The expansive tendencies of process art discussed in the previous chapter accelerated in the decades after 1970, and process has now become a dominating concern of contemporary artistic production, routinely cited in artist’s statements, curatorial presentations, and critical evaluations. Process represents a vital alternative to the conception of the artwork as a commodified object. Even the most traditional art objects may be presented in relation to processes as occasions for intensified experiences, thus emphasizing the artwork’s living purpose rather than its physical identity. The work of art as a material object is the result of a process, and it serves to instigate further processes of thought and feeling in those who encounter it. Process thus connotes experiential engagement and that the artwork, be it a portable object, a digital video, an installation, or a restaurant, does not require the self-sufficiency and autonomous value of a market commodity. It is an easy claim to make and one that signals an attitude rather than specifying the particular qualities of any given artwork.
This open-endedness is surely one of the reasons for the success of the term “process” and its related concepts. A generalized positivity, process may be employed and applied to any situation, and it will imply at the very least an engagement with time. It also often suggests a sensitivity to situation, an ability to adapt, a responsive malleability, an attitude that gives marked attention to the powers of environment to shape identity.1 Even works generated by isolated internal systems, such as paintings and drawings created by mutating computer programs, inevitably undergo changes occurring over time that mimic the evolutionary metamorphoses of living things. Contemporary art, broadly considered as a field of activity with prevailing attitudes, norms, and beliefs, accepts what process philosophers such as Whitehead and Bergson emphasized: there are no isolated, static, enduring entities; all is flux, change, process.
In recent decades the focus of the discipline of art history has paralleled the shift in contemporary artistic production away from the isolated object as commodity to consideration of the artwork within its social, economic, and political contexts. Structuralist and post-structuralist thought, often mediated through anthropological approaches, have been important influences in this change. One result of this shift has been the growth of art historical interest in previously overlooked artifacts from the “minor arts,” such as domestic furnishings and devotional sculptures, as well as greater attention to the role art has played in the lives of people and their communities. Art has not dissolved into life; it has become more firmly embedded within it, and that imbrication has become a primary concern of both scholars and artists. These general transformations of attitude and focus in both the study and creation of art have brought the concept of process into the foreground. To stress process and relation is by default to reject the significance of the artwork as an isolated commodity of intrinsic value and to acknowledge the primary importance of its relationships and use. Under the aegis of process the artwork is vital, it lives and acts, it creates and sustains relationships, and it serves as a force for transformation and renewal.
A driving force in the ever-increasing importance of process in contemporary art has been the establishment of a powerful and engaged feminist presence in the art world beginning in the 1970s. The importance of feminism in challenging and enlarging long-established notions of artistic process cannot be overstated. By claiming that domestic labor and the performing body enact creative processes, artists such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Carolee Schneemann helped to concretize the extensive potential of process as a central motive in contemporary art. The collaborative labor employed in many feminist art projects, most famously Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, has also had a profound influence on attention to the significance of artistic production processes that goes well beyond the individual artist’s creative travails, which were the focus of attention in the early and mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, the feminist insistence on the particularity of the individual body and its experiences greatly helped to extend the conception of creative processes beyond restrictive representations of “universal,” generally presumed to be male, artists as described by Merleau-Ponty and many others. In exposing patriarchal assumptions and prejudices and eliminating barriers to women, feminist artists contributed to an enormous expansion of what constitutes a meaningful artistic process and experience and to whom such processes and experiences are available.
In ways unimagined by John Dewey, art has become widely recognized as a universally available experience. Linda Montano’s book You Too Are a Performance Artist accompanied her 2013 exhibition “Always Creative” at SITE Santa Fe. It describes her performance pieces in chronological order, and on the facing page of each piece’s description is an instructional workbook for readers wishing to create their own version of the piece. This is a means for extending the artistic process to everyone as well as an outgrowth of Montano’s personal exploration of integrating art processes to all aspects of existence. Her 1973 piece Odd Jobs, in which she integrated art into performing odd jobs to earn money, is exemplary in this regard: “I painted rooms, while maintaining an art attitude of awareness, spontaneity, and imagination . . . I liked what I was doing when I called it art, probably because I was in a state of wakefulness that I associated with the art making process.”2 Montano’s “art attitude” has become pervasive. States of being associated with the arts and the processes of making and experiencing them are now considered among the most desirable personal experiences and achievements. Just as art has become deeply embedded within life, it has also become an emblem and index of the life well lived. The proliferation of DIY (do-it-yourself) venues, craft fairs, how-to books, and websites on the arts and crafts may be cited as evidence for the widespread desire of the general population to engage in creative production. Also telling is the ever-increasing number of students pursuing college degrees in the studio arts. Self-realization is associated with creativity, and creativity is a process traditionally associated with the arts. It is the artist’s creative process that remains the model for creativity in other disciplines such as the sciences and social sciences, which are more often conceived as restrained by rules and laws.3
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s discussions of creativity and his influential concept of “flow,” total absorption in an activity, are notable examples of a generalized notion of the psychological and personal achievements associated with the creative process. In Csikszentmihalyi’s view the creative process is necessary for a fulfilled life, one that does not succumb to the passive pleasures of the modern world, as well as for the general evolution of culture:
It is easy to . . . see the inner freedom of the creative person as an elite privilege. While the rest of us are struggling at boring jobs, they have the luxury of doing what they love to do, not knowing whether it is work or play. . . . Far more important . . . is the message that the creative person is sending us: You, too, can spend your life doing what you love to do. . . . Even if we don’t have the good fortune to discover a new chemical element or write a great story, the love of the creative process for its own sake is available to all. It is difficult to imagine a richer life. . . .
Creative individuals lead exemplary lives. They show how joyful and interesting complex symbolic activity is. . . . They have become pioneers of culture, models for what men and women of the future will be—if there is to be a future at all. It is by following their example that human consciousness will grow beyond the limitations of the past. . . . Perhaps our children, or their children, will feel more joy in writing poetry and solving theorems than in being passively entertained. The lives of these creative individuals reassure us that it is not impossible.4
Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of the creative process and “flow” is not limited to the practice or experience of art, paralleling contemporary attitudes within the arts themselves. Just as the creative process may be generalized to many, maybe even all, areas of human activity, the arts themselves can no longer be restricted to a limited number of traditionally sanctioned materials and activities. Here is where one can see the merging of art into life. In his 1998 book Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go, the artist and art therapist Shaun McNiff explicitly states that he aligns himself with the integration of art and life,” and that his book is a “reflection on creative living as well as art”: “I simply want to declare that a person’s license to create is irrevocable and it opens to every corner of daily life. The ways of creation are as natural as breathing and walking. We live within the process of creation just as much as it exists within us.”5 As society becomes more and more concerned with creative experience in the process of daily living, it begins to intersect with an art world that increasingly incorporates the processes of daily life into art’s arena. Distinctions become almost wholly a matter of context rather than determined by concrete differences in activity or experience. Artists become exemplary people who have made their creative process a central experience, whatever it entails physically and materially.
In addition to general social and cultural attitudes regarding the importance of the processes of creative experiences in ordinary existence, philosophers are also attempting to readdress issues of traditional aesthetics in relation to a new process-oriented approach to the arts. Dewey’s Art as Experience remains a major touchstone for the contemporary philosophers Richard Shusterman and Crispin Sartwell, who have outlined new ways of understanding the significance of aesthetic experience. Sartwell presents his Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions as an attempt to develop a theory of art that can be used to transform ordinary experience. He distinguishes between theories of art based on purpose (including most traditional Western aesthetic theories) and those that characterize art in terms of processes in the manner of Dewey.6 Such artistic processes must be intrinsically satisfying and absorbing pursuits, and thus are to be found in all areas of human activity.
Various Asian artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions are key references for Sartwell. Zen mindfulness is a fundamental aspect of the aesthetic experience in his view. He also sees Indian philosophy’s concept of knowing as a type of fusion with the object of knowledge as a more meaningful approach to epistemology than Cartesian dualism: “To see a tree is to be fused with a tree. . . . Seeing is like breathing: a process in which part of my environment is incorporated into my body, in which the distinction between myself and the object is collapsed.” For Sartwell the dominant aesthetics of modernism as defined by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried with its emphasis on vision and a transcendent idealism is the result of modern Western aesthetics’ perverse emphasis on art for art’s sake and progressive development.7 A reevaluation of the centrality of process in aesthetics will return Western notions of art to their proper role in the attentively lived experiences of individuals in relation to the world around them.
Like Sartwell, Richard Shusterman seeks to revitalize Western aesthetics, which he sees as having motivated the once-fecund developments of modern art that have reached their end. More engaged with debates and issues directly concerning contemporary artists, critics, and theorists than Sartwell, Shusterman advances the belief that aesthetics necessarily engage the body and senses. The recent turn to conceptual, an-aesthetic art has resulted in the greater appeal and success of the popular arts, particularly popular music, where pleasure and affect still reign and can provide an antidote to our largely affectless information culture.8 Of particular interest to Shusterman is the arena of bodily experience and its contribution to philosophical knowledge, which he has denominated “somaesthetics.”9 In the current information age Shusterman sees the body as the most stable and durable aspect of individual existence; it is what we use to organize our world and establish a unified identity.10 Attention to the body and its experience are the necessary means for people to maintain their sense of self in a world increasingly dominated by abstractions and immaterial forms of information. Shusterman’s work builds directly on Dewey’s pragmatism and conviction that experience is the solid ground for understanding. His engagement with theorizing the body as a source of knowledge and identity also situates his thought in close relation to contemporary craft theorists who similarly address physical ways of knowing.11
The increasing valorization of physical engagement in material practices in the so-called visual arts in recent decades has resulted in a marked degree of critical self-consciousness on the part of artists, critics, and theorists. Given the importance of Robert Morris’s writings and art for the development of the turn to the physical in the 1960s it is not surprising that he continued to question the significance of the physical processes of art making during the subsequent decades.12 In 1981 Morris considered the relationship of the decorative to the therapeutic activities qualities associated with repetitive and rhythmic processes of making that have been employed since prehistory: “It brings to the fore an impulse that is ancient and pervasive: that repetitive physiological twitch of eye and hand that is both productive and lulling. It has always been there in every handmade artifact from the knitted sweater to a Stella striped painting.” In Morris’s view the prevalence of decorative art indicates a refusal of social engagement, a retreat from action:
He who practices the decorative would appear to be a happy Zen master whittling on a stick. The decorative refuses questions in its dedication to the repetitive and automatic. . . . Whether mindless or enlightened, this work constitutes the great refusal. Its rhythms are linked to those bodily sequences of the repetitive required for the first tools ever made. Its very endlessness, its automatic procedures, and its avoidance of decision promote it as the ultimate activity of escape. . . .
Numbness in the face of a gigantic failure of imagination has set in. The decorative is the apt mode for such a sensibility, being a response on the edge of numbness . . . the ultimate response to a pervasive death anxiety. Perhaps we can all become Zen masters. After all, Zen originated as a martial discipline that enabled the samurai to become indifferent to his own demise.
Morris employs the notion of the decorative broadly to include much more than the appearance of the work. Like the well-established conception of craft as predetermined production outlined by Collingwood, Morris associates the process of making decorative works with “repetitive, rhythmic, physical activity in which the anxiety of decision-making is absent, or has occurred initially and prior to the action.”13 He explicitly includes the artists Sol LeWitt, Hanne Darboven, and Agnes Martin in this category.
Morris’s ideas form an interesting contrast to contemporary craft theorists’ discussions of repetitive making in which repetition is never simple repetition in the manner of industrial assembly-line labor but rather part of a process of mastery. The tact developed by the craftsperson during innumerable hours of practicing a craft is not a form of avoidance, therapy, or relaxation, but a physical form of learning in which the body and mind acquire knowledge of a material and its potential. While not a formula for direct critical social intervention, philosophers such as Shusterman and Sartwell see this experience as crucial in developing both self-identity and a more engaged awareness of the self’s relation to the physical world.14 These acquisitions need not foster only escapism and refusal; indeed, strong self-identity and attentive engagement with the surrounding environment may surely create a foundation for social and political action. Something of this nature seems implicit in Benjamin Buchloh’s comment on contemporary artists’ engagement with traditional skills: “One paradox of aesthetic deskilling has of course been the fact that while the historical desire for artistic skills has disappeared, the desire to implement skills as an opposition to the anomic destruction of the self has increased its urgency.”15 From being a basic requirement of artistic ability and success, artistic skills (engagement with the material craft of a given art form) have become a means to create a sense of self-identity and social worth.
