THE ANARCHIST ART OF JOHN CAGE, Richard Kostelanetz

In surveying his work in music and theater, in poetry and visual art, I have noticed that the American John Cage favored a structure that is nonfocused, nonhierarchic and nonlinear, which is to say that his works in various media consist of collections of elements presented without climax and without definite beginnings and ends. This is less a negative structure, even though I am describing it negatively, than a visionary esthetic and political alternative. In creating artistic models of diffusion and freedom, Cage is a libertarian anarchist.

What makes Cage's art special, and to my senses politically original, is that his radical politics were expressed in decisions not of content but of form. For instance, one quality of nearly all works of his for large ensembles is that they do not need a conductor. By extension, the work implies that outside of music, as well as in, it is possible to create social mechanisms that likewise can function without conductors, without chiefs. In other words, in the form of his art, in the form of performance, is a representation of an ideal polity.

It is precisely in relinquishing traditional opportunities for authority that Cage made essentially political decisions. His scores are designed to encourage a greater variety of interpretations than usual. There is no 'right way' to do them, though there are wrong ways, especially if a performer violates the instructions that are not left to chance. A second reflection of Cage's politics was writing music for an ensemble of equals, even when he was one of the performers, thereby resisting such conventional hierarchical forms as a soloist with a backup group. (The fact that this last feature was always true indicates to me that Cage subscribed to his egalitarian esthetics long before he was conscious of them.) Thirdly, the principle of equality extends to the materials of his art. Not only are all notes equal, but all instruments are equal, regardless of their rank in the musical tradition. In Credo in Us (1942), for instance, the piano has no more presence than the home radio; all are equidistant from the audience. Fourth, he performed his music in gymnasiums as well as opera houses, the assumption being that all venues are equally legitimate.

In his book 'Notations' (1968), where Cage presented in alphabetical order a single page apiece of scores chosen by contributing composers, the radical assumption is that the editor has no more authority than the reader in assigning value. Nothing is featured by being put ahead of the others, or having its name on the book's cover. The absence of hierarchy and of editorial discrimination in this book likewise reflects his politics. (A traditional editor would huffily characterize a book like 'Notations' as 'an abdication of professional responsibility.') Anyone who ever worked in theater with Cage knew that he believed every performance venue should have convenient exits so that spectators can leave whenever they wish. Capturing anyone's body was to him no more justifiable in art than in life. One truth of Cage's own functioning was that no one loses anything by relinquishing power, but the essence of his method is not to tell but to show.

With that last point in mind, it is instructive to contrast the anarchism of Cage's art with another masterpiece of anarchist art in our time, the Living Theater's production of 'Paradise Now' (1968). Those of us who saw it two decades ago will remember that 'Paradise Now' was structured as a series of sketches designed to elicit audience participation. Thus, it opened with the performers reciting testimony of their own imprisonment: 'I can't travel without a passport,' they repeatedly proclaimed, confronting and challenging the audience to respond with argument or shocked acceptance. 'I am not allowed to take off my clothes.' 'I don't know how to stop the war,' they kept on repeating. From this purgatory the performers progress to sketches of liberation, which is paradise, culminating with members of the audience being invited onstage to leap into the locked arms of male company members. Structurally, this play is dialectical, moving from antithesis to synthesis; and in this respect, it differs from Cage who hasn't presented any antitheses, as far as I can tell, in at least forty years.

Another difference is that 'Paradise Now' is preachy, Julian Beck even telling us that we've been offered glimpses of the postrevolutionary age. Cage, by contrast, shows instead of tells, for his assumption is that, in the community represented by his art, the Promised Land has come. When asked about his response to such programmatic political music as Frederic Rzewski's, he said, 'I have difficulty with it, because it's so pushy. It has precisely in it what government has in it: the desire to control; and it leaves no freedom for me. It pushes me toward its conclusion, and I'd rather be a sheep, which I'm not, than be pushed along by a piece of music. I'm just as angry, or refusing to go along with the 'Hallelujah Chorus' as I am with the Attica one [by Rzewski]. The moment I hear that kind of music I go in the opposite direction. And they use the technique of repetition, and of sequence, incessantly [as did the Living Theater, I should add]. And I can do without that.'

One thing that fascinates me about Cage is the purity of his anarchism. His perceptions are true to his politics; in neither his speech nor his behavior do you find the kinds of contradictions and compromise that some political people think are opportune for ultimate ends. He is utterly free of pretenses to superior humanity and thus false snobbism (and in these respects so utterly different from his sometime protege Morton Feldman). I've always regarded Cage as epitomizing the noncompetitive life, where no one is regarded as a threat who must be eliminated, where you can afford to be generous with your own work as well as your possessions, and to do work so extreme and idiosyncratic that plagiarism need not be feared. As he has always made a point of publishing his writings in small magazines as well as large, assuming that the putative 'reputation' of any venue affects him not, it is not surprising that his 1980s creative text on the Satie society bypassed book-publishing entirely to become available gratis, but only through the modem on your home computer. Even Cage's philosophy is true to his politics, at a time when, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, Philosophy is for the artist, especially for some painters nowadays, much as the Bible is to the minister, which is to say a respectable source that can be used to justify anything. I recently read scores of interviews with him and have never found Cage claiming anything about his art that was demonstrably false.

It is scarcely surprising that in his own professional life he has resisted not only titles and accompanying power but servility, being neither a boss nor an employee but, instead both, or more precisely a small businessman with a peripheral relation to another small business that didn't give him much power (or until recently made much money)--the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In other words, even in his own life there was an absence of antitheses. When Harvard offered him a professorship in 1988-89, giving him one of those titles purportedly raising its bearer above the nonprofessors, I warned him that, especially if you will be talking about anarchy, you must insist upon being called the Charles Eliot Norton 'Person' of Poetry. (I reminded him that England's anarchist movement went through a divisory crisis in 1953, when Herbert Read accepted a knighthood!) When I later asked him 'what it was like to be a Harvard Professor,' he replied, appropriately, 'not much different from not being a Harvard professor.'

Another quality I admired about Cage was that, especially in contrast to many post-socialists of his generation, he never doubled back. He never said that an earlier position of his was now unacceptably radical. As a result, he was never been an ex-anything in either esthetics or politics. His art, as I noted before, always displyed the anarchist characteristics defined here. I would judge that one reason for his professional confidence to the end, in politics as well as esthetics, is that he knew from the beginning that he never wrong, which I hasten to add is not the same thing, especially in politics, as being always right.

One Cagean tactic that always puzzled me in reading interviews with him is how he often rationalized an esthetic move in terms not of ideology but simply of social benefit. Let me quote an example from my book, 'Conversing with Cage' (1988, 2002), where he said of his 'Freeman Etudes' for violin: 'They are intentionally as difficult as I can make them, because I think we're now surrounded by very serious problems in the society, and we tend to think that the situation is hopeless and that it's just impossible to do something that will make everything turn out properly. So I think that this music, which is almost impossible, gives an instance of the practicality of the impossible.'

Once I recognized this tendency toward sociological rationalization in Cage's commentary, I was skeptical about it, thinking it might represent a certain opportunism; but the more often I saw it, I began to recognize Cage as someone who came of age in the 1930s, when ideas about social betterment through art were more plentiful. To me, Cage was essentially a thirties lefty, who was more interesting than others who came out of that period because he made some original perceptions not only about art but especially about the place of politics in art, and then the possible role of art for politics, all the while remaining true to the sentiment of that time. In my sense of Cage, Zen and chance and everything else came afterwards; they are merely icing on this essentially anarchist cake.

(1993).

www.richardkostelanetz.com
Rkosti@aol.com

above copied from:

Development of the Artist's Book, Peter D. Verheyen

Written by Peter D. Verheyen
for FIA 610, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University April, 1998

What is a book? An artist's book? A livre d'artiste?

What is a book? Traditionally the book form has been associated with the codex, a textblock of folded signatures, sewn to some kind of support with a cover. Although this structure (with some variations) has existed for over a thousand years other forms have come to be called books as well, including clay tablets, scrolls, petrogylphs and, now, some argue computer files as well. Illustrations have been a part of "books" almost from the beginning being used to illustrate the text and depict events or places or people... within, the Nuremberg Chronicle being an early example of this. The illustrations were not, however, meant to be seen as art. William Blake (1757 -1827) changed that with his artists' books, among them The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence. In these, Blake wrote the text, made the etchings of the text and illustrations, printed, and then hand-colored the pages. The only thing Blake did not do it seems was bind them. Blake was far ahead of his time. The artist's book did not reappeared until this century and was adopted as a format by the Futurists, DADA, and the Constructivists among others. The livre d'artiste which co-existed with the artist's book, was similar yet also very different.
Livre d'artiste vs. artist's book:

What is the difference between an artist's book and a livre d'artiste. Johanna Drucker in her work The Century of Artists' Books draws a very clear distinction. According to her, the livre d'artiste came into being as a publishing enterprise initiated by such figures as the Parisian art dealers Vollard and Kahnweiler who saw a business opportunity in marketing deluxe editions illustrated by recognized or upcoming stars in the fields of visual arts or poetry, among them Chagall, Picasso, Apollonaire, Matisse, Miro, Ernst. This was a distinctly French undertaking with no real parallels in the United Kingdon or Germany.

