The introduction’s epigraphs are drawn from Sultan, ed., Chuck Close Prints, 132; and Schneemann, “Sensibility of the Times,” 171.
1. Scholarly consideration of process as a conceptual issue has been virtually nonexistent in recent decades. In No Place of Grace T. J. Jackson Lears has offered perhaps the only analysis of the concept and its broader social significance with particular attention paid to the turn of the twentieth century.
2. Rhoades collaborated with students at the Städelschule in Frankfurt to produce salad dressing containing the essence of the actor Kevin Costner. See chapter 9 of this volume, “It’s All about the Process,” for a discussion of the work.
3. While certain conceptual approaches to process art may be exceptions to this, even the most conceptual process art tends to be concerned with physical experience, albeit often at a remove. See chapter 8 of this volume, “Process Art.”
4. See Risatti, Theory of Craft; and Metcalf, “Craft and Art.”
5. One of the most well-known studies is Rothenberg, Emerging Goddess. An interesting example studying MFA students over ten years is Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, Creative Vision.
6. For an example of the latter, see Rank, Art and Artist. More recently it has become common to equate creativity with economic success. See Florida, Rise of the Creative Class.
7. Balzac, Unknown Masterpiece, 52 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
8. De Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse,” 197–98.
9. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization.”
10. Focillon, Life of Forms, 36, 44–45.
11. Roger Fry believed the viewer is affected by an awareness of the artist’s mark-making activity, imaginatively feeling in his own body the physical gestures necessary to create the lines and shapes of a work. See Vision and Design, 33–35.
12. Focillon’s variation of formalism is notably different from the analytic approach associated with Clement Greenberg that has come to define the term in the Anglo-American critical tradition since the 1960s.
13. Michael Fried’s famous essay “Art and Objecthood,” with its final statement that “presence is grace,” is perhaps the best modern example of the aesthetic exaltation ascribed by formalists to the experience of viewing successful art.
14. The belief that an artwork’s reception is integral to the artwork as an unfinished process in German Romantic theory is discussed in Leonard, “Picturing Listening,” 276. Marcel Duchamp insisted on the importance of the viewer in the completion and judgment of the artwork. See “Creative Act,” 25–26.
15. See Hosmer, “Process of Sculpture,” 734–37.
16. Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 134.
17. Shusterman, Performing Live.
18. This is not the case for the highly influential work of Rosalind Krauss, who has developed psychoanalytically informed structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to reinvigorating formalism. Krauss’s colleagues Hal Foster and Yve-Alain Bois have pursued related approaches that also are not directly engaged with social and political concerns.
This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1097a, 30–35. All Aristotle works cited in this chapter can be found in Aristotle, Complete Works.
1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1094a, 14–16.
2. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, Book I, 1197a, 5–13.
3. Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1337b, 5–17.
4. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 227. See also Mossé, Ancient World, 25–28.
5. Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1337b, 5–17.
6. Ibid., Book VIII, section 3.
7. Ibid., Book VIII, 1341a, 10–12, 17–20; 1341b, 9–12.
8. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1 (A), Section 1, 981a 28–981b 9.
9. Burford, Craftsmen, 153, 241n412; Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 157–58.
10. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 152.
11. Ibid., 153.
12. Burford, Craftsmen, 198–99.
13. Ibid., 199–200.
14. Ibid., 200, 248n569.
15. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 3.
16. Ibid., 153.
17. Ibid., 230.
18. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 1.
19. Ibid., 2–3.
20. Burford, Craftsmen, 208–9.
21. See Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 22; and Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 23.
22. Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 34–38.
23. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 30–31. Classical authors were not as supportive of the status of painting as Renaissance writers claimed. See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 181.
24. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 46.
25. Ibid., 112.
26. Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, 13–46.
27. Ibid., 187
28. Ibid., 13.
29. For a detailed analysis of the role of the intellect in Renaissance theories of artistic labor, see Summers, Judgment of Sense, 281–82.
30. Ibid., 320.
31. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 16.
32. Ibid., 84.
33. Ibid., 105.
34. The scientist and philosopher Michael Polyani first articulated the concept of tacit knowledge in 1958 and developed it in The Tacit Dimension (1966). The concept has been widely adopted by craft theorists (and others).
35. G. Baldwin Brown’s preface to Vasari, Vasari on Technique, 3.
36. Vasari on Technique, 206, 208 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
37. Vasari, Lives, 140–41 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
38. Barolsky, Faun in the Garden, 66, 76
39. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 172, 177.
40. Ibid., 228–29, 247–48.
1. Kant, Critique of Judgment, I:43 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
2. Hegel, Aesthetics, 26 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
3. Clayre, Work and Play, 8–13. Rabinbach notes that while the eighteenth-century philosophes, including Rousseau, excoriated aristocratic idleness, they allowed the poet’s idleness to retain an exalted status because it was seen as a preparation for creative production. See Human Motor, 28.
4. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 40.
5. Ibid., 138.
6. Marx, Essential Writings, 59.
7. Ibid., 56–57.
8. Cited in Clayre, Work and Play, 48–49.
9. Clayre, Work and Play, 54–56. According to Clayre, Marx, like many nineteenth-century thinkers, conceived work as both a necessity and the means for the full realization of human potential through free action. In Rabinbach’s view Marx only held the latter position in his early work. In his later writings Marx advocated an ideal of work in which workers had no permanent specialization and alternated between scientific/intellectual and manual labor.
10. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic, 80–81.
11. Ibid., 82.
12. Marx, Essential Writings, 85.
13. Clayre, Work and Play, 44.
14. Cited in ibid., 45.
15. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 169–70 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
16. Ruskin was no political revolutionary. He advocated a conservative social structure in which a beneficent ruling class freed the workingman from care, and in turn the workingman served his “reverent” leader.
17. Morris, Collected Works, 5.
18. Ibid., 9.
19. Ibid., 168–69.
20. Thompson, William Morris, 105.
21. Morris, Collected Works, 29.
22. Clayre, Work and Play, 156.
23. Vida Scudder cited in Boris, Art and Labor, 187.
24. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 9.
25. Day’s criticism is a commonplace of academic art theory, which decried the merely superficial copying of surface features of artworks. This could be avoided by direct study from nature and by imitating the principles of ancient artists rather than their artworks. See Cramer, Abstraction, 22–25.
26. See Lears, No Place of Grace, 69.
27. On the enormous rise of amateur artistic production, particularly among upper and middle class women, that began in the eighteenth century see Bermingham, Learning to Draw. For a discussion of the place of the amateur in the contemporary art world, see Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor?, 146–47.
28. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 42.
29. Ibid., 62.
30. Williams, Culture and Society, xiv.
31. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 88.
32. Boris, Art and Labor, 15.
33. Ibid., 14.
34. Isaac Clark cited in ibid., 86.
35. Boris, Art and Labor, 83.
36. Candace Wheeler cited in ibid., 101.
37. Boris, Art and Labor, 156.
38. Masten, Art Work.
39. See Callen, Women Artists, 96–135, 219; and Callen, “Sexual Division.”
40. On the history and changing status of needlework in the nineteenth century, see Callen, Women Artists, 96–98; and Parker, Subversive Stitch.
41. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 145–46.
42. Boris, Art and Labor, 94.
43. Lears, No Place of Grace, 54–57.
44. Ibid., 69–70.
45. Ibid., 82.
46. Eastlake, “Review,” 97–98.
47. Among the most famous of the early arguments for photography as an art form are Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography (1864); Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalist Photography (1889); and Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography” (1899).
