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Overview
The pioneering composer and music theorist makes his final on the totality of his work and thought in these three wide-ranging dialogues.
“I was obliged to find a radical way to work ― to get at the real, at the root of the matter,” John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. This quest led him beyond the bounds of convention in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists.
Joan Retallack's conversations with Cage explore his artistic production in its entirety. Cage's comments range from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works.
In her comprehensive introduction, Retallack describes Cage’s lifelong project as “dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes.” Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction ― a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819571861 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/21/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 284 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else
John Cage
A NOTE ON CAGE'S TEXT
A substantial part of the first conversation in MUSICAGE is devoted to John Cage's methods in composing this lecture-poem, but I'd like to make a couple of suggestions for the reader unfamiliar with his mesostic texts. (Texts structured along a string of capital letters running down their middle.) It may be helpful to think of this piece as a kind of linguistic fugue, a canonic and recombinatory interplay of three voices — that of Jasper Johns (from whose statements this text is composed), John Cage, and, of course, chance.
The pleasure of the eye in reading Cage's mesostics is both vertical and horizontal. The pleasure of the ear is one of resonances perhaps most clearly revealed in reading aloud. Cage had many ways of composing mesostic poetry. Here he used chance operations to locate "meso-strings" from Jasper Johns' statements about art so that Johns' silent voice (the strings cannot be heard when the poem is read aloud and are on the edge of invisibility on the page) is the force that fragments and reconfigures his own thoughts. For instance, Cage's first variation on Johns' statements is drawn together by A DEAD MAN TAKE A SKULL COVER IT WITH PAINT RUB IT AGAINST CANVAS SKULL AGAINST CANVAS. This String of letters becomes a vertical current gathering words into horizontal axes (what Cage called "wing words") by means of the mesostic rules on pp. 57 and 61. Though the range of possible wing words is a function of chance, Cage chose their precise number, taking into account both breath and breadth — that is, both musical elements and possibilities for meaning. The result is a poem in which the interactions between chance and selection that are "Nature's manner of operation" are formally foregrounded. Reading this text is an exercise in letting go of preconceptions about how words should relate to one another (syntax and grammar), clearing the way to notice novel semantic sense. The poem becomes more and more densely textured, more and more musical, as each section arrives in the wake and aftermath and echo of all that went before, as vertical and horizontal axes are in continual visual play, as the capitalized mesostic letters generate words within words.
Cage devised a notation for facilitating the spoken performance of his mesostic poetry: "A space followed by an apostrophe indicates a new breath. Syllables that would not normally be accented but should be are printed in bold type." (Introduction to I-VI [Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990], p. 5) But he did not mean for this to constrain the readings of others. One can feel entirely free to play with the phrasing. The variable bonding of letters, words, and phrases adds more and more dimensions to each variation on the source text. There is a limitless proliferation of meanings. Think of Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else as a score. Think of the reading you are about to do as an exploratory, performative act that is but one of many possible realizations. Cage's mesostics are preceded by the Johns statements on which they are based. — JR These texts come from statements by Jasper Johns, taken from Mark Rosenthal's Jasper Johns Work Since 1974 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988), which follow. They are not about Johns' statements and because of the way they are written, other statements are produced.
— JOHN CAGE, New York City, 1988
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.
Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
The condition of a presence.
The condition of being there.
its own work its own its it its shape, color, weight, etc.
it is not another (?)
and shape is not a color (?)
Aspects and movable aspects.
To what degree movable?
Entities splitting.
The idea of background
(and background music)
idea of neutrality air and the idea of air
(In breathing — in and out)
Satie's "Furniture Music" now serving as background for music as well as background for conversation.
Puns on intentions.
Take an object Do something to it Do something else to it
" " " " "
One thing made of another. One thing used as another.
An Arrogant Object. Something to be folded or bent or stretched, (SKIN?).
We say one thing is not another thing.
Or sometimes we say it is.
Or we say "they are the same."
Whether to see the 2 parts as one thing or as two things.
Think of the edge of the city and the traffic there. Some clear souvenir — A photograph (A newspaper clipping caught in the frame of the mirror).
My work became a constant negation of impulses.
At times I will attempt to do something which seems quite uncalled for in the painting, so that the work won't proceed so logically from where it is, but will go somewhere else.
My experience of life is that it's very fragmented. In one place, certain kinds of things occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.
My thinking is perhaps dependent on real things. ... I'm not willing to accept the representation of a thing as being the real thing, and I am frequently unwilling to work with the representation of the thing as ... standing for the real thing. I like what I see to be real, or to be my idea of what is real. And i think i have a kind of resentment against illusion when i can recognize it. Also, a large part of my work has been involved with the painting as object, as real thing in itself. And in the face of that 'tragedy,' so far, my general development ... has moved in the direction of using real things as painting. That is to say i find it more interesting to use a real fork as painting than it is to use painting as a real fork.
My work feeds upon itself.
Most of my thoughts involve impurities ...
A Dead Man.
Take a skull.
Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas.
Shake (shift) parts of some of the letters in voice (2). A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.
