ART: 'WORKING PROCESS' AT COLUMBUS CIRCLE

The process by which an artist creates his work seems to be of increasing interest in our phenomenologically minded society - an interest that has impelled artists to use more skill in making their mental processes available. Seeing how a visual work is made is not always so gratifying, of course, as observing the finished product. But after all, if writers can tell us through notes and diaries how they produced their novels, why shouldn't artists be allowed to clue us in on the way they do what they do?

For ''The Working Process,'' the first exhibition offered by City Gallery, in the new home of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs at 2 Columbus Circle, 17 artists have been invited to create a work of art and explain its evolution. The show, whose artists range from the well-known painter Alvin Loving to the up-and-coming conceptual artist Candace Hill-Montgomery, is co-sponsored by the Organization of Independent Artists.

The exhibition, let it be said at once, is very professionally installed in a handsome space that used to be the second-floor gallery of the Huntington Hartford Museum. As with any group show, however, what's here is of very unequal interest. Some artists have taken the work itself seriously, but regarded very lightly the ''process'' explanation. For ''Passage Morphius'' for example, Daniel Noble has constructed a fantasy boat of arresting presence, draped in cotton scrim and carrying a shaggy cargo of birch branches, fur and velvet scraps. His documentation, however, consists of a photo of a cluttered studio, a grimacing photo of a ''savage'' in skins (himself?) and a postcard of bathing beauties on a Long Island beach.

On the other hand, the explanation by Benjamin Grubler, one of the show's organizers, on how he achieved his painting, ''Sentinel,'' is more convincing than the work itself. The painting, an arrangement of geometric images - frames and grids - inflected by a textured square of paint and a free-form shape that resembles a country on a map, is accompanied by a collage that shows how the work was inspired by schematic images that have intrigued the artist since childhood: the surfaces of ancient wall paintings, the illusory light from outer space.

Candace Hill-Montgomery contributes a ''conceptual'' piece, comprising a garishly painted cabinet full of food cans, draped with red tape and set on a fake grass mat, accompanied by a cherrywood chair whose seat is lettered with the legend, ''Did Washington really chop down cherries so we could sit in Washington ... '' She explains that her main concerns are ''people and society'' and that she uses ''elements from the lives of black people whom I live with.'' Well and good, but as art, her work is not particularly evocative. With ''Tiepolo's Heaven,'' Margo Machida exhibits one of the show's most energetic works, a brightly painted wall relief in which geometric forms are set off by soft ones, and an unpretentious documentation in which she explains step by step how the piece goes from drawings to three-dimensional execution.

Of other artists in the show, the work of Darell Nettles, Rebecca Martin, Jean Wagner and Mr. Loving are of particular interest, though with the exception of Miss Wagner, whose concern is with what makes pornography tick, their documentation doesn't bring much enlightenment. The show may be seen 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., Monday through Friday, through May 1.

Other shows of the week include: Juan Hamilton (Robert Miller Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street): In his first New York exhibition in 1978, Juan Hamilton, a protege of Georgia O'Keeffe, showed some rather handsome pots that seemed to aspire to sculpture. Now, the pots have actually blossomed into that state, transmuted into sensuous black forms in clay and in bronze, whose rounded surfaces are polished to a deep gleam. One or two still retain traces of pothood - that is, they have small-bore openings at the top, and several sit, like pots, comfortably around on the floor. Most of them, however, are commanding sculptural presences, placed on austere white architectural bases in one of the season's most elegant installations. So deep is their luster that reflections tantalizingly interfere with a true reading of their shapes, and at their edges, they seem to shatter the light around them into a fine mist.

The sculptures come in two basic shapes, globular and columnar, and -with one unfortunate exception, a globular form whose rounded volumes have been mechanistically planed here and there - they have the natural, organic look of giant pebbles smoothed by centuries of flowing water. But what grips us is the tension between this ''natural'' look and the eloquent artifice that tells us they are very man made. Nature never did it so good. (Through May 9.)

Susan Hall (Patricia Hamilton Gallery, 20 West 57th Street): There's an engaging sensibility at work in Susan Hall's show, compounded partly of private visions, partly of 20's nostalgia and partly of affection for the kitschy illustrations on postcards from foreign lands before the photorama took over. In a series of dashing Conte-crayon drawings in black and terra cotta, the artist covers a wide range of subjects: a gypsified young woman, another with a flapper's bob and long cigarette holder, an eagle's head, a mime regarding himself in a mirror, a river voyage that looks like a souvenir scene done on birch bark. Certain motifs recur -playing cards, a crescent moon, a dark house with lighted windows.

Of Miss Hall's paintings, the largest and most emotive is ''Night Train Express,'' depicting a train entering a switchyard, its powerful lamp illuminating a desolate landscape of houses and trees with a mountain backdrop. But the haunting quality of the scene seems compromised by its mundane attention to color. Her other canvases are devoted, for the most part, to stylized postcard subjects: a Japanese woman holding a fan, a Spanish bull ring, a chromo landscape of New York crowned by a huge Saturn. They are done in bright, sometimes garish hues and surrounded by gestural, thickly textured borders that hark back to Abstract Expressionism, as if to place kitsch in a high-art context? The show - all in all, not Miss Hall's best -would be better without them. (Through April 29.)