Buchloh’s comment was made at the conclusion of a catalog essay on Gabriel Orozco, an artist whose practice is wide-ranging in its materials and approaches. He has photographed the evanescent appearance of vapor from his breath on the veneer of a highly polished black piano and worked with a group of assistants to draw tattoo-like patterns on a life-size replica of a whale skeleton. Generally considered a conceptual artist in his overall approach, Orozco draws attention to the ways in which the material and conceptual are tightly interwoven in his art-making process. He has exhibited his working tables, which present the accumulated material residue of years of work, and in an interview he stated, “You need all that accumulation of things left over. Production processes are co-opted, but these tables cannot be.”16 It appears that it is just this activity, the manifesting of ideas in physical forms, that most concerns the artist. According to Briony Fer, “For Orozco, I think, ‘process’ means something quite different from what it meant for the Post-Minimalists. . . . Against a ‘specific object’ is set an indeterminate one in a permanent state of incompletion. Material process is a thought process, not a product, let alone a finished product. Conversely, thought is manifested as material. Thinking occurs through things, where material things are a necessary condition of thought.”17 Orozco himself said, “It motivates me to constantly situate myself at the beginning of a process, to be a beginner at something.”18 While these statements tend to be vague and generally applicable to any number of artists, they represent an attempt to pin down the practice of an artist who works between traditional processes of material production and reductive conceptual approaches. How does the viewer or critic connect such disparate works in so many media in a way that does not rely solely on the artist’s personal identity or some sort of overarching message? The answer that many critics have supplied for Orozco is that the artist explores the effects of concept and chance not simply on materials or systems, but on engaged processes of making.
The significant relation of the conceptual to the artist’s processes is also explored by contemporary artists whose work focuses exclusively on performance and action rather than the creation of material objects. Arguably such work may be understood as a particularly pure investigation of process understood first and foremost as the experience of existing in time. Suzanne Lacy has described performance and conceptual art as instrumental in isolating the process of art, helping to bring to the fore “one of the most basic elements of art: the experiencing being.”19 Tehching Hsieh’s successive yearlong performance pieces were on the most basic level a process of experiencing what it means to exist within the limited parameters of a defining concept. In reference to his first One Year Performance, in which he isolated himself in his tiny studio, he said, “I tried to bring art and life together in time, and to be in this as a process. I was so concentrated on thinking about art. . . . What’s important to me is that people can see that in this special period of time, one year, the artist’s thinking process became a work of art.”20 Hsieh’s personally rigorous One Year Performance pieces are far removed from the physical processes associated with artistic skills and craft production, but they may nevertheless be criticized as escapist and insufficiently politically and socially engaged in the ways Morris critiques the processes of making preconceived “decorative” art. Likewise, they may be appreciated in the terms laid out by Shusterman and Sartwell for their deeply experiential investigation of the physical self in the world. And, as we shall see, focus on the processes and experience of being so central to the socially isolated performance artist is a significant component of relational aesthetics and socially engaged art practices, where close attention to ordinary social processes and relationships is a primary means of defining them as artistic processes.
In recent decades the general concepts of process have been well-established as an arena for artistic activity as well as a critical cliché indicating an artist’s engaged concern with the experiential aspects of his or her practice and its effects. A rare attempt to develop the concept may be found in the notion of the informe (formless) as theorized by Rosalind Krauss. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’s 1997 book Formless: A User’s Guide, which accompanied an exhibition they co-curated at the Pompidou Center in Paris, takes the form of an idiosyncratic encyclopedia of concepts and terms, with artworks employed as exemplary illustrations. Among the latter are well-known examples of process art. Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead is described by Krauss under the heading “Moteur” as “a demonstration of his own determination to invade the fixed image of stabile sculpture with the counterimage of ‘process,’ of something continually in the act of making and unmaking itself.” Bois likewise emphasizes the role of process in the work of Robert Morris and Lygia Clark, but the most illuminating comments appear in the context of Krauss’s concluding essay, “The Destiny of the Informe,” in which she insists on the concept of informe as describing operations and procedures that “deal a low blow to the processes of form.”21 The formless is a process of subversion, not a category of materials or the simple inverse of form with good gestalt.
Citing Georges Bataille, Krauss defines abjection (a cognate of the informe) “operationally, as a process of ‘alteration,’ in which there are no essentialized or fixed terms, but only energies within a force field.”22 Closely connected to a deconstructive practice, Krauss’s concept of the informe is an attempt to formulate an alternative means of conceptualizing aspects of modern artists’ practice that counter or replace the formalist approaches associated with Greenbergian modernism. The informe has been criticized on the grounds that it fails to provide a strong alternative to the idealist terms and fundamental oppositions of formalism, offering only a reversal of values that still relies on and reifies the essential categories it claims to overthrow. Regardless of its purported failure to thoroughly reconceptualize the terms of modern art and thought, however, taken in broad terms the informe may be seen as a rare attempt to theorize an aspect of artistic process in terms that go beyond simple description.
Conceived as a destabilizing operation with roots in the fundamental structures of the human mind as developed by a largely Lacanian psychoanalysis, the informe offers an approach to theorizing the potential of artistic process to undermine the accepted categories of thought and action. However, the concept of the informe fails to achieve any serious disruption of the relation of the artwork to commodity culture. The artworks associated with the informe are not understood as psychological fetishes, objects that replace a fundamental lack; they are rather the residue of a psychological activity, a deconstructive process of “unforming.” Nevertheless, these residue objects continue to function as commodity fetishes in the art world; they are reified as objects containing all the symbolic values associated with difficult “high” art. To a portion of the contemporary art world, to merely reconceive the psychological underpinning of certain artists’ processes of creation is relatively trivial as long as that reconception leaves the existing power structures and economy in place. Thus the informe has been criticized as merely offering a reconfiguration of preexisting aesthetic values rather than a thorough deconstruction of art in all its traditional modes and purposes.
The sociopolitical conscience and consciousness of art in recent decades has become both a dominant value and a means to justify the social relevance of art. Employing cultural criticism as a means to raise awareness, question established values, and work to effect the establishment of more liberal and democratic attitudes has become a common approach in contemporary art since the 1980s. (Robert Morris’s critique of the processes of making “decorative” art discussed above is one instance of this preeminent concern.) This preoccupation with sociopolitical engagement as well as high-level theoretical and conceptual content has been accompanied by its seeming opposite—art that revels in its inconsequence and pleasure in the unintellectual. In the cerebral world of art criticism and theory, however, even the art most celebrated for its refusal of intellectual and theoretical content is perceived as providing conceptual or sociopolitical commentary.23 Process, in contrast, represents a positive value that has been allowed to remain generally outside the realm of theory and often, to a degree, politics. As discussed above, it is employed as a means to justify the significance of the disparate and apolitical work of Gabriel Orozco without relying on the notion of artistic self-expression. The artist’s works are the products of a process of making thought material. Nothing could be simpler or more basic. What distinguishes the artist from the inventor or scientist, whose work also materializes concepts, is that the final product is not evaluated in terms of its utility. In fact, the uselessness of the artist’s product is often what makes its production process meaningful.
