If a black sign represents the pupil of an eye, a series of other appropriately placed signals, representing eyebrows and lids, will reiterate the message till the entire eye will unambiguously offer itself to our view. The fact that there are two eyes constitutes yet another element of redundancy—let’s not forget that modern painting seldom needs more than one eye to suggest the entire face.
But in the Ravenna mosaic there are two eyes because that is what the figurative convention demands—a figurative convention which, in information theory, would correspond to the law of probability of a given system. As a result, most traditional mosaics are figurative messages that have a univocal meaning and convey a limited amount of information.
Suppose we take a white sheet of paper and spill some ink on it. The result will be a random image with absolutely no order. Let’s now fold the paper in two so that the ink blot will spread evenly on both sides of the sheet. When we unfold the paper we will find before us an image that has a certain order—i.e., symmetrical repetition, one of the most elementary forms of redundancy as well as the simplest avatar of probability.
Now, even though the drawing remains fundamentally ambiguous, the eye has a few obvious points of reference: indications of a particular direction, suggestions of possible connections. The eye is still free, much freer than it was with the traditional mosaic, and yet it is directed toward the recognition of some forms rather than others, varied and variable forms whose very identification involves the unconscious tendencies of the viewer, while the variety of possible solutions they invite reconfirms the freedom, the ambiguity, and the suggestive power of the figure.
And yet. as I have already mentioned, the figure contains a number of interpretive directions, enough so that the psychologist who proposes the test feels quite disoriented if his patient’s answer falls outside the province of his predictions.
Let’s now transform both the ink blot and the pieces of the mosaic into the gravel which, crushed and pressed by a steamroller, becomes pavement. Whoever looks at the surface of a road can detect in it the presence of innumerable elements disposed in a nearly random fashion. There is no recognizable order in their disposition.
Their configuration is extremely open and, as such, contains a maximum amount of information. We are free to connect the dots with as many lines as we please without feeling compelled to follow any particular direction. This situation is very similar to that of white noise: an excess of equiprobability does not increase the potential for information but completely denies it. Or rather, this potential remains at a mathematical level and does not exist at the level of communication. The eye no longer receives any direction.
This is again evidence that the richest form of communication— richest because most open—requires a delicate balance permitting the merest order within the maximum disorder. This balance marks the limit between the undifferentiated realm of utter potential and a field of possibilities.
This problematic, liminal situation is characteristic of the kind of painting that thrives on ambiguity, indeterminacy, the full fecundity of the informal, the kind of painting that wants to offer the eye the most liberating adventure while remaining a form of communication—albeit the communication of extreme noise endowed with barely enough intention to deserve the status of signal.
Oth erwise, the eye might as well contemplate the surface of a road or a stained wall: there is no need to frame these unlimited sources of information that nature and chance have so kindly put at its disposal. Again, it must be emphasized that intention alone is enough to give noise the value of a signal: a frame suffices to turn a piece of sackcloth into an artifact. This intention can, of course, assume all sorts of different forms: our present task is to consider how persuasive they must be in order to give a direction to the freedom of the viewer.
If! draw a square around a crack in a wall with a piece of chalk, I automatically imply that I have chosen that crack over others and now propose it as a particularly suggestive form—in other words, I have turned it into an artifact, a form of communication, simply by isolating it, by calling attention to it in a rather mechanical fashion not unlike the use of quotation marks in literature. But at times this intention may assume a much more complex form, intrinsic to the configuration itself. The direction I insert into the figure may retain a high degree of indeterminacy and yet steer the viewer toward a particular field of possibilities, automatically excluding other ones.
This is what a painter does even in his most casual creation, even when he limits himself to scattering his signals across a canvas in a rather random fashion. If, after looking at Dubuffet’s Materiologies—which are much like a road surface or other bare terrain in their attempt to reproduce the absolute freedom and unlimited suggestiveness of brute matter—somebody had told him that they bore a strong resemblance to Henri IV or Joan of Arc, the artist would probably have been so shocked that he would have questioned the sanity of the speaker.
In a perplexed essay on tachisme entitled «A Seismographic Art,»13 Herbert Read wonders whether the numerous ways in which we can interpret blot of ink on a piece of paper have anything to do with an aesthetic response. According to him, there is a fundamental distinction between objects that are imaginative and objects that merely evoke images. In the second instance, the artist is the person who views the image, not the person who creates it. A blot lacks the element of control, the intentional form that organizes the vision. By refusing to use any form of control, tachisme rejects beauty in favor of vitality.
If contemporary art merely upheld the values of vitality (as the negation of form) over those of beauty, there would be no problem: at this particular stage in the evolution of taste, we all could easily make do without the latter. What concerns us here is not the aesthetic value of an act of vitality but rather its power to communicate. Our civilization is still far from accepting the unconditional abandonment to vital forces advocated by the Zen sage. He can sit and blissfully contemplate the unchecked potential of the surrounding world: the drifting of clouds, the shimmer of water, cracks in the ground, sunlight on a drop of dew. And to him everything is a confirmation of the endless, polymorphous triumph of the All.
But we still live in a culture in which our desire to abandon ourselves to the free pursuit of visual and imaginative associations must be artificially induced by means of an intentionally suggestive construct. As if that were not enough, not only do we have to be pushed to enjoy our freedom to enjoy, but we are also asked to evaluate our enjoyment, and its object, at the very moment of its occurrence. In other words, we still live in a culture dominated by dialectics: I am supposed to judge both the work in relation to my experience of it, and my experience of it in relation to the work. I might even have to try to locate the reasons for my reaction to the work in the particular ways the work has been realized—if nothing else, in order to judge it as a means to an end, at once process and result, the fulfillment or the frustration of certain expectations and certain goals. For the only criterion I can use in my evaluation of the work derives from the degree of coincidence between my capacity for aesthetic pleasure and the intentions to which the artist has implicitly given form in his work.
Thus, even an art that upholds the values of vitality, action, movement, brute matter, and chance rests on the dialectics between the work itself and the «openness» of the «readings» it invites. A work of art can be open only insofar as it remains a work; beyond a certain boundary, it becomes mere noise.
To define this threshold is not a function of aesthetics, for only a critical act can determine whether and to what extent the «openness» of a particular work to various readings is the result of an intentional organization of its field of possibilities. Only then can the message be considered an act of communication and not just an absurd dialogue between a signal that is, in fact, mere noise, and a reception that is nothing more than solipsistic ranting.
Form and Openness
The lures of vitality are clearly denounced in an essay on Dubuffet by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues. He notes that in Mirobolus, Macadam and Co. Dubuffet has pushed his art to its extreme limit, showing his audience perpendicular views of the most basic ground formations. All abstraction is gone, and what’s left is the immediate presence of matter in all its concreteness. We contemplate the infinite in a layer of dust: «Just before the exhibition, Dubuffet had written to me that he was afraid his `texturologies’ brought art to a very dangerous point where all difference between the object— supposed to provoke thought and act as a screen for the viewer’s visions and meditations—and the basest and least interesting material formation had
