What is form? How do we define it? How do we see it in an object; in any object, ranging from art to how a politician appears to us?
Form is a complex thing often misunderstood especially if a person does not do art or call what he or she does, “art”. But many have said that anything a person does is art if he or she calls it that. It is also how we see it that makes something art. These assertions have stood the test of time. Art can be anything. Form is everywhere and everything. But what is it?
Form is how something forms in our minds. The classicists thought that the object is beautiful because its forms are beautiful, or comes close to the measurements of what is beautiful. But Aquinas saw that beauty itself forms in the mind of the viewer. The mind is “pleased” by the thing that is beautiful. The Modernist took this idea forward and said, the mind’s “faculty of taste” experienced the “beauty feeling”.
This Modernist assertion relieved the artist of an inexorable obligation to the mathematics and measurements of beauty. The ability to see the beautiful is inherent in the mind of the individual. It is automatic, unmediated, natural, and intuitive. The Modernists made classical measures non-obligatory. Which claim also freed the individual from an obligation to academics. One does not need to study and master anything to see or make something beautiful. One can also “feel” one’s way through the complexities of it.
One embarks on a quest to discover beauty. The search for this knowledge is what is essential, not the knowledge itself. And since any search involves always a bit of chance, the validity of chance as technique became one of the major contributions of Modernism to the history of art. Every artist is a searcher. Official certification from institutions of authority is absolutely not required.
Form is the abstract idea that appears in the mind of the person when he or she confronts a thing of beauty or its opposite, the ugly. To define form we must see through appearances and ask ourselves, What is form constructed of?
If one learns a bit of drawing, one finds immediately that even the beauty of a simple line can be improved and enhanced. As an experiment, draw 10 simple lines on a piece of paper. Do this automatically, without thinking.
A close review of each of the lines reveals immediately how some lines are better than others. Give it a bit of time, and then one can even make the judgement, Which is the best line of all?
But there is no such thing as a simple line. Lines reveal everything, even the state of mind of the person making it. A good teacher can generally “feel” the degree of confidence of the lines of his students.
And yet, line is only one of several “elements of form” or what artists call, “elements of design”. There is value, which refers to the play of light and shade on the flat surface if one talks of painting, or the shadows formed by the planes of the object if one speaks of sculpture. It is called contrast in the sense of photography. But it works the same way even for poetry and prose.
The other elements are: color, texture, space, balance and composition. The student of art studies these elements both in theory and in technique, in the works of the masters and in their own works, until it becomes second nature, until they can make anything seem beautiful. This makes us realize then that we or our minds can be easily manipulated by “form”, especially when we do not understand it well.
A politician can take on a pretended “form” to seem good when in fact the opposite is what is true. Politician often hire media-specialists to do this for them.
Thankfully, there is a theory called the “form of purpose”, which we can take to mean that the purpose of anything can be decoded in its forms. “The slip always shows”. The form of the object might make the object seem immediately pleasing but closer inspection always shows what its maker intends the object to be or do.
Thus, when a corrupt politician presents himself or herself as a person of the people through pictures in media, the ploy may work for a while. But eventually, the truer picture also forms.
What forms is an aesthetic understanding of the inherent purpose of those pictures. The abstract of what we see eventually shows the politician for all of his or her claimed truths; but it will also show whatever hypocrisy, ugliness and monstrosity is there. Form is not forgiving. It lies. But only for a small moment. In the same breath, it reveals also the deepest most incipient and purposeful truths.