The Becoming of Art: A Cocreative Process
Introduction
One of the most unexpected but gravest pains I have perhaps experienced in this lifetime thus far is when a piece of music got, according to me, violently interrupted by applause. The musical performance consisted of a group of people playing large drums. The deep drumming sounds drilled through my bones, and when the last drum had sounded, I was caught off guard by the audience around me that broke out into a loud applause. I remember literally screaming ‘nooo, what did you do’, but no one else seemed to be as bothered as I was. For me, there was a silence needed after the drumming. The frequencies of the drums were still vibrating in my bones. The silence afterwards was part of the piece of music, it was a critical part necessary to process the intensity that I had just experienced. Until this day I grieve that experience that got ripped out of my body, yet at the same time never had a chance to leave it or calmly die out. It may sound a bit dramatic, but I am sure that there are people that recognize the violation of a piece of music because it got interrupted by applause or screaming before the last notes had sounded, or before a necessary silence sounded. To what extent does silence, as in the absence of played notes, form a part of a music piece? Silences during a music piece are an integral part, there is little ambiguity about that, but how about after a music piece ends?
The question of when and how an artwork is completed is one that various thinkers have written about and forms part of the wider question of what art is. What remains understudied, however, is the role the various senses might have in answering the question of where an artwork begins and where it ends. Based on the five senses, it might seem clear where an artwork begins or ends – a music piece starts with the first sound and ends with the last sound, a painting begins when something becomes visible and ends when the visible object no longer changes, or the painting begins where you can physically touch the canvas and ends where that canvas physically stops for example. If you would regard culinary practices as an artwork, you could say the same for taste and smell. However, these senses do not account for the anecdote mentioned above, or for the fact that an artwork can be interpreted or experienced in various ways by different people. In that sense, an artwork can take different shapes for different people depending on the emotional experience or interpretation that the artwork evokes.
Considering only the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, these emotional experiences cannot be accounted for as part of an artwork. However, whereas in the West we recognize five senses, this is far from universal. On top of that, the specific ordering in which senses are considered and used differs. Some strands of Hinduism, for example, recognize ten senses or Indiryas. That is, in addition to the five sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) they also recognize the five so-called motor organs (hands, feet, mouth, anus, and genitals) that help humans interact with the world. In many Western African cultures, the heart is recognized as an additional sense based on the belief that the heart has the ability to sense and perceive emotions and spiritual energies in a distinctive way from the other senses. The heart is considered the center of emotion and intuition. The idea of a ‘sixth sense’ is also recognized in traditional Chinese culture where this sense is associated with ‘qi’, the vital energy that flows through all living things. Even in Western cultures the term ‘sixth sense’ is sometimes used to refer to intuition of a psychic ability. With regards to the ordering of the senses, in the West sight and sound are generally seen as the ‘higher senses’ that are most important since they are most closely related to the mind (Howes 2009, 22-23; Howes 2013, 8-9). However, this is not universal. Songhay shamans in Niger, for example, prioritize taste, smell and hearing over sight and can “taste kinship, smell witches, and hear the ancestors” (Elliott and Culhane 2017, 48).
In this essay, I will look at the beginning and completion of an artwork by focusing on the bodily sensual experience of it as a body of art. In the first section I will look at the ambiguity of the beginning of an artwork by looking at two examples, that of a painting and a piece of music. In the second section I will explore the ambiguity of the completion of an artwork, here I will also discuss the concept of Death of the Author (cf. Barthes 1967). In the third and final section, then, I will discuss who should be considered the artist or creator given the ambiguity of an artwork’s beginning and completion. In the conclusion I will shortly summarize the arguments in this essay.
The beginning of the artwork
To understand where an artwork begins, we must ask the question of when the process of creating art begins. To illustrate the ambiguity of the answer to this question and to move beyond an inevitable abstractness when writing about art, I will briefly examine two examples of what are commonly considered artworks: a painting and a piece of music.
The conventional painting is mostly a visible experience; hence one might assume that a painting starts with the paintbrush touching the canvas. This moment signifies the first visible sign of the shapes or colors that will eventually comprise the artwork. But as many people who have made a painting will recognize even this is not a self-evident moment of beginning. Sometimes you first make a sketch before using paint or colors on your canvas. This means that in questioning when the creation of art begins, the sketching would have to be included. Now suppose that the sketch is not done on the eventual canvas, but on a separate piece of paper. The sketching on this paper is included in the process of creating the eventual painting, but does it also form part of the painting?
