John Cage : Scores & Prints

Whitney Museum of American Art February 25 - f^ay 2, 1982 "We have eyes as well as ears..." John Cage has been using his eyes as well as his the Large Glass share its status as major work. ears for forty-five years of work, and it is his The Glass itself operates as a giant blueprint or audience - alternately delighted, outraged and mechanical model, activated by its changing envi- bewildered - which now finds itself able to see ronment and the viewers who could be said to be and hear more clearly. Always interested in the "performing" it as they look. Interested in mak- visual arts. Cage wavered between devotion to ing a work which was not a work of "art," Duchamp music and to painting, chose the former, but kept resorted to any method at hand, including musical a weather eye on the latter. The rigorous purity composition . 2 Cage, in his turn, borrows images of Mondrian's abstraction attracted his admir- and methods from the visual arts and employs any ation in the 1930s, and in 1948 we find him material at hand to write much of his music. quoting the fresh and pithy statements of Paul As his compositions grew increasingly complex Klee.l The erratic, floating shapes of Calder's and (after 1950) were generally based on chance mobiles and the crystalline structure of Richard operations. Cage's notation changed as a matter Lippold's gold and silver wire sculptures have of course: "Everything came from a musical de- found in him a rapt observer. Among the litany mand, or rather from a notational necessity."-^ of names which appear and reappear in his writ- From the earliest pieces for prepared piano, his ings and interviews, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, scores have often included handwritten pages of Robert Rauschenberg , Jasper Johns recur, and he intricate instructions, which in later works such has written thoughtfully about each of these as Water Music fuse with the score to become a friends and colleagues. Tobey's White Writings , kind of visual poetry. Another cluster of scores Graves' magic circles, Rauschenberg ' s myriad derives from astromical maps, still another from silkscreened images, Johns' serried or super- chance determinations as to whether flaws in the imposed numbers, could constitute notations for paper are to be read as notes or silences. In possible worlds of sound as Cage's extraordinary one group of pieces, many of them for magnetic varieties of notation pull his music into the tape. Cage employed transparent sheets of plastic visual field. printed with lines, dots, or small symbols. By Scores have exerted a fascination over non- superimposing these materials, or in some cases musical viewers for centuries. We are grateful by cutting out each symbol in a little square and to Cage and the collection of scores by modern letting them fall at random on a sheet of paper', composers he assembled for the Foundation for each would-be performer arrives at his own score. Contemf)orary Performance Arts (currently housed Cage introduced color into his notations in Aria at Northwestern University and published in part of 1958, and it runs delicately riot in several in his Notations of 1969) for revealing the wild works of the 1970s. profusion of graphic invention in experimental But the visual abundance of scores is custom- music. The increasing interest on the part of arily reserved for performers, and Cage has al- present-day observers in notations of all sorts ways sought to give his listeners something to (dance as well as music) may have to do with our look at. During his long and fruitful collabora- passion for the working drawing. Thomas Eakins' tion with Merce Cunningham, audiences have needed analyses of the angles at which ripples of water to be "omniattentive" : ^ watching the dancers, catch the light now attract as many admirers as listening to sounds and silences, and enjoying do his finished paintings of scullers on the the costumes, sets and lighting designed by a Schuylkill River. Marcel Duchamp's scribbled notes and his fastidious plans and elevations for Photograph by Robert Mahon from John Cage: A Portrait Series , 1981 . , . ^ t distinguished succession of artists. After 1958, formed through color and enlargement into an Cage himself moved with increasing alacrity abundant vocabulary of images for an ongoing se- toward his own version of "theater," which he saw quence of print editions. Determinedly uncon- as providing greater richness and flexibility cerned with self-expression. Cage finds it inter- than music alone, coming closer to his goal of esting to see what will happen as he combines resembling "Nature in her manner of operation."^ straight lines and curves (the latter always ob- Resisting recordings of his music as frozen his- tained by dropping pieces of string on the plate, tory, Cage stressed the spatial properties unique in memory of Duchamp) with the Thoreau drawings to live performance. He has given increasing through chance operations, just as he accepts and attention to the visual components of his compo- enjoys unforeseeable variations in the perfor- sitions, using projected slides and films, and mance of indeterminate music. Yet his most non- encouraging his audiences to make use of all intentional works are undeniably his own: "Your their faculties. chance is not the same as my chance," as Duchamp Neglecting no faculty of his own. Cage made remarked in another context. his first decisive venture into printmaking in The question of skill arises. Whether using 1969, producing two lithographs and eight plexi- star charts or observing imperfections in a sheet grams in celebration of his friend Duchamp, who of paper to devise a piece of music. Cage per- had died in October of the previous year. Since forms often painstaking and extended labor with that time, and with growing intensity since 1978, patience and discipline, a quality he prizes. he has devoted himself to making prints as he New freedoms do not imply less work. His recent continues to write music and a range of poetry prints are similarly feats of careful observation and prose. In fact the three activities are and precise execution: although chance opera- sometimes inseparable from one another in his tions may dictate that an entire image falls out- work, which seems to please him. One field for side of the printed sheet ( Changes and Disappear- the intersection of creative energies has been ances ) its absence is as specific as its presence provided by Cage's admiration for Henry David would have been. Above all. Cage pays attention. Thoreau, neither artist nor musician, but a pas- The first to sight a mushroom, he also knows its sionate observer of nature. Thoreau's thinking scientific name. Never having attempted etching and writing often surface in Cage's music (the or engraving prior to his first visit to Crown Song Books of 1970, for example in which "we con- Point Press, he deliberately explored his lack of nect Satie with Thoreau") and in his lectures. knowledge in Seven Day Diary (Not Knowing) as he Cage discovered Thoreau's Journal through a poet gained in skill friend, Wendell Berry, in 1967, and was delighted Cage has always been interested in the in- by the tiny drawings they included: "When I terpenetration of fields: music, technology, first saw them [as slides, no longer illustrating poetry, mycology, theater, dance, and the visual the text], I realized I was starved for them."^ arts come alive in their encounters in his work These minute records of trees and leaves, hills (itself often taking the form of collaboration and waterfalls, feathers and rabbit tracks, in- with others) . He seeks to make us more aware of terrupt the flowing lines of brown ink in Tho- life itself, in its multiplicity of detail and reau's handwritten journals as a stone or twig infinite possibilities, by letting things be diverts a stream.^ Joyfully adopting printed themselves and operate freely and simultaneously versions of the drawings as a readymade shorthand on our astonished sensibilities. for the natural world. Cage found that they could be played as music - Score (40 Drawings by Tho- Anne d 'Harnoncour reau) and 23 Parts - projected on a screen as Curator of 20th-century Art part of a performance - Empty Words - or trans- Philadelphia Museum of Art Notes Acknowledgments The title is taken from Cage's 1955 article, "Experi- "John C age : Score s and Print s" wa S CO organ ized by Anne mental Music," published in Silence (Middletown, Conn.: d ' Harno ncourt , Cur ator of 20t h-Cen tury Art, Philadel- Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 12. phia Mu seum o f Art and Patter son S ims, Assoc iate Cura- l.In "Defense of Satie," a lecture delivered at Black tor , Pe rmanen t Col lection, Wh i tney Mus eum of Amer ican Mountain College in 1948, printed for the first time in Art. C harlot ta Ko tik, Curato r, th e Al bright -Knox Art Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (New York: Praeger Pub- Gallery , Buff alo, New York, s ignif ican tly CO ntributed to lishers, 1974) , p. 82. the developme nt of this proje ct. Petr Kotik helped ini- 1 2. Duchamp note published in A ' inf initif (New York: tiate t he pro ject and, as dir ector of the S. E.M. Ensem- Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., 1966). Duchamp's two known ble, wi 11 pre sent at the Whit ney M useu m thre e evenings scores are Musical Erratum of 1913 (Collection of Mme of John Cage music on March 3 1, Ap ril 1 , and April 2, Duchamp) and La Mariee mise a nu par ces eel ibataires, 1982.

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