Irrational Systems

The art of the period we now refer to as Modernism articulates a major change in the processes by which culture was produced. Considering how we define the temporal limits of this period – bookended by the industrial revolution and the second world war - the radical extent of this change is unsurprising. Society was dealing with the trauma of adapting to an industrialised way of life, and with it, an entirely new socio-economic system. The agrarian lifestyle was 'systematically undermined' in order to attract more young labourers to participate in the new industrial economies of the thriving cities.i The result was that the population of countries such as Britain were greatly redistributed, with large numbers of inward migration to urban centers at the expense of rural communities. This process was duly reflected in visual art, music, and literature of the early 20th century through the emergence of new styles, genres and methodologies of creating cultural products. In visual arts, the cubist works of Picasso and Bracques are common associations with this period, their paintings capturing the noise; the angularity of the mechanisms of the factory; the dull tones of brick and smog; and most of all, their style was a major break from the established and accepted methods with which the world could be depicted by artists. Similarly, in the world's of literature and music, the associated traditions of the medium were deliberately disregarded in order to create works that were undeniably 'modern' and shocking, and articulate of the new vocabularies of the 20th century.

Arguably, one of the most influential methodologies adopted across the worlds of Modernist visual arts, music, and literature was the use of indeterminacy and rule-based systems to assist in the creation of a work. The implementation and design of the system could of course vary widely, but in general it maintained a common function: to create 'happy accidents', unpredictable events surprising to the author which could be assimilated into the artwork. Systems art reflected the methodologies of the factory – the mechanistic alignments of the shifts of the labourers, like cogwheels interacting with the body of industry, the furnace, the pistons, the machinery, the smokestacks – each component interacting with respect to the other according to the rules created by the factory owner in order to enable the mass production of an arbitrary item. The adoption of systems by early 20th century artists was prescient – not only does their work parallel the emergence of a mechanical structure in society, it also is reflective of our society: 100 years later, the notion of the system is even more fundamental to how we negotiate the everyday.

In the essay Systems Esthetics, the art theorist Jack Burnham provides the following defines a 'system' as follows: In as much as a system may contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power sources, and so on, a system is, to quote the systems biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a 'complex of components in interaction', comprised of material, energy and information in various degrees of organisation.ii Thus, we can loosely surmise that an indeterminate system has to be a system that has a variability or unpredictability in the organisation of these components. In systems art, the components are the 'stuff' of the artwork – the raw materials that make up the physical work, the energy being the actions of the artist, the information being the signs and symbols contained within the work. We can consider the 'organisation' to be the series of rules that decide how the individual components interact with each other. In systems art, the organisation of the artwork is designed so that, to some degree, the decision-making process is automated and thus the responsibility of authorial consideration is partially removed.

The subjective capacity of the viewer of a work of art can cause a problematic tension in this definition, but there is an important difference between 'reading' an artwork in an unintended manner, and the 'production' of an artwork that is somewhat unintended in form. Writing in The Poetics of the Open Work, Umberto Eco argues that all artworks are variable in so much as they are open to the 'full emotional and imaginative resources of the interpreter'iii, but a work of systems art is 'open-ended' in its materiality. To put it another way, not only is the work open to the subjective interpretation of the viewer, but also it is open to the artist/performer who creates the work through the subjective interpretation of their rule-based system.

The interest in applying indeterminate systems to the creation – or the generation – of an artwork is a Modernist idea, at least in terms of the western art institution. Pre-1900, we can see isolated examples of indeterminate systems in artworks. The popular 18th century musical parlor game Musikalisches Würfelspiel is an early example of the use of chance and rule-based procedures as a creative device. Generally, the performer is instructed to roll a dice, the results of which selects a short melodic fragment from an array, and repeated until an entire musical composition is generated.iv Going back further in history, systems and chance were an integral part of eastern art and philosophy. The I-Ching (The Book of Changes) is an ancient Confucian text that could be consulted by the reader for spiritual guidance. The book contains 64 symbols, known as hexagrams, each with a particular attributed meaning. The reader enacts an divination process that will return a specific hexagram from the book, which because of its chance selection, is considered to have a special meaning to the reader. The I-Ching was central to a number of important artworks during the mid-20th century, particularly the composition Music of Changes by John Cage, which I will discuss in depth later.

Over the course of the 20th century, we can see how systems were implemented by many artists/writers/composers to varying degrees and purposes. We can loosely group these implementations into two forms: rational systems and irrational systems. For now I will discuss irrational systems as an important feature of Modernist art movements such as Dada. Irrational systems are based on rulesets that are open in their interpretability or their action, and as a result return a variable and coincidental product. In each repetition of an irrational system's process, the likelihood that exactly the same product will be returned twice is unlikely. This type of system is common in early 20th century Modernist art.