Some contemporary artists have made the labor involved in their production process central to individual artworks. A notable example is Janine Antoni’s Slumber (1993), in which the artist slept in the gallery while an electroencephalograph recorded the brainwave signals of her rapid eye movements (REM). When awake, she worked at a loom using strips from her nightgown to transcribe her recorded REM patterns into a blanket. Creative labor becomes performance here as well as a means to create an art object, and neither aspect can be isolated from the whole. Even the artist’s rest is part of the artwork and its production process with the REM pattern created while she dreams indexing the activity of her subconscious mind, the purported source of inspiration and creativity. Although the work suggests a closed circuit of artistic process, Antoni expressly engaged visitors to the gallery in conversation as she worked on the weaving. Thus the piece, which has been performed in different locations over the course of many years, also has a social dimension that incorporates others in what seems to be a presentation of the artist’s personal creative process. Physicality is a characteristic of Antoni’s work as a whole, and she has stated that she is particularly interested in both the ways viewers imaginatively engage with the physical actions she has made to produce her works and in creating works that require the viewer for their completion. Antoni thus continues a long tradition of engaging the viewer in the artist’s creative process that was, as we have seen, central to modern art theory.
The work of many contemporary artists explicitly engages with the social, political, and commercial issues associated with artistic labor. This is true of very different types of artists, such as Liza Lou, who spent years creating life-size replicas of a kitchen and backyard lawn in tiny glass beads, and Jeff Koons, who hires traditionally trained artisans and studio assistants to make his works. Both make pointed commentaries on the nature of handwork in the contemporary world and its relation to the art object as a commodity. Koons’s distance from the manual production of his highly crafted, monstrous-kitsch artworks is integral to his ironic embrace of luxury commodity culture in an age of consumerism and wealth fueled by manipulating financial abstractions such as high-frequency trading and complex derivatives. In contrast, Liza Lou’s early bead works are the products of immense amounts of the artist’s own meticulous handwork.
Often interpreted in terms of commentary on the drudgery of women’s domestic labor, Lou’s Kitchen is a powerful manifestation of the artist’s long-term engagement with a remarkably tedious and intensive labor process commonly associated with traditional handcrafts. The sheer scale of the project, as well as its conceptual engagement with issues of gender and labor, make it an important site for considering the nature of the artist’s process and its difference and points of intersection with domestic work and craft. In recent years Lou has opened a studio in South Africa where she employs local craftswomen in the production of her bead-based art. Lou’s workshop offers the example of a socially conscious employment of cheap craft labor notably different from Jeff Koons’s polished New York “factory” of more than seventy assistants. Despite the differences, however, both artists demonstrate the place of anonymous handcraft labor in the contemporary art world where widespread reliance on studio assistants has become conspicuous. Koons has repeatedly pointed out that Rubens and Rembrandt had large studios, examples that prove a large studio in no way inhibits either the realization or the recognition of individual artistic greatness. Unlike his illustrious predecessors, however, Koons does not have the skills to physically make his own works. Commonly described as a conceptual artist, Koons supplies the ideas, controls the quality of the products, and acts as the owner, designer, and general overseer of a factory that makes luxury art objects. The working process is of no greater importance to the final project than the factory practices of Maserati or Prada, and that is part of the point of Koons’s art.
The production processes of Jeff Koons’s artwork are well aligned with the values represented by luxury consumer culture. The label is the guarantor of status and quality; the processes that produced the shiny final product are in themselves irrelevant. To be concerned with the production processes would destroy the sense of the object’s inevitability, its magical presence. Also significant is the relationship of Koons’s factory production processes to those of his conceptual predecessor, Andy Warhol. As has often been noted, Koons’s studio is a markedly professional venture unlike Warhol’s haphazard 1960s Factory, which was as much a social scene as it was a production space for artworks. In his own studio Koons has exponentially increased the vaunted impersonality of Warhol’s production processes as exemplified by his use of paint-by-number techniques. Warhol’s early 1960s Do It Yourself series mocked the contemporary amateur fad of painting by mechanically following a numbered system of color application. Warhol’s “unfinished” paint-by-numbers paintings made it obvious that the production process and its regimented anonymity was the subject of the work. Koons, by contrast, uses the technique as a practical means to unify the work of his assistants and guarantee its impersonality and efficiency. The final product, which gives no indication of its process of production, has all the painterly personality of a Hollywood billboard, and it is just that magical appearance of an image that is the desired effect.
The work of Liza Lou is notably different from Koons’s in that the enormous amount of labor that goes into the making of her artworks is integral to their meaning and effect. This was particularly true when she worked alone for years beading Kitchen and Backyard. Her shift to a workshop production system markedly changed the significance of her works. From the exhibition of a lone “obsessive” woman’s handwork, Lou’s art has become more directly political in its content and its production processes. Lou’s South African studio and its many workers is an example of an attempt to ameliorate the economic lives of the inhabitants of the putative third world. It is an art world venture comparable to the Peace Corps or, more precisely, fair trade organizations. Lou’s art represents direct engagement with certain political and social values, which in turn add to the products’ economic value. Furthermore, Lou’s imminently practical goal to employ workers with training in traditional South African beading adds another value to her workshop production—it is, at least conceptually, infused with the vitality of traditional tribal craft production.
One thing that may be considered a link between the very different productive arenas created by Koons and Lou is the degree to which both artists’ studio practices reveal the distance from active making prevalent in the contemporary Western world. Although there is currently a widespread popular fashion for DIY practice often linked to an environmentally concerned political and social conscience, the general attitudes of Western culture are markedly divorced from the messy processes of object production. As Jessica Stockholder and Joe Scanlan noted in their introduction to a 2004 forum on art and labor at Yale University:
Now we are aware of very little, if any, of the making of the things we need. It happens elsewhere, often overseas. . . . Where Marx worried about alienated labor . . . today we experience the opposite . . . phenomenon of being able to buy things we could not afford to make. . . . It is . . . painful and numbing to be so divorced from the making of things and from the people who make them for us. Our art of today reflects this distance. And so a lot of art, on the face of it, seems to be not about making but about choosing. . . . Art mirrors our lack of production or, more precisely, it mirrors how acceptable modes of production—what we are willing or unwilling to do—have changed.24
Koons’s New York studio/factory filled with anonymous assistants producing “his” art and Lou’s South African workshop doing likewise (although Lou, unlike Koons, does participate in the physical production of her works) both demonstrate how the contemporary artist’s labor is “outsourced.”
Koons and Lou are extreme examples of a contemporary phenomenon that itself is perhaps not as abrupt a divorce from past practice as it might seem at first glance. Although the vast studio workshops of successful artists from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century largely disappeared in the heyday of modern art, modern artists who could afford to do so commonly employed assistants to help with the administrative and practical aspects of their studio practice. What has changed is the degree to which studio assistants have become integral to the actual production of the final product. Koons’s production studio lies at one extreme of this spectrum, but many contemporary artists could not efficiently produce their work without the aid of many assistants. This is particularly true for complex site-specific installations that must be created in place and on schedule. For some of these the immense amount of labor involved in the creation of the work is integral to its effect, and it does make a distinct difference to know that many people created the work rather than just one person.
Tara Donovan’s works consist of arrangements of many thousands of common objects, such as plastic drinking straws, Styrofoam cups, or index cards, to create visually striking forms. Haze, a cloud-like wall made of plastic drinking straws, impresses viewers not only because such a banal object can be used to create a beautiful and unexpected optical effect, but also because of the overwhelming number of meticulously placed straws required to achieve it. Officially created by one person, Tara Donovan, most viewers automatically envision the lone artist at work for weeks arranging hundreds of thousands of straws and respond with intensified awe at the achievement. If authorial credit were given to all the assistants who worked on the piece, many viewers would likely ignore authorship altogether and consider the work in a manner comparable to the designed effects of movie sets or amusement parks. Unlike similarly striking popular entertainments, however, Donovan’s work as presented in galleries and museums depends on the tradition of artists who make their works by hand.
It is no secret that Donovan employs assistants; for her 2008–9 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the museum situated information specialists in the galleries to discuss the works and explain exactly how they were made. Published material on the artist such as catalog essays and exhibition reviews, however, do not typically mention the labor of assistants and often refer to the works as if they were created by the artist alone. Contemporary artists and their critics embrace the employment of assistants as a matter of course, and despite the occasional comment that disparages their employment in the case of technically incompetent artists like Koons, there seems to be no serious objection. The artist’s role as the conceptual generator of the work has long been considered adequate justification for his or her denomination as its sole author.25
Other art forms have recently changed the ways they credit those who assist in the production of a work, even while maintaining traditional authorial credit. In recent literature, both literary and scholarly, published author’s acknowledgments now provide a lengthy and detailed account of the many individuals who contributed in some manner to the production of a book, even to the level of thanking friends and family members who cooked meals and offered personal “support.” (The technicians—typesetters and the like—responsible for the physical creation of the book are, however, very rarely acknowledged by the author.) Ever-expanding movie credits are another example of a trend toward acknowledging the labors of the most peripheral contributors to a work of art. In contrast, even large retrospective catalogs of most artists’ work do not acknowledge the hired assistants who physically produced the works, nor the typically large network of professional supporters and suppliers who contributed directly to the works’ production, much less the more nebulous assistance of friends and family.
The disjunction created by the traditional conception of the artist as sole producer of the works attributed to him or her is not the only interesting aspect of the contemporary trend of conceiving and executing works heavily dependent on the labor of assistants. Also significant is the growing importance of the artist’s role as a social organizer of a group work process. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the most well-known artists to have made this role the acknowledged center of their art and its process.26 Although social engagement has become a recognized art world value, contemporary installation artists who rely on the labor of assistants do not foreground this aspect of their process as a meaningful part of the work. Assistants seem to be considered, for the most part, of less significance than the sites and materials used, which are often discussed in artists’ statements. Comparable in importance to equipment or tools, assistants are necessary but rarely acknowledged publicly.
Long-standing art world conventions are one reason for the continuing tendency to attribute artworks to a single author without qualification or addition. Similar conventions exist in architecture, although in architecture, unlike the visual arts, it is well-known that the architect credited with a building’s design typically works collaboratively in a firm—itself often named after its lead designer, whose name is the equivalent of a brand marker or label. What makes the art world’s general tendency to avoid mention of assistants as significant parts of the production process interesting is the degree to which the omission indicates the tension between competing art world values. On the one hand, there is the conventional role of the artist as the sole author and generator, even genius, of the work. Buttressing this role is the now common claim that a specific work is fundamentally conceptual, no matter how large and obdurately material it may in fact be. The artist is the individual who conceived the work; all others who contribute to its physical manifestation are mere anonymous laborers. On the other hand, the romantic conception of the lone authorial genius has long been attacked as obsolete, and for decades artists have assaulted traditional notions of artistic identity from almost every imaginable angle. The artist no longer has to make anything or have any specific skills, but as the widespread refusal to eliminate the notion of the artist as the individual “creator” of an artwork indicates, the essence of authorship remains a central art world value. It is the process and experience of that individual artist/creator, not his or her assistants, that matters when discussing the genesis of an artwork. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are rare exceptions to this general rule in making a significant point of the distinction between the conception of the piece and the physical making of it. But even these typically give authorial credit to LeWitt, and only secondarily, if at all, to the physical makers.
There are exceptions to the enduring embrace of individual authorship. Increasing numbers of artist groups have rejected the concept of the lone artist/creator and adopted a corporate/group identity. It remains to be determined how such groups will affect general views of the creative process and whether they will offer new ways of valuing collaborative production. Many of these groups work in areas and media long associated with relatively anonymous group production such as architecture, design, and event coordination. As we have seen throughout this book, the values traditionally associated with the artist’s creative process have been connected to the individual, particularly the psychology and experience of the artist at work. The individual working artist has long been considered the liberated ideal of the modern worker whose processes are fully self-generated and self-directed. The processes of collaborative artist groups address the embedded sociality of creative production to a much higher degree, but this does not mean they are necessarily embarking on wholly new terrain. Not only are certain media like architecture and design traditionally associated with group creative production, there are now many business environments, most famously those of Apple and Google, that foster creative production through relaxed, nonhierarchical, stimulating environments and relationships.
