[Manuel Valente Alves, “Le Temps Retrouvé”, 2001]

THE ART OF CHANCE by José A. Bragança de Miranda

Let us begin with this series of photographs by Manuel Valente Alves. They are immediately recognisable, while remaining enigmatic. Are they landscapes to which a portrait is added? In principle, they are a lot simpler than that. A garden, a lake, trees and grass, indistinct passers-by and cyclists, some lights, objects, a bench, a dustbin, a face and, finally, a bluish atmosphere. Then comes the desire for placing and dating: Hamburg, 13 January 2001. In the evening? And a title, evocative of Proust, uniting them: Le Temps Retrouvé.

At that very moment, in some garden in Hamburg, an infinity of things and images were taking leave of each other. They were lost, but these remained. In other gardens, other places, they would dissipate, leaving nothing behind. They would also lose themselves in other times. It would take a space that associated at the same time the pictures taken and the pictures untaken, the things that have images and the things that have not reached an image. Because an essential injustice seems to be here: only very little can be “saved”. This remainder and its connection to “art” in its present moment is what we want to address here.

It is said that we live in a time of images. Nothing could be falser. The time of the image was a theological time, where the image of God would qualify all the others. A time that found out that whatever existed, immense and prolific though it was, was always the same, a pale image of something more essential: salvation, toward which all things pointed. Once God disappeared, philosophers, moved by the yearning for truth, strove to set up a system that would hierarchize and control images. Ghosts, spectres, sirens and monsters would all disappear if they had not been protected by “aesthetics”. Romanticism was nothing else than a haven for these exiled images, which came to it looking for refuge. But they would stay there as simple “copies”, devoid of density and weight.

It took a technically operated disaster for all this system of control to crumble, leaving behind endless nostalgia. In a famous essay on the “work of art”, Walter Benjamin tells us there was, first of all, a metaphysical crisis whose essential consequence was the loss of the framing that created, by enclosing it, the space where images would fixate themselves and objects circulated. The crisis Benjamin describes comprises the reversion of body and image, copy and original, presence and absence. In Benjamin’s words, this was the “crisis of the aura”. What disappears with the aura’s loss is the vehicular structure of the “beyond”, that used to drag everything behind itself, even that which could not be fixated, that which was an “image” only to the “gods”.

Yet, to talk about the disappearance of the framing does not mean it has disappeared. Its instances have, on the contrary, infinitely multiplied themselves. The case of photographic cameras is enlightening. As they grew in number, everyone became a small generator of frames, able to register everything. In modern times, chance and contingency are returning, making everything “absurd” and inhuman. Everything being, from a theological point of view, “images” out of an absolute gaze, these now appear inside a dispersion and invisibility that seem to attribute unforeseen responsibilities upon “art”.

Of course, nowadays there are many mathematics of “chaos” and contingency, which is itself being included in computer systems that use it. Rather than abolishing it, they merge with it. Everything is retained within the “space” of databases, computer or digital machine memories. In a chaotic way, but such chaos is controlled. In an interactive installation, for instance, all possibilities are computed, but no one can compute them… except the computer itself. Here we have a bad kind of chance. What is infinite for humans is finite for the machine. How can we do the same, or something like that, without abolishing the chance in which all things are immersed? Mallarmé was right when he said that chance could not be abolished, but we are hardly able to understand it…

Hamburg, 13 January 2001, an evening. That day, that moment… What is left out of images? Their contingency, the chance that brings them imperatively to the fore, something the picture taken always obliterates. Here are the images in their utmost opacity. All that could not be incorporated into the images accompanies them as a “halo”, an “aura”. Benjamin’s crisis of the “aura” fundamentally implies that what is “remote” and “unique” can only be thinkable as a chance cast. Any kind of “image” could be used. I could do that… In their banality, these sentences show us that all framing is now basically technical. That affects not only the apparatus that fixates something into a small “picture”, but also all kinds of framing: literature, myth, museum, history. Mechanical effects, all of them. The monstrosity of things returns thus, only now without the things. This is the situation Hölderlin described as a “state of indigence”. Now that things have fallen in their invisibility, into oblivion, that they have become disconnected, is it necessarily a question of re-inserting, of re-connecting what became disconnected? Hence the diffuse feeling that art saves by “fixating”, by bringing to memory, by making things “endure”. It is as if everything was looking for salvation, in the moment when everything can be registered. In this context, Baudelaire would talk about an “anarchy of things”.

Manuel Valente Alves places his photographs, interconnecting them, in an installation enlightened by Marcel Proust. Through Proust, a radical issue is again taken up: what can be “saved” when everything can be fixated? Even more: if, in a time of total contingency, art is to exist, it is at stake in the tension between total recording, absolute memory, and the gesture that brings about the work of art.