1. Boime, Academy, 24, 122.
2. Ibid., 82, 181–82.
3. Ibid., 42–43, 128.
4. See Sheriff, Fragonard, chaps. 4 and 5.
5. Ibid., 142–44.
6. Cited in Boime, Academy, 119.
7. Boime, Academy, 74. Couture (and others) followed well-established precedent in finishing his paintings by placing sketch-like marks to signify painterly inspiration and rapidity of execution. See Clements, “Michelangelo on Effort.”
8. Boime, Academy, 149.
9. Cited in ibid., 116.
10. Milner, Studios of Paris, 39.
11. Ibid., 141.
12. See Bomford et al., Art in the Making, 36–37, 55; and Callen, Art of Impressionism, 3–5, 98–110.
13. See Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé.”
14. Paul Cézanne, letter to his mother, September 26, 1874, in Harrison and Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 549.
15. Shiff, “End of Impressionism,” 67.
16. See Shiff, Cézanne, 16; Gautier, “Art in 1848,” 320; and Boime, Academy, 88–89.
17. Shiff, Cézanne, 51.
18. Mallarmé, “Impressionists,” 33.
19. Zola, Mes Haines, 341.
20. Zola cited in DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision,” 720. See also Shiff, Cézanne, 37.
21. Zola cited in DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision,” 721.
22. Art-historical scholarship has increasingly addressed the signs of the Impressionist painters’ working processes in their paintings. See Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé”; DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision”; Brettell, Impression; and House, Monet. Other key texts that address technical issues are Bomford et al., Art in the Making; and Callen, Art of Impressionism.
23. Reprinted in Moffat, ed., New Painting, 130.
24. See the Balzac discussion in the introduction to this volume.
25. Bernard, “Memories of Paul Cézanne,” 65.
26. D’Souza, “Paul Cézanne.”
27. Zola cited in ibid.
28. Fry, Cézanne, 57.
29. Bernard cited in Shiff, Cézanne, 295n36.
30. Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 10.
31. The notion of Cézanne’s painting as a rendering visible of tactile experience has been developed by Shiff in “Constructing Physicality”; and Joachim Pissarro in “Cézanne.”
32. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 63, 64, 65–66, 69.
33. Ibid., 70–71.
34. Johnson, “Phenomenology and Painting.”
35. Denis, Théories, 262–78.
36. For a discussion of the complexities of the relationship of Impressionism to scientific objectivity and positivism, see Shiff, Cézanne, 21–26.
37. Signac, Eugène Delacroix, 984.
38. Ibid., 981–82. Félix Fénéon also remarked on the lack of importance of the painter’s technique in Neo-Impressionist painting. See “Neo-Impressionism,” 111.
39. Fénéon, “Neo-Impressionism,” 112.
40. Veblen outlined this problem in Leisure Class, 159–60.
41. Charles Henry’s systematization of the emotional effects of form, line, and color in “Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetic” was highly influential for Neo-Impressionism.
42. For discussion of the relation of Seurat’s technique to modern mechanical production and the democratic potential of the technique, see Nochlin, Politics of Vision, 173, 181–82; and Broude, “New Light.”
43. The most succinct exposition of Greenberg’s position is his 1960 essay “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 4, 85–93.
44. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 38.
45. Ibid., 35–36.
46. Yve-Alain Bois has discussed Matisse’s debt to Cézanne’s working process in this regard, describing it as “the economy of the session.” See Bois, Painting as Model, 48–51.
47. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 39, 36.
48. Ibid., 37.
49. Matisse’s advice to his students made the same point. See “Matisse Speaks to His Students, 1908: Notes by Sarah Stein,” in Barr, Matisse, 552.
50. Matisse began photographing the various working stages of his paintings in 1935. See chapter 4 of this volume, “New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process.”
51. Bell, Art, 28–29.
52. On the equation of sincerity and individuality see Tolstoy, What Is Art? 154–55.
53. Barr, Matisse, 118.
54. Zervos, “Du Phénomène Surréaliste,” 114.
55. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 6.
56. Ibid., 43.
57. Cited in ibid., 172.
58. For another discussion of the artist’s labor, see “Art and Socialism” in Fry, Vision and Design, 76–78.
1. Goldwater, Symbolism, 1–5; Rubin, Impressionism, 354; Tucker, Monet, 94.
2. For discussions of the marketing strategy and collectors of Monet’s series paintings, see Klein, “Dispersal of the Modernist Series”; Stuckey, “Predictions and Implications”; Rubin, Impressionism, 343–54; and Tucker, Monet, 98–99.
3. It is now known that Monet completed these works in the studio, but the significance of the works remains largely dependent on their role as records of Monet’s optical experiences.
4. Mondrian, New Art, 41.
5. Ibid., 42.
6. Ibid., 58.
7. Cramer, Abstraction, chap. 7.
8. Mondrian, New Art, 299.
9. “It is not enough to explain the value of a work of art in itself; it is above all necessary to show the place which a work occupies on the scale of the evolution of plastic art.” Ibid., 293.
10. The New York paintings are often seen as instituting a new phase in Mondrian’s art; however, whether this change constitutes an evolutionary advance along the lines of the painter’s stated project is another question. Cramer, Abstraction, 147–48.
11. Mondrian, New Art, 239.
12. Holty, “Mondrian.”
13. Cahiers d’Art was renowned for its extensive photographic documentation of recent work by famous modern artists. Modern art dealers distributed the magazine outside Paris in major art centers such as New York, London, and Berlin, and the magazine is often referred to as a Bible for those interested in modern art in New York in the 1930s and 1940s.
14. Grant, Surrealism, chap. 10.
15. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 179.
16. Amédée Ozenfant claimed he was the first artist to systematically photograph the genesis of a work when he documented the vicissitudes of the mural-sized painting Life he created between 1931 and 1938. See Ozenfant, Foundations, 334. In addition to a photographic record of the work’s creation, Ozenfant kept a journal of the political and social events that affected its development.
17. Fry, Henri-Matisse. Matisse called his stages “states,” and his documentation of the states of his paintings was likely influenced by his work making etchings in the previous years.
18. Delectorskaya, L’Apparente facilité, 23.
19. Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 184.
20. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 36.
21. Ibid., 74.
22. Ibid., 73.
23. Aagesen, “Painting as Film,” 163.
24. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 178; Baldassari, Picasso Photographe.
25. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,” 268.
26. Arnheim’s text reflects trends in thinking about the modern artist’s process associated with existentialism and the art and critical discourse of the New York school.
27. Paul Haesaerts filmed Picasso painting on glass in his 1949 documentary Visit to Picasso. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso also shows Picasso painting on glass.
28. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 179.
29. Hess, “Matisse.”
30. Frankfurter, “Is He the Greatest?” 22.
31. Arb, “Spotlight on de Kooning,” 33.
32. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” 145–46.
33. Ibid., 162–63.
34. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management.
35. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” 142.
36. See Green, Cubism; and Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, for detailed discussions of art vivant and the significance of the materiality of paint.
37. The emphasis on gross physicality and violence in the art of the interwar period is now often linked to the experiences of World War I. See Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia; and Stich, Anxious Visions.
38. Focillon, Life of Forms, 2–3, 31 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
39. Focillon recounts a story of the Japanese artist Hokusai pouring blue paint on a scroll and then having a chicken with its feet dipped in red ink walk on it. The resulting pattern was generally perceived as a painting of autumn leaves floating on water. Focillon writes, “The memory of long experiment with his hands on the different ways of evoking life brought him . . . to attempt even this. The hands are present without showing themselves, and, though touching nothing, they order everything” (75).
40. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization,” for a discussion of the debates on the Surrealists’ passive automatism and more active interpretations of the artist’s activity. See also Grant, Surrealism.
41. In this passage Focillon makes direct reference to Surrealist automatic techniques as well as to Surrealist found objects. See Aragon, La Peinture au défi, for an expansive discussion of the artist’s materials in the context of Surrealism.
42. Nolde, “On Primitive Art,” 97.
43. Curtis, Sculpture, 94.
44. The modern system of the arts was largely established in the eighteenth century based in part on the distinction between liberal and mechanical arts. See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 224–27, for a brief discussion of the historically provisional nature of the system.
45. Silverman, Art Nouveau, chap. 3.
46. See Singerman, Art Subjects, 100–108, on the influence of early childhood education theories in the development of Bauhaus pedagogy.
47. Raleigh, “Johannes Itten,” 284–87, 302.
48. Collingwood’s text is a work of philosophical aesthetics that considers a range of issues concerning the nature of art. Following Benedetto Croce, Collingwood defines art as a language, and he posits an important social and moral role for art as a means to discover, express, and communicate truths.
49. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 129 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
50. Berenson also influenced Fry’s interpretation of Cézanne. Collingwood’s examples throughout his text are more often literary rather than concerned with visual art, and sculpture is never discussed. The variability and inconsistencies in Collingwood’s discussion of different arts and their effects on his general philosophy of art as expounded in the Principles is examined in Davies, “Collingwood’s ‘Performance’ Theory.”
51. While Collingwood’s discussions are often directly involved with the physicality of the visual artist’s work, his overall view of the nature of the artist’s activity has a strongly antimaterialist cast: “The work of art . . . is not a bodily or perceptible thing, but an activity of the artist; and not an activity of his ‘body’ or sensuous nature, but an activity of his consciousness” (292).
52. Collingwood stated that the artist was not unique in experience or emotion, but only “in his ability to take the initiative in expressing what all feel and all can express” (119).
This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 70–71.
1. Bourdieu, “Invention of the Artist’s Life,” 96.
2. Ibid., 97.
3. The precondition of an independent income for the modern artist’s identity is one of the main points of Bourdieu’s discussion. Ibid., 81n3.
4. Bell, Art, 172.
5. Bourdieu, “Invention of the Artist’s Life,” 80.
6. For views of modernism as fundamentally and exclusively masculinist, see Pollock, Vision and Difference, chaps. 1 and 3; and Duncan, “MoMA’s Hot Mamas.”
7. For a discussion of the ways women artists have defined their artistic identity in productive relation to modernism, see Wagner, Three Artists, particularly 4–6, 214–17. See also Swinth, Painting Professionals, chap. 6.
8. Fiedler, On Judging Works, 697.
9. “We can only see before us, and in the form of goals, what it is that we are—so that our life always has the form of a project or choice, and thus seems to us self-caused.” Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 71.
10. According to Robert Williams, Alberti, Vasari, and Leonardo all suggest that the artist represents the highest form of subjectivity, a notion he sees as derived from ancient rhetorical theory. “Individuality achieves its highest form” in the Italian artist’s study of nature and through unstinting labor, the “relentlessly self-critical, all-consuming personal discipline involved . . . in the process of self-objectification. . . . Art is work, both in the sense of application to particular tasks and as a comprehensive personal discipline that enters into and transforms every corner of experience, every recess of consciousness. The artist must make himself over entirely according to the demands of his vocation. . . . Art demands a sustained and systematic effort to establish the conditions of the possibility of all self-fashioning.” Williams, “Leonardo’s Modernity,” 37.
11. Fiedler, On Judging Works, 698.
12. Fry, Vision and Design, 261.
13. Bell, Art, 141–42.
14. Schapiro, “Cézanne,” 40.
15. Quoted in Shiff, Cézanne, 190.
16. Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 20.
17. According to Sawyer there is no evidence that Dewey read Collingwood’s work or vice versa. Sawyer, Group Creativity, 103.
18. Dewey, Art as Experience, 3 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
19. Dewey makes a distinction very similar to Collingwood’s means/ends distinction between art and craft when he discusses the differences of mechanical production from artistic creation (138–39).
20. Dewey’s ideas on modern education, which emphasized hands-on experience and individualized programs, had been enormously influential for decades by the time he published Art and Experience. This type of childhood education influenced the teaching approaches adopted by Itten and Albers in the Bauhaus Vorkurs.
21. This final sentence suggests an approach to a more Kantian notion of a pure aesthetic experience. Dewey’s position in general directly opposes that of Kant (see Dewey, Art as Experience, 252–53, for an explicit rejection of Kant’s aesthetics), but here he provides an opening for explaining the effects of an aesthetic object in terms that bear a notable resemblance to Kant’s discussion of beauty as purposive form distinct from merely sensual pleasure. There are also distinct echoes of Dewey’s text in Michael Fried’s famous (formalist) essay “Art and Objecthood,” as well as in Robert Morris’s equally well-known contemporaneous discussion of so-called minimalist objects in his “Notes on Sculpture.”
22. Art as Experience was dedicated to Barnes, who worked closely with Dewey and is cited directly at numerous points in the text. Barnes’s views on art were published in a number of books, including his comprehensive 1937 text The Art in Painting. In this text and his other monographs on modern artists Barnes outlines a standard formalist position on the nature of the artist and the artist’s work.
23. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 279, 283–84, 287. Collingwood is quick to qualify the nature of the truths of art as emotional, as individual facts, not truths of relation determined by intellect.
24. In the artist’s consciousness there is no significant distinction between self and world because the world is what the artist experiences and the medium of expression. Ibid., 291–92.
25. Ibid., 325.
26. Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés”; Desnos, “Surréalisme.”
27. For a detailed discussion of these issues in relation to Surrealist texts and art criticism of the 1920s and 1930s, see Grant, Surrealism.
28. Zervos, “Lithographies de Henri Matisse” and “Phénomène Surréaliste.”
29. Tériade, “Documentaire sur la jeune peinture: I.” and “Documentaire sur la jeune peinture: V.”
30. Decalcomania was originally a decorative transfer technique invented in the eighteenth century. It was also the basis for a popular party game in which ink was dripped on paper and then folded to create suggestive forms. Hermann Rorschach’s psychological inkblot tests, first published in 1921, were based on this technique. In a 1936 issue of the magazine Minotaure André Breton presented Oscar Dominguez’s use of decalcomania as the first fully automatic technique. The Surrealists sought direct access to the origins of art in the images of the unconscious through hypnosis, recitations of dreams, and rapid speech or writing beginning in the early 1920s. It is probably these well-known experiments that Dewey is referring to by conjuring a rabbit out of the place where it lies hid.
31. Art as language is a major topic analyzed in Collingwood’s Principles of Art. Dewey states, “Because objects of art are expressive, they are a language. . . . Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. . . . The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it” (106).
32. “For the modern view process, activity, and change are the matter of fact. At an instant there is nothing. Each instant is only a way of grouping matters of fact. . . . All the interrelations of matters of fact must involve transition in their essence. All realization involves implication in creative advance.” Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 146. Process philosophy is considered to have been founded by Whitehead with the 1929 publication of his Process and Reality. Whitehead’s process philosophy is indebted to Bergson, who is often (retroactively) considered a process philosopher.
33. See Bergson, Laughter, 154–61. Bergson also described the artist as having a privileged position in relation to the universe’s creative activity. The creation of an artwork is a vital process. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 340–41.
34. Antliff, Inventing Bergson. Harold Rosenberg thought Hans Hoffman’s philosophy was indebted to the Bergson’s pre–World War I ideas about intuition and élan. See Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 251.
35. Robert Motherwell cites him as an influence who helped him understand the philosophical nature of abstraction. See Motherwell, Collected Writings, 86, 99, 142, 279. Louis Finkelstein read Whitehead in the 1940s and discussed him with Tworkov and de Kooning. See Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 278. Daniel Belgrad makes a case for the great importance of Whitehead’s ideas for modern poets, particularly Charles Olson, as well as for Motherwell. See Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity.
36. Whitehead’s philosophy was explicitly developed as a philosophical attempt to come to terms with the transformation in the nature of physical reality revealed by the theory of relativity and the other discoveries of the new physics. See Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 140.
37. “Deep within ourselves we know time is a ‘becoming.’ We rework our monumental concept of time into that of a fluid time, i.e., one whose duration has a plastic quality.” Focillon, Life of Forms, 55.
38. Ibid., 49–51. Focillon’s reference to Leonardo’s wall is another reflection of the debates surrounding Surrealism. For the Surrealists, Max Ernst in particular, Leonardo’s advice to artists to seek subjects in the random markings on an old wall was an early example of the value of their own automatic procedures. They believed that the images any given individual saw in the random marks on the wall were the embodiment their own unconscious obsessions and desires. The more conservative view, and the one espoused by Focillon, was that only the trained artist discerned forms in random marks and could use them as the basis for creative inspiration.
39. Ibid., 51.
40. Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic work focused on artists from the beginning. He was a close associate of Sigmund Freud in Vienna until 1926, when he moved to Paris and became well known as a therapist and lecturer. Among his patients were the writers Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller.
41. Rank, Art and Artist, 425 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
42. Rank listed Goethe, Rodin, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt as examples. He did not think the present age had produced any great art and thought this might be due to the lack of collective ideologies against which the strong individualism of the artistic personality needs to fight (18).
43. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 61.
44. Collingwood held a similar view of the artist’s activity; see above.
45. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 69–70.
46. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 175
47. Ibid., 215–16. “This disclosure of an immanent or incipient significance in the living body extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression” (230).
48. Ibid., 226.
49. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 83. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of painting was markedly affected by Matisse’s discussion of his working process in “Notes of a Painter,” as well as François Campaux’s 1946 film of Matisse at work, Un Grand Peintre français: Henri Matisse.
50. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 88, 90–91.
51. Ibid., 95–97.
52. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 148.
53. See Grene, “Aesthetic Dialogue,” 224–25.
54. Fry, Vision and Design, 34–35.
55. Dewey also objected to theories that separate art forms on the basis of their appeal to one sense—vision in the case of painting, hearing in music. In his view artworks were expressions of experiences arising from human experiences with the surrounding environment. It is the totality of embodied experience in the world that is significant, not the appeal to a single sense (123–24).
56. Contemporary distinctions between ceramicists, who are considered craftspeople, and those who are considered “clay artists” still often rely on this same difference.
57. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 55, 144–45, 243–44, 247.
58. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 104.
59. Ibid., 112.
60. Wagner, Three Artists, 281–82.
The section of this chapter under the subheading “Artistic Process and Amateur Artists” contains material from my article “‘Paint and Be Happy’: The Modern Artist and the Amateur Painter: A Question of Distinction,” Journal of American Culture 34, no. 3, Copyright © 2011, Wiley Periodicals.
1. Liberman, Artist in His Studio, 33.
2. Picasso, “Picasso Speaks,” 215.
3. Unlike Cézanne, Giacometti was considered a skilled artist in a traditional sense, thus his struggle included the effort to not give in to his facility. See Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 90.
4. Sartre, “Search for the Absolute,” 613.
5. Collingwood also stressed the morality of the artist’s labor; see chapter 5 in this volume.
6. Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti, 194.
7. Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 87.
8. Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti, 197.
9. Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 127–28.
10. Ibid., 128–30.
11. For a discussion of Giacometti’s increasing obsessiveness, see Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 120.
12. Giacometti quoted in Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti, 216.
13. Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 120.
14. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 68.
15. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization.”
16. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 58, 61.
17. Ibid., 78–80.
18. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 29.
19. Here, too, see chapter 5 of this volume, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization.”
20. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 32–33.
21. For discussion of the political dimension of Rosenberg’s concept of action, see Orton, “Action, Revolution, Painting”; and Balken, “Rosenberg and American Action Painters,” 210.
22. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 34. In his criticism Rosenberg stressed the distinctions between pure automatism and the more conscious and engaged work of painters like Pollock and Joan Mitchell. For instance, he saw Jean Dubuffet’s work as lacking the necessary tension. See Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 83, 92, 97. The critique of an easy automatism and “apocalyptic wallpaper” in “The American Action Painters” is often understood as an attack on Jackson Pollock.
23. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 42–43.
24. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 104.
25. Unlike Cézanne and Giacometti, de Kooning did not work directly from life/models; his work is not a record of perceptual experience in the way that Cézanne’s always and Giacometti’s often is.
26. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 111–12, 117, 119, 125. The concept of “tact” and its use by Rosenberg to describe de Kooning’s approach closely follows its usage in terms of craftsmanship: a knowing responsiveness to the medium developed over many years of working with it.
27. Ibid., 128.
28. Hess, “De Kooning Paints,” 31, 65.
29. Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 148.
30. Alfred Barr’s Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, published in 1946 by the Museum of Modern Art, emphasized the artist’s working process with many reproductions of sketches, studies, and variations of major works, notably Demoiselles and Guernica.
31. Arb, “Spotlight on de Kooning,” 33.
32. Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 229. In “De Kooning Paints a Picture” Hess wrote parenthetically that de Kooning’s academic training and a period of “lyrical Ingrism” gave him the mastery essential to discarding or changing convention (64–65).
33. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,” 267–70. Picasso first discusses photographing the stages of a work in progress in this same interview. See chapter 4 of this volume, “New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process.”
34. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 classic existentialist text Being and Nothingness. The reproductions in Barr’s Picasso: 50 Years of His Art emphasize Picasso’s paintings of monstrous women.
35. Doubt and ambiguity have been much discussed as dominant themes of de Kooning’s art. See Hess, Willem de Kooning; Shiff, “De Kooning Controlling”; Wagner, “De Kooning, Drawing.”
36. See Shiff, “Water and Lipstick,” “With Closed Eyes,” and “De Kooning Controlling.”
37. The persistent interest in evaluating the works de Kooning made during his last illness, a form of Alzheimer’s, is a telling indicator of the ways his art has been valued. These late works would probably be classed as a type of automatic production, lacking the artist’s conscious control or regulation. Since de Kooning’s reputation rested on the fact that his art was not automatic, the late works cannot be considered truly de Koonings in the sense in which his brand was defined. They are, however, by his hand, and that hand was considered one of the most well developed in late twentieth-century art. Many feel that there must be real value (not just market value) in that hand’s products because the artist’s mind must have fully entered into its gestures and responses after so many decades of practice.
38. Hess, Willem de Kooning, 28.
39. Ibid., 27.
40. In a 1961 review of a group exhibition devoted to the creative process, Vivien Raynor complained that a series of Nell Blaine’s preparatory drawings for her “fresh and lovely” paintings demonstrated that being an artist was painful labor and “no fun at all.” See Raynor, “Creative Process,” 38. By the early 1960s the discourse of the artistic process as dangerous and risky labor was outdated, but the gender implications of Raynor’s criticism remain both significant and conventional: a woman’s painting should be “fresh and lovely” naturally and without serious labor. See chapter 8 of this volume, “Process Art,” for further discussion of Raynor’s review.