Whether we decide to include the paper sketch in the eventual artwork or not, even the sketches or paint might not actually be the first visible aspect of the artwork. Without a canvas there would be nothing to hold the paint together, which means that the canvas forms an integral part of the eventual artwork. The creating of the canvas, then, would have to be included in the creation of the painting – stretching a canvas, cutting the wooden frame. But we can go one step further. Suppose that we are talking about a landscape painting. The visible experience of the painting is based on a visible landscape, or some aspects of it. This could mean that the process of creating a painting, as a primarily visible experience of art, might even start with the painter looking at landscapes. Or, even more radically, one might argue that the painting as a visual representation of a landscape (or aspects of it) is already somehow present in the landscape itselfin the same way Michelangelo famously said that every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. This reflects Michelangelo’s belief that the job of a sculptor was to reveal something that already existed rather than create something from scratch. But, in the case of the landscape painting, can we then say that the physical landscape forms part of the artwork?
We might come up with different answers to these questions and undoubtedly various people will have different opinions and feelings about them. The point, however, is not to answer all these questions but rather to illustrate in how many ways they can be answered. This means that the beginning of a painting is far from self-evident. I will give another brief example to show this.
Whereas a painting is mostly a visible experience, a music piece is mostly an audible experience. Hence, similar to the painting, we might first assume that the music starts when the first note sounds. But suppose the music piece is played by an orchestra. Would not the first movement of the conductor then form the beginning of the music piece? After all, without the conductor lifting their hands, no sounds would follow. Now suppose that a group of people, perhaps the orchestra, is practicing a piece of music. You might say that musical practice as an expression of music is art, but when people practice a music piece,is the practice then also part of the artwork? And if the music piece is constantly played differently, whether that is with slightly different improvisations, or the same notes but with a whole different emotionality to it, does that mean that there is a dynamic range of what the artwork is? And when, with what level of adaptations, does it become a new artwork altogether?
When philosophizing where the painting and the music piece start, I focused primarily on one sense at a time. However, as you may have already thought while reading these examples, neither a painting nor a music piece are solely visible or audible experiences. Some paintings are less of a direct representation of a visible experience in the world (such as a landscape), but rather an expression of a non-visible experience such as an emotion, or they combine visible impressions and invisible emotionality. Similarly, a music piece is not solely an audible experience but also an expression of emotions or a state of being or even thinking (whether that is in lyrics or rhythm). So, taking this into account we might wonder whether these artworks start with the emotionality they are based on or inspired by. And if that is the case, if the same emotional experience creates several artworks, are they truly separate?
What I have attempted to illustrate in this section is that artworks, and thereby the creation of an artwork, cannot be said to have an unambiguous beginning to them. However, this might not be a problem as long as we can say when an artwork is finished: perhaps with the last brushstroke on the canvas, or the last note that has sounded. In the next section I will discuss to what extent an artwork can be considered finished when we consider interpretation of an artwork as integral to the artwork itself.
The completion of the artwork
Whereas on the issue of the beginning of art there is little literature, on the issue of the completion of art there is much more. In this section, I will discuss several authors and point out what I argue is their biggest flaw, namely that they seem to consider an artwork as a merely material, physical object. Instead, I will argue that a crucial aspect of what constitutes an artwork is that it evokes a certain response. This response goes beyond the five senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting) – it evokes emotions, bodily sensations or a thinking process. In other words, the experience of the artwork creates or comprises the artwork. Since the evocation of such responses keeps happening as long as people experience the artwork, I will then conclude that an artwork is never completed.
In his text ‘When is a work of art finished?’ Hudson Hick (2008) discusses contemporary philosophers Monroe Beardsley and Paisley Livingston’s works in aesthetics literature. Hick’s discussion focuses on how Beardsley and Livingston consider the issue of art completion by attempting to formulate necessary conditions for a work being finished. Hudson Hick concludes that such necessary conditions are impossible to define, but we should instead look for sufficient conditions. Regardless of the sufficient or necessary conditions, both Beardsley, Livingston and Hudson Hick (2008) contend that a state of being finished can be attributed variously to the artist with respect to a particular work, and to the work itself. This means that “an artist might not be done until they have decided that the work is done, but if nothing further has been done to the work it seems that the work was finished when the last change was made” (Hudson Hick 2008, 70). I am interested in the latter, namely when an artwork itself is finished. However, I would argue we have to ask to what extent an artwork itself can be finished.
Beardsley, Livingston and Hudson Hick all implicitly assume an artwork to be a merely material object. Hudson Hick (2008) mentions examples of when the last word is written, or when the last brushstroke has been made. An artwork seems to be considered as a physical material body. However, the experience of an artwork goes beyond its physical materiality: at the very least, the physical materiality evokes an experience in the person experiencing the artwork (by hearing it, seeing it etc.). I think we can all agree that one of the most important attributes of art is that it does something in our bodies. A work of art can move people, evokes emotions, or other sensations in the body – the frequencies of music even influence our own bodies brainwaves/frequencies (a phenomenon that is known as ‘entrainment’).
This experience is one that goes beyond the five senses commonly recognized in the West as explained in the introduction (Elliott and Culhane 2017, Chapter 3; Howes 2009; Howes 2013). We do not merely hear a song; the song evokes a certain emotion and/or internal bodily response. I argue that this experience of the artwork is essential to what constitutes art. Hence, if we look at the sensual experiences of art (beyond the five senses), we understand that what constitutes an artwork goes beyond its material physicality and includes the responses it can evoke. This means that an artwork is changed and created also after its assumed material physicality (last brushstroke painted, last word put on the page) seems ‘finished’. The extent to which an artwork will keep being experienced and hence createdmeans that it may never be completed. But then, if an artwork is constantly being created, who is the artist?
Who is the artist?
Intuitively, an artwork is created by an author or someone I will call the ‘original artist’. As we have seen in the last section, however, part of what constitutes the artwork is the internal responses it evokes in human beings experiencing the artwork in whatever way. In that sense, we can say that the person experiencing the artwork is also at least partly creating it. This concept is often referred to as ‘death of the author’. In this section, I will explore the concept of ‘death of the author’ by looking at its use by various thinkers. Specifically, I will contend with several thinkers that an artwork is determined neither solely by the ‘original artist’, nor solely by the art-experiencer. Then, I will go a step further and discuss the extent to which the artwork itself participates in the process of creation through the practice of agency.
The concept ‘death of the author’ refers to a literary theory that was introduced by French philosopher Roland Barthes in 1967. According to Barthes, the idea of the author as the sole source of meaning in a literary work is problematic. Instead, he argues that the meaning of a text is not determined by or limited to the author’s intentions, but rather by the reader’s interpretation. Therefore, Barthes suggested that the focus of a literary work should be solely on the text itself and how it is interpreted by the reader. The theory is referred to as ‘death of the author’ because it suggests that once a literary work, or a work of art, is created, the author no longer has control over its meaning or interpretation (Barthes 2016).
In his book, The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot (originally written in 1955) even argues that the author’s disappearance is a necessary condition for the creation of literature. The act of writing involves a kind of self-erasure in which the author must release control over the text and allow it to live a life of its own (Blanchot 2015). Gilles Deleuze made a similar argument when stating that the painter must ‘destroy’ themselves and allow the painting to take on a life of its own in order to create a powerful and impactful artwork (Deleuze & Bacon 1981). Although I indeed find it evident that an artist has to release control over their artwork in order for it to be created, or at least shown, I disagree with Barthes, Blanchot and Deleuze that the original artist (or author in his context) has to completely erase or destroy themselves.
There are thinkers who offer more nuanced perspectives. In his 1969 essay ‘What is an author?’, Michel Foucault critiques the author as a singular, fixed identity and argues that the idea of an author as the sole originator of a text is a relatively recent development in Western culture. He challenges the idea that the author is the source of meaning of a text and instead argues that this meaningis shaped by a complex network of discourses and practices extending beyond the individual author (Foucault 2013). Hence it seems that Foucault does not necessarily erase the author, but rather includes it in a network of creating factors. Jacques Derrida’s work on the notion of ‘deconstruction’ challenges traditional notions of language and meaning. He, for example, states that the meaning of a text is not fixed, but is instead in constant flux based on its context and the various interpretations that arise from it (Bass 2020). Italian semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco (1979) suggests that the meaning or interpretation of an artwork is not determined solely by the artist or the reader, but rather by the interaction between the two. He states that the reader of a text, for example, brings their own knowledge and experiences to the interpretation of the text, but that the interpretation is always also mediated by the text itself. I agree with this latter approach that is more nuanced: both the author or ‘original artist’, as well as the person who experiences art, are the ones creating an artwork.
As argued in the previous section, the experience of art is a subjective one, which means that the artwork stretches out into many people. Since an artwork can be experienced years, decades or even centuries after the last brushstroke has been put on a painting, or the last note has been recorded, the artwork is never completed. But does, then, the artwork in itself also have a sort of agency?
I am not the first to suggest that art has some sort of agency. In anthropological literature, there have been discussions on this for decades. In his book Agency and Art, anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998) argues that an anthropological study of art means studying the social contexts in which artwork is produced, circulated, and received. According to him, an artwork mediates social agency. Gell defines agency as being attributable to ‘those persons (and things) seen as initiating causal sequences … caused by acts of mind or will or intention’ (Gell 1998, 16). According to this definition, art objects cannot be agents in themselves, but act merely as extensions of their maker’s or user’s agency (2004, 541). Gell further denies the intrinsic agency of art objects by suggesting that what a person sees or experiences is a function of their previous experience, their mindset, their culture etc. (Gell 1998, 33). In anthropology agency often refers not to people’s intentions but their ability to act and make a choice of action. In this sense, agency cannot be attributed to an artwork as it cannot be said to have intentions.
Contrary to these definitions of agency, I would say that an artwork in itself, without being necessarily intended in that way by the artist, has agency in the sense that it has the power to evoke emotions or reactions for both the artist and the audience of an artwork. This agency cannot be separated from the agency of the other artists (the ‘original artist’ and the people experiencing the artwork). What I mean by this is that the agency of an artwork is still tied to the context in which it is produced.For example, a painting of a red square will evoke different emotions for people that live in a communist regime and hence have certain associations with the color red than those who do not. At the same time, the agency of an artwork is also still dependent on a person’s history of experiences, emotions when experiencing the artwork, cultural background, etcetera (Gell 1998) – someone who has experienced a breakup will feel different emotions from hearing a love song than someone who just got engaged. To an extent, then, the agency of an artwork is cocreated by the context and the person experiencing the artwork, and this only becomes clear when we take into account the sensuality of an artwork beyond the five senses.
Conclusion
To summarize, to understand where an artwork begins, I first asked when the process of creating art begins. The answer was that the creation of an artwork cannot be said to have an unambiguous beginning, especially when looking beyond the five senses commonly recognized in the West. This would not be a problem as long as we could say that an artwork can be finished. However, that question too is ambiguous. When we consider an artwork as more than a merely material, physical object and contend that a crucial aspect of what constitutes it is that it evokes a certain response,) we see that the experience of the artwork cocreates or comprises it. This means that an artwork is changed and created also after its assumed material physicality seems ‘finished’. I then asked the question ofwho the artist is. On the one hand there is the ‘original artist’, but on the other hand we can also say that the person experiencing the artwork is at least partly creating the artwork – a concept that is sometimes called ‘death of the author’. I contended that there does not have to be a complete death of the original author, but rather that an artwork is a constant cocreative process. In this cocreative process, the artwork itself participates in the process of creation through the practice of agency. The artwork in itself has agency in the sense that it has the power to evoke emotions or reactions for both its ‘original artist’ and its audience . However, this agency cannot be separated from the agency of the other artists (the ‘original artist’ and the people experiencing the artwork). Instead, the agency of an artwork is still tied to the context in which it is produced. Based on this argumentation we can then conclude that the making of an artwork is a cocreative process. In this cocreative process there is not one artist, but rather that the artist is an interwoven network of the ‘original artist’, the audience, and the artwork itself. The role of each of these cocreators can only be understood when considering the bodily sensation of an artwork beyond the five (Western) senses. In that sense an artwork might be best seen not as a noun that has a beginning and an end, but rather as a verb: work that is constantly in creation.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. 2016. “The death of the author.” Readings in the Theory of Religion, 141-145. London: Routledge.
Bass, Alan. 2020. “‘Signature Event Context’: Margins of Philosophy (Derrida 1982 [First Published 1972])”. In Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, 105-134. Routledge.
Blanchot, Maurice. 2015. The Space of Literature: A Translation of” l’Espace Littéraire”. University of Nebraska Press.
Culhane, Dara. 2017. “Sensing” In A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and creative Methodologies, edited by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane. North York: University of Toronto Press: 45-67.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Francis Bacon. 2003. Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. University of Minnesota Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1979. The role of the reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts (318). Indiana University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2017. “What is an Author?” Aesthetics (4), 284-288. Routledge.
Hick, Darren Hudson. 2008. “When is a work of art finished?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66(1), 67-76. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2008.00288.x.
Howes, David, ed. 2009. The Sixth Sense Reader. Oxford: Berg.
Howes, David. 2013. “The Expanding Field of Sensory Studies.” Sensory Studies. http://www.sensorystudies.org/sensational-investigations/the-expanding-field-of-sensory-studies/.