On the other hand, if the painter is aware of a distinction, then the viewer can either work toward the recognition of an intentional message or abandon himself to the vital and unchecked flux of his most unpredictable reactions. The latter is the attitude Mandiargues assumes when he compares what he feels while contemplating Dubuffet’s texturologies to the emotions evoked in him by the powerful. muddy flow of the Nile, or to the real happiness one feels at plunging one’s hands into the sand of a beach and then watching it coolly and quickly flow through the fingers while the palms are still soothed by the deep warmth of matter.
But if this is indeed the case, why bother with the painting, which is so much more limited in possibilities than the real sand or the immensity of natural matter at our disposal? Obviously because the painting organizes crude matter, underlining its crudeness while at the same time defining it as a field of possibilities; the painting, even before becoming a field of actualizable choices, is already a field of actualized choices. This is why, before launching into a hymn to vitality, the critic celebrates the painter and what he proposes. Only after his sensibility has been thus directed does he feel ready to move on to unchecked associations prompted by the presence of signs which, however free and casual, are nevertheless the products of an intention and, therefore, the marks of a work of art.
The critical analysis that seems to be closest to the Western conception of artistic communication is the one that tries to recognize, at the heart of the «accidental» and the «fortuitous» that arc the substance of a work, the signs of a «craft» or «discipline» by virtue of which, at the right moment, the artist is able to activate the forces of chance that will turn his work into a chance domestiquie, «a sort of torque, whose poles. when they come into contact, far from nullifying each other, retain their potential difference.» Geometry is what finally provides Dubuffet’s «texturology» with a check and a direction, so that, in the end, the painter will still be the one «who plays on the keyboard of evocation and reference.»‘ Similarly, drawing is what finally controls the freedom of Fautrier’s colors by providing them with a dialectics between the presence of a limit and its absence, in which «the sign shores up the overflow of matter.»16
Even in the most spontaneous expressions of action painting, the multitude of forms that assail the viewer and allow him extreme freedom of interpretation is not like the record of an unexpected telluric event: it is the record of a series of gestures. each of which has left a trace with both a spatial and a temporal direction of which the painting is the only wimess. Of course, we can retrace the sign back and forth in every sense, without changing the fact that the sign is a field of reversible directions which an irreversible gesture has imposed on the canvas—a field that invites us to explore all possible directions in search of the original (and now lost) gesture till we finally find it and, with it, the communicative intention of the work.
This sort of painting tries to retain the freedom of nature, but of a nature whose signs still reveal the hand of a creator, a pictorial nature that, like the nature of medieval metaphysics, is a constant reminder of the original act of Creation. This sort of painting is, therefore, still a form of communication, a passage from an intention to a reception. And even if the reception is left open—because the intention itself was open, aiming at a plural communication—it is nevertheless the end of an act of communication which, like every act of information, depends on the disposition and the organization of a certain form. Understood in this sense, the «informal» is a rejection of classical forms with univocal directions but not a rejection of that form which is the fundamental condition of communication. The example of the informal, like that of any open work, does not proclaim the death of form; rather, it proposes a new, more flexible version of it form as a field of possibilities.
Here we realize not only that this art of chance and vitality is still dependent on the most basic categories of communication (since it bases its informativeness on its formativity) but that it also offers us, along with all the connotations of formal organization, the conditions for aesthetic appreciation. Let us take Jackson Pollock’s art as an example. The disorder of the signs, the disintegration of the outlines, the explosion of the figures incite the viewer to create his own network of connections. But the original gesture, fixed by and in the sign, is in itself a direction that will eventually lead us to the discovery of the author’s intention.
Of course, this is possible only because the gesture, unlike a conventional referent, is not extraneous and exterior to the sign (in other words, it is not a hieroglyph of vitality that can be serially reproduced, and which will forever evoke the notion of «free explosion»). Gesture and sign coexist in a particular balance, impossible to reproduce, resulting from the fusion of inert materials and formative energy, and from a series of connections among the various signs that allow our eyes to discern, beyond these, the interrelationship of the original gestures (and the accompanying intentions). Here again we confront a fusion of elements similar to the one that, in the best moments of traditional poetry, weds sound and sense, the conventional value of the sound and the emotion it evokes. Western culture considers this particular fusion as an aesthetic event characteristic of art.
The «reader» who, at the very moment in which he abandons himself to the free play of reactions that the work provokes in him, goes back to the work to seek in it the origin of the suggestion and the virtuosity behind the stimulus, is not only enjoying his own personal experience but is also appreciating the value of the work itself, its aesthetic quality. Similarly, the free play of associations, once it is recognized as originating from the disposition of the signs, becomes an integral part of the work, one of the components that the work has fused into its own unity and, with them, a source of the creative dynamism that it exudes. At this point, the viewer can savor (and describe, for that’s what every reader of informal art does) the very quality of the form, the value of a work that is open precisely because it is a work.
It becomes clear that quantitative information has led us to something much richer: aesthetic information.17
The former type of information consists in drawing as many suggestions as possible out of a totality of signs—that is, in charging these signs with all the personal reactions that might be compatible with the intentions of the author. This is the value all open works deliberately pursue. Classical art forms, in contrast, imply it as a condition necessary to interpretation but, rather than giving it a privileged status, prefer to keep it in the background, within certain limits.
The latter type of information consists in referring the results drawn from the former type back to their original organic qualities, in seizing, behind the suggestive wealth we exploit, a conscious organization, a formative intention, and in enjoying this new awareness. This awareness of the project that underlies the work will, in turn, be another inexhaustible source of pleasure and surprise, since it will lead us to an evergrowing knowledge of the personal world and cultural background of the artist.
Thus, in the dialectics between work and openness, the very persistence of the work is itself a guarantee of both communication and aesthetic pleasure. Not only are the two values intimately connected, but each implies the other—which is certainly not the case with a conventional message such as a road sign, where the act of communication exists without any aesthetic effect and exhausts itself in the apprehension of the referent, without ever inducing us to return to the sign to enjoy the effectiveness of its message in the way it is formally expressed. «Openness.» on the other hand, is the guarantee of a particularly rich kind of pleasure that our civilization pursues as one of its most precious values, since every aspect of our culture invites us to conceive, feel, and thus see the world as possibility.
V. Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics
Television has long been the object of so many debates and so many theoretical reflections that some people have begun to speak of a «televisual aesthetics.»
In the context of Italian philosophical terminology, «aesthetics» refers to the investigation of art in general, to the human act that generates it, and to the overall characteristics of its objects. We cannot speak of an «aesthetics of painting» or of an «aesthetics of cinema,» unless we refer to certain problems that, though they may be particularly obvious in painting or in cinema, are nevertheless common to all the arts, and, as such, likely to reveal certain human attitudes that could become the object of theoretical reflection and contribute to a philosophical anthropology.
In order to apply the term «aesthetics» to the technical discourses, stylistic analyses, and critical judgments of a particular art, we would have to give
