About: Process

All
About The Theory and Discourse

of Modern Artistic Labor
Process Kim Grant

All About Process
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All
About
Process
The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor
Kim Grant
The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State
Publication Data University
All rights reserved
Names: Grant, Kim, 1962– , author. Printed in the United States of America
Title: All about process : the theory and Published by The Pennsylvania State
discourse of modern artistic labor / University Press,
Kim Grant. University Park, PA 16802–1003
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania :
The Pennsylvania State University Press, The Pennsylvania State University Press is
[2017] | Includes bibliographical a member of the Association of American
references and index. University Presses.
Summary: “A study of the concept of artistic
process in the Western tradition of the It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State
visual arts. Focuses on modern and University Press to use acid-free paper.
contemporary art and analyzes the Publications on uncoated stock satisfy
development of process as a discourse the minimum requirements of American
that increasingly locates the primary National Standard for Information
value of art in the artist’s creative Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
labor”—Provided by publisher. Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016042616 | ISBN
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
2016042616
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For Charles
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Nothing is finally understood until its
reference to process has been made
evident.
—Alfred North Whitehead
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Contents
Introduction: 6 The Artist’s Process at

Process as Value Mid-Century
1 138
1 Conceptualizing the Artist’s 7 Art and Social Processes

Labor Prior to the Nineteenth 173
Century
8 Process Art
16
188
2 Art, Craft, and Industrialization
9 It’s All About the Process
34
222
3 The Artist’s Process from the
Notes
Academic to the Modern
248
58
Bibliography
4 New Conceptions of the
268
Artist’s Process
84 Index
279
5 The Artist’s Process as a Means
of Self-Realization
112
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Introduction
Process as Value
I really did believe that process would set you free. . . . A signature style is
about how it happened, not what is made. I think of myself as an orchestrator
of experience.
—Chuck Close
Process invites risk, uncertainty, vision, unpredictability, concentration and

blind devotion.
—Carolee Schneemann
The elevation of artistic process over product has become a, perhaps the,
central cliché of artists’ statements in recent decades. Like most clichés it
has a basis in truth; many contemporary artists employ processes that pre-
clude or eliminate the production of durable objects. The ubiquity of the
cliché, however, suggests that artists’ devotion to process is far more mean-
ingful than a simple descriptive statement. The fact that so many artists
consider themselves to be primarily engaged with process, albeit understood
in varied ways, reflects widely shared assumptions about the meaning and
purpose of art and the work of the artist. The embrace of artistic process is
a value claim, and it is the purpose of this book to explore the history and
significance of process as term of value. How and why have so many artists
embraced process as the most significant aspect of their activity? How was
artistic process perceived and valued in earlier periods of Western art? How
has the creation of art objects been theorized and evaluated in comparison
to the production of craft and industrial objects? What general social and
cultural attitudes have contributed to the elevation of artistic process?
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Finally, what does the high valuation of artistic process indicate about the
place of artists and the arts in contemporary society?1 This study is intended
to provide answers to these questions and others in its careful examination
of the meaning of artistic process.
When artists state that for them it is all about the process, they are
saying many different things. At the simplest level it is a declaration that they
2 are dedicated and attentive to their creative labors. This is probably the most
common use of the phrase, and one that stresses artists’ commitment to
their own work rather than external goals. It is the doing of the work rather
than the outcome that is the most important thing for such artists. A com-
mon corollary to this attitude is a desire and intention to create work that is
not predetermined; the artwork is a natural outgrowth of the artist’s working
process. If that were all there were to the concept of process in contemporary
art discourse, it would be simple to paraphrase it as follows: artists like to
work at making art, and the art they make reflects their attention to the way
they work. Accepting this paraphrase, however, fails to acknowledge the
extent to which artists have taken refuge, so to speak, in the concept of
process. It has become a strategy artists use to preserve their integrity in the
face of a seemingly endless onslaught of theoretical interpretations and
critical positions. Rather than assuming the position of an intellectual theo-
rist, many artists prefer simply to assert the fundamental motivation of their
work as located within the making of the work itself.
It sounds simple, but it is not so straightforward. Militating against a
naïve return to uncomplicated making is a high degree of consciousness,
which may not affect every individual artist but certainly colors the art world
perception and understanding of artistic process. Artists’ statements con-
sistently show that process is a considered approach; it can even be the point
and purpose of contemporary artworks, as demonstrated by Jason Rhoades’s
2001 Costner Complex (Perfect Process), which he described as “not meant to
be viewed as an object, a performance or even a goal-oriented activity, but
simply as a perfect process.”2 Process reaches far beyond the artist’s studio
to comprehend a multiplicity of approaches, connections, and relations
embraced by contemporary artists in their work. In this sense “process”
becomes a term that reveals the extent to which contemporary artists are
engaged with situating their work within the world—not just finding it a
physical location, but siting it much more broadly in terms of social relations
and cultural significance. Studio processes are only the beginning of a topic
that expands to embrace the purpose and meaning of art at every level, from
the local to the global (and even the universal), the biological to the artificial,
All About Process

the secular to the spiritual. The artist’s process takes its place in the inter-
locking processes that make up the world, a microcosm of activity in time.
The extreme malleability of the concept of process in relation to art
poses certain difficulties for analysis. Limiting the concept to the literal
physical processes employed by artists reduces it to a narrow consideration
of technical concerns, while the concept’s potential for virtually infinite
expansion threatens to render it too broad for meaningful discussion. In 3
order to understand the appeal of process as a key concept for contemporary
art, it is necessary to take a wide view of its significance in terms of both its
present and historical usages and implications. In this study the concept of
process is understood and examined in several different ways specifically
relevant to visual art. Of primary concern are the ways the artist’s working
processes have been conceptualized and valued in the Western tradition,
particularly during the modern period. This topic is connected with much
broader issues raised by labor in general, especially the relationship of
manual work to both intellectual and mechanical labor. Integrally related to
conceptions of the artist’s working process are also conceptions of the art-
ist’s identity as an individual engaged in work processes. Understood in this
way, the artist’s identity becomes a model for conceiving the physical, psy-
chological, social, and philosophical significance of labor, often specifically
manual labor. Considering artistic working processes also leads to examina-
tion of those who engage in artistic processes but are not necessarily con-
sidered artists, such as craftspeople, students, and amateurs, and the effects
such engagements have on both the definition of art and artists, and the
social role of art making.
Accompanying the recent prominence of artistic process is a corre-
sponding decline of the artist’s product as an object of independent aesthetic
interest. This places concern for artistic process in counterpoint to formal-
ist approaches derived from Kantian concepts of beauty and disinterested
evaluation, and it challenges the commodity status of artworks. As far back
as ancient Greece the art object’s status as a commodity contributed to the
low social status of the artist-craftsperson. In accordance with a widespread
cultural suspicion of industrial production and commodification in the
modern era, artists increasingly stressed the distinctions between artistic
and nonartistic processes of production in ways that elevated the signifi-
cance of the resulting artworks. The artist became a very special type of
maker, engaged in important human processes. The art objects produced
were increasingly valued as signs of the artist’s distinctive processes of mak-
ing rather than independently valuable commodities. Considering art in
Introduction

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

solely to the analysis of the artwork itself, typically the aesthetic effects of
the artwork as an object, rather than consideration of who made it or pre-
cisely how it was made. This approach derives in large part from the Western
tradition of philosophical aesthetics, which is concerned almost solely with
beauty and the artwork’s effects on the viewer. As we will see, there are
connections between formalist approaches and the artist’s process, but these
have not generally been given the degree of attention that has been lavished 5
on the aesthetic effects of artworks’ formal qualities.
Since the 1970s, conceptual art and theoretical concerns have domi-
nated contemporary art discourses and have offered more interpretive dis-
tractions from artistic process. This is particularly true of the forms of
conceptual art that elevate the idea over any form of making. The earliest
articulation of this position is usually credited to Marcel Duchamp’s defini-
tion of the “ready-made,” which reduced the artist’s activity to the act of
choosing an object, based on total aesthetic and moral indifference to it.
Joseph Kosuth’s 1969 text “Art after Philosophy” as well as his series of works
presented under the title Art as Idea as Idea redefined art as purely concep-
tual, further reducing the importance of the artist’s process. It should be
noted, however, that engagement with process is a significant aspect of some
conceptual art, as will be discussed later in this book. Process also remains
outside the purview of some structuralist and post-structuralist approaches
in which artworks are valued primarily for their engagement with theoretical
issues. This position is perhaps most strongly represented by the artists
associated with simulationism and the appropriation art of the 1980s, such
as Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Cindy
Sherman, whose works are often interpreted as extended glosses on concep-
tual approaches initiated by Duchamp.
The recent embrace of process by many contemporary artists in their
public statements as well as their work often, but by no means always,
reflects a rejection of the notion that artists are subservient to critical theory
and ideas. This is a position that has also been adopted by recent craft theo-
rists as a means to determine the distinction between art, defined as reliant
on conceptual approaches, and craft, defined as primarily concerned with
making.4 For many artists and craftspeople, claiming a primary engagement
with process is to assert that their work is not the mere illustration or
manifestation of preexisting theories and agendas. It is an attempt to reclaim
the significance of what artists do and how they do it.
A problem with focusing attention on the artist’s working processes is
the danger of narrowing the discussion to topics and technical issues of
Introduction

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

their reactions he perceives the failure of his work, and that perception
destroys him.
The story has a broad range of significance, including a commentary on
the limits of the Western artistic tradition’s goal to record visual experience
in paint. In terms of the artist’s process Balzac’s tale is a cautionary one; it
warns of the dangers that can threaten artists whose dedication to their work
is unregulated. The artist needs external goals and limits in order to create 7
effective artworks. Balzac emphasizes that Frenhofer was “a sublime painter!
but unlucky for him, he was born to riches, and so he [had] leisure to follow
his fancies” (28). This great and talented painter had too much liberty and
was able to indulge in the excesses of inspiration. Such unrestrained inspira-
tion can carry the artist beyond what is possible to realize in a work of art.
Thus the artistic product as a practical end must be kept in mind as a means
of regulation.
Too much theory is also a serious danger: “For painters, practise and
observation are everything; and when theories and poetical ideas begin to
quarrel with the brushes, the end is doubt. . . . Work! painters have no busi-
ness to think, except brush in hand” (28). To attempt to go beyond the
boundaries of what a specific art can achieve is to destroy the possibility of
aesthetic achievement. Artists must accept the limitations of their art form
and work within them. This is an early manifestation of what will become a
cornerstone of formalist modernism—dedication to medium specificity—
but it is also a simple injunction to the artist to be concerned solely with the
processes of making. It is the latter significance that concerned artists such
as Cézanne, Picasso, and de Kooning, who will become exemplars of total
dedication to the processes of painting. For them, Frenhofer’s intense solip-
sistic devotion to his painting will be emblematic of their own process. The
danger of excessive theorizing is a constant through the history of modern
art, and one regularly countered by artists’ statements insisting on the purity
of their process. As we will see in the pages that follow, modern artists such
as Matisse who described their working processes claimed they were not
reliant on theories. They presented their work as fully engaged with the
processes of making necessary and appropriate to their medium, untainted
by external theories and ideas. The injunction given to the young painter in
Balzac’s tale to work without excessive theorizing indicates that the success-
ful artist’s process has long been perceived as an undistracted and total
engagement with making.
Balzac’s story also portrays the traditional artist’s dependence on the
public who evaluates the products of his work. It is clear that Frenhofer
Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Widespread efforts to locate and define specifically female forms of art
and art making accompanied the rise of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s
and had an enormous effect on the growth of interest in the creative process
as a subject and focus of contemporary art. Artistic processes traditionally
associated with women’s crafts and amateur art became a site of great inter-
est for contemporary artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro who
adopted and elevated long-devalued forms of art making. They drew atten- 13
tion to the extent to which profound engagement with artistic process was
not limited to the narrow category of socially recognized artists, but was in
fact a pervasive social activity. Feminist artists also challenged the prevalent
modern image of the artist as a solitary male genius and reinstated collabo-
ration as a valuable component of the artistic process. In addition, feminists’
emphasis on the value of personal experience led many artists to examine
their individual creative processes in depth and to expand these well beyond
the traditional boundaries of object-oriented production. Mierle Laderman
Ukeles’s maintenance art, Carolee Schneemann’s eroticized performance
art, and Linda Montano’s wide-ranging experiential performances provide
highly influential examples of the myriad ways the processes of common
activities previously unassociated with art or art making can be both the
subject and the object of significant art.
In the contemporary art world, anything may be a work of art. This is
often understood by those who are not seriously engaged with the visual arts
in a limited fashion. They may know enough about modern art to shrug with
indifference or disdain as they acknowledge that art can be anything. But
when asked to consider how this is the case, many, perhaps most, people will
respond that anything a person thinks is beautiful—be it a urinal, a pile of
rags, or a sunset—is a work of art. This conception marries the traditional
association of art with beauty and aesthetics to a misunderstanding of mod-
ern art’s subversive rejection of traditional concerns. It is accompanied by
another related and widespread conviction—that anyone may make a work
of art. Thus the cook, the gardener, the knitter, even the housecleaner may
in common parlance be declared artists when they devote an exceptional
degree of care, attention, and inventiveness to the production of something
beautiful, be it a meal, a flower bed, a sweater, or the arrangement of a room.
This is a true democratization of art and an intriguing public response to the
growing distance between institutionalized contemporary art and the gen-
eral public. It seems that as institutionally recognized artistic activity
becomes incomprehensible to the public, the more that public embraces
traditional notions of art-making activity in their own lives. While for many
Introduction

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

Shusterman’s revisions of traditional Western aesthetics are part of a
general reassessment of the meaning and purpose of art sparked by wide-
spread changes in late-capitalist, postindustrial society. In recent decades,
art history and criticism have accepted the limitations and failures of West-
ern aesthetics and its methodological offspring, formalism, to comprehend
fully the significance of art. What has largely replaced traditional approaches
have been critical theory and contextual analysis, both of which are primar- 15
ily concerned with situating art and culture in relation to broad social and
political concerns.18 Serious philosophical efforts to reconsider the role and
purpose of art in relation to experiential concerns, like Shusterman’s, are
rare. This may be because, as Shusterman and others argue, Western phi-
losophy is fundamentally biased in favor of the mental and conceptual rather
than the bodily and experiential. Language and concepts for addressing
experience have been relatively neglected in the Western intellectual tradi-
tion, and this has had a serious effect on the establishment of a developed
understanding of the significance and role of process in the arts.
It is the purpose of this study to provide a foundation for understanding
how the artist’s process has been conceived and valued in the Western artis-
tic tradition, beginning with a historical overview and then analyzing the
topic more specifically in relation to modern and contemporary art. A pri-
mary goal for this book is the careful consolidation and analysis of the mate-
rial on this topic. There is a long history of critical and theoretical texts
addressing the artist’s process, particularly in the modern period, which have
not always received the attention they deserve because other issues and
concerns have taken precedence. These are not obscure texts by any means.
Most of the texts and artists that will be discussed in the pages to follow are
well known and have been highly influential. What is not always clear about
them is how their explicit engagement with process fits into a broader pic-
ture of the purposes of art, particularly in the modern industrial and post-
industrial world. Artistic process and its relation to the meaning and purpose
of art are a primary consideration for artists. Critical theory in its varied
forms provides many valuable ways to examine art, but these often have
little or nothing to do with what matters to artists or many of their viewers.
It is my intention to provide a concrete outline and analysis of the ways
process has become a central concern for contemporary artists and their
viewers.
Introduction

1
Conceptualizing the Artist’s
Labor Prior to the Nineteenth Century
Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more complete than that
which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and . . . we call
complete without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and
never for the sake of something else.
—Aristotle
The artist’s process of creation was not a significant topic for general discus-
sion or analysis before the nineteenth century; indeed, before the Renais-
sance, artists were barely separated from other skilled manual workers. All
forms of manual labor were ranked relatively low in Western societies, which
valued abstract immaterial activities and functions more highly than physi-
cal and material ones. Arguments for the elevated status of the fine arts
originating in the Renaissance emphasized the artist’s intellectual work and
largely ignored the manual labor necessary to produce artworks. In discus-
sions of the artist’s work prior to the nineteenth century, the dominant trend
is one that remains powerful today: the privileging of the intellectual and
conceptual over the manual and material. Nevertheless, attitudes and ideas
that characterize modern interest in the artist’s process have roots in earlier
discussions of the artist’s labor.
Aristotle’s definition of a worthy pursuit quoted above is precisely what
artists now so often enshrine in their statements about artistic process—an
activity that is complete and desirable in itself without reference to a goal or
end product. This is ironic given that Aristotle uses the craftsman’s activity
of making as an example of a lesser pursuit because it is always oriented to
the requirements of a specific goal.1 Activities that are not directed toward

any goal whatsoever have the highest value: “For the arts of making have
some other end beyond the making . . . but in the processes of doing there
is no other end beyond the doing. . . . Wisdom, then, is concerned with doing
and things done, but art with making and things made.”2 Aristotle separates
wisdom and action from art and making; his example of self-sufficient action
is music making because it has no external purpose, whereas art and craft
inevitably serve some specified goal. 17
It is common knowledge that ancient Greek and Roman society con-
sidered manual labor, which included what came to be known as the fine
arts, to be a base activity appropriate to slaves and the lowest social orders.
According to Aristotle, manual and remunerative labor deform the body and
degrade the mind.3 Plutarch noted the vast distinction between admiring
an artwork and admiring the artist who made it: “No gifted young man, upon
the seeing the Zeus of Pheidias at Olympia, ever wanted to be Pheidias. . . .
For it does not necessarily follow that, if a work is delightful . . . the man
who made it is worthy of our serious regard.”4 Aristotle believed only men
of leisure were able to devote themselves to the most meaningful human
activities: politics and ethics. He did nevertheless advocate education in
certain arts for children destined to be leaders in society—just not too
much, because if they attend “to them too closely, in order to attain perfec-
tion in them . . . harmful effects will follow.”5 For Aristotle, drawing, like
reading and writing, is useful for acquiring knowledge; it also helps to
develop the ability to make aesthetic judgments.6 Music is the only artistic
activity he associates with the intellectual activity of leisure, but the devel-
opment of professional skill in musical performance will lead away from
music as a means of self-improvement to a professional activity that gives
“vulgar pleasure” to others.7
Aristotle’s discussion of arts education for children destined to become
the leaders of society laid the foundation for many of the Western tradition’s
notions of the role and place of the arts in society. The artistic education of
the European upper classes from the Renaissance on was largely based on
Aristotle’s views. Distinctions between the professional and the upper-class
amateur artist are indebted to Aristotle, as are some aspects of the general
significance of the artist’s process. His discussion of music lays out the terms
for conceptualizing the pleasure of practicing an art form for its own sake,
while his description of the professional artisan whose mind is “absorbed”
and “degraded” by his work provided the basis for the widespread conception
of the artist’s attitude of total dedication to work. For Aristotle this dedica-
tion detracted from the higher values he associated with free human action;
Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor

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

As for the other aspects of the painting, those which are not wholly
apparent to amateurs like us but which nevertheless contain the whole
power of the art—such as drawing the lines with the utmost exactitude,
making a precise mixture of the colors and an apt application of them,
employing shading where necessary, a rationale for the size of the fig-
ures, and equality and harmony of the parts to the whole—let painters’
pupils, whose job it is to know about such things, praise them. As for 19
me, I particularly praised Zeuxis for this achievement, namely that in
one and the same design he has demonstrated the greatness of his artis-
tic skill in a variety of ways.10
Lucian’s text is interesting not only for his distinction between the craft
concerns of the painter and the representational concerns of the non-artisan
viewer, but also for what the artist himself desired from the viewers of his
work. According to Lucian, the viewers of Zeuxis’s centaur family were most
interested in the novelty of the subject; they praised “the strangeness of its
conception” and failed to appreciate the artist’s representational skill:
The result was that Zeuxis, when he perceived that the newness of the
subject was preoccupying them and drawing their attention away from
its artistic quality, and the precision of its details was being treated as a
by-product, said to his pupil: “. . . They are praising only the clay of my
work, but as to the lighting effects, and whether these are beautifully
executed and of artistic merit, these questions they treat as if they were
not of much importance; rather, the new-fangled quality of the subject
surpasses in renown the precision of its workmanship.11
Lucian’s tale sets up terms of discussion and evaluation that have endured
to the present. Zeuxis is capable of impressive invention, a quality that will
become of great significance in the elevation of the artist’s intellectual, and
consequently social, status in the Renaissance and afterward. Nevertheless,
the painter apparently disdained this invention as the mere “clay” of his
work. What Zeuxis prized was his manual/technical skill. He considered the
subject/idea as the mere substrate for the artistry of its pictorial realization,
which was the culmination of the years of labor that resulted in the mastery
of his craft. What Zeuxis wanted was viewers able to appreciate, at least to
a degree, that mastery, and surviving descriptions of the achievements of
ancient Greek artworks suggest that this was not an unrealistic desire.

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

of the artist, it was largely impossible to conceive of the artist exercising his
thought-directed skills in the absence of an intended final product. The art-
ist’s process has as a goal a finished work; without that goal there is no
process, no creative impetus. Only when arrested by death or other unex-
pected circumstances would it be possible to capture an index of the creative
process. This may have been of great interest and value to other artists, but
Greek society in general would never have considered it comparable to a 21
finished artwork.
Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between making and doing can be
taken as key to classical thinking in this regard. The artist is a maker, not a
doer/actor; his goal is the creation of a thing, which may be done well or not.
The free man, in contrast, acts in accordance with moral aims, which are
intangible; his goal is to act well. By defining the artist as a maker, creating
in accordance with the needs and requirements of a defined product, it is
impossible to separate the artist’s activity from its productive goal. The
working process is fully identified with its aim, the final product, and it can-
not be isolated without losing its reason for being. The interest of the unfin-
ished work is its capacity to offer insight into how a great artist/maker
achieved his products—an interest comparable to that provoked by the
engineering blueprints for a steam engine, which show how the machine
works. To appreciate the evidence of a creative process in itself, as an index
of action, requires an altogether different set of human values and ideologi-
cal assumptions. The overall concern in discussions of art, artworks, and
artists from the ancient world to the nineteenth century was to analyze and
evaluate the artwork as a product. Interest in the artist’s creative process
was largely limited to analysis of the means employed to create the product,
rather than to consideration of those means as significant in themselves.
Only in the nineteenth century, when industrialization prompted a serious
reconsideration of the distinctions between creative and mechanical pro-
cesses, did the artist’s labor in itself become a focus of critical and theoreti-
cal concern.
Although there is scant evidence to support the notion that artisans and
craftworkers were more highly regarded in the Middle Ages than previously
(or subsequently in the case of many forms of craftwork), the Middle Ages
have been considered a golden age of craftsmanship ever since John Ruskin
published The Stones of Venice in the mid-nineteenth century. For Ruskin and
many others, this long period before the Renaissance separation of the fine/
liberal arts from the crafts seemed to promise a fairer social and cultural rec-
ognition of all artisanal work. The paucity of explicit documentary evidence

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

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

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

commercial. That this also is the proper and logical conclusion of “fine art,”
and the effective suicide of what could be conceived as visual art’s funda-
mental identity, is also something one might term a problem. It does, how-
ever, have the virtue of making it clear that the essentially idealist, intellectual
goals of the Western fine arts from the Renaissance onward are in direct
conflict with the traditional role of art as a humanly created material thing
intended to be perceived by the senses. The long tradition of art’s intellec- 25
tualization in theoretical and critical discourse has tended to obscure the
technical and creative processes of artistic production. Zeuxis’s complaint
that the public was only interested in his original concept, the “clay” of the
work, and ignored the artistry of his technical achievements might well have
been echoed by countless artists since the time of the Renaissance. As Leon-
ardo remarked, few painters write about the science and nobility of their art,
and therefore few people other than practicing artists understand it. His own
writings may be seen as an attempt to rectify this situation, and they dem-
onstrate that the separation between intellectual art and “mechanical” craft
is often extremely difficult to distinguish with absolute clarity.
Leonardo was among the first to insist that painting was a liberal art
because it was a science, both rooted in knowledge derived from (visual)
experience and a form of intellectual endeavor connected with mathematics
through its basis in perspective. It was also based in imagination, like poetry,
but more durable, more sensually direct, more temporally immediate, and
more readily available to all. In Leonardo’s view, sculpture from marble was
not a science but a mechanical art, requiring little to no mental effort, whose
practice produces sweat and fatigue.26 Leonardo’s ideas ultimately became
the basis for the first art academies in Italy, which stressed the study of
perspective and proportion as the foundation of art. In fact, this would be
the basis for all academic art instruction up to the nineteenth century.
In his extensive writings on the art of painting, Leonardo focused pri-
marily on instructions for achieving accurate representations of objects in
space and light. Careful study and diligent labor are the presumed foundation
for the artist’s gradual mastery of his means. Leonardo rarely addresses what
may be considered the psychological experience or process of art making
directly, although he occasionally comments on appropriate attitudes for the
artist in relation to others and to society. He adjures the artist to avoid work-
ing with the goal of making a lot of money, sometimes for exalted moral
reasons and sometimes because he seems to have believed that profitable
art making was injurious to true excellence. Leonardo also believed that the
artist worked most diligently when alone, and that the company of others

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

ever, this theoretical component (comprising mathematical perspective,
optical theories of light, anatomical knowledge, etc.) diminished to the level
of mechanical practice. It became little more than part of the painter’s trade,
a type of knowledge comparable to the painter’s knowledge of materials and
the means of their fabrication and employment. What was ultimately most
successful historically as the intellectual component of the fine artist’s work
was a topic Leonardo addressed relatively little: imagination. Here was a 27
mental activity that could not be reduced to rules and precepts, although
Leonardo’s famous injunction to seek imaginative stimulus in the arbitrary
forms of cracks and stains on old walls shows that he even formulated strat-
egies for provoking imagination.
One more issue deserves attention in the context of Leonardo’s theo-
retical writing: the process of naturalistic depiction he both described explic-
itly and implied. Leonardo believed that constant practice, guided by
theoretical understanding and proper judgment, was the basis of artistic
mastery and excellence. This practice was not to be limited to drawing spe-
cific subjects, but to encompass the representation of everything found in
the visible world. Through the practice of drawing from nature the artist
develops increasing knowledge of the means of representation. For Leon-
ardo, proof of the artist’s understanding lay in the ability to draw from
memory with perfect accuracy. This, it might be argued, is evidence for his
conviction that the painter’s labor is primarily mental rather than manual.29
However, the distinction is not clear, and it is often claimed that Leonardo
advocated the development of the artist’s manual dexterity through constant
practice as a primary means to artistic mastery. David Summers has pointed
out the dilemma faced by anyone attempting to comprehend the complexity
of manual practice in Renaissance art:
Languages of sensate judgment have probably always been integral to

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

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

unintended by Aristotle) between theoretical knowledge that can be verbal-
ized and ignorant “mechanical” practice.
The effects of this divorce may be seen in the degree to which artistic
practices and processes were long considered outside the purview of general
public interest in the arts. What the artist did in the studio was mysterious
and, at the same time, largely beneath the notice of those interested in the
arts. Such an attitude toward the artist’s actual work contributed to general 29
social conceptions of the artist as both a lowly worker and a mysterious being
subject to strange, even divine, motive forces. A telling indication of these
views, and the changes initiated in the nineteenth century in the status of
the artist’s labor, may be found in G. Baldwin Brown’s preface to the first
English translation of Vasari’s Introduction to his famous Lives of the Artists.
The topic of the Introduction is artistic technique, and, as Brown’s preface
explains, it was not translated earlier because in the mid-nineteenth century
readers were not interested in technical processes. By 1907, however, accord-
ing to Brown, William Morris had taught the public the importance of tech-
nique, and there was a readership for Vasari’s text.35 It is this growth of
interest in the artist’s material techniques and processes that is a primary
characteristic of modern art and a central theme of this study.
Vasari’s Introduction, like Leonardo’s writings on painting, is primarily
practical and instructive, and only occasionally offers insights into the char-
acter of the artist’s work. Echoing Leonardo, Vasari insists on the importance
of long study and practice of drawing from nature, which develops both
correctness and facility for design.36 Drawing from nature is in Vasari’s view
the only way to master painting’s most difficult task, foreshortening. Its dif-
ficulty leads to the highest graces and beauties of painting. For Vasari, hard
work and practice lead to mastery, which is identified by apparent ease of
creation (216–17). According to Vasari, “Art will always be associated with
the grace of naturalness . . . and the work be brought to perfection not with
the stress of cruel suffering, so that men who look at it have to endure pain
on account of the suffering which they see has been borne by the artist in his
work, but rather with rejoicing at his good fortune in that his hand has
received from heaven the lightness of movement which shows his painting
to be worked out with study and toil certainly, but not with drudgery” (211).
Manual dexterity is, of course, not the sole requirement for the artist; it must
be accompanied by good judgment. It is mind and hand that create art: “What
design needs, when it has derived from the judgment the mental image of
anything, is that the hand, through the study and practice of many years, may
be free and apt to draw and to express correctly . . . whatever nature has

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

his work that are at variance with the narrative of the great artist overcoming
all difficulties that lie in his path. Vasari’s insistence on Michelangelo’s per-
fectionism often contradicts the main theme of the artist’s stupendous
achievements and his ability to overcome the difficulties of all the art forms
in which he worked. Vasari portrays Michelangelo as excessively critical of
his own work, claiming that the artist said he would show little or nothing
of his work publicly if he were able to satisfy his own desire for perfection. 31
Michelangelo’s great knowledge made it impossible for him to overlook the
smallest imperfection, and this is why he rarely finished anything. His fin-
ished works were done in his youth; they were rare in his maturity (176–77).
The artist whose work was, according to Vasari, characterized by supreme
success in overcoming every difficulty without leaving a single trace of the
great labor involved, is in the next sentence an artist whose sublime imagina-
tive conceptions led him to spoil and abandon many works. Before his death
Michelangelo burned his sketches, designs, and cartoons to hide the great
labors he endured in his desire for perfection (204–5).
Vasari’s complex and contradictory description of Michelangelo set in
place an enduring image of the artist’s extreme dedication to the processes
of his work. First in importance, particularly from the Romantic period
onward, is the artist’s devotion to his art, to the neglect of all other aspects
of life (205). The artist is isolated, absorbed, even obsessed with work, a
characteristic described as early as Aristotle’s discussion of the intellectual
dangers of professional achievement in the arts. The great artist as por-
trayed by Vasari also has standards that are beyond human realization; thus
he is by nature bound to fail in his own estimation. It will always be hard
labor without resolution or achievement. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries this image will become central to a conception of the modern
artist’s self-sufficient devotion to work, unrestrained by externally defined
criteria. It may be a perennially dissatisfied self-sufficiency, but like Vasari’s
Michelangelo the modern artist will be portrayed as completely dedicated
to creative labor; everything else will be considered a distraction from that
primary focus.
Apart from the psychology of the artist profoundly engaged in his artis-
tic process as outlined in Vasari’s life, Michelangelo’s actual production
offers important demonstrations of the artist’s process. Paul Barolsky has
claimed that the non finito or unfinished is a significant category of the artist’s
work and profoundly connected to the Renaissance concept of poetry:
“Michelangelo, by showing the work in different stages of completion, is in
effect revealing its making. . . . He is displaying his poetry, in the root sense

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

panies by the nineteenth century had significant effects on the education of
artists and craftsmen. Public art schools and academies provided all artistic
training. Trade and technical schools educated artisans and workers destined
for industrial trades, entrenching the distinction between the fine arts and
the so-called mechanical arts in a formal educational system. However, even
in technical schools, up to the middle of the nineteenth century drawing
remained the primary pedagogical focus.40 While most likely an indication 33
of institutional laziness, this is an intriguing development. Where previously
disegno was conceived as the intellectual basis for the fine arts, and thus
the means for distinguishing them from arts more explicitly concerned
with the manipulation of materials, in the nineteenth century drawing
became the foundation for all practical arts. Thus, by implication, all arts,
fine and applied, became fundamentally conceptual.
The conceptual orientation of all the applied and technical arts occurred
at what has long been seen as a key moment in the history of Western art:
the widespread recognition of the effects of industrialization on the arts. It
is here that the issue of artistic process began to engage less with art making’s
relation to conceptualization and more with the relationship of art making
and the broad category of work/labor. As we have seen, the ancient Greeks
disdained the artist as a laborer; for them it was the man of leisure who was
able to cultivate the full potential of humanity. From the Renaissance onward,
the artist was able to rise in social status by embracing the conceptual nature
of his work and distancing himself from the stigma of physical labor. Such a
view was enshrined in art academies, where training developed the most
intellectual and least physical aspects of the artist’s work. Beginning in the
eighteenth century, however, widespread shifts in the nature of labor, primar-
ily the result of industrialization, had far-reaching effects on the understand-
ing of the artist’s work and its significance.

2
Art, Craft, and Industrialization
In the eighteenth century, European philosophers began a serious examina-

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

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

providing the fine arts (and, by extension, artists) with a claim to a more
exalted role in human knowledge and experience than they had been tradi-
tionally granted. Following the Aristotelian tradition Kant addressed the
relation of theory to material craft, and he distinguished art from science on
the grounds that art requires material skills developed through practice in
addition to theoretical knowledge.1 He also distinguished art from craft on
the grounds that art is “agreeable on its own account” and thereby a free 35
activity of the spirit, while crafts are “mercenary”—a description reminiscent
of the Greek view that craftsmen were not free because their labor was
directed to satisfying the requirements of others. Kant described craft as
disagreeable labor, made attractive only because it results in payment. Fine
art, however, cannot be remunerated according to any determinate standard,
a distinction that seems to derive from Renaissance developments when
successful artists were paid for their experience rather than the time involved
in producing a work.
Unlike craft, fine art is mentally stimulating in itself without reference
to any other purpose (I:44). Kant was quick to limit any extreme interpreta-
tion of art’s freedom, though, and insisted on the necessity of constraints
for the successful embodiment of artistic spirit. Because art is the product
of thought rather than chance, it requires a mechanical component that can
be encompassed by rules. Genius provides material for fine art, but it must
be processed and given form by academically trained talent (I:46–47). In
keeping with tradition, Kant outlined a balance between the artist’s free
activity, which allows for the original creations of genius, and necessary rules
and constraints. The mechanical component of art is learned, but art should
nevertheless appear natural and give no evidence of painstaking adherence
to rules (I:45). The education of the artist requires a complex negotiation
that develops the artist’s natural abilities and mechanical skills, and Kant
implicitly described the artist’s successful process as achieving a balance
between established rules and freedom. This process must be taught by
demonstration and example rather than rule:
So in fine art there is only manner (modus), not method (methodus): the
master must show by his example what the student is to produce, and
how. He may in the end bring his procedure under universal rules, but
these are more likely to be useful to the student as occasional reminders
of what the main feature of that procedure are, than as prescriptions. . . .
The master must stimulate the student’s imagination until it becomes
commensurate with a given concept; he must inform the student if the

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

guishes between art and mechanical production according to rules and
specifications.2 Also echoing earlier theorists, he is quick to assert that while
art requires freedom from rules in order to allow for the inspirations of
genius, it also requires talent and development “by thought, reflection on
the mode of its productivity, and practice and skill in producing” (27). What
is interesting regarding the artist’s activity as described by Hegel is his notion
that the artist’s labor is a means of objectifying thought and feeling, a belief 37
that derives from his overall conception of art as the materialization of spirit.
This idea will become fundamental to conceptions of the modern artist’s
process as an activity of self-expressive production.
In Hegel’s view the need for art is a universal human constant, and it
derives from human self-consciousness. Human beings have a basic need to
alter the external world by making marks on it; it is “man’s rational need to
lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in
which he recognizes again his own self” (31). Hegel’s example of this funda-
mental human need is a child who throws rocks into a pond to enjoy the
resulting circular ripples. In altering material reality, human beings find both
self-knowledge and a means of communication with others. Another satisfac-
tion that Hegel attributes to the self-objectifying process of making art is a
potential therapeutic effect: “It may often be the case with an artist that,
overtaken by grief, he mitigates and weakens for himself the intensity of his
own feeling by representing it in art. Tears, even, provide some comfort. . . .
But still more of an alleviation is the expression of one’s inner state in words,
pictures, sounds, and shapes” (49). In connecting the artist’s creative process
to the externalization of personal emotion, Hegel articulated a cornerstone
of Romantic art theory and provided a foundation for modern expressionism.
Hegel evaluates the artist’s emotional expression and its relation to
inspiration with care. First, he notes that inspiration does not arise on
demand; it requires specific promptings, which may (or may not) be the
artist’s own feelings. According to Hegel, “Inspiration is the state of the
artist in his active process of forming both his subjective inner conception
and his objective execution of the work of art, because for this double activ-
ity inspiration is necessary” (287). Having determined that an inner drive
fuels the artist’s inspiration, Hegel then considers it in relation to external
motivations. He notes that artists have created great works whose subjects
were commissioned and that artists often complain of lacking subjects as
the basis on which to create. For Hegel, the artist’s inspiration is not com-
pletely self-generated, an act of pure self-expression. Inspiration is “being
completely filled with the theme, being entirely present in the theme, and

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

work, and it also answers fundamental requirements in producing necessary
objects for practical use. Furthermore, Rousseau emphasized the indepen-
dence of the craftsman and saw his labor as like the independent labor of
nature. Rousseau promoted forms of labor in which physical work is balanced
with mental/creative work, and opposed the free labor of the craftsman to
the monotony of certain trades, which foster stupidity through their repeti-
tious drudgery.3 39
Rousseau’s ideal of a balance between mental and physical work is an
instance of what will become an enduring theme in discussions of industrial
labor and the problems that arise with the increasingly narrow specialization
of work. Concern for the mechanical fragmentation of modern society and
individuals is a central issue in the late eighteenth-century writings of Fried-
rich Schiller. He described modern society, as it had developed after losing
the wholeness and equilibrium characteristic of ancient Greece, as “an
ingenious piece of machinery, in which out of the botching together of a vast
number of lifeless parts a collective mechanical life results. . . . Enjoyment
was separated from labor, means from ends, effort from rewards. Eternally
chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to
be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise of the wheel he drives ever-
lastingly in his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead
of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of
his occupation, of his science.”4 Schiller proposed aesthetic education as the
means to restore harmony and wholeness to modern society and its indi-
vidual members.5 His discussion was primarily abstract and philosophical
rather than practical, but Schiller’s vision of a fragmented and mechanized
modern society became commonplace, and throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury social theorists (and later psychologists) attempted to diagnose and find
cures for its ills. These cures often included not only passive experience of
the arts and artist-designed environments, but also direct engagement with
artistic processes as a means to restore wholeness to individuals.
In his early writings Karl Marx, the most influential of the nineteenth-
century social theorists, saw the artist’s work as exemplary of free labor in
contrast to the labor of the factory worker under industrial capitalism. In his
1844 text Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx described the condition
of the modern wage earner as alienated from both his labor and the products
of his labor: “He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labor as
part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life.”6 The products of the
worker’s labor do not belong to him but to the owner of the factory in which
he works, thus: “Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his

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

associated with this view that have become increasingly central to artists and
theorists engaged in the critical examination of the artist’s labor. Most mod-
ern artists are associated with the production of a particular type of com-
modity in an individual style that is presumed to be the artist’s natural
expression. Market forces as embodied by art dealers and galleries often
pressure successful artists to continue to work in their established style in
order to remain commercially viable. This, as Marx recognized, can be 41
extremely limiting for the artist and results in an artistic labor process little
different from that of the alienated factory worker. In recent decades many
artists have successfully rejected the limiting notions of individual style to
work in a broad spectrum of styles and media. Moreover, artists like Andy
Warhol and Jeff Koons developed large workshops with many assistants to
work under their direction in a manner comparable to the production pro-
cesses of Horace Vernet. This raises even more complex issues regarding the
nature of the artist’s work process, which will be discussed in chapter 9.
One aspect of Marx’s thinking has particular relevance for the tradi-
tional division and hierarchy of the arts based on the degree of conceptual-
ization presumed appropriate to them: “Division of labor only becomes truly
such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor
appears. . . . From now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself
from the work and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology,
philosophy, ethics, etc.”12 An elimination of the division between mental and
material labor in the arts would implicitly eliminate hierarchical distinctions
between the arts and between different practitioners within the arts. Thought
and action would be inextricably bound up with one another, creating a
holistic form of productive/creative activity.
Marx’s thinking indicates what becomes a central theme of modern
artistic thought, the artificiality of separating the artist’s work into concep-
tual and practical arenas. This theme is by no means clearly dominant in
discussions about the nature of the visual arts, but it is a major trend from
the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Indeed, it is intriguing to consider
that many artists use conceptual strategies to engage in Marxist social/cultural
critiques (e.g., Victor Burgin), thereby implicitly maintaining a sharp distinc-
tion between theory and practice in their actual work, although not in their
conception of the work’s engaged social positioning (as praxis). In contrast,
artists who are not explicitly politically engaged in their work and who reject
attempts to theorize their activity from outside the actual creative process—
that is, artists who are often criticized for their narrowly aesthetic concerns
by their more politically engaged peers—are more closely engaged in fulfilling

the holistic requirements Marx saw as the necessary condition for free pro-
ductive labor.
The Arts and Crafts Movement and Artistic Process
Work was often described as a blessing in the nineteenth century, a trope

42 that Alasdair Clayre has suggested may reflect the extent to which mechani-
zation created a formless existence for the new wealthy upper classes. Work
offered social acceptance, identity, and routine, all of which served as a
replacement for the rituals and ceremonies that once structured time for the
ruling classes.13 Marx believed the centrality of work in Hegel’s Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit was its greatest insight: “Hegel grasps the self-production of man
as a process, as objectification and supersession of this alienation; . . . he thus
grasps the nature of work and comprehends objective man.”14 Identity is
created through human labor, the interaction of self with the material and
social world; thus, the form of labor becomes a matter of extreme impor-
tance. It is this concern with the situation of labor and its practical and
philosophical implications that lies at the root of what is arguably the most
influential discourse addressing the importance of process in the creation
of art, that formulated in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
John Ruskin, the primary influence on the Arts and Crafts ideology,
believed that labor was noble and the source of the greatest human happi-
ness. Art and craftsmanship were in turn the most valuable forms of work
because of their beneficial effects on the worker. Like Marx, Ruskin believed
that the most beneficial labor must unite the mental and the physical, the
manual and the intellectual. He denounced the
fatal error of despising manual labor when governed by intellect; for it

is no less fatal an error to despise it when thus regulated by intellect,
than to value it for its own sake. We are always in these days endeavor-
ing to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and
another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other
an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the
thinker often to be working. . . . It is only by labor that thought can be
made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy. . . . It
would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind, and
the dishonor of manual labor done away with altogether. . . . In each
several profession, no master should be too proud to do its hardest work.
All About Process

The painter should grind his own colors; the architect work in the
mason’s yard with his men.15
In The Stones of Venice Ruskin deplored the exaltation of mindless perfection

in modern architectural ornament and compared modern tastes to those of
the Renaissance and classical Greece, when artists and artisans were slaves
and held to inhuman standards of perfection: “Men were not intended to work 43
with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions” (161).
In those cultures, according to Ruskin, artisans were mere hands, physical
laborers who made no thoughtful contributions to the building as a whole.
Ruskin believed every manual laborer has intellectual and emotional
potential that must be developed, even at the expense of perfection. Any
workman can be trained to manual precision, “but if you ask him to think
about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own
head, he stops, his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one
he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to
his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He
was only a machine before, an animated tool” (161). Ruskin advocated the
embrace of the human imperfections he saw in Gothic craftsmanship, which
for all its “fantastic ignorance” gave “signs of the life and liberty of every
workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in the scale
of being” (163). Furthermore, he believed that the social upheavals of his day
happened not because of material deprivation, but rather because workers
took no pleasure in their labor and hoped greater wealth would make them
happy.16
Ruskin saw the division of labor in modern industrial manufacturing as
a primary contributor to the debasement of contemporary workers, who are
“divided into mere segments of men . . . so that all the little piece of intelli-
gence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts
itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail” (165). His solution
was to demand only products that were the result of “healthy and ennobling
labor,” and he formulated three rules to that end: abolish the manufacture
of unnecessary objects that do not require invention; abolish unnecessary
finish; and allow no imitation except as a record of noble work. As examples
of these ideas he proposed the elimination of mindless glass bead making,
which gives workers palsy, and the promotion of glass vessel making, which
offers liberal opportunity for invention. Similarly, he advocated the mentally
stimulating crafts of the goldsmith and enamel worker and condemned the
unimaginative cutting of gemstones.

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

human mind and not mechanical labor? For Ruskin the primary signs of
mental involvement in production were imperfections in the final product.
Lack of finish indicated to him a mind absorbed by the most elevated aspect
of making, which is invention, and impatient of the mindless tedium of
perfect finish. The craft product has indeed taken a step up in the hierarchy
of the arts to become an intellectual product. (This is in keeping with a
seemingly opposed trend, the widespread institutionalization of technical 45
training, in which drawing, the intellectual basis of the fine arts, became the
basis of craft instruction.) For a thinker who exalted manual labor and
believed that even hard labor should be shared by all, Ruskin was extremely
quick to condemn unintellectual labor, even when it might contribute to the
beauty of an object. The result is to see in surface beauty a tangible sign of
social inequity and a brutalization of human labor.
Ruskin’s views on the relation between a craft product and the process
of its production are often somewhat obscure. He insisted that the designer
and fabricator of a craft object should be the same person because “one
man’s thoughts can never be expressed by another, and the difference
between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who
is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a com-
mon work of art” (168–69). What specifically indicates this inventive “spirit
of touch” is left undetermined, though it appears the answer may be signs
of ineptitude. Ruskin stressed that no good work of art can be perfect and
that to expect perfection is to misunderstand the ends of art: “No great man
ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that is to say, his
mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution . . . and according
to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction
with the best he can do” (170–71). Only Leonardo strove for perfection, and
Ruskin claimed that the vanity of this effort can be seen in his inability to
finish anything. The second reason for valuing artistic imperfection Ruskin
enumerates is that it is “the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a
state of progress and change” (171).
It appears that Ruskin’s admiration for anonymous Gothic craftspeople
was largely the result of what he perceived as the ineptitudes and inconsis-
tencies of their products. These were for him signs of their free and intel-
lectually creative labor, and he conceived the gifted creative artist, whether
craftsman or fine artist, as often having a personality lacking “accurate and
methodical habits” (173). For Ruskin, what is most significant is to delineate
how the artist is distinct from the mindless manual worker; thus he stresses
the organic qualities of the artist and the degree to which artistic labor and

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

equate the craftsperson’s artistry with the inconsistencies and roughness
that Ruskin saw as indications of the artisan’s intellectual engagement with
his material. Morris offered explicit advice to aspiring craftspeople:
Be careful to eschew all vagueness. It is better to be caught out going

wrong when you have had a definite purpose, than to shuffle and slur so
that people can’t blame you because they don’t know what you’re at. 47
Hold fast to distinct form in art. . . . Always think your design out in your
head before you begin to get it on paper. . . . You must see it before you
can draw it, whether the design be of your own invention or Nature’s.
Remember always, form before color, and outline, silhouette, before
modeling. . . . Furthermore, those of you especially who are designing
for goods, try to get the most out of your material, but always in such a
way as honors it most.19
This advice is traditional in its stress on beauty, art’s origin in the mind, and
form and drawing as the foundation of art. Less traditional is the adjuration
to honor the material, which was the result of Morris’s deep concern to
counteract the indifference to materials that was a widespread phenomenon
in nineteenth-century machine-made decorative arts.
It is customary to contrast Arts and Crafts’ ideals with the practices and
processes of industrial production—most notably the lack of proper atten-
tion to style and medium in machine-made furnishings and the separation
of the designer from the practical labor of the factory worker—but it is also
interesting to consider them in relation to the traditional practices of artists’
studios. Ruskin’s rejection of fine finish as an index of mindless labor stands
in marked contrast to well-established studio practices. Studio assistants
often performed many of the earlier stages in the creation of an artwork (the
underpainting or initial carving of the block) according to the master artist’s
designs and instructions. It was the later stages that showed the master’s
hand, and even the final stage, that of polishing a marble sculpture, for
example, was often accomplished under the master’s close direction at least,
given the need to determine degrees of finish for different areas of the work.
In elevating what he considered the lack of overrefinement of Gothic sculp-
ture to the status of an index of the artist’s uncorrupted idea, Ruskin roman-
ticized the medieval sculptor and ignored the reality of medieval (and later)
studio production, in which divided labor played a significant role.
The relation of Morris’s views to traditional notions and practices is also
interesting. Given that Morris’s primary intention was to establish (in his

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

lectuals found pleasure and relaxation in certain forms of manual labor,
notably occasional agricultural or craft work, they may have assumed that
the manual laborer desired a corresponding mitigation of physical work by
intellectual occupation. This notion has an interesting parallel in the (some-
what incongruous) stress on the intellectual labor of the craftsman by Ruskin
and Morris. Morris’s emphasis on drawing and the preexistence of a mental
concept for a work’s final form, for example, is clearly derived from academic 49
instruction and theory. Thus, while Morris’s craft revival and its attendant
insistence on truth to materials had an incalculable influence on the develop-
ment of critical and theoretical attention to medium and technique as central
concerns in modern art, his own basic aesthetic concepts were far from
revolutionary.
Despite Morris’s essentially conservative conception of the fundamen-
tal components of artistic production and the nature of the artist, the Arts
and Crafts movement had a profound effect on the concept of the artist’s
process and its significance. This effect worked in two important ways. The
first is the emphasis on the process of artistic production, developed by
Ruskin and Morris in response to what they perceived as the evils of indus-
trial processes and their unsatisfactory products. What had once been con-
sidered a matter of little consequence beyond the artist’s or craftsman’s
studio was elevated to a level of great importance. The value of an aesthetic
object depended on the means of its production, and not merely on its final
form. In the context of the Arts and Crafts movement this belief was more
often a rhetorical posture than a means to develop a notably new under-
standing of art, as this comment by Lewis Day makes evident: “There is
infinitely more to be learned from the study of ancient processes than from
the worship of antique forms. . . . Our respect for the consummate art, the
admirable tact, the masterly treatment of material, that we find in the best
old work, can but increase with closer familiarity. . . . [It] is not only worthy
of study, but capable of impregnating our work with no little of its own
reality and manliness.”24 Given that artists since the Renaissance had made
it a primary goal to rediscover and master the processes of ancient art, there
is no real weight to Day’s implication that earlier artists had merely indulged
in superficial “worship” of antique forms.25 Nevertheless, ameliorating the
public’s ignorant evaluation of art was a major concern for those involved
with the Arts and Crafts movement. Industrial production might fool the
uninstructed public into admiration of its mindless products by superficial
qualities such as elaborate forms or highly finished surfaces, but the knowl-
edgeable viewer could evaluate a product more correctly and read the signs

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

of its physical aptitude as a tool but because of its unique capacity to work
with feeling. What matters is not so much what is produced but how it is
produced.
Here we might consider a new variation on the definition of art, distinct
from its limitation to a specialized meaning in the early nineteenth century
as discussed by Raymond Williams: “An art had formerly been any skill; but
Art, now signified a particular group of skills, the ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ 51
arts. Artist had meant a skilled person, as had artisan; but artist now referred
to these selected skills alone. . . . Art came to stand for a special kind of truth,
‘imaginative truth,’ and artist for a special kind of person.”30 The conceptions
of art and artist in Arts and Crafts discourse are clearly more universal. They
revive the broader senses of earlier usage, encompassing arts (i.e., the crafts)
not traditionally associated with imagination, but do so by elevating them
to the level of the imaginative arts and stressing their intellectual and cre-
ative foundations. In addition, an expanded meaning of art could include any
and all types of activity, provided they were undertaken in a properly moral
and emotional spirit.
Writing in an exhibition catalogue in 1935, C. R. Ashbee, one of the major
figures of the Arts and Crafts movement, declared the wide-ranging signifi-
cance of the crafts: “They are an educational necessity; they are part of the
community’s leisure, and do themselves grow out of leisure; they are, in
short, a great human need, and in a mechanistic age they take their place
among the humanities.”31 The crafts have now assumed a place within mod-
ern society and no longer serve as a means to its reinvention. They have
become a form of amelioration, a necessary antidote to a mechanistic age,
one that will help people to develop and maintain their humanity. Like the
study of ancient Greece and Rome, Shakespeare, and Italian Renaissance art,
the crafts are part of the humanities, the intellectual means to keep modern
people in touch with the achievements of past cultures and individuals.
These achievements, unlike those of the sciences, have no immediate practi-
cal use; their value is primarily moral.
Ashbee’s emphasis on education and leisure reflects the terms of the
widespread success of the Arts and Crafts movement in middle-class culture.
As Elaine Boris has discussed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries the constituency for artistic crafts grew enormously in the United
States. The movement “offered handicraft as a means to train all the facul-
ties, to develop mental, ethical, and physical virtues and bring wholesome,
real pleasure to its practitioners. In this way, all work could become artis-
tic.”32 It is evident that what concerned those involved with the movement

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

of Art” ideology based on Ruskin’s ideas dominated the New York art world.
In the years following the Civil War many women had successful careers as
professional illustrators and designers, and they were seen as workers com-
bating the degrading effects of industrialization and the attendant disrup-
tions of society and traditional artisanal labor.38
Despite the great interest of Arts and Crafts promoters in the creative
process and the enormous influence the movement had in developing, revi- 53
talizing, and elevating traditional women’s crafts, Arts and Crafts theorists
made no notable discursive distinction between the processes of tradition-
ally male and female crafts. This is surprising given that they largely main-
tained conventional gender divisions in terms of craft practices, with women
typically employed in needlework and china painting, while men dominated
woodworking and ceramics. Women were considered best suited for decora-
tive work, which required fine detail and small hands and could be done in
the home. This definition of the types of artistic production considered
suitable for women had been in place since at least the eighteenth century.
In fact, Arts and Crafts leaders subscribed explicitly, and more often implic-
itly, to the widespread nineteenth-century belief that women were intel-
lectually inferior to men, and thus more suited to imitative labor than to
design. William Morris, to cite the most prominent example, designed car-
pets, tapestries, and embroidery patterns for female weavers and needle-
workers to fabricate. Of course, such practices contravened Arts and Crafts
ideals regarding artistic process and maintained what Ruskin had condemned
as a corrupt industrial practice.39
Nevertheless, the Arts and Crafts movement unquestionably raised the
artistic status of women’s traditional handcrafts, including needlework. The
artistic aspects of this traditional and pervasive form of creative and practi-
cal occupation for women of all social ranks was often overlooked in the
nineteenth century, in large part because of its historical association with
women’s domestic and professional labor.40 The primary purveyor of art
supplies in nineteenth-century London contrasted the laborious drudgery
of needlework with the creative pleasures of the new crafts, such as decoup-
age and lacquer, whose supplies he was marketing.41 These new “artistic”
crafts, barely distinguishable from consumerism and requiring little more
effort than making tasteful choices of preprinted materials, were promoted
as replacing traditional crafts that required excessive amounts of tedious
labor. The Arts and Crafts movement’s stress on the pleasures and benefits
of traditional craftwork stood in direct contrast to these easy and modern
forms of women’s amateur art making intended to demonstrate the artist’s

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

Gustav Stickley, the most well-known proponent of Arts and Crafts in the
United States, promoted crafts as a means to rebalance abnormal lives.45 That
rebalancing consisted broadly of a reengagement with physical acts, with
basic, even primal or instinctual, feelings, all of which were held to be
authentic experiences in contrast to the experiences of modern life.
55
Photography and Artistic Process
While the Arts and Crafts movement had enormous influence on the rise in
importance and general understanding of the artist’s process and its effects
on both artists and artworks, somewhat ironically the new “mechanical”
art of photography also made important contributions to general percep-
tions of the artistic process. Beginning in the Renaissance fine artists had
claimed high status for their work based on its intellectual requirements.
This was particularly true of drawing, which was considered to require sig-
nificant conceptual understanding for the creation of accurate naturalistic
representations. The invention of photography provided a mechanical means
to make accurate images requiring no artistic training or ability and no con-
ceptual effort. Not only did photography fail to fulfill the requirements of a
fine art, it was even difficult to classify as a craft given that its basic forms of
production could be learned and adequately mastered in a few lessons. Its
processes were mechanical and chemical; they required knowledge and
precision but not long-term practice and highly developed skills for profes-
sional mastery, as evidenced by the rapid training of professional photogra-
phers in the nineteenth century.
Early debates on the potential artistic status of photography are highly
instructive regarding the conception of the artistic process in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. This is primarily because the arguments
explicitly engaged distinctions between mechanical/technical and artistic
processes. The latter were repeatedly defined in the context of photography
as reflecting the artist’s thought and controlled by conscious choices, in
comparison to the mindless visual records of the former. Lady Eastlake’s
1857 review serves as an early representative of this enduring conviction:
Correctness of drawing, truth of detail, and absence of convention, the

best artistic characteristics of photography, are qualities of no uncom-
mon kind, but the student who issues from the academy with these in
his grasp stands, nevertheless, but on the threshold of art. The power of
selection and rejection, the living application of that language which lies

dead in his paint-box, the marriage of his own mind with the object
before him, and the offspring, half stamped with his own features, half
with those of Nature, which is born of the union—whatever appertains
to the free-will of the intelligent being, as opposed to the obedience of
the machine—this, and much more than this, constitutes the mystery
called Art, in the elucidation of which photography can give valuable
56 help, simply by showing what it is not.46
Later arguments for recognizing photography as an art form generally main-

tained Eastlake’s position regarding the nature of art as a product of the
artist’s mind. Unlike Eastlake, however, they successfully contended that
photography was an adequate artistic medium able to reflect the artist’s
thought and not merely a mechanical device for making visual records.47
Photography’s challenge to the fine arts contributed to a narrowing and
refinement of the definition of artistic and creative activity. The art of mak-
ing representational images ultimately lost prestige as an elite art form
requiring a high level of intellectual and scientific training. In fact, photog-
raphy contributed to a greater awareness that the precise representational
techniques associated with academic art were more mechanical than artistic;
they were the result of precision craftsmanship rather than an intellectually
engaged artistic process. Romantic attitudes also greatly contributed to
changes in the fine arts and evaluations of artistic processes associated with
mental engagement. Intellectual and emotional values that previously had
been of lesser significance, such as inspiration, imagination, originality, and
self-expression, became increasingly important and gradually achieved
ascendancy over traditional forms of intellect associated with the fine arts,
such as scientific knowledge and classical erudition. Romantic values were
clearly distant from the mechanical images typical of early photography, but
photographers were soon eager to prove that their medium was capable of
producing art in accord with prevailing requirements for originality and
imagination.
More important in terms of artistic process than the details of the
struggle to have photography recognized as an art form, however, is the extent
to which discussions of photography, both its techniques and the theoretical
debates regarding its artistic nature, rendered discussions of artistic process
common. As photography became a popular hobby, technical discussions of
photographic methods and materials frequently appeared in the popular
press. Debates on the artistic potential of photography were widely published
in general interest magazines with a broad readership. This occurred most
All About Process

prominently in relation to world’s fairs and other international expositions
where the location of photography in the industrial arts or fine arts sections
was fodder for public debate. Such public discussions revitalized general
understanding of art and fostered interest in its definition.
Amateur practitioners of photography may also have felt personally
engaged and knowledgeable given their own experiences with creative work-
ing processes. Among photographers there was a full spectrum of positions 57
ranging from those whose interests were primarily technical and scientific,
to those whose methods were more in keeping with traditional craft mastery,
and those who embraced an intuitive and personal approach. Often com-
pared with writing, photography is remarkable among image-making media
for its flexibility. Because its basic employment can be extremely simple and
available to anyone, photography demonstrates far more obviously than
drawing, painting, or printmaking that image making has no natural or nec-
essary connection to art. Photography’s artistic qualities must be sought
elsewhere, and among the sites considered to potentially reveal artistry was
the artist’s process.
Those who wished to promote the artistic potential of photography
often attempted to show in detailed terms how the medium was not obdu-
rately mechanical; it could be made to reflect the desires and intentions of
the photographer, who controls the final product. As simple as such a con-
cept is, the notion that the photographer has creative control over the pro-
cess was an effective way to convince people that artistic production was
within their reach. Unlike drawing, which required manual facility and sig-
nificant training to master, by the end of the nineteenth century photography
had made image making a relatively simple affair, and anyone who wished
could devote themselves to it as a form of art making. This complemented
the general increase of amateur art-making activities and expanded the
numbers of those personally involved in the processes of artistic creation.
Thus, from the anti-industrial efforts of the Arts and Crafts movement to
the popular embrace of photography as an artistic medium, by the late nine-
teenth century the general public had become increasingly aware of, and
often directly engaged with, artistic processes. Art was no longer just syn-
onymous with beautiful objects made for passive contemplation; it was also
the result of a complex and labor-intensive activity, and consciousness of
that activity became ever more important for understanding modern art.

3
The Artist’s Process from
the Academic to the Modern
Modern art reflects a destabilization of the traditional understanding and

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

past, or are new processes and techniques required? For the modernists the
answer was clearly the latter, but they varied enormously in their conception
of what the new approach should be. For some their process was intended
to foster intuitive and free productive activity, while others embraced more
controlled and rational processes directed toward specific aesthetic and
social goals. Modern artists’ working processes reveal stances taken in rela-
tion to the values and processes of modern society—a desire either to 59
develop neglected qualities or to assist in the advancement of newly domi-
nant ones. In both cases the artistic product itself was intended to reflect
the processes of its production. Unlike the tradition of the fine arts estab-
lished in the Renaissance, which valued intellect over the artist’s manual
labor and generally ignored the latter in public discourse, modern artists
increasingly valued and displayed their processes, often explaining and pro-
moting them in written texts and interviews. The artist’s work was no longer
simply the production of aesthetic objects; the modern artist was a worker
whose labor had new purpose and meaning in modern society.
The shifts in values associated with the artist’s work in the nineteenth
century are striking, and in many ways surprising. The standard account of
the development of modern art describes the gradual overcoming of the rigid
strictures and technical training associated with the academy and their
replacement by a liberated, more creative, individual, and expressive
approach to art making. While this is, in its broad outline, a reasonably accu-
rate description of nineteenth-century developments, the specific forms of
valuation that accompanied these overall changes are often unexpected. For
one, the modern painter’s labor was often perceived as more physical and
less intellectual than that of his academic predecessors. The modern paint-
er’s work was also seen as becoming more, rather than less, preoccupied with
technical concerns. Thus liberation from the constraints of traditional sub-
ject matter and techniques meant, in the opinion of many observers, that
modern artists were more engaged with the physical constraints of the
medium than were academic artists. This is notably different from conven-
tional descriptions of modern art’s development, which tend to stress the
conceptual innovations of modern artists’ work in terms of subjects and
techniques, as well as in their rejection of an academicism overly dependent
on the mindless deployment of established technical procedures. Also
notable is the fact that many critics and artists considered modern artists to
be less hardworking than their academic predecessors and peers. Such
assessments are clearly dependent on the vantage point of the judge, but
what is undeniable is that during the nineteenth century the conception of
The Artist’s Process

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

marks of inspiration in a completed painting, and he noted that the artist
who knows his work will be exhibited loses confidence in his inspiration and
tends to overfinish his painting, thereby ruining it: “He modifies it, he spoils
it, he overworks it; all this civilizing and polishing in order not to displease.”6
In contrast, Thomas Couture produced what were essentially facsimiles of
inspiration, working to give his paintings the qualities of an unfinished sketch
by obliterating underlying signs of meticulous labor with dry, sweeping 61
brushstrokes.7
From the academic vantage point the unfinished qualities of the sketch
made it unsuitable for serious consideration and public display: “Everything
pertaining to preliminary studies was identified with métier, and everything
concerning the finishing process was identified with the artist’s erudition.”8
Even acknowledging the potential of the sketch to reveal native talent and
inspiration was not enough to qualify it as a completed artwork. Ingres,
widely admired for the perfect finish of his paintings, insisted on concealing
his method in order to keep the painted illusion intact. Ernest Meissonier,
also known for his meticulous finish, was similarly concerned to hide the
traces of his labor and refused to exhibit anything but finished works in his
lifetime. Many artists, including Delacroix, believed that the ability to finish
a work successfully was the mark of a true artist. According to this view
talent was relatively common, but the refined intellectual capacity and tech-
nical knowledge required to make a successful artwork were comparatively
rare. Nineteenth-century artists and viewers who evaluated art by academic
standards often criticized unfinished, sketchy paintings as signifiers of lazi-
ness and incompetence rather than inspiration and originality; some critics
deplored the “chorus of exaggerated praise for all kinds of improvised work,
pochades and ébauches, the sketchy and the half-finished, and systematic
denigration of conscientious work.”9
Given the foundation of the unfinished, sketch-like work in discourses
promoting inspiration, genius, and freedom, it is somewhat surprising that
the Impressionists were often considered by their peers to be more con-
cerned with painting technique than with inspiration and freedom. This is a
significant thread of the discourse surrounding Impressionism and may be
seen as part of the foundation for a formalist viewpoint, which would not
develop a careful formulation until the twentieth century. Meissonier,
renowned for the extreme precision of his own technique, criticized Impres-
sionist painters for their lack of invention but praised their technical knowl-
edge and facility with painted effects. 10 Another highly successful
nineteenth-century painter working in a flawless academic style, Jean-Léon

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

displaying that fact through a rough and idiosyncratic technique. Further-
more, it is precisely the nineteenth-century modern artist’s naïveté, his
willed ignorance, and his search for a direct representation of the innocent
perception of nature that becomes his trademark.13
Interestingly, it is not only the nineteenth-century modern artist who
appears to be more of a craftsperson than a fine artist in the traditional terms
of the academy. Late nineteenth-century academic painting was widely seen 63
as having abandoned intellectual concerns to become merely a highly refined
style of flawless naturalism, as represented by the very successful work of
William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The intellectual abdication of late nineteenth-
century academic art rendered it what traditional academic art theory,
grounded in the intellectual value of the fine arts, would likely have consid-
ered a mere craft product. And in its finely finished technical perfection, the
work of the academics appeared less like a refined handcraft and more like
something artificial, inhuman, machine-made. By contrast, much modern
nineteenth-century painting, with its idiosyncratic rendering and lack of
finish, signified human and natural processes of production imbued with
emotion and individuality. It is the latter that became identified with truly
artistic creation and ultimately linked to the artist’s conceptual activity,
while the former was increasingly considered mindless illustration.
Cézanne’s disdainful criticism of academic technique and its admirers
is exemplary of the modern artist’s view of the profound artistic significance
of his own labor: “I have to work all the time, not to reach that final perfec-
tion which earns the admiration of imbeciles.—And this thing which is com-
monly appreciated so much is merely the effect of craftsmanship and renders
all work resulting from it inartistic and common. I must strive after perfec-
tion only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser. . . . The hour always
comes when one breaks through and has admirers far more fervent and
convinced than those who are only attracted by an empty surface.”14
Cézanne’s insistence that he has to work very hard not to paint “perfectly”
is notable. Whereas once artists labored for years to master correct painting
technique, for the modern artist the difficult labor is to avoid it. Skill is
merely having the means to produce an “empty surface”; it is craft rather
than art. And the struggle the artist undertakes to circumvent skill makes
him “truer and wiser,” leading to intellectual achievement.
The growing number of painters who abandoned traditional academic
finish in the nineteenth century represents a change in general ideas about
the artist’s process. While there is little that is completely novel in the ways
the artist’s activity was conceived, there were distinct shifts in emphasis and

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

representational techniques, a so-called primitive style. More complex was
developing a means to convey the seriousness and skill that would earn
critical respect and public admiration.
Critics who knew the Impressionist artists personally often stressed
their hard work; Mallarmé stated that the Impressionist was an energetic
modern worker,18 while Zola compared Manet to a hardworking bourgeois.19
Their labor, in the discussions of both critics, consisted largely in forgetting 65
what they had learned about painting in order to paint what they see in
nature. Clumsiness becomes a sign of success in this project, as is evident in
Zola’s criticism: “Not the least delight for the eyes. A painting austere and
serious; and extreme concern with truth and accuracy, a will fierce and
strong. You are a great blunderer [maladroit], monsieur [Pissarro], you are
an artist that I like.”20 “Pissarro . . . does not have any of the minute skillful-
ness of his colleagues. He is in the realm of excellence, the relentless pursuit
of the true, heedless of the tricks of métier. His canvases, which lack all
fireworks and spice, discover a nature too living and too pungent in its real-
ity.”21 Zola, who admired above all the artist who revealed the uniqueness of
his vision, his individual temperament, considered the artist’s labor an
intensive project of self-discovery, a stripping bare of all conventions of see-
ing and artistic technique that would make painting a trivial production
process. The painter who knows what he sees and how to make a picture of
it is merely a mechanical producer of an artistic commodity. Impressionist
painting is the record of the hard work involved in developing a truly per-
sonal and direct visual relation to nature.22
One of the primary reasons that Impressionist paintings suggest the
artist’s labor is their lack of finish and the representational clarity that tra-
ditionally denoted completion. These are paintings that often seemed to
contemporary viewers to be arrested at an early stage in their process of
creation, which might continue to its resolution when the painter returns to
the canvas. This is evident in early critics’ and viewers’ complaints that
specific paintings seemed unfinished, as well as in the persistently reiterated
critical conviction that Impressionist artists had not yet resolved their means
of expression. For example, Ernest Chesneau wrote, “Obviously, this is not
the last word in art, nor even of this art. It is necessary to go on and to
transform the sketch into a finished work. But what a bugle call for those
who listen carefully, how it resounds far into the future!”23 While comments
such as this indicate contemporary critics’ desire for some more finished form
of painting than that achieved by Impressionist artists (and arguably an
inability of nineteenth-century critics to recognize a work of art as adequately

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

tagonist of Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre—is a discursive product linked to late
nineteenth-century views of the linked pathologies of degeneration and
genius.26 Cézanne and his work have become inextricably bound up with
Zola’s portrayal of the authentic artist as necessarily a frustrated failure. In
Zola’s novel genius is inevitably abortive and impotent, and yet the artist
sincerely dedicated to his impossible project points the way to the future.
This is how Zola saw the Impressionists, whose “struggle is not yet over: they 67
remain unequal to the work which they attempt, they stutter without being
able to find the word. But their influence is no less profound, because they
follow the only possible course, they march towards the future.”27
In Zola’s interpretation the Impressionist artist has abandoned the
certainties of convention to pursue an art structured by the individual tem-
perament in relation to the world. In this project there are no dependable
guidelines for success; indeed, it may well be that the notion of individual
temperament to which Zola was so dedicated is necessarily a barrier to the
full “realization” of an art. Individuality as indexed by a marked idiosyncrasy
of style is, to follow Zola’s metaphor, a language in its nascent stages. Once
it succeeds and becomes a recognizable language, a means of communication
through established codes, it loses its originality. Failure is thus built in to
the romantic notion of the modern artist as a unique individual creating an
art reflecting a singular vision. To succeed, the modern artist must fail, must
remain unique, isolated, misunderstood, speaking a barely comprehensible
language. Success would mean establishing a style, a language that others
can employ with attendant conventions and correctness—in other words, a
new academicism.
The insoluble tensions at the heart of a dominant view of the modern
artist’s identity and labor contributed to the enormous significance of pro-
cess in modern art. Given that resolution, the creation of a successful prod-
uct, is tantamount to abandoning the modern artist’s fundamental identity
as someone who seeks the proper and unique means of individual self-
expression, the most successful of modern artists are those for whom the
process of making art remains forever unresolved. Cézanne was exemplary
in this regard. Roger Fry emphasized the artist’s efforts to evade formulas
and characterized his art in formal terms: “It is evident that all his life he was
continually brooding over one tormenting question; how to conciliate the
data of Impressionism with—what he regarded as essential to style—a perfect
structural organization. . . . It was this determination to arrive at a perfect
synthesis of opposing principles, perhaps, that kept Cézanne’s sensibility at
such a high tension, that prevented him from ever repeating himself, from

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

an infinite number of conditions. Cézanne sometimes pondered hours at a
time before putting down a certain stroke. . . . Expressing what exists is an
endless task.” In keeping with received notions regarding the Impressionist
project, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the painter’s desire to paint naturally
without relying on convention, and like Zola he compares the painter’s work
to the creation of a language: “He speaks as the first man spoke and paints
as if no one had ever painted before. . . . The artist launches his work just as 69
a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything
more than a shout. . . . The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not
exist anywhere—not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the
artist himself, in his unformulated life.”32 Cézanne’s painting is, in Merleau-
Ponty’s interpretation, a creative process in the fullest meaning of the phrase;
no conception precedes it.
Out of his sensations Cézanne creates a new language with every work;
and this labor is inextricably bound up with the artist’s life, his psychology
as well as the material circumstances of his existence. As Merleau-Ponty
described it, “That work to be done called for that life. . . . Cézanne’s life found
its only equilibrium by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His
life was the preliminary project of his future work. The work to come is
hinted at, but it would be wrong to take these hints for causes, although they
do make a single adventure of his life and work. Here we are beyond causes
and effects.”33 It has been observed that Merleau-Ponty found in Cézanne’s
art and statements crucial elements for the development of his own phe-
nomenological philosophy, in which the physical body plays a key role in
human experience and epistemology.34 Thus, although Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology belongs to a later point in the historical trajectory I have
been tracing, it has roots in the nineteenth century, when artists (and writers
on artists) first started to find the travails of the artist’s working life more
than trivial biographical information. The philosopher’s serious consider-
ation of Cézanne’s creative process may be viewed as a kind of ratification;
the artist’s difficulties were a matter of profound importance—a key means
for thinking through the nature of embodied experience and the significance
of material production in a world where such issues had hitherto largely been
overlooked and ignored.
In the discursive context of Impressionism and Postimpressionism the
modern artist’s labor often figures as a particularly individual, unpredictable,
idiosyncratic (and often useless or failed) form of creative production.
Critical and theoretical accounts of the modern artist’s labor emphasized it
as natural, unregulated, and notably distinct from the conventional labor of

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

leaves the originality of the artist intact, and even helps it? Actually, it is
idiotic to confuse Camille Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, Signac, and Seurat. Each
of them imperiously betrays his disparity . . . but never through the use of
facile gimmicks. . . . To them objective reality is simply a theme for the cre-
ation of a superior, sublimated reality in which their personality is trans-
formed.”39 In addition, as Signac indicated when he described the technique’s
evasion of virtuosity and skill, there was a notable tendency to present the 71
technique as more populist—anyone might learn this technique and be able
to communicate their vision. And, in fact, many successful painters employed
the technique in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
The Neo-Impressionist painter was concerned with the finished work
of art, the product. The final work was intended to provide a seamless and
complete visual experience, not one that (as with Impressionist paintings)
insistently reminded viewers of its creation by obvious material traces of
an idiosyncratic physical process. In addition, unlike Cézanne’s proto-
linguistic style, the Neo-Impressionist “language” is fully formed and
intended to be transparent to its content. Through mastery of divisionism,
the Neo-Impressionist painter is theoretically able to fabricate paintings
that directly communicate his or her idea or vision. The fabrication process
is essentially instrumental; manual dexterity and physical engagement are
reduced to a minimum. This is in keeping with the Neo-Impressionist paint-
ers’ understanding of vision and painting as isolated, essentially disembod-
ied, optical experiences. This disembodied vision reaffirmed painting’s
traditional association with the mind and intellect; in Neo-Impressionism
the manual activity of painting becomes an efficient vehicle for conveying
the painter’s idea.
By claiming divisionism was a painting technique that allowed for a
direct representation of the artist’s vision, unimpeded by the manual tricks
of painterly gesture, Signac and others were trying to establish it as a more
mental, even spiritual, art than previous modern styles, most particularly
Impressionism. A modern scientific painting technique restored the tradi-
tional intellectual value of painting as a fine and liberal art. From this vantage
point it is possible to see Impressionism once more as the academics had
done, a style primarily engaged with métier, essentially the material craft of
painting, rather than an intellectual art. Mastery of an impersonal technique
with a foundation in scientific optics could reestablish modern painting on
an intellectual basis and avoid the sloppy “gimmicks” of painterly craft. All
those precisely painted dots reaffirmed the cleanliness of the painter’s labor
and highlighted its rationality.

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

iment to the manifestation of each artist’s unique vision. Implicitly, indi-
viduality is assumed to be a transcendent immaterial quality, one that is part
of the artist’s intellectual, and possibly spiritual, identity and not essentially
connected to the physical body.
Neo-Impressionism inaugurated a new approach that would pro-
foundly affect modern art and the conceptualization of the artist’s working
processes. This style—based on a predetermined, uniform, and systematic 73
technique—was, at least theoretically, shared by all artists who employed
it. It provided an efficient, largely mechanical process to achieve the basic
pictorial goal of satisfying human aesthetic needs while communicating an
individual vision through the painted product. Given this attention to the
effective creation of a product, it is not difficult to see Neo-Impressionist
painting as the artist’s equivalent to modern industrial production tech-
niques in which efficiency takes priority.42 For the first time the modern
artist’s process could be understood as aligned with the processes, values,
and achievements of modern industry. And, as Signac claimed, a predeter-
mined technical process was not an impediment to the human value of
individual self-expression; it could be a means to affirm the uniqueness of
the individual. Freed from the requirement to create an autographic mate-
rial technique, the Neo-Impressionist artist was unbound by physical
constraints and able to communicate the visual, mental, and spiritual
directly to the viewer. This is comparable to the liberating effects often
claimed for modern industry, which reduces the need for dirty physical
labor and offers the worker more opportunities for intellectual develop-
ment and participation.
By the beginning of the twentieth century the modern artist’s process
was closely associated with objectivity, science, and industry as well as with
subjectivity, individualism, and craftsmanship. These often-conflicting asso-
ciations continued to haunt modern art throughout the century. As hand-
workers in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, modern
artists inevitably engaged with traditional craft processes and values. As
artists their work was also inevitably situated in relation to the intellectual
traditions of the fine arts. The difficulty was to define how these traditional
concerns were relevant to the modern artist’s working process, and ulti-
mately how the modern artist’s working processes were relevant to modern
society. This was not simply a narrow professional concern of artists, as it
had been prior to the nineteenth century when the academy defined the
processes, nature, and role of art. Artistic process and its significance defined
modern art. What precisely the artist did to make art and what that making

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

of modernist art as evolving to an ever-greater purity of medium, indepen-
dent of individual artists’ views and projects, is an abstracted view of modern
art history. As he acknowledged, this grand scheme was not related to the
conscious intentions of modern artists—although some, such as Kandinsky,
Mondrian, and Malevich, proposed theories and created works that were
directly relevant. Considering the early modernist artists, critics, and theo-
rists in terms of their expressed views on artistic process shows that a dif- 75
ferent sort of formalism than the one commonly associated with Greenberg
was a major concern. This was a formalism in which the artist’s product is
integrally related to the process of its creation. Although the final work was
often intended to be a self-sufficient aesthetic object (and thus a reasonably
appropriate subject for the sort of abstract formal analysis widely practiced
in the mid-twentieth century), that was a minor concern compared to the
complex processes that led to its successful creation. Furthermore, those
processes were central to the meaning of the final artwork. They often dis-
tinguished it by means of indexical signs as human-made rather than an
industrial product, thereby signifying a range of values associated with
human identity and activity in opposition to inhuman industrial processes.
In the instances when modern artists adopted values and processes associ-
ated with modern industry, their artistic labor was no less significant, and
their goals remained indicative of broad human and social values.
In 1908 Henri Matisse published “Notes of a Painter,” in which he
described his goal as a painter: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity
and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which
could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of
letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something
like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” In
Matisse’s view a painting is a purely aesthetic object whose effects are con-
veyed by formal means, and his text provides the outline of a pure formalism.
The basic points include the following: (1) the artwork conveys its meaning
by formal means and not by subject matter (“A work of art must carry within
itself its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder even
before he recognizes the subject matter”);44 (2) there is a natural relation
between form and feeling that makes it possible to communicate by formal
means; (3) the successful artwork is unified, and every formal element con-
tributes to the meaning of the whole; (4) unity presupposes the artwork’s
self-sufficiency, and therefore nothing external to the artwork is required to
make it successful. These points stressed by Matisse are in keeping with the
formalist views adopted by Bell, Fry, and later Greenberg; nevertheless,

Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” is also one of the most influential accounts of
a modern artist’s working process and its significance.
By the time he published “Notes of a Painter” Matisse had studied and
successfully employed academic painting techniques as well as the range of
modern techniques and styles, including Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism,
and Fauvism. This experience with widely different artistic attitudes and
76 commitments contributed to the depth and seriousness of his account,
which reveals the painter’s careful consideration of his artistic means. He
begins by denying any distinction between the artist’s intellectual labor and
the craft labor of the painter’s métier:
What I am after, above all, is expression. Sometimes it has been con-

ceded that I have a certain technical ability but that all the same my
ambition is limited, and does not go beyond the purely visual satisfac-
tion such as can be obtained from looking at a picture. But the thought of
a painter must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means, for the
thought is worth no more than its expression by the means [emphasis added],
which must be more complete . . . the deeper is his thought. I am unable
to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of trans-
lating it.45
For Matisse, the painter’s intellectual labor is manifested in the painter’s

means; the two cannot be separated as they had been in the academic tradi-
tion. This assertion is the foundation of the detailed discussion of his artis-
tic process that follows.
Matisse methodically situates his working process at the intersection of
nature, intuition, technical knowledge, and expression. Denying critical
accusations that he applied a theoretical method in creating his purportedly
“unnatural” paintings, and explicitly distinguishing his own intuitive
approach from the scientific methods espoused by Signac and the Neo-
Impressionists, Matisse insisted that his work as a painter is engaged with
the medium as a means of expression. A key aspect of this engagement is his
attentiveness to the expressive requirements of painting. Matisse described
how each element in a given work affects the others and changes the equi-
librium of the whole. The addition of a color, a dot, or a line completely
transforms a work, and it is the artist’s role to constantly adjust the work’s
elements in order to make it conform as a whole to his expressive inten-
tions.46 This is material labor that cannot be done mechanically; it requires
the artist’s full mental and emotional engagement at every moment.
All About Process

Matisse’s text is characterized by a balanced evaluation of seemingly
opposed aspects of the artist’s labor. He assigns importance to both nature
and the imagination in the artist’s working process; likewise, intuition and
technical knowledge also play key roles. Given his description of the artist’s
need to calibrate the many opposed aspects of a successful creative process,
it is not surprising that Matisse evaluates artists in terms of their self-
discipline: “I think that one can judge of the vitality and power of an artist 77
who, after having received impressions directly from the spectacle of nature,
is able to organize his sensations to continue his work in the same frame of
mind on different days, and to develop these sensations; this power proves
he is sufficiently master of himself to subject himself to discipline.” This was
one means Matisse used to distinguish his artistic goals from those of the
Impressionists, who were presented as passive in their working processes
rather than consciously directing their results at every moment. Matisse’s
emphasis on discipline also indicated that he did not regard the painter’s
work as simple or easy, even though it has its source in feeling. The artist
must be able to control personal emotions in order to employ them success-
fully in the making of art: “I want to reach that state of condensation of
sensations which makes a painting. I might be satisfied with a work done at
one sitting, but I would soon tire of it; therefore, I prefer to rework it so that
later I may recognize it as representative of my state of mind.”47 The painter’s
disciplined labor results in an achievement that is not only expressive but
intellectual as well. In addition, Matisse situated his working process in
terms of traditionally classical values of harmony, clarity, order, and balance.
These are achieved through the artist’s thoughtful and diligent labor.
Although he describes his goal as creating a work of his mind, at times
Matisse describes the artist’s working process in a manner that suggests a
craftsman’s preoccupation with technique as a means to create a successful
product rather than the intellectual concerns traditionally attributed to art-
ists. Despite his insistence on the artist’s responsiveness to the developing
artwork, Matisse stated that he “must have a clear vision of the composition
from the very beginning,”48 and he explicitly contrasted this with the “con-
fused expression” of Rodin’s fragmentary approach. The contradiction
between the need for a clearly envisioned final product and the constant
negotiation and adaptation required to bring the work to fruition is never
reconciled in the text.
“Notes of a Painter” serves to illustrate a key moment in the conception
of the modern artist’s labor when a tenuous balance is struck between the
process of the artwork’s creation and its achievement as a completed product.

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

There is another key difference between Matisse’s description of his
goals and that of previous artists. For the academic artist the goal was the
subject of the artwork, be it an imagined death of Socrates or a still life
painted from an array of real objects. Structural harmony was an important
ingredient, but it was a subsidiary technical objective. The artist’s working
process was geared to create an appropriate naturalistic painting of a given
subject. Realist and Impressionist artists likewise worked to produce paint- 79
ings of specific scenes. Their broad goal was accurate naturalistic represen-
tation of their subject. Matisse, in contrast, abandoned naturalism as an
objective and replaced it with his own feeling of compositional harmony and
expressive adequacy. Subject matter is described almost as an afterthought
when Matisse briefly mentions his desire to avoid “troubling and depressing
subject matter,” and his belief that the human figure allows him to best
express his “nearly religious feeling” toward life. Far more important to him
is his claim that the forms and colors of Giotto’s frescoes provoke appropri-
ate feelings in him before he knows what scenes they represent. (This notion
would soon be taken up by the formalist critic and theorist Clive Bell as
“significant form,” which he defined as the universal sign of great art that
requires no knowledge of subject or tradition to appreciate, merely a native
sensitivity to form comparable to a good ear for music.)51 The painting’s
subject—and a Matisse painting always has a naturalistic subject—has
become largely a pretext, a touchstone for the artist’s working process. It
prompts the artist’s work, but it does not serve as a model in any usual sense.
Matisse does not analyze the figure and scene in order to make an accurate
record of its appearance. He consults his feelings as he looks at the canvas
and at the scene it represents; his work as a painter consists of “condensing”
forms to “essential line,” of using color to provoke equivalents to the emo-
tional experiences he has when perceiving the scene.
This describes a key step in the modernist development of nonrepre-
sentational art, the beginning of the rupture between a painting’s subject
and its representation in the painting. Matisse’s approach shows the influ-
ence of scientific studies of the relations between emotions and color and
form. Although Matisse specifically rejected the direct equivalencies used by
the Neo-Impressionists, such connections made it possible to conceive an
art that could communicate emotion directly through formal elements. This
opened up altogether new approaches to understanding the artist’s labor as
well as changing the notion of what constituted a successful artwork. To
communicate emotion Matisse uses a process reliant on intuition and feel-
ing. The artist is the first test case for the success of the work—if it conveys

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

discovered that many of his students had little understanding of anatomy
and were unable to draw the human body, so he instituted figure study ses-
sions for them.53 Intuitive self-expression was by no means all that was
required to create successful artworks in Matisse’s view.
An important corollary to the modern expressive artist’s requisite skills
is the ability of the critic or connoisseur to evaluate the modern artist’s work.
Successful modern art critics relied on their claim to be able to distinguish 81
qualitative differences in artists’ self-expressive works. Christian Zervos,
editor of the highly influential modern art magazine Cahiers d’Art, promoted
the superiority of Matisse and Picasso based on the artists’ technical mastery,
which he claimed was evident in even a single drawn line.54 This became an
enduring cliché—the great masters of modern art had strong foundations in
academic technical skills, and this gave them the ability to create innovative
modern works. The knowledgeable viewer can discern not only the mark of
genius but also the beneficial effects of traditional technical mastery in the
most untraditional artworks. Such convictions have a basis in truth, but they
often became unproven, and unprovable, assertions.
Critical evaluation relates directly to the conception of the modern art-
ist’s process and its relation to the artwork, most particularly to the problem
of establishing and regulating qualitative distinctions. What is to distinguish
a successful artist’s work from that of the unsuccessful, or the professional
artist from the amateur? If beginning in the nineteenth century artists need
only record their unique “way of seeing,” how was success or, more urgently,
failure to be determined? Some technical skills were required while natural-
ism remained an expectation, but once that barrier had been breached and
it became a matter of expressing feeling, even the minimal requirement of
reasonably accurate rendering was no longer evidently necessary. What were
the signs in an artwork that would reveal the artist’s success when there were
no standard operating procedures? The implicit answer most often made to
this problem was that there were still fundamental requirements, the real
artists met them, and the true connoisseurs could see that they had done so.
If you needed to ask for further information you were not in a position to
understand. That many things contributed to create successful modern art-
ists’ reputations other than the quality of their work is unquestionable, but
the fact remains that the only publicly acknowledged justification for artistic
success was the artist’s ability as revealed by the quality of his or her work.
Quality—whose work had it and whose eye could instantly perceive it—was
the basis of artistic value. Those unable to perceive it were, as Clive Bell
wrote, like a tone-deaf person at a concert, and given the social and cultural

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

aesthetic pleasure; according to him, art “corresponds to the great laws of
life, of rhythm, of symmetry. All art obeys these laws.”57 Thus, while it might
appear that Matisse’s goals for his art were modest, they were allied with
prominent contemporary social issues. In “Notes of a Painter” modern art
is implicitly therapeutic, and in contrast to the overworked businessman the
modern artist’s labor is natural and intuitive. It allows for self-expression
and the creation of beautiful, harmonious objects that have healing effects. 83
Modern art is firmly associated with leisure and relaxation, both directly in
terms of the pleasure that it gives to nonworking hours and less directly in
the implied association between the artist’s work and pleasant occupation.58
Amateur painting was well established as a popular pastime by the early
twentieth century, and Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” helped to refine and
reinforce popular notions regarding the desirability and satisfactions of an
artistic labor closely aligned with intuitive self-expression. These notions
are, of course, markedly opposed to modern artists’ own insistence that they
worked very hard.

