Band Structures (1969) was my first encounter with
Manfred Mohr in 1975. He is an artist; I am a theoretician. We
share an interest in semiotics and computers. And probably more: a
love of Paris and New York, for example; respect for Max Bense's
provocative activity; the desire to explore. This is why, I assume,
that at about the same time as he gained access to the plotter of
the Institut Météorologique in Paris, I was
improvising my own plotter in order to finally see the images I
generated on a computer. This is also why, after getting to know
more of his work, I came to realize that the rather frivolous
formula computer artist, embraced by so many who were
neither computer scientists nor artists, does not apply to him.
Manfred Mohr owns an aesthetic space (to use Frieder Nake's
concept) within which his talent unfolded in a very original way.
It is exactly this original way that prompts my writing about him,
as it prompted, in some of my articles and lectures, a public
celebration of his remarkable art. The aspect of his work I will
focus on in these lines is randomness. Omnipresent and yet so hard
to understand, not to say integrate in our activity, randomness
pervades even the most structured work we are aware of:
mathematics, physics, genetic mutations. It also insinuates itself
in the world of our thoughts and feelings. The more some people try
to avoid it, the subtler its embrace. Think about those traces of
randomness in endeavors of extreme precision exploration of
the cosmos, human genes, the mind and how they open unexpected
perspectives. The history of accidental discoveries, as they are
labeled, is much more impressive than that of methodical
invention.
But Mohr does not shy away from randomness; rather, he makes it
work for him. As pervasive as randomness is, we still do not know
too much about it. As a theoretic construct, it is quite slippery.
As a reality of existence, it often makes life look like a vast
lottery. The aleatoric, another name for randomness, is
wedded to the Latin Alea jacta est, The dice are tossed.
Well, Manfred Mohr knows a lot more about randomness than do those
who wrote the Treatises on the topic. His first "study" of it
resulted in a charming book, Le Petit Livre de Nombres au
Hasard (Paris, 1971, Edition d'artiste), the output of a random
number generator. This is concrete poetry at its best, no
longer semantic games or word-image translations, but the
embodiment, in elegant succeeding columns, of what randomness (also
evoking the notion of hazard) is: the impossibility to infer from
what was to what will be. In some ways, randomness is a reaction to
determinism.
When computers first attracted attention through their potential
use for art, the consensus was that while programs can describe the
algorithmic component of art, intuition could only be modeled by
randomness. Bense obviously made this point (in his
Aesthetica), and so did his entire "Stuttgart School." Across
the Atlantic, A. Michael Noll, working in the Speech and
Communications Department at Bell Laboratories, manipulated lines
and shapes, allowing the random number generator to modulate the
boring world of order. My own interest in randomness came via
historically acknowledged examples of permutational art (Mozart
remains my favorite example). They also came through Tristan Tzara,
whose genius for provocation and innovation led to the Dada
movement and its many consequences in the aesthetics of the modern
and post-modern. Jackson Pollock was one of these consequences. But
while I was trying to make cognitive aesthetics possible, Manfred
Mohr made art that integrated the thought I was trying to
express in theoretic terms. Needless to say, even in retrospect,
his success makes my attempts so much more futile.
So what is Mohr's art in terms of converting randomness from a
technique into an aesthetic component? Mohr himself comes from
action painting (but not only). His good fortune was to have found
an intellectual and artistic influence in K. R. H. Sonderborg, a
painter capable of and intent upon extracting abstraction from
natural forms, a source of conceptual inspiration. Sonderborg's
strong aesthetic intuition must have left an impression upon Mohr's
view of art at a time when to experiment meant to define himself.
One of Mohr's friends, the composer Pierre Barbaud, used computers
in music, fascinated by how subjectivity can be literally
overwritten in the processing of programs. Obviously, many more
influences can be traced, but I am not writing biography. My
interest is in the original appropriation of a mathematical notion
in a large body of work in which, for the viewer and for the
painter himself, all that counts is the art. Indeed, while looking
at Manfred Mohr's compositions, the viewer will not see programs,
computers, random number generators, or algorithms. Manfred Mohr
does not illustrate the technology of computer graphics or even the
functioning of random number generators. His work is not animated
by the primitive thought of imitating with new technology what the
masters, or the kitsch producers, generated with the pencil and the
brush within the aesthetics of mimesis. He is not even interested
in the thought animating constructivists, minimalists, or artists
engaged in other tendencies in which some critics rushed to
catalogue him.
