“Miró in the Third Person: 8 Statements” (1966), “Nam June Paik: A Diary” (1965)

[22. Pi / Grace, Nine in the first Place, Six in the Second, and Nine at the Top. Changing To:  46. Shêng / Pushing Upward]

Change your mind or change your receiver (your receiver is your mind).

A special thanks to Exact Change for sending along a complimentary copy of Composition in Retrospect in support of this project. I will probably include this text in a final series of readings leading up to the centennial, since the text was part of a final project in Cage’s life culminating with this publication.

Today I’m reading through two more statements on artists in the central section of A Year From Monday. As I mentioned last week, John Cage devoted a series of essays in the middle of his second book on artists working in other mediums, with the surprising addition of Miró, an artist that had little to do with Cage; the inclusion of this essay is curious—it was a commissioned essay and I have the feeling that Cage lumped several writings from his summer at Cadaqués with Duchamp I mentioned a few weeks ago. The Miró essay is brief, and it sounds like Cage is talking about Duchamp more than anything else from several of the references. Thus we have another indirect thread of readings: Cage reading Miró through the lens of Duchamp, and my reading Cage’s reading of Duchamp’s reading of Miró – the network of discourse continues.

Cage openly expressed disdain for surrealism on a number of occasions, especially Salvador Dalí (which he lambasted after a visit to his Figueres retreat near Cadaqués during the same summer he visited Duchamp), yet he devoted time for this essay, and chose to include it in A Year From Monday. My guess is that this decision had as much to do with Duchamp as anything, but perhaps there are other hidden reasons, or perhaps Cage made an exception to this exceptionally unique artist. Everyone is entitled to change their minds (or their receivers).

I think this is why Cage chose to write “in the third person” about Miró, and the 8 statements are as vague as the surrealist landscapes. There is mention of chess, of course, and the Catalan landscape, a misdirected interpretation of Latin (Un image, not anima, as Duchamp noted), Cage’s familiar automatic door anecdote, and several references to specific works, which I will do my best to decode:

This is the way: looking out over the sea where his island is. “I do this with all my heart.” Way to do what? Catalunya.

Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), 1923-4

A gardener, he’s also a hunter, even when sleeping: earth disturbed, is receptive to whatever there is in the air: they told me he wanted to know, to see what was happening.

I think, if anything, Cage was open to this receptiveness in Miró, the landscape space held within the relief of such works as the Spanish Dancer series, and he chose to reflect this feeling in the layout of the text itself, which is sparse and open.

Space. Even when close, there is distance.

The second essay on Paik is much more direct, since Paik was a close friend and occasional foe of Cage’s. Cage first met Paik in 1958 during his infamous Darmstadt lectures discussed earlier on this blog, and they remained close until the end of Cage’s life. Paik was among the first composers to take the conceptual turn, embracing Fluxus during his time in Europe, and in 1964, championing the nascent genre of video art after he purchased one of the first portable videotape recorders, the Sony Portapak, after receiving a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (notably, it was Cage that wrote Paik’s reference letter for the grant).

Within video art studies, along with the larger arena of media studies, the “Portapak history” as it has come to be known, is a particularly contested portion of media history, one rife with all the familiar academic squabbles regarding determinism, corporate and commercial peddling, and the like; Paik was, self-admittedly, at the forefront of this history, and his relationship to Cage generates one of the many streams of Cagean influence in the larger cultural sphere of postwar America – sort of like the Kevin Bacon game.

The extent of Cage’s interaction and dialogue with Paik is far too great to convey in a short blog post, but suffice to say, it was a tumultuous and energetic dialogue that in many ways represented the emerging post-Cagean aesthetics of 1960s conceptual artists. Cagean notions of indeterminacy, the aesthetic of silence, chance techniques, technological utopianism, multimedia expansionism and a free-spirited embrace of the notion of interdisciplinary collaboration were sparked by Cage’s core texts and recordings churned out of Wesleyan University Press and small print record labels, and Paik’s antics epitomized this rapid transformation. The floodgates were suddenly open, and with it, the kitchen sink, that bathwater, and the baby.

