ArtPage on Aleatory

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aleatory and aleatoric - Composition depending upon chance, random accident, or highly improvisational execution, typically hoping to attain freedom from the past, from academic formulas, and the limitations placed on imagination by the conscious mind. There is a tradition of Japanese and Chinese artists employing aleatoric methods, many influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the west, precedents can be found among artists of ancient Greece, and later among artists of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) recommended looking at blotches on walls as a means of initiating artistic ideas. Aleatory was also employed by numerous twentieth century avant-garde artists. Followers of the Dada and Surrealism produced numerous examples. Jean Arp (French, 1887-1966) made collages by dropping small pieces of paper onto a larger piece, then adhering them where they landed. André Masson (French, 1896-1987) and Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) allowed their pens to wander over sheets of paper in the belief that they would discover in those doodles the ghosts of their repressed imaginations. Similarly, Tristan Tzara (Romanian, 1896-1963) created poetry by selecting sentences from newspapers entirely by chance.

The artist Protegenes, becoming frustrated with his efforts to paint a dog foaming at the mouth, "finally fell into a rage with his art . . . and dashed a sponge against the place in the picture that offended him . . . and chance produced the effect of nature in the picture!" Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), Roman scholar and naturalist.
"[The artist Wang Mo] excelled in splattering ink to paint landscapes. . . . There was a good deal of wildness in him, and he loved wine. Whenever he wished to paint a hanging scroll, he would first drink, then after he was drunk he would splatter ink. Laughing or singing, he would kick at it with his feet or rub it with his hands. . . . According to the forms and appearances, he would make mountains and rocks, clouds and water." Anonymous Chinese writer in a ninth century treatise on painting.
"If you wish to acquire good style for mountains, and to have them look natural, get some large stones, rugged, and not cleaned up; and copy them from nature, applying the lights and the darks as your system requires." Cennino Cennini, an early 15th century follower of Giotto, in his treatise on painting.
"Look at walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones. If you are about to invent some scenes, you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, with valleys and various groups of hills." Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519), Italian Renaissance artist. Treatise on Painting.

In music, the major exponent of aleatory was John Cage (American, 1912-1992), who sometimes composed by using dice, and also with a randomizing computer program.

An example:

Jean (Hans) Arp (French, born in Germany, 1886-1966), Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17, torn-and-pasted papers on gray paper, 19 1/8 x 13 5/8 inches (48.6 x 34.6 cm), Museum of Modern Art, NY. See collage and Dada.

Jean (Hans) Arp, Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1917, cut-and-pasted paper, ink, gouache, and bronze paint on colored paper, 13 1/8 x 10 1/4 inches (33.2 x 25.9 cm), Museum of Modern Art, NY.

John Cage, Water Music, 1952, India ink on paper; 10 sheets, 11 x 17 inches (27.9 x 43.2 cm) each, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. This musical composition was based on aleatoric operations with random sounds. The score for the piece (a photo of which is linked to at the title) requires a performer to: pour water from one receptacle to another, slam a keyboard lid shut, shuffle a deck of cards and deal seven into the piano strings, and blow a duck whistle into a bowl of water (as long as breath holds). Cage's use of ambient sound in his work parallels the use of found objects by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-) during the same period. (See Pop Art.) Rauschenberg's white paintings inspired one of Cage's most famous compositions, made in 1952, 4' 33", during which a pianist sits at a piano, opens and closes the lid between each of three movements, and then exits the stage in silence. His experimental approach derived in part from Zen, a philosophy that values chance over structured sequence, and he once described the evolution of his work as moving "from structure to process, from music as an object having parts, to music without beginning, middle, or end, music as weather." Cage's revolutionary work influenced generations of American artists, with a wide-reaching impact similar to that of Jackson Pollock's action paintings. Also see zip.

"Accidents, try to change them -- it's impossible. The accidental reveals man."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Quoted in: Vogue (New York, Nov. 1, 1956). See Cubism and Spanish art.

"I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful."
Joan Miró (1893-1983), Spanish painter. See Surrealism.
There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end."
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), American painter. see Abstract Expressionism.
"I don't use the accident. I deny the accident."
Jackson Pollock.
"All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve."
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), English painter. See English art and Expressionism.
"I have meant what I have done. Or: I have often meant what I have done. Or: I have sometimes meant what I have done. Or: I have tried to mean what I was doing."
Jasper Johns (1930-), American painter. See Pop Art.
"Doesn't 'expecting the unexpected' make the unexpected expected?"
George Carlin (1937-), American comedian.

Also see accident, accidental, automata, automatism, blot, blotto painting, collage, exquisite corpse, mobile, montage, Rorschach test, and Japanese suiseki or Chinese scholars' rocks.