While deluxe editions were not unusual at the time, the idea of merging them with the fine arts was. These editions were generally released unbound, essentially as a suite of prints or at best very simply bound. The buyer would then take them to their favorite binder designer such as Bonet, Creuzevault, or Legrain. These "collaborations" were nothing short of breathtaking.

To Drucker the livre d'artiste stopped just short of being artist's books by "stopping just at the threshold of conceptual space in which artist's books operate." This is because it is very rare to find a livre d'artiste which "interrogates the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or production activities." To Drucker, these livres d'artistes seem to be "embalmed" in excessive production values, with a very stiff relationship between the text and images which seemed forced into an outdated structure or format.

The main distinction between the livres d'artistes and the artist's book is that the former were almost always initiated by the publisher with often little or no relationship between the artist and writer. The binder was only an afterthought, though a significant one as it now turns out. By contrast, the artist's book is understood to be the work of one individual or a collaborative effort. In either case, it is conceived from start to finish as an integrated unit. The motive is also quite different. While the livre d'artiste was created as a financial venture, the artists' motives are more likely to be to make themselves heard or to share a vision. Making money is nice, but not the reason for creating the work. The artist's book is by nature, and for the reasons just mentioned more likely to be non-traditional in format and structure. In fact, it is almost expected that artists deviate as far as they dare from the traditional form entering into the realm of sculpture. Indeed, most of the creators of artist's books are not tied to anyone discipline in particular. Some are primarily printmakers but most are not and bring a very broad background to their "books" (I use that term loosely). As opposed to the livres d'artistes these are more than likely to be unique objects and as such are more closely allied with painting and sculpture. Technically, they are created using a variety of techniques, employing fine printing as easily as xerography.

Another category which falls somewhat between the two is the fine press artist's book. This category is generally more closely allied with the livre d'artiste in that it is an editioned work. While some fine press artist's books are the work of an individual, more often than not working in close collaboration, an author, artist, printer, binder. On a more commercial level the 1920's - '40's saw a number of artist's books released by major publishers. Featured are the work of Lynd Ward who published several novels in woodcuts, John Vassos who took to offset, Rockwell Kent and others. Zines, issued by micro-presses in small or large editions, regularly, or just once, fit in this category, with the difference that the production is often less elaborate and refined, but also more experimental in content and concept. They are a way for the artist to reach a wide audience without great expense, similar in many ways to the Dada publications.
Importance of structure to the artist's book:

In contrast to the livre d'artiste, the artist's book is likely to make the structure of the book an integrated part of its overall design and concept. How the "book" or object is assembled is as important as the contents of the book, if any. It is quite common for "book artists" to create "books" which are no more than finely engineered works of paper, often highly complex, which contain no text and only the faintest hint of "bookness" (a term coined by Philip Smith a British fine binder who came to binding by way of painting). The structure determines how the "book" is read, and influences how the "reader" interacts with it. Pages can open up from both sides and panels can be hinged along different sides making the viewer unfold the structure as they "read" it. Pop-ups can reveal hidden aspects. By slightly changing a series of illustrations animation can be created as the "reader" flips through the pages quickly. Through the use of transparency, an image can evolve and de-evolve as the "pages" are turned. The possibilities are almost endless, and one innovation leads to another. In the process the "reader" becomes increasingly drawn into the object as they interact with it. This idea of the importance of structure is explored in detail in Keith Smith's book Structure of the Visual Book..
Significance of the illustrator to the book:

In the text to the MOMA exhibition catalog A Century of Artists Books, Riva Castleman breaks down the relationships of the parties as: artists with authors; artists as authors; artists for authors; and artists without authors.

Artists with authors represents the livres d'artiste where the artist and author are brought together, the artist's role being to embellish the words of the author, just as it the typesetter and designer's role.

Artists as authors refers to artists who decided that they wanted to express themselves in words as well as images. With Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Duchamp this was very successful and their works helped define their movements (Bauhaus, Constructivism, Dada). Others such as Miro, Leger, and Matisse were more than capable of putting into words the expressiveness of their painting.

Artists for Authors is much like the first category except that the pairing of the two is often more remote. While, as with the first category, the two parties may know each other and exchange ideas, here more often than not the artist was commissioned, or chose to illustrate an earlier text. Artists, however, could also take existing texts and use those as the basis for new works. An example is Tom Philips' treatment of two works. The first, entitled A Humament, was derived from a text (The Human Document) which Philips bought at a flea market for 2 shillings. Through overpainting and other alterations of the text he created a new one. Philips also treated Dante's Inferno as well as translating it.

The final category, artists without authors, this is where, according to Castleman, the origins of the modern artist's book can be found. Grosz's Ecce Homo and El Lissitzky's About Two Squares are examples of this as is Frans Masereel La Ville and some of Lynd Ward's work such as Gods's Man. Edward Ruscha is credited with setting the pattern for the modern artist's book with his 1963 work Twentysix Gas Stations, a work in which he juxtaposed the images of gas stations, chosen for their similarity of appearance and function with a blank facing page.

The Fluxus movement, founded at the same time, was a collaborative international movement which created a large body of work in the form of printed cards, broadsides, booklets, often boxed together in a "neo-Dada" manner. This movement led to the explosive growth of the artist's book movement in the 1970's and '80's which was inclusive rather than exclusive, with easy to acquire works of art.
Future of the artist's book and trends:

What is the future of the artist's book? The past twenty-five years, especially the past fifteen have seen an explosive growth in the number of artists creating "books" and the acceptance of the format along with other more "mainstream" forms of art. Exhibitions are becoming increasingly widespread and "the book" as concept is being taught in a number of art programs. Printmakers are still making prints and many of these will still end up in "book" form. What is being lost is the art of the craft of fine bookbinding. Those who are teaching in the programs do not have the skills to pass on the finer points of binding, and those in private practice can't afford to take on apprentices for the most part. Perhaps the end of this century will see the end of the finely bound book. When one looks at what artists consider "books," it becomes clear that the term is being used to describe sculptures and wall hangings. These may be derived conceptually from "the book," but that does not make them a book, nor does it make them any less a work of art. Likewise a piece of granite, carved and polished to look like a thick sewn signature is not a book. It depicts one, but that does not make it one. Duchamp may have said that "it is art because I say it is," and in his case it may well have been, but it is all to easy to extend to "it is a book because I say it is." While other forms may transmit information, like clay tablets, scrolls, or graffiti on a wall, that does not make them books.

As technology has advanced, bringing with it new means of producing and creating texts, and illustrating the "book," the very concept of the "physical book" is changing. With the advent of the Web and it's ability to hyperlink to other parts of a document or another document altogether, the book need no longer exist as a physical artifact. Janet Maher, a professor of art at Loyola College, created a work entitled ALPHABET which exists only electronically and is composed of a series of animated images which flash a text, depicting the alphabet across the viewer's screen. Is it a book? I'm not so sure, but it is art. As programs grow in versatility and ease of use, we can expect increasing artists to chose this as their medium.

I'd like to close with Philip Smith's statement on "bookness" which sums up, in my mind, the book form. While the boundaries of a form must be explored, a commonly agreed upon vocabulary is important for an understanding of that form as well as any discussion of it.

"Bookness: The qualities which have to do with a book. In its simplest meaning the term covers the packaging of multiple planes held together in fixed or variable sequence by some kind of hinging mechanism, support, or container, associated with a visual/verbal content called a text. The term should not strictly speaking include pre-codex carriers of text such as the scroll or the clay tablet, in fact nothing on a single leaf or planar surface such as a TV screen, poster or hand-bill.

"Bookness" is however being stretched to include forms which carry a digitalized or electronic text such as a CD, a hard disk or a microchip, or miscellaneous forms such as spirals of paper with continuous text, or pyramids, dodecahedrons and other geometric multiplanar forms (which could also have text inscribed on them). I would not describe all these things as having the quality of bookness or being strictly covered by the definition. A blank book is still a book, but a blank do decahedron or unmarked spiral of paper is not a book, it is a dodecahedron etc. A text is a text and not a book, but any other object one likes to imagine may perhaps be its conveyance. A text can be inscribed on anything but this does not make it a book, or have the quality of bookness, even as a scroll retains its scrollness without any text on it. A teddy bear with text on it is not a book! The book is not the text, although it is traditionally associated with it, and these two elements appear often to be mistaken for the same thing. The book is the hinged multiplanar vehicle or substrate on which texts, verbal, or tactile (the latter would include braille and other relief or embossed effects, found objects, pop-ups) maybe written, drawn, reproduced, printed or assembled.

The large imposed sheets on which texts are printed before folding into quires or signatures are not yet in book form (the qualities of bookness have not yet been imparted to them); nor to microfilm or microfiches by which book texts may be scanned be described as having bookness. They would be considered in the single planar form as on a video monitor (or a painting for example), but when the same text is arranged into book form it then taken on the qualities of bookness. It is questionable whether something becomes a book by being called such. The notion that an artist may call anything he likes a "work of art" or a "book", because he says so, is the extreme of sloppy thinking and contravenes everything we regard as leading to truth, notwithstanding Marcell Duchamp!

