Art as a system and process

Art – whether visual or performing – can be understood as an open, generative system, i.e. as a process that constitutes itself in the making, is not oriented towards a teleological goal and therefore has no end point. The individual work is not a finished product, but a node within a network in which meanings arise.

In “The Art of Society” (1995), Niklas Luhmann describes art as an autopoietic system that reproduces itself through its own operations and whose elements – the works of art – appear not as end points but as temporary manifestations of ongoing communication. This understanding can be transferred to literature: Roland Barthes' idea of the “Death of the author” (1967) detaches the work from the creator's intention and opens it up to the infinite production of meanings in the act of reading. In “Opera aperta” (1962), Umberto Eco formulates the concept of the ‘open work of art’: a form that only finds its completion in interaction with the reader or viewer.

In the visual arts, this processual character is particularly evident in the practices of conceptual art, the Fluxus movement and process art of the 1960s and 70s. Joseph Kosuth emphasised in “Art after Philosophy” (1969) that art is not primarily an object, but a discursive process. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe artistic and literary processes in “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980) as ‘rhizomatic’ – not hierarchical, not linear, but networked, open to new connections at any time.

Literary techniques such as the Surrealists' ‘écriture automatique’ or the experimental structures of the Oulipo group (Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau) understand text production as a rule-based but potentially infinite game. Here, the text is a system of possibilities that is not fixed in a final form. Readers do not act as passive consumers, but as active co-producers who generate new meanings in the process of reception.

In contemporary art, this understanding is reflected in Nicolas Bourriaud's “Relational Aesthetics” (1998), where art is understood as a social process that only becomes complete through interaction. Accordingly, digital and algorithmic art – like procedural literature – can also be read as self-generating systems whose initial states are merely the conditions for a potentially infinite becoming.

Art as process therefore does not mean arbitrariness, but rather ‘structured openness’: a system that is shaped by its own internal rules, materials and contexts without ever exhausting itself in a final stage. The work – be it a painting, an installation, a novel or a poem – is only a momentary state of aggregation within a more comprehensive, open and constantly changing structure. In this understanding, art is not what remains, but what happens.