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Summer Session Kansan
Art Forms: Vehicles for Expression
(Editor's note: This is the first of three articles.)
By Bernard Henrie
The chances are that if you wander through the KU modern art museum you will have one comment as you leave.
It probably will be the same comment that you make after reading a T. S. Eliot poem:
"I DON'T UNDERSTAND it."
The shadowy world of aesthetics is a confusing and inhospitable place for the layman who might venture there.
There are no handy roadmaps or signposts to understanding—no semester-long courses offering knowledge.
But there is one concept in all art literature, oil painting, sculpture, or whatever—that makes more concrete the abstractions of aesthetics.
THAT CONCEPT is bound in the word "form."
An understanding of form begets an understanding of the critic's reason for disdaining one work and praising a second which often is similar in many respects.
Form, by strict definition, is the external appearance or shape of anything under consideration. Form, by broader definition of the aesthete, is anything which provokes recognition on the part of the reader or viewer.
EUT THE artist strives not for simple recognition — or over simplified understanding — but to profoundly influence his critic. The form of the piece of art must touch some inner recess of the critic and, according to such outstanding art critics as Clive Bell, only great art can stimulate such depth-felt responses.
The physiological basis of this response is of interest to the symbolic philosophers and the Gestalt psychologists. For most literary critics the physical basis for the response to form is not primary — they are willing to note that it apparently takes place and then to concern themselves, as will this series of stories, with form and what makes it up.
"Form." Kenneth Burke wrote in his essay, "Lexicon Rhetoricae," "in literature is an arousing and fulfillment of desires." He lists five types of forms, most of them overlap in any work of art. There is the form of:
"SYLOGISTIC progression is the form of a perfectly conducted argument advancement, advancing step by step." (The mystery story, for example.)
"Qualitative progression," like theyllogistic form but not as obvious.
"Conventional form . . . the appeal of form as form.
"Minor or incidental forms . . metaphor, paradox disclosure, reversal."
But form, considered as Burke outlines it, does not explain the work of art, as Burke himself points out. We are looking at the heart, not at what makes it pump. Mark Schorer puts it like this:
"... it is only when we speak of the achieved content . . . that we speak as critics." Schorer places the emphasis on the technique used to create, or achieve, the form that provokes the profound response. It is not difficult to say something fails to work, or is not good. It is much more difficult to explain why it does not start or is not good. It is obvious that a car does not start. It is not so obvious as to why.
THE SECOND article in this series will look to the mechanics but for now we are going to continue the discussion of the finished product; artistic form.
Floyd Horowitz, instructor of English and faculty advisor to Quill magazine, observes that students — and often their instructors — approach form in a too restricted and unambitious manner.
There seems to be a fear, Horowitz said, of venturing out from the obvious forms that are easily recognized. Art is concerned with those forms whose meanings are not obvious.
"ONE COLLECTS — book form, for students or even for one's colleagues, concepts of written form and I think many of them are quite commonplace, at least they are well known in the trade." Horowitz said. "They are well known as the constituents of what people will recognize."
Form, for Horowitz, is a rationalized concept — that it is a thing thought about. Or thought about, at least, in so far as it is concerned with perception. Form, so considered, can be recognized without any greater need for understanding, at this time, the physical-psychological process involved.
"I tend to be interested in less formal aspects of writing, myth, for instance, interests me very much. Symbol interests me very much; the possibilities of configuration of imagery, likewise," Horowitz said.
"IN ONE sense it is possible to identify modes and structures within those concepts of images, but just whether that will constitute form, as some people know it or not, is another matter. So this is one of the limitations, certainly, of my own interest," he said.
By using imagery or symbols of obscure and indefinite meaning, the author creates new possibilities of meaning, but at the same time the author faces the problem of losing his reader; that is, the reader can simply make no sense — commonplace understanding — of the writing. This "losing the reader" is what Horowitz deals with in his pragmatic point of view.
ward writing is to present to the reader a form which I assume I can recognize," Horowitz explained. "Parenthetically, I would say that I always have difficulty with this.
"My pragmatic point of view to-
"I ALWAYS tend to be somewhat more esoteric or specialized or recondite, and this means that I continually compensate in a good deal of what I do for the distinction between what other people consider as form and what I consider as form." Horowitz said.
"Form here is a practical matter of recognition. It is a common denominator of recognition and it holds elements of psychological manifestation as well as just purely rational training.
"Many of the kinds of writing which we read have no form except the form of a syntax which we can readily understand. And one of the interesting things about this concept of form is that when you are writing sentences which make sense, using words which in turn make sense, you can get away with much less form in favor, let us say, of presenting a recognizable language, than you can get away with if you were presenting a less structured syntax, let us say, in poetry where further structures than the syntax provide form," Horowitz said.
THE PROBLEM which confronts the writer and drives him to a detailed consideration of form is this: the form of syntax alone does not provide the writer with enough possibilities of meaning. Syntax does, however, serve effectively for commonplace communication. But when the artist attempts to express ideas and impressions for which there are not ready nouns he must merge old words in a metaphoric process and thereby create new meanings.
These new, and usually difficult-to-understand metaphors, take on a certain loose order and, hopefully, we recognize or understand something — that something is form. Form is the thing we understand.
"Very often what this comes into is a problem of, call it the inductive- deductive problem-solving mechanism whereby if you create a form by giving evidences but not by giving generalizations, then the reader must go through the process and determine the form of the stated generalization and the structure of its being said, and sometimes the structure and form then become synonymous terms," Horowitz said.
"AT OTHER times (in story analysis) what you are doing, in effect, is the prediction of the form which you attempt to fill out when illustrating it and this illustration, as often as not, does not fulfill itself, does not fulfill your prediction for form, but it gives enough of a hint so that the reader is at least assured of a certain kind of intention and does not have to go through the inductive process himself, but rather through a process of identification, which does not necessarily call for casual reasoning; the result is what we call form in literature." Horowitz said.
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ACROSS FROM HILLCREST
"Form is an interesting problem area. I think, because almost without exception the newer forms in literature have run into, call it reader difficulty, because the associations — while they include many usual things, still, for some reason, reach a level of abstractionist difficulty which obscures this concept of form.
"Instead, we have the thought that the work under consideration, James Joyce's "Ulysses," for instance, to take a commonplace example, doesn't have a particular form.
"WELL. THEN the critic comes along and discovers, or extrapolates, at least rationalizes, that there is a form created by the structure of an analogy, and so it goes.
"Well, as soon as we become involved in this concept of form, I think the possibilities for defining form are immediately larger," Horowitz concluded.
The possibilities of new and greater meaning are also immediately larger and for that reason it would seem valuable — as Horowitz said at one point — to deal with as many forms as possible; remembering that there is reward, of a sort, in venturing from cliché forms to new and more ambitious ones.
Starlight Show Tickets
Henry Shenk, sponsor of the chartered bus trips to the Starlight Theatre in Kansas City, advises that tickets are now available for the first show, Thursday, June 20. Reservations for "Show Boat," featuring Robert Horton and Dorothy Coulter, may be made at 103 Robinson. Prices, which include transportation in an air-conditioned bus, are $2.75, $3.25 and $3.75.
THE HARBOUR 1031 Mass.
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SUMMER WORSHIP First Presbyterian Church
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First service — 9:00 a.m.
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