“Existence” (in any of its senses) cannot be abstracted from “process.” The notions of process and existence presuppose each other.
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 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 three-dimensional 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 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 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 became politically engaged and considered their artistic activity in terms that were explicitly critical of contemporary society. As increasingly self-conscious 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” (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 non-mortal 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 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 post-1960 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 labor-intensive 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 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 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 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 self-expression, 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 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 non-literate 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 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 once-dominant 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 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 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 self-expression 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 manifest . . . 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.