The limits of control: Search for fine art strategies with as low level of control. Analysis of their creative processes

Résumé

In the 20th century tendencies towards artistic practises which distanced the work from its creator appeared. The majority of these strategies achieved this distance with systems which minimized control from the side of the artist, using different modes of unpredictability in their creative process.The importance of the unforeseeable in all its forms, chance, fortuity, randomness, chaos, in the thought and artistic production of the post-modern and contemporary world is indisputable(Gamboni, 1999). Many art theory and art history investigations that confirm this exist.Furthermore. Randomness, “a cardinal characteristic of our century” (Bork, 1967), has in the visual arts after Marcel Duchamp, the same importance as the found object (Iversen, 2010). The immense existing bibliography and the number of exhibitions about the subject, are indicative of its importance in modern art (Malone 2009). The most important event of the 20th century was the fall of determinism (Hacking, 2010) and in this century artistic practises begin to be driven by chance and not only influenced by it (Lejeune 2011). A very common idea in the related bibliography as well as an very intuitive idea is that creation without intention is impossible (Rothenberg, 1979). There is no evidence that absolute chance has been used by any artist, as there is always a cause or an objective, even if it is just the intention to create. At this point, the creation of a work with absolute chance, or complete loss of control, seems impossible, since this would imply the spontaneous appearance of something universally accepted as a work of art. The objective of this research is to push the limits of this impossibility. What most artists have been doing is to introduce an element without control in their creative process, with which different results could manifest themselves (Malone, 2009). We want to see what happens when we take the role of control in the creative process to its lowest limits.