This is another complicated arena of Cage Studies, one rife with all the familiar camps and ideological discourses that encrust layers upon layers of intellectual calcite on an ageing memory of 1960s utopianism. Most importantly, Paik marked the first turn toward identity and sexual politics, elements that were explicitly cloaked within Cage’s oeuvre. One only has to take a cursory glance at some of Paik’s most infamous Fluxus works, particularly his collaborations with cellist and avant-garde impresario Charlotte Moorman, to see the sea of change sweeping over the Cagean aesthetic.

There is a lot to be said about Cage and Paik in regard to technology, media theory and television studies, and I think I’ll save some of that discussion for Cage’s later essay on Paik  as I’m running short of time this week. I will end with this note however. Paik has been in the news quite a lot lately, particularly after the recent Tate Liverpool exhibition and the ongoing archival project at the Smithsonian headed by John Hanhardt, and several scholars, such as Dieter Daniels, have dug in to the relationship between Cage and Paik. There are many angles to view this unique interaction, from identity politics to media history, but most importantly I believe that the transition from Cage to Paik represents a larger shift within American culture past the high-modernism of the neo-avant-garde and toward the colorful world of pastiche and schizophrenic juxtaposition that sparked Frederic Jameson’s critique. Cage aptly concluded his essay with a recent Paik proposal, which in my mind represents the gentle intrusion into the Cagean artwork of something else:

My new composition in now 1 minutes. (For Prof. Fortner). The Title will be either “Rondo Allegro”, or “Allegro Moderato”, or only “Allegretto”. Which is more beautiful? I use here: Colour Projector. Film 2-3 screens. Strip tease. boxer. hen (alive). 6 years girl. light-piano. motorcycle and of course sounds. one TV. // “whole art” in the meaning of Mr. R. Wagner.  

“Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas” (1964)

[6. Sung / Conflict, Six in the First Place, Nine in the Second. Changing to:  25. Wu Wang / Innocence (The Unexpected)]

A painting is not a record of what was said and what the replies were but the thick presence all at once of a naked self-obscuring body of history.

How does the flag sit with us, we who don’t give a hoot for Betsy Ross, who never think of tea as a cause for parties?

This is the second of four essays on non-musician artists in the second half of A Year From Monday (although Nam June Paik was a musician, his primary medium was video). It is also John Cage’s major statement on Jasper Johns, another member of the American neo-avant-garde. It is noticeably dense and long, comparable only to Cage’s essay on Rauschenberg in Silence, and I find it interesting that Cage spent so much time describing these two artists while devoting very little space to composers such as Edgard Varèse and Arnold Schoenberg—even to Merce Cunningham for that matter. Cage notes in the introduction to the essay that he spent a great deal of time investigating the “aura of his personality,” and the literary style of personal anecdotes is in contrast to the Whitmanesque prosaic tone of “On Robert Rauschenberg Artist, and His Work.”

I am not an art historian, and as with the Rauschenberg essay, I defer to the standard criticisms and stylistic boundaries. It is tempting for anyone in the humanities to dabble in a neighboring field, a dalliance that in the beginning often feels exhilarating, but ultimately ends with an embarrassing hangover. The same can be said of Cage himself; while he did have a general understanding of modern art from his early studies (including the often-cited anecdote of his brief stint teaching art history to Santa Monica housewives in the 1930s for extra cash), in this case and in many others, Cage reads any and all artistic programs against his own, and thus this is less a reading of Johns and more a reading of Cage’s aesthetic of silence in relationship to Johns.

There has been a recent rush to publish on the history of sound art, and many of these investigations, such as Seth Kim-Cohen’s In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, prop this history against the solid weight of twentieth century American art criticism. Theories of the acousmatic, reduced listening, and the objet sonore are of particular interest to electroacoustic composers and sound artists, and as with many auditory histories, theory tends to rely on the primacy of the visible over the audible in writing and constructing sonic history. Thus, audio examples of phenomenological experiences are described using the many visual metaphors critics carefully constructed to describe the radical pace of innovation in postwar American art.  

