chance and circumstance: contingency and intention

1 | C h a n c e a n d C i r c u m s t a n c e : C o n t i n g e n c y a n d I n t e n t i o n

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Chance and Circumstance: Contingency and Intention

Is contingency one of art’s constants, or merely a genetic marker of modernity?

Considering the Cunningham-Cage-Duchamp-Rauschenberg-Johns collaboration of 1960’s

New York in light of Reza Negarestani’s article on ‘Complicity and Contingency’, I propose

that a search for the ‘real’ is at the core of a contingent practice.

Concluding a recent discussion with a Professor of Pharmacology, a colleague who balances

on the tenuous line between science visual art and dance promotion, about the John Cage-

Merce Cunningham collaboration in dance and music, was his observation …”Contingency,

it’s really big right now!”

The concept of contingency is a complex one. Its multifaceted meaning incorporates a

rather dated understanding of it to mean both chance, that is, freedom from necessity, the

fortuitous or unplanned, and dependence on something outside itself.

Contingency is not self-sufficient, neither is it true nor untrue.



The Oxford English Dictionary1 provides definitions of contingency that range from “a

chance occurrence; an event the occurrence of which could not have been, or was not

foreseen; an accident, a casualty“ to ”an event conceived or contemplated as of possible

occurrence in the future,” to “a thing or condition of things contingent or dependent upon an

uncertain event”. In philosophical terms, contingence is truth by virtue of the way things in

fact are and not by logical necessity. To confine contingency in artistic practice to one

definition or to the notion of ‘true contingence’ has similar problems as the attempt to

circumscribe ‘contemporaneity’, contingency is contextual and conditional.

Contingence weaves itself into many facets of our contemporary reality. In fact, contingent

possibilities are expected, even planned for in most areas of human endeavour, as much as

it is possible to plan for contingencies. To maintain a ‘contingency fund’ is a common

practice in most businesses, organisations, companies. Articles addressing contingency in

some form available on academic databases, discuss the treatment of substance addiction,

politics and war, psychiatric conditions and treatment, computer science and statistics,

history and politics, psychology, education, design, and this list is not exhaustive.

My professional life as a secondary school art teacher is structured on the contingent. The

humanscape of education, populated as it is with students of various abilities, personalities,

psychological development, physical development, egos, modes of learning, socio-economic

histories, sociability, confidence, all in one classroom is one where an effective teacher has

to be prepared to deal with all contingencies. Add to this, school hierarchies, policies and

pedagogies which must be addressed, technical issues in handling various media and

countless other considerations, education appears to be frought with the contingent.

Wherever human activity is involved, contingent elements impact, and many commentators

contend that contingency is a modern concern. From a very general observation by

Baudelaire2 “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the

other being the eternal and immovable” to the entire tome of Richard Rorty’s ‘Contingency,

Irony and Solidarity’ which covers the contingencies of language, the contingencies of

selfhood and the contingencies of a liberal community after “The French Revolution had

shown that the whole spectrum of social institutions could be replaced almost overnight”3



In ‘The Contingent Object’ Martha Buskirk4 argues that the contingent is especially

privileged in the work of many modern and contemporary artists. Written about the

contemporary situation in 2003, she looks at how contemporary art continues to redefine

what an "original" means and, consequently, how the production and reception of art

continues to respond to the challenge of contingent factors.

M.A.Doane5 posits that the representation of the contingent or the ephemeral is a fixation

of modern society, referring to “modernity’s fascination with chance and the ephemeral” as

generating an obsession with the legibility of the contingent.

Piet Mondrian and his English colleague Ben Nicholson ‘believed that art was most

profoundly concerned with timeless universals which could ultimately lift it above the

contingent transience of modern life6’. I contend that contingency IS one of the timeless

universals.

My friend and colleague’s off-the-cuff remark, …”Contingency, it’s really big right now!”

clearly referenced the importance of contingency in contemporary dance in 2013, and

prompted a closer look at John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s life-long partnership and

impact on contemporary dance, music and art. Their collaboration with Jasper Johns and

Robert Rauschenberg in “Walkaround Time” was Cunningham’s homage to Marcel

Duchamp.

