Accidental Modernism is an exhibition of works in which chance is employed in direct contrast to the willed control of the artist. It includes paintings, drawings, prints, video, film, sculpture and mixed-media works from 1926 to the present by: Wayne Atkins, Ann Craven, Devon Costello, Vishal Jugdeo, André Masson, Adam McEwen, Bill Morrison, Richard Pettibone, Dieter Roth, Daniel Spoerri, Josh Smith, Rudolf Stingel, Agathe Snow, Jean Tinguely, Keith Tyson, Robert Watts, and the Otra de Vaqueros Edition, a collaborative work by Artemio, Allora & Calzadilla, Bernadette Corporation, Jay Chung & Q. Takeki Maeda, Minerva Cuevas, Jeremy Deller, Claire Fontaine, Mario Garcia-Torres, Karl Homqvist, Bruno Serralongue, Sean Snyder, Reena Spaulings.

The incorporation of accidental forces at the heart of the modernist project began in the early twentieth century with such works as Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14), which was formally determined by the chance placement of strings, and with Dada-Surrealist practices such as frottage and automatic writing. By mid-century, a western aesthetic had arisen in which the artistic self was submitted to Zen notions of chance, participation and an existential sense of the absurd. In the 1960s, Daniel Spoerri, associated with the Nouveau réaliste and Fluxus movements, created his signature series of Tableaux-pièges by affixing the eaten remains of various meals to the tables on which they were served and Jean Tinguely created his “Meta-matic” machines to produce drawings and paintings independently of the artist’s hand and eye.

A resurgence in the embrace of the accident and the found object in much recent art suggests a relationship with history that is as ambiguous as it is fertile. As many of the pieces in the exhibition, were created during the Modernist period (e.g., drawings by Masson and Tinguely; sculpture by Spoerri and Dieter Roth), their inclusion details a blurring within that history.

Among the works on view are Robert Watts’s For Alice (a.k.a. Snake Boxes) (1965), an homage to the Three Standard Stoppages, and Richard Pettibone’s appropriation of that seminal work in miniature; Bill Morrison’s Light is Calling (2004), composed of decayed 35mm film footage that has been transferred to video; Agathe Snow’s Paper General (2007), an assemblage of objects and debris, found near James Fuentes’ Lower East Side gallery where it was first exhibited; and a series of prints created last year by the artists who participated in the Otra de Vaqueros residency and exhibition project in Mexico City, described as an “altered reiteration” of Francis Picabia’s Cacodylic Eye (1921), which challenged the authority of singular creation by featuring numerous signatures.

Christopher Eamon is Director of the New Art Trust, San Francisco and Curator of the distinguished Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, San Francisco. He was previously Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and has curated shows of video and new media art at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; P.S.1/MoMA, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and other major institutions.