As a musician and a musicologist, I naturally feel that this trend is unjust, yet realize it is inevitable, due to one simple fact: the steep commodity market value of art versus the tenuous value of a musical object or composition, thus providing a consumerist imperative to construct theory to add weight to artistic objects. The relationship between Cage and his two counterparts in the visual arts, Johns and Rauschenberg, perhaps epitomizes this drastic economic disparity, and it is surprising that this perhaps rather touchy topic has largely gone unnoticed. In Cage’s essay on Johns, he casually mentions Johns’ Jaguar sitting unused in the garage of his summer home on Edisto Beach, the registration unfiled. He goes on to allude to what was no doubt a difficult situation for a struggling composer to witness:

The Jaguar repaired and ready to run sits in a garage unused. It has been there since October. An electrician came to fix the thermostats but went away before his work was finished and never returned. The application for the registration of the car has not been found. It is somewhere among the papers which are unfiled and in different places. For odd trips a car is rented. If it gets too hot, a window is opened. The freezer is full of books. The closet in the guest room is full of furniture. There is, and anyone knows there is, a mystery, but these are not the clues.

I think it would be unfair and unjust in any way to implicate the artists in this economic disparity; it is a curious fact of modern society that we value and identify tactile visual material as objects and denigrate or devalue ephemeral auditory experience—no one except for the artists themselves really decried the fall of the music industry, yet vintage clothing, or custom handmade knots (admittedly a joke) continue to demand a premium. Concrete objects are more clearly defined as property, and thus it is easier for one to ascribe them a commercial value by reifying their status as unique and original. In the end, however, musicians have managed to survive via a thick skin coupled with a heavy dose of self-deprecation and irony.     

But more to the point, there are some very good comparisons to be made between Cage’s “sound-as-sound” thesis and the painterly strategies of Johns. While Rauschenberg presented artworks that epitomized Cage’s extremist dictums of nothing at once or everything at once through his White Paintings and assemblages, Johns provided something else: literal self-reflective images, paintings that were abstract yet representational, providing, as one critic puts it, “a twist with a knife attached” in the Abstract Expressionist criteria. Naturally Cage was in full support of the attack.

“Any fool can tell that that’s a broom.” The clothes (conventions) are underneath. The painting is as naked as the day it was born.

There are certain self-admitted natural affinities between Johns and Duchamp’s retinal literalism, with one marked difference: Duchamp signed literal everyday objects, while Johns literally painted everyday objects, leaving traces of the painterly object embedded within the encaustic. I believe that, in the end, this was one line of differentiation between Cage and Johns, though in the end any surface contradictions in style were overridden by their mutual respect and friendship.

In the center of the essay Cage reproduces Duchamp’s famous dictum of retinal literalism: the suggestion “to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory transfer from one like object to another the memory imprint,” a concept I believe to be comparable to the sound-as-sounds thesis, which in certain ways paralleled theories of the acousmatic and reduced listening espoused by French engineer and acoustician Pierre Schaeffer. Musicologists, and especially theorists, have tried desperately to link Cage’s program with Schaeffer’s, and while it is true that Cage visited his studio in Paris during his first Guggenheim fellowship in 1948, there is scant evidence that he truly understood or embraced the concepts, and even if he did, they were in many ways anathema to his concept of unmediated perception.

The problem with theories of the acousmatic and reduced listening is fundamentally an audiovisual one, related directly to Michel Chion’s notion of “synchresis,” the indelible weld between sound and image that occurs upon first experiencing an audiovisual event. To review, acousmatic sound refers to the Pythagorean experience of listening to a veiled sound, the source unseen, and reduced listening advocated for an auditory goal similar to Duchamp’s impossible situation. What Schaeffer failed to incorporate in his thesis was Duchamp’s precondition: reduced listening was an impossibility, and the goal was not to succeed, but to attempt to reach toward that impossibility of memory transfer – to get away from the literalness of the thing.