In a story by Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451, there is a group of people who, in order to save them, memorise books, and are called "walking books"! Other similarly claimed substitutes abound in so-called book-artists' jargon, but the memories of books are not yet in book form, and so cannot be called books or have bookness. One could say however that a pack of Tarot cards does have bookness. It functions as a working group of loose-leaf planar surfaces with related images conveying textual matter in pictorial form. Traditional knowledge has it that the Tarot is in fact a philosophical treatise. The planes of a book have a necessary relationship or they simply become a collection of arbitrary planes for which a book format is not essential for the conveyed meaning. Many arbitrarily devised objects such as chewed or dissolved texts in bottles, etc., may or may not be art objects, but they are not objects with bookness. The book-maker's art should be distinguished from the art-maker's book. The book is generally thought of as a compact, conveniently portable mobile object (although there can be giant books, made of any material). The book, as book, has multiple planes because all the text or material it contains would be too unwieldy in a single planar form. There are book-like objects or appearances and object-like books, but that is a different story."

Bibliography:

* The Ardent Image: Book illustration for adults in America, 1920 - 1942. Toledo, OH: Ward M. Canada Center, The University of Toledo, 1995.
* The Art of the Book and the Book Arts Press. Upper Arlington, OH: Logan Elm Press & Papermill, 1994.
* The Book as Art: Modern illustrated books and fine bindings, part 1. New York: Sotheby's 1995.
* The Book Stripped Bare: A survey of books by 20th century artists and writers. Hempstead, NY: The Emily Lowe Gallery and Hofstra University Library, 1973.
* Castleman, Riva. A Century of Artists Books. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994.
* Polnische Buchkunst der Gegenwart. Warsaw: Verband der Polnischen Bildenen Künstler, Bezirk Warschau, 1996.
* Dressing the Text: The fine press artists' book. Santa Cruz, CA: The Printers' Chappel of Santa Cruz, 1995.
* Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists Books. New York: Granary Books, 1995.
* The New Bookbinder. London: Journal of Designer Bookbinders. Various issues.
* Ray, Kevin. Una Selva Oscura: Tom Philips's Inferno. St. Louis, MO: Special Collections, Washingotn University Libraries, 1997.
* Smith, Keith. Structure of the Visual Book, 3rd ed. Rochester, NY: Keith Smith Books, 1994.
* Smith, Keith. Text in the Book Format. Fairport, NY: The Sigma Foundation, 1989.
* Smith, Philip. Designer Bookbinders Newsletter. London: Summer 1996. Letter to the editor.
* Trusky, Tom. Some Zines 2: Alternative & Underground Artists & Eccentric Magazines & Micropresses. Boise, ID: Cold-drill books, Department of English, Boise State University, 1996.
* There are also an increasing number of resources relating to this subject on the Web. Links to most of these can be found at

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Excerpts From Speculation (1967-1970), Mel Bochner

For a variety of reasons I do not like the term “conceptual art.” Connotations of an easy dichotomy with perception are obvious and inappropriate. The unfortunate implication is of a somewhat magical/mystical leap from one mode of existence to another. The problem is the confusion of idealism and intention. By creating an original fiction, “conceptualism” posits its special nonempirical existence as a positive (transcendent) value. But no amount of qualification (or documentation) can change the situation. Outside the spoken word, no thought can exist without a sustaining support.

A fundamental assumption in much recent past art was that things have stable properties, i.e., boundaries. This seemingly simple premise became the basis for a spiraling series of conclusions. Boundaries, however, are only the fabrication of our desire to detect them . . . a trade-off between seeing something and wanting to enclose it. For example, what we attribute to objects as “constancy of size,” during their progressive diminution when we walk away from them, is not a set of snapshot images gradually blending together. Concentration produces the illusion of consistency. Sight itself is prelogical and without constants (out of focus). The problem is that surrendering the stability of objects immediately subverts any control we think we have over situations. Consider the possibility that the need to identify art with objects is probably the outgrowth of the need to assign our feelings to the things that prompt them.

The “history of art” and the “history of painting andsculpture” are not the same, but merely coincident at some points.

Immediate experience will not cohere as an independent domain. Memories tend to be remains, not of past sensations, but past verbalizations. The discussion of much recent art has attempted the substitution of stimulus information for sensation (exterior vs. interiorization). This has not resolved discreteness with continuity. Perception of an object is generally preconceived as taking place within a point-by-point time. This disconnected time, a lingering bias of tense in language, restricts our experiencing the conjunction between object and observation. When this conjunction is acknowledged, “things” become indistinguishable from events. Carried to its conclusion, physicality, or what separates the material from the nonmaterial (the object from our observation), is merely a contextual detail. A structure that concerns the nonobject oriented artist is the language that he uses to formulate his thoughts. There is nothing inherently antivisual about this pursuit. Works of art are not illustrations of ideas.

If, as it has been said, time presupposes a view of time, perception also includes its presuppositions. Perception is geared to cancel out whatever is stray or unaccountable. “Back-ground” is characterized negatively as the unclear, indistinct, and nonarticulated. But background is neither the margin nor fringe of the implicit. It is only through the function of its “opening out” that we are presented with a passage to the density of things. The realm of ideas is the operative link preceding any of the forms of objectness: it is an expanse of directions, not dimensions; of settings, not points; of regions, not planes; of routes, not distances. Beneath materiality are not merely facts but a radiation spreading out beyond dimensionality, involvement, and signification.

What if we were to think only about the place from which works of art enter our consciousness? Five possibilities come to mind:
1) what we look up at
2) what we look down upon
3) what we see straight on
4) what we are surrounded by
5) what is not seen by looking
(One dividend of such an approach could be the erasure from our minds of all vestiges of the listless “object quality” of paintings, or the leaden “specific materials” of sculpture.) We could then simply concentrate on where we are looking. Consideration of “where” implies more than an ontology of position. It suggests that differentiations by style need not be made and then transformed into values. All art exists as it exists within its own described set of conditions. The only esthetic question is recognition . . . re-cognition . . . thinking it again.

A desire to eliminate “furniture” from art is not nihilistic. What does initially appear “sterile” is an attitude that establishes nothing, produces little, and by its very nature cancels out results. Also there is the gratuitousness of being unwilling to transform the world or accumulate in it . . .

At the risk of appearing self-contradictory, I do not believe art is understood through intellectual operations, but rather that we intercept the outline of a certain manner of treating (being in) the world.

Thinking via the constant intervention of procedures, one over another, filters out the arbitrariness of conventional thought patterns. Any sort of in-formation or re-formation can be diverted by externally maintained constants. The fascination with seriality and modular form (which continues, disguised, in the work of many artists) made it possible, at one point, to clarify and distinguish the processes involved in the realization of the work of art. Ordered proceduralism often led to an inversely proportional visual complexity. Suppression of internal relational concerns opened the way for the involvement with ideas beyond the concentricity of objects. It became apparent that the entire foundation of art experienced from a “point of view” was irrelevant to art of attenuated size or total surround, i.e., works without experienced centers. A case in point is the work made in and for a single place. Wall-works, for example, simply bypass double supports. Marks on the wall, here forward and in view, there only peripherally visible, held where they are by the wall’s mass . . . spread along the surface. They cannot be “held,” only seen. As such they are neither copy nor paradigm. Art of this nature is not secondly present. Its uniqueness (single placedness) is its coexistent unity with its own appearance.

Formalist art is predicated on a congruency between form and content. Any artist who considers this dichotomy either irreconcilable (or desirable) is no longer interested in formal relationships. For this artist the activity of making is not equivalent to the informing of content (a more appropriate word would be “intent”). Certain intents are capable of various equally viable realizations.

Imagination is a word that has been generally banned from the vocabulary of recent art. Associations with any notion of special power reserved for artists or of a “poetical world” of half-dreams seem particularly unattractive. There is, however, within the unspecified usage of the word a function that infuses the process of making and seeing art. The root word “image” need not be used only to mean representation (in the sense of one thing referring to something other than itself). To re-present can be defined as the shift in referential frames of the viewer from the space of events to the space of statements or vice versa. Imagining (as opposed to imaging) is not a pictorial preoccupation. Imagination is a projection, the exteriorizing of ideas about the nature of things seen. It reproduces that which is initially without product. A good deal of what we are “seeing” we are, in this sense, actually imagining. There is an overlap in the mind of these two dissimilar activities. We cannot see what we cannot imagine.

One does not frequently think with his eyes closed, although what one is thinking at any moment need not be directly concerned with what one is looking at. A nonvisual thought (one without background) seems highly unlikely.

Ultimately, description as a critical method fails. Pretending to a nonsubjective rendering of the object, it cuts off the peripheral pressures of experience. When visual data is accepted as the only basis of apprehension, there is no possibility for an account of intentions. At the same time, descriptive self-enclosure does not create itself as its own sole recipient.

Would anything change if sensible things were conceived of as “across” space, rather than “in” space? First, objects would cease to be the locus of sight. Then, no longer centers in themselves, they would demand to be perceived as the organization by everything around them. What might result from this conjecture is a sense of trajectory rather than of identity. What common sense has always presented as a unity (objects) become only the negatives in a field of determinants. Opaque, yet fragmented, what is seen is only what stops my view beyond . . . it is in front of me but without being in depth. Profiled in this way, matter surrenders its obstinate chunkiness to reveal only a position in a cross section of orientations and levels, these levels merge on but one plane into dimensional sense data. And even on this plane, thought can efface them.

A procedural work of art is initiated without a set product in mind. In a piece of this kind the interest is only in knowing that the procedures, step by step, have been carefully and thoroughly carried through. The specific nature of any result is contingent on the time and place of implementation, and is interesting as such. It is the “proceeding” that establishes it.

On approaching the threshold of nonenduring art, we can easily postulate an art of microseconds . . . but rarely see it. Why does art have to be any more distinct than peripheral vision? I do not mean this in the sense of “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t.” I am imagining an art which by taking up all the expected requirements of our basic modes of perception would, in so doing, render itself invisible.

In the context of visual art what could the term “dematerialization” mean? I find that it contains an essential contradiction that renders it useless as an idea. The inherent weakness is revealed when the derivation of the term is examined. Tracing the origin of the idea leads one back to the basic confusion in the notion of “abstraction.” All “abstract art” is premised on the belief in a first-level reality composed of constituent and separate qualities. In order to arrive at a truer “reality,” the abstract artist must take apart this composite structure. The act of disjointure was to result in an intensification of the abstracted quality (color, shape, texture, etc.). This then became the material for further manipulation. The entire substructure of this concept is flawed. It simply is not possible to break things down into classifiable components, at least not without destroying the essential unity that is their existence. The blue of my typewriter is inseparable from its smooth surface. The blue-smooth surface was not created by combining a “blue” with a “smooth.” Abstraction is an analytical method and not a reversible equation. One further step along this same line of reasoning yields “dematerialization.” If all qualities are taken away, you have de(no)-materialization (components). But given the evidence that abstraction itself is without credible grounds, can one derive from it a second level . . . a completely nonontological art? My disagreement with dematerialization goes beyond a squabble with terms. There is no art that does not bear some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to irony. Words set up circumstances for understanding, and this particular one only perpetuates old confusions. It is misleading to the intentions of artists finding different ways for art to come into being . . . and both how and how long it stays there.


NOTES
Reprinted from Artforum (May, 1970).

above copied from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/bochner_speculation.html

Some Statements on Sound Poetry, Bob Cobbing

From Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978


Leonardo da Vinci asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems a to me to be achieving this aim. PARTLY it is a recapturing of a more primitive form of language, before communication by expressive sounds became stereotyped into words, when the voice was richer in vibrations, more mightily physical. The tape-recorder, by its ability to amplify and superimpose, and to slow down the vibrations, has enabled us to rediscover the possibilities of the human voice, until it becomes again something we can almost see and touch. Poetry has gone beyond the word, beyond the letter, both aurally and visually ... Sound poetry dances, tastes, has shape. MY USE of 'vocal-microparticles' as Henri Chopin calls the elements with which we now compose sound poetry, retains, indeed emphasises, the natural quality of the human voice, more perhapsthan does Chopin's poetry. But both he and I are attempting to use a new means of communication which I believe is an old method re-established, which is more natural more direct and more honest than, for example, the present day voice of politics and religion ... Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape. Poetry now resides in other elements. 1969

We Aspire to Bird Song:

We are aided in our search by sophisticated instruments, the microphone and the tape-recorder. Our human voices extend the range of the tape-recorder's abilities by their demands upon it. Conversely, the tape-recorder's treatment of the voice teaches the human new tricks of rhythm and tone, power and subtlety. We are in a position to claim a poetry which is musical and abstract; but however hard we try to do so can we escape our intellect? In the poetry of pure sound, yes.... Materials are the micro-particles of the human voice which amplified, possibly transposed in speed or pitch, superimposed one, two or many times, treated perhaps with a filter, echo or chopper, shaped maybe by editing, result in a piece no naked voice could achieve. 1969

Sophisticated / Primitive:

Two lines of development in concrete sound poetry seem to be complimentary. One, the attempt to come to terms with scientific and technological development in order to enable man to continue to be at home in his world, the humanisation of the machine, the marrying of human warmth to the coldness of much electronically generated sound. The other, the return to the primitive, to incantation and ritual, to the coming together again of music and poetry, the amalgamation with movement and dance, the growth of the voice to its full physical powers again as part of the body, the body as language. 1970

Music for Dancing:

COMMUNICATION is primarily a muscular activity It is potentially stronger than everyday speech, richer than those monotonous seeming printed words on the page.... Say 'soma haoma'. Dull. Say it dwelling on the quality of the sounds. Better. Let it say itself through you. Let it sing itself through you. The vowels have their pitch, the phrase has potential rhythms. You do it with the whole of you, muscular movement, voice, lungs, limbs. Poetry is a physical thing. The body is liberated. Bodies join in song and movement. A ritual ensues. 1972

Poetry in Performance:

The concept of one voice scarcely making use of the physical possibilities of body- almost disembodied - reading with attention only to intellect and syntax to an audience ranged in rows, gives way to a new concept of complex bodily movements and mobile vocal-body sounds in space, - moving in space and sensed in different intensities and from different directions by an audience who may, in the event, become participants, and who may also be scattered in space; just as, with electronic equipment (e.g. the four or eight channel systems employed in Sweden) sounds may be given substance and precisely placed to come from this direction or any direction, from five yards to fifty yards, with this or that quality, this or that intensity of vibrations, this or that physical and emotional (and, indeed, intellectual) effect on the bodyframes receiving them 1972

above copied from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cobbing.html

John Cage at Seventy: An Interview, Stephen Montague

From "American Music" Summer 1985


John Cage hardly needs an introduction. Nineteen eighty-two was the year of his seventieth birthday and marked over half a century of creative activity. Celebrations were worldwide for the artist and man who has become one of the most important and influential composers of this century.

The following material is taken from interviews the author conducted with Cage on March 18, 1982, at Cage's loft on West 18th Street, New York, and on May 29, 1982, before a live audience during the "Cage at 70" weekend at the Almeida Festival, London, England. The photographer Mark Haven was present during the New York interview, and the critic Keith Potter was present during the London interview. The entire "Cage at 70" was filmed by Peter Greenaway (TransAtlantic Films) for a forthcoming documentary on Cage. Brief excerpts from this interview have appeared in Classical Music (May 22, 1982): 11, and in Contact, no. 25 (Autumn 1982): 30.



Stephen Montague: You are seventy years old on September 5. What are the best and the worst things about being your age? What are some of your reflections?

John Cage: Well, I have a friend named Doris Dennison, who is seventy-four and whose ninety-six-year-old mother lives alone in Oregon and is still taking care of herself. Doris called her one day and asked how she was. Mrs. Dennison said: "Oh, I'm fine, it's just that I don't have the energy I had when I was in my seventies."

My attitude toward old age is one of gratitude for each day. Poor Henry David Thoreau died at age forty-four. You know he had the habit of walking through the streets of Concord in the dead of winter without any clothes on, which must certainly to have disturbed the local citizens no end. Later there was a lady who each year would put flowers on Emerson's grave and mutter as she would pass Thoreau's: "And none for you, you dirty little atheist!" Anyway, as I get older and begin to be almost twice as old as Thoreau, I am naturally grateful for all this time. It strikes me that since there's obviously a shorter length of time left than I've already had, I'd better hurry up and be interested in whatever I can. There's no fooling around possible. No silliness. So where I used to spend so much of my time hunting mushrooms, I've recently become interested in indoor gardening. I now tend to spread myself thinner and thinner. I'm always looking for new ways of using my energy but meanwhile continuing the other activities.

About five or six years ago, I was invited to make etchings at the Crown Point Press in California. I accepted immediately, even though I didn't know how to make them, because about twenty years before, I was invited to trek in the Himalayas, and didn't. I later discovered that the walk was going to be on elephants with servants, and I've always regretted that missed opportunity. I thought I was too busy. I am now multiplying my interests because it is my last chance. I don't know what will turn up next. The doctor told me at my age anything can happen. He was right. I got rid of arthritis by following a macrobiotic diet; work is now taking on the aspect of play; and the older I get the more things I find myself interested in doing. If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun. It then resembles the Venus da Mio, which manages quite well without an arm.

Montague: What are some of your other current interests?

Cage: Macrobiotic cooking within the last ten years. If I have the chance, I am going to do a macrobiotic cookbook in collaboration with Allison Knowles. It will resemble my mushroom book, which is part of my book called M. In other words, instead of just being about cooking, it will be about everything that interests me. But I will arrange the use of chance operations so that cooking comes up more than anything else.

Montague: Do you have any regrets, anything you might have done differently as you review your seventy years?

Cage: You mean, how would I re-create the past? Well, I said long ago that if I were to live my life over again, I would be a botanist rather than an artist. At that time the botanist Alexander Smith asked me why. And I said: "To avoid the jealousies that plague the arts. Because people think of art so often as self-expression." I don't, but so many people do. "And therefore, if their work is not receiving what they consider proper attention, they then feel unhappy about it and get offended." One of my teachers, Adolf Weiss, got very angry at me simply because I became famous. He was sure I was, in some way, being dishonest, because he had been honest all his life and he'd never become famous. So he was sure I was doing something wrong and evil. But when I said to Alexander Smith that I would like to change my life by being a botanist, he said that showed how little I knew about botany. Then later in the conversation I mentioned some other botanist, and he said: "Don't mention his name in my house!" So I think that all human activities are characterized in their unhappy forms by selfishness.