This situation is serious, because our works share that same fate. The fact is that, should any association or connection abolish chance, presenting itself as “work”, chance will eventually absorb it. In our current situation, all “works” are at once engulfed by chance, circulating arbitrarily, either according to the whims of installation, reviews, museums, or within a void separate from all this.

Though in every “work”, or image, there are always internal movements, hidden bifurcations, or Gulliver-like telescopings, these are immediately damaged by the desire to create a “work”, which opposes to their absolute presence the contingency of “reality”. Now, the feeling that the work abolishes chance, by choosing what must remain and founding upon that its own permanence, is related to the fact that, every work being an effect of the frame and an instance of framing, anything entering it will seem fatal. Even interactive works, that go through an infinity of “states” or “forms”, find their fatality in the modulation of their chaotic series. There is fatality in all approximations, connections or juxtapositions “assembled” in a frame (and the value of an “installation” lies in its being an immensely fragile frame). This allows us to understand the avant-garde’s insistence upon the work’s “destruction”, blowing it into fragments, but also selecting, augmenting, and “mixing” them, in order to be “appropriated” and activated… until they fall into a new frame. Essential though this is, it is not enough.

The typical Proustian problem lies in a refusal of total memory, of recording everything. The pathology of chance would be abolished by “retaining” everything. Indeed, the total memory can only be the camera. Cameras that photograph by themselves are a fine instance of that, and they are everywhere. The world is being recorded on video, filmed, and digitalised. Every camera already includes its own framing. It would be possible to photograph “everything”, even movement. Cameras are cinematic entities, especially those that aim at “animating” life. Here lies the absolute advantage of machines, as well as their basic weakness. What use can be given to their “fixating” abilities? Claude Simon once wrote: “No human mind is able to memorize all that the eye encompasses over one of these ceaseless fractions of second time shifts about at dizzying speed”. Photography has the advantage “to fixate and memorize what our memory is unable to retain, that is, the image of something that only took place or existed over a very small amount of time”. But to fixate everything would be the same as “freezing reality”. Now, human fixation loses or rarefies, saving “everything” in a way other than technical.

This is precisely what makes photography a truly revealing experience, unlike the other arts. These have always worked upon simulacra, while photography works upon matter (something concealed by all simulacra). An enlightening sentence by Pasternak: “History is made by no one; you cannot see it, just as you cannot see the grass grow”. In a certain way, nothing is essentially done, except affecting “matter” through “simulacra”. All kinds of tropisms take place both in and out of the “works”, in as obscure a way as the uncontrollable movement of growing grass, with its inaudible noise, etc. Everything is magnetised but finality is missing or is as invisible as grass growing. Well, how does grass grow into becoming “our” history? It does so by becoming itself an image of history. We can see grass growing and hear its noise in the midst of all those things associated by “history” and that share the fragility of “grass”. Such fragility can be abundantly found in Hamburg, 13 January 2001. We must, then, see the work of art as identical to the tension between “reality” and “simulacra”. Only the simulacrum saves, and it is lost in contingency, in the recesses of “reality”.

Thus, in a very Proustian way, art is precisely the way of looking for. Are we “looking for” in order to keep, or “fixate”, something? We must rather be looking for what has been fixated, what has been kept. Besides, to fixate “everything” denies art itself, turning it into a 1 x 1 map that includes us even before we find the work. The same question keeps coming back: why should we keep these moments and passages, when too much must be left out, outside the frame? Hence the aesthetical uselessness of fixating everything. Nothing would be resolved, everything would become worse. Against the opacity of a work that thus falls back into the very contingency it wanted to abolish, against the desire of returning everything as an absolute work, we need a new poetical physics, one that makes up all the fascination of Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades”. The “infra-mince” is the tension of the simulacrum within the objectivity of the “fixated”. It is what Lezama Lima calls “cantidad hechizada” or “materia artizada”.

Proust’s lesson, adduced by Valente Alves, is essential from this point of view. After all, Le temps retrouvé is the sign that Proust’s writing has finally become possible, turning into a “bewitched quantity”. That was all he wished for; that is all his “happiness”. It is neither “time recovered”, nor a “search for lost time”; it is rather, as Nathalie Sarraute clearly saw, a search for “future time”. It is a question of opening up the present, of inventing time.

When Goethe says “tarry now, fair moment”, he says half the art, the stopping and fixating that obliterate time, but the other half is missing. The “invention of time” at the very instant it obliterates itself, by sticking itself to, wrapping itself around, life. But this is a very “special” life. In Proust’s instance, it is a “writer’s” or “artist’s” life. Yet, other kinds of life need art. It is a question of affecting the commonplace, of inserting oneself in it through the simulacrum of a life one has not really chosen. Eternal recurrence is the discovery of the “heaviest burden” of what is particular, contingent. We are, apparently, before another form of fatality… with the difference that over it the utmost freedom reigns.