4
New Conceptions of
the Artist’s Process
Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter” provided an enduring template for a basic

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

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

a common strategy used by many modern artists to give temporal structure
to their working process. A series of works devoted to the same subject or
issue could not only reveal its different aspects, as in Monet’s series of pop-
lars, haystacks, and images of Rouen Cathedral, it could also display the
artist’s work as a progressive development. The most striking series pro-
duced by modern artists are those that show the artist’s road to nonrepre-
sentational art, notably those of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. Each 85
of these artists conceived their path to nonobjective painting as a spiritual
journey with great relevance for humankind, thereby giving their artistic
labor a significant social and spiritual dimension. These artists’ work was
framed as a struggle for liberation from the physical world, and the serious-
ness of this struggle is attested to by its duration, comprising many years of
devotion to carefully considered, diligent production.
The modern artist’s series of works is interesting to consider in relation
to the traditional academic process, in which a number of studies and
sketches of various types lead up to a final major work. The preliminary
stages were of interest to those, usually artists themselves, who wish to see
the artist’s working procedures; preliminary works were exhibited to the
public and valued by knowledgeable collectors. Generally, however, prior to
the nineteenth century artists created works in series to be exhibited as a
group when they created a narrative cycle such as the Stations of the Cross
or the Rake’s Progress. Monet’s series paintings, which show the same sub-
jects under different atmospheric and light conditions, may be related to the
traditional cycle of images representing the seasons, although these do not
typically show the same scene for each season. More significant than the
consistency of Monet’s subjects is the degree to which his series paintings
are intended to represent the artist’s individual acts of looking and painting
in time. Well-known accounts of Monet’s working process describe how he
worked on a painting only as long as the light conditions were appropriate,
and when they had shifted he would turn his attention to another painting
in the series. The series thus not only gives a temporal portrait of its subject,
Rouen Cathedral as transformed by the moving sun and changing weather,
it also presents a concrete record of the artist’s labor in time.
Monet’s series works are often linked to trends associated with Symbol-
ist developments that also affected the Postimpressionist painters, most
notably in terms of their increasing abstraction.1 They may also be seen in
this context in terms of the greater systematization of the painter’s working
process as discussed above with regard to Neo-Impressionism. This system-
atization, as well as the notable restriction of subject matter in the series
New Conceptions of the Artist’s Process

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

reveals the artist’s development, or at least transformations, through time.
Each moment may have equal value in relation to its significance. No single
work has priority as an original.
The series of images recording changes in time was a pervasive concern
in the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by the widely reproduced pho-
tographic images of figures in motion by Muybridge, Marey, and Anschutz,
as well as early forms of cinematic equipment such as the zoetrope. In paint- 87
ing a series of works showing the changes in the visual appearance of a
subject over time, Monet does not merely adopt a popular conceptual format
for representing a subject; he also displays the artist’s labor as never ending.
There is no completion of an action, no narrative resolution, only the infinite
potential of recording the endless variations of appearance. Each moment
is of equal interest. On one level the lesson of Monet’s later work, and
Cézanne’s as well, is that the representational artist’s process is infinite,
restricted only by the painter’s own limitations. A single simple subject
provides enough impetus to work for a lifetime. This work is not mere rep-
etition; the successful modern artist is the one whose resources allow for
constant variation and development. Resolutions are only temporary; one
image in the series may be brought to fulfillment, but it also serves as a
stepping-stone for the next one.
It might be argued that the later work of Monet and Cézanne is not
precisely a new approach to the artist’s labor, but rather a revaluation of it
in which the artist’s working process takes a more central position. Formerly,
a Chardin still life or a Claude landscape was valued as a product in which
the artist’s name served as a sort of trademark or signifier of its quality. These
artists created paintings that were dependably excellent in terms of the qual-
ity of their craftsmanship. In the case of a Monet or a Cézanne painting,
however, the artist’s name is not merely synonymous with the quality of his
craftsmanship. These artists’ paintings are inextricably related to the life of
the artist as part of their value. To own a Monet or a Cézanne painting is to
own a small piece of the consciousness and labor of that artist, the transcrip-
tion of what he saw and felt at a particular moment in time. While this is true
to a degree of all artworks given that they are created by individuals in time,
it was not part of the significance of the work in the way that it is for Monet’s
and Cézanne’s later works. Awareness of an artwork as signifying a “piece”
of the artist’s life is a development of the later nineteenth century.
A different set of issues is raised by artists whose work forms develop-
mental or evolutionary series, notably those pioneers on the road to nonrep-
resentational art. Throughout his career Piet Mondrian stressed the need for

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

ation of individual artworks. Framed in terms of universal human spiritual
development, the paintings represent a developmental process intended to
be understood as much greater than that of an individual artist. Artistic
process for Mondrian (as well as for the other contemporary pioneers of
nonrepresentational painting, Kandinsky and Malevich) was a means to
achieve spiritual development that would affect all humanity. It is hard,
maybe even impossible, to conceive a greater exaltation of the artist’s labor. 89
But even without considering the elevated terms in which Mondrian saw his
process, it is distinctive in its orientation toward a specific goal and its pro-
gressive evolutionary nature. Once he had achieved “neoplasticism,” how-
ever, Mondrian’s artistic process was comparable to that of many other
modern artists, such as Matisse, who were engaged with intuitively creating
formally resolved and harmonious works.
The strong trajectory of Mondrian’s development retrospectively cre-
ates a remarkably consistent logic. His first important text, “The New Plastic
in Painting,” was published in 1917, several years before he reached the pla-
teau of his own evolution, and it laid out the key points of his art theory. It
shows that Mondrian saw his work in terms of evolutionary progress well
before it reached its final form. Although he claimed the (modern, neoplas-
tic) artist worked by intuition rather than program, becoming fully conscious
of the rationale behind the work only after it was created, this is not alto-
gether accurate. Mondrian was consciously directing his work to ever-greater
abstraction, and thus he was necessarily viewing each painting in terms of a
larger project that was developing over time. The significance and, indeed,
the value of Mondrian’s paintings from 1907 to 1923 is conditioned not by
their qualities as individual works, but by their location in the artist’s pro-
cess, what they represent of his path to “pure plastic.” This is not merely the
result of an art historical vantage point reinforced by decades of textbooks
on modern art and monographs on Mondrian; it is how Mondrian himself
saw and valued the works.9
Mondrian’s artistic process in the developmental evolutionary stage of
his career may be seen as a microcosm of modern art as a whole, and not
only because the artist himself described it in this way. As we have seen, from
the mid-nineteenth century onward modern art was conceived as unfinished
and evolving. In his art and theories Mondrian proclaimed both the purpose
and the conclusion to this historical process, and he posited that the next
stage would be the dissolution of art into life, the aesthetically satisfying
environment. Many supporters of modern art shared his views. Clement
Greenberg followed Mondrian in his conviction that modern art’s historical

trajectory led to pure abstraction, as well as the artist’s belief that individual
artists’ contributions to this evolution were made intuitively and without
predetermined intention. In positing an end to traditional art, separate from
life, Mondrian’s views were also aligned with those of the Constructivists in
the Soviet Union and certain aspects of Bauhaus thinking, and prefigured
key aspects of post-1960s art. It is important then to recognize that Mon-
90 drian’s conception of his process, and that of modern artists as a whole,
added further depth and dimension to the importance and understanding of
the artist’s process. What the modern artist does matters, and it is far from
being merely a narrow technical concern of makers of useless commodities.
The modern artist’s process reveals and assists in the spiritual development
of humanity; it reflects and contributes to the historical evolution of the
modern world.
Mondrian’s working process necessarily changed once he achieved his
pure plastic art. At that point the evolutionary process to which he had been
dedicated for over fifteen years reached, if not precisely an end point, at least
a plateau from which there would be no more major developments beyond
the theoretical projection of the end of painting at some future date.10 Noth-
ing indicates, though, that the achievement of a pure plastic art raised dif-
ficulties for Mondrian’s working process. He seems to have painted
contentedly, exploring the infinite variations of his highly restricted approach
for the remaining twenty-plus years of his life. In fact, he addressed the
change directly: “Generally, once the artist finds the plastic expression
proper to himself, he does not push it any further—as it was possible to do
until the present. But in Neo-Plastic this is no longer possible because Neo-
Plastic is the limit of plastic expression. . . . In Neo-Plastic the question is to
perfect the work. . . . Although Neo-Plastic remains within its aesthetic limits,
Neo-Plastic work can appear in different ways, varied and renewed by the
personality of the artist to which it owes its strength.”11 On one level the ease
with which Mondrian shifted from a focus on progressive evolution to explo-
ration of a highly restricted range of options attests to the artist’s intellectual
and aesthetic satisfaction with the conclusion of his evolutionary develop-
ment. On another level the shift in approach is remarkable in that it required
what seems to be a radical change in the artist’s own conception of his work-
ing process and goal. He appeared to transform himself from a seeker to
something closer to a craftsman as defined by R. G. Collingwood, a maker
with a comparatively fixed conception of his intended product. Mondrian’s
work became engaged solely with manipulating his discovered means to a
consistent goal—the attainment of harmony, or “equilibrium,” the term he
All About Process

preferred. In his view this equilibrium was, and always had been, the goal of
art, and with the new plastic art it was now clearly visible rather than cloaked
in representational forms.
An intriguing insight into Mondrian’s attitudes toward his process was
given by Carl Holty, who described Mondrian working on his late Boogie
Woogie paintings in New York. When he saw that the paintings were con-
stantly changing he was dismayed at the loss of so many beautiful composi- 91
tions, and he asked Mondrian why he didn’t make a new, different painting
for each change. Mondrian replied that he didn’t want paintings, he wanted
to find things out.12 This statement reveals that Mondrian, despite his highly
restricted means, continued to view his work as a process of discovery. The
product, however carefully finished, was merely an instance of his work and
not a final goal. To a degree this attitude is explicable in terms of Mondrian’s
acute awareness of the very limited appreciation for his art. From the begin-
ning of his evolutionary journey to pure plastic art he had to produce market-
able art in addition to what he considered his important work in order to
support himself. His neoplastic work was labor undertaken solely out of
personal interest and conviction. It was thus doubly pure, free of naturalistic
form and free of commercial worldly expectations.
General public awareness of the artistic process increased during the
1930s, prompted by more detailed information and discussion of how mod-
ern artists worked. Articles on modern art brought the reader into close
proximity to the stages of the artist’s creative process. From its inception in
1926 Cahiers d’Art, the leading French magazine devoted to modern art, was
committed to the presentation of modern artists’ work, and regularly pub-
lished the most recent productions of leading artists, particularly Matisse
and Picasso, in extensive layouts.13 These presentations were often made in
the context of textual debates on Surrealist automatism that explicitly
addressed the artist’s means and the creative processes appropriate to the
creation of successful modern artworks.14 In Cahiers d’Art detailed documen-
tation of the work of the masters of modern art was intended to demonstrate
both their inspired development and the creative control and technical
achievements that were the foundation of their art. The magazine’s editor,
Christian Zervos, also published Picasso’s catalogue raisonné between 1932
and 1978. These presentations of living artists’ work allowed readers to wit-
ness the artists’ processes and creative development. They also affected
artists, who became increasingly self-conscious of their own work processes.
Jeffrey Weiss has discussed the ways the catalogue raisonné project affected
Picasso; the artist began to date all his works, and he also seems to have

begun to work faster, often producing several works a day, as well as empha-
sizing the formal effects of rapid creation.15 Such changes suggest a self-
conscious effort to present himself as an inspired and fecund creator,
possibly one who works automatically. Cahiers d’Art’s reproductions of living
artists’ most recent works portrayed the modern artist as a constant laborer,
someone exploring a theme or idea over and over in slight variations. Indi-
92 vidual works were presented as part of a series and yet significant in them-
selves. They were printed in large format on consecutive single pages, even
when the works were small, rapidly created sketches made on vacation. Such
reproductions enhanced the value of modern artists’ work while promoting
the image of the modern artist as a tireless worker always engaged in the
creative process of exploration and elaboration.
It was in this context that first Matisse and then Picasso published
photographic documentation of stages of their work in progress.16 Matisse
began having photographs taken of the creation of his paintings in the mid-
1930s, and eight stages of his Large Reclining Nude of 1935 were published in
Roger Fry’s monograph on the artist that same year.17 Matisse’s assistant
later stated that Matisse wanted to document each “significant stage” of
provisional completion before he discovered an imperfection that would lead
him to revise the painting the following day.18 He continued to document his
paintings in this manner for the remainder of his career. The photographs
were published on several occasions and were exhibited with the final paint-
ings in the 1940s. Matisse stated that he wished to exhibit the photographs
of the stages of his paintings in 1945 to show younger artists how hard he
worked, and it is now well known that he took many months to complete
some of his paintings.19 What appears to be a simple, rapidly executed paint-
ing was in fact often the result of extended labor and multiple revisions.
The photographic documentation of Matisse’s paintings indicates that
the painter’s process remained consistent with what he had described in his
1908 “Notes of a Painter.” Although the first stage seems successful, the
artist does not accept it as fully expressing his thought. Each stage appears
plausibly finished in accordance with his stated belief that a painter must
maintain the overall harmony of the painting throughout the painting pro-
cess. The different stages also show the artist sacrificing accurate naturalis-
tic depiction for pictorial expression. There is, however, no consistent
progress from one stage to the next—neither the traditional progress from
loose sketch to finely finished work, nor a consistent reversal of this approach,
although some viewers have claimed to see the latter as the overriding prin-
ciple. It is true that often the first stages of the painting have the most natu-
All About Process

ralistic detail, and subsequent stages eliminate detail in favor of a more broad
treatment of the subject. This is in keeping with Matisse’s description of his
process of condensing the subject to its essential lines in order to make it
more effective in communicating his sensations.20 But this is not by any
means the painter’s sole concern, and many stages of the work show marked
alterations in tone, design, and likely color as well (though the photographs
are monochromatic), not a progressive distillation. 93
In 1936 Matisse made a statement that attests to the continuity of his
process as he had described it in 1908:
The reaction of each stage is as important as the subject. For this reac-
tion comes from me and not from the subject. It is from the basis of my
interpretation that I continually react until my work comes into har-
mony with me. Like someone writing a sentence, rewrites it, makes new
discoveries. . . . At each stage, I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next
sitting, if I find a weakness in the whole, I find my way back into the
picture by means of the weakness . . . and reconceive the whole. Thus
everything becomes fluid again and as each element is only one of the
component forces. . . . The whole can be changed in appearance but the
feeling still remains the same. . . . Basically the expression derives from
the relationships.21
As the photographs of the states of his paintings show, Matisse’s labor fol-
lows no easily described path. The changes to his paintings reflect his own
idiosyncratic requirements and cannot be reduced to a formula or program.
In this very lack of a definable program they provide an example of a creative
process, the artist’s labor that follows no rules but those dictated by the
artist’s own feelings. Perhaps even more important, they show, as Matisse
intended them to, how hard the artist works to achieve his goals. The artist’s
difficult labor was a persistent theme for Matisse, who wrote in 1935, “I have
always believed that a large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the
struggle which the artist wages with his limited medium.”22 In displaying the
signs of that struggle Matisse contributed to a broad midcentury effort to
place the artist’s process at the center of artistic significance.
Matisse described the exhibition of the stages of his work as didactic,
and it is certainly instructive regarding the artist’s working process. The
presentation of the photographs of earlier stages with the final work, how-
ever, raises complex issues regarding the nature of the completed artwork.
An insistence on resolution and pictorial harmony is a constant throughout

Matisse’s career, as is the implication that an artwork is finished when it
accurately expresses the artist’s feeling. Equally important, however, is the
artist’s ongoing exploration of different solutions to a given pictorial project.
This is evident in his long-term engagement with specific subjects, his ten-
dency to make different versions of the “same” painting, and his late-career
preoccupation with recording the different stages of his work through pho-
94 tographic documentation. There is in the end no solution, no resolution, no
final work, just an ongoing and laborious process. Matisse himself seems to
have become increasingly aware of this later in his career as he displayed his
process to the public. In the brochure for the large 1945 Galerie Maeght
exhibition of six paintings accompanied by framed photographs of their
multiple stages he was quoted as saying, “Every time I’ve done something
successfully, I say to myself, ‘that’s it, I’ve got it, I understand’; but no, noth-
ing has been learned. The conclusion of a picture is another picture.”23 This
conception of the artist’s labor as a never-ending process will become central
to modern art in the ensuing decade.
Matisse was the first important modern artist to have the stages of his
painting published, but Picasso soon followed his lead. Picasso had used
photography in his work beginning around 1900,24 but he does not appear to
have documented states of works in progress until the 1930s. His first pub-
lication of an in-progress drawing was an illustration accompanying a 1935
interview in Cahiers d’Art in which the artist stated, “It would be very inter-
esting to preserve photographically, not the stages, but the metamorphoses
of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain
in materializing a dream. But there is one very odd thing—to notice that
basically a picture doesn’t change, that the first ‘vision’ remains almost
intact.”25 Like Matisse, Picasso stresses the importance of the artist’s initial
conception as a guiding force in the creation of a work. However, Picasso’s
statement is also imbued with Surrealist ideas regarding the painter’s image
as the transcription of a dream, and consequently he downplays the artist’s
creative labor as manifested through the metamorphoses of the picture.
Picasso’s working process, when later documented, is notably different from
that of Matisse. It is more traditional in revealing the artist progressing from
a less complete to a more finished final work. The presentation of the cre-
ative processes of the leading masters of modern painting thus revealed two
very different methods of working: one that used constant revision to achieve
an aesthetic goal, and one that demonstrated a cumulative progression to a
final product.
All About Process

Although Matisse preceded Picasso in publishing states of his work in
progress, Dora Maar’s photographs of Picasso’s creation of Guernica became
the emblematic images of a modern artwork in the process of creation. Eight
stages of Guernica were published in Cahiers d’Art in July 1937. Many more
working images, studies, and later developments were subsequently pub-
lished, culminating in Rudolf Arnheim’s 1962 psychological study Picasso’s
Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting.26 The political significance and ambitious 95
scale of Guernica made its fame inevitable in the context of modern art,
which very rarely produced works that met the requirements of traditional
masterpieces. The documentation of its creation served as the ultimate
example of the modern artist’s labor to find satisfactory expression of feel-
ing. The painting was, however, unusual for modern art in its attempt to
communicate widely shared emotions in response to a tragic public event.
Its creation thus was an anomaly, and the staging of its creation for photo-
graphic documentation makes it doubtful as an authentic representation of
Picasso’s process in general.
The published stages of Guernica’s creation were the most explicit
attempt to reveal Picasso’s working process until the artist was filmed paint-
ing in 1949,27 but Picasso’s creative process had long been the subject of
scrutiny. By 1937 his work had been meticulously documented and published
for years, and Jeffrey Weiss has discussed how the reproductions of Picasso’s
work in the Zervos catalogue raisonné represented “an interpretation of
process.”28 By arranging the works sequentially the catalog suggests develop-
ment and the continuity of the artist’s production. This affected the artist’s
perception of his own work; as noted above Picasso began to date everything
he produced, suggesting explicit engagement with a temporal view of his
labor. Given his great fame it is likely that his entire creative process had long
been a self-consciously staged series of events enacted with full awareness
of being observed. This would inevitably affect any view of his work as the
product of liberated and authentic self-expression. Once the entire creative
process becomes an object for observation and analysis its significance
undergoes radical changes, an issue that would be taken up directly by sub-
sequent generations of artists.
Interest in the modern artist’s process was promoted in the United
States beginning in the 1940s, most notably by the magazine ARTnews, which
would become a key supporter of the New York school artists. In the 1940s
the magazine published several articles on Matisse’s painting process. The
first, “Mr. Matisse Paints a Picture: 3 Weeks’ Work in 18 Views,” published

on a single page in September 1941, reproduced Woman with a Necklace in
black and white with seventeen photographs of early stages, all of which were
exhibited at the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Museum). The
brief unsigned text made a passing comparison to the many alterations of
Picasso’s Guernica, also painted in a short period of time. Several articles in
the April 1948 issue, published to coincide with the Matisse retrospective at
96 the Philadelphia Museum, also stressed the painter’s working process.
Thomas Hess’s article reproduced three photographs of the artist standing
and painting murals or a large canvas. This was a distinct choice to emphasize
his painting as a physical activity, given that Matisse did not typically work
at large scale and usually painted while seated.29 Albert Frankfurter’s article
reproduced ten photographs of different states of The Lady in Blue, dated
between February and April 1937. The caption for these reproductions reads,
“Matisse’s technique is one of continual recreation.”30 This observation
neatly coincided with the magazine’s brief review of Willem de Kooning’s
first one-man show, in which Renée Arb wrote that his abstractions were
“the result of months of sketching and alteration.”31 Years of emphasis on
the working processes of the great modern masters had paved the way for a
generation of artists whose work would be at least as famous for its process
of production as for the artworks produced.
Modern Art and Industrial Processes: Purism
While many modern artists in the early twentieth century echoed Matisse
in stressing the expressive and intuitive aspects of their work, others
espoused rational modes of artistic production. Among the most prominent
of these were Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who devel-
oped Purism in the years immediately following World War I. The Purists
denigrated idiosyncratic emotional painting and promoted a rationally
conceived art that would be executed with a scientifically based technique.
They saw their paintings as part of a general mechanical evolution, a process
they defined as the progressive development of utilitarian objects to their
most efficient and essential forms. Purist paintings both illustrated this
evolution and participated in it; they represented standard household objects
as essential geometric shapes, while the paintings themselves were precisely
designed to communicate harmonious emotions efficiently through math-
ematical proportions and carefully structured color relationships.
Rational preconception was a key component of Purist paintings, and
the Purists rejected outdated notions of the artist’s genius in favor of the
All About Process

artist as an industrial artisan. They believed that the modern artist’s quest
for originality and genius had resulted in a pernicious loss of technical abil-
ity, and they particularly singled out Fauvism for its detrimental influence
on modern artists.32 As we have seen, Matisse, the leading Fauve painter, had
explicitly described the need for an intelligent and controlled artistic tech-
nique in his “Notes of a Painter.” His insistence on the importance of expres-
sion and intuition, however, had helped to foster the popular notion that 97
these were the most significant aspects of the artist’s process. The Purists
were unrelenting in their critique of the loss of technical rigor among mod-
ern artists and unflinching in their embrace of a solution they derived from
industrial production processes:
The habit of painting without preliminary research, under the sway of

emotions that we try to express in fits and starts, is too pervasive. We
believe, by contrast, that a work should be completely set in the mind;
in which case technical realization is merely the rigorous materialization
of the conception, almost a matter of fabrication. In this way the shock-
ing approximations found in so many works of the period, their tenta-
tive, bristly, or febrile craftsmanship, will be avoided. . . . In sum, artists
who analyze like scientists will advance farther. . . . Painters should
propose constructions that are as clear as geometry. . . . Nothing being
left to chance. Chance is what art casts out.33
The Purists believed that aligning artistic production with the progressive
achievements of modern technology, science, and industry was the means
to create a properly modern art. Like all modern achievements, art produc-
tion should rationally maximize its outputs for optimal efficiency.
The adoption and promotion of the attitudes and processes of industrial
technology in the production of art represented a radical about-face in mod-
ern art theory. While there was a precedent in the employment of scientific
theories of optics and color by Neo-Impressionists, modern art theory was
dominated overwhelmingly by the embrace of broadly Romantic attitudes
that stressed individualism, emotion, inspiration, and originality. These
attitudes were implicitly, and often explicitly, conceived as countering the
inhuman values associated with modern industrialization. The qualities and
values Ruskin had associated with art and modern technology in the mid-
nineteenth century endured and changed very little—that is, until they were
directly challenged in the 1910s. The first challenge was offered by the Futur-
ists, who embraced industrialization along with violence; both were conceived

romantically and vaguely as means to destroy the weight of the past and its
failures and to usher in a new era of promise. With Purism (and also Russian
Constructivism), though, the romantic values of the past were abandoned,
and what was once perceived as the inhumanity of industrial production was
reconceived as the most effective means to realize a truly modern, efficient,
and ideal world. One corollary to this shift in attitude is an embrace of col-
98 lective values over the individual. For the Purists and many others the artist’s
individual aesthetic sensitivity is instrumental to artistic creation; it is not,
however, in itself the purpose of artistic creation. The individual artist serves
society.
The Purists modeled their conception of the artist as a collective worker
on the organization of modern factory workers in the production process.
In their magazine L’Esprit Nouveau they published admiring articles about
Taylorism, the industrial organization strategies invented by Frederick Tay-
lor, which were widely employed in American factories.34 Like Taylor, the
Purists saw scientific efficiency as a means for restructuring not just indus-
try but society as a whole. Ozenfant and Jeanneret acknowledged the his-
torical critiques of industrial labor, and proposed a counterargument in
which the fragmentation of the industrial labor process and the alienation
of the worker from his product is redeemed by his pride in the products
created by collective labor:
Today, it must be acknowledged, mass production methods imposed by

the machine effectively hide from the worker the final result of his
efforts. However, thanks to the rigorous programs of modern factories,
manufactured products are so perfect that they give labor teams cause
for collective pride. A worker who has executed only a single isolated
component understands the interest of his labor; the machines covering
the factory floor make him perceive power and clarity, make him feel at
one with work of such perfection that his mind alone would never have
dared even aspire to it. This collective pride replaces the old artisanal
spirit by elevating it to more general ideas. This transformation seems
to us an advance; it is an important factor in modern life.35
According to the Purists, modern industrial society, regulated by science and

mathematical principles, was positioned to realize the eternal ideals of clas-
sical Greece in the creation of a perfect, healthy, rational, and harmonious
environment and society. Purist art was to be the decorative analog to this
rational perfection, and its production was the result of careful preconcep-
All About Process

tion. The Purists believed that mathematical harmony provided the highest
form of human aesthetic satisfaction, and thus by implication that the Purist
artist in the process of creating mathematically harmonious designs was
experiencing great pleasure.
The Purist artist’s pleasure was theoretically limited to the conceptual
stage of the painting; its physical creation was simple manual labor compa-
rable to that of a builder following an architect’s plan. In this, Purism 99
embraced the much-critiqued division of industrial labor between manage-
ment and the worker, the mental and the physical. The individual artist is a
microcosm of the industrial production process—and as in that process, the
highest value is placed on management, the brains of the factory, while
manual skills are relatively negligible. The Purists likewise conceived aes-
thetic satisfaction in a limited manner, largely discounting the physical and
material in favor of the mental and conceptual. Their valorization of mind
over material in the creative process was, however, notably distinct from
their contemporaries associated with Constructivism and the Bauhaus.
Although similarly engaged with geometric abstraction and developing a
rational approach to creative production appropriate for modern industrial
society, both the Constructivists and the Bauhaus artists and designers made
physical materials a central concern. They did not situate their endeavors in
relation to a disembodied ideal of pure mathematical harmony as the Purists
did; rather, they sought to establish greater sensitivity to, and consciousness
of, the physicality of creative work and to make this awareness central to the
artist’s working process.
Among the major shifts represented by modern art in relation to its
predecessors are not only the shift away from conceiving and evaluating the
fine arts of painting and sculpture in terms of naturalistic representation and
the reconceptualization of the artist’s process, but also the related change
in attitudes toward the artist’s materials. Previously considered merely
instrumental material vehicles for the artist’s conception, and as such fully
understood and attended to only by the trained artist/artisan, the artist’s
materials increasingly took center stage as the physical manifestation of the
artist’s process. Maurice Denis’s 1890 formalist statement that prior to rep-
resentation a painting is “a plane surface covered with colors assembled in
a certain order” directly called attention to the importance of the painter’s
medium. Matisse’s 1908 “Notes of a Painter” provided a more detailed
account of the central significance of the modern painter’s means. The
increasing valorization of the artist’s means as a complex mode of significa-
tion rather than a transparent vehicle for a preexisting message created a

new field of operation for the artist. Not only did it allow for a wider latitude
of approaches to traditional media, it also became possible to consider the
signifying potential of nontraditional media, the most famous of which is the
introduction of collage into the arena of the modern fine arts.
The elevated status of the fine arts traditionally depended on their intel-
lectual and immaterial qualities and carefully ignored the fundamental real-
100 ity that artists work (hard) with physical materials that are often messy and
intractable. The Purists’ dedication to the ideal and conceptual character of
their paintings, and their devaluation of the painter’s physical labor, is the
exemplary modern instantiation of a long tradition with roots in the values
of ancient Greece. Unlike earlier intellectually oriented approaches, however,
the Purists were working in the context of the new modern developments
that began in the nineteenth century. These developments included novel
approaches to valorizing art that emphasized the artist’s labor and material
techniques, as well as new understandings of the purpose and meaning of
art that replaced moral education and spiritual uplift with more pragmatic
physical and emotional goals.
Matisse conceived the painter’s role as providing therapeutic relaxation
to the modern bourgeois worker, and this paralleled the social goals of the
Arts and Crafts movement. Even the idealist Purists considered art as a means
to create a salubrious material environment that actively promoted the health
of its occupants. Their ideal harmonious paintings were intended to be instru-
mental and efficient, qualities that depend on physicality. They also depicted
the ideal modern shapes of ceramics and glassware that they claimed had
evolved to their most pure and efficient form through centuries of use. Thus,
although the Purists ignored the materiality of painting as a craft in their
theoretical texts, the subjects of Purist paintings were physical objects
designed to be perfectly adapted to manual use. Furthermore, Purist paintings
were designed, often very specifically, to complement and decorate modern
homes, contributing to the healthy and harmonious modern environment.
Physicality and Matter: The Modern Artistic Process and the Artist’s Medium
After the dissolution of Purism in 1925 both Ozenfant and Jeanneret turned
their attention to an often-aggressive engagement with tactility and the
physicality of materials. In this they were in accord with the reigning attitude
of the period, which is marked by artistic preoccupations with the physical
and material. From the heavy painterliness of expressive modern painting,
commonly denominated art vivant,36 to the more radical concerns of the
All About Process

Surrealists, modern artists in the later 1920s and 1930s were engaged with
material physicality. This is evident in styles that emphasized the materiality
of paint and other materials employed by the artist, and in themes that
stressed the brute physicality of the earth and the (often overtly sexualized)
human body.37
One of the most significant considerations of the period’s preoccupation
with art’s materiality is Henri Focillon’s 1934 book The Life of Forms in Art, 101
which declared the paramount importance of the physicality of art: “A work
of art is not the outline or graph of art as activity; it is art itself. . . . Art is
made up, not of the artist’s intentions, but of works of art. . . . In order to
exist at all, a work of art must be tangible. . . . It is in this very turning outward
that its inmost principle resides.” “Without matter art could not exist.”38 For
Focillon art is the metamorphosis of forms, and he considered the artist’s
process as a key to understanding the concrete artwork. He stated that the
study of technical phenomena allows “entrance to the heart of the problem,
by presenting it to us in the same terms and from the same point of view as it is
presented to the artist. . . . In viewing technique as a process and trying to
reconstruct it as such, we are given the opportunity of going beyond surface
phenomena and of seeing the significance of deeper relationships” (36).
Focillon is careful to distinguish basic craft techniques (which he calls craft)
from the specific creative processes that create artworks (which he calls
technique). He likens the latter to biological development and claims that
the artist’s technique goes beyond the limitations of craft—often, in Focil-
lon’s view, as a result of attempting to make one medium produce the effects
of another.
Focillon not only emphasizes the literally physical, he also defines the
artist’s thought as fundamentally an activity of forming. All mental processes
are, according to Focillon, formal activity: “The mind is a design that is in a
state of ceaseless flux, of ceaseless weaving and then unweaving, and its
activity, in this sense, is an artistic activity” (44). What the artist does is
develop “the very technique of the mind” in material form. Indeed, the artist
thinks in material form: “In the mind it [form] is already touch, incision,
facet, line, already something molded or painted, already a grouping of
masses in definite material. It is not, it cannot be, abstract. As such, it would
be nothing. It calls importunately for the tactile and the visual” (46). Focillon
lays great stress on the importance of the artist’s touch, which he defines as
the meeting point of form, matter, tool, and hand. Touch imbues the artwork
with the quality of life. His 1936 essay “In Praise of Hands” further developed
his belief in the importance of touch for the artist: “Art is made by the hands.

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

rioration and breakage offer curious possibilities. . . . Such an alchemy does
not . . . merely develop the stereotyped form of an inner vision; it constructs
the vision itself, gives it body and enlarges its perspectives. The hand is not
the mind’s docile slave”(76).41 Prefiguring ideas later developed by Merleau-
Ponty, Focillon locates the artist’s activity as the intersection of the mental
and physical, the body and the world: “I separate hands neither from the
body nor from the mind. . . . The mind rules over the hand; hand rules over 103
the mind. . . . The creative gesture exercises a continuous influence over the
inner life. The hand wrenches the sense of touch away from its merely recep-
tive passivity and organizes it for experiment and action. . . . Because it
fashions a new world, it leaves its imprint everywhere upon it” (78). The
exalted tone and sweeping universalist claims that characterize Focillon’s
text should not obscure the fact that his ideas are deeply engaged with con-
temporary issues regarding the nature of art and art making. The period
between the two world wars is remarkable for its radical reconsiderations of
the social role and significance of art and the artist’s labor. Focillon’s claims
for the nature of art and art making are in many ways typical of this period
and its pervasive concern to identify the fundamental purpose and meaning
of art as human creative activity.
The attention to the significance of manual manipulation of physical
materials so prominent in Focillon’s writing reflects a major trend within
early twentieth-century modern art, particularly developments in modern
sculpture. Beginning with Gauguin’s engagement with ceramics and sculp-
ture, many modern artists, including Degas, Matisse, and Picasso, turned
their attention to new approaches to the creation of three-dimensional
artworks. Influenced by the example of non-Western artifacts entering Euro-
pean museums and galleries, modern artists sought to expand their creative
identities beyond the limiting parameters of traditional Western art forms.
Just as Gauguin had carved decorative panels and created furnishings and
pottery in addition to painting, the artists of Die Brücke created sculptures,
decorative panels, and woodcuts that reflected their “primitive” identities.
Conceiving the roughly worked surfaces and crude carving as indicative of
the honesty of their expression, Die Brücke artists claimed the kinship of
their works with those created by the artists of African and Oceanic cultures.
Their assessment of the significance of these putatively primitive art forms
shows the persistence of Ruskin’s notion that crudely carved forms were
honest reflections of the artist’s thought uncontaminated by the false refine-
ments of academicism.

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

than from art academies and their more intellectual approach to making
sculpture.43
In turning their efforts to developing a more direct physical relationship
with their work, modern sculptors necessarily made significant changes not
only in traditional working processes but also often in the amount of time
and labor involved in the creation of individual works. The extremely slow
labor of direct stone carving changed what it was possible for a sculptor to 105
achieve in terms of both quantity and quality of work. Whereas sculptors
previously took the material of the final work largely for granted—either
bronze or (typically) Italian marble—in the early twentieth century direct
stone carvers began to investigate the qualities of local stones and to con-
sider their variations as integral to the qualities of the final sculpture. The
change in the artist’s process not only changed the types of artworks created,
it became one of many new signifiers of the artworks. Whereas previously a
sculpture would be evaluated for its design, its conception, and its solution
of a representational problem such as a monument, a portrait, or a mytho-
logical reference, the modern sculpture was to be evaluated by the artist’s
engagement with the medium. Crude carving and simplified forms were the
obvious results of honest labor, a loving and sensual attention to a particular
piece of stone or wood, which had released its encased figure at the insistent
tapping of the artist’s chisel.
Modern artists’ embrace of more primitive or elemental approaches to
the creation of sculptural and decorative objects was an outgrowth of ideas
developed in the context of modern painting and literature, but another
important influence was a set of ideas and attitudes developed in the context
of design and the decorative arts. Ruskin’s notions were foundational for the
broad conception of a more honest, direct form of art making in contrast to
the classical and academic system of idealization and intellectual refinement.
Supporting those ideas were not only the widespread ideals of the Arts and
Crafts movement as promoted by William Morris and others, but also
approaches developed within the German system of design education that
culminated in the innovative educational programs of the Bauhaus. By the
early twentieth century there was a systematic effort to train designers for
modern industry in Germany by integrating theory and practice; students
not only learned theoretical principles of design but also served apprentice-
ships to learn professional practices.
The growing importance of design, particularly industrial design, in the
modern world had enormous effects on thinking about the process of mak-
ing. Previously, a broad and largely undertheorized distinction had arisen

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

vaguely defined project of fostering the development of a creative and
expressive personality.
A key locus for the development of modern artist training and its focus
on developing the artist’s sensitivity to materials was the Bauhaus, particu-
larly in its foundations class (Vorkurs), as well as in the focus on a single craft
in the workshop training that followed. The Vorkurs, initially conceived by
Johannes Itten in 1919 and later largely taught by Joseph Albers, incorporated 107
progressive approaches recently developed for the education of young chil-
dren.46 Both Itten and Albers had taught elementary school prior to their
employment at the Bauhaus, and they used new educational strategies that
promoted immediate hands-on experience and direct exploration of materi-
als.47 This was in direct contrast to the emphasis on drawing in traditional
academic art instruction. The Bauhaus, which unified two previously sepa-
rate institutions, an Academy of Fine Art and a School of Arts and Crafts,
was not a school for training traditional fine artists; its goal was to train
artist-designers who would have the intellectual and creative skills tradition-
ally associated with the fine artist combined with the technical and mechan-
ical knowledge of the industrial designer and artisan. The ultimate goal was
the integration of all art forms and the fulfillment of fundamental human
and social requirements.
The Bauhaus embrace of hands-on experience in the initial “foundation”
stages of art education was not an arbitrary import from progressive educa-
tional theory; it was part of the assumptions that lay at the basis of modern
art. First, it was a natural outgrowth of Ruskinian notions regarding the
sincerity and honesty of direct handwork. By emphasizing hands-on experi-
ence Bauhaus educators sought a fusion between mind and matter, the
reciprocal effects of the artist on the material and the material on the artist.
Second, the Bauhaus foundations class reflected prevailing notions that the
modern artist needed to rediscover fundamental artistic and emotional
truths that had been lost or obscured by an excessively narrow, regimented,
and intellectualized Western fine arts tradition. In attempting to return to a
state of ignorance and carefully investigating the material properties of a
common object—a newspaper, to take one example—the Bauhaus student
was led to discover new ways to understand and employ matter. Nothing was
taken as given, and such an approach fostered original questions and solu-
tions as well as an attitude of ceaseless exploration.
For the designer or architect, an open and creative approach to materi-
als allows for novel and ingenious solutions to given problems. For the
modern “fine” artist, however, problems are rarely externally imposed, and

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

same time directed to develop highly personal goals and methods to achieve
them. In the difficult position between these contradictory attitudes, artists
often developed a quasi-scientific approach to their own processes of cre-
ation. This was a logical solution. The modern artist was conceived as the
mysterious locus of creative production, which cannot be generalized beyond
the individual; it was thus appropriate for artists educated to analyze mate-
rials, colors, and primary forms to turn their analytic attention to their own 109
activities; the creative process in itself thus became the ultimate significance
of the artist’s work.
In 1938 the philosopher R. G. Collingwood published his Principles of Art,
a text that outlines an influential philosophy of art as expression.48 It also
reflects the common understanding of the modern artist’s process as it had
developed over the previous decades. Collingwood began by defining a
separation of art from craft, or “the technical theory of art,” based largely on
differing processes of production. Collingwood asserted that the craftsper-
son is wholly concerned with the creation of a predetermined product in
which a known end determines the technique or means of production. This
is not only true of utilitarian objects such as pots, furniture, and clothing,
but also applies to any work created for a specific purpose, be it a poem
written to commemorate an event, a commissioned portrait, a play written
and produced to entertain, and so forth. In the creation of such works tech-
nique is effective; it gets the job done.
The artist, by contrast, is engaged in an experiential process of making;
unlike the craftsperson, for the artist the means are at least as important as
the end product because the artist’s defining act is expression of emotion.
In his notion of the artist’s goals and labor Collingwood largely conformed
to the influential ideas first thoroughly described in Matisse’s “Notes of a
Painter” and later generally accepted as fundamental to modern art. The
artist’s product is the result of an open-ended engagement with the material,
one that fosters a more personal and psychological approach to the creation
of the work, which, in turn, becomes an exploration and instantiation of the
artist’s feelings. Collingwood believed the specificity of the artist’s emotion
was discovered during the process of creating the artwork, and he was care-
ful to distinguish between mere “ranting” or venting of emotion and art that
is created “deliberately and responsibly, by people who know what they are
doing, even though they do not know in advance what is going to come of
it.”49 For Collingwood artistic production is defined by the specific qualities
and attitudes of the artist. It is not the act of making a picture, poem, or

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

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

5
The Artist’s Process as a
Means of Self-Realization
Although it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his work, it is equally
certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done
called for that life. From the very start, Cézanne’s life found its only equilibrium
by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary
project of his future work . . . a single adventure of his life and work.
—Maurice Merleau- Ponty
In the previous chapters we traced the concept of the artist’s process primar-
ily through its relation to historical conceptions of the artist’s work. What
the artist does to produce an artwork and how this labor is conceptualized
and valued have been the dominant issues examined thus far. In considering
them it is evident that taking into account the artist as an individual person-
ality is often an important means for understanding the artist’s labor. This
is particularly true in the case of the almost mythical personalities of artists
such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Van Gogh, as well as fictional artists
created by Balzac and Zola. For certain prominent artists the artistic process
is hard to separate from their personalities, which give their processes
uniqueness and a means of explaining the exceptional qualities of the art
they produced. Somewhat oddly, in their very exceptionality these artists
came to stand for artists in general. The outstanding artist became the model
and definition of all artists, and the oddities and extremism of their person-
alities became the basis for a widespread conception of the creative artistic
person.
The reason for this conception, despite the many examples of promi-
nent artists who gave no evidence of extreme deviations from the normative

in their personal or working lives, are complex. They can be understood as
part of a general identification of the artist as a type of worker who is not
hampered by the limitations imposed on most workers in modern industrial
capitalist society. The modern artist is the exemplar of the free laborer, the
worker whose production is determined by individual will rather than the
demands of the market. As we saw in chapter 2, thinkers such as Marx and
Ruskin made important contributions to the conception of the artist as free 113
laborer. Pierre Bourdieu’s essay “The Invention of the Artist’s Life” offers
a useful discussion of the modern artist’s identity as outlined in Gustave
Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education. He writes, “The artist’s exclusive
dedication to his art is the precondition for art and the artist’s emancipa-
tion, and in this way it is purified of all dependence and any social func-
tion.”1 The artist’s freedom is inextricably bound to the works he produces,
which are comparably divorced from social utility: “By reserving the name
‘work of art’ for something priceless, for the pure and disinterested work,
which is not for sale or which in any case is not created to be sold, by writing
for nothing or for no one, the artist affirms that he is irreducible to a simple
producer of merchandise. . . . The real intellectual or artist is he who . . .
sacrifices a fortune to the realization of his projects.”2 As Bourdieu (and
others) have pointed out, the notion of the artist as a free individual is a
social and ideological construction; artists are subject to the whims of
fashion and the art market unless they have independent incomes.3 Never-
theless, the notion of the artist as a free, utterly self-motivated laborer is
central to the definition of the artist’s social identity in modern capitalist
society. What Clive Bell wrote in 1914 remains a common perception of the
artist’s identity to this day: “The artist and the saint do what they have to
do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity.
They do not produce to live—they live to produce. There is no place for
them in a social system based on the theory that what men desire is pro-
longed and pleasant existence. You cannot fit them into the machine, you
must make them extraneous to it. You must make pariahs of them, since
they are not part of society but the salt of the earth.”4 This exalted concep-
tion of the artist has understandably led to a fascination with the artistic
personality. Who or what is this person who is able to escape the bonds that
limit the majority? Why are certain people able to devote their lives entirely
to the production of original creations of no practical utility? The artist
must be an exceptional individual, not a mere worker, and thus the extreme
personalities of certain historical artists must represent the normative
exceptionality of the artist.
The Artist’s Process as a Means of Self-Realization

