Towards A New Formalist Treatment of Art

Draft: 4/27/2016

I.

Preface

So long as we are invested in art, we must have a conception of it, so that we may formulate a method of its
treatment. It must then be the first task of anyone invested in art to establish what is meant when the word
is used: that one thing that goes by the name of art; that here there is only one activity that is meant by
using the word. It may be useful to bear in mind that for us, the proper question to ask is not, What is art?
but When?
The treatment most conducive to the life of art is what we are calling a new Formalist treatment. The name

Emily Heinz 4/25/2016 2:08 PM

Comment [1]: This was edited to come
across less dogmatically.

Formalist is in reverence to the treatment of the forms of thinking within the work of art, which is the flint
that sparks the moment of art. There is no other place art occurs, nor any other method, whatever else may
approximate its effect or take on its appearance. Because of its singularity, art can no more be removed
from human life than any other aspect of human nature: it is so bound to us that its death is tantamount to
our own. It has thus become necessary to establish a treatment of art that corrects current mistakes in
order to serve the life of art.
Here, the nature of the distinction between art and non-art is does not hinge upon whether or not that
distinction has always been recognized, but that activities of mind are by their natures different. Therefore
any practice that is not participation in art is a practice of non-art, which means something different to art. If
this distinction were not the case, anything that was not the activity of art would satisfy us well enough
without it. In such a case, there would be no natural impulse to make artwork, nor would we have any
innately serious regard for artworks at all, for anything else would satisfy this natural demand. We could not
make the claim that we felt otherwise. If, then, we are to make the claim that we do have a serious regard
for art, that we do feel the need for it, we are evidently pre-disposed to hunger after it, and not some other
thing. Art is not a detour to some other place, activity, or thing.

Emily Heinz 4/11/2016 6:02 PM

Comment [2]: There is a distinction
between art and non-art, and its the
nature of the distinction were concerned
with here, apparently.
Emily Heinz 4/17/2016 6:30 PM
Comment [3]:

II. Art and Non-Art

Being that they are cultural phenomena, new treatments of art struggle from their inception against
barricades of cultural conventions. Their difficulties have historically stemmed from a recurring social
impulse to call works of art which appear divergent from established traditions are in fact non-art. We see
examples of this in various historical narratives: the first Impressionist paintings were once scrutinized with
disdain, the first photographs were once deemed useful for science alone, and the first emergences of
abstraction in art were once only considered failed art.
We also know of the ultimate acceptance of these things, and we consider such an acceptance to signify a
shift in cultural thinking, as these changes in thinking originate new treatments of art, in which works are
granted the identity of art where once they were denied this. It cannot be denied that the frontiers of artistic
thinking have not been expanded because of these shifts.
It would seem today, then, as though we have solved whatever problem we believed we were working on,
for there is very little which asserts itself as art that we would refute as non-art, although there is very much
hostility to the idea that anything can be called non-art; this indicates some fixation on the idea that art itself
is somehow exalted above all other things. It might appear, then, as though we have today adopted the
most appropriate treatment of art, as it is apparently one that resolves the problems of conventional

Emily Heinz 4/11/2016 6:10 PM

Comment [4]: PRESENT Again,
Artistotles general lines.

dogmatism so as to secure an endless potential future for art. In fact, the problem has not been resolved,
but dissolved: instead of making formulations on the nature of art so as to construct treatments, we have
abandoned the notion that we need such treatments at all. Art is something that stands beyond working
definitions. It is the only thing on which we have fully abandoned our stakes. This appears as liberation,
when it is in fact destruction: when anything goes by the name of art, then it is meaningless name.
The refusal to identify one work as a work of art and another as a work of a kind of non-art signifies the
forced conflation of art with that which is not. We act as though we are no longer capable of knowing one
from the other, though, it is clear that our natural attitudes towards art and towards non-art remain different
to one another, because they are inherently different things.
As determinate ideas of various types of non-art are more readily accepted than are determinate ideas of
art, non-art is more easily defended, because they are understood. Because they are understood, they are
valuable, and therefore the presence of meaning in non-art supplants the seeming absence of meaning in
art. If there is no idea of art from which to begin, it is inevitable to mistake non-art as art, as there is no
precedents by which to determine otherwise. As a result, much of what is called art-making today is based
on the idea that art begins with a complete understanding of what the work will be, what it will mean, and
what it will do prior to its being, or, in another conception: art is only legitimate when coherent ideas can
ostensibly be applied to it post-hoc.
With no ideas from which to begin, there can be no idea of art with any value, so the values of non-art take
the place of artistic ones, which results in the misidentification of art. Or, a treatment is constructed based
upon false investments, an apparent staking with no stakes, a phenomenon both caused and signified by a
failure to offer any identification of art whatsoever. These treatments are contrary to any life of art.