Helen Frankenthaler used the language of danger and risk in a 1965 interview to discuss her painting process in formal terms, demonstrating how the mid-century discourse of artistic process was adopted and employed by a working artist to define her personal creative methods: “It is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal ‘Signature.’ I have been trying, and the process began without my knowing it, to stop relying on gesture, but it is a struggle. ‘Gesture’ must appear out of necessity not habit. I don’t start with a color order but find the color as I go. I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do.” In the same interview Frankenthaler denied the relevance of her gender to her painting: “Obviously, first I am involved in painting not the who and how. . . . The making of serious painting is difficult and complicated for all serious painters. One must be oneself, whatever.” Geldzahler, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” 37–38.
41. Of the forty-three artists profiled in the ARTnews “X Paints a Picture” series from 1949 to the end of 1955 only three were women (Honoré Sharrer, Isabel Bishop, and Irene Rice Pereira). After 1955 until 1962, when the series ended, the ratio improved, as four of the seventeen artists profiled were women (Janice Biala, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Elaine de Kooning).
42. Pollock, Vision and Difference, chaps. 1 and 3; Board, “Constructing Myths”; Duncan, “Virility and Domination” and “MoMA’s Hot Mamas.”
43. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,” 268.
44. For a discussion of the difficult situation faced by modern artists whose exhibited artworks may not reveal their dedication to their work, see Menger, “Profiles of the Unfinished,” 60–61.
45. For a discussion of the historical American view of art as a feminine practice, see Singerman, Art Subjects, 41–45. Singerman notes that large numbers of men studying in art programs in colleges and universities under the GI Bill at mid-century assisted in the widespread masculinization of art and artist education in the United States. It was then distinguished from (feminine) art teacher education, which had previously been the dominant focus of art education in the United States (127).
46. Scholars do not agree on Pollock’s relevance to Rosenberg’s essay. See Balken, “Rosenberg and American Action,” 213; and Kleeblatt, ed., Action/Abstraction, 137, 139.
47. It is not Pollock’s but Gorky’s paintings that Greenberg described most strongly in terms of the artist’s process. See Greenberg, Collected Essays, 218–19.
48. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, 23.
49. Ibid., 63, 76–77.
50. In 1910 the writer Roland Dorgelès submitted three paintings to the Salon des Indépendants under the name Boronali. They had been painted by a donkey with a loaded paintbrush attached to its tail.
51. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, 77.
52. Steinberg, “Month in Review,” 82–83.
53. On the rise of amateur art making in the 1950s and 1960s, see Barzun, “New Man”; Toffler, Culture Consumers; and Marling, As Seen on TV, chap. 2.
54. Matisse expressed this view in a 1949 interview. See Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 122.
55. “ARTnews National,” 1.
56. For the 1949 competition the magazine defined an amateur as someone whose major occupation or source of income was not the practice or teaching of painting. Later, art students and anyone selling art in a gallery were excluded from amateur status as well.
57. The text is implicitly directed to men: “After all, if you try and fail, there is not much harm done. . . . And then you can always go out and kill some animal, humiliate some rival on the links, or despoil some friend across the green table.” Churchill, “Painting as a Pastime,” 14. The magazine’s editorial call for entries to its amateur competition also seems directed at the male reader (see below). This is ironic given that women amateur artists far outnumbered men, as the magazine discovered in its survey published a few months later. See “Amateur Standing: Who and How,” 10. Jacques Barzun wrote on the rise of amateur painting in 1958: “Art is seen to be compatible with manliness, on the one hand, and with serious business—indeed with affairs of state—on the other. The fine arts are acquiring the respectability of fishing and golf.” Barzun, “New Man,” 39.
58. Churchill, “Painting as a Pastime,” 13–14.
59. Frankfurter, “Vernissage,” 11.
60. Barzun made a similar point: “With the passing of the class system there also went something of the mild subordination needed for being a spectator. There is abroad in the world a passion for participation. . . . ‘I, too, am a painter’ was said by Correggio in emulation of Raphael; it could be said by John Doe in emulation of his President, and it would be a corollary to their common citizenship.” Barzun, “New Man,” 43. Barzun is referring to President Eisenhower’s much-publicized painting hobby, which, like Churchill’s, was portrayed as form of relaxation and unpretentious enjoyment for the powerful statesman.
61. Kingsbury, “Amateur Standing,” 10.
62. Quoted in Seckler, “Amateur Standing,” 8.
63. See Berkman’s “Amateur Standing” column from May 1956, 10.
64. See the “Amateur Standing” column from March 1950, 8.
65. “Best Amateurs,” 64.
66. Quoted in the “Amateur Standing” column from January 1951, 8, 60.
67. Critics typically gave only very brief characterizations of amateur works that often stressed their exuberance and cheerfulness. Even prizewinning works were not usually described in any detail.
68. Genauer, “Amateurs,” 13.
69. Dewey, Art as Experience, 45.
70. At the March 1953 national convention of the Artist’s Equity Association in St. Louis the delegates condemned amateur artists for taking away professional artists’ wall space and income. See “Amateur Art Menace,” 81.
71. Frankfurter, “Editorial: Amateur Joy,” 15.
72. “Amateur Art Menace,” 81.
73. Pearson, “Remarkable Exhibition,” 21. Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko, and William Baziotes exhibited work in the 1949 Whitney Annual.
74. Hess, “8 Excellent,” 35.
75. The 92nd Street Y is a renowned Jewish community and cultural center in New York City established in 1874. It has offered art programs and adult education classes since its inception.
76. See Berkman’s “Amateur Standing” column from February 1957, 66.
77. Langsner, “Mullican Paints a Picture,” 35; Porter, “Rivers Paints a Picture,” 82; Campbell, “Ferren Paints a Picture,” 54; de Kooning, “Greene Paints a Picture,” 50.
78. “Amateur Standing: Who and How,” 10. It was commonplace for articles on amateur art competitions in the 1950s to give an accounting of the gender and professions of the entrants. Women typically outnumbered men by two to one.
79. By the standards of the early twentieth-first century, the sexism of Frankfurter’s editorial and its “joke” is breath taking: “Among the better stories that used to go around during the Depression was the one about the chorus girl who sadly said, ‘Six weeks ago I lost my job, three weeks ago I had to sell my wrist watch, two weeks ago I sold my fur coat—and last night I lost my amateur standing.
We are concerned over amateur painters who are losing their standing—in maybe not quite so well-defined a way, but nevertheless in, well, probably the second-oldest profession in the world (the painter of that bison in the rock caves of Altamira could not have been far behind the ladies of the evening on Atlantis).
The problem is less funny than it is serious.” See Frankfurter, “Editorial: Amateur Joy,” 15.
80. For discussions of the perceived threats of female amateur artists to male professionals, see Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 174–81; and Swinth, Painting Professionals, 27.
81. Two months later Allan Kaprow’s “‘Happenings’ in the New York Scene” was published in the magazine. Given that Happenings rendered distinctions between professional and amateur artists irrelevant, the disappearance of the column seems appropriate.
82. Berkman, “Uses of Spontaneity,” 23.
83. For discussions of professional art education for U.S. women in the nineteenth century, see Swinth, Painting Professionals; Masten, Art Work; and Prieto, At Home in the Studio.
