random objectivations

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  fig. 1 random objectivation (1964)
  In the publication random objectivations (1972), de vries helpfully reproduced one of the pages (119) in Fisher and Yates's Statistical Tables for Biological, Agricultural and Medical Research that he had used as the basis for the many works he created from the procedure of plotting random points on a given plane, each of which bears the generic title. The procedure itself he had described in detail in an article [herman de vries, 'random objectivations] in the second issue of revue nul=0 in April 1963, which also gives a summary of the various works that de vries had undertaken in the previous four years in which he had used random methods of composition. It is worth while to read the article in full:
• [Click here to read the article in full]
• In writing of 'visual information', de vries was resorting to a term that emphasised the objective nature of the works generated by the random procedures he had employed. By 'objective' here, I mean both the negative quality of what might be called 'inexpressiveness', and the positive quality of 'suchness'- of their being objectively what they are and nothing else, and referring to nothing else. These works may be regarded as works of art for they are indeed endlessly various and fascinating, and elegant in the sense attached to that term by mathematicians describing a perfectly economical and balanced equation. They could not be but as they are, and, if we choose to do so, we may find their address to the mind abstractly beautiful.
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  fig. 2 random objectivation (1964/1965)
  We may, fortuitously, find them beautiful in other affective ways, of course: the configuration of elements across a plane may resemble a constellation of stars, or a scatter of dandelion seeds, or we may find visually exciting the play of unpredictable random black or colour points across the perfect order of an invisible grid. Every one of these random objectivations was made by using an arbitrarily determined procedure and resort to the random tables in Fisher and Yates. The random dots in space works of the early 1970s may thus look at first glance like a spatter of inkspots, but each dot (in reality a disc of black ink whose size is exactly determined by stencil) is carefully plotted on a series of random crossing points, set against the co-ordinates of the sheet edges, in what de vries calls 'an irregular weaving'. That a real and random spatter of blots might look like this, is, in the final order of things, no coincidence at all, any more than that the stars in the universe are where they are (or were) merely by cosmic accident.
  • ... i obtained results which were acceptable to the spectator and gave the impression that they were intended as art.' They may give that impression, but they carried no such intention, of course: in fact they were as devoid of the normal intentionality of art as their making was an avoidance of the technical skills that are traditionally considered to be central to artistic creation, the characteristically personal deployment of which is the signature of "style". The "visual information" they contained was nothing more nor less than the purely objective facts that were the unpredictable outcome of the random method. The human element which de vries admitted to be present was that of the choice of method, and of the materials.
• The human element was present in fact, above all in the philosophical position implicit in the various art actions and their diverse outcomes, and this was the creative energy that gave them meaning and interest. 'the true meaning of randomness has profound philosophical aspects, but there is no reason to go into these here.' 'No reason', because it is in the nature of art that it is not discursive, and it is in the nature of de vries's philosophy that it is not susceptible to analytical disquisition. It depends, rather, upon demonstration and indication: the revelation of the true relations of things in reality (relations often unseen, unsuspected and unexpected) by direct pointing, by the array, by the repositioning of found objects and by other demonstrative procedures. Each of the potentially infinite number of random objectivations is at once specific to its constraints and a demonstration of the principle of randomness. For de vries, its value as a philosophical proposition lies both in its specific realisation and in its possibilities of generic multiplicity.
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  fig. 3 random objectivation - V73-84 (1973)
  The 'profound philosophical aspects' which de vries declined to explain in his text in revue nul=0 were succinctly outlined by the Danish art historian Troels Andersen in a publication ['rational structures'], panel 13 information produced in Copenhagen to accompany de vries's exhibition there in early 1969. Andersen, who in the previous year had edited a comprehensive collection of Malevich's writings, and in 1920 was to publish, in Amsterdam, the definitive catalogue raisonné of Malevich's Berlin exhibition, including those paintings in the Stedelijk, was critically well-equipped to comment on the philosophical content of de vries's work of the previous ten years. He was steeped in Malevichian thought, at the centre of which was a concept profoundly relevant to a consideration of de vries's project: that the work of art is a visible and material manifestation of invisible energies, physical, metaphysical and spiritual.