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

would have been understood as referring to human beings in general. What
I am suggesting here is not that women have not been marginalized in the
history of modern art (they clearly have been), but that the discourse that
shaped the modern artist’s identity and artistic process was not as narrowly
masculinist as it has sometimes been portrayed.6 It was an identity that
women could assume, and many did.7 The modern artist as an exceptional
person was situated outside the common concerns of most people, and this 115
identification could easily apply to women. A serious commitment to art
making could be as much a renunciation of social expectations for women
as it was for men. In the nineteenth century it was common for women to
completely give up their artistic activities when they married, and it was
often spinsters (women who failed to fulfill their social obligation to marry
and raise children) who continued to practice their art throughout their lives.
The fact that many of these women were amateurs rather than professionals
earning money from their labors would not necessarily have affected their
dedication or their own sense of purpose as artists. As we have seen, to be
socially isolated and dedicated to a labor without expectation of recognition
or success was a key characteristic of the modern artist’s identity.
The artist as manifesting common psychological experiences of early
life is another common theme in modern art theory. In 1876 Konrad Fiedler
made an early formulation of the significance of the artist’s work as the
development of natural perceptual and preconceptual tendencies of the
human mind neglected in most people after childhood: “In the artist, a pow-
erful impulse makes itself felt to increase, enlarge, display, and to develop
toward a constantly growing clarity that narrow, obscure consciousness with
which he grasped the world at the first awakening of his mind.”8 Fiedler, a
philosopher and theorist often credited with developing an early version of
pure formalism, was interested in the psychological processes involved in
the creation and reception of art. In relating art to psychology Fiedler, and
many others, sought to explain the significance of art in terms of fundamen-
tal human requirements rather than mere utility or decoration. Art reflects
essential aspects of what it is to be human, and thus the processes of its
genesis are matters of great importance.
The modern public’s interest in the artist’s personality and work pro-
cesses may be attributed in large part to broad shifts in the conception of
human identity that occurred in modern times. As human will (as opposed
to God’s divine will) was assumed to play a greater role in the fabrication of
human life and experience, it became possible to conceive a meaningful
equivalence between artistic production and self-fashioning, a theme that

became particularly pronounced in existentialism and phenomenology in
the 1940s and 1950s.9 The artistic process came to be seen as a microcosm
and metaphor for self-development and self-realization. The exaltation of
artistic process can only occur when the artist’s experience is paramount,
and that can only be the case in a culture that places high value on the
individual person. This is why there is no real interest in the artist’s process
116 prior to the Renaissance, at which time a new consciousness of the artist as
a subjective and self-creating actor became possible.10 Prior to the Renais-
sance, though, the artist could still be conceived as a model for human
potential. The concept of divine inspiration served to explain the value of
the artist’s process in an era when human identity and destiny was thought
to be in the hands of gods. The artist’s inspiration could then be exemplary
of proper human activity infused with divine will.
More modern concepts of the artist’s process are, in contrast, often
particularly concerned with the proper human relation to the material world.
In this we may see a general consciousness of matter as potential commod-
ity as well as substance with potential moral value. What does the artist do
to matter to transform it into a meaningful product? And once that process
becomes an object of attention, is it not more “valuable” than what it pro-
duces, just as the goose that lays golden eggs is more valuable than the
individual (unfertilized) eggs? Indeed, are the artist’s products not merely
the residue and witnesses of significant process? As early as 1876 Fiedler
claimed that this was the case:
The mental life of the artist consists in constantly producing this artis-
tic consciousness. This it is which is essentially artistic activity, the true
artistic creation, of which the production of works of art is only an
external result. . . . A work of art is not the sum of the creative activity
of the individual, but a fragmentary expression of something that can-
not be totally expressed. The inner activity which the artist generates
from the driving forces of his nature only now and then rises to expres-
sion as an artistic feat, and this feat does not represent the creative
process in its entire course, but only a certain state. It affords views
into the world of artistic consciousness by bringing from out of that
world one formed work in a visible, communicable expression. This
accomplishment does not exhaust, does not conclude this world, for
just as infinite artistic activity precedes this feat, so can an infinite
activity follow.11
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In situating the artwork as merely the residue of a highly valued mental activ-
ity, Fiedler helped to develop the theoretical understanding of modern art.
Ever-increasing attention to the modern artist’s process is a hallmark
of the twentieth century. A significant early locus for this attention can be
found in the critical discourse addressing Cézanne’s painting, which was
inextricably bound up with the personality of the artist. According to his
critics and admirers, Cézanne’s art was the focus of his life, and, as noted in 117
chapter 3, he had the independent means to devote himself to an artistic
project that had no financial or practical rewards. Cézanne’s art has long
been understood as reflecting his life, not in a merely biographical sense, but
in its fullest sense. In 1913 Clive Bell wrote, “Cézanne is a type of the perfect
artist; he is the perfect antithesis of the professional picture-maker. . . . He
created forms because only by so doing could he accomplish the end of his
existence—the expression of his sense of the significance of form. . . . The
real business of his life was not to make pictures, but to work out his own
salvation.”12 A few years later Roger Fry asserted that “Cézanne then, though
his external life was that of the most irreproachable of country gentlemen, . . .
was none the less the purest and most unadulterated of artists, the most
narrowly confined to his single activity, the most purely disinterested and
the most frankly egoistic of men.”13 In 1959 Meyer Schapiro observed,
“Cézanne’s masterliness includes, besides the control of the canvas in its
complexity and novelty, the ordering of his own life as an artist. His art has
a unique quality of ripeness and continuous growth.”14
In recording his sensations as he perceived the world around him,
Cézanne is widely considered to have produced a pictorial equivalent of the
shifting and open-ended nature of lived experience. In 1901 Gustave Geffroy
wrote, “They say that Cézanne’s canvases are not finished. It doesn’t matter,
so long as they express the beauty [and] harmony he has felt so deeply. Who
will say at what precise moment a canvas is finished? Art does not proceed
without a certain incompleteness, because the life it reproduces is in per-
petual transformation.”15 A half century later Schapiro claimed that
the form is in constant making and contributes an aspect of the encoun-

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

operations is more compelling to us than their meanings or relation to
our desires, and evokes in us a deeper attention to the substance of the
painting.
The marvel of Cézanne’s classicism is that he is able to make his
sensing, probing, doubting, finding activity a visible part of the painting.16
118 These last two quotations frame over fifty years of critical writing on
Cézanne’s art. Geffroy’s text reflects the Bergsonian notion of flux (“per-
petual transformation”) prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century,
while Schapiro’s echoes the phenomenological preoccupations of the middle
of the century, yet both give evidence of the enduring significance of
Cézanne’s paintings as tangible manifestations of an artistic process con-
tiguous with the artist’s physical and mental life processes.
In many ways Cézanne may be seen as a template for defining the mean-
ing of the artist’s process in twentieth-century modern art; later artists will
be appreciated and critically presented in terms markedly similar to those
used for discussing Cézanne. This increasing emphasis on the artist’s process
and its necessary intertwining with the artist’s life and personality is reflected
in influential philosophical and theoretical texts on art. In the last chapter
we saw how Collingwood’s theory of art stressed the artist’s total emotional
and psychological engagement in the process of creation, which (potentially)
leads to an ever-expanding understanding and awareness. John Dewey’s 1934
text Art as Experience took a similar approach; however, unlike Collingwood,
whose theories often have a tendency to limit the nature of art making,
Dewey’s are expansive.17 According to Dewey, works of art are not simply
physical products but “refined and intensified forms of experience.”18 This
definition allows Dewey to consider an enormous range of activities and
experiences as artistic; Collingwood, in contrast, limited art first to previ-
ously recognized artworks and then further narrowed the category by insist-
ing that art only be used to describe works created by a certain qualitatively
determined process.19
Dewey contended that modern industrial capitalism had contributed to
the pernicious separation of art from life and daily experience, isolating it in
artworks placed in museums and galleries rather than locating it in objects
and activities throughout the community. Artists themselves are also isolated
from society in the industrial age because they do not participate in mass
production (8–9, 341). It was Dewey’s hope that his text would recover the
“continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living” (10). In
this his work shares the aims of the Arts and Crafts movement as well as
All About Process

many of his contemporaries, including the Purists, Mondrian, and the Bau-
haus faculty, who also hoped to integrate aesthetic satisfactions into daily
experience. Whereas they hoped to create objects and physical environments
that would achieve this goal, however, Dewey intended to promote a new
understanding of art and the aesthetic experience that would revitalize
everyday existence.20 His widely influential book is a significant moment in
the relatively subtle (some might claim insidious) reconceptualization of 119
what art is and does that is one of the primary characteristics of twentieth-
century modernism. In Dewey’s text we find not only an examination of the
experiential nature of the process of making art, but also a definition of the
successful reception of artworks that is strongly associated with imagina-
tively reenacting that process.
Dewey carefully distinguishes an experience from mere experience.
The latter is simply the interaction of a living being with its environment,
but an experience is “when the material experienced runs its course to
fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in
the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work
is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a
game is played through; a situation . . . is so rounded out that its close is a
consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and
carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency” (35). A
true experience in Dewey’s definition has aesthetic quality. It stands in
contrast to the unrelated, incoherent occurrences and events of much of
life as well as to mechanically connected events ordered by convention
(40). An experience has pattern and structure that connects action and its
effects (44), and it is the perception of this that is the substance of the
artist’s process:
The artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the
connection between what he has already done and what he is to do
next. . . . A painter must consciously undergo the effect of his every brush
stroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is
going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and
undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce. To appre-
hend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes
of thought. (45)
Dewey cites Matisse throughout his text, and the influence of his “Notes of
a Painter” is evident in Dewey’s descriptions of the artist’s working process

as the continuous equilibration of a work’s successive elements in relation
to the effect of the whole:
The form of the whole is therefore present in every member. Fulfilling,

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

The artist has the power to seize upon a special kind of material and
convert it into an authentic medium of expression. The rest of us require
many channels and a mass of material to give expression to what we
should like to say. . . . The artist sticks to his chosen organ and its cor-
responding material, and thus the idea singly and concentratedly felt in
terms of the medium comes through pure and clear. He plays the game
intensely, because strictly. . . . The true artist sees and feels in terms of 121
his medium and the one who has learned to perceive esthetically emu-
lates the operation. (200)
Thus, in Dewey’s view, while the aesthetic experience is universal and not
limited to the production or reception of works of art, the artist and the
production of art are special cases. This apparent contradiction may have its
source in the influence of Alfred Barnes’s ideas about the nature of art and
artistic creation, which were more specific and narrowly formalist than
Dewey’s tendency to a more general, even universalist approach to defining
the nature of art and aesthetic experience.22
The special nature of the artist is also addressed by Collingwood, who
ascribes to the true artist an emotionally intense and profoundly moral
character. He claims that an artist who does not have “deep and powerful
emotions will never produce anything except shallow and frivolous works of
art.” In making a work of art, Collingwood believes, the artist attempts to
become conscious of an emotion; failing to do so results in the failure of the
artwork and signifies insincerity, a moral failure, and a “corruption of con-
sciousness.” In defining art as the successful expression of an honest emo-
tion, Collingwood set terms for understanding how the artist works and what
constitutes artistic merit. Any given artwork is created by the artist out of
necessity; it is integrally related to a particular moment in the artist’s life and
could not be created at any other time. Collingwood condemned as superfi-
cial the notion that artworks form part of evolutionary series either in an
artist’s oeuvre or in the history of art as a whole. Rooted in the artist’s sincere
expression, the successful artwork is equivalent to truth.23 The artist’s work
is also the result of the artist coming to self-knowledge through activity. This
activity is a form of self-creation in which an emotional experience comes
to consciousness.24
Both Collingwood and Dewey provide definitions of the nature of the
artist and of artistic activity that are part of broad philosophical positions
on the nature and role of art and aesthetics in human life and experience.

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

on the nature of artistic inspiration, talent, and technique. While the Sur-
realists attempted to revise artistic values and evaluated works on the basis
of unfettered imaginative invention, more conservative supporters of mod-
ern art redefined automatism in terms of traditional artistic skill. The
essence of the debates around automatism focused on the evaluation of an
artist’s process. The Surrealists refused to define a dependable automatic
technique or a consistent means for determining whether a given product 123
was the result of an automatic process.26 They knew once such a technique
was defined it would be subject to inauthentic imitation; works might then
be made to appear to be automatically created without actually being so.
There would be a defined automatic form and style, which could be sepa-
rated from its process of creation and turned into an inauthentic product,
a mere commodity.27
The Surrealists’ contemporaries, however, were not so leery of taking a
definitive position. The Cahiers d’Art critics Christian Zervos and Tériade
contested the Surrealist notion of automatism and redefined it as the skilled
artist’s ability to create successful works of art without conscious direction.
Thus, rather than tapping into a universally available creative imagination
in the subconscious, automatism was employed in terms that corresponded
to its traditional definition as the employment of an action rendered
mechanical (automatic) through training and habit. Zervos used this notion
to insist on the superior abilities of established artists, notably Matisse and
Picasso, whose talent and long experience allowed them to create with little
conscious attention to the physical manipulation of their media.28 Tériade
promoted a group of young artists he labeled Neo-Fauves whose vaporous
inchoate “automatic” style he claimed was the result of their liberated
engagement with the process of painting, which took precedence over any
desire to create a fully resolved product.29
The other prominent art critics working in France during the 1920s and
1930s did not take up the challenges raised by Surrealist automatism as
directly and as often as did the Cahiers d’Art critics. Generally, mainstream
modern art during these decades was viewed as highly individualized self-
expression. The most common critical viewpoint was based on a belief in
the significance of the artist’s unique personality, which infused artistic
subject and technique. Artistic process was thus conceived as a natural out-
pouring of emotion, a conception related to the Surrealists’ automatism. The
difference lay less in the two conceptions of direct expression than in the
Surrealists’ serious attempts to avoid establishing individual or group styles
through the production of consistent works. The expressive painters of the

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

Western dedication to rationality, Dewey’s aesthetic experience is funda-
mentally Aristotelian in its emphasis on the ordered relation of parts to
whole.
Philosophers like Dewey and Collingwood believed (as did those more
immediately involved with art) that a work made in accordance with the
proper process of artistic creation would naturally and inevitably evoke an
aesthetic experience in the attentive viewer of the work. All forms of art 125
were, in the views of both Dewey and Collingwood, expressive language, and
as such their purpose and nature was to communicate in their particular
medium.31 Herein lies one of the foremost difficulties of modern art con-
ceived as expression. How, precisely, was art capable of communication? Was
its language natural, conventional, or a combination of the two? To what
degree was originality possible before a work became utterly incomprehen-
sible? These are questions that reach far beyond our immediate concern with
process, but they have important resonance for that concern. Dewey and
Collingwood explicitly, and other theorists and critics more often implicitly,
believed that the imaginative reconstruction of the artist’s process of creat-
ing a given artwork was a crucial means of aesthetic communication. The
work must thus provide enough indications of that process for communica-
tion to occur. What had previously been considered merely technical con-
cerns of artists rapidly became an essential ingredient in the understanding,
reception, and evaluation of artworks.
In shifting the focus from objects to experience, Dewey’s and Colling-
wood’s philosophical approaches may also be compared to process philoso-
phy in a broader sense. The most prominent process philosophers, Henri
Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, both rejected the traditional philo-
sophical focus on things as merely instrumental to thought rather than
definitive of the true nature of reality and being.32 There is a distinct paral-
lelism in the process philosophers’ reconceptualization of the nature of
reality, in which time and motion take priority over the static entity, and
the turn to process over product in the valuation of modern art. Just as the
stable self-identical object is for process philosophy merely a moment in the
constantly changing life of any given entity (itself artificially isolated from
the continuum of the universe), the artwork came more and more to be seen
as a mere by-product of the essential nature of art: the (ever-expanding)
process of the artist.
Process philosophers claimed the individual, isolated object was not
truly real; it was merely convenient for human instrumentalism. In Bergson’s
writing this tendency to think instrumentally is described as generalizing

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

artist, unlike the nonartist, develops and becomes richer throughout life and
into old age: “Forms never cease to live. In their separate state, they still
clamor for action, they still take absolute possession of whatever action has
propagated them, in order to augment, strengthen and shape it. They are the
creators of the universe, of the artist and of man himself. . . . [They are]
concrete and active forces powerfully at work among the things of matter
and space.” In Focillon’s view, great artists, like Delacroix, Chardin, and 127
Turner, lead ordinary, limited lives, waiting for “the essential events that
originate in the life of forms.” They face life as Leonardo faced the old wall,
discovering forms in what to others are merely arbitrary marks.38 Focillon
emphasizes the inevitable linkage between the artist and the forms he cre-
ates; this is not a simple connection between creator and product created.
There is an endless symbiotic circuit that includes the audience as well
through the universality of forms and the human innate psychological pre-
disposition to be affected by them: “Every act is still a gesture, and every
gesture a kind of hieroglyph. . . . [William] James has shown, that every
gesture exercises on the life of the mind an influence that is none other than
the influence of all form, then the world created by the artist acts on him,
acts in him and acts on other men.”39 As discussed in the previous chapter,
Focillon emphasized the physicality of the artist’s work as communicated
through the hand’s shaping of matter. His ideas are thus an exemplary
attempt to theorize a fully integrated conception of artist, artwork, viewer,
and reality based on the philosophical concept of life as an unending process,
a flux of forms with no ultimate goal or resolution.
While the effects of process philosophy on the conceptualization of the
artist’s process were most often vague and general, developments in psychol-
ogy more directly affected understanding of the artist’s work and processes
of creation. Interest in the relation between the artist’s process and person-
ality were widespread in the 1930s. In 1932 the psychologist Otto Rank
published Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development in which
he analyzed the psychological labor involved in the artistic process.40 He
noted that in contrast to earlier periods there was now an ideology of the
artist rather than an ideology of art, and that “artistic creation has . . . changed
from a means for the furtherance of the culture of the community into a
means for the construction of personality.”41 Modern artists are character-
ized by a marked degree of self-consciousness, and the first step the artist
takes is one of self-fashioning (31, 37). Rank’s analysis was not merely of
current attitudes, however; he also made general statements about the
nature of the artist’s process. He claimed that the process of all “great”

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

social alienation, desire for self-expression, these characteristics of the artis-
tic personality have become commonplace attitudes with attendant discom-
forts and even pathologies. Rank believed that art would be replaced by a
psychologically assisted development of the self-aware personality; it was
(and is), however, more common to believe in the potential of artistic cre-
ation as a means to alleviate psychological discomforts. This conviction
developed with the rise of amateur production in the nineteenth century and 129
was an important component of the Arts and Crafts movement. Regardless
of whether the modern viewer considered him- or herself an amateur artist,
however, the belief in a strong affinity between the artist’s psychology and
persona and that of nonartists became a foundational assumption of modern
art. These are the grounds on which the modern self-expressive artist’s work
has meaning that goes beyond the purely personal, and what makes it pos-
sible for the highly individualized work of many modern artists to find an
audience and, in some instances, great success. What is shared is no longer
a common literature, the classical myths and biblical scenes of the Western
tradition, but a common humanity, a common psychology, common desires.
The modern artist’s work, both the process and what it produces, becomes
emblematic of an often-intolerable human situation and the means to ame-
liorate it. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “It is nonetheless possible that Cézanne
conceived a form of art which, while occasioned by his nervous condition, is
valid for everyone.”43
By the mid-twentieth century the artist’s process was often closely
linked to the development of concepts of human action and self-definition
in the context of phenomenology and existentialism, philosophical
approaches that had enormous popular influence. Merleau-Ponty’s phenom-
enological analysis of Cézanne and his project was of great importance—not
just in providing a means for considering Cézanne’s art, but for framing the
way artists’ work was understood and evaluated as a fully creative process.
One of the central issues in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of art is the concept
of original expression. In his view the artist, and the modern artist in par-
ticular, in creating a painting invents a new potential language and, more
than that, a novel form of meaning.44 The process of creation is thus fully
creative; it does not reflect any universal structure or order, and there is no
given concept that the artist merely fulfills in making the work: “He speaks
as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. . . .
‘Conception’ cannot precede ‘execution.’ Before expression, there is nothing
but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will
prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there. . . . The

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

new form of behaviour, or towards other people, or towards his own thought,
through his body and his speech.”48 The painter at work is formulating an
expressive language, not merely employing a preexisting one. A slow-motion
film of Matisse painting, which showed him hesitating and sketching out
choices in the air before choosing to make a mark, revealed to Merleau-Ponty
that the artist’s signifying intention is in the process of creating the work.49
He believed this to be true even in eras where the ostensible goal of the 131
painter was precise realistic representation.
In a discussion of the modern artist’s interest in “incomplete” work
Merleau-Ponty outlines why modern artists find the creative process far
more significant than what is produced. For some artists the incomplete
work, the sketch, represents a trivial automatism, a personal gesture or mark
of individual expression valuable solely as a sign of originality. This is of no
interest to Merleau-Ponty. For him artists such as Cézanne and Klee are not
childish narcissists of this sort, their works are not mere improvisational
tokens of individualism. They communicate directly through a long-
developed gesture, a personal style: “The accomplished work is thus not the
work which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer
and invites him to take up the gesture which created it and, skipping the
intermediaries, to rejoin, without any guide other than a movement of the
invented line (an almost incorporeal trace), the silent world of the painter,
henceforth uttered and accessible.” The modern artist who is developing a
style, a language that expresses his unique experience, leaves concrete works
in his wake, but these do not concern the artist in themselves. What matters
is how creating them has allowed him to develop: “Without going back to
them, and by the sole fact that they have fulfilled certain expressive opera-
tions, he finds himself endowed with new organs; and experiencing the
excess of what is to be said over and beyond their already verified power, he
is capable . . . of going ‘further’ in the same direction. It is as if each step taken
called for and made possible another step, or as if each successful expression
prescribed another task.” In Merleau-Ponty’s description the artist’s work is
vital and living to the degree that the artist cannot really see it:
It is that very life, to the extent that it emerges from its inherence, ceases
to be in possession of itself and becomes a universal means of under-
standing and of making something understood, of seeing and presenting
something to see—and thus is not shut up in the depths of the mute
individual but diffused throughout all he sees. . . . There must have been
the fecund moment . . . when an operant and latent sense found the

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

opposed paths, no partial “solutions,” no cumulative progress, no irre-
trievable options. . . . [The painter’s] quest is total even where it looks
All About Process

partial. Just when he has reached proficiency in some area, he finds that
he has reopened another one where everything he said before must be
said again in a different way. . . . The discovery itself calls forth still
further quests. The idea of . . . painting’s being fully and definitively
accomplished is an idea bereft of sense. For painters, if any remain, the
world will always be yet to be painted; even if it lasts millions of years . . .
it will all end without having been completed.52 133
This quotation directly rejects the then prevalent modernist notion of paint-
ing’s evolution to a state of ultimate purity. Painting must be considered an
activity of body and mind in relation to the physical world inhabited and
perceived. For Merleau-Ponty the painter’s labor is a profoundly significant
act of human perception and communication.53
The embodied nature of human experience, and thus all human thought
and action, is central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and it is also a
central to many twentieth-century discussions of the artist’s process. It is
inextricably related to the conceptualization of the artist’s gesture, particu-
larly as it developed into a key signifying component of modern artworks.
Roger Fry, perhaps now most widely recognized for his critical contributions
to modernist formalism, described what he called “the emotional elements
of design” in terms that explicitly related them to embodiment. According
to Fry, the drawn line is a record of a gesture; it is modified by the artist’s
feeling and directly communicates that feeling to the viewer. Likewise, rep-
resented mass, space, and light all have the power to communicate thanks
to human embodied experience: “Nearly all these emotional elements of
design are connected with the essential conditions of our physical existence:
rhythm appeals to all the sensations which accompany muscular activity;
mass to all the infinite adaptations to the force of gravity which we are forced
to make. . . . The graphic arts arouse emotions in us by playing upon what
one may call the overtones of some of our primary physical needs. They . . .
appeal . . . directly and immediately to the emotional accompaniments of our
bare physical existence.”54 Fry’s focus here is not the artist’s process; never-
theless, his discussion provides a justifiable opening for considering the
increasing importance of bodily gesture and physical experience as the
foundation of modern artworks. Fry himself did not propose this as a
uniquely modern phenomenon; he cited Michelangelo’s painted figures as
examples and claimed that representation of a human body was needed to
make the emotional elements of design truly effective. Nevertheless, he laid
a foundation for thinking more explicitly about the ways the artist’s marks,

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

‘tactile values’. . . . Every kind of language is in this way a specialized form of
bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother
of all languages.” By dance Collingwood means an “‘original’ language of total
bodily gesture . . . which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is
using all the time.” Gesture is thus not a specialized activity; it is a necessary
adjunct to human embodiment. Collingwood defines it as “the motor side
of our total imaginative experience.”57 As embodied beings we communicate 135
our thoughts and feelings through our gestures and attitudes; we are engaged
with the physical world. For the artist at work that engagement is total, and
there is little meaning in separating subject from object, gesture from
medium.
Merleau-Ponty similarly developed the notion of the gesture as a nexus
of relation between the embodied self and the enveloping world that is
developed by the artist:
The movement of the artist tracing his arabesque in infinite matter

amplifies, but also prolongs, the simple marvel of oriented locomotion
or grasping movements. Already in its pointing gestures the body not
only flows over into a world whose schema it bears in itself but possesses
this world at a distance rather than being possessed by it. So much the
more does the gesture of expression, which undertakes to delineate what
it intends and make it appear “outside,” retrieve the world. . . . All per-
ception, all action which presupposes it, and in short every human use
of the body is already primordial expression.58
The artist’s expression is thus an extension of a natural activity of all human

beings, and this activity is integral to the nature of being in the world: “The
words, lines, and colors which express me come out of me as gestures. They
are torn from me by what I want to say as my gestures are by what I want to
do. In this sense, there is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take
orders, not even those I would like to give to myself.”59 There is throughout
Merleau-Ponty’s writings about art a presumption of honesty and authentic-
ity in the artist’s labor. The artist’s work is the result of embodied being in
the world, the transformation of that experience into the creation of physi-
cal objects that are responses to the situated nature of being; this is some-
thing that cannot be feigned or manipulated.
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical approach is highly relevant to the work
of many modern artists in the mid-twentieth century who were deeply
engaged with exploring the nuances of their creative activity. For some

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

To claim that Hesse’s art aims to remember and express a common
human quality or experience is not the same as attributing to it some
universal force or purpose.60
Wagner’s work discusses the ways in which Hesse, Georgia O’Keefe, and Lee
Krasner negotiated the gender-biased cultural assumptions and ideologies
of twentieth-century modern art in the creation of their own art and artistic 137
identities. Not only is it undeniable that these ideologies were formative for
artists working in the Western context regardless of gender or cultural back-
ground, many aspects of these ideological discourses provided fruitful
concepts for later feminist development and elaboration. As we shall see, the
attention to bodily experience so emphasized by Merleau-Ponty will become
a hallmark of a specifically feminist attention to embodiment and process.

6
The Artist’s Process at Mid-Century
As we saw in the previous chapter, art and the processes of art making
became central to mid-twentieth-century philosophical discussions about
the nature of human existence and action in the modern world. Artists
themselves sometimes situated their work in broad philosophical terms,
but more often they served as examples of dedication to the processes of
creative labor. This chapter examines mid-twentieth-century artists whose
working processes became emblematic of extreme dedication to process
and the critical discourse that promoted them. This discourse builds on
earlier discussions of prominent modern artists, most notably Cézanne, as
well the tradition of difficulty previously traced in relation to modern
artistic production. In addition to extending earlier discursive themes, the
mid-century emphasis on artistic process transformed the ways artists
perceived their own work. A striking example of this is Picasso’s statement
published in 1960: “Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do
a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly
and there is a logical sequence in all this research. That is why I number
them. It is an experiment in time. I number them and date them. Maybe
one day someone will be grateful.”1 This is a complete reversal from the
artist’s famous 1923 statement, in which he said, “I can hardly understand
the importance given to the word research in connection with modern
painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the
thing.”2 For many artists at mid-century, total engagement in their working
process defined them, and the final resolution that the completed artwork
had once signified began to diminish in importance. This shift in values
not only affected the work of prominent artists, it also had notable effects

on both the general public’s engagement with art and the ways artists were
educated.
Alberto Giacometti is the mid-twentieth-century artist most often
invoked as the heir to Cézanne. Like Cézanne, Giacometti led a highly
restricted existence devoted to the pursuit of representing what he saw, and
also like his predecessor his sense of that pursuit was of an almost impos-
sible task in which he made very slow progress over the course of decades.3 139
Jean-Paul Sartre described his dedication: “Giacometti is not interested in
statues at all, but only in sketches, insofar as they help him to his goal. He
breaks everything, and begins all over again. From time to time, friends are
able to save a head, a young woman, a youth, from the massacre. He doesn’t
care, and goes back to his task. He has not had a single exhibition in fifteen
years. . . . The marvelous unity of this life lies in its insistent search for the
absolute.”4 For Sartre, Giacometti is the quintessential existential man who
takes nothing as given and devotes himself to discovering and confronting
the unmediated object of his gaze. The severe restrictions of his existence
are proof of the sincerity of his labors. The artist’s task is the ultimate effort,
one that encapsulates the existential task of all human beings, the need to
confront existence directly without preconceptions or prefabricated mean-
ings. Not only did Sartre describe the existentialist’s stance as a rigorous
moral test, he also considered it an ongoing labor without final resolution.
There is never a moment of ultimate revelation, a moment of rest and abso-
lution. Thus human life, like Giacometti’s relentless labor, is a continual test
of endurance and dedication to a goal that is always just out of reach.
More significant than the attainment of a goal is the attitude maintained
in its pursuit; at each moment the individual must maintain good faith and
act with authenticity. These are key concepts for existentialism that had wide
influence on mid-twentieth-century thought, particularly in the realm of art
and culture. They inflected preexisting notions of artistic expression and
individual style with a strong moral tone.5 Dedication to the creative process
became increasingly a means to demonstrate absolute moral commitment
to truth and authenticity. The artist’s activity was no longer the production
of artworks; rather, it became one of the most, even the most, concrete
example of authentic action. As Sartre’s description of Giacometti shows,
the artist is not concerned at all with the products that result from that
action; what matters is the effort, the act, the process.
Writers who knew Giacometti inevitably emphasized the artist’s total
dedication to process rather than to results. Mercedes Matter wrote:

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

labor became a mysterious, even primordial task, one for which there were
no precedents, not even in his own previous works: “In each work the artist
begins his task by putting himself in the condition of one totally lacking in
the technical means for carrying it out. . . . [James] Lord questioned Giacom-
etti about his ‘technique’ for translating his ‘vision into something which is
visible to others.’ ‘That’s the whole drama,’ Giacometti replied, ‘I don’t have
such a technique.’ He then said that despite his excellent training he had 141
never been able to paint what he saw. ‘So I had to start all over again from
scratch . . . and things have been going from bad to worse.’”9 If every work
began from nothing and no existing technique was implemented in its cre-
ation, then it is evident there would be a serious problem determining when
the work was completed. And, indeed, there was: “Painting and sculpting are
transformed into a process of knowing and self-knowing; ‘whether an art-
work is a failure or a success,’ Giacometti said, ‘is, in the end, of secondary
importance.’ The repudiation of aesthetic objectives makes finishing a paint-
ing impossible, since reality has no formal goal. The artist is ‘only working
for the sake of the experience that I feel when working,’ and he could keep
busy forever on a single canvas, producing a rubble of sensations, and percep-
tions, all passé, like . . . the chaos discovered at the end of Balzac’s The
Unknown Masterpiece.”10 Obviously there were products of Alberto Giacom-
etti’s labor, a great many products in fact, but what preoccupied the artist
was the creative process, the effort to render what he saw in drawings or
sculptures. This is far from unusual. What makes Giacometti an exemplary
artist for his time is the extremity of his dedication. His life was his art; he
lived and worked in his studio, even when he could afford to live more com-
fortably. He was obsessed with capturing the image of his sitter, which per-
sistently eluded him. A lifetime of dedication to his task seemed not to
advance him appreciably closer to his goal.11
Giacometti was himself aware of the unusual nature of his life and work:
“In a way, it is rather abnormal that instead of living one spends one’s time
trying to copy a head, immobilizing someone in a chair every afternoon, the
same person for five years, trying to copy him without succeeding, and still
going on. It’s not an activity one could call exactly normal, do you think? One
has to belong to a certain social environment for it to be even tolerated . . .
it’s an activity that’s useless to the whole of society. It’s a purely individual
satisfaction, extremely egotistical and basically annoying even to the person
himself.”12 In stating that his activity was socially useless Giacometti was
certainly mistaken. His work—not merely the products of his labor, but its
means of production—had significant social value. Giacometti’s dedication

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

accounts for art’s hold on the minds of men. One enters the studio as one
would an arena. One’s entire character is revealed in the action, one’s
style. . . . Of course, everyone undergoes risks just by living. From one point
of view, the artist’s function is to give each risk its proper style. In this sense
everyone should be an artist.”16
Robert Motherwell, in fact, defined the entire New York school of paint-
ers in terms of the existentialist process of authentic self-definition: 143
The School of New York tries to find out what art is precisely through
the process of making art. That is to say, one discovers . . . rather than
imposes a picture. What constitutes the discovery is the discovery of
one’s own feeling, which none of us would dare to propose before the
act of painting itself. . . . We know what we believe by how we paint. . . .
The major decisions in the process of painting are made on the grounds
of truth, not taste. Conventional painting is a lie—not an imposture,
but the product of a man who is living a lie. . . . That painting and
sculpture are not skills that can be taught in reference to preestab-
lished criteria, whether academic or modern, but a process, whose
content is found, subtle, and deeply felt; that no true artist ends with
the style he expected to have when he began, anymore than anyone’s
life unrolls in the particular manner one expected when young; that it
is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that
one finds oneself and one’s own style . . . such is the experience of the
School of New York.17
Here is the moral justification not just for the artist’s process, but also for
its necessary isolation from external influence. What had been understood
by many thoughtful modern artists at the end of the nineteenth and begin-
ning of the twentieth centuries as a delicate and judicious balancing between
the perception of external reality, the formal organization of a painting, and
the expressive intentions of the artist had become a much more restricted
direct engagement between the painter and the painting. External influences
such as established painting techniques, other artworks, even perceived real-
ity, became potential disruptors of the honesty of the artist’s encounter with
the act of painting. The artistic process became reified, sacrosanct, not only
a means of self-definition but human potential made concrete. The rapid
dominance of this view of the artist’s labor in the mid-twentieth century
coincided with an enormous expansion of artist education programs in col-
leges, universities, and art schools, which, as we shall see, established not

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

an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the
act more fully his own.”22 The description is strongly reminiscent of early
critical assaults on Surrealist automatic painting that stressed its formal
weaknesses resulting from a lack of structural rigor and developed skills.
Now, however, it is less a matter of formal incapacities than a lax aestheti-
cism that indexes a lack of proper moral engagement with the artistic pro-
cess. Rosenberg claims that this easy mystical painting makes good 145
commodities and recognizable autographic styles. The latter criticism is
comparable to Merleau-Ponty’s dismissive approach to mere self-expression,
and the rejection of art that is merely a successful commodity was an avant-
garde strategy well established by the Surrealists during the 1920s.
Rosenberg’s distinction between an easy creative process that docilely
follows chance where it may lead and an active, tension-filled, dialectical,
and engaged process sketches out the beginnings of an evaluative scale. In
this scale it would appear that conventional aesthetic or formal appeal is
likely to be suspect as inadequately engaged. Similarly, it may be that the
artist who finds some sort of satisfaction as an indicator that the work is
finished is also not fully dedicated to the process. Robert Motherwell’s state-
ment from 1947 presents an interesting case in this regard:
I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of

the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors
which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without
images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the
surface by innumerable trials and errors. The final picture is the process
arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view.
My pictures have layers of mistakes buried in them—an X-ray would
disclose crimes—layers of consciousness, of willing. They are a succes-
sion of humiliations resulting from the realization that only in a state of
quickened subjectivity—of freedom from conscious notions, and with
what I always suppose to be secondary or accidental colors and shapes—
do I find the unknown, which nevertheless I recognize when I come
upon it, for which I am always searching.23
Motherwell here describes a working process that is a series of efforts to con-

sciously control the work, all of which result in failure, and an ultimate discov-
ery, which apparently arrives only when consciousness is relaxed and feeling
takes over. The work then contains the efforts, “layers of mistakes,” that led
to its final form. The struggle is framed here in fundamentally Surrealist

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

Kooning stated that he considered painting a way of living. This way of living,
as Rosenberg described it, was utterly unfettered by any predeterminations.
In his art the artist is fully open to the multiplicity of experience and as a
result has no style. Rosenberg explicitly rejected the notion that de Kooning
worked automatically; thus de Kooning’s paintings cannot be seen in terms
of Motherwell’s description of a series of failed attempts to achieve autom-
atism. For Rosenberg what was most significant was the tension of de Koon- 147
ing’s process, which he described as a “mismating of immediacy and will,”
an ongoing attempt to reconcile the unpremeditated mark with the artist’s
conscious aesthetic will. He wrote that the artist’s labor is comparable to
that of a boxer or mountain climber, a developed and instinctual responsive-
ness to a constantly changing situation, what Rosenberg called a “trained
sense of immediate rightness”: “In the situation that keeps arising on the
canvas, the artist-actor must be governed not by rule, nor even by esthetic
principle, but by tact.”26 Rosenberg also explicitly stated that de Kooning had
a craftsman’s competitive approach to his painting, matching his own skills
against the great painters of the past.27 It is his consciousness of history and
his constant deployment of the nuances of the painter’s craft that keep de
Kooning from being a merely self-expressive painter in Rosenberg’s account.
But it is also, and more significantly for the painter’s reputation, the intensity
of his struggle that came to define de Kooning’s painting.
The notion that de Kooning’s painting resulted from an extreme strug-
gle with his medium became prominent in the early 1950s when Thomas
Hess published an article on the making of Woman I for ARTnews. Accompa-
nied by many photographs of the painting at various moments in its making
by Rudolph Burckhardt, the article documents the painting’s two-year gen-
esis, in which it seemed less to advance from an incomplete to a completed
state than to be begun, destroyed, and begun again. In Hess’s account the
making of de Kooning’s painting was not a development or progress but a
romantic voyage comparable to those undertaken by nineteenth-century
poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The photographs document arbitrary
stops on the voyage, not significant stages of the work, and are no “more or
less ‘finished’ than the terminus.” The voyage itself is what matters in Hess’s
account, the “exploration for a constantly elusive vision, solution to a prob-
lem that was continually being set in new ways.” Like Rosenberg, Hess
stresses the artist’s rejection of automatism in favor of the long process of
thoughtful labor: “The artist . . . refuses to capitalize on the process of cor-
rection and the happy accidents it so often produces. Changes made after

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

artist, and it is hardly remarkable that in the face of such unflagging creative
production the next generations of artists would find themselves caught up
in examinations of the creative process.
De Kooning, like many ambitious artists of the time, sought to challenge
Picasso. He cited the huge 1939 Picasso retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art as a major influence on his development, and there are impor-
tant ways that de Kooning’s process and reputation followed that of the 149
modern master.30 Like Picasso, de Kooning worked ceaselessly to subvert the
technical skills and facility he had acquired in his early academic training,
yet these very skills remained key to the success and appreciation of both
artists’ work. This was a significant aspect of de Kooning’s reputation that
appears in the earliest published criticism of his work. For example, in 1948
Reneé Arb wrote, “Here is virtuosity disguised as voluptuousness—the pro-
cess of painting becomes the end. Technique is lavish and versatile; drafts-
manship elegant and precise.”31 Likewise, Clement Greenberg wrote, “The
indeterminateness or ambiguity that characterizes some of de Kooning’s
pictures is caused, I believe, by his effort to suppress his facility. There is a
deliberate renunciation of will in so far as it makes itself felt as skill, and
there is a refusal to work with ideas that are too clear. . . . These very contra-
dictions are the source of the largeness and seriousness we recognize in this
magnificent first show.”32 Also, like Picasso, de Kooning devoted his life with
single-minded intensity to his work. Both artists drew constantly and were
remarkably prolific, although unlike Picasso, de Kooning destroyed most of
his early work. This in itself can be seen as an important indicator of the
situation of the young modern artist at mid-century. Whereas the old master
was constantly displaying his fecundity, the next generation was over-
whelmed with anxiety, unable to fix the value and significance of any product.
Picasso’s confident and seemingly infinite proliferation of works, which
were widely published and exhibited, provided younger mid-century artists
with contradictory messages. One was that the successful modern artist was
fully engaged in making, in the creative process, and produced works natu-
rally as a tree bears fruit, each one no more or less valuable than the last. In
apparent contradiction, however, was the immensity of Picasso’s youthful
achievements and the travails that accompanied them. Two of his most
important paintings, the portrait of Gertrude Stein and the Demoiselles
d’Avignon, were notorious struggles to make, and the second, arguably the
greatest single painting of the twentieth century, was not considered finished
by the artist. Furthermore, by the mid-1930s Picasso was on record as the

confident artist finding success in his failures, satisfied by his own hard-won
dissatisfactions:
In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages.

Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of addi-
tions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture—then
150 I destroy it. . . . A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand.
While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it
is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of
whoever is looking at it. . . . When you begin a picture, you often make
some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy
the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful
discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms
it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end
is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own con-
noisseur. I sell myself nothing.33
The success of de Kooning’s women paintings of the early 1950s seems in

this light almost overdetermined.
The combination of the subject, the overwhelming figure of a “mon-
strous” woman, bearing the obvious indexical signs of the artist’s long cre-
ative struggle to produce her, was the perfect manifestation of the difficulties
facing the modern figure painter at mid-century. Not only was the work a
contemporary revision of Matisse’s and Picasso’s earlier “masterpieces,” it
also portrayed in vivid form the existential anxieties associated with figura-
tion and interpersonal communication. In place of the refined decorative
resolution of Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude, the sculptural solidity of
Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, or the confrontational graphic simpli-
fications of his Demoiselles, de Kooning presented women who oscillate
irresolutely in form and character. Their presences are demanding; they have
imposing scale and color, as well as, in many instances, dominant anatomical
parts that draw attention. Nevertheless, their forms are largely unfixed, body
parts appear in varying undecidable positions and locations, and their emo-
tional aspect is likewise ambiguous. They are most often described as mon-
strous and menacing, interpretations well in keeping with Sartrean
existentialism’s view of the dangerous power of another person’s gaze.34 In
these paintings de Kooning’s well-established existential anxieties as an art-
ist found an appropriate subject.35 Irresolvable process directed itself to an
unfixable representation: the mysteries of woman as perceived by a man.
All About Process

The traditional figurative subject was also a source of great difficulty and
anxiety for an ambitious modern artist at mid-century. Arguably the most
influential critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, promoted the conviction
that modern art had evolved to pure nonrepresentational abstraction and
that figuration was a step backward. It was a view shared by many supporters
of modern art, as de Kooning well knew, and his own first one-man show in
1948 had been an exhibition of nonrepresentational painting much admired 151
by Greenberg. The women paintings with their overt display of both figura-
tive subject and the artist’s unresolved painting process thus represented
another approach to understanding the significance of the modern artist’s
work. In de Kooning’s women paintings the artist’s labor does not result in
the exalted impersonality of medium-specific purity and optical sensation
(what Rosenberg mocked as “apocalyptic wallpaper”) promoted by Green-
berg and his followers. Instead, de Kooning’s paintings manifest an alto-
gether different vision of the modern artist’s achievement: the persistence
of the artist’s physical and emotional labor in the face of indifference and
even denigration. Of course, de Kooning’s dedicated craftsmanship, his full
engagement with his creative process, ultimately was not just well received
but became an inspiration for many artists. Here was an artist whose work
was the result of a single-minded devotion to the process of making art, who
worked without theories or abstract limitations, and who discovered in his
labor its raison d’être. In an age of ever-increasing mechanization, a life
devoted to the craft of painting and a seemingly endless exploration of its
nuances began to take on a kind of value and meaning in itself.
One of the major themes in discussions of de Kooning’s art is its physi-
cality and the physicality of the artist’s working process. Richard Shiff has
explored de Kooning’s manual techniques in drawing and painting, as well
as the artist’s conceptualization of physicality as the basis for his work. He
contends, for example, that the women de Kooning painted are less the result
of the artist’s perceptions of women than they are representations of his own
kinesthetic sensations and sense of physical embodiment.36 Attention to the
physical processes of drawing, the formation of gesture and its subversion
when it becomes too easy or habitual, is at the center of de Kooning’s work.
It is what allowed him to find tension and continued interest in a creative
process that could easily have become mere rote activity. In a combination
of constant invention of new strategies for spontaneous production and
careful attention to the products of his actions de Kooning kept his process
active and engaged throughout his career.37 There was, according to the art-
ist’s supporters, no resting on an achieved style for de Kooning: “Standard[s]

will always be flexible, as the experience is always new. . . . A system cannot
be willed. It grows . . . like a crystal. Irrelevancies of Style, including the art-
ist’s own style, must be excluded, for the experience depends, in part, on
freshness for its validity.”38
The requirement for infinite engagement and novelty places the artist
in a precarious position. There is no place to rest for the artist fully engaged
152 with his process, and Hess emphasized the extent to which de Kooning
worked to keep his work off balance, in process:
Hazard enters in every change of angle and brushstroke. It is not unusual

for a painting to be turned upside down or 90 degrees at the last minute.
The artist feels he must keep off-balance in front of his work. The picture
is a bet kept riding on rolls of the dice. It can be lost at any throw. When
it can no longer be lost, the picture is finished. The artist is outside. And
to keep his bet on the table, the most dangerous methods must be used.
Peril becomes as much a part of the medium as turpentine. The means
cannot be separated from the ends in the finished work . . . because the
only separable means are those pounds of paint that have been scraped
to the floor.39
Hazard, peril, lost bets, the artist’s work is difficult, even dangerous, balanced
on the knife-edge between the failures of complacency and loss of control.
Here the artist’s process becomes a metaphor for the difficult, even impos-
sible, negotiation of personal identity in the modern world. Either one
becomes the impersonal automaton, the bureaucratic “organization man,”
or founders in a schizophrenic abyss, a puppet driven by external forces
beyond one’s control.
The mid-twentieth-century critical discourse that situated process as
central to the significance of modern art reflected widespread contemporary
values and projected a specifically male image of the modern artist who
engages in conventionally masculine attitudes. He embraces danger, destruc-
tion, and risk in the battle against conformity and forces of moral disorder.
There seems to be no obvious position for the female artist in this discourse,
which marginalized active self-defining women just as the contemporary art
world and society did.40 Women do not appear as artists in the most well-
known and influential accounts of mid-twentieth-century modern artistic
process, and they were notably marginalized in published discussions of
individual artist’s processes.41 They are, however, disturbingly present as the
depicted subject with which the male artist struggles in his desperate efforts
All About Process

to make his creative mark. Balzac’s character Frenhofer, whose failed paint-
ing of a female nude in which only a foot remained recognizable after years
of labor, initiated what became a persistently repeated exercise, renewed,
practiced, and represented through the decades of modernism in the work
of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and de Kooning. The modern artist does not
just do battle with his medium and abstract forces as the core of his creative
process; he also does battle with women whose representation constantly 153
eludes him.
It is not surprising that the discourse of modern artistic process was a
site for articulating and promoting what has long been recognized as the
profound gender bias of modernism.42 Indeed, it would be remarkable to find
that such a prominent cultural discourse had escaped prevailing social val-
ues, conceptions, and prejudices. The discourse of artistic process did offer
women at mid-century something important, however: a means to conceive
their largely unrecognized creative labors as potentially meaningful and even
heroic. In stressing the high value of unceasing, dedicated labor as a personal
act of self-definition in the face of public indifference, the discourse of mod-
ern artistic process provided unacknowledged artists of all genders, classes,
and racial identities with a powerful and potentially sustaining ideology.
Certainly ideology is not as practically sustaining as the financial remunera-
tion that often accompanies an artist’s public recognition, but it did allow a
space for conceiving highly significant creative activity within the constraints
of social, cultural, and economic oppression and prejudice. That these con-
straints greatly affected women is inarguable, evident not only in the relative
neglect of female professional artists at mid-century but also in the relega-
tion of many dedicated women to the category of amateur artists, which will
be discussed below. As we shall see, though, the discourse of process was not
only used to promote the gender biases of modernism; it was employed to
undermine many of the value claims made for modern art and would prove
to be an invaluable tool in expanding its parameters to include a far wider
range of practices and practitioners than were recognized in the first half of
the twentieth century.
Thomas Hess’s 1953 ARTnews article on the creation of Woman I with its
accompanying photo documentation was part of a mid-century phenomenon:
the public presentation of artists at work. As discussed in chapter 4, ARTnews
followed the French magazine Cahiers d’Art in showing the stages of artworks
by famous modern artists like Picasso and Matisse in the 1940s. At the end
of that decade the magazine began its regular series of illustrated articles
documenting artists at work. Since the first of these, “Ben Shahn Paints a

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

mid-century, and the extent to which the artwork as product revealed that
process was a means to justify its significance and even acclamation.
Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the artist’s work were enhanced by the
slow-motion sequences of Matisse drawing in a 1946 documentary film. Just
as the philosopher (and the artist himself in this case) can discover new
aspects of the creative process on film, so, too, may the public begin to con-
sider viewing the artist’s labor as a means of access for understanding and 155
valuing modern art. Scenes of the artist working in the studio helped to
develop public recognition that modern artists did in fact work hard, even if
the products of their labor seemed childish or lacking in skill when first
compared to the representational masterpieces of previous centuries.44
Documentation of artists at work also helped to define them as individuals
who often resembled menial laborers rather than the figure of the clean,
intellectual, even aristocratic fine artist promoted since the Renaissance. In
the United States the image of the artist as a workingman, someone who
engaged in dirty physical labor, was a means not just of holding up the artist
as a liberated alternative to the middle-class office worker but also of proving
that art was a masculine activity in a society that had long viewed art as a
suspiciously feminine pursuit for a man.45
The most masculine image of the modern artist was that of Jackson
Pollock, whose much-remarked-on roughneck appearance, unorthodox drip
painting process, and seemingly incomprehensible, enormous, nonrepresen-
tational paintings became a popular public icon of the outrageous modern
artist. In Pollock’s case, perhaps even more than de Kooning’s, the artist’s
creative process was integral to the significance of the works. This was so
evidently true that it was almost neglected in the critical discourse of the
late 1940s and 1950s. Rosenberg implicitly deflated the claims Pollock had
to be an “action painter” in his famous essay by his reference to “apocalyptic
wallpaper,” although it seems inevitable that Pollock influenced Rosenberg’s
conception of action painting.46 Clement Greenberg, Pollock’s primary
critical supporter, thought that the value and interest of Pollock’s work
resided in the paintings themselves and the ways he saw them as advancing
the formal development of modern art. How they were made was not an issue
he concerned himself with in his evaluations, although he acknowledged
Pollock’s skillful manipulation of his drip technique.47 Other critics often
described the way the drip paintings were created but did not connect the
process to the evaluation of the final works; it remained mere information
about the artist’s quasi-automatic technique rather than a topic to analyze

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

insisted on the artist’s thoughtful development of the work. This was no
mere automatism, but the careful creation of a “record” of a “released expe-
rience”; the final stages of the work were “slow and deliberate,” directed to
bringing the “exceedingly complex” design to “a state of complete organiza-
tion.” In what appear to be paraphrases of Pollock, Goodnough encapsulates
the contradictory difficulties the painter faced in making works with such a
striking and relatively novel technique: “Pollock feels that criticism of a work 157
such as this should be directed at least in terms of what he is doing, rather
than by standards of what painting ought to be. He is aware that a new way
of expression in art is often difficult to see, but he resents presentation of
his work merely on the level of technical interest.”49 On the one hand Pollock
believes his painting needs to be evaluated on its own terms, not in terms of
the standards of previous paintings, but he does not want its uniqueness to
turn it into a merely singular demonstration of an unusual technique. Given
that the method so easily could become a performance with slightly freakish
overtones, like the notorious donkey painting with its tail in 1910,50 it is not
surprising that Pollock was apparently satisfied with Greenberg’s formalist
evaluation of his paintings and their place in the development of modern art.
Goodnough’s article is an important precursor to both Rosenberg’s “The
American Action Painters” and Hess’s “De Kooning Paints a Picture.” As in
those later articles, the author stresses the painter’s intense and immediate
engagement with his painting process as key to the significance of the work:
These [modern abstract] artists are not concerned with representing a

preconceived idea, but rather with being involved in an experience of paint
and canvas, directly [emphasis added], without interference from the
suggested forms and colors of existing objects. The nature of the experi-
ence is important [emphasis added]. It is not something that has lost
contact with reality, but might be called a synthesis of countless contacts
which have become refined in the area of the emotions during the act
of painting. Is this merely an act of automatism? Pollock says it is not.
He feels that his methods may be automatic at the start, but that they
quickly step beyond that. . . . Decisions about the painting are made
during its development and it is considered completed when he no
longer feels any affinity with it.51
Goodnough’s overall interest is to outline how the artist’s creative process

is able to create an emotionally expressive and formally integrated work that
can stand apart from the artist as a successful aesthetic object. This is certainly

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

the artwork and criticism that seeks to value art based on the artist’s engage-
ment in the process of making a work without precedent or preconception.
The great importance of the artist’s process in the critical and philo-
sophical understanding of mid-twentieth-century art raised problems for the
future. If as Rosenberg and others claimed it was the artist’s active and
engaged creative process that was significant, how was that to be evaluated?
What guaranteed that a properly engaged process would be visible in the 159
final artwork? Once the signs of an engaged process were recognizable they
would become a style and easily subject to inauthentic deployment, no lon-
ger a balancing act on the knife-edge between success and failure. This was
an issue for the second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters who
adopted a style of gestural abstraction indebted to de Kooning and whose
achievements are commonly considered aesthetic rather than existential.
Also problematic is the purpose of an art wholly engaged with its process of
production. Elevating the importance of artistic process above the creation
of an aesthetically successful artwork seems to lead to a solipsistic art, one
that would have little or no interest to anyone other than the person making
it. Art would no longer be aesthetic or a form of communication; it would
simply be an activity, something more akin to a sport than traditional artis-
tic production. This, as we shall see, is in fact one of the outcomes of the
emphasis placed on artistic process in the mid-twentieth century.
Artistic Process and Amateur Artists
The rise of the New York school coincided with another mid-century artistic
phenomenon, the development of a strong amateur art movement in the
United States.53 Sparked by the American publication of Winston Churchill’s
book Painting as a Pastime in 1950, amateur painting became a national fad
supported by the popular press as well as many businesses, which sponsored
painting classes, clubs, and exhibitions. The discourse promoting painting
as a hobby reveals public attitudes toward the values and benefits of making
art as well as raising significant challenges to the modern artist’s identity and
process. These challenges are particularly notable in the pages of ARTnews,
which in addition to being the main promoter of the New York school paint-
ers also strongly championed the amateur art movement.
As we have seen, critical supporters of modern art in the 1950s exalted
the artist’s total engagement in the experiential processes of making, some-
times even at the expense of producing finished artworks. In these terms
amateurs were positioned to be ideal modern artists; they were commonly

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

because he (or she)57 will never acquire the instinctive skills of the trained
artist: “We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces.
We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paintbox.”58 The article was
illustrated by four photographs of Churchill painting plein-air landscapes in
Cannes, Miami, and Marrakesh, and one of him working in his well-equipped
home studio in England.
Churchill’s article was buttressed by the magazine’s call for entrants to 161
its amateur painting competition in which the editor, Albert Frankfurter,
enlarged on the (masculine) virtues of amateur painting: “Amateur painting
is far more than a recreation sport for the tired business man . . . it actually
is the basis for a sure, sound inner knowledge of the creative process. The
more amateur painters then, and the higher their standards and more intense
their efforts, the greater and better the artistic feeling of a nation. We can
think of no better way to build and constantly increase a national audience
deeply involved with the art of America than by fostering one to which the
actual practice of art is a part of its daily life.”59 The magazine’s strategy of
getting that tired modern businessman out of his comfortable armchair
where he was contemplating the soothing products of Matisse’s labors and
in front of an easel painting his own pictures was well in tune with American
values. Instead of the distanced appreciation of the traditional connoisseur,
the new American audience for modern art would be fellow makers, men
with knowledge derived from hands-on experience.60
In the next issue of ARTnews Alison Mason Kingsbury described the
enormous number of enthusiastic amateur artists in Ithaca, New York, whose
active art association had been featured in Life magazine the previous April.
She agreed with Churchill on the pleasures and benefits of amateur art mak-
ing and stated, “In a mechanized and regulated life such as most people
necessarily lead, the useless, the game, the thing-in-itself is the greatest pos-
sible release. It is therapy and happiness.” She also made an equivalence
between the amateur and the modern artist who both embrace freedom of
expression and reject the demands of the marketplace: “The very direction
taken by the present practicing artist was established over a century ago with
the Romantic Movement, which liberated art from authority and gave the
right to paint to the individual. The subsequent innovators were amateurs in
the truest sense. They preferred to discover and to paint what they believed,
rather than to sell. Their doctrine of free expression permeates all our aes-
thetic thought as surely as the doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau permeate
our social and political thought.”61 Modern painting is honest self-expression,
liberated from all external constraints and concerns. It is a self-sufficient

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

art critics and writers resorted to similar notions. According to the New York
Times critic Aline Louchheim, for the amateur artist making is a pleasure,
while the professional suffers unremitting agony to reach elevated goals:
“The amateur’s greatest satisfaction . . . is in the doing rather than the result,
the absorption in the work, the sense of personal challenge, the joy of . . .
making with his own hands . . . and perhaps above all, the escape from his
everyday world . . . for the professional . . . the result is what counts. The 163
doing is a hard process, circumscribed by stringent self-discipline, by con-
stant checking against a high goal, by harsh requirements.”66 Although
Louchheim suggests there is a qualitative distinction between the products
of the amateur and those of the professional artist, for whom “the result is
what counts,” she focuses her comparison on the differing experiences of
the process of making. This is unsurprising given that it was rare for a critic
to devote serious attention to amateur artists’ works. Amateur art was gen-
erally discussed in a manner similar to that used for children’s art. What was
significant was that amateurs were engaged in making art; the quality of the
results was of no real interest to professional critics.67
At the beginning of the amateur art fad the critic Emily Genauer quoted
Winston Churchill’s statement that painting “is a friend who makes no
undue demands, excites no exhausting pursuits,” and she continued, “This,
I dare say, will be something of a surprise to those thousands of professional
painters to whom the practice of their art is . . . the most agonizing, soul-
searching effort. Mr. Churchill’s remark, however, provides a useful and
needed definition of an amateur painter. If you paint for fun . . . you’re an
amateur.”68 Genauer’s distinction between amateur and professional on the
basis of the artist’s emotional experience reflects the contemporary shift to
evaluating art based on the experience of its production rather than on the
final product. It was becoming commonplace to claim that the true artist’s
labor was defined by its difficulty. In Art and Experience Dewey had described
the artist’s working process as “one of the most exacting modes of thought,”69
and Collingwood similarly emphasized the difficulties of the creative process
in his Principles of Art. As we have seen, this notion was prevalent in discus-
sions of contemporary artists such as Giacometti and de Kooning, and it was
also taken up by critics to determine the differences between amateurs and
professionals.
In 1953 ARTnews’s early enthusiastic support of amateur art began to
dissipate. This seems to have been at least partially the result of the com-
mercial success of some amateur artists.70 The magazine published an edito-
rial by Albert Frankfurter that began by comparing amateurs who sold their

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

the professionals he had expected them to support in 1949. If anyone could
become a successful artist, then the elite cachet that underpinned the art
world would disappear, and quality would become a mere matter of personal
taste. The amateur artist had become a monster that threatened the art
world’s control of quality and value.
Outside the pages of ARTnews, critics did not hesitate to suggest that
amateur artists were often better than their professional counterparts. The 165
more conservative American Artist was explicit about the threat amateur art
posed to avant-garde artists: “If amateurs more frequently get hung today
may it not be because of the very nature of modern art in which the gap
between disciplined talent and superficial cleverness has been narrowed
immeasurably?”72 In his 1950 review of the first ARTnews amateur painters
competition for Art Digest Ralph Pearson wrote, “There are practically none
of the crude blunderings which represent our professional School of Confu-
sion. The amateurs, it seems, have much to teach a considerable group of
professionals. Comparison between this cross-section of pastime-paintings
and that of the professionals at the Whitney Museum Annual is inevitable. . . .
The average technical skill of the amateurs, for instance, is markedly superior
to a surprising number of the professionals. . . . There are no amateur
examples as incredibly crude as a half-dozen ultra-confusionist fumblings
honored by inclusion at the Whitney.”73 Thomas Hess took a notably differ-
ent position in his review of the Whitney Annual in ARTnews. He claimed it
was the best of the recent Annuals, and that works by Pollock, de Kooning,
Motherwell, and Greene rose above the large number of inept abstract paint-
ings.74 Since Pearson did not name the artists whose work he deplored as
crude “ultra-confusionist fumblings” we cannot know to whom he was refer-
ring. Nevertheless, his insistence on the evidence of technical skills and the
relatively conservative tendencies of his criticism in general suggests he was
not likely to be receptive to the works Hess admired.
The trend of New York school painting supported in the pages of ART-
news during the 1950s led away from traditional evaluative standards alto-
gether to promote the notion of art making as experience and action freed
from preexisting determinations and learned technique. An unintended
result was the implicit leveling of qualitative distinctions between profes-
sional and amateur painting. The difference outlined by Frankfurter hovered
between the crassly material, the artist who had to earn a living from his art,
and the spiritually dedicated artist as the natural born servant of an “outra-
geously demanding muse.” Neither identity was predicated on the quality or
interest of the professional artist’s work.

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

believe that their own liberated self-expression could equal that of the pro-
fessional artist. The incoherence of the ARTnews position on amateur art
revealed the fundamental difficulty of defining professional modern art as
authentic self-expression by means of an unrestricted creative process.
The dividing line between amateur and professional began to seem
increasingly arbitrary, especially as the numbers of highly dedicated “ama-
teur” painters grew and could claim to devote as much or more time and 167
energy to their art than did many “professional” artists. This was most often
true of women who did not work and were able to spend more time on their
art than were professionals who had to teach or work other jobs to support
themselves. In reality, despite the persistent address to the male amateur in
articles and advertisements, it was widely known that the great majority of
amateur artists were women who did not work outside the home. As early
as 1949 ARTnews reported the predominance of women among amateur art-
ists: “The amateur painting epidemic is rapidly reaching across the United
States. . . . Generally the strongest contingent consists of housewives (moth-
ers, grandmothers and widows). Following closely on their heels are business
men, physicians, teachers, students and professional artists (mostly com-
mercial).”78 This recognition did not affect the discursive construction of the
amateur artist who was explicitly figured as male in most articles on the
subject. A notable exception to this was Frankfurter’s comparison of amateur
artists to prostitutes,79 and his claim that they were taking bread out of the
mouth of professionals takes on a more pointed tone and precise meaning
when understood as directed explicitly toward women. Women could afford
to be amateur artists, while men were professionals who needed to work to
support themselves and their families. Seen in this light, the professional
artist’s high-minded dedication and suffering, his freedom of expression and
unhampered self-discovery, seem more and more like a protectionist rhe-
torical stance intended to convey value on the production of commodities
that in the end anyone might produce themselves.80
The “Amateur Standing” column disappeared from ARTnews without
notice or explanation after the March 1961 issue.81 In his last column Berk-
man completely reversed his views on amateur artists’ weaknesses and
needs. Suddenly, amateurs were no longer naturally self-expressive originals
deficient in knowledge and skills; they were now overly academic. After years
of urging amateur artists to develop technical knowledge and discipline,
Berkman chided them for being rule-bound and submissive. He claimed that
“most amateurs restrict themselves to a mechanical rote imposed by their
teachers. . . . As students such amateurs often were teacher’s pets, and they

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

as an amateur activity coincided with an enormous expansion of artist edu-
cation in the United States during the 1950s. The large number of predomi-
nantly male students enrolling in college under the GI Bill is generally
credited to the postwar boom in colleges and universities in the United
States, which included the establishment of many art departments. Previ-
ously, colleges and universities focused on art history; the making of art,
when part of the curriculum at all, was generally limited to education pro-
grams and art teacher training, which were geared toward women.83 By mid-
All About Process

century, however, there were more classes in studio art as colleges began to
expand their notion of art appreciation to include understanding gained
through direct participation in the creative process, a belief that also affected
mid-century concepts of the value of amateurism, as we have seen.84 As
Howard Singerman discusses in Art Subjects, this mirrored the expanding
influence of John Dewey and his followers in education, who saw art as a
rigorous mode of thought and thereby a valuable aspect of general education 169
(115–16). The big shift, though, was the establishment of BFA and MFA pro-
grams that were neither traditional academic programs nor professional
programs for training designers and commercial artists. It is in the context
of these programs that new attitudes about the significance of the artistic
process developed in ways that have had an enormous effect on both the
understanding and the creation of art since the mid-twentieth century.
Among the key attitudes for the acceptance of visual arts programs in
the university setting was the rejection of craft training as the necessary
focus of an artist’s education.85 As discussed above, there is a long history
going back to the Renaissance of promoting the intellectual aspects of artis-
tic creation over manual craftsmanship. The traditional intellectualism of
the fine arts was manifested in university visual arts programs as a scientific
orientation in which concepts and projects, often drawn from the Bauhaus
foundations class, were pursued as a species of laboratory work (71). The
making of art came to be defined by exploration and experimentation, dis-
covery and invention. Equipped with basic design principles, established as
fundamental truths of vision and perception rather than mere traditional
forms (88–89), the developing artist pursued various “problems,” which
might result in products along the way. Here is a reframing of the modern
artist’s project as exemplified by Cézanne, Giacometti, Mondrian, and even
Picasso. Like these artists, the university-trained artist would not be unduly
concerned with the creation of saleable commodities, but would be engaged
in a creative process presumed to be of value in and of itself. Indeed, the
establishment of artist-training programs on this model was a way to guar-
antee the self-sufficient value of the creative process. An MFA program
taught would-be artists how to be artists, far more than it taught them how
to create art that would allow them to pursue financially successful art
careers. That was the province of commercial art and design.
Artist education was established in the university setting on terms that
were often self-contradictory. It borrowed many ideas and strategies from
the Bauhaus foundations program, but it rejected the pragmatic and social
orientation of the Bauhaus as a whole. Visual arts programs rested on the

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

the expense of creating a work of art. He made them work on the same sheet
of paper all term. They were to draw self-portraits and then erase them and
begin again. His projects were designed to promote “unmastery” and open
students up to possibilities (145). Singerman describes the art teaching of
the Abstract Expressionists as psychologically oriented, intended to provoke
students to find themselves and their own individuality as artists. As such
the teaching of technique was extraneous to the main goal, which was the 171
fashioning of individuals into artists (146–49).
The most renowned teacher among the Abstract Expressionists, Hans
Hofmann, was both older and far more traditional in his respect for crafts-
manship and belief in the necessity of mastering the medium and formal
values. He encouraged his students to explore varieties of paint handling,
but he did not promote any specific technique as a desirable end in itself.
Technique was, for Hofmann, a means to the end of creating a formally
successful work of art. His overall position was a vague amalgamation of
common early twentieth-century views on the nature of modern art as a
combination of personal expression, a loosely spiritual response to nature,
and formal mastery of the medium. The very successful careers of many
Hofmann students as second-generation Abstract Expressionists suggest
that a grounding in some type of formal training in painting was a practical
prerequisite for the successful “unmastering” of Abstract Expressionism.
Rothko, Newman, and Still were supposedly proud of their inability to draw
(139), but such statements must be taken with certain reservations. First,
although they probably did not draw particularly well in a traditional aca-
demic sense since none of them had undergone the full rigors of academic
training, they all studied art for years and had extremely long careers teach-
ing art, so they undoubtedly had at least adequate drawing skills. Second,
and more important, however, is that being able to draw well was considered
a completely outdated skill by mid-century. After Picasso’s famous claim that
he labored to draw like a four-year-old, ambitious modern artists could (and
often did) happily announce that they did not labor under the handicap of
too much skill.
The tension between the traditional values of technical mastery and the
liberated dedication to the process of painting would soon disappear in the
expanded embrace of pure experience that replaced aesthetic evaluation in
the 1960s. Harold Rosenberg turned from emphasizing the importance of art
as action and event to upholding his belief that only certain types of con-
sciously developed experiences were artistically/aesthetically meaningful.
He described Hofmann’s teaching not in terms of technical instruction in

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

7
Art and Social Processes
“Existence” (in any of its senses) cannot be abstracted from “process.” The
notions of process and existence presuppose each other.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Process is the immanence of the infinite in the finite; whereby all bounds are
burst, and all inconsistencies resolved. . . . In process the finite possibilities of
the universe travel towards their infinitude of realization.
— Alfred North Whitehead
One of the dominant trends of contemporary art that began in the late 1950s
and escalated through the following decades is an increased emphasis on
process at the expense of a final artistic product. Many artists turned their
attention away from the technical and psychological processes required to
create a painting or sculpture, which had been the emphasis of earlier mod-
ern artists, and began to consider how their creative working processes could
engage people more broadly. This often entailed greater viewer involvement
with the making and physical experience of art, and some artists’ work, such
as that of Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, became
engaged with direct social intervention. The shift to a more public-oriented
approach to the artist’s work and role was part of a widespread reconsidera-
tion of the social purposes of art and the artist undertaken by popular think-
ers. In addition to the work of Allan Kaprow and John Cage, who expanded
the concept of artistic process through both their art and theories, this
chapter discusses the influential ideas of Hannah Arendt, Marshall McLuhan,
Norman Brown, and other thinkers who addressed the place of art and the

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

environment the viewer’s experience is an equal participant in the work’s
creation.
The growth in importance of the viewer’s role as participant is a sig-
nificant development in the history of the concept of process in art. Kaprow
insisted that the new art widened art’s arena to all human activity, and in
doing so art became theoretically unlinked from the object to become an
open and unfinished process, one re-created by each viewer/participant. In 175
this approach Kaprow expands previous theories, notably those of Dewey
and Collingwood, that stressed viewers’ need to re-create the artist’s creative
process to complete the artwork’s communicative function. However,
Kaprow’s view did not mark an immediate revolution in the making and
conception of art. The transition of emphasis from art conceived primarily
as objects to a focus on art as process was widely variable, and many highly
regarded artists of the 1960s made works in traditional materials using tra-
ditional techniques. There was, nevertheless, a marked shift away from the
conception of art as expressive creation and toward an emphasis on neutral
engagement with process, even among artists creating more traditional
handmade objects. A telling instance of this new attitude appears in Wylie
Sypher’s 1962 discussion of Jean Dubuffet’s “post-existential” art. Sypher
describes Dubuffet’s art as “operationalist”: it merely indexes the artist’s
hand at work. That hand as part of the universe contains within its move-
ments the rhythm of the universe, and the artist’s activity discovers the
common rhythm in things.3 The shift to an emphasis on process may be
described in very broad terms as a widening of perspective. Not only is there
an expansion of art that led beyond the single art object and traditional
media to encompass the totality of the environment, there is also a very
noticeable extension of critical and theoretical viewpoints from those con-
cerned primarily with artist and art object to the role of both within the
larger structures of society. In these expanded contexts what was often
considered most significant was art as part of a greater process.
Another highly influential figure in the turn to a new broader perspective
on art and its relation to the world was the composer John Cage, who affected
many visual artists directly through his teaching, friendships, and collabora-
tions, as well as conceptually through his work and ideas. Cage adopted an
approach to musical composition that allowed chance and the environment
to replace traditional structure in the work. His 1958 series of lectures “Com-
position as Process,” in which he outlined his approach, were particularly
important. Cage described his compositional strategies based on chance,
tossing coins to determine the notes and tempo of the music, which led him

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

became politically engaged and considered their artistic activity in terms that
were explicitly critical of contemporary society. As increasingly self-
conscious social actors, many artists turned away from their traditional role
as isolated producers of luxury commodities and embraced a variety of
strategies that elevated the exploration and exhibition of process over the
creation of marketable products. Underpinning these new attitudes was a
widespread reconsideration of not only the role of art in contemporary 177
society but, perhaps even more important, a reevaluation of the nature and
role of the artist.9
Hannah Arendt identified process as a defining concept of the modern
age in The Human Condition. This 1958 text is representative of its time in
the emphasis it places on process, though Arendt’s direct discussion of pro-
cess as a formative modern concept is an unusual meta-analysis. It was far
more common for writers to employ the terms and discuss the effects of
processes than it was to recognize those terms and effects as part of a broad
intellectual and discursive apparatus. Thus, even before considering Arendt’s
views and their potential relevance for postwar developments in visual art
it must be recognized that her insistence on the key importance of the con-
cept of process for modern thought and society is highly significant. Her
ideas can be seen as marking a waypoint between Whitehead’s abstract
philosophical speculations and the concrete realities of modern social exis-
tence. Indeed, in Arendt’s view Whitehead’s process philosophy should
probably be understood along with Bergson’s as a reflection of modern sci-
entific, social, and economic developments rather than accurate ontological
description.
Arendt claims that human beings in the modern world have been
reduced to mere laborers whose lives are wholly occupied by production and
consumption, the basic processes of life. This situation has its origins in the
political theory of the seventeenth century, which exalted process, a concept
that was “virtually unknown until the modern age.”10 Political theorists were
“naturally drawn to the phenomenon of a progressing process itself, so
that . . . the concept of process became the very key term of the new age as
well as the sciences, historical and natural, developed by it” (105). Modern
philosophers such as Bergson and Nietzsche imbricate labor within the
natural processes of biology and “glorify the sheer dynamism of the life
process” itself. For Arendt such views limit human life and society: “The
animal laborans does not flee the world but is ejected from it in so far as he
is imprisoned in the privacy of his own body, caught in the fulfilment of needs
in which nobody can share and which nobody can fully communicate”

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

developed in the 1960s. Arendt’s concern that modern society has lost the
ability to value contemplative thought and judgment, as well as the loss of a
true public society linked by ideas, values, and public action, parallels the
social and political concerns of artists such as Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys,
and Victor Burgin. For Arendt, human value lies not in consumption or even
in the production of durable objects, but in shared meaning and communal
actions that give human significance to life and its objects. Thus art that 179
privileges thought and the creation of communities based on shared values
is most directly in accord with Arendt’s general position as articulated in The
Human Condition, despite her exalted description of the work of art as a
meaningfully enduring created object.
Arendt’s text is useful both as a means for outlining some of the con-
cerns of post-1960s art and also for articulating a cogent critique of its
emphasis on process. Process defines the modern era in both its conceptual
understanding of the world and its literal organization of production and
society in Arendt’s view, but she does not see this as having been a success
in terms of creating human meaning. For Arendt the elevation of process
over product is destroying human potential and isolating modern individu-
als in merely private physical satisfactions. Thus Arendt disagrees with what
has been largely a positive valuation of process over product by many post-
1960 artists. It may be that some artists and their audiences are content to
embrace art as a source of individual satisfaction rather than productive of
shared social meaning.
More intriguing is Arendt’s distinction between labor and work and its
potential critical relation to post-1960 art. In describing the modern world
as a society of laborers seeking only to consume what it produces, Arendt
offers an explanation not only of the ever-changing disposable styles of
modern art but also of the specific success of Pop Art. In their subject matter
of disposable commodities, mass media, and popular culture, as well as in
their parodic employment of mass-production processes, silkscreens from
Warhol’s Factory and Roy Lichtenstein’s hand-painted Ben-Day dots seem
like tongue-in-cheek illustrations of Arendt’s critique of the contemporary
animal laborans.12 As Arendt described it, the characteristics of labor are
repetition and an endless process (125)—and these are also notable charac-
teristics of Warhol’s prints and Lichtenstein’s paintings of comics.13
Even more directly aligned with Arendt’s critique are various labor-
intensive pieces such as Vito Acconci’s Step Piece (1970) and Mierle Ukeles’s
Maintenance Art performances (1973). Such “works” abolish the product alto-
gether and investigate the form of labor as an artistic process. As Acconci’s

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

replacement of object-oriented art for a process-oriented society. If art was
formerly the production of nonutilitarian objects in a society where all other
making was directed toward utility (what Arendt defined as human produc-
tions that sought immortality), then a new form is required in a society
dominated by labor rather than productive work. Kaprow’s transient Hap-
penings, in which those involved submit to a free-form process, a series of
sequential events, represents a reinvention of art appropriate to a society 181
that aspires to create no durable products. Rather than the nonutilitarian
object, art becomes a nonutilitarian process, a game rather than a hobby.
Kaprow saw Happenings as experimental and exploratory, terms that
reflect a scientific attitude, which, as Arendt pointed out, was typical of the
modern era in which processes were more significant than any resulting
products. Kaprow also stated that describing Happenings as art was unnec-
essary, since they might just as appropriately be described as a sport.15 In this
he echoes Arendt’s view that there was no meaningful distinction in a labor-
ing society between artistic activity and tennis (128). Aesthetic experience
is no longer focused on an object and its specific sensory/emotional effects
on a viewer. It becomes the utterly individualized, bodily, private experience
Arendt considered the inevitable result of a society dedicated solely to labor.
Again, while Arendt saw this as a cause for concern and even lament, Kaprow
and the many artists who engaged with process-oriented, psychological, and
corporeal experiential art embraced the exploration of new avenues of aes-
thetic experience and significance.
The social role of art and artists became a topic of general interest and
consideration in the public discourse of the 1960s. In The Culture Consumers,
published in 1964, Alvin Toffler examined the place of art in American soci-
ety and the ways it served to fulfill the psychological needs of modern work-
ers to express their individuality, both by making choices as consumers of
art or by amateur art production.16 Toffler considered that art would become
central to people’s lives as their leisure increased: “In that super-industrial
civilization of tomorrow, with its vast, silent, cybernetic intricacies and its
liberating quantities of time for the individual, art will not be a fringe ben-
efit for the few, but an indispensible part of life for the many. It will move
from the edge to the nucleus of national life.” “What will the shrinkage of
work mean for the human psyche, so deeply wedded to the gospel of toil?
How does a man in a leisure-filled world structure his personality? Around
what cluster of values? The decline of work creates a vacuum in which other
values, once the property of a special elite, sprout. Aesthetic discrimination,
for example, becomes more important. Art takes on new relevance.”17 In

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

the characteristics of the new electric-age individual is the abolition of a
distinction between work and leisure. In the previous mechanical age, work-
ers were forced to endure “specialist servitude” from which they needed idle
leisure to recuperate, but in the electric age work will foster total involve-
ment. Distinctions between work and leisure will become irrelevant because
people will all be like artists, wholly and intensely involved in their activities
(301). Modern society was undergoing a “re-tribalization” in which art as a 183
specialist activity would disappear, and like “native” societies everyone
would soon make art (212).19 “‘Work,’ however, does not exist in a non-
literate world,” McLuhan wrote. “The primitive hunter or fisherman did no
work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the
whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of
labor and the specialization of functions” (129). As these are now ending in
the new age of total involvement everyone will become an artist, rendering
the title irrelevant.
Process was a central concept for McLuhan’s understanding of the new
electric age,20 which he saw as initiated by television and other “cool” media.
With its low-resolution images television fosters a new form of engagement
in its viewers, leading them to participate in the creation of meaning in a
manner inappropriate to the previously dominant “hot” media with their
high information content. Participation in process is the defining mode of
being in the new electric age, and television is one of McLuhan’s primary
examples. Television’s “mosaic” image, as well as the mosaic form of the
modern newspaper, requires the viewer to participate in a democratic pro-
cess of understanding through association: “The mosaic form means, not a
detached ‘point of view,’ but participation in process” (188). Although McLu-
han insisted that what was relevant was the medium rather than the message
or content, he noted that television’s adaptation to process rather than
products affected its content. Television programs engaged the viewer in
processes; the Western frontier show was a process of town building, and
do-it-yourself programs were also cited as examples of the focus on process
in television programming (278–79). McLuhan described the broadcasting
of the Kennedy funeral as the most powerful example of viewer engagement:
“It revealed the unrivaled power of TV to achieve the involvement of the
audience in a complex process. . . . The Kennedy funeral, in short, manifested
the power of TV to involve an entire population in a ritual process” (293).
McLuhan promoted a wholesale reenvisioning of the modern world as
a universe not of things but of processes, relationships, and information.
Material objects become effectively irrelevant in a society dedicated to depth

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

modernity.24 Morse Peckham, whose ideas were widely cited in artist’s writ-
ings of the decade, described art as a sort of testing ground: “Art is the
reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and
significant problem may emerge. Art is the exposure to the tensions and
problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the
tensions and problems of the real world.”25 Changes in art arise as artists
respond to environmental changes by developing adaptive strategies. Peck- 185
ham’s view is similar to McLuhan’s notion that artists teach people how to
adjust to changes in technology. For both writers, artists have great social
importance as teachers and role models. Also, both stressed the need for
adaptive changes in human interactions with the environment that are bio-
logical, psychological, and perceptual.
Norman O. Brown, another very popular writer of the period, studied
the psychological situation of the modern industrial human being. He
believed that art has healing power; like psychoanalysis it is able to make the
unconscious conscious.26 According to Brown, modern people need to
recover the meaning of the sensual body, which has been lost in the inhuman-
ity of capitalism and devotion to abstractions and commodities: “The more
the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and
at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever
fuller articulation of the lost life of the body. Hence increasing sublimation
is a general law of history.”27 Artists thus have an implicit mandate to abjure
the creation of things and recover the lost bodily knowledge that has been
submerged and sublimated in the modern world.
Popular writers such as McLuhan, Peckham, and Brown provided a basis
for the questioning and reenvisioning of the artist’s role and activity that
became central to visual art in the 1960s and after. Artists would no longer
be producers of objects; they would be engaged social beings proposing
alternatives, exploring new approaches, developing and participating in
experimental processes, and expanding their activities to embrace their sur-
roundings and the entire lived world. The artist’s process, previously con-
ceived as an activity narrowly directed to the creation of artworks, will
expand to potentially limitless expanse. It will no longer be just a metaphor
for the creation of identity and the processes of life; it will be engaged directly
with those processes.
A key impetus for the expansion of artistic process to all areas of human
experience in the later decades of the twentieth century was the feminist
movement and the enormous escalation of feminist concerns among practic-
ing artists. As discussed above in the context of Arendt’s theoretical analysis

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

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

8
Process Art
The crisis of the formalistic is periodic and perpetual, and for art to renew
itself, it must go outside itself, stop playing with the given forms and methods,
and find a new way of making.
—Robert Morris
In 1961 the New School staged an exhibition titled “The Creative Process”
that showed examples of work by well-known modern artists including Josef
Albers, Nell Blaine, José de Creeft, Arshile Gorky, Jacques Lipchitz, and
Elaine de Kooning. Completed works were accompanied by preliminary
sketches and artists’ comments explaining their creative process. The exhi-
bition indicates the general public interest in artists’ working processes,
which had been well established by the long-running “X Paints a Picture”
series in ARTnews. This interest would be bolstered by the series of “Art in
Process” exhibitions curated by Elayne Varian at the Finch College Art
Museum in Manhattan between 1962 and 1973, as well as the many documen-
tary films made of artists at work during the 1960s.1 The exhibition review
by Vivien Raynor published in Arts Magazine, however, suggests that the
revelations made in such a show could be unwelcome. Raynor described the
exhibition as having a “somewhat oppressive atmosphere of Sunday-school
seriousness,” and she drew the conclusion that “clearly, being an artist is no
fun at all. It may also dawn on them [the exhibition’s viewers] that not only
can a work of art’s gestation period be longer than an elephant’s, but that
attention tends to focus on the struggles of parturition at some expense to
the offspring itself.”2 While acknowledging that the sculptors’ preliminary
sketches might be didactically useful for the ignorant, Raynor found the

exhibition of preparatory drawings for the “fresh and lovely” paintings of
Nell Blaine a superfluous demonstration of the artist’s painful labor. In
Raynor’s view, insight into the artist’s creative process undermined appre-
ciation of the achievement of the final work. The review ended as follows:
“Who knows how the uninitiated react to such confessions? The cognoscenti,
presumably, expect to be shown how the emotional wheels go around. Any-
way, there seems to be an unlimited supply of creators only too happy to 189
show that they are regular guys, with problems just like everyone else.”3
Implicitly, such normalizing of artists destroys the magic of their achieve-
ments, at least for the uninitiated.
Raynor’s review and the exhibition it discussed were predicated on
what was soon to become a dated conception of the artist’s process. The
exhibition displayed the way modern artists created paintings and sculp-
tures. It was a view of what happened backstage, so to speak, and as Raynor
pointed out, it could also reveal the artists’ emotional travails in the accom-
plishment of their work. The contrast between the “fresh and lovely” Blaine
painting of an interior and her painful labor to achieve it might appropriately
be seen as ruining the necessary impression of the painting’s spontaneous
creation. If something seems natural and is exposed as artifice, its meaning
is forever changed. In the case of Blaine’s painting, what was exposed were
apparently not preliminary works that might lead to a greater understand-
ing and appreciation of her technical achievement. Rather, preliminary ink
and wash drawings represented the artist’s emotional preparations, just as
one might see an actor warming up before a performance, which demon-
strated that the final painting was far from an immediate spontaneous
response to a scene.
A completely natural artistic expression is a fiction even for the artist
who has mastered a medium. Seeing an artist’s creative process will inevita-
bly destroy many illusions, both perceptual and emotional, on which tradi-
tional and modern art rely. Thus it may well be that one of the central
contributing factors to the demise of expressive painting in the 1960s was
the increasing visibility of the artist’s creative process. Ad Reinhardt wrote
in 1954 that he read a pile of ARTnews “X Paints a Picture” profiles as part of
an assignment to satirize them. He found they “so satirized themselves” that
it was impossible to make serious fun of them, and that it was shocking to
see how artists fit themselves into predetermined roles.4 While Reinhardt
was notoriously cantankerous, similar notions must have crossed many other
minds by the late 1950s and may well have contributed to the dispassionate
stances that came to characterize artists of the 1960s.5
Process Art

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

time and space by virtue of atomic and subatomic forces. Time and motion
are thus a part of the chair’s identity, and in shifting attention and investigat-
ing the chair in terms of these it becomes a different subject altogether. Of
course, most process artworks are not engaged with molecular and atomic
structure, but they are often concerned with broad and interrelated systems
in terms of material, context, and environment, as well as the human actions
these involve. 191
Harold Rosenberg defined process art rather differently, seeing it as part
of a rejection of traditional aesthetic and artistic concerns: “Aesthetic with-
drawal also paves the way for ‘process’ art—in which chemical, biological,
physical, or seasonal forces affect the original materials and either change
their form or destroy them, as in works incorporating growing grass and
bacteria or inviting rust—and random art, whose form and content are
decided by chance. . . . The principle common to all classes of de-aestheticized
art is that the finished product, if any, is of less significance than the proce-
dures that brought the work into being and of which it is the trace.”8 In
Rosenberg’s view, process art represents an expansion of the artist’s con-
cerns beyond the arena of traditional artistic production rather than a nar-
rowing of focus to the artist’s processes of making as described by
Pincus-Witten. Both critics do agree, however, that in process art the final
product is diminished in importance, and this is an enduring legacy of the
period. Whatever the artwork that remains may be, its purpose is to be a
remnant or witness to the process that created it rather than an object of
independent aesthetic significance.
One of the difficulties posed for an analytic discussion of process art is
the lack of clearly defined boundaries. It was not an established movement
with a committed membership; it is more properly understood as a primary,
even overarching concern of a particular period, the late 1960s and early
1970s. It included a broad spectrum of artists who engaged with process in
markedly different ways, ranging from the obdurately physical and material
to the immaterial and conceptual. Two broad trends are identifiable. The
first is the one referred to by Pincus-Witten and Krauss, which includes
artists devoted to the close examination of the procedures of their art mak-
ing and the materials they employed. This is the tendency most commonly
identified with process art, and it is associated with artists who participated
in a number of notable exhibitions in the late 1960s: “Eccentric Abstraction”
(Fishback Gallery, 1966); “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” (Whitney
Museum, 1969); “Nine at Leo Castelli” (1968); “Live in Your Head: When
Attitudes Become Form” (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969); and “Art in Process IV”
Process Art

