Let us short circuit the philosophers and define form as means or method of delivery. Content gets delivered. Undelivered content is unimaginable, since imagination itself is a means of delivery. Is an empty form possible, a void delivery? Even ‘Grey Field’ delivers a uniform colour within discretely framed two dimensional space, not to mention a title: Feldgrau was the colour of German army uniforms during the world wars.
If a representation delivers something that is conventionally recognizable, nothing we can slap on a wall, a plinth or a computer monitor will fail to represent. It might fail to represent lilies, or a prime minister, or the Christ’s passion, but it will speak at the very least of whatever it is. Something gets delivered; form is never empty.
The distinction of form from content is a propadeutic, its value exhausted by its utility. What carries meaning in one context is our subject in the next. To master this interchange of functions is to learn the art of saying something.
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