700 Artists’ Processes by Maxime Chanson (review)

700 Artists’ Processes is an art object in itself. Its author, Maxime Chanson, who lives and works in Paris, has developed a singular artistic project that consists of inventorying and analyzing the activity of other artists. He showed the results of his investigation in a solo exhibition in Paris and collated them into a publishing format, the object of this unusual book, which looks like an economic report rather than a book about art.

Having difficulty in identifying his own artistic originality, Chanson researched other artists not only to find his own identity but also to show that there is no hierarchy between them when we simply focus on the drivers of their creation and the means they use to express it. In a concern for clarification pushed to the level of the absurd, his method offers a pedagogical tool for decoding the multiple tendencies and preoccupations that coexist within contemporary creative activity. Hence, this book says as much about Chanson as it does about the artists he studied.

The preface, by art historian Alexandre Quoi, is excellent and sets out the context for the book and its author as well as invites us, the readers, to be open-minded when following through. With economy of words, Chanson thoroughly presents the aims and objectives of his study, his research methodology, his analysis and results that are then laid out into multiple tables filled with words but also statistics. And that starts confusing us. Is it a reliable scientific study or is it something else? And what is this something else? Can we trust these results? If so, how would we know? This uncertainty motivates us to continue our discovery, not necessarily turning the pages in a chronological order. Hence, it may take a bit of time to understand how best to navigate amongst them, but once we have found our way through it is a very pleasant adventure.

Chanson’s investigation is based on a system of classifying artists’ approaches according to categories that describe the creative process. His core area of study, “the artistic process,” is defined as the combined action between Motors (what drives an artist to create) and Means (the modus operandi the artist employs). The model he developed offers a general map of the concerns driving the most prominent contemporary artists and the processes through which these concerns translate into works of art. We are, then, able to use this basis to further investigate what makes an artistic process original.

In order to select his 700 artists (in fact, 600 international, 148 French), Chanson set up a series of arbitrary criteria, such as the number of solo exhibitions in established venues an artist participated in over a defined timeframe. Artworks, statements and writings by the selected artists (last resort a third party) were studied to define their process. He then analyzed the data collected on each artist in order to identify any consistent elements. Chanson explains “what quickly emerged from the study was that artistic process could be grouped into families of concerns (the Motors) and families of modi operandi (the Means).” However, it is not clear whether these two categories Motors and Means, which borrow formulae from cognitive psychology, are the outcomes of the study analysis or are a pre-study decision, i.e. they actually drove the selection and the analysis. More confusion here.

He defines the Motors as ideas that emerge prior to the creative process as such. They stem from the artist’s deep-seated convictions. Motors are never called into question. They are the lifetime explorations that underlie the need the artist is trying to satisfy. Chanson refers en passant to cognitive psychology, showing in the Appendix the template he adapted for his own classification—again no information source regarding its authors, but schools of thought are listed. This table is important, however, as it provides a background for Chanson’s classification and definitions of sub-sections as well as furthering our insight into what he puts behind the...