84. Singerman, Art Subjects, 113 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
85. The “fine arts” were generally replaced with “visual arts” and “design” around mid-century as a means to avoid the hierarchical and value distinctions associated with the terms “fine arts” and “crafts.” Singerman sees this switch as one of the many effects of the influence of the Bauhaus (70).
86. From a 1992 interview with de Kooning’s Black Mountain College student Gus Faulk quoted in Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 257.
87. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 149.
88. Ibid., 254.
This chapter’s epigraphs are drawn from Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 96, 54.
1. Judd, “Specific Objects.”
2. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, 86–89.
3. Sypher, Loss of the Self, 113–30.
4. Cage, “Composition as Process,” 22.
5. Ibid., 23.
6. Suzuki translated the I Ching, which Cage used to create his chance compositions.
7. Kaprow and McLuhan described similar qualities as Zen. For a discussion of Zen artworks see Hoover, Zen Culture, 225, 227. Recent scholarship insists on the limitations of the American/Western understanding of the intricacies of Zen and other forms of Eastern philosophy and religion. See Monroe, Third Mind; and “Exhibition as Proposition.”
8. Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 83. For the importance of Dewey’s Art as Experience in the development of Kaprow’s art and the relationship of Kaprow’s artistic practice to Zen, see Kelley, Childsplay, 7–8, 200.
9. Caroline Jones also notes radical shifts in the artist’s role and production during this period. See Machine in the Studio, 57.
10. Arendt, Human Condition, 116 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
11. Arendt believes that every activity unconnected with labor has become a hobby. Hobbies were a popular topic of public discussion during the 1950s. See Mulac, Hobbies; and Marling, As Seen on TV, chap. 2.
12. Jeffrey Weiss has recently discussed Jasper Johns’s work in similar terms: “Johns brought the labor of painting to a new place, one that might be associated with the epistemology of the absurd.” Weiss, “Painting Bitten,” 26.
13. Caroline Jones has discussed the parallelism between art practice of the 1960s and industrial labor practices: “The industrial aesthetic of postwar America emphasized the performative over the iconic.” See Machine in the Studio, 61. This is evidenced in part by the heyday of documentary films of artists, which showed artists at work in their studios.
14. Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto.”
15. Kaprow, “Untitled Guidelines,” 709.
16. Toffler, Culture Consumers, 50–54. The Situationist critique of exactly these attitudes in Europe should be seen as the revolutionary side of the same coin.
17. Ibid., 56, 208.
18. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 70–71 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
19. McLuhan cited the Balinese as a culture that had no art because they “do everything as well as possible” (72).
20. McLuhan’s debt to the process philosophy of Henri Bergson is evident in numerous references throughout Understanding Media. The Medium Is the Massage, McLuhan’s 1967 work with Quentin Fiore, opens with a quote from Whitehead. In a 1969 interview McLuhan stated, “My books constitute the process rather than the completed project of discovery.” Quoted in Theall, Understanding McLuhan, 30.
21. Judd, “Specific Objects.”
22. For a discussion of Robert Morris’s ideas, see chapter 8 of this volume, “Process Art.”
23. Formalist art theory was a key influence on McLuhan, notably the ideas of Heinrich Wölfflin and Adolf Hildebrand, both of whom are referred to in Understanding Media. Donald Theall discusses McLuhan in relation to the formalism of the literary New Critics. See Understanding McLuhan, 80, 119.
24. Herbert Marcuse’s widely read Marxist critique of industrial society described art as a means for proposing alternative worlds in a manner reminiscent of the Surrealists. See One-Dimensional Man, 238–39.
25. Peckham, Man’s Rage, 314.
26. Brown, Life Against Death, 312.
27. Ibid., 297.
28. For a discussion of feminist critiques of the gendered nature of the “universal” body in relation to body art, see Jones, Body Art. Jones notes that the many female body artists active in the 1960s she interviewed stated that it was only the men who were interested in Merleau-Ponty’s ideas (256).
29. In a 2007 interview Schneeman stated, “I have to remind myself how obsessed I was with process. Joan Mitchell’s work was another link to the physicalization of the body since with her work, I recognized the stroke as an event. All of the theoretical elements that come around my work, I keep tracing them back to painting.” Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat Record, 446.
30. Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics, 163.
31. Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat Record, 448.
This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from Morris, Continuous Project, 84.
1. See Jones, Machine in the Studio, for a detailed discussion of these films.
2. Raynor, “Creative Process,” 38.
3. Ibid.
4. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 201.
5. Caroline Jones noted Frank Stella’s disgust with ARTnews rhetoric about artists’ development. See Machine in the Studio, 120.
6. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 16.
7. Krauss, “Voyage on the North Sea,” 30.
8. Rosenberg, De-Definition of Art, 29. Rosenberg here emphasizes processes that do not require artistic intervention, but in the same essay he does acknowledge process art as “redefining art as the process of the artist or his materials,” which abolishes traditional media requirements (37).
9. Morris, Continuous Project, 43.
10. Ibid., 46.
11. Morris also curated the group show “Nine at Leo Castelli” in December 1968. The show at Castelli’s warehouse included works by Giovanni Anselmo, Bill Bollinger, Eva Hesse, Steve Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and Gilberto Zorio. Much of the work was made of malleable modern materials, including Serra’s lead Splashing.
12. Ehrenzweig was very popular among artists in the late 1960s. Robert Smithson was also deeply engaged with his notion of dedifferentiation.
13. Morris, Continuous Project, 67.
14. Ibid., 68–69.
15. Morris, Mind/Body Problem, 234.
16. Morris, Continuous Project, 69.
17. Morris also cited George Kubler’s The Shape of Time as the unique art historical text to address meaning as found in the making process rather than the form of the final artwork. See Continuous Project, 73 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
18. In 1970 Morris offered his artistic services in an advertisement for the Peripatetic Artists Guild, which identified the artist’s labor with both blue- and white-collar workers. See Berger, Labyrinths; and Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, on Morris’s active political engagement during the 1960s.
19. Maurice Berger discusses Morris’s engagement with contemporary politics and quotes Stanley Aronowitz: “The nature of the New Left, summarized in a single word . . . [was] process. It signaled an almost religious return to experience. . . . Rhetorical repetition, procedural debate, and moral invocations to kindness and equality were all part of the process of community building.” Berger, Labyrinths, 93. In broad terms Morris’s concerns seem somewhat aligned with Walter Benjamin’s position in “The Author as Producer,” in which he stresses the need for the artist to engage with the means of production as a strategy for turning consumers (the audience) into actors and producers. Benjamin sees Brecht’s epic theater as exemplary in this regard and describes it as a “dramatic laboratory.”
20. Michael Fried’s rejection of the physical engagement predicated in much minimalist art in his essay “Art and Objecthood” is even more relevant to Morris’s subsequent discussions of process art. Fried’s position derived from Greenberg’s formalism and maintains the aesthetic significance and autonomy of the artwork.
21. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 6–7.
22. It was common to see process art as a challenge to Greenberg’s ideas. See Monte and Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 27.
23. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 27–28.
24. Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon of 1755 is the key text in this tradition. In 1940 Greenberg published “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in which he argued for the purity of the individual art forms in modernism. Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 1, 23–37.
25. For a study of time and the new information age in the art of the 1960s, see Lee, Chronophobia.
26. Marcia Tucker compared the work of the artists in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials to the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, which she described as a “constant present” created by repetition without beginning, middle, and end. Monte and Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 36.
