What is particular to Donatello and shared by many 20th-century artists is that some part of the systematic making process has been automated. The employment of gravity and a kind of “controlled chance” has been shared by many since Donatello in the materials/process interaction. However it is employed, the automation serves to remove taste and the personal touch by co-opting forces, images, processes, to replace a step formerly taken in a directing or deciding way by the artist. Such moves are innovative and are located in prior means but are revealed in the a posteriori images as information. Whether this is draping wax-soaked cloth to replace modeling, identifying prior “found” flat images with the totality of a painting, employing chance in an endless number of ways to structure relationships, constructing rather than arranging, allowing gravity to shape or complete some phase of the work—all such diverse methods involve what can only be called automation and imply the process of making back from the finished work.

Automating some stage of the making gives greater coherence to the activity itself. Working picks up some internal necessity at those points where the work makes itself, so to speak. At those points where automation is substituted for a previous “all made by hand” homologous set of steps, the artist has stepped aside for more of the world to enter into the art. This is a kind of regress into a controlled lack of control. Inserting the discontinuity of automated steps would not seem, on the face of it, to reduce the arbitrary in art making. Such controlled stepping aside actually reduces the making involvement or decisions in the production. It would seem that the artist is here turned away from the making, alienated even more from the product. But art making cannot be equated with craft time. Making art is much more about going through with something. Automating processes of the kind described open the work and the artist’s interacting behavior to completing forces beyond his total personal control.

The automated process has taken a variety of forms in various artists’ work. Jasper Johns focused very clearly two possible ways for painting. One was to identify a prior flat image of target or flag with the total physical limit of the painting. Another sequentially systematic mode that implied process was the number and alphabet works. These, and Stella’s subsequent notched striped paintings, present total systems, internally coherent. Both imply a set of necessary sequential steps which, when taken, complete the work. Less painterly and far more deliberate, Stella’s work of the early ‘60s was some of the first to fold into a static, “constructed” object its own means of production. I have discussed elsewhere¹² how the work of both artists, with its deliberateness of execution according to an a priori plan implies a mode of making, or form of behavior, that can be more fully realized in the making of three-dimensional objects.

So-called Minimal art of the early and mid-sixties was based on the method of construction. The structure necessary to rectilinear forming precludes any “arranging” of parts. The “how” of making was automated by accepting the method of forming necessary to rectilinear things. What is different about making objects, as opposed to applying a surface, is that it involves the body, or technological extensions of it, moving in depth in three dimensions. Not only the production of objects, but the perception of them as well involves bodily participation in movement in three dimensions. It might be said that the construction of rectilinear objects involves a split between mental and physical activity and a simultaneous underlining of the contrast; on the one hand the obviousness of the prior plan and on the other the extreme reasonableness of the materials used to manifest the structure. A certain strain of constructed art of the ‘60s continued an emphasis on refined or colored surfaces and optical properties—essentially an art of surfaces moved into three dimensions.

Other constructed art opted for the emphasis on more traditionally sculptural values—volume, mass, density, scale, weight. The latter work tended to be placed on the floor in one’s own space. This is a condition for sculptural values in materials to register most fully since it is under this condition that we make certain kinesthetic, haptic, and reflexive identifications with things. I have discussed the nature of this perceptual bond to things in our own body space before.¹³ For the argument here it is only necessary to reiterate a few points. The body is in the world, gravity operates on it as we sense it operating on objects. The kinds of identification between the body and things initiated by certain art of the ‘60s and continued today was not so much one of images as possibilities for behavior. With the sense of weight, for example, goes the implicit sense of being able to lift. With those estimations about reasonableness of construction went, in some cases, estimations of the possibility for handling, stability or lack of it, most probable positions, etc. Objects project possibilities for action as much as they project that they themselves were acted upon. The former allows for certain subtle identifications and orientations; the latter, if emphasized, is a recovery of the time that welds together ends and means. Perception itself is highly structured and presupposes a meaningful relation to the world. The roots of such meanings are beyond consciousness and lie bound between the culture’s shaping forces and the maturation of the sense organs which occurs at a pre-verbal stage. In any event, time for us has a direction, space a near and far, our own bodies an intimate awareness of weight and balance, up and down, motion and rest and a general sense of the bodily limits of behavior in relation to these awarenesses. A certain strain of modern art has been involved in uncovering a more direct experience of these basic perceptual meanings and it has not achieved this through static images but through the experience of an interaction between the perceiving body and the world which fully admits that the terms of this interaction are temporal as well as spatial, that existence is process, that the art itself is a form of behavior that can imply a lot about what was possible and what was necessary in engaging with the world while still playing that insular game of art.