As I have pointed out elsewhere, Baroque poetics evolved from the new vision of the cosmos introduced by the Copernican revolution and already figuratively suggested by Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical shape of planetary orbits—a discovery that called into question the privileged position of the circle as the classical symbol of cosmic perfection. Just as Baroque structure reflects the conception—no longer geocentric and, therefore, no longer anthropocentric—of a nonfinite universe, so it is possible, as Mathieu tries to show in his article, to find a parallel between the nonEuclidean geometries of today and the rejection of classical geometric forms by art movements such as Fauvism and Cubism; between the emergence of imaginary or transfinite numbers in mathematics and the advent of abstract painting; between Hilbert’s attempts to axiomatize geometry and the appearance of Neoplasticism and Constructivism:
Von Neumann’s and Morgenstem’s Game Theory, one of the
most important scientific events of this century, has also proved
particularly fruitful in its application to contemporary art, as
Toni del Rienzo has brilliantly shown in relation to action paint-
ing. In this vast domain that now ranges all the way from the
possible to the probable, in this new adventure that sees indeter-
minism lording it over inanimate, living and psychic matter,
the problems with which the Chevalier de Mere confronted
Pascal three centuries ago are as obsolete as Dali’s notions of
hazard-objectif and Duchamp’s meta-irony. The new relation-
ship between chance and causality and the introduction of a
positive and negative anti-chance, are one more proof of our
break with Cartesian rationalism.
No need to linger on the more or less daring scientific assertions of the painter I have just quoted, or to question his strange convic Lion chat indeterminism lords it over inanimate, living, and psychic matter. This passage is a clear example of the influence that revolutionary scientific concepts can wield over the emotions and imagination of an entire culture.
It is true that neither the principle of indeterminacy nor quantum mechanics tells us anything about the structure of the world, being mostly concerned with ways of describing certain aspects of it; but it is also true that they have shown us how certain values that we believed absolute and valid as metaphysical frameworks (such as the principle of causality or that of contradiction) are neither more nor less conventional than most new methodological principles and are as ineffective as means of explaining the world or of founding a new one.
What we find in art is less the expression of new scientific concepts than the negation of old assumptions. While science, today, limits itself to suggesting a probable structure of things, art tries to give us a possible image of this new world, an image that our sensibility has not yet been able to formulate, since it always lags a few steps behind intelligence— indeed, so much so, that we still say the sun «rises» when for three centuries we have known it does not budge.
All this explains how contemporary art can be seen as an epistemological metaphor. The discontinuity of phenomena has called into question the possibility of a unified, definitive image of our universe; art suggests a way for us to see the world in which we live, and, by seeing it, to accept it and integrate it into our sensibility. The open work assumes the task of giving us an image of discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it. It takes on a mediating role between the abstract categories of science and the living matter of our sensibility; it almost becomes a sort of transcendental scheme that allows us to comprehend new aspects of the world.
This is what we must remember when we read the emotional panegyrics criticism devotes to informal art, and confront the enthusiasm with which it hails the new unexpected freedom that such an open field of stimuli has brought to our imagination.
Dubuffet deals with primordial realities and the mana, the magical currents that connect human beings to the objects that surround them. But his art is much more complex than any primitive art. I have already alluded to his multiple ambiguities and zones of signification. Many of these are produced by complex spatial organizations of the canvas, by the deliberate confusion of scale, by the artist’s habit of seeing and representing things simultaneously from different angles . . .
It is a rather complex optical experience not only because our point of view is constantly changing and there are numerous optical dead ends, perspectives creating paths that might end in the middle of a plain or at the edge of a cliff, but also because we are constantly jolted by the painting, by this constantly flat surface on which none of the traditional techniques has been used. But this multiple vision is quite normal: this is how we really see things during a walk in the country, as we climb a hill or follow sinuous paths. This tendency to view things from different spatial perspectives at the same time suggests that the same simultaneity is also possible with time.6
Fautrier paints a box as if the concept of box did not exist; more than an object, it is a debate between dream and matter, a tentative groping in the direction of the box, in that zone of uncertainty where the possible elbows the real . . . The artist has the marked impression that things could be quite different.’
Fautrier’s matter . . . is a matter that never gets simpler; rather, it becomes ever more complicated as it captures and assimilates all sorts of possible meanings, incorporating aspects or moments of reality, and saturating itself with live experience.’
The attributes that best suit Dubuffet’s representation are quite different: they express infinity, indistinction, indiscretion (all these terms should be taken in their etymological sense).
The optics of matter in fact demands that we witness the shattering of all notional outlines, the disintegration and disappearance of familiar aspects, in both things and people. And if some trace, some presence of formal definition, persists, this optics demands that we question it, that we inflate it by multiplying it and confusing it in a tumult of projections and dislocations.9
The «reader» is excited by the new freedom of the work, by its infinite potential for proliferation, by its inner wealth and the unconscious projections that it inspires. The canvas itself invites him not to avoid causal connections and the temptations of univocality, and to commit himself to an exchange rich in unforeseeable discoveries.
Among such «readings,» one of the most substantial and disturbing is certainly that in which Audiberti tells us what he sees in Camille Bryen’s paintings:
Finally, nothing is abstract, any more than it is figurative. The intimate simnel of an ibis’s femur—or of a plumber’s, for that matter—conceals, like a family album, all sorts of postcards: the dome of the Mvalides, the Ncw Grand Hotel at Yokohama. Atmospheric refraction makes all mineral tissue echo with wellwrought mirages. Hordes of submedullary staphylococci line up to draw the outline of the trade tribunal in Menton .. . The infinitude of Brycn’s paintings seems to me more valid than if he limited himself to illustrating the usual relationship between the immobility of contemporary painting and what preceded it and what will follow it. I must again insist on the fact that, in my eyes, Bryen’s work has the merit of really moving. It moves through space and through time.
It plunges into the venomous vegetation of the bottom, or soars out of the abysses of a gnat’s rotten tooth toward the blink of our eye and the fist of our hand. The molecules of the chemical pictorial substances and of the visionary energy that make it up throb and settle under the horizontal shower of our look. Here is the phenomenon of continuous creation, or of revelation, in all its flagrancy. Bryen’s art—a «feather»—does not, like other art and everything else down here, attest to the permanent union between the stock market and the petty exoticism of spiders and woods hawking cobalts. No . . .
Even when it is finished, presentable and signed—that is, given its social and commercial proportion, and waiting for the attention or the contemplation of those who sec it and whom it turns into seers—its forms or nonforms keep changing in space ahead of both the canvas and the paper, ahead of the soul of this seer himself, ahead of everything. They give birth: by and by, the star makes its nest in decors and secondary outlines that eventually become dominant. They settle in transparent layers over the background image. And suddenly, the painting gives way to a sort of cybernetics, as it is vulgarly called. We see the work of art dehumanizing itself, freeing itself from man’s signature. It accedes to an autonomous movement that electronic meters (if one knew where to plug them in) would love to measurei°
Audiberti’s «reading» tells us at once about the possibilities and the limits of the open work. The fact that half of his reactions have nothing to do with an aesthetic effect, and are merely personal divagations induced by the view of certain signs, is itself worthy of our attention.
Is this, in fact, a limitation of this particular «reader,» who is more involved with the games of his own imagination than with the work, or is it a limitation of the work that it should play a role similar to that of mescaline? Whatever the case, this text gives us a clear example of the kind of exaltation that can be derived from conjectural freedom, from the unlimited discovery of contrasts and oppositions that keep multiplying with every new