For the Dadaists, such systems were used as a method to disrupt the habitual and meditated modes of creation that were being practiced elsewhere in the artworld, simultaneously critiquing the idea of the artist/author by lessening their own role in the creation of the artwork. Despite Dadaism's paradoxical denouncement of logic, order, and rationality, simple systems with open parameters were used as a tool to create spontaneous works of art.v Harriet Ann Watts, in her book The Fictions of Chance, discusses why indeterminate methods were an attractive model for the Dadaists to critique the art institution. She writes: 'The Dada artist freed himself from the rule of reason and causality be welcoming chance in the creative act itself[...] Through chance, the artist can destroy old aesthetic habits as well as create new patterns of perception.'vi

The 'new tendency in art' – as described in Hugo Ball's Dadaist manifesto, Zurich, 1916 - was aided by the inclusion of aleatory systems throughout the creative process. While art history remembered the skilled and the mastercraftsmen, Dada explored the powers of accidental, the fluke, and the derision of technical ability. In Hans Arp's Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916-17), a simple irrational system with few rules is used to create the artwork. The title suggests that Arp dropped cut-up pieces of paper onto the canvas, allowing the unpredictable fluttering of the falling pieces to decide their eventual resting point, and then glued them in place. (Despite the descriptive title, the rectilinear order of the composition suggests that perhaps Arp's own subjective hand manipulated the results of his 'irrational' system.)

The Dadaists used such systems as a vehicle for subversion and controversy. To declare the products of simple systems such as Arp's collages a “work of art” was to disrespect the traditions of the institutionalised artworld itself. 'The Dadaists aimed to juggle away, to parody, and to ridicule all 'accepted ideas', all forms of social activity.'vii The goal was to use the accidental openly as a means to abstraction, and to undermine the importance of the artist-as-author. Anybody could follow Arp's system and produce a collage 'equal' to his.

'Make a painting: of happy or unhappy chance (luck or unluck)' - from Duchamp's notes in relation to The Large Glassviii

The influence of indeterminate processes as in the aforementioned Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance found their way into the work of the New York Dadaists, a group Marcel Duchamp was associated with while working on The Large Glass (or, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even). The piece is a large two-panel composition in which a bride, seven bachelors and various mechanical miscellanea are described on metal and glass as a series of impenetrable contraptions and nonsensical machines. While it is likely that Duchamp began preliminary work on The Large Glass before the Zurich Dadaist manifesto was announced, the use of indeterminate processes found their way into the creation of the work, even entirely accidentally: when in transit from New York to Connecticut for exhibition, the panes of glass were shattered. Duchamp describes how the damage was an addition to the work: I like the cracks, the way they fall...But the more I look at it the more I like the cracks: they are not like shattered glass. They have a shape. There is a symmetry in the cracking, the two crackings are symmetrically arranged and there is more, almost an intention there – a curious intention, that I am not responsible for, a ready-made intention, in other words, that I respect and love.ix The fact that the damage was completely unanticipated mirrors Duchamp's approach in much of his work at this time. He had previously left The Large Glass out in his loft to gather dust, and had used simple systems such as his Standard Stoppages – dropping a piece of string in order to describe a curve which he would transcribe with a pencil – in is notebooks for The Large Glass. (The Standard Stoppages also take the form of sculptural works, in which pieces of wood are cut to the curvature described by the dropped length of string.)

In the works of Duchamp and the European Dadaists at this time, we can see a balance in the hierarchy between the undetermined and the predetermined. In the use of processes with variable outcomes, it could be argued that the artist is using chance as a collaborator, and a method to move away from cliché derived from practice – i.e. the habitual tendencies of the artist embodied by their own idiosyncratic style. As Harriet Ann Watts states in The Fictions of Chance: Chance offered a fruitful context in which to articulate experience which could not be expressed in traditional modes; it helped the artist free himself from the restrictions of established Western aesthetic tradition.x The use of irrational systems imposed the possibility of removing much of the impact of the artist's hand from the work, and therefore also the identifiable imprint of a specific artist's style, so they could create something that lies outside the sphere of conscious human experience. The aspiration was that perhaps the use of indeterminate systems can help the artist to drop the baggage of history, experience and education, thus formulating new and original works of art separate from anything that had been made before it.

