It’s hard to draw lines through history.

Or, I should say, it’s easy to draw lines through history, and that’s why we must beware. We are encouraged in this program to find a cohesive line through our body of work. At this stage, I’d say the term “body of work” is itself a dubious claim for many of us to make, but more to the point is the worry that such a focus on alignment and organization of our works is misguided, or even wrong-headed.

When making things fit becomes the dominant mindset, it’s probably time to question your goals.

Some Robert Morris to this point, speaking of the art world in general (back in 1973!) - my emphases added:

“The conversion of a sequence of past events into a series of dialectical steps confers on the past more than directional progress. At the root of hypostatizing differences into thesis and antithesis, oscillations and contrasts into contradictions, lies the desperate, animistic compulsion to deny the contingency of man’s acts at all costs. The uses of the past to illustrate the shape of art’s change as a coherent progression informs all recent art theory. Institutionalized memory remains the primary mythical arena, dominated and terrorized by the inadmissable suspicion that time passes the more or less random processes of cultural change rather than receiving the impress of evolving systems.” (Morris, Robert, 1973. Some Splashes in the Ebb Tide. In Continuous Project Altered Daily, October Books, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. p, 125)

The process has its political and economic basis as well, for all theories of art’s recent history are also theories of scarcity in which a given “line” of works and people are posited as the dignifigant one… The game of building a dialectical line allows for rationalizations of more discontintuities - in fact, it demands them. Which way one works backward into the past is not so much of consequence as is the maintenance of agreed-upon exclusive nodes along the line. One of discourse’s major tasks is to see to the maintenance of exclusivity. A requirement for these few is not so much that they create a single, unique work but rather that they produce by reptition or slight variation a large amount of one kind of thing: a kind of “modulated” scarcity suitable for the present disttribution systems… (ibid, p 125-126)

Part of this is simple relativist nihilism. I won’t comment on the economical side of this art-theorizing and making model, because I know nothing about it, but it does help me think through my own processes that I have adopted while at RISD. You see, I have a guilty admission to make, but I am starting to think it is this lazy selfish vice of mine that actually suceeds in producing somewhat decent work in this program. The party line of art expounding an idea, illustrating a theory, or, perhaps most insidious, making a point seems a recipe for dull, pretentious art that is also inneffective. Art may be very good at many things, but it is not a good tool for explaining science or motivating revolt.

I am getting off point. The sentence I wanted to type as my guilty admission is “most of my best stuff starts with no idea. The corrolary to this is “I am beginning to think that my best stuff starts with no idea, and that those pieces built to illustrate or explore concepts are either dull as art or innefective at doing what they ostensibly wanted.”

The things I have made that I consider more sucessful have come from a material investigation (build a trailer as if it is a boat, venerate the neglected side of plywood) a skills-building exercise (learn mechanics), or a process-driven directive (craft a useless and self-consuming loop for myself).

The things I have built which I consider less successful have come from more specific, even convoluted directives (create something that makes visible the information transfer between human and plant using wireless communication; develop a process that allows cultures to see and enact the gaps in assumptions between them).

Perhaps the distinction here is not idea vs. no idea, but simple idea sucessfully enacted vs. convoluted concept not yet achieved.

Hmm.

Well, time for more Morris:

“Animating a pluralism of modalities, however, was an underlying commonality of means that might be termed the strategy of automated making. Although it has not been emphasized, it seems impotent (sic?) to recognize that the gradual, pervavise development of the automated came to infect so many areas of art and to join in the mutual task of undermining the heroic. Frank Stella initiated some of the first of these structuralist strategies by converting the process of painting into a system of picture-making in which the arbitrary and incremental are ablished in favor of compulsory development. The weight of the art act is thereby shifted from judgements about termination toward decision for initiation… (ibid, p, 127, 129)