Critical discourse on Cunningham and Cage emphasises the spontaneity, naturalness, anti-

formalism and anarchy of their work, and frequent mention of chance elements. “Cage

picked up where the Dadaists left off” wrote Jill Johnston in an early consideration of Cage

and dance. “His inventive experiments with sound, and his studies in Zen, led him to the

philosophy of indifference that Duchamp had so beautifully exemplified…The chance gesture

became a spiritual insight into the condition of chaos, which is the natural order of the

world”7. The very life we’re living: the central assertion of Gelassenheit’8, central to Cage

and Cunningham was the ‘aesthetic pragmatics of everyday life’.



Duchamps’ synthesis of aesthetic experience and the logical and systematic character of

science and mathematics was right up Cage’s alley. The conjunction of disparate elements

of chance, the third and fourth dimension space-time, linguistics, logic and authorship were

features of the playful and simultaneous multi-dimensional thinking that Duchamp

contributed to considerations of the contingent, and concurred with Cage’s own Buddhist

beliefs. Featuring a playful yet systematic critique of deterministic reasoning, Duchamp and

his work were well established in conservative New York a generation before the Cage-

Cunningham partnership kicked off.

A self-declared elitist who invented the rules of the compositional game he engaged in, John

Cage had few, if any contemporaries of his ilk. His practice challenged the modern musical

tradition reaching back to Hayden and Mozart, says Hamm9. In creating musical works

which fragmented style and structure, abandoning a linear narrative, and questioning the

role of intentionality in art practice, Cage used contingent practices to select notation,

sounds and instruments in his compositions through the tossing of coins or dice and later

through the use of random number generators on the computer. Cunningham also

incorporated contingency in his choreography. He would choreograph a finite number of

movements over specified minutes, using ‘chance procedures’ to select the order of

performing these movements so that a different version of each dance was performed each

time.

Cage and Cunningham employed ostensibly contingent practices although Perloff10 urges

her reader to study the works themselves rather than the artists’ statements of intention.

Although theirs was a natural form referencing the sounds and movements of everyday life,

timing design and control were paramount. What Cage called ‘purposeless play’-‘a way of

waking up to the very life we’re living’-was planned down to the last detail as was

Cunningham’s choreography of decentredness and ‘natural movement’.



Merce Cunningham was already a brilliant, seasoned and talented dancer and

choreographer by the time he met John Cage. A soloist in the renowned Martha Graham

Company between 1939 and 1945, he first collaborated with John Cage in New York in 1944,

continuing to work with a select group of loyal dancers, forming the Merce Cunningham

Dance Company in 1953. Cunningham choreographed and danced over a hundred works

with his company, with Cage as musical director, and Jasper Johns and Robert

Rauschenberg, artists and complicit friends designed and created the sets. Music and art

were integral to the choreography but autonomous. Respect for Duchamp and the

contingent were the ostensible links between them.

Jasper Johns "I tend to like things that already exist…..Do something, do something to that,

and then do something to that.10" Relating the origins of ‘Walkaround Time’, Cunningham’s

choreographic homage to Duchamp, Johns said “One doesn’t usually know where ideas

come from” … “I think the trigger for the Duchamp set was seeing a small booklet showing

each of the elements of ‘The Large Glass’ in very clear line drawings. It occurred to me that

these could be enlarged and incorporated into some sort of décor. Merce was agreeable, if I

would be the one to ask Marcel for permission. Duchamp was agreeable if I executed the

work.”11 Johns made seven large rectangular vinyl inflatables screen printed with images

taken from Duchamp's The Large Glass. “That set took apart different elements of “The

Large Glass” and broke them up into translucent boxes like scientific specimens and, in

performance, held them up to the light in … turning them into stage décor through which

lighting passed. Duchamp’s only specification was that at one point they should all be placed

together. In one solo Cunningham danced a “striptease” on one spot while changing tights, a

tribute to Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.”12

Jasper Johns set for ‘Walkaround Time’ 1968



Formal and material issues brought to the fore initially by Duchamp and picked up by the

Cunningham-Cage-Rauschenberg-Johns collaboration correlate with Buskirk’s11 reflections

on contemporary art. The increasing reliance on concept, and context superceding the

material realization of production seems to have informed Reza Negarestani ‘s excruciating

but illuminating chapter "Contingency and Complicity."13

Considering the varied works of Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, the

question of ‘what is common to those artists who embrace the contingency of their

materials?’ is pertinent. Negarestani5 proposes that the connection is that the contingent

artist has ‘complicity with contingent materials’14.

In the examples drawn here, Merce Cunningham’s contingent material was his dancing,

John Cage’s contingent material was his musical composition often incorporating contingent

sounds of life, Marcel Duchamp’s contingent materials were pre-fabricated objects, Robert

Rauschenberg’s contingent materials were paint and sculptural components in his

‘combines’, Jasper John’s contingent materials were paint or some previously fabricated

objects already in the world.

