chance & change

• Addressing himself directly to Furlong's remark ("This house feels as though it is animated by intense curiosity"), de vries's immediate response was, significantly, more emphatic on the aesthetic aspects of his response to things than on the quality of his (scientific) 'curiosity': "yes, when i look around i realise i live in the midst of a perfect wonder. what surrounds me is intensely beautiful. but i do not have to talk about beauty, i can show what i have been seeing, keeping as close as possible to the real facts." Notwithstanding the lack, understandable in a conversational exchange, of Wittgensteinian exactitude with regard to the word 'facts', what de vries refers to here is the strategy of presenting actuality, the collection and display of the natural object itself: the abnegation of theoretical and taxonomic approaches to reality in exchange for the presenting of 'real works'.
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  fig. 1 in het bos stond een eik (1991).
  He is also referring to the shift [...] made during the early years of his residence at Eschenau, from the abstract-concrete experiments with randomness to the demonstration of chance and change in the actuality of natural processes as they create the infinite variety of configurations, complexities and species-forms. Each natural obfect possesses - like the coral fragments and the shells collected on the Mahé beach - the quality of 'suchness': each one is 'just this', what it is, and not something other. "so i came to realise that nothing is the same", says de vries of that moment when he saw that every shell, though of the same species, had a different black and white pattern: "every chance of a realisation in our primary reality is a new chance, nature never, never repeats itself. you can pick a thousand leaves from one tree and when you come to compare them you won/t find two the same. they can be similar but they are differenf they have a kind of programme of their own and it works out always in an individual way ... even two leaves beside each other on the same twig are not the same."
• de vries came to realise that the principle of randomness does not sufficiently account for this apparently infinite variation in natural phenomena. Works such as one, two and three hours beneath my apple tree (1975), under the birch (1982), beneath the maples beside the spring (1992) [and unter der weide, am löchla (2003)] in which he has fixed the leaves as they have fallen in a seemingly random configuration, have made visible, says de vries, "that which people do not see any more. but [they're] also about randomness in nature, as well ... randomness and chance. in the beginning i said when a leaf falls from a tree there are many factors making the leaf at a certain moment fall on a certain point and this togetherness [of factors] i called randomness. but later i saw that everything is causal, and 'randomness' in fact expresses our inability to grasp the complexity of all these causes." (from a conversation with Paul Nesbitt, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 1991).
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  fig. 2 change (2008).
  chance and change situation (1972) is one of the earliest photo-works with this title: it features a scatter of pine-needles strewn by the wind over a plank floor dappled by sunlight and shade. The complex disposition of the needles and the momentary variegation of light and shade are subject to immediate change, depending upon the chance occurrence of the next puff of breeze and the next moment's reconfiguration of light and shadow. Change creates at all times chance possibilities: every field - such as this floor - is a field of chances; chance creates at any moment in time possibilities of change. "change is everywhere. nothing remains the same", said de vries in a 2004 interview. "every manifestation is a new one. every moment is new, nothing is stable: the process is durable. douglas huebler [the American conceptual artist] called this 'duration'. i call it 'change'. duration and change are the same as 'fact'. change brings chance. without changes no chances. things can be different but can still be identical, an embodiment of world as fact as happening." This is not a banal observation of the mutability of things; it is a proposition of principle. 'Fact' here denotes abstract process, it equates to the term as it is used in Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "The sign through which we express the thought I call the propositional sign. And the proposition is the propositional sign in its projective relation to the world... the propositional sign is a fact." (propositions 3.12 and 3.14)
• 'chance and change' is, then, de vries's dynamic version of the evolutionary principle, accounting at once for the development of species and species variation. In this sense, works such as 72x erophila verna (1994) and 148x salix elaeagnos (1993) [or salix c.f. eleagnus : 66× (2010)] may be regarded as demonstrations of chance fields, for every specimen in each of the arrays - identified as of identical species (and in the case of the Salix leaves, coming from the same tree) - is different from every other, and the differences have been wrought by subtle 'changes' in their immediate situations, in what de vries calls "a complicated chance and change structure". 'chance and change' works through millennia to originate and develop species, within a single generation to create morphological and behavioural diversity, and within the single life of an organism to determine its most minute transformations. The principle also accounts for every moment's difference from every other: the opposition of the moment of stillness to the timeless flow; the cloud now billowing, now dispersing, the ripple and wave now visible, now taken up into the next turbulent surge: stasis/kinesis unending!
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