About the Project

This project grew out of the doctoral dissertation of Tim Gorichanaz, presented in 2018 at Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics.

In his study, Tim looked at the philosophy of documents, and he asked if art can be considered a document. He focused specifically on self-portraits—a little old-fashioned, to be sure, in these selfie days, but there was a time when the pen and brush were the latest technologies, too.

Tim’s research suggests that we should think of art as a process, rather than a product. We should see art as unfinished, because that’s where its real power lies. And if we can do that, then maybe we can realize that we humans are unfinished as well.

Art as unfinished

When we look at art, we tend to focus on its content. “That’s a picture of a rhino!” We may also locate it within a certain style or historical period. “Ah, abstract expressionism—a reaction to war if I ever saw one.” But can’t we also think of art as an experience? Something that’s happening?

The thing is, we’re used to thinking of art as a finished product. Of course it’s a finished product, you say—it’s hanging on the wall, isn’t it? Granted, it may be done being physically manipulated, but as long as there are people to see it, to have experiences with it, then it’s not yet finished.

The philosopher Catherine Elgin, who writes about the power of art to enhance our thinking, has said it this way: “The picture is inexhaustible. There is always more to be found.” There’s a similar sentiment in the memoir-novel of Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book One:

That was my only parameter with art, the feelings it aroused. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure. … I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can’t explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility.

Art is inexhaustible in part because it depends on you. When you look at art, you’re bringing something to the table. A lot of somethings, in fact: associations, memories, feelings and desires. All this melds together as you bring in what the artwork has to offer. Every time you look, you may see something a little different. That’s because every experience brings a new set of associations, memories, feelings and desires.

To really understand art as unfinished, it helps to focus on the process of a piece’s making, rather than just how it appears today. After all, the material components that make up a piece of art were once strewn about—it’s not as if the artist pulled them out of nowhere. So, in his study, Tim endeavored to tell the stories of a number of self-portraits by examining them as they were being made.

People as unfinished

If we can think this way about art, then what about people? The question came to Tim’s mind because he was studying self-portraits, and when it comes to self-portraits, the distinction between art and person is quite blurry. In Tim’s study, when the artists referred to aspects of the self-portrait, they often used the words me and my. “My hands are too big,” for instance. Just think: if you do an image search for most public figures, you’ll find photographs of them; but if you do an image search for an artist, you’ll find photographs of their artwork.

We people, as long as we’re alive, are unfinished. Even after we’re dead, to some extent, our stories continue. It really is like in the Pixar film Coco: You don’t die your final death until everyone living has forgotten you, until your footprints on the earth have all faded.

This is easy to see intellectually, but it’s a hard thing to really live. As we go about life, we tend to see other people as finished, even as we recognize that we ourselves are unfinished. We look at other people as the consummate expressions of themselves.

That guy cut me off—he’s a jerk, end of story. The person who broke up with me? Irremediably blind. This person trying to change her career? Of course she’s failing—at the end of a day, she really just is a desk receptionist. So-and-so is just a dilettante. So-and-so is shy, bad at math, an addict, a criminal… When we deal with people, we tend to reduce them to some essential characteristic that we perceive in them. Another way of saying that is we define people by their pasts—we lock them in. We refuse to see that they can change, that they’re just as unfinished as we are, and just as imperfect.

Not to mention that we tend to see servers, cashiers and baristas more as objects rather than people. When you’re checking out, are your eyes on the things you’re buying and the credit card terminal, or are you meeting the eyes of the person who’s helping you?

Part of this project is to help you wake up to the way everything and everyone is unfolding around you. We may perceive things as finished, as objects, as final, but everything is happening.

That goes for ourselves, too. Don’t be so hard on yourself: You’re still in progress.