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.
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 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.
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 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 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
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
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 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
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 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 twentieth-century 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:
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 as the continuous equilibration of a work’s successive elements in relation to the effect of the whole:
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):
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)
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. 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’ self-conceptions. 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 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 self-expression. 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 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 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 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 post-structuralist 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 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” 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, 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 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 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 long-developed 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:
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 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 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
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 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 ‘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:
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 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?
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.