Instead of remaining obsessed with particularities, even those of the “work” we would always like to be absolute, we must start from a reverse experience. The “heaviest burden” Nietzsche uses to describe “eternal recurrence” can come from anywhere, anytime. For instance, from the famous Proustian “cup of tea” and the “petite madeleine” that leaves its taste in the cup. What hides behind the “unfathomable banality” of that teacup and those crumbs from the shell-shaped madeleine? It is, basically, an “epiphany” that takes place “absent-mindedly” and all of a sudden. Could it be that everything once associated to the madeleine will recur through it until, finally, the world itself will be there? The odds are against it. The Madeleine is only a lucky cast of the dice. The hero that tries to write and escape the banality of existence is “saved” by the madeleine’s taste. Images come in droves, each of them an obstacle to all the others. They overlap one another in the “memory” they occupy. Memory must be emptied and freed, a void must be created. Everything will be possible then.

Proust tells us this happens in a way devoid of either control or method. Should there be a method, it would be the one of absent-mindedness. How can we simulate absent-mindedness while being, at the same time, really absent-minded? We need “luck”, an effect of chance, according to Proust’s words: “The past […] lies hidden, away from the grasp and reach of intelligence, in some object (in the feeling given by this material object), of whose existence we have not the smallest inkling. It is up to chance that we will find or not that object before we die”. It is that “lucky chance” that will open up everything, work and life included.

Something happens or not. We are dealing with happenings. A kind of happening that has to do with the work of art, but does not confine itself to it. This happening can take place through no matter what: everything that denies it can propitiate it. Only thus can the bad contingency of things, their appearances and endless circularity, be abolished. The object through which the happening takes place becomes thus identical to the happening, suddenly seeming “enchanted”, undergoing a marvellous change that turns “reality” into a “materia artizada” which suddenly “includes” us. Barthes’ famous “punctum” is a tropism that leaps out of an apparently fixed and fixated something, a “work” or something similar, to affect our freedom.

Is it possible that a work of art can lead to this effect? Proust has shown instead that all works are effects of this effect. He tells us also that this is uncontrollable, an effect of chance: “It is up to chance that we will find or not that object before we die”. The whole artistic institution bases itself upon the deleterious delusion that we hold the rules for creating a work of art. With rules and knowledge, we can always make a “work”, but not one “of art”. Even more serious, a work of art is nothing more than a disturbance of the “commonplace”.

Such is my reading of the Duchampian thesis, according to which “it is the spectator who makes the picture”. Indeed, the desire to make a “work of art” is the sign of an essential flaw, which the Romantics called “inspiration”, for lack of a better name. Marcel Duchamp used to talk, a little ambiguously, it is true, of a “transmutation phenomenon”, saying, “when inert matter is changed into a work of art, a real transubstantiation takes place and the spectator’s important role is to determine the weight of that work on the aesthetic scales”. Is this an “addition” to the work, which would always remain “open”? No, it is rather an oscillation, an aesthetic “weight” that only makes sense in “life”. Nothing is going on inside it, as if it were a “nut”, but, as Joseph Conrad would say, everything lies on the way how, once it is made, it integrates what it has “captured” or fixated, the one who made it and had to remain outside of it, as well as everything it has contacted with. Other things, other images, the “spectator”. That has lead Beckett to say: “Proust cares not about concepts, he pursues the Idea, the concrete”. Now, what is the idea but a never fully traced outline, multitudinously opening and reopening itself? The idea envelops the work, the work envelops life. The work of art is dead if it is unable to push its “envelop” and indefinitely disturb, risking its own destruction.

Hence the famous Duchampian experience is nothing more than that “envelope” or “package” that, having picked up some velocity, moves on. Towards… anyone able to receive it, or not. It is the fact of being on the move that confers “eternity” to the work, preserving what it has fixated from aesthetical fixation itself. Until the “image” comes up. Until it is “made”, as Beckett says. “The image is made” against the lines of the image and against the lined-up images, emerging as a kind of vertigo, weighing in upon us, as we look on or are there, when we are lucky to be there, shaking and disturbing us… something we feel and explore all our life, in order to go on living. Nothing but chance…

[English translation: José Gabriel Flores]

[BRAGANÇA DE MIRANDA, José A., “The art of chance”, in exhibition’s catalogue “Le Temps Retrouvé”, Galeria Luís Serpa, Lisboa, June 2001]