Acknowledging materiality as subordinate to artistic production, Negarestani suggests that

different and various engagements can emerge between the artist and materials, driven by

the artists’ interaction with materials. These engagements, however, will exhibit only some

possibilities of participation15. Possibilities are limited by two aspects of the artist’s

interaction with materials; the artist’s determinations decisions and capacities and the

artist’s connection with the medium.

These possibilities are not contingencies in themselves, but contingency can allow certain

possibilities that can be used as bases for interactions and dynamic processes, obtuse

possibilities which resist such interactions, or no possibilities at all. Contingency, says

Negarestani, is the associative expression of possibilities, or no possibility at all. Anything

can happen, but equally, nothing might happen. Contingency, she says, is the ‘simultaneous

suspense of infinite likelihoods and inexplicable frozenness16. In other words, contingency is

a ‘way station’ or a ‘stop over’, not a destination.



In the selected examples of contingent practice referred to in this paper, the contingent

possibilities have provided for the ‘suspense of infinite likelihoods’ forming the basis for

intercourse and or dynamic and obscure processes. None of the examples we are looking at

have remained in the state of ‘inexplicable frozenness’, which is precisely why we are able

to examine them fifty to one hundred years after their appearance. If nothing had

happened, there would be nothing here for us to discuss.

Discussing open-ended processes of art production which celebrate unfinished artworks,

and affect-driven interactions with materiality, Negarestani looks to James Gibson’s Theory

of Affordances17 as a theory acknowledging that every agency has its’ own set of

affordances, limits within which it can persevere in being itself.

This concept of the artist’s capacities or affordances is predicated on Gibson’s notion of the

nature of affordances as concepts either determined by the artist’s cognition, determined

by the artist’s environment or the result of the artists connection with materials; affordance

circumscribes the artists’ ‘openness’. In other words, the more an artist can afford, the more

open she can be to contingent possibilities.

John Cage was in possession of an extraordinary set of affordances, huge intellect, solid

training in composition and philosophy. ‘I didn’t study music with just anybody; I studied

with Schoenberg. I didn’t study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I’ve always

gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company’18.



Merce Cunningham’s ability to leap was extraordinary. Youtube clips present him as

physically mesmerising in the way he moved and held himself. Still photographs of him and

Caroline Brown, who danced in his company for twenty years demonstrate only some of his

affordances, not to overlook his fierce intelligence, determination and daily training

regimes.

One of the affordances that Gibson does not mention, which must impact on an artist’s

openness to contingency, is that of finance, perhaps encompassed by the comment

‘determined by the environment we live in’. Here I think of Marcel Duchamp’s enviable

position in not having to work to earn an income. Supported financially much of his life by

his father’s estate, Duchamp was able to afford the energy to apply his considerable

intellect, emotional intelligence, contacts and academic training as a painter in the

Academie Francais to intellectual and artistic pursuits. In Pierre Cabanne’s ‘Dialogues with

Marcel Duchamp’, he talks frankly about his ‘affordance’, though not with Gibson’s

terminology. “Having been lucky…basically I’ve never worked for a living. I consider working

for a living, slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. ..I understood, at a certain

moment, that it wasn’t necessary to encumber one’s life with too much weight, with too

many things to do, with what is called a wife, children, a country house, an automobile. And I

understood this, fortunately, rather early. This allowed me to live for a long time as a

bachelor, more easily than if I had had to face the normal difficulties of life. So I consider

myself very happy. I’ve never had a serious illness, or melancholy or neurasthenia. Also, I

haven’t known the strain of producing, painting not having been an outlet for me, or having

a pressing need to express myself.”19



Because this putative ‘openness’ remains circumscribed by affordance, some forms of

explicit openness toward the concept of materiality in art are incapable of thinking

contingency, says Negarestani20. Her use of contingency here means both a contingent

conception of materiality that has its own autonomy, and the contingent influences of

artist’s materials on the course of the artistic production and the artwork itself. This, of

course, applies to any number of open-ended processes, or affect-driven interactions with

materiality. As Cunningham relates the following incident, Rauschenberg’s great affordance

is apparent, "Bob had made this beautiful white box, but the fireman at the theatre came

and looked at it and said, 'You can't put that on stage. It isn't fireproof.' Bob was very calm.