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

process is extremely malleable and open to interpretation, thus providing
opportunities for a multitude of artistic approaches. At a time when the
traditional value of art as an aesthetic commodity was increasingly consid-
ered corrupt and debased, artists maintained the vitality and relevance of
their work by adopting the rubric of process. They did so using both micro-
cosmic and macrocosmic means—the close examination of individual pro-
cesses of artistic making, and the exploration of the artist’s labor in relation 193
to much larger social and environmental processes.
Robert Morris was the primary artist to articulate the concerns of pro-
cess art and to attempt to theorize their significance in a series of articles
published in Artforum between 1968 and 1970. His position was changeable,
and although as an artist he is commonly associated with artists who focused
on close examination of their working processes and materials, his theo-
retical concerns encompassed a much broader view of the artwork and art-
ist’s labor. His theoretical writings thus help to establish the importance of
situating process art within a wider ambit of artists and approaches than is
often associated with it.
Morris’s 1968 essay “Anti-Form” is a foundational text of process art. It
focuses directly on the artist’s process of making, which Morris claimed was
a new concern for artists and theorists: “The process of ‘making itself’ has
hardly been examined. It has only received attention in terms of some kind
of mythical, romanticized polarity: the so-called action of the Abstract
Expressionists and the so-called conceptualizations of the Minimalists. This
does not locate any differences between the two types of work.”9 According
to Morris, American art has developed by uncovering alternative premises
for making, and in doing so it has gone beyond the European devotion to
formal relationships as a basic aesthetic device. His primary example is
Jackson Pollock, who reconsidered the painter’s tools and medium and
acknowledged paint’s liquid properties by dripping it rather than using a
brush. Contemporary artists continue along this path, moving away from the
rigid industrial materials that were the focus of minimalism to investigate
the properties of other materials, even to the extent of sometimes making
materials rather than things. Refusing to consider form as an end, contem-
porary artists explore gravity, chance, and indeterminacy.10 Morris’s focus is
thus on the investigation of forces and energies by contemporary artists who
perform experiments in the processes of making. His own contemporary
work is exemplary of the trend he describes, as is that of Richard Serra and
Barry Le Va.11 All of these artists were employing malleable materials such
as felt, rubber, and industrial thread waste to produce works with random
Process Art

forms created by gravity and the artist’s largely unorganized actions. Morris’s
essay gives no indication of any final goal or purpose for the artistic investi-
gations into the physical processes of making in his essay. They seem to be
pursued purely for their own sake, a novel iteration of the modernist art for
art’s sake; or perhaps in the hope of making discoveries that would lead to
as yet unimagined purposes or meanings, just as the scientist’s investigation
194 of the properties of a given substance may lead to greater understanding of
the nature of chemistry or physics.
The following year, in “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects”
(1969), Morris proposed a purpose or meaning for the artist’s work discussed
in “Anti-Form,” but it does not directly concern the artist’s literal process of
making. Rather, Morris returned to the perceptual concerns prominent in
his earlier writing on minimalism to discuss the significance of the inchoate
forms produced by artists investigating the properties of chance and gravity.
The essay focuses on the close relationship between indeterminate, unstruc-
tured works and the “dedifferentiated” vision discussed by Anton Ehrenz-
weig in The Hidden Order of Art (1967).12 In Morris’s opinion, contemporary
artists are “restructuring perceptual relevance” by creating heterogeneous
spreads of substances without organization or clearly delimited forms, a
pre-gestalt perceptual experience. Priority has shifted from form to sub-
stance, from construction to “chance, contingency, indeterminacy—in short,
the entire area of process. Ends and means are brought together in a way
that never existed before in art.”13 Morris outlined an evolution from form,
through working processes, to perception in the development of sculpture:
To begin with the concrete physicality of matter rather than images

allows for a change in the entire profile of three-dimensional art: from
particular forms, to ways of ordering, to methods of production and,
finally, to perceptual relevance.
. . . The notion that work is an irreversible process ending in a static
icon-object no longer has much relevance. The detachment of art’s
energy from the craft of tedious object production has further implica-
tions. This reclamation of process refocuses art as an energy driving to
change perception. . . . The attention given to both matter and its
inseparableness from the process of change is not an emphasis on the
phenomenon of means. What is revealed is that art itself is an activity
of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and muta-
bility, of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering
new perceptual modes.14
All About Process

Here Morris detaches process from its usual meaning as a synonym for
means and procedures and gives it a much broader significance as a term
referring to universal forces of change. In this he suggests a view of process
comparable to that proposed in the process philosophies of Whitehead and
Bergson, which embraced similar notions of the perpetually unstable muta-
bility of the universe.
Morris’s claims for the new art are ambitious, a wholesale reorganization 195
of human perception. In insisting on the “relevance” of the developments
of contemporary art he indicates his engagement with the popular reenvi-
sioning of the artist’s role by Marshall McLuhan and Morse Peckham. Morris
adopts both thinkers’ belief that the artist’s importance lies in discovering
and helping people to adapt to perceptual changes. McLuhan’s emphasis on
the new need for process and engagement rather than clear narratives and
completed “icons” is a central concern in Morris’s new art form, and Morris’s
insistence on the perceptual relevance of dedifferentiated heterogeneous
fields echoes McLuhan’s claim that the new mode of perception was holistic
and mosaic. In “Notes on Sculpture, Part IV: Beyond Objects” Morris rejects
the notion of artistic process in relation to the creation of things and replaces
it with a much more extensive conception of art as an open-ended activity,
“an energy.” It is this position that links Morris to an expanded conception
of process art that includes artists whose activities directly engage with
social and environmental processes.
Morris’s own contemporary artworks consisted of random actions
executed in large scale using construction materials that never resolve into
a final form. For Continuous Project Altered Daily (1969) the New York art
dealer Leo Castelli’s warehouse was opened to the public for twelve days. It
was filled with an array of construction materials that Morris arranged and
rearranged “more or less aimlessly” for the duration of the “show.”15 In his
Whitney Museum retrospective the following year Morris refused the tradi-
tional exhibition of previously made works and created a type of construc-
tion site in which huge concrete blocks were rolled down a track and allowed
to fall randomly. There was no formal opening, but visitors were able to see
the work as it was being created.
Both of these works demonstrate Morris’s interest in the physicality of
construction processes, which he believed had become obscured in contem-
porary society. He observed that no one sees things being made any more,
and the actual processes of the production of ordinary objects are largely
unknown: “As a consequence, our immediate surroundings tend to be read
as ‘forms’ that have been punched out of unidentifiable, indestructible plastic
Process Art

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

Peckham and Ehrenzweig’s psychological concerns remained central to Mor-
ris’s consideration of the relevance of process, he added a new theorist to
the mix, Ferdinand de Saussure, whose structural linguistics were employed
as a means to explore binary structure in human art-making behavior.17
The essay begins by making a distinction between oil painting and tool
making. Both are ways of making, but their products differ in that a painting
establishes itself in relationship to society and the environment while a tool 197
is an intermediary in such relations. Morris posits that art’s predominantly
social function explains why there has been little examination of the nature
of art making itself. He proposes to rectify the omission and announces his
conviction that “there are ‘forms’ to be found within the activity of making
as much as within the end products. These are forms of behavior aimed at
testing the limits and possibilities involved in that particular interaction
between one’s actions and the materials of the environment” (73). These
behavioral forms have been overlooked hitherto because those who discuss
art know “almost nothing” about how it is made. Attending to the body’s
physical activity of making will obviate what Morris sees as artificial media-
based distinctions, and he considers that this may lead to “anthropological
designations” rather than “art categories.” His approach is both anthropo-
logical and psychological: “The entire enterprise of art making provides the
ground for finding the limits and possibilities of certain kinds of behavior
and that this behavior of production itself is distinct and has become so
expanded and visible that it has extended the entire profile of art” (75). In
shifting attention to the process of art making, art has transformed its prod-
uct. For Morris, reconsideration of the process of artistic production is a
means to renew art, which had fallen into formalism and the repetition of
given forms and methods.
Morris discusses what he considers key moments in the shift of atten-
tion to process in the arts. The first he notes is John Cage’s systematization
of the arbitrary. This is part of a larger project of post–World War II art in
which artists sought to “recover” their means by “grasping a systematic
method of production which was one way or another implied in the finished
product.” Morris outlines a genealogy from Duchamp through Cage, Jasper
Johns, and Frank Stella to conceptual art in which a priori systems are used
to structure works. This art remains “Idealist” in Morris’s view, and its arrival
at the “totally physically paralyzed conclusions of Conceptual art” indicates
its ultimate sterility. Morris also identifies a second strand of “system-
seeking art making,” which is the more phenomenological approach built on
“the ‘tendencies’ inherent in the materials/process interaction” as typified
Process Art

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

sensory perceptions, particularly kinesthetic ones. It would appear that he
believed art is and should be a laboratory for studying human behavior:
A certain strain of modern art has been involved in uncovering a more

direct experience of these basic perceptual meanings [weight and bal-
ance, up and down, near and far, motion and rest] and it has not achieved
this through static images, but through the experience of an interaction 199
between the perceiving body and the world that fully admits that the
terms of this interaction are temporal as well as spatial, that existence
is process, that the art itself is a form of behavior that can imply a lot
about what was possible and what was necessary in engaging with the
world while still playing that insular game of art. (90)
This new role for art as an arena for examining behavior does not seem to
have been considered an end point by Morris; rather, he places it as a stage
in the evolutionary dialectic of modern art. Minimalism provided construc-
tion as the alternative to the Abstract Expressionists’ art based on arrange-
ment, and the current interest is a dialectical counterpoint to construction:
“Don’t build . . . Drop, hang, lean, in short, act. . . . The static noun of ‘form’
is substituted for the dynamic verb to ‘act’ in the priority of making . . . the
material is being probed for openings that allow the artist a behavioristic
access” (91). Morris believes that focus on the making process is leading
artists in all the arts into the world beyond the studio, museum, and gallery.
He concludes that “as process becomes part of the work instead of prior to
it, one is enabled to engage more directly with the world in art making
because forming is moved further into the presentation” (92). What Morris
does not explain is why this is important; he seems to assume that direct
engagement with the world is an obviously desirable goal for art.
Despite his rational scientific approach, Morris is noticeably shy about
explaining the purpose of his investigations beyond the vague notion of
changing perception. Here, one might consider the validity of Hannah
Arendt’s critique of the scientific process, which has no goal beyond informa-
tion. Morris shies away from stating that process art may awaken the audi-
ence’s political awareness and engagement in a Brechtian fashion, and yet
he implies that somehow this dedication to process will open art to the
environment in a manner that will transform art into a more general social
and humanly active function.19 There is at times a nostalgic quality evident
in Morris’s texts. This is particularly noticeable in “Notes on Sculpture, Part
IV” when he discusses the public’s unfamiliarity with contemporary factory
Process Art

production techniques and the theatrical quality of urban construction sites.
Morris often seems to want less to prepare people’s perceptions for the
contemporary disembodied and formless information society than he wants
to display the lost bodily theater of physical labor.
In keeping with Morris’s assertion in “Anti-Form” that American artists’
attention to the processes of making has replaced the European devotion to
200 formal relationships, process art is commonly considered part of a wide-
spread rejection of formalism and its emphasis on the art object, and also
often a rejection of the modernist project altogether.20 It is important to
recognize, however, that this rejection is not clear or definitive. First, as
previous chapters of this book have shown, the artist’s process was a central
concern of modern art from its beginnings. Second, the investigation of the
properties of the artist’s means and materials which Morris credits Pollock
with discovering is directly in keeping with Clement Greenberg’s definition
of modern art. In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” Greenberg
described the avant-garde as imitating the disciplines and processes of art
rather than imitating the appearance of the world. In turning their attention
to their medium, avant-garde artists test its limits and discover the param-
eters for abstract art:
[The avant-garde artist] turns out to be imitating, not God—and here I

use “imitate” in its Aristotelian sense—but the disciplines and processes
of art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the “abstract.” In
turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience,
the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. The
nonrepresentational or “abstract,” if it is to have aesthetic validity, can-
not be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some
worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of com-
mon, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in
the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already
imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art
and literature.21
Greenberg’s famous statement is relevant to much process art. Although

process art is associated with the expansion of art beyond the limits of tra-
ditional media and materials, as well as the boundary that traditionally
separated art from life (both anathema to Greenberg and his supporters),
the exploration of what Morris defined as “the process of making itself” as
art and the investigation of the properties of the artist’s materials remains
All About Process

plausibly within the realm of Greenberg’s definition of the avant-garde art-
ist’s activity.22 Just as modernist painters such as Josef Albers explored the
properties of color, process artists such as Morris and Serra explored the
physical properties of their materials.
One of the most famous texts associated with process art is Richard
Serra’s list of verbs from 1967–68, which includes many verbs designating
actions employed by him and by other process artists to make what are now 201
well-known works. While some verbs seem to dictate a precise action for
making a specific work or works, such as “to roll” in relation to Serra’s Thirty-
Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up (1968) or “to tear” in relation to his Tearing Lead
(1968), others are less amenable to physically explicit reading. “To arrange,”
“to complement,” “to mark,” “to modulate,” and “to continue” are verbs that
can apply to many physical actions taken by an artist, and thus do not offer
obvious means for readily understood indexical object production. Those
verbs that are easily demonstrated by final products, however, provide a basic
ground line for thinking about process art as simply an extension of the
modernist investigation of the artist’s means, more art whose “subject” is
the making of art.
It is this meaning that remains the underlying intention of many artists
who to this day employ the mantra “it’s all about the process.” Process is the
last bastion of modernist self-reference, and the only one that still enjoys
prestige. Formalism is now almost universally discredited as a limited
approach overly concerned with trivial aesthetics and insufficiently engaged
with significant social and political issues. The artist’s own activity, however,
is still widely accepted as an example of human freedom in action, no matter
what the actual art activity may be. An artist engaged in the process is fully
absorbed in the making of art; it is in essence simply to be an artist at work.
Ad Reinhardt provided the definitive unapologetic statement for this posi-
tion in 1970:
There is a kind of moral prestige that an artist has, like a priest in a sense.
I guess because he’s not involved in exploiting anybody. . . . I don’t
want the fine-art process, which to me is a free process, in which you
didn’t have a job to do, confused with something else. It was not
unconscious or automatic, it was free. If you were painting, you had a
lot of painting to do. . . . You didn’t have some idea yourself or some-
body else had an idea and then you carried it through and then some-
body could tell you if you did it right or not. That’s the commercial or
industrial process.23
Process Art

Reinhardt’s view resonates with the ideological conviction of the freedom
of the modern artist and the modern artist’s labor that developed in the
nineteenth century and has endured to the present day.
Process art does represent a significant rejection of the modernist insis-
tence on the separation and purity of the art forms based on traditional
media. In addition, distinctions between the arts were long made on the basis
202 of their relationship to time.24 Thus music, theater, and literature are time-
based arts, while painting and sculpture are atemporal and largely concerned
with space. Michael Fried upheld the distinction in “Art and Objecthood”
(1967) when he argued against the “theatricality” of minimalism and its
dependence on temporal experience for its (in Fried’s view, nonaesthetic)
effects. After the 1950s many artists who insisted on the need to expand the
parameters of the visual arts beyond their traditional, media-based limita-
tions were deeply involved with incorporating time into their work.25 This
might be the time of the viewer’s experience, as discussed by Robert Morris
in terms of minimalism in the first three of his “Notes on Sculpture” essays
as well as in “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” and by Victor
Burgin more generally in “Situational Aesthetics” (1969), or in the temporal
unfolding of a Happening where distinctions between viewer and artist are
lost. For the first tendency of process art it was typically the artist’s time of
making that became central to the work.26 For the second, more expansive
tendency, time was integral to the relations between the artwork and the
processes of society and the environment.
Systems Aesthetics, Series, and Conceptualism
An important strain of process art was engaged in the examination and use
of immaterial technological processes, notably information systems and
their relation to production. One of the main proponents of systems aesthet-
ics, Jack Burnham, wrote, “We are now in transition from an object-oriented
to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from
the way things are done. The priorities of the present age revolve around the
problems of organization.”27 In Burnham’s view, systems thinking encom-
passes the human, mechanical, and natural arenas and seeks to balance the
needs of all. He emphasized the notion that systems analysis, even in the
Pentagon, is an art, not “cold-blooded” logic, and he quotes a pioneer of
systems analysis, E. S. Quade: “Systems analysis, particularly the type
required for military decisions, is still largely a form of art. Art can be taught
in part, but not by the means of fixed rules” (31). As Burnham presents it,
All About Process

the “art” of systems analysis is the only hope for the future of humankind in
an era when technology threatens the very possibility of life on earth.
In such a situation, art and its purposes have changed. Gone is the goal
of beautifying modern life through the production of art objects; now “only
the didactic function of art continues to have meaning. . . . The specific function
of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities,
but in relations between people and between people and the components of their 203
environment. . . . In an advanced technological culture the most important artist
best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis-à-vis society” (31). Burnham
cites Duchamp, Warhol, and Morris as artists who have rejected “craft-
fetishism” and modern formalism in their efforts to align their artistic output
with the technology and psychic means of contemporary production. Such
an approach will ultimately turn artistic and technological decision making
into a single activity in Burnham’s view, and he refers to Morse Peckham’s
definition of art as an “adaptive mechanism” that may help people develop
strategies for surviving changes in the environment.
Burnham believed that systems aesthetics “go beyond” the contrived
confines of staged environments and Happenings to focus on conceptual
forces that define systems, and he situated systems aesthetics as developing
from minimalism. Morris’s process works are an example of systems aesthet-
ics in their breakdown of hierarchy between results and technique. Other
artists Burnham cites as employing a systems aesthetic are Carl Andre, Les
Levine, Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, and Hans Haacke. What unites the
work of these artists as described by Burnham is, however, less attention to
systems than a rejection of formalist concerns and the isolated art object.
He quotes Haacke’s artist statement from 1968: “A ‘sculpture’ that physically
reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range
of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond
the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a
relationship that is better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent pro-
cesses. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. He becomes
a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real” (35). Haacke’s interest in
expanded systems seems closest to embodying the “post-formalist” position
outlined by Burnham, particularly in terms of engaging the broader political
and social arena. Art would no longer be its own isolated territory, but inte-
gral to society as a whole. Burnham claims a paradigm shift is occurring not
just in art, but in humanity. Homo faber is becoming homo arbiter formae, man
the maker of aesthetic decisions, which will control the quality of life on
earth (35).
Process Art

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

profitable within the next year. The work of art will be the profit or loss from
the transaction:
Profit Systems One is a concern on the part of the artist for dealing with
a “real” societal system. The work is involved with the process of the
business system which influences our daily lives. It is a “post-object
work” in that it has no visible form. Profit Systems One is a work about 205
process. The process is a result of an open continuing system called the
“stock market,” a system directly connected to our life style.
Mr. Levine feels that it is no longer necessary for the artist to pro-
duce objects in a society whose object needs are over provided at the
present. “What is more important for the artist to deal with,” states Mr.
Levine, “are the ambient systems and the software patterns which influ-
ence our culture. The negative approach to these systems has been so
acceptable to most artists that it seems desirable and novel to consider
their positive aspects at this time.”30
Running a restaurant, buying and selling stock—ordinary commercial pro-

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

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

Like the physical and material investigations of Morris and Serra, the
artists who developed more avowedly conceptual approaches to process art
may be seen as performing a type of scientific experimentation and analysis.36
Bochner and LeWitt both promoted the emotional neutrality of their con-
ceptual approaches,37 which they saw as revealing the process of artistic
thinking. Bochner wrote, “It’s this constant churning of a process. That idea
of taking something and looking at it and pulling it apart, and then pulling 207
the parts apart.”38 Completed works were the physical results of systematic
processes and often explicitly exhibited as such with titles explaining the
procedures used to generate the works. Bochner described the work of Dan
Flavin, Carl Andre, and LeWitt as serial systems: “Serial or systematic think-
ing has generally been considered the antithesis of artistic thinking. Systems
are characterized by regularity, thoroughness, and repetition in execution.
They are methodical. It is their consistency and the continuity of application
that characterizes them. Individual parts of a system are not in themselves
important but are relevant only in how they are used in the enclosed logic
of the whole series.”39 This is the language of science and industry, and the
works it describes also typically employed a visual language reminiscent of
science textbook diagrams and the regular forms of assembly line produc-
tions. The “products” of the experiment/labor are the elements of artistic
thought made material. Again, process thinking is used to expand the explo-
ration and analysis of the artist’s medium associated with modernist formal-
ism’s investigations.40 In this instance the medium of art is not the materials
in themselves, but the artist’s thought process as it is manifested in the
production of objects.
One of the notable characteristics of conceptual process art is the ten-
dency toward serial production. In many instances an idea generates a series
of works, LeWitt’s many series of cubes variously divided, multiplied, and
incomplete being among the most well-known examples. For works such as
these the series becomes a manifestation of the work as a generative process.
No one work has priority over another; there is no evolution; each member
is an example of permutation, and often, but not always, the order of pre-
sentation and fabrication is arbitrary. In comparison with the series works
of Monet and Mondrian discussed in chapter 4, there are notable differences.
Unlike Monet’s series paintings, each work of a conceptual series of process
art does not reflect the artist’s perceptions in time. The work is notably more
distant from the emotions and psychology of the artist as well as the artist’s
physical and emotional relationship to the environment.
Process Art

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

The Artist’s Work and the Artist’s Role
Recent art historical discussions of the art of the 1960s have stressed the
relation of art to labor and politics as well as the efforts made to shift the
emphasis from the artwork as a commodity/product to other aspects of art
making and aesthetic experience. Benjamin Buchloh outlined a transition
from the traditional “aesthetic of the studio” to Pop Art and minimalism’s 209
industrial “aesthetic of production and consumption” to conceptual art’s
“aesthetic of administration,”43 the last of which has since become an estab-
lished category in discussions of contemporary artistic production. The
parallelism between recent changes in art and the broad social transforma-
tions resulting from the shift from an industrial economic base to an
information-centered economy are incontrovertible. This symmetry is often
considered a key factor in discussions of the changing concept of the artist’s
work and the corresponding tendency to focus on process rather than prod-
uct. However, although some artists and theorists like Jack Burnham aligned
non-object-oriented process and systems art with the new information age,
more often the turn away from art as commodity was explained as it was in
Les Levine’s press release for Profit System One—as a refusal to contribute
to the excess production of luxury objects.
Many artists were engaged in radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and
this engagement affected their attitudes about their own work as artists.
Chris Gilbert has written that artists of the period were so obsessed with
work and labor issues that “instead of ‘painting’ and ‘sculpture,’ then, ‘work’
expands in common usage to cover both and in doing so slips neatly between
referring to work as object and work as action.”44 Julia Bryan-Wilson sees art-
ists in the 1960s as not only conceiving themselves as laborers but also as
committed to New Left political attitudes defined by process, which signified
the “democratic ideals of open debate and interactivity.”45 While this attitude
varied greatly in its applicability to specific artists and works, in the late
1960s the Art Workers’ Coalition proposed that all artists receive wages
rather than depend on the sale of work for their income. The “dematerializa-
tion” of art in the late 1960s and 1970s has often been viewed as a response
to a slump in the art market, and this must also be considered as affecting
artists’ attitudes toward their production and self-evaluation. How does an
artist work without making saleable commodities? However that question
is answered, the response holds the key to what the artist’s role is and the
nature of the artist’s “work” and identity.
Process Art

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

recite, to perform new movements, but to make up continuously mouldable
material.”47 Echoing McLuhan in the artist’s rejection of a socially defined
“role,” Celant reconceives the artist as the responsive individual fully
engaged and attentive to the processes of life.
The incorporation of flexibility and sensitivity in the broadest sense to
material and environmental processes as well as engagement with the full
range of social processes is a hallmark of the work of artists such as Joseph 211
Beuys and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. These artists are instigators and
facilitators, and their activity is often comparable to that of the old-fashioned
impresario. Their works are created to draw attention to the myriad pro-
cesses that constitute them and thereby create greater public awareness of
the interrelated processes that form the living environment, from social
institutions and structures to the natural world. Only occasionally consid-
ered as examples of process art, it is these artists and those who worked in
similar veins (particularly environmental artists such as Helen and Newton
Harrison, Alan Sonfist, and the like) whose work comprises the most sweep-
ing embrace of the constellation of ideas related to process.
While one of the dominant trends of the 1960s was the merging of art
into life and the abandonment of traditional media and techniques, there
was also a strong reassertion of the value of the artist and of art making.
McLuhan considered artists as role models for the new age of total engage-
ment, and the commonly held notion that artists were particularly dedicated
to their work compared to the ordinary worker helped to establish the artist’s
processes of making as a subject of general interest. The artist’s work and
psychology of creation became not only a topic for critical or scholarly dis-
cussion but also significant components of artworks both as apparent con-
tent and implied meaning. Harold Rosenberg’s concept of art as action and
the emphasis on making that was such an important part of the understand-
ing of Abstract Expressionism was a key precursor and influence. Also con-
tributing to the general evaluation of the artist were popularized notions
about creativity and focused mental attitudes. Art was increasingly seen as
an activity that, pursued with proper attention, was its own spiritual and
psychological reward. Certain types of artists were linked with this notion,
usually those whose work seemed to involve particularly tedious or vacuous
production processes.
Ad Reinhardt helped to form the general notion of the modern artist as
an exceptionally dedicated worker. He was an early proponent of the artist’s
activity as liberated making, unhampered by external concerns or evaluations
and utterly engrossed in the processes of the art form. As he said in a 1970
Process Art

interview, “If you were painting, you had a lot of painting to do.” Reinhardt’s
views were influenced by Zen attitudes, and he had a highly disciplined
notion of the artist’s labor, as evidenced by the following statement from
1960: “This is the one lesson from the East and from the West. The forms of
art are always preformed and premeditated. The creative process is always
an academic routine and sacred procedure. Everything is prescribed and
212 proscribed.” Moreover, in 1962 he wrote:
The one subject of a hundred years of modern art is that awareness of

art of itself, of art preoccupied with its own processes and means. . . .
The one way in art comes from art working and the more an artist works
the more there is to do. . . . The one direction in fine or abstract art today
is in the painting of the same one form over and over again. The one
intensity and the one perfection come only from long and lonely routine
preparation and attention and repetition. The one originality exists only
where all artists work in the same tradition and master the same conven-
tion. The one freedom is realized only through the strictest art discipline
and through the most similar studio ritual. Only a standardized, pre-
scribed, and proscribed form can be imageless, only a stereotyped image
can be formless, only a formularized art can be formulaless.48
As distant as Reinhardt’s relentless formalism may seem from the dissolution

of art into life that preoccupied so many artists in the 1960s, his art and his
ideas were nevertheless highly influential. His dedication to the processes
and means of an art form are directly related to artists like Serra and Morris
who pursued investigations of materials and processes in a similarly rigorous
fashion.
Perhaps even more influential was Reinhardt’s paradoxical, even mysti-
cal conviction that liberation was achieved through strict discipline. Here
was a belief that could sustain artists who remained committed to their work,
particularly to making material objects, in the face of an indifferent market,
an uninterested public, and a questionable social purpose. As the role and
significance of artistic production became increasingly subject to doubt and
suspicion, artists needed to justify their continued dedication to production.
The innate need for self-expression, so long a recognized motivation for
artists, had become as suspect as the production of luxury commodities.
Reinhardt offered a plausible rationale: the artist was like a monk, dedicated
and disciplined, the devotee of a process that might result in great, albeit
immaterial, rewards. Implicitly, the work created by such a process would also
All About Process

be somehow capable of communicating to viewers this immaterial, possibly
spiritual achievement.
Spiritual achievement aside, though, Reinhardt suggested a way for art-
ists and art to be considered as simple free labor, an activity to be performed
for its own sake.49 Its products need not be subjected to the doubts engen-
dered by capitalist markets for luxury goods, nor need it be abandoned for
the greater freedom of life. To question the making of art was no more or 213
less meaningful than to question the living of life. It is a simple act to be
performed or not, but its significance and virtues can only be discovered in
the doing, in the processes it entails. This is an attitude that runs through
much of the art of the later 1960s and 1970s.50 Bryan-Wilson has commented
on LeWitt’s wall drawings as an absorbing exercise that borders on Zen
meditation, and she quotes the following from LeWitt’s 1970 statement:
“The draftsman and the wall enter a dialogue. The draftsman becomes bored
but later through this meaningless activity finds peace or misery.”51 Chuck
Close has cited LeWitt’s wall drawings as a key influence, as well as process
issues in general: “I really did believe that process would set you free. Instead
of having to dream up a great idea—waiting for the clouds to part and a bolt
of lightning to strike your skill—you are better off just getting to work. In
the process of making things, ideas will occur to you. . . . You never have to
be stuck.”52 Similarly apposite is Walter de Maria’s brief Fluxus essay from
1960 in which he claimed that meaningless work, such as moving blocks back
and forth between boxes or digging holes and filling them in, could contain
all the best qualities of painting and sculpture without their limitations.
Indeed, according to de Maria most paintings are old-fashioned records of
meaningless work. The ultimate significance of meaningless work, however,
may be more than it appears: “Whether the meaningless work, as an art form,
is meaningless, in the ordinary sense of that term is of course up to the
individual.” De Maria concluded with the simple injunction “Get to work.”53
Process Art and Craft
During the 1950s a new craft movement, particularly in ceramics, expanded

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

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

immediately evident of these is the devoted attention to making and work-
manship that emphasizes repetition over innovation. The work of Ad Rein-
hardt and Agnes Martin exemplifies this approach. Reinhardt and Martin
belonged to an earlier generation but were much admired in the 1960s and
1970s. As painters their work was inevitably seen as fine art, while the
spiritual associations made with their work as an activity, as well as with
the “sublime” effects of the paintings themselves, directed attention away 215
from the close relationship of their activity to that traditionally associated
with craft. Peter Dormer has noted that craftspeople do not build careers
on continuous invention; they mine the possibilities of a form or limited
series of forms over years in a cautious and incremental process.58 Rein-
hardt’s subtly nuanced tonal relationships, Martin’s grids, as well as Joseph
Albers’s squares are all easily understood as explorations of aspects of the
craft of painting (and in Martin’s case, drawing as well). Reinhardt’s and
Martin’s dedication to a sharply restricted format was additionally often
considered a form of disciplined spiritual exercise that led to a higher form
of awareness. In this they, too, may be compared to craftspeople whose
mastery of the repetitive manual activity of craft production is often associ-
ated with elevated mental and spiritual states.59
A key impetus for the coming together of modern art and qualities long
associated with craft in the 1960s was the rejection of inspiration and origi-
nal expression as artistic goals. Since the late nineteenth century, modern
art had been identified with originality and freedom in contrast to the duti-
ful and repetitive labor of the craftsperson. That distinction, although chal-
lenged by the Bauhaus and other modern approaches to traditional crafts as
well as the development of creative expression in traditional craft media,
remained largely intact until the era of Pop and minimalism. Even then art-
ists were often distinguished from craftspeople on the basis of materials and
techniques; artists embraced industrial materials and technology while
craftspeople usually continued to work with traditional materials and meth-
ods. That distinction remained in force among the most historically success-
ful artists associated with process art (Morris and his industrial felt and
thread waste; Serra’s rubber, lead, and steel; Hesse’s fiberglass and latex).
However, more significant than differences in material was, as Auther noted,
the distinction made on the basis of ideas. Artists were embodying concepts
in their work; craftspeople were simply making objects. The simplest proof
of this difference could be found in the artist’s ability to change materials
without loss of prestige or effectiveness, while the craftsperson is typically
dedicated to mastery of a single medium.60
Process Art

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

be an inhuman achievement. It is in the context of heavy industry that the
human body and its physical limitations appear most fully.
Robert Morris seems to have been thinking along these lines to some
degree when he distinguished art from “the craft of tedious object produc-
tion” and insisted that art making is not equivalent to “craft time.”67 His
call for “automation,” which he defined as the inclusion of the arbitrary and
accidental in the work process, is also striking in relation to the history of 217
craft and industrial production. Ruskin’s influential notion that the pursuit
of handcraft activity was humanly beneficial in comparison to the auto-
mated production of factories is upended by Morris’s choice of term. For
Morris as an artist it is handcraft that is tedious, inhuman production, and
automation becomes the mechanism for short-circuiting the individual
control and choice that Ruskin wanted to restore to the worker. One hun-
dred years after Ruskin developed his ideas, the artist’s control had become
a burden and a means to isolate art from life and the world by placing it
within the narrow confines of a formalism defined by aesthetic taste. As
Morris saw it the solution was interruption by an arbitrary system of inhu-
man procedures—in other words, “automation.” Such procedures would
prompt the artist to respond spontaneously and result in works that indexed
truly human actions.
In counterpoint to Morris’s rejection of “craft time” as related to artis-
tic production is the work of artists associated with process art who empha-
sized the tedious labor of making. Eva Hesse is exemplary in this regard with
her use of various forms of wrapping and coiling. Critical evaluation of
Hesse’s art frequently stressed her craft techniques and described them in
psychological terms as “obsessive” or “compulsive.”68 This is also far distant
from Ruskinian notions of craft and its human benefits. The basic processes
of craft activity are here connected not with the competence, control,
achievement, and self-respect that Ruskin and William Morris promoted as
generally improving, but with both the healing qualities and the illnesses
associated with the crafts as therapy. Craftwork may be salutary, but it also
reveals neuroses. Rote activity is both tedious and obsessive. It may lead to
spiritual or psychological release, or it may simply reflect an inability to break
out of a pattern of activity. The results in Hesse’s case are artworks com-
monly considered expressive objects. Thus the extreme emphasis on certain
types of repetitive physical craft processes became a means to expand the
expressive potential of the artist’s physical language of making beyond the
well-established employment of spontaneous working processes as artisti-
cally expressive means.69
Process Art

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

always derogatorily associated with crafts, and have been conditioned
towards such chores as tying, sewing, knotting, wrapping, binding, knit-
ting, and so on. Hesse’s art transcends the cliché of “detail as women’s
work” while at the same time incorporating these notions of ritual as
antidote to isolation and despair. . . . The mythical Penelope is always
being mentioned pejoratively in regard to art by women. Yet hers was a
positive, not a negative action, despite its impermanence. 219
As Elissa Auther notes, Lippard uses Hesse’s work to present a positive view
of an essentialist feminine approach to artistic process.70
Women’s work, so long associated with what Hannah Arendt saw as
merely life-sustaining “labor,” was brought out of the shadows and given
serious art world attention beginning in the 1970s. In the concept-driven art
world, works that foregrounded traditional women’s work processes—be
they embroidery, quilting, china painting, crochet, or the more radical per-
formance/interventions of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art—were
valorized. Critical terms long employed to belittle putatively feminine art,
such as detail-oriented, finished, delicate, or decorative, were embraced as
hallmarks of a new feminine aesthetic. Feminist artists adopted processes
that linked them with the anonymous women diligently pursuing their
domestic arts in the past. In most cases, though, feminist artists of the 1970s
seem to have been primarily interested in gaining recognition for the artistic
and aesthetic value of traditional women’s crafts as well as in their human,
sociological, and symbolic meanings.71 They apparently were not as inter-
ested in exploring the experience of those craft processes—or at least this
was not an issue that they emphasized in the presentation and discussion of
their work. That would come later.
Artists’ Education and Process after 1960
The dramatic changes in art that occurred in the 1960s have often been
connected to changes in the education of artists after World War II. The
artists of the 1960s were the first generation of college-educated artists, and
many of them had studied in programs based at least in part on Bauhaus
approaches. One of the results of these new programs was a generation of
artists very conscious of their activities as artists. Harold Rosenberg described
young artists of the era as producing cool, calculated, and impersonal work;
for them, “creation is taken to be synonymous with productive processes, and
is broken down into sets of problems and solutions.”72 Howard Singerman
Process Art

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

direct influence of Ehrenzweig, but also with the systematic projects of Sol
LeWitt and Chuck Close, which were always intended to produce works
that could not be predicted or contained by the rational procedures that
created them.
The second dominant current in the education of the postwar artist
identified by Singerman and others is an emphasis on verbal and conceptual
skills, typically at the expense of developing technical and craft-based skills.78 221
The results of such educational approaches are evident in the conceptual
orientation of the art world since the 1950s. The artistic process has become
both the means for making art and the subject of art. Robert Morris wrote
in 1970, “Ends and means have come progressively closer together in a vari-
ety of different types of work in the twentieth century. This resolution
reestablishes a bond between the artist and the environment. This reduction
in alienation is an important achievement and accompanies the final secu-
larization that is going on in art now.”79 Morris’s optimistic notion that the
drawing together of ends and means would result in the abolition of the
artist’s alienation and disappearance of art into life seems not to have been
a desire for the end of art altogether. Morris appears to have believed instead
that the artist could become an active force for (unspecified) social change
rather than the isolated producer of luxury commodities. To a limited extent
that has come to pass, although not perhaps in a manner desired by Morris.
Process Art

9
It’s All About the Process
The expansive tendencies of process art discussed in the previous chapter

accelerated in the decades after 1970, and process has now become a domi-
nating concern of contemporary artistic production, routinely cited in art-
ist’s statements, curatorial presentations, and critical evaluations. Process
represents a vital alternative to the conception of the artwork as a com-
modified object. Even the most traditional art objects may be presented in
relation to processes as occasions for intensified experiences, thus emphasiz-
ing 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 situa-
tion, 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 occur-
ring 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 223
mediated through anthropological approaches, have been important influ-
ences in this change. One result of this shift has been the growth of art his-
torical interest in previously overlooked artifacts from the “minor arts,” such
as domestic furnishings and devotional sculptures, as well as greater atten-
tion 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 contem-
porary art has been the establishment of a powerful and engaged feminist
presence in the art world beginning in the 1970s. The importance of femi-
nism 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
224 SITE Santa Fe. It describes her performance pieces in chronological order,
and on the facing page of each piece’s description is an instructional work-
book 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 per-
forming 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 achieve-
ments. 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 tradition-
ally associated with the arts. It is the artist’s creative process that remains
the model for creativity in other disciplines such as the sciences and social
sciences, which are more often conceived as restrained by rules and laws.3
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s discussions of creativity
and his influential concept of “flow,” total absorption in an activity, are
notable examples of a generalized notion of the psychological and personal
achievements associated with the creative process. In Csikszentmihalyi’s
view the creative process is necessary for a fulfilled life, one that does not
succumb to the passive pleasures of the modern world, as well as for the
general evolution of culture:
It is easy to . . . see the inner freedom of the creative person as an elite
privilege. While the rest of us are struggling at boring jobs, they have the
All About Process

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 ele-
ment 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 225
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 atti-
tudes within the arts themselves. Just as the creative process may be gen-
eralized 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 impor-
tance of the processes of creative experiences in ordinary existence, phi-
losophers 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
226 (including most traditional Western aesthetic theories) and those that char-
acterize 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 mean-
ingful 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 atten-
tively lived experiences of individuals in relation to the world around them.
Like Sartwell, Richard Shusterman seeks to revitalize Western aesthet-
ics, 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 anti-
dote to our largely affectless information culture.8 Of particular interest to
Shusterman is the arena of bodily experience and its contribution to philo-
sophical knowledge, which he has denominated “somaesthetics.”9 In the
current information age Shusterman sees the body as the most stable and
durable aspect of individual existence; it is what we use to organize our world
and establish a unified identity.10 Attention to the body and its experience
are the necessary means for people to maintain their sense of self in a world
All About Process

increasingly dominated by abstractions and immaterial forms of informa-
tion. Shusterman’s work builds directly on Dewey’s pragmatism and convic-
tion 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 227
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 develop-
ment 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 mak-
ing during the subsequent decades.12 In 1981 Morris considered the relation-
ship 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 deci-
sion 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 theo-
rists’ discussions of repetitive making in which repetition is never simple
228 repetition in the manner of industrial assembly-line labor but rather part of
a process of mastery. The tact developed by the craftsperson during innu-
merable 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 deskill-
ing 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 physi-
cal forms, that most concerns the artist. According to Briony Fer, “For Oro-
zco, I think, ‘process’ means something quite different from what it meant
All About Process

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 moti-
vates 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 229
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 overarch-
ing 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 perfor-
mance 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 isolat-
ing 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 expe-
riencing 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 produc-
tion, 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 pro-
cesses 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 indicat-
230 ing 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 accom-
panied an exhibition they co-curated at the Pompidou Center in Paris, takes
the form of an idiosyncratic encyclopedia of concepts and terms, with art-
works 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 deter-
mination to invade the fixed image of stabile sculpture with the counterim-
age 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.
All About Process

Conceived as a destabilizing operation with roots in the fundamental
structures of the human mind as developed by a largely Lacanian psycho-
analysis, the informe offers an approach to theorizing the potential of artistic
process to undermine the accepted categories of thought and action. How-
ever, 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 231
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 rela-
tively trivial as long as that reconception leaves the existing power structures
and economy in place. Thus the informe has been criticized as merely offer-
ing 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 “deco-
rative” art discussed above is one instance of this preeminent concern.) This
preoccupation with sociopolitical engagement as well as high-level theo-
retical and conceptual content has been accompanied by its seeming oppo-
site—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 apoliti-
cal 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 distin-
guishes the artist from the inventor or scientist, whose work also material-
izes 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 produc-
tion process meaningful.
Some contemporary artists have made the labor involved in their pro-
duction 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
232 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 pur-
ported 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 pre-
sentation of the artist’s personal creative process. Physicality is a character-
istic 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 hand-
work in the contemporary world and its relation to the art object as a com-
modity. Koons’s distance from the manual production of his highly crafted,
monstrous-kitsch artworks is integral to his ironic embrace of luxury com-
modity culture in an age of consumerism and wealth fueled by manipulating
financial abstractions such as high-frequency trading and complex deriva-
tives. 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-
All About Process

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 233
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 dem-
onstrate the place of anonymous handcraft labor in the contemporary art
world where widespread reliance on studio assistants has become conspicu-
ous. 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 physi-
cally 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 guaran-
tor 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 pro-
duction 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 produc-
tion 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 enor-
mous amount of labor that goes into the making of her artworks is integral to
234 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 immi-
nently 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 con-
cerned political and social conscience, the general attitudes of Western
culture are markedly divorced from the messy processes of object produc-
tion. 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 . . . phenom-
enon of being able to buy things we could not afford to make. . . . It is . . .
painful and numbing to be so divorced from the making of things and
from the people who make them for us. Our art of today reflects this
distance. And so a lot of art, on the face of it, seems to be not about
making but about choosing. . . . Art mirrors our lack of production or,
more precisely, it mirrors how acceptable modes of production—what
we are willing or unwilling to do—have changed.24
All About Process

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 235
from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century largely disappeared in
the heyday of modern art, modern artists who could afford to do so com-
monly 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 plas-
tic 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 amuse-
ment 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 retro-
spective 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 justi-
236 fication 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 autho-
rial 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 profes-
sional 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 interest-
ing aspect of the contemporary trend of conceiving and executing works
heavily dependent on the labor of assistants. Also significant is the growing
importance of the artist’s role as a social organizer of a group work process.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the most well-known artists to have made
this role the acknowledged center of their art and its process.26 Although
social engagement has become a recognized art world value, contemporary
installation artists who rely on the labor of assistants do not foreground this
aspect of their process as a meaningful part of the work. Assistants seem to
be considered, for the most part, of less significance than the sites and
materials used, which are often discussed in artists’ statements. Comparable
in importance to equipment or tools, assistants are necessary but rarely
acknowledged publicly.
Long-standing art world conventions are one reason for the continuing
tendency to attribute artworks to a single author without qualification or
addition. Similar conventions exist in architecture, although in architecture,
All About Process

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 237
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 deter-
mined 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 coor-
dination. 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 Städel-

238 schule 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 dress-
ing containing the “essence” of Kevin Costner. The curator and head of the
Städelschule, Daniel Birnbaum, later described the project in Artforum, quot-
ing Rhoades’s own statements: “What Rhoades was after in the work was a
kind of collective bliss, a moment where everyone worked in ‘perfect har-
mony,’ 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 pro-
moted not only by Dewey, but also by contemporary philosophers Shuster-
man 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 rela-
tional aesthetics, and Costner Complex is a good example of what Bourriaud
described as the relational artists’ concern for social process and experience
as the basis of their art.30 The art object for such artists “does not represent
the logical end of the work, but an event.”31 Conceptually related to process
philosophy, and explicitly linked to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari,32 Bourriaud’s view of the dominant artistic concerns of the 1990s
stressed the importance of time and ever-shifting relationships. He cited
Guattari as a source for understanding the practices of contemporary artists
All About Process

who use time as a material to create and stage “devices of existence includ-
ing working methods and ways of being, instead of concrete objects.” Their
efforts are in line with Guattari’s assertion that “the only acceptable end pur-
pose 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 239
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 Bour-
riaud 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 Tira-
vanija’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 instal-
lations 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
240 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 expe-
riences 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 engage-
ment 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 aware-
ness 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 pro-
cesses. As contemporary philosophers Shusterman and Sartwell claim, art
develops experiential awareness; it is about processes, not things.
Relational aesthetics may be seen as one curator’s effort to pin down a
very broad attitude in contemporary society and the arts. Although criticized
for its vagueness and lack of critical and political engagement, Bourriaud’s
relational aesthetics was an ambitious and influential attempt to give an
All About Process

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 criti- 241
cal/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, par-
ticularly 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 com-
modity 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 dis-
course 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 ineluc-
table interdependence. . . . Dissemination of . . . [their] ideas and distri-
bution 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,
242 giving the work its value and content. It develops this way as its systematic-
ity develops not just in the objects N55 produces but in the fact that it fun-
damentally 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. Presum-
ably, 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 contem-
porary 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 clas-
sifications of the natural sciences through dioramas and installations. His
Neukom Vivarium (2006) in the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washing-
ton, 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 Sculp-
ture 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.”
All About Process

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 indi-
vidual primarily concerned with aesthetic, potentially spiritual, issues and
the scientist as objective researcher seeking to understand and master natu-
ral laws. These artists find in natural and artificial processes both their 243
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 con-
scious 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 con-
cerned 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, educa-
tors, and the inclusive category of nonprofit organizations known as NGOs
(nongovernmental organizations). Broadly understood, their work encom-
passes 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 (includ-
ing 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
244 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 prac-
tice 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 prob-
lems. 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 modern-
ist 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 con-
ventions that characterizes the history of modern art. Thus, in Kester’s view,
dialogical art represents a reconceptualization of the work of art as “a pro-
cess 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 conscious-
ness. In her view, socially engaged art has generally not been subjected to
All About Process

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 245
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. Pro-
cess has become comparable to concepts such as beauty, expression, and
spirituality, which have long served to denote the distinctive quality, achieve-
ment, 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 craftsman-
ship. 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 emo-
tional. 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, rigor-
ous techniques, and attentive making outside the range of traditional art
object production. More often process implies an almost mystical connec-
246 tion 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. Pro-
cess 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. Pro-
cess, 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 philoso-
phers and theorists attempted to define the nature of human labor and the
relation of thought to creative activity. The rise of industrialization provided
All About Process

a critical impetus to the conceptualization of the artist’s process as a par-
ticularly 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 247
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 encom-
pass everything as the dissolution of art as a distinct category of objects and
processes. Business and engineering schools now teach techniques of cre-
ative 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 understand-
ing 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.

