The Impossible Reversal

“George Brecht’s Deck: A Fluxgame (1964) is a singular object, one that hovers between toy, game, and puzzle. It consists of playing cards printed with black-and-white images, collaged from encyclopedia drawings, diagrams, and photos”

“The subject matter is wide-ranging and comes from specialist domains: mechanics, optics, architecture, fluid dynamics, sport, etc”

“The sixty-four cards have neither suit nor number and, despite the suggestion of divisibility into eight groups of eight or four groups of sixteen, clear categories are wanting”

“The meaning of each individual card is a mystery. The collages often seem to generate thematic associations or visual puns, but they simultaneously resist such interpretations”

“Instead of looking for an interpreter, the cards need to be handled, to be spread out on a table and piled up, to be shuffled and dealt”

“The game includes no instructions, rules, or goals, and only the work’s title and materials suggests it is a game at all. Yet, the cards ask to be played with, even without any explanation of what that means”

“People invent all sorts of games with Deck, they collaborate to improvise stories and tell fortunes, they use the cards as prompts for performance, to inspire drawings, and much else. In Deck, one confronts the riddle-like character that pervades all of Brecht’s work”

“Deck, and George Brecht’s art more generally links together chance, indeterminacy, and freedom through play”

“Games provide such equipment in the form of dice, cards, coins, roulette wheels, lottery draws, and spinners”

“Brecht’s studies of probability theory and the philosophy of science were what first drew him into the orbit of contemporary art”

“Trained as a chemist, Brecht spent the first fifteen years of his career with Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, during which time he began experimenting with chance procedures in drawing and painting. A night class introduced Brecht to the methods of Dadaism and Surrealism, as well as the action painting of Jackson Pollock and the composition methods of John Cage”

“He began to correspond with Cage in 1956, and wrote an essay on chance methods in science and art the next year. When Cage offered a course in experimental composition at the New School for Social Research in 1959, Brecht jumped at the opportunity. Each week of this class, Cage would give a minimal and odd prompt for composition, and during the following week the class would perform and discuss the works that resulted”

“Brecht met and collaborated with future members of Fluxus, an artistic movement of the 1960s that tried to merge art in everyday life. For many Fluxus artists, games, jokes, and toys were an ideal way to accomplish this goal—especially when they were made in a skewed or disrupted manner”

“Brecht responds scientifically to such skepticism about chance. Since the rise of probabilistic thinking in the 19th century, the notion of strict causality has been untenable, and the theorems of Kurt Gödel and Werner Heisenberg show that uncertainty is the bedrock of reality”

“Giving up control is always a relative procedure for Brecht, the production of a zone of unknowing that is partial”

“Brecht’s vision of aleatory aesthetics, especially as it is articulated in “Chance-Imagery,” is more systematic than many of his contemporaries”

“Yet, Brecht’s work undergoes a sudden change around 1961 because of a contradiction introduced by chance.9 After that date, the elaborately structured possibilities of his playing card works are paired down dramatically. He starts to write simple directions that sometimes amount to a single word and rarely stretch to more than a handful”

“Indeed, while actual cards remain important for his event scores, as in Water Yam (1963), their content no longer seem to instruct at all, but merely call attention to ongoing processes within the world”

“Pieces, such as “Drip Music,” which in 1959 read “A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel,” are simplified to “Second version: Dripping.” These works drop the programmatic and explicit tools for generating bias free randomness, and raise a question about the role of chance in Brecht’s method”

“In a 1966 afterward to the belated publication of “Chance-Imagery,” Brecht writes that he could not “have foreseen the resolution of the distinction between choice and chance which was to occur in my own work.”10 Brecht was not worried about exerting a structuring control over the outcome of situations, but he did recognize that his scores imposed an alien will upon people”

“Cage said of one early piece that “[n]obody ever tried to control me so much,” and Brecht later reflected that he “learned that lesson there, I realized I was being dictatorial.”12”

“By moving from elaborate card pieces to brief and simple scores, Brecht solves this dilemma by leaving the realization of a given work up to the participant”

“In his notebooks Brecht invents the “enigmatic notion of ‘choiceless choosing’” as a synthesis of each constraint”

“Chance continues to play a role in Brecht’s proto-minimalist events through the coincidence of word and world. He understands all sorts of everyday occurrences to fulfill the conditions for an event like “Dripping,” without any need for a performer. Noticing a leaky faucet, a rainstorm, or sweat on a hot day all count as valid realizations of the score”