Montague: What was your earliest interest in composition? Were you interested as a child?

Cage: No, I was interested in music. You are not taught in school to become a composer. I think what you are taught in school is to become a poet. So much emphasis is put on reading and writing. So if you feel like making something new, I think the tendency is to make poetry. And I'll bet you a nickel that everyone who has gone to public school has written a poem. Music and things like that are put after hours, so to become interested in music you had to have some special inclination, and I had it. But in school, when I signed up for the glee club, they said we'll have to test your voice. They tested it and informed me that I didn't have one. So within school I was not a musician, but outside of school I studied the piano with my Aunt Phoebe. Mother and Dad bought me a piano.

Montague: Your father was an inventor. What were some of his inventions?

Cage: He invented a submarine that held the world's record in 1913 for staying underwater. But it ran by means of a gas engine, so it left bubbles on the surface, and you could tell where it was. It never occurred to him that it would be important to hide. When he saw that people wanted to travel underwater secretly, he then invented a way to discover them. It was used in World War I in the English Channel to detect German submarines. When he died he was working on space travel without the use of fuel. In other words, the release from or acceptance of gravity.

Montague: Where did he do his training?

Cage: Out of the blue. He never graduated from high school.

Montague: My grandfather was also an inventor and had a similar background with no real formal training. He was the inventor of the snap clothes pin, double-ended toothpick, hard-surface paper plate, book matches, and other such things, but never graduated from high school.

Cage: Right, inventors don't have to.

Montague: It was that era when the explosion of inventions was just beginning. So did your father encourage you in music, or did he want you to follow his work?

Cage: He wanted me to follow his work. He was nominally an electrical engineer, but I always felt like that humorous writer for the New Yorker who wrote a beautiful article on how frightened he was about being shocked by electricity. I always had that feeling about electricity, whereas my father evidently didn't.

Montague: Didn't you once say that your early work in electronic music was somewhat terminated because of your fear of electrical shock?

Cage: Well, it isn't exactly terminated, but there was a concert I gave with David Tudor in the late 1950s or early 60s in New Jersey where everything we touched gave us a shock. It must have been a very amusing concert because we were always jumping. Everything we touched shocked us. Everything!

Montague: That must be one of your definitions of a nightmare. Did you continue?

Cage: Yes, but we couldn't escape. We were constantly shocked everywhere.

Montague: Do you have any interest in pop music?

Cage: No, but every now and then I'm obliged to be curious because someone says, for example, Brian Eno likes my work very much. So what do I think of his? I don't have a playing machine, so it's awkward to find out. Recently I've been making etchings in California, and most of the artists that go to the Crown Point Press like to have music played while they are working. So there is a sound system. Realizing that, I asked them if they had some Brian Eno I could hear, and they did. So I heard some. What I liked about it were the silences in it. What I didn't like about it was the fact that after each silence the same kind of thing happened that happened after the first silence-or before the first silence. He had too much of an idea plus the idea of silence, and I liked that idea.

Also the silence had a kind of unpredictable length.

Montague: Earning a living as a composer in any era has traditionally been difficult. How old were you when you could really say you were earning a living just as a composer?

Cage: Well, I began to make money not from actually writing music but from lecturing, concerts, and all such things, what you might call the paraphernalia of music, not until I was fifty. But then I did. Now I could get along without giving any concerts if I chose to live in a poor corner of the world. My income from my past work is sufficient to live on in a very modest situation. I used to suggest to Merce Cunningham that it was time to retire, and he said: "Where would you go?" And I said: "To Bolivia." He said: "Why?" So I said: "Because surely no one there is interested in modern music." I'd like to be somewhere where the phone doesn't ring. You see I refuse to have an answering service. I consider it a form of twentieth-century immorality.

Montague: In what way?

Cage: Well, it means that you disconnect yourself from the society. And it will. It's a form of selfishness.

Montague: Do you have your name in the telephone book?

Cage: No, I don't, but that's not my wish. That's Merce's wish because he's involved with a large company of dancers and a school, so if his name were in the phone book, it would be awful. Anyway, people find out what your number is whether it's in the book or not.

Montague: The photographer Mark Haven has commented that in your loft there is more a suggestion of contemporary graphics, with the jasper Johns prints and so forth, than music. There does seem to be very little suggestion of your work as one walks around.

Cage: Well maybe, except there was an Italian article recently with photos about this loft which said it was musical. Everything here is as visible as sound is audible. The pictures unevenly placed are like notes on a staff. But the thing about this place that is musical is the street noise from Sixth Avenue.

Montague: Do you like all the noise?

Cage: I love it!

Montague: You don't have double glass on your windows. Is that because you've always been fascinated with sound, noise, and so forth?

Cage: I became very interested in noise a long time ago through Oscar Fishinger, who made abstract films. He made a remark that impressed me: "Everything has a spirit and that spirit can be released by setting whatever it is into vibration." That started me off hitting things, striking them, rubbing them, working with percussion, and getting interested in noise. I wouldn't dream of getting double glass because I love all the sounds. The traffic never stops, night and day. Every now and then a horn, siren, screeching brakes, extremely interesting and always unpredictable. At first I thought I couldn't sleep through it. Then I found a way of transposing the sounds into images so that they entered into my dreams without waking me up. A burglar alarm lasting several hours resembled a Brancusi.

Montague: Tell me more about Bolivia.

Cage: The funny thing is that this loft is Bolivia. See this is the Avenue of the Americas, and if you look out the window you'll see a plaque that says Bolivia. For years I'd been saying I wanted to live in Bolivia, so I could have found this apartment not by searching as I did, but by simply going to it. Coming here to the Avenue of the Americas.

Montague: Surely in seriousness.

Cage: You think I'm not serious?

Montague: But surely Bolivia is not politically the most savory country you could pick.

Cage: It's not very good here in the United States either.

Montague: Is there some place else where you'd prefer to live? Say politically?

Cage: On the moon.

Montague: I think you'd have other problems there... but you'd probably be the only composer.

Cage: That's how I invented the prepared piano.

Montague: On the moon?

Cage:... because I was the only composer around.

Montague: Wait, let's run that back again.

Cage: Well, in 1938 Syvilla Fort, a magnificent black dancer/choreographer in Bonnie Bird's company at the Cornish School in Seattle, was giving a dance program on Friday, and I was the only composer around. She asked me to make the music for this bacchanalia. The space was small, and there was no room for percussion, only room enough for a grand piano. So I had to do something suitable for her on that piano. And that's what happened. She asked me on a Tuesday. I got to work quickly and finished it by Thursday.

Montague: Were you trying to re-create African or oriental music?

Cage: At that time, because I had recently been studying with Arnold Schoenberg, I wrote either twelve-tone music or percussion music. I first tried to find a twelve-tone row that sounded African, and I failed. So then I remembered how, the piano sounded when Henry Cowell strummed the strings or plucked them, ran darning needles over them, and so forth. I went to the kitchen and got a pie plate and put it and a book on the strings and saw that I was going in the right direction. The only trouble with the pie plate was that it bounced. So then I got a nail, put it in, and the trouble was it slipped. So it dawned on me to wind a screw between the strings, and that was just right. Then weather stripping and so on. Little nuts around the screws, all sorts of things. I invited Mark Tobey and Morris Graves over to listen to it, and they were delighted. And so was Syvilla, and so was I, and so was my wife, Xenia. We were all so happy, happy as could be. When Lou Harrison came over and heard it, he said: "Oh dammit! I wish I'd thought of that!"

Montague: Recently I played some of your prepared-piano pieces in Montevideo, Uruguay, and a young composer ran up on stage after the concert, looked in the piano, and said nearly the same thing: "Dammit man, why I could not think of that!"

Cage: That's the trouble, of course, for any individual. There is the rest of society and the rest of history. I think we have to take that circumstance as the means upon which we work to help us discover the nature of the next step, rather than taking it as something to lament. That's what my father would have done.

Montague: You said in a lecture: "The past must be invented, the future must be revised. Doing both makes what the present is. Discovery never stops." Is the avant-garde dead?

Cage: People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it's finished. It isn't. There will always be one. The avantgarde is flexibility of mind. And it follows like day, the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without the avant-garde nothing would get invented. If your head is in the clouds, keep your feet on the ground. If your feet are on the ground, keep your head in the clouds.

Montague: How would you describe your politics?

Cage: I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions. Just recently ... well you know how interested the English composer Cornelius Cardew was in politics. He made the mistake of being interested in what he would consider "good government." Good communist government. And now that the poor fellow is dead, the friends around him want to start institutions in his memory to further the institutions in which he was interested. I think that we should be sad that we have lost an individual, Cornelius Cardew at only forty-five, and look around for someone else who was as sensitive and open to changes. But not form an institution in memory of him, which I would certainly not support. I won't even support something like the Wilderness Society, and I love mushrooms, the forest, and all that. But I hate what those institutions are doing to them. Do you know what they do? They buy up a big piece of what you might call wilderness, or waste land, land that no industry or metropolis has thought suitable for a city or factory. Then they make rules that you can't pick anything. You have to approach the whole thing as a museum. And they are turning the whole of nature into museums in the name of saving the wilderness, but with no good reason or purpose.