This, in my mind, was Cage’s ultimate sound-as-sounds goal of unmediated perception, something reflected time and time again in his writing as an ideal rather than a possibility, hence the extensive veil of Zen dictums and east Asian heuristics that speak of a pure situation of “imitating nature in her manner of operation.” Does viewing a flag purely for is visual pleasure cause one to reach a state of unmediated perception in the same way as hearing a frog croak amidst the clatter of Williams Mix? In my mind, no, and this is the inherent problem of the modern mediated subject: we have developed our facilities for spatial perception purely according to visual calculations, and thus our ability to develop visual theories is much more adept, while our auditory facilities are largely untrained, even among the best musicians. One can look at a Schenkerian graph and understand the complexity of form, and perhaps hear it on a local scale, but one can rarely and only partially comprehend musical form (or deliberate anti-form, non form, or any other structure) in its totality the way one can when looking at an architectural form or a painting set against a relief. In the end, the debate remains more concerned with the matter of degree, not kind.

I believe that this conflict between optical and cochlear is inherent in Cage’s critiques of visual artists, and his essay on Johns is in my mind less complete than the essay on Rauschenberg. The problem seemed to lie in the issue of literalness and specificity, which are difficult issues to parse in the Cage aesthetic. Johns’ flags were not literally flags, yet they literally represent them, while Cage’s sounds, particularly in experiments with magnetic tape, were literal sounds, inscriptions of a reality, and they literally represent them, but there is no concern for what them is; Johns chose specific objects, Cage chose any object. The brushstrokes embedded in the encaustic provided a marker of the figurative, yet Cage’s tape splices, static, and various markers of fidelity did not point back to the creator.  

Perhaps (or likely) these thoughts are incomplete, but this is a growing and notable debate within sound art history, rich with new criticism and theory that will hopefully, in the future, create a better understanding of the nature of the auditory experience, one that relies less on the primacy of the visual, and one defined more in terms of the audiovisual experience.

      

An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them? Deluge.

“26 Statements Re Duchamp” (1963)

[11. T'ai / Peace, Nine in the Second Place, Six in the Sixth Place. Changing To:  22. Pi / Grace]

He simply found that object, gave it his name. What then did he do? He found that object, gave it his name. Identification. What then shall we do? Shall we call it by his name or by its name? It’s not a question of names.

First off, thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith (or possibly just an office assistant) at Ubu Web for the tweet last week, which seems to have brought a new audience to this otherwise obscure blog. To reiterate for any newcomers, I explain the concept behind this project of “reading through” on the “About This Blog” page to the right. I imagine my note regarding the copy of Variations V on Ubu Web last week sparked the tweet (everyone seems to have set up their own personal protective net of Google Alerts nowadays); technically this is another video that hovers in the “grey area” of copyright, and as Ubu has proven, the power of dissemination often usurps the desire to control and restrict. I’ve had a loan copy of this video for years from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company archives, and it is one work that really could put a tailspin on authorship rights, especially in lieu of recent discussions by Mark Bartlett in the special edition of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal devoted to Stan VanDerBeek; Variations V comes up a lot on these pages, and the political discussions are a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but interesting for anyone who can access the journal (read: the firewall of academic privilege, another ironic twist to Bartlett’s critique).

Ubu Web is in a very unique position to present a counterweight to the chilling effect argument regarding copyright and distribution, an issue particularly relevant to this week’s reading. Here we are dealing with art forms that are essentially meant to overthrow the commodity exchange ideal of commercialism, yet through the beautiful circularity of commodification, these artworks themselves have, in the process, become quite valuable to some people, and as a result familiar legal boundaries have been set up to protect the property of rightsholders. That these objects constitute familiar definitions of “property” is again part of the circular commodification argument, and one that Ubu Web has put front and center. Commercial artists have no problem arguing that the products they create are commodities and thus should be protected by the legal boundaries set in place to protect property; however, avant-garde and experimental artists are hesitant to openly advocate that their products are in fact personal property—that their ideas have exchange value in the same sense as a patent or proprietary information. I can’t imagine that artists subject their pupils or assistants to NDA’s just yet, but if one were to take this logic down the long and winding road of legalese, it might just end up this way.

