Formalism: The Art of Criticism

Formalism was, at its core, a means of analyzing and critiquing the various types of artistic works produced at the time. It began as a literary movement, and it was from there that it established its basis for interacting with the remaining arts. Shklovsky, an important figure in the literary movement, stressed the idea that words have lost their meanings. With this point, it is easy to agree. Looking at the current usage of language, one rarely sees the origins of a word. It is actually quite fascinating to look in an etymological dictionary, simply because modern culture is so disconnected with the meanings of words. In fact, many words are misused so frequently that incorrect meanings become attributed to them. This would anger the Formalists even more than the issues of their day. They recommended that literature be analyzed for form and not for content, so that the quality of their literature would rise above a mere story. This has been embedded as the focus of modern literary analysis.

When translated to art, the ideas begin to break down a bit. The Formalists had a pure theory of literature that attempts to integrate itself into painting. The transition does not prove to be all that successful. They praise the same paintings as the Suprematists, only for different reasons. It is true that the works of Malevich are quite profound in their ability to capture the meaning behind painting, not just a work itself. But still, is this really an example of Suprematism and Formalism? Neither group was long-lived or especially organized. The Suprematists tended to migrate toward simple geometries. The Formalists became synonymous with abstraction, which is probably the only reason why so many works of different genres were adopted into the Formalist style. It appears to have been less than successful as a movement of art.

In architecture and industrial design, the movement found slight success through Tatlin. He at least produced the Monument to the Third International, which is very much a Formalist composition. It does not capture any essence of building, sculpture, monument, or object, but rather focuses on the purity of forms. The material, the vocabulary as it were, was used in a new manner, thus accomplishing the Formalist goals. These materials were combined in such a novel manner that no one has dared to construct the monument. At the scale of a model, the project was successful. However, the external conditions, especially the conditions of wind velocities, would not scale proportionately, which would make such a lightly constructed work very unstable at full scale.

In true communist form, Tatlin’s Studio rarely credited the creator of the object. This follows Formalism directly, as they did not believe in the artist or writer, but rather the movement to which the person belonged. This is possibly the most controversial. Is their theory correct? Are works of art and literature inevitable? If one artist does not make them, will another? It is hard to say. It is possible that if Malevich had not painted a Black Quadrilateral, then someone else would have. On the other hand, it is difficult to envision a complex literary work as being inevitable. In the end, it appears that detailed representational works, against which the Formalists fought, would not exist without the individual. Formalist works, on the other hand, could probably have existed without specific artists. They claim this makes their art more valuable, but additional thought and logic seem to contradict this principle.