Montague: What would you do as an alternative?

Cage: I would let it all go to heaven and to hell at the same time. That happens automatically. There's a poem by e e cummings: "sweet spontaneous earth." Have you read it? He says in it: "we poke and prod thee and thou answereth us only with spring." Look at the highway on the Hudson River which is not being used any longer. Walk on it, and you'll see that plants are growing up through the cement. Even in England, which seems to be such a small place, there seems to be plenty of land.

Montague: I grew up in Florida which, over the years since I've been away, has been ravaged by greedy land developers, and now the East Coast and much of the West Coast is a neon nightmare, a kind of formica monument to poor taste, bad planning, and avarice at its lowest level. How does one deal with this kind of greed?

Cage: There is no way. I don't think there is any way to deal with it; except I think the best thing to do is to do something through affirmative action rather than political action.

Montague: Affirmative in what sense? How would you do it? Stop it?

Cage: No, not stop it. Discourage it through your lack of interest in it. When you see all these detergents and things, just don't buy them anymore. I think the best way to get rid of government-which is the source of a lot of this, because the government is on the side of the developers and on the side of the factories and all that-is to embarrass the government out of existence. We have really ruined Puerto Rico and now El Salvador and many other places. I think we have to embarrass the government out of existence.

Montague: How?

Cage: By not voting. By not accepting their offer of letting us vote. By refusing any connection with the government. Thoreau said: "Government is a tree, its fruit are people. As people ripen, they drop from the tree"-his Essay on Civil Disobedience.

Montague: Do you pay taxes, or do you follow Thoreau's example?

Cage: I keep on paying my taxes which Thoreau wouldn't have done, but I do it in order to be free of the things the government could do to me in revenge. I want to be able to continue my work, so in that situation I do what the government requires, but no more. Thoreau didn't because he could continue his work, in which no one was interested while he was alive, whereas my situation is the reverse. Many, many people are interested in what I am doing, so I must continue. When Thoreau gave a lecture, only two or three people turned up, and when he published a book, he had to give it away. No one would buy them.

Montague: I know you are a great admirer of Thoreau. If you could speak with anyone else of the past eras, whom would you like to talk with?

Cage: James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Erik Satie. If we went back further, I wouldn't mind meeting Mozart. I think he was a great musician. I like his ten dency toward complexity and away from unity. I would let Bach stay on his side of the street, and I also wouldn't bother with Beethoven or Haydn.

Montague: Why not Haydn? I would have thought you'd be interested in his inventive quality.

Cage: No, it's not inventive. It's simpleminded. The cadences are impossible!

Montague: How about some composers in the nineteenth century? Wagner for instance?

Cage: I would have enjoyed meeting Grieg.

Montague: Grieg? Why Grieg?

Cage: Well, he had an independent mind. He was able to write all those fifths when they were forbidden in what was considered good writing.

Montague: How about people in other fields like literature, painting, poetry?

Cage: Well, I think anybody in his right mind would have enjoyed meeting Leonardo. Joyce loved the work of Ibsen, did you know that? Dostoyevski, but then I would have had to learn Russian. I'm very glad to be alive in the twentieth century with respect to painting. I don't find previous periods of painting as interesting as it is now, but Giotto might have been interesting. I would like to have known Johannes Eckhart, a contemporary of Dante. And I would have dearly loved to have seen Milarepa floating in the form of a thistle over the landscape of Tibet. Milarepa was the great Tibetan saint, if saint is the right word, or yogi, whatever.

Montague: You studied Zen Buddhism in the 1940s and '50s, which had a great influence on you. How much does the I Ching govern your life? Do you throw the I Ching each morning?

Cage: My life, as you can imagine from what I said earlier, is not governed. And certainly not by the I Ching. I attempt to move according to circumstances. I now have 200 plants, and when I'm home, they have first priority. I spend the first two hours of each day without the I Ching taking care of them. I use the I Ching when it is useful, just as I turn on the water faucet when I want a drink. I find the I Ching useful to answer questions, and when I have questions, I use it. Then the answers, instead of coming from my likes and dislikes, come from chance operations, and that has the effect of opening me to possibilities that I hadn't considered. Chance-determined answers will open my mind to the world around.

Montague: What was a recent question you asked the I Ching?

Cage: Gregory Rose and Michael Nyman had arranged a number of my works to be performed on the Almeida Festival, London. Michael had read my own criticism of a program a few years ago at the Whitney Museum where I said that I found my music very boring when it was played too seriously. So he suggested we liven up the situation in some way. I had done a "circus" of my music at San Diego a number of years ago by having quite a few of my works played simultaneously using chance operations to determine the number of times each piece was repeated during the event. I did a similar thing in London. A "circus" of simultaneous events in a derelict church. I knew the desired length of the concert and found out from the I Ching when a work was to be played. The problem here is that you have to ask practical questions. For example, the same person cannot play in two different pieces that are being performed simultaneously.

Montague: Most composers like some of their own works better than others or at least feel some are more important than others. Which piece or pieces of yours would you consider the most important?

Cage: Well the most important piece is my silent piece, 4'33".

Montague: That's very interesting. Why?

Cage: Because you don't need it in order to hear it.

Montague: Just a minute, let me think about that a moment.

Cage: You have it all the time. And it can change your mind, making it open to things outside it. It is continually changing. It's never the same twice. In fact, and Thoreau knew this, and it's been known traditionally in India, it is the statement that music is continuous. In India they say: "Music is continuous, it is we who turn away." So whenever you feel in need of a little music, all you have to do is to pay close attention to the sounds around you. I always think of my silent piece before I write the next piece.

Montague: Where was it first performed?

Cage: In Woodstock, New York, 1952, in a hall quite suitably called the Maverick Hall, which was out in the woods. The back of the hall was open to the forest, and it was performed on a program of piano music given by David Tudor.

Montague: How did you come to compose a piece which is silence?

Cage: I had thought of it already in 1948 and gave a lecture which is not published, and which won't be, called: "A Composer's Confessions." And it was given as a lecture at Vassar College in a course of a festival involving artists and thinkers in all fields. Among those was Paul Weiss, who taught philosophy at Yale University. I was just then in the flush of my early contact with oriental philosophy. It was out of that that my interest in silence naturally developed. I mean it's almost transparent. If you have, as you do in India, nine permanent emotions, and the center one is the one without color-the others are white or black-and tranquillity is in the center: freedom from likes and dislikes. It stands to reason the absence of activity, which is also characteristically Buddhist well, if you want the wheel to stop, and the wheel is the Four Noble Truths: the first is "Life is Activity," sometimes translated "Life is Pain." If the wheel is to be brought to a stop, the activity must stop. The marvelous thing about it is when activity comes to a stop, what is immediately seen is that the rest of the world has not stopped. There is no place without activity. Oh there are so many ways to say it. Say I die as a person. I continue to live as a landscape for smaller animals. I just never stop. Just put me in the ground, and I become part and parcel of another life, another activity. So the only difference between activity and inactivity is in the mind. And the mind that becomes free of desire, Joyce would agree here, free of desire and loathing-that's why he said he was so involved with comedy, because tragedy is not free from these two. So when the mind has become in that way free, even though there continues some kind of activity, it can be said to be inactivity. And that's what I have been doing, and that's why the critics are so annoyed with my work. Because they see that I am denying the things to which they are devoted.

Montague: What other works of yours do you feel have also been very important?

Cage: All the others.

Montague: All of the others, but the silent piece stands above the rest.

Cage: It's more radical. I think the pieces since the silent piece, in a sense, are more radical than the ones that precede it, though I had an inclination toward silence that you can discern in very early pieces written in the 1930s. One of my early teachers always complained that I no sooner started than I stopped. You can see that in the Duet for Two Flutes or in those early piano pieces that are written in the '30s. Then I'm always introducing silence right near the beginning when any composer in his right mind would be making things thicker and thicker. I was getting thinner and thinner.

Montague: Your music often suffers bad performances because it looks easy

Cage: And we don't have to practice it, right?

Montague: What can a composer who writes music that looks deceptively easy do to defeat this kind of attitude in performers? Try to give them some insight into the difficulties of "simple" music?

Cage: I don't think you can do that. You have to do what I did for a recent performance of my Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras at the Metz Festival in France. I had written into the contract that there were to be ten rehearsals devoted entirely to this work. That is to say, thirty hours of rehearsal. About three-quarters of the way through rehearsals, the musicians obviously became interested in what they were doing. So interested that they wanted to hear it. Every time they had a chance they would leave the group and go out and listen, then go back. The performance was excellent! Do not write for an orchestra unless you have in the contract, some way that will hurt them, plenty of rehearsals. In other words, you have to get them into a situation in which they have nothing else to do but that work. Then while they're working, they'll become interested. But there is no way, as they say, to lead a horse to water and make him drink. You can't be sure that they'll get interested even though you make a time length in which they might, but that's the first step. Nothing else will work because you can write books galore as I have ... they won't read them. And even bright people won't read them. In Metz some of the musicians got interested in a way I would never have imagined. One man came up to me and said: "I like this music. It has pulse." Well that was the last thing I would have thought that it had!