'Go away,' he said to me. 'I'll solve it.' When I came back two hours later he'd covered the

frame with damp green branches.”21

Reflections of art on its material conditions, reflections which can be extended to the

creative reflection of the artist on her materials, can nurture both artistic creativity and the

understanding of artistic production. But, points out Negarestani22, this reflection cannot

occur through gestures of openness, because it is precisely the restricted nature of

openness that confines us to affordable conceptions of materiality in artistic production.

This means that thematically profound and aesthetic obligations, are simply expressions of

this affordable conception of materiality; a materiality that is essentially illusory and limited

by affordance. A cyclical loop!

Whenever the creative role of materiality in artistic production becomes the subject of art

itself, the artistic notion of complexity is often privileged. But, says Negarestani complexity

points to the sort of evolution out of the possible states which were determined by the

contingency of the artist’s materials. So complexity presupposes that the transition from

contingency to possibility has already occurred. Add to that, the fact that these emergence-

oriented processes of complexity follow the same logic of affordable interactions whereby

those possibilities that have an adverse effect on the emergence of contingency are either

appropriated or eliminated. In this sense, writes Negarestani23, complexity domesticates the

thought of contingency.



As a young teacher, an older experienced colleague suggested to me that in the introduction

of creative tasks, ‘from uniformity, complex diverse outcomes can occur, but it doesn’t work

the other way around’. He was right, and his observation has long been incorporated into

my operational repertoire.

Negarestani would seem to agree with Duchamp also, on complexity here. Duchamp's

concern with logic is most clearly noted in two of his more significant areas of interest:

chance and chess. A world class chessmaster, for Duchamp chess was an organized,

integrated and ordered whole, composed of rule based interactions wherein outcomes

were as influenced by unquantifiable contingent elements such as guile or desire as by

systematic reasoning. This led him to assert that complexity in any system was inherently

non-deterministic24. We see this questioning of aggregation in his use of chance in aesthetic

production, and his ‘Tres Stoppages-Etalon’ [Three Standard Stoppages], subverts

deterministic systems through chance.

‘ Duchamp ‘Tres Stoppages-Etalon’1913

After measuring three sections of thread each precisely one meter in length, he dropped

them from a height of exactly one meter. Using the curves created by the contingent fall of

the threads, he produced three templates cut from a straight edge to produce the work. The

templates were mounted in a box and became ‘Trois Stoppages-Étalon’.

The idea is that, from three identical actions using three identical materials, complexity of

determinants occur is illustrated. This partially contingent work subverts the concept of

immutable standards of measurement. His attention to chance here, not only posed an

alternative to early twentieth century "laws" of science but also undermined early twentieth

century conventions about aesthetic production.



Looking at Duchamps’ ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. The Large Glass’, and

the ‘cracks in transit’, Duchamps’ complex work containing numerous notes and

components. As well as indicating his exceptional affordance has, in its exposure to the

contingence of more turbulence than it could sustain, provided Duchamps with a

circumstance which demonstrated his openness to contingent possibilities. Any number of

possibilities could have been embraced after the cracks occurred, but his extraordinary

affordance provided the openness to contingency in declaring the work ‘definitively

unfinished’.

Duchamps’ ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even

The assertion is that being ‘open to contingency’ is not a simple open versus closed

equation, because it’s our capacities which determine our openness and consequently our

modes of interaction, so we can only be open to contingency within the specific limits we

can afford.



If we replace our given affordable possibilities with other possibilities, or cease such

possibilities altogether, our sensible openness to contingency will deteriorate.

Consequently, Negarestani states, a twisted type of interaction with contingent materials is

necessary, an interaction that is built on the discipline of closure. She argues that in this

situation, the work of art endeavours to embrace the twisted logic of capacity and strict

closure itself, as contingency’s playground25, results in an acidic attack on our tastes and

beliefs, allowing an attack on the entire bounds of our thought and notion of creativity, as

‘the distillate of humiliation administered by the thought of contingency. Cunningham

relates, “Rauschenberg had made a very beautiful hanging object, with streamers, but we

couldn't use it because in those days we played in so many places where it wasn't possible to

hang anything… a few days later and he had made something else… Wonderful object!