After the first Voice, I suppose there was something left over, some kind of anxiety, some question about the use of the word in the first painting. Perhaps its smallness in relation to the size of the painting led me to use the word in another way, to make it big, to distort it, bend it about a bit, split it up.
In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and partly due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve. I think some of the changes in my work relate to that.
Try to use together the wall the layers the imprint.
The question of what is a part and what is a whole is a very interesting problem, on the infantile level, yes, on the psychological level, but also in ordinary, objective space.
Entities/splitting.
An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them? Deluge.
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.
Yes, but it's skin.
I think it is a form of play or a form of exercise and it's in part mental and in part visual but that's one of the things we like about the visual arts the terms in which we're accustomed to thinking are adulterated or abused.
CHAPTER 2Cage's Loft, New York City September 6–7, 1990
John Cage and Joan Retallack
I arranged to tape this conversation with John Cage for publication in the Washington D.C. literary journal Aerial. The editor, Rod Smith, was planning a special issue featuring Cage's work with language and demonstrating, via juxtaposition, its connection with contemporary experimental poetry in America. What follows appeared in Aerial 6/7 along with "Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else" and a selection of Cage's macrobiotic recipes. Our conversation focused in some detail on poetic practice but, like all encounters with Cage, moved in many other directions as well. Cage's worklife and life-work were pragmatically and spiritually intertwined and interdisciplinary. At the time of this taping, we were in the midst of the "Gulf crisis," which had not yet degenerated into "Desert Storm." President Bush was still ostensibly in pursuit of a peaceful solution to the confrontation with Saddam Hussein of Iraq. — JR
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6
JR: (Setting up tape recorder on dining room table.) This is an odd way to have a conversation, (pause) I've thought a lot about your statement "All answers are answers to all questions" and how that relates to the process of the interview. Have you thought about that?
JC: I haven't thought about it, but we can talk about it. (laughter)
JR: It seems that logic should dictate something other than the usual kind of interview. I thought of coming with a card game of questions and answers — where we simply shuffled and played. I'm curious; what would your reaction have been to that?
JC: Well it's hard to know, but I would have followed what was happening. I mean I would have done what I was expected to do. (laughter)
JR: What I decided was that it would have been my game and therefore inappropriate.
JC: Yes. No, no, I think you're right.
JR: Another thought I had was that we could telescope out or in — in perspective. I tend to start out wide-angled in my thinking. The order of these questions reflects that. But we could reverse or change the order at any time.
JC: No, I'm perfectly willing to go with you.
JR: Recently I met M. C. Richards at the Quashas'.
JC: She called yesterday, yes.
JR: She's, as you know, involved with the notion of "Mother Earth" — doing things to heal the earth. Thinking about that metaphor — Mother Earth — in relation to Buckminster Fuller's metaphor, Spaceship Earth, in the context of the Persian Gulf crisis — how fragile things seem at the moment — I have some questions about the relationship between art and that fragility. Does, for instance, the gulf between mass culture and so-called high culture mean that no matter how smart or wise we become in our art, the life that is closer to mass culture, mass media, will always be in some sort of "gulf" crisis?
JC: I think the nature of what you're calling a "gulf" crisis will change. I mean the specificities. I actually think — I'm saying "think" rather than "hope" — it seems to be in the air that the present Gulf crisis is already outdated. It doesn't belong to our time.
JR: What do you mean?
JC: We're moving toward a global situation. And this Gulf crisis has very specifically to do with nations. And Fuller already told us years ago — I forget the number, but it's something like 153 or 159 sovereignties — that our first business is to get rid of those sovereignties, those differences. And to begin to recognize the truth, which is that we're all in the same place and that the problems that are for one of us are for all of us. There's no place to hide anymore. And there's no way to separate one people from another.
JR: That's so "reasonable."
JC: But I think the crisis will be the kind of crisis that will work globally, and then we will put our minds, like you were speaking about ... we will put our minds to how to correct those things we really recognize without the clouding over of politics and economics.
JR: So you think, though this is an old-style crisis, it may have a new-style resolution?
JC: I don't know what the resolution will be in this case, but I think the new problems will be different — say, in a hundred years. And they'll be recognized by everyone and people will put their minds to solving them and we'll do it! (laughter)
JR: I love hearing that, and I think it's interesting that you say it's a thought and not a hope.
JC: Well I'll tell you why. The political situation has greatly changed in this last year, as I think all of us agree, between Russia and the United States — the question of two superpowers being —
JR: — Antagonistic —
JC: — Is not true any longer. We feel that the more militarism we give up, the better in the case of Russia and the United States. And there's an enormous feeling — I think a genuine feeling — of friendship back and forth. This Gulf crisis erupts in a fairly global optimism and one of the amazing things about it is, it split the Arab world, and that the Arab world didn't stay together in a plain national situation. There's an indication of a kind of international, or global or united nations — whatever you want to call it — at the present point, a kind of global intelligence at work against, not in agreement with, Iraq, hmm?
