editions and publications

• 1972 :: random objectivations
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  random objectivations (1972)
  in herman de vries' work we can witness the transition from "random" to "chance" of the beginning of the seventies. random objectivations (1972) then chance-fields = chance-felder (1973) still visually evoke the world of calculations. both books resort to mathematical tables used in natural sciences research to produce abstract configurations of shapes and colours. herman de vries had direct knowledge of these tables because, unlike most artists so inspired at the time, he was using these in the context of his work as a researcher at the institute of applied biological research in nature until l968. quite unexpectedly in this scientific context, the introduction to random objeclivations describes a five-week vacation he took alone in a wild polder in holland (water, marsh, heoah and woods, tides and birds). herman de vries writes the following: "between my life here and my work i have found no contradiction; on the contrary, i have felt them to be directly linked because it is clearly apparent to me that the same laws direct work and life. what i have done in the drawing, was visible in the landscape around me." the affirmation of such continuity between the work of the mind and reality, between nature known and nature lived, between thought and life, surprises the reader nonetheless as the book offers one hundred pages of geometric shapes and optical play with lines, achieved by using predetermined mathematical formulas, in no way derived from natural shapes.
• in fact, this book was a preparation for the broadening scope of herman de vries' subject matter. until then the random method had been as much a matter of work discipline as a creative process borrowed from the natural sciences and destined to deprive the work of subjective points of view (necessarily partial) and hierarchies (all possibilities being equal). but, by opening his consciousness to "facts, structures, aspects of reality and that which we otherwise have not thought of", what was no more than a formal creative process, was to become the instrument of a concrete revelation: reality is not an object separate from us onto which the mind imposes its conventional investigative techniques from the outside, as science would have it. reality is, on the contrary, the real agent of our thinking process, to which it gives content and method. this means that knowledge ought no longer be in opposition to the changing nature of life, nor to the tangible immediacy of perception; it also means that method no longer can be a mere intellectual construction, artificial to begin with and abstract in its results.
• such a naturalization of method leads to a new kind of works, started in 1971, notably with chance and change slide series, but still not obvious in random objectivations, although the book's introduction ends by evoking them: "in my recent work with photos, film and slides, i show with this link between 'chance and change', aspects in which we live - which we live." this established relationship between chance and change means that what is stake is no longer to master randomness through calculus, but to enjoy the infinite possibilities and unpredictable transformations of nature. these are also ours because nature is no longer a matter of knowledge, not even an environment for our existence, but is our actual life and its movement. realizing this unity between man and nature is to live more fully; also more consciously because it means to know nature from the inside; and finally more poetically because it means to inscribe our creations into the creative movement of nature itself and thus restore full significance to the classic definition of art as imitation of nature. [19]
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