Manfred Mohr's art is, if we leave aside his early works, the
result of a systematic, yet creative, exploration of the world of
geometry, in particular the square and its many embodiments in the
three-dimensional cube and hypercubes of varied spatial dimensions.
In this exploration, the artist uses a very powerful
instrument the computer able to perform an enormous
number of operations and to generate huge amounts of visual
representations. But all this is part of the aesthetic
search, not the result. It amounts to a large scale effort of
identifying, in the universe of dimensional relations, entities
that can finally coalesce in expressive units. At the end of the
search, a relational entity results a sign. But don't be
fooled by the terminology. Mohr generates signs as an expression of
intimate knowledge of the space he explores and of himself, the
explorer who, instead of discovering continents, makes continents.
Aesthetic continents, of course. Unless we understand what he is
trying to achieve the very expressive, synthetic condition of
a sign we will not fully understand his method and vision.
In order to free his explorations from the burdens of
psychological patterns, Manfred Mohr literally harnesses randomness
and makes it operate on the entities selected for exploration.
Value free choices, that is, choices that do not carry over
prejudices and constraints inherited from culture or motivated by
psychology, are almost impossible if the choice is left to
so-called subjectively driven selection. This is a component of his
very comprehensive philosophy. Paradoxically, randomness retrieves
for Manfred Mohr what is usually eliminated in the vast space of
aesthetic choices. For instance, Mohr wrote very clearly how he
treats the very loaded notion and culture of symmetry. He also
explained how, with the help of randomness, he explores the space
of expressive possibilities usually discarded in art as being ugly
or artistically unattractive. Directions are examined as they are
revealed by the random search. At times, it seems that what drives
the computer engine is not its CPU as much as the random number
generator performing selections on the output. This generator
whips the program, gives it unexpected directions, and avoids
the boring and never aesthetically satisfying deterministic
inertia. No surprise, since Manfred Mohr does not try to emulate
art or produce similes of art objects. This is why he does not need
all the bells and whistles of computer graphics utilities. The
resolution he is after is not one of the display, or the printer,
but of the search. Instead of pseudo-effects, he prefers powerful
entries into the complexity of the space of his artistic
investigation.
Chaos research shed new light on randomness. What at first
examination seemed random proved to have, over wider cycles, an
intrinsic structure in some cases. Bifurcations were made visible.
Attractors, embodying a deep sense of order and a higher level of
determinism, emerged in explanatory models effective in physics,
biology, and genetics. Self-similarity emerged as a powerful
concept, and fractal dimensions changed the way we look at the
world. Does all this affect Manfred Mohr's perspective? Does it put
his work in a different light? Most certainly. His art is strict in
expression, but aesthetically it belongs to the open system of
aesthetic values. We talked about all this, and about many other
components of his method of aesthetic exploration. I think that
neither he nor I can agree on more than the well known fact that
random number generators are, after all, pseudo random. If
you run them long enough, they start displaying exactly the order
one is trying to avoid. But having rehashed all this new
terminology, I come to another level of Mohr's artistic foundation.
Not only isn't he willing or prepared to ride with the fashionable,
but he is also not prepared to pose as a scientist.
Mohr is really dedicated to aesthetic exploration as another form
of gaining knowledge, definitely orthogonal if not always
complementary to science. His art is precise and at the same time
extremely expressive. After randomness is creatively used to open
new avenues, through associations otherwise ignored, when it comes
to the final piece of art, nothing is left to hazard. The work thus
results as the unity of all its components: the formal, the
cognitive, the semiotic, and craftsmanship. The significance of
this particular condition of his work can be better understood if
one follows its major cycles. Sure, every artist has what is called
an early work phase. In the imaginary catalogue
raisonné of Mohr's work, the early art testifies not so
much to a time of discovery as of self-definition. The random
component of intuitive searching, without even the thought that
there is such a thing as a random number generator, applies to
methods and themes. Afterwards, Subjective Geometry became a
launching pad leading to early algorithmic work and the foundation
of his aesthetics in the exceptional Cubic Limit series. The
artist is in a sui generis state of revelation. His primary
structure, the cube (which he calls a metastructure), allows him to
both explore a rich universe and to demythify the way of achieving
effective aesthetic communication. Clarity of forms results from
exploring the underlying structure of the three-dimensional
appearance. Nothing is arbitrary. The system integrates randomness
in order to achieve aesthetic freedom from stereotype and
prejudice.
