Praxis
As I take it, art practice does not respond to any previous theoretical assumption. It refers to a human making which, going beyond instinctive and automatic behaviours (like a spider spinning its web), is peculiarly utilitarian [1]. Its usefulness has to do with what Lacan says when he defines psychoanalysis as practice: "Praxis is the broadest term for any concerted action by man, giving you the ability to deal with the Real through the Symbolic" (2008: 14). In the sense expressed here, the usefulness of art practice is its dealing with the Real. Dealing with the Real is done through the effort to make the new survive, which goes beyond specific formal solutions, artworks, pictures, themes, fads or styles.
Art practice does not arise from innate behaviour; it is not a first-grade act or a purely subjective response to the vicissitudes of existence [2]. If we make art it is because others before us have either developed knowledge, practices, skills and beliefs that nurture art, or were already making art. From the beginning, making art is a cultural matter, the dignity of which reflects a common consensus, in the sense that it gathers and consolidates multiple behaviours and past experiences. It does not come out of a subject, alone in the face of danger, confronting existential questions; but of a historical search in which subject inherits a series of conditions which lead him or her to confront the unknown. This does not deny the consideration that the practice will only be valid or useful when there is a total subjective commitment.
We make art because others have made it before; but all that has already been done exists not as a regulatory framework, but only as a condition of possibility, a form of exemplary practical wisdom and a possibility of intersubjective communication. For us, the legacy of our predecessors is a framework of options and a background from which to construct the new, which continually seeks the realization and perpetuation of desire.
A perpetuation of desire which, in other words, means satisfying the need to make the visible, to represent the force that moves the world; which integrates and condenses the perceptual, affective and conceptual. This integration will become objectified as the products of praxis, although the production of these effects is, for the maker, secondary to production itself. Although art is made to be seen, nothing explains artists' habitual compulsion to make much more than they show, unless this integration occurs within practice itself. In that sense, one could say that, despite the fact that others have made art before, thus guaranteeing the existence of a framework which can in some ways be compared with a theoretical framework; it is making itself which on each occasion brings new ways of being into art, thus extending its framework. The specificity of art as a praxis therefore lies in its ability to establish perpetually new models and modes of existence. It merges thinking and objects, body and spirit in an indissoluble unity. This is probably the source of Picasso's famous expression “I do not seek, I find.”
But how can we characterize, in particular, such a praxis?[ [3] I identify four key aspects to it:
A. Subjective involvement.
Classical science bases its methodology on the desire for objectivity, which would not be, taken to its extreme, anything other than the fantasy of observation without an observer. In art, the impossibility of such an aspiration is recognized, and the maker is subjectively involved in his or her experiments from the start. As a parody of the difference, we might think of a scientist who first takes the temperature of thermometer to know how much it will cool the water whose temperature is being measured, as opposed to the artist who puts her or his hand in the water. The mode of communication of the results would also be different: a figure (37º) as opposed to a sentence or an exclamation (Oh, it's hot but not burning!). In art, you do not observe phenomena from a safe, supposedly objective distance; but from the intimate awareness of being part of, and contributing to permanently changing what you work with. We work from a non-neutral position, and in that sense often turn to stories of experiences because the impossibility of separating analysis from judgement and opinion is obvious.
B. Art practice is radically procedural.
Faced with the idea of the project, where aims and methods are predetermined, artistic practice is a kind of continuous research, often a lifetime investigation in which, according to subjective involvement and the complexity of its symbols, any predetermination is a serious obstacle to its development. To work procedurally means that to go where you do not know, you need to go the way you do not know. So, it is possible to determine a starting point, but not a working method or a clear eventual aim. Desirably, both method and objective should self-generate; here, time, the experience of non-teleologically directed time, is an essential ingredient.
C. The product of praxis, the artwork, does not express pre-existing or external meanings.
While object and praxis are not apparently the same, and both are relatively self-sufficient, it is also true they are related recursively to each other. The object mediates and helps to form viewers' and authors' subjectivities, not as a transmitter of content, but as a generator of it. The work, rather than an answer, is always a question that needs the intervention of the viewer to generate meaning. Just as the blue sky does not symbolize joy but it makes it, so that it is itself joy, no work of art means anything different from what it is. This does not mean that the information in it is dispensable, but that all that matters should always be a relational event. It also means that binary categories such as form and content are alien to us. From this point of view, not everything can be used; there can always be more or less successful artistic actions. We avoid literalism that construes artefacts as illustrations of a particular existing or external content to themselves.
D. In art, advances occur through personal discoveries.
You can only learn and know what you have experienced, and this is not easy to objectivise. It is unrealistic to expect to extract a single and precisely communicable item of content from art practice. Rather, we should be alert to the emergence of the new, to cognitive advances, to the odd and complicated feelings that unsettle and reposition us, that reveal something very diffuse but concrete at the same time, and which help us to implement guidelines for a different performance. I refer here to aesthetic experience as the experience of the new.
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[1] Practice, or "human making", is defined as follows: "The term "praxis" is used here as opposed to the term "behaviour." Behaviour is an ethological or psychological concept; Praxis is an anthropological concept (practice presupposes conduct, and yet is again a new form of behaviour when, for example, it is automated as routine). We talk about the spider weaving its web as behaviour (not praxis), but we speak of the practice of workers on a loom. In each case, we would need to discuss the determination of the boundary between behaviour and praxis. In general, we assume that practice is the result of the anamorphosis of previous behaviour, which means that it will be necessary to have very complex cultural, social and historical settings within which to recast certain behaviours of hominids, even of primitive men, to lead to the form of praxis. The idea of praxis, understood this way, corresponds closely with the meaning, in Spanish, of the expression "human making" - to the extent that this making has added the Latin agere (corresponding to the praxis of Aristotle, which, according to him, would be moderated by phronesis, prudentia) as the Latin facere (corresponding to Aristotle's poiesis, moderated by techne, ars)." (García Sierra, 1999)
[2] Moraza defines artistic knowledge as "second grade knowledge“: "Faced with the romantic perspective which considers art as a link with the world without any mediation, as first grade knowledge, we instead are sure the artistic consciousness presupposes (and not only in principle, but constantly) other previous forms of awareness or wisdom: it is not a first grade recognition and does not point to a first grade form of knowledge, but to a knowledge of knowledge, a non-strictly subjective and not definitely objective reflection. It is not from their embodied individuality that people develop, without further ado, "naturally", aesthetic exploration and rationality. The development of "artistic knowledge" is not an individual but a historical process, as its processes behoove of a rationality that is to be constituted from inherited (supra individual) beliefs, and not only from individual experiences (which, in any case, exist merely as cultural formations, mediated by supra individual beliefs and knowledge)." (Moraza, 2004).
[3] This characterization draws from the ideas of the artist and professor at the University of Vigo (Spain) Juan Luis Moraza, expressed in numerous articles and lectures which can be found online.