The features of making in innovative art need not be extended to considerations about its semiotic nature insofar as non-artists are concerned. Peckham himself has pointed out that the roles of artist and perceiver are not interchangeable. The disorienting in innovative art is the as yet unperceived new structure. All past art that is no longer disorienting gives us no evidence that patterning was ever absent and new art is not disorienting to those who are engaged in making it. Yet another distinction has to be made here, namely that the kind of patterning involved in a search for motivated art takes place on the level of behavior which is prior to visible formal results. Insofar as this behavior is visible in the end results, it participates in a semiotic function. But these intentional acts of process revealed say nothing as to whether or not the impact of the entire experience will be disorienting for the viewer. It would seem that the making of art approaches the polar situation of arbitrary/non-arbitrary on a synchronous front as opposed to the viewer’s access to these alternatives which is always diachronic—i.e., from the experience of disorder to that of order with time. It might be said that the current art which I am dealing presents the least amount of formalistic order with an ever greater order of the making behavior being implied. It is as though the artist wants to do the most discontinuous, irrational things in the most reasonable way. And there seems to be almost an inverse ratio at work in this progress toward the recovery of means: ever more disjunctive art acts carry ever more ordered information regarding the systematic means of production. This information is increasingly allowed into the work as part of the image.

Any process implies a system but not all systems imply process. What is systematic about art that reduces the arbitrary comes out as information revealing an ends-means hookup. That is, there is about the work a particular kind of systematizing that process can imply. Common to the art in question is that it searches for a definite sort of system that is made part of the work. Insofar as the system is revealed it is revealed as information rather than esthetics. Here is the issue stated so long ago by Duchamp: art making has to be based on other terms than those of arbitrary, formalistic, tasteful arrangements of static forms. This was a plea as well to break the hermeticism of “fine art” and to let in the world on other terms than image depiction.

III

The two modes of systematizing employed by American art over the last half century have been briefly sketched in. The materials/process approach tends to predominate now. American art, unlike American thought, has occasionally had a strong Idealist bias but the a priori has so far proved unnerving and uncomfortable tools for the American artist. To pursue a more material route was, in the late ‘40s, to be up against the formalism of Cubism. Pollock was the first to beat his way out of this. But all art degenerates into formalism, as Pollock himself found out. The crisis of the formalistic is periodic and perpetual and for art to renew itself it must go outside itself, stop playing with the given forms and methods, and find a new way of making.

Certain artists are involved in the structure I am stating here. They form no group. The nature of the shared concerns do not mold a movement nor preclude the validity of other approaches and concerns. The term “mainstream” is political. Several present-day critics can be observed wading down one, hoping to one day float on the back of the oarsmen they have in tow. In fact, the current art swamp is awash with trickling mainstreams. Art that has or is participating in the structure articulated here is, to me, either interesting or strong or both.¹⁰ Of the many concerns in art, the ones dealt with here have given powerful leverage in opening up possibilities whether as mere tendencies in past work or self-conscious methods in present work. Other kinds of art making focus other concerns—the nature of color in art making would, it seems, be totally outside these investigations.

The issues here stretch back into art history but in no particularly linear way. The concerns are partly about innovative moves that hold in common a commitment to the means of production. Duchamp, Cage, Pollock, Johns, Stella, have all been involved, in different ways, in acknowledging process. Quite a few younger artists are continuing to manifest the making process in the end image. But the tendencies to give high priority to the behavior end of making can be found in much earlier artists. Rather than modeling parts of the costumes in the Judith and Holofernes, Donatello dipped cloth in hot wax and draped it over the Judith figure. This meant that in casting the molten bronze had to burn out the cloth as well as the wax. In the process some of the cloth separated from the wax and the bronze replaced part of the cloth revealing its texture. This was a highly finished work and corrections could have been made in the chasing phase had the artist wanted to cover it up. It has also been claimed that the legs of the Holofernes figure were simply cast from a model rather than worked up in the usual way.¹¹ Evidence of process in this work is not very apparent and could only have been noticed by the initiated. But here is an early example of the systematic, structurally different process of making being employed to replace taste and labor and it shows up in the final work. Draping and life casting replace modeling. Michelangelo’s “unfinished” marbles give far more evidence of process but with the important difference that no structurally new method of making is implied.