Chance

About

Chance enters art whenever an artist hands some decisions to accident, rules or other people. The idea is older than modernism: Leonardo da Vinci advised painters to find battles and landscapes in stained walls, and around 1785 Alexander Cozens published a method for building landscapes from random ink blots.

In the 20th century it became a deliberate strategy against taste and intention. Tristan Tzara proposed making a poem from cut-up newspaper words drawn out of a bag, and John Cage used the I Ching to determine the notes of Music of Changes (1951). In 1960 François Morellet let the odd and even digits of a telephone directory distribute squares of two colours; Stanley Brouwn asked passers-by to sketch directions for him; Huang Yong Ping spun a roulette wheel to decide what to paint in the 1980s. Gerhard Richter's 2007 window for Cologne Cathedral arranges thousands of coloured squares at random.