The dynamic amplification seen in Futurist forms and the decomposition represented in Cubism are other ways of capturing mobility; but even here, mobility is only a counterpart to the stability of the initial forms, which, moreover, are reasserted by their very deformation or dislocation.
Sculpture shows us yet another way of approaching the open work: the plastic forms of Gabo or Lippold invite the viewer to participate actively in the polyhedral nature of the works. The form itself is so constructed as to appear ambiguous, and to assume different shapes depending on the angle from which it is viewed.’ Thus, as the viewer walks around the work, he witnesses a continuous metamorphosis. Something similar had already happened in Baroque architecture, with the abandonment of a privileged frontal perspective. Besides, one could easily argue that to be open to different perspectives is a characteristic of sculpture.
Seen from the back, the Apollo Belvedere is not the same as it is when seen from the front. On the other hand, apart from works that were designed to be seen only from the front (like the statues that adorn the columns of some Gothic cathedrals), most sculptures, though they can be viewed from different angles, are intended to produce a global impression, the cumulative result of various perspectives. The Apollo Belvedere seen from the back implies and evokes the total Apollo. A frontal perspective will have the same effect. No matter where the viewer stands, the complete form will inevitably emerge out of his memory or his imagination.
This is not the case with Gabo’s work. Seen from below, his sculptures make one imagine a variety of possible and mutually exclusive perspectives; and though each perspective is satisfactory in itself, it inevitably frustrates the viewer who would like to apprehend a totality.’
Calder goes still further: his forms move before our eyes. Each of his works is a «work in movement» whose movement combines with that of the viewer. Theoretically, work and viewer should never be able to confront each other twice in precisely the same way. Here there is no suggestion of movement: the movement is real, and the work of art is a field of open possibilities. The myriad reflections of Munari’s ‘,mini and the «moving works» of the young avantgarde are more extreme examples of the same phenomenon.’
«Informal» art, in the broader sense I have given it, belongs here, next to these formal experiments. It is not work in movement, since the painting is there, before our eyes, physically defined once and for all by the pictorial signs that constitute it; neither does it require any movement on the part of the viewer—no more, that is, than any other painting that demands that its viewer be constantly aware of the various incidences of light on the roughness of its surface and the contrasts of its colors.
And yet, it is an «open work»— in an even more mature and radical way than any of those mentioned above. Its signs combine like constellations whose structural relationships are not determined univocally, from the start, and in which the ambiguity of the sign does not (as is the case with the Impressionists) lead back to reconfirming the distinction between form and background. Here, the background itself becomes the subject of the painting, or, rather, the subject of the painting is a background in continual metamorphosis.
Here, the viewer can (indeed, must) choose his own points of view, his own connections, his own directions, and can detect, behind each individual configuration, other possible forms that coexist while excluding one another in an ongoing relationship of mutual exclusion and implication. At this point we need to ask two questions concerning not only the poetics of the «informal» but the poetics of the «open work» in general:
What are the historical reasons for—the cultural background of— such a poetics, and what vision of the world does it imply?
- Are such works legible? If so, what are the conditions of their communicability and what are the guarantees that they will not suddenly lapse into either silence or chaos? In other words, can we define the tension between the mass of information intentionally offered to the reader and the assurance of a minimal amount of comprehensibility, and is there a possible agreement between the intention of the author and the viewer’s response?
Neither of these questions concerns the aesthetic value of the works under examination.
The first presumes that, in order to express an implicit vision of the world and its relationship with an entire aspect of contemporary culture, a work of art must at leastpartly satisfy the requisites of that particular communicative discourse commonly known as «aesthetics.» The second concerns the elementary conditions of communication necessary for the recognition of a potentially richer and deeper meaning, characterized by the organic fusion of various elements, and characteristic of aesthetic value. As for the aesthetic possibilities of informal art, I shall discuss them in the third part of this chapter.
Informal Art as an Epistemological Metaphor
From a cultural standpoint, informal art definitely shares a general characteristic of the open work. Its forms appear as the epistemological metaphors, the structural resolutions, of a widespread theoretical consciousness (not of a particular theory so much as of an acquired cultural viewpoint). They represent the repercussion, within formative activity, of certain ideas acquired from contemporary scientific methodologies—the confirmation, in art, of the categories of indeterminacy and statistical distribution that guide the interpretation of natural facts. Informal art calls into question the principle of causality, bivalent logics, univocal relationships, and the principle of contradiction.
This is not the opinion of a philosopher who is determined to find a conceptual message in every form of art. This is part of the poetics of the artists themselves, whose very vocabulary betrays the cultural influences against which they are reacting. The uncritical use of scientific categories to characterize an artistic attitude is often dangerous; the mere transposition of a scientific term into a philosophical or critical discourse requires a number of tests and a cautious redefinition that would indicate whether the new usage is merely suggestive or metaphorical.
On the other hand, those who are shocked by the use, in aesthetics or elsewhere, of terms such as «indeterminacy,» «statistical distribution,» «information,» «entropy.’ and so forth, and who fear for the purity of philosophical discourse, forget that both philosophy and traditional aesthetics have often relied on terms (such as «form,» «power,» «germ,» etc.) that once belonged to physics and cosmology. And yet, it is precisely because of a similar terminological nonchalance that traditional philosophy has been called into question by more rigorous analytic disciplines.
If we are aware of these problems, when we encounter an artist who uses scientific terminology to define his artistic intentions we will not assume that the structures of his art are a reflection of the presumed structures of the real universe; rather, we will point out that the diffusion of certain notions in a cultural milieu has particularly influenced the artist in question, so that his art wants and has to be seen as the imaginative reaction, the structural metaphorization, of a certain vision of things (which science has made available to contemporary man). Given the context, my discussion here should not be seen as an ontological investigation but rather as a modest contribution to the history of ideas.
Good examples of this tendency can easily be found in museum catalogues or in critical articles. One of these is George Mathieu’s article «D’Aristote a ‘abstraction lyrique» (From Aristotle to lyrical abstraction),9 in which the painter tries to retrace the progress of Western civilization from the ideal to the real, from the real to the abstract, and from the abstract to the possible. To this extent, the article is a history of the genesis of the poetics of the informal, of lyrical abstraction, and ofall the other new forms discovered by the avantgarde before they make their way into popular consciousness.
According to Mathieu, the evolution of forms is parallel to that of scientific concepts: «If we consider the collapse of classical values in the domain of art, we will realize that an equally profound parallel revolution has taken place in the sciences, where the recent failure of concepts concerning space, matter, parity, and gravitation, along with the resurgence of notions of indeterminacy and probability, of contradiction and entropy, seem to indicate the reawakening of mysticism and the possibilities of a new transcendence.»
Obviously, at a methodological level, a notion like that of indeterminacy does not postulate any mystical possibilities but only al lows one to describe certain microphysical events with all due caution— caution that should also be used when dealing with the same notion at a philosophical level. On the other hand, rather than questioning Mathieu’s right to use a scientific concept as a stimulus to the imagination, we should try to figure out how much of the original stimulus is left in the structuring of pictorial signs, and whether there is any continuity between the vision of things implicit in the scientific
