Universal Principles of Art

65 PROCESS AS MEANING

ART WORKS CAN BE ENGENDERED BY ENGAGING IN PRESCRIBED PHYSICAL PROCESSES

Instead of engaging in complex, intuitive decision making in producing a work of art, some contemporary artists have chosen to adopt an approach of simply carrying out a mechanical process. The American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–56) abandoned his early figurative work to make pictures by swinging paint across large canvases using brushes held well away from the surface to form long swirling arcs of splattered pigment. The resultant formations derive from the largely serendipitous distribution of the paint. Various sculptors quickly followed Pollock’s example, most notably Robert Morris (1931–), who produced many works in which the end product is ...