Producing a picture without conscious knowledge or control
Georgiana Houghton, whose work was exhibited in London in 1871, claimed that a spirit beyond
herself guided her hand in drawing pictures out of a mass of spiralling convolutions. The results of
her vision were the first to emerge from the Western tradition that lacked any discernible
reference to the outward features of the world. Her paintings were known, second or third hand,
to Kandinsky through illustrations in the books on spiritualism that he was studying in the first
decade of the next century. How far they influenced his own style is unknown but Haughton’s
work, superficially at least, resembles in its swirling movement the background style adopted by
the Futurists.
(044) Georgiana Haughton 1864 ‘The Ominpresence of the Lord’ (black and white reproduction)
The continental pioneers of non-figurative art produced their seminal works during the period
1909-13. The first account of this process of creativity initiated by deliberately assembling a
plane of disorder was written by Hans Arp recording his encounter in 1909 with Vladimir
Baranoff-Rossine.
“He showed me some drawings of his in which, using coloured points and lines, he had
expressed his inner world in an entirely new way. They were not abstractions of
landscapes, human figures or objects, as one finds in Cubist pictures. I showed him
canvases which I had covered with a black web, a network of writing signs, ruins of lines
and bizarre stains. This was the result of my painfully hard work over many months.”
Arp was then 23 years old, an isolated artist trying to find a plastic language of his own outside
the prevailing fashions. He later turned to collage, not as Picasso and Braque had done to
enhance design, but to actually distance himself from Cubism by practicing a certain disorder.
His works around 1915 refer only to themselves. For example, a piece of tissue with a leaf and
flower pattern and the smashed corner of a cardboard box were arranged according to the laws
of chance on overlapping papers. In this process Arp was probably enacting a suggestion made
to him by Kandinsky who he visited in 1912. Later he recounted that “In his studio, words, forms
and colours blended together were transformed into fabulous exotic works of a sort never seen
before”. In his work Arp, through a process of ‘configurative becoming’, brought these random
starters to fruit’ through a deliberate mental activity of oppositions. Following Kandinsky, line
was opposed to colour; contour opposed to field, matter apposed to the incorporeal. The non-
figurative subjects that emerged have a unity of an identity of opposites; as line becomes colour,
contour becomes filled and matter becomes light.
Kandinsky said, recalling these early days,
“Days on which I did not work (rare though they were!) I considered wasted, and
tormented myself on their account. If the weather was at all decent, I would paint every
day for an hour or two, mostly in the old part of Schwabing, which was then slowly
becoming a suburb of Munich. At a time when I was disappointed with my studio work
and the pictures painted from memory, I painted large numbers of landscapes, which
nevertheless gave me little satisfaction, so that later there were very view of them I
worked into pictures….In my studies, I let myself go. I had little thought of houses and
trees, drawing coloured lines and blobs on the canvas with my palette knife, making them
sing just as powerfully as I knew how. Within me sounded Moscow’s evening hour, but
before my eyes was the brightly coloured atmosphere of Munich, saturated with light, its
scale of values sounding thunderous depths in the shadows.”
He was later to try to codify this kind of abstraction. An example given in Kandinsky’s book,
‘Point and Line to Plane’, shows the way in which a partly disordered scaffold of points could
produce a plane for organising a picture based on curved and straight lines.
(026) Kandinsky’s Horizontal-vertical-diagonal point pattern for a free line construction
(027) Hans Arp 1918 Charcoal
(028) Hans Arp 1941-2 Black ink
Arp was one of the intellectual links between the chaos of DADA and the pictorial order of the
Surrealists. Theories and principles began to be erected to structure DADA’s basic anarchic aim
to break with the past. The Surrealist manifesto gave the following definition of its creative
process:
Surrealism, n.m. Pure psychic atomatism through which it is intended to express, either
verbally or in writing, the true functioning of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of
all control exerted by reason and outside any aesthetic or moral pre-occupation.
Encycl. Philos. Surrealism rests on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of
association neglected until now, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested
play of thought. It aims at the definitive ruin of all other psychic mechanisms and at is
substitution for them in the resolution of the principal problems of life.
A significant approach to formalise the production of meaningful images from a random baseline
was that of Kenneth Martin in the 1970s. He set up the coordinates for drawing straight lines
between paired points in a square plane by selecting numbers at random. From this starting point
he invented new rules to codify the process of making the connections. From the resultant
images he selected those that he felt had potential to reproduce as paintings.
(045) Square planes with randomly coordinated lines: framework produced using the method of
Kenneth Martin (1973
The process of turning the random into the significant was a particular feature of Andreas Muller- Pohle’s work with black and white photography in the 1980s. ‘Transformance’ was the title of his
book of 45 photographs, each 20.5 X 13.7 cm, selected from random camera shots. Muller-
Pohle gave himself up to chance when he reversed the photographic ‘eye- hand’ procedure. He
pressed the release button without looking and subsequently selected images from the developed
film. He did not use criteria of how closely the finished photograph coincides with a possibility
seen through a view-finder. The search for information, drama and an unexpected Gestalt, which
motivates photographers, has been deferred until prints have been made. ‘Eye-hand’ has become
‘hand- eye’. Chance has become the ground on which freedom stands. Vilem Flusser who wrote
an introduction to the collection concluded:
‘Thus Muller-Pohle’s photographs subvert: they subvert the ontology of photographs.
And they subvert the normal meaning of ‘freedom’. This book, then, opens a
perspective onto what life in a world dominated by cameras and similar machines might
be: a deliberate, creative informing of the accidental products of apparatus.
(046) Two pictures taken at random from ‘Transformations’ Andreas Muller-Pohle ‘European
Photography 1983