All this is fine for me to ponder; I’m an academic and I make no money off of my armchair chatter, except perhaps for the long sought after academic appointment, which is arguably a subsidized form of art market criticism; high-minded cultural capital imbued on art objects to ensure their long-term appreciation.  In fact, I would venture to say that it is this carrot and stick environment that usurps the alleged “Crisis of Competence” that seems to be the hot topic right now; with enough pressure, everyone eventually becomes a centrist.

I think the reason Marcel Duchamp continues to resonate so deeply with artists and intellectuals, and particularly within Cage Studies, is that he poignantly highlighted the perennial problems of commodification, value and use arguments for art objects, and basic epistemological, and, eventually, ontological arguments surrounding art works and art world definitions. As with most aesthetic arguments, much ink has been spilled on what, in the grand scheme of things, is fairly trivial; however I believe that the artworld commodity argument parallels a much more important cultural issue of proprietary information rights that Cage’s father, John Cage Sr., an inventor and engineer, was very much involved in, and which Duchamp implied in many of his technological puns and commentaries within these complex art objects (or theories).

To back up a second, Duchamp’s critique is centered around the hot air argument of “What is Art?” There are many ways to approach this argument, all of them interesting but none of them conclusive. First, one can begin with highlighting aspects of language structure itself: Is it “art”? Is “it” art? or “Is” it art? Here we have three degrees of the skepticism argument that has dominated postwar art criticism. In the first category, one is skeptical of the entire definition of art; in the second, one is skeptical of this definition of art versus any other, or none at all; in the third, however, one focuses more on action, on use-value in a context, which in the end, as many argue, is about all we can really conclude in this case. It is art because it is art. We’re done here, right? (Ironically, I feel that the opposing argument, the Cartesian ideals of Platonic form, is more than happily embraced by that growing subcategory of art—design, which itself is more than happy to embrace commodification, but that’s another matter.)

I won’t pretend to have a profound grasp on this argument, because, as in many contemporary cases of art theory, we are really not dealing so much with aesthetic arguments anymore as we are with basic metaphysical and ontological arguments in general; all of which are interesting to ponder, but perennial in the greatest sense, and thus in the end it is perhaps more useful for one to wander off on their own and mull over rather than try and follow the rough logic of an obscure and wordy blog post.

To return to the text, this is Cage’s only major essay focusing on Duchamp, who, like Schoenberg, looms large over the Cagean legacy, and posits many questions surrounding modernist lineage and influence that dominate Cage Studies today. While the argument I presented a few weeks ago regarding Schoenberg and serialism was much more specific in terms of method, the cross-currents between Cage and Duchamp are more difficult to parse. How do we define the level of influence, when the literal influence of Duchamp was the negation of definitions of art? This is the core problem behind the early critiques of the American neo-avant-garde that I have mentioned many times in this blog. If Cage was resuscitating the historical avant-garde strategies of shock and negation, to what value, if any, can we ascribe this postwar recapitulation? Or is it a recapitulation?

Art historian Branden Joseph has gone to great lengths to delineate the boundary between these two art movements; the first, the historical avant-garde of Dada and artists surrounding Duchamp, marks an originary point that historians love to cling to; this is the first instance of this train of thought, and since the ideas espoused by Dadaists were the negation of art forms, to recapitulate those same ideas would negate the point of the first instantiation of the ideas. Moreover, it would in turn validate the commodification of artworks by addressing the value of the actual objects Duchamp identified: putting non-art in a museum—even discussing it for that matter—by this definition, makes it art. Art is anything we call art, and thus we are back to that same formulation: It is art because it is art.

Cage’s essay is less concerned with this circular argument than it is with Duchamp himself, something Marjorie Perloff has examined in detail. The tension between Cage’s cool modernist veil of nonsubjectivity is in stark contrast to the highly sexualized eroticism of Duchamp’s artworks and art world critique, and as Perloff argues, this tension is the centerpiece of the Cage-Duchamp dialogue. Kenneth Silverman recently alleged in his new Cage biography that the sexual double entendre between Cage and Duchamp was—at least in 1942 when he first met the Dada master—literal. This is an aspect of Cage’s life that will likely forever be relegated to the backwaters of intellectual discussion, primarily because Cage so expertly veiled his own sexual discourse within the larger realm of the negative aesthetics of silence, as I have mentioned in the past.

