the process as the practice
Exert, 2023
Understanding the Role of the Process
through Socially Engaged, Photographic Methodologies
Output vs. Process
Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics” helpfully summarises the debate of interactivity in today’s art in one concise question, “How is art focussed on the production of such forms of conviviality capable of re-launching the most emancipation plan, by complementing it?” (Bourriaud, 1998)
Over the past decade, the positioning of contemporary art and community-based, dialogic practices has meant for a bridging between the previously disparate conversations around artistic participation, modes of collaboration, and exchange. Visual practitioners have begun to undertake tools and methodologies, realised through participatory practices, to shift the vernacular around image-orientated cultures and to try and challenge the assumed, traditional lens-based outcome of these practices. Moreover, the question emerges, what constitutes a process-based practice and what role does it play in co-produced, collaboratively engaged strategies of image-making?
Surrounding the idea of the image and the object, there exists the need for both the challenging value of the aesthetic and the essential worth of the process. Those involved in social practice and the arts, are living in the tension of what value supersedes another in their artistic manifestos. Currently, there are rising numbers of artists and art collectives that have “defined their practice around the facilitation of dialogue among diverse communities” and are “parting from traditions of object making.” (Kester, 2004) These same groups have begun to adopt an artistic, performance and process-based approach to making. Grant Kester’s “Conversations Pieces” gathers useful reflections on the critique of “object-based artwork”, reflecting that the work is often solely produced by the artist and rather only offered for the viewers consumption rather than participation. Kester criticises that art of convention merely “focuses on the formal appearance of physical objects, which are understood to possess an imminent meaning.” (Kester, 2004) However, one would argue, therefore, that more than ever, there calls for an attempt of an “opening up” to the production of a body of work and of imagery. The meaning of an image almost never sits at the surface and the process helps etch out a ‘relational space’ for the making and thinking around engagement-based imagery, where often the hidden construction becomes the object itself.
Further questions arise, where aesthetics and object-based imagery largely communicate the nature of collaborative, photographic practices, how may they overlay and obscure the wanderings of the process? As image-makers, the challenges lie in understanding how one may place the process AS the engagement, over the final imagery that circulates in a project? In the traditional, photographic sense, often a body of work solely culminates in the image. However, differing from traditions of conceptual process art, socially engaged art engages with the image differently. The image is essential but is not the core of the work. There is distance between the way we think around the images, and Bourriaud helpfully points to a necessary “radical, upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals, introduced by modern art” (Bourriaud, 1998) in order to grasp these new ways of working.
These meanderings, in my own research, open up two conversations, speaking to performance and documentation as a tool and challenge in its temporal nature and in the value of imagery that creates aesthetically and artistically engaging work. I question whether if photography was envisioned throughout rather than at the end of a process, how there may there be a narrative shift around imagery, which enforces an approach that forefronts the process in lens-based medias. In the words of British artist Peter Dunn, images are better known as “context providers” rather than “content providers.” (Kester, 2004)