Many artists associated with process art were also engaged with “time-based” arts. Robert Morris was seriously involved with modern dance in the 1950s and 1960s, while Richard Serra made movies, the most famous of which, Hand Catching Lead (1968), is a landmark of process art.
27. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 31 (hereafter cited parenthetically in this chapter).
28. Pamela Lee has noted that in the late 1960s “the notion of process in art became as much a curatorial and critical thematic as it referred to the making of art as such.” See “Some Kinds of Duration,” 26.
29. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 55.
30. Levine, Profit Systems One.
31. Kaprow, “Untitled Guidelines,” 711.
32. For Kosuth’s view of process art as “reactive” see Meyer, Conceptual Art, xi.
33. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 80–82.
34. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” reproduced in Meyer, Conceptual Art, 175.
35. Meyer, “Second Degree,” 102. Similar views are expressed in Lee, “Some Kinds of Duration”; and Green, “When Attitudes Become,” 136. Robert Pincus-Witten distinguished between the early “pictorial/sculptural” phase of postminimalism, peaking between 1968 and 1970, in which artists emphasized the process of making, and a later conceptual phase that emerged around 1970. See Postminimalism, 16.
36. Scientific analogies were common in discussions of the material concerns of much process art. James Monte compared Barry Le Va’s use of time in his distribution pieces to the way a biologist estimates the growth of microorganisms developed in a laboratory. See Monte and Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 9.
37. “For me the use of self-generating procedures to make art was a liberation from the limitations of my own ego. It represented an escape from individualism by the objectification of the process. I remember believing that it may be the means of achieving Flaubert’s dream of the annihilation of the author.” Bochner quoted in Meyer, “Second Degree,” 97.
38. Bochner quoted in Prinz, “Language Is Not Transparent,” 194.
39. Bochner, “Serial Art Systems,” 40.
40. Bochner associated his work with Gustave Flaubert, a writer considered one of the initiators of modernist literature. The relation of Bochner’s work to modernist formalism is a major theme of both James Monte’s and Marcia Tucker’s catalog essays for Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials.
41. See Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” in Originality of the Avant-Garde, 244–58.
42. Jones, Machine in the Studio.
43. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art.”
44. Gilbert, “Herbie Goes Bananas,” 72.
45. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 86.
46. Celant, “Art Povera,” 662–63.
47. Ibid., 663–64.
48. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 28, 218, 53, 56.
49. For a discussion of the Marxist significance of Reinhardt’s artistic labor as free in relation to capitalist labor, and the identity of the artist as created through engagement in a free work process, see Marie, “Ad Reinhardt,” 471–75.
50. Looking back at the experience of painting his black stripe paintings in the late 1950s, Frank Stella said, “I really wanted to make something. I didn’t want to spend my time futzing around or seeing how clever I could be. . . . I really wanted to finish the paintings that I had it in my mind to do.” He continued: “[The] process of [the stripe paintings was] simpleminded. . . . But it was a lot more intense; just doing those things, painting those stripes one after another is quite enervating and numbing. It’s physically fairly exacting . . . I couldn’t keep it up. The physical concentration . . . it was just a different kind of way of being, a different kind of process. But the process was everything then, as it is now.” Jones, Machine in the Studio, 121, 128.
51. Bryan-Wilson in Molesworth, ed., Work Ethic, 158.
52. Quoted in Sultan, ed., Chuck Close Prints, 132.
53. De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” 526.
54. Daniel Belgrad links the rise of pottery as a fine art medium to the widespread desire for spontaneity in the arts in the postwar period. He credits the British potter Bernard Leach with initiating the development by bringing Japanese potters to art schools like Black Mountain College in the United States, where they taught Zen aesthetics as well as pottery. Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 166–67. The inclusion of traditional craft programs in American university art departments and the adoption of Bauhaus approaches to artist education were also important contributors to the elevation of traditional crafts to the level of the fine arts.
55. See chapter 4, “New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process,” and chapter 5, “The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization,” in this volume for discussion of Collingwood’s ideas.
56. See Auther, String, Felt, Thread, in particular chapter 2.
57. Ibid., 60–68, 80–86, 88.
58. Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” 149.
59. “Once technical skill is mastered in an area, the making of an object . . . may offer a transcendent experience to the maker as mastery of motor control allows the maker to work in harmony with material substance to give form to mere shape—something of this Zen-like experience is what M. C. Richards hints at in the title of her book Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.” Risatti, Theory of Craft, 101–2.
60. In practical terms this particular distinction is a recent development. Fine artists were long associated with specific media, even though from the Renaissance on they based their elevation from craftsmen to fine artists on their conceptual activity. See chap. 1, “Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor Prior to the Nineteenth Century,” for Renaissance distinctions of the fine arts from crafts.
61. Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” 147.
62. For a more extended discussion of the relationship of handcrafts to the body and the physical world as well as human thought and language, see Brett, Rethinking Decoration, 225–57.
63. Metcalf, “Craft and Art,” 80.
64. Risatti, Theory of Craft, 99.
65. Ibid., 108.
66. On the craft revival of the 1960s and 1970s see Auther, String, Felt, Thread, 25–28.
67. Morris, Continuous Project, 68, 87.
68. “This tendency to camouflage is an extension of Hesse’s earlier crafts approach in which she compulsively wrapped, coiled, threaded and layered.” Douglas Crimp quoted in Auther, String, Felt, Thread, 83. Pincus-Witten describes her “compulsive coiling” as “a kind of pleasure-inducing craftswork,” and he connected her compulsive activity to the obsessive and compulsive craftwork of Lucas Samaras and Lee Bontecou, other artists he also associated with postminimalism. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 49, 82.
69. Briony Fer has written that Hesse’s work has “an intensely made quality, but what making constituted for Hesse does not seem to be self-evident. The label of ‘process art’ never quite did justice to Hesse’s project.” Fer, Infinite Line, 118.
70. Lippard quoted in Auther, String, Felt, Thread, 84.
71. Auther, String, Felt, Thread, chap. 3. Elyse Speaks suggests that Lee Bontecou’s work of the 1960s and its critical reception contributed to the successful incorporation of traditional craft processes into the terrain of the expressive art object. Her discussion of Bontecou is a cogent examination of the intersection of the processes of making and ideological conceptions of craft, art, hobbies, and gender. Speaks, “Terms of Craft.”
72. Rosenberg, De-Definition of Art, 40.
73. Singerman, Art Subjects, 70–72. On the educational value of “creative problem-solving skills” in the arts, see also Efland, History of Art Education, 237.
74. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 21–23.
75. Ehrenzweig gives examples of the Bauhaus, which once liberated students from academic clichés only to founder in rational analysis of empty form; and of Rauschenberg’s revelatory teacher who cut up one of his drawings to make a collage, which is now a wholly standard procedure with predictable results “evident in commercial galleries everywhere.” Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order of Art, 55.
76. Ibid., 58, 62. Ehrenzweig was a psychologist, and his primary interest was defining the psychological role of art for the individual and the community. Briefly, he believed that art was a means to instantiate unconscious irrational creative impulses. Rational control of artistic production obstructed the artist’s creativity, the ability to turn the chaos of the universe into a unique pattern: “Creativity can almost be defined as the capacity for transforming the chaotic aspect of undifferentiation into a hidden order that can be accompanied by a comprehensive (syncreatic) vision” (127).
77. Ibid., 146.
78. Singerman, Art Subjects, 150–64.
79. Morris, Continuous Project, 75.
1. Marsha Meskimmon has made process a central concept in her analysis of contemporary feminist art. In her view process is a means to materialize female subjectivity and the active encounter of self with the wider social body, as well as central to the materialization of female desire. See Women Making Art, 73, 94.