Chance had it that my professional life brought me close to an
artist, David Brisson, seduced by the geometry of the cube and its
"incarnations" in spaces beyond three dimensions. It also brought
me close to a mathematician, Thomas Benchoff, who was trying to
visualize the cube in four, five, and six dimensions. Exciting
individuals, exciting themes, exciting times for knowledge that was
becoming increasingly computational. Where we, living and working
in a three-dimensional space, have problems visualizing a cube in
four or more dimensions, the computer, with no time and space
culture to affect its behavior, accepts coordinates and displays
whatever is inputted. What results are strange images, always more
interesting when animated. In the late sixties, the same A. Michael
Noll I alreadymentioned also looked at the hypercube and even came
up with computer techniques for displaying n-dimensional
hyper-objects. His inspiration came from Flatland, Edwin
Abbott's beautiful little story of two worlds of different
dimensions.
But after all is said and done, all this is science, hard-core
attempts to discover new things. Manfred Mohr is fundamentally
interested in something else. And this something else is comprised
of dimensions in their generality, dimensions as possibilities,
such as a three-dimensional cube affords, or a four-, five-, or
even six-dimensional cube makes possible. Somebody speculated that
the fifth dimension might be seen as "the ultimate spiritual
essence." Who knows? We know, however, that in order to deal with
Einstein's theory of relativity, geometries of spaces with six (and
more) dimensions are necessary. In the dimensions Mohr explores,
the focus is not on mathematics, although a relativistic thought is
definitely present. His ultimate goal is to generate those
synthetic, very dense carriers of aesthetic meaning that are his
unconfoundable signs. From whichever space he explores, he returns
to his "êtres-graphiques," in two dimensions, semiotic
entities that emerge as a result of generative processes.
Complexities of the spaces he explores are not erased, rather
translated into the signs he generates.
Each dimension is explored to exhaustion. But the travail is of
creative search, not confined by pre-defined biases or subjective
inclinations. A window is always opened; the cube, no matter in
which dimensional space, is looked at as a space of possibilities.
Sectioning, rotations, shifts, an entire repertory of procedures
(additive, subtractive, juxtapositional, etc.) for reducing the
image to essential elements are applied. What governs the entire
process is the stubborn determination to extract art where almost
all others would see only debris or meaningless forms. If the
metaphors of gold mining were not so tired, one would be inclined
to use them in describing what Mohr does. The cycles of
Divisibility (3-dimensional cube), Dimensions
(4-dimensional), Laserglyphs, and Contrapunct (6-D
hypercubes) follow naturally, but each reveals hidden aesthetic
possibilities. Definitely, in order to cope with the complexity of
such higher dimension spaces, Mohr refined the strategy of
exploring them by using randomness. As a result, the exploration
returns a sculptural dimension even to the final obstinate painting
on canvas. I dare to say that this dimension results from the
intrinsic search, not from some decorative choice.
Yes, where all those who tried the path of geometry ended up with
the decorative, Manfred Mohr avoids it exactly because his
exploration is freed, through randomness (or is it chaos?), from
the subjectivity that usually crystallizes in decorative art.
Nevertheless, randomness is not a constructive principle, a way of
introducing some of the lost spontaneity and improvisational
quality of making art. It is constitutive in the deep sense
of supporting discovery. As a method of exploration, Mohr's
randomness no longer simulates intuition and spontaneity the
dominant trend in the so-called art generated with
computers but literally guides intuition. Randomness guides
intuition beyond the boundaries that the artist accepts,
consciously or unaware of them, unaware as we all are of
being captive to prejudices, even when rejoicing in our
creative intuitions.
We have come to a closure. Methods and subject fuse into the work.
They confer necessity upon the work, as in a sign the unity of its
elements converges. It should be clear why the actual paintings,
China ink drawings, installations, and everything else Mohr
produces, project a sense of unity. The semiotic focus on signs
confers to his works not only expressive, but also communicative
functions. Although randomness helped open new avenues, its
contribution to the aesthetic process is in the artifact, not in
competition with it. In some ways, the process itself search,
evaluation, critical inquiry becomes the final work of art.
The realm which Manfred Mohr explores, the method, and the unifying
vision set a new borderline to this ever changing and ever
challenging human projection we call art.