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Ars combinatoria: mystical systems, procedural art, and the computer
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Janet Zweig
Many other artists who used procedures in their work often used permutation as one such approach. The Fluxus artist Emmett Williams wrote permutational poems, some as early as the 1950s. Later, permutational procedures entered many of his performative works. In one titled Four Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices, each of the five performers is given a square score for one word of the piece: you, just, never, quite, know. Choosing what path to take through the gridded score by any method they prefer, the performers say their words when they reach a black dot, moving through all one hundred squares to the beat of a metronome. Williams says, "There must be a google or two of possible variations."(32)
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Similar strategies entered the visual arts. In 1967 Robert Morris made a sculpture titled Permutation. Morris said that he came up with the idea when he found that some of his works were too large to fit through doorways. Permutation is made of a number of minimal modular forms of fiberglass that can be reconfigured in space in a variety of ways. Morris said: "The situation sort of presented itself to me that I might make a series of forms that would have no definite shapes, but rather a set of possible shapes."(33)
To make Axiom of Exhaustion in 1971, Mel Bochner wrote consecutive numbers on eight tapes laid in a grid on the floor [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED]. He exhausted all possibilities of both direction and orientation in the process of making the work (as well as in the reading of the piece) by combining the four possible directions that the numbers are oriented with the four possible directions in which numbers travel. For example, one row of numbers might run from east to west while facing south, and so forth. Within each grid square, he placed a symbolic fraction, using the letters A-D, representing the directions of the tapes that bound the square. Bochner says, "it is the 'exhaustion' of the complete set of permutations of directions and orientation.... There may be nothing more, or less, to it than that."(34) It is interesting to compare this work to the Sefer Yetzirah, which also exhausts direction ("a depth of beginning, a depth of end, a depth of good, a depth of evil, a depth of above, a depth of below, a depth of east, a depth of west, a depth of north, a depth of south"(35)), as well as to Llull's Art, where letters represent divine attributes.
Other artists to explore permutation in their work at that time include, of course, Sol LeWitt, whose wall drawings and sculpture permute elements of form extensively; Allan Kaprow, who used variations on a given number of elements in performance work; the choreographer Deborah Hay, who used specific movements as permutable elements in works such as 20 Permutations of 2 Sets of 3 Equal Parts in a Linear Pattern; and the filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who often systematically reconfigured and repeated a limited set of images through editing.
In 1961 the writer Raymond Queneau published an unusual book titled Cent mille milliards de poemes, or 100,000,000,000,000 de poemes, designed by Massin [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED].(36) A rhyming sonnet is printed on each page of the book. The separate lines of each page are cut horizontally, one from the other, so that they can be peeled back in any combination, revealing new sonnets with new meanings. There are, of course, 100,000,000,000,000 possible sonnets. Queneau was part of a group called Oulipo, or Ouvroir de litterature potentielle, which he founded in 1960 with Francois Le Lionnais; and which included Harry Matthews, George Perec, and Jacques Roubaud. Oulipo was a workshop whose members explored the use of procedural constraints on generative systems for the production of texts.(37) Many other members of Oulipo made permutational poems.
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