Marcel Duchamp as "Rose Sélavy" Photograph by Man Ray, 1921

Despite the problems with Cage’s discourse on subjectivity, his essay on Duchamp, surprisingly, addresses the issue directly. These art works are not art works at all, as Cage argues, they are Duchamp. Take this quote:

The check. The string he dropped. The Mona Lisa. The musical notes taken out of a hat. The glass. The toy shot-gun painting. The things he found. Therefore, everything seen—every object that is, plus the process of looking at it—is a Duchamp.

And now the examples mentioned here:

One of the many "Czech Checks" sent to Cage 

Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14)

L.H.O.O.Q (1919)

Erratum Musical (1913)

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923)

Throughout the rather terse essay, Cage fixates on the image of Duchamp himself; he was an attractive individual, and the sexual tension is part of the game, part of the dialogue between the two artists. It was likely very much one-way, however; Duchamp was fond of many sexual puns, but his sexuality was quite literal, quite visceral, and generally off-putting to Cage. There are several references to Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923), including the dust metaphor I have discussed before, and a sly attack on Jackson Pollock regarding his 1951 documentary filmed by Hans Namuth, which shows a scene of Pollock applying his pour technique to a large sheet of glass, while Namuth filmed the artist at work underneath, enabling the voyeuristic spectator to literally be “in” the painting.

Jackson Pollock 51', dir. Hans Namuth

Getting "In" the Painting

Pollock, No 29, 1950

Cage’s critique once again highlighted the Cage/Pollock determined indeterminacy/determined determinacy divide I have been focusing on:

Seems Pollock tried to do it—paint on glass. It was in a movie. There was an admission of failure. That wasn’t the way to proceed. It’s not a question of doing again what Duchamp already did. We must nowadays nevertheless be able to look through to what’s beyond—as though we were in it looking out. What’s more boring than Marcel Duchamp? I ask you (I’ve books about his work but never bothered to read them.) Busy as bees with nothing to do.

Here Cage is explicit in attacking the very act of recapitulation that critics slapped on his own program: We can be “busy as bees with nothing to do,” mimicking Duchamp’s Dadaist antics, or we can move on to something else, something new, something beyond, “in looking out,” not out looking in. The question then remains: did Cage succeed in this task? Is it art? 

“Diary: Audience 1966,” and “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued (1966)”

[31. Hsien / Influence (Wooing), Nine in the Fifth Place, Six in the Sixth Place. Changing to:  56. Lü / The Wanderer]

A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.

I’m reading through two essays today, both of which are a continuation of the overarching theme of A Year From Monday: the mosaic diary. The three diary entries bifurcate the book (as bookends and a divider), and the essays in between focus on specific composers, theorists and artists. The only out of place essay is “Julliard Lecture” from 1952, which as Cage mentions in the introduction, was inserted at David Tudor’s request. This structure makes for a larger mosaic of ideas, interconnected in the diary entries and elaborated on in the specific essays.  

I’ve already discussed the method Cage used to write his diary entries, which he also used for “Diary: Audience 1966.” Christopher Shultis broke down this essay based on Cage’s manuscript notes, and as I noted, Cage only used chance procedures for certain elements such as number of words and number of entries; otherwise the text itself is freely-composed. From Chris’s article one can get an idea of how Cage worked through (or around) some of the limitations. The word count restriction made for some interesting challenges, such as the opening few lines:

It is interesting to note how Cage worked through the word limitations. In most cases, the limitations forced him to simply be more concise; to write better and more clearly. Other than that, however, the chance operations really had little effect on the actual content here or elsewhere, and should really just be considered as a starting point or template for a freely composed essay. What makes these essays difficult, in my mind, is that each section does not necessarily follow in any specific logic or direction. Obviously that is what Cage was trying to do, but without any direction, all we really have is a collection of observations and anecdotes.

I think it helps to read these essays the way one would read an actual diary. Entries are sometimes long, sometimes complete, but more often than not incomplete, and many are deeply veiled personal anecdotes; this gives one a glimpse into the psyche of the writer: what is preoccupying them during a given week? does it have to do with interactions or conversations? Are there overriding preoccupations or ideas that they keep coming back to, and if so, what does that imply about their personality or intellectual interests?

