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Meredith Malone

Chance Aesthetics

2009

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Meredith Malone with essays by Susan Laxton and Janine Mileaf, and contributions by Bradley Bailey and Emily Hage 

Winner of the Midwest Art History Society Award for Outstanding Catalogue for 2009, Chance Aesthetics embraces the role played by chance in modernist art from the beginning of the 20th century through the early 1970s. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum, this volume brings together a broad range of artistic practices that replace active decision-making with the unexpected possibilities inherent in accident and random influence. Dropping pieces of cut paper onto a surface and gluing them down where they lay; dripping or flinging paint across a canvas; letting the progressive decay of organic materials determine a composition; and flipping coins to compose a musical scores—these are some of the processes used by artists included in the volume that both tap into the creative potential of chance and control its operation. 

Cloth 172 pp. 
ISBN 978-0-936316-27-7

Distributed by University of Chicago Press