In 2001 Jason Rhoades created a collaborative artwork at the Städelschule in Frankfurt where he was a visiting artist. Titled Costner Complex (Perfect Process), the project was installed in the school’s Portikus gallery and consisted of art students producing industrial-scale amounts of salad dressing containing the “essence” of Kevin Costner. The curator and head of the Städelschule, Daniel Birnbaum, later described the project in Artforum, quoting Rhoades’s own statements: “What Rhoades was after in the work was a kind of collective bliss, a moment where everyone worked in ‘perfect harmony,’ performing ‘smoothly and efficiently, having surrendered to the task at hand,’ as he [Rhoades] wrote in the catalogue. ‘It is not meant to be viewed as an object, a performance or even a goal-oriented activity, but simply as a perfect process.’”27 Rhoades’s emphasis on harmony and surrender suggests the long-standing tradition of conceiving art making as a fully immersive and focused activity. As we have seen, this is the approach examined and promoted not only by Dewey, but also by contemporary philosophers Shusterman and Sartwell, as well as the sociologist Csikszentmihalyi. By directing his efforts to create a perfect process toward a mundane project requiring simple group labor,28 Rhoades’s Costner Complex (Perfect Process) suggests that any group activity may achieve fully attentive experiential harmony. Indeed, it might well imply that simple group labor is the key to such a state. Rhoades’s work is an example of the widespread contemporary cultural tendency to reevaluate the experiential virtues of simple manual labor,29 a trend that is hardly surprising in an era when ever more people’s working and leisure experiences are primarily engaged with the nonphysical world mediated by the computer screen.
Jason Rhoades was associated with curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, and Costner Complex is a good example of what Bourriaud described as the relational artists’ concern for social process and experience as the basis of their art.30 The art object for such artists “does not represent the logical end of the work, but an event.”31 Conceptually related to process philosophy, and explicitly linked to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,32 Bourriaud’s view of the dominant artistic concerns of the 1990s stressed the importance of time and ever-shifting relationships. He cited Guattari as a source for understanding the practices of contemporary artists who use time as a material to create and stage “devices of existence including working methods and ways of being, instead of concrete objects.” Their efforts are in line with Guattari’s assertion that “the only acceptable end purpose of human activities is the production of a subjectivity that is forever self-enriching its relationship with the world.”33
Bourriaud saw relational artists as creating works that instantiate largely indeterminate and unregulated processes drawn from everyday life. He explicitly distinguished their work from the process art of the 1960s and 1970s, which he grouped with conceptual art and described as fetishizing the mental process to the detriment of the object. Bourriaud claimed, “Present-day art does not present the outcome of a labour, it is the labour itself, or the labour-to-be.” Even when relational art takes the traditional form of images, Bourriaud declared that the artist’s process is central: “Making a work involves the invention of a process of presentation. In this kind of process, the image is an act.”34 An example of this notion of image as act can be seen in Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe’s project No Ghost Just a Shell, in which a copyrighted Japanese manga figure named Annlee was purchased and employed by a number of artists in animated videos. The entire project embraces the life of an image through its permutations, not just as the literal image of an imaginary figure, but as a legal identity and an open signifier subject to the processes of communication and economic exchange that structure modern societies.
No Ghost demonstrates that relational aesthetics as described by Bourriaud engages with the concept of process on an extremely broad scale. It may be seen as an attempt to theorize, or at a minimum locate and outline, the common concerns of a broad array of artists working in ways that evade the traditional production of art objects as commodities. The most widely recognized exemplar of relational aesthetics, Rirkrit Tiravanija, is famous for gallery installations in which he made and served Thai soup to anyone who dropped by. His works engage the processes of social interaction, often in terms of designed spaces. The production of T-shirts, often with politicized messages, is another manifestation of Tiravanija’s engagement with forms of social interaction, as is the artistic community/retreat The Land he created in Thailand with fellow artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert. The openness of Tiravanija’s work, which primarily offers occasions for undefined experience, could be considered concerned with process; however, that concern is so diffuse that it offers little purchase for further specific reflection.
Carsten Höller, another artist associated with relational aesthetics, often makes biological processes central to his works. Höller, who formerly worked as a research entomologist, is one of many contemporary artists whose artwork engages biological, or mock-biological, processes. In Höller’s installations human visitors act as test subjects, sometimes in relation to animals and plants, as in Soma, where visitors slept in an installation with reindeer, mice, canaries, and flies who may have ingested psychoactive mushrooms. Comparable to animal behaviorist experiments, Holler’s installations place the visitor in the role of the experiencing subject in a created environment. Liam Gillick likewise focuses on designing environments, in his case in the geometric forms of modernism, that become containers for the social experiences of their visitors. The artist’s own creative processes are of little to no importance in such works, which foreground the experiences of those who visit them. The attentive visitor may become more conscious of the ways their attitudes and experiences are shaped by the spaces they occupy, a consciousness that may expand into a broader awareness of how social spaces are part of a pervasive process of socialization that promotes specific values and attitudes.
It is unclear how much so-called relational artists like Tiravanija, Höller, and Gillick depend on promoting conscious awareness in the viewers and participants of their work. Critics have deplored the lack of political engagement in the artists promoted by Bourriaud35 and suggested that their work merely provides a rarified form of art world entertainment in an affluent society dominated by mindless experience and popular entertainments.36 Regardless of the validity of this criticism, it is certain that the focus on participation and experience by many contemporary artists reflects the values of a society in which the accumulation of experiences increasingly dominates leisure activities. Artists who offer occasions for active experience provide their audiences with settings that encourage a more thoughtful and conscious perception of those experiences. It was just this intensified awareness of experience that Dewey defined as integral to the processes of making and perceiving art. In its broadest sense, then, certain contemporary artists have expanded the experiences of art beyond the traditional boundaries of the processes of making an object and the perception of it as a made object, to the processes of living and the perception of those as experiential processes. As contemporary philosophers Shusterman and Sartwell claim, art develops experiential awareness; it is about processes, not things.
