On Chance in Artistic Creation: August Strindberg, 1894

I really enjoyed the poetic, confessional tone of this meditation on chance and the role it plays in making art, music, poetry etc. As a piece of writing it's intensely visual and conjures a rapid, cascading stream of images - lots of them related to nature: the beautiful siren of the woods with the emerald green hair who morphs into a tree trunk as the boy draws closer, the deserted plough over which the farmer has tossed his coat, which variously appeared as two farmers embracing, a breakfast party or a tree trunk before the 'curtain of consciousness' rose.
Strindberg mentions that he is reluctant for his conscious and rational mind to kick in and identify the plough with the coat hanging on it. He really seems to relish the state of not knowing what he's looking at or listening to, of being in a netherworld of consciousness - caught somewhere between the conscious and unconscious. Actually, it is interesting that back then he was thinking in these terms about the psyche... Freud's influence?
Once Strindberg does recognise the plough he sees while walking in the woods, it seems all 'The fun is over!' It's interesting in the next paragraph that he mentions the 'philistines' who find it difficult to understand modernist paintings and then expounds on his own very visceral and sensuous experience of a painting and the way it vacillates between looking 'like' something and then not 'like' anything. Again the writing embodies a feeling of very rapid physical movement between sense and nonsense, consciousness and unconsciousness, being and not being. Again all his observations are related to nature 'the nucleus of a cell', 'ice crystals on window panes'.
Also notable in this paragraph is the revelation that in 1894 people like Strindberg had the idea of the viewer completing or assisting in the realisation of the work, which we think of as quite a modern idea. Strindberg writes: '... and the picture reveals itself to the viewer, who has assisted at the birth of the painting.'
What's enjoyable for me in this writing is the way Strindberg's imaginative and highly subjective mode absolutely mirrors his theme of 'the lively imagination' . He's also talking straight to me as a reader: "Have you ever worked with rhyme? I thought so!" His enthusiasm is almost bubbling over. He might be writing a letter to a friend.... He definitely wants me to like him and he's jumping through hoops to make this fun and lively for me to read. He's also full of ideas; it's not just flim flam.
I noticed the article is filled with a web of shifting relationships: artist to work: artist to audience; audience to artist and so on. One minute he is deciphering a painting, the next minute he is making his own painting, detuning his guitar to make an 'Arabian' melody, listening to cockatoos and macaws. Phew.... he's busy.
The anecdote about his wife falling 'into ecstacy' about his painting of the cave is hilarious and very recognisably true. He clearly has a sense of humour when he says eight days later 'she sees my masterpiece as pure garbage'!
My favourite sentence which sort of nails this piece, with its insistence on subjectivity and the maverick qualities of a viewer's interpretation, which he thinks is absolutely to be celebrated, is: "And there are those who claim that art exists in and of itself!"
I love how packed with imagery and ideas this writing is; it's also quite joyous and celebratory of both 'making' and looking.





Unnatural fact: the fictions of Robert Smithson: Dr Duncan White, Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design