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John Cage’s Shoes–Robert Storr speaks in Paris
By matthew rose
April 20, 2009 · 12 Comments
I think it was the 13th of August, 1992, that artist and neighbor Ray Johnson called me with the news that John Cage was dead. I know it was early in the morning, and not the day he died, the 12th, because when I went outside to get a coffee and a New York Times, Cage’s obit was fully formed, a solid page, a gray tombstone reserved only for those who have come to New York to change the world. Ray hung up and I assume spent the day dialing all sorts of people to tell them that John Cage was dead, without really saying what or who Cage was to him. The two met around 1948 at the famed avant-garde Black Mountain College. When Johnson died in 1995, the world discovered in that artist’s home the white and black shoes he’d painted with Cage’s name on them across the toes.
Robert Storr drinking champagne at The American University of Paris. PHOTO: SUSIE HOLLANDS (www.ivyparis.com)
John Cage has been the silent bandleader of contemporary art for decades, according to Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, who outlined the bulk and body of contemporary art in the West in a 90-minute breakneck lecture at the American University of Paris last week.
Storr, the decidedly unslick 2007 curator of the Venice Biennale, argued convincingly that Cage has had more to do with American (and international) art than pretty much anyone since Duchamp. Cage (1912–1992) spent decades using random chance operations to mine the world for noise and turn it into music (his 1952 4’33″ silent piece in three movements the most well-known). The musician set traps for sound (and life) to experience the everyday and the mundane. His “prepared piano” placed objects on piano strings to alter their sounds. Working with chance and randomness engendered a contemporary aesthetic focusing on the varied flavors of “nothing,” one that continues to permeate every pore of the art world skin.
Storr’s thesis danced though dozens of artists, including Gerhard Richter, Ellsworth Kelly, Philip Guston, Nam June Paik, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, George Maciunas and Christian Marclay who either directly or indirectly sampled Cage’s magic. That magic flirted with the potent precept: There is no reason for anything, hence the embrace of chance. [Johnson would be more interested in synchronicity – an excellent word to look up – but he did his fair share of nothings as well]. Richter made abstract chance-driven Cage-ian paintings in dull grays (“colors nobody wants“) and old master-style pop images of toilet paper and color charts lifted from paint stores. More to the point, Kelly determined that he could make paintings “without ideas” and launched into collage in the early 1950s using torn colored papers to develop compositions. Johns could kidnap numbers or maps or flags are re-present them. Marclay more recently, said Storr, tied an electric guitar to an old truck, miked it, and drove through the sagebrush – an ode to country music. My favorite works of Marclay’s include the video “Telephone,” (1995) – featuring dozens of black and white Hollywood video clips of people answering a ringing phone. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” echoed often without conclusion.
Robert Rauschenberg Automobile Tire Print, 1953; print; black paint on twenty sheets of paper, mounted on fabric, 16 1/2 in. x 264 1/2 in. (41.91 cm x 671.83 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis; © Robert Rauschenberg Estate / Licensed by VAGA, New York.
Another favorite is Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print” (1953) where Cage was “printer” and “press,” driving his Model A over 100 sheets of typewriter paper that Rauschenberg had laid out one rainy day on Fulton Street in NYC. The tire, inked with black house paint, produced a kind of musical score; the finished work resembles a scroll. [See Rauschenberg talk about the event.]
Cage’s influence also extended to video art (Nam June Paik), performance art/living sculpture (Gilbert & George), and dance (Merce Cunningham). Storr indicated that you can see the smiling ghost of Cage playing footsie and more with creation from New York to Kyoto. (Sonic Youth on their SYR4 album performed Cage’s piece Six and one of Four).
But it wasn’t always easy for the lanky Cage. Storr delighted in telling the story about our hero fresh from Chicago landing chez Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst in 1943. The heiress had arranged to transport the musician’s instruments for a concert in her gallery, the famed Art of This Century. Cage, an ambitious artist, arranged on his own to give a concert at the Museum of Modern Art, and in telling this to Guggenheim, discovered how twisty and tangled the art world could be. She canceled his show and refused payment for the transport of his instruments. Cage broke down and cried. In the next room, Duchamp, “the uber-art father figure,” was idly rocking in a chair, smoking a cigar. He wanted to know why Cage was crying; Cage told him, and the Frenchman said barely anything but according to Cage, in Marjorie Perloff’s John Cage: Composed in America, “…his presence was such that I felt calmer…He had calmness in the face of disaster.”
Portrait of John Cage & Felix The Cat By Matthew Rose, 2006. Collage on Board. Collection Lauri Murphy, Denver, Colorado.
Calmness, unlike the cool violence of Warhol and brutal brand of art making by Pollock, suggested Storr, seeped in everywhere; it was not media specific – say in painting or serial nihilism – but through Cage’s Zen-like principles. Teaching at Black Mountain and New School for Social Research in the 1950s, Cage’s lectures and ideas reached deep into a generation of artists so varied that now, said Storr, “We are living in a world where the conversation about art is about the conversation.” And it led Richter, for one, to paint about painting in the language of painting. “He determined that one image was as good as another.” But Cage, composer, writer, doer, thinker, participant and go-to guy in contemporary art had no agenda to speak of, and appeared to walk through post World War 2 art world with a smile on his face…changing everything in sight.
