Thoughts on the Formal Method

El Lissitzky wanted to eliminate the concept of perspective from his art as a way of eliminating the natural sense of depth perception of a human being. Normally, the human eye uses the vanishing of lines and the extension to their intersections to judge distance. This is done without any thought. He theorized about the unsettling nature of the axonometric, a drawing where the lines will never vanish. He believed that such a drawing would allow the human mind to grasp the infinite nature of space. There is an ambiguity to parallel lines, and to perspectives without clarifying figures, that makes it impossible for one to truly grasp the space. While this is an interesting theory, axonometric drawings rarely appear to by anything more than a little unsettling. The viewer may have an unconscious understanding that this is not how the world works, but rarely does it help in the understanding of infinite space. It typically does more to isolate the drawing as an object that could never exist in reality. This is what it has in common with infinite space; objects that do not vanish even slightly and infinite space are both impossible. As far as grasping the impossible and portraying it on canvas, El Lissitzky was successful. As far as attaining a representation of infinite space, he appears to be much less successful.

The more successful attempt of his is to eliminate the third dimensional axis in the drawing while making it appear that the objects are still three-dimensional. Many of his Prouns have objects all drawn with different techniques. Some are perspective and some are axonometric. This combination is much more successful at being unsettling. There is no fundamental orientation and no clear location for the observer. He wished his Prouns to be displayed horizontally to disconnect the viewer from the typical relationship to a work. When the Formalists attempted to incorporate these concepts into architecture, such as the Palace of Labor by the Vesnin brothers, they showed that such strong ideas about art could be translated into an architecture that fundamentally reflected the nature of the regime.

There came about in the minds of Choisy, Eisenstein, and the like, an obsession with the relationship between cinema and architecture. These theorists wanted to have architecture be central to the plot of a movie. They believed that the representation of a work was as important as the work itself. For instance, Choisy agreed that the axonometric drawing was the most powerful, and he felt that it communicated the agitation and animation of the building itself. Personally, it is hard to see such characteristics in axonometric drawings, but this was the common belief of the day. It was used as a means of gaining a new understanding of their surroundings. Eisenstein also helped to introduce the idea of contextualism, which has since fallen from popularity but was once a grave concern of architecture.

Furthermore, Eisenstein did not believe that elements of architecture had to be literal in order to be present. For instance, he believed that symmetry did not have to be exact if the visual symmetry made up for it. His example is the Acropolis. This appears true even today. When one looks at the plan of the Acropolis, one rarely sees a horribly disorderly composition. The buildings are not symmetrical but the composition is balanced, and this was what Eisenstein thought was the better means of design. The basis of all of this design is memory. Designing with memory is something that Eisenman has clearly undertaken as well. In his buildings, though much more modern, memory is the key to the design. The buildings are designed to evoke certain memories, and the understanding of many of his spaces hinges on the observer’s memory of what he has seen before. All of these ideas form montage because they are multiple frames that have been superimposed not in the physical reality, but in the mind. This architectural theory is most interesting because it does relate almost entirely to the mental effects of architecture. Such intellectual concepts were key to the Formal Method.

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.