The Time of Creation

Is art object or relation? Let us explore a vision of creation where the work resides in shared experience rather than in technical mastery. Thus are also revealed the multiple temporalities of the creative process.

The Work as Relation

What is a work of art? This seemingly simple question reveals radically opposed conceptions of artistic creation. For some, the work is necessarily an external object, the fruit of progressive elaboration without which there would be no genuine appropriation of artistic language. This vision places the work at the center, aiming to create an object of value through a process of technical refinement.

My perspective belongs to an entirely different tradition, that of John Dewey and art as experience. I consider that the work resides in what we experience together, in interaction with others, in the memory we keep of this experience, not in a beautiful object that would remain foreign to us. Art then becomes an aesthetics of relation rather than a pure visual aesthetics. Creating work together means creating something that is not external to us, but that constitutes us.

The Trap of Participation

So-called participatory creations sometimes illustrate the limits of an overly object-centered conception of art. People invited to contribute may see their essential input co-opted by those who hold symbolic power – the recognized artists. The example of Clare Torry on Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon is revealing: her vocal improvisation constitutes an essential contribution to the record, which she nevertheless discovered without having followed the production process. The band had the intuition to invite someone from outside, to let her improvise, then to integrate this raw material into the final work.

This example questions the value we assign to what emerges from improvisation and instantaneity, provided an intentionality exists. It’s not about claiming that everything is equal, but about going beyond traditional value judgments. This is the major contribution of structuralists, particularly Roland Barthes: proposing a broad understanding of creations, not to hierarchize them but to understand their various social roles.

The Spectator as Co-creator

This approach aligns with the very foundation of sociology: understanding the world rather than judging it morally. The question of art brut illustrates this tension. Calling “art” productions whose authors didn’t necessarily conceive them as such might seem presumptuous. Yet, by choosing this designation, we accomplish the spectator’s part in artistic work. We discover in it what belongs to us, thus revealing that art functions as an interaction device.

Duchamp’s teaching points in this direction: designating as a work of art an object that wasn’t one a priori effectively transforms it into a work of art, because we perceive in it forms, aesthetics, cultural references that question us. The legitimation of crafts in museums seems relevant to me: these forms, which didn’t envision themselves as art at the time of their creation, nevertheless transmit to us something essential about the culture in which their creators evolved.

The Multiple Temporalities of Creation

The question of time in artistic creation reveals itself to be more complex than it appears. Time is not merely a simple linear continuum. The belief that artistic creation would require a scholastic elaboration time, proceeding step by step toward progressive refinement, offers only a partial vision of the creative process.

Time can precede the creative act: when we enter a particular state, almost trance-like, something can crystallize in a few moments, giving birth to a form of extraordinary density. Preparation time counts as much as production time. Alfred Deller expressed this admirably in a 1975 interview: he never rehearsed, he simply sang, but prepared himself by reading philosophy. One might think he didn’t work, but it was quite the opposite: he prepared his body, his soul, his gesture, his breathing, his perception of the world. This preparation enriched his singing in an audible way.

Preparing to Do Rather Than Preparing the Object

Elaboration time can therefore be production time, but also preparation time, the time of an entire life, or even a time of later reinvestment. This time belongs specifically to each person. This is why, in teaching creation, it seems essential to me to invite people to prepare themselves to do rather than to prepare the object.

It’s about putting oneself in condition, mentally, physically, emotionally, philosophically, to welcome a moment of extraordinary density, to perceive intensely and instantly elaborate significant artistic forms. This approach reveals a crucial distinction between the fantasy of mastery and genuine artistic creation. The elaboration process is often accompanied by the illusion that one would progressively reach an increasingly accomplished form. But this belief itself stems from largely unconscious cultural references, even when one claims to work on them consciously.

Emancipation Through Intuition

Emancipation from cultural norms can emerge in intuition. The essential thing is to recognize it, to examine it together, to remain open to what others have created, in other words, to remake society around what has emerged. The richness of each person’s intuition, in this modified state of consciousness, allows reaching in a few moments elaborations of which the creator themselves is not immediately aware, and which we will discover together in the time of looking and re-elaboration.

Transmission and Creative Unconscious

For me, transmission resides precisely in this capacity to create the conditions for self-discovery through art. It doesn’t necessarily pass through methodologies that become repetition and prevent art from being a means of inner exploration. An overly technical approach risks misunderstanding the potentially therapeutic dimension of art, the presence of the unconscious in the creative phenomenon and all that it allows us to deploy.

This dimension touches our profound humanity and our capacity to create society together, by discovering ourselves ever more deeply, by revealing who we are. Art then becomes not the mastery of a technique, but the continuous exploration of our relationship to the world and to others, an exploration that demands less control than openness, less know-how than know-being.

Perhaps this is where the true radicality of art resides: not in the transgression of forms, but in its capacity to transform ourselves, provided we accept to let go of our certainties about what should be a “legitimate” work or creative process.