Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics

Heidegger, Derrida and Contingency in Twentieth Century Art

Ian Andrews

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350148482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

In drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and aligning it with a new trend in interdisciplinary phenomenology, Ian Andrews provides a unique look at the role of chance in art and its philosophical implications. His account of how the composer John Cage and other avant-garde creatives such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha used chance in their work to question the structures of experience and prompt a new engagement with these phenomena makes a truly important contribution to Continental philosophy. Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the disciplines of phenomenology, deconstruction and hermeneutics, as well as being compelling reading for anyone interested in pursuing sound studies, art theory and art history through an interdisciplinary post-phenomenological lens.

1

The spot on the wall

This book presents a defence for the deployment of the aleatory or chance operation in the work of art. In other words, it seeks to give chance a chance, to rescue its image from some of the standard derisions it has been forced to endure. I will propose that the work of chance is neither frivolous buffoonery, nor clownish anti-art. I will argue that its rationale has serious philosophical implications. It may be that following this line of thought through philosophy and the discourse of art, we may discover that, in the end, chance was never on trial at all. Rather, it is art, or the standardized conceptions of art, that needs to be revised. Aleatory procedures in art will always attract bad press from, on the one hand, those who believe that the work of art is essentially a manifestation of the feelings or innate sensibilities of the artist, or from, on the other hand, those who believe that art is an act of commentary and that the work of art is merely a carrier for ideas and external truths, political or otherwise. The exploration of the use of chance in art opens up a theoretical space that puts into question the role of intention in art and thought. The question shifts to asking: What is the place of intention in art? Why does intention, as either rational, calculating, conceptual reasoning, or as irrational, intuitive, expression, dominate all conceptions of art, the activity of the artist and the work of art? My first task will first be to delimit the chance operation – or what might more properly be described as ‘the mechanical aleatory procedure’ – in the history of art and determine the differences between it and other allied procedures. This will take the form of a kind of potted history where I examine the practices and their rationales and determine, in a brief way, how these rationales come into proximity with various theoretical currents in the twentieth century.

Chance came to be deployed as an artistic strategy in its most pure form in the early twentieth century with the avant-garde movements of dada and surrealism. However, the roots of chance as an aid to artistic practice go much further back. Max Ernst’s essay on frottage begins with a quote from Leonardo da Vinci, from his Treatise on Painting – a text that was much admired by the surrealists.

It is not to be despised, in my opinion, if, after gazing fixedly at the spot on the wall, the coals in the grate, the clouds, the flowing stream, if one remembers some of their aspects; and if you look at them carefully you will discover some quite admirable inventions. Of these the genius of the painter may take full advantage, to compose battles of animals and of men, of landscapes or monsters, of devils and other fantastic things which bring you honor. In these confused things genius becomes aware of new inventions, but it is necessary to know well (how to draw) all the parts that one ignores, such as the parts of animals and the aspects of landscape, rocks, and vegetation.¹

Leonardo advocates a technique that finds, in certain physical ephemera, textures and patinas – such as aged or smeared walls, stones and veined marble – the subjects which the artist aspires to capture, such as landscapes, battles and animals. He recounts Botticelli’s example where an artist throws a paint-soaked sponge against the wall and sees, in the pattern produced, a landscape. This story replicates another – said to be apocryphal – from Pliny, where a painter, frustrated by his attempts to capture the foam at the mouth of a dog, finally throws his sponge in disgust at the failed rendering and, by chance, the result delivers everything he had been striving to achieve. Pliny goes on to say that, in this case, chance comes to represent nature in art, and reflects that the painting of the dog is due to an equal result of chance and art – or we might say chance and technics. This conception, no doubt, comes from Agathon’s saying reproduced by Aristotle: ‘art (technē) is beloved of chance (tuche), and chance of art.’²

