Certain art since World War II has edged toward the recovery of its means by virtue of grasping a systematic method of production which was in one way or another implied in the finished product. Another way of putting it is that artists have increasingly sought to remove the arbitrary from working by finding a system according to which they could work. One of the first to do this was John Cage who systematized the arbitrary itself by devising structures according to deliberate change methods for ordering relationships. Cage’s deliberate chance methods are both prior to and not perceptible within the physical manifestation of the work. The kind of duality at work here in splitting off the structural organization from the physically perceived still has strains of European Idealism about it. However, for Cage such Idealism was forged into a dual moral principle: on the one hand he democratized the art by not supplying his ordering of relationships and on the other, by his insertion of chance at the point of decision about relationships, he turned away the engagement with “quality”—at least at the point of structural relationships where it is usually located. It is not possible to mention Cage without bringing in Duchamp who was the first to see that the problem was to base art making on something other than arrangements of forms according to taste. It is not surprising that the first efforts in such an enterprise would be to embrace what would seemingly deny certain aspects of preferred relationships—chance ordering. The entire stance of a priori systems according to which subsequent physical making followed or was made manifest are Idealist-oriented systems which run from Duchamp down through the logical systems of Johns and Stella to the totally physically paralyzed conclusion of Conceptual art. This has been one thread of how the systematic has been enlisted to remove the arbitrary from art activity.

Another thread of system-seeking art making, distinct enough to be called a form of making, has been built on a more phenomenological basis where order is not sought in a priori systems of mental logic but in the “tendencies” inherent in a materials/process interaction. Pollock was the first to make a full and deliberate confrontation with what was systematic in such an interaction. Until Pollock, art making oriented toward two-dimensional surfaces had been a fairly limited act so far as the body was concerned. At most it involved the hand, wrist and arm. Pollock’s work directly involved the use of the entire body. Coupled to this was his direct investigation of the properties of the materials in terms of how paint behaves under the conditions of gravity. In seeing such work as “human” behavior” several coordinates are involved: nature of materials, the restraints of gravity, the limited mobility of the body interacting with both. The work turned back toward the natural world through accident and gravity and moved the activity of making into a direct engagement with certain natural conditions. Of any artist working in two dimensions it could be said that he, more than any others, acknowledged the conditions of both accident and necessity open to that interaction of body and materials as they exist in a three-dimensional world. And all this and more is visible in the work.

II

To see a certain strain of art making as behavior which has the motivating urge to reduce the arbitrary is to do more than impute a certain psychology to artists or assert a particular historical interpretation. The very framing of the issue implies oppositions of the arbitrary and non-arbitrary. Not only have psychologists such as Morse Peckham and Anton Ehrenzweig been concerned with the oppositions that lie along an axis similar to the arbitrary/non-arbitrary division but linguists and anthropologists as well have been concerned with the structural “binarisms” embedded in language and operating behind myths. Support for the pervasiveness of a binary structuring is sought, ultimately, at the biological level: “Finally, some authors are confident that digitalism, which is the rival of the analogical, is itself in its purest form—binarism—a ‘reproduction’ of certain physiological processes, if it is true that sight and hearing, in the last analysis, function by alternating selections.”⁴ Even this statement in its contrasting the analogical and the binary as alternatives has a binary form. The linguist, de Saussure, sees language operating primarily according to oppositions and it naturally follows that his theory itself comes in the form of oppositions and polarities which he ascribes to mental activity itself. Such a Kantian outlook is seen also in Levi-Strauss’s analyses of myths. Key terms in both de Saussure and Levi-Strauss are themselves dual: diachronic/synchronic, syntagmatic/associative, arbitrary/motivated. I am especially concerned with the last pairing of terms for the present analysis—terms which held quite a bit of importance for de Saussure: