The Radical Use of Chance in 20th Century Art (review)

The main aim of this ambitious and assiduously realized study is to use philosophical writing by Clément Rosset — presented as the only philosopher whose system of thought is premised entirely on the concept of chance (p. 9) — as the basis for analysing literature, art, and music by André Breton, François Morellet, and John Cage (deliberately or not, Lejeune emphatically masculinizes the history and practice of chance). The well-founded Introduction reminds us that chance and randomness are not rhetorical artistic fancies but recently discovered facts of the subatomic universe, and shows that little detailed work exists currently regarding the use of chance as a creative, structural, and philosophical principle in art. The first four chapters deal with chance in science and philosophy, the original and under-researched work of Rosset, and the distinction between the ‘radical’ artistic use of chance and an eclectic range of precursors running from fatrasies to Mozart (to which an index and dates of original publication would have done full justice). The chapter on Breton aims to reveal the complexity and nature of chance within Surrealism (but, as in his rather conventional view of Dada as nihilistic destruction, Lejeune’s equating of Breton with Surrealism ignores substantial recent work that has expanded the canon and scope of ‘radical’ French culture). Free association invited ‘chance to intervene in the creative procedure’ (p. 87) in quest not of the complete absence of causality but of unconscious treasures and surprises. Lejeune, however, draws on such tensions to produce a careful and substantiated set of conclusions: Breton saw in chance ‘[the] clue to the existence of an underlying, and unifying, level of human apprehension’, redefined chance by endowing it with meaning (the duality of ‘Surrealist chance’), and worked towards ‘a level of reality beyond Materialism’ in which events are connected not causally but by the logic of desire (pp. 127–28). Morellet, who describes himself as ‘le fils monstrueux de Mondrian et Picabia’ (p. 146), matches Rosset more closely in his use of chance to detach art from his own background and personal history, even if ‘unexpectedness’, ‘disorder’, and ‘structural unpredictability’ (pp. 147–49) have parameters and accidental order. Thus Morellet’s Répartition aléatoire de 40 000 carrés selon les chiffres pairs et impairs du bottin téléphonique (1961) produces a roughly even — and predictable — split between red and blue squares. Cage comes closest to producing in art both Rosset’s description of reality as ‘sans raison [et] sans but’ (p. 55) and the quasi-Buddhist view of art, selfhood, and desire as delusional ‘duplications’. The book at times threatens to become a somewhat dry exercise in taxonomy, although Lejeune does well to use philosophy as an analytic, rather than qualitative, complement to art, and the chapters on individual figures represent substantial, balanced contributions to debates about different periods of ‘avant-garde’ culture. Appended by interviews with Rosset (2004) and Morellet (2005), the book is an original, impressive, and richly suggestive analysis of the philosophical qualities and problems produced by artists who eschew the safe ground of conventional aesthetics for risk-taking and experimentalism.