Towards a Field Theory for Post-Modernist Art

Leonardo, Vol. 13, pp. 51-52. Pergamon Press 1980. Printed in Great Britain TOWARDS A FIELD POST-M ODERNIST Roy Ascott** THEORY FOR ART* I would like to look at the attributes of a paradigm for art, a field theory which would replace the formalist modernist aesthetic. It takes as its focus not form but behavior; not an information model of the sending/receiving of messages in a one-way linearity but the interrogation of probabilities by the viewer; it looks at a system in which the artwork is a matrix between two sets of behaviors (the artist and the observer) providing for a field of psychic interplay which can be generative of multiple meanings, where the final responsibility for meaning lies with the viewer. To understand this paradigm it is first necessary to know what Formalist Modernism was not. It was not connective, inclusive, transactional, associative, referential , interactive, changeable, discontinuous, multilayered , impure, ambiguous; it ignored autobiographical data and questions of personality. Post-modernist art by encompassing these qualities presents a connective paradigm which in turn demands a connective criticism. This art we call post-modern recognizes time and periodicity, but, rather than being tied to one-way time series, it can move back and forth in time and can be associated in its reversibility with the new physics. It moves across and through different areas of knowledge and in this networking can be associated with cybernetics. It contains layers of possible meanings all existing simultaneously but inertly until negotiated by the viewer and can be associated both with new linguistics and the old Sufi thought. It mixes the left and right hemispheres and employs both reason, passion and chance. In comparison , Formalist Modernism employs a very restricted code. The insistent linearity in time of Formalist Modernism was tied to the idea of progress and the future, the styles and the modes of the modernist aesthetic were linked almost causally in a straight line on which there was no going back, for it was thought that to look to the past could only be regressive. I wish to point instead to a cyclical universe of interactions in space, time and consciousness, where past, present and future mingle, where the objective and subjective find their operational link in probability and indeterminacy, where we can explore the matrix of matter and psychism. Ambiguity, associative linkages, the boundary regions of art and consciousness, crossing the lines between individual *Paper presented at the College Art Association Annual Meeting, New York, N.Y., U.S.A., on 17 February 1978 (unpublished). **Artist and teacher, 16 Bloomfield Road, Bath BA2 2AB, England. 51 dreams, memories and events, between cultures and histories: this is the prospectus for Post Modernism. Art does not reside in the artwork alone, nor in the activity of the artist alone, but is understood as a field of psychic probability, highly entropic, in which the viewer is actively involved, not in an act of closure in the sense of completing a discrete message from the artist (a passive process) but by interrogating and interacting with the system ‘artwork’to generate meaning. This field provides for transactions to take place between the psychic system ‘artist’and the psychic system ‘viewer’where both are, to use Umberto Eco’s phrase, ‘gambling on the possibility of semiosis’. Thus the viewer/observer must be a participator and is of operational importance in the total behavior of the system. A field theory of art must pay much attention to the participator. Formalist Modernism saw itself moving through time like an arrow, directed to the future with simple, clear and direct messages on its shaft or, naively, with no messages at all, asif human consciousnesswere in any way disposed to abandon its prime function-the creation of meaning-in favour of a bland and passive contemplation of ‘pure’ form. This idea of art always moving on, eyes set only on the future with never a thought for previous events, is found also in biology and the theory of evolution, both tied up with the notion of development and irreversibility. The claim of Formalist Modernism to have dispensed with the Newtonian world view was correct only to some extent within...