III. Art and Artworks

Emily Heinz 4/27/2016 12:42 PM

Comment [5]: A note: conflating art
with non-art also kind of
means conflating art with works of art. Its
like mistaking the means for the ends.

Emily Heinz 4/11/2016 6:17 PM

Comment [6]: The implication here is
that we do know one from the other, but
we refuse to acknowledge that we do
know.
Emily Heinz 4/11/2016 6:23 PM
Comment [7]: It doesnt mean theres
only one of them, either, very much the
contrary is true: ideas have value. If
theres an idea whatsoever then you have
a more determinate conception of what
youre discussing.
Emily Heinz 4/11/2016 6:15 PM
Comment [8]: Ideas, not idea. This
is because the text doesnt want to posit
itself as the only formalist text.

There are certain actions of mind over which we have little to no natural control: the human eye projects
images onto the retina upside-down. It is an activity of the mind that turns the image our eye takes in to
what we call the right side up. It is an automatic action, naturally imposed.
The imagination is one such imposed mental mechanism that organizes sensory information, memory, and
emotion. These organizations, by virtue of being organizations, have forms, which we call thought. These
forms are structures in which the world becomes understood, for the making of the forms is the way in
which the mind pieces together the qualities of an object so that the object is an object, and then an object
with meanings in relation to the self. Because the mechanism of the imagination is independently
determined for each individual, these forms of thought are unattainable to a mind outside the one in which
it originates, unless they are made sensible in a kind of mediation. This is the act of expression.
A work of art is an expression that is fixed in media, which is not informed nor restricted by any laws
unnatural to itself. In works of non-art, such as what we call design, some thinking comes prior to the
expression of the work, which serves as the superlative rule to the form then expressed. In the expression
of a work of art, the form of a thought is embodied in the media as the thought comes into being, mediated
by nothing but itself. Expression is therefore the way in which thinking is done outside of the mind.
Different works of art demand different mediations, depending on which is most appropriate to their forms.
The medium of the work of art is the method of the work of art by being the method by which it is
expressed. When contemplating a work of art, it is necessary to remember that it is not the medium which
makes a work of art fecund for art, but whether or not the work has a medium at all. Works of art are unique

Emily Heinz 4/27/2016 12:24 PM

Comment [9]: The way is really
important here; it literally is the METHOD.
Emily Heinz 4/27/2016 12:24 PM
Comment [10]: The fusing of these
qualities, the construction of meanings,
these are done independently.
Emily Heinz 4/27/2016 12:24 PM
Comment [11]: This needs to be
entirely re-considered.

to their expressions, and as such are irreproducible. They are untranslatable into any other media but the
one in which they were expressed.
A speaker is a speaker only as there is a listener. A listener can be a listener so long as there is speech. In
communication, there must be a duality. There must also be a means of communicating. As a speaker is
only a speaker as there is a listener, so too is a listener is only a listener so long as there is a speech at all.
The work of art is then both speech and speaker, and the beholder is her listener. The listener, however, is
not a passive entity, for the listener is only still a listener if he is doing the action of listening. What
constitutes listening in art is an apprehension of the entire form of the thinking expressed as the work of
art, so that it is re-constructed in the mind of the beholder. If the work is approached with a pre-determined
idea, which goes unwavering, then the work can never properly be seen, because the action of art isnt
undergone. A proper act of beholding occurs when the mind adopts the mode of thinking in the work of art.
When works of art are apprehended to be complete wholes, then every part of the work is perfectly defined
by every other part, so that no aspect of the work is superfluous. When this happens, it is momentous it is
the only occasion wherein one mind is granted a thought in its entirety that originated in another mind. This
could have happened by no other means than this, and it is the main reason art cannot actually be
supplanted by non-art. Through the act of beholding, the listener becomes the speech; the viewer
becomes the work. This moment is when art occurs.