In the mid 20th century, the study of historical eastern philosophy became popular amongst western academics and artists – inspiring new ideas in science and the arts. In the 1950s, these eastern traditions of chance were explored again by John Cage in a range of musical works. In his book Talking Music, the author William Duckworth states that 'Cage came to believe that Western music during the Renaissance had taken a wrong turn, becoming too egocentric and making itself ineffective in the process.'xi It was the concept of relinquishing the artist from his ego through the use of indeterminate systems that interested Cage: It is thus possible to make a musical composition of which is free from individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of literature and 'tradition' of the art. The sounds enter the time-space[...] centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to abstraction.xii

One of the most ground-breaking of Cage's works during this period was an indeterminate musical composition similar to the Muzikalisches Wurfelspiele of the 18th century. The work, titled Music of Changes and dated from 1951, was inspired by one of the five classics of ancient Chinese literature, the I-Ching. In the composition, each odd-numbered hexagram of the book was assigned a fragment of a musical phrase pre-composed by Cage, while even-numbered hexagrams were silent. The performer would then enact the divination process (the system specifies a series of coin-tosses based on the tradition of the I-Ching) that would select a hexagram and indicate which corresponding musical fragment (or period of silence) should be played. The equal distribution of silence and sound over the odd and even-numbered cells resembles the relationship between yin and yang – two halves in a recursive state of balanced transformation.

The indeterminate system also stretches to decide how the sounds should be played in terms of timbre, dynamics, and so on. The variety (the number of potential outcomes) of the system means that the likelihood of the divination process returning two performances that followed the same progression would be very slim: The result of all these techniques was a score of directions that was so unspecific that no two performances of the same Cage piece would ever be as recognisably alike as, say two inept or even eccentric performances of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.xiii In the use of systems in the performance and composition of his works, Cage was able to explore the inbetweens of sound, noise, and silence. He places himself alongside chance as a co-composer: the composition always remains unfinished. There is no singular product of the system that could definitively be called Music of Changes, each is 'equal' to the many permutations that will remain silent.

Like the Dadaists, it could be argued that Cage's experiments with chance were also reflective of the introduction and rapidly increasing importance of systems and processes within society in general. The economy of the United States, rebounding from the war, relied on the implementation of automated systems to control the complex operations of mass-production and the management of foreign policy and the economy. The development of new forms of mathematics and the advancements being made with computer technology at this time contributed massively to the emergence of the new 'systems-oriented culture': In the past our technologically conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done. xiv Despite their similar intentions for using chance as a methodology to develop their respective artworks, Duchamp and Cage's approach is quite different. Duchamp's method applying chance to The Large Glass is completely open and with little boundaries. The chance occurrence of the shattered glass was appropriated as integral to the artwork after the incident, adopted as a critique of the pristine aesthetic and its implications on art valuation expected by the art institution at the time. On the other hand, Cage's method is probabalistic and binary. To use a technological metaphor, Cage can be considered the programmer of 'software' that generates musical compositions according to the specific and limited rules of the system. A 1950s computer could quite feasibly perform the divination process (or software) of Music of Changes, and generate a composition for a human performer.

As systems became firmly embedded within western culture by the end of the 20th century, the focus on process-over-object pioneered by the Dadaists, Duchamp and Cage had led to the establishment of an array of new methodologies for art-making – in music, literature, and the visual and performance arts. To return to Eco's writing about the 'open work', he describes how the structure of art has always been reflective of how 'science and contemporary culture view reality': The notion of 'possibility' is a philosophical canon which reflects the widespread tendency in contemporary science: the discarding of a static, syllogists view of order, a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context.xv For Eco, the use of processes and indeterminacy in art and the resulting ambiguity of authorship is natural in a society that operates on an uncertain yet systematic level, from quantum physics, to industry, to theology. Thus, the methodologies implemented by the Dadaists, Duchamp, Cage, and their contemporaries provide us with an alternative method to explore the emergence and early foundations of our systems-oriented culture, one in which the definitions of authorship, the 'original', and reproducibility are unsettled.

i “The traditional way of life of rural populations [was] systematically undermined in order to create a docile and disciplined factory workforce” (Robins and Webster, 1988: p2)
ii Burnham, Jack - Systems Esthetics, 1968.
iii Eco, Umberto – The Poetics of the Open Work, 1989
iv The most famous attributed author of a Muzikalisches Würfelspiele is Mozart, although this attribution is unproven. (see David Cope, 1996)
v Kristiansen, 1968: 3
vi Watts, Harriet Ann - The Fictions of Chance (1980: 1)
vii Frey, John G. (1936: 12)
viii From Duchamp's notes in relation to The Large Glass, in Sanouillet and Peterson (1973: 23)
ix As quoted by Sanouillet and Peterson (1973: 127)
x Watts, Harriet Ann (1980, 156)
xi Duckworth, William (1999: 4)
xii John Cage, 1961, quoted by Nicholls (2002: 230)
xiii Kostelantz, 1996: 10
xiv Burnham, 1968a: 3
xv Eco, 89: 14