The story of the sponge can easily be read as a practical way to reproduce ephemera such as the foam at a dog’s, or horse’s, mouth. Here chance might be utilized in order to depict the chaotic, the random, the contingent. The sponge, one could say, generates noise. But in Leonardo’s handling of the story of the sponge something else comes into play. The chance procedure is regarded as a stimulant to the imagination. In the chaotic forms, images suggest themselves to the artist. However, what the artist sees in the noise is what the artist wishes to see. E. H. Gombrich describes this process as an ‘interaction between making and matching, suggestion and projection’.³ For an artist like Alexander Cozens – who took Leonardo’s advice quite seriously, integrating it into his ‘blotting method’ – what he and his pupils wished to see in the random application of ink were landscapes, and in particular, landscapes depicted in the manner of Claude Lorrain. Gombrich compares this process to the psychiatric diagnostic tool developed by Hermann Rorschach. Known as a ‘projective’ test, the Rorschach test suggests certain objects to the patient who projects unconscious images onto the shapes. The patient attempts to find meaning in contingency; signification in the a-semiotic. Rorschach’s procedure belongs to the history of what is known as ‘kleksography’ – the art of discovering images in inkblots – which begins with the work of the German romantic poet and spiritualist Justinus Kerner with the publication of his Kleksographien, a volume of poetry and inkblots, in 1857. Kerner developed his poetry out of the images and in this way the chance element functioned as a stimulant to his imagination.

Surrealism and automatism

Ernst’s deployment of frottage (and other techniques such as grattage) is, as Georges Hugnet points out, ‘not exactly the aesthetic exploitation of a spot on the wall in the manner of Leonardo,’ but it still remains very close.⁴ However, instead of matching the perceived images to conscious and determinant images in the mind, the objective of Ernst’s frottage is to uncover images stored in the unconscious (if we believe this to be possible). The method involves, as Ernst puts it, ‘excluding all conscious mental guidance (of reason, taste, morals), reducing to the extreme the active part of that one whom we have called, up to now, the “author” of the work’.⁵ This process certainly involves chance, but to a much greater extent it is aligned with the surrealist technique of ‘pure psychic automatism’. This practice, which is typified by the method of automatic writing, presents one way in which the artist may gain access to the resources of the unconscious. For André Breton , the unconscious does not falsify; it cannot be controlled, and it is innately free from the biases imposed by the conscious mind (rationality). The plethora of surrealist chance techniques are variously said to project, reflect or appeal to the unconscious.

In the first surrealist manifesto, Breton appeals to Pierre Reverdy’s definition of poetic metaphor in order to get to the heart of the surrealist image:

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.

The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.⁶

Although he accepts Reverdy’s conception of metaphor, Breton objects that

it does not seem possible to bring together, voluntarily, what he calls ‘two distant realities’ [such as Lautreamont’s chance meeting of an umbrella and sewing machine on a dissection table]. The juxtaposition is made or not made, and that is the long and the short of it.⁷

The upshot of this is that, for Breton, surrealist images cannot emerge out of consciousness. They cannot be evoked at will, nor, once they have emerged from the unconscious, can they be suppressed. They cannot be imagined since imagination is a reflective and voluntary activity. They can only be discovered, found or encountered. In surrealist automatism it is not just reason, rationality, discursive consciousness that need to be bypassed, but any conscious imaginative or reflective process. Breton is well aware that the unconscious cannot be made to bend to the will of consciousness, and that it will not give up its contents on demand or respond to a direct programmatic interrogation.

Breton views Reverdy’s two distant realities as resembling the poles of an electrical power source between which constitute a potential difference – or ‘voltage’ in the more common usage. The spark is what is generated by this difference. The greater the difference, the larger the spark. The conjunction of the two poles – which always remains a difference and not a sublation – produces a meaning, while not directly violating reason to produce the irrational or the illogical. The meaning can, nevertheless, only be observable by reason but cannot be its product (which the irrational certainly can). Although, at times, described as a higher reality, surreality would better be described as a widened reality: a reality that, in phenomenological terms, includes for the human subject not just correlates of consciousness but correlates of the unconscious.

Of the various surrealist techniques, it is automatic writing, dream reports and mediumistic, quasi-spiritualist, experiments that constitute a dialogue with interiority. Although some of these techniques may resemble the séance, automatism does not transcend the consciousness/unconscious of the individual subject, and as such can be said to constitute an atheist resistance to any religious or spiritualist externality where the voice or word emits from some supersensible realm of the dead. (Avital Ronell reminds us that the French word for psychoanalytic session is séance.)⁸ At the same time, by contrast, surrealist games introduce chance procedures which are essentially external to any singular individual consciousness, operating in an inter-subjective manner.

