Form, Content And Substance In Art

My art can be classified as abstract, but this is not at all accurate to what I do. The heart of it is a very basic interaction with substance. This oversight of the most substantial comes from its transparency by its very prevalence. It is overlooked while ideas and concepts take precedence. Ideas and concepts define the abstract. But neither form nor content are the foundation, rather it is substance.

Early art forms have a great awareness on the substantial. In tribal ceremonial rituals, decorating the body with mud and organic materials is about the relationship the participants have to these materials found in their worlds. A head dress is more about the materials that make it up than an item to be worn. Mud may become a disguise but it is a disguise made up of soil. It is not specific properties that are as important as the actuality of the material, it's history and relationship to those that seek and use it in their world.

Many artists in contemporary art have begun to put attention back on substance. Joseph Beuys is the prime example. He makes his metaphors and associations based on the origin, properties and history of various materials; fat, felt, wax, honey, basalt. Their inclusion in his work shows the potency of meaning materials have outside of any form in which they can be placed. The form chosen in his work reinforces the inherent meaning of the materials themselves.

Ideas and critical thinking about art are often blind to this aspect of the substantial. When it is discussed that Van Gough used earth pigments in his early works to represent the rural life of the peasants he was depicting it color as symbol that is referred to. What is not mentioned is that the pigments used actually come from the earth. The metaphor is greater than just a reference to an earth tone, a single property of the material. The artist depicts the lives of peasants and their agrarian connection to earth by using earth itself.

Andy Warhol's greatest attribute in his art would be considered his cleverness in taking the emblematic out of popular culture and putting it into the context of an art culture. However in this displacement of the emblems of consumerism he was commenting on the increasing abstraction in the culture away from a view of the substantial. The labels and product packages he reproduced stand for substantial materials, food substances and processed metal. However these substances require no label to be identified as what they are. The label is given due to a capitalistic and consumer economy, They are a complete abstraction. By reproducing labels and boxes which are empty, having no physical connection with the stuff they represent, he is showing how these emblems create distance from the actual by removing it once more. He is very much referring to the concrete and our relationship to it.

The great trickster and showman Yves Klein is often referred to a having invented a proprietary color, International Klein Blue or IKB. In actuality he formulated a binder/pigment recipe which would retain the greatest intensity of his chosen pigment. Color cannot be invented, it is a property of material, in this case ultramarine pigment, which cannot invented either. This is something that is forgotten in the cultural legend of the artist. It is possible that this misinterpretation was propagated by Yves Klein's own design, and if so this is a sly comment on how the substantial is easily overlooked by the lure of the conceptual. One can claim ownership to an idea, but not to the existence of substance.