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• Andersen, in what is a densely compressed text, makes clear that what he values in de vries's work is its rigorous demonstration that the world as perceived - the phenomenal world in all its manifestations - is subject to the universal law of randomness; that what may seem 'natural' or 'logical' is subsumed under a condition of actuality that is beyond the order we may be trying, intellectually, to impose. What is controlled by any ordering of our own invention is what comes into our logical understanding or what offers evidence to our senses; what remains outside our rationally comprehended 'knowledge' or is beyond our senses is nevertheless a bigger part of reality with a coherence that we obviously cannot comprehend. In this, Andersen puts his finger on a central insight of de vries's, and one which is close to that expressed in the final proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus - 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' - which may refer to both the physical facts of the world and to metaphysical realities beyond ordinary comprehension.
• 'Being silent'- in de vries's case, refusing to elaborate a philosophical position in critically rationalist, discursive terms - should not be taken to intimate that he (any more than Wittgenstein) considers that certain aspects of 'reality' are beyond all demonstration; indeed (and this is true of de vries's work as a whole and not simply of the random objectivations) every work is just such a demonstration. Each one of the random objectivations is, precisely, giving an instance of the reality that lies behind it; it is a demonstrative illustration (a means to throwing light on something): taking many together (and bearing in mind that the series is potentially infinite) we are presented with a glimpse of the beauty that informs things and determines their infinite diversity. You, the spectator, are presented with figures - diagrammatic geometric images - as immediate material actualisations of dynamic energy and as images of an order the majority of whose determinant relations you do not know: thus, 'you come closer to reality.' As de vries was to write in 1976, in a text begun in Frankfurt and completed in Mumbai:
  • true philosophy is immediate actual.
    so, any communication of it can go from and to the actuality of it, which is not symbols. so, liberated of thinking with symbols, philosophy is life and actuality.
    true art is immediate actual. so, any communication of it can go from and to the actuality of it, which is not symbols. so, liberated of thinking with symbols, art is life and actuality.
    true actuality is immediate actual. so, any communication of it can go from and to the actuality of it, which is not symbols. so, liberated of thinking with symbols, actuality is life and actuality.
• By adopting random procedures de vries demonstrates that out of randomness comes a multitude of possible immediate actualities, each of which is also an intimation of an order: the random objectivations are figures that, for Andersen, 'correspond' to those of 'axiomatic geometry', and that will 'clarify our mode of thought and insight'. The idea implied here of randomness as constituting in itself an order of complexity is neatly summarised by the mathematician, A.M. Born, as quoted by de vries in a text of 1968 (fragmentarische argumente): 'in his long pursuit of order in nature, the scientist has turned a corner. he is now after order and disorder without prejudice, having discovered that complexity usually involves both.' de vries the artist-poet is truly wallace stevens's 'connoisseur of chaos' who proposes:
  • A. A violent order is disorder; and
    B. A great disorder is an order. These
    Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
• The introductory note to de vries's chance-fields/chance felder, an essay on the topology of randomness (1973), lightly hints at its essentially philosophical purpose:
  • look back, any place, any time, to actuality, when you have read chance-fields.
• What has the appearance of a book of geometric figures, an exercise in mathematical abstraction, is in fact a proposition about the nature of our everyday reality in the phenomenal world. de vries had been familiar with Wittgenstein's Tractatus since 1965, and proposition 5,634 had long been a key text for him:
  • Everything we see could be otherwise.
    Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise.
    There is no order of things a priori.
• Ihe random objectivations are, in a profound sense, formal visual extensions of these propositions of Wittgenstein, just as the many later works, presenting natural objects or traces of natural process in various ways, are concrete demonstrations of them.
