the real works

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  fig. 1 collected mahé (1970)
  In 1970 on the beach at Mahé in the Seychelles de vries picked up two handfuls of broken white coral, and observed, as if it were a revelation, that every piece was created by the same process, and yet that each was utterly distinct from the other: what was the same was different. From the same beach de vries took twenty-four seashells of the same species, and arranged them in a small cabinet frame in a three-line grid ['collected mahé', 1970]. "what is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts" wrote Wittgenstein in Tractatus, Proposition 2. A fact is an abstract classification: that the shells presented in the work are of a given species of mollusc is a taxonomic fact. As shells, however, they are irreducibly things, and every one is different from every other. collected mahé, seychelles (august 1970) presents us not with facts but with the actuality of twenty-four unique seashells. It is the first of what de vries has called 'the real works', and it inaugurates an extraordinary and sustained artistic-philosophical project of great significance and like no other in the art of our time.
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• He is also referring to the shift, already mentioned, 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 object 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 different, 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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