Frontiers of Pattern Recognition ed. by S. Watanabe (review)

Books 263 character and movement of the dancer in his costumes, which, says the critic ‘he has seen in movement’. Despite its dated and rhetorical style, Alexandre’s text is direct and convincing; it leaves no doubt about his enthusiasm for the Ballets Russes. ‘There are no nerves so insensitive as not to vibrate involuntarily’, he comments and finds in the immediacy of the Ballets’ impact :a vitality long smothered: ‘He (Bakst) has stirred in each of us the slumbering Pagan and the unconscious worshipper of deities, hidden from us by the twilight, but destined by nature to return to life in the dawn of some distant tomorrow .’ The second part of the book comprises ‘Notes on the Ballets’ by Jean Cocteau, which, in their abstruse and precious poetical conceits and their evocative analogies complement well Bakst’s own work. They present glittering notes first-hand of ballet productions that can never be repeated. Cocteau revives in his texts the sense of being in the theatre, enthralled and fascinated. This is the case nowheremorethaninhisdescriptionof thearrivalonstage of Madame Rubinstein in Clgopritre, embalmed in twelve exotic veils, each of which is removed with a different series of dances and gestures. Cocteau captures the dramatic hiatus induced by the final revelation of the woman within: ‘ ...and so she stood, with vacant eyes, pallid cheeks, and open mouth, before the spell-bound audience, penetratingly beautiful, like the pungent perfume of some exotic essence.’ The worldly exoticism of Cocteau’s text is itself a subject of fascination: ‘Disposed as I already was to admire Rimsky-Korsakoff’s music, Madame Rubinstein has fixed it in my heart, as a long blue-headed pin might impale a moth with feebly fluttering wings.’ Apart from the excitement induced by the originality of Bakst’s colour and pattern and by the curious combination of vigour and delicacy characteristic of his work, Dover Publications in reconstructing this text of 1913 have resurrected a document close to the heart of the Ballets Russes. It is still full of rewards for its reader. Chance and Order: Drawings by Kenneth Martin. Waddington Galleries, London, 1973. 77 pp., illus. Paper 52.00. Reviewed by Arthur L. Loeb* Conceptual Art is characterized, not primarily by an object as its ultimate product, but by the idea or concept underlying the production of an object. If an object is produced at all by a conceptual artist, its significance is considered secondary to the concept. It might be well to consider this book from the vantage point of conceptual art. The concept is to construct a grid of regularly spaced points, to which numerical values are assigned either by chance or by a rigid rule. These points are joined together by lines, again according to a rigid ‘rule of the game’ or by shuffling numbered cards, letting chance determine the combinations to be joined. Color is adjoined as a variable to this system of points and lines and again determined by a similar combination of generating rules and chance. Theresult isa small book containing the generating rules, the tables of numbers generated by shuffling cards in each series of patterns and reproductions of the artist’s sketches, all drawn on square-grid graph paper. No effort is made to produce patterns with draughtsman-like perfection: erasures, blots and hand-written digits are clearly visible. Although there are frequent references to prints in which some of the patterns in this book have been used, these prints themselves are not here reproduced. Method is the object of this book: aesthetic visual quality is not aimed for in first instance. Andrew Forge, in his ‘Introduction’ expresses his own fascination with reading this book through in sequence, following the game with a sense of suspense. This reviewer *Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. must confess being somewhat less fascinated by the process but this is only a personal reaction to the process of watching another person’s highly structured doodling. I could not suppress a longing to see some of the finished prints referred to, even though I was aware of the intrusion on the purity of concept that reproduction of these prints in...