So the distinction I am adressing here is really idea as process vs. idea as concept. In the misguided machines, the starting idea was to learn mechanics. Through this process I began to attach meaning to the movements I was crafting, and arrived at the concept of a misguided machine. This concept then became a process, as I applied the notion of misguided in a variety of ways (misguided approaches to materials) and toyed with the identity of the machine (make me the misguided machine). *

Which brings us neatly to the next passage I have chosen to quote from Robert Morris:

“And as the making phase diffracted into its separate parts, the artist began to face his activities in a different direction. If art previously had something of the character of an act taken against the world, or more accurately, against the world once removed by the isolation of the studio, it ceased to address itself to that lonely situation of rehearsal where the individual act was adjusted and finalized for subsequent presentation as communication in a gallery. Armed with an ever more tightly wound sense of the a priori, the artist turned more directly to address his audience, to release his plan energized by this or that self-completing system, without the need for rehearsal. Moving closer to his audience, the artist finally seized the act of transmission itself as subject. Object, in one form or another, still mediated, but with all the transparency that linguistic, photographic, or personal presences could provide. No doubt Vito Acconci’s Seed Bed achieved a kind of ultimate transparency and directness of transmission by requiring the audience to assume without proof his behavior and to fill in its contours with their own fantasy. The transmission of fantasy is possibly the ultimate reduction of the mediating object and the most inclusive use of audience. At this point the audience becomes both the artist’s subject and his object. “(ibid, p. 131)

In labelling people still as “audience,” however inclusively and directly they are addressed, Morris points to the fact that these exercises are still trapped within art world context.

“It has been a safe, contained spectacle where one could watch the critical turn constantly back on itself, where it might not only harmlessly “purify” itself, but finally transform the critical itself into those production values under whose banner now swarm the legions of SoHo” (ibid, p. 135)

So, where does that leave art discourse, that clean line drawn through history that we started with?

“Impotent to usher art out of the cultural anterooms of the decorative, it oscillates between hysterical but half-hearted attempts to prop up one more hero and sour dismissals of large blocks of related works… The bow of discourse towards related works was a gesture of control, a nod for exclusive entry… Certainly no act of discourse has been an encouragement for freedom.” (Ibid, p 135, 137)

So where is he (and this) going? Like most of my writing here, there are some compelling arguments and toothy phrases that evaporate into a heady gas. The line of discourse is a process of control. Works that address the audience directly still address them as audience, abstracted through art-world mirrors. And the self-reflective does it safely. Heroism is destroyed. “Heros” are propped up, and Vito Acconci wacking off is not the answer.

The answer, of course, lies in the real world, “the artist as journalistic antihero” (Ibid, p. 141), the “agreeable embrace of either polarity” of nature and culture rather than the old “assertion of transcendent individual identity.” (p. 141). The artist and the audience are both part of society, and discourse is irrelevant because the art is the discourse.

Now, this positioning can be titled in two directions. It seems we can have art that functions like some sort of motivational speaker, interventions with clear beginnings and ends meant to prove some point or direct people in some direction. Or art can be a discourse as in a conversation, a system set loose in the world, audience as object and subject but also art as object and subject as well as artist.

I need to stop myself at this point because its all getting way too heady and anyways I am not allowed to talk about Art as art for fear of straying back into art about Art. I guess the simplest and most obvious point of all of this is that positioning art as a maker is a folly, and that focusing on the process not the concept of art might bring some more interesting results than the murky metaphors and unsubstantiated assumptions of Art With A Point.

Put more simply, I am trying to vindicate myself for thinking more about how I am making my art than why.

Oh, and I have decided to position my thesis as corporate innovation strategy.

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*Perhaps this semi-recursive system (that eats its output as the impetus for the next iteration- or is that merely iterative) will again arrive at a new concept. And then this concept becomes the process of the next and so on and so on but this of course feels far too neat. And besides, I think this is probably a retroactive reading for the purposes of linearity rather than a straightforward appraisal of the system (if there is one) at work and the attributes that contribute to it.