“For the observer, each is a random occurrence that just happens to coincide with the printed word, which makes the chance character explicit”

“Other kinds of uncertainty are just as, or more, important to Brecht’s style. Brewing a pot of coffee as part of a morning routine, for instance, produces a “dripping” that is neither dictated nor random but habitual”

“With the reduction of chance operations, we might expect to see a similar decline in the toys and games that Brecht used to model chance. In fact, exactly the opposite occurs. Toys become a staple element of the assemblages and Fluxkits that Brecht created after 1962”

“Hand puppets, tops, skipping rope, all kinds of balls, alphabet blocks, dominoes, chess pieces, and many more such objects appear throughout his work. Dice and cards persist, but without the one-to-one correspondence between card and instruction that characterized his early scores”

“Brecht also produced a series Fluxkits with George Maciunas that take games as an explicit theme. In the Games and Puzzles (1965) series, Brecht gives the player outlandish tasks that exacerbate the ambiguity of his simplified event scores”

“Toys, games and puzzles thus continue to serve as models of uncertainty for Brecht, but in a sense that goes beyond chance. Unlike games of chance, puzzles are ordinarily determined: they have a right answer, and that answer becomes trivial and obvious after it has been solved”

“This context helps illuminate the game of Deck that initially seems so hard to parse. Like Brecht’s early work with playing cards, Deck uses cards to highlight the effects of chance. After internalizing the problem of choiceless choice, Brecht does not instruct the player about how to play with Deck. The player must invite the game into her life”

“It is impossible to take in the whole of Deck at once, to try to make global claims about its meaning. So, a randomly dealt hand of cards becomes the ideal way of grasping, quite literally, a subset of Deck and making sense out of it. Chance thus becomes one moment within the larger movement of Brecht’s aesthetic of uncertainty”

“We can trace the relation between chance and interpretation further by comparing Deck with its twin, Universal Machine II (1965). This was a work composed in the same year, and with the same set of encyclopedia imagery, which Brecht cut up again and re-arranged to make Deck”

“In Universal Machine II, the diagrams are condensed onto a single piece of paper, which has been glued onto the back of a wooden box. The box is covered by a sheet of glass, and contains some assorted objects—buttons, metal clips, an awl, or stones—which are unique in each piece. On a facing cover are suggestions for using Universal Machine II, such as “For a novel: / Shake the box. Open. Chapter 1. Close. / Shake the box. Open. Chapter 2. Close” or, “New sciences. Determine two or more elements. Find out all you can about each element. Establish a science which treats of these elements” or, “Need a friend? Shake box.””

“Like Deck, the act of shaking subordinates chance operations to a moment of interpretive uncertainty. Each time, a gestalt forms between the background images and a piece of debris, which draws a connection between two or more images in contingent and reciprocal ways”

“Unlike Deck, though, Universal Machine II explicitly writes out its possible functions, and thereby draws attention to the meaning-making operation”

“Universal Machine II connects the most disparate things into a single universe of sense. By establishing chance relations between its objects, it produces an ontological flattening”

“Deck extends this operation, which the debris highlights, through a chance combination of cards”

“The title of Universal Machine II calls attention to a universal flattening. At the same time, the title encodes a critical pun, one that sets up a contrast between Brecht’s work and the computational flattening of the universal Turing machine”

“The Turing machine, described by Alan Turing in 1936, is a theoretical model of a computer that describes how it is possible to build a machine that can perform any computation by reading instructions from a tape, and transforming those instructions according to a table of values”

“one of Brecht’s commentators, Henry Martin, describes his work as “an enormous computer insofar as it accepts any and all information that one cycles into it.”23”

“However, with his transition away from instructions, Brecht’s work no longer establishes a universality through the computer’s ability to reduce the world into a series of calculable bits. In contrast to computation, Universal Machine II borrows a model of universal connection from the encyclopedia form, which establishes an aleatory and indeterminate connection between entries”

“The invitation of the encyclopedic images and the chance structure of the cards allow Deck to make the transit from toy to puzzle to game, and back again. It gives the player a push and a hint, but does not give them a means or a map. It is rule-governed but without any rules, purposive without any purpose. Deck marks the most accomplished synthesis of Brecht’s thinking about chance, instructions, and uncertainty”