For ARTPOOL’S CHANCE DIARY

Dear Julia & Galantai,

When I received the announcement for Artpool’s “Chance future: year of chance” project, I knew I would participate in some way. Chance is the art of the accident, and offers us an opportunity to use it to develop something interesting. Since I’m an optimist, bad chance becomes good chance, and so my difficult years of dealing with breast cancer and betrayal were now transitioning through this year of zeroes (P.S.), with an opportunity for a fresh start, for a new chance to re-shape those scrambled memory chips!

“In the time of the sand heap world, the problem is accident: improbable, accidental clusters of particles do accumulate. This post-modern time imposes esthetic values and unexpected miraculous situations. It is a time for artists because to create is to produce unexpected, improbable situations, and the non-human universe does the same thing by chance. The artist on the other hand, a cluster within the sand heap, turns accident into purpose.” Vilém Flusser

Prompted by my daughter’s desire to do our family genealogy, my Brazilian sister and I had decided to meet in Vienna in June to do some family research, and at my insistence, to travel to Budapest to visit Artpool and Arnyékkötők. Some people have a desire to investigate their past history to free themselves from their uncertainty, but I wanted to re-establish the personal thread, to discover, perhaps, why I didn’t feel connected to any of the countries I had liven in. In the afternoon of June 20, we entered Artpool’s Research Center and I delivered my contribution to Galantai’s year of chance project. I don’t recall the precise drift of our conversation, or what made Julia place one of Vilém Flusser’s books in front of me. Chance Present! Synchronicity! Chance Confetti! My sister, fatigued from the heat, suddenly perked up with the comment “that’s our cousin.” It was a chance event worthy of Galantai’s Chance Future Network Construction! Vilém Flusser, famous philosopher, professor of communications at Sao Paulo University, Brazil and Ecole Nationale de la Photographie, Arles, France, a member of our family? Incredible, unbelievable, how could this be? How did this connection come about?

“We are the result of highly improbable but statistically calculable coincidences, and by this coincidence we are capable of generating further coincidences. To put this more traditionally, the species Homo sapiens, an accidental, improbable product of chance, accidentally has the ability to produce further improbable situations by its own intention. In the human species in other words, chance accidentally turns around and becomes intention.” Vilém Flusser

My family has experienced both forced deportations as well as voluntary emigration, from Bulgaria via Hungary, Austria and England to Brazil and the United States. Fate did not permit me, as a ten year old, to compel my Bulgarian/Austrian parents to remain in Brazil. Had we stayed my chance diary might have been quite different! Our Brazilian family included my sister from Vienna, her Czech husband, and his relatives, all from Prague. His favorite cousin Edith was married to Vilém Flusser, and we were all beneficiaries of Vilém’s strange and wonderful conversations at family get-togethers. Edith was very much involved with Vilém’s work, and after his death in 1991, edited his papers and books. I returned to England with my parents, and as a young adult, emigrated to Oregon’s west coast USA via a brief residence in Chicago. I started work as an independent artist after a chance encounter with a sculptor professor who, paradoxically, used examples of László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes in his classes at our local college.

“Once we have discovered [...] that it is all a blind game of chance that we, mysteriously, can accelerate, and that will automatically exhaust itself in time, we can play at it for the pure fun of it. [...] This is the answer given by Homo ludens, the esthetic, artistic response.” Vilém Flusser

For years I read Vilém Flusser’s fascinating and provocative essays in Art Forum (in the library of that same college). They were so stimulating, and in addition served as a validation of my own esthetic focus. It never occurred to me that there was a connection between this Flusser and the Flusser family in the Sao Paulo of my childhood. Families are so strange: everyone in my Brazilian family knew what kind of art I did, yet no one ever referred me to Vilém’s work. I wrote many art statements about my work with surrogate stones, strange geographies of chance, fakery and reality, and their relationship to my installations of tables and chairs, all of which my American audience found too philosophical and personal! The international fax installations that I later coordinated like “Megaliths & Office Machines” were ways of comparing our use of chance, tools and random images to articulate what Galantai has called a mass produced uniqueness.

“Codes today are pictorial and challenge us to conceive of a world that we are incapable of conceiving through speech. Perhaps our alphabets are getting in the way now.” Vilém Flusser

Galantai’s chance construction had a really deep resonance for me on a very personal level. Life is a series of ongoing negotiations where we struggle to achieve a balance between two opposing arenas: in the first, we try to deal with chance happenings and encounters that are thrust upon us by fate and by events occurring on the stage of history; in the second, we try to maintain a semblance of control over our environment in a fragmented, chameleonic world. And at the intersection where these arenas meet and clash, lies an opportunity: the potential of a zero beat energy for a chance future network construction!

Lilian A. Bell
September 7, 2000

P.S. and speaking of zeroes, Vilém Flusser’s columns published in two Sao Paulo newspapers during the 1970’s were called “Posto Zero” (taking no position)