Doing and Illustrating: Practice, Duration, and Meaning in Contemporary Art
Where Artwork Comes From — and Why It Matters
There is a subtle distinction in contemporary art that shapes how work is understood, collected, and sustained over time.
It has less to do with style or subject matter, and more to do with where an artwork originates.
This distinction has been discussed across art criticism, phenomenology, and curatorial writing for decades, often through questions of practice, duration, and embodied knowledge rather than through image analysis alone (Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Amelia Jones).
One way to approach it is to consider whether a work emerges primarily from illustrating an idea or from working through a practice.
Two Starting Points
Illustrating
Illustrative approaches often begin with a concept the artist intends to communicate.
That concept may involve an emotion, a narrative, a message, or a symbolic meaning. The artwork is constructed as a visual form that represents that idea.
This mode of working has long been central to narrative painting, allegorical imagery, and symbolic representation, where meaning becomes accessible early in the encounter and interpretation resolves relatively quickly.
Art historian James Elkins notes that much visual analysis operates at this level, focusing on how images communicate ideas within a single frame or moment.
2. Working Through Practice
Other approaches begin with sustained engagement rather than a predefined concept.
Here, the artist works from repeated actions, long-term practices, lived conditions, or familiar perceptual environments. The artwork develops through continued involvement, and meaning accumulates gradually.
This approach aligns with philosophical accounts of perception as something formed through bodily experience and repetition rather than abstract thought alone (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
It also connects to contemporary art practices that privilege duration and return, where difference becomes perceptible through repetition over time, a framework articulated by Gilles Deleuze.
Early in a practice, clarity often feels like success. As a practice deepens, different values begin to matter—duration, restraint, and the ability for a work to remain active without explanation. Learning to recognize that shift has been part of my own development as a painter.
An Analogy Outside of Art
A helpful comparison can be found outside visual art.
A travel brochure and a well-used map both describe the same place. One is designed for immediate clarity. The other records repeated use.
Curatorial writing often relies on similar distinctions when evaluating whether work reflects sustained inquiry or a single resolved gesture (Brian O'Doherty).
How This Appears Visually
Works that emerge from illustration often present a clear visual resolution and rely on legible symbolism. Their interpretive clarity arrives early in the encounter.
Works that emerge from practice tend to allow uncertainty to remain. They revisit similar conditions with variation, value restraint, and retain a sense of familiarity rather than staging.
This logic appears across practices associated with minimalism, process art, and serial work, including artists such as Agnes Martin, On Kawara, and Roman Opalka, where repetition functions as a perceptual tool rather than a stylistic limitation.
Why This Matters to Collectors
Collectors frequently encounter art through brief interactions: online images, market booths, or short conversations.
Understanding whether work develops from sustained engagement can support clearer decisions, especially when encountering new artists.
Museum and collection-building practices consistently emphasize long-term coherence and endurance over immediate impact, a tendency discussed in contemporary criticism by writers such as Hito Steyerl, who frames artworks as part of extended systems of circulation and time rather than isolated objects.
A Question That Can Help
When encountering a piece of art, it can be useful to ask:
“Does this work reflect extended time spent inside a particular way of seeing or doing?”
This question mirrors how institutional contexts often assess whether a practice continues to develop across bodies of work rather than resolving at the level of a single image.
Situating This Within My Own Practice
In my own work, swimmers appear through long familiarity with water and repeated attention to how perception shifts below the surface.
The paintings develop from those conditions, registering changes in light, orientation, and sensation over time. The subject remains consistent so that perceptual differences can become visible.
This approach aligns with photographic and painterly practices that revisit the body under consistent conditions, such as the swimmer portraits of Rineke Dijkstra.
Why This Distinction Is Useful
For collectors, this framework offers language for understanding why certain works continue to resonate.
For artists, it clarifies why some practices deepen through return.
For curators, it aligns with how work is often evaluated within institutional settings, where duration, coherence, and spatial intelligence shape exhibition and acquisition decisions (Miwon Kwon).
References & Further Reading
(You can title this “References” or “Further Reading,” depending on how formal you want the post to feel.)
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press.
Elkins, J. (2001). Why Art Cannot Be Taught. University of Illinois Press.
Jones, A. (1998). Body Art/Performing the Subject. University of Minnesota Press.
Kwon, M. (2004). One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. MIT Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge.
O’Doherty, B. (1999). Inside the White Cube. University of California Press.
Steyerl, H. (2017). Duty Free Art. Verso.