Montague: What outstanding works besides your own works spring to mind if I were to ask you for some works you've heard that were written since say 1945?

Cage: I think that piece with the Spanish title Hay una mujer desaparecida, by Christian Wolff is a wonderful piece. I don't know his work sufficiently well, but I think his work is important. I thought Alvin Curran's For Cornelius on the March 13 "Wall to Wall Cage" marathon (New York) was very touching. I think the music of David Tudor is extraordinary. You see my situation is such that I write music all day, and I don't hear a great deal. So I don't know that my answer to you is of any use to anyone but me.

Montague: You have been using texts taken from James Joyce for at least forty years. In one of your recent works, Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, you read another setting of Finnegans Wake along with a sixteen-channel tape and eight Irish musicians performing their instruments around the audience. You seem to have a great fascination with Irish culture. Are you of Irish descent?

Cage: No, I'm an Englishman. I have a little French blood and a little Scottish blood, and perhaps some Swedish blood. I would love to have some Irish blood, but I don't. Maybe if I were ill and had to have a transfusion in Dublin, or even New York, I could have some Irish blood.

Montague: Do you always drink Guinness, or Irish whiskey?

Cage: Well, now I don't drink alcohol because of my macrobiotic diet. It's a funny thing. I don't have any desire for it either. But when I was drinking, it was a very fine single malt whiskey. Let's see, what do I like to drink now? I guess I like water. (laughter) It quenches the thirst.

Montague: Do you smoke?

Cage: I used to smoke at least three packs a day. Everything that happened was a signal to light a cigarette. Finally I divided myself into two people: one who knew he'd stopped, the other who didn't. Every time the one who didn't know picked up a cigarette to light it, the other one laughed until he put it down.

Montague: Do you ever go to the cinema?

Cage: No.

Montague: What do you do for leisure?

Cage: I don't have any leisure. It's not that I have my nose to the grindstone. I enjoy my work. Nothing entertains me more than to do it. That's why I do it. So I have no need for entertainment. And my work is not really fatiguing, so that I don't need to relax. Merce's work is physically tiring, so he likes to look at television. But I don't so much enjoy that. Or put me down in a situation where I have plenty of energy and I'm not permitted to do my work, then I'll look at television.

Montague: I was interested in your comments on Watergate in your talk during the Almeida Festival.

Cage: "Watergate: It took Americans 200 years to produce its own form of theater. Compare The Persians by Aeschylus, Noh drama, boredom, fascination. The only time I wrote any music was between 12:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. when the Senators went to lunch."

Montague: And what was it you said about interruptions?

Cage: "Divide the work to be done into parts and the time into equal numbers. Then you can proceed giving equal attention to each of the parts. Or you could say, study being interrupted. Take telephone calls as unexpected pleasures. Free the mind from its desire to concentrate. Remain open to what you can't predict. I welcome whatever happens next."

Montague: This is your seventieth year-the beginning of a new decade for you. Your life-style and the macrobiotic diet seem to agree with you. You're in good health and seem very fit.

Cage: I'm gradually learning how to take care of myself. It has taken a long time. It seems to me that when I die, I'll be in perfect condition.


---
Stephen Montague is an American concert pianist and composer presently based in London. He has toured extensively throughout Europe and the Americas and most recently had done a series of broadcasts on American music for the BBC.


Above copied from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cage_montague_interview.html

STATEMENT ON INTERMEDIA, Dick Higins

Art is one of the ways that people communicate. It is difficult for me to imagine a serious person attacking any means of communication per se. Our real enemies are the ones who send us to die in pointless wars or to live lives which are reduced to drudgery, not the people who use other means of communication from those which we find most appropriate to the present situation. When these are attacked, a diversion has been established which only serves the interests of our real enemies.

However, due to the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio, our sensitivities have changed. The very complexity of this impact gives us a taste for simplicity, for an art which is based on the underlying images that an artist has always used to make his point. As with the cubists, we are asking for a new way of looking at things, but more totally, since we are more impatient and more anxious to go to the basic images. This explains the impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films. We do not ask any more to speak magnificently of taking arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done. The art which most directly does this is the one which allows this immediacy, with a minimum of distractions.

Goodness only knows how the spread of psychedelic means, tastes, and insights will speed up this process. My own conjecture is that it will not change anything, only intensify a trend which is already there.

For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world.

Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia (which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means), the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for? Having discovered tools with an immediate impact, for what are we going to use them? If we assume, unlike McLuhan and others who have shed some light on the problem up until now, that there are dangerous forces at work in our world, isn´t it appropriate to ally ourselves against these, and to use what we really care about and love or hate as the new subject matter in our work? Could it be that the central problem of the next ten years or so, for all artists in all possible forms, is going to be less the still further discovery of new media and intermedia, but of the new discovery of ways to use what we care about both appropriately and explicitly? The old adage was never so true as now, that saying a thing is so don´t make it so. Simply talking about Viet Nam or the crisis in our Labor movements is no guarantee against sterility. We must find the ways to say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicating. For this we will need new rostrums, organizations, criteria, sources of information. There is a great deal for us to do, perhaps more than ever. But we must now take the first steps.

Dick Higgins
New York
August 3, 1966

---------------
Published in:
Wolf Vostell (ed.): Dé-coll/age (décollage) * 6, Typos Verlag, Frankfurt - Something Else Press, New York, July 1967

above copied from:http://www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/Higgins/intermedia2.html

The Hybrid Book: Intersection and Intermedia, Alisa Fox, Dorothy Krause, and Shawn K. Simmons

A report by Alisa Fox, Dorothy Krause, and
Shawn K. Simmons.

The word hybrid is defined by Webster’s as “anything
derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of
elements of different or incongruous kinds.” Does, combining
in unexpected ways materials, language or anything meant to
convey information, ideas, and emotions fit this definition?
I think it clearly describes the nature of our book arts
world as we move forward into the 21st century. Book
artists are constantly challenged with defining art and craft,
looking to the past for tradition and forward for new possibilities.
The Hybrid Book Conference hosted by the University of the
Arts in Philadelphia June 4-6, 2009, was successful in creating
a dialog that challenged and discussed those directives. The
panel-based conference focused on the flexible and complex nature
of the book, through both its multiple levels of interpretation –
two dimensional, three-dimensional and time-based – and its
relevance to many different fields of study. The speakers
explored the past, present and future of book arts in such
varied areas as printing (letterpress, offset, and digital),
academia, artist collaboration, technology and content
generation. In total, eight intriguing panels were offered,
two during every panel session with each attendee able to
enjoy four full panels throughout the conference. Regrettably,
attendees were not able to see all the panels.

The Opening

The event began on Thursday evening with introductory
comments by Susan Viguers, Director of the MFA Book Arts/
Printmaking program at UArts and Conference Coordinator,
as well as remarks from the President of UArts, Sean T.
Buffington, and Dean of the College, Stephen Tarantal,
emphasizing the impact and relevance of both the Book
Arts program and this conference on the community. This
was followed by Steve Miller of the University of Alabama’s
MFA in the Book Arts Program interviewing with Gunnar
Kaldewey and Hedi Kyle - an enlightening and powerful
kickoff to the conference. The question and answer structure
demonstrated that our similarities and differences as artists
show up in very distinct ways. Kaldewey and Kyle have
interesting similarities in their German background. However,
their work processes are very different. Hedi Kyle’s past as
a graphic designer shows itself in her design of both pages
and structures and her experience as a book conservator
has influenced the way she works with tactile materials and
creates forms.
These fanciful,interactive musical arrangements of color, folds,
and found objects challenge our visual intellect. But what is
particularly exciting about Kyle’s work is her ability to
constantly take risk and challenge her process, as seen,
for example, in her piece Soap Opera, where she layered
digital translucent images of soap ends.
Gunnar Kaldewey also uses materials in a profound way but
through a more traditional press approach. His background
as a rare book dealer impacts his work. Frequently
collaborating with other artists and writers, Kaldewey
creates an extraordinary sense of purpose to a particular
text. Paper artists, visual artists, writers, and bookbinders,
under Kaldewey’s guiding hand, breathe new life and vision
into ideas. Embossment, metal, foil and handmade paper are
examples of the material connections that Kaldewey makes
with a diversity of texts that span time and countries.
Irma Boom was not part of the evening interview, but was
a key participant in the exhibition at the Rosenwald-Wolf
Gallery, The Hybrid Book: Irma Boom, Gunnar A. Kaldewey,
and Hedi Kyle, that allowed us to see three very different
book artists. Boom takes a hold of graphic design and color
and punches forward using offset printing to her advantage.
Gatefolds, tabs and the pure physicality of 200 plus pages that
have been trimmed to reveal strata give us a new way to look
at books.