2. Montano, You Too, 30.
3. The sociologist Anthony Giddens gives creativity a central place in his discussion of modern conceptions of self-identity. See Modernity and Self, 35 and 41. For psychological approaches to the study of creativity see Runco and Albert, eds., Theories of Creativity; and Runco, Critical Creative Processes.
4. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 106, 125.
5. McNiff, Trust the Process, 11, 5, 2.
6. Sartwell, Art of Living, xi, 12.
7. Ibid., 32, 125, 70.
8. Shusterman, Performing Live, 3, 32–33.
9. Shusterman sees somaesthetics as the source of nonlinguistic forms of understanding, which are not interpretive. He cites Dewey, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty as earlier thinkers who explored this area of understanding. Ibid., 135. Mark Johnson’s Body in the Mind is also a key text for Shusterman’s somaesthetics.
10. Shusterman, Performing Live, 148, 162.
11. The craftsperson’s physical engagement is often opposed to the presumed dominance of visuality in modern art. See Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 39, 165–69. The sociologist Richard Sennett also theorizes the significance of experience and bodily knowledge from a pragmatist viewpoint. He sees this form of knowledge as creating a continuum between the organic/physical and the social world of human relations. See The Craftsman, 290.
12. Morris, “Writing with Davidson,” 620.
13. Morris, Continuous Project, 251, 254, 255, 250.
14. David Brett makes a similar point: “The skillful and loving engagement with materials, with the brute stuff of the world, is an ethical engagement because it is the point at which metaphor is created. We are what we make.” See Rethinking Decoration, 257.
15. Buchloh, “Gabriel Orozco,” 207.
16. Orozco, Gabriel Orozco, 121.
17. Fer, “The Scatter,” 224.
18. Orozco, Gabriel Orozco, 14.
19. Lacy, “Debated Territory,” 174.
20. Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat Record, 460.
21. Bois and Krauss, Formless, 137, 202, 214, 240.
22. Ibid., 245.
23. See for example the works of Jeff Koons, as well as that of the YBAs (Young British Artists), specifically, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas.
24. Stockholder and Scanlan, “Art and Labor,” 51.
25. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party offers an interesting example of the difficulties faced by an artist who relies heavily on collaboration and retains sole authorship of a work. Chicago has long been criticized for failing to give due credit to her collaborators, even though she made collaboration central to the realization of the project. Hundreds of volunteers worked on The Dinner Party, and a documentary film recorded the interactions of the group in the process of creating the work.
26. In 1994 Christo retroactively assigned dual authorship of all “his” large-scale installations to both himself and his wife. Prior to this act they were publicly attributed to him alone. While this shift in attribution granted his wife equal partnership, their now joint authorship is still far from full acknowledgment of the all the participants integral to the works’ realization. It is not difficult to envision a list of all the people involved that would be comparable to the seemingly endless credits of a contemporary Hollywood movie.
27. Birnbaum, “Art of Education,” 476.
28. The Portikus video of the project shows that the labor involved was fundamentally what was needed to run an ordinary small salad dressing production factory. The only non-mundane part of the process was the exposure of the salad dressing to multiple video monitors playing the films of Kevin Costner that instilled the Costner essence.
29. See for example Sennett, The Craftsman; and Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft. For a discussion of Rhoades’s work as part of a “slacker aesthetics” that undermines the work ethic of artworks, see Drucker, Sweet Dreams, 95–102.
30. “Process” is commonly used to describe the aims of work associated with relational aesthetics. See Steiner, “Lost Paradise,” 142–43; and Thomas, “.all hawaii eNtrées,” 232.
31. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 54.
32. Deleuze has been described as a process philosopher and linked to Whitehead. He also wrote a book on Bergson, whose ideas influenced his own. See Clark, “Whiteheadian Chaosmos.”
33. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 103.
34. Ibid., 47, 110, 111.
35. See Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”; and Foster, “Arty Party.”
36. See Zahm, “L’hiver de l’amour,” 139–40.
37. Kwon, One Place, 24, 50, 31. Kwon also quotes James Meyer: “The functional site is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and discursive filiations and the bodies that move between them. . . . It is an informational site . . . a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus” (29).
38. To cite one example, Eugene Thacker describes systems approaches in biology as “an alternative way of understanding the organism at the molecular level, without over-emphasis on individual genes or genomes. . . . Process and interaction became the starting points for research, rather than identification of individual genes. Such a focus on process and interaction implies a wider view of the living cell, and, indeed, the organism. . . . The systems biology approach re-adapts biology to the terms of information processing and networking. . . . Mainstream biotech realizes DNA-as-data, then systems biology maybe seen as an actualizing of genetic information as process and interaction.” See “Open Source DNA,” 36–37.
39. Last, “Systematic Inexhaustion,” 118–20, 115.
40. Lacy, “Debated Territories,” 174–75.
41. Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages,” 46.
42. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 12. Kester’s concept of the dialogic is derived from the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.
43. Kester, One and the Many, 114–15.
44. Kester defines art “through its function as a more or less open space within contemporary culture: a space in which certain questions can be asked, certain critical analyses articulated, that would not be accepted or tolerated elsewhere.” See Conversation Pieces, 68. Art is, thus, a social context that can allow greater freedom to imagine and realize solutions to community problems. Artists are similarly people presumed to be free from institutional goals and requirements and thereby able to take a broader view of any given situation (ibid., 101).
45. Ibid., 90.
46. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 19, 255.
47. Shaun McNiff states, “It is such a commonplace saying within the creative arts that until recently I have been reluctant to utter the three words for fear of being trite: ‘Trust the process.’ Whenever I find myself in a difficult situation, the principle is reaffirmed.” See Trust the Process, 13
48. Johanna Drucker has described the “contemporary attention to use and process” in terms of “the affective gesture [that] brings the inert to life, it rehumanizes material, not in the romantic sense but in a production sense. Affectivity gives material a sense of intention and form, of sentience and action, it shifts it out of the mere material while engaging with it, tweaking the stuff, making it active.” See Sweet Dreams, 173.
49. Brett, Rethinking Decoration, 257.
50. See Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” 152, 219, 224.
51. The cover copy for McNiff’s Trust the Process encapsulates this pervasive attitude: “Whether in painting, poetry, performance, music, dance, or life, there is an intelligence working in every situation. This force is the primary carrier of creation. If we trust it and follow its natural movement, it will astound us with its ability to find a way through problems. . . . There is a magic to this process that cannot be controlled by the ego. Somehow it always finds the way to the place where you need to be, and a destination you never could have known in advance. When everything seems as if it is hopeless and going nowhere . . . trust the process.”
52. By this I mean the artist’s self-identity. The artist’s identity is not always so easily recognized in certain arenas, although even in the highest reaches of the art world it is most often a question of whether someone is a successful artist. If any individual claims to be an artist there are virtually no grounds now for contesting the truth of the assertion. Hans Abbing has pointed out that the art world defines professional artists not on whether they make a living from their art but on whether they strive for art world recognition. See Why Are Artists Poor?, 147. Glenn Adamson noted that one distinction between the contemporary artist and the craftsperson is that the craftsperson has to distinguish him- or herself from the hobbyist, whereas the artist, since anything can be a work of art, does not face this difficulty: “There is no such thing as an amateur contemporary artist, only an unsuccessful one.” See Thinking Through Craft, 143.