[“…practice [as] glittering liveliness / drawing on Bataille’s philosophy / art = framed as sacrifice and sovereign moment = a rupture from profane, utilitarian time into the sacred instant, beyond discourse, knowledge, or ego.”]

— — —

After 1929, the only artistic production is the one expressed by the mass-artist, embodied in his constructive capacity, as though artistic production constituted the form of this capacity. And this is the story which, amid constant experimentation, leads us all the way to ’68. This is the period in which abstraction and production are intertwined: the abstraction of the current mode of production and the representation of possible worlds; the abstraction of the image and the use of the most varied materials; the simplification of the artistic gesture and the geometric destructuring of the real, and so on and so forth. Picasso and Klee, Duchamp and Malevich, Beuys and Fontana, Rauschenberg and Christo: we recognize in them artists sharing the same creative experience. A new subject and an abstract object: a subject capable of demystifying the fetishized destiny imposed by capital.

And then? What can we draw from this? ’68 comes and we reach a moment when contemporary art confronts new questions. How does the event arise? How can passion and the desire for transformation develop here and now? How is the revolution configured? How can man be remade? How can the abstract become subject? What world does man desire and how does he desire it? What are the forms of life taken by this extreme gesture of transformation? [105-106]

[. . .]

Artistic production traverses industry and constitutes common languages. Therefore, every production is an event of communication, and the common is constructed through multitudinous events. Consequently, this is how the capacity to renew the regimes of knowledge and action that — in the era of cognitive labour — we call artistic is determined. [117]

[. . .]

Art defines itself as form of life, characterized by poverty at its base, and by revolutionary will at the apex of the becoming-swarm. [121]

– Antonio Negri: ‘Metamorphoses’

[production = “constructive capacity” of individuals -> immaterial labour (knowledge, information, and communication) + transformative power of “the multitude” (a collective engaged in new forms of production and resistance) / notion of the artist as an individual creator is replaced by the mass-artist (a network of interconnected singularities) who embodies the collective, constructive capacity of society / artistic production becomes a form of expressing the ability of individuals to build and transform rather than being solely a product of the individual artist]

Barnett Newman: ’The Ideographic Picture’, 1947

— — —

1977 | Royal College of Art / Winfrith Newburgh

“…a complex assemblage that suggests a virtual interconnection between himself, objects, and the whole interior studio environment” / “…and in contemporary painting there appeared to be scant respect for form (apart from that demanded by the conventional, rectangular boundary).” 

– David Thistlewood: ‘Herbert Read, Formlessness and Form – An introduction to his aesthetics’, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984

“The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall.” 

– Donald Judd: ‘Specific Objects’, 1965

…the moment when one is no longer able to define what divides art from non-art. Creativity, liberated from disciplinary boundaries and specific know-how, could now be exerted as a ubiquitous agency / the least amount of mediation between artist and materials / everyday world and artistic world = unstable modus operandi = chaos and contingency = “when both being and non-being, existence and non-existence, are encircled within the same form” / …just as work deviates into non-work, so art morphs into non-art…

– Gabriele Guercio: ‘The form of the indistinct: Picasso and the rise of Generic Creativity’, 2013

— — —

1977 Royal College of Art Abbey Minor Scholarship / Florence (Ghiberti / Brunelleschi)

1978 Royal College of Art Travel Bursary / Paris (Léger)

“The crudeness, variety, humour, and downright perfection [. . .] made me want to paint in slang with all its colour and mobility.”

– Fernand Léger, c1917

— — —

[21.01.2025]

“We were shifting our role away from traditional teaching on an individualistic and divisive basis, to a collaborative one, in which the sharing of experience created a relationship that, was more positive and productive.”

David Cashman: ”There are those that are the product of participatory processes and communal creative activity, whether it’s with kids or adults — lots of possibility of interaction. There’s another sort, which I’d call an interpretive one where the artist seeks information from the environment or the community where they live and they’ve got a contract with the community to interpret their needs and concerns. Then there’s another kind of artist who isn’t any of those things, who’s projecting an internal image out onto the environment, and that worries me.”

Roger Fagin: “The gallery system is not nourishing, the way our system operates now involves an appalling wastage. [. . .] We are trying to develop our role into a multiplicity of functions, so that our work as ‘artists’ isn’t separated from our educational and administrative function, or the physical labour we do, or our interactions with people with other skills. What we are doing is clearly not original or unique to one individual but to break down those concepts to create something which is the end product of a process which involves the uniqueness, originality and creativity of lots of different people interacting.”

David Cashman: “Our experience is that we get help when we ask for it, and we show there is positive energy on the move. We haven’t said we can’t get on with architects and planners and bureaucrats. We’ve gone out and taken them on. Because there are people who have vision and positive creative energy and they need to give it space to let it grow!”

– David Cashman and Roger Fagin | Islington Schools Education Project, 1975

Working Notes

[2008] 23.11.2023

[…filière désigne une chaîne d’activités économiques (de la matière première au produit fini)]

LINK: https://davidpattenwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/e28098the-quick-and-the-deade28099.pdf

“The…atmosphere of a place is where the mysteries of the trade become no mysteries, they are as it were in the air [and] children learn many of them unconsciously” [Alfred Marshall, ‘Principles of Economics’, 1890] and “the process…must necessarily remain continually unfinished and infinitely continuing.”

21.05.2025

[artistic production emerging in the post-1929 era / immaterial labor (knowledge, information, and communication) and the transformative power of ‘the multitude’ (a collective of individuals engaged in new forms of production and resistance in shaping the art landscape) / the artist as an individual creator is replaced by the mass-artist (as a network of interconnected singularities), who embodies the collective, constructive capacity of society / artistic production = form of expressing the ability of individuals to build and transform, rather than being solely a product of individual genius.]

