herman de vries

random objectivations

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• herman de vries wants to exclude the personal signature, important in CoBrA and Informal art, as much as possible from his compositions. For these works, he uses the name 'visual information', a term which at the time was much in vogue and which was meant to replace the term 'art'. As artists in earlier avant garde movements have done, he also arrives at the concept of chance. His concept of randomness is partly based on the statistic definition of chance, such as used in scientific experiments: random sequences of numbers - which are actually borrowed from a book on statistical methods for biology! - are now used as a starting point to make random drawings and reliefs [Note 10: During that period, many artists used similar concrete, non-personal principles. Famous is the example of François Morellet, who opens the Paris telephone book at random and uses the columns of telephone numbers for the positioning and development of elements in a certain work]:
  • carrying out my compositions called 'random objectivations', i started reading the numbers from a haphazardly chosen point of the table, and gave a 'value' to each digit. value here means: a colour, glueing on a square or leaving it out, etc. in this way i obtained results which were acceptable for the spectator and gave the impression that they were intended as art. i would like to point out that all compositions are of equal quality if they are sufficiently large, i.e. made with more than 20 or 30 numbers [Note 11: to be p. 29].
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  fig. 1. random objectivation v72-54
  The tables used by de vries are statistical guarantees for making objective measurements, tests and calculations. de vries, however, interprets the random sequence of numbers as spatial and temporal coordinates: he reads the build up and the dimensions of a work in these deadly dull numbers. The impersonal remarks of de vries that these works give the impression of being art and under which conditions their respective qualities turn out to be equal, do not detract from the fascination which the visual complexities of these works still hold for us. For example, in comparison with Schoonhoven's reliefs, we see that we are dealing with two entirely different notions of complexity. Schoonhoven's work deals with the tension between the grid and the make. In de vries' work, the grid becomes less and less important and one is finally left with the presence of image-elements in empty space.
• For de vries demonstrates that in his random objectivations, he is not merely showing chance at play, but also a personal, decisive moment, which is founded on his ascribing values, his coding of the numbers from the random tables. The random coordinates materialize into a wide range of forms such as sticks, cubes, squares, triangles, and in the drawings for colour squares, circles, colour dots, combinations of large and small black dots, lines, etc. A number of three-dimensional works are also realized. de vries shows constellations, concrete structures, situations, to use a word that was in vogue in art circles around 1970 and which, among other things, was associated with a (personal, social, political, and also artistic) structure which allows for the making of choices. The visual possibilities which are realized in such works as impersonal choices, meant a maximum in freedom of perception for the spectator [Note 12: Compare to be pp. 26, 30]. Each random objectivation was, again and again, a first realization out of 'white'. For de vries' further work, it is important that they all seem to be visual cross-sections of multidimensional processes, where it does not matter whether they have a minimal character - one line between two random points in space - or a maximal character.
• Their peculiar internal tension has perhaps to do with something that can be formulated in terms of time. Something that is random, is random only at a specific moment, at a following moment this is no longer the case since it then becomes part of a constellation or situation (and can itself become a condition for other random moments).
• A work of de vries is random work, for the spectator it is 'visual information' or 'art'. This amounts to the internal, temporal tension between process and result. In de vries' random objectivations, we receive perhaps in visual terms the equivalent of the tension which was formulated by the philosopher Wittgenstein in his Tractatus as 'Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things'[Note 13: Proposition 5.634 in the Pears & McGuinness translation, quoted in German by de vries in the wittgenstein papers, 1975 (exhibition catalogue Groningen 1980, p. 179). This quotation immediately is qualified by de vries in two footnotes: 'is there no a priori order of things?' and 'what meaning does it have here?'] In his random works, de vries has seen this as a declaration of freedom.
• With the reference to Wittgenstein, once more a new domain in de vries' oeuvre is indicated. First however I want to round off by pointing out the significance which this concept has also had after 1975. For example, there is de vries' interest in the process-like aspects of nature, which he also presents as cross-sections of complex situations, as in the three-part work 1, 2 and 3 hours under my apple tree (1975). In this work, three sheets have registered the falling of leaves during 1, 2 and 3 hours respectively. Nature does the work here, the statistical tables are no longer needed. The conditions for the work are an equivalent of the conditions which, on the existence level, determine how processes develop. In work of this kind, de vries takes a further step away from art, in favour of non-art, of what he calls the 'actual poetry' of nature. Finally, however, he finds art in both, and integrates chaos and order in, for example, a highly charged diptych like salix I & II (1986).
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• TEXT CREDITS
  Passage from Cees de Boer, '"the world is my poetry". Some moments from life = work of herman de vries', in exhibition catalogue Oeuvreprijs 1998. Beeldende kunst : herman de vries (Stichting Fonds voor de beeldende kunsten, vormgeving en bouwkunst : Amsterdam 1998) 21, 23, 25.
• IMAGE CREDITS
  'random objectivation v72-54' 1972
  acylic on wooden board, white paint
  60 × 60 cm.
  Collection unknown.

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