Form vs. content

You can always analyze visual art in terms of content or appearance, its formal qualities. I would argue that it’s a game to separate them: they’re indissoluably linked. Everything in the material world around us has a narrative.

So to… classify visual art alone as the one medium that shouldn’t require any effort on behalf of anybody to ever understand it—you should just be able to look at it and walk away—as a pure sensation: that relegates it the level of… a roller coaster ride….Just shut your eyes and enjoy the ride.

I’m more in mind of saying, Open your eyes and enjoy the ride. Because it’s much more exciting if you are thinking and questioning, and you don’t know what it is, and it is full of questions and statements that you can’t possibly [grasp]. Because that is a truer reflection of just how extraordinary reality is than something that’s… neatly tied up in a bow… There, Look at that, Be at peace, Go home.

I’m more interested in something that leaves you asking all those questions like What is that? I don’t know what that is.

—Matthew Ritchie, Art:21 Structures