The Conference

The panels were successful in inspiring ideas from current
letterpress and typography practice to the impact of current
social and political content/practice. Technology today is
always a conversation and the discussion of the world of offset
and digital tools and applications lets us see that we continue
to push our current boundaries. We tend to get caught up in
the immediate issues in front of us–
whatever those issues
may be – but an environment such as the Hybrid Book
Conference challenges us to look outside our bubble. Miller,
Kaldewey and Kyle, with Boom in the exhibition, managed to
provide a solid platform to address many issues.
The conference began in earnest on Friday morning with
four possible sessions to attend. In the first session, speakers
looked to the future of the book arts from academic and
pragmatic directions with two coinciding lectures: Book Arts
in Academia (see inset for further discussion) and The Future
of Letterpress. In the second session, attendees could choose
from Modes of Production: Collaborative Processes or Offset
Applications: Then and Now.
The latter session provided a thoughtful and intelligent
conversation about the use and relevance of offset printing
within its historical context. After Tony White’s complete
account of offset’s timeline, Clifton Meador then proceeded
to expose offset as a subjective medium, a technology
just like any other which fits into, or possibly reflects, the
culture of the time as well as an artist’s interest in form. He
reminded us that the process of offset printing has its own
voice and meaning related to its place in history; because we
think of offset as the norm, as somehow neutral, we tend to
forget that this tool does have a voice, with variations and
translations of color, by reflecting its history in commerce and
advertising, in implying its neutrality. In contrast to Meador’s
relatively academic perspective, Patty Smith finished the
session with a personal history of her relationship with offset,
framing it with the many dichotomies she finds while using
the process. She explained that offset can be both rigid and
versatile, genderless and macho, demanding and easy-going,
amongst other pairings.
Panels on day two explored the hybrid nature of
relationships that occur in bookmaking: text relating to form
and image, collaborations between artists, the book relating
to culture through environment and technology. In Text and
the Hybrid Book, panelists considered the many ways a book
artist might approach the use of text in context, content and
form. Of note in this session, which was moderated by Elysa
Voshell with panelists Jen Bervin, Julie Chen and Robin Price,
was the discussion surrounding generating and finding text,
and the journey to determine, manipulate, and edit it once
found. Chen revealed her brainstorming and mind-mapping
techniques for text generation, while Bervin and Price shared
personal methods and rules to finding and editing secondary
sources.
One of the final sessions, The Reciprocity of Books and
Digital Media, moderated by Lori Spencer with panelists Patti
Belle Hastings, Margot Lovejoy and Sue O’Donnell, focused
on the importance of bookmakers keeping technology in their
sights as we move forward in the field. O’Donnell effectively
explained that books and websites have much in common
when looking at the relationship of author to audience: both
involve touch, movement, the ability often to add comments
and interact, and therefore the opportunity for the audience
to become, in part, author as well. This was underscored all
the more when the final speaker, Hastings, pointed out how
people today covet their mobile devices much as they might a
well-read and beloved book.
O’Donnell, and later Lovejoy, pointed out that bookmakers
can expand on both the experience for the audience and
the scope of readership by embracing different modes of
technology in bookmaking by using many media: web,
motion, twitter, interactivity, print on demand, PDFs, etc.
Finally, Hastings completed the panel with an entertaining
and thoughtful discussion of how the digital form is not
only influencing the landscape of book arts, but also how
bookmakers are now commenting on the subjective form
of these digital tools through their work (reminiscent of
Meador’s remarks from the previous day), most notably Rob
Cockerham’s “Kindling: the Wireless Wooden Reading Device
(see kindling01.shtml>).
As a final note, Susan Viguers has informed us that The
Hybrid Book volunteers are expecting to have podcasts of
all the conference sessions available to the general public at
before
you read this review. We highly recommend visiting them to
further explore these relevant and inspiring panels.

The Hybrid Book Fair

The Hybrid Book Fair accompanied the panel discussions
and consisted of 150 exhibitors occupying 74 tables on
two floors of UArts’ Gershman Hall. So that there were no
conflicting programs the fair was scheduled in the afternoons
after the panels allowing conference attendees to devote their
full attention to the work being exhibited.
Participating artists, presses and organizations were
diverse. While most of the artists and presses were showing
their books, Shana Leino had a table selling her elegant steel
and carved elk bone tools and Oak Knoll had both books
published by their press and a selection of books related to the
book arts. Drew Cameron, Co-Director of the Combat Paper
Project and contributing founder of the Warrior Writers
Project, was part of the panel “Book Art in the Social Sphere”
and also had a booth on the book fair floor selling paper and
books made from the uniforms of veterans. The conference
organizers encouraged student participation with a reduced
price on shared tables and they were well represented with
innovative offerings including Robert Lewis papers made
from fruits and vegetables. Exhibiting organizations included
the Delaware Valley Guild of Book Workers; the Center for
Book Arts in NYC; Philadelphia Center for the Book; and the
Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester.
Two of the largest displays were by booksellers Priscilla
Juvelis at one entrance and Bill and Vicky Stewart of Vamp
& Tramp across the room at the opposite entrance. Occupying three
tables each, they were exhibiting the books of artists they
represented and were also looking to add new artists, which they
both were able to do. Since most book artists are happier making
books than marketing them, there are some very happy book artists.
Viewers included exhibitors and vendors, when they could get away
from their tables, conference attendees, speakers, and the general
public. Ruth Rodgers (Wellesley College), Jae Rossman (Yale), Laurie
Whitehall Chong (RISD) and Arthur Jaffe (Jaffe Center for the Book,
Florida Atlantic University) were among the diligent curators
and special collections librarians who spent the entire 10 hours the
fair was open looking carefully through the work that was
presented, and despite budgetary constraints, purchased
books to add to their collections.
Adjacent to the book fair, on the upper level, was 800,000:
Acknowledge. Remember. Renew. This installation of
800,000 pages in 2,500 books was displayed in 100 coffinlike
crates – one page for each victim and one crate for each
day of the tribal genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994.
Viewers could make a donation and place their handprint
on a page of one of the books. William Snyder, who created
this project, presented it at the panel, “Intersection +
Intermedia”.
At 4 pm on the second day, awards and purchase prizes
were given by Bright Hill Word and Image Gallery, the
College Book Art Association, Columbia University, The
Free Library of Philadelphia, The Jaffe Center for Book Arts,
Journal of Artists’ Books, Philadelphia Center for the Book,
Swarthmore College, Temple University, The University of
the Arts, the University of Pennsylvania, Wellesley College
and Yale University. Three of the awards were received by
Sun Young Kang, a 2007 MFA graduate of the UA program,
whose elegantly cut and burned boxes deserved all the
acclaim she was given. Final notes: A project as large as
this conference can’t be perfect and requires a tremendous
amount of work, in this case by graduate and undergraduate
students, alumni, faculty and volunteers. The small but
dedicated leadership team showed a vision that for a first
conference was overwhelming. The Hybrid conference 2009 was
born successfully, with many things learned along the way. It’s
important to note that none of this would have happened
without the inspiration and hard work of Susan Viguers,
Amanda D’Amico, Michelle Wilson and Mary Tasillo.
These four women, all artists in their own right, took the
last two years, to build this “hybrid” conference. All in all,
these women managed to create an environment ripe with
opportunity for the whole book arts community. The only
complaint was that UArts has no plans to host similar events
on a regular basis.
As a final note, in addition to the podcasts of the panels,
JAB26 (Fall 2009) Brad Freeman will review the work of
William Snyder and Antonio Serra both of whom received
the JAB Emerging Artist Award for Exemplary Work at the
Hybrid Conference. Snyder’s work encourages viewers to
participate in a larger project of building basic infrastructure
in Rwanda. Serra’s altered publications, pretending to be
mainstream magazines, in fact deliver information that
the US media generally ignore about our wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
In addition, Amanda D’Amico and Michelle Wilson have
written a review of the Hybrid Conference which includes
descriptions of the panels, the exhibitions (Kaldeway, Kyle),
the alumni exhibition, and the book arts fair.
Alisa Fox is currently a print, paper, installation and
book artist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her work
focused on texture and tactile exploration based on the
social structure and the culture in rural Nebraska. She has
recently completed her Masters of Fine Art degree at The
University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She has exhibited
internationally and nationally, most recently curating and
working with the Iraq Veterans Against the War and the
Peoples Republic of Paper in an exhibition in Martha’s
Vineyard, Massachusetts. She currently is exhibited and
represented by Editions Limited Gallery of Indianapolis,
and was previously Associate Professor/Program Chair of
the Fine Art department at Ivy Tech Community College
in Indianapolis. She is online at
Dorothy Simpson Krause work includes large-scale
mixed media pieces, artist books and book-like objects
that bridge between these two forms, but until this book
fair had never shown her books for sale. She is the author
of Book + Art: Handcrafting Artists’ Books published by
North Light in 2009 and co-author of Digital Art Studio:
Techniques for combining inkjet printing with traditional
art materials, published by Watson-Guptill in 2004. She
can be reached at or
.
Shawn Kathleen Simmons is a book artist and graphic
designer based near Kent, Ohio where she is an Assistant
Professor of Visual Communication Design at Kent
State University. She received her Master of Fine Arts
from Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, where she
studied design and bookmaking. Inspired by her love of
photography, literature, art history and anthropology,
Shawn has focused her most recent creative explorations
on unusual formats and structures with which to convey
her ideas. She can be reached at gmail.com>.

above copied from: http://www.philobiblon.com/bonefolder/vol6no1contents.htm
The BONEFOLDER — Volume 6, No. 1, Fall 2009