“Common to the art in question is that it searches for a definite sort of system that is part of the work. Insofar as the system is revealed it is revealed as information rather than esthetics.”

Art tells us nothing about the world that we cannot find elsewhere and more reliably.
—Morse Peckham

Between the two extremes—a minimum of organization and a minimum of arbitrariness—we find all possible varieties.
—Ferdinand de Saussure

I

A variety of structural fixes have been imposed on art—stylistic, historical, social, economic, psychological. Whatever else art is, at a very simple level it is a way of making. So are a lot of other things. Oil painting and tool making are no different on this level and both could be subsumed under the general investigation of technological processes. But it is not possible to look at both in quite the same light since their end functions are different, the former being a relation to the environment, oneself, society, established by the work itself while a tool functions as intermediary in these relations. Perhaps partly because the end function of art is different from the intermediary function of practical products in the society a close look at the nature of art making remains to be undertaken. Authors such as Morse Peckham¹ have looked at art as behavior but from the point of view of discovering its possible social function. He and others divide the enterprise into two basic categories: the artist’s role-playing on the one hand and speculations on the general semiotic function of the art on the other. My particular focus lies partly within the first category and not at all within the latter. Psychological and social structuring of the artist’s role I will merely assume as the contextual ground upon which this investigation is built. The interest here is to focus upon the nature of art making of a certain kind as it exists within its social and historical framing. I think that previously, probably beginning with Vasari, such efforts have been thought of as a systemless collection of technical, anecdotal, or biographical facts which were fairly incidental to the real “work” which existed as a frozen, timeless deposit on the flypaper of culture.

Much attention has been focused on the analysis of the content of art making—its end images—but there has been little attention focused upon the significance of the means. George Kubler in his examination of Machu Picchu² is startlingly alone among art historians in his claim that the significant meanings of this monument are to be sought in reconstructing the particular building activity—the eccentric grinding and fitting of the stones—and not in a formal analysis of the architecture. I believe there are “forms” to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end products. These are forms of behavior aimed at testing the limits of possibilities involved in that particular interaction between one’s actions and the materials of the environment. This amounts to the submerged side of the art iceberg. The reasons for this submersion are probably varied and run from the deep-seated tendency to separate ends and means within this culture to the simple fact that those who discuss art know almost nothing about how it gets made. For this and perhaps other reasons the issue of art making, in its allowance for interaction within the environment and oneself, has not been discussed as a distinct structural mode of behavior organized and separate enough to be recognized as form in itself.

The body’s activity as it engages in manipulating various materials according to different processes has open to it different possibilities for behavior. What the hand and arm motion can do in relation to flat surfaces is different from what hand, arms, and body movement can do in relation to objects in three dimensions. Such differences of engagement (and their extensions with technological means) amount to different forms of behavior. In this light the artificiality of media-based distinctions falls away (painting, sculpture, dance, etc.). There are instead some activities that interact with surfaces, some with objects, some with objects and a temporal dimension, etc. To focus on the production end of art and to lift up the entire continuum of the process of making and find in it “forms” may result in anthropological designations rather than art categories. Yet the observation seems justified by a certain thread of significant art which for about half a century has been continually mining and unearthing its means and these have become progressively more visible in the finished work.

Ends and means have come progressively closer together in a variety of different types of work in the 20th century. This resolution re-establishes a bond between the artist and the environment. This reduction in alienation is an important achievement and accompanies the final secularization that is going on in art now.³ However, what I wish to point out here is that the entire enterprise of art making provides the ground for finding the limits and possibilities of certain kinds of behavior and that this behavior of production itself is distinct and has become so expanded and visible that it has extended the entire profile of art. This extended profile is composed of a complex of interactions involving factors of bodily possibility, the nature of materials and physical laws, the temporal dimensions of process and perception, as well as resultant static images.