Tracing Chaos along Gray Dots
(‘Klee,’ to a certain degree, can be a stand-in for ‘modern art’)
The work of Paul Klee is alienating at a first glance. As demonstrated in this drawing, the rhythm in the placement of his figures is erratic. Their flat composition and distribution refuse to impart an inhabitable sense of depth that we’re accustomed to. His clusters of lines and shapes at times spiral dizzyingly inward, engaged in an incessant chatter. But they also have a rationally deictic function as the edges of his discernable figures also protrude and point in such a way that ultimately guides the eye to every corner of the painting.
To our relief, Klee grants us recognizable hints at a certain naturalism, allowing us to make out not just foliage but also the beasts in the midst. Nonetheless, the sheer phantasmagoria of the sketch as a whole may leave us indifferent to the life in it. The constant bundles of lines hinting at shadows, and the stark, rectangular divisions in the upper right and lower left hand corners seem to splinter the work into a dreamscape untethered from a reality we’re sympathetic to. If we were to scan the sketch, its suffocating business evokes no noticeable joy, anger, or sadness. If anything, we’re left confused.
If an interpretation or an emotional response is out of the question, we might want to ask ourselves: So where do we start with looking at Klee? Or rather, how can we even begin to start looking at it? Much like a viewer responding to his work, Klee also wrestled with a heterogeneous mass of information seemingly arranged without any rhyme or reason: the world around him. For Klee, what does it mean to artistically render this chaos, the constant change that we find even the ground beneath our feet is undergoing?
Klee begins his pedagogical notebooks by noting that “Chaos as an antithesis is not complete and utter chaos, but a locally determined concept relating to the concept of the cosmos” (Klee, 3). This opening remark suggests that the work of art as localized chaos is in fact a captured moment or an idea that constantly stands in opposition to what he refers to as the cosmos, the underlying causes and principles accounting for the constant flux of the world. For Klee, the reality of total chaos would cease to be such upon being subsumed under ordering, visual categories. And this is perhaps the reason why he notes that even a simple gray point, “once established… leaps into the realm of order” (Klee, 4). While it seems as if Klee’s remarks are operating on a great deal of abstraction, slowly thinking through the experience of taking in visual information gives a great deal of weight to his formulation of chaos and order.
Klee’s reference to the gray point, which at first seems like a visually innocuous experience, is one that imbues the figure with a great deal of theoretical privilege in his understanding of art. For Klee:
“The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is neither hot nor cold; it is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions.”
Gray is not merely an absence or total concentration of color in the way that black or white are, nor is it a completely inert color. Klee would say that the color’s complete neutrality is what grounds the chaos of the art work. All form and color are deviations, repetitions, generalizations, and organizations of the gray point. It is Klee’s cellular unit and frame of reference for all artistic representation. As demonstrated in his drawing, lines are extensions (or perhaps even continuous duplications) of these gray points; the shapes and masses of these lines suggesting shades and textures, are also closed or open configurations of these lines. Where we may see an errant gray point on a blank sheet of paper, Klee sees an “establishment of a point in chaos” because the ordering principles of our visual experience begin to move into motion as they attempt to accommodate and make sense of the speck on an otherwise blank slate.
So when returning to Garten der Leidenschaft, consider looking at it quite closely and at an easy pace. Examine the adjacent figures when looking at a group of lines. How consistent are the strokes? Do they follow regular patterns in angle, distance, and thickness? (And of course, never forget to see where they may lead you.) Is the space around them claustrophobic, relatively? If there is any recognizable figuration, what do the subjects seem to resemble, and why would they be placed next to each other? Within a certain distribution of lines and figures, how are they ordered? Where does the drawing seem to lean into chaos, and how is kept at bay?
Additionally for Klee, the figures that have already been rendered on a service by no means dictate an end to this tension between chaos and the forces trying to contain it. In fact, he states that “the cosmogenetic moment is at hand… The order thus created [in the establish of a point in chaos] radiates from it in all directions” (Klee, 4). While at first a seemingly overimportant claim, perhaps in the context of his notion of the gray point, he is suggesting that boundless possibilities of new visual elements in a drawing or painting present themselves. Klee refers to this not-yet actualized dimension (what Deleuze referred to as the virtual) of the work of art as cosmogenetic, because the infinite potential of the chaotic point is also a potential for new entirely new worlds of experience.
The catalyst of this cosmogenesis in Klee’s schema is what he will refer to as the egg.
