God does not throw dices

To Greek philosophers the concepts of “world” and “order” were synonymous. To our contemporaries the world is more akin to chaos. Art has sought order in disorder, disorder in order, sometimes managing to find a balance between the two. By Angela Vettese, art reviewer and critic.

Albert Einstein’s contention was that God doesn’t throw dices. It was shortly after he made this famous statement that Juan Mirò was happily painting sky-scapes with constellations of randomly arranged astral bodies without any centre or fringe, scattered about over the canvas in unrestrained, jubilant disorder. Dices were most definitely thrown by John Cage to compose his music and paint pictures. He let himself be guided by the results of chance and data processing operations based on the I Ching oracle – ancient traditions of the Far East against modern-day science, the conscience of the nonconscience of life versus Western rationality.
It wasn’t long before the topic of the alternating ebb and flow of chance and necessity worked its way into scientific debate, leading to discoveries that disprove Einstein’s contention. A small platoon of physicists, including Bohr, Plank, and Heisenberg set out to inquire deeply into the make up of matter, taking it apart until it became clear that at the heart of it all chance and hence the imponderable do indeed play a large role. What’s more, Stephen Jay Gould, a great populariser in the field of the biological sciences, has explained that the belief of man as being at the apex of the pyramid of life is quite groundless. If the parameter is the capacity for multiplication and expansion, then bacteria most definitely take first prize, while if it’s longevity as a species, there’s no beating that of turtles.
To Greek philosophers “order” and the “universe” were one and the same. To our modern minds the world is essentially a chaotic place. It is indeed a popular opinion, even though only a limited number of thinkers are truly familiar with the discoveries and arguments of modern-day science that support this view. Somehow though it is a commonly held view. Perhaps it is an awareness born of the fact that the stead-fast cause-effect relationships that were believed to govern the universe ever since Aristotle and then on down the centuries through to Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton no longer seem to hold.
The helter-skelter of technological innovations and the rate at which the changes they wrought have occurred have been such as to tear asunder long-standing norms and customs by which people were content to live out their lives by. Be it the way wheat is farmed or a wedding celebrated, rules that have stood the test of time for centuries have suddenly turned irrelevant.
But the mind, and not only the human one at that, craves for a pattern. The model of universal beauty common also to animals and essential for biological reproduction is strongly rooted in the idea of symmetry, which is indeed symptomatic of bodily health and fitness. The eye that scrutinizes its surroundings strives to make sense of what it sees by structuring its field of vision, by distinguishing what’s central from what’s peripheral, figure from field, what calls for attention, especially for reasons of survival, from what can be safely overlooked.
The curved universe of modernday physics as it is conceived by the contemporary mind is essentially hubless, a circumstance that gives rise to paradoxical effects that artists, as usual, have been quick to perceive and render in effective imagery and visual metaphors.
Mark Tobey’s and Jackson Pollock’s all-over painting style subverts prospective and wholly deprives the painting of any internal order, a powerful metaphor of the lose of any anchoring point. Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concepts are like lacework on the canvas, a jubilant celebration of sky-borne freedom, of all that which is new and unrestrained, of a challenging disorder to ponder over and respond to. Monochromatic paintings in all their variants and renditions, from Malevic’s white rectangle to Yves Klein’s deep blue backgrounds, underscore the concept of emptiness, an emptiness that can be perceived as a pattern only in so far as it is content-free.
But disorder does not suit man. When confronted with it individuals can even take refuge in obsessive, compulsive, and repetitive behaviour patterns in an attempt to reinstate order, regardless of how, to put things back into their proper place, even if there isn’t any. We’ve all experienced what it’s like to brood over a problem until we don’t come up with the solution, or even when we can’t find a solution, because instead of setting it aside or deciding to face up to it we let ourselves be overwhelmed by it.
Contemporary art is rife with formulae and equations, numbers and encoded signs like nervous tics. Over the last thirty years, Hanna Darboven, for instance, has been depicting tangles of rational sums imbued with a perverse and repetitive logic. Roman Opalka’s paintings are littered with progressive numbers set against a white background. Painted in
increasingly paler shades of grey, it’s as if they were marking the passing of time, waiting to fade out completely with old age so as to let death bestow upon them a sense of
finality, of accomplishment. On Kawara has mailed cards to addresses across the globe with only one statement written on them: “I am still alive”. In this way he hopes to leave a sign of his passing through life, plotting its itinerary by counting the places along the way and marking the passing of time. In his early works Tony Cragg attempted to reshape items of coloured plastic junk. His works are now in marble, bronze, and alabaster, but he still talks of the sculptor’s task in terms of bringing out the hidden order that lies buried deep within matter. And yet how can one forget his enormous piece of modular sculpture made up of cubes exhibited at the 1997 edition of the Biennale in Venice and meant as a tribute to the precarious, unenduring status of any given form?
Alighiero Boetti has devoted almost all his work to the relationship between order and disorder. In a book and two large wall-hangings he attempts to rank the thousand longest rivers in world, proving what an impossible task it indeed is, as measurements in nature are far from permanent and can differ widely depending on the source.
Boetti’s works in any case point to a possible way for coming to terms with uncertainty – striving for order in our times entails above all being willing to acknowledge and accept disorder.
It means no longer striving for something absolute outside ourselves but seeking our own centre of gravity within ourselves.
Rather than yearning and searching for fixed rules by which to guide and govern our lives, we must learn to enact “the rule of self-rule”.
What’s essential in following one’s individual calling is to be coherent with one’s self. The proper, universal, as-it-should-be order of things is a belief for those who will have a faith. All the others are left to cope with chaos, the unpredictability of the future, and chance. But far from being the source of life’s blunders these aspects are indeed what make life possible in the first place, and what give it the essential impetus and energy to continue renewing itself.