Process art

Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and patterning. Process art is concerned with the actual doing; art as a rite, ritual, and performance. Process art often entails an inherent motivation, rationale, and intentionality. Therefore, art is viewed as a creative journey or process, rather than as a deliverable or end product.

Process art movement

Process art has been entitled as a creative movement in the US and Europe in the mid-1960s. In scholarly artistic discourse }, the work of Jackson Pollock is hailed as an antecedent. Process art in its employment of serendipity has a marked correspondence with Dada. Change and transience are marked themes in the process art movement. The Guggenheim Museum states that Robert Morris in 1968 had a groundbreaking exhibition and essay defining the movement and the Museum Website states:

Process artists were involved in issues attendant to the body, random occurrences, improvisation, and the liberating qualities of nontraditional materials such as wax, felt, and latex. Using these, they created eccentric forms in erratic or irregular arrangements produced by actions such as cutting, hanging, and dropping, or organic processes such as growth, condensation, freezing, or decomposition.

The ephemeral nature and insubstantiality of materials was often showcased and highlighted.

The Process art movement and the environmental art movement are directly related:

Process artists engage the primacy of organic systems, using perishable, insubstantial, and transitory materials such as dead rabbits, steam, fat, ice, cereal, sawdust, and grass. The materials are often left exposed to natural forces: gravity, time, weather, temperature, etc.

In process art, as in the Arte Povera movement, nature itself is lauded as art; the symbolization and representation of nature, often rejected.

Process art antecedent

The process art movement has precedent in indigenous rites, shamanic and religious rituals, cultural forms such as sandpainting, sun dance, and the Tea ceremony are fundamentally related pursuits.

Aspects of the process of the construction of a Vajrayana Buddhist sand mandala (a subset of sandpainting) of Medicine Buddha by monks from Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, New York that began February 26, 2001 and concluded March 21, 2006 has been captured and web-exhibited by the Ackland's Yager Gallery of Asian Art. The dissolution of the mandala was on June 8, 2001.

Process art artists

• Lynda Benglis
• Chris Drury
• Eva Hesse
• Bruce Nauman
• Christopher Le Tyrell
• Robert Morris
• Alan Saret
• Richard Serra
• Keith Sonnier

References

• Wheeler, D. (1991). Art Since the Midcentury: 1945 to the Present.