Shape and Story

There are times when content strains against the limits of a container, when the material itself feels too unwieldy, too fragile, or too charged to be held by any known form. And yet, again and again, artists attempt the improbable: to find the shape that can hold what feels unholdable.

This negotiation is not new. The interplay between form and content has been foundational in the long history of art. Across centuries, artists have come to understand that vessel and substance are never truly separate. The structure of a sonnet shapes the thought it carries; the weight of marble governs the gesture of a sculpted arm; the architecture of a cathedral defines how the body holds the encounter with awe. Every era and discipline, has wrestled with the same question: What form can hold this?

I was reminded of this perennial tension while watching the new Huntington production of Fun Home, the musical whose very existence still seems inconceivable. Who would have imagined that musical theater—a genre so often identified with spectacle, romance, or camp—could carry a story as tender and devastating as Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel? A young woman discovers and claims her queer identity; a father holds his own concealed life in a tight, airless fist; the collapse of a family; the suicide that arrives with a terrible, quiet inevitability. These elements do not immediately suggest songs, ensemble numbers or reprises.

And yet, in the hands of Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lisa Kron (book and lyrics), the form expands. It stretches. It accommodates. The musical becomes a vessel capacious enough for ambiguity, sorrow, revelation, restraint. In Fun Home, the architecture of musical theater doesn’t simply hold the story—it reshapes itself in response to the story’s gravitational pull. Here, content and form aren’t separate spheres; they are co-conspirators. The score moves from playfulness to stillness in a breath; motifs reappear like the return of generational patterns; silence is allowed to work alongside melody. The result is a reminder that form is not fixed—it is in fact quite porous, elastic, and capable of being remade by a truth it is asked to carry.

This same dance between form and content was also demonstrated for me in a very different context. I recently visited the Rashid Johnson exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum with my friend Amy Gordon. The Guggenheim is a space that famously resists easy installations. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling ramp pulls everything into motion. So no matter what work is installed, the architecture insists on being read alongside it. (Clearly that was Wright’s intent!) The building is not a neutral frame; it can be a collaborator, a conspirator, or, on occasion, an adversary.

Johnson’s work, installed into that audacious spiral, is layered and emotionally muscular. But it is also at times uneven and unresolved. The poem that emerged from Amy’s experience (see below) is attuned, inter alia, to that essential tension: the challenge of inhabiting a space that carries so much of its own story, its own ego, its own gravitational field. When you put art inside the Guggenheim, what happens? Does the space absorb the work, or does the work break open the space? How do content and container negotiate their shared terrain?

Her poem does not offer an answer, but explores so many nuances that are being negotiated. Line breaks echo the museum’s ramps—moments of descent, pauses for breath, sudden exposures. The language moves in curves rather than straight lines. Form and content converse constantly, quietly. The building’s audacity becomes part of the poem’s architecture.

Of course Fun Home and Guggenheim Poem are very different. One is a polished theatrical production unfolding over two hours; the other is a set of carefully crafted and evocative words, created after an afternoon in a museum. But these two share that perennial understanding that form is not a frame applied after the fact. Form is alive. It is shaped by what it carries. It pushes back, it gives way, it leans in, it insists.

Every artistic encounter—whether on a proscenium, in a spiral museum, or in the space of a poem—reminds us that meaning is made at the meeting point between what is said and how it is housed. Artworks endure when that meeting is fertile, when form and content recognize their interdependence. When they accept that each will be changed by the other.

This is an ongoing invitation: let form be reshaped by content, and content by form. To listen for the architecture that each story requires. To find or build the vessel that can carry a particular truth to where it needs to go.

 

Guggenheim Poem

By Amy Gordon

 

When they invite me

to display my work on the winding walls

of the Guggenheim, I’ll start at the top

 

with red roses, not painted roses, but real

roses with carmine petals as silky as a kitten’s fur,

and though we know a rose doesn’t leap

 

about your feet at night or keep you awake,

if you close your eyes and stroke the petals

of a rose, can you tell the difference?

 

Now open your eyes,

and you are confronted with

color—how intense the color—

 

the painted fingernail of a courtesan,

the voluptuous lips of Marilyn Monroe.

I want you, museum-goers, to want

 

to travel with rose petals all your life,

let them be your luck, your scrap

of baby blanket, your French poem

 

that reminds you that beauty blooms,

blushes, then in the first rainstorm

becomes bits of vegetable matter

 

printing the pavement

with exclamations of color, teaching us

there is beauty in decay,

 

and my carmine roses,

as you wind down the Guggenheim

ramp, will gradually fade

 

to a dusky rose and these roses

will have thorns, old-fashioned

roses that haven’t lost

 

their smell. I’ll fill the air

with scent from wastebaskets

of roses, and Yo Yo Ma

 

will be in the middle

playing his cello and there will be

one yellow rose, and there will be

 

one rust-colored dahlia

with its lion’s mane of petals

and winding down and down

 

the white Guggenheim walls, I’ll scribble

with a red crayon, as if to say

I was here.

 

Fun Home is playing at the Huntington through December 14.

More about Amy Gordon here.