Alec Albright – Looking Outwards – 06

Above is John Cage’s “Dereau #11”, which he created in 1982 as a part of his visual chance art. The randomness was implemented in this work through several aspects. First, once a shape had been selected to be drawn, the quadrant in which it was drawn was randomly selected. Then, the color of the object appears alone or in combination with one of forty-five colors in chance-determined percentages with or without white. This work is admirable to me because it seems to follow no structure, but the procedure behind it is fairly well-defined. This piece could have turned out in an endless number of ways, and the odds of this exact work being created through his defined mechanism again are infinitely slim.