Storr’s lecture made for an eventful evening, as far as a discourse on silence and nothing went. For many, Storr’s lecture answered quite a few rumblings about the seeming pointlessness of contemporary art, but left open the question about whether the enormous stream of nothing(s) really came to something. My guess is yes: Coming back to Johnson’s portrait of John Cage, I think a bit about meeting the Buddah on the road and stepping into his shoes.
Ray Johnson A Shoe (John Cage Shoes) 1977
Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. His next exhibition, Confessions, Obsessions & Indiscretions opens Saturday, May 9 at Soma Gallery, Cape May, New Jersey.
Tags: American University of Paris, christian marclay, gerhard richter, john cage, Rauschenberg, ray johnson, robert storr, Yale University School of Art
Readers Comments (12)
Robert Storr seems to be having fun up there…
how far can one go with the idea of making art about art about art about art about art about OUROBOROS man!
Its mimesis the basis
in all different places
Encarta says:
définition:
- explication précise de ce qu’est (quelque chose ou quelqu’un)
- action de déterminer avec précision (quelque chose)
- formule précise qui explique le sens ou les sens (d’un mot ou d’une expression)
WWW
great piece, matty. i thrill to this stuff! you neglected to mention john ashbery, arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century, who, like cage, attended the suzuki lectures at columbia and was deeply affected by them in his own work, writing according to what he called “managed chance.” must read the book “psychotherapy without the self,” exp. the chapters on creativity.
(cont.) i actually wrote a poem (below) called “chance operations” about the process which i sent to ashbery. he put it into his archives and sent a copy to the john cage trust, which now also has it in theirs.
Chance operations
(on John Cage’s Music of Changes”)
No one can say just what it was
that Ashbery heard that night. Many heard an
hour of banging, alternating abruptly with
spells of purest silence. Cage had
allowed it,
arranged it,
according not to
his or anybody’s likes or dislikes
but to that oldest of Chinese orchestrators, the
I Ching.
All that one can assume
in the pearled and patchy light of reconstruction
is that
Ashbery went home that night
with the notion of
chance
ringing in his ears; that he
ran the whole way, dizzy and empty and
hemorrhaging at his fingertips; that after a
whole year of looking he found himself
seeing;
and that he
finally understood, after all that time, the
perfect gift and
utter randomness of those
first few words.
Good piece there.
While randomness is my motto, utter randomness is depressing. I saw the electronic installation called ” Listening Post ” by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. It is a screen composed of a multitude of small screens which are displaying chat room texts picked up off of the web in real time. Off screen voices read the texts creating a choral effect. At first it has a HAL -like effect and is in turns soothing and funny. There is even some accidental sense and within a few milenia a narrative style book would emerge. Beneath it all is the cry for recognition (like Marclay’s “Telephone” ). But after awhile the randomness is too much and we want to have a one on one dialogue with either the machine or a person. We need to respond and take the conversation somewhere . . . to square it.
That squaring is the same as finishing a work of art or a musical composition. We always need to trim and crop events and our representation of them. We frame chance in finite spaces i.e. games or paintings and as such create islands in the stream of chance driven events.
I would imagine that for most artist there is a thrill to get working and see what happens. But there is also a desire to attain an objective and with regularity. Although every moment in life is a roll of the dice, personal established probabilities are employed towards that end.
As spectators do we really need to be confronted with randomness itself? Isn’t art about creating some thing against all odds?
Bref, who wants to be in anyone else’s shoes? It’s a miracle to be wearing a pair at all!
I think Cage and Beuys will be the second generation of heroes of contemporary art. And Warhol? How confusing Warhol is! He is the opposite of Cage, collecting everything and raising it to the level of art, or as Arthur Godfrey used to say, anything, if old enough, becomes art. While Cage allowed for everything to collect itself. No wonder he was a buddhist.
Terrific comments, many thanks for thickening the stew. Robert Storr just e mailed me the photo of John Cage in front of the large gray Ab Ex painting by Gerhard Richter. It’s on storefrontwindows.blogspot.com/ Matthew
Am I allowed to take sides here? Are there sides here?
I have to say that store front windows look liked those depressing, graffiti etched things that have been cropping up in Philadelphia. No wonder Storr looks a little depressed.
Back to taking sides. I sorta think Max is right in that life is random (although sometimes it tricks you into thinking it’s run by regulated forces rather than human action, coincidence and laws of nature). The point of art is to not be random–to say something and have a point. But if the art’s very randomness speaks to an issue in life and somehow elucidates it, well then, random works.
any chance someone has either a transcript or a recording of the lecture somewhere?? This is a thesis I would be very interested in hearing.
Hello Jorge,
Unfortunately I do not think there was a transcript. Storr spoke from some notes, I believe, but nothing written, and certainly not anything that was circulated. There is a possibility it was videotaped. You might contact the American University of Paris and the other organizations to see if such a tape exists and whether you might be able to view it.
Storr is at Yale, so you might simply contact him directly. He’s very open…but as you can imagine, extremely busy.
Best,
Matthew
P.S. http://abookaboutdeath.blogspot.com/
To anyone who was at the lecture: Was there any mention of Cage’s influence on specific women artists?
Lovely article. I have designed a quick poster using those gorgeous shoes for the John Cage for Christmas Number One in the UK campaign. Best wishes.