Relational aesthetics may be seen as one curator’s effort to pin down a very broad attitude in contemporary society and the arts. Although criticized for its vagueness and lack of critical and political engagement, Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics was an ambitious and influential attempt to give an overarching definition for contemporary artists’ widespread engagement with practices focused on relations and processes rather than the production of objects. Miwon Kwon has also contributed to the discussion about process as it relates to contemporary site-specific artwork: “The ‘work’ no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process, provoking the viewers’ critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of viewing.” This is a major theme that runs throughout contemporary art and the critical/theoretical writing that addresses it. Critics (and artists) often connect artists’ engagement with processes rather than products to late capitalism, the shift to an information economy, and the effects of globalization, particularly in terms of the flow of information, goods, and labor: “The very nature of the commodity as a cipher of production and labor relations is no longer bound to the realm of manufacturing (of things) but is defined in relation to the service and management industries.” Deleuze’s concepts of the rhizome and nomadism have become standard reference points for conceptualizing the fluid, decentralized, and nonhierarchical systems that purportedly structure contemporary reality. Kwon states, “What is the commodity status of anti-commodities, that is, immaterial, process-oriented, ephemeral, performative events? . . . The nomadic principle also defines capital and power in our times.”37
Emphasis on process is hardly limited to the arts or a politicized discourse related to social and economic trends. It pervades the contemporary world, particularly in relation to the worldwide interconnections of digital communication and media systems. These, in keeping with McLuhan’s thesis that the medium is the message, structure much current thinking throughout the sciences and humanities.38 In a world increasingly focused on systems and interactions, it is not surprising that artists are engaged with these new terms. Writing about the contemporary Danish group N55, Nana Last describes their work in terms of systemic interventions and manipulations:
Working from within the structures proposed and disseminated by practices such as N55’s forces fluctuations between people and things, between living systems and information systems, to suggest their ineluctable interdependence. . . . Dissemination of . . . [their] ideas and distribution of the procedures for their construction are essential components of the work itself, so that information systems are as much a site of production, inquiry, and life support as are the physical units that form the various modules of inhabitation. The issues raised by the Internet-based dissemination that N55 employs are furthered by the formal construction of the projects themselves. . . . Once put into the hands of others, the products, despite the specificity of the manuals, are open to interpretation, mutation, and a host of other transformative processes.
In Last’s view process is central to N55’s work: “The sense of an ongoing production process that the work engenders is its most compelling aspect, giving the work its value and content. It develops this way as its systematicity develops not just in the objects N55 produces but in the fact that it fundamentally distributes ideas, not objects.”39 Even though they provide plans for object creation, those objects are vehicles for transmitting ideas about how to live an ecologically and economically sustainable existence. Presumably, emphasizing the ideas rather than the relatively transitory objects they create is intended to suggest a more enduring intervention in the world by affecting consciousness, which will change people’s lives and attitudes.
The broad engagement with process that characterizes much contemporary art is also evident in the work of many artists whose work makes an explicit process or processes its subject. This is especially common among artists whose work addresses science and the natural environment. To cite a few prominent examples, Mark Dion’s work explores the systems and classifications of the natural sciences through dioramas and installations. His Neukom Vivarium (2006) in the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washington, straddles the dividing line between art and scientific display of natural processes of growth and regeneration. It is a climate-controlled installation of an eighty-foot-long decaying Western Hemlock log that supports the emergence of new plant life. Edouardo Kac engages with genetics as a means of artistic creation. He has worked with scientists in manipulating genes to create a florescent rabbit (GPF Bunny, 2000) and a hybrid flower (Natural History of the Enigma, 2003–8) that contains Kac’s own DNA. Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries (2006) is a series of “biotopes” that are framed containers for living microbial environments, which the artist manipulates and displays on the wall like traditional pictures. Roxy Paine explores both natural and artificial production processes. He has created computer programmed art-making machines such as SCUMAK (Auto Sculpture Maker) (1998) and PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit) (1999–2000) and exhibited them at work along with their products. Paine also has designed his own fictional tree species based on the natural growth processes of real trees and fabricated them in metal according to their own processes of “growth.”
For these artists, engaging natural and artificial processes in their work is a means to address the human relationship with nature and creation in a manner more traditionally reserved for scientists. Their work breaks down long-held distinctions between the modern artist as self-expressive individual primarily concerned with aesthetic, potentially spiritual, issues and the scientist as objective researcher seeking to understand and master natural laws. These artists find in natural and artificial processes both their subjects and their medium. Their works are objects for contemplation and often ethical consideration, unlike conventional scientific displays, which are primarily didactic and intended to convey “neutral” information. As nonscientists engaging in putatively scientific investigations these artists’ works also serve to demonstrate how anyone may participate in the conscious exploration and questioning of processes that affect everyone’s life. How does artificial creation affect the world? Should human beings make living beings to order? Can machines create art? Are natural processes objects of art? Are creative processes inherently good, and how do we evaluate them?
In recent years one of the most prominent art world debates has concerned the definition and significance of what have been termed socially engaged art practices. Like artists whose work involves the practices and processes of scientific investigation, socially engaged artists work on nonart terrain, one usually occupied by social workers, community activists, educators, and the inclusive category of nonprofit organizations known as NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). Broadly understood, their work encompasses the entirety of social processes, and it is often difficult to distinguish from the social activism of nonartists. What precisely makes such work art, and how can it be evaluated? These questions continue to spark serious debate. In 1995 Suzanne Lacy defined the process of public art projects, which involve entire communities to realize, as central to their identity as art. In her view, performance and conceptual art isolated and focused on the artist’s process, thereby paving the way for artists to take a more public role as a conduit for the experiences of others in a social group, something she describes as offering empathy as a public service.40 Lacy does not limit her conception of the artistic process in “new genre public art” to the artist’s anthropological empathy for a social group. She also outlines a spectrum of activities involved in public art projects that engage all participants (including a distant audience that knows the work only by report), in a mutually reinforcing, expansive, and interactive process. Lacy calls for a redefinition of art, “not primarily as a product but as a process of value finding, a set of philosophies, an ethical action, and an aspect of a larger sociocultural agenda.”41
Grant Kester is another prominent critical promoter of socially engaged art who has described process as central to its identity. He is dedicated to “dialogical processes” and claims to have developed “a new aesthetic and theoretical paradigm of the work of art as a process—a locus of discursive exchange and negotiation.”42 The traditional concept of the artist disappears in Kester’s new paradigm, where no single individual creates the work or its guiding concept. The work is not a vehicle for self-expression either; rather, “expression takes place through an unfolding extemporaneous process among an ensemble of collaborative agents. . . . Here the mindful surrender of agency and intentionality is not marked as a failure or abandonment (of the prerogatives of authorship or the specificity of ‘art’), but as a process that is active, generative, and creative.”43 The range of socially engaged art practice is very broad, and Kester supports collaborative projects, such as Park Fiction and Project Row Houses, that involve communities in constructive dialogue that leads to the identification and resolution of community problems. Such projects are distinguished from the socially engaged, process-oriented works created by artists associated with Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics in being more removed from art world institutions and having fully relinquished authorial control.
