Letting go. Chance as a Creative Strategy in the Visual and Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century.

Abstract

For much of man's artistic creation, chance has been dismissed in the creative process and treated as a defect. In the eyes of society, its possible use confirmed a lack of artistic skill. The 20th century, which was a time of profound social and technological change, brought this to an end. Artists began to take advantage of the unknown and, ridding themselves of limitations, experimented with what was beyond their control. This paper, examines the reasons for and proposes a course of this change by scrutinising a number of works by visual and performance artists that used chance in innovative ways and reshaped its understanding, sometimes not only in the context of art. The chronological arrangement of the examples allows for an understanding of the progression of this change and shows that each work helped to achieve a diminishing artistic limitation among the subsequent ones. Moreover, the analysis of the chance, although still often understood pejoratively, offers great possibilities for the development of the creative process.