Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Thoughts on process and content

So I've been reading The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (Oxford University Press 1992 ed. Stephanie Terenzio) -- some of the best writing on art from an artist I've ever come across.

"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 modulation 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. The are a succession 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... the closer one gets to the absolute, the more mercilessly all the weaknesses of my work are revealed."

I love the idea of a work beginning as "a series of mistakes" and "correction of mistakes by feeling". He describes the process of working without an agenda (i.e. overt social or political statement) and the process through which decisions are made honestly and beautifully.

I work my two-dimensional work in a very similar manner -- though right now I do begin with intended forms and emotions, trying to balance aleatoric and intentional approaches. Those innumerable trials and errors -- that history -- is as much a part of the piece as the "finished" presentation. I like to take that to another level, as well, constantly working on multiple pieces in several mediums which (deliberately) engage each other in feedback loops.

I've had a lot of trouble with this one myself. People will ask, especially when one works non-objectively or very abstractly, "What is this about?". We (especially formally taught artists, but also Americans in general) are trained to approach engagement with an artwork as a process of accessing content -- that the only possible "work of the work" (thank you, Walter Benjamin), it's purpose, is to either promote a certain agenda or to be some sort of commentary on the structure it exists within.

Now, one could argue that any artwork promotes an agenda, or is self-reflexive; any idea, of course, has a relationship to the worldview-paradigm it exists in. But to work outside of that intentionality -- this makes a work (and it's "work") difficult to describe, as even the structure of description (and hence, validation) exists within the "engagement to access content" paradigm.

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