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.

By listening to her dual nature, she achieved a rare ability to invent mental “micro-climates”, opportunities to avoid the here and now and enter the “forever”. However, a listening, thinking mind should not aspire to the noisy confusion of large events but should introduce small ideas. These ideas then generate transformations, tiny but active, nourished by that special form of attention: “making yourself available, like paper”.

There is nothing heroic about it: “see small, hear small and think small”, she writes on those pages typed between 1952 and 1964. Even today, in her book The other rooms (2009), she invites us to listen to shadows: “People need shadows in order to rest. I’d like you to send a bunch of shadows to a friend”. Silent shadows which could be the faces of people loved and lost, but also the shadows created by the sun in a room, which become three-dimensional before our eyes and therefore a welcoming space filled with emptiness created especially for us, a space we can fill with our bodies or thoughts.

Listening to birdsong means understanding what the emptiness of the sky contains: life. Ono’s short film Outro consists of a single image coming in and out of focus. It shows Ono, Sean as a young boy, and John Lennon in a garden, a family appearing and disappearing. It is already in a void, or no longer exists, but the game of disappearing images is guided by the constant presence of the birds.

John Cage, her lifelong friend, also dedicated one of his most famous pieces to birds. The same birds who represent the sound of the skies and also of emptiness, and which represent the soundtrack of silence. We all know what idea Cage had of silence, as he even tried looking for it inside an anechoic chamber and was forced to accept that in the absence of any sound, we hear at the very least the blood flowing through our veins and the beating of the heart. Silence, the music consisting of a rest sign written on a fiveline stave, is nothing more than another anthem to listening, to the noise of the heart, the noise of emptiness, the fullness of meaning we can achieve even when there are no more words. We should mention at this point that Japan, a significant influence on both Yoko Ono and Cage, is a universe in which the kind of silence aimed at listening to the rustling of a falling leaf is much more highly regarded than it is in the West. In this fluctuating world every moment comes and goes, and it is worth remembering this even by just concentrating on the noise that consumes it.

We should remember that ancient practice brought back in vogue by Yoko Ono: the wish tree. It can be an olive tree, a maple or even a simple wooden panel bedecked with handwritten notes declaring our wishes. The artist arrives and gathers them all up, as with the Wish Tree at the 2003 Biennale, makes a small bonfire and delivers them up to the dustbowl of the world. Burning them is not intended to be an offence, but a way of perpetrating our wishes. We, who expressed these desires, have another powerful ritual at our disposal to help us achieve them: not magic, but listening. By writing down what we want, by hanging up that note, we have had to focus on an emotion, a future prospect. Nothing, other than understanding, re-reading and listening to our desire, can help us realise it. Yoko is not a witch, she is an elderly fairy, who now has the wisdom to help us listen to what we feel.

The theme of this edition of illywords is “La cultura dell’ascolto” (or “the Culture of Listening”). Did this lead to the idea of choosing “Accecare l’ascolto” (“Blocking the ears”) as the title for the section on theatre and the role of theatrical performance in the modern art of Artissima?
A.B. The title, “Blocking the ears” was inspired by the theatre of Carmelo Bene, a great Italian actor who battled against the modern tradition of bourgeois theatre and script-led theatre with his naturalist approach. Bene rejected what is known as “director-led theatre” in order to restore the actor to his role as the ultimate protagonist of the theatre. Theatre is “made” by the actor and his “scenic” script rather than a script he has to recite from memory as a mere “entertainer” or “persuader”. In some ways the script is considered secondary, because a theatrical performance should be seen and experienced to the full. The word became enhanced and uncoupled from its meaning, no longer with the hitherto purely communicative function but taking on a meaning of its own, leaving traces of a sound interpreted as oblivion. In this sense, Bene speaks of “blocked ears”. We have dedicated this five-day event in Turin to this idea of a theatre as a “non-place” or a “universal place”, theatre as an “act”.

Is “Blocking the ears” intended to highlight the fact that the cognitive process depends on interdependence between the senses – or is it just a good title?
A.B. There is no need to highlight the fact that the cognitive process depends on interdependence between the senses, this concept is already very clear. As I said, “Blocking the ears” refers to a new way of experiencing the theatre. I have to admit that sometimes (but not always) I think it is also a good title!

What role has listening played in modern art, and how much has it changed during the past 30 years?
A.B. If by listening you mean the approach to listening and understanding, I’d say that this attitude has always played a fundamental role in art. You cannot see a work if you don’t understand it. If you mean listening in the strict sense of the word – with your ears – I’d say that from the early 1900s, hearing became just as important as sight. Think of the futuristic and Dadaist avant garde theatre, the work of John Cage, or the culture of “happenings”, performance and video art, for example.

What is left of the artist who used to closet himself in his studio or head off to far-flung locations in order to express his creativity?
A.B. Nothing.

Does the modern spectator want to listen, to get involved, or does he prefer a passive role, judging the work from the outside, perhaps guided by a critical framework that will help him to understand it?
A.B. There are many types of spectator, all very different. Everyone confronts a work of art as he thinks best, or perhaps to the best of his ability. A passive attitude should always be countered: to realise its potential a work of art always needs someone who can receive it and knows how to “listen”, in other words art needs us in order to exist.

Can art shows, rather than museums and biennial exhibitions, be seen as a kind of crossroads for thoughts and encounters, and therefore also opportunities for listening?
A.B. Art shows (the good ones) are effectively places where people meet and thoughts come together, so they can be seen as opportunities for listening. In the art world, biennale events and museums have a different role – obviously just as important – so it would be better not to mix up these different levels and confuse the public in the process.

Do you believe that the message conveyed by contemporary art influences the conscience of a multitude of people or is it intended for a small cultural elite instead?
Art in all historical periods had its public that was often reduced to a cultural elite. Only after passing through a historical approval it becomes closer to the wide public, like today impressionism is. At the time of its creation it also was seen and appreciated only by a small circle. It is a normal process that contemporary art is going through as well. I do not think that art should flatter or adapt to the tastes of the large public. For that we have entertainment, TV, design etc. I do not see art as something that should entertain and be largely accepted straight away like a pop star.

Your research underlines the need for a new ethical and political awareness. Could you please elaborate on this statement?
I position myself more as a witness then as a preacher. There are fields of human activity for everything so if one wants to be politically or socially active, one can do that without misusing art for it. I find that a social engagement as such cannot be enough to be considered as art.

Belonging to a community bound to a specific territory and, at same time, living in a globalized and “homogenized” society. How can these two contradictions coexist?
I do not think that I, or any of us, lives in a globalized or homogenized society. If you are talking about the Coca-Cola, McDonalds etc. society that is only a part of the society, the part of  economic goods. And that of only a part of the world. Otherwise I see many differences in between France and Italy for example. Even more so in between Europe and the States. I do not know what would be this homogenized society? The world is at a point of being the least homogenised than it has probably ever been.

Some of your artworks highlight the role played by women. To what extent did your “woman’s point of view” influence your artworks?
It influenced my work to the extent that I am, as a person a woman and therefore have a female point of view. The male point of view is what we are used to, what we see in majority. The female point of view was so long in the shadow that we almost forgot that it exists and that it is somewhat different from the male.