Colours, comic strips all over it. You could pass through it or under it or round it. He made it

out of stuff he’d picked up off the street. I loved it because it was impossible to know what it

was”26

Complicity is the embrace of contingence through that twisted mode of closure. Complicity,

Negarestani says, can be understood as an involvement and collusion but one with no

emphasis on commonalities. Dismissive of commonalities as affordances for all involved

parties, she states, ‘contingency entertains no commonality with anyone’ and ‘the

contingency inherent to artists materials does not entail any commonality with the artist’s

intentions; if anything, such contingency bends, hijacks and punctures such schemes,

sensibilities and intentions27. In the process of artistic production the work is created based

on patterns of intrusion, twisting and suspension based on its contingent materials, rather

than commonalities.

Complicity, says Negarestani, exhibits this necessary shift from the inhibitive role of

commonalities to closure’s role in the focussed engagement with contingency. Openness

tames the thought of contingency through affordable states of interaction, commonalities

and other forms of ‘soft dogma’.



Closure allows the ‘real’ expression of contingency and its unrestricted play. Therefore,

Negarestani speculates, closure realises openness in its radical sense, that is, as a ‘being

opened’ by the contingent materials that form the work. Complicity inverts through closure,

the ‘soft dogma’ of ‘openness toward contingent materials’ twisting into a ‘being opened by

contingent materials’28. So contingent materials activate, and closure motivates.

That complicity reformulates the work’s rigorous closure as a narrative plot where

contingencies occur, where the unpredictable twists manifest into artistic production as a

conspiracy of contingent influences as the work continues towards completion and

coherency and, Negarestani confides, ‘the plot thickens’29. The notion of ‘creative openness’

is revealed in this conspiracy, as a distraction. Luring the contingent forces to declare

themselves by playing their weirdest games, the work’s closure becomes the only way to

participate with and uncover the conspiracy of contingent materials.

“Cunningham used chance, in some form, at some point (but not necessarily the same point)

or points in the making of every dance. While the habit may have originally been inspired by

Cage and Marcel Duchamp--friend to both Cage and Cunningham, and Cage's chess partner-

- that Cunningham was intentionally--if at times quite minimally--depersonalizing his work in

order to open it out to the individual viewer. In retrospect, one can see the choreography

getting himself out of his own way, to allow for possibilities he had not encountered

before.”30

In considering the conspiracy of contingent materials, Negarestani illustrates with the idea of a

continuum of everyday superficiality, horror, reason, comedy, suspense and seamless banality are all

‘fuzzy gradients’ of the same contingent universe that might be brought in or out of focus with no

regard for necessity at all. This conspiracy of contingent materials recognises the contingence of the

very universe we inhabit. So to place art and the universe as part of the same dynamic, I think of

John Cage again “ my music is purposeless play….simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re

living, which is so excellent one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its

own accord”31.



Complicity, therefore, highlights the metamorphosis of the artist’s attitude towards her

materials. The reputed audaciousness and contingence of experimenting with materials is

replaced by a rigorous approach to closure of the work. In this process, the artist becomes

an accomplice with the thought of contingency and revealing the conspiracy of contingent

materials in opening the work over and above its limits. Negarestani proposes here, a

fundamental shift in the understanding of a work of art is being suggested by an artistic

transition. Her proposal is that a work of art should be assessed in regard to its capacity to

reveal itself as the field of experimentation for its contingent materials. A work of art should

be appraised as a conspiracy plotted by anonymous materials rather than in terms of its

experimental ‘adventurism’ towards the materials at hand32. Cunningham relates how

Rauschenberg deliberately factored serendipity into the set design for one of their works.

“In every town where it was performed he assembled a new wardrobe of costumes from

local thrift stores, and constructed a new set out of objects he had found at the theatre”. 33

Concurring with the rigorous nature of closure in Cage-Cunningham lexicon, the discipline of

closure, says Negarestani, lures the contingent forces to play their role in ‘plotting’ the work

of art with utter determination and in doing so, reveal their twisted conspiracies. This

‘closure’ must be thought of as a mode of coherency capable of bringing these contingent

forces into focus, rather than the convenient translation into a sort of mystical, introverted

response to ‘chance’ elements, or confirmation of a contingent identity as an artist.

Contingence can affect many aspects of an artistic practice, to various degrees of influence,

yet I suggest that a totally contingent practice is not possible and in this I agree with

Negarestani. The freedom explored in the playground of contingent forces without the

discipline of closure, without manifestation is like the colloquial ‘pissing into the wind’.



“Contingency, outside of any design, plan or intention, bears witness to a real whose very

lack of predictability reinforces its reality. Perhaps it is this lust for the real in a society

saturated with visual images that undergirds the desire to figure contingency, to stabilise it”

suggests M.A Doane34.