Automatism and abstract expressionism

In the late 1930s the ideas of surrealist automatism begin to drift across the Atlantic and begin to inform the practices of the New York school and abstract expressionism. These artists embraced particular aspects of automatism such as its prescriptions for limiting the control enforced by rational consciousness over artistic production. As Robert Motherwell relates, they took the central aim of surrealism as proposed in Breton’s definition in the first surrealist manifesto, in Motherwell’s words, ‘to make a work automatically without a priori aesthetic or moral conditions’.⁹ At the same time, however, whil e distrusting the literariness of surrealism, and what they saw as its clichés and romanticism – typified by the work and promotional activity of Salvador Dali, the most visible of the surrealists at the time – the New York artists ultimately began to question the role of the unconscious in automatism.

The precepts of surrealist automatism arrived in New York from at least two different directions. The Byelorussian, John Graham (Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowski)¹⁰ – an early mentor for Motherwell and Pollock – brought the core ideas of surrealist automatism, and the techniques of automatic writing, from Paris (where he was allegedly acquainted with Breton). Graham published a monograph on art entitled System and Dialectics of Art, which, rather than proscribing a Hegelian dialectics, offered his meditations on the purpose and origin of art in a question and answer format. Like Breton, Graham regards the unconscious as a vast archive of all previous experiences available to be tapped by the artist. The purpose of art, as Graham sees it, is to restore lost access to the unconscious. As he puts it,

Human beings lost to a great extent or never possessed the access to the wisdom stored in the unconscious. The unconscious mind is the power house, the creative agent. The conscious mind is the clearing house or a controlling agent.¹¹

For Graham, the personal technique, which he calls ‘automatic ecriture’, is one of three necessary elements in the production of the work of art.

Another stream for the ideas of automatism was introduced by the Chilean painter Roberto Matta Echaurren who set up a group of ‘automatic painters’ including Pollock, Motherwell, Peter Busa, William Baziotes and Gerome Kamrowski. The formation of this group, as Motherwell claims, marked the real beginning of abstract expressionism.¹² Although highly critical of what they viewed as surrealism’s clichéd images, this group of artists met regularly to develop methods of painting utilizing automatic principles sometimes resulting in collaborative paintings.¹³ These automatic practices were informed, to various degrees, by existentialism, ideas concerning the Jungian collective unconscious, Gestalt theory, the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the American pragmatism of John Dewey and William James, Chinese Daoism and Japanese Zen Buddhism. It was through the combination of these various currents that abstract expressionists began to rethink the role of the unconscious in what came to be known as action painting. Although Motherwell, in the 1950s, was quick to defend the role of the unconscious in automatic painting – against vulgar assertions that implied that the action painter’s activity consisted simply of not knowing what they are doing, making paintings in their sleep, or in a state of intoxication – he had already by 1944 begun to cast doubt on the automatism of surrealism:

The fundamental criticism of automatism is that the unconscious cannot be directed, that it presents none of the possible choices which, when taken, constitute any expression’s form. To give oneself over completely to the unconscious is to become a slave.¹⁴

The unconscious is not accessible by the will, nor can it be directed by the will. Paradoxically then, for Motherwell, ‘the retreat into the unconscious is in a sense the desire to maintain a “pure ego”, [where, in contrast] everything in the conscious world is held to be contaminating’.¹⁵

Against the literary models of surrealism, Motherwell favoured what he calls a ‘plastic automatism’ which had absolutely nothing to do with delving into the unconscious. Motherwell’s model is instead physiological. In this way, the painters of the New York school slowly extracted themselves from the surrealist idea of ‘pure psychic automatism’, towards a more physical automatism based on the experimental exploration of material properties and actions. It became clear that, like Leonardo’s spot on the wall, or the Rorschach inkblots, an automatism that worked with the imagination (conscious or unconscious) could not help producing the clichés that were the product of a received Freudian stock of subjects and images, images which would be, in turn, further legitimized by the subsequent application of psychoanalytic theory. Here projection could be seen to be at work producing consciously sexual and transgressive images.¹⁶ Writer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The spot on the wall
• 2 Sound and phenomenology: Pierre Schaeffer’s sonic research
• 3 Chance as epochē: John Cage and non-intentionality
• 4 Twisting free from aesthetics and the will
• 5 Purposive purposelessness
• 6 Fluxus and the flux
• 7 The spark of contingency: Photography, cinema and temporality
• 8 Poethics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright