All About Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor 9780271079493

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All About Process

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All About Process The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor

Kim Grant

The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Names: Grant, Kim, 1962– , author. Title: All about process : the theory and discourse of modern artistic labor / Kim Grant. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A study of the concept of artistic process in the Western tradition of the visual arts. Focuses on modern and contemporary art and analyzes the development of process as a discourse that increasingly locates the primary value of art in the artist’s creative labor”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2016042616 | ISBN 9780271077444 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | Art, Modern. Classification: LCC NX160 .G73 2017 | DDC 701/.15—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ 2016042616

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Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

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For Charles

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Nothing is finally understood until its reference to process has been made evident.

—Alfred North Whitehead

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Contents

Introduction: Process as Value 1 1 Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor Prior to the Nineteenth Century 16 2 Art, Craft, and Industrialization 34 3 The Artist’s Process from the Academic to the Modern 58 4 New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process 84 5 The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization 112

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6 The Artist’s Process at Mid-Century 138 7 Art and Social Processes 173 8 Process Art 188 9 It’s All About the Process 222 Notes 248 Bibliography 268 Index 279

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Introduction Process as Value

I really did believe that process would set you free. . . . A signature style is about how it happened, not what is made. I think of myself as an orchestrator of experience.

—Chuck Close Process invites risk, uncertainty, vision, unpredictability, concentration and blind devotion.

—Carolee Schneemann

The elevation of artistic process over product has become a, perhaps the, central cliché of artists’ statements in recent decades. Like most clichés it has a basis in truth; many contemporary artists employ processes that preclude or eliminate the production of durable objects. The ubiquity of the cliché, however, suggests that artists’ devotion to process is far more meaningful than a simple descriptive statement. The fact that so many artists consider themselves to be primarily engaged with process, albeit understood in varied ways, reflects widely shared assumptions about the meaning and purpose of art and the work of the artist. The embrace of artistic process is a value claim, and it is the purpose of this book to explore the history and significance of process as term of value. How and why have so many artists embraced process as the most significant aspect of their activity? How was artistic process perceived and valued in earlier periods of Western art? How has the creation of art objects been theorized and evaluated in comparison to the production of craft and industrial objects? What general social and cultural attitudes have contributed to the elevation of artistic process?

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Finally, what does the high valuation of artistic process indicate about the place of artists and the arts in contemporary society?1 This study is intended to provide answers to these questions and others in its careful examination of the meaning of artistic process. When artists state that for them it is all about the process, they are saying many different things. At the simplest level it is a declaration that they are dedicated and attentive to their creative labors. This is probably the most common use of the phrase, and one that stresses artists’ commitment to their own work rather than external goals. It is the doing of the work rather than the outcome that is the most important thing for such artists. A common corollary to this attitude is a desire and intention to create work that is not predetermined; the artwork is a natural outgrowth of the artist’s working process. If that were all there were to the concept of process in contemporary art discourse, it would be simple to paraphrase it as follows: artists like to work at making art, and the art they make reflects their attention to the way they work. Accepting this paraphrase, however, fails to acknowledge the extent to which artists have taken refuge, so to speak, in the concept of process. It has become a strategy artists use to preserve their integrity in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of theoretical interpretations and critical positions. Rather than assuming the position of an intellectual theorist, many artists prefer simply to assert the fundamental motivation of their work as located within the making of the work itself. It sounds simple, but it is not so straightforward. Militating against a naïve return to uncomplicated making is a high degree of consciousness, which may not affect every individual artist but certainly colors the art world perception and understanding of artistic process. Artists’ statements consistently show that process is a considered approach; it can even be the point and purpose of contemporary artworks, as demonstrated by Jason Rhoades’s 2001 Costner Complex (Perfect Process), which he described as “not meant to be viewed as an object, a performance or even a goal-oriented activity, but simply as a perfect process.”2 Process reaches far beyond the artist’s studio to comprehend a multiplicity of approaches, connections, and relations embraced by contemporary artists in their work. In this sense “process” becomes a term that reveals the extent to which contemporary artists are engaged with situating their work within the world—not just finding it a physical location, but siting it much more broadly in terms of social relations and cultural significance. Studio processes are only the beginning of a topic that expands to embrace the purpose and meaning of art at every level, from the local to the global (and even the universal), the biological to the artificial, All About Process

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the secular to the spiritual. The artist’s process takes its place in the interlocking processes that make up the world, a microcosm of activity in time. The extreme malleability of the concept of process in relation to art poses certain difficulties for analysis. Limiting the concept to the literal physical processes employed by artists reduces it to a narrow consideration of technical concerns, while the concept’s potential for virtually infinite expansion threatens to render it too broad for meaningful discussion. In order to understand the appeal of process as a key concept for contemporary art, it is necessary to take a wide view of its significance in terms of both its present and historical usages and implications. In this study the concept of process is understood and examined in several different ways specifically relevant to visual art. Of primary concern are the ways the artist’s working processes have been conceptualized and valued in the Western tradition, particularly during the modern period. This topic is connected with much broader issues raised by labor in general, especially the relationship of manual work to both intellectual and mechanical labor. Integrally related to conceptions of the artist’s working process are also conceptions of the artist’s identity as an individual engaged in work processes. Understood in this way, the artist’s identity becomes a model for conceiving the physical, psychological, social, and philosophical significance of labor, often specifically manual labor. Considering artistic working processes also leads to examination of those who engage in artistic processes but are not necessarily considered artists, such as craftspeople, students, and amateurs, and the effects such engagements have on both the definition of art and artists, and the social role of art making. Accompanying the recent prominence of artistic process is a corresponding decline of the artist’s product as an object of independent aesthetic interest. This places concern for artistic process in counterpoint to formalist approaches derived from Kantian concepts of beauty and disinterested evaluation, and it challenges the commodity status of artworks. As far back as ancient Greece the art object’s status as a commodity contributed to the low social status of the artist-craftsperson. In accordance with a widespread cultural suspicion of industrial production and commodification in the modern era, artists increasingly stressed the distinctions between artistic and nonartistic processes of production in ways that elevated the significance of the resulting artworks. The artist became a very special type of maker, engaged in important human processes. The art objects produced were increasingly valued as signs of the artist’s distinctive processes of making rather than independently valuable commodities. Considering art in

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Introduction

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terms of process is thus to trace a history of the strategies used to define the value of art outside the scales of value usually employed for other luxury commodities. In broad terms, the artist’s process becomes the site for a distinctly human, nonutilitarian, purposeful activity of immense value in itself. Its products are mere traces and remains of that physical and mental activity; they are in themselves of little to no value to their creator. In this way the artist is freed, at least theoretically, from directly engaging in commodity production. Examining the discourse of artistic process is to study the discursive relationship of artistic making to other forms of making, notably utilitarian and industrial production. Distinctions between art and craft are also a key topic for analysis, as these distinctions often shift with the changes in emphasis on artistic process that characterize modern and contemporary art. Certain themes arise repeatedly in discussions of artists’ working processes, most notably those associated with extreme dedication and difficult labor. Related to these, and often overlooked in discussions of visual art, is the physicality of the artist’s labor. The artist’s process inevitably engages the artist as a physical embodied being and almost as necessarily concerns the artist’s connection to the experiences of material reality.3 The artist’s hard work often takes place without a clearly defined goal, thereby rendering the artist’s labors endless, and any results resistant to external evaluation. Thus, unlike working processes directed toward the production of a known utilitarian object, the modern artist’s process becomes a self-sufficient activity directed toward no certain end. One significant effect of the increasing focus on the artist’s process as the locus of value and meaning is that the possibility of external standards of evaluation disappears. Experience becomes a, and often the, primary value—and experience is a value that resists standardization and critical evaluation. The centrality of process in contemporary art discourse must be viewed, in part, as an attempt to redress the oversights and omissions of previously dominant ways of discussing and understanding art. The first of these is a historical neglect of the significance of the artist’s activity and experiences. While the artist has often taken priority over the artwork in terms of public interest, the artist’s role is commonly reduced to that of a character rather than that of a creator whose primary concern is the activity of creation. It is the personality of the individual artist as divined from biographical information that attracts the attention of the general public, while the concerns of the working artist and his or her relation to the work produced are neglected. The formalist approaches that dominated art world discourse for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century take the opposite tack. They are directed All About Process

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solely to the analysis of the artwork itself, typically the aesthetic effects of the artwork as an object, rather than consideration of who made it or precisely how it was made. This approach derives in large part from the Western tradition of philosophical aesthetics, which is concerned almost solely with beauty and the artwork’s effects on the viewer. As we will see, there are connections between formalist approaches and the artist’s process, but these have not generally been given the degree of attention that has been lavished on the aesthetic effects of artworks’ formal qualities. Since the 1970s, conceptual art and theoretical concerns have dominated contemporary art discourses and have offered more interpretive distractions from artistic process. This is particularly true of the forms of conceptual art that elevate the idea over any form of making. The earliest articulation of this position is usually credited to Marcel Duchamp’s definition of the “ready-made,” which reduced the artist’s activity to the act of choosing an object, based on total aesthetic and moral indifference to it. Joseph Kosuth’s 1969 text “Art after Philosophy” as well as his series of works presented under the title Art as Idea as Idea redefined art as purely conceptual, further reducing the importance of the artist’s process. It should be noted, however, that engagement with process is a significant aspect of some conceptual art, as will be discussed later in this book. Process also remains outside the purview of some structuralist and post-structuralist approaches in which artworks are valued primarily for their engagement with theoretical issues. This position is perhaps most strongly represented by the artists associated with simulationism and the appropriation art of the 1980s, such as Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman, whose works are often interpreted as extended glosses on conceptual approaches initiated by Duchamp. The recent embrace of process by many contemporary artists in their public statements as well as their work often, but by no means always, reflects a rejection of the notion that artists are subservient to critical theory and ideas. This is a position that has also been adopted by recent craft theorists as a means to determine the distinction between art, defined as reliant on conceptual approaches, and craft, defined as primarily concerned with making.4 For many artists and craftspeople, claiming a primary engagement with process is to assert that their work is not the mere illustration or manifestation of preexisting theories and agendas. It is an attempt to reclaim the significance of what artists do and how they do it. A problem with focusing attention on the artist’s working processes is the danger of narrowing the discussion to topics and technical issues of

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professional concern to artists rather than topics of interest to the nonartist public. The artist’s manual labor, the techniques employed in the making of an artwork, often holds little interest for those who are not themselves artists. However, an aspect of the artist’s process that has attracted general interest in the modern period is the creator’s psychological experiences. While psychological studies of specific artists and their art are typically connected to biographical and iconographic concerns, some attention has been given to the more general topic of the psychological attitudes and experiences of artists at work.5 Interest in the psychology of the artist as a creative person is not simply an academic topic. The artist has increasingly come to represent the fully realized human being, and the experiences and psychology of the artist are often considered a model for everyone who aspires to full self-realization.6 A broad cultural attitude developed during the course of the twentieth century that defined the artist as the exemplary modern personality; and as a corollary, what artists do, the processes they implement and undergo in the creation of artworks, became compelling subjects for general public examination. The enormous increase in amateur art production beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing up to today’s DIY (do-it-yourself) culture is one aspect of this phenomenon that will be discussed in this book. One of the most influential early descriptions of the artist’s labor and the difficulties that accompany it appears in Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 tale The Unknown Masterpiece, which became a defining text for many modern artists. Cézanne, Picasso, and de Kooning are all known to have felt affinity with this story’s account of a profoundly dedicated painter whose work is ultimately a failure. In the 1920s Picasso created a suite of etchings to illustrate an edition of the story published by his dealer Ambrose Vollard. Balzac’s tale, set in the seventeenth century, describes a painter named Frenhofer who labors ceaselessly in private to create his masterpiece. Passionately engaged in the process of creating this single painting, into which he attempts to bring the accumulation of an entire life of learning, philosophy, and artistic mastery, he is unable to separate himself from the work in order to see it objectively. For ten years he paints the figure of a woman, adding layers of paint to perfect the image; as he proudly states, “Some of the shadows in this painting cost years of my life.”7 When Frenhofer finally shows his masterpiece to two painters, however, all they can see is a foot. “They were petrified with admiration for that foot, a fragment which had escaped from the slow, steady process of destruction which had overtaken the rest of the painting” (52). Revealing his painting to viewers breaks the spell of his labor. In seeing All About Process

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their reactions he perceives the failure of his work, and that perception destroys him. The story has a broad range of significance, including a commentary on the limits of the Western artistic tradition’s goal to record visual experience in paint. In terms of the artist’s process Balzac’s tale is a cautionary one; it warns of the dangers that can threaten artists whose dedication to their work is unregulated. The artist needs external goals and limits in order to create effective artworks. Balzac emphasizes that Frenhofer was “a sublime painter! but unlucky for him, he was born to riches, and so he [had] leisure to follow his fancies” (28). This great and talented painter had too much liberty and was able to indulge in the excesses of inspiration. Such unrestrained inspiration can carry the artist beyond what is possible to realize in a work of art. Thus the artistic product as a practical end must be kept in mind as a means of regulation. Too much theory is also a serious danger: “For painters, practise and observation are everything; and when theories and poetical ideas begin to quarrel with the brushes, the end is doubt. . . . Work! painters have no business to think, except brush in hand” (28). To attempt to go beyond the boundaries of what a specific art can achieve is to destroy the possibility of aesthetic achievement. Artists must accept the limitations of their art form and work within them. This is an early manifestation of what will become a cornerstone of formalist modernism—dedication to medium specificity— but it is also a simple injunction to the artist to be concerned solely with the processes of making. It is the latter significance that concerned artists such as Cézanne, Picasso, and de Kooning, who will become exemplars of total dedication to the processes of painting. For them, Frenhofer’s intense solipsistic devotion to his painting will be emblematic of their own process. The danger of excessive theorizing is a constant through the history of modern art, and one regularly countered by artists’ statements insisting on the purity of their process. As we will see in the pages that follow, modern artists such as Matisse who described their working processes claimed they were not reliant on theories. They presented their work as fully engaged with the processes of making necessary and appropriate to their medium, untainted by external theories and ideas. The injunction given to the young painter in Balzac’s tale to work without excessive theorizing indicates that the successful artist’s process has long been perceived as an undistracted and total engagement with making. Balzac’s story also portrays the traditional artist’s dependence on the public who evaluates the products of his work. It is clear that Frenhofer

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believed his work was a success. He is convinced he has created a masterpiece and is proud of the shadows “that cost years of his life” when he shows the painting to his fellow painters. Their inability to see any image other than a woman’s foot in the painting both reveals Frenhofer’s self-delusion and destroys it. Upon realizing the failure of his masterpiece Frenhofer cries, “So I am a dotard, a madman, I have neither talent nor power! I am only a rich man, who works for his own pleasure, and makes no progress, I have done nothing after all!” (56). Although engrossed with his working process for many years, the final goal for Frenhofer was the production of an art object that others would understand and admire. Failing to meet that goal invalidated all his previous labor. He concluded that he had merely “worked” without producing anything. All his labor was the trivial self-indulgence of a wealthy man, a hobby. It is likely that Cézanne’s intense self-identification with Frenhofer included a fear that he, too, would be judged as engaged in pointless labor, a rich man’s pastime. By the middle of the twentieth century, attitudes had changed markedly. Where Balzac and Cézanne saw tragedy, de Kooning saw absurdist humor.8 For decades now, and perhaps increasingly, artists have taken a position directly opposed to Balzac’s tragic Frenhofer. It is, they claim, the process, not the product, that defines them as artists, and thus their work cannot be evaluated solely in terms of its products. For many serious contemporary artists a successful artistic product has become a triviality. The admiration of art world peers is now directed to something intangible, an experience the artist is presumed to have had that is implied by the artist’s labor. The contemporary artist’s product, when it is a material object, often serves to represent that labor and experience rather than having independent aesthetic merit. Frenhofer’s protracted effort, rather than being a symbol of the desperate folly of artistic self-delusion, has become the contemporary artist’s greatest achievement. Years of dedicated work that do not produce a valuable, aesthetically appealing object can now be considered both successful and highly meaningful. There are, as we will see in the course of this study, many factors that have contributed to the recent elevation of process over product. For now, however, we must be satisfied with a few brief observations in relation to Balzac’s tale. Contemporary artists often no longer accept even the basic assumptions that underlie The Unknown Masterpiece. Not only has the presumed goal of naturalistic representation been long defunct, now the conception of the art object as a valuable, aesthetically satisfying commodity often evokes anxiety and suspicion. In a world of beautiful, mass-marketed All About Process

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luxury items, the creation of more extravagant commodities seems meaningless to many artists (although artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons have been very successful at creating just such commodities that simultaneously parade and mock their own extravagance). Art has come to stand more and more for intangible values rather than obvious tangible ones, and the identity of the artwork as the result of and occasion for experience has gained enormous ground over the artwork as a self-sufficient object. Artistic success, long equated with readily identified, tangible, and more or less stable signs— harmonious composition, virtuoso brushwork, masterful carving, and so forth—has retreated to the imponderables of subjective perceptions, the provocative thought, the critical concept, the frisson of emotional response. More than one hundred years after the publication of The Unknown Masterpiece Frenhofer’s fictional painting was realized as the ultimate contemporary artistic success. Hailed as “action painting” by Harold Rosenberg, the art of New York school painters, particularly Willem de Kooning, represented an authentic form of creative struggle made visible.9 Illegible layers of paint became the index of true artistic effort, the physical manifestation of artistic process. Over the course of a century, unregulated inspiration, solipsistic labor, and a lack of rules and limits had been transformed from barriers into meaningful characteristics of artistic achievement. Unlike in Balzac’s day, there were philosophical and artistic discourses that made it possible to value and appreciate the signs of unresolved creative struggle. It is the development of this discourse, the shift from considering artistic technique as a means directed toward an end product to considering the artist’s labor an adequate means of signification in itself, that is one of the main subjects of this study. The working processes of certain modern artists have received serious attention from critics and scholars, but there has been no attempt to synthesize these accounts into a broader picture of the development of conceptions of the modern artist’s process. This study rectifies this lack. It carefully analyzes the published discussions of the working processes of prominent modern artists that formed common conceptions of the artist’s labor. This examination helps us to understand more fully what the artist’s process means and what values contributed to its recent status as a dominating concern. In addition to analyzing the discursive representation of the working processes of modern artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Giacometti, and de Kooning, this study also examines the work of philosophers and art theorists who addressed the working processes of modern artists. These include Henri Focillon, R.  G. Collingwood, John

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Dewey, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. All these thinkers, to varying degrees, addressed the physical as well as the mental and psychological aspects of the artist’s process. In their writings the artist’s process is an experience that is exemplary of fully realized human experiences in general. The integration of mind and body achieved in the artistic process as described by prominent thinkers thus became emblematic of a successfully engaged relation between a human being and the physical material of the world. Henri Focillon’s highly influential text The Life of Forms in Art, originally published in 1934, is an early example of a theoretical discussion of the artist’s process. It forms a bridge between traditional conceptions of the artist’s labor as primarily directed toward the production of art objects and a new attitude more concerned with the profound significance of the artist’s working process that derived in large part from debates surrounding Surrealist automatism. This approach would be more fully developed in the 1940s and 1950s in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological discussions of the artist’s labor, which focused specifically on Cézanne and Matisse. Focillon conceived the physical artwork as a “graph of activity” that manifests the artist’s metamorphoses of matter. He insisted on the importance of studying artistic techniques because they allow the viewer to see “the heart of the problem, by presenting it to us in the same terms and from the same point of view as it is presented to the artist. . . . In viewing technique as a process and trying to reconstruct it as such, we are given the opportunity of going beyond surface phenomena and of seeing the significance of deeper relationships. . . . [Technique is] a fundamental element of knowledge that reiterates a creative process.” Key to Focillon’s thinking is the point of contact between the artist and matter, the hand and its touch. The artist’s touch gives the artwork life, imposing its own vital structure on matter. Focillon elaborates a connection between the artist’s creative touch and the fundamental activity of the human mind. “The mind is a design that is in a state of ceaseless flux, of ceaseless weaving and then unweaving, and its activity, in this sense, is an artistic activity. Like the artist, the mind works on nature. . . . Now the artist develops, under our eyes, the very technique of the mind; he gives us a kind of mold or cast that we can both see and touch. . . . Perhaps, in our secret selves, we are all artists who have neither a sense of form nor hands.”10 For Focillon the artist’s manual work is the physical manifestation of mental processes common to all. Perception of the artist’s technical labor is a means to view the instantiation of thought, which is in its very nature ceaseless creative activity engaging with the world. All About Process

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Evident in Focillon’s discussion and Harold Rosenberg’s later description of action painting is an attempt to elevate the artist’s technical process to the level of primary meaning in the understanding of the work of art. The artwork represents a direct encounter between artist and material, and the outcome of that encounter is most significantly an index of its occurrence, not an object that may be appreciated in isolation from its creation. But who are the viewers capable of perceiving the significance of the indications of artistic process? In stating that the artist’s technique mirrors the activity of human thought, Focillon suggests that there is a natural aptitude inherent in all viewers to appreciate the artist’s process. Perhaps only the knowledgeable and reflective viewer is consciously aware of the effects that the artist’s technical process have on the final work, but implicitly even the most technically ignorant viewer is affected by the residual signs of artistic labor.11 In a broad sense, the psychological and emotional engagement of the viewer by the indexical effects of artistic process replaces the long Western aesthetic tradition of engaging the viewer through the convincing depiction of emotionally affecting figures and scenes. Instead of scenes representing the sad nobility of Socrates’s suicide or the ravaging barbarism of the Massacre of the Innocents, what attracts the viewer’s attention are the nuances of a contour line as it forms a shape, or the variations in paint handling from impasto to vaporous washes. This is a species of formalism, but one that implies consciousness of the artwork as an object situated in the world, an awareness often considered antithetical to formalism.12 Elevation of the perception of the artist’s process in the artwork does not merely attempt to explain the material genesis of formal qualities such as line, composition, texture, and tone. It insists on the viewer’s consciousness of the artwork as a human-created object. As such, the artwork becomes a locus of communication, a sign of a complex, motivated activity intended to provoke a sense of shared humanity. In this way it is possible to consider the artwork, viewed as the result of a creative process, as a point of intersection bringing people together in mutual recognition of their roles as active makers. Rather than the distanced admiration traditionally associated with the perception of beauty, a focus on creative process is less likely to be considered a means to transcend materiality in aesthetic exaltation.13 Viewer response may be more often associated with a desire to reciprocate with an act of making, a common reaction to art and one rarely addressed in aesthetic discussion except when studying poems inspired by encounters with artworks. Broad consideration of artistic process must also include reception as integral to the aesthetic experience.14 Instead of viewing art as a cognate for

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an object, process extends the concept of art to include the object as one point in a complex web of intersecting activities, comprising the artist’s process of creation, the object, and the multitude of responses to that object. In this fashion, the understanding of the artwork becomes extended through space and time, and the accretions of experience fundamentally affect the work and its meaning rather than being considered dismissible historical accidents. Process emphasizes that the artwork can be an integral force within both individual and social human life. It is this function of art that has become particularly compelling in recent decades for artists seeking to determine a significant role for art in postindustrial, late-capitalist society. The expansion and centrality of process in contemporary art is greatly indebted to the development of feminism and its enormous influence in the art world. Process as conceived and articulated within the historical context of the modern Western artistic discourse is dominated by the ideas of the male artists, critics, theorists, and philosophers who set its terms. It is not until the latter half of the twentieth century that women become significant shapers of that discourse. Prior to that time, artistic process was conceived and discussed in terms of the “gender-neutral” and presumed universal male artist. Aspiring female artists worked to achieve access to the same training received by their male peers, although this was often not possible for certain aspects of fine arts education, particularly those requiring study of the nude. Despite pervasive institutional separation, ambitious female artists typically conceived their processes as no different from those of their male peers. This was often a requirement for public recognition.15 Putatively feminine qualities of artistic expression could be important ingredients in a female artist’s success—for example, that of Elisabeth VigéeLebrun and Berthe Morisot—and these qualities affected conceptions of the artist’s process to a degree, but they were rarely discussed or analyzed in depth. Feminine was a broadly descriptive term akin to romantic and expressive and was used to describe artistic qualities linked to a wide range of artistic techniques and processes: the finely nuanced modeling of Vigée-Lebrun, the loose brushwork of Morisot, the delicate precision of Rachel Ruysch, and the vaporous color pours of Helen Frankenthaler. Feminine qualities were also commonly linked to the types of artistic production that women most often practiced professionally and as amateurs: design, illustration, and the socalled minor arts and decorative crafts. These were art forms in which technical processes were considered predominant, rather than the conceptual concerns that distinguished the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. All About Process

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Widespread efforts to locate and define specifically female forms of art and art making accompanied the rise of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s and had an enormous effect on the growth of interest in the creative process as a subject and focus of contemporary art. Artistic processes traditionally associated with women’s crafts and amateur art became a site of great interest for contemporary artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro who adopted and elevated long-devalued forms of art making. They drew attention to the extent to which profound engagement with artistic process was not limited to the narrow category of socially recognized artists, but was in fact a pervasive social activity. Feminist artists also challenged the prevalent modern image of the artist as a solitary male genius and reinstated collaboration as a valuable component of the artistic process. In addition, feminists’ emphasis on the value of personal experience led many artists to examine their individual creative processes in depth and to expand these well beyond the traditional boundaries of object-oriented production. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s maintenance art, Carolee Schneemann’s eroticized performance art, and Linda Montano’s wide-ranging experiential performances provide highly influential examples of the myriad ways the processes of common activities previously unassociated with art or art making can be both the subject and the object of significant art. In the contemporary art world, anything may be a work of art. This is often understood by those who are not seriously engaged with the visual arts in a limited fashion. They may know enough about modern art to shrug with indifference or disdain as they acknowledge that art can be anything. But when asked to consider how this is the case, many, perhaps most, people will respond that anything a person thinks is beautiful—be it a urinal, a pile of rags, or a sunset—is a work of art. This conception marries the traditional association of art with beauty and aesthetics to a misunderstanding of modern art’s subversive rejection of traditional concerns. It is accompanied by another related and widespread conviction—that anyone may make a work of art. Thus the cook, the gardener, the knitter, even the housecleaner may in common parlance be declared artists when they devote an exceptional degree of care, attention, and inventiveness to the production of something beautiful, be it a meal, a flower bed, a sweater, or the arrangement of a room. This is a true democratization of art and an intriguing public response to the growing distance between institutionalized contemporary art and the general public. It seems that as institutionally recognized artistic activity becomes incomprehensible to the public, the more that public embraces traditional notions of art-making activity in their own lives. While for many

13

Introduction

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people this type of artistic activity is closely linked to the creation of beauty (understood broadly as anything aesthetically satisfying), that is by no means its sole concern. Particularly important are the pleasures to be derived from engaging in the creative process itself. In the 1970s Daniel Bell observed that making art had become associated with personal fulfillment, and similarly that there had been a corresponding shift from objective standards of evaluation to merely personal responses, presumably of the sort represented by the cliché “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” According to Bell, “With the expansion of higher education, and the growth of a semi-skilled intelligentsia, moreover, a significant change has taken place. . . . Large numbers of people . . . now insist on the right to participate in the artistic enterprise—not in order to cultivate their minds or sensibilities, but to ‘fulfill’ their personalities. Both in the character of art itself and in the nature of the responses to it, the concern with self takes precedence over any objective standards.”16 What Bell described is the expansion of the Romantic notion of self-expression throughout society. In the late twentieth century, finding an outlet for one’s personal creativity became a widely embraced (and often therapeutic) goal. While Focillon had distinguished the artist from the nonartist in an implicitly essentialist manner, he had also suggested the existence of a common human creative impulse to manipulate physical materials to create forms. Such activity may be seen as primary, an intersection of mind and matter fundamental to human experience. Conceived in this fashion, the dedication to the creative process expressed by so many artists may be understood as a final, inarguable justification for their activity. Inarguable, because it asks for no external validation, it is no different from why a person hikes or swims. The artist, like the hiker and swimmer, will probably have specific reasons and goals, but the activity is its own purpose and does not require further justification. Ultimately, what dedication to process provides is an occasion for experience, and there is now a tradition of understanding experience as the kernel of artistic activity, both that of creation and that of reception. The most wellknown discussion of this topic is John Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience, a book that, like Focillon’s, has been very popular with both artists and the general public and remains in print. Dewey’s pragmatic approach has recently attracted renewed interest among scholars, most notably Richard Shusterman, who has used Dewey’s ideas as a basis for his “somaesthetics,” an approach to aesthetics that emphasizes the role of bodily experience.17

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Shusterman’s revisions of traditional Western aesthetics are part of a general reassessment of the meaning and purpose of art sparked by widespread changes in late-capitalist, postindustrial society. In recent decades, art history and criticism have accepted the limitations and failures of Western aesthetics and its methodological offspring, formalism, to comprehend fully the significance of art. What has largely replaced traditional approaches have been critical theory and contextual analysis, both of which are primarily concerned with situating art and culture in relation to broad social and political concerns.18 Serious philosophical efforts to reconsider the role and purpose of art in relation to experiential concerns, like Shusterman’s, are rare. This may be because, as Shusterman and others argue, Western philosophy is fundamentally biased in favor of the mental and conceptual rather than the bodily and experiential. Language and concepts for addressing experience have been relatively neglected in the Western intellectual tradition, and this has had a serious effect on the establishment of a developed understanding of the significance and role of process in the arts. It is the purpose of this study to provide a foundation for understanding how the artist’s process has been conceived and valued in the Western artistic tradition, beginning with a historical overview and then analyzing the topic more specifically in relation to modern and contemporary art. A primary goal for this book is the careful consolidation and analysis of the material on this topic. There is a long history of critical and theoretical texts addressing the artist’s process, particularly in the modern period, which have not always received the attention they deserve because other issues and concerns have taken precedence. These are not obscure texts by any means. Most of the texts and artists that will be discussed in the pages to follow are well known and have been highly influential. What is not always clear about them is how their explicit engagement with process fits into a broader picture of the purposes of art, particularly in the modern industrial and postindustrial world. Artistic process and its relation to the meaning and purpose of art are a primary consideration for artists. Critical theory in its varied forms provides many valuable ways to examine art, but these often have little or nothing to do with what matters to artists or many of their viewers. It is my intention to provide a concrete outline and analysis of the ways process has become a central concern for contemporary artists and their viewers.

15

Introduction

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1 Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor Prior to the Nineteenth Century

Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more complete than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and . . . we call complete without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.

—Aristotle

The artist’s process of creation was not a significant topic for general discussion or analysis before the nineteenth century; indeed, before the Renaissance, artists were barely separated from other skilled manual workers. All forms of manual labor were ranked relatively low in Western societies, which valued abstract immaterial activities and functions more highly than physical and material ones. Arguments for the elevated status of the fine arts originating in the Renaissance emphasized the artist’s intellectual work and largely ignored the manual labor necessary to produce artworks. In discussions of the artist’s work prior to the nineteenth century, the dominant trend is one that remains powerful today: the privileging of the intellectual and conceptual over the manual and material. Nevertheless, attitudes and ideas that characterize modern interest in the artist’s process have roots in earlier discussions of the artist’s labor. Aristotle’s definition of a worthy pursuit quoted above is precisely what artists now so often enshrine in their statements about artistic process—an activity that is complete and desirable in itself without reference to a goal or end product. This is ironic given that Aristotle uses the craftsman’s activity of making as an example of a lesser pursuit because it is always oriented to the requirements of a specific goal.1 Activities that are not directed toward

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any goal whatsoever have the highest value: “For the arts of making have some other end beyond the making . . . but in the processes of doing there is no other end beyond the doing. . . . Wisdom, then, is concerned with doing and things done, but art with making and things made.”2 Aristotle separates wisdom and action from art and making; his example of self-sufficient action is music making because it has no external purpose, whereas art and craft inevitably serve some specified goal. It is common knowledge that ancient Greek and Roman society considered manual labor, which included what came to be known as the fine arts, to be a base activity appropriate to slaves and the lowest social orders. According to Aristotle, manual and remunerative labor deform the body and degrade the mind.3 Plutarch noted the vast distinction between admiring an artwork and admiring the artist who made it: “No gifted young man, upon the seeing the Zeus of Pheidias at Olympia, ever wanted to be Pheidias. . . . For it does not necessarily follow that, if a work is delightful . . . the man who made it is worthy of our serious regard.”4 Aristotle believed only men of leisure were able to devote themselves to the most meaningful human activities: politics and ethics. He did nevertheless advocate education in certain arts for children destined to be leaders in society—just not too much, because if they attend “to them too closely, in order to attain perfection in them . . . harmful effects will follow.”5 For Aristotle, drawing, like reading and writing, is useful for acquiring knowledge; it also helps to develop the ability to make aesthetic judgments.6 Music is the only artistic activity he associates with the intellectual activity of leisure, but the development of professional skill in musical performance will lead away from music as a means of self-improvement to a professional activity that gives “vulgar pleasure” to others.7 Aristotle’s discussion of arts education for children destined to become the leaders of society laid the foundation for many of the Western tradition’s notions of the role and place of the arts in society. The artistic education of the European upper classes from the Renaissance on was largely based on Aristotle’s views. Distinctions between the professional and the upper-class amateur artist are indebted to Aristotle, as are some aspects of the general significance of the artist’s process. His discussion of music lays out the terms for conceptualizing the pleasure of practicing an art form for its own sake, while his description of the professional artisan whose mind is “absorbed” and “degraded” by his work provided the basis for the widespread conception of the artist’s attitude of total dedication to work. For Aristotle this dedication detracted from the higher values he associated with free human action;

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however, for later societies that place high value on labor, particularly fulfilling labor, the completely dedicated artist will become one of the most admired and envied social types. The figure of the modern artist in particular is an amalgamation of Aristotelian values. Modern artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, working without commissions and dedicated to art for art’s sake, did not work toward a predetermined goal and thus cannot be faulted for being mere mechanical laborers or for having “degraded” minds in Aristotle’s terms. The rejection of professional academic training and developed technical skills by many modern artists is likewise an approach that avoids the debilitating distortions of character and mind Aristotle associated with narrow professionalism. The disassociation of the artist from technical mastery and professional craftsmanship has greatly increased in recent years as more and more artists work in many and varied media, establishing the contemporary artist as a figure more like Aristotle’s social leader concerned with politics and ethics. This is particularly true of artists who have dispensed with the making of saleable commodities altogether, who can be considered truly free actors. Aristotle’s conception of the artisan’s labor thus informs and supports values associated with very different types of artistic labor— both the total dedication of the artist to the elimination of all other considerations as well as the artist’s more liberated engagement with conceptual issues and sociopolitical concerns. While the ancient Greeks’ low opinion of artisans as manual laborers is renowned, they also defined the terms in which artists and their labor would be admired. The Greeks valued knowledge over technical skills, and Aristotle praised the greater wisdom of master craftsmen who understand the principles of their art above ignorant craftsmen with mere experience who labor mechanically.8 From its origin, conceptual understanding takes precedence over technical skill in the Western artistic tradition. Classical texts do occasionally praise the intellectual achievements of artists9 and the intellectual achievements of artisanal labor, but the general conception of the crafts as skilled manual labor conditioned the ways they were discussed. Surviving documents indicate that the primary concern was technical skill (techne), and sculptures, paintings, and buildings that were admired for specific technical achievements acquired renown. How precisely these achievements occurred was not generally discussed. Indeed, Lucian drew attention to this as the province of the practicing artisan and not of the amateur viewer in a text on Zeuxis’s painting of a centaur family:

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As for the other aspects of the painting, those which are not wholly apparent to amateurs like us but which nevertheless contain the whole power of the art—such as drawing the lines with the utmost exactitude, making a precise mixture of the colors and an apt application of them, employing shading where necessary, a rationale for the size of the figures, and equality and harmony of the parts to the whole—let painters’ pupils, whose job it is to know about such things, praise them. As for me, I particularly praised Zeuxis for this achievement, namely that in one and the same design he has demonstrated the greatness of his artistic skill in a variety of ways.10

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Lucian’s text is interesting not only for his distinction between the craft concerns of the painter and the representational concerns of the non-artisan viewer, but also for what the artist himself desired from the viewers of his work. According to Lucian, the viewers of Zeuxis’s centaur family were most interested in the novelty of the subject; they praised “the strangeness of its conception” and failed to appreciate the artist’s representational skill: The result was that Zeuxis, when he perceived that the newness of the subject was preoccupying them and drawing their attention away from its artistic quality, and the precision of its details was being treated as a by-product, said to his pupil: “. . . They are praising only the clay of my work, but as to the lighting effects, and whether these are beautifully executed and of artistic merit, these questions they treat as if they were not of much importance; rather, the new-fangled quality of the subject surpasses in renown the precision of its workmanship.11 Lucian’s tale sets up terms of discussion and evaluation that have endured to the present. Zeuxis is capable of impressive invention, a quality that will become of great significance in the elevation of the artist’s intellectual, and consequently social, status in the Renaissance and afterward. Nevertheless, the painter apparently disdained this invention as the mere “clay” of his work. What Zeuxis prized was his manual/technical skill. He considered the subject/idea as the mere substrate for the artistry of its pictorial realization, which was the culmination of the years of labor that resulted in the mastery of his craft. What Zeuxis wanted was viewers able to appreciate, at least to a degree, that mastery, and surviving descriptions of the achievements of ancient Greek artworks suggest that this was not an unrealistic desire.

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Classical viewers often recognized and celebrated the impressive representational techniques that were the focus of ancient Greek artists. Alison Burford has noted, “Quotation after quotation can be given to show that it was the way in which a statue or painting had been executed, and the intentional effects the sculptor or painter had achieved, which drew admiration and analytical comment from the educated public . . . the attainment of absolute realism was the artistic ideal.”12 Artists were famed for specific technical achievements that set them above their peers; for example, Quintilian noted Polykleitos’s precision, Zeuxis’s employment of light and shade, and Parrhasios’s subtlety of line.13 Pliny and Plutarch remarked on the quality of the bronze and bronze alloys that created the impressive simulations of skin on notable sculptures.14 One reason for the emphasis on technical achievements in the surviving texts is that these writings were often based on earlier texts by practicing artists. This is the case for Pliny, whose sources included the sculptors Antigonos and Xenocrates.15 While Lucian excused himself from an exposition of the means Zeuxis employed to achieve his naturalistic effects, Pliny explained the basis of artists’ admiration of Parrhasios’s techniques in his mastery of contour drawing.16 A particularly interesting section of Pliny’s text describes the value of unfinished works. Whereas Parrhasios’s drawings are a source of interest and education to his fellow artists for their technical mastery, unfinished works in which the underdrawing is still visible have the virtue of revealing the artist’s thought: “The last works of artists and their unfinished pictures . . . are held in greater admiration than finished works; for in these the sketch-lines remain and the actual thoughts of the artists are visible.”17 This conception of unfinished artworks as being closer to the artist’s idea persists in critical evaluations to this day. They are indexes of an arrested process, one that has yet to arrive at a finished product in which, Pliny’s text implies, the artist’s thought has become indistinguishable from the unified and concrete form of the completed work. That unfinished works were generally “held in greater admiration than finished works” in ancient Greece is an unlikely exaggeration, although it is probable that artists greatly admired them. In the ancient world the artwork was an object created for a purpose, be it a temple sculpture, a painting to decorate a room, a ritual vessel, or some other item. Without such destinations there would be no commissions for artworks and thus no artworks. Craftsmen were social servants who worked for their livelihood, hence Aristotle’s designation of them as unfree: they did not produce art to exercise their mind and skills for their own pleasure. Given the cultural expectations All About Process

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of the artist, it was largely impossible to conceive of the artist exercising his thought-directed skills in the absence of an intended final product. The artist’s process has as a goal a finished work; without that goal there is no process, no creative impetus. Only when arrested by death or other unexpected circumstances would it be possible to capture an index of the creative process. This may have been of great interest and value to other artists, but Greek society in general would never have considered it comparable to a finished artwork. Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between making and doing can be taken as key to classical thinking in this regard. The artist is a maker, not a doer/actor; his goal is the creation of a thing, which may be done well or not. The free man, in contrast, acts in accordance with moral aims, which are intangible; his goal is to act well. By defining the artist as a maker, creating in accordance with the needs and requirements of a defined product, it is impossible to separate the artist’s activity from its productive goal. The working process is fully identified with its aim, the final product, and it cannot be isolated without losing its reason for being. The interest of the unfinished work is its capacity to offer insight into how a great artist/maker achieved his products—an interest comparable to that provoked by the engineering blueprints for a steam engine, which show how the machine works. To appreciate the evidence of a creative process in itself, as an index of action, requires an altogether different set of human values and ideological assumptions. The overall concern in discussions of art, artworks, and artists from the ancient world to the nineteenth century was to analyze and evaluate the artwork as a product. Interest in the artist’s creative process was largely limited to analysis of the means employed to create the product, rather than to consideration of those means as significant in themselves. Only in the nineteenth century, when industrialization prompted a serious reconsideration of the distinctions between creative and mechanical processes, did the artist’s labor in itself become a focus of critical and theoretical concern. Although there is scant evidence to support the notion that artisans and craftworkers were more highly regarded in the Middle Ages than previously (or subsequently in the case of many forms of craftwork), the Middle Ages have been considered a golden age of craftsmanship ever since John Ruskin published The Stones of Venice in the mid-nineteenth century. For Ruskin and many others, this long period before the Renaissance separation of the fine/ liberal arts from the crafts seemed to promise a fairer social and cultural recognition of all artisanal work. The paucity of explicit documentary evidence

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on the views of pre-Renaissance artisans regarding their own labor has made this an area ripe for speculation, particularly among those interested in the history of craft production and its social valuation. Modern descriptions of the situation of the medieval artisan often seem to be colored by nostalgia for a time when all artists, regardless of medium, were fully integrated participants in the social order, and when all artisanal products were highly valued and appreciated for their contribution to the culture as a whole. Actual attitudes toward art making in a period spanning almost a thousand years and a vast array of local and regional cultures ( just considering a broadly defined European cultural area) were enormously varied. Even within the more narrowly defined late medieval or Gothic period, which was the principal object of Ruskin’s interest, there were undoubtedly many variations. The most often cited source of information on traditional artist’s workshop practices is Cennino Cennini’s fourteenth-century manual on painting, which gives detailed technical accounts of the painter’s labors.18 In describing the methods for preparing painting materials and the techniques necessary to the painter’s craft, Cennini gives some insight into the proper psychological attitudes of the successful painter. The artisan’s enjoyment of his work is an important concept for Cennini: “There are those who pursue [the profession] because of poverty and domestic need, for profit . . . but above all these are to be extolled the ones who enter the profession through a sense of enthusiasm and exaltation.”19 Cennini’s claim that some artists are motivated to choose the profession by “loftiness of spirit” may suggest that the arts were special activities calling for great enthusiasm, but this may be reading more significance into the statement than is appropriate. In ancient Greece the pride artists took in their achievements, as recounted in their epitaphs, was not notably different than that recounted in the epitaphs of miners and carpenters.20 Any artisan, indeed any worker, is more likely to succeed when motivated by enjoyment of the work itself. In discussions of the modern European artist’s identity it is commonplace to emphasize the shift in the status of certain arts, notably painting and sculpture, that began in the Renaissance. Beginning in the fourteenth century, painting was increasingly considered as a liberal rather than a mechanical art. A practical indicator of this shift is that during the fifteenth century the artist, typically a painter or sculptor, began to be distinguished from the craftsman by being paid for his experience rather than for his time and labor.21 Also indicative is the artist’s ability to be selective about what commissions to accept without impairing his career.22 These are superficial All About Process

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signs demonstrating a change in the artist’s status that do not, however, explain its occurrence. For that, it is necessary to turn to the arguments for the inclusion of certain visual arts among the liberal arts, which established an enduring rift between what came to be known as the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture and the so-called crafts, which traditionally include all other forms of hand making. At its foundation the elevation of painting, sculpture, and architecture to the level of the liberal arts was based on arguments that emphasized the primacy of the intellectual aspects of the arts over their material techniques. In this they maintained the bias toward immaterial thought (theory) over material manual labor evident in classical texts. While there were different strategies for defining mental labor as the basis of the fine arts—some emphasizing painting’s similarities to the longaccepted liberal art of poetry, some emphasizing the scientific and conceptual nature of the fine arts, some stressing inspiration as the primary source of the artist, others advocating the moral and instructive purpose of art—all were agreed that some form of immaterial conceptual activity was the true foundation of the fine arts. Renaissance humanists supported the elevation of the status of painting and sculpture, claiming that the ancient Greeks had greatly honored artists and consequently praising contemporary artists and their achievements in exalted terms.23 The crafts, in contrast, were considered to be engaged with mere manual skills and technical knowledge, both of which were limited and determined by the materials they employed and the destination of their products. The elevation of painting and sculpture to the level of the liberal arts marked a new social identity for the artist, and an elevated social status is the most often noted result of the shift from the manual labor of the craftsperson to the intellectual labor of the fine artist. Less attention has been given to the way the new conception of the artist could unify previously separate activities into a new single category. Artisans were commonly identified with the material they worked—thus in Florence sculptors belonged to the guild associated with building, while painters belonged to the guild associated with medicine. Italian art academies established in the sixteenth century, in contrast, ignored the medium in which the artist would ultimately produce works and conceived drawing, disegno, as the foundation and focus of study. Disegno rendered obsolete any distinctions between the fine arts based on medium and unified artists as a new social group on the basis of their shared intellectual concerns. These included the study of anatomy, accurate naturalistic rendering, and the illustration of subjects drawn from history, religion, literature, and the imagination.24

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Despite the intellectualization of the fine arts, artisanal concerns with materials and media continued to have an effect on artists’ status and selfconception. The unification of the fine arts on the intellectual basis and common ground of disegno could never completely overcome the reality that the visual artist works with specific materials. The long Western tradition of aesthetic debate regarding the relative superiority of painting over sculpture or vice versa (paragone) is one aspect of the enduring recognition by artists and aestheticians that the medium of an artwork does matter both to the artist and to the viewer. Another area in which it is evident that the material craft of painting and sculpture continued to have enormous importance is in critical and aesthetic discussions of specific works or artists. Determinations of quality were never simply evaluations of intellectual content; they were inevitably also concerned with the artist’s technical achievements. The altarpiece, the classical allegory, the royal portrait, all might be judged in terms of their ability to fulfill their religious, moral, and social functions, but underlying all these was the artist’s craft that made them possible. Technical skill was thus, rather peculiarly, taken for granted and yet absolutely central to an artist’s success and recognition. This is most evident in the persistent focus on the various contributions to naturalistic representation made by individual artists in texts on their lives and achievements. In the transition from guild traditions to the elevation of painting and sculpture to the status of the fine arts, the nature of the art object as a material commodity endured. The guild system, which often divided productive labor according to the materials employed, was a social form of regulating commerce—understood primarily as the exchange of goods. To elevate painting and sculpture to the status of liberal arts is to make an implicit, and clearly false, claim that paintings and sculptures are not material things liable to commercial regulation. Pevsner notes that in seventeenth-century Rome the guild rebelled against the institution of a tax payable to the academy and contrasted the idle life of the artist to the industry of the artisan and “the usefulness of craft and trade with the futility of the fine arts.”25 Here artisans used the rhetoric of the fine artists against them—if the fine artist merely exercises his mind rather than producing socially useful objects, what purpose does his work serve? According to Aristotle’s terms, the liberal arts were not really work at all in any tangible sense. In this respect the advent of a purely conceptual art during the 1960s (in the context of what was then more commonly called the visual arts or simply “art”) is the first realization of the self-contradictory Renaissance ideal of an art that has escaped the confines of materiality, both literal and All About Process

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commercial. That this also is the proper and logical conclusion of “fine art,” and the effective suicide of what could be conceived as visual art’s fundamental identity, is also something one might term a problem. It does, however, have the virtue of making it clear that the essentially idealist, intellectual goals of the Western fine arts from the Renaissance onward are in direct conflict with the traditional role of art as a humanly created material thing intended to be perceived by the senses. The long tradition of art’s intellectualization in theoretical and critical discourse has tended to obscure the technical and creative processes of artistic production. Zeuxis’s complaint that the public was only interested in his original concept, the “clay” of the work, and ignored the artistry of his technical achievements might well have been echoed by countless artists since the time of the Renaissance. As Leonardo remarked, few painters write about the science and nobility of their art, and therefore few people other than practicing artists understand it. His own writings may be seen as an attempt to rectify this situation, and they demonstrate that the separation between intellectual art and “mechanical” craft is often extremely difficult to distinguish with absolute clarity. Leonardo was among the first to insist that painting was a liberal art because it was a science, both rooted in knowledge derived from (visual) experience and a form of intellectual endeavor connected with mathematics through its basis in perspective. It was also based in imagination, like poetry, but more durable, more sensually direct, more temporally immediate, and more readily available to all. In Leonardo’s view, sculpture from marble was not a science but a mechanical art, requiring little to no mental effort, whose practice produces sweat and fatigue.26 Leonardo’s ideas ultimately became the basis for the first art academies in Italy, which stressed the study of perspective and proportion as the foundation of art. In fact, this would be the basis for all academic art instruction up to the nineteenth century. In his extensive writings on the art of painting, Leonardo focused primarily on instructions for achieving accurate representations of objects in space and light. Careful study and diligent labor are the presumed foundation for the artist’s gradual mastery of his means. Leonardo rarely addresses what may be considered the psychological experience or process of art making directly, although he occasionally comments on appropriate attitudes for the artist in relation to others and to society. He adjures the artist to avoid working with the goal of making a lot of money, sometimes for exalted moral reasons and sometimes because he seems to have believed that profitable art making was injurious to true excellence. Leonardo also believed that the artist worked most diligently when alone, and that the company of others

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distracted him from his work. This is somewhat modified by his statements on the artist’s need for the impetus of competition to learn and advance in his art, and that comparison with the work of others was an important aspect of learning. In general, the image Leonardo creates of the artist is that of a diligent, thoughtful worker who labors to master complex means of naturalistic representation. This is accomplished in slow and careful stages, a process he compared to reading and to climbing stairs to the top of a building.27 Leonardo’s artist is goal-oriented; achieving that goal requires intellectual and conceptual labor, as he stressed, but ultimately all the work leads to the creation of a precise and predetermined product. Given that Leonardo’s approach became the basis for academic art education, it is appropriate to consider the artistic process as implied in his writings. In many ways, little differentiates Leonardo’s artist from earlier craftsmen, as both strive to create excellent products that require mastery of their means. Although it is conventional to credit Leonardo, and other Renaissance artists and writers, with changing the status of painting by promoting the intellectual labor of the painter, Leonardo suggests that painting was always an intellectual art and that its traditional low status was the result of a lack of knowledgeable discussion of its processes.28 His theoretical, fundamentally pedagogic writings were intended to demonstrate the complex mental activity that is a necessary component of accurate naturalistic representation. It is interesting to consider the degree to which complex intellectual exercise is required once technical rules of the sort Leonardo compiled are in place. Leonardo performed impressive intellectual labor in devising perspectival techniques, understanding anatomy, and so forth, but once these techniques were established they could be learned and applied with far less thought than their discovery and initial articulation required. It appears that Leonardo intended his notes to be used by artists, and if this was the case they provided a shortcut to knowledge. All rules and precepts must be applied judiciously in the infinite number of situations that confront the painter, which requires careful thought and knowledge acquired through observation and experience. Nevertheless, the most significant intellectual activity in Leonardo’s own estimation, the mathematical principles required, is supplied by ready-made rules. In their efforts to master a higher degree of accuracy in naturalistic depiction than had generally been required in the preceding centuries, Renaissance artists were briefly in a position to claim that their work represented a novel form of artistic labor by virtue of its larger theoretical component. Once mastered and institutionalized, how-

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ever, this theoretical component (comprising mathematical perspective, optical theories of light, anatomical knowledge, etc.) diminished to the level of mechanical practice. It became little more than part of the painter’s trade, a type of knowledge comparable to the painter’s knowledge of materials and the means of their fabrication and employment. What was ultimately most successful historically as the intellectual component of the fine artist’s work was a topic Leonardo addressed relatively little: imagination. Here was a mental activity that could not be reduced to rules and precepts, although Leonardo’s famous injunction to seek imaginative stimulus in the arbitrary forms of cracks and stains on old walls shows that he even formulated strategies for provoking imagination. One more issue deserves attention in the context of Leonardo’s theoretical writing: the process of naturalistic depiction he both described explicitly and implied. Leonardo believed that constant practice, guided by theoretical understanding and proper judgment, was the basis of artistic mastery and excellence. This practice was not to be limited to drawing specific subjects, but to encompass the representation of everything found in the visible world. Through the practice of drawing from nature the artist develops increasing knowledge of the means of representation. For Leonardo, proof of the artist’s understanding lay in the ability to draw from memory with perfect accuracy. This, it might be argued, is evidence for his conviction that the painter’s labor is primarily mental rather than manual.29 However, the distinction is not clear, and it is often claimed that Leonardo advocated the development of the artist’s manual dexterity through constant practice as a primary means to artistic mastery. David Summers has pointed out the dilemma faced by anyone attempting to comprehend the complexity of manual practice in Renaissance art:

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Languages of sensate judgment have probably always been integral to the practice of art, indispensable to its conduct and teaching, even if these languages have not always been regarded as significant, and even if the kind of “rightness” sought by skilled eyes and hands has not always been valued, or regarded as a significant metaphor, or paradigm. In general, these languages must be supposed to be closer to the purposes of craft than to the purposes of art literature, and there are relatively few records of them. There are certainly many more records in the results of the practice of Renaissance art than there are in its justifying “theory.”30

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Summers here echoes Leonardo’s point regarding the lack of painters’ discussions of their art, which has resulted in a general failure to recognize the nobility of its science, or what in current language we would describe as the complexity and significance of its technical processes. In The Body of the Artisan Pamela Smith has attempted to reconstruct the largely unarticulated understanding that was the province of the manual worker up through the seventeenth century. She sees the bodily and biological metaphoric understanding typical of artisans as an important contributor to the development of modern science. This understanding of natural processes was enhanced by engagement with alchemy and alchemical processes. In Smith’s view, artisans labored to manipulate and control natural materials in order to produce new objects and thus were particularly interested in nature’s processes of generation and transformation.31 Such interest could have religious meaning; Paracelsus believed that the knowledge of nature gained through experience and manual labor gave understanding of God’s creation. The light of nature was understood to be embodied in the working processes of craftspeople, who “reformed” fallen nature by creating noble objects from it—thus generating a means to redemption.32 According to Smith, the experiential knowledge of artisans had little in common with the intellectual activity promulgated by rhetoricians and theorists. In the context of a late sixteenth-century dialogue between Theory and Practice, Bernard Palissy gave an account of his search for enamels to create a porcelain vessel in which he emphasized the intensity of the physical labor involved. Practice refuses to give Theory the secrets discovered in the course of labor, claiming that others should learn from practice as well so that they do not esteem the knowledge too lightly. Theory is disgusted and says the art is too mechanical to be prized, but Practice claims it is not mechanical.33 Palissy’s text suggests the degree to which even in the sixteenth century it was difficult to distinguish between pure theoretical knowledge that may be clearly described in words and precepts, on the one hand, and the nuanced knowledge gained by the experienced artisan, on the other. Craft theorists have described this “tacit knowledge” as a key characteristic of craftsmanship.34 The failure of art theorists to appreciate this area of knowledge may be ascribed in large measure to Aristotle’s distinction between the theoretical ignorance of the craftsman, whose understanding is based only on experience, and the master who is able to teach because he understands and can teach the principles that underlie the craftsman’s labor. This distinction seems to have hardened over time into a complete divorce (probably All About Process

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unintended by Aristotle) between theoretical knowledge that can be verbalized and ignorant “mechanical” practice. The effects of this divorce may be seen in the degree to which artistic practices and processes were long considered outside the purview of general public interest in the arts. What the artist did in the studio was mysterious and, at the same time, largely beneath the notice of those interested in the arts. Such an attitude toward the artist’s actual work contributed to general social conceptions of the artist as both a lowly worker and a mysterious being subject to strange, even divine, motive forces. A telling indication of these views, and the changes initiated in the nineteenth century in the status of the artist’s labor, may be found in G. Baldwin Brown’s preface to the first English translation of Vasari’s Introduction to his famous Lives of the Artists. The topic of the Introduction is artistic technique, and, as Brown’s preface explains, it was not translated earlier because in the mid-nineteenth century readers were not interested in technical processes. By 1907, however, according to Brown, William Morris had taught the public the importance of technique, and there was a readership for Vasari’s text.35 It is this growth of interest in the artist’s material techniques and processes that is a primary characteristic of modern art and a central theme of this study. Vasari’s Introduction, like Leonardo’s writings on painting, is primarily practical and instructive, and only occasionally offers insights into the character of the artist’s work. Echoing Leonardo, Vasari insists on the importance of long study and practice of drawing from nature, which develops both correctness and facility for design.36 Drawing from nature is in Vasari’s view the only way to master painting’s most difficult task, foreshortening. Its difficulty leads to the highest graces and beauties of painting. For Vasari, hard work and practice lead to mastery, which is identified by apparent ease of creation (216–17). According to Vasari, “Art will always be associated with the grace of naturalness . . . and the work be brought to perfection not with the stress of cruel suffering, so that men who look at it have to endure pain on account of the suffering which they see has been borne by the artist in his work, but rather with rejoicing at his good fortune in that his hand has received from heaven the lightness of movement which shows his painting to be worked out with study and toil certainly, but not with drudgery” (211). Manual dexterity is, of course, not the sole requirement for the artist; it must be accompanied by good judgment. It is mind and hand that create art: “What design needs, when it has derived from the judgment the mental image of anything, is that the hand, through the study and practice of many years, may be free and apt to draw and to express correctly . . . whatever nature has

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created. For when the intellect puts forth refined and judicious conceptions, the hand which has practiced design for many years, exhibits the perfection and excellence of the arts as well as the knowledge of the artist” (206). As we shall see, great technical facility will become highly problematic in the nineteenth century, when it will be associated with the drudgery of mechanical processes of production rather than the graceful manifestations of inspired and judicious conceptions. In contrast, the hard labor of the artist is a persistent theme in Vasari’s Lives that will endure and be enhanced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vasari describes Raphael as “devoting himself with indescribable energy to the studies connected with his art” and being impelled by the labors of Leonardo and Michelangelo.37 Raphael spares himself no effort in the creation of his works, engaging in all aspects of their production. He “compelled himself by incredible labours to effect that in a few months . . . which . . . would have demanded many years for its attainment.” Michelangelo is Vasari’s exemplary artistic genius who unites all the natural gifts with the labor of study and practice. While Vasari repeatedly stresses the naturalness of Michelangelo’s talent, he also recounts the artist’s intense dedication to his studies, even on nights and holidays, which made him better than his jealous peers. His study was not, however, theoretical. Vasari claimed that he lived much in the world and found his material by direct observation, acquiring knowledge that philosophers seek in books and reflection. This connection to the lived world is the foundation of his art’s wide appeal, in Vasari’s opinion, and he notes that his art was considered extraordinary both by knowledgeable artists and by the general public. Vasari’s legendary account of the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling emphasizes the great difficulties of the project, which included both physical pain and technical disasters. Furthermore, Vasari claimed, surely erroneously, that Michelangelo painted the entire ceiling alone, without even a man to grind the colors. All of these drawbacks set the stage for the artist’s incredible achievement: “His zeal for his art increased daily, while the knowledge and improvement which he constantly perceived himself to make, encouraged him to such a degree that he grudged no labour, and was insensible to all fatigue” (91). Pain and difficulty, overcome by unswerving devotion and an extraordinary effort of will, mark the road to success, at least for the naturally gifted artist. Here is a foundational narrative for the Western artist, and one that is in keeping with still prevalent recipes for success in modern society. Particularly interesting in Vasari’s description of Michelangelo’s artistic process are a number of statements made about the artist’s attitude toward All About Process

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his work that are at variance with the narrative of the great artist overcoming all difficulties that lie in his path. Vasari’s insistence on Michelangelo’s perfectionism often contradicts the main theme of the artist’s stupendous achievements and his ability to overcome the difficulties of all the art forms in which he worked. Vasari portrays Michelangelo as excessively critical of his own work, claiming that the artist said he would show little or nothing of his work publicly if he were able to satisfy his own desire for perfection. Michelangelo’s great knowledge made it impossible for him to overlook the smallest imperfection, and this is why he rarely finished anything. His finished works were done in his youth; they were rare in his maturity (176–77). The artist whose work was, according to Vasari, characterized by supreme success in overcoming every difficulty without leaving a single trace of the great labor involved, is in the next sentence an artist whose sublime imaginative conceptions led him to spoil and abandon many works. Before his death Michelangelo burned his sketches, designs, and cartoons to hide the great labors he endured in his desire for perfection (204–5). Vasari’s complex and contradictory description of Michelangelo set in place an enduring image of the artist’s extreme dedication to the processes of his work. First in importance, particularly from the Romantic period onward, is the artist’s devotion to his art, to the neglect of all other aspects of life (205). The artist is isolated, absorbed, even obsessed with work, a characteristic described as early as Aristotle’s discussion of the intellectual dangers of professional achievement in the arts. The great artist as portrayed by Vasari also has standards that are beyond human realization; thus he is by nature bound to fail in his own estimation. It will always be hard labor without resolution or achievement. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this image will become central to a conception of the modern artist’s self-sufficient devotion to work, unrestrained by externally defined criteria. It may be a perennially dissatisfied self-sufficiency, but like Vasari’s Michelangelo the modern artist will be portrayed as completely dedicated to creative labor; everything else will be considered a distraction from that primary focus. Apart from the psychology of the artist profoundly engaged in his artistic process as outlined in Vasari’s life, Michelangelo’s actual production offers important demonstrations of the artist’s process. Paul Barolsky has claimed that the non finito or unfinished is a significant category of the artist’s work and profoundly connected to the Renaissance concept of poetry: “Michelangelo, by showing the work in different stages of completion, is in effect revealing its making. . . . He is displaying his poetry, in the root sense

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of poiesis, ‘making.’” “The roughly worked surfaces are traces of the artist’s hand at work, not in the sense of mere maneggiare or management of his tools but as the manifestation of the exalted skill of the hand, which . . . ‘follows the intellect.’ As an indication of metamorphosis, the non finito mirror the very rhythms of his activity.”38 The classical writer Pliny described the unfinished drawings of Parrhasios in just this way, thereby establishing an important precedent for valuing the unfinished work as revealing the artist’s thought. For Vasari, however, Michelangelo’s unfinished works were a sign of failure, indicating that whatever value they may have for understanding the artist’s working methods, they did not meet contemporary criteria for artistic success. Barolsky’s understanding of the non finito in Michelangelo’s work seems to have more in common with the admiration of rough unfinished work of certain twentieth-century modern artists than with the values of Renaissance art discourse, which prized the successful material realization of the artist’s conceptions above all. As art academies were established in the seventeenth century, they provided a more balanced understanding of the artist’s labor than was evident in earlier texts intended to promote the intellectual qualities of the fine arts at the expense of material practice. Academic art instruction continued to have an intellectual bias, but practice was not ignored within specified parameters. In his 1607 L’Idea de’ pittori, scultore e architetti Federico Zuccaro, founder of the Accademia de San Luca in Rome, insisted on the necessity of concrete activity and demonstrative practice as an adjunct to theory. He claimed that theory alone is sterile. While activities in early art academies, such as lectures on art theory, perspective, and classical art, were often theoretical in their orientation, they were conceived as supplements to training in the workshop of a practicing artist. Within the academy the practical focus of instruction was disegno, particularly drawing from the model, and as academic instruction became more structured it continued to focus exclusively on drawing as the basis of all the arts. Students learned to draw in stages, first by copying drawings or prints, then by drawing from plaster casts of ancient classical sculpture, and finally by drawing from the figure—an educational process recommended by Leonardo and Vasari. While initially intended to provide intellectual education and training for fine artists, European art academies assumed a wider role by the end of the eighteenth century, when branch schools were established to train craftsmen. This training remained focused on drawing; craft materials and procedures were ignored in the belief that the manual manipulation of tools was a matter of no artistic importance.39 The abolition of guilds and trade comAll About Process

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panies by the nineteenth century had significant effects on the education of artists and craftsmen. Public art schools and academies provided all artistic training. Trade and technical schools educated artisans and workers destined for industrial trades, entrenching the distinction between the fine arts and the so-called mechanical arts in a formal educational system. However, even in technical schools, up to the middle of the nineteenth century drawing remained the primary pedagogical focus.40 While most likely an indication of institutional laziness, this is an intriguing development. Where previously disegno was conceived as the intellectual basis for the fine arts, and thus the means for distinguishing them from arts more explicitly concerned with the manipulation of materials, in the nineteenth century drawing became the foundation for all practical arts. Thus, by implication, all arts, fine and applied, became fundamentally conceptual. The conceptual orientation of all the applied and technical arts occurred at what has long been seen as a key moment in the history of Western art: the widespread recognition of the effects of industrialization on the arts. It is here that the issue of artistic process began to engage less with art making’s relation to conceptualization and more with the relationship of art making and the broad category of work/labor. As we have seen, the ancient Greeks disdained the artist as a laborer; for them it was the man of leisure who was able to cultivate the full potential of humanity. From the Renaissance onward, the artist was able to rise in social status by embracing the conceptual nature of his work and distancing himself from the stigma of physical labor. Such a view was enshrined in art academies, where training developed the most intellectual and least physical aspects of the artist’s work. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, widespread shifts in the nature of labor, primarily the result of industrialization, had far-reaching effects on the understanding of the artist’s work and its significance.

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2 Art, Craft, and Industrialization

In the eighteenth century, European philosophers began a serious examination of the nature and purposes of art as well as the role of the artist and the significance of artistic production. Art became an important site for considering the intersection of human intellectual powers and material form, and the means of its creation began to receive attention as a highly meaningful endeavor. Kant and Hegel gave art a prominent place and purpose in human activity, creating a foundation for thinkers such as Marx and Ruskin who developed more detailed accounts of the nature of the artist’s labor and its role in society. With the growth of industrialization and the accompanying social upheavals the nature of work became a pressing issue, and the artist’s work served as a conceptual model for fulfilling labor that was taken up by the Arts and Crafts movement. The notion of art as fulfilling labor not only affected analyses of work, it also became a central concern for discussions of leisure and therapeutic activities that would ameliorate the deleterious effects of modern life. Art making became a widespread activity in the nineteenth century as more and more people had the leisure time to devote to amateur arts and crafts. This expanding public engagement with the processes of artistic creation set the stage for the increased importance of process in modern art.

Nineteenth-Century Philosophical and Theoretical Views of the Artist’s Process

In his enormously influential Critique of Judgment Immanuel Kant established what distinguished artistic production from other forms of production. Kant relied on earlier notions, but his contention that the experience of beauty was a means to discover the powers of the human mind had the effect of

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providing the fine arts (and, by extension, artists) with a claim to a more exalted role in human knowledge and experience than they had been traditionally granted. Following the Aristotelian tradition Kant addressed the relation of theory to material craft, and he distinguished art from science on the grounds that art requires material skills developed through practice in addition to theoretical knowledge.1 He also distinguished art from craft on the grounds that art is “agreeable on its own account” and thereby a free activity of the spirit, while crafts are “mercenary”—a description reminiscent of the Greek view that craftsmen were not free because their labor was directed to satisfying the requirements of others. Kant described craft as disagreeable labor, made attractive only because it results in payment. Fine art, however, cannot be remunerated according to any determinate standard, a distinction that seems to derive from Renaissance developments when successful artists were paid for their experience rather than the time involved in producing a work. Unlike craft, fine art is mentally stimulating in itself without reference to any other purpose (I:44). Kant was quick to limit any extreme interpretation of art’s freedom, though, and insisted on the necessity of constraints for the successful embodiment of artistic spirit. Because art is the product of thought rather than chance, it requires a mechanical component that can be encompassed by rules. Genius provides material for fine art, but it must be processed and given form by academically trained talent (I:46–47). In keeping with tradition, Kant outlined a balance between the artist’s free activity, which allows for the original creations of genius, and necessary rules and constraints. The mechanical component of art is learned, but art should nevertheless appear natural and give no evidence of painstaking adherence to rules (I:45). The education of the artist requires a complex negotiation that develops the artist’s natural abilities and mechanical skills, and Kant implicitly described the artist’s successful process as achieving a balance between established rules and freedom. This process must be taught by demonstration and example rather than rule:

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So in fine art there is only manner (modus), not method (methodus): the master must show by his example what the student is to produce, and how. He may in the end bring his procedure under universal rules, but these are more likely to be useful to the student as occasional reminders of what the main feature of that procedure are, than as prescriptions. . . . The master must stimulate the student’s imagination until it becomes commensurate with a given concept; he must inform the student if the Art, Craft, and Industrialization

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latter has not adequately expressed the idea, the idea that even the concept cannot reach because the idea is aesthetic; and he must provide the student with sharp criticism. For only in this way can the master keep the student from immediately treating the examples offered him as if they were archetypes, models that he should imitate as if they were not subject to a still higher standard and to his own judgment, [an attitude] which would stifle his genius, and along with it would stifle also the freedom that his imagination has even in its lawfulness, the freedom without which there can be no fine art. (I:60) The dangers of overly explicit teaching must be avoided, but so also must the opposite, a laxity in educational direction. Kant criticized “some of the more recent educators [who] believe that they promote a free art best if they remove all constraint from it and convert it from labor into mere play” (I:43). For Kant such freedom turns art into the production of chance rather than the stimulating exercise of mental powers. Kant’s discussion of the artist’s education and the artistic process remain relevant. As we shall see, many contemporary artists and systems of artist education have developed artistic processes devoted to the exploration of chance as a producer of artworks. While some of these, such as Allan Kaprow’s early Happenings, seem at least on the surface to be “mere play” in Kant’s terms, others are not devoid of rules and constraints. Artists such as Sol LeWitt explore chance processes within carefully defined limits that resemble the parameters of scientific experiments. The works these processes create are not intended to be aesthetically beautiful, which is what Kant considered the most mentally stimulating aspect of fine arts. They do, however, stimulate and exercise the mind by demonstrating the complex tensions between rule and freedom involved in the artist’s process as described by the philosopher. Thus, although beauty is no longer the primary goal and definition of successful art, Kant’s brief description of the artist’s process delineates concerns central to contemporary artists’ self-conscious investigations of their own processes of creative production. Like Kant and most writers on aesthetics, G. W. F. Hegel devotes relatively little attention to the artistic process. His efforts are primarily engaged with the relation of art to the historical development of the human spirit conceived as the embodiment of Absolute Spirit coming to its ultimate selfunderstanding. Nevertheless, because Hegel considers the fine arts to be a significant moment in this teleological process, he does provide some description of the artist’s labor. Following his predecessors, Hegel distinAll About Process

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guishes between art and mechanical production according to rules and specifications.2 Also echoing earlier theorists, he is quick to assert that while art requires freedom from rules in order to allow for the inspirations of genius, it also requires talent and development “by thought, reflection on the mode of its productivity, and practice and skill in producing” (27). What is interesting regarding the artist’s activity as described by Hegel is his notion that the artist’s labor is a means of objectifying thought and feeling, a belief that derives from his overall conception of art as the materialization of spirit. This idea will become fundamental to conceptions of the modern artist’s process as an activity of self-expressive production. In Hegel’s view the need for art is a universal human constant, and it derives from human self-consciousness. Human beings have a basic need to alter the external world by making marks on it; it is “man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self” (31). Hegel’s example of this fundamental human need is a child who throws rocks into a pond to enjoy the resulting circular ripples. In altering material reality, human beings find both self-knowledge and a means of communication with others. Another satisfaction that Hegel attributes to the self-objectifying process of making art is a potential therapeutic effect: “It may often be the case with an artist that, overtaken by grief, he mitigates and weakens for himself the intensity of his own feeling by representing it in art. Tears, even, provide some comfort. . . . But still more of an alleviation is the expression of one’s inner state in words, pictures, sounds, and shapes” (49). In connecting the artist’s creative process to the externalization of personal emotion, Hegel articulated a cornerstone of Romantic art theory and provided a foundation for modern expressionism. Hegel evaluates the artist’s emotional expression and its relation to inspiration with care. First, he notes that inspiration does not arise on demand; it requires specific promptings, which may (or may not) be the artist’s own feelings. According to Hegel, “Inspiration is the state of the artist in his active process of forming both his subjective inner conception and his objective execution of the work of art, because for this double activity inspiration is necessary” (287). Having determined that an inner drive fuels the artist’s inspiration, Hegel then considers it in relation to external motivations. He notes that artists have created great works whose subjects were commissioned and that artists often complain of lacking subjects as the basis on which to create. For Hegel, the artist’s inspiration is not completely self-generated, an act of pure self-expression. Inspiration is “being completely filled with the theme, being entirely present in the theme, and

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not resting until the theme has been stamped and polished into artistic shape.” The artist must “forget his own personality and its accidental particular characteristics and immerse himself . . . entirely in his material . . . [to become] the living activation of the theme” (288). The artist’s activity is thus a combination of self and external reality in which the artist’s subject is first internalized and then expressed (pressed out) in the shaping of artistic form—material marked by the artist’s activity. Whereas Kant conceived the successful artist’s process as achieving a balance between rule and freedom that would allow for the creation of beauty, Hegel provided a broader conception of the artist’s process as manifesting an integral relationship between mind and physical matter. Furthermore, in describing the artist’s need to immerse himself in his subject to the point of self-forgetfulness, as well as the therapeutic aspects of artistic production, Hegel articulated psychological aspects of the artist’s process that would become central themes for modern artists and theorists. The significant role that Hegel (and other Romantic philosophers, theorists, and artists) ascribed to art in the history of human endeavor set the stage for a reconsideration of the artist’s role and its social and intellectual importance. Previously, the fine arts had largely been valued as a social commodity. They conveyed cultural distinction, provided luxury and enjoyment for the educated upper classes, served as a means to display wealth, power, and intellectual refinement, and purveyed knowledge and propaganda. As philosophers and theorists began to situate art as a central achievement of humankind, something that approached the importance of religion and philosophy, art and the processes of its making became a matter of widespread interest and importance. Hegel describes the artist as one who “acquires his subject matter in himself and is the human spirit actually selfdetermining and considering, meditating, and expressing the infinity of its feelings and situations: nothing that can be living in the human breast is alien to that spirit” (607). The artist has moved from being a provider of beauties and luxuries to being the representative of humanity, and the artist’s process has become the means for human (and thereby, according to Hegel, the Absolute’s) self-knowledge. The philosophical elevation of the fine arts, and by extension the artist, that began in the eighteenth century was accompanied by a reconsideration of the artisan and his labors. An early indication of a new tendency to exalt the manual labor of the artisan appears in Rousseau’s Emile, where he declares the craftsman to have the best of all possible ways of life. It allows for the expression of what Rousseau saw as a natural human need for creative All About Process

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work, and it also answers fundamental requirements in producing necessary objects for practical use. Furthermore, Rousseau emphasized the independence of the craftsman and saw his labor as like the independent labor of nature. Rousseau promoted forms of labor in which physical work is balanced with mental/creative work, and opposed the free labor of the craftsman to the monotony of certain trades, which foster stupidity through their repetitious drudgery.3 Rousseau’s ideal of a balance between mental and physical work is an instance of what will become an enduring theme in discussions of industrial labor and the problems that arise with the increasingly narrow specialization of work. Concern for the mechanical fragmentation of modern society and individuals is a central issue in the late eighteenth-century writings of Friedrich Schiller. He described modern society, as it had developed after losing the wholeness and equilibrium characteristic of ancient Greece, as “an ingenious piece of machinery, in which out of the botching together of a vast number of lifeless parts a collective mechanical life results. . . . Enjoyment was separated from labor, means from ends, effort from rewards. Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise of the wheel he drives everlastingly in his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science.”4 Schiller proposed aesthetic education as the means to restore harmony and wholeness to modern society and its individual members.5 His discussion was primarily abstract and philosophical rather than practical, but Schiller’s vision of a fragmented and mechanized modern society became commonplace, and throughout the nineteenth century social theorists (and later psychologists) attempted to diagnose and find cures for its ills. These cures often included not only passive experience of the arts and artist-designed environments, but also direct engagement with artistic processes as a means to restore wholeness to individuals. In his early writings Karl Marx, the most influential of the nineteenthcentury social theorists, saw the artist’s work as exemplary of free labor in contrast to the labor of the factory worker under industrial capitalism. In his 1844 text Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx described the condition of the modern wage earner as alienated from both his labor and the products of his labor: “He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labor as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life.”6 The products of the worker’s labor do not belong to him but to the owner of the factory in which he works, thus: “Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his

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essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . does not develop freely his physical and mental energy. . . . His labor is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. . . . The worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.”7 In contrast to the alienated worker, Marx conceived a non-alienated form of work comparable to traditional artisanal production in which the worker is in control of the means and products of his labor. He claimed that in a society that had abolished private property and established correct relations between work and product, “our productions would be so many mirrors reflecting our nature . . . a free manifestation of life and enjoyment of life.”8 Such an integral and personal relation between producer and product is the hallmark of much modern artistic production, and Marx compared the post-revolution worker to a composer whose activity is truly free. Once material needs are satisfied work becomes life’s primary desire; it is the action that develops human potential.9 Marx’s early notion of ideal work suggests that the modern selfexpressive artist would be a strong example of unalienated labor, however. Margaret Rose has shown that Marx decried individualistic notions of artistic talent and genius as limiting. He also critiqued the narrow specialization of artists by medium, which he linked to the pernicious division of labor within society as a whole. In the future communist society, Marx believed, individuals would not be limited to narrow areas of specialization or excluded from the possibility of realizing the full range of their particular artistic talents.10 Marx was interested in successful contemporary artists like Horace Vernet who had large workshops with assistants, which demonstrated the virtues of cooperative labor. In rejecting the notion of “priestlike artists,” Rose claims, Marx “above all brought attention back from the art object to the process of its production and opened the way for the elimination of the theoretical division between art and technological labor,” which was enshrined in the tradition of German aesthetic theory dominated by Kant, Hegel, and Schiller.11 Marx’s views provide useful terms with which to evaluate modern and contemporary artists’ processes. The modern artist is commonly considered a self-motivated worker whose labor is self-affirming and spontaneous; the artist thus represents a successful alternative to the alienated workers employed under industrial capitalism described by Marx. This has been, and remains, a widely held view of the exceptional freedom and integration of the modern artist’s life and labor. Marx, however, recognized difficulties All About Process

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associated with this view that have become increasingly central to artists and theorists engaged in the critical examination of the artist’s labor. Most modern artists are associated with the production of a particular type of commodity in an individual style that is presumed to be the artist’s natural expression. Market forces as embodied by art dealers and galleries often pressure successful artists to continue to work in their established style in order to remain commercially viable. This, as Marx recognized, can be extremely limiting for the artist and results in an artistic labor process little different from that of the alienated factory worker. In recent decades many artists have successfully rejected the limiting notions of individual style to work in a broad spectrum of styles and media. Moreover, artists like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons developed large workshops with many assistants to work under their direction in a manner comparable to the production processes of Horace Vernet. This raises even more complex issues regarding the nature of the artist’s work process, which will be discussed in chapter 9. One aspect of Marx’s thinking has particular relevance for the traditional division and hierarchy of the arts based on the degree of conceptualization presumed appropriate to them: “Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. . . . From now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the work and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.”12 An elimination of the division between mental and material labor in the arts would implicitly eliminate hierarchical distinctions between the arts and between different practitioners within the arts. Thought and action would be inextricably bound up with one another, creating a holistic form of productive/creative activity. Marx’s thinking indicates what becomes a central theme of modern artistic thought, the artificiality of separating the artist’s work into conceptual and practical arenas. This theme is by no means clearly dominant in discussions about the nature of the visual arts, but it is a major trend from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Indeed, it is intriguing to consider that many artists use conceptual strategies to engage in Marxist social/cultural critiques (e.g., Victor Burgin), thereby implicitly maintaining a sharp distinction between theory and practice in their actual work, although not in their conception of the work’s engaged social positioning (as praxis). In contrast, artists who are not explicitly politically engaged in their work and who reject attempts to theorize their activity from outside the actual creative process— that is, artists who are often criticized for their narrowly aesthetic concerns by their more politically engaged peers—are more closely engaged in fulfilling

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the holistic requirements Marx saw as the necessary condition for free productive labor.

The Arts and Crafts Movement and Artistic Process

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Work was often described as a blessing in the nineteenth century, a trope that Alasdair Clayre has suggested may reflect the extent to which mechanization created a formless existence for the new wealthy upper classes. Work offered social acceptance, identity, and routine, all of which served as a replacement for the rituals and ceremonies that once structured time for the ruling classes.13 Marx believed the centrality of work in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was its greatest insight: “Hegel grasps the self-production of man as a process, as objectification and supersession of this alienation; . . . he thus grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man.”14 Identity is created through human labor, the interaction of self with the material and social world; thus, the form of labor becomes a matter of extreme importance. It is this concern with the situation of labor and its practical and philosophical implications that lies at the root of what is arguably the most influential discourse addressing the importance of process in the creation of art, that formulated in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. John Ruskin, the primary influence on the Arts and Crafts ideology, believed that labor was noble and the source of the greatest human happiness. Art and craftsmanship were in turn the most valuable forms of work because of their beneficial effects on the worker. Like Marx, Ruskin believed that the most beneficial labor must unite the mental and the physical, the manual and the intellectual. He denounced the fatal error of despising manual labor when governed by intellect; for it is no less fatal an error to despise it when thus regulated by intellect, than to value it for its own sake. We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working. . . . It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy. . . . It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind, and the dishonor of manual labor done away with altogether. . . . In each several profession, no master should be too proud to do its hardest work. All About Process

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The painter should grind his own colors; the architect work in the mason’s yard with his men.15 In The Stones of Venice Ruskin deplored the exaltation of mindless perfection in modern architectural ornament and compared modern tastes to those of the Renaissance and classical Greece, when artists and artisans were slaves and held to inhuman standards of perfection: “Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions” (161). In those cultures, according to Ruskin, artisans were mere hands, physical laborers who made no thoughtful contributions to the building as a whole. Ruskin believed every manual laborer has intellectual and emotional potential that must be developed, even at the expense of perfection. Any workman can be trained to manual precision, “but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops, his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool” (161). Ruskin advocated the embrace of the human imperfections he saw in Gothic craftsmanship, which for all its “fantastic ignorance” gave “signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in the scale of being” (163). Furthermore, he believed that the social upheavals of his day happened not because of material deprivation, but rather because workers took no pleasure in their labor and hoped greater wealth would make them happy.16 Ruskin saw the division of labor in modern industrial manufacturing as a primary contributor to the debasement of contemporary workers, who are “divided into mere segments of men . . . so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail” (165). His solution was to demand only products that were the result of “healthy and ennobling labor,” and he formulated three rules to that end: abolish the manufacture of unnecessary objects that do not require invention; abolish unnecessary finish; and allow no imitation except as a record of noble work. As examples of these ideas he proposed the elimination of mindless glass bead making, which gives workers palsy, and the promotion of glass vessel making, which offers liberal opportunity for invention. Similarly, he advocated the mentally stimulating crafts of the goldsmith and enamel worker and condemned the unimaginative cutting of gemstones.

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Ruskin insisted on the need for the artist’s intellectual engagement (invention) in order to rise above the mere employment of mechanical craft skills; this position is one of the pillars of the Western aesthetic tradition. What is remarkable about his ideas is the degree to which he extended this position to all crafts. Aesthetic notions are not in his view merely applicable to the evaluation of the work of fine artists but should be applied to all human-made products. Thus the viewer is adjured to become aware of the craft object as created not by human hands, but rather by a human mind: “Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves’ work, unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so only the practical purpose be answered, and never imagine that there is reason to be proud of something that may be accomplished by patience and sandpaper” (167). Ruskin’s values are imbued with morality. Not only must intellectual and manual labor contribute in equal balance to the well-made product as indicated by the object’s final form, but the product must also demonstrate that no unnecessary labor has been added. Excessive finish is a meaningless superficiality, one that appeals to trivial desires for decorative appeal. His condemnation of glass bead making and gem cutting as mindless labor also indicates a condemnation of mere showy adornment. The beautiful object presented for the display of its fine color and texture is a material embodiment of vanity, where surface beauty is taken to be more satisfying than beauty created by intelligent craft. Human labor guided by intelligence is the true value, and it is Ruskin’s intention to define the terms by which it may be determined. In this he makes the unlikely assertion that finely finished work is always achieved at the expense of properly intellectual craft: “You cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking about his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone” (168). The extremity of Ruskin’s contention that form and finish are at odds in craft production indicates the limits of his understanding of craftsmanship. In his eagerness to exalt the intellect’s role in handcraft production he failed to account for the extent of the worker’s physical engagement with his materials. Instead, he looked for physical signs of intellectual engagement. What precisely in a finished work shows that the work is the product of a All About Process

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human mind and not mechanical labor? For Ruskin the primary signs of mental involvement in production were imperfections in the final product. Lack of finish indicated to him a mind absorbed by the most elevated aspect of making, which is invention, and impatient of the mindless tedium of perfect finish. The craft product has indeed taken a step up in the hierarchy of the arts to become an intellectual product. (This is in keeping with a seemingly opposed trend, the widespread institutionalization of technical training, in which drawing, the intellectual basis of the fine arts, became the basis of craft instruction.) For a thinker who exalted manual labor and believed that even hard labor should be shared by all, Ruskin was extremely quick to condemn unintellectual labor, even when it might contribute to the beauty of an object. The result is to see in surface beauty a tangible sign of social inequity and a brutalization of human labor. Ruskin’s views on the relation between a craft product and the process of its production are often somewhat obscure. He insisted that the designer and fabricator of a craft object should be the same person because “one man’s thoughts can never be expressed by another, and the difference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of art” (168–69). What specifically indicates this inventive “spirit of touch” is left undetermined, though it appears the answer may be signs of ineptitude. Ruskin stressed that no good work of art can be perfect and that to expect perfection is to misunderstand the ends of art: “No great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution . . . and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do” (170–71). Only Leonardo strove for perfection, and Ruskin claimed that the vanity of this effort can be seen in his inability to finish anything. The second reason for valuing artistic imperfection Ruskin enumerates is that it is “the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change” (171). It appears that Ruskin’s admiration for anonymous Gothic craftspeople was largely the result of what he perceived as the ineptitudes and inconsistencies of their products. These were for him signs of their free and intellectually creative labor, and he conceived the gifted creative artist, whether craftsman or fine artist, as often having a personality lacking “accurate and methodical habits” (173). For Ruskin, what is most significant is to delineate how the artist is distinct from the mindless manual worker; thus he stresses the organic qualities of the artist and the degree to which artistic labor and

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products are not rigidly mechanical, predictable, or governed by rules. In Ruskin’s view, the Gothic spirit was fundamentally creative, and Gothic artisans were “capable of perpetual novelty” rather than being bound by established principles and forms. Unrestricted capacity for invention, dedication to the realization of an idea in material form—even when the material or techniques are inadequate to its expression—freedom from rules and restrictions, these are all qualities attributed to the greatest fine artists during the Renaissance and after, particularly during the Romantic period. Thus, despite his stated disdain for the Renaissance, Ruskin’s views as expressed in his widely influential Stones of Venice are less a critique of Renaissance notions of the artist than an expansion of them to a broader spectrum of art makers accompanied by an amplification of the traits associated with inspiration. William Morris adopted many of Ruskin’s ideas as articulated in Stones of Venice, which he declared “the truest and most eloquent” statement on the pleasure in work,17 and he dedicated himself to reinstating them in the modern world. His primary efforts were directed toward the revival of handcrafts, which he saw as the solution to the debasement of modern mechanized labor. The craftsman who takes joy in his labor forms the foundation of Morris’s vision of a society most suited to fulfilling the fundamental needs of humanity. He promoted a society of artists and those sensitive to the arts, and he believed that such a society had existed before the conception of the artist had come to be separated from that of the craftsman: “Time was when the mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well acknowledged by the world, when imagination and fancy mingled with all things made by man, and in those days all handicraftsmen were artists, as we should now call them. . . . The artist came out from the handicraftsmen and left them without hope of elevation, while he himself was left without the help of intelligent, industrious sympathy. Both have suffered; the artist no less than the workman.”18 In Morris’s view the intellectualization of the artist divorced him from the craftsman and left the craftsman to become a mere manual laborer. Furthermore, the modern artist has become alienated from all but the most educated level of society, and the aesthetic needs of the populace remain unfulfilled. The reunification of mind and physical labor in a revived craft industry, which created beautiful items for practical use, would be the means to heal modern society of its many ills. Given his direct personal engagement with craftwork, it is not unreasonable to expect that Morris’s notions of the craftsperson’s working process would be more concrete than Ruskin’s vague and often impractical pronouncements, and to a degree this is the case. Morris, for example, does not All About Process

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equate the craftsperson’s artistry with the inconsistencies and roughness that Ruskin saw as indications of the artisan’s intellectual engagement with his material. Morris offered explicit advice to aspiring craftspeople: Be careful to eschew all vagueness. It is better to be caught out going wrong when you have had a definite purpose, than to shuffle and slur so that people can’t blame you because they don’t know what you’re at. Hold fast to distinct form in art. . . . Always think your design out in your head before you begin to get it on paper. . . . You must see it before you can draw it, whether the design be of your own invention or Nature’s. Remember always, form before color, and outline, silhouette, before modeling. . . . Furthermore, those of you especially who are designing for goods, try to get the most out of your material, but always in such a way as honors it most.19

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This advice is traditional in its stress on beauty, art’s origin in the mind, and form and drawing as the foundation of art. Less traditional is the adjuration to honor the material, which was the result of Morris’s deep concern to counteract the indifference to materials that was a widespread phenomenon in nineteenth-century machine-made decorative arts. It is customary to contrast Arts and Crafts’ ideals with the practices and processes of industrial production—most notably the lack of proper attention to style and medium in machine-made furnishings and the separation of the designer from the practical labor of the factory worker—but it is also interesting to consider them in relation to the traditional practices of artists’ studios. Ruskin’s rejection of fine finish as an index of mindless labor stands in marked contrast to well-established studio practices. Studio assistants often performed many of the earlier stages in the creation of an artwork (the underpainting or initial carving of the block) according to the master artist’s designs and instructions. It was the later stages that showed the master’s hand, and even the final stage, that of polishing a marble sculpture, for example, was often accomplished under the master’s close direction at least, given the need to determine degrees of finish for different areas of the work. In elevating what he considered the lack of overrefinement of Gothic sculpture to the status of an index of the artist’s uncorrupted idea, Ruskin romanticized the medieval sculptor and ignored the reality of medieval (and later) studio production, in which divided labor played a significant role. The relation of Morris’s views to traditional notions and practices is also interesting. Given that Morris’s primary intention was to establish (in his Art, Craft, and Industrialization

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view, reestablish) a world in which labor was a joy to the laborer by placing artistry at the heart of the production process, it is not surprising that he emphasized the artistic nature of the laborer. In his celebrated biography E. P. Thompson claims that Morris sought out apprentices without special gifts and took it for granted that any intelligent boy had the makings of an artist and craftsman,20 but Morris’s writings indicate a different, more traditional attitude: “Inborn knowledge has shown [the path] to you; if it is otherwise with you than this, no system and no teachers will help you produce art of any kind, be it never so humble. Those of you who are real artists know well enough all the special advice I can give you, and in how few words it may be said—follow nature, study antiquity, make your own art and do not steal it, grudge no expense of trouble, patience or courage, in the striving to accomplish the hard thing you have set yourselves to do.”21 Inborn talent, the study of nature and antiquity, hard work, integrity—these are all definitions of the artist and his training derived from Renaissance texts. Thus Morris’s ideas are important not for their originality regarding the artist’s identity or labor, but for extending the notion of the artist into areas that had been largely ignored by art academies. In his efforts to elevate the craftsman’s status to that of the fine artist Morris’s ideas are perhaps somewhat more traditional than their widespread effects. By advocating the renewal of joy in the labor of craft production through the institution of greater creative freedom for the worker, which in turn would create more beautiful objects for daily use that would elevate the quality of life for society as a whole, Morris set the stage for a far more democratic understanding of creative production. If the laborer or craftsman could exercise his native creative talents through labor and thus achieve joy, why should this option not be available to all? Alasdair Clayre has pointed out many fallacious presumptions in the theories and attitudes toward work espoused in the writings of Marx, Ruskin, and Morris. Most significantly, there is no indication of the supposed joy in labor of the craftsman that plays such a key role in Morris’s ideas. There are no records of the medieval craftsman’s feelings about his work,22 and it is not until the development of the special concept of the artist in the Renaissance that concern about mental attitudes toward artistic labor becomes apparent in surviving texts. Clayre posits that nineteenth-century theorists, middle-class writers, and intellectuals who derived pleasure from their own work projected similar expectations of pleasure on an industrial working class that had none. In 1898 Vida Scudder noted that “it was the middle-class intellectual—not the wage worker—who demanded ‘joy in labor.’”23 As intelAll About Process

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lectuals found pleasure and relaxation in certain forms of manual labor, notably occasional agricultural or craft work, they may have assumed that the manual laborer desired a corresponding mitigation of physical work by intellectual occupation. This notion has an interesting parallel in the (somewhat incongruous) stress on the intellectual labor of the craftsman by Ruskin and Morris. Morris’s emphasis on drawing and the preexistence of a mental concept for a work’s final form, for example, is clearly derived from academic instruction and theory. Thus, while Morris’s craft revival and its attendant insistence on truth to materials had an incalculable influence on the development of critical and theoretical attention to medium and technique as central concerns in modern art, his own basic aesthetic concepts were far from revolutionary. Despite Morris’s essentially conservative conception of the fundamental components of artistic production and the nature of the artist, the Arts and Crafts movement had a profound effect on the concept of the artist’s process and its significance. This effect worked in two important ways. The first is the emphasis on the process of artistic production, developed by Ruskin and Morris in response to what they perceived as the evils of industrial processes and their unsatisfactory products. What had once been considered a matter of little consequence beyond the artist’s or craftsman’s studio was elevated to a level of great importance. The value of an aesthetic object depended on the means of its production, and not merely on its final form. In the context of the Arts and Crafts movement this belief was more often a rhetorical posture than a means to develop a notably new understanding of art, as this comment by Lewis Day makes evident: “There is infinitely more to be learned from the study of ancient processes than from the worship of antique forms. . . . Our respect for the consummate art, the admirable tact, the masterly treatment of material, that we find in the best old work, can but increase with closer familiarity. . . . [It] is not only worthy of study, but capable of impregnating our work with no little of its own reality and manliness.”24 Given that artists since the Renaissance had made it a primary goal to rediscover and master the processes of ancient art, there is no real weight to Day’s implication that earlier artists had merely indulged in superficial “worship” of antique forms.25 Nevertheless, ameliorating the public’s ignorant evaluation of art was a major concern for those involved with the Arts and Crafts movement. Industrial production might fool the uninstructed public into admiration of its mindless products by superficial qualities such as elaborate forms or highly finished surfaces, but the knowledgeable viewer could evaluate a product more correctly and read the signs

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that indicated an artist’s engagement in a truly creative process. Increasingly, such signs became the hallmarks of meaningful art making. The second effect of the Arts and Crafts movement was the expansion of art making to society at large as the means to full self-development and, as a corollary, a cure for anxieties and ill health.26 The process of making art thus became a general concern rather than one limited to a group of professionals. The audience for art was increasingly engaged with the production of art, not merely as an idea, but in terms of individual practice. This in turn might be said to increase the number of artistically knowledgeable viewers able to discern and appreciate the signs of a developed creative process evident in an artwork. Whether this was in fact the case is unclear; it is more certain that it helped to create a large number of amateur artists, craftspeople, and hobbyists who formed a sort of shadow art world that persists to this day.27 In addition to promoting artistic production throughout society as a means to achieve well-being, health, and happiness, the Arts and Crafts movement may be credited with promoting an expanded understanding of the meaning of art. Thus those who felt themselves unable to make art are still able to engage in meaningful artistic activity. In an 1897 essay titled “Of Art and Life” T. J. Cobden-Sanderson wrote, “It is as far as may be, to do each thing, however small, however great, it is to do each right thing well, in the spirit of an artist, in the spirit of the whole. Art . . . is primarily . . . doing a right thing well . . . and its immediate future is to apply this idea of itself to the whole of life.”28 Eight years later Cobden-Sanderson reiterated this position in an essay on the Arts and Crafts movement, in which he described art “as the supreme mode in which human activity of all kinds expresses itself at its highest and best.” He outlined several alternative ways to define the Arts and Crafts movement, including “insistence on the worth of man’s hand, a unique tool in danger of being lost . . . , or of emotional as distinguished from merely skilled or technical labor . . . [or as] a movement to bring all the activities of the human spirit under the influence of one idea . . . that life is creation, and should be creative in modes of art.”29 As these quotations indicate, art is no longer limited to specific objects but has become a term indicating a quality of activity that need not even be directed toward making a specific thing. In expanding art to encompass a specifically moral activity—the highest, the best, the right thing done well— Cobden-Sanderson defines making art as an attitude rather than a set of specialized physical actions directed toward the creation of an object. Furthermore, the hand may be the means for art making, but this is not because All About Process

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of its physical aptitude as a tool but because of its unique capacity to work with feeling. What matters is not so much what is produced but how it is produced. Here we might consider a new variation on the definition of art, distinct from its limitation to a specialized meaning in the early nineteenth century as discussed by Raymond Williams: “An art had formerly been any skill; but Art, now signified a particular group of skills, the ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ arts. Artist had meant a skilled person, as had artisan; but artist now referred to these selected skills alone. . . . Art came to stand for a special kind of truth, ‘imaginative truth,’ and artist for a special kind of person.”30 The conceptions of art and artist in Arts and Crafts discourse are clearly more universal. They revive the broader senses of earlier usage, encompassing arts (i.e., the crafts) not traditionally associated with imagination, but do so by elevating them to the level of the imaginative arts and stressing their intellectual and creative foundations. In addition, an expanded meaning of art could include any and all types of activity, provided they were undertaken in a properly moral and emotional spirit. Writing in an exhibition catalogue in 1935, C. R. Ashbee, one of the major figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, declared the wide-ranging significance of the crafts: “They are an educational necessity; they are part of the community’s leisure, and do themselves grow out of leisure; they are, in short, a great human need, and in a mechanistic age they take their place among the humanities.”31 The crafts have now assumed a place within modern society and no longer serve as a means to its reinvention. They have become a form of amelioration, a necessary antidote to a mechanistic age, one that will help people to develop and maintain their humanity. Like the study of ancient Greece and Rome, Shakespeare, and Italian Renaissance art, the crafts are part of the humanities, the intellectual means to keep modern people in touch with the achievements of past cultures and individuals. These achievements, unlike those of the sciences, have no immediate practical use; their value is primarily moral. Ashbee’s emphasis on education and leisure reflects the terms of the widespread success of the Arts and Crafts movement in middle-class culture. As Elaine Boris has discussed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the constituency for artistic crafts grew enormously in the United States. The movement “offered handicraft as a means to train all the faculties, to develop mental, ethical, and physical virtues and bring wholesome, real pleasure to its practitioners. In this way, all work could become artistic.”32 It is evident that what concerned those involved with the movement

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was less the production of art objects than it was the engagement in their making and the formation of identity: “Crafts promoters emphasized craftsmanship as process: the worker, as much as the work, was the product. Arts and crafts would check the ugliness of daily life by turning artists into craftsmen and workers into artists.”33 The concern with forming attitudes and identity through training in craft production dovetailed with the growth of universal public education and the development of educational strategies and goals for society at large. While much art training in public education was directed toward developing skills necessary for work in industrial and mechanical trades, this practical goal was supplemented by educators who saw training in basic art practices as a means to develop more exalted aspects of human potential. One consequence of the influence of Arts and Crafts ideas on general art education in the United States was the combination of drawing and manual training in an effort to develop the “complete child” who would become both a competent worker and a knowledgeable consumer of decorative products. Art’s mission was “to give increased joy to living; by teaching men both how to take pleasure in producing, and how to find happiness in possessing artistic surroundings.”34 These are relatively modest goals in comparison to the exalted aspirations that were often associated with art education. As Boris notes, “Most educators looked to the ‘art spirit’ for its potential to liberate the individual, its ability to unlock creativity and encourage freedom.”35 The liberating capacities of artistic creativity were most often promoted in relation to women, particularly middle- and upper-class women with an excess of leisure time. One textile artist encouraged affluent women seeking an outlet for creative expression to learn to make decorative artworks because they “comfort souls . . . who pined for independence” and ease “the dulling effects of wasted leisure.”36 For women needing to earn a living, craft production was considered a more independent alternative to working in a factory; it was a means of earning income at home. Art schools for women promised to fill both the practical and emotional needs of these two groups. For those who became dedicated to craft production the rewards were not merely the products of their self-directed labor but the pleasures associated with work. According to Boris, “The craftsman was a person who controlled his or her own labor; work was the standard of value, the highest social activity; and the worker deserved the fruits of labor, including pleasure from the actual process of making.”37 April Masten has shown that artistic labor played a significant social role beyond the improvement of individual women’s lives and experiences in the mid-nineteenth century, when a “Unity All About Process

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of Art” ideology based on Ruskin’s ideas dominated the New York art world. In the years following the Civil War many women had successful careers as professional illustrators and designers, and they were seen as workers combating the degrading effects of industrialization and the attendant disruptions of society and traditional artisanal labor.38 Despite the great interest of Arts and Crafts promoters in the creative process and the enormous influence the movement had in developing, revitalizing, and elevating traditional women’s crafts, Arts and Crafts theorists made no notable discursive distinction between the processes of traditionally male and female crafts. This is surprising given that they largely maintained conventional gender divisions in terms of craft practices, with women typically employed in needlework and china painting, while men dominated woodworking and ceramics. Women were considered best suited for decorative work, which required fine detail and small hands and could be done in the home. This definition of the types of artistic production considered suitable for women had been in place since at least the eighteenth century. In fact, Arts and Crafts leaders subscribed explicitly, and more often implicitly, to the widespread nineteenth-century belief that women were intellectually inferior to men, and thus more suited to imitative labor than to design. William Morris, to cite the most prominent example, designed carpets, tapestries, and embroidery patterns for female weavers and needleworkers to fabricate. Of course, such practices contravened Arts and Crafts ideals regarding artistic process and maintained what Ruskin had condemned as a corrupt industrial practice.39 Nevertheless, the Arts and Crafts movement unquestionably raised the artistic status of women’s traditional handcrafts, including needlework. The artistic aspects of this traditional and pervasive form of creative and practical occupation for women of all social ranks was often overlooked in the nineteenth century, in large part because of its historical association with women’s domestic and professional labor.40 The primary purveyor of art supplies in nineteenth-century London contrasted the laborious drudgery of needlework with the creative pleasures of the new crafts, such as decoupage and lacquer, whose supplies he was marketing.41 These new “artistic” crafts, barely distinguishable from consumerism and requiring little more effort than making tasteful choices of preprinted materials, were promoted as replacing traditional crafts that required excessive amounts of tedious labor. The Arts and Crafts movement’s stress on the pleasures and benefits of traditional craftwork stood in direct contrast to these easy and modern forms of women’s amateur art making intended to demonstrate the artist’s

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decorative skill and taste without undue effort. Thus, while full participation of women in all aspects of designing and making within the context of Arts and Crafts was often limited, the movement established an enormously influential discourse that elevated the value of women’s traditional domestic arts as well as full engagement in the creative process. In this it promoted the significant participation of women in both the traditional crafts and the fine arts in the twentieth century. The belief that work itself is a positive good underlies Arts and Crafts ideology. Work offers pleasures and rewards that are both social and personal, but the type of work that is valued is not mere labor, but labor that is fully cognizant of and participating in a complete process. Modern industrial labor was castigated throughout the nineteenth century for its division into separate, endlessly repeated tasks for each worker, who was thus disengaged from the entire process of production. What Arts and Crafts ideologues enshrined was the embrace of the entire work process as a means to individual wholeness and full social participation, as well as a personal relation to the products of their labor. Knowing how something was made, in fact being able to make it, was intended to combat the alienation of modern individuals from the objects they used every day. This goal can be seen in a 1904 model mural for schools proposed in The Craftsman magazine that depicted the processes of furniture making, baking, and pottery production.42 The elevation of such subjects to the level of education and art indicates an attitude toward traditional labor that can be accounted for by its rarity in everyday experience. When the baking of a daily loaf is no longer a regular and necessary activity, it becomes possible to realize that the texture of dough being kneaded and the smell of yeast in rising bread are aesthetic experiences and that the making of bread may be a pleasure in itself. T. J. Jackson Lears has discussed the enshrinement of process in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture as an attempt to compensate for the loss of ethical and religious frameworks for determining ultimate values. Self-expression and experience became ends in themselves, creating a culture primarily devoted to self-fulfillment and consumption. The craft revival was one aspect of a broad cultural attempt to rediscover authentic experience, an antimodern reaction against the lack of individual autonomy in modern capitalist society.43 Craft activities became part of a therapeutic effort to ameliorate the exhausting effects of modern life, which created intellectual and nervous complaints. Manual labor, particularly that involved in craft production, was idealized and believed to hold the solution for the ills of both factory workers and businessmen.44 As Lears points out, All About Process

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Gustav Stickley, the most well-known proponent of Arts and Crafts in the United States, promoted crafts as a means to rebalance abnormal lives.45 That rebalancing consisted broadly of a reengagement with physical acts, with basic, even primal or instinctual, feelings, all of which were held to be authentic experiences in contrast to the experiences of modern life. 55

Photography and Artistic Process

While the Arts and Crafts movement had enormous influence on the rise in importance and general understanding of the artist’s process and its effects on both artists and artworks, somewhat ironically the new “mechanical” art of photography also made important contributions to general perceptions of the artistic process. Beginning in the Renaissance fine artists had claimed high status for their work based on its intellectual requirements. This was particularly true of drawing, which was considered to require significant conceptual understanding for the creation of accurate naturalistic representations. The invention of photography provided a mechanical means to make accurate images requiring no artistic training or ability and no conceptual effort. Not only did photography fail to fulfill the requirements of a fine art, it was even difficult to classify as a craft given that its basic forms of production could be learned and adequately mastered in a few lessons. Its processes were mechanical and chemical; they required knowledge and precision but not long-term practice and highly developed skills for professional mastery, as evidenced by the rapid training of professional photographers in the nineteenth century. Early debates on the potential artistic status of photography are highly instructive regarding the conception of the artistic process in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is primarily because the arguments explicitly engaged distinctions between mechanical/technical and artistic processes. The latter were repeatedly defined in the context of photography as reflecting the artist’s thought and controlled by conscious choices, in comparison to the mindless visual records of the former. Lady Eastlake’s 1857 review serves as an early representative of this enduring conviction: Correctness of drawing, truth of detail, and absence of convention, the best artistic characteristics of photography, are qualities of no uncommon kind, but the student who issues from the academy with these in his grasp stands, nevertheless, but on the threshold of art. The power of selection and rejection, the living application of that language which lies Art, Craft, and Industrialization

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dead in his paint-box, the marriage of his own mind with the object before him, and the offspring, half stamped with his own features, half with those of Nature, which is born of the union—whatever appertains to the free-will of the intelligent being, as opposed to the obedience of the machine—this, and much more than this, constitutes the mystery called Art, in the elucidation of which photography can give valuable help, simply by showing what it is not.46 Later arguments for recognizing photography as an art form generally maintained Eastlake’s position regarding the nature of art as a product of the artist’s mind. Unlike Eastlake, however, they successfully contended that photography was an adequate artistic medium able to reflect the artist’s thought and not merely a mechanical device for making visual records.47 Photography’s challenge to the fine arts contributed to a narrowing and refinement of the definition of artistic and creative activity. The art of making representational images ultimately lost prestige as an elite art form requiring a high level of intellectual and scientific training. In fact, photography contributed to a greater awareness that the precise representational techniques associated with academic art were more mechanical than artistic; they were the result of precision craftsmanship rather than an intellectually engaged artistic process. Romantic attitudes also greatly contributed to changes in the fine arts and evaluations of artistic processes associated with mental engagement. Intellectual and emotional values that previously had been of lesser significance, such as inspiration, imagination, originality, and self-expression, became increasingly important and gradually achieved ascendancy over traditional forms of intellect associated with the fine arts, such as scientific knowledge and classical erudition. Romantic values were clearly distant from the mechanical images typical of early photography, but photographers were soon eager to prove that their medium was capable of producing art in accord with prevailing requirements for originality and imagination. More important in terms of artistic process than the details of the struggle to have photography recognized as an art form, however, is the extent to which discussions of photography, both its techniques and the theoretical debates regarding its artistic nature, rendered discussions of artistic process common. As photography became a popular hobby, technical discussions of photographic methods and materials frequently appeared in the popular press. Debates on the artistic potential of photography were widely published in general interest magazines with a broad readership. This occurred most All About Process

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prominently in relation to world’s fairs and other international expositions where the location of photography in the industrial arts or fine arts sections was fodder for public debate. Such public discussions revitalized general understanding of art and fostered interest in its definition. Amateur practitioners of photography may also have felt personally engaged and knowledgeable given their own experiences with creative working processes. Among photographers there was a full spectrum of positions ranging from those whose interests were primarily technical and scientific, to those whose methods were more in keeping with traditional craft mastery, and those who embraced an intuitive and personal approach. Often compared with writing, photography is remarkable among image-making media for its flexibility. Because its basic employment can be extremely simple and available to anyone, photography demonstrates far more obviously than drawing, painting, or printmaking that image making has no natural or necessary connection to art. Photography’s artistic qualities must be sought elsewhere, and among the sites considered to potentially reveal artistry was the artist’s process. Those who wished to promote the artistic potential of photography often attempted to show in detailed terms how the medium was not obdurately mechanical; it could be made to reflect the desires and intentions of the photographer, who controls the final product. As simple as such a concept is, the notion that the photographer has creative control over the process was an effective way to convince people that artistic production was within their reach. Unlike drawing, which required manual facility and significant training to master, by the end of the nineteenth century photography had made image making a relatively simple affair, and anyone who wished could devote themselves to it as a form of art making. This complemented the general increase of amateur art-making activities and expanded the numbers of those personally involved in the processes of artistic creation. Thus, from the anti-industrial efforts of the Arts and Crafts movement to the popular embrace of photography as an artistic medium, by the late nineteenth century the general public had become increasingly aware of, and often directly engaged with, artistic processes. Art was no longer just synonymous with beautiful objects made for passive contemplation; it was also the result of a complex and labor-intensive activity, and consciousness of that activity became ever more important for understanding modern art.

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3 The Artist’s Process from the Academic to the Modern

Modern art reflects a destabilization of the traditional understanding and significance of the artist’s work process. A new consciousness of labor and its capacity for meaning evolved as artists developed a consciously modern form of art. One dominant trend—typified in its early stages by the Impressionists, followed by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Matisse—is directly comparable to the values traced in the previous chapter with regard to the Arts and Crafts movement. In this trend hand labor, attention to materials, and the social and psychological values of making are dominant concerns. The overall tendency is to reject values and processes associated with industrial production in favor of what were perceived to be more natural and human qualities. Intuitive making and the physical and material aspects of the artistic process were important, and as a corollary awkwardness, ineptitude, and failure were more meaningful and often more highly esteemed than inhuman perfection. The second dominant trend—typified by the NeoImpressionists, Purists, Constructivists, and Bauhaus adherents—which developed slightly later than the first, is characterized by an embrace of values associated with industrialization. Rather than situating artistic processes in counterpoint to industrial processes, these modern artists adopted aspects of industrial production processes, attitudes, and goals to make artworks. What the artists of both tendencies share is a belief that how they make their art, their productive process, is highly meaningful. The artist’s craft and techniques are no longer a narrow professional concern, as they had been prior to the nineteenth century. The very nature of the artist’s labor is in question. Where does the artist’s work belong in a modern industrialized society? Does the artist maintain the ideals and academic standards of the

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past, or are new processes and techniques required? For the modernists the answer was clearly the latter, but they varied enormously in their conception of what the new approach should be. For some their process was intended to foster intuitive and free productive activity, while others embraced more controlled and rational processes directed toward specific aesthetic and social goals. Modern artists’ working processes reveal stances taken in relation to the values and processes of modern society—a desire either to develop neglected qualities or to assist in the advancement of newly dominant ones. In both cases the artistic product itself was intended to reflect the processes of its production. Unlike the tradition of the fine arts established in the Renaissance, which valued intellect over the artist’s manual labor and generally ignored the latter in public discourse, modern artists increasingly valued and displayed their processes, often explaining and promoting them in written texts and interviews. The artist’s work was no longer simply the production of aesthetic objects; the modern artist was a worker whose labor had new purpose and meaning in modern society. The shifts in values associated with the artist’s work in the nineteenth century are striking, and in many ways surprising. The standard account of the development of modern art describes the gradual overcoming of the rigid strictures and technical training associated with the academy and their replacement by a liberated, more creative, individual, and expressive approach to art making. While this is, in its broad outline, a reasonably accurate description of nineteenth-century developments, the specific forms of valuation that accompanied these overall changes are often unexpected. For one, the modern painter’s labor was often perceived as more physical and less intellectual than that of his academic predecessors. The modern painter’s work was also seen as becoming more, rather than less, preoccupied with technical concerns. Thus liberation from the constraints of traditional subject matter and techniques meant, in the opinion of many observers, that modern artists were more engaged with the physical constraints of the medium than were academic artists. This is notably different from conventional descriptions of modern art’s development, which tend to stress the conceptual innovations of modern artists’ work in terms of subjects and techniques, as well as in their rejection of an academicism overly dependent on the mindless deployment of established technical procedures. Also notable is the fact that many critics and artists considered modern artists to be less hardworking than their academic predecessors and peers. Such assessments are clearly dependent on the vantage point of the judge, but what is undeniable is that during the nineteenth century the conception of

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the artist’s labor, particularly the painter’s labor, was subjected to significant scrutiny and change. Albert Boime’s The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century examines shifts in artistic training and production that increasingly placed value on the early generative phase of the sketch rather than on the finished work. Linking this change in emphasis to the French Revolution’s goals of individual freedom and Romantic ideals of originality, inspiration, and expression, Boime suggests some of the linkages between artistic labor and the overarching attitudes and goals that condition the value and direction of that labor. Academic artistic training in nineteenth-century France was designed to prepare artists to create grands machines, the large-scale paintings of significant historical or religious subjects that had been considered the pinnacle of academic production since the seventeenth century. Artists’ training stressed hard work and diligence indicated by the mastery of controlled techniques of highly finished illusionistic drawing and painting. These techniques also signified moral qualities such as self-control and discipline, as well as denoting the artist’s conceptual labor—the educated thought required to make the many choices involved in successfully creating a complex work of art. Mechanical skills and technical knowledge were thus hallmarks of academic artistic production, and they were intensively developed by copying works of earlier masters as well as by the graduated exercises of the academic curriculum.1 Serving as a counterpoint to the development of polished technical skills were academic exercises intended to provoke the aspiring artist’s natural and instinctive abilities. Quick sketches were associated with inspiration and genius, and drawings made from memory were thought to develop the artist’s mental abilities and promote original compositions; both beliefs were consistent with the views of Leonardo and other earlier theorists.2 As Boime has discussed, the two poles of academic artistic training were often at odds. In the first half of the nineteenth century a quickly sketched copy of a masterpiece could be considered mere “hackwork, the product of industry,” or the primary means to rediscover a great artist’s initial inspiration.3 In the eighteenth century a rapid and sketchy painting or drawing style had been admired as an index of inspiration, enthusiasm, and native genius.4 Artists attempted to provoke the imaginations of viewers, who responded by mentally completing the inchoate areas of the image.5 Early nineteenth-century Romantic artists such as Géricault similarly adopted sketchy, incomplete styles to convey their inspired originality and freedom. This was not without its problems. Delacroix was concerned by the difficulty of retaining the All About Process

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marks of inspiration in a completed painting, and he noted that the artist who knows his work will be exhibited loses confidence in his inspiration and tends to overfinish his painting, thereby ruining it: “He modifies it, he spoils it, he overworks it; all this civilizing and polishing in order not to displease.”6 In contrast, Thomas Couture produced what were essentially facsimiles of inspiration, working to give his paintings the qualities of an unfinished sketch by obliterating underlying signs of meticulous labor with dry, sweeping brushstrokes.7 From the academic vantage point the unfinished qualities of the sketch made it unsuitable for serious consideration and public display: “Everything pertaining to preliminary studies was identified with métier, and everything concerning the finishing process was identified with the artist’s erudition.”8 Even acknowledging the potential of the sketch to reveal native talent and inspiration was not enough to qualify it as a completed artwork. Ingres, widely admired for the perfect finish of his paintings, insisted on concealing his method in order to keep the painted illusion intact. Ernest Meissonier, also known for his meticulous finish, was similarly concerned to hide the traces of his labor and refused to exhibit anything but finished works in his lifetime. Many artists, including Delacroix, believed that the ability to finish a work successfully was the mark of a true artist. According to this view talent was relatively common, but the refined intellectual capacity and technical knowledge required to make a successful artwork were comparatively rare. Nineteenth-century artists and viewers who evaluated art by academic standards often criticized unfinished, sketchy paintings as signifiers of laziness and incompetence rather than inspiration and originality; some critics deplored the “chorus of exaggerated praise for all kinds of improvised work, pochades and ébauches, the sketchy and the half-finished, and systematic denigration of conscientious work.”9 Given the foundation of the unfinished, sketch-like work in discourses promoting inspiration, genius, and freedom, it is somewhat surprising that the Impressionists were often considered by their peers to be more concerned with painting technique than with inspiration and freedom. This is a significant thread of the discourse surrounding Impressionism and may be seen as part of the foundation for a formalist viewpoint, which would not develop a careful formulation until the twentieth century. Meissonier, renowned for the extreme precision of his own technique, criticized Impressionist painters for their lack of invention but praised their technical knowledge and facility with painted effects. 10 Another highly successful nineteenth-century painter working in a flawless academic style, Jean-Léon

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Gérôme, employed a similar method of evaluation when he denigrated the handling of paint as merely “a question of skin.” For him the important consideration was “construction,” the composition of the work, which was traditionally associated with the artist’s conceptual ability.11 During the course of the nineteenth century a high degree of finish became a key means to distinguish academic painting’s dedication to traditional intellectual qualities in contrast to a new modern painting, which adopted a physical conception of painting associated with contemporary experience. Romantic painters who employed traditional indexes of inspiration in their seemingly rapid painterly technique diminished in the academic context, and it was the modern artists who most often produced rough, highly textured paint surfaces. Modern artists who rejected traditional subjects to embrace contemporary life—be it the woods and fields of the Barbizon painters, the rural life and working peasants of the Realists, or the urban and suburban scenes of the Impressionists—adopted modes of painting that emphasized their physical immersion in the material world. Portable tubes of heavy-bodied paint allowed them to work rapidly and directly from nature.12 Critics often compared Realist painters employing palette knives to apply heavy layers of thick paint to masons working with their trowels. This cliché served a dual purpose: it described the directness of the painter’s physical engagement with the material of his art, and it implied the artist’s rough, unrefined, and anti-intellectual approach. It is commonplace to connect the changes in nineteenth-century painting to economic shifts in the art market, most notably the decrease in painters able to support themselves by fulfilling official state commissions and the increase in the art-buying public among the bourgeois middle classes. What also must be addressed are the effects of a reevaluation of artisanal labor in the context of rapid industrialization and the growth of the urban office worker. These effects are evident in the Arts and Crafts movement and its widespread influence, but they have not generally been associated with shifts in nineteenth-century painting. One such effect that has not been carefully considered is essentially a reversal of the long-standing academic tradition that values the painter’s intellect above his craft. In the new modern artistic approaches of the nineteenth century, the artist’s claim to intellectual superiority vanishes and is, in part, replaced by what may be described as the artist’s value as a craftsperson, a physical rather than an intellectual worker. It is not just the plein-air subjects that appeal to the city-dwelling connoisseur; it is also the associations of the Barbizon/Impressionist painting with the hand-crafted object, one made by an individual, and aggressively All About Process

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displaying that fact through a rough and idiosyncratic technique. Furthermore, it is precisely the nineteenth-century modern artist’s naïveté, his willed ignorance, and his search for a direct representation of the innocent perception of nature that becomes his trademark.13 Interestingly, it is not only the nineteenth-century modern artist who appears to be more of a craftsperson than a fine artist in the traditional terms of the academy. Late nineteenth-century academic painting was widely seen as having abandoned intellectual concerns to become merely a highly refined style of flawless naturalism, as represented by the very successful work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The intellectual abdication of late nineteenthcentury academic art rendered it what traditional academic art theory, grounded in the intellectual value of the fine arts, would likely have considered a mere craft product. And in its finely finished technical perfection, the work of the academics appeared less like a refined handcraft and more like something artificial, inhuman, machine-made. By contrast, much modern nineteenth-century painting, with its idiosyncratic rendering and lack of finish, signified human and natural processes of production imbued with emotion and individuality. It is the latter that became identified with truly artistic creation and ultimately linked to the artist’s conceptual activity, while the former was increasingly considered mindless illustration. Cézanne’s disdainful criticism of academic technique and its admirers is exemplary of the modern artist’s view of the profound artistic significance of his own labor: “I have to work all the time, not to reach that final perfection which earns the admiration of imbeciles.—And this thing which is commonly appreciated so much is merely the effect of craftsmanship and renders all work resulting from it inartistic and common. I must strive after perfection only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser. . . . The hour always comes when one breaks through and has admirers far more fervent and convinced than those who are only attracted by an empty surface.”14 Cézanne’s insistence that he has to work very hard not to paint “perfectly” is notable. Whereas once artists labored for years to master correct painting technique, for the modern artist the difficult labor is to avoid it. Skill is merely having the means to produce an “empty surface”; it is craft rather than art. And the struggle the artist undertakes to circumvent skill makes him “truer and wiser,” leading to intellectual achievement. The growing number of painters who abandoned traditional academic finish in the nineteenth century represents a change in general ideas about the artist’s process. While there is little that is completely novel in the ways the artist’s activity was conceived, there were distinct shifts in emphasis and

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degrees of significance. Among the most notable was the extent to which the artist’s labor engaged the physical and mental experience of being in the world as indicated by the increasing stress on the artist’s direct access and response to nature. With the Barbizon painters, the Realists, and the Impressionists the artwork was increasingly viewed as the result, even the record, of the artist’s unique and individual response to experience of the world. Supporters of the new art believed that conventional techniques of representation acquired in the course of academic training hampered the development of a technique that would convey the artist’s own specific, idiosyncratic way of seeing. According to Richard Shiff, by the late nineteenth century “the mode of perception, of vision, was of greater consequence to the impressionist or symbolist artist than the view seen or the image presented. In this respect both impressionists and symbolists placed themselves in opposition to what they regarded as ‘academic’ art that valued the object of its own creation more than the process that brought it into being. The conception of ‘impressionism’ that motivated Monet, Cézanne, and others centers on a particular kind of experience—at once objective and subjective, simultaneously physical, sensory, and emotional.”15 The modern work of art becomes evidence of the artist’s working experience, and critics who supported the new art acknowledged this by focusing their commentary on technical issues.16 Shiff has discussed the difficult situation of Impressionist painters, whose technique was often interpreted as signifying contradictory procedures and aims. While modern artists pursued originality in rejecting established academic techniques and procedures, they were not to be understood as merely responding with passive spontaneity to their sensations. Thus modern artists must be considered diligent workers with developed techniques based on careful study, who were also responsive and without preconceptions in their representation of nature.17 All of this may be viewed as an attempt to rediscover and define a thoroughly natural process of artistic creation, one that avoided the preformulated and established methods of academic tradition and yet was comparably rigorous in the pursuit and employment of its means. Deviations from strict photographic realism were the first, and a relatively simple, means to signify an individual and nonmechanical artistic process. Far more difficult than this fundamentally negative approach to avoiding competent conventional representation was discovering a strategy that would display the artist’s hard work and dedication to the development of individual creative means. An idiosyncratic, nonacademic style was potentially as easy as painting without having mastered traditional All About Process

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representational techniques, a so-called primitive style. More complex was developing a means to convey the seriousness and skill that would earn critical respect and public admiration. Critics who knew the Impressionist artists personally often stressed their hard work; Mallarmé stated that the Impressionist was an energetic modern worker,18 while Zola compared Manet to a hardworking bourgeois.19 Their labor, in the discussions of both critics, consisted largely in forgetting what they had learned about painting in order to paint what they see in nature. Clumsiness becomes a sign of success in this project, as is evident in Zola’s criticism: “Not the least delight for the eyes. A painting austere and serious; and extreme concern with truth and accuracy, a will fierce and strong. You are a great blunderer [maladroit], monsieur [Pissarro], you are an artist that I like.”20 “Pissarro . . . does not have any of the minute skillfulness of his colleagues. He is in the realm of excellence, the relentless pursuit of the true, heedless of the tricks of métier. His canvases, which lack all fireworks and spice, discover a nature too living and too pungent in its reality.”21 Zola, who admired above all the artist who revealed the uniqueness of his vision, his individual temperament, considered the artist’s labor an intensive project of self-discovery, a stripping bare of all conventions of seeing and artistic technique that would make painting a trivial production process. The painter who knows what he sees and how to make a picture of it is merely a mechanical producer of an artistic commodity. Impressionist painting is the record of the hard work involved in developing a truly personal and direct visual relation to nature.22 One of the primary reasons that Impressionist paintings suggest the artist’s labor is their lack of finish and the representational clarity that traditionally denoted completion. These are paintings that often seemed to contemporary viewers to be arrested at an early stage in their process of creation, which might continue to its resolution when the painter returns to the canvas. This is evident in early critics’ and viewers’ complaints that specific paintings seemed unfinished, as well as in the persistently reiterated critical conviction that Impressionist artists had not yet resolved their means of expression. For example, Ernest Chesneau wrote, “Obviously, this is not the last word in art, nor even of this art. It is necessary to go on and to transform the sketch into a finished work. But what a bugle call for those who listen carefully, how it resounds far into the future!”23 While comments such as this indicate contemporary critics’ desire for some more finished form of painting than that achieved by Impressionist artists (and arguably an inability of nineteenth-century critics to recognize a work of art as adequately

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resolved if it did not have an academic finish), it also suggests attitudes toward artists’ working processes. Critics apparently found both interest and aesthetic satisfaction in works that were not resolved or finished. However, they also seemed to believe that viewers must have faith in the artists’ ability to conclude their researches and resolve their means because, they imply, it is their ultimate resolution that will justify the interest of the earlier stages. As far back as ancient Greece commentators admired the qualities of unfinished artworks, but what makes the Impressionist critics’ comments unusual is that they promise a successful future with no basis for their certainty. Impressionist paintings were not presented as unfinished; it was the critics and viewers who projected the need for further development and completion onto them. The promise of future resolution, and the persistent deferral of its fulfillment, will haunt modern art for decades. What in the end might be one of the most significant distinctions of modern art is not only its temporary and provisional nature, but its faith in an ultimate resolution of artistic means, the ability to truly finish a work of art. Once artistic resolution and fulfillment are abandoned as impossible dreams and process is embraced for its own sake, the art object loses its potential to be a material object of absolute plenitude and aesthetic satisfaction. This is what happens in the 1960s. From the beginning, the possibility of a successful resolution to the modern artist’s labors often seems unlikely. The frustration and failure of the modern artist was established as a staple of the critical discourse with the inception of the new art. Balzac’s seventeenth-century character Frenhofer was a nineteenth-century creation that highlighted the difficulties faced by the isolated artist who labors without social direction or restriction.24 His labor is pure, which would seem to lead him to exalted achievements as he works unconstrained by external requirements, but Frenhofer wallows in a solipsistic rut, unable to form an accurate evaluation of his own work, into which he puts all his energy, faith, and dedication. The result is complete failure. Cézanne’s self-identification with Frenhofer is famous25 and suggests the painter’s ironic self-appraisal. Like Frenhofer, Cézanne was financially independent and able to devote himself fully to artistic selfrealization. In claiming identity with Frenhofer, Cézanne seems to embrace the fictional artist’s failure. Cézanne expects to have devoted his life to painting indecipherable messes when his work is judged by other eyes. Aruna d’Souza has discussed the extent to which the many accounts of Cézanne’s “doubt” and “failure”—and particularly the widespread and enduring identification of the artist with Claude Lantier, the doomed proAll About Process

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tagonist of Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre—is a discursive product linked to late nineteenth-century views of the linked pathologies of degeneration and genius.26 Cézanne and his work have become inextricably bound up with Zola’s portrayal of the authentic artist as necessarily a frustrated failure. In Zola’s novel genius is inevitably abortive and impotent, and yet the artist sincerely dedicated to his impossible project points the way to the future. This is how Zola saw the Impressionists, whose “struggle is not yet over: they remain unequal to the work which they attempt, they stutter without being able to find the word. But their influence is no less profound, because they follow the only possible course, they march towards the future.”27 In Zola’s interpretation the Impressionist artist has abandoned the certainties of convention to pursue an art structured by the individual temperament in relation to the world. In this project there are no dependable guidelines for success; indeed, it may well be that the notion of individual temperament to which Zola was so dedicated is necessarily a barrier to the full “realization” of an art. Individuality as indexed by a marked idiosyncrasy of style is, to follow Zola’s metaphor, a language in its nascent stages. Once it succeeds and becomes a recognizable language, a means of communication through established codes, it loses its originality. Failure is thus built in to the romantic notion of the modern artist as a unique individual creating an art reflecting a singular vision. To succeed, the modern artist must fail, must remain unique, isolated, misunderstood, speaking a barely comprehensible language. Success would mean establishing a style, a language that others can employ with attendant conventions and correctness—in other words, a new academicism. The insoluble tensions at the heart of a dominant view of the modern artist’s identity and labor contributed to the enormous significance of process in modern art. Given that resolution, the creation of a successful product, is tantamount to abandoning the modern artist’s fundamental identity as someone who seeks the proper and unique means of individual selfexpression, the most successful of modern artists are those for whom the process of making art remains forever unresolved. Cézanne was exemplary in this regard. Roger Fry emphasized the artist’s efforts to evade formulas and characterized his art in formal terms: “It is evident that all his life he was continually brooding over one tormenting question; how to conciliate the data of Impressionism with—what he regarded as essential to style—a perfect structural organization. . . . It was this determination to arrive at a perfect synthesis of opposing principles, perhaps, that kept Cézanne’s sensibility at such a high tension, that prevented him from ever repeating himself, from

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ever executing a picture as a performance. Each canvas had to be a new investigation and a new solution.”28 Living and working in isolation for much of his career, Cézanne was unconcerned with the production of a marketable product; his paintings, often undated and unsigned, were left in a state of provisional completion. He is famous for the statement made toward the end of his life that he was the primitive of the way he discovered, that all those years of labor had only achieved a beginning.29 His “doubtful” achievement was, nevertheless, at the cost of many years of great labor that required all his focus and all his energies. Isolated and famously misanthropic, Cézanne followed in the footsteps of the Michelangelo legend, an artist who devoted himself completely to his art. The paintings themselves are typically understood to display the artist’s perceptual and creative processes as their fundamental subject. Meyer Schapiro’s description of a Cézanne painting is exemplary: “the minutely ordered creation of an observant, inventive mind intensely concerned with its own process. . . . Tangible touches of color . . . [make] us aware of a decision of the mind and an operation of the hand. . . . The self is always present, poised between sensing and knowing, or between its perceptions and practical ordering activity, mastering its inner world by mastering something beyond itself.”30 While this might be said of many Impressionist works, in the case of Cézanne his paintings are often considered uniquely insightful indexes not just of an individual “way of seeing” but of the complex nature of seeing, in which the tensions between nature and the viewing subject, eye and body, eye and mind exist in a state of interdependence in which no single aspect can be successfully isolated.31 These issues and the paradoxes they raise were at the root of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Cézanne’s art: “His painting was paradoxical: he was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature. . . . This is what Bernard called Cézanne’s suicide: aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it. This is the reason for his difficulties and for the distortions one finds in his pictures.” For Merleau-Ponty, however, the tensions and paradoxes of Cézanne’s painting are not merely a peculiarity of the artist’s project, they are revelatory of human perception, and also of the nature of all painters’ endeavors: “Cézanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective . . . is not a geometric or photographic one.” Visual perception encompasses the multiplicity of sensory experience, and it is this unified perception, this wholeness that Cézanne strove to represent: “That is why each brushstroke must satisfy All About Process

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an infinite number of conditions. Cézanne sometimes pondered hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke. . . . Expressing what exists is an endless task.” In keeping with received notions regarding the Impressionist project, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the painter’s desire to paint naturally without relying on convention, and like Zola he compares the painter’s work to the creation of a language: “He speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. . . . The artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout. . . . The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere—not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life.”32 Cézanne’s painting is, in MerleauPonty’s interpretation, a creative process in the fullest meaning of the phrase; no conception precedes it. Out of his sensations Cézanne creates a new language with every work; and this labor is inextricably bound up with the artist’s life, his psychology as well as the material circumstances of his existence. As Merleau-Ponty described it, “That work to be done called for that life. . . . Cézanne’s life found its only equilibrium by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary project of his future work. The work to come is hinted at, but it would be wrong to take these hints for causes, although they do make a single adventure of his life and work. Here we are beyond causes and effects.”33 It has been observed that Merleau-Ponty found in Cézanne’s art and statements crucial elements for the development of his own phenomenological philosophy, in which the physical body plays a key role in human experience and epistemology.34 Thus, although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology belongs to a later point in the historical trajectory I have been tracing, it has roots in the nineteenth century, when artists (and writers on artists) first started to find the travails of the artist’s working life more than trivial biographical information. The philosopher’s serious consideration of Cézanne’s creative process may be viewed as a kind of ratification; the artist’s difficulties were a matter of profound importance—a key means for thinking through the nature of embodied experience and the significance of material production in a world where such issues had hitherto largely been overlooked and ignored. In the discursive context of Impressionism and Postimpressionism the modern artist’s labor often figures as a particularly individual, unpredictable, idiosyncratic (and often useless or failed) form of creative production. Critical and theoretical accounts of the modern artist’s labor emphasized it as natural, unregulated, and notably distinct from the conventional labor of

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academic artists, which was implicitly (and sometimes directly) linked to dehumanized and mindless industrial labor. Beginning in the 1880s, however, there were notable changes in the discourses supporting modern art, which began to adopt language and ideals that occasionally reflected a growing willingness to conform to modern industrial work processes, attitudes, and goals. A new generation often favored a more objective, universal approach. Maurice Denis’s distinction between “subjective deformation” and “objective deformation” is exemplary of the new attitude. Subjective deformation is the result of the artist’s individual way of seeing, while Denis theorized objective deformation as employing a universal means of formal distortion that would enable the creation of a shared artistic language of form.35 Neo-Impressionist painting in particular is understood as rejecting Impressionism’s purported idiosyncrasy and embracing modern scientific approaches and the industrial values of objectivity, efficiency, and regularity.36 Neo-Impressionist painters were presented as recording optical experience with scientific accuracy. Paul Signac described the Impressionist painters as using a “technique relying on instinct and inspiration,” while the Neo-Impressionists employed a “methodical and scientific technique.”37 Modern artists’ abandonment of academic technique and conventions of picture making was presented not as an attempt to evade the mechanical and predictable in favor of the unique and individual, but as steps on the road to a more accurate representation of optical experience. The employment of a regularized “dot” brushstroke was proposed as the most effective means for achieving the optical mixture of colors based on the principles of divisionism. Signac claimed Delacroix as the technical forebear of the NeoImpressionists and cited his warnings against the seductive charm and “convenience” of ostentatious brushwork. More desirable, in Signac’s view, was the neutral efficiency of the divisionist stroke: “The optical mixture of small strokes of colour methodically laid down one next to the other, does not leave much room for virtuosity and skill. The painter’s hand has little importance; only the eye and brain take on a role.”38 Supporters of Neo-Impressionism promoted the virtues of the divisionist technique in terms that revived long-established academic tenets. The most notable of these is the stress on the artist’s intellect over manual technique. Paul Signac claimed that reducing the painter’s language by removing the signifying capacity of the brushstroke and regularizing the means for representing light and color made Neo-Impressionist painting a more efficient means for the artist to communicate an individual vision: “Is it necessary to mention that this uniform and almost abstract execution All About Process

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leaves the originality of the artist intact, and even helps it? Actually, it is idiotic to confuse Camille Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, Signac, and Seurat. Each of them imperiously betrays his disparity . . . but never through the use of facile gimmicks. . . . To them objective reality is simply a theme for the creation of a superior, sublimated reality in which their personality is transformed.”39 In addition, as Signac indicated when he described the technique’s evasion of virtuosity and skill, there was a notable tendency to present the technique as more populist—anyone might learn this technique and be able to communicate their vision. And, in fact, many successful painters employed the technique in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The Neo-Impressionist painter was concerned with the finished work of art, the product. The final work was intended to provide a seamless and complete visual experience, not one that (as with Impressionist paintings) insistently reminded viewers of its creation by obvious material traces of an idiosyncratic physical process. In addition, unlike Cézanne’s protolinguistic style, the Neo-Impressionist “language” is fully formed and intended to be transparent to its content. Through mastery of divisionism, the Neo-Impressionist painter is theoretically able to fabricate paintings that directly communicate his or her idea or vision. The fabrication process is essentially instrumental; manual dexterity and physical engagement are reduced to a minimum. This is in keeping with the Neo-Impressionist painters’ understanding of vision and painting as isolated, essentially disembodied, optical experiences. This disembodied vision reaffirmed painting’s traditional association with the mind and intellect; in Neo-Impressionism the manual activity of painting becomes an efficient vehicle for conveying the painter’s idea. By claiming divisionism was a painting technique that allowed for a direct representation of the artist’s vision, unimpeded by the manual tricks of painterly gesture, Signac and others were trying to establish it as a more mental, even spiritual, art than previous modern styles, most particularly Impressionism. A modern scientific painting technique restored the traditional intellectual value of painting as a fine and liberal art. From this vantage point it is possible to see Impressionism once more as the academics had done, a style primarily engaged with métier, essentially the material craft of painting, rather than an intellectual art. Mastery of an impersonal technique with a foundation in scientific optics could reestablish modern painting on an intellectual basis and avoid the sloppy “gimmicks” of painterly craft. All those precisely painted dots reaffirmed the cleanliness of the painter’s labor and highlighted its rationality.