In terms of contingency’s very unpredictability reinforcing its reality and observing the

contemporary lust for the real, I agree with Doane, but if Plato’s famous cave scenario is any

indication of currency, a ‘lust for the real’ has always been a component of the human

psyche. The discussion of what constitutes contingency in artistic practice taps into one of

the oldest philosophical discussions in the Western tradition of philosophy, a yearning for

the real, human and natural . I propose that this yearning for the real is a basic human urge,

fundamental to the human psyche.

Conscious interaction with contingency, the chance element, the incidental, is an attempt

to engage with real life, real art, reality.



Notes

1. Oxford English dictionary

2. Baudelaire, Charles. 1981. “The Painter of Modern Life”, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E.

Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 403

3. Rorty, Richard, “Irony,Contingency and Solidarity”34

4. Buskirk, Martha. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003. Discovery eBooks,

EBSCOhost (accessed October 20, 2013).

5. Doane, Mary Ann. The emergence of cinematic time: Modernity, contingency, the archive. Harvard University Press, 2002.

6. "Mondrian/Nicholson; in parallel.(Brief article)(Book review)." Reference & Research Book News, 2012., Academic OneFile,

EBSCOhost (accessed October 30, 2013)

7. Johnston, Jill, (Author). "Cage and modern dance." In Collected Work: Writings about John Cage. Pages: 334-337. (AN:

1993-10417), n.p.: 1993. RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, EBSCOhost (accessed October 30, 2013)

8. Perloff, Marjorie. 2012. "Difference and discipline: the Cage/ Cunningham aesthetic revisited.(John Cage and Merce

Cunningham)(Report)(Author abstract)." Contemporary Music Review no. 1: 19. Academic OneFile, EBSCOhost (accessed

October 21, 2013).

9. Hamm, Charles. 1997. "Privileging the moment: Cage, Jung, synchronicity, postmodernism. (composer John Cage;

psychologist Carl Jung)." The Journal Of Musicology no. 2: 278. Academic OneFile, EBSCOhost (accessed October 21, 2013).

10. Perloff, Marjorie. 2012. "Difference and discipline: the Cage/ Cunningham aesthetic revisited.(John Cage and Merce

Cunningham)(Report)(Author abstract)." Contemporary Music Review no. 1: 19. Academic OneFile, EBSCOhost (accessed

October 21,2013).

11. “Cunningham and Johns: Rare Glimpses into a Collaboration”, Alastair Macaulay, New York

Times,7/1/2013,http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/arts/design/jasper-johns-speaks-of-merce-cunningham.html





14. Mackay, Robin. The medium of contingency / edited by Robin Mackay. n.p.: Falmouth, U.K. : Urbanomic ; London, U.K. :

Ridinghouse ; New York, N.Y. : distributed in the US by RAM Publications, 2011., 2011. Harvard Library Bibliographic

Dataset, 11-17 EBSCOhost (accessed October 23, 2013).

15. Mackay, The medium of contingency,11



18. "AFFORDANCE THEORY." (January 1, 2006): Credo Reference Collections, EBSCOhost (accessed October 30, 2013).

19. Perloff,’Difference and discipline,”19

20. Cabanne, Pierre, and Marcel Duchamp. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp / by Pierre Cabanne ; translated from the French

by Ron Padgett. n.p.: London : Thames and Hudson, 1971., 1971. UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE's Catalogue,15 EBSCOhost

(accessed September 23, 2013).


22. “The Joy of Sets”,Judith Mackrell,The Guardian,7/6/2005, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/jun/06/dance



25. “Intentions:Logical and Subversive”,Richard K.Merritt,tou-fait articles,April

2003,http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/merritt/merritt2.htm




http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/arts/design/jasper-johns-speaks-of-merce-cunningham.html



http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/jun/06/dance




30. Nancy Dalva, “The Way of Merce”,nancy dalva,24/10/2012,http://www.nancydalva.com/2012_10_01_archive.html



33. “The Joy of Sets”, Judith Mackrell, The Guardian, 7/6/2005, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/jun/06/dance

34. Doane, Mary Ann1. “NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Contingency.” Art Bulletin 94, no.3 (September 2012):348-349. Art Full Text

(H.W. Wilson) EBSCOhost accessed October 1, 2013).

‘

http://www.nancydalva.com/2012_10_01_archive.html

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/jun/06/dance

chance and circumstance: contingency and intention

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