12.01.2026

[mass practice requires theoretical vigilance = a collective anti-expressive discipline aimed at interrupting and dismantling assumptions / suspending authorial identity, hierarchical form, and habitual attachment -> engaging in conscious, alternative actions, behaviours and practices / non-separation can only exist as a provisional, collective, and contested arrangement towards the disciplined suspension of separative reactions within shared production]

“I have said: To hell with culture; and to this consignment we might add another: To hell with the artists. Art as a separate profession is merely a consequence of culture as a separate entity, in a natural society there will be no precious or privileged being called artists: there will be only workers.”

– Herbert Read: ‘To Hell With Culture’, 1941

Anna Mendelssohn [Grace Dent]: Relentless, c1997

Draft summary: the primacy of practice over abstract theory / to rethink / a practice with its own material conditions and effects / and rejections / painting does not culminate in a purified essence but remains caught in overdetermined tensions between materials, institutions, ideologies, and modes of perception / a site of structural contradiction / material conditions not aesthetic mystification vs institutional approaches to painting = critical re-description of painting’s conditions / refusal of closure = painting permanently “under struggle” / [revolutionary ruptures] / concepts of interconnected practices / theory itself as a kind of practice / integrated yet relatively autonomous and mutually affecting / refusing identification with image, composition, depth, or authorial intention / non-privileging of subject, gesture, or site / de-hierarchisation: multiplicity without separation / the work functions when reactions (aesthetic, institutional, authorial) are suspended / processes are allowed to unfold without grasping / meaning is not affirmed or rejected, but circulated = equanimity as material organisation + distributed operational awareness / materialist practice insists on making conditions visible / post-studio constructed practice = suspension of separative operations (forms, identities, and reactions) -> collective production = anti-expressive discipline -> reconfigured common material conditions / theoretical vigilance = a collective anti-expressive discipline aimed at interrupting and dismantling assumptions / suspending authorial identity, hierarchical form, and habitual attachment -> engaging in conscious, alternative actions, behaviours and practices / non-separation can only exist as a provisional, collective, and contested arrangement towards the disciplined suspension of separative reactions within shared production / operationalised as anti-expressivity, distributed authorship, and procedural transparency = collective anti-expressivity that suspends habitual interpellation rather than cultivating insight or bliss.

Amsterdam 16.08.2024

Artistic production = social cooperation / creativity is collective, anonymous, and productive / Art = a mode of social labour within the multitude + Artwork = a process, practice, or relation, not a finished object.

Art without expressive subject / not a subject expressing interiority / agency is distributed across practices, materials, institutions / meaning is produced structurally, not intentionally.

Berlin 07.06.2023

Painting as mass practice, not individual expression / a repeatable practice / a set of operations / a refusal of stylistic signature / practice emerges from material conditions themselves / the work is of the same order as mass labour [NOTE: Picasso ‘deskilling’ / “Picasso did not so much mimic or adopt modern engineering techniques as produce an object that reflects on the conditions of simplified or de-skilled labor in the present, while also infusing ordinary forms of labor with remarkable intellect, imagination, and tactile immediacy.” – Christine Poggi: ‘Picasso’s First Constructed Sculpture: A Tale of Two Guitars’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 94, No. 2, June 2012].

Washington DC 28.09.2024

Post-studio condition / no privileged site of production / no unified artwork as final synthesis / no authorial centre / mass artist as distributed practice = procedural or collective = a set of operations, not an object = reprogramming everyday practice, not symbolic commentary / no exterior position = an art practice which operates by reorganising the supports and surfaces of social cooperation itself.

Working Notes: June 2025

“Lethaby wrote that he didn’t believe in genius one bit, nor anything else abnormal. He ‘wanted the commonplace’. ‘Art should be everywhere. It cannot exist in isolation or one-man-thick; it must be a thousand men thick.’ [. . .] Meanwhile we can begin to live it, as some of you are doing, even in the midst of the old world and among the monuments of its failures as well as its successes.”

– Lionel Esher: ‘Architecture in a Crowded World, Vision and Reality in Planning’, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1971 | Concluding Address, Royal College of Art, 1976

Statements:

Practice is found in concrete material and social relations. The work, therefore, does not comment on something external to itself, but embraces the internal tensions and contradictions inherent to the idea of ‘beneficial practice’ and the potential of the mass-artist. Rather than relying on abstract aesthetic assumptions, this bracketing positions practice before theory, allowing knowledge to emerge through engagement with specific configurations of simultaneous events. The shift from individual, intentional authorship toward collective or relational production addresses the tension between distributed productive capacities and cultural authority. Making as ‘well-making’ becomes a non-final, non-compositional, ongoing process—a negotiation between material conditions, social cooperation, and institutional constraints.

Art is labour embedded in social life and material reality, not a privileged or separate sphere. Practice precedes theory: knowledge, value, and artistic sense emerge through doing, material engagement, and collective processes, and not through detached contemplation.

‘Beneficial practice’ is adaptive, relational, self-emptying labour grounded in everyday conditions. The ‘mass-artist’ prioritises shared production over individual expression, and emphasises cooperation, common life, and ongoing labour rather than finished objects or galleries. The work unfolds through co-creative, negotiated processes.

Art becomes an ongoing, processual activity: a way of doing and making that dissolves boundaries between individual and collective, material and social. It is ethically open and materially grounded, responsive to concrete conditions—and resistant to closure or separation from life.