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http://www.artnews.com/2014/04/30/the-sound-of-silence/ Page 1 of 6
The Key to Understanding John Cage’s Silent Piece at MoMA | ARTnews 1/9/2560 BE, 12:52
On the other side of the plinth is Zen for Film (1965), a white rectangle of
light on the wall. Nam June Paik’s continuously running 16mm film isn’t
soundless—the whir of the projector ensures that. And it’s not abstract—
flecks of black dust, caught on the film stock, whiz by on the wall. But then,
4’33” isn’t soundless either, and it isn’t abstract. Paik had been studying
music when, in 1958, he heard Cage speak at a composers’ gathering in
Darmstadt, Germany. Cage’s arousing, outrageous performance so
overwhelmed Paik that he decided to become an artist.
The exhibition begins early in the 20th century with artists who lit up the
mind of the 23-year-old Cage when he saw their works in 1935 in the Los
Angeles home of collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg. Tellingly,
everything in this first half is either a painting or a sculpture—even 3
Standard Stoppages, Marcel Duchamp’s 1913–14 experiment with chance
composition. Duchamp randomly dropped three threads, but he transferred
the resulting curves to pieces of wood, which he placed in a wood box. The
operation of chance as a compositional device is the invention most often
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The Key to Understanding John Cage’s Silent Piece at MoMA | ARTnews 1/9/2560 BE, 12:52
borrowed from Cage by other artists, and this is a reminder of how far back
the conversation began. A chance piece by Jean (Hans) Arp and assemblages
by Kurt Schwitters round out the picture.
Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, who were both personally close to Cage, are
represented by two small but spectacular paintings owned by MoMA. The
Graves is black-over-black night-moodiness, and the Tobey is a casual pileup
of white writing. On the same wall are two pieces by Josef and Anni Albers,
who taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the site of Cage’s
many notable collaborations—with friends Willem and Elaine de Kooning,
for instance, as well as Buckminster Fuller. Richard Lippold, in Five
Variations within a Sphere (1947), made a set of lighthearted wire
constructions for his friend Cage’s loft at 326 Monroe Street.
The leap to Paik’s Zen for Film is meant to be as jarring as it was at the time
Paik first exhibited the piece. In the second half of the exhibition, almost
nobody (except Cage’s close “accomplices” Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns) makes paintings or sculpture. Instead, artists who knew Cage,
studied with him, and admired his radical performative vision—first
demonstrated at the debut of 4’33”—put forth an explosion of
nonconventional forms.
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The Key to Understanding John Cage’s Silent Piece at MoMA | ARTnews 1/9/2560 BE, 12:52
In an interview with this writer, Kaprow recalled that he created the first
proto-Happening to fulfill an assignment in Cage’s class. Kaprow, who had
admired Cage since seeing 4’33” performed in New York in 1954 and who
studied with him at the New School, began writing his own articles and
reviews from this new viewpoint. As shown at MoMA, Paik, Kaprow, Dick
Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, George Brecht,
Henry Flynt, and their friends changed the performance universe and
integrated “multimedia” into the realm of possibilities for art-making.
Less well known is Cage’s pervasive influence on artists who picked up his
book Silence: Lectures and Writings after 1961. The final galleries of the
exhibition examine the early years of Minimal and Conceptual art through
artists with degrees of connection to Cage: Robert Morris, Walter De Maria,
Lawrence Weiner, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Robert Barry, Ian Wilson,
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The Key to Understanding John Cage’s Silent Piece at MoMA | ARTnews 1/9/2560 BE, 12:52
There was a “before John Cage” and an “after John Cage,” and the two
worlds are so distinctly separate that they seem to have existed in different
art universes. MoMA’s exhibition suggests as much in the first bay off the
entry doors, where Cage’s graphic notation for Fontana Mix (1958)
introduces the argument. Graphic notations, invented by Feldman and Cage
and their friends in the early ‘50s, are drawings that compare to paintings of
the period. Fontana Mix, an intricate swirl of looping and straight lines and
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The Key to Understanding John Cage’s Silent Piece at MoMA | ARTnews 1/9/2560 BE, 12:52
Though Cage was a composer and, late in his life, a visual artist, neither of
those descriptions achieves the significance of his world-altering role in the
new universe of the postmodern.
Kay Larson is the author of Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen
Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (Penguin Press).
A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of ARTnews
on page 54 under the title “The Sound of Silence.”
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