ing Chance via Pollock and Cage Brecht wrote about Cage and Duchamp before coming into close contact with the work of either. While Allan Kaprow’s essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in Art News in January 1958, remains the most noted (and the most explicit) of this generation’s responses to Pollock, Brecht’s extensive research in this area is less known.8 With Pollock’s example as a springboard, Brecht developed a paper called “Chance-Imagery,” which traces the use of chance in art from Duchamp and Dada through Surrealism to Pollock and Cage, finally proposing ideas for current practice.9 In tandem with this writing, Brecht conducted systematic OCTOBER 82 5. Recent scholarship has tilted this record slightly. Branden Joseph mentions the original score in Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), p. 49; and Liz Kotz has expanded upon her own earlier accounts (which focus on the final text score) to discuss the three scores, in Words To Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). 6. To elaborate: in 1952, 4'33'' was conventionally notated. In 1953, when Cage began to frame the piece in relation to his project at large, he reformulated the score as a graphic object. It appeared as a series of vertical lines on white pages (where 1/8 inch equaled 1 second), elegantly echoing the abutments of Rauschenberg’s white canvases. At the end of the 1950s, as he was teaching his class, the most radical transformation came. Since the artists and poets among Cage’s students could not write music, they composed their own experimental works with words, widening the conceptual scope of the score in the process. At this time, Cage redefined his 4'33'' for the last time, casting it into text, with one word for each of the three movements: “tacet,” “tacet,” “tacet.” 7. The term “Combine” was Rauschenberg’s: to define his own work, as not painting and not sculpture. “Intermedia” was coined by Dick Higgins (Brecht’s Fluxus peer and fellow member of the Cage class). 8. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57, no. 6 (1958); repr. in Jeff Kelley, ed., Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life: Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–9. 9. The text was published, almost a decade after it was written, as “Chance-Imagery,” Great Bear Pamphlet (New York: Something Else Press, 1966). chance experiments, and by 1956–57, he was working on a series of paintings registering uneven deposits of dye—captured in pockets, twisted with marbles, and drying at different rates—on the surface of bed sheets. The expressive appearance of these “paintings” was an illusion. In fact, they intensified the relinquishing of authorial control Brecht had seen in Pollock, because their chromatic incident was generated by indirect means, if not quite via systematic “indeterminacy” (Brecht did not yet have that Cagean concept fully integrated in his repertoire). In 1957, he explained the conceptual basis of his process: Each painting is an entity which organizes itself and guides its own development. Because of my method of working, each form in the painting exists from the first as paint, rather than as an idea in my mind, later to be transformed into paint. Thus my paintings have no pre-existent life, external or antecedent to themselves, and my function consists, not in design, but in choosing among various elements already present. Since I am not concerned with the origin of the elements from which I choose, recent paintings have placed intentional emphasis on a chance genesis of the first forms, and some experimental paintings have been based on a concept of strict randomness.10 From Abstraction to Model 83 10. Brecht, brochure for exhibition, Old Mill Gallery, Tinton Falls, New Jersey, March 8–April 11, 1956. Collection Hermann Braun, Remscheid; repr. Alfred Fischer, ed., George Brecht Events: A Heterospective (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2005), p. 222. Left: Brecht. 6/57. 1957. Right: Brecht. 8/57. 1957.