Content - the subject matter of an artwork - is elucidated, or illuminated, or constrained or totally F'd up by the way an artist employs form. Form, which is all the physical aspects of an artwork (medium, color, structure, etc.), will determine if the content is communicated as the artist intends it to be. Or sometimes, on a tough day, just in some artistically acceptable manner. In the olden days, when content looked like reality, this was something a viewer was able to think about, to attempt to discern, to judge. It did not mean that the artist's intention was what the viewer actually saw. That is a totally different kettle of fish. But regardless of the viewer, it was a criterion of integrity for the artist.
Today, this has changed and become much more difficult. In much of abstraction, the boundaries between content and form have become substantially blurredeven in the mind of the artist, many of whom proceed in an essentially "contentless" fashion, or at least effectively so. In abstraction, what is the representation of an idea, after all? And even the abstraction of form has proceeded far past anything discernible, in most cases. So this traditional relationship, always so important for purposes of visual and philosophical clarity, not to mention the questions of integrity of meaning and intention, are today frequently absent.
Does this matter? I don't know that it does, from the perspective of a viewer. After all, a work of art either moves one or it doesn't. But for the artist? It certainly changes their practice. Is it better to simply go, without impediment or obligation to form? More emotive, certainly, more attention to structure, texture and color - the design elements, certainly. Does this potentially tap into something deeper? Or does it lose something deeper? Just what is it that the discipline of form adds??? I surely have no answers. But I have many questions.
