Content

Content

When we look at a work, we realize the individual components are not crucial themselves. What is important is how the elements combine. In Art, like with Food, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the synergy produced from parts combining is what we respond to. We can understand a work’s synergy through observing how elements integrate. Therefore, let us condense a work to its two basic spheres—Content and its Expression.

The first area, is “Content.” Content is what the work is about, the idea, its theme, the information, or message it communicates. The other area I label, a “Content’s Expression”. How a maker combines all the work's elements through its composition, flow, its emphasis, the strength and weakness of its expression. Here we will examine Content; next will be Expression; then we will see how they combine.

Content may exist for its own pleasure, like dancing a jig or a picture depicting a landscape or fruit on a table, such as Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Oranges (1899).

The Content could be representative and/or symbolic:

of Love, as the song My Funny Valentine (1937);

of War, like the movie Das Boot (1981);

of Betrayal and its futility, as in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar (1599);

Spiritual Ecstasy, as Dervishes whirling display;

Nationalistic Sentiments, like The Star Spangled Banner (1814);

Moral Messages, in a myth like Gilgamesh (pre-2150 BC) or an Aesop (620-560 BC) fable such as The Tortoise and the Hare or Francisco Goya’s painting, The Third of May, 1808 (1814).

Works may exist for Social Fun, like the square dance, Virginia Reel (1685).

One more thing about Content, the work’s subject may also be about a medium’s abstract-“formal” elements, of materials and structures: the subject of “paint,” as Jackson Pollack’s “drip paintings” and Mark Rothko’s “color field” paintings shows; how James Turrell used the subject of light to illuminate space and shapes; composer, John Cage used the subject of “sound and silence” in his “chance ‘music’” works, like 4'33" (1952) or the way the Nicholas Brothers acrobatic tap and aerial movements—“flash dancing”—utilized extreme jumps that landed in an open-split position.

Also, the “formal” element of structure, could be the subject of a work’s composition, like Victor Vasarely’s pictures of black and white pattern space-interactions or how dancer, Mr. Bojangles’s rhythmic movements were the subject for his dancing on stairs, which every dancer on stairs imitates.

The percentage of artists exclusively using their medium’s “formal” elements as subject matter is relatively small.