Change
3 Coins 64 Times
by Anthony Stephenson 2011

When John Cage used "The Book of Changes (I Ching)" - a fortune telling game that started off using three yarrow sticks and then later three coins - as a method of composition, he was expanding on a trend in 20th century modernism that employed chance. Perhaps the most notorius example of this being Jackson Pollock's expansion of the surrealist's "automatic drawing" into his signature "drip paintings". These attempts at systematizing the ineffable were different than Andy Warhol's obsessive depictions of the dollar bill whose near manic repetitiveness were perhaps echoed later in the various works by Allan McCollum. As a student, decades ago, I asked Chris Burden what was the overarching theme of his work, and, without any pretension, he simply replied that he would try to think of "What Can Be Done". But as Frederic Jameson pointed out in his book on Postmodernism, the "...alarming disjunction point between the body and it's built environment ... can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of ... the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects." Indeed, what can be done?

Copyright 2011, 2012 Anthony Stephenson