The following was provoked by a question posed on the Facebook group N e w A e ѕ т н e т ι c.
Terms:
- Product, taken as the result of a process.
- Process, taken as that which will result in a product.
- Process as Product, e.g. Roman Opalka's 1 to Infinity (1965-), a work which involved the filling of canvases with numbers while counting them into a recorder. Each canvas became a detail in the larger unfinished (and by definition unfinishable) work.*
- Intention/Will, as including both working from/to a plan, schema or concept and working to no plan: i.e. contingently, through accident and chance.
- Action, as doing/undoing/not-doing: doing/undoing, as actions [i.e. process]; not-doing, as finishing [i.e. product].
- Telos, as the expectation of some end [i.e. some satisfying realisation of a pre-existing concept, or some satisfying realisation not previously conceived of].
- Satisfaction, as the condition for not-doing.
Having crudely set out these terms, let me even more crudely apply them to my own practice.
What is my process? What are my intentions? At the outset, I do not know what I want, I never do (I used to but I never quite got it so I stopped wanting it).
Having started, what I get are various dispositions and compositions that change with my doing and undoing - these cannot be called phases or stages until there is a final product of which they could be said to be phases or stages. There is no guarantee of reaching a satisfying end, only doing and undoing.
Both necessary [i.e. to suggest a definite form] and contingent [i.e. to randomise and open up possibilities] marks can be deployed right up to the end of a picture. There are no hard technical rules in my practice regarding telos. A process could end (a product begin) with a blob or a calculated fine line.
A satisfying end, as defined above, is, for me, the point where the willful acts of doing and undoing are exhausted and a certain resistance from the work obliges me to not-do, to stop. What, in process, was contingent, capable of being or not being (through doing and undoing) now, as product, just is: it cannot be different - it is necessary.
Let us imagine two reasons for satisfaction:
1) a product being the realisation of a pre-conceived object/idea, with process being fidelity to the concept.
2) a product being the realisation of an un-pre-conceived object/idea, with process being fidelity to the ghost of an idea that will only emerge through process [i.e. cannot be said to exist ideally separate from the work].
The second reason is the one that motivates me. I make pictures to experience the haunting that the product exerts on me before it is realised. 'Haunting' is a clumsy word for what I'm describing but it serves in so far as it suggests a trace, something at the limits of consciousness. Or, perhaps better said, this ghost is my unconscious/subconscious - 'me' in the broadest and least sanitised sense.
I then, as artist, am the machine - the processor - and my products are communications from a blindly determined object (myself) to itself - the catch being that the 'self' so addressed is not the one that produced the address! The production redefines the producer. Making remakes the maker.
* In mentioning this example, it occurs to me that, conceiving as we do of individual works as being part of a larger 'body' of work, might not these bodies themselves be both products (histories of production) and processes (technical and thematic shifts over time)?
