By Chance’s Design
- Angela Rosana
- Sep 28
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 29
Images seldom remain tethered to the motive that first called them into being. Born within a context, obedient to a certain logic, they drift away carrying the possibility of other readings. Chance is not simply the unforeseen instant of a captured form; it is also the restless transit that dismantles the first order and rearranges meaning.
Every shift generates a deviation. What once appeared self-evident takes on unanticipated contours, exposing the fragility of any initial intent. No artwork exists that cannot be pierced by other discourses, unsettled by foreign gazes, inscribed in territories never its own. It is within this indeterminate space that the force of the uncontrollable comes into view.
There is no fixed meaning.
Each artwork—whether painting, sculpture, photograph or installation—is traversed by the context in which it is situated, and it is this environment that lends it weight and direction. What seems stable proves to be transient, for it takes only a shift of scenery, a new network of relations, a displacement of discourse, and the work is no longer the same.
This movement owes little to the will of its maker and everything to the contingencies of the places where it is received. Indeterminacy is not confined to the moment of creation; it extends into circulation. Each insertion into a new field opens the way to unforeseen readings, meanings unimagined at the outset and still unresolved.
If the reading of an artwork changes with every displacement, it is not merely because its setting shifts but because no sign holds steady in itself. The same may be said of words, gestures, objects: all bear the imprint of a first context, yet all remain open to being read otherwise. Instability is not the exception but the very rule that erodes the illusion of singular meaning. Duchamp made this visible when he transformed the crack in The Large Glass into an inseparable part of the work: the accident ceased to be a flaw and became structure, exposing that nothing is immune to recombination.
Chance is not noise to be suppressed nor deviation to be corrected. It is the very condition of all that circulates, of all that reinscribes itself. The artwork merely makes visible this principle: nothing remains untouched, everything is subject to recombination. Creation approaches life precisely in that both are born of intentions yet never remain captive to them. The unforeseen intervenes as a latent force, capable of displacing meanings and corroding every appearance of solidity. What once seemed stable sooner or later dissolves into new constellations, revealing the precariousness of every order.
There is no final surface. There are only moments of reading, fragments entwined, provisional meanings that shimmer before they vanish. It is within this instability that the power of the unpredictable emerges, as though the world were endlessly remade from what refuses to be calculated.
Written By Angela Rosana
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