Universal Principles of Art

Artists are usually interested in control, the skilled and thoughtful manipulation of a medium. But the actions of chance have always played some role in art making, and in the last one hundred years some artists have embraced uncertainties for a variety of purposes.

APPROACHES

• Useful accident

The handling of any physical medium incorporates a certain element of chance. The painter can never be quite sure about how a particular wet brushstroke will look, and the sculptor can never guarantee exactly what is going to happen with the next strike of his or her chisel. In a sense the artist is always a little bit in the hands of chance and will negotiate many small “accidents” during the creation of a work. For instance, in a very brushy style of painting, the ongoing creation of accidents followed by a decision about whether to keep, modify, or erase them can be a deliberate strategy.

Some modern artists have embraced a more direct role of chance, incorporating random occurrences as features of their works. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), for example, invented arbitrary rules for determining how parts of his The Large Glass would look based on the chance formations of a falling piece of string.

Some artists, particularly the Surrealists, expressed an almost mystical belief in the actions of chance, suggesting that incorporating chance events puts the work in touch with the unconscious mind. This idea was influenced by Sigmund Freud’s view that accidents precipitated by individuals are not accidents at all but rather expressions of unconscious desires.

Some artists contend that art does not have to be made by the artist but can be, instead, something whose fabrication the artist simply mediates. This is part of a broader strain of modernism that dissents from the Romantic claim that art is, or should be, a projection of the personality and identity of the artist. Using chance to make the work removes the personality of the artist from the equation altogether.

12 CHANCE

APPROACHES