chance
(…) For an artist who would question the conventional boundaries of the artist’s relation to the act of making, the risks consequent upon intentional misreading will seem justified. Crucial to one normative view of the relation between artist and artefact is the assumption that every trait of a work owes its presence to a deliberate decision made by the artist. The composer John Cage, by way of a constellation of intricate stratagems of abdication, has deflected the force of this assumption. The adoption of a whole phylum of procedures, called “chance operations,” as a pathway alternative to rationalising intentionality, has resulted in making the artist more conspicuous by his presumed absence. That Absence which replaces the artist cannot, by definition,’choose’;it can only make non-choices.To choose is to exclude; to negate choice is, by implication, to include everything. But to subvert the notion of choice is to invert the intellectual perspective within which choice operates. To make non-choices is to situate oneself, as an artist, at an intersection of inclusion and exclusion where, in the absolute copresence of every possible compositional option and every conceivable perceptual pathway, the notion of choice becomes irrelevant. (…)
From the text ‘Notes on composing in Film’ included in the book ‘Circles of Confusion’ by Hollis Frampton
Reunion: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Electronic Music and Chess
The book of changes:
Aline Guillermet on G. Richter’s overpainted photographs