If I had to summarize some of the main themes in these diary entries it would be as follows: Technocratic idealism, unimpededness and interpenetration, (seemingly) random anecdotes or aphorisms (such as the opening quote), and food. Technocratic idealism in particular floods the diary. I’ve already mentioned the relationship between Cage, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller, and the ideas Cage proposes in the diary are sometimes absurd, sometimes amusing, but always creative and idealistic.

Here are a few examples: The conversion of roadside telephone booths into temporary decentralized living quarters available to anyone who needs a place to stay; chemical therapies for diseased Russian chickens; the adoption of a universal voltage and electrical outlet standard (Vary the not the connecting means but the things to be connected); free cars within cities to be used like shopping carts (similar to the ZipCar, actually); subterranean living quarters in the arid desert climates; cover Times Square with a geodesic dome and put in plastic chairs and tables (which, ironically, Mayor Bloomberg recently did – sans dome, mind you); universal garbage can sizes to increase efficiency; return to the gold standard (sounds like Ron Paul to me…); picturephones (which are, of course, now ubiquitous with Skype and FaceTime); contraceptives for cows to reduce greenhouse emissions; Russian cosmonaut technology for electronically-induced sleep; the list goes on and on…

If Cage did not have the cultural cachet that he did one could easily mistake this for the ramblings of a mad scientist, or perhaps an engineer or inventor. Here I see the mind of an incessant inquisitor, one willing to turn over any stone for an idea, a mushroom, a new way of living, or anything curious enough to deserve one's attention. And that in a sense is the point of the diaries – to paint a picture of Cage as a person, and a persona.

Biographically speaking, it is clear that Cage wrote the majority of the second diary entry during his summer tour of Europe in 1966, where after a grueling series of performances with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Spain, France, and Germany (which included the wonderful taping of Variations V at WDR, which Kenneth Goldsmith has slyly uploaded to Ubu HERE), Cage spent several weeks in Cadaqués, the infamous Catalan retreat town home to, among others, Marcel Duchamp. Cage played chess with Duchamp nearly every day, and one gets a sense of the snide yet playful attitude of Duchamp in these diary entries. I’ll spend more time with Duchamp next week, and I think it’s no coincidence that Cage’s Duchamp essay was placed after this diary entry.

I’ll end with another great anecdote:

After an hour or so in the woods looking for mushrooms, Dad said, “Well, we can always go and buy some real ones.”    

“Mosaic” (1966)

[55. Fêng / Abundance [Fullness], Unchanging]

“I disagree with almost everything”

                -Arnold Schoenberg

“Mosaic” is John Cage’s major essay on Schoenberg, although Schoenberg’s name pervades virtually all of his writings. Cage insistently posited a modernist lineage stemming from Schoenberg’s compositional approach to serialism, and as Cage’s story goes, noise and indeterminacy were the next logical step in the “evolution” of Western art music. You can tell this tale by starting as far back as you like, from modal/tonal relationships in Monteverdi, to the “long-line” of Beethoven, the chromaticism of Wagner, “developing variation” in Brahms, “emancipation of the dissonance” in Schoenberg, etc., but few besides Cage himself were willing to connect the next modernist dot to Cage’s compositional approach, even half a century later.

In my mind, the problem here is that musicologists are simply talking over each other. When we are speaking of Western tonal art music, Cage’s program, and particularly his aesthetic of silence, comes across as something altogether different. To be sure, Cage still utilized the resources of Western concert music to launch his campaign (I am thinking in particular of 4’33”, which is a specific critique of the concert music setting), but in the end he was equally concerned with the relationships between listening, object, and alterity.

Nevertheless, Cage still clung to certain conventions of tonally-structured music, especially later in life when he returned to composing for acoustic instruments, and his relationship to Schoenberg’s thinking consistently returned to the fundamentals. It is notable that, as many scholars have proven, all that Cage likely gleaned from his early studies with Schoenberg were nothing more than this, fundamentals of counterpoint and analysis. I imagine the courses were insightful, and judging from Cage’s recollections, rather curious, but in the end they were really just elementary counterpoint classes that most undergraduates in a music school are obliged to take.

Cage’s favorite anecdote about having “no ear for music” was both a provocation and a veil. Did he literally not know anything about music, and thus resorted to esoteric compositional methods to hide his inadequacies? Most certainly not. To put it the other way, however, that Cage understood counterpoint and harmony well enough to construct a system of an even higher order of complexity than serialism is, in my mind, a bit of a stretch. To be sure, Cage conceived of elaborate mathematical puzzles and systems for ordering events temporally, but none of his systems maintained a constant variable point to base further elaborations on. Schoenberg’s system of serial composition was, in most cases, nested in a late-romantic style relating to form and content, and it was not until the hard-edge serialism of the postwar schools emerged that the system began to look a lot like chance and indeterminacy.

As I have mentioned before, however, these two extreme oppositional poles were the logical extension of one idea: namely the removal of romantic expressionism from the ordering of musical notes, and once this extreme was reached, there was really nowhere else to go. Academic composers still occasionally apply serial techniques in their works, and many downtown composers still look to Cage as a model or a mirror for their own work, but neither camps have resonated deeply enough in modern culture to be appropriately called a living “school” of composition.

That is not a critique of either approaches relative merit or value, it’s rather a historical evaluation. Most of Cage’s works are viewed as fascinating historical artifacts, no different from the eclectic methods of ars subtilior in the fourteenth century. What has lasted and remains a strong cultural force, in my mind, are the profound notions Cage advocated for listening in general, and thus while it is appropriate to trace historical comparisons between Cage and Schoenberg regarding method, I hesitate to advocate for a sweeping generalization of the historical effect of this particular connection.

The second notion that creeps up still today in Cagean lore is the supposed anecdote from Schoenberg that Cage as an “inventor of genius,” and I think it is appropriate to once again set the record straight here. The anecdote arose after Los Angeles impresario Peter Yates sent a note to Cage in 1953. I’ll transcribe the section verbatim:

I have planned several times to tell you—and always forget to—that during my last conversation with Schoenberg I made an effort to find out how much he knew about the work of his self-appointed disciples, especially those in NY. He knew nothing of them, their work or their names, except his few elder friends, not even about his pupils. Until he thought of you, and at once he brightened and explained, to this effect “An inventor! An inventor of genius. Not a composer, no, not a composer, but an inventor. A great mind.” Recognizing that the qualification balances your own estimate of the old man, I think you should be honored and happy that both his esteem and his affection for you remained so vocal and so visible.

                -Peter Yates to John Cage, 8 August, 1953. John Cage Collection, Northwestern University, Series I, Box 3, Folder 8, Item 1, p. 2.

The question remains just what Yates meant by “to this effect,” but nevertheless Cage was fond of quoting the anecdote, and scholars continue to cite the anecdote as fact, despite the minimal evidence. Not that it matters one way or the other for most, but it is evidence of the complex notions of lineage that pervade academic, artistic, and social constructions of history.

In many ways this notion of memory and history is reflected in the structure and title of the essay, and it is here that I think Cage is most adept at approaching the act of remembering. As the essay implies, it is a mosaic of ideas surrounding Schoenberg, constructed from snippets of his recently-published correspondence, subjected to I-Ching calculations, and then filled in with Cage’s own memories of his early counterpoint classes. Most of the anecdotes pop up elsewhere in Cage’s writings, and he persistently returns to the relationship between Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Hauer. I’ll end with a note on the various anecdotes that pervade the Schoenberg legacy, particularly those in Los Angeles surrounding his eclectic demeanor and his fondness for tennis. Here, it seems, we have a character as odd and curious as Cage, and here I see a fine parallel to be made.

Charlie Chaplin, Gertrud and Arnold Schoenberg, David Raskin. Photograph by Max Munn Autrey

Arnold Schoenberg and Lucca Lehner shaking hands with Gertrud Schoenberg and Felix Khuner at the net, at the conclusion of a tennis doubles game in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1937.