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Neo-Impressionism recuperated certain traditional academic values, but there are important distinctions that arise from the shifting valuation of craft in the nineteenth century. After the establishment of industrial manufacture many common handmade products lost value and became obsolete. Subsequently, with the success of the Arts and Crafts movement and related discourses, handmade objects gradually assumed a position of higher value than those that were mechanically produced. It was by displaying their intellectual concerns that the fine arts of painting and sculpture initially distinguished themselves from the merely handmade—the so-called minor arts or crafts, in which material technique was the sole concern. By the eighteenth century, coincident with the beginning of modern industrialization, the values of intellect and rationality that had distinguished the fine arts from the minor arts began to be replaced by emotional and expressive values. Industrialization further complicated the identity of the fine arts by adding the need to demonstrate their distinction from the mechanically produced.40 A painting in which representational technique was so realistic that it approached the photographic was in danger of being considered a mechanical demonstration of technical skill rather than a skillful, and hence transparent, display of the painter’s (traditionally intellectual) subject. The fine art of painting in particular (sculpture was less immediately affected) was thus the locus of a collision between different and evolving systems of value: one, the valuation of the mental/intellectual/emotional over the manual/material, and two, the valuation of the handmade crafts over mechanical production. Impressionism largely managed to hold these differing value systems in balance through the figure of the artist whose idiosyncratic, “unfinished” technique guaranteed both the evasion of the mechanical and that the manual/material was the product of an individual’s mind and emotions. NeoImpressionism, in emphasizing intellectual content by adopting a more scientific approach to technique, upset this equilibrium. Although it was compared to weaving, a traditional form of craft labor, the efficient regimentation of divisionism threatened to become mechanical. Neo-Impressionism thus stands in marked opposition to the high valuation of the individual idiosyncrasies of the handmade as promoted by Impressionism and in the realm of crafts and decorative arts in the late nineteenth century. NeoImpressionism’s elevation of the artist’s vision, the more scientific and accurate representation of optical effects and emotion through divisionism and the calculated effects of design,41 revived and advanced the longestablished tradition of painting’s intellectual concerns and appeal to the mind. And as Signac argued, Neo-Impressionism’s technique was no impedAll About Process

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iment to the manifestation of each artist’s unique vision. Implicitly, individuality is assumed to be a transcendent immaterial quality, one that is part of the artist’s intellectual, and possibly spiritual, identity and not essentially connected to the physical body. Neo-Impressionism inaugurated a new approach that would profoundly affect modern art and the conceptualization of the artist’s working processes. This style—based on a predetermined, uniform, and systematic technique—was, at least theoretically, shared by all artists who employed it. It provided an efficient, largely mechanical process to achieve the basic pictorial goal of satisfying human aesthetic needs while communicating an individual vision through the painted product. Given this attention to the effective creation of a product, it is not difficult to see Neo-Impressionist painting as the artist’s equivalent to modern industrial production techniques in which efficiency takes priority.42 For the first time the modern artist’s process could be understood as aligned with the processes, values, and achievements of modern industry. And, as Signac claimed, a predetermined technical process was not an impediment to the human value of individual self-expression; it could be a means to affirm the uniqueness of the individual. Freed from the requirement to create an autographic material technique, the Neo-Impressionist artist was unbound by physical constraints and able to communicate the visual, mental, and spiritual directly to the viewer. This is comparable to the liberating effects often claimed for modern industry, which reduces the need for dirty physical labor and offers the worker more opportunities for intellectual development and participation. By the beginning of the twentieth century the modern artist’s process was closely associated with objectivity, science, and industry as well as with subjectivity, individualism, and craftsmanship. These often-conflicting associations continued to haunt modern art throughout the century. As handworkers in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, modern artists inevitably engaged with traditional craft processes and values. As artists their work was also inevitably situated in relation to the intellectual traditions of the fine arts. The difficulty was to define how these traditional concerns were relevant to the modern artist’s working process, and ultimately how the modern artist’s working processes were relevant to modern society. This was not simply a narrow professional concern of artists, as it had been prior to the nineteenth century when the academy defined the processes, nature, and role of art. Artistic process and its significance defined modern art. What precisely the artist did to make art and what that making

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signified in broad terms were fundamental to modern art’s purpose and meaning. To a large extent the long-standing identification of modern art with a narrowly defined formalism has obscured the central importance of process in modern art. The dominant understanding of formalism focused attention on the formal qualities of the artwork in isolation from its means of production. It is commonly associated with the modernist criticism of Clement Greenberg, and also with that of Maurice Denis, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell, who contributed early theoretical formulations. They drew attention to the formal elements of design that had long been neglected by critics and viewers primarily interested in subject matter and narrative. These formal elements were not always considered in isolation from the process that produced them; as we have seen, Roger Fry analyzed the relevance of Cézanne’s process. Clive Bell’s focus was, in contrast, directed to the forms of the finished artwork rather than its process of production. Early formalists’ efforts should be associated with the broad attempt to give modern art an objective scientific basis. As the influence of Charles Henry’s theories on the Neo-Impressionists shows, some modern artists hoped to employ scientifically proven means to provoke specific emotional responses using color and shape. Early formalism was thus part of a general effort to understand art and aesthetics scientifically and in relation to human physiology and psychology. Clement Greenberg’s mid-twentieth-century formalism emphasized an evolutionary view of modern art in which each art form was developing toward a state of pure medium specificity. In the case of painting Greenberg believed the essence of the medium was its two-dimensionality and that the evolutionary trend was toward flatness. He evaluated artworks in terms of their contribution to the evolution of their medium and not in relation to extra-artistic contextual concerns. He was also committed to making judgments of quality based on the artwork’s aesthetic effects as conveyed by abstract form. It was the “Greenbergian” approach to formal analysis of artworks that became standard in much art criticism, museum catalogs, and art-historical writing beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Artistic process and its central importance for modern art were largely overlooked and elided, while Greenberg’s insistently impersonal history of modern art’s formal evolution was widely influential.43 Key texts on early twentieth-century modern art, especially those written by modern artists themselves, show how central the artist’s process was to both the theory and production of modern art. Greenberg’s understanding All About Process

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of modernist art as evolving to an ever-greater purity of medium, independent of individual artists’ views and projects, is an abstracted view of modern art history. As he acknowledged, this grand scheme was not related to the conscious intentions of modern artists—although some, such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, proposed theories and created works that were directly relevant. Considering the early modernist artists, critics, and theorists in terms of their expressed views on artistic process shows that a different sort of formalism than the one commonly associated with Greenberg was a major concern. This was a formalism in which the artist’s product is integrally related to the process of its creation. Although the final work was often intended to be a self-sufficient aesthetic object (and thus a reasonably appropriate subject for the sort of abstract formal analysis widely practiced in the mid-twentieth century), that was a minor concern compared to the complex processes that led to its successful creation. Furthermore, those processes were central to the meaning of the final artwork. They often distinguished it by means of indexical signs as human-made rather than an industrial product, thereby signifying a range of values associated with human identity and activity in opposition to inhuman industrial processes. In the instances when modern artists adopted values and processes associated with modern industry, their artistic labor was no less significant, and their goals remained indicative of broad human and social values. In 1908 Henri Matisse published “Notes of a Painter,” in which he described his goal as a painter: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” In Matisse’s view a painting is a purely aesthetic object whose effects are conveyed by formal means, and his text provides the outline of a pure formalism. The basic points include the following: (1) the artwork conveys its meaning by formal means and not by subject matter (“A work of art must carry within itself its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder even before he recognizes the subject matter”);44 (2) there is a natural relation between form and feeling that makes it possible to communicate by formal means; (3) the successful artwork is unified, and every formal element contributes to the meaning of the whole; (4) unity presupposes the artwork’s self-sufficiency, and therefore nothing external to the artwork is required to make it successful. These points stressed by Matisse are in keeping with the formalist views adopted by Bell, Fry, and later Greenberg; nevertheless,

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Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” is also one of the most influential accounts of a modern artist’s working process and its significance. By the time he published “Notes of a Painter” Matisse had studied and successfully employed academic painting techniques as well as the range of modern techniques and styles, including Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Fauvism. This experience with widely different artistic attitudes and commitments contributed to the depth and seriousness of his account, which reveals the painter’s careful consideration of his artistic means. He begins by denying any distinction between the artist’s intellectual labor and the craft labor of the painter’s métier: What I am after, above all, is expression. Sometimes it has been conceded that I have a certain technical ability but that all the same my ambition is limited, and does not go beyond the purely visual satisfaction such as can be obtained from looking at a picture. But the thought of a painter must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means, for the thought is worth no more than its expression by the means [emphasis added], which must be more complete . . . the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.45 For Matisse, the painter’s intellectual labor is manifested in the painter’s means; the two cannot be separated as they had been in the academic tradition. This assertion is the foundation of the detailed discussion of his artistic process that follows. Matisse methodically situates his working process at the intersection of nature, intuition, technical knowledge, and expression. Denying critical accusations that he applied a theoretical method in creating his purportedly “unnatural” paintings, and explicitly distinguishing his own intuitive approach from the scientific methods espoused by Signac and the NeoImpressionists, Matisse insisted that his work as a painter is engaged with the medium as a means of expression. A key aspect of this engagement is his attentiveness to the expressive requirements of painting. Matisse described how each element in a given work affects the others and changes the equilibrium of the whole. The addition of a color, a dot, or a line completely transforms a work, and it is the artist’s role to constantly adjust the work’s elements in order to make it conform as a whole to his expressive intentions.46 This is material labor that cannot be done mechanically; it requires the artist’s full mental and emotional engagement at every moment. All About Process

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Matisse’s text is characterized by a balanced evaluation of seemingly opposed aspects of the artist’s labor. He assigns importance to both nature and the imagination in the artist’s working process; likewise, intuition and technical knowledge also play key roles. Given his description of the artist’s need to calibrate the many opposed aspects of a successful creative process, it is not surprising that Matisse evaluates artists in terms of their selfdiscipline: “I think that one can judge of the vitality and power of an artist who, after having received impressions directly from the spectacle of nature, is able to organize his sensations to continue his work in the same frame of mind on different days, and to develop these sensations; this power proves he is sufficiently master of himself to subject himself to discipline.” This was one means Matisse used to distinguish his artistic goals from those of the Impressionists, who were presented as passive in their working processes rather than consciously directing their results at every moment. Matisse’s emphasis on discipline also indicated that he did not regard the painter’s work as simple or easy, even though it has its source in feeling. The artist must be able to control personal emotions in order to employ them successfully in the making of art: “I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting. I might be satisfied with a work done at one sitting, but I would soon tire of it; therefore, I prefer to rework it so that later I may recognize it as representative of my state of mind.”47 The painter’s disciplined labor results in an achievement that is not only expressive but intellectual as well. In addition, Matisse situated his working process in terms of traditionally classical values of harmony, clarity, order, and balance. These are achieved through the artist’s thoughtful and diligent labor. Although he describes his goal as creating a work of his mind, at times Matisse describes the artist’s working process in a manner that suggests a craftsman’s preoccupation with technique as a means to create a successful product rather than the intellectual concerns traditionally attributed to artists. Despite his insistence on the artist’s responsiveness to the developing artwork, Matisse stated that he “must have a clear vision of the composition from the very beginning,”48 and he explicitly contrasted this with the “confused expression” of Rodin’s fragmentary approach. The contradiction between the need for a clearly envisioned final product and the constant negotiation and adaptation required to bring the work to fruition is never reconciled in the text. “Notes of a Painter” serves to illustrate a key moment in the conception of the modern artist’s labor when a tenuous balance is struck between the process of the artwork’s creation and its achievement as a completed product.

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Matisse explains (albeit with some contradictions) the integral relation between how he paints and what he paints. His initial conception, a desire to express a particular emotion, guides his process, informing each choice in the creation of a work. Every brush stroke offers the artist new possibilities for the final work, and the artist’s labor is weighing each of these against the initial impetus of the work and deciding which would be the most effective in bringing the work into conformity with his initial conception—the feeling he intended to express. The final work reflects the moment when the artist was satisfied that the work had reached the ordered and harmonious material equivalent of this initial feeling. Matisse’s approach is notably different from those of his predecessors. First, the academic artist’s process involves the development of preparatory sketches to resolve the final work’s composition, lighting, color, and so forth. Once these are decided the artist’s labor is largely a mechanical application of technique, which makes it possible for assistants to perform much of this labor in the studios of successful artists. Matisse, in contrast, has not resolved these issues prior to beginning work on the painting. Instead, he resolves them as he paints. From his description, he appears to consider the work’s overall balance of color and composition at every moment. Thus, at least theoretically, the painting is in some measure complete at each point in the process of its making.49 Much later in his career Matisse would document these provisional completions photographically, and occasionally he exhibited these photographs with the final painting.50 They show that Matisse’s paintings did not progress from less to more resolved; rather, they were subjected to (sometimes major) changes throughout their creation. Earlier stages were often no more or less finished to an external eye than the final painting, which Matisse presumably felt most effectively expressed the intended emotion. The Impressionist artist’s process also differed notably from that of Matisse. The Impressionist paints records of visual experience, and each of the painter’s marks is intended to create an analog of the painter’s visual experience of the scene. There is (theoretically) no need for the Impressionist artist to evaluate the work in terms of its overall formal equilibrium as it is being painted; it is enough for the artist to work stroke by stroke, accurately recording each color area viewed. As noted above, Matisse explicitly contrasted his mentally engaged working process to that of the Impressionists. He made constant adjustments to bring the work into conformity with a preexisting conception that would express his feelings; each stage thus required evaluation in relation to the work’s intended purpose. All About Process

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There is another key difference between Matisse’s description of his goals and that of previous artists. For the academic artist the goal was the subject of the artwork, be it an imagined death of Socrates or a still life painted from an array of real objects. Structural harmony was an important ingredient, but it was a subsidiary technical objective. The artist’s working process was geared to create an appropriate naturalistic painting of a given subject. Realist and Impressionist artists likewise worked to produce paintings of specific scenes. Their broad goal was accurate naturalistic representation of their subject. Matisse, in contrast, abandoned naturalism as an objective and replaced it with his own feeling of compositional harmony and expressive adequacy. Subject matter is described almost as an afterthought when Matisse briefly mentions his desire to avoid “troubling and depressing subject matter,” and his belief that the human figure allows him to best express his “nearly religious feeling” toward life. Far more important to him is his claim that the forms and colors of Giotto’s frescoes provoke appropriate feelings in him before he knows what scenes they represent. (This notion would soon be taken up by the formalist critic and theorist Clive Bell as “significant form,” which he defined as the universal sign of great art that requires no knowledge of subject or tradition to appreciate, merely a native sensitivity to form comparable to a good ear for music.)51 The painting’s subject—and a Matisse painting always has a naturalistic subject—has become largely a pretext, a touchstone for the artist’s working process. It prompts the artist’s work, but it does not serve as a model in any usual sense. Matisse does not analyze the figure and scene in order to make an accurate record of its appearance. He consults his feelings as he looks at the canvas and at the scene it represents; his work as a painter consists of “condensing” forms to “essential line,” of using color to provoke equivalents to the emotional experiences he has when perceiving the scene. This describes a key step in the modernist development of nonrepresentational art, the beginning of the rupture between a painting’s subject and its representation in the painting. Matisse’s approach shows the influence of scientific studies of the relations between emotions and color and form. Although Matisse specifically rejected the direct equivalencies used by the Neo-Impressionists, such connections made it possible to conceive an art that could communicate emotion directly through formal elements. This opened up altogether new approaches to understanding the artist’s labor as well as changing the notion of what constituted a successful artwork. To communicate emotion Matisse uses a process reliant on intuition and feeling. The artist is the first test case for the success of the work—if it conveys

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the desired emotion to him then it may be presumed to do so for others. Even more important than the artist’s task of communicating emotion directly through form is the artist’s close attention to his own working process. As the significance of the artwork’s ostensible subject dwindles, the work becomes increasingly self-referential, and the artist is able to justify his labor in the terms of the labor itself. That labor consists primarily of the thoughtful evaluation of the emotional effects of every change in the artwork’s form. Matisse effectively created a reliable formula to justify the value of all paintings created in accordance with his process: they are the expression of the artist’s feelings for the subject, and the choices made in their creation are intuitive given that feeling cannot be subjected to external rules. A problem raised by this stress on the artist’s intuitive personal expression and lack of rules was that it nullified fixed standards of artistic evaluation. This was far from being Matisse’s intention, but his text represented an important step in the detachment of modern art from the educational systems and institutions that had previously served to set standards and procedures for artists. This was often viewed as liberating and productive, but it raised a number of problems in terms of the education of artists and the evaluation of artworks. These problems have most often been addressed in terms of the modernist requirement of originality, which becomes an increasingly significant issue in twentieth-century art criticism and theory, but they appear initially in the embrace of un- or anti-theoretical emotional expression. The moment that expression becomes both the artist’s motivation and the artist’s goal, no objective standards can be consistently applied. All that may be termed a means of evaluation is an assessment of the artist’s sincerity—as indicated most often by consistent devotion to creating a type of work over the course of many years.52 Matisse did not intend to create a free-for-all in the realm of modern art production. He wrote “Notes of a Painter” in response to a specific situation, and his emphasis on intuition and expression was primarily intended to refute accusations that he was an overly theoretical and inhuman painter. His own work was anchored in sound academic discipline and technical training, and his goals were often traditional, most notably his insistence on the classical values of beauty, purity, and harmony. His own aesthetic expression was constrained by these values, and his mastery of naturalistic representation served as a foundation for his ability to discover “essential” lines and forms. The extent to which he assumed such a foundation was necessary for liberated expression became evident when he ran his own art school. He All About Process

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discovered that many of his students had little understanding of anatomy and were unable to draw the human body, so he instituted figure study sessions for them.53 Intuitive self-expression was by no means all that was required to create successful artworks in Matisse’s view. An important corollary to the modern expressive artist’s requisite skills is the ability of the critic or connoisseur to evaluate the modern artist’s work. Successful modern art critics relied on their claim to be able to distinguish qualitative differences in artists’ self-expressive works. Christian Zervos, editor of the highly influential modern art magazine Cahiers d’Art, promoted the superiority of Matisse and Picasso based on the artists’ technical mastery, which he claimed was evident in even a single drawn line.54 This became an enduring cliché—the great masters of modern art had strong foundations in academic technical skills, and this gave them the ability to create innovative modern works. The knowledgeable viewer can discern not only the mark of genius but also the beneficial effects of traditional technical mastery in the most untraditional artworks. Such convictions have a basis in truth, but they often became unproven, and unprovable, assertions. Critical evaluation relates directly to the conception of the modern artist’s process and its relation to the artwork, most particularly to the problem of establishing and regulating qualitative distinctions. What is to distinguish a successful artist’s work from that of the unsuccessful, or the professional artist from the amateur? If beginning in the nineteenth century artists need only record their unique “way of seeing,” how was success or, more urgently, failure to be determined? Some technical skills were required while naturalism remained an expectation, but once that barrier had been breached and it became a matter of expressing feeling, even the minimal requirement of reasonably accurate rendering was no longer evidently necessary. What were the signs in an artwork that would reveal the artist’s success when there were no standard operating procedures? The implicit answer most often made to this problem was that there were still fundamental requirements, the real artists met them, and the true connoisseurs could see that they had done so. If you needed to ask for further information you were not in a position to understand. That many things contributed to create successful modern artists’ reputations other than the quality of their work is unquestionable, but the fact remains that the only publicly acknowledged justification for artistic success was the artist’s ability as revealed by the quality of his or her work. Quality—whose work had it and whose eye could instantly perceive it—was the basis of artistic value. Those unable to perceive it were, as Clive Bell wrote, like a tone-deaf person at a concert, and given the social and cultural

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cachet of the arts there were surely many unwilling to admit to the insensitivity of their aesthetic perceptions. Matisse’s famous desire to create art that soothes “mental workers,” businessmen and men of letters, also presents the artist’s role in a somewhat ambiguous position regarding his creative invention. Matisse situates himself in relation to contemporary society as a provider of pleasure and relaxation to the (implicitly middle-class and urban) male intellectual worker. In doing so he seems to define himself as a craftsman or decorator, an artisan whose final product is largely determined in advance both in broad terms and in specific details. While balance and purity are goals in keeping with a long tradition of Western art and aesthetics that served as a basis of French academic theory and instruction, Matisse omits the more elevated goals of academic art, most notably moral instruction and the accompanying representation of exalted and edifying actions and individuals. In the modern world the artist’s role is merely to serve people who can afford artworks and who want to occupy leisure time with pleasant and restful sights. Given such a social role, all that seems to be required of the artist is a developed technique and sensibility for aesthetic expression in a given medium. Matisse’s formulation of his working process may be grouped with a broad Postimpressionist tendency to stress a more resolved, objective, and unified approach to the artist’s labor. In keeping with widespread efforts to solidify the modern artist’s project, Matisse also specified a significant role for the modern artist as a creator of socially useful products. This role is comparable to that espoused by the Arts and Crafts movement, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, also hoped to ameliorate the toll that modern life and labor took on society. This will be a long-enduring theme, and modern art will be repeatedly cited as contributing to the improvement of human life in the face of the debility inflicted by modern industrial society. In the late nineteenth century there was a general preoccupation with worker fatigue and a pervasive fear that modern life disregarded the body’s needs and exhausted the health of the population.55 Nervous fatigue and neurasthenia, both terms used to describe an incapacity for sustained effort, were common complaints; according to Charles Féré, a prominent French physician of the era, they prompted people to indulge in luxuries, excitement, and physical pleasures.56 By describing his art as intellectually soothing, Matisse claimed he could contribute to the health of the population, and more than that, he implied that his art could reconnect the intellectual worker with the fundamental rhythms of life by means of the natural rhythms of art. Féré considered the rhythms of the body to be the root of all art and All About Process

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aesthetic pleasure; according to him, art “corresponds to the great laws of life, of rhythm, of symmetry. All art obeys these laws.”57 Thus, while it might appear that Matisse’s goals for his art were modest, they were allied with prominent contemporary social issues. In “Notes of a Painter” modern art is implicitly therapeutic, and in contrast to the overworked businessman the modern artist’s labor is natural and intuitive. It allows for self-expression and the creation of beautiful, harmonious objects that have healing effects. Modern art is firmly associated with leisure and relaxation, both directly in terms of the pleasure that it gives to nonworking hours and less directly in the implied association between the artist’s work and pleasant occupation.58 Amateur painting was well established as a popular pastime by the early twentieth century, and Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” helped to refine and reinforce popular notions regarding the desirability and satisfactions of an artistic labor closely aligned with intuitive self-expression. These notions are, of course, markedly opposed to modern artists’ own insistence that they worked very hard.

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4 New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process

Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” provided an enduring template for a basic understanding of the modern artist’s process of creating an artwork as a constantly negotiated balance between abstract formal requirements and expressive concerns. Not all modern artists followed directly in Matisse’s footsteps, but his description of his own creative process is very useful for conceptualizing a wide range of artists’ working processes in the first half of the twentieth century. Modern artists gave differing weights to the degrees of control, harmony, and self-expression in their works, but their working processes generally involved negotiating these elements to a satisfactory, albeit often provisional, conclusion. There are, however, elements of the modern artist’s process not addressed by Matisse that are crucial for understanding its conceptualization and broader significance. These include the ways in which the modern artist’s process was conceived as a temporal activity; its relation to new modes of industrial production; the importance of the artist’s labor as a specifically manual process engaged with material production; and the ways in which modern conceptions of the artist’s process affected the education of artists and subsequently the art they produced.

The Artist’s Labor in Time: Series and Stages

In addition to conceptions of the artist’s process pertaining to the creation of individual artworks, it is important to consider the artist’s process over time and how it has been understood in relation to the artist’s oeuvre as a whole or in part. The temporal aspect of the modern artist’s process was an enduring concern, particularly for artists who conceived their work in terms of an ongoing developmental or evolutionary process. Serial production was

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a common strategy used by many modern artists to give temporal structure to their working process. A series of works devoted to the same subject or issue could not only reveal its different aspects, as in Monet’s series of poplars, haystacks, and images of Rouen Cathedral, it could also display the artist’s work as a progressive development. The most striking series produced by modern artists are those that show the artist’s road to nonrepresentational art, notably those of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. Each of these artists conceived their path to nonobjective painting as a spiritual journey with great relevance for humankind, thereby giving their artistic labor a significant social and spiritual dimension. These artists’ work was framed as a struggle for liberation from the physical world, and the seriousness of this struggle is attested to by its duration, comprising many years of devotion to carefully considered, diligent production. The modern artist’s series of works is interesting to consider in relation to the traditional academic process, in which a number of studies and sketches of various types lead up to a final major work. The preliminary stages were of interest to those, usually artists themselves, who wish to see the artist’s working procedures; preliminary works were exhibited to the public and valued by knowledgeable collectors. Generally, however, prior to the nineteenth century artists created works in series to be exhibited as a group when they created a narrative cycle such as the Stations of the Cross or the Rake’s Progress. Monet’s series paintings, which show the same subjects under different atmospheric and light conditions, may be related to the traditional cycle of images representing the seasons, although these do not typically show the same scene for each season. More significant than the consistency of Monet’s subjects is the degree to which his series paintings are intended to represent the artist’s individual acts of looking and painting in time. Well-known accounts of Monet’s working process describe how he worked on a painting only as long as the light conditions were appropriate, and when they had shifted he would turn his attention to another painting in the series. The series thus not only gives a temporal portrait of its subject, Rouen Cathedral as transformed by the moving sun and changing weather, it also presents a concrete record of the artist’s labor in time. Monet’s series works are often linked to trends associated with Symbolist developments that also affected the Postimpressionist painters, most notably in terms of their increasing abstraction.1 They may also be seen in this context in terms of the greater systematization of the painter’s working process as discussed above with regard to Neo-Impressionism. This systematization, as well as the notable restriction of subject matter in the series

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paintings, allowed Monet to develop his focus and to explore the nuances of his perceptual activity in more precise detail. Monet’s series works are exemplary of a shift in the modern artist’s activity as it develops from an approach largely derived from traditional painting methods and products to a more self-conscious and considered attitude toward the artist’s labor. A series like Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings raises interesting issues about the artist’s work and its relation to the artist’s products that are relevant to much modern art. First, the series needs to be considered in relation to more traditional approaches to the production of multiple works on the same subject. Monet’s works are not copies, duplicates of the same image; they are, rather, variations on a theme. What distinguishes them from the work of a successful still-life painter like Claesz or Chardin who produces a group of paintings of the same objects in slightly different configurations in order to satisfy the market for his work? And what distinguishes them from Monet’s own earlier paintings of bathers at La Grenouillère? One difference is a greater consistency of subject; there is minimal rearrangement of the composition. Also distinct from the works of an artist who paints very slightly different works to satisfy the market is the fact that Monet exhibited many of the Rouen Cathedral paintings as a group. He wanted viewers to see them together and to be able to study the differences in paintings of the exact same subject. If the goal were merely to satisfy a market demand there would be no advantage to exhibiting the works together, as their uniqueness would be diminished in the eyes of collectors, resulting in lower prices for each work. As it transpired, the Rouen Cathedral paintings sold at very high prices.2 This is not, however, simply a matter of art market economics. Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings are valuable as part of a series because of the way they were created, and because of what was by then widely known about the artist’s working process. Each painting was intended as the index of a temporal moment, what Monet perceived at a given point in time;3 this was key to the painting’s significance. The subject was largely a pretext for the artist’s work; it became a signifier for Monet by simple repetition. A similar effect was achieved in retrospect by Cézanne and his many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire as well as those of apples. Thus a certain type of modern artist becomes identified with an intensive focus on a simple subject. Such artists’ work explores the seemingly infinite nuances of representing that subject, wherein each variation has meaning, which is another difference from multiples or copies, where variations are of no particular importance. Multiples and copies also decrease the value of each individual work, while the variations on a theme explored by the modern artist creates a series that All About Process

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reveals the artist’s development, or at least transformations, through time. Each moment may have equal value in relation to its significance. No single work has priority as an original. The series of images recording changes in time was a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by the widely reproduced photographic images of figures in motion by Muybridge, Marey, and Anschutz, as well as early forms of cinematic equipment such as the zoetrope. In painting a series of works showing the changes in the visual appearance of a subject over time, Monet does not merely adopt a popular conceptual format for representing a subject; he also displays the artist’s labor as never ending. There is no completion of an action, no narrative resolution, only the infinite potential of recording the endless variations of appearance. Each moment is of equal interest. On one level the lesson of Monet’s later work, and Cézanne’s as well, is that the representational artist’s process is infinite, restricted only by the painter’s own limitations. A single simple subject provides enough impetus to work for a lifetime. This work is not mere repetition; the successful modern artist is the one whose resources allow for constant variation and development. Resolutions are only temporary; one image in the series may be brought to fulfillment, but it also serves as a stepping-stone for the next one. It might be argued that the later work of Monet and Cézanne is not precisely a new approach to the artist’s labor, but rather a revaluation of it in which the artist’s working process takes a more central position. Formerly, a Chardin still life or a Claude landscape was valued as a product in which the artist’s name served as a sort of trademark or signifier of its quality. These artists created paintings that were dependably excellent in terms of the quality of their craftsmanship. In the case of a Monet or a Cézanne painting, however, the artist’s name is not merely synonymous with the quality of his craftsmanship. These artists’ paintings are inextricably related to the life of the artist as part of their value. To own a Monet or a Cézanne painting is to own a small piece of the consciousness and labor of that artist, the transcription of what he saw and felt at a particular moment in time. While this is true to a degree of all artworks given that they are created by individuals in time, it was not part of the significance of the work in the way that it is for Monet’s and Cézanne’s later works. Awareness of an artwork as signifying a “piece” of the artist’s life is a development of the later nineteenth century. A different set of issues is raised by artists whose work forms developmental or evolutionary series, notably those pioneers on the road to nonrepresentational art. Throughout his career Piet Mondrian stressed the need for

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the public’s awareness of modern art’s evolution in stages leading from realism to pure neoplasticism. For Mondrian these stages represented the most advanced phase of human evolution. The modern artist is the representative of the most advanced spirit of the age, intuitively developing consciousness of the laws and true harmonious nature of pure reality underlying the transitory forms of physical objects. Mondrian saw the artist’s work as more than the making of artworks; it also consisted of developing a rational awareness of discoveries reached intuitively during the process of making art and explaining them to the public.4 In his many texts on art Mondrian adopts a Hegelian view of art and the artist as manifestations of the evolving spirit of times,5 and consequently he has a notable tendency to depersonalize the artist’s activity. Art acts in his writings far more than artists do; artistic movements, rather than individual artists, tend to serve as evolutionary markers. Nevertheless Mondrian does describe his conception of the individual artist’s activity based on his own experiences and working process. As Matisse had done, he consistently stressed the intuitive nature of the artist’s labor; for Mondrian the artist does not work from a preconceived theoretical program but discovers truth through the process of painting: “To those who evolved the new plastic out of naturalistic painting . . . [the truths brought to life by Abstract-Real painting] are irrefutable truths—truths that they became conscious of through the process of working. For them those truths can never be preconceived dogma, since they were arrived at only by way of conclusion.”6 The evolution of Mondrian’s painting from naturalistic representation to abstract purity was the result of a developing process of abstraction, which necessarily occurred over an extended period.7 He repeatedly insisted that his abstraction had its origin in his intuitive engagement as a painter with visible reality: “The execution is of the greatest importance in the work of art; it is through this, in large part, that intuition manifests itself and creates the essence of the work. . . . All that the non-figurative artist receives from the outside is not only useful but indispensable.”8 Beginning with naturalistic representation Mondrian slowly freed himself of individualized personal feeling to discover the universal forces underlying particular reality. This evolutionary process of abstracting from nature is documented in his paintings beginning around 1907 and continuing until the early 1920s, when he arrived at the nonrepresentational schema of right-angled compositions of white, black, and primary colors that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life. During the years of his evolution to pure abstraction Mondrian’s artistic process is notable for its engagement with a much larger goal than the creAll About Process

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ation of individual artworks. Framed in terms of universal human spiritual development, the paintings represent a developmental process intended to be understood as much greater than that of an individual artist. Artistic process for Mondrian (as well as for the other contemporary pioneers of nonrepresentational painting, Kandinsky and Malevich) was a means to achieve spiritual development that would affect all humanity. It is hard, maybe even impossible, to conceive a greater exaltation of the artist’s labor. But even without considering the elevated terms in which Mondrian saw his process, it is distinctive in its orientation toward a specific goal and its progressive evolutionary nature. Once he had achieved “neoplasticism,” however, Mondrian’s artistic process was comparable to that of many other modern artists, such as Matisse, who were engaged with intuitively creating formally resolved and harmonious works. The strong trajectory of Mondrian’s development retrospectively creates a remarkably consistent logic. His first important text, “The New Plastic in Painting,” was published in 1917, several years before he reached the plateau of his own evolution, and it laid out the key points of his art theory. It shows that Mondrian saw his work in terms of evolutionary progress well before it reached its final form. Although he claimed the (modern, neoplastic) artist worked by intuition rather than program, becoming fully conscious of the rationale behind the work only after it was created, this is not altogether accurate. Mondrian was consciously directing his work to ever-greater abstraction, and thus he was necessarily viewing each painting in terms of a larger project that was developing over time. The significance and, indeed, the value of Mondrian’s paintings from 1907 to 1923 is conditioned not by their qualities as individual works, but by their location in the artist’s process, what they represent of his path to “pure plastic.” This is not merely the result of an art historical vantage point reinforced by decades of textbooks on modern art and monographs on Mondrian; it is how Mondrian himself saw and valued the works.9 Mondrian’s artistic process in the developmental evolutionary stage of his career may be seen as a microcosm of modern art as a whole, and not only because the artist himself described it in this way. As we have seen, from the mid-nineteenth century onward modern art was conceived as unfinished and evolving. In his art and theories Mondrian proclaimed both the purpose and the conclusion to this historical process, and he posited that the next stage would be the dissolution of art into life, the aesthetically satisfying environment. Many supporters of modern art shared his views. Clement Greenberg followed Mondrian in his conviction that modern art’s historical

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trajectory led to pure abstraction, as well as the artist’s belief that individual artists’ contributions to this evolution were made intuitively and without predetermined intention. In positing an end to traditional art, separate from life, Mondrian’s views were also aligned with those of the Constructivists in the Soviet Union and certain aspects of Bauhaus thinking, and prefigured key aspects of post-1960s art. It is important then to recognize that Mondrian’s conception of his process, and that of modern artists as a whole, added further depth and dimension to the importance and understanding of the artist’s process. What the modern artist does matters, and it is far from being merely a narrow technical concern of makers of useless commodities. The modern artist’s process reveals and assists in the spiritual development of humanity; it reflects and contributes to the historical evolution of the modern world. Mondrian’s working process necessarily changed once he achieved his pure plastic art. At that point the evolutionary process to which he had been dedicated for over fifteen years reached, if not precisely an end point, at least a plateau from which there would be no more major developments beyond the theoretical projection of the end of painting at some future date.10 Nothing indicates, though, that the achievement of a pure plastic art raised difficulties for Mondrian’s working process. He seems to have painted contentedly, exploring the infinite variations of his highly restricted approach for the remaining twenty-plus years of his life. In fact, he addressed the change directly: “Generally, once the artist finds the plastic expression proper to himself, he does not push it any further—as it was possible to do until the present. But in Neo-Plastic this is no longer possible because NeoPlastic is the limit of plastic expression. . . . In Neo-Plastic the question is to perfect the work. . . . Although Neo-Plastic remains within its aesthetic limits, Neo-Plastic work can appear in different ways, varied and renewed by the personality of the artist to which it owes its strength.”11 On one level the ease with which Mondrian shifted from a focus on progressive evolution to exploration of a highly restricted range of options attests to the artist’s intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction with the conclusion of his evolutionary development. On another level the shift in approach is remarkable in that it required what seems to be a radical change in the artist’s own conception of his working process and goal. He appeared to transform himself from a seeker to something closer to a craftsman as defined by R. G. Collingwood, a maker with a comparatively fixed conception of his intended product. Mondrian’s work became engaged solely with manipulating his discovered means to a consistent goal—the attainment of harmony, or “equilibrium,” the term he All About Process

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preferred. In his view this equilibrium was, and always had been, the goal of art, and with the new plastic art it was now clearly visible rather than cloaked in representational forms. An intriguing insight into Mondrian’s attitudes toward his process was given by Carl Holty, who described Mondrian working on his late Boogie Woogie paintings in New York. When he saw that the paintings were constantly changing he was dismayed at the loss of so many beautiful compositions, and he asked Mondrian why he didn’t make a new, different painting for each change. Mondrian replied that he didn’t want paintings, he wanted to find things out.12 This statement reveals that Mondrian, despite his highly restricted means, continued to view his work as a process of discovery. The product, however carefully finished, was merely an instance of his work and not a final goal. To a degree this attitude is explicable in terms of Mondrian’s acute awareness of the very limited appreciation for his art. From the beginning of his evolutionary journey to pure plastic art he had to produce marketable art in addition to what he considered his important work in order to support himself. His neoplastic work was labor undertaken solely out of personal interest and conviction. It was thus doubly pure, free of naturalistic form and free of commercial worldly expectations. General public awareness of the artistic process increased during the 1930s, prompted by more detailed information and discussion of how modern artists worked. Articles on modern art brought the reader into close proximity to the stages of the artist’s creative process. From its inception in 1926 Cahiers d’Art, the leading French magazine devoted to modern art, was committed to the presentation of modern artists’ work, and regularly published the most recent productions of leading artists, particularly Matisse and Picasso, in extensive layouts.13 These presentations were often made in the context of textual debates on Surrealist automatism that explicitly addressed the artist’s means and the creative processes appropriate to the creation of successful modern artworks.14 In Cahiers d’Art detailed documentation of the work of the masters of modern art was intended to demonstrate both their inspired development and the creative control and technical achievements that were the foundation of their art. The magazine’s editor, Christian Zervos, also published Picasso’s catalogue raisonné between 1932 and 1978. These presentations of living artists’ work allowed readers to witness the artists’ processes and creative development. They also affected artists, who became increasingly self-conscious of their own work processes. Jeffrey Weiss has discussed the ways the catalogue raisonné project affected Picasso; the artist began to date all his works, and he also seems to have

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begun to work faster, often producing several works a day, as well as emphasizing the formal effects of rapid creation.15 Such changes suggest a selfconscious effort to present himself as an inspired and fecund creator, possibly one who works automatically. Cahiers d’Art’s reproductions of living artists’ most recent works portrayed the modern artist as a constant laborer, someone exploring a theme or idea over and over in slight variations. Individual works were presented as part of a series and yet significant in themselves. They were printed in large format on consecutive single pages, even when the works were small, rapidly created sketches made on vacation. Such reproductions enhanced the value of modern artists’ work while promoting the image of the modern artist as a tireless worker always engaged in the creative process of exploration and elaboration. It was in this context that first Matisse and then Picasso published photographic documentation of stages of their work in progress.16 Matisse began having photographs taken of the creation of his paintings in the mid1930s, and eight stages of his Large Reclining Nude of 1935 were published in Roger Fry’s monograph on the artist that same year.17 Matisse’s assistant later stated that Matisse wanted to document each “significant stage” of provisional completion before he discovered an imperfection that would lead him to revise the painting the following day.18 He continued to document his paintings in this manner for the remainder of his career. The photographs were published on several occasions and were exhibited with the final paintings in the 1940s. Matisse stated that he wished to exhibit the photographs of the stages of his paintings in 1945 to show younger artists how hard he worked, and it is now well known that he took many months to complete some of his paintings.19 What appears to be a simple, rapidly executed painting was in fact often the result of extended labor and multiple revisions. The photographic documentation of Matisse’s paintings indicates that the painter’s process remained consistent with what he had described in his 1908 “Notes of a Painter.” Although the first stage seems successful, the artist does not accept it as fully expressing his thought. Each stage appears plausibly finished in accordance with his stated belief that a painter must maintain the overall harmony of the painting throughout the painting process. The different stages also show the artist sacrificing accurate naturalistic depiction for pictorial expression. There is, however, no consistent progress from one stage to the next—neither the traditional progress from loose sketch to finely finished work, nor a consistent reversal of this approach, although some viewers have claimed to see the latter as the overriding principle. It is true that often the first stages of the painting have the most natuAll About Process

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ralistic detail, and subsequent stages eliminate detail in favor of a more broad treatment of the subject. This is in keeping with Matisse’s description of his process of condensing the subject to its essential lines in order to make it more effective in communicating his sensations.20 But this is not by any means the painter’s sole concern, and many stages of the work show marked alterations in tone, design, and likely color as well (though the photographs are monochromatic), not a progressive distillation. In 1936 Matisse made a statement that attests to the continuity of his process as he had described it in 1908:

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The reaction of each stage is as important as the subject. For this reaction comes from me and not from the subject. It is from the basis of my interpretation that I continually react until my work comes into harmony with me. Like someone writing a sentence, rewrites it, makes new discoveries. . . . At each stage, I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find a weakness in the whole, I find my way back into the picture by means of the weakness . . . and reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again and as each element is only one of the component forces. . . . The whole can be changed in appearance but the feeling still remains the same. . . . Basically the expression derives from the relationships.21 As the photographs of the states of his paintings show, Matisse’s labor follows no easily described path. The changes to his paintings reflect his own idiosyncratic requirements and cannot be reduced to a formula or program. In this very lack of a definable program they provide an example of a creative process, the artist’s labor that follows no rules but those dictated by the artist’s own feelings. Perhaps even more important, they show, as Matisse intended them to, how hard the artist works to achieve his goals. The artist’s difficult labor was a persistent theme for Matisse, who wrote in 1935, “I have always believed that a large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which the artist wages with his limited medium.”22 In displaying the signs of that struggle Matisse contributed to a broad midcentury effort to place the artist’s process at the center of artistic significance. Matisse described the exhibition of the stages of his work as didactic, and it is certainly instructive regarding the artist’s working process. The presentation of the photographs of earlier stages with the final work, however, raises complex issues regarding the nature of the completed artwork. An insistence on resolution and pictorial harmony is a constant throughout New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process

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Matisse’s career, as is the implication that an artwork is finished when it accurately expresses the artist’s feeling. Equally important, however, is the artist’s ongoing exploration of different solutions to a given pictorial project. This is evident in his long-term engagement with specific subjects, his tendency to make different versions of the “same” painting, and his late-career preoccupation with recording the different stages of his work through photographic documentation. There is in the end no solution, no resolution, no final work, just an ongoing and laborious process. Matisse himself seems to have become increasingly aware of this later in his career as he displayed his process to the public. In the brochure for the large 1945 Galerie Maeght exhibition of six paintings accompanied by framed photographs of their multiple stages he was quoted as saying, “Every time I’ve done something successfully, I say to myself, ‘that’s it, I’ve got it, I understand’; but no, nothing has been learned. The conclusion of a picture is another picture.”23 This conception of the artist’s labor as a never-ending process will become central to modern art in the ensuing decade. Matisse was the first important modern artist to have the stages of his painting published, but Picasso soon followed his lead. Picasso had used photography in his work beginning around 1900,24 but he does not appear to have documented states of works in progress until the 1930s. His first publication of an in-progress drawing was an illustration accompanying a 1935 interview in Cahiers d’Art in which the artist stated, “It would be very interesting to preserve photographically, not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream. But there is one very odd thing—to notice that basically a picture doesn’t change, that the first ‘vision’ remains almost intact.”25 Like Matisse, Picasso stresses the importance of the artist’s initial conception as a guiding force in the creation of a work. However, Picasso’s statement is also imbued with Surrealist ideas regarding the painter’s image as the transcription of a dream, and consequently he downplays the artist’s creative labor as manifested through the metamorphoses of the picture. Picasso’s working process, when later documented, is notably different from that of Matisse. It is more traditional in revealing the artist progressing from a less complete to a more finished final work. The presentation of the creative processes of the leading masters of modern painting thus revealed two very different methods of working: one that used constant revision to achieve an aesthetic goal, and one that demonstrated a cumulative progression to a final product.

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Although Matisse preceded Picasso in publishing states of his work in progress, Dora Maar’s photographs of Picasso’s creation of Guernica became the emblematic images of a modern artwork in the process of creation. Eight stages of Guernica were published in Cahiers d’Art in July 1937. Many more working images, studies, and later developments were subsequently published, culminating in Rudolf Arnheim’s 1962 psychological study Picasso’s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting.26 The political significance and ambitious scale of Guernica made its fame inevitable in the context of modern art, which very rarely produced works that met the requirements of traditional masterpieces. The documentation of its creation served as the ultimate example of the modern artist’s labor to find satisfactory expression of feeling. The painting was, however, unusual for modern art in its attempt to communicate widely shared emotions in response to a tragic public event. Its creation thus was an anomaly, and the staging of its creation for photographic documentation makes it doubtful as an authentic representation of Picasso’s process in general. The published stages of Guernica’s creation were the most explicit attempt to reveal Picasso’s working process until the artist was filmed painting in 1949,27 but Picasso’s creative process had long been the subject of scrutiny. By 1937 his work had been meticulously documented and published for years, and Jeffrey Weiss has discussed how the reproductions of Picasso’s work in the Zervos catalogue raisonné represented “an interpretation of process.”28 By arranging the works sequentially the catalog suggests development and the continuity of the artist’s production. This affected the artist’s perception of his own work; as noted above Picasso began to date everything he produced, suggesting explicit engagement with a temporal view of his labor. Given his great fame it is likely that his entire creative process had long been a self-consciously staged series of events enacted with full awareness of being observed. This would inevitably affect any view of his work as the product of liberated and authentic self-expression. Once the entire creative process becomes an object for observation and analysis its significance undergoes radical changes, an issue that would be taken up directly by subsequent generations of artists. Interest in the modern artist’s process was promoted in the United States beginning in the 1940s, most notably by the magazine ARTnews, which would become a key supporter of the New York school artists. In the 1940s the magazine published several articles on Matisse’s painting process. The first, “Mr. Matisse Paints a Picture: 3 Weeks’ Work in 18 Views,” published

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on a single page in September 1941, reproduced Woman with a Necklace in black and white with seventeen photographs of early stages, all of which were exhibited at the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Museum). The brief unsigned text made a passing comparison to the many alterations of Picasso’s Guernica, also painted in a short period of time. Several articles in the April 1948 issue, published to coincide with the Matisse retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum, also stressed the painter’s working process. Thomas Hess’s article reproduced three photographs of the artist standing and painting murals or a large canvas. This was a distinct choice to emphasize his painting as a physical activity, given that Matisse did not typically work at large scale and usually painted while seated.29 Albert Frankfurter’s article reproduced ten photographs of different states of The Lady in Blue, dated between February and April 1937. The caption for these reproductions reads, “Matisse’s technique is one of continual recreation.”30 This observation neatly coincided with the magazine’s brief review of Willem de Kooning’s first one-man show, in which Renée Arb wrote that his abstractions were “the result of months of sketching and alteration.”31 Years of emphasis on the working processes of the great modern masters had paved the way for a generation of artists whose work would be at least as famous for its process of production as for the artworks produced.

Modern Art and Industrial Processes: Purism

While many modern artists in the early twentieth century echoed Matisse in stressing the expressive and intuitive aspects of their work, others espoused rational modes of artistic production. Among the most prominent of these were Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who developed Purism in the years immediately following World War I. The Purists denigrated idiosyncratic emotional painting and promoted a rationally conceived art that would be executed with a scientifically based technique. They saw their paintings as part of a general mechanical evolution, a process they defined as the progressive development of utilitarian objects to their most efficient and essential forms. Purist paintings both illustrated this evolution and participated in it; they represented standard household objects as essential geometric shapes, while the paintings themselves were precisely designed to communicate harmonious emotions efficiently through mathematical proportions and carefully structured color relationships. Rational preconception was a key component of Purist paintings, and the Purists rejected outdated notions of the artist’s genius in favor of the All About Process

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artist as an industrial artisan. They believed that the modern artist’s quest for originality and genius had resulted in a pernicious loss of technical ability, and they particularly singled out Fauvism for its detrimental influence on modern artists.32 As we have seen, Matisse, the leading Fauve painter, had explicitly described the need for an intelligent and controlled artistic technique in his “Notes of a Painter.” His insistence on the importance of expression and intuition, however, had helped to foster the popular notion that these were the most significant aspects of the artist’s process. The Purists were unrelenting in their critique of the loss of technical rigor among modern artists and unflinching in their embrace of a solution they derived from industrial production processes:

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The habit of painting without preliminary research, under the sway of emotions that we try to express in fits and starts, is too pervasive. We believe, by contrast, that a work should be completely set in the mind; in which case technical realization is merely the rigorous materialization of the conception, almost a matter of fabrication. In this way the shocking approximations found in so many works of the period, their tentative, bristly, or febrile craftsmanship, will be avoided. . . . In sum, artists who analyze like scientists will advance farther. . . . Painters should propose constructions that are as clear as geometry. . . . Nothing being left to chance. Chance is what art casts out.33 The Purists believed that aligning artistic production with the progressive achievements of modern technology, science, and industry was the means to create a properly modern art. Like all modern achievements, art production should rationally maximize its outputs for optimal efficiency. The adoption and promotion of the attitudes and processes of industrial technology in the production of art represented a radical about-face in modern art theory. While there was a precedent in the employment of scientific theories of optics and color by Neo-Impressionists, modern art theory was dominated overwhelmingly by the embrace of broadly Romantic attitudes that stressed individualism, emotion, inspiration, and originality. These attitudes were implicitly, and often explicitly, conceived as countering the inhuman values associated with modern industrialization. The qualities and values Ruskin had associated with art and modern technology in the midnineteenth century endured and changed very little—that is, until they were directly challenged in the 1910s. The first challenge was offered by the Futurists, who embraced industrialization along with violence; both were conceived New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process

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romantically and vaguely as means to destroy the weight of the past and its failures and to usher in a new era of promise. With Purism (and also Russian Constructivism), though, the romantic values of the past were abandoned, and what was once perceived as the inhumanity of industrial production was reconceived as the most effective means to realize a truly modern, efficient, and ideal world. One corollary to this shift in attitude is an embrace of collective values over the individual. For the Purists and many others the artist’s individual aesthetic sensitivity is instrumental to artistic creation; it is not, however, in itself the purpose of artistic creation. The individual artist serves society. The Purists modeled their conception of the artist as a collective worker on the organization of modern factory workers in the production process. In their magazine L’Esprit Nouveau they published admiring articles about Taylorism, the industrial organization strategies invented by Frederick Taylor, which were widely employed in American factories.34 Like Taylor, the Purists saw scientific efficiency as a means for restructuring not just industry but society as a whole. Ozenfant and Jeanneret acknowledged the historical critiques of industrial labor, and proposed a counterargument in which the fragmentation of the industrial labor process and the alienation of the worker from his product is redeemed by his pride in the products created by collective labor: Today, it must be acknowledged, mass production methods imposed by the machine effectively hide from the worker the final result of his efforts. However, thanks to the rigorous programs of modern factories, manufactured products are so perfect that they give labor teams cause for collective pride. A worker who has executed only a single isolated component understands the interest of his labor; the machines covering the factory floor make him perceive power and clarity, make him feel at one with work of such perfection that his mind alone would never have dared even aspire to it. This collective pride replaces the old artisanal spirit by elevating it to more general ideas. This transformation seems to us an advance; it is an important factor in modern life.35 According to the Purists, modern industrial society, regulated by science and mathematical principles, was positioned to realize the eternal ideals of classical Greece in the creation of a perfect, healthy, rational, and harmonious environment and society. Purist art was to be the decorative analog to this rational perfection, and its production was the result of careful preconcepAll About Process

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tion. The Purists believed that mathematical harmony provided the highest form of human aesthetic satisfaction, and thus by implication that the Purist artist in the process of creating mathematically harmonious designs was experiencing great pleasure. The Purist artist’s pleasure was theoretically limited to the conceptual stage of the painting; its physical creation was simple manual labor comparable to that of a builder following an architect’s plan. In this, Purism embraced the much-critiqued division of industrial labor between management and the worker, the mental and the physical. The individual artist is a microcosm of the industrial production process—and as in that process, the highest value is placed on management, the brains of the factory, while manual skills are relatively negligible. The Purists likewise conceived aesthetic satisfaction in a limited manner, largely discounting the physical and material in favor of the mental and conceptual. Their valorization of mind over material in the creative process was, however, notably distinct from their contemporaries associated with Constructivism and the Bauhaus. Although similarly engaged with geometric abstraction and developing a rational approach to creative production appropriate for modern industrial society, both the Constructivists and the Bauhaus artists and designers made physical materials a central concern. They did not situate their endeavors in relation to a disembodied ideal of pure mathematical harmony as the Purists did; rather, they sought to establish greater sensitivity to, and consciousness of, the physicality of creative work and to make this awareness central to the artist’s working process. Among the major shifts represented by modern art in relation to its predecessors are not only the shift away from conceiving and evaluating the fine arts of painting and sculpture in terms of naturalistic representation and the reconceptualization of the artist’s process, but also the related change in attitudes toward the artist’s materials. Previously considered merely instrumental material vehicles for the artist’s conception, and as such fully understood and attended to only by the trained artist/artisan, the artist’s materials increasingly took center stage as the physical manifestation of the artist’s process. Maurice Denis’s 1890 formalist statement that prior to representation a painting is “a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” directly called attention to the importance of the painter’s medium. Matisse’s 1908 “Notes of a Painter” provided a more detailed account of the central significance of the modern painter’s means. The increasing valorization of the artist’s means as a complex mode of signification rather than a transparent vehicle for a preexisting message created a

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new field of operation for the artist. Not only did it allow for a wider latitude of approaches to traditional media, it also became possible to consider the signifying potential of nontraditional media, the most famous of which is the introduction of collage into the arena of the modern fine arts. The elevated status of the fine arts traditionally depended on their intellectual and immaterial qualities and carefully ignored the fundamental reality that artists work (hard) with physical materials that are often messy and intractable. The Purists’ dedication to the ideal and conceptual character of their paintings, and their devaluation of the painter’s physical labor, is the exemplary modern instantiation of a long tradition with roots in the values of ancient Greece. Unlike earlier intellectually oriented approaches, however, the Purists were working in the context of the new modern developments that began in the nineteenth century. These developments included novel approaches to valorizing art that emphasized the artist’s labor and material techniques, as well as new understandings of the purpose and meaning of art that replaced moral education and spiritual uplift with more pragmatic physical and emotional goals. Matisse conceived the painter’s role as providing therapeutic relaxation to the modern bourgeois worker, and this paralleled the social goals of the Arts and Crafts movement. Even the idealist Purists considered art as a means to create a salubrious material environment that actively promoted the health of its occupants. Their ideal harmonious paintings were intended to be instrumental and efficient, qualities that depend on physicality. They also depicted the ideal modern shapes of ceramics and glassware that they claimed had evolved to their most pure and efficient form through centuries of use. Thus, although the Purists ignored the materiality of painting as a craft in their theoretical texts, the subjects of Purist paintings were physical objects designed to be perfectly adapted to manual use. Furthermore, Purist paintings were designed, often very specifically, to complement and decorate modern homes, contributing to the healthy and harmonious modern environment.

Physicality and Matter: The Modern Artistic Process and the Artist’s Medium

After the dissolution of Purism in 1925 both Ozenfant and Jeanneret turned their attention to an often-aggressive engagement with tactility and the physicality of materials. In this they were in accord with the reigning attitude of the period, which is marked by artistic preoccupations with the physical and material. From the heavy painterliness of expressive modern painting, commonly denominated art vivant,36 to the more radical concerns of the All About Process

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Surrealists, modern artists in the later 1920s and 1930s were engaged with material physicality. This is evident in styles that emphasized the materiality of paint and other materials employed by the artist, and in themes that stressed the brute physicality of the earth and the (often overtly sexualized) human body.37 One of the most significant considerations of the period’s preoccupation with art’s materiality is Henri Focillon’s 1934 book The Life of Forms in Art, which declared the paramount importance of the physicality of art: “A work of art is not the outline or graph of art as activity; it is art itself. . . . Art is made up, not of the artist’s intentions, but of works of art. . . . In order to exist at all, a work of art must be tangible. . . . It is in this very turning outward that its inmost principle resides.” “Without matter art could not exist.”38 For Focillon art is the metamorphosis of forms, and he considered the artist’s process as a key to understanding the concrete artwork. He stated that the study of technical phenomena allows “entrance to the heart of the problem, by presenting it to us in the same terms and from the same point of view as it is presented to the artist. . . . In viewing technique as a process and trying to reconstruct it as such, we are given the opportunity of going beyond surface phenomena and of seeing the significance of deeper relationships” (36). Focillon is careful to distinguish basic craft techniques (which he calls craft) from the specific creative processes that create artworks (which he calls technique). He likens the latter to biological development and claims that the artist’s technique goes beyond the limitations of craft—often, in Focillon’s view, as a result of attempting to make one medium produce the effects of another. Focillon not only emphasizes the literally physical, he also defines the artist’s thought as fundamentally an activity of forming. All mental processes are, according to Focillon, formal activity: “The mind is a design that is in a state of ceaseless flux, of ceaseless weaving and then unweaving, and its activity, in this sense, is an artistic activity” (44). What the artist does is develop “the very technique of the mind” in material form. Indeed, the artist thinks in material form: “In the mind it [form] is already touch, incision, facet, line, already something molded or painted, already a grouping of masses in definite material. It is not, it cannot be, abstract. As such, it would be nothing. It calls importunately for the tactile and the visual” (46). Focillon lays great stress on the importance of the artist’s touch, which he defines as the meeting point of form, matter, tool, and hand. Touch imbues the artwork with the quality of life. His 1936 essay “In Praise of Hands” further developed his belief in the importance of touch for the artist: “Art is made by the hands.

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They are the instrument of creation, but even before that they are an organ of knowledge. . . . [The artist] touches, he feels, he reckons weight, he measures space, he molds the fluidity of atmosphere to prefigure forms in it, he caresses the skin of all things. With the language of Touch he composes the language of Sight” (70). The essential nature of touch, its foundational importance for the human species, is a point Focillon reiterated as he described the artist as a link to the origins of man: “The artist, carving wood, hammering metal, kneading clay, chiseling a block of stone, keeps alive for us man’s own dim past. . . . Is it not admirable to find living among us in the machine age this determined survivor of the ‘hand age’? . . . In the artist’s studio are to be found the hand’s trials, experiments, and divinations, the age-old memories of the human race which has not forgotten the privilege of working with its hands” (71). Gauguin is Focillon’s primary example of the modern man who rejects the abstract preoccupations of the modern office worker, the stockbroker playing with “the void of numbers,” and returns to his basic human desire to work with his hands. In doing so he restored intensity to an overrefined artistic tradition. One of the primary achievements Focillon ascribes to the artist as a hand maker is the ability to exploit the accidental, which he sees as counter to the automatic and mechanical as well as to reason. The artist “takes advantage of his own errors and of his faulty strokes to perform tricks with them . . . he never has more grace than when he makes a virtue out of his own clumsiness.” This must be done almost without thought as an instinctive physical response: “Woe to the slow gesture and to stiff fingers!” (74). The artist’s mind, manual skills, and technical ability are a fully integrated method of creative action that extends beyond the literally physical. The artist thinks in terms of materials and even without touching them is able to create works of art.39 Focillon’s 1936 text reflects contemporary artistic debates, most notably those raised by Surrealist automatism and the development of Surrealist objects, both avenues for exploiting the significance of chance forms and material encounters. Unlike the Surrealists, though, Focillon is directly concerned with the artistic meaning of these occurrences, and he rejects the Surrealist notion of automatism, wherein artists passively transmit inner visions.40 It is the encounter between matter and mind that creates art: “As accident defines its own shape in the chances of matter, and as the hand exploits this disaster, the mind in its own turn awakens. This reordering of a chaotic world achieves its most surprising effects in media apparently unsuited to art, in improvised implements, debris and rubbish whose dete-

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rioration and breakage offer curious possibilities. . . . Such an alchemy does not . . . merely develop the stereotyped form of an inner vision; it constructs the vision itself, gives it body and enlarges its perspectives. The hand is not the mind’s docile slave”(76).41 Prefiguring ideas later developed by MerleauPonty, Focillon locates the artist’s activity as the intersection of the mental and physical, the body and the world: “I separate hands neither from the body nor from the mind. . . . The mind rules over the hand; hand rules over the mind. . . . The creative gesture exercises a continuous influence over the inner life. The hand wrenches the sense of touch away from its merely receptive passivity and organizes it for experiment and action. . . . Because it fashions a new world, it leaves its imprint everywhere upon it” (78). The exalted tone and sweeping universalist claims that characterize Focillon’s text should not obscure the fact that his ideas are deeply engaged with contemporary issues regarding the nature of art and art making. The period between the two world wars is remarkable for its radical reconsiderations of the social role and significance of art and the artist’s labor. Focillon’s claims for the nature of art and art making are in many ways typical of this period and its pervasive concern to identify the fundamental purpose and meaning of art as human creative activity. The attention to the significance of manual manipulation of physical materials so prominent in Focillon’s writing reflects a major trend within early twentieth-century modern art, particularly developments in modern sculpture. Beginning with Gauguin’s engagement with ceramics and sculpture, many modern artists, including Degas, Matisse, and Picasso, turned their attention to new approaches to the creation of three-dimensional artworks. Influenced by the example of non-Western artifacts entering European museums and galleries, modern artists sought to expand their creative identities beyond the limiting parameters of traditional Western art forms. Just as Gauguin had carved decorative panels and created furnishings and pottery in addition to painting, the artists of Die Brücke created sculptures, decorative panels, and woodcuts that reflected their “primitive” identities. Conceiving the roughly worked surfaces and crude carving as indicative of the honesty of their expression, Die Brücke artists claimed the kinship of their works with those created by the artists of African and Oceanic cultures. Their assessment of the significance of these putatively primitive art forms shows the persistence of Ruskin’s notion that crudely carved forms were honest reflections of the artist’s thought uncontaminated by the false refinements of academicism.

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Emile Nolde’s text on the virtues of primitive art is representative of many modern artists’ views:

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We do not care for Raphael, and are less enthusiastic about the statues of the so-called golden age of Greece. Our predecessors’ ideals are not ours. . . . It is the ordinary people who laboured in their workshops and of whose lives scarcely anything is now known . . . that we love and respect today in their plain, large-scale carvings in the cathedrals. . . . Why is the art of primitive peoples not considered art at all? . . . In our own time, every earthenware vessel or piece of jewellery, every utensil or garment, has to be designed on paper before it is made. Primitive peoples, however, create their works with the material itself in the artist’s hand, held in his fingers. They aspire to express delight in form and the love of creating it. Absolute originality, the intense and often grotesque expression of power and life in very simple forms—that may be why we like these works of native art.42 For certain modern artists, classical ideals and the related tradition of divorcing artistic conception from the craftsman’s labor were no longer viable means of creative production. Direct physical engagement with matter is the route to expressive power and originality. Centuries of aesthetic refinement, of making matter reflect the mind, were rejected by the modern artists who embraced the crude physicality of materials as a direct means to express physical and emotional vitality. The modern sculptor’s direct contact with the medium was a marked shift from traditional academic practice. Prior to the revival of direct carving in stone and wood in the early twentieth century, sculptors worked primarily in clay or other malleable media such as plaster or wax to create models and maquettes for final works cast in bronze or carved in marble. Craftsmen, not the artist, created the final physical work of art, which in many instances was refined and polished to a state of ideal perfection or striking realistic representation, rather than displaying the signs of its material construction. Artists were not trained in the casting of bronze or the carving of stone in the academic system, and most were presumably content to maintain their position as the brains behind the manual labor of craftsmen. Given this situation it is hardly surprising that painters made so many major innovations in early modern sculpture. Penelope Curtis has pointed out that the most innovative sculptors working in stone in the early twentieth century came from artisanal backgrounds and peasant roots rather All About Process

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than from art academies and their more intellectual approach to making sculpture.43 In turning their efforts to developing a more direct physical relationship with their work, modern sculptors necessarily made significant changes not only in traditional working processes but also often in the amount of time and labor involved in the creation of individual works. The extremely slow labor of direct stone carving changed what it was possible for a sculptor to achieve in terms of both quantity and quality of work. Whereas sculptors previously took the material of the final work largely for granted—either bronze or (typically) Italian marble—in the early twentieth century direct stone carvers began to investigate the qualities of local stones and to consider their variations as integral to the qualities of the final sculpture. The change in the artist’s process not only changed the types of artworks created, it became one of many new signifiers of the artworks. Whereas previously a sculpture would be evaluated for its design, its conception, and its solution of a representational problem such as a monument, a portrait, or a mythological reference, the modern sculpture was to be evaluated by the artist’s engagement with the medium. Crude carving and simplified forms were the obvious results of honest labor, a loving and sensual attention to a particular piece of stone or wood, which had released its encased figure at the insistent tapping of the artist’s chisel. Modern artists’ embrace of more primitive or elemental approaches to the creation of sculptural and decorative objects was an outgrowth of ideas developed in the context of modern painting and literature, but another important influence was a set of ideas and attitudes developed in the context of design and the decorative arts. Ruskin’s notions were foundational for the broad conception of a more honest, direct form of art making in contrast to the classical and academic system of idealization and intellectual refinement. Supporting those ideas were not only the widespread ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement as promoted by William Morris and others, but also approaches developed within the German system of design education that culminated in the innovative educational programs of the Bauhaus. By the early twentieth century there was a systematic effort to train designers for modern industry in Germany by integrating theory and practice; students not only learned theoretical principles of design but also served apprenticeships to learn professional practices. The growing importance of design, particularly industrial design, in the modern world had enormous effects on thinking about the process of making. Previously, a broad and largely undertheorized distinction had arisen

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between the fine arts and the artisanal crafts, where the former were considered to be founded on more intellectual and conceptual concerns.44 The introduction of modern production techniques, the division of labor in the factory, and the use of machines led to further distinctions. The earliest was the distinction so influentially described by Ruskin between the direct labor of the traditional artisan who implements his own ideas and designs in the hand making of an object and the “slave” labor of the craftsman who makes objects designed by another person. Other significant distinctions between handmade and factory-made objects arose from the differences between the object made by a single individual and the object made by divided labor in a series of steps effected by different individuals. The object made by a single individual revealed knowledge of the material and also displayed the artisan’s pride in the final product, while the object produced by divided labor could not be the result of a full understanding of the material, its working, or pride in production. All of these distinctions led to novel forms of valuing work processes. Handwork, long considered a low form of labor compared to less physical, more intellectual work, acquired significant value in modern industrialized society, not only in terms of art made by professional and amateur artists. The French, for example, faced with the success of German industrial design and production in the late nineteenth century, decided to focus their energies on luxury commodities produced by traditional time-consuming artisanal processes.45 One of the interesting effects the broad social revaluation of working processes had on the art world was an enormous increase in attention to materials. Media for the fine arts had been well established since the later Renaissance, but by the beginning of the twentieth century there were many new additions. Each of these new materials was subjected to careful scrutiny and experimentation. What were the potentials of these new media? How could they be manipulated to expressive ends? Emile Nolde’s emphasis on the modern artist’s appreciation of close contact with materials and their potential for direct expression is exemplary. Even traditional media were reexamined for their expressive potential through direct manipulation. Sophisticated technical processes for realistic representation were ignored or abandoned as modern artists discovered new approaches to the use of oil paint and marble. Long-established processes were broken down to basic components, which were then reexamined from every possible angle. The overall approach to the education of the modern artist became a novel amalgamation of traditional artisanal training in the properties and potentialities of materials, largely acquired through direct experiment, and the much more All About Process

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vaguely defined project of fostering the development of a creative and expressive personality. A key locus for the development of modern artist training and its focus on developing the artist’s sensitivity to materials was the Bauhaus, particularly in its foundations class (Vorkurs), as well as in the focus on a single craft in the workshop training that followed. The Vorkurs, initially conceived by Johannes Itten in 1919 and later largely taught by Joseph Albers, incorporated progressive approaches recently developed for the education of young children.46 Both Itten and Albers had taught elementary school prior to their employment at the Bauhaus, and they used new educational strategies that promoted immediate hands-on experience and direct exploration of materials.47 This was in direct contrast to the emphasis on drawing in traditional academic art instruction. The Bauhaus, which unified two previously separate institutions, an Academy of Fine Art and a School of Arts and Crafts, was not a school for training traditional fine artists; its goal was to train artist-designers who would have the intellectual and creative skills traditionally associated with the fine artist combined with the technical and mechanical knowledge of the industrial designer and artisan. The ultimate goal was the integration of all art forms and the fulfillment of fundamental human and social requirements. The Bauhaus embrace of hands-on experience in the initial “foundation” stages of art education was not an arbitrary import from progressive educational theory; it was part of the assumptions that lay at the basis of modern art. First, it was a natural outgrowth of Ruskinian notions regarding the sincerity and honesty of direct handwork. By emphasizing hands-on experience Bauhaus educators sought a fusion between mind and matter, the reciprocal effects of the artist on the material and the material on the artist. Second, the Bauhaus foundations class reflected prevailing notions that the modern artist needed to rediscover fundamental artistic and emotional truths that had been lost or obscured by an excessively narrow, regimented, and intellectualized Western fine arts tradition. In attempting to return to a state of ignorance and carefully investigating the material properties of a common object—a newspaper, to take one example—the Bauhaus student was led to discover new ways to understand and employ matter. Nothing was taken as given, and such an approach fostered original questions and solutions as well as an attitude of ceaseless exploration. For the designer or architect, an open and creative approach to materials allows for novel and ingenious solutions to given problems. For the modern “fine” artist, however, problems are rarely externally imposed, and

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the Bauhaus foundations approach adopted in almost every artist education program in the West would ultimately become a generator of individual artists’ programs in itself. This is particularly apparent in the work of the first generation of fine artists to be educated in the Bauhaus-derived art programs of American art schools and university art departments. Artists who came to maturity in the 1960s, such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and Josef Albers himself, developed mature work based on Bauhaus foundations exercises that focused on the process of exploring the potential of materials. This points to a much broader and pervasive influence of Bauhaus foundations on the overall conception of the artist’s work. In emphasizing primary forms, colors, and concepts as the basic building blocks for artistic creation the Bauhaus foundations program and its many imitators and offshoots fostered a deeply self-conscious awareness of artistic process in modern artists. Prior to the twentieth century artists were trained to master the skills required to produce specific products, typically representational paintings or sculptures. In the twentieth century previous artistic standards were rejected in favor of originality, primitivism, sincerity, and expression. This presented enormous challenges for anyone attempting to devise an educational system to train modern artists. The Bauhaus foundations course was widely adopted as the most flexible system to develop sensitivity to materials and unrestricted imaginative approaches to employing them. When Itten assigned his students exercises to discover what was essential and contradictory in a material, the project was both specific and abstract; it required a consideration of a given material’s properties but lacked a framework for determining whether an answer was correct. In terms of the open-ended requirements of modern painting and sculpture, sensitivity to materials and analysis of color and form offered a rudimentary vocabulary with little or no direction on how to employ it and to what ends. Facing a lack of external goals or requirements, the modern artist was left with the means and processes of artistic creation as a primary subject and focus of attention. Modern art education focused on developing an abstract approach to conceptualizing what a given material was capable of communicating; it purposely kept open what the artist should communicate or express. Artistic creation was largely conceived as natural, at least for certain individuals, and care was taken not to overeducate would-be artists for fear of blocking or corrupting their individuality. Thus art students were taught a broadly scientific approach to analyzing and experimenting with materials while at the

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same time directed to develop highly personal goals and methods to achieve them. In the difficult position between these contradictory attitudes, artists often developed a quasi-scientific approach to their own processes of creation. This was a logical solution. The modern artist was conceived as the mysterious locus of creative production, which cannot be generalized beyond the individual; it was thus appropriate for artists educated to analyze materials, colors, and primary forms to turn their analytic attention to their own activities; the creative process in itself thus became the ultimate significance of the artist’s work. In 1938 the philosopher R. G. Collingwood published his Principles of Art, a text that outlines an influential philosophy of art as expression.48 It also reflects the common understanding of the modern artist’s process as it had developed over the previous decades. Collingwood began by defining a separation of art from craft, or “the technical theory of art,” based largely on differing processes of production. Collingwood asserted that the craftsperson is wholly concerned with the creation of a predetermined product in which a known end determines the technique or means of production. This is not only true of utilitarian objects such as pots, furniture, and clothing, but also applies to any work created for a specific purpose, be it a poem written to commemorate an event, a commissioned portrait, a play written and produced to entertain, and so forth. In the creation of such works technique is effective; it gets the job done. The artist, by contrast, is engaged in an experiential process of making; unlike the craftsperson, for the artist the means are at least as important as the end product because the artist’s defining act is expression of emotion. In his notion of the artist’s goals and labor Collingwood largely conformed to the influential ideas first thoroughly described in Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” and later generally accepted as fundamental to modern art. The artist’s product is the result of an open-ended engagement with the material, one that fosters a more personal and psychological approach to the creation of the work, which, in turn, becomes an exploration and instantiation of the artist’s feelings. Collingwood believed the specificity of the artist’s emotion was discovered during the process of creating the artwork, and he was careful to distinguish between mere “ranting” or venting of emotion and art that is created “deliberately and responsibly, by people who know what they are doing, even though they do not know in advance what is going to come of it.”49 For Collingwood artistic production is defined by the specific qualities and attitudes of the artist. It is not the act of making a picture, poem, or

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sculpture that determines the making of an artwork, but psychologically and emotionally how and with what intentions the work is created. Art is thus the result of a certain successful process that relies on a very specific mental and emotional engagement with the creation of a product. Collingwood’s discussions of painting as an art are notable for their emphasis on the physicality of the painting process, an approach he acknowledged derived from Bernard Berenson’s views on the importance of tactile values in painting.50 He particularly stressed Cézanne’s painting as representing the experience of touch, not vision: “Cézanne was right. Painting can never be a visual art. A man paints with his hands, not with his eyes. . . . What one paints is what can be painted, no one can do more, and what can be painted must stand in some relation to the muscular activity of painting it” (144–45). Rejecting what he called the nineteenth-century formalist notion that painting can be understood as the arrangement of two-dimensional colored shapes on canvas, Collingwood insisted that the experience of painting (and subsequently the experience of viewing the painting) involved the full range of sensory experience, “an imagined experience of total activity” (149). The education of the artist was not a topic Collingwood addressed at length, but he did briefly refer to it in a way that revealed how he understood the artist’s process: “The watching of his own work with a vigilant and discriminating eye, which decides at every moment of the process whether it is being successful or not, is not a critical activity subsequent to, and reflective upon, the artistic work, it is an integral part of that work itself. . . . What a student learns in art school is not so much to paint as to watch himself painting; to raise the psycho-physical activity of painting to the level of art by becoming conscious of it” (281). For Collingwood the artist’s activity is a formative experience, never a mere technical procedure. In making art the artist learns, and such learning never ceases for the artist since the growth of greater knowledge and understanding is basic to Collingwood’s definition of the artist’s work: “Only a person with experience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how little . . . [you see] compared to what you come to see in it as your painting progresses. . . . A good painter . . . paints things because until he has painted them he doesn’t know what they are like. . . . [For a painter seeing includes tactile values that can be] sensuously apprehended only through muscular motion. . . . It is a comprehensive awareness” (303–4).51 The process of art making is a form of developing self-knowledge, a coming together of physical, mental, and emotional being in relation to the perception of an external object. In this holistic underAll About Process

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standing of the artist’s process Collingwood defined not only what art was, but also how it could be understood as a model for the construction of a fully conscious and experienced mode of living.52 It is this view that lies at the foundation of the inextricable connection often made between the artist’s process and the artist’s life. 111

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5 The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization

Although it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done called for that life. From the very start, Cézanne’s life found its only equilibrium by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary project of his future work . . . a single adventure of his life and work.

—Maurice Merleau- Ponty

In the previous chapters we traced the concept of the artist’s process primarily through its relation to historical conceptions of the artist’s work. What the artist does to produce an artwork and how this labor is conceptualized and valued have been the dominant issues examined thus far. In considering them it is evident that taking into account the artist as an individual personality is often an important means for understanding the artist’s labor. This is particularly true in the case of the almost mythical personalities of artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Van Gogh, as well as fictional artists created by Balzac and Zola. For certain prominent artists the artistic process is hard to separate from their personalities, which give their processes uniqueness and a means of explaining the exceptional qualities of the art they produced. Somewhat oddly, in their very exceptionality these artists came to stand for artists in general. The outstanding artist became the model and definition of all artists, and the oddities and extremism of their personalities became the basis for a widespread conception of the creative artistic person. The reason for this conception, despite the many examples of prominent artists who gave no evidence of extreme deviations from the normative

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in their personal or working lives, are complex. They can be understood as part of a general identification of the artist as a type of worker who is not hampered by the limitations imposed on most workers in modern industrial capitalist society. The modern artist is the exemplar of the free laborer, the worker whose production is determined by individual will rather than the demands of the market. As we saw in chapter 2, thinkers such as Marx and Ruskin made important contributions to the conception of the artist as free laborer. Pierre Bourdieu’s essay “The Invention of the Artist’s Life” offers a useful discussion of the modern artist’s identity as outlined in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education. He writes, “The artist’s exclusive dedication to his art is the precondition for art and the artist’s emancipation, and in this way it is purified of all dependence and any social function.”1 The artist’s freedom is inextricably bound to the works he produces, which are comparably divorced from social utility: “By reserving the name ‘work of art’ for something priceless, for the pure and disinterested work, which is not for sale or which in any case is not created to be sold, by writing for nothing or for no one, the artist affirms that he is irreducible to a simple producer of merchandise. . . . The real intellectual or artist is he who . . . sacrifices a fortune to the realization of his projects.”2 As Bourdieu (and others) have pointed out, the notion of the artist as a free individual is a social and ideological construction; artists are subject to the whims of fashion and the art market unless they have independent incomes.3 Nevertheless, the notion of the artist as a free, utterly self-motivated laborer is central to the definition of the artist’s social identity in modern capitalist society. What Clive Bell wrote in 1914 remains a common perception of the artist’s identity to this day: “The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not produce to live—they live to produce. There is no place for them in a social system based on the theory that what men desire is prolonged and pleasant existence. You cannot fit them into the machine, you must make them extraneous to it. You must make pariahs of them, since they are not part of society but the salt of the earth.”4 This exalted conception of the artist has understandably led to a fascination with the artistic personality. Who or what is this person who is able to escape the bonds that limit the majority? Why are certain people able to devote their lives entirely to the production of original creations of no practical utility? The artist must be an exceptional individual, not a mere worker, and thus the extreme personalities of certain historical artists must represent the normative exceptionality of the artist.

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Bourdieu considers that the modern artist occupies a position comparable to that of the adolescent: “The idealist representation of the ‘creator’ as pure subject, with neither attachments nor roots, finds its spontaneous equivalent in the bourgeois adolescent’s dilettantism, provisionally freed of social determinisms.”5 In this view the artist’s experience is not completely alien to nonartists; members of the bourgeoisie (though typically not the lower laboring classes) are able to compare the situation and personality of the modern artist to a relatively liberated period of their own lives. It is at least in part a result of this sense of equivalent experience that the modern artist’s work and production find an interested audience. The artist acts as a surrogate who is able to pursue impractical goals and discover what may result. Through the artist the bourgeois is given an opportunity to enjoy a vicarious experience of liberation. General definitions and understandings of the modern artist’s identity were often concerned, both implicitly and explicitly, with male artists. Exemplary artists were all male, and it was bourgeois men who were able to define themselves and experienced a period of adolescent liberty before becoming professional workers, husbands, and fathers in the way Bourdieu describes. Bourgeois women’s social identities were typically much more rigidly defined and restricted beginning in childhood and had no significant comparable stage of liberty. Also, women were often not allowed, much less expected, to have careers in the nineteenth century; they were usually intended to devote their labors to their homes and families (and, when possible, charitable activities). Nevertheless, despite the social expectations of middle-class women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the undeniable cultural assumption that artists were male, it was possible for women to identify themselves as artists. Middle-class women did engage in commercial employment as artists, usually out of economic necessity, and some had very successful professional careers. Amateur art also became the province of middle- and upper-class women beginning in the nineteenth century when art and music were often the only subjects they studied formally. Many women were thus personally engaged in the processes of art making and potentially able to view their own experiences as comparable to those described as characterizing artists. However, the question is not just whether women experienced the processes of artistic creation, but how they situated themselves and their experiences in relation to the discourse of the exceptional artist. In Bell’s comparison of the artist to the saint there is no obvious gender bias other than the reference to “what men desire,” which by the standards of his time All About Process

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would have been understood as referring to human beings in general. What I am suggesting here is not that women have not been marginalized in the history of modern art (they clearly have been), but that the discourse that shaped the modern artist’s identity and artistic process was not as narrowly masculinist as it has sometimes been portrayed.6 It was an identity that women could assume, and many did.7 The modern artist as an exceptional person was situated outside the common concerns of most people, and this identification could easily apply to women. A serious commitment to art making could be as much a renunciation of social expectations for women as it was for men. In the nineteenth century it was common for women to completely give up their artistic activities when they married, and it was often spinsters (women who failed to fulfill their social obligation to marry and raise children) who continued to practice their art throughout their lives. The fact that many of these women were amateurs rather than professionals earning money from their labors would not necessarily have affected their dedication or their own sense of purpose as artists. As we have seen, to be socially isolated and dedicated to a labor without expectation of recognition or success was a key characteristic of the modern artist’s identity. The artist as manifesting common psychological experiences of early life is another common theme in modern art theory. In 1876 Konrad Fiedler made an early formulation of the significance of the artist’s work as the development of natural perceptual and preconceptual tendencies of the human mind neglected in most people after childhood: “In the artist, a powerful impulse makes itself felt to increase, enlarge, display, and to develop toward a constantly growing clarity that narrow, obscure consciousness with which he grasped the world at the first awakening of his mind.”8 Fiedler, a philosopher and theorist often credited with developing an early version of pure formalism, was interested in the psychological processes involved in the creation and reception of art. In relating art to psychology Fiedler, and many others, sought to explain the significance of art in terms of fundamental human requirements rather than mere utility or decoration. Art reflects essential aspects of what it is to be human, and thus the processes of its genesis are matters of great importance. The modern public’s interest in the artist’s personality and work processes may be attributed in large part to broad shifts in the conception of human identity that occurred in modern times. As human will (as opposed to God’s divine will) was assumed to play a greater role in the fabrication of human life and experience, it became possible to conceive a meaningful equivalence between artistic production and self-fashioning, a theme that

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became particularly pronounced in existentialism and phenomenology in the 1940s and 1950s.9 The artistic process came to be seen as a microcosm and metaphor for self-development and self-realization. The exaltation of artistic process can only occur when the artist’s experience is paramount, and that can only be the case in a culture that places high value on the individual person. This is why there is no real interest in the artist’s process prior to the Renaissance, at which time a new consciousness of the artist as a subjective and self-creating actor became possible.10 Prior to the Renaissance, though, the artist could still be conceived as a model for human potential. The concept of divine inspiration served to explain the value of the artist’s process in an era when human identity and destiny was thought to be in the hands of gods. The artist’s inspiration could then be exemplary of proper human activity infused with divine will. More modern concepts of the artist’s process are, in contrast, often particularly concerned with the proper human relation to the material world. In this we may see a general consciousness of matter as potential commodity as well as substance with potential moral value. What does the artist do to matter to transform it into a meaningful product? And once that process becomes an object of attention, is it not more “valuable” than what it produces, just as the goose that lays golden eggs is more valuable than the individual (unfertilized) eggs? Indeed, are the artist’s products not merely the residue and witnesses of significant process? As early as 1876 Fiedler claimed that this was the case: The mental life of the artist consists in constantly producing this artistic consciousness. This it is which is essentially artistic activity, the true artistic creation, of which the production of works of art is only an external result. . . . A work of art is not the sum of the creative activity of the individual, but a fragmentary expression of something that cannot be totally expressed. The inner activity which the artist generates from the driving forces of his nature only now and then rises to expression as an artistic feat, and this feat does not represent the creative process in its entire course, but only a certain state. It affords views into the world of artistic consciousness by bringing from out of that world one formed work in a visible, communicable expression. This accomplishment does not exhaust, does not conclude this world, for just as infinite artistic activity precedes this feat, so can an infinite activity follow.11

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In situating the artwork as merely the residue of a highly valued mental activity, Fiedler helped to develop the theoretical understanding of modern art. Ever-increasing attention to the modern artist’s process is a hallmark of the twentieth century. A significant early locus for this attention can be found in the critical discourse addressing Cézanne’s painting, which was inextricably bound up with the personality of the artist. According to his critics and admirers, Cézanne’s art was the focus of his life, and, as noted in chapter 3, he had the independent means to devote himself to an artistic project that had no financial or practical rewards. Cézanne’s art has long been understood as reflecting his life, not in a merely biographical sense, but in its fullest sense. In 1913 Clive Bell wrote, “Cézanne is a type of the perfect artist; he is the perfect antithesis of the professional picture-maker. . . . He created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of his existence—the expression of his sense of the significance of form. . . . The real business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own salvation.”12 A few years later Roger Fry asserted that “Cézanne then, though his external life was that of the most irreproachable of country gentlemen, . . . was none the less the purest and most unadulterated of artists, the most narrowly confined to his single activity, the most purely disinterested and the most frankly egoistic of men.”13 In 1959 Meyer Schapiro observed, “Cézanne’s masterliness includes, besides the control of the canvas in its complexity and novelty, the ordering of his own life as an artist. His art has a unique quality of ripeness and continuous growth.”14 In recording his sensations as he perceived the world around him, Cézanne is widely considered to have produced a pictorial equivalent of the shifting and open-ended nature of lived experience. In 1901 Gustave Geffroy wrote, “They say that Cézanne’s canvases are not finished. It doesn’t matter, so long as they express the beauty [and] harmony he has felt so deeply. Who will say at what precise moment a canvas is finished? Art does not proceed without a certain incompleteness, because the life it reproduces is in perpetual transformation.”15 A half century later Schapiro claimed that

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the form is in constant making and contributes an aspect of the encountered and random to the final appearance of the scene, inviting us to an endless exploration. The qualities of represented things, simple as they appear, are effected by means that make us conscious of the artist’s sensations and meditative process of work. . . . The coming into being of these objects through Cézanne’s perceptions and constructive

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operations is more compelling to us than their meanings or relation to our desires, and evokes in us a deeper attention to the substance of the painting. The marvel of Cézanne’s classicism is that he is able to make his sensing, probing, doubting, finding activity a visible part of the painting.16 118

These last two quotations frame over fifty years of critical writing on Cézanne’s art. Geffroy’s text reflects the Bergsonian notion of flux (“perpetual transformation”) prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century, while Schapiro’s echoes the phenomenological preoccupations of the middle of the century, yet both give evidence of the enduring significance of Cézanne’s paintings as tangible manifestations of an artistic process contiguous with the artist’s physical and mental life processes. In many ways Cézanne may be seen as a template for defining the meaning of the artist’s process in twentieth-century modern art; later artists will be appreciated and critically presented in terms markedly similar to those used for discussing Cézanne. This increasing emphasis on the artist’s process and its necessary intertwining with the artist’s life and personality is reflected in influential philosophical and theoretical texts on art. In the last chapter we saw how Collingwood’s theory of art stressed the artist’s total emotional and psychological engagement in the process of creation, which (potentially) leads to an ever-expanding understanding and awareness. John Dewey’s 1934 text Art as Experience took a similar approach; however, unlike Collingwood, whose theories often have a tendency to limit the nature of art making, Dewey’s are expansive.17 According to Dewey, works of art are not simply physical products but “refined and intensified forms of experience.”18 This definition allows Dewey to consider an enormous range of activities and experiences as artistic; Collingwood, in contrast, limited art first to previously recognized artworks and then further narrowed the category by insisting that art only be used to describe works created by a certain qualitatively determined process.19 Dewey contended that modern industrial capitalism had contributed to the pernicious separation of art from life and daily experience, isolating it in artworks placed in museums and galleries rather than locating it in objects and activities throughout the community. Artists themselves are also isolated from society in the industrial age because they do not participate in mass production (8–9, 341). It was Dewey’s hope that his text would recover the “continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living” (10). In this his work shares the aims of the Arts and Crafts movement as well as All About Process

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many of his contemporaries, including the Purists, Mondrian, and the Bauhaus faculty, who also hoped to integrate aesthetic satisfactions into daily experience. Whereas they hoped to create objects and physical environments that would achieve this goal, however, Dewey intended to promote a new understanding of art and the aesthetic experience that would revitalize everyday existence.20 His widely influential book is a significant moment in the relatively subtle (some might claim insidious) reconceptualization of what art is and does that is one of the primary characteristics of twentiethcentury modernism. In Dewey’s text we find not only an examination of the experiential nature of the process of making art, but also a definition of the successful reception of artworks that is strongly associated with imaginatively reenacting that process. Dewey carefully distinguishes an experience from mere experience. The latter is simply the interaction of a living being with its environment, but an experience is “when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation . . . is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency” (35). A true experience in Dewey’s definition has aesthetic quality. It stands in contrast to the unrelated, incoherent occurrences and events of much of life as well as to mechanically connected events ordered by convention (40). An experience has pattern and structure that connects action and its effects (44), and it is the perception of this that is the substance of the artist’s process:

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The artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next. . . . A painter must consciously undergo the effect of his every brush stroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce. To apprehend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes of thought. (45) Dewey cites Matisse throughout his text, and the influence of his “Notes of a Painter” is evident in Dewey’s descriptions of the artist’s working process The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization

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as the continuous equilibration of a work’s successive elements in relation to the effect of the whole:

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The form of the whole is therefore present in every member. Fulfilling, consummating, are continuous functions, not mere ends, located at one place only. An engraver, painter, or writer is in process of completing at every stage of his work. . . . The series of doings in the rhythm of experience give variety and movement; they save the work from monotony and useless repetitions [the mechanical]. The undergoings . . . supply unity; they save the work from the aimlessness of a mere succession of excitations [the arbitrary]. An object is peculiarly and dominantly esthetic, yielding the enjoyment characteristic of esthetic perception, when the factors that determine anything which can be called an experience are lifted high above the threshold of perception and are made manifest for their own sake. (56–57; bracketed terms added) The last sentence of the preceding quotation gives evidence of an art for art’s sake position related to pure formalism that seems counter to Dewey’s experiential definitions of art.21 This is one of the intriguing aspects of Dewey’s text, which often hovers between a very open-ended approach to defining the location of aesthetic experience and a much more rigid evaluative determination of what constitutes true artistic experiences and objects. In his opening chapter Dewey extols the aesthetic nature of the pleasures to be found in domestic gardening, playing ball, and tending a fire, as well as the artistic engagement of the intelligent mechanic satisfied and engaged by his work (5). In his subsequent discussions of the art of painting, however, he takes pains to define and limit the ways in which painting can be considered aesthetic. To be true artistic creation a painting’s means must be integral to the work, and furthermore, to have an aesthetic experience the viewer must perceive those means as integral: “We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work” (325). Dewey asserts that illustrative paintings perceived solely as such do not provide aesthetic experience. Furthermore, aesthetic experience cannot arise from analyzing a painting solely in terms of the technique of its production, because doing so separates means from ends (199). The artist is a special individual in Dewey’s view, someone who has a natural sensitivity to some aspect of nature and desires to “remake” it in a particular medium (265):

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The artist has the power to seize upon a special kind of material and convert it into an authentic medium of expression. The rest of us require many channels and a mass of material to give expression to what we should like to say. . . . The artist sticks to his chosen organ and its corresponding material, and thus the idea singly and concentratedly felt in terms of the medium comes through pure and clear. He plays the game intensely, because strictly. . . . The true artist sees and feels in terms of his medium and the one who has learned to perceive esthetically emulates the operation. (200)

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Thus, in Dewey’s view, while the aesthetic experience is universal and not limited to the production or reception of works of art, the artist and the production of art are special cases. This apparent contradiction may have its source in the influence of Alfred Barnes’s ideas about the nature of art and artistic creation, which were more specific and narrowly formalist than Dewey’s tendency to a more general, even universalist approach to defining the nature of art and aesthetic experience.22 The special nature of the artist is also addressed by Collingwood, who ascribes to the true artist an emotionally intense and profoundly moral character. He claims that an artist who does not have “deep and powerful emotions will never produce anything except shallow and frivolous works of art.” In making a work of art, Collingwood believes, the artist attempts to become conscious of an emotion; failing to do so results in the failure of the artwork and signifies insincerity, a moral failure, and a “corruption of consciousness.” In defining art as the successful expression of an honest emotion, Collingwood set terms for understanding how the artist works and what constitutes artistic merit. Any given artwork is created by the artist out of necessity; it is integrally related to a particular moment in the artist’s life and could not be created at any other time. Collingwood condemned as superficial the notion that artworks form part of evolutionary series either in an artist’s oeuvre or in the history of art as a whole. Rooted in the artist’s sincere expression, the successful artwork is equivalent to truth.23 The artist’s work is also the result of the artist coming to self-knowledge through activity. This activity is a form of self-creation in which an emotional experience comes to consciousness.24 Both Collingwood and Dewey provide definitions of the nature of the artist and of artistic activity that are part of broad philosophical positions on the nature and role of art and aesthetics in human life and experience.

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They broke with long-standing philosophical tradition in focusing attention on the artist and the experience of art making rather than on beauty and the aesthetic experience of the viewer of the artwork. This relatively novel approach to philosophical aesthetics took into account recent developments of modern art and modern art theory, which were radically transforming the nature of art and its social role. In his conclusion Collingwood wrote, “The aesthetician . . . is not concerned with dateless realities lodged in some metaphysical heaven, but with the facts of his own place and time. . . . The problems I have discussed are those which force themselves upon me when I look round at the present condition of the arts in our own civilization.”25 Dewey’s text, likewise, was diagnostic and prescriptive of broad social change that would reinstate imaginative aesthetic experience as a guiding force in culture and society, rather than allowing art to become isolated and sterile in galleries and museums. That both books remain in print over seventy years after their initial publication attests to their continued topicality. The nature of art and the artist’s experience as described by Dewey and Collingwood are still integral to many people’s understandings and to many artists’ selfconceptions. Although more than seven decades have passed, and countless changes have occurred in the arts and the art world, the fundamental situation described and analyzed by Dewey and Collingwood remains in place. In fact, certain aspects of their ideas have become increasingly relevant. One concern that Dewey and Collingwood shared with many art writers of their day is an interest in defining the nature of the artist and the artist’s activity, particularly its psychological aspects. This interest is apparent not only in writings by independent theorists, critics, and philosophers, it is also a major concern of art movements such as Purism and Surrealism between the two world wars. Surrealism in particular was dedicated to defining and liberating the fundamental creative activity of the human mind. Surrealist automatism was developed as a strategy for bypassing the inhibitions raised by conscious techniques and predetermined goals in order to externalize creative mental energies lodged in the subconscious in concrete form. Automatism was available to all and was intended to erase distinctions between artists and nonartists based on talent and training. All human beings are creative artists in their minds, as Freud’s investigation of the creative mental activity of dreams had demonstrated. The Surrealists hoped, at least in theory, to release that creativity and use it to create a new reality that would fulfill the liberated desires of humanity. The Surrealist theory of automatism and the work of visual artists such as Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and André Masson instigated a long-lasting debate All About Process

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on the nature of artistic inspiration, talent, and technique. While the Surrealists attempted to revise artistic values and evaluated works on the basis of unfettered imaginative invention, more conservative supporters of modern art redefined automatism in terms of traditional artistic skill. The essence of the debates around automatism focused on the evaluation of an artist’s process. The Surrealists refused to define a dependable automatic technique or a consistent means for determining whether a given product was the result of an automatic process.26 They knew once such a technique was defined it would be subject to inauthentic imitation; works might then be made to appear to be automatically created without actually being so. There would be a defined automatic form and style, which could be separated from its process of creation and turned into an inauthentic product, a mere commodity.27 The Surrealists’ contemporaries, however, were not so leery of taking a definitive position. The Cahiers d’Art critics Christian Zervos and Tériade contested the Surrealist notion of automatism and redefined it as the skilled artist’s ability to create successful works of art without conscious direction. Thus, rather than tapping into a universally available creative imagination in the subconscious, automatism was employed in terms that corresponded to its traditional definition as the employment of an action rendered mechanical (automatic) through training and habit. Zervos used this notion to insist on the superior abilities of established artists, notably Matisse and Picasso, whose talent and long experience allowed them to create with little conscious attention to the physical manipulation of their media.28 Tériade promoted a group of young artists he labeled Neo-Fauves whose vaporous inchoate “automatic” style he claimed was the result of their liberated engagement with the process of painting, which took precedence over any desire to create a fully resolved product.29 The other prominent art critics working in France during the 1920s and 1930s did not take up the challenges raised by Surrealist automatism as directly and as often as did the Cahiers d’Art critics. Generally, mainstream modern art during these decades was viewed as highly individualized selfexpression. The most common critical viewpoint was based on a belief in the significance of the artist’s unique personality, which infused artistic subject and technique. Artistic process was thus conceived as a natural outpouring of emotion, a conception related to the Surrealists’ automatism. The difference lay less in the two conceptions of direct expression than in the Surrealists’ serious attempts to avoid establishing individual or group styles through the production of consistent works. The expressive painters of the

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1920s and 1930s were all dedicated to the production of an immediately identifiable original style. For the Surrealists such consistency corrupted individual freedom and led to the commodification of both creative works and their creators. What mattered in the Surrealist view was the purity of the process; the product was merely residue of an experience, one that (it was hoped) would spark further Surrealist experiences in its viewers. Echoes of these debates are readily apparent in the work of Dewey and Collingwood, most broadly in their joint interest in the experience of the artist and their examination of the artistic process, but also in the details. Dewey, for example, took a relatively conservative mainstream view on the role of the subconscious and the artistic potential of spontaneous expression. Given his definition of an aesthetic experience as a fully digested, ordered, and completed experience this seems inevitable. After equating William James’s description of the subconscious element in religious experience to the processes of spontaneous expression, Dewey claims, “New ideas come leisurely yet promptly to consciousness only when work has previously been done in forming the right doors by which they may gain entrance. Subconscious maturation precedes creative production in every line of human endeavor. The direct effort of ‘wit and will’ of itself never gave birth to anything that is not mechanical; their function is necessary, but it is to let loose allies that exist outside their scope. . . . When patience has done its perfect work, the man is taken possession of by the appropriate muse and speaks and sings as some god dictates” (73). A few pages later he makes even more direct reference to what he clearly sees as the falsity of the Surrealist position, which denies all preparation and training in favor of the fully automatic production. Dewey may believe that esthetic experience is available to all, but he does not consider that everyone has the capacity for artistic creation: “What most of us lack to be artists is not the inceptive emotion, nor yet merely technical skill in execution. It is capacity to work a vague idea and emotion over into terms of some definite medium. Were expression but a kind of decalcomania, or a conjuring of a rabbit out of the place where it lies hid, artistic expression would be a comparatively simple matter. But between conception and bringing to birth there lies a long period of gestation” (75).30 Thus, although Dewey shared common ground with the Surrealists in the desire to broaden the conception of art into a wider realm of experience beyond its traditional isolation in works of art, as well as a shared criticism of contemporary capitalist social and economic structures, Dewey’s view of the artist’s process remained comparatively conservative. Unlike the Surrealists who embraced disjunction and disorder in hopes of overturning the All About Process

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Western dedication to rationality, Dewey’s aesthetic experience is fundamentally Aristotelian in its emphasis on the ordered relation of parts to whole. Philosophers like Dewey and Collingwood believed (as did those more immediately involved with art) that a work made in accordance with the proper process of artistic creation would naturally and inevitably evoke an aesthetic experience in the attentive viewer of the work. All forms of art were, in the views of both Dewey and Collingwood, expressive language, and as such their purpose and nature was to communicate in their particular medium.31 Herein lies one of the foremost difficulties of modern art conceived as expression. How, precisely, was art capable of communication? Was its language natural, conventional, or a combination of the two? To what degree was originality possible before a work became utterly incomprehensible? These are questions that reach far beyond our immediate concern with process, but they have important resonance for that concern. Dewey and Collingwood explicitly, and other theorists and critics more often implicitly, believed that the imaginative reconstruction of the artist’s process of creating a given artwork was a crucial means of aesthetic communication. The work must thus provide enough indications of that process for communication to occur. What had previously been considered merely technical concerns of artists rapidly became an essential ingredient in the understanding, reception, and evaluation of artworks. In shifting the focus from objects to experience, Dewey’s and Collingwood’s philosophical approaches may also be compared to process philosophy in a broader sense. The most prominent process philosophers, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, both rejected the traditional philosophical focus on things as merely instrumental to thought rather than definitive of the true nature of reality and being.32 There is a distinct parallelism in the process philosophers’ reconceptualization of the nature of reality, in which time and motion take priority over the static entity, and the turn to process over product in the valuation of modern art. Just as the stable self-identical object is for process philosophy merely a moment in the constantly changing life of any given entity (itself artificially isolated from the continuum of the universe), the artwork came more and more to be seen as a mere by-product of the essential nature of art: the (ever-expanding) process of the artist. Process philosophers claimed the individual, isolated object was not truly real; it was merely convenient for human instrumentalism. In Bergson’s writing this tendency to think instrumentally is described as generalizing

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reality into language and symbols through which human beings think and perceive the world. The poet and artist are, in contrast, able to perceive reality directly and through their art are able to explore and communicate the specificity of individual experiences.33 Artworks are thus occasions for experience, a conviction that we have seen was later examined in the work of Dewey and Collingwood. In a more general way the emphasis on process and experience may be seen concretely reflected in the rejection of the artwork as a mere commodity, first by the Surrealists and later, beginning in the 1960s, more and more widely across the spectrum of contemporary artists. The broad ideas of process philosophy should be viewed as creating a general matrix for thinking about process and the nature of reality rather than in terms of specific influence on the developments of modern art. Beginning with Bergson, commonly considered to have been the most widely popular philosopher in history, around 1900 the ideas of process philosophy created an environment of thought in the twentieth century, much in the way that deconstruction has been a broad cultural influence in the last decades of that century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Just as it is not necessary to have read Jacques Derrida to have imbibed basic poststructuralist attitudes and ideas, direct study of the writings of Bergson and Whitehead is not required for familiarity with basic concepts of process as developed by those philosophers. Of course, many people did read Bergson, especially in the early years of the twentieth century, and Mark Antliff has studied the explicit influence of his ideas on modern artists in the 1910s.34 Whitehead’s popular influence peaked in the 1950s, and scholars have discussed his work in relation to artists and writers of that decade.35 As interesting as exploring direct connections between philosophers and individual artists can be, however, what is ultimately most significant is the general shift in philosophical attention and attitudes represented by process philosophy. In addition, process philosophy is closely linked to the dramatic changes in the scientific understanding of the nature of physical reality occurring in the early twentieth century,36 yet another hugely influential shift in general understanding that has had illimitable effects on overall perceptions and attitudes in the modern world. Henri Focillon’s Life of Forms, discussed in the previous chapter in relation to art, craft, and the materiality of art making, was strongly influenced by Bergsonian thought, most pronounced in the emphasis on the endless creative flux of forms as the nature of reality.37 Like Bergson, Focillon attributes to artists a capacity for unmediated grasp of the true nature of reality. In Focillon’s description the artist is possessed by forms, and in return the All About Process

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artist, unlike the nonartist, develops and becomes richer throughout life and into old age: “Forms never cease to live. In their separate state, they still clamor for action, they still take absolute possession of whatever action has propagated them, in order to augment, strengthen and shape it. They are the creators of the universe, of the artist and of man himself. . . . [They are] concrete and active forces powerfully at work among the things of matter and space.” In Focillon’s view, great artists, like Delacroix, Chardin, and Turner, lead ordinary, limited lives, waiting for “the essential events that originate in the life of forms.” They face life as Leonardo faced the old wall, discovering forms in what to others are merely arbitrary marks.38 Focillon emphasizes the inevitable linkage between the artist and the forms he creates; this is not a simple connection between creator and product created. There is an endless symbiotic circuit that includes the audience as well through the universality of forms and the human innate psychological predisposition to be affected by them: “Every act is still a gesture, and every gesture a kind of hieroglyph. . . . [William] James has shown, that every gesture exercises on the life of the mind an influence that is none other than the influence of all form, then the world created by the artist acts on him, acts in him and acts on other men.”39 As discussed in the previous chapter, Focillon emphasized the physicality of the artist’s work as communicated through the hand’s shaping of matter. His ideas are thus an exemplary attempt to theorize a fully integrated conception of artist, artwork, viewer, and reality based on the philosophical concept of life as an unending process, a flux of forms with no ultimate goal or resolution. While the effects of process philosophy on the conceptualization of the artist’s process were most often vague and general, developments in psychology more directly affected understanding of the artist’s work and processes of creation. Interest in the relation between the artist’s process and personality were widespread in the 1930s. In 1932 the psychologist Otto Rank published Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development in which he analyzed the psychological labor involved in the artistic process.40 He noted that in contrast to earlier periods there was now an ideology of the artist rather than an ideology of art, and that “artistic creation has . . . changed from a means for the furtherance of the culture of the community into a means for the construction of personality.”41 Modern artists are characterized by a marked degree of self-consciousness, and the first step the artist takes is one of self-fashioning (31, 37). Rank’s analysis was not merely of current attitudes, however; he also made general statements about the nature of the artist’s process. He claimed that the process of all “great”

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artists is a lifelong labor on a principal work or theme.42 For these artists, living and creating are reciprocal and overlapping (38), and they are bought at the cost of ordinary living (429): “For the artist himself the fact that he creates is more immediately important than what he produces. . . . Production is a vital process which happens within the individual and is independent at the outset from the ideology manifested in the created work” (59). In Rank’s view the artist’s process is part of an important psychological process of ego development; moreover, “in some artists the representation of a process of personal development seems to be the chief aim of their work” (375). Among the many psychological processes Rank outlines in his analysis of the artist are issues that directly affect the artist’s working processes, such as the difficulties involved in beginning and finishing works and the problems raised by success (386–87). For the artist, art making is a refuge from life, and yet this refuge has its own tensions and complexities and is never a complete and satisfying experience; it also must always return to life. The unresolvable difficulties of the artist’s situation are exemplified in the issue of success, which is “a stimulus to creativity only so long as it is not attained—which means, as long as the artist believes he can regain life by his success and so free himself from the bondage of creating. Bitterly, then, he finds out that success only strengthens the need for creating” (408). In addition to his psychological analysis of the artist’s neuroses, Rank provides an expansive evaluation of the artist’s situation in modern society. He places the personality of the artist outside the arena of isolated clinical interest and makes it central to the self-consciousness of modern industrial man: “From the Renaissance on, a man felt himself driven to, but also chosen for, artistic expression; nowadays, with individualism so common, art is looked upon as a means to develop personality. Every strong individuality feels nowadays that a potential artist lies somewhere within him, which is prevented from growth and expression only by the external decay of a materialistic and mechanistic environment” (427). In Rank’s view the modern neurotic is symptomatic of the modern conflict between the individual and society, which in an earlier period could have been surmounted in artistic creation. The “protection” that artistic creation once granted creative personalities is no longer available, and their creative energies must be redirected to the ultimately more fulfilling task of personality creation and development (429–31). Rank’s text is part of a long-term trend that identifies and explores what were once considered the exceptional qualities of the artist’s personality and sees them as now widespread in modern society. Extreme individualism, All About Process

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social alienation, desire for self-expression, these characteristics of the artistic personality have become commonplace attitudes with attendant discomforts and even pathologies. Rank believed that art would be replaced by a psychologically assisted development of the self-aware personality; it was (and is), however, more common to believe in the potential of artistic creation as a means to alleviate psychological discomforts. This conviction developed with the rise of amateur production in the nineteenth century and was an important component of the Arts and Crafts movement. Regardless of whether the modern viewer considered him- or herself an amateur artist, however, the belief in a strong affinity between the artist’s psychology and persona and that of nonartists became a foundational assumption of modern art. These are the grounds on which the modern self-expressive artist’s work has meaning that goes beyond the purely personal, and what makes it possible for the highly individualized work of many modern artists to find an audience and, in some instances, great success. What is shared is no longer a common literature, the classical myths and biblical scenes of the Western tradition, but a common humanity, a common psychology, common desires. The modern artist’s work, both the process and what it produces, becomes emblematic of an often-intolerable human situation and the means to ameliorate it. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “It is nonetheless possible that Cézanne conceived a form of art which, while occasioned by his nervous condition, is valid for everyone.”43 By the mid-twentieth century the artist’s process was often closely linked to the development of concepts of human action and self-definition in the context of phenomenology and existentialism, philosophical approaches that had enormous popular influence. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of Cézanne and his project was of great importance—not just in providing a means for considering Cézanne’s art, but for framing the way artists’ work was understood and evaluated as a fully creative process. One of the central issues in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of art is the concept of original expression. In his view the artist, and the modern artist in particular, in creating a painting invents a new potential language and, more than that, a novel form of meaning.44 The process of creation is thus fully creative; it does not reflect any universal structure or order, and there is no given concept that the artist merely fulfills in making the work: “He speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. . . . ‘Conception’ cannot precede ‘execution.’ Before expression, there is nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there. . . . The

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artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout. . . . The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere.” Because it is wholly new, this language must find those who are able to understand it in order to go beyond being a private dream or a mere object: “It is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others. If a work is successful, it has the strange power of being self-teaching. . . . The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people.”45 Nothing is given; the meaning of the work is created as it is made and as it is experienced; it is a process of uncertain outcome and no final resolution. In order for the modern artist to create a language that appeals to the experiences of others there must be some form of common ground, which was widely conceived to be the physical embodied experience of living in the world. Merleau-Ponty addressed this issue from a phenomenologist’s vantage point, but, as we shall see, it was considered from a number of positions by other philosophers, critics, and artists as well. In Merleau-Ponty’s view the work of art is like a living body: “a nexus of living meanings,” an entity “in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed.”46 It is understood in the same way that a person understands another person’s gestures, through what Merleau-Ponty describes as identification with and mutual confirmation of another’s experiences: “It is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive ‘things.’ The meaning of a gesture thus ‘understood’ is not behind it, it is intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by gesture, and which I take up on my own account.” Because the human orientation to the world is gestural and expressive, humans inevitably perceive the things of the world as expressive, allowing the painter the power of meaningful expression.47 While the notion of the expressiveness of things might suggest that the painter’s expression relies on the representation of objects, this is not the case. Not only do Merleau-Ponty’s notions regarding the nature of language allow for the communicative possibilities of nonrepresentational art, they ultimately reject the notion that representational artists depict an unmediated perceptual world. These ideas also explain how an utterly original art may be successful: “Moreover significances now acquired must necessarily have been new once. We must therefore recognize as an ultimate fact this open and indefinite power of giving significance—that is, both of apprehending and conveying meaning—by which man transcends himself towards a All About Process

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new form of behaviour, or towards other people, or towards his own thought, through his body and his speech.”48 The painter at work is formulating an expressive language, not merely employing a preexisting one. A slow-motion film of Matisse painting, which showed him hesitating and sketching out choices in the air before choosing to make a mark, revealed to Merleau-Ponty that the artist’s signifying intention is in the process of creating the work.49 He believed this to be true even in eras where the ostensible goal of the painter was precise realistic representation. In a discussion of the modern artist’s interest in “incomplete” work Merleau-Ponty outlines why modern artists find the creative process far more significant than what is produced. For some artists the incomplete work, the sketch, represents a trivial automatism, a personal gesture or mark of individual expression valuable solely as a sign of originality. This is of no interest to Merleau-Ponty. For him artists such as Cézanne and Klee are not childish narcissists of this sort, their works are not mere improvisational tokens of individualism. They communicate directly through a longdeveloped gesture, a personal style: “The accomplished work is thus not the work which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it and, skipping the intermediaries, to rejoin, without any guide other than a movement of the invented line (an almost incorporeal trace), the silent world of the painter, henceforth uttered and accessible.” The modern artist who is developing a style, a language that expresses his unique experience, leaves concrete works in his wake, but these do not concern the artist in themselves. What matters is how creating them has allowed him to develop: “Without going back to them, and by the sole fact that they have fulfilled certain expressive operations, he finds himself endowed with new organs; and experiencing the excess of what is to be said over and beyond their already verified power, he is capable . . . of going ‘further’ in the same direction. It is as if each step taken called for and made possible another step, or as if each successful expression prescribed another task.” In Merleau-Ponty’s description the artist’s work is vital and living to the degree that the artist cannot really see it:

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It is that very life, to the extent that it emerges from its inherence, ceases to be in possession of itself and becomes a universal means of understanding and of making something understood, of seeing and presenting something to see—and thus is not shut up in the depths of the mute individual but diffused throughout all he sees. . . . There must have been the fecund moment . . . when an operant and latent sense found the The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization

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emblems which were going to disengage it and make it manageable for the artist and at the same time accessible to others. Even when the painter has already painted, and even if he has become in some respects master of himself, what is given to him with his style is not a manner, a certain number of procedures or tics that he can inventory, but a mode of formulation that is just as recognizable for others and just as little visible to him as his silhouette or his everyday gestures. . . . We must not conclude . . . that the representation of the world is only a stylistic means for the painter, as if the style could be known and sought after outside all contact with the world, as if it were an end. We must see it developing in the hollows of the painter’s perception as a painter; style is an exigency that has issued from that perception.50 I have quoted this text at such length because it is essential for understanding the significance of the artistic process for many artists’ self-identity at mid-century. Merleau-Ponty provides a key distinction between a trivial originality, a mere childish egotistic automatism, and a meaningful development of personal style through a dedicated artistic process. It is in these terms that the work of many modern artists will be valued and presented. Among the most prominent of these are Giacometti and de Kooning, whose work and critical appreciation we will consider shortly. Merleau-Ponty’s description of the artist’s labor grants it a profundity and depth that goes well beyond simple self-expression. It does not, however, represent the forefront of a universal evolution of humanity in the way that Mondrian and Kandinsky described it, nor even the more restricted impersonal evolution of the art form to the purity of medium specificity espoused by the formalism of Clement Greenberg. For Merleau-Ponty the artist’s labor is specific to the artist, not representative of some grand scheme of human or artistic development toward an ultimate goal. It is a process that is ongoing and eternal, fundamentally no different for modern painters than for prehistoric cave painters: “The painter himself is a person at work who each morning finds in the shape of things the same questioning and the same call he never stops responding to. In his eyes, his work is never completed; it is always in progress.”51 In “Eye and Mind,” published in 1961, Merleau-Ponty elaborates on this idea: There are no separated, distinct “problems” in painting, no really opposed paths, no partial “solutions,” no cumulative progress, no irretrievable options. . . . [The painter’s] quest is total even where it looks All About Process

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partial. Just when he has reached proficiency in some area, he finds that he has reopened another one where everything he said before must be said again in a different way. . . . The discovery itself calls forth still further quests. The idea of . . . painting’s being fully and definitively accomplished is an idea bereft of sense. For painters, if any remain, the world will always be yet to be painted; even if it lasts millions of years . . . it will all end without having been completed.52

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This quotation directly rejects the then prevalent modernist notion of painting’s evolution to a state of ultimate purity. Painting must be considered an activity of body and mind in relation to the physical world inhabited and perceived. For Merleau-Ponty the painter’s labor is a profoundly significant act of human perception and communication.53 The embodied nature of human experience, and thus all human thought and action, is central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and it is also a central to many twentieth-century discussions of the artist’s process. It is inextricably related to the conceptualization of the artist’s gesture, particularly as it developed into a key signifying component of modern artworks. Roger Fry, perhaps now most widely recognized for his critical contributions to modernist formalism, described what he called “the emotional elements of design” in terms that explicitly related them to embodiment. According to Fry, the drawn line is a record of a gesture; it is modified by the artist’s feeling and directly communicates that feeling to the viewer. Likewise, represented mass, space, and light all have the power to communicate thanks to human embodied experience: “Nearly all these emotional elements of design are connected with the essential conditions of our physical existence: rhythm appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular activity; mass to all the infinite adaptations to the force of gravity which we are forced to make. . . . The graphic arts arouse emotions in us by playing upon what one may call the overtones of some of our primary physical needs. They . . . appeal . . . directly and immediately to the emotional accompaniments of our bare physical existence.”54 Fry’s focus here is not the artist’s process; nevertheless, his discussion provides a justifiable opening for considering the increasing importance of bodily gesture and physical experience as the foundation of modern artworks. Fry himself did not propose this as a uniquely modern phenomenon; he cited Michelangelo’s painted figures as examples and claimed that representation of a human body was needed to make the emotional elements of design truly effective. Nevertheless, he laid a foundation for thinking more explicitly about the ways the artist’s marks, The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization

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the embodied gestures that create indexes in an artist’s medium, could be an effective means of artistic expression and communication. In Art as Experience Dewey also discusses the bodily aspects of artistic expression and reception. The artist’s motor responses channel emotion into art during the process of art making, and the viewer likewise relies on physical experiences to respond to the artist’s work: “Motor preparation is a large part of esthetic education. . . . To know what to look for and how to see it is an affair of readiness on the part of motor equipment” (98). Dewey argues against pure aesthetic qualities and insists that responses to line and shape are conditioned by experience of physical reality (99–101).55 He also develops a more direct and historically conscious consideration of the artist’s gesture in a discussion about the distinctions between “automatic” arts like singing and dancing, which require no medium beyond the artist’s body, and “shaping” arts that deal with external materials. He notes that the shaping or technological arts become fine arts if they have, or can acquire, the spontaneity and the “rhythm of vital natural expression” of the automatic arts (228–29).56 Collingwood’s distinction between fine art and craft relied on a similar separation of the open and expressive engagement with artistic means from the merely mechanical focus on the end product. Collingwood also explores the ways that forms generated by, and indexing, bodily movement have emotional power. He claims that an artist who wants to reproduce the emotional effect of a ritual dance cannot do so by producing an image of the dancers dancing because the effect depends on the traced pattern. What is needed is a drawing of the pattern itself, and Collingwood speculates that the emotional power of pre-Christian Celtic designs may have been achieved by representing the dance patterns of religious ceremonies. Collingwood declared that painting’s tactile nature was a modern discovery first evident in Cézanne’s paintings and subsequently projected back to the early Renaissance in Bernard Berenson’s concept of “tactile values.” Both Cézanne in his painting practice and Berenson in his analyses of Renaissance paintings were attentive to motor sensations; in their different ways they taught that painting was not a visual art but a tactile one: “Painting can never be a visual art. A man paints with his hands, not with his eyes. . . . What one paints is what can be painted . . . and what can be painted must stand in some relation to the muscular activity of painting it.” Like Fry, Collingwood stresses gesture as a foundational means of communication in painting: “The art of painting is intimately bound up with the expressiveness of the gestures made by the hand in drawing, and of the imaginary gestures through which a spectator of a painting appreciates its All About Process

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‘tactile values’. . . . Every kind of language is in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages.” By dance Collingwood means an “‘original’ language of total bodily gesture . . . which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time.” Gesture is thus not a specialized activity; it is a necessary adjunct to human embodiment. Collingwood defines it as “the motor side of our total imaginative experience.”57 As embodied beings we communicate our thoughts and feelings through our gestures and attitudes; we are engaged with the physical world. For the artist at work that engagement is total, and there is little meaning in separating subject from object, gesture from medium. Merleau-Ponty similarly developed the notion of the gesture as a nexus of relation between the embodied self and the enveloping world that is developed by the artist:

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The movement of the artist tracing his arabesque in infinite matter amplifies, but also prolongs, the simple marvel of oriented locomotion or grasping movements. Already in its pointing gestures the body not only flows over into a world whose schema it bears in itself but possesses this world at a distance rather than being possessed by it. So much the more does the gesture of expression, which undertakes to delineate what it intends and make it appear “outside,” retrieve the world. . . . All perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short every human use of the body is already primordial expression.58 The artist’s expression is thus an extension of a natural activity of all human beings, and this activity is integral to the nature of being in the world: “The words, lines, and colors which express me come out of me as gestures. They are torn from me by what I want to say as my gestures are by what I want to do. In this sense, there is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take orders, not even those I would like to give to myself.”59 There is throughout Merleau-Ponty’s writings about art a presumption of honesty and authenticity in the artist’s labor. The artist’s work is the result of embodied being in the world, the transformation of that experience into the creation of physical objects that are responses to the situated nature of being; this is something that cannot be feigned or manipulated. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical approach is highly relevant to the work of many modern artists in the mid-twentieth century who were deeply engaged with exploring the nuances of their creative activity. For some The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization

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prominent, even representative artists of that period their process of creation became the conscious focus of their labor and their art. This is not to suggest a priority either for the philosophers who were exploring the significance of the artist’s process and experience or for the artists who were likewise engaged and often the object of intellectual analysis. While these two contemporaneous areas of intellectual and creative activity were preoccupied with notably similar issues and concerns, there is nothing to indicate that either field had precedence or priority over the other. The work and thought of artists inflected that of the thinkers and vice versa in equal measure. Both contributed to the articulation of a very broad set of attitudes about the nature of humankind and the situation of humanity in a modern world that many believed was becoming increasingly dehumanized. The artist as a “hand worker” in a society where such labor was no longer relevant to most people came to represent a host of values and attitudes toward what it means to be human that were perceived as neglected and in danger of being lost and forgotten. The processes of art making, once barely considered outside the narrow circles of craft practitioners, had become an important arena for discovering the nature of human action and expression and how these are integrally related to the wider world. For the early twenty-first-century reader the universalizing discourse of mid-twentieth-century philosophy and art theory, particularly the discussion of embodiment, raises significant concerns. How, we wonder, was it possible to ignore gender and cultural distinctions in a discourse so deeply engaged in examining bodily experience? The subsequent development of feminist consciousness and critiques has made the gender bias of universalizing discourses of “mankind” so glaringly evident that it can be difficult to conceive that they were received as unproblematic investigations applicable to all. In her 1996 discussion of Eva Hesse’s belief in a genderless meritocracy for art, Ann Wagner notes that Hesse existed at a “real cultural remove” in presuming “viewers . . . who are human before and after they are male or female, embodied and sensate in ways more profoundly similar than different.” She continues: Has the notion of a profoundly human art become merely utopian or, worse, incorrect and illegible, the casualty of cultural amnesia and regulation? Have human embodiment and mortality become simultaneously so prosaic and sensationalized as to make us forget that they are what we most share?

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To claim that Hesse’s art aims to remember and express a common human quality or experience is not the same as attributing to it some universal force or purpose.60 Wagner’s work discusses the ways in which Hesse, Georgia O’Keefe, and Lee Krasner negotiated the gender-biased cultural assumptions and ideologies of twentieth-century modern art in the creation of their own art and artistic identities. Not only is it undeniable that these ideologies were formative for artists working in the Western context regardless of gender or cultural background, many aspects of these ideological discourses provided fruitful concepts for later feminist development and elaboration. As we shall see, the attention to bodily experience so emphasized by Merleau-Ponty will become a hallmark of a specifically feminist attention to embodiment and process.

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6 The Artist’s Process at Mid-Century

As we saw in the previous chapter, art and the processes of art making became central to mid-twentieth-century philosophical discussions about the nature of human existence and action in the modern world. Artists themselves sometimes situated their work in broad philosophical terms, but more often they served as examples of dedication to the processes of creative labor. This chapter examines mid-twentieth-century artists whose working processes became emblematic of extreme dedication to process and the critical discourse that promoted them. This discourse builds on earlier discussions of prominent modern artists, most notably Cézanne, as well the tradition of difficulty previously traced in relation to modern artistic production. In addition to extending earlier discursive themes, the mid-century emphasis on artistic process transformed the ways artists perceived their own work. A striking example of this is Picasso’s statement published in 1960: “Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research. That is why I number them. It is an experiment in time. I number them and date them. Maybe one day someone will be grateful.”1 This is a complete reversal from the artist’s famous 1923 statement, in which he said, “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.”2 For many artists at mid-century, total engagement in their working process defined them, and the final resolution that the completed artwork had once signified began to diminish in importance. This shift in values not only affected the work of prominent artists, it also had notable effects

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on both the general public’s engagement with art and the ways artists were educated. Alberto Giacometti is the mid-twentieth-century artist most often invoked as the heir to Cézanne. Like Cézanne, Giacometti led a highly restricted existence devoted to the pursuit of representing what he saw, and also like his predecessor his sense of that pursuit was of an almost impossible task in which he made very slow progress over the course of decades.3 Jean-Paul Sartre described his dedication: “Giacometti is not interested in statues at all, but only in sketches, insofar as they help him to his goal. He breaks everything, and begins all over again. From time to time, friends are able to save a head, a young woman, a youth, from the massacre. He doesn’t care, and goes back to his task. He has not had a single exhibition in fifteen years. . . . The marvelous unity of this life lies in its insistent search for the absolute.”4 For Sartre, Giacometti is the quintessential existential man who takes nothing as given and devotes himself to discovering and confronting the unmediated object of his gaze. The severe restrictions of his existence are proof of the sincerity of his labors. The artist’s task is the ultimate effort, one that encapsulates the existential task of all human beings, the need to confront existence directly without preconceptions or prefabricated meanings. Not only did Sartre describe the existentialist’s stance as a rigorous moral test, he also considered it an ongoing labor without final resolution. There is never a moment of ultimate revelation, a moment of rest and absolution. Thus human life, like Giacometti’s relentless labor, is a continual test of endurance and dedication to a goal that is always just out of reach. More significant than the attainment of a goal is the attitude maintained in its pursuit; at each moment the individual must maintain good faith and act with authenticity. These are key concepts for existentialism that had wide influence on mid-twentieth-century thought, particularly in the realm of art and culture. They inflected preexisting notions of artistic expression and individual style with a strong moral tone.5 Dedication to the creative process became increasingly a means to demonstrate absolute moral commitment to truth and authenticity. The artist’s activity was no longer the production of artworks; rather, it became one of the most, even the most, concrete example of authentic action. As Sartre’s description of Giacometti shows, the artist is not concerned at all with the products that result from that action; what matters is the effort, the act, the process. Writers who knew Giacometti inevitably emphasized the artist’s total dedication to process rather than to results. Mercedes Matter wrote:

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“Each time I work,” said Alberto Giacometti, “I am ready without a moment’s hesitation to undo all that I did the day before because each day I have the impression that I see further.” This was Giacometti’s life, this irrevocable beginning again, this voluntary life of Sisyphus. It was an effort indefatigably sustained, the all-consuming focus of his energies. . . . “I’m only happy when I’m trying to do the impossible. . . . It’s an endless quest.”6 According to David Sylvester, “His interest was not in producing the best results he might be capable of: it was in endlessly putting his capabilities to the test. ‘I see something, find it marvellous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary; I advance in any case. Whether I advance by failing or whether I advance by gaining a little, I’ll always have gained for myself, personally. If there’s no picture, that’s too bad. So long as I’ve learned something about why.’”7 Matter also noted that “in later years it became more and more difficult for him to complete anything, until finally he rejected the very idea of finishing a work. By then it was only what he was gaining in the process that mattered, not the particular work that happened to survive or to be destroyed as the case may be.”8 As described in these texts on the artist’s life and work, Giacometti was completely indifferent to everything but his creative efforts. This included the products of that effort. It was his brother Diego who facilitated Alberto’s complete devotion to the labor of creation. Diego took on the role of the traditional craftsman, allowing Alberto to instantiate the creative process. Thus Alberto was able to be completely immersed in the immediacies of creation, the drawing and sculpting from direct observation, without having to stop and make more practical decisions. Diego fabricated the armatures for the sculptures, cast the works in plaster when Alberto stopped working for the night, and oversaw their final casting in the bronze foundry, even to the point of supervising the patination of the final works. Division of labor in the artist’s studio is traditional; what made Giacometti’s studio unusual was the type of labor the artist performed. Traditionally, the artist supplied the ideas and the assistants provided the more laborintensive craft production. In Giacometti’s studio the artist engaged in physically and emotionally intensive labor, and it was the assistant’s role to control the situation in ways comparable to how a stage manager and producer create the conditions for a theatrical production. Giacometti’s own All About Process

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labor became a mysterious, even primordial task, one for which there were no precedents, not even in his own previous works: “In each work the artist begins his task by putting himself in the condition of one totally lacking in the technical means for carrying it out. . . . [James] Lord questioned Giacometti about his ‘technique’ for translating his ‘vision into something which is visible to others.’ ‘That’s the whole drama,’ Giacometti replied, ‘I don’t have such a technique.’ He then said that despite his excellent training he had never been able to paint what he saw. ‘So I had to start all over again from scratch . . . and things have been going from bad to worse.’”9 If every work began from nothing and no existing technique was implemented in its creation, then it is evident there would be a serious problem determining when the work was completed. And, indeed, there was: “Painting and sculpting are transformed into a process of knowing and self-knowing; ‘whether an artwork is a failure or a success,’ Giacometti said, ‘is, in the end, of secondary importance.’ The repudiation of aesthetic objectives makes finishing a painting impossible, since reality has no formal goal. The artist is ‘only working for the sake of the experience that I feel when working,’ and he could keep busy forever on a single canvas, producing a rubble of sensations, and perceptions, all passé, like . . . the chaos discovered at the end of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece.”10 Obviously there were products of Alberto Giacometti’s labor, a great many products in fact, but what preoccupied the artist was the creative process, the effort to render what he saw in drawings or sculptures. This is far from unusual. What makes Giacometti an exemplary artist for his time is the extremity of his dedication. His life was his art; he lived and worked in his studio, even when he could afford to live more comfortably. He was obsessed with capturing the image of his sitter, which persistently eluded him. A lifetime of dedication to his task seemed not to advance him appreciably closer to his goal.11 Giacometti was himself aware of the unusual nature of his life and work: “In a way, it is rather abnormal that instead of living one spends one’s time trying to copy a head, immobilizing someone in a chair every afternoon, the same person for five years, trying to copy him without succeeding, and still going on. It’s not an activity one could call exactly normal, do you think? One has to belong to a certain social environment for it to be even tolerated . . . it’s an activity that’s useless to the whole of society. It’s a purely individual satisfaction, extremely egotistical and basically annoying even to the person himself.”12 In stating that his activity was socially useless Giacometti was certainly mistaken. His work—not merely the products of his labor, but its means of production—had significant social value. Giacometti’s dedication

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to his process, his life devoted to the effort to make concrete a single relatively simple idea, the image of his own perception, provided a public example for others to follow. Complete dedication to an idea, no matter how apparently useless, is the means to create meaning in life. In the existentialist’s world where there is no faith, no certainty of God, no common morality, all that is left is the individual’s choice to act or not. The artist’s act, continually repeated, is an affirmation of human purpose in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity. As Harold Rosenberg wrote in the early 1970s, “As a legend, Giacometti is a match for Duchamp, though of an opposite order: against the celebrated impresario of non-works . . . he represents the absolute worthwhileness of engaging in the processes of creating sculptures and paintings.”13 While Giacometti may be one of the more extreme examples, his dedication and seriousness of purpose are characteristics of many midtwentieth-century artists. Also notable in the artistic discourse of the period is an overall sense of the exalted, even universal import of the artist’s endeavor. For Robert Motherwell it is a demonstration of human potential in an era that provides little external inspiration: “No one now creates with joy; on the contrary, with anguish; but there are a few selves that are willing to pay; it is this payment, wherever one lives, that one really undertakes in choosing to become an artist. The rest one endures. . . . In so doing, one discovers who one is, or, more exactly, invents oneself. If no one did this, we would scarcely imagine of what a man is capable.”14 Merleau-Ponty saw the artist’s original self-expression through automatic personal gestures as trivial,15 and many other mid-century writers, critics, and artists tended to avoid stressing the artist’s work as mere personal expression in favor of an emphasis on the artist’s struggle to make work. Motherwell described his work’s power and significance as preeminently moral: “I should guess that when it [my painting] moves anyone it is because of its moral struggle. . . . Aesthetic decisions in the process of painting are not primarily aesthetic in origin but moral. . . . One might say today that the morality of a picture is unusually dependent on what the artist refused to accept in it as bearable. Modern pictures—‘abstract’ ones, that is—tend to be the residues of a moral process.” The artist’s self-expression was situated in a larger more significant context than a simple and direct assertion of personal identity. As existentialist thinkers stressed, personal identity had to be created, often with great difficulty. The artist’s process was thus a concrete example of the difficulties faced by the individual attempting to arrive at self-definition: “Art is a form of action, a drama, a process. It is the dramatic gesture itself in modern times, not a religious content, that All About Process

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accounts for art’s hold on the minds of men. One enters the studio as one would an arena. One’s entire character is revealed in the action, one’s style. . . . Of course, everyone undergoes risks just by living. From one point of view, the artist’s function is to give each risk its proper style. In this sense everyone should be an artist.”16 Robert Motherwell, in fact, defined the entire New York school of painters in terms of the existentialist process of authentic self-definition:

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The School of New York tries to find out what art is precisely through the process of making art. That is to say, one discovers . . . rather than imposes a picture. What constitutes the discovery is the discovery of one’s own feeling, which none of us would dare to propose before the act of painting itself. . . . We know what we believe by how we paint. . . . The major decisions in the process of painting are made on the grounds of truth, not taste. Conventional painting is a lie—not an imposture, but the product of a man who is living a lie. . . . That painting and sculpture are not skills that can be taught in reference to preestablished criteria, whether academic or modern, but a process, whose content is found, subtle, and deeply felt; that no true artist ends with the style he expected to have when he began, anymore than anyone’s life unrolls in the particular manner one expected when young; that it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one’s own style . . . such is the experience of the School of New York.17 Here is the moral justification not just for the artist’s process, but also for its necessary isolation from external influence. What had been understood by many thoughtful modern artists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries as a delicate and judicious balancing between the perception of external reality, the formal organization of a painting, and the expressive intentions of the artist had become a much more restricted direct engagement between the painter and the painting. External influences such as established painting techniques, other artworks, even perceived reality, became potential disruptors of the honesty of the artist’s encounter with the act of painting. The artistic process became reified, sacrosanct, not only a means of self-definition but human potential made concrete. The rapid dominance of this view of the artist’s labor in the mid-twentieth century coincided with an enormous expansion of artist education programs in colleges, universities, and art schools, which, as we shall see, established not The Artist’s Process at Mid-Century

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only a widespread approach to artist education but also set in place an enduring belief in the exalted importance of the artistic process. The writer and critic most closely associated with the existentialist interpretation of New York school painting is Harold Rosenberg, whose article “The American Action Painters” appeared in ARTnews in 1952. In this well-known essay Rosenberg described the American painter as staging an encounter with the canvas, which became “an arena in which to act.” The painted image is the result of this encounter, unlike in previous eras when images originated in the artist’s mind. Echoing earlier writers such as Collingwood and Dewey, Rosenberg stressed the artist’s physical gestures and likened them to dance in their capacity to “enact” the artist’s psychic state. The painter’s primary gesture is the line, which establishes the painter’s movements as aesthetic statements: “Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction—psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked.”18 This description of what is required for accurate critical evaluation of action painting is a particularly interesting theme of Rosenberg’s essay that revitalizes issues of evaluation that had been hotly debated during the interwar period in Paris in the context of Surrealist automatism.19 How precisely were marks to be read as indexes of authentic processes, be they processes of pure automatism, emotional expression, or existential engagement, and who was capable of accurately reading them? Rosenberg’s essay is famous for its formulations of the action painter’s process; the artist rejects all preexisting guides and goals, “works in a condition of open possibility,” and “accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating.” He claims that the test of a painting’s seriousness is the “degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the artist’s total effort to make over his experience. A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an action and its relation to a transforming process in the artist.” Each brushstroke is both a decisive result of the dramatic dialogue between painter and canvas and the formation of a new question.20 This description suggests that the action painting will somehow index an ongoing dialectical tension, although there is no concrete description of what the physical signs of this dialectic may be.21 Rosenberg does provide the alternative to engaged action painting. It is an easy mystical painting based on luck and chance that creates “unearned masterpieces,” and a gesture that “completes itself without arousing either All About Process

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an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own.”22 The description is strongly reminiscent of early critical assaults on Surrealist automatic painting that stressed its formal weaknesses resulting from a lack of structural rigor and developed skills. Now, however, it is less a matter of formal incapacities than a lax aestheticism that indexes a lack of proper moral engagement with the artistic process. Rosenberg claims that this easy mystical painting makes good commodities and recognizable autographic styles. The latter criticism is comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s dismissive approach to mere self-expression, and the rejection of art that is merely a successful commodity was an avantgarde strategy well established by the Surrealists during the 1920s. Rosenberg’s distinction between an easy creative process that docilely follows chance where it may lead and an active, tension-filled, dialectical, and engaged process sketches out the beginnings of an evaluative scale. In this scale it would appear that conventional aesthetic or formal appeal is likely to be suspect as inadequately engaged. Similarly, it may be that the artist who finds some sort of satisfaction as an indicator that the work is finished is also not fully dedicated to the process. Robert Motherwell’s statement from 1947 presents an interesting case in this regard:

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I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and errors. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view. My pictures have layers of mistakes buried in them—an X-ray would disclose crimes—layers of consciousness, of willing. They are a succession of humiliations resulting from the realization that only in a state of quickened subjectivity—of freedom from conscious notions, and with what I always suppose to be secondary or accidental colors and shapes— do I find the unknown, which nevertheless I recognize when I come upon it, for which I am always searching.23 Motherwell here describes a working process that is a series of efforts to consciously control the work, all of which result in failure, and an ultimate discovery, which apparently arrives only when consciousness is relaxed and feeling takes over. The work then contains the efforts, “layers of mistakes,” that led to its final form. The struggle is framed here in fundamentally Surrealist The Artist’s Process at Mid-Century

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terms, and tension implicitly arises from alternating efforts to control and to relinquish control. Echoes of formalism (internal relations, unification, colors, and shapes) and of Matisse’s description of his painting process reveal Motherwell’s marriage of a more traditional painter’s method, the craftsman’s concern to create a well-made object, to a Surrealist search for pure automatism. This dual approach does have a goal that is ultimately discovered/revealed in the final stage of the painting. Motherwell’s 1947 statement is interesting in part because it shows a means for understanding the process of a New York school painter in terms that are clearly indebted to well-established practices of modern artists. Discussions of Willem de Kooning, the painter whose improvisational process Rosenberg credited as the inspiration for “The American Action Painters,” are often more difficult to parse, although aspects of Motherwell’s statement are notably applicable. De Kooning’s paintings are commonly considered to be “arrested processes” that have “layers of mistakes buried in them,” and he might plausibly have said about them that “they are a succession of humiliations.” He is well-known for describing his paintings as “slipping glimpses,” which might be compared to Motherwell’s final moment when what he was seeking “flashes into view.” The differences seem to lie in motivation. Whereas Motherwell was apparently seeking something, an image, some sort of formal resolution, by quasi-automatic means, de Kooning seems to have been fully engaged by the process itself. It is this, of course, that made him such an inspiration for Rosenberg, and it is this aspect of the artist’s achievement that has recently been of particular interest to scholars. According to Rosenberg, de Kooning was strongly affected by Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece as well as Cézanne’s life and work.24 Like Giacometti, whom de Kooning also admired, de Kooning belongs to a tradition of failure, artists so absorbed by their working process that they not only cannot achieve a final product, they cannot even see what they are making with anything approaching ordinary detachment.25 There is, however, a notable difference: whereas the other prominent artists of this lineage approach the tragic in their attitudes, de Kooning seems not only to have considered his situation absurd but to have found it amusing. Rosenberg described the situation of the modern artist as focused solely on making art. To him, painting is detached from social, metaphysical, and aesthetic objectives: “The function of art is no longer to satisfy wants, including intellectual wants, but to serve as a stimulus to further creation.” De

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Kooning stated that he considered painting a way of living. This way of living, as Rosenberg described it, was utterly unfettered by any predeterminations. In his art the artist is fully open to the multiplicity of experience and as a result has no style. Rosenberg explicitly rejected the notion that de Kooning worked automatically; thus de Kooning’s paintings cannot be seen in terms of Motherwell’s description of a series of failed attempts to achieve automatism. For Rosenberg what was most significant was the tension of de Kooning’s process, which he described as a “mismating of immediacy and will,” an ongoing attempt to reconcile the unpremeditated mark with the artist’s conscious aesthetic will. He wrote that the artist’s labor is comparable to that of a boxer or mountain climber, a developed and instinctual responsiveness to a constantly changing situation, what Rosenberg called a “trained sense of immediate rightness”: “In the situation that keeps arising on the canvas, the artist-actor must be governed not by rule, nor even by esthetic principle, but by tact.”26 Rosenberg also explicitly stated that de Kooning had a craftsman’s competitive approach to his painting, matching his own skills against the great painters of the past.27 It is his consciousness of history and his constant deployment of the nuances of the painter’s craft that keep de Kooning from being a merely self-expressive painter in Rosenberg’s account. But it is also, and more significantly for the painter’s reputation, the intensity of his struggle that came to define de Kooning’s painting. The notion that de Kooning’s painting resulted from an extreme struggle with his medium became prominent in the early 1950s when Thomas Hess published an article on the making of Woman I for ARTnews. Accompanied by many photographs of the painting at various moments in its making by Rudolph Burckhardt, the article documents the painting’s two-year genesis, in which it seemed less to advance from an incomplete to a completed state than to be begun, destroyed, and begun again. In Hess’s account the making of de Kooning’s painting was not a development or progress but a romantic voyage comparable to those undertaken by nineteenth-century poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The photographs document arbitrary stops on the voyage, not significant stages of the work, and are no “more or less ‘finished’ than the terminus.” The voyage itself is what matters in Hess’s account, the “exploration for a constantly elusive vision, solution to a problem that was continually being set in new ways.” Like Rosenberg, Hess stresses the artist’s rejection of automatism in favor of the long process of thoughtful labor: “The artist . . . refuses to capitalize on the process of correction and the happy accidents it so often produces. Changes made after

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prolonged study . . . [are] preceded by scraping back to the canvas.”28 Hess describes de Kooning’s painting method as “fast” and his tempo as “hectic”; this rapid pace is broken up by periods of consideration and scraping out previous layers to begin again. Hess’s long championship of de Kooning, which began with “De Kooning Paints a Picture” and lasted for many years of critical and personal support, built on the painter’s previously established reputation. His peers had long respected De Kooning as an artist of notable skills developed in a European art academy as well as by training as a traditional European decorator. Such skills, unusual among artists in the United States, not only impressed the artists he knew, they also made it possible for him to find occasional work as an illustrator and decorative artist. In the mid-century New York art world de Kooning was respected for renouncing his training to devote himself to the creation of modern art, and in that effort working relentlessly to evade his technical facility. The fact that he rarely exhibited prior to the early 1950s, seemed unable to complete a painting despite constant labor, and lived in extreme poverty added to the legend of the uncompromising artist dedicated to an impossible project at great personal cost. Not only did he refuse to become a commercial artist, he destroyed most of his paintings. Such unremunerated dedication was highly esteemed by his peers and seen as an example of extreme artistic integrity. De Kooning’s legendary labor to create modern paintings needs to be considered in terms of its context and precedents. First, there is the American context where prior to the 1950s it was virtually impossible to become a successful modern artist, particularly without first establishing a reputation in Europe. According to de Kooning’s biographers, in the 1930s when no one could sell art New York artists often discussed the process of painting itself as an intrinsic good.29 Dedication to modern painting in the United States was established as a fruitless endeavor; even the few American museums devoted to modern art had no interest in American artists. The second important issue is that of precedent. Cézanne’s labors were, of course, wellknown, but there were the even more immediate and apposite precedents of Matisse and, most importantly, Picasso. Ambitious young artists considered Picasso their greatest predecessor, the artist whose achievement they had to master and surmount in order to establish their own reputations. And Picasso was a formidable artist whose reputation and achievements, in addition to being legendary, were virtually cognates for modern art itself. Picasso, the inexhaustible, relentless creator, became the measure of the modern

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artist, and it is hardly remarkable that in the face of such unflagging creative production the next generations of artists would find themselves caught up in examinations of the creative process. De Kooning, like many ambitious artists of the time, sought to challenge Picasso. He cited the huge 1939 Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art as a major influence on his development, and there are important ways that de Kooning’s process and reputation followed that of the modern master.30 Like Picasso, de Kooning worked ceaselessly to subvert the technical skills and facility he had acquired in his early academic training, yet these very skills remained key to the success and appreciation of both artists’ work. This was a significant aspect of de Kooning’s reputation that appears in the earliest published criticism of his work. For example, in 1948 Reneé Arb wrote, “Here is virtuosity disguised as voluptuousness—the process of painting becomes the end. Technique is lavish and versatile; draftsmanship elegant and precise.”31 Likewise, Clement Greenberg wrote, “The indeterminateness or ambiguity that characterizes some of de Kooning’s pictures is caused, I believe, by his effort to suppress his facility. There is a deliberate renunciation of will in so far as it makes itself felt as skill, and there is a refusal to work with ideas that are too clear. . . . These very contradictions are the source of the largeness and seriousness we recognize in this magnificent first show.”32 Also, like Picasso, de Kooning devoted his life with single-minded intensity to his work. Both artists drew constantly and were remarkably prolific, although unlike Picasso, de Kooning destroyed most of his early work. This in itself can be seen as an important indicator of the situation of the young modern artist at mid-century. Whereas the old master was constantly displaying his fecundity, the next generation was overwhelmed with anxiety, unable to fix the value and significance of any product. Picasso’s confident and seemingly infinite proliferation of works, which were widely published and exhibited, provided younger mid-century artists with contradictory messages. One was that the successful modern artist was fully engaged in making, in the creative process, and produced works naturally as a tree bears fruit, each one no more or less valuable than the last. In apparent contradiction, however, was the immensity of Picasso’s youthful achievements and the travails that accompanied them. Two of his most important paintings, the portrait of Gertrude Stein and the Demoiselles d’Avignon, were notorious struggles to make, and the second, arguably the greatest single painting of the twentieth century, was not considered finished by the artist. Furthermore, by the mid-1930s Picasso was on record as the

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confident artist finding success in his failures, satisfied by his own hard-won dissatisfactions:

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In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture—then I destroy it. . . . A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. . . . When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing.33 The success of de Kooning’s women paintings of the early 1950s seems in this light almost overdetermined. The combination of the subject, the overwhelming figure of a “monstrous” woman, bearing the obvious indexical signs of the artist’s long creative struggle to produce her, was the perfect manifestation of the difficulties facing the modern figure painter at mid-century. Not only was the work a contemporary revision of Matisse’s and Picasso’s earlier “masterpieces,” it also portrayed in vivid form the existential anxieties associated with figuration and interpersonal communication. In place of the refined decorative resolution of Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude, the sculptural solidity of Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, or the confrontational graphic simplifications of his Demoiselles, de Kooning presented women who oscillate irresolutely in form and character. Their presences are demanding; they have imposing scale and color, as well as, in many instances, dominant anatomical parts that draw attention. Nevertheless, their forms are largely unfixed, body parts appear in varying undecidable positions and locations, and their emotional aspect is likewise ambiguous. They are most often described as monstrous and menacing, interpretations well in keeping with Sartrean existentialism’s view of the dangerous power of another person’s gaze.34 In these paintings de Kooning’s well-established existential anxieties as an artist found an appropriate subject.35 Irresolvable process directed itself to an unfixable representation: the mysteries of woman as perceived by a man. All About Process

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The traditional figurative subject was also a source of great difficulty and anxiety for an ambitious modern artist at mid-century. Arguably the most influential critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, promoted the conviction that modern art had evolved to pure nonrepresentational abstraction and that figuration was a step backward. It was a view shared by many supporters of modern art, as de Kooning well knew, and his own first one-man show in 1948 had been an exhibition of nonrepresentational painting much admired by Greenberg. The women paintings with their overt display of both figurative subject and the artist’s unresolved painting process thus represented another approach to understanding the significance of the modern artist’s work. In de Kooning’s women paintings the artist’s labor does not result in the exalted impersonality of medium-specific purity and optical sensation (what Rosenberg mocked as “apocalyptic wallpaper”) promoted by Greenberg and his followers. Instead, de Kooning’s paintings manifest an altogether different vision of the modern artist’s achievement: the persistence of the artist’s physical and emotional labor in the face of indifference and even denigration. Of course, de Kooning’s dedicated craftsmanship, his full engagement with his creative process, ultimately was not just well received but became an inspiration for many artists. Here was an artist whose work was the result of a single-minded devotion to the process of making art, who worked without theories or abstract limitations, and who discovered in his labor its raison d’être. In an age of ever-increasing mechanization, a life devoted to the craft of painting and a seemingly endless exploration of its nuances began to take on a kind of value and meaning in itself. One of the major themes in discussions of de Kooning’s art is its physicality and the physicality of the artist’s working process. Richard Shiff has explored de Kooning’s manual techniques in drawing and painting, as well as the artist’s conceptualization of physicality as the basis for his work. He contends, for example, that the women de Kooning painted are less the result of the artist’s perceptions of women than they are representations of his own kinesthetic sensations and sense of physical embodiment.36 Attention to the physical processes of drawing, the formation of gesture and its subversion when it becomes too easy or habitual, is at the center of de Kooning’s work. It is what allowed him to find tension and continued interest in a creative process that could easily have become mere rote activity. In a combination of constant invention of new strategies for spontaneous production and careful attention to the products of his actions de Kooning kept his process active and engaged throughout his career.37 There was, according to the artist’s supporters, no resting on an achieved style for de Kooning: “Standard[s]

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will always be flexible, as the experience is always new. . . . A system cannot be willed. It grows . . . like a crystal. Irrelevancies of Style, including the artist’s own style, must be excluded, for the experience depends, in part, on freshness for its validity.”38 The requirement for infinite engagement and novelty places the artist in a precarious position. There is no place to rest for the artist fully engaged with his process, and Hess emphasized the extent to which de Kooning worked to keep his work off balance, in process: Hazard enters in every change of angle and brushstroke. It is not unusual for a painting to be turned upside down or 90 degrees at the last minute. The artist feels he must keep off-balance in front of his work. The picture is a bet kept riding on rolls of the dice. It can be lost at any throw. When it can no longer be lost, the picture is finished. The artist is outside. And to keep his bet on the table, the most dangerous methods must be used. Peril becomes as much a part of the medium as turpentine. The means cannot be separated from the ends in the finished work . . . because the only separable means are those pounds of paint that have been scraped to the floor.39 Hazard, peril, lost bets, the artist’s work is difficult, even dangerous, balanced on the knife-edge between the failures of complacency and loss of control. Here the artist’s process becomes a metaphor for the difficult, even impossible, negotiation of personal identity in the modern world. Either one becomes the impersonal automaton, the bureaucratic “organization man,” or founders in a schizophrenic abyss, a puppet driven by external forces beyond one’s control. The mid-twentieth-century critical discourse that situated process as central to the significance of modern art reflected widespread contemporary values and projected a specifically male image of the modern artist who engages in conventionally masculine attitudes. He embraces danger, destruction, and risk in the battle against conformity and forces of moral disorder. There seems to be no obvious position for the female artist in this discourse, which marginalized active self-defining women just as the contemporary art world and society did.40 Women do not appear as artists in the most wellknown and influential accounts of mid-twentieth-century modern artistic process, and they were notably marginalized in published discussions of individual artist’s processes.41 They are, however, disturbingly present as the depicted subject with which the male artist struggles in his desperate efforts All About Process

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to make his creative mark. Balzac’s character Frenhofer, whose failed painting of a female nude in which only a foot remained recognizable after years of labor, initiated what became a persistently repeated exercise, renewed, practiced, and represented through the decades of modernism in the work of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and de Kooning. The modern artist does not just do battle with his medium and abstract forces as the core of his creative process; he also does battle with women whose representation constantly eludes him. It is not surprising that the discourse of modern artistic process was a site for articulating and promoting what has long been recognized as the profound gender bias of modernism.42 Indeed, it would be remarkable to find that such a prominent cultural discourse had escaped prevailing social values, conceptions, and prejudices. The discourse of artistic process did offer women at mid-century something important, however: a means to conceive their largely unrecognized creative labors as potentially meaningful and even heroic. In stressing the high value of unceasing, dedicated labor as a personal act of self-definition in the face of public indifference, the discourse of modern artistic process provided unacknowledged artists of all genders, classes, and racial identities with a powerful and potentially sustaining ideology. Certainly ideology is not as practically sustaining as the financial remuneration that often accompanies an artist’s public recognition, but it did allow a space for conceiving highly significant creative activity within the constraints of social, cultural, and economic oppression and prejudice. That these constraints greatly affected women is inarguable, evident not only in the relative neglect of female professional artists at mid-century but also in the relegation of many dedicated women to the category of amateur artists, which will be discussed below. As we shall see, though, the discourse of process was not only used to promote the gender biases of modernism; it was employed to undermine many of the value claims made for modern art and would prove to be an invaluable tool in expanding its parameters to include a far wider range of practices and practitioners than were recognized in the first half of the twentieth century. Thomas Hess’s 1953 ARTnews article on the creation of Woman I with its accompanying photo documentation was part of a mid-century phenomenon: the public presentation of artists at work. As discussed in chapter 4, ARTnews followed the French magazine Cahiers d’Art in showing the stages of artworks by famous modern artists like Picasso and Matisse in the 1940s. At the end of that decade the magazine began its regular series of illustrated articles documenting artists at work. Since the first of these, “Ben Shahn Paints a

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Picture,” appeared in May 1949, the series was well established by the time de Kooning was featured in 1953. In ARTnews these features on artists at work were often oriented toward the artist as a personality and usually included images of the artists in their studios literally at work rather than a series of images of a work in progress. The reader was thereby given a feeling of immediacy and intimacy with the artist’s working process. Magazine photo essays on artists’ working processes were not limited to art magazines; they also appeared in mainstream news magazines such as Life and were paralleled by films of artists at work. Picasso was filmed while he painted, most famously in 1956 in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso. In this film, which the director introduces by saying it will supply us with a public display of genius, Picasso states that in showing his working process he wants to “get to the bottom of the story,” and that in order to do so “everything must be risked.” To the painter who said that he felt like a matador when he was painting, the idea of the artist’s work as risking all may not have seemed hyperbolic. It is also a statement very much in tune with contemporary existentialist attitudes and Harold Rosenberg’s conception of the American action painters, whom he saw as participants in a risky adventure. Whether the filming of the artist at work truly gives viewers a sense of risk is impossible to know, but Clouzot attempted to create an atmosphere of suspense in filming the progress of the many works Picasso creates for the movie. More significant than any emotional charge generated by the filming is the vivid presentation of the sequential nature of the artist’s work. It seems possible that this method even affected Picasso’s own perception of his process, making the sense of temporal development more self-conscious than it had been in his earlier career. As quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Picasso told the filmmaker Alexander Liberman late in his career that all his paintings were researches and experiments in time, thereby renouncing his famous 1923 statement that his artistic labor was “finding” rather than researching. Even in 1935, just two years before his creation of Guernica was documented and published in Cahiers d’Art, Picasso told Christian Zervos, “I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done.”43 Without making an evaluation of what such a dramatic shift in attitude meant for Picasso himself, it is possible to see it as a reflection of changes in the cultural valuation of the modern artist’s process and product. The artist’s process—and not just that of Picasso the recognized genius, but that of all artists—had become a source of great curiosity by

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mid-century, and the extent to which the artwork as product revealed that process was a means to justify its significance and even acclamation. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the artist’s work were enhanced by the slow-motion sequences of Matisse drawing in a 1946 documentary film. Just as the philosopher (and the artist himself in this case) can discover new aspects of the creative process on film, so, too, may the public begin to consider viewing the artist’s labor as a means of access for understanding and valuing modern art. Scenes of the artist working in the studio helped to develop public recognition that modern artists did in fact work hard, even if the products of their labor seemed childish or lacking in skill when first compared to the representational masterpieces of previous centuries.44 Documentation of artists at work also helped to define them as individuals who often resembled menial laborers rather than the figure of the clean, intellectual, even aristocratic fine artist promoted since the Renaissance. In the United States the image of the artist as a workingman, someone who engaged in dirty physical labor, was a means not just of holding up the artist as a liberated alternative to the middle-class office worker but also of proving that art was a masculine activity in a society that had long viewed art as a suspiciously feminine pursuit for a man.45 The most masculine image of the modern artist was that of Jackson Pollock, whose much-remarked-on roughneck appearance, unorthodox drip painting process, and seemingly incomprehensible, enormous, nonrepresentational paintings became a popular public icon of the outrageous modern artist. In Pollock’s case, perhaps even more than de Kooning’s, the artist’s creative process was integral to the significance of the works. This was so evidently true that it was almost neglected in the critical discourse of the late 1940s and 1950s. Rosenberg implicitly deflated the claims Pollock had to be an “action painter” in his famous essay by his reference to “apocalyptic wallpaper,” although it seems inevitable that Pollock influenced Rosenberg’s conception of action painting.46 Clement Greenberg, Pollock’s primary critical supporter, thought that the value and interest of Pollock’s work resided in the paintings themselves and the ways he saw them as advancing the formal development of modern art. How they were made was not an issue he concerned himself with in his evaluations, although he acknowledged Pollock’s skillful manipulation of his drip technique.47 Other critics often described the way the drip paintings were created but did not connect the process to the evaluation of the final works; it remained mere information about the artist’s quasi-automatic technique rather than a topic to analyze

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or explore. Pollock himself concluded an interview in 1950 by stating, “Naturally, the result is the thing—and—it doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.”48 Pollock certainly believed that what he was doing was making paintings (and he hoped successful ones), not merely engaging in a process that was its own reward and raison d’être. It was the notorious 1949 article in Life that first placed textual emphasis on the artist’s process. The piece began with a summing up of critical evaluations from Greenberg to Pollock’s Long Island grocer, a deliberate strategy that played off highbrow and lowbrow, New York City and the country, the United States and Europe. No direct evaluation was made of Pollock’s painting beyond noting the enormous disparity in previous critical evaluations of the artist, which ranged from major modern artist to degenerate. However, an implicit evaluation seems evident in the statement that Pollock studied under the “Realist Thomas Benton but soon gave this up in utter frustration and turned to his present style.” Undoubtedly many readers would read this as indicating that Pollock was unable to paint realistically. What followed were some brief quotations about his technique and a description of his process that stressed its workingman’s physicality and improvisatory messiness; the inadvertent inclusion of cigarette butts and dead bees in the painting topped off the list of “foreign matter” that went into a Pollock painting. It is hard not to read the article as intending to sympathize with readers suspicious of the value of modern art, but it is interesting that it is in this context that Pollock’s process becomes the primary issue. Perhaps the unacknowledged author, staff writer Dorothy Seiberling, decided that while the readership of Life might not feel themselves qualified to form a meaningful opinion of the paintings, they would have an opinion on the artist’s process. Whatever her motivation, it seems evident that she decided Pollock’s painting process was particularly interesting and worthy of attention simply for what it was. Unlike contemporary art critics she made no effort to link the artist’s working process to the paintings. Robert Goodnough’s article “Jackson Pollock Paints a Picture” appeared in the May 1951 issue of ARTnews. Accompanied by the now-famous photographs of Pollock at work on Autumn Rhythm by Hans Namuth, the piece represents the first fully detailed description of the artist’s working methods and their relevance to his paintings. As Goodnough presented it, Pollock’s painting process consisted of bouts of “feverish intensity” interspersed with long periods of contemplation. He stressed the physicality of Pollock’s drip method, explicitly comparing its beginnings to a ritual dance, but he also All About Process

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insisted on the artist’s thoughtful development of the work. This was no mere automatism, but the careful creation of a “record” of a “released experience”; the final stages of the work were “slow and deliberate,” directed to bringing the “exceedingly complex” design to “a state of complete organization.” In what appear to be paraphrases of Pollock, Goodnough encapsulates the contradictory difficulties the painter faced in making works with such a striking and relatively novel technique: “Pollock feels that criticism of a work such as this should be directed at least in terms of what he is doing, rather than by standards of what painting ought to be. He is aware that a new way of expression in art is often difficult to see, but he resents presentation of his work merely on the level of technical interest.”49 On the one hand Pollock believes his painting needs to be evaluated on its own terms, not in terms of the standards of previous paintings, but he does not want its uniqueness to turn it into a merely singular demonstration of an unusual technique. Given that the method so easily could become a performance with slightly freakish overtones, like the notorious donkey painting with its tail in 1910,50 it is not surprising that Pollock was apparently satisfied with Greenberg’s formalist evaluation of his paintings and their place in the development of modern art. Goodnough’s article is an important precursor to both Rosenberg’s “The American Action Painters” and Hess’s “De Kooning Paints a Picture.” As in those later articles, the author stresses the painter’s intense and immediate engagement with his painting process as key to the significance of the work:

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These [modern abstract] artists are not concerned with representing a preconceived idea, but rather with being involved in an experience of paint and canvas, directly [emphasis added], without interference from the suggested forms and colors of existing objects. The nature of the experience is important [emphasis added]. It is not something that has lost contact with reality, but might be called a synthesis of countless contacts which have become refined in the area of the emotions during the act of painting. Is this merely an act of automatism? Pollock says it is not. He feels that his methods may be automatic at the start, but that they quickly step beyond that. . . . Decisions about the painting are made during its development and it is considered completed when he no longer feels any affinity with it.51 Goodnough’s overall interest is to outline how the artist’s creative process is able to create an emotionally expressive and formally integrated work that can stand apart from the artist as a successful aesthetic object. This is certainly The Artist’s Process at Mid-Century

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a different emphasis from Rosenberg’s, whose interests were more with the artist as actor rather than as creator, but Goodnough, a painter and member of the New York school himself, gives an indication of how the painters of the period conceptualized the significance of their working processes. They did not reject the importance of the final product as the next generation would. It is that next generation who will view Rosenberg’s action painting as proposing an art of pure creative process, with Jackson Pollock serving as the prime exemplar of that attitude. The centrality of Pollock’s process for the understanding and reception of his painting took on a slightly different guise in Leo Steinberg’s 1955 review of a retrospective of his work. Steinberg, unlike previous reviewers, saw great effort in Pollock’s painting process rather than the graceful automatism others had noted. Indeed, Steinberg’s Pollock seems to have somehow become confused with de Kooning, an artist struggling against his own skills to realize an impossible task. He describes the paintings as “manifestations of Herculean effort, this evidence of mortal struggle between the man and his art. For the man mortifies his skill in dogged quest for something other than accomplishment. From first to last the artist tramples on his own facility and spurns the elegance that creeps into a style which he has practiced to the point of knowing how.” According to Steinberg, Pollock’s paintings look easy to make, and this is an intentional effect in keeping with contemporary values that place functionality over craftsmanship. The artist “has no love for conspicuous diligence” and instead embraces “mindless ferocity and chance.” These are cultural values Steinberg finds inhuman, but he locates their source in the much-cited example of modern art: Frenhofer’s illegible painting in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the tale that, Steinberg notes, made Cézanne cry. What is perhaps most intriguing about Steinberg’s review is its conclusion, in which he discusses the painting he likes most in the show, the 1951 Echo: “A huge ninety-two-inch world of whirling threads of black on white, each tendril seeming to drag with a film of ground that bends inward and out and shapes itself mysteriously into a molded space. There is a real process here; something is actually happening. . . . With all my thoughtsicklied misgivings about Pollock, this satisfies the surest test I know for a great work of art.”52 Steinberg’s language seems somehow corrective, even chiding, as he takes the process-oriented language of Rosenberg’s action painting and applies it to the formal achievements of Pollock’s Echo. Implicit in the article is a conviction that the critic cannot evaluate the artist’s process except as it is manifested in the work. Here is the middle ground between a criticism that assumes aesthetic achievement rests in formal resolution of All About Process

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the artwork and criticism that seeks to value art based on the artist’s engagement in the process of making a work without precedent or preconception. The great importance of the artist’s process in the critical and philosophical understanding of mid-twentieth-century art raised problems for the future. If as Rosenberg and others claimed it was the artist’s active and engaged creative process that was significant, how was that to be evaluated? What guaranteed that a properly engaged process would be visible in the final artwork? Once the signs of an engaged process were recognizable they would become a style and easily subject to inauthentic deployment, no longer a balancing act on the knife-edge between success and failure. This was an issue for the second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters who adopted a style of gestural abstraction indebted to de Kooning and whose achievements are commonly considered aesthetic rather than existential. Also problematic is the purpose of an art wholly engaged with its process of production. Elevating the importance of artistic process above the creation of an aesthetically successful artwork seems to lead to a solipsistic art, one that would have little or no interest to anyone other than the person making it. Art would no longer be aesthetic or a form of communication; it would simply be an activity, something more akin to a sport than traditional artistic production. This, as we shall see, is in fact one of the outcomes of the emphasis placed on artistic process in the mid-twentieth century.

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Artistic Process and Amateur Artists

The rise of the New York school coincided with another mid-century artistic phenomenon, the development of a strong amateur art movement in the United States.53 Sparked by the American publication of Winston Churchill’s book Painting as a Pastime in 1950, amateur painting became a national fad supported by the popular press as well as many businesses, which sponsored painting classes, clubs, and exhibitions. The discourse promoting painting as a hobby reveals public attitudes toward the values and benefits of making art as well as raising significant challenges to the modern artist’s identity and process. These challenges are particularly notable in the pages of ARTnews, which in addition to being the main promoter of the New York school painters also strongly championed the amateur art movement. As we have seen, critical supporters of modern art in the 1950s exalted the artist’s total engagement in the experiential processes of making, sometimes even at the expense of producing finished artworks. In these terms amateurs were positioned to be ideal modern artists; they were commonly The Artist’s Process at Mid-Century

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portrayed as devoted to the process of art making as an activity good in itself. Unconstrained by the need to make saleable commodities, they were freer than were professional artists to fulfill their individual needs for selfexpression and self-discovery.54 Furthermore they were, at least theoretically, unhampered by education and training in conventional modes of picture making; they were uncorrupted originals, another key desideratum for modern artists. All of these advantages were repeatedly raised in articles devoted to amateur art. ARTnews’s support of amateur artists coincided precisely with the establishment of “X Paints a Picture” as a regular feature. In the May 1949 issue of the magazine Thomas Hess published “Ben Shahn Paints a Picture.” The same issue announced the ARTnews national amateur painters competition and opened with an article by Winston Churchill on the pleasures of amateur painting. The next issue initiated another regular monthly feature, “Amateur Standing,” which ran until 1961. Throughout the 1950s illustrated articles about professional artists at work were published in the same magazine that provided support and advice directly to amateur artists, thereby foregrounding the processes of making. This is a marked shift in approach for the magazine, which had focused on historical artworks and work by prominent European modern artists, not “hands-on” articles about contemporary American artists or amateur painters. ARTnews hoped to capitalize on the burgeoning amateur art fad by opening its pages to the concerns of amateur artists. This strategy was clearly stated in the announcement of the national amateur competition: “The Editors of Art News believe: that the actual practice of art by non-professionals offers rich rewards of pleasure and relaxation; and that amateur painters become the most understanding and enthusiastic audience for the art of professionals, contemporaries as well as masters of the past.”55 However, the strategy was not ultimately a success. From the beginning of its support of amateur art ARTnews upheld the distinction between amateurs and professional artists, although the magazine admitted it could sometimes be difficult to maintain.56 Winston Churchill provided the basic model for the amateur artist. In his article he expanded on the ARTnews editors’ claim that painting “offered rich rewards of pleasure and relaxation.” He recommended it as an “absorbing new amusement” with which to occupy leisure time. For Churchill painting is an “inexpensive independence, a mobile and perennial pleasure apparatus” that supplies “new mental food and exercise” and “an unceasing voyage of pleasure and discovery.” He abjures notable artistic success. In Churchill’s view the amateur painter who begins late in life, as he did, must have audacity, All About Process

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because he (or she)57 will never acquire the instinctive skills of the trained artist: “We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paintbox.”58 The article was illustrated by four photographs of Churchill painting plein-air landscapes in Cannes, Miami, and Marrakesh, and one of him working in his well-equipped home studio in England. Churchill’s article was buttressed by the magazine’s call for entrants to its amateur painting competition in which the editor, Albert Frankfurter, enlarged on the (masculine) virtues of amateur painting: “Amateur painting is far more than a recreation sport for the tired business man . . . it actually is the basis for a sure, sound inner knowledge of the creative process. The more amateur painters then, and the higher their standards and more intense their efforts, the greater and better the artistic feeling of a nation. We can think of no better way to build and constantly increase a national audience deeply involved with the art of America than by fostering one to which the actual practice of art is a part of its daily life.”59 The magazine’s strategy of getting that tired modern businessman out of his comfortable armchair where he was contemplating the soothing products of Matisse’s labors and in front of an easel painting his own pictures was well in tune with American values. Instead of the distanced appreciation of the traditional connoisseur, the new American audience for modern art would be fellow makers, men with knowledge derived from hands-on experience.60 In the next issue of ARTnews Alison Mason Kingsbury described the enormous number of enthusiastic amateur artists in Ithaca, New York, whose active art association had been featured in Life magazine the previous April. She agreed with Churchill on the pleasures and benefits of amateur art making and stated, “In a mechanized and regulated life such as most people necessarily lead, the useless, the game, the thing-in-itself is the greatest possible release. It is therapy and happiness.” She also made an equivalence between the amateur and the modern artist who both embrace freedom of expression and reject the demands of the marketplace: “The very direction taken by the present practicing artist was established over a century ago with the Romantic Movement, which liberated art from authority and gave the right to paint to the individual. The subsequent innovators were amateurs in the truest sense. They preferred to discover and to paint what they believed, rather than to sell. Their doctrine of free expression permeates all our aesthetic thought as surely as the doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau permeate our social and political thought.”61 Modern painting is honest self-expression, liberated from all external constraints and concerns. It is a self-sufficient

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activity that fulfills needs unmet by the requirements of modern life. This conception combines the Arts and Crafts movement’s belief in the virtues of art making with a modernist belief in art for art’s sake. Kingsbury’s view of art as therapeutic self-expression was typical of the explanations given for the popularity of amateur art making. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which sponsored art classes and annual exhibitions for employees, published a brochure titled Money Isn’t Everything in which the rationale for these activities was described in terms derived directly from the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris: “In an industrial society which grows more complex daily, jobs become more demanding, more routine and further removed from the end product. One of the challenges to modern management is how to afford people the greatest possible degree of satisfaction in the work they do, no matter how routine it is. . . . If the art class is contributing to the ‘wholeness’ of individuals in their daily jobs, it is serving an important function.”62 Art making was an established means to ameliorate the drudgery of modern labor, and its support in the workplace indicates a desire to increase productivity by fulfilling the psychological and emotional needs of workers. Making art was also repeatedly portrayed as a means to combat the dehumanizing effects of modern life in general: “To the painter today, whether professional or amateur, it is immensely important that he avow the unique vitality of his own creative resources, and prove . . . that he . . . [is] not a standard product of mass civilization. People today need to . . . create an identity for themselves in a mechanical age of routine, with art as an outlet for individualism. Thus modern art, claimed by some to be radical, is actually the most democratic expression of individual character.”63 Amateur painting’s therapeutic effects included supplying not just pleasure and individual expression but also purpose and meaning. As one optometrist wrote, he “turned to art to satisfy an obscure hunger” and to escape the loneliness and boredom of his job. After working all day, he paints every evening for the “joy of release,” in addition to sketching in his lunch hours and painting intensely on his vacations.64 According to ARTnews some amateur artists aspired to the degree of dedication they attributed to professional artists: “The life of the artist, devoted to an ideal that elevates it above the stresses and strains and the humdrum necessities of commonplace lives, appears to the amateur almost in that sublime light which other ages have reserved for the lives of the saints.”65 This description implies that the writers for ARTnews had a more realistic conception of the artist’s labor than did idealistic amateur artists, but when pressed to distinguish between amateurs and professionals many All About Process

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art critics and writers resorted to similar notions. According to the New York Times critic Aline Louchheim, for the amateur artist making is a pleasure, while the professional suffers unremitting agony to reach elevated goals: “The amateur’s greatest satisfaction . . . is in the doing rather than the result, the absorption in the work, the sense of personal challenge, the joy of . . . making with his own hands . . . and perhaps above all, the escape from his everyday world . . . for the professional . . . the result is what counts. The doing is a hard process, circumscribed by stringent self-discipline, by constant checking against a high goal, by harsh requirements.”66 Although Louchheim suggests there is a qualitative distinction between the products of the amateur and those of the professional artist, for whom “the result is what counts,” she focuses her comparison on the differing experiences of the process of making. This is unsurprising given that it was rare for a critic to devote serious attention to amateur artists’ works. Amateur art was generally discussed in a manner similar to that used for children’s art. What was significant was that amateurs were engaged in making art; the quality of the results was of no real interest to professional critics.67 At the beginning of the amateur art fad the critic Emily Genauer quoted Winston Churchill’s statement that painting “is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites no exhausting pursuits,” and she continued, “This, I dare say, will be something of a surprise to those thousands of professional painters to whom the practice of their art is . . . the most agonizing, soulsearching effort. Mr. Churchill’s remark, however, provides a useful and needed definition of an amateur painter. If you paint for fun . . . you’re an amateur.”68 Genauer’s distinction between amateur and professional on the basis of the artist’s emotional experience reflects the contemporary shift to evaluating art based on the experience of its production rather than on the final product. It was becoming commonplace to claim that the true artist’s labor was defined by its difficulty. In Art and Experience Dewey had described the artist’s working process as “one of the most exacting modes of thought,”69 and Collingwood similarly emphasized the difficulties of the creative process in his Principles of Art. As we have seen, this notion was prevalent in discussions of contemporary artists such as Giacometti and de Kooning, and it was also taken up by critics to determine the differences between amateurs and professionals. In 1953 ARTnews’s early enthusiastic support of amateur art began to dissipate. This seems to have been at least partially the result of the commercial success of some amateur artists.70 The magazine published an editorial by Albert Frankfurter that began by comparing amateurs who sold their

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work in galleries to prostitutes and went on to dissuade them from taking bread out of the mouths of hardworking professional artists.71 He asked amateurs to renounce public ambition, and the grounds of his request were experiential: Frankfurter claimed to be worried about how materialism would destroy amateur artists’ disinterested pleasure in art for art’s sake and lead to bitterness and disappointment, “which can sour art, even for the born artist who has spent all his life at it.” Amateurs can find “endless rewards in self-expression and in the greater enjoyment of some of the highest, nearest to divine, works of the human race,” but selling art should be the sole province of “those who have dedicated themselves to the agony of giving an entire lifetime to one outrageously demanding muse.” Frankfurter thus separated the amateur and the professional on the basis of both nature (the “born artist”) and dedication. Amateurs may have a limited experience of “art for art’s sake” as long as their efforts remain pure (noncommercial); the professional artist’s effort is on an altogether different plane of dedication and selfsacrifice. It is not a pleasure; it is a vocation fraught with pain and difficulty. The commercial success of amateur artists underlined the difficult rhetorical terrain of modern art. Little seemed to differentiate the amateur from modern artists, who were increasingly portrayed as rejecting traditional developed skills to embrace freedom of expression, truth, and authenticity. Were the only significant differences a capacity for dedicated suffering and the need to earn a living from selling artwork? Frankfurter’s attempt to police the boundary between amateur and professional painting must be considered in terms of what went unsaid in the pages of ARTnews—what, exactly, determined quality in contemporary painting? Like many modern art critics before and after him, Frankfurter took a stand for his magazine as an arbiter of quality without offering any substantive explanation for its judgments. By his own account, not only were amateur painters getting one-person exhibitions in the most prestigious locations in the American art world, their art was selling; both of these occurrences suggested that amateur art might equal the quality of art by professional artists. However, the success of some amateur artworks could be attributed to other causes, such as the ignorance of a public unable to perceive the higher quality of professional work, or the fame of the amateur artist in another context (as was case for Churchill). Rather than attempting to explain the qualitative differences between amateur and professional work, Frankfurter simply requested amateurs to leave the field on “ethical” grounds. He was in an impossible position, attempting to placate rival interests. The amateurs whose ambitions ARTnews had fostered under Frankfurter’s aegis had quickly come to challenge All About Process

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the professionals he had expected them to support in 1949. If anyone could become a successful artist, then the elite cachet that underpinned the art world would disappear, and quality would become a mere matter of personal taste. The amateur artist had become a monster that threatened the art world’s control of quality and value. Outside the pages of ARTnews, critics did not hesitate to suggest that amateur artists were often better than their professional counterparts. The more conservative American Artist was explicit about the threat amateur art posed to avant-garde artists: “If amateurs more frequently get hung today may it not be because of the very nature of modern art in which the gap between disciplined talent and superficial cleverness has been narrowed immeasurably?”72 In his 1950 review of the first ARTnews amateur painters competition for Art Digest Ralph Pearson wrote, “There are practically none of the crude blunderings which represent our professional School of Confusion. The amateurs, it seems, have much to teach a considerable group of professionals. Comparison between this cross-section of pastime-paintings and that of the professionals at the Whitney Museum Annual is inevitable. . . . The average technical skill of the amateurs, for instance, is markedly superior to a surprising number of the professionals.  .  .  . There are no amateur examples as incredibly crude as a half-dozen ultra-confusionist fumblings honored by inclusion at the Whitney.”73 Thomas Hess took a notably different position in his review of the Whitney Annual in ARTnews. He claimed it was the best of the recent Annuals, and that works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, and Greene rose above the large number of inept abstract paintings.74 Since Pearson did not name the artists whose work he deplored as crude “ultra-confusionist fumblings” we cannot know to whom he was referring. Nevertheless, his insistence on the evidence of technical skills and the relatively conservative tendencies of his criticism in general suggests he was not likely to be receptive to the works Hess admired. The trend of New York school painting supported in the pages of ARTnews during the 1950s led away from traditional evaluative standards altogether to promote the notion of art making as experience and action freed from preexisting determinations and learned technique. An unintended result was the implicit leveling of qualitative distinctions between professional and amateur painting. The difference outlined by Frankfurter hovered between the crassly material, the artist who had to earn a living from his art, and the spiritually dedicated artist as the natural born servant of an “outrageously demanding muse.” Neither identity was predicated on the quality or interest of the professional artist’s work.

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ARTnews changed its approach to amateur art in 1953, replacing its earlier enthusiastic promotion with informational and didactic articles that explicitly positioned amateurs as technically inferior to professional artists. The painter, and director of the 92nd Street Y, Aaron Berkman, took over the “Amateur Standing” column in 1955 and focused it on instructional topics such as perspective and historical techniques.75 Berkman urged intelligent engagement and not just enthusiastic participation, and insisted that amateur artists recognize their technical limitations: “Amateurs don’t have the time to devote to developing professional techniques; they are mainly interested in the ‘momentary deed,’ the act of accomplishment.”76 While this was a common view, and one stated by Churchill at the beginning of the amateur art fad, in the context of the contemporary art promoted in ARTnews it was deeply ironic. Very little differentiated amateur artists’ interest in the “momentary deed” from the professional artists being profiled in ARTnews who disdained facility, proficiency, and control. In fact, the shift to an instructional approach in the “Amateur Standing” column occurred at the moment when the magazine began to profile painters such as Larry Rivers, Lee Mullican, John Ferren, and Balcomb Greene in its “X Paints a Picture” series. All of these artists claimed to have little to no control over their painting process and stated that they considered facility and virtuosity meaningless.77 They claimed to seek spontaneity and freshness, the very qualities that had been held up as primary attributes of amateur painting during the past several years. Nevertheless, Berkman ignored contemporary trends and increasingly devoted “Amateur Standing” to advice on developing traditional skills of pictorial design. It is tempting to assume that the writers for ARTnews believed that successful liberated artistic self-expression required a firm grounding in traditional skills in the manner of Matisse and Picasso. That was not, in fact, the case, as the magazine profiled artists who claimed to have had no formal training. In the pages of ARTnews the professional artist could be self-taught and trying to create a painting in two minutes of spontaneous brushwork that abjured all skill and facility. He could claim not to know whether the work he had just made was successful or what its significance was, but the magazine deemed him a professional, apparently by fiat. The amateur, in contrast, was by definition lacking the technical skills, understanding of pictorial practice, and dedication that characterized the professional artist. Amateur painters must be encouraged in order to expand the audience and market for art (and art instruction), but they must never be allowed to All About Process

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believe that their own liberated self-expression could equal that of the professional artist. The incoherence of the ARTnews position on amateur art revealed the fundamental difficulty of defining professional modern art as authentic self-expression by means of an unrestricted creative process. The dividing line between amateur and professional began to seem increasingly arbitrary, especially as the numbers of highly dedicated “amateur” painters grew and could claim to devote as much or more time and energy to their art than did many “professional” artists. This was most often true of women who did not work and were able to spend more time on their art than were professionals who had to teach or work other jobs to support themselves. In reality, despite the persistent address to the male amateur in articles and advertisements, it was widely known that the great majority of amateur artists were women who did not work outside the home. As early as 1949 ARTnews reported the predominance of women among amateur artists: “The amateur painting epidemic is rapidly reaching across the United States. . . . Generally the strongest contingent consists of housewives (mothers, grandmothers and widows). Following closely on their heels are business men, physicians, teachers, students and professional artists (mostly commercial).”78 This recognition did not affect the discursive construction of the amateur artist who was explicitly figured as male in most articles on the subject. A notable exception to this was Frankfurter’s comparison of amateur artists to prostitutes,79 and his claim that they were taking bread out of the mouth of professionals takes on a more pointed tone and precise meaning when understood as directed explicitly toward women. Women could afford to be amateur artists, while men were professionals who needed to work to support themselves and their families. Seen in this light, the professional artist’s high-minded dedication and suffering, his freedom of expression and unhampered self-discovery, seem more and more like a protectionist rhetorical stance intended to convey value on the production of commodities that in the end anyone might produce themselves.80 The “Amateur Standing” column disappeared from ARTnews without notice or explanation after the March 1961 issue.81 In his last column Berkman completely reversed his views on amateur artists’ weaknesses and needs. Suddenly, amateurs were no longer naturally self-expressive originals deficient in knowledge and skills; they were now overly academic. After years of urging amateur artists to develop technical knowledge and discipline, Berkman chided them for being rule-bound and submissive. He claimed that “most amateurs restrict themselves to a mechanical rote imposed by their teachers. . . . As students such amateurs often were teacher’s pets, and they

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find it difficult to understand why others do not equally appreciate their efforts.” The answer to this problem? “Improvisation,” “let the picture happen,” and let the “intuitive self take over.” In time the student will find in painting “a process of self-revelation and self-communication” and “his art [will] become a personalized creative act instead of a mechanical process.”82 Almost parenthetically, Berkman noted that such tapping of intuition was “made popular by Abstract-Expressionism,” but his real interest was to connect the technique to Zen ink painting as described by D. T. Suzuki and he devoted half the column to this subject. The about-face in Berkman’s final “Amateur Standing” column suggests that after a delay of several years the ideas promoted in ARTnews articles on the New York school painters had become mainstream. Nevertheless, the disjunction is startling. The magazine that most strongly promoted the Abstract Expressionists suggested techniques for painting intuitively and spontaneously to amateur painters only well after the heyday of the style. And when Berkman finally did so he virtually ignored the Abstract Expressionists in favor of Zen ink painting. Also striking is the change in attitude toward amateur painters. At the beginning of the 1950s the magazine was enthusiastically supportive of amateurs’ right to and pleasure in selfexpression through painting, no matter what their style or technique. Ten years later those same amateurs were insufficiently self-expressive, insufficiently original; they were merely engaged in a “mechanical process” that must be changed into a “personalized creative act.” Just making a painting was no longer enough to escape from the “mechanized and regulated life” Kingsbury had seen as the lot of most Americans in 1949; by 1961 creative self-expression required instruction in proper attitudes and techniques for self-liberation.

Changes in Artists’ Education

The ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism and the increase in art making as an amateur activity coincided with an enormous expansion of artist education in the United States during the 1950s. The large number of predominantly male students enrolling in college under the GI Bill is generally credited to the postwar boom in colleges and universities in the United States, which included the establishment of many art departments. Previously, colleges and universities focused on art history; the making of art, when part of the curriculum at all, was generally limited to education programs and art teacher training, which were geared toward women.83 By midAll About Process

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century, however, there were more classes in studio art as colleges began to expand their notion of art appreciation to include understanding gained through direct participation in the creative process, a belief that also affected mid-century concepts of the value of amateurism, as we have seen.84 As Howard Singerman discusses in Art Subjects, this mirrored the expanding influence of John Dewey and his followers in education, who saw art as a rigorous mode of thought and thereby a valuable aspect of general education (115–16). The big shift, though, was the establishment of BFA and MFA programs that were neither traditional academic programs nor professional programs for training designers and commercial artists. It is in the context of these programs that new attitudes about the significance of the artistic process developed in ways that have had an enormous effect on both the understanding and the creation of art since the mid-twentieth century. Among the key attitudes for the acceptance of visual arts programs in the university setting was the rejection of craft training as the necessary focus of an artist’s education.85 As discussed above, there is a long history going back to the Renaissance of promoting the intellectual aspects of artistic creation over manual craftsmanship. The traditional intellectualism of the fine arts was manifested in university visual arts programs as a scientific orientation in which concepts and projects, often drawn from the Bauhaus foundations class, were pursued as a species of laboratory work (71). The making of art came to be defined by exploration and experimentation, discovery and invention. Equipped with basic design principles, established as fundamental truths of vision and perception rather than mere traditional forms (88–89), the developing artist pursued various “problems,” which might result in products along the way. Here is a reframing of the modern artist’s project as exemplified by Cézanne, Giacometti, Mondrian, and even Picasso. Like these artists, the university-trained artist would not be unduly concerned with the creation of saleable commodities, but would be engaged in a creative process presumed to be of value in and of itself. Indeed, the establishment of artist-training programs on this model was a way to guarantee the self-sufficient value of the creative process. An MFA program taught would-be artists how to be artists, far more than it taught them how to create art that would allow them to pursue financially successful art careers. That was the province of commercial art and design. Artist education was established in the university setting on terms that were often self-contradictory. It borrowed many ideas and strategies from the Bauhaus foundations program, but it rejected the pragmatic and social orientation of the Bauhaus as a whole. Visual arts programs rested on the

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largely unexamined and unstated assumption of the value of art and artists in human life and society. This value was not located in the artist’s successful creation of products, because that would turn artists into mere producers of commodities. Thus art programs did not foster the acquisition of mere production skills, the traditional purview of artist training. Instead, university art programs become self-generating, self-sufficient systems, producing artists trained primarily to become financially self-supporting only within the confines of academia. In this institutional context they could devote themselves to exploring the nuances and potential significance of the creative process isolated from the pressure to create successful, or even selfsufficiently meaningful, products—and that, it might well be argued, has great potential value as sociological, psychological, and even philosophical experimentation. The success of the Abstract Expressionist generation was a key impetus for the institutionalization of art programs that abandoned a skills-based approach to artist education in favor of a broad-based experimental approach intended to develop artists in a more holistic sense. As the first generation of American artists to enjoy international acclaim the Abstract Expressionists served as role models, and it was evident that, with occasional exceptions, these were artists whose success did not rely on traditional artistic skills. Indeed, in the late 1940s a group of the New York school artists opened their own art school, Subjects of Artists, in which there was no hands-on teaching of art. Rather, the students were treated as if they were artists and participated in discussions with their teachers. Singerman sees the open conversations about student artworks held at Subjects of Artists as the origin of the critique method that remains central to artist education programs to this day (142). Teaching projects designed by artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation are indicative of a process-oriented rather than product-oriented approach. Robert Motherwell devoted five lectures to the stages of Guernica in his class at Hunter College; and he gave a similar amount of attention to the 180 drawings of the artist and his model in Picasso’s The Human Comedy. When hired to teach a summer class at Black Mountain College in 1948 de Kooning set up a still life and told his students that they would spend the entire summer looking at it: “On one piece of paper or one canvas we are going to look at it until we get it exactly the way it is. Then we’re going to keep working on it until we kill it. And then we’re going to keep working on it until it comes back on its own.”86 In the 1950s Ad Reinhardt also gave his students projects designed to keep them involved in the creative process at All About Process

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the expense of creating a work of art. He made them work on the same sheet of paper all term. They were to draw self-portraits and then erase them and begin again. His projects were designed to promote “unmastery” and open students up to possibilities (145). Singerman describes the art teaching of the Abstract Expressionists as psychologically oriented, intended to provoke students to find themselves and their own individuality as artists. As such the teaching of technique was extraneous to the main goal, which was the fashioning of individuals into artists (146–49). The most renowned teacher among the Abstract Expressionists, Hans Hofmann, was both older and far more traditional in his respect for craftsmanship and belief in the necessity of mastering the medium and formal values. He encouraged his students to explore varieties of paint handling, but he did not promote any specific technique as a desirable end in itself. Technique was, for Hofmann, a means to the end of creating a formally successful work of art. His overall position was a vague amalgamation of common early twentieth-century views on the nature of modern art as a combination of personal expression, a loosely spiritual response to nature, and formal mastery of the medium. The very successful careers of many Hofmann students as second-generation Abstract Expressionists suggest that a grounding in some type of formal training in painting was a practical prerequisite for the successful “unmastering” of Abstract Expressionism. Rothko, Newman, and Still were supposedly proud of their inability to draw (139), but such statements must be taken with certain reservations. First, although they probably did not draw particularly well in a traditional academic sense since none of them had undergone the full rigors of academic training, they all studied art for years and had extremely long careers teaching art, so they undoubtedly had at least adequate drawing skills. Second, and more important, however, is that being able to draw well was considered a completely outdated skill by mid-century. After Picasso’s famous claim that he labored to draw like a four-year-old, ambitious modern artists could (and often did) happily announce that they did not labor under the handicap of too much skill. The tension between the traditional values of technical mastery and the liberated dedication to the process of painting would soon disappear in the expanded embrace of pure experience that replaced aesthetic evaluation in the 1960s. Harold Rosenberg turned from emphasizing the importance of art as action and event to upholding his belief that only certain types of consciously developed experiences were artistically/aesthetically meaningful. He described Hofmann’s teaching not in terms of technical instruction in

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painting but in terms of developing the creative attitudes of his students. In Rosenberg’s view, Hofmann tried to get his students into the canvas to awaken pictorial life, and to “give rise to the ‘meetings,’ ‘bridges,’ ‘communions’ of a continuous creative process that embraced all of its components, including the artist himself, in a singleness.”87 For Rosenberg, Hofmann’s approach to art making stood in marked contrast to the uncreative free-forall of the early 1960s: “What may not be rejected is his [Hofmann’s] conviction that art is essentially creation. Anything can be a work of art, but its mode of production decides its meaning and its value. . . . He saw art as that kind of activity by which the actor himself is transformed.”88 This is in essence what many artists have meant when they claim what is most significant is the artistic process. As we shall see, however, that is only one aspect of the meaning of process in recent art. Mid-twentieth-century art and criticism represents a moment of precarious equilibrium when the artist’s process began to rival the final work in significance. For most prominent critics the ultimate value was still the aesthetic quality and interest of the works of art produced, but artists’ working processes were an increasingly important factor in critics’ interpretations and evaluations. In the decades to come process would triumph over the final artwork as artists and the art world in general began to question the meaning and role of art, particularly its status as a valuable aesthetic commodity. The art of a painter like Jackson Pollock thus stands at a crossroads where the artist’s process and the artwork it produces are equal in importance and inseparable. In the following decades, as the modern artwork increasingly loses its identity as a personally expressive aesthetic object, the processes of its production acquire altogether different purposes and meanings.

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7 Art and Social Processes

“Existence” (in any of its senses) cannot be abstracted from “process.” The notions of process and existence presuppose each other.

—Alfred North Whitehead Process is the immanence of the infinite in the finite; whereby all bounds are burst, and all inconsistencies resolved. . . . In process the finite possibilities of the universe travel towards their infinitude of realization.

— Alfred North Whitehead

One of the dominant trends of contemporary art that began in the late 1950s and escalated through the following decades is an increased emphasis on process at the expense of a final artistic product. Many artists turned their attention away from the technical and psychological processes required to create a painting or sculpture, which had been the emphasis of earlier modern artists, and began to consider how their creative working processes could engage people more broadly. This often entailed greater viewer involvement with the making and physical experience of art, and some artists’ work, such as that of Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, became engaged with direct social intervention. The shift to a more public-oriented approach to the artist’s work and role was part of a widespread reconsideration of the social purposes of art and the artist undertaken by popular thinkers. In addition to the work of Allan Kaprow and John Cage, who expanded the concept of artistic process through both their art and theories, this chapter discusses the influential ideas of Hannah Arendt, Marshall McLuhan, Norman Brown, and other thinkers who addressed the place of art and the

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artist in contemporary society. Both Arendt and McLuhan conceived process as a ruling concept of modern life, albeit in very different ways, and their ideas help to illuminate the central role that process came to play in the art of the 1960s and beyond. Harold Rosenberg’s insistence on painting as an event and an arena in which to act must be seen as a key early manifestation of the development from the artist’s process as a means to create an artwork to the artist’s process as an action with much wider potential meaning and purpose. Also of great significance was the widespread conviction that modern avant-garde art was fundamentally evolutionary, a belief that impelled artists (and critics) to search for novel approaches and attitudes that would build on previous achievements. Artists presented their work in relation to texts that located it historically and in terms of the meaningful development of modern art: Allan Kaprow situated his Happenings as an extension of Rosenberg’s conception of action painting, while Donald Judd described the new threedimensional art of the early 1960s as the necessary next stage in the formalist evolution of painting as described by Greenberg.1 Both expanded the notion of the work of art well beyond the isolated art object to encompass creative activity and perceptual, psychological, and kinesthetic experiences. Kaprow’s 1958 ARTnews article “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” predicted many of the themes and attitudes that would dominate the art of the 1960s. Kaprow stressed the ritualistic aspects of Pollock’s drip paintings and their incompleteness, which amplifies the viewer’s role: “This is indeed far from the idea of a ‘complete’ painting. The artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved here.” The large scale of Pollock’s paintings creates “environments” and turns the viewer into a “participant.” Also central to Pollock’s achievement and the future of art, in Kaprow’s view, is an intensity of engagement with the “stuff of his art as a group of concrete facts seen for the first time,” which Kaprow describes as a Zen quality. Pollock’s form provokes a pleasurable “delirium, a deadening of the reasoning faculties, a loss of ‘self.’” Kaprow predicts that “Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life. . . . We shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art.”2 Somewhat paradoxically, then, Kaprow framed the great expressive individualist painter of the Abstract Expressionist generation as the initiator of a new phase of art that rejects the importance of the artist’s original expression as embodied in the work of art in favor of the creation of an open environment. In this new All About Process

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environment the viewer’s experience is an equal participant in the work’s creation. The growth in importance of the viewer’s role as participant is a significant development in the history of the concept of process in art. Kaprow insisted that the new art widened art’s arena to all human activity, and in doing so art became theoretically unlinked from the object to become an open and unfinished process, one re-created by each viewer/participant. In this approach Kaprow expands previous theories, notably those of Dewey and Collingwood, that stressed viewers’ need to re-create the artist’s creative process to complete the artwork’s communicative function. However, Kaprow’s view did not mark an immediate revolution in the making and conception of art. The transition of emphasis from art conceived primarily as objects to a focus on art as process was widely variable, and many highly regarded artists of the 1960s made works in traditional materials using traditional techniques. There was, nevertheless, a marked shift away from the conception of art as expressive creation and toward an emphasis on neutral engagement with process, even among artists creating more traditional handmade objects. A telling instance of this new attitude appears in Wylie Sypher’s 1962 discussion of Jean Dubuffet’s “post-existential” art. Sypher describes Dubuffet’s art as “operationalist”: it merely indexes the artist’s hand at work. That hand as part of the universe contains within its movements the rhythm of the universe, and the artist’s activity discovers the common rhythm in things.3 The shift to an emphasis on process may be described in very broad terms as a widening of perspective. Not only is there an expansion of art that led beyond the single art object and traditional media to encompass the totality of the environment, there is also a very noticeable extension of critical and theoretical viewpoints from those concerned primarily with artist and art object to the role of both within the larger structures of society. In these expanded contexts what was often considered most significant was art as part of a greater process. Another highly influential figure in the turn to a new broader perspective on art and its relation to the world was the composer John Cage, who affected many visual artists directly through his teaching, friendships, and collaborations, as well as conceptually through his work and ideas. Cage adopted an approach to musical composition that allowed chance and the environment to replace traditional structure in the work. His 1958 series of lectures “Composition as Process,” in which he outlined his approach, were particularly important. Cage described his compositional strategies based on chance, tossing coins to determine the notes and tempo of the music, which led him

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to recognize that structure is not necessary: “Structure is no longer a part of the composition means. The view taken is not of an activity the purpose of which is to integrate the opposites, but rather of an activity characterized by process and essentially purposeless.”4 The lack of traditional structure in Cage’s music turns the auditor’s attention to “silence,” and thus to ambient sounds that become incorporated into the piece. It allowed the auditor to simply hear; the “mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception.”5 Cage’s approach influenced two largely distinct directions of the art of the 1960s. The first is the application of a randomly determined, systematic approach to the making of art; this is one of the main strands of process and conceptual art, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The second is an emphasis on art as an open experience produced equally by the artwork’s creator/initiator and the audience/viewer/receiver, who gives the work a unique and provisional completeness through his or her encounter with it. For Cage this approach is closely related to Zen Buddhist ideas he studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, the prolific and highly influential scholar and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the United States.6 While Cage absolved Zen (and Dada) of direct responsibility for his ideas in the introduction to his collection of writings titled Silence, his interest in relinquishing control and allowing the work to become part of the environment, open to the individual experiences of the audience members, closely accords with what were understood to be Zen attitudes.7 These attitudes also strongly influenced Kaprow; they were not, however, foreign to Western philosophical thought. As Hannah Higgins has noted, there are strong connections between Zen emphasis on sensory experience of everyday life and the Pragmatist ideas of John Dewey.8 His much-reprinted Art as Experience is not merely a document of the late 1930s; it continued to be a highly influential text and contributed to the great interest in experiential processes in the art of the 1960s. The shift in emphasis from product to process in the art of the second half of the twentieth century was overdetermined. A comparable shift was evident in many areas of contemporary thought from philosophical metaphysics to cultural theory, sociology, psychology, economics, and even business. Also important in broad terms was the increasing function of modern art as an arena of cultural and social criticism. The role of the modern artist as an inventor of alternatives to existing social structures and institutions was well established by mid-century, although most often those proposals were utopian and visionary. In the social upheavals of the 1960s many artists All About Process

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became politically engaged and considered their artistic activity in terms that were explicitly critical of contemporary society. As increasingly selfconscious social actors, many artists turned away from their traditional role as isolated producers of luxury commodities and embraced a variety of strategies that elevated the exploration and exhibition of process over the creation of marketable products. Underpinning these new attitudes was a widespread reconsideration of not only the role of art in contemporary society but, perhaps even more important, a reevaluation of the nature and role of the artist.9 Hannah Arendt identified process as a defining concept of the modern age in The Human Condition. This 1958 text is representative of its time in the emphasis it places on process, though Arendt’s direct discussion of process as a formative modern concept is an unusual meta-analysis. It was far more common for writers to employ the terms and discuss the effects of processes than it was to recognize those terms and effects as part of a broad intellectual and discursive apparatus. Thus, even before considering Arendt’s views and their potential relevance for postwar developments in visual art it must be recognized that her insistence on the key importance of the concept of process for modern thought and society is highly significant. Her ideas can be seen as marking a waypoint between Whitehead’s abstract philosophical speculations and the concrete realities of modern social existence. Indeed, in Arendt’s view Whitehead’s process philosophy should probably be understood along with Bergson’s as a reflection of modern scientific, social, and economic developments rather than accurate ontological description. Arendt claims that human beings in the modern world have been reduced to mere laborers whose lives are wholly occupied by production and consumption, the basic processes of life. This situation has its origins in the political theory of the seventeenth century, which exalted process, a concept that was “virtually unknown until the modern age.”10 Political theorists were “naturally drawn to the phenomenon of a progressing process itself, so that . . . the concept of process became the very key term of the new age as well as the sciences, historical and natural, developed by it” (105). Modern philosophers such as Bergson and Nietzsche imbricate labor within the natural processes of biology and “glorify the sheer dynamism of the life process” itself. For Arendt such views limit human life and society: “The animal laborans does not flee the world but is ejected from it in so far as he is imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfilment of needs in which nobody can share and which nobody can fully communicate”

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(118–19). The conception of modern man as a laborer leads to isolation within the bodily and private, and neglect of the active public and political relationships Arendt considers the only means for achieving human significance. Arendt contrasts labor to work; unlike labor, which produces only to consume, work is directed to the production of durable things that include both material objects and institutions. She sees work as having largely disappeared in the modern world, resulting in a shift in values: “The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans” (126). In Arendt’s view the artist is the only worker left in a society of laborers, but the artist’s work has been defined as a form of play equivalent to tennis or a hobby rather than a meaningful, productive activity (128).11 Nevertheless, it is the work of art that Arendt sees as the last bastion of homo faber, man the maker, and because works of art are not utilitarian they form a particularly meaningful class of objects: “Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the nonmortal home for mortal beings. It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality, not the immortality of the soul or of life but of something immortal achieved by mortal hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read” (168). In this quote Arendt adopts a traditional Kantian notion of the significance of the artwork. The production of such enduring and meaningful objects is, Arendt implies, unlikely to persist in a modern society devoted to process. Process-oriented thinking originated in the experience of homo faber with his means/ends concerns, but in the modern era process itself became exalted over product. Arendt cites different reasons for this shift; one is the use of automated production processes (151–52), while the other is more broadly conceived as the scientific viewpoint in which the goal is knowledge rather than the production of things. Products are mere side effects for the scientist (297), and in the era of automated processes products become increasingly tailored to the process rather than external requirements. As the value of human-made products has disappeared in the process-oriented society, so, too, have values associated with the mind, particularly contemplation. Processes, not ideas, determine not just form but meaning as well, resulting in a loss of fixed standards of evaluation and judgment. Considered in terms of Arendt’s critique of modern society, The Human Condition shares common ground with certain strands of conceptual art that All About Process