• chance-fields presents five sets of five geometrical figures, each one composed of five random configurations of rectangles in outline, of random dimensions in centimetres (the chosen elements) distributed on the white field of the page. The first set deploys 1 rectangular element, the second, 2 such elements, the third, 3, the fourth, 5 and the fifth, 10 such elements. Complexity increases necessarily with each successive set, as the number of elements increases and their given relations multiply exponentially: the first set thus presents '5 chances out of a range of [a mere] 76,176' such chances; the final set presents '5 chances out of a range of 6,579,329,566,975,974,127,670,720,595,328,889,43O,137,295,077,376'. [an astonishing, and literally inconceivable number]. The 'pages of illustrations' that comprise chance fields/chance felder provide a perfect example of Andersen's 'visual experience' that allows 'no choice to be made, no preference [to be] possible a priori' and demonstrate the fact that 'a random distribution ... includes all possibilities of distribution... and is therefore of a more general order' than those created by 'intuitive or logical' methods.
• The three-dimensional structures, reliefs, objects and sculptures that de vries made during this period are all in accord with the general principle that they could be otherwise than what they are: they offer no ground for preference. All are painted white, and carry into the three-dimensional world the whiteness that was so important a feature not only of white is superabundance, where it signified both absence and superabundance - the void and the chaos of infinite potentiality - but also as the 'field of chances' in the diagrammatic planar objectivations. After forty years or more their poignancy as historical objects is intensified, ironically, by the anonymous neutrality of their material presence, the whiteness of their surfaces, whose impersonal purpose in both aspects was precisely intended to achieve the elimination of affect but which now speak of their creation, in acts of personal intention, in a period of idealistically revived avant-garde-ism. They have become poignant relicts of late modernism.
• History has many ways of modifying the impact and meaning of objects. (Consider Marcel Duchamp's provocatively propositional Fountain, whose secondary career as affective object began only after the publication of Alfred Stieglitz's moody and shadowy photograph of it.) On the occasion of the first exhibition of assembled block (1961) a bystander asked the question: 'mr de vries, where is the expression?' to which the artist replied: 'in the glue.' This was a double-edged joke: we see now that the decision to 'compose' the block (which entailed the glue) was indeed less impersonal than it seemed at the time. The random colour configurations of random objectivation - collage (1970) have a beauty of form and colour relations that is inescapably connected, we see now, at the deepest level, but coming from the opposite direction, so to speak, to that of the 'concrete abstractions' of Richard Lohse. Far from being random in their construction, Lohse's paintings are demonstrations of perfectly predictable relations in what the Swiss artist with whom de vries had discussions in the 1970s, described as a 'structured field'.
• The artistic enactment of the random principle in the three-dimensional world was most immediately obvious in the sculptures which consist of a blind scattering (different in every manifestation) of wooden cubes and blocks, and in works of randomly plotted arrangements such as zufallsstapelung (1975), dating from the same year as a seminal work of de vries - one, two and three hours under my appte tree - which demonstrates the principle of randomness as it obtains in the natural domain. By this time, de vries had settled in the village of Eschenau in northern Bavaria and had already embarked on his work with natural processes and natural objects, which has been central to his project ever since. four stems, made as early as 196O, in certain obvious respects anticipates this later body of work, but it is very much a 'modified readymade' in that the natural objects of the title, randomly chosen with none of them having any quality more special than any of the others, have been tied together and painted white. Nature has become art here in more ways than one: four stems is a sculpture.
• In September 1965, in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a large random spatial structure was created which took the concept of random objectivity into the domain of the architectural. This was constructed by museum staff according to a manual provided by the artist. This gave the positions of the hanging panels in relation to two linear co-ordinates (aligned with two sides of a square drawn on thefloor, which was removed when the structure was completed), with random heights for the hang of the panels, and with the direction of their placement being determined in relation to the two walls of the space in which there were windows. 'personally', wrote de vries afterwards, 'i saw only the object completely finished, 35 minutes before the opening of the exhibition. by then, any personal encroachments on my part were no longer possible, nor needed either.'
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