The experiences of contemporary poetics (whether concerning music or other art forms) show how much the situation has changed.
In its search for an «openness of the second degree,» in its reliance on ambiguity and information as essential values of a work of art, contemporary poetics rebels against the psychic inertia that has been hiding behind the promise of a recovered order.
Today, the emphasis is on the process. on the possibility of identifying individual orders. The kind of expectation aroused by a message with an open structure is less a prediction of the expected than an expectation of the unpredictable. The value of an aesthetic experience is determined today not by the way a crisis is resolved but rather by the way in which, after propelling us into a sequence of known crises determined by improbability, it forces us to make a choice. Confronted by disorder, we are then free to establish temporary, hypothetical systems of probability that are complementary to other systems that we could also, eventually or simultaneously, assume. By so doing, we can enjoy both the equiprobability of all the systems and the openness of the process as a whole.
As I have already mentioned, only a psychology concerned with the genesis of structures can justify this tendency of contemporary art. And indeed, today’s psychology seems to pursue its explorations in precisely the same directions taken by .
Information and Perception
Information theory has contributed greatly to opening new perspectives for psychological research. In his study of perception as a deformation of the object (meaning that the object varies according to the position of the perceiver), the psychologist Ombredane, along with others I have already mentioned,42 has come to the conclusion that this process of exploration eventually ends when the perceiver chooses one particular form (which, from that moment on, imposes itself on all the others). But Ombredane refuses to give a Gestaltist answer to the question «Where do such forms come from?» Instead, he prefers to examine the genesis of this structural phenomenon in the light of experience.
«If we compare different points of view . . . then we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of perception is that perception is the result of a process of fluctuation that involves a continuous exchange between the disposition of the subject and all the possible configurations of the object—configurations that are more or less stable within a more or less isolated spatiotemporal system characteristic of that particular behavioral episode . . .
Perception can be expressed in terms of probability, like those used in thermodynamics or in information theory.» Consequently, the percept is none other than the temporary stabilization of a sensible configuration resulting from the more or less redundant organization of useful information that the receiver has selected from a field of stimuli during the perceptual process.
The same field of stimuli can yield an indeterminate number of more or less redundant patterns; what Gestaltists call the «right form» is such a pattern, the one that «requires the least information and the most redundancy.» Consequently, the «right form» corresponds to the «maximal state of probability of a fluctuating perceptual whole.» At this point we realize that, in terms of statistical probability, the «right form» loses all its ontological connotations, thus ceasing to be the prefixed structure of all perceptual processes, the definitive code of perception.
The undetermined field of stimuli that can yield various forms of redundant organization is not the opposite of the «right form,» just as a nonperceivable, amorphous whole is not the opposite of the percept. The subject chooses the most redundant form out of a particular field of stimuli when he has reasons to do so, but he can disregard the «right form» in favor of other patterns of coordination that have remained in the background.
According to Ombredane. it should be possible to characterize different ways of exploring the field of stimuli from both an operational and a typological standpoint: «There are those who cut their exploration short and opt for a particular structure before having a chance to use all the information they could have gathered; there are those who prolong their exploration and refuse to adopt any structure; and then there are those who reconcile the two attitudes and try to be aware of several possible structures before they integrate them into a progressively constructed unitary percept.
There are also those who slide from one structure to the next without being aware of the incompatibilities between them. This is what happens in people suffering from hallucinations. If perception is a form of ‘commitment.’ there are different ways in which one can commit oneself, or refuse to commit oneself, to seeking useful information.»
This brief typological survey ranges all the way from the pathological to the everyday, and allows for a large number of perceptive possibilities which it entirely justifies. There is no need to stress the value that these psychological hypotheses can have for a discussion of art. All one needs to add is that, given such premises, psychologists will have to explain how and to what extent an apprenticeship based on unusual perceptual exercises and intellectual operations might modify the usual schemes of reaction. (Which is to say: Will the use of information theory prevent the violations of codes and systems of expectation from turning into the key elements of a new code, of a new system of expectations?) Aesthetics, art history, and the phenomenology of taste have confronted, if not quite solved, this problem for centuries, at a macroscopic level. How often have new creative modes changed the meaning of form, people’s aesthetic expectations, and the very way in which humans perceive reality?»
is an expression of such a historical possibility: here is a culture that, confronting the universe of perceivable forms and interpretive operations, allows for the complementarity of different studies and different solutions; here is a culture that upholds the value of discontinuity against that of a more conventional continuity; here is a culture that allows for different methods of research not because they may come up with identical results but because they contradict and complement each other in a dialectic opposition that will generate new perspectives and a greater quantity of information.
After all, the crisis of contemporary bourgeois civilization is partly due to the fact that the average man has been unable to elude the systems of assumptions that are imposed on him from the outside, and to the fact that he has not formed himself through a direct exploration of reality. Wellknown social illnesses such as conformism, unidirectionism, gregariousness, and mass thinking result from a passive acquisition of those standards of understanding and judgment that are often identified with the «right form» in ethics as well as in politics, in nutrition as well as in fashion, in matters of taste as well as in pedagogical questions.
At which point, we may well wonder whether contemporary art, by accustoming us to continual violations of patterns and schemes—indeed, alleging as a pattern and a scheme the very perishability of all patterns and all schemes, and the need to change them not only from one work to the next but within the same work—isn’t in fact fulfilling a precise pedagogical function, a liberating role. If this were the case, then its discourse would go well beyond questions of taste and aesthetic structures to inscribe itself into a much larger context: it would come to represent modern man’s path to salvation, toward the reconquest of his lost autonomy at the level of both perception and intelligence.
IV. The Open Work in the Visual Arts
Nowadays, to say that a poetics of the «informal» is characteristic of contemporary painting involves a generalization. No longer limited to a critical category, the term «informal»‘ has come to designate a general tendency of our culture and to encompass, along with painters such as Wols and Bryen, the tachistes, the masters of action painting, art brut, art autre, and so on, at which point we might as well inscribe it under the broader rubric of.
«Informal art» is open in that it proposes a wider range of interpretive possibilities, a configuration of stimuli whose substantial indeterminacy allows for a number of possible readings, a «constellation» of elements that lend themselves to all sorts of reciprocal relationships. As such, «informal painting» is closely related to the open musical structures characteristic of postWebem music and to a form of poetry which in Italy goes by the name of novissima, whose representatives have already agreed to define it as «informal.»
The «informal» can be seen as the last link in a series of experiments aiming at the introduction of «movement» into painting. But this may not be enough of a definition, since the quest for movement has accompanied the evolution of the visual arts for quite some time, and can already be detected in early petroglyphs as well as in the Nike of Samothrace, in the way the fixed line tries to represent the mobility of real objects. Movement can also be suggested by repeating the same figure and thus representing a particular character at different times. This is the technique used on the tympanum of the portal of the Souillac cathedral, which depicts the story of Theophilus the cleric; it can
thilde’s tapestries at Bayeux—a truly cinematic sequence, consisting of a number of juxtaposed photograms. But it is a technique that represents movement by means of substantially fixed structures, without involving the structure of the work itself or the nature of the sign.
The structure begins to