JR: When you said "a kind of global intelligence" what came to mind was our relatively thin layer of neocortex that overlays all of that other brain that isn't rational, and I wonder if the optimism of which you speak is not the optimism of, again, a high culture — occupying a small part of the brain and a small part of the general population on the globe. I ask this because, in trying to understand the Middle East situation myself — before the Gulf crisis — as well as other so-called "third world" areas, most of the reading I've done has stressed the tribal nature of cultures in the Middle East and, say, in Africa — the idea that the conflict is between tribalism and nationalism, which "we" look at as an advance. Tribalism being oriented toward issues of blood and —
JC: Blood and earth and such things.
JR: Yes, and "kin," so that it's very hard to recognize and respect the "other."
JC: The artificial one, the seemingly artificial.
JR: Yes. In the New York Times a few Sundays ago there was an article that talked about the "new cultural tribalism" in this country — that at this point we feel our audiences are so split, there has to be a women's art, a black art, an Arab art, a Latino art ...
JC: Very, very pluralistic. I think that's the nature of everything though. That's much better than having everybody a bunch of sheep.
JR: The point the writer in the Times was making was that this does not necessarily further understanding. If the only audience is the one reflected in the piece it becomes a kind of cultural solipsism.
JC: I don't think that's true.
JR: So you think the availability of multiple perspectives will be —
JC: Yes. There's always someone coming in from the street, into a situation where they don't belong, (laughter) I mean, it's not pure. What we're basically in, it seems to me, is a greater population than the earth has ever experienced before, and we just don't know what's happening or how to deal with it yet. We're inexperienced, we're uneducated, and so forth, about the reality of the present circumstance. This article sounds as though they know something. Whereas I think we don't know much about what we're doing. But I do believe that we're on one earth and I think more and more people realize this. And if we could give up this silliness of the difference of nations and concern ourselves with problems that affect all of us, we would make a great step forward. ... And, on a less Utopian level now, if President Bush's tactic of making an economic war before making a militaristic one ... if it works, it will be really a boost for optimism — following the Russian, what you could call, erasure of politics, hmm? If we could now have an erasure of militarism through economics. The Japanese, for instance ... they actually think they need the oil. Actually, we don't need the oil. Fuller has told us long ago we should quickly not use it anymore.
JR: Solar energy and —
JC: All those things. We need the oil in order to do the things that really must be done, rather than the things that needn't be done, like driving for no reason at all from one place to another in all the cities of the earth. If you just imagine from the sky any metropolis, you see all this vast waste of oil.
JR: That's true, and so I wonder about the basis for optimism.
JC: Fuller said we would need that oil in order to start the necessary pumps of the future to solve the giving of food and utilities and whatnot to everyone on earth rather than just the few.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Musicage"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Joan Retallack.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
<P>List of Illustrations<BR>Acknowledgements<BR>Introduction: Conversations in Retrospect – Joan Retallack<BR>WORDS<BR>Art is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else – John Cage<BR>Cage's Loft, New York City: September 6-7, 1990 – John Cage and Joan Retallack<BR>VISUAL ART<BR>Cage's Loft, New York City: October 21-23, 1991 – John Cage and Joan Retallack<BR>MUSIC<BR>Cage's Loft, New York City: July 15-17 1992 – John Cage and Joan Retallack<BR>July 18, 1992 – John Cage, Joan Retallack, and Michael Bach<BR>July 30, 1992 – John Cage and Joan Retallack<BR>Appendixes<BR>A. Selected Cage Computer Programs<BR>B. Mesostic Introduction to The First Meeting of the Satie Society<BR>C, Writing through Ulysses (Muoyce II). Typescript Page from Part 17 based on the "Nightgown" section of Ulysses<BR>D. Excerpts from Manuscript and Score of Two (1992)<BR>E. Notated Time Bracket Sheets for Thirteen (1992) Pages 14, 15,16<BR>F. Writing through Ulysses (Muoyce II), Part 5<BR>G. IC Supply Sheet Marked by Cage with Red, Blue and Black Pencils<BR>H. Excerpts from Score for Europera 5<BR>I. Europera 5 at MOMA<BR>J. Letter Outlining Plans for Noh-opera<BR>K. Notated Time Bracket Sheets for 59 (1992), Pages 2 and 4<BR>L. Project for Hanau Squatters<BR>M. First Page of One (1991)<BR>N. First Page of Ten (1991), Violin I<BR>Index</P>What People are Saying About This
“Of all the books on John Cage that have appeared since his death in 1992, this is without doubt the most informative, offering its readers a rich and thought-provoking profile of one of this century's greatest artists in the last years of his life. Cage on words, on art, on music. The intelligent inquisitiveness of both interviewer and interviewee is refreshingly evident at every turn, giving further evidence (if any is needed) of the truth in Cage's life-long insistence that the world is an interesting place not for the answers it provides, but for the questions we ask.”
"Joan Retallack's conversations with John Cage are a pleasure to read -- two interesting minds at work and play. Cage enjoyed talking, but also listening. An exchange of ideas was one of his life-streams."
