December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
Instead of engaging in complex, intuitive decision-making, some contemporary artists have adopted an approach of simply carrying out a mechanical process. The American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) abandoned his early figurative work to make pictures by swinging paint across large canvases to form long swirling arcs of splattered pigment. The resultant formations derive from the largely serendipitous distribution of the paint.
Making art through process creates artworks that do not carry the traditional baggage of art, the expectation that they hold meaning, convey the intentions of the artist, and provide complex kinds of aesthetic pleasure.
Writing about such works in 1952, the critic Howard Rosenberg observed, ...