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developed in the 1960s. Arendt’s concern that modern society has lost the ability to value contemplative thought and judgment, as well as the loss of a true public society linked by ideas, values, and public action, parallels the social and political concerns of artists such as Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys, and Victor Burgin. For Arendt, human value lies not in consumption or even in the production of durable objects, but in shared meaning and communal actions that give human significance to life and its objects. Thus art that privileges thought and the creation of communities based on shared values is most directly in accord with Arendt’s general position as articulated in The Human Condition, despite her exalted description of the work of art as a meaningfully enduring created object. Arendt’s text is useful both as a means for outlining some of the concerns of post-1960s art and also for articulating a cogent critique of its emphasis on process. Process defines the modern era in both its conceptual understanding of the world and its literal organization of production and society in Arendt’s view, but she does not see this as having been a success in terms of creating human meaning. For Arendt the elevation of process over product is destroying human potential and isolating modern individuals in merely private physical satisfactions. Thus Arendt disagrees with what has been largely a positive valuation of process over product by many post1960 artists. It may be that some artists and their audiences are content to embrace art as a source of individual satisfaction rather than productive of shared social meaning. More intriguing is Arendt’s distinction between labor and work and its potential critical relation to post-1960 art. In describing the modern world as a society of laborers seeking only to consume what it produces, Arendt offers an explanation not only of the ever-changing disposable styles of modern art but also of the specific success of Pop Art. In their subject matter of disposable commodities, mass media, and popular culture, as well as in their parodic employment of mass-production processes, silkscreens from Warhol’s Factory and Roy Lichtenstein’s hand-painted Ben-Day dots seem like tongue-in-cheek illustrations of Arendt’s critique of the contemporary animal laborans.12 As Arendt described it, the characteristics of labor are repetition and an endless process (125)—and these are also notable characteristics of Warhol’s prints and Lichtenstein’s paintings of comics.13 Even more directly aligned with Arendt’s critique are various laborintensive pieces such as Vito Acconci’s Step Piece (1970) and Mierle Ukeles’s Maintenance Art performances (1973). Such “works” abolish the product altogether and investigate the form of labor as an artistic process. As Acconci’s

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stamina increased through daily exercise in Step Piece, he presented a demonstration of Arendt’s notion that the art of animal laborans is a merely private physical experience and satisfaction, a “hobby.” Ukeles’s Maintenance Art performed a feminist commentary on the repetitive, unproductive maintenance labor often associated with women in the context of the museum and its immortal objects. Although Ukeles’s goal in her Maintenance Art project was political rather than personal, the assertion that repetitive maintenance processes deserved to be considered artistic processes turns attention to the individual experience of the actor/artist as key in the definition of art “work.” If not, what would distinguish maintenance art from simple maintenance? Ukeles’s “Maintenance Art Manifesto” highlighted the value distinctions traditionally made between “development systems” (gendered male) and “maintenance systems” (gendered female), and she noted the “infection” of maintenance in avant-garde developmental art, as well as the almost pure employment of maintenance processes in recent conceptual and process art.14 Ukeles’s insights are suggestive in ways that go beyond her explicit feminist concerns to revalue traditional women’s work, based largely on the argument that male avant-garde artists had recently made institutionally admired artworks based on maintenance processes. Ukeles gendered labor as feminine and object-producing work as traditionally masculine, and in doing so she echoed Arendt’s implicit notion that a modern society dedicated to labor is a “feminine” society. As Arendt noted, modern society simultaneously liberated women and the working classes, with the corresponding effect that the material concerns and bodily functions of labor and work were no longer hidden as they had been since ancient Greece (72–73). Using Arendt’s insights into the developments of modern society (but not her value judgment of them) helps us to see that as work and its processes come increasingly into view they establish new terms of interest and valuation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the artwork enjoyed status as an ideological commodity, the immortal object of productive work (this was also Arendt’s view). Later, in the labor-centered, consumer-driven, and disposable culture of postwar society, the artist’s bodily processes of labor acquire ever-greater symbolic meaning and social significance. Also suggestive in relation to Arendt’s ideas is Allan Kaprow’s development of Happenings. According to Arendt, modern society, dominated by the ideology of labor, considers all nonlabor activities to be equivalent to play (127–28). Kaprow’s Happenings, with their lack of final products and their acknowledged emphasis on process over product, seem to be the ideal All About Process

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replacement of object-oriented art for a process-oriented society. If art was formerly the production of nonutilitarian objects in a society where all other making was directed toward utility (what Arendt defined as human productions that sought immortality), then a new form is required in a society dominated by labor rather than productive work. Kaprow’s transient Happenings, in which those involved submit to a free-form process, a series of sequential events, represents a reinvention of art appropriate to a society that aspires to create no durable products. Rather than the nonutilitarian object, art becomes a nonutilitarian process, a game rather than a hobby. Kaprow saw Happenings as experimental and exploratory, terms that reflect a scientific attitude, which, as Arendt pointed out, was typical of the modern era in which processes were more significant than any resulting products. Kaprow also stated that describing Happenings as art was unnecessary, since they might just as appropriately be described as a sport.15 In this he echoes Arendt’s view that there was no meaningful distinction in a laboring society between artistic activity and tennis (128). Aesthetic experience is no longer focused on an object and its specific sensory/emotional effects on a viewer. It becomes the utterly individualized, bodily, private experience Arendt considered the inevitable result of a society dedicated solely to labor. Again, while Arendt saw this as a cause for concern and even lament, Kaprow and the many artists who engaged with process-oriented, psychological, and corporeal experiential art embraced the exploration of new avenues of aesthetic experience and significance. The social role of art and artists became a topic of general interest and consideration in the public discourse of the 1960s. In The Culture Consumers, published in 1964, Alvin Toffler examined the place of art in American society and the ways it served to fulfill the psychological needs of modern workers to express their individuality, both by making choices as consumers of art or by amateur art production.16 Toffler considered that art would become central to people’s lives as their leisure increased: “In that super-industrial civilization of tomorrow, with its vast, silent, cybernetic intricacies and its liberating quantities of time for the individual, art will not be a fringe benefit for the few, but an indispensible part of life for the many. It will move from the edge to the nucleus of national life.” “What will the shrinkage of work mean for the human psyche, so deeply wedded to the gospel of toil? How does a man in a leisure-filled world structure his personality? Around what cluster of values? The decline of work creates a vacuum in which other values, once the property of a special elite, sprout. Aesthetic discrimination, for example, becomes more important. Art takes on new relevance.”17 In

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Toffler’s view the rise in amateur art activity, art collectors, and corporations promoting the arts among their workers were all indicative of a future in which art would play a key role in giving structure and meaning to life. That such a belief would become commonplace at precisely the moment artists were questioning and even abandoning established concepts of selfexpression, individuality, style, quality, and technical mastery is deeply ironic. It is as if the “avant-garde” were fleeing the masses just as they were beginning to catch up—but rather than advancing, as the term avant-garde implies, the artists seem to have run around behind the general public to appropriate the ordinary and the everyday. Compared to the issues addressed by some contemporary artists, Toffler’s ideas were outdated. Nevertheless his views provide a context for thinking about how artists situated themselves and their activity in society. Arendt also saw art assuming an important place as an activity pursued during the increasing leisure time of modern life. These thinkers consider art as an activity to be practiced by makers and non-makers alike. The latter are participants in significant activity as viewers and/or purchasers of art. Even in Toffler’s relatively conservative account, art is conceived less as a special kind of handmade object and more as an arena for social activity. What’s more, it is an important social activity on a level with the most valued and absorbing of modern human activities, work. As social thinkers began to consider the enormous and growing importance of leisure activities, including art, in modern industrial society, art acquired serious social purpose. In doing so art became understood as more than a special class of luxury objects created by talented people—it became an activity, an attitude, an important process of life in which all people were participants. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was one of the most influential and widely read books of the 1960s. It, too, granted artists a pivotal role in modern society as heralds of the future and as social educators. In McLuhan’s view it was artists who first understood the enormous psychic significance of technological changes and were able to develop strategies for dealing with them.18 The contemporary shift from mechanical to electric technology, which was the core subject of the book, initiated a complete revision of human experience, one that McLuhan claimed had been foreseen by modern artists ever since Cézanne abandoned linear perspective for a “tactile” approach (105). McLuhan outlines two important roles for the artist: the first is as the insightful leader who is able to come to terms with technological change, and the second is as role model for everyone. McLuhan claims that one of All About Process

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the characteristics of the new electric-age individual is the abolition of a distinction between work and leisure. In the previous mechanical age, workers were forced to endure “specialist servitude” from which they needed idle leisure to recuperate, but in the electric age work will foster total involvement. Distinctions between work and leisure will become irrelevant because people will all be like artists, wholly and intensely involved in their activities (301). Modern society was undergoing a “re-tribalization” in which art as a specialist activity would disappear, and like “native” societies everyone would soon make art (212).19 “‘Work,’ however, does not exist in a nonliterate world,” McLuhan wrote. “The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor and the specialization of functions” (129). As these are now ending in the new age of total involvement everyone will become an artist, rendering the title irrelevant. Process was a central concept for McLuhan’s understanding of the new electric age,20 which he saw as initiated by television and other “cool” media. With its low-resolution images television fosters a new form of engagement in its viewers, leading them to participate in the creation of meaning in a manner inappropriate to the previously dominant “hot” media with their high information content. Participation in process is the defining mode of being in the new electric age, and television is one of McLuhan’s primary examples. Television’s “mosaic” image, as well as the mosaic form of the modern newspaper, requires the viewer to participate in a democratic process of understanding through association: “The mosaic form means, not a detached ‘point of view,’ but participation in process” (188). Although McLuhan insisted that what was relevant was the medium rather than the message or content, he noted that television’s adaptation to process rather than products affected its content. Television programs engaged the viewer in processes; the Western frontier show was a process of town building, and do-it-yourself programs were also cited as examples of the focus on process in television programming (278–79). McLuhan described the broadcasting of the Kennedy funeral as the most powerful example of viewer engagement: “It revealed the unrivaled power of TV to achieve the involvement of the audience in a complex process. . . . The Kennedy funeral, in short, manifested the power of TV to involve an entire population in a ritual process” (293). McLuhan promoted a wholesale reenvisioning of the modern world as a universe not of things but of processes, relationships, and information. Material objects become effectively irrelevant in a society dedicated to depth

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involvement and engagement. McLuhan saw this in advertisements where the product was no longer pictured; rather, ads portrayed the consumer as a producer, someone participating in social purposes and processes (201). The spectator becomes an artist and adopts “Eastern” attitudes associated with Zen Buddhism to become involved with the environment as an active process (viii). Corresponding to the new world is a new human being, one whose sensory system has been rearranged. No longer will sight be the dominant sense as it was in the literary/mechanical era; instead, tactility will reign, and in McLuhan’s view the sense of touch is not a single isolated sense in the way that sight is, but rather the sense that links and combines all senses. Electric age human beings are thus full sensory creatures. In terms of art McLuhan predicted the end of “pictorial consumption” and the beginning of a new depth age of art oriented toward production rather than consumption. Participation, do-it-yourself, and personal involvement would be the characteristics of the new art (153). In a statement that prefigures the aesthetic stakes of minimalism’s challenge to modernism laid out in Michael Fried’s famous 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” McLuhan notes the current loss of the traditional Kantian foundation of aesthetic judgment, “disinterest”: “The very word ‘disinterested,’ expressing the loftiest detachment and ethical integrity of typographic man, has in the past decade been increasingly used to mean: ‘He couldn’t care less.’ The same integrity indicated by the term ‘disinterested’ as a mark of the scholarly temper of a literate and enlightened society is now increasingly repudiated as ‘specialization’ and fragmentation of knowledge and sensibility” (157). Medium specificity, vision as the dominant sense, and Kantian aesthetic judgment founded on disinterested evaluation are all hallmarks of the oncedominant modernism associated with Clement Greenberg and later adopted by Fried, which McLuhan saw as obsolete. McLuhan announced its historical supersession by the currents that would soon be associated with minimalism and what Donald Judd called “the new three-dimensional work.”21 Bodily engagement, deep involvement, participation in the process of creation, and the rejection of pure visuality and the isolated aesthetic object all characterized the new artistic trends of the 1960s, which were outlined most effectively by Kaprow and Robert Morris.22 It is ironic that McLuhan, whose insistence on the significance of medium over message was fundamentally formalist,23 articulated the overthrow of Greenbergian formalism’s basic premises so comprehensively. Popular texts discussing the situation of modern Western man in the early 1960s often proposed art as a potential aid or remedy for the ills of All About Process

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modernity.24 Morse Peckham, whose ideas were widely cited in artist’s writings of the decade, described art as a sort of testing ground: “Art is the reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and significant problem may emerge. Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world.”25 Changes in art arise as artists respond to environmental changes by developing adaptive strategies. Peckham’s view is similar to McLuhan’s notion that artists teach people how to adjust to changes in technology. For both writers, artists have great social importance as teachers and role models. Also, both stressed the need for adaptive changes in human interactions with the environment that are biological, psychological, and perceptual. Norman O. Brown, another very popular writer of the period, studied the psychological situation of the modern industrial human being. He believed that art has healing power; like psychoanalysis it is able to make the unconscious conscious.26 According to Brown, modern people need to recover the meaning of the sensual body, which has been lost in the inhumanity of capitalism and devotion to abstractions and commodities: “The more the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever fuller articulation of the lost life of the body. Hence increasing sublimation is a general law of history.”27 Artists thus have an implicit mandate to abjure the creation of things and recover the lost bodily knowledge that has been submerged and sublimated in the modern world. Popular writers such as McLuhan, Peckham, and Brown provided a basis for the questioning and reenvisioning of the artist’s role and activity that became central to visual art in the 1960s and after. Artists would no longer be producers of objects; they would be engaged social beings proposing alternatives, exploring new approaches, developing and participating in experimental processes, and expanding their activities to embrace their surroundings and the entire lived world. The artist’s process, previously conceived as an activity narrowly directed to the creation of artworks, will expand to potentially limitless expanse. It will no longer be just a metaphor for the creation of identity and the processes of life; it will be engaged directly with those processes. A key impetus for the expansion of artistic process to all areas of human experience in the later decades of the twentieth century was the feminist movement and the enormous escalation of feminist concerns among practicing artists. As discussed above in the context of Arendt’s theoretical analysis

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of process in modern life and thought, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art was a significant feminist intervention in the discourse of artistic process. In linking the repetitive processes of women’s traditional household labor to historical and contemporary processes of artistic creation, conventionally gendered male, Ukeles helped to establish an enormously productive arena for artistic investigation of physical, social, and cultural processes. This was true of feminist artists and artist groups in general, such as the famous CalArts Feminist Art Program led by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, which combined art making with study of historical women artists, examination of the social roles of traditional domestic arts and crafts, and an insistence on art as a site for raising personal, social, and cultural awareness. Feminist intervention was not only an impetus for reconceiving art as a locus of, and means for, investigating social and cultural processes, it also was deeply engaged in a reexamination of the artistic process as embodied activity. In promoting awareness of the biases and limitations of the masculinist “universal” conceptions of the artist (such as those recently theorized by Merleau-Ponty28 and Sartre), feminist theorists and artists opened new arenas for artistic investigation of the artist’s body as a site for creative processes. These included celebrations of the female body as naturally creative in its biological capacity to create and nurture life, as well as critical and contestatory approaches that investigated the gendered body as a site of cultural determination and interpretation. Carolee Schneemann’s pioneering performances in the 1960s foregrounded the erotic and gendered nature of bodily actions and creative processes. The intersection of her concerns as a painter deeply involved with process and her active body consciousness resulted in work that directly engages the personal and gendered physicality of artistic action.29 She has described Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–77), which involved her swinging suspended from a rope and marking the surrounding walls, as the “direct result of Pollock’s physicalized painting process” and a drawing that maps time by spatial signs.30 The work was also intended to engage with social and cultural processes and “dismantle the fixity of museum patterns,” thus creating a novel form of viewing the actively creating body in a cultural space. Although Schneeman has denied an interest in Merleau-Ponty, in a 2007 interview she, too, distinguished her creative process from personal selfexpression as she seeks to embody the act of creation: “‘Enacting yourself’ . . . has nothing to do with process. When I’m working there is no ‘self’—it’s not about me—it’s about the materiality, about the body I activate. . . . It’s a body as an instrumentality through which certain energies might become maniAll About Process

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fest . . . it’s not a kind of conceptually predetermined process . . . I’m involved in phrasing and the musicality of time, the duration of gesture.”31 In physically manifesting the creative body Schneeman literally embodies the creative process as the substance of her artwork. It is this elimination of the art object in favor of process and experience that will become central to many artists’ work by the end of the twentieth century. 187

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8 Process Art

The crisis of the formalistic is periodic and perpetual, and for art to renew itself, it must go outside itself, stop playing with the given forms and methods, and find a new way of making.

—Robert Morris

In 1961 the New School staged an exhibition titled “The Creative Process” that showed examples of work by well-known modern artists including Josef Albers, Nell Blaine, José de Creeft, Arshile Gorky, Jacques Lipchitz, and Elaine de Kooning. Completed works were accompanied by preliminary sketches and artists’ comments explaining their creative process. The exhibition indicates the general public interest in artists’ working processes, which had been well established by the long-running “X Paints a Picture” series in ARTnews. This interest would be bolstered by the series of “Art in Process” exhibitions curated by Elayne Varian at the Finch College Art Museum in Manhattan between 1962 and 1973, as well as the many documentary films made of artists at work during the 1960s.1 The exhibition review by Vivien Raynor published in Arts Magazine, however, suggests that the revelations made in such a show could be unwelcome. Raynor described the exhibition as having a “somewhat oppressive atmosphere of Sunday-school seriousness,” and she drew the conclusion that “clearly, being an artist is no fun at all. It may also dawn on them [the exhibition’s viewers] that not only can a work of art’s gestation period be longer than an elephant’s, but that attention tends to focus on the struggles of parturition at some expense to the offspring itself.”2 While acknowledging that the sculptors’ preliminary sketches might be didactically useful for the ignorant, Raynor found the

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exhibition of preparatory drawings for the “fresh and lovely” paintings of Nell Blaine a superfluous demonstration of the artist’s painful labor. In Raynor’s view, insight into the artist’s creative process undermined appreciation of the achievement of the final work. The review ended as follows: “Who knows how the uninitiated react to such confessions? The cognoscenti, presumably, expect to be shown how the emotional wheels go around. Anyway, there seems to be an unlimited supply of creators only too happy to show that they are regular guys, with problems just like everyone else.”3 Implicitly, such normalizing of artists destroys the magic of their achievements, at least for the uninitiated. Raynor’s review and the exhibition it discussed were predicated on what was soon to become a dated conception of the artist’s process. The exhibition displayed the way modern artists created paintings and sculptures. It was a view of what happened backstage, so to speak, and as Raynor pointed out, it could also reveal the artists’ emotional travails in the accomplishment of their work. The contrast between the “fresh and lovely” Blaine painting of an interior and her painful labor to achieve it might appropriately be seen as ruining the necessary impression of the painting’s spontaneous creation. If something seems natural and is exposed as artifice, its meaning is forever changed. In the case of Blaine’s painting, what was exposed were apparently not preliminary works that might lead to a greater understanding and appreciation of her technical achievement. Rather, preliminary ink and wash drawings represented the artist’s emotional preparations, just as one might see an actor warming up before a performance, which demonstrated that the final painting was far from an immediate spontaneous response to a scene. A completely natural artistic expression is a fiction even for the artist who has mastered a medium. Seeing an artist’s creative process will inevitably destroy many illusions, both perceptual and emotional, on which traditional and modern art rely. Thus it may well be that one of the central contributing factors to the demise of expressive painting in the 1960s was the increasing visibility of the artist’s creative process. Ad Reinhardt wrote in 1954 that he read a pile of ARTnews “X Paints a Picture” profiles as part of an assignment to satirize them. He found they “so satirized themselves” that it was impossible to make serious fun of them, and that it was shocking to see how artists fit themselves into predetermined roles.4 While Reinhardt was notoriously cantankerous, similar notions must have crossed many other minds by the late 1950s and may well have contributed to the dispassionate stances that came to characterize artists of the 1960s.5

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Regardless of whether contempt for the clichés of the artist’s struggle to express his or her vision affected the turn to impersonal artworks in the 1960s, it is certain that by then presentation of artists’ working processes had become commonplace. The mysteries of the modern artist’s studio and the secret alchemy of creation were no longer arcane or specialized knowledge available only to the initiated. They were exposed in films, photographs, and articles for everyone to see. The artist at work had become a performer whose working process, the arena of creative production, was taking center stage. For some artists of the 1960s it would displace the production of objects altogether. Mel Bochner’s 1966 exhibition “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Art” at the School of Visual Arts was staged as a response to Varian’s “Art in Process: The Visual Development of a Structure” exhibition at Finch College where working drawings were presented alongside finished artworks. In Bochner’s exhibition “preparatory” drawings were the work. Even artists who continued to make concrete objects would turn increasingly to objects whose primary, sometimes only, significance lay in their identity as indexes of their own creation. Robert Pincus-Witten described process art simply as work that emphasized the process of its making, “a process so emphatic as to be seen as the primary content of the work itself . . . the virtual content of the art became that of the spectator’s re-creation of the actions used by the artist to realize the work in the first place.”6 Over two decades later Rosalind Krauss stated that process art was not adequately theorized.7 This simplicity and lack of theory was one of the essential qualities of process art, an attempt to explore the fundamental aspects of artistic creation, in a sense, innocently. It may be understood, at least in part, as the physical parallel to conceptual art’s testing of the boundaries and definitions of art itself. Krauss suggested that process artworks often investigate a single medium with such intensity that the medium itself may change its traditional artistic nature from a basic substance or category of art into a complex of forces, attitudes, and identities. Paint shifts from a colored substance used as a vehicle for representation to become a subject for contemplation and investigation, a physical material examined and manipulated in all its permutations. The distinction is analogous to the philosophical premises of the process philosophers Whitehead and Bergson, who insisted that the stable “thing” was a mere convenient abstraction, an arrested process of forces in time and space. To put it simply, a chair can be considered as a chair, but it can also be considered in terms of the laws of physics as a molecular structure that coheres in All About Process

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time and space by virtue of atomic and subatomic forces. Time and motion are thus a part of the chair’s identity, and in shifting attention and investigating the chair in terms of these it becomes a different subject altogether. Of course, most process artworks are not engaged with molecular and atomic structure, but they are often concerned with broad and interrelated systems in terms of material, context, and environment, as well as the human actions these involve. Harold Rosenberg defined process art rather differently, seeing it as part of a rejection of traditional aesthetic and artistic concerns: “Aesthetic withdrawal also paves the way for ‘process’ art—in which chemical, biological, physical, or seasonal forces affect the original materials and either change their form or destroy them, as in works incorporating growing grass and bacteria or inviting rust—and random art, whose form and content are decided by chance. . . . The principle common to all classes of de-aestheticized art is that the finished product, if any, is of less significance than the procedures that brought the work into being and of which it is the trace.”8 In Rosenberg’s view, process art represents an expansion of the artist’s concerns beyond the arena of traditional artistic production rather than a narrowing of focus to the artist’s processes of making as described by Pincus-Witten. Both critics do agree, however, that in process art the final product is diminished in importance, and this is an enduring legacy of the period. Whatever the artwork that remains may be, its purpose is to be a remnant or witness to the process that created it rather than an object of independent aesthetic significance. One of the difficulties posed for an analytic discussion of process art is the lack of clearly defined boundaries. It was not an established movement with a committed membership; it is more properly understood as a primary, even overarching concern of a particular period, the late 1960s and early 1970s. It included a broad spectrum of artists who engaged with process in markedly different ways, ranging from the obdurately physical and material to the immaterial and conceptual. Two broad trends are identifiable. The first is the one referred to by Pincus-Witten and Krauss, which includes artists devoted to the close examination of the procedures of their art making and the materials they employed. This is the tendency most commonly identified with process art, and it is associated with artists who participated in a number of notable exhibitions in the late 1960s: “Eccentric Abstraction” (Fishback Gallery, 1966); “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” (Whitney Museum, 1969); “Nine at Leo Castelli” (1968); “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969); and “Art in Process IV”

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(Finch College, 1969). Among the prominent participants in this trend were Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Dorothea Rockburne, Mel Bochner, Chuck Close, Barry Le Va, Lynda Benglis, Allan Saret, Bruce Nauman, Joel Shapiro, and Keith Sonnier. Most of these artists were engaged with examining the physicality of making and the material properties of their media. There was also an important contingent of artists and theorists who explored the more immaterial and conceptual aspects of art-making processes during the late 1960s that includes Bochner and Nauman as well as Sol LeWitt and Jack Burnham. Another related group of artists comprised those who, while often working in traditional media and established styles and formats, exalted the discipline of their own laborious art-making processes as a primary concern. Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin are prominent exemplars of this group. The second broad tendency of process art is more amorphous. It includes artists who engaged with myriad processes outside the conventional parameters of art making and the production of art objects, as well as often outside the forms and institutions of the art world. Rosenberg’s citation of “chemical, biological, physical, or seasonal forces” as primary agents in the creation of process artworks is indicative of some approaches of the artists associated with this tendency. These include artists affiliated with the Earth and Environmental Art movement such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Helen and Newton Harrison, and Allan Sonfist, as well as artists associated with Arte Povera as defined by the art critic Germano Celant. The tendency is, however, much broader than using largely uncontrolled natural processes as vehicles for the production of artworks. It involves an expansive view of art as an activity that participates in a wide spectrum of processes from the social and cultural to the anthropological and biological. Thus artists who directly engaged with social and cultural processes such as Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude also fall under this expanded rubric of process art as it developed in the late 1960s. There is no hard division between the two tendencies of process art, and artists sometimes worked in both veins. In emphasizing this broader tendency it is not my intention to subsume recognized categories, such as Earth Art and Environmental art, under an expanded process art. Rather, it is my goal to show the range of the effects of process art and to outline the enormous significance of process as an overarching and formative artistic concern in the late 1960s and thereafter. It may be compared in importance to the concepts of beauty or expression as defining artistic goals and concerns of earlier periods. Like those concepts, All About Process

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process is extremely malleable and open to interpretation, thus providing opportunities for a multitude of artistic approaches. At a time when the traditional value of art as an aesthetic commodity was increasingly considered corrupt and debased, artists maintained the vitality and relevance of their work by adopting the rubric of process. They did so using both microcosmic and macrocosmic means—the close examination of individual processes of artistic making, and the exploration of the artist’s labor in relation to much larger social and environmental processes. Robert Morris was the primary artist to articulate the concerns of process art and to attempt to theorize their significance in a series of articles published in Artforum between 1968 and 1970. His position was changeable, and although as an artist he is commonly associated with artists who focused on close examination of their working processes and materials, his theoretical concerns encompassed a much broader view of the artwork and artist’s labor. His theoretical writings thus help to establish the importance of situating process art within a wider ambit of artists and approaches than is often associated with it. Morris’s 1968 essay “Anti-Form” is a foundational text of process art. It focuses directly on the artist’s process of making, which Morris claimed was a new concern for artists and theorists: “The process of ‘making itself’ has hardly been examined. It has only received attention in terms of some kind of mythical, romanticized polarity: the so-called action of the Abstract Expressionists and the so-called conceptualizations of the Minimalists. This does not locate any differences between the two types of work.”9 According to Morris, American art has developed by uncovering alternative premises for making, and in doing so it has gone beyond the European devotion to formal relationships as a basic aesthetic device. His primary example is Jackson Pollock, who reconsidered the painter’s tools and medium and acknowledged paint’s liquid properties by dripping it rather than using a brush. Contemporary artists continue along this path, moving away from the rigid industrial materials that were the focus of minimalism to investigate the properties of other materials, even to the extent of sometimes making materials rather than things. Refusing to consider form as an end, contemporary artists explore gravity, chance, and indeterminacy.10 Morris’s focus is thus on the investigation of forces and energies by contemporary artists who perform experiments in the processes of making. His own contemporary work is exemplary of the trend he describes, as is that of Richard Serra and Barry Le Va.11 All of these artists were employing malleable materials such as felt, rubber, and industrial thread waste to produce works with random

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forms created by gravity and the artist’s largely unorganized actions. Morris’s essay gives no indication of any final goal or purpose for the artistic investigations into the physical processes of making in his essay. They seem to be pursued purely for their own sake, a novel iteration of the modernist art for art’s sake; or perhaps in the hope of making discoveries that would lead to as yet unimagined purposes or meanings, just as the scientist’s investigation of the properties of a given substance may lead to greater understanding of the nature of chemistry or physics. The following year, in “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects” (1969), Morris proposed a purpose or meaning for the artist’s work discussed in “Anti-Form,” but it does not directly concern the artist’s literal process of making. Rather, Morris returned to the perceptual concerns prominent in his earlier writing on minimalism to discuss the significance of the inchoate forms produced by artists investigating the properties of chance and gravity. The essay focuses on the close relationship between indeterminate, unstructured works and the “dedifferentiated” vision discussed by Anton Ehrenzweig in The Hidden Order of Art (1967).12 In Morris’s opinion, contemporary artists are “restructuring perceptual relevance” by creating heterogeneous spreads of substances without organization or clearly delimited forms, a pre-gestalt perceptual experience. Priority has shifted from form to substance, from construction to “chance, contingency, indeterminacy—in short, the entire area of process. Ends and means are brought together in a way that never existed before in art.”13 Morris outlined an evolution from form, through working processes, to perception in the development of sculpture: To begin with the concrete physicality of matter rather than images allows for a change in the entire profile of three-dimensional art: from particular forms, to ways of ordering, to methods of production and, finally, to perceptual relevance. . . . The notion that work is an irreversible process ending in a static icon-object no longer has much relevance. The detachment of art’s energy from the craft of tedious object production has further implications. This reclamation of process refocuses art as an energy driving to change perception.  .  .  . The attention given to both matter and its inseparableness from the process of change is not an emphasis on the phenomenon of means. What is revealed is that art itself is an activity of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and mutability, of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes.14 All About Process

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Here Morris detaches process from its usual meaning as a synonym for means and procedures and gives it a much broader significance as a term referring to universal forces of change. In this he suggests a view of process comparable to that proposed in the process philosophies of Whitehead and Bergson, which embraced similar notions of the perpetually unstable mutability of the universe. Morris’s claims for the new art are ambitious, a wholesale reorganization of human perception. In insisting on the “relevance” of the developments of contemporary art he indicates his engagement with the popular reenvisioning of the artist’s role by Marshall McLuhan and Morse Peckham. Morris adopts both thinkers’ belief that the artist’s importance lies in discovering and helping people to adapt to perceptual changes. McLuhan’s emphasis on the new need for process and engagement rather than clear narratives and completed “icons” is a central concern in Morris’s new art form, and Morris’s insistence on the perceptual relevance of dedifferentiated heterogeneous fields echoes McLuhan’s claim that the new mode of perception was holistic and mosaic. In “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects” Morris rejects the notion of artistic process in relation to the creation of things and replaces it with a much more extensive conception of art as an open-ended activity, “an energy.” It is this position that links Morris to an expanded conception of process art that includes artists whose activities directly engage with social and environmental processes. Morris’s own contemporary artworks consisted of random actions executed in large scale using construction materials that never resolve into a final form. For Continuous Project Altered Daily (1969) the New York art dealer Leo Castelli’s warehouse was opened to the public for twelve days. It was filled with an array of construction materials that Morris arranged and rearranged “more or less aimlessly” for the duration of the “show.”15 In his Whitney Museum retrospective the following year Morris refused the traditional exhibition of previously made works and created a type of construction site in which huge concrete blocks were rolled down a track and allowed to fall randomly. There was no formal opening, but visitors were able to see the work as it was being created. Both of these works demonstrate Morris’s interest in the physicality of construction processes, which he believed had become obscured in contemporary society. He observed that no one sees things being made any more, and the actual processes of the production of ordinary objects are largely unknown: “As a consequence, our immediate surroundings tend to be read as ‘forms’ that have been punched out of unidentifiable, indestructible plastic

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or unfamiliar metal alloys.” He continues in a vein that suggests he conceived his work as a sort of antidote to the general ignorance of construction practices: “It is interesting to note that in an urban environment construction sites become small theatrical arenas, the only places where raw substances and the processes of their transformation are visible, and the only places where random distribution is tolerated.”16 Morris’s contemporary theaters of random “construction” without any goal were performances of process that sought to uncover new perceptual modes. To what extent they succeeded in doing so is perhaps something that can only be determined by those who experienced them. It is certain that they, like minimalism, Happenings, and many other performative and “theatrical” events of the 1960s art world, were part of a general trend to turn the artwork from an object into an open-ended experiential process. Many artists associated with the process art of the late 1960s and early 1970s were engaged in an exploration of nonart materials associated with industrial technology. They brought an artist’s labor and sensibility to bear on previously nonaesthetic territory. Richard Serra donning the protective gear of a metal worker and throwing molten lead at the wall proclaimed the aesthetic interest of industrial labor techniques and materials. These had stimulated the public’s imagination since the eighteenth century, but it was only in the mid-twentieth century that artists took them literally into their own hands and displayed their appeal. This is not to say, however, that it was as simple as watching a metal worker at work. Serra’s Splashing (1969) was emphatically impractical, producing something that could only be of interest in the terms of contemporary artistic and aesthetic issues. Also, Serra’s investigation of the material’s properties was extremely basic, particularly when compared to the types of testing employed by contemporary industry. Unlike many industrial processes, the process artist’s actions and their results are easily understood and perceived. Industrial labor, a form of work largely hidden from public view as Morris pointed out, was thus theatricalized in some process art. Morris likewise noted that the material and techniques used were typically outmoded and rudimentary. Technological processes no longer used for utilitarian ends become ripe for aesthetic consideration. Morris’s final essay on process art, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated” (1970), is both a summing up and an extension of his previous articles. Unsurprisingly, given the title, the essay focuses on artists’ processes of making rather than the perceptual issues that were paramount in the previous year’s “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV.” While All About Process

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Peckham and Ehrenzweig’s psychological concerns remained central to Morris’s consideration of the relevance of process, he added a new theorist to the mix, Ferdinand de Saussure, whose structural linguistics were employed as a means to explore binary structure in human art-making behavior.17 The essay begins by making a distinction between oil painting and tool making. Both are ways of making, but their products differ in that a painting establishes itself in relationship to society and the environment while a tool is an intermediary in such relations. Morris posits that art’s predominantly social function explains why there has been little examination of the nature of art making itself. He proposes to rectify the omission and announces his conviction that “there are ‘forms’ to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end products. These are forms of behavior aimed at testing the limits and possibilities involved in that particular interaction between one’s actions and the materials of the environment” (73). These behavioral forms have been overlooked hitherto because those who discuss art know “almost nothing” about how it is made. Attending to the body’s physical activity of making will obviate what Morris sees as artificial mediabased distinctions, and he considers that this may lead to “anthropological designations” rather than “art categories.” His approach is both anthropological and psychological: “The entire enterprise of art making provides the ground for finding the limits and possibilities of certain kinds of behavior and that this behavior of production itself is distinct and has become so expanded and visible that it has extended the entire profile of art” (75). In shifting attention to the process of art making, art has transformed its product. For Morris, reconsideration of the process of artistic production is a means to renew art, which had fallen into formalism and the repetition of given forms and methods. Morris discusses what he considers key moments in the shift of attention to process in the arts. The first he notes is John Cage’s systematization of the arbitrary. This is part of a larger project of post–World War II art in which artists sought to “recover” their means by “grasping a systematic method of production which was one way or another implied in the finished product.” Morris outlines a genealogy from Duchamp through Cage, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella to conceptual art in which a priori systems are used to structure works. This art remains “Idealist” in Morris’s view, and its arrival at the “totally physically paralyzed conclusions of Conceptual art” indicates its ultimate sterility. Morris also identifies a second strand of “systemseeking art making,” which is the more phenomenological approach built on “the ‘tendencies’ inherent in the materials/process interaction” as typified

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by Pollock’s poured painting (77). This is the approach Morris himself defined and embraced in earlier essays, and he considers it to be currently dominant and implies that it is more successful. After identifying two trends of process-oriented production, Morris turned to a consideration of the dialectics of order/disorder in the artist’s work, and he claims that contemporary art shows a correlation between structured, information-based behavioral processes and formally chaotic products (83). Morris remained committed to the notion that the artist seeks order and meaning; he just relocated order and meaning away from material form to immaterial behavior. One strategy that Morris considered particularly effective in revealing the artist’s process as behavior is “automation,” his term for the use of chance procedures that short-circuit artistic choice, control, and aesthetic taste, and allow “more of the world to enter” (87). Although abdicating from controlled decisions suggests the artist is alienated from the artwork, Morris states that this is not the case: “Art making cannot be equated with craft time. Making art is much more about going through with something. Automating processes of the kind described open the work and the artist’s interacting behavior to completing forces beyond his total personal control” (87). Such “opening” also creates a context of possibility and choice for what seems very close to a behaviorist experiment. Morris’s interest in “automating processes” needs to be considered in political terms that lie somewhat outside the ostensible main topic of his essay. Morris sees automation as a remedy for the alienation of the modern artist/worker from the product of his or her labor. It is notably different from the common historical remedy for the alienation of the worker in industrial capitalist society, a Ruskinian embrace of handwork and self-regulated artisanal production. When Morris writes that art making cannot be equated with craft time, he rejects that well-established tradition and implies that the artist/craftsperson has simply become another alienated worker, the supplier of luxury goods for the wealthy. What is needed is a new alternative, and the one he embraces is to use automation as a means to connect the artist to the environment and demystify artistic production.18 While this approach may succeed in dislodging the artist/craftsman’s labor from its well-established position of privilege, Morris ran the risk of a different sort of mystification—that of making the artist’s activity a vessel or cognate for undefined universal forces and processes of change. Morris’s ultimate position is a hybrid of behaviorism and phenomenological investigation. He is interested in art that focuses attention on human All About Process

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sensory perceptions, particularly kinesthetic ones. It would appear that he believed art is and should be a laboratory for studying human behavior: A certain strain of modern art has been involved in uncovering a more direct experience of these basic perceptual meanings [weight and balance, up and down, near and far, motion and rest] and it has not achieved this through static images, but through the experience of an interaction between the perceiving body and the world that fully admits that the terms of this interaction are temporal as well as spatial, that existence is process, that the art itself is a form of behavior that can imply a lot about what was possible and what was necessary in engaging with the world while still playing that insular game of art. (90)

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This new role for art as an arena for examining behavior does not seem to have been considered an end point by Morris; rather, he places it as a stage in the evolutionary dialectic of modern art. Minimalism provided construction as the alternative to the Abstract Expressionists’ art based on arrangement, and the current interest is a dialectical counterpoint to construction: “Don’t build . . . Drop, hang, lean, in short, act. . . . The static noun of ‘form’ is substituted for the dynamic verb to ‘act’ in the priority of making . . . the material is being probed for openings that allow the artist a behavioristic access” (91). Morris believes that focus on the making process is leading artists in all the arts into the world beyond the studio, museum, and gallery. He concludes that “as process becomes part of the work instead of prior to it, one is enabled to engage more directly with the world in art making because forming is moved further into the presentation” (92). What Morris does not explain is why this is important; he seems to assume that direct engagement with the world is an obviously desirable goal for art. Despite his rational scientific approach, Morris is noticeably shy about explaining the purpose of his investigations beyond the vague notion of changing perception. Here, one might consider the validity of Hannah Arendt’s critique of the scientific process, which has no goal beyond information. Morris shies away from stating that process art may awaken the audience’s political awareness and engagement in a Brechtian fashion, and yet he implies that somehow this dedication to process will open art to the environment in a manner that will transform art into a more general social and humanly active function.19 There is at times a nostalgic quality evident in Morris’s texts. This is particularly noticeable in “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV” when he discusses the public’s unfamiliarity with contemporary factory Process Art

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production techniques and the theatrical quality of urban construction sites. Morris often seems to want less to prepare people’s perceptions for the contemporary disembodied and formless information society than he wants to display the lost bodily theater of physical labor. In keeping with Morris’s assertion in “Anti-Form” that American artists’ attention to the processes of making has replaced the European devotion to formal relationships, process art is commonly considered part of a widespread rejection of formalism and its emphasis on the art object, and also often a rejection of the modernist project altogether.20 It is important to recognize, however, that this rejection is not clear or definitive. First, as previous chapters of this book have shown, the artist’s process was a central concern of modern art from its beginnings. Second, the investigation of the properties of the artist’s means and materials which Morris credits Pollock with discovering is directly in keeping with Clement Greenberg’s definition of modern art. In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Greenberg described the avant-garde as imitating the disciplines and processes of art rather than imitating the appearance of the world. In turning their attention to their medium, avant-garde artists test its limits and discover the parameters for abstract art: [The avant-garde artist] turns out to be imitating, not God—and here I use “imitate” in its Aristotelian sense—but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the “abstract.” In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or “abstract,” if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature.21 Greenberg’s famous statement is relevant to much process art. Although process art is associated with the expansion of art beyond the limits of traditional media and materials, as well as the boundary that traditionally separated art from life (both anathema to Greenberg and his supporters), the exploration of what Morris defined as “the process of making itself” as art and the investigation of the properties of the artist’s materials remains All About Process

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plausibly within the realm of Greenberg’s definition of the avant-garde artist’s activity.22 Just as modernist painters such as Josef Albers explored the properties of color, process artists such as Morris and Serra explored the physical properties of their materials. One of the most famous texts associated with process art is Richard Serra’s list of verbs from 1967–68, which includes many verbs designating actions employed by him and by other process artists to make what are now well-known works. While some verbs seem to dictate a precise action for making a specific work or works, such as “to roll” in relation to Serra’s ThirtyFive Feet of Lead Rolled Up (1968) or “to tear” in relation to his Tearing Lead (1968), others are less amenable to physically explicit reading. “To arrange,” “to complement,” “to mark,” “to modulate,” and “to continue” are verbs that can apply to many physical actions taken by an artist, and thus do not offer obvious means for readily understood indexical object production. Those verbs that are easily demonstrated by final products, however, provide a basic ground line for thinking about process art as simply an extension of the modernist investigation of the artist’s means, more art whose “subject” is the making of art. It is this meaning that remains the underlying intention of many artists who to this day employ the mantra “it’s all about the process.” Process is the last bastion of modernist self-reference, and the only one that still enjoys prestige. Formalism is now almost universally discredited as a limited approach overly concerned with trivial aesthetics and insufficiently engaged with significant social and political issues. The artist’s own activity, however, is still widely accepted as an example of human freedom in action, no matter what the actual art activity may be. An artist engaged in the process is fully absorbed in the making of art; it is in essence simply to be an artist at work. Ad Reinhardt provided the definitive unapologetic statement for this position in 1970:

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There is a kind of moral prestige that an artist has, like a priest in a sense. I guess because he’s not involved in exploiting anybody. . . . I don’t want the fine-art process, which to me is a free process, in which you didn’t have a job to do, confused with something else. It was not unconscious or automatic, it was free. If you were painting, you had a lot of painting to do. . . . You didn’t have some idea yourself or somebody else had an idea and then you carried it through and then somebody could tell you if you did it right or not. That’s the commercial or industrial process.23 Process Art

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Reinhardt’s view resonates with the ideological conviction of the freedom of the modern artist and the modern artist’s labor that developed in the nineteenth century and has endured to the present day. Process art does represent a significant rejection of the modernist insistence on the separation and purity of the art forms based on traditional media. In addition, distinctions between the arts were long made on the basis of their relationship to time.24 Thus music, theater, and literature are timebased arts, while painting and sculpture are atemporal and largely concerned with space. Michael Fried upheld the distinction in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) when he argued against the “theatricality” of minimalism and its dependence on temporal experience for its (in Fried’s view, nonaesthetic) effects. After the 1950s many artists who insisted on the need to expand the parameters of the visual arts beyond their traditional, media-based limitations were deeply involved with incorporating time into their work.25 This might be the time of the viewer’s experience, as discussed by Robert Morris in terms of minimalism in the first three of his “Notes on Sculpture” essays as well as in “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” and by Victor Burgin more generally in “Situational Aesthetics” (1969), or in the temporal unfolding of a Happening where distinctions between viewer and artist are lost. For the first tendency of process art it was typically the artist’s time of making that became central to the work.26 For the second, more expansive tendency, time was integral to the relations between the artwork and the processes of society and the environment.

Systems Aesthetics, Series, and Conceptualism

An important strain of process art was engaged in the examination and use of immaterial technological processes, notably information systems and their relation to production. One of the main proponents of systems aesthetics, Jack Burnham, wrote, “We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done. The priorities of the present age revolve around the problems of organization.”27 In Burnham’s view, systems thinking encompasses the human, mechanical, and natural arenas and seeks to balance the needs of all. He emphasized the notion that systems analysis, even in the Pentagon, is an art, not “cold-blooded” logic, and he quotes a pioneer of systems analysis, E.  S. Quade: “Systems analysis, particularly the type required for military decisions, is still largely a form of art. Art can be taught in part, but not by the means of fixed rules” (31). As Burnham presents it, All About Process

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the “art” of systems analysis is the only hope for the future of humankind in an era when technology threatens the very possibility of life on earth. In such a situation, art and its purposes have changed. Gone is the goal of beautifying modern life through the production of art objects; now “only the didactic function of art continues to have meaning. . . . The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment. . . . In an advanced technological culture the most important artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis-à-vis society” (31). Burnham cites Duchamp, Warhol, and Morris as artists who have rejected “craftfetishism” and modern formalism in their efforts to align their artistic output with the technology and psychic means of contemporary production. Such an approach will ultimately turn artistic and technological decision making into a single activity in Burnham’s view, and he refers to Morse Peckham’s definition of art as an “adaptive mechanism” that may help people develop strategies for surviving changes in the environment. Burnham believed that systems aesthetics “go beyond” the contrived confines of staged environments and Happenings to focus on conceptual forces that define systems, and he situated systems aesthetics as developing from minimalism. Morris’s process works are an example of systems aesthetics in their breakdown of hierarchy between results and technique. Other artists Burnham cites as employing a systems aesthetic are Carl Andre, Les Levine, Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, and Hans Haacke. What unites the work of these artists as described by Burnham is, however, less attention to systems than a rejection of formalist concerns and the isolated art object. He quotes Haacke’s artist statement from 1968: “A ‘sculpture’ that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real” (35). Haacke’s interest in expanded systems seems closest to embodying the “post-formalist” position outlined by Burnham, particularly in terms of engaging the broader political and social arena. Art would no longer be its own isolated territory, but integral to society as a whole. Burnham claims a paradigm shift is occurring not just in art, but in humanity. Homo faber is becoming homo arbiter formae, man the maker of aesthetic decisions, which will control the quality of life on earth (35).

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To an extent the enshrinement of process art in the late 1960s as a favored approach of cutting-edge contemporary artists seems to have prompted a tendency to claim almost anything as process art.28 Obviously, all art may be viewed in terms of process, as indeed may all forms of existence as indicated by the process philosophies of Whitehead and Bergson. For Jack Burnham process art represented both the strategy and the goal of art’s disappearance into the full spectrum of human activity. He described Levine’s Restaurant (a real restaurant opened by the artist Les Levine in 1969 named Levine’s Restaurant) as “the ultimate real time art work devised to date. The restaurant is process in all its vicissitudes.” Burnham quoted Les Levine’s artist’s statement, which reveals a serious consideration of the parameters of process art: “All process oriented works rely on the viewer and the art critic for their final definition as works of art. If it is neither photographed nor written about, it disappears back into the environment and ceases to exist. . . . Good or bad are irrelevant in terms of process. On a process level being totally excited is of no more value than being totally bored. If you run around in your backyard and make a good painting, it’s just the same as running around in your backyard and making a bad painting. Running around is running around.” The restaurant and the painting may both be easily understood as processes occurring in time, but their nature as art processes is less clear. What, indeed, makes the restaurant process art? Burnham states that the existence of anything as art distinct from its “media” depends on “conceptual focus,” that “the reality of art continues to reside in its unreality.”29 Burnham does not address how the restaurant is (or is not) different from all other restaurants, which presumably are not art. It appears that Burnham believed the existence of art depends on awareness rather than on anything tangible, and he considered that it was necessary to maintain the conceptual distinction between art and nonart. Levine himself indicated that it is the viewer and critic who make the determination. In contrast, the painting as a long-established art form will easily be understood as a work of art, and it is likely that its quality will be evaluated. Process art thus affects different activities and entities in variable ways. It can drain traditional art of its distinction from other objects, but it also has the potential to transform nonart into artworks, extending Duchamp’s conceptual ready-mades into a broader arena beyond single objects. In April 1969 Les Levine issued a press release concerning a new work, Profit Systems One. It announced the artist’s purchase of stock in Cassette Cartridge Corporation and his intention to sell the stock at a time deemed

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profitable within the next year. The work of art will be the profit or loss from the transaction: Profit Systems One is a concern on the part of the artist for dealing with a “real” societal system. The work is involved with the process of the business system which influences our daily lives. It is a “post-object work” in that it has no visible form. Profit Systems One is a work about process. The process is a result of an open continuing system called the “stock market,” a system directly connected to our life style. Mr. Levine feels that it is no longer necessary for the artist to produce objects in a society whose object needs are over provided at the present. “What is more important for the artist to deal with,” states Mr. Levine, “are the ambient systems and the software patterns which influence our culture. The negative approach to these systems has been so acceptable to most artists that it seems desirable and novel to consider their positive aspects at this time.”30

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Running a restaurant, buying and selling stock—ordinary commercial processes become process art, and in doing so seem to acquire value beyond the merely financial. Levine’s consideration of the “positive aspects” of stock trading from an artist’s vantage point implies something more than the enjoyment of financial profit, or at least the hope thereof. What seems to be missing from these works is a degree of awareness or criticality. What was gained artistically or aesthetically by engaging in Profit System One? How was running a restaurant as process art different from the ordinary business of running a restaurant? Answers to these questions are relevant simply because the answers, whatever their substance, would reflect on the temporal nature of the works in some manner and reconfirm the nature of the enterprises as art. Levine’s Restaurant and Profit System One recall Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis and critique of modern man as concerned only with unproductive labor and the transitory personal satisfactions of consumption. Levine, however, seemed willing to let his process art merge uncritically with life. In this regard Kaprow wrote, “Why shouldn’t an artist program a Happening over the course of several days, months, or years, slipping it in and out of the performers’ daily lives? There is nothing esoteric in such a proposition, and it may have the distinct advantage of bringing into focus those things one ordinarily does every day without paying attention—like brushing one’s teeth.”31 Kaprow posited that awareness was a key component of a Happening; it Process Art

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might be retrospective awareness, or as above, a more attentive approach to experience. Levine’s process art pieces give no indication, however, of the effects of the increased awareness that seems necessary and proper to their identity as art even in terms of the very broad parameters proposed by Kaprow. Lacking any knowledge of the actual manifestation/experience of the works through time would seem to situate them more convincingly in the realm of the conceptual proposition Robert Morris criticized as idealist. The relation between conceptual art and process art is complex and fluid, lacking easily demarcated boundaries. While Joseph Kosuth’s “art as idea as idea” in its most uncompromising idealist definition has little relation to process,32 there is a significant strain of art developed in the 1960s that is a close marriage between concept and process. Its most well-known published statements were made by Sol LeWitt, who wrote in 1967: When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. . . . It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned. . . . If the artist carries through his idea and makes it into visible form, then all the steps in the process are of importance. . . . All intervening steps—scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work, models, studies, thoughts, conversations—are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product.33 In 1969 LeWitt stated, “The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made. . . . Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. . . . The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.”34 James Meyer has noted that Robert Morris’s antiform, an “activity that claimed to have achieved an absolute motivation of process, an art that followed from the necessities of materials deployed by a body, an art devoid of ‘form’ (intention),” came to dominate the historical view of process art / postminimalism.35 This understanding has somewhat overshadowed the less physical/materialist, more conceptual approaches to process art of artists such as LeWitt, Mel Bochner, and Robert Smithson.

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Like the physical and material investigations of Morris and Serra, the artists who developed more avowedly conceptual approaches to process art may be seen as performing a type of scientific experimentation and analysis.36 Bochner and LeWitt both promoted the emotional neutrality of their conceptual approaches,37 which they saw as revealing the process of artistic thinking. Bochner wrote, “It’s this constant churning of a process. That idea of taking something and looking at it and pulling it apart, and then pulling the parts apart.”38 Completed works were the physical results of systematic processes and often explicitly exhibited as such with titles explaining the procedures used to generate the works. Bochner described the work of Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and LeWitt as serial systems: “Serial or systematic thinking has generally been considered the antithesis of artistic thinking. Systems are characterized by regularity, thoroughness, and repetition in execution. They are methodical. It is their consistency and the continuity of application that characterizes them. Individual parts of a system are not in themselves important but are relevant only in how they are used in the enclosed logic of the whole series.”39 This is the language of science and industry, and the works it describes also typically employed a visual language reminiscent of science textbook diagrams and the regular forms of assembly line productions. The “products” of the experiment/labor are the elements of artistic thought made material. Again, process thinking is used to expand the exploration and analysis of the artist’s medium associated with modernist formalism’s investigations.40 In this instance the medium of art is not the materials in themselves, but the artist’s thought process as it is manifested in the production of objects. One of the notable characteristics of conceptual process art is the tendency toward serial production. In many instances an idea generates a series of works, LeWitt’s many series of cubes variously divided, multiplied, and incomplete being among the most well-known examples. For works such as these the series becomes a manifestation of the work as a generative process. No one work has priority over another; there is no evolution; each member is an example of permutation, and often, but not always, the order of presentation and fabrication is arbitrary. In comparison with the series works of Monet and Mondrian discussed in chapter 4, there are notable differences. Unlike Monet’s series paintings, each work of a conceptual series of process art does not reflect the artist’s perceptions in time. The work is notably more distant from the emotions and psychology of the artist as well as the artist’s physical and emotional relationship to the environment.

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While Mondrian’s paintings were not intended to reflect his personal psychological state, they also are very different from the series work of process artists. As previously discussed, for many years Mondrian’s painting was consciously evolutionary and directed toward the goal of pure abstraction. Process artists generally eschewed an evolutionary approach and often embraced explicitly devolutionary or entropic processes. Mondrian’s search for, and later permutations of, perfect compositional order and harmony were also anathema to process artists whose work employed at best provisional relations and tenuous balances. Even seemingly ordered series of geometric forms like Frank Stella’s or LeWitt’s were based on simple order or mathematical formulae, what Donald Judd described as one thing after another, rather than compositional harmony. Series as employed by process artists tended toward the meaningless and absurd rather than the expression of profound sensibility or evolutionary striving.41 Caroline Jones has discussed at length the connections between industrial production and the series work of Stella, as well as the productions of Warhol’s Factory.42 Adoption of the processes and materials of industrial technology were a common means employed by artists of the 1960s to counter the expressive concerns of the previous generation. It is, however, important to remember that the Abstract Expressionists also often worked in series and occasionally used industrial materials. In their hands such approaches were intended to turn the impersonal tools of labor into instruments of personal expression and original creative activity. The tendency of Abstract Expressionists, notably Pollock, Still, Reinhardt, and Rothko, to number and date their paintings rather than title them seemed to emphasize their identity as members of a series. However, unlike the later series of minimalist and some process artists, the Abstract Expressionist series seems less like a group of similar objects than the equivalent of a journal or diary. Differences do not reflect a systematic procedure that creates variations but rather the nuances of lived changes, the shifts of mood or attitude, the conditions of living as life transpires. An Abstract Expressionist series seems to portray the unique personal “weather” of an individual being in much the way that Monet portrayed weather conditions affecting the appearance of Rouen Cathedral. While the next generation of artists rejected the project of self-expression in art, they surely learned from their Abstract Expressionist predecessors that the permutations of a simple motif, be it a vertical line, stacked rectangles, or the sinuous thread of poured liquid, could be varied infinitely to create interest.

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The Artist’s Work and the Artist’s Role

Recent art historical discussions of the art of the 1960s have stressed the relation of art to labor and politics as well as the efforts made to shift the emphasis from the artwork as a commodity/product to other aspects of art making and aesthetic experience. Benjamin Buchloh outlined a transition from the traditional “aesthetic of the studio” to Pop Art and minimalism’s industrial “aesthetic of production and consumption” to conceptual art’s “aesthetic of administration,”43 the last of which has since become an established category in discussions of contemporary artistic production. The parallelism between recent changes in art and the broad social transformations resulting from the shift from an industrial economic base to an information-centered economy are incontrovertible. This symmetry is often considered a key factor in discussions of the changing concept of the artist’s work and the corresponding tendency to focus on process rather than product. However, although some artists and theorists like Jack Burnham aligned non-object-oriented process and systems art with the new information age, more often the turn away from art as commodity was explained as it was in Les Levine’s press release for Profit System One—as a refusal to contribute to the excess production of luxury objects. Many artists were engaged in radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and this engagement affected their attitudes about their own work as artists. Chris Gilbert has written that artists of the period were so obsessed with work and labor issues that “instead of ‘painting’ and ‘sculpture,’ then, ‘work’ expands in common usage to cover both and in doing so slips neatly between referring to work as object and work as action.”44 Julia Bryan-Wilson sees artists in the 1960s as not only conceiving themselves as laborers but also as committed to New Left political attitudes defined by process, which signified the “democratic ideals of open debate and interactivity.”45 While this attitude varied greatly in its applicability to specific artists and works, in the late 1960s the Art Workers’ Coalition proposed that all artists receive wages rather than depend on the sale of work for their income. The “dematerialization” of art in the late 1960s and 1970s has often been viewed as a response to a slump in the art market, and this must also be considered as affecting artists’ attitudes toward their production and self-evaluation. How does an artist work without making saleable commodities? However that question is answered, the response holds the key to what the artist’s role is and the nature of the artist’s “work” and identity.

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These concerns affected the strain of process art that directly engaged large-scale processes from the cosmic and environmental to the social. Robert Smithson rejected the traditional situation of the artwork as a commodity in a gallery and turned his attention to working in the larger environment, from parks and jungles to industrial wastelands. His exploration of entropy was closely related to Morris’s notion of antiform and the many works of the period that were attempting to manifest Ehrenzweig’s notion of dedifferentiation. Disorder as a reigning natural process became both the subject and the form of many artworks. Gravity was employed in a similar manner. In his most famous work, Spiral Jetty, Smithson embraced natural processes from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, symbolically in the work’s shape, but also literally in its situation. Placed to become part of a highly changeable landscape, the work grows and erodes, appears and disappears as it is affected by the chemical, meteorological, and geological changes of the environment. The Italian critic Germano Celant outlined the concerns of many contemporary artists engaged with natural processes in his essay on Arte Povera. He related their approach to John Dewey’s notion of art as the expansion of sensuous experience and awareness and quoted John Cage on art as coming from “an experimental condition in which one experiments with the living.” “[The artist] has chosen,” wrote Celant, “to live within direct experience . . . he wants to take part in the oneness of every minute . . . all of his work tends towards . . . an experiment with contingent existence. . . . He destroys his social ‘function’ because he no longer believes in cultural goods. He denies the moralistic fallaciousness of artistic production, the creators of the illusionistic dimension of life and reality. He believes only in his own personal experience.”46 Celant’s approach is closely related to Kaprow’s notions and the general trend of the period to integrate art and life. What his essay on Arte Povera highlights is the artist’s identity and attitude as central to the new conception of art. While Kaprow saw Happenings as a new merging of art into life that largely eliminated the special role of the artist, Celant elevates the importance of the artist. This is not to say that Celant promoted traditional notions of the artist as genius or prophet; in fact, he explicitly rejected them. The artist’s attitude is nevertheless all-important in Celant’s conception: “Thus his availability to all is total. He accumulates continuously desire and lack of desire, choice and lack of choice. . . . He abolishes his role of being an artist, intellectual, painter or writer and learns again to perceive, to feel, to breathe, to walk, to understand, to make himself a man. Naturally, to learn to move oneself, and to re-find one’s own existence does not mean to admire or to All About Process

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recite, to perform new movements, but to make up continuously mouldable material.”47 Echoing McLuhan in the artist’s rejection of a socially defined “role,” Celant reconceives the artist as the responsive individual fully engaged and attentive to the processes of life. The incorporation of flexibility and sensitivity in the broadest sense to material and environmental processes as well as engagement with the full range of social processes is a hallmark of the work of artists such as Joseph Beuys and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. These artists are instigators and facilitators, and their activity is often comparable to that of the old-fashioned impresario. Their works are created to draw attention to the myriad processes that constitute them and thereby create greater public awareness of the interrelated processes that form the living environment, from social institutions and structures to the natural world. Only occasionally considered as examples of process art, it is these artists and those who worked in similar veins (particularly environmental artists such as Helen and Newton Harrison, Alan Sonfist, and the like) whose work comprises the most sweeping embrace of the constellation of ideas related to process. While one of the dominant trends of the 1960s was the merging of art into life and the abandonment of traditional media and techniques, there was also a strong reassertion of the value of the artist and of art making. McLuhan considered artists as role models for the new age of total engagement, and the commonly held notion that artists were particularly dedicated to their work compared to the ordinary worker helped to establish the artist’s processes of making as a subject of general interest. The artist’s work and psychology of creation became not only a topic for critical or scholarly discussion but also significant components of artworks both as apparent content and implied meaning. Harold Rosenberg’s concept of art as action and the emphasis on making that was such an important part of the understanding of Abstract Expressionism was a key precursor and influence. Also contributing to the general evaluation of the artist were popularized notions about creativity and focused mental attitudes. Art was increasingly seen as an activity that, pursued with proper attention, was its own spiritual and psychological reward. Certain types of artists were linked with this notion, usually those whose work seemed to involve particularly tedious or vacuous production processes. Ad Reinhardt helped to form the general notion of the modern artist as an exceptionally dedicated worker. He was an early proponent of the artist’s activity as liberated making, unhampered by external concerns or evaluations and utterly engrossed in the processes of the art form. As he said in a 1970

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interview, “If you were painting, you had a lot of painting to do.” Reinhardt’s views were influenced by Zen attitudes, and he had a highly disciplined notion of the artist’s labor, as evidenced by the following statement from 1960: “This is the one lesson from the East and from the West. The forms of art are always preformed and premeditated. The creative process is always an academic routine and sacred procedure. Everything is prescribed and proscribed.” Moreover, in 1962 he wrote: The one subject of a hundred years of modern art is that awareness of art of itself, of art preoccupied with its own processes and means. . . . The one way in art comes from art working and the more an artist works the more there is to do. . . . The one direction in fine or abstract art today is in the painting of the same one form over and over again. The one intensity and the one perfection come only from long and lonely routine preparation and attention and repetition. The one originality exists only where all artists work in the same tradition and master the same convention. The one freedom is realized only through the strictest art discipline and through the most similar studio ritual. Only a standardized, prescribed, and proscribed form can be imageless, only a stereotyped image can be formless, only a formularized art can be formulaless.48 As distant as Reinhardt’s relentless formalism may seem from the dissolution of art into life that preoccupied so many artists in the 1960s, his art and his ideas were nevertheless highly influential. His dedication to the processes and means of an art form are directly related to artists like Serra and Morris who pursued investigations of materials and processes in a similarly rigorous fashion. Perhaps even more influential was Reinhardt’s paradoxical, even mystical conviction that liberation was achieved through strict discipline. Here was a belief that could sustain artists who remained committed to their work, particularly to making material objects, in the face of an indifferent market, an uninterested public, and a questionable social purpose. As the role and significance of artistic production became increasingly subject to doubt and suspicion, artists needed to justify their continued dedication to production. The innate need for self-expression, so long a recognized motivation for artists, had become as suspect as the production of luxury commodities. Reinhardt offered a plausible rationale: the artist was like a monk, dedicated and disciplined, the devotee of a process that might result in great, albeit immaterial, rewards. Implicitly, the work created by such a process would also All About Process

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be somehow capable of communicating to viewers this immaterial, possibly spiritual achievement. Spiritual achievement aside, though, Reinhardt suggested a way for artists and art to be considered as simple free labor, an activity to be performed for its own sake.49 Its products need not be subjected to the doubts engendered by capitalist markets for luxury goods, nor need it be abandoned for the greater freedom of life. To question the making of art was no more or less meaningful than to question the living of life. It is a simple act to be performed or not, but its significance and virtues can only be discovered in the doing, in the processes it entails. This is an attitude that runs through much of the art of the later 1960s and 1970s.50 Bryan-Wilson has commented on LeWitt’s wall drawings as an absorbing exercise that borders on Zen meditation, and she quotes the following from LeWitt’s 1970 statement: “The draftsman and the wall enter a dialogue. The draftsman becomes bored but later through this meaningless activity finds peace or misery.”51 Chuck Close has cited LeWitt’s wall drawings as a key influence, as well as process issues in general: “I really did believe that process would set you free. Instead of having to dream up a great idea—waiting for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike your skill—you are better off just getting to work. In the process of making things, ideas will occur to you. . . . You never have to be stuck.”52 Similarly apposite is Walter de Maria’s brief Fluxus essay from 1960 in which he claimed that meaningless work, such as moving blocks back and forth between boxes or digging holes and filling them in, could contain all the best qualities of painting and sculpture without their limitations. Indeed, according to de Maria most paintings are old-fashioned records of meaningless work. The ultimate significance of meaningless work, however, may be more than it appears: “Whether the meaningless work, as an art form, is meaningless, in the ordinary sense of that term is of course up to the individual.” De Maria concluded with the simple injunction “Get to work.”53

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Process Art and Craft

During the 1950s a new craft movement, particularly in ceramics, expanded the potential of traditional craft media to become vehicles for personal artistic expression and thus modern “fine” art.54 The division between fine arts and crafts was traditionally made on the basis of utility and conceptual content. Painting and sculpture transmitted ideas through representation and had no utilitarian purpose, while crafts such as ceramics, weaving, and woodworking produced useful and often decorative objects. The modern Process Art

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conception of art as a means of personal expression made it possible to transform traditional craft media into expressive artistic means. Collingwood’s distinctions between art and craft processes were at the heart of this transformation. By making nonutilitarian works in craft media according to the processes and attitudes Collingwood used to define fine art production (open-ended, responsive, and uniquely self-expressive making), craftspeople became artists.55 The art world’s turn away from conceiving art as personal expression in the 1960s did not halt this trend, and to this day many artists working in traditional craft media see their work as artistic self-expression in Collingwood’s terms. Defining art as expression allowed for an easy conceptual transformation of traditional craft media into vehicles for creating art by employing expressive creative processes. Process art, in contrast, occupies a complex and ambivalent position in relation to traditional craft media, processes, and values. First, it is important to recognize that, despite its amorphous boundaries and expansive, often populist concerns, process art is a phenomenon of the rarefied intellectual art world. Engaging with the processes of making things, running a restaurant, buying stock, moving earth, or any of the other activities associated with process art did not immediately turn someone into a process artist. This is equally true for craftspeople, even though their work was often directly engaged with activities and concerns that preoccupied process artists. Elissa Auther has studied the critical reception of the postminimalist felt, rope, and fiber works of Robert Morris and Eva Hesse in relation to the reception of work by contemporary fiber artists.56 She discovered that, despite the emphasis on making and the investigation of materials that defines process art, both Morris and Hesse were understood to be working primarily in relation to ideas and concepts rather than in relation to materials. It was the contemporary fiber artists whose work was evaluated in relation to their materials and production processes. As Auther notes, this critical emphasis on conceptual understanding is ironic given that Hesse’s and Morris’s works are highly valued for their tactility and engagement with materials that make explicit appeals to physical and bodily experience. Process art exalted certain craft values, such as close attention to materials and hand making, but this had no immediate effect on either the traditional elevation of conceptual concerns in the fine arts or the art world’s view of artists working in traditional craft media.57 Although strong distinctions between craft and so-called fine art remained in force through the 1960s and 1970s, attitudes and values commonly associated with craft acquired art world significance. One of the most All About Process

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immediately evident of these is the devoted attention to making and workmanship that emphasizes repetition over innovation. The work of Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin exemplifies this approach. Reinhardt and Martin belonged to an earlier generation but were much admired in the 1960s and 1970s. As painters their work was inevitably seen as fine art, while the spiritual associations made with their work as an activity, as well as with the “sublime” effects of the paintings themselves, directed attention away from the close relationship of their activity to that traditionally associated with craft. Peter Dormer has noted that craftspeople do not build careers on continuous invention; they mine the possibilities of a form or limited series of forms over years in a cautious and incremental process.58 Reinhardt’s subtly nuanced tonal relationships, Martin’s grids, as well as Joseph Albers’s squares are all easily understood as explorations of aspects of the craft of painting (and in Martin’s case, drawing as well). Reinhardt’s and Martin’s dedication to a sharply restricted format was additionally often considered a form of disciplined spiritual exercise that led to a higher form of awareness. In this they, too, may be compared to craftspeople whose mastery of the repetitive manual activity of craft production is often associated with elevated mental and spiritual states.59 A key impetus for the coming together of modern art and qualities long associated with craft in the 1960s was the rejection of inspiration and original expression as artistic goals. Since the late nineteenth century, modern art had been identified with originality and freedom in contrast to the dutiful and repetitive labor of the craftsperson. That distinction, although challenged by the Bauhaus and other modern approaches to traditional crafts as well as the development of creative expression in traditional craft media, remained largely intact until the era of Pop and minimalism. Even then artists were often distinguished from craftspeople on the basis of materials and techniques; artists embraced industrial materials and technology while craftspeople usually continued to work with traditional materials and methods. That distinction remained in force among the most historically successful artists associated with process art (Morris and his industrial felt and thread waste; Serra’s rubber, lead, and steel; Hesse’s fiberglass and latex). However, more significant than differences in material was, as Auther noted, the distinction made on the basis of ideas. Artists were embodying concepts in their work; craftspeople were simply making objects. The simplest proof of this difference could be found in the artist’s ability to change materials without loss of prestige or effectiveness, while the craftsperson is typically dedicated to mastery of a single medium.60

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Process artists were often engaged with issues relevant to the body and the senses, and this is a key area in which they approached the concerns of the handcrafts. Theories of handcraft and the particular areas of competence associated with craft have long emphasized the craftsperson’s “tacit knowledge,” which refers to the physical knowledge developed through working with a medium over a long period of time.61 The craftsperson has “tact” or “bodily intelligence,” which may be described as a “feel” for the material, its potential, and its current state.62 This sort of experiential knowledge, impossible to acquire through verbal instruction, is one of the defining features of the master craftsperson: “In their loyalty to medium, process and skill, the individuals who comprise craft culture elevate the bodily and spatial intelligences to a position of primary importance.”63 Howard Risatti has discussed how thoroughly the physical processes of making have permeated the crafts in their traditional divisions, as well as in the names for practitioners (weavers, joiners, turners, etc.).64 In his view, craft objects are “somatically oriented”: they are made by hand and retain the hand’s shape, and they are made for the human body and its actions.65 The great rise in popularity of the tactilely oriented crafts as both hobbies and products during the 1960s and 1970s was one of the ways McLuhan seemed to have been prescient about the values and interests of the electric age.66 Art world trends toward tactile values and physical immersion in environments also reflected his views. One of the primary interests of the process artists was an examination of the physical nature of making. In contrast to the craftsperson for whom the body is instrumental in the creation of a specific object, many process artists turned their full attention to physical activity as it acts on materials. Their actions are rudimentary and often absurdly incompetent. In Serra’s film Hand Catching Lead the hand rarely catches the falling lead bar, and his Tearing Lead, Casting, and Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up are hardly works that reveal the types of tacit knowledge acquired by the craftsperson. They are rather indexes of the simple obduracy of the material and its crude malleability in human hands. Morris’s jumbles of construction materials, folded felt, and piles of industrial thread waste are similarly awkward residues of human action. Read in relation to craft values these process pieces seem to bear witness to the physical ineptitude of the human body in relation to the sheer size, weight, and bulk of industrial materials. Unlike many works associated with high-level craftsmanship in which the beauty of the object often seems to belie its handmade production, these process works fully attest to human action. Somewhat oddly, process art reverses Ruskinian values by suggesting that the perfection achieved by highly refined handcraft skills may All About Process

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be an inhuman achievement. It is in the context of heavy industry that the human body and its physical limitations appear most fully. Robert Morris seems to have been thinking along these lines to some degree when he distinguished art from “the craft of tedious object production” and insisted that art making is not equivalent to “craft time.”67 His call for “automation,” which he defined as the inclusion of the arbitrary and accidental in the work process, is also striking in relation to the history of craft and industrial production. Ruskin’s influential notion that the pursuit of handcraft activity was humanly beneficial in comparison to the automated production of factories is upended by Morris’s choice of term. For Morris as an artist it is handcraft that is tedious, inhuman production, and automation becomes the mechanism for short-circuiting the individual control and choice that Ruskin wanted to restore to the worker. One hundred years after Ruskin developed his ideas, the artist’s control had become a burden and a means to isolate art from life and the world by placing it within the narrow confines of a formalism defined by aesthetic taste. As Morris saw it the solution was interruption by an arbitrary system of inhuman procedures—in other words, “automation.” Such procedures would prompt the artist to respond spontaneously and result in works that indexed truly human actions. In counterpoint to Morris’s rejection of “craft time” as related to artistic production is the work of artists associated with process art who emphasized the tedious labor of making. Eva Hesse is exemplary in this regard with her use of various forms of wrapping and coiling. Critical evaluation of Hesse’s art frequently stressed her craft techniques and described them in psychological terms as “obsessive” or “compulsive.”68 This is also far distant from Ruskinian notions of craft and its human benefits. The basic processes of craft activity are here connected not with the competence, control, achievement, and self-respect that Ruskin and William Morris promoted as generally improving, but with both the healing qualities and the illnesses associated with the crafts as therapy. Craftwork may be salutary, but it also reveals neuroses. Rote activity is both tedious and obsessive. It may lead to spiritual or psychological release, or it may simply reflect an inability to break out of a pattern of activity. The results in Hesse’s case are artworks commonly considered expressive objects. Thus the extreme emphasis on certain types of repetitive physical craft processes became a means to expand the expressive potential of the artist’s physical language of making beyond the well-established employment of spontaneous working processes as artistically expressive means.69

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Hesse was engaged with processes of making whose connections with traditional craft processes were immediately evident. This is not the case with the more conceptual artists associated with process art, but even their work provides an interesting comparison with traditional craft processes. As previously discussed, the fundamental distinction between art and craft in the early twentieth century, most fully articulated by Collingwood, was based primarily on the artist’s open and responsive relationship to the creative process. While the craftsperson worked toward a clearly defined goal—the creation of a predetermined product—the artist was fully engaged in making an object that materialized a feeling or experience whose final form was only determined in that process. Art that takes the process of making as both its subject and concept problematizes this distinction. In a LeWitt wall drawing, for example, the artist provides a recipe or conceptual motor for making a drawing that is executed by others. There is no simple way to distinguish the actual making of the drawing from a craft process, and thus the result might reasonably be considered a craft product according to the standards of modern art. It is slightly different from making an item of clothing according to a preset pattern in that the final drawing is not a known product as the clothing is; however, there is no significant difference in the two production processes. This example makes strikingly clear the shift from the modernist expressive definition of art to a definition of art dependent on concepts and context; process no longer determines a work of art’s identity as art. How a work is made, both in terms of technical process and medium and in terms of the maker’s attitude, cannot be considered a significant measure for evaluating its artistic identity. And, as a corollary, defining art in terms of concepts and context means that all traditional craft media and craft processes are now available to the artist. One area where craft processes occupy a central position is in the context of feminism. The crafts traditionally associated with women’s work played a key role in the feminist movement during the 1970s and contributed to a widespread revival of interest in craftwork. The vibrancy of the debate about the distinctions between art and craft owes an enormous debt to feminist critiques of traditional hierarchies. Eva Hesse’s work, in particular, has often been evaluated in relation to the historically feminine crafts even though there is nothing to indicate that Hesse considered her work in this way. Lucy Lippard wrote in her well-known monograph on the artist: The wrapping and binding and layering process is . . . repetitive and makes the viewer relive the intensity of the making. . . . Women are All About Process

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always derogatorily associated with crafts, and have been conditioned towards such chores as tying, sewing, knotting, wrapping, binding, knitting, and so on. Hesse’s art transcends the cliché of “detail as women’s work” while at the same time incorporating these notions of ritual as antidote to isolation and despair. . . . The mythical Penelope is always being mentioned pejoratively in regard to art by women. Yet hers was a positive, not a negative action, despite its impermanence.

