Brooklyn has been making the most of summer’s full with some great arts events, and I’ve had a chance to enjoy a couple of them. Last weekend Brooklyn had its “Go” event, with 1,708 artists opening their studios in 44 neighborhoods for some 18,000 people to drop in. Eight studios were within two blocks of my apartment, so I did not dare miss out. The week before that the folks at the Panoply Performance Lab presented a Labor Day picnic edition of their ongoing Performancy Forum. At the conclusion of that event there was an open discussion under the heading “process vs. product.” Thinking about process is what I do, when I'm doing it right, but something about this opposition-- "process vs. product" --unsettled me, and I'd like to try to explain that.
The participants in the forum all came from different circles, but more than one of them expressed an interest in the ways that performance might be able to resist being reduced to a product. Benjamin Sebastian’s performance put a body in gold sequin shorts at the center of a process involving urination, the consumption of raw eggs, vomiting, and the methodical repetition of a familiar text: “All that glitters.” He moved through a set of paces that challenged his body to consume two-dozen raw eggs at the same time that audience members were challenged to question the comfortable, imagined distance we often seek to maintain between “our selves,” "our bodies," and "other bodies." To regard his process as a product would have been to reduce a performance to spectacle, thereby eliminating every question it presented by neatly packaging its messiness.
But it seemed to me that by placing process in opposition to product, the entire binary was left waiting to be reduced to a product itself. Some of the responses from artists gave me the sense that their use of “process” and “product” was less theoretical and more ontological. By this I mean that they weren’t asking us to deal with what they did as a process, so much as they were claiming that their “work” was“process,” not “product." It seemed to me that “process” and “product” had become things, and “process” the thing was being elevated above “product” the thing; the pure artist was the one whose entire project was a pure "process" cleansed of “product.” In the bout “Process vs. Product,” Product was Apollo Creed.
If my sense is right--and in any case, what I am describing certainly did not hold true for all or even most of the artists present--then I think this is reminiscent of a bourgeois ideology involving "pure" and “purposeless” art. It would be a mistake, I think, to consider what we call "performance" in the narrow sense a privileged site of process, and I will go one step further to suggest that when a self-identified performer makes this mistake, it can be a self-serving mystification. And though theorists and critics have often been guilty of making “objects” of their materials, that is not the only way of theorizing or engaging in criticism. Trying to escape the burden of theory by making “process” into some thing that exists leads us right back into the trap we were right to try and escape in the first place.
Doing so also leaves us at risk of missing the processes involved in those things one might otherwise be tempted to call products, leaving us sorting whatever we encounter into one of two categories. Some examples from the events I cited above demand a better approach. The Performancy Forum featured a thrilling performance by Joey Molinaro with Adjua Greaves, Valerie Kuehne, and Brian McCorkle. The performance involved a score, and one performer was concerned that this score occasionally distracted from a more process-oriented engagement with other performers, that it was in some sense a product polluting the process. But in contrast to this, Molinaro explicitly drew attention to the ways that the score rested at the intersection of many processes, crystallizing some while opening opportunities for those that otherwise could never have been set in motion.
Further, as part of the Brooklyn Go event I visited two studios populated with what someone might call “products,” but that could be better described in terms of process. Brian Fernandes-Halloran’s sculptures, made of wax and pieces of found wood, seemed haunted with processes that preceded and succeeded his own. If someone might want to look at them as “products,” it was far more rewarding to think about them as social processes, something Fernandes-Halloran encouraged visitors to do. The opposition “process vs. product” was not helpful; the desire to deal with processes was. Likewise, Angelica Bergamini was visibly thrilled at the opportunity to talk about her elaborate processes, the searching gestures of a painter, the discovery of landscapes as they emerged on her canvas, the marks of a laser printer and the shimmering exchange between textures. If what she was doing resulted in "products," that never came up in our conversation. Perhaps it is significant that she has recently begun using computer animation software to set the printed figures in her paintings traveling through the spaces of ongoing processes.![]()
The participants in the forum all came from different circles, but more than one of them expressed an interest in the ways that performance might be able to resist being reduced to a product. Benjamin Sebastian’s performance put a body in gold sequin shorts at the center of a process involving urination, the consumption of raw eggs, vomiting, and the methodical repetition of a familiar text: “All that glitters.” He moved through a set of paces that challenged his body to consume two-dozen raw eggs at the same time that audience members were challenged to question the comfortable, imagined distance we often seek to maintain between “our selves,” "our bodies," and "other bodies." To regard his process as a product would have been to reduce a performance to spectacle, thereby eliminating every question it presented by neatly packaging its messiness.
But it seemed to me that by placing process in opposition to product, the entire binary was left waiting to be reduced to a product itself. Some of the responses from artists gave me the sense that their use of “process” and “product” was less theoretical and more ontological. By this I mean that they weren’t asking us to deal with what they did as a process, so much as they were claiming that their “work” was“process,” not “product." It seemed to me that “process” and “product” had become things, and “process” the thing was being elevated above “product” the thing; the pure artist was the one whose entire project was a pure "process" cleansed of “product.” In the bout “Process vs. Product,” Product was Apollo Creed.
If my sense is right--and in any case, what I am describing certainly did not hold true for all or even most of the artists present--then I think this is reminiscent of a bourgeois ideology involving "pure" and “purposeless” art. It would be a mistake, I think, to consider what we call "performance" in the narrow sense a privileged site of process, and I will go one step further to suggest that when a self-identified performer makes this mistake, it can be a self-serving mystification. And though theorists and critics have often been guilty of making “objects” of their materials, that is not the only way of theorizing or engaging in criticism. Trying to escape the burden of theory by making “process” into some thing that exists leads us right back into the trap we were right to try and escape in the first place.
Doing so also leaves us at risk of missing the processes involved in those things one might otherwise be tempted to call products, leaving us sorting whatever we encounter into one of two categories. Some examples from the events I cited above demand a better approach. The Performancy Forum featured a thrilling performance by Joey Molinaro with Adjua Greaves, Valerie Kuehne, and Brian McCorkle. The performance involved a score, and one performer was concerned that this score occasionally distracted from a more process-oriented engagement with other performers, that it was in some sense a product polluting the process. But in contrast to this, Molinaro explicitly drew attention to the ways that the score rested at the intersection of many processes, crystallizing some while opening opportunities for those that otherwise could never have been set in motion.
Further, as part of the Brooklyn Go event I visited two studios populated with what someone might call “products,” but that could be better described in terms of process. Brian Fernandes-Halloran’s sculptures, made of wax and pieces of found wood, seemed haunted with processes that preceded and succeeded his own. If someone might want to look at them as “products,” it was far more rewarding to think about them as social processes, something Fernandes-Halloran encouraged visitors to do. The opposition “process vs. product” was not helpful; the desire to deal with processes was. Likewise, Angelica Bergamini was visibly thrilled at the opportunity to talk about her elaborate processes, the searching gestures of a painter, the discovery of landscapes as they emerged on her canvas, the marks of a laser printer and the shimmering exchange between textures. If what she was doing resulted in "products," that never came up in our conversation. Perhaps it is significant that she has recently begun using computer animation software to set the printed figures in her paintings traveling through the spaces of ongoing processes.
