Lot 55: Richard Killeen 18 Objects oil on board title

Richard Killeen 18 Objects oil on board title inscribed 690mm x 690mm The history of chance as a formal element in modernist cultural practice is a rich and intriguing one. It includes composers such as John Cage who made use of the I Ching to guide selection and deployment of notes, and who in 1951 wrote Imaginary Landscape No. 4, a sound work for radios that required two operators for each set, one to control frequency and the other volume. Cage's written 'score' provided detailed instructions on how the operators should tune and retune their radio sets but the composer had no control over what was playing on the various channels; this depended on time and location of performance. Chance played a role too in some of Jean Arp's arrangements of torn paper squares; the position of the pieces of paper on their support depended on how they fell when dropped by the artist. Marcel Duchamp even invented new units of measure for the unique and unrepeatable when he dropped three strings from a height and glued their irregular contours to boards, as if they could act as templates, standard references for all future falls of string. Killeen's rebus-like painting 18 Objects partakes of this tradition of perversely systematic, 'pataphysical' modernity; a tradition that applies an apparent science of consistency and order to the production of the irrational, arbitrary work of art. Killeen made twelve of these paintings, each 24" x 24". The twelve paintings were all composed through various arrangments of a possible thirty six different images and motifs. The selection of which images were ascribed to each panel, twelve at a time, was made by dealing twelve cards from a pack of thirty six cards painted up with all the possible motifs. The location of each motif was determined by the throw of a six-sided dice. What Killeen sought, like Cage and Duchamp before him, with his combination of gaming and self-imposed limitations was an unsettling or re-routing of the controlling authority of the artist. These 1970 paintings anticipate the role that chance plays in the cut-outs which began in 1978; though in the cut-outs unpredictability resided in the choices made as owners, gallerists and curators took up the challenge of deploying the parts according to personal whim and aesthetic judgement. Killeen's dice and card paintings stimulate a mental and optical hop-scotch as they move between different types of sign language; they are part pictograms, part calligrams, part ideograms, playing on the textual and imagistic origins of graphic language. Allan Smith