Kester’s theoretical analysis links dialogical art to the history of modernist aesthetics and art theory and offers few means to distinguish between the creative processes of a socially engaged art project and those of a nonart social project. Little beyond the claims and social/institutional contexts of its participants clearly demarcates the difference, although Kester asserts that the artistic identity of the project endows it with the capacity to evade, and even transgress, social, institutional, and creative restrictions.44 The evasion of convention is central to Kester’s understanding of the artistic identity of dialogical art, and he links it to the continual disruption of conventions that characterizes the history of modern art. Thus, in Kester’s view, dialogical art represents a reconceptualization of the work of art as “a process of communicative exchange,” responsive to its situation and liberatory in its potential.45 It is a type of process, or more precisely, it is an attitude or orientation that informs the process of realizing a socially engaged project.
Claire Bishop has proposed an alternative theoretical understanding of socially engaged participatory art practices based on their capacity to frame complex issues and pose difficult questions that provoke critical consciousness. In her view, socially engaged art has generally not been subjected to rigorous standards of evaluation. Not only is the mere fact of consensual collaboration often deemed sufficient for art critical approbation, but the “emphasis on process over product—or, perhaps more accurately, on process as product—is justified on the straightforward basis of inverting capitalism’s predilection for the contrary.” To simply privilege process over project is insufficiently critical, Bishop implies, and she is unusual in recognizing that process has become a largely unexamined positive value. She has written that it is a “common tendency for socially engaged artists . . . to adopt a paradoxical position in which art as a category is both rejected and reclaimed: they object to their project being called art because it is also a real social process, while at the same time claiming that this whole process is art.”46 This observation illustrates not only the problematic conflation of art and active social engagement but also the peculiar discursive role played by the concept of process and its vague connotation of universal beneficence. Process has become comparable to concepts such as beauty, expression, and spirituality, which have long served to denote the distinctive quality, achievement, and purpose of art.
From the most amorphous and diffuse employment of process to signify the interrelatedness of the universe and all the activities therein to the most precise and material discussions of a single artist’s repetitive actions, the discourse of process is intended to convey positive values that justify the significance of art and art making. To be concerned with process is implicitly to give art ethical weight and moral purpose, be it through engagement with the structures of the world or the development of personal consciousness. The common injunction to artists to “trust the process”47 implies that artists should not only be attuned to their material and actions but also have faith in the ultimate purposiveness of the relation between them that will lead to a meaningful result.48
The optimistic notion that simply making naturally results in meaning may be seen as the result of an intersection between two fundamentally conflicting notions. One is at the foundation of thinking about craftsmanship. David Brett sees the craftsperson’s dedicated labor as a means of self-fashioning: “The skillful and loving engagement with materials, with the brute stuff of the world, is an ethical engagement because it is the point at which metaphor is created. We are what we make.”49 Many craft theorists believe the craftsperson making is engaging in a form of knowing and self-exploration.50 The long-term development of a craft skill results in a holistic form of knowledge that embraces the physical, the mental, and the emotional. In contrast to the craftsperson’s profound and disciplined knowledge of materials and techniques are the attitudes associated with the merging of art and life that have been a driving force in the art of recent decades. The discourse of process amalgamates these two distinct views. In some instances it is employed to refer to aspects of the crafts’ approach to materials, rigorous techniques, and attentive making outside the range of traditional art object production. More often process implies an almost mystical connection between the artist’s activity, whatever it may be, and the universe.51 The artist’s process can be trusted to lead somewhere, to generate meaning, to matter. And in a world where the artist’s identity is predicated on this belief and little else,52 everyone can consider themselves artists and trust that their life processes are meaningful.
The discourse of process has perhaps become more than anything a strategy of deferral and a rejection of completion. It is a means to evade final judgments of value or quality, even a refusal to define basic terms on which to base such judgments. The artist engaged with the process does not need to assess the product; activity, both mental and physical, is everything. Process is a cognate for living. Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece still provides a valuable insight into the artist’s work. To stop the working process and evaluate its products is to destroy the faith that forms the foundation of the artist’s labor. The final product will never be as satisfying, as filled with power and potential, as the process of its making. Products, even great works of art, belong to the world of finite things; they have limits and deficiencies. Process, by contrast, is infinite.
In its general outline the concept of artistic process in Western art and aesthetics has expanded from a narrow focus on the specific procedures necessary to create an art object to embrace potentially every form of human action and thought. In this it follows the expansion of the conception of art and its social role in Western culture that began in the Renaissance and escalated in the modern period. The physical process of making works of art was long considered inferior to the values and activities associated with intellectual activity and sociopolitical engagement. When Renaissance artists and thinkers began to acknowledge and promote the role of intellect in the production of art, the social value of the artist and the artwork increased. In subsequent centuries the complex imbrication of mind and matter that characterized the creation of art received ever greater attention as philosophers and theorists attempted to define the nature of human labor and the relation of thought to creative activity. The rise of industrialization provided a critical impetus to the conceptualization of the artist’s process as a particularly significant, even defining, human activity.
As we have seen, the modern artist came to be viewed as an exemplary human being, one whose labors were emblematic of human needs to create and communicate meaning and self-identity through the shaping of physical matter. While the status of the artist increased in the modern period, artistic identity also expanded. More and more people participated in art and craft processes as amateur makers, thereby fulfilling their own needs to establish self-identity, as well as engaging in what were considered therapeutic leisure activities that counteracted the dehumanizing effects of modern industrial society. In the latter half of the twentieth century the conception of the artist became diffuse, shifting from the notion of an exceptional individual, a “genius,” to a contextually defined identity, someone who works in the socially and culturally defined arena of art. Artistic processes likewise shifted from defined procedures for making certain types of objects to include the entire spectrum of human (and even nonhuman) activity conceived and presented as art.
It can be difficult at times not to perceive the expansion of art to encompass everything as the dissolution of art as a distinct category of objects and processes. Business and engineering schools now teach techniques of creative processes, thereby erasing once well-established distinctions between free-form artistic processes and the rational systematized techniques of modern business and industry. How do such practices affect the understanding of artistic processes as free, nonutilitarian labor? Alternatively, how is that understanding affected when artists claim their artwork is the process of creating and running a business, buying and selling stock, or planning and building a housing project? Why does the art world embrace such activities as art? It may well be that the conception of art as a special and distinct activity tied to the creation of a certain class of objects, dominant since the Renaissance, is rapidly disappearing. If that is the case, then the discourse of process may be one of the best witnesses to the ongoing failure to redefine and resituate the social and cultural energies and activities that have been understood as artistic creation.