Notes
Introduction 6. For an example of the latter, see Rank,

Art and Artist. More recently it has
The introduction’s epigraphs are drawn become common to equate creativity
from Sultan, ed., Chuck Close Prints, 132; with economic success. See Florida,
and Schneemann, “Sensibility of the Rise of the Creative Class.
Times,” 171. 7. Balzac, Unknown Masterpiece, 52
1. Scholarly consideration of process as a (hereafter cited parenthetically in
conceptual issue has been virtually this chapter).
nonexistent in recent decades. In No 8. De Kooning, “Content Is a Glimpse,”
Place of Grace T. J. Jackson Lears has 197–98.
offered perhaps the only analysis of the 9. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Art-
concept and its broader social signifi- ist’s Process as a Means of Self-
cance with particular attention paid to Realization.”
the turn of the twentieth century. 10. Focillon, Life of Forms, 36, 44–45.
2. Rhoades collaborated with students at 11. Roger Fry believed the viewer is
the Städelschule in Frankfurt to pro- affected by an awareness of the artist’s
duce salad dressing containing the mark-making activity, imaginatively
essence of the actor Kevin Costner. feeling in his own body the physical
See chapter 9 of this volume, “It’s All gestures necessary to create the lines
about the Process,” for a discussion of and shapes of a work. See Vision and
the work. Design, 33–35.
3. While certain conceptual approaches 12. Focillon’s variation of formalism is
to process art may be exceptions to notably different from the analytic
this, even the most conceptual process approach associated with Clement
art tends to be concerned with physical Greenberg that has come to define the
experience, albeit often at a remove. term in the Anglo-American critical
See chapter 8 of this volume, “Process tradition since the 1960s.
Art.” 13. Michael Fried’s famous essay “Art and
4. See Risatti, Theory of Craft; and Met- Objecthood,” with its final statement
calf, “Craft and Art.” that “presence is grace,” is perhaps the
5. One of the most well-known studies is best modern example of the aesthetic
Rothenberg, Emerging Goddess. An exaltation ascribed by formalists to the
interesting example studying MFA stu- experience of viewing successful art.
dents over ten years is Getzels and 14. The belief that an artwork’s reception
Csikszentmihalyi, Creative Vision. is integral to the artwork as an unfin-

ished process in German Romantic 19. Ibid., 2–3.
theory is discussed in Leonard, “Pictur- 20. Burford, Craftsmen, 208–9.
ing Listening,” 276. Marcel Duchamp 21. See Wittkower and Wittkower, Born
insisted on the importance of the under Saturn, 22; and Baxandall, Paint-
viewer in the completion and judgment ing and Experience, 23.
of the artwork. See “Creative Act,” 22. Wittkower and Wittkower, Born under
25–26. Saturn, 34–38.
15. See Hosmer, “Process of Sculpture,” 23. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 30–31. Classi-
734–37. cal authors were not as supportive of
249
16. Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 134. the status of painting as Renaissance
17. Shusterman, Performing Live. writers claimed. See Kristeller, Renais-
18. This is not the case for the highly influ- sance Thought, 181.
ential work of Rosalind Krauss, who 24. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 46.
has developed psychoanalytically 25. Ibid., 112.
informed structuralist and post- 26. Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, 13–46.
structuralist approaches to reinvigorat- 27. Ibid., 187
ing formalism. Krauss’s colleagues Hal 28. Ibid., 13.
Foster and Yve-Alain Bois have pursued 29. For a detailed analysis of the role of the
related approaches that also are not intellect in Renaissance theories of
directly engaged with social and politi- artistic labor, see Summers, Judgment
cal concerns. of Sense, 281–82.
30. Ibid., 320.
31. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 16.
Chapter 1 32. Ibid., 84.
33. Ibid., 105.
This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from 34. The scientist and philosopher Michael
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Polyani first articulated the concept of
1097a, 30–35. All Aristotle works cited tacit knowledge in 1958 and developed
in this chapter can be found in Aristo- it in The Tacit Dimension (1966). The
tle, Complete Works. concept has been widely adopted by
1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, craft theorists (and others).
1094a, 14–16. 35. G. Baldwin Brown’s preface to Vasari,
2. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, Book I, 1197a, Vasari on Technique, 3.
5–13. 36. Vasari on Technique, 206, 208 (hereafter
3. Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1337b, 5–17. cited parenthetically in this chapter).
4. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 227. See 37. Vasari, Lives, 140–41 (hereafter cited
also Mossé, Ancient World, 25–28. parenthetically in this chapter).
5. Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1337b, 5–17. 38. Barolsky, Faun in the Garden, 66, 76
6. Ibid., Book VIII, section 3. 39. Pevsner, Academies of Art, 172, 177.
7. Ibid., Book VIII, 1341a, 10–12, 17–20; 40. Ibid., 228–29, 247–48.
1341b, 9–12.
8. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1 (A), Sec-
tion 1, 981a 28–981b 9. Chapter 2
9. Burford, Craftsmen, 153, 241n412; Pollitt,
Art of Ancient Greece, 157–58. 1. Kant, Critique of Judgment, I:43 (here-
10. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 152. after cited parenthetically in this
11. Ibid., 153. chapter).
12. Burford, Craftsmen, 198–99. 2. Hegel, Aesthetics, 26 (hereafter cited
13. Ibid., 199–200. parenthetically in this chapter).
14. Ibid., 200, 248n569. 3. Clayre, Work and Play, 8–13. Rabinbach
15. Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 3. notes that while the eighteenth-
16. Ibid., 153. century philosophes, including Rous-
17. Ibid., 230. seau, excoriated aristocratic idleness,
18. Cennini, Craftsman’s Handbook, 1. they allowed the poet’s idleness to
Notes to Pages 12–39

retain an exalted status because it was upper and middle class women, that
seen as a preparation for creative pro- began in the eighteenth century see
duction. See Human Motor, 28. Bermingham, Learning to Draw. For a
4. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, 40. discussion of the place of the amateur
5. Ibid., 138. in the contemporary art world, see
6. Marx, Essential Writings, 59. Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor?, 146–47.
7. Ibid., 56–57. 28. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 42.
8. Cited in Clayre, Work and Play, 48–49. 29. Ibid., 62.
9. Clayre, Work and Play, 54–56. According 30. Williams, Culture and Society, xiv.
250
to Clayre, Marx, like many nineteenth- 31. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 88.
century thinkers, conceived work as 32. Boris, Art and Labor, 15.
both a necessity and the means for the 33. Ibid., 14.
full realization of human potential 34. Isaac Clark cited in ibid., 86.
through free action. In Rabinbach’s 35. Boris, Art and Labor, 83.
view Marx only held the latter position 36. Candace Wheeler cited in ibid., 101.
in his early work. In his later writings 37. Boris, Art and Labor, 156.
Marx advocated an ideal of work in 38. Masten, Art Work.
which workers had no permanent spe- 39. See Callen, Women Artists, 96–135, 219;
cialization and alternated between sci- and Callen, “Sexual Division.”
entific/intellectual and manual labor. 40. On the history and changing status of
10. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic, 80–81. needlework in the nineteenth century,
11. Ibid., 82. see Callen, Women Artists, 96–98; and
12. Marx, Essential Writings, 85. Parker, Subversive Stitch.
13. Clayre, Work and Play, 44. 41. Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 145–46.
14. Cited in ibid., 45. 42. Boris, Art and Labor, 94.
15. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 169–70 (here- 43. Lears, No Place of Grace, 54–57.
after cited parenthetically in this 44. Ibid., 69–70.
chapter). 45. Ibid., 82.
16. Ruskin was no political revolutionary. 46. Eastlake, “Review,” 97–98.
He advocated a conservative social 47. Among the most famous of the early
structure in which a beneficent ruling arguments for photography as an art
class freed the workingman from care, form are Henry Peach Robinson, Picto-
and in turn the workingman served his rial Effect in Photography (1864); Peter
“reverent” leader. Henry Emerson, Naturalist Photography
17. Morris, Collected Works, 5. (1889); and Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial
18. Ibid., 9. Photography” (1899).
19. Ibid., 168–69.
20. Thompson, William Morris, 105.
21. Morris, Collected Works, 29. Chapter 3
22. Clayre, Work and Play, 156.
23. Vida Scudder cited in Boris, Art and 1. Boime, Academy, 24, 122.
Labor, 187. 2. Ibid., 82, 181–82.
24. Greensted, ed., Anthology, 9. 3. Ibid., 42–43, 128.
25. Day’s criticism is a commonplace of 4. See Sheriff, Fragonard, chaps. 4 and 5.
academic art theory, which decried the 5. Ibid., 142–44.
merely superficial copying of surface 6. Cited in Boime, Academy, 119.
features of artworks. This could be 7. Boime, Academy, 74. Couture (and
avoided by direct study from nature others) followed well-established
and by imitating the principles of precedent in finishing his paintings by
ancient artists rather than their art- placing sketch-like marks to signify
works. See Cramer, Abstraction, 22–25. painterly inspiration and rapidity of
26. See Lears, No Place of Grace, 69. execution. See Clements, “Michelan-
27. On the enormous rise of amateur artis- gelo on Effort.”
tic production, particularly among 8. Boime, Academy, 149.

9. Cited in ibid., 116. 36. For a discussion of the complexities of
10. Milner, Studios of Paris, 39. the relationship of Impressionism to
11. Ibid., 141. scientific objectivity and positivism,
12. See Bomford et al., Art in the Making, see Shiff, Cézanne, 21–26.
36–37, 55; and Callen, Art of Impression- 37. Signac, Eugène Delacroix, 984.
ism, 3–5, 98–110. 38. Ibid., 981–82. Félix Fénéon also
13. See Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, remarked on the lack of importance
Mallarmé.” of the painter’s technique in Neo-
14. Paul Cézanne, letter to his mother, Impressionist painting. See “Neo-
251
September 26, 1874, in Harrison and Impressionism,” 111.
Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 549. 39. Fénéon, “Neo-Impressionism,” 112.
15. Shiff, “End of Impressionism,” 67. 40. Veblen outlined this problem in Leisure
16. See Shiff, Cézanne, 16; Gautier, “Art in Class, 159–60.
1848,” 320; and Boime, Academy, 88–89. 41. Charles Henry’s systematization of the
17. Shiff, Cézanne, 51. emotional effects of form, line, and
18. Mallarmé, “Impressionists,” 33. color in “Introduction to a Scientific
19. Zola, Mes Haines, 341. Aesthetic” was highly influential for
20. Zola cited in DeLue, “Pissarro, Land- Neo-Impressionism.
scape, Vision,” 720. See also Shiff, 42. For discussion of the relation of Seur-
Cézanne, 37. at’s technique to modern mechanical
21. Zola cited in DeLue, “Pissarro, Land- production and the democratic poten-
scape, Vision,” 721. tial of the technique, see Nochlin, Poli-
22. Art-historical scholarship has increas- tics of Vision, 173, 181–82; and Broude,
ingly addressed the signs of the Impres- “New Light.”
sionist painters’ working processes in 43. The most succinct exposition of
their paintings. See Isaacson, “Consta- Greenberg’s position is his 1960 essay
ble, Duranty, Mallarmé”; DeLue, “Pis- “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg, Col-
sarro, Landscape, Vision”; Brettell, lected Essays, vol. 4, 85–93.
Impression; and House, Monet. Other 44. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 38.
key texts that address technical issues 45. Ibid., 35–36.
are Bomford et al., Art in the Making; 46. Yve-Alain Bois has discussed Matisse’s
and Callen, Art of Impressionism. debt to Cézanne’s working process in
23. Reprinted in Moffat, ed., New Painting, this regard, describing it as “the econ-
130. omy of the session.” See Bois, Painting
24. See the Balzac discussion in the intro- as Model, 48–51.
duction to this volume. 47. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 39, 36.
25. Bernard, “Memories of Paul Cézanne,” 48. Ibid., 37.
65. 49. Matisse’s advice to his students made
26. D’Souza, “Paul Cézanne.” the same point. See “Matisse Speaks to
27. Zola cited in ibid. His Students, 1908: Notes by Sarah
28. Fry, Cézanne, 57. Stein,” in Barr, Matisse, 552.
29. Bernard cited in Shiff, Cézanne, 295n36. 50. Matisse began photographing the vari-
30. Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 10. ous working stages of his paintings in
31. The notion of Cézanne’s painting as a 1935. See chapter 4 of this volume, “New
rendering visible of tactile experience Conceptions of the Artist’s Process.”
has been developed by Shiff in “Con- 51. Bell, Art, 28–29.
structing Physicality”; and Joachim 52. On the equation of sincerity and
Pissarro in “Cézanne.” individuality see Tolstoy, What Is Art?
32. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 63, 154–55.
64, 65–66, 69. 53. Barr, Matisse, 118.
33. Ibid., 70–71. 54. Zervos, “Du Phénomène Surréaliste,”
34. Johnson, “Phenomenology and Paint- 114.
ing.” 55. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 6.
35. Denis, Théories, 262–78. 56. Ibid., 43.

57. Cited in ibid., 172. 16. Amédée Ozenfant claimed he was the
58. For another discussion of the artist’s first artist to systematically photograph
labor, see “Art and Socialism” in Fry, the genesis of a work when he docu-
Vision and Design, 76–78. mented the vicissitudes of the mural-
sized painting Life he created between
1931 and 1938. See Ozenfant, Founda-
Chapter 4 tions, 334. In addition to a photographic
record of the work’s creation, Ozenfant
1. Goldwater, Symbolism, 1–5; Rubin, kept a journal of the political and social
252
Impressionism, 354; Tucker, Monet, 94. events that affected its development.
2. For discussions of the marketing strat- 17. Fry, Henri-Matisse. Matisse called his
egy and collectors of Monet’s series stages “states,” and his documentation
paintings, see Klein, “Dispersal of the of the states of his paintings was likely
Modernist Series”; Stuckey, “Predic- influenced by his work making etchings
tions and Implications”; Rubin, Impres- in the previous years.
sionism, 343–54; and Tucker, Monet, 18. Delectorskaya, L’Apparente facilité, 23.
98–99. 19. Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 184.
3. It is now known that Monet completed 20. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 36.
these works in the studio, but the sig- 21. Ibid., 74.
nificance of the works remains largely 22. Ibid., 73.
dependent on their role as records of 23. Aagesen, “Painting as Film,” 163.
Monet’s optical experiences. 24. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 178; Baldassari,
4. Mondrian, New Art, 41. Picasso Photographe.
5. Ibid., 42. 25. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,”
6. Ibid., 58. 268.
7. Cramer, Abstraction, chap. 7. 26. Arnheim’s text reflects trends in think-
8. Mondrian, New Art, 299. ing about the modern artist’s process
9. “It is not enough to explain the value associated with existentialism and the
of a work of art in itself; it is above all art and critical discourse of the New
necessary to show the place which a York school.
work occupies on the scale of the evolution 27. Paul Haesaerts filmed Picasso painting
of plastic art.” Ibid., 293. on glass in his 1949 documentary Visit
10. The New York paintings are often seen to Picasso. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s
as instituting a new phase in Mondri- 1956 film The Mystery of Picasso also
an’s art; however, whether this change shows Picasso painting on glass.
constitutes an evolutionary advance 28. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 179.
along the lines of the painter’s stated 29. Hess, “Matisse.”
project is another question. Cramer, 30. Frankfurter, “Is He the Greatest?” 22.
Abstraction, 147–48. 31. Arb, “Spotlight on de Kooning,” 33.
11. Mondrian, New Art, 239. 32. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cub-
12. Holty, “Mondrian.” ism,” 145–46.
13. Cahiers d’Art was renowned for its 33. Ibid., 162–63.
extensive photographic documentation 34. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Manage-
of recent work by famous modern art- ment.
ists. Modern art dealers distributed the 35. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cub-
magazine outside Paris in major art ism,” 142.
centers such as New York, London, and 36. See Green, Cubism; and Golan, Moder-
Berlin, and the magazine is often nity and Nostalgia, for detailed discus-
referred to as a Bible for those inter- sions of art vivant and the significance
ested in modern art in New York in the of the materiality of paint.
1930s and 1940s. 37. The emphasis on gross physicality and
14. Grant, Surrealism, chap. 10. violence in the art of the interwar
15. Weiss, “Matisse Grid,” 179. period is now often linked to the expe-
riences of World War I. See Golan,

Modernity and Nostalgia; and Stich, and he posits an important social and
Anxious Visions. moral role for art as a means to dis-
38. Focillon, Life of Forms, 2–3, 31 (here- cover, express, and communicate
after cited parenthetically in this truths.
chapter). 49. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 129
39. Focillon recounts a story of the Japa- (hereafter cited parenthetically in this
nese artist Hokusai pouring blue paint chapter).
on a scroll and then having a chicken 50. Berenson also influenced Fry’s inter-
with its feet dipped in red ink walk on pretation of Cézanne. Collingwood’s
253
it. The resulting pattern was generally examples throughout his text are more
perceived as a painting of autumn often literary rather than concerned
leaves floating on water. Focillon with visual art, and sculpture is never
writes, “The memory of long experi- discussed. The variability and incon-
ment with his hands on the different sistencies in Collingwood’s discussion
ways of evoking life brought him . . . to of different arts and their effects on
attempt even this. The hands are pres- his general philosophy of art as
ent without showing themselves, and, expounded in the Principles is exam-
though touching nothing, they order ined in Davies, “Collingwood’s ‘Perfor-
everything” (75). mance’ Theory.”
40. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Art- 51. While Collingwood’s discussions are
ist’s Process as a Means of Self- often directly involved with the physi-
Realization,” for a discussion of the cality of the visual artist’s work, his
debates on the Surrealists’ passive overall view of the nature of the artist’s
automatism and more active interpre- activity has a strongly antimaterialist
tations of the artist’s activity. See also cast: “The work of art . . . is not a
Grant, Surrealism. bodily or perceptible thing, but an
41. In this passage Focillon makes direct activity of the artist; and not an activity
reference to Surrealist automatic tech- of his ‘body’ or sensuous nature, but an
niques as well as to Surrealist found activity of his consciousness” (292).
objects. See Aragon, La Peinture au défi, 52. Collingwood stated that the artist was
for an expansive discussion of the art- not unique in experience or emotion,
ist’s materials in the context of Surre- but only “in his ability to take the ini-
alism. tiative in expressing what all feel and
42. Nolde, “On Primitive Art,” 97. all can express” (119).
43. Curtis, Sculpture, 94.
44. The modern system of the arts was
largely established in the eighteenth Chapter 5
century based in part on the distinc-
tion between liberal and mechanical This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from
arts. See Kristeller, Renaissance Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,”
Thought, 224–27, for a brief discussion 70–71.
of the historically provisional nature of 1. Bourdieu, “Invention of the Artist’s
the system. Life,” 96.
45. Silverman, Art Nouveau, chap. 3. 2. Ibid., 97.
46. See Singerman, Art Subjects, 100–108, 3. The precondition of an independent
on the influence of early childhood income for the modern artist’s identity
education theories in the development is one of the main points of Bourdieu’s
of Bauhaus pedagogy. discussion. Ibid., 81n3.
47. Raleigh, “Johannes Itten,” 284–87, 302. 4. Bell, Art, 172.
48. Collingwood’s text is a work of philo- 5. Bourdieu, “Invention of the Artist’s
sophical aesthetics that considers a Life,” 80.
range of issues concerning the nature 6. For views of modernism as fundamen-
of art. Following Benedetto Croce, tally and exclusively masculinist, see
Collingwood defines art as a language, Pollock, Vision and Difference, chaps. 1

and 3; and Duncan, “MoMA’s Hot discusses the differences of mechani-
Mamas.” cal production from artistic creation
7. For a discussion of the ways women (138–39).
artists have defined their artistic iden- 20. Dewey’s ideas on modern education,
tity in productive relation to modern- which emphasized hands-on experi-
ism, see Wagner, Three Artists, ence and individualized programs, had
particularly 4–6, 214–17. See also been enormously influential for
Swinth, Painting Professionals, chap. 6. decades by the time he published Art
8. Fiedler, On Judging Works, 697. and Experience. This type of childhood
254
9. “We can only see before us, and in the education influenced the teaching
form of goals, what it is that we are— approaches adopted by Itten and
so that our life always has the form of a Albers in the Bauhaus Vorkurs.
project or choice, and thus seems to us 21. This final sentence suggests an
self-caused.” Merleau-Ponty, approach to a more Kantian notion of
“Cézanne’s Doubt,” 71. a pure aesthetic experience. Dewey’s
10. According to Robert Williams, Alberti, position in general directly opposes
Vasari, and Leonardo all suggest that that of Kant (see Dewey, Art as Experi-
the artist represents the highest form ence, 252–53, for an explicit rejection of
of subjectivity, a notion he sees as Kant’s aesthetics), but here he pro-
derived from ancient rhetorical theory. vides an opening for explaining the
“Individuality achieves its highest effects of an aesthetic object in terms
form” in the Italian artist’s study of that bear a notable resemblance to
nature and through unstinting labor, Kant’s discussion of beauty as purpo-
the “relentlessly self-critical, all- sive form distinct from merely sensual
consuming personal discipline pleasure. There are also distinct
involved . . . in the process of self- echoes of Dewey’s text in Michael
objectification. . . . Art is work, both in Fried’s famous (formalist) essay “Art
the sense of application to particular and Objecthood,” as well as in Robert
tasks and as a comprehensive personal Morris’s equally well-known contem-
discipline that enters into and trans- poraneous discussion of so-called
forms every corner of experience, minimalist objects in his “Notes on
every recess of consciousness. The art- Sculpture.”
ist must make himself over entirely 22. Art as Experience was dedicated to
according to the demands of his voca- Barnes, who worked closely with
tion. . . . Art demands a sustained and Dewey and is cited directly at numer-
systematic effort to establish the con- ous points in the text. Barnes’s views
ditions of the possibility of all self- on art were published in a number of
fashioning.” Williams, “Leonardo’s books, including his comprehensive
Modernity,” 37. 1937 text The Art in Painting. In this
11. Fiedler, On Judging Works, 698. text and his other monographs on
12. Fry, Vision and Design, 261. modern artists Barnes outlines a stan-
13. Bell, Art, 141–42. dard formalist position on the nature
14. Schapiro, “Cézanne,” 40. of the artist and the artist’s work.
15. Quoted in Shiff, Cézanne, 190. 23. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 279, 283–
16. Schapiro, Paul Cézanne, 20. 84, 287. Collingwood is quick to qualify
17. According to Sawyer there is no evi- the nature of the truths of art as emo-
dence that Dewey read Collingwood’s tional, as individual facts, not truths of
work or vice versa. Sawyer, Group Cre- relation determined by intellect.
ativity, 103. 24. In the artist’s consciousness there is no
18. Dewey, Art as Experience, 3 (hereafter significant distinction between self and
cited parenthetically in this chapter). world because the world is what the
19. Dewey makes a distinction very similar artist experiences and the medium of
to Collingwood’s means/ends distinc- expression. Ibid., 291–92.
tion between art and craft when he 25. Ibid., 325.

26. Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés”; Desnos, indebted to Bergson, who is often (ret-
“Surréalisme.” roactively) considered a process phi-
27. For a detailed discussion of these losopher.
issues in relation to Surrealist texts 33. See Bergson, Laughter, 154–61. Bergson
and art criticism of the 1920s and also described the artist as having a
1930s, see Grant, Surrealism. privileged position in relation to the
28. Zervos, “Lithographies de Henri universe’s creative activity. The cre-
Matisse” and “Phénomène Surréaliste.” ation of an artwork is a vital process.
29. Tériade, “Documentaire sur la jeune See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 340–41.
255
peinture: I.” and “Documentaire sur la 34. Antliff, Inventing Bergson. Harold
jeune peinture: V.” Rosenberg thought Hans Hoffman’s
30. Decalcomania was originally a decora- philosophy was indebted to the Berg-
tive transfer technique invented in the son’s pre–World War I ideas about
eighteenth century. It was also the basis intuition and élan. See Rosenberg, Anx-
for a popular party game in which ink ious Object, 251.
was dripped on paper and then folded 35. Robert Motherwell cites him as an
to create suggestive forms. Hermann influence who helped him understand
Rorschach’s psychological inkblot tests, the philosophical nature of abstraction.
first published in 1921, were based on See Motherwell, Collected Writings, 86,
this technique. In a 1936 issue of the 99, 142, 279. Louis Finkelstein read
magazine Minotaure André Breton pre- Whitehead in the 1940s and discussed
sented Oscar Dominguez’s use of decal- him with Tworkov and de Kooning. See
comania as the first fully automatic Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 278.
technique. The Surrealists sought direct Daniel Belgrad makes a case for the
access to the origins of art in the great importance of Whitehead’s ideas
images of the unconscious through for modern poets, particularly Charles
hypnosis, recitations of dreams, and Olson, as well as for Motherwell. See
rapid speech or writing beginning in the Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity.
early 1920s. It is probably these well- 36. Whitehead’s philosophy was explicitly
known experiments that Dewey is developed as a philosophical attempt
referring to by conjuring a rabbit out of to come to terms with the transforma-
the place where it lies hid. tion in the nature of physical reality
31. Art as language is a major topic ana- revealed by the theory of relativity
lyzed in Collingwood’s Principles of Art. and the other discoveries of the new
Dewey states, “Because objects of art physics. See Whitehead, Modes of
are expressive, they are a language. . . . Thought, 140.
Language exists only when it is listened 37. “Deep within ourselves we know time
to as well as spoken. . . . The work of is a ‘becoming.’ We rework our monu-
art is complete only as it works in the mental concept of time into that of a
experience of others than the one who fluid time, i.e., one whose duration has
created it” (106). a plastic quality.” Focillon, Life of
32. “For the modern view process, activity, Forms, 55.
and change are the matter of fact. At an 38. Ibid., 49–51. Focillon’s reference to
instant there is nothing. Each instant is Leonardo’s wall is another reflection of
only a way of grouping matters of the debates surrounding Surrealism.
fact. . . . All the interrelations of mat- For the Surrealists, Max Ernst in partic-
ters of fact must involve transition in ular, Leonardo’s advice to artists to
their essence. All realization involves seek subjects in the random markings
implication in creative advance.” on an old wall was an early example of
Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 146. Pro- the value of their own automatic proce-
cess philosophy is considered to have dures. They believed that the images
been founded by Whitehead with the any given individual saw in the random
1929 publication of his Process and Real- marks on the wall were the embodi-
ity. Whitehead’s process philosophy is ment their own unconscious obsessions

and desires. The more conservative 53. See Grene, “Aesthetic Dialogue,”
view, and the one espoused by Focillon, 224–25.
was that only the trained artist dis- 54. Fry, Vision and Design, 34–35.
cerned forms in random marks and 55. Dewey also objected to theories that
could use them as the basis for creative separate art forms on the basis of their
inspiration. appeal to one sense—vision in the case
39. Ibid., 51. of painting, hearing in music. In his
40. Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic work view artworks were expressions of
focused on artists from the beginning. experiences arising from human expe-
256
He was a close associate of Sigmund riences with the surrounding environ-
Freud in Vienna until 1926, when he ment. It is the totality of embodied
moved to Paris and became well known experience in the world that is signifi-
as a therapist and lecturer. Among his cant, not the appeal to a single sense
patients were the writers Anaïs Nin (123–24).
and Henry Miller. 56. Contemporary distinctions between
41. Rank, Art and Artist, 425 (hereafter ceramicists, who are considered crafts-
cited parenthetically in this chapter). people, and those who are considered
42. Rank listed Goethe, Rodin, Michelan- “clay artists” still often rely on this
gelo, and Rembrandt as examples. He same difference.
did not think the present age had pro- 57. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 55, 144–
duced any great art and thought this 45, 243–44, 247.
might be due to the lack of collective 58. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,”
ideologies against which the strong 104.
individualism of the artistic personality 59. Ibid., 112.
needs to fight (18). 60. Wagner, Three Artists, 281–82.
43. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,”
61.
44. Collingwood held a similar view of the Chapter 6
artist’s activity; see above.
45. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” The section of this chapter under the
69–70. subheading “Artistic Process and Ama-
46. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Per- teur Artists” contains material from my
ception, 175 article “‘Paint and Be Happy’: The
47. Ibid., 215–16. “This disclosure of an Modern Artist and the Amateur
immanent or incipient significance in Painter: A Question of Distinction,”
the living body extends, as we shall Journal of American Culture 34, no. 3,
see, to the whole sensible world, and Copyright © 2011, Wiley Periodicals.
our gaze, prompted by the experience 1. Liberman, Artist in His Studio, 33.
of our own body, will discover in all 2. Picasso, “Picasso Speaks,” 215.
other ‘objects’ the miracle of expres- 3. Unlike Cézanne, Giacometti was con-
sion” (230). sidered a skilled artist in a traditional
48. Ibid., 226. sense, thus his struggle included the
49. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” effort to not give in to his facility. See
83. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 90.
painting was markedly affected by 4. Sartre, “Search for the Absolute,” 613.
Matisse’s discussion of his working 5. Collingwood also stressed the morality
process in “Notes of a Painter,” as well of the artist’s labor; see chapter 5 in
as François Campaux’s 1946 film of this volume.
Matisse at work, Un Grand Peintre fran- 6. Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti,
çais: Henri Matisse. 194.
50. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 7. Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, 87.
88, 90–91. 8. Matter and Matter, Alberto Giacometti,
51. Ibid., 95–97. 197.
52. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 148. 9. Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 127–28.

10. Ibid., 128–30. 29. Stevens and Swan, De Kooning, 148.
11. For a discussion of Giacometti’s 30. Alfred Barr’s Picasso: Fifty Years of His
increasing obsessiveness, see Sylvester, Art, published in 1946 by the Museum
Looking at Giacometti, 120. of Modern Art, emphasized the artist’s
12. Giacometti quoted in Matter and Mat- working process with many reproduc-
ter, Alberto Giacometti, 216. tions of sketches, studies, and varia-
13. Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 120. tions of major works, notably
14. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 68. Demoiselles and Guernica.
15. See chapter 5 of this volume, “The Art- 31. Arb, “Spotlight on de Kooning,” 33.
257
ist’s Process as a Means of Self- 32. Greenberg, Collected Essays, vol. 2, 229.
Realization.” In “De Kooning Paints a Picture” Hess
16. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 58, 61. wrote parenthetically that de Koon-
17. Ibid., 78–80. ing’s academic training and a period of
18. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 29. “lyrical Ingrism” gave him the mastery
19. Here, too, see chapter 5 of this volume, essential to discarding or changing
“The Artist’s Process as a Means of convention (64–65).
Self-Realization.” 33. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,”
20. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 32–33. 267–70. Picasso first discusses photo-
21. For discussion of the political dimen- graphing the stages of a work in prog-
sion of Rosenberg’s concept of action, ress in this same interview. See chapter
see Orton, “Action, Revolution, Paint- 4 of this volume, “New Conceptions of
ing”; and Balken, “Rosenberg and the Artist’s Process.”
American Action Painters,” 210. 34. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 classic exis-
22. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 34. In tentialist text Being and Nothingness.
his criticism Rosenberg stressed the The reproductions in Barr’s Picasso: 50
distinctions between pure automatism Years of His Art emphasize Picasso’s
and the more conscious and engaged paintings of monstrous women.
work of painters like Pollock and Joan 35. Doubt and ambiguity have been much
Mitchell. For instance, he saw Jean discussed as dominant themes of de
Dubuffet’s work as lacking the neces- Kooning’s art. See Hess, Willem de
sary tension. See Rosenberg, Art on the Kooning; Shiff, “De Kooning Control-
Edge, 83, 92, 97. The critique of an easy ling”; Wagner, “De Kooning, Drawing.”
automatism and “apocalyptic wallpa- 36. See Shiff, “Water and Lipstick,” “With
per” in “The American Action Paint- Closed Eyes,” and “De Kooning Con-
ers” is often understood as an attack trolling.”
on Jackson Pollock. 37. The persistent interest in evaluating
23. Motherwell, Collected Writings, 42–43. the works de Kooning made during his
24. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 104. last illness, a form of Alzheimer’s, is a
25. Unlike Cézanne and Giacometti, de telling indicator of the ways his art has
Kooning did not work directly from been valued. These late works would
life/models; his work is not a record of probably be classed as a type of auto-
perceptual experience in the way that matic production, lacking the artist’s
Cézanne’s always and Giacometti’s conscious control or regulation. Since
often is. de Kooning’s reputation rested on the
26. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 111–12, 117, fact that his art was not automatic, the
119, 125. The concept of “tact” and its late works cannot be considered truly
use by Rosenberg to describe de Koon- de Koonings in the sense in which his
ing’s approach closely follows its usage brand was defined. They are, however,
in terms of craftsmanship: a knowing by his hand, and that hand was consid-
responsiveness to the medium devel- ered one of the most well developed in
oped over many years of working late twentieth-century art. Many feel
with it. that there must be real value (not just
27. Ibid., 128. market value) in that hand’s products
28. Hess, “De Kooning Paints,” 31, 65. because the artist’s mind must have

fully entered into its gestures and Bishop, and Irene Rice Pereira). After
responses after so many decades of 1955 until 1962, when the series ended,
practice. the ratio improved, as four of the sev-
38. Hess, Willem de Kooning, 28. enteen artists profiled were women
39. Ibid., 27. (Janice Biala, Jane Freilicher, Joan
40. In a 1961 review of a group exhibition Mitchell, and Elaine de Kooning).
devoted to the creative process, Vivien 42. Pollock, Vision and Difference, chaps. 1
Raynor complained that a series of Nell and 3; Board, “Constructing Myths”;
Blaine’s preparatory drawings for her Duncan, “Virility and Domination”
258
“fresh and lovely” paintings demon- and “MoMA’s Hot Mamas.”
strated that being an artist was painful 43. Zervos, “Conversation with Picasso,”
labor and “no fun at all.” See Raynor, 268.
“Creative Process,” 38. By the early 44. For a discussion of the difficult situa-
1960s the discourse of the artistic pro- tion faced by modern artists whose
cess as dangerous and risky labor was exhibited artworks may not reveal their
outdated, but the gender implications dedication to their work, see Menger,
of Raynor’s criticism remain both sig- “Profiles of the Unfinished,” 60–61.
nificant and conventional: a woman’s 45. For a discussion of the historical Amer-
painting should be “fresh and lovely” ican view of art as a feminine practice,
naturally and without serious labor. see Singerman, Art Subjects, 41–45.
See chapter 8 of this volume, “Process Singerman notes that large numbers of
Art,” for further discussion of Raynor’s men studying in art programs in col-
review. leges and universities under the GI Bill
Helen Frankenthaler used the lan- at mid-century assisted in the wide-
guage of danger and risk in a 1965 spread masculinization of art and artist
interview to discuss her painting pro- education in the United States. It was
cess in formal terms, demonstrating then distinguished from (feminine) art
how the mid-century discourse of teacher education, which had previ-
artistic process was adopted and ously been the dominant focus of art
employed by a working artist to define education in the United States (127).
her personal creative methods: “It is a 46. Scholars do not agree on Pollock’s rel-
struggle for me to both discard and evance to Rosenberg’s essay. See
retain what is gestural and personal Balken, “Rosenberg and American
‘Signature.’ I have been trying, and the Action,” 213; and Kleeblatt, ed., Action/
process began without my knowing it, Abstraction, 137, 139.
to stop relying on gesture, but it is a 47. It is not Pollock’s but Gorky’s paintings
struggle. ‘Gesture’ must appear out of that Greenberg described most
necessity not habit. I don’t start with a strongly in terms of the artist’s pro-
color order but find the color as I go. cess. See Greenberg, Collected Essays,
I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than 218–19.
rely on things I know I can do.” In the 48. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews,
same interview Frankenthaler denied 23.
the relevance of her gender to her 49. Ibid., 63, 76–77.
painting: “Obviously, first I am 50. In 1910 the writer Roland Dorgelès
involved in painting not the who and submitted three paintings to the Salon
how. . . . The making of serious paint- des Indépendants under the name Bor-
ing is difficult and complicated for all onali. They had been painted by a don-
serious painters. One must be oneself, key with a loaded paintbrush attached
whatever.” Geldzahler, “Interview with to its tail.
Helen Frankenthaler,” 37–38. 51. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews,
41. Of the forty-three artists profiled in 77.
the ARTnews “X Paints a Picture” series 52. Steinberg, “Month in Review,” 82–83.
from 1949 to the end of 1955 only three 53. On the rise of amateur art making in
were women (Honoré Sharrer, Isabel the 1950s and 1960s, see Barzun, “New

