Process Art as Methodological Innovation: From University Studios to Digital Practice

This article examines Process Art - an artistic movement that emerged from United States university art programs in the 1960s - as a viable methodological framework for contemporary practice-based research. While Process Art is typically understood as a historical movement characterised by its emphasis on making over outcome, this study argues that its pedagogical foundations and core principles position it as a rigorous, autonomous arts-based research methodology. Drawing on the movement's key characteristics - foregrounding labour, valuing process over product, non-skilled execution, and treating the body as both subject and object - the article demonstrates how Process Art methods evolved within educational contexts that prioritised theory-practice integration and systematic inquiry. Through analysis of seminal works by Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and contemporary practitioner Elizabeth Price, this research establishes Process Art's capacity to address questions of artistic labour, embodied knowledge, and the visibility of making processes. The article contributes to ongoing discussions about practice-based research methodologies by proposing that Process Art offers an internally generated framework - born within art education rather than borrowed from other disciplines - uniquely suited to investigating the corporeal dimensions of artistic production. This has particular potential for understanding digital sculpture, where computational smoothness threatens to efface indexical traces of the artist's hand.