CHOICE

The removal of choice.

How many art theories have had, as a central precept, the removal of choice?   Why have many modernist artists been concerned with the removal of choice?  Who were they?

To name a few:
-New Measurement Group, who we just talked about
-twelve tone music systems
-Joseph Albers
-early music compositions of Terry Riley (In C)
-the Daddistis.
The list goes on and on.

Why were they interested in the removal of choice?  To get outside of their culture.  To think afresh.  To conceive solutions in a culturally unfettered manner.  To find a way to do it in a way that has not been done before.  In short, to create with the widest possible bandwidth.

Ellsworth Kelly describes this removal of choice as a “delay.”  In a discussion of Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings, (see ELLSWORTH KELLY PLANT DRAWINGS) Richard Schiff gives us the following,

“Had Kelly viewed the sheet of paper as a format while he was observing the tree, no matter how rapid his act of linear registration, he would have introduced a mental delay – in this instance, not a factor of suspended sensation but of the inhibiting force of cultural memory, the suspicion that this line or that ought to end here or there in order to fit the page, a format already utilized by others on innumerable comparable occasions.” p48.

Kelly calls this delay “choice.”

Kelly’s delay enables the removal of deeply ingrained His use of the word choice implies cultural choice.  And he wanted to get away from that.  He wanted to remove the inhibiting force of cultural memory.

The removal of cultural memory is at the heart of Transparent Drawing.  In the same manner that Kelly ensures that there is a delay in his methods, we are also concerned with this delay so that the choices we make are in the service of resolved forms and enclosures.
Transparency is our delay.

Transparency is our separation from the inhibiting force of cultural memory.  Transparency is our removal of culturally ingrained choice.

1.  Schiff, Richard.  Ellsworth Kelly New York Drawings 1954-1962.  Prestel. London.