Formalism and Anti-Formalism in Yeats and Aoki

Abstract

My reading of W. B. Yeats and Shigeru Aoki is based on two major movements of art and literature: Formal and Anti-Form, or Conceptualism. At a glance these two movements, Formalism and Conceptualism, do not seem to be related. Formalism claims, to put it simply, that a work of art is self-sufficient, and it is enough to read, for example, “Lappis Lazuli” alone, without regard to how and why the poem was written. Conceptualism is a much more complex movement, Marcel Duchamp being the beginning, and it is not easy to define it. In this paper, I look at proto-Conceptual Artists, such as Yeats, Aoki, Lee Ufan. The Conceptual Art movement seems to me to originate in Marcel Duchamp. The Conceptualism is an attempt to create a new art, but in essence it is just another version of “Anti-Formalism,” a struggle to destroy old form to rebuild new form. The efforts remind me of the cycle of civilization or of the 28 phases of the changing moon as elaborated in Yeats’s A Vision.