A bowl of fruit is going soft in the Barbican’s Curve, and the lights are listening to it. In Yuko Mohri’s new commission, In Concert, which opened on 1 October and runs until 24 January 2027, sensors plugged into ripening fruit read its moisture and pass the readings to a row of old streetlamps salvaged from the building. As the fruit decomposes, the lamps pulse and a feedback loop turns the whole slow process into sound.
Nobody, the artist included, knows exactly what the room will look or sound like next Tuesday. That is the point. Mohri calls the forces she works with “unstable elements”: magnetism, humidity, air, water and gravity. At the far end of the gallery her Moré Moré (Leaky) series lets dripping water set off chain reactions among buckets, traffic cones and musical instruments, a homage to the makeshift repairs Tokyo subway staff rig up to contain leaks.
Chance as a working method
Handing decisions to something outside yourself is an old move in modern art, and it is more disciplined than it looks. In 1960 François Morellet divided a canvas into a grid of 40,000 squares and had his wife or sons read numbers aloud from a telephone directory. An even number meant he marked a square; an odd one meant he skipped it. The marked squares were painted blue and the rest red. The title gives the method away: Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, 50% Blue, 50% Red. It now sits in MoMA’s collection, and its appeal is how few choices Morellet allowed himself.
The same appetite for surrendered control runs through John Cage, whose live electronics with David Tudor inform the feedback loop in Mohri’s lamps, and through younger performers such as the pianist Xinyu Liu, who lets audience drawings steer a performance. In each case the artist writes the rules and then lets the material answer back.
The artist who tried to beat the wheel
Marcel Duchamp wanted something bolder. He wanted to tame chance outright. In 1924, between chess tournaments on the Riviera, he became absorbed in roulette. He studied the published sheets of past results, kept to even-money bets such as red or black, and followed a martingale, the old system of doubling the stake after every loss. “I haven’t stopped being a painter,” he wrote to a friend. “Now I draw on chance.”
To fund the experiment he made an artwork that doubled as a financial instrument, the Monte Carlo Bond: a bearer bond for a company meant to raise 15,000 francs, split into 30 numbered bonds at 500 francs each, with his alter ego Rrose Sélavy named as president and buyers promised 20% interest. Fewer than eight were ever assembled. As the MIT Press Reader’s account of Duchamp’s roulette years sets out, he came away roughly even, bored by what he called a “delicious monotony”, and decided the system was too slow to be of any practical use.
Why no system survives the zero
Duchamp’s sums had the flaw every betting system shares. A martingale feels safe because one win recovers every earlier loss, but a long losing run can empty the bankroll or hit the table limit first, and the individual bets never get any better. The ball has no memory. A single-zero wheel has 37 pockets and pays even-money bets as if it had 36, which is where the house’s 2.7% comes from. No pattern of stakes moves that figure. The inventor Hiram Maxim was making the same point in 1904, in a book Duchamp may well have read.
The arithmetic has not moved since then. What has moved is how openly it is published. The ledger Duchamp tried to keep by hand now exists in public: Casino.net publishes independent online casino reviews for 15 markets, 236 so far, scoring each operator against more than 100 data points that include RTP figures, bonus terms, payment methods and responsible gambling tools. The margin on a modern game is printed as a return-to-player figure, so the comparison worth making is between games and the venues that offer them.
Casino.net’s standing advice to try a new game in demo mode before staking anything is closer to Morellet than to Duchamp. Learn the rules of the system first, then decide how much of yourself to hand over to it, and treat what follows as entertainment with a known price rather than a puzzle with a solution.
What the market made of the bond
The bond has had a more volatile career than its author. Monte Carlo Bond (No. 30) sold at Christie’s in New York for $2.4m in 2015. When it returned to the same saleroom on 18 May this year it made $1.14m, a 52% loss on the previous sale, according to HENI’s auction records. For a work that promised its holders 20% a year, it is a fitting result.
Repair, not control
Mohri’s title points somewhere Duchamp never went. The Barbican links In Concert to the Latin consertare, to mend, bind or fasten together, and the show is threaded through with repair: lamps rescued from storage during the centre’s renovation, leaks contained with whatever was to hand. Where Duchamp tried to force roulette into a game of chess, Mohri accepts that the room will drift and builds something that keeps working when it does.
Mohri’s lamps have no stake in any of it. On 8 October she performs with Christian Marclay at the Barbican, two artists who build their work out of what they cannot predict. Along the Curve the fruit will keep rotting on schedule, the one outcome in the room nobody needs a system for.
