⁰ since, like Smithson and his successors among earthwork artists, Olmsted created with natural materials that interact with their environment and change over time.

Obviously Olmsted was a forerunner only, working a hundred years before most of our other examples were created, but Smithson, in recognizing him as a precursor, articulated in this essay some of the important principles of the move beyond form, in fiction as well as the visual arts. In designing Central Park, Smithson argues, Olmsted understood the “dialectical landscape” that embraces an inevitable interaction between nature and people.¹¹ This is a design that is allowed to evolve, accommodating “chance and change in the material order of nature” (159). The park is open to the myriad ways in which both nature and people effect change upon it. Smithson notes such gritty elements as the graffiti on boulders and the lurking hustlers and muggers in the Ramble, and contrasts such conditions with the “pseudoinnocence” of a romantic ideal of nature detached from “physical interconnections” (164–65). The landscape of the park, then, undergoes an ongoing process of alteration, its designed features blending in with the operations of those who use it and with the unexpected changes wrought by nature itself, not all of them necessarily what the designer had in mind. What he did have in mind, however, according to Smithson, is the necessity of this dialectic.

Smithson also notes that the park did not start from scratch. “Far from being an inner movement of the mind, [such a landscape] is based on real land; it precedes the mind in its material external existence” (160). In other words, the landscape design emerges from and works with what already exists in the world: in this case natural aspects of the land in Manhattan. It does not originate in an abstract conception in the mind of the artist or designer, as if possessing an independent, autonomous essence. In both its inception and its accommodation of chance and change, the dialectical landscape resists any abstract or ideal conception. It is “indifferent to any formal ideal.”¹²

In this sense, as Smithson writes, Olmsted’s parks “exist before they are finished, which means in fact they are never finished.”¹³ They originate with existing materials and extend beyond themselves, open to the unexpected, to the alterations of time and human use, to “an endless maze of relations and interconnections, in which nothing remains what or where it is, as a-thing-itself” (165). This description can apply to both a chronological and a geographical expansion beyond the apparent boundaries of the work. Olmsted himself referred to the New York subways as extensions of the park. “The reservoirs and the museum are not a part of the Park proper,” he wrote, “they are deductions from it. The Subways are not deductions because their effect, on the whole, is to enlarge, not lessen, the opportunities of escape from the buildings” (169). In this conception the subways continue the park, its porous boundaries extending wherever an escape from buildings presents itself.

Smithson’s 1973 description of Central Park as lying open to “an endless maze of relations and interconnections, in which nothing remains what or where it is, as a-thing-itself” is an excellent description of the move beyond form that characterized his own art. Here the term will be used to describe an important trend in the arts since 1960, generally the period considered “postmodern.” There will be no attempt here to define or characterize postmodern arts as a whole, only to identify this particular trend, track it across various media, and attempt to understand what it seeks to convey.

Certainly such works elude a gestalt reading, open as they are to change and interaction. “Dialectics of this type,” wrote Smithson, “are a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects” (160). This is perhaps the most important principle of the move beyond form. The work of art functions as part of a larger whole. It is not seen as a discrete and finished thing, but is embedded in a web of relations. No formal ideal removes it from the relations in which it is entangled. It remains on a continuum in space and time with its surroundings, its artist sharing part of the task of creation with those elements within which the work is embedded. Just as Olmsted recognized that the park does not have definitive outlines, but extends beyond itself through the subways, or any other avenue that provides an escape from buildings, this “way of seeing,” as Smithson called it, does not presume to impose a single, unifying creative vision, as if from outside the system, onto existing conditions. It sees all things not as isolated objects but as part of a continuum that begins and ends beyond itself in a tangle of interconnections.

A similar impulse can be found in theater. Beginning in the 1960s, troupes like the Living Theater invaded the space of the audience, thumbing their noses at convention and inviting spontaneous interaction. Clearly that gesture gave birth to a new conception of performance art. By 1977, commentator Jerome Rothenberg identified the characteristics of a new vision of theater, strongly indicating a move beyond form. He included among these characteristics the breakdown of boundaries and genres, including boundaries between art and life, or between one art form and another; the transience or self-obsolescence of the artwork; the value placed not on formal characteristics but what the art does; an inclusion of the audience as participants; a surfacing or resurfacing of liminality, the place of “ ‘fruitful chaos’ and possibility”; and a stress on action and/or process, including the blurring of the distinction between theatrical time and real or extended time.¹⁴

In all of the foregoing examples, we see a move beyond form. If form is a coherent unit or structure that is conceived as an independent entity,¹⁵ the works discussed here all defy that conception. In the chapters that follow, there will be visual as well as musical examples, though the principal emphasis will be on postmodern fictions that behave in a similar way. These narratives body forth structures that defy structure and forms that defy form. They resist domination by a single authorial voice, their boundaries are permeable, and/or they exist in dialogue with a work or works outside themselves, surrendering independent integrity. They gesture toward a way of thinking that does not fully acknowledge the distinction between inside and outside the work, as if straining to say what transgresses all such barriers. They tend to represent themselves less as things-in-themselves than as interconnected with what lies outside their borders. For visual artists, what lies outside are the spaces not circumscribed by the work, but created by the work in relation to its surroundings. For fictional narratives (or musical examples), what lies outside can take several forms, including what exists on the border between the imaginable and the unimaginable, or what exists only in interaction with the reader, viewer, or listener, or what takes place beyond the chronological boundaries suggested by the work. In every case, unity and coherence are eluded, and yet in this very escape from totality is the indefinable space where meaning resides. This book proposes to examine that meaning, arguing that the move beyond form represents an attempt to say what cannot be said by more traditional formal methods. Essentially this creative undoing in the arts accomplishes serious philosophical work, work that is particularly applicable to the circumstances of the late twentieth century.

Though there are certainly isolated examples of the move beyond form before the 1960s, the pace of this creative undoing in the arts increases from that point, a fact that reflects similar developments in the wider cultural context. Here, too, boundaries blur and seemingly separate categories dissolve. A glance at some of these developments should make clear that we need new vehicles for understanding this process; the old ways of thinking by isolating and examining separate entities or phenomena no longer apply.

* * *

THE CULTURAL CONTEXT

As Salman Rushdie writes in Shalimar the Clown, “Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.” This is of course a line from a work of fiction, but it is fiction that arises from and also reflects a central condition of contemporary life, at least in the developed or developing world. A brief summary here will set the move beyond form in the arts in its larger setting, that is, within a network of relations that c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Tale of Competing Critical Narratives
• 1. The Move beyond Form in Context
• 2. Transforming Space over Time: The Visual Arts
• 3. Musical Interplay: Tan Dun’s The Map and Other Examples
• 4. Refusing Self-Containment: Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year
• 5. Dissolving Boundaries, Exposing Webs
• 6. Echoing Spaces beyond the Boundaries
• 7. Hybrid Zones in the Mirror Arcade
• 8. Traversing Medial Spaces beyond the Ending
• 9. Remaking
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index