Man”; Toffler, Culture Consumers; and was portrayed as form of relaxation
Marling, As Seen on TV, chap. 2. and unpretentious enjoyment for the
54. Matisse expressed this view in a 1949 powerful statesman.
interview. See Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 61. Kingsbury, “Amateur Standing,” 10.
122. 62. Quoted in Seckler, “Amateur Stand-
55. “ARTnews National,” 1. ing,” 8.
56. For the 1949 competition the magazine 63. See Berkman’s “Amateur Standing”
defined an amateur as someone whose column from May 1956, 10.
major occupation or source of income 64. See the “Amateur Standing” column
259
was not the practice or teaching of from March 1950, 8.
painting. Later, art students and any- 65. “Best Amateurs,” 64.
one selling art in a gallery were 66. Quoted in the “Amateur Standing”
excluded from amateur status as well. column from January 1951, 8, 60.
57. The text is implicitly directed to men: 67. Critics typically gave only very brief
“After all, if you try and fail, there is characterizations of amateur works
not much harm done. . . . And then that often stressed their exuberance
you can always go out and kill some and cheerfulness. Even prizewinning
animal, humiliate some rival on the works were not usually described in
links, or despoil some friend across any detail.
the green table.” Churchill, “Painting 68. Genauer, “Amateurs,” 13.
as a Pastime,” 14. The magazine’s edi- 69. Dewey, Art as Experience, 45.
torial call for entries to its amateur 70. At the March 1953 national convention
competition also seems directed at of the Artist’s Equity Association in St.
the male reader (see below). This is Louis the delegates condemned ama-
ironic given that women amateur art- teur artists for taking away profes-
ists far outnumbered men, as the mag- sional artists’ wall space and income.
azine discovered in its survey See “Amateur Art Menace,” 81.
published a few months later. See 71. Frankfurter, “Editorial: Amateur Joy,”
“Amateur Standing: Who and How,” 15.
10. Jacques Barzun wrote on the rise 72. “Amateur Art Menace,” 81.
of amateur painting in 1958: “Art is 73. Pearson, “Remarkable Exhibition,” 21.
seen to be compatible with manliness, Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Wil-
on the one hand, and with serious lem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell,
business—indeed with affairs of Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Tobey, Mark
state—on the other. The fine arts are Rothko, and William Baziotes exhibited
acquiring the respectability of fishing work in the 1949 Whitney Annual.
and golf.” Barzun, “New Man,” 39. 74. Hess, “8 Excellent,” 35.
58. Churchill, “Painting as a Pastime,” 75. The 92nd Street Y is a renowned
13–14. Jewish community and cultural center
59. Frankfurter, “Vernissage,” 11. in New York City established in 1874.
60. Barzun made a similar point: “With the It has offered art programs and adult
passing of the class system there also education classes since its inception.
went something of the mild subordina- 76. See Berkman’s “Amateur Standing”
tion needed for being a spectator. column from February 1957, 66.
There is abroad in the world a passion 77. Langsner, “Mullican Paints a Picture,”
for participation. . . . ‘I, too, am a 35; Porter, “Rivers Paints a Picture,” 82;
painter’ was said by Correggio in emu- Campbell, “Ferren Paints a Picture,”
lation of Raphael; it could be said by 54; de Kooning, “Greene Paints a Pic-
John Doe in emulation of his President, ture,” 50.
and it would be a corollary to their 78. “Amateur Standing: Who and How,” 10.
common citizenship.” Barzun, “New It was commonplace for articles on
Man,” 43. Barzun is referring to Presi- amateur art competitions in the 1950s
dent Eisenhower’s much-publicized to give an accounting of the gender and
painting hobby, which, like Churchill’s, professions of the entrants. Women

typically outnumbered men by two to 86. From a 1992 interview with de Koon-
one. ing’s Black Mountain College student
79. By the standards of the early Gus Faulk quoted in Stevens and Swan,
twentieth-first century, the sexism of De Kooning, 257.
Frankfurter’s editorial and its “joke” is 87. Rosenberg, Anxious Object, 149.
breath taking: “Among the better sto- 88. Ibid., 254.
ries that used to go around during the
Depression was the one about the cho-
rus girl who sadly said, ‘Six weeks ago I Chapter 7
260
lost my job, three weeks ago I had to
sell my wrist watch, two weeks ago I This chapter’s epigraphs are drawn
sold my fur coat—and last night I lost from Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 96,
my amateur standing. 54.
We are concerned over amateur 1. Judd, “Specific Objects.”
painters who are losing their stand- 2. Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews,
ing—in maybe not quite so well- 86–89.
defined a way, but nevertheless in, well, 3. Sypher, Loss of the Self, 113–30.
probably the second-oldest profession 4. Cage, “Composition as Process,” 22.
in the world (the painter of that bison 5. Ibid., 23.
in the rock caves of Altamira could not 6. Suzuki translated the I Ching, which
have been far behind the ladies of the Cage used to create his chance compo-
evening on Atlantis). sitions.
The problem is less funny than it is 7. Kaprow and McLuhan described simi-
serious.” See Frankfurter, “Editorial: lar qualities as Zen. For a discussion of
Amateur Joy,” 15. Zen artworks see Hoover, Zen Culture,
80. For discussions of the perceived 225, 227. Recent scholarship insists on
threats of female amateur artists to the limitations of the American/West-
male professionals, see Bermingham, ern understanding of the intricacies of
Learning to Draw, 174–81; and Swinth, Zen and other forms of Eastern philos-
Painting Professionals, 27. ophy and religion. See Monroe, Third
81. Two months later Allan Kaprow’s Mind; and “Exhibition as Proposition.”
“‘Happenings’ in the New York Scene” 8. Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 83. For the
was published in the magazine. Given importance of Dewey’s Art as Experi-
that Happenings rendered distinctions ence in the development of Kaprow’s
between professional and amateur art- art and the relationship of Kaprow’s
ists irrelevant, the disappearance of the artistic practice to Zen, see Kelley,
column seems appropriate. Childsplay, 7–8, 200.
82. Berkman, “Uses of Spontaneity,” 23. 9. Caroline Jones also notes radical shifts
83. For discussions of professional art edu- in the artist’s role and production dur-
cation for U.S. women in the nine- ing this period. See Machine in the Stu-
teenth century, see Swinth, Painting dio, 57.
Professionals; Masten, Art Work; and 10. Arendt, Human Condition, 116 (here-
Prieto, At Home in the Studio. after cited parenthetically in this
84. Singerman, Art Subjects, 113 (hereafter chapter).
cited parenthetically in this chapter). 11. Arendt believes that every activity
85. The “fine arts” were generally unconnected with labor has become a
replaced with “visual arts” and hobby. Hobbies were a popular topic of
“design” around mid-century as a public discussion during the 1950s. See
means to avoid the hierarchical and Mulac, Hobbies; and Marling, As Seen on
value distinctions associated with the TV, chap. 2.
terms “fine arts” and “crafts.” Singer- 12. Jeffrey Weiss has recently discussed
man sees this switch as one of the Jasper Johns’s work in similar terms:
many effects of the influence of the “Johns brought the labor of painting to
Bauhaus (70). a new place, one that might be associ-

ated with the epistemology of the 25. Peckham, Man’s Rage, 314.
absurd.” Weiss, “Painting Bitten,” 26. 26. Brown, Life Against Death, 312.
13. Caroline Jones has discussed the paral- 27. Ibid., 297.
lelism between art practice of the 1960s 28. For a discussion of feminist critiques
and industrial labor practices: “The of the gendered nature of the “univer-
industrial aesthetic of postwar America sal” body in relation to body art, see
emphasized the performative over the Jones, Body Art. Jones notes that the
iconic.” See Machine in the Studio, 61. many female body artists active in the
This is evidenced in part by the heyday 1960s she interviewed stated that it
261
of documentary films of artists, which was only the men who were interested
showed artists at work in their studios. in Merleau-Ponty’s ideas (256).
14. Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto.” 29. In a 2007 interview Schneeman stated,
15. Kaprow, “Untitled Guidelines,” 709. “I have to remind myself how obsessed
16. Toffler, Culture Consumers, 50–54. The I was with process. Joan Mitchell’s
Situationist critique of exactly these work was another link to the physical-
attitudes in Europe should be seen as ization of the body since with her
the revolutionary side of the same work, I recognized the stroke as an
coin. event. All of the theoretical elements
17. Ibid., 56, 208. that come around my work, I keep
18. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 70–71 tracing them back to painting.” Jones
(hereafter cited parenthetically in this and Heathfield, eds., Perform Repeat
chapter). Record, 446.
19. McLuhan cited the Balinese as a cul- 30. Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics, 163.
ture that had no art because they “do 31. Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform
everything as well as possible” (72). Repeat Record, 448.
20. McLuhan’s debt to the process philoso-
phy of Henri Bergson is evident in
numerous references throughout Chapter 8
Understanding Media. The Medium Is the
Massage, McLuhan’s 1967 work with This chapter’s epigraph is drawn from
Quentin Fiore, opens with a quote Morris, Continuous Project, 84.
from Whitehead. In a 1969 interview 1. See Jones, Machine in the Studio, for a
McLuhan stated, “My books constitute detailed discussion of these films.
the process rather than the completed 2. Raynor, “Creative Process,” 38.
project of discovery.” Quoted in Theall, 3. Ibid.
Understanding McLuhan, 30. 4. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 201.
21. Judd, “Specific Objects.” 5. Caroline Jones noted Frank Stella’s
22. For a discussion of Robert Morris’s disgust with ARTnews rhetoric about
ideas, see chapter 8 of this volume, artists’ development. See Machine in the
“Process Art.” Studio, 120.
23. Formalist art theory was a key influ- 6. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 16.
ence on McLuhan, notably the ideas of 7. Krauss, “Voyage on the North Sea,” 30.
Heinrich Wölfflin and Adolf Hilde- 8. Rosenberg, De-Definition of Art, 29.
brand, both of whom are referred to in Rosenberg here emphasizes processes
Understanding Media. Donald Theall that do not require artistic interven-
discusses McLuhan in relation to the tion, but in the same essay he does
formalism of the literary New Critics. acknowledge process art as “redefining
See Understanding McLuhan, 80, 119. art as the process of the artist or his
24. Herbert Marcuse’s widely read Marxist materials,” which abolishes traditional
critique of industrial society described media requirements (37).
art as a means for proposing alterna- 9. Morris, Continuous Project, 43.
tive worlds in a manner reminiscent of 10. Ibid., 46.
the Surrealists. See One-Dimensional 11. Morris also curated the group show
Man, 238–39. “Nine at Leo Castelli” in December

1968. The show at Castelli’s warehouse minimalist art in his essay “Art and
included works by Giovanni Anselmo, Objecthood” is even more relevant to
Bill Bollinger, Eva Hesse, Steve Kalten- Morris’s subsequent discussions of
bach, Bruce Nauman, Alan Saret, Rich- process art. Fried’s position derived
ard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and Gilberto from Greenberg’s formalism and main-
Zorio. Much of the work was made of tains the aesthetic significance and
malleable modern materials, including autonomy of the artwork.
Serra’s lead Splashing. 21. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 6–7.
12. Ehrenzweig was very popular among 22. It was common to see process art as a
262
artists in the late 1960s. Robert Smith- challenge to Greenberg’s ideas. See
son was also deeply engaged with his Monte and Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 27.
notion of dedifferentiation. 23. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 27–28.
13. Morris, Continuous Project, 67. 24. Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon of 1755 is
14. Ibid., 68–69. the key text in this tradition. In 1940
15. Morris, Mind/Body Problem, 234. Greenberg published “Towards a
16. Morris, Continuous Project, 69. Newer Laocoon,” in which he argued
17. Morris also cited George Kubler’s The for the purity of the individual art
Shape of Time as the unique art histori- forms in modernism. Greenberg, Col-
cal text to address meaning as found in lected Essays, vol. 1, 23–37.
the making process rather than the 25. For a study of time and the new infor-
form of the final artwork. See Continu- mation age in the art of the 1960s, see
ous Project, 73 (hereafter cited paren- Lee, Chronophobia.
thetically in this chapter). 26. Marcia Tucker compared the work of
18. In 1970 Morris offered his artistic ser- the artists in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/
vices in an advertisement for the Peri- Materials to the music of Philip Glass
patetic Artists Guild, which identified and Steve Reich, which she described
the artist’s labor with both blue- and as a “constant present” created by
white-collar workers. See Berger, Laby- repetition without beginning, middle,
rinths; and Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, and end. Monte and Tucker, Anti-
on Morris’s active political engagement Illusion, 36.
during the 1960s. Many artists associated with process
19. Maurice Berger discusses Morris’s art were also engaged with “time-
engagement with contemporary politics based” arts. Robert Morris was seri-
and quotes Stanley Aronowitz: “The ously involved with modern dance in
nature of the New Left, summarized in the 1950s and 1960s, while Richard
a single word . . . [was] process. It sig- Serra made movies, the most famous of
naled an almost religious return to which, Hand Catching Lead (1968), is a
experience. . . . Rhetorical repetition, landmark of process art.
procedural debate, and moral invoca- 27. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 31
tions to kindness and equality were all (hereafter cited parenthetically in this
part of the process of community build- chapter).
ing.” Berger, Labyrinths, 93. In broad 28. Pamela Lee has noted that in the late
terms Morris’s concerns seem some- 1960s “the notion of process in art
what aligned with Walter Benjamin’s became as much a curatorial and criti-
position in “The Author as Producer,” cal thematic as it referred to the mak-
in which he stresses the need for the ing of art as such.” See “Some Kinds of
artist to engage with the means of pro- Duration,” 26.
duction as a strategy for turning con- 29. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 55.
sumers (the audience) into actors and 30. Levine, Profit Systems One.
producers. Benjamin sees Brecht’s epic 31. Kaprow, “Untitled Guidelines,” 711.
theater as exemplary in this regard and 32. For Kosuth’s view of process art as
describes it as a “dramatic laboratory.” “reactive” see Meyer, Conceptual Art, xi.
20. Michael Fried’s rejection of the physi- 33. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual
cal engagement predicated in much Art,” 80–82.

34. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual free in relation to capitalist labor, and
Art,” reproduced in Meyer, Conceptual the identity of the artist as created
Art, 175. through engagement in a free work pro-
35. Meyer, “Second Degree,” 102. Similar cess, see Marie, “Ad Reinhardt,” 471–75.
views are expressed in Lee, “Some 50. Looking back at the experience of
Kinds of Duration”; and Green, “When painting his black stripe paintings in
Attitudes Become,” 136. Robert Pincus- the late 1950s, Frank Stella said, “I
Witten distinguished between the early really wanted to make something. I
“pictorial/sculptural” phase of post- didn’t want to spend my time futzing
263
minimalism, peaking between 1968 and around or seeing how clever I could
1970, in which artists emphasized the be. . . . I really wanted to finish the
process of making, and a later concep- paintings that I had it in my mind to
tual phase that emerged around 1970. do.” He continued: “[The] process of
See Postminimalism, 16. [the stripe paintings was] simple-
36. Scientific analogies were common in minded. . . . But it was a lot more
discussions of the material concerns of intense; just doing those things, paint-
much process art. James Monte coming those stripes one after another is
pared Barry Le Va’s use of time in his quite enervating and numbing. It’s
distribution pieces to the way a bio- physically fairly exacting . . . I couldn’t
logist estimates the growth of micro- keep it up. The physical concentra-
organisms developed in a laboratory. tion . . . it was just a different kind of
See Monte and Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 9. way of being, a different kind of pro-
37. “For me the use of self-generating process. But the process was everything
cedures to make art was a liberation then, as it is now.” Jones, Machine in the
from the limitations of my own ego. It Studio, 121, 128.
represented an escape from individual- 51. Bryan-Wilson in Molesworth, ed., Work
ism by the objectification of the pro- Ethic, 158.
cess. I remember believing that it may 52. Quoted in Sultan, ed., Chuck Close
be the means of achieving Flaubert’s Prints, 132.
dream of the annihilation of the 53. De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” 526.
author.” Bochner quoted in Meyer, 54. Daniel Belgrad links the rise of pottery
“Second Degree,” 97. as a fine art medium to the widespread
38. Bochner quoted in Prinz, “Language Is desire for spontaneity in the arts in the
Not Transparent,” 194. postwar period. He credits the British
39. Bochner, “Serial Art Systems,” 40. potter Bernard Leach with initiating
40. Bochner associated his work with Gus- the development by bringing Japanese
tave Flaubert, a writer considered one potters to art schools like Black Moun-
of the initiators of modernist litera- tain College in the United States,
ture. The relation of Bochner’s work to where they taught Zen aesthetics as
modernist formalism is a major theme well as pottery. Belgrad, Culture of
of both James Monte’s and Marcia Spontaneity, 166–67. The inclusion of
Tucker’s catalog essays for Anti-Illusion: traditional craft programs in American
Procedures/Materials. university art departments and the
41. See Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” in adoption of Bauhaus approaches to art-
Originality of the Avant-Garde, 244–58. ist education were also important con-
42. Jones, Machine in the Studio. tributors to the elevation of traditional
43. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art.” crafts to the level of the fine arts.
44. Gilbert, “Herbie Goes Bananas,” 72. 55. See chapter 4, “New Conceptions of
45. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 86. the Artist’s Process,” and chapter 5,
46. Celant, “Art Povera,” 662–63. “The Artist’s Process as a Means of
47. Ibid., 663–64. Self-Realization,” in this volume for
48. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art, 28, 218, 53, 56. discussion of Collingwood’s ideas.
49. For a discussion of the Marxist signifi- 56. See Auther, String, Felt, Thread, in par-
cance of Reinhardt’s artistic labor as ticular chapter 2.

57. Ibid., 60–68, 80–86, 88. 69. Briony Fer has written that Hesse’s
58. Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” work has “an intensely made quality,
149. but what making constituted for Hesse
59. “Once technical skill is mastered in an does not seem to be self-evident. The
area, the making of an object . . . may label of ‘process art’ never quite did
offer a transcendent experience to the justice to Hesse’s project.” Fer, Infinite
maker as mastery of motor control Line, 118.
allows the maker to work in harmony 70. Lippard quoted in Auther, String, Felt,
with material substance to give form to Thread, 84.
264
mere shape—something of this Zen- 71. Auther, String, Felt, Thread, chap. 3.
like experience is what M. C. Richards Elyse Speaks suggests that Lee Bonte-
hints at in the title of her book Center- cou’s work of the 1960s and its critical
ing in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.” reception contributed to the successful
Risatti, Theory of Craft, 101–2. incorporation of traditional craft pro-
60. In practical terms this particular dis- cesses into the terrain of the expressive
tinction is a recent development. Fine art object. Her discussion of Bontecou
artists were long associated with spe- is a cogent examination of the intersec-
cific media, even though from the tion of the processes of making and
Renaissance on they based their eleva- ideological conceptions of craft, art,
tion from craftsmen to fine artists on hobbies, and gender. Speaks, “Terms of
their conceptual activity. See chap. 1, Craft.”
“Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor 72. Rosenberg, De-Definition of Art, 40.
Prior to the Nineteenth Century,” for 73. Singerman, Art Subjects, 70–72. On the
Renaissance distinctions of the fine educational value of “creative problem-
arts from crafts. solving skills” in the arts, see also
61. Dormer, “Craft and the Turing Test,” Efland, History of Art Education, 237.
147. 74. Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism, 21–23.
62. For a more extended discussion of the 75. Ehrenzweig gives examples of the Bau-
relationship of handcrafts to the body haus, which once liberated students
and the physical world as well as from academic clichés only to founder
human thought and language, see in rational analysis of empty form; and
Brett, Rethinking Decoration, 225–57. of Rauschenberg’s revelatory teacher
63. Metcalf, “Craft and Art,” 80. who cut up one of his drawings to
64. Risatti, Theory of Craft, 99. make a collage, which is now a wholly
65. Ibid., 108. standard procedure with predictable
66. On the craft revival of the 1960s and results “evident in commercial galler-
1970s see Auther, String, Felt, Thread, ies everywhere.” Ehrenzweig, Hidden
25–28. Order of Art, 55.
67. Morris, Continuous Project, 68, 87. 76. Ibid., 58, 62. Ehrenzweig was a psychol-
68. “This tendency to camouflage is an ogist, and his primary interest was
extension of Hesse’s earlier crafts defining the psychological role of art
approach in which she compulsively for the individual and the community.
wrapped, coiled, threaded and lay- Briefly, he believed that art was a
ered.” Douglas Crimp quoted in means to instantiate unconscious irra-
Auther, String, Felt, Thread, 83. Pincus- tional creative impulses. Rational con-
Witten describes her “compulsive coil- trol of artistic production obstructed
ing” as “a kind of pleasure-inducing the artist’s creativity, the ability to turn
craftswork,” and he connected her the chaos of the universe into a unique
compulsive activity to the obsessive pattern: “Creativity can almost be
and compulsive craftwork of Lucas defined as the capacity for transform-
Samaras and Lee Bontecou, other art- ing the chaotic aspect of undifferentia-
ists he also associated with postmini- tion into a hidden order that can be
malism. Pincus-Witten, accompanied by a comprehensive (syn-
Postminimalism, 49, 82. creatic) vision” (127).

77. Ibid., 146. 13. Morris, Continuous Project, 251, 254, 255,
78. Singerman, Art Subjects, 150–64. 250.
79. Morris, Continuous Project, 75. 14. David Brett makes a similar point: “The
skillful and loving engagement with
materials, with the brute stuff of the
Chapter 9 world, is an ethical engagement
because it is the point at which meta-
1. Marsha Meskimmon has made process phor is created. We are what we make.”
a central concept in her analysis of con- See Rethinking Decoration, 257.
265
temporary feminist art. In her view pro- 15. Buchloh, “Gabriel Orozco,” 207.
cess is a means to materialize female 16. Orozco, Gabriel Orozco, 121.
subjectivity and the active encounter of 17. Fer, “The Scatter,” 224.
self with the wider social body, as well 18. Orozco, Gabriel Orozco, 14.
as central to the materialization of 19. Lacy, “Debated Territory,” 174.
female desire. See Women Making Art, 20. Jones and Heathfield, eds., Perform
73, 94. Repeat Record, 460.
2. Montano, You Too, 30. 21. Bois and Krauss, Formless, 137, 202, 214,
3. The sociologist Anthony Giddens gives 240.
creativity a central place in his discus- 22. Ibid., 245.
sion of modern conceptions of self- 23. See for example the works of Jeff Koons,
identity. See Modernity and Self, 35 and as well as that of the YBAs (Young Brit-
41. For psychological approaches to the ish Artists), specifically, Damien Hirst,
study of creativity see Runco and Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas.
Albert, eds., Theories of Creativity; and 24. Stockholder and Scanlan, “Art and
Runco, Critical Creative Processes. Labor,” 51.
4. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 106, 125. 25. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party offers an
5. McNiff, Trust the Process, 11, 5, 2. interesting example of the difficulties
6. Sartwell, Art of Living, xi, 12. faced by an artist who relies heavily on
7. Ibid., 32, 125, 70. collaboration and retains sole author-
8. Shusterman, Performing Live, 3, 32–33. ship of a work. Chicago has long been
9. Shusterman sees somaesthetics as the criticized for failing to give due credit
source of nonlinguistic forms of under- to her collaborators, even though she
standing, which are not interpretive. made collaboration central to the real-
He cites Dewey, Foucault, and Merleau- ization of the project. Hundreds of vol-
Ponty as earlier thinkers who explored unteers worked on The Dinner Party,
this area of understanding. Ibid., 135. and a documentary film recorded the
Mark Johnson’s Body in the Mind is also interactions of the group in the process
a key text for Shusterman’s somaes- of creating the work.
thetics. 26. In 1994 Christo retroactively assigned
10. Shusterman, Performing Live, 148, 162. dual authorship of all “his” large-scale
11. The craftsperson’s physical engage- installations to both himself and his
ment is often opposed to the pre- wife. Prior to this act they were pub-
sumed dominance of visuality in licly attributed to him alone. While this
modern art. See Adamson, Thinking shift in attribution granted his wife
Through Craft, 39, 165–69. The sociolo- equal partnership, their now joint
gist Richard Sennett also theorizes the authorship is still far from full
significance of experience and bodily acknowledgment of the all the partici-
knowledge from a pragmatist view- pants integral to the works’ realization.
point. He sees this form of knowledge It is not difficult to envision a list of
as creating a continuum between the all the people involved that would be
organic/physical and the social world comparable to the seemingly endless
of human relations. See The Crafts- credits of a contemporary Hollywood
man, 290. movie.
12. Morris, “Writing with Davidson,” 620. 27. Birnbaum, “Art of Education,” 476.

28. The Portikus video of the project and, indeed, the organism. . . . The sys-
shows that the labor involved was fun- tems biology approach re-adapts biol-
damentally what was needed to run an ogy to the terms of information
ordinary small salad dressing produc- processing and networking. . . . Main-
tion factory. The only non-mundane stream biotech realizes DNA-as-data,
part of the process was the exposure of then systems biology maybe seen as an
the salad dressing to multiple video actualizing of genetic information as
monitors playing the films of Kevin process and interaction.” See “Open
Costner that instilled the Costner Source DNA,” 36–37.
266
essence. 39. Last, “Systematic Inexhaustion,” 118–
29. See for example Sennett, The Crafts- 20, 115.
man; and Crawford, Shop Class as Soul- 40. Lacy, “Debated Territories,” 174–75.
craft. For a discussion of Rhoades’s 41. Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages,” 46.
work as part of a “slacker aesthetics” 42. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 12. Kester’s
that undermines the work ethic of art- concept of the dialogic is derived from
works, see Drucker, Sweet Dreams, the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.
95–102. 43. Kester, One and the Many, 114–15.
30. “Process” is commonly used to 44. Kester defines art “through its function
describe the aims of work associated as a more or less open space within
with relational aesthetics. See Steiner, contemporary culture: a space in which
“Lost Paradise,” 142–43; and Thomas, certain questions can be asked, certain
“.all hawaii eNtrées,” 232. critical analyses articulated, that would
31. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 54. not be accepted or tolerated else-
32. Deleuze has been described as a pro- where.” See Conversation Pieces, 68. Art
cess philosopher and linked to White- is, thus, a social context that can allow
head. He also wrote a book on Bergson, greater freedom to imagine and realize
whose ideas influenced his own. See solutions to community problems. Art-
Clark, “Whiteheadian Chaosmos.” ists are similarly people presumed to
33. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 103. be free from institutional goals and
34. Ibid., 47, 110, 111. requirements and thereby able to take
35. See Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational a broader view of any given situation
Aesthetics”; and Foster, “Arty Party.” (ibid., 101).
36. See Zahm, “L’hiver de l’amour,” 139–40. 45. Ibid., 90.
37. Kwon, One Place, 24, 50, 31. Kwon also 46. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 19, 255.
quotes James Meyer: “The functional 47. Shaun McNiff states, “It is such a com-
site is a process, an operation occur- monplace saying within the creative
ring between sites, a mapping of insti- arts that until recently I have been
tutional and discursive filiations and reluctant to utter the three words for
the bodies that move between fear of being trite: ‘Trust the process.’
them. . . . It is an informational site . . . Whenever I find myself in a difficult
a temporary thing; a movement; a situation, the principle is reaffirmed.”
chain of meanings devoid of a particu- See Trust the Process, 13
lar focus” (29). 48. Johanna Drucker has described the
38. To cite one example, Eugene Thacker “contemporary attention to use and
describes systems approaches in biol- process” in terms of “the affective ges-
ogy as “an alternative way of under- ture [that] brings the inert to life, it
standing the organism at the molecular rehumanizes material, not in the
level, without over-emphasis on indi- romantic sense but in a production
vidual genes or genomes. . . . Process sense. Affectivity gives material a sense
and interaction became the starting of intention and form, of sentience and
points for research, rather than identi- action, it shifts it out of the mere mate-
fication of individual genes. Such a rial while engaging with it, tweaking the
focus on process and interaction stuff, making it active.” See Sweet
implies a wider view of the living cell, Dreams, 173.

49. Brett, Rethinking Decoration, 257. easily recognized in certain arenas,
50. See Dormer, “Craft and the Turing although even in the highest reaches of
Test,” 152, 219, 224. the art world it is most often a ques-
51. The cover copy for McNiff ’s Trust the tion of whether someone is a success-
Process encapsulates this pervasive ful artist. If any individual claims to be
attitude: “Whether in painting, poetry, an artist there are virtually no grounds
performance, music, dance, or life, now for contesting the truth of the
there is an intelligence working in assertion. Hans Abbing has pointed out
every situation. This force is the pri- that the art world defines professional
267
mary carrier of creation. If we trust it artists not on whether they make a liv-
and follow its natural movement, it ing from their art but on whether they
will astound us with its ability to find a strive for art world recognition. See
way through problems. . . . There is a Why Are Artists Poor?, 147. Glenn Adam-
magic to this process that cannot be son noted that one distinction between
controlled by the ego. Somehow it the contemporary artist and the crafts-
always finds the way to the place person is that the craftsperson has to
where you need to be, and a destina- distinguish him- or herself from the
tion you never could have known in hobbyist, whereas the artist, since any-
advance. When everything seems as if thing can be a work of art, does not
it is hopeless and going nowhere . . . face this difficulty: “There is no such
trust the process.” thing as an amateur contemporary art-
52. By this I mean the artist’s self-identity. ist, only an unsuccessful one.” See
The artist’s identity is not always so Thinking Through Craft, 143.

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Index
abjection, 230 Bell, Clive, 74, 79, 81, 113–14, 117

Abstract Expressionism, 159, 168, 171, 208, Bell, Daniel, 14
211 Berenson, Bernard, 110, 134
academic art theory and education, 25–26, Bergson, Henri, 125–26, 177, 190, 255 n. 33,
32–33, 59–63, 82 261 n. 20
drawing and, 23–24, 33–34, 107 Berkman, Aaron, 166–68
academic painting techniques, 59–64, 78–79 Beuys, Joseph, 179, 192, 211
Acconci, Vito, 179–80 Bishop, Claire, 244–45
Albers, Joseph, 107–8, 188, 201, 215 Black Mountain College, 170
amateur art, 6, 17, 57, 83, 181–82, 247 Blaine, Nell, 188–89, 258 n. 40
ARTnews and, 159–69 Bochner, Mel, 190, 192, 206–7, 263 n. 40
Arts and Crafts movement and, 50, 129 Boime, Albert, 60
women and, 12–13, 53, 114–15, 153, 167, Bois, Yve-Alain, 230, 249 n. 18, 251 n. 46
250 n. 27 Boris, Elaine, 51–52
Antoni, Janine, 232 Bouguereau, William–Adolphe, 63
Arendt, Hannah, 173–74, 199, 205, 219–20 Bourdieu, Pierre, 113–14
The Human Condition, 177–82, 185 Bourriaud, Nicholas, 238–40, 244
Aristotle, 16–18, 21, 28, 31 Brown, G. Baldwin, 29
art for art’s sake, 18, 120, 162, 164, 194, 226 Brown, Norman O., 173, 185
Arte Povera, 192, 210 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 209, 213
ARTnews, 95–96, 153–54, 159–68, 188–89, 261 Buchloh, Benjamin, 209, 228
n. 5 Burckhardt, Rudolph, 147
Arts and Crafts movement, 42–55, 82, 105, Burford, Alison, 20
129, 162 Burgin, Victor, 41, 179, 202
Ashbee, C. R., 51 Burnham, Jack, 192, 202–4, 209
Auther, Elissa, 214–15, 219
automatism, 102, 122–24, 131–32, 144–47, Cage, John, 173, 175–76, 197, 210
157–58, 255 n. 30 Cahiers d’Art, 81, 91–92, 94–95, 123, 153–54,
252 n. 13
Balzac, Honoré de, 6–9, 66, 141, 146, 153, 246 Celant, Germano , 192, 210–11
Barbizon painters, 62, 64 Cennini, Cennino, 22
Barnes, Alfred, 121, 254 n. 22 Cézanne, Paul, 6–9, 63–69, 86–87, 117–18
Barolsky, Paul, 31–32 Collingwood on, 110, 134
Bataille, Georges, 230 Giacometti and, 139
Bauhaus, 58, 105, 107–8, 119, 169 Merleau-Ponty on, 112, 129–31

Chardin, Jean–Baptiste, 86–87, 127 DIY (do-it-yourself ), 6, 183–84, 224, 233–34
Chicago, Judy, 13, 186, 223, 265 n. 25 Donovan, Tara, 235–36
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 192, 211, 236, 265 Dormer, Peter, 225
n. 26 Dubuffet, Jean, 175
Churchill, Winston, 159–61, 163–64, 166 Duchamp, Marcel, 5, 142, 197, 203–4, 248 n. 14
Claesz, Pieter, 86
Clayre, Alasdair, 42, 48 Earth Art, 192
Close, Chuck, 1, 192, 213, 221 Eastlake, Lady, 55–56
Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 154, 252 n. 27 education of artists, 106, 143–44, 168–72, 219–
280
Cobden-Sanderson, T. J. , 50 21, 258 n. 45. See also academic art
Collingwood, R. G., 109–11, 118, 121–22, 124– theory and education
26, 134–35, 214 Aristotle on, 32–33
conceptual art, 5, 178–79, 190, 197, 206–7, Bauhaus and, 107–8
228–29 Collingwood on, 110
Constructivism, 58, 90, 98–99 Kant on, 35–36
Couture, Thomas, 61, 250 n. 7 Matisse and, 80–81
craft, 72, 198, 213–19, 233–34, 245. See also William Morris on, 48
Arts and Crafts movement Ehrenzweig, Anton, 194, 197, 210, 220–21, 262
Collingwood on, 109–11, 134 n. 12
distinct from fine art, 46, 72–73, 106, Ernst, Max, 122, 255 n. 38
218 L’Esprit Nouveau, 98
Focillon on, 101 evolutionary process, 96, 121, 132, 194, 208,
Kant on, 35 222
in Middle Ages, 21–22 formalism and, 74, 174
in the Renaissance, 23–25 Mondrian and, 87–91
theory of, 5, 28, 216, 245 existentialism, 116, 129, 139, 142–44, 150, 159
training, 32–33, 107 expression and self-expression, 67, 72, 106,
women and, 13, 52–3, 232–34 123, 147, 154
craftsperson, artist as, 62–63, 82 amateur artists and, 161–68
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 224–25, 238 Collingwood on, 109, 125, 134
craft and, 213–14
Day, Lewis, 49 Dewey on, 121, 124–25, 134
De Kooning, Willem, 6–9, 96, 146–53, 157–59, Fiedler on, 116
170 Hegel on, 37–38
decorative art, 44, 47, 52–54, 100, 105, 227–29 Lears on, 54
Degas, Edgar, 103 Matisse and, 76–81, 83, 92–93, 97
Delacroix, Eugène, 60–61, 70, 127 Merleau-Ponty on, 129–30, 135, 142, 145
Deleuze, Gilles, 238, 241 Picasso and, 95, 157
De Maria, Walter, 213 Rank on, 128–29
Denis, Maurice, 70, 74, 99 rejection of, 174–75, 212, 215
deskilling, 170–71, 228, 237 Romanticism and, 60
Dewey, John, 169, 176, 227, 238, 240 expressionism, 37, 103–4
Art as Experience, 14, 118–22, 124–26,
134, 225–26, 256 n. 55 failure, 6–8, 45, 58, 81, 145–50
Die Brücke, 103 Cézanne and, 66–67
difficulty, 4, 6, 29–31, 128, 138, 142 Giacometti and, 141
Cézanne and, 63, 66, 68–69 Michelangelo and, 31–32
De Kooning and, 146–47, 151–53 modern art and, 69
Giacometti and, 139–41 Fauvism, 76, 97
Matisse and, 93 feminism, 12–13, 136–37, 185–87, 218–19, 223–
Motherwell and, 145–46 24, 265 n. 1
Pollock and, 158 Féré, Charles, 82–83
Dion, Mark, 242 Fiedler, Konrad, 115–17
division of labor, 39–43, 47, 54, 99, 106, 140 finish, 44–45, 47, 60–66
Index

Flaubert, Gustave, 113, 263 n. 37, 263 n. 40 Hegel, G. W. F. , 34, 36–38, 40, 42
Focillon, Henri, 9, 14, 248 n. 12 Henry, Charles, 74, 251 n. 41
The Life of Forms in Art, 10–11, 101–3, Hess, Thomas, 96, 147–48, 152–53, 157, 160,
126–27 165
formalism, 3–5, 7, 11, 74–75, 197, 207 Hesse, Eva, 108, 136–37, 192, 214–15, 217–19
Collingwood on, 110 Hirst, Damien, 9, 265 n. 23
Denis and, 99 Hofmann, Hans, 171–72, 255 n. 34
Dewey and, 120 Höller, Carsten, 239–40
Fiedler and, 115 Holty, Carl, 91
281
Fry and, 133 Hsieh, Tehching, 229
Greenberg and, 132, 157, 174, 184, 200– Huyghe, Pierre, 239
201, 230
Judd and, 174 imagination, 25, 27, 35–36, 51, 56, 77
limitations of, 15, 217 Impressionism, 58, 61–72, 77–79
McLuhan and, 184, 261 n. 23 industrial design, 105–7
rejection of, 200–201, 203 industrial labor, 39–40, 54, 162, 228, 261 n. 13
Reinhardt and, 212 industrial processes and production, 3, 4, 47,
Frankenthaler, Helen, 12, 258 n. 40 217, 233
Frankfurter, Albert, 96, 161, 163–65, 167 adopted by artists, 58, 70, 73, 196, 207–
Fried, Michael, 184, 202, 226, 254 n. 21, 262 8, 215
n. 20 Purism and, 96–100
Fry, Roger, 67–68, 74–75, 92, 117, 133–34, 248 Ruskin on, 43, 53
n. 11 industrialization, 21, 33–34, 53, 58, 82, 246–47
Futurism, 97–98 Dewey on, 118
effect on art, 62, 73, 75, 209
Gauguin, Paul, 58, 102–3 informe, 230–31
Geffroy, Gustave, 117–18 Ingres, J. A. D. , 61
gender bias and modern art, 12, 114–15, 136– inspiration, 23, 56, 60–2, 97, 116, 215
37, 152–53, 180, 258 n. 40 Hegel on, 37
genius, 67, 96–97, 220, 237, 247 Ruskin on, 46
Hegel on, 37 Surrealism and, 123
Kant on, 35–36 Itten, Johannes, 107–8
Marx on, 40
Picasso as, 154 Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard, 96–100
style of, 60–61, 81 Jones, Caroline, 208, 261 n. 13
Géricault, Théodore, 60 Judd, Donald, 108, 174, 184, 208
Gérome, Jean-Léon, 61–62
Giacometti, Alberto, 9, 132, 139–42, 146, 163, Kac, Edouardo, 242
169 Kandinsky, Wassily, 75, 85, 89, 132
Giacometti, Diego, 140 Kant, Immanuel, 34–36, 38, 254 n. 21
Gillick, Liam, 240 Kaprow, Allan, 173–76, 180–81, 184, 205–6,
Goodnough, Robert, 156–58 210, 260 n. 81
Greenberg, Clement, 74–75, 226, 251 n. 43, Kester, Grant, 244
262 n. 22, 262 n. 24 Klee, Paul, 131
“Avant Garde and Kitsch,” 200–201 Koons, Jeff, 5, 9, 41, 232–36, 265 n. 23
formalist evolution and, 89–90, 132, Kosuth, Joseph, 5, 206
151, 174 Krauss, Rosalind, 190–91, 230, 249 n. 18
on De Kooning, 149, 151 Kwon, Miwon, 241
on Pollock, 155–57
Guattari, Felix, 238–39 Lacy, Suzanne, 229, 243–44
Last, Nana, 241–42
Haacke, Hans, 173, 179, 192, 203 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 54–55, 248 n. 1
Happenings, 36, 174, 180–81, 196, 202–3. See Leonardo da Vinci, 25–30, 32, 45, 60, 112, 127
also Kaprow, Allan Le Va, Barry, 192–93, 263 n. 36
Index

Levine, Les, 203–6, 209 moral purpose and instruction, 23–24, 50–51,
LeWitt, Sol, 36, 192, 206–8, 213, 221, 237 60, 142–43, 145
craft processes and, 218, 228 existentialism and, 139
liberal arts vs. mechanical arts, 22–25 omission of, 82, 100
Lichtenstein, Roy, 179 Morris, Robert, 184, 188, 192–203, 206–7, 221,
Lippard, Lucy, 218–19 227–31
Lou, Liza, 232–35 craft and, 214–17
Ehrenzweig and, 220
Malevich, Kasimir, 75, 85, 89 Morris, William, 29, 46–49, 53, 105, 162, 217
282
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 65 Morisot, Berthe, 12
Manet, Edouard, 65 Motherwell, Robert, 142–43, 145–46, 165, 170
manual labor, 38–39, 49, 54, 84, 151, 238 music, 17, 79, 114, 175–76, 236, 262 n. 26
in Ancient Greece, 16–19
in the Renaissance, 27 N55, 241
modern artists and, 59, 100–107, 136 Namuth, Hans, 156
of the artist, 6, 10, 62, 72, 94, 232 Neo-Fauvism, 123
of the craftsperson, 23, 28, 46, 215 Neo-Impressionism, 58, 70–74, 76, 79, 85, 97
Ruskin on, 42–45 New York school, 9, 95, 143–46, 158–59, 165,
Martin, Agnes, 192, 215, 228 170
Marx, Karl, 34, 39–42, 48, 113, 234, 250 n. 9 Nietzsche, 177
Masson, André, 122 Nolde, Emil, 103–4, 106
Matisse, Henri, 58, 103, 123, 148, 150, 153
Dewey on, 119–20 Orozco, Gabriel, 228–29, 231
Notes of a Painter, 75–84, 92, 97, 99, 109, Ozenfant, Amédée, 96–100, 252 n. 16
161
Merleau-Ponty on, 10, 131, 155 Paine, Roxy, 242
photographic documentation of paint- Palissy, Bernard, 28
ing, 91–96 Paracelsus, 28
McLuhan, Marshall, 173–4, 182–85, 195, 211, Parreno, Philippe, 239
216, 241 Parrhasios, 20, 32
McNiff, Shaun, 225, 267 n. 51 Pearson, Ralph, 165
mechanical processes and techniques, 21, Peckham, Morse, 185, 195–97, 203
27–30, 33, 72–73, 78, 251 n. 42 Pevsner, Nicholas, 24
amateurs and, 167–68 Pheidias, 17
Hegel on, 37 phenomenology, 69, 116, 118, 129, 133, 196–97.
Kant on, 35–36 See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
LeWitt on, 206 photographic documentation of artistic pro-
McLuhan on, 182–84 cess, 78, 92–96, 147, 153–56, 190, 252
photography as, 55–57 n. 16
Ruskin on, 44–46 photography, 55–57, 87
mechanization, 42, 161–62 Picasso, Pablo, 103, 138, 148–50, 153–54, 169,
Meissonier, Ernest, 61 171
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 132–33, 135, 142, 145, Cahiers d’Art and, 81, 91–92, 123
186, 223 Guernica, 95–96, 154, 170, 257 n. 30
on Cézanne, 10, 68–69, 112, 129–31 The Unknown Masterpiece and, 6–7
on Matisse, 10, 131, 155 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 190–91, 220, 263 n. 35
Michelangelo, 30–32, 112, 133 Pissarro, Camile, 65, 71
minimalism, 193–94, 196, 199, 202–3, 209, Pliny, 20, 32
215 Plutarch, 17, 20
Miró, Joan, 122 Pollock, Jackson, 155–58, 165, 172, 208
Mondrian, Piet, 75, 85, 119, 132, 169 Kaprow on, 174
series of, 87–91, 207–8 Morris on, 193, 197–98, 200
Monet, Claude, 9, 64, 85–87, 207–8 Schneemann on, 186
Montano, Linda, 13, 224 Polykleitos, 20
Index

Pop Art, 179, 209, 215 Summers, David, 27–28
Postimpressionism, 69, 82, 85. See also Neo- Surrealism, 94, 101, 126. See also automatism
Impressionism Suzuki, D. T., 168, 176
Purism, 58, 96–100, 119, 122 Sypher, Wylie, 175
systems aesthetics, 202–9
Rank, Otto, 127–29
Raphael, 30, 104 tacit knowledge, 28, 216, 249 n. 34
Raynor, Vivien, 188–89, 259 n. 40 Taylorism, 98
Realism, 62, 64, 79 Tériade, 123
283
Reinhardt, Ad, 170–71, 189, 192, 201–2, 211–13, therapy, art as, 50, 54–55, 83, 100, 217, 247
215 amateur artists and, 161–62
relational aesthetics, 229, 238–40, 244 Hegel on, 37–38
Rhoades, Jason, 2, 238 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 239–40
Risatti, Howard, 216 Toffler, Alvin, 181–82
Rose, Margaret, 40
Rosenberg, Harold, 142, 171–72, 174, 191–92, Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 13, 179–80, 186,
211, 219 192, 219, 223
“The American Action Painters,” 9, 11, unfinished artwork, 20, 31–32, 61, 65–66, 72, 89
144–47, 154–55, 157–59 The Unknown Masterpiece. See Balzac,
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, Emile, 38–39 Honoré de
Ruskin, John, 34, 53, 97, 105–6, 162, 217
The Stones of Venice, 21–22, 42–49 Van Gogh, Vincent, 58, 112
Varian, Elayne, 188, 190
Sartre, Jean–Paul, 139, 186 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 29–32
Sartwell, Crispin, 226, 228–39, 238, 240 Vernet, Horace, 40–41
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 197 Vigée–Lebrun, Elizabeth, 12
Schapiro, Meyer, 68, 117–18 Vollard, Ambrose, 6
Schapiro, Miriam, 13, 186
Schiller, Friedrich, 39–40 Wagner, Ann, 136–37
Schneemann, Carolee, 1, 13, 186–87, 223 Warhol, Andy, 41, 179, 203, 208, 233
serial production, 84–92, 207–8 Weiss, Jeffrey, 91, 95
Serra, Richard, 108, 196, 201, 216, 220, 230 Whitehead, Alfred North, 125–26, 173, 177,
Seurat, Georges, 71, 251 n. 42 190, 195, 223, 255 n. 32
Shiff, Richard, 64, 151 Williams, Raymond, 51
Shusterman, Richard, 14–15, 226–29, 238, 240
Signac, Paul, 70–73, 76 Zen Buddhism, 184, 212–13, 226–27, 260 n. 7,
sincerity, 80, 107–8, 121, 135, 139, 251 n. 52 263 n. 54
Singerman, Howard, 169–71, 219–21 Cage and, 176
Smith, Pamela, 28 Kaprow and, 174
Smithson, Robert, 192, 203, 206, 210, 220 Zervos, Christian, 81, 91, 95, 123, 154
somaesthetics, 14, 226, 265 n. 9 Zeuxis, 18–20, 25
Steinberg, Leo, 158–59 Zola, Emile, 65, 67, 69, 112
Stella, Frank, 197, 208, 227, 261 n. 5, 263 n. 50 Zuccaro, Federico, 32
Index

“All About Process brings a wealth of art-historical knowledge and perceptive
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—Richard Shusterman, author of Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics
“This is an elegant, clear text that will serve as an excellent primer for anyone
interested in the histories of thinking about making and the artistic process. Art
students as well as students of aesthetics and history of art will benefit from its
careful, thoughtful synthesis of an array of complex, foundational texts pertaining to
the theme of ‘process’ and making.”
—Jo Applin, author of Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field
In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary
concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume,
Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing
concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of
modern and contemporary art.
This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed
examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as
well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and
John Dewey. Placing “process art” within a larger historical context, Grant looks at
the changing relations of the artist’s labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial
production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body
and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist’s role in
modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic
theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor.
Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and

contemporary art reveals how artists’ explicit engagement with the concept fits into a
broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.
Kim Grant is Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art at the
University of Southern Maine. She is the author of Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and
Reception.
Cover illustration: Janine Antoni, Slumber, 1993 The Pennsylvania State University Press
© Janine Antoni; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring
Augustine, New York. University Park, Pennsylvania
www.psupress.org

About: Process

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About The Theory and Discourse

Process Kim Grant

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The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

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Introduction: 6 The Artist’s Process at

1 Conceptualizing the Artist’s 7 Art and Social Processes

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Process invites risk, uncertainty, vision, unpredictability, concentration and

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Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor

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Conceptualizing the Artist’s Labor

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Languages of sensate judgment have probably always been integral to

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