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As Elissa Auther notes, Lippard uses Hesse’s work to present a positive view of an essentialist feminine approach to artistic process.70 Women’s work, so long associated with what Hannah Arendt saw as merely life-sustaining “labor,” was brought out of the shadows and given serious art world attention beginning in the 1970s. In the concept-driven art world, works that foregrounded traditional women’s work processes—be they embroidery, quilting, china painting, crochet, or the more radical performance/interventions of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art—were valorized. Critical terms long employed to belittle putatively feminine art, such as detail-oriented, finished, delicate, or decorative, were embraced as hallmarks of a new feminine aesthetic. Feminist artists adopted processes that linked them with the anonymous women diligently pursuing their domestic arts in the past. In most cases, though, feminist artists of the 1970s seem to have been primarily interested in gaining recognition for the artistic and aesthetic value of traditional women’s crafts as well as in their human, sociological, and symbolic meanings.71 They apparently were not as interested in exploring the experience of those craft processes—or at least this was not an issue that they emphasized in the presentation and discussion of their work. That would come later.

Artists’ Education and Process after 1960

The dramatic changes in art that occurred in the 1960s have often been connected to changes in the education of artists after World War II. The artists of the 1960s were the first generation of college-educated artists, and many of them had studied in programs based at least in part on Bauhaus approaches. One of the results of these new programs was a generation of artists very conscious of their activities as artists. Harold Rosenberg described young artists of the era as producing cool, calculated, and impersonal work; for them, “creation is taken to be synonymous with productive processes, and is broken down into sets of problems and solutions.”72 Howard Singerman Process Art

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has discussed how university visual arts departments were structured more like science laboratories than humanities classrooms; students experimented and explored in hopes of making new discoveries. The new was valued over the old and traditional. Problem solving was the educational goal, and the art student was conceived as a researcher.73 The entire enterprise dovetailed with Hannah Arendt’s notion of the modern process-oriented society that values research over results. The systematization of approaches to art making endemic to art education was recognized as a problem early on. In 1969 Robert Pincus-Witten described Richard Serra’s attempt to find an antidote for the “final-objectoriented nature of prevailing teaching practice” in the early 1960s. Serra taught his students to analyze the physical properties of their materials and to consider “issues and procedures which are central to the execution of any specific act.” This pedagogic emphasis on process then became a given, another standard academic tool.74 Anton Ehrenzweig offered a popular way for artists to conceive of their activity beyond the standardization of academic instruction. Like Serra (who according to Pincus-Witten quit teaching because his approach had become standard), Ehrenzweig noted how quickly disruptive procedures become strategies that produce predictable results.75 Ehrenzweig believed artists needed to embrace constant uncertainty to keep from falling into established patterns, and he advised a total abandonment of geometric exercises for art students. Complete mastery of a medium was also undesirable, because lack of control is the source of creative invention. His discussion of the desirable level of control is directly comparable to the Collingwood/Dewey conception of an artistic process. In Ehrenzweig’s view the true artist does not have total conscious control of the medium but rather an equal conversation with it. Thus the education of artists must involve keeping students off balance and not allowing them to achieve control and comfort with their medium. He realized that this was becoming impossible; students quickly adapted to the use of disruption and chance procedures and turned them into “gimmicks.” For Ehrenzweig this marked the end of modern art defined as an art of disrupted expectations.76 Ehrenzweig nevertheless saw art as a highly significant arena of human activity and believed that it must be fostered. He wrote, “The students must be taught— by coercion if necessary—not to wait on their inspiration and rushes of spontaneity, but to work hard at being spontaneous through choosing tasks that cannot be controlled by analytic vision and reasoning alone. This learning may take months, years or a whole lifetime.”77 Here we can see not only agreement with artists like Morris and Smithson, who acknowledged the All About Process

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direct influence of Ehrenzweig, but also with the systematic projects of Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close, which were always intended to produce works that could not be predicted or contained by the rational procedures that created them. The second dominant current in the education of the postwar artist identified by Singerman and others is an emphasis on verbal and conceptual skills, typically at the expense of developing technical and craft-based skills.78 The results of such educational approaches are evident in the conceptual orientation of the art world since the 1950s. The artistic process has become both the means for making art and the subject of art. Robert Morris wrote in 1970, “Ends and means have come progressively closer together in a variety of different types of work in the twentieth century. This resolution reestablishes a bond between the artist and the environment. This reduction in alienation is an important achievement and accompanies the final secularization that is going on in art now.”79 Morris’s optimistic notion that the drawing together of ends and means would result in the abolition of the artist’s alienation and disappearance of art into life seems not to have been a desire for the end of art altogether. Morris appears to have believed instead that the artist could become an active force for (unspecified) social change rather than the isolated producer of luxury commodities. To a limited extent that has come to pass, although not perhaps in a manner desired by Morris.

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9 It’s All About the Process

The expansive tendencies of process art discussed in the previous chapter accelerated in the decades after 1970, and process has now become a dominating concern of contemporary artistic production, routinely cited in artist’s statements, curatorial presentations, and critical evaluations. Process represents a vital alternative to the conception of the artwork as a commodified object. Even the most traditional art objects may be presented in relation to processes as occasions for intensified experiences, thus emphasizing the artwork’s living purpose rather than its physical identity. The work of art as a material object is the result of a process, and it serves to instigate further processes of thought and feeling in those who encounter it. Process thus connotes experiential engagement and that the artwork, be it a portable object, a digital video, an installation, or a restaurant, does not require the self-sufficiency and autonomous value of a market commodity. It is an easy claim to make and one that signals an attitude rather than specifying the particular qualities of any given artwork. This open-endedness is surely one of the reasons for the success of the term “process” and its related concepts. A generalized positivity, process may be employed and applied to any situation, and it will imply at the very least an engagement with time. It also often suggests a sensitivity to situation, an ability to adapt, a responsive malleability, an attitude that gives marked attention to the powers of environment to shape identity.1 Even works generated by isolated internal systems, such as paintings and drawings created by mutating computer programs, inevitably undergo changes occurring over time that mimic the evolutionary metamorphoses of living things. Contemporary art, broadly considered as a field of activity with prevailing

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attitudes, norms, and beliefs, accepts what process philosophers such as Whitehead and Bergson emphasized: there are no isolated, static, enduring entities; all is flux, change, process. In recent decades the focus of the discipline of art history has paralleled the shift in contemporary artistic production away from the isolated object as commodity to consideration of the artwork within its social, economic, and political contexts. Structuralist and post-structuralist thought, often mediated through anthropological approaches, have been important influences in this change. One result of this shift has been the growth of art historical interest in previously overlooked artifacts from the “minor arts,” such as domestic furnishings and devotional sculptures, as well as greater attention to the role art has played in the lives of people and their communities. Art has not dissolved into life; it has become more firmly embedded within it, and that imbrication has become a primary concern of both scholars and artists. These general transformations of attitude and focus in both the study and creation of art have brought the concept of process into the foreground. To stress process and relation is by default to reject the significance of the artwork as an isolated commodity of intrinsic value and to acknowledge the primary importance of its relationships and use. Under the aegis of process the artwork is vital, it lives and acts, it creates and sustains relationships, and it serves as a force for transformation and renewal. A driving force in the ever-increasing importance of process in contemporary art has been the establishment of a powerful and engaged feminist presence in the art world beginning in the 1970s. The importance of feminism in challenging and enlarging long-established notions of artistic process cannot be overstated. By claiming that domestic labor and the performing body enact creative processes, artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Carolee Schneemann helped to concretize the extensive potential of process as a central motive in contemporary art. The collaborative labor employed in many feminist art projects, most famously Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, has also had a profound influence on attention to the significance of artistic production processes that goes well beyond the individual artist’s creative travails, which were the focus of attention in the early and mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, the feminist insistence on the particularity of the individual body and its experiences greatly helped to extend the conception of creative processes beyond restrictive representations of “universal,” generally presumed to be male, artists as described by Merleau-Ponty and many others. In exposing patriarchal assumptions and prejudices and

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eliminating barriers to women, feminist artists contributed to an enormous expansion of what constitutes a meaningful artistic process and experience and to whom such processes and experiences are available. In ways unimagined by John Dewey, art has become widely recognized as a universally available experience. Linda Montano’s book You Too Are a Performance Artist accompanied her 2013 exhibition “Always Creative” at SITE Santa Fe. It describes her performance pieces in chronological order, and on the facing page of each piece’s description is an instructional workbook for readers wishing to create their own version of the piece. This is a means for extending the artistic process to everyone as well as an outgrowth of Montano’s personal exploration of integrating art processes to all aspects of existence. Her 1973 piece Odd Jobs, in which she integrated art into performing odd jobs to earn money, is exemplary in this regard: “I painted rooms, while maintaining an art attitude of awareness, spontaneity, and imagination . . . I liked what I was doing when I called it art, probably because I was in a state of wakefulness that I associated with the art making process.”2 Montano’s “art attitude” has become pervasive. States of being associated with the arts and the processes of making and experiencing them are now considered among the most desirable personal experiences and achievements. Just as art has become deeply embedded within life, it has also become an emblem and index of the life well lived. The proliferation of DIY (do-it-yourself) venues, craft fairs, how-to books, and websites on the arts and crafts may be cited as evidence for the widespread desire of the general population to engage in creative production. Also telling is the ever-increasing number of students pursuing college degrees in the studio arts. Selfrealization is associated with creativity, and creativity is a process traditionally associated with the arts. It is the artist’s creative process that remains the model for creativity in other disciplines such as the sciences and social sciences, which are more often conceived as restrained by rules and laws.3 The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s discussions of creativity and his influential concept of “flow,” total absorption in an activity, are notable examples of a generalized notion of the psychological and personal achievements associated with the creative process. In Csikszentmihalyi’s view the creative process is necessary for a fulfilled life, one that does not succumb to the passive pleasures of the modern world, as well as for the general evolution of culture: It is easy to . . . see the inner freedom of the creative person as an elite privilege. While the rest of us are struggling at boring jobs, they have the All About Process

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luxury of doing what they love to do, not knowing whether it is work or play. . . . Far more important . . . is the message that the creative person is sending us: You, too, can spend your life doing what you love to do. . . . Even if we don’t have the good fortune to discover a new chemical element or write a great story, the love of the creative process for its own sake is available to all. It is difficult to imagine a richer life. . . . Creative individuals lead exemplary lives. They show how joyful and interesting complex symbolic activity is. . . . They have become pioneers of culture, models for what men and women of the future will be—if there is to be a future at all. It is by following their example that human consciousness will grow beyond the limitations of the past. . . . Perhaps our children, or their children, will feel more joy in writing poetry and solving theorems than in being passively entertained. The lives of these creative individuals reassure us that it is not impossible.4

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Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of the creative process and “flow” is not limited to the practice or experience of art, paralleling contemporary attitudes within the arts themselves. Just as the creative process may be generalized to many, maybe even all, areas of human activity, the arts themselves can no longer be restricted to a limited number of traditionally sanctioned materials and activities. Here is where one can see the merging of art into life. In his 1998 book Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go, the artist and art therapist Shaun McNiff explicitly states that he aligns himself with the integration of art and life,” and that his book is a “reflection on creative living as well as art”: “I simply want to declare that a person’s license to create is irrevocable and it opens to every corner of daily life. The ways of creation are as natural as breathing and walking. We live within the process of creation just as much as it exists within us.”5 As society becomes more and more concerned with creative experience in the process of daily living, it begins to intersect with an art world that increasingly incorporates the processes of daily life into art’s arena. Distinctions become almost wholly a matter of context rather than determined by concrete differences in activity or experience. Artists become exemplary people who have made their creative process a central experience, whatever it entails physically and materially. In addition to general social and cultural attitudes regarding the importance of the processes of creative experiences in ordinary existence, philosophers are also attempting to readdress issues of traditional aesthetics in relation to a new process-oriented approach to the arts. Dewey’s Art as It’s All About the Process

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Experience remains a major touchstone for the contemporary philosophers Richard Shusterman and Crispin Sartwell, who have outlined new ways of understanding the significance of aesthetic experience. Sartwell presents his Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions as an attempt to develop a theory of art that can be used to transform ordinary experience. He distinguishes between theories of art based on purpose (including most traditional Western aesthetic theories) and those that characterize art in terms of processes in the manner of Dewey.6 Such artistic processes must be intrinsically satisfying and absorbing pursuits, and thus are to be found in all areas of human activity. Various Asian artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions are key references for Sartwell. Zen mindfulness is a fundamental aspect of the aesthetic experience in his view. He also sees Indian philosophy’s concept of knowing as a type of fusion with the object of knowledge as a more meaningful approach to epistemology than Cartesian dualism: “To see a tree is to be fused with a tree. . . . Seeing is like breathing: a process in which part of my environment is incorporated into my body, in which the distinction between myself and the object is collapsed.” For Sartwell the dominant aesthetics of modernism as defined by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried with its emphasis on vision and a transcendent idealism is the result of modern Western aesthetics’ perverse emphasis on art for art’s sake and progressive development.7 A reevaluation of the centrality of process in aesthetics will return Western notions of art to their proper role in the attentively lived experiences of individuals in relation to the world around them. Like Sartwell, Richard Shusterman seeks to revitalize Western aesthetics, which he sees as having motivated the once-fecund developments of modern art that have reached their end. More engaged with debates and issues directly concerning contemporary artists, critics, and theorists than Sartwell, Shusterman advances the belief that aesthetics necessarily engage the body and senses. The recent turn to conceptual, an-aesthetic art has resulted in the greater appeal and success of the popular arts, particularly popular music, where pleasure and affect still reign and can provide an antidote to our largely affectless information culture.8 Of particular interest to Shusterman is the arena of bodily experience and its contribution to philosophical knowledge, which he has denominated “somaesthetics.”9 In the current information age Shusterman sees the body as the most stable and durable aspect of individual existence; it is what we use to organize our world and establish a unified identity.10 Attention to the body and its experience are the necessary means for people to maintain their sense of self in a world All About Process

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increasingly dominated by abstractions and immaterial forms of information. Shusterman’s work builds directly on Dewey’s pragmatism and conviction that experience is the solid ground for understanding. His engagement with theorizing the body as a source of knowledge and identity also situates his thought in close relation to contemporary craft theorists who similarly address physical ways of knowing.11 The increasing valorization of physical engagement in material practices in the so-called visual arts in recent decades has resulted in a marked degree of critical self-consciousness on the part of artists, critics, and theorists. Given the importance of Robert Morris’s writings and art for the development of the turn to the physical in the 1960s it is not surprising that he continued to question the significance of the physical processes of art making during the subsequent decades.12 In 1981 Morris considered the relationship of the decorative to the therapeutic activities qualities associated with repetitive and rhythmic processes of making that have been employed since prehistory: “It brings to the fore an impulse that is ancient and pervasive: that repetitive physiological twitch of eye and hand that is both productive and lulling. It has always been there in every handmade artifact from the knitted sweater to a Stella striped painting.” In Morris’s view the prevalence of decorative art indicates a refusal of social engagement, a retreat from action:

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He who practices the decorative would appear to be a happy Zen master whittling on a stick. The decorative refuses questions in its dedication to the repetitive and automatic. . . . Whether mindless or enlightened, this work constitutes the great refusal. Its rhythms are linked to those bodily sequences of the repetitive required for the first tools ever made. Its very endlessness, its automatic procedures, and its avoidance of decision promote it as the ultimate activity of escape. . . . Numbness in the face of a gigantic failure of imagination has set in. The decorative is the apt mode for such a sensibility, being a response on the edge of numbness . . . the ultimate response to a pervasive death anxiety. Perhaps we can all become Zen masters. After all, Zen originated as a martial discipline that enabled the samurai to become indifferent to his own demise. Morris employs the notion of the decorative broadly to include much more than the appearance of the work. Like the well-established conception of craft as predetermined production outlined by Collingwood, Morris associates It’s All About the Process

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the process of making decorative works with “repetitive, rhythmic, physical activity in which the anxiety of decision-making is absent, or has occurred initially and prior to the action.”13 He explicitly includes the artists Sol LeWitt, Hanne Darboven, and Agnes Martin in this category. Morris’s ideas form an interesting contrast to contemporary craft theorists’ discussions of repetitive making in which repetition is never simple repetition in the manner of industrial assembly-line labor but rather part of a process of mastery. The tact developed by the craftsperson during innumerable hours of practicing a craft is not a form of avoidance, therapy, or relaxation, but a physical form of learning in which the body and mind acquire knowledge of a material and its potential. While not a formula for direct critical social intervention, philosophers such as Shusterman and Sartwell see this experience as crucial in developing both self-identity and a more engaged awareness of the self’s relation to the physical world.14 These acquisitions need not foster only escapism and refusal; indeed, strong selfidentity and attentive engagement with the surrounding environment may surely create a foundation for social and political action. Something of this nature seems implicit in Benjamin Buchloh’s comment on contemporary artists’ engagement with traditional skills: “One paradox of aesthetic deskilling has of course been the fact that while the historical desire for artistic skills has disappeared, the desire to implement skills as an opposition to the anomic destruction of the self has increased its urgency.”15 From being a basic requirement of artistic ability and success, artistic skills (engagement with the material craft of a given art form) have become a means to create a sense of self-identity and social worth. Buchloh’s comment was made at the conclusion of a catalog essay on Gabriel Orozco, an artist whose practice is wide-ranging in its materials and approaches. He has photographed the evanescent appearance of vapor from his breath on the veneer of a highly polished black piano and worked with a group of assistants to draw tattoo-like patterns on a life-size replica of a whale skeleton. Generally considered a conceptual artist in his overall approach, Orozco draws attention to the ways in which the material and conceptual are tightly interwoven in his art-making process. He has exhibited his working tables, which present the accumulated material residue of years of work, and in an interview he stated, “You need all that accumulation of things left over. Production processes are co-opted, but these tables cannot be.”16 It appears that it is just this activity, the manifesting of ideas in physical forms, that most concerns the artist. According to Briony Fer, “For Orozco, I think, ‘process’ means something quite different from what it meant All About Process

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for the Post-Minimalists. . . . Against a ‘specific object’ is set an indeterminate one in a permanent state of incompletion. Material process is a thought process, not a product, let alone a finished product. Conversely, thought is manifested as material. Thinking occurs through things, where material things are a necessary condition of thought.”17 Orozco himself said, “It motivates me to constantly situate myself at the beginning of a process, to be a beginner at something.”18 While these statements tend to be vague and generally applicable to any number of artists, they represent an attempt to pin down the practice of an artist who works between traditional processes of material production and reductive conceptual approaches. How does the viewer or critic connect such disparate works in so many media in a way that does not rely solely on the artist’s personal identity or some sort of overarching message? The answer that many critics have supplied for Orozco is that the artist explores the effects of concept and chance not simply on materials or systems, but on engaged processes of making. The significant relation of the conceptual to the artist’s processes is also explored by contemporary artists whose work focuses exclusively on performance and action rather than the creation of material objects. Arguably such work may be understood as a particularly pure investigation of process understood first and foremost as the experience of existing in time. Suzanne Lacy has described performance and conceptual art as instrumental in isolating the process of art, helping to bring to the fore “one of the most basic elements of art: the experiencing being.”19 Tehching Hsieh’s successive yearlong performance pieces were on the most basic level a process of experiencing what it means to exist within the limited parameters of a defining concept. In reference to his first One Year Performance, in which he isolated himself in his tiny studio, he said, “I tried to bring art and life together in time, and to be in this as a process. I was so concentrated on thinking about art. . . . What’s important to me is that people can see that in this special period of time, one year, the artist’s thinking process became a work of art.”20 Hsieh’s personally rigorous One Year Performance pieces are far removed from the physical processes associated with artistic skills and craft production, but they may nevertheless be criticized as escapist and insufficiently politically and socially engaged in the ways Morris critiques the processes of making preconceived “decorative” art. Likewise, they may be appreciated in the terms laid out by Shusterman and Sartwell for their deeply experiential investigation of the physical self in the world. And, as we shall see, focus on the processes and experience of being so central to the socially isolated performance artist is a significant component of relational aesthetics and

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socially engaged art practices, where close attention to ordinary social processes and relationships is a primary means of defining them as artistic processes.

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In recent decades the general concepts of process have been wellestablished as an arena for artistic activity as well as a critical cliché indicating an artist’s engaged concern with the experiential aspects of his or her practice and its effects. A rare attempt to develop the concept may be found in the notion of the informe (formless) as theorized by Rosalind Krauss. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’s 1997 book Formless: A User’s Guide, which accompanied an exhibition they co-curated at the Pompidou Center in Paris, takes the form of an idiosyncratic encyclopedia of concepts and terms, with artworks employed as exemplary illustrations. Among the latter are well-known examples of process art. Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead is described by Krauss under the heading “Moteur” as “a demonstration of his own determination to invade the fixed image of stabile sculpture with the counterimage of ‘process,’ of something continually in the act of making and unmaking itself.” Bois likewise emphasizes the role of process in the work of Robert Morris and Lygia Clark, but the most illuminating comments appear in the context of Krauss’s concluding essay, “The Destiny of the Informe,” in which she insists on the concept of informe as describing operations and procedures that “deal a low blow to the processes of form.”21 The formless is a process of subversion, not a category of materials or the simple inverse of form with good gestalt. Citing Georges Bataille, Krauss defines abjection (a cognate of the informe) “operationally, as a process of ‘alteration,’ in which there are no essentialized or fixed terms, but only energies within a force field.”22 Closely connected to a deconstructive practice, Krauss’s concept of the informe is an attempt to formulate an alternative means of conceptualizing aspects of modern artists’ practice that counter or replace the formalist approaches associated with Greenbergian modernism. The informe has been criticized on the grounds that it fails to provide a strong alternative to the idealist terms and fundamental oppositions of formalism, offering only a reversal of values that still relies on and reifies the essential categories it claims to overthrow. Regardless of its purported failure to thoroughly reconceptualize the terms of modern art and thought, however, taken in broad terms the informe may be seen as a rare attempt to theorize an aspect of artistic process in terms that go beyond simple description.

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Conceived as a destabilizing operation with roots in the fundamental structures of the human mind as developed by a largely Lacanian psychoanalysis, the informe offers an approach to theorizing the potential of artistic process to undermine the accepted categories of thought and action. However, the concept of the informe fails to achieve any serious disruption of the relation of the artwork to commodity culture. The artworks associated with the informe are not understood as psychological fetishes, objects that replace a fundamental lack; they are rather the residue of a psychological activity, a deconstructive process of “unforming.” Nevertheless, these residue objects continue to function as commodity fetishes in the art world; they are reified as objects containing all the symbolic values associated with difficult “high” art. To a portion of the contemporary art world, to merely reconceive the psychological underpinning of certain artists’ processes of creation is relatively trivial as long as that reconception leaves the existing power structures and economy in place. Thus the informe has been criticized as merely offering a reconfiguration of preexisting aesthetic values rather than a thorough deconstruction of art in all its traditional modes and purposes. The sociopolitical conscience and consciousness of art in recent decades has become both a dominant value and a means to justify the social relevance of art. Employing cultural criticism as a means to raise awareness, question established values, and work to effect the establishment of more liberal and democratic attitudes has become a common approach in contemporary art since the 1980s. (Robert Morris’s critique of the processes of making “decorative” art discussed above is one instance of this preeminent concern.) This preoccupation with sociopolitical engagement as well as high-level theoretical and conceptual content has been accompanied by its seeming opposite—art that revels in its inconsequence and pleasure in the unintellectual. In the cerebral world of art criticism and theory, however, even the art most celebrated for its refusal of intellectual and theoretical content is perceived as providing conceptual or sociopolitical commentary.23 Process, in contrast, represents a positive value that has been allowed to remain generally outside the realm of theory and often, to a degree, politics. As discussed above, it is employed as a means to justify the significance of the disparate and apolitical work of Gabriel Orozco without relying on the notion of artistic selfexpression. The artist’s works are the products of a process of making thought material. Nothing could be simpler or more basic. What distinguishes the artist from the inventor or scientist, whose work also materializes concepts, is that the final product is not evaluated in terms of its utility.

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In fact, the uselessness of the artist’s product is often what makes its production process meaningful. Some contemporary artists have made the labor involved in their production process central to individual artworks. A notable example is Janine Antoni’s Slumber (1993), in which the artist slept in the gallery while an electroencephalograph recorded the brainwave signals of her rapid eye movements (REM). When awake, she worked at a loom using strips from her nightgown to transcribe her recorded REM patterns into a blanket. Creative labor becomes performance here as well as a means to create an art object, and neither aspect can be isolated from the whole. Even the artist’s rest is part of the artwork and its production process with the REM pattern created while she dreams indexing the activity of her subconscious mind, the purported source of inspiration and creativity. Although the work suggests a closed circuit of artistic process, Antoni expressly engaged visitors to the gallery in conversation as she worked on the weaving. Thus the piece, which has been performed in different locations over the course of many years, also has a social dimension that incorporates others in what seems to be a presentation of the artist’s personal creative process. Physicality is a characteristic of Antoni’s work as a whole, and she has stated that she is particularly interested in both the ways viewers imaginatively engage with the physical actions she has made to produce her works and in creating works that require the viewer for their completion. Antoni thus continues a long tradition of engaging the viewer in the artist’s creative process that was, as we have seen, central to modern art theory. The work of many contemporary artists explicitly engages with the social, political, and commercial issues associated with artistic labor. This is true of very different types of artists, such as Liza Lou, who spent years creating life-size replicas of a kitchen and backyard lawn in tiny glass beads, and Jeff Koons, who hires traditionally trained artisans and studio assistants to make his works. Both make pointed commentaries on the nature of handwork in the contemporary world and its relation to the art object as a commodity. Koons’s distance from the manual production of his highly crafted, monstrous-kitsch artworks is integral to his ironic embrace of luxury commodity culture in an age of consumerism and wealth fueled by manipulating financial abstractions such as high-frequency trading and complex derivatives. In contrast, Liza Lou’s early bead works are the products of immense amounts of the artist’s own meticulous handwork. Often interpreted in terms of commentary on the drudgery of women’s domestic labor, Lou’s Kitchen is a powerful manifestation of the artist’s longAll About Process

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term engagement with a remarkably tedious and intensive labor process commonly associated with traditional handcrafts. The sheer scale of the project, as well as its conceptual engagement with issues of gender and labor, make it an important site for considering the nature of the artist’s process and its difference and points of intersection with domestic work and craft. In recent years Lou has opened a studio in South Africa where she employs local craftswomen in the production of her bead-based art. Lou’s workshop offers the example of a socially conscious employment of cheap craft labor notably different from Jeff Koons’s polished New York “factory” of more than seventy assistants. Despite the differences, however, both artists demonstrate the place of anonymous handcraft labor in the contemporary art world where widespread reliance on studio assistants has become conspicuous. Koons has repeatedly pointed out that Rubens and Rembrandt had large studios, examples that prove a large studio in no way inhibits either the realization or the recognition of individual artistic greatness. Unlike his illustrious predecessors, however, Koons does not have the skills to physically make his own works. Commonly described as a conceptual artist, Koons supplies the ideas, controls the quality of the products, and acts as the owner, designer, and general overseer of a factory that makes luxury art objects. The working process is of no greater importance to the final project than the factory practices of Maserati or Prada, and that is part of the point of Koons’s art. The production processes of Jeff Koons’s artwork are well aligned with the values represented by luxury consumer culture. The label is the guarantor of status and quality; the processes that produced the shiny final product are in themselves irrelevant. To be concerned with the production processes would destroy the sense of the object’s inevitability, its magical presence. Also significant is the relationship of Koons’s factory production processes to those of his conceptual predecessor, Andy Warhol. As has often been noted, Koons’s studio is a markedly professional venture unlike Warhol’s haphazard 1960s Factory, which was as much a social scene as it was a production space for artworks. In his own studio Koons has exponentially increased the vaunted impersonality of Warhol’s production processes as exemplified by his use of paint-by-number techniques. Warhol’s early 1960s Do It Yourself series mocked the contemporary amateur fad of painting by mechanically following a numbered system of color application. Warhol’s “unfinished” paint-by-numbers paintings made it obvious that the production process and its regimented anonymity was the subject of the work. Koons, by contrast, uses the technique as a practical means to unify the work

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of his assistants and guarantee its impersonality and efficiency. The final product, which gives no indication of its process of production, has all the painterly personality of a Hollywood billboard, and it is just that magical appearance of an image that is the desired effect. The work of Liza Lou is notably different from Koons’s in that the enormous amount of labor that goes into the making of her artworks is integral to their meaning and effect. This was particularly true when she worked alone for years beading Kitchen and Backyard. Her shift to a workshop production system markedly changed the significance of her works. From the exhibition of a lone “obsessive” woman’s handwork, Lou’s art has become more directly political in its content and its production processes. Lou’s South African studio and its many workers is an example of an attempt to ameliorate the economic lives of the inhabitants of the putative third world. It is an art world venture comparable to the Peace Corps or, more precisely, fair trade organizations. Lou’s art represents direct engagement with certain political and social values, which in turn add to the products’ economic value. Furthermore, Lou’s imminently practical goal to employ workers with training in traditional South African beading adds another value to her workshop production—it is, at least conceptually, infused with the vitality of traditional tribal craft production. One thing that may be considered a link between the very different productive arenas created by Koons and Lou is the degree to which both artists’ studio practices reveal the distance from active making prevalent in the contemporary Western world. Although there is currently a widespread popular fashion for DIY practice often linked to an environmentally concerned political and social conscience, the general attitudes of Western culture are markedly divorced from the messy processes of object production. As Jessica Stockholder and Joe Scanlan noted in their introduction to a 2004 forum on art and labor at Yale University: Now we are aware of very little, if any, of the making of the things we need. It happens elsewhere, often overseas. . . . Where Marx worried about alienated labor . . . today we experience the opposite . . . phenomenon of being able to buy things we could not afford to make. . . . It is . . . painful and numbing to be so divorced from the making of things and from the people who make them for us. Our art of today reflects this distance. And so a lot of art, on the face of it, seems to be not about making but about choosing. . . . Art mirrors our lack of production or, more precisely, it mirrors how acceptable modes of production—what we are willing or unwilling to do—have changed.24 All About Process

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Koons’s New York studio/factory filled with anonymous assistants producing “his” art and Lou’s South African workshop doing likewise (although Lou, unlike Koons, does participate in the physical production of her works) both demonstrate how the contemporary artist’s labor is “outsourced.” Koons and Lou are extreme examples of a contemporary phenomenon that itself is perhaps not as abrupt a divorce from past practice as it might seem at first glance. Although the vast studio workshops of successful artists from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century largely disappeared in the heyday of modern art, modern artists who could afford to do so commonly employed assistants to help with the administrative and practical aspects of their studio practice. What has changed is the degree to which studio assistants have become integral to the actual production of the final product. Koons’s production studio lies at one extreme of this spectrum, but many contemporary artists could not efficiently produce their work without the aid of many assistants. This is particularly true for complex site-specific installations that must be created in place and on schedule. For some of these the immense amount of labor involved in the creation of the work is integral to its effect, and it does make a distinct difference to know that many people created the work rather than just one person. Tara Donovan’s works consist of arrangements of many thousands of common objects, such as plastic drinking straws, Styrofoam cups, or index cards, to create visually striking forms. Haze, a cloud-like wall made of plastic drinking straws, impresses viewers not only because such a banal object can be used to create a beautiful and unexpected optical effect, but also because of the overwhelming number of meticulously placed straws required to achieve it. Officially created by one person, Tara Donovan, most viewers automatically envision the lone artist at work for weeks arranging hundreds of thousands of straws and respond with intensified awe at the achievement. If authorial credit were given to all the assistants who worked on the piece, many viewers would likely ignore authorship altogether and consider the work in a manner comparable to the designed effects of movie sets or amusement parks. Unlike similarly striking popular entertainments, however, Donovan’s work as presented in galleries and museums depends on the tradition of artists who make their works by hand. It is no secret that Donovan employs assistants; for her 2008–9 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the museum situated information specialists in the galleries to discuss the works and explain exactly how they were made. Published material on the artist such as catalog essays and exhibition reviews, however, do not typically mention the labor

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of assistants and often refer to the works as if they were created by the artist alone. Contemporary artists and their critics embrace the employment of assistants as a matter of course, and despite the occasional comment that disparages their employment in the case of technically incompetent artists like Koons, there seems to be no serious objection. The artist’s role as the conceptual generator of the work has long been considered adequate justification for his or her denomination as its sole author.25 Other art forms have recently changed the ways they credit those who assist in the production of a work, even while maintaining traditional authorial credit. In recent literature, both literary and scholarly, published author’s acknowledgments now provide a lengthy and detailed account of the many individuals who contributed in some manner to the production of a book, even to the level of thanking friends and family members who cooked meals and offered personal “support.” (The technicians—typesetters and the like—responsible for the physical creation of the book are, however, very rarely acknowledged by the author.) Ever-expanding movie credits are another example of a trend toward acknowledging the labors of the most peripheral contributors to a work of art. In contrast, even large retrospective catalogs of most artists’ work do not acknowledge the hired assistants who physically produced the works, nor the typically large network of professional supporters and suppliers who contributed directly to the works’ production, much less the more nebulous assistance of friends and family. The disjunction created by the traditional conception of the artist as sole producer of the works attributed to him or her is not the only interesting aspect of the contemporary trend of conceiving and executing works heavily dependent on the labor of assistants. Also significant is the growing importance of the artist’s role as a social organizer of a group work process. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the most well-known artists to have made this role the acknowledged center of their art and its process.26 Although social engagement has become a recognized art world value, contemporary installation artists who rely on the labor of assistants do not foreground this aspect of their process as a meaningful part of the work. Assistants seem to be considered, for the most part, of less significance than the sites and materials used, which are often discussed in artists’ statements. Comparable in importance to equipment or tools, assistants are necessary but rarely acknowledged publicly. Long-standing art world conventions are one reason for the continuing tendency to attribute artworks to a single author without qualification or addition. Similar conventions exist in architecture, although in architecture, All About Process

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unlike the visual arts, it is well-known that the architect credited with a building’s design typically works collaboratively in a firm—itself often named after its lead designer, whose name is the equivalent of a brand marker or label. What makes the art world’s general tendency to avoid mention of assistants as significant parts of the production process interesting is the degree to which the omission indicates the tension between competing art world values. On the one hand, there is the conventional role of the artist as the sole author and generator, even genius, of the work. Buttressing this role is the now common claim that a specific work is fundamentally conceptual, no matter how large and obdurately material it may in fact be. The artist is the individual who conceived the work; all others who contribute to its physical manifestation are mere anonymous laborers. On the other hand, the romantic conception of the lone authorial genius has long been attacked as obsolete, and for decades artists have assaulted traditional notions of artistic identity from almost every imaginable angle. The artist no longer has to make anything or have any specific skills, but as the widespread refusal to eliminate the notion of the artist as the individual “creator” of an artwork indicates, the essence of authorship remains a central art world value. It is the process and experience of that individual artist/creator, not his or her assistants, that matters when discussing the genesis of an artwork. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are rare exceptions to this general rule in making a significant point of the distinction between the conception of the piece and the physical making of it. But even these typically give authorial credit to LeWitt, and only secondarily, if at all, to the physical makers. There are exceptions to the enduring embrace of individual authorship. Increasing numbers of artist groups have rejected the concept of the lone artist/creator and adopted a corporate/group identity. It remains to be determined how such groups will affect general views of the creative process and whether they will offer new ways of valuing collaborative production. Many of these groups work in areas and media long associated with relatively anonymous group production such as architecture, design, and event coordination. As we have seen throughout this book, the values traditionally associated with the artist’s creative process have been connected to the individual, particularly the psychology and experience of the artist at work. The individual working artist has long been considered the liberated ideal of the modern worker whose processes are fully self-generated and selfdirected. The processes of collaborative artist groups address the embedded sociality of creative production to a much higher degree, but this does not mean they are necessarily embarking on wholly new terrain. Not only are

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certain media like architecture and design traditionally associated with group creative production, there are now many business environments, most famously those of Apple and Google, that foster creative production through relaxed, nonhierarchical, stimulating environments and relationships.

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In 2001 Jason Rhoades created a collaborative artwork at the Städelschule in Frankfurt where he was a visiting artist. Titled Costner Complex (Perfect Process), the project was installed in the school’s Portikus gallery and consisted of art students producing industrial-scale amounts of salad dressing containing the “essence” of Kevin Costner. The curator and head of the Städelschule, Daniel Birnbaum, later described the project in Artforum, quoting Rhoades’s own statements: “What Rhoades was after in the work was a kind of collective bliss, a moment where everyone worked in ‘perfect harmony,’ performing ‘smoothly and efficiently, having surrendered to the task at hand,’ as he [Rhoades] wrote in the catalogue. ‘It is not meant to be viewed as an object, a performance or even a goal-oriented activity, but simply as a perfect process.’”27 Rhoades’s emphasis on harmony and surrender suggests the long-standing tradition of conceiving art making as a fully immersive and focused activity. As we have seen, this is the approach examined and promoted not only by Dewey, but also by contemporary philosophers Shusterman and Sartwell, as well as the sociologist Csikszentmihalyi. By directing his efforts to create a perfect process toward a mundane project requiring simple group labor,28 Rhoades’s Costner Complex (Perfect Process) suggests that any group activity may achieve fully attentive experiential harmony. Indeed, it might well imply that simple group labor is the key to such a state. Rhoades’s work is an example of the widespread contemporary cultural tendency to reevaluate the experiential virtues of simple manual labor,29 a trend that is hardly surprising in an era when ever more people’s working and leisure experiences are primarily engaged with the nonphysical world mediated by the computer screen. Jason Rhoades was associated with curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, and Costner Complex is a good example of what Bourriaud described as the relational artists’ concern for social process and experience as the basis of their art.30 The art object for such artists “does not represent the logical end of the work, but an event.”31 Conceptually related to process philosophy, and explicitly linked to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,32 Bourriaud’s view of the dominant artistic concerns of the 1990s stressed the importance of time and ever-shifting relationships. He cited Guattari as a source for understanding the practices of contemporary artists All About Process

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who use time as a material to create and stage “devices of existence including working methods and ways of being, instead of concrete objects.” Their efforts are in line with Guattari’s assertion that “the only acceptable end purpose of human activities is the production of a subjectivity that is forever selfenriching its relationship with the world.”33 Bourriaud saw relational artists as creating works that instantiate largely indeterminate and unregulated processes drawn from everyday life. He explicitly distinguished their work from the process art of the 1960s and 1970s, which he grouped with conceptual art and described as fetishizing the mental process to the detriment of the object. Bourriaud claimed, “Presentday art does not present the outcome of a labour, it is the labour itself, or the labour-to-be.” Even when relational art takes the traditional form of images, Bourriaud declared that the artist’s process is central: “Making a work involves the invention of a process of presentation. In this kind of process, the image is an act.”34 An example of this notion of image as act can be seen in Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe’s project No Ghost Just a Shell, in which a copyrighted Japanese manga figure named Annlee was purchased and employed by a number of artists in animated videos. The entire project embraces the life of an image through its permutations, not just as the literal image of an imaginary figure, but as a legal identity and an open signifier subject to the processes of communication and economic exchange that structure modern societies. No Ghost demonstrates that relational aesthetics as described by Bourriaud engages with the concept of process on an extremely broad scale. It may be seen as an attempt to theorize, or at a minimum locate and outline, the common concerns of a broad array of artists working in ways that evade the traditional production of art objects as commodities. The most widely recognized exemplar of relational aesthetics, Rirkrit Tiravanija, is famous for gallery installations in which he made and served Thai soup to anyone who dropped by. His works engage the processes of social interaction, often in terms of designed spaces. The production of T-shirts, often with politicized messages, is another manifestation of Tiravanija’s engagement with forms of social interaction, as is the artistic community/retreat The Land he created in Thailand with fellow artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert. The openness of Tiravanija’s work, which primarily offers occasions for undefined experience, could be considered concerned with process; however, that concern is so diffuse that it offers little purchase for further specific reflection. Carsten Höller, another artist associated with relational aesthetics, often makes biological processes central to his works. Höller, who formerly worked

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as a research entomologist, is one of many contemporary artists whose artwork engages biological, or mock-biological, processes. In Höller’s installations human visitors act as test subjects, sometimes in relation to animals and plants, as in Soma, where visitors slept in an installation with reindeer, mice, canaries, and flies who may have ingested psychoactive mushrooms. Comparable to animal behaviorist experiments, Holler’s installations place the visitor in the role of the experiencing subject in a created environment. Liam Gillick likewise focuses on designing environments, in his case in the geometric forms of modernism, that become containers for the social experiences of their visitors. The artist’s own creative processes are of little to no importance in such works, which foreground the experiences of those who visit them. The attentive visitor may become more conscious of the ways their attitudes and experiences are shaped by the spaces they occupy, a consciousness that may expand into a broader awareness of how social spaces are part of a pervasive process of socialization that promotes specific values and attitudes. It is unclear how much so-called relational artists like Tiravanija, Höller, and Gillick depend on promoting conscious awareness in the viewers and participants of their work. Critics have deplored the lack of political engagement in the artists promoted by Bourriaud35 and suggested that their work merely provides a rarified form of art world entertainment in an affluent society dominated by mindless experience and popular entertainments.36 Regardless of the validity of this criticism, it is certain that the focus on participation and experience by many contemporary artists reflects the values of a society in which the accumulation of experiences increasingly dominates leisure activities. Artists who offer occasions for active experience provide their audiences with settings that encourage a more thoughtful and conscious perception of those experiences. It was just this intensified awareness of experience that Dewey defined as integral to the processes of making and perceiving art. In its broadest sense, then, certain contemporary artists have expanded the experiences of art beyond the traditional boundaries of the processes of making an object and the perception of it as a made object, to the processes of living and the perception of those as experiential processes. As contemporary philosophers Shusterman and Sartwell claim, art develops experiential awareness; it is about processes, not things. Relational aesthetics may be seen as one curator’s effort to pin down a very broad attitude in contemporary society and the arts. Although criticized for its vagueness and lack of critical and political engagement, Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics was an ambitious and influential attempt to give an All About Process

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overarching definition for contemporary artists’ widespread engagement with practices focused on relations and processes rather than the production of objects. Miwon Kwon has also contributed to the discussion about process as it relates to contemporary site-specific artwork: “The ‘work’ no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process, provoking the viewers’ critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of viewing.” This is a major theme that runs throughout contemporary art and the critical/theoretical writing that addresses it. Critics (and artists) often connect artists’ engagement with processes rather than products to late capitalism, the shift to an information economy, and the effects of globalization, particularly in terms of the flow of information, goods, and labor: “The very nature of the commodity as a cipher of production and labor relations is no longer bound to the realm of manufacturing (of things) but is defined in relation to the service and management industries.” Deleuze’s concepts of the rhizome and nomadism have become standard reference points for conceptualizing the fluid, decentralized, and nonhierarchical systems that purportedly structure contemporary reality. Kwon states, “What is the commodity status of anti-commodities, that is, immaterial, process-oriented, ephemeral, performative events? . . . The nomadic principle also defines capital and power in our times.”37 Emphasis on process is hardly limited to the arts or a politicized discourse related to social and economic trends. It pervades the contemporary world, particularly in relation to the worldwide interconnections of digital communication and media systems. These, in keeping with McLuhan’s thesis that the medium is the message, structure much current thinking throughout the sciences and humanities.38 In a world increasingly focused on systems and interactions, it is not surprising that artists are engaged with these new terms. Writing about the contemporary Danish group N55, Nana Last describes their work in terms of systemic interventions and manipulations:

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Working from within the structures proposed and disseminated by practices such as N55’s forces fluctuations between people and things, between living systems and information systems, to suggest their ineluctable interdependence. . . . Dissemination of . . . [their] ideas and distribution of the procedures for their construction are essential components of the work itself, so that information systems are as much a site of production, inquiry, and life support as are the physical units that form the various modules of inhabitation. The issues raised by the Internetbased dissemination that N55 employs are furthered by the formal It’s All About the Process

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construction of the projects themselves. . . . Once put into the hands of others, the products, despite the specificity of the manuals, are open to interpretation, mutation, and a host of other transformative processes.

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In Last’s view process is central to N55’s work: “The sense of an ongoing production process that the work engenders is its most compelling aspect, giving the work its value and content. It develops this way as its systematicity develops not just in the objects N55 produces but in the fact that it fundamentally distributes ideas, not objects.”39 Even though they provide plans for object creation, those objects are vehicles for transmitting ideas about how to live an ecologically and economically sustainable existence. Presumably, emphasizing the ideas rather than the relatively transitory objects they create is intended to suggest a more enduring intervention in the world by affecting consciousness, which will change people’s lives and attitudes. The broad engagement with process that characterizes much contemporary art is also evident in the work of many artists whose work makes an explicit process or processes its subject. This is especially common among artists whose work addresses science and the natural environment. To cite a few prominent examples, Mark Dion’s work explores the systems and classifications of the natural sciences through dioramas and installations. His Neukom Vivarium (2006) in the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washington, straddles the dividing line between art and scientific display of natural processes of growth and regeneration. It is a climate-controlled installation of an eighty-foot-long decaying Western Hemlock log that supports the emergence of new plant life. Edouardo Kac engages with genetics as a means of artistic creation. He has worked with scientists in manipulating genes to create a florescent rabbit (GPF Bunny, 2000) and a hybrid flower (Natural History of the Enigma, 2003–8) that contains Kac’s own DNA. Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries (2006) is a series of “biotopes” that are framed containers for living microbial environments, which the artist manipulates and displays on the wall like traditional pictures. Roxy Paine explores both natural and artificial production processes. He has created computer programmed art-making machines such as SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker) (1998) and PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit) (1999–2000) and exhibited them at work along with their products. Paine also has designed his own fictional tree species based on the natural growth processes of real trees and fabricated them in metal according to their own processes of “growth.”

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For these artists, engaging natural and artificial processes in their work is a means to address the human relationship with nature and creation in a manner more traditionally reserved for scientists. Their work breaks down long-held distinctions between the modern artist as self-expressive individual primarily concerned with aesthetic, potentially spiritual, issues and the scientist as objective researcher seeking to understand and master natural laws. These artists find in natural and artificial processes both their subjects and their medium. Their works are objects for contemplation and often ethical consideration, unlike conventional scientific displays, which are primarily didactic and intended to convey “neutral” information. As nonscientists engaging in putatively scientific investigations these artists’ works also serve to demonstrate how anyone may participate in the conscious exploration and questioning of processes that affect everyone’s life. How does artificial creation affect the world? Should human beings make living beings to order? Can machines create art? Are natural processes objects of art? Are creative processes inherently good, and how do we evaluate them? In recent years one of the most prominent art world debates has concerned the definition and significance of what have been termed socially engaged art practices. Like artists whose work involves the practices and processes of scientific investigation, socially engaged artists work on nonart terrain, one usually occupied by social workers, community activists, educators, and the inclusive category of nonprofit organizations known as NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). Broadly understood, their work encompasses the entirety of social processes, and it is often difficult to distinguish from the social activism of nonartists. What precisely makes such work art, and how can it be evaluated? These questions continue to spark serious debate. In 1995 Suzanne Lacy defined the process of public art projects, which involve entire communities to realize, as central to their identity as art. In her view, performance and conceptual art isolated and focused on the artist’s process, thereby paving the way for artists to take a more public role as a conduit for the experiences of others in a social group, something she describes as offering empathy as a public service.40 Lacy does not limit her conception of the artistic process in “new genre public art” to the artist’s anthropological empathy for a social group. She also outlines a spectrum of activities involved in public art projects that engage all participants (including a distant audience that knows the work only by report), in a mutually reinforcing, expansive, and interactive process. Lacy calls for a redefinition of art, “not primarily as a product but as a process of value finding, a set of

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philosophies, an ethical action, and an aspect of a larger sociocultural agenda.”41 Grant Kester is another prominent critical promoter of socially engaged art who has described process as central to its identity. He is dedicated to “dialogical processes” and claims to have developed “a new aesthetic and theoretical paradigm of the work of art as a process—a locus of discursive exchange and negotiation.”42 The traditional concept of the artist disappears in Kester’s new paradigm, where no single individual creates the work or its guiding concept. The work is not a vehicle for self-expression either; rather, “expression takes place through an unfolding extemporaneous process among an ensemble of collaborative agents. . . . Here the mindful surrender of agency and intentionality is not marked as a failure or abandonment (of the prerogatives of authorship or the specificity of ‘art’), but as a process that is active, generative, and creative.”43 The range of socially engaged art practice is very broad, and Kester supports collaborative projects, such as Park Fiction and Project Row Houses, that involve communities in constructive dialogue that leads to the identification and resolution of community problems. Such projects are distinguished from the socially engaged, processoriented works created by artists associated with Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics in being more removed from art world institutions and having fully relinquished authorial control. Kester’s theoretical analysis links dialogical art to the history of modernist aesthetics and art theory and offers few means to distinguish between the creative processes of a socially engaged art project and those of a nonart social project. Little beyond the claims and social/institutional contexts of its participants clearly demarcates the difference, although Kester asserts that the artistic identity of the project endows it with the capacity to evade, and even transgress, social, institutional, and creative restrictions.44 The evasion of convention is central to Kester’s understanding of the artistic identity of dialogical art, and he links it to the continual disruption of conventions that characterizes the history of modern art. Thus, in Kester’s view, dialogical art represents a reconceptualization of the work of art as “a process of communicative exchange,” responsive to its situation and liberatory in its potential.45 It is a type of process, or more precisely, it is an attitude or orientation that informs the process of realizing a socially engaged project. Claire Bishop has proposed an alternative theoretical understanding of socially engaged participatory art practices based on their capacity to frame complex issues and pose difficult questions that provoke critical consciousness. In her view, socially engaged art has generally not been subjected to All About Process

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rigorous standards of evaluation. Not only is the mere fact of consensual collaboration often deemed sufficient for art critical approbation, but the “emphasis on process over product—or, perhaps more accurately, on process as product—is justified on the straightforward basis of inverting capitalism’s predilection for the contrary.” To simply privilege process over project is insufficiently critical, Bishop implies, and she is unusual in recognizing that process has become a largely unexamined positive value. She has written that it is a “common tendency for socially engaged artists . . . to adopt a paradoxical position in which art as a category is both rejected and reclaimed: they object to their project being called art because it is also a real social process, while at the same time claiming that this whole process is art.”46 This observation illustrates not only the problematic conflation of art and active social engagement but also the peculiar discursive role played by the concept of process and its vague connotation of universal beneficence. Process has become comparable to concepts such as beauty, expression, and spirituality, which have long served to denote the distinctive quality, achievement, and purpose of art. From the most amorphous and diffuse employment of process to signify the interrelatedness of the universe and all the activities therein to the most precise and material discussions of a single artist’s repetitive actions, the discourse of process is intended to convey positive values that justify the significance of art and art making. To be concerned with process is implicitly to give art ethical weight and moral purpose, be it through engagement with the structures of the world or the development of personal consciousness. The common injunction to artists to “trust the process”47 implies that artists should not only be attuned to their material and actions but also have faith in the ultimate purposiveness of the relation between them that will lead to a meaningful result.48 The optimistic notion that simply making naturally results in meaning may be seen as the result of an intersection between two fundamentally conflicting notions. One is at the foundation of thinking about craftsmanship. David Brett sees the craftsperson’s dedicated labor as a means of selffashioning: “The skillful and loving engagement with materials, with the brute stuff of the world, is an ethical engagement because it is the point at which metaphor is created. We are what we make.”49 Many craft theorists believe the craftsperson making is engaging in a form of knowing and selfexploration.50 The long-term development of a craft skill results in a holistic form of knowledge that embraces the physical, the mental, and the emotional. In contrast to the craftsperson’s profound and disciplined knowledge

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of materials and techniques are the attitudes associated with the merging of art and life that have been a driving force in the art of recent decades. The discourse of process amalgamates these two distinct views. In some instances it is employed to refer to aspects of the crafts’ approach to materials, rigorous techniques, and attentive making outside the range of traditional art object production. More often process implies an almost mystical connection between the artist’s activity, whatever it may be, and the universe.51 The artist’s process can be trusted to lead somewhere, to generate meaning, to matter. And in a world where the artist’s identity is predicated on this belief and little else,52 everyone can consider themselves artists and trust that their life processes are meaningful. The discourse of process has perhaps become more than anything a strategy of deferral and a rejection of completion. It is a means to evade final judgments of value or quality, even a refusal to define basic terms on which to base such judgments. The artist engaged with the process does not need to assess the product; activity, both mental and physical, is everything. Process is a cognate for living. Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece still provides a valuable insight into the artist’s work. To stop the working process and evaluate its products is to destroy the faith that forms the foundation of the artist’s labor. The final product will never be as satisfying, as filled with power and potential, as the process of its making. Products, even great works of art, belong to the world of finite things; they have limits and deficiencies. Process, by contrast, is infinite. In its general outline the concept of artistic process in Western art and aesthetics has expanded from a narrow focus on the specific procedures necessary to create an art object to embrace potentially every form of human action and thought. In this it follows the expansion of the conception of art and its social role in Western culture that began in the Renaissance and escalated in the modern period. The physical process of making works of art was long considered inferior to the values and activities associated with intellectual activity and sociopolitical engagement. When Renaissance artists and thinkers began to acknowledge and promote the role of intellect in the production of art, the social value of the artist and the artwork increased. In subsequent centuries the complex imbrication of mind and matter that characterized the creation of art received ever greater attention as philosophers and theorists attempted to define the nature of human labor and the relation of thought to creative activity. The rise of industrialization provided

All About Process

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a critical impetus to the conceptualization of the artist’s process as a particularly significant, even defining, human activity. As we have seen, the modern artist came to be viewed as an exemplary human being, one whose labors were emblematic of human needs to create and communicate meaning and self-identity through the shaping of physical matter. While the status of the artist increased in the modern period, artistic identity also expanded. More and more people participated in art and craft processes as amateur makers, thereby fulfilling their own needs to establish self-identity, as well as engaging in what were considered therapeutic leisure activities that counteracted the dehumanizing effects of modern industrial society. In the latter half of the twentieth century the conception of the artist became diffuse, shifting from the notion of an exceptional individual, a “genius,” to a contextually defined identity, someone who works in the socially and culturally defined arena of art. Artistic processes likewise shifted from defined procedures for making certain types of objects to include the entire spectrum of human (and even nonhuman) activity conceived and presented as art. It can be difficult at times not to perceive the expansion of art to encompass everything as the dissolution of art as a distinct category of objects and processes. Business and engineering schools now teach techniques of creative processes, thereby erasing once well-established distinctions between free-form artistic processes and the rational systematized techniques of modern business and industry. How do such practices affect the understanding of artistic processes as free, nonutilitarian labor? Alternatively, how is that understanding affected when artists claim their artwork is the process of creating and running a business, buying and selling stock, or planning and building a housing project? Why does the art world embrace such activities as art? It may well be that the conception of art as a special and distinct activity tied to the creation of a certain class of objects, dominant since the Renaissance, is rapidly disappearing. If that is the case, then the discourse of process may be one of the best witnesses to the ongoing failure to redefine and resituate the social and cultural energies and activities that have been understood as artistic creation.

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Notes

Introduction

1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

The introduction’s epigraphs are drawn from Sultan, ed., Chuck Close Prints, 132; and Schneemann, “Sensibility of the Times,” 171. Scholarly consideration of process as a conceptual issue has been virtually nonexistent in recent decades. In No Place of Grace T. J. Jackson Lears has offered perhaps the only analysis of the concept and its broader social significance with particular attention paid to the turn of the twentieth century. Rhoades collaborated with students at the Städelschule in Frankfurt to produce salad dressing containing the essence of the actor Kevin Costner. See chapter 9 of this volume, “It’s All about the Process,” for a discussion of the work. While certain conceptual approaches to process art may be exceptions to this, even the most conceptual process art tends to be concerned with physical experience, albeit often at a remove. See chapter 8 of this volume, “Process Art.” See Risatti, Theory of Craft; and Metcalf, “Craft and Art.” One of the most well-known studies is Rothenberg, Emerging Goddess. An interesting example studying MFA students over ten years is Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, Creative Vision.

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6. For an example of the latter, see Rank, Art and Artist. More recently it has become common to equate creativity with economic success. See Florida, Rise of the Creative Class. 7. Balzac, Unknown Masterpiece, 52 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). 8. De Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse,” 197–98. 9. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of SelfRealization.” 10. Focillon, Life of Forms, 36, 44–45. 11. Roger Fry believed the viewer is affected by an awareness of the artist’s mark-making activity, imaginatively feeling in his own body the physical gestures necessary to create the lines and shapes of a work. See Vision and Design, 33–35. 12. Focillon’s variation of formalism is notably different from the analytic approach associated with Clement Greenberg that has come to define the term in the Anglo-American critical tradition since the 1960s. 13. Michael Fried’s famous essay “Art and Objecthood,” with its final statement that “presence is grace,” is perhaps the best modern example of the aesthetic exaltation ascribed by formalists to the experience of viewing successful art. 14. The belief that an artwork’s reception is integral to the artwork as an unfin-

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15. 16. 17. 18.

ished process in German Romantic theory is discussed in Leonard, “Picturing Listening,” 276. Marcel Duchamp insisted on the importance of the viewer in the completion and judgment of the artwork. See “Creative Act,” 25–26. See Hosmer, “Process of Sculpture,” 734–37. Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 134. Shusterman, Performing Live. This is not the case for the highly influential work of Rosalind Krauss, who has developed psychoanalytically informed structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to reinvigorating formalism. Krauss’s colleagues Hal Foster and Yve-Alain Bois have pursued related approaches that also are not directly engaged with social and political concerns.

Chapter 1

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1097a, 30–35. All Aristotle works cited in this chapter can be found in Aristotle, Complete Works. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1094a, 14–16. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, Book I, 1197a, 5–13. Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1337b, 5–17. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 227. See also Mossé, Ancient World, 25–28. Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1337b, 5–17. Ibid., Book VIII, section 3. Ibid., Book VIII, 1341a, 10–12, 17–20; 1341b, 9–12. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1 (A), Section 1, 981a 28–981b 9. Burford, Craftsmen, 153, 241n412; Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 157–58. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 152. Ibid., 153. Burford, Craftsmen, 198–99. Ibid., 199–200. Ibid., 200, 248n569. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 3. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 230. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 1.

19. Ibid., 2–3. 20. Burford, Craftsmen, 208–9. 21. See Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 22; and Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 23. 22. Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 34–38. 23. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 30–31. Classical authors were not as supportive of the status of painting as Renaissance writers claimed. See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 181. 24. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 46. 25. Ibid., 112. 26. Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, 13–46. 27. Ibid., 187 28. Ibid., 13. 29. For a detailed analysis of the role of the intellect in Renaissance theories of artistic labor, see Summers, Judgment of Sense, 281–82. 30. Ibid., 320. 31. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 16. 32. Ibid., 84. 33. Ibid., 105. 34. The scientist and philosopher Michael Polyani first articulated the concept of tacit knowledge in 1958 and developed it in The Tacit Dimension (1966). The concept has been widely adopted by craft theorists (and others). 35. G. Baldwin Brown’s preface to Vasari, Vasari on Technique, 3. 36. Vasari on Technique, 206, 208 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). 37. Vasari, Lives, 140–41 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). 38. Barolsky, Faun in the Garden, 66, 76 39. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 172, 177. 40. Ibid., 228–29, 247–48.

249

Chapter 2 1. Kant, Critique of Judgment, I:43 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). 2. Hegel, Aesthetics, 26 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). 3. Clayre, Work and Play, 8–13. Rabinbach notes that while the eighteenthcentury philosophes, including Rousseau, excoriated aristocratic idleness, they allowed the poet’s idleness to

Notes to Pages 12–39

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250

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

retain an exalted status because it was seen as a preparation for creative production. See Human Motor, 28. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 40. Ibid., 138. Marx, Essential Writings, 59. Ibid., 56–57. Cited in Clayre, Work and Play, 48–49. Clayre, Work and Play, 54–56. According to Clayre, Marx, like many nineteenthcentury thinkers, conceived work as both a necessity and the means for the full realization of human potential through free action. In Rabinbach’s view Marx only held the latter position in his early work. In his later writings Marx advocated an ideal of work in which workers had no permanent specialization and alternated between scientific/intellectual and manual labor. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic, 80–81. Ibid., 82. Marx, Essential Writings, 85. Clayre, Work and Play, 44. Cited in ibid., 45. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 169–70 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). Ruskin was no political revolutionary. He advocated a conservative social structure in which a beneficent ruling class freed the workingman from care, and in turn the workingman served his “reverent” leader. Morris, Collected Works, 5. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 168–69. Thompson, William Morris, 105. Morris, Collected Works, 29. Clayre, Work and Play, 156. Vida Scudder cited in Boris, Art and Labor, 187. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 9. Day’s criticism is a commonplace of academic art theory, which decried the merely superficial copying of surface features of artworks. This could be avoided by direct study from nature and by imitating the principles of ancient artists rather than their artworks. See Cramer, Abstraction, 22–25. See Lears, No Place of Grace, 69. On the enormous rise of amateur artistic production, particularly among

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

upper and middle class women, that began in the eighteenth century see Bermingham, Learning to Draw. For a discussion of the place of the amateur in the contemporary art world, see Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor?, 146–47. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 42. Ibid., 62. Williams, Culture and Society, xiv. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 88. Boris, Art and Labor, 15. Ibid., 14. Isaac Clark cited in ibid., 86. Boris, Art and Labor, 83. Candace Wheeler cited in ibid., 101. Boris, Art and Labor, 156. Masten, Art Work. See Callen, Women Artists, 96–135, 219; and Callen, “Sexual Division.” On the history and changing status of needlework in the nineteenth century, see Callen, Women Artists, 96–98; and Parker, Subversive Stitch. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 145–46. Boris, Art and Labor, 94. Lears, No Place of Grace, 54–57. Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 82. Eastlake, “Review,” 97–98. Among the most famous of the early arguments for photography as an art form are Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography (1864); Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalist Photography (1889); and Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography” (1899).

Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Boime, Academy, 24, 122. Ibid., 82, 181–82. Ibid., 42–43, 128. See Sheriff, Fragonard, chaps. 4 and 5. Ibid., 142–44. Cited in Boime, Academy, 119. Boime, Academy, 74. Couture (and others) followed well-established precedent in finishing his paintings by placing sketch-like marks to signify painterly inspiration and rapidity of execution. See Clements, “Michelangelo on Effort.” 8. Boime, Academy, 149.

Notes to Pages 39–61

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

Cited in ibid., 116. Milner, Studios of Paris, 39. Ibid., 141. See Bomford et al., Art in the Making, 36–37, 55; and Callen, Art of Impressionism, 3–5, 98–110. See Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé.” Paul Cézanne, letter to his mother, September 26, 1874, in Harrison and Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 549. Shiff, “End of Impressionism,” 67. See Shiff, Cézanne, 16; Gautier, “Art in 1848,” 320; and Boime, Academy, 88–89. Shiff, Cézanne, 51. Mallarmé, “Impressionists,” 33. Zola, Mes Haines, 341. Zola cited in DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision,” 720. See also Shiff, Cézanne, 37. Zola cited in DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision,” 721. Art-historical scholarship has increasingly addressed the signs of the Impressionist painters’ working processes in their paintings. See Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé”; DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision”; Brettell, Impression; and House, Monet. Other key texts that address technical issues are Bomford et al., Art in the Making; and Callen, Art of Impressionism. Reprinted in Moffat, ed., New Painting, 130. See the Balzac discussion in the introduction to this volume. Bernard, “Memories of Paul Cézanne,” 65. D’Souza, “Paul Cézanne.” Zola cited in ibid. Fry, Cézanne, 57. Bernard cited in Shiff, Cézanne, 295n36. Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 10. The notion of Cézanne’s painting as a rendering visible of tactile experience has been developed by Shiff in “Constructing Physicality”; and Joachim Pissarro in “Cézanne.” Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 63, 64, 65–66, 69. Ibid., 70–71. Johnson, “Phenomenology and Painting.” Denis, Théories, 262–78.

36. For a discussion of the complexities of the relationship of Impressionism to scientific objectivity and positivism, see Shiff, Cézanne, 21–26. 37. Signac, Eugène Delacroix, 984. 38. Ibid., 981–82. Félix Fénéon also remarked on the lack of importance of the painter’s technique in NeoImpressionist painting. See “NeoImpressionism,” 111. 39. Fénéon, “Neo-Impressionism,” 112. 40. Veblen outlined this problem in Leisure Class, 159–60. 41. Charles Henry’s systematization of the emotional effects of form, line, and color in “Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetic” was highly influential for Neo-Impressionism. 42. For discussion of the relation of Seurat’s technique to modern mechanical production and the democratic potential of the technique, see Nochlin, Politics of Vision, 173, 181–82; and Broude, “New Light.” 43. The most succinct exposition of Greenberg’s position is his 1960 essay “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 85–93. 44. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 38. 45. Ibid., 35–36. 46. Yve-Alain Bois has discussed Matisse’s debt to Cézanne’s working process in this regard, describing it as “the economy of the session.” See Bois, Painting as Model, 48–51. 47. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 39, 36. 48. Ibid., 37. 49. Matisse’s advice to his students made the same point. See “Matisse Speaks to His Students, 1908: Notes by Sarah Stein,” in Barr, Matisse, 552. 50. Matisse began photographing the various working stages of his paintings in 1935. See chapter 4 of this volume, “New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process.” 51. Bell, Art, 28–29. 52. On the equation of sincerity and individuality see Tolstoy, What Is Art? 154–55. 53. Barr, Matisse, 118. 54. Zervos, “Du Phénomène Surréaliste,” 114. 55. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 6. 56. Ibid., 43.

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Notes to Pages 61–82

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57. Cited in ibid., 172. 58. For another discussion of the artist’s labor, see “Art and Socialism” in Fry, Vision and Design, 76–78.

Chapter 4

252

1. Goldwater, Symbolism, 1–5; Rubin, Impressionism, 354; Tucker, Monet, 94. 2. For discussions of the marketing strategy and collectors of Monet’s series paintings, see Klein, “Dispersal of the Modernist Series”; Stuckey, “Predictions and Implications”; Rubin, Impressionism, 343–54; and Tucker, Monet, 98–99. 3. It is now known that Monet completed these works in the studio, but the significance of the works remains largely dependent on their role as records of Monet’s optical experiences. 4. Mondrian, New Art, 41. 5. Ibid., 42. 6. Ibid., 58. 7. Cramer, Abstraction, chap. 7. 8. Mondrian, New Art, 299. 9. “It is not enough to explain the value of a work of art in itself; it is above all necessary to show the place which a work occupies on the scale of the evolution of plastic art.” Ibid., 293. 10. The New York paintings are often seen as instituting a new phase in Mondrian’s art; however, whether this change constitutes an evolutionary advance along the lines of the painter’s stated project is another question. Cramer, Abstraction, 147–48. 11. Mondrian, New Art, 239. 12. Holty, “Mondrian.” 13. Cahiers d’Art was renowned for its extensive photographic documentation of recent work by famous modern artists. Modern art dealers distributed the magazine outside Paris in major art centers such as New York, London, and Berlin, and the magazine is often referred to as a Bible for those interested in modern art in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. 14. Grant, Surrealism, chap. 10. 15. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 179.

16. Amédée Ozenfant claimed he was the first artist to systematically photograph the genesis of a work when he documented the vicissitudes of the muralsized painting Life he created between 1931 and 1938. See Ozenfant, Foundations, 334. In addition to a photographic record of the work’s creation, Ozenfant kept a journal of the political and social events that affected its development. 17. Fry, Henri-Matisse. Matisse called his stages “states,” and his documentation of the states of his paintings was likely influenced by his work making etchings in the previous years. 18. Delectorskaya, L’Apparente facilité, 23. 19. Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 184. 20. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 36. 21. Ibid., 74. 22. Ibid., 73. 23. Aagesen, “Painting as Film,” 163. 24. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 178; Baldassari, Picasso Photographe. 25. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,” 268. 26. Arnheim’s text reflects trends in thinking about the modern artist’s process associated with existentialism and the art and critical discourse of the New York school. 27. Paul Haesaerts filmed Picasso painting on glass in his 1949 documentary Visit to Picasso. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso also shows Picasso painting on glass. 28. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 179. 29. Hess, “Matisse.” 30. Frankfurter, “Is He the Greatest?” 22. 31. Arb, “Spotlight on de Kooning,” 33. 32. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” 145–46. 33. Ibid., 162–63. 34. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management. 35. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” 142. 36. See Green, Cubism; and Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, for detailed discussions of art vivant and the significance of the materiality of paint. 37. The emphasis on gross physicality and violence in the art of the interwar period is now often linked to the experiences of World War I. See Golan,

Notes to Pages 83–101

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38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

Modernity and Nostalgia; and Stich, Anxious Visions. Focillon, Life of Forms, 2–3, 31 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). Focillon recounts a story of the Japanese artist Hokusai pouring blue paint on a scroll and then having a chicken with its feet dipped in red ink walk on it. The resulting pattern was generally perceived as a painting of autumn leaves floating on water. Focillon writes, “The memory of long experiment with his hands on the different ways of evoking life brought him . . . to attempt even this. The hands are present without showing themselves, and, though touching nothing, they order everything” (75). See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of SelfRealization,” for a discussion of the debates on the Surrealists’ passive automatism and more active interpretations of the artist’s activity. See also Grant, Surrealism. In this passage Focillon makes direct reference to Surrealist automatic techniques as well as to Surrealist found objects. See Aragon, La Peinture au défi, for an expansive discussion of the artist’s materials in the context of Surrealism. Nolde, “On Primitive Art,” 97. Curtis, Sculpture, 94. The modern system of the arts was largely established in the eighteenth century based in part on the distinction between liberal and mechanical arts. See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 224–27, for a brief discussion of the historically provisional nature of the system. Silverman, Art Nouveau, chap. 3. See Singerman, Art Subjects, 100–108, on the influence of early childhood education theories in the development of Bauhaus pedagogy. Raleigh, “Johannes Itten,” 284–87, 302. Collingwood’s text is a work of philosophical aesthetics that considers a range of issues concerning the nature of art. Following Benedetto Croce, Collingwood defines art as a language,

49.

50.

51.

52.

and he posits an important social and moral role for art as a means to discover, express, and communicate truths. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 129 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). Berenson also influenced Fry’s interpretation of Cézanne. Collingwood’s examples throughout his text are more often literary rather than concerned with visual art, and sculpture is never discussed. The variability and inconsistencies in Collingwood’s discussion of different arts and their effects on his general philosophy of art as expounded in the Principles is examined in Davies, “Collingwood’s ‘Performance’ Theory.” While Collingwood’s discussions are often directly involved with the physicality of the visual artist’s work, his overall view of the nature of the artist’s activity has a strongly antimaterialist cast: “The work of art . . . is not a bodily or perceptible thing, but an activity of the artist; and not an activity of his ‘body’ or sensuous nature, but an activity of his consciousness” (292). Collingwood stated that the artist was not unique in experience or emotion, but only “in his ability to take the initiative in expressing what all feel and all can express” (119).

253

Chapter 5

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 70–71. Bourdieu, “Invention of the Artist’s Life,” 96. Ibid., 97. The precondition of an independent income for the modern artist’s identity is one of the main points of Bourdieu’s discussion. Ibid., 81n3. Bell, Art, 172. Bourdieu, “Invention of the Artist’s Life,” 80. For views of modernism as fundamentally and exclusively masculinist, see Pollock, Vision and Difference, chaps. 1

Notes to Pages 101–115

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7.

254

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

and 3; and Duncan, “MoMA’s Hot Mamas.” For a discussion of the ways women artists have defined their artistic identity in productive relation to modernism, see Wagner, Three Artists, particularly 4–6, 214–17. See also Swinth, Painting Professionals, chap. 6. Fiedler, On Judging Works, 697. “We can only see before us, and in the form of goals, what it is that we are— so that our life always has the form of a project or choice, and thus seems to us self-caused.” Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 71. According to Robert Williams, Alberti, Vasari, and Leonardo all suggest that the artist represents the highest form of subjectivity, a notion he sees as derived from ancient rhetorical theory. “Individuality achieves its highest form” in the Italian artist’s study of nature and through unstinting labor, the “relentlessly self-critical, allconsuming personal discipline involved . . . in the process of selfobjectification. . . . Art is work, both in the sense of application to particular tasks and as a comprehensive personal discipline that enters into and transforms every corner of experience, every recess of consciousness. The artist must make himself over entirely according to the demands of his vocation. . . . Art demands a sustained and systematic effort to establish the conditions of the possibility of all selffashioning.” Williams, “Leonardo’s Modernity,” 37. Fiedler, On Judging Works, 698. Fry, Vision and Design, 261. Bell, Art, 141–42. Schapiro, “Cézanne,” 40. Quoted in Shiff, Cézanne, 190. Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 20. According to Sawyer there is no evidence that Dewey read Collingwood’s work or vice versa. Sawyer, Group Creativity, 103. Dewey, Art as Experience, 3 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). Dewey makes a distinction very similar to Collingwood’s means/ends distinction between art and craft when he

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

discusses the differences of mechanical production from artistic creation (138–39). Dewey’s ideas on modern education, which emphasized hands-on experience and individualized programs, had been enormously influential for decades by the time he published Art and Experience. This type of childhood education influenced the teaching approaches adopted by Itten and Albers in the Bauhaus Vorkurs. This final sentence suggests an approach to a more Kantian notion of a pure aesthetic experience. Dewey’s position in general directly opposes that of Kant (see Dewey, Art as Experience, 252–53, for an explicit rejection of Kant’s aesthetics), but here he provides an opening for explaining the effects of an aesthetic object in terms that bear a notable resemblance to Kant’s discussion of beauty as purposive form distinct from merely sensual pleasure. There are also distinct echoes of Dewey’s text in Michael Fried’s famous (formalist) essay “Art and Objecthood,” as well as in Robert Morris’s equally well-known contemporaneous discussion of so-called minimalist objects in his “Notes on Sculpture.” Art as Experience was dedicated to Barnes, who worked closely with Dewey and is cited directly at numerous points in the text. Barnes’s views on art were published in a number of books, including his comprehensive 1937 text The Art in Painting. In this text and his other monographs on modern artists Barnes outlines a standard formalist position on the nature of the artist and the artist’s work. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 279, 283– 84, 287. Collingwood is quick to qualify the nature of the truths of art as emotional, as individual facts, not truths of relation determined by intellect. In the artist’s consciousness there is no significant distinction between self and world because the world is what the artist experiences and the medium of expression. Ibid., 291–92. Ibid., 325.

Notes to Pages 115–122

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26. Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés”; Desnos, “Surréalisme.” 27. For a detailed discussion of these issues in relation to Surrealist texts and art criticism of the 1920s and 1930s, see Grant, Surrealism. 28. Zervos, “Lithographies de Henri Matisse” and “Phénomène Surréaliste.” 29. Tériade, “Documentaire sur la jeune peinture: I.” and “Documentaire sur la jeune peinture: V.” 30. Decalcomania was originally a decorative transfer technique invented in the eighteenth century. It was also the basis for a popular party game in which ink was dripped on paper and then folded to create suggestive forms. Hermann Rorschach’s psychological inkblot tests, first published in 1921, were based on this technique. In a 1936 issue of the magazine Minotaure André Breton presented Oscar Dominguez’s use of decalcomania as the first fully automatic technique. The Surrealists sought direct access to the origins of art in the images of the unconscious through hypnosis, recitations of dreams, and rapid speech or writing beginning in the early 1920s. It is probably these wellknown experiments that Dewey is referring to by conjuring a rabbit out of the place where it lies hid. 31. Art as language is a major topic analyzed in Collingwood’s Principles of Art. Dewey states, “Because objects of art are expressive, they are a language. . . . Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. . . . The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it” (106). 32. “For the modern view process, activity, and change are the matter of fact. At an instant there is nothing. Each instant is only a way of grouping matters of fact. . . . All the interrelations of matters of fact must involve transition in their essence. All realization involves implication in creative advance.” Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 146. Process philosophy is considered to have been founded by Whitehead with the 1929 publication of his Process and Reality. Whitehead’s process philosophy is

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

indebted to Bergson, who is often (retroactively) considered a process philosopher. See Bergson, Laughter, 154–61. Bergson also described the artist as having a privileged position in relation to the universe’s creative activity. The creation of an artwork is a vital process. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 340–41. Antliff, Inventing Bergson. Harold Rosenberg thought Hans Hoffman’s philosophy was indebted to the Bergson’s pre–World War I ideas about intuition and élan. See Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 251. Robert Motherwell cites him as an influence who helped him understand the philosophical nature of abstraction. See Motherwell, Collected Writings, 86, 99, 142, 279. Louis Finkelstein read Whitehead in the 1940s and discussed him with Tworkov and de Kooning. See Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 278. Daniel Belgrad makes a case for the great importance of Whitehead’s ideas for modern poets, particularly Charles Olson, as well as for Motherwell. See Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity. Whitehead’s philosophy was explicitly developed as a philosophical attempt to come to terms with the transformation in the nature of physical reality revealed by the theory of relativity and the other discoveries of the new physics. See Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 140. “Deep within ourselves we know time is a ‘becoming.’ We rework our monumental concept of time into that of a fluid time, i.e., one whose duration has a plastic quality.” Focillon, Life of Forms, 55. Ibid., 49–51. Focillon’s reference to Leonardo’s wall is another reflection of the debates surrounding Surrealism. For the Surrealists, Max Ernst in particular, Leonardo’s advice to artists to seek subjects in the random markings on an old wall was an early example of the value of their own automatic procedures. They believed that the images any given individual saw in the random marks on the wall were the embodiment their own unconscious obsessions

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39. 40.

256

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

and desires. The more conservative view, and the one espoused by Focillon, was that only the trained artist discerned forms in random marks and could use them as the basis for creative inspiration. Ibid., 51. Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic work focused on artists from the beginning. He was a close associate of Sigmund Freud in Vienna until 1926, when he moved to Paris and became well known as a therapist and lecturer. Among his patients were the writers Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. Rank, Art and Artist, 425 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). Rank listed Goethe, Rodin, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt as examples. He did not think the present age had produced any great art and thought this might be due to the lack of collective ideologies against which the strong individualism of the artistic personality needs to fight (18). Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 61. Collingwood held a similar view of the artist’s activity; see above. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 69–70. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 175 Ibid., 215–16. “This disclosure of an immanent or incipient significance in the living body extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression” (230). Ibid., 226. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 83. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of painting was markedly affected by Matisse’s discussion of his working process in “Notes of a Painter,” as well as François Campaux’s 1946 film of Matisse at work, Un Grand Peintre français: Henri Matisse. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 88, 90–91. Ibid., 95–97. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 148.

53. See Grene, “Aesthetic Dialogue,” 224–25. 54. Fry, Vision and Design, 34–35. 55. Dewey also objected to theories that separate art forms on the basis of their appeal to one sense—vision in the case of painting, hearing in music. In his view artworks were expressions of experiences arising from human experiences with the surrounding environment. It is the totality of embodied experience in the world that is significant, not the appeal to a single sense (123–24). 56. Contemporary distinctions between ceramicists, who are considered craftspeople, and those who are considered “clay artists” still often rely on this same difference. 57. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 55, 144– 45, 243–44, 247. 58. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 104. 59. Ibid., 112. 60. Wagner, Three Artists, 281–82.

Chapter 6

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

The section of this chapter under the subheading “Artistic Process and Amateur Artists” contains material from my article “‘Paint and Be Happy’: The Modern Artist and the Amateur Painter: A Question of Distinction,” Journal of American Culture 34, no. 3, Copyright © 2011, Wiley Periodicals. Liberman, Artist in His Studio, 33. Picasso, “Picasso Speaks,” 215. Unlike Cézanne, Giacometti was considered a skilled artist in a traditional sense, thus his struggle included the effort to not give in to his facility. See Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 90. Sartre, “Search for the Absolute,” 613. Collingwood also stressed the morality of the artist’s labor; see chapter 5 in this volume. Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti, 194. Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 87. Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti, 197. Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 127–28.

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10. Ibid., 128–30. 11. For a discussion of Giacometti’s increasing obsessiveness, see Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 120. 12. Giacometti quoted in Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti, 216. 13. Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 120. 14. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 68. 15. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of SelfRealization.” 16. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 58, 61. 17. Ibid., 78–80. 18. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 29. 19. Here, too, see chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization.” 20. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 32–33. 21. For discussion of the political dimension of Rosenberg’s concept of action, see Orton, “Action, Revolution, Painting”; and Balken, “Rosenberg and American Action Painters,” 210. 22. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 34. In his criticism Rosenberg stressed the distinctions between pure automatism and the more conscious and engaged work of painters like Pollock and Joan Mitchell. For instance, he saw Jean Dubuffet’s work as lacking the necessary tension. See Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 83, 92, 97. The critique of an easy automatism and “apocalyptic wallpaper” in “The American Action Painters” is often understood as an attack on Jackson Pollock. 23. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 42–43. 24. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 104. 25. Unlike Cézanne and Giacometti, de Kooning did not work directly from life/models; his work is not a record of perceptual experience in the way that Cézanne’s always and Giacometti’s often is. 26. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 111–12, 117, 119, 125. The concept of “tact” and its use by Rosenberg to describe de Kooning’s approach closely follows its usage in terms of craftsmanship: a knowing responsiveness to the medium developed over many years of working with it. 27. Ibid., 128. 28. Hess, “De Kooning Paints,” 31, 65.

29. Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 148. 30. Alfred Barr’s Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, published in 1946 by the Museum of Modern Art, emphasized the artist’s working process with many reproductions of sketches, studies, and variations of major works, notably Demoiselles and Guernica. 31. Arb, “Spotlight on de Kooning,” 33. 32. Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 229. In “De Kooning Paints a Picture” Hess wrote parenthetically that de Kooning’s academic training and a period of “lyrical Ingrism” gave him the mastery essential to discarding or changing convention (64–65). 33. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,” 267–70. Picasso first discusses photographing the stages of a work in progress in this same interview. See chapter 4 of this volume, “New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process.” 34. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 classic existentialist text Being and Nothingness. The reproductions in Barr’s Picasso: 50 Years of His Art emphasize Picasso’s paintings of monstrous women. 35. Doubt and ambiguity have been much discussed as dominant themes of de Kooning’s art. See Hess, Willem de Kooning; Shiff, “De Kooning Controlling”; Wagner, “De Kooning, Drawing.” 36. See Shiff, “Water and Lipstick,” “With Closed Eyes,” and “De Kooning Controlling.” 37. The persistent interest in evaluating the works de Kooning made during his last illness, a form of Alzheimer’s, is a telling indicator of the ways his art has been valued. These late works would probably be classed as a type of automatic production, lacking the artist’s conscious control or regulation. Since de Kooning’s reputation rested on the fact that his art was not automatic, the late works cannot be considered truly de Koonings in the sense in which his brand was defined. They are, however, by his hand, and that hand was considered one of the most well developed in late twentieth-century art. Many feel that there must be real value (not just market value) in that hand’s products because the artist’s mind must have

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38. 39. 40.

258

41.

fully entered into its gestures and responses after so many decades of practice. Hess, Willem de Kooning, 28. Ibid., 27. In a 1961 review of a group exhibition devoted to the creative process, Vivien Raynor complained that a series of Nell Blaine’s preparatory drawings for her “fresh and lovely” paintings demonstrated that being an artist was painful labor and “no fun at all.” See Raynor, “Creative Process,” 38. By the early 1960s the discourse of the artistic process as dangerous and risky labor was outdated, but the gender implications of Raynor’s criticism remain both significant and conventional: a woman’s painting should be “fresh and lovely” naturally and without serious labor. See chapter 8 of this volume, “Process Art,” for further discussion of Raynor’s review. Helen Frankenthaler used the language of danger and risk in a 1965 interview to discuss her painting process in formal terms, demonstrating how the mid-century discourse of artistic process was adopted and employed by a working artist to define her personal creative methods: “It is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal ‘Signature.’ I have been trying, and the process began without my knowing it, to stop relying on gesture, but it is a struggle. ‘Gesture’ must appear out of necessity not habit. I don’t start with a color order but find the color as I go. I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do.” In the same interview Frankenthaler denied the relevance of her gender to her painting: “Obviously, first I am involved in painting not the who and how. . . . The making of serious painting is difficult and complicated for all serious painters. One must be oneself, whatever.” Geldzahler, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” 37–38. Of the forty-three artists profiled in the ARTnews “X Paints a Picture” series from 1949 to the end of 1955 only three were women (Honoré Sharrer, Isabel

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

Bishop, and Irene Rice Pereira). After 1955 until 1962, when the series ended, the ratio improved, as four of the seventeen artists profiled were women (Janice Biala, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Elaine de Kooning). Pollock, Vision and Difference, chaps. 1 and 3; Board, “Constructing Myths”; Duncan, “Virility and Domination” and “MoMA’s Hot Mamas.” Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,” 268. For a discussion of the difficult situation faced by modern artists whose exhibited artworks may not reveal their dedication to their work, see Menger, “Profiles of the Unfinished,” 60–61. For a discussion of the historical American view of art as a feminine practice, see Singerman, Art Subjects, 41–45. Singerman notes that large numbers of men studying in art programs in colleges and universities under the GI Bill at mid-century assisted in the widespread masculinization of art and artist education in the United States. It was then distinguished from (feminine) art teacher education, which had previously been the dominant focus of art education in the United States (127). Scholars do not agree on Pollock’s relevance to Rosenberg’s essay. See Balken, “Rosenberg and American Action,” 213; and Kleeblatt, ed., Action/ Abstraction, 137, 139. It is not Pollock’s but Gorky’s paintings that Greenberg described most strongly in terms of the artist’s process. See Greenberg, Collected Essays, 218–19. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, 23. Ibid., 63, 76–77. In 1910 the writer Roland Dorgelès submitted three paintings to the Salon des Indépendants under the name Boronali. They had been painted by a donkey with a loaded paintbrush attached to its tail. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, 77. Steinberg, “Month in Review,” 82–83. On the rise of amateur art making in the 1950s and 1960s, see Barzun, “New

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54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

Man”; Toffler, Culture Consumers; and Marling, As Seen on TV, chap. 2. Matisse expressed this view in a 1949 interview. See Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 122. “ARTnews National,” 1. For the 1949 competition the magazine defined an amateur as someone whose major occupation or source of income was not the practice or teaching of painting. Later, art students and anyone selling art in a gallery were excluded from amateur status as well. The text is implicitly directed to men: “After all, if you try and fail, there is not much harm done. . . . And then you can always go out and kill some animal, humiliate some rival on the links, or despoil some friend across the green table.” Churchill, “Painting as a Pastime,” 14. The magazine’s editorial call for entries to its amateur competition also seems directed at the male reader (see below). This is ironic given that women amateur artists far outnumbered men, as the magazine discovered in its survey published a few months later. See “Amateur Standing: Who and How,” 10. Jacques Barzun wrote on the rise of amateur painting in 1958: “Art is seen to be compatible with manliness, on the one hand, and with serious business—indeed with affairs of state—on the other. The fine arts are acquiring the respectability of fishing and golf.” Barzun, “New Man,” 39. Churchill, “Painting as a Pastime,” 13–14. Frankfurter, “Vernissage,” 11. Barzun made a similar point: “With the passing of the class system there also went something of the mild subordination needed for being a spectator. There is abroad in the world a passion for participation. . . . ‘I, too, am a painter’ was said by Correggio in emulation of Raphael; it could be said by John Doe in emulation of his President, and it would be a corollary to their common citizenship.” Barzun, “New Man,” 43. Barzun is referring to President Eisenhower’s much-publicized painting hobby, which, like Churchill’s,

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

78.

was portrayed as form of relaxation and unpretentious enjoyment for the powerful statesman. Kingsbury, “Amateur Standing,” 10. Quoted in Seckler, “Amateur Standing,” 8. See Berkman’s “Amateur Standing” column from May 1956, 10. See the “Amateur Standing” column from March 1950, 8. “Best Amateurs,” 64. Quoted in the “Amateur Standing” column from January 1951, 8, 60. Critics typically gave only very brief characterizations of amateur works that often stressed their exuberance and cheerfulness. Even prizewinning works were not usually described in any detail. Genauer, “Amateurs,” 13. Dewey, Art as Experience, 45. At the March 1953 national convention of the Artist’s Equity Association in St. Louis the delegates condemned amateur artists for taking away professional artists’ wall space and income. See “Amateur Art Menace,” 81. Frankfurter, “Editorial: Amateur Joy,” 15. “Amateur Art Menace,” 81. Pearson, “Remarkable Exhibition,” 21. Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko, and William Baziotes exhibited work in the 1949 Whitney Annual. Hess, “8 Excellent,” 35. The 92nd Street Y is a renowned Jewish community and cultural center in New York City established in 1874. It has offered art programs and adult education classes since its inception. See Berkman’s “Amateur Standing” column from February 1957, 66. Langsner, “Mullican Paints a Picture,” 35; Porter, “Rivers Paints a Picture,” 82; Campbell, “Ferren Paints a Picture,” 54; de Kooning, “Greene Paints a Picture,” 50. “Amateur Standing: Who and How,” 10. It was commonplace for articles on amateur art competitions in the 1950s to give an accounting of the gender and professions of the entrants. Women

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79.

260

80.

81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

typically outnumbered men by two to one. By the standards of the early twentieth-first century, the sexism of Frankfurter’s editorial and its “joke” is breath taking: “Among the better stories that used to go around during the Depression was the one about the chorus girl who sadly said, ‘Six weeks ago I lost my job, three weeks ago I had to sell my wrist watch, two weeks ago I sold my fur coat—and last night I lost my amateur standing. We are concerned over amateur painters who are losing their standing—in maybe not quite so welldefined a way, but nevertheless in, well, probably the second-oldest profession in the world (the painter of that bison in the rock caves of Altamira could not have been far behind the ladies of the evening on Atlantis). The problem is less funny than it is serious.” See Frankfurter, “Editorial: Amateur Joy,” 15. For discussions of the perceived threats of female amateur artists to male professionals, see Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 174–81; and Swinth, Painting Professionals, 27. Two months later Allan Kaprow’s “‘Happenings’ in the New York Scene” was published in the magazine. Given that Happenings rendered distinctions between professional and amateur artists irrelevant, the disappearance of the column seems appropriate. Berkman, “Uses of Spontaneity,” 23. For discussions of professional art education for U.S. women in the nineteenth century, see Swinth, Painting Professionals; Masten, Art Work; and Prieto, At Home in the Studio. Singerman, Art Subjects, 113 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). The “fine arts” were generally replaced with “visual arts” and “design” around mid-century as a means to avoid the hierarchical and value distinctions associated with the terms “fine arts” and “crafts.” Singerman sees this switch as one of the many effects of the influence of the Bauhaus (70).

86. From a 1992 interview with de Kooning’s Black Mountain College student Gus Faulk quoted in Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 257. 87. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 149. 88. Ibid., 254.

Chapter 7

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

This chapter’s epigraphs are drawn from Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 96, 54. Judd, “Specific Objects.” Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, 86–89. Sypher, Loss of the Self, 113–30. Cage, “Composition as Process,” 22. Ibid., 23. Suzuki translated the I Ching, which Cage used to create his chance compositions. Kaprow and McLuhan described similar qualities as Zen. For a discussion of Zen artworks see Hoover, Zen Culture, 225, 227. Recent scholarship insists on the limitations of the American/Western understanding of the intricacies of Zen and other forms of Eastern philosophy and religion. See Monroe, Third Mind; and “Exhibition as Proposition.” Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 83. For the importance of Dewey’s Art as Experience in the development of Kaprow’s art and the relationship of Kaprow’s artistic practice to Zen, see Kelley, Childsplay, 7–8, 200. Caroline Jones also notes radical shifts in the artist’s role and production during this period. See Machine in the Studio, 57. Arendt, Human Condition, 116 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). Arendt believes that every activity unconnected with labor has become a hobby. Hobbies were a popular topic of public discussion during the 1950s. See Mulac, Hobbies; and Marling, As Seen on TV, chap. 2. Jeffrey Weiss has recently discussed Jasper Johns’s work in similar terms: “Johns brought the labor of painting to a new place, one that might be associ-

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

ated with the epistemology of the absurd.” Weiss, “Painting Bitten,” 26. Caroline Jones has discussed the parallelism between art practice of the 1960s and industrial labor practices: “The industrial aesthetic of postwar America emphasized the performative over the iconic.” See Machine in the Studio, 61. This is evidenced in part by the heyday of documentary films of artists, which showed artists at work in their studios. Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto.” Kaprow, “Untitled Guidelines,” 709. Toffler, Culture Consumers, 50–54. The Situationist critique of exactly these attitudes in Europe should be seen as the revolutionary side of the same coin. Ibid., 56, 208. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 70–71 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). McLuhan cited the Balinese as a culture that had no art because they “do everything as well as possible” (72). McLuhan’s debt to the process philosophy of Henri Bergson is evident in numerous references throughout Understanding Media. The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan’s 1967 work with Quentin Fiore, opens with a quote from Whitehead. In a 1969 interview McLuhan stated, “My books constitute the process rather than the completed project of discovery.” Quoted in Theall, Understanding McLuhan, 30. Judd, “Specific Objects.” For a discussion of Robert Morris’s ideas, see chapter 8 of this volume, “Process Art.” Formalist art theory was a key influence on McLuhan, notably the ideas of Heinrich Wölfflin and Adolf Hildebrand, both of whom are referred to in Understanding Media. Donald Theall discusses McLuhan in relation to the formalism of the literary New Critics. See Understanding McLuhan, 80, 119. Herbert Marcuse’s widely read Marxist critique of industrial society described art as a means for proposing alternative worlds in a manner reminiscent of the Surrealists. See One-Dimensional Man, 238–39.

25. 26. 27. 28.

Peckham, Man’s Rage, 314. Brown, Life Against Death, 312. Ibid., 297. For a discussion of feminist critiques of the gendered nature of the “universal” body in relation to body art, see Jones, Body Art. Jones notes that the many female body artists active in the 1960s she interviewed stated that it was only the men who were interested in Merleau-Ponty’s ideas (256). 29. In a 2007 interview Schneeman stated, “I have to remind myself how obsessed I was with process. Joan Mitchell’s work was another link to the physicalization of the body since with her work, I recognized the stroke as an event. All of the theoretical elements that come around my work, I keep tracing them back to painting.” Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat Record, 446. 30. Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics, 163. 31. Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat Record, 448.

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Chapter 8

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from Morris, Continuous Project, 84. See Jones, Machine in the Studio, for a detailed discussion of these films. Raynor, “Creative Process,” 38. Ibid. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 201. Caroline Jones noted Frank Stella’s disgust with ARTnews rhetoric about artists’ development. See Machine in the Studio, 120. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 16. Krauss, “Voyage on the North Sea,” 30. Rosenberg, De-Definition of Art, 29. Rosenberg here emphasizes processes that do not require artistic intervention, but in the same essay he does acknowledge process art as “redefining art as the process of the artist or his materials,” which abolishes traditional media requirements (37). Morris, Continuous Project, 43. Ibid., 46. Morris also curated the group show “Nine at Leo Castelli” in December

Notes to Pages 179–193

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262

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

1968. The show at Castelli’s warehouse included works by Giovanni Anselmo, Bill Bollinger, Eva Hesse, Steve Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and Gilberto Zorio. Much of the work was made of malleable modern materials, including Serra’s lead Splashing. Ehrenzweig was very popular among artists in the late 1960s. Robert Smithson was also deeply engaged with his notion of dedifferentiation. Morris, Continuous Project, 67. Ibid., 68–69. Morris, Mind/Body Problem, 234. Morris, Continuous Project, 69. Morris also cited George Kubler’s The Shape of Time as the unique art historical text to address meaning as found in the making process rather than the form of the final artwork. See Continuous Project, 73 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). In 1970 Morris offered his artistic services in an advertisement for the Peripatetic Artists Guild, which identified the artist’s labor with both blue- and white-collar workers. See Berger, Labyrinths; and Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, on Morris’s active political engagement during the 1960s. Maurice Berger discusses Morris’s engagement with contemporary politics and quotes Stanley Aronowitz: “The nature of the New Left, summarized in a single word . . . [was] process. It signaled an almost religious return to experience. . . . Rhetorical repetition, procedural debate, and moral invocations to kindness and equality were all part of the process of community building.” Berger, Labyrinths, 93. In broad terms Morris’s concerns seem somewhat aligned with Walter Benjamin’s position in “The Author as Producer,” in which he stresses the need for the artist to engage with the means of production as a strategy for turning consumers (the audience) into actors and producers. Benjamin sees Brecht’s epic theater as exemplary in this regard and describes it as a “dramatic laboratory.” Michael Fried’s rejection of the physical engagement predicated in much

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

minimalist art in his essay “Art and Objecthood” is even more relevant to Morris’s subsequent discussions of process art. Fried’s position derived from Greenberg’s formalism and maintains the aesthetic significance and autonomy of the artwork. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 6–7. It was common to see process art as a challenge to Greenberg’s ideas. See Monte and Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 27. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 27–28. Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon of 1755 is the key text in this tradition. In 1940 Greenberg published “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in which he argued for the purity of the individual art forms in modernism. Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 1, 23–37. For a study of time and the new information age in the art of the 1960s, see Lee, Chronophobia. Marcia Tucker compared the work of the artists in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ Materials to the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, which she described as a “constant present” created by repetition without beginning, middle, and end. Monte and Tucker, AntiIllusion, 36. Many artists associated with process art were also engaged with “timebased” arts. Robert Morris was seriously involved with modern dance in the 1950s and 1960s, while Richard Serra made movies, the most famous of which, Hand Catching Lead (1968), is a landmark of process art. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 31 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter). Pamela Lee has noted that in the late 1960s “the notion of process in art became as much a curatorial and critical thematic as it referred to the making of art as such.” See “Some Kinds of Duration,” 26. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 55. Levine, Profit Systems One. Kaprow, “Untitled Guidelines,” 711. For Kosuth’s view of process art as “reactive” see Meyer, Conceptual Art, xi. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 80–82.

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34. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” reproduced in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 175. 35. Meyer, “Second Degree,” 102. Similar views are expressed in Lee, “Some Kinds of Duration”; and Green, “When Attitudes Become,” 136. Robert PincusWitten distinguished between the early “pictorial/sculptural” phase of postminimalism, peaking between 1968 and 1970, in which artists emphasized the process of making, and a later conceptual phase that emerged around 1970. See Postminimalism, 16. 36. Scientific analogies were common in discussions of the material concerns of much process art. James Monte compared Barry Le Va’s use of time in his distribution pieces to the way a biologist estimates the growth of microorganisms developed in a laboratory. See Monte and Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 9. 37. “For me the use of self-generating procedures to make art was a liberation from the limitations of my own ego. It represented an escape from individualism by the objectification of the process. I remember believing that it may be the means of achieving Flaubert’s dream of the annihilation of the author.” Bochner quoted in Meyer, “Second Degree,” 97. 38. Bochner quoted in Prinz, “Language Is Not Transparent,” 194. 39. Bochner, “Serial Art Systems,” 40. 40. Bochner associated his work with Gustave Flaubert, a writer considered one of the initiators of modernist literature. The relation of Bochner’s work to modernist formalism is a major theme of both James Monte’s and Marcia Tucker’s catalog essays for Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. 41. See Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” in Originality of the Avant-Garde, 244–58. 42. Jones, Machine in the Studio. 43. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art.” 44. Gilbert, “Herbie Goes Bananas,” 72. 45. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 86. 46. Celant, “Art Povera,” 662–63. 47. Ibid., 663–64. 48. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 28, 218, 53, 56. 49. For a discussion of the Marxist significance of Reinhardt’s artistic labor as

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

free in relation to capitalist labor, and the identity of the artist as created through engagement in a free work process, see Marie, “Ad Reinhardt,” 471–75. Looking back at the experience of painting his black stripe paintings in the late 1950s, Frank Stella said, “I really wanted to make something. I didn’t want to spend my time futzing around or seeing how clever I could be. . . . I really wanted to finish the paintings that I had it in my mind to do.” He continued: “[The] process of [the stripe paintings was] simpleminded. . . . But it was a lot more intense; just doing those things, painting those stripes one after another is quite enervating and numbing. It’s physically fairly exacting . . . I couldn’t keep it up. The physical concentration . . . it was just a different kind of way of being, a different kind of process. But the process was everything then, as it is now.” Jones, Machine in the Studio, 121, 128. Bryan-Wilson in Molesworth, ed., Work Ethic, 158. Quoted in Sultan, ed., Chuck Close Prints, 132. De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” 526. Daniel Belgrad links the rise of pottery as a fine art medium to the widespread desire for spontaneity in the arts in the postwar period. He credits the British potter Bernard Leach with initiating the development by bringing Japanese potters to art schools like Black Mountain College in the United States, where they taught Zen aesthetics as well as pottery. Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 166–67. The inclusion of traditional craft programs in American university art departments and the adoption of Bauhaus approaches to artist education were also important contributors to the elevation of traditional crafts to the level of the fine arts. See chapter 4, “New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process,” and chapter 5, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization,” in this volume for discussion of Collingwood’s ideas. See Auther, String, Felt, Thread, in particular chapter 2.

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57. Ibid., 60–68, 80–86, 88. 58. Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” 149. 59. “Once technical skill is mastered in an area, the making of an object . . . may offer a transcendent experience to the maker as mastery of motor control allows the maker to work in harmony with material substance to give form to mere shape—something of this Zenlike experience is what M. C. Richards hints at in the title of her book Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.” Risatti, Theory of Craft, 101–2. 60. In practical terms this particular distinction is a recent development. Fine artists were long associated with specific media, even though from the Renaissance on they based their elevation from craftsmen to fine artists on their conceptual activity. See chap. 1, “Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor Prior to the Nineteenth Century,” for Renaissance distinctions of the fine arts from crafts. 61. Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” 147. 62. For a more extended discussion of the relationship of handcrafts to the body and the physical world as well as human thought and language, see Brett, Rethinking Decoration, 225–57. 63. Metcalf, “Craft and Art,” 80. 64. Risatti, Theory of Craft, 99. 65. Ibid., 108. 66. On the craft revival of the 1960s and 1970s see Auther, String, Felt, Thread, 25–28. 67. Morris, Continuous Project, 68, 87. 68. “This tendency to camouflage is an extension of Hesse’s earlier crafts approach in which she compulsively wrapped, coiled, threaded and layered.” Douglas Crimp quoted in Auther, String, Felt, Thread, 83. PincusWitten describes her “compulsive coiling” as “a kind of pleasure-inducing craftswork,” and he connected her compulsive activity to the obsessive and compulsive craftwork of Lucas Samaras and Lee Bontecou, other artists he also associated with postminimalism. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 49, 82.

69. Briony Fer has written that Hesse’s work has “an intensely made quality, but what making constituted for Hesse does not seem to be self-evident. The label of ‘process art’ never quite did justice to Hesse’s project.” Fer, Infinite Line, 118. 70. Lippard quoted in Auther, String, Felt, Thread, 84. 71. Auther, String, Felt, Thread, chap. 3. Elyse Speaks suggests that Lee Bontecou’s work of the 1960s and its critical reception contributed to the successful incorporation of traditional craft processes into the terrain of the expressive art object. Her discussion of Bontecou is a cogent examination of the intersection of the processes of making and ideological conceptions of craft, art, hobbies, and gender. Speaks, “Terms of Craft.” 72. Rosenberg, De-Definition of Art, 40. 73. Singerman, Art Subjects, 70–72. On the educational value of “creative problemsolving skills” in the arts, see also Efland, History of Art Education, 237. 74. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 21–23. 75. Ehrenzweig gives examples of the Bauhaus, which once liberated students from academic clichés only to founder in rational analysis of empty form; and of Rauschenberg’s revelatory teacher who cut up one of his drawings to make a collage, which is now a wholly standard procedure with predictable results “evident in commercial galleries everywhere.” Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order of Art, 55. 76. Ibid., 58, 62. Ehrenzweig was a psychologist, and his primary interest was defining the psychological role of art for the individual and the community. Briefly, he believed that art was a means to instantiate unconscious irrational creative impulses. Rational control of artistic production obstructed the artist’s creativity, the ability to turn the chaos of the universe into a unique pattern: “Creativity can almost be defined as the capacity for transforming the chaotic aspect of undifferentiation into a hidden order that can be accompanied by a comprehensive (syncreatic) vision” (127).

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77. Ibid., 146. 78. Singerman, Art Subjects, 150–64. 79. Morris, Continuous Project, 75.

Chapter 9 1. Marsha Meskimmon has made process a central concept in her analysis of contemporary feminist art. In her view process is a means to materialize female subjectivity and the active encounter of self with the wider social body, as well as central to the materialization of female desire. See Women Making Art, 73, 94. 2. Montano, You Too, 30. 3. The sociologist Anthony Giddens gives creativity a central place in his discussion of modern conceptions of selfidentity. See Modernity and Self, 35 and 41. For psychological approaches to the study of creativity see Runco and Albert, eds., Theories of Creativity; and Runco, Critical Creative Processes. 4. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 106, 125. 5. McNiff, Trust the Process, 11, 5, 2. 6. Sartwell, Art of Living, xi, 12. 7. Ibid., 32, 125, 70. 8. Shusterman, Performing Live, 3, 32–33. 9. Shusterman sees somaesthetics as the source of nonlinguistic forms of understanding, which are not interpretive. He cites Dewey, Foucault, and MerleauPonty as earlier thinkers who explored this area of understanding. Ibid., 135. Mark Johnson’s Body in the Mind is also a key text for Shusterman’s somaesthetics. 10. Shusterman, Performing Live, 148, 162. 11. The craftsperson’s physical engagement is often opposed to the presumed dominance of visuality in modern art. See Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 39, 165–69. The sociologist Richard Sennett also theorizes the significance of experience and bodily knowledge from a pragmatist viewpoint. He sees this form of knowledge as creating a continuum between the organic/physical and the social world of human relations. See The Craftsman, 290. 12. Morris, “Writing with Davidson,” 620.

13. Morris, Continuous Project, 251, 254, 255, 250. 14. David Brett makes a similar point: “The skillful and loving engagement with materials, with the brute stuff of the world, is an ethical engagement because it is the point at which metaphor is created. We are what we make.” See Rethinking Decoration, 257. 15. Buchloh, “Gabriel Orozco,” 207. 16. Orozco, Gabriel Orozco, 121. 17. Fer, “The Scatter,” 224. 18. Orozco, Gabriel Orozco, 14. 19. Lacy, “Debated Territory,” 174. 20. Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat Record, 460. 21. Bois and Krauss, Formless, 137, 202, 214, 240. 22. Ibid., 245. 23. See for example the works of Jeff Koons, as well as that of the YBAs (Young British Artists), specifically, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas. 24. Stockholder and Scanlan, “Art and Labor,” 51. 25. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party offers an interesting example of the difficulties faced by an artist who relies heavily on collaboration and retains sole authorship of a work. Chicago has long been criticized for failing to give due credit to her collaborators, even though she made collaboration central to the realization of the project. Hundreds of volunteers worked on The Dinner Party, and a documentary film recorded the interactions of the group in the process of creating the work. 26. In 1994 Christo retroactively assigned dual authorship of all “his” large-scale installations to both himself and his wife. Prior to this act they were publicly attributed to him alone. While this shift in attribution granted his wife equal partnership, their now joint authorship is still far from full acknowledgment of the all the participants integral to the works’ realization. It is not difficult to envision a list of all the people involved that would be comparable to the seemingly endless credits of a contemporary Hollywood movie. 27. Birnbaum, “Art of Education,” 476.

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28. The Portikus video of the project shows that the labor involved was fundamentally what was needed to run an ordinary small salad dressing production factory. The only non-mundane part of the process was the exposure of the salad dressing to multiple video monitors playing the films of Kevin Costner that instilled the Costner essence. 29. See for example Sennett, The Craftsman; and Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft. For a discussion of Rhoades’s work as part of a “slacker aesthetics” that undermines the work ethic of artworks, see Drucker, Sweet Dreams, 95–102. 30. “Process” is commonly used to describe the aims of work associated with relational aesthetics. See Steiner, “Lost Paradise,” 142–43; and Thomas, “.all hawaii eNtrées,” 232. 31. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 54. 32. Deleuze has been described as a process philosopher and linked to Whitehead. He also wrote a book on Bergson, whose ideas influenced his own. See Clark, “Whiteheadian Chaosmos.” 33. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 103. 34. Ibid., 47, 110, 111. 35. See Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”; and Foster, “Arty Party.” 36. See Zahm, “L’hiver de l’amour,” 139–40. 37. Kwon, One Place, 24, 50, 31. Kwon also quotes James Meyer: “The functional site is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and discursive filiations and the bodies that move between them. . . . It is an informational site . . . a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus” (29). 38. To cite one example, Eugene Thacker describes systems approaches in biology as “an alternative way of understanding the organism at the molecular level, without over-emphasis on individual genes or genomes. . . . Process and interaction became the starting points for research, rather than identification of individual genes. Such a focus on process and interaction implies a wider view of the living cell,

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

and, indeed, the organism. . . . The systems biology approach re-adapts biology to the terms of information processing and networking. . . . Mainstream biotech realizes DNA-as-data, then systems biology maybe seen as an actualizing of genetic information as process and interaction.” See “Open Source DNA,” 36–37. Last, “Systematic Inexhaustion,” 118– 20, 115. Lacy, “Debated Territories,” 174–75. Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages,” 46. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 12. Kester’s concept of the dialogic is derived from the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. Kester, One and the Many, 114–15. Kester defines art “through its function as a more or less open space within contemporary culture: a space in which certain questions can be asked, certain critical analyses articulated, that would not be accepted or tolerated elsewhere.” See Conversation Pieces, 68. Art is, thus, a social context that can allow greater freedom to imagine and realize solutions to community problems. Artists are similarly people presumed to be free from institutional goals and requirements and thereby able to take a broader view of any given situation (ibid., 101). Ibid., 90. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 19, 255. Shaun McNiff states, “It is such a commonplace saying within the creative arts that until recently I have been reluctant to utter the three words for fear of being trite: ‘Trust the process.’ Whenever I find myself in a difficult situation, the principle is reaffirmed.” See Trust the Process, 13 Johanna Drucker has described the “contemporary attention to use and process” in terms of “the affective gesture [that] brings the inert to life, it rehumanizes material, not in the romantic sense but in a production sense. Affectivity gives material a sense of intention and form, of sentience and action, it shifts it out of the mere material while engaging with it, tweaking the stuff, making it active.” See Sweet Dreams, 173.

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49. Brett, Rethinking Decoration, 257. 50. See Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” 152, 219, 224. 51. The cover copy for McNiff ’s Trust the Process encapsulates this pervasive attitude: “Whether in painting, poetry, performance, music, dance, or life, there is an intelligence working in every situation. This force is the primary carrier of creation. If we trust it and follow its natural movement, it will astound us with its ability to find a way through problems. . . . There is a magic to this process that cannot be controlled by the ego. Somehow it always finds the way to the place where you need to be, and a destination you never could have known in advance. When everything seems as if it is hopeless and going nowhere . . . trust the process.” 52. By this I mean the artist’s self-identity. The artist’s identity is not always so

easily recognized in certain arenas, although even in the highest reaches of the art world it is most often a question of whether someone is a successful artist. If any individual claims to be an artist there are virtually no grounds now for contesting the truth of the assertion. Hans Abbing has pointed out that the art world defines professional artists not on whether they make a living from their art but on whether they strive for art world recognition. See Why Are Artists Poor?, 147. Glenn Adamson noted that one distinction between the contemporary artist and the craftsperson is that the craftsperson has to distinguish him- or herself from the hobbyist, whereas the artist, since anything can be a work of art, does not face this difficulty: “There is no such thing as an amateur contemporary artist, only an unsuccessful one.” See Thinking Through Craft, 143.

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Index

abjection, 230 Abstract Expressionism, 159, 168, 171, 208, 211 academic art theory and education, 25–26, 32–33, 59–63, 82 drawing and, 23–24, 33–34, 107 academic painting techniques, 59–64, 78–79 Acconci, Vito, 179–80 Albers, Joseph, 107–8, 188, 201, 215 amateur art, 6, 17, 57, 83, 181–82, 247 ARTnews and, 159–69 Arts and Crafts movement and, 50, 129 women and, 12–13, 53, 114–15, 153, 167, 250 n. 27 Antoni, Janine, 232 Arendt, Hannah, 173–74, 199, 205, 219–20 The Human Condition, 177–82, 185 Aristotle, 16–18, 21, 28, 31 art for art’s sake, 18, 120, 162, 164, 194, 226 Arte Povera, 192, 210 ARTnews, 95–96, 153–54, 159–68, 188–89, 261 n. 5 Arts and Crafts movement, 42–55, 82, 105, 129, 162 Ashbee, C. R., 51 Auther, Elissa, 214–15, 219 automatism, 102, 122–24, 131–32, 144–47, 157–58, 255 n. 30 Balzac, Honoré de, 6–9, 66, 141, 146, 153, 246 Barbizon painters, 62, 64 Barnes, Alfred, 121, 254 n. 22 Barolsky, Paul, 31–32 Bataille, Georges, 230 Bauhaus, 58, 105, 107–8, 119, 169

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Bell, Clive, 74, 79, 81, 113–14, 117 Bell, Daniel, 14 Berenson, Bernard, 110, 134 Bergson, Henri, 125–26, 177, 190, 255 n. 33, 261 n. 20 Berkman, Aaron, 166–68 Beuys, Joseph, 179, 192, 211 Bishop, Claire, 244–45 Black Mountain College, 170 Blaine, Nell, 188–89, 258 n. 40 Bochner, Mel, 190, 192, 206–7, 263 n. 40 Boime, Albert, 60 Bois, Yve-Alain, 230, 249 n. 18, 251 n. 46 Boris, Elaine, 51–52 Bouguereau, William–Adolphe, 63 Bourdieu, Pierre, 113–14 Bourriaud, Nicholas, 238–40, 244 Brown, G. Baldwin, 29 Brown, Norman O., 173, 185 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 209, 213 Buchloh, Benjamin, 209, 228 Burckhardt, Rudolph, 147 Burford, Alison, 20 Burgin, Victor, 41, 179, 202 Burnham, Jack, 192, 202–4, 209 Cage, John, 173, 175–76, 197, 210 Cahiers d’Art, 81, 91–92, 94–95, 123, 153–54, 252 n. 13 Celant, Germano , 192, 210–11 Cennini, Cennino, 22 Cézanne, Paul, 6–9, 63–69, 86–87, 117–18 Collingwood on, 110, 134 Giacometti and, 139 Merleau-Ponty on, 112, 129–31

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280

Chardin, Jean–Baptiste, 86–87, 127 Chicago, Judy, 13, 186, 223, 265 n. 25 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 192, 211, 236, 265 n. 26 Churchill, Winston, 159–61, 163–64, 166 Claesz, Pieter, 86 Clayre, Alasdair, 42, 48 Close, Chuck, 1, 192, 213, 221 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 154, 252 n. 27 Cobden-Sanderson, T. J. , 50 Collingwood, R. G., 109–11, 118, 121–22, 124– 26, 134–35, 214 conceptual art, 5, 178–79, 190, 197, 206–7, 228–29 Constructivism, 58, 90, 98–99 Couture, Thomas, 61, 250 n. 7 craft, 72, 198, 213–19, 233–34, 245. See also Arts and Crafts movement Collingwood on, 109–11, 134 distinct from fine art, 46, 72–73, 106, 218 Focillon on, 101 Kant on, 35 in Middle Ages, 21–22 in the Renaissance, 23–25 theory of, 5, 28, 216, 245 training, 32–33, 107 women and, 13, 52–3, 232–34 craftsperson, artist as, 62–63, 82 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 224–25, 238 Day, Lewis, 49 De Kooning, Willem, 6–9, 96, 146–53, 157–59, 170 decorative art, 44, 47, 52–54, 100, 105, 227–29 Degas, Edgar, 103 Delacroix, Eugène, 60–61, 70, 127 Deleuze, Gilles, 238, 241 De Maria, Walter, 213 Denis, Maurice, 70, 74, 99 deskilling, 170–71, 228, 237 Dewey, John, 169, 176, 227, 238, 240 Art as Experience, 14, 118–22, 124–26, 134, 225–26, 256 n. 55 Die Brücke, 103 difficulty, 4, 6, 29–31, 128, 138, 142 Cézanne and, 63, 66, 68–69 De Kooning and, 146–47, 151–53 Giacometti and, 139–41 Matisse and, 93 Motherwell and, 145–46 Pollock and, 158 Dion, Mark, 242 division of labor, 39–43, 47, 54, 99, 106, 140

DIY (do-it-yourself ), 6, 183–84, 224, 233–34 Donovan, Tara, 235–36 Dormer, Peter, 225 Dubuffet, Jean, 175 Duchamp, Marcel, 5, 142, 197, 203–4, 248 n. 14 Earth Art, 192 Eastlake, Lady, 55–56 education of artists, 106, 143–44, 168–72, 219– 21, 258 n. 45. See also academic art theory and education Aristotle on, 32–33 Bauhaus and, 107–8 Collingwood on, 110 Kant on, 35–36 Matisse and, 80–81 William Morris on, 48 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 194, 197, 210, 220–21, 262 n. 12 Ernst, Max, 122, 255 n. 38 L’Esprit Nouveau, 98 evolutionary process, 96, 121, 132, 194, 208, 222 formalism and, 74, 174 Mondrian and, 87–91 existentialism, 116, 129, 139, 142–44, 150, 159 expression and self-expression, 67, 72, 106, 123, 147, 154 amateur artists and, 161–68 Collingwood on, 109, 125, 134 craft and, 213–14 Dewey on, 121, 124–25, 134 Fiedler on, 116 Hegel on, 37–38 Lears on, 54 Matisse and, 76–81, 83, 92–93, 97 Merleau-Ponty on, 129–30, 135, 142, 145 Picasso and, 95, 157 Rank on, 128–29 rejection of, 174–75, 212, 215 Romanticism and, 60 expressionism, 37, 103–4 failure, 6–8, 45, 58, 81, 145–50 Cézanne and, 66–67 Giacometti and, 141 Michelangelo and, 31–32 modern art and, 69 Fauvism, 76, 97 feminism, 12–13, 136–37, 185–87, 218–19, 223– 24, 265 n. 1 Féré, Charles, 82–83 Fiedler, Konrad, 115–17 finish, 44–45, 47, 60–66

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Flaubert, Gustave, 113, 263 n. 37, 263 n. 40 Focillon, Henri, 9, 14, 248 n. 12 The Life of Forms in Art, 10–11, 101–3, 126–27 formalism, 3–5, 7, 11, 74–75, 197, 207 Collingwood on, 110 Denis and, 99 Dewey and, 120 Fiedler and, 115 Fry and, 133 Greenberg and, 132, 157, 174, 184, 200– 201, 230 Judd and, 174 limitations of, 15, 217 McLuhan and, 184, 261 n. 23 rejection of, 200–201, 203 Reinhardt and, 212 Frankenthaler, Helen, 12, 258 n. 40 Frankfurter, Albert, 96, 161, 163–65, 167 Fried, Michael, 184, 202, 226, 254 n. 21, 262 n. 20 Fry, Roger, 67–68, 74–75, 92, 117, 133–34, 248 n. 11 Futurism, 97–98 Gauguin, Paul, 58, 102–3 Geffroy, Gustave, 117–18 gender bias and modern art, 12, 114–15, 136– 37, 152–53, 180, 258 n. 40 genius, 67, 96–97, 220, 237, 247 Hegel on, 37 Kant on, 35–36 Marx on, 40 Picasso as, 154 style of, 60–61, 81 Géricault, Théodore, 60 Gérome, Jean-Léon, 61–62 Giacometti, Alberto, 9, 132, 139–42, 146, 163, 169 Giacometti, Diego, 140 Gillick, Liam, 240 Goodnough, Robert, 156–58 Greenberg, Clement, 74–75, 226, 251 n. 43, 262 n. 22, 262 n. 24 “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” 200–201 formalist evolution and, 89–90, 132, 151, 174 on De Kooning, 149, 151 on Pollock, 155–57 Guattari, Felix, 238–39 Haacke, Hans, 173, 179, 192, 203 Happenings, 36, 174, 180–81, 196, 202–3. See also Kaprow, Allan

Hegel, G. W. F. , 34, 36–38, 40, 42 Henry, Charles, 74, 251 n. 41 Hess, Thomas, 96, 147–48, 152–53, 157, 160, 165 Hesse, Eva, 108, 136–37, 192, 214–15, 217–19 Hirst, Damien, 9, 265 n. 23 Hofmann, Hans, 171–72, 255 n. 34 Höller, Carsten, 239–40 Holty, Carl, 91 Hsieh, Tehching, 229 Huyghe, Pierre, 239

281

imagination, 25, 27, 35–36, 51, 56, 77 Impressionism, 58, 61–72, 77–79 industrial design, 105–7 industrial labor, 39–40, 54, 162, 228, 261 n. 13 industrial processes and production, 3, 4, 47, 217, 233 adopted by artists, 58, 70, 73, 196, 207– 8, 215 Purism and, 96–100 Ruskin on, 43, 53 industrialization, 21, 33–34, 53, 58, 82, 246–47 Dewey on, 118 effect on art, 62, 73, 75, 209 informe, 230–31 Ingres, J. A. D. , 61 inspiration, 23, 56, 60–2, 97, 116, 215 Hegel on, 37 Ruskin on, 46 Surrealism and, 123 Itten, Johannes, 107–8 Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard, 96–100 Jones, Caroline, 208, 261 n. 13 Judd, Donald, 108, 174, 184, 208 Kac, Edouardo, 242 Kandinsky, Wassily, 75, 85, 89, 132 Kant, Immanuel, 34–36, 38, 254 n. 21 Kaprow, Allan, 173–76, 180–81, 184, 205–6, 210, 260 n. 81 Kester, Grant, 244 Klee, Paul, 131 Koons, Jeff, 5, 9, 41, 232–36, 265 n. 23 Kosuth, Joseph, 5, 206 Krauss, Rosalind, 190–91, 230, 249 n. 18 Kwon, Miwon, 241 Lacy, Suzanne, 229, 243–44 Last, Nana, 241–42 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 54–55, 248 n. 1 Leonardo da Vinci, 25–30, 32, 45, 60, 112, 127 Le Va, Barry, 192–93, 263 n. 36

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Levine, Les, 203–6, 209 LeWitt, Sol, 36, 192, 206–8, 213, 221, 237 craft processes and, 218, 228 liberal arts vs. mechanical arts, 22–25 Lichtenstein, Roy, 179 Lippard, Lucy, 218–19 Lou, Liza, 232–35

282

Malevich, Kasimir, 75, 85, 89 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 65 Manet, Edouard, 65 manual labor, 38–39, 49, 54, 84, 151, 238 in Ancient Greece, 16–19 in the Renaissance, 27 modern artists and, 59, 100–107, 136 of the artist, 6, 10, 62, 72, 94, 232 of the craftsperson, 23, 28, 46, 215 Ruskin on, 42–45 Martin, Agnes, 192, 215, 228 Marx, Karl, 34, 39–42, 48, 113, 234, 250 n. 9 Masson, André, 122 Matisse, Henri, 58, 103, 123, 148, 150, 153 Dewey on, 119–20 Notes of a Painter, 75–84, 92, 97, 99, 109, 161 Merleau-Ponty on, 10, 131, 155 photographic documentation of painting, 91–96 McLuhan, Marshall, 173–4, 182–85, 195, 211, 216, 241 McNiff, Shaun, 225, 267 n. 51 mechanical processes and techniques, 21, 27–30, 33, 72–73, 78, 251 n. 42 amateurs and, 167–68 Hegel on, 37 Kant on, 35–36 LeWitt on, 206 McLuhan on, 182–84 photography as, 55–57 Ruskin on, 44–46 mechanization, 42, 161–62 Meissonier, Ernest, 61 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 132–33, 135, 142, 145, 186, 223 on Cézanne, 10, 68–69, 112, 129–31 on Matisse, 10, 131, 155 Michelangelo, 30–32, 112, 133 minimalism, 193–94, 196, 199, 202–3, 209, 215 Miró, Joan, 122 Mondrian, Piet, 75, 85, 119, 132, 169 series of, 87–91, 207–8 Monet, Claude, 9, 64, 85–87, 207–8 Montano, Linda, 13, 224

moral purpose and instruction, 23–24, 50–51, 60, 142–43, 145 existentialism and, 139 omission of, 82, 100 Morris, Robert, 184, 188, 192–203, 206–7, 221, 227–31 craft and, 214–17 Ehrenzweig and, 220 Morris, William, 29, 46–49, 53, 105, 162, 217 Morisot, Berthe, 12 Motherwell, Robert, 142–43, 145–46, 165, 170 music, 17, 79, 114, 175–76, 236, 262 n. 26 N55, 241 Namuth, Hans, 156 Neo-Fauvism, 123 Neo-Impressionism, 58, 70–74, 76, 79, 85, 97 New York school, 9, 95, 143–46, 158–59, 165, 170 Nietzsche, 177 Nolde, Emil, 103–4, 106 Orozco, Gabriel, 228–29, 231 Ozenfant, Amédée, 96–100, 252 n. 16 Paine, Roxy, 242 Palissy, Bernard, 28 Paracelsus, 28 Parreno, Philippe, 239 Parrhasios, 20, 32 Pearson, Ralph, 165 Peckham, Morse, 185, 195–97, 203 Pevsner, Nicholas, 24 Pheidias, 17 phenomenology, 69, 116, 118, 129, 133, 196–97. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice photographic documentation of artistic process, 78, 92–96, 147, 153–56, 190, 252 n. 16 photography, 55–57, 87 Picasso, Pablo, 103, 138, 148–50, 153–54, 169, 171 Cahiers d’Art and, 81, 91–92, 123 Guernica, 95–96, 154, 170, 257 n. 30 The Unknown Masterpiece and, 6–7 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 190–91, 220, 263 n. 35 Pissarro, Camile, 65, 71 Pliny, 20, 32 Plutarch, 17, 20 Pollock, Jackson, 155–58, 165, 172, 208 Kaprow on, 174 Morris on, 193, 197–98, 200 Schneemann on, 186 Polykleitos, 20

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Pop Art, 179, 209, 215 Postimpressionism, 69, 82, 85. See also NeoImpressionism Purism, 58, 96–100, 119, 122 Rank, Otto, 127–29 Raphael, 30, 104 Raynor, Vivien, 188–89, 259 n. 40 Realism, 62, 64, 79 Reinhardt, Ad, 170–71, 189, 192, 201–2, 211–13, 215 relational aesthetics, 229, 238–40, 244 Rhoades, Jason, 2, 238 Risatti, Howard, 216 Rose, Margaret, 40 Rosenberg, Harold, 142, 171–72, 174, 191–92, 211, 219 “The American Action Painters,” 9, 11, 144–47, 154–55, 157–59 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, Emile, 38–39 Ruskin, John, 34, 53, 97, 105–6, 162, 217 The Stones of Venice, 21–22, 42–49 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 139, 186 Sartwell, Crispin, 226, 228–39, 238, 240 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 197 Schapiro, Meyer, 68, 117–18 Schapiro, Miriam, 13, 186 Schiller, Friedrich, 39–40 Schneemann, Carolee, 1, 13, 186–87, 223 serial production, 84–92, 207–8 Serra, Richard, 108, 196, 201, 216, 220, 230 Seurat, Georges, 71, 251 n. 42 Shiff, Richard, 64, 151 Shusterman, Richard, 14–15, 226–29, 238, 240 Signac, Paul, 70–73, 76 sincerity, 80, 107–8, 121, 135, 139, 251 n. 52 Singerman, Howard, 169–71, 219–21 Smith, Pamela, 28 Smithson, Robert, 192, 203, 206, 210, 220 somaesthetics, 14, 226, 265 n. 9 Steinberg, Leo, 158–59 Stella, Frank, 197, 208, 227, 261 n. 5, 263 n. 50

Summers, David, 27–28 Surrealism, 94, 101, 126. See also automatism Suzuki, D. T., 168, 176 Sypher, Wylie, 175 systems aesthetics, 202–9 tacit knowledge, 28, 216, 249 n. 34 Taylorism, 98 Tériade, 123 therapy, art as, 50, 54–55, 83, 100, 217, 247 amateur artists and, 161–62 Hegel on, 37–38 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 239–40 Toffler, Alvin, 181–82

283

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 13, 179–80, 186, 192, 219, 223 unfinished artwork, 20, 31–32, 61, 65–66, 72, 89 The Unknown Masterpiece. See Balzac, Honoré de Van Gogh, Vincent, 58, 112 Varian, Elayne, 188, 190 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 29–32 Vernet, Horace, 40–41 Vigée–Lebrun, Elizabeth, 12 Vollard, Ambrose, 6 Wagner, Ann, 136–37 Warhol, Andy, 41, 179, 203, 208, 233 Weiss, Jeffrey, 91, 95 Whitehead, Alfred North, 125–26, 173, 177, 190, 195, 223, 255 n. 32 Williams, Raymond, 51 Zen Buddhism, 184, 212–13, 226–27, 260 n. 7, 263 n. 54 Cage and, 176 Kaprow and, 174 Zervos, Christian, 81, 91, 95, 123, 154 Zeuxis, 18–20, 25 Zola, Emile, 65, 67, 69, 112 Zuccaro, Federico, 32

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