Artist as a Formal System
What kind of objects artworks are
Vanushkin rejects the idea of an artwork as an object, for its being pragmatic and overdetermined by distribution. Instead, for the systematic account, we are invited to see an artwork as a discrete pattern. Here, the pattern means that an artist composes the work based on a recognisable routine. Discrete implies the topological orientation of the pattern regarding the border between the conditions of artistic composition and the market operations. The two domains are explained as abstractions, with artwork appearing among them as the abstract discrete pattern.
Discursive practices in making and speaking about art
- Formal schematism. Account of art (as in education) in terms of its material production, to elucidate the relations among existing works and the constructive decisions about them (e.g. using a nail to hold two blocks of wood together).
- Mood implication. A conversation about the vibes made possible by the relations the audience establishes with the artwork’s abstractions.
- Narrative approach. A look at history, biography and interviews with to create the routines or rules for the pattern. This often risks blurring the boundary between the artwork and the narrative thus created.
The first approach, in terms of art’s schematics, appears to be most fit for the task of creating a presentation of the artist as a formal system. The material account deals with art as aesthetically significant (ref. philosopher Immanuel Kant), with the term aesthetics used to refer to the total of channels of the audience’s perceptive apparatus. The matters communicated through the channels are defined as the vibe (ref. literary scholar Peli Grietzer) — a shorthand for a mood range that encompasses multiple cultural artefacts, e.g. ‘noir vibe’.
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Further (ref. philosopher Edmund Husserl), it is proposed that such apparatus be limited only to the recombining of already known matters, which simultaneously limits the affective response evoked by art as it resonates only with the things that the audience can recognise.
The artist as a system
Therefore, artistic praxis consists of boundaries and choices made by the artist concerning those boundaries. Boundaries can be related to internal (mediums, skills or materials) and external (contexts, audiences, social rules) factors. One important choice is the choice of abstractions, both compositional and one of market operations, not least in terms of what kind of possibilities they afford.
The system must have a topological plane of activity (ref. philosopher Gilles Deleuze): a Search Space, where the boundaries and choices are enacted and continuously negotiated as the artwork takes shape.
The conventions existing in the sphere of market operations, — such as the artist, the brand or the genre, — are not natural, but exist as an imprint of the historical weight of the previous investments and expenditures. There is, thus, an alienating gap between the idea of an artist as someone who creates art and the artist in their capacity as praxis — the latter is a market effect and therefore constrains the former. The elision of this alienation is precisely the downside of the narrative approach as discussed above.
The rule
An artistic routine, or a rule, is a revolving motion of practice, when the artist invents a rule, applies it, integrates the result, and adjusts the rule, after which the circle repeats. In other words, the rule begins with an abductive imaginative leap that creates a hypothesis, after which the inference is repeatedly applied to rectify the hypothesis. The Search Space warrants the use and the specific meaning of the abstraction at play. In the same way as the discourse and the actual use of money in society are made possible by everyone’s acceptance of money as an abstract expression of value, the discourse and the various uses of painting are made possible by society’s adoption of a general hypothesis of painting.
Inspiration and creativity
Inspiration is “arranging one’s own mental workspace through compiling a canon of references and existing works” — with such cultural entities as TikTok helping to transform the notion from a highly professionalised practice into common activity.
Creativity is the “maximisation of the affective qualities of a combination of existing elements”, as we saw above in the discussion of the limitations — the choice of the most aesthetically titillating features.
Such intentional activity here is compared to axiomatic thinking, borrowed from mathematics, where it is used to refer to building a particular foundation of a formal program through a limited number of axioms. However, such a precise move is seen as not entirely possible in art, where the many logics can be grafted onto each other and no specific hierarchy of rule application is required. Therefore, the deterministic program for art, similar to the one in maths, is not entirely possible, and a dynamic model seems a more viable solution.
Such a dynamic model can be constructed through the use of abductive reasoning (ref. logician Charles Sanders Peirce), as seen before, to build theories in a given Search Space.
Conclusion
To be an artist means to invent a figure of an artist, in terms of internal choices for art making. Yet, there can be no artist as a formal system without the conventions external to it, such as social rules and market conditions. The artist-system needs to be conscious of what such external boundary-shaping conventions are.
References
- Vanushkin, Alexey. “